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.