2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumClinton supporters are exemplars to the world
Man offering freehugs comforts crying child being yelled at by protesters at Clinton rally #SOSPolitics @SOS_EnEsp
https://mobile.twitter.com/benchmarkpol/status/728773578900918272
GreatGazoo
(3,937 posts)Hillary supporters mocking the little people while stealing their Social Security money:
DemocratSinceBirth
(99,719 posts)polly7
(20,582 posts)And wars of choice that devastate the lives of millions of children?
You should remove the 'to the world bit' (just a friendly suggestion).
DemocratSinceBirth
(99,719 posts)polly7
(20,582 posts)DemocratSinceBirth
(99,719 posts)polly7
(20,582 posts)by Jason Hirthler / March 24th, 2016
Of course, to imply that the brutal assassination of the leader of a sovereign state by foreign-backed terrorists was a criminal act would be to implicate Hillary Clinton in a war crime. And that, we all know, is off the table. But that is the first point to make in an honest discussion of Clintons involvement in Libya. It was a war crime, violating the U.N. Charter and the Nuremburg principals. Wars of aggression, as Nuremberg judge Robert Jackson limned, are the supreme international crime, because they contain within them the evil of the whole. Precisely the story of Libya, a country with the highest standard of living in Africa, destroyed by Western NATO aerial forces backing terrorist jihadists on the ground. The once proud nation is now a festering swamp of extremism and an escape valve for ISIS fighters being routed in Syria.
Over the course of his career, Gaddafi implemented a huge raft of social and economic programs that were highly popular with the people. It seems hard to reconcile the notion of a populace living in perpetual fear with one that receives free education, healthcare, housing, and a novel system of direct democracyborn in an Islamic state.
Basically an admirer of Gamal Nassers theories of economic nationalism as a path between Cold War polarities, Gaddafi was an independent-minded, anti-imperialist Muslim radical. He dramatically altered the shape of the state several times, lastly by creating something called the Jamahiriya, which was a radical form of direct democracy, or at least an attempt at it. In short, small communities would meet, debate issues, and send off representatives to a peoples congress to shape laws based on community decisions. Then this legislation would be sent to revolutionary committees for implementation. Observers have noted instances in which Gaddafi, in a nominal role of avuncular overseer, was rebuffed by the Jamahiriya system and times where he rejected its demands. As head of the armed forces, he never really relinquished the power that would have made the Jamahiriya all the more empowering to the population. But this is not to say it does not include elements that American democracy could not profit by, notably the Jeffersonian and anarchic notion of delegating decision-making to the most grassroots level.
For Africans, these were monumental undertakings and offered the hope of independence from Western militaries, multinationals, and creditors. For the West, Gaddafis actions were the ultimate crime. He was essentially trying to block the IMF from furthering shackling Africa in suffocating debt that, to be sure, would provide a steady flow of interest payments back to Western banks. He also effectively proposed a de-dollarized African economic block free of both the dollar reserve currency and Western lending institutions. He understood that both were tools of oppression and enslavement. He wanted to replace these extractive tools with continental development funds beneficial to Africans.
For all of this he was murdered and his country reduced to ruin.
As part of the run up to war, Barack Obama froze some $30 billion belonging to the Libyan Central Bank. This money was going to fund the above developments. How convenient that the money was frozen, which derailed the projects, and that a no-fly zone was implemented, which immediately led to the illegal war that overthrew the Gaddafi government.
Its obvious that the United States sought to unseat Gaddafi because he threatened the global superstructure of U.S. power. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, Washington isnt afraid of Islam but independence. This tragic spectacle has played out ad nauseum across the history of the American empire. In North America itself, in Central and South America, in Africa, in Eastern Europe, and throughout Asia. Anywhere freethinkers rear their un-indoctrinated heads, they are swiftly cut down. Rulers like Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin, and Hugo Chavez are demonized not for their flaws as governors but for their virtues as nationalists. Independent domestic economics, independent foreign policiesthese are the bête noir of Washingtons imperial plan.
Sadly, the rest of the world has been slow to learn the hard lesson that the United States cant be trusted. This should have been obvious to the world during the Native American genocide. But each new generation of leaders forget their history and repeat the gullibility of their forbears. Yet it is also every new generation of American leaders that somehow ingest the vices of their antecedents.
As time was running out, Gaddafi fielded several peace proposals to the West, ignored by Hillary Clinton as she made an impassioned push for war. He tried vainly to deny the lies promoted incessantly by the Western media: that he was minutes away from committing genocide on his own population. He never had a chance. Media is the spearhead of American foreign policy. Controlling the narrative is the fight that must be won before the war is fought. There is no better practitioner of this shadowy art than Washington.
Full article: http://dissidentvoice.org/2016/03/hillarys-hate-crime/
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511647122
Mandela praised Qaddafi for fully supporting ending apherteid.
This question becomes even more valid in light of what the mainstream media, in the wake of the former South African presidents death, have been anxiously hiding from the public: the actual close and crucial alliance between Mandela and Gaddafi. Back in the 70s and 80s, when the West refused to allow sanctions against Apartheid in South Africa and used to call Mandela a terrorist, it was none other than Libyas Muammar Gaddafi who kept supporting him. Gaddafi funded Mandelas fight against Apartheid by training ANC fighters and by paying for their education abroad, and their bond only became stronger after Mandelas release from prison on February 11, 1990.
When Mandela was taken to the ruins of Gaddafis compound in Tripoli, which was bombed by the Reagan administration in 1986 in an attempt to murder the entire Gaddafi family, he said:
No country can claim to be the policeman of the world and no state can dictate to another what it should do. Those that yesterday were friends of our enemies have the gall today to tell me not to visit my brother Gaddafi. They are advising us to be ungrateful and forget our friends of the past.
In response, Gaddafi thanked Mandela for his friendship, saying: Who would ever have said that one day the opportunity for us to meet would become reality. We would like you to know that we are constantly celebrating your fight and that of the South African people, and that we salute your courage during all of those long years you spent in detention in the prison of Apartheid. Not a single day has passed without us having thought of you and your sufferings.
Eight years later, when then U.S. president Bill Clinton visited Mandela in March 1998, Clinton criticized the South African presidents meeting with Muammar Gaddafi. In reaction to that criticism, Mandela straightforwardly replied:
I have also invited Brother Leader Gaddafi to this country. And I do that because our moral authority dictates that we should not abandon those who helped us in the darkest hour in the history of this country. Not only did the Libyans support us in return, they gave us the resources for us to conduct our struggle, and to win. And those South Africans who have berated me for being loyal to our friends, can literally go and jump into a pool.
On the eve of the NATO-led war against Libya, Gaddafis booming country largely co-funded three projects that would rid Africa from its financial dependence on the West once and for all: the African Investment Bank in the Libyan city of Sirte, the African Monetary Fund (AFM), to be based in the capital of Cameroon, Yaounde, in 2011, and the African Central Bank to be based in the capital of Nigeria, Abuja. Especially the latter angered France not coincidentally also the main orchestrator of the war on Libya because it would mean the end of the West African CFA franc and the Central African CFA franc, through which France kept a hold on as much as thirteen African countries. Only two months after Africa said no to Western attempts to join the AFM, Western organized protests against the AFMs benefactor, Muammar Gaddafi, started to erupt in Libya ultimately resulting in the freezing of $30 billion by the West, which money mostly was intended for the above mentioned financial projects.
But Gaddafi helped the African continent in more than just material ways. More than any other African leader, he supported Mandelas ANCs struggle against the racist regime in South Africa. Above that, many Black Africans, especially sub-Saharan African migrants and refugees, found a new home in Gaddafis prosperous Libya.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37301.htm
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1251&pid=1164288
DemocratSinceBirth
(99,719 posts)polly7
(20,582 posts)Haiti .......... just worth a few little youtube videos which spell out the exact opposite of what was done to they and their collaterally damaged children.
Elitist, self-entitled pap.
DemocratSinceBirth
(99,719 posts)polly7
(20,582 posts)When the children cry
Let them know we tried
'Cause when the children sing
The new world begins
What have we become
Just look what we have done
All that we destroyed
You must build again
GreatGazoo
(3,937 posts)but everything Galloway says here applies to Hillary's support for the Iraq War, her speech and her vote:
DemocratSinceBirth
(99,719 posts)GreatGazoo
(3,937 posts)polly7
(20,582 posts)Bluenorthwest
(45,319 posts)"It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s and because of both president and Mrs. Reagan in particular Mrs. Reagan we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it, nobody wanted to do anything about it, and that too is something I really appreciate with her very effective low-key advocacy. It penetrated the public conscience and people began to say, hey, we have to do something about this too."
Of course not one word of that is true. What is true is that today, AIDS is the number one cause of death in South Africa. Yes.
cali
(114,904 posts)was spouting right wing shit on social security. Frankly, I think.many of.you would support such crap if Hillary said we had to to save social security.
DemocratSinceBirth
(99,719 posts)catnhatnh
(8,976 posts)just ask and they'll tell you. Their humility is YUUUUGE!!!!