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Thread: Are Europeans Un-Civilized Barbarians Who Oppose the DP?

  1. #1
    Administrator Michael's Avatar
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    Smile Are Europeans Un-Civilized Barbarians Who Oppose the DP?

    In Andrew Grant DeYoungs topic I read some horrible things about europeans from stixfix69 I donīt want to keep unanswered. To keep the topic free from Off-topic I started this topic.

    I visited the US since 2006 7 times, I have contact with US citizens in real (mostly soldiers since birth (f.e. neighbours)) and online. I follow the news, read books and newspapers which discuss other issues than Michele Obamas clothing or stories about royals. That doesenīt make me an expert of the US, but I made my own opinion.

    At first I want to say that you canīt compare Europa and the US. We have a lot of common believes, but Europe and the US made different developments since a few centuries. Personaly I believe in the transatlantic friendship and I hope we can stay together in future. Iīll prefer the US as partner instead of Russia or China.

    Quote Originally Posted by stixfix69 View Post
    Without law, there is no order, and you have to admit in Europe, they will riot, destroy property, and have no care for other people, if they raise the retirement age by a few years, or lets say raise the cost of education. That's a strong showing of civility.......
    You canīt take one point out of context. Itīs true that there had been riots f.e. in Greece. We can discuss the issue about Greece if you want. Itīs just unfair to use this example and declare Europa as a part of the world without civility.

    Through Wikipedia I found some riots in the US/north America, too. Mostly after some teams lost games or due to racial reasons. I donīt use this examples to say all americans are hooligans nor I write that all us citizens are racist.

    In Greece is the problem that the people loose more or less everything. Theyīre in fear and helpless. I doubt that the US will be a peacefull country if they would run out off money at the beginning of august. Do you think the people accept it without complaining that they wonīt get wellfare, retirement, .... ? You can read the news about Wisconsin in february what happened there...

    Quote Originally Posted by stixfix69 View Post
    It is the U.S.A who went into Iraq to take a mad man out, from the genocide he was committing, yet the U.N. wanted to make it all about WMD, where was the U.N. when those people we being slaughtered???
    ... and it was an error to went into the Iraq with a lie. It was the idea to get "your" hands on the iraqian oil and to remove Sadam who doesenīt want to be Washingtons puppet anymore. The genozid wasnīt the true motive. It was about Saddams WMD which had been never found. There are other countries f.e. in Africa with a genozid too, but nobody cares.

    The US lost a lot of credibility in the world and in Guantanamo itīs moral innocence. Referd to the US you lost in Iraq a lot of daughters and sons of your country. A lot of them returned with injuries on body and brain.

    You spend billions of Dollars to remove a corrupt dictator without a muslim belief with chaos and a extremist muslim regime. The country is now instable and the situation for the most citizens of Iraq is worser than before.

    Most of the european countries ("New Europe refering" to D. Rumsfeld) arenīt happy with their participation in the Iraq War. Some countries do the same (causing chaos) in Lybia at the moment.

    Some words about the european opinion about the DP. Western Europe is (Iīm sorry) safer than the US. The risk of being murdered is much lesser than in the US. This is similar on a lot of other crimes (I have my theory that this is related to the drug problem in the US). Also we donīt have as much TV stations as in the US. We donīt have stations who follow up crimes mostly all day long. Crime isnīt therefore such a big issue for us.

    The people donīt care much about crime and how to punish it. Eventualy we have not the majority, but a remarkable amout of people in Europe who support the DP anyway.

    I hope you got my points stixfix69. I donīt want to be rude, I just wanted to make my points.

  2. #2
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    I love it when Michael gets all fired up!

    This would have been a perfect example of US heathens!



    6 days ago.Rodney King arrested on suspicion of DUI in California

  3. #3
    Administrator Michael's Avatar
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    I donīt think it was a plan to link a movie we canīt watch Germany due to the rights of the used music...

    At first I wanted to add a signature ("We left the trees too!"), but I thought the posts is a good start for a topic to remove some prejudice.

    We donīt hug trees, we support partialy the DP too, ...

    Oh, and I wouldnīt have been the officer who arrested Rodney King.

  4. #4
    Jehan
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    I completely agree with your post Michael
    Jehan

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    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    The article below is admittedly four years out of date. However, it does show that ordinary Europeans are not much different than Americans when it comes to the death penalty. It's European governments which are largely out of step with their own citizens on this particular issue.
    __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _______

    Europe, America and the Death Penalty

    by Soeren Kern

    GEES Analysis
    January 30, 2007

    The execution on 30 December of Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi dictator, was (not surprisingly) greeted with the reflexive moral superiority complex that has come to characterize the anti-death-penalty left wingers who make up much of today's European news media. Although Hussein was sentenced to death by a sovereign Iraqi court which provided Saddam with a level of justice that he never gave to the thousands of people he murdered, political commentators across the continent were quick to portray the execution as another example of the values gap that exists between a Europe that is enlightened and an America that is unsophisticated and uncivilized.

    Writing in the Barcelona-based La Vanguardia, Eusebio Val, one of the most reliably anti-American propagandists in the Spanish press corps, tried to convince his readers that Saddam was executed because US President George W Bush never forgave the former Iraqi leader for attempting to assassinate his father (incredibly, Val was also concerned about whether Saddam had been allowed to snack on his beloved Doritos corn chips before he was hanged). Slightly less sensational, the Germany-based Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wielded the tried and true tactic that pits the United States against Europe. Its headline declared that: "President Bush praised the execution, from Europe came sharp criticism."

    Imagine, then, the chagrin felt by sheepish euro-lefties when a Novatris/Harris poll conducted for the French daily Le Monde found that a majority of respondents in Britain (69 percent), France (58 percent) and Germany (53 percent) said they were in favor of executing Saddam Hussein. And in Spain, where the Socialist government (which imagines it can 'erase' its own history through secret midnight raids to remove street signs, statues and other symbols dating back the Franco dictatorship) announced that it "laments this morning's execution of the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein," 51 percent of Spaniards surveyed said they thought Saddam should indeed be executed.

    Echoing these findings, another poll, this one commissioned by Germany's leftwing Stern magazine, found that 50 percent of Germans support the death penalty for Saddam, 39 percent oppose it and another 11 percent don't know. In a highly unusual gesture, the Germany's leftist Spiegel magazine admitted that the poll results were "surprising."

    But the survey results are not really very surprising at all. In fact, poll after poll shows that ordinary European citizens favor the death penalty almost as much as do Americans. In Britain, for example, opinion surveys consistently show that between two-thirds and three-quarters of the population favors the death penalty, about the same as in the United States. In Italy and France, which have dominated the international fight against capital punishment, roughly one-half of the population wants it reinstated. And in Canada, where the political left like to portray their country as kindler and gentler than its southern neighbor, up to 70 percent of Canadians want to bring back the death penalty, which was abolished there some 30 years ago.

    To be sure, there is a highly contentious debate within the United States over capital punishment, and the practice has been banned in a dozen American states. According to government statistics, death sentences in America have dropped by some 50 percent and executions by 40 percent since 2000. Moreover, according to a recent Gallup poll, some 65 percent of Americans support the death penalty, down from an all-time high of 80 percent in 1994. If anything, however, these numbers show that Europeans and Americans are really not very far apart at all on the issue of capital punishment.

    But if ordinary Europeans hold perspectives that are quite similar to those of ordinary Americans, then why do European elites persist in trying to sell the idea that there is a big values gap between Europe and the United States on this issue?

    Well, that is precisely the question raised by the Financial Times Deutschland in a 2 January editorial, in which it expresses amazement at all of the crocodile tears being shed over Saddam's execution. Why, the paper asks, is there not more outrage among European lefties at the executions in China, which, according to Amnesty International, is the world leader in capital punishment? Why is there not more of a leftwing outcry at the practice in Iran and Saudi Arabia of hanging teenage homosexuals in public squares? Moreover, the newspaper argues that accusations of "American victors' justice" are unfair because the United States initially banned the death penalty in Iraq, but the Iraqi government subsequently reinstated the practice: "One can only speculate as to why politicians are making the butcher Saddam Hussein, of all people, into a martyr for human rights," the paper says.

    It does not require much speculation, however, to conclude that the uproar by the European left over the execution of Saddam Hussein is either disingenuous at best, or hypocritical and/or dishonest at worst.

    Locating the Real Values Gap

    Whatever the case may be, one thing is for certain. There is a values gap, and what's more, one does not need to look across the Atlantic to find it. In fact, upon closer examination one may deduce that the European political and media elite are trying to draw attention to a transatlantic values gap that does not exist, in an effort to conceal a trans-European values gap that really does exist.

    In fact, Europe is teeming with signs of a burgeoning values gap between European political and media elites on the one hand and ordinary European citizens on the other. Like on the issue of capital punishment, for example. As many polls show, most European countries have small majorities in favor of the death penalty, and yet European elites have abolished capital punishment in spite of (not in response to) the wishes of European voters. And yet, European elites sanctimoniously insist that opposition to the death penalty is a "European value."

    And a similar dynamic is at work with the project of European integration. For example, five years ago European elites abolished national currencies in favor of a common currency, but with little or no input from European voters. (And in the few countries where there was a referendum, like in Denmark, voters said "no" to the euro.) Today, public support for the euro is lower than at any point since its induction in 2002. According to a recent EU survey, just 48 percent of eurozone citizens think the transition from national currencies to the euro was a beneficial move.

    Yet another example involves the European constitution. After voters in France and the Netherlands rejected the document in a referendum, Jean-Claude Juncker, prime minister of Luxembourg and the then head of the rotating EU presidency, said that French and Dutch citizens would have to keep voting until they came up with the right response.

    By contrast, it is inconceivable that an American politician could be so openly patronizing vis-ā-vis the US electorate and get away with it. In an insightful essay about transatlantic relations in the December 2002 edition of The American Enterprise, a public policy magazine, veteran transatlantic observer Karl Zinsmeister writes that: "Many Europeans, in a way Americans find impossible to understand, are willing to let their elites lead them by the nose. There is a kind of peasant mentality under which their 'betters' are allowed to make the important national judgments for them. 'Europe's leaders see themselves as wise parents, and their citizens as children,' explains journalist and Briton Clive Crook. 'In France, Germany, and the institutions of the European Union, elites take major political decisions and impose them on the voters without consulting them,' summarizes John O'Sullivan. 'Political elites feel that the people have no right to obstruct the realization of the European dream.'"

    And why don't European politicians respond to public opinion?

    Because European democracy is less democratic than American democracy, according to a July 2000 essay titled 'Death in Venice' which was published in The New Republic, a weekly news journal which appeals to many American progressives. In trying to understand why, if European and American voters favor the death penalty in equal measure, European countries have abolished the practice and the United States has not, the essay concludes that part of the answer lies in the differences between European parliamentary government and the American separation-of-powers system.

    "Parliamentary government may provide voters with more ideological variety, but it is much more resistant to political upstarts, outsiders, and the single-issue politics on which the death penalty thrives. In parliamentary systems, people tend to vote for parties, not individuals; and party committees choose which candidates stand for election. As a result, parties are less influenced by the odd new impulses that now and again bubble up from the electorate," the essay concludes.

    In other words, in European countries where elite opinion is largely united in their opposition to capital punishment, their parliamentary forms of government make it difficult to translate public support into legislative action. Indeed, candidates who support contrary views on the death penalty are less likely to be chosen to stand for election. By contrast, candidates in the United States are mostly independent and self-selected, and as such they serve as a much more direct conduit between public opinion and political action.

    In the final analysis, then, if there is a genuine transatlantic values gap, it lies not in a superior European concept of morality, but in an inferior European form of democracy!

    The Story Behind the Story

    It would seem, then, that the hysterical reaction to the execution of Saddam Hussein by the European left has in fact very little to do with the underlying issues surrounding capital punishment, but a whole lot to do with promoting a value system that the euro-left likes to call 'progressive'.

    Indeed, as many insightful analysts on both sides of the Atlantic have already concluded, the desire among European elites to turn the death penalty into a transatlantic wedge issue is deeply rooted in leftwing ideology. Unlike in the United States, the far-left in most European countries constitutes an important political force, and their representatives dominate wide swaths of the media, academia and a variety of influential political parties.

    Not only do euro-lefties reject the death penalty in all cases (putting them at odds with a majority of their own fellow citizens), but they also oppose American-style free-market capitalism, the American concept of limited government and individual self-reliance, the American desire to promote democracy abroad, as well as the projection of American economic, political and military power around the world.

    At the same time, however, they brush aside the inconvenient fact that this American power they so despise is the same power that guarantees their freedom and secures the very liberty that allows them to propagate their ideology. For Europe is unable to defend itself without American largesse. And this paradox exposes the phoniness behind European "progressive" ideology, which at base is a morally bankrupt worldview built upon a wobbly foundation of deceit, equivocation and post-modernist gobbledygook.

    It also lays bare that the European left's concern for human rights is little more than a cover for its primary objective of spreading the false religion of anti-Americanism. As Charles Krauthammer, the American political commentator, pointed out in the Washington Post in March 2005, going back at least to the Spanish Civil War, the left has always prided itself on being the great international champion of freedom and human rights. And yet, when the United States removed the man responsible for torturing, gassing and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, "the left suddenly turned into a champion of Westphalian sovereign inviolability."

    "A leftist judge in Spain orders the arrest of a pathetic, near-senile Gen. Augusto Pinochet eight years after he's left office, and becomes a human rights hero—a classic example of the left morally grandstanding in the name of victims of dictatorships long gone. Yet for the victims of contemporary monsters still actively killing and oppressing—Khomeini and his successors, the Assads of Syria and, until yesterday, Hussein and his sons—nothing. No sympathy. No action. Indeed, virulent hostility to America's courageous and dangerous attempt at rescue," Krauthammer wrote.

    The transatlantic values gap over the death penalty is little more than a fiction being propagated by a self-righteous European elite that refuses to face reality. And this reality is that ordinary Europeans and ordinary Americans see eye-to-eye on most issues, including capital punishment. In this context, a growing number of analysts on both sides of the Atlantic have concluded that the death penalty, like so many other wedge issues, is part of a much broader effort by European elites to conceal the reality of European moral decline by attempting to portray Europe as a moral vanguard.

    America is not perfect, but at least its political system is designed in a way that its elected officials cannot ignore the will of the electorate. If European voters would hold their elected officials to account, American-style, many transatlantic wedge issues, including "values gap" over capital punishment, would disappear overnight.

    http://kern.pundicity.com/5525/europ...-death-penalty

  6. #6
    Administrator Michael's Avatar
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    Thank you for shairng this article Moh. I think he describes the situation really good. I think the US is more conservative than Europe. And therefore the left wing politicans with their ideals canīt get as much power as here.

    In Germany we had big protest from left wing politicans who had been upset as chancellor Merkel said what most people in Germany thought - it was good that the US killed Osama bin Laden. Even in that case the media found enough politicians (no backbenchers) who criticized the US for their actions. Thatīs unbelievable.

    Itīs the anti-Americanism which is deep-rooted in left wing-circles which is one of the main problems. These people donīt see what the US did for the world and how good the peoples lifes there are compared with Chinia, India, Brasil, and all the other countries which are preferred by the lefties.

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    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    I think one problem the left has in Europe is that they long ago won on the big issues. All Western European countries have national health care, collective bargaining, old-age pensions, guaranteed paid vacations, paid maternity leave, etc. So, nowadays, what is a self-respecting lefty supposed to do once all the major battles have been fought and won? Unfortunately, they often end up getting into utter nonsense, such as naming streets after murderers on death row in the States, raising a ruckus whenever a US or Israeli bomb kills a civilian by mistake while largely keeping silent whenever non-Western people butcher non-Western people, somehow ostensibly being for women's rights but looking the other way when Islam (sorry, extremist Islam) oppresses women (including in European countries) and so forth and so on.

  8. #8
    Jehan
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    "All Western European countries have national health care, collective bargaining, old-age pensions, guaranteed paid vacations, paid maternity leave, etc."

    It is not only the left of these countries that support the reforms listed here. It is true that most Europeans stand well to the left of US politics and find it difficult to understand why the US does not give more help to the underprivilaged of its society.

    I just prefer the concept of non involvement in the affairs of other sovereign states, inlcuding Iraq, Afganistan, Libya....... the list is endless. Involvement always makes matters worse.
    Jehan

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    Banned TheKindExecutioner's Avatar
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    Yeah, I saw in a documentary that it's only the ELITES in Europe than have banned the death penalty. That is REALLY ironic because for over a THOUSANDS years Europeans executed and beheaded you if looked at the the wrong way! LMAO!

    But the ordinary people in Europe are more pro-death penalty that the crazy elites! For example I heard the population of England is actually has a majority of people who are PRO death penalty! Isn't that true for much of Europe where the PEOPLE are more pro DP than the crazy government?

  10. #10
    Administrator Michael's Avatar
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    Hi TKE! To be honest the DP isnīt a huge issue here. Most people donīt care. Violent crimes are on a significant lower level here. There are not much guns outside. The people care more for jobs, taxes, retirement plans, enivronment protection and such things. If you ask them in a poll about the DP a major part of the people will say "yes" but they have not much knowledge about the DP and how it works. Some "lefties" use the DP for their US-bashing, but that doesenīt count.

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