Interesting little para there… too bad the rest of the article is this dumb ass horseshit that seems to assume that the “defense industry” is the problem as if that weren’t inextricable from NATO and the Pentagon itself, both of which need to die. You’re telling me you can make the connection between the police brutality and NATO, but not the defense industry and NATO?
Every American President pulls this sort of fucked up shit when it comes to international policy. Every supporter of any given American President will tell you “Oh he’s got access to information that we can’t understand, oh he’s actually playing strategy, oh he’s actually so wise.” Despite this claim of access to information and Nth Dimensional Chess, every American President manages to make the world more unstable and a worse place via actions like this. Also, the evidence always overwhelmingly supports the idea that actions like this have fuck-all to do with “intelligence” and everything to do with protecting American power and hegemony at the cost of foreign lives and livelihood.
Gov’t Information Brochures: Hello! You’ve been targeted for a United States drone assassination!
Considering the “Did You Know…” in particular, how is this “war” ever supposed to fucking end? Do the President or Congress even have the power to do so?
As in Iraq, the killing and abuse of civilians by occupation forces has been an integral part of this dirty war from its earliest days. As it drags on, ever more outrages emerge. Last year, members of a US unit were convicted of killing Afghan civilians for entertainment, cutting off body parts as trophies and leaving weapons with the corpses to make it seem as if they were killed in combat.
Nor is such depravity just a US habit, of course. Last year a hungover British guardsman stabbed a 10-year-old boy in the kidneys for no reason. British soldiers are currently on trial for filming their abuse of Afghan children, while US WikiLeaks files record 21 separate incidents of British troops shooting dead or bombing Afghan civilians.
The line between deliberate and accidental killings is in any case a blurred one. As the US General Stanley McChrystal, former commander of Nato troops in Afghanistan, commented: “We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.”
“Massacres are the inevitable result of foreign occupation”
All the Historians sighing “No shit, Sherlock” … If you say “I support the war” (or, even worse, “I support the occupation”) but follow up with “But I certainly don’t support these atrocities committed by the troops,” then there is an essential disconnect going on in your brain. If you think we should still have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, then you think we should be murdering children. If you think we should still be “fighting” in the Middle East, then you support things like the desecration of the bodies of the dead. Whether you realize that or not is a different matter. War is a crime in itself AND a crime from which these crimes inevitably follow.
“Centrifugal State” - Who Is IOZ
I hate to just plop down the conclusion to a piece, but this contains a crucial point I can’t emphasize enough, even at the risk of being repetitive and repeating IOZ’s repetitions:
Accepting (and I don’t) that some wars, sometimes, are truly necessary doesn’t dissolve the evil or absolve people or nations from their participation in them; they can never fully be atoned for or forgiven.
This I believe to be one of the truths underpinning the tragedy that is the “victors” in war. Even the victors of war (or revolution!) must condemn themselves when all is said done, anything less is not enough. Sadly, this never seems to happen, certainly not when the State wages war.
