What, will these hands ne'er be clean?
By Capt. Fogg
There's a lesson to be learned from the trial of Guatemala's former dictator Efrian Rios Montt; ‘a man of great personal integrity . . . totally dedicated to democracy’ said Ronald Reagan, surprised upon visiting him in Honduras that Central America was composed of several countries. But few Americans will care or will even be aware that at long last he's been found guilty of genocide and war crimes.
The things that went on in Guatemala were gruesome, horrifying and heart-breaking but I don't have the stomach to relate even part of it. You can read about it here and if you do, if you can tear yourself away from Boston Bomber stories, School shooting stories' da scores' and Cleveland sex slaves long enough, perhaps you'll take a further moment to meditate and perhaps agonize over the part our country, always howling about freedom as if we invented it, played in yet another sordid and brutal horror.
Yes, Rios Montt is a monster like so many Latin American monsters in Chile, Argentina and elsewhere, all of whom were supported by the Land of the Free and even placed in power by violent US assistance. Rios Montt whose squads were supported and advised by and trained by the Reagan administration, wasn't a Communist you see and that's what counts and so it didn't matter that he raped, tortured, brutalized attempted to murder an entire ethnicity because they were better off dead than Red. better off dead than getting in the way of the very few and very rich. Red of course means looking for some hero to improve life from the hopeless, unchanging, grinding, disease ridden, starvation and poverty Central American Kleptocracy needs in order to provide a most excellent life for people like Rios Montt and his generals.
The 86 year old and frail monster has now been sentenced to 80 years in jail, although he claims he never got his hands dirty or bloody, as though that were grounds for clemency or forgiveness.
Who amongst us, the champions of freedom, has clean hands? Kindly old avuncular Ron is dead, but he's still the hero who made the sun come up in America. His own Himmler, Ollie North continues to be admired and listened to and frankly my dear, America doesn't give a damn about any of the things we did in the name of protecting American Corporate imperialism from land reform or about how much innocent blood was soaked into foreign soil to do it.
Go on worrying about how dangerous it is to live in America, how expensive to fuel your three SUVs and how high your taxes are. There's a one in more than a million chance of some psycho shooting you after all and that Asian, Middle Eastern, central and South American blood isn't on your hands. You're not some bleeding-heart Liberal anyway.
There's a lesson to be learned from the trial of Guatemala's former dictator Efrian Rios Montt; ‘a man of great personal integrity . . . totally dedicated to democracy’ said Ronald Reagan, surprised upon visiting him in Honduras that Central America was composed of several countries. But few Americans will care or will even be aware that at long last he's been found guilty of genocide and war crimes.
The things that went on in Guatemala were gruesome, horrifying and heart-breaking but I don't have the stomach to relate even part of it. You can read about it here and if you do, if you can tear yourself away from Boston Bomber stories, School shooting stories' da scores' and Cleveland sex slaves long enough, perhaps you'll take a further moment to meditate and perhaps agonize over the part our country, always howling about freedom as if we invented it, played in yet another sordid and brutal horror.
Yes, Rios Montt is a monster like so many Latin American monsters in Chile, Argentina and elsewhere, all of whom were supported by the Land of the Free and even placed in power by violent US assistance. Rios Montt whose squads were supported and advised by and trained by the Reagan administration, wasn't a Communist you see and that's what counts and so it didn't matter that he raped, tortured, brutalized attempted to murder an entire ethnicity because they were better off dead than Red. better off dead than getting in the way of the very few and very rich. Red of course means looking for some hero to improve life from the hopeless, unchanging, grinding, disease ridden, starvation and poverty Central American Kleptocracy needs in order to provide a most excellent life for people like Rios Montt and his generals.
The 86 year old and frail monster has now been sentenced to 80 years in jail, although he claims he never got his hands dirty or bloody, as though that were grounds for clemency or forgiveness.
Who amongst us, the champions of freedom, has clean hands? Kindly old avuncular Ron is dead, but he's still the hero who made the sun come up in America. His own Himmler, Ollie North continues to be admired and listened to and frankly my dear, America doesn't give a damn about any of the things we did in the name of protecting American Corporate imperialism from land reform or about how much innocent blood was soaked into foreign soil to do it.
Go on worrying about how dangerous it is to live in America, how expensive to fuel your three SUVs and how high your taxes are. There's a one in more than a million chance of some psycho shooting you after all and that Asian, Middle Eastern, central and South American blood isn't on your hands. You're not some bleeding-heart Liberal anyway.
posted by Libby Spencer at 4:30 PM
3 Comments:
Thank you for writing this Fogg. I didn't have the heart to talk about it but I have to say, much I hate to celebrate another's misfortune, I take great satisfaction in seeing justice finally done here.
I know that celebrating misfortune is morally wrong in the abstract, but then abstraction is a kind of distortion. At Passover, Jews express sorrow, albeit small sorrow, for the Egyptian troops drowned whilst chasing them. They were only following orders, you see.
This heartless, cowardly, remorseless, unrepentant piece of snakeshit wasn't following orders and I'm angry that it's not possible for him to suffer one ten thousandth as much as the people he slaughtered and tortured.
But as an American - all of us as Americans bear an original sin, a collective guilt for Guatemala and a horrible host of other places where we aided and abetted such horrors, such offenses against humanity in the name of "freedom."
I cringe every time some pseudopatriotic Chauvinist blowhard uses the very word freedom and associates it with who we are and what we do and what we have done. We're not moral leaders, we have little to do with a "free world" other than to make it free for us to exploit, to steal, to oppress.
I sometimes fall asleep by trying to count the countries we've invaded, the cannibal monsters we've supported, the genocides, the shock and awe. With the exception of the early 1940's nearly all of it had to do with power and money and territorial lust and greed for more.
You're right about this. To be fair, I think a lot of people don't really know how brutal our foreign policy has been, and still is. They base their emotional response on old war movies where we are always the heroes.
And yikes, have to think falling asleep counting atrocities is not conducive to pleasant dreams...
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