The Four Color Media Monitor

Well, it is decidedly time to have a look at what this strange fellow called Scott Slemmons wrote in his response to Michael Medved's critique of Marvel's destruction of Captain America. And from what I can tell, it's even worse than I thought, because the following pretty much shows that this Slemmons has something very, VERY wrong with himself:

Medved also objects to another issue of the comic, where Captain America visits Dresden and recounts the story of the bombing of that city during World War II. Now Medved is objecting to the discussion of events that could be found in any decent junior high history textbook? He's objecting that Captain America is not proud of what is considered one of the greatest wartime atrocities in modern history?

Hold it right there, Slemmons, because that is your most hideous error here, and pushes the detonater button on any credence that could be given to your argument.

It seems to me that poor Mr. Slemmons is quite intent on obscuring a most important matter in all this, that being what Germany had done, which was to inflict the Holocaust upon the Jews of Europe, and even the Gypsies, among others. Speaking of which, I tried using the Ctrl+F option on the page, trying to find the words "Holocaust", and even "Jews", and didn't find anything. Tsk tsk tsk, just what impact does Slemmons expect to make if he's going to obscure the atrocities the Nazis inflicted upon innocent Jews and others in Europe, and even their bombing England with rockets, and refuse to bear in mind that Germany brought it upon themselves with their hostile, barbarous aggression?

Slemmons also makes an accusation against the American government without even confirming his facts. He says:

The desire to whitewash American history is a major theme of Medved's column. He also objects to an issue of the comic that says that American weapons were used by foreign governments to harm their own people (again, it's true. In fact, during the Iran-Iraq War, the American government provided Saddam Hussein with the chemical weapons that he later used to gas the Kurds--not to mention all the "freedom fighters" we've given money to in Latin America).

Uh, Mr. Slemmons, I don't suppose you've got any facts to confirm that? Hello? Because from what I'm able to turn up, it was - guess who? - GERMANY during the 1980s that provided Saddam's dictatorship with the very chemical weapons he used against the Kurds:

The reason the BND [German foreign intelligence service] is well-informed of Iraqi WMD programs - nuclear, biological and chemical - is straightforward: since the early 1980s, it has monitored German exports of dual-use nuclear technologies, precursor chemicals for poison-gas weapons, and "pharmaceutical" products and equipment for biological weapons manufacture to the Middle East. Indeed, there are strong suspicions that it was a silent partner in a Hamburg front company, Water Engineering Trading or WET, which covered for and facilitated such exports. Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix said in his January 27 report that tons of Iraqi chemical and biological agents and precursors were unaccounted for. Over the years, well over half of the precursor materials and a majority of the tools and know-how for their conversion into weapons were sold to Iraq by German firms - both prior to and after the 1991 Gulf War. The BND has the details.

And, as the English-language section of Deusche Welle reported in 2002:

Germany, Iraq’s number one arms supplier?

The most contentious piece of news for Germany is that the report names it as the number one supplier of weapons supplies to Iraq. German firms are supposed to easily outnumber the firms from other countries who have been exporting to Iraq.

They have delivered technical know-how, components, basic substances and even entire technical facilities for the development of atomic, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction to Iraq right since 1975.

In some cases, conventional military and technical dealings between Germany and Iraq are said to date till 2001, ten years after the second Gulf war and a time when international sanctions against Saddam Hussein are still in place.

The paper reports that the dossier contains several indications of cases, where German authorities right up to the Finance Ministry tolerated the illegal arms cooperation and also promoted to it to an extent.As noted in this research, there were other European countries and sources that provided weapons to Saddam's gang, but Germany was by far the biggest offender. That Slemmons failed to look that up shows just how ignorant he really is.

And with that told, I think it possible to say that, Slemmons made a very serious error (or, did he know better and was deliberately lying?). If he's going to ignore how Germany was the one that started the whole disaster of WW2 and put the blame only on the US for Saddam's getting WMDs, then his whole argument just crashes to earth dead on arrival.

Labels: Captain America, Europe and Asia, islam and jihad, marvel comics, moonbat writers, politics, terrorism