BY JAN HAAG
THE CRIMES OF WAR
I WANT TO KNOW
#125
11-09/10-03
For Chungmi
Listening to the radio on a Sunday morning I hear a recapitulation of
Korean war
news that none ever heard fifty years ago,
hear today only on the odd Sunday
morning stations or from
college
campuses or Berkeley or other banished-
to-the-fringes and
marked-to-be-annihilated-by-the-FCC places,
that dozens? hundreds? thousands? hundreds of thousands? of
our U.S.
troops, our boys, our brave boys in khaki, while they were
annihilating villages in Korea, as they were to annihilate villages in
Vietnam,
stood in line (probably in the evening) for access to the
rape rooms.
Joking and laughing, eager for combat they stand in the line
waiting to stick their penises into the bodies of terrified girls
and women. Maybe there were rape rooms for the gay guys, too,
waiting to stick their penises in the assholes of Korean and Vietnam
boys.
Now we've all heard, if we listen carefully to the odd radio
station
or have a friend who wrote a play -- about the Comfort Women
raped,
mutilated, killed by the Japanese -- that these victims slowly,
cautiously have stepped forward to tell their tales.
But what we don't hear, have never heard, is what happens to the other
victims: those lads, the U.S. troops, our boys, our brave boys in khaki
who pulled their penises out of their khaki pants and pushed them
into the fragile bodies of little girls, weeping mothers, sisters,
daughters
who, if they (the girls) were lucky, then died with the smeared,
injected-by-many semen oozing white and viscous from their
gentle-lipped, hidden entrances to the privacy from which
babies slip newborn into the world.
The soldiers, we assume -- because they were the
winners,
the conquerors, the God-on-our-side ones -- lived on:
dozens?
hundreds? thousands? hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops,
our boys,
our brave boys in khaki, our rapists came home and now
walk among us
leading "normal" lives. There's never a whisper about prosecution
for the rapers (whether they be our boys or Japanese or Muslim or
Christian
or Jew) in each war zone where victims, losers, are
shackled in rape rooms
or restrained spread-eagle on the ground by
the lads and their cooperative
buddies so their friends can push their penises into the contorted-by-fear
bodies of young girls, mothers, aunts, grieving grandmothers. In
each
war zone, where this has happened from time immemorial, on each
battle
ground, the lads, our U.S. troops, our boys, our brave boys in
khaki stuff
their limp penises covered with their buddies' semen and the girls'
blood and fear back into their khaki pants, adjust their guns belts,
bring their heavy weapons round front again where they can be
easily grabbed to shoot and walk off. Or, leaning against a tree
or the wall of the rape room, they light a cigarette and enjoy the rumpus
of the later comers, the girls, women, meaty-pieces for penis-hard
men.
What I want to know is: Who are these men now? Do they enjoy sex
with their wives? girlfriends? prostitutes? Are they the ones who
go on
raping in "civil" society? Are they the ones (our congressmen) who vote
for more wars, more combat, more victims so they can go once again
into
the rape rooms, under the trees and stick their battle hardened
penises into
other peoples' mothers, sisters, daughters, aunts, and
maybe the butts
of other soldiers twisting, turning, screaming-not-to-be-raped. Do they
come home, live with their memories? Maybe they are the ones who
declare
themselves for more wars. I, personally, never meet a single
person who defends
the U.S. terrorist attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq,
Haiti, Columbia, Guatemala,
El Salvador, Vietnam and the hundreds of other countries the U.S.A.
has invaded and raped "to bring 'democracy' into the lives of the living
and the dead." We kill in countries not our own, we bomb so
we
can rebuild (at great profit) their infra structures, we rape
those we came to rescue from rape. Yet in the polls, Bush and his henchmen
still stand high. Somebody must vote for them. Are they the old
rapers
with the hard penises? soft now with the horror, the
remembrance of
destroying the bodies, the lives of girls, mothers,
daughters, sisters, aunts.
Are they the ones who need Viagra to get it up just enough to father
a single daughter for their later-in-life pleasure? Who are they, these
dozens?
hundreds? thousands? hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops,
our boys, our brave
boys in khaki brutally screwing their sisters,
screwing the earth, so there
is no place to come home to unhaunted by their hideous memories.
Is
my experience so limited or have all the rapers turned into liberals,
demonstrators, protesters? Do they change their minds once they
experience the "glories" of war or do they want more and more,
more under the trees, in the rape rooms changing procreation
to putrefaction with their terrible pleasures to be
remembered,
lived with, until the day they die? -- victims forever
of man's
uncontrolled terrorism of his human sisters/brothers.
I WANT TO KNOW II
#80
08-11-04
"brainwashing, n. a method for changing attitudes or beliefs, esp.
through
torture or psychological-stress techniques."
p.84, Random House Webster's Dictionary, third edition.
I learn from Amy Goodman's
DEMOCRACY NOW this morning
a few
moments from
the last month of Jeff Lucey's
life.
He
was in Iraq, he was young,
he had never killed or willingly
harmed another, he was ordered
to shoot two Iraqis
point-blank
with a gun. He shot
one in the eye
(saw the light dim in the other)
(the nose was gone and the eye
that had been shot)
and the other
in the chest,
took
their dog-tags
(because he had them when he got home),
wore them
around his neck
left them on his bed
and hung himself.
His parents, Joyce and Kevin
could not fine help for him,
though both they and the doctors
agreed
that Jeff
suffered from
Post-Traumatic-Stress Syndrome.
I find that a,
help-or-no-help, teeth-chatteringly,
nauseating, propagandistic
diagnosis.
Jeff suffered
from being ordered to do an
immoral, criminal,
in-human act by his commanders and his country,
an act which he thought was wrong
and he did not want to do,
but did.
It was not he who was sick. He was the only
sane man among his fellow soldiers,
doctors and distressed
family members.
He knew
it was wrong to kill (two of the
Iraqis America had come to "free")
and, having killed, he could
think of no other way
to right wrong acts
than to kill the
killer:
himself.
Everything else is brainwashing:
the
washing of my brain and your brain,
his Mom's brain and his Dad's,
his doctors and his officers'
brains --
an attempt to
rinse away the human
knowledge that it is wrong to kill,
that
war is a crime
and every act committed within it
criminal;
an attempt to rinse away the human knowledge
that every
moral participant
(the sane ones, the killers) in war ought to
become
a suicide. Jeff was not sick.
He stood up,
he took
the ultimate stand against
being ordered to do what is not moral,
what is not human, what is not humane,
what any sane, honorable,
morally courageous man
should do when forced to do a deadly, criminal
act against his fellows.
I want to know
how the rest of us
listen to the radio, lead our lives,
hear horrors, do horrible
things, allow ourselves
to be brainwashed of our sanity -- so it can
be replaced
with the desires, acts and consciousness of murderers.
Copyright © 2004 Jan Haag
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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