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Virginia Tech, A Glimpse into What America has Inflicted on Iraq
By Sherwood Ross
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click here for related stories: peace/antiwar
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4-18-07, 9:14 am
At the memorial ceremony for those slain at Virginia Tech, President Bush said today [April 17] he did not know what the victims had done to deserve their fate. How this nation wept as one when thirty innocent Americans perished and twenty more were wounded! There is almost nothing else on the television news but this tragedy --- not even news from the ongoing slaughter from the war in Iraq.
Here we have the sorry spectacle of the man in the White House who made the war on Iraq, where a disaster comparable to the Virginia Tech massacre occurs four or five times a day every day, leading the nation in prayer! Yet when does this man go on television to ask the American people to pray for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have been murdered in the illegal war he launched? And just as the students and teachers who perished at the hands of a crazed killer on the Virginia Tech campus had done nothing to deserve their fate, neither have the people of Iraq committed any crime to endure the unendurable they are suffering at the hands of a president who professed to be “horrified” at the events on a peaceful campus. If a South Korean student is regarded as a berserk killer for murdering thirty people what is President Bush, whose invasion to control oil-rich Iraq has cost nearly three quarters of a million lives, created four million refugees, and plunged the Middle East into turmoil?
The American people, including the families of the murdered Virginia Tech innocents, have collective blood-guilt on their hands. I have not gone to jail to protest the war machine, so I am no better than they and probably a good deal worse because I have given the issue some thought. How many of those parents in the audience hearing the President’s words had elected to Congress men and women who voted for lax laws on gun ownership? How many of those parents in the audience had also voted for legislators who backed the president’s illegal invasion of Iraq? Are we, as a nation, too obtuse to grasp the connection between our “gun culture” policy at home and our militarist policy abroad that murders and mutilates human beings at every turn? Practically any one in America can buy a gun, and abroad, any dictator in the world can buy weapons made in America because we just happen to be the world’s biggest arms peddler.
What kind of a society has America become? Why do we have two-million men in our prisons? Why, in some cities, is every second or third male either in prison or out on parole? Why is the murder rate soaring in so many cities? Why is there on average more than one killing a day in a city like Philadelphia? Why are our own terrorists murdering 30,000 Americans each year and injuring tens of thousands more with rapid-fire handguns of the sort used on the Virginia Tech campus? Do we realize, speaking of terrorists, that ten times as many Americans are being killed by Americans each year as all our troops in Iraq? Osama bin Laden is everywhere in America. He has a thousand faces. They are the faces of our own dispossessed, our own poverty-stricken, our own unemployed, our own underclass, our own idolized gangsters , our own youth who grew up in front of television sets that ooze violence and blood.
Who is responsible for the killings in Iraq except the same now bereaved parents of the murdered students at Virginia Tech? It’s not that some of them voted to elect George Bush. Anyone can be deceived, particularly by a notorious liar. But when the president broke the law and invaded Iraq, violating the UN Charter, how many of them protested? Today they are upset that a young, crazed gunman has ran amok on the campus of a peaceful university, but where were they when President Bush defied the United Nations and ran amok in Iraq? Do they know, as Amnesty International reported on the same day as the Virginia Tech murders, the Middle East “is on the verge of a massive humanitarian crisis” because three-million Iraqis have been “forcibly displaced” by the war the grief-stricken Mr. Bush began? Who do the American people think made this humanitarian crisis in the Middle East if not the American people?
The same parents who weep for their children might consider that they and their neighbors are also spending a half trillion dollars a year so that the Pentagon, just over the horizon from Virginia Tech, can wage a war that is snuffing out the lives of children of other parents just like their own. Thousands of Virginians work for the military-industrial complex. They work for the Pentagon. They work for defense contractors. They work for the Central Intelligence Agency. They are in the business of killing directly or indirectly, yet how many of them are haunted by the consequences of their “jobs” in their dreams at night?
All across America, people who attend church and regard themselves as “good” people, such as the bereaved at Virginia Tech, are working in the plants that make atomic bombs and warplanes and napalm and cluster bombs and are creating new, demonical designs of germ warfare and space-based weapons so vile and horrible they defy description.
America as a nation has become an organized nightmare. Yesterday, the nation woke up to the pain of the kind of killing it has been inflicting widely around the world since its fleets of bombers roared out to destroy Dresden, since it leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, since it laid waste to Vietnam, since it overthrew Chile, and now since it has invaded two Middle Eastern nations in its thirst for oil. Yes, weep for the innocent victims of Virginia Tech, who only wanted to study and live in peace. But weep also, America, for the people of Iraq! If President Bush cared as much for them as he cares for his own, he would have to hold four news conferences a day. He would never stop grieving.
--Sherwood Ross is an American writer who covers military and political topics.
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Comment List
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I Sparks
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04/20/2007 14:30
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This is a great example of a 'moral relativist' argument. If any other students are reading this, please take notes. If there are no 'rights and wrongs' in the world or good and evil, then no one need take responsibility for their actions.
As to the VT shooting, I believe that the shooter has been conclusively shown to have had some deep seeded problems that led him to make the most awful of choices...He made the decision to kill innocent people and therefore be 'evil'. For whatever those kids crimes were, real or imagined, they were innocent.
The author of the above article tries to pull some heart strings and make it appear that the US is bad, if not the worst, place in the world and that we are some sort of Soviet-style expansionist hegemony bent on world domination or destruction. I would pose the author look around him and see how good this place is. While not perfect, it is certainly better than most of the other countries 'alive' on the planet today.
Another point to note about the VT massacre may not be realized by those who have heard of the tragedy: The policy of the campus was to not allow firearms to be carried by those legally allowed to do so. In this light, the shooter had already broken the law. The law worked 'as advertised' on all the law abiding citizens that became the victims of the that tragic day.
Many do not seem to realize that criminals, by definition, do not follow laws. Only law abiding citizens do.
As to the author touching on Dresden and other World War II events, he must not have learned that we were provoked to war during that time period. The Dresden bombing (and later that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) was carried out against production areas that contained mostly civilians. These civilians, by continued support in industry and not stopping their armies from fighting, showed tactit support for the war and themselves became defined as legitimate targets for that war. You can now look at current wars and conflicts and note that civilians are not targeted by the U. S. military, although do become casualties when caught in the crossfire. Most of the civilian casualties in Iraq can be directly attributed to the acts of organizations such as Sadr's militamen, Al Qaeda in Iraq, elements of people fightings a sectarian war against those of a different creed (Shiite v Sunni v Kurds v Christian, etc), Iranian trained subversives and those of the former ruling class.
Please read the author's article again, then go to a library and read the history for yourself. Don't take my words or his at face value, make up your own mind.
Thanks for your time.
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