Land of the Weak and the Wussy

 

by Dave Lindorff

 

There may have perhaps have been a time when America was a land of at least some brave people. although arguably a nation that celebrates as heroic a history that features lots of people with modern guns and cannons conquering and destroying another people who were living in the stone age and fighting back with bows and arrows, and that built its economy on the backs of men and women held in chains certainly has a tough case to make. What is clear though is that there is nothing brave about modern-day America.

Whatever we were, we have degenerated into a nation that finds glory in deploying the most advanced high-tech, high-explosive weaponry against some of the world's poorest people, that justifies killing women and children, even by the dozens, even if by doing so it manages to kill one alleged "enemy" fighter. A nation that exalts remote-controlled robot drone aircraft that can attack targets in order to avoid risking soldiers' lives, even though by doing so, it is predictable that many, many innocent people will be killed. A nation that is proud to have developed weapons of mass slaughter, from shells laden with phosphorus that burns to death, indiscriminately, those who are contacted by the splattered chemical to elaborately baroque anti-personnel fragmentation bombs that spread cute little colored objects designed to look like everything from toys to food packages, but which upon contact explode, releasing whirling metal or plastic fleschettes which shred human flesh on contact.

The Marines who battled their way up the hillsides of Iwo Jima, or the soldiers who struggled ashore under withering fire on the beaches of Normandy would be appalled at what passes for heroic behavior in today's American military. But that's not the worst of it.

The worst of it is back home in the USA, where millions of citizens who bitch about their taxes and who pay as little attention as possible to the fact that their nation is deeply mired in two wars, routinely refer to those who do their fighting for them as heroes, but then want nothing to do with the consequences of those wars (or for that matter the people who actually fight them).

One particularly telling consequence of those wars is that the US now has several hundred prisoners, mostly at the prison camp on the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, whom the American people don't want to have moved to their shores. And why won't we Americans accept the responsibility for incarcerating and trying these captives? Because we are so afraid that their comrades will strike back at us with acts of terrorism if we bring them here.

First of all, a moment of rational thought, please. Does anyone seriously think that the radical Islamic groups and independence fighters who are battling American forces in places like Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan are so symbolically obsessed that they would only attack places in America where their fellows are actually being held? Do people actually think that such people would not attack some place in the continental US right now if they could, in retaliation for people being held at the inaccessible base in Guantanamo?

Please. Let's get real.

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