Thread: Have the "Special Forces" Redeemed Themselves by Killing bin Laden?

This morning I was watching CNN coverage of the execution slaying (as it would be described if it had been perpetrated by anyone other than triggermen of the U.S. government) of Osama bin Laden, and the reporter relating details of the “op” veered into singing the masculine praises of the military’s special forces whose members had carried out the hit. It would seem that the special forces are going to be the new firefighters, the new he-manly heroes of our society. Certainly this will be the case for macho adolescent American males, who like to identify with, and vicariously tap into the prowess of the Navy SEALs, Green Berets, marines, etc. No doubt teenage boys and young men all over the country are feeling quite adrenalized and pumped up by the role of the SEALs in “taking out” the leader of Al Qaeda. And the public in general will no doubt be encouraged to amorally admire the skill and bravery of Uncle Sam’s supersoldiers and uber assassins. Yes, get ready for the media’s full-on glorification of the best trained killers on the planet – the special forces of the United States military.

Why is this prospect disturbing? Aren’t the special forces the “good guys”? According to the dictionary they are.The Oxford Dictionary of English defines “special forces” as follows, “the units of a country's armed forces that undertake covert, counterterrorist, and other specialized operations”. This is the sort of uncritical, conventional, and positive definition that the media will predictably rubber-stamp, purvey, and inculcate. What’s wrong with it is that it takes no account whatsoever of the real uses that are routinely made of the martial expertise of special forces personnel. In a blunt nutshell, the special forces function primarily as the shock troops and “torpedoes”, to use a mafia term, of the government. You know, the same government that functions, to a seriously undemocratic degree, as the instrument not of the will of the populace, but rather the will of the elite of society. The special forces, then, are indirectly the highly lethal servants of the special interests of the elite.

I take no pleasure in bursting anyone’s idealistic bubbles, but these are the hard-boiled politico-economic facts of life. Along with espionage and dirty tricks agencies, such as the CIA and NSA, the military’s special ops units are a part of an intelligence-military complex designed to keep the world a safe place for the business and political establishment that runs it. That is, to preserve itself the global power structure needs its skullduggery squad and its “enforcers”; secret services such as the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the British MI6 are the former, and military special forces are the latter.

Oh sure, the official and noble mission statement of a country’s special forces is of course to safeguard it, the country as a whole, from its enemies. But as we all know official fictions and under-the table reality, shall we say, are often quite different propositions. The inglorious under-the-table reality of the special forces (and the military in general, of course) is that it’s frequently tasked to serve & safeguard the mercenary agendas of the corporate kingpins, “wiseguys” of Wall Street, barons of banking, and political potentates who make up the higher echelons of society*.

All our patriotic programming makes it hard to accept, but the armed forces and its elite troops are frequently just a tool for the lucrative implementation of the shock doctrine, the voracious profiteering of large military contractors, the covetous securing of oil fields, etc. As the song says, “Money, money, money” – the military serves those who have it roughly 99.9% of the time, and every now and then the country. And, if I may reiterate, the much-held-in-respect special forces are no exception whatsoever to the way the military is corruptly co-opted by the capitalist overlords of the system. If anything, the special forces highlight the illicit exploitation of the military as the homicidal henchmen of the high chiefs of the moneyocracy.

Forgive me for being utterly disregardful of the gullible sensibilities of those who still believe in that hallowed part of the system called the “armed services”. It’s quite interesting how the military remains so hallowed, remains the only part of the system that’s widely immune from the people’s cynicism about government and public institutions. There are a couple of obvious explanations for this. The military is naïvely viewed as the defense force of the nation, and its members are respected as the national tribe’s valorous warriors. It’s an uncritical respect that patriotically pedestalizes the military above any severe reproach and inclines people to look the other way as far as the realeconomik function of the military in the plutocratic world order goes. And then there’s Vietnam. As a culture we’re still atoning for the unkind way veterans of that immoral war were treated, still overcompensatingly falling all over ourselves to show support for “the troops”, and lionizing the military’s crème de la crème, its “special forces”.

It’s really about time that American society lets go of the guilt. Sure, it wasn’t very compassionate for anti-war protestors to denounce returning, post-traumatically-stressed GIs as baby killers, but neither did Vietnam vets deserve any appreciation for their “service”, for once again, their service was to the Establisnment, not the people. And thus has it been, again and again, since Vietnam. And thus is it today in Afghanistan and the Middle East, where the mighty military machine of the U.S., and its point men in the special forces, fight and kill to achieve the selfish objectives of the economic-governmental establishment.

The Navy SEALs may have dealt a stunning blow to international terrorism by whacking bin Laden, but this doesn’t change the fact that they’re normally just deadly instruments in the hidden hand of corporate Big Brother – not, I’ll repeat with politically-incorrect explicitness, not the gallant guarantors of our security, and the knightly guardians of our liberty.

As the Tony Montana character in the movie Scarface earthily says, “Capitalism is getting fu*ked”. Pure and simple, the real function of the military, of every part of the military, is to keep the fu*ked masses of humanity permanently bent over for the capitalist elite.

And, all hyperbole aside, it’s the capitalist elite, not Al Qaeda, that’s the real threat to the well-being of John and Jane Q. Public. It’s the capitalist elite, for example, whose program of globalization and greed has caused who knows how much human suffering, and how much death. Yes, poverty kills, as surely as terrorist bombs, and the brutal global economy and recession continues to inflict conditions of poverty all around the world that are taking a toll in life that will probably never be honestly calculated. Mm hmm, if the folks in the special forces really wanted to do us all a service they’d go rogue and start going after the fat cats who’ve put millions of people on unemployment; in homeless shelters; and in early graves due to lack of health insurance, to crime caused by poverty, to drugs dealt and used to escape from the bleakness of poverty, etc.

In his monologue last night Jay Leno said “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that Osama bin Laden is dead. What’s the bad news? There is no bad news!”. And then of course right on cue the audience burst into uproarious laughter. But, as per ususal, the last laugh is on us, because the bad news is that the real enemies of our liberty and livelihood, the aforementioned capitalist elite, are still out there, and in fact not only does the system and the military not protect us from these enemies, it’s now and historically has always been cozily in bed with them. Instead of going along with the amoral and inane idolizing of our modern ninjas, the SEALS, rangers, Delta Force, etc.; instead of teaching our children to gloss over the ethical issues and admire them for being tough and proficient killers; instead of falling for the patriotic hype of the military and its special forces, we need to begin to call them out on the carpet for what they really are, servants of power.

Right now, like the Munchkins after Dorothy’s house lands on the wicked witch of the East, the country is rejoicingly singing choruses of Ding Dong the wicked terrorist is dead. Aside from the question of whether it’s very becoming to take such gleeful pleasure in the death of a human being, any human being, we’re only playing into the manipulation of our reality by the corporate-owned media and the government, i.e. the ole Establishment. That is, our conceptualization of reality has been thoroughly manipulated so that we think that a Third-World outfit like Al Qaeda, and a punk with religious delusions of grandeur like bin Laden are the bogeyman we should be focused on! Perhaps if we one day find the military and its special forces being used against us we’ll finally realize who they really work for, and who the real public enemies are. But of course by then it might be too late.


* The U.S. special forces also protect the global power structure by schooling the murderous "security" forces of Third World client regimes. The bloody personnel they train in other human rights-challenged countries frequently engage in crimes against their own people; and occasionally go private, becoming the hired heavies of drug cartels. This is what's happened in Mexico, where the Los Zetas cartel is now run in paramilitary fashion by ex Mexican special forces soldiers who were professionally trained by the U.S.'s School of the Americas, an elite academy for the killers and torture technicians of the military and police organizations of Latin American allies. With the Zetas now setting up narco-terrorist cells in the U.S. you might say, à la Malcolm X, that once again our chickens are coming home to roost. Thanks a lot special forces!

Originally Posted by Gypsy

Stop crapping all over our troops, and in particular our special ops teams.

Can we still crap on the corporate....err governporate that controls them?

...corporatitarment......

Lmao.....Redeem Ourselves.....for going out and doing what we are suppose to do. There is a difference between a Warrior and a Soldier.....The Soldier, does so for Country. Such is not the same for the Warrior.

Armies....are made to go out destroy and kill.....not build Nations! There has never been redemption, there is only Sacrifice!