[Peace-discuss] What we - & Obama - are responsible for

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Creeping Terror: The New American Way of War
	Written by Chris Floyd
	Tuesday, 18 May 2010 13:04

The American way of war is a marvelously ingenious thing. And thoroughly modern 
too. No more of that "don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes" jazz; 
your modern "warfighter" (they aren't called "soldiers" anymore, you know) 
prefers to view his targets through, say, a computer screen safely ensconced 
back in the Homeland or thousands of feet in the sky, or else through the 
unearthly greenish glow of night-vision scopes. And open combat? Forget it. The 
new American way is the sneak attack on civilian homes in the dead of night. You 
creep up, you break in, you cap a few ragheads, then you run away. What glory! 
What magnificent valor!

The Washington Post reports on yet another glorious page in the annals of the 
exceptional nation "intended by God to be a light set on a hill to serve as a 
beacon of hope and Christian charity to a lost and dying world." It's the usual 
story. Secret "warfighters" suddenly attack a civilian compound in the middle of 
the night. This, not surprisingly, provokes a few shots from some of the 
inhabitants, who have no idea who is attacking their home. The superior 
firepower of the beacons of hope and Christian charity quickly overcome the 
piddling arms of the demonic heathens, however, and in a trice, there are dead 
gook – sorry, raghead – bodies all around. Including children – you've got to 
have children in your body count these days, if you want to be a thoroughly 
modern Christian beacon warfighter. Then you and your brave band of secret 
warriors run away and prepare for the next bold raid.

Naturally, the local losers come out and boo-hoo-hoo over their dead relatives, 
as if no one had ever seen their son shot to death in front of their eyes 
before.  They trot out all their evidence that the victims had nothing to do 
with the "insurgents" (which is what your modern warfighter calls anyone who 
objects to the presence of armed foreigners prowling all over their land), they 
keen and wail and do all the other animalistic stuff that primitives do when one 
of the pack snuffs it. "Oh, I lost my son, oh my son, my precious son," etc., 
etc. – as if there's not a dozen more when he came from; you know how those 
people breed.

But anyway, here's the beauty part: if the local dorky darkies start to 
complain, you just say, "Hey man, we came under fire! Those monkeys shot at us 
when we came sneaking up on their house in the middle of the night with our guns 
drawn. That proves they were bad guys. We had to take them out."

That's it. That's the drill. It happens virtually every week now in Afghanistan 
– just as it happened time and again in Iraq, back when some guy named Stanley 
McChrystal was in charge of covert ops for that evil, reactionary throwback, 
George W. Bush. Whatever happened to old Stan anyway? Oh yeah; the nice, 
progressive, thoroughly modern Barack Obama put him in charge of the whole 
shooting match in Afghanistan, as well as the not-so-secret war of assassination 
in Pakistan. And oddly enough, the slaughter of civilians in both of these 
target countries has been rising ever since.

But hey, that's just how we roll nowadays. That's the American way of war. 
Creep, sneak, kill, run, lie – repeat.  Sure, it only makes things worse, 
creates more enemies, keeps the wars going. But isn't that the point? Check it 
out, baby: they're piling an extra $33.5 billion of prime war pork on top of the 
mountain of Terror War funding already laid out for this year! And you need a 
whole lot of blood to wash down that meat – and a whole lot of new enemies to 
make sure the feast never ends.

	"Making Friends With Evil": A Fable for Our Times
	Written by Chris Floyd
	Saturday, 15 May 2010 23:18

Arthur Silber outdoes himself with this one-two punch of an essay:

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2010/05/ii-story-for-children-making-friends.html

It begins with a tale that pierces to the essence of what we are -- and what we 
are becoming -- under our murderous imperium. The second half unfolds some of 
the implications of the fable in the hard facts of the present day, taking off 
from the almost indescribable depravity of the current "debate" over Barack 
Obama's open assertion of the power to assassinate anyone on earth at his 
arbitrary order, and the continuation of torture under the current 
administration, despite all the bright shining lies to the contrary.

Silber ends with an adjuration that encapsulates, with searing clarity, 
something I have been trying to say for a long time:

     Consider again the nature of the subjects under discussion: the immense 
evil of torture ... and Obama's claim that he has the "right" to assassinate 
anyone without judicial process or evidence of any kind whatsoever, simply 
because he says so. Reread the little story offered above. And then be brave 
enough finally to state the truth, at least in what should be the sacred space 
of your own mind:

     This is insane.

     This is monstrous.

     This is deeply, unforgivably, irredeemably evil.

     Here is a note for those who write and talk about these issues. If you 
write on these subjects and if you talk about them regularly on radio and 
television, and if you do not state -- repeatedly, with all the conviction and 
passion that you can command -- that actions of this kind are insane, monstrous 
and deeply evil, you are not opposing the monstrousnessness. You are 
accommodating it, seeking excuses for it, trying to minimize it -- or, to use 
the phrase I often employ in my own notes -- you are "making friends with evil."

     If you do this, you are not fighting against the monstrousness. You are 
part of it.


But don't be content with just an excerpt. Go read the whole piece, and the links.

--From <http://www.chris-floyd.com/>.

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