At 02:06 PM 5/17/2002 -0500 Dan Minette wrote: >The British are no longer a world power, so folks pretty well ignore what >they do. The minus for being one of the two superpowers and then the only >superpower is that everything that is done is held under a microscope. >Basically, its not worth complaining about the British or the French, they >barely affect people's lives. In South America, the US is seen as >dominating people's lives. This is only partially true, we are a tremendous >influence, but it does color attitude.
Now this is plain silly Dan. Media coverage in the United Staes is *not* representative of world opinion. Just because the media here doesn't cover Gibraltar doesn't mean that nobody cares about Gibraltar. The Spanish and the Gibrlatarans *do* care. Likewise, the Argentinians care greatly about the Falklands. But let me propose a similar proposition for you, Dan. After the British took the Falklands/Malvinas Islands they basically evicted all of the Spanish/Argentinian inhabitants and replaced them with British colonists. Now, if you were supreme world leader, and had the opportunity to solve this situation morally, what do you do: 1) Legitimize ethnic cleansing by leaving the Falklands in the possession of the UK 2) Deny the right to self-determination of the Falklanders, and turn them over to a government they have no desire to be ruled by. Neither option is particularly appetizing, eh? Most reasonable people, however, generally choose option #1 - the righting a past wrong does not justify making a new wrong today. There are a *lot* of unfortunate acts of history, even in our own country's past. We simply cannot, however, go around making the United States worse off today by trying to right all of the wrongs we made in the past, whether they were wrongs against Native Americans, slaves, or Panamanians. JDG
