If folks think Christianity is more dangerous than Islam, all one has to do is look at Iran and Afghanistan before "conservative Islam" took over.Quote:
Originally Posted by Paladin
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If folks think Christianity is more dangerous than Islam, all one has to do is look at Iran and Afghanistan before "conservative Islam" took over.Quote:
Originally Posted by Paladin
Why cast your net so far when you only need to ask what have the Christian militants like Greg Abbott done in Texas? What have they done to the rights of pregnant women in distress with medical complications? Increased their distress, sent them close to death for life-saving treatment in another State.Quote:
Originally Posted by MrFanti
Can you also explain why your Big Daddy thinks The Ten Commandments should be publicly displayed but not The Lord's Prayer?
And can you confirm that it was the Christian Greg Abbott who licensed for sale the Battlefield Artillery and Kiddy-Shredder ammunition that a week later was used to spray six year olds all over the walls of their classroom in Uvalde -in contravention of the Law of the United States, and also a violation of the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States -?
Maybe focus on the Taliban on your doorstep?
Let me guess, you never served in your country's military, whatever that country is.
So what? Serving in the military in this country (UK) does not have the aura of loyalty that some Americans like to think it is, though some would like it like that. There have been attempts to make it so, but how can anyone call every veteran a 'hero' when all they did was spend every day in Camp Bastion cooking breakfast, lunch and dinner? Merely serving in the military doesn't make anyone a hero. The rhetoric got out of hand, when the reality was that the British were as much a flop in Afghanistan as they were in Iraq, two conflicts that left both countries worse off than they were, and that's a grim conclusion given what they were in, say, 1979.Quote:
Originally Posted by Paladin
Is there such a thing as a 'Just War'? Many will argue that the Second World War was justifiable because of the Nazis, but it could be agued that the German ambition to dominate Europe was the same in 1939 as it was in 1914, and that in both cases the aim of the war was to prove that one power dominating all the others is not acceptable, indeed you could go back to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and all that happened after it with the concept of a 'balance of power' to see how international politics has moved up and down the scale of armed conflict and peaceful co-operation.
Something goes wrong, and some wise guy emerges who talks tough and says he will change things. The key is not to care who or how many die to achieve the ambition. The Americans got it wrong in Vietnam, in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, in Iraq and Afghanistan. But look at the catastrophic mistakes also made by al-Qaeda and Da'esh/ISIS -you would think all this militarism would be judged to be what it is: an expensive way to fail, while counting the cost of the hatred, the bitterness and resentment, and the pain that endures has no statistic.
WW1 and WW2 started for completely different reasons, or have you forgotten...
"when all they did was spend every day in Camp Bastion cooking breakfast, lunch and dinner?"
As you Don't know, we (NATO) had nearly zero cooks cooking anything anywhere. It was all contracted out and all the work was done by third country nationals, with a small number of US & NATO personnel supervising and managing the work.
That said, even the "cooks in camp Bastion" and everywhere else were subjected to regular indirect fire and occasional ground attacks against even the largest of bases.
Bottom line, you weren't there; I was so don't step on that land mine.
You don't think the domination of Europe was the key fact in both World Wars? The British Empire went to war in 1914 because it had a treaty obligation to Belgium whose sovereignty was violated by the German Empire -the aim was to reject Germany's aim to dominate Europe.Quote:
Originally Posted by Paladin
The British went to war with Germany again in 1939 because it violated the sovereignty of Poland, having previously annexed Austria and through Czechoslovakia shown it's ambition was to dominate Europe.
Go back and review the sequence of events in July & Aug 1914. The war didn't state in western europe, it started in easten eurpos and crossed over later as a result of really asinine idiots in charge of the major powers. Three cousins all going to war with each other...
Not quite. The chain of events leading to war was triggered by the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, but the fighting actually started on the Western front.Quote:
Originally Posted by Paladin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_World_War_I
Serbia is not in Eastern Europe, and Christopher Clark has made a strong case for the origins of the war with the Balkan Wars that followed the demands of Serbian Nationalists in the first decade of the 20thc, and it was the ultimatum Austria-Hungary delivered to Serbia following the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand that was the occasion which sparked off a world war.Quote:
Originally Posted by Paladin
The point was made by Harry Hinsley in Power and the Pursuit of Peace when he pointed out the difference between an event or an occasion and a cause. The assassination in Sarajevo was the occasion, but the cause was Imperial Domination, in this case, of Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm II resented the fact that Germany was a late player to the Great Game, unification taking place in 1870 long after the maritime powers -Spain, France, the Netherlands and Britain- had carved up the resource rich corners of the world between them. The Conference of Berlin in 1884-85, the so-called 'Scramble for Africa' did parcel up those parts of the Continent not already taken by the Big Three (Britain, France and Spain) but meant all Germany got was the parts nobody wanted, in East and West, and South-West Africa. Thus Wilhelm saw the European continent ripe for German domination, with the Balkans and Greece offering large tracts of agricultural land and access to the Mediterranean Sea. Adolf Hitler shared the same obsession, and in his case considered the people living in these lands little more than savages who were surplus to the needs of the Aryan Race.
So I suggest you re-adjust your set, and think again about how the Imperial Ambitions of one collided the with the Treaty obligations of another, and how a jigsaw of such alliances led to the mash up of Europe, and with it the Middle East -and, incidentally, was also the spark that lit the Nationalist and Communist movements in China (May 1919 and all that), but that is a whole other plate of noodles to unravel.
But the first declarations of war were in the east, Austria on Serbia and Germany on Russia. It's in you own quoted list! Jeez...Quote:
Originally Posted by filghy2
The Germans thought they could take out France quickly, had to go through Belgium which pissed of GB, but it was their plan to quickly take out France and then punish Russia for being insolent. But the Austrians sucked wind and the French, British & Belgians held (barely), so that plan went to hell fast.
And when Austria went after Serbia it got its ass handed to it.