Wednesday, March 20, 2013

International Blame the Victim Week?

Sometimes, ya just gotta steal material, so I'm basing a post on a comment from Sadly, No! and (if I'm not mistaken Balloon Juice) regular Chris, who really should be blogging because he's knowledgable and astute. Chris writes, with regard to a post skewering racist nutbag Jack Cashill's post (I'm not making this up) Why Florida Persists in the Zimmerman Persecution:


It’s oddly appropriate that he’s coming out with this chickenshitbullshit the same week as all that “poor rapists, such a promising career” stuff is in the media. Is there some sort of national Blame The Victims; The Guilty Are The True Heroes week going on that I’m not aware of?


It would seem that this is not only Blame the Victims Week nationally, but internationally as well. Besides Cashill's piece (do read Cerberus' summary, this week has also seen CNN's sympathetic coverage of the Steubenville rapists (as an aside, I feel the town should be razed because it sure as hell seems too corrupt to redeem). To give the week an international "flavor", this week marks the tenth anniversary of the biggest "Blame the Victim" episodes in recorded history... the United States invaded Iraq to prevent the use of chemical weapons by a dictator who was not discouraged to use WMD by the very man who spearheaded the Iraq War effort. To heighten the horror, an American company sold Saddamn pesticides which could be used on "pests" of the two-legged variety as well as the six-legged variety.

So... what a week this is to commemorate the unsung sociopaths, be they authoritarian assholes with a history of violence and itchy trigger fingers, overly entitled teenage douchebags who thought they could use an unconscious girl as their sex toy (and all of those who enabled them to engage in this heinous behavior), or an entire administration staffed by individuals who armed a nasty dictator with nasty weapons and then used their own malfeasance as a pretext to depose said dictator (with thousands of American casualties, millions of Iraqi casualties, and a shredded Constitution as a result).

I think I shall now be sick.

4 comments:

Mandos said...

This is my take on David Frum's ruminations about his role in the war, if anyone cares:

my newest bloggy gig

kennymfg said...

a shredded Constitution as a result

Well it is just a goddamned piece of paper!

Great post and ditto on the Chris appreciation.

mikey said...

You're right, of course, but I would observe this isn't something unusual that we're just seeing this week.

This is just another case of the powerful defining society and writing history, and the weak and powerless left with no part of the story.

In America particularly, wealth and power are seen as fundamentally "good", and therefore people who are part of the powerful tribes can never be bad or wrong. THEY must be the victims, and those other folks are just collateral damage.

Collateral damage. Spend some time thinking about THAT fucking term and the whole foul edifice becomes clear...

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

I think we're all supposed to blame Glenn Greenwald this week.
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