JOHN CHUCKMAN
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MARJORIE COHN IN CONSORTIUM NEWS
“As Afghan Carnage Continues, US Presidential Candidates Face Key Question
“Democratic contenders should commit to immediate troop withdrawal and to cooperate with international investigations of U.S. war crimes”
I honestly do not believe that Americans generally give a damn that their government is slaughtering people, anywhere.
They’ve been at the business since WWII in many meaningless imperial wars and interventions.
Killing is what Washington does. I think it fair to say it has become a major national industry.
A couple of generations of Americans have grown up with that as their formative environment, many making careers around it with military service or employment in the defense industry or careers in various government agencies such as the State Department.
And I have to say that the fairly prevalent xenophobia and blind patriot religious belief in the country just reinforce the perception of indifference and brutality.
I have never seen sorrow or regret or concern over about three million Vietnamese killed, and killed horribly by napalm, cluster bombs, and carpet bombing, plus having had their country left strewn with landmines and tons of poisonous Agent Orange.
And it seems to me, most Americans do just sit back and watch a good deal of that horror repeated on poor souls in the Middle East. America’s reasons and methods have been different there, but the results, in terms of death and destruction, have pretty well been the same. The Neocon Wars have killed at least two million people and created many millions of desperate refugees.
America’s brutal wars abroad breed brutality on the home front too.
