History always starts yesterday, and any unseemly portions of it are walled off, for the bigots. Setting aside any assumptions about the wisdom or justice of the policies and acts, how are the citizens of the U.S., accounting for nearly half of the entire world’s military expenditures, prosecutors of a two-phase war in Iraq lasting twenty years and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands, fighting and killing for a decade in Afghanistan and environs, killers of millions in Vietnam and Korea at the limits of our neo-empire, and so on, and so on, in a position to lecture anyone on their “bloody borders”? Taking a longer and wider view, why is it exactly that the mass suicidal world wars and genocides, the colonial wars and genocides, the already-noted “brushfire” wars of the Cold War – together accounting for millions upon millions of direct victims, long before we begin an accounting for two centuries of indirect economic warfare – all say nothing essential about our Christian or post-Christian civilization, but, in the eyes of conservatism’s most idiotic idiots and many others who ought to know better, these latest incidents around the U.S. embassies in diverse unhappy nations of the Middle East, or all the acts of Islamic terrorism added together, say something both unique and essential about Islamic civilization? To turn to a different comparison, to this point the total casualties in all of the embassy protests and associated attacks seem barely to have exceeded those of the single movie theater shooting in Aurora – but Islamic civilization is the sick civilization over which we are qualified to stand in judgment? Or one more word: Breivik. Human beings have bloody borders and bloody innards. And are a bunch of bloody hypocrites.
Bloody Hypocrites
