Fear, Loathing and Allergies

How can the weekend massacre of at least 16 sleeping Afghan citizens get any more shocking and disgusting? When the New York Times goes along with the U.S. government's propaganda machine, and attempts to whitewash what was essentially an act of terror into a pesky glitch. They bemoan the fact that this temporary aberration in our humanitarian effort makes us look bad. How unfair is it that the Taliban will get to seize on an "unfortunate event" by a lone gunman for some propaganda? The Times quotes one unnamed American military official as saying "the fear is that all these incidents, taken together, play into the Taliban’s account of how we treat the Afghan religion and people. And while we all know that’s a false account — think how many the Taliban have killed, and never once taken responsibility — it’s a very hard perception to combat.”

Yeah, it's hard out there for an invading military machine which commits atrocity after atrocity, night raid after night raid, drone attack after drone attack, to actually be called out for committing them by the real bad guys, isn't it?

The Times goes on to make the diagnosis that the Afghan people have developed an "understandable allergy" to a decade of American occupation. As one reader pointed out in the comments section, the use of the word "allergy" in describing the outrage and despair of an occupied people is cavalierly dismissive. An allergy, after all, is an abnormal reaction to an innocuous substance. In its insidious choice of words, The Times is deriding blowback by the victims of American imperialism as an unhealthy overreaction. An earlier article in the same newspaper describes the American invaders as being under siege:

American officials scrambled Monday to understand why a veteran Army staff sergeant, a married father of two only recently deployed here, left his base a day earlier to massacre at least 16 civilians, 9 of them children, in a rural stretch of southern Afghanistan. The devastating, unexplained attack deepened the sense of siege for Western personnel in this country, as denunciations brought a moment of unity to three major Afghan factions: civilians, insurgents and government officials.

Not once to we hear any details from "the paper of record" about the actual victims of this massacre. A  majority were children, but like all "collateral damage", any vestige of the human beings they once were has been glossed over in favor of how their inconvenient deaths have presented a dilemma to the American overlords.  The real victims are the maligned invaders, it would appear. This is like the kid who murders his parents and then whines to the judge about being left an orphan. Here is my own comment in response to the Times article:

The unnamed military official quoted in this article has some chutzpah. He has the nerve to complain that this massacre and other abuses will be used as propaganda fodder by the Taliban, and that the occupying Americans are just warm cuddly puppies who totally respect the people whose Korans they burn and whose corpses they desecrate? This is either an indication of monumental ignorance, or imperialistic arrogance of epic proportions.

The Afghan people have been occupied against their will for a decade. The children murdered in what was really an act of terrorism have never lived in a country that was not occupied. And all the Americans seem to care about is how this "isolated" bad behavior puts a monkeywrench into their strategy and their psy-ops campaigns to win hearts and minds.

The American response to these outrages is always the same: express some shallow and unctuous regrets, throw some bags of cash at the impoverished "collateral damage", promise some vague accountability, cover up as much as possible, claim that these escalating abuses are isolated instances and above all, blame the victims if they continue to resist the benevolence of their invaders.

President Obama fit in his condolence call to Hamid Karzai while riding in his limo on his way to watch his own kid play basketball on Sunday. While he considers the massacre "tragic and shocking" it in "no way represents the exceptional character of our military."

We ought to rename this country the United States of Arrogance.