Sunday, July 20, 2014

Masters of War and Hypocrisy

What a difference a body count makes.

Over the weekend, a numerical tie was reached between the corpses littering a field of Ukrainian sunflowers and the corpses spread out within the Gaza outdoor prison. The temporary parity achieved was 298 people in each locale. The Ukrainian crash death toll is static, while the Gazan casualties keep piling up. Today alone, an additional 87 Palestinians and 13 Israeli soldiers died.

The plane crash victims have engendered the usual official outrage from government officials pretending to be capable of such a normal human emotion. Photos and life stories of the passengers have been spread out on the front pages and on the TV screens. But with the exception of the young boys playing on the beach, the civilian Palestinians shot and bombed to death have been described by the same sanctimonious officials as unfortunate collateral damage.

President Obama fumes from one side of his mouth that Putin and Russia will have to pay for this atrocity. And from the other side of his mouth he humbly requests that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu use a little restraint in his own killing spree. Obama wants the whole world to punish Russia. He wants the whole world to support Israel, not matter what.

Russian-made military hardware allegedly killed innocent airline travelers. American-made military hardware kills innocents throughout the world. The day before a surface-to-air missile shot a jumbo jet out of the sky, Predator drone missiles blasted yet another group of Muslim "militants" on the Obama Kill List into oblivion. And on Saturday, a dozen more people died in a similar American attack.

American drone operators often target the rescuers and recovery crews of drone casualties in what's euphemistically described as a "double tap." This practice  is a war crime.  But that didn't stop Secretary of State John Kerry from railing on TV against "drunken separatists" who had the nerve to dishonor crash victims by "unceremoniously" placing their bodies in refrigerated railroad cars.

The New York Times, fully on board with the US government-spawned propaganda, actually had headlines blaring that the "rebels" were holding the corpses hostage!
 Pro-Russian separatist militiamen have seized custody of the bodies of about 200 victims of the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet that was blown out of the sky by a surface-to-air missile, Ukrainian officials said on Sunday, and rebels continued to limit access to the crash site in eastern Ukraine, blocking the work of experts even as hundreds of untrained local volunteers were picking through the wreckage with sticks.
I guess the drunken mobs should count themselves lucky that a drone double-tap was not in the cards when they decided to go "picking" through the wreckage in order to place the corpses into body bags.

And while Kerry is demanding accountability and intact bodies, Obama himself has been granted legal immunity from accounting for his own 2,000-plus corpse count. The Senate has quietly absolved him of a requirement to divulge the names and other particulars of his drone victims. As far as the actual bodies are concerned, there was likely very little left to "pick through" anyway -- no necessity to treat them with respect, refrigeration, cremation, burials, or funerals to appease the grieving relatives. Obama has also been granted continuing permission from the Congress he pretends to despise to keep classified the names of any American citizens who might potentially be placed on his Kill List.

It's a wonder they all don't explode from the sound of their own hypocrisy. But that would require an actual conscience.

Meanwhile, follow the money. It leads straight into the coffers of the masters of war: the weapons manufacturers, the oil and gas industries, the big banks, and the politicians who so ably serve them before spinning through the revolving doors for their big cash payouts.


7 comments:

Pearl said...

NBC News Pulls Veteran Reporter from Gaza After Witnessing Israeli Attack on Children http://interc.pt/1stzor3

If the killing of those young boys playing on the beach had not happened in front of a hotel where news reporters with cameras were gathered they might have just become faceless numbers. And the irony that the victims of the Malaysian plane disaster over the Ukraine were extraordinary people whose knowledge and future work could have saved so many lives makes one wonder about such a coincidence.
Wonderful column Karen - so hard to read. Our democracy has become a rotting corpse lying in a field and putting it in a refrigerated train will not revive it. I hope, if the missile was a Russian one that Putin will have the courage to be honest and take full responsibility for this mishap and perhaps try and reach out to the rest of the world for help. He is in over his head as are our 'great' leaders dealing with the fruits of the past.

James F Traynor said...

Cubana flight 455 and Iranian flight 655 vs
Korean flight 007 and Maylasian flight 17.

Jeez guys their body count is higher! This is the US of A! We can do better than that. We've go to. For the flag we've wrapped ourselves in and the cross we carry! Onward Christian Soldiers ... etc. , etc., etc..

James F Traynor said...

OMG! It's worse than I thought, I omitted Lockerbie!

Of course there is Central America - on the ground. And we did knock off those Papist nuns and 6 Jesuits. Oh, St. John Paul III corrected us there; revolutionary theology, dontcha know. The Papists are officially on our side. Ask any parish priest.

Pearl said...

Of course James you realize you are going to burn in Hell? However I sometimes wonder, especially after all the recent news if this is where we all are actually.
Thanks for your honesty. Also I recall that the present Pope had some skeletons in the closet about abandoning some of his colleagues when they were being indicted politically for their unholy work with the poor and speaking out.
Buyer beware.

James F Traynor said...

Yeah Pearl, I know. My family has been lighting the way for generations

Pearl said...

James I am glad to know you will not be alone in Hell. I may be there also not as a first choice since my 'good deeds' may allow me into a more heavenly place but should I find out and meet the divine being who arranged our universe, I will have to have a very hot discussion with him/her/it's utter failings with the invention of the human race and will say enough to be removed to the nether regions. We can then continue our dialogue there one day, James, along with your and some of my relatives!
Meanwhile, Karen's blog can keep us more peacefully occupied.

annenigma said...

Hamas knows what it's doing. They lured Israel into a ground war at great cost to their own people because it's only when Israelis start dying in numbers that anyone even notices or cares. If Hamas hadn't done that, Israel would just continue with their remotely directed genocide. Why shouldn't Hamas push the limit to get the world to notice? It's working. What do they have to lose? Living in Hell. That's an escape worth fighting and dying for - an end to suffering.

The Evil Empire and it's Evil Twin, Israel, are going to pay a high price someday. Wait, I take that back. WE the people are going to pay a high price, just as the children in Gaza are. Hamas knows that innocents pay the price for escape from Israeli massacres.

I know that's not our American version of events - they just want to 'wipe Israel off the face of the earth', but we're being set up to be sacrificed at some point, part of the long game played by our leaders for the benefit of corporations.

Such is Hell.