Syria Crisis
On short... you have 2 terrible sides fighting against each other and the rest of the world just watches the spectacle while also stirring more chaos in there...
This is ridiculous man, come on someone has to intervene here. This is 21st century people round the globe are watching unlike previous years & thanks to media for this@ of coverage. Is USA planning something big here ?
If you intervene you'll have to offer solutions... I don't know any power capable of doing such thing without sending everyone to hell lol.chinn70 wrote:This is ridiculous man, come on someone has to intervene here. This is 21st century people round the globe are watching unlike previous years & thanks to media for this@ of coverage. Is USA planning something big here ?
And intervene and do what? Bomb both sides? Okay. They can do that... then what?
Obama just commented on the situation. He's basically saying that if nothing changes we're going in.
It's all part of the plan.
God this shit is so depressing. I wish there was something I could do to help, but I'm too busy trying to fix the madness going on in my back yard. This entire planet needs a WWIII so we can form The Federation and leave all this suffering behind.
Where are you Picard to save us?
Where are you Picard to save us?
Intervention won’t end the conflict and adding another faction to an ongoing situation of infighting will complicate matters even more. If the world was really motivated purely by the moral ethical duty to save Syrian lives, then there are more effective peaceful ways to do so. Simple things such as providing food, clean water and infrastructure, distributing vaccines, and providing guidelines to prevent the spread of infectious diseases would easily save more lives than a US intervention. It would have foreseeable, visible results as opposed to the uncertain outcome of a strike on a place like Syria.chinn70 wrote:This is ridiculous man, come on someone has to intervene here. This is 21st century people round the globe are watching unlike previous years & thanks to media for this@ of coverage. Is USA planning something big here ?
RIFA wrote:On short... you have 2 terrible sides fighting against each other and the rest of the world just watches the spectacle while also stirring more chaos in there...
You know what’s equally as depressing for me, there’s a war of annihilation going on in Syria and how many Arabs, people in the same region, are losing sleep or thinking twice about it? Arabs generally don’t fucking give a damn about anyone else as long as they are across some fictional line on a map. I had a conversion with an elderly Syrian refugee and he said to me that for years they were called to fight for Palestine and they didn't, so now God has brought the jihad to them. While I don't take that literally, I fully agree with the notion. Arabs are so tribal and so embedded to create fictional differences between each other that as long as something happens in a city that's not mine, we automatically feel no responsibility to act on it. For example, when Creamfields, a dance music festival, was cancelled in Beirut last fall because of the possible American strike over Syria, there were more outrage and concern from my friends over the party than on the matter of Syrian lives. Understandably most Lebanese feel a very strong attachment to Beirut, Baalbek and Tripoli but were it not for an accident of history 90 years ago they would also be crying for Damascus, Aleppo, Homs today. We are a people who share 'relatively' the same history for the last 2000 years, share the same language, largely share the same culture, we listen to the same music, watch the same shows, have the same superstitions but yet we could careless about those same people that live a few miles away because of an arbitrary line on a map. Syria’s civil war? "I’m in Jordan, I don’t care.” US invaded Iraq? "Well I’m Syrian, what happens across the border is not my problem." This is largely why the Arab world is in the mess it is in today, everything in the Middle East could be corrected if people viewed themselves as equals and not competing sects, nationalist, or tribes.Peace wrote:God this shit is so depressing. I wish there was something I could do to help, but I'm too busy trying to fix the madness going on in my back yard.
The Rise of Syria’s Urban Poor: Why the War for Syria’s Future Will Be Fought Over the Country’s New Urban Villages
http://cco.dodlive.mil/files/2014/01/Th ... n_Poor.pdf
I always thought a lot of the Syrian conflict arose because of socioeconomic differences but was turned into a sectarian civil war by the Sunni Syrians who misunderstood the reason why they were being targeted by the regime. The minority represent a majority of the middle and upper class of society. The regime is protecting that class domination, where the urban rich elite (included Sunni, Shia, Christian, and everything in between) are dominating over the rural poor (who are largely Sunni, this majority represents the revolution). The majority sees this domination by the minorities and secularities over the poor and in their mind this translates as oppression against Sunni. This feeds extremist elements into the population which allows foreign involvement and Islamic fundamentalists to exploit the conflict for their personal interest, thus creating many different faction.
And the reference to Ibn Khaldun (one of my all time favourite Arab scholar) in the article was spot on. He describes this phenomenon in the Muqaddima. He basically said that the Middle East is in a never-ending loop where barbaric but morally superior settlers from the country side infiltrate cities, become decadent and forget their origins, only to be replaced by a more conservative wave of settlers. And you look now, all these social elites and foreign tourists and journalists talk about how the Arab world is getting more religious. When in fact, these elites and foreigners usually stay within the urban centers that were formerly sort of like a cultural oasis in third world countries, and as the people immigrated from the countryside to the cities they brought their cultural habits and religious orthodoxy. This is the most important factor that practically no one talks about. People look at a bunch of pictures showing school girls in mini-skirts in 1970's Baghdad and think the whole of Iraq was like this, when in reality it couldn't have been much further from the truth. It's just that the huge cultural gap between the cities and the country have closed and the cities are no longer for the elites. It has merely just levelled between different areas.
Where I live, in Beirut, the social elite constantly talk about how Lebanon is "going backward” and this might be true from their perspective but ask a first generation college graduate from my mother's village about his perspective and he’ll tell you a different story. For example, he might tell you that his grandfather couldn’t read or his mother was married before finishing school, from that perspective society isn’t going backward. Its the same with the Syrian Diaspora I have spoken to, the upper class will talk for hours about their secular cosmopolitan wonderland called Damascus where they could sip wine in bars long into the night. Whilst those from rural areas will speak of the poor conditions and the lack of dignity and all that. The Syrians from the upper class genuinely don't understand why anyone revolted. They are completely oblivious.
http://cco.dodlive.mil/files/2014/01/Th ... n_Poor.pdf
Twenty years ago, Charles Glass observed the early days of this phenomenon in his travelogue, Tribes with Flags. From Aleppo’s poor eastern suburbs, the section of the city most firmly under opposition control today, he wrote, “Now, I realized the village had come to the city, planting itself outside and growing in. The poor farmers were bringing their customs… to cosmopolitan Aleppo. …They were turning their apartments into compact versions of their mud houses. It was not poverty, but tradition, that had put a whole family in one room.” For thousands of years, rural migrants were assimilated into urban life.
I always thought a lot of the Syrian conflict arose because of socioeconomic differences but was turned into a sectarian civil war by the Sunni Syrians who misunderstood the reason why they were being targeted by the regime. The minority represent a majority of the middle and upper class of society. The regime is protecting that class domination, where the urban rich elite (included Sunni, Shia, Christian, and everything in between) are dominating over the rural poor (who are largely Sunni, this majority represents the revolution). The majority sees this domination by the minorities and secularities over the poor and in their mind this translates as oppression against Sunni. This feeds extremist elements into the population which allows foreign involvement and Islamic fundamentalists to exploit the conflict for their personal interest, thus creating many different faction.
And the reference to Ibn Khaldun (one of my all time favourite Arab scholar) in the article was spot on. He describes this phenomenon in the Muqaddima. He basically said that the Middle East is in a never-ending loop where barbaric but morally superior settlers from the country side infiltrate cities, become decadent and forget their origins, only to be replaced by a more conservative wave of settlers. And you look now, all these social elites and foreign tourists and journalists talk about how the Arab world is getting more religious. When in fact, these elites and foreigners usually stay within the urban centers that were formerly sort of like a cultural oasis in third world countries, and as the people immigrated from the countryside to the cities they brought their cultural habits and religious orthodoxy. This is the most important factor that practically no one talks about. People look at a bunch of pictures showing school girls in mini-skirts in 1970's Baghdad and think the whole of Iraq was like this, when in reality it couldn't have been much further from the truth. It's just that the huge cultural gap between the cities and the country have closed and the cities are no longer for the elites. It has merely just levelled between different areas.
Where I live, in Beirut, the social elite constantly talk about how Lebanon is "going backward” and this might be true from their perspective but ask a first generation college graduate from my mother's village about his perspective and he’ll tell you a different story. For example, he might tell you that his grandfather couldn’t read or his mother was married before finishing school, from that perspective society isn’t going backward. Its the same with the Syrian Diaspora I have spoken to, the upper class will talk for hours about their secular cosmopolitan wonderland called Damascus where they could sip wine in bars long into the night. Whilst those from rural areas will speak of the poor conditions and the lack of dignity and all that. The Syrians from the upper class genuinely don't understand why anyone revolted. They are completely oblivious.
Well, that article sums up everything in brief for what's happen' now.
They focussed more on how poverty or socio-economic division can lead into an immense movement (Baba amr).
Then this is the case with every developing country. The rich families enjoy their privileges, while the poor remain the same for years.
They focussed more on how poverty or socio-economic division can lead into an immense movement (Baba amr).
Then this is the case with every developing country. The rich families enjoy their privileges, while the poor remain the same for years.
