I can’t even produce a metaphor for the drug world anymore. I don’t even like the phrase the drug world since the phrase implies a different world.”
― Charles Bowden, Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family
You don’t need a thousand hours studying what trauma is, what forms it might take, delving into wars and conflicts, from the great war, when the psychologists in Europe attempted to study (sic; sick) shell shocked veterans, and, of course, how many civilians are there in that process of witnessing the most horrific treatment of humans and animals at the hands of, well, the soldiers, sure, and the definition of soldier is:
1. a person who serves in an army; a person engaged in military service.
2. an enlisted person, as distinguished from a commissioned officer: the soldiers’ mess and the officers’ mess.
a person of military skill or experience: George Washington was a great soldier.
verb (used without object): to act or serve as a soldier.
Informal. to loaf while pretending to work; malinger:
3. a wingless caste of ant or termite with a large specially modified head and jaws, involved chiefly in defense.
Soldiers? Mindless individuals? Bizarrely propagandized patriotic fools? Blood lust wannabes? Mercenaries in the employ of dirty, grotesque nations? Those who would rather wrap themselves in flags, swastikas, Ukrainian blue and yellow ribbons, and then, shoot to kill, shoot anything that moves, Murder All Military Aged Men? But they are being pushed around territories and lands by the War is a Racket Money Kings and Queens (do you want to see if your school, business, your own measely money investments are into one of these Top 100 War Profiteers? How about My Lai?
Hit men, one and all, whether from one of the Military Academies, or just from the dungeons of mercenary hell; hired on, persuaded by incompetents — generals and chiefs of staff and politicians and heads of the war profiteers and the civil servants in the revolving door scam. Teary eyed songs on Veterans Day/Armistice Day. Pathetic selling war, more war, and ZERO negotiations — many of them do not care about civilians, fighters, museums, churches, land, et al. Truly ruthless, in that they dehumanize their own babies, daughters, wheelchair-bound grandfathers, their own pets, all of it, it is open season. Sure, not THEIRS directly, but those children, babies, sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, old and young, moms and pops on the OTHER side. Oh, that’s right, only kill those deemed the enemy? Nakba anyone?
Barbaric, brutal, and, if they went into uniformed, armed “service” with any humanity in their bones, any guts that states war is evil, well, well, well, they come out natural-born killers, warped, broken, disassociated from people, angry, psychotic, psychologically wounded, and, then, that shell shock we talked about early in the days of nascent psychology. Do not judge too harshly those youth that get caught up in gangs, who have nothing of a family unit, who have nothing to live for but guns, macho, abuse, drug running, following a leader, and murder. Which Faustian Gamble is the Best Faustian Bargain?
Beware, though, as you watch Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro in Sicario I, II, or III, because that macho shit — and it includes brutality, murdering, execution, rape, pedophilia, torturing, soldiering on, i.e., looking up to a male or male-like leader — might make the viewer forget the ones in suits and with briefcases and Harvard MBA’s and JD’s and political positions that they are the killers. Desensitized? Habituated? Normalized? Shows with action and no discussion board? Yeah, that’s Entertainment. I’ve met Perkins, and he too is not anything more than a hit man in mea culpa profit-making land mode. Can you really fix the sins of your own life, and the sins of your father? This fellow, again, gets on Democracy Now and into Green Festivals, vaunted as some hero (NOT).
You know, so many of us did not sign up to be murderers, never joined the economic draft, never bought into fraternities and macho Friday Night Football horror; or lusted after CIA, Criminal Injustice Outfits. Many of us never sought to work for any of those alphabet agencies of despair/disgust/ disasters/death: DoD, FBI, ATF, CIA, NSA, HHS, and on and on, including DOJ. The Faustian Bargain has been signed, sealed and delivered daily by the tens of thousands for those people who want to gain, abuse, get one over on “them,” and who want to be part of the disaster capitalism shock troops of whichever form of abuse and trauma deliver one might find herself or himself in.
Oh Faustus!
Sure, Chuck Bowden was amazing, died semi-young (in his sixty-ninth year) and was a true hero of the journalistic kind.
I live in a time of fear and the fear is not of war or weather or death or poverty or terror. The fear is of life itself. The fear is of tomorrow, a time when things do not get better but become worse. This is the belief of my time. I do not share it. The numbers of people will rise, the pain of migration will grow, the seas will bark forth storms, the bombs will explode in the markets, and mouths fighting for a place at the table will grow, as will the shouting and shoving. That is a given. Once the given is accepted, fear is pointless. The fear comes from not accepting it, from turning aside one’s head, from dreaming in the fort of one’s home that such things cannot be. The fear comes from turning inward and seeking personal salvation. The bones must be properly buried, amends must be made. Also, the beasts must be acknowledged. And the weather faced, the winds and rains lashing the face, still, they must be faced. So too, the dry ground screaming for relief. There is an industry peddling solutions, and these solutions insist no one must really change, except perhaps a little, and without pain. This is the source of the fear, this refusal to accept the future that is already here. In the Old Testament, the laws insist we must not drink blood, that the flesh must be properly drained or we will be outcasts from the Lord. They say these rules were necessary for clean living in some earlier time. I swallow the blood, all the bloods. I am that outlaw, the one crossing borders. The earlier time is over.
― Charles Bowden,Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future
I’ve been to a couple of Bowden’s talks, and spoke with him in El Paso a very long time ago, it seems, when I was a journalist and teacher and, well, we will not get into THAT other thing. He’s not my guru, but he held some gravitas for me in the world of writing and journalism and speaking out against the crimes of the many set upon us all by the criminals in high office, the lobbies, the corporate boards, even the local and state agencies populated by big and small Eichmann’s, you know, little Eichmann’s. The drug gangs, lords, thugs, and politicians in Mexico are facilitated by, well, you guessed it, Military!
Let’s look at maltreatment of our children. Here and everywhere. Yes, the dirty dealings we set out for our own children and the collective children.
So, the pop-psychology headline, “Childhood Maltreatment Linked With Multiple Mental Health Problems” Jan. 10, 2023 just illustrates how slow witted, how dum downed and how flippant the entire show is, and when I mean show, I mean mainstream and internet feeds/news/games/ propaganda/marketing/ PR/advertising/yellow journalism.
The findings suggest that preventing eight cases of child maltreatment would prevent one person from developing mental health problems.
Corresponding author, Dr Jessie Baldwin (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences), said:
“It is well known that child maltreatment is associated with mental health problems, but it was unclear whether this relationship is causal, or is better explained by other risk factors.
“This study provides rigorous evidence to suggest that childhood maltreatment has small causal effects on mental health problems. Although small, these effects of maltreatment could have far-reaching consequences, given that mental health problems predict a range of poor outcomes, such as unemployment, physical health problems and early mortality.
“Interventions that prevent maltreatment are therefore not only essential for child welfare, but could also prevent long-term suffering and financial costs due to mental illness.”
Think hard Americanos, pro-Capitalists, pro-war drumming fools the absolute trauma of any conflict, that is, armed including those of the suited economic hit men as well as those tatooed hitmen children of the Pablo Escobar-El Chapo variety. Think of the Holly-Dirt images and storylines that show those folk, and it is Mario Puzo on steroids, because there is true admiration of the Mafia and the Sin City Juarez sicarios. Really, when it comes to Holly-Dirt. What about guys like Cormac McCarthy and his “No Country for Old Men” novel-turned-into-hit-movie?
What is trauma, then, those childhood maltreatments? Researchers define childhood maltreatment as any physical, sexual or emotional abuse or neglect before the age of 18. Imagine the life and times of a Palestinian, or a Yemeni? Imagine the life and times of those children in Donbass after the Chosen People’s Maiden coup under the auspices of the religious zealots of the Zionist variety — Nuland, Kagan, Blinken, et al?
Imagine what maltreatment is when in that Juarez neighborhood where familes are broke by booze, bounty, poverty, machoism, the unholy trinity of materialism, war, and greed? Think about how difficult it is to be a hero in your own family, neighborhood, school, job, state, country.
Thnks of all that trauma the USA inflicts on children before age 18. School lunches are not being cut, and school districts across the land are holding the proverbial hundreds of millions of dollars owed bag. Think hard how a Republican cuts the school lunches, and how dysfunctional schools are with a counselor for every 250 or more elementary students. Think of your community and try and find one qualified child psychologist with real work under her belt.
Student meal debt is rising rapidly in many school districts across the country.
The reason: now that federal funding that made school meals free for all students during the pandemic has ended, families are either struggling to pay for school meals or aren’t even aware that the program ended and they are now obligated to pay.
The end of universal free school meals comes as inflation and rising labor costs are driving up food prices for both schools and families.
No anger yet, over this messed up reality while the multimillionaire Nazified War Thug Zelenskyy gets billions and billions from U$A?
Maltreatment! Think of all the news, all the parents’ fears coming home to the child. Think of yelling, cursing, whipping, swatting, all of that, including how little attention and interaction adults have with those developing spirits-bodies-brains. So many adults are checked out, infantilized, Disneyfied and vapid and vacant. Fear and anger, the ugly mix with greed, that pretty much do it.
Think think think how corrupted adults are, and how foolish even people who want to do good are when they spend time worrying or reading about body shaming at the Golden Globes when their own communities lack childcare, day care, domestic abuse care, health care, mental care, activities care.
Who are the monsters? The kiddos surviving the hell on the streets? Dodging the violent adults? Hiding from the murdering cops? Are they kings of their own world?
Kings of the World? How does this film about teenagers in Columbia questing for the land one lad’s grandmother once owned but who had the land taken away? Of course, at the end of the flick, they make it to the land, and find gold miners polluting it, and, then, bam, all the kids get murdered. That is not a spoiler alert, my fine socialist readers, I hope!
Here’s the Indie Wire BS:
Before “The Kings of the World,” the latest feature from Colombian writer-director Laura Mora, inserts us in the bustling streets of Medellín, where teenagers wield machetes to protect themselves, a shot of a fairy-tale-appropriate white horse introduces the dreamlike atmosphere of this ferocious fable about five adolescent street boys denied basic humanity.
Homeless and with no blood family to guard them, the young souls at the forefront of this electrifying social drama fend for themselves in a gritty urban environment. Their only comfort comes from the brotherly affection they display for one another. That state, caught between tenderness and violence as they navigate an inhospitable reality, defines the visceral energy of “The Kings of the World,” Colombia’s most recent Oscar entry.
The leader of the group, 19-year-old Rá (Carlos Andrés Castañeda), has just learned that the land his grandmother was forcefully evicted from many years in the past has finally been returned to him, the sole heir, as part of the government’s land restitution policies. As Rá, Castañeda exudes an air of innocence wrapped in determination. Heroically not bitter despite the harshness he’s faced, his large, expressive eyes illuminate a path forward.
The reality is that these boys are abused, man, and they drink and smoke, and get their asses kicked and beat up and knifed. The reality is they are the street urchins of Dickens or Bowden, the victims of maltreatment after maltreatment. The movie might have that Lord of the Flies undertone, but the reality is we the view should be steaming under the collar looking at how messed up Latin American countries are with the rich and oligarchs and the Americanos messing with the majority of the good people . . . . Until, generations of young men end up anchorless, stuck in the cycle of guns, drugs, knives, duking it out, dog-eat-dog, ugliness of one and then another and then a thousand maltreatments foisted upon them by parents, family, town, state, country, the world.
Think hard now how deeply that shell shocking does, and how wide it is cast, with the elites, the ones in suits and with suites, determining the extent of history and the future. This is this horror machine, this murderer in a suit, telling the world, telling unborn generations, or young generations, what shall be: No more Russia, no more diplomacy. Imagine that maltreatment having an even deeper affect on each new cycle of Harvard bound sad sake, taught by the Georgetown University Chosen People that history is determined by money, murder, war and elites gaming the systems, full stop.
If you do not wake up angry every day, then your are living in your organic (sic) granola world of inhuman existence. I’m not saying to go around with that anger as your operating position, but it should be there, somewhere, when intercoursing with the humanity and systems around you. This picture is worth a thousand words, and I can’t keep barraging the reader with more and more words, since I am not hearing the readers deploying those words to describe these felons for who they are — murderers, perversions of humanity, the maltreatment engines of today’s generation and generations to come (Stoltenberg and Biden):
Yeah, yeah, you gotta be laughing, for sure, at these Anglo Saxons of the highest degenerate order. But you ain’t pissed yet? Come on. See the memorial for children murdered in Donbass from 2014 to 2021?
No? Ahh, shucks, another Slav Chosen Person, Madeline, uh? Remember those cold eyes, those cold hands, wrapped on the money bags, as people, children, THOSE kiddos, are destroyed by more economic hit men and West Point brass?
Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.
—60 Minutes (5/12/96)
Or, this absurdity?
“It’s one thing to find out you’re Jewish… but another to find out that relatives had died in concentration camps. That was a stunning shock.”
Madeleine Albright first learned of her Jewish identity when she was 59, two weeks before being sworn in as the first female Secretary of State in U.S. history.
“It was a complicated family story,” she said in an interview.
Read all about this, which is never covered in Western Media: “More than 150 children killed in Donbass since 2014”
The lack of curiosity in the monopoly media is far from a lack of thinking: It is a full-fledged attack on people, on history, on truth, on the Fourth Estate’s ability (once) to affect change, to get people motivated to throw the buggers out.
A Dow Jones search of mainstream news sources since September 11 turns up only one reference to the Albright quote–in an op-ed in the Orange Country Register (9/16/01). This omission is striking, given the major role that Iraq sanctions play in the ideology of archenemy Osama bin Laden; his recruitment video features pictures of Iraqi babies wasting away from malnutrition and lack of medicine (New York Daily News, 9/28/01). The inference that Albright and the terrorists may have shared a common rationale–a belief that the deaths of thousands of innocents are a price worth paying to achieve one’s political ends–does not seem to be one that can be made in U.S. mass media. (Source)
Ahh, read an old piece on how massively corrupt the media are then, when USA military and planners attacked water treatment plants and restricted chlorine for keeping water safe. Read about the effects of sanctions, the very price was worth it on those children. Do you not believe that Albright, like an ocean liner’s worth of others just like her, is not a criminal of the very worst Dante’s Circles of Hell kind?
Yes, maltreatment, in early childhood?
Thomas Nagy of Georgetown University unearthed a Defense Intelligence Agency document entitled “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,” which was circulated to all major allied commands one day after the Gulf War started. It analyzed the weaknesses of the Iraqi water treatment system, the effects of sanctions on a damaged system and the health effects of untreated water on the Iraqi populace. Mentioning that chlorine is embargoed under the sanctions, it speculates that “Iraq could try convincing the United Nations or individual countries to exempt water treatment supplies from sanctions for humanitarian reasons,” something that the United States disallowed for many years.
Combined with the fact that nearly every large water treatment plant in the country was attacked during the Gulf War, and seven out of eight dams destroyed, this suggests a deliberate targeting of the Iraqi water supply for “postwar leverage,” a concept U.S. government officials admitted was part of military planning in the Gulf War (Washington Post, 6/23/91).
A Dow Jones search for 2000 finds only one mention of this evidence in an American paper–and that in a letter to the editor (Austin American-Statesman, 10/01/00). Subsequent documents unearthed by Nagy (The Progressive, 8/10/01) suggest that the plan to destroy water treatment, then to restrict chlorine and other necessary water treatment supplies, was done with full knowledge of the explosion of water-borne disease that would result. “There are no operational water and sewage treatment plants and the reported incidence of diarrhea is four times above normal levels,” one post-war assessment reported; “further infectious diseases will spread due to inadequate water treatment and poor sanitation,” another predicted.
Combine this with harsh and arbitrary restrictions on medicines, the destruction of Iraq’s vaccine facilities, and the fact that, until this summer, vaccines for common infectious diseases were on the so-called “1051 list” of substances in practice banned from entering Iraq. Deliberately creating the conditions for disease and then withholding the treatment is little different morally from deliberately introducing a disease-causing organism like anthrax, but no major U.S. paper seems to have editorialized against the U.S. engaging in biological warfare–or even run a news article reporting Nagy’s evidence that it had done so. (The Madison Capitol Times–8/14/01–and the Idaho Statesman–10/2/01–ran op-eds that cited Nagy’s work.)
— Source, Nov.1, 2001, “We Think the Price Is Worth It — Media uncurious about Iraq policy’s effects–there or here” by Rahul Mahajan.
Who makes money off of all the pain, the disease, all the epigenetic harm, all the chronic illnesses, all the psychotic breaks, all the PTSD a la Shell Shock? Who makes money or hay from meth or coke addiction? Crime pays, right, for the criminal justice systems of oppression, suppression, plea agreements, revolving door private prison complex.
Read all about it, that Sophisticated, High Brow, Articulate, Shakespeare-Producing Anglo Saxon Murder Incorporated, with the King and Queen and Lords looking over them. Makes those street kids I used to talk with in El Paso and Juarez, you know, spooks or huffers, using glue and even gasoline to get high:
Caroline Elkins’ accounts of British soldiers ramming broken bottles into the vaginas of female Kenyan prisoners during the Kikuyus’ Mau Mau revolt is not, by any stretch, the worst example of Albion’s imperial violence she recounts. Because this 870 page book is awash with similar instances of systematic war crimes by the British administration in Kenya, in Nigeria, Jamaica, South Africa, Malaya, Palestine, Cyprus, Nyasaland, India and countless other outposts of empire, justifiable comparisons between the British and the Nazis arise time and again.
And, although many Nazis were brought to book for their crimes, no British were, even though General Sir Frank Kitson, one of the most notorious of these Grade A war criminals, who hopscotched about from one colonial killing field to the next, is still alive and, no doubt, still plotting the murder of others. The book makes it plain that the British had a bunch of such military and civil service troubleshooters, psychopathic thugs like Kitson and Bomber Harris they were prepared to send, almost at a moment’s notice, to any part of their rotten empire where the “natives” had to be duffed up, a euphemism for barbaric tortures derived from Douglas Duff, one of their Satanic number.
Many of these savages, such as Percival and Montgomery, served alongside the Black and Tan terrorist group in Ireland, before moving on to Palestine, India and Malaya where they honed their torture techniques, which resembled those devils use in medieval paintings.
— “Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire” (at Strategic Culture, banned from FU Book)
Is it this face you are afraid of? Baby-faced: These are the incredibly young-looking ‘hit men’ at the helm of Mexico’s feared Gulf Cartel.
Or do these fellows really scare the shit out of you?
Ahh, there are so many houses of horrors, in the millions, man, that would scare the pants off of any sicario:
Sacred Yet? And I am big on NOT letting a teachable moment pass, a bit of Jewish Zeaotry tied to the origins of the word, “sicario,” which Jewish Holly-Dirt writers and producers and directors might never let the Netflix public see. (Curious, no, why you see no movies, dramas or otherwise, on the Top platforms or from movie studies on the murdering of families and youth and pets by the Jewish Occupiers? )
The Sicarii (Modern Hebrew: סיקריים siqariyim) were a splinter group of the Jewish Zealots who, in the decades preceding Jerusalem’s destruction in 70 CE, strongly opposed the Roman occupation of Judea and attempted to expel them and their sympathizers from the area. The Sicarii carried sicae, or small daggers, concealed in their cloaks. At public gatherings, they pulled out these daggers to attack Romans and alleged Roman sympathizers alike, blending into the crowd after the deed to escape detection.
The Sicarii are regarded as one of the earliest known organized assassination units of cloak and daggers, predating the Islamic Hashishin and Japanese ninja by centuries. The derived Spanish term sicario is used in contemporary Latin America to describe a hitman.
Eight of the Deadliest Assassin Groups in History
Shell Shocked?
Martin Luther King’s Birthday?
It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.
— Martin Luther King, Jr., Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, 31 March 1968 . . . . Born in 1929, King’s actual birthday is January 15 (which in 1929 fell on a Tuesday).
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.
Paul Haeder | Radio Free (2023-01-20T16:10:54+00:00) More than a “Syndrome”: Trauma, Distress, and Pain. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/20/more-than-a-syndrome-trauma-distress-and-pain/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.