"If You Don't Have the Stomach to Kill, Don't Fight with Guns"

Astonishing in the Orwellian way its monumental deceit is being masked by the nation’s propagandist media, the Abbott and Costello routine by the White House and Congress goes on. While the media-addled public looks on distracted by the farce, the military industrial complex goes on with its latest and most lucrative project and rip-off of the taxpayer and poor, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Never in the field of human political endeavor – with the possible exception of the Sixteenth Amendment or the Cold War - has such a gargantuan, while thunderously obvious, swindle been accomplished. Obviously, the swindler doesn’t want the U.S. to quickly – or, perish the rational thought, soon - withdraw from the war. And, just as obviously, it doesn’t want the U.S. to swiftly win it, either. So – voilá – status quo. Just what we have. Quite, as an old CIA master was wont to call such, an “orchestration.”

My god, people – how stupid can you be?!

Rhetorical question. Obviously, you’re stupid enough to believe that a military able to spend until three hundred million citizens already on the equivalent of history’s biggest taxation treadmill and working themselves to death can’t subdue a country with a population seven percent of that number. You’re stupid enough to believe that the government of a nation smart enough to have gone to the moon, do DNA and stem-cell research, and a hundred-odd similar miracles of science can’t close a border thirteen hundred and fifty miles long.

That last is a no-brainer so obvious, matter of fact, that it’s laughable.

Speaking of which, the news these day is mostly low comedy (hence, I suppose, my having been reminded of Abbott and Costello). A few minutes ago, at reference on the TagWorld Internet site to “The Nigerian 419 Scam,” I cracked up again. The scam, known for literally centuries as “The Spanish Prisoner,” is a confidence trick in which the mark is persuaded to advance relatively small sums of money in the hope of collecting a much larger one. Authors on websites like Wikipedia expressed amazement at the vast numbers of people who are stupid enough to be duped by something so obvious.

No mention, of course, is made of the stock market.

A nation dumb enough to fall for an even older scam, that of Paying Protection Money – “Danegeld,” it was called when Ninth Century Vikings ran it – to a gang of thieves as blatant as the federal government should be surprised when they also fall for “The Spanish Prisoner?” Come on! You don’t see, for instance, the so-called “War on Drugs” as a Protection Racket? Even the average high school class – we did it once, in Del Rio, Texas – can come up with methods whereby the traffic for illicit drugs would be brought to a halt in a year’s time.

“How stupid?” Stupid enough to believe that a government so desirous of protecting the public that it’s willing to spend ten billion dollars a year on marijuana law enforcement is at the same time unwilling to protect its children from the one hundred, twenty a day influx of pedophiles, kidnappers, and sexual predators from Mexico. That’s how stupid.

So the wars go on – and they will go on. And, as the administration now admits, they will go on for generations. Tell me that isn’t the sweetest scam in history. It earns billions for the military industrial complex rich, and all it costs is purchase of the co-operation of a Congressional-Presidential Mutt and Jeff routine, one assuring that the Pentagon employs only enough troops to further assure that fighting – the maiming and killing is incidental – goes on without possibility of “mission accomplished.” Sweet!

And as long as the public, especially the poor who contribute the bodies of their sons and daughters, husband, fathers – and now, even mothers – unlike the rich and those who will reap the benefits - can be suckered by confidence games equivalent in their blatantly obvious character to “The Spanish Prisoner,” “The Pigeon Drop,” and Danegeld, they will continue, too.

As long as the public can be kept ignorant and oblivious of the history wherein the corporate rich bribed and bought the legislation that has brought us to things like the all-volunteer military (show me a better way to assure that someone like Dick Cheney wouldn’t have to embarrass himself with the nuisance of having to obtain draft deferment after deferment), the war will go on.

As long as the public knows nothing of the means by which “Corporate America” corporations acquired the same rights as those of an individual citizen, including Fourteenth Amendment identity, but without the same responsibilities (imagine, among people intelligent enough to be lawyers, how that came about), it will go on.

As long as the nation’s courts are willing to permit the government’s evasion of a ruling on the constitutionality of the War Powers Act, and make a mockery of the U.S. Constitution that prevents waging of war by the military’s Commander in Chief (how do you suppose a provision for preventing an evil as obvious as that one – just what’s happened to us in Iraq – came to be circumvented so smoothly?), it will go on.

And, it’ll only take a few dollars spent on trinket medals (you’d think they could at least put precious metals in the damned things, wouldn’t you?), a few more of the Veterans Administration, Walter Reed Building Eighteen Hearing whitewashes, and the meretricious like to keep the public hornswoggled.

I’ve spoken here often about Operation Mockingbird, the CIA program to gain control of and used the nation’s news media, and the relentless manner in which the government has striven to manage what amounts to the public consciousness (you really don’t recognize that in today’s news?). History will go much further.

History will note how CIA and military industrial strategists infiltrated and co-opted humanist, feminist, and other extremist groups in order to weaken the society and nation’s thought processes. Children, always the target of totalitarian regimes and dictatorial ideologues, could be disciplined without corporal punishment and cleverly “loving” psychological devices. So we were told – relentlessly. The traditional, two parent, male-dominated family was passé, uncivilized and Neanderthal. “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” became a feminist mantra. It also became important to create a new paragon of maleness, the “sensitive” man. So we were told – relentlessly.

With the rise of feminism reasonable in its initial and basic premises, came a bizarre evolution. New terminology – another device and trapping of the propagandist, but totally un-noticed by the public – began its insinuation into the language. Many terms, to say nothing of traditional practices, became “sexist,” and “politically incorrect.” Spitted epithets, especially those like the solecism “male chauvinist pig” were chic. A woman could do anything a man could do, the feminist creed said, even labor and fight. Any actual demonstration of the truth and to the contrary, of course, was sexist and politically correct, then actually became illegal.

I was reminded of J.S. Mill. “A State which dwarfs its men,” he noted, “in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.”

That about describes it, today – doesn’t it?

Under the new ideologies, the nation’s educational system felt into dysfunctional and convulsing chaos. Unable to discipline children in any manner except by resort to contradictorily convolute processes amounting to organizational bluster or cajolery, teachers devoted entire classroom sessions to simply maintaining order. Soon, even middle school campuses came to resemble prisons more than anything else, with patrolling police and security personnel – including, of course women – everywhere; that while technology like computers, equipment used for sports and anything else imaginable including every kind of toy and plaything conceivable became essential to learning. “Studies” abounded, all purporting speciously and fecklessly to “better education,” and “support our children.” As education and school systems went from one nitwit nostrum to another, students unable to compose a simple sentence, do simple arithmetic, or identify their state’s outline on a map effectively took over administration of their schools.

“School shootings” – incidents wherein students went to school with guns and killed their classmates – became common, all but routine. “Hazing,” incidents wherein students beat, raped, and otherwise brutalized their fellows, abounded, too, and pregnancy among high school, even middle school, girls did, in fact, become routine. It also became illegal to expel the expectant mothers, or otherwise show repugnance for their immorality. Morality, too, became “politically incorrect.”

In what history will recognize as no mere co-incidence, the U.S. Supreme Court “handed down” – “capitulated,” a law school professor said – Roe v. Wade, probably the most poorly, and speciously reasoned ruling in the court’s history. Within months, the heretofore murder of a child required for immunity from prosecution only that some part of its body remain in the mother during the killing. Many a historian, logician, and legal scholar wondered how long it would take for the newborn to simply have its head smashed under his mother’s foot or against the nearest door.

More and concomitantly, the public’s music, literature, and arts devolved to a degree exalting by comparison even that of primitive savages on the islands of the Pacific. From melody and lyric once deemed respectable by even professors, graduate students and skilled purveyors of the art, music lost all semblance of its elevated forms, becoming stripped of everything but the most primitive rhythm, percussion and chant, the so-called “rap.” Language and literature reached near incomprehensibility, filled with COIK – Clear Only If (already) Known – references and solecistic nonsense. “Romance” novels, drivel appealing to the very lowest feminine mentality, and machismo minimalist “adventure” stories appealing in a similar manner to the increasingly effeminate, “sensitive” male filled bookstores and libraries. A comically clichéd and derisively written mockery of the former, “Naked Came the Stranger,” became a best-seller. Newspaper composition went to the eighth grade level, then sixth. Journalist’s and editors gaffes became regular fare for comedians’ audiences.

The often bizarre and tongue-tied diction of politicians including the nation’s president became likewise a form of entertainment. Political and other oratory devolved to sophomoric levels, more interesting in the comic relief provided from bloviating politicians and political campaigns than in substance or point.

Everywhere, tests scores and job application performance reached levels both frightening and humiliating. Television comedians like Johnny Carson, and, later, Jay Leno, would develop “shticks” intended to demonstrate the appalling stupidity of the new public. In the news almost daily, society demonstrated its “dumbing-down,” and columnists like James Kilpatrick and writers like Steve Allen began pointing out the phenomenon, all to no avail. Ideologues like the feminists, political liberals – the two became identified with one another – and humanists generally would not be deterred, demanding more of the same, and, on account of their new-found political clout, getting it.

It was an eerily familiar time, I can tell you, and not only because I had read Orwell. “In the future,” the Fletcher School wonk told a seminar I intended at the University of Colorado in the late sixties, “government will deceive, confuse, and bewilder the public in order to maintain power.” He cited Nazi German Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels repeatedly in his presentation.

History, watching, saw the bewilderment of the public reach first the level required by the Cold War, then the war in Vietnam, then Desert Storm, now Iraqi Freedom (note the term – newspeak, anyone?). During Korea, a nation still mentally alert, disciplined and law-abiding but tired of war, gritted its teeth and accepted. With Vietnam, the second war waged by a President using a bewildered public to brow-beat the Congress into submission came to a halt when public resentment at their government’s criminal behavior withdrew support and took to the streets.

The federal propagandists’ reaction was a masterpiece and something to see, still another example of the power – especially scientific - of the most massively funded government in history. Phony veterans, both extemporaneous and in government hire for propagandist purposes, were everywhere. The “orchestration” was state of the art and directed by the best behaviorists known to man, psychologists and sociologists who were also the best funded. Never again thereafter would the public dare criticize its military or their Commander in Chief. People who recognized the overtones of Goebbels and Hitler, to say nothing of long passages being uttered almost verbatim by federal spokesmen, were shouted down, threatened, or attacked.

"Of course,” Nazi German Reichsmarschall Herman Goering said at Nuremburg, “the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

Anybody recognize that? Lately? “How stupid?” – how stupid can you get?

My fellow citizens, for even one totally unschooled in history, the machinations of government since the military industrial complex corporations’ coup in the late nineteen fifties leaves a trail more evident than that of a buffalo herd across a snowy field. From warning by a Five-Star General President concerning its offing and portent, to one otherwise inexplicable event after another up until the present, there can be no rational doubt. For heaven’s sake, and the sake of your children and grandchildren, wake up! You are being hoodwinked.

Even if you will not do the study required to see that I must be right, at least consider where we are now. To prosecute as we are a war with the purported intent of this one is utterly absurd, ridiculous. There is simply no way that what the administration says it intends to do can be done. None! If we leave Iraq now, there will, indeed, be a vicious civil war. There is a civil war now, a war being fought to the greatest extent and highest intensity the participants are capable; the difference is that our men and women won’t be dying in future operations.

While I hesitate to evince moral questions to a society demonstrating the level of such this one does, I would point out that we do not have the moral right to go on with partial measures. Unless we can stop the daily killing of scores of Iraqis, we have no right to be there. Do we mean, by our determination to stay for “generations,” to cause the killing to go on? How can anyone ascertain that what will ensue when we leave will be worse than what is already occurring, and that it will go on as long as it will, should be stay and proceed as we are?

Can anyone still argue that Saddam Hussein would have killed as many Iraqis as have died since we invaded?

The dead in the event of a withdrawal will be, as they are now, the responsibility of George W. Bush and his military industrial complex masters. That they lied to deceive the nation and its public in order to wage war would relieve the nation and public of responsibility, even ignoring the fact that nothing we can do short of an all-out effort will succeed.

If we are to subdue the country, we must re-invade with six hundred, fifty thousand troops and we must destroy the ability of the parties now killing us and themselves to resist what we intend to do. Included in that is the killing of everyone who resists or may resist. There has never been any other way to do that – never! That the U.S. and its public doesn’t have the stomach for that doesn’t change the fact of what must be done.

If you don’t intend to kill, don’t get in a fight with guns. It is just that simple – it has always been that simple!

This isn’t a matter, or tactical situation, uniquely constituted either in its character or its nature. War and control of the conquered is a science as old and well-known as human history. Dozens, scores of direct and valid parallels can be drawn from one’s own experiences. There are no, arcane, complex or esoteric considerations

It is a simple as “your can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”