Some say that when someone dies, if you don’t have something nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything. I would say that when a war criminal dies, if you can’t tell the truth, you should keep your mouth shut.
If a war criminal in the global south died, western imperialists would not say something nice, unless, of course, that war criminal was aligned with the west. There is no default response of niceness towards a dead war criminal who wasn’t part of the empire.
This is a long-winded way of saying that following Dick Cheney’s death, the tributes we’ve seen from centrists have not been about civility. They have been about support for his war crimes.
The media’s framing of Cheney has been almost as bad as the centrist politicians’. Headlines I’ve seen from organisations such as the “neutral” BBC have tried to sanitise Cheney’s record.
Imagine framing Himmler as “the most influential chancellor in Nazi Germany’s history” because we should be respectful towards dead people…
Dick Cheney was one of the architects of the so-called War on Terror and while his death toll is hard to quantify, it’s plausibly in the millions. He played a leading role in the bombings of Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, and Somalia. He was responsible for firing depleted uranium shells in Fallujah which has led to babies being born with deformities to this day. Cheney said he had no regrets about Iraq and that “we made exactly the right decisions”.
When Himmler died, we did not say nice things about him. It is equally perverse to praise a man who killed potentially millions in the Middle East. If you disagree with that statement, it’s because you don’t value Middle Eastern lives.
Cheney served as White House chief of staff in the 1970s and was a driving force behind the Cold War. He served as defence secretary during the first Iraq war and the invasion of Panama under President George HW Bush. He later became vice president under President George W Bush and was a huge advocate of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He pushed the lie that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
Some liberals speak fondly of Cheney because he was a critic of Trump, but he was not a critic for any moral reason. He was simply smart enough to know that Trump’s stupidity and unpredictability were a threat to the empire. Cheney initially endorsed Trump but turned against him, due to his attitudes towards Russia and Nato. It speaks volumes about Kamala Harris that Cheney endorsed her instead.
Cheney was worried Trump might not be a warmonger so he must have been relieved to see him threaten Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, and other countries before he passed.
Cheney was such a great guy that he opposed the release of Nelson Mandela, and once blasted his hunting companion with 30 pellets from a shotgun, causing him to have a heart attack. Cheney suffered five heart attacks himself and was twice fitted with a pacemaker before receiving a heart transplant, helping him to avoid death far longer than he deserved.
While Cheney was keen to send young men to die in foreign lands, he wasn’t keen to wear a military uniform himself. As a young man, he pursued multiple legal avenues to win a string of deferments. Now I don’t begrudge anyone for avoiding military service. I do, however, begrudge it when demonic old men expect young men to make sacrifices they weren’t willing to make themselves.
Cheney was the very opposite of a patriot who was willing to sacrifice Americans to line his own pockets. He was once the CEO of Halliburton, the company that made $40 billion from the war on terror. Halliburton won the contract to restore Iraq’s oil industry after the war ended. Cheney personally received deferred payments of over $2 million in one of the most egregious conflicts of interests in modern history.
Cheney was a morally repugnant individual who played a key role in setting up the Gantanamo Bay torture facility. In 2001, he pushed President Bush to sign an executive order stripping “terror suspects “ of their legal rights.
Cheney was a self-described “proponent of enhanced interrogation techniques”, such as waterboarding, which are not only barbaric but proven not to work. Tortured prisoners will say whatever you want to hear and this meant the US kept obtaining false information. Even worse, many of those tortured at Guantanamo turned out to be innocent.
Cheney was not just a demon, he was a liability, and anyone who is being nice about him, either knows nothing about him, or supports his evil deeds. No decent person would be nice about someone who spread untold misery throughout his wretched life and was remorseless until the end. If there is a hell, Dick Cheney is there now, and it is absolutely where he belongs.
Thank you for reading. All of my content will always be freely available, but if you wish to support my work, you can do so at Ko-fi or Patreon. Likes, shares and comments also help massively.
To quote Lemmy from Motorhead," being dead doesn't make anyone less of c*nt." Amen to that.
Absolutely loved this article 👏 well written and explained