"I know Elliott," Boot told an interviewer for The New Yorker. "He has been a colleague of mine at the Council on Foreign Relations, and I think that he is a very smart person. I think he is basically a good person and he is somebody who I don’t see as being terribly ideological." The interviewer pressed Boot fairly hard, and elicited this revealing tidbit among others:
You know, there’s no question that the Reagan Administration wasn’t some unique offense on Elliot’s part. I think the Reagan Administration did call into question the veracity of the reporting on the massacre, which was borne out by subsequent investigation, but you have to ask: What is the proper response to human-rights abuses by an allied regime, which in this case is battling a communist insurgency?I think that first sentence is some version of "But all the cool kids in the Reagan Administration were enabling massacres and torture! It wasn't just Elliott!" As if that were somehow an exculpation. It's probably not fair to plug some other names in there, but I'll do it anyway: There's no question that the Third Reich wasn't some unique offense on Eichmann's part! He is a good person, just doing his job, and not terribly ideological. That runs afoul of Godwin's Law, perhaps, but moderate Republican apologetics call for extreme measures.
You could plug in other names with equal effect: Stalin's or Pol Pot's measures battling insurgencies by petty-bourgeois counter-revolutionaries, say. Not only Hitler but Marshall Petain and Emperor Hirohito, among so many others, were battling communist insurgencies; which is why the United States chose fascist collaborators to run Europe and Asia after defeating the Axis. The suppression of Trotsky and his followers by Lenin and Stalin was also a battle against a communist insurgency.
"Communism", like "socialism," is generally used as a meaningless epithet when argument fails or is simply too much work. Every government that the US helped to overthrow in the twentieth century was smeared as communist, even when it was obviously no such thing.
Boot, like his peers, just keeps digging himself in deeper, as he tries vainly to explain why his critics just don't understand what he was trying to get at in his defenses of endless war, torture, and massacre. He's not like Trump! he cries plaintively. Few are convinced, but the corporate media will continue giving him space to keep on bloviating and whining. It's social welfare for right-wing hacks. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Boot stamping on a human face ... forever.
(I don't know about the title of this post, maybe it's a bit much, maybe it's too easy. But the alternatives were worse; you have to look at the context.)
