Now is the Time to Remember Colin Powell's Victims
The soldier, general, diplomat, and war profiteer, was rewarded in life for his war crimes with fame, popularity, and millions of dollars
One of the most prolific war criminals of the past half-century has died. Colin Powell lived a long life and finally died at 84 this week.
I’m certain many of his family members and friends are sad today at his passing. I am not.
I instead find it appropriate to use the occasion of war criminals’ deaths to reflect on the lives of the people they snuffed out. For his part, Powell is responsible for the death of over a million people, tortured, murdered, and slandered posthumously, on several different continents.
For his crimes on behalf of U.S. empire Powell was rewarded with titles, accolades, and tens of millions of dollars. It seems to me that he has thus already been given more than his share of praise and goodwill.
Powell was instrumental in silencing whistleblowers and covering up the My Lai Massacre, one of the single most shocking war crimes in American history, where U.S. soldiers assaulted and murdered hundreds of unarmed men, women, children, and infants in Vietnam.
Powell was a key figure in the Iran Contra scandal where the U.S. illegally sold weapons to Iran in order to fund murderous “Contras” in Nicaragua who used the support to torture, rape, and kill civilians.
Powell oversaw the brutal and senseless invasion of Panama, which violated their sovereignty and murdered hundreds of innocent people.
Powell oversaw illegal massacres in the first Gulf War, including the murder of Iraqis after the war had been officially ended.
Powell’s lies to the American people and the world about fabricated Iraqi weapons were singularly essential in stoking support for another war with Iraq in 2003. As a direct result of Powell’s lies and campaigning for the war on Iraq, over a million Iraqi people, mostly women and children, have been murdered.
On this, the day of this war criminal Colin Powell’s death, I want to extend my condolences to all the aforementioned victims of his cold, genocidal life and career. Please join me in doing so.