COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY CHRISTOPHER WILSON IN THE
GUARDIAN AND PROMPTLY REMOVED
Top 10 books about
tyrants
The novelist
Christopher Wilson assembles a rogues’ gallery of despots and dictators
Okay, but you have studiously ignored others, in some cases
just as horrible.
Lyndon Johnson was a man documented as having first won
election in Texas through vote fraud.
And he was the man who started the pointless war in Vietnam
that would kill 3 million locals, many in the most horrible fashion, for the
sin of wanting their artificially-divided country re-united.
The million victims of Cambodia's Killing Fields also belong
to America's credit. It was when their neutral government was toppled by
American bombing and mini-invasions, that the monsters took control, and
America stood by and watched.
Johnson also was an immensely corrupt man, building a small
economic empire for himself while only serving at government jobs.
I would put the boyish smile of Obama here, too.
The Peace Prize winner - they gave it to him out of
desperate hopes after George Bush - launched many wars and dirty murderous
operations in the Mideast. He killed at least half a million in places as
far-flung as Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and others, and he drove
millions from their homes as refugees to almost destabilize Europe.
Very importantly, he initiated America's industrial-scale
extrajudicial killing scheme, a filthy, shameful thing that makes the efforts
of the old Argentine junta look amateurish. He killed thousands of innocents,
and even the intended targets were all legally innocent of anything.
He kept on the best of terms with the Mideast's tyrants -
Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and others never having to fear repressing and killing
their opponents. No drones for them.
He supported the coup in Ukraine against a
democratically-elected government, causing the deaths of thousands, a civil
war, and the emergence of neo-Nazi militias to the fore.
He then played games about Russian aggression, as they
responded reasonably to all this, and re-ignited the Cold War, hurling troops
and planes and tanks to Russia's border.
He allowed the horror of Syria - at least 300,000 people
killed - as mercenary rag-tag armies, pretending to be jihadists, worked to
topple a peaceful government, well regarded by a majority of its people.
The horrors there included the use of small amounts of
American-supplied chemical weapons (the government troops only recently
discovering a small cache whose marking are unmistakable) in an effort to get
an excuse (a "red line" as he put it) to send in the air force and
bomb the crap out this beautiful land. Only the work of a much-cleverer leader
prevented his success.
And on the home front, despite raising huge hopes in his own
people ("Yes we can!"), he failed, in any serious way, to help them
in eight years.
Fine man indeed with that smile and baritone voice. At least
the corporate press still thinks so.
There are others, but I make my point.
In many cases, the only difference between what are called tyrants
and others is a good press and being on the right side.
