>political mind? I'm not moralizing here; I find the omission
>peculiar and troubling for the most self-centered, practical
>reason: it indicates to me that there are large, important
>holes in the metaphorical heads of our leadership, either
>because they actually think this way or they think they can
>pretend they do. (Not that I haven't gotten this idea
>before.)
I think she was just focusing on more recent history. I graduated high school in '88 and remember reading in textbooks about what happened to the American Indians. And perhaps while it wasn't as self-flagellating as you may wish it was, it did prepare the student to go on and read books like Zinn's History of the American People. So I don't see any hole.
>The review in the _Nation_ tried to get at this by another
>route, I suppose, in noting that Powers's attention to
>intervention was very selective. But that is what I expect:
>the leadership are people who desire power, especially over
>other people, or they wouldn't be the leadership; if they
>desire power, they will notice and publicize what serves this
>power and downplay or omit what opposes or undermines it.
This is true in general, but why then does Powers write about the US's recent crimes? (from the Nation review): "But as Power illustrates, it was not simply that the United States did nothing. Often Washington indirectly and directly aided the genocidaires. In Cambodia, for example, the US bombing that preceded Pol Pot's seizure of power "killed tens of thousands of civilians." While horrific in its own right, "it also indirectly helped give rise to a monstrous regime" responsible for the deaths of upwards of an estimated 2 million Cambodians. And in the case of Iraq's slaughter of the Kurds, the Reagan White House dismissed reports of Saddam Hussein's gassings and other atrocities while maintaining aid to his regime, preferring to maintain its unholy alliance with Iraq in its war with Iran. The year after Saddam's forces decimated several thousand Iraqi Kurdish villages and killed close to 100,000 Kurdish civilians (1987-88), Washington, now under Bush Sr., actually doubled the amount of agricultural credit it had been providing to Saddam's regime, increasing it to more than $1 billion."
As far as leaders go, I liked Zizek's comments on anarchism in Doug's recent interview.
Peter