by Black Agenda Report editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
Kyle: Long overdue Karmic justice.
America, born in genocide and constantly renewed by bloodbaths, treats mass murder as a virtue. Chris Kyle answered the “clarion call of white supremacy, manifest destiny and imperial delusion.” Now that he’s dead, the world is a better place.
“Kyle declared that Iraqis were not really human beings and thus had lost any right to stay alive.”
One of the ways in which humans wrestle with the existence of evil is by hoping that the evil doer gets his or her just desserts. This hope is expressed with expressions such as “what goes around comes around” or “you reap what you sow.”
Despite all of this wishful thinking, it is rare for cosmic justice [5] to be served as completely as it was in the case of the late Chris Kyle. Kyle was a Navy SEAL sniper in Iraq who served five tours of duty and by his own estimate killed 150 people. This week Kyle was himself shot to death and by another veteran no less.
Kyle should have lived in ignominy for taking so many lives, but instead he was decorated with medals and became a celebrity as a result of what should have been prosecuted crimes. Kyle wrote a best selling book, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in American History. He had a starring role in a NBC reality show, Stars Earn Stripes, a disgraceful ode to militarism and empire. He and another veteran met their end in an ill-advised effort to treat a former marine suffering from PTSD. Kyle was good at killing but he wasn’t much of a mental health professional. He used a shooting range as a venue to treat other vets having difficulty adjusting to civilian life. Let’s just say it didn’t work out very well.
“Kyle was good at killing but he wasn’t much of a mental health professional.”
The United States government committed a terrible crime when it invaded Iraq nearly ten years ago.
Estimates of the number of Iraqis killed range from 150,000 to over 1 million. Like human beings throughout human history, Iraqis didn’t take kindly to being occupied and they fought back as best they could. The media may call them terrorists or insurgents, but Iraqis have as much right to defend themselves and their country as anyone else in the world and Kyle had no right to kill any of them.
Obviously he didn’t see it that way. He felt justified and quite moral in killing so many people and he did it in typical American fashion. In a Fox news interview [6], Kyle declared that Iraqis were not really human beings and thus had lost any right to stay alive.
“I considered the people I was killing to be savages because of the violence they committed against American troops, the beheadings, the rapes of innocent villagers. They lived by putting fear into other people’s hearts and civilized people don’t act that way. I wasn’t so much committed to killing them as I was committed to making sure that every service member over there, whether American or allied, came home – I was killing them to protect my fellow Americans. You have to get into the mentality and you can not think of them as human beings.”
Don’t think of them as human beings. That is the long standing clarion call of white supremacy, manifest destiny and imperial delusion. America has long accepted decidedly uncivilized behavior as being morally superior, even when it obviously isn’t.
“Iraqis have as much right to defend themselves and their country as anyone else in the world and Kyle had no right to kill any of them.”
American troops were guilty of raping their fellow soldiers and Iraqi prisoners and other civilians too. As for beheadings it should be pointed out that humans are decapitated by bombs and bullets. All of the allegations Kyle made against Iraqis can be laid at America’s doorstep too. Civilization is definitely in the eye of the beholder.
The people who plan the wars don’t suffer. George W. Bush and Tony Blair went on to make millions of dollars giving corporate speeches and Blair even has the gall to present himself as a religious leader of sorts. The Iraqi victims and the soldiers maimed or killed or suffering from PTSD pay the real price for the wrongdoing planned from on high.
Kyle is survived by a wife and young children who are no doubt grieving, but the same is surely true of his 150 victims. They left family behind. Children are fatherless or motherless or homeless because of the “civilized” United States. It is tragic for all of these people to have suffered so much but until they can be seen as civilized human beings, there will be no end to American slaughter.
There is another old saying which perfectly describes the death of Chris Kyle. “The chickens come home to roost.”
Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. [7] Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley@BlackAgendaReport.com.
[8]
Department of War PTSD white supremacy
Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/freedom-rider-sniper-gets-sniped
Links:
[1] http://blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/department-war-0
[2] http://blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/ptsd
[3] http://blackagendareport.com/category/life-america/white-supremacy
[4] http://blackagendareport.com/sites/www.blackagendareport.com/files/kyle.jpg
[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/04/us/chris-kyle-american-sniper-author-reported-killed.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0
[6] http://foxnewsinsider.com/2012/01/05/factor-interview-america’s-most-lethal-sniper-chris-kyle-details-his-150-certified-kills-reveals-why-he-punched-jesse-ventura/
[7] http://freedomrider.blogspot.com/
[8] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fblackagendareport.com%2Fcontent%2Ffreedom-rider-sniper-gets-sniped&linkname=Freedom%20Rider%3A%20Sniper%20Gets%20Sniped
2 comments
not appropriate, it is the propagandists who create the myths and beat the drums that are to blame, not the poor footman who are brainwashed and act according to their manipulated consciousness. The murder of this “hero” in a society warped to deem him such is not something to crow about, in fact it demeans the true message of this site. A mistake was made here,
We disagree, Tim and would like you to reconsider.
If we follow your logic NO ONE —ever —can be held responsible for anything because they can all claim they were brainwashed by this or that, or merely doing what the laws allowed. History shows that in far too many cases the law was way below the moral dictates that should rule the conscience of all human beings. This was true, for example, under the plantocracy regime in the American South, whose pro-slavery canon was actually in danger of extending itself to the whole United States. The law said slavery was legal, but was it just? Was it moral? The question gets even more interesting when we consider that not only Southern law, but Southern churches supported slavery. How’s that for a travesty of what Christ taught? Personally am not a theist, but I mention this because far too many people in the US still claim to be, and to follow the commands of the Judeo-Christian faith.
In the final analysis, just as the magistrates do not allow the defense of “not knowing the law,” failing to conduct oneself in a decent and whenever possible compassionate manner, is an individual’s flaw. There are many activities that require a very uncompassionate heart to discharge: clubbing seals for a pittance that can be earned in a different manner; shooting animals for “sport,” or destroying entire species by wantonly overfishing or over”harvesting” the seas and the wild, as the euphemism would have it. If human beings merely acted strictly within the confines of the law, and in many cases not above it, this would be an even more horrendous world than it is.
Second, a man who was involved in a clearly illegal and cowardly military operation has lots to think about, not to mention the witnessing of innumerable barbarities triggered by such invasion on all sides. Again, we must ask, where does the moral sin lie? With the bully who invades under cover of immense technological superiority and under false pretenses, or with those who, by whichever means, defy the occupiers? How long can you excuse a person for not “realizing” that his eager participation was wrong?
Chris Kyle was no hero. He was a mediocre man with very little empathetic imagination, despite his belated attempt to wash his name (or doubts about his actions) by supposedly helping vets with PTSD. Fact is, many Vets have come home from these filthy wars broken men, haunted by the atrocities they witnessed their fellow soldiers commit, or which they themselves committed. Their conscience in far too many cases have forced them to commit suicide. It is a tribute to these men that eventually they came to feel so bad about what they had done that they took their own lives to relieve themselves of their mental agonies. Their decency killed them. No such decency was ever evidenced by Chris Kyle.
—Sean Lenihan, Associate Editor