rowan wrote:Where have I lectured you in English vocabulary? I have questioned your bias. You are supporting war crimes. The UN has uncovered enough evidence in a few months to make those accusations, yet you still provide apologies for Assad and Putin.
Once again, a complete distortion of the truth and inversion of the facts. The UN accused all sides, as has already been pointed out to you. But it was you who refused to acknowledge this referred to the US & Britain and others as well, and this from an organization which is heavily influenced by Washington. It really doesn't get any more damning. So which is worse? Invading other countries and committing war crimes, or defending a country and committing war crimes? Whose war crimes do we remember from WWII? Does Hollywood make movies about the Holocaust, or does it make them about Dresden? The Syrian government was obliged to defend the country from the terrorists America armed, trained and sent in there, and was framed for the chemical attack in Damascus, while the Russians were invited to help. America was not invited, but still managed to bomb plenty of innocent people, including 80 Syrian soldiers during a crucial cease-fire. Of course, Syria was only one of 7 Middle Eastern countries the US was bombing at the time
The British only decided to stop the practice of slavery once it had no longer become profitable for them to do so. Prior to that they had, of course, been one of the major perpetrators. In fact, it was quite typical of the hypocrisy and arrogance the British developed during the imperial era they they immediately began to preach to others the moment they decided to withdraw from the sordid business themselves. & you think this is something to be genuinely proud of? The British transported 15 million slaves across the Atlantic, at least 2 million of whom died during the journey (many simply thrown overboard if they became ill). Countless more slaves were executed in the colonies, of course, with slow-burning to death one of the various methods of torture used. Oh, but never mind all that. Once the practice was no longer profitable to them, the British led the charge against it...
The British and their descendents were to the fore of a genocide in North America that claimed millions of lives. This pointing the finger at others tactic of yours is really weak and does not diminish the horrors of Britain's past and present one iota. In Kenya they devised the most horrific methods of torture imaginable - shoving broken bottles into women's vaginas and dragging men behind cars to their death, for example, while in India they fired them out of cannons for amusement. The main difference between the Germans and the British is that the latter have been at it much, much longer - centuries, in fact - and still are. But the greatest evil of the British is that they have refused to be held fully accountable and rather whitewashed it all with despicable propaganda.
I've never denied that rebel groups committed war crimes. But your denials of Syrian and Russian crimes are repeated and delusional. Did you not claim that Assad was entitled to use any means to defend his position, and that indiscriminate Russian bombing was fine because they had an invitation to be there? Was it not you who tried to rubbish any source which tried to prove the government atrocities.
There is one propagandist on here. If confused, look in the mirror.
No, it is plainly you who is focusing on the resistance rather than the perpetrators. You are an apologist for American and British war crimes whose tactic is to point the finger at everyone else.
You seriously need to look in the mirror and apply some of that logic to yourself.
Re: Britain's War Crimes
Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2017 3:39 pm
by rowan
Sandydragon wrote:
rowan wrote:
Sandydragon wrote:
I've never denied that rebel groups committed war crimes. But your denials of Syrian and Russian crimes are repeated and delusional. Did you not claim that Assad was entitled to use any means to defend his position, and that indiscriminate Russian bombing was fine because they had an invitation to be there? Was it not you who tried to rubbish any source which tried to prove the government atrocities.
There is one propagandist on here. If confused, look in the mirror.
No, it is plainly you who is focusing on the resistance rather than the perpetrators. You are an apologist for American and British war crimes whose tactic is to point the finger at everyone else.
You seriously need to look in the mirror and apply some of that logic to yourself.
Classic Sandy. Pointing the finger at others to deflect attention from himself.
Re: Britain's War Crimes
Posted: Wed Mar 15, 2017 11:36 am
by onlynameleft
caldeyrfc wrote:
Lord Lucan wrote:Does anybody actually read any of these long winded cut and paste jobs, I canne be bothered.
And yet you will post any old lunatic from youtube as evidence in support of Trump
Well done racist John nice to see you haven't changed even if your name has
I don't remember a poster called Racist John?
Re: Britain's War Crimes
Posted: Wed Mar 15, 2017 1:27 pm
by rowan
& while some may be quick to cite the UN whenever a decision actually goes against one of their country's countless enemies, let's remember this:
For the past 50 years, the essence of British strategy has been to ensure the UN’s failure to prevent or condemn Britain’s, or its allies’, acts of aggression. From 1980 to 1988, for example, Britain and the US vetoed 12 separate UN Security Council resolutions condemning apartheid South Africa – Britain vetoing 11 of these, the US all 12. After its brutal invasion of Angola, South Africa was protected from full international pariah status when the US vetoed, and Britain abstained on, a resolution in 1981. Britain used its veto in May 1986 against a draft resolution condemning South Africa’s attacks on Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe, and the following month Britain and the US vetoed a resolution condemning South Africa for further attacks on Angola.
When Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975, leading to the deaths of around 200,000 people in one of the bloodiest operations in post-war history, Britain in effect supported Jakarta at the UN. Declassified files show that the British planned before the invasion not to condemn the Indonesians and that ‘if there is a row in the United Nations . . . we should keep our heads down and avoid taking sides’. Between 1975 and 1982 there were two Security Council resolutions and eight General Assembly resolutions condemning the invasion and urging Indonesian withdrawal. Britain did vote in favour of the two Security Council resolutions, though these were weakly worded and simply ‘called upon’ Jakarta to withdraw. London abstained on, or voted against, all the General Assembly resolutions, while it provided arms to Indonesia and deepened aid, trade and diplomatic relations.
When the US organised an invasion of Guatemala in 1954 to overthrow the reformist nationalist government of Jacobo Arbenz, the Guatemalans took their case to the UN. A Guatemalan request for the Security Council to consider its complaints about external aggression was rejected partly due to abstentions from Britain and France, acting in support of US policy.
US aggression against Nicaragua in the 1980s resulted in condemnations from around the globe, while the US delivered seven UN vetoes between 1982 and 1986. On all of them, Britain declared its de facto support for Washington by abstaining. Thus Britain could not bring itself to condemn the mining of Nicaraguan ports by the US or support the ruling of the International Court of Justice which found the US aggression against Nicaragua to be illegal and which demanded the US comply with international law.
Similarly, when the US invaded Panama in 1989 it was not only Washington but also London that vetoed a draft resolution calling on the US to withdraw.
For the first decades of the post-war world, the British government fought tooth and nail to keep the UN out of its colonial affairs. In 1950, for example, the Colonial Office noted that such ‘ignorant or prejudiced outside interference would do uncalculable harm’. It also explicitly stated its fear that the colonial powers would have to become ‘accountable to the United Nations’, something which necessarily had to be avoided.
In the early 1960s, Britain undertook a covert, ‘dirty’ war in Yemen to destabilise a new, popular republican government. A British ministerial meeting of December 1963 concluded that ‘any proposal that the United Nations should be invited to find a solution for the problem should be resisted since it would be detrimental to our position’ in neighbouring Aden. The UN, explained Sir Roger Allen, deputy undersecretary at the Foreign Office, consisted only of ‘trouble makers’ and would reflect only the position of the Egyptians, then Britain’s rival in the region.
British policies have long been condemned at the UN and invariably ignored and deflected by Whitehall planners. After the British intervention in Oman in the 1960s to support the extremely repressive Sultan’s regime against a rebellion, the UN’s ad hoc committee produced a report in January 1966 concluding that Oman was a ‘serious international problem’ arising from ‘imperialistic policies and foreign intervention’. Afro-Asian delegates in the Fourth Committee, which dealt with colonial issues, tabled a motion stating that ‘the colonial policies of the UK in its various forms prevents the people of the territory from exercising their rights to self-determination and independence’, and calling on Britain to cease repressive activity and withdraw troops. This resolution was passed by large majorities in both the Fourth Committee and the General Assembly and was subsequently ignored by London, which got on with the business of backing its client.
When Britain invaded Egypt in October 1956, international condemnation provoked London’s first Security Council vetoes. Britain refused any serious attempts to resolve the dispute with Egypt through the UN since ‘neither the Security Council nor the General Assembly could give us what we wanted’, Foreign Office minister Anthony Nutting later explained. According to Geoff Simons’ study of the UN, Prime Minister at the time, Anthony Eden ‘was prepared to have the crisis discussed in the Security Council but only as a prelude to independent British action’. He notes that UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjold, did his best to ensure the success of talks at the UN ‘but there was a substantial British interest in their failure, and fail they did’, thus paving the way for military aggression.
During the civil war in Nigeria between 1967 and 1970, London backed the Lagos government’s brutal repression of the secessionist region of Biafra. This support included the prevention of any significant UN involvement in the war. Britain was ‘strongly opposed to any suggestion of taking the Nigerian question to the United Nations’, the Commonwealth Secretary told US officials at the time.
The files also show that due to public opposition to Britain’s policy of arming the Nigerian government during its aggression, British officials went through the motions at the UN of taking soundings on an arms embargo. The files make clear that this was done entirely for public relations, to demonstrate that an arms embargo was a ‘non-starter’ and so enable Britain to continue arming the regime. ‘The Prime Minister’s purpose in suggesting these soundings was presumably to strengthen our parliamentary position’, a Foreign Office official noted.
Western policy at the UN well before Iraq was described by former adviser to the Secretary General, Erskine Childers. He noted that the Western powers have long used ‘economic bribery and intimidation’ to get their way at the World Bank and IMF but that this had now been extended to the UN:
Two years ago, Yemen embarked on a civil war that has consumed the country between warring factions. The UK, however, has made around 10 times more in profit from war in Yemen than it has given in aid to the country.
Yemen and the UK government’s involvement
The war in Yemen is being fought mainly between the Western-backed Sunni majority administration and the Shia Houthi rebel movement. After seizing the capital Sana’a in 2014, the Houthis took over another important city, Taiz, on 22 March 2015. And by 26 March 2015, Saudi Arabia-led forces launched a full-on offensive against the Houthis. This action has led to criticism, with a conservative civilian death toll estimate at over 10,000; accusations of crimes against humanity; and allegations that al-Qaeda has significantly increased its presence in Yemen thanks to the Saudi intervention. Not to mention placing the country under a siege that has seen it hover at the brink of famine.
This conflict has prompted two responses from the UK government. First, opportunistic fervour to keep selling arms to Saudi Arabia. Second, to provide cursory aid to a debilitated Yemen. And as Amnesty International’s Yemen Researcher Rasha Mohammad points out, the UK has approved £3.3bn-worth of export licences compared to the £371.5m in aid provided over the last two years.
Hypocrisy
Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty’s Deputy Director for Research at its Beirut office, said this in a statement:
Two years of conflict have forced three million people to flee their homes, shattered the lives of thousands of civilians and left Yemen facing a humanitarian disaster with more than 18 million in desperate need of assistance. Yet despite the millions of dollars’ worth of international assistance allocated to the country, many states have contributed to the suffering of the Yemeni people by continuing to supply billions of dollars’ worth of arms
The organisation is unequivocal in its indictment, indicating that the governments of both the UK and the US should reverse their current policy.
The Saudi regime, however, is currently Britain’s most important weapons client. The UK has repeatedly denied there is any evidence that Saudi Arabia has committed ‘war crimes’. Not least using weapons originating from the UK. But mounting evidence has indicated it has. With this lucrative arms trade in mind, critics have previously slammed the government for:
Whitewashing calls for investigations into how Saudi-led forces are using UK-made arms.
The discovery of UK-manufactured cluster bombs in Yemen.
The presence of British military officials in the coalition’s airstrike command centre.
Millions of pounds’ worth of aid would not be necessary if the UK did its diplomatic duty. Theresa May’s government should be helping to stop this conflict, not making a bounty from it.
Quit India: ‘In complete silence the Ghandi men drew up and halted a hundred yards from the stockade. At a word of command, scores of native policemen rushed upon the advancing marchers and rained blows on their heads with their steel-clod lathis. Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off blows. They went down like ninepins. Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing with fractured skulls or broken shoulders.’
Elsewhere, in the city of Sholapur, news of Gandhi’s arrest provoked a general strike on 7 May. In clashes the following day, the police killed 25 protestors. Order was not restored until 16 May when a brutal martial law regime was introduced, accompanied by the merciless flogging of the workers. The leaders of the Sholapur uprising were all put on trial for their lives. They were hanged on 12 July, 1931.
On 30 October 1928 Lajpat Raj led a peaceful demonstration in Lahore that was attacked by the police. He was personally beaten by a British police officer and never recovered from his injuries, dying just over two weeks later. ‘The foremost and popular man in the Punjab’ could be beaten and killed with impunity. A veteran 63 year old Congress leader, the first president of the All India Trade Union Congress, was beaten to death by a British policeman.
Winston Churchill led the way: ‘It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Ghandi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the regal palace . . . to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King Emperor.’ This combination of racism and ignorance was to characterise Churchill’s attitude to India and Indians.
In a number of areas revolutionary governments were established. This was a massive popular uprising, centred in Bihar and the eastern United Provinces. The British deployed over 30,000 troops to crush it. The confrontatins were terribly one-sided, however, with rebel crowds without firearms battling against heavily armed troops supported where necessary by air attack. Resistance was broken by shootings, beatings, mass arrest, house burnings and collective fines. The Contai district, for example, was subjected to a reign of terror with 12,000 arrests, 956 houses burned down, and hundreds of incidents of rape by police and troops.
On another occasion 19 men were arrested when they were found ‘near the railway’ by a military patrol. Without any other evidence than suspicion, they were sentenced to 30 stripes with the whip and seven years imprisonment. By the time the revolt was finally crushed over 90,000 people had been arrested. There were prisoners ‘who died through beating and ill-treatment.’ The official figure for the number of rebels killed by troops and police during the suppression of the revolt was 1060. Nehru gave a figure of 10,000 killed but other estimates go as high as 25,000.
India still had to face the greatest disaster to befall the country in the 20th century, the Bengal famine of 1943-44. This was the product of food shortages brought about by the war. The British administration responded with ‘a callous disregard of its duties in handling the famine.’ The result was a terrible death toll from starvation and disease in 1943-44 that totalled more than 3.5 million men, women and children.
When presented with details of the crisis in Bengal, Churchill commented on ‘Indians breeding like rabbits.’ Churchill’s attitude was quite explicitly racist. He told Amery, ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’ Amery, on one occasion said, ‘I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.’ And it was not just to Amery that Churchill made his feelings clear. He told his private secretary that ‘the Hindus were a foul race . . . and he wished Bert Harris could send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them.’
17 August 1947 was settled on as the date for independence. The British, in reality, had been thrown out. The best assessment was provided by General Hastings Ismay. ‘India in March 1947 was a ship on fire in mid-ocean with ammunition in the hold. By then it was a question of putting out the fire before it actually reached the ammunition. There was in fact no option before us but to do what we did.’
Do you get paid for each hit resulting from a link pasted onto here or something?
Re: Britain's War Crimes
Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2017 6:07 pm
by rowan
No, it's more of a hobby . . .
Martin McGuinness died last week, one time IRA leader, more recently a British government minister-the irony of even writing that still leaves me a bit incredulous. Inevitably a lot has been written about his ‘journey’ from gunman to peacemaker and his supposed damascene conversion. That as it may be, people like McGuinness don’t appear in an ahistorical vacuum-however much it would seem that way if you had occasion or the misfortune to read much of the coverage on him in much of the British media since last week, and some of the Irish media for that matter. Whatever you think of his actions in the 1970s and 80s, the rotten social and political conditions that produced and formed him were set in stone long before he was even born. And when he came of age, apolitical as most people are at that young age, working class people in his native city of Derry took to the streets to demand civil rights, rights long denied them by a vindictive state that hated and despised them, McGuiness saw them battened and kicked off the streets.
Later he would see them shot and killed by high velocity bullets, fired by an army sent in to ‘keep the peace’ between catholics and protestants. A deliberate fiction set up by that the same state that had sent its soldiers into Derry and Belfast, to obscure the fact that it itself was an active and murderous actor in the Ulster conflict from almost the very beginning. Very little of this context, whatever your views on McGuinness, was discussed, analysed or parsed on British television or in the print media last week-the historical amnesia was breath-taking if not surprising. Instead, McGuinness and the IRA were set up as the main cause of all the violence. It was as if the Troubles and the conditions that lead to it had nothing to do with the actions of the British state, and when the violence got going in earnest in the early 1970s that same state positioned itself as a somehow neutral arbitrator between the warring natives in some kind of grubby post-colonial war. It wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now. The kneejerk and violent militaristic response from that state reached its apex on Bloody Sunday in 1972 in Derry in the Bogside where McGuinness was from, when fourteen people were shot and killed by the parachute regiment and many more were injured, both physically and psychologically. The IRA were no doubt responsible for some horrendous crimes, crimes that cannot and should not be whitewashed, we all know this. But as someone said of McGuinness the war came to his door, not the other way around. This simple historical and factual observation cannot and must not be whitewashed. There isn’t always to sides to every story-sometimes there is just the truth, and sometimes there are just the lies.
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’’
Re: Britain's War Crimes
Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2017 6:14 pm
by morepork
Right. Hobby. essellent.
Re: Britain's War Crimes
Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2017 6:59 pm
by kk67
morepork wrote:Right. Hobby. essellent.
As opposed to,....?.
Professional..?. I think about all the times I hear people describe themselves as 'professionals',.....and I get the feeling we need a few less of them. Not in a Khmer Rouge way but just generally I feel it's increasingly being used as a BS justification for theft and incompetence.
Professional Drivers....(killers)
Professional Journalists....(liars)
Professional Financial Advisers....(crooks)
Professional Lawyers.....(more liars)
Professional Accountants.....(more crooks).......the list goes on.
'I'm a professional insurance adviser'.......You're a twat.
Re: Britain's War Crimes
Posted: Wed Mar 29, 2017 9:41 pm
by rowan
Chilling
Excerpts from Mark Curtis’ speech at the September 2005 Conference Against International Terrorism, in which Curtis describes how Britain is one of the leading supporters of terrorism in the world today. Curtis asserts that Britain is almost permanently opposed to the ‘grand principles’ of peace, democracy, human rights and overseas development and explains how in the thousands of policy planning documents he has studied, British planners have made it clear that their goals are based on organising the global economy to benefit Western corporations and controlling how certain regions around the world develop so that they maintain pro-Western investment climates. Moreover, Curtis explains how British policy is designed to ensure that Britain maintains its power status through a special relationship with the United States, based on access to nuclear weapons. Curtis explains how the “national interest” is really a euphemism for “elite interests”, and cites the December 2003 “Defence White Paper” which outlines plans for a new phase of global military intervention around the world, under the cover of international terrorism, within which British planners made it clear that the invasion of Iraq was merely phase 1 of a much broader plan in which other countries would follow.
