Iranians! Trust US imperialists and You Die!

From Dwight in Hungary 1956 to Don in Iran in 2026, Same Shit, Different Smells.

See Opinion | U.S. Misled Hungarians in 1956 Revolt - The New York Times.

See 'Help is on the way,' Donald Trump says as he urges Iranians to 'keep protesting' | BBC News

Between 1995 and 2005, for a decade, I was intensely engrossed in policy advocacy in Washington DC. Ralph Nader, who undoubtedly is one of the greatest American Citizens of Lebanese ancestral origin, generously offered me a free desk, an access to a copy, a free telephone, an administrative support at his Center for the Study of Responsive Law in Washington, DC. The future mother of my older American girl was “incubated” at the center at the time, and Ralph was extremely nurturing and supportive of the next generation of activists whom he saw as “promising”.

I remain forever grateful to him.

Retrospectively, I call my activism during those Washington days the exilic politics of delusions - that is, my own delusions.

Specifically, that there are “American (liberal) values” (or moral sentiments) that any freedom fighter or dissident or dissident in exile could appeal to, unlike the former Soviets or China’s Maoists.

This delusion was widely shared among my peers - I am 62 now - and in the previous generation of Burmese dissidents who ended up as exiles in USA.

My elders, a previous generation of exiles, were equally delusional.

But they were either not honest enough or simply lacked the intellectual capacity to critically reflect on the exilic failures, to tell us the younger generation - in our 20’s and 30’s - that American policy makers who bark freedom around the world would not lift a finger when push comes to shove.

Painful fact: American policy class attach no values, when it comes to Other (societies and countries) to human lives, social stability, racial and religious harmony or peace (not simply absence of violent conflict, but equal and non-exploitative group relations without which genuine peace is not conceivable).

To the contrary, American political class that formulate foreign policy are like groups of vultures that are in search of carcasses to feast on.

In that decade, as a student organizer and later a full-time activist, I met loads of policy-makers, advisers, staffers and so on.

Misguidedly, I tried to focus on “our shared values”, in every single policy lobby meeting or media appearance, using my American education and oral and advocacy skills I learned from my American peers. I would put on the best tailor-made suit I ever owned to go what I at the time thought were “important meetings” - in the West Wing, the Executive House, the Hill (Congressional offices), or simply cafes and bars, to try to input Washington’s policy direction on Burma affairs.

Myanmar, an utter falsity language-wise, was not the word we used in Washington or among the circles of dissidents abroad, in those days, despite the fact that the country’s name was changed by the country’s imbecilic military dictatorship in 1989 as an act of whitewashing - a faux decolonializing act - the bloody crackdown of 1988 nationwide uprisings during which 3,000 unarmed protestors - the New York Times’ conservative estimate, the locals would tell you - were gunned down on the streets of Rangoon, Mandalay, Saggaing, and so on.

Beyond Burma circles, those of us exiled dissidents from “shit hole countries under tinpot dictators” - strongly believed - and still do - in freedom, equality and human rights, so much so that we were prepared fully to give up everything - our families “back home”, normal careers and concomitant economic security, the smells and sights of one’s own birthplace -, risk lives and reputations, and embrace a freedom struggle with uncertain outcome.

Alas, I wasn’t prepared for the rude awakening, “lobbying” - I LOATH this word - US Executive Branch and Congress, that would come towards the end of that decade.

It came in the form of a one-on-one meeting with a senior policy bureaucrat in the political affairs division on Asian affairs in US State Department.

In his words, “I can’t conscience myself to tell you that you (Burmese democratic opposition led by Aung San Suu Kyi, then) have the support of the US Government while we are not prepared to do anything meaningful.”

A Korean War vet, he was old enough to remember what the (General) Dwight Eisenhower Administration did to the Hungarian Uprising in Budapest in 1956.

He pointedly told me what Washington did during those fateful weeks in Hungary: it let the bloodbath of Hungarian dissidents clamouring for democratic change and a nation free of Moscow’s grip.

In the year 2026, my fellow Myanmar or Burmese exiles - as well as those in the country - still have not learned the most important lesson: Washington, whatever the party is in charge, is not trustworthy, much less an ally for any liberation struggle.

Once at a Burma policy seminar held at the Brookings Institution, Wesley Clark, the honouree of Presidential Medal of Freedom and Supreme Commander of NATO in Europe during the Kosovo War, graced a small group of Burmese dissidents and Washington’s usual Burma policy wonks with his American exceptionalist bullshit of “We Americans balance our democratic values and interests.”

This was not long after Bush-Cheney plundered Iraq for oil.

Remember former drug-addict and born-again George W., as President, uttering the non-sense — “freedom is on the march” — at the start of the second US invasion that destroyed Iraq and gifted West Asia with Daesh or ISIS.

I was dying to tell him that you Americans (policy-types) lift NOT a finger unless to advance your corporate and other interests.

I decided to bite my tongue. Why talk to the wall?

The global destruction for a dime or a lunacy of Washington’s strategies is a bipartisan thing, a policy-makers’ pastime, if you like.

See Madeleine Albright saw US as an ‘indispensable nation’ and NATO expansion eastward as essential

The late Madeline Albright, who escaped the Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia under the false ID as a young Catholic girl, proclaimed her adopted (imperialist) country “the indispensable nation”, while at the same time treating literally hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, including many thousands of ill and sick children as, well, disposable, in effect.

Once, I ended a Burma policy meeting at the West Wing of the White House with a group of senior policy staffers on Burma and Asia, including the sitting President Bill Clinton’s speechwriter, telling them pointedly, “you know Burmese lives are not just statistics.”

I didn’t want to return to that building for another meeting. There was no bridge to burn: no bridge to start with, really. That is, no bridge exists between humanist resisters and those who view policy-destroyed human lives as “collateral damage.”

A sense of me talking to a wall of inhumanity washed all over me, and in those moments, I do not hold back, for my own self-respect.

To fuckin’ hell with your American policy!, is my default position.

The oppressed typically liberate themselves, under the right circumstances, even their march to freedom takes centuries.

When I saw Donald Trump’s “Help is on the way”, I feel shiver down my spine for the genuine Iranian dissidents who have taken to the streets in large protest of daily economic hardships and perpetual state of literal insecurity - largely resultant of decades of Washington’s policies of economic warfare and literal military threats and strikes.

As with the local elements in Teheran and other places, reportedly orchestrated by Mossad with the declared aim of “regime change” (meaning disintegration of Iran, the last stronghold of resistance against Zio-Imperialist expansion of domination and control in the oil-rich and strategic West Asia), they fully deserve their body bags.