----- Original Message ----- From: "John D. Giorgis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, May 18, 2002 11:09 AM Subject: Re: Jimmy Carter & Cuba...
> 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 Argentineans care > greatly about the Falklands. Well, I've been in many places around the world and have seen the local media coverage. My uncle lived in Venezuela for about 25 years. I know that the Venezuelan media coverage of the US far far outweighs the media coverage of any other foreign country. The Argentineans care about the Falklands, but the people of Venezuela were not really all that upset about it. Any time the US hiccups, it makes the papers there. I'll stand corrected if Alberto tells me that the actions of Britain and France are covered by the Brazilian media at anywhere close to the level that the actions of the US are. > > 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/Argentinean inhabitants and replaced them with British colonists. Well, according to http://www.yendor.com/vanished/falklands-war.html, the British involvement with the island dates back to close to 1765, close to the 1764 date of the first settlement of the island by the French. This, BTW, was an Argentinean source. The American ownership of the canal zone does not have this historical basis. It isn't even clear who lived on the Falklands before the mid 18th century...at least as far as I can tell. I did a search on Malvinas too, and didn't get a lot of data that supported the contention that the islands were inhabited. It is quite possible that there were Native Americans on that island initially, which would make the Falklands ownership by the present residents close to the condition of the US inhabitation of North America. With the canal zone, we basically started a civil war when the price asked by the Colombian government was more than we wanted to pay. When the new government balked at our terms, we told them we'd find other quislings if need be who'd sign our terms. Basically, when the attorney general at the time made the analogy with rape, one knows it wasn't anywhere close to a fair deal. > > Most reasonable people, however, generally choose option #1 - the righting > a past wrong does not justify making a new wrong today. What wrong was there in returning the canal to Panama? There were some citizens of the US resident there, but very few were multi-generational residents. How is the disruption of their lives significantly worse than the disruption of the lives of folks who had to move for TVA work? Dan M.
