Pfc. Sandoval, Ashley Wells, Pat Macpherson, Wisdom Quarterly; Tom Engelhardt (TomDispatch.com), HuffingtonPost.com; DemocracyNow.org, 11-11-13
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| Take your psych meds and commit suicide if you don't "like" it, b-tch!! - Sir, yes, sir! |
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| I should have killed that m@therf@&#$r for calling me a "b-itch" instead of taking it out on those Hajjis and Afghani civilians trying to defend themselves against us. God, I need a drink. |
Today marks Armistice Day and Remembrance Day, now called "Veterans Day" to glorify war heroes and heroines in the US. It is a federal holiday that tries to encourage new recruits to sign up to go on killing missions and to honor, or at least pretend not to forget, about former US men and
women who fought for America's military-industrial complex, the joint corporate-governmental organizations that keep war going.
Veterans continue to face
extremely high levels of planned suicide (brought on by psychotropic medications that bring suicidality on as a known side effect, particularly after iatrogenic addiction to opioid painkillers), unemployment, homelessness, traumatic brain injury,
PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), and homicidal and violent tendencies, particularly when someone secures a job in law enforcement upon returning and concealing one's traumatic brain injury and PTSD symptoms.
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| Racism makes war make sense (Occupy) |
Since 2000, nearly 6,000
service members have experienced traumatic amputations from injuries
caused by improvised explosive devices and other war-related dangers.
Nearly one million active service members have been diagnosed with at
least one mental health disorder since 2000; nearly half of those have
been diagnosed with two or more. Alcoholism and pharmaceutical drug addiction, far from being counted as mental health disorders, are counted as "treatment" when they are causing and contributing to so much of the problem.
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| The Pentagon's pentagram where most wars are planned long in advance of a provocation. And if the MIC is not provoked, a pretext is developed. This is standard operating procedure. |
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| Suicide is murder, too |
According to the Department of Veterans
Affairs, an estimated 22 veterans take their own lives each day. These are just active duty service members; no one is counting former active duty members, whose suicide numbers are much higher. How many years does one have after returning from committing war crimes and getting insufficient to no help at all from the VA, what does anyone expect? The Pentagon is happy to drug anyone who asks for help, because numb zombies can hardly speak up about what America is doing. Whistleblowers are annihilated or "neutralized" for fear that they undermine morale and reduce recruiting numbers.
Last
year, more US military personnel died by their own hands than the
hands of others. On any given night, nearly 63,000 veterans are
homeless. Many suffer chronic debilitating mental health problems. These numbers do not look at wars of old. This is from the new wave of conflicts in the pretext we all accept as the "war on terror," a tactic, making it endless war, having set up an "enemy" we could never exhaust.
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| Sometimes ya have to burn a village. |
Now war is permanent. No peace is at hand. No armistice is possible, because there is no one who could give up if they wanted to. So innocent noncombatants are targeted with drones, likely in the hopes that someone will come fight back. And that will be the enemy. It is like a bully going around pushing and killing other students, daring anyone to come do something about it, thus justifying the military-industrial complex's ongoing terror and war-making.
Democracy Now! was joined today by longtime writer and photographer Ann Jones, author of the
new book, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s
Wars—The Untold Story. More
No "Armistice" for Washington's Global War
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| I was raped for my service. |
It was exactly 95 years ago: the 11th hour of the 11th day of the
11th month of 1918, the moment when major hostilities in the charnel
[ground] that was World War I ended. In 1919, November 11th officially
became "Armistice Day" [marking the cessation of hostilities] in the United States.
As it happened, though,
major hostilities were suspended for just two brief decades before an
even more devastating global war [was begun]. In 1954, nine years after World
War II ended, with the previous "great" conflict having proved [to be] anything
but -- as once advertised -- "the war to end all wars," and the memory of
its armistice fading, the holiday was officially relabeled "Veterans Day" [War-makers Day].
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| Who is being charged for US govt's wars? |
And so it has remained in the second half of the last century and
the first 13 years of this one as those veterans piled up.
There were the
ones from Korea, Vietnam [Cambodia, Laos, and secret wars elsewhere, leaving rarely a single year since the founding of the USA that it was not engaged in making war somewhere, usually in more than one place at a time], and too many American [kinetic or low-level conflict] interventions
to mention.
[There were also in the] new century -- from the
disastrous counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan [with secret bombing runs over and the establishment of US military bases in Pakistan, Waziristan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan...with all eyes on nearby Iran]. (In
Washington's conflicts in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, where the
"soldiers" or "airmen" are generally drone-robots, there really are no
veterans [except the Las Vegas remote controllers suffering PTSD for their war crimes].) More
