photo above: Spec Ops Magazine
WN: In short, Canada’s Special Operations Regiment (CSOR), are a bunch of trained hitmen. There is no declared war Canada is in1. Testimonials are ubiquitous that intelligence gathered by CSOR and others by its very nature is often faulty, frequently manipulated, at best uncertain, at worst invitation to open slaughter of innocents–not unlike drone warfare.
That Canada is still knee-deep in the global post-9/11 war against terror is a fact that its citizens seem to have little time for.—Canadians avoiding debate on role in war on terror, by .
The Spec Ops Magazine has delightful titles like: “Official longest confirmed sniper kill.” How stirring a thing to know! How proud one feels of these Canadian homegrown assassins. What a wonderful skillset to return to Canada with! And “heroes” such as “American Sniper” Chris Kyle are tragically sick role models–Kyle himself victim of an assassin (“. . . for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”–Jesus, Matthew 26:52) . . . Little wonder that some upon return home continue “open season” on their domestic enemies. After all, it really isn’t “murder,” just “poaching out of season” . . .
Who but God knows who and how many fell victim to wanton slaughter in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, etc.–by the CSOR “Good Guys”? For instance (from my Front Page):
The Vietnam War is classic instance of what it means for America to be “leader of the free world.” It was prosecuted under five Presidents: from Eisenhower to Nixon, 1955 to 1975. The New York Times ran an article in 2003 about a series published by The Toledo Blade, based upon accounts of several Vietnam War veterans, entitled “Report on Brutal Vietnam Campaign Stirs Memories.” The article reads in part:
The report, published in October [2003] and titled ‘Rogue G.I.’s Unleashed Wave of Terror in Central Highlands,’ said that in 1967, an elite unit, a reconnaissance platoon in the 101st Airborne Division, went on a rampage that the newspaper described as ‘the longest series of atrocities in the Vietnam War.2
“Vietnam was an atrocity from the get-go,” [one veteran] said in a recent telephone interview. “It was that kind of war, a frontless war of great frustration. There were hundreds of My Lais. You got your card punched by the numbers of bodies you counted.”—The Toledo Blade, “Report on Brutal Vietnam Campaign Stirs Memories.”
Sir Winston Churchill and Allies however used the language of inducing massive citizen terror in support of Britain’s Bomber Command headed by Sir Arthur Harris. We read:
An Associated Press war correspondent named Howard Cowan soon filed a dispatch (which inexplicably cleared the censors) stating that “the Allied air commanders have made the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of German population centers as a ruthless expedient to hastening Hitler’s doom.” The report was widely circulated in the United States, to awkward effect. Among other things, Cowan’s phrase “the Allied air chiefs” linked the British and the Americans in ways that the Americans found uncongenial. (Sifting Dresden’s Ashes: Sixty years after the Allies’ bombing of Dresden enveloped the city in flames, controversy persists over whether the attack was militarily justified or morally indefensible. But another question, no less crucial, is seldom asked: Did wartime conditions allow military leaders to look away as they violated their own principles?, Tami Davis Biddle, Essays | Spring 2005, Wilson Quarterly Archives. (emphasis added)
Warfare is ineluctably massive, deliberate inducement of terror in noncombatant populations!
So yes: CSOR when engaged militarily is a malignant Canadian homegrown blight that does/will indeed metastasize into a Frankenstein “over there,” that will continue to devastate innocent lives and families, that will continue to produce returned operatives with the most severe form of PTSD: Moral Injury.3
Canadian mission creep means $1.5 billion designated to CSOR over the next twenty years. That’s $50 million annually. And it will only increase.
CSOR is a tragic waste of men and money: immoral, and unlawful by international legal and Geneva Conventions standards.
Then again: that’s over there. And frankly (or frankensteinly) Canada seemingly don’t give a damn!
And this kind of “inhuman barbarism”–Franklin Roosevelt‘s designation in 1939 of Nazi Blitzkrieg bombings–was not limited, has never been limited, to just one war the “Good Guys” participate(d) in. It has been ubiquitous, though only minusculely reported.
In 2006, The Canadian War Museum in Ottawa (a rarity in Western democracies) became embroiled in a controversy, led by War Veterans, over a single panel that read:
The value and morality of the strategic bomber offensive against Germany remains bitterly contested. Bomber Command’s aim was to crush civilian morale and force Germany to surrender by destroying its cities and industrial installations. Although Bomber Command and American attacks left 600,000 Germans dead, and more than five million homeless, the raids resulted in only small reductions in German war production until late in the war.
Historian David J. Bercuson in discussing the controversy concludes carefully:
The CBO [Combined Bomber Offensive] killed large numbers of German civilians. It was intended to do so whether or not air crews were let in on the secret. The killing of those civilians was an inevitable outcome of the need to critically damage the German ability to wage war well in advance of the break-in to Germany on the ground.
War is by its very nature a collective act and no one who is a part of the collectivity that is at war can expect to be saved harmless from it. The ultimate immorality would have been to not fight the Nazis with all the power at the command of the Allied leadership. In my view, this is a truism that is not put clearly enough in this exhibit. (emphasis added)
Ultimately, the panel was changed to:
The strategic bombing campaign against Germany, an important part of the Allied effort that achieved victory, remains a source of controversy today.
Strategic bombing enjoyed wide public and political support as a symbol of Allied resolve and a response to German aggression. In its first years, the air offensive achieved few of its objectives and suffered heavy losses. Advances in technology and tactics, combined with Allied successes on other fronts, led to improved results. By war’s end, Allied bombers had razed portions of every major city in Germany and damaged many other targets, including oil facilities and transportation networks. The attacks blunted Germany’s economic and military potential, and drew scarce resources into air defence, damage repair, and the protection of critical industries.
Allied aircrew conducted this gruelling offensive with great courage against heavy odds. It required vast material and industrial efforts and claimed over 80,000 Allied lives, including more than 10,000 Canadians. While the campaign contributed greatly to enemy war weariness, German society did not collapse despite 600,000 dead and more than five million left homeless. Industrial output fell substantially, but not until late in the war. The effectiveness and the morality of bombing heavily-populated areas in war continue to be debated.
This was but one instance (albeit gargantuan) of Allied mass killings of civilians. And as indicated above, it undeniably was intended and authorized at the highest Command level.
As to the “truism” adduced above: Down through the annals of history, this has ever been majority conventional wisdom. Then along comes Jesus and much in conventional ethics is turned upside down. Just as it was unthinkable until Jesus that one is morally duty-bound to give aid to the hated enemy (in The Good Samaritan Story)–something philosophers Hannah Arendt and Ivan Illich assert quite definitively as revolutionarily new in Jesus--so it is unthinkable since Jesus that his moral dictate of “Love your enemies” allows for exceptions. If one exception is allowed, then Jesus’ call is an ethical House of Cards that immediately collapses into meaninglessness.
Yet in the long history of Christian ethics, the denial–even prohibition–of axiomatic and deontological exceptionless love of enemies for Jesus’ followers is ubiquitous. And as I always add: also iniquitous to the core . . .
In an article entitled 20 Forgotten Atrocities Committed by the Allies During World War II, we learn of massive war crimes committed against Germans, Italians, and Japanese. We read:
Although incomparable to the ultimate evils of the Third Reich or Japanese Empire, a crime – or in these instances the violation of international law and basic human decency – does not justify or excuse another. Some such instances, like the bombing of Dresden in 1945, remain a topic of considerable moral debate while other atrocities have become lost to popular memory and consigned to the annals of history.
The following is a random selection of Allied atrocities–with the half doubtless never told:
Life Magazine’s Picture of the Week, May 22, 1944: “Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you-note for the Jap skull he sent her”. LIFE/Wikimedia Commons.
- Mass murder of POWs;
- of shipwrecked sailors;
- hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees denied entry to Canada, Britain and the United States–thus forced to return to Germany and certain death;
- forced repatriation of millions of Soviet dissidents and POWs by Western Allies that resulted in the imprisonment, torture, and execution of hundreds of thousands;
- enemy body parts taken as souvenirs–on some Pacific Theatre battle fronts as many as 60% of the enemy headless–shipped home by the “Good Guys,” as in the Life Magazine photo here;
- vast numbers of post-War POWs and repatriated civilians relegated to slave labour and brutally treated;
- between 1945-50 more than 10 million ethnic German civilians were forcibly deported to Germany after the war from liberated countries, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians;
- the US established the Rheinwiesenlager from April to September of 1945 where they quickly built a series of “cages” in open meadows and enclosed them with razor wire–in the Bad Kreuznach cage, up to 560,000 men were interned in a congested area and denied adequate food, water, shelter or sanitary facilities and they died like flies of disease, exposure and illness after surviving on less than 700 calories a day. There are 1,000 official graves in Bad Kreuznach, but it is claimed there are mass graves which have remained off limits to investigation;
- Western Allied soldiers raped tens of thousands of women across the European and Pacific theatres of war4;
U.S. servicemen entering Yasuura House, a military brothel administered under the Recreation and Amusement Association. Wikimedia Commons.
- In response to the high levels of rape by Allied soldiers, the Japanese government was compelled to establish the Recreation and Amusement Association, providing access to a network of dozens of military brothels forcibly employing 20,000 Japanese women as young as their early teens for the sexual amusement of the occupying U.S. servicemen;
- Allied soldiers often refused to accept the surrender of Japanese troops, instead engaging in the widespread and unlawful executions of POWs–it has also been suggested this was a strategic choice among U.S. senior officers, who “opposed the taking of prisoners on the grounds that it needlessly exposed American troops to risks” from Japanese soldiers feigning surrender to launch suicide attacks, and just 42,543 Japanese had successfully surrendered to the Allies, contrasted with military deaths amounting to 2.1-2.3 million;
- The use of incendiaries, such as napalm, resulted in catastrophic and lasting damage to the targeted cities, with approximately 40 percent of the urban areas of the 66 cities subjected to Allied bombing destroyed and resulting in 15 million Japanese homeless from a population of 70 million–including conventional bombing of Tokyo March 9, 1945 by dropping napalm combined with petroleum jelly, resulting in the destruction of more than 40 square kilometers of the capital city and the deaths of more than 100,000 civilians (some of these victims were literally melted by the resultant inferno)–not to mention then authorization of dropping two atomic bombs. General Curtis LeMay, given charge of the Pacific Theatre in 1944, later acknowledged that had the Allies lost the war he would have been charged with war crimes for commanding the multiple brutal operations–done with great alacrity, and on record laconically describing his Pacific Theatre policy as “Bomb and burn ’em till they quit.” In Errol Morris‘ film The Fog of War, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara said also that he and LeMay would have been tried as war criminals, had the U.S. lost the War.5, etc.; etc.; etc.
Read the rest of the 20 Forgotten Atrocities . . . and weep. At its simplest, as we learned in kindergarten: two wrongs never make a right . . .
Especially egregious was treatment of enemy POWs at War’s end, as we read in this article, After the End: Who Put the Bad in Bad Kreuznach?: For starters:
There was no “peace treaty” in place at the end of the War. German POWs were labelled “disarmed enemy forces” (DEF) rather than “prisoners of war” in order to skirt provisions of the Hague Land Warfare Convention which mandated humane treatment, including that which stated: “After the peace treaty, prisoners of war should be dismissed into their homeland within shortest period.” By this manipulation of justice, German POWS could be taken to the lands of their former enemies and used as slave labor for extended periods, often at the cost of their lives due to grim hardships encountered before, during and after transit. Furthermore, a German soldier designated as DEF had no right to any food, water or shelter, and could, as many thousands did, die within days.
There were no impartial observers to witness the treatment of POWs held by the U.S. Army. From the date Germany unconditionally surrendered, May 8, 1945, Switzerland was dismissed as the official Protecting Power for German prisoners and the International Red Cross was informed that with no Protecting Power to report to, there was no need for them to send delegates to the camps.
Half of the German POWs in the West were imprisoned by the US forces, half by the British. The number of prisoners reached such a huge proportion that the British could not accept any more, and the US consequently established the Rheinwiesenlager from April to September of 1945 where they quickly built a series of “cages” in open meadows and enclosed them with razor wire. One such notorious field was located at Bad Kreuznach where the German prisoners were herded into the open spaces with no toilets, tents or shelters. They had to burrow sleeping spaces into the ground with their bare hands and in some, there was barely enough room to lay down.
It continues:
In Cold BloodMany German soldiers at the end of the fighting desperately tried to get to a place where they could be taken captive by the Americans rather than the Russians. Some swan, ran or crawled to safety. Others resorted to stealing US jeeps or donning US uniforms to accomplish this and when caught were usually treated as spies and executed. If captured in small groups, the US Army unofficial policy was to slaughter the prisoners where they stood, if they were SS. The largest (currently acknowledged) massacres at the hands of the Americans were the murder of 700 troops of the surrendered 8th SS Mountain Division, atrocities carried out against the surrendered SS Westphalia Brigade where most of the German captives were shot through the back of the head, and the machine gunning of 300 surrendered camp guards at Dachau. There was also an alleged mass murder of as many as 48 surrendered German prisoners who were captured on April 15, 1945 at Jungholzhausen. An eye-witness stated: “The Americans forced the Germans to walk in front of them with raised hands in groups of four. Then they shot the prisoners in their heads from behind.” The bodies were loaded onto a truck and taken away. The matter is still “under investigation”! There were other incidents of lawlessness and outright murder.
A mass grave outside of Nüremberg discovered after the war contained the bodies of some 200 SS soldiers. Autopsies revealed that most had been shot at close range or beaten to death by US Seventh Army rifle butts. In the village of Eberstetten, 17 German soldiers of the ‘Gotz von Berlichingen’ Division were shot after they surrendered to US troops. 14 members of the 116th Panzer Division were marched through the streets of Budberg on April 8, 1945 to the US 95th Infantry Division command post where they were lined up and shot. Three were wounded and managed to escape.
On April 13, 1945, the US Infantry entered the village of Spitze near Cologne and made the village inhabitants gather in front of the church. 20 German soldiers among them, members of an anti-aircraft unit stationed in the village, were separated and marched several hundred yards to a field just outside the village where they were lined up and mowed down by machine-gun fire. The US Army ordered the civilians to dig graves and bury the dead. A memorial for the victims was built in 1995. Etc., etc., etc.
So just what atrocities are being/have been committed with official Canadian government blessing by CSOR in its highly secretive (to Canadian journalists and general population) operations? And just what number of atrocities is “not too much” or “too much?”According to a 2018 U.S. Defense Department survey across five branches of the armed services (the most recent such document we have), 20,500 assaults occurred that year against active duty women and men. Yet fewer than half of those alleged crimes were reported within the military’s justice system and just 108 convictions resulted.—Changing the Way the Military Handles Sexual Assault, by Andrea Mazzarino
I write in Homo Homini Ubuntu:
Famous psychologist Sigmund Freud once quoted a popular ancient Roman proverb that went: Homo homini lupus: “Man is wolf to man.” He further claimed that despite most cultures’ Golden Rule of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”, and despite that,
When once the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance, part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence (Civilization and its Discontents, trans. and ed., James Strachey, WW Norton, 1961, pp. 58 -63).
Similarly, a book by philosopher David Livingstone, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War (2007) presents humans as biologically “wired to fight,” and murderous to the core: Western civilization clearly from the above in no way an exception! Livingstone writes understatedly:
The history of humanity is, to a very great extent, a history of violence (p. 57.)
When “There are no impartial observers,” atrocities, while not always the norm, become commonplace. Overwhelmingly so, even when observers are recording . . .
So the next time we pass through the ubiquitous pieties of Remembrance Day/Armistice Day (Canada), or Veterans Day (U.S.) November 11, reflect on what is being remembered/celebrated in light of the above–and so much more that could have been adduced! Yet religious and secular ceremonies are conducted in the most pious, sacrosanct of proceedings.Our ambivalence about war’s identity simply expresses ambivalence about our own identities, which are collectively inseparable from the wars our nations have fought. These are the wars for which we have paid, from which we have benefitted, by which we are traumatized. Whatever may be noble and heroic in war is found in us, and whatever is evil and horrific in war is also found in us.—, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War
Then juxtapose that annual solemnity with the ubiquitous solemnities around capital punishment. Historian/theologian James Megivern (The Death Penalty: An Historical and Theological Survey, New York/Mahway, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1997) in his massive study of the death penalty describes a centuries-long “gallows pietism” throughout Europe that argued a “celestial-security” atonement or expiation theology that undergirded executions. He writes:
When it worked, it was obvious to all that the gallows was a special work of God, a providential occasion where proper dispositions for a good Christian death were ideally enacted in a grand public liturgy from which all could learn important lessons in both living and dying as good Christians (p. 162).
There was a Catholic and Protestant variation of this. In England in the 18th century, more than 200 crimes were officially punishable by capital punishment–for a plethora of nonviolent acts including stealing a loaf of bread; crimes invariably arising from widespread abject poverty.
Yet one reads this account from historian Timothy Gorringe—and recoils in revulsion–written by famed evangelist Charles Wesley–brother to John Wesley–of his visit to Newgate prison, July, 1738, on the morning he accompanied nine prisoners to the gallows:
They were all cheerful, full of comfort, peace and triumph, assuredly persuaded that Christ had died for them and waited to receive them into paradise…. I never saw such calm triumph, such incredible indifference to dying.
He returned home and wrote:
Full of peace and confidence in our friends’ happiness. That hour under the gallows was the most blessed hour of my life (God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation, Timothy Gorringe, 1996, p. 4).
Now consider this. The Wesley’s and their followers were genuinely concerned for the poor. Gorringe in this context plaintively asks:
What was it, then, which prevented them from seeing what the editors of the Spectator so clearly perceived [ ‘that law grinds the poor’ and ‘rich men make the law’]? How was it that they could see people . . . whose hopeless background they perfectly understood, go to the gallows for offences which were trivial and which involved no violence against the person, without exerting themselves to have the sentence commuted? . . . How is it that the question whether the law might be wrong, or even wicked, does not arise for these good Christian people? How could they come away from scenes of judicial murder feeling that this was ‘the most blessed day of their lives?’ (Gorringe, 1996, p. 5, emphasis added)
So I ask: How is it that the question whether participation in war might be wrong, or desperately wicked, does not arise for today’s good Christian or secular people? How can one come away from scenes of “warfare pieties” on Remembrance Days memorializing Allied mass murder–and a multitude of other mass horrors–feeling that this was ‘a most blessed day of contemporary Canadians’/Americans’ lives?’
How is it that we do not recoil in revulsion? On the contrary? . . .
To be sure, however, as in the pullquote above: Whatever may be noble and heroic in war is found in us, and whatever is evil and horrific in war is also found in us.–, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. It’s our human condition. So let’s indeed remember the “noble and heroic” of those who died in past wars--enemies included! But let’s in that remembering, single out the abject evil of war and commit to “study war no more” as in the following video and its powerful, somber message:
excerpts:
Footnotes:But this is the strange world of 21st-century asymmetric warfare: alliances are built on temporary interests and the distinction between friend and foe can be fluid. Canada has found itself supporting warlords accused of war crimes in Afghanistan; the U.S. is working with a Marxist-Leninist militia in Syria with ties to a designated terrorist organization in Turkey.
On the other side, the enemy, whether it is ISIS or the Taliban, does not operate like a conventional foe. It does not play by the rules; it can appear and disappear in an instant; it lays traps and cares little who falls in them; and its goal isn’t battleground victories but inflicting a thousand wounds to bleed its adversary into submission.
For conventional armies, fighting such an enemy has proven costly. When there are no uniforms and no frontlines, when the enemy is everywhere and nowhere, the usual military tactics and strategies make little sense. Instead, what has been successful is a force that uses similar tactics as the enemy’s, special forces that are small and agile and discreet, who rely on stealth and who can partner with local irregular forces to carry out precision strikes.
Countries like Canada and the U.S. are increasingly turning to these special operations forces, the commando units that occupy the so-called “grey zone” of war. According to the Liberal party’s 2017 defence policy review, the reliance on these secretive units is set to increase for the foreseeable future, with $1.5 billion in projected new spending over the next 20 years and up to 605 additional personnel.
…
Using special forces is a slippery process that becomes harder to reverse the more they are used, and it is made worse by the fact that Canada’s special operations command is cloaked in secrecy, even more so than its American counterpart. The April announcement of Canadian involvement in Makhmour was the first news of what Canada’s elite fighters have been up to in Iraq in more than a year. At the same time, it came just over a week after the Canadian government announced it would be extending the mission for another year. There may already be more of these missions that Canadians know nothing about.
Please click on: CSOR Shadow Army
- Since gaining the authority to declare war under the Statute of Westminster 1931, Canada has declared war only during the Second World War.[1][2]—Wikipedia[↩]
- It continued:
‘For seven months, Tiger Force soldiers moved across the Central Highlands, killing scores of unarmed civilians – in some cases torturing and mutilating them – in a spate of violence never revealed to the American public,’ the newspaper said, at other points describing the killing of hundreds of unarmed civilians.
‘Women and children were intentionally blown up in underground bunkers,’ The Blade said. ‘Elderly farmers were shot as they toiled in the fields. Prisoners were tortured and executed – their ears and scalps severed for souvenirs. One soldier kicked out the teeth of executed civilians for their gold fillings.” The New York Times confirmed the claimed accuracy of the stories by contacting several of those interviewed. It reported:
But they wanted to make another point: that Tiger Force had not been a ‘rogue’ unit. Its members had done only what they were told, and their superiors knew what they were doing.
Burning huts and villages, shooting civilians and throwing grenades into protective shelters were common tactics for American ground forces throughout Vietnam, they said. That contention is backed up by accounts of journalists, historians and disillusioned troops…
“Vietnam was an atrocity from the get-go,” [one veteran] said in a recent telephone interview. “It was that kind of war, a frontless war of great frustration. There were hundreds of My Lais. You got your card punched by the numbers of bodies you counted.”
Current likely Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry was also quoted giving evidence before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971. He reported that American soldiers in Vietnam had
raped, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
Nicholas Turse [later author of: Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam], a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, has been studying government archives and said they were filled with accounts of similar atrocities.
“I stumbled across the incidents The Blade reported,” Mr. Turse said by telephone. “I read through that case a year, year and a half ago, and it really didn’t stand out. There was nothing that made it stand out from anything else. That’s the scary thing. It was just one of hundreds.”
Yet there were few prosecutions.[↩]
- “Moral injury” has most commonly come to mean the transgression, the violation, of what is right, what one has long held to be sacred—a core belief or moral code—and thus wounding or, in the extreme, mortally wounding the psyche, soul, or one’s humanity. As with so many concepts for which definitions fall short, moral injury is most clearly seen and understood in stories. –Meagher, Robert Emmet. Killing from the Inside Out: Moral Injury and Just War (p. 4, Cascade Books, Kindle Edition.)
Of the above book we read:
Armies know all about killing. It is what they do, and ours does it more effectively than most. We are painfully coming to realize, however, that we are also especially good at killing our own “from the inside out,” silently, invisibly. In every major war since Korea, more of our veterans have taken their lives than have lost them in combat. The latest research, rooted in veteran testimony, reveals that the most severe and intractable PTSD–fraught with shame, despair, and suicide–stems from “moral injury.”–and as in Vietnam and Afghanistan turns out to be all for naught.[↩]
- We read this from Tom Engelhardt, May 23, 2021, in: Andrea Mazzarino, A Pandemic of Sexual Assault in the Military?:
Wherever you find U.S. military personnel, you find sexual misconduct – at recruiting stations, boot camp, and the acclaimed academic bastions of the armed forces — the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the Air Force Academy and the Naval Academy at Annapolis; on bases in the United States and off them, too; in American cities and in foreign locales from Australia to the United Arab Emirates; in remote war zones and on ships at sea; among senior leadership and the rank and file; and against men and women, boys and girls, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and straight people.
The Canadian army likewise has been unable to eradicate/contain runaway sexual assaults in their ranks.
See too about its sister institution: RCMP Perpetuates Misogynistic, Homophobic And Racist Culture: Report. Men doing violence is common denominator.
See finally: War, Police and Prisons: Cross-Examining State-Sanctioned [Male!] Violence.
It seems men either need expulsion from all three institutions, or . . . Men are hopelessly violent once in service of/authorized to do violence by, the State.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere . . .[↩]
- In the post Brutal Facts about General Curtis LeMay, we learn in great detail that LeMay in every way was an indescribably brutal monster. Yet he never repented ’til his death in 1990, and by War’s end, he was the most decorated General in American history. He was also given many international awards. He went on to do similarly in North Korea, etc. He was unmatched in sheer volume of lives and infrastructure destroyed–then or since. In short, he was an American mass murderer par excellence–with the higest level of authorization by President Harry Truman, who was amongst other things a fine Baptist Sunday School teacher. (I guess for Truman John McDougall is right: Jesus Was an Airborne Ranger. Though I’ve not yet found chapter and verse. Obviously somewhere in the American Standard Version . . . )
See too: Ruthless American Incendiary Bombing Of Japan In 1945[↩]
