Since I last wrote about the bipartisan shrieking, hysterical reaction to Trump’s planned military withdrawal from Syria the other day, it hasn’t gotten better, it’s gotten worse. I’m having a hard time even picking out individual bits of the collective freakout from the political/media class to point at, because doing so would diminish the frenetic white noise of the paranoid, conspiratorial, fearmongering establishment reaction to the possibility of a few thousands troops being pulled back from a territory they were illegally occupying.
Endless war and military expansionism has become so normalized in establishment thought that even a slight scale-down is treated as something abnormal and shocking. The talking heads of the corporate state media had been almost entirely ignoring the buildup of US troops in Syria and the operations they’ve been carrying out there, but as soon as the possibility of those troops leaving emerged, all the alarm bells started ringing. Endless war was considered so normal that nobody ever talked about it, then Trump tweeted he’s bringing the troops home, and now every armchair liberal in America who had no idea what a Kurd was until five minutes ago is suddenly an expert on Erdoğan and the YPG. Lindsey Graham, who has never met an unaccountable US military occupation he didn’t like, is now suddenly cheerleading for congressional oversight: not for sending troops into wars, but for pulling them out....
It is absolutely bat shit crazy that we feel normal about the most powerful military force in the history of civilization running around the world invading and occupying and bombing and killing, yet are made to feel weird about the possibility of any part of that ending. It is absolutely bat shit crazy that endless war is normalized while the possibility of peace and respecting national sovereignty to any extent is aggressively abnormalized. In a sane world the exact opposite would be true, but in our world this self-evident fact has been obscured. In a sane world anyone who tried to convince you that war is normal would be rejected and shunned, but in our world those people make six million dollars a year reading from a teleprompter on MSNBC.
How did this happen to us? How did we get so crazy and confused?...Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue Journalist
Endless War Has Been Normalized And Everyone Is Crazy
Caitlin Johnstone
3 comments:
How? $6m a year (or more).
Economics 101.
How did this happen to us? How did we get so crazy and confused?...
The Baby Boomers: From Give Peace a Chance to Give Blowing People to Pieces a Chance?
I are one but was always at odds with my generation.
More seriously, ignorance or disbelief* of the Bible, especially the Old Testament.
Otherwise, we would never have had a government-privileged usury cartel in the US.
*John Calvin argued that the prohibition on usury did not apply to "business" loans. There is no such distinction in the Bible; instead usury was only allowed from foreigners (Deuteronomy 23:19-20).
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