Somewhere, at this moment, the CEOs of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and other defense war contractors are saying “thank you”, crying tears of joy.  The temptation of the U.S. to butt into yet another situation that has no plausible connection to “defense” as a human being with the slightest brain function would understand the term has struck again, this time pushing the U.N. to give a meaningless veneer of legitimacy by implying that “the world” approves.  Out of a claimed concern for civilian lives, “our” government is going to stretch the taxes they’re extracting from us to add more rain of fiery death.  So predictable they are.

No matter what any sycophantic media talking head or grease-palmed PR hack says, the following truths will be borne out:

-This is a foot in the door.  All claims to the contrary are undiluted horseshit, the second anything happens to a single U.S. jet there will be escalation.  Hell, probably even if nothing happens to one.

-Whatever system replaces that of Qadaffi’s regime, the political elite here and their business partners will expect to be able to treat it like their pet.

On the bright side, maybe if our meddling lasts long enough, Paul Krugman can write a column about all the jobs created replenishing our supply of missiles…

America, Fuck Yeah!

Click here to view the embedded video.

From: poloblsd@aol.com [mailto:poloblsd@aol.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 01, 2010 1:03 AM
To: mike@gogulski.com
Subject: nice website

Dear Mike,

I understand that you are the creator of this website that specifically says “fuck the troops“. I don’t think you mean to actually fuck the troops, that would make you a homosexual-well judging by your picture I guess that is a possibility-but it’s not really relevant now is it. The message you have tried to convey in your very limited intellectual capacity simply doesn’t hold up. I don’t see any type of educational masthead or anything that would tell me or any one else reading your comments that you are intellectually qualified to make these statements, so I’m going to guess that this is just your very limited and I might add, lame ass opinion. You specifically mention all of the innocents being killed. I’m just curious, what would you call all of the people killed in the 9-11 attacks?

Here’s the thing Mike, it’s beyond difficult to have an intellectual argument with someone like you who is completely unarmed. I’m guessing you live in a trailer park and are married to your sister, but that’s just a guess..actually it could be your first cousin, no matter. I would offer to send you a plane ticket to any place else in the world, so you could go there and experience first hand, what it’s like to live in another country, without the types of freedoms you obviously took for granted every single day of your useless life here, but I see that you’ve already left. So if you’ve left why do you think anyone cares what you think? Well maybe the FBI or Secret Service or Homeland Security. I’ll forward your information to them just in case.

I am an average American citizen who thanks God (yes, Mike that’s with a capital “G”) every day for the sheer bravery and heroism exhibited by our men and women in uniform. People like you who never accomplish anything in life are truly sad individuals that’s why you live the way you do. You don’t have the courage or intellect to actually get out there and do anything, now do you? Frankly, I pity you, but candidly, I pity your mother more.

Barbara Donahue
President
Grand Prix Productions
(310) 889-9310

Well I hope that made you feel better, Barbara. If your idea of being “intellectually armed” is to insinuate things about your opponent’s sexuality, social status, lack of education and potential inbreeding, I really don’t know what to say. The people killed on 9/11 were victims, sure. Do their deaths excuse the murder of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan? Oh, and I don’t believe in imaginary sky fairies (with capital letters or without). As for “sheer bravery and heroism”, I guess that must include the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent people?

I’ll tell Mom you said hello. And by the way, fuck the troops. Oh, and happy Memorial Day.

YouCut – a first-of-its-kind project – is designed to defeat the permissive culture of runaway spending in Congress. It allows you to vote, both online and on your cell phone, on spending cuts that you want to see the House enact. Vote on this page today for your priorities and together we can begin to change Washington’s culture of spending into a culture of savings.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel comes close to the mark with regard to how productive this will be in its lead paragraph:

Instead of voting for your favorite “American Idol” or “Dancing with the Stars” contestants, you can now vote on your favorite federal spending cut – courtesy of the GOP.

House Republicans say their new “YouCut” program will give voters the chance to suggest budget-slashing proposals directly to members of Congress and see lawmakers act on their ideas. Republicans say they will try to force colleagues to vote on the cuts every week on the House floor.

The ROFLCopter in action

Deploy the ROFLCopter!

Astute observers will note that the “project” targets just shy of a mere $6 billion of the $3.6 trillion 2010 proposed budget, nearly all of which class as favorite Republican targets. Not one red cent of the nearly $800 billion per year to fund the military would be on the table, let alone the around $300 billion a year which buys such nice things as endless war in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan.

Click here to view the embedded video.

On the one hand, I am grateful to WikiLeaks for making this available. On the other, I am ashamed, disappointed and frightened that such direct evidence of evil is necessary for people to ascertain its presence and dominion.

“Bushmaster” will never be prosecuted by the system which put him in control. Maybe one or two of the CounterStrike-addled kids who actually did these murders will, and be released after a couple of years, having been “rehabilitated”. The whole goddamned thing will be swept under the rug and forgotten, much like the carpet-bombing and napalming of Vietnamese and Burmese families two generations ago. Much like the firebombing of Dresden. Much like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Much like the massacres in the Philippines. Oh, I could go on…

And the machine will grind on. Threatening, extorting, imprisoning, torturing, maiming and murdering, until we put a stop to it. These creatures — I cannot call them “people” — live in your communities. They attend your churches. They dine in your restaurants. They attend PTA meetings at your school. They shop in your grocery store, and, maybe, they occasionally come into contact with your children or grandchildren at the playground. They are monsters, worthy of less than the bottom of a well, and yet they live among you.

And they are forming your culture. They are defining the world we live in. They are honored and revered for their “service” to rival global death machines. And the music swells, the crowd rises, hands go over hearts, and…

Download (PDF, 3MB). Also at Scribd.

Disable vehicles!

Any Persian speakers around? Translate and redistribute, please.

What you can do to bring down the tyrants

We had been there a couple of times already during our two weeks or so in the city. Antigua itself is beautiful, up in the high country, filled with classic colonial-period architecture, lots of neat little shops, and plenty for the tourist. Just to the south, Volcán de Agua towers some 12,000 feet above everything. As Guatemala goes, you couldn’t ask for a more serene, lovely place.

Volcán de Agua, Antigua, Guatemala

And the restaurant was lovely too, with an indoor courtyard with tropical trees, a lively bar in the back and a menu worth sampling again and again. Though at the top end of the scale for Guatemala, the prices were quite comfortable for bearers of United States dollars looking for great food in a nice setting. The clientele were generally foreign tourists, with the occasional group of darker-skinned, upper-class guatemaltecos appearing as well.

A couple of people walk in and start making for the back of the restaurant, where there might be some tables available. They approach us, as we’re sitting at a table against a wall along the route to the back. A young man, perhaps 19 years of age, followed by a middle aged man, presumably his father. Both guatemaltecos.

My eye is caught for some reason. Something isn’t right about the youth’s gait. In an instant, I see why: his arm ends in a short stump just below his shoulder. And then I notice his father behind him, with a prosthetic arm slung over his shoulder.

Tragic. What horrible accident must have led to this. I can’t even imagine what life would be like, less than physically complete, not to mention the sensations, the horror, the feelings that must come of losing a limb. The folks who live in the countryside and till the land in Guatemala have hard lives, and accidents must be common.

I turn my attention back to my shrimp cocktail, quickly, as they approach our table.

But something is still not right with the young man’s gait, and I turn as they pass, perhaps impolitely, and look again.

And it is then that I see that the father carries not one, but two prosthetic arms slung over his shoulders. And that his son’s other arm is also mostly missing, ending in a slightly longer stump than the other.

What do you call a young man with no arms?

Victim.

Perhaps I drop my fork as the realization hits me: this young man walking past me, just entering adulthood, was not the victim of an accident.

Silence on the Mountain

Right up until the end of the bloody 46-year Guatemalan “civil” war in 1996, state-sponsored gangs roamed the countryside, striking targets of opportunity and instilling fear into the populace, in hopes of crushing support for the guerrilla resistance groups. A favorite tactic, described in Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala; Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala and elsewhere, was for the terror squads to attack small, rural villages suspected of sheltering or supporting the guerrillas. Everyone in the village was forced out of their homes at gunpoint, assembled, and segregated: men over here, women over there, children here. The villagers watched as soldiers and police raped their mothers, sisters and daughters. Those who resisted were simply shot. Those surviving now watched as some of the children, boys especially, had one or both of their arms or hands hacked off with machetes. And then most of the men were executed. Still more were led away from the villages, bound and at gunpoint, enslaved or slaughtered and never to be seen again: los desaparecidos, the disappeared.

The armless young man who just walked past me, without doubt, was one of those children in the villages in the early- to mid-1990s — mutilated, crippled by the criminal violence of state agents in the service of an inhuman ruling class, and left to live as a reminder to those who would challenge their privilege.

I tried several times, in conversations with guatemaltecos, to ask about the war, and how it had touched their lives. None would speak of it to me — perhaps because I am a white man, but without question because they want to forget.

When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men’s weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength.

The appointment of Lee Doren as Crasher-in-Chief, his actions since and CEI’s refusal to remove him have demonstrated clearly that Bureaucrash is no longer a place for liberty.

The Art of War

Some of us have laid siege, in an attempt to recapture what we felt we had lost. Drawing back to a broader perspective, though, we must realize that we never had Bureaucrash, as evidenced by how easily it has been corrupted, and thus we have lost nothing.

Let us no longer lay siege and waste our energies on a hopeless cause.

Let us instead go out to the other places which have been and which are being established to foster the cause of authentic liberty. Let us keep our weapons sharp, our ardor high, and let us build community and strength to support the broader war.

And may Bureaucrash rust in pieces.

PS: Goodbye, Bureaucrash. My account will remain until deleted, but I will no longer participate there.

I have a bit of a different outlook on those troops, as many of you know.

A child's life CHANGED forever, thanks to America's brave soldiers. Bala Baluk district, Farah province, Afghanistan, 5 May 2009. Photo via the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, www.rawa.org

I set out today to put forward a Memorial Day post to remember, a real shocker, if you will.

But I found myself surveying endless sets of photos of the horrors of war. Children missing limbs. Hideously mutated stillborn babies, courtesy of “depleted” uranium munitions. Battlefield trauma surgery. Burn victims. Executions. Murder, mutilation, death.

And my will faltered. I find I don’t have much to say. Or, perhaps I do, but digging deeply enough to put the words together is hurting me, and so I must back away.

So, instead, I leave you with the photo at right, and with simple linkage to my two pieces from around this time last year: Fuck the troops! and A Memorial Day tribute to police state supporters. And also with a few words from fellow anarcho-blogger Cork, in “A memorial day we can all get behind“:

Some anarchists will tell you that the troops died for nothing. But that’s not exactly true.

They died to butcher women and children. They died to make life miserable and unbearable for people all across the globe. They died to strengthen the police state. They died to take away our liberties. They died to enrich the military industrial complex. They died to make the world safe for US-style corporatist capitalism. They died to strengthen dictators and tyrants. They died to ensure US hegemony over the entire world, and to enslave the innocent. They died to destroy and steal from foreign countries. They died to worsen the economy and harm the poor. They died to end habeas corpus and protect torture.

In a nutshell: they died to make the world a far worse, far more despicable, and far more dangerous place. And they did so knowing exactly what they were doing.

Oh, it was just an exercise.

From the comments to “Multinational forces storm Mayport beach for drills“, wherein commenter “tut tut” need not be forgiven for her/his use of the imperial first-person plural:

This is like one of those stories I used to write for my high school newspaper. I’d comment on everything but what the actual news in the the story was. And I’d have my thesaurus next to me to make it seem like I knew more than I actually did.

Why does the author not ask the obvious questions:

What the hell is this troop of military soldiers doing by running war games on our beaches?

Why is it a multinational group to begin with? Are we at war with Peru?  Is Peru at war with us?

Why is it US soldiers and soldiers from several different foreign countries are training to ‘jell’ and why is that ‘good’?

I’m surprised he didn’t write something like ‘The alabaster whiteness of the rugged Major’s teeth shone as fireflies in the aggravated heavens.’

Puff piece that tells me nothing of what I need to know about this curious incident.

SOUTHCOM press release (and Google cache).