Yes, I know, as many
readers will be quick to inform me, the West never had any morality.
Nevertheless things have gotten worse.
In hopes that I will be
permitted to make a point, permit me to acknowledge that the US dropped nuclear
bombs on two Japanese cities and fire-bombed Tokyo; that Great Britain and
the US fire-bombed Dresden and a number of other German cities, expending more
destructive force, according to some historians, against the civilian German
population than against the German armies; that President Grant and his Civil
War war criminals, Generals Sherman and Sheridan, committed genocide against the
Plains Indians; that the US today enables Israel's genocidal policies against
the Palestinians -- policies that one Israeli official has compared to 19th
century US genocidal policies against the American Indians; that the US in the
new 21st century invaded Iraq and Afghanistan on contrived pretenses, murdering
countless numbers of civilians, and that British prime minister Tony Blair lent
the British army to his American masters, as did other NATO countries, all of
whom find themselves committing war crimes under the Nuremberg standard in lands
in which they have no national interests, but for which they receive an American
pay check.
I don't mean these few
examples to be exhaustive. I know the list goes on and on. Still, despite the
long list of horrors, moral degradation is reaching new lows. The US now
routinely tortures prisoners, despite its strict illegality under US and
international law, and a recent poll shows that the percentage of Americans who
approve of torture is rising. Indeed, it is quite high, though still just below
a majority.
And we have what appears
to be a new thrill: American soldiers using the cover of war to murder
civilians. Recently American troops were arrested for murdering Afghan civilians
for fun and collecting trophies such as fingers and skulls.
This revelation came on
the heels of Pfc. Bradley Manning's alleged leak of a US Army video of US
soldiers in helicopters and their controllers thousands of miles away having fun
with joy sticks murdering members of the press and Afghan civilians. Manning is
cursed with a moral conscience that has been discarded by his government and his
military, and Manning has been arrested for obeying the law and reporting a war
crime to the American people.
US Rep. Mike Rogers, a
Republican, of course, from Michigan, who is on the House Subcommittee on
Terrorism, has called for Manning's execution. According to Rep. Rogers, it
is an act of treason to report an American war crime.
In other words, to obey
the law constitutes "treason to America."
Rep. Rogers said that
America's wars are being undermined by "a culture of disclosure," and that this
"serious and growing problem" could only be stopped by the execution of
Manning.
If Rep. Rogers is
representative of Michigan, then Michigan is a state that we don't
need.
The US government, a font
of imperial hubris, does not believe that any act it commits, no matter how
vile, can possibly be a war crime. One million dead Iraqis, a ruined country,
and four million displaced Iraqis are all justified, because the "threatened" US
Superpower had to protect itself from nonexistent weapons of mass destruction
that the US government knew for a fact were not in Iraq and could not have been
a threat to the US had they been in Iraq.
When other countries
attempt to enforce the international laws that the Americans established in
order to execute Germans defeated in World War II, the US government goes to
work and blocks the attempt. A year ago on October 8, the Spanish Senate,
obeying its American master, limited Spain's laws of universal jurisdiction in
order to sink a legitimate war crimes case brought against George W. Bush,
Barack H. Obama, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
The West includes Israel,
and there the horror stories are 60 years long. Moreover, if you mention any of
them you are declared to be an anti-semite. I only mention them in order to
prove that I am not anti-American, anti-British, and anti-NATO, but am simply
against war crimes. It was the distinguished Zionist Jewish Judge, Richard Goldstone,
who produced the UN report indicating that Israel committed war crimes when it
attacked the civilian population and civilian infrastructure of Gaza. For his
efforts, Israel declared the Zionist Goldstone to be "a self-hating Jew," and
the US Congress, on instruction from the Israel Lobby, voted to disregard the
Goldstone Report to the UN.
As the Israeli official
said, we are only doing to the Palestinians what the Americans did to the
American Indians.
The Israeli army uses
female soldiers to sit before video screens and to fire by remote control
machine guns from towers to murder Palestinians who come to tend their fields
within 1,500 meters of the inclosed perimeter of Ghetto Gaza. There is no
indication that these Israeli women are bothered by gunning down young children
and old people who come to tend to their fields.
If the crimes were limited
to war and the theft of lands, perhaps we could say it is a case of jingoism
sidetracking traditional morality, otherwise still in
effect.
Alas, the collapse of
morality is too widespread. Some sports teams now have a win-at-all-cost
attitude that involves plans to injure the star players of the opposing teams.
To avoid all these controversies, let's go to Formula One racing where 200 mph
speeds are routine.
Prior to 1988, 22 years
ago, track deaths were due to driver error, car failure, and poorly designed
tracks compromised with safety hazards. World Champion Jackie Stewart did much
to improve the safety of tracks, both for drivers and spectators. But in 1988
everything changed. Top driver Ayrton Senna nudged another top driver Alain
Prost toward a pit wall at 190 mph. According to AutoWeek (August 30, 2010),
nothing like this had been seen before. "Officials did not punish Senna's move
that day in Portugal, and so a significant shift in racing began." What the
great racing driver Stirling Moss called "dirty driving" became the
norm.
Nigel Roebuck in AutoWeek
reports that in 1996, World Champion Damon Hill said that Senna's win-at-all-cost
tactic "was responsible for fundamental change in the ethics of the sport."
Drivers began using "terrorist tactics on the track." Damon Hill said that "the
views that I'd gleaned from being around my dad [twice world champion Graham
Hill] and people like him, I soon had to abandon," because you realized that no
penalty was forthcoming against the guy who tried to kill you in order that he
could win.
When asked about the
ethics of modern Formula One racing, American World Champion Phil Hill said:
"Doing that sort of stuff in my day was just unthinkable. For one thing, we
believed certain tactics were unacceptable."
In today's Western moral
climate, driving another talented driver into the wall at 200 mph is just part
of winning. Michael Schumacher, born in January 1969, is a seven times World
Champion, an unequaled record. On August 1 at the Hungarian Grand Prix, AutoWeek
Reports that Schumacher tried to drive his former Ferrari teammate, Rubens
Barrichello, into the wall at 200 mph speeds.
Confronted with his
attempted act of murder, Schumacher said: "This is Formula One. Everyone knows I
don't give presents."
Neither does the US
government, nor state and local governments, nor the UK government, nor the
EU.
The deformation of the
police, which many Americans, in their untutored existence as naive believers in
"law and order," still think are "on their side," has taken on new dimensions
with the police militarized to fight "terrorists" and "domestic
extremists."
The police have been off
the leash since the civilian police boards were nixed by the conservatives. Kids
as young as 6 years old have been handcuffed and carted off to jail for school
infractions that may or may not have occurred. So have moms with a car full of
children (see here for example.)
Anyone who Googles videos
of US police gratuitous brutality will call up tens of thousands of examples,
and this is after laws that make filming police brutality a felony. A year or
two ago such a search would call up hundreds of thousands of
videos.
In one of the most recent
of the numerous daily acts of gratuitous police abuse of citizens, an
84-year-old man had his neck broken because he objected to a night-time towing of his car. The
goon cop body-slammed the 84-year-old and broke his neck. The Orlando, Florida,
police department says that the old man was a "threat" to the well-armed much
younger police goon, because the old man clenched his fist.
Americans will be the
first people sent straight to Hell while thinking that they are the salt of the
earth. The Americans have even devised a title for themselves to rival that of
the Israelis' self-designation as "God's Chosen People." The Americans call
themselves
"the indispensable
people."