Update: Right now it is running about 50/50 on whether it is ever ok to mention negative information when a public figure passes. However, it seems as though those who are voting "Never," are not giving us the benefit of their reasoning. So, c'mon, folks. If it's "Never, no matter what evil thing they've done" tell us why.
I recieved my first hide rating here at Dkos when Richard Holbrooke passed away a few days ago. At first I was confused ("Gee, what happened to my comments?") Once I figured it out, I felt taken aback and a little embarassed. It hadn't been my intention to offend and it certainly hadn't been my intention to become an archetype, as someone called me. If you go to the parent of this comment you can see what I mean. I reread the glowing tributes and wondered if my recollection was so wrong. I mulled over a "Mea Culpa" diary in my head these last few days. Being quite short of time this past week, I just didn't get to it. Good thing, it turns out.
Last night I got a refresher course in "Richard Holbrooke 101." Democracy Now! airs at 5 pm eastern time in my neck of the woods (gotta plug our great little community radio station here - http://www.weru.org and I was happy to be home and able to listen. And I realized why I had written so impulsively.
http://www.democracynow.org/...
Amy Goodman lays it out:
While tributes have been pouring in for Richard Holbrooke, little attention has been paid to his role in implementing and backing U.S. policies that killed thousands of civilians. As Assistant Secretary of State in the Carter administration, Holbrooke oversaw weapons shipments to the Indonesian military as it killed a third of East Timor’s population. In 1980, he played a key role in the Carter administration’s support for a South Korean military crackdown on a pro-democracy uprising in the city of Kwangju that killed hundreds of people. Details of Holbrooke’s role in East Timor and Korea have been entirely ignored by the corporate media since his death—hardly covered before, as well. Richard Holbrooke was also a prominent Democratic backer of the Bush administration’s decision to attack Iraq in 2003.
Independent journalist Jeremy Scahill, author of "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," describes the background leading up to Holbrooke's support for the American War on Iraq, his part in the "utter militarization of... U.S. diplomacy," and, here, Holbrooke's part in the disintegration of Yugoslavia:
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, you know, Richard Holbrooke was a central player in the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Everyone knows. The whole world knows. Slobodan Miloševic was a mass murderer and a thug. Radovan Karadžic, Ratko Mladic, all of these Bosnian Serb leaders, they were thugs. What never gets talked about is that what Richard Holbrooke and other U.S. officials were doing was supporting Croatian ethnic cleansers that were trained by U.S. private military company MPRI to engage in the single-greatest ethnic cleansing of the war against the Serbs in Krajina.
Amy Goodman on the genocide in East Timor:
I want to go back in time. I’ve been to East Timor a number of times during the Indonesian occupation, one of the worst genocides of the 20th century. John Pilger also did a remarkable documentary about it called Death of a Nation. East Timor is a place that was occupied by the fourth-largest military in the world, Indonesia. And it started under Ford and Kissinger and went on to Carter, and Holbrooke was in that administration. A third of the population was killed.
John Pilger, longtime journalist and filmmaker, creator of the documentary about East Timor, "Death of a Nation," on Richard Holbrooke:
Well, look, Richard Holbrooke is the embodiment of rapacious U.S. policy. And I think there’s something interesting here in the—all the commemoration of his career that has gone on, interesting in regard to the WikiLeaks issue, because here we have—and it’s not only in the United States, it’s here, as well: "This great peacemaker, this great statesman, has passed on." Well, that’s just not true. And if we’d had a kind of WikiLeaks glimpse of the truth of Holbrooke’s career, we might not be getting all these effusions at the moment.
The outpouring of high praise of the career of Richard Holbrooke, with hardly a mention of the part he played in bringing untold misery to several corners of the earth reminds me of President Obama's desire to "...look forward, not back," regarding prosecution of the Bush era war criminals and torture. The national amnesia continues.
I've tried to represent some of the highlights here. It's worth it to go and listen to or watch the entire show.
I'm not sure how I feel about negative comments in a R.I.P. story. Perhaps the comments to this diary, if there are any, will help clarify that for me.