"Well, it's their fault bringing their kids to a battle."
Those words, spoken by a faceless soldier, echo from a classified US military video released by the site Wikileaks.org. The release comes on the heels of the revelation of a cover-up in Afghanistan—and the anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, as well as the anniversary of his “Beyond Vietnam” speech.
King spoke to the Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam, saying “It should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam."
Hearing allegations that special forces troops in Afghanistan may have dug the bullets out of their pregnant victims bodies to hide evidence, hearing airmen on the Wikileaks tape begging “Come on, let us shoot!” and hearing the editor of Wikileaks say that the shooters talked in the way that people do when they're playing video games--it reminded me of King's words.
He told the truth about war: that it is horrible, that it does poison your soul. Dr. King also said, in a different speech, that there is such a thing as being too late when it comes to speaking up against your goverment doing wrong.
The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Support us by signing up for our podcast, and follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter.com.
I just love the idea of a “white guy” using the moniker “Crazy Horse 18″ flying around Iraq in an “Apache” helicopter “gun ship” and using a machine gun and Hellfire™ missiles to “light up” Iraqi civilians (including children). It just doesn’t get any better than that! Why couldn’t I have been in the ‘Twin Towers’ on 9/11 and thereby been spared being subjected to this ‘freak show’?
By DICKERSON3870 on April 7th, 2010 at 12:43 pm
Those are unfortunate words spoken. But we also need to take into consideration the managers of this “system” who allow this, but also pluck these young people out of media controlled and isolated adolescence to do just these jobs!
Remember who they chose to put in charge of running the prison at Abu Ghraib, or Wagram? These young people were from rural counties of Maryland and West Virginia, who had probably never met a Muslim in their lives. If they knew anything about them, they learned in in Post 9-11 American on FCC licenses. And they’re the ones who went to prison.
But, what kind of educational, social economic and media eco-system did these young people grow up in?
De-humanizing “enemies” is age old trick of ruling elites to keep these wars going. Virtual reality makes it that much easier. How do we know what these commanders told these young men about these men with cameras walking across those flat open spaces? We don’t. We do know what kind of world they live in, what they hear everyday about these local people (particularly press). We can learn a lot about what kinds of worlds they came from.
Poor Polish young adult peasants were used in games like this too, late in the game of WWII. And years after their economy was deliberately dismantled and decimated by occupiers to create just the Hobbesian conditions of “state of nature” to bring out these worst kinds of aspects of human behaviour. They’ve taken a lot of heat these generations later, but only scholars now publish about official papers to destroy the economy and take it “back to a state of nature” so the Polish nation would be more desperate and compliant.
Our own economic conditions created here for the least well off by the most well of bear some resemblance to all of this. As does the near-ubiquitous control of broadcast media by few players in this country, hardly distinguishable from each other.
We need to examine the system that chose those young men, trained them for it, and the old men (or women) who claim to be in charge of it (or rather run far away when there’s any such claiming to be done, leaving that for “tools” to take falls)!
By planck on April 7th, 2010 at 3:29 pm