Lately I've been on shows with other guests who've expressed outrage and amazement that the U.S. government would blow up people on boats, exclaiming that they never could have imagined such a thing until this moment. A U.S. senator has said he finds video of one particular missile-murder the most disturbing thing he's ever seen.
A couple of months into these boat killings, could anyone have imagined that corporate media outlets and Congress Members and boatloads of lawyers would be discovering the double-tap as something novel, and declaring their outrage? I think part of the provenance of this phenomenon lies in the conversation in the corporate agora about illegal orders, which was clearly created to object to the use of the so-called National Guard in U.S. cities but ended up being understood as relevant to murdering boaters. And part of it has to do with the personalities, statements, and general obnoxiousness of Trump, Hegseth, et alia.
But for those of us who lived through the Bush-Cheney slaughters, saw people freak out over the collateral murder video, were disgusted by Obama setting up terror Tuesdays to pick men, women, and children to murder along with anyone near them while declaring himself good at killing people, and saw drone murders become routine during the Obama - Trump - Biden - Trump years -- for those of us who've been watching a livestreamed genocide in Gaza, a Ukrainian meatgrinder, the killing fields of Sudan, the ongoing horrors growing out of the "successful drone war" in Yemen, not to mention the sanctions (now with a no-fly-zone) that have killed huge numbers of people in Venezuela, etc., etc., the newfound outrage at professional, organized mass-murder (whether bizarrely limited to double-taps or not) is confounding.
But maybe there are good, or not-so-good, reasons to behave as if Pete Hegseth is the first U.S. government employee to order murders. Maybe these reasons explain the strange silences surrounding us. Here are ten possibilities:
- It's a strategic 3-D-chess bank-shot. First you gradually and patiently let people get indignant about the double-tap murders. Then you will someday gently nudge them into the obvious realization that the first-strike murders are murders as well. (Some people have already gotten there.) Then you will encourage them along to understanding that mass-murder by missile is not morally different on dry land. Then you will invite them into a conversation about the urgent need to abolish all wars and militaries if life is going to last on this planet. The New York Times had a column on Friday about how this supposedly new mode of murder is corroding our society; who wants to be the one to take that glimmer of awareness away from somebody?
- It's a racist, fascist, Republican, MAGA thing. Let's say you're a fan of Mr. Hegseth and a great admirer of his tough new innovation in sadism. Discovering that Obama's operation made Petey's look like a pre-school just won't fit into your (corner of the) worldview. Learning about all the houses and cafes and cars and wedding parties and piles of body parts is literally inconceivable.
- It's a Democratic thing. You are not so much a person as a voter, and you must think like a strategic voter 365-7-24. That means admitting nothing by your team, denying everything alleged, and making counter-accusations. A few Republicans are already screaming that Trump murders are OK because of Obama murders. If you admit that Obama murdered people and denounce all murders by all sides, the Republicans will win, or you'll have suggested that a sainted leader who murdered just the right families who deserved it is the equivalent of a sociopath blowing up heroic socialist fishermen. One does not agree with madmen.
- It's a willed ignorance thing. You managed to avoid ever knowing about Obama or Biden drone-murdering anyone. You avoided all the warnings by annoying peace activists that the drone wars would have blowback, that the drone technology would proliferate, that the team you hate would be handed the powers that you were avoiding knowing that the team you love or tolerate was seizing. You actually do not know that anyone has been blown up before, so you are free to be newly outraged and to pine for the peace that Kamala would have created. You have a duty to denounce the "revisionists."
- It's a constraint on crazed pacifism. Your priority, as a sensible person not given to conspiracy theories or oversimplicity or mad untested schemes, is to avoid becoming a crazed pacifist who wouldn't defend his grandmother in a dark alley (as no one could possibly do who does not support a trillion-dollar-a-year war machine). If you were to draw no distinction between a criminal double-tap and a first-strike, it wouldn't be too many steps from there to conceiving of all war as criminal -- or even recognizing the existence of the UN Charter and reading it. So, by necessity, for the maintenance of decent civilized existence, that one double-tap missile is a unique outrage. Murder does not exist in war, as war is the legalization and purification of murder.
- It's an exhaustion thing. Maybe you did notice and admit to all the horrors of past decades. Maybe you spoke and wrote and rallied and demonstrated and went to jail and did it all again and again. You may not think there's really time for people one-by-one, taking 30 years each, to catch on to the unjustifiable horrors of militarism. It may seem as outrageous as the proposal from a New York Times columnist to fly each jackass on Earth to a melting glacier to educate them about the climate (as required for that columnist himself). But if somebody catches on, for phony partisan reasons, even if they ought to have done so many years ago, who are you to object in any way? When the nukes are flying, you won't be handing out literature about the need to abolish nuclear weapons, but you won't mind if someone picks some up. You might even smile a weak smile.
- It's being the innocence you want to see in the world. One strategy to de-normalizing organized mass-murder would be to just begin acting as if it's not normal. And if that means reacting to the latest incident as if it were unprecedented, so be it. We must envision the sane world into being through our self-realizations of projected realities. Or something. Obama did speak up recently to denounce violence when someone his government had trained and used in a death squad in Afghanistan shot two people in Washington DC.
- It's a Hegseth thing. The problem is not organized mass-murder. The problem is the platforms on which Hegseth chats about it, or the unacceptable second strike, or the alcohol, or the general dumbfuckery of the childish secretary of slaughter. We need the death machine in respectable hands!
- It's the other sort of Hegseth-ish thing. Dude, how can you pick up chicks who are outraged at the latest outrage if you tell them it's nothing new? Go with the flow, man. It's cool.
- It's not a thing at all. You're actually denouncing all the ongoing murders by U.S. employees, former employees, weapons customers, and viceroys all over the world. But the censorship and algorithms have eliminated your voice so we don't know about you.
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