- WEAPON MENTALITY 3

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Le pire imbécile se croit le plus sage- apprentimarcv
Ne traitez personne d'imbécile – Jésus

The greatest fool thinks himself wisest - learnermarkv
Call no man a fool. Jesus

Chapters

• 0:06 on the “field of honor,” the dark lines tend to blur between tragic accident, heroic self-sacrifice and summary execution
• 5:41 Losses among the info elite can always be replaced from the info proletariat
• 7:13 the routine of evil

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
 From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld 
Learner, begin

- WEAPON MENTALITY (III) -

The more elite the military unit, the more numerous its leader casualties in combat. Many of them earned posthumous decorations by leading their troops into the teeth of enemy fire. Others, less popular, were shot in the back by their own troops. Even hunting hounds turn on their masters sometimes.

Paul Lackman notes that according to official estimates, a thousand American commissioned officers were “fragged” by their men during America’s debacle in Vietnam (“We won every battle, but lost the war.”). Live grenades were rigged to their toilet seats or wired under their cots at base camp. These statistics could be doubled and redoubled by unreported incidents, casualties of accident or battle, plus those involving non-commissioned officers (sergeants) — all in all, a big chunk of total American casualties. 

Armies tend to chew themselves up in any case. Officially, six percent of American combat deaths in World War II (sic) were lost to accidental, “friendly” fire. World War II frontline GIs called the U.S. Army Air Corps “the American Luftwaffe.” It would have been like lining up a reinforced American infantry division of eighteen thousand men and mowing them down with machines guns. 

This is probably just another institutional understatement, (See No. 11 in “Big Lies”). Fighting in jungles, in urban areas and other settings of limited visibility and intense close combat often raises casualty counts from friendly fire — a problem aggravated when firepower is aimed against dense combat concentrations. Nonetheless, this is about par for most mechanized armies. 

Officially, the US Government executed one hundred and forty-two American soldiers during World War II (sic); a fate that befell at least ten thousand German soldiers, hundreds of thousands of Soviets and millions of unarmed civilians. It befell at least two thousand French soldiers during World War I (sic) and who knows how many more during underground WWII combat between Free French rebels and Vichy Nazi collaborators?

On the “field of honor,” the dark lines tend to blur between tragic accident, heroic self-sacrifice and summary execution. 

Just imagine: you’re patrolling hostile terrain with a couple dozen terrified, worn-out and filthy teenagers. They’re draped with automatic weapons and high explosives, and eager to bang away at any threat. They’re backed in turn by unimaginable firepower brought down more or less sight-unseen by distant artillerists and pilots equally stressed-out. Duck and cover! 

A standard American tactic in Vietnam was to lure large enemy formations into aerial and ground artillery killing fields baited with undermanned and isolated Allied units. http://www.g2mil.com/lost_vietnam.htm. American generals poured firepower on Vietnam, the way a piggy youngster might pour mounds of sugar in his breakfast cereal. Districts containing millions of neutral Vietnamese were turned into free-fire-zones where every target (fixed and moveable) was fair game. Thus “friendly” fire turned out to be proportionately deadlier. 

During the 1990 Kuwait War, allied friendly fire and accidents virtually matched the mortality rate of hostilities. 

Until recently, crime and punishment, starvation, bad food, dirty water, exposure and especially fever killed many more combatants than did battle. Undiagnosed, war-induced epidemics still plague modern combat veterans, despite the best efforts of their medics. More Iraqi children died from embargo-related privation, than Iraqi soldiers from Allied firepower. 

We have turned ourselves into conscience-suppressed barbarians insulated from our deplorable results by never-ending weapon propaganda. 

“More than 9,600 of the relatively young Operation Desert Storm veterans have died since serving in Iraq, a statistical anomaly,” wrote Dan Kapelovitz [in 2004] the reporter who interviewed Picou. Of those still living, more than a third – upward of 236,000 – have filed Gulf War Syndrome-related claims with the Veteran’s Administration.

 “Research overwhelmingly suggests these ailments and deaths were caused by depleted uranium, a metal the military use in much of their hardware, so dense it can pierce through steel-armored tanks. But this radioactive material has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, according to the renowned scientist Helen Caldicott. In Iraq, incidences of cancer, childhood leukemia and rare mutations in newborns have skyrocketed.” http://www.rense.com/general42/werq.htm

[In 2014, the cause most favored lately has been the vaccine used to block chemical agents, or perhaps the one immunizing against weaponized infection. All three of them combined, most likely?].


Picture a main battle tank ablaze from fuel and ammunition detonating inside its armored carapace. The flaming wreck gives off a thin plume of white smoke while it burns super hot, then a greasy black one you could smell miles downwind. The first thing to smoke, besides the crew’s bodies, would be the vaporized uranium that seared its way through the tank armor to begin with – like a jet of super-hot steam passing through a block of ice – that smears its interior now. This smoke-driven scum coats the landscape. Desert rains will wash it deep into the earth and slowly out to sea. Every windstorm thereafter will raise a cloud of radioactive dust.

During the Kuwait War, more American troops got poisoned by inhaling depleted uranium vaporized from American anti-tank shells, than the handful that suffered lead poisoning from Iraqi gunfire. 

During the Second, thousands more combat casualties accrued. I can’t believe the count I have had to add of quiet coffin ceremonies while I revised Learner. Don’t ask me why we let desperate Iraqis and Afghans get up close and personal with American troops for so long, or what we accomplished thereby, except stuffing the pockets of weapons industrialists.


Losses among the info elite can always be replaced from the info proletariat. Indeed, the quality of leadership improves as narrow responsibilities are entrusted to lower-order chauvinists. Mercenary martinets who grew up as abused children are easier to recruit and control than progressive populists raised with tender loving care. 

Campaigns of political violence and terror favor political extremists over moderates until revulsion overwhelms the survivors. Then, for the sake of peace, the worst killers are granted amnesty and sent home. Leaders take their bloody gains into luxury exile; spear-bearers go home to terrorize their peaceful neighbors. Every survivor grows old nursing gory nightmares. Thank God, they all die eventually and (let’s hope) take their nightmares with them.

Paradise may emerge once we stop burying so many nightmares with the bodies of our dead.

I wonder what life would be like if half our surviving neighbors were unpunished murderers and a third of our people were their mutilated or murdered victims — as in Rwanda. What a waking nightmare — the likes of which each of us must have endured during countless past lives. Not to mention being chewed alive for countless eons prior, with no surcease except occasional reincarnation into a chewer.

There are so many of those killers, there seems to be no good way to re-educate them before the deed, or punish or rehabilitate them afterwards. Learners will have to find new ways to do just that before the necessity reappears, God forbid. Reverend James Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 1995 in South Africa is a Learner handbook for this mind-numbing task.

One of weapon management’s most spectacular obscenities is the routine of evil as described by Hannah Arendt in her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 

The contemporaries of Lot and Noah are said to have perished from the unforeseen consequences of their Routine of Evil, as had the fabled Atlanteans. Once they embraced it, no alternative remained for them but annihilation. Ten thousand years after the Atlantis disaster, Plato reported that that society had indulged in arcane energy technologies gone astray — sound familiar? 

It might not have been Sodom and Gomorrah’s sexual gymnastics, per se, that God condemned. Rather, He didn’t approve when humans started believing that the upright were fools and evil had become cool. 

The visionary Edgar Cayce described the Atlanteans’ final conflict as a civil war. They had created human-animal chimera mutants that served them as slaves and intelligent beasts of burden. According to Cayce, two expressions of Atlantean social philosophy emerged. One forbade sexual relations between purebred humans and chimeras, whereas the other sought to permit it. 

I suspect it was a bit more complicated than that. The first group probably wanted apartheid, whereas the second advocated equality. As usual, their arguments sank to the level of: “We’ll never let our sisters and daughters be raped by their kind!” Cayce, an old-school Virginian, reduced the argument to familiar racial-sexual terms and stood squarely on the side of apartheid. Both sides were annihilated in any case. 

Paul Di Filippo, in his book Ribofunk, wrote a brilliant series of short stories describing the outcome of trans-human biotechnology. 

Once permissive criminality and institutional brutality become dependably profitable; once doing good becomes somehow effeminate, impractical and unwise; and once official monologue begins to ennoble evil and blur our sense of right and wrong (the ultimate ambition of weapon mentality); meaningful activities grind to a halt. 

In most cases, public morality serves to guarantee group survival. The wages of sin is death; every sinner dies, one way or another. But societies only succumb to their internal contradictions once they’ve institutionalized their worst brutality. Here we are.

Nobody can tell how many concentration camp guards were certifiable sadists and psychopaths. The remainder must have been minor sociopaths: petty criminals, stupid opportunists and mediocre conformists who took advantage of brutal opportunities offered by their totally guilty superiors. 

Those superiors, in turn, kept their hands clean by distancing themselves from the brutality they had instituted. They established multiple tiers of bureaucracy to run a complicated paper chase of pain, misery and murder. In this manner, they distanced themselves both physically and emotionally from the process. Only rarely would a few of them go slumming among their victims to torture and murder a sampling of them, as brief diversions for themselves and to set an example for their underlings.

Indeed, the most demanding concentration camp tasks – barracks discipline, stoking the gas chambers and ovens with bodies and disposing of the remains – were relegated to kapos and Sonderkommandos respectively: concentration camp trustees on the one hand, and inmate untouchables on the other. Both groups were absolute victims of the camp system. 

I should thank Tante Micheline, my mother’s best friend forever, for that reminder. She took me to see movies like Alexander Nevski and The Tank during early birthdays, to remind me that Russians were good folk just as heroic, virtuous and graceful, even though my country held them to be boogey-men fit only for nuclear extermination. 

Basically, the concentration camps were set up to keep SS goon squads – handpicked from the gutters and prisons of the Reich – from going insane. That mental failing was all too frequent. 

If concentration camp guards had had to live, eat and sleep in barracks with their charges, the way army drill instructors must with their trainee platoon, most of them would have developed protective feelings. Many of them did anyway, if only for a handful of beneficiaries. 

Instead, feelings had to be compartmentalized. One mental “box” stored thoughts of family, friends, co-workers and the nation; the other, used at work, was intended for the inmates of a new universe of mind-numbing cruelty. 

We do much the same thing in our own heads, since we occupy a global concentration camp we refuse to recognize. We apply a long-familiar double standard to minorities, to foreigners and to the homeless. Basically, those unlucky enough to stand outside our “good box” don’t merit the consideration we give our pets.

Learners won’t let anyone inside the “bad box” any longer — at least not in real space-time. In imaginary, ritual and theatrical spaces, more likely. 


As Elvis Costello sings, “What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding?”
Plus he sings: “Every day, every day, every day, I write the book…” 

Sing it loud and clear, my man!

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COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net