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Mahmoudiya Amnesia
None of the current news accounts on yesterday’s incident of some U.S. soldiers killed and others abducted south of Baghdad mentions the likely reason why this has happened.
There are US troops missing after five killed in ambush and a U.S. Hunts for Missing Personnel in Iraq is on its way. Meanwhile some alleged Al-Qaida Group Says It Has Missing GIs.
The above incident, now helpfully assigned to some ‘al-Qaida’, happened near to Mahmoudiya.
If the media had a bit of longer term memory, that city’s name would bring up some associations:
War Crimes: Mahmoudiya Rape-Massacre Trials :
According to the federal affidavit, PFC Steven D. Green and four other soldiers with Bravo Company, First Battalion, 502nd Infantry, in the Army’s 101st Division, planned the attack after spotting Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi, a 14 year-old Iraqi schoolgirl, at a traffic checkpoint they were manning near Mahmoudiya. On the day of the attack, Green and the other soldiers drank alcohol and dressed in black before going to the girl’s house. They broke in, and Green took the girl’s father, mother, and her 5 year old sister in a room and killed them all. Green, then the others, gang-raped the 14 year-old girl, then Green shot her "two or three times in the head". They set the girl’s body on fire, then went about covering up the crime.
But no press account connects the current capture of GI’s around the same town to that crime. Instead the "al-qaeda" story is getting lots of hype. But the incidents are most likely connected.
The capturing (and killing) of GI’s in that area has happened before: Statement claims link between Mahmoudiya incident, 2 killings July 10, 2006
Militant Islamic Web sites have posted video that purportedly shows the bodies of two U.S. soldiers kidnapped and killed last month in Yusufiya, Iraq.
The video was accompanied by a statement that linked the killings with the alleged rape of a young Iraqi woman in March.
…
"This video is issued and presented as a revenge for our sister who was dishonored by one of the soldiers of the same brigade that these two soldiers belonged to," reads the statement posted along with the video.
There must be some institutionalized media amnesia with regard to reports on U.S. behavior in foreign countries.
It is always some "al-qaeda" doing something "bad" without any detectable reason. In reality the starting point of such action is usually the behavior of the U.S. and its camouflaged ‘missionaries’.
Addendum:
Charlotte Davis Kasl writes, of the epidemic of ‘psychic numbing’ and ‘disassociation’ in her work entitled: Many Roads, One Journey. Though her work deals mostly with addictions, and recovery/discovery etc, she breaks down the roots of war, abuse, fear, (chemical and psychological) addiction , violence, dehumanization and exploitation as the result of the system created by patriarchy, hierarchy and capitalism maintained through force of state violence.
Women and minorities know this well, she writes, “Women and minorities are taught to disassociate from their pain and anger at being abused and exploited”. While the perpetrators of exploitation are taught not to empathize with the people they exploit; thus [they too]disassociate from love and compassion. Addictions (including ‘process addictions’ such as power, greed, sex, etc…) become a natural cover-up for both victim and perpetrator. “I don’t want to know I’m being exploited by people who say they care” “I don’t want to know I’m abusing others for my own selfish gains”. So forget. Have a drink, eat more ice scream, spend money, go to the race track, or work until you drop. [shop, watch television]” Hey, American idol is on! What about Anna Nicole’s, fathers baby!
She goes on to say, “reading the newspapers, one sees constant evidence of psychic numbing or disassociation in our leaders.” Just as in Zimbardo’s prison experiment the guards (perpetrators) i.e., “authority” become just as disassociated as the prisoners (victims). She goes into examples, but one that comes to my mind, is the fairly recent EPA rule of loopholes allowing pesticide testing on children.
If politics is the art of influencing people through great myths, then what if some of the people see through these myths and fight back? Then it becomes incumbent on the state/elite to rev it up a few notches through fear and coercion. To maintain it today they use apocalyptic myths to justify fear and control through the mass media vanguard. And if symbolic violence doest work, well, there’s always the real thing. For what humans, above all, want is security, says Dostoyevsky’s Great Inquisitor.
Influencing the crowds or even whole nations of common longings and yearnings by a demagogue is called mass hypnosis. Generally, mass hypnosis is applied to religious and ideological sessions as well as cults through the use of coercive persuasion techniques such as Post-hypnotic suggestions, Neuro-linguistic programming, Hypnofetishism, and Political brainwashing.
Consider De Tocqueville who in the first half of the nineteenth century wrote: “For 50 years, it has been repeated to the inhabitants of the United States that they form the only religious, enlightened and free people. They see that up to now, democratic institutions have prospered among them; they therefore have an immense opinion of themselves, and they are not far from believing that they form a species apart in the human race.” So if we were to believe that mass hypnosis does indeed produce the dominant perception of the world, does that mean that we are condemned to subscribe to the currently dominant mass ideology of the cultural hemisphere that we populate? It is likely, yet not all do.
Like the the Soviet Union show-trials, the American elite powers have adopted the Psychology of Totalism. They promise to save us from nightmares, when what they are really doing is projecting their own nightmares on the population via the vehicle of prop-agenda in mass media hypnosis for their own selfish needs. Abuse a victim long enough, and they begin to abuse themselves.
Posted by: Uncle $cam | May 13 2007 23:33 utc | 3
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