Once again Chris Hedges tells it like it is.
The Idolizing of Chris Kyle is so disturbing that I find it hard to
read the various accounts praising him.
Some of my acquaintances urge me to keep an open mind and listen to
the Libertarian and Right Wing commentators. I have tried. Really!
But the hate and vicious attacks and out and out lies, drive my blood
pressure to the top floor. Thank goodness Cathy and I still travel
about the Great Olympic Peninsula, visiting older blind and low vision
folks. It is refreshing to know that the vast majority of these
people are good, loving folks who have lived good lives, raised good
children and want to believe that we Americans are basically good
people. These people keep me grounded. They remind me that there is
still a level of sanity abroad in the Land.
I have no grudge against Chris Kyle or those who believe his way of
life is the right way. They are products of a sick, greed ridden
Ruling Class. What concerns me is how we can begin to undo the
craziness that has been planted in their heads.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/26/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Killing Ragheads for Jesus: On Watching 'American Sniper'
> Published on
> Monday, January 26, 2015
> by
> TruthDig
> Killing Ragheads for Jesus: On Watching 'American Sniper'
> by
> Chris Hedges
>
> Actor Bradley Cooper (r) playing U.S. Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle in the
> film 'American Sniper.' (Photo: Public domain)
> "American Sniper" lionizes the most despicable aspects of U.S. society--the
> gun culture, the blind adoration of the military, the belief that we have
> an
> innate right as a "Christian" nation to exterminate the "lesser breeds" of
> the earth, a grotesque hypermasculinity that banishes compassion and pity,
> a
> denial of inconvenient facts and historical truth, and a belittling of
> critical thinking and artistic expression. Many Americans, especially white
> Americans trapped in a stagnant economy and a dysfunctional political
> system, yearn for the supposed moral renewal and rigid, militarized control
> the movie venerates. These passions, if realized, will extinguish what is
> left of our now-anemic open society.
> The movie opens with a father and his young son hunting a deer. The boy
> shoots the animal, drops his rifle and runs to see his kill.
> "Get back here," his father yells. "You don't ever leave your rifle in the
> dirt."
> "Yes, sir," the boy answers.
> "That was a helluva shot, son," the father says. "You got a gift. You gonna
> make a fine hunter some day."
> The camera cuts to a church interior where a congregation of white
> Christians--blacks appear in this film as often as in a Woody Allen
> movie--are
> listening to a sermon about God's plan for American Christians. The film's
> title character, based on Chris Kyle, who would become the most lethal
> sniper in U.S. military history, will, it appears from the sermon, be
> called
> upon by God to use his "gift" to kill evildoers. The scene shifts to the
> Kyle family dining room table as the father intones in a Texas twang:
> "There
> are three types of people in this world: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Some
> people prefer to believe evil doesn't exist in the world. And if it ever
> darkened their doorstep they wouldn't know how to protect themselves. Those
> are the sheep. And then you got predators."
> The camera cuts to a schoolyard bully beating a smaller boy.
> "They use violence to prey on people," the father goes on. "They're the
> wolves. Then there are those blessed with the gift of aggression and an
> overpowering need to protect the flock. They are a rare breed who live to
> confront the wolf. They are the sheepdog. We're not raising any sheep in
> this family."
> The father lashes his belt against the dining room table.
> "I will whup your ass if you turn into a wolf," he says to his two sons.
> "We
> protect our own. If someone tries to fight you, tries to bully your little
> brother, you have my permission to finish it."
> There is no shortage of simpletons whose minds are warped by this belief
> system. We elected one of them, George W. Bush, as president. They populate
> the armed forces and the Christian right. They watch Fox News and believe
> it. They have little understanding or curiosity about the world outside
> their insular communities. They are proud of their ignorance and
> anti-intellectualism. They prefer drinking beer and watching football to
> reading a book. And when they get into power--they already control the
> Congress, the corporate world, most of the media and the war machine--their
> binary vision of good and evil and their myopic self-adulation cause severe
> trouble for their country. "American Sniper," like the big-budget feature
> films pumped out in Germany during the Nazi era to exalt deformed values of
> militarism, racial self-glorification and state violence, is a piece of
> propaganda, a tawdry commercial for the crimes of empire. That it made a
> record-breaking $105.3 million over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday long
> weekend is a symptom of the United States' dark malaise.
> "The movie never asks the seminal question as to why the people of Iraq are
> fighting back against us in the very first place," said Mikey Weinstein,
> whom I reached by phone in New Mexico. Weinstein, who worked in the Reagan
> White House and is a former Air Force officer, is the head of the Military
> Religious Freedom Foundation, which challenges the growing Christian
> fundamentalism within the U.S. military. "It made me physically ill with
> its
> twisted, totally one-sided distortions of wartime combat ethics and justice
> woven into the fabric of Chris Kyle's personal and primal justification
> mantra of 'God-Country-Family.' It is nothing less than an odious homage,
> indeed a literal horrific hagiography to wholesale slaughter."
> Weinstein noted that the embrace of extreme right-wing Christian
> chauvinism,
> or Dominionism, which calls for the creation of a theocratic "Christian"
> America, is especially acute among elite units such as the SEALs and the
> Army Special Forces.
> The evildoers don't take long to make an appearance in the film. This
> happens when television--the only way the movie's characters get
> news--announces the 1998 truck bombings of the American embassies in Dar es
> Salaam and Nairobi in which hundreds of people were killed. Chris, now
> grown, and his brother, aspiring rodeo riders, watch the news reports with
> outrage. Ted Koppel talks on the screen about a "war" against the United
> States.
> "Look what they did to us," Chris whispers.
> He heads down to the recruiter to sign up to be a Navy SEAL. We get the
> usual boot camp scenes of green recruits subjected to punishing ordeals to
> make them become real men. In a bar scene, an aspiring SEAL has painted a
> target on his back and comrades throw darts into his skin. What little
> individuality these recruits have--and they don't appear to have much--is
> sucked out of them until they are part of the military mass. They are
> unquestioningly obedient to authority, which means, of course, they are
> sheep.
> We get a love story too. Chris meets Taya in a bar. They do shots. The
> movie
> slips, as it often does, into clichéd dialogue.
> She tells him Navy SEALs are "arrogant, self-centered pricks who think you
> can lie and cheat and do whatever the fuck you want. I'd never date a
> SEAL."
> "Why would you say I'm self-centered?" Kyle asks. "I'd lay down my life for
> my country."
> "Why?"
> "Because it's the greatest country on earth and I'd do everything I can to
> protect it," he says.
> She drinks too much. She vomits. He is gallant. He helps her home. They
> fall
> in love. Taya is later shown watching television. She yells to Chris in the
> next room.
> "Oh, my God, Chris," she says.
> "What's wrong?" he asks.
> "No!" she yells.
> Then we hear the television announcer: "You see the first plane coming in
> at
> what looks like the east side. ..."
> Chris and Taya watch in horror. Ominous music fills the movie's soundtrack.
> The evildoers have asked for it. Kyle will go to Iraq to extract vengeance.
> He will go to fight in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, a
> country
> that columnist Thomas Friedman once said we attacked "because we could."
> The
> historical record and the reality of the Middle East don't matter. Muslims
> are Muslims. And Muslims are evildoers or, as Kyle calls them, "savages."
> Evildoers have to be eradicated.
> Chris and Taya marry. He wears his gold Navy SEAL trident on the white
> shirt
> under his tuxedo at the wedding. His SEAL comrades are at the ceremony.
> "Just got the call, boys--it's on," an officer says at the wedding
> reception.
> The Navy SEALs cheer. They drink. And then we switch to Fallujah. It is
> Tour
> One. Kyle, now a sniper, is told Fallujah is "the new Wild West." This may
> be the only accurate analogy in the film, given the genocide we carried out
> against Native Americans. He hears about an enemy sniper who can do "head
> shots from 500 yards out. They call him Mustafa. He was in the Olympics."
> Kyle's first kill is a boy who is handed an anti-tank grenade by a young
> woman in a black chador. The woman, who expresses no emotion over the boy's
> death, picks up the grenade after the boy is shot and moves toward U.S.
> Marines on patrol. Kyle kills her too. And here we have the template for
> the
> film and Kyle's best-selling autobiography, "American Sniper." Mothers and
> sisters in Iraq don't love their sons or their brothers. Iraqi women breed
> to make little suicide bombers. Children are miniature Osama bin Ladens.
> Not
> one of the Muslim evildoers can be trusted--man, woman or child. They are
> beasts. They are shown in the film identifying U.S. positions to insurgents
> on their cellphones, hiding weapons under trapdoors in their floors,
> planting improvised explosive devices in roads or strapping explosives onto
> themselves in order to be suicide bombers. They are devoid of human
> qualities.
> "There was a kid who barely had any hair on his balls," Kyle says
> nonchalantly after shooting the child and the woman. He is resting on his
> cot with a big Texas flag behind him on the wall. "Mother gives him a
> grenade, sends him out there to kill Marines."
> Enter The Butcher--a fictional Iraqi character created for the film. Here we
> get the most evil of the evildoers. He is dressed in a long black leather
> jacket and dispatches his victims with an electric drill. He mutilates
> children--we see an arm he cut from a child. A local sheik offers to betray
> The Butcher for $100,000. The Butcher kills the sheik. He murders the
> sheik's small son in front of his mother with his electric drill. The
> Butcher shouts: "You talk to them, you die with them."
> Kyle moves on to Tour Two after time at home with Taya, whose chief role in
> the film is to complain through tears and expletives about her husband
> being
> away. Kyle says before he leaves: "They're savages. Babe, they're fuckin'
> savages."
> He and his fellow platoon members spray-paint the white skull of the
> Punisher from Marvel Comics on their vehicles, body armor, weapons and
> helmets. The motto they paint in a circle around the skull reads: "Despite
> what your momma told you ... violence does solve problems."
> "And we spray-painted it on every building and walls we could," Kyle wrote
> in his memoir, "American Sniper." "We wanted people to know, we're here and
> we want to fuck with you. ...You see us? We're the people kicking your ass.
> Fear us because we will kill you, motherfucker."
> The book is even more disturbing than the film. In the film Kyle is a
> reluctant warrior, one forced to do his duty. In the book he relishes
> killing and war. He is consumed by hatred of all Iraqis. He is intoxicated
> by violence. He is credited with 160 confirmed kills, but he notes that to
> be confirmed a kill had to be witnessed, "so if I shot someone in the
> stomach and he managed to crawl around where we couldn't see him before he
> bled out he didn't count."
> Kyle insisted that every person he shot deserved to die. His inability to
> be
> self-reflective allowed him to deny the fact that during the U.S.
> occupation
> many, many innocent Iraqis were killed, including some shot by snipers.
> Snipers are used primarily to sow terror and fear among enemy combatants.
> And in his denial of reality, something former slaveholders and former
> Nazis
> perfected to an art after overseeing their own atrocities, Kyle was able to
> cling to childish myth rather than examine the darkness of his own soul and
> his contribution to the war crimes we carried out in Iraq. He justified his
> killing with a cloying sentimentality about his family, his Christian
> faith,
> his fellow SEALs and his nation. But sentimentality is not love. It is not
> empathy. It is, at its core, about self-pity and self-adulation. That the
> film, like the book, swings between cruelty and sentimentality is not
> accidental.
> "Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious
> emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel," James Baldwin
> reminded us. "The wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to
> experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore,
> the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty."
> "Savage, despicable evil," Kyle wrote of those he was killing from rooftops
> and windows. "That's what we were fighting in Iraq. That's why a lot of
> people, myself included, called the enemy 'savages.'... I only wish I had
> killed more." At another point he writes: "I loved killing bad guys. ... I
> loved what I did. I still do ... it was fun. I had the time of my life being
> a
> SEAL." He labels Iraqis "fanatics" and writes "they hated us because we
> weren't Muslims." He claims "the fanatics we fought valued nothing but
> their
> twisted interpretation of religion."
> "I never once fought for the Iraqis," he wrote of our Iraqi allies. "I
> could
> give a flying fuck about them."
> He killed an Iraqi teenager he claimed was an insurgent. He watched as the
> boy's mother found his body, tore her clothes and wept. He was unmoved.
> He wrote: "If you loved them [the sons], you should have kept them away
> from
> the war. You should have kept them from joining the insurgency. You let
> them
> try and kill us--what did you think would happen to them?"
> "People back home [in the U.S.], people who haven't been in war, at least
> not that war, sometimes don't seem to understand how the troops in Iraq
> acted," he went on. "They're surprised--shocked--to discover we often joked
> about death, about things we saw."
> He was investigated by the Army for killing an unarmed civilian. According
> to his memoir, Kyle, who viewed all Iraqis as the enemy, told an Army
> colonel: "I don't shoot people with Korans. I'd like to, but I don't." The
> investigation went nowhere.
> Kyle was given the nickname "Legend." He got a tattoo of a Crusader cross
> on
> his arm. "I wanted everyone to know I was a Christian. I had it put in red,
> for blood. I hated the damn savages I'd been fighting," he wrote. "I always
> will." Following a day of sniping, after killing perhaps as many as six
> people, he would go back to his barracks to spent his time smoking Cuban
> Romeo y Julieta No. 3 cigars and "playing video games, watching porn and
> working out." On leave, something omitted in the movie, he was frequently
> arrested for drunken bar fights. He dismissed politicians, hated the press
> and disdained superior officers, exalting only the comradeship of warriors.
> His memoir glorifies white, "Christian" supremacy and war. It is an angry
> tirade directed against anyone who questions the military's elite,
> professional killers.
> "For some reason, a lot of people back home--not all people--didn't accept
> that we were at war," he wrote. "They didn't accept that war means death,
> violent death, most times. A lot of people, not just politicians, wanted to
> impose ridiculous fantasies on us, hold us to some standard of behavior
> that
> no human being could maintain."
> The enemy sniper Mustafa, portrayed in the film as if he was a serial
> killer, fatally wounds Kyle's comrade Ryan "Biggles" Job. In the movie
> Kyle
> returns to Iraq--his fourth tour--to extract revenge for Biggles' death. This
> final tour, at least in the film, centered on the killing of The Butcher
> and
> the enemy sniper, also a fictional character. As it focuses on the dramatic
> duel between hero Kyle and villain Mustafa the movie becomes ridiculously
> cartoonish.
> Kyle gets Mustafa in his sights and pulls the trigger. The bullet is shown
> leaving the rifle in slow motion. "Do it for Biggles," someone says. The
> enemy sniper's head turns into a puff of blood.
> "Biggles would be proud of you," a soldier says. "You did it, man."
> His final tour over, Kyle leaves the Navy. As a civilian he struggles with
> the demons of war and becomes, at least in the film, a model father and
> husband and works with veterans who were maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He
> trades his combat boots for cowboy boots.
> The real-life Kyle, as the film was in production, was shot dead at a
> shooting range near Dallas on Feb. 2, 2013, along with a friend, Chad
> Littlefield. A former Marine, Eddie Ray Routh, who had been suffering from
> PTSD and severe psychological episodes, allegedly killed the two men and
> then stole Kyle's pickup truck. Routh will go on trial next month. The film
> ends with scenes of Kyle's funeral procession--thousands lined the roads
> waving flags--and the memorial service at the Dallas Cowboys' home stadium.
> It shows fellow SEALs pounding their tridents into the top of his coffin, a
> custom for fallen comrades. Kyle was shot in the back and the back of his
> head. Like so many people he dispatched, he never saw his killer when the
> fatal shots were fired.
> The culture of war banishes the capacity for pity. It glorifies
> self-sacrifice and death. It sees pain, ritual humiliation and violence as
> part of an initiation into manhood. Brutal hazing, as Kyle noted in his
> book, was an integral part of becoming a Navy SEAL. New SEALs would be held
> down and choked by senior members of the platoon until they passed out. The
> culture of war idealizes only the warrior. It belittles those who do not
> exhibit the warrior's "manly" virtues. It places a premium on obedience and
> loyalty. It punishes those who engage in independent thought and demands
> total conformity. It elevates cruelty and killing to a virtue. This
> culture,
> once it infects wider society, destroys all that makes the heights of human
> civilization and democracy possible. The capacity for empathy, the
> cultivation of wisdom and understanding, the tolerance and respect for
> difference and even love are ruthlessly crushed. The innate barbarity that
> war and violence breed is justified by a saccharine sentimentality about
> the
> nation, the flag and a perverted Christianity that blesses its armed
> crusaders. This sentimentality, as Baldwin wrote, masks a terrifying
> numbness. It fosters an unchecked narcissism. Facts and historical truths,
> when they do not fit into the mythic vision of the nation and the tribe,
> are
> discarded. Dissent becomes treason. All opponents are godless and subhuman.
> "American Sniper" caters to a deep sickness rippling through our society.
> It
> holds up the dangerous belief that we can recover our equilibrium and our
> lost glory by embracing an American fascism.
> (c) 2015 TruthDig
> Killing Ragheads for Jesus: On Watching 'American Sniper'
> Published on
> Monday, January 26, 2015
> by
> TruthDig
> Killing Ragheads for Jesus: On Watching 'American Sniper'
> by
> Chris Hedges
>
> Actor Bradley Cooper (r) playing U.S. Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle in the
> film 'American Sniper.' (Photo: Public domain)
> "American Sniper" lionizes the most despicable aspects of U.S. society--the
> gun culture, the blind adoration of the military, the belief that we have
> an
> innate right as a "Christian" nation to exterminate the "lesser breeds" of
> the earth, a grotesque hypermasculinity that banishes compassion and pity,
> a
> denial of inconvenient facts and historical truth, and a belittling of
> critical thinking and artistic expression. Many Americans, especially white
> Americans trapped in a stagnant economy and a dysfunctional political
> system, yearn for the supposed moral renewal and rigid, militarized control
> the movie venerates. These passions, if realized, will extinguish what is
> left of our now-anemic open society.
> The movie opens with a father and his young son hunting a deer. The boy
> shoots the animal, drops his rifle and runs to see his kill.
> "Get back here," his father yells. "You don't ever leave your rifle in the
> dirt."
> "Yes, sir," the boy answers.
> "That was a helluva shot, son," the father says. "You got a gift. You gonna
> make a fine hunter some day."
> The camera cuts to a church interior where a congregation of white
> Christians--blacks appear in this film as often as in a Woody Allen
> movie--are
> listening to a sermon about God's plan for American Christians. The film's
> title character, based on Chris Kyle, who would become the most lethal
> sniper in U.S. military history, will, it appears from the sermon, be
> called
> upon by God to use his "gift" to kill evildoers. The scene shifts to the
> Kyle family dining room table as the father intones in a Texas twang:
> "There
> are three types of people in this world: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Some
> people prefer to believe evil doesn't exist in the world. And if it ever
> darkened their doorstep they wouldn't know how to protect themselves. Those
> are the sheep. And then you got predators."
> The camera cuts to a schoolyard bully beating a smaller boy.
> "They use violence to prey on people," the father goes on. "They're the
> wolves. Then there are those blessed with the gift of aggression and an
> overpowering need to protect the flock. They are a rare breed who live to
> confront the wolf. They are the sheepdog. We're not raising any sheep in
> this family."
> The father lashes his belt against the dining room table.
> "I will whup your ass if you turn into a wolf," he says to his two sons.
> "We
> protect our own. If someone tries to fight you, tries to bully your little
> brother, you have my permission to finish it."
> There is no shortage of simpletons whose minds are warped by this belief
> system. We elected one of them, George W. Bush, as president. They populate
> the armed forces and the Christian right. They watch Fox News and believe
> it. They have little understanding or curiosity about the world outside
> their insular communities. They are proud of their ignorance and
> anti-intellectualism. They prefer drinking beer and watching football to
> reading a book. And when they get into power--they already control the
> Congress, the corporate world, most of the media and the war machine--their
> binary vision of good and evil and their myopic self-adulation cause severe
> trouble for their country. "American Sniper," like the big-budget feature
> films pumped out in Germany during the Nazi era to exalt deformed values of
> militarism, racial self-glorification and state violence, is a piece of
> propaganda, a tawdry commercial for the crimes of empire. That it made a
> record-breaking $105.3 million over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday long
> weekend is a symptom of the United States' dark malaise.
> "The movie never asks the seminal question as to why the people of Iraq are
> fighting back against us in the very first place," said Mikey Weinstein,
> whom I reached by phone in New Mexico. Weinstein, who worked in the Reagan
> White House and is a former Air Force officer, is the head of the Military
> Religious Freedom Foundation, which challenges the growing Christian
> fundamentalism within the U.S. military. "It made me physically ill with
> its
> twisted, totally one-sided distortions of wartime combat ethics and justice
> woven into the fabric of Chris Kyle's personal and primal justification
> mantra of 'God-Country-Family.' It is nothing less than an odious homage,
> indeed a literal horrific hagiography to wholesale slaughter."
> Weinstein noted that the embrace of extreme right-wing Christian
> chauvinism,
> or Dominionism, which calls for the creation of a theocratic "Christian"
> America, is especially acute among elite units such as the SEALs and the
> Army Special Forces.
> The evildoers don't take long to make an appearance in the film. This
> happens when television--the only way the movie's characters get
> news--announces the 1998 truck bombings of the American embassies in Dar es
> Salaam and Nairobi in which hundreds of people were killed. Chris, now
> grown, and his brother, aspiring rodeo riders, watch the news reports with
> outrage. Ted Koppel talks on the screen about a "war" against the United
> States.
> "Look what they did to us," Chris whispers.
> He heads down to the recruiter to sign up to be a Navy SEAL. We get the
> usual boot camp scenes of green recruits subjected to punishing ordeals to
> make them become real men. In a bar scene, an aspiring SEAL has painted a
> target on his back and comrades throw darts into his skin. What little
> individuality these recruits have--and they don't appear to have much--is
> sucked out of them until they are part of the military mass. They are
> unquestioningly obedient to authority, which means, of course, they are
> sheep.
> We get a love story too. Chris meets Taya in a bar. They do shots. The
> movie
> slips, as it often does, into clichéd dialogue.
> She tells him Navy SEALs are "arrogant, self-centered pricks who think you
> can lie and cheat and do whatever the fuck you want. I'd never date a
> SEAL."
> "Why would you say I'm self-centered?" Kyle asks. "I'd lay down my life for
> my country."
> "Why?"
> "Because it's the greatest country on earth and I'd do everything I can to
> protect it," he says.
> She drinks too much. She vomits. He is gallant. He helps her home. They
> fall
> in love. Taya is later shown watching television. She yells to Chris in the
> next room.
> "Oh, my God, Chris," she says.
> "What's wrong?" he asks.
> "No!" she yells.
> Then we hear the television announcer: "You see the first plane coming in
> at
> what looks like the east side. ..."
> Chris and Taya watch in horror. Ominous music fills the movie's soundtrack.
> The evildoers have asked for it. Kyle will go to Iraq to extract vengeance.
> He will go to fight in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, a
> country
> that columnist Thomas Friedman once said we attacked "because we could."
> The
> historical record and the reality of the Middle East don't matter. Muslims
> are Muslims. And Muslims are evildoers or, as Kyle calls them, "savages."
> Evildoers have to be eradicated.
> Chris and Taya marry. He wears his gold Navy SEAL trident on the white
> shirt
> under his tuxedo at the wedding. His SEAL comrades are at the ceremony.
> "Just got the call, boys--it's on," an officer says at the wedding
> reception.
> The Navy SEALs cheer. They drink. And then we switch to Fallujah. It is
> Tour
> One. Kyle, now a sniper, is told Fallujah is "the new Wild West." This may
> be the only accurate analogy in the film, given the genocide we carried out
> against Native Americans. He hears about an enemy sniper who can do "head
> shots from 500 yards out. They call him Mustafa. He was in the Olympics."
> Kyle's first kill is a boy who is handed an anti-tank grenade by a young
> woman in a black chador. The woman, who expresses no emotion over the boy's
> death, picks up the grenade after the boy is shot and moves toward U.S.
> Marines on patrol. Kyle kills her too. And here we have the template for
> the
> film and Kyle's best-selling autobiography, "American Sniper." Mothers and
> sisters in Iraq don't love their sons or their brothers. Iraqi women breed
> to make little suicide bombers. Children are miniature Osama bin Ladens.
> Not
> one of the Muslim evildoers can be trusted--man, woman or child. They are
> beasts. They are shown in the film identifying U.S. positions to insurgents
> on their cellphones, hiding weapons under trapdoors in their floors,
> planting improvised explosive devices in roads or strapping explosives onto
> themselves in order to be suicide bombers. They are devoid of human
> qualities.
> "There was a kid who barely had any hair on his balls," Kyle says
> nonchalantly after shooting the child and the woman. He is resting on his
> cot with a big Texas flag behind him on the wall. "Mother gives him a
> grenade, sends him out there to kill Marines."
> Enter The Butcher--a fictional Iraqi character created for the film. Here we
> get the most evil of the evildoers. He is dressed in a long black leather
> jacket and dispatches his victims with an electric drill. He mutilates
> children--we see an arm he cut from a child. A local sheik offers to betray
> The Butcher for $100,000. The Butcher kills the sheik. He murders the
> sheik's small son in front of his mother with his electric drill. The
> Butcher shouts: "You talk to them, you die with them."
> Kyle moves on to Tour Two after time at home with Taya, whose chief role in
> the film is to complain through tears and expletives about her husband
> being
> away. Kyle says before he leaves: "They're savages. Babe, they're fuckin'
> savages."
> He and his fellow platoon members spray-paint the white skull of the
> Punisher from Marvel Comics on their vehicles, body armor, weapons and
> helmets. The motto they paint in a circle around the skull reads: "Despite
> what your momma told you ... violence does solve problems."
> "And we spray-painted it on every building and walls we could," Kyle wrote
> in his memoir, "American Sniper." "We wanted people to know, we're here and
> we want to fuck with you. ...You see us? We're the people kicking your ass.
> Fear us because we will kill you, motherfucker."
> The book is even more disturbing than the film. In the film Kyle is a
> reluctant warrior, one forced to do his duty. In the book he relishes
> killing and war. He is consumed by hatred of all Iraqis. He is intoxicated
> by violence. He is credited with 160 confirmed kills, but he notes that to
> be confirmed a kill had to be witnessed, "so if I shot someone in the
> stomach and he managed to crawl around where we couldn't see him before he
> bled out he didn't count."
> Kyle insisted that every person he shot deserved to die. His inability to
> be
> self-reflective allowed him to deny the fact that during the U.S.
> occupation
> many, many innocent Iraqis were killed, including some shot by snipers.
> Snipers are used primarily to sow terror and fear among enemy combatants.
> And in his denial of reality, something former slaveholders and former
> Nazis
> perfected to an art after overseeing their own atrocities, Kyle was able to
> cling to childish myth rather than examine the darkness of his own soul and
> his contribution to the war crimes we carried out in Iraq. He justified his
> killing with a cloying sentimentality about his family, his Christian
> faith,
> his fellow SEALs and his nation. But sentimentality is not love. It is not
> empathy. It is, at its core, about self-pity and self-adulation. That the
> film, like the book, swings between cruelty and sentimentality is not
> accidental.
> "Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious
> emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel," James Baldwin
> reminded us. "The wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to
> experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore,
> the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty."
> "Savage, despicable evil," Kyle wrote of those he was killing from rooftops
> and windows. "That's what we were fighting in Iraq. That's why a lot of
> people, myself included, called the enemy 'savages.'... I only wish I had
> killed more." At another point he writes: "I loved killing bad guys. ... I
> loved what I did. I still do ... it was fun. I had the time of my life being
> a
> SEAL." He labels Iraqis "fanatics" and writes "they hated us because we
> weren't Muslims." He claims "the fanatics we fought valued nothing but
> their
> twisted interpretation of religion."
> "I never once fought for the Iraqis," he wrote of our Iraqi allies. "I
> could
> give a flying fuck about them."
> He killed an Iraqi teenager he claimed was an insurgent. He watched as the
> boy's mother found his body, tore her clothes and wept. He was unmoved.
> He wrote: "If you loved them [the sons], you should have kept them away
> from
> the war. You should have kept them from joining the insurgency. You let
> them
> try and kill us--what did you think would happen to them?"
> "People back home [in the U.S.], people who haven't been in war, at least
> not that war, sometimes don't seem to understand how the troops in Iraq
> acted," he went on. "They're surprised--shocked--to discover we often joked
> about death, about things we saw."
> He was investigated by the Army for killing an unarmed civilian. According
> to his memoir, Kyle, who viewed all Iraqis as the enemy, told an Army
> colonel: "I don't shoot people with Korans. I'd like to, but I don't." The
> investigation went nowhere.
> Kyle was given the nickname "Legend." He got a tattoo of a Crusader cross
> on
> his arm. "I wanted everyone to know I was a Christian. I had it put in red,
> for blood. I hated the damn savages I'd been fighting," he wrote. "I always
> will." Following a day of sniping, after killing perhaps as many as six
> people, he would go back to his barracks to spent his time smoking Cuban
> Romeo y Julieta No. 3 cigars and "playing video games, watching porn and
> working out." On leave, something omitted in the movie, he was frequently
> arrested for drunken bar fights. He dismissed politicians, hated the press
> and disdained superior officers, exalting only the comradeship of warriors.
> His memoir glorifies white, "Christian" supremacy and war. It is an angry
> tirade directed against anyone who questions the military's elite,
> professional killers.
> "For some reason, a lot of people back home--not all people--didn't accept
> that we were at war," he wrote. "They didn't accept that war means death,
> violent death, most times. A lot of people, not just politicians, wanted to
> impose ridiculous fantasies on us, hold us to some standard of behavior
> that
> no human being could maintain."
> The enemy sniper Mustafa, portrayed in the film as if he was a serial
> killer, fatally wounds Kyle's comrade Ryan "Biggles" Job. In the movie Kyle
> returns to Iraq--his fourth tour--to extract revenge for Biggles' death. This
> final tour, at least in the film, centered on the killing of The Butcher
> and
> the enemy sniper, also a fictional character. As it focuses on the dramatic
> duel between hero Kyle and villain Mustafa the movie becomes ridiculously
> cartoonish.
> Kyle gets Mustafa in his sights and pulls the trigger. The bullet is shown
> leaving the rifle in slow motion. "Do it for Biggles," someone says. The
> enemy sniper's head turns into a puff of blood.
> "Biggles would be proud of you," a soldier says. "You did it, man."
> His final tour over, Kyle leaves the Navy. As a civilian he struggles with
> the demons of war and becomes, at least in the film, a model father and
> husband and works with veterans who were maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He
> trades his combat boots for cowboy boots.
> The real-life Kyle, as the film was in production, was shot dead at a
> shooting range near Dallas on Feb. 2, 2013, along with a friend, Chad
> Littlefield. A former Marine, Eddie Ray Routh, who had been suffering from
> PTSD and severe psychological episodes, allegedly killed the two men and
> then stole Kyle's pickup truck. Routh will go on trial next month. The film
> ends with scenes of Kyle's funeral procession--thousands lined the roads
> waving flags--and the memorial service at the Dallas Cowboys' home stadium.
> It shows fellow SEALs pounding their tridents into the top of his coffin, a
> custom for fallen comrades. Kyle was shot in the back and the back of his
> head. Like so many people he dispatched, he never saw his killer when the
> fatal shots were fired.
> The culture of war banishes the capacity for pity. It glorifies
> self-sacrifice and death. It sees pain, ritual humiliation and violence as
> part of an initiation into manhood. Brutal hazing, as Kyle noted in his
> book, was an integral part of becoming a Navy SEAL. New SEALs would be held
> down and choked by senior members of the platoon until they passed out. The
> culture of war idealizes only the warrior. It belittles those who do not
> exhibit the warrior's "manly" virtues. It places a premium on obedience and
> loyalty. It punishes those who engage in independent thought and demands
> total conformity. It elevates cruelty and killing to a virtue. This
> culture,
> once it infects wider society, destroys all that makes the heights of human
> civilization and democracy possible. The capacity for empathy, the
> cultivation of wisdom and understanding, the tolerance and respect for
> difference and even love are ruthlessly crushed. The innate barbarity that
> war and violence breed is justified by a saccharine sentimentality about
> the
> nation, the flag and a perverted Christianity that blesses its armed
> crusaders. This sentimentality, as Baldwin wrote, masks a terrifying
> numbness. It fosters an unchecked narcissism. Facts and historical truths,
> when they do not fit into the mythic vision of the nation and the tribe,
> are
> discarded. Dissent becomes treason. All opponents are godless and subhuman.
> "American Sniper" caters to a deep sickness rippling through our society.
> It
> holds up the dangerous belief that we can recover our equilibrium and our
> lost glory by embracing an American fascism.
> (c) 2015 TruthDig
>
>
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