Doug's Darkworld

Well, an army psychiatrist purportedly went off his rocker and shot a bunch of folks in Fort Hood, Texas. I say purportedly, because there is only one thing about this case we can be absolutely certain of. The army will lie. The US military is under absolutely no obligation to tell the truth about anything, has every incentive to lie, and has been caught in lie after lie after lie. All they have to do is flood the airwaves with their version of events, the media will dutifully parrot it, and people will believe it. Then later if the truth comes out, it will be buried in the back pages and most people won’t even hear about it, let alone believe it. Humans are funny that way, they will believe the first thing they hear, and pretty much never revisit the issue. I’m not of course saying there aren’t some fine honourable folks in the military, in fact some of the finest human beings I have ever known were career military. The modern US military is a business though, and their business is selling endless war. For the purpose of getting endless war spending and endless war contracts. And they do a fine job of it, aided and abetted by a lying media and lying government. Smedly Butler said it best, “War is a racket.”

Knowing this, it makes it hard to come to any real conclusions about the shooting itself. And as well, it’s going on very risky ground to draw any conclusions from a single incident. Some guy lost it and shot some people, hopefully there’s not much more to it than that. However, while the incident itself can’t tell us anything, the reaction to it can. And there it’s both interesting and depressing. A big deal will be made about the heroics of it all. It’s a pretty good bet that the alleged lone shooter survives, he won’t ever see the light of day again, let alone a civilian lawyer. It’s fascinating how quickly initial reports of multiple shooters and many friendly fire deaths almost instantly morphed into the lone shooter and heroic defence story. It’s almost uncanny how that always happens in incidents like this. Note previous paragraph about lies.

There will be a certain amount of Muslim bashing, that goes without saying. There will be a discussion about the combat stress our troops are suffering from, but all in a “support our troops context.” There won’t be a whole lot of discussion about why our troops are going halfway around the world to get their heads fucked up in wars to protect western corporate access to Asia’s oil and gas. That we won’t be discussing. It’s like watching doctors treating a man who has his hand stuck in a blender, but no one dares suggest it would be a lot easier to treat him if he would just pull his hand out of the blender. Basically a terrible tragedy that likely has some relation to our overseas wars will be used to justify same. Sigh.

As others have pointed out, the people who died in Texas won’t be counted as casualties of war. If war is such a  great thing, why do we go to such great lengths to disguise and hide the true cost of it? I’d like to see a public debate on that some day. I’m pretty sure than when people act evasive, it means they have something to hide. God rest the souls of all the victims of these stupid wars, wherever they fell. War is bad, peace is good, how the hell did we ever forget that?

“War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”

—Smedley Butler

“The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.”

—David Friedman

“What a cruel thing is war:  to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world.”

—Robert E. Lee, letter to his wife, 1864

(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit, is central to illustrating the post, ands is arguably a historically important image. Credit and copyright: AP Photo. It’s a picture of Howard Unruh, modern America’s first mass shooter, the day after his shooting. On Sept 6 1949 Howard meticulously shot and killed 13 people. He too was a war veteran, though in his case it seems he was just crazy. Crazy people usually aren’t very dangerous, the exception being paranoid schizophrenics like Howard. He is quoted in the title of this post. My only  point here, restated, is that killing people really is nuts … but using people’s senseless deaths to justify killing more people, now that’s not nuts, that’s evil. Welcome to the “war on sanity.”)