Pleased to Meet You, Hope You Guess
My Name
by Not Sure
20 November 2022
The Rape of Nanjing (Nanking) starting December 13, 1937, was a massacre that lasted six weeks, with mass gang-rapes, and contests between officers to see who could kill the most people. It is estimated that more than 300,000 men, women and children were murdered. Between 20,000 and 80,000 women and children were raped or sodomized. People were disemboweled. Many were decapitated and their heads put on pikes. Some were slowly cut into pieces until they died. Others were burned alive. Rows of children were beheaded by samurai-wielding officers. Some witnesses said they saw babies cut out of the wombs of their mothers and fed to dogs.
***
"In Quảng Trị City, I had
a friend who was working for USAID. He
was advisor to an Army group, and he asked me if I would like to accompany him
into a village to see how they [the villagers] act. So I went with him
and they didn't find any enemy but they found a woman…she was questioned by
about six Army [personnel]…then they shot her.
She was dead and this guy came over, he was a former Major for twenty
years and he got hungry again and came over and was [also] working for USAID, (U.S.
Aid and International Development). And
he went over there and ripped her clothes off and took a knife and
cut from her vagina, well, just about all the way up to her breast
and pulled her organs out, just about all the way out of her cavity and then he
stopped and knelt over her and began to pull every inch of skin off her body
and left her there as a sign for something or other."
- An American veteran speaking at the Winter Soldier Investigation, Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 1971. Testimony used for 1972 film Winter Soldier.
Figure 1 Winter Soldier Interrogation
“Just after
the man killed the Vietnamese, a woman came out of the village, and someone
knocked her down and Medina shot her with his M16 rifle. I was fifty or sixty
feet from him and saw this. There was no reason to shoot this girl. Mitchell,
Conti, Meadlo, Stanley, and the rest of the squad and
the command group must have seen this. It was pure out-and-out murder.
Then our squad
entered the village. We were making sure no one escaped from the village.
Seventy-five or a hundred yards inside the village we came to where the
soldiers had collected fifteen or more Vietnamese men, women, and children in a
group. Medina said, “Kill everybody. Leave no one standing.”
- PFC Herbert L. Carter, from Wabash County, IN, describes atrocities committed at My Lai.
Figure 2 My Lai Massacre
"Four
Soviet soldiers who deserted in Afghanistan said yesterday that the military
intervention was taking a toll on the soldiers, whom they described as
demoralized by harsh conditions and wide drug use as well as the perils of
battle in a hostile environment.
The four
deserters, speaking at a news conference in New York, said that indiscriminate
killing of civilians, brutal treatment of soldiers by their officers and
widespread illness were among the problems affecting the soldiers.
'Some Soviet
soldiers are so filled with rage that they kill everyone they see,' said one of
the deserters, Alexei Peresleni, a 20-year-old
sergeant. 'A war is a war and a soldier is a soldier.
We're no different from the way American soldiers were in Vietnam. The fighting
is very indiscriminate.'"
- August 3, 1984, New York Times article, 4 Soviet Deserters Tell of Cruel Afghan War
Figure 3 Russia Leaves Kabul
“On Aug. 16,
the day after Kabul fell to the Taliban, the Veterans Crisis Line received a
nearly 12 percent increase in calls, compared to the volume of calls last year
on the same day. On Aug. 25, the call line had a 17 percent increase compared
to the previous year. Miller clarified that the VA doesn’t know if the uptick
is directly attributable to the situation in Afghanistan and attributing any
suicide to one particular cause vastly oversimplifies
complex mental health challenges. But
it’s clear that many veterans are struggling to watch a country that they
fought in for 20 years now fall to the Taliban.”
- August 29, 2021, Shannon Vavra for The Daily Beast
Figure 4 U.S. Leaves Kabul
Photographer
Eddie Adams took a photograph of General Nguyễn
Ngọc Loan just before Loan executed a Vietcong
prisoner. This iconic photo won awards
for Adams, who had a few regrets about the picture. He said that two people died. The prisoner and the general, because that
imaged messed up the general’s life, who was “doing his duty.” Adams said, “Still photographs are the
most powerful weapons in the world. People believe them; but photographs do
lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths…” An Unlikely Weapon was a documentary made
about Adams in 2008. Adams said, “They
say the written word is bullshit. The
picture is what does it.”
I’ve never had a problem with
the written word. I understand we’re in
the visual age and most people can’t be bothered to read. But I can “see” things in my
imagination. When I read that a man took
a knife and cut a woman from her vagina to just below her breasts, I can “see”
that, and I see it in a way that a picture could never capture. Anyone who has ever quartered a chicken or a
turkey, raw or cooked, will understand the effort involved in cutting through
flesh and bone. Even a sharp knife needs
a bit of muscle behind it to make quick work of the job. To cut all the skin off a woman’s body would require
both concentration and patience. A picture
couldn’t convey that effort.
Figure 5 Eddie Adams photo - Execution of Nguyen Van Lem
But the still photograph can etch an image onto our psyches in a way that even “moving pictures” cannot, because we are swept up into the movement. We become part of the action and don’t have time to absorb each image. Yet film too lies often, with or without manipulation. We all know now that an enterprising captain of a battalion saw some restless Iraqis gathered in Baghdad’s Firdos Square and a while later we saw footage of angry Iraqi citizens toppling Saddam Hussein’s statue. We weren’t shown the crane of an M-88 Hercules tank. The “hundreds” gathered in the square were mostly reporters and Marines.
Before the embedded journalists of the Gulf War we had photojournalism and war photography has often been staged. The iconic Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima photograph was actually a picture of the second flag planted that day. A larger flag in the afternoon to replace the flag that had been raised in the morning. A very real event, but with some staging nonetheless.
Figure 6 Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima
In this Redux, an hour excerpt from Alan Watt’s talk of February 14, 2021, which was more than four hours, Alan gives listeners a profound lesson on how class distinctions are made and used, for raising generations of “warriors” who will carry out the geopolitical aims of the ruling class. These soldiers are often pulled from the “lower” classes and are heavily indoctrinated with the mythologies of their nation. The young men willingly go to war to defend their country against gooks, slant-eyes, slits, Huns, Boche, barbarians, commie-pinkos and Japs. The enemy is demonized, stripped of their humanity.
Alan
said, “But from ancient
Greece to Rome, all the way up to the British Empire, then the American Empire,
it's always the same thing. You must always tell your troops you're going off
to... that's what they said when they went into…INTO Iraq, right, Operation
Iraqi Freedom, what they called it. What
a... how pitiful was that? Pitiful. And
here it is, the natives of that country looking at these American troops, and
the American troops were cussing and swearing at them, saying, we're bringing
you democracy, you stupid so-and-so's, you know. And here's the natives who are looking at
them in bewilderment. Because they didn't want your idea, they knew that you didn't
have democracy, Mr. G.I. Joe. But
you certainly have been brainwashed, 'eh?
Spouting off democracy to a people who had their own system, whether you
like it or not, it's their system. It's not a matter of, you don't invade
countries because you don't like certain things, you see. Because then what are
you going to do when some tyrant wants to invade you because he doesn't like
certain things either?”
Alan wasn’t chiding or mocking
those who believe that they are fighting for a righteous cause, but he was
telling us that this system of class and money turns us against each other
rather than recognizing the precariousness of our own lives within the
system. The “elite” have long classed
poverty as a mental illness, yet everything is designed to keep us “in our
place” or blissfully blind to how we’re all just a paycheck or two away from
disaster. He makes a point of
highlighting Hollywood’s utter contempt for the people and region from whom so
many soldiers are pulled, the Southern states of the U.S. He also talked of the irony of conquered
people (India, Scotland) who become some of best soldiers, fighting for those
who destroyed their own cultures, sometimes not even a generation earlier.
In
researching this piece, I found a 2020 article from Children’s Health Defense
that said, “US military members are routinely taking up to 19 prescription
medications to enhance performance and reduce stress. The collateral damage is
that, when current active duty, reserve members, and the National Guard are
included, 20 veterans die by suicide every day in the US.” Other articles have stated that at present,
American veterans exist on a drug regimen of up to 15 different
medications. Regardless of the positive
benefits some of these drugs might have, the cumulative side effects of that
many prescriptions must be harmful.
Alan talked about those who end
up with PTSD and the further harm that may be done to them by the psychoactive
medications they take. He said, “The
way you FIX the problem is to DEAL with things that are causing the problem…There's consequences to all of this. It's consequences to our actions as
well. M-hm. Because without what seems to be the obvious
visible things you're fighting for, I mean, in other words, for the propaganda
that you’re fed, if you don't see it in action, the real propaganda, well they
told me it was going to be this and that and the whole thing, and those folks
aren't as bad as they make them out to be.
But without all of that, you see, and you're still killing them, y'know, once there's a conflict in your mind, that's you. And it's drug time. And they'll, yeah, they can keep you going
for tour after tour after tour doing that kind of thing if they want to. Then
it's your problem later on. It is your
problem. Who else is it, 'eh? It's you that's taking the drugs to flatten
your emotions.”
That struck me as such an
important point. It’s when the
propaganda stops working that the conflict in one’s mind really kicks in. There’s a total disconnect between what you’ve
been told and what you’re seeing with your own eyes.
All of
my reading and researching reminded me of a documentary I saw a few years ago
entitled Winter Soldier. This
film was released in 1972 from footage shot during what was referred to as the
Winter Soldier Investigation which lasted from January 31 to February 2 of
1971. The media event and veteran
testimony was sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to publicize
war crimes and atrocities committed by the United States Armed Forces and their
allies. The event got very little
coverage outside of Detroit and some media organizations tried to discredit the
authenticity of the participants. The Detroit
Free Press checked all military records against the Department of Defense
and verified that all witnesses were veterans of the Vietnam War.
One of the initial supporters of
the event was the actress, Jane Fonda.
Fortunately for the long-term impact of the film, it was decided that
she and some other controversial figures would not participate in the
investigation or the film. A series of
fundraising events and concerts leading up to the investigation had included
performances by Fonda, actor Donald Sutherland (whose son Kiefer narrated An
Unlikely Weapon), concerts by David Crosby and Graham Nash and the folk
singer Phil Ochs.
John Kerry, a decorated veteran
with two Purple Hearts, Bronze and Silver stars, joined Vietnam Veterans
Against the War upon his return home and participated in the investigation and
film. Kerry was born into the wealthy Forbes family, and his father’s career
included the Army Air Corps and the Foreign Service. He would go on to become a
Senator, the 68th Secretary of State under President Obama. He is now the first Presidential Special
Envoy for Climate.
What is important about this
film is not the celebrities who swirled around in the shadows but the faces and
voices of the young veterans who wanted to find a way to deal with their
conflicted feelings about what they were involved in. One of the veterans who had been a pilot
smiled incongruently as he described seeing VC thrown out of helicopters on
quite a few occasions. A commenter on
one of the sites where the film was uploaded ascribed the smile to a sort of
nervous response to a painful situation; a not atypical reaction of someone
suffering with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
They describe situations and events so horrific that the viewer is left
in disbelief or incomprehension. These
events are referred to as SOP. Standard
Operating Procedure.
The My Lai Massacre took place
on March 16, 1968. Between 347 and 504
unarmed people were killed by U.S. Army soldiers. The victims included men, women, children and
infants. Some of the women were
gang-raped and mutilated. Children as
young as twelve were raped, their bodies mutilated. There were cover-up
attempts and then the subsequent blame of 2nd Lt. William Calley and his trial.
News of the massacre did not reach the American public until Seymour
Hersh published a story on November 13, 1969.
It was said about Vietnam that
this was the first war that played on televisions in living rooms across the
world, especially in America, and that watching the daily footage of bloody and
chaotic scenes sickened the American people and support for the war waned. When the public became aware of the My Lai
Massacre, the protest movement picked up steam.
At a glance,
it might seem that awareness of what happened at My Lai would make the
revelations of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War easier to comprehend and
accept, yet the VVAW was boycotted by most news outlets. Many organizations
attempted to discredit those veterans who chose to participate in the
Investigation. One of the stated goals of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War
in their presentation of the Winter Soldier Investigations was to show that the
atrocities they recounted were not the actions of a rogue soldier (a reference
to Lt. Calley and My Lai) but were Standard Operating
Procedure.
Abu Ghraib was one of Iraq’s
most notorious prisons under Saddam Hussein.
After the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military used the prison as a
detention facility. In 2003, Amnesty
International published reports of human rights violations by the U.S.
military. Abuses included not giving
prisoners clothing and denying them sleep for extended periods of time. U.S. soldiers physically abused and
humiliated prisoners. The George W. Bush
administration said these were isolated cases and not U.S. military
policy. Eleven soldiers were charged,
court martialed, sentenced to military prison and dishonorably discharged.
Figure 7 Prisoner on a Leash - Abu Ghraib
This type of abuse has nothing
to do with protecting one’s country or fellow citizens. This is something dark that is unleashed and
encouraged. The young veterans who spoke
in Winter Soldier described their training as being focused on seeing
the enemy as something not even human.
One soldier recounted that when he was on his tour of duty an officer
spotted a little bracelet that he wore.
The soldier told his superior officer that it had been a little gift
from a Vietnamese boy. The officer made
him remove the bracelet immediately.
There is no room in war for any sentiment that humanizes the other side.
What struck me most about the
film was a couple of young men who felt compelled to speak to save others from
participating in something that they might not be able to live with later. Several of them were thinking about the kind
of indoctrination that they had received their whole lives that made violence
seem fun. One man said, “It’s in the
cartoons. We grow up with this.”
Winter Soldier was 1971. Abu Ghraib was 2003. The suffering amongst active-duty soldiers and veterans has gotten worse. The 2018 Department of Defense Suicide Report said 47% of active duty suicides had zero deployments. Veterans aged 18-34 had almost double the rate of suicides as older veterans. According to an article from Children’s Health Defense, “One possibility is the increasing trend of military suicides in the US began in 2006 and is temporally correlated with the Pentagon’s 2006 policy that permitted and encouraged SSRI medications.”
“Total load” of prescription drugs is another factor. “A Veteran Affairs study of 157 veterans with PTSD reported an average use of 6.4 ± 3.8 prescribed drugs with a maximum of 19 prescribed drugs. These drugs were from the following 17 categories: anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, anxiolytics, hypnotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, anti-cholinergics, anti-convulsants, anti-hypertensives, diuretics, cardiovascular drugs, diabetes drugs, dyslipidemia drugs, analgesics, anti-inflammatory drugs, gastrointestinal drugs, and narcotics.”
In
this talk, Alan Watt said “But the
modern drugs that the military are on, by prescription, are, it's incredible,
what an amazing cocktail. They've always had articles breaking out in the
military magazines about these cocktails that they’re on now, now that they are
keeping them in with tour after tour for years at a time sometimes, some of
these tours. They can break them up, but
they're in the military for years, you see. Even when they come back on leave,
they're kept on this drug, this heavy drug state, and they're prescribed them
like candy by the doctors. Even on the bases. We've had articles recently again
about that in the US and Canada and other countries. There are no questions asked about them, keep
them drugged, keep their emotional response flat. And that's what these drugs do to you, they
flatten responses.”
It’s THE system, THE agenda that
Alan described in such detail. A class
system keeps us divided. Nobody wants to
be poor. We are taught to look upon
those with less (less money, less education, less privilege) as not quite
human, so in that way CLASS makes enemies.
Those in the middle class agree with those in the upper class that the
lower class must be sub-human or somehow mentally deficient. Yet those in the upper class see themselves
as a separate species from all below them.
They’ve no more in common with a middle manager than with a factory
worker or the man who mows their lawn.
Divided in this way, we cannot see our common enemy.
Seattle is Dying was made
in 2019 and as Alan said, that was before Covid came along. Drug use, tent cities. Prescription drug abuse, in
particular oxycodone, is highlighted in the excellent 2013 documentary, Oxyana.
In 2009, there was a 20/20 Diane
Sawyer special on poverty and an epidemic of prescription drug use in the
Appalachians entitled A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains. I was only able to find an intro to the
full-length show, but in that intro the narrator is talking about a hero of a
war and says “The Appalachians has lost more men and women to America’s wars
than any other part of the American nation.”
In this talk, Alan talked about how Scottish young men were used as
soldiers for England’s wars and said, “It's interesting to watch the same
thing that's happened in the US, exactly the same thing, from the same, a lot
of the same stock actually that was soaked up by America, that came from
Britain, from England and Scotland and Wales and Ireland. You can see it too,
the ones that Hollywood hates, [Alan chuckles.] through their movies all the
time in the South, y'know, where the same stock
eventually were deported from Scotland and places like that. They became, again, the bodies, they'd fill
the uniforms up, they'd supply the bodies to fill the uniforms.”
In World War I,
there were about 40 million who died, including 16 million military
personnel. That war has often been
called a war of attrition. Which side
had the most men in the trenches they could send out into the open battlefield
to be mowed down. I’ve often wondered
what it would feel like to be in the trench that smelled of blood, rotting
flesh, urine and feces, waiting for your turn to be sent over the top. The horror of attrition is vividly captured
in the movie Gallipoli.
The casualties of
World War II are numbered at between 75-80 million. Amphetamines were widely used by both
sides. Benzedrine. Bennies.
Cocaine was used in both world wars.
Alcohol has long been used in militaries around the world, through history. “Liquid courage.” A 1971 U.S. Department of Defense report
stated that half of all military personnel had used cannabis.
Alan said, “Once they come out of the military they're kept
on these drugs as much as possible. That's why they're wrecks. A lot of them end up on the streets, these
guys. Because little bits creep back into them, then you try to say, well who
am I? What am I? Did I do that? Y'know? Why did I do
that?”
Those were the questions several of the young men in Winter Soldier were asking themselves. “Did I do that?” “Why did I do that?”
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is real. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs reports that in any given year 11-20% of all veterans suffer from PTSD. That’s a very high percentage.
In this system we’re born into, WE the little people are used as cannon fodder for geopolitics we’ll never fully comprehend and for the theft of resources. Some people do write editorials asking why NATO troops were guarding poppy fields in Afghanistan. Every war gets lots of coverage and depending on the era, we crawl under our desks in an odd training exercise to minimize exposure to an atomic bomb (!) or we cry over the pictures of babies born with birth defects due to Agent Orange.
Figure 8 Baby with Agent Orange birth defects
We pick a side, and we scream at the television, venting our two minutes of hate. What changes? Another generation is born, grows in their indoctrination and is used in their turn. All that is different now is that the war upon us has been so effective. Our willingness to comply has brought us right into the Painless Concentration Camp of the Mind.
Alan:
“So, self-destruction,
once cultural domination by another group has been put upon them, always
happens. Mainly towards the men. And it's encouraged. And it's no more as
evident as in the American education system today where they literally teach
you not just about what ethnic group is responsible, to be hated about
everything, but also what gender mainly. And that's taught by taxpayers’ money,
'eh. So, they get churned out hating the
males. Quite something isn't it? And you
think somehow that's all quite normal? This is warfare, this is literal warfare
upon you.
That's also what's taught in
preparation for genocides in the past, and maybe the future. You always name
your enemy, blame them for all the world's problems, and all your problems,
demonize them, put them into third-rate status, and in a nation or, y'know, even an Empire, third-rate status you see until
they're nobodies, ridicule them, lambaste them, teach the public to hate them,
all in preparation for what? Generally, their annihilation, folks.
And I don't wish for things.
There's no point in wishing for things. But it would be nice if folk started to
realize what's going on. That would be nice, wouldn't it? But I don't put out much hope for that
because the massive psychological indoctrinations system is pretty
well perfected. It was perfected when Bertrand Russell wrote his books
in the 1940s and 50s, and onwards. He said that, you know, if they can get the
children young enough, he said, it doesn’t matter.”
I’m with Alan. “There's no point in wishing for things.” But it really would be nice if people
didn’t turn away from horror because it isn’t happening to them. It would be nice if instead of a simplistic
little picture of reality the way we’ve been indoctrinated to see it, we could
handle a thousand words about WHAT IS.
© Not Sure
Additional reading/viewing:
Winter Soldier (1972) - US veterans testified war crimes in Vietnam.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/OQGNnCUZWksf/
Pharma Loaded U.S. Soldier Part 1: Taking Inventory of Risks
4 Soviet Deserters Tell of Cruel Afghanistan War
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/08/03/world/4-soviet-deserters-tell-of-cruel-afghanistan-war.html
Association between Agent Orange and birth defects: systematic review
and meta-analysis
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16543362/
Veteran and Military Mental Health Issues
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34283458/
Substance use disorders in military veterans: prevalence and treatment
challenges
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5587184/
Oxyana
https://www.bitchute.com/video/FMA7LrMMHoYj/
Seattle is Dying
https://www.bitchute.com/video/zUrXmrYozFHW/
A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains (intro)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOo2uETKuFs