Today, a friend asked me what the UK response was to the recent Iranian capture of British soldiers. The discussion evolved, and the friend, who's an American Bush-supporter, said that she thought Iran was trying to goad the US into a war, both with the capture and with it's nuclear programme. I replied that it looked to me more like Iran was getting edgy at having US troops surrounding it on all sides and with the UN imposing sanctions, and that the capture was probably a warning shot telling people to back off, and that the nuclear programme was to prevent a war, rather than cause one, since Iran would have learned from the examples of Iraq and North Korea; one of which didn't have WMD's and got invaded, and the other which does have them and is untouchable, to which she replied "We'll see.".
I then got onto how there was a documentary last night about the fall of communism and subsequent attempts to spread democracy, and how the 'shock therapy' economic measures used in Russia at the behest of western analysts precipitated an economic collapse that left all the major Russian commercial assets in the hands of an elite few, since the workers, who were given shares in the companies the worked for, were forced to sell those shares in order to buy food when the Ruble collapsed, to which her reply was that it was the fault of corrupt leaders, and nothing to do with Western interference. I told her about how in Iraq, things may not have been pretty before, but at least they worked, and that when 'democratic values' are imposed on a country, chaos results and that democratic values are the first thing to go out the window when people are desperate for security and food on the table, which she dismissed as one-sided propaganda and paranoid conspiracy theories intended to blame the ills of the world on the US, saying that "the U.S. has done a lot of good in the world - much more so than Communist or Dictatorships...", and then when I got onto a history lesson about how the US, through the actions of the CIA, has very often been directly responsible for those dictatorships through it's proxy power plays and by overthrowing democratically elected governments and replacing them with US-friendly dictatorships, using multiple sources detailing the past CIA actions in Iran, Cuba, Chile, etc, etc, and she refused to hear it, dismissing it all as propaganda, and saying "PEter, I don't know how you can be SO SMART and so one sided in how you understand the world."
It's a constant theme with her; whenever she hears something she doesn't like, she dismisses the source as biased, or gets emotional and goes off in a huff, saying she can't deal with it, or just switches off altogether and pretends that the subject doesn't exist. Does anyone else here know people like that? How do you deal with them? And what causes someone to become so blind to things that they can't even take a lesson in the history of their own country? I generally avoid subjects like these with her, because it's like banging my head against the wall, but sometimes I just have to give it a go, with predictable results.
