Sunday 12 January 2020

Evil Regimes But Our Evil Regimes

The World has always had its share of bad guys, vicious, abusive regimes that nobody should be supporting but someone has and if you guessed 'the West' then congratulations, you have won a pair of goldfish and a pair of gental electrocution clamps.
The international community treats dictators as pariahs as they deserve no place in a modern world but occasionally a psychopath leader comes along who we not only turn a blind eye to but actually offer financial or military support.
Guys like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, a monster who had been responsible for thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of cases of torture over his 30 years rule who received $1.3 billion in military aid each year and even when he ordered security forces to began the wholesale murder of protesters, we looked the other way as the bodies piled up in the streets.
Then there was Iraq's Saddam Hussein who Donald Rumsfeld was famously photographed shaking hands with in the 1980's to seal the deal of the arms, money, satellite intelligence and even chemical & bio-weapon precursors although this all went south when he endangered the oil supply, silly man.
Chile's Augusto Pinochet's 17-year reign of torture, executions and secret torture camps wasn't enough to dissuade the west from vetoing our friends extradition to Spain to face charges of murder in 1999.
The corrupt Somoza Family bled Nicaragua dry and slaughtered thousands which irked the residents of Nicaragua but the west did everything we could to keep them in power including support to the Nicaraguan National Guard, a brutal and sadistic terrorist group who bombed civilian neighbourhoods killing around 10,000 and funding their Contra terrorist campaign.
On the Korean peninsula, it hasn't always been the Northern part with the nutter, the South had Park Chung-Hee who banned short skirts, men's long hair and protests against his authoritarian rule, torturing and murdering thousands of protesters.
Suharto of Indonesian had fans in influential Western capitals even while plundering over £35 billion, killing one third of the population on the island of Timor, ethnic cleansing—raping, torturing and garroting hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese and murdering 2 million of his own people while receiving guns, riot-control vehicles, and fighter jets which the dictator used to bomb civilian areas
Before Castro the Cubans were ruled over by Fulgencio Batista making life hell for ordinary Cubans and who the West did it's best to keep in power despite the 20,000 Cubans he executed, bombing entire villages and rigging elections.
What’s a few human rights abuses between friends we ask while supporting the Al-Khalifa family in Bahrain, overlooking unlawful detention and torturing thousands of protesters to continue selling them arms as we do with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia who executes homosexuals, deprives women of many of their rights, imprisons children and holds executions in the city centre but as they buy tens of billions of arms from the West, which have subsequently been used to massacre entire villages in Yemen, we overlook it.
Colonel 'Mad Dog' Gadaffi may have been forcibly removed by the West in the end but previously we we were besties, even detaining and extraditing enemies of the Gaddafi regime from over the world where they were beaten, electrocuted, tortured and murdered as well as funding the IRA terrorists to attack England and worldwide assassinations by his governments hit squads.
Might be worth remembering the next time our Governments are manoeuvring a regime into it's gun sights because there are some nasty, evil regimes around but if they are our nasty, evil regimes, they are okay by us.

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