Comments for Outer Darkness: The Gulag Cancer Grows, State Terror Intensifies at http://www.chris-floyd.com , comment 1 to 13 out of 13 comments http://www.chris-floyd.com Fri, 22 Aug 2008 01:05:49 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1517/135/#comment-8020 @Druff, who said: "You further murder-for-empire by simply paying your taxes" Well, so long as the ultimate penalty for -not- paying is death, no, you aren't. You are a contributor, but an unwilling one. - Mike Gogulski Thu, 29 May 2008 01:49:05 +0100 http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1517/135/#comment-8013 We can pray for peace and it mean something for mankind. Thoughts change basic structure ans become material through good works. This school ground we call earth could be a better place without profiting on or fellow man pain. Thank you for all you do. Keith Richard Radford Jr. - Keith_Richard_Radford_Jr Wed, 28 May 2008 19:09:59 +0100 http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1517/135/#comment-8005 I represent two clients at Guantanamo. Some time in the next five weeks the supreme court will rule on the constitutionality of the Military Commissions Act...that is the law that took away the Writ of Habeas Corpus for the gitmo detainees and just about anyone else the executive declares is an "enemy combatant." I am sharing the article I just wrote for In These Times about how one Bush lawyer... now a professor at Columbia law school managed to keep my client at gitmo for now more than six years...even though he was found not to be an enemy... http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3692/a_kinder_gentler_torture/ - hcgorman Wed, 28 May 2008 06:09:01 +0100 http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1517/135/#comment-7994 "There are no degrees of guilt. If you further murder-for-empire, you are culpable. End of story." Evan, I think this is a bit too broad. You further murder-for-empire by simply paying your taxes, but I don't think you'd assign equal culpability to your average taxpayer and, say, Cheney. Or would you? Also, regarding the moral agency of your typical troop, for me I think it sort of depends on whether I'm inclined to call this prevalent inhuman/belligerent/authoritarian personality trait a mental disease that in some ways overshadows or debilitates intellectual choice. And I haven't decided yet. Say it is... should that carry any weight, regardless? - Druff Tue, 27 May 2008 21:19:04 +0100 http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1517/135/#comment-7970 Grandma Jefferson said: "It's poverty and economic hopelessness that drives many to volunteer, the children of the poor & working poor, coming from the cannon-fodder classes that the neoc***s love to decimate..." With all due respect, this helicopter pilot, Katzenberger, of Kansas City, Mo., wasn't poor and economically hopeless when he joined the war machine, GJ. They don't let poor people learn how to fly multi-million dollar penis replacements that kill people. (and Mr. Floyd, surely you can crack back at me with something more effective than that tepid crack about the quality of an American edumacation. wink) - arthurdecco Tue, 27 May 2008 01:25:41 +0100 http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1517/135/#comment-7965 Bill, I thank you for agreeing with me where you did. Where you disagree is a quarrel of degree, and I have noted your inclination to find degrees of guilt where they don't really exist. You like to find Big Bad Men who are Supremely Bad because that makes you feel like you got a Kingpin when you get them. The sad truth is that EVERY PERSON INVOLVED is equally culpable. EVERYONE. There are no degrees of guilt. If you further murder-for-empire, you are culpable. End of story. Your perspective is a product of American Liberalism, Bill. You and other Liberals try to parse things in a pseudo-intellectual fashion, and you try desperately to blame One Big Kingpin for the acts of underlings. It really boils down to moral choices, Bill. I'd love to hear you extrapolate the argument further, to explain how Private Joe Sixpack is LESS guilty than Don Rumsfeld when Pvt Sixpack is the one killing innocent Iraqis, and Rumsfeld is just sitting in an office somewhere. Please explain how that works. - Evan Rhood Mon, 26 May 2008 16:32:12 +0100 http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1517/135/#comment-7962 Okay - 200 Hellfire missles fired from March through May according to WaPo, a major uptick in the air campaign to coincide with the increased detention sweeps through Sadr City as the surge winds down. Some Hellfires from Apache helicopters, some from Predator drones. Someone please calculate the economic cost, per Hellfire, of this use of hi tech weaponry against a sniper or a guy planting an IED. Then let's do an accurate body count to calculate the human cost. Capt. Ben Katzenberger, the pilot who trained for three years for this mission before starting his first tour of duty in occupied Iraq tells the reporter "But you better not screw this up. If you mess up, people get hurt." Col. Edens, his unit commander, is quoted assuring us stateside civilian shock and awe afficianados "It's not Hollywood and it's not 110% perfect." No shit. And when you don't mess up, people get hurt. Although I was drafted into the Army infantry during the Vietnam era, I tend to agree with Evan Rhood's stark moral judgment: if you volunteer for today's military, you know you're training for today's imperial missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the other, less publicized combat zones sprouting up in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia in the global war on terror. The first waves of reserves that were activated and sent could validly claim they never dreamed they would be called upon for this. But after five years, there ain't no excuses now. I quibble only with Evan's equation that "They're as guilty as Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney IMO." Not quite. Capone was still more culpable than his thug underlings, and those who were merely aiders and abettors. Bill from Saginaw - bill from saginaw Mon, 26 May 2008 02:48:03 +0100 http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1517/135/#comment-7958 I have no empathy for someone who goes over there to "serve his(her) country" and I don't really care, to be honest, about the fact that the US Military pulls disproportionately from poor people. It's not a secret what the US Military does: travel to other nations, and kill people. That's what they do. They kill. They murder. It's only not called "murder" because of the excuse of "war." Those who enlist willingly are fools. Draftees are another matter but how heavily used is the draft these days? If you're poor, you have a lot of other options besides joining the US Military. And on top of that there are moral choices: ordered to "clear" a house of Iraqis, what do you do? Ordered to shoot anyone who moves, what do you do? Only a god-damned fool would be in that situation. And I'm not fond of giving fools their due. Just because they're ignorant fools from poverty-stricken backgrounds doens't make them Noble Fools. They're as guilty as Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney IMO. We all make choices. We all must stand by our choices, and therefore we must choose wisely. - Evan Rhood Sun, 25 May 2008 14:24:27 +0100 http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1517/135/#comment-7957 It's poverty and economic hopelessness that drives many to volunteer, the children of the poor & working poor, coming from the cannon-fodder classes that the neoc***s love to decimate, and these people tend to be "super" patriots, steeped in the jingoistic flag-waving lockstep bullshit mythology about freedom and democracy, and "defending" the Merkun way of life, from bith. The point made is how this demonic junta is destroying our people too, because the troops weren't all born stone-cold killers, they had to be warped into that. And as the statistics show us, tens of thousands are returning as PTSD haunted, suicidal wrecks, precisely because they really aren't equal to the atrocities they're ordered commit once deployed. And everything done by them, and this nation,to Iraq and it's helpless people, is a war crime, a crime against humanity, because as we all keep saying, they shouldn't be there at all. That they were duped by lies into joining up doesn't change that. - Grandma Jefferson Sat, 24 May 2008 23:30:52 +0100 http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1517/135/#comment-7954 Quite the roundup, Chris. I gotta agree with arthurdecco above, though. These kids that are over there now are stone-cold killers, and their feelings should be last on anyone's list of concerns. I just blogged on this topic the other day here: [url]http://www.nostate.com/77/fuck-the-troops/[/url] - Mike Gogulski Sat, 24 May 2008 20:59:37 +0100 http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1517/135/#comment-7952 You think the pilot is "well-educated" because he graduated from an American university? Who's the "hopeless romantic" now? - chris Sat, 24 May 2008 17:16:29 +0100 http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1517/135/#comment-7951 OneworldGoverningRulingElites make Zombies so that war can happen and continue on into the future since it is a brain synapse in the collective unconscious of our species. My father was one of those zombies. He was a Huey Helicopter pilot and he set-up the secret service bases across Thailand for the IndoChina Wars during the 1960s. Now upon flying for the CIA, Air America, during the latter 1960s and into the 1970s, he became disgusted with how "mercenary" war had become. After suffering a couple of massive coronary attacks and his health suffering immensely from his POW days of WWII - yes he was shot down at age 22, and remained a POW (tortured) for the remainder of the war in Germany where he was shot down during his first flight over - he did not live out his winter years in a state of peace. A study has finally been concluded and it proves that in military families the homicide rate for children is higher than in "ordinary" families. As soon as someone decides to become a military government mule they have given up the right to an imagination and therefore they are a ZOMBIE. Detachment is a zombie tactic since it is this state of brain dead sub-human that must be programmed in order for a once upon a time sane human to harm their own. My father's mother said about him when he returned from WWII: "He was damaged goods." My mother when she passed last year said: "WWII was the war to end all wars." Until a 51% majority of human beings realize in the collective unconscious -- a military of zombies and wars created by OGRES are nightmares sold as a dreams and branded as life -- we are doomed to remain ignorant in the conscious choices of our "super conscious." And so we get more and more of the educated helicopter pilot who can't see that he is a murderer and worse, nothing more than a zombie for OGRES who are cannibals dressed up in suits of the 21st Century. In a word, tragedy. - Bilxoi Sat, 24 May 2008 11:57:05 +0100 http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1517/135/#comment-7950 Chris, You are a brilliant thinker, a talented writer and a hopeless romantic too. The last infuriates me. ""You get that detached feeling." Here we see the agonizing spectacle of a young man deadening his soul, trying his best to stifle his humanity --- "I know I can do this" – so that he can kill another human being, somewhere down there in the jumble of brown Legos, "where everything looks the same."" This man hasn't had to "deaden" his soul. He hasn't tried his best to "stifle his humanity". He joined the forces long after the illegal invasion of Iraq began, presumably after completing university. He is a well-educated volunteer who chose to become a helicopter pilot, knowing full well he would be sent to an Arab country where he could missle-murder arabs with impunity, while never even getting his palms soiled. He is a war criminal. - arthurdecco Sat, 24 May 2008 01:17:31 +0100