Motivated by a Majikthise post to get my giant brain off its Saturday movie-channel-watching keister and read in the Washington Post about the war—man, I hate reading about the war more than anything—I was sickened in the extreme by an article on what Lindsay is calling Iraq’s My Lai. The piece relates locals’ accounts of the massacre in cold blood of two dozen Iraqi civilians by US Marines last November. Seems a few of our boys sought vengeance with a door-to-door shooting spree in the town of Haditha after a roadside bomb killed one of their buds. Three families and a taxi-full of college students were murdered. Naturally a coverup ensued.
(The WaPo helpfully points out, as an aid to readers are slow to grasp the horrific extent of the pathos, perhaps because they are too distracted by the porn in the Victoria’s Secret sidebar ad, that the murdered civilians included women-and-children.)
Senseless massacres and their subsequent coverups are the ultimate and inexorable consequence of a social order founded on dominance. What other outcome could you possibly expect, when you take a bunch of uneducated teenage boys, tell them God is an American, women are fuckholes, and brown people are dirt, give them guns, and send them off to shoot people merely to gratify the vanity of imperialist godbag corporate hooligans?
The US military reportedly paid survivors between $1500 and $2500 for each dead family member. Go USA!
I’m glad you brought up the women-and-children angle that’s been pushed in the far-too-limited media coverage of this atrocity. That’s something that always bugs me, for reasons I understand, but have trouble articulating. Murder of civilians is a freakin’ WAR CRIME, and it shouldn’t matter whether the victims are men, women, children, or fuzzy puppies. Yet media coverage subsumes women and children into a single group — presumably as especially defenseless. Gah.
I know it grates, but in a patriarchial society if there are no women and children in a massacre, you can’t call it a massacre. They always call them ‘firefight with insurgents’. I cannot think of a single example of an occupation without crimes committed by the occupying force. Not one, ever.
None the less we are supposed to believe their bullshit stories about bad apples, and an abberation. Bullshit. Atrocities are the norm in an occupation.
I so totally blame the fucking patriarchy.
Yes, I blame the men ( “uneducated teenage boys” who are told “God is an American, women are fuckholes, and brown people are dirt” who are given guns and then sent “off to shoot people merely to gratify the vanity of imperialist godbag corporate hooligans” ) who shot these civilians, but I blame even more the “godbag corporate hooligans.” There are those at the top, the big business excs., who put such horrible perceptions into mainstream America ( hell, the mainstream world ) just to solidify their own power by keeping the masses too preoccupied with all these issues so they won’t attack the wealthy and powerful who cause all this misery in the first place. Society feeds these ideas to the individual and the individual shits these ideas back to society ( by way of the individual’s actions, of course ) AND when stuff like this happens, those who start this never-ending hate circle ( the corporate bigwigs ) get away scot-free and there are none who are the wiser.
These soldiers are to blame. But there are also others - the top dogs, the food chain masters, the powerful, white men - who have never even stepped foot in a war zone, who feed us all these hateful ideas, for the sake of keeping wealth and power in their small, greedy fists.
“man, I hate reading about the war more than anything”
Yep. There are lots of awful, awful things in the news. This war seems to have more power over my psyche than anything else. Whether we’re talking about the serially murdered women of Juarez, Mexico, children stepping on land mines, strippers being vilified for accusing college boys of raping them, cancer fun runs, or what have you, this war has the power to make me madder, sadder, and physically sicker than any other topic.
Can’t even articulate all the reasons why. Can’t even go there.
Remember, though, they hate us for our freedoms.
“Two U.S. military boards are investigating the incident as possibly the gravest violation of the rule of war by U.S. forces in the three-year-old conflict with Iraq.”
Innocent people are murdered every day in Iraq… from terrorists, death squads, depleted uranium, 500 lb. bombs dropped in urban areas, contaminated water supplies, the collapsed health-care system, and many many other reasons besides psychotic Marines out for revenge. And of course, merely counting the dead and maimed leaves out the millions and millions of children and adults who will carry the psychic scars from all this the rest of their lives.
At Nuremburg the judges made the point that worst of Germany’s war crimes was simply launching a war without any moral justification. The same is true here, and we shouldn’t lose site of that fact.
It is time to declare war obsolete. There simply is no reason any more to engage in it. It has always been for profits in the corporate sector.
If the curtain is pulled back, everyone will see that.
Hello.