Isolation Nation

Please, please tell me that this is your closed minded way of attempting to be provocative and not an insight into a bigoted and hate filled, not to mention completely ignorant soul. Are you actually attempting to hold a single black leader as reference to all black leaders? Really? By that same thought logic (and I use the word logic very loosely here) we would never vote for another white leader again. Must I really run off a list of those of the lighter persuasion, which have created chaos and pain? Let???s just look at this country???s current ???illustrious??? leader shall we?

It???s funny, here is a man claiming himself to be the guardian of true democracy, however, when those are really in need of it, of course he sits on his hands???or when it is practiced, those practicing are ostracized. I guess somehow oil reserves must further strengthen democracy, I don???t know.

Idiot. Obama has nothing remotely to do with this despotic old man who is increasingly making the notion of a return to the former Rhodesian government a very attractive idea in terms of saving millions of starving and brutalized people. Bring back Ian Smith, down with Mugabe!

I am appalled by your racist and rather ignorant statement!!! Oppression, malevolence and gluttony know no racial, ethnic or religious bounds. Many white men have murdered, raped and stolen the treasures of a nation. Some did it blatantly through conquest; some through the vial of legitimate governance; and many more through the legacy of bigotry. I???m happy to see that people like ???paulte??? are a dieing breed and our country is on the verge of growing-up!

I'm afraid that's an insult to Hitler.

I'd settle for some correctness - period. Forget the political aspect.

Please read these posts carefully before spewing non sequiturs. Paulte didn't say that Mugabe is a terrible ruler because he's black. He said he represents black rule at its worst. By inference I could say that Hitler represented the worst in German leadership. Remember people - differentiate between leaders and hoi polloi. As for the BHO comment - I found it improbable and absurd but not altogether impossible.

Actually being born in 1929 Germany would not have been that great. This was the year the Great American Depression became a world wide economic catastrophe. Germany was under the rule of the weak and corrupt Weimar Republic - remember the Nazis did not come to power until Jan.1933. By the time Paulte was a young teen he would have been drafted into the Hitler Youth and used as cannon fodder on the Eastern Front....hardly an idyllic existence. Way to thrown in the obligatory Hitler/Nazi/German comparsion without having any idea of what you're referring to!...I'm proud of you.

Sadly, the U.N. tends to succeed or falter along with its chief powerholder these days, which would be the U.S. America has had eight years of basically completely ignoring and withdrawing from it, and unfortunately a good deal of American thinking going around these days is that the U.N. is useless, which ignores the fact that it has more or less become that way because we made it so.

American politicians these days are too busy caving to Israeli pressure to spit hardline rhetoric at Iran than they are ready to take on the more egregious cases of dictatorship around the world. The U.S. still has an embassy active in Burma, too, just as an FYI.

Quite a few.

Northern Africa along the coast tends to be somewhat developed in contrast to the rest of the continent. Egypt is one of the preeminent cultural powers, a true nation and rather full of culture. Further west, Morocco and Algeria, while by no means free from problems, also have had a certain amount of stability as well as developing culture of their own (I love rai music particularly). Nigeria in the West has a relatively powerful economy, though there are some pretty serious problems with violence between groups there. In the South, South Africa is also known for relative stability and the best-developed economy in Africa, though the Zimbabwe crisis has provoked horrible anti-refugee riots there at present.

But I've met people from even war-ravaged countries, exchange students mostly, who were educated, peaceful, and scholarly. It's a mistake to think that the "whole continent" is filled with nothing but murder and exploitation because there's strife in much of it. Remember, developed countries sometimes exploit their people and allow them to live in horrendous conditions too, though not to the same extent as in Africa.