Silent Coup: The Rise of the Anti-Government Flash Mobs

Anymore, it's always the same: peaceful "democratic" protests, in country after country, against supposedly undemocratic and unresponsive governments that are--wait for it--democratically elected by the people, which eventually turn violent. But are these events really orchestrated silent coups--or attempted coups-- disguised as domestic current events? Ted Snider of Anti-War.com seems to think so.

There is no doubt that the American government has been providing arms, money and logistical support to Al Qaeda in Syria, Libya, Mali, Bosnia, etc.– and related Muslim terrorists in Chechnya, Iran, and many other countries. That's right. We're funding extremest elements within the broader population of targeted nations in order to destabilize targeted nations, ultimately leading, not to a democratic leader in power, but, instead,  radicals  in power who most definitely do not support a democratic government In other words, the genuine protestors, of which there are many, are merely pawns in a chess game played by much more powerful interests and geopolitical forces.

But as the American media continues to mischaracterize the ongoing protests and downplay "the radical ultra-nationalist character of some protesters" not to mention the western leaders (U.S. and EU) continued support of these anti-government protesters--thus, rationalizing what they're doing--we the taxpayers remain blinded to the silent coups that are taking place right under our noses.

A New Cold War? Ukraine Violence Escalates, Leaked Tape Suggests U.S. Was Plotting Coup

“I mean that. I mean that Moscow—look at it through Moscow’s eyes. Since the Clinton administration in the 1990s, the U.S.-led West has been on a steady march toward post-Soviet Russia, began with the expansion of NATO in the 1990s under Clinton. Bush then further expanded NATO all the way to Russia’s borders. Then came the funding of what are euphemistically called NGOs, but they are political action groups, funded by the West, operating inside Russia. Then came the decision to build missile defense installations along Russia’s borders, allegedly against Iran, a country which has neither nuclear weapons nor any missiles to deliver them with. Then comes American military outpost in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, which led to the war of 2008, and now the West is at the gates of Ukraine. So, that’s the picture as Moscow sees it. And it’s rational. It’s reasonable. It’s hard to deny.

But as for the immediate crisis, let’s ask ourselves this: Who precipitated this crisis? The American media says it was Putin and the very bad, though democratically elected, president of Ukraine, Yanukovych. But it was the European Union, backed by Washington, that said in November to the democratically elected president of a profoundly divided country, Ukraine, "You must choose between Europe and Russia." That was an ultimatum to Yanukovych. Remember—wasn’t reported here—at that moment, what did the much-despised Putin say? He said, "Why? Why does Ukraine have to choose? We are prepared to help Ukraine avoid economic collapse, along with you, the West. Let’s make it a tripartite package to Ukraine." And it was rejected in Washington and in Brussels. That precipitated the protests in the streets.

And since then, the dynamic that any of us who have ever witnessed these kinds of struggles in the streets unfolded, as extremists have taken control of the movement from the so-called moderate Ukrainian leaders. I mean, the moderate Ukrainian leaders, with whom the Western foreign ministers are traveling to Kiev to talk, they’ve lost control of the situation. By the way, people ask—excuse me—is it a revolution? Is it a revolution? A much abused word, but one sign of a revolution is the first victims of revolution are the moderates. And then it becomes a struggle between the extreme forces on either side. And that’s what we’re witnessing. -- Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University.

A 1967 interview with Miles Copeland Jr., a famed CIA Agent who helped the Agency stage a coup in Syria in 1949, which could easily apply today



Links:

The UN Says the Ukrainian People Must Decide their Fate, NATO Wants Something Else

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War on Drugs: Stained Forever By the Blood of Their Parents

Below are a few photos of an attack on a family (June, 2010), who was traveling on the Casas Grandes Highway (the interstate highway that connects the state of Chihuahua to the West coast of Mexico) by award winning photographer Javier Manzano

As Manzano pulled up to the scene both of the rear side windows of the vehicle had been shot in. Inside the car, a 3-year old girl was holding the hand of her fatally wounded mother, and standing outside the car, the girl’s 4-year old brother, stained with the blood of his parents looked toward the highway. The assailants took the children’s father. It took an hour for the ambulance to arrive and the mother died en route to the hospital. Soon after, the decapitated body and head of the children’s father was found 20 kilometers down the road.

4-year old boy stares off into the highway as soldiers stand guard next to the
vehicle where the boy and his family were driving a few minutes earlier.

3-year old girl holds the hand of her mother as they wait for the ambulance. 
The mother died en-route to the hospital

The 4-year old boy and 3-year old girl look on as the ambulance takes their mother away.

The head of 32-year-old Mario Alberto Iglesias, the father to the two young children
and husband of Maria de Jesus was located on the 70km marker of the same highway in
which the initial attack was reported.

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April: The Cruelest Month?

T.S.Eliot called April the cruelest month, and indeed, at the end of this April, in particular, it may seem that a twisted sort of reverence is being paid to the tragedies of Aprils elapsed in time.

“April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.”

― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Bloody April, "officially" refers to April 1917.It's the name given to the British air support operations during the Battle of Arras, during which particularly heavy casualties were suffered by the Royal Flying Corps at the hands of the German Luftstreitkräfte.

Interestingly, on April 1, 1778, Oliver Pollock, a New Orleans businessman, created the "$" symbol, a mark that, no doubt, underlies much of the bloodletting and violence,  not only in April, of course, but throughout history.

Let's take a look at a few of these notable man-made events that took place in the cruelest of months:

April 1, 1933 - Nazi Germany begins persecution of Jews boycotting Jewish businesses
April 1, 1934 - Bonnie and Clyde encountered two young highway patrolmen near Grapevine, Texas. Before the officers could draw their guns, they were shot dead.
April 1, 1945 - U.S. forces invade Okinawa during WWII. The Battle of Okinawa has been called the largest sea-land-air battle in history. It is also the last battle of the Pacific War.

April 2, 1986 - Four U.S. passengers killed by bomb at TWA counter Athens Airport Greece
April 2, 2012 - One Goh shot and killed seven people at Oikos University, a Korean Christian college in Oakland, Calif., where he had previously studied.

April 3, 1975 - The Easter Sunday Mass Murders: James Rupperts plotted and schemed to kill his family in order to collect more than $300,000 in life insurance, savings, investments and real estate.
April 3, 2009 - Naturalized immigrant Jiverly Wong shot and killed 13 people and himself at the American Civic Association immigration center in Binghamton, N.Y. He left a note complaining about harassment from the police and his inability to get a job.

April 4, 1968 - Civil Rights leader Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed by a sniper in Memphis, Tennessee.

April 5, 1862 - Battle of Yorktown began as part of the Peninsula Campaign of the American Civil War.
April 5, 1894 - Eleven striking miners killed in riot at Connellsville, Pennsylvania,
April 5, 1951 - Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are sentenced to death.

April 6, 1815 - The massacre at Dartmoor Prison. The English militia shoots prisoners of the War of 1812, indiscriminately, hundreds killed
April 6, 1917 - U.S. entered World War I in Europe.
April 6, 1968 - Richmond Indiana explosion: Gunpowder stocks at a sporting-goods store explode, killing 41 and injuring over 150 people.
April 6, 1994 - The beginning of genocide in Rwanda as a plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi was shot down. They had been meeting to discuss ways of ending ethnic rivalries between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes. After their deaths, Rwanda descended into chaos, resulting in genocidal conflict between the tribes. Over 500,000 persons were killed with two million fleeing the country.
April 6, 2012 - White supremacists Jake England and Alvin Watts shot and killed three black pedestrians in Tulsa, Okla., in a racially motivated attack.

April 7, 1712 - In New York City, 27 black slaves rebelled, shooting nine whites as they attempted to put out a fire started by the slaves. The state militia was called out to capture the rebels. Twenty one of the slaves were executed and six committed suicide.
April 7, 1818 - General Andrew Jackson conquered St. Marks Florida from Seminole Indians during the first Seminole war.
April 7, 1862 - Battle of Shiloh: Grant defeats Confederates at Battle of Shiloh, Tennessee, the bloodiest battle in United States history up to that time.
April 7, 1865 - Battle of High Bridge: Together, the battles at High Bridge were tactically inconclusive, despite the 847 Union casualties (including 800 captured) versus only about 100 Confederate.

April 8, 1864 - Battle of Mansfield, also known as the Battle of Sabine Crossroads, in De Soto Parish, Louisiana. The Union forces had suffered 113 killed, 581 wounded, and 1,541 captured. Confederate loss was "about 1,000 killed and wounded".

April 9, 1864 - Battle of Pleasant Hill of the American Civil War, near Pleasant Hill, Louisiana, between Union forces was essentially a continuation of the previous day's Battle of Mansfield, fought nearby, which ended around sunset due to darkness.
April 9, 1917 - Battle of Arras began.
April 9, 1940 - German cruiser Blucher torpedoed and capsizes in Oslofjord, 1,000 die.
April 9, 1945 - A U.S. Liberty ship loaded with aerial bombs explodes, setting three merchant ships afire, killing 360 people in Bari harbor, Italy.
April 9, 1945 - The Allied tanker Nashbulk collides with the U.S. freighterSt. Mihiel in fog
off Massachusetts, killing 15.

April 10, 1863 - Battle of Franklin in Williamson County, Tennessee, during the American Civil War.
April 10, 1917 - Eddystone Ammunition Corporation, a munitions factory explodes in Eddystone PA, kills 133 workers, mainly women and girls. 52 never identified
April 10, 1942 - The WWII Bataan Death March began as American and Filipino prisoners were forced on a six-day march from an airfield on Bataan to a camp near Cabanatuan. Some 76,000 Allied POWs including 12,000 Americans were forced to walk 60 miles under a blazing sun without food or water to the POW camp, resulting in over 5,000 American deaths.
April 10, 1966 - First large scale B-52 bombing raid on North Vietnam

April 11, 1863 - Battle of Suffolk (Hills Point), in Suffolk Virginia
April 11, 1942 - Three thousand Jews from Zamosc, Poland, are deported to the Belzec death camp.

April 12, 1861 - Battle of Fort Sumter: The American Civil War began as Confederate troops under the command of General Pierre Beauregard opened fire at 4:30 a.m. on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina.
April 12, 1864 - Fort Pillow Massacre, The battle ended with a massacre of surrendered Federal black troops by soldiers under the command of Confederate Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Military historian David J. Eicher concluded, "Fort Pillow marked one of the bleakest, saddest events of American military history.
April 12, 1864 - Battle of Blair's Landing in Red River Parish, Louisiana.
April 12, 1908 - Fire leaves 12 dead, 85 missing and presumed dead, and 17,000 homeless in Chelsea Massachusetts.
April 12, 1963 - Birmingham police use dogs and cattle prods on peaceful demonstrators
April 12, 1982 -  Three CBS employees were shot to death when they stumbled upon the abduction of a woman in a rooftop parking lot on a pier on Manhattan's West Side

April 13, 1863 - Battle of Irish Bend near Franklin, the seat of St. Mary Parish in southern Louisiana.
April 13, 1918 - Electrical fire kills 38 mental patients in Norman State Hospital in Oklahoma City.
April 13, 1919 - Amritsar Massacre-British troops fired on a crowd of unarmed Indian protesters, killing hundreds.
April 13, 1945 - Gardelegen Massacre, SS burns and shoots 1,100 inside a barn near the Medieval walled town of Gardelegen in eastern Germany

April 14 - France declares war on Austria, starting French Revolutionary Wars
April 14, 1865 - President Abraham Lincoln was shot and mortally wounded while watching a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater in Washington. He was taken to a nearby house and died the following morning at 7:22 a.m.
April 14, 1994 - Black Hawk Down incident. U.S. F-15 accidentally shoots 2 U.S. helicopters down over Iraq, 26 die

April 15, 1912 - In the icy waters off Newfoundland, the luxury liner Titanic with 2,224 persons on board sank at 2:27 a.m. after striking an iceberg just before midnight. Over 1,500 persons drowned while 700 were rescued by the liner Carpathia which arrived about two hours after Titanic went down.
April 15, 1986 - U.S. air raids Libya, code-named Operation El Dorado Canyon, comprised air-strikes by the United States against Libya. The attack was carried out by the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps via air-strikes, in response to the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing.

April 16, 1854 - The Powhatan sank off the coast of New Jersey in a severe storm, with no survivors. The loss of life was estimated by various sources to be between 250 and 311 people.
April 16, 1947 - The Texas City disaster, the deadliest industrial accident in U.S. history, and one of the largest non-nuclear explosions. Originating with a mid-morning fire on board the French-registered vessel SS Grandcamp (docked in the Port of Texas City), its cargo of approximately 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate detonated, with the initial blast and subsequent chain-reaction of further fires and explosions in other ships and nearby oil-storage facilities killing at least 581 people, including all but one member of the Texas City fire department. The disaster triggered the first ever class action lawsuit against the United States government, under the then-recently enacted Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), on behalf of 8,485 victims.
April 16, 2007 – Virginia Tech Massacre – 32 killed; 17 injured.
April 16, 2013 – Boston Marathon Explosions– 3 killed; 107 injured.

April 17, 1961 - A U.S.-backed attempt to overthrow Premier Fidel Castro of Cuba failed disastrously in what became known as the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

April 18, 1862 - Battle of Forts Jackson and St. Philip the decisive battle for possession of New Orleans in the American Civil War.
April 18, 1864 - Battle of Poison Springs, in Ouachita County, Arkansas as part of the Camden Expedition.
April 18, 2013 – Fertilizer plant explosion, Texas – 14 killed, hundreds injured

April 19, 1775 — Revolutionary War began with the Battle of Lexington and Concord, which made the Masonic-led Revolutionary War inevitable.
April 19, 1904 — The Great Fire of Toronto.
April 19, 1943 — After trapping the last Jewish Resistance Fighters in a storm drain in Warsaw, and holding them for several days, Nazi Storm Troopers began to pour fire into each end of the storm drain, using flame-throwers. They continued pouring the fire into the drain until all fighters were dead. Blood sacrifice brought about by a fiery conflagration.
April 19, 1989 - 47 U.S. sailors were killed by an explosion in a gun turret on the USS Iowa during gunnery exercises in the waters off Puerto Rico.
April 19, 1993 – Waco Massacre: An FBI assault lead to the burning down of the compound of a sect named Branch Davidians, killing 76 men, women and children.
April 19, 1995 - Oklahoma City bombing – 168 people killed.
April 19, 2010 - BP Oil/Deep Water Horizon disaster

April 20, 1889 - Birthday of Adolf Hitler. 
April 20, 1898 - Spanish American War declaration: Congress adopted a resolution declaring war against Spain.
April 20, 1914 - Ludlow Massacre: Miners in Ludlow, Colorado, were attacked by National Guardsmen paid by the mining company. The miners were seeking recognition of their United Mine Workers Union. Five men and a boy were killed by machine gun fire while 11 children and two women burned to death as the miners' tent colony was destroyed.
April 20, 1985 — ATF raid on The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord compound in northern Arkansas.
April 20, 1999 – Columbine High School Massacre - 13 people murdered, 21 injured.

April 23, 1946 - U.S. Sailor, 19, goes berserk on Yangtze; kills 9 shipmates in sudden frenzy

April 24, 1915 - Armenian genocide In Asia Minor during World War I, the first modern-era genocide began with the deportation of Armenian leaders from Constantinople and subsequent massacre by Young Turks. In May, deportations of all Armenians and mass murder by Turks began, resulting in the complete elimination of the Armenians from the Ottoman Empire and all of the historic Armenian homelands. Estimates vary from 800,000 to over 2,000,000 Armenians murdered.

April 26, 1986 - At the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine, an explosion caused a meltdown of the nuclear fuel and spread a radioactive cloud into the atmosphere, eventually covering most of Europe. A 300-square-mile area around the plant was evacuated. Thirty one persons were reported to have died while an additional thousand cases of cancer from radiation were expected. The plant was then encased in a solid concrete tomb to prevent the release of further radiation.

April 27, 1865 - On the Mississippi River, the worst steamship disaster in U.S. history occurred as an explosion aboard the Sultana killed nearly 2,000 passengers, mostly Union solders who had been prisoners of war and were returning home.

April 28, 1996 - The Port Arthur massacre was a killing spree in which 35 people were killed and 23 wounded, mainly at the historic Port Arthur prison colony, a popular tourist site in south-eastern Tasmania, Australia.

April 29, 1992 -  Rodney King riots erupted in Los Angeles following the announcement that a jury in Simi Valley, California, had failed to convict four Los Angeles police officers accused in the videotaped beating of an African American man.

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Most Americans Have No Idea What Happens in War.

A must read for Memorial Day: Against Annihilation of the Spirit: Let Us All Become Cowards by Arthur Silber

An excerpt:

"In an essay written some time ago, I quoted Paul Fussell at length, on "The Culture of War, and the Culture of Chickenshit." Fussell has written at least two indispensable books: The Great War and Modern Memory, about World War I, and Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. In Wartime, at the opening of the chapter, "'The Real War Will Never Get in the Books,'" Fussell writes (highlights added and footnotes omitted in all the following excerpts):

What was it about the war that moved the troops to constant verbal subversion and contempt? It was not just the danger and fear, the boredom and uncertainty and loneliness and deprivation. It was rather the conviction that optimistic publicity and euphemism had rendered their experience so falsely that it would never be readily communicable. They knew that in its representation to the laity what was happening to them was systematically sanitized and Norman Rockwellized, not to mention Disneyfied. They knew that despite the advertising and publicity, where it counted their arms and equipment were worse than the Germans'. They knew that their automatic rifles (World War One vintage) were slower and clumsier, and they knew that the Germans had a much better light machine gun. ... And they knew that the greatest single weapon of the war, the atomic bomb excepted, was the German 88-mm flat-trajectory gun, which brought down thousands of bombers and tens of thousands of soldiers. The Allies had nothing as good, despite one of them designating itself The World's Greatest Industrial Power. The troops' disillusion and their ironic response, in song and satire and sullen contempt, came from knowing that the home front then (and very likely historiography later) could be aware of none of these things.

The Great War brought forth the stark, depressing Journey's End; the Second, as John Ellis notes, the tuneful South Pacific. The real war was tragic and ironic, beyond the power of any literary or philosophic analysis to suggest, but in unbombed America especially, the meaning of the war seemed inaccessible. As experience, thus, the suffering was wasted. The same tricks of publicity and advertising might have succeeded in sweetening the actualities of Vietnam if television and a vigorous uncensored moral journalism hadn't been brought to bear. America has not yet understood what the Second World War was like and has thus been unable to use such understanding to re-interpret and re-define the national reality to arrive at something like public maturity.

The truth today is still worse, for we have significantly regressed. Even as our governing class remains absolute in its determination to avoid the central and most fundamental lessons from Vietnam, it has remembered and applied certain lessons very well indeed. The horrors of Iraq, including the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent Iraqis, never even enter the consciousness of most Americans. The dead and horrifically injured Americans are shuffled offstage without ceremony. The great majority of Americans continue in their preferred mode of existence: intellectually ignorant and lazy, spiritually fat and self-satisfied, and completely oblivious to the unimaginable suffering their government inflicts in other parts of the world.

Our national media remain cowed and intimidated, and they refuse, a few honorable exceptions aside, to provide details of the daily and hourly horrors in Iraq to the public. A single major newspaper could provide a noble and invaluable service: if they gave a damn at all about unnecessary death and suffering, they would select the most awful and horrifying picture they could find -- a body with its guts falling out, a bloody corpse shorn of arms and legs, a mutilated face made unrecognizable -- and fill up their entire front page with it, a new one every day. Perhaps after a month or two, enough Americans would demand that their government stop butchering people who never harmed us. [To achieve the sought-for effect, the pictures obviously should be of Iraqis, and only Iraqis. The Iraqis had no choice about our criminal war of aggression, and the endless destruction we have unleashed; the United States did -- and does, even today. We could leave, as we quickly would if we had any remaining decency and humanity, but we won't.]

Most Americans have no idea at all what happens in war. I certainly don't pretend that I do, either -- but I read a great deal on the subject, and I try to learn. From Fussell's Wartime again:

What annoyed the troops and augmented their sardonic, contemptuous attitude toward those who viewed them from afar was in large part this public innocence about the bizarre damage suffered by the human body in modern war. The troops could not contemplate without anger the lack of public knowledge of the Graves Registration form used by the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps with its space for indicating: "Members Missing." You would expect front-line soldiers to be struck and hurt by bullets and shell fragments, but such is the popular insulation from the facts that you would not expect them to be hurt, sometimes killed, by being struck by parts of their friends' bodies violently detached. If you asked a wounded soldier or marine what hit him, you'd hardly be ready for the answer, "My buddy's head," or his sergeant's heel or his hand, or a Japanese leg, complete with shoe and puttees, or the West Point ring on his captain's severed hand. What drove the troops to fury was the complacent, unimaginative innocence of their home fronts and rear echelons about such experiences as the following, repeated in essence tens of thousands of times. Captain Peter Royle, a British artillery forward observer, was moving up a hill in a night attack in North Africa. "I was following about twenty paces behind," he says,

when there was a blinding flash a few yards in front of me. I had no idea what it was and fell flat on my face. I found out soon enough: a number of infantry were carrying mines strapped to the small of their backs, and either a rifle or machine gun bullet had struck one, which had exploded, blowing the man into three pieces -- two legs and head and chest. His inside was strewn on the hillside and I crawled into it in the darkness.

...

Sometimes damage to the body was well beyond endurance, for those perceiving as well as those damaged. Once in the Normandy battles a British major accompanied a stretcher party searching for a wounded man earlier parties had missed. "Sure enough," he says,

we found a poor little chap with both legs blown off above the knees, moaning softly and, I remember, he was saying, "Oh dear! Oh dear!" The stretcher-bearer shook his head and, I thought, looked pointedly at my revolver.

And there's an indication of what can be found on the ground after an air crash in one soldier's memories of a morning after an artillery exchange in North Africa. Neil McCallum and his friend "S." come upon the body of a man who had been lying on his back when a shell, landing at his feet, eviscerated him.

"Good God," said S., shocked, "here's one of his fingers." S. stubbed with his toe on the ground some feet from the corpse. There is more horror in a severed digit than in a man dying: it savors of mutilation. "Christ," went on S. in a very low voice, "look, it's not his finger."

Toward the end of the same chapter, Fussell writes about "Eugene B. Sledge's memoir of a boy's experience with 'the old breed,' the United States Marines," which Fussell describes as "one of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war." Fussell says the tone of Sledge's book is "unpretentious, unsophisticated, modest, and decent." Fussell continues:

But for Sledge the worst of all was a week-long stay in rain-soaked foxholes on a muddy ridge facing the Japanese, a site strewn with decomposing corpses turning various colors, nauseating with the stench of death, "an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell's own cesspool." Because there were no latrines and because there was no moving in daylight, the men relieved themselves in their holes and flung the excrement out into the already foul mud. It was a latter-day Verdun, the Marine occupation of that ridge, where the artillery shellings uncovered scores of half-buried Marine and Japanese bodies, making the position "a stinking compost pile":

If a Marine slipped and slid down the back slope of the muddy ridge, he was apt to reach the bottom vomiting. I saw more than one man lose his footing and slip and slide all the way to the bottom only to stand up horror-stricken as he watched in disbelief while fat maggots tumbled out of his muddy dungaree pockets, cartridge belt, legging lacings, and the like. . . .

We didn't talk about such things. They were too horrible and obscene even for hardened veterans. . . . It is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane. . . . To me the war was insanity.

And from the other side of the world the young British officer Neil McCallum issues a similar implicit warning against the self-delusive attempt to confer high moral meaning on these grievous struggles for survival. Far from rationalizing their actions as elements of a crusade, McCallum and his men, he says, "have ceased largely to think or believe at all":

Annihilation of the spirit. The game does not appear to be worth the candle. What is seen through the explosions is that this, no less than any other war, is not a moral war. Greek against Greek, against Persian, Roman against the world, cowboys against Indians, Catholics against Protestants, black men against white -- this is merely the current phase of an historical story. It is war, and to believe it is anything but a lot of people killing each other is to pretend it is something else, and to misread man's instinct to commit murder.

Accounts of this kind are unknown to the American public. Most Americans are unaware of any and all such details; most Americans do not want to know them and will stop you, should you try to tell them. To the extent our political leaders are cognizant of such facts, they do everything in their power to prevent them from reaching the public. After all, our governing class might undertake the next campaign of slaughter any day now; if Americans knew what that slaughter actually entailed, they might not go along with the smug complacence they have exhibited on all such previous occasions. In an identical manner, if the ignorance of the American public were penetrated to any significant degree, they might demand an immediate end to the pointless murder in Iraq. But our governing class must maintain its prerogatives; as Higgs notes, it would not do to let the inmates run the asylum.

So the myths prevail. Our wars are always noble, fought for the purest of motives. Our warriors are similarly noble, engaged in a high-minded crusade. They butcher and slaughter, and are butchered and slaughtered themselves, so that "civilization" might be preserved. Never mind that many of the warriors themselves would not agree. Never mind that the front-line soldiers know that war is insanity, and only insanity. Never mind the overwhelming, senseless, futile, endless horror of what actually happens in combat, and the details that never reach the public.

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Do the "Enlightened" Ones Have a Global Plan?

All the wars are bankster wars. Don't sacrifice your children on the altar of evil.

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Death by Taser

According to Amnesty Int.,  over 400 Americans were Tasered to death, since TASER International introduced their "more than likely to kill than not" torture weapon, and it appears Florida police can't get enough.

In, Tallahassee Florida, On April 26, 2011, Kevin Darius Campbell died after police Tasered him.

And on April 22, 2011, another Florida man, Adam Spencer Johnson,  with no prior history of arrest, who just turned 33-years old, died after police Tasered him.

Apparently, children are not off limits. An 11-year-old Florida girl  was stunned by a Taser in March 2008 after she swung at a deputy. The latter’s nose was bloodied. The girl was “taken to Florida Hospital East to have the Taser prongs removed.”

On October 14, 2007 (video below), Robert Dziekanski, a man who did not speak or understand English, died minutes after being shocked by Royal Canadian Mounted Police at the Vancouver International Airport.



Now, if you think TASER International's gotten away with murder...well, you're right.  In 2008, a federal jury in San Jose, California, found TASER International, Inc., responsible for  the death of 40-year-old Robert C. Heston who died after being Tasered in February of 2005.  The jury found TASER failed to warn police agencies that repeated TASER shocks can cause cardiac arrest. However, shorty after, the Judge threw out all punitive damages awarded in the case. 

On June 6, a jury had found TASER International 15 percent responsible for the death of Mr. Robert C. Heston during an arrest on February 19, 2005 in which five law enforcement officers discharged five (5) TASER M26 ECDs deploying six (6) cartridges. The jury also found that Mr. Heston's own actions, including toxic methamphetamine ingestion, were 85 percent responsible for his death.

"TASER International is obviously very pleased with Judge Ware's ruling with respect to punitive damages, which leaves $153,150 in net compensatory damages remaining," stated Doug Klint, General Counsel for TASER International. "The jury, in this case, clearly exceeded its ability to award punitive damages which are not permitted under California law on a finding of negligent failure to warn."

"Notwithstanding the favorable ruling on these motions, TASER International will continue to consider all appropriate legal channels available in this case, including filing an appeal," added Klint.

Links:

Woman Confronts Bus Driver About Daughter Being Bullied

Shocking News: Taser Wins!

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Drone Slaughter: the Video-Game Massacres

War, what is it good for? Apparently, it's good fun. That is, if you're fortunate enough to call yourself an American. Even the Department of Homeland Security is having a blast, as it tries to keep up with "Snooki", launching its  first reality TV show, "Inside DHS," that will, no doubt, present the illusion of a  "veil-lifting look at the government division that fights terrorism".  However, if you live in Pakistan ( Afghanistan, or any other targeted nation),  America's "persistent violation of Pakistan’s territorial sovereignty by the unmanned US war-planes" may be driving you into the arms of the evil Taliban.

Despite all the "fun" we're having over here, people are dying over there.  The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) reported that US drones killed 957 people, injuring another 383, in Pakistan, in 2010.  (The US does not even bother keeping track of the number of civilians killed by drones. After the American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information request with the Department of Defense, the department said it does not compile statistics about the total number of civilians killed by drones, which are unmanned aircraft). So, yes, the Pakistani population is angry.  After all, they do not get a chance to participate in the fun and games.

But, based 7,000 miles away, the "safe and sound" gamers, who operate these drones,  are having a great time.   

"The US military are now so addicted to the use of these drones they call them "army crack". One hit and you are hooked they say. Ground forces now don’t want to leave their bases in Iraq and Afghanistan without those "eyes in the sky" above their heads."

Links:

High School Drop Out Turns Drone Pilot Thanks to Computer Games

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Evil in Our Name: Up the Ladder of Collective Responsibility

The body of Gul Mudin, the son of a farmer, killed on 1/15/10. A member of the "kill team" is posing behind him. Der SPIEGEL published 4 photos from the hundreds, possibly even thousands of images and videos it has seen. 

Try, for a moment, to forget everything the corporately owned mainstream propaganda machine spits out, and take a look at the big picture of America, right now.

Our nation's infrastructure is crumbling. Trillions of dollars has disappeared from our treasury. The poverty rate continues to escalate. Americans are losing their homes at an alarming rate due to systemic fraud, so massive, that it's virtually incomprehensible. The middle-class is gradually disappearing. Domestic unemployment remains near 10% (or triple that, if you add in all of the unemployed adults capable of work, yet not fully employed). Over 50 million Americans lack sufficient health care. Billionaire banksters and corporate elites continue to reap reward for plundering our nation's economy, growing wealthier by the minute. Meanwhile, our government, bypassing Congress, in violation of our Constitution, under the guise of saving others, continues to invade one resource-rich country after another, killing and horrifically injuring millions of innocent civilians...and sometimes, for the pure joy of it.

Consider for one moment, how we, the people would react if any other country dared to do to us what we continue to do to them. Imagine the terror of living everyday, surrounded by death squads, house raids, checkpoints, detentions, curfews, unmanned predator drones constantly flying overhead, ready to fire at anything that these soulless machines deem suspicious, and the constant flow of blood in our streets. Imagine the terror of knowing that thousands of fully armed foreign soldiers and mercenaries - trained killers - roam our soil, free to do whatever they want, with impunity. Now, who are the terrorists, again?

So, it should not come as any surprise that some of our troops are participating in monstrously evil acts for fun.  Hundreds, perhaps thousands of horrific photos of our soldiers killing unarmed civilians, otherwise known as "free kills" in soldier speak, were finally released on Der Spiegel, yesterday.   But, the Daily Censored reported on this back in September of 2010.  One has to wonder why it took so long to come to our attention. 

As one person commented, this is not a single occurrence...these atrocious acts are ongoing, as fatigued soldiers, wrapped up in layer upon layer of protective covering, no longer differentiate between civilians and combatants - who, in their indoctrinated eyes, are considered less than human, in this "kill or be killed" environment.

"It's not just a couple of soldiers, my nephew is in the army and is on his 4th time over there, he's seen too many of US soldiers making free kills just for the fun of it. There's no such just 2 individual soldiers doing this. It's happening more often than you might think. That's the reality and it's not funny anymore."

No, this type of "group evil"...this blood lust flows out, like the demons inside Pandora's box,  from maintaining a constant atmosphere drenched in the pathology of war. Moreover, these illegal wars are not fought for the "greater good", they are created to line the pockets, and to increase the power of the predators and parasites who reside at the top of the global food chain.   When profit, power and status trump  human life, exhibited in the excess of materialism that pervades American culture, barbaric acts, like the ones that these soldiers (who just happened to be caught) committed, will continue to escalate, as it is an integral part of warfare that is perpetuated only to feed the greedy beast of empire.

The bottom line is that our hands are smeared in the blood of tens of thousands of human casualties. After all, not only are we aware of all of the wars in our name, we also know that the military very often serves as a dumping ground for the most incorrigible of our nation's children. It is we, the people, in effect, who choose, employ, and pay America's soldiers to do our dirty work...our killing for us.

"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation…want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening, they want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters…. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." -- Frederick Douglass, 1857

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Fulfilling the Dream?

In 1964, Martin Luther King had been asked to comment on a statement by Senator-Elect Robert F. Kennedy of New York to the effect that it might be possible to elect an African American president within 40 years. Martin Luther King responded, "I've seen levels of compliance with the civil rights bill and changes that have been most surprising. So, on the basis of this, I think we may be able to get a Negro president in less than 40 years." However, aside from being the first African American President, Martin Luther King would be disappointed in President Obama's seemingly infatuation with the establishment.

Not only does Obama continue his predecessor's escalation of the Military-industrial complex, his pro-business status quo bias - which favors incumbent firms over potential, big business over small, and corporate interests over consumer - is completely at odds with Dr. King's non-violent philosophy and commitment to ending poverty by championing the rights of the poor and marginalized in American society.

Consider the US military plans to more than triple its inventory of high-altitude, armed and unarmed drones capable of 24-hour patrols by 2020. President Obama has also made it clear that he concurs with President Bush's policy, that gives the President the right to assassinate American citizens - if suspected of terrorism - without a trial. (U.S. military teams, intelligence deeply involved in aiding Yemen on strikes).

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. . . .

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, "it doesn't really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them," a senior administration official said. "They are then part of the enemy."

Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called "High Value Targets" and "High Value Individuals," whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including [New Mexico-born Islamic cleric Anwar] Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi's name has now been added.

Martin Luther King, once said the United States is, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." Nothing has changed. The explosion of technology within the last decade has made it possible to engage in a very insidious form of violence with little to no accountability. Unmanned drones and adjunct private armed forces kill in such a way that leaves the U.S. accountable, liable, or answerable to no one.

On the other hand, in fairness to President Obama, one must keep in mind that never before has the state succeeded in maintaining unsustainable human practices without operating through violence, oppression, and the destruction of environment. Therefore, as long as we, the people insist on retaining the lifestyle to which we've become accustomed, President Obama does not have much choice.

Cowardice asks the question: is it safe? Expediency asks the question: is it political? Vanity asks the question: is it popular? But conscience asks the question: is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor political, nor popular – but one must take it simply because it is right. -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

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300,000 Child Soldiers Simply Dream of Being Children

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Bullies Are Cowards

Normal everyday seemingly boring events often lead me to post what most would consider a boring rant. I just hope that no one reads my blog and recognizes themselves in one of these boring events. Considering that all of one or two people read this blog, I'll say my chances are pretty good that won't happen.

A few days ago I was jogging across the school parking lot I ran into an old acquaintance and his 10-year old son. I hadn't seen him in years so I decided to do a "stop and chat" as Larry David calls it, and catch up on his life. While we were talking his son starts laughing and pointing toward an unusually short man walking along the edge of the parking lot. My friend casually told the boy,

"Cut it out, we're trying to talk."

The boy continued to mock this man so my friend turns to me and jokingly says,

"He is really short, isn't he?"

As if the fact that this man was unusual in some way was justification for his son's behavior. Since it was obvious that this kid's father wasn't going to intervene and the man could probably hear and see what the boy was doing I leaned over and told the kid,

"You do know that the man you're laughing at is Sammy "the stub" Luciano, descendant of Lucky Luciano. He specializes in taking out people under 5' tall."

I was hoping this kid was less than 5' tall and would get the message to back off. He must've understood because he looked at me like I was psycho and quickly walked over to his father's side for protection from me or Sammy "the stub" Luciano, I don't know which.

Unfortunately, often times, danger must be present, real or imagined, as Sammy "the stub" Luciano was for that boy, for an issue to be taken seriously; the fact that the matter at hand is hurting others is not enough.

Now that school shootings seem to occur more often than ever before and children or teenagers who have been severely bullied are the shooters, schoolyard bullying is being taken a little more seriously but I'm afraid it's going to take a few more "Columbines" before teachers, parents, politicians and administrators make eliminating or decreasing bullying a priority.

The other end of the spectrum and far more common and much less reported on, are those victims of bullying that turn on themselves. We'll never know how many people end up committing suicide because they are being bullied and see no way out or the bullying they've experienced in the past has resulted in taking their own life. Most of the time the cause will be blamed on something else such as mental illness, or an abusive home situation, which is more than likely true but I'm sure there are many cases where bullying plays a large part.

It's reported that teachers notice and intervene in only one out of 25 episodes of verbal or emotional bullying behavior. There is no excuse for teachers and/or parents to ignore such behavior for that type of conduct usually escalates. In addition to intervening, adults should take a proactive approach and create role-playing situations to teach empathy to children starting in pre-school and continue teaching the importance of empathy throughout the child's educational process. If we combine intervention, teaching empathy with a no tolerance for schoolyard terrorism policy, I think we would see a radical decrease in such behavior.

Bullies intimidate smaller or weaker people that they know won't fight back...bully is just another word for coward.

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Did Hitler Use Profanity?

I was brought up in a very animated household environment, a few curse words short of the Osborne family. My mother did not curse that much but my dad made up for it in spades. As young children we were not allowed to curse, but as we reached teenage years my siblings and I made my dad's repertoire sound Mary Poppinish.

My cousins, on the other hand, were raised in an environment where cursing was prohibited and any violation merited the worst punishment imaginable. One of my cousins shot someone's dog, blinding him in one eye, just because he felt like it. My aunt and uncle punished him by taking his bb gun away. Later that same day that same cousin said a bad word and almost 15 years later he is still recovering from the drastic measures taken to ensure that word would never be spoken from his lips again.

I'm certainly not advocating profanity become part of the mainstream media, but it does make me wonder why we choose to censor curse words as if they alone could cause our society to collapse. If the word "fuck" appears in one of our major newspapers or magazines, or is heard on radio or television...the news media goes crazy, yet no one flinches at the violence we are constantly exposed to from the time we are very young.

Obscene means offensive to the mind, morality or decency and there is no doubt words have the power to violate our sensibilities, but aren't we giving those same words more potency by overreacting to them? Especially when the truly obscene -- children without health insurance(vetoing SCHIP), dead and severely injured soldiers, children and civilians(Iraq war), violence in our inner cities etc are glossed over and ignored? Why do we allow the utterance of a word; the sight of a breast; men kissing each other, and other such innocuous occurrences turn us into raving lunatics?

Maybe it's because we really do value what people say more than what people do. Maybe it's because we don't think the truly obscene will affect us directly or we're afraid if we pay too much attention, those terrible things may affect us directly. And maybe that's why we ended up with the leaders we have today.

From what I understand Hitler refrained from using profanity.

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Exploiting 9/11

"Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return."

It evokes a tragedy that marks an epoch. From the outset, the warfare state has exploited "9/11," a label at once too facile and too laden with historic weight -- giving further power to the tacit political axiom that perception is reality.

Often it seems that media coverage is all about perception, especially when the underlying agendas are wired into huge profits and geopolitical leverage. If you associate a Big Mac or a Whopper with a happy meal or some other kind of great time, you're more likely to buy it. If you connect 9/11 with a need for taking military action and curtailing civil liberties, you're more likely to buy what the purveyors of war and authoritarian government have been selling for the past half-dozen years.

"Sept. 11 changed everything" became a sudden cliche in news media. Words are supposed to mean something, and those words were -- and are -- preposterous. They speak of a USA enthralled with itself while reducing the rest of the world (its oceans and valleys and mountains and peoples) to little more than an extensive mirror to help us reflect on our centrality to the world. In an individual, we call that narcissism. In the nexus of media and politics, all too often, it's called "patriotism."

What happened on Sept. 11, 2001, was extraordinary and horrible by any measure. And certainly a crime against humanity. At the same time, it was a grisly addition to a history of human experience that has often included many thousands killed, en masse, by inhuman human choice.

It is simply and complexly a factual matter that the U.S. government has participated in outright mass murders directly -- in, for example, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Panama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq -- and less directly, through aid to armies terrorizing civilians in Nicaragua, Angola, East Timor and many other countries.

The news media claim to be providing context. But whose? Overall, the context of Uncle Sam in the more perverse and narcissistic aspects of his policy personality. The hypocrisies of claims about moral precepts and universal principles go beyond the mere insistence that some others "do as we say, not as we do." What gets said, repeated and forgotten sets up kaleidoscope patterns that can be adjusted to serve the self-centered mega-institutions reliably fixated on maintaining their own dominance.

Media manifestations of these patterns are frequently a mess of contradictions so extreme that they can only be held together with the power of ownership, advertising and underwriting structures -- along with notable assists from government agencies that dispense regulatory favors and myriad pressure to serve what might today be called a military-industrial-media complex. Our contact with the world is filtered through the mesh of mass media to such a great extent that the mesh itself becomes the fabric of power.

The most repetitious lessons of 9/11 -- received and propagated by the vast preponderance of U.S. news media -- have to do with the terribly asymmetrical importance of grief and of moral responsibility. Our nation is so righteous that we are trained to ask for whom the bell tolls. Rendered as implicitly divisible, humanity is fractionated as seen through red-white-and-blue windows on the world.

Posing outside cycles of violence and victims who victimize, the dominant vision of Pax Americana has no more use now than it did six years ago for W.H. Auden's observation: "Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return."

We ought to know. But we Americans are too smart for that.

The U.S. media tell us so.

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An Acceptable Level of Violence.

I believe Bush was being very sincere when he commented, "Success is not no violence," as the violence he is talking about has no direct impact on him or his family and friends...he's made and is making quite of that in almost every action he has taken as President of the United States.

President Bush has a very high tolerance for violence as long as it targets those outside his tightly knit network of wealthy and powerful people.

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