Genocide In Rwanda, and US INaction

James Heartfield Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Wed Oct 25 19:25:59 PDT 2000


In message <a0.b562b87.2728e1b9 at aol.com>, LeoCasey at aol.com writes
>Now if the proposition you suggest below -- that America will always
>intervene on the wrong side, and so its intervention must always be opposed
>-- is of type (a), then it seems to me that you must actually deal with the
>examples I provided you which I believe shows it to be false as a _universal_
>theorem

How many times do you have to get bitten to before you decide that its better not to show your backside to a dog?

It's not an a priori argument to say that the US acts against the interests of democracy, it's an empirical argument.

How many examples do you want? Iraq, Somalia, Korea, Cuba, Grenada, Phillipines, El Salvador, Nicaragua, the Persian Gulf, Lebanon, Libya, Indonesia, Vietnam, Belgrade, Panama, Chile...

The act of faith here is Leo's dogged supplication to the benign dictator. Why not ask Myra Hindley to keep an eye on your kids while your at it?

Even if we took Leo's example of the People's War on face value, you would still be left with an absurd gamble that you might be wiped out and placed under a dictatorship (silly me, that's exactly what did happen to eight thousand Hutus in Rwanda).

So what of the People's War? What really did happen? While Nazi Germany exhausted itself slaughtering Europe's partisans, the US and Britain, having hung back in Africa and Asia defending their colonial possessions. Only when Tito's Yugoslavs and Stalin's Red Army threatened to take Europe did the US push for a second front. Until that time their 'intervention' was pretty similar to the intervention in the Iran-Iraq war, where one US statesman took the view that it was better they wiped each other out.

-- James Heartfield



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