"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Oct 27, 2010

Know Nothing But

As of this year, almost forty percent of all Iraqis will have known nothing but the occupation of their homes by American oppressors:

"0-14 years: 38.8% (male 5,711,187/female 5,514,794)"

Those at the upper limit of the range were four years old when the US invaded their country. Eleven million, out of twenty-nine million total, whose normality is occupation.

That's the point of staying in Iraq.

Having children who grow into adulthood knowing nothing but occupation.

And if you think it doesn't work - check out what's left of Palestine. When your frame of reference is occupation, when all you know is that your home really belongs to soldiers and the army, who can enter and  invade it at will - you negotiate, fight and defend yourself from that position. Your enforced disadvantage means that any "gains" you make still end up being wins for your oppressor.

2 comments:

Ethan said...

Well, that's fucking sobering.

Jack Crow said...

And old, old, old lesson to be learned here (I think), Ethan.

Look at one company, one church towns - under their own sort of occupation, producing degraded people who act like victims (paranoid conspiracism, substance abuse, fragmented relationships, armageddonist fantasies, etc) and then act against their perceived opponents as if everything those opponents do is an attack.

Crippled, not-quite-persons. Soldiers. Shock troops. People who negotiate away their own interests, because the desire for the image of stability itself becomes addictive, becomes the only form of power. Because they don't have the capacity to know better.

Our economy is a refugee camp, in that light - churning out people who are very easily manipulated because they know just enough to feel their disadvantage, but never enough to do anything about it.

That's why a power occupies - absorbs all the costs, all the burdens, even the high risk of failure.

Because the reward, damn that reward is something - isn't it?

Respect,

Jack