Waffling on Belgium

“Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” Henry Stanley so famously said. Less famously, he helped depraved atrocity-monger, King Leopold of Belgium, take over the Congo. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Conan Doyle and the Belgian Congo The horrors committed by this now beatifically presumptuous and geopolitically irrelevant country stand out in the highlight reel of history's evils.

That Belgium would dare to lecture American leaders about war crimes—and without even a mention of their own past affronts to human decency! Thankfully, this pathetic and hypocritical farce now comes to an end, as the new leadership of Belgium has finally had the good sense to kill its “law” that allowed such crimes to be prosecuted in Belgium courts against non citizens, such as Bush, Blair and Sharon. Yahoo! News - Belgium Shuts Book on Controversial War Crimes Law What can the Belgians be thinking of, to interfere with the sovereign right of a country, especially the world’s undisputed leader, to determine it’s foreign policy? In short, to send troops to combat threats to its security?

Belgium can only take such a grandstanding high road because NATO protects it, which is to say we do. And because its time as a world power has passed, it can now conveniently ignore its own bad behavior, ascribing it, one supposes, to earlier, unenlightened times.

Sic semper gloria mundi, I suppose. Look at the flowing and ebbing of all empires and spheres of influence on the world stage and you will see nothing more clearly than that. With the passing into history comes forgetfulness. And with forgetfulness the delusion of moral and ethical progress.

Historical hubris aside, the implications of Belgian judicial activity on international law and order would have been grave and threatening. Imagine a country telling leaders of other countries how to treat their own citizens! Or using its own ideas of justice as a pretext for trying and convicting non-nationals!

Oh wait. We're doing that right now with citizens of France, England, Afghanistan and most famously Iraq. Don’t we have them in Cuba? No bail? No trials? No nothing?

Didn’t we just knock off the governments of a pair of countries (and are tapping on the door of a handful more), because we decided that they were guilty of threatening us? And please, do NOT say that we got the OK from the UN to oust these now departed former allies and miscreants (who well deserved their present rewards). In twin disappointments, they proved incapable of sufficient moral clarity and we of sufficient patience.

So is it sauce for the goose, not fit for the gander? Correct. Does Belgium, the goose, have the mightiest military the world has ever seen? Does the leadership in Brussels have one finger on the nuclear button, a twitch away from raining down massive destruction on us, should we dare to ignore its will?

No. That, of course, is the crux of the argument. So let's leave aside all the pious hypocrisy. Our overwhelming might makes us the ganders. We make the rules. We try in our courts anyone we think atrocious and neither ask for nor accept counsel from the rest of the world.

So it has always been. You think our behavior better than Leopold's in the Congo? Ask the Cheyenne; ask the Hopi. Ask the heirs of our slavery. And if you ask them in the former Belgian Congo about the Belgian war crime law, they would probably ask that the now tiny, once fearful imperialist nation go check into its own jail.

History remembered helps put some of this in perspective. Sure, that was ages ago. About a century, or three or four generations. When your grandma’s parents were young. A decade before Leo's efforts in the Congo we ended slavery in this country.

Does America do business differently today? I would hope so.

I think America stands for freedom and justice. I think the USA is a great country where even the most modest incomes still cover a nice TV or a few new shirts.

So I am not going to visit any factories in China where they make TVs and clothes anytime soon, just in case. How China Hides Its Slave Labor From the Free World

I wouldn't want to have to change my mind about America, or those uppity Belgians and their insulting efforts to hold us to standards they didn’t meet, back when it was their turn to run the world.
¶ 7:47 AM