Continual War Mongering Violence

 

war

I have thought about indifference and/or fright as being a main cause of US citizens accepting all of the perpetual wars and conflicts that the USA are embroiled in creating and maintaining. They are never ending and they are great for filling the financial coffers of the military-industrial complex, as well as the pickets of some politicians.

Does Donald Trump Own Stock in the Company that Manufactured … https://mediabiasfactcheck.com › Fact CheckApr 10, 2017 – In the bombing, the USA launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at a cost of approximately 60 million dollars. The manufacturer of … In this opinion piece, the author Bill Palmer states “Donald Trump owned stock in Raytheon up through at least the start of the presidential election cycle. …

Yet there seems more than just apathy or fear involved. As Edward Curtin wrote: Now it is spring again.  Yesterday as I drove to work through the gentle New England spring rain, I noticed how fast the grass was turning green and how in a few days the weather will turn quite warm and the flowers and foliage will explode with joy. “Explode,” yes.  That word dragged my thoughts across the world. And I thought of all the bombs and missiles exploding throughout the Middle East and the guns of the killers exploding everywhere, extinguishing the possibility for joy for so many. And the nuclear ones hiding in their silos and those treacherously sliding silently under the world’s oceans in Trident submarines, primed to kill us all.And the indifference of so many people to this carnage, initiated and sustained by our own government.  Or was it indifference or something else?  It seemed to me as I wondered in the rolling silence of the car that it was that and yet wasn’t just that.  There was a missing link that I couldn’t fully understand, and still don’t.  Was it fear? – From Though Invisible to Us, Our Dead Are Not Absent
One of the reasons, it seems, for US citizen avoidance of our country’s war mongering activities has to do with something I will label as “the new norm.” Here are two examples about the ways that the condition works.

When an elderly Englishman whom I knew in his older years was a young boy, he first cried when he saw other bigger boys in his slum-neighborhood boxing each other so as to inflict nosebleeds, black eyes, concussions and other damages. Then he got accustomed to the sport and learn to like it. Indeed, it became the new norm for combat sports for him and he learned to enjoy watching men spar and beat each other up on TV. He liked it way more than wrestling, football, soccer or other sports wherein people can get severely harmed or killed.

In a Nazi prison camp, the commander liked the voice of a seven year old Jewish boy. So he would have the boy row him around a pond on Sundays while singing to himself. (This event is documented in the book and movie, “Shoah,” which took eleven years to write and film.)

The young boy was also given a job for the rest of the week, which was to hit with a hammer anyone over the head, who moved after having been taken from the gas showers. He was also to undress the bodies and lay the belongings in piles for similar sorts of objects like shoes, jewelry, shirts, etc., to be put together.

At first, he found the tasks utterly horrid to undertake and, after a while, he got use to them as part of his routine in the same way, I guess, that abattoir workers in some slaughterhouses repeatedly use sledgehammers on animals to knock them out before they are disembodied.

In a similar vein, I think that many Americans are so habituated to the brutal carnage that our government carries out abroad that nary an eyebrow is raised anymore amongst some people. However, others are very upset by it and by such so-called games as boxing. Indeed, some are so sensitive to harm done unto others that they can’t watch much by way of TV news or violent movies as there is just too much revulsion and shock at both venues.

A second reason that some American may not be too much concerned about the conflicts that the USA leads abroad could be that the coverage of the brutality is very scanty and short in TV news. Deliberately the MSM is very shallow and curtailed about such matters.

Thirdly, lots of people in the USA are struggling to get by with their own lives. We have lots of poverty here and some adults are simply overwhelmed with their jobs and family affairs even when not poor. So the focus is not so much on the government activities, but on matters related to kinfolk and work, as well as ensuring that an adequate income is made. So some people have no time to worry about wars when more pressing concerns take precedence, it appears.

Fourth, some Americans do like that our country is looked at as being a threat to the world. They think that it is positive as it makes other countries and individuals afraid to attack the USA.

Well, I tend to disagree as, in my own view, I can see the urge to retaliate against the USA and its people is strong. Believe me, I do know that it is since I live around thirty miles from where the Boston Marathon Bombing took place.

Fifth, maybe some Americans are just resigned to the permanent state of war. After all, a whole bunch of us worked like the dickens to try to stop the Vietnam War. Then what? Another one started and yet another one and another one on and on and on.

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Maybe, too, many of the US citizenry are accustomed to the sociopaths and psychopaths that lead our government into murder. Thus maybe they just shrug their shoulders when some mentally ill, immoral person like Madeleine Albright makes a comment like the following one. (I bet that they’d change their minds on the matter if it were THEIR OWN CHILDREN killed.)

It is not that US citizens lack compassion. I have seen it time and again in response to hurricanes and other matters. So perhaps it is about distancing themselves from the pain of war and at least some of the other causes that I mentioned in the text above.

There is some sort of mental illness exhibited here in my opinion. To laugh at someone dying and to be instrumental in the killing?

Yes, we got rid of one unbelievably awful person, Hillary with her thinking that murder is funny, only to replace her with another almost duplicate one, Donald Trump.

Now does anyone REALLY wonder about the reason that so many people around the world want to come to the USA and our allies’ countries to bomb, shoot, drive vans and so on into crowds of people? Do they really think that these murderers are not somehow RETALIATORY?

Nobody should kid himself. If the USA and allies does it to the foreigners, many of them are going to do it right back to us as rough justice.

What’s the meaning of the phrase ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth‘?. The notion that for every wrong done there should be a compensating measure of justice. What’s the origin of the phrase ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth‘?. From the Code of Hammurabi. Hammurabi was King of Babylon, 1792-1750BC. The code …

Frankly I need no images of afterlife in Hell. I have plenty right here and now — ones from abroad and ones on US soil. (The second brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was caught about twenty or so miles from my home and we had been warned by some officials to stay indoors until he was caught while keeping our homes locked during the Boston Marathon bombing hunt for him.)

When will all of this extreme horror, misery and suffering end that the US dishes out abroad simultaneously on multiple fronts? Will it ever? Can it? Will Americans work harder for peace and not just in terms of gun violence in our own country? I have no idea. I do know, though, that the hell is only going to get worse in wars and retaliation if we do not try to stop the massacres all the way around.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Cowardice asks the question – is it safe? Expediency asks the question – is it politic? Vanity asks the question – is it popular?  But conscience asks the question – is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; But one must take it because it is right.”

Sally Dugman is a writer in MA, USA

 

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