: : SDF: I thought that in the last half-century or so it was mainly the US government that was largely responsible for creating wars : Don: And I thought it was the communists, with their various "wars of national liberation".
Oh, well, silly me. I always thought that liberation was a good thing. i seem to recall something called the Revolutionary War, and something else called the Civil War. I guess not, Uncle Sam knows best for everyone, be it the Nicaraguans or the Congolese....NOT.
: :-- the US was entirely responsible for creating the phony regime "South Vietnam" (against the dictum of the agreed-upon Geneva convention, which decreed an election to unite North and South Vietnam to be held in 1956 AT THE LATEST) and sustaining it through warfare for two decades, at a cost of two million lives...
3 million, I believe....
: Don: And there is the Sino-Vietnamese war, and the Korean war, and the Soviet invasion of Afganistan,
as opposed to the US invasion of Grenada,
: and the wars between India and Pakistan,
did you know that the United States consistently supported the wrong side? During the brief war in '71 over Bangladesh, when the Pakistanis were slaughtering three million Bengalis and India was trying to liberate them, the United States actually sent some warships to aid PAKISTAN!!? Fortunatley, the Pakistanis surrendered before the US got there.
:and the Russian war against Chechnia,
started by that darling of the west, Yeltsin (long may he rot)
:and the Falklands,
between two of our favorite right-wing capitalists, thatcher and Galtieri
:and a Soviet attempt to start a revolution in Mexico,
(?) are you talking about the student protests in '68, or teh Zapatista insurrection, both of which were demands for social justice?
:and the Soccer war, the war between Iran and Iraq, and the various Marxist revolutions in Asia, Africa, and South America.
I tend to think that most of the latter were just wars, by peopel seeking their basic human rights and the dignity due to human beings.
Of course, on the otehr hand., there's all the notable genocidal and war-mongering regimes that were allies of the US over teh course of this century, including the three that perpetrated teh century's bloodiest genocides- all in the name of capitalism. Remember Indonesia? Belgium? Pre-WWI Germany? Guatemala? El Salvador? Brazil?
: :then there's the 100,000 or so children that have died due to the embargo upon Iraq,
: Don: Yeah, right.
:
"Yeah, right"? What do you mean, "yeah, right"? Whenever a fact is uncomfortable you choose to deny it? This statistic has been verified by nonpartisan sources across teh board, it's pretty much accepted by all sides. the least you could do is recognize the victims of American policies. Saying black si white doesn't make it so.
: :and we should certainly count that phoniness in Kosovo as US aggression -- it's like a State Department official said during the bombing: "We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that's what they are going to get."
: Don: And of course we claimed the Serbs killed 100,000 while we were bombing them (and had no way to verify), then we quietly revised down to 10,000 and now we are having trouble finding mass graves.
: : And then there's the nonsense the US government is planning today in Colombia, kind of like that nonsense visited upon El Salvador and Nicaragua in the early 1980s with the blessings of US guns and money, not to mention the fun the Secret Team had with the governments of Haiti, Panama, Guatemala (1952, getting rid of Rios De Montt), Iran (1956, installing the Shah), Brazil (1964, replacing Goulart with a dictatorial junta), Chile (1974, ousting Allende after his election), the Phillipines (since the US conquered them before WWI) etc. etc. A good place to start unbrainwashing oneself in this regard is Howard Zinn's book A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, or anything of Chomsky.
: Don: After the Sandistas were out of power, the mass graves of some of their victims were found. Funny, but lefties seem to overlook this . . .
Yes, it figures you'd ignore the fact that the Sandinistas were democratically elected, taht they were the freest and most responsible government in Central America, and that any errors they made pale in comparison to teh repression in Guatemala or El Salvador. right now they're discovering mass graves in Honduras, the last American ally in the region that had been believed to be 'democratic' during teh '80s....apparently not. The right-wing regimes in Central America, it appears now, were murderous across the board. The Sandinistas were not.
: : It's like Gary Nash et al. say in HISTORY ON TRIAL: there are two versions of patriotism at work in the history wars, one intent upon sugarcoating history to make the US government look good, the other intent upon telling the truth to make the US government a better government. (I'm paraphrasing because I'm not using my computer at home and the book is at home.)
: Don: The current leftist historical revisionism is neither patriotic nor interested in the truth. Rather, it creates its own "truth" to reach pre-determined conclusions.
Oh, nonsense. Nothing 'the left' has done is as blatant a lie as the conservatives' canard that Nicaragua was repressive. As Chomsky ahs said, it requires a voluntary totalitarianism to say this, becasue thefacts clearly show that Nicaragua had ahd an election which was by all standards the freest in the region, in comparison to teh US allies Guatemala and El Salvador which were terror states run by death squads.
I despise the currnet crop of over-educated right wing historians funded by think tanks and recognized as 'important scholars' who use their privileged position to pontificate on how communism was muredrous and unworkable. If they've got nothing of value to say, then they shouldn't say anything. Befroe tehy start criticizing communism, tehy shoudl experience how it is to be a starving peasant in Brazil or a grape picker in California.
