🚀 go-pugleaf

Rogue Apple
by Stan Goff
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stan-goff/rogue-apple_b_21738.html

The Guardian Unlimited ran a story today about the Haditha
massacre. It called the Marines who slaughtered two dozen
civilians "rogues." The bad apple defense is back.

We need a new legal precedent that disallows this defense;
but then again we need to put the whole war and the system
that spawned it in the dock.

We take a bunch of boys and raise them to believe that their
sexuality is associated with the ability to menace in order
to get respect. We sit them in front of television and films
to see how killing resolves problems and guns attract adoring
erotically objectified women. We send them to school to learn
American Origin Myths about the glory of genocide.
We encourage Boy Scouts where they can learn military
discipline. We segregate them into a youth culture where
gender policing kills their empathy. And when they haven't
been specially prepared by Daddy's net worth for law school
or medicine or management where they can sublimate all that
aggression, we give them the option to work at Mickey-D's
or join the fucking Marine Corps -- where, by the way,
they will learn to fight dragons (you saw that ad, didn't you)
and wear spiffy uniforms. Then we get them in Basic Training
or Boot Camp, where during bayonet training they learn to
holler "Kill, kill, kill!" Or "Blood, blood, blood makes the
grass grow!" Instead of merit badges like they got if there
were Scouts, they can earn new badges. Then we prepare them
to fight a war for lies; and prepare them with intelligence
briefings and cultural indoctrination that are racist drivel,
delivered often as not by a Staff Sergeant with a pickled
brain who watches "Cops" in his off time. When they get to
the war, there really are people who are trying to shoot
them (they have just set foot on these other people's land
with guns, fercrissake... what would WE do?). So they arrive
with aggression trained for a lifetime, surrounded by
masculinity police (their peers) to ensure when the time
comes they show no mercy, then add fear and shake well.
Their job is to beat down this population. They know it.
The population knows it. It is apparent they are enemies,
and since all of these people are hostile to the Marines,
and the Marines have alreay learned to typify them with
the term hajji (something one step down from a Homo sapien),
then presto bingo alakazam! Race war. Now one of the
ungrateful Arabs detonates a roadside bomb, killing one
of these people who have been given the mission to beat
down the same Arabs. He, of course, is long gone.
That's how a mechanical ambush works. Duh.

These Marines (and the Army, too) have already
been -- collectively -- slaughtering civilians
at an alarming rate, often in ones and twos,
but in Fallujah they did so by the bushels,
often as they lay abed or cowered in corners
trying to hide.

So someone will have to explain to me why, after
this mechanical ambush killed one Marine, there
was something out of the ordinary enough to be
categorized as "rogue" when these de-empathized,
militaristic boys from an imperial society, freshly
trained to holler "Kill, kill, kill!" leapt out and
shot down 24 "hajjis," male and female, all ages.

I'll tell you what the rogue aspect of this was.
Someone got the pictures. Just like Abu Ghraib.
Anyone who thinks this was a single instance of
the intentional killing of civilians, I have
beachfront property to sell you in Odessa, Texas.

The one Marine who was killed will now be among the
congealed and faceless mass of idealized war dead to
be celebrated for their willingness to kill and die
for the empire this weekend. There will be no day for
the dead of Katrina. There is no day for those lost
on The Middle Passage. There is no day for Wounded Knee
or the Trail of Tears. There is no day for the 9-11 of
women killed each year by men in the US, mostly those
who claim to love them. And there will be no day to
celebrate or remember the lives of those lost at
My Lai or Haditha.

This day that in yet another way confers such immense
and often unearned public esteem on those who bear arms
for the state is part of the reason that those boys were
raised the way they were, and led inexorably to them
behaving the way they did. And they were not rogues.
They were us.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stan-goff/rogue-apple_b_21738.html