Politics.be - Exit Carter

Jimmy Carter is dood. Ook op een gezegende leeftijd die een voorrecht voor de biljonairs klasse lijkt te zijn terwijl de rest van ons liefst niet te lang van een pensioen mag 'profiteren' (het woord alleen al).

Hij zal herinnerd worden als een van de minst misdadige POTUSsen van het hedendaagse imperium. Zelfs met humanitaire trekjes op bepaalde momenten. Maar laten we naast de gebruikelijke en te verwachten ophemeling van de "leiders van de vrije wereld" (kuch) waar de "vrije westerse pers" (kuch kuch...ik ben verkouden) van overloopt toch ook een steekproef nemen van de andere kant.

Citaat:

I gave you the good, now it’s time to give you the bad regarding the legacy of former President Jimmy Carter. Here are some of the peanut farmer’s worst abuses when it came to empire…

1. Carter secretly supported the genocidal Pol Pot government ousted by Vietnam in 1979. This secret support was essential to further punishment of Vietnam for having successfully defended her own population against the American invaders. The US strategy also intended to outflank the Vietnamese, who were aligned with the Soviet Union and to back the Pol Pot forces, aligned with China.

2. Carter declared his support for the Shah of Iran despite the rampant torture practiced by the Shah's secret police in close collaboration with the CIA. He was more emphatic than Richard Nixon in his support. Then then-president said of the Shah, “There is no leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal friendship and gratitude."

3. Following the Indonesians' 1975 invasion of East Timor, Carter continued to arm Indonesia's army dictatorship as well as give diplomatic support (vetoing U.N. resolutions to end the atrocities in the former Portuguese colony). The war killed more than 200,000 East Timorese, making it the worst genocide relative to population since World War II. Carter did nothing to pressure General Suharto (Indonesia's chief of state) to end the war. He was an ally and major supporter of the Indonesian military's repression of its own population, as well as the slaughter of the East Timorese people. The army's murderous stranglehold on East Timor will continue as long as the ruling military clique of Indonesia lets transnational oil companies have a good share of East Timorese oil profits.

4. During his watch, Carter aided and supported Nicaragua's then-dictator Anastasio Somoza, who murdered and repressed tens of thousands of his own people. When Somoza's forces were about to lose control of the main cities, Carter attempted to launch an invasion under the fig leaf of an intervention by the Organization of American States (OAS). The OAS refused and Carter then planned to send the US military to salvage Somoza's army, which was established by and beholden to the US government-but it was too late. Carter made sure that Somoza was ferried out of the country on a Red Cross-painted US aircraft. The CIA under President Carter helped to reestablish Somoza's army as a terrorist force against the people of Nicaragua. These "contras" assassinated social workers, doctors and civilians, burned crops and tried to exterminate any possibility of social reform that the Sandinistas created.

There are other egregious imperialistic examples from the Carter years. They include supporting Marcos in the Philippines as he declared martial law or funding the Mujahideen in Afghanistan after the Soviet intervention in 1979. That decision cost America $3 billion, saw the deaths of 1.5 million Afghans and led to the creation of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. If I listed all Carter’s war crimes, it would take you significantly longer to read this post. Overall, you get the point.

Carter was an amazing humanitarian in his later years. That still doesn’t mean we have to turn a deaf ear to the cries of the victims of empire he left behind.

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