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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