Friday, April 10, 2015

human decency? get real!

No need to thank us: Our results speak for themselves.
Since it happened in 1975, the American withdrawal of support from Cambodia is probably best forgotten so that America can commit the same mistake again with a glowing sense of fitness.
Meeting me one day, a haggard [American Ambassador to Cambodia John Gunther] Dean, who had lost 15 pounds, asked rhetorically: "Isn't there any sense of human decency left in us?"
From 1975 to 1979, an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians lost their lives to the regime that filled the vacuum after American withdrawal. That was 21% of the entire population.

More recently, William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, was quoted on Democracy Now, an independent-ish news channel, as saying, "the volume of major [weapons] deals concluded by the Obama administration in its first five years exceeds the amount approved by the Bush administration in its full eight years in office by nearly $30 billion. That also means that the Obama administration has approved more arms sales than any U.S. administration since World War II."

"A sense of human decency" is just a quaint and somewhat addled phrase in the minds of those inclined buy-buy-buy Congressmen and sell-sell-sell weaponry. The Middle East is such a selling opportunity.

Decency ....

No rich and powerful person ever got that way be being nice. The skeletal remains are the least of the proof of that.

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