Monday - August 29, 2011

I loathe the Arab Spring and almost everything about it, says Peter Hitchens

A few days ago writing in the Daily Mail, Peter Hutchens had this to say.

The official pretext, that we are ‘intervening to protect civilians’, is lying hogwash and should be laughed at every time it is used. In the past few days – according to reliable reports – Libya’s rebels have been guilty of indiscriminate shooting into civilian areas and the brutal and arbitrary arrests of suspected opponents.

And he had more to say on that subject such as:

We’re cheering on a football crowd with AK-47s, who could be worse than Gaddafi

The moment has come to admit that I loathe the Arab Spring and almost everything about it.

It looks to me pretty much like a football crowd armed with AK-47s and bazookas, with the added ingredient of Islamic militancy. Why am I expected to like it?
For we are all supposed to approve of it. Every media outlet, every politician, every church pulpit, treats it as an unmixed Good Thing.
Not me. I look at these wild characters in baseball caps and tracksuit bottoms blasting ammunition into the sky (often killing or injuring innocents far away, but they don’t care) and I am mainly thankful that they are a long way off.

I suppose it is possible that this lot will miraculously create a law-governed democracy with freedom of speech and conscience. But I somehow shan’t be surprised if they don’t.

Just because existing regimes are bad, it does not follow that their replacements will be any better. The world has known this since the French Revolution of 1789, when bliss and joy turned to mass murder and dictatorship in a matter of months.

Egypt’s upheaval has already begun to go bad. Libya’s has been plastered with danger signs from the start. The anti-Gaddafi rebels are an incompetent and fractious mess. They have already murdered one of their own leaders.

And – I think it very wrong that this aspect is played down so much – their victory would never have happened without Nato providing them with an air force, as it did for the equally suspect Kosovo Liberation Army in the early days of Blair.

Here are some problems for the cheerleaders of this event, most of them modern Left- liberals. The savage regimes that are now falling are the direct result of the destruction of the empires of Europe. America, which encouraged this, quietly hung on to its own large land empire. So did the USSR.

These campaigners for ‘colonial freedom’ argued – I recall them doing it – that it didn’t matter what sort of regimes arose when independence came. What mattered was that they would be free from us. That ‘freedom’ led directly to Colonel Gaddafi.

True, Europe’s empires were often violent and cruel, though ours was generally better than the others. And they were frequently corrupt, though again ours was cleaner than the others. But their misdeeds were petty set beside those of most of the newly ‘free’ countries of Africa and the Middle East.

Now it is the very same Left-liberals who are most set on using bombs and sanctions to overthrow the states they were so keen on. How strange that, more than half a century after the Suez bungle finished us as a Mediterranean power, British military force is now in action again in North Africa, bolstering a farcical yet sinister army in pick-up trucks whose aims we don’t even know.

unedited source is here

Well, the fact is that NATO and I suppose to some possible degree the USA as well, is involved.
For Brits and Europeans (I make a distinction between them,) Libya is very close by and many folks are much worried that should full scale war on the scale of Iraq take place, Europe and the UK might be flooded with even more immigrants seeking asylum.  And we have all seen how ready to accept those folks the govts here have been in the past.  Never mind what the public thinks. The job of the public is to support what the govts. mandate. They don’t have to agree, they just have to pay for it.  So you can see the concern.

Meanwhile ..... having already spent I really don’t know how many millions in support of rebels or freedom fighters or whatever the heck they are,
and btw there are SAS ppl on the ground over there in support of anti Gadiffi forces, Brits have been told that in spite of their support,
here. Read it for yourself.  I’m sure you’ll all be shocked.

Posted by peiper     on 08/29/2011 at 06:56 AM   
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