William Blum's Occasional Anti-Empire Report - some sane analysis

[Drew Phipps]

To my mind, "execution" means where the act of killing is done openly or publicly, or under color of law, while assassination implies something done covertly or by surprise. I would characterize the US's bombing of Hussien's palace with the intent to kill him before the official opening of hostilities as something closer to "assassination." I think the drone strikes against US citizens, without warrant, is more like an "assassination." I am frankly shocked and dismayed a) that the US did it and still does it and b) that Bush and Obama admitted doing it.

By contrast, once hostilities are publicly declared, by either combatant, I'd say leaders are fair game for the other side. I recall in the American Revolution, where the colonialist rebels deliberately targeted officers, drawing cries of "foul" from the civilized countries of Europe, as if mowing down rows of conscripted poor young men first is somehow "good form."

[Peter Lemkin]

CIA motto: "Proudly overthrowing the Cuban government since 1959."

Now what? Did you think that the United States had finally grown up and come to the realization that they could in fact share the same hemisphere as the people of Cuba, accepting Cuban society as unquestioningly as they do that of Canada? The Washington Post (February 18) reported: "In recent weeks, administration officials have made it clear Obama would travel to Cuba only if its government made additional concessions in the areas of human rights, Internet access and market liberalization."
Imagine if Cuba insisted that the United States make "concessions in the area of human rights"; this could mean the United States pledging to not repeat anything like the following:
Invading Cuba in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs.
Invading Grenada in 1983 and killing 84 Cubans, mainly construction workers.
Blowing up a passenger plane full of Cubans in 1976. (In 1983, the city of Miami held a day in honor of Orlando Bosch, one of the two masterminds behind this awful act; the other perpetrator, Luis Posada, was given lifetime protection in the same city.)
Giving Cuban exiles, for their use, the virus which causes African swine fever, forcing the Cuban government to slaughter 500,000 pigs.
Infecting Cuban turkeys with a virus which produces the fatal Newcastle disease, resulting in the deaths of 8,000 turkeys.
In 1981 an epidemic of dengue hemorrhagic fever swept the island, the first major epidemic of DHF ever in the Americas. The United States had long been experimenting with using dengue fever as a weapon. Cuba asked the United States for a pesticide to eradicate the mosquito involved but were not given it. Over 300,000 cases were reported in Cuba with 158 fatalities.
These are but three examples of decades-long CIA chemical and biological warfare (CBW) against Cuba. We must keep in mind that food is a human right (although the United States has repeatedly denied this.
Washington maintained a blockade of goods and money entering Cuba that is still going strong, a blockade that President Clinton's National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, in 1997 called "the most pervasive sanctions ever imposed on a nation in the history of mankind".
Attempted to assassinate Cuban president Fidel Castro on numerous occasions, not only in Cuba, but in Panama, Dominican Republic and Venezuela.
In one scheme after another in recent years, Washington's Agency for International Development (AID) endeavored to cause dissension in Cuba and/or stir up rebellion, the ultimate goal being regime change.
In 1999 a Cuban lawsuit demanded $181.1 billion in US compensation for death and injury suffered by Cuban citizens in four decades "war" by Washington against Cuba. Cuba asked for $30 million in direct compensation for each of the 3,478 people it said were killed by US actions and $15 million each for the 2,099 injured. It also asked for $10 million each for the people killed, and $5 million each for the injured, to repay Cuban society for the costs it has had to assume on their behalf.
Needless to say, the United States has not paid a penny of this.
One of the most common Yankee criticisms of the state of human rights in Cuba has been the arrest of dissidents (although the great majority are quickly released). But many thousands of anti-war and other protesters have been arrested in the United States in recent years, as in every period in American history. During the Occupy Movement, which began in 2011, more than 7,000 people were arrested in about the first year, many were beaten by police and mistreated while in custody, their street displays and libraries smashed to pieces. ; the Occupy movement continued until 2014; thus, the figure of 7,000 is an understatement.)
Moreover, it must be kept in mind that whatever restrictions on civil liberties there may be in Cuba exist within a particular context: The most powerful nation in the history of the world is just 90 miles away and is sworn vehemently and repeatedly sworn to overthrowing the Cuban government. If the United States was simply and sincerely concerned with making Cuba a less restrictive society, Washington's policy would be clear cut:

• Call off the wolves the CIA wolves, the AID wolves, the doctor-stealer wolves, the baseball-player-stealer wolves.
  
• Publicly and sincerely (if American leaders still remember what this word means) renounce their use of CBW and assassinations. And apologize.
  
• Cease the unceasing hypocritical propaganda about elections, for example. (Yes, it's true that Cuban elections never feature a Donald Trump or a Hillary Clinton, nor ten billion dollars, nor 24 hours of campaign ads, but is that any reason to write them off?)
  
• Pay compensation a lot of it.
  
• Sine qua non end the God-awful blockade.
  

Throughout the period of the Cuban revolution, 1959 to the present, Latin America has witnessed a terrible parade of human rights violations systematic, routine torture; legions of "disappeared" people; government-supported death squads picking off selected individuals; massacres en masse of peasants, students and other groups. The worst perpetrators of these acts during this period have been the military and associated paramilitary squads of El Salvador, Guatemala, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Uruguay, Haiti and Honduras. However, not even Cuba's worst enemies have made serious charges against the Havana government for any of such violations; and if one further considers education and health care, "both of which," said President Bill Clinton, "work better [in Cuba] than most other countries" , and both of which are guaranteed by the United Nations "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" and the "European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms", then it would appear that during the more-than-half century of its revolution, Cuba has enjoyed one of the very best human-rights records in all of Latin America.
But never good enough for American leaders to ever touch upon in any way; the Bill Clinton quote being a rare exception indeed. It's a tough decision to normalize relations with a country whose police force murders its own innocent civilians on almost a daily basis. But Cuba needs to do it. Maybe they can civilize the Americans a bit, or at least remind them that for more than a century they have been the leading torturers of the world.

[Peter Lemkin]

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[TD="bgcolor: #d2d2d2, align: center"]Why Terrorists Hate America[/TD]
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[TD="bgcolor: #d2d2d2, align: center"]by William Blum[/TD]
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[TD="bgcolor: #d2d2d2, align: center"]Common Ground[/TD]
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Why do terrorists hate America enough to give up their lives in order to deal the country such mortal blows? Of course it's not America the terrorists hate; it's American foreign policy. It's what the United States has done to the world in the past half century -- all the violence, the bombings, the depleted uranium, the cluster bombs, the assassinations, the promotion of torture, the overthrow of governments, and more. The terrorists -- whatever else they might be -- are also rational human beings; which is to say that in their own minds they have a rational justification for their actions. Most terrorists are people deeply concerned by what they see as social, political or religious injustice and hypocrisy, and the immediate grounds for their terrorism is often retaliation for an action of the United States.
Most Americans find it difficult in the extreme to accept the proposition that terrorist acts against the United States can be viewed as revenge for Washington's policies abroad. They believe that the US is targeted because of its freedom, its democracy, its modernity, its wealth, or just being part of the West.
But government officials know better. A Department of Defense study in 1997 concluded that: "Historical data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States." Former president Jimmy Carter, some years after he left the White House, was unambiguous in his concordance with such a sentiment: "We sent Marines into Lebanon and you only have to go to Lebanon, to Syria or to Jordan to witness first-hand the intense hatred among many people for the United States because we bombed and shelled and unmercifully killed totally innocent villagers -- women and children and farmers and housewives -- in those villages around Beirut. . . . As a result of that . . . we became kind of a Satan in the minds of those who are deeply resentful."
The terrorists responsible for the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 sent a letter to the New York Timeswhich stated, in part: "We declare our responsibility for the explosion on the mentioned building. This action was done in response for the American political, economical, and military support to Israel the state of terrorism and to the rest of the dictator countries in the region."
For more than four months the most powerful nation in history rained down a daily storm of missiles upon one of the poorest and most backward people in the world. Eventually, this question pressed itself onto the world's stage: Who killed more innocent, defenseless people? The terrorists in the United States on September 11 with their flying bombs? Or the Americans in Afghanistan with their AGM-86D cruise missiles, their AGM-130 missiles, their 15,000 pound "daisy cutter" bombs, their depleted uranium, and their cluster bombs? By year's end, the count of the terrorists' victims in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania stood at about 3,000. The total count of civilian dead in Afghanistan was essentially ignored by American officials and just about everyone else, but a painstaking compilation of numerous individual reports from the domestic and international media, aid agencies, and the United Nations, by an American professor -- hunting down the many separate incidents of 100-plus counts of the dead, the scores of dead, the dozens, and the smaller numbers -- arrived at considerably more than 3,500 through early December, and still counting.
The American scorched-earth bombing of Afghanistan may well turn out to be a political train wreck. Can it be doubted that thousands throughout the Muslim world were emotionally and spiritually recruited to the cause of the next Osama bin Laden by the awful ruination and perceived injustice? That is to say, the next generation of terrorists. Indeed, in December, while the American bombs were still falling on Afghanistan, a man -- British citizen Richard Reid, who was a convert to Islam -- tried to blow up an American Airlines plane en route to the United States with explosives hidden in his shoes. At the London mosque that Reid had attended, the cleric in charge warned that extremists were enlisting other young men like Reid and that agents aligned with radical Muslim figures had stepped up recruiting efforts since September 11. The cleric said that he knew of "hundreds of Richard Reids" recruited in Britain. Reid, described in the press as a "drifter," reportedly traveled to Israel, Egypt, the Netherlands, and Belgium before arriving in Paris and boarding the American Airlines plane. This raises the question of who was financing him. The freezing of numerous bank accounts of alleged terrorist groups throughout the world by the United States may have rather limited effect.
Americans do not feel any more secure in their places of work, in their places of leisure, or in their travels than they did a day before their government's bombings began.
Has the power elite learned anything? Here's James Woolsey, former Director of the CIA, speaking in December in Washington, advocating an invasion of Iraq and unconcerned about the response of the Arab world: The silence of the Arab public in the wake of America's victories in Afghanistan, he said, proves that "only fear will re-establish respect for the U.S." What, then, can the United States do to end terrorism directed against it? The answer lies in removing the anti-American motivations of the terrorists. To achieve this, American foreign policy will have to undergo a metamorphosis.
If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize to all the widows and orphans, the tortured and impoverished, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism. Then I would announce, in all sincerity, to every corner of the world, that America's global interventions have come to an end, and inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the USA but now -- oddly enough -- a foreign country. I would then reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims. There would be more than enough money. One year's military budget of 330 billion dollars is equal to more than $18,000 an hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born. That's what I'd do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I'd be assassinated.

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[David Guyatt]

Common sense isn't it.

[Peter Lemkin]

https://williamblum.org/aer/read/146
The Anti-Empire Report #146

By William Blum Published November 6th, 2016

A collection of thoughts about American foreign policy

Louis XVI needed a revolution, Napoleon needed two historic military defeats, the Spanish Empire in the New World needed multiple revolutions, the Russian Czar needed a communist revolution, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires needed World War I, Nazi Germany needed World War II, Imperial Japan needed two atomic bombs, the Portuguese Empire in Africa needed a military coup at home, the Soviet Empire needed Mikhail Gorbachev … What will the American Empire need?
"I don't believe anyone will consciously launch World War III. The situation now is more like the eve of World War I, when great powers were armed and ready to go when an incident set things off. Ever since Gorbachev naively ended the Cold War, the hugely over-armed United States has been actively surrounding Russia with weapons systems, aggressive military exercises, NATO expansion. At the same time, in recent years the demonization of Vladimir Putin has reached war propaganda levels. Russians have every reason to believe that the United States is preparing for war against them, and are certain to take defensive measures. This mixture of excessive military preparations and propaganda against an "evil enemy" make it very easy for some trivial incident to blow it all up." Diana Johnstone, author of "Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton"
In September 2013 President Obama stood before the United Nations General Assembly and declared, "I believe America is exceptional." The following year at the UN, the president classified Russia as one of the three threats to the world along with the Islamic State and the ebola virus. On March 9, 2015 President Barack Obama declared Venezuela "an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States".
Vladimir Putin, speaking at the UN in 2015, addressing the United States re its foreign policy: "Do you realize what you have done?"
Since the end of World War 2, the United States has:

1. Attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically-elected.
   
2. Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
   
3. Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.
   
4. Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries.
   
5. Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.*
   
6. Plus … although not easily quantified … has been more involved in the practice of torture than any other country in the world … for over a century … not just performing the actual torture, but teaching it, providing the manuals, and furnishing the equipment.
   

*See chapter 18 of William Blum, "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower"
On October 28, 2016 Russia was voted off the UN Human Rights Council. At the same time Saudi Arabia won a second term, uncontested. Does anyone know George Orwell's email address?
A million refugee from Washington's warfare are currently over-running Europe. They're running from Afghanistan and Iraq; from Libya and Somalia; from Syria and Pakistan.
Germany is taking in many Syrian refugees because of its World War Two guilt. What will the United States do in the future because of its guilt? But Americans are not raised to feel such guilt.
"The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful." Vice-President Dick Cheney West Point lecture, June 2002
Two flew over the cuckoo's nest: "We are, as a matter of empirical fact and undeniable history, the greatest force for good the world has ever known. … security and freedom for millions of people around the globe have depended on America's military , economic, political, and diplomatic might." Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney, "Why the world needs a powerful America" (2015)
State Department spokesperson Mark Toner: "Assad must go even if Syria goes with him."
Many of the moves the Obama administration has made in terms of its Cuba policy are in lockstep with Bill Clinton's, as expressed in the recommendations of a 1999 task force report from the Council on Foreign Relations. The report asserted that "no change in policy should have the primary effect of consolidating, or appearing to legitimize, the political status quo on the island."
A successful American regime change operation in Syria would cut across definite interests of the Russian state. These include the likely use of Syria as a new pipeline route to bring gas from Qatar to the European market, thereby undercutting Gazprom, Russia's largest corporation and biggest exporter. Assad's refusal to consider such a route played no small role in Qatar's pouring billions of dollars in arms and funds into the Syrian civil war on behalf of anti-Assad forces.
"War with Russia will be nuclear. Washington has prepared for it. Washington has abandoned the ABM treaty, created what it thinks is an ABM shield, and changed its war doctrine to permit US nuclear first strike. All of this is obviously directed at Russia, and the Russian government knows it. How long will Russia sit there waiting for Washington's first strike?" Paul Craig Roberts, 2014
Iran signed the nuclear accords with the United States earlier this year by agreeing to stop what it never was doing. Any Iranian nuclear ambition, real or imagined, is of course a result of American hostility towards Iran, and not the other way around.
If the European Union were an independent and rational government it would absolutely forbid any member country from stockpiling American nuclear weapons or hosting a US anti-ballistic missile site or any other military base anywhere close to Russia's borders.
Full Spectrum Dominance, a term the Pentagon loves to use to refer to total control of the planet: land, sea, air, space, outer space and cyberspace. Can you imagine any other country speaking this way?
Henry Kissinger at the Paris Peace Talks, September 1970. "I refuse to believe that a little fourth rate power like North Vietnam does not have a breaking point."
In 2010, WikiLeaks released a cable sent to US embassies by then- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She wrote this: "Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support for Al Qaeda, the Taliban, al Nusra and other terrorist groups … worldwide." Surely this resulted in at least Washington's much-favored weapon: sanctions of various kinds. It did not.
US General Barry McCaffrey, April 2015: "Because so far NATO's reaction to Putin's aggression has been to send a handful of forces to the Baltics to demonstrate resolve,' which has only convinced Putin that the alliance is either unable or unwilling to fight. So we had better change his calculus pretty soon, and contest Putin's stated doctrine that he is willing to intervene militarily in other countries to protect' Russia-speaking people. For God's sake, the last time we heard that was just before Hitler invaded the Sudetenland."
No, my dear general, we heard that repeatedly in 1983 when the United States invaded the tiny nation of Grenada to protect and rescue hundreds of Americans who supposedly were in danger from the new leftist government. It was all a fraud, no more than an excuse to overthrow a government that that didn't believe that the American Empire was God's gift to humanity.
Since 1980, the United States has intervened in the affairs of fourteen Muslim countries, at worst invading or bombing them. They are (in chronological order) Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo, Yemen, Pakistan, and now Syria.
How our never-ending mideast horror began: Radio Address of George W. Bush, September 28, 2002: "The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given. The regime has long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist groups, and there are al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq. This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year." Yet … just six weeks before 9/11, Condoleezza Rice told CNN: "Let's remember that his [Saddam's] country is divided, in effect. He does not control the northern part of his country. We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."
The fact is that there is more participation by the Cuban population in the running of their country than there is by the American population in the running of theirs. One important reason is the absence of the numerous private corporations which, in the United States, exert great influence over all aspects of life.
"The U.S. is frantically surrounding China with military weapons, advanced aircraft, naval fleets and a multitude of military bases from Japan, South Korea and the Philippines through several nearby smaller Pacific islands to its new and enlarged base in Australia … The U.S. naval fleet, aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines patrol China's nearby waters. Warplanes, surveillance planes, drones and spying satellites cover the skies, creating a symbolic darkness at noon." (Jack A. Smith, "Hegemony Games: USA vs. PRC", CounterPunch)
Crimea had never voluntarily left Russia. The USSR's leader Nikita Khrushchev, a native of the region, had donated Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. Crimeans were always strongly opposed to that change and voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia after the US-induced Ukrainian coup in 2014. Russian President Vladimir Putin refers to the Ukrainian army as "NATO's foreign legion", which does not pursue Ukraine's national interests. The United States, however, insists on labeling the Russian action in Crimea as an invasion.
Putin re Crimea/Ukraine: "Our western partners created the Kosovo precedent' with their own hands. In a situation absolutely the same as the one in Crimea they recognized Kosovo's secession from Serbia legitimate while arguing that no permission from a country's central authority for a unilateral declaration of independence is necessary… And the UN International Court of Justice agreed with those arguments. That's what they said; that's what they trumpeted all over the world and coerced everyone to accept and now they are complaining about Crimea. Why is that?"
Paul Craig Roberts: "The absurdity of it all! Even a moron knows that if Russia is going to put tanks and troops into Ukraine, Russia will put in enough to do the job. The war would be over in a few days if not in a few hours. As Putin himself said some months ago, if the Russian military enters Ukraine, the news will not be the fate of Donetsk or Mauriupol, but the fall of Kiev and Lviv."
In a major examination of US policy vis-à-vis China, published in March 2015, the authoritative Council on Foreign Relations bluntly declared that "there is no real prospect of building fundamental trust, peaceful coexistence,' mutual understanding,' a strategic partnership, or a new type of major country relations' between the United States and China." The United States, the report declares, must, therefore, develop "the political will" and military capabilities "to deal with China to protect vital U.S. interests."
"John F. Kennedy changed the mission of the Latin American military from hemispheric defense' an outdated relic of World War II to internal security,' which means war against the domestic population." Noam Chomsky
Cuban baseball players who are paid a million dollars to play for an American team are not "defectors", a word which has a clear political connotation.
Boris Yeltsin was acceptable to American and Europeans because he was seen as a weak, pliable figure that allowed Western capital free rein in the newly opened Russian territory following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin's era was also a time of rampant corruption by Russian oligarchs who were closely associated with Western capital. That corrosive culture came to a halt with the election of Vladimir Putin twice as president between 2000-2008, and again in 2012.
Many ISIS leaders were former Iraqi military officers who were imprisoned by American troops. The fight isn't against ISIS, it's against Assad; at the next level it isn't against Assad, it's against Putin; then, at the next level, it isn't against Putin, it's against the country most likely to stand in the way of US world domination, Russia. And it's forever.
Connecting to the US-based Internet would mean channeling all of Cuba's communications directly to the NSA.
George W. Bush has been living a comparatively quiet life in Texas, with a focus on his paintings. "I'm trying to leave something behind", he said a couple of years ago. Yeah, right, George. We can stand up some of the paintings against the large piles of Iraqi dead bodies.
Seymour Hirsch: "America would be much better off, if, 30 years ago, we had let Russia continue its war in Afghanistan … The mistake was made by the Carter administration which was trying to stop the Russians from their invasion of Afghanistan. We'd be better off had we let the Russians beat the Taliban." (Deutsche Welle, April 2, 2014 interview) We'd be even better off if we hadn't overthrown the progressive, secular Afghan government, giving rise to the Taliban in the first place and inciting the Russians to intervene on their border lest the Soviet Islamic population was stirred up.
The former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in an interview in 1998 summed up exactly what the US thinks of the UN: "The UN plays a very important role. But if we don't like it, we always have the option of following our own national security interests, which I assure you we will do if we don't like what's going on." She is now a foreign-policy advisor to Hillary Clinton.
"A leader taking his (or her) nation to war is as dysfunctional in the family of humankind as an abusive parent is in an individual family." Suzy Kane
"It would be some time before I fully realized that the United States sees little need for diplomacy. Power is enough. Only the weak rely on diplomacy … The Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States." Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Secretary-General of the United Nations from January 1992 to December 1996
"Interventions are not against dictators but against those who try to distribute: not against Jiménez in Venezuela but Chávez, not against Somoza in Nicaragua but the Sandinistas, not against Batista in Cuba but Castro, not against Pinochet in Chile but Allende, not against Guatemala dictators but Arbenz, not against the shah in Iran but Mossadegh, etc." Johan Galtung, Norwegian, principal founder of the discipline of peace and conflict studies
"No mention was made that Iraq's Christians had been safe and sound under President Saddam Hussein even privileged until President George Bush invaded and destroyed Iraq. We can expect the same fate for Syria's Christians if the protection of the Assad regime is torn away by the US-engineered uprising. We will then shed crocodile tears for Syria's Christians." Eric Margolis, 2014
"Jewish Power is the capacity to silence the debate on Jewish Power." Gilad Atzmon
"We need a trial to judge all those who bear significant responsibility for the past century - the most murderous and ecologically destructive in human history. We could call it the war, air and fiscal crimes tribunal and we could put politicians and CEOs and major media owners in the dock with earphones like Eichmann and make them listen to the evidence of how they killed millions of people and almost murdered the planet and made most of us far more miserable than we needed to be. Of course, we wouldn't have time to go after them one by one. We'd have to lump Wall Street investment bankers in one trial, the Council on Foreign Relations in another, and any remaining Harvard Business School or Yale Law graduates in a third. We don't need this for retribution, only for edification. So there would be no capital punishment, but rather banishment to an overseas Nike factory with a vow of perpetual silence." Sam Smith
"I have come to think of the export of democracy' as the contemporary equivalent of what missionaries have always done in the interest of conquering and occupying the uncivilized' world on behalf of the powers that be. I have said that the church' invented the concept of conversion by any means, including torture and killing of course, as doing the victims a big favor, since it was in the interest of saving' their immortal souls. It is now called, democratization'." Rita Corriel
"It is more or less impossible to commemorate the war dead without glorifying them, and it is impossible to glorify them without glorifying their wars." Paul Craig Roberts