Without directly mentioning his successor, former president Obama’s speech on Tuesday in South Africa countered many of President Trump’s policies and habits.
— Read on www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2018/07/17/obama-deliver-mandela-address-likely-rebuke-trump/wuMdmfv1KLgbXJwH22PemJ/story.html
This fascinates me because it seems to be entirely unaware of why so many countries are not exactly sharing Barack’s vision. I mean specifically this chain of events: without intending to set off a chain reaction, Barack plays to the international Arab audience, talking to them about how the US is interested in playing a real role in their countries and how he sees them, all in ‘liberal democracy’ terms, then the US openly supports ‘regime change’, meaning uprisings, in various Arab states, ranging notably from Libya to Syria, then war breaks out across those areas, and those countries fall apart, and now the Syrian conflict alone has killed maybe over 400,000 people, driven out literally millions of people, and Libya is not really an entity you can call a ‘country’ anymore, and Egypt is embroiled in rebellions in Sinai and in its south, and literally some million or two people walked to Europe and is it really any wonder why places like Hungary and the Czech Republic aren’t exactly happy with the imagery of ‘liberal democracy’?
I should mention that regime change started with Iraq, and that created lots of refugees as well, but they were mostly contained in their own region until Syria fell apart (and Turkey essentially pushed refugees to walk through to Europe).
jomi: playing with perception 