The CIA’s Afghan Death Squads(theintercept.com) |
The CIA’s Afghan Death Squads(theintercept.com) |
And the media often is involved in the “coverup”.
In Indonesia the CIA orchestrated rebels and then a coup that resulted in the killing of over 3 million locals. And mainstream American media were involved in the cover up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Indonesia
https://www.workers.org/indonesia/chap2.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/th...
Other massacre examples that had coverups and denials:
Gotta say this article goes above and beyond to document what happens in these pointless permawars used to justify (U.S) military spending.
Greenwald and the intercept reached an irresolvable position regarding publishing standards, so they went their separate ways. Greenwald now publishes elsewhere.
You seem to be implying a publication exercising their editorial privilege is proof that they lack integrity. Maybe the intercept is in fact a corrupt publication, but that depends entirely on your judgement of their decision not to publish what Greenwald wanted to publish.
We really have learned nothing from Vietnam. There, too, unrestricted murder of children was justified as removing future enemies.
And at no point since this madness started has there ever been a declaration of what "victory" looks like.
But yeah, let's celebrate the troops! Hooray for our warriors who "keep America safe". Let's pour even more money into this madness and wave the flag, shall we?
I often wonder where passionate distrust of the government has emerged from in recent years, and it is probably things like this which disillusion readers.
> Actions like these damage American moral authority in the region
America (well, technically, the federal government of the United States of America) has not had an ounce of credibility in 15 years, at least.
It's laughable to assume otherwise.
The USA has 5% of the global population. The rest of the 95% of the globe's population harbors no illusions about "American moral authority".
This article, and the story it contains, is abhorrent. Disgusting. Saddening. America is breeding, and paying, war criminals.
I have friends/family in the military. I don't talk to most of them anymore.
How can I pretend to be friends with people who are part of a system of global oppression, murder, and violence?
You're part of a system of African child slave labor.
Nobody ever faced consequences for any of it.
I gotta be honest, the idea that things like this "damage American moral authority" is just such a purely America-centric view. Americans truly have no idea how they are perceived by the rest of the world. Across the globe, polls consistently show America is viewed as the greatest threat to world peace.
[1] although the very puerile "it's no fun ruling unless the ruled know you're doing it" is the only explicit answer the book gives to the question posed by where Goldstein's text is left hanging: of what does "...the original motive, the never-questioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought doublethink, the Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards..." really consist?
It seems 100% counterproductive. It looks like checks and balances don't work that well after all.
I'm starting to see the benefits of small government. The case for a decentralized, citizen-driven monetary system is also increasingly strong. Reduction of government and monetary reform must go together or else we risk corporations or some other large bureaucratic organisations replacing the government and end up doing the same kinds of senseless things.
An economy should not support such massive and immoral waste of human lives and productive capacity.
> The period in which The Intercept documented the escalation of violence in Wardak falls neatly between the first round of formal U.S.-Taliban talks in late 2018 and the signing of the Doha agreement early this year. The rate of 01 night raids, and the number of civilians killed as a result, fell dramatically last winter and stopped almost entirely this spring.
And why would anyone need to draw their "own conclusions" when Greenwald has been very explicit as to why he left.
"The period in which The Intercept documented the escalation of violence in Wardak falls neatly between the first round of formal U.S.-Taliban talks in late 2018 and the signing of the Doha agreement early this year."
I can hardly say I know enough to clear Bush or Biden of using death squads, but it does seem like the major escalation and change in tactics occurred between January 21, 2017 and today.
The war is not black and white; good versus evil. Almost nothing in the world is that simple and straightforward. Do you honestly think it would become a great place to live if the US just withdrew?
This is not a competition to count up who did more worse stuff. We as a country have been caught in a slippery slope with no easy completely morally correct way out. The fact is that we are in the war now and playing monday morning quarter back does nothing.
I'm sure that our country didn't think their actions of having americans in saudi arabia would have pissed off Osama and the countless other hijackers bad enough that they attacked us on 9/11. But the fact is they did, then the Taliban provided safe haven for them and our only option to try to avoid similar attacks in the future was to go in and get rid of the safe haven. If we leave now, the taliban will take over and it will be a safe haven again. If we stay, our fellow americans continue to die in an ugly horrible war.
Where was the easy right morally correct answer in any of that that was readily apparent at the time?
That's precisely how it's done in China and North Korea, as well as many other places, and almost every terror regime in history. It's also used in America whenever prosecutors / prison operators want to "send a message."
There's great value in keeping a population cowed when a small percentage of them can recount the horrors they've suffered for disobedience to authority. Execution is only reserved for actual threats to the regime, and the odd show trial.
The main account about this is in the last chapter of Bellum Gallicum, probably written by one of his lieutenants. A translation to English: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Commentaries_on_the_Gallic_Wa... from the Latin: http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/caesar/gall8.shtml#44
> Real regimes don't mildly torture problematic people and then keep them around at length
"Mildly torture"? Did we read the same book? The torture in 1984 was as systematic and torturous as possible. Of course it's fiction, but nothing mild about it. Also, death squads are used by regimes that are unstable or fighting for power. Like in afghanistan. The totalitarian state described in 1984 was the opposite of afghanistan - completely secure.
Also, Smith wasn't in the "real world" with a "real regime", it's fiction. I hope you realize that. He is narrating a fictional world. So it's rather absurd to claim that he is an unreliable narrator because he isn't narrating the real world. By that logic, every narration in fiction is unreliable and as a consequence makes the claim about unreliable narration absurd.
For a classical tyranny were deaths squads are almost never necessary, because mass control is extremely efficient, "Brave New World" is better suited.
That's why the Fair Cobalt Alliance (FCA) [1] was initiated.
[1] https://www.theimpactfacility.com/commodities/cobalt/fair-co...
Mond also summarises why contemporary people are so willing to follow visions like ISIS or QAnon:
"Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."
(NB that BNW was written after WWI, 1984 after WWII, which may, beyond the temperaments of their authors, also explain how the visions got so much darker. Note also that Huxley wrote a much-less-famous utopia near the end of his life.)
As for Smith's torture, I see:
Part 3, Chapter 1: hit on the elbow
Part 3, Chapter 2: beaten, but apparently not enough to break bones. Screamed at, but mostly questioned (not giving leave to urinate is another detail that makes me think Orwell was writing cathartically about his public school days. See "Such, Such Were The Joys".)
Part 3, Chapter 3: restrained. a "dial" of unclear action. scars of unknown origin (and we know that Smith already suffered from varicose lesions well before)
Part 3, Chapter 4: mention of dentures (but had he lost teeth from torture, or from his poor living conditions beforehand?)
Part 3, Chapter 5: failure to be tortured by rats
That's a lot of alleged hours of O'Brien's time, which presumably would be spent (as O'Brien, unlike Smith, got excellent marks on his A levels, thereby getting into the Inner Party) doing something of value for Oceania, rather than enabling Smith's narcissism. It's obvious Smith doesn't have any useful information to give up. How much of an example "pour encourager les autres" could Smith possibly be, considering the oh-so wide, expansive, nature of his circle of friends and acquaintances? The O'Brien of Part 3 is also cardboard, and reminds me of nothing so much as Johnny Hale from "Such, Such Were The Joys".
Consider also:
No sensory deprivation, no waterboarding. Nothing that approaches even Korean-War-era physiological-limit techniques.
A return to the polls to vote for more of the same!
> when we were non-interventionist
When exactly was that? Was it when the US was only indirectly involved via education, assistance, and spook-craft? When it was only involved in "police actions" and not wars? Are we strictly speaking about the US government or also US corporations? The US has always been involved in foreign conflicts from the start.
Actually no, in 2008 Obama won a solid victory while sounding notes of change and ending the wars. Then he got elected and did what he was put there to do, which was sell the people out.
The elites have been exercising their veto over the peace vote since 11/22/63.
In a better world, the soviets would have done all the hard work to introduce minor things like school for girls[1] to afghanistan in the early eighties, and then it would have gone capitalist along with the rest of the ex-soviet -stans, nearly bloodlessly, in the early nineties.
Help afghanis, yes. Help the taliban? That was a poor, even a foreseeably poor, decision.
[1] for an idea of the variation in that part of asia, compare music videos from tajikistan and from iran, for example...
It would be like saying bilbo baggins is an unreliable narrator in lord of the rings because magical rings don't exist in the real world. Absurd. But you could say the narrator in fight club may be unreliable since its revealed he has mental issues and the stories don't line up within the movie/book.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737728
[1] part II chap 8. By comparison with 1984, the FBI usually gets violent nutcases to come up with their own scenarios without such explicit prompting, but in real life these sorts of people are not lacking for supposing that (their often paranoidly fictional) ends justify the (thankfully equally fictional, at least when they procure "bombs" from HumInt sources) means, either.
Also, what other options did we have to help afghanis at the time? There were definitely numerous cons to supporting the taliban, but weren't they the most capable organization at waging war in the area at the time? I guess we could have tried to find more moderate opposition to the Russians but that would have come at the cost of having less capable opposition to the Russians.
I'm sure that some of our leaders, members of the CIA, and soldiers may have been corrupt and self serving in their decisions but I would argue that a majority of them were rational and honorable individuals who were doing their best to uphold the oaths they made to protect America. They were figuratively and some times literally giving their lives to something they truly believed in. It doesn't seem right to cast them all under the bus and say they were corrupt evil individuals without exercising empathy and contemplating what they knew at the time and the choices that were laid out in front of them.
(I'm not attempting to say that people were making corrupt decisions, I'm sure they were trying to do their best. What I'm attempting to say is that "providing advanced technology to people whose values are entirely contrary to yours" is not only in retrospect stupid, but should have been notably stupid at the time as well.)
You really are failing to understand the criticism. You can't claim a narrator is unreliable because the fiction doesn't align with reality. That's not how that works.
You do realize that 1984 was written in the 1940s predicting describing a fictional world nearly 50 years in the future?
It's a simple concept you are intentionally ignoring. If you want to claim "unreliable narrator", you need to show that within the fictional world. You can claim it because the fictional world doesn't match the real world. Because using that absurd logic, everything is unreliable.