America (& Allies) Create Slave-Markets in Libya and then Condemn Them
On November 14th, CNN broadcast a landmark investigative report titled “People for sale: Where lives are auctioned for $400” and showed many marketplaces in Libya where Blacks are sold as slaves in the same way it used to be done in the United States and especially in the southern US states. This commerce wasn’t explained but merely shown. However, CNN here exhibited, by publishing this 7-minute video news report, a courage and an honesty that’s extraordinary in US journalism, because it brought home to the American people one of the many vile but too often unreported results of US foreign policy, and of the US military that is the top-respected of all US institutions as shown in Gallup’s ongoing polls on Americans’ respect and disrespect for over a dozen US institutions and federal government agencies. The American public place the American military (the organization that carries out America’s invasions such as of Libya) at the very top of Americans’ value-system, way above any other federal agency or department. Maybe Germans under Adolf Hitler were also like this. After all, how does a nation perpetrate destructions of vulnerable nations one-after-another, for years on end, such as of Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Libya, and Syria, and Yemen — none of which had ever even invaded the US — and still keep its public hoodwinked faithfully in support of such a perpetual-war machine (its military-industrial complex), even increasing its budget to destroy yet more nations, while actually cutting spending to benefit the US taxpaying public itself? This seems like ancient Sparta, but on steroids. A very dangerous country, it is, whose citizens accept being exploited for the benefit of its tiny aristocracy, who do actually benefit from all this military spending. (This statement isn’t referring to the low-level soldiers, who simply do what they’re told; it’s referring instead to the people who own controlling interests in companies such as Lockheed Martin, which make the ‘goods’ those soldiers employ as tools-of-their-trade. America’s soldiers are merely the workers, who use those tools. The generals, however, often become executives and board-members of the aristocracy’s institutions, and this is then called the “revolving door” between the official government and the private one. The generals are, indeed, agents of the aristocracy, but the general public are just the aristocracy’s serfs.)
These slave-markets that blossomed into existence soon after we invaded, can be added to all the other destructions of Libya, and of Iraq, and of Syria, and of Honduras, and of many other nations, that the US military has destroyed. This publicly supported mass-murdering operation against the residents of foreign countries — the US military establishment that Americans supremely respect — has been enforcing US Government policies abroad, and it wouldn’t function unless the same aristocracy that owns the weapons-makers controls also the government that orders it to perpetrate such evils as these invasions. (Furthermore, in addition to America’s outright invasions of countries that never invaded us, there have also been CIA coups destroying yet more such countries, as in Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, Honduras 2009, and Ukraine 2014, just to mention the most prominent ones. The US empire doesn’t function only by direct military means: the US military-industrial complex is a many-faceted beast, including the CIA etc. The actual annual budget for it is now around a trillion dollars.)
Here’s an excerpt from the CNN report about this Libyan slavery that the US and its allies have produced:
Carrying concealed cameras into a property outside the capital of Tripoli last month, we witness a dozen people go “under the hammer” in the space of six or seven minutes.
“Does anybody need a digger? This is a digger, a big strong man, he’ll dig,” the salesman, dressed in camouflage gear, says. “What am I bid, what am I bid?”
Buyers raise their hands as the price rises, “500, 550, 600, 650 …” Within minutes it is all over and the men, utterly resigned to their fate, are being handed over to their new “masters.”
After the auction, we met two of the men who had been sold. They were so traumatized by what they’d been through that they could not speak, and so scared that they were suspicious of everyone they met.
This was a predictable result even before our invasion, just as was predictable there the numberless hundreds of thousands of refugees from the chaos that would be produced by America’s (and America’s allies) killing Muammar Gaddafi (of which Hillary Clinton was so proud) and destroying his anti-jihadist government (which had served his nation so vastly better than its conquerors have done). The guilt for this slavery doesn’t rest only with the leader of the US alliance; but it does rest mainly with that, because, as Barack Obama himself said, on 28 May 2014, “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation,” which means that every other nation is “dispensable,” in his eyes. Even his successor, Trump, hasn’t yet said anything so blatantly evil as that. Of course, it’s natural that a country which can tolerate such leaders will be viewed worldwide as “the greatest threat to peace in the world,” as the US is, in fact, viewed.