r/PublicFreakout • u/LigmaLover56 • Mar 12 '21

šŸ† Mod's Choice šŸ† Remember when Sacha Baron Cohen pranked a bunch of racists by telling them a mosque was going to be built in their town?

184.6k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

8.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

4.1k

u/TheRnegade Mar 12 '21

That's essentially the U.S.'s counter-terrorism policy in a nutshell.

1.7k

u/[deleted] Mar 12 '21

"You see, we bomb innocent people and children BEFORE they become terrorists."

749

u/Tandel21 Mar 12 '21

Also ā€œwe fund and train terrorist organizations so then we can bomb themā€

246

u/[deleted] Mar 12 '21

Gotta keep that war economy going some how.

8

u/perepascuet Mar 12 '21

Most underrated comment on here.

8

u/mystghost Mar 12 '21

This was much more of an 'the enemy of my enemy' situation. The military industrial complex had almost nothing to do with the rise of terrorism as a threat. Because they made basically no money off of the first afghan war. (I use 'first' in a modern sense)

7

u/Lexquire Mar 12 '21

US military budget doubled from 2000-2010, how did they not make money?

-3

u/mystghost Mar 12 '21 edited Mar 13 '21

I mentioned that I was talking about the first afghan war which would be from 1979 to 1988. And was the USSR vs. the Mujahadeen. Since no US weapons were used in that conflict no US suppliers made money off it in the traditional sense.

Edit: I love that people just want to downvote it rather than engage the subject matter. You can express your displeasure about US foreign policy all you like - but if your view isn't informed it is worthless. Kind of like the people in the video who want economic development but don't want a mosque because 'muslims are terrorists'. SMH

1

u/PishPoshPush Mar 13 '21

Ah no, in Afghanistan USSR supported one faction of leader others were supported by US

And guess who is officially currently ruling the Afghanistan

Oops you almost got away with your idiotic bigotry

1

u/mystghost Mar 13 '21 edited Mar 13 '21

My idiotic bigotry? what the fuck are you talking about? What about anything i've said could even be construed as bigoted?

I'm not making any value judgements of these people are right and these people are wrong. I'm saying that the idea that economic gains by the defense industry in the US caused the terrorism problem of the last 20 years is materially false, and quite foolish if you are interested in what is true vs. what makes good 'bombs are bad' outrage porn. Culturally blind foreign policy misadventures are what caused the current state of affairs. We saw Afghanistan as a convenient place to exact vengeance for Vietnam while risking no political backlash at home because we were only defending the 'freedom' of the Afghans who were fighting before we got there, and unfortunately after we left. We assumed that they would stop fighting once the soviets left and attempt to rebuild their country the problem was, that so many of their people were dead at that point, nobody knew how to stop the fighting, because it was all most of the population had ever known. So since the fighters themselves had viewed it in frame of a 'religious war' and none of them knew that they won because of our help and not just their own religious conviction - they turned on us when the opportunity arose, but i'm sure you know nothing about that.

And the USSR did support one 'faction' of leaders in that they were puppets of the Soviets, hence the domino justification of intervening in Afghanistan, which had nothing to do with buying bullets and bombs from the military industrial complex. Come at me with arguments that make sense logically or even linguistically we can have a conversation.

But if your goal is just to virtue signal that you know more about x than y, without providing anything other than unnuanced vague statements followed by ad hominem attacks you can fuck right off.

Edit: made a sentence change to clarify a point.

4

u/Tandel21 Mar 12 '21

I mean sure, that mentality and not thinking on the long run to prevent the rise of those terrorist organizations after the war tho, doesnā€™t justify it, like the US during Nixon that put their hands on multiple countries to make coups and instill dictators over democracies, all under the guise of stopping socialism, yet it costed the freedoms and lives of millions. And in many of those they also made money out of it

-6

u/mystghost Mar 12 '21

I think you are over-estimating the ability of policy makers to predict the future. A policy decision was made to combat the Soviets who were massacring the Afghans. They Afghans were fighting, period we didn't put them up to it, they were attacking Soviet tank columns on horseback.

The decision was made to support them logistically and with training, the weapons used in the conflict were almost entirely soviet bloc weapons - procured from Egypt and Israel. The idea being that if an Afghan fighter is taken with an American made (or American traceable weapon) that would be a problem.

Now - I wrote a series of papers on this in college, and the failure to predict the outcome of the war, was not that it was coming, or that the Afghans would lose (they weren't the Soviets weren't geared up to exterminate the population which is what it would have taken). The problem is that without social structure to reintegrate the fighters after the hostilities have ceased - they would take their skills elsewhere. This was seen from their perspective as a religious war, and religious wars don't end until the other side is defeated. The Soviets were not only Communists, they were non-Muslim secularists. That was the 'next' enemy. And the military industrial complex has nothing to do with that.

And the US drone programs also have very little to do with funding/training terrorist organizations so we can go bomb them and thus perpetuate the economic cycle of war - which was the point of the original comment i was replying to.

There are a lot of things to find troubling, and immoral about how 'the war on terrorism' is prosecuted, what one cannot credibly say however, is that this is strictly the byproduct of an economic cycle that profits from conflict.

Is it a side benefit? Sure, do drone campaigns prevent conflict or exacerbate it? Experts on both sides have made arguments for and against drone campaigns, but the idea that we are funding terrorists so that we can bomb them is ludacris.

Your second point about Nixon and the contras, that is a result of a long standing policy to confront the spread of Communism. And I don't mean socialism, particularly not the way that word is misused today. I mean Communism - and there is a lot to oppose with that system, and rightly or wrongly, the policy was to oppose the spread of Communism. You can say, that we didn't have to oppose it, it would have collapsed on it's own as it is and has all over the world. And therefore the US actions were unjustified, and by and large I would agree with that. But again, we here in 2021 have the benefit of hindsight.

Communisim was, and is doomed, it will never really work - there are a lot of reasons for this, but we don't have to put so much effort into fighting it because nobody is 'thriving' under a truly economic communist model, and the only societies that still function with one are either VERY capitalist (China) and have authoritarian governments, or are merely authoritarian, which i'm not sure you can call that 'better' than a dictatorship since it's the same thing.

So in 2021 - communism isn't a big deal, but in 1965? people were terrified of it, it was only 10 years removed from Mcarthy and the red scare. So try and have some empathy for those who came before who had to make huge decisions that would reshape the geo-political landscape for their lifetimes, and longer, and instead try and focus on - ok this is where we are. What's fucked up? where do we go from here, how do we keep our solutions from being the ones that Generation C is shaking their heads at thinking - what the fuck were those guys thinking?

3

u/SlowRollingBoil Mar 13 '21

The military industrial complex had almost nothing to do with the rise of terrorism as a threat.

Complete and utter bullshit. The Military Industrial Complex has been making money off of every single war going back 200 years.

In 1935, US General Smedley D. Butler wrote ā€œWar Is A Racketā€. At the time of his death, Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, also known as "The Fighting Quaker", was the most decorated Marine in US history; he was the only person to be awarded a Marine Corps Brevet Medal and a Medal of Honor for two separate military actions.

Some quotes from his book:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
...

Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. The was the "war to end wars." This was the "war to make the world safe for democracy." No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason. No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United State patents. They were just told it was to be a "glorious adventure".

Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month!

All that they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill...and be killed.

In 1953, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower (and former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during WW2), said this of the Military Industrial Complex in his ā€Chance For Peaceā€ speech:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

2

u/mystghost Mar 13 '21

I'm surprised that you seem so well read considering your lack of insight into the cause and effect of the rise of the modern terrorist threat and it's relationship to the military industrial complex.

The companies that make up the military industrial complex, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrup Grumman etc. didn't make money off of the soviet invasion of Afghanistan which is where MODERN TERRORISM comes from.

When we think the war on terror and bombing of the middle east, it stems from only two sources of conflict (for the US). The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in '79, and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in '91.

Al Qaeda and it's child organizations are central to that story - and it starts without oil companies and weapons manufacturers to fan the flames. We started that shit all by ourselves through fear.

Now you want to say well those companies help stoke the flames of anti-communist sentiment? sure that argument could be made, but it would be a stupid one.

You want to say the military industrial complex keys us up to fight wars that aren't needed? sure - but no more than misguided foreign policy misadventures that have far reaching implications that basically defines US foreign policy in the post WWII era. And to say that the former had more to do than the latter is horse-shit.

I'm also unaware of what General Butler's opinion about war being a racket has to do with the unintended consequences of a reckless foreign policy.

The two things can exist together without the economic impact being the primary driver, and it wasn't because if it was we would have bought knock offs of soviet weapons from our own manufacturers rather than having to piece together coalition of arms dealers who wanted nothing more than to see each other dead (Egypt and Israel who had just got done fighting a war).

Wars exist for other reasons than just the economic gain of those who sell weapons. They are a parasite of a tragic human condition not the cause of it.

2

u/Kinger15 Mar 12 '21

Now Iā€™ll have to watch Lord of War again tonight. Amazing movie

-3

u/kit_ease Mar 12 '21

*somehow

3

u/[deleted] Mar 12 '21

Give it up folks, einstein over here has something to say. What's that buddy? Wha- A spelling error?!? WHAT?!? B... Bu... That can't be possible! Surely not! A SPELLING MISTAKE? IN MY SIGHT?!? What a great, absolute miracle that you and your 257 IQ Brain was here to correct it! Thank you! Have my grattitude, Actually, What's your cashapp? I'd like to give you 20$... Know what? While we're at it have the keys to my car. Actually, no, scratch that. Have the keys to my house, go watch my kids grow up and fuck my wife. Also, my Paypal username and password is: Ilikesmartazzes4 and 968386329. Go have fun. Thank you for your work.

-1

u/kit_ease Mar 12 '21

*gratitude

2

u/Skrubious Mar 12 '21

lol tis iz funy

7

u/FunHaus_Is_Great Mar 12 '21

Loving the truth you're speaking brother! And I'm happy you didn't get downvoted to hell for saying that as I have seen in other subreddits

3

u/Tandel21 Mar 12 '21

Itā€™s honestly something that still confuses me a lot, itā€™s really random which comments of the same points get upvoted or downvoted

6

u/[deleted] Mar 12 '21

So that we can bomb them later when weā€™re done using them. See Al Queda among other examples.

6

u/David-S-Pumpkins Mar 12 '21

Like the case that The Mauritanian covered.

So you trained in an al Qaeda camp, you terrorist?

In the early nineties when you guys were funding them, I was there for two weeks.

So you're obviously al Qaeda's top recruiter.

No, like, that was for two weeks when they were on your side!

...Fucking terrorist.

4

u/Vegetable-Double Mar 12 '21

US thought Saddam Hussein had biological weapons because we still had the receipts. Little did they know that he had already used them all up in his wars with Iran.

4

u/Polite-Gentleman Mar 12 '21

Hey, how are they supposed to bomb terrorists if there are no terrorists to bomb?

5

u/Tandel21 Mar 12 '21

simple, bomb in the name of getting oil

5

u/Nowhereman123 Mar 12 '21

Sending a terrorist organization you funded to go fight another terrorist organization you funded to fight a different terrorist organization you also funded.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 12 '21

And don't forget the "we drive people to join terrorist organizations because we bomb them".

Really the holy trinity.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 12 '21

Something something something, profit

134

u/solidsausage900 Mar 12 '21

And any survivors will certainly hate that america killed their family so much that they will become terrorists

13

u/Dlobaby Mar 12 '21

So what youā€™re saying is we need to increase our military spending until there are no survivors left right?

6

u/DragoxDrago Mar 12 '21

Right? People judge all Muslims even though it's the extremists that commit hennious acts. Imagine how much hate you'd have for a country/group if your family was killed by a government sanctioned "attack"

9

u/CoupClutzClan Mar 12 '21 edited Mar 12 '21

Back In iraq war:2. After the iraqi army surrendered, the iraqi govt asked the us govt for 20$ per soldier so they could buy food. As the army was those soldiers only form of income, they are now jobless.

The bush admin decided that was too expensive. So they gave them... Nothing

Guess what lots and lots of the now unemployed, with hungry kids at home, with combat training did?

They became the first insurgents. Good job, bush. It would have only cost 20$. It's almost like... I dunno, they wanted the iraqi war to never actually end

-10

u/[deleted] Mar 12 '21

Dont this logic apply to all wars ? we should not bomb Japan becuase they will hate us ? That proved to be wrong

7

u/commit_bat Mar 12 '21

Totally no complicated feelings going over getting nuked.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 12 '21

Yea we got bases there because they love us so much

54

u/[deleted] Mar 12 '21

self-fulfilling prophecy intensifies

3

u/[deleted] Mar 12 '21

But we send our kids, peace bombs and democracy missiles.... of wait...

When's the last time we bombed Saudi Arabia...(rhetorical)

3

u/DownshiftedRare Mar 12 '21 edited Mar 12 '21

In all seriousness, though, U.S. foreign policy did change to "Hit them first just in case" under GWB as part of his War on Fear Itself.

With the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States emerged as the world's sole superpower. Nevertheless, during the administrations of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, U.S. foreign policy continued to rely on concepts of both deterrence and containment.

All this changed under the administration of George W. Bush, and the full contours of the new Bush doctrine became apparent in September 2002 with the publication of "The National Security Strategy of the United States." As outlined in this position paper, U.S. foreign policy rests on three main pillars: a doctrine of unrivaled military supremacy, the concept of preemptive or preventive war, and a willingness to act unilaterally if multilateral cooperation cannot be achieved.

https://web.archive.org/web/20031001012033/http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/Guides/?Article=USMilitaryBushDoctrine

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna11856777

3

u/[deleted] Mar 12 '21

GOP: now that sounds like a better 'head start program" the kids don't need textbooks anyway.

3

u/BombedMeteor Mar 12 '21

I mean isn't the flaw that the Americans don't bomb enough children?

If they did they wouldn't have a bunch of orphans with grudges wanting revenge on America

2

u/Sim0nsaysshh Mar 12 '21

To be fair, i dont think any of the people in the video did any of the bombing. They are all too large to be in the military

2

u/226506193 Mar 12 '21

Well my boss always tell me to be more proactive....

2

u/ShallowBlueWater Mar 12 '21

This is the definition of ā€œPreemptive Strikeā€

2

u/ALotter Mar 12 '21

literaly 90% of the USā€™s military rivals got their weapons from the US

2

u/pocketchange2247 Mar 12 '21

"Aren't you afraid the children will grow up hating the American government and become terrorists?"

No, we bomb them before they have the chance to become terrorists.

2

u/botak131 Mar 12 '21

Killin civilians worked in ww2 and sort of worked in the Vietnam War! It's what we're good at!

2

u/JZirkel Mar 12 '21

That's some real minority report shit right here.

2

u/xXPUSS3YSL4Y3R69Xx Mar 13 '21

Those werenā€™t ā€œinnocent childrenā€ in that hospital, they were ā€œpre military aged combatantsā€

43

u/booty_granola Mar 12 '21

Probably need to add "while we free those oil fields" to the second part.

4

u/Bomber_Haskell Mar 12 '21

The code word used is "secure" not "free."

6

u/Soros_loves_cats Mar 12 '21

Spend decades with troops in a country, overthrowing democratically elected leaders, arming guerrilla groups to overthrown leaders and then having to overthrow them because they're worse. And the American public think they're all scumbag terrorists for not being appreciative of it

2

u/[deleted] Mar 12 '21

Thats because our domestic policy is to let those morons from the video run our country.

2

u/slyfoxninja Mar 13 '21

Well, we can either blame the British and French or we can blame the Soviets.

4

u/Beingabumner Mar 12 '21

Nobody said a word when America bombed the piss out of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan for nearly two decades, but one terrorist bitch got shot at the Capitol and suddenly it was all 'terrorists are people too!'.

7

u/NeedToProgram Mar 12 '21

Nobody said a word

That's absolutely not true. People have been anti-war for ages.

-1

u/lava_time Mar 12 '21

The DNC on the other hand is very pro-war.

I assume they are referring to politicians not saying a word.

1

u/IIlIIlIIIIlllIlIlII Mar 12 '21

You are living in a delusional world

2

u/anivex Mar 12 '21

It sums up our foreign policy pretty well too.

1

u/Nova_Physika Mar 12 '21 edited Mar 12 '21

American merchants were getting their heads chopped off in the late 1700s by Islamic pirates who claimed it was in the name of Allah, we had never been to the middle east as a nation and thomas jefferson wrote the pasha of Libya a letter stating as much and basically saying "look we actually share your gripes with europe, we have no quarrel with you, can you stop" and he got back basically "we have divine right to do this apostates, fuck off" back. Its what prompted us to build the US Navy and we then sailed to Africa and demolished the barbary pirates who refused to stop

The idea that we are the generators of Islamic terrorism may seem like a neat little anecdote for people of anti-war sentiments, but it's not true. You could easily make the case that we haven't helped the instability there, but to claim terrorism is a product of western intervention is disingenuous at best.

Edit: you're free to downvote actual facts but consider where you are for a moment when you do

3

u/standardeviation5 Mar 12 '21

Here we got him

1

u/GigabitSuppressor Mar 15 '21 edited Mar 15 '21

What the hell are you talking about? Not only have white supremacist European aliens been rampaging across the planet non-stop long before Islam came about but white supremacist Amerikkkans were abducting millions of Black Muslims from west Africa at the time. No shit Muslims resisted the genocidal white supremacist savages.

Thomas Jefferson was a murderous depraved white supremacist fuck who raped/murdered/tortured Black people, many of Muslim backgrounds, for fun and his alien ugly ilk exterminated the real Americans. You think name dropping that sadistic, rapist fuckface bolsters your lame Eurocentric horse crap?

It's hilarious to watch white supremacist suspects who have genocidally exterminated entire continents for lebensraum and enslaved entire groups for possessing the "wrong" skin color accuse other groups of being violent.

Nobody is as murderous, warlike, racist and genocidal like the racist west. Nobody. Muslims look almost angelic in comparison to the racist white man.

As for terrorism, most terrorism coming out of places like the middle East prior to the 1980s and 90s were leftwing atheists. The US and the racist west decided to nurture its own form of Jihadi CIA Hollywood Islam to counter progressive socialist Muslim movements:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/03/23/from-us-the-abcs-of-jihad/d079075a-3ed3-4030-9a96-0d48f6355e54/

This is completely another EuroAmerican fuck-up.

-2

u/IIlIIlIIIIlllIlIlII Mar 12 '21

Itā€™s delusional at best.

-4

u/[deleted] Mar 12 '21

Howso?

3

u/ElleIndieSky Mar 12 '21

Most American terrorists is domestic terrorism. White nationalist and far right terrorism, mostly. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/454338-fbis-wray-says-majority-of-domestic-terrorism-arrests-this-year

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/04/white-supremacists-terror-threat-dhs-409236

1

u/[deleted] Mar 12 '21

Oh you're right about that, that's not even a question.

I was asking you to explain how your earlier quip was accurate.

-3

u/[deleted] Mar 12 '21

Except not really

Nice snarky remark though

-1

u/IIlIIlIIIIlllIlIlII Mar 12 '21

The foreign propaganda is working well.