december 2004

Who is the real enemy?

Do you support your country
even if what it does is evil?
So what does that make you?




By John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net

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.