Al Qaeda calls a truce

[Ned]

Originally posted by Pax Africanus
When you take the wraps off the Neocon policies what you really have is Neoimperialism. I am opposed to imperialism in any shape or form.

I don't see it leading to safer world, middle east or U.S.

I see orphans, cripples, and funerals. All in the name of a war for peace. Ridiculous.

I am all for fighting but only for just causes.

War for peace?

In a way, yes. We believe democracy is the solution. If war is the only alternative to remove a hostile dictatorship, one that supports al Qaeda, then so be it.

If this is neoimperialism, fine. Even the Romans viewed their conquests as spreading civilization and a better form of government.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Pax Africanus
Your statement is B.S. .

Well, given the incredibly shallow level of analysis in your following diatribe, I think your quote could best be applied to your supposed critique of British imperialism- I love how you sum up mass literacy campaigns as being equivalent to learning the right words to say when serving tea- I mean, you've missed out cucumber saandwiches, pantomimes and British bobbies- surely you could have put more cliches in.

I quite happily consent to the fact that imperialism was not necessarily a good thing for the conquered peoples, but to imply that it was all or mostly bad is just as nonsensical as the old red map of Empire mentality which could only see good things in the system.

I suggest that rather than spewing bile over the British Empire (and praising the Roman Empire- how bizarre is that) you take the time to read the works of informed critics of Empire, such as C.L.R. James, Rabindranath Tagore, and George Orwell.

They act as correctives to the currently fashionable critique of empire which ignores any beneficial aspects or useful heritage, and inflates all the negative attributes,seeking to blame the white man, or the Empire for ethnic violence, religious conflicts or communal rioting and disharmony, all of which supposedly NEVER happened before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, or the English merchants landed in Surat.

[Pax]

I'm not only criticizing the British but all empires after the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire/Republic escapes my criticism because I find many of it's policies to be forward thinking and fair minded for the times. I hold the enlightened Europeans to a slightly higher standard.
On the other hand. The Latter day Europeans brought civilization to the savages. Their civilization. Their religion. As documented in History books that you seem to not have read.

[Az]

if this is true, the same is true for the Romans.

However, in reality, Neither they, nor the europeans considered all non-europeans/Romans savages. Only those that weren't civilized.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Pax Africanus
I'm not only criticizing the British but all empires after the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire/Republic escapes my criticism because I find many of it's policies to be forward thinking and fair minded for the times. I hold the enlightened Europeans to a slightly higher standard.
On the other hand. The Latter day Europeans brought civilization to the savages. Their civilization. Their religion. As documented in History books that you seem to not have read.

Umm, and what did the Romans bring to Gaul and Britain, and Spain, and Carthage?

In history books you seem largely to have ignored. You might want to read what the Romans did to centres of druid worship in Britain for example, or what they did to the city of Carthage, or what they did to Jerusalem, before rewriting history to suit your own prejudices.

Yes, the Roman Empire was very forward thinking- large scale institutionalized slavery, public crucifixions, public executions, public gladiatorial combats to the death, persecution of religious minorities (Jews, Christians, druids), annihilation of cities (bye bye, Carthage, so long Jerusalem), torture, et cetera, et cetera.

All to bring THEIR culture and THEIR rule to areas of the world that hadn't yet had the benefit of Roman rule.

[Az]

are you denying that the Roman Empire was an ethically positive thing for the world?

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by Pax Africanus
I'm not only criticizing the British but all empires after the Roman Empire.

You have to admit, that's not what you said. ou specifically singled out the British empire. Apology accepted.

The Roman Empire/Republic escapes my criticism because I find many of it's policies to be forward thinking and fair minded for the times. I hold the enlightened Europeans to a slightly higher standard.

Were they more forward thinking than the Greeks, from whom the Romans seem to have stolen most of their culture and technology? The difference is that with the exception of Alexander and his minions, who technically weren't Greek, the Greeks largely spread their culture via trade and small colonies, thus sparing the majority of the locals the depradations of empire.

On the other hand. The Latter day Europeans brought civilization to the savages. Their civilization. Their religion. As documented in History books that you seem to not have read.

The Romans OTOH spread Greek civilization and technology topped off with Roman feudal-like politics, law and commerce. While the Romans didn't per se inflict their religion on their subjects they did require that everyone recognize the Emporer's divinity. At least Christianity stopped that. Oh yeah, and all that slavery stuff. Christianity had only just begun to snuff it out in the empire when the barbarians invaded and re-established it. Go figure.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Azazel
are you denying that the Roman Empire was an ethically positive thing for the world?

As opposed to whom, or under which emperors?

The Celtic peoples, for instance, had equality between men and women, in war, in society, and before the law- something which Ancient Rome and the Hellenistic civilizations (save for Hellenized Egypt) lacked.

They also had a sophisticated legal system.

The Celts thought the Roman worship of idols fatuous- and was Roman law necessarily better than Jewish law, for instance?

A great debt was owed by the Romans to the Greeks, as Dr. Strangelove points out, and it's frequently said that the Greeks, defeated, conquered Rome- especially in the realms of Hellenized Roman law, philosophy, art, culture, theoretical science, and so on.

In some respects, a useful analogue would be the Arab conquest of the older civilizations of Iran and the Eastern Roman Empire.

I confess, Azazel, I find it hard to admire the ethics or morality of Nero, Caligula, Heliogabalus and some of the other 'luminaries' of Imperial Roman rule.

Even the revered Hadrian was willing to go to war against the Jews in order to force them to stop the practice of circumcision- now if Pax Africanus doesn't think that isn't imposing the culture of the colonizer on the subject people, I'm hard put to understand why he thinks there's any qualitative difference between the Roman and later European empires, and specifically the British- who left the Muslims, Hindus, Jains and Parsees of the Indian sub-continent to their own devices.

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by molly bloom
- now if Pax Africanus doesn't think that isn't imposing the culture of the colonizer on the subject people, I'm hard put to understand why he thinks there's any qualitative difference between the Roman and later European empires, and specifically the British- who left the Muslims, Hindus, Jains and Parsees of the Indian sub-continent to their own devices.

Well, except for brutally banning the suttee and the thugee. Do you call that enlightened despotism?

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove

Well, except for brutally banning the suttee and the thugee. Do you call that enlightened despotism?

Clearly banning sati/suttee and the thuggee cult are instances of unacceptable Imperialist interference and an arrogant imposition of alien colonialist cultural norms-like the Muslim Moghuls’ emancipation of the Hindu caste, the Harijans, and relatively enlightened approach towards the status of women on the Indian sub-continent.

But of course, they were Asiatics and that was Islam- an Asiatic religion. Unlike 'Western' Christianity, cough, cough .

I think we should encourage more widows to turn themselves into crispy critters on their husbands' funeral pyres- it shows great marital devotion, after all.

As for thuggee- well, I suppose you could see it as a form of population control and tithing combined in one neat bundle- or garotte. Perhaps the Mormons could take it up, or the Jehovah's Witnesses- after all, think of the opportunities each group would get, knocking on the doors of complete strangers as they do.

(Interestingly enough, suttee/sati is not a strictly Hindu religious practice, but apparently stems from earlier pre-Hindu or pre-Hinduizing culture)

[Sikander]

Originally posted by oedo

Italy provided no support at all. Germany provided more support than Italy, although we officially opposed the war. Italy did exactly other way round. They agreed but didn't support.

Which considering Italian military history was actually quite a help.

(Sorry for the joke, I couldn't help myself despite knowing better)

[Ramo]

I don't think it was- it had simply shifted from the public arena to the non-governmental sphere.

In Algeria, thanks to a bloody civil war that had cost thelives of thousands of Algerians and many non-Algerians, secularism was maintained at the price of human rights violations (admittedly on both sides).

Similarly in Egypt, support for groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood goes underground, again as the result of the actions of the largely one party autocratic government of Mubarak, and following such unpleasantnesses as the massacre of an international party of tourists at a top tourism site, and the murder of Sadat. More human rights violations followed in Egypt, of course, and what you see is largely the same as what happened in Algeria- the Islamic extremists paradoxically thrive on government oppression, especially somewhere like Egypt, which of course borders on the mini-Satan, Israel, attracts Jewish and Israeli tourists, caters to the international tourist trade, and is steeped in institutionalized state corruption, has massive poverty related problems, and a chaotic infrastructure.

Similarly in Iran, 'reformist' movements were (and still are) hampered by governmental and quasi-governmental hardline Islamists (although to describe them as Islamists is perhaps as inaccurate as describing some right wing Christian fundamentalists as 'Christian', since their version of Islam hardly tallies with the Islam of history, which accommodated Christianity and Judaism, and did not convert by the sword, or bomb) who seek to impose the kind of joyless, repressive Iran embodied in the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini, a forward to the past state, that elevated obscurantism and ignorance at the expense of progress and pragmatism.

Molly, I would argue that secular repression is not an excuse for the destruction of the Muslim Brotherhood and the FIS, rather a symptom of their inviability (and Iran, I'd argue is at a precipice of a revolution). The internal contradictions of the Islamist ideology in a modern economy brought these movements down. The social frabric for the Islamist movements - clerics, poor youths and disenfranchised bourgeois have time and time again fallen apart at the seams, either causing their movements to collapse before attaining power or leaving their governments in precarious stability.

The poor saw political Islam as essentially a framework for some sort of socialist or social democratic advance, the middle class saw it as a way to kick out the corrupt nationalists without fundamentally changing the social order, and the clerics saw it as a path to bringing back an ahistorically totalitarian caliphate.

These sorts of coalitions are bound to collapse. In Algeria, at the height of FIS' power, when it was arguing for the revolt against the gov't, at the same time it was condemning strikes. It was killing journalists. Its thuggery was putting itself fundamentally at odds with the Algerian people, and that is why it failed. Similarly, the Muslim Brotherhood never was able to achieve critical mass because it simply was pissing off too many of the people. Sure, repression from the gov't was used to destroy these movements, but support from both govt's were used to support these movements as a bulwark against the left (in addition to support from other sources, i.e. OBL). The same thing was happening in any number of Islamic states.

Of course Islamism did take over governments, for instance Khomeniist Iran. But how did he do it? Well, the Shah's gov't angered just about every aspect segment of Iranian society, and the most pivotal groups were the workers. Their mark is still visibile in the representative institutions enshrined in the country's constitution. So the clerics highjacked the movement without making clear these dividions, and after they were in power the socialists were simply purged. Similarly, the clerics pissed off the middle class with their strict enforcement of Sharia (in fact, women were so pissed off, they protested in huge numbers, and the gov't was forced to back down and instead implement these laws piecemeal). And any possible dissidence for the next 10 years was soaked up in the fervor of the war against Iraq. But just over a decade after the war ended, the kids who grew up in this Islamic Republic voted overwhelmingly to empower the reformist movement to usher in secularism. Recent student protests almost brought the society to the brink of revolution. Now, it's only the revolutionary guards and the cowardice of the politicians (Khatami still didn't resign after the conservatives stole the election despite his promises ) that's preserving the rule of Khamenei et al.

Yes, there was the Taleban, etc. But the only thing keeping political Islam in power in just about any given place is brute force (and Saudi and Pakistani money). And any ideology without a social basis doesn't have much of a future. The path of the Jihadi is the recourse of someone without any real political options; it demonstrates fundamental weakness in their movements, not strength.

In Sudan it was slightly different, since from the days of Nimeiry's regime, the government had hoped to appease or possibly stave off, full scale state cooption of Islamism by degrees, with a little application of sharia here, an extension of it there, all without the consultation of southern Sudan's largely black African Christian and animist citizens, and with the application of slavery, human rights' violations, and as in Al;geria, a covert and overt civil war.

Of course Sudan wasn't as important an asset as Egypt, so despite the Khartoum Embassy assassinations, and despite harbouring international terrorists, it more or less slipped off the radar (except for a little foreign adventurism in Clinton's presidency) and the north -south cultural and religious divide and civil war carried on for 20 years:

Honestly, I know far less about the politics of Sudan (with regards to internal Islamic dissent, etc.) than I ought to.

[Az]

I'll reply to Molly later.

[Ramo]

So you think their colonies would have been better off without the British coming?

You realize they would still be ancient civilizations and in absolute poverty, by our standards.

By the standards of the time, large parts India were extremely industrialized. When Clive entered Dhaka after he conquered Bengal in the middle of the 18th century, he described it was comparable to London. The region had a thriving textiles industry, rich farm land and high-quality cotton. Throughout the subcontinetn, there were advanced steel-making and even ship-building industries.

So after they took over, the Brits imposed protective tariffs on Indian goods so that Manchester mills wouldn't have to face serious competition. The great industrial centers in the subcontinent were subsequently de-industrialized, and the farm land was depleted in growing opium. IIRC, India's GDP/capita grew something like 20% between 1820 and 1950 (as much as it grew in about 20 years of independence).

[Pax]

I conceed to criticize all empires including the Romans. But I still hold the latter Europeans to a higher standard. I hold them to that standard because their Christian based belief system that IMHO should lead them away from not towards war, slavery, racism and etc.