The dogs of war are always in heat. They bark, they gnaw, they kill and breed. Civilisation a chimera, chewing through bones, tearing at flesh, the killers are never in defeat. No matter how well behaved they act, whatever laws claim to be their collar and what kennel of state they sleep from within. They bark for more. A hungry pack, they hunt, kill. They want more. As a mob we tell ourselves lies, we pretend to be cultivated and wise. We look down on the savagery of ancient times, when tribes waged wars. They did it with bare hands, axes and clubs. We are sophisticated now with missiles,...
The Wigan Pier of the Periphery
I just finished some work in the city. I was working with a pair of carpenters, men in dirty clothes with splinters in their hands. As we worked the nicely dressed office class ignored those building the world around them, the delivery drivers, the cleaners, the homeless picking tobacco from pieces of spent paper. I was among the people in the periphery, the insignificant to the important careerists of the government and corporate class who rode elevators up towers of glass to sit through a day where taxation and monopoly fees keep them paid. The conversations among us dirty men is usually...
Triple Tap Murders…Oh Look, a Cat Video
Recently the Israeli Defense Force murdered an aid convoy. A group of international aid workers who had coordinated with the IDF and who were travelling on an IDF approved route. When the aid workers came under attack, they contacted the IDF. Three assaults were launched by the IDF, killing seven World Central Kitchen aid workers. The term "triple tap" has been used. The IDF will investigate itself. The outraged, the shocked, and the indifferent alike watch as children die daily in Palestine. The aid workers' bodies were mutilated by weapons likely supplied by the United States.And in...
A Home into a House
It’s a modest house, a unit trapped inside of a suburb within a suburb. Mostly elderly live here. A woman in her late seventies greets me, “I’m Rosanne, the neighbour.” She takes me through the house and shows me what needs to be carried out. Heavy furniture and the boxes too heavy for others to lift. The house is stripped down to its bare bones, dust and remnants of a home barely linger. I load my ute, Rosanne watches, disappears and returns with a cup of tea for me. We share idle chit chat, the weather, never having enough time and eventually how lovely the person whose belongings I am...
Five Chimneys of Gaza
Millions and thousands become empty numbers when scaled in the context of history. As a scale of human life taken, those numbers are tragic and can seem unreal. A life balanced against policy, allowed to suffer and die beneath a wider context that is expedient or abstract skewered by passions and contemporary politics. A life that destroyed, punished and tortured by complete strangers with such certainty, despite innocence. At best guilt by association in the most remote attachment is the only grounds for culpability. With ideology, the authority of law and the language of justice, the...
$5400
One of the terrorist-murderers captured in Moscow claimed that he was paid the equivalent of US$5400 to kill innocent people. In his native Tajikstan that is no doubt a lot of money. His willingness to kill for money is not new, the mercenary trade is one steeped in romance but also be despised. Usually depending on any given historical perspective. Though these men were murderers. Spree killers, motivated by the ideology of terror and money. While other spree killers the world over may do their terrible deed with a vicious thrill these men are now heroes to some, because the crime is...
Collateral Murder 2.0
When the footage of Reuters journalists and civilians were Wikileaked to the world, there was outrage. A shame exhibited by some in the American government caused them to reel from the crime that had been exposed, to downplay the prevalence of such murders, and ultimately to shift the blame to Julian Assange and Wikileaks itself. It worked in the end: Assange is locked away in judicial purgatory, the wider world has mostly forgotten what Wikileaks has revealed, and mainstream media continues to be a predominantly homogenized mouth piece for power. Now, we see another moment of an execution...
Greetings
The big boss man has said that we can blog, chat and rant about whatever we wish. So, expect to see as much from me here. I most likely will keep most things about the liberty and anti-war sector but I was thinking about sharing short stories, training advice, anecdotes and other tidbits that would not ordinarily go under the category of article. Also, as I am blogging here directly forgive my English, English rather the Yank version that the good editors here have to convert from my ramblings often. To which I commend them for being supremely awesome.With that in mind, all the best and...