Sunday, August 07, 2005

What have we done?

Camilo Mejia, an army staff sergeant who was sentenced to a year in military prison in May, 2004 for refusing to return to Iraq after being home on leave, talks openly about what he did there:

“What it all comes down to is redemption for what was done there. I was turning ambulances away from going to hospitals, I killed civilians, I tortured guys…and I’m ashamed of that. Once you are there, it has nothing to do with politics…it has to do with you as an individual being there and killing people for no reason. There is no purpose, and now I’m sick at myself for doing these things. I kept telling myself I was there for my buddies. It was a weak reasoning…because I still shut my mouth and did my job.”

Mejia then spoke candidly about why he refused to return:

“It wasn’t until I came home that I felt it-how wrong it all was and that I was a coward for pushing my principles aside. I’m trying to buy my way back into heaven…and it’s not so much what I did, but what I didn’t do to stop it when I was there. So now it’s a way of trying to undo the evil that we did over there. This is why I’m speaking out, and not going back. This is a painful process and we’re going through it.”

-- Dahr Jamail, What have we done?

But even those who hear will do little other than whine. We are a nation of cowards, afraid to put our own bodies, our own livelihoods on the line for what is right and just. My heart goes out to those few like Camilo Mejia who refuse to participate in the atrocities anymore... but as long as the majority of the American people refuse to budge from in front of the television screens and monitors, the Camilo Mejias of this world will pay the price but will succeed in saving nothing but their own soul, their own conscience.

Which of course is no small thing. It's just a shame that the majority of the American people prefer to believe whatever justifies their fat, lazy apathetic lives of masticating and defectating and accumulating shiny baubles of no import, and refuse to believe anything that might actually require them to, like, actually do something... and thus put the Camilo Mejias of the world into the situation of paying the price for our amoral pursuit of the stupid life.

- Badtux the Disgusted Penguin

Plato's Law: The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

3 comments:

  1. Damn! It's on the internets so I should be skeptical of it but, this story has the feel of truth. I may never stop being mad at my fellow Amurikkkans for being gullible enough to be taken in by a cowardly charletan.

    Television will be the death of my nation.

    CAFKIA

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  2. ...And people get so angry when anyone brings up the autrocities Americans committed in Vietnam, because it dishonors the nobility of our mission there. The fact is that war is a free-for-all and not some honorable game of cricket. No one plays fair. War reduces all the players to monsters...and that does dishonor the nobility of our so-called mission.

    Sadly, the Bush lemmings won't believe this story because it conflicts with what the need to believe to justify their faith in Bush, the Iraq War, and the state of the world today.

    No wonder our military vets are so messed up when they come home. Over there, it's all right to commit murder and other autrocities and then they come home and have to be civilized according to our view of what civilized is.

    ReplyDelete
  3. What? You're saying that war isn't about honor and glory and the adulation of the iberated? You don't say!

    That was the main reason why I was against this war from the beginning. As a student of history, I know that War is Hell, and thus to be embarked upon only when necessary. The war in Afghanistan was necessary -- Osama attacked America, and the Taliban were unable/incapable/not willing to hand him over. The war in Iraq, we now know, was unnecessary and the Bush Administration knew that from the start but fixed the evidence to convince people to go to war anyhow because of... oil? Profits? Some dim-bulb idea of installing democracy by force of arms? Nobody's actually managed to give me a convincing reason... and bringing Hell to a people for no reason at all has to be something that qualifies one for the lowest circles of Hell.

    ReplyDelete

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