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Re: TV Nation




I'll start by saying that Im a curmudgeon on this subject and I've never
really liked that TV Nation guy (he's a self-aggrandizer with no concept
of context in the "real world") so I doubt I would have liked the spread
he did that I seem to be defending had I seen it, which I didn't. 

I should also say that things are a little different in the 90s, so my
babbling below is somewhat dated in extent, but not in spirit. 

Okay, all that being said the School for the Americas teaches the military
leaders of a region in which practically every military's primary use is
wiping out scores of its own citizens. This was done to Fight the Commies,
who in Latin America tend to be totally unenfranchised and extremely poor
rural types. Often supporters of the elected government the current regime
overthrew. It is impossible to train Latin American military leaders
without knowing you are training potential human rights abusers. So even
if there is no training of that nature going on it's still a morally
dubious thing. 

But there is that sort of training going on. The big thing taught is
counter insurgency, which basically takes the form that the US used in
Vietnam. That is, go into some rural village, where all of the gooks/
mestizo and Indian peasants look the same, and shoot some of them at
random because they all look the same and you can't tell which ones you
should be shooting. Hardly innocent stuff. 

The School is also pretty pointless now, unless you think that Castro is
still exporting revolution. The Shining (Happy) Path is the only hard core
leftist rebel group still doing any big time work in the region.  Castro
is too poor to do anything. Regional militaries are now left fighting each
other or the local Indians. 

The thing is that most every right wing coup in the region in the post
WWII era was aided by the CIA, and most every right wing coup led to
massive human rights abuses. The US government is not responsible for
every nasty thing to happen there, but the US has done a lot to keep the
region wildly unstable and authoritarian very very little to prevent this.
Much more then anywhere else in US foreign policy at any time, and for
very little reason. 

Nate Florin, sorry to get so off topic

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