BobHarris.com - Speaking ill of the dead

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Who Hates Whom:
Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts,
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Speaking ill of the dead

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Wednesday, 27 December 2006

It's not supposed to be very nice, but then again, neither is being complicit in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people.

Gerald Ford was, by all accounts, a nice guy. A fine athlete in his youth. A good friend to those around him. People liked Ford. They really did. So that counts for a lot.

And in 1975, Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger gave Indonesia's dictator, Suharto (who was primarily armed by the US, and who had risen to power in a massive bloodbath), the green light to invade East Timor. According to the existing records, once this small matter was settled, they then discussed how Indonesia could make more money from oil.

The very next day, Indonesia invaded.

Of the estimated population of 700,000, up to 100,000 people were killed in the first year. Amnesty International put the eventual death toll from the Indonesian occupation at about 200,000.

The Ford administration and the US media simply looked the other way. And today, almost everyone involved, including former presidents Clinton and Carter, are looking the other way again.

Of course, playing ball with dictators is something every US president has done since long before any of us were born. And sometimes it may well have been a forced choice between two evils, one any decent person would have made. (Where would the US have been in WWII, if not allied with Stalin?) But you'd hope this stuff would be a last resort, not a first.

But in the records of Ford's meeting with Suharto, no alternative to invasion and mass killing -- negotiations with the East Timor socialists, say, aiming at peaceful integration of the island; or maybe US aid to East Timor as a means of co-opting the nation into looking West, say -- was even suggested.

There's one more thing missing from the pre-packaged Two Minutes Grief prepared long in advance of the death of any powerful figure (see Cheney's here; Castro's is here), which is of course completely different from the authentic grief felt by families and friends of any lost loved one -- even the faraway dead who are reduced to mere statistics by their sheer number:

Prosecution of Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the gang for any of the obvious -- illegal war, lying to Congress, domestic surveillance, etc. -- is nearly impossible to imagine partly because of Ford's pardon of Nixon, which in turn served as a debating-point precedent for Bush 41's mass pardon of Iran-Contra figures. The culture of impunity around the executive branch owes a lot to the man being lionized today.