That's fucking stupid

Posts Tagged ‘GWB’

I have always wondered what would happen to a gorilla if it was trained to use an AK47 assault rifle. I guess some modifications would need to be made to the trigger guard and training a gorilla, especially one holding an AK47, might be a little difficult but they can be trained to communicate with sign language so it’s likely to be possible in terms of intelligence.

I expect that the gorilla would do what any animal would do once it has been given a competitive advantage over its peers, it would use the advantage to kill male gorillas and mate with female gorillas; as they have been genetically programmed to do. With no concept of our bizarre rules of society, or rather with their own rules that are quite different, surely the outcome would be very different from that which would happen when a human gets hold of firearms.

Now let’s imagine what would happen if that gorilla ruled a particular area of territory. With finite resources it might get greedy and want to expand its territory in order to expand the base of power that it controls. An area that is rich in resources might look rather attractive but if it means killing the dominant gorilla in that area then with no social rules to prevent it, what’s to stop it?

Now imagine that the gorilla is stripped of its AK47 (no volunteers for that job) and is removed from its position of power and status. Put it in a cage and feed it regularly while providing visual stimulus and what would happen? With no need to go out hunting and foraging the gorilla would become lazy and rather than spending its days looking after its young would become idle and let its captors provide for its young. With no need to provide for all the baby gorillas I would expect our gorilla to spend its time playing, eating and fucking female gorillas in order to make more baby gorillas. With very little investment in the baby gorillas I would not expect our gorilla to care much about them.

I absolutely love the idea of civilisation as a way to improve the position of the western white nations, making them also look all benevolent and lovely, while simultaneously crushing the development of other parts of the world. It takes a delightfully nasty self-serving streak to come up with an idea like the UN, democracy and international war crimes tribunals because it all has this greasy veneer of respectability.

Take the concept of war crimes, an oxymoron in itself because in a war the concept of crimes are a little blurred. It’s not a war crime for the US to drop a bomb on Japan that kills or injures many hundreds of thousands of people, it’s not a war crime for the imperialistic British to use guns against tribes with spears, it’s not a war crime for the coalition forces to invade a country and force its leader to endure a humiliating show trial before being hung on live TV; yet if any other nation did this sort of thing it would probably be considered a war crime.

War is an ugly and dirty thing, the idea of it is for one group to kill or capture as many of the opposition as possible while sustaining as few losses as possible. The winner is the one to inflict the most damage, or to persuade the loser that they should surrender. In order to make war more palatable to western voters the ideas of rules of engagement have been introduced to keep the losses down for western nations while allowing them to continue to bully the smaller nations. Iraq was an immoral war but it wasn’t illegal because historically the rules of war have been made by the winners.

Nuclear armament is also an area of incredible arrogance, the US and UK were responsible for creating and using the most ridiculously powerful weapon ever devised. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed but now we claim to have learned from our mistakes and only those countries which already have the power of nuclear weapons or the plentiful energy of nuclear power can keep it; all the other, less developed, countries are prevented from taking the same developmental steps. Many of the human rights and ‘Geneva convention’ standards which western nations have devised are pretty self serving because they are standards which we did not adhere to during our own development yet treaties such as Kyoto which had the potential to stifle the growth of developed nations were swiftly ignored with no repercussions.

Now don’t get me wrong here, I am not saying that this is the wrong way for things to be as I am a westerner and benefit directly from this arrangement, but let’s be honest about it. The US invaded Iraq because they could, with no strong opposition (such as that provided by the USSR during the cold war) they were free to go bully some little middle eastern nation. No UN mandate exists to try Bush for war crimes because the US is still the dominant force in the world, so let’s just be honest about what we did. The mandate of all these trivial little war crimes tribunals comes directly from the dominant groups and they can change the goalposts at any time by creating installations such as Camp X-Ray which operate under a whole new set of rules made up for the occasion.