Blog -> Veterans Day
Veterans Day
11 November 2009
So today is veterans day in the USA. I was listening to the radio earlier. I know, that was my first mistake right there. I'm not a fan of
anyone talking on radio stations that play music, if i want to listen to pricks talk shit i will listen to talk radio or turn on the idiot box
in the corner. Anyway, things had been going pretty well, in that i had heard several pretty good songs without anyone speaking. Then, upon
hearing the opening bars of a song i didn't want to hear, and naturally turning the dial, i somehow managed to catch just a few short seconds
of one radio 'personality'. He said that all too familiar bullshit line - support the troops not the war. This is like supporting the rapist
but not the rape. You don't like that metaphor? How about supporting the murderer but not the murder? Not really a metaphor that one is it?
How long will we let these pricks in suits define the word murder for us?
George Carlin talked a lot about what he called the euphemising of language. When soldiers returned from war they were often diagnosed as
having
shell shock. Over the years, this same phenomenon became known as
battle fatigue,
operational exhaustion and then
post-traumatic stress disorder. And he makes the point that veterans would probably be getting better treatment for their conditions if
it was still called shell shock. This is the sort of thing people should be talking about on a day like this, rather than bending over
obediently to the corporate supervisors of their own hell, the same bunch running the war.
why is the war in Iraq still going on?
For the freedom of Iraq? How about the freedom not to be bombed? How free can a place ever be when there's thousands of foreign troops there?
In Vietnam, many USA troops refused to follow orders instructing them to kill Vietnam civilians. It was all part of a large and deliberately
under-reported anti-war movement within the military at the time. Some of them even killed the generals who were telling them to do the
killing. Now that is democracy. It's also the reason why ground troops were taken out of Vietnam. Air strikes took their place of course - it's
much harder to feel empathy for people when you are bombing them from the sky, much easier to kill your fellow human beings when you can't see
their eyes or their blood.
The same course of events seems likely for Iraq. Many soldiers have handed over weapons to Iraqis as they can see they are just defending their
country. They support righteousness rather than the flag that happened to fly over the land they happened to be born in.
It wasn't long after the war started that the USA installed their own government in Iraq. That was several years ago, and since that day, they
have then surely been at war with themselves. But the war goes on. And on, and on.
Of course the bottom line is that people are making money. The phrase 'military industrial complex' is often used to describe these people, but
using such lifeless words as that only serves to lengthen the life's of such things. People are profiting from murder. Of course no-one tells it
like it is on TV. They would rather drown the truth with a language so diluted it has become inhumane.
The rich make money out of the poor. It happens throughout almost every industry you can think of. From hip hop and punk to Walmart and Home
Depot. The war machine is really just a graphic illustration of that reality.
Tags
Iraq war George Carlin murder for profit veterans day
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