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06/09/2004:
"Reagan Was Behind Mass Murder"
Journalist Allan Nairn: Reagan Was Behind "One Of The Most Intensive Campaigns Of Mass Murder In Recent History"democracynow.org
... I think if accurate history is written in the future this will be seen as one of the great crimes of history, and I'm not in the U.S. now, but when I -- I'm hearing about how Reagan is being celebrated, and I don't know, I suspect that a lot of people in Central America when they hear about that, maybe feel the same way that a lot of Americans feel when they hear the stories about people in other countries wearing Osama bin Laden t-shirts. You know, a feeling of just complete dismay and disgust. How can people do that? How can people celebrate such a mass killer? That's a complicated question.
There are various reasons why people celebrate mass killers. One of them that especially applies in the case of the U.S. is maybe they don't know. Maybe they don't know that he was a mass murderer, and that is largely the case with what happened in Central America because the way the U.S. press covered it and failed to cover it the facts never got through to the American public. If they did, people would not stand for it. But Reagan -- one thing you have to say for Reagan, and one thing I think you also have to say for Bush now, they justly and appropriately for politics spoke in terms of good and evil. Because a lot of politics a good and evil. But he lied about it. What he did was evil. What Bush is doing now is evil when he causes the deaths of civilians. Americans have to face the facts. They have to look at things the way they really are, and then you can't do anything about the victims of El Salvador and Guatemala now, but you can do something about those who are still alive. For example, I mentioned Coca-Cola and Guatemala: dozens of union organizers there were gunned down by death squads. Almost the exact same things has happened in recent years at the Coca-Cola franchise in Colombia. One union leader pops up and he's gunned down. This practice is continuing and it has to stop.
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