In June Paraguay’s legislature gave the green light to the U.S. military for a series of 13 joint exercises to run through December 2006. Then the rumors began appearing in the Latin American press: The United States was moving to establish a military base at Mariscal Estigarribia, a town in Paraguay just 124 miles from Bolivia’s southeast frontier and within easy… return to article
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Reader Comments (27)Page 1 of 1 pagesOnce the United States arrives, it takes a long time to leave … and that really frightens me.
Spoken like a true socialist. It is quite appropriate that the socialsts are frightened, considering the terrible damage they have done in the world.
Once the United States arrived, fascist Germany and militarist Japan went away, to be replaced by prosperous democracies.
Once President Reagan arrived and began to straighten out the economic and military mess that Carter left, the corrupt and inefficient Soviet Union collapsed like the house of straw that it was, leaving multiple growing and prospering democracies.
Once President Bush arrived, the Taliban went into hiding, as did Saddam, and two new democracies are growing and prospering.
It is obvious that, if you want democracy and prosperity, the democracies are your ally, and the communists, socialists , and religious terrorists are the enemy. If the enemy is not too great a threat, like Old Europe and Cuba, you can isolate them and wait for them to collapse of inefficiency, corruption, and old age.
If the enemy starts to kill your people or threatens to do so, it raises the stakes. For example, Israel is a democracy, of course, and the President of Iran threatened to destroy Israel, which in itself is an act of war; you may expect Israel to defend itself, if other developments don’t intrude first. Then Iran will become a democracy also. As will Venezuela and Cuba.
Posted by scorp on Nov 10, 2005 at 9:38 PM “Then Iran will become a democracy also. As will Venezuela and Cuba.”
And one day, with any luck, so will the United States. One day, every single vote will be accurately counted, ensuring that we have a representative government. One day, the will of the people will truly be served by the leaders who today are elected primarily on the basis of how many millions of campaign dollars they secure from special interests. One day, our elected officials will look beyond the smarmy smiles of lobbyists and big corporate donors, and undertake actions which help every single American, no matter how poor or disadvantaged they are. One day, our health care system will provide high quality care to all citizens rather than subsidizing insurance companies. One day, our tax system will require everyone, including the upper class and corporations who have fled offshore, to pay their fair share of taxes to support the common good.
We can all dream, can’t we?
Posted by pete29 on Nov 11, 2005 at 1:29 AM Once the U.S. arrived, Trujillo was left to become the dictator of the Dominican Republic. Once the US arrived hostages were exchanged for the sale of arms to terrorists. Money was then used to support cut-throat revolutionaries no better than the government they were out to depose.
Once the US arrived Juan Bosch, the democratically elected president (the first after the fall of Trujillo) was deposed and after some bloodshed the much more pro-US Balaguer was back in power (who by the way was an advisor of the bloody dictator).
Once the US arrived, clandestinely, Pinochet had free reign in Chile but at least that communist Allende was not in power (despite the fact that he was elected).
Once the US arrived and helped train government goons to supress grassroots rebellions against opressive, but pro US, regimes in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama.
Once the US arrived Sadam Hussein had biological weapons, but they were to be used against Iranians and that’s ok because they are not pro US.
Somewhere there exists a world informed only by Fox news where John Wayne is president and a former Miss America is first lady, where all houses have picket fences, where every family as a mother and a father, two kids, and a dog, where everyone has equal opportunity, where race doesn’t matter, where the US has only ever been a force for good in an otherwise evil world filled with nothing but communists, fanatics, and other dark and sinister anti-US forces. This is the land where Scorp lives.
Posted by Neruda on Nov 11, 2005 at 1:30 AM For another interesting, informative article on this disturbing news, see
US Military in Paraguay Prepares to “Spread Democracy”
at
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/47/44/
Posted by mangomundo on Nov 11, 2005 at 2:38 AM There’s a Latin American expression I’ve heard. ‘He who sleeps with an elephant sleeps lightly’.
Be considerate of poor scorpy. He has to sleep with the elephant of his own conscience. The possibility of his own complicity in the horror death and misery that is the history of US intervention in this hemisphere is just too painful to contemplate. His need is to shout down that still voice of conscience that is eating away at the psychic armor of his misplaced loyalties. Is it too much to ask to give the poor guy a little space to rant? It’s really only a cry for help.
It’s OK scorpy, we are all on the same side here.
Posted by luminous beauty on Nov 11, 2005 at 3:13 AM Neruda -
Well, no, you are all screwed up, as usual. The USA has not always been a force for good. In an unstable world, the USA once tried to be a force for stability, and the greatest destabilizing force in the world at the time was communism, of course, but you know that; 100 million dead people can’t be wrong. And all those dead people are still destabilizing Russia, and parts of Eastern Europe, and the border states south of Russia, and China.
But when communism was gone, good things started to happen. Countries of Eastern Europe and Latin America enthusiastically embraced democracy, and the existing democracies were glad to help. Chile and Estonia are particularly good examples, with freedom, growth, and prosperity, but conditions in most of the European states and some of the South American states have improved significantly. Then there is Cuba, who stumbles and bumbles along, represessed and depressed and pathetic. And Venezuela! With oil prices sky high and Chavez in complete control, you have to wonder why the economy is deteriorating.
You can look up the data at:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/knew/
http://www.freedomhouse.org/research/specreports/ar2004.pdfBut you don’t strike me as a person who is aware, much less influenced, by data. You like to complain, and what better to compain about than your lost socialist utopia? And if the socilaists are in decline, as in Old Europe, you can complain about our efforts to eliminate terrorism and bring democracy to the Middle East. So you complain, and we will create democracy; imperfectly, unsteadily, but certainly, we will bring democracy to the middle East. And there is not a damn thing you can do about it.
Posted by scorp on Nov 11, 2005 at 5:25 AM Scorp
Once again you weave your fanciful tale of magnanimous America struggling to fulfill it’s destiny of saving the rest of the world from itself.It’s the kind of arrogance that can only be born of the type of bungling incompetence demonstrated by our current president.
Listen for once. The US has a very contradictory record. Did you not think through any of the examples I listed? You talk about Chile for instance and gloss right over the fact that the US supported a ruthless dictator that “disappeared” any dissenters. Only when he stopped jumping at our command did he become a problem. And history repeated itself with Sadam Hussein.
Why do you need to believe in a polyana version of the US in order to be patriotic? Why are you so against real self-reflection? The type that adults do when they assess their lives.
And for the record, much of Latin America is moving toward center-left politics in response the neo-liberal policies that the US and the world bank rammed down their throats. These were policies that kept majorities in poverty. At least in Cuba the poverty was spread out and accompanied by medical care, near 100% literacy, childcare and other such evil socialist inventions.
And before you pull your usual communist killed more peole than we did, so that makes them evil and us good routine, let me just add that I, and as far as I can tell almost no one here, is defending communist regimes as cities on the hill. I have no beef with a free market economy, However I do think that when corporation have permanent offices in DC to solicit favorable legislation in return for campaign contributions that undermined Democracy and the free market. And I think that when the US acts in ways that undermine it’s credibility as a force for stability because it seems expedient it also undermines democracy and the free market.
If you truly loved the US rather than derive some sort of gingoist sense of self esteem from portraying it as perfect, you would demand that the US rise up to the promise of it’s foundation rather than be led by hubris. You would demand accountability because you took the time to understand both the great and the terrible things the US had done and you wanted to ensure that our leaders would not lead us down a path that is not in keeping with our vision for ourselves as Americans. Instead you just defend the party line and convince yourself that the US has always acted in the most noble way and for the most noble reasons. It even sounds like you still think that Iraq had something to do with terrorists or weapons of mass destruction. You justify America’s sins with the juvenile charge that someone else behaved worse. And so you do nothing to challenge the country to rise to meet it’s promise. Keep up the good work blind followers are essential to those who seek nothing but power.
Posted by Neruda on Nov 11, 2005 at 5:57 AM I’m just an average guy but the way I see it I think Mr. Scorp should stop listening to guys like Limbaugh and Hannity and switch to somebody like Thom Hartmann. It would be much harder to cling to such dark, mad delusions when exposed to truth and clarity, even with such a tightly closed mind.
Posted by Codger on Nov 11, 2005 at 12:53 PM Like all bullies, Scorpy believes might makes right. As long as he’s the one holding the stick.
It’s interesting that the cruel tyrant (read, democratically elected president), Chavez, gave away a million plus barrels of oil to the US markets to alleviate the shortages caused by Katrina. He has also made an offer to provide gas and heating oil discounts to low income US residents through Citgo gas stations. It’s curious how the evil and inefficient socialist policies of Chavez have created the highest economic growth rates on the planet. It’s no wonder the Bushies hate his guts.
Posted by luminous beauty on Nov 11, 2005 at 4:00 PM Big ELEPHANT TRACKS en America del Sur.
Anyone remember the Venezuelan prosecutor blown up by terrorists a year ago. Seems at least one of the worms has turned.
Posted by luminous beauty on Nov 12, 2005 at 12:42 AM If anyone is interested, HERE is an interesting and critical first hand account of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution written by one of the US’s leading anarchist thinkers.
Posted by luminous beauty on Nov 12, 2005 at 1:14 AM Neruda -
The playing area of an American football field is 300 feet long and 160 feet wide, or 48,000 square feet.
The average human body contains five liters of blood. One-hundred million dead innocents, the number killed by your socialist/communist allies, represents 500,000,000 liters of blood. If you put a ten foot wall around thirty-seven football fields, you would have just enough capacity to contain the blood of the innocent civilians killed by your communists.
Now, I know that you don’t like to talk about the dead bodies. If I were a communist, I wouldn’t want to talk about it either; I would change the subject as quickly as possible. But something should be learned from all those football fields of blood, and you have learned nothing.
The communists had to be stopped, even if they are your heroes, even if the democracies made mistakes, even if there was collateral damage, even if it was expensive, even if we had to support some unsavory characters against some utterly vile characters; the communists had to be stopped. And they were stopped. Mercifully, your other allies, socialist Old Europe, are stopping themselves, as they drift into decline, impotence, and irrelevance.
Socialism was the defining ideology/pathology of the twentieth century. The deadly pathology was the necessary result of the flawed ideology. The socialist ideology is self-centered, self-limited, and close-minded, not unike the other recent and current ideologies, fascism and Islamic fascism. If any of these ideologies were to succeed, people like me would end up filling more football fields. Never happen, MF.
Fortunately, democracy and free-market capitalism are triumphing nicely over you dumb-ass and destructive ideologues. Enjoy.
Posted by scorp on Nov 12, 2005 at 7:20 PM Straw men soaked in blood.
Stalin, Mao, & Pol Pot were communists.
S, M, & PP were bloody dictators.
Ergo, all communists always support bloody dictators.Do you really need this syllogism analyzed, scorpy?
Try this one:
Sukharno, Duvalier, & Pinochet were bloody dictators.
The US supported S, D, & P.
Therefore, the US sometimes supports bloody dictators.or:
Allende, Arbenz, &
Chavez were all democratically elected leaders.
The US plotted to overthrow A, A, & C.
Thusly, the US does not in principle support democracy abroad.Which arguments are true and which one is just blowing smoke up your ass?
Posted by luminous beauty on Nov 12, 2005 at 9:12 PM Correction: should be Suharto, not Sukarno. I’m always getting my Indonesian dictators mixed up.
Posted by luminous beauty on Nov 12, 2005 at 9:32 PM And then there was Saddam Hussein. I know you don’t want to read all this ‘socialist’ ‘propaganda’ so I’ll post a little bit:
In the quotations collected below, the name of the leader who was assassinated is spelled variously as Qasim, Qassim and Kassem. But, however you spell his name, when he took power in a popularly-backed coup in 1958, he certainly got recognized in Washington. He carried out such anti-American and anti-corporatist policies as starting the process of nationalizing foreign oil companies in Iraq, withdrawing Iraq from the US-initiated right-wing Baghdad Pact (which included another military-run, US-puppet state, i.e., Pakistan) and decriminalizing the Iraqi Communist Party. Despite these actions, and more likely because of them, he was Iraq’s most popular leader. He had to go!
In 1959, there was a failed assassination attempt on Qasim. The failed assassin was none other than a young Saddam Hussein. In 1963, a CIA-organized coup did successfully assassinate Qasim and Saddam’s Ba’ath Party came to power for the first time. Saddam returned from exile in Egypt and took up the key post as head of Iraq’s secret service. The CIA then provided the new pliant, Iraqi regime with the names of thousands of communists, and other leftist activists and organizers. Thousands of these supporters of Qasim and his policies were soon dead in a rampage of mass murder carried out by the CIA’s close friends in Iraq.
Washington giveth and Washington taketh away.
Posted by luminous beauty on Nov 12, 2005 at 10:01 PM And what is it I’m supposed to learn from an * who can’t even formulate a proper syllogism?
Posted by luminous beauty on Nov 12, 2005 at 10:14 PM Oh Scorp I wonder what it must be like to be you, a charicature of myself.
Really your last post was possibly the most idiotic thing I have heard since the claim that Dubya was a good leader. You really only have one song to sing and you are soooo out of tune.
Truly you no nothing. By your estimate the US economy is thriving even while Walmart continue to become the biggest employer in the US. And it pays crap and the children of it’s employees need welfare in order to get medical attention. Although as far as you are concerned if they can’t afford to see a doctor then to hell with them, they don’t deserve it. Humbug to them those beggars. Is that about the level of your thinking. I am sure you justify the crusades because those muslims needed to be chased out of the holy land and the indians deserved to be the victims of cultural genocide too, right Scorpy? After all they are all just collateral damage along with the napalmed civilians in Vietnam and the American soldiers exposed to agent orange and traumatized by war in which their leaders demanded they behave in the most unlawful ways. am sure you believe this too Scorp, because it is so much easier than thinking and demanding that your country behave in ways that match it’s words.
It must be nice to sit up on you high horse and wonder why the entire world does not get it but you. Those crazy old Euros are just falling apart aren’t they? Despite having a stronger currency, despite the fact that many of the scandinavian countries have the highest reported levels of satisfaction on quality of life scales. Oh they are educated and healthy but damn them they beleive in these crazy notions that greed is in fact not a virtue, that paranoid behavior toward other countries is not the wisest foriegn policy position.
Scorp yours is a cheap and easy patriotism because it allows you to brainlessly follow your marching orders and shit on the entire world in the name of freedom. Yours is a cheap and easy patriotism where you allow your country to commit atrocties and believe the delusional rationalizations. You just don’t understand that our best leaders have always demanded that we rise above the easy ends justify the means mentality of petty wannabe Machiavelis like you.
You Scorp are the walking talking ugly American and god help us with the likes of you and the helm. Yes yours is a cheap and easy patriotism because it requires no examinatoin of history beyond 3rd grade history books where the US is always the noble country struggling to bring freedom, no thought, no introspection, no empathy, no real humanity. In short it is a braindead and dangerous repetition of increasingly archaic talking points.
What is it like Scorp to live that delusion? Because you know if you and Dubya ever stopped staring at the yellow wallpaper, you might realize that it is not the world.
Posted by Neruda on Nov 12, 2005 at 11:41 PM And what is it I’m supposed to learn from an * who can’t even formulate a proper syllogism?
I know Scorp is probably struggling with your syllogism as he is not adept at logic so I wanted to express my compliments on your syllogisms. Isn’t it funny how plain basic logic makes things?
Are you able to follow along Scorp?
Posted by Neruda on Nov 12, 2005 at 11:45 PM Loony Booty -
You have been educated beyond your intelligence.
You formulate three improper syllogisms, and accuse me of - what, exactly?
Posted by scorp on Nov 12, 2005 at 11:56 PM Neruda -
Truly you no nothing.
Well, that is not true of course. Actually, I yes quite a few things.
Posted by scorp on Nov 13, 2005 at 1:43 AM Really, scorpy, why don’t you show off your superior learning and intelligence and do the analysis?
You do have a talent for redundantly repeating redundancies again and again. It’s like deja vu all over.
Posted by luminous beauty on Nov 13, 2005 at 2:30 AM I’m not accusing you of anything, scorpy baby. I’m just trying to encourage you to think.
Posted by luminous beauty on Nov 13, 2005 at 2:48 AM Loony Booty -
I see no point in spelling out my analysis of your three flawed syllogisms for your entertainment. But Neruda seems to have been impressed by your efforts. Why don’t you try to teach him the fundamentals of logic? Good luck!
Posted by scorp on Nov 13, 2005 at 1:02 PM I’m not interested in ‘your’ analysis, scorpy. I would like you to do a proper analysis. Believe me, I dont find analysis amusing. Analysis is dry as dust, but it’s the necessary effort of rational minds. It’s a job of work. You prefer making unsubstantiated assertions based on unreasoned opinions, that’s OK. But you aren’t fooling anybody. The traces of intellectual laziness are all over your posts.
Posted by luminous beauty on Nov 13, 2005 at 3:36 PM analysis schlamalisis…dust to dust…we pray this day…and everyone said amen.
Posted by David in Canada on Nov 16, 2005 at 11:49 PM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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