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Lemmingly, We Roll Along
When soldiers die, the politicians who sent them to their deaths typically use euphemisms and circumlocutions — like “lost,” “fallen,” or “ultimate sacrifice.” On one level, the avoidance of blunt language can be seen as a sign of respect, but on another, it is just one more evasion of responsibility for the snuffing out of young lives.
There has been unusually wide (and for the most part supportive) reaction to my article of August 8 (They Died in Vain: Deal With It) on the killing of 30 American troops when their helicopter was shot down over Afghanistan on the night of the 6th. One website posting the article clocked 181 comments; scanning through them, I found many substantive, helpful ones.
Let me share one telling comment, which seemed to me particularly — if sadly — apt:
“Two lemmings are chatting while standing in the line to the cliff. One says to the other, ‘Of course we have to go over the edge. Anything else would dishonor all the lemmings that have gone before us.’”
And so it goes, thought I, with our Lemming-in-Chief (LIC) Barack Obama … and those who lemmingly follow him.
The President’s and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s words about the 30 dead soldiers, including members of the elite Seal Team 6, were very carefully chosen. But they bore the telltale earmarks of “the Lemming Syndrome.”
“We will honor the fallen by showing our unyielding determination to press ahead … to move forward with the hard work,” said Panetta on Aug. 8.
That same day, President Obama also stressed how “our troops will continue the hard work. … We will press on.” There was also subdued talk from both leaders about how the troops were “lost.”
Gosh, I thought, I did not know that the 30 U.S. troops were just “lost” or that they had simply “fallen.” Sounds like maybe we can still find them and help them get up – when the hard truth is that they’re dead.
Similarly, persistent use of “helicopter crash” seems to be a deliberate attempt to hide the hard reality that it was a rocket-propelled grenade that downed the helicopter and that this is why the troops ended up “fallen.” The anodyne language helps soft-pedal the fact that Afghans who don’t like American troops making middle-of-the-night raids all over their country have access to RPGs capable of downing aircraft.
These angry Afghans are usually described as “militants” or, in a sad reflection on the primitive level of the conversation on the war, simply as “the bad guys.”
Perhaps others of my (Vietnam) generation are hearing what I am hearing as background music — the plaintive lyrics of the song, “When Will They Ever Learn?”
More evocative of such times — then and now — are the words Pete Seeger put to music during a large lemming infestation 44 years ago:
“We were neck-deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool said to push on.” Pete Seeger, 1967
An earlier version of this article appeared on Consortiumnews.com
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Wouldn't be great to have a say?
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YES, mschlee!!!
Simply amazing that still no media coverage has related this (and other) African/Middle East wars to Thomas Barnett's 2006 Naval War College book and strategy, "The Pentagon's New Map", which promulgates the current plan of the global corporate/financial/militarist Empire controlling our former country, to capture the entire 5000 miles swath of "GAP" countries from Mauritania to the Chinese boarder.
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
Liberty & democracy
over
violent
empire
New America People's Party 2012 -- our last change against the 'Globalism' that is the post nation-state global empire
Each of our Individual Voices Is More Important Than We've Realized
a study which says that even one dissenting voice can give people permission to think for themselves. Specifically:
Solomon Asch, with experiments originally carried out in the 1950s and well-replicated since, highlighted a phenomenon now known as "conformity". In the classic experiment, a subject sees a puzzle like the one in the nearby diagram: Which of the lines A, B, and C is the same size as the line X? Take a moment to determine your own answer...
The gotcha is that the subject is seated alongside a number of other people looking at the diagram - seemingly other subjects, actually confederates of the experimenter. The other "subjects" in the experiment, one after the other, say that line C seems to be the same size as X. The real subject is seated next-to-last. How many people, placed in this situation, would say "C" - giving an obviously incorrect answer that agrees with the unanimous answer of the other subjects? What do you think the percentage would be?
Three-quarters of the subjects in Asch's experiment gave a "conforming" answer at least once. A third of the subjects conformed more than half the time.
Get it so far? People tend to defer to what the herd thinks.
But here's the good news:
Adding a single dissenter - just one other person who gives the correct answer, or even an incorrect answer that's different from the group's incorrect answer - reduces conformity very sharply, down to 5-10%.
Why is this important? Well, it means that one person who publicly speaks up can sway a group of people away from group-think.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/03/there-is-still-hope.html
http://www.washingtonsblog.com
Thanks once again to Ray McGovern for continually speaking the truth to those who will listen. Since I was a child in Catholic school, I was keenly aware of the dangers of group think. We were told that only the Catholics had it right and that all non-believers were going to hell and not to even associate with them. As an American citizen I was told to salute the flag and to support any war effort we were involved in because as a nation, we were always doing what was right and there was certainly no need to question the official story - ever - period. I am not a child any more and have watched in horror as what seems to be the majority of my fellow citizens doing as they are told as we are led to the edge of madness over and over again. I have a saying: People do things because other people do them. And once again those same people will vote for the Dem rats and Oblahblah in 2012 in our broken and corrupt political system. Same old story; no need to question, observe or even think for ourselves - it has all been decided and taken care of. Do as you are told; watch the others going over the edge - it will be alright - we have god on our side.
John, great comment. I too had your upbringing, but it took me many years to understand the brainwashing that goes on with just those two things. Add in the songs 'God bless america, My country tis of thee, and all the other brainwashing songs and things we are subjected too.
Few people see that they are BS. Most people become Lemmings.
It's my understanding that "God Bless America" was written by Irving Berlin after escaping Nazi Germany, and only acquired its jingoistic nature sometime later.
Not true. Irving Berlin came as a child with his family from Russia to the U.S. in the 1890's. He never had to escape from Nazi Germany. He wrote "God Bless America" sometime around WWI. It became a hit when Kate Smith sang it in 1938.
Still, every time I hear the song "God Bless America" I can only think that perhaps the rest of the world's countries ought to be blessed too. If there is such a thing as God (I personally do not believe so), I wouldn't have much respect for Him (or is it It) if all the blessing was laid on the U.S.A.
Reminds me of the bumper sticker:
"God bless the whole world. No exceptions."
John: Thank you for sharing the anecdotal information. You notice that both the call to patriotism, my country right or wrong, and the call to religious fealty, rest on a taught respect that demands OBEDIENCE to AUTHORITY.
When so many children are conditioned by religions that use the fear of hell and damnation to banish any questions, and get them to stand in line, saluting the religious institution that their forbears obeyed, it's easy to see why America is such an authoritarian culture.
Societies do punish those who don't go along with the rules, those who refuse to line up. It's no coincidence that the rise of the Christian Fundamentalist movement through its elaborate network of churches, TV stations, radio stations, and publishing, runs parallel with a leadership intent upon punishing "whistle-blowers," and any persons courageous enough to challenge orthodoxies, or expose the hypocrisy that hides behind a number of government agencies.
Principled persons like Bradley Manning, Tim De Christopher, Julian Assange, and others are key examples of current scape-goats.
Inverted totalitarianism relies upon the structures of fear to force renegades into complicance with "doctrines of conformity." Yet society ONLY grows from the rebel and inventive acts of those who step out of line! And this is why they are so feared by those invested in the status quo. Incidentally, rebels, radicals, revolutionaries, Truth tellers, and inventors are all sacred unto the sign-phase next up on the Universal Dial of Time. It's pure self-defense on the part of the established elites to work so hard to punish the Light bearers, as if they can maintain the darkness (that of a new Dark Age of short, but intensified, duration) in this way...
Light on!
This is what I believe is the crux of the problem. Here is our society faced with some serious issues, whether that be continued wars, the failure of our legal system and the multitudes we imprison, the increasing disparity between rich and poor, the coming energy crisis, or the poisoning of our planet. We are in serious need of coming up with new creative ways of living and working out these problems.
There are many intelligent, knowledgeable, and creative people in our society and we should be trying to engage these people. Instead they are stuffed into a box, many without even realizing it.
As polycarpe posted in another thread, people are kept in an adolescent state. What better way to keep people there than to have an adult population that is still scared by the boogyman? We are taught to feed our individualistic desires rather than learning how to work together and communicate with each other from the very beginning of our educations. This lack of connectedness with each other hinders our emotional and psychological growth. We become xenophobes. Many get a god complex about their notions and opinions that they are incapable of even discussing core issues. We don't have to work together, we don't have to take responsibility, actual responsibility for our own communities, our state, our nation, as this is all done for us by large corporate and governmental entities.
At some point, this will all smack us in the face. It looks more and more to me that the train going 500mph is showing no signs of slowing before the oncoming brick wall.
Although, this forum and CD gives me some hope. That there is a core group of people who do think for themselves and are willing to share their insightful thoughts.
Has CD thought of expanding on this forum as a way to bring this community closer?
NEO: I don't know if you were responding to my post, but I think you raised excellent points about the atomization of society, and the lack of any instruction in the ways and means to work together, or get along. Strangely enough, when I argue against the extreme footprint of militarism upon our society, some (in this forum) suggest that it's on the battlefield where men learn to bond. As if we have to be confronted by death to understand the benefits of sharing LIFE.
I have suggested a CD radio show as a means for some of our more vigorous "inside" debates to reach others; and I thought of even having quarterly social events, perhaps in each part of the nation. No mechanism for catalyzing these possibilities has shown up, to my knowledge.
When the system went down yesterday, it was disorienting because many of us rely on this site for our information, and also find ourselves stimulated by the interchange of views found here, and few other venues.
Much of what we've all been apprised of via this site and its authors (and more astute posters) would be considered alien or virtual conspiracy theory by the typical listeners to the MSM. When Truth itself is marginalized, a society can not avoid massive sociological problems. But the elites thought of this pre-emptively, hence the control of the media, added to recent inroads to shut off cell phone service, added to surveillance on citizens. What better way to co-opt any events that might come too close to raising awareness about the awful, unlawful, and nefarious activities of the status quo "owners?" And then making people like Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and Tim De Christopher into "examples."
Now that the US has lost its credit rating, and the stock market has once again imploded (and it's amazing how this event is being framed as a SEPARATE correction, as if it's not the NATURAL outcome of the fake money recently pumped in, without any remedial moves put in place to correct the problems in the first place!), with jobs off-shored, infrastructure in some areas crumbling, public schools being defunded, insurance companies going wild on their own deregulation frenzy, and natue coming apart at the seams all over... there is NO way the economy can ever return to its faux-driven astronomical heights.
Crash time... (the only thing slowing it down is the incredulity principle.)
Brush up your skills, because barter will become The Way very soon.
Yes, I was responding to your post Siouxrose, thank you for your comments.
I think the challenge that lies ahead of any given group in a crash scenario is how well that group or community pulls together. No person is an island unto themselves, we rely on each other every day, whether we want to admit it or not.
Unfortunately the mechanism that binds us (generally) is unfettered capitalism. This may change. This can change. It doesn't mean that capitalism in of itself is wrong, but perhaps there are other alternatives that may work as well or in conjunction.
To me it would seem that any system, line of thought, philosophy that can not or is unwilling to contemplate and re-examine beliefs and perspectives is stagnant. It is not enough to say, "well that's just the way things are". We all need to take responsibility for ourselves AND our communities, which means we all need to contribute. Which is hard for people to do when they're concerned with working hard to get out of debt or looking for a job to find housing, or when they have their big screen TV and SUV and don't have to take that responsibility.
The resources are there for us to survive whether the money or oil is available or not. I believe we can live good and fulfilling lives, but we need to organize. Many of us need to grow up, and perhaps a crash is what will force the issue.
Great articles Mr. McGovern,
The public should see the full cost of war, gravely injured and dead young men and women, while at the same time hearing a full debate over the often ambiguous and dubious justifications for continuing the incredibly costly war in Afghanistan.
People opposed to very questionable war and militarism often shudder when they hear members of the public and politicians say to active duty members of the military..."Thank you for your sacrifice", or "Thank you for your service". This is due to the fact that war's justifications coming from power hungry politicians and often warmongering uniformed military leaders are misleading and ambiguous at best and based on outright untruths and lies at worst. Simply put, our fellow citizens' (who are temporarily in military uniform) service and "sacrifice" have been wasted and were in vain.
These facts will not change when we avoid the real debate about war as we offer soldiers (and ourselves) misleading, shallow and cheap platitudes about "honoring" soldiers....the truth is the American people want less war, militarism, and needless deaths and injury of their brothers, sisters, family members and neighbors.
Mr. McGovern's recommendation: "Deal with it!" reminds me of the funeral oration given by Pericles after the Battle of Marathon. That is bascially what he told the Athenians who had lost relatives in the battle. He did not gloss over the losses, nor did he use euphemisms to ease the pain.
I wonder, Ray, will the psychopaths in charge of this country deign to call all of the people they will MURDER by slashing SS, Medicare and Medicaid "lost" or "fallen"?
Getting your ass blown up in the service of the fascist neoliberal elite sure is great copy but having yourself starved to death or watching your loved ones physically deteriorate due to lack of funds is just as effective and just as important a role in the global sweep of neoliberal fascism.
Why not honor all of the seniors and poor who will die for the great neoliberal fascist cause with medals?
We could call them Sacrifice Awards.
Five points for being blown up in a pointless war, 3 points for watching your parents die untreated, 2 points for every child who missed a treatment.
Then add just add up all your Sacrifce Award points, register at sacawards.com and you'll be eligible for lots of great deals from participating vendors like Walmart, GM and Monsanto.
These people are quite simply anti-human, traitors to our species.
These people are quite simply a species unto themselves.
"“We will honor the fallen by showing our unyielding determination to press ahead … to move forward with the hard work"
“our troops will continue the hard work. … We will press on.”
As long as "we" are working hard, and "we" are pressing on...well, it's sufficient, right? Life is not absurd, "we" are not murderers; the violent, oppressive, hypocritical, brave new world "we" have created is not the mother of all blights. "We" are not diseased (as a small distant voice somehere in our brain keeps telling us).
It is the language of slavery; do the "hard work", but avoid specifics, motives, and reasons at all costs.
Mr. McGovern,
You speak the truth, and for us "Lemming" mutants that have found a different reality, our frustration knows no boundaries. We watch in horror as thousands continue to die by the gun, or the bomb, or the depletion of resources, the lack of access to water, etc. And all the while the military industrial complex and the warmongers and profiteers expel euphemisms that seem to satisfy the majority of cliff jumpers, urging them on as one, just another day of destruction , horror and pain. Our "leaders" merely press the buttons, accepting pellets of complicity and convenience, food and sustenance and reward for what all lemmings deem right and just and honorable. The United States is diminished and at the hands of our "leaders" and those so eager to follow. The democratic party, the republican party merely facilitate and proclaim our duty to jump.
When another lemming begins the march towards oblivion its effect is hardly one persons downfall, it is the degradation and destruction of the whole civilization. And as one civilization succumbs so will all of us suffer.
Those who expel gasses through their mouths twisting our horrors into quaint tradition and honorable measures are the true monsters of us all. For in reality and in plain speak, those that exalt war and wrap it in flags are feasting on roasted lamb and fine wines atop all the dead.
OLD HARE: Great post! I feel what you do. And Yogananda long ago lectured at the U.N. relating the direct association between human acts of violence and reverberations sent through the unseen webs that hold nature together. He made it clear that were wars and the arms trades to continue, humanity would see an uptick in hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis, floods, and droughts. WE ARE THERE.
I realize that the either-or thinkers in our forum have difficulty grasping the holistic fact that High thinkers, those who enter into states of awareness most of us never touch, can come to an awareness synchronous with that which is measured by orthodox science and its technological devices. Truth, like a mountain, can be reached from a number of paths. That science has caught up with the mystics suggests the gravity of our situation...
Until people put down ARMS to join hands, the circles of life will remain not only broken, but will dangerously continue to come apart.
The analogy of lemmings to what our political leaders are doing in Vietnam [sorry, make that Afghanistan] by Ray McGovern is most relevant and incisive. But it is quite surprising that Mr. McGovern did not point out that not everyone has to be a lemming as I am sure that R. G. is quite aware of the GI rebellion that took place during the Vietnam conflict when thousands of military personnel, as seen in the extraordinary documentary Sir! No Sir!, refused to be lemmings by protesting against their government's militant policies at or near military bases both at home and abroad. Many of them had the courage of their convictions when they ended up in jail for their beliefs.
The point is that if those in the military who fought in Vietnam could say NO to what the government and the military was doing back then then surely those in the military can do the same thing today in far greater numbers than they are now doing. Will the current generation finally understand that they did not leave their brains behind in the civilian world by realizing that they, like the generation that was around some forty odd years ago, have a right to Question Authority even if that authority emanates from the military? Will those in the military finally come to the conclusion that they are dying and coming back to this country without an arm or a leg or paralyzed from the neck down because they have been lied to by their government? Or will they continue to stupidly and robotically obey the questionable orders that they are given by their commanding officers?
If only the robots in the military can reach the same epiphany that former Green Beret Master Sergeant Donald Duncan did when he wisely noted in Sir! No Sir! that:
I was doing it right but I wasn't doing right.
"The mass of men serves the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt."- Henry David Thoreau [1817-1862], American author and philosopher
Will those in the military today continue to justify Thoreau's belief that they are wooden men and men [and women] of straw or will more of them finally use their brains by saying NO to American imperialism?
ERROLL: I agree with you in principle, and applaud YOUR principles regarding challenging the MIC; but I would add that the mood in Amerika today is far more conservative than it was 40 years ago. Nixon's people learned from the Nazis and the rebels of the 60's, and they've made it UNMANLY to question war. So deeply is the idea of violence coupled with alleged manhood today, that any considered-viable leader must show their willingness to be HARD and FIRM and TOUGH on crime, or the enemy du jour.
I find it sad that women and gays would want to join the MIC, although the futility of the job search in today's industrially decimated environment lends at least a financial rationale for their doing so.
When I was coming of age, what passed for heroism was the character of a Gregory Peck or James Stewart challenging unjust rules.
If you notice (and the guy I date pointed this out to me), there's been a cunning increase, an upping of the ante on all sorts of violence as depicted on the screen. Today's hero is NEVER seen without his gun, as if it's a biological extension of his own being.
Heroism has been DIRECTLY and PURPOSELY linked with a love of violence.
Clint Eastwood's various shoot-outs came first, followed by plenty of Bruce Willis roles, or punching matches with Sly Stallone.
The pressure on men to act like bullies, to show a HARDness at all times, to not waiver in their willingness to use force, is conditioned into Amerikan males in a way that more than suggests a tribute to Rome and Sparta.
Until the romanticized concept of violence is exposed for the lethal rot that it is, too many psyches will remain conditioned to care-less behaviors. Think of the kids using their cell phones to retain images of those they abused in combat. It is beyond sickening. Violence and porn work together, as both cheapen life. If anyone thinks the torture practices that went on (and possibly still do) at Amerika's offshore prison complexes are not porn, they ought to do some soul searching.
Plus the incredible proliferation of porn via the Internet works hand in glove with the uptick in violence around the world, especially that which is engineered by Amerika's very own MIC.
If the subject weren't so grim, this discussion could be a game of Mad Libs.
A helicopter was [fill in the blank]. Innocent civilians were [fill in the blank].
Soldiers were [well, you get the idea].
Shot down? No, it crashed. Brutally killed? No, it was collateral damage.
And then there is the ultimate euphemism: The Department of Defense. Maybe we should go back to the pre-World War II terminology and call it what it is, the Department of War.
I agree – except on the use of “lemmings,” though I suppose there is no way to stuff that expression back in the bag. The lemming claim is about as true as Adam being created from clay and Eve from one of Adam’s ribs.
Actually, the true story of Disney's 1958 "White Wilderness" film (the sole source of this false tale), the construction of the lie, is perhaps a better match for the lies we’ve been told than the concept of lemmings following leaders to doom. As with the making of Disney's lemming “doc” it is the humans doing the lemming bit, not the lemmings, who have more sense.
That lemmings supposedly committed mass suicide by following leaders across waters where they all drowned is a lie, created by Disney “documentarians” as part of their animal story line. There is a famous scene where these lemmings jump over a cliff into the deep water (Arctic Ocean) and swim to their eventual doom. They never did any such thing. The film makers created the scene.
The film makers constructed a whirling table at the top of their “cliff” and set the camera just below. Then, on top, where the camera didn’t see it, the film makers threw the poor lemmings onto the turntable which caused the lemmings to come flying off the camera side, giving the impression that they were jumping off a cliff. After that they show the lemmings in water (it was a river) to swim and told us that the animals were swimming out to open water, never to reach land, drowning instead.
When I checked for a reference for this comment I realized that, (real life irony here) the film won the Academy Award for best documentary feature. Also, another scene, of a polar bear cub, was manufactured in studio. Good ole' Disney. It is not hard to Google and get a lot of references but I will include this one from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Wilderness_%28film%29
One quote: "... the particular species of lemming shown in the film is not known to migrate, much less commit mass suicide."
So much for God, country and Disney!
Thanks for posting this. I was scanning down the comments to see if it had been mentioned...and you saved me a bunch of typing.
The lemming analogy is fittingly apt in this day and age.
It is yet one more piece of regurgitated, corporate sponsored, nonsense passing itself off as truth...with a majority of the population lapping it up like famished kittens.
Even if Ray didn't mean to use the lemmings in this way...it is deviously appropriate none-the-less :)
Keep up the good fight, Mr. McGovern
ETA...great doc by the CBC about Hollywood and their often reprehensible treatment of animals.
http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/cruelcamera/
As long as they've made movies, animals have been killed or injured to do it.
The controversial shot of lemmings leaping to their death from the Disney film, White Wilderness. In reality, they were flung from a turntable (not seen) into a river.In a landmark investigation twenty-five years ago, called Cruel Camera, the fifth estate's Bob McKeown uncovered an uncomfortable, even shocking, reality about moviemaking: animals, intentionally put in harm's way, abused, often killed to create the kind of cinematic excitement that draws a crowd.
As well, the fifth estate found that in wildlife documentaries, the casualties are often the truth. Nature films, including award-winning documentaries made by esteemed studio such as Disney, sometimes used fakery in their shots. (watch the original film online)
It certainly is true that the "lemming suicide" idea is false. I've read that the source of the story was the 1958 Disney movie, but it wasn't. It unquestionably popularized the notion.
I read a little nature guide when I was seven in 1957. There was a picure of a mass of lemmings going over a cliff into the ocean. The text said when the population of lemmings reached an unsustainable limit they "went over the cliff" en masse. My father, who assisted me in reading and interpreting the book, told me he had heard this about lemmings before. What the book failed to mention was that lemmings were attempting to migrate and not in as dramatic a manner as shown.
But Disney, yes...how about the famous "dance of the scorpions" from "The Living Desert"? I think that film won awards, too.
It's not that "we" never learn, it's that the MIC has a network of powerful controls in place, hence my favored euphemism: Mars rules!
Tradition, for the most part, maintains the patriarchal orthodoxy. Young men join "the services" to honor their fathers who did so before them, as did their fathers, and so on. Just as the cigarette company, Virginia Slims, catered to the type of female who wanted to prove herself to men, by utilizing the slogan, "You've come a long way, baby," to lure women into smoking, similar conditioning led some women into recently joining "the services." Welcome to the killing fields, in either place!
Until the entire Mars rules ethos which has been so deeply etched into our nation's character and psyche is exposed for the TERROR that it is, many people will act as those lemmings, and prefer the language of "killng them softy with our MIC song," to the reality of blood shed, severed limbs, and grotesquely exploded body parts. All that truth has been conveniently laundered out of media's portrayals of "heroism."
Societies have mostly been structured by men. Now some in this forum can reasonably argue that it was not all men, it was white men of privilege. And that IS true. Nonetheless, until religions give equal time to God the Mother, as they do God the Father, we will see women treated as second-class citizens, deprived of their sovereign rights, raped too often, and by extension, the Great Mother, nature, treated to similar disrespect. Without the TRUE partnership of the female side of The Force, the warrior Mars holds dominion. And ALL sentient beings are paying a price for this lack of balance.
Only an idiot can't see that the asymmetric focus on militarism has already begun to gut our nation of necessary services and infrastructure. This model that puts killing/war/aggression/soldiering first, is the precise reason why nature is everywhere coming asunder. And while it's true that many of us play a role in leaving a fossil-fuel-footprint behind, it's also true that had there been vigorous campaigns to invent and distribute less toxic energy systems, most of us would have gotten on-board.
The armies marching into lands thousands of miles away, and carting all their heavy equipment along, leaving a trail of blood and toxic detritus in their wake, are far more GUILTY of energy/resource exploitation than the average Joe or Jane who has to commute 18 miles to his or her job. (I thought I'd nip this favored blame-the-citizens meme in the bud, before the forum's foremost apologists for militarism and/or the status quo show up to use it.)
Obama is nothing but a war monger-in this, he is a true brother to Dubya, Cheney, Rove, Tenet, Wolfowitz, etc. His complete acquiescence to the far-right corporate war makers has proven there is no "hope" for ANY "change" from this or any other deely-entrenched Oligarch. Our troops continue, lemming-like, into this morass which has no purpose other than for them to be MURDERED by the inhuman war machinery. Smedley Butler was right-war is a racket.
I'd like Mr.O'Compromise to be hard, tough, and unyielding to Israelis, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, Rahm Emanuel, Cass Sunstein, Eric Holder, Dennis Ross, Peter Orszag, and Thomas Donilon.
Instead, he's hard and tough and mean to Arabs in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, to the poor and powerless in American society, and to older Americans, and to children in America, and to Bradley Manning.
Rad Pitt from 'Fight Club' [1999]: "God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't."
A President with a backbone has to choose whom to smile upon and whom to scowl at. One without a backbone smiles at everyone.
If I could just watch the other lemmings go over the edge, I'd be OK with that. But our nations are MAD (mutual assured destruction). The concept has never been repudiated, and I know now, as I have always known, that it is just a matter of time before it is employed. This bent on self-destruction goes much deeper than our escapades in Afghanistan and the plans are already drawn to include the nuclear weapons of India and China. All lemmings should be very concerned--you'll die even if you never went near the cliff.
Or as the Late Great Phil Ochs worded: "It's always the old to lead us to the War, Always the Young too fall, and look at all the've done with a sabor and a gun, tell me is it worth it all?"
Also let me add: What I was seeing the late 80's in Afganistan that the Soviet army was coming home and being given great praise for their heroics. They didnt win. Our generation of Solders or Generation of spectators of Fox News would say things like "The Soviets got there Asses handed to them". I think the U.S. is currently being handed the same.
Ahhh, it's a good web day for ctrl-z.
"Posted by ctrl-z
Aug 8 2011 - 2:01pm
Cartoon: Two lemmings are conversing while standing in the line to the cliff. One says to the other, "Of course we have to go over the edge. Anything else would dishonor all the lemmings that have gone before us.""
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/08-1 (a thread with 181 comments)
:-)
Hey, you're famous! :)
And it's the best kind of fame: anonymous.
:-)
It takes almost an entire society to keep lying to people that have lost family members in these wars telling them they haven't died in vain or that they are fighting for our freedoms and other such nonsense or the media talking about our heroes. Americans are idiots to believe this crap but by and large they do.
Here is Shakespeare's take:
"Well, ’tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honour set-to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word “honour”? What is that “honour”? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism".
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This is a powerful "catechism" from one supposed to be a coward and fool, Sir John Falstaff during the battle of Shrewsbury. This testimony is as the French say "sans pareil". "Therefore I’ll none of it" and that is the battle cry of revolutions.
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I have played Owen Glendower in this play, Henry IV, part One and I have wondered many times whether WS was anti-war in his heart and what he would write to this site of Common Dreams were he alive today. Or would he write a play with the title "Obama, part one" with battles all around the globe? Even though England of his time was different from the USA today what emerges from his "King-plays" is that war-making of all kinds had long been and perhaps forever the principal industry of his island nation as it is of our nation today. I suspect that WS would immediately recognize that our society and war-making habits are no different from his England and Falstaff would have a big belly laugh if we claimed to be better and he had a huge belly. In fact, I can think of only very few nations in which that has never been the case or has not been the case for a long time and these are always small countries like Switzerland. But then I immediately remember the name Oerlikon which shows that the war profiteers of Switzerland simply feed on the war-making of other nations. There are leaches and leachees and as long as the leachees either sign up for war or vote funds for it or support war-making by being passive nothing will change.
"......you get an estimate of 1,486,338 deaths within that year. Even if you use the lower poverty totals from the Census Bureau, 43.6 million people, you get an estimate of 1,228,169 deaths in 2009. "
And that just for the US. The toll from Big Finance is much higher than that from War, the latter being an enabler for the former.
Thank you for the expression "Lemming-in-Chief".