Tag: collateral damage

BLM – The 2020 Version of the GOP’s 1860’s Version .. Prove Me Wrong

I hope by now y’all know that Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) you see today does not operate under the premise that black lives matter. This movement is only using the slogan as a front for their own purposes and agenda, since much of their violence was aimed at the very lives (Black community and persons) they claim “matter”.

This has happened before you know, even in these United States when in 1861 Lincoln reacted violently to the exit of seven sovereign states from his mythical holy “union”. You see, Lincoln’s idea of union was not the same as the founder’s view, as he said it was “a family, bound indissolubly together by the most intimate organic bonds”. Lincoln’s rhetoric helped framed this to be first a religious war to violently bring these seven states back and when that failed to motivate the masses being slaughtered on the battlefields, a religious war to “free” the slaves. Black lives all of a sudden mattered!

Lincoln’s initial effort was to transform the united States as a federated association to a monolithic and divinized entity which must be worshiped, be permanent, be unquestioned and all powerful. The zealous aspect of this narrative demonstrated itself as early as late 1861 where in Missouri, this conflict’s ramp-up had Union Brig. James H. Lane say:

We believe in a war of extermination .. I want to see every foot of ground in Jackson, Cass and Bates counties burned over .. everything laid waste ..

On 23SEP1861 his artillery opened fire on Saint Clara Country courthouse and soon the rest of the town of Osceola was ablaze as well when Union soldiers then robbing the bank and downing large quantities of whiskey.

By JAN1862 Union cavalry burned 45 buildings in Dayton, MO, 42 in Rose Hill, MO and 150 private homes in Johnson County, so do you see the pyromaniac tendencies that make BLM and the GOP-led Union terrorists so similar?

If the religious zealot led BLM movement in 2020 is allowed to continue, you will see similarities to what happened to Fredericksburg, VA in DEC1862 happen in most all urban areas of the USA. The Union Army bombed the city of Fredericksburg instead of shelling the Confederate armies that controlled the heights above the city. The Union soldiers then sacked the city itself. Sounds of screams, broken chinaware, splintering furniture was followed by the scattering of men’s and women’s clothes in the streets, letters and documents pulled from desks as the men drank liquor found and continued unrestrained in smashing doors and windows with ZERO concerns for private property. This is trademark Marxism which emphasizes that all property is collective and none is to be private. This is how BLM members today justify what they do in Portland, Chicago and Philadelphia.

This link between Lincoln’s GOP and Marx should be of no surprise to anyone who had a history class, unless the history taught was not complete. Everyone should be aware that Lincoln and Karl Marx personally communicated and had a sort of mutual admiration society. Upon being reelected, Lincoln received a letter from Marx saying, “We congratulate the American people upon your reelection by a large majority.” Lincoln responded with a thank-you letter. (If you want more background to the connection, this expensive book ($150USD) can give you the details)

As the war effort necessitated Lincoln transitioning the goal of the war from “keeping the union” to “freeing the slaves”, the atrocities accelerated.

The fires that Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman used to remove Atlanta as an obstacle to his objectives resulted in piles of corpses, black and white, women and children. But Sherman could easily look past this as he saw a “greater good” beyond this “collateral damage” in writing to his wife:

… extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the people [of the South] ..

Later in life, Sherman would quip, “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”. Sherman boasted in his letters to Grant that in one day he had set fires to 2700 barns, 70 flour and wheat mills and stole or killed 7000 cattle and sheep.

Gen. Phillip Sheridan with his 35,000 man army unopposed in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia pillaged and plundered, killed and burnt so that Grant’s order to make this valley a “barren waste” might be satisfied:

.. the land should be left so vacant that crows flying over would need to pack their lunches ..

If black lives really mattered, why did the Union Army destroy everything that could have been used by them to avoid starvation in the months after the war? Do note that few if any slaves went north with their “rescuers” and Sherman himself had bridges burnt behind his army to prevent the blacks from following. Black lives didn’t really matter, but the narrative inspired the masses to really behind that thought. Sound familiar?

Post war the GOP used the blacks as their political force in the south and stoked race warfare to ensure societal division not just then, but for generations to come. In 1877 when the GOP finally was caught in their web of lies, deceit and crimes within government, did they finally abandon the manipulation of the blacks for political power in the south. Used and abused, the story of Marxist / totalitarianism that relies on separating people into groups/classes for their divide and conquer schemes.

Liberty, personal property rights and the pursuit of happiness are never the order of the day when the GOP of the 1860s or the Bolsheviks of the 1910s or the Nazis of 1930s or the Democrat-aligned/BLMers of the 2020s come to town.

Time to defend yourself, your loved ones and friends from those that see no value in your life or property. The communist Kymar Rouge who ruled Cambodia for a time had a line:

Losing you is not a loss. Keeping you is no specific gain

Socialist Germany looked at Jews this way. Marxist Union troops looked at Southerners this way. Communist Soviet Union saw Ukrainians this way.

The BLM in 2020 looks at you this way.

Be on guard in these days but have hope in the One who can allow a handful of people, the “weak” to make a difference in the days, months and years to come. Train your kids well and open their eyes.

Peace out

-SF1

Collateral Damage: Can We Make Civilians Spectators Again? Probably Not

I am fully aware that the term “collateral damage” as used by the US Empire refers to the “unfortunate” death of innocent civilians as a result of “pre-war” sanctions. The most popular clip on the Internet is Secretary of State Madeline Albright being interviewed about the 500,000 children that died as a result of sanctions on Iraq between Gulf War I and II:

The reason I ‘air-quote’ the term pre-war is that in all reality, sanctions themselves are an act of war, even though it is on the economic variety. While there are no guns used, there is force used to ensure that the economic activity sanctioned actually does not take place, and that is indeed backed by guns. It is both coercion and violence-based. The state dictates that peaceful trade can not take place and its edicts will be followed, as the consequences to any business is well known. No business can go rogue in the sanction war.

Truth be told, we in the US on the domestic front are again close to having personal conversation scrutinized for words of support towards these sanctioned countries filled with people who desire peaceful trade with American citizens. If one supports Palestinian people, one is assumed to be anti-Semitic, if one supports Russian people, one is assumed to be a Russian-bot.

There was a time when war’s harm toward civilians caught in the crossfire was recognized and attempts were made toward international rules that safeguarded citizens as much as possible from the political conflicts that broke out across the world. By the 1700s in fact, this was the norm, which is why there was such disgust when British dragoon leader Banastre Tarleton would kill both the wounded enemy as well as civilians that appeared to “aid the enemy”.

By the time seven states decided to leave the American union in 1861, this norm had not yet changed. Most of the civilized world’s battles took place on the outskirts of cities.

From an article written by one who has seen war with his own eyes since Vietnam, Tom’s Dispatch writes about this time period:

In fact, the classic American instance of war-as-spectator-sport occurred in 1861 in the initial major land battle of the Civil War, Bull Run (or, for those reading this below the Mason-Dixon line, the first battle of Manassas). “On the hill beside me there was a crowd of civilians on horseback, and in all sorts of vehicles, with a few of the fairer, if not gentler sex,” wrote William Howard Russell who covered the battle for the London Times. “The spectators were all excited, and a lady with an opera glass who was near me was quite beside herself when an unusually heavy discharge roused the current of her blood — ‘That is splendid, Oh my! Is not that first rate? I guess we will be in Richmond tomorrow.’”

Yes, a picnic lunch adjacent to a large battle. You now know how everyone assumed that civilians would not be targeted. People in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Syria, Pakistan, Yemen and Libya pretty much know the opposite is true with the US Empire in the 21st century.

Reflecting back once more:

That woman would be sorely disappointed. U.S. forces not only failed to defeat their Confederate foes and press on toward the capital of the secessionist South but fled, pell-mell, in ignominious retreat toward Washington. It was a rout of the first order. Still, not one of the many spectators on the scene, including Congressman Alfred Ely of New York, taken prisoner by the 8th South Carolina Infantry, was killed.

By in large, the southern armies were driven by principles. The leadership time and again desired to spare the civilian population of the havoc of war. When Robert E. Lee’s army invaded the northern states of Maryland and Pennsylvania, his men were under strict orders NOT to help themselves to the resources of these civilians but rely on their own supplies. This was even apparent at the end of the war in 1865 when a hungry, tired and destitute southern army under Robert E. Lee retreated from Richmond and came across a rare cow in the countryside. Robert E. Lee directed his hungry men to return that cow to its rightful owner.

We do however know that there were civilian deaths during this internal conflict where one section of the country desired to depart in peace. Tom’s Dispatch explains:

Judith Carter Henry was as old as the imperiled republic at the time of the battle. Born in 1776, the widow of a U.S. Navy officer, she was an invalid, confined to her bed, living with her daughter, Ellen, and a leased, enslaved woman named Lucy Griffith when Confederate snipers stormed her hilltop home and took up positions on the second floor.

“We ascended the hill near the Henry house, which was at that time filled with sharpshooters. I had scarcely gotten to the battery before I saw some of my horses fall and some of my men wounded by sharpshooters,” Captain James Ricketts, commander of Battery 1, First U.S. Artillery, wrote in his official report. “I turned my guns on that house and literally riddled it. It has been said that there was a woman killed there by our guns.” Indeed, a 10-pound shell crashed through Judith Henry’s bedroom and tore off her foot. She died later that day, the first civilian death of America’s Civil War.

We know she was not the last to die. Many would die as Union army cut swaths through the south in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. Civilian’s fields, silver and homes would not be spared, nor were their personal bodies as many women were raped by the marauding troops from the north. As in many countries in the Middle East today, these atrocities would not soon be forgotten.

Tom’s Dispatch (Nick Turse) continues:

No one knows how many civilians died in the war between the states. No one thought to count. Maybe 50,000, including those who died from war-related disease, starvation, crossfire, riots, and other mishaps. By comparison, around 620,000 to 750,000 American soldiers died in the conflict — close to 1,000 of them at that initial battle at Bull Run.

So by 1865 these ratios were starting to change. Civilian deaths are hard to estimate, but you can be assured that military deaths these days are minimal when compared to those of innocent civilians.

In Vietnam, we saw this on black and white TV before the government decided to control more of what the masses would view:

A century later, U.S. troops had traded their blue coats for olive fatigues and the wartime death tolls were inverted. More than 58,000 Americans lost their lives in Vietnam. Estimates of the Vietnamese civilian toll, on the other hand, hover around two million. Of course, we’ll never know the actual number, just as we’ll never know how many died in air strikes as reporters watched from the rooftop bar of Saigon’s Caravelle Hotel ..

Since the 1960s, this trend has only accelerated and has not only produced more of what our own CIA calls “blowback” (I mean, when you blow up funeral processions with drones, you will multiply the number of freedom-fighters, errr I mean “terrorists” in a region) but it also has cause economic and political refugees seeking a better life in other regions of the world. For both the military-industrial complex and politicians, this is actually a win-win for them. How sick is that?

Tom’s Dispatch article winds down by saying:

In this century, it’s a story that has occurred repeatedly, each time with its own individual horrors, as the American war on terror spread from Afghanistan to Iraq and then on to other countries; as Russia fought in Georgia, Ukraine, and elsewhere; as bloodlettings have bloomed from the Democratic Republic of Congo to South Sudan, from Myanmar to Kashmir. War watchers like me and like those reporters atop the Caravelle decades ago are, of course, the lucky ones. We can sit on the rooftops of hotels and listen to the low rumble of homes being chewed up by artillery. We can make targeted runs into no-go zones to glimpse the destruction. We can visit schools transformed into shelters. We can speak to real estate agents who have morphed into war victims.  Some of us, like Hedrick Smith, Michael Herr, or me, will then write about it — often from a safe distance and with the knowledge that, unlike Salah Isaid and most other civilian victims of such wars, we can always find an even safer place.

A safer place. I am sure this is what those imprisoned in Gaza feel, or those in Libya near Tripoli these days, or in various areas of Iraq and Afghanistan and even in areas of Syria.

This will probably all “come home to roost” as our foreign policy of intervention and disruption plus regime change causes people to uproot and move. There is always “baggage” involved when violence displaces families.

This all will not end well, nor will this country be exempt from the fallout.

-SF1