Yeah, I’m talking about politics, because it’s F’ing horrendous. The drum beat for war is throbbing in the heart of America. A brutal tyrant has used chemical weapons on his own people! Never mind for the moment that the rebels have the same chemical weapons and have beheaded victims. It’s a humanitarian crisis all around, such is the nature of civil war, and war in general. When you go around killing people, conventional morality, common decency, and social etiquette go out the window. Insanity is the new norm, and with insanity comes all manner of horrific affronts to ones sense of a civilized society.
Rather than educating the public, it serves the interests of our leaders to keep us ignorant and unaware of history, so that we may go along with whatever is in the best interests of the most powerful people and corporations at the expense of everyone else. In short, the ruling elite have a vested interest in the herd being a bunch of easily duped chumps. That makes sense, doesn’t it? One wants a docile subservient class to shut up and work harder.
So, we don’t want to remember all the chemicals America doused Vietnam with (killing millions), and we prefer to be blissfully ignorant of the birth defects blossoming in Fallujah as a result of American use of white phosphorus and depleted uranium in weapons there a decade ago. What is wanted is for the American public, and as much of the world as possible, to get used to the idea of a new war and to gradually accept it. Uncle Sam wants you to sip the Kool-Aid, so he’s going to shower you in it. Then it will just be a matter of “supporting the troops” and rallying around the flag. We can all get behind the flag! It will be us and God against the Martians, and if the economy tanks so be it to fight the alien menace before they eat our brains.
And yes, Winston Churchill indeed uttered the fine words I slapped in to that quickie graphic. Below is a more complete quote.
“I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas.
I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected.”*
Let’s not pretend that when we go to war we are any less barbaric, that we don’t have a legacy of using chemical weapons or worse (c’mon, you just can’t compete with nuclear weapons, which only America has used), or even that getting blown up by a bomb, plastered with napalm, or dying from exposure to depleted uranium or Agent Orange is somehow better than getting gassed. It’s all murder. There’s no fair and good murder, especially when it’s done not out of necessity, but opportunistically, such as in the name of conquest or jockeying for what remains of the planet’s oil reserves.
Update: Recent segment on Abby Martin addressing U.S. use and support of chemical weapons”
*Winston S. Churchill: departmental minute (Churchill papers: 16/16) 12 May 1919 War Office
Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 
The hypocrisy (or confusion) lives inside me. I’d happily support a hyper-smart bomb that kills that bad guy there without touching the innocent dude next to him. After that, I’d feel shame at being OK with anybody dying.
In the end, even our smartest bombs are less indiscriminant than other things not perfectly focused.
Rant on! It’s good to hear from folks who are less confused than I am.
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The bombs that kill the bad guys are the hyper-dumb ones that go off in the face of the person arming them.
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Yeah, I guess they’re not science fiction bombs.
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Robert Heinlein’s first novel, The Sixth Column, was a shockingly racist tract in which the unremittingly evil and stupid ‘Pan-Asians’ over-run the US but get wiped out by a handful of heroes who’ve developed super-weapons that only harm Asians.
When he wasn’t constructing the most ridiculous stereotypes of the subhuman Pan-Asians Heinlein was ‘delighting’ his readers with luridly gory descriptions of the effects of the super-weapons.
The man was a crypto-fascist creep.
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Personally, I’m pretty damned sure that isn’t about the chemical weapons except as an excuse to have a war that America and Israel are so eager for that they’re pissing themselves. We want to kill innocent women and children in order to garner a better toe hold on the Earth’s remaining reserves of oil, or at least enough of it to finish the job of clogging the atmosphere with enough carbon to insure global warming. It’s stupidity on a massive scale that makes me wonder why intelligent people, when you put them together, become one giant Cyclops of idiocy. So, Heinlein was a racist was he? Ah well, just add him to the list.
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That’s a topic of debate among sci-fi fans but if you ask me the evidence from ‘The Sixth Column’, ‘Farnham’s Freehold’ and the accounts from people who knew him makes it a slam-dunk.
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OK. Rants will keep coming. It’s so hard to accept another war in the name of piece, when really it’s in the name of war.
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Churchill was no hypocrite on that issue.
He authorised use of mustard gas against Kurdish rebels in Mesopotamia in 1919, though it was probably never actually employed by field commanders.
He authorised the use of newly developed chemical in gas bombs against Bolsheviks in Russia in 1919 and they were used.
Finally he called for the ‘drenching’ of German cities with poison gas and anthrax in 1944 – when the war was already all but over – apparently as punishment for German civilians for going along with Hitler. Luckily cooler heads prevailed that time – British troops were on the verge of entering Germany and even if not gassed or infected they sure would have been subject to reprisals from the German populace.
Hitler, on the other hand repeatedly refused to authorise the use of Germany’s stocks of Sabum and Sarin – well in advance of any chemical weapons the allies had – even right up to requests made during the final desperate days in the Fuhrerbunker. Maybe his own experience of being mustard gassed in WWI taught the monster at least a shred of empathy.
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Right. Churchill wasn’t being a hypocrite, but O-bomb-a and Kerry are being hypocrites pretending that we Americans and our allies haven’t historically employed chemical weapons or other dastardly munitions headless of the untold death and suffering they would cause on innocent civilians including children. I think it’s been established that the bombs never needed to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki because Japan had already thrown in the towel. So, dropping those bombs on civilian populations was A-OK, was it?! It was a humanitarian disaster on a gargantuan scale. So, yeah, Churchill wasn’t being hypocritical, Oh-Bomber is.
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