----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Renato Pompeu" <•••@••.•••>
To: <•••@••.•••>
Subject: Re: cj#931> re: "Who in the hell started the barbarism some 8
yearsago?"
Date: Sat, 8 May 1999 19:52:43 -0300
Well, as a Brazilian, I see that Serbs have comitted and go on commiting
atrocities. I see that Soviet Communists committed atrocities. But the
countries that committed the foremost atrocities in all World History were
the Western ones. The United States, Great Britain and Western Europe,
along the centuries, have each one committed atrocities that far outnumber
anything that Communist or any other kind of human institution has done.
Just little Belgium has killed, under the command of "hero" Stanley ("Dr.
Livingstone, I presume"), more persons in Belgian Congo in a few years than
its own population. Everybody knows what the Spaniards did in Mexico and in
the Inca Empire.
Jews ask indemnitions for extermination and slave labour enforcement in
Nazi camps. Why do not Americans, Britons and Western Europeans in general
pay indemnition to the millions of descendants of people they enslaved and
do the billions of descendants of people they paid wages under the minimum
necessary for subsistence? And of the millions they killed in its
illegitimate conquests of territory from the Natives in all corner of the
world?
Do you think that democracy legimates everything? Do not you know that the
ancient democracy in Athens voted in favour of killing all inhabitants of a
city which was not even an ennemy, but an ally which the Athenians thought
was not helpful enough (read Thucydides).
In my country, Brazil, in the 1960s and 1980s American and British experts
were sent to teach torture to the agents of the military dictators, during
all the period that the authoritarian regime favoured foreign investment.
One of these "teachers", American Dan Mitrione, was killed by people he had
tortured after these people were released as innocent. Then, from 1975
onwards, as the military regime became increasingly nationalist, mr. Carter
discovered that there was a "human rights problem" in Brazil.
Do not you know that in the bombings against Serbia there are planes from
Turkey, a Nato member that treats its Kurds much more awfully than Serbians
have ever treated their Albanians? I see reports that Serbians kill and
rape, and beat, but I see also reports that Turks do all that and more:
they torture their Kurds, using the same American and British "techniques"
which were applied in Brazil.
Renato Pompeu
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 09 May 1999 23:55:37 +0600
To: •••@••.•••
From: "wendell w. solomons" <•••@••.•••>
Subject: ANCIENT GAME Run with fox and hunt with hound
Date: Fri, 07 May 1999 18:02:36 -0700
From: Sid Shniad <•••@••.•••>
Subject: For globalism to work
"For globalism to work, American can't be afraid to act like the almighty
superpower that it is....The hidden hand of the market will never work
without a hidden fist - McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell
Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the
world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States
Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."
-- "What the World Needs Now," Thomas Friedman, New York Times,
March 28, 1999
--- -- -
Thomas Friedman, in the New York Times on April 6th: "I wouldn't
underestimate the impact on a modern European state of sustained
NATO air bombardments, which should be intensified once the weather
clears. People tend to change their minds and adjust their goals
as they see the price they are paying mount. Twelve days of surgical
bombing was never going to turn Serbia around. Let's see what 12
weeks of less than surgical bombing does. Give war a chance."
--- -- -
The Nation
May 24, 1999
'Degrading' America
By Stephen F. Cohen
[...]
Still more, the bombing and missile attacks are growing into an all-out
assault on the economic and other civilian underpinnings of Yugoslav
society. NATO sorties are literally demodernizing Serbia. Two or three
decades of its economic development-the foundation of the elementary
well-being of ordinary men, women and children-have already been destroyed.
Nor is this high-tech savagery against a small country inadvertent or
without zealous US advocates. The NATO command's cruel euphemisms about
"collateral damage" are common military obfuscation. But there is also the
"liberal" bloodlust of the May 10 New Republic, which features an article
cheering the assault on civilians on the basis of Serbian "collective
guilt," and of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, on April 23, who
demands a "pulverizing" of the "Serbian nation" back to 1950 ("We can do
1389 too"), including Belgrade teenagers "still holding rock concerts" and
families "going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides." Such demands, widely
echoed elsewhere in the media and even by the White House press secretary,
in effect call upon the United States to commit what are legally defined as
war crimes.
The Clinton Administration bombers and their apologists must not be allowed
to represent the rest of us. They have imposed a moral barricade on the
soul of America, and to that barricade Americans must go in moral
opposition. The pulverizers' purported morality rests primarily on a
fraudulent analogy-equating Serbian treatment of Kosovar Albanians with the
Nazi extermination of Jews. The analogy wantonly debases the historical
reality and memory of the Holocaust: Milosevic's reign of terror has turned
most Kosovars into refugees fleeing toward sanctuaries; Hitler gave most
European Jews no exit and turned them into ash. And even given Milosevic's
real atrocities, what has become of the American ethical axiom, Two wrongs
don't make a right? Or the central moral lesson of this awful political
century, that ends do not justify means?
In truth, US political and military leaders now care little about the
morality (or legality) of their actions in Yugoslavia, only the
"credibility of NATO." To this we must answer: We care more about the moral
reputation of America. In large parts of the world, it too has been
pulverized, certainly "degraded" much worse than Milosevic's capabilities.
Russia, which ought to be our greatest international concern, is the most
alarming example. Not long ago, millions of its citizens, particularly
young ones upon whom the Clinton Administration based its certitudes about
a pro-American Russia, saw the United States as an exemplar of civilized
political conduct. Now most of them see us as barbarians in the sky.
We must prove they are wrong by stopping the bombing of Yugoslavia before
the necessary political settlement is even harder to achieve, before the
only peace is that of the graveyard and moral redemption is impossible.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
========================================================================
•••@••.•••
a political discussion forum.
crafted in Ireland by rkm
(Richard K. Moore)
To subscribe, send any message to •••@••.•••
A public service of Citizens for a Democratic Renaissance
(mailto:•••@••.••• http://cyberjournal.org)
Non-commercial reposting is hereby approved,
but please include the sig up through this paragraph
and retain any internal credits and copyright notices.
Copyrighted materials are posted under "fair-use".
To see the index of the cj archives, send any message to:
•••@••.•••
To subscribe to our activists list, send any message to:
•••@••.•••
Help create the Movement for a Democratic Rensaissance!
A community will evolve only when
the people control their means of communication.
-- Frantz Fanon
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful
committed citizens can change the world,
indeed it's the only thing that ever has.
- Margaret Mead
Share: