Why is this point overlooked by most ??

Remember the Nightrider.

"Immortalist" <reanimater_2000@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1121967132.345570.32060@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

Question; Why are the countries that aligned with the soviet union
during the cold war the ones now that produce terrorists after the
soviet side lost and collapsed to oblivion?

Maybe because they were the ones who combine a love for authoritarianism
with enough poverty to hate the (relatively) wealthy. The USSR did not, in
general, funnel aid to nascent democracies; they preferred dictators with
whom they could negotiate without the messy business of taking into account
the opinion of the people.

Maybe it's not entirely true, the number of terrorists from Saudi Arabia
seems to be a major and significant exception.
Ireland produced a lot of terrorists, so did Columbia and Sri Lanka, Maybe
the picture is muddier than it seems and we tend to focus on certain
terorists and a narrow span of time

Ed


Ed

I'm not to sure what you mean by "aligned". Don't forget that the
nations of Eastern Europe were aligned with the Soviet Union and they
completely support the US/GB efforts to free Iraq from their former
nightmare.

Now, if you mean the Muslim terrorists that's another matter. The now
defunct Soviet Union were strong supporters of Islamic terrorists. Most
of these terrorists were indoctrinated at the Patrice Lumumba University
in Moscow. The Warsaw Pact nations also provided weapons, forged
documents, money, training facilities and sanctuary. Some of the best
known terrorist of Soviet times like Carlos Ramirez and Wadi Haddad who
was a KGB agent spent a great deal of time there.

Most people don't realize how influential the First Directorate of the
KGB was. They contributed to any movement that might lead to the
destabilization of the West. After those files were partially opened it
became known that the KGB contributed to Martin Luther King.

Their objective is the same. They have adopted the Soviets fear and
hatred of the West from their close association with that former
monstrous regime.

Immortalist wrote:

Question; Why are the countries that aligned with the soviet union
during the cold war the ones now that produce terrorists after the
soviet side lost and collapsed to oblivion?

Sir Frederick wrote:

July 21, 2005, 8:07 a.m.

Battered-Left Syndrome
We are in a war, like it or not.

By Ted Lapkin
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/lapkin200507210807.asp

The aftermath of the London terrorist bombings has demonstrated that
the antiwar Left is severely afflicted by the political equivalent of
battered-wife syndrome. With each new beating, the scarred and bruised
victims of spousal abuse tend to excuse and rationalize the actions of
their tormentors. A stubborn unwillingness to accept the proposition
that their partners are violent louts plunges these woeful women into
a morass of self-deception that spawns only further violence.

The far Left has similarly proved unable to liberate itself from the
web of rose-tinted delusions that it has spun about the nature of
Islamic extremism. After each al Qaeda outrage, leftist ideologues are
quick to castigate their own countrymen for a catalogue of sins, both
real and imagined. With a perverse combination of self-loathing and
adoration of the enemy, the radical Leftist mantra preaches that if
only we were nicer, the jihadists could not fail to love us. It's our
own fault if Osama bin Laden doesn't realize what good people we are.

And all the while, these "progressive" academics, pundits, and
politicians engage in ridiculous intellectual contortions designed to
mitigate the guilt of the terrorist perpetrators. When push comes to
shove, some intellectuals believe that Islamism is simply an
understandable reaction to what they describe as "Western
imperialism."

The streets of Britain's capital city were still damp with innocent
blood when the same obscene dance of political self-flagellation
began. Within hours of the explosions on the Underground, author Tariq
Ali was blaming these attacks on George Bush and Tony Blair. The
architects of the London bombings were exercising their just
entitlement to vengeance for the "violence being inflicted on the
people of the Muslim world," he wrote.

Journalist Robert Fisk rushed to sing from the same song-sheet in the
left-wing British daily The Independent. "It was crystal clear Britain
would be a target ever since Tony Blair decided to join George Bush's
'war on terror,'" Fisk thundered. The true arch-terrorists of our
time, he argued, could be found in the White House and 10 Downing
Street.

And if the causes of Islamist terrorism were being falsely diagnosed
by leftist ideologues, then the policy proposals being advanced by
these same voices were morally bankrupt as well. Rather than pursue
the fanatics had who visited such death upon the innocent of London,
George Galloway, a radical member of Parliament, urged Britain to
adopt the Spanish model of crumpling under pressure.

After a terrorist attack last year on Madrid's rail system, Spain's
socialist government withdrew its troops from Iraq. But Prime Minister
Jose Zapatero's capitulation did not remove Spain from al Qaeda's
target list. In mid-June 2005, CNN reported that 16 members of Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi's network were arrested in Madrid while planning
additional terrorist attacks against that city.

On September 11, Americans became aware that they were facing a war
against an enemy of a kind they had never before encountered. And
through bombings, decapitations, and assassinations it has dawned upon
other democratic nations that, like it or not, they too are part of
this same conflict.

Our enemies go by such names as al Qaeda, Jamaa Islamiya, Hamas, and
Hezbollah. They belong to a global jihadist movement that considers it
a religious duty to wage holy Islamic war against the infidels of the
West.

This is a war that we did not start, but that we dare not leave
unfinished. We dare not because our foes are fanatics who strap
explosives to their bodies and fly airliners into office buildings. We
dare not leave it unfinished because our antagonists see the
destruction of our civilization as a necessary precursor to the
expansion of their own culture.

Our jihadist enemies are fighting to create an ideal society that
looks a lot like Afghanistan under the Taliban. And this is a vision
that is repugnant to the foundational ideals of free people
everywhere. Women forced to be barefoot, burka-clad, illiterate, and
unemployed. Christians and Jews barely tolerated as second-class
dhimmicitizens. No art, no science. Societies dominated by poverty,
oppression, backwardness, and ignorance.

In the world according to radical Islam it's the jihadist way or the
highway, and these 7th-century dogmas represent the only acceptable
outcome to al Qaeda.

But the far-left views the world through a political prism that
distorts this essential reality. Fixated by a knee-jerk hostility
towards all things American, the likes of Ali, Fisk, and Galloway
refuse to recognize the existence of this conflict, much less the
stakes that are involved. Their primal instinct is to appease bin
Laden and his cohorts rather than oppose them.

But Winston Churchill defined an appeaser as "someone who feeds the
crocodile in the hopes of being eaten last." The sooner we accept the
fact that this is a war; then the sooner we can get about the task of
winning it.

- Ted Lapkin is director of policy analysis at the Australia/Israel
and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), a Melbourne think tank.

* * *

Terrorism does not confront us with the kind of threat that we faced in
the 20th century in Fascism and Communism. Terrorists do not control,
and have no chance of controlling, a powerful state. Terrorists do not
offer ideas with universal appeal, as Fascism and Communism did.
Insofar as the terrorist of September 11th actually embraced a formula
for government, this formula has been tried and failed in Iran and
Afghanistan. So, terrorism cannot dislodge the supremacy of peace,
democracy and free markets.

The Cold War itself provided a context for almost everything that
happened in the world, which either derived from or could be related to
that great conflict between East and West.

...The Cold War resembled the other great wars of the modern period --
the Napoleonic War, World Wars I and II -- in that it was a global
struggle, the outcome of which transformed the world. But it was unlike
those predecessors in one crucial way: the Cold War was won not by
force of arms, but by the force of example.

It was the success the West enjoyed in politics, and particularly in
economics, that held the key to the collapse of Communism. The Western
example that won the Cold War is still extremely potent. The forces of
example that brought down communism are still operating in the world,
and now without serious rival. They exert a gravitational pull
everywhere, and that gravitational pull is a political force not to be
underestimated.

...Peace ...reigns in ...the world's core, the rich wealthy
countries. But outside the core, in the periphery -- what we used to
call the third world -- things are far more turbulent: the peace of the
core and the turbulence of the periphery are related.

The United States fought in Korea and in Vietnam not because those
countries were of intrinsic importance to us, but rather as part of a
larger conflict with the Soviet Union. During the Cold War and for all
of the modern period before this and indeed for most of recorded
history, the great powers saw the world as a kind of chessboard.

Every part was interconnected and so even the queens--- even the great
powers -- of the global system had to be concerned about the pawns: the
loss of a pawn, as every chess player knows, can lead ultimately to the
loss of the game itself.

Great powers cared about the pawns of the world until the 21st century,
but that is no longer true, or at least it's not true in the same way
that it has historically been true. That is one reason that the world
outside the core has been so disorderly. For on the whole, and with
important exceptions, the core's interest in the periphery helped to
promote stability there. Those sources of stability are gone, leading
to the new world disorder that we have observed since the collapse of
Communism.

...The Middle East is home to the world's largest reserves of oil, a
cut-off of which could inflict great damage on the core economies. The
Middle East is also home to countries that aspire to get nuclear
weapons, and it is a spawning ground of terrorism, as we need no
reminding after September 11 of last year. The solution to the problems
we face in the Middle East and in and from the periphery is the spread
to these countries of peace, democracy and free markets. What are the
chances this will happen? That is the subject of the third part of this
book.

...the end of the Cold War was "a victory of Western ideas, Western
political institutions and, above all, Western economic practices."
The transition, however, from a socialist economy to a market economy,
was not an easy one. Most European countries announced that they were
going to eliminate the old systems and adopt the ideas of allowing
prices to be set by supply and demand and selling state-owned
enterprises to private owners.

http://www.state.gov/s/p/of/proc/tr/15162.htm

http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/357Lsum_s2_MMandelbaum.htm

Immortalist wrote:

Question; Why are the countries that aligned with the soviet union
during the cold war the ones now that produce terrorists after the
soviet side lost and collapsed to oblivion?

Sir Frederick wrote:

July 21, 2005, 8:07 a.m.

Battered-Left Syndrome
We are in a war, like it or not.

By Ted Lapkin
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/lapkin200507210807.asp

The aftermath of the London terrorist bombings has demonstrated that
the antiwar Left is severely afflicted by the political equivalent of
battered-wife syndrome. With each new beating, the scarred and bruised
victims of spousal abuse tend to excuse and rationalize the actions of
their tormentors. A stubborn unwillingness to accept the proposition
that their partners are violent louts plunges these woeful women into
a morass of self-deception that spawns only further violence.

The far Left has similarly proved unable to liberate itself from the
web of rose-tinted delusions that it has spun about the nature of
Islamic extremism. After each al Qaeda outrage, leftist ideologues are
quick to castigate their own countrymen for a catalogue of sins, both
real and imagined. With a perverse combination of self-loathing and
adoration of the enemy, the radical Leftist mantra preaches that if
only we were nicer, the jihadists could not fail to love us. It's our
own fault if Osama bin Laden doesn't realize what good people we are.

As opposed to rightists, who exploit people's fear to gain more control
for their own purposes.

It's almost as if the terrorists play into your hands, isn't it?

They give you a great opportunity to try to seize power.

It's disgusting that you would abuse the public like this.

And all the while, these "progressive" academics, pundits, and
politicians engage in ridiculous intellectual contortions designed to
mitigate the guilt of the terrorist perpetrators. When push comes to
shove, some intellectuals believe that Islamism is simply an
understandable reaction to what they describe as "Western
imperialism."

No. A spade is a spade.

Everyone knows.

Disgusting how you try to take advantage of it.

Makes you look like a kook.

You got ta be a macho man, eh?

Are you gay?

The streets of Britain's capital city were still damp with innocent
blood when the same obscene dance of political self-flagellation
began. Within hours of the explosions on the Underground, author Tariq
Ali was blaming these attacks on George Bush and Tony Blair. The
architects of the London bombings were exercising their just
entitlement to vengeance for the "violence being inflicted on the
people of the Muslim world," he wrote.

Journalist Robert Fisk rushed to sing from the same song-sheet in the
left-wing British daily The Independent. "It was crystal clear Britain
would be a target ever since Tony Blair decided to join George Bush's
'war on terror,'" Fisk thundered. The true arch-terrorists of our
time, he argued, could be found in the White House and 10 Downing
Street.

And if the causes of Islamist terrorism were being falsely diagnosed
by leftist ideologues, then the policy proposals being advanced by
these same voices were morally bankrupt as well. Rather than pursue
the fanatics had who visited such death upon the innocent of London,
George Galloway, a radical member of Parliament, urged Britain to
adopt the Spanish model of crumpling under pressure.

After a terrorist attack last year on Madrid's rail system, Spain's
socialist government withdrew its troops from Iraq. But Prime Minister
Jose Zapatero's capitulation did not remove Spain from al Qaeda's
target list. In mid-June 2005, CNN reported that 16 members of Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi's network were arrested in Madrid while planning
additional terrorist attacks against that city.

On September 11, Americans became aware that they were facing a war
against an enemy of a kind they had never before encountered. And
through bombings, decapitations, and assassinations it has dawned upon
other democratic nations that, like it or not, they too are part of
this same conflict.

Our enemies go by such names as al Qaeda, Jamaa Islamiya, Hamas, and
Hezbollah. They belong to a global jihadist movement that considers it
a religious duty to wage holy Islamic war against the infidels of the
West.

This is a war that we did not start, but that we dare not leave
unfinished. We dare not because our foes are fanatics who strap
explosives to their bodies and fly airliners into office buildings. We
dare not leave it unfinished because our antagonists see the
destruction of our civilization as a necessary precursor to the
expansion of their own culture.

Our jihadist enemies are fighting to create an ideal society that
looks a lot like Afghanistan under the Taliban. And this is a vision
that is repugnant to the foundational ideals of free people
everywhere. Women forced to be barefoot, burka-clad, illiterate, and
unemployed. Christians and Jews barely tolerated as second-class
dhimmicitizens. No art, no science. Societies dominated by poverty,
oppression, backwardness, and ignorance.

In the world according to radical Islam it's the jihadist way or the
highway, and these 7th-century dogmas represent the only acceptable
outcome to al Qaeda.

But the far-left views the world through a political prism that
distorts this essential reality. Fixated by a knee-jerk hostility
towards all things American, the likes of Ali, Fisk, and Galloway
refuse to recognize the existence of this conflict, much less the
stakes that are involved. Their primal instinct is to appease bin
Laden and his cohorts rather than oppose them.

But Winston Churchill defined an appeaser as "someone who feeds the
crocodile in the hopes of being eaten last." The sooner we accept the
fact that this is a war; then the sooner we can get about the task of
winning it.

- Ted Lapkin is director of policy analysis at the Australia/Israel
and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), a Melbourne think tank.

* * *

Terrorism does not confront us with the kind of threat that we faced in
the 20th century in Fascism and Communism. Terrorists do not control,
and have no chance of controlling, a powerful state. Terrorists do not
offer ideas with universal appeal, as Fascism and Communism did.
Insofar as the terrorist of September 11th actually embraced a formula
for government, this formula has been tried and failed in Iran and
Afghanistan. So, terrorism cannot dislodge the supremacy of peace,
democracy and free markets.

The Cold War itself provided a context for almost everything that
happened in the world, which either derived from or could be related to
that great conflict between East and West.

...The Cold War resembled the other great wars of the modern period --
the Napoleonic War, World Wars I and II -- in that it was a global
struggle, the outcome of which transformed the world. But it was unlike
those predecessors in one crucial way: the Cold War was won not by
force of arms, but by the force of example.

It was the success the West enjoyed in politics, and particularly in
economics, that held the key to the collapse of Communism. The Western
example that won the Cold War is still extremely potent. The forces of
example that brought down communism are still operating in the world,
and now without serious rival. They exert a gravitational pull
everywhere, and that gravitational pull is a political force not to be
underestimated.

...Peace ...reigns in ...the world's core, the rich wealthy
countries. But outside the core, in the periphery -- what we used to
call the third world -- things are far more turbulent: the peace of the
core and the turbulence of the periphery are related.

The United States fought in Korea and in Vietnam not because those
countries were of intrinsic importance to us, but rather as part of a
larger conflict with the Soviet Union. During the Cold War and for all
of the modern period before this and indeed for most of recorded
history, the great powers saw the world as a kind of chessboard.

Every part was interconnected and so even the queens--- even the great
powers -- of the global system had to be concerned about the pawns: the
loss of a pawn, as every chess player knows, can lead ultimately to the
loss of the game itself.

Great powers cared about the pawns of the world until the 21st century,
but that is no longer true, or at least it's not true in the same way
that it has historically been true. That is one reason that the world
outside the core has been so disorderly. For on the whole, and with
important exceptions, the core's interest in the periphery helped to
promote stability there. Those sources of stability are gone, leading
to the new world disorder that we have observed since the collapse of
Communism.

...The Middle East is home to the world's largest reserves of oil, a
cut-off of which could inflict great damage on the core economies. The
Middle East is also home to countries that aspire to get nuclear
weapons, and it is a spawning ground of terrorism, as we need no
reminding after September 11 of last year. The solution to the problems
we face in the Middle East and in and from the periphery is the spread
to these countries of peace, democracy and free markets. What are the
chances this will happen? That is the subject of the third part of this
book.

...the end of the Cold War was "a victory of Western ideas, Western
political institutions and, above all, Western economic practices."
The transition, however, from a socialist economy to a market economy,
was not an easy one. Most European countries announced that they were
going to eliminate the old systems and adopt the ideas of allowing
prices to be set by supply and demand and selling state-owned
enterprises to private owners.

50,000 words and nothing to say......

http://www.state.gov/s/p/of/proc/tr/15162.htm

http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/357Lsum_s2_MMandelbaum.htm