A PAST THAT NO LONGER APPLIES

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From: Don Clark

A PAST THAT NO LONGER APPLIES

 

Recently, a good friend sent me a great list of “pin drop” stories.

 

Those are stories about times in the past when you could hear a “pin drop” in the silence created by the perfect responses of American officials to foreign leaders who unfairly criticized our nation.

 

They are wonderful stories based on wonderful things our nation has done selflessly and sacrificially for other nations.

 

They reinforce the noble way we like to think of ourselves as Americans. 

 

But, as I cautioned my friend, we must never forget---if fact, we must urgently remember---that the American story has a dark side.

 

For example, the brutal, bloody conquest our U.S. Marines inflicted on the Philippines

 

The CIA's 1954 overthrow of the first democratically elected government in the entire Middle East whose leader loved the United States and modeled his nation’s new Republic after ours, in order to guarantee control and access of the USA and Great Britain to Iran’s oil.

 

Iran’s new republic was the first government our CIA ever overthrew.  It was a vile act of international evil for which we and the world are still paying a bitter price.  But it gave the most powerful men in Washington, like vampires, their first insatiable taste for blood.

 

Then came the CIA’s overthrow of nine democratically elected governments in Central and South America, replacing them with brutal dictatorships and death squads trained by our military, who would do our bidding and protect American business interests, even if it meant “eliminating” many of their own people.  Oh yes, and guard against supposed subversion south of our border by “Communism.”  (See the movie:  “Romero” with Raul Julia and “Havana” with Robert Redford.)

 

Also came all the foreign elections we've rigged, manipulated, twisted, bribed and bought to get the outcomes we wanted.  If we didn’t get what we wanted at the ballot box, we simply resorted to the right caliber bullet in the right political head.

 

Today, our huge outrage and political upheaval over Russia’s meddling in our elections is a high act of laughable hypocrisy compared to what America has done in the elections of other nations.

 

Or how about all the drugs the CIA has smuggled into this nation to raise secret funding for their global “black ops, without any official oversight or accountability, at the horrific cost of all the corruption, addictions, degradation, and deaths those drugs have caused to the American people.

 

(See the movies:  "Kill the Messenger," "American Made,”  “Savages,”  “Traffic,” and “Blow” for starters.)

 

How about the CIA’s hidden hand in the needless, senseless, unwinnable Vietnam War that took the lives of 58,000 of our finest young men, with countless others maimed, wounded, and emotionally devastated.

 

Plus at least one million Vietnamese lives lost in courageously fighting the American Super-Power for their own national independence, just as we once fought for our independence against mighty England.  

 

How about our bombing campaign on Iraq.  Bill Clinton's three days of bombing raids on Iraq, just as his impeachment hearings began, killed at least 10,000 Iraqi men women and children, three times the number who perished in the attacks of 9/11. The number of Iraqis killed comes from our military’s own conservative estimate.

 

 Arab leaders bitterly asked:

 

 "Do our men, women, and children have to die for Monica Lewinsky?"  

 

They gave us fair warning:

 

"We do not have your bombers and your bombs, but we do have weapons of our own devising.  You have treated us like insects whose lives you can crush beneath your boots without consequences.  But we will not let this atrocity go unanswered.  We promise you:  We are coming to America to give you our answer."  

 

The honorable war we fought in WWII was followed by the creation in America of a vast, secretive, dishonorable intelligence apparatus.

 

 Its purpose was so we would never again be taken by another surprise like “Pearl Harbor.” 

 

But to accomplish that mission, that apparatus adopted the secret use of any evil to defeat the use of any evil by our enemy.

 

One cannot continually use evil, even in a good cause, without eventually becoming evil. 

 

That is the sprawling apparatus that has become the dominant power in America---one that works evil all over the world and increasingly here within our own borders. 

 

That includes the assassination of John F. Kennedy and many political murders like it.  Even President Truman, who signed the creation of this covert monster into official existence, later regretted and repented of what he'd done. 

 

I delivered a three-part lecture on these matters at a university in Riverside, California.  The faculty and students rejected what I had to say.  But the foreign students---the foreign students---came to me deeply grateful that "someone has finally told the Americans the truth.”  

 

"We can't do it," they said.  "Americans won't listen to us.  They think we're ungrateful.  They tell us to go back where we came from if we don't like it here.  But you are an American.  They must listen to you."

 

It is almost impossible for most Americans even to conceive that America might be "The Bad Guys."  We have too many “pin drop” stories from an earlier part of our nation’s life to make us feel otherwise.  But that is exactly who we’ve steadily become.  

 

Immediately after the attacks of 9/11, a man from the Middle East wrote an Op-Ed for one of our major East Coast newspapers.

 

In essence, he wrote: 

 

"You Americans don't have to try to convince us Arabs about America's values and virtues.  Why do you think so many of want to immigrate here?  Why do you think we send our sons and daughters to be educated here?  I love America.  I love everything about America.  I love your music, your television, your movies, your sports.  I've been to church with my Protestant friends.  I've been to services with my Catholic friends.  I've been to synagogues with my Jewish friends.  Not once have I ever experienced the slightest degree of discrimination or unfriendliness.  But what you Americans do not understand, and what you Americans seem determined NOT to understand, is that your values and your virtues do not extend beyond your borders.  In other parts of the world, the secret forces of your government crush the very freedoms and destroy the very liberties for others that you so deeply prize for yourselves."  

 

That's the America we're living in. 

 

That’s the America we need to bring back to its true nobility. 

 

We do that by once again championing and living out our best morals and highest values, both for ourselves and for humankind.

 

We do that by demanding the end of those officials and those agencies who prove they are unwilling to live by those values.

 

Where do those best morals and values come from?

 

The man who is still the iconic America leader for liberals, progressives, and radicals, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, once said, in essence:

 

“America is never greater and never stands higher than when it is closest in its national life to the principles and precepts taught in the Bible.”

 

---Don Clark

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On Nov 15, 2019, at 4:25 AM, Andrew Benjamin  wrote:

I do, but it's encyclopedic. Clark's narratives are a typical Noam Chomslyite spin on history.

What we did we did for our own security.

Sometimes the results had unintended consequences, mostly the decisions by bad leaders.

Or good ones who occasionally made bad decisions.

JFK started Vietnam. He also stood at the Berlin Wall. But he prevented the world from incinerating itself.

He capitulated to the Russians. What choice would you have made?

Nixon didn't lose Vietnam. John Kerry and his bunch did.

Bad leaders abound. Jimmy Carter can be thanked for the explosion of global terror.

The communists can be thanked for exporting revolt to South America, Africa and Asia.

Are our leaders to be blamed to going after the larger danger, communism, and neglecting others that damaged us?

How would they raise the money to fight secret wars?

Was Oliver North wrong? Not in my book!