If you thought America's aggressive excesses were going to end with the departure of Bush-Cheney from the White House, think again. Chris Hedges writes of "a new wave of 'humanitarian interventionists' ...who naively see in the U.S. military a vehicle to create a better world."
"They know little of the reality of war or the actual inner workings of empire. They harbor a childish belief in the innate goodness and ultimate beneficence of American power. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, the horrendous suffering and violent terror inflicted in the name of their utopian goals in Iraq and Afghanistan, barely register on their moral calculus. This makes them at once oblivious and dangerous. “Innocence is a kind of insanity,” Graham Greene wrote in his novel “The Quiet American,” and those who destroy to build are “impregnably armored by … good intentions and … ignorance.”
"There are no good wars. There are no just wars. As Erasmus wrote, “there is nothing more wicked, more disastrous, more widely destructive, more deeply tenacious, more loathsome” than war. “Whoever heard of a hundred thousand animals rushing together to butcher each other, as men do everywhere?” Erasmus asked. But war, he knew, was very useful to the power elite. War permitted the powerful, in the name of national security and by fostering a culture of fear, to effortlessly strip the citizen of his or her rights. A declaration of war ensures that “all the affairs of the State are at the mercy of the appetites of a few,” Erasmus wrote.
"These “humanitarian interventionists” studiously ignore our own acts of genocide, first unleashed against Native Americans and then exported to the Philippines and, later, nations such as Vietnam. They do not acknowledge, even in light of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our own capacity for evil. They do not discuss in their books and articles the genocides we backed in Guatemala and East Timor or the crime of pre-emptive war. They minimize the horror and suffering we have delivered to Iraqis and Afghans and exaggerate or fabricate the benefits. The long string of atrocities carried out in our name mocks the idea of the United States as a force for good with a right to impose its values on others. The ugly truth shatters their deification of U.S. power. "
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5 comments:
With all this big stick talk against North Korea, and all the bullshit surrounding Syria, Libya and Iran, and the ongoing campaign to vilify Cuba and Venezuela... it just gets so freaking depressing. I still can't believe how we ignore the destruction and devastation we (collective Western we) have caused to Iraq and Afghanistan.
It's a good deal more than depressing, B.Y. We don't hear much about how America's supposed response to North Korea is playing with Beijing.
America has, for example, deployed two X-band radar systems, one of them a seaborne platform, to the region notionally to detect any North Korean missile launch. That has been accompanied by ABM batteries.
In conjunction with Obama's military "pivot" to Asia, these steps are easily seen as provocation by the Chinese. The U.S. is moving to contain China by deploying defensive and offensive military technology on China's doorstep. Beijing sees North Korea as a convenient ruse for the Americans.
As so much European history shows, nations that perceive themselves in danger of containment can become susceptible to paranoia.
It doesn't help that the U.S. is performing fly-bys of B-2 stealth bombers and F-22 stealth fighters in the Korean peninsula.
America has already staged one rehearsal of a stealth pre-emptive attack to take down China's air defences, "Operation Chimichanga."
I wrote about his last May:
http://the-mound-of-sound.blogspot.ca/2012/05/heres-what-f-35-is-really-about-canadas.html
These are highly provocative acts that, taken cumulatively, can easily fuel Chinese suspicion and paranoia. It doesn't help that America clings to its notions of exceptionalism backed by military superiority and pre-emptive war at whim. If you had the world's first and only permanent warfare state in your backyard, you might turn paranoid too.
Interesting too is the recent US campaign to name, shame and shun select Russians for human rights abuses. Few can rival America for arrogance, convenient memory, unnecessary provocation and hypocrisy.
Pot calls out kettle
Americans think they are do-gooders and keepers of the world. They need a dose of reality.
For my entire lifetime, and almost certainly all of yours too, the U.S. has been the dominant nation on earth. Yet they haven't been quite so excessive about it in the past. Chris Hedges, at some point several years ago, said America was actually at its best in the wake of Vietnam, chastened and modest albeit still unrivaled.
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