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War Criminals vs. American Heroes - What's the Difference?


DonRocks

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Well, you asked:

When you win, you get to write history. When you have fox news, you get to write history. When you have american exceptionalism, you get to ignore thorny questions because we are better than them. 

If we are gong to solve the world's foreign policy problems, we will need to deal with people who's philosophy we don't share. With people who live in nations whom our fearless leader calls "shithole nations." People we have oppressed. The Palestinians and the Israelis, Russian, Iran, parts of the Muslim world. If we say the other side are dogs who are not human, or if they are human, not as good as we are, why should be expect then to sit and make a deal. So we have to bomb them out of existence, or fight meaningless endless wars. And this military mindset leads people to commit atrocities in the name of doing good.

But we are the good guys so our atrocities don't count. But to that Yemeni community that has been bombed for years by Saudi arcraft with US made bombs dropped with American logistical support, they might not view us as good guys. To countries who have been invaded, whose leaders have been deposed to protect American or Russian or English interests, we may not be the good guys. To a Palestinian living in Gaza who has seen death rations of 20 to  or even 100 to one, who gets electricity only a few hours a day, who can't build new facilities because construction materials are denied them. Palestinians who cross the border in the West Bank for work and medical care, regularly die waiting in line to get thru a checkpoint. I am not saying that there is nothing wrong on the Palestinian side, but surely babies paying the price for political leadership can't be the right answer. 

Our founding fathers created a country based on taking the land and the resultant slaughter of native populations, slavery and, in the words of Howard grad Ta-Nehisi Coates, the destruction of the black body, that led to Jim Crow, lynchings {over 4,000 pne of the last with the dragging death of James Byrd in 1998}, redlining. gerrymandering, voter suppression etc, our founding fathers may not have been the good guys. 

But that is how things were I hear some say. OK. What of it? Does that make it right or take away the harm?

There are great clips of James Baldwin:

How much time do you want?

Baldwin on Dick Cavett   Perhaps the finest 3 minutes on TV ever

We need to face up to our past and understand how our 'truth' runs roughshod over the experience and documented horrors we have inflicted thru war, racism, exceptionalism. And now we are warring on the poor, the immigrants who cook our food, take care of us in the hospital or our parents in the nursing home, who maintain our gardens and country clubs, etc. 

I am pissed off that we can't discuss this or that we have a  president who denies it totally. That for 40% of our country, this is all fine. That money conveys right. I am pissed off we are trying to win unwinnable wars. That we have corrupted our values so e have so much weaponry of death in a country where people go bankrupt from medical debt and black kids are disciplined at 3 times the rate of white kids for the same infractions in school. 

Our world surviving mankind requires us to come to some answers soon or we will not survive without great violence and upheaval. If we don't face up to our culpability, and others do so too, the end is near. 

Just a thought, not a sermon. Hell, it is a sermon! {I stole that construction from Don. At least I am crediting him.}

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