Alan: Against the backdrop of My Lai -- and in the larger context of Uncle Sam's mini-holocausts in Vietnam and Iraq -- I encourage American conservatives to quit their complacent quest to condemn Bowe Bergdahl (with neither "fair trial" nor "presumption of innocence") and to re-direct their energy to demanding formal investigation of Bergdahl's claim that American soldiers used military vehicles to run down Afghan children "for sport."
Here are other references to GI "sport."
Here are other references to GI "sport."
"My Lai Massacre"
Wikipedia
My Lai Massacre
PBS
My Lai Photographs
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Alan: Here is how American conservatives tell Bergdahl's tale:
From The Right Scoop:
"The New York Post just posted an article that details a letter that Bergdahl sent to his parents a few days before he disappeared, telling them he was ashamed to be an American:
Bowe Bergdahl would detail his disillusionment with the Afghanistan campaign in an e-mail to his parents three days before he went missing.“I am sorry for everything here,” he wrote. “These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid.” Bergdahl also complained about fellow soldiers. The battalion commander was a “conceited old fool,” he said, and the only “decent” sergeants, planning to leave the platoon “as soon as they can,” told the privates — Bergdahl then among them — “to do the same.”
“I am ashamed to be an American. And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools,” he concluded. “I am sorry for everything. The horror that is America is disgusting.”"
Alan: Since most truth is revealed in context -- and obscured by cherry-picking -- note the crucial elements deleted from The Right Scoop's citation above:
"I am sorry for everything here," Bowe told his parents. "These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live." He then referred to what his parents believe may have been a formative, possibly traumatic event: seeing an Afghan child run over by an MRAP. "We don't even care when we hear each other talk about running their children down in the dirt streets with our armored trucks... We make fun of them in front of their faces, and laugh at them for not understanding we are insulting them." Bowe concluded his e-mail with what, in another context, might read as a suicide note. "I am sorry for everything," he wrote. "The horror that is america is disgusting." "America's Last Prisoner Of War," Rolling Stone Magazine - http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/americas-last-prisoner-of-war-20120607?page=4
The New York Post, Breitbart Blog and other conservative publications have also elided Bergdahl's description of barbaric behavior by his fellow soldiers. According to Bergdahl, GIs slaughtered Afghan children by running them down with military vehicles, then making light of the dead. http://nypost.com/2014/05/31/the-bizarre-tale-of-americas-last-known-pow/ http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/06/03/Bergdahl-Is-Obama-s-People
At an even deeper level of contextualization, consider University of Michigan History Professor Juan Cole's essay, "Terrorism And The Other Religions". http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/04/terrorism-and-other-religions-juan-cole.html
Here is a pertinent (and fact checkable) pie chart from Cole's article:
The unpalatable truth is this: Relentless slaughter has been Christian "civilization's" modus operandi for centuries.
Butchery is what "good" white people do best.
George Carlin: "We Like War Because We're Good At It" (Video)
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/george-carlin-we-like-war-because-were.html
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In recent decades, American conservatives have grown chthonically apprehensive that Revelation will yank back the curtain on Christendom's glibly-justified carnage.
To forfend the horror of this realization -- and consequent psychological disintegration -- conservatives have made it their business, at least since St. Ronald, to represent America as an exceptional "shining city on a hill."
And to burnish that bogus brilliance they countenance NO naysaying.
The "debate" has been closed and will not be re-opened.
At stake is The Conservative Project's very survival and therefore not one "conservative" in a hundred will risk illuminating the dark.
Truth be damned.
"The Way and The Life" as well?
Since "the best defense is a good offense," conservatives are incandscently committed to the platitudes inscribed on Orwell's "Ministry of Truth."
"WAR IS PEACE"
"FREEDOM IS SLAVERY"
"IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH"
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"1984"
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It is time to restore perspective and proportion to The Body Politic.
"Thomas Aquinas On American Conservatives' Continual Commission Of Sin"
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It is time conservatives grew up, stopped simpering, and undertook the "personal responsibility" whose Pharisaic preachment is ever on their lips.
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"Yeshua Excoriates His Fellow Pharisees"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/08/yeshua-excoriates-fellow-pharisees-woe.html
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If Bergdahl found himself participating in an operation that killed children for amusement, desertion might have been -- or might understandably have been perceived as -- the only moral option left.
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