I fucking hope it damages the morale of the troops. I would hope that, eventually, the volunteer forces that trusted their country to use them wisely, instead of as an array of crash test dummies, would revolt. I hope they strike. I hope they increasingly refuse to serve. I hope they link up with the Iraqi population and say basta! We need to leave this country, and fuck our leadership and fuck yours for not making that possible, but increasingly putting us in a hole. I hope they have gone past discouraged to a righteous, revolutionary anger …
enlighten the troops - we have lost in Iraq and you are being played for suckers (Limited, Inc.)
yeah and then there’s the other thing, the right-wing chickenshit thing, where every time they whip out the morale argument, they’re blaming the infantry for losing the war. see, see, our weak soldiers, they’re so sensitive, they can’t carry out our perfect plans unless they feel totally loved… we love them, but you don’t, and they can feel that, and THAT’S WHY THEY FAIL, that’s why they fail, that’s why they fail… the echo fades away but the refrain sticks, and that last handful of blinkered people wonder, will our troops be able to tough it out?
guts! and playing without a helmet! and a coach who bets on the other team! those are things that make a man proud of his army.
“Troop morale,” our responsibility? or theirs? May 5, 2007
by Glenn Disney - Corbin, Ky. Tel: 608-213-8448 WarRumors@gmail.com
Senator Harry Reid’s recent shocker that the “Iraq War is lost,” was the granddaddy of reality checks. Troop morale, and the effect words and opinions have on it, became a top war-support issue. Most polls, real or contrived, support the idea that troop morale rises and falls with words and opinions back home.
A tense truism is revealed if troops’ confidence is sensitive to anti-war sentiment, leading to some awkward conclusions.
Soldiers can’t comprehend the rightness or wrongness of their mission. Or, youth’s naivety to the complexities of foreign affairs needs generals and presidents to spoon-feed them purpose, judgment, and reason to obey unnatural orders. That troops must synthesize hate to the point, and for the duration required to kill strangers, needs solid indoctrination. Surely, allied soldiers must blindly believe the story-line that Iraq spews forth the weapons of America’s destruction!
These are the worries on which war propagandists toss and turn. A young soldiers’ vulnerability to free thinking and independent conclusions, must be secretly and continuously squelched by military elitists to keep the War Machine intact - to justify their own existence.
The essential elements of patriotism, duty, and honor depends upon the success of defeating individual freedom and intellect - to make all that’s important, corporate. These snipers of peace - the war industrialists, are reproduced in Washington D.C., decade after decade, and sold to the public under guise after guise.
Harry Reid’s belief that the Iraq War is lost is correct, but conclusion drawn perhaps for the wrong reason. The Iraq War was never intended to win, nor end. To do so would mean the end of the need for the Patriot Act, the end of documenting, categorizing and spying on us. An Iraq War win would threaten the perverted dependence upon Uncle Sam, designed to forever protect, i.e., control us. It would mean the end of near plans to suspend the U.S. Constitution, under the pretense of military protection, “for our own good.”
Lockjaw, The Mexican Problem and The Profit of Controversy
by Glenn Disney - commonwrites@gmail.com
The subject on Mexican illegal immigration is monopolized by elite analysts sitting behind sparkling clean capitalistic windows, none of whom have ever eaten a goat-taco and and think that Cancun is a model of what all Mexico should be. The narrow perspective we’re given of Mexico and illegal immigrants by Daddy-Media keeps us glued to everything except healing, and indeed separates us from those real human solutions which are obfuscated by Fox News’ neocons and other right-wing media outlets. To them it’s all about patriotism, standards of living and money! To the Mexican illegal immigrant, it’s about survival, land reclamation and pursuit of happiness upon earth, originally without borders and fences. Deep within the border-crosser is a sense of unalienable and natural permission to enter and inhabit the continental U.S.. That consciousness stems from history. Americans, pleased to whine, condemn and demand as they watch hordes of third world humans flock into their backyard, are ignorant to that important fact. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since the 1840’s. It’s outlandish to suppose that we need to start from the beginning to understand and then reconcile the Mexican illegal immigration problem. History is always the beginning. Starting from the beginning of a problem to solve it only applies 99.9% of the time. The “Mexican” problem is apparently exempt from this method.
We’re propagandized to believe that’s it’s about “national security”, yet existing immigration laws remain slack. It’s ludicrous to assume that a sealed Mexican-U.S. border will keep al Qaeda out! Al Qaeda has heard of Canada. Al Qaeda also knows how to walk through the North Woods and cross imaginary border lines.
We’re warned that our medical system will fail due to Mexicans flooding our emergency rooms, stressing available resources. Yet our current health system is legally allowed to cheat its insured clients for profit and bankrupt patients caught off financial guard by a medical emergency. We yawn and keep voting for the healthcare lobby-bribed politicians. We should have revolted by now! We’re defending a corrupt healthcare system while demanding that non-citizens stay out of it!
We’re asked to believe that the Mexican border problem started in the 1980’s and that Reagan dropped the ball with an amnesty-cloaked answer. Dig deeper, however, and discover that we unofficially begged Mexicans to cross the border during both world wars to replace our millions of absent agricultural workers, turned soldier and factory worker. Our massive agri-industry realized what a labor savings this happened to be and so quietly and lucratively kept it going in the 50’s, 60’s and right on into 2007.
We don’t want to dig deeper. We just want a quick explanation, a quick blame, and a quick solution. It fits our “quick” lifestyle! Right-wing media realized a market for frustrated, hurried and history-challenged Americans and rushed in with an inoculation of nationalism, patriotism, and self-righteousness - thus Fox News and the likes were born!
We’re quite a busy society. We don’t have time to dutifully study the illegal Mexican immigration dilemma beyond the few minutes that Sean Hannity ambushes an invited interviewee who happens to lean on the human side of the issue. We’re bound by lifestyle to grab the drive-thru version of the border problem, bagged and handed to us at the window by a smiling and famous media “commentator-expert?” Finding an American willing to delve into our nations’ respective histories is difficult. Linking our own history with any culpability to today’s transmigration problems is taboo.
If one could be lured away from media’s slim pickings on the subject, perhaps Ulysses S. Grant’s profound and uniquely qualified statement that, “[The Mexican War] was one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation,” would be a good appetizer. The meal would include: a good helping of (1) Manifest Destiny, a splendidly prepared portion of (2) Pretext for War, involving U.S. troops ordered to march up and down the border to incite an attack, and (3) Congressman Lincoln’s specifically and unnerving outlined opposition to the war, served on the side.
The U.S. Mexican War was blatantly manipulated; a war of aggression to the extent that we quickly paid the crippled nation 15 million for California and New Mexico and acquired vast territories, later to become states. “We take nothing by conquest” was our pompous conclusion. The facts are voluminous supporting the case that the U.S., marauding on the 1800’s spirit of ‘Manifest Destiny’, essentially stole several states from a newly independent Mexico. Mexico really never recovered economically or politically, experimenting with revolutions and monarchies thereafter. And so, standing proudly as Americans, thinking that we owe them nothing, is to stand on backs. To think that the average, uneducated border-crosser is ignorant of his Mexican history, is to be ignorant. The stories of Miguel Hidalgo to Antonio López de Santa Anna are written on their hearts and in their version.
Should we ever experience the blissful calm resulting from lockjaw setting in on Minutemen’s Jim Gilchrist, State-endorsed Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Bill Cunningham, we could begin to ponder some of the more human alternatives to the border problem with our southern neighbor, Mexico. These famed right-wing pundits, waving flags and scarring the public with selective, and diversionary illegal immigration statistics, get richer and richer with TV and radio appearances and publications on this and other issues. The controversy is calculated and cultivated to stir emotion and stuff cash in their pockets. Americans, more than most, need to recognize the “business” of controversy and the media. Were it not for our gullibility and contribution to ratings and marketing, the Hannitys, Coulters and such, would be little better than superb used-car sales people. Then, at least, their honesty index would improve.
Left up to common people on both sides of a future “open” border, and after some initial growing pains, a natural economy and society would evolve, abrogating the need for trade agreements to enrichen only the corporate leaders and politicians, as does ‘NAFTA.” Political commentators and so-called experts on immigration would also go by the wayside, forever exposing their incompetence and uselessness.