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Photo Montage of the Moment…
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It is so heartening to see this worldwide togetherness on this issue. Something good will come.
I would like to see, in an upcoming march, the Iraqi flag on more than 100,000 coffins.
A great number of them should be tiny, child-sized coffins.
The neocons are spending a great deal of time pointing out that freedom has been cheap. Only 1,500 some odd deaths of Americans to bring great and lasting peace to the mid-east.
That lie needs to be chewed on a bit IMO.
I have a few more. 🙂
I had this to say to an acquaintance of mine who, after reading this link, said the draft would be good to "get the wimps off the street":
"The point about the draft is that it is coming up because volunteers are going way down. The volunteer is an endangered species it seems at first blush.
Immigrants, blacks and hispanics who cannot find the way to education and good work have been the prime volunteers – but that is fading frighteningly fast as the general points out.
Now those volunteers are going away because they smell the fascism. They see thru the lies. They no longer fail to see whose comfort zone it is that they are perpetuating.
As the general says they see what the high class really thinks about them when they get back and become street people with signs saying "Vet needs food" and "vet needs work" and "vet needs a home".
I give them money from time to time and talk with them. The phony ones I avoid, the sincere ones I listen to because I need a shock from time to time.
Most go past them without taking much of a look. Perhaps they think all of them are phony.
I argued with one who said he was sent to vietnam only to murder. I said but you were forced to go for the good of your country … you believed that didn’t you? He just repeated, without even listening to me, we went there to murder.
Yep … I was unnerved when a well-to-do vet told me the same thing. I had argued with him too … argued that he was forced to go thru the draft and was just, therefore, following orders.
He angrily told me he had been there in person and knew what he was talking about. He said we went there to murder. But other vets did accept my argument that they were just following orders.
The general wants them to have more social security and other benefits for life when they get back. More to inspire them to "volunteer".
I think the general does that because he is very, very comfortable in his zone and is speaking from his place of comfort. I do not really think he understands that the true volunteer does not do it for money.
Nevertheless the admin is loosing "volunteers" at home and abroad because the message is mixed. They offer glory and a few bucks.
But the ones they target with their wall street marketing schemes are not volunteers if they have to be paid. And if they have to be paid "enough" for bearing arms. Paid enough to being willing.
What the general advocates is making it a better business deal. The patriotic rhetoric is not doing it and he is ready to admit that and move on.
Earning citizenship, as a few have done, or earning a lot of glory and not much else by getting a job in the military and then killing others in foreign lands is less and less palatible to the "volunteers". Because they are not volunteers.
Not that there is anything wrong with the dwindling group of those no longer believing the lies Amerika is paying the MSM to put out.
But because Amerika is becoming obviously fascist capitalists – take the goodies by military force instead of economic capitalism – there is wrong in that picture.
Lies do not inspire volunteers and mercenaries are only inspired by the bucks. When the lies get high and the bucks get low the lines go down.
To keep preaching economic capitalism as the way to prosperity and as the way of the successful – while practicing military force "capitalism" (robber barons) and trying to cover up what is becoming obvious – even to these less educated, is why they no longer volunteer.
The message is not convincing.
There is a good deal of difference between Americans and Amerikans, and it is increasingly obvious. The Amerikans need the mercenaries but America looks for volunteers.
America is beautiful in its own rite and it is in many places around the earth. Amerika is ugly and it too is in many places around the earth.
Hey Simon and Garfunkle had it right when they sang "we’ve all gone to look for America".
Many start the journey from Amerika because they think America is but a short journey from there.
But that misses the point. We always used to say, when we were in Anchorage, "Alaska is not far from here".
It confuses geography with goodness. Amerika is concerned with geography and America is concerned with goodness. Alaska is a geographical concept but America is so much more than that. It is worth finding but all the money in the world can’t get a person there."
To my brothers and sisters worldwide, bless you all, you give me hope that all is not yet lost.
RAGE ON!!
A customer of mine came to my house this morning to pick up his boat that I had repaired for him. He is a big , rough G.I. Joe looking dude who served in combat in Vietnam. I’m 6’3 and 230 lbs. and I wouldn’t want to tangle with him, but he’s the friendliest, loudmouthed, rough around the edges guy you’de ever want to meet.
Anyway, as he was leaving he asked me if I was going to the parade. I say, what parade? He says the St. Patricks Day parade in Montauk. So I hesitate for a second, but tell him, actually I’m going to a Peace vigil to mark the 2nd anniv. of the war in Iraq. He says, you’re against the war? I say, Uh, (gulp) yeah, I’m against the war. He asks how old I am, figured out later that he was trying to see if I was old enough to have been in Vietnam, so I told him, 43. He told me that he did his time in Vietnam, unwillingly as he put it, and that it was a crime the way Vietnam vets were treated when they came back and a bigger crime the way the government basically blew them off when they returned. First I told him that he deserves all the respect in the world for his sacrifice. I told him that I think it’s a crime the way the soldiers returning from Iraq wounded and with broken bodies and broken souls are being cast off by the government they are sent to fight for, how they have to pay for their own meals and outrages like that. It was a short conversation, but the last thing he said to me was that the government should be shot for what it is doing. I let that be the last word as he thanked me and left.
This guy, who I had pre-judged to be a gung-ho Bush supporter, made the most radical anti-government statement I have yet heard. I think there are probably many more like him in our present military, although you wouldn’t know it listening to all the propaganda flying around the airwaves these days.
To all those men and women serving in Iraq and around the world who feel trapped and frightened, please don’t lose hope. You are not forgotten. As you can see on this page, there are millions around the world fighting to end this war, fighting to bring you home, safe and sound. Hold on.
Peace
Children stories are one of the most provocative and unnerving during times of war.
I wondered how the hatred pictured in this MSM article (link here) will effect these children during their life.
These children, after their mother and father were massacred, are being told lies. They are being told that their parents are still alive.
In emotional effect these are walking dead. The soldiers of nations at war are exonerated and the children become the forgotten walking dead.
Sometimes their killers end up as homeless people on the street. Their glory waning.
But the fat cats who engineer the wars forget about all of them and get back to planning the next "glory days".
Dredd,
These children will grow up to be the next Osama Bin Ladens, and who could blame them? I would surely react the same way.
Dredd,
that figure of 100,000 civilians killed in Iraq is not reliable. The original report, from which that number came, claimed only that the 95% confidence interval was [8000,188000]. In other words, we’re only sure that it was more than 8000 but less than 188000, so we really don’t have any idea.
I’m only pointing this out because the left has its own deceptions and half-truths, and I think it hurts our credibility when we propagate them.
MARCH ON….. Do not do what the Pentagon and Media want and forget them!
I actually believe the death toll in Iraq of Iraqi’s is higher than 100,000. How many endless days of 20 or 30 killed in a car bomb or 10 Iraqi policemen killed or tens of bodies found by the street can there be before i t adds up to this many?
The point isn’t how many it is they didn’t ask the U.S. to bring them Democracy , they didn’t want to die, they obviously hadn’t dies under Saddam, so are they better off…… NO!
That 1,500 number for our troops doesn’t seem to change either.