People with mental disorders and "social cleansing"

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Those with mental disorders are prime targets for latter-day Einsatzgruppen
which operate unchecked in many "developing" countries:

http://colombiareports.com/colombia-new ... nsing.html

http://web.jrn.columbia.edu/studentwork ... erwood.asp

And our tax dollars are probably helping to enable alot of it.


This is from "Understanding Power" by Noam Chomsky.






"Just take a look at U.S. aid, for instance. There have been a lot of
studies of it, including studies by people who write in the mainstream,
and what they show is that there is in fact a very high correlation between
U.S. foreign aid and human rights abuses. For example, Lars Schoultz at the
University of North Carolina-who's the major academic specialist on human
rights in Latin America and a highly respected mainstream scholar-published
a study on U.S. aid to Latin America almost fifteen years ago, in which he
identified an extremely close correlation between U.S. and torture: as he
put it, the more a country tortures it's citizens and the more egregious are
the violations of human rights, the higher the U.S. aid.

In fact, it's true at this very moment. The leading human rights violator
in the Western Hemisphere by a good margin is Columbia, which has just
an atrocious record-they have "social cleansing" programs, before every
election members of the opposition parties get murdered, labor union
leaders are murdered, students, dissidents are murdered, there are death
squads all around. Okay, more than half of the U.S. aid to the entire Western
Hemisphere goes to Columbia, and the figure's increasing under Clinton. Well,
that's just normal, and like I say, similar results have been shown world-wide.
So claims about our concern for human rights are extremely difficult to support:

In precisely the regions of the world where we've had the most control,
the most hideous things you can imagine happen systematically-people
have to sell their organs for money in order to survive, police death squads
leave flayed bodies hanging by roadsides with their genitals stuffed in their
mouths, children are enslaved, and worse, those aren't even the worst stories.


If you take a look at the recent Amnesty International report on Columbia,
they say almost casually-just because it's so routine-that in Columbia-that
in Columbia they carry out what's called "social cleansing": the army and the
paramilitary forces go through the cities and pick up "undesirables", like
homeless people, or homosexuals, or prostitutes, or drug addicts, anybody
they don't like, and they just take them and murder them, then chop them
up and mutilate their bodies for organ transplants. That's called "social
cleansing" and everybody thinks it's a great idea. And again, this goes on
throughout the U.S. domains".

Colombia has never been all that stable. Starting in 1947, just as America's economic boom was starting, Colombia slid into civil war. "La Violencia" lasted about until the end of the 1950s. There was a brief interregnum, then the left wing FARC took up arms against the government and the wealthy hired mercenaries to counter government weakness in the face of the threat. The country has been at war ever since, even as other Latino countries have largely ended their civil wars, or in Argentina's case learned to live with a high level of random crime, which while brutal is not a civil war in the traditional sense.

So basically Colombia has been at war with itself since the 1940s, and all the people who remember a time before war have long since died. When that happens to a country, like in Somalia for example, war is more comforting than peace, since it's all people know, so violence becomes self-perpetuating. Chomsky is right on a superficial level, but places like Colombia would be basketcases even without the CIA. Any country that can wage a 60 year civil war-the longest in modern world history-is probably beyond help, even if all aid was withdrawn.

In such a society, those who can't support themselves are viewed as less than human and as burdens on the society that have to be jettisoned for the survival of the whole. It's very much a pre-civilization meme, that the weak have to be eliminated for the strong to live, and it's found in all societies that return to a primitive state. It's likely that Colombia will slip back into the stone age long before any real effort to fix it could be made, and the brain drain makes things all that much worse.

Colombia is probably similar to medieval Europe, especially in the central and eastern areas, where wars lasted for hundreds of years, and only when people realized that they didn't know why they were fighting, or who they were fighting, did the war really end. One war lasted 118 years, and the combatants who made a peace treaty were very different from those who started fighting.

It's like in Somalia-the ethnic militias of the early 90s are long gone, and the fight now is between the government of Mogadishu, supported by the West, and an Al Qaeda supported Islamist militia, Al Shabaab. Al Shabaab briefly won the war, but the US couldn't handle what they saw as an Al Qaeda win, so they plunged Somalia back into war. Basically, an organization that really didn't exist at the start of the war won it. That's the way long wars go.

Hmm, I thought it was because human rights abuses make citizens worse off, thus making Western nations feel more guilty, thus making them want to send more aid (opposite causal direction). IMO, Western Europe and the UN have this idea that just throwing money at countries where people are suffering, in and of itself, will somehow improve ordinary citizens' lives. Not so different from many US politicians, who think giving more money to public schools will automatically make them better. The US government spends more money on public schools than most Western European nations but gets worse test results, last time I checked, probably because most of the money goes to administrators (who can make 6 figure salaries) instead of teachers and classroom materials. Similarly, with foreign aid, most of the aid money never gets to the citizens. The corrupt governments take it, and don't waste it on unimportant trifles like, say, food. Not that the whole UN aid bureaucracy isn't corrupt, too--remember the Oil for Food scandal?

Interesting, pezar, I didn't know most of that.

I would support this. However, when you see where this information is coming from...