NATION OF COWARDS

John Chuckman

 

What else can you fairly call a people who attack a population of refugees confined to a small space surrounded on every side by fences and machine-gun towers, a population with nowhere to run? No, that is not put strongly enough. Not just attack, but use the latest and most ferocious weapons from the American arsenal to slaughter more than 2100 people, including more than 500 children, destroying along the way a major portion of the housing, businesses, and institutions of a poor people.

The definition of a coward is not the traditional military one of a soldier who won’t fight. No, that’s far too simplistic and self-serving. The genuine meaning of the word, the meaning that warrants our full sense of revulsion and contempt, is someone who attacks someone far weaker than themselves. A large man who beats a woman or a child with his fists or a policeman who clubs a handcuffed prisoner – that is the accurate and meaningful definition of the word. And the people of Israel responsible for Operation Protective Edge are as sadly perfect examples of genuine cowards as you can find in the world.

What remarkable courage it takes – outfitted as the IDF is with Kevlar armor, the latest intelligence gadgets, satellites, radios, support of every imaginable kind, and immensely powerful weapons (they even get hot pizzas delivered as they pause in their gruesome work) – to shoot people who cannot run away, are often poorly fed and clothed, and who mostly have no weapons. And the courage of the Israeli pilots who make bombing runs over homes, schools, apartments, and stores from the safety of their supersonic fighters is surely remarkable. They remind me of the American pilots who shot and incinerated countless retreating Iraqi soldiers in the (engineered) First Gulf War while the television broadcasts caught their gleeful shouts of “Wow, it’s just like shooting fish in a barrel!”

Yes, Americans are the only comparable example of Israel’s cowardice, the Americans who literally enable Israel’s savagery but also themselves have given the world the best part of half a century of savagery abroad, the deaths of literally millions of civilians in half a dozen countries – deaths by carpet bombing, napalm, missiles, white phosphorus, various poisons, and the razor-like shards of cluster bombs.

The United States, like Israel, is never called to account for the worst record on the planet of mass killing and destruction. You simply cannot name a contemporary criminal enterprise or a so-called terrorist organization which has a record so steeped in horrors as those two.

Wholesale death inflicted with utter disregard for international law and custom has become standard policy for both countries. Yes, there are always excuses for mass murder, the weasel words such as communists or terrorists or dictators and weapons of mass destruction (Americans ironically being the only people on earth who actually used them, twice, on civilians) – all of them having no more real meaning than Stalin’s chilling wreckers, a word he used to signal his creatures that it was time for a new bloody purge. In some cases those purged were simply people Stalin did not like or of whom he felt jealous, but in most cases of the millions smashed or consigned to hell on earth, the only motive was to terrify a population into submission, and that is exactly what Israel’s motive is for its periodic massacres of Palestinians and Lebanese.

Anyone of moderate intelligence who reads and thinks must know Israel is in no danger from anyone, least of all the Palestinians who have no organized army, no navy, and no air force, not to mention very little of anything else. Israel is armed to the teeth with conventional and non-conventional weapons, it leans back arrogantly into the arms of super-power America and plays the victim in a land it victimizes, and it functions as a garrison state whose major purpose is to hold down and make miserable millions of people who happen not to be Jewish, all the while hoping they will one day pick up and leave. It is absurd to say Israel’s security is endangered by anyone, and especially by the hopeless, lifetime prisoners of Palestine.

Turning a blind eye to the Holocaust three-quarters of a century ago was an unforgivable thing, but in at least one very real sense, it is now even more culpable the way the West turns a blind eye to Israel’s horrors. The Holocaust was perpetrated in great secrecy, and there was no Internet or international media equipped with satellites to tell the world what was happening. There was no United Nations or other international organizations watching. Today, what Israel does is everywhere to be seen. People in America eat their suppers watching Israeli jets bombing homes. Without much effort you can find images of Palestinian children with portions of their heads missing. And we all saw the Israelis from Sderot sit in lawn chairs on a bluff in the evening breeze laughing and applauding as women and children writhed in agony far below much like ants being stepped on.

 

INSANITY OR SECURITY?

John Chuckman

Informing as part of an open society? Indeed, under Mr. Bush’s proposed Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS for short) – a kind of national, atomic-mutation of Neighborhood Watch – an estimated four percent of Americans will join a long and glorious tradition of state-security informants.

The tradition has roots going back at least to the French Revolution. During the Terror, citizens were encouraged to inform on neighbors and even children to inform on their parents. More than a few harmless people went to the guillotine just on the basis of a hateful neighbor denouncing them.

Of course, there was Stalin’s immense bloodbath over two continents. Informants played an important part in his heavy industry of organized murder. And one recognizes other suggestive similarities to what’s happening in America. When Stalin was ready to announce another purge, he often spoke indirectly of “wreckers,” wreckers of the Revolution. Just this suggestion from his lips was enough to get the thugs and psychopaths busy about their work.

Has anyone noticed the paler-but-still-similar sense of the term terrorists? And with the heavily-biased press in America, we have all been conditioned to have an immediate mental image of a terrorist: He’s a swarthy fellow with a difficult Arabic or Persian name and a strange religion. Remember, if there is one thing America is good at, one thing at which it has no equal on the planet, it is marketing. And America has intensively marketed this image for years.

The informing tradition was carried on in societies as diverse as Nazi Germany, the East German Stasi, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the horrific youth brigades of China’s Cultural Revolution.

My right-wing readers, yes I do have some, sometimes question how I can possibly ever associate America with ugly things like fascism? Well, the TIPS program and the Patriot Act, both deliberately bland names for insidious, dangerous things, is the word made flesh, so to speak.

I have in the past humorously observed the prevalence of insanity in America. I admit to using that term in a rather loosely-defined sense, but America is the land of Black Helicopters, alien abductions, Aryan churches, rattlesnake worship, speaking in tongues, and Texas.

And you cannot live in America without discovering there also are a lot of angry people there. You see them on the streets, you meet them in stores, you experience them as neighbors. In your face. Mind your own business. Foul language. Indeed, I can attest to a fair sampling of such language in mail from my more perverse readers. Odd, don’t you think, to send a person you’ve never met a disgustingly foul letter only because you don’t agree with his column? And although I receive mail from many countries, the only source for this kind of stuff, I’m sorry to say, is America.

I believe social Darwinism, whose roots now deeply vein American society, is largely responsible for this. We should never forget that Social Darwinism was the underlying philosophy of Adolf Hitler, and, while America’s version is not quite so poisonous, there are similarities. It is a philosophy that breeds an atmosphere of contempt for others, especially the less fortunate. A sense of “I’m alright, Jack!” It raises the shabby idea of winners and losers to an exalted status. And it breeds a lot of human misery in the midst of a very prosperous society.

Of course, the tender ministrations of America’s fundamentalist Christians only add to a pressure-cooker climate. If you’re not of the correct profession, something must be wrong with you. And for sure, if you’re anything unusual, any kind of non-conformist or person born with the wrong genes, then your life may well qualify as an abomination. “Oh, how we love the sinner but hate the sin,” making it extremely difficult for the recipients of such bounteous love to distinguish which of the two is being hated at any given moment and always forgetting the Good Lord’s claim to the exclusive right of judgment.

Despite all the rhetoric about good neighbors in America, you are pretty much on your own when something goes wrong. The anarchy of urban decay, brutal police, racism, rotten public schools, large numbers of functional illiterates, unethical and predatory business practices, a lack of decent health care for many, a pervasive invasion of individual privacy for the advantages of corporate marketing, love-it-or-leave-it attitudes, guns and the influence of the military’s culture of death everywhere – these things generate resentments, divisions, loneliness, and anger. Lots of anger.

A friend, recently returning to America from a long stint in Europe, provided an excellent, illustrative anecdote of institutionalized insanity in America when an airport security man held his laptop computer upside down and started shaking it. My friend naturally enough asked what he was doing, and the security man’s reply was, “You never heard of anthrax?”

Now I ask, in view of these readily-observed characteristics of American society, does anyone in his right mind believe that it is a good idea to promote institutionalized informing? Why, something like one-half to one percent of the population suffers from schizophrenia. Another, equal slice suffers from various forms of depression. About three-quarters of a percent is behind bars. Many times that are ex-convicts. Ten or twenty percent believes the end of the world is imminent and there are people walking around with the “Mark of the Beast” on their foreheads. Huge numbers of Americans are addicted to booze or drugs.

And any of them may just be of a mind to inform on you.