By David Swanson
http://davidswanson.org/dan-crenshaw-sounds-like-a-propagandist-for-mass-murder/
What is more sick about U.S. society?
1) It’s totally 100% acceptable to make cruel stupid jokes about people’s appearance.
2) There’s an exception. You shouldn’t do it if the thing you’re making fun of relates to their participation in mass murder.
3) Violation of that exception is such a sin that you must publicly repent and grovel.
4) This is true even if the sin was committed on a steadfastly unfunny and unintelligent television program that nobody watches.
5) The repentance is incomplete without declaring the participant in mass murder to be a “war hero.”
6) You also must promote militarism in general and instruct the audience to honor participants in mass murder with meaningless phrases like “never forget.”
7) You can claim to find heart-warming unity around mass-murder operations and have not a single campaign launched to remove a single one of your advertisers.
8) Only if the entire charade carefully omits any description of how one gets to be a “war hero” and does forget — always forgets — all of the following can it be truly redemptive:
The Afghan government was willing to turn over Bin Laden to trial in a third country.
He was never tried or convicted of anything.
He was later killed elsewhere, but the war didn’t pause.
Most people in Afghanistan have never even heard of 9/11.
War is illegal.
Afghanistan is hellishly worse off than ever.
The war on terrorism has predictably and steadily increased terrorism.
U.S. commanders of the war have said it should be ended the moment after they left that position and have called the war and various aspects of the war counterproductive for many years now.
Candidate Trump said the war should be ended.
The war has murdered hundreds of thousands of people.
The war makes people all over the world despise the United States.
The people who make Saturday Night Live would make IEDs instead if some foreign force occupied Manhattan.
They’ll probably do something dumber than that when Manhattan goes underwater.
The war has cost the United States trillions of dollars.
A tiny fraction of that could have ended starvation on earth or provided actual aid on a scale to make the United States the most loved country in the world.
The war has had a devastating impact on the natural environment in Afghanistan and globally.
We’ve lost many freedoms, justified by this mass-murderous crime for “freedom!”
Veterans of the war are disproportionately represented in the recent crop of mass-shooters.
We don’t have to say “U.S. mass shooters” because that’s basically redundant.
People who try to flee Afghanistan and other hells the U.S. creates are the same people liberals have at least mixed emotions about under the name “immigrants.”
The Saturday Night Live studio audience was conspicuously silent during the most warmongering remarks.
One line would have garnered more applause than the past season of the show: “End the f**king war.”
--
David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio.He is a 2015, 2016, 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee.
Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.
Help support DavidSwanson.org, WarIsACrime.org, and TalkNationRadio.org by clicking here: http://davidswanson.org/donate. Sign up for these emails at https://actionnetwork.org/forms/articles-from-david-swanson.
