By Jay Janson
February 14, 2018
This week, the present US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, during his trip to five Latin American nations, made headlines world wide when he made the following barely veiled threatening statement, “In the history of Venezuela and South American countries, it is often times that the military is the agent of change when things are so bad, and the leadership can no longer serve the people.” and shortly afterward referring to the elected president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro added,
“If the kitchen gets a little too hot for him, I am sure that he’s got some friends over in Cuba that could give him a nice hacienda on the beach and he could have a nice life over there.”
There are few countries in Latin America that have not experienced the USA both secretly and overtly backing a right wing military government coup.[1]
The US Secretary of State’s criminally insane back handed remarks favoring a civil war, with all the probable loss of lives a civil war would bring, seems to fit as appropriate within a US foreign policy of world domination. Human suffering has never been of any consequence to the financial interests of that 1/10 of 1 per cent of Americans who, to one degree or another, rule us all.
That is the way it has been since the end of the Second World War, a war made possible by US investments and joint ventures in the rearming of Nazi Germany,[ 2] a war that made the USA rich and the first all powerful single superpower.
Now that China is about to replace the USA as the most powerful economy in the world,[3] maybe the days of such arrogance from a US Secretary of State are numbered, though the all powerful criminal media owned by the US military industrial complex would have us think otherwise. The CIA overseen mainstream media is preparing its audience for a probable future ‘necessary’ war with US designated ‘adversaries’ Russia and China.
However, although ‘Might makes right!’ might continue to prove to be axiomatic and to assure US capability to make war whenever and wherever, there is a countering ultimate truth that whoever has the most money can buy the most guns. Also worth noting is that overspending on one’s military could lead to the demise experienced by the now non-existent Soviet Union.
There is something else that has made this archival research peoples historian wonder, and that is the prevalent assumption that the US and its allied neocolonial powers will forever continue to get away with mass murder and genocide.
That there be no law against invading other countries the way the USA has done to so many dozens of vulnerable Third World nations. At Nuremberg in 1945, Nazi Germans and Japanese leaders were held legally accountable for their much shorter run at doing the same as Americans have been doing since these principles were universally signed on to. It is also worth remembering that according to the long since universally adopted Nuremberg Principles of International Law, every single soldier following illegal orders to invade or bomb shall be tried as criminally responsible for his actions.[4]
Back in 1991, former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark wrote, “US Foreign Policy is the Greatest Crime Since WWII,” in his book, The Fire This Time – US War Crimes in the Gulf, in which, Attorney Clark sites specific crimes in dozens of nations bombed and invaded by Americans since WW II[5]. Thirteen years later, back in Iraq for the crimes of a second President Bush, Clark declared, that
“American aggression had already created incalculable levels of “misery for the world”; that “the poor of the planet [are] made poorer, dominated and exploited by the foreign policies of the U.S. and its rich allies;” that “the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression, an offense called ‘the supreme international crime’ in the Nuremberg Judgment.”
The question arises, ‘how long can indescribably enormous crimes go unpunished?’ How long can the human race, so phenomenally accomplished in science and art, in space exploration and medicine, afford to let this unearthly criminal insanity continue – an indescribably idiotic wholesale extermination of millions of children, women and men?
Yours truly, just back from a month in China, as guest of his students of thirty years ago and marveling on the calm, warm, intelligent and joyful behavior of people throughout all levels of society, tuned in on C-Span Public TV Channels to watch the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee discuss the “present day threats to American interests world wide,” and the eighteen year and failing occupation war in Afghanistan. It was embarrassingly amazing to listen to government officials tossing outright fabrications back and forth while continually congratulating one and another obsequiously on ‘each other’s fine service in protecting our great country.’ Freaky! People who are really great, don’t need to keep telling each other and everyone else how great they are.
Seems, when time runs out on ‘exceptional America,’ a very considerable amount of Americans should be able to escape being put in the dock, by simply claiming, with good proof, criminal insanity.
*
Jay Janson, who lived and taught in Korea for six years, is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked in all continents in 67 countries; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India, Sweden, Germany Vietnam and the US; now resides in NYC.
Notes
1. History of U.S. Interventions in Latin America
https://www.yachana.org/teaching/resources/interventions.html
2. 27 Million Died in Russia Because Wall Street Built Up Hitler’s Wehrmacht to Knock Out Soviet Union
3. “According to conservative estimates, by 2017, China will overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy, and by 2050, its economy will be twice as large as that of the United States. Chinese influence will extend well beyond the economic sphere. The full social, cultural and political repercussions of China’s ascendancy will be felt sooner. In the coming decades, the West will be confronted with the fact that its systems, institutions and values are no longer the only ones on offer.” [When China Rules the World -The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order by Martin Jacques] See also Nobel in Economics Joe Stiglitz – The Chinese Century, http://cgt.columbia.edu/news/stiglitz-chinese-century/
4. GIs Who Invaded Vietnam, Iraq, etc. Were Criminals By International Law & US Army’s Own Law Regarding any order to invade and or kill in another country: “An order which is unlawful not only does not need to be obeyed but obeying such an order can result in criminal prosecution of the one who obeys it. Military courts have long held that military members are accountable for their actions even while following orders — if the order was illegal.
5. The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf by Ramsey Clark, 1992 Relying on evidence gathered firsthand as well as eyewitness reports, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark accuses the U.S. government and its allies of committing war crimes during their attack on Iraq. Clark also presents evidence that the U.S. provoked the war to gain permanent domination over the Gulf. Amazon Book Review.
