COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN
Once again, France’s Hollande demonstrates the pathetic,
almost comic, figure he is by awarding France’s highest honor to the American
soldiers who stopped a gunman on a train.
The soldiers’ act was unquestionably a brave one, but no
braver than a hundred others that must have happened during the year.
Previously Hollande, in an act which resembled parody,
awarded the Legion of Honor to four victims of an attack on a Paris grocery
store. His response came close to making the award meaningless: find yourself
in the wrong place at the wrong time, get shot by mindless gunmen, and suddenly
you are elevated to secular sainthood.
After all, violent acts and murders do happen regularly. I
cannot recall another instance in which the corpses of a murderer’s victims were
elevated to national heroes. If that were the practice in the United States,
with 25,000 murders a year, the factory couldn’t keep up with minting medals.
Of course, in both these instances Hollande is playing up to
the ridiculous, deliberately exaggerated fears of terror, relentlessly promoted
by the United States, and that is their distinguishing, common feature.
In this last one, the train incident, he also flatters those
whom he has served with such cringing, dog-like loyalty, the Americans.
My God, how low France has fallen from the days of de
Gaulle.
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Response to a further
comment about why there is so much violence:
A certain percent of
all human beings, everywhere and always, is mentally unbalanced, including such
conditions as psychopathy. That's just a biological fact, much as saying a
certain percent of any population is born blind or lame or with various degenerative
diseases.
I suspect the proportion of such people is not wildly different
over time, although, of course, the world’s ever-increasing population yields
an ever-greater absolute number of mentally ill people.
What has changed in the contemporary world for sure are the
unbelievable quantities of deadly weapons available. They are everywhere, in
the millions. And why is that the case? Because the United States pushes them
(yes, including AK-47s and other weapons not of American origin) out like
products from an assembly line to destabilize places in dozens of locations
where it is unhappy about either a government’s position on American policy or about
a people trying to topple a tyrannical government that America just happens to
favor. Examples of the former include Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and dozens
of others, while examples of the latter include Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, or
Egypt.
Many of these weapons stay around for a lifetime. The most
vivid case of this recently was perhaps in Libya. The CIA and others pumped
weapons into the place to destabilize Gadhafi. When he was gone, the CIA was
back trying to round up some of the vast quantities left in the chaotic country
to ship to the madmen they had set up to topple still another government they
dislike, that of Syria. It was in that covert operation that an American
ambassador was killed at Benghazi, an example of intelligence blowback and an
incident never explained because America didn’t want to advertise the facts
behind it.
in the process of so much aggression and destabilization,
the press is filled day after day with stories arousing all kinds of powerful
emotions in millions of people. Just think of the people of Gaza being slaughtered
by hi-tech American weapons supplied to Israel in fleet-loads, or of people of
Yemen being slaughtered by the same American weapons supplied to the absolute
kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a place where the ISIS scare tactic of public beheading
is just the day-in, day-out normal practice of government. Just think of the
madman running Turkey who secretly ships the same American weapons to terror
groups destroying Syria while offering refuge to the cowardly monsters as may
be required.
Just think of the horrors of millions of migrants in the
press today - all of them a direct effect of America’s various acts in places
from Syria to Libya. Those tidal waves of human suffering are tearing many
societies apart as well as individuals.
You cannot expect an international society of laws unless
you yourself are willing to respect the rule of law.
Nothing could be clearer than that the United States is not
willing to live by the rule of law, although it unfailingly pays lip-service to
it. In Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Ukraine, and a dozen other
places, America is manufacturing misery and oppression on a gigantic scale. And
all of the exaggerated stuff about terror keeps citizens intimidated from
raising their voices. And of course some of that “terror” is just the
legitimate response of oppressed and frustrated people made to appear mindless
by America’s relentless propaganda.
