Us V. Them

In any type of fight, conflict, or struggle, let alone a War, an Us vs. Them mentality always infects and pervades the mindset of those involved. Us, we are righteous, good, just, blessed, the epitome of virtue. Them, they are scum, animals, barbaric savages; they’re absolutely fucking worthless evil sub-human pigs. So it goes in the GWOT (Global War on Terror, because it’s always a good idea to bomb an emotion). It’s good versus evil. It isn’t only America that’s on the side of good, as it’s assaulted by no less than what very well could be an army of the minions of Satan, it’s all of Western-Christian civilization, set upon by the swarthy, scheming Islamofascistic hordes of the third world. They are unequivocally evil, not one shred of doubt about, and we must lock them up, possibly torture them, and kill them, for the good of the world.

Sometimes, even to a terrorist sympathizer such as myself, it can seem like there is something that really is different about them, that Al Qaeda and their ilk are not only an especially vicious assortment of sadists and thugs, but that compared to us, they must be pathologically ghoulish in their love of killing as many people as possible. Take for example one of the worst things anyone could ever hope to not see, it’s definitely the worst I’ve ever come across, the video of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi beheading Eugene Armstrong. Anyone who has the misfortune to watch that cannot come away from it without knowing that what they saw is as pure evil that you can get, it stands shoulder to shoulder with any other acts of depravity visited upon man by his fellow man.

The site of a man being held down while someone in a balaclava saws through their neck doesn’t leave you, and the sound, the sound of it is even worse. I can’t imagine anything that could ever sound any worse than that, a man screaming as a knife blade cuts into his throat, turning into a high pitched squeal as it gurgles through so much blood. Words don’t match it, and they shouldn’t be able to. And you can find dozens more like that, hundreds even; beheadings, shootings, bombings, a lot of them accompanied by these awful chanting Islamic songs devoid of instrumentations, nasheeds. A group of men lined up and laying down in front of a wall, unloaded on with a Kalashnikov. An injured man helped to his feet after surviving a helicopter crash, then promptly murdered by his “rescuers.” Countless videos of a convoy of hummers, people in the background whispering “allahu akbar!”, then they highlight a particular car… BOOM! it disappears in a sudden grey explosion, and now they’re shouting, “ALLAHU AKBAR!!!”

This is a group, or rather, a grassroots movement, that methodically documents the most violent, evil actions imaginable, that glorifies them, lays them out before the world, “this is us, this is what we believe, what we stand for.”; there has to be something wrong with them, something different about them, something that we wouldn’t be capable of, doesn’t there? But then, we do the exact same thing. Of course, we clean things up a little, at least from the view on our end. We don’t go out and use knives that we very well might have just finished using to make a sandwich, we don’t use Improvised Explosive Devices set up by roadsides and set off by garage door openers, or suicide bombers. We don’t have to, we spend too much money to have to do something as unsophisticated and messy as all that. That would be embarrassing. We have F-16’s, Tomahawk cruise missiles, precision GPS guided JDAM’s, apache gunships, predator and global hawk UAV’s (a pet peeve, I’m with Bill Maher on this one, think whatever you want of a young man who will drive a car packed with explosives into a military convoy, or who can pilot a plane right into a building, but do not call them cowards when there are soldiers flying remote control combat missions, blowing up some car in Mosul with a hellfire missile while they’re sitting in an air conditioned building in Nevada sipping lattes), and al sorts of other flashy, high tech instruments of death.

And people have uploaded snuff films made from our side, you know, the good one, all over the web; you can find dozens, hundreds of them. Many of them are from the IR camera of a gun sight, devoid of color, so when you see a man torn from limb to limb, leaving a glowing white stain on an empty grey field, it somehow seems more sanitized, less gory. Our sides preferred style of battle is from a distance. That’s what we like to do, distance ourselves from the killing and danger; the people we’re trying to kill can’t help but get in close and dirty, their shoestring budgets necessitate it.

So while the videos they post up there might be more gruesome, our’s are just as brutal and violent, even more so perhaps, if the idea of institutionalized killing turns you off more than young guys taking up the initiative on their own. There are a plethora of buildings viewed from the sights of bombers seen disappearing in a silent blast of dust and debris, of eyes in the sky tracking convoys of cars and trucks, then those being shredded by gunfire and missiles, of men being dismembered and decapitated by bullets shot from apaches, and there’s also footage shot by soldiers from the ground with their own personal camcorders, mostly of air strikes taking out whole buildings, and everyone inside them, also of firefights, and the aftermath of such engagements. Often, you can hear people in the background shouting things like “Hell Yeah!” and “Jesus!”

So we upload those videos for all the world to see, glorifying our way of mechanized killing, some of them are even spliced together to form montages, which can be set to music, most of the time something like heavy metal. Are we really different from them at all? On anything other than a technological level? On one website where you can find tons of these videos, anybody can post comments about them, and most of those comments come from people on our side, or who at least sympathize with us. Those comments contain some of the most ultra-nationalistic, racist, hateful, and violent sentiments I’ve read. On the enemies’ websites and message boards, most of the comments that they leave on their videos don’t go much beyond “praise god” and “thank you brother.”

Their hate doesn’t come through quite as rabidly on the islamofascist forums. The people on the good side have things like this to say about videos of us brutally killing people in as many ways as our grand technology allows:

"mmm think i saw some mooj parts flying there...dogs will eat fried meat tonight."

“1 less Arab terrorist wasting the Earth's precious oxygen.”

“Beautiful,just beautiful...some more brownies we need not worry about GOT BLESS THOSE BRAVE PILOTS”

"thx dude, and sure those dirty Sunni Wahabi Salafi pigs will go to hell all of them cuz they infidels. cheers :D"

"Die f***ing scum!!!"

"They are Muji Pork with salad now. LMFAO LOLZzzzzzzzzz"

"Quoted comment by lasrever: murder is nothing to gloat about, even if it's an enemy Murder??? If someone broke into your house while you and you lovely wife were in bed. Would murder him or just kill him? I'm not talking about gloating. I'm talking about the difference between "murder" or ridding your cat of fleas."

"Excellent Vid,outstanding! I laughed and laughed."

"Nice day for shooting daiperheads..."

"There are still some hadjis in there alright... Sliding down the sides of the back of the walls.. Hahahha ******* LIT UP!! Get some scumbags!!"

"the rats will have a virtual mooj buffet over this."

"Man i love that last clip. No Muja can escape! Can you imagine the fear and horror the Mujas felt in their last minutes? Just as they deserve."

"LMAO at the terrorists. Lets see, we offer a chance to have a happy life, raise children, enjoy all life has to offer. The terrorist way of life includes beheading videos, randomly blowing up civilians and chanting while cutting your body with a knife. Which future would you 'accept'"

"ohhh glorious Allah... thank you for putting the dummies that take your religion too far into our gun sites so that we may blow them too bits and send them straight to hell!! ALLLLAAAHHHHHHH BOMBCAR!"

"the dirty Sunni Wahabi Insurgent who survived at first is engaged again by Apache @1:23 and killed with his friend and u can see his dirty dead body @1:44. Allah Akbar :)"

"HELL YEAH, THATS WHAT I NEED TO SEE, OWNED OWNED!!! WE NEED MORE POSTS OF MOOJS GETTING ****ED UP."

"HA HA HA HA HA HA looks like those dumb arse iraqis never learn . stay home you will live longer but thousands of years of inbreeding gives the world whole nations of dumb dumb dumb people like iraq iran ect ect"

"God I love when we slaughter these primitive little Muslims. It's so easy -- like stepping on ants! I guess they shouldn't have tried to f.uck with us."

"If they keeping this killing pace the UN is gonna put these Mother F@#$&$ on the Endangered species list.....ahahaahahahahahha"

"why run? you can't hide EVER!! all you mooji brother will die and you can't hide!! you guys picked the wrong side! ALLAH is not with you. HAHAHAHA!! islam scum."

"ahahahaha death from above. Didn't even know it was coming. Mooj bits all over the place."

"More dead rag heads!! i love it when the dogs get away and moojs get owned bigtime!! voted!! keep up the good work killing those scum bag cowards..."

"as easy as squishing bugs"

"so true... but what do you expect from guys worshipping a rock and hoping for virgins fron their pedophile prophet."

"hahahah the dirty Sunni Wahabi Pigs get OWNED as usual by the heroic US Troops (God Bless Them)."

"sexy fukin vid it feels so good to watch those dirty sunnis get fukin owned...how do these e-hajis root for these jobless uneducated pieces of shit...welll they must be like them too"

"You killed another Iraqi. The world is safe now."

"Oh man, those Haji's got OWNED! Those muslim terrorists are such MORONS. Sounds like they need to pray to a real God instead."

To me, it seems pretty clear, we hold no monopoly on good and virtue, and they certainly don’t have the market cornered on brutality and evil and hatred. Whichever side they happen to be on, people are going to be people, for badder or for worse.

Why write, right?

Why do I write? Why should I write? I’m not all that sure why I do, or whether doing so does any good or not. Perhaps it’s some type of a neurological defect, a compulsion to put my thoughts to paper, which usually do, even when where they end up doesn’t have the slightest bit of paper, just bits and bytes.

Most of what I write, I write for me. I think it might be because most of the time I’m thinking, about all sorts of things, some random, and in wanting to make sense, or a reasonable facsimile of sense, of everything that’s going on around everywhere, and if I can collect all those disparate things floating around in my consciousness, if I can structure it into something that’s coherent, something that can make sense to other people, I can be just that little bit more sure that the way I have things worked out in this skull of mine is more or less kind of close to the way things actually are, or the way things actually could be.

But since that might be why I write, it sure as hell sounds as good as any other explanation, I don’t see what good to anyone else it would do to read it.

It seems to be as clear as day that that I’m right about most of the things I think about, my positions on all the issues seem to be well thought out, but there are people who would vehemently, venomously disagree with pretty much anything I could possibly say, and I’m sure more than a few of them feel that they have things worked out just as well as I do. But both of us can’t both be right.

If I was going to pigeon hole myself, I’d label myself politically very firm liberal-leftist with libertarian tendencies. Abortion doesn’t bother me at all, I think drugs should be legalized, I don’t get apoplectic if a see a tit during the Super Bowl, guys should be able to marry guys and gals ought to be able to marry gals, if I wanted to pay someone for a quick hummer I should be able to, pressing 1 for English doesn’t annoy me, people should feel free to gamble away their house, and I think something as absurd as religion should be a very, very private affair. But how can I be so sure?

I haven’t got any special qualifications to be taken seriously about anything. My resume is embarrassingly thin. I’ve got a High School diploma, I was the valedictorian, but that’s out of a class of two dozen from a school packed with criminals. The only other thing I could think of to put on there is that I’m an ordained reverend, thank you Universal Life Church. However, when it comes right down to it, I’m just a seventeen year old kid from a city in a state that most other Americans think is a foreign country. I truly have zero qualifications. I’m just another guy, lost in this world without a map. I have no special insights, no unique fountain of truth. I feel that I’m right, that even if the broad sense of things doesn’t make an iota of sense, at least the reasons I feel the way I do about specific issues do.

In reality, I see no reason to assume I’m anymore right than anyone else. Bill Kristol, Pat Robertson, Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore, Michael Behe, George W. Bush, there’s no reason I should be any more right about any possible thing than these people are. Anything I write that by chance someone happens to read should be read with as much skepticism as can be mustered. All of it’s the product of an imperfect mind trying to make sense of an incomprehensible world. I may get a few things right, but I have to be getting a few wrong, but hopefully, as time goes on, and I grow nearer the precipice, I can get closer to what is.

That question, “why the fuck do I bother writing?” seems slightly more interesting, given that that shining jewel of a newspaper, Las Cruces’ own Sun-News, saw fit to publish my letter. I write them. Earlier they published a letter from what I would assume to have to be a fascist Christian zealot, not a very bright one at that, with the thesis of “we don’t deserve Bush,” that was the actual title, and going by that alone, any reasonable person could think to themselves, “well shit, of course Bush isn’t a president we deserve.” But what the zealot actually meant, the point of the letter, was that “we don’t deserve Bush” he’s much too good for us. What the fuck dude?! Someone can be that masochistic? He sounds like a battered wife who keeps crawling back to her husband.

He went on to say that Mr. Bush never gets the credit he deserves for how great the economy’s been doing, you know, the one with that whole recession thing looming over it and all. His third point is that people are always railing against the poor guy for not wanting to kill unborn children. Even though I’m all for baby killing, we should be tossing the little larval people off of bridges two at a time, I can’t remember the last time somebody jumped all over him on account of the abortion issue. After seven years of his regime occupying the White House, there are so many screw ups, nobody need bother bringing up abortion, You could pick from the war, water-boarding, torture, signing statements, Guantanamo Bay, habeas corpus, extraordinary rendition, domestic spying, nepotism, cronyism, corruption, hurricane Katrina, FEMA, Valerie Plame, or even the trigger happy Dick. Who needs to bring up abortion anymore? I don’t.

It was the guy’s middle and main point that really pissed me off, enough to jot off a letter to that paper. His argument goes something like this: since the War in Iraq started, more people have been killed in murders and highway accidents here in the states than the 4,000 or so soldiers that have died “over there,” so it must be safer to send our young people to Iraq, because of course the streets of Camden and Oakland are so much rougher than Baghdad and Fallujah. The problem with that is that it’s like comparing a crate of apples to boxcars of apples, a whole freight train load.

Sure, more people meet their maker violently here at home than have in those desert sands, but we’re dealing with 300,000,000 people here. Only around 800,000 people have served tours of duty in Iraq during the last five years. When you work out the numbers, it comes to being at least eight times more dangerous to be stationed in Iraq than it is to live in any of America’s most dangerous cities.

To claim that we’re saving the lives of our young people by shipping them to an overseas war is absolutely fucking absurd on its face. Much of the time I know it’s entirely possible for me to be wrong about something, but this is one that I know I am not. The least the dumb guy could’ve done is quoted the right figures; it would even have made his case all that much stronger. He understated his highway fatality figures by almost 400%, and the number of murders was twice and a half what he said.

That’s one of the reasons I write, because I don’t want all the bullshit I hear to go unanswered. A letter to the editor does do that much better than when I fire something off into the void of the internet. The only people reading this version of what I have to say are phantoms. But as it goes, I’d much rather write for phantoms than I would newspaper editors. All I can do is try to be me, whoever that is. But I can’t be me in a letter to the editor. I have to be the type of person they would want to print a letter from, I have to change my tone, to be more formal, reverent. I don’t like that tone, And this particular letter limits you to three hundred words; it can be hard to package things down that small, especially if it’s a response to something that requires a little vitriol. But sometimes you’ve got to sacrifice things that you prefer for a greater good. So, hopefully, at least a few thousand people were able to hear some semblance of my voice, and that dumb zealot didn’t go unanswered.