John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN GOV’T SLVES
“How the US Bullies the World into Its Sanctions Regime”
In most instances, the reasons for America’s laying sanctions are either mistaken or, perhaps more often, simply high-handed. They are a way of making others do what you want them to do, short of war.
We have a number of examples today, with that of Venezuela being an outstanding one. Here is a democratic government which continues holding elections even in times of great stress, accused of being undemocratic, and it is fighting for its life against sanctions and CIA dark operations and threats from Washington of still more dire actions.
Sanctions are virtually never principled, although tiresome language actually abusing principles is often used to defend them.
When it does come to really principled matters, American sanctions are rarely imposed. In America, principles are never permitted to stand in the way of the establishment’s selfish interests.
A current example is Israel’s appalling treatment of the Palestinians. Another is the violent and criminal behavior Rodrigo Duterte, President of the Philippines. Both situations are as appropriate cases for principled sanctions as you are likely to find, but the word “sanction” is never heard from Washington.
The past example of Nationalist South Africa, of course, springs to mind.
The American power establishment valued that country as a “bulwark against communism” and did not want to hurt it, despite its terrible record of human abuse. Only when the American public began to lead, pressuring some corporations and joining forces with other nations who were acting, did Washington reluctantly lay sanctions.
So, truth be told, almost all sanctions are misguided and selfish, having nothing to do with values or principles. Only the rarest examples are otherwise.
And, on strictly practical grounds, many sanctions ultimately do not work. There isn’t always a stick big enough to use for a given case.
And, further, many sanctions even have counter-productive results, such as causing nations to substitute new products or services for sanctioned ones or to find new creative channels for obtaining the sanctioned ones.
Why do Americans even think their government has the right to hurl these thunderbolts at so many in the first place?
America is the only country in the world that announces sanctions almost as regularly as announcements are made about flights at a big city airport.
When America is not starting wars, it is trying to attack people with sanctions.
Does that not speak clearly of being an international bully?
Why would anyone want to embrace that identity?
Well, bullies are just bullies and do what it is that bullies do, and that explains the motivations of America’s truly corrupt power establishment, but why do ordinary Americans in any way support it?
Perhaps, the fact that they seem to do so is the clearest evidence of just how manipulated the American public is by its press and politicians, of just how much they are sheep-like followers rather than the independent-minded people they enjoy crediting themselves with being.
