I visit Facebook maybe thrice a decade but yesterday a link took me to this, posted two months ago. Disregarding the fact no source is given for its figures, does anything strike you as weirdly awry here? Gob-smackingly specious, even?
One respondent helpfully points out why.
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One day I’ll post at length on stupid arguments to make political points. Perverse attributions of causality will get top billing. In a November 2020 post, God’s warriors: America’s Christian Right, I noted this from a speech by former Sunday School teacher and CIA Director Mike (“lie-cheat-steal”) Pompeo to the Ronald Reagan Institute on The Promise of America:
… you don’t see individual families trying to migrate to Iran, or to Russia, or to Venezuela. Those countries offer abuse, not the opportunities that free nations can afford peoples.
Trump was blunter with his “shithole countries” but I’ve heard better folk than either voice the same risible reasoning. I liken it to the local bully whose thefts, extortions and power to isolate and marginalise resistance make his house the richest in the ‘hood, insisting – and needing deeply to believe it – that he’s the loveliest guy in town. Why wouldn’t he? Everybody wants to hang out with him; everybody wants in on his munificence and – ahem – protection.
But should that neighbourhood bully’s power wane – and with it his thefts, extortions and ability to marginalise resistance – will they still flock to his house in quite the same numbers?
Here’s another causal mismatch. An exodus of refugees from Venezuela is blamed on “failed Chavism”, much as the Vietnamese “boat people” of half a century earlier 1 were “fleeing failed communism”. In neither case, according to the narrative writ large by our systemically corrupt corporate media, did Washington’s lethal sanctions – of the kind which condemn millions to starvation and killer diseases, and which punish any third party country unwise enough to trade – have anything to do with it!
In contexts less genocidal, attributions of cause and effect so spectacularly wrongheaded can be amusing.
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- Ten years ago I visited a residential home for disabled men and women in Hoi Anh, Vietnam. Half the residents were disfigured, many in grotesque ways, by the Agent Orange the Pentagon used in its war on the Vietnamese people. Surprised by the youth of some, I was told the toxic effects are congenital. To this day children are born with severe defects as a result of chemical warfare Washington arm-twisted the UN out of describing as such. On what ground? That any harm to civilians was collateral and secondary to the aim of depriving Vietcong/NVA of ground cover. In fact millions of hectares of land remained uncultivable into the twenty-first century. This in a country on starvation rations for decades due to America’s embargo, and punishing of nations friendly to Hanoi.
Great analogy with the waning power/popularity of the fading mafia boss. Two worries: the havoc he may cause on his way down; and the significant number of nasty thugs in the opposition.
Re Vietnam: my abiding memory from visits in the 1990s is of the lack of rancour against the US. I’m not sure all its victims will be so forgiving.
Hi Martin. Re the two concerns voiced in your first paragraph, I concur entirely. In fact both have been uppermost in my thinking for the past decade.
I too have been struck on visits to Vietnam by how little rancour – zero in fact on six visits of three or four weeks each between 2010 and 2018 – I heard or saw towards Americans or French. I guess the the country’s growing prosperity and burgeoning middle class have something to do with this; likewise the fact most of today’s Viets were born after the war.