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

  1. Hey! Very Nice! Check out this website I found where you can get a FREE
    GAME SYSTEM. It's not available everywhere, so go to the site and put
    in your zipcode to see if you can get it. I got mine and sold it!

    http://www.degree-programs-online.info/extramoney.htm

    ReplyDelete

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

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.

The Hydra Heads of Wokeness

Have you ever tried to explain why a meme is funny or true to someone completely unfamiliar? You first have to explain the image if unknown, then the context of the image and its relationship to the idea meant to be conveyed. Then you explain the wit behind the connection, while pointedly avoiding any other connections that could be made. Despite your explanation the listener, lacking your context, creates his own. In creating his own connections he creates his own meaning for the meme. Obviously, your only recourse was to detail the harm that came from the listener's inability to make sense of the meme as you had. When I say that wokeness works like a meme , this is what I mean. It only functions for people who think they get the underlying idea. It lacks explanatory power for anyone not already versed in the cultural language. More important, it lacks any ability to address critique by those who reject its premises or answer basic questions about the underlying assertions. Asking