Thursday, January 25, 2007

Does anyone care

The Husband has been busy over at Amerikan Turk, I am sure it their love of rubber.....on wheels!!!!

Anyway here is the Husband's comments to a variety of posts. Does anyone care to comment?

Murat, its very very tempting but work will not allow. In the process of bidding three contract worth $1.5bn and I am the package manager for them all...for my sins. I am not still commuting but am riding every weekend, snow or not on the mountain bike or road depending how I feel!!

Peacemaker and bolsa hey: I never said I agreed with liquidation just that people should be punished. Mass killing is not to be condoned by anyone. However you make an interesting point that those who commit treason should be punished directly. However when its a particular ethnicity what are you to do with their families etc. behind your lines. I agree that killing them is not the answer and in todays PC climate morally reprehensible, so lets say internment to ensure that the relatives of the people who commit treason do not now undermine your efforts to repel the invading army. But what do you do when its over, let a group of people back into your society who can create tension?, pretend nothing happened, please tell me what? Assimilation? Look at the Balkans for how successful that is. I don't know, do you?

And yes I agree the Brits have a less than perfect record, remember we invented the concentration camp during the Boer War long before the Germans in WWII. However I cannot agree with you regarding the Americans. Even a cursory reading will reveal that the original reaction to the uprising led by Washington was perceived as "free born Englishmen (who happened to be living in the American Colonies) standing up for the rights against a tyrant (King George III) who happened to be their own King. Most of the books written (by Americans) about the War of Independence make that point so it would have been rather difficult for the Brits to wipe out the......Brits and be accused of genocide. As a good example try 1776 by David McCullough or The First American, biography of Franklin if you doubt my word.

It is very easy to look back with perfect 20/20 hinsight and criticize with our highly evolved morals. But I feel that to understand events you have to consider the morals or ethics of the time. The events we are talking about happened in let's say the 1920's. Go back about 100 years and what can we find in the history of warfare. The battle of Talavera and the Peninsula campaign thats what. What happened there is that after a siege the British Army stormed the town and once inside the town was subjected to 3 days of sacking and looting where a large number of civilians were killed. Why you ask, well the rules of warfare at that time permitted three days of sacking if the local population had helped the army defending the town which is what happened at Talavera. In this instance it was the British Army but read any book about that period and you will see the same story repeated by any army you care to mention. By today's standards we would haul those troops up as they were in breach of the Geneva Convention but that did not exits, or as in Iraq troops would be accused of murder but by the standards of that period it was accepted. Was it genocide? Was it right, please feel free to judge people and events over whom you have no influence because i can't. Or seeing as you raise the Hutus and Tutsis what about the Zulu mefecane that slaughtered thousands in Southern Africa in the 1800's. Basically if Shaka Zulu turned up outside your town you either had to surrender or die. Genocide? Please enlighten me with your modern sensibilities if you feel qualified to judge a people, culture and set of morals you or I cannot possibly understand.

Oh and who ever said I was civilized? Can you not make comments without a personal attack?

2 comments:

Redneck Texan said...

I've made a mental note not to jack with Andy. ;-)

He brings his facts to an argument.

Eski Kanka Jim said...

Well....... I say Andy should forget about genocides, wars, retributions, death, etc, and stick to Belly Dancing !!!

However, failing that, how about pissing off the darlin' wifey and supporting the Mighty ANKARAGUCU ???!!!