Robbery, butchery, rapine, these they misname Empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.
--Calgacus
Steven D. Green, recently discharged from the 502nd Infantry Regiment, charged with raping, killing, and burning 15-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza, and with killing Hamza's mother, father, and seven-year-old sister, grew up in Midland, Texas. George W. Bush, the man who dispatched ex-PFC Green to Iraq, also grew up in Midland, Texas.
There are no coincidences. So held Jung. "[T]he self-same event, although a link in two totally different chains, nevertheless falls into place in both, so that the fate of one individual invariably fits the fate of the other, and each is the hero of his own drama while simultaneously figuring in a drama foreign to him[.]" That's Schopenhauer.
"Curses, like chickens, sooner or later come home to roost." And that is my grandmother.
It is right that ex-PFC Green is George II's "homey," come home to roost in the chickenhawk's own Midland. For ex-PFC Green is the scrofulous face of George II's Operation Iraqi Fiefdom.
The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilize savage and senile and paranoidal peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells or metal mines.
John T. Flynn
In the coming weeks and months, we will learn much about ex-PFC Green.
We may learn that, as a youth, he delighted in torturing and killing small animals. That he burned people, dismissing the notion that such burning caused harm. We may learn that he joined with others in a club devoted to hazing, humiliation, and graverobbing. That he associates with people of dubious character, including convicted liars and other felons.
We may learn that his grandfather provided aid and comfort to the German Reich during WWII. That his father cut deals with terrorists. That his parents were of such cold character that they played golf rather than acknowledge the death of a daughter. That he has a criminal record, that he is an alcoholic, that he is a substance abuser, that he is a deserter, that he is suspected of domestic violence.
We may learn that he mocked those that he put to death. That he taunts the blind. That he is a megalomaniac. That he engages in sadism as a means of quelling personal anxiety.
We will surely hear that ex-PFC Green is a "bad apple," wholly unrepresentative of the US military "mission" in Iraq, an evil freak, a near-mutant, a loose cannon who somehow blundered into the infantry and there ran unaccountably amok.
The Kossack civil society summarized this meme precisely right in quinn's recent diary:
No, No, No, No, they need the storyline to be an individual aberant act.
That whomever did it was a monster, that it was an sole individual aberation, not a systemic, intentional, or predictable outocome of policy, that they already kicked him out of the military, and that the agie issue (15 (girl) versus 20-25 woma)was an honest mistake, not an intentional attempt to downplay or mislead.
What we are seeing here is far worse than coverup - we are seeing damage contol spin.
That's one theory: that Midland boy Green is an aberration, some sort of monstrous ur-human whose rampage was freakish and unique. This theory conveniently absolves, say, Midland boy George of any responsiblity for Green's crime, a crime that occurred in a theater of war where George chose to extend Imperial America.
A second theory, hinted at in civil society's post, and more expressly set forth, on occasion, on this site and elsewhere, is that Midland boy Green's murder and rapine may be blamed on "a failure of leadership." With this theory, it is Midland boy Green who receives absolution, the fault squarely attributed to Midland boy George.
There is a harder theory. And that is that both Midland boys must accept responsibility: Green for what he did, George for sending him to where he did it. Further, this third theory argues that any Midland boy, placed where George placed Green, was placed at risk of acting as Green and his cohorts did. Why? Because, regardless of nation, regardless of conflict, regardless of era, there festers "the general debasement resulting from life in the army, with its glorification of the uniform and the flag, and its authorized violence and murder."
Those are the words of Leo Tolstoy, soldier. He served in an artillery regiment in the Crimean War, and those words are from his novel Resurrection. There he also says:
Military service always corrupts a man, placing him in conditions of complete idleness, that is, absence of all intelligent and useful work, and liberating him from the common obligations of humanity, for which it substitutes conventional considerations like the honour of the regiment, the uniform and the flag, and, on the one hand, investing him with unlimited power over other men, and, on the other, demanding slavish subjection to superior officers . . . .
[W]here a civilian would not be able to help being secretly ashamed of such conduct, a soldier thinks it the proper way to live, brags and is proud of it, especially in time of war. "We are ready to sacrifice our lives in war, and therefore a gay carefree existence is not only pardonable but absolutely necessary for us--and so we live that life."
In some such confused fashion Nekhlyudov thought at this period of his life; and all this time he felt the delight of being liberated from the moral restraint he had formerly accepted for himself, and lived in a continuous mad state of chronic selfishness.
The wickedness of Midland boy Green's mad state of chronic selfishness, of his liberation from moral restraint, is easy to see, because it involved rape, as well as murder. Rape, in this age, is no longer regarded as a legitimate "spoil" of war, as it had been for millennia. This is why, of all the crimes committed by American military personnel in George II's extension of Empire, only Green's offense is not loudly and stoutly defended on the perpetual bullhorn of right-wing talk radio.
As for all that mere torture and murder?
How many does it take to metamorphose wickedness into righteousness? One man must not kill. If he does it is murder. But a state or nation may kill as many as they please, and it is not murder. Only get enough people to agree to it, and the butchery of myraids of human beings is perfectly innocent.
Adin Ballou
Ernest Hemingway, as was his wont, put it succinctly: "War is a crime. Ask the infantry. Ask the dead."
The special savagery of Midland boy Green's crime, and the special role Midland boy George played in creating the conditions for that crime, should not blind us to the fact that ALL Midland boys involved in Operation Iraqi Fiefdom, ALL Midland boys out there extending American Empire, are accessories of war. As are ALL of we, here in this "democracy," for so long as we allow these Midland boys, out there acting in our name, to continue building "our" Empire.
I'm tired of a life of crime. Aren't you?
I can't bear to see any more Midland boys made criminals. I want them all home. Midland boy George, too.
Have you ever looked at a man?
There is something helpless and majestic about a man.
If you believed in anything, you could not kill a man.
A woman has two legs. She'll build a house--from cellar to rooftop, with her own hands. She'll put seeds in the ground. She'll watch the sun and the rain at work. She'll take a man to bed. She'll find enough tenderness and love to get her through the day. You'd think that woman deserved a little something. You'd think that woman was worthy of a jot or two of sympathy and consideration. You'd think that maybe someone would say, Let's just let her alone for a while, and she what she can do.
This house. Do you see this house?
It is a house where human beings live.
They deserve more than bloody kicks in the ass.
There is a strange dignity about them.
They are looking at you as I talk.
I want you to leave them alone.