Support Our Goons

A goon is a gangster, thug or hired gun, particularly one to deal with or eliminate opposition. Pepe Escobar in ICH Oct 16, 2014 uses no other name to refer to IS or the Caliph’s forces. These armed fighters might very well be goons. Might!

Soldiers, young men formerly powerless now enhanced with death-dealing machinery, tend toward goon-like behavior, especially when emerged in combat circumstance. All soldiers. Always. Everywhere. Except, it seems, the soldiers of the NAE (North Atlantic Empire.)

Have you ever heard of an American soldier referred to as a goon, or any other negative label? Soldiers, troops, units, forces, boots-on-the-ground, brigades or any other sterile military description will do. These are the good guys. In contrast, nothing but negative attributes are attached to the enemies of the NAE, the bad guys. This consistent mass media protocol applied with broad strokes combined with the enormous arsenal of Hollywood’s and TV’s red-white-and-blue heroes and superheroes blasting away at injustice and saving the world time and again, consolidates the impression that American soldiers are, for all practical purposes, ladies and gentlemen with guns.

You don’t really believe that, Dorothy, do you!? Escobar mentions “the triangle of death in those hardcore days of American occupation.” This was when the foreign, invading aggressors occupied small towns, roads, private houses and schools outside Bagdad. The Iraqis were so desperate to strike back at the barbaric occupiers that they were blowing themselves up as bombs. Are we supposed to believe that these invading forces from a distant and strange culture were less goony than the present domestic forces?

It’s a question of semantics. Executing an individual quickly and painlessly by cutting their throat is “an act of a goon”. Shocking-and-awing a city, destroying 100s of building and 1000s of people with massive firepower, including DU weapons that will cause cancer and deformed babies for years to come, is “an operation.”

To see the true nature of goonery, let’s move out of the battlefield. A woman in the Philippines was killed last week by a U.S. Marine. A newspaper informs us that “there is a long history of the U.S. military committing heinous acts against people in the Philippines and not really being brought to justice because military agreements more or less protect them (= the goons.)”

If we move north a bit to Japan we can learn (in a Review by undergraduate students at Harvard’s Institute of Politics) that “Scandals involving rape, vehicular homicide, and other violent crimes perpetrated by U.S. service members against Japanese civilians have been commonplace. Between 1954 to 2000, over 200,000 violent crimes involving U.S. troops were recorded on Japanese soil”. One outstanding incident occurred in 1995 when “two U.S. Marines and one U.S. sailor kidnapped and gang-raped a twelve-year-old Okinawan schoolgirl”. It doesn’t get much goonier than that!

Note that the goons just mentioned were stationed in friendly countries in times of peace. They represent two of the 700 bases in over 150 countries throughout the world. All the other countries have their own records of violent crimes by US goons.

If we need conclusive evidence of USA goonery, we needn’t go to war zones or foreign countries. Documented reports show that American service women are raped and gang-raped by their co-soldiers and superior officers regularly. “More than 70 members of the US Military encounter coerced and abusive sexual contact, aggravated sexual assault or are raped every day. That’s three every hour.” From Soraya Chemaly’s article in Huff Post.

Two things to keep in mind.
War always involves goonery on both sides.
The worst goons are always part of the foreign or occupying forces.

“What’s the use of staring fascism in the face
when you are blinded by its shiny bullshit?”
Dartwill Aquila

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