This must stop now. You wonder, how can we do it? And your mind says, immediately: Whatever it takes.
-Peggy Noonan, advocating genocide against Iraqi children, April 2004
An indian who is as bad as the white man cannot live in our nation; he would be put to death and eaten by the wolves. We told them to leave us alone and keep away from us but they followed on and beset our paths and coiled themselves among us like the snake. They poisoned us by their touch. This is the cause of us making war; and they know it. It is known to all white men. They ought to be ashamed of it. Indians are not deceitful. Indians do not tell lies. Indians do not steal. But they look at the indian spitefully and speak bad of us... It is true that the white men do not scalp the head: but they do worse - they poison the heart.
-Cheif Black Hawk, 1832
Well this is some old business that needed taking care of, so it may be some days late and a few hundred billion dollars short, but here goes. As some of you may recall way back in early April 2004 four Blackwater mercenaries got the George Armstrong Custer/Mogadishu treatment in Fallujah, Iraq. The grotesquley macabre images of which quickly reverberated throughout the world and sparked one of the most grotesquely macabre editorials ever written. This was penned by none other than Ronald "Ketchup is a Vegetable" Reagan's former propagandist, Peggy Noonan. Yes the same subhuman creature that trumpeted it was "Morning in Amerikkka" as poor children saw their school lunches evaporate, death squads crank up in Central America and Osama Bin Laden's Afghan Mujahadeen get sent many millions of dollars and hundreds of Stinger missiles to boot, circa 1984.
This creature, this...this thing, sat down and banged out some of the most bloodthirsty prose seen since the days of Manifest Destiny sought justification for the Twin Godheads of this country's foundation: African Slavery and Indian Genocide. Fittingly enough, it appeared in the editorial section of The Wall Street Journal, the very mouthpiece of Capitalist Exploitation and Those Without Souls aka the ruling class. Let's take a look (take a deep breath and if you have just eaten you might want to wait a few minutes before continuing) shall we?:
"The world is used to bad news and always has been, but now and then there occurs something so brutal, so outside the normal limits of what used to be called man's inhumanity to man, that you have to look away. Then you force yourself to look and see and only one thought is possible: This must stop now. You wonder, how can we do it? And your mind says, immediately: Whatever it takes."
Wow, where to begin... Well, let's start with some muuuuch needed perspective. These haughtily indignant words were written well after the last vestiges of any moral justification for the invasion/occupation of Iraq (which resulted in the slaughter of countless thousands of Iraqi civilians) had disappeared. We knew there were no WMD there and therefore we knew that Bush/Cheney were two big lying sacks of murderous shit. Whatever it takes? How 'bout some fucking TRUTH you pig, or have you been writing your lame ass propaganda so long that the truth is an abstract quantity, something impossible for you to grasp? But Wait it gets better...or worse, since I hope we are all living outside of Peggys "Up is Down Bizarro World":
"The pictures that television appropriately mostly did not show and the Internet inevitably mostly did were horrifying in a way that was reminiscent of the first still pictures of the Trade Center victims of 9/11. It was like seeing people in business suits falling through the air again. It was as if someone pointed a camera at evil and actually caught it in the act."
Ah several of the most amazing "qualities" of the propagandist are on display here in all their sick glory. To whit:
EMOTIVE PANDERING: Hey, let's exploit the 9/11 dead ONE MORE TIME, Peggy.
SELECTIVE MEMORY: I guess you don't recall the sight of hundreds of massive bombs dropped on Baghdad just a year earlier do you? Oh, but those were just Iraqis being shredded into little pieces by them, many of them not even wearing business suits. Their lives ain't worth remembering much, huh Peggy?
LACK OF PERSPECTIVE: Comparing civilians going about their workday to armed mercenaries in an illegal war halfway around the world.
And it still gets better (worse):
"This stops nothing, the terrorists will not win. A State Department spokesman said the contractors "were trying to make a difference and to help others." Indeed they were. There are many such in Iraq. They are risking their lives for many reasons, including improving the prospects for health and safety of 12-year-old boys like the one quoted by Reuters who witnessed the actions of his elders after the attack on the civilians. "I am happy to see this," he said."
"It is hard not to hate the teenagers and young men who celebrated under the bridge where they hanged the charred bodies. They are human expressions of nihilism. They take pleasure in evil, and they were not shy to show it. They are arrogant. They think barbarity is their right.
If this time, in this incident, these young men are left unchecked, their ways and attitudes, their assumptions and method of operating will only be encouraged, and spread. So we had better check them."
If this time, in this incident, these young men are left unchecked, their ways and attitudes, their assumptions and method of operating will only be encouraged, and spread. So we had better check them."
Those fucking savages, Peggy!! How DARE they not throw rose petals at our glorious mercenaries while they were applying symbolic bandaids after kneecapping them with a machine gun. Ungrateful sand niggers, the lot of them! Why can't they be civilized like the lilly white neighbors in your gated community, Peggy!? (You know, the ones heavy with Boeing, Raytheon and Halliburton in their investment portfolios.) Why didn't they invite the mercs over for a spot of tea? You just can't reason with those savages Peggy, much less understand them. There's only one solution Peggy and you know what it is...to check them, Peggy. Yes we must check them. Umm, what are you suggesting?
"We know what the men and boys who did the atrocity of Fallujah look like; they posed for the cameras. We know exactly what they did--again, the cameras. We know they massed on a bridge and raised their guns triumphantly. It's all there on film. It would be good not only for elemental justice but for Iraq and its future if a large force of coalition troops led by U.S. Marines would go into Fallujah, find the young men, arrest them or kill them, and, to make sure the point isn't lost on them, blow up the bridge. "
That's right. Arrest them and/or kill them, whichever comes first. Then blow them up. And nuke them and their damn bridge, too. Wow Peggy, I didn't know you were taking testosterone injections. Check your adams apple, baby. Thump your chest like the big wholesome silverback gorilla that you are. Well guess what, Pegs...you got your wish. Your boys lobbed several thousand rounds of white phosphorus all over that motherfucker. Enough to melt the skin off every first born (and second and third born) son in the whole city. We depopulated it, too, just like Andy Jackson did the USA of the troublemaking savage Indians more than 150 years ago. Like the Nazis did to Lidice more than 60 years ago. Are you happy Peggy? Do you sleep better at night knowing that white people will not be dishonored by brown savages anywhere on earth?
Not long after this the story of Abu Ghraib broke, and Peggy shut the hell up about Iraq. And of course, it should come as no surprise that Peggy had not a damn thing to say about Hurricane Katrina, except praising Bush's inaction and empty rhetoric while the underclass were being washed away.
