...the Associated Press published a report providing further confirmation that the facility was targeted and bombed by US military personnel with full knowledge that it was a functioning hospital. The attack lasted for an hour, destroying the building and killing 30 people, including at least 13 MSF staff members and 10 patients.This is only one example among countless others I could use (many much worse), but it's recent and I only need one to make this point. Where were all the "prayers" and "thoughts" for any of these people from most of you posting your condolences about what just happened in Paris? I'm sorry if this offends anyone, or if you feel like I'm trying to take attention away from the lives lost and disrespecting those grieving, but that is the opposite of what I'm doing. I'm trying to honor them.
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The report follows a previous article citing a former intelligence official who said special operations analysts had mapped the entire area and drawn a circle around the hospital.
The new report adds to the growing body of evidence demonstrating that US forces knowingly and deliberately destroyed a hospital that was performing civilian functions, a grave violation of the Geneva Conventions and a violation of the US War Crimes Act. According to the latter, those found guilty of committing such a crime can be subject to life imprisonment or death.
Among the possible motivations for the attack is the fact that the hospital was the only major medical center in northeastern Afghanistan, and it provided aid to all those injured in the escalating conflict between US forces and the Taliban-led insurgency. Beyond those immediately killed, hundreds or even thousands will die as a result of their loss of access to medical care.
In a statement released on October 23, which reported an increase in the death toll from 22 to 30, MSF noted that the destruction of the hospital "will have a huge impact on access to surgical care for hundreds of thousands of people in the region... Last year, more than 22,000 patients received care at the hospital and more than 5,900 surgeries were performed."
I'm simply trying to get you to think and to feel deeper, and to expand your circle of empathy beyond Paris in order to grasp the bigger picture of why these attacks happen. This opinion piece gets to the core of some of those reasons: The Age of Despair: Reaping the Whirlwind of Western Support for Extremist Violence. A larger game is at work, one we often do not see.
Let's start by asking: Why are you more upset over one group of people being murdered and not another group? Or is the bombing of a hospital not terrorism? Do Afghan lives not mean as much as Parisian lives?
The events yesterday in Paris are heartbreaking and disturbing. What I find more disturbing is how easily people ignore why these things are even happening and who actually arms and funds Islamic extremists. How many just swallow the mainstream media propaganda and are therefore oblivious to history? Most disturbing is that 90% of the people that send their prayers and condolences online to those who died in Paris (as good as their intentions are), never seem to bat an eye at, or send a single prayer to, the millions of people slaughtered by the U.S./EU/Israeli/Saudi war machine, which created these extremist groups in the first place through direct and indirect results of Western foreign policy and Western proxy armies.
When an attack like this happens in the West, everyone is so, so sad - yet when hundreds of homes are leveled in Gaza, or elsewhere in the Middle East, there is relative silence! We should be equally upset about all of this senseless killing orchestrated by psychopaths in the highest echelons of society, not just what our TVs tell us we should be upset about. We should be sending our thoughts and prayers everyday to all the innocents murdered with our tax dollars, not just when an attack occurs in Europe or the U.S. Such events are also used as a fear-monger tactic and fuel to continue the very same policies and wars-for-profit that result in such attacks, whether orchestrated by extremists or by intelligence agencies.
To those who expressed themselves over the Paris attacks, yet remained silent over countless similar atrocities, I ask: where were your condolences, your "thoughts", your "prayers" for those killed in the attack on the Afghan hospital by US forces, or any other war crime committed by or supported by your own government? What determined your care for one group of people and not another? Was it your attitude? Your popularity? Maybe it was the type of information you are exposed to, or deliberately expose yourself to? Was it your beliefs?
Most likely it's all of that - and more. The main question here is: Do you really have control over what you pay attention to and care about?
I guess terrorism is only what our psychopathic leaders and their media moguls tell us it is, and only then when it happens to us in the West, not when we're the perpetrators. It seems that a lot of people only take the time to share their condolences about a tragedy when it's trending and trendy to do so, and such trends are not only tracked and played upon by the power brokers in society, but are also manufactured and directed for larger political purposes. When Gaza was getting bombed to smithereens in summer of 2014, I didn't see half the response I saw over this recent attack on social media and in conversation.
I'm sad for Paris today. I'm thinking about it a lot. I know this article, or a Facebook post, or a Tweet, won't change anything in the grand scheme of things, but such things may do more than we think, and can plant seeds in people's minds, just like the TV does. It helps to vent our frustration with all the lies, and to counter them even just a little bit. Many people decided to use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media to voice their concerns, their "thoughts and prayers" about Paris, and I completely understand why you did this.
You cared that people got killed for no reason. I get it. I feel that way everyday. But this is also a sinister manipulation of the public at large, and anyone who is familiar with Edward Bernays knows that powerful people put lots of time, money, and research into figuring out how to control what people think, like, and care about (I highly recommend the documentary series The Century of the Self). We all must understand how and why we are programmed by psychopaths in power, the richest of whom are in control of our own countries here in the West, and how these same people influence us to be selective with our conscience, with our caring.
Every single day, even my best and happiest days (like right now - I'm on tour with a band called The Gray Company, staying in a beautiful home in North Carolina with amazing friends, and having a blast!) I set some time aside to think of all the others dying at the hands of our government and the Secret Government, the National Security State, and its military industrial complex. I devote some time to reading and studying, and I try to post and disseminate information. I don't wait for the mainstream media to tell me when to be upset and when to care, and what is true and what isn't. I try to look and work it out and hold off on concluding. I choose to care because I value Truth, and I understand Truth hurts us in the process of seeking Her, and I'm willing to endure the pain of knowing for a chance to dance with Truth.
I wasn't always like this though. It takes hard work and effort to Love and to seek the Truth, to draw up Her bitter-sweet water and drink it and to be changed by Her - it's a constant effort to care and know how crazy the world really is while at the same time allowing yourself to be happy when necessary, and to appreciate your own life, and to strive in such a crazy world without letting it get to you and still succeed. I understand why so many shut this stuff out and just want to focus on their own life and success, or only spare a thought or condolence when it's trendy to do so, especially when it's shoved in our faces, while other events get downplayed or ignored. It's easier to believe the lies and watered-down truth when it's spoon-fed to us - it's more comfortable and takes no effort. But will it help us grow?
I wasn't always like this. You also don't have to be the way you may be, to be manipulated by powers you don't understand. But only if you really want to seek knowledge, to objectively Love, to seek Truth - if you truly want to care MORE. Take the feelings you get from the Paris attacks, the sadness for those lives lost in the middle of a grander chess game, and use it as motivation to learn and to speak - to try and follow the moves on the board by unseen hands. Post your thoughts and feelings every single day about ALL the innocents dying, not just for one day - because such things happen every day, and we all carry the responsibility for it and for doing something about it. The least we can do is make an effort to really understand it, to pay attention and speak out as much as possible, rather than blindly accepting what the talking heads tell us is going down and whose deaths we should or should not care about.
Dr. Martin Luther. King, Jr. once said "Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness." Of course, once you are aware of that decision, it's then up to you to choose. Choose wisely.
Reader Comments
Here's what we wrote about it: [Link]
But since you brought it up - or changed the subject - why don't you think about what situation exists that causes you to worry about the EU open border policy? Isn't it the massive influx of refugees? As Niall pointed out, that problem wouldn't exist if it weren't for the western allies blowing the crap out of their countries.
But it's pretty clear you were just taking a shot at Sott without any concern for the relevance of your comment, so I doubt you will even read this, or care.
Try to imagine that you had to leave your home, your country, all your possesions just to save your life and flee to another country where you are not wanted, forced to live in tents with no health care. You have saved only your life for the time being and do not know what the future will bring. Your children begging in strrets, those who can find work without social security and minimum pay just trying to put some food in your mouth. Some becoming thieves and robbing the gold teeth of the dead from graves, other trying to cross the sea and drowning in the sea. You think these will not happen to you but think again.
If Europe and half of US becomes too cold to live there will be a migration to hotter places on earth, those places from where these refugees came from.
Turkey like other European nations and the Gulf states and the US have blood on their hands and they cannot wash it off no matter how many times they wash.
I truly do understand your heartfelt attempt at assuaging violence begotten violence and I understand the frustration of how one horrific event shadows others that are equally,if not more sadistic than what we have witnessed in the last 24 hours. I will admit I am guilty of that very accusation, but not because one set of lives are any less or more important than any other lives. Unfortunately, I can not control what event will turn the most heads in the world. Even more unfortunate, is the fact that, in times of crisis, a key point in popular momentum has to be calculated to work accordingly WITH that momentum and good,bad,or indifferent, I truly think this is a time to act.
Picture if you will an automobile stuck in snow trying to get out. The object is to rock that car back and forth IN TIME with the forward momentum in order to achieve traction and get it out of the rut. You don't push forward when the car is rolling backward. For some reason, unexplicable to me, bombing doctors and hospitals wasn't the time,Israel obliterating a part of humanity to the brink of genocide wasn't sufficient...nor were so many other atrocities that have happened in the recent past. At this point, we can no longer question WHEN the time is right to act,it just so happens that after this Parisian attack...the wheels of the alert public have finally started moving forward. It's out of our control. The ONLY thing that IS in our control is to bend down, dig in, and PUSH FORWARD to get this damn thing out of the rut we are in.
Why do I think this way? I will be happy to explain and I challenge anyone to debate me on these points. I WANT to hear from another human being that can argue the following points because I truly do want to be wrong.......here goes nothing......
The power infrastructure in the world we live in now is in a very precarious position, in that it CANNOT be allowed to shut down....EVER. If we lose cooling power to ANY of our nuclear reactors or spent fuel pools, humanity is finished.
Fukushima is belching out radioactive contaminants every single minute of every single day and that accident ALONE is sufficient for an ELE (aka Extinction level event).
We are also riding around totally exposed, cosmologically speaking, in space and it is actually probable that a cosmological event
will happen to bring about an ELE.
In the past, events like this have happened from time to time, and have wiped out much of humanity. Humanity, however is extremely resilient and, human wars and conflict aside, we have always seemed to "bounce back".
In this new nuclear age, however, if humanity is confronted again with such a catastrophe, ALL existing reactors and spent fuel pools will go unattended thereby rendering this planet uninhabitable for ANY life, let alone humans. This is,IMHO, the extinction to end all extinctions.
Even if peace were to suddenly spring up right this instant and somehow we all "woke up" to our dilemma and actually recognized our insanity, there is still the problem of cleaning this entire planet up. And here is a question I NEVER see anyone ask in the anti-nuclear
realm is this....Once humanity is woken up to the lie that is nuclear energy (i.e. splitting atoms to boil water to spin turbines) and figures out in a general concensus that it is disasterously insane....how do we convince our younger generations to properly educate them to handle this waste and clean up our messes??? I can guarantee you that the "nuclear waste clean-up" kiosk on career day is going to be VERY LONLEY when the kids shop around for occupations. The future for humanity now is bleak at best...This is NOT an opinion.
This may seem like a subject that is WAY off base but in my mind it does correlate....because when faced with a scenario like that, my mind goes right to "we finally TRULY have nothing left to lose now"
Sure violence is never the answer to violence...in a world that DOES have a future...this is NOT the case anymore, and quite frankly probably lost it's future when the first atom was ever split!
I will admit my faults and also conceed that I am certifiable at this point now. But the idea of "going down in a blaze of glory" and taking ONE of these psychopaths out with me is only sounding a little MORE rational everyday, not less. If someone has a rebuttal to this line of thinking...PLEASE I beg of you to help me try to see differently.My life is not only welcoming it, it DEPENDS on it.
-On the Edge
"This may seem like a subject that is WAY off base but in my mind it does correlate....because when faced with a scenario like that, my mind goes right to "we finally TRULY have nothing left to lose now"
Sure violence is never the answer to violence...in a world that DOES have a future...this is NOT the case anymore, and quite frankly probably lost it's future when the first atom was ever split! "
You seem to be saying that people learning to stop killing each other - learning to show empathy for ALL humanity - is entirely irrelevant because we are all screwed anyway due to the presence of nuclear reactors that will melt down if left unattended.
Maybe you ought to consider the fact that human beings killing each other on a massive scale is one of the first eventualities that would leave nuclear reactors unattended. You might also want to consider that there is a relationship between human behaviour and cosmological ELEs. Our nasty mindset gives off a rather negative energy that sends a message to the cosmos that we need to be eradicated before we destroy this planet - as we are, we attract such events. If we change our way of thinking, we may be able to curtail such an event, if it isn't too late.
So why not consider the importance of trying to achieve what we can NOW, instead of freaking out about what will happen if we don't even try. I know, it's a tall order. But you might be surprised at how much difference a small individual effort can make, especially if more and more individuals make them.
You could start by asking yourself if you are the kind of person who only empathizes with the suffering of those people your television tells you you should, or if you empathize with ALL human suffering.
Don't you find it rather telling that, the day before the Paris attacks, Lebanon suffered its worst terror attack in 25 years, but the West barely even noticed to it?