The Marketplace of Ideas

Would we all agree that killing 500,000 people is a bad thing?

Would we?

I mean, ... y'know, ... we're all hardened and cynical due to these uncertain times we live in and everything, ... but still, ... killing half-a-million people is a big deal, right?

So, like, the UN sanctions that were primarily enforced by the US and UK, ... they killed ONE MILLION IRAQIS. Including 500,000 children.

Those are our lovely liberal-capitalist-democrats at work.

Yes, yes, ... there are arguments out there that most of the deaths were Saddam Hussein's fault, ... because mortality rates were highest in the area under his direct control. I also hear it argued that it was physically impossible for the Germans to have gassed so many people to death in the concentration camps that they had to do the job. But both of these sorts of arguments are "holocaust denial." What the people who doubt the death and misery caused by the UN/US/UK are doing is denying a holocaust.

I took the time to ask the man in charge of the "Oil for Food" program about those claims. Hans von Sponeck resigned in protest at the barbarism of the Clinton-Blair policies. The deaths were mainly the fault of the sanctions. Deaths were lower in the desert and in the highlands of the Kurds because of climate/population factors. Spurious claims notwithstanding, Western democrats killed one million Iraqis with their sanctions and now, based on the recent Lancet study, our leaders have presided over the deaths of at least half-a-million more.

And yet, and yet, ... the media still continues to blather about how we have the Iraqis' best interests at heart. How the US troops (aside from a few bad apples torturing and humiliating prisoners, who were rounded up in random sweeps, at Abu Ghraib, s'more bad apples massacring unarmed civilians in Haditha, a couple more bad apples beating prisoners to death, a few more bad apples raping a teenage Iraqi girl and then killing her and burning her and her family, a few dozen bad apples taking trophy photos of Iraqis that they killed at "check-points," and who then went on to upload these photos at a porn site in exchange for free access, and on and on) are doing a fine job of "nation-building" and "winning hearts and minds" (the same fucking expression from Vietnam where FOUR MILLION were killed, ostensibly to "prevent a bloodbath") and oh yes.

I mean, to think that this isn't "brainwashing" going on, ... just because some of the nit-wits who have been processed by this media system actually believe their garbage, ... it doesn't make it any the less lies and brainwashing.