Objecting to pillaging gets tiresome — but . . .

© 2019 Peter Free

 

30 December 2019

 

 

Over Christmas

 

I did not any find evidence that seasonal thoughts of Sweet Baby Jesus had an ameliorating effect upon the United States' cultural penchant for violent pillaging.

 

 

For instance, these observations

 

Paul Craig Roberts accurately pointed to the unrestrained greed that has turned American institutions into rabid looters — evidently with our "democratic" society's self-destructing approval:

 

 

Paul Craig Roberts, Privatization Is Resurrecting Feudalism, Unz Review (27 December 2019)

 

 

Chris Hedges delineated that immoral absurdity of the Democratic Party's impeachment poke at President Trump:

 

 

Chris Hedges, The Impeachment's Moral Hypocrisy, TruthDig (23 December 2019)

 

 

And the House of Representatives again lavishly funded the Military Industrial Complex. Thereby, completely ignoring the military's long-documented lying. As well as its penchant for initiating the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of hapless people for no good strategic reason. Deaths which included, of course, our own troops.

 

 

Why keep objecting . . .

 

. . . if this generalized nastiness is what American culture wants?

 

There is a repetitive sameness in what I and others write in opposition to these abuses of position and power.

 

To what end does our (apparently ineffectual) opposition go?

 

 

Caitlin Johnstone has one answer

 

She wrote that:

 

 

The US empire is by far the worst warmongering imperialist force on the planet.

 

No other nation has cultivated a giant globe-sprawling empire in the form of tightly knit alliances with powerful murderous governments like the UK, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

 

No other nation is constantly laboring to sabotage and undermine any government which refuses to be absorbed into military and economic alliance with it using[:]

 

sanctions,

 

staged coups,

 

covert CIA operations,

 

color revolutions,

 

economic manipulations,

 

propaganda,

 

the arming of dissident militias,

 

and

 

launching full-scale military invasions.

 

Only the US and the nations that its cancerous empire has metastasized into are doing anything like that on anywhere near the scale.

 

I have a special responsibility for the evils of the empire in which I live.

 

© 2019 Caitlin Johnstone, Why I Don’t Criticize Russia, China, Or Other Unabsorbed Governments, CaitlinJohnstone.com (30 December 2019) (reformatted)

 

 

In this, Johnstone quoted Noam Chomsky

 

Where and who one is, matters.

 

Chomsky said that:

 

 

My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons.

 

For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also . . . I can do something about it.

 

So even if the US was responsible for 2% of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2% I would be primarily responsible for.

 

And that is a simple ethical judgment.

 

© Americans against Islamophobia, What’s Never Trending on Twitter: U.S. Has Killed Way More People than the LRA’s Joseph Kony, Islamophobia Today (30 December 2019) (quoting Noam Chomsky from an uncited interview)

 

 

The moral? — We do not get to slumber, just 'cause repetitiveness tempts us to feel like it

 

When we do not object to evil, we are complicit in its doing.