By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
The troubled Central American state of Guatemala has just received an abject apology from the highest levels of the U.S. government for America’s recently-exposed 1940s policy of infecting Guatemalans with STDs (Sexually Transmitted Diseases) in order to test the newly-developed drug penicillin.
That the U.S. would only now be apologizing – and only after it was exposed – for a seven-decades-old crime against humanity is in and of itself appalling.
But what is more appalling is that this most-recently-disclosed transgression against mankind is just the tip of the iceberg in what seems to be a policy that transcends the lifetime of the American Republic of perpetually inflicting as much damage upon the human species as possible.
There is so much more that America’s ruling class has to apologize for – an entire national history littered with the sanguine debris of slavery, indentured servitude, wars, invasions, coups d’etat, imposed dictatorships, genocide, racism, homophobia, misogyny, generalized bigotry and unmitigated corporate greed and capitalist ruthlessness.
The STD experiments in Guatemala are reminiscent of the CIA’s experiments with LSD and other psychoactive drugs on unsuspecting mental patients here in Canada two decades later.
No matter whether the party in power in Washington was the Republicans or the Democrats, the insatiable corporate capitalist lust for American global hegemony has always come to the fore just as the cream used to rise to the top of an old-fashioned glass bottle of pasteurized milk.
The Obama administration’s abject and belated apology to Guatemala for its heinous policy of using Guatemalan prisoners and mental patients as human guinea pigs pales to a trace when it is considered that the United States of America continues to practice barbarity against the rest of the world even to this day.
The thwarted coup attempt in Ecuador over the past couple of days was very likely inspired and financed by the CIA, as was the coup d’etat achieved in Honduras a few months ago.
America’s all for “democracy,” unless whichever electorate involved chooses the wrong party – a party committed primarily to the interests of the masses rather than to those of American multinational corporations.
Let’s not forget even as the U.S. currently has its nosed wedged into the Middle East so-called “peace” process, that it is the Israeli-American predilection for precluding the participation of the democratically elected Palesrtinian Hamas administration that dooms those very talks to failure.
Let’s not forget that over the past decade alone, various American federal administrations have depicted a wide range of other countries as “rogue states,” “ax(e)s of evil” or just plain, old-fashioned enemies – from Iraq to Afghanistan to North Korea to Syria to Iran to Cuba to Venzuela, et al, for a variety opf sometimes-lame reasons.
And let’s not forget that the U.S. spends more money on its myriad military adventures and misadventures than the whole rest of the world combined.
America was right to apologize to Guatemala and the Guatemalan victims. But it also has much, much more to be sorry for.