I’m finding it increasingly difficult to read The News these days. It’s as if the articles are written for the simple minded … or are written by the simple minded. Regardless, for the most part The News is junk.
Last week I found myself at the website of Foreign Affairs magazine. Here’s a cut and paste from Wikipedia:
Foreign Affairs is an American magazine of international relations and U.S. foreign policy published by the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, membership organization and think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs.
And who makes up The Council on Foreign Relations? That’s a Conspiratorial Google for another day. Let’s just say for now these guys don’t write with crayons.
The article that caught my eye was What If the War in Ukraine Doesn’t End? about how long Russia might be in Ukraine. The CFR was founded in 1921 and they’ve been around long enough so they should know the answer to that question. But the article itself didn’t give any real answers – just a bunch of blather blather yack yack.
The real answer to the that question is a variation of the old joke:
Where does an 800 pound gorilla sleep? Anywhere it wants to.
Since the end of World War II when a nuclear state invaded a non-nuclear state, the nuclear state stayed in the non-nuclear state butchering the people for as long as it wanted to.
Period.
The US illegally invaded Vietnam in 1964 and by the time they packed up and went home 11 years later about 6 million Vietnamese had been killed. According to the CIA’s own figures the illegal invasion and bombing of Cambodia took another six hundred thousand lives.
The US illegally invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and left at least a quarter of a million dead in its wake 20 years later.
The US illegally invaded Iraq in 2003 with the combat mission formally concluding 18 years later. About a million Iraqis perished during that time.
These three examples are unarguably war crimes containing within them multiple war crimes. The people that committed them are war criminals.
Period.
US politicians from the President on down and pundits who supported America’s most recent war crimes, are calling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a war crime and Vladimir Putin a war criminal.
From William Rivers Pitt’s column published in the April 12, 2022 Truthout.org
“In the wake of so-called Shock and Awe (i.e. the mass bombing of a city full of civilians), and alongside Abu Ghraib (mass torture of people being held, without trial, by an occupying force), Fallujah was the apex of brutality by the waning US empire,” journalist Dahr Jamail, who reported for Truthout for many years, told me in a recent email. “I know because I was there before, during, and after the sieges of that city.”
Jamail continued:
“The corporate press is aghast at the atrocities they are witnessing across Ukraine, and rightly so. The intentional targeting of civilians, collective punishment, bombing civilian targets like apartments and train stations and hospitals: all war crimes.
Finding burned bodies with their hands tied, cluster bombs, and encircling cities and intentionally starving the people within them and cutting them off from medical help — war crimes the corporate press, and presidents of the EU and U.S. and other countries are right to call as such.
But where was this same outrage about U.S. war crimes in Iraq? Having reported from that country off and on for a decade, I can say unequivocally that the Russians have done nothing worse in Ukraine than the U.S. military did in Iraq.”
Hearts and Minds, a documentary about the Vietnam war, was released in 1974. The scene that has stayed with me for the last 48 years is a funeral of a South Vietnamese soldier and his devastated family. The screaming and sobbing mother had to be held back from climbing into the grave after the coffin.
Cut to:
General William Westmoreland, commander of American military operations in Vietnam, telling the stunned film maker that “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.”
Last week President Biden accused Russia of genocide. What he did not say was:
We should know … The United States has committed genocide against anybody we’ve wanted to for nearly 250 years.
Life is Plentiful, Life is Cheap, and Hypocrisy is seemingly infinite, here on planet Earth.
Regards from Beautiful British Columbia,
Bob
