With great love,
Baba
Panama and Ukraine
If my missive to my granddaughter weren't already overlong, I would have connected it with the issue of Ukraine. There remain so many relevant and shameful stories of United States slaughter of innocents that need to be told in that context. But for Eva, the connection with Ukraine will have to wait for another day.
But I can remind anyone reading this that Panama's tale is intimately linked to the official and mainstream portrayals of Russian atrocities in Ukraine. Those portrayals are hypocritical beyond measure.
I mean recall on the one hand how official U.S. descriptions of Russia's "Special Military Operation" have the United States somehow taking a lofty moral position regarding the war crimes of Vladimir Putin. Official accounts of the Ukraine war constantly ask the question, how could he justify interfering in the affairs of his neighbor to the west? Just think of all the lives needlessly wasted for one man's supposed imperial ambitions!
Oh sure (the story goes) the United States has committed its share of errors in the past. Everyone admits that. But those were simply a few well-intentioned mistakes that prove the rule of American exceptionalism as a highly principled moral agent in the world. It's nothing like what Putin's doing.
But then on the other hand think how the case of Panama calls attention to the hypocrisy of such historical deception - of the very nonsense that CRT exposes. For as already stated, Panama represents but a very dim reflection of U.S. crimes committed across the planet -- and especially in its Latin American "backyard" since the end of the Second Intercapitalist War (1939-1945). There it has exercised brutality far beyond what I told Eva about Panama -- far beyond what the Russians are doing in Ukraine.
In fact, according to ex-CIA station chief (in Angola) John Stockwell, since the Second Intercapitalist War, the United States has waged a "Third World War" against the world's poor in general. And that war has taken at least six million lives. At least six million!
To get Stockwell's point, just check the long, long list of U.S. interventions here. The list clarifies why the chief patron saint of CRT, Dr. Martin Luther King, described the United States (not Russia) as "the world's greatest purveyor of violence..
About its occurring armed interventions in the Global South, Stockwell says "Every one of them (was) illegal, every one of them disruptive of the lives of societies of other peoples and many of them bloody and gory and beyond comprehension almost."
Again, review Stockwell's allegations. Look at that list of U.S. interventions in Global South countries. Think about the implications of Stockwell's number, 6,000,000.
Conclusion
Should I have shared that unvarnished truth with a 13-year-old before she's had time to internalize the patriotic history CRT opponents would have here learn first?
Obviously, I think so. But you be the judge.
As I see it, this trip by my granddaughter Eva is indeed a teachable moment. Such opportunities to open eyes and expand consciousness should never be wasted in the name of protecting even young teenagers from life's harsh realities.
I'm hoping for Eva that Panama, the beach, turtle eggs, bananas, her homestay -- and El Chorillo -- will represent another huge step in her awakening process.
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