Truth can sting, but only if one is paying attention — Maitreya Bhakal, regarding the United States' internationally displayed psychosis

06 August 2021

In remembrance of two mushroom clouds

We might reflect upon what the US did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki (in August 1945) as visually symbolizing American leadership's fondness for killing hapless people:

Our government’s tests of atomic weapons on people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 76 years ago were rationalized using these myths which transformed indiscriminate destruction into a "good thing."

Hiroshima was "a military base."

The US atomic bombings "ended the war," and they "prevented an invasion and saved lives."

This mythology stands as a roadblock to the elimination of nuclear weapons.

The "good bomb" story is still believed by many in the United States because of decades of deliberate myth-making started by President Truman.

John V. Denison agrees.

So does David Swanson.

Yet the 'good bomb' tradition lives on.

Jumping forward in historical time . . .

Maitreya Bhakal's two paragraphs about the present day are accurate enough:

A nation-state version of a psychopath, the US refuses to give up its addiction to bombing innocent people. In just over a month, it’s bombed Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan – and shows no signs of developing a conscience.

America loves killing anything that moves. Like the nation-state version of the psychopathic serial murderer, it loves bombing weak, poor, defenseless nations that cannot fight back – nations that have done no harm to it and pose no threat to it.

American devastation of the essentially helpless . . .

. . . is done to profit our Military Industrial Complex. Including its bestarred, gravitas-laden head propagandists.

All are complicit.

None are accountable.

And, proportionately speaking, no one else cares.

Recently writing about the Vietnam War, as constituting a representative paradigm of sorts, William Astore observed that:

One day in a long and atrocious war, Cotton Hildreth and his wingman decided they’d put humanity first; that they wouldn’t destroy a defenseless village despite orders to do so.

It didn’t matter. That village and those people were destroyed anyway a few days later.

It was just another day in a war allegedly fought to contain communism but which instead led to uncontained barbarity by a so-called democratic alliance.

US propaganda, naturally, supports evisceration of the hapless

As with Japan in 1945, Americans — perhaps the plurality among those who still remember — defend the extermination of millions of Vietnamese (20 and more years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki) as necessary:

'If only we'd been allowed to use nukes,' they say.

That same wanna-nuke-'em logic had been proposed — regarding the obliteration of North Korea — just a few years before. That proposed escalation coming even in spite of (or perhaps because of) the atrocities that we had already committed there via 'conventional' means:

How many Americans, for example, are aware of the fact that U.S. planes dropped on the Korean peninsula more bombs — 635,000 tons — and napalm — 32,557 tons — than during the entire Pacific campaign against the Japanese during World War II?

How many Americans know that “over a period of three years or so,” to quote Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, “we killed off … 20 percent of the population”?

For a point of comparison, the Nazis exterminated 20 percent of Poland’s pre-World War II population. According to LeMay, “We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea.”

More than 3 million civilians are believed to have been killed in the fighting, the vast majority of them in the north.

This eagerness to deal death and mayhem . . .

. . . lies at the core of our national 'soul'.

Death-dealing seems to be engrained in our USA-(x3)-chanting character. Power is good, we tell ourselves.

Even morality-avoiding Realpolitikers could easily argue that this psychopathic twist of ours is not useful in generating sensible geopolitical strategies.

These psychotic mental processes caused the deaths of perhaps one million Iraqis, as a result of the United States' lie-justified invasion of their country in 2003.

That's a lot of almost exclusively innocent people. Way more than the US has ever lost in a war. Strategically, all that of exterminatory 'effort' was wasted.

Massively destructive instability resulted across a wide swath of the planet. Only a profit-seeking armaments vendor would call the outcome anything other than a gargantuan evil.

Indicatively, volumes 1 and 2 of the (reportedly self-critical) US Army's examination of its contribution to the Iraq War was published, not read and then immediately buried.

Institutional entombment of Iraq War facts was . . .

. . . beyond doubt, done on purpose. Obliterate the best in your national character to benefit the worst.

Bhakal's point about Americans' shared national psychopathy is clinically accurate.

Similar US military obfuscation . . .

. . . is now occurring in Afghanistan. With no self-critique, I suspect, to follow:

As the United States rushes to remove its troops from Afghanistan this summer, the Pentagon has imposed a de-facto press blackout on their departure.

[T]he obfuscation was predictable. Leaving a country that many expect will now collapse into civil war, the United States has no victory to declare; it can only acknowledge the reality of relinquishment and retreat.

“A military that’s withdrawing from battle, whether it’s an organized withdrawal or a retreat, doesn’t want any media nearby,” said the Getty combat photographer John Moore.

“When you’re leaving a field of battle, it never looks victorious.”

The conflict will cost taxpayers more than two trillion dollars . . . according to the Costs of War project at Brown University, which also estimates that more than a hundred and seventy thousand people died in the conflict, counting Afghan forces, Taliban fighters, and contractors.

That figure includes twenty-four hundred U.S. troops and forty-seven thousand civilians who died in a project that failed at its most basic goal of defeating the Taliban . . . .

If it’s true that the military kept the war shrouded when it was convenient, it’s also true that very few Americans went looking for it.

“One of the guiding principles is to keep the American people on our side at all costs,” [Pentagon spokesman] Steve Warren told me.

“Controlling the imagery, controlling the message, controlling the sentiment is always geared toward that singular goal—don’t let the American people think we failed. Don’t let them think that, no matter what.”

So maybe it all worked out: they didn’t have to show us, and we didn’t have to look.

The moral? — If we hide our national penchant for serial murder and exploitation . . .

. . . will no one notice?

Certainly not most Americans.

This is what happens, when a powerful nation like ours has, by Plutocratic design, an all-volunteer military:

Nobody else has skin (or blood) in the murder game.

And the volunteers themselves are subsequently owned by an Imperial Oligarchy that uses them to advance its own interests.

Thus, by structural intent, no homeland-sourced objections arise to permanently-fostered mayhem abroad.

The phrase — societal psychosis of nuke-ish dimensions — is the only sane description of how all this works.

As Bhakal concludes:

In the last 20 years alone, the US and its allies have bombed West Asia (or to use the Eurocentric term, “Middle East”) and North Africa at the rate of 46 bombs per day.

That’s not a typo – that’s almost two bombs every hour, every single day, for 20 years.

But US leaders aren’t perturbed – it isn’t white people they’re killing after all, they’re only killing the proverbial “other” who were coming to destroy “us” innocent people, and we are simply fighting the good fight.

[I]mages of US Marines saying goodbye to their kids at airports often go viral, as they fly away to slaughter children much like their own.

By the way, RT — the source of the above-cited extract — is controlled by the Russian Government. Thus, according to the American Plutocracy (which looks out for us 24/7) everything it publishes is a lie.

PeteFree.com

Truth can sting, but only if one is paying attention — Maitreya Bhakal, regarding the United States' internationally displayed psychosis