Do not bring back past oppression

THE EDITOR: Anyone watching George Bush Jr vilifying Saddam Hussein while at the same time extolling the noble values of America, would inevitably conclude that he is either a good actor, he is moved by a very deep sense of moral outrage or he has conveniently chosen to forget America’s recent past - an America which he wishes to parade before the world as the paragon of rectitude, fair play and civilised behaviour.

Maybe Saddam has discovered the art of genocide from the very Americans who recoil in horror at the genocide perpetrated against his own people by his barbaric regime. In case Bush has forgotten, there was a campaign euphemistically called the Pacification of the West that lasted from 1865-1890. This resulted in the extermination of the original America: their homes were burnt, winter stocks destroyed and men, women and children massacred by the American Calvary at the Sand Creek, Standing Rock and Wounded Knee!

We also need to remind George Bush that his religious ancestors enslaved Africans, brutalised them on their cotton plantations and after Emancipation denied them their basic human rights for decades. What a pity Bush Jr was not in power during the hey day of the white Saddam Husseins who presided over the brutal apartheid regime in South Africa! No doubt that world would have witnessed the spectacle of American tanks in Capetown and Pretoria and despots like Vorster and Botha would have also been condemned to the pantheon of brutal failed dictators. But that is just wishful thinking. It appears that not only blood but also colour is thicker than water, or the Republican Administration of 1980-1992 lost its sense of moral outrage where white oppression of blacks was involved. Bush needs to be reminded that his indignant America has ‘slept’ with almost every brutal dictator the 20th century has spawned when the self interest of their ‘America first’ policy demanded it. They ‘slept’ with Stalin (their close ally in WW II), Batista, Trujilo, Marcos, Bakassa, Papa Doc, Pinochet and the Shah of Iran and a host of others who surpassed Saddam for the sheer brutality of their rule.

Caucasians excel at masking their naked self-interest behind pious moral platitudes and religious high-mindedness. They always perpetrate their dastardly deeds on some religious platform. They are consistent in their modus operandi! So we find today that Bush has become the latest and most celebrated addition to the stock of born-again Christians and this provides him with the perfect platform to pursue his own national agenda in such a maliciously deceptive and hypocritical way. Rather than trying to pontificate the rest of the world, Bush and his right-wing American supporters would be well advised to take out the California Redwood from their own eyes rather than seeking to take a log out of the eyes of brutal dictators like Saddam Hussein and the rest that still exist in the Middle East.

C J LEWIS
Trincity