Tag Archives: imperialism

Political Rants

The year in advance.

Leave a comment

Okay, I promised domestic policy this week, but I’m going to have to go back on that for a paragraph or two. It’s the product of swallowing so much crap news over the course of the week. Just a few minutes of Latin America coverage by NPR is enough to make me want to pull my own head off. So I just want to dwell on that topic for a few minutes … don’t mind me.

One that got awayObama’s shift on Cuba is instructive in a lot of ways. For one, it is wildly popular, with something like 60% of the country in support. That has been reflected in polls for quite a long time. Second, it does help to lay bare the true nature of the relationship. Just listening to our diplomats lecture Cuba on human rights issues is enough irony to last a decade in and of itself. For chrissake, we can’t even claim to hold to a high standard on human rights even within the confines of Cuba itself!

Raul Castro has said that reestablishing normal relations would require our return of Guantanamo Bay – the only eastern-facing harbor on the island, which would be kind of useful for trade with Europe. The Obama administration has rejected that out of hand. Again … does any news organization in the United States ever examine the issue of our dubious claim on Guantanamo Bay? Nope. Too busy reporting on Russia’s heinous seizure of Crimea.

It goes deeper than that. Why have we targeted Cuba for five decades? Dictatorship? That can’t be it. We cozy up to dictators in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and elsewhere without a problem. Human rights? Please! Here’s a more plausible explanation. We “owned” Cuba, like a master owns a slave. Cuba broke away, setting a “bad” example for the other slaves. We have never accepted its disobedience, and we have punished it grievously ever since. We’ve invaded it, attacked its people, attempted to assassinate its leaders, strangled it economically as only a superpower can, vilified it in every imaginable way.

So … the nation that innovated the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 pursues the same principle on the national stage. That is the context of this new detente with Cuba.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Short memory

Leave a comment

North Korea has unilaterally withdrawn from its 1953 ceasefire agreement with South Korea, cutting the emergency hotline between the two halves of this divided peninsula. The move has been roundly condemned as provocative and an indication of increasing cravenness on the part of third-generation great leader Kim Jong Un, whose government recently tested a nuclear device. As reported on NPR and other major news networks, this behavior is portrayed as almost innate, not rooted in anything other than blind aggression and dogmatic fealty to the North’s longstanding cult of personality and garrison state mentality.

All they know of us.
All they know of us.

Now, it is true that the North Korean state is an ossified, garrison state, very oppressive – a dungeon, even. I can’t defend it. But they didn’t arrive at this state of affairs without prompting. There is one thing they want: a non-aggression treaty with the United States. Because the war of 1950-53 was fought with the U.S. more than with South Korea, and that was a war of genocidal proportions, particularly for the North. The U.S. unleashed everything short of nuclear weapons on the North during that period, until no standing structures remained north of the 38th parallel. This after years of oppressive U.S. occupation of the southern half of Korea, which itself followed more than three decades of Japanese occupation.

When North Koreans talk about destruction, they know the meaning of the word. It is not an abstraction for them. After all, they share Poland’s great misfortune of being geographically located between two great powers, frequently at odds. Worse yet, they became ground zero of a growing cold war that was never hotter than it was during that three year period in the Korean peninsula. If they have nuclear weapons, it’s because they don’t want to be attacked. And if they take exception to the annual mock-invasion of the north conducted by Washington and Seoul, it is because they have a deep memory of the devastation of sixty years ago.

In America, we haven’t forgotten the Korean War so much as simply never known it in the first place, except for the dwindling number of veterans who fought there. It’s high time we stopped acting like an aggrieved empire and found a way to settle this conflict … before it explodes again.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Crock tears.

Leave a comment

Rumor has it they used to wait until the person they despise was cold in the ground before excoriating them. Now, not so much. So Hugo Chavez, elected president of Venezuela three times (four if you count the recall) is called a “strong man” and “steadfast ally of dictators” who “showered the poor with social programs”. Rest in peace, anyone?

Chavez
Rest in peace.

I’m not surprised to hear this kind of claptrap on NPR news (known around my house as “Empire News”), particularly since their point man on Latin America – Juan Forero – is an abysmal reporter, incessantly critical of Chavez while giving a remarkably easy ride to Colombia (the last report I heard from him on Colombia, within the last six months or so, made no mention of human rights violations, intimidation, ongoing repression). He characterizes Chavez’s complaints against American imperialism as if U.S. economic and political domination of Latin America were some drug-induced hallucination by frenzied Bolivarian revolutionaries.

Forero’s principle complaints against Chavez, aside from his efforts to buy his people’s love with “showers” of social benefits, were that:

  • Chavez supported FARC, the guerrilla group operating in Colombia, according to the Colombian government (now there‘s a reliable source) and “interviews with former Colombian guerrillas” – or interrogations, perhaps?
  • Chavez had nasty friends, like Iran and Syria (and Bahrain? And Saudi? Oh, right … those are our friends.)
  • He called people names. (That never, ever happens here.)

NPR is not alone in this. It’s pretty much everywhere, even on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show (Maddow described Chavez as “clownish” I believe). NBC seems hyper-focuses on Venezuela’s oil, what’s going to happen to it, why that makes the country so important, etc. I think embedded in that rhetoric is the root of all this animus towards Chavez. Yes, he had some dictatorial tendencies, but he was certainly not a dictator. They despise him because he wouldn’t play the IMF game; because he was independent of Washington, unlike previous Venezuelan regimes. As with Cuba and Haiti, they hate him because he took Venezuela away from them. It’s got nothing to do with “democracy” and everything to do with empire and money.

If no one else will say it, I will. Rest in peace. Best of luck, Venezuelans … there’s trouble ahead.

luv u,

jp