Phil Mirzoev's blog

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Why did the West start a war against Gaddafi but not against Syria?

Needless to say how reluctant the West was to utter a single word against Yemen bloody government or against Bahrain etc for a lot of 'special interests' and 'special relationships'. There's also little doubt that relatively 'inimical' Syria traditionally used by the USA in its rhetoric as 'a medium strength bad guy' has been and still is all in all to the liking of the same USA and the West in general so long as it is not a democracy (one of the main priorities of the foreign policy of the West being to keep the privilege of democracy from the Middle East as long as possible) and is not a military or economic threat (no difference for that matter from Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan etc etc). So this is too a self-explanatory question why the West has held out hope to the last that the Syrian government at last will be successful in suppressing its people and regaining the full state control (so that the traces of all the killings could be cleared and relegated to the category of 'suspected but not proved).
But as I see, there are still a lot of misunderstanding and delusion among the public about the belated but inexorable decision of the USA and other Western countries to get rid of - actually just KILL Gaddafi - a butcher and terrorist much worse and better proven than the recently killed Bin Laden, Gaddafi who up until recently had been to the liking of the West SO MUCH that had been not only completely legitimized and legalized by the latter, but embraced, kissed, wooed in all manner of ways and invited to all sort of parties personally by |Western leaders as a guest of honor.
Why did the West in general and the US in particular finally (however reluctantly and belatedly) take a decision to get rid of Gaddafi? The answer, I believe, is very simple. They - Western governments - just didn't have any other way-out of this situation (though, they DESPERATELY searched for one - no doubts about this). Otherwise, if they didn't, there would arise a ridiculously and most obviously and unprecedentedly 'perverse' and unhidden situation where after the Gaddafi crushed the rebellion the West would just continue oil business with him as unusual, despite the fact that the huge 'genocidal' killings and tortures by Gaddafi of its own people would be a 120% proven fact - just something like continuing the blossoming trade and investment relations with Hitler after the Holocaust had become a PROVEN fact. It would destroy to the ground and for evermore all this, however already flimsy, house of cards of the Western 'high moral democratic grounds', the myth about its promoting and supporting democratic values around the globe beyond the borders of its nations (of cause not all western democratic countries belong to 'the West' in this context, but an overwhelming majority of them; I don't want to blame e.g. Sweden which neither was involved in the sweet oil friendship with Gaddafi nor even bought a barrel of oil from Libya ). Of cause, there would be an ethically acceptable middle way - just leaving Libya alone with huge sanctions, denying its leaders from entry for good, freezing their accounts for good etc, and... of course (!) STOPPING BUYING OIL from Gaddafi and freezing all the oil investment projects there... But this quite legitimate way would be UNACCEPTABLE for the... of course.. these magic words trumping any morals, ethics and values, and justifying anything on Earth (if there's no direct PROOF of the crimes on a scale of Holocaust with thousands of skulls found and revealed publicly)  - 'SPECIAL INTERESTS'! - a key word combination which even Nobel prize laureate Obama is absolutely not shy about using as an argument for everything going against democracy in the rest of the world. Those special 'wallet interests' which for the USA and many of their Western allies in the end measure any democratic values and those very 'high moral grounds' in the units of oil barrels....

Friday, June 3, 2011

A letter to a friend: don't have illusions, there are no good governments

There's no such thing as a government that cares about its people - 'good government'. Also don't have any illusions about the governments of the so called developed democracies, or, as I call them, 'semi-democracies'. As such, generally, they don't care a damn about people's lives - they have never done in the past, they never do, and they never will as long as they exist in their present form. Even more to the point, for example, the Communist China government have the same will to improve the lives of the people unlike the American or British or French governments, or to be more honest the TOTAL ABSENCE thereof. In fact the paradox is that there are some reasons to suspect that actually Chinese government even do care a bit for the Chinese people, but the main distinction between the US and China governments is the limits of the involvement and the actual power with the existing political and legal systems. As to the state agencies (like the police or army or whatever), they care more about people's needs in the US than in China - again because of the place they occupy within the system, precisely because in China there's all those agencies have the priority to protect the Government and control the people. But the main difference is the system. If you put the American government in place of the Chinese one you not only don't see any positive change, but actually you might well become a witness of a serious deterioration by comparison. Just give the American government the same levers of control as those in the hands of their counterparts in China, and you see the great metamorphoses almost at once... Don't have any illusions about it. The American people some time in the past just twisted arms of their authorities and forced them to introduce such laws and procedures that guarantied a point of no return for any form of radical dictatorship or totalitarian political control. If the Chinese people will be able to  do the same, they too will be become at least a 'semi-democracy' like the US, which preserves much more freedoms and some kind of political competition and rotation of power, albeit hugely far from ideal. I don't have any doubt as to what kind of posts such figures as Sarkozy or Bush would try to gain, if, suppose, with the help of a time machine they had been transported into the period of the Third Reich in the 1930s. The same goes for Tony Blair. Absolutely no doubts on this one. The same goes for their governments. Don't have any delusions about the nature of the modern governments in the nation-states. There are very substantial differences between legal and cultural models of the contemporary states - YES, but the difference between their governments is almost ZERO, cos the governments are kind of relics in their nature.
There's no such thing as a good government. There's only better controlled governments, worse controlled governments and practically UNCONTROLLED governments - all with the same motives and very similar interests which don't have anything to do with the population's well-being as well as with the ethics or moral. They are intrinsically immoral, and so far there's nothing for it. Take it or leave it. Yes you can say with some degree of certainty that KGB government of Russia does occupy a special place among all others in terms of cruelty and blood-thirst, but it more relates just to the fact of their being KGB, which initially and historically has never been a government as such. But even so, this difference is much less than it could appear at first sight.

A note about the Americans love affair with their guns

This is my short reply to one blogger's question:
Do you think that it's not guns that increase murders, it's nations that are full of people demanding guns?
My answer:
Both are true.
Guns which are practically in an unrestricted circulation nation-wide of course rise the killing rate and not only that - suicide rate too. At the same time Americans have a very high percentage of people who don't value life enough in practice (the conservative historical legacy of the US). But guns in turn help to keep the very cult of guns and teach Americans from the cradle that guns are part of their culture and an integral attribute of their fight with 'bad guys'. America - we must recognize it and the faster the better for the US - is in this sense much more violent and blood thirsty in this respect than Switzerland and many other European countries for that matter. The death penalty is another very singular distinction in the mass mentality of the US from Europe (the idea of killing as a punishment is very live in the US)
But, guns increase murder rate too, and there's no reasonable doubt that the criminal killing rate in the same Switzerland would fall even lower if the free guns circulation was stopped. They were not invented to protect lives, the fire arms were invented to kill.
The very ban, or, at least serious modification of the rules which would give an individual the right to posses a real gun, would not only reduce directly the killing rate, but also would start a major review of the centuries old romantic love affair of America with their guns, would start some sole searching, and, maybe, today's children in the US will grow into some 'less American' and 'more European' adults in this respect:) One must start somewhere first with word then with deed.