Curiouser and Curiouser! on war

The Horrors of War

Fri, 09 Jul 2004 08:09:05 +0100

Russian soldier Vasily Mishnin writes to his pregnant wife:

We go to the depot to get our rifles. Good Lord, whats all this? Theyre covered in blood, black clotted lumps of it are hanging off them. . . . It is frightening even to sit or lie down here the rifle is shaking in my hands. My hand comes down on something black: it turns out there are corpses here that havent been cleared away. My hair stands on end. I have to sit down. There is no point in staring into the distance it is pitch dark. All I can feel is fear. I am so frightened of the shells that I want the ground to open up and swallow me. . . . Suddenly a screeching noise pierces the air, I feel a pang in my heart, something whistles past and explodes nearby. My dear Lord, I am so frightened and I hear this buzzing in my ears. I leave my post and climb into my dugout. It is packed, everyone is shaking and asking again and again, "Whats going on? Whats going on?" One explosion follows another, and another. Two lads are running, shouting our for nurses. They are covered in blood. It is running down their cheeks and hands, and something else is dripping from underneath their bandages. Theyre soon dead, shot to pieces. There is screaming, yelling, the earth is shaking from artillery fire and our dugout is rocking from side to side like a boat. . . . Our eyes are full of tears, we wipe them away, but they just keep coming because the shells are full of gas. We are terrified. . . . We will probably never see each other again all it takes is an instant and I will be no more and perhaps no one will be able to gather the scattered pieces of my body for burial. . . . A zeppelin attacked Ostrow in the night and dropped a few bombs, many killed. One woman and her two kids got blown to pieces that blew away in the wind.

To get a war to work to get men to kill other men that have never aggressed against them and that they dont even know the state must do two things: convince men to love the state and to hate the members of other states. The first is always cloaked in patriotism, and leads to an acceptance of interventionism. The second is always cloaked in nationalism, and leads to hatred toward foreigners within ones country.

[The Horrors of War from LewRockwell.com]

Saucer People 2 Clarke 0

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 08:37:53 +0100

I was just pondering how in 2010, according to Arthur C. Clarke, we should be capable of launching rescue missions to Jupiter. I don't see it myself, do you? So where did he go wrong? One thing Clarke didn't account for was major economies (the US and UK at the forefront) throwing billions of dollars that could have been:

Not borrowed to mortgage the future
Spent by it's owners for the betterment of themselves and those around them
soundly invested

into

buying arms
killing people
suppressing people
lining the pockets of profiteering warmongers

How terribly shortsighted of him.

I'll try harder from now on

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 13:14:05 +0100

Or if they had considered the American intervention in Lebanon, they would easily have found the following evaluation by their own military of a situation much like that of Iraq. Of the involvement in Lebanon in 19821983, Lieutenant Commander Westra states:
"American policy was formulated without adequate consideration of the complexity of the Lebanese conflict or its political and religious antecedents. Additionally, our policy was pursued from a purely American perspective without consideration of the goals and motivations of numerous factions involved in the fighting. As a consequence of these policy shortcomings, American military forces were mistakenly committed as a first resort before all diplomatic and other means had been exhausted."
"The key problem of our involvement in Lebanon was that American military forces were mistakenly committed in order to solve a complex set of political problems that had no military solution. By submitting future regional conflicts to a "Lebanon Test," policymakers will have an in-depth model delineating the multitude of considerations and pitfalls affecting policy formulation and the use of military force to secure the objectives of policy in regional conflicts."
If many in the military knew better, wouldnt this information reach the President? Mightnt it even seep out to the bloodthirsty editorial writers and thence to the gung-ho public? [ Bushs Folly - Michael S. Rozeff]

How much more of this imperial folly from the US and British governments are we going to stand for? I think it's a shame more people in the UK didn't reflect on what Blair (and to be fair a raft of previous UK governments) have done and choose to vote against extending his time in office.

I think we needed a breather and an opportunity to reflect upon what kind of country we want to be and where our interests lie. I don't believe they lie in interfering with Middle Eastern politics, propping up the Saudi regime, etc...

It may be that ceasing to intervene in this area is going to cause us economic turbulence but I think that's inevitable anyway with the policy we are persuing. I also think that all the money being funnelled into Iraq and the War on Terror could be better used.

I've heard what I think is a lot of nonsense about why the London bombings occurred. Especially people talking about why they aren't related to the war on Iraq. The usual claim being that 9/11 happened before the war on Iraq so it can't be related. I find it hard to believe that even the people peddling this nonsense really believe it.

Question: Why didnt the terrorists strike Switzerland instead of England? After all, the two countries share the same freedom and values, dont they?
Answer: The Swiss government didnt attack Iraq. It doesnt meddle in the Middle East. It didnt participate in the brutal sanctions against the Iraqi people. It doesnt maintain an empire of overseas bases. It doesnt go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. The Swiss government minds its own business.
Thats why the terrorists did not strike Switzerland.
Of course, the same cannot be said of England, whose foreign policy in the Middle East can be summed up as follows: Whatever the U.S. government does, the British government supports and joins. Thus, the British government participated in President Bushs recent war on Iraq a war against a sovereign and independent country that never attacked the United States or England or even threatened to do so. It is a war that has produced the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people not just American and British soldiers, but also Iraqi soldiers and civilians none of whom had anything to do with the 9/11 terrorist strikes in the United States.
Thats why the terrorists struck in London instead of Bern.
Thats also why the terrorists struck in New York, both in 1993 and 2001, and at the Pentagon.
The terrorist retaliations are rooted in anger and hatred not for American and English freedom and values, as President Bush and Prime Minister Blair maintain, but instead in anger and hatred for U.S. and British foreign policy.
Why would it be otherwise? Why should foreigners especially radical, violent ones react any differently to the killings and maiming of their family, friends, and countrymen than Westerners do when their family, friends, and countrymen are killed or maimed by foreigners?
Consider the torture, rape, sex abuse, and murder scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Why wouldnt Middle Easterners react in much the same way that Americans would react if American men were treated in a similar manner in some foreign prison?
What will be the response of government officials to the terrorist strikes in London? You guessed it: more severe government crackdowns on civil liberties to protect us from the terrorists, which not surprisingly was the same position that they were taking before the terrorist strikes in London. [Terrorism Comes With Empire - Jacob G. Hornberger]

As citizens I think we fail to be interested in what our government really does and the effects it has. The world is so interconnected, how can be believe that invading other countries and killing their people, however justified we feel, will not provoke reactions from them and those that empathise with them?

On the day of the London attacks I couldn't escape the feeling that if I lived in Iraq I'd probably be so numbed to the concept of bombs going off and people being killed that, unless it was one of my own dead or missing, that I'd shrug and, maybe, hope for a quieter tomorrow. We think we are safe here, so it's obviously shocking to be targeted for an attack.

People being killed is terrible but let's seek perspective. Our military, on the orders of our elected government, have been killing people en masse for some time now and, despite the rhetoric about minimizing civillian casualties, there are a lot of dead men, women, and children who didn't sign up for a war in their homeland.

I am sorry to the people who have died, here and abroad, that I haven't done more to bring my government to account for it's actions. All I can do is try harder from now on.

One of the scariest things I've read recently

Mon, 27 Mar 2006 09:45:07 +0100

From San Francisco Bay View a piece about the long term impact of (and the reason for) the deployment of depleted Uranian weaponry:

Just 467 U.S. personnel were wounded in the three-week Persian Gulf War in 1990-1991. Out of 580,400 soldiers who served in Gulf War I, 11,000 are dead, and by 2000 there were 325,000 on permanent medical disability. This astounding number of disabled vets means that a decade later, 56 percent of those soldiers who served now have medical problems.

The number of disabled vets reported up to 2000 has been increasing by 43,000 every year. Brad Flohr of the Department of Veterans Affairs told American Free Press that he believes there are more disabled vets now than even after World War II.

There's a lot more in that piece and, if true, it's quite disturbing.

I tried verifying the numbers and can confirm that number dead & wounded (at least Wikipedia seems to agree)[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War]. I have no idea how to go about verifying the number of U.S. servicemen and women (and their families) dead since 1995.

Does anyone in the US know where to get those numbers?

Real truth is always subversive

Fri, 21 Apr 2006 13:00:51 +0100

John Pilger gave a talk recently about journalism as a tool of the state. The way the US and British states have gotten away with murder over Iraq is a good case in point. The liberty of not having a television or reading a newspaper (I confess I do still occasionally listen to Radio4 news bulletins as I wake-up) has given me a distance from the mainstream media that I have never enjoyed before.

During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. The dissident novelist Zdenek Urbánek told me, "In one respect, we are more fortunate than you in the west. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. Unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines, because real truth is always subversive."

Since the late 80's my skepticism about what I am told has grown and grown. I think that I believed not one word of what was reported in the build-up to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

On 24 August last year, a New York Times editorial declared: "If we had all known then what we know now, the invasion [of Iraq] would have been stopped by a popular outcry." This amazing admission was saying, in effect, that the invasion would never have happened if journalists had not betrayed the public by accepting and amplifying and echoing the lies of Bush and Blair, instead of challenging and exposing them.

I am getting all my news online and from voices (such as John Pilger). On Wednesday Euan talked about how he found watching a documentary so frustrating because of the editorial slant and how reading is so much better for him because he finds it easier to make his mind up. Quoting Pilger again:

Language is perhaps the most crucial battleground. Noble words such as "democracy," "liberation," "freedom" and "reform" have been emptied of their true meaning and refilled by the enemies of those concepts. The counterfeits dominate the news, along with dishonest political labels, such as "left of center," a favorite given to warlords such as Blair and Bill Clinton; it means the opposite. "War on terror" is a fake metaphor that insults our intelligence. We are not at war. Instead, our troops are fighting insurrections in countries where our invasions have caused mayhem and grief, the evidence and images of which are suppressed.

When we read we have a much greater capacity to understand the language being used and its effect upon us. In particular I believe we have a greater capacity to understand it's emotional effect upon as and so understand when we are being manipulated.

Further by reading authentic voices I can take what I know about that person and adjust my filters accordingly when I try to understand what they are saying. For example anyone who reads my weblog on even a semi-regular basis must have a fairly good idea of my views, the trajectory along which they are changing, and the pace.

If I think I know where I am going philosophically I guess you probably know it even better. And from that you will know my weaknesses and my blind spots and adjust accordingly (and even tell me about it sometimes, please?!)

As long as the media remain a compliant tool of the state I shall shun them and their tainted product.

The Master Key

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 08:51:15 +0100

Robert Higgs shows why you can't be a pro-war Libertarian:

My claim is that those who give a free hand to the government in its foreign and defense policy-making will ultimately discover that they have handed their rulers the key that opens all doors, including the doors that obstruct the government's invasion of our most cherished rights to life, liberty, and property. The war-making key is, so to speak, the master key for any government, because when critical tradeoffs must be made, war will override all other concerns and, as an ancient maxim aptly informs us, inter armas silent leges. Anyone who has looked into the actions of the U.S. Supreme Court, for example, knows that during wartime the justices have placed themselves on the casualty list by effectively rolling over and playing dead. Without at least a semblance of the rule of law and an independent judiciary, all hopes for the maintenance of a free society are in vain.