Imagine a man who raped his neighbour’s wife and clubbed the children to death in front of him, then tortured and murdered the neighbour. Then he sold their vital organs for money, stole everything in the house and then burned it down. Now imagine that the State, with all the evidence in front of them, decided to let that man walk free without charge. And instead of prosecuting him, the State granted him money from the Treasury to carry on with his work. And then he did it again, and they gave him more money, more status and more power. The public would be apoplectic – the outcry would be loud enough to bring down a Government.
Now imagine a man who repeated these same crimes on thousands of occasions across an entire country. And that this man receives huge payments from us to carry on doing more of the same for generations.
But we don’t have to imagine this man. This man is real. In the Dominican Republic his name is Trujillo. In El Salvador his name is Duarte. In Cuba his name is Batista. In Chile his name is Pinochet. In Nicaragua his name is Somoza. In Paraguay his name is Stroessner.
Where is our outrage? The crimes are on a massive scale. Genocide, mass murder, bombing with napalm and phosphorus, dispossession, rape, plunder, beheading and mutilation; sadism, torture and disappearances; eviction, starvation and disease; co-ercion, subversion and breaking International Law; running drugs and slaughtering babies for their organs on human farms; blackmail and bribery; burning of crops; destruction of property; napalm deserts. ..and we pay these men to do it.
Do we think that Hitler was worse? These crimes are all with the U.S. as the perpetrator or as the accomplice. History uncovers secrets and is unpopular with the Men of Highest Depravity. Lower forms of life stoop to serve these men in turn.
These crimes also demonstrate an irrefutable case for a re-run of the Nuremburg Trials. Where Hitler left off, the US re-employed his murderous scum and carried on – the battlefield also shifted from Europe to the Third World. Remember Klaus Barbie, Josef Mengele, Stefano delle Chiaie.
Thousands of American soldiers died in World War 2. If the dead were looking down, how would they feel about their Leader wrapping himself in the American flag while he finds homes for ex-Nazis and funds the continuation of their work? It has been noted that while the Allies won the War, subsequent events have ensured that the real winner was Hitler.
It is very hard indeed to swallow such views when uttered. While the facts support the conclusions, they stand in stark opposition to a steady long term diet, administered to all of us over seven decades – a steady diet high in distortion, omission, fantasy and lies. But as we all know, a lie told loudly enough and often enough eventually becomes a truth. If the facts contradict it, they must be concealed.
Extreme has become normal, and exposure of it produces denial and anger.
It is interesting to note that these are also the two first stages of grief. When we grieve we follow these stages, and they are followed in turn by bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Maybe we exist in a tacit knowledge of the crimes that are committed in our name – the newspapers are littered with tales of our essentially benevolent intentions going sadly astray – it is hard to avoid the figures on civilian casualties when we march off to do good..
Are we are living in a state of suspended grief? It is certainly depressing to open one’s eyes to the facts of reality and I would not do this if I was unable to offer hope of a solution. Maybe when the world is ready to hear the truth then we can arrive at a state of acceptance. Not acceptance of what we allowed to happen, but acceptance that it happened. The first step to dealing with a problem is acknowledging that the problem exists in the first place.
If that problem was in the past then one of the only purposes of discussing it is to ensure that we never repeat the same mistakes again. But sadly we are not an advanced species at this stage in our history.
In the 2020s, there is a man in Saudi Arabia, another in Haiti, another in Burma, another in Egypt. Beyond impotent condemnation and gesture sanctions we know that the U.S. will not unseat despots and bring democracy. Beyond howls of outrage, we know now that nothing substantive will be done to stop this. No protest would be big enough to stop this. We will uncover alternative means in Book Two.
Before that, we need to look to the short term and to stop this practice now. To do this, we will become experts in the workings of empire building. We will become completely familiar with the tools of its use and thus with the tools to dismantle it in the short term.
To do this we will put ourselves in the position of a country that desires regime change. We will not condemn the above behavior but instead we will employ it to throw off the attentions of a different foreign power. We will use Northern Ireland as a theoretical example.
And finally in this section, having understood completely the methods of empire-building, we will pick up the tools to derail it.