Twitter / SophieCo_RT: British officer turned
British officer turned #mercenary, Simon #Mann spent 5 yrs in African jails after a failed coup - he shares his story http://rt.com/shows/sophieco/169264-private-military-companies-child/
Ex-mercenary & SAS officer: Worst atrocities committed by child soldiers ― RT SophieCo
SS: Can I ask you something – if you were right now offered a contract to topple Bashar Assad, would you go for it?
SM: I would absolutely not go for that. No, I think that situation is so horrific and so complex…No, that would be a no. I must be getting older.
SS: But also, these are your words: “Toppling foreign governments is what democracy is all about.” Do you still think so?
SM: Well, democracy is about changing governments, but it's about changing governments in a legal and, hopefully, non-military, non-violent way.
SS: We don’t see much of that going on lately.
SM: Well, where are you talking about?
SS: Iraq, Libya, once again, what they are trying to do in Syria. We can also talk about all these countries in the Arab Spring, but it’s going to take us to a whole new subject. But, in general, you know, toppling governments for democracy’s sake doesn’t usually bring democracy nowadays, because these countries where the governments were changed aren’t really much better off than they were before.
SM: Yeah, you’re opening a very big subject here. In fact, I’m on Twitter, and I have tweeted about this quite a few times, and I’ve actually said that if you’ll look at the revolutions – the French, the British, the Russian – they were almost invariably followed by periods of great unrest. For a revolution to go straight from being a violent upset of the existing order to being a well-run democracy is impossible, it just won’t happen, because the act of the revolution is so violent that the aftershocks are so great, that there is a period of chaos.
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/d1021/20140211#1392116201
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/d1021/20140203#1391424466