During Memorial Day moments of silence to honor those who ‘gave’ their lives, exclude my six bunk mates buried somewhere in North Korea. They would be really pissed, being thanked for dying while killing dirt poor people in their own country because of phony radio, newspaper praise of how we were protecting Koreans from Koreans. 16 wars — same simple-minded protecting people from themselves.
Happy Memorial Day weekend everyone. By the way, should you happen to attend one of those militarized Memorial Day observances with parades, uniforms, flags flying and speeches about wonderful patriotic sacrificing of ones life, during the requested moment of silence, exclude my six basic training bunk mates buried somewhere in North Korea. They would be really pissed if anyone thanked them for dying while forced to participate in killing dirt poor people in their own country because of some phony radio and newspaper praise how we were protecting Koreans from themselves.
Four of those six buddies were draftees — in the army because didn’t want to go to jail. The fifth one had been persuaded to join and get off a jail sentence for petty thievery. The youngest one was glad to be drafted out of doing nothing at home in the jobless Ozark Mountains. He was wearing the first and only pair of shoes (boots) he ever owned when he died in a country in which no one spoke English.
In the sea of destruction, death and bleeding all around them, the occasional glimpse of wild eyed mothers in rags desperately trying to care for and save there little children, my friends learned that we had all been had by the rich bosses of the America they had naively believed in. Somehow, incredulously, these bastards must have been making money from this hell they had arranged by convincing enough stupid people that it was necessary.
If they (what was left of the them) could arise from the hole in the ground they must have been thrown in hurriedly, rise up through the green grass and bushes growing over their cadavers somewhere in the now again beautiful mountains up near the Chinese border, they would have loved to ghost in from the spirit world and bust up a Memorial Day service that praised the war that ended their young lives in an idiotic hail of flying metal.
If they could have lived, while raising families and getting to be 80 like their fellow draftee writing this, they would have seen other guys suckered into dying while openly murdering in Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, in the Dominican Republic, Panama, in Iran, Lebanon, Grenada, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and as of a month ago, Libya. Killing people to protect them from their own people was the principle laid down.
During all these decades of U.S. military butchering millions of men, women and children, they would have read from time to time in investigative journalism or released CIA files, of their presidents secretly ordering the funding of destabilization, civil war creation, even assassination of popular leaders of the third world that had led to to the death of many more millions of men, women and children in Greece, Guatemala, Congo, Sudan, Cuba, Haiti, in Indonesia, Angola, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Many more died in these covertly warred upon countries than when and where U.S planes and American troops on the ground were doing their thing.
This incomprehensible total of uncountable billions of years of life cut from innocent human beings, just so millionaires could make money on top of the impossible to spend millions they already had. The United States of America, once the beacon of light for the oppressed all around the world, has now surpassed, in number of lives taken, the worse horrors of insane mass murder throughout the history of Mankind. And that is not counting the millions that die every year of starvation among the half of mankind that lives on less than two dollars a day, so business people can fill the world with weapons of mass destruction.
How has it been accomplished?
We see the attractive news telecasters with their calculated friendly charm. We don’t see the pentagon and CIA people in the board rooms of the media conglomerates which now have unprecedented power, owning press and television, book publishing, film production and databases, and flooding schools with war promoting, military idolizing magazines like Time, US Report, and Newsweek.
Sometimes their incredible mass deception is easy. “North Korea attacked a peaceful South Korea!” On that simple slogan, all U.S. atrocities become their fault. Simply never let the sheep know about the now well documented more than a hundred thousand massacred in the South by the U.S. sponsored government of hated Syngman Rhee during the years BEFORE the troops from the North came south – or that before the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force attacked in force the short Korean civil war had been already over after five weeks – that the South Korean Army had defected or gone home – that South Koreans either welcomed their brothers from the North or at least were glad to be rescued from the American implanted murderous dictator Rhee. (Of course never let Americans be ashamed that the U.S. had divided Korea in two after W.W.II and that after WW I, President Wilson had Okayed what would be a 35 year long terrible Japanese occupation of Korea.)
Explaining why Obama had to order the destruction of Libya has been a little more hairy. The media had to lie that peaceful protesters were being targeted. There were no peaceful protesters. Wealthy Socialist Libya, with free health care and free education, had, according to UN assessment last year, a standard of living higher than nine European countries including Russia, better longevity and lower infant mortality. Most everyone owns a car, personal income level is high. Anderson Cooper has never mentioned this envious economy of Libya. There were no “peaceful demonstrations.”
Feb. 15 and 16: mobs of a hundred or so are setting fire to traffic police stations. During the week before, workers at Chinese and Korean building projects were being beaten and robbed and chased (they would soon all be brought home.) Feb. 17 saw a co-opting from overseas of the anniversary demonstration commemorating the 2006 wild demonstrations happening around the world which in Benghazi some protesters had died trying to burn down the Italian Consulate. In 2006, there were cries that Gaddafi was insufficiently enraged by the Danish cartoons.
American funded Libyan exile organizations in London had cleverly called for a “day of rage” against Gaddafi on that Danish cartoon anniversary. CNN filmed a crowd of people jumping up and down railing against Gaddafi. The next day, all the news agencies reported the same figure of about 26 dead, including policemen who had died. That was all CNN needed to proclaim, “Gaddafi is targeting peaceful protesters who only want democracy,” even though the only video footage shown was of a scattering of people running with the sound of shots from where or whom not visible.
CIA, with M16, Mossad and French intelligence, using a good amount of al Qaida manpower micromanages a successful armed attack, heavy weapons appearing almost immediately. In all the subsequent weeks of attacking cities and towns, these tough guys in pickup trucks will never be reported by CNN as having killed anyone. A civil war is whipped up taking advantage of the nine thousand year old tribal rivalry between Tripolitana and Cyrenaica.
The are horrific reports from German Reuters agency journalists in insurgent captured Benghazi, but CNN telecast reporters never report from the streets of Benghazi or any other rebel governed captured towns. CNN continues to report only from Tripoli where no effort is spared to portray the Libyan army as murderers and rapists. However BBC and Reuters reported rebels executed 50 black Libyan soldiers, during the very first days, some hanged in the street, one beheaded, all beaten.
Check out the background of the stooges the CIA has groomed to lead the Libyan insurgency and new American style democracy to come, thanks to U.S.NATO air strikes and increased funding and enhanced CIA leadership behind the scenes.
With all the decades of the conglomerate networks portraying Libya’s oil nationalizing Gaddafi a monster, CNN’s amazing announcement that “Gaddafi was going to kill everybody” immediately became such an disputable fact that Obama was able to cite it in explaining his order for air strikes.
That Gaddafi was for sure going to kill the Libyans he had lead so well for forty years was sold to the gullible US and European public as Obama’s and NATO leaders’ sole reason to bomb the Libyan government – bomb on the pretext of creating a no fly zone. A no fly zone call created by anti-Gaddafi’s Libya Western media. There had been videos of a couple planes shot down but none of planes attacking civilian population, only verbal accusations by telereporters Nic Robertson and Anderson Cooper, who for days pointed to the same bomb crater outside of town but admitting no one was hurt. Libya’s small air force did finally play a part in turning around the pickup trucks mounted with large anti-air craft and antitank guns headed for Tripoli.
Within less than a couple of weeks, awesome billions of dollars were stolen by Obama with all U.S controlled international finance institutions collaborating. Then U.S. NATO air strikes came to be ordered by a U.S. controlled UN Security Council in which China and Russia didn’t dare interfere. (Though China lost billions of dollars worth of construction projects and being the prime purchaser of Libya’s oil.)
U.S. and EU investors see opportunities as oil rich Libya will be stopped from selling oil to China and will be stopped from minting gold dinars to replace the the dollar and euro and stopped from pushing for African Unity to halt continued white world investor exploitation.
Gaddafi, Chairman of the African Union, another great leader of African Unity, will be removed as were Nkruma and Patrice Lumumba before him.
((Documentation for the above section on Libya’s suffering was provided in a previously published comprehensive history from Feb. 15 through April 26 see copious footnotes in “Capitalism’s Warplanes: CIA & al Qaida Destroy Socialist Libya’s 53rd Highest Living Standard.”)) (An imperative more basic than keeping US backed dictators in power and eliminating non-capitalist regimes is at work in Libya and the Middle East. An imperative that has created all wars. It is imperative for private investment financial capital to accumulate, and to accumulate at an ever increasing rate, pushing the wealthy owners of capital into ever new variations of same ancient conspiracy of the rich against the poor.)
“When Britain lost control of Egypt in 1956, Prime Minister Anthony Eden said he wanted the nationalist president Gamal Abdel Nasser “destroyed” murdered “I don’t give a damn if there’s anarchy and chaos in Egypt”. Those insolent Arabs, Winston Churchill had urged in 1951, should be driven “into the gutter from which they should never have emerged”.
The language of colonialism may have been modified; the spirit and the hypocrisy are unchanged. A new imperial phase is unfolding in direct response to the Arab uprising that began in January and has shocked Washington and Europe, causing an Eden-style panic. The loss of the Egyptian tyrant Mubarak was grievous, though not irretrievable; an American-backed counter-revolution is under way as the military regime in Cairo is seduced with new bribes and power shifting from the street to political groups that did not initiate the revolution. The western aim, as ever, is to stop authentic democracy and reclaim control.
The assault on Libya, a crime under the Nuremberg standard, is Britain’s 46th military “intervention” in the Middle East since 1945. Like its imperial partners, Britain’s goal is to control Africa’s oil.” ((From “Welcome to the Violent World of President Obama” by John Pilger.))
General Wesley Clark says he was told years years ago in a briefing that the plan was to take out seven countries in five years. After Afghanistan and Iraq would come Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Sudan, Somalia and then Iran.
Ordinary Americans have been reduced from good common folk to commercial TV mesmerized dolts slap happily putting themselves on the side of the military of “an American government owned by a conspiracy of the strongest financiers of the wealthy’ (Franklin Delano Roosevelt writing confidentially in 1932). This amoral human machine has been intent on producing war after war for profit since the war of 1812, the wars against Native Americans, and the war of independence from England.
Enjoy the holiday weekend. What the hell, that’s why we mourn. We mourn all the enjoyments the war dead missed out on.