A Huge Eye-Opener

• Date: 25.11.2008
• Book: Strange Liberators: Militarism, Mayhem, and the Pursuit of Profit
• Author: plappen

Review

Strange Liberators: Militarism, Mayhem and the Pursuit of Profit, Gregory Elich, 2006, ISBN 1595265708


American foreign policy, especially during the Bush Administration, has been characterized as "incompetent" or "misguided," along with other such words. On the contrary, American foreign policy is actually very competent and works quite well, when its real purpose is to make the world safe for wealthy Western investors. Any country, no matter its size, that refuses to go along with America’s demands is to be strangled into submission, by any means available.

Americans remember the Korean War as a limited "police action." North Koreans remember it as a time of total annihilation, when everything and anything was bombed. The seemingly irrational North Korean fear of an American invasion becomes much more rational considering that, in 1994, the Clinton Administration was very close to declaring war on North Korea, because of its nuclear program. The use of nuclear weapons to destroy North Korea’s nuclear facilities would have spread radioactivity over most of the Korean peninsula, and killed hundreds of thousands of people, a fact which really didn’t bother the Clinton Administration.

North Korea, in the midst of a huge energy crisis, has been willing to scrap its uranium reprocessing capabilities, in exchange for a couple of light water reactors (which are not good for reprocessing), and shipments of heavy oil until the reactors are finished. America and North Korea signed an agreement in 1994, which America promptly ignored. The American bargaining postition, from then until now, is full of bullying, and threats, and demanding that North Korea totally scrap its nuclear program, before America will agree to any kind of talks (with no guarantee that America will agree to do anything for North Korea).

The justification for the bombing and invasion of Yugoslavia was that hundreds of thousands of Albanians were being thrown out of Yugoslavia. The problem is that there was no evidence of thousands of people in mass graves, and the exodus of refugees started after the bombing. The 77 days of NATO bombing was supposed to target military facilities; nearly anything was considered a military target. Industrial plants were targeted, to cause maximum economic hardship, and all sorts of toxic materials were released into the atmosphere. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe’s "crime" was to put the interests of his people ahead of those of Western investors.

I thought that I knew my way around present-day international relations, but this book was a huge eye-opener. Using local media sources (Korean, Yugoslav and Zimbabwean), Elich has written an amazing book. See for yourself what "democracy" from America means to the rest of the world.