15A010 Barbarism Defined by Jim Davies, 2/6/2015   

Hats off to Fox News, who defied the calls of their contemporaries and published the ISIS video of the immolation of Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh. The Establishment is glad to wage war and make us pay for it, but most reluctant to let us see what war is like.

Top left, Moaz is shown standing, incredibly bravely, knowing that a horrible death is a few seconds away. Arms are raised, perhaps in prayer. The flames have approached from the right, and just burst into the cage where he is trapped. Top right, they engulf him and he leaps around in agony. Bottom left he begins to lose control of his legs. And bottom right, he is on his knees facing the camera. When it's over, his captors use a back-hoe to crush the cage with debris and drive over it, totally desecrating his body.

This is barbarism, more vivid than I've ever seen it.

But wait, the reader may say: this is not war, this is savagery. The pilot was a prisoner of war, and the ISIS savages flouted the rules of war. War isn't really like this!

Yes, it is. The video lasts 22 minutes, and begins by showing King Abdullah of Jordan happily meeting Obama and other Pols, then sending pilots like Moaz on their way, then the fiery results of the raids they make. No doubt some bombs hit only their targets, and take out only killers; but nobody denies that there are innocents immolated also as "collateral damage." It is known that that will happen, yet the missions continue. The producers clarify that al-Kasasbeh caused children to burn to death, so his punishment fits the crime.

More: "civilized", "Christian" governments of the West did that and much, much more in their almost-endless wars. Dresden was fire-bombed in 1945, burning alive as many as 50,000 people. So was Tokyo. So was Hamburg and other cities, earlier. Villages were napalmed, in Viet Nam. And then of course there are Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where 150,000 were subjected to agonizing deaths, sometimes lasting several days. In earlier times the Roman Church burned alive heretics alive such as Giordiano Bruno, and numerous Protestants - who retaliated in like manner.

So if ISIS is barbaric, and it is, those governments are hundreds of thousands of times more barbaric. This is exactly what war is like; war is barbarism, and governments do it. With our money which they steal, and with our implicit and sometimes explicit support in the form of votes.

Why do they do it? - because they are governments; they want to rule. This is their nature, and the barbarism of war is a natural part of that wish to rule. The ISIS people want to rule by setting up a state they call a Caliphate, meaning a theocratic country - the worst kind of all perhaps - in roughly the same area that a Caliphate operated before the British and French intervened in the early 20th Century. The Iraqis wish to go on ruling the same area, as does the Syrian government in its East. And over it all broods the US FedGov, eager to rule by proxy any area it can reach; and while I'm glad Fox put out this video, I fear their motive may have been to enrage public opinion to favor yet more war, with US boots once again on Iraqi sand. The first time a USAF plane malfunctions and leads to ISIS' immolation of its pilot, that is what will surely happen.

The insanity of the urge to rule leads to war, and war consists of barbarism. There is no cure for it, except to rid human society of the plague of government. That is why this Blog exists.

Barbarism is government, and government is barbarism. That is how the word is best defined.