Hi Hawkmoon,
Re: Boy Raymond.. you're on the warpath tonight, aren't you now??... :0)
Sometimes I find bellicosity invigorating. However, it's strictly of a verbal nature and is meant to occasionally shock some of my readers into a new way of viewing their world. Hopefully it's more insightful than inciteful.
Re: Patently Patton ~ You choose your examples well. I can't say anything about the Patton deception other than Bravo! It was absolutely the right thing to do. And it was a noble cause. We have no dispute there.
Where I do have a concern about the deception is when the CIA and the Marines are called in to Nicaragua or Honduras for the sake of the United Fruit Co., where we have participated in the ending of a democratic regime in Chile for the sake of the multinationals and numerous other episodes where the CIA and our military have been called in to prop up dubious dictators whose primary loyalty has been to corporate interests at the expense of the welfare and freedoms of their own peoples. If you look at the long list of involvements of our CIA and military, the great preponderance of instances involve damaging or destroying nationists (think George Washington, et al), democrats, and movements of the left, no matter how anti-communist. We have almost obsessively favored militarists, dictators, oligopolists and repressive regimes that would cater to the needs of our multinationals. That's the part of the CIA's role that I have trouble with. While we have our own unique brand of representative democracy here in the U.S., we seem to fear the spread of it anywhere else in the world. This is truly an irony to me. Though I can easily understand that a messy thing like democracy isn't what any secret police worth it's salt would care to deal with.
Just tossing out some ideas. The notion of deception is something that I take very seriously. For instance, in order to be better at seeing through what Don Rumsfeld and Gen Myers are likely to tell us from the podium about events in our newest war, I just read John R. MacArthur's "The Second Front". A book about the consistency with which the American public were deceived with regard to the Gulf War. Starting with the infamous "babies thrown from incubators" lie, to the lies about the accuracy and surgical precision of our smart bombs, to the supression of information about how we buried alive surrendering Iraqi soldiers, one has to wonder where the line should be drawn. I'm not at all interested in having legitimate military secrets divulged in an untimely fashion. But I am seriously concerned about a pattern of deception and disguised ulterior motivations that our government may wish to indulge itself in.
Warpath, indeed. Gosh, I do like the fact that you skipped 60 years of foreign interventions until you could find one that was pure and chaste enough to represent the American ideal. That says a lot.
Salaams, Ray :) |
