John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY RALPH RAICO IN THE UNZ REVIEW
“The Taboo Against Truth”
“Speaking truth to power” is not easy when you support that power. Perhaps this is the reason why so few Western historians are willing to tell the whole truth about state crimes during this century.”
"In fact, all great states in this century have been killer states, to a greater or lesser degree."
https://www.unz.com/article/the-taboo-against-truth/#comment-3600137
Indeed.
And I wonder how many Americans know the postwar record of their own country in the world?
You know, the bloody work America busied itself with during its golden age of postwar dominance, the period of “the American Dream,” while American families watched “Ozzie and Harriet” and “Mary Tyler Moore” and “Seinfeld” and “Friends”?
One-fifth of the entire population of North Korea exterminated in three years of carpet bombing? That's a Pentagon number, too.
How many Americans know their country conducted a true holocaust in Vietnam? 3 million Vietnamese killed. Carpet bombing. Napalm. Early cluster bombs.
A huge legacy of landmines and Agent Orange left behind to keep killing and maiming for decades.
At least a million died in the "killing fields" of Cambodia. The United states had an important role in bringing that about. A neutral government was constantly pressured and harassed and secretly bombed and periodically invaded on a small scale until it collapsed and the Khmer Rouge took over.
The US then did not lift a finger to stop the butchery by the Khmer Rouge.
In Iraq, the illegal US invasion killed about a million people and so set back one of the most advanced Arab states that it still has not recovered. Millions lack such basics as clean water and electricity.
Libya was the best-run government on the continent of Africa. Everything from clean water to good education was provided free to its people, and the country was kept at peace. Today it is in ruins, and fighting over its future continues.
The horrors of the proxy war in Syria, the covert work of the US and some allies, has killed over 600,000 people and destroyed great parts of a truly beautiful and historic land.
The millions of refugees that came close to de-stabilizing parts of Europe were the result of people desperately seeking safety from America’s bombing in its destructive series of Mideast wars.
During the coup in Indonesia after President Sukarno, there was a huge bloodbath as anyone even thought to be a communist had his throat cut. The rivers were said to run red with blood from hundreds of thousands of victims thrown in.
During the horror, the US State Department burned up the phone lines submitting the names of communists or communist suspects.
Apart from the big events, there have been just dozens of coups and interventions and dirty wars over the postwar period - from those in Iran and Guatemala to Chile and Ukraine and Bolivia – all democratic governments overthrown, just ones the US didn’t like.
The ugly suppurating wounds of Palestine never stopped leaking over the decades, and America never made the effort to stop what it could have easily stopped.
