According to Lorne Gunter who I normally trust and respect quite a lot as a Post columnist, the treaty of Westphalia kept "Europe largely at peace for more than three centuries". I don’t think so. How do you explain the 18th century. War was constant, at least with the major powers. I do know there were a number of invasions and counter invasions during the 16th century. It wasn’t Westphalia that brought about the Pax Britannica. It was the British Navy and the Congress of Vienna and the Treaty of Paris.
Germany invaded Austria and France during that period and lesser countries got in on it too. Westphalia had a loophole in it the size of a locomotive that was used over and over again by Napoleon, King Louis and Bismarck to "defend their territory" that had nothing to do with security or autonomy.
For most of our lifetime and the history of mankind, there have been dictators and thugs in control of countries. We have the chance to eradicate them. I don’t think sitting by and allowing Burma to kill hundreds of thousands of its own people is justified in the name of peace. It brings more trouble and gives comfort to all those aspiring juntas and others who look up to the likes of the president of Sudan and his likes.
The 1930’s are more instructive here. The more comfort and leeway you give dictators, the more trouble you get. Nihilism doesn’t work for me on this. The answer is for Western countries to back up the deals they make for the peace and security of peoples, whether or not the UN agrees.
Gunter points out that any of these countries could be secured by one brigade of troops. It doesn’t make it any better to sit back and let it go on. It’s excessive that we have the luxury of allowing people to die and molder and be poor and miserable while we comment on how safe our way of life is. Democracy would not have come to half the world by now if we had had that attitude in the past sixty years.
We have the means of eliminating the terrible scourge of blindness in children due to malnutrition just by the use of golden rice in the developping world. This isn’t happening because GM foods have been banned due to the activities of groups like Greenpeace.
We have victory in our grasp but we still seem determined to snatch defeat from its jaws.
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Does anyone ask in the Middle East who controlled the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip before the Six Day War? This war is cited as the turning point of Middle Eastern politics. Gaza, along with Sinai, was owned by Egypt which it lost in 1967 and only got back in 1978 when it achieved a peace treaty with Israel. Golan was held by Syria. No Palestinians lived there as far as I know. The West Bank was held by Jordan. Why weren’t the Palestinians given a state by those countries? The official reason: we’re waiting for Israel to be destroyed. The real reason: these countries had no more interest or desire in seeing a Palestinian state than Israel does now. They feared the Palestinians having any control over this territory. They wanted it for themselves and they thought the Palestinians would start a fundamentalist Islamic movement in its own country.
King Hussein of Jordan (who escaped assassination at least twice by these elements) was particularly worry about this. At least one-third of his country is Palestinian already, even without counting the West Bank. Certainly the Egyptians, always with an eye on the Muslim brotherhood, are worried about the same result.
It is hypocritical in extreme for these countries to talk about a homeland for the Palestinians when all of them, including the countries that held any of these territories before 1967. They had an opportunity to give the Palestinians a state and refused to do so time and time again. They continue to hold the dark dream that one day Israel will disappear through whatever means.
And for all those Christian Arabs who had the dream of living free in an Arab state once the Israelis were evicted from their various settlements, they should look at Lebanon and see their future.
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John Baird had this incredible faculty for convincing me to support something I don’t like. Recently, in an attack on the carbon tax that Stéphane Dion is considering putting into his platform (something I’m a little soured on of late), Mr. Baird said people have to ask themselves if they can trust Mr. Dion to spend any money he’d collect on the gas tax on the environment. This is why nothing happens regarding greenhouse gases.
I don’t care if the money raised is spent on the environment. That’s not the point. The point is to discourage people from doing things that create emissions. I don’t agree with the concept entirely and don’t agree with the underlying principle that we have to go out and fight global warming, I do find it amusing that Mr. Baird has found the wrong way to attack the issue. How would one spend it on the environment? If you can find a way, great. But since Mr. Dion is promising it will be revenue neutral, the money would be spent on the areas that income tax was spent for. Frankly, since I’ve advocated a consumption tax rather than income taxes, I find it attractive in that sense. I hope it’s married with a general tax cut so that there are equivalent reductions in income taxes otherwise people won’t understand it. Mr. Dion needs to explain how it’s going to be revenue neutral.
Mr. Baird is a one-note wonder who has no imagination at all. I don’t know if I support the carbon tax idea, but Mr. Baird is doing a good job of making me think about supporting it. Well done.
Whatever criticism I might have about a carbon tax, one thing you can say about it is that it would be a big step in getting rid of greenhouse gases. It would be more than Mr. Baird has done in well over a year of being the Environment minister.
Mr. Baird and Jack Layton are only the most recent examples of moron politicians (like Jim Prentice) who bring in more and more things to make it harder for us to get out oil and the gas the we need and then complain about the high prices of gas and how something needs to be done about it. If you believe that the consumption of this stuff is bad, who cares how high the price goes up? Why doesn’t Mr. Layton tell everyone to get on a bike? Why doesn’t he get on his?
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After the recent earthquake, China has declared the Olympics to be safe.
What about the Chinese?
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