Laughing Our Way to Destruction

If members of the US public were ever to wonder what the other 95% of humanity thinks about them, would it be better to break that harsh truth to them gently or just to blurt it out?

I’m going to go with the latter.

Here’s Frankie Boyle explaining the advantages of Scottish independence: “Scotland would no longer have to invade places like Afghanistan for American interests. . . . I don’t support America’s wars. I don’t even think they are wars. They’re one-way traffic, mass-murder. There’s never been a time when a shepherd has beaten a helicopter. You never switch on the news to see ‘A shock result in Afghanistan today when a missile was destroyed by a wedding.’ Because not only will America go into your country and kill all your people. But what’s worse I think is they’ll come back twenty years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad. Oh boo hoo hoo. Americans making a movie about what Vietnam did to the soldiers is like a serial killer telling you what stopping suddenly for hitchhikers did to his clutch.”

If you don’t think people find such remarks acceptable, listen to this laughter:

Living in the United States we’ve been trained to appreciate the fact that the wars do in fact make the soldiers feel sad. In fact they significantly increase rates of depression and violence and suicide. We tell each other not to blame the soldiers, rather to blame the top politicians. But then we don’t really do that, do we? Bush is off painting himself in the bathtub and otherwise doing his imitation of the original King George III during his blue urine period. Obama is cheered by his fans because his wars make him sad and he declares them with such heartfelt reluctance. But from the point of view of people who are told about non-American deaths in their newspapers and on their televisions and radios (that is, from the point of view of 95% of humanity) US wars are mass-slaughter of innocents. Ninety percent of the deaths are on one side. Ninety percent of those deaths are civilians by every definition. When the US says it’s going to launch another war because it opposes genocide, the rest of the world responds “We what the f%^$^! do you call your wars?”

Think the rest of the world is crazy? Think it’s just bad jokes that miss the serious complicated facts of the matter. Watch how an intelligent Englishman watches an Obama speech:

Or you can watch how an American views Lindsey Graham’s speeches:

Or how an American comedian views US foreign policy:

When an American gets honest about US warmongering it has to be a joke. It has to sneak in. We don’t want to hear it. But we shouldn’t keep imagining the rest of the world doesn’t know what’s going on.