Промышленный лизинг Промышленный лизинг  Методички 

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Lawrence Summers is another case in point. In December 1991, while chief economist for the World Bank, he wrote an internal memo saying that the Bank should encourage migration of the dirty industries to the less-developed countries because, amongst other reasons, health-impairing and death-causing pollution costs would be lower. Inasmuch as these costs are based on the lost earnings of the affected workers, in a country of very low wages the computed costs would be much lower. I think, he wrote, the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. 11 Despite this memo receiving wide distribution and condemnation, Summers, in 1999, was appointed Secretary of the Treasury by President Clinton. This was a promotion from being Undersecretary of the Treasury-for international affairs.

We also have Clinton himself, who on day 33 of the aerial devastation of Yugoslavia- 33 days and nights of destroying villages, schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, the ecology, separating people from their limbs, from their eyesight, spilling their intestines, traumatizing children for the rest of their days... destroying a life the Serbians will never know again-on day 33 William Jefferson Clinton, cautioning against judging the bombing policy prematurely, saw fit to declare: This may seem like a long time. [But] I dont think that this air campaign has been going on a particularly long time. 12 And then the man continued it another 45 days.

Clintons vice president, Albert Gore, appeared eminently suitable to succeed him to the throne. In 1998, he put great pressure on South Africa, threatening trade sanctions if the government didnt cancel plans to use much cheaper generic AIDS drugs, which would cut into US companies sales. 13 South Africa, it should be noted, has about three million HIV-positive persons among its largely impoverished population. When Gore, who at the time had significant ties to the drug industry, 14 was heckled for what he had done during a speech in New York, he declined to respond in substance, but instead called out: I love this country. I love the First Amendment. 15

Its interesting to note that when Madeleine Albright was heckled in Columbus, Ohio in February 1998, while defending the administrations Iraq policy, she yelled: We are the greatest country in the world!

Patriotism is indeed the last refuge of a scoundrel, though Gores and Albrights words dont quite have the ring of Deutschland uber alles or Rule Britannia .

In 1985, Ronald Reagan, demonstrating the preeminent intellect for which he was esteemed, tried to show how totalitarian the Soviet Union was by declaring: Im no linguist, but Ive been told that in the Russian language there isnt even a word for freedom. 16 In light of the above cast of characters and their declarations, can we ask if theres a word in American English for embarrassment ?

No, it is not simply that power corrupts and dehumanizes.

Neither is it that US foreign policy is cruel because American leaders are cruel.



Its that our leaders are cruel because only those willing and able to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment; it might as well be written into the job description. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers-let alone American soldiers-do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to.

Theres a sort of Peter Principle at work here. Laurence Peter wrote that in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. Perhaps we can postulate that in a foreign policy estab-lishment committed to imperialist domination by any means necessary, employees tend to rise to the level of cruelty they can live with.

A few days after the bombing of Yugoslavia had ended, the New York Times published as its lead article in the Sunday Week in Review, a piece by Michael Wines, which declared that Human rights had been elevated to a military priority and a preeminent Western value...The war only underscored the deep ideological divide between an idealistic New World bent on ending inhumanity and an Old World equally fatalistic about unending conflict...there is also a yawning gap between the West and much of the world on the value of a single life.

And so on. A paean to the innate goodness of the West, an ethos unfortunately not shared by much of the rest of the world, who, Wines lamented, just dont buy into Western notions of rights and responsibilities. 17 The Times fed us this morality tale after the West had just completed the most ferocious sustained bombing of a nation in the history of the planet, a small portion of whose dreadful consequences are referred to above.

During the American bombing of Iraq in 1991, the previous record for sustained ferociousness, a civilian air raid shelter was destroyed by a depleted-uranium projectile, incinerating to charred blackness many hundreds of people, a great number of them women and children. White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater, reiterating US military statements that the shelter had been a command-and-control center, said: We dont know why civilians were at that location, but we do know that Saddam Hussein does not share our value for the sanctity of human life. 18

Similarly, during the Vietnam War, President Johnson and other government officials assured us that Asians dont have the same high regard for human life as Americans do. We were told this, of course, as American bombs, napalm, Agent Orange and helicopter gunships were disintegrating the Vietnamese and their highly regarded lives.

And at the same time, on a day in February 1966, David Lawrence, the editor of US News & World Report, was moved to put the following words to paper: What the United States is doing in Vietnam is the most significant example of philanthropy extended by one people to another that we have witnessed in our times.



I sent Mr. Lawrence a copy of a well-done pamphlet entitled American Atrocities in Vietnam, which gave graphic detail of its subject. To this I attached a note which first repeated Lawrences quotation with his name below it, then added: One of us is crazy, followed by my name.

Lawrence responded with a full page letter, at the heart of which was: I think a careful reading of it [the pamphlet] will prove the point I was trying to make-namely that primitive peoples with savagery in their hearts have to be helped to understand the true basis of a civilized existence.

The American mind-as exemplified by that of Michael Wines and David Lawrence-is, politically, so deeply formed that to liberate it would involve uncommon, and as yet perhaps undiscovered, philosophical and surgical skill. The great majority of Americans, even the most cynical-who need no convincing that the words that come out of a politicians mouth are a blend of mis-, dis-and non-information, and should always carry a veracity health warning-appear to lose their critical faculties when confronted by our boys who are risking their lives . If love is blind, patriotism has lost all five senses.

To the extent that the cynicism of these Americans is directed toward their governments habitual foreign adventures, its to question whether the administrations stated interpretation of a situation is valid, whether the stated goals are worthwhile, and whether the stated goals can be achieved-but not to question the governments motivation. It is assumed a priori that our leaders mean well by the foreign people involved-no matter how much death, destruction and suffering their policies objectively result in.

Congressman Otis Pike (R.-NY) headed a committee in 1975 which uncovered a number of dark covert actions of US foreign policy, many of which were leaked to the public, while others remained secret. In an interview he stated that any member of Congress could see the entire report if he agreed not to reveal anything that was in it. But not many want to read it, he added.

Why? asked his interviewer.

Oh, they think it is better not to know, Pike replied. There are too many things that embarrass Americans in that report. You see, this country went through an awful trauma with Watergate. But even then, all they were asked to believe was that their president had been a bad person. In this new situation they are asked much more; they are asked to believe that their country has been evil. And nobody wants to believe that. 19

This has been compared to going to a counselor because your child is behaving strangely, and being told, You have a problem of incest in your family. People cant hear that. They go to a different counselor. They grab at any other explanation. Its too painful.20

In The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides, speaking of the practice of plundering villages, the main source of a warriors livelihood, tells us that no disgrace was yet attached to such an achievement, but rather credit .



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