Feeding into my growing disgust and fear of this administration’s evildoers, is the recent revelation of the “Death Squad” tactics being discussed, and way back then, in the early 80’s, good ol’ Ronald Reagan:
The Reagan administration repeatedly insisted that the Salvadoran government and armed forces were not responsible for the violence . . . As President Reagan himself declared in a speech . . . in July 1983, “Much of the violence there – whether from the extreme right or left – is beyond the control of the government.” A month later, Abrams (Elliot Abrams, the head of the State Department’s human rights bureau) insisted . . . it was “unfair” to blame the military for the violence because “we really don’t know who the death squads are.”
I’ve been reading A People’s History of the United States recently, which is probably held by American nationalists, especially neoconservatives, in the smae light as “The Satanic Verses” is my extremist Muslims (perhaps the neoconservatives don’t really consider it “blasphemous”, but merely mambt-pamby, after all, this is all done in the national interest, and what’s a higher calling than that? This is the ultimate value of the neocon world). A People’s History is anathema to American nationalistic conservatives becuase it DARES to call into question the American mythology of “freedom for all” and that America is about, with the aid of God and the side of right, which is the “spread of freedom and liberty”. Meanwhile, The People’s History examines the massive property and wealth holdings of the framers of the Constitution, and illustrates/illuminates the not-so-gallant motivations that may well have been a much more prominent impetus to the “building” of the United States (alonmg with many other Western Nations who went on expeditions to further their empires when the seas became familiar enough to explore further, and explorers theorized about alternate routes to the East (Columbus thought it would be India, not knowing that another large Continent, North America, lay in the way). Their sponsoring Empires had them seek out and plunder, and the English colonists who would become the American Revolution instigators took those lessons of nation building on into the 19th, 20th, and 21st Centuries. Today’s Neocons seem to be a reincarnation of the “Narcissim of the Nation-State” (I just made that up; don’t think I’ve heard that before…how ’bout that?)
So, the “Salvadoran Option” is a more recent throwback, and is being considered as a possible avenue for the Iraq occupation, to quell the insurgency, just as the U.S. trained forces that became the “Contras” to eliminate the Sandinistas, and became notorious for their brutality and atrocities (as did the Sandinistas as well; an awful conflict, half -sponsored and fed by the United States, a nd Reagan lied to the American people about it. (One of the very first Sojourners issues I ever saw had the front cover headline “Reagan is Lying About Nicaragua”. He kept the American people (or he tried) completely in the dark about Central America. Now the talk is to train Islamic “contra-insurgents”, and when I heard the news of a bomb today, that thought crossed my mind. But it crossed my mind when I realize that there is not much that surprises me or shocks me anymore about this administration, or the hideous plans it is capable of hatching and carrying out.