Atrocities down the memory hole...

Something I wrote on preceived nobility of intentions behind the Kerry-Lugar Bill, as it appeared in a DAWN piece. Surprisingly, DAWN didn't edit it out!
 
"Which country has ever been helped by US aid? Read stuff like Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States (for a detailed account of an endless list of atrocities and genocides carried out and sponsored by US starting with the killing of 10 million natives and continuing into the 21st century), or William Blum’s Killing Hope (which talks about more than 50 US invasions in sovereign states since the WWII, there were more than 100 before that) or Chomsky’s Deterring Democracy (which lists detailed accounts suppression of democracy, through mass killing, slaughter, threat and destructive economic sanctions). Our media ignores these crucial details, and pretends these never happened and have nothing to do with Pakistan. Pakistan is just another chapter in this rampage. What US has wrought, our politicians can’t even imagine-I mean they are corrupt and all that, but shedding blood, carrying out out genocides as policy is unheard of in our political tradition (look at Berzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard -same person who conceived the “Bear Trap”- in which he discusses the possibility of genocide as a policy tactic!) Being against terror doesn’t imply supporting US, in fact it is to be directly opposed to US foreign policy, which, these books will show, is replete with its own terrorism, much worse, and much greater in scale. How can we trust such a state? Why doesn’t the media talk about bombing of Cambodia and Laos (1300 villages were wiped off the face of the earth by aerial bombing which was personally supervised by Henry Kissinger), or East Timor (1 million slaughtered), or Vietnam (2 million civilians dead, My Lai massacre), the Hiroshima/Nagasaki Nuclear bombing and countless others to give us some context in which we can understand current affairs. Isn’t one against all kinds of terrorism, of radical groups but also of the states, especially when one carried out by the state dwarfs by a huge margin anything done by the radical outfits (can anything Taliban have done match the fire bombing of Dresden, or the Hiroshima bombing?). So shouldn’t one give proportionate weightage to each. Aren’t newspapers based on the moral principle that people have a right to know. I would like the columnists to explain these crucial and important omissions?"
 
http://blog.dawn.com/2009/11/02/hillarys-headache/ 
 
-Haroon
Einstein