by Surly1, Doomstead Diner
Originally published on the Doomstead Diner on November 16, 2015
“Something awful has happened in Paris. Out of it will be born something awful in the collective mind and the collective heart and the collective soul. ” – Charles Pierce
Events in Paris have focused our attentions and energies like few other since 9/11/2001 and provided a serious harbinger of doom this week. Some people, lie-weary since 1963 and 2001, look first to the false flag and the shitmist of corporate media misdirection. Others look appropriately to the dead and the grieving. Others use the tragedy to weigh the heft of their favorite political cudgels, this with the blood still in the streets of Paris. A special House of Shame should be erected especially for these:
Mother Jones accumulated some of the worst reactions to the tragedy:
At this point the conversation turns, as it has inside the Diner Forum, to cui bono? What seems unmistakeable is that some will benefit. Clearly those who share ends if not means with the terrorists, which includes the Gates of Vienna/Stormfront crowd, Marine LePen, and cultural rightists of all stripes, neocons, neofascists, nativists, xenophobes, war munitions-makers, overseas contractors, builders of fences, closers of borders, and those who arm them. Authoritarians all.
And to this point, Esquire‘s Charles Pierce noted how Paris will skew the political process and essentially redefine the terms of political engagement by starting every question with, “In light of what happened in Paris.” As seen from the small gill-net sampling of tweets from the social media sewer, look for
a momentary spasm of unreason and an easily dispersed cloud of spittle in our national dialogue. At worst, there will be a sort of undeclared truce between our two major political parties – which, after all, are funded in whole or in part by the same people – that domestic issues will have to go on “the back burner” because this has been declared a national-security election again, that the campaign will be less about keeping people solvent and more about keeping them “safe.”
And we know cui bono from that. The same Deep State as always. Pierce cites Robert LaFollette, the populist hero in Wisconsin who rose to oppose Woodrow Wilson’s effort to drag the US into the First World War:
The poor, sir, who are the ones called upon to rot in the trenches, have no organized power, have no press to voice their will upon this question of peace or war; but, oh, Mr. President, at some time they will be heard… when the people today who are staggering under the burden of supporting families at the present prices of the necessaries of life find those prices multiplied, when they are raised 100 percent, or 200 percent, as they will be quickly, aye, sir, when beyond that those who pay taxes come to have their taxes doubled and again doubled to pay the interest on the nontaxable bonds held by [J. P.] Morgan and his combinations, which have been issued to meet this war, there will come an awakening; they will have their day and they will be heard. . .
LaFollette was wrong. The US went to war, the masses failed to rise, and the longed for progressive moment dissipated at the sound of the martial drumbeat. And was then dispersed as the troops came home by the specter of the Red Scare, the Palmer raids, and the rise of one J. Edgar Hoover. This time, we are presented with the prospect of eternal war, one that will be “merciless” according to Hollande, against a enemy eager to use terrorism as a tactic to illustrate what foreign policy “blowback” looks like in the global North. Causing a generalized fear and mutual loathing on all sides, and a shot of martial adrenaline into the heart of a war-weary and broke American populace.
At this point it matters less whether this was just eight guys who rolled into shore on the French Riviera in a sailboat with a couple of homegrown accomplices, or whether they are picking up their Kalishnikovs from street vendors or from CIA-provided containers. They had a support network. Although questions remain:
French authorities on Saturday said the horrific rampage of bullets and explosions that left 129 dead in Paris on Friday was carried out by suicide bombers connected to the Islamic State who broke into three groups with a single objective: to kill as many people as possible.
France – and Europe – was once again confronted with the violence of homegrown terrorism. At least one of the seven dead assailants was a French national – a 29-year-old with a criminal record who had been previously monitored by French intelligence and linked to Islamist extremism. Two others, a senior Belgian official said, appeared to be Belgian foreign fighters, including an 18-year-old who had fought in Syria. A Syrian passport was found near the body of another assailant.
Indeed. Interesting how intact passports are always found on the body of or near the crime scene. Remember the passport found in the Charlie Hebdo shooting? One the one found after 9-11? Is that cordite I smell, or 9-11? And as to the false flag allegations, our governments wouldn’t lie to us, would they?
Social media is certainly a reflection of the national mood, as many move to turn their Facebook profile picture into an overlay of the French tricolor, a gesture of solidarity as meaningless as it is facile. I have not done that and probably won’t for reasons best articulated by another Facebook friend named Diane:
I will not be updating my profile to support France. Sorry. It sucks that people died, always does. But more totally innocent black people are killed by our own cops in a month, every month than were killed there by terrorists. We have our own, unmentionable terrorist here. BTW, they have started killing poor whites too. Will THAT make us finally care?
France is bombing the shit out of Syria, and still collecting taxes from a bunch of African nations for its “losses” to slavery and their colonies there. Who mourns that?
I will not indulge in Islamophobia, because the refugees in Europe are going to pay for this, when these are the people they are running from. The people the US and the EU armed, trained and paid for to a great extent. The people they are trying to demonize.
Lastly, so many people have died in the Middle East this week…ISIS suicide bombers detonated themselves in the southern part of Beirut last Thursday, killing 43 people and wounding 239 and none of us painted our image in their flag.
… And still, innocents died! Yes, I feel for them with the same Mother’s instinct that makes every Palestinian child mine, every Somalian child mine, every young Black father my son, every trembling Iranian girl mine.
Another perspective from a FB friend named Michael:
While we mourn the carnage in Paris, and gnash our teeth, and pull at our hair-shirts, it’s a good time to remember that people are not separated from the actions of their governments. Blowback is hell.
We can trot out our righteous indignation, and our sense of victim-hood at the hands of “terror,” but, really isn’t it just one of Newton’s laws of motion? For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Islamic fighting units are not birthed in a vacuum. The “west” has been meddling in the Middle East for a century.
“Persian oil … is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it’s ours.” FDR to the British Ambassador.
We mourn the carnage in Paris. We imagine our innocent selves at a concert, or a ballgame, or a shopping mall, and gunned down by crazy terrorists who hate us for our freedom, and decadent lifestyle. We’re taught we are victims of terror. We’re innocent. We have nothing to do with anything. We’re just minding our own business, and people attack us for no reason, but the fact they’re evil.
But we know this isn’t true. The war didn’t begin with them.
But we are victims. We’re victims of the policies of our own government. Policies we either don’t care enough about to change, or we agree with them, or we’re helpless before them. But, whatever, the truth is, in war 90% of the causalities are non-military. And in the Forever War, the battlefield is everywhere.
After we’ve destroyed nations, wrecked societies, killed hundreds of thousands, and displaced millions, is it any wonder folks would attempt to fight back? And once in a while land a punch?The last thing we should be is surprised.
We mourn. But we should also understand. And we can’t do that if we sweep history under the rug.
But sweeping history under the rug is what we do. Not for nothing did Gore Vidal refer to this country as “The United States of Amnesia.”
It is easy for us to bow our heads in sorrow for the people of Paris. Yet there are Lebanese and Iraqi dead as well that don’t make the news. All human sacrifices made, ultimately, to the interests of a neocon policy cabal that has made military might the primary implement of foreign policy, as well as the military industrial complex, war profiteers and multinational corporations who grow fat on the “rebuilding.”
My tax dollars have been diverted to one war effort or another my entire adult life. At some point, one gets sick of tallying the deaths, the endless skein of gratuitous and unnecessary violence. Especially knowing that a handful of Satan’s minions are amassing obscene profits from a trade soaked in the blood of innocents.
If you find yourself likewise sick of this violence, this unnecessary shedding of the blood of the young and innocent on foreign soil, then do your homework and vote. Many lives depend on it here and abroad. And if you find yourself wringing your hands and justifying your non-participation by saying it won’t change anything, then congratulations, and check out a mirror: you’re an accomplice. But maybe you can make your Facebook a profile pic a tricolor and show us how much you care.
Mark Twain articulated the the true costs of war as well as anyone ever as in the short story know as “The War Prayer.” Twain’s “aged stranger” appears in the midst of a church service blessing the troops, and adds “the rest of the story” to the pastor’s heartfelt prayer:
O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it –
For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimmage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!
We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
The Great Culling is at hand.
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