For some reason – maybe I’ve been reading the wrong sort of literature – the only collocations I know for the word benign are “tumour” and “hegemon”.
“We were all relieved to learn that her tumour was benign.”
” USA was a benign hegemon.”
At present, USA is no longer a hegemon, and it certainly isn’t and never has been benign. Look at all the wars – the past, present and future wars.
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But this post is not about my views, not even about the Ukraine or Iran wars. I would like to bring to your attention the work of a Swede living in Norway who has devoted his career to research.
Ola Tunander is “research professor emeritus” at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO, an institution that he has served since 1987). He is a heavyweight on research about inter alia the cold war and Nordic security issues.
However, he is not first and foremost a particularly good writer. The articles I wish to bring to your attention are not eloquent. They will not move you to tears. In fact they may even bore you because they are detached, painfully detailed and based on research over many years. Moreover they concern a topic that may not even interest you: the assassination of the Swedish prime minister, Olav Palme, in 1986. The police investigation was reminiscent of that following the killing of a US president in 1963: It was farcical.
The reason I recommend the four articles is that they demonstrate that USA’s intentions never were, in any sense or anywhere, “benign”, not before the fall of the Soviet Union nor after. Not in Europe nor anywhere else. Not even in Sweden and certainly not for the majority of US citizens. Also, they demonstrate that no matter how honest a cop you are, or police prosecutor, or forensic scientist, or witness, you will do as you’re told if you smell sulphur. Else: you will at best lose your job. And people do get killed, you know.
The four articles focus on and examine the reliability of various sources. If you find you haven’t the patience for such scrutiny, I advise you to read as much of Part I as you can manage and then skip to Part IV.
The bottom line — whether or not you do actually read those four articles, is that the US billionaires running USA will stop at nothing in order to get rid of anyone standing in their way. The most recent case in point is the rape of Venezuela, which they have been planning for decades in both parties, with repeated unsuccessful coup attempts and regime change operations and by demonising its leaders,. Trump finally did it! Yup, he’s a degenerate, but his foreign policy differs from that of past administrations only in that it makes no attempt to pretend to be benign.