Das Boot: The Unsinkable Warmonger (Unreliable Sources / The Nation)

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Unreliable Sources
By Mark Ames
January 14, 2009

The real mystery of our age is this: why do all the media warmongers still have jobs, after the way they goaded us into the epic disaster we've found ourselves in? Back in 2001, when a panicked America foolishly handed the steering wheel to pundits like Max Boot, America was at the height of its economic and geopolitical power. What happened next was a lot like that rent-a-car prank in the first Jackass film: decades of America's accumulated wealth and geopolitical power trashed overnight in a reckless neocon joyride. The warmongers pulled out of the lot in a mint-condition, gas-guzzling boat, cheerfully assuring America that everything would turn out fine. Cut to the slapstick punch line: Boot pushing the remains of the totaled car back onto the lot. Only instead of apologizing like the Jackass pranksters, Boot cheerfully tells America, "You see, I told you it would turn out great! Now give me your next-best car; I'd like to take it out for a spin ..."

...In the 19th century .. European imperialists would plant their flag and impose their laws at gunpoint. The territory that now comprises Pakistan was not entirely peaceful when it was under British rule. Nor was Somalia under Italian and British sovereignty. But they were considerably better off than they are today--not only from the standpoint of Western countries but also from the standpoint of their own citizens.

I find it amazing that Boot is allowed to print outrageous declarations like that in public and not be subjected to a public shaming campaign that forces him into early retirement from public service, Trent Lott-style. If Boot had written that blacks were "considerably better off under apartheid rule than they are today," he'd be branded a racist and dropped from every newspaper in the country. And yet it's OK to say the equivalent about subjects of the British Raj--and no one even blinks?

Let's remind ourselves how great Boot's fetishized British Raj was "from the standpoint of their own citizens": their life expectancy fell 20 percent from 1872 to 1921, their incomes fell 50 percent in the last half of the nineteenth century and roughly 50 million natives died in famines overseen by the Raj's imperial authority--famines that occurred at the same time the British were exporting grain from Raj fields and ports. The Brits allowed these Indo-Pakistani holocausts to go on under their administration on the popular theory that providing famine relief would create a bunch of welfare queens, as well as the popular belief that it was a good thing from nature's standpoint to allow the "weak" to die off ...

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090126/ames

[DBoon]

1. Sounds like the Irish were a test case for India

this all sounds very much like what Ireland went through 100 years earlier under British rule

On Edit: Anyone who adopts the pen-name of "Max Boot" sounds like a fascist to me. Why this guy gets any exposure in any credible media is a sad commentary on how reactionary our media has become