By Paul Edwards
March 20, 2018 "Information Clearing House" - There is a curious practice that was not uncommon among what we used to call primitive cultures until we realized how primitive our own was. It is to select an object--often a living animal, sometimes a person or persons--and by consensus among shamanic authority, magically infuse it with all the blackest sins and crimes committed by the people or society and then to destroy it ritually to expiate those collective transgressions.
A cognate
idea was the basis of the story of the
crucifixion of Jesus who, it was said,
was sacrificed to atone for the sins of
the entire human race.
It is, and
always has been, one of the functions of
religion to alleviate, in magical ways,
the otherwise irremediable anguish and
punishing guilt that all humanity
experiences as the inevitable result of
its worst behavior. The fact that most
of the world’s people are, at least
nominally, adherents to major religions,
indicates that absolution is a general
necessity for us.
Certain
mature, self-reflecting cultures outgrew
the need to shed their guilt onto
symbolic objects, and dared to take
personal responsibility before their
gods. Jews, on Yom Kippur, confess
their sins and seek forgiveness of YHWH.
The sincerity with which a person
embraces this act is--as in other
rituals, such as Catholic absolution by
confession--no doubt widely variable but
the societal ethical advance from
“scapegoating” is clear.
In a
historic owning of guilt by an advanced
society, the German people accepted
collective moral failure for Nazi
atrocities. This one-off, single issue
act of national will by a war-hammered
people who decided anything less would
be intolerable is unique in the history
of major nations.
Taking
responsibility for their obviously
reprehensible actions is not a thing
powerful countries do. Whatever is most
shameful, most evil and ugly, in their
pasts they routinely deny and bury in
promoting and defending their false
mythos, their glorious history. In
this, America is not exceptional.
Built on a
base of genocide and slavery, America
has never acknowledged either, much less
made an admission of guilt. Setting
that aside, the decades since WWII have
witnessed a sequence of our brutal and
violent intrusions in the affairs of
dozens of countries never equaled by any
other empire. In recent decades, this
vicious, bloody, destructive bullying of
vulnerable nations has become so
flagrantly obvious to the entire world
outside our poisoned propaganda bubble,
that outright denial of responsiblity
for so much human suffering has become
impossible.
The tactic
of choice under that pressure has been
to make one among the myriad atrocities
our military routinely commits the focus
of stern official disapproval, branding
it a mad exception, a horrid aberration,
far out of the norm of decent,
restrained behavior that governs our
troops. The problem, then, is
attributed to a few “bad apples”:
deviants, misfits, moral cripples.
Fifty years
ago, it was Lt. Calley, the Butcher of
My Lai. We were asked to believe that
this sad, slow-witted hillbilly had, on
his own sick authority, implemented the
deaths by automatic weapon fire of 500
Viet civilians. And in the end, we
bought it. In the high ranks above him
no one was condemned, no one paid the
price paid by disgraced, soldout Calley.
At Abu
Ghraib, decades later, the torture,
sexual degradation, sadistic abuse, and
murder perpetrated there, when it could
not be hidden any longer, was hung on
another couple of knuckle-dragging
grunts, and chiefly on a defective,
damaged female refugee from
trailer-trash squalor.
The true
horror of this grossly dishonest ploy by
lying military top brass and powerful
civilian criminals responsible for these
travesties is that, in focusing the
attention of our deeply ignorant public
on what is represented as proper justice
for a rare and regrettable crime, they
mask and conceal the fact that our
massive, wealth-devouring military
machine is a mass murder juggernaut that
kills, and has killed for decades,
millions of ignorant, innocent people
around the world for the benefit of
American Capitalism.
All our government’s phony, sanctimonious bullshit about “nation building”, “promoting democracy”, “defeating terrorism”, “punishing dictators”, “R2P” and all the vast lexicon of doublespeak official America blathers at a jaded world, is just hollow, dishonest, pathetic cover for the voracious Capitalist Jabberwock that mandates the rape and destruction of the world for the vile greed of its boss clique of mindless, heartless, subhuman monsters.
Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Information Clearing House.
=====
Join the Discussion
It is not necessary for ICH readers to register before placing a comment. We ask that you treat others with respect. Take a moment to read the following - Comment Policy - What Or Who is Information Clearing House and Purpose and Intent of this website: It is unacceptable to slander, smear or engage in personal attacks on authors of articles posted on ICH. Those engaging in that behavior will be banned from the comment section.