War in Iraq, going overkill on the enemy? The US government making you believe we have to wage this war because otherwise Saddam Hussein will destroy us all. We’ve heard this in the months after 9/11. However, this little video fragment I found originated from  years before, when 9/11 meant the US sponsored coup d’etat in Chile…

Bill Hicks was, in my humble opinion, one of the best stand up comedians out there. I’m not so much in the mood of getting in that whole debate whether Denis Leary stole his work or not so lets now get into that!

What is interesting about this clip is to see that Hicks’ story, even though it’s about the Persian Gulf War, could be applied to most of the US’ military actions throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. When you hear his story you can simply replace Iraq with any other place the US invaded, be it Vietnam, Grenada, Afghanistan, Iraq (again?), Korea, Somalia, Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Pakistan, etc etc etc.

Some might say that Hicks was ahead of his time when telling this story, especially in the context that this same war was repeated about a decade later by yet another Bush. However, when taking a closer look it is part of a common pattern that has been repeated over and over and over. Sadly this means that Bill Hicks wasn’t that ahead of his time in this story, but simply described something that has always part of US’ foreign policy.

And here I was trying to simply post a Bill Hicks video…