When it comes to the militarized use of unmanned aircraft, especially if it involves strapping bombs on them to obliterate people remotely (innocent or not), it is imperative that we protest against the use of drone strikes now. Otherwise protesting against drone strikes could become punishable by drone strike.
Taking that sentiment to heart, Ruben Bolling offers us his clever cartoon on the subject: (more…)
Death tolls since the beginning of the US’s non-consensual liberation of Iraq: about 20,000 for the insurgents/defenders and 4,500 for the invaders/democratizers.
Compare that to the number of Iraqi civilians who’ve been killed in the past ten years. Estimates range from 100,000 up to 1,000,000. Even at the conservative end, that’s four dead good-guys for every combatant.
And the stats coming out of Iraq are not uncommon for war zones. Armed conflict always hits the civilian population the hardest.
What this means for you war-hungry young men and women out there is: if you decide to enlist as a soldier of war, you’d better be prepared to kill innocent people.
Now, don’t worry. It will never get put to you that way. Just the opposite, in fact. You’ll be told – and you’ll probably believe – that you’re fighting to save and protect lives.
But, for every enemy you and your comrades slay, be sure to prevent the deaths of at least five non-combatants. That way you’ll make a net positive for the, on average, four or more innocent lives you just took.
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Then again, when you try to get into the math of it all, what really becomes clear is how millions of people are fighting and dying so that the super-rich can grow even richer.
Outspoken author Glenn Greenwald put out a provocative piece today called The Decade’s Greatest Scam which outlines the absurdity of spending billions of dollars to fight terrorism – a threat that kills the same number of people who die drowning in a bathtub each year.
Greenwald says these industries are exploiting the people’s irrational fear as a for-profit business:
Exaggerating, manipulating and exploiting the Terrorist threat for profit and power has been the biggest scam of the decade; only Wall Street’s ability to make the Government prop it up and profit from the crisis it created at the expense of everyone else can compete for that title.
Nothing has altered the mindset of the American citizenry more than a decade’s worth of fear-mongering. So compelling is fear-based propaganda, so beholden are our government institutions to these private Security State factions, and so unaccountable is the power bestowed by these programs, that even a full decade after the only Terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, its growth continues more or less unabated.
The author also points out how most of these new security measures will ultimately be used not for protection against terrorism, but rather, as tools used to subdue uprisings and keep the people down:
The Security State has little to do with addressing ostensible Terrorist threats, it has much to do with targeting perceived domestic and political threats, especially threats brought about by social unrest from austerity and the growing wealth gap.
The prime aim of the growing Surveillance State is to impose domestic order, preserve prevailing economic prerogatives and stifle dissent and anticipated unrest.
The Western World has been fighting the war on terror for ten years, costing tremendous amounts of blood and treasure, not to mention liberty and freedom.
And what has been the result? Death and chaos.
If we really want more security in our world, maybe it’s time to try something else besides wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on the tools of war.
How about investing some of these funds into programs that alleviate poverty and strengthen communities? Then we’ll see which method works better to stabilize societies, resolve conflicts and build a peaceful planet.
