Tuesday, 30 April 2013

Ken Livingstone speaks out against American Foreign Policy and the resultant "anger against injustices"




"Very often, people get incredibly angry about injustices that they see."
Referring to "torture at Guantanamo Bay, at Bagram airbase", rendition, and "ignorance in the Bush White House about Islam" and Middle East issues, he said: "People get angry - they lash out.
"It's the whole squalid intervention that has disfigured the record of the Western democracies.
"I think this fuels the anger of the young men, who - as we saw in Boston - went out, and, out of anger and demand for revenge, claimed lives in the West." 
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/04/30/ken-livingstone-boston-bombing-comments_n_3186207.html?utm_hp_ref=uk

For the information of my American friends, Ken Livingstone is the ex mayor of London and something of a pariah to the political Establishment - he was certainly no friend of Tony Blair for example.
He could be thought of as the equivalent of Dennis Kucinich to Barack Obama.
Somebody else's comment 
"What he said was no more or less than the truth. Our interventions in the Arab world have been far from noble. Even if you credit western governments with good intentions and not lust for oil, some of the things that have happened, and are happening, will stoke anger in the countries they are happening in. Some people will act on both true and perceived injustices. It's the inevitable fallout of having our troops stationed in foreign territory.

That's ALL Livingstone said, and he's not wrong.

He wasn't trying to justify terrorist actions, but to explain them. If you can't even talk about the reasons why these people act as they do, you can't begin to solve it. The last thing we REALLY need, is people like this Tory trying to make political capital out of an appalling atrocity." 
My reply to the above comment  
"Exactly.

When you are not even allowed to speak up and identify the real cause of a problem you will never be able to find a solution.

American interventionism in the world has nothing to do with altruism.
It is about wealth and power and imposing one country's will on others.

It is also about bombing other countries and killing innocent civilians.
American Foreign Policy is also about invasions, political CIA coups and stirring up trouble against regimes that the American government doesn't like.

It is little wonder that American Foreign Policy inspires a good deal of hatred around the world.
It is little wonder that occasionally America suffers the consequences of the American government's actions with a terro r attack. The CIA calls it blowback.

Switzerland has passed very anti Muslim laws - no building of mosques etc.
But the Swiss don't go around bombing or invading other countries.
The Swiss haven't suffered a terro rist strike and one is not likely.

The attack on 7/7 in London wouldn't have happened if the UK didn't go poking it's nose into other people's business and stirring up hatred, by the British government supporting the invasion of Iraq etc."

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