- There is a toxic quality to war that affects the inner
life of individuals and, as a collective consequence, the society itself.
In the degradation and dehumanization of the individual lies the destruction
of all mankind.
-
- - Butler Shaffer
-
-
- Americans have a great and terrible secret they hide
within themselves, ever pretending that it doesn't exist. But in the deepest,
darkest part of their hearts, if they're honest, they know with certainty
that it does.
-
- But, oh, do they deny it! Americans couch this denial
in all manner of panicky rationalizations - religious, political, psychological,
astrological, you name it ... any pretense will do in order to deny what's
really going on, in order to avoid the crushing guilt for what is nothing
less than inexcusable, semiconscious savagery.
-
- This secret is so big and so dark it can't be confronted
all at once. Better to take it one little piece at a time, and then let
the idea of its overwhelming magnitude sink in just a little bit at a time,
so that by the time you confront all the aspects of this multi-faceted
horror, some of you who read this can perhaps begin to publicly admit this
terrible secret and perhaps even begin to take positive steps to correct
the stupendous damage this secret has caused - and is causing right this
very minute.
-
- One little piece at a time. Let's start with Iraq, since
that seems to be the one place in the world at present where the needless
bleeding is the worst.
-
- Listen to this carefully, Americans. Do you understand
that the death toll in Iraq over the past 13 years numbers in the high
hundreds of thousands? And do you understand that America is responsible
for virtually all of those deaths? Let's say 99 percent of them.
-
- I can hear all those denial switches clicking on out
there as I ask this question. Hey we're fighting terror! Those Muslims
are savages! Saddam deserved what he got! We're trying to bring democracy
to an uncivilized country!
-
- I'll repeat it as a statement. Iraqis murdered since
1991? 800,000 to 1.5 million. American lives lost because of combat initiated
by the United States? 1,000 or so in the past two years, 10,000 more in
the intervening years since the first Gulf War introduced deadly depleted
uranium ammunition onto the world's stage, and fatally poisoned so many
of our own troops.
-
- 11,000 Americans dead! Around a million Iraqi lives suddenly
snuffed out for reasons you can bet most of them really never understood.
And worse, future generations of both Iraqis and Americans doomed to complicated
lives of cancer and birth defects. And that's just in this one single country,
in this one continuous military action.
-
- Americans are responsible for every single one of these
murders, every single one of these tragedies. And not a single one of these
sad stories - these shocking terminations of unsuspecting, productive and
innocent lives - ever represented any threat to the physical security of
the United States.
-
- Can you comprehend that? Is anything getting through?
-
- Americans, in their selfish, willful blindness, are responsible
for thousands of deaths all around the world - EVERY YEAR! And they have
been for more than a hundred years.
-
- No, you can't get away with saying we're fighting a war,
and war is hell. This is not a war in Iraq! Saddam had no airforce, and
we made him destroy all his missiles. Then we embraced the lies told about
him in order to begin a multi-year campaign of mass murder. Iraq never
had a chance. It was never a fair fight.
-
- Let me ask you this. We went to war in Iraq to get rid
of Saddam. Saddam is long gone. Why are we still killing people? Why are
we still sacrificing our own soldiers? And why are we planning more wars?
-
- You know the answer. It's in the deepest, darkest part
of your heart. We didn't go to war against Iraq to overthrow a tyrant.
We invaded Iraq because we wanted to steal a country's precious resources,
because we, in the blatant hubris of our soulless blindness, believe we
can steal for any reason.
-
- This is how Americans come to support mass murder of
innocents for reasons that are lies. This has been going on full bore since
at least the late 1890s, when American obliterated a million Filipinos
to keep them safe from the Spanish. All this of course is not counting
the 60 million Native Americans we exterminated throughout the 19th century,
because they were savages, less than human.
-
- And this is of course the paradigm that civilization
has followed ever since, the British in India, the French in Indochina,
the Belgians and the Portuguese in Africa, and all of the above and more
throughout the bloody conquest of the Western Hemisphere.
-
- Some literature asserts that even Hitler was impressed
with the extermination policies of the white Europeans as they raped and
pillaged their way across an undeveloped continent. Of course the more
germane comparison these days is the way the Israelis have cut down the
hapless Palestinians over the last half century, using their "holy"
books to declare anyone in their voracious path to be less than human,
and therefore eligible to be murdered without a second thought.
-
- But Americans need to realize - and admit - that Israelis
learned this heartless attitude from us. I even heard the esteemed Jewish
theologian Michael Lerner - darling of the Zionist gatekeeper liberals
- use this argument: how can Americans complain what the Israelis are doing
to the indigenous inhabitants of their accursed chunk of Middle Eastern
sand when the Americans set the example for the world to follow by exterminating
the entire indigenous population of North America, and have behaved the
same way throughout the rest of the world ever since? He has a point.
-
- And this is the great and terrible secret all Americans
hide within themselves, and palliate their guilt with such lame rationalizations
as manifest destiny or "we need that oil."
-
- Fact is, none of those Palestinians, nor any of those
Iraqis, would have died without the tacit approval of Americans. It wouldn't
have happened.
-
- Sure, you can sit back and pontificate that those Islamic
"savages" would have killed each other anyway, but you can't
prove that, and you can prove that it has been American manipulation, first
and foremost, that has allowed that vicious bunch of Israelis to go into
that region and become a raging terminal cancer. I supposed it's only poetic
justice that now Israel, with its pervasive political control of the U.S.
political system, can manipulate events to the point where it can get America
to come into the same region and do its dirty work, as is happening now
in Iraq.
-
- Iraq is not now nor ever has been a threat to the physical
security of the United States. But Americans lie to themselves - we all
know about THOSE lies - and arbitrarily declare that Iraq can bomb us with
imaginary drones in 45 minutes, so we better bomb them first.
-
- Same with Palestine. Palestinians were never a threat
to anyone. But like Iraqis, they had something we wanted. And it is the
great and terrible secret of every American that we will permit - and even
cheer - the mass murder of innocents simply because we want to rob them
of what is rightfully theirs.
-
- Ask your preacher about that. I'm sure he'll produce
a suitable Biblical quote that approves of the murder of anybody who has
something you want.
-
- But we can't blame this on a worldwide Jewish conspiracy,
nor on the Jesuits, the elusive Illuminati, nor even the London-based global
banking aristocracy. This is about the American people, and their continuing
willingness to look the other way while those who are all too willing to
prey on the innocent kill people for profit and pass the price savings
on to the blind cowards who sputter half-baked maxims about terror and
security while they sit in their easy chairs in their stiflingly boring
and braindead American suburbs.
-
- And contemplate the horrid fact that both presidential
candidates endorse this indefensible policy of war based on lies, guaranteeing
exactly the kind of future so chillingly outlined in Schwarzenegger's "Terminator"
movies.
-
- We no longer need an excuse to kill anyone with impunity.
Of course, in our materialistic American coma we have apparently become
too dumbed down to realize that what happens "out there" will
soon happen "in here," but by the time that the neocon self-immolation
of America finally dawns on us, it will be way too late to do anything
about it. Perhaps it already is.
-
- As the globalized American war machine spreads its flaming
hell around the globe, the heart of the devil (enthusiastically cheered
on by many who call themselves preachers) beats loudly in inane American
hamlets among those silent morons who simply refuse to acknowledge what
is being done in their names, who simply refuse to realize that what is
happening to those faceless strangers so far away is one day soon also
going to happen to us, right here.
-
-
-
-
- John Kaminski is an Internet columnist based in Florida
whose essays are seen on hundreds of websites around the world. They have
been collected into two anthologies, "America's Autopsy Report"
and the soon-to-be-published "The Perfect Enemy." For more information
go to http://www.johnkaminski.com/
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