| Not only are we responsible for a considerable number of human rights violations pertaining to our foreign and domestic policies, we've funded more guerilla fighters and caused more violent overthrows than any one nation in history. You can't really say "we're better than the average" when we've had a hand in making the average so god-damned low. I mean, in the last 20 years in the Middle East we've given $12 billion to arm and train Osama-and-co to make the Russians' lives a living hell in Afghanistan (with only a slight side effect of making the Afghanis' lives a living hell in Afghanistan), we've sold $76 billion worth of arms and advisors to both sides of the Iraq/Iran conflict, and are now funding and supporting Kurdish guerilla forces after having given Turkey and Iraq helicopters and chemicals to destroy them. We've allowed Israel an army worthy of a country ten times its size, and turned a blind eye to the more than 150 UN violations these past two decades alone. And that's not going into the lovely bits of Lebanon and Yemen and Syria and Saudi Arabia that we've helped foster. So how are we a bastion of Human Rights? We just fund other people to do our dirty work and then wipe our hands of it when everything goes to shit!
. . . whenever any government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such forms as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. |