At some point in the next few hours or days, it is likely that deeply damaged collection of moral cretins known as “Western leaders”, will sit down behind the gargantuan phalanxes of heavily armed security that keeps their well-wadded rumps safe and cozy and give the nod to some close-cropped flunky laden with medals for mendacious time-serving and relentless butt-covering to launch the airstrikes that will kill a large number of human beings. Poor souls who had absolutely nothing to do with the alleged chemical weapon attacks allegedly carried out by Syrian government forces.
That is to say, the leaders of the West, particularly the notoriously bloodthirsty nations of the United States and Great Britain, will murder a number of their fellow human beings for no reason whatsoever. What’s more, they know this and admit it beforehand, speaking under oath, as the U.S. military chief did this week, of the inevitable “collateral damage” the coming attacks will cause.
These Western leaders, primarily Barack Obama and the pathetic, feckless ex-PR shill David Cameron, will knowingly murder an unknown number of people while braying all the while of their own righteousness and the strict “legality” of their acts of mass murder. They will be supported in these murders by the leaders of the so-called opposition parties, who will, as always, line up like automatons and spew out mindless, spineless rhetoric in favor of murdering people, because they too are deeply damaged moral cretins who hope one day to have the opportunity to sit in well-wadded comfort and order human beings to be killed.
These wretched, cowardly weaklings — the leaders, their opposition, their minions — believe that the exercise of brutal, death-dealing power (at a distance; always, always at a safe distance!) will somehow fill up the howling emptiness inside them. It will not, of course, but they are too stupid to know this — or else they are already so far steeped in blood that they can’t stop, can’t go back, their humanity is already lost.
These leaders know that their action will murder innocent people (as so many of their actions do, week after week, year after year), they know (because their own analysts and experts tell them) that it will exacerbate extremism, worsen the conflict in Syria, destabilize the region, increase global tensions and lead directly and indirectly to the needless death and horrific suffering of countless people in the days and years to come.
They know all this, they will do it anyway. They know all this, but they do not care. They don’t know how to care. They have given themselves over to Moloch — to the insane, inhuman force of violent domination — and they must blindly follow its dictates. Nothing can stop them, no reasoned argument, no moral objection, not even self-interest, national or personal. They are insane. They are stupid. They are enslaved to murderous power — so they will kill.
Chris Floyd is a columnist for CounterPunch.