Quote:
Originally Posted by ShadoWarrior
Most of the Muslim countries from North Africa to Pakistan are arguably still socially in the stone age. Women had more rights in the European feudal era than they do today in many so-called 'modern' Muslim nations. And tribalism, which pervades almost all Muslim countries, is a stone age concept. Nation is a bronze age invention, and these folks haven't yet grasped that simple concept.
Some people talk about bombing someone "back to the stone age". These so-called nations are still in the stone age. Cave dwellers with AKs. Or in the case of Pakistan, missiles and nukes.
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As said earlier, the attempts to Westernisize the Middle Eastern countries are really as useful as teaching a fish to ride a unicycle. It might be entertaining at first, but with such fundamental differences, it has very little of a chance to work in reality. And the word is often, fundamental. Pun intended.
I can remember the Iraqi guy who went to High School with me - he was telling the class about Islam and said something along these lines: "The Shiites are really brutal and uncivilized - you steal, they cut off your hand from the wrist. We Sunnites are much more civilized - we only cut off your fingers."
The fact is, the U.S. of A. meant well by ridding Iraq of Saddam and removing Taleban from the seat of power in Afghanistan, but the attempts to "help" are most often misguided by misunderstanding the local culture. You can't just remove a head of state and tell the people of the said state they are now free to elect someone in his stead. That way you only create a vacuum of power - a vacuum that is going to be filled by something else, most often a puppet of the faction that removed the previous head of state.
A very good description of this particular thing is the episode of Over There, where the team enters a village in Iraq to provide protection for the negotiations between the villagers and the oil company that wants to build a pipeline next to the village. The oil company representative doesn't want to build a mosque for the village and encourages the wife of the local hardliner imam to demand for a school, which eventually leads to her banishment from the village by her own husband, partially because Dim tries to help her as well.
I'm not really saying all of the Americans are like this, but from what I've come to see is that most of you don't really see what goes on beyond the borders of your own state and even far less, beyond the U.S. borders. Of course this is a bit of generalization, just like saying most of the Muslim countries are socially in the stone ages. They are culturally very different from the western world and yes, they treat their women poorly, if they get out of line, but then again, there are some Christian factions that are just as stone aged, if you ask me. It doesn't matter, what the religion is - fundamentalists are fundamentalists everywhere and they act pretty much the same everywhere, no matter what the religion is.
As for the U.S. military diminishing it's power, I don't really see that generally as a bad thing. I can't say I'm anti-U.S., but I kind of frown to the way, you guys have driven your own agendas at gunpoint ever since the Iron Curtain came down. The appeasement policy the U.S. has towards Israel is something very disturbing - UN sanctions against Israel harassing people, who lived in the region before someone got the bright idea to actually erect a jewish colony there, can not be put in to action because the motions are vetoed by the U.S..
What the world would most definitely need is a bit broader point of view. And thus endeth the rant. No hard feelings, people. I know some very intelligent and nice Americans, who actually know where Finland is and have enough curiosity to get to know other cultures and societies.
