Abolish death – foto by Smith
Ten years ago when I first watched the hijackers crash two airplanes into the World Trade Center Towers, my first response was awe at how people with no army, no money, no war equipment and few soldiers had turned the might of the mightiest military power on the planet against itself by simply using our own commercial airplanes to attack one of the world’s biggest symbols of capitalism.
I’m not forgetting or forgiving their murder of almost 3.000 civilians. Killing civilians is an abomination no matter who does it and is to be condemned whether done by terrorists, drug dealers, armies, nations, world organizations, corporations, the police, or legalized prison executioners.
But their terrorist tactics themselves were brilliant. Now I know this kind of thinking is not going to read well with the corporate-news fed, but if the situation were reversed and we’d successfully attacked the world’s biggest arms supplier terrorist nation who had been bombing our civilians, we’d be making movies and hit records about it.
Fact is, since 1950, the USA has been the major aggressor in the world — we’ve continuously bombed and invaded sovereign nations without declaring war, we’ve assassinated other country’s leaders, we’ve kidnapped citizens of foreign countries and tortured them, we’ve fomented coups, we’ve declared illegal embargoes on entire nations and killed half a million children in the process.
The USA is the biggest maker and seller of weapons of mass destruction in the world; ipso facto, we’re the largest terrorist organization. And yet our defense budget is bigger than the rest of the world’s defense budgets combined.
Recent government cables revealed U.S. soldiers in Iraq handcuffed 10 citizens — a 70 year old woman, a 5 month baby, 4 toddlers under 5 and 4 civilians — then shot them in the head and called down an air strike to destroy evidence of their actions. The Iraqi government complained and we ignored them.
If other countries did this to us, we’d fight back. So I understand why we were attacked — it was simple retribution for all the brown-red-yellow-black-skinned people we have killed and are still killing around the world ever since we moved to North America and started in on the Indians and the Mexicans.
The bad joke here is fewer than 3,000 Americans died in the towers . . . George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have killed more than 3,000 Americans in their retaliation, not to mention murdering over one million Iraqi civilians which is exceptionally perverse because Iraq had nothing to do with either 9-1-1 or weapons of mass destruction.
Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, Gonzalez, Yoo, Rice, Tenant and scores more should be on trial right now for torture and war crimes and crimes against humanity. Instead most of them are on book tours raking in big bucks and yucks.
As for me, the sound of Americans cheering the deaths of yellow-brown-red-black skinned people causes unpleasant tension between what I see and what I was taught to believe we stood for as a people. Christians who kill and then strut in blood step bragging strike me as somewhat hypocritical.
You know, for a book whose main tenant is Thou Shalt Not Kill, there’s certainly a lot of blood shed under its aegis.
No flag is worth it – foto by Smith
Brilliant post that requires no other comment…
yes
Thanks Ranger. Figure I’ll lose a few folk with this one but I’m just so tired of the shallow self-serving patriotic bullshit I read and hear and see daily. All these folk complain but never do anything, never served if the military, never had an original thought outside their own sick self-satisfaction.
Ditto to you John.