Skip to main content

The New Semper Fiefdom

A U.S. soldier who raped a Nigerian woman in Italy was given a lighter sentence because the court deemed his tour of duty in Iraq had made him less sensitive to the suffering of others.

According to an Italian court document obtained by Reuters on Tuesday, James Michael Brown, a 27-year-old paratrooper from Oregon stationed in northern Italy, was sentenced to five years and eight months for rape in February 2004.

Brown beat and handcuffed the woman, a Nigerian resident in the town of Vicenza. He raped her vaginally and anally and left her to wander the streets naked in search of help.

The crime would have earned him an eight-year sentence, but the judges reduced the penalty due to the "extenuating circumstances'' of the psychological effects of Brown's year of service in Iraq, the document said.

Leaving aside my thoughts that the leniency had as much to do with the victim's race as anything, this news brief in the NY Times chilled me. It leads me to wonder if they felt one year of duty had rendered him so incapable of feeling empathy, would two or three years have set him free?

This story brought back my childhood fears of vietnam vets snapping and going on killing sprees. Ticking time bombs waiting to go off, trained by the government to kill, returned broken. It makes for good comic book or movie fodder, so I don't actually know how much of that was urban legend and how many acts of random brutal violence were committed by vets. I have heard that more vets have killed themselves than were killed in the war. It ultimately depends on who's statistics you trust more.

Still, weekly another soldier goes on trial for abuses committed at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo and recently a British soldier chose to end an exemplary eight year career rather than continue working with Americans in Iraq.

He said he had witnessed "dozens of illegal acts" by US troops, claiming they viewed all Iraqis as "untermenschen" - the Nazi term for races regarded as sub-human.

-------------------

[He] said the American military's "gung-ho and trigger happy mentality" and tactics had completely undermined any chance of winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi population. He added that many innocent civilians were arrested in night-time raids and interrogated by American soldiers, imprisoned in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, or handed over to the Iraqi authorities and "most probably" tortured.

It makes me wonder what percentage of our soldiers will return prepared for civilian life. Certainly our military would do better to spend its money preparing for that eventuality than going after the people who deserted from the last unjust war.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

'Anti-racism', All Trap, No Honey: A Discourse About Discourse

One of the things that prevents me from writing more often is the sense that I'm just writing the same thing repeatedly from a slightly different angle. In a nutshell, all I'm saying is that moral idealism substituted for material goals will not lead to justice, but is an argument against materialism. I'm a dumb person's low rent Adolph Reed Jr. translator. I'm a "class reductionist" who understands that when the discourse is reduced to just class there's nothing as important as food, water and shelter that's left out. I often find myself contending with people who insist that there is, unable to name anything. They don't understand that they're making an argument against economic redistribution, or they don't care. There are no concrete manifestations of systemic racism or any oppression that are not dealt with through economic redistribution. When people say that economic redistribution won't end racism, what they mean is that
Post a Comment
Read more

The Cuckoo Movement

A reed warbler raising a common cuckoo chick it hatched from an egg surreptitiously placed in its nest by the cuckoo's parent “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”―  George Orwell Parasite to Virus Brood parasites are species that manipulate other organisms to raise their young for them. Among the best known of brood parasites is the cuckoo.  A number of cuckoo species have specialized to lay their eggs among hosts whose eggs theirs mimic closely enough to provide protective camouflage. The eggs hatch sooner than host eggs, the chicks grow faster, and they often eject the eggs or hatchlings of the host from the nest. The cuckoo chicks begin to mimic the cries of the host young to encourage the fostering birds to keep up with their growth to the detriment of their own young. Following one of the first documented cases of computer espionage in the mid 80s, the concept of brood parasitism was applied to malware.
Post a Comment
Read more

Erasing Women To Be Inclusive

I began a Dictionary for the Modern Age. It was an attempt to record the absurdity of social justice discourse and its remove from material reality. It started as an amusement but I grew quickly unable to inure myself to how dumb, to be frank, the discourse is. If the point of language is to trade in reality and meaning, the point of social justice discourse is the exact opposite. It exists to obscure reality and remove meaning to substitute the desires of elites for the needs of vulnerable people. It has no defined concepts or fixed definitions. This is especially apparent with what is called trans rights activism.  It's entirely discursive, but you're not allowed to ask questions about it. It starts by premising that there is some right lost to people upon declaring themselves the opposite sex that must be reattained. False premises are always the basis of this ideology spread through logic defying assertions of faith like, transwomen are women. There is no right lost, the go
Post a Comment
Read more