This is a tough one for me. I’m sure the guys who have decided that I’m an “America kicker” or America hater” will see this as more proof, if they bother to read it. No worries – I’ve been silent long enough and not looking to win any popularity contests.

Many of the great philosophers hold as a crucial maxim some variation of “Know Thyself,” (Socrates, I think). Sun Tzu, in his “Art of War,” speaks of the importance of knowing oneself and knowing the enemy in battle. The bible tells us to be “sure that your sin will find you out;” Numbers 32:23.

We are a great and good people in many ways. On the other hand, no one respects some blowhard lout who brags about what a fine fellow he is while his wife regularly sports black eyes and his kids are hungry and in rags. My point being that we have all sorts of debris hidden under the rug that is rarely acknowledged. Instead we laud our wonderfulness right and left while routinely denouncing the sins and faults of other nations.

We hear regularly about the brutal subjugation of Eastern Europe by Russia or of Mao’s and Stalin’s purges. These things were reprehensible but we have done similar deeds on a smaller scale, generally because the nations they were done in were smaller.

Even George Will and Pat Buchanan reference our slaughter of around 200,000 Filipinos between 1898 and 1902, over some absolutely necessary colonial adventure.
http://b-books.blogspot.com/

We heard plenty about Daniel Ortega, “The dictator in designer glasses,” as called by Reagan because an admirer had bought Ortega around $8,000 worth of high quality prescription glasses. We hear very little of Arnoldo Aleman, aka The Fat Man (300 lbs and short), president of Nicaragua from ’97 to ’01, during which time he managed to loot approximately $100 million from his country, the second poorest in the hemisphere after Haiti. The same percentage of GDP in the U.S. would be $144 billion (!?). Aleman was part of the crowd promoted to power by Geo. Schultz and co. after the brave and noble contras put and end to the communist scourge there. More on Aleman at:
http://www.theassassinatedpress.com/sellout.htm

Phil Roetinger was one of the main CIA operatives in Guatemala in 1954 when we overthrew the presidency of Jacobo Arbenz, ostensibly for communist leanings but more likely because the was a threat to the United Fruit holdings of the Dulles brothers – high mucky mucks in the Eisenhower admin. I was fortunate enough to hear him speak and talk with him in Seattle in ’88. He regularly spoke out and wrote about what he believed was a debacle visited on that country by our ill-advised meddling. He was fluent in Spanish and had traveled extensively in Latin America and was appalled at the Nicaraguan adventure. Who ever hears about Phil Roetinger? The history of our plunder of Nicaragua is a long one, about 150 years worth.

We cannot be a truly great and enduring nation until we come clean about our past and current crimes and abuses and take steps to avoid such piracy in the future. Doing so will be a great act of “loving America,” IMHO.

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1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K