As Americans are getting up to go to work……….
As they go about their daily routines, showering, breakfasting, lunching, snacking, taking their coffee breaks ………..
During travel time, shopping, cooking, walking the dog…….
While having fun playing with their children in the evening
When they fall asleep at night……….
………. They know that other Americans, inevitably some friends or family, or guys from their hometown, are desperately busy in this or that poor foreign country killing bad guys – and often enough inadvertently dispatching as well, the bad guys’ children, relatives and friends along with a lot of family of ‘good guys’.
The newscasters praising the wars and those who will die fighting them, the viewers across the nation sitting on their couches and believing everything they hear…………….
The charming actors speaking during the Grammy and Academy Awards shows, those in the theater audience, the millions watching them on TV…….
The marvelous athletes running the ball, the fans in the stands cheering, those tuned-in at home, and “those American servicemen and women ‘serving’ all around the world” watching………………
The priests, ministers, rabbis preaching about everything BUT the wars from the pulpit, the listening members of the congregations feeling religious togetherness …………………………….
Have all at one time or another seen footage of their fellow Americans, dressed to kill, carrying star-wars-quality heavy weapons and electronic battle gear in one of dozens of poor former colonies….
Have seen footage of bombs being dropped or missiles excitingly fired followed by brilliant explosions and are aware that it is being done in the name of all Americans…..
Have paid their income tax, knowing they were funding all this mayhem on non-Americans in their own countries, towns, homes, described so absurdly and scarily as ‘defending America, the freedoms of Americans, and the “American Way of Life” (understood to be much better than the way of life of the other ninety-five percent of humanity).
Your author, as a draftee, served in the occupation of Nazi Germany. Back then, we soldiers, and our families stateside, tended to hold all Germans responsible for the fifty million lives, taken mostly in hails of flying metal, subsequent to their government ordering their friends and family members to commit war crimes on innocent populations.
Everyone, everywhere, should pause to take thought that no one is completely innocent in country perpetrating crimes against humanity. Everyone is involved in one way or another. We servicemen in the US Army that had lost so many guys while pushing the Nazi armies out of invaded nations, pictured these Germans we afterward occupied, enjoying concerts, ball games, movies, their families, only some few upset about the loss of life, as their relatives, friends and countrymen were on a rampage of killing innocent citizens in other peoples countries.
Nobody during war WW II, nor any war ever, was just ordinary people. When the killing is going on, no one is uninvolved. Everyone in the aggressor nation, will be contributing, collaborating, supporting, acquiescing, be ‘understanding’ and accepting, grovelling in fear or oppose the war in the most effective way possible.
Everyone becomes special, either doing his or her part in the war effort, or calculating how not to be complicit, or risking one’s life against the war as others participate in war, or just indifferently having an enjoyable personal life (“Its not my problem, I’m not interested in politics’).
Indifference is an especially strong political statement. Alighieri Dante and Martin Luther King Jr. imagined “the hottest place in hell being reserved for those who in times of moral crisis, maintain neutrality.” All attitude and posture is constantly political.
Sure, German children were misled, were told modern Grimm fairy tales to justify and explain Germany’s destructive invasions and were told nothing of the suffering the invasions were causing.
Just so are American children taught that their nation was attacked on 9/11 because America is good, does good, and never did anything to anyone anywhere to have provoked attack. (An attack by Arabs unable to defend their people from the great power of the US military, dedicated to suicide just to kill Americans back)…..
….. told nothing about there having been no Afghani or Iraqi, among the eighteen Saudis who flew American airliners into the Pentagon and World Trade Center,.
…. told nothing of the half million Iraqi infants and toddlers whose death US Secretary of State Madeline Albright said were “worth the price” of US foreign policy goals,
….. told as little as possible of the 100,000 Iraqis on a desert highway, helplessly shot in the back from the sky as they retreated home from their claimed province of Kuwait, [“its not a number that interests me very much,” Gen. Collin Powell, who had been Commander of Operation Desert Storm]……
…. informed of the indescribable suffering deaths of Palestinians as a result of US foreign policy….
….. told nothing of US Presidential Adviser Brzezinski having illegally invited and funded the accused 9/11 planner Saudi Osama bin Laden and his Arab followers into CIA held Persian-speaking Afghanistan, [Zbigniew Brzezinski to Jihadists: Your cause is right! – YouTube] ……
…. nothing of why powerful American investors wanted and still want control of the whole territory of Afghanistan for decisively important and lucrative oil pipelines, denying a war on Iraq for its great oil reserves. [The Deadly Pipeline War: US Afghan Policy Driven By Oil Interests, Jurist, 12/8/2001]http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forum/forumnew41.php
…. and nothing of President Carter in mid 1979 having had the CIA secretly, criminally, fund. arm and train Islamic fundamentalist hill tribesmen terrorists, who did not want education for their girls and women, to create a civil war against a popular friendly women-liberating socialist Kabul administration (Brzezinski afterwards proudly revealing his intention of drawing in the Soviet military to protect their ally and thereby fall into a Vietnam-like trap), thus initiating a thirty years of death and destruction upon an innocent and very poor Afghan population……[Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser in ‘Le Nouvel Observateur’ (France), Jan 15-21, 1998 p.76.]
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Compare the psyop con game laid on American children by Big Brother networks, and in-school national news magazines today, with the same media incitement for the invasion of Korea, America’s first of dozens of US post-WW II wars on third world countries? Notice the similarities between the absurd propaganda during the present decade long heroic War Against Terrorism in Afghanistan as exposed above, and war propaganda during America’s first heroic war against communism in Korea as exposed in the following paragraphs.
Here below is what the brain washing corporate commercial media made sure Americans did not know about Korea:
namely what all Koreans know:
1. That there is only one Korea and one Korean people.
2.That US Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson recognized (Wilson officially), Korea as Japanese Territory supporting for business interests a brutal forty year long Japanese occupation. [Teddy Roosevelt’s Secret Deal with Japan, History News Network, 12/7/2009]
3.That the US Army did not fight the Japanese in Korea and by the time it entered Korea, Koreans had set already set up nascent political organizations.
4. That when the US criminally divided Korea in half and occupied militarily the southern half, no Korean was asked beforehand.
5. That the US disrupted Korean arrangements, brought Singman Rhee over from Washington and installed him as president of an separate government of South Korea in rigged elections under US occupation. [Biographies: Syngman Rhee, Dillard, James]
6. That the Special Forces and Police of Rhee government massacred nearly 200,000 unionist and community organizers of communist or socialist beliefs, not infrequently along with their women and children in the years BEFORE the North Korean armies attacked the Rhee government. [UN statistics document a minimum of 30,000 massacred just on Cheju Island far off the southern coast of South Korea in 1948.] In 2005 the South Korean National Assemblyestablished a Truth and Reconciliation Commission during the presidency of independent minded Kim Daejung. The Commission sought to “reveal the truth behind civilian massacres during the Korean War and human rights abuses during the [South Korean] authoritarian period and to write truth into Korea’s modern history and recent evidence of U.S. and South Korean responsibility for the massacre of civilians before and during the Korean War”). [Wikipedia]
7. That when the US invaded in force, the fighting between Koreans was already over, the peninsula again united except for the southern most city of Pusan occupied by American forces – The army of the hated Rhee government had either defected north or gone home. (The large city of Seoul had been easily occupied in a few days. In five weeks all Korea except Pusan had been unified.)(More than a month later came the 75,000 troops strong, 260 flotilla landing at Inchon preceded by 43 planes dropping 94 canisters of napalm with no regard to civilians – now recognized by both sides a an atrocity worthy of compensation.) South Korea Says U.S. Killed Hundreds of Civilians, NY Times, 8/3/2008]
8. That northern Korea back then was more highly cultured and industrially developed than the south – not the draconian, most militarized nation in the world, it is today after having been completely flattened by US bombers and hermetically sealed off by sixty years of severely punishing US mandated international sanctions.
9. The US and its allies even under colonial powers dominated UN flag bombed every city and town North and 3 million Koreans perished, along with a nearly a half million Chinese who in the end came to Korea’s aid and pushed the US forces back out of the North.
10. When Korea was again divided, Singman Rhee was so despised that after the American war was over, he had to flee for his life. Today his name is avoided even in Korean school books. After three decades of military dictatorships a civilian government was elected in the 1990s and the US. has kept the pressure on North Korea militarily, politically, economically as if the Cold War was still on.
In between the lies and war in Korea then and the lies and war in Afghanistan today, Americans have either invaded or bombed, or both: Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Panama, Granada, Nicaragua, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan, and Libya, always to protect the indigenous population from itself. Starting with Greece and Iran, America’s CIA has practiced homicidal violence in the interests of American overseas enterprise in three times that number of nations. On the screen John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Charlton Heston, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris and many other macho movie idols have pictured US invaders of poor nations not as superpower punks, but as brave, manly and courageous saviors of local children.
I recall how we American WW II soldiers slowly began to understand that by the time most good German citizens realized they had allowed their government to be stolen by self-seeking nefarious gangs, they no longer were permitted to speak out without deadly consequences for their families. And so, I marvel that though most Americans realize their government has been highjacked by a crooked and criminally homicidal investment banking elite, and still enjoy the freedom to speak out, they do not bother themselves to do so.
Before Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead, he proclaimed in two now famous sermons, “Silence is betrayal!” Forty years later, even American antiwar activists never seem to go beyond blaming the war crimes on the various US Commander-in-Chief Presidents, of whom America’s number one intellectual, Noam Chomsky, says every one of them after FDR could have been hung if tried by the Nuremberg Principles.
Yet democracy would have it that the president is only the servant of all Americans, duly elected to honestly execute the law in representing the will of Americans in general. And by the way, those presidents giving criminal war commands are never themselves personally pulling the trigger on anyone. It’s Americans individually who carry out their president’s ordered crimes against humanity while fellow Americans at home watch.
If a people be not responsible for what kind of a government it has and the crimes that government commits, who is? How can it be solely the president they themselves have chosen who is responsible?
Someday Americans will count up the millions of their fellow Earthlings who have fallen in harms way of American soldiers, marines and airmen in their own beloved countries, and come to see themselves for what they are: Less than intelligent, less than honest, less than kind and less than sane in prosecuting all these sixty years of war on vulnerable third world populations without concern for such a massive taking of lives, maiming and destruction.
God Bless America for her virtues and keep her safe, but
“God Damn America for her crimes against humanity.”
[Rev. Jeremiah Wright, President Barak Obama’s former pastor who presided over his marriage vows and later the baptism of his children.]
Jay Janson, lived and taught in Seoul 1993-99, and four of his draftee basic-training bunk-mates are buried somewhere in North Korea.