by John Kelly, International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic (Irish Section)
Supporting the International Conference “The Hague Proceedings against Slobodan Milosevic: Emerging Issues in International Law”
We live in strange times. When fun is equated with destruction and murder. Consider if you will this comment summarising a personal military ethos and directed to us by former latrine orderly US Marine officer Lieutenant General James Mattis…
“It´s fun to shoot some people. You go into Afghanistan, you´ve got guys who slap women around for five years because they don´t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain´t got no manhood anyway, so it´s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.” It was this same Lieutenant General Mattis who dismissed photographic evidence of the slaughter by US-led forces of dozens of people at an Iraqi wedding party last year.
Among the dead were 27 members of the extended Rakat family their wedding guests and even the band of musicians hired to play at the ceremony. 11 of the dead were women. 14 were children.
In November last year Operation Phantom obliterated the historic and beautiful city of Falluja in Iraq the home of over 300,000 people before the merciless onslaught by US forces. Hundreds of thousands of children and an equal number of the sick and the elderly have died in Iraq as a direct result of sanctions imposed on Iraq by the United Nations.
There were no weapons of mass destruction so Iraq constituted no threat to countries in the West. Clearly the specific purpose to invading Iraq was to reduce the country to third world status and lessen its influence in the Middle East on behalf of Israel and corporate interests across the globe.
World populations conditioned through the media principally to accepting the basic concept of the “enemy” and the “alien” respond in Pavlovian fashion to such words as “evil” and “dictator” and are correspondingly evoked into a war like mode and disposition and as often as not this leads to a manufactured desire for revenge.
The unrelenting remorseless media demonisation of the Serbian people and President Slobodan Milosevic serves as exemplar without parallel of this Orwellian consciousness controlling process.
War is an immensely profitable enterprise for a relatively small number of people for whom it is an absolute necessity to control the consciousness or to put it another way annihilate the consciousness of millions of people across the globe.
The most effective way to do this is through sensationalism which is basically a disguised form of sadomasochism. In short you create a desire for and addiction to all that is sensational.
Public crucifixions were certainly sensational as were public beheadings and hangings and gladiatorial contests. Unquestionably all this blood letting paved the way for an acceptance of slaughter unlimited in mass warfare.
Desensitisation is the purpose of this exercise. In this blood soaked age the capacity to desensitise the great mass of people everywhere is truly phenomenal. Drugs and excessive use of alcohol and an addiction to loveless and mechanistic style pornography obliterating any concept of affection or consideration for others is projected as “normal” and all that is debased and meretricious and gratuitously violent is daily fare on television screens across the world. No longer are we afforded time to reflect as we are ceaselessly besought by the deceivers and would be manipulators of the collective consciousness to “move forward” as we are bade quite sternly to “come to terms with” grief and loss and the leave taking of loved ones and matters over which we may have little or no control but nevertheless require reflection.
Perhaps we should resist this cold blooded imperative to live precisely in the moment as we might perhaps challenge the martial call to “move forward” perceiving it to be in no way concerned with our personal or collective welfare but rather to be a directive to conform to an ethos of a militaristic even imperialistic ethos.
In the struggle for truth, justice and peace over imperialism and warfare join the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic in its support of President Slobodan Milosevic and other Yugoslav political prisoners who are currently on trial at the US/NATO sponsored “tribunal” in The Hague.
John Kelly
International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic (Irish Section)
For further information please do not hesitate to contact us at:
cdsmireland@eircom.net Tel: +044 45787 or +086 1963134 http://www.icdsmireland.org/ (ICDSM Ireland)
