US President Barak Obama took to three former enemy targets in Asia this year.
His mission in Vietnam was to sell “lethal weapons”. This comes after a 50 year embargo of selling it weapons, and after the US weapons industry had scored billions selling death tools to its government so that it could conduct the un-provoked war (1960-75). The cost in human lives: between 1.5 and 3.9 three million Vietnamese and 58,000 US aggressors.
Weapon sales are conditioned, naturally, on Vietnam respecting US-defined human rights.
In return for this generous offer, the Vietnamese government commits itself to drop its Russian-built MIG-21 jet fighters and buy US-made F-16s. And The Man didn’t even have to apologize for previous White House custodians’ mass murder.
Japan was next Obama’s marketing list. He even dared stop at Hiroshima where he didn’t apologize either. He simply said that “artefacts tell us that violent conflict appeared with the very first man.”
The Man began his speech thusly:
Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.
We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans, a dozen Americans held prisoner.”
We remember all the innocents killed across the arc of that terrible war and the wars that came before and…