Saturday, April 20, 2013

THE BOSTON BOMBERS & ALL THAT - A Facebook Ranticle by The Jester

The following ranticle was originally posted on Facebook
 this morning, as a response to the  picture above

Sadly - shootin' folk is American as Apple Pie.

And what's with these new kids on the block? - the Boston Bombers - they're like some kind of Super-terrorists.

Get four or five like him together and they could take on the army, storm the Whitehouse .. - where's Captain America when you need him?

And where did they get all those bullets ? WalMart, probably.

Or did they come free with the latest issue of G.I.Joe?

The bombing was a truly, terrible pointless atrocity - and really bad PR for 'Jihadists' (if thats what they are) - I can't imagine what benefit they thought might be wrought through choosing a civilian rather than political or symbolic target (not that that excuses 9/11 - but as a declaration of war at least the towers & Whitehouse made some kind of twisted sense).

However, the bombers appear to have scored in the aftermath - the confrontations have looked more like a war on the home front than anything this visible that has gone before - and  a war in which a couple of hoodlums can actually give the US authorities a run for their money ? Great. Not.

The initial bombing was so horrific and ill-conceived that I thought it might decrease the likelihood of such abominations recurring - but doesn't this protracted pitched battle seem more likely to inspire imitators to try doing it 'better', with grander, 'better' selected targets & even more heavily armed confrontations ? Its like an open invitation for terrorists to prove they love guns and blowing things up as much as the cops.

I don't know exactly what could have been done better by the authorities, but the way it ended up is disastrous - was it really necessary to have a massive shoot-out, or do the cops just leap at every chance to use their guns to the max ? Were other options considered? Were there no stealthier alternatives to 'neutralise' this youth than simply returning fire ?

The global economy thrives on tension & conflict, call it competition if you will - if you must - but I don't see an end to this unless we can free the global market from national debts, and from the massive inequities in distribution of wealth amongst individuals - which could largely be the product of lack of market freedom due to increasingly artificial national market borders and the endemic concept that bodies of co-operating individuals can be owned.

Individual slavery may be 'prohibitted', but as long as companies can be owned every employee is a slave - 'the things one needs' may be a more subtle incentive than a whip, but people will kill for you, or file papers, or flip burgers, for the best years of their lives - its patently clear that if you own someone's 'company' you own them, you have bought their very lives, the very time of their manifestation has been turned to build your sorry empire according to your whim, your whim to over-produce, so that you, personally, can have too much, while they get sweet FA.

This is a barbarous system - godless slavery in plain sight all around me - until this is addressed of course people are going to continue committing extreme acts of insubordination, both at random & with varying degrees of co-ordination.

These acts will only make it more difficult for any change to be achieved, escalating the divisive cycles of hatred & violence between peoples, a meme which serves the status quo by obscuring the real battle between the oppressors & the oppressed. It is worth asking whether, in this manner, it serves 'the powers that be' to be complicit in presenting these atrocities as a war.

Only pacifist means can achieve meaningful change - violence begets violence, hatred begets hatred, bigotry begets bigotry, politics begets politics. The only meaningful weapons are information, communication, organisation & infrastructure.

Obviously.