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Colin Powell already dead, And the saint obituary on us.
The New York Times called him a “pioneer”: America’s first black national security adviser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and secretary of state.
Other mainstream American media have also adopted a similar route, exploding in a typical American self-praising way that blacks who have been discriminated against can go to this point in their lives.
CNN proudly quoted Powell’s words in the 2001 Senate Confirmation of the Secretary of State’s hearing. He claimed to “show the world: follow our model, and within a period of time from our beginning, if you believe in the values of support [sic], You can see amazing things like me sitting in front of you and get your approval.”
After all, there is hardly any post-race more magical than someone born in Harlem—as a young American military officer, he was barred from entering certain restaurants and motels in his country—continuing meticulous planning in Countless brown people have been wiped out abroad, not to mention people of other skin colors.
MSNBC showed the assessment of Richard Haass, chairman of the US Council on Foreign Relations, which took the biographies of the saints a step further. According to this assessment, Powell is “one of the most honest people I have ever seen.”
Of course, anyone is guessing how the term “honesty” applies to its 76 minutes of lies In 2003, it directly laid the foundation for the George W. Bush administration to crush Iraq before the UN Security Council-this did not prevent MSNBC from naming the part of Powell after his death: “Richard Haas: Colin Powell is based on reality “.
If Powell’s reality includes non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and other threats, what does “reality” mean?
At present, at least, this means that political media organizations in the United States are deceiving themselves and praising in detail a man who died after helping to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world-they themselves are considered not worth mentioning in any mainstream Powell tribute. .
For example, due to “U.S.-led war and occupation,” the Washington Post managed to squeeze in the term “more than 100,000 Iraqis died”-a number that is not only underestimated, but only when it is clearly more important. “Thousands of Americans have died” in Iraq.
Powell’s predictions are so numerous that his 2003 speech at the United Nations will “get a prominent paragraph in my obituary”-or that support for the Iraq War is a “stain” on his record.
Perhaps Powell did not know that the Iraqi lie was not the only “stain” in his record, at least objectively speaking.
As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George HW Bush, Powell oversaw Operation Desert Storm in 1991—or what Robert Jensen, a former professor of journalism at the University of Texas put it, “we call it the Gulf War Massacre”.
In the Los Angeles Times in May 2000—nearly three years before defeating all the stains—Jensen observed that the massacre in question was by far “one of the most concentrated attacks on the entire society in modern warfare” , Including targeted and indiscriminate bombing of civilians.
Jensen emphasized that in both cases, the explosion constituted a “war crime under the Geneva Convention.”
In 1989, Powell also hosted various Damage caused by bombs In the Central American country of Panama, countless mainly impoverished Panamanian civilians were slaughtered when the U.S. military carried out “Operation for the Just Cause” against Manuel Noriega, a long-time ally of the United States and the asset of the CIA.
As a test run of the Gulf War, this operation was-surprise, surprise-based on a fabricated sensational narrative, only when the U.S. military triumphantly announced that it had found hidden cocaine in Noriega’s house. It becomes better to be called visit.
It didn’t matter, it was later discovered that “cocaine” was tamale wrapped in banana leaves.
In any case, this is obviously a day’s work of “reasonable honesty” and “based on reality.”
During his decades of service on behalf of the American Empire, Powell also indirectly participated in the noble causes of the United States, such as the infamous Vietnam Mylai Massacre and the Iran Gate scandal.
In her Powell obituary for Jacobin Magazine — titled “Colin Powell, a polite war criminal, at the age of 84” — Lisa Featherstone recalled that the man was “so affected. “Welcome”, so much so that people from both political parties in the United States “begged him to run for president for decades.”
But even in his small position, he still did a good job of uniting and maintaining the support of the two parties for the killing of the emperor-and putting it on a “polite” face as much as possible.
By the way, Powell criticized the then U.S. President Donald Trump on CNN’s State of the Union address last year as “a liar to the matter, and he escaped because people will not hold him accountable.”
But if the current biographies of saints show any signs, then the accountability system in American politics is nothing short of a miracle.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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