Wednesday, February 10, 2010

If you're not outraged...

I had been kicking this idea around in my head about starting a blog to air my own rants about the news of the day. What finally kicked me in the butt and prompted the inauguration of the site was a BBC news item about the death of Charlie Wilson, the hard-drinking, adulterous Texas pr--k who was the moving force behind funding the mujahadeen in Afghanistan. The Beeb saw fit to bring in Mike Shaw, late of the CIA, who lauded Wilson for his dedication to opposing the USSR and helping to end it.
Usually the interviewers on the BBC are pretty tough, but this guy got no hard questions at all. What about the fact that one of the CIA's top guys later masterminded the attack on the U.S. on 9/11? What about the interim period after the Soviets retreated and their opponents went on a rape spree in Kabul for months, which gave rise to the Taliban, who now make a hobby out of rocketing girls schools and splashing girl students' faces with acid? What about the other untold and unnecessary human suffering caused by this and all our other proxy wars in the name of smashing the Soviet Union, which was never a true existential threat but rather a wonderful raison d'etre for our war-making industries?
My salivary glands can never, for the rest of my life, create enough spit to spew on the graves of people like Charlie Wilson, Ronald Reagan, et al, for their pigheaded contempt for human life and their simple-minded worship of Mammon. Too bad he, like Reagan, got to die peacefully without ever facing justice for his complicity in war crimes.
More to come; can't promise when.