Look at them.
Look at them again. Each one alone in his own world. When you walk like that, trudging for miles through snow from one scene of death and destruction to another, memory becomes a mosaic of fragments. God only knows what these German soldiers had been thinking as they committed their crimes against humanity, particularly on the Russian front, and what may or may not have been revisiting them in this picture. Here, silently crossing an endless plain, they were exhausted, probably hungry, and deeply disturbed.
Am I defending them. Certainly not! But I put to you that they were victims, just as whole populations have been victims, again and again and again throughout history. So were the peoples governed by Churchill and Stalin, but it just so happened that Hitler crossed a red line, from our perspective, that of considering certain “races” of the human species “untermenschen”. He was not the only one, of course: The British, the French, and the US Americans, to name but the most powerful, refused to accept the Jewish refugees on the St. Louis in 1939. And to this day, they consider African and Latin American lives, not to mention Palestinians and Iranians dispensable.
We were not informed, I repeat, just as we are not being informed now. We are only useful for the high and mightily insofar as we are ignorant of their misdeeds.
To this day, people like you and me are unwittingly committing heinous deeds on behalf of the rich and powerful (currently the US government) in the Middle East, in Latin America and wherever they can get a foothold (Venezuela, Mexico, Argentina, Equador, Colombia, Bolivia, Honduras, Guatemala…).
Imagine a feature film called “The American Way”. We follow the protagonists, Marco Rubio and the ghosts of the Dulles Brothers, as they loot Latin America’s resources and arrange for political opponents to be assassinated. Unlike them, most of their soldiers have “hearts” – in the sense that killing (e.g. by starvation) innocent people goes against the grain (most ordinary people have moral fibre). The brave and decent US soldiers refuse to do the bidding of Rubio and the Dulles brothers, so wave after wave of collective suicides hamper the extractivist operations.
In the real world, cries of anguish ae now being heard from US aircraft carriers. Larry Johnson on Sonar 21 has published a heartbreaking letter from a grieving father:
He was deployed to Abu Dhabi for about 10 months. He was supposed to return on March 2nd, but the events on Feb 28th (which was also his BIRTHDAY) changed that abruptly, extending his deployment almost six months. He returned about a month ago.
… He immediately checked himself into the hospital for PTSD …[and was] released after a week or so, despite his own protestations,
…Operational security prevented us from speaking as regularly as we did prior to the war starting, but I do know he was deeply affected by the double tap Tomahawk missile strike in Minab, and was sickened by the genocide in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. Nobody, he said, believes in the mission.
We who live in Europe have difficulty understanding the cost of war. I actually believe that US Americans know more about it, because relatives and friends of the 58,281 US Americans who lost their lives in Vietnam and many permanently traumatised US veterans are still alive. But do they see the Vietnam war from the Vietnamese perspective?
In Europe we are being goaded into a war that we will definitely not win. I’m not saying that Russia will win the war Europe is so gung-ho to wage, but Europe will certainly not. The war the EU is hankering for will be a net disaster for all of us.
There are too many boys and girls playing war games on their computers!!!
There are too many bored boys and girls who hanker for a bit of action. What do they know of the consequences of “action”?
And too many of us – including myself — did not notice a crime against humanity committed by the USA and the UK in the mid 1970s and ever since. (One of the many, it is true, but this one had a troublesome witness: John PiIger.
John Pilger was a witness of many US/UK crimes. The UK and USA are surely glad he is dead, but his voice is not. See Pilger films.
According to AP News, the USA has used the Diego Garcia Base as “an all but indispensable platform” for “security operations” in the Middle East, South Asia and East Africa”. Dirty business, to say the least. Here is John PIlger’s documentary about Chagos/Diego Garcia.