Sensitive to your identities, while our War Machine kills you — what could be more American?

© 2020 Peter Free

 

24 July 2020

 

 

This is twistedly funny . . .

 

. . . although you are probably 'foreign' — if you instantly see its ridiculous irony:

 

 

The Senate voted 86-14 on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). That’s above the two-thirds majority it would take to override a potential veto . . . .

 

The Senate’s bill includes broad outlines for Pentagon policy initiatives and allocates a total of $740.5 billion . . . .

 

But the language over renaming Confederate-named bases quickly emerged as a flash point . . . .

 

The Senate’s bill would form a commission to come up with a plan for renaming the bases.

 

The Defense secretary would then “implement the plan submitted by the commission ... and remove all names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate the Confederate States of America ... or any person who served voluntarily with the Confederate States of America from all assets of the Department of Defense” within three years of the bill being enacted.

 

© 2020 Jordain Carney, Senate passes bill with plan to change Confederate-named bases over Trump veto threat, The Hill (23 July 2020)

 

 

Translated into perceptible sense

 

This defense funding bill means that the Senate — and the House, which essentially passed the same thing — will fund the American War Machine with almost a trillion dollars.

 

And, at the same time, we will make it honorably clear that we kindly Americans will not tolerate discrimination (even if only historical) against brown and black people.

 

 

This kind-hearted honorableness (on our part) occurs, despite . . .

 

. . . using the annually allocated near-trillion dollars to regularly kill (directly or indirectly) brown and black — and soon maybe yellow — 'foreign' people, whose purported insurgent activities we object to.

 

All over the world.

 

Every day of the year.

 

 

As I have indicated

 

It probably takes a non-American to get the laughably backwards irony of this typically US accomplishment in failed morality and governance.

 

 

Hypocrisy or diversion?

 

The United States is unequalled expert at manufacturing glaring hypocrisy on a 24/7 basis.

 

For instance, the US Oligarchy diverts public attention from its money-grubbing, deadly machinations by focusing the American public's attention on the alleged importance of protecting and nurturing an exceedingly wide range of personal 'identities'.

 

That so, no matter how irrelevant to actually massively bleeding societal problems those (often imaginatively concocted) identities are.

 

Somehow — in this mix of combatively inclined societal stupidity — whatever can be conceived of as an 'identity character' becomes a real problem for the Mass of Humanity to confront.

 

 

With this most recent Defense funding bill . . .

 

Southern identities of long ago have suddenly become symbols of pure evil — despite the fact that most of the Boys in Gray never owned slaves.

 

Most Confederate folk fought the Union because — like virtually everyone else in History — they were inescapably caught up in goings-on of the physical geography that they inhabited.

 

Where one lives is often more a predictor of behavior than anything else.

 

Think, for instance, the alleged war of cultures between Christianity and Islam.

 

Do you see a lot of freedom of choice in either?

 

Any thoughtfully knowledgeable chance to assign evility and blame exclusively to one side or the other?

 

 

Yet . . .

 

Rather than admit that:

 

 

the United States' imperialistic

 

Oppression Apparatus

 

continues to thump 'people of color'

 

(that nauseating phrase) —

 

we're just 'gonna' rename

 

a few military bases

 

and

 

all will be well

 

in America Land

 

and, therefore

 

presumably

 

everywhere else.

 

 

Nuance is not an American forte

 

Functioning mind, one might reasonably add, is not either.

 

If imperceptive stupidity had legs, it would be us.

 

 

The moral? — So here we are again . . .

 

The world's number one warmongering entity — the US Department of Defense — getting another nearly trillion dollar boost.

 

 

If one accounts for all the funds that Security Secrecy does not prevent us from tracing, our National Protection Racket gets well over a trillion bucks every year.

 

 

This egregious largesse — considering all the other societal needs that go unmet — now arrives under the sole camouflage of Defense's eager agreement to rename a handful of (allegedly) offensively tagged military places.

 

How these (culturally indicative) US circumstances differ in language, intent and purpose from Chairman Mao's much reviled Cultural Revolution beats me.

 

 

Note

 

In that last regard, the United States' newly minted and unrelenting hostility to China is equally revealing.

 

We are being manipulated for someone else's profit, again.

 

If you doubt this, take a look at Professor Richard Wolff's concisely common-sensed video, here:

 

 

Richard D. Wolff, Wolff Responds: Why a Cold War Against China?, YouTube (23 July 2020)