Posted on 09/26/2010 11:18:39 AM PDT by nuconvert
On the map, the two little fly-specks above Guadaloupe are not labeled. Are they St. Pierre and Miquelon (off the coast of Newfoundland, but part of France)?
A tangible defense for a nation like Georgia is to internationalize, that is, to actively invite numerous (desirable) foreign nationals to work and live there, so other nations will have an interest in protecting their citizens.
This can also have many positive cultural benefits to your own people, at the same time, such as creating a tourism industry, jobs and the new infrastructure to support business and housing.
Turkey did a lot of damage no doubt, but Greece has been free for close to 200 years. Something else must be at play:
“The culture of the Orthodox Church differs sharply from the Western post-Enlightenment ethos, which emphasizes secularism, capitalism, and the primacy of the individual. It still maintains residual fears about the West that parallel in many ways current Muslim insecurities: fears of Western missionary proselytism, the perception of religion as a key vehicle for the protection and preservation of their own communities and culture, and a suspicion of the „corrupted‰ and imperial character of the West. Indeed, in an Orthodox Christian Middle East, Moscow would enjoy special influence, even today, as the last major center of Eastern Orthodoxy. The Orthodox world would have remained a key geopolitical arena of East-West rivalry in the Cold War. Samuel Huntington, after all, included the Orthodox Christian world among several civilizations embroiled in a cultural clash with the West. “
IMO, Georgian idea is dumb. They have neither English speaking nations near nor real chance to join EU.
They are poor corrupt dictatorship with a majority of active population working in Russia as illegal aliens.
Their stupid president chased a goal to become something like Israel for America on the Middle East but for his region and failed badly.
Now it seems like he is to become something for America like Cuba was for Soviets instead. I think it won’t work for him better than it did for Castro.
Before the Ottoman conquest there was a lot of anti-Western sentiment among the Greeks--aggravated by the Fourth Crusade which resulted in the sack of Constantinople, but going back much earlier. Odo of Deuil's account of the Second Crusade (mid-12th century) reports a lot of hostility towards the Franks on the part of the Greeks.
bttt
Georgian is actually a Kartvelian language. The Karvelian family is a small group of languages unique to the South Caucasus, and I don’t believe it’s related to the North Caucasian languages, although they do share some similar aspects such as not pronouncing consonants on the end of words. In the Laz language (in the Karvelian family) the word for yes is “ho.” In Chechen (a North Caucasian language) it is “ha.” But this could just be a coincidence.
Castro is still in power and so is Saakashvili.
Actually Russia already occupied those territories for almost twenty years before Russia’s brutal and unprovoked 2008 invasion of Georgia and ethnic cleansing of its population. In all those years the Georgians have not tired of resisting Russia’s barbaric imperialism. Their hatred of Russia only grew. So Russia really gained nothing in 2008.
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