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Hornberger’s Blog, April 2006

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Friday, April 28, 2006 An article in yesterday’s New York Times about Vietnam holds a valuable lesson about U.S. foreign policy and the U.S. government’s related policy of trying to isolate the American people from the rest of the world. Vietnam, as everyone knows, is ruled by a non-democratic communist/socialist regime. That means that the citizenry of Vietnam are not free. The interventionist philosophy would go something like this: “We’ve got to liberate the Vietnamese people from tyranny, just as we have done for the Iraqi people. This decision belongs to our president—the “decider” — not to the people of Vietnam. We love the Vietnamese people and are concerned about their well-being. Attack and invade. Any American who opposes us is a communist sympathizer.” Tens of thousands of Vietnamese people would be killed and maimed in the process, just as in Iraq. Moreover, Vietnamese insurgents, who would be called “terrorists,” would battle to oust the U.S. occupiers from ...

American Democracy Indicted

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Attention Deficit Democracy by James Bovard (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 291 pages. “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” So says a popular bumper sticker. Indeed, those of us who have been paying attention to the political scene for years have often found ourselves outraged. The president’s approval rating has gone up and down, but throughout his five years in office never has public outrage been quite commensurate with the levels of incompetence, deception, and criminality coming from Washington. The same was true under Clinton. People are simply not paying attention. There are few writers who pay more attention to the political follies of our time and who provide their readers with more meticulously documented reasons to be outraged than James Bovard, whose new book, Attention Deficit Democracy, presents his diagnosis of what is so ...

Bush Pledges More Mayhem in the Middle East

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Asked recently about his position on Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions, President Bush said, “I made it clear, and I’ll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel.” This statement brought precisely zero reaction from the public and the media. Do the American people fully appreciate that this president is committed to sending their sons and daughters to kill and die — yet again — in a foreign country? Leaving aside the reigning political mythology, by what moral principle does he pledge other people’s lives without their consent? It is bad enough to die for “one’s own” country, which, let’s face it, in practice always means for the exploiting elite who head the government. Being sent to die for another country’s elite is obscene. Would some of those at risk like to ...

Hornberger’s Blog, February 2006

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Tuesday, February 28, 2006 I wonder how U.S. officials reacted to the leaked draft of a report on Mexico’s “dirty war,” which was waged in part during the presidential regime of Luis Echeverria (1780-76) and three other Mexican presidents. Under what they termed “Operation Friendship, “Echeverria’s military forces conducted ''illegal searches, arbitrary detentions, torture, the raping of women in ...