Ah, the joys of Republican presidents....
“The old bitch !!” said Richard Nixon of Indira Gandhi."Indians are cunning, traitorous people." “I don’t know why the hell anybody would reproduce in that damn country but they do."
So he and Kissinger, the original NeoCon, supplied guns and bullets and covered up with media for Pakistan's Muslim army killing 300,000 mostly Hindus and driving 10,000,000 Hindus out of Bangladesh. Another 800,000 civilians were killed by one hand or another.
It's something in the Republican water.
There's Ronald Reagan ordering the gunners on U.S. Navy ships off Beirut, Lebanon to open fire on the suburbs. All told they killed 1,500 civilians, much of it after reagan had been driven out of his mini-occupation. The justification from Ronnie: "Teach them a lesson."
Or Bush43. Attacking the wrong country after 9/11 so he could be a War President.
Lovely people, not.
You want to read "The Blood Telegram" by Gary J. Bass to get the full flavor of masculine fantasy among Republicans. To understand what comes when these txrd/shxts do murder to show off for their country club cronies.
Why avoid Republican presidents ??? Because the GOP nominates high-function psychopaths?
Do you need more of a reason than that?
Reader reviews of the book add eye witness reportage. Below the orange muffin:
The story won't be complete without the gallant, humane and honest officers in the State Dept, Sen.Ted Kennedy and journalists like Sydney Schanberg of NYT. Archer Blood, the Consul General in Dacca, and his deputies put up a tremendous struggle against the policy conducted by Nixon. In the process, many of them jeopardised their careers for good. Kenneth Keating, the US ambassador to India, was another sterling personality, fighting his own govt's indifference to genocide. Ted Kennedy visited India and toured the refugee centers and fought for the Bengalis in Capitol Hill. In a lighter vein, it so happened that while the massive blood letting and killings were going on in East Pakistan, the three officers in the Dacca Consulate who fought for justice for the Bengalis, were named Blood, Butcher and Killgore!"
For me as a person of Indian origin, it was a surprise to read that 90% of all those 10 million refugees from East Bengal were Hindus. This information was never highlighted in the Indian media in 1970-71. I think it was good that they did not because otherwise, we might have had to deal with sectarian groups in India which would have tried to convert the crisis into a crisis for Muslims in India. The other point is that India, for all its proclamations of non-alignment and third-world solidarity, found itself completely without friends from the world at large and was censured in the UN General Assembly. India had to depend on the USSR mostly for diplomatic support and had to fund the refugee relief mainly from its own impoverished masses. India's 'friends' in the Islamic world, like Jordan, Turkey, Iran and Egypt, transferred fighter aircraft to bolster their Islamic bretheren in Pakistan, even though India had more Muslims than Pakistan in 1971!
It shows the deep failure of India's conduct of foreign policy in the early years after independence. The Indian edition of the book has the strange title 'India's Secret war in East Pakistan'. Even for ordinary citizens like me in India in 1971, there was nothing secretive about India's involvement in East Pakistan as early as March 1971. We used to habitually joke that it was probably the Bengal regiment of the Indian army that is euphemistically called Mukti Bahini! Finally, it is a matter of pride for India's pluralist society that the three Generals who conducted and won the war were a Sikh (J.S.Aurora), a Parsi (Sam Manekshaw) and a Sephardic Jew(Rafael-Jacob).
-- Ragu Nathan
And similarly:
The Blood Telegram is an absolutely critical book, outlining not only the mass-murder of Bengalis in 1971 but also the absolute and utter degradation of the spirit implicit in imperial policy (in this case that of the U.S.). While the slaughter in Vietnam continued under the bellicose and paranoid regime of Nixon and Kissinger, another, more time-intense slaughter happened a little to the West in one of the world's poorest countries- what is now Bangladesh. Very likely millions were wantonly slaughtered (and scores of thousands raped) in the West Pakistani pogrom against an East Pakistani population yearning to be free.
-- Romi Mahajan
The book quotes Nixon from his own audio tape archive. The comments about India parallel Nixon and Kissinger's hatred for the Vietnamese.
We're the civilized people in America. They're not.
Consider McCain and Mitt Romney. What would those two be like if they had the U.S. military to use for murders?
Nothing has changed. It's not going to change. Not with Republicans while they pick leaders same as 1960 to 2012.