Monsanto and Other Crap

Jeff Nguyen, the author of Deconstructing Myths, a blog that I follow, got me going with his delightfully facetious and hard-hitting “Dear Monsanto” post.

“Well put” sounds like lame praise for this creative way of addressing the ongoing horrors of Agent Orange as experienced by the people of Viet Nam and US GI’s.

I never fail to puzzle (and grind my teeth) over how Canadian and US media do their endless “show and tell” about the terror produced by foreign agents while ignoring the terror exported by (recently) drones and, in the 1960’s, Napalm and, as Jeff Nguyen points out in his eloquent “Thank You” letter to Monsanto, the long-lasting legacy of cancers and other horrors caused by using the defoliant, Agent Orange, during the Vietnam War. The victims of this horrible Monsanto chemical are/will be generations of Vietnamese and also many US soldiers who were exposed.

On a more general tack, I have watched the history of US hegemony around the world in South America closely since the 1960’s (Guyana and Cuba) and, later, the US-supported ousting of Chile’s democratically-elected socialist President Salvador Allende.

Allende committed suicide on “the first 9/11,” September 11, 1973, after it became clear that the coup against his regime would succeed that day. Further reading made me aware that successive US presidents have supported several of the cruelest ever dictators in South and Central America and the Caribbean since the early 20th century.

Jeff Nguyen points out that Agent Orange has a two decade half life – a serious and ongoing problem for the Vietnamese.

Outside our hemisphere the depleted uranium used by the US for armor-piercing bullets in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries has an impressive half life of 4.5 billion years. DU is still scattered all over those countries and half of its present harmfulness will still be around when Really Old Sol swells into a red giant and swallows up Mother Earth as it reaches the end of its starry starry life.

Half a million more Iraqi children under five, for Pete’s sake, have died just as a result of the 1990 – 2003 sanctions placed on that country by the US and the UK, among others, due to “High rates of malnutrition, lack of medical supplies, and diseases from lack of clean water” And that’s before the “War on Terror.”

If that is not a form, an overwhelming form, of terror, then what is? And the wars were failures that succeeded in increasing, natch, foreign hatred of the US and, yep, terror.

The Monsantos of this world not only make stuff that’ll kill you right away, they also are part of a changing agribusiness-dominated globe that is driving peasants off their land and into personal starvation while big companies and the wealthy compete to buy up the land under their feet and plant monocultures (single crops like wheat, corn, soya…) for export that only will benefit the winners of the global economic games/wars that are now being fought over wealth and scarcity. Their GMO’s also sometimes kill wildlife and may impact human health as well in the long run.

Not one, but many unpleasant and unhealthy thoughts, which is why I have largely tuned out and stopped writing about this crap.

I’ve seen the future and I don’t want to watch.

Thank you, Jeff for getting my dander up. You got me to take my hands off my eyes for a moment, anyway. Maybe longer…

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