By Josef Gregory
Mahoney
As U.S. President Joe Biden and his Secretary of State Anthony Blinken attempt to rebrand post-Donald Trump America through new policies and narratives at home and abroad, the topic of “human rights” has become, once again, a focal point of Washington’s propaganda. China should welcome this discussion and join it robustly.
A dark history: From what pedestal does the U.S. preach and point? Which president in American history had clean hands? Which president did not preside over a nation with systemic abuse of its own people, especially the poor, women and minorities? Which have avoided war and aggression?
The U.S. came into being through genocide against Native Americans, shady deals with despots that more than doubled the nation’s size, aggressive wars against Mexico and Spain, and invasions and suppressions as the U.S. went global at the end of the 19th century, reaching further from its shores, including into the Pacific, with violent takeovers of the Philippines and a number of strategically located islands that fueled increasing instability in Asia, stimulating in no small part Japan’s aggressive responses.
It is part of the U.S. political imaginary to forget the past, largely, with each new administration, to remember only in a cursory way the mistakes that others made without fully taking responsibility for them. This allows the U.S. to perpetually renew itself, to turn the pages of history without ever actually reading or understanding what has been done, how one page leads to another, and how so many of the pages say largely the same things.
For example, Trump excoriated his predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, for their crimes in international affairs, from the former’s invasion of Iraq under false pretenses (which included bald-faced lies with fake “intelligence” to the UN Security Council that directly sparked ongoing human rights travesties throughout the Middle East), to the latter’s continued drone wars and disastrous meddling in Libya, Syria, Ukraine and beyond.
Then Trump proceeded to write his own place in history. He doubled down on the U.S. prison in Guantanamo, a site of torture, and not only promoted people previously involved with Bush’s torture policies, but explicitly promoted torture and said the U.S. should have done worse.
He also ordered the assassination via drone of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, who was then visiting Iraq, killing several Iraqi leaders in the same attack. While he justified it as preventing violence, there are credible accounts of him admitting privately that he did it to appease conservatives in the Senate who were then considering his fate in his first impeachment trial. The trial, it should be recalled, centered on whether his own meddling in Ukraine was self-serving and not merely for the national good.
A UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions concluded in a report to the UN Human Rights Council that Trump’s action was exceptionally inappropriate and likely a war crime.
But this was not the only disturbing thing done by Trump. One must also recall his heavy hand against Latin American migrants, including separating parents and children; his anti-Muslim travel restrictions; his dog-whistle tactics that tacitly encouraged white supremacists and fueled racial injustice against African Americans; his racist rants and trade war against China that prompted an incredible wave of anti-Asian violence in the U.S. and beyond; and his complete mishandling of the COVID-19 epidemic that left more than half a million Americans dead, with millions more diminished by the illness and its social and economic effects—the costs of which are still beyond anyone’s capacity to compute.
And while it might seem gratuitous, one might add that Trump’s crimes against humanity included quitting the Paris Agreement and convincing many Americans that climate change is not a real problem, at the very least not one for which they have any responsibility, despite the fact that the U.S. has by far the highest emissions per capita in the world.
One also can point to Trump abandoning the World Health Organization in the middle of the pandemic, undermining the global capacity to deal with the disease, as well as his decision to advance unilateral sanctions against Iran and others, contrary to international agreements and law, and to refuse to relax them for humanitarian reasons during the worst days of the outbreak, leading to even more misery and death.
Even if Biden has not yet committed any comparably great sins in this particular iteration of his public life (though he was part of gross actions during the Obama years and his long tenure in the Senate), he continues the tradition of turning the page while also continuing American hegemony and interventionism.
–The Daily Mail-Beijing Review News Exchange Item
