CARTOON: The Murderous Myth Of American Courage
Consider us blustery high-tech, remote cowards.
Column & Cartoons by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (2/9/24)
I wrote the following paragraph in a Substack response to the headline for the excellent Caitlan Johnstone column posted below: “The US Keeps Bombing People While Saying It Doesn't Want To Fight”. It garnered a lot of likes so I decided to expand it.
One of the myths of America is that we love to fight. We love to murder, not fight. We drop bombs from high-flying bombers or launch missiles from hundreds of miles away or guide drones across another nation's landscape to slaughter a wedding party or force the Ukrainians to lose a generation fighting the Russians for enrichment of our weapons manufacturers and access to their resources and land. None of that is fighting. As with all bullies, the U.S. is cowardly, craven and self-centered. We kill for profit and to give our hollowed out culture the delusion of purpose and courage. America is anything but courageous. I have never been so ashamed of this nation.
Having worked with some traumatized veterans in my counseling career, I want to stress I am not criticizing boots-on-the-ground members of the military, who so often are betrayed and victimized by this country’s political and top military leadership both on the battlefield and when they return home. While some join the military for lofty ideals of freedom and democracy, many join for the opportunity to go to college which they otherwise could never afford or, even, to have health insurance for themselves and their families, which this nation will never assure its people.
As we witness daily, far too many veterans return traumatized and abandoned, living out their days homeless with far too many addicted to drugs.
While individual members of the active military — about 0.4 percent of the population — often show great personal and unit courage, their leadership in the White House, War Department and a venal congress bought off by arms manufacturers and oil drillers is as cynical and duplicitous as it is corrupt.
And cowardly.
High-tech, remote cowards
Despite what the Hollywood regurgitation of war porn markets, most of the military killing we do is done remotely. Whether it is a family blown to smithereens by drones piloted by military laptop warriors half-a-world away, or — as in Ukraine — by proxy troops of another nation, we rarely get our hands bloody directly fighting for the oil we steal and Wall Street profit. Consider us blustery high-tech, remote cowards.
In fact, our murderous ruling class will — as they have done throughout the Middle East and at the some 900 known military bases sprinkled around the globe — actively use American troops as bait in order to “justify” high-altitude bombings. Just as we saw recently with Joe Biden ordering over 85 bombings in Iraq and Syria after three Georgia Army reservists were killed at a remote base in Jordan. A supposed innocent “logistical base” that was in fact a drone operation facility.
(Check out the disgusting standard perfunctory pro forma photo of “Genocide” Joe & Jill doing the usual cynical presidential greeting of three more sacrificed-for-empire soldiers.)
Contrary to national claims of fighting for peace, in our 248 years since independence there have been only 15 years of peace. The rest of the time, we have waged wars large and small — mostly for corporate profit — from here to the most remote niches around the globe.
Where once we had skin in the game, now we can simply launch multi-million dollar missiles and drones or pay-off corrupt foreign leaders to march their troops into muddy trenches and death traps carrying weapons made in America. Our CIA will coordinate assassinations and overthrow governments deemed obstacles to corporate profit. We simply cannot talk, negotiate, learn from our many errors, problem solve or — God forbid — compromise. We cannot even define “diplomacy”. We have no skills at patience or nuance. Bullies never do.
One of the things that especially drove official Washington and their PR staff in corporate media pant-wetting insane about Tucker Carlson’s recent informative interview with Russian leader Vladimir Putin was Putin’s open invitation for the U.S. to engage in formal talks over our crumbling corporate grift in Ukraine. How dare he make such a logical suggestion when there are more innocents to kill and money for Boeing and General Dynamics to shovel up.
Our standard response
Instead, our standard response to any conflict or grab for foreign oil is remote, high-tech military terrorism. You know, like we are now seeing in the US/Israel genocide in Gaza. An atrocity that will escalate in the coming days as the Zionist Nazi leadership in Tel Aviv goes in for the final genocidal kill in Rafa, where Israel had ordered Gazans to flee to be safe. Instead, they have been herded for convenient slaughter.
Rafa, a city of 280,000 is now home to 1.4 million homeless, defenseless, starving, sickened refugees — 600,000 of which are children. Israel’s industrialized murder will be carried out with American funding, machinery, weaponry and cynical hand-wringing diplomatic cover.
The modern Nazis are not only in Tel Aviv. They are in Washington D.C. as well, where their pudgy, nicely manicured hands are clean and the ranks include our Zionist-funded congressional “representatives”.
So do Americans really like to fight? No. We’re chicken. But we love to phone in our murder, maiming and mayhem with long-distance weaponry and blood of someone else’s young men.
Call us what we are: Cowards for Corporate Profit.
We simply cannot talk, negotiate, learn from our many errors, problem solve or — God forbid — compromise. We cannot even define “diplomacy”. We have no skills at patience or nuance. Bullies never do.
Putin Drives America’s Dumbed Down Neocons Pant-Wetting Insane:
The US Keeps Bombing People While Saying It Doesn't Want To Fight
It’s just so surreal. It’s like someone running up to you and slinging punches at your face while screaming “I DO NOT WISH TO FIGHT! THIS IS NOT AN ASSAULT!”
By Caitlan Johnstone
Caitlan Newsletter (2/8/24)
One of the weirdest things happening in the world today is the way US officials keep insisting that they are not at war with the groups they’re dropping bombs on in the middle east, and that they do not seek conflict with the people they are attacking.
Shortly after another massive round of attacks on Houthi targets in Yemen, Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder told reporters on Monday that the US is not at war with the group.
“We don’t seek an escalation with the Houthis. We’re not at war with the Houthis. We’re not seeking to go to war with the Houthis,” Ryder said.
The day before, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told CNN’s State of the Union that “the United States also is not looking for a wider war in the middle east,” even as he refused to rule out direct attacks within Iran, and even as the US-backed war on Gaza has expanded to US bombing campaigns in Yemen, Syria and Iraq.
This is just days after President Biden released a statement saying “The United States does not seek conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world” while the United States was in the process of dropping bombs on multiple middle eastern countries.
It’s just so surreal. It’s like someone running up to you and slinging punches at your face while screaming “I DO NOT WISH TO FIGHT! THIS IS NOT AN ASSAULT!” They wear a plastic smiling mask and pay lip service to peace while operating the single most aggressive and murderous power structure on this planet.
The empire has been doing this same freakish Nice Guy Axe Murderer schtick with Gaza. The Biden administration could force an end to Israel’s genocidal atrocities in the Gaza Strip at any time but are instead choosing to provide those atrocities with full unconditional support, and as they do this they’re simultaneously putting on a performance to suggest that they disapprove of Israel’s actions. The White House has expressed “concern” over the death and suffering of civilians in Gaza no fewer than twenty times as of this writing, yet has continued to back the Israeli onslaught without taking any concrete actions to make the death and suffering stop.
That’s what we’re seeing when Biden administration officials tell the press that Biden referred to Netanyahu as a “bad fucking guy”, or when Secretary of State Antony Blinken solemnly finger-wags at Israel saying the dehumanization of the October 7 attack “cannot be a license to dehumanize others.” They’re putting on a big show about opposing Israel’s crimes against humanity as though they are not enthusiastically facilitating those crimes. They’re acting like they’re a passive witness to the atrocities in Gaza when in reality they’re an active participant. They’re posing as the peacemaker while acting as the warmaker.
And now we learn that US military advisors have been deployed to Kinmen, a group of Taiwan-controlled islands so close to the Chinese mainland that in the late sixties giant loudspeakers were built there to blast anti-communist propaganda over the water into the PRC.
Contrast this move with a recent headline from The Times saying “China opens Antarctic base on America’s doorstep,” which will show up as self-evidently nonsensical to anyone who has ever looked at a globe. It’s taken as a given that the US is entitled to amass a military presence right on China’s coastline, but the idea of China establishing a presence literally anywhere on planet Earth is interpreted as extreme aggressions on “America’s doorstep”.
It’s almost a cliché at this point to say imagine if China did this to the US, but seriously. Imagine if China did this to the US. As one Twitter follower put it, at just three kilometers away the Kinmen islands are closer to mainland China than Martha’s Vineyard is to the coast of Massachusetts. If China came anywhere near amassing any kind of military presence that close to the United States, it would be considered an act of war and the US would attack immediately.
So the US is clearly the aggressor here. …
Read the rest and 7-minute audio version
Facts of the current world we live in! Some extremely powerful & wealthy entities are needed to meaningfully push against the evil lobbyists & their agendas. It’s like an evil freight train running at 1000 miles per hour…. Only another bigger train running in the opposite direction at 5000 miles per hour can stop & destroy it.
And it's not just the USA. It's Canada, the UK and other nations that are supplying Israel with money, arms and diplomatic cover as well.
It must stop. How do we make this happen?
I'll be writing and sending a letter to our Prime Minister and friends today, and sharing it with the papers and on Substack. Pressuring them is just one tactic of many. Boycotting Israeli firms is another and so is taking to the streets.