If Not Us, Then Who?
By Timothy V. Gatto
20 April, 2010
Countercurrents.org
Some psychologists say that abuse, whether physical, emotional or sexual, tends to leave a mark on those that were abused, sometimes causing the abused to become abusers. I tend to think that this tendency can also be carried on to groups of people, even entire nations.
In the last century, one good example of abuse that left the victims to become abusers is the former USSR. The government and the media, especially during the last century glossed over the fact that an estimated 20-25 million Soviets, military and civilian were killed in the Second World War by their enemies and by Stalin’s purges. We almost completely forget that other nation’s that belonged to the Axis powers by choice, such as Romania, Bulgaria, many Ukrainians and other Eastern European nations that believed in Hitler and had their own Nazi apparatus. They contributed to Germany’s war effort by providing their own divisions of soldiers and their resources against the USSR, therefore it was not surprising that the Soviets kept a firm boot heel on these nations during the Cold War. I dare say that the reprisals could have been much worse, but whether it was pragmatism or the recent slaughter of so many people during the war which was the prime factor for restraint is open to speculation. Either way, the situation could have been much worse.
The Jewish people also suffered under the Nazi’s. This may have been a factor in the way they violently removed the Palestinians from their homeland and the many senseless killings that contributed to the formation of the Jewish State. The question I have is that 65 years after the end of WWII, why does the carnage against the Palestinian people persist? How long does it take for a people to realize that violence begets violence? The sad truth is that it wasn’t the people of Palestine that committed the atrocities against the Jews, but the Nazi’s.
Israel has become its own worst enemy. The very thing that they cite as an example of man’s inhumanity to man, the Holocaust, has been replaced by the wanton violence against a people that lived side by side with the Jews since antiquity. DNA studies have proven that the Jews and the Palestinians share the same bloodline; they are closer to the Palestinians than they are to the Eastern European Jews that migrated to Israel after the war. Why the insatiable bloodlust they display toward the people of Palestine? When will the carnage stop? From the decimation of the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, led by Ariel Sharon on the Israeli side and the Lebanese Christian Militias, upwards of 2,500 men women and children of these squalid camps were mercilessly slaughtered in 1983 while the world did and said nothing. The recent “Operation Cast Lead”, the brutal assault on the Gaza Strip by the Israeli Defense forces using white phosphorus and napalm and cluster munitions supplied by the United States was an act of abject horror.
The Goldstone Commission led by a South African Jew, stated categorically that many war crimes were committed on a basically defenseless population with a median age of 14 by a professional military with the most modern military aircraft and armor that money can buy, most of it supplied or given by the United States of America, used against a people that have never lifted a finger against our people. The rest of the world also contributed to the Israeli atrocities by remaining silent after it was over. The United Nations Secretary Ban Ki-Moon delivered a speech to the world from Gaza as white phosphorus munitions lay smoldering behind him, in the middle of a UN Relief Compound.
We castigate Neville Chamberlin for desiring “Peace in our time” as he enabled Nazi Germany to swallow Czechoslovakia without a fight. We ask members of NATO to join the United States against a ragtag group of Taliban in Afghanistan and tell them that it is their “moral duty” to support us in this war for a petroleum pipeline through the country. We called Iraq a rogue nation and invaded it under the guise of removing “weapons of mass destruction” that the UN inspectors insisted that Saddam never had. After we defeated their gutted military that was decimated through years of sanctions and air attacks, we disbanded their government, police forces, fire departments and municipal maintenance units on the pretext of de-Baathification and left the Iraqi people without any government services, electricity and a bombed out infrastructure and wondered why most of the population became “insurgents”.
We have used nuclear weapons in three areas of the world, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan and call these weapons “depleted uranium”. Meanwhile, the rods inside these munitions work so efficiently is because they produce an atomic reaction when used against armor, turning white-hot and slipping through armor like a hot knife through butter, vaporizing into particles smaller than a micron and having a nuclear half-life of over 400,000 years. This radioactive dust gets into the soil, the air, the water. It is ingested by humans and animals. Radioactivity in the atmosphere has been detected over Northern Europe. Parents in Iraq, after the birth of a child no longer ask if the child is a boy or a girl. They ask if it’s “normal”. Birth defects are up 400 percent in Iraq. Babies are born without heads or their eyes missing or their nose in the middle of their foreheads. Yet the media says nothing and our government denies everything. Soldiers returning from Iraq, transfer this radioactive poison to their wives through their sperm. There is a rash of incidents where babies are born to service members that appear to be normal, but after eight months or so the infant’s heart explodes because the heart muscle is too thin. Veterans develop bone degeneration, cancers and other side effects of radiation, depending on the amount of radioactive particles ingested. The government denies this also.
If abuse creates abusers, then when were Americans “abused”? To this writer, I just don’t see it. It seems that we have never suffered to the extent the Russian people and the Jewish people suffered. What is our excuse? Is the mission of “bringing democracy to the world” that so many government officials claim worth killing innocent civilians that have never attacked us? The perpetrators of 9/11 according to our own government (if you believe the “official” story) were mostly Saudi Arabian, yet that nation is the second largest recipient of military aid behind Israel. Why do we have military bases in over 90 countries? Why do we need 800 military bases? Why are we spending 47% of the world’s military expenditures? Why isn’t the media screaming about this?
In fact, why do I feel like I have to write about all of this? If this were 20 or 30 years ago, it would be on the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post. The TV news media would be talking these facts to death. Senators would be demanding investigations. The uproar would have been deafening. The truth is that the media is an agent of the corporate world and the corporate world controls the government. These military expenditures are great for GE and Westinghouse, giant media conglomerates besides being large defense contractors. It all works hand in glove. The days of the independent journalist on a major media outlet are gone. What you read on the internet (including this piece) is as close to the truth as you will get.
People decry the cost of the recent healthcare bill, yet we are spending about 1.5 trillion dollars this year on the military. Where are our priorities? Where is the logic in this?
Nothing I’ve written here is something I haven’t written about before. I could go on. In fact I have written one book with two more on the way on exactly what I’m writing about today. Maybe I am boring some people, but I feel that what I’m writing about must be said again and again. This is not what I would have wished for my country. I feel responsible. The only way I know to fight against what is happening is to write about it, if I have to, again and again and again. We have so many problems that challenge us that need to be addressed. Issues such as Peak oil, the vanishing Middle-Class, our crumbling infrastructure, the corruption of our financial industry and the outsourcing of American industry to name but a few.
Sorry if I bored you with this. If I piqued your interest I succeeded. If I made you angry, check out the facts and write to me, you may find out, unfortunately for you, it is all true. To those that know all about what I’ve written here, keep telling others. If not us, then who will speak the truth?
[email protected] Read Tim's Political Novel "From Complicity to Contempt" and his new novel "Kimchee Days, or, Stoned Cold Warriors" from Oliver Arts and Open Press at all online booksellers.
