"bad people"

i saw this stale, simple-minded slather from old 'Dead Hands Moses' himself and i had
to comment.  as if human beings can be sorted into simplistic, benign or malevolent,
all or nothing categories.  like gods or devils.  as if those who think they're "good guys"
don't inflict harm.  as if believing "we" are the good guys and "they" the bad ones
doesn't result in ample room for hate and zero tolerance for self evaluation, or
even honest observation, feeding the delusional exceptionalism and patriotism our
politicians pander to, as ugly when the nazis practiced it as it is coming out of Trump's
pie hole, or dripping from War Queen Hillary's polished, silver tongue.  as if this binary,
"us versus them" propaganda doesn't furnish wars with willing fodder, and can't be
aimed at any ethnic, or vaguely discernible, "different" group the corporate planners
of empire, their media mouthpieces, fatuous clowns or folksy presidents shake their
sticks at.  just ask one of the four million used-to-be Asians, those impoverished farmers
with their devalued families full of fragile toddlers, fractious teens, and frail elders
that we've "taken out" during the last fifty years.  or one of the guests at all those
wedding parties.  oh wait, you can't.  many of them couldn't even be identified.
well, you can take our "freedom protectors'" word for it – they were all bad people.
"gooks" and other, equally effective epithets, easily inserted in the "bad guy" slot.
of course, that's only a rough estimate.  we left off counting their corpses when our
journalists climbed into bed with our hired guns.  it's too much work identifying all those
fragments and charred remains, and why bother, when such unimportant lives from
Obama's "inessential" nations don't even merit inclusion in Washington's Community
of Subdued Colonies, or notches on Mr. Heston's gunbelt, a suitably phallic memento
of the non-stop propaganda he churned out all those years in his sterling and exemplary
service for the war industry, before the advent of video games rendered his inculcation
of impressionable, insecure youth redundant.  let's go kill us some more of them
"bad people" now.  (just tell me who they are).

- Evan Hawthorn, the 28^th of November, 2015

I Stand with France's Victims (rueful musings on the loss of humanity)

the failure of Americans to recognise their fellow human beings wears out my fondness

for them.  harmless innocents going about their business are incessantly killed in our
name.  hapless bystanders, patriots of 'other' nations, children playing on a beach,
entire wedding parties, rebellious souls who look their oppressors in the eye,
architects, musicians, dishwashers, and journalists.  even nurses and doctors.  it is
long-standing US policy to have drones return after a precise interval, so the rescue
workers can be killed.  27 out of every 28 drone victims just happened to be in the
vicinity, and virtually every intended victim has been reported killed on multiple
occasions, rendering a lethal math unfathomable even to the grim reaper.  our
'special forces' do their lightening raids in places we'll never even hear about,
since their activities are immune to oversight.  but you can rest assured that right
at this moment they are filling children's hearts with terror somewhere in the world,
as they knock down doors and round up family members in the middle of the night.
that is what they do.  when they're not training others to do it for them.  and
there's no dearth of oil-soaked, despotic deputies and sadistic acolytes, eager to
spread the reach of our torture techniques and nightmarish devices to the ends
of the earth.  indeed, since Columbus first bumped into Hispaniola, entire language
families have disappeared, thanks to the practiced brutality of the scions of Europe,
as they enslaved their hosts and righteously accumulated their ill-gotten gains,
repackaged as deserved, granted by god 'prosperity'.

now ten dozen people have been killed in Paris, and everyone in America is 'standing
with France'.  but who amoung us stands with the victims of France?  were none of
these darker skinned, "ethnic" relations precious beings with lessons to teach and
lives left to touch?  since we kill so many without even blinking, on and on, year
after year, speaking about it in terms of wasted expense, of political manoeuvrings,
of boots on the ground, and how many soldiers we lost in the act of killing them,
we must not believe they're actually human, must we?  what can be their worth if
millions of their deaths can go by uncounted, almost unnoticed, dwarfed by the
emotion stirred up by this single outbreak of violence?  if the senseless killing of
innocents is so upsetting to Americans, but only when it happens to ourselves or
our pale-skinned cohorts, in other words, one percent of the time, just what are

these vaunted values our leaders so brazenly claim to protect?  i'm visited by
visions of German citizens in the nineteen forties, mourning some calamity arranged
by the French resistance and i think, how could anyone feel solidarity for such a
heartless, self-focused people?

of course, French citizens are not responsible for the violence their ruling class,
seemingly unable to let go of its colonial 'interests', inflicts on North Africa and
the Middle East.  corporate-owned 'Democracy', as everyone knows, is too hollow
a shell to effect actual policy change.  but neither are the people residing in any
of the countries whose right to govern we have usurped responsible for the actions
of 19 Saudi bombers.  or the still bleeding tragedy in France.  if anything, they
are less responsible, given the fact that their rulers don't even pretend to be
democratic.  but terrorists, like western governments, hold citizens accountable

for the actions of a few, or even for a single individual.  thus entire villages of
native Americans were wiped out over the death of a white man's cow.   thus
went hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, and the Southeast Asians in their millions.
thus Afghanistan, and then Iraq, were bludgeoned into the stone age without
provocation.  yet we blithely support our storm troopers, and the pitiless
fundamentalists our war mongers arm and then disavow, as they "protect" our
fragile, neurotic "freedom" by presumptively and brutally invading destitute
nations that did us no harm, ringing up astronomical profits, destroying entire
societies, tearing up every last vestige of civility, every promise of improved
lives for their children, every remnant of lingering, latent hope.  damaging even
the air they breathe, and the genes they manage to pass on.

if you feel compelled to stand with France today, but can't find it in yourself
to rise up in unremitting fury against the ceaseless slaughter of the hapless
children of a lesser god, pigmented and unprofitable as she is doubtless likely
to be, if you can find it in yourself to feel for these few, stolen souls but
turn the page on the countless, irredeemable loss that relentlessly piles up
every day of our lives, please be up front about it and don a white sheet.

- Evan Hawthorn, the 14^th of November, 2015

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