(Pulling together a lot of threads, most of you, dear readers, will follow along fine without a jillion links.)
There won’t be a revolution. The moment for that was long, long ago. About the only way you could get a decent riot now would be for something truly life-threatening, but then you’d have to convince everyone it was really a dangerous situation. That won’t be easy.
So we had this big pile of Afghanistan reports leaked out. Yes, there is some significance to them. Taken together as a whole, they are proof positive the warfare there is a failure. It also shows the utterly disgusting ethics which steer this warfare, the vast sea of cruel inhumanity upon which floats the US military.
It is not news.
Remember the My Lai Massacre? I was about 12, living in Anchorage, Alaska, and it was all over the schools. Being on the Left Coast, you can bet the peacenik movement was quite strong there, even if it was the far north end of that coast. We even had a strong Green movement before it was called that. But it was just about as powerless as the little flowers they picked from the meadows to wear in their hair. I suppose the most powerful element of leftism there was the Anti-War movement. That awful event greatly strengthened it among the secondary school age population, and draft resistance might have been significant, had we the population to see much drafting.
I wasn’t conscious of current events before that, but it was the beginning of such for me. Since then, I actually served in the military twice. I’ve also taught history among other things, and I can assure you, even though I spent most of my adult years on the Right, I realized how dirty it was. As far as I have been able to determine, there has never been a clean, just war in the whole of Western Civilization, at the very least. There was a time when atrocities stirred the masses, but not here, and not now.
The mainstream press has reported on some of the worst during our national history. Even if the dirtiest secrets had to wait until alternative news got rolling, what we got was bad enough. My Lai didn’t stop the war; we simply got run out of the country. You can analyze it to death, but that’s how it ended. You want to stop the war in Afghanistan? That’s what it will take. Same with all the other places we have troops fighting. However much difference was made by public sentiment over Viet Nam, we won’t be seeing that again.
Indeed, the most egregious, unconscionable violations of all government activity are uncovered every day, but we aren’t in the streets screaming for blood. Little victories here and there, like that tiny town in California which tossed out their overpaid city staff, will not make any significant difference. The Tea Party was compromised before it got rolling. Folks notice, alright, but then they go back to watching the clot of drunken exhibitionists selling t-shirts in New Jersey so they can become famous on MTV. Indeed, they travel hundreds of miles and stand in line all day so they can sign a waiver and walk in that little t-shirt shop. We didn’t have that when I was a teenager.
We also didn’t have the Internet, but that hasn’t helped much. A slender handful of folks do notice all those revelations of malfeasance and war crimes, and we talk about it a great deal. But if we think there is any hope of whipping up a popular movement for change, we are lying to ourselves. All we are doing is making sure TPTB know who to round up and put in the FEMA camps KBR is building. Yeah, you and me.
If we organize, they’ll simply murder us, because we aren’t stupid enough to be suckered like those much-publicized “terrorist plots” of mayhem, all of which uniformly arose from the informant getting it going. No, they realize the real deal would never threaten the public, just the government thugs. Most of us know better than to organize in the first place, at least not such that we form an easy target for rulers’ fears.
And some, like me, simply have no plans to hurt anybody, not even the thugs. Indeed, a solid commitment to avoid hurting anyone. But that won’t blunt their fear, since they aren’t rational in the first place. They’ll come for us, too.
