This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Antiwar crowd

  • I guess we all have PTSD, then

    IVAW member, Jeremy Bergren, has a blog post up on the IVAW website in which he defends his bout with PTSD. Like most of the IVAW members, Bergren never deployed. His unit deployed, but he was legally absent – and that, apparently is the source of his PTSD;

    I will not get too much into the guilt and shame that goes through a marine’s, or probably any servicemember’s, heart and head in a situation like this, but it is at a disturbing level to be stuck stateside while your friends, your peers, and unit are gone. Throughout my unit’s deployment I had a difficult time sleeping, had nightmares about what they were doing, but this made me feel more alienated so I never talked about it and just bid my time and got out as soon as my contract allowed me to.

    Yeah, his unit was a mortuary unit, so I’m guessing his nightmares were somehow related to ninja zombie mutant robots. If his unit was infantry, or engineer, I might understand crediting his discomfort to survivor’s guilt, but they were pogues in the rear with the gear.

    I don’t usually comment about others’ PTSD, but let’s recount what IVAW members think cause their PTSD. We had one, whose name slips my mind for the moment, who got PTSD while guarding a gate at 8th and Eye in DC in the weeks following 9-11. We have Matthis Chiroux who claims his PTSD stems from listening to others tell war stories in the barracks and finally, Bergren, who claims he suffers PTSD because he DIDN’T deploy – he got it from his dreams and imagination.

    I guess that about covers everything, doesn’t it? Everyone who ever put on a uniform for more than a day suffers from PTSD. Hell, I pulled gate guard while I was at the reception station at Fort Polk on day four of my active duty time. All of the prior service guys at the reception station were Vietnam vets in 1974, and they loved to tell us their war stories – shit, I guess I had PTSD right from the get-go.

  • Matthis and Agosto: flag burning is cool

    Matthis Chiroux of the IVAW burns an American flag in Lafayette Park, DC
    Matthis Chiroux IVAW burns flag

    Two new blog posts at IVAW, one by Victor Agosto another by Matthis Chiroux, explain why they’re cool to like flag burning and you’re not. First, Victor rolls out a list of terrible things Americans have done – none of them anything done by people we know, but things that happened before we were all born;

    The flag represents the U.S. but it does not represent us. The flag represents the state, a tool the ruling class uses to further its interests. This state has killed its indigenous inhabitants and has enslaved its people.

    Yeah, that’s not from the International Socialist Organization, is it?

    It is a state which serves the interests of insurance companies rather than the interests of people who are ill. It bails out banks but not hard working people who face foreclosure. It facilitates corporate exploitation of workers all over the world. It engages in wars for control and profit.

    I am for the people who live within the territorial bounds of the “republic.” I am proud of their struggles for an eight-hour work day, gender equality, racial desegregation, ending child labor, and ending wars. However, we are not better than the rest of the world’s people. We are all one human family.

    That could’ve been taken from a speech by Eugene V. Debs, the socialist who ran against Woodrow Wilson in 1920 from prison. All of the same talking points. Now that Agosto is out of prison, he can go anywhere he wants. I urge him to go to a country that doesn’t embarrass him quite so much.

    But Matthis takes his fractured rhetoric to comedic heights;

    As the burning American flag clutched in my fist above me bathed my fingers in yellow flame, I felt no pain nor shame of conscience. I stared into the eyes of 5,000 people and returned to dust a genocidal fairytale. One force-fed to me since birth and later used to enslave my body. A bed-time story of epic deceptions. A lost dream groped for in the empty darkness.

    What a douche. Of course, he tried to write about the flag, but, as always with Matthis, he can’t help but make himself the center of the room.

    I long to take the needle off this skipping record and rest it on my broken heart.

    Me, too, you drama queen. I hope your broken heart doesn’t take as long to heal as your broken leg, you pansy. I wonder if Jesse MacBeth is writing his stuff these days.

    I didn’t put links in because you can’t get to IVAW from here – don’t ask me why, it makes no sense, but they blocked incoming traffic from TAH. But you can get there from Yahoo or Google.

    All of the ISO members of IVAW are changing their avatars on Facebook to the picture of Chiroux burning the flag according to people who can see their profiles. Camilo Mejas is one of them.

    Word on the street is that one of the board members of IVAW is planning to file a grievance with the rest of the board over this incident. Of course, knowing who that board member is, I don’t believe he has the testicular fortitude to follow through. He’ll probably be bought off by the rest of the board with the promise of a Skittles castle with a moat of Snickers bars.

  • Confidence in how the war is fought

    Every week or so, dicksmith at VoteVets is fond of reminding us how many terrorists are being killed in Afghanistan under the current administration. Mostly he’s talking about dead terrorists resulting from the use of Joe Biden’s robot ninja zombies.

    dicksmith fails to mention the ways this administration is making us less safe. Ways like releasing terrorists back into the wild from Guantanamo;

    It marks the 34th time that a U.S. judge frees a Guantanamo terrorist since the Supreme Court ruled that detainees could challenge their incarceration in federal court. Slahi arrived at the military compound in 2002 and claims he was tortured, threatened with death, sleep deprived and moved around the base blindfolded.

    Slahi’s terrorist activities are extensive and detailed in the 9/11 Commission report, which explains how he recruited four of the September 2001 conspirators from the renowned Hamburg Germany cell. They include Mohammed Atta, Marwan al Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah, the suicide pilots of American Airlines Flight 11, United Airlines Flight 175, and United Airlines Flight 93.

    Yeah, I know it’s a judge who released Slahi, but it’s the choice of the administration to try these animals in a court of law instead of just leaving them imprisoned. Is there any doubt that the world willbe less safe when Slahi is released? How much sense does it make to release him on technicalities of law?

    I’d love for dicksmith or Tony Camerino to explain how this makes us more safe and how closing Guantanamo makes even a little sense.

    Thanks to Mad Bear for the link.

  • The DC protest video highlights

    Here are some of the videos I’ve found and were sent to me about the protest this last weekend.

    A young reporter gets a lesson from a tea partier on wardrobe selection;
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  • Matthis’ Big Weekend Adventure

    A little bird called to tell me that Matthis Chiroux was arrested this weekend for making mud stencils in front of the White House. Sure enough, I found a photo of the arrest at Al Jazeera.

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    Notice the cane on the ground – he’s still playing the sympathy card for his broken leg from A FRICKEN YEAR AGO! I think that’s Elaine Brower, crackpot emeritus, next to him.

    Of course, this is the photo that’ll bring the most comment. Former Army Sergeant and recipient of a General Discharge Under Honorable Conditions and six day TDY veteran of Afghanistan Matthis Chiroux burning a US Flag to score some hippie chic strange.

    chiroux-flag

    His leg doesn’t seem to be bothering him, does it? The IVAW folks were keeping this close to their vest passing it around on their Facebook accounts, but thanks to some refugees, we have it now.

  • Stanford considers reinstituting ROTC

    The Washington Times reports that fprmerly prestigious Stanford is reconsidering it’s 40-year-old ban on the Army’s ROTC program.

    The return of ROTC to Stanford would carry a particular symbolism because of the fiery way in which the military/academic program left.

    Anti-war demonstrators burned down the Navy ROTC building on campus in 1968. Two years later, Stanford stopped giving credit for ROTC curriculum courses, citing what administrators said was the low academic rigor of the classes. The ROTC program was banished from the campus in 1973.

    “Low academic rigor” means, of course, that there was nothing that taught important classes like “The Historiography of Mutant Sex” or “You Can’t Hug Your Children With Nuclear Arms”.

    The university, along with several other “ivy” colleges are now considering lifting their ban because they’re trying to convince the president to lift the military’s gay ban.

    “That is inconsistent with the fundamental values of the university,” [Columbia President Lee Bollinger] said.

    Funny how they can think of more reasons to exclude the ROTC program from their university life than reasons to include ROTC.

    Instead of kowtowing to the eggheads, the government should, instead, close their ROTC program to the students who attend those colleges completely. As it stands now, for example, students at Harvard (which won’t let ROTC on campus) who want to attend ROTC have to go to MIT for their ROTC classes. The government still pays at least a portion of their tuition. That should end. freeze those universities completely out of the program until they decide to conform.

    Why should the military bow to a bunch of pointy-headed dorks – especially so these pseudo-intellectuals make have input to a system they don’t even understand. Besides, Harvard, Stanford and Yale are only brand names these days. their students are no better educated than any other. Who needs ’em?

  • Ringo meets the protesters

    There’s a special brand of crazy in LA and it takes a special guy to record the images. That’s why we welcome Ringo the Gringo into the TAH fold. He took some pictures of the protest last Saturday and these provide a nice a contrast to the supposed racial slurs in DC that were a topic of conversation this weekend. When he finishes his post, I’ll add his link.

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  • VFP’s DC theater

    Code Red and Code Pink 027

    I ran into Concretebob at the Code Red rally yesterday and he pointed me to the VFP’s theater in DC yesterday. Anemic doesn’t begin to describe what was going on at their little theater yesterday;

    Code Red and Code Pink 028

    The display, of course is supposed to be markers of every soldier killed in Iraq. Some of the markers have actual names of the fallen, but most of them look like this;
    Code Red and Code Pink 030

    Most of the people who visited the display, were on their way to the Capitol Code Red rally, so the doofuses had an audience thanks to Jon Voight and Michelle Bachman. You have to wonder why VFP doesn’t support war with Iran – you know, the guys who’ve promised to erase Israel from the face of the earth, denied there was a holocaust, and are all for hastening the arrival of the twelfth imam;

    Code Red and Code Pink 029

    I’d heard from Concretebob that Cindy Sheehan was there along with IVAW and VVAw, but when I got there, all I saw was this ten-year-old girl and a few hippies;

    Code Red and Code Pink 033

    Code Red and Code Pink 032

    I guess it’s because when I was at the display, there were no TV cameras.

    Well, if you take a look at all three of the posts I’ve written about the events in DC yesterday, you decide which was more attended at their advertised start time. I’m not making any estimates of any of the crowds – you decide from the pictures.