You are the enemy. You probably didn’t know that, but your government reminded me of it just recently.
Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard was killed in Afghanistan the other day. So what? So this. An Associated Press photographer caught his death on film. And the AP sent out the pictures for publication.
Secretary of Defense Gates was shocked, shocked! that such pictures would be published. “Because they are upsetting to the the soldier’s family.” Well, la dee dah. In fact, double la dee dah.
Why is Gates so upset? We are all aware that many young Americans have been killed and otherwise maimed in Afghanistan. What nobody would be able to tell you, including a lot of people with degrees in foreign policy and military policy, is exactly WHY they are dying and being maimed over there. But that’s another story for another day.
Here’s why Gates is upset. As long as the dying are nameless, and more importantly, faceless young men and women, nobody gives them a second thought. Admit it. We have become callous about death. We have become used to the fact that our government sends young people to their deaths on poorly explained and even unexplained missions. They are strangers to us, so our concern is somewhat limited. We only really care if we know them or their families. Or if they’re from the same town. It’s become kind of like the celebrity who has dedicated his life to curing some hideous disease he never used to care about until the minute his sister came down with it. As long as we don’t see the pictures of these unknown soldiers, as long as we don’t identify with them and their families, the government can pretty much do whatever it wants.
But publish a picture of a a cherubic young cadet in full dress uniform for everyone to see, alongside pictures of that same young man disemboweled and short one limb as he bleeds to death in the middle of Gahddamistan, and you have something we here on Earth call REALITY – the reality that our government is killing our young people, and probably a lot of the enemy’s (who are they again?) young people and old people and in between people, and they haven’t really told us why. In fact, they will never tell us why.
This ties into what I wrote initially, i.e., the government considers you the enemy. Our government puts a lot of effort into protecting its secrets. They don’t want you to see dying soldiers. They don’t want you to know why we’re in Afghanistan now, years after being there might have arguably done some good. And there are a lot of other things they don’t want you to know. They classify documents all day long every day, including weekends and holidays. It seems that as the Post Office is cutting back, the classifiers are ramping up. They have so many classified documents that most of the time, when they finally become unclassified, its not clear why they were ever classified in the first place.
And what is the point of classifying documents? And trying to censor the press? The point is that YOU are not to be told what is really going on. Read some history and you’ll know at once that our government is riddled with spies. We have more moles in our government than in a plastic surgeon’s waste basket. And some of those moles have security clearances you and I could only dream of. To cite just a few examples of the government’s security clearance aptitude, Soviet spies given the highest clearance knew the innermost secrets of our entire nuclear weapons program during WWII and supplied the USSR with all the details necessary to build their own bomb shorty after the war. Our nuclear submarine program, classified in every detail for decades, was dimed out by more than one traitor on the inside, putting innumerable lives at stake. This is the rule, not the exception. There is literally no secret the government classifies that is not known almost immediately by our enemies. And when the spy isn’t in our midst, he or she is likely in the employ of one of our allies with whom we also share the secrets that you and I are not allowed to know. The British are famous for trusting their spies right up until the decade after they’ve defected.
So you, my friend, are the target of this censorship. You are the target of classification of secrets. Our enemies know a lot more about our government than you do or ever will. In fact, the average poppy grower in Afghanistan likely has a truer picture of the United States Government than most of us ever will. But you pay taxes and vote and sometimes volunteer to die for your country. The enemy doesn’t do that. Do they? I guess you can think of not knowing the truth as your reward for citizenship.
So, say a prayer for Lance Corporal Bernard. Feel his pain. Try to imagine his life slipping away as he went into shock and the world went ghostly silent, slipping just out of his reach. Put yourself in the place of his grieving parents. Because that is exactly what the government of your country does not want you to do. Because if you truly do that, truly feel that, then you are the enemy. Until next time.
