The Good, the Bad and the Crazy (Saul Landau)

[rabs]

(Tongue-in-cheek article, but on a serious issue -- terrorism. Good read.)

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The political elite and its stenographic media don’t classify types of terrorists. If they did we would get the good, the bad and the crazy.

Since no one is perfect, the virtuous purveyors of death and destruction naturally need flexibility. Mistakes occasionally occur. For example, when US drones – a basic weapon for virtuous terrorists -- routinely whack civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and other remote areas, the Pentagon occasionally admits its honest mistake. The drone directors, of course, had every reason to believe that the corpses, when alive, were terrorists and not school children and housewives.

Similarly, in late July when NATO bombs destroyed a hospital in Libya, the spokespeople for that once anti-Soviet defense organization admitted to yet another well-meaning error. Had the bomb hit the evil (everyone knows that!) Col. Gadaffi’s troops or supporters, they inferred, a humanitarian cause would have been served. After all, look what that the treacherous Gadaffi had done to the United States and Western Europe! (Why he had even cut deals with Western oil companies and abandoned his nuclear weapons program; not having learned the lesson from Iraq, he made himself vulnerable.)

While the world followed Libyan and Afghan wars in which “Good terrorist” bombs blew away scores of bad people and bad-terrorist bombs blew away additional scores of good ones, few paid attention (certainly not the mass media) to the June celebration in Hialeah Florida. Mayor Carlos Hernandez invited the media to “join us at our next City Council Meeting where Cuban activist & artist Luis Posada Carriles will receive the Key to the City of Hialeah, along with a proclamation naming the day Luis Posada Carriles Day in Hialeah.”

The invitation explained that Posada “is being honored for his unwavering dedication towards advancing democracy and demanding freedom in Cuba and the western hemisphere.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/landau08052011.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. I think that Landau may have the right idea here. Serious debate is not possible...

...in the "western world" as it is. Only "black comedy" is adequate to address what is happening.

I am reminded that Jonathan Swift got so in a rage at the thuggery and dumfuckery of the rich, he had to run up and down the stairs of his house to work off his outrage. Proposing that the English aristocracy eat Irish babies as the economic "solution" for Ireland was not really satire; it was a shave too close to what was actually occurring.

The movie "Dr. Strangelove" also comes to mind. It was really not an exaggeration of the psychosis and dumbfuckery that seized U.S. civilian and military leadership during the "anti-communist" era.

These two responses to the vicious profiteering of the rich and the corporate of their day were better than all other political commentary. We need something like that to describe the Wonderlandish "Mad Tea Party" malevolence of the current bastards running the world. (And there's another one: Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass"--not a fairy tale at all, but commentary on the upside down, inside out, backwards world of Victorian political and social hypocrisy. Only the 'maddest" of commentary could actually describe it.)

Kudos to Saul Landau for addressing the utter madness that has seized our world once again. I, too, have been particularly struck by the mind-bogglingness of these drone bombers flying here and there, missing, slaughtering innocent people--and, in Libya, slaughtering rebels, civilians and the loyal Libyan military alike--the U.S. apologizing as they "test out" their latest diabolical "high tech" death-dealer on random human beings, and nobody giving a goddamn, at least according to the corpo-fascist press. There are probably people who give a goddamn somewhere but they don't count.

One thing I did NOT expect is that the Obamites would be worse than the Bushwhacks. But, you know, they are, in some particular chilling ways. Libya, for one. They didn't even bother with the formality of lying to Congress. No discussion. War by presidential fiat. Yeah, maybe it's just an itsy bitsy little war. What, me worry? (Thank you, MAD magazine!)