Why are so few willing to discuss real historical events?

[carepov]

No doubt, Carepov, and I dare say many caring, balanced, loving people. This doesn't in any way diminish the fact that the USA, as controlled by a relatively small select group, has been for its entire history a predatory, terrorist rogue nation.

"Because the United States does not look like a militarized country, it's hard for Americans to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state, that it garrisons much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere at any moment."

Tom Engelhardt

And yet the world is a less violent place than ever before. Worldwide, the cummulative deaths of violence (1%) and war (0.3%), are less than suicide (1.5%) or car accidents (2%)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate

[Argus]

[ name=carepov" post="1043311" timestamp="1428001987]

However, you could also write volumes about American led positive deeds. In many cases, American actions were unprecedentedly good.

That is simply not true, Carepov. The USA doesn't do things for altruistic reasons. Try to describe the good things the USA has done. You'll find it's not the easy task you think it is.

Well, it defeated the Nazis... and the Communists.

[Argus]

Though the North Koreans had a reputation for viciousness, according to Cumings, U.S. soldiers actually engaged in more

civilian massacres.

And he would know that because, of course, the North Koreans carefully documented all the massacres they were involved in.

This included dropping over half a million tons of bombs and thousands of tons of napalm, more than was

loosed on the entire Pacific theater in World War II, almost indiscriminately.

Really? Almost indiscriminately? They just dropped it wherever they felt like it, not on the enemy? That seems... unlikely.

The review goes on to say, Cumings deftly

reveals how Korea was a clear precursor to Vietnam: a divided country, fighting a long anti-colonial war with a committed

and underestimated enemy; enter the U.S., efforts go poorly, disillusionment spreads among soldiers, and lies are told at

top levels in an attempt to ignore or obfuscate a relentless stream of bad news. For those who like their truth unvarnished,

Cumingss history will be a fresh, welcome take on events that seemed to have long been settled.

There's nothing really secret about the US's initial response to the attack by North Korea. It was confused and inadequate, featuring mass desertion by poorly trained, poorly equipped troops led by incompetent officers. Nevertheless, an ideologue like Cumings is hardly the type to give us unvarnished truth. His politics have been far left wing for decades.

Edited April 3, 2015 by Argus

[Michael Hardner]

Well, it defeated the Nazis... and the Communists.

Blaringly obvious example, yes. Also the foundation of modern democracy and economy, and western liberation movements for gender and sexual orientation, too.

[Je suis Omar]

And yet the world is a less violent place than ever before. Worldwide, the cummulative deaths of violence (1%) and war (0.3%), are less than suicide (1.5%) or car accidents (2%)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate

Ask all the poor countries of the world that the USA has raped and pillaged about that, Carepov.

[Argus]

That's precisely the point, Carepov, one can't locate in the historical record events where the USA has been a force for good.

You're not speaking German or Russian. That's a pretty good force for good example.

[Je suis Omar]

Blaringly obvious example, yes. Also the foundation of modern democracy and economy, and western liberation movements for gender and sexual orientation, too.

No democracy for the poor countries the USA used to steal massive amounts of wealth. You are joking about "liberation movements for gender and sexual orientation, too".

[Argus]

The USA has been nothing but a bully towards the poor countries of the world,

Most of the 'poor countries' of the world are run by thuggish dictators.

[Je suis Omar]

You're not speaking German or Russian. That's a pretty good force for good example.

You do have a very difficult time focusing, Argus. TimG's caring argument resurrected.

[carepov]

Ask all the poor countries of the world that the USA has raped and pillaged about that, Carepov.

Au contraire, mon Omar. The more interaction a country has with the US the more developed it is. You do know that the worldwide poverty rate is also at a historic low, n'est pas?

[Je suis Omar]

Most of the 'poor countries' of the world are run by thuggish dictators.

Supported by the USA.

[Michael Hardner]

No, not joking- see The Stonewall riots

[Je suis Omar]

Au contraire, mon Omar. The more interaction a country has with the US the more developed it is. You do know that the worldwide poverty rate is also at a historic low, n'est pas?

The Secret Wars of the CIA

Excerpts from a talk by John Stockwell

http://www.serendipity.li/cia/stock1.html

...

Approaching this subject from my own point of view, my own experience -- my special expertise in the CIA covert actions -- let's look at Nicaragua. This is the most famous covert action of the fifty that are going on today. They say there are thirteen "major" ones. This is not the biggest one. Afghanistan is. We've spent several hundred million dollars in Afghanistan. We've spent somewhat less than that, but close, in Nicaragua. Nicaragua is the most famous one, and there's a reason. Part of it is it's closer, but a big part of it is the fact that the Administration is using Nicaragua for a very special purpose, so they have made it public from the outset.

What this is is a technique of destabilization. In covert action, you call it destabilization. You have a target: a government that you don't like. You pick a country you're going to go after. The reasons are quite whimsical. We go after a country for a while, and if it doesn't work, sometimes we wind up being friends with them. They pick a government. They target them. They send the CIA in with its resources and its activists: hiring people, hiring agents to tear apart the social and economic fabric of the country. It's a technique for putting pressure on the government, hoping they can make the government come to the U.S.'s terms, or that the government will collapse altogether and they can engineer a coup d'etat, and have the thing wind up with their own choice of people in power.

Now ripping apart the economic and social fabric is fairly textbookish. What we're talking about is going in and deliberately creating conditions where the farmer can't get his produce to market; where children can't go to school; where women are terrified inside their homes as well as outside; where government administered programs grind to a complete halt; where the hospitals are treating wounded people instead of sick people; where international capital is scared away and the country goes bankrupt.

If you ask the State Department today what is their official explanation of the purpose of the Contras, they say, it is to attack economic targets, meaning, break up the economy of the country. Of course, they're attacking a lot more.

To destabilize Nicaragua, beginning in 1981, we began funding this force of Somoza's ex-National Guardsmen, calling them the Contras, the counter-revolutionaries. We created this force, which did not exist until we allocated money. We armed them. We put uniforms on their backs and boots on their feet, gave them camps in Honduras to live in, medical supplies, doctors, training, leadership, direction, as we sent them in to destabilize Nicaragua. Under our direction, they have been systematically blowing up bridges, sawmills, graneries, government offices, schools, health centers. They ambush trucks so the produce can't get to market. They raid farms and villages. The farmer has to carry a gun while he tries to plow, if he can plow at all.

If you want one example of hard proof of the CIA's involvement in this and their approach to it, dig up the "Sabotage Manual" that they were circulating throughout Nicaragua: a comic-book type of a paper, with visual explanations of what you can do to bring a society to a halt: how you can gum up typewriters; what you can pour in a gas tank to burn up engines; what you can stuff in a sewer to stop up the sewage so it won't work -- things you can do to make a society simply cease to function.

Systematically, the Contras have been assassinating religious workers, teachers, health workers, elected officials, government administrators. Remember the "Assassination Manual" that surfaced in 1984? It caused such a stir that President Reagan had to address it himself in the presidential debates with Walter Mondale. They use terror to traumatize society so that it cannot function.

I don't mean to abuse you with verbal violence, but you have to understand what your Government and its agents are doing.

They go into villages. They haul out families. With the children forced to watch, they castrate the father. They peel the skin off his face. They put a grenade in his mouth, and pull the pin. With the children forced to watch, they gang-rape the mother, and slash her breasts off. And sometimes, for variety, they make the parents watch while they do these things to the children.

This is nobody's propaganda !

There have been over a hundred thousand American "Witnesses for Peace" who've gone down there, and they have filmed and photographed and witnessed these atrocities immediately after they've happened, and documented thirteen thousand people killed this way -- mostly women and children.

These are the activites done by the Contras. The Contras are the people President Reagan called "freedom fighters." He said: "They are the moral equivalent of our founding fathers."

In 1960, we came up with a new term, a policy of trying to correct the problems of Central and Latin America -- the economic imbalances -- by addressing them directly. In President Kennedy's famous program he said: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, will make violent revolution inevitable." However, the millions and millions of dollars that we put into this program, inevitably went to the rich, and not to the ordinary people of the countries involved. While we were doing this, or trying -- saying we were trying to correct the problems of Central and Latin America -- the CIA was doing its thing too.

The CIA was, in fact, forming the police units that are, today, the death squads in El Salvador. The leaders were on the CIA's payroll, trained by the CIA in the United States. We had the public safety program going throughout Central and Latin America for twenty-six years, in which we taught them to break up subversion by interrogating people: interrogation, including torture, the way the CIA taught it.

Dan Mitrione, the exponent of these things, spent seven years in Brazil and three in Uruguay, teaching interrogation; teaching torture. He was supposed to be the master of the business: how to apply the right amount of pain, at just the right times, in order to get the response you want from the individual. They gave them crank generators -- with "U.S.A.I.D." written on the side, so the people even knew where these things came from -- and developed a wire that was strong enough to carry the current and fine enough to fit between the teeth, so you could put one wire between the teeth, and the other in or around the genitals. You could crank, and submit the individual to the greatest amount of pain, supposedly, that the human body can register.

Now, how do you teach torture? Someone can teach you about torture, but sooner or later you have to get involved. You have to lay on your hands and try it yourself. They would pick up guinea pigs off the streets: beggars, and take them in to use in these torture training classes. Of course, the horror of that is, these people wouldn't know why they were being tortured. They couldn't give up. They couldn't say: "I'm sorry! Stop the pain! I'll tell you the names of everybody involved!" All they could do was lie there and scream!

When they would collapse, they would bring in doctors who would shoot them up with Vitamin B and rest them up for the next class. And when they would die, they would mutilate the bodies and throw them out on the streets to terrify the population, so that everybody would be afraid of the police and the Government. This is what the CIA was teaching them to do.

One of the women who was in this program for two years -- tortured in Brazil for TWO YEARS -- testified internationally when she eventually got out. She said the most horrible thing about it, in fact, was that the people doing it were not raving psychopaths. She couldn't break mental contact with them the way you could if they were psychopaths. They were very ordinary people.

She told about being tortured one day: She's on this table, naked in a room full of six men, and they're doing these incredibly painful, degrading things to her body. There's an interruption. The American is called to the telephone, and he's in the next room, and the others take a smoke break. She's lying on this table, and he's saying: "Oh, hi Honey. Yes, I can wrap it up here in another hour or so, and meet you and the kids at the Ambassador's on the way home."

There's a lesson in all this. The lesson is:

It isn't just the Gestapo maniacs, or KGB maniacs, who do inhuman things to other people.

It's PEOPLE who do inhuman things to other people.

And we are responsible for doing these things on a massive basis, to people of the world today. We do it in a way that gives us plausible denial to our own consciences. We create a CIA, a secret police, with a vast budget, and let them go and run these programs in our name. We pretend like we don't know what's going on, though the information is there for us to know. And we pretend like it's okay because we're fighting some vague communist threat. We're just as responsible for these ONE TO THREE MILLION PEOPLE we've slaughtered, and for all the people we've tortured and made miserable, as the Gestapo was for the people that they slaughtered and killed. Genocide is genocide !!

[Je suis Omar]

No, not joking- see The Stonewall riots

Michael once told me that it was my responsibility to present that needed for my contentions. So I did. I think Michael should be willing to follow his own advice.

[On Guard for Thee]

Not if they won the war.

Too bad your namesakes blew it in Iraq, speaking of war criminals.

[bush_cheney2004]

Supported by the USA.

The USA supports lots of things, including Canada's illegal wars and "war crimes".

[Je suis Omar]

The USA supports lots of things, including Canada's illegal wars and "war crimes".

No doubt they do. Shall we do a comparison of US and Canada's war crimes and terrorist acts.

You also, in a stalwart fashion, support war crimes, war criminals, terrorism and terrorists.

And with obvious great pride.

Edited April 3, 2015 by Je suis Omar

[bush_cheney2004]

No doubt they do. Shall we do a comparison of US and Canada's war crimes and terrorist acts.

You also, in a stalwart fashion, support war crimes, war criminals, terrorism and terrorists.

And with obvious great pride.

It's better than living a smug, sanctimonious lie while still enjoying and exploiting the spoils of war and conquest.

[Je suis Omar]

It's better than living a smug, sanctimonious lie while still enjoying and exploiting the spoils of war and conquest.

I'm not enjoying or exploiting the results of centuries of USA war crimes and terrorism. I am standing dead set against it. Just as people did against Nazi atrocities.

I am exposing the lie. You, on the other hand, tell us how proud you are to support the big lie and support the war criminals and terrorists.

You, and folks like you are living the lie, knowing full well just what a gigantic lie it is and if it's not silence, it's folks like you trying to glorify a fiction, trying to glorify the slaughter of millions by the hypocritical nation that has lied for over two centuries, all done just to steal more from the poorest of the poor.

Our language doesn't have a word for that kind of evil.

Or maybe it does, 'Bush/Cheney', in the same sense as 'Adolph Hitler'.

Edited April 3, 2015 by Je suis Omar

[bush_cheney2004]

I'm not enjoying or exploiting the results of centuries of USA war crimes and terrorism.

Sure you're not....that is the biggest lie of all. Typical....

I embrace and acknowledge U.S. history and foreign policy without reservation or regret.

Edited April 3, 2015 by bush_cheney2004

[Je suis Omar]

The phoney narrative of the USA and its lapdogs is fast falling to pieces. Running out of bogeymen, the USA created its own, using them as they have long used allied, US trained terrorists to murder innocents. For the USA this is even better.

---------------------------

The West Recruits Terrorists: 25,000 ISIS Fighters from Foreign Countries since Mid-2014. UN Report

By Joachim Hagopian

Global Research, April 04, 2015

Region: Middle East & North Africa

Theme: United Nations, US NATO War Agenda

In-depth Report: IRAQ REPORT, SYRIA: NATO'S NEXT WAR?

According to a just released UN report that monitors al Qaeda and ISIS terrorist groups, from the time ISIS splashed onto the headlines last June in its infamous trek southward from Syria into Iraq to take over the second largest city Mosul without encountering any opposition, a whopping 20,000 foreign recruits from over 100 countries thats most nations on earth have since converged on Iraq and Syria alone to join up as terrorists ostensibly fighting to rid the Middle East of the so called Western infidels. Another 5000 new recruits from foreign countries are additionally fighting in other war zones like Libya and now Yemen.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-west-recruits-terrorists-25000-isis-fighters-from-foreign-countries-since-mid-2014-un-report/5440512

[Je suis Omar]

I embrace and acknowledge U.S. history and foreign policy without reservation or regret.

That illustrates that you are true comrades of those who support the worst of what Stalin and Hitler have done. You are saying that you are the equivalent of those who participated in Nazi concentration and death camps.

[bush_cheney2004]

That illustrates that you are true comrades of those who support the worst of what Stalin and Hitler have done. You are saying that you are the equivalent of those who participated in Nazi concentration and death camps.

No, clearly it is only you who is saying that.

[Je suis Omar]

No, clearly it is only you who is saying that.

Here's yet another source that illustrates just what an evil the USA is and has been throughout its long sordid history.

The only difference between the USA and the Nazis or Stalin is that the latter two had a much shorter run. The USA has been evil since before it was a "nation".

Quotes can't really describe how guardedly one should consider the appellation 'nation' as a reference to the USA.

Study: U.S. regime has killed 20-30 million people since World War Two

James A. Lucas

CounterCurrents.org

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 06:35 UTC

http://www.sott.net/article/273517-Study-US-regime-has-killed-20-30-million-people-since-World-War-Two

[bush_cheney2004]

Here's yet another source that illustrates just what an evil the USA is and has been throughout its long sordid history.

How does this relate to your personal attack in violation of forum rules ?