We don't even think about it. It's completely irrelevant to our daily lives. And, even if we thought about it there's really nothing we can do about it. I'm talking, of course, about the cultural commitment to being an empire engaged in permanent war.
Currently our focus is on claiming the oil, water and mineral rights of the Caspian Basin and Middle East. We are involved in a crusade for corporate profit that lines the pockets and promotes the stratospheric lifestyles of a wee tiny elite that are turning our nation into a feudal society.
The human cost is of no consequence because those who become the muscle for the military-corporation are irrelevant. They are just chumps, numbers on a page, collateral damage, necessary losses. It doesn't matter that there have been 91,000 causalities in the Iraq-Afghan crusade. Nor does it matter that the Department of Defense warned that up to 20 percent of veterans (360,000) suffer traumatic brain injury from IED blasts.
You never hear in the news that 508,152 Iraq and Afghanistan vets are patients in the VA system. Nor that there are thousands of vets who wait over a year for treatment stemming from mental health issues.
We are publicly deaf to the stunning reality that every day 18 vets attempt suicide, and that the number of soldiers killed in Afghanistan doubled in the first quarter of this year. We never heard that in 2009 alone there were 3,230 reports of sexual assault: soldier traumatizing soldier. And, of course, homeless vets are now simply part of the scenery in every city. All of this we shrug off as normal, nothing to get too concerned about.
Over two million soldiers have been deployed in the Iraq-Afghan crusade, with over 40 percent deployed multiple times. Currently we have 100,000 soldiers in Afghanistan alongside another 100,000 tax-paid mercenary corporation employees. Someday, those who physically survive will return to our towns and cities, each emotionally and spiritually wounded. But so what? They did what they do, and we do what we do. We work hard at forgetting the connection.
And completely uninteresting is the massive civilian body count inflicted by us on the indigenous population. In Iraq, figures range from 655,000 to over a million with an additional four million displaced. In Afghanistan, we're talking tens of thousands slaughtered and over two million displaced. Nobody cares. It's in our cultural DNA. Who remembers our original sin with the Indians? War, rape and pillage is what we do, it's who we are. Like a fish in water, we know no other reality. Nor do we care to.
The latest word is that the empire is bankrupt so there will be a great propaganda onslaught to convince us to shred our commonwealth and social security networks. The military budget, of course, will not be touched. Welcome to America: a friendly fascist state.