War comes naturally to sociopaths, and then it’s sold to the rest of us
Nothing is
more frightening for our
endless war machine than a
military grunt who thinks
for him or herself.
By Lee Camp: Every year a certain number of our soldiers
decide they’d rather not be involved in shooting people they don’t know so that
ExxonMobil can have more oil or Lockheed Martin can make more cash or MSNBC /
Fox News can give their hosts topics for their upcoming poetry books.
Basically, these soldiers do something horrifying, something terrible,
something often called “treasonous” … They — wait for it — think for themselves!
(Glass shatters. Woman screams. Baby
cries.)
Nothing is more frightening for our endless
war machine than a military grunt who thinks for him or herself. They’re supposed
to do nothing more than follow orders. They’re supposed to ask a superior
officer for permission to wear a different color pair of socks. That’s right —
the biggest, toughest gladiators in our society have to get authorization to
switch from boxers to briefs.
I’ll get to what this has to do with our
inverted totalitarian corporate pillaging in a moment.
One of the more notable soldiers who stood
up this year was Spenser Rapone — a second lieutenant discharged on June 18,
2018, for disparaging the U.S. war machine online and promoting a socialist
revolution. (Clearly our enormous globe-spanning military complex can
obliterate any possible enemies except independent thought, which promptly
turns it to a mush akin to pea soup.) Apparently reading about the true story
of Pat Tillman
pushed Rapone toward the realization that he was a pawn in the middle of a
massive lie.
“Pat Tillman showed me I could resist the
indoctrination,” Rapone said.
“I did not have to let the military dehumanize me and turn me into something monstrous.
When I learned how his death was covered up to sell the war, it was shocking.”
To sell the war. Why is it they would need
to sell a war? Oh, I know — because it’s completely unjustifiable. For
activities people naturally agree with or enjoy doing, you don’t have to advertise
them. Like you don’t see ads saying, “Hey, feed your kids. … Don’t forget.” Or
a commercial saying, “Try having sex some time. It’s fun!” That stuff comes
pretty naturally. But you do need promotion (read: media propaganda) for our
endless war games because it does not come naturally to most of us. War comes
naturally to sociopaths, and then it’s sold to the rest of us, much like a used
car or an ill-advised timeshare in Cleveland.
But the military is not the only place
where conscientious objectors play a role. It might be the only one where
walking away can get you locked up in prison spending your days sewing
McDonald’s uniforms, but there are a lot of moments in our messed-up
world when you can turn your back and do the right thing.
For example, fewer and fewer people are
willing to do the job of killing millions of animals every year. A recent
report “revealed that staff shortages at slaughterhouses [in the
U.K. were] threatening Christmas sales. Some 10,000 positions are unfilled at
major abattoirs. … The report explains that for most potential applicants, the
industry’s low pay is not the problem but that ‘people simply do not want to do
this work anymore.’”
Oh come on, you fragile snowflakes! “Ewww,
I can’t handle chopping the heads off a thousand pigs a day. It hurts my
feelings to end the life of hundreds of sentient beings who haven’t done
anything to me to warrant such treatment. WAAH! I don’t like loading buckets of
adorable chickadees into the grinding colander so they can be turned into a
meat milkshake that will ultimately be served to a labradoodle or a puggle. BOO
HOO HOO!” (I might have made up the term “grinding colander.”)
In all seriousness, working at the killing
fields of a factory farm has life-long impacts that no one talks about. (And by
“no one,” I mean the media and our politicians and most everybody else.) As the Guardian
reported, “Slaughterhouse work has been linked to a variety of
disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder and perpetration-induced
traumatic stress. One pig slaughterer said the ‘worst thing’ about the work is
its ‘emotional toll’. … A worker at a chicken plant said one of his colleagues
was ‘hauled off to the mental hospital’ after he ‘kept having nightmares that
chickens were after him.’” (It’s tough to say what the chickens would’ve done
with him had they caught him. Professional torture is made difficult by a lack
of hands.)
These workers who have walked off the
killing floors should be honored as conscientious objectors. They should be
rewarded for realizing it’s better to get paid to hand out coffees at the
coffeehouse than death sentences at the slaughterhouse.
And conscientious objection happens in the
big tech world too. This past May, a dozen Google
employees quit to protest the company’s role in drone-killing
technology created for the Pentagon, and another 4,000 signed an internal
petition to stop the partnership.
While I agree with those who quit, I think
if I had worked there, I would’ve stayed. I would’ve stayed just so I could
stealthily stick into each drone targeting system one of my beard hairs. I
could have quietly fucked up the Pentagon’s drones for decades to come.
There have been many great objectors in our
police forces, too. Captain Ray
Lewis was in the Philadelphia police force for 23 years. Then he
became an outspoken critic of police abuse, militarization, excess force and
the inequality that has hollowed out our society like an aggressive virus. He
shows up to protests in full uniform and stands on the front lines to help remind
the other cops what they should be protecting — and it’s not oil pipelines or
Wall Street banks. Perhaps most importantly, he does it all with a mustache
that looks like it houses squirrels in the winter. It’s quite possible that
without the facial hair, not a single police officer would give a shit.
However, you can really reach a cop through his ’stache. (Sorry, his or her ’stache.)
Ray Lewis, a retired Philadelphia police
captain who is now a critic of police abuse and militarization. (Capt. Ray
Lewis / Facebook)
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Conscientious objectors even show up in the
grand hallways of the famously lockstep mainstream media outlets. Just last
week, veteran national security journalist William Arkin left his job at NBC
and MSNBC and basically blasted them in an
open letter “… for becoming captive and subservient to the national
security state, reflexively pro-war… and now the prime propaganda instrument of
the War Machine’s promotion of militarism and imperialism.” Of course, anyone
who regularly reads independent outlets like Truthdig would probably say Mr.
Arkin is roughly 30 years late to this realization. Yet it still takes nerve,
gonads and a spine to turn against your employer while calling them out for
manufacturing consent for hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths. (Certain
types of deep-water fish are made up of only nerves, gonads and a spine, and
they’re constantly being insolent to their employers.)
The truth is, we the people may not have
that much power. We don’t control our democracy anymore now that every decision
is based on money. We can’t instantly change the entire system. But we have one
very powerful tool — we have the power of our labor.
Millions of Americans, and hundreds of
millions worldwide, work for corporations or organizations that do evil every
single day. This list includes:
People at the big banks that fund the
destruction of our world
Officials sent to steal children from their
mothers and fathers
People working at big oil companies,
pushing papers while knowing we only have 11 years left
to completely change our behavior
Soldiers told to drone bomb a guy they’ve
never met before
Merchants in charge of selling Kid Rock
T-shirts
The list is endless, and ALL of these people
have the ability to say “I object. I will not help with your villainy.”
If they all objected — we would see a
different world overnight.
Check out Lee Camp’s new comedy special at LeeCampComedySpecial.com .
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