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-----Original Message-----
From: Clay Claiborne via Marxism
I heard commercial air planes had flown that route many times a day
before
this shoot down. In any case they knew as well the government that Putin
forces had weapons that could shoot them down if they flew within 60km
of
East Ukraine, So if you're going to blame Ukraine, you also have to
blame
MH, KLM, and all other carriers who continued to use this route.
Or you can use normal logic and blame those who shot down the plane.
.....................................................................................................................
In this case I agree with Shane and others. It simply has nothing to do
with whose side you're on the Ukraine (I can't see that either side is
worth dying for, but that's irrelevant). If a government is using aerial
bombardment of cities and population centres then the people below are
entitled to defend themselves using anti-aircraft guns, just as the
Vietnamese did, just as you and I would like the FSA to be able to do to
resist Assad's aerial genocide, except that the US does everything in
its power to block this elementary right to self-defense to the Syrians
(and, of course, to the Palestinians).
So of course we can, to some extent, "blame those who shot down the
plane" in as much as they were obviously not very careful and the result
was a horrific mistake. But you can't really blame people getting bombed
from the sky for trying to shoot down the planes that bomb them. If you
do, then you have to agree with the shabby and transparently dishonest
excuse the US gives for blocking Manpads to the FSA for years - that
"jihadists" might get them and use them to shoot down passenger planes.
Obviously I'd like to see Syrian rebel-land flooded with Manpads, and
for regional Arab states to defy the US diktat on this, so that tons of
Baathist warplanes could be made to fall out of the sky. But if I took a
flight in that direction, I'd check that it wasn't flying over Syria.
And if either the Syrian regime gave clearance to passenger planes to
fly over, or any miserly airline capitalists flew their planes over
Syria rather than paying a few dollars to re-route, and a rebel
anti-aircraft gun accidentally hit a passenger plane, then the regime
and the airline company definitely would be responsible.
The Ukraine regime's "Anti-Terrorist Operation" air war is of course
less a thousandth of the unlimited Baathist air war in Syria in
intensity and bloodiness, but at the end of the day all air war is a war
crime by definition.
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