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With
the trembling fervor of a newly-anointed disciple
in a melange of Bob Grant White Hate Radio Rant and
Satinesque Radical Middle Thought-Less Nouveau Imperialism
came the three-pronged mendacious alogy, an arrogant
impetus to repeat the past. In summary:
1.
The U. S. Ascendant Force is stretched beyond its
physical limits babysitting the Rest of The World
in a mighty effort to police The Incompetent Fatuous
Others who will otherwise bereft of Our Supreme Intervention
fall upon each other in a satanic quagmire of flesh-rending
maleficent frenzy;
2.
All persons of African descent are predisposed to
unspeakable acts of violence against themselves and
others* therefore rendering them less than subhuman
and all Asians can be placed in that same category
if they can be distracted long enough from one of
several vile daily pastimes they share with Africans,
i.e., ripping intestines out of the living, etc.;
3.
Cowardly Irish republicans are waiting in the wings
with demonic urgency eager to applaud gleefully when
America takes a hit.
Gaping,
all agog, I managed "She did not just
say that."
Ahh,
but I'm afraid she did, she did indeed. In three and
one half pages of purblind rambling, Nearly The Entire
Planet was insulted including Fellow Americans --
by association with the ideas -- and Furred Members
of The Natural World -- by insolent inclemency. Snap
Shot was entirely disconnected from its reference
to Avoiding Park Benches
except for the shared word "Rwanda".
Let's
do look at 'Rwanda'. Defining Ruandi-Urundans as 'Tutsi'
and 'Hutu' is a gross simplification of intricate
kinship, political, and economic interrelations that
existed among the indigenous Twa, the Bantu-speaking
baHutu and the Hima baTutsi with their long history
of intermarriage and cohabitation. Before German,
British, and Belgian colonial exploits, the cattle/client-patron/status
marriage-based clan system was remarkably homogenous
and fluid. A person could be 'Tutsi' and 'Hutu' simultaneously
in a complex language that fit the society. Colonialism
imposed racial attitudes, rigid stratification, and
foreign religion which destroyed the fabric of Ruandan-Urundan
culture, pitting portions of society against each
other through manipulation of attitudes and privilege.
That paved the way for eternal war and exploitation
shielded by selective sanitized language.
Once,
there was a chance for Rwanda and Burundi. In the
neighboring Congo there was an exceedingly dangerous
man whose progressive social movement threatened to
bring sweeping stability and peace to all of Africa.
The grisly tale snakes through Belgium's obscene profits
from copper-uranium-gold mines, foreign banking, a
future MI5 head and deliberations at Whitehall, Eisenhower's
order, CIA and poisoned toothpaste, UN complicity
and ends with the humiliation, torture, and execution
of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, age thirty-five,
and two of his ministers.
"The
following day Katanga's interior minister called a
senior Belgian policeman to his office with orders
to conceal the killings. He said 'You destroy them,
you make them disappear. How you do it doesn't interest
me,' says Gerard Soerte. Soerte and a companion exhumed
the bodies from shallow graves, hacked them into pieces
and dissolved them in acid from the Belgian-run mines
nearby. 'We were there for two days,' says Soerte.
'We did things an animal wouldn't do. That's why we
were drunk. Stone drunk.' When they ran out of acid,
they made a fire for the last remains. When they had
finished, there was no trace of human remains."
(Akerman)
Patrice
Lumumba was an important man.
Worldwide,
the greedy little power manipulations are disguised
and explained away behind the brutal tolls of both
trumpeted mobilized warfare and shrouded insidious
oppression whereby the corrupt ruling elite serviced
by the sacrifices of those coerced or conscripted
to The Cause pit brother against sister against brother
fostering the most despicable crimes humans are made
capable of by teaching them to dehumanize and demonize
the victim.
A
few known atrocities of the U. S. government's military:
Mobile
Bay, Trail of Tears, Matamoros, Monterey, Vera Cruz
(twice), Chapultepec, Huamantla, Thibodaux, Wounded
Knee, The Philippines, Ludlow Tent Colony, Tulsa,
Inchon Port, No Gun Ri, Sinchon, Hiroshima, Nagasaki,
Pilsen, Royan, My Lai, Kent, El Mozote, Mutlaa/Basra,
Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Kandahar, Sherbergan
Some
of the racist rationale:
"Our
fighting blood was up, and we wanted to kill niggers…
This shooting human beings is a hot game and beats
hunting all to pieces. We charged them and such a
slaughter you never saw. We killed them like rabbits;
hundreds, yes, thousands of them. Everyone was crazy.
[The killing was] fast and furious, the dead goo-goos
piling up thicker than buffalo chips. Picking off
niggers in the water [was] more fun than a turkey
shoot... Nigger fighting business... I am in my glory
when I can sight my gun on some brown skin and pull
the trigger." Anonymous U. S. Soldiers, on orders
to kill anyone over the age of ten, The War in The
Philippines.
"Think
of it, niggers speaking French!"
Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, The Occupation
of Haiti.
"First,
the underlying rational policy, that is, that the
only good gook is a dead gook. Very similar to the
only good Indian is a dead Indian and the only good
nigger is a dead nigger."
Captain Robert B. Johnson, U. S. Army, West Point/'65,
in testimony on The War in Vietnam.
"Expressing
his disgust at an 'indoctrination' in which Marines
chanted, 'Rape the town and kill the people, that’s
the thing we love to do', during five-mile runs, and
were frequently roused with cries of 'Nuke the sand-niggers
in the Middle East', Larson said 'Why didn’t
I speak up earlier… I fell for the whole boot
camp thing hook, line, and sinker'."
Erik Larson, deserter, U. S. Marine Reservist, The
Persian Gulf War.
"If
there was anybody there, they were the enemy. We were
told specifically that if there were women and children
to kill them."
Private Matt Guckenheimer, U. S. Army, The War in
Afghanistan.
Baby-sitting?
Some
of the world's war veterans, the substance-abusing
veterans of the U. S. military from years past and
recent, the drunken and suicidally despondent Dallaire,
Northern Irelanders shuffling along streets with this
night's blue bag, attempt to escape from what they
saw or what they did and what they fear will happen
again.
Central
to preventing recurrence is the open-minded willingness
to explore history and the self-restraint to listen
long enough to grasp it. "Either the United
States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy
the United States." (W. E. B. Du Bois)
*The Color Line: 'Black-on-black violence' is the
racist rationale behind the U.S. federally-funded
Violence Initiative Project and the National Institute
of Mental Health's biomedical social controls which
use 'scientific' study by way of statistical manipulation
to prove racist views in the utterly-discredited Jensen
style targeting people of African descent and Latinos.
The reference to 'blackness' or 'color' is shaded
depending on the preference of the racist, i.e., the
Irish were considered 'colored' in Victorian England.
Focusing on 'black-on-black violence' as a risk factor
is an inherently paternalistic racist tool implying
that violence is particular to or more acceptable
in black communities. Also, this is a peculiar way
of referring to large-scale war. For example, no one
refers to WWII as 'white-on-white violence' or the
war in Bosnia as 'white-on-white violence'. In addition,
the 'black-on-black violence' label removes white
society and the state apartheid apparatus from the
responsibility of extreme colonial and post-colonial
social decay. The rationale justifies different methods
of policing and unequal standards of justice and civil
rights for blacks and whites. "Unemployment runs
in the genes just like bad teeth." (Richard Herrnstein,
Princeton University, co-author of The Bell Curve.)
The implications of such 'scientific' racism resurfacing
again at a time in which biomedical ethics is not
just a debate but an oxymoron are frightening.
For
opinions on war from some of the United States of
America's Veterans of War go to: Veterans
For Peace and Vietnam
Veterans Against the War Anti-Imperialists
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