Four-star essay by Billmon on war porn and America's Heart of Darkness

[BurtWorm]

http://billmon.org/archives/002188.html

I came across the Nation article on nonwthatsfuckedup.com, which meant I had to take a good, hard look at the psychopathic side of the American spirit, and consider its implications not just for the war on terrorism and the occupation of Iraq, but its role in the emergence of an authentically fascist movement in American politics, one which feeds on violence and the glorification of violence, and which has found an audience not just in the U.S. military (where I think -- or at least hope -- it's still a relatively small fringe) but in the culture as a whole.

I don't have time at the moment to explain fully why and how this peek at the banality of evil changed my thinking, although I'll try to cover it in a future post. Suffice it to say that my visit to nowthatsfuckedup.com was a reminder of the genocidal skeletons hanging in the American closet. It left me with the conviction -- or at least an intuitive suspicion -- that an open-ended war in Iraq (or in the broader Islamic world) will bring nothing but misery and death to them, and creeping (or galloping) authoritarianism to us.

We have to get out -- not because withdrawal will head off civil war in Iraq or keep the country from fallling under Iran's control (it won't) but because the only way we can stop those things from happening is by killing people on a massive scale, probably even more massive than the tragedy we supposedly would be trying to prevent.

[Old and In the Way]

1. I posted his essay earlier....really brilliant writing.

The blog is a must read for me.

[BurtWorm]

2. I don't read it that often, but this one was very powerful.

He expressed something I was feeling while looking at the reports of the new torture scandal brewing with 82nd Airborne. I fear people are going to miss it, thinking it's the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, but it was going on while Abu Ghraib was on the front pages and is only just seeing light now.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

3. I saw an example of this side of America yesterday

when I was driving in Fayetteville AR. I got behind a pickup truck with two Bush signs. There was also a photograph in the back window with a small sign I couldn't make out. Finally, while stopped at a traffic light, my husband made it out. It was a photo of a young man with a machine gun. The sign said his name and his unit and then "Number of kills-unlimited". I felt sick.

[BurtWorm]

4. The military breeds psychopathy.

Not to say that all soldiers or veterans are psychopaths, of course. But the ideal soldier in war time is a psychopath who feels nothing upon killing or maiming another person. (The US isn't alone, of course, in turning people into killing machines. We're just very efficient at it.)

[BurtWorm]

5. kick