2/19/2025

 Wednesday, February 19, 2025

D+104

1942 FDR ordered the detention and internment of all Japanese Americans on the West Coast

1945  The invasion of Iwo Jima

In bed by 9:3-, awake and up at 5:05 but awake between 1:30 and 2:30 with 2 Low Glucose alarms treated with 2 cough drops.    2° outside with a wind chill of -9°.  It looks like some wild creature(s) found some sustenance from the seeds and suet I left on the front stoop two days ago after the last snowfall when the arctic cold set in.

Prednisone, day 304, 5 mg., day 15, Kevzara, day 1/14.  2.5 prednisone at 5:05 a.m. and 5 p.m.   Kevzara injection at 10:15.  Other meds at 10 a.m. 

Marines from the Graves Registration Unit working with a few of the 5,931 Marines killed in action, died of wounds or missing in action and presumed dead.  An additional 209 deaths occurred among the Navy corpsmen and surgeons assigned to the Marines.   I chose this photograph, and others below, rather than Joe Rosenthal's 'iconic' photo of the flag raising at Iwo Jima because it gives a much truer picture of the slaughterhouse that Iwo became in February and March of 1945.

It's the 80th anniversary of the invasion of Iwo Jima.   From my memoir:

 

    More than the citizens of perhaps any other nation, Americans celebrate military service.  Every night the CBS Evening News has a segment on “Fallen Heroes;” every Sunday morning, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos’ program closes with “In Memoriam.”  This canonization of soldiers is due to the fact that the United States is a military empire. The central idea of empire is the exertion of national power over others who are not part of the nation, the strong over the weak. A recent Paul Krugman column reported that next year the United States’ military expenditures will equal or exceed those of the rest of the world combined.  If true, it is evidence of a level of economic, political, and military imperialism never before seen on earth.  Since all empires are ultimately dependent on military power to ‘project’ their will on others by lethal force or the threat of it, empires must glorify their armed forces.  This is so not only because the empire depends ultimately on the military being able and willing to kill subordinate peoples who resist American hegemony, but also because the military men and women must be willing to be killed to advance the economic and political goals of the empire.  These goals are hard to accomplish with volunteer soldiers and even harder with conscripts who normally have no desire to kill or to be killed and who have little or nothing to gain personally from the fruits of empire     

     To get imperial conscripts to “do their duty,” conditioning is necessary.  First, they must be politically conditioned to believe that the subordinate people’s opposition or resistance to the empire’s will somehow threatens them or their families, “our way of life” or “our freedom.”  This conditioning is seen in many guises, in the nightly “Fallen Heroes” blurbs, in the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ fiasco, back to rallying cries about making the world “safe for democracy” in a “war to end all wars” and changing the name of the “War Department” to the “Department of Defense” between 1947 and 1949.  America must never be seen as waging a war of aggression, only of defending itself (hence the utility of the Pearl Harbor attack) or (when it serves a political or economic interest) defending the innocent victims of ‘tyranny’ or at least defending ‘freedom’ which as our last President reminded us, our enemies hate and we love.  Do our military men believe this?    Lance Corporal Hess, USMC, is quoted in The Proud: Inside the Marine Corps, published in 1992:

“I look at it this way.  If I do have to kill, I will.  And while I’m doing it I’ll be thinking about my family.  My mother.  And, lookit, do I want some raghead Ay-rab dictating the price of gas she buys or some commie-type hardass coming over here, ruling her, telling her what to do, and you know, exploiting her.  It’s for her that you kill.  It’s for us.”

He thinks about it again.

 “Hell yeah, I’ll kill them all.  And not just the communists.  It’s anybody who’s against the United States.  Anybody who wants to say that one man can be a dictatorship and the people don’t have anything to say about it.  And he wants to try that on the United States?  Well, I’m gonna kill him with all the vigor I have in my body.  That’s what it’s all about: preserving our way of life.  That’s my job."

These are the words of one successfully conditioned American fighting man, ready to kill for Mom and her experience at the gas pump.  And of course, there are politicians perfectly willing to send him off to kill for Mom and millions of folks back home who are perfectly willing to have him kill in their names.  Right wing radio and evangelical Christianity regularly fan the flames of bellicosity.  As Yeats wrote A Prayer for My Daughter: 

For arrogance and hatred are the wares

Peddled in the thoroughfares. 

    In addition to the general political conditioning of the populace, it is also necessary to individually condition military persons to the idea of maiming and killing other human beings and to grind down their resistance to making themselves vulnerable to being maimed or killed, or, as we euphemistically put it, being put “in harm’s way.”  For some, this requires little more than the political conditioning that the whole nation is subjected to.  Air Force pilots and crews who flew long-range bombing missions from bases in the U.S. to drop high explosive bombs in Kosovo and then return to base never having seen the results of the bombing didn’t require a lot of extra conditioning.  On the other hand, soldiers and Marines who engage in killing and dying that is ‘up close and personal’ require a lot of conditioning, something very much akin to brainwashing.  

    Our imperial politicians and the mainstream media gloss over the fact that the business of the armed forces is killing and destroying, death and destruction.  Every other mission is subordinate.  Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines exist to deploy and employ weapons of destruction, from rifles to hydrogen bombs, or to support those who do.  The Marine Rifleman’s Creed is  an embarrassingly ‘over the top’ piece of writing, but is also characteristically blunt about the relationship between military people and their weapons:

THIS IS MY RIFLE. There are many like it but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I master my life. My rifle without me is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than any enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will.

My rifle and myself [sic] know that what counts in this war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of our burst, nor the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. We will hit.

My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weakness, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will.

Before God I swear this creed. My rifle and myself [sic] are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life. So be it, until victory is America's and there is no enemy, but Peace 

    I cringe as I read this “Creed,” knowing that countless Marine ‘boots’ have been forced to commit it to memory and to recite it on command, robot-like.  The weapon is personified, the person is weaponized, identified with the killing instrument, turned into a “lean, green, killing machine.”

    The Marine Rifleman’s Creed was written by Major General William H. Rupertus not long after the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor.  Rupertus was a career Marine infantry officer, not a grammarian.  We can be sure that he did not see the concluding sentence of his creed as a double entendre.  Is “Peace” the goal or the enemy?  It is not difficult to make the case that for Fortress America, peace is the enemy.  Endless war is the goal.  Only with endless war can the neocons and other militarists justify the nation’s military budget and all that goes with it, like arguments for the “unaffordability” of universal health care for our civilian citizens.

. . .

William Manchester, himself a World War II Marine, wrote a memoir, Goodbye Darkness, in which he described the landing beach on Iwo Jima:

It resembled Doré’s illustrations of Inferno.  Essential cargo – ammo, rations, water – was piled up in sprawling chaos.  And gore, flesh, and bones were lying all about. The deaths on Iwo were extraordinarily violent.  There seemed to be no clean wounds, just fragments of corpses.  It reminded one battalion medical officer of a Bellevue dissecting room.  Often the only way to distinguish between Japanese and Marine dead was by the legs; Marines wore canvas leggings and Nips khaki puttees.  Otherwise identification strings of viscera fifteen feet long, over bodies which had been cut in half at the waist.  Legs and arms, and heads bearing only necks, lay fifty feet from the closest torsos.  As night fell the beachhead reeked with the stench of burning flesh.

    I wrote those words about 20 years ago when Geri and I (and for a time, my Dad, and Andy, Anh, and Peter) lived outside of Saukville.  It was during the presidency of George W. Bush and the reign of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and after we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.  I read them now in the era of Donald Trump who has threatened to use military force to take control of the Panama Canal Zone from the nation-state of Panama and to take control of Greenland from its government and the government of Denmark.  He also originally suggested he would use American troops to take control of the Gaza Strip, to "own it", and turn it into the "Riviera of the Middle East."  What has happened to the United States over the course of my lifetime?

LTMW at a tufted tit-mouse vainly trying to extract a sunflower seed from its tube.  It motivated me to put on my fur hat, winter jacket, and warm gloves to fill the sunflower/safflower tube and to replace a suet cake.   The guilt of the empty feeder in this bitter cold weather has been killing me.

Geri has been doing better today but she stretched her new knee too much this afternoon causing some nasty pain.

Micaela is here for dinner tonight, her treat. Culver's burgers and fries.  

Trump called Zelensky a "dictator" today on Truth Social, raising again the long lingering question of whether Trump is merely a Russian asset, or is a Russian agent.  He betrayed our partners=in-arms the Kurds in Syria to the Turks.  He is betraying our friends in Ukraine to Putin and the Russians.  He is betraying us/US to Putin.   Tom Wolfe: You're either on the bus or off the bus.  We're all off his bus an eventually under his bus. Rick Wilson: Everything Trump Touches Dies.