Illustrating on dimension of the Harper Regime, David Bruser at the Toronto Star does a very good job of illustrating the impact of Afghanistan war on some veterans of that war.
You know, it takes a particularly wicked and sadistic mind to keep someone in a trauma-inducing situation for no reason, and then deny them the care when they afterward. The impact of industrial war on soldiers has been known for almost a century now. The government does not have the option of saying "we didn't know this is what Afghanistan would do." The information is widely available.
Therefore, exposing soldiers to war without good cause, and then reducing or denying their care afterward is an act of abject cruelty. If the Geneva Conventions were applied, this would be torture and therefore forbidden. In yesteryear, this would be an hanging offence if people were shown to have died as a result.
This Harper Regime, which has destroyed the lives of so many young people is now trying to give itself the power to legally rig elections after it got caught stealing the last one. In a just world, attempting such a thing would grounds for a long detention or some kind of banishment.
Fuck them.
A tail dragging romp through the swamps of the world
2 comments:
Even the Big Cod, Hillier, has said he 'didn't know' what deployments to Afghanistan would do to our soldiers. What does that say about Hillier and the other second or third-rate generals who commanded our miniscule force in that ill-fated war?
As you said, the impacts of 'industrial warfare' have been well known for a long time. Somehwere in my crawlspace lies a hardcover copy of a U.S. government study of infantry combat in WWII and the effects on soldiers. It was completed, as I recall, sometime prior to the mid-50s.
It chronicles, in statistical detail, the psychological toll inflicted on soldiers in combat for even a small interval. No soldier could take continuous combat for very long before succumbing to one malady or another. It documented how these affects could be persistent long after the soldier was demobbed.
Maybe all the Canadian Forces' copies are likewise lost in someone's crawlspace.
Yeah, I saw that quote from Hillier. He damn well ought to have known, but I wonder if instead he actually believed his own Don Cherry style "scumbag" bullshit so much that he thought his troops were really 1-D Hollywood action heroes and not actual human beings.
It sometimes seems as British generals have much more mature critical commentary. Ours, not so much.
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