No More Squealing from a Strange Maccie

When a human being whimsically takes the life of another, he becomes a murderer and is prosecuted by the laws of the land and hopefully removed from society.

When a human being whimsically takes the lives of many people, he is labeled "mass murderer" or "serial killer", and where possible society similarly removes him from circulation as a punishment and prophylaxis against further loss of life.

When a human being whimsically snuffs out human life on a grand scale, with perhaps thousands dying all in a days work, his title is not "serial murderer" but "Mr American defense secretary". He is not removed from society for his crimes but further elevated by appointment to presidency of the World Bank, after which he continues his career until a ripe old age, firmly ensconced in the protectively incestuous embrace of the world's power elite.

Robert Strange (I kid you not) McNamara is no more. He died aged 93 a few weeks ago. He "served" as defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and has been hailed (damned) along with Kissinger as the principal architect of the Vietnam war.

As the video below discusses, he was complicit in the Gulf of Tonkin fraud, and then basically bullied and railroaded a most reluctant Lyndon Johnson into the war in 1965.



How many lost, damaged & destroyed souls one can pile up on Strange Maccie's doorstep will never be known precisely. But this bespectacled academic technocrat arrogated to himself the right to play geopolitical games, involving destruction and the spilling of human blood in horrifying measure. The consequences of this evil whimsy have reached far into the future.

Nearly half a century on, Vietnamese mothers continue to birth grotesque foetuses and malformed neonates due to herbicides and defoliants introduced into the environment by the Americans.

Vietnam vet and war correspondent Joe Galloway recounts an amusing and uplifting anecdote about the hated McNamara. The old boy was catching a ferry to Martha's Vineyard. A hippie artist spotted him in the pub and enticed him out onto the deck, whereupon he wrestled the shocked Maccie over the side of the ferry - and almost into the drink if he had not clutched onto the railing. As the incensed hippie artist prized his fingers loose one by one, Maccie's vocal squealing and caterwauling alerted fellow passengers who came to the rescue.

It must have been sweet beyond anything to hear this murderous fuck wailing in mortal fear of his life.

May we all raise our children to be hippie artists, for therein lies the salvation of this world.

Fortunately, as of a few weeks ago, this Strange Maccie can squeal no more.

Robert Strange McNamara, you will never R.I.P.

Genocide & Torture - the boss made me do it

"People do not spontaneously engage in gratuitous counter-evolutionary destruction of their own species. There is always a free pass for genocide, granted by the ruling classes to citizens on the ground."
Reg Corleonis, 2008

Dr Milgram was a very clever man.

In the early 60's he proved that we're all capable of genocide. This is how ...

Milgram got white-coated lab scientists to instruct experimental subjects to administer painful and sometimes fatal electric shocks to ordinary people, who were paid to act as if they were in pain or on the brink of death. (ie. they weren't really experiencing the shocks, just pretending to.)

Even though the experimental subjects knew they were hurting people, and in some cases understood that their "victims" were close to death, they continued to administer the shocks at ever-increasing voltages. Some of them felt uncomfortable about doing it. But the guy in the white coat said it was ok. So they carried on regardless.

Milgram's results prove that when human beings operate within an authoritative matrix which sanctions torture and death, they suspend their innate sense of compassion and empathy in favour of discharging their civic duty. If the moral environment legitimises and demands genocide, for example, people very easily controvert their own consciences in order to perpetrate these abuses.

While they may not feel good about it, they would rather conform to the prevailing authority, which in Milgram's case was the white-coated lab technician directing the experiment and instructing them to administer the shocks.

The 20th-century may go down in history books as a period of technological innovation and space travel that revolutionized the way people live. In the history book I am writing for my children, the 20th-century is headlined "Century of Genocide", which has revolutionised the way people die.

Starting with the Armenian genocide sanctioned, encouraged, and perpetrated by the Young Turks, by some accounts as many as 1.5 million Armenian Christians died between 1915 and 1916. Joseph Stalin developed a new technique: genocide by deliberately induced famine, which ostensibly caused the deaths of over 10 million Ukrainians in the 1930s. We move on to the Nazi Holocaust of the 1940s which targeted Jews, gypsies and homosexuals, inter alia. Then there were the millions of people genocided at the hands of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s. The Rwandan genocide of the 1990s where half a million souls gave up their lives in a brief yet intense orgy of inter-tribal factionalism. I am sure I have missed a few.

In all the above cases, without exception, the behaviours demonstrated so tangibly by Dr Milgram were responsible for these tragedies. When the common folk buy into the philosophies of persecution and death touted by senior members of their communities and societies, genocide happens.

Tthe genocidal habits of the previous 100 years continue to manifest with vigour. The ongoing Darfuri genocide perpetuated by sophisticated Sudanese Arab plutocrats against tribal Africans in the west is heading for half a million victims, although accurate figures are difficult to come by. The Iraqi genocide courtesy Washington-style liberation must be just about crossing the 1 million mark – the full extent of this travesty has been concealed by a well-oiled spin apparatus.

Genocide just keeps on going.

Milgram’s experiment and the behaviours it identified are just as pertinent as they ever were. The question is, why? Why do people descend into the abyss simply because authority figures redefine the norms?

Is there a way out of this? What is the way out? I have a few social theories which I will be posting to Pierre's Other Blog in due course. Maybe, we can find an answer to this.