The Man Who Knew Too Much
Just when you thought you’d heard it all, the smirking Barbary ape we have as a president attempts to rationalize and excuse his imperial campaign in Iraq by way of historical context – normally a reasonable method to suss out the unpredictable dynamics of sociopolitical tumult, that is, if you demonstrate the slightest clarity and honesty in regards to that historical context. Nobody could believe it this week when Bush had the nuts to explicitly summon the American-Vietnamese War as a corollary for his causeless war – didn't we all say that six years ago? Our ears screamed in disbelief when we heard him assert that not pulling out of Indochina later than we did was the reason for that genocidal action’s failure. Did the President just say that? Who else but the 20th century’s docket of totalitarian maniacs could’ve come right out as Bush has done and say our so-far greatest national shame should’ve lasted longer, culled hundreds of thousands of more lives, obliterated more countryside, and spent billions more of taxpayers’ money?
It should be plain to a middling middle-schooler that Bush’s view of history – or, rather, his speechwriting teams’ – teeters on the cliff-edge of nonsense, by virtue of a single ridiculous supposition: that, say, the slaughter of the Khmer Rouge after the U.S. dis-employment was a direct result of that dis-employment, not a direct result of the previous years of bombing, slaughter, maiming, occupation, and, not incidentally, the U.S.-bought-&-handled 1970 coup, which installed puppet ruler Lon Nol. We assisted the Khmer Rouge in their ascent and mayhem not by avoiding a fight, but by beginning and waging one to begin with. And it’s a fight we begin and wage over and over, in various sovereign nations and for obvious corporate-economic reasons; I can only measure the stunning frequency with which this dynamic gets implemented against the stunning reliability of the media to not recognize it, but instead regard each and every case as new, unique and only analyzable in its procedural details.
The strategy used by Bush’s team is as old as the hills, and is contingent on another dynamic, without which no imperial power can survive: the use of its citizens as cannon fodder and the propagandistic battery of philosophies that enable that use, which include personifying the conflict and its purposes with soldiers alive and killed in action. The face on the Iraq War, as with the Indochinese wars and every limb-scattered intervention before and after, from the Phillipines to Libya, shouldn’t be the pimply, beloved mug of Jimmy Q. Couldn’t-Afford-College, and his weeping mother and young pregnant wife. The face of the wars we see should belong to the men that cause them. You want to personify the Iraq conflict, to know how to feel about it? Ignore the military mugshots of hometown boys now coming home in shreds. Look instead at the dead-eyed faces of the perfidious white millionaires who have the meetings and make the calls, and who correctly believe they live in a kind of demigod’s paradise, where they can throw lightning bolts at will and never be held responsible for mass murder.
I've been numb since the results of the last presidental election. Each new atrocity, each lie, each blatant abuse of power...they don't even surprise me anymore. I expect continuous villainy and utter lack of accountability (discounting the occasional "resignation" which seems like an awfully small price to pay for crimes of this magnitude), and my expectations are met, almost every day. I still live in the U.S., but in some fundamental (and, I fear, permanent) way, I'm no longer here.
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Yes, that speech before those vets was stupendously ignorant and arrogant, even by the Asshole-In-Chief's criminal standards. But to attempt to sell his perversion of history on the back of Graham Greene, well, that was really the kicker. Did he and the stooges who prepare this nonsense for him really think that no one would be watching, and call him out on this? Even Christopher Hitchens, one of the chimp's most vocal cheerleaders, called this "moronic".
Arrogance, hubris, and stupidity, does this explain what we're dealing with here, or is it something else? The mind reels.
Caught Bill Maher Friday night. Tim Robbins vs Stephen Hayes. Robbins is a bright guy who was mis-matched by the smarmy Mr Hayes. Note to whomever: If you're going to send forth an actor to match wits with an apologist for Team Texas, let the actor be better prepared. Please.
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I went back to chapter 10, "Wartime", of the 9/11 Report. This is where the so-called "proof" of the connection between Iraq and the 9/11 terrorists is said to be found, according to Stephen Hayes, author of "Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President", and Tim Robbins' sparring partner. In a word- bullshit. Read the chapter, its only 14 pages, and see if an indictable connection, a connection worthy of going to war, is postulated therein. [I'll save you the trouble. You won't find one.]
The thing about Hayes is, we're not dealing with an unassailable intellect, here. He's a mouthpiece, a shill, a rent-boy for the Right. Jon Stewart easily dismantled his foolish assertion of Dick Cheney as a forceful leader of unquestionable character. These fools will ride these lies to the bitter end. Long, long after they've been exposed. They are unrelenting and shameless, and that is why they need to be challenged and beaten down with equal force.
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A Stalinist regime took over South Vietnam after the fall of Saigon and it began to perpetrate what all of its predecessors and successors perpetrated: mass liquidation of human life and freedom.
I am well aware, of course, that the Left doesn’t care about the human beings for whom it purports to speak. So, as I expected, Mr Atkinson, you couldn’t really care less about the terrible fate that will befall Iraqis if we withdraw, just as befell the South Vietnamese people when we left them to be conquered by the brutal and totalitarian North.
You are clearly not interested in the summary executions of the tens of thousands of innocent South Vietnamese that the North Vietnamese perpetrated after their victory.
These victims had done nothing to deserve “vengeance” -- unless being human represented a crime. And you are not interested in the hundreds of thousands of political prisoners who were thrown into prisons and forced labor camps without any formal charges of any kind.
It was this reign of terror that caused two million refugees and hundreds of thousands of boat people to plunge into the Gulf of Thailand and into the South China Sea. And it was this reign of terror that witnessed Hanoi initiate a vicious and sadistic pogrom against its ethnic Chinese citizens in 1978.
But I you know you couldn’t care less about all this. All that you really care about is that the U.S. lost in Vietnam and the communists won -- an end result that you discuss in this symposium with an evident glee that you can’t even conceal.
I know, I know, the viciousness with which the communists treated their new victims was all America’s fault. This is typical leftist pedagogy: no matter what crime against humanity a totalitarian adversary of the U.S. ever commits, it is the devil that made them do it. And we obviously know who you think the devil is.
But the reality is that the communist tyrants who captured South Vietnam brutalized their new victims for the same reason the Khmer Rouge brutalized theirs: faithfulness to the Marxist-Leninist creed in general and to the Maoist creed in particular.
The Left flies into ecstasy at the idea that the Khmer Rouge’s genocide was somehow the result of the U.S. bombing of Cambodia in 1973. The only problem here, of course, is that the Khmer Rouge psychopaths were not Jeffersonians before 1973. They were the fanatic Stalinists they always were and always would be. Their intellectual leaders, who had all been radicalized in France’s universities (they called themselves Angka Loeu – “the Higher Organization”), had meticulously planned their leftist social engineering experiment far before their sensitivities were hurt by American bombing.
The Khmer Rouge killed millions of human beings because, like Lenin, Stalin and Mao before them, they were motivated by the yearning for mass death and suicide,a impulse to “wipe the slate clean,” impose violent collectivization, and to build a new man.
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