My family has pretty much always been in support of Western military. My father’s father served in the end of WWII, my mother’s father was in the army. My father was absolutely fascinated with fighter jets, and regularly took me to airshows. I was dead-set on becoming a fighter pilot until age 14, when I discovered I needed glasses. My dream was, in essense, shot down (pun intended).
I was always told by my father and CNN that Israel always has to defend itself against people who just hated them for no reason. When 9/11 happened, I was pretty sure I was still going to join the Air Force. I got my glider pilot’s license the next summer, and my private pilot’s license the summer before 12th grade. I was not uncommon for my father to have a military themed wallpaper on his office desktop background.
This is a tomahawk cruise missile warhead delivery system being launched from a naval vessel. It can deliver over 1,000 lbs of explosive over 2,500 kilometers. I’d see things like this on Extreme Machines and love it. I can just picture the narrator saying something along the lines of “With technology like this, the bad guy doesn’t even have a chance to fire a single bullet.”.
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Nowaways, my perspective is a little different. I see Israel as a bully, I question our involvement in Afghanistan, supporting a false government, when only about 100 taliban are actually in the country (they’re all in Pakistan now). I can understand if we’re making money off of their drugs, which is what it seems. Funny they don’t tell you that Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, is the brother of a major drug lord. It’s also funny that the Allies only burn southern opium crops, not northern ones.
I see this senseless violence, and greed that is to a level no different than telecommunications companies screwing over the public, or ticketmaster charging you $25 in “convenience fees” per event ticket, and wonder where we’ve gone wrong. We’re all just greedy motherfuckers, it seems.
Now when I look at a photo of a tomahawk cruise missile, I see the real result:
This child was at a distance from the target. I think its safe to guess that whoever was in the blast radius could now only be poured into a vial. This shit happens nearly daily in Iraq. How about if one cruise missile were to hit a rural community in Pennsylvania? It would be a massive tragedy. Hit a few brown people in the desert? Meh.
Let’s pretend that is a photo of a child in Canada who died at the hands of, say, the Chinese. Would they be winning our hearts & minds, or would we sign up to kill those invaders at any cost?
My point? I do not believe that our tactics are helping us at all in reducing the threat of terrorism.
If so, what should we do?
Posted by Matt on December 10th, 2009.
we should educate ourselves about things that arent emphasized in the mass media.
it sounds lame, but if we just protest this war, there’ll be another one in 15 years to take its place. lasting change only comes to a country’s leadership when you change the population itself.
i suggest:
-kill your tv
-learn everything you can
-talk to people about what you learn
of course, a healthy dose of grassroots-democracy, like the referendums the swiss have been doing since 1521, would go a long way. do you see the swiss debasing their culture to outside forces like america or islam, or trampling on other countries’ rights?
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksabstimmung_(Schweiz)
Posted by central_european on December 12th, 2009.
you know, my family was always military. opa (grandfather) in the wehrmacht, other grandfather stood up against the soviets in budapest in ‘56, then evacuated to canada when nato chickened out. my father spent 20 years in the canadian forces, in the nuclear bunker in north bay and deployed hundreds of meters from the front in cold war west germany, my mom left home at the age of 16 to join the militias in toronto. i spent 4 years in the cadets and two years in the german infantry.
now i spend my days yelling at the riot police about tuition (in between comp sci classes and assignments), two large demonstrations per week (2000 students). looking at the preliminary results of the last 4 weeks (we hold 50 universities in germany occupied right now), and how the politicians are stumbling over themselves to fix the bologna-mess they made of our unis, i feel confident saying ive done more for the human race in the last 4 weeks than in 9 months in afghanistan.
Posted by central_european on December 12th, 2009.
Hey Andrew,
I agree with you for the most part. There are several members of my extended family who have either served or are serving in Canadian military, so it was difficult for me to realize that while I support the troops, I do not support the tactics that are being used. I would recommend reading “Three Cups of Tea” by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin if you haven’t already. It is very powerful and will help anyone who reads it realize that the solution is not violence, but education. The problem is that the only real solution takes a long time to see results, and the western world, particularly the U.S, want to see more immediate results.
Posted by Veronique L on December 29th, 2009.