"It is fun to shoot some people"
Mon Feb 7, 2005 13:20
64.140.158.54
U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Gen. James Mattis said:
"It is fun to shoot some people"
and, what's more, you can watch
his audience laughing and clapping
at
Mario's Cyberspace Station
The Global Intelligence News Portal
http://mprofaca.cro.net/
Mario Profaca
mario.profaca@zg.htnet.hr
====================================
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html
"Some People Push Back" On the Justice of Roosting Chickens
By Ward Churchill
NEWS FLASH:
Ward Churchill Resigns As Head of Ethnic Studies As Result of Political Backlash Against This Essay
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/backlash.html
READ Ward Churchill's Response to Critics of this Essay
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/ward_churchill_responds.html
CHECK OUT right-wing Governor Bill Owens' letter calling on churchill to resign
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/bill_owens.html
ALSO: read why this article is on this website
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/why_churchill.html
For more coverage of this story, scroll to the bottom of this document or click here:
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html#More_Documents
& for a laugh or a cry, read the mail i have received since this essay has been in the news
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill_feedback.html
When queried by reporters concerning his views on the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November
1963, Malcolm X famously - and quite charitably, all things considered - replied that it was merely
a case of "chickens coming home to roost."
On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens - along with some half-million dead Iraqi
children - came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center.
Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well.
The Iraqi youngsters, all of them under 12, died as a predictable - in fact, widely predicted -
result of the 1991 US "surgical" bombing of their country's water purification and sewage
facilities, as well as other "infrastructural" targets upon which Iraq's civilian population depends
for its very survival.
If the nature of the bombing were not already bad enough - and it should be noted that this sort of
"aerial warfare" constitutes a Class I Crime Against humanity, entailing myriad gross violations of
international law, as well as every conceivable standard of "civilized" behavior - the death toll
has been steadily ratcheted up by US-imposed sanctions for a full decade now. Enforced all the while
by a massive military presence and periodic bombing raids, the embargo has greatly impaired the
victims' ability to import the nutrients, medicines and other materials necessary to saving the
lives of even their toddlers.
All told, Iraq has a population of about 18 million. The 500,000 kids lost to date thus represent
something on the order of 25 percent of their age group. Indisputably, the rest have suffered - are
still suffering - a combination of physical debilitation and psychological trauma severe enough to
prevent their ever fully recovering. In effect, an entire generation has been obliterated.
The reason for this holocaust was/is rather simple, and stated quite straightforwardly by President
George Bush, the 41st "freedom-loving" father of the freedom-lover currently filling the Oval
Office, George the 43rd: "The world must learn that what we say, goes," intoned George the Elder to
the enthusiastic applause of freedom-loving Americans everywhere. How Old George conveyed his
message was certainly no mystery to the US public. One need only recall the 24-hour-per-day
dissemination of bombardment videos on every available TV channel, and the exceedingly high ratings
of these telecasts, to gain a sense of how much they knew.
In trying to affix a meaning to such things, we would do well to remember the wave of elation that
swept America at reports of what was happening along the so-called Highway of Death: perhaps 100,000
"towel-heads" and "camel jockeys" - or was it "sand niggers" that week? - in full retreat, routed
and effectively defenseless, many of them conscripted civilian laborers, slaughtered in a single day
by jets firing the most hyper-lethal types of ordnance. It was a performance worthy of the nazis
during the early months of their drive into Russia. And it should be borne in mind that Good Germans
gleefully cheered that butchery, too. Indeed, support for Hitler suffered no serious erosion among
Germany's "innocent civilians" until the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943.
The essay on this page was expanded into a full-length book - to buy Ward Churchill's Book "On The
Justice of Roosting Chickens" for $20.95, postage included - click above on the image
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Visit the George W, Bush - International Terrorist website
There may be a real utility to reflecting further, this time upon the fact that it was pious
Americans who led the way in assigning the onus of collective guilt to the German people as a whole,
not for things they as individuals had done, but for what they had allowed - nay, empowered - their
leaders and their soldiers to do in their name.
If the principle was valid then, it remains so now, as applicable to Good Americans as it was the
Good Germans. And the price exacted from the Germans for the faultiness of their moral fiber was
truly ghastly. Returning now to the children, and to the effects of the post-Gulf War embargo -
continued bull force by Bush the Elder's successors in the Clinton administration as a gesture of
its "resolve" to finalize what George himself had dubbed the "New World Order" of American
military/economic domination - it should be noted that not one but two high United Nations officials
attempting to coordinate delivery of humanitarian aid to Iraq resigned in succession as protests
against US policy.
One of them, former U.N. Assistant Secretary General Denis Halladay, repeatedly denounced what was
happening as "a systematic program . . . of deliberate genocide." His statements appeared in the New
York Times and other papers during the fall of 1998, so it can hardly be contended that the American
public was "unaware" of them. Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Madeline Albright openly
confirmed Halladay's assessment. Asked during the widely-viewed TV program Meet the Press to respond
to his "allegations," she calmly announced that she'd decided it was "worth the price" to see that
U.S. objectives were achieved.
The Politics of a Perpetrator Population
As a whole, the American public greeted these revelations with yawns.. There were, after all, far
more pressing things than the unrelenting misery/death of a few hundred thousand Iraqi tikes to be
concerned with. Getting "Jeremy" and "Ellington" to their weekly soccer game, for instance, or
seeing to it that little "Tiffany" and "Ashley" had just the right roll-neck sweaters to go with
their new cords. And, to be sure, there was the yuppie holy war against ashtrays - for "our kids,"
no less - as an all-absorbing point of political focus.
In fairness, it must be admitted that there was an infinitesimally small segment of the body
politic who expressed opposition to what was/is being done to the children of Iraq. It must also be
conceded, however, that those involved by-and-large contented themselves with signing petitions and
conducting candle-lit prayer vigils, bearing "moral witness" as vast legions of brown-skinned
five-year-olds sat shivering in the dark, wide-eyed in horror, whimpering as they expired in the
most agonizing ways imaginable.
Be it said as well, and this is really the crux of it, that the "resistance" expended the bulk of
its time and energy harnessed to the systemically-useful task of trying to ensure, as "a principle
of moral virtue" that nobody went further than waving signs as a means of "challenging" the patently
exterminatory pursuit of Pax Americana. So pure of principle were these "dissidents," in fact, that
they began literally to supplant the police in protecting corporations profiting by the carnage
against suffering such retaliatory "violence" as having their windows broken by persons less
"enlightened" - or perhaps more outraged - than the self-anointed "peacekeepers."
Property before people, it seems - or at least the equation of property to people - is a value by
no means restricted to America's boardrooms. And the sanctimony with which such putrid sentiments
are enunciated turns out to be nauseatingly similar, whether mouthed by the CEO of Standard Oil or
any of the swarm of comfort zone "pacifists" queuing up to condemn the black block after it ever so
slightly disturbed the functioning of business-as-usual in Seattle.
Small wonder, all-in-all, that people elsewhere in the world - the Mideast, for instance - began to
wonder where, exactly, aside from the streets of the US itself, one was to find the peace America's
purportedly oppositional peacekeepers claimed they were keeping.
The answer, surely, was plain enough to anyone unblinded by the kind of delusions engendered by
sheer vanity and self-absorption. So, too, were the implications in terms of anything changing, out
there, in America's free-fire zones.
Tellingly, it was at precisely this point - with the genocide in Iraq officially admitted and a
public response demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were virtually no Americans,
including most of those professing otherwise, doing anything tangible to stop it - that the combat
teams which eventually commandeered the aircraft used on September 11 began to infiltrate the United
States.
Meet the "Terrorists"
Of the men who came, there are a few things demanding to be said in the face of the unending
torrent of disinformational drivel unleashed by George Junior and the corporate "news" media
immediately following their successful operation on September 11.
They did not, for starters, "initiate" a war with the US, much less commit "the first acts of war
of the new millennium."
A good case could be made that the war in which they were combatants has been waged more-or-less
continuously by the "Christian West" - now proudly emblematized by the United States - against the
"Islamic East" since the time of the First Crusade, about 1,000 years ago. More recently, one could
argue that the war began when Lyndon Johnson first lent significant support to Israel's
dispossession/displacement of Palestinians during the 1960s, or when George the Elder ordered
"Desert Shield" in 1990, or at any of several points in between. Any way you slice it, however, if
what the combat teams did to the WTC and the Pentagon can be understood as acts of war - and they
can - then the same is true of every US "overflight' of Iraqi territory since day one. The first
acts of war during the current millennium thus occurred on its very first day, and were carried out
by U.S. aviators acting under orders from their then-commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton. The most that
can honestly be said of those involved on September 11 is that they finally responded in kind to
some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course.
That they waited so long to do so is, notwithstanding the 1993 action at the WTC, more than
anything a testament to their patience and restraint.
They did not license themselves to "target innocent civilians."
There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that
bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the
World Trade Center . . .
Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But
innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global
financial empire - the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has
always been enslaved - and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" - a
derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" - counts as less than an excuse among this relatively
well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to
others of what they were involved in - and in many cases excelling at - it was because of their
absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and
self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of
which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and
rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of
visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile
sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.
The men who flew the missions against the WTC and Pentagon were not "cowards." That distinction
properly belongs to the "firm-jawed lads" who delighted in flying stealth aircraft through the
undefended airspace of Baghdad, dropping payload after payload of bombs on anyone unfortunate enough
to be below - including tens of thousands of genuinely innocent civilians - while themselves
incurring all the risk one might expect during a visit to the local video arcade. Still more, the
word describes all those "fighting men and women" who sat at computer consoles aboard ships in the
Persian Gulf, enjoying air-conditioned comfort while launching cruise missiles into neighborhoods
filled with random human beings. Whatever else can be said of them, the men who struck on September
11 manifested the courage of their convictions, willingly expending their own lives in attaining
their objectives.
Nor were they "fanatics" devoted to "Islamic fundamentalism."
One might rightly describe their actions as "desperate." Feelings of desperation, however, are a
perfectly reasonable - one is tempted to say "normal" - emotional response among persons confronted
by the mass murder of their children, particularly when it appears that nobody else really gives a
damn (ask a Jewish survivor about this one, or, even more poignantly, for all the attention paid
them, a Gypsy).
That desperate circumstances generate desperate responses is no mysterious or irrational principle,
of the sort motivating fanatics. Less is it one peculiar to Islam. Indeed, even the FBI's
investigative reports on the combat teams' activities during the months leading up to September 11
make it clear that the members were not fundamentalist Muslims. Rather, it's pretty obvious at this
point that they were secular activists - soldiers, really - who, while undoubtedly enjoying cordial
relations with the clerics of their countries, were motivated far more by the grisly realities of
the U.S. war against them than by a set of religious beliefs.
And still less were they/their acts "insane."
Insanity is a condition readily associable with the very American idea that one - or one's
country - holds what amounts to a "divine right" to commit genocide, and thus to forever do so with
impunity. The term might also be reasonably applied to anyone suffering genocide without attempting
in some ma
"It is fun to shoot some people"
and, what's more, you can watch
his audience laughing and clapping
at
Mario's Cyberspace Station
The Global Intelligence News Portal
http://mprofaca.cro.net/
Mario Profaca
mario.profaca@zg.htnet.hr
====================================
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html
"Some People Push Back" On the Justice of Roosting Chickens
By Ward Churchill
NEWS FLASH:
Ward Churchill Resigns As Head of Ethnic Studies As Result of Political Backlash Against This Essay
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/backlash.html
READ Ward Churchill's Response to Critics of this Essay
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/ward_churchill_responds.html
CHECK OUT right-wing Governor Bill Owens' letter calling on churchill to resign
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/bill_owens.html
ALSO: read why this article is on this website
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/why_churchill.html
For more coverage of this story, scroll to the bottom of this document or click here:
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html#More_Documents
& for a laugh or a cry, read the mail i have received since this essay has been in the news
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill_feedback.html
When queried by reporters concerning his views on the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November
1963, Malcolm X famously - and quite charitably, all things considered - replied that it was merely
a case of "chickens coming home to roost."
On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens - along with some half-million dead Iraqi
children - came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center.
Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well.
The Iraqi youngsters, all of them under 12, died as a predictable - in fact, widely predicted -
result of the 1991 US "surgical" bombing of their country's water purification and sewage
facilities, as well as other "infrastructural" targets upon which Iraq's civilian population depends
for its very survival.
If the nature of the bombing were not already bad enough - and it should be noted that this sort of
"aerial warfare" constitutes a Class I Crime Against humanity, entailing myriad gross violations of
international law, as well as every conceivable standard of "civilized" behavior - the death toll
has been steadily ratcheted up by US-imposed sanctions for a full decade now. Enforced all the while
by a massive military presence and periodic bombing raids, the embargo has greatly impaired the
victims' ability to import the nutrients, medicines and other materials necessary to saving the
lives of even their toddlers.
All told, Iraq has a population of about 18 million. The 500,000 kids lost to date thus represent
something on the order of 25 percent of their age group. Indisputably, the rest have suffered - are
still suffering - a combination of physical debilitation and psychological trauma severe enough to
prevent their ever fully recovering. In effect, an entire generation has been obliterated.
The reason for this holocaust was/is rather simple, and stated quite straightforwardly by President
George Bush, the 41st "freedom-loving" father of the freedom-lover currently filling the Oval
Office, George the 43rd: "The world must learn that what we say, goes," intoned George the Elder to
the enthusiastic applause of freedom-loving Americans everywhere. How Old George conveyed his
message was certainly no mystery to the US public. One need only recall the 24-hour-per-day
dissemination of bombardment videos on every available TV channel, and the exceedingly high ratings
of these telecasts, to gain a sense of how much they knew.
In trying to affix a meaning to such things, we would do well to remember the wave of elation that
swept America at reports of what was happening along the so-called Highway of Death: perhaps 100,000
"towel-heads" and "camel jockeys" - or was it "sand niggers" that week? - in full retreat, routed
and effectively defenseless, many of them conscripted civilian laborers, slaughtered in a single day
by jets firing the most hyper-lethal types of ordnance. It was a performance worthy of the nazis
during the early months of their drive into Russia. And it should be borne in mind that Good Germans
gleefully cheered that butchery, too. Indeed, support for Hitler suffered no serious erosion among
Germany's "innocent civilians" until the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943.
The essay on this page was expanded into a full-length book - to buy Ward Churchill's Book "On The
Justice of Roosting Chickens" for $20.95, postage included - click above on the image
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Visit the George W, Bush - International Terrorist website
There may be a real utility to reflecting further, this time upon the fact that it was pious
Americans who led the way in assigning the onus of collective guilt to the German people as a whole,
not for things they as individuals had done, but for what they had allowed - nay, empowered - their
leaders and their soldiers to do in their name.
If the principle was valid then, it remains so now, as applicable to Good Americans as it was the
Good Germans. And the price exacted from the Germans for the faultiness of their moral fiber was
truly ghastly. Returning now to the children, and to the effects of the post-Gulf War embargo -
continued bull force by Bush the Elder's successors in the Clinton administration as a gesture of
its "resolve" to finalize what George himself had dubbed the "New World Order" of American
military/economic domination - it should be noted that not one but two high United Nations officials
attempting to coordinate delivery of humanitarian aid to Iraq resigned in succession as protests
against US policy.
One of them, former U.N. Assistant Secretary General Denis Halladay, repeatedly denounced what was
happening as "a systematic program . . . of deliberate genocide." His statements appeared in the New
York Times and other papers during the fall of 1998, so it can hardly be contended that the American
public was "unaware" of them. Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Madeline Albright openly
confirmed Halladay's assessment. Asked during the widely-viewed TV program Meet the Press to respond
to his "allegations," she calmly announced that she'd decided it was "worth the price" to see that
U.S. objectives were achieved.
The Politics of a Perpetrator Population
As a whole, the American public greeted these revelations with yawns.. There were, after all, far
more pressing things than the unrelenting misery/death of a few hundred thousand Iraqi tikes to be
concerned with. Getting "Jeremy" and "Ellington" to their weekly soccer game, for instance, or
seeing to it that little "Tiffany" and "Ashley" had just the right roll-neck sweaters to go with
their new cords. And, to be sure, there was the yuppie holy war against ashtrays - for "our kids,"
no less - as an all-absorbing point of political focus.
In fairness, it must be admitted that there was an infinitesimally small segment of the body
politic who expressed opposition to what was/is being done to the children of Iraq. It must also be
conceded, however, that those involved by-and-large contented themselves with signing petitions and
conducting candle-lit prayer vigils, bearing "moral witness" as vast legions of brown-skinned
five-year-olds sat shivering in the dark, wide-eyed in horror, whimpering as they expired in the
most agonizing ways imaginable.
Be it said as well, and this is really the crux of it, that the "resistance" expended the bulk of
its time and energy harnessed to the systemically-useful task of trying to ensure, as "a principle
of moral virtue" that nobody went further than waving signs as a means of "challenging" the patently
exterminatory pursuit of Pax Americana. So pure of principle were these "dissidents," in fact, that
they began literally to supplant the police in protecting corporations profiting by the carnage
against suffering such retaliatory "violence" as having their windows broken by persons less
"enlightened" - or perhaps more outraged - than the self-anointed "peacekeepers."
Property before people, it seems - or at least the equation of property to people - is a value by
no means restricted to America's boardrooms. And the sanctimony with which such putrid sentiments
are enunciated turns out to be nauseatingly similar, whether mouthed by the CEO of Standard Oil or
any of the swarm of comfort zone "pacifists" queuing up to condemn the black block after it ever so
slightly disturbed the functioning of business-as-usual in Seattle.
Small wonder, all-in-all, that people elsewhere in the world - the Mideast, for instance - began to
wonder where, exactly, aside from the streets of the US itself, one was to find the peace America's
purportedly oppositional peacekeepers claimed they were keeping.
The answer, surely, was plain enough to anyone unblinded by the kind of delusions engendered by
sheer vanity and self-absorption. So, too, were the implications in terms of anything changing, out
there, in America's free-fire zones.
Tellingly, it was at precisely this point - with the genocide in Iraq officially admitted and a
public response demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were virtually no Americans,
including most of those professing otherwise, doing anything tangible to stop it - that the combat
teams which eventually commandeered the aircraft used on September 11 began to infiltrate the United
States.
Meet the "Terrorists"
Of the men who came, there are a few things demanding to be said in the face of the unending
torrent of disinformational drivel unleashed by George Junior and the corporate "news" media
immediately following their successful operation on September 11.
They did not, for starters, "initiate" a war with the US, much less commit "the first acts of war
of the new millennium."
A good case could be made that the war in which they were combatants has been waged more-or-less
continuously by the "Christian West" - now proudly emblematized by the United States - against the
"Islamic East" since the time of the First Crusade, about 1,000 years ago. More recently, one could
argue that the war began when Lyndon Johnson first lent significant support to Israel's
dispossession/displacement of Palestinians during the 1960s, or when George the Elder ordered
"Desert Shield" in 1990, or at any of several points in between. Any way you slice it, however, if
what the combat teams did to the WTC and the Pentagon can be understood as acts of war - and they
can - then the same is true of every US "overflight' of Iraqi territory since day one. The first
acts of war during the current millennium thus occurred on its very first day, and were carried out
by U.S. aviators acting under orders from their then-commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton. The most that
can honestly be said of those involved on September 11 is that they finally responded in kind to
some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course.
That they waited so long to do so is, notwithstanding the 1993 action at the WTC, more than
anything a testament to their patience and restraint.
They did not license themselves to "target innocent civilians."
There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that
bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the
World Trade Center . . .
Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But
innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global
financial empire - the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has
always been enslaved - and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" - a
derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" - counts as less than an excuse among this relatively
well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to
others of what they were involved in - and in many cases excelling at - it was because of their
absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and
self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of
which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and
rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of
visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile
sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.
The men who flew the missions against the WTC and Pentagon were not "cowards." That distinction
properly belongs to the "firm-jawed lads" who delighted in flying stealth aircraft through the
undefended airspace of Baghdad, dropping payload after payload of bombs on anyone unfortunate enough
to be below - including tens of thousands of genuinely innocent civilians - while themselves
incurring all the risk one might expect during a visit to the local video arcade. Still more, the
word describes all those "fighting men and women" who sat at computer consoles aboard ships in the
Persian Gulf, enjoying air-conditioned comfort while launching cruise missiles into neighborhoods
filled with random human beings. Whatever else can be said of them, the men who struck on September
11 manifested the courage of their convictions, willingly expending their own lives in attaining
their objectives.
Nor were they "fanatics" devoted to "Islamic fundamentalism."
One might rightly describe their actions as "desperate." Feelings of desperation, however, are a
perfectly reasonable - one is tempted to say "normal" - emotional response among persons confronted
by the mass murder of their children, particularly when it appears that nobody else really gives a
damn (ask a Jewish survivor about this one, or, even more poignantly, for all the attention paid
them, a Gypsy).
That desperate circumstances generate desperate responses is no mysterious or irrational principle,
of the sort motivating fanatics. Less is it one peculiar to Islam. Indeed, even the FBI's
investigative reports on the combat teams' activities during the months leading up to September 11
make it clear that the members were not fundamentalist Muslims. Rather, it's pretty obvious at this
point that they were secular activists - soldiers, really - who, while undoubtedly enjoying cordial
relations with the clerics of their countries, were motivated far more by the grisly realities of
the U.S. war against them than by a set of religious beliefs.
And still less were they/their acts "insane."
Insanity is a condition readily associable with the very American idea that one - or one's
country - holds what amounts to a "divine right" to commit genocide, and thus to forever do so with
impunity. The term might also be reasonably applied to anyone suffering genocide without attempting
in some ma
