Or, I did answer it many times already and now you are just complaining to complain. Any justification for a the kinds of military actions listed in any of these recent threads are always compromises and often justifications for the benefit of oligarchs. sometimes, like Yugoslavia in the 90s, or some African civil wars, there are massive killings of innocent people and destruction of not just infrastructure but history and art. Those are times when the UN can actually get it right, but even then, there is still collateral damage and those other nice terms for killing people. So, no matter how I answer, youâll find something wrong with it, and youâd be right. So, whatâs the point in asking?
So why was NATO right to bomb the sovereign country Serbia yet Russia is wrong to bomb the sovereign country Ukraine?
Never be afraid to answer a question just because someone might disagree with you, why you even participate in these discussions makes no sense to me, you end up griping at others and being upset that people do disagree with you.
If you donât want people to ask you questions then donât post and participate, surely thatâs easy to understand?
Oh dear, now youâre downright embarrassing, guess you havenât noticed some of us have history here, so Lausten going for the âweâ ainât no big thing. Ever notice some of the hearts his comments receive? Thatâs the âwe.â I (we) hope you can appreciate that.
You donât even have the clarity or honest to recognize the significant difference between Putin and Clinton. Clinton did not single handedly order and sustain that bombing.
Yes, Serbia was hideous, but it surely donât equal the monstrosity going on Ukraine right now!
https://www.icty.org/en/press/final-report-prosecutor-committee-established-review-nato-bombing-campaign-against-federal
Hereâs NATOâs side of the story, Jan. 2022
- NATO has been leading a peace-support operation in Kosovo â the Kosovo Force (KFOR) â since June 1999.
- KFOR was established when NATOâs 78-day air campaign against Milosevicâs regime, aimed at putting an end to violence in Kosovo, was over.
- The operation derives its mandate from United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244 (1999) and the Military-Technical Agreement between NATO, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Serbia.
- KFORâs original objectives were to deter renewed hostilities, establish a secure environment and ensure public safety and order, demilitarise the Kosovo Liberation Army, support the international humanitarian effort and coordinate with the international civil presence.
- Today, KFOR continues to contribute towards maintaining a safe and secure environment in Kosovo and freedom of movement for all.
- With the coronavirus outbreak, KFOR is fully implementing the preventive measures recommended by the World Health Organization for the protection of military personnel and providing assistance to the institutions in Kosovo and to EULEX.
- NATO strongly supports the Belgrade-Pristina EU-brokered Normalisation Agreement (2013).
Whatâs Putin going to do for Ukraine after heâs blasts it into rubble and bodies?
Some backstory Washington Post, May, 1999.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/balkans/stories/belgrade050399.htm
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 3, 1999BELGRADE, May 2 â NATO airstrikes on major electrical power plants blacked out Belgrade and large areas of Serbia tonight, hours after Yugoslavia released three captured American soldiers in what it said was a goodwill gesture. The attack dramatically brought the allied air campaign home to millions of ordinary Serbs.
It has been said many times, they are both wrong. Iâm not avoiding the question, Iâm saying there is no right answer.
No one is saying it is okay - why are you saying Putin is justified??? - when all he has for reasons is a paranoid dictatorâs syndrome.
Listing NATOâs lies is no better than listing Russiaâs lies! NATO Lied, their spokesmen lied, there were huge anti-war protests around the world that were mischaracterized by the press and media, the level of outrage was huge.
Serbia had been experiencing terrorist attacks from the KLA during the mid and late 90s. The US state department are on record as declaring the KLA to be an Islamist backed terrorist organization. The KLA operated from within areas of the Kosovo region, Serb territory as much as California or Texas is US territory.
What would you expect your government to do if a terrorist organization began operating inside say California and bombing police stations in Arizona or Nevada? What if that terrorist group was financed by external actors and populated with mercenaries from say El Salvador?
I think youâd expect to be protected and perhaps see the military brought into to confront and go after these terrorist, this is exactly what Serbia did and that is 100% in accordance with international law.
No, the entire situation became useful to the West as a pretext for disarming Serbia, in order to justify that the contrived claims of âethnic cleansingâ were dreamed up and propagated by a compliant uncritical press.
Many countries today do not recognize Kosovo as a sovereign state but as an occupied part of Serbia.
Furthermore NATO is (so it claims) a defensive organization with the objective of defending members from external armed attack. Serbia attacked no NATO member so NATO had no role to play.
Furthermore the UN never authorized such an attack by NATO and an armed assault in a sovreign nation other than for self defense against a current attack is illegal under the UN charter which all NATO members have an obligation to uphold.
Clint spearheaded the plan, without US support NATO can do nothing, it cannot act unless all members agree.
NATO blew up a Serb TV station/tower - in Ukraine when Russia did that recently it was portrayed in the Western press as an attack on free speech, well here is the sickness of NATO when discussing their deliberate attack on a station/tower killing several young journalists in the process:
Hugoâs repetition is getting annoying and contributing nothing. Iâll try a reset here.
I donât remember the details, but here are some criteria I remember for âjustifiableâ war. And Iâll add that the US and NATO help maintain a world of conflict, not to mention the CIA supporting all sorts of nefarious activity, so even with these criteria, they could still be unjustified in intervening.
Clear and present danger (not a possible threat in the future)
Defending the crossing of internationally established borders.
Protection of innocent civilians, equivalent to what you would do if you saw someone being attacked in public.
Defending the destruction to resources, artifacts, non-military targets, and to infrastructure that disrupts economies beyond the harm to whatever you are claiming deserves the call to defend yourself or go on the attack. That one gets dicey because itâs nearly impossible to conduct a major action in a purely surgical military-only fashion.
Those have been around for a while. Iâll add, in this modern world of terrorism, where a small group can cause a lot of damage, that some sort of âpoliceâ action is justified, as in finding someone who bombed or gassed or caused a lot of civilian damage. Or the people who funded it.
If you apply that the current situation in Ukraine, I think you can see what my opinion would be. With the caveats that I included here.
Please, Hugo, most people here agree that NATOâs attack on Serbia was not justified, or is at least questionnable.
Incidentally, if you want to open a topic about Serbia, do it and i will give my views.
Does a wrong committed by NATO in Serbia justify a wrong committed by Russia in Ukraine ?
I would say that NATO what ever its wrongs was not preparing an attack on Russia and i dare you to give me a fact proving the contrary, even if Nato integrated ex eastern Soviet block countries.
.And i would add that even if NATO wrongs justify an attack on Ukraine, which they donât for me, they donât justify the war crimes committed by Russia, they donât justify the negation of Ukraine itself by Russia, they donât justify Russia will of destroying Ukraine as an independent state with a democratic state.
Putin mobilizes the 1941-1945 patriotic war memory to tell that Ukraine and anyone who supports it are Nazi. Putin in his today speech spoke of Donbass and west, never of Ukraine.
If Russia just wanted to prevent Ukraine of joining OTAN, it would have been enough to attack along the border, take some land and negotiate. He choose to attack Kyiv, trying to overthrow or even capture the government.
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Well I agree NATO doesnât give the impression of planning an attack on Russia, but that is also what happened in Serbia, NATO became a tool used by certain Western powers after a precedent had been set. NATO isnât a body with its own agenda, it reflects and acts in accordance with dominant political players.
The very fact that NATO launched a huge bombardment on a sovereign nation without authorization from the UN is a huge cause for concern for all of us. It means international law, the UN as a means of avoiding war is rendered useless and cannot be depended upon.
It is well know that the US acts multilaterally when it can and unilaterally when it cannot act multilaterally, that is to say the US will use and leverage the UN against other nations (Iraq, Iran, etc) but will ignore the UN altogether when it canât get its own way with the UN.
Without a doubt the Russian attack on Ukraine is illegal but in perspective, it is not a special case or a particularly significant one, of illegality and so does not warrant any more condemnation than our own governments attacks in Serbia, Iraq, Laos and many many more.
Nobody wants to talk about war crimes, destructive geopolitics and so on UNLESS the antagonist is a power opposed to the West, this is an established fact about Western media as was shown by Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent, the most well established data based result in the social sciences.
Crying over another governments crimes in Ukraine is easy, resisting our own governments ongoing initiation is equivalent crimes is the hard part.
The damage done to Iraq is a huge obscenity, I bet few participants here have ever looked at the facts about that crime, the consequences, hereâs a snippet about Ramsay Clark, how many here had even heard of him? and this site calls itself a âhumanistâ site? thatâs laughable.
Sadly now no longer with us, heâs a fine American who could have spoken at length on this subject, heâd also likely laugh at the false moral outrage about Ukraine.
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So, nobody, except Noam.
he was an Attorney General. Not exactly obscure.
Gonna start showing you the rules. Behave like a normal person and youâll be fine. Imagine acting the way you are in a room full of people, going around, pointing at people and calling them hypocrites, demanding they answer your questions, getting mad when they say they answered and they have a question, say âwhat aboutâ to just about anything, accusing them of being unaware of the news. Do you think the host would ask you to leave?
5. In the opinion of CFI and for the purposes of this Forum, âhumanismâ is to be interpreted broadly. Anyone self-identifying as a humanist should be so considered. Discussions as to which Forum members are humanists is discouraged, and continued denigration and harassment of self-described humanist Forum members in that light is considered disruptive to CFIâs mission and to that of CFIâs Forum.
Germany publicly repented for the crimes committed before and during WWII, France repented for the crimes committed in Algeria during 1954-1962 war.
USA acknowledged that crimes were committed in Vietnam and so.
Putin suppressed "Memorial " the private organization which was documented the crimes of Staline and communism.
The difference between democracy and dictatorship is than in a democracy theses facts can be debated.
SIMON SCHAMA: WHEN HISTORY IS WEAPONISED FOR WAR
As Putin appeals to the distant past to justify his invasion of Ukraine, militant nostalgia is on the march around the world
Financial time
MAY 6 2022
Bad history can kill. Those who butcher the truth may end up butchering people.
Perhaps it is the confidence that his autocracy has a stranglehold on what is and what is not history that allows Putin to attach the label of âNaziâ to anyone with the gall to resist his invasion.
On June 28 1989, MiloĹĄeviÄ summoned a crowd estimated at 600,000 to a million to commemorate the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo at Gazimestan, near Pristina, where a monumental tower, built in 1953, is inscribed with a âcurseâ attributed to the Serbian Prince Lazar HrebeljanoviÄ on the eve of the battle and allegedly âdiscoveredâ by the 19th-century poet and philologist Vuk KaradĹžiÄ. âWhoever is a Serb or of Serbian birth,â the lines go, âand fails to come to fight at Kosovo, may he never have a son or daughter ⌠may nothing grow that is sown from his hand,â and so on.
On the day of the anniversary, MiloĹĄeviÄ descended in a helicopter and addressed the immense crowd. âSix centuries laterâ, MiloĹĄeviÄ said, the battle had to be fought again, not in arms perhaps, âbut that too cannot be ruled outâ. Politika, the newspaper voice of the government, headlined that âwe are living again in the time of Kosovoâ. Shortly afterwards Kosovoâs autonomy was suppressed; a decade of terror, akin to an enemy occupation, was inaugurated and Albanian was forbidden as a language of education. The ferocious repression ended only with NATOâs bombing campaign on Serbia and the collapse of MiloĹĄeviÄâs rule.
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Hi there. Being new here i had a quick scan and cant find posts that supports this
But sadly âcan beâ does not translate to "is being " in western democracy as brilliantly explained by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky on how our news is filtered and boundaries of discussions tightly controlled.
âGermany publicly repented for the crimes committed before and during WWII, France repented for the crimes committed in Algeria during 1954-1962 war.â
Crocodile tears.
Germany has over the couple of decades entered into period of revisionist and falsifications of history to downplay hitlers crimes.
âUSA acknowledged that crimes were committed in Vietnam and so.â
Bad apples doesnt account for the massive war crimes inflicted by american bourgeoisie. America never admitted this.
Putin suppressed "Memorial " the private organization which was documented the crimes of Staline and communism.
Putin reputiated the Russian revolution , its leaders and the demands of workers at that time. Putin has shown his hat as right wing capitalist
Cheers everyone !!
What a mess of an answer. Solomon islands govt backing yemen ???
How many ordinances they have dropped. ??? 
on themselves??? 
Really good job here by Hugo in showing up the reactionary mindset . Quite hilarious reading the post that demands a conversation only to be followed up with I dont have to answer your question
Pity he left
The irony is strong in this one.
Iâm not getting what you mean by âdemand a conversationâ. I pointed out that what hugo was doing was not something I would call a conversation. I didnât demand anything from him. He then committed the most glaring, obvious, school-yard-level, act of bad manners, posting âanswer my questionâ.
Statements about otherâs mindsets are the opposite of speaking to their points and backing up your points with evidence, data, and logic. The introduction to the rules of this forum, found under FAQ, starts with ââŚfostering an evidence-based, scientific outlook and humanist values.â If you arenât interested in that, find another forum.
He makes good observation, like lots of focus on posting about the person rather than what the person is saying. That comment on solomon islands with yemen blows me away.
Oh i see. He was suspended
In what way? This is an old thread. I looked up the politics of it then, but Iâve forgotten it.
How long have you been moderator?
Not really relevant. A few years.
Its an interesting read going through the archives way back to 2014 in what was being said and what was predicted to how things have panned out now.
I notice there were heaps more posters back then with a much more diverse group of opinions and thoughts to today. Different moderator or moderators i presume.