It is
truly a devil of a choice. Support American
soldiers murdering innocent civilians throughout Iraq and win
the hollow, uneasy applause of your neighbors?
Or do
you secretly root for Iraqi civilians turned revolutionaries
trying the defend their war-wracked country against the
murderous Western invaders ... and risk being arrested for
treason?
You've
heard the stories, if you've chosen to listen. Here's today's
roundup: Gunmen in American helicopters shooting a family of
five trying to swim across a river while escaping the carnage
in Fallujah. Or killing doctors and nurses who were trying to
help those wounded by indiscriminate American bombing. Or that
story of the American soldier "finishing off" an injured Iraqi
man.
These
are only the latest of thousands of heartless atrocities
wreaked on a ravaged country by an overwhelming military force
that can only be described as completely insane. Representing
a country that can only be described with the same phrase. The
country in question is yours. Can you deal with
that?
What
America is doing to Iraq is a thousand times worse than Saddam
Hussein every dreamed about doing to anyone! What America is
doing to Iraq is worse than any dictator, no matter how
vilified, has ever done to any other country!
You've
heard the pornographic tales about Abu Ghraib prison. How does
it sit with you that Americans are regarded as sadistic sex
perverts by the rest of the world? Judging by the behavior of
American soldiers, that is what we are.
And
what do you do about it? How do you react, sitting in your
easy chair on Sunday watching football? Turn to your favorite
Internet porn site?
Try to
ignore all those stories about the election, a trickle turning
into a tidal wave of evidence that shows Bush got more votes
than there were voters in a number of states? But if your
thought process is that evolved, you realize that overturning
this recent smelly election would not solve the problem,
because the guy who lost is just as much a warmonger as the
guy who won.
So you
go back to your football game, and maybe turn up the volume a
little, just in case you have a little bit of conscience left
and can hear in your mind the distant screams of women and
children being cut to ribbons by American ordnance in
Fallujah. And all for no good reason.
You
know, the thing that really gets me about the American
butchery in Iraq is that it is a well-known fact — doubted by
no one — that the reasons uniformed American men and women are
even in Iraq are lies. Well-established lies, proven many
times. No weapons of mass destruction. And no connection to
al-Qaeda (even though al-Qaeda was invented by the CIA as an
excuse to make wars everywhere).
Yet it
apparently has occurred to no one with any degree of power in
this warped society of ours that this means all the lives we
have squandered in our War of Lies in Iraq are an absolutely
evil abomination, completely unnecessary, except to maintain
the fiction that the lies about weapons of mass destruction
and al-Qaeda somehow don't really matter, and that we can kill
anybody we want at any time.
There
are two ways you can look at this. If you know a little about
real American history, you know we have butchered people all
over the world and clothed the horrific deeds in noble
rhetoric so as not to offend our bloated sense of self-worth.
If you know this, then you are part of the choir I so often
preach to.
But if
you think America has any remaining shred of decency and
honesty in the way it barges around the world, killing
innocent people with impunity as it goes, then I have to tell
you that in your profound and deliberate ignorance, you are an
accessory to mass murder. By your silence and inaction, you
are assisting in the daily murders of innocent
people.
Are you
too stupid to make the connection? Waging war on the basis of
lies is mass murder, and you are supporting it. Could it be
any clearer?
I
strongly urge anyone who supports the murderous and evil
American presence in Iraq to instruct their children to
immediately go and start killing their own neighbors,
especially if their skin is not lily white, because this is
exactly what the U.S. invasion of Iraq is telling us to do. We
don’t need a reason to kill people, unless it’s because they
have something that we want.
Since
Iraq has something we want — namely oil — it’s OK to kill
them. That’s what we are teaching are children. This is no
joke. That’s what our children are learning. Just listen to
the soldiers in Iraq describe what they are
doing.
How
they have unleashed their savage hatred against people who
have never done a thing to hurt them.
Oh,
don’t argue 9/11 to me. Iraqis had nothing to do with 9/11.
That atrocity wasn’t carried out by Arabs, it was carried out
by rich white men who pretend to be pious Christians and Jews
hiding behind their billions of dollars.
For
Americans, this is the profound lesson of the Iraq war. We
don’t need a reason to rob and kill someone anymore. Our
religious president says it’s the right thing to do, and has
destroyed our Constitution, as well as our reputation around
the world, to prove it.
And
this is the lesson of 9/11. You stage a terror attack to
convince the world we need to fight terror. This is what the
Israelis have done over the last century to the
Palestinians.
But it
appears that we as a people — the American people — will never
learn this lesson. Or, we will never learn it in time,
anyway.
We have
let our world be radically changed by a few evil, rich, white
and soulless businessmen who control the information we
receive and the appartus that governs us, and now we have let
200-plus years of relative freedom go down the drain simply
because these men wanted to make even more money and sold us
on a story that convinced us we were in danger from a foreign
threat, just like they always do, just like they have always
done.
They
have changed the character of the world based on a big lie
that we swallowed because we failed to have the courage to
challenge what they said.
And
look what happened. This killing will never stop, you know.
The dogs of war have been unleashed. Those American kids who
are doing all that killing in Iraq will bring all the stuff
back home, and give it to us here.
You’ve
heard about the plans, of course, haven’t you? The economic
collapse, the concentration camps for debtors and dissenters.
Sure, watch your football game. It can’t possibly happen here.
Don’t let your mind wander to the Fallujah scenario being
transferred to Oakland, or Ann Arbor, or
Houston.
I know,
for most of you, it’s already too late to change your mind.
The die in cast (and the cast will soon be
dead).
Paste
that “Support Our Troops” ribbon on the back of your car. That
way the rest of us will know you are cheering for mass murder
because of reasons that are lies.
And
when you look in the mirror, don’t look directly into your own
eyes. That’s what happened to some of our soldiers who came
back from Iraq, you know.
You
know. Some of the ones who went down to the cellar and put a
bullet into their temple.
Should
your soul suddenly click on after its long period of dormancy,
it could happen to you, you know.
This
little snippet of an old song has been playing in my head
these last few days. It reveals how old I am. Crosby, Stills,
Nash & Young. 1970. “Wooden Ships.”
Horror grips us as we watch you die. All we can do
is echo your anguished cries. Stare as all human feelings
die. We are leaving — you don’t need us.
America
has become a nation of moral cowards and intellectual liars.
Maybe the good people should get out, while they can. A
curdled country like this doesn’t deserve to
survive.
John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf
Coast of Florida, and is acutely ashamed, in this rancid day
and age, to be an American. His essays have appeared on
hundreds of websites around the world and have been collected
into two anthologies. The latest, titled "The Perfect Enemy,"
is available at http://www.johnkaminski.com/
Spread the truth about war and
terrorism to others who are either misinformed or
misguided by the mainstream media and the current
administration. It is not enough just for you to
know the truth. You must make others aware. Together we
can all make a difference and change the perilous road
we are currently on. Please support freedom of
information and expression. Help bring true democracy
back to America.
Buy one or more of these bumper
stickers today, give them to your friends. Don't be
afraid to let others know what you think and how you
feel!
- Tony Naz, Webmaster and Administrator of
WARFOLLY.com
Thank you for supporting independent,
non-corporate journalism.
