ONE UGLY REALITY
Hey Katy Perry, Here’s How The Real Military Prepares For War
HEY KATY PERRY, NEXT TIME YOU PITCH THE U.S. MARINES IN A MUSIC VIDEO, CONSIDER DEPICTING THE HORRIFIC CRUELTIES PERPETRATED ON ANIMALS to “simulate” battlefield wounds.
Full disclosure: I can’t watch the gruesome savagery depicted in the video embedded below. I don’t even recommend that you watch it. But I want you to be aware that while Katy Perry and Pauly D play into the military’s hands by romanticizing service, actual warfare looks nothing like the simulated games about which we rah rah on music videos and reality shows.
While I respect the men and women who serve America with honor, our nation’s latest military incursions overseas have been tainted by dishonor. Our invasion in Afghanistan was followed by intervention in Iraq, and our reasons for being there remain unsatisfyingly opaque. The estimated hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, U.S. soldiers’ pissing on the dead, troops posing with bloody body parts, the tortures at Abu Ghraib, and the a “thrill kill” team collecting trophy body parts and the continuing operations at Quantanimo Bay — are all manifest ways in which the wars have debased us.
Between 2001 to April 27, 2012, more than 6,400 American troops have died Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. The estimated number of injured varies wildly, but the most conservative estimates put the number at 45,367.
Ostensibly, it’s to help these injured soldiers that the Department of Defense contracted with a company called Tier 1 Group to cut off the limbs of goats with tree trimmers, and to shoot and main other animals while still alive.
These animals are “killed in horrific military training exercises that are supposed to simulate injuries on the battlefield,” contends LeakSource2012, which released the video embedded below on YouTube.
A retired U.S. Navy Lieutenant Colonel has posted a petition on Change.org to pressure the Department of Defense to “eliminate this outdated and unnecessarily cruel practice because these secret training exercises “bear no resemblance to real battlefield condition.”
The chilling video documents an example of what Salon’s David Sirota calls America’s “monstrous killing apparatus at work.”
“The atrocities that power modern life are now integral to what we define as the norm,” writes Sirota in a review of Timothy Pachirat’s new book, Every Twelve Seconds. “And whether that norm is eating meat, driving massive cars or flippantly waging war, changing the status quo warrants more than just knowledge — it requires the will to change once knowledge is available.”
The will to change won’t come until we face the sickening realities of what we do — sometimes in the name of patriotism.
There’s no more noble trait than bravery, but we need to make a point of differentiating it from psychopathology - and entertainment.
