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As a footnote, the obituaries on the death of actor Ed Asner, the protagonist of that series called Lou Grant, they collected that the production was canceled for ideological reasons. Not only could the content of the series be encrypted as a progressive vision of journalism in democracy, but also the protagonist had dared to criticize, from his position as union representative of the actors, the activities of the United States Government to overthrow democratic governments and impose related dictatorships in Latin America. A sin that made him unpatriotic. Those little things in a life invite us to loosen up the memory muscle a bit. We tend to be left with a vision of the past so reduced to a cliché, so contained in a simple and accessible story, that we miss one of the great pleasures of life, which is none other than facing complexity without eagerness to solve it, but to celebrate it. Now that we live in a time of bonfire and piousness, the acceptance of that complexity demands memory and a taste for nurturing the official versions of these small discords. Nothing was ever simple and in the future it will not be.
The departure of allied troops from Afghanistan may warrant a more ambitious look at the foreign policy of the United States and its allies. The colossal rout and a drone attack that killed an innocent family capped off a misguided variant of interventionism. And although the mission has not been fulfilled, at least many Afghans have for some time had unique experiences such as studying, expressing themselves, informing themselves and acquiring vital ambitions in a certain freedom. Strategic neglect has allowed teaching to remain in the hands of the ultra-religious for decades. When we do not want to understand that formation is the seed of almost everything, we run into impotence. Because the departure from Kabul has been, in short, a spectacle of helplessness and frustration. The association of this sad end with the 9/11 attacks point to a disastrous management of the shock emotional. In a recent documentary titled Coup 53, the exile Taghi Amirani, together with editor Walter Murch, analyzes the intrigues surrounding the coup that overthrew a democratic government in Iran to clear the way for the klepto-dictatorship of the Shah and finally the revolutionary fundamentalist reaction. As far back as 1953, the British and American secret services engineered a painful plot to bring down Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq, democratically elected but who had dared to undertake the nationalization of Iranian oil.
It is not easy to understand the plan hatched as a response to the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. Twenty years later, we started laying each piece and the result is chilling. The amount of money derived from companies and individuals borders on the pornographic. There are family sagas related to war that will live on for generations of this plunder. One of the reasons for the immediate advance of the Taliban before the US military withdrawal was due to the intrinsic corruption of the puppet governments. One of the greatest moral defeats of the democracies involved has been this intersection of monetary interests and a supposed opportunistic geostrategy. The official story will have to be told as a notable failure.