This was not a ‘mistake’ made by an ‘incompetent’ president. It was those things, to be sure, but leaving it at that would be like describing 9/11 in the history books as an airplane crash. This was a king sporting. This was a war trumped up with zero necessity. This was a war of power and profit. This was a war of immense deceits. This is a disastrous war of epic proportions.
My guess is that Americans simply can’t go there, just as many can’t possibly entertain the thought that 9/11 might have been done by their government, or at least perhaps allowed to happen. People can imagine that the war was a mistake, but not that they are such pathetic pawns of their own government that their lives and the lives of American military personnel are of zero consequence to political elites. Or that those daddy-figures upon whom they rely for their precarious sense of security could in fact be vicious predators readily able to betray, ruin and destroy their own public for purposes of financial or power enrichment.
This is just too much for the psyche to handle. This is something that happens in banana republics, or history books, right? – not in contemporary democratic America. And certainly not by those super-patriots of the Republican right, the ones who are so eternally vigilant about keeping us safe.
To truly understand the magnitude of what is at stake here, one has to resort to the greatest of violations of trust of which the human animal is capable, such as the molestations of daughters by their fathers, or of little boys by their priests, or the betrayal of comrades during wartime. Such sickening transgressions are often too heinous to even contemplate, frequently blowing the psychological circuits of anyone subjected to them.
Sometimes the choice is between denial or death.
And so it is that Americans continue through their day, oblivious – by self design – to the magnitude of the evil that has been visited upon them.
But, ironically, this is not remedy at all. Obliviousness to victimization by government is no excuse, especially in a democracy, and especially when other innocent people are much greater victims, to the tune of about a million in number.
To a very large extent, those who would ignore the crimes committed in their name – crimes they have the power to stop – become criminals themselves.
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