Another handful of “NATO soldiers” (which turned out to actually be Americans) were killed this past weekend by roadside bombs in Afghanistan.

Has anybody else noticed that the mainstream media rarely tells us about the single deaths until much later when the soldier’s body bag comes home? The Pentagon seems to sense the obligation to tell us about the multiple deaths, but obviously doesn’t want the public to start realizing that, after ten gruesome years, we are losing that inglorious war, similar to how we won every battle in Vietnam but still lost the war and how lost the last Iraq War when we retreated from that devastated nation a year or two ago. Did we not notice that the average Iraqi was in the street cheering the victory of their freedom fighters who succeeded in driving out us infidels?

Of course the world’s oil giants and financiers did declare victory because they are still in control of the plundered oil fields, although they still need uncounted numbers of mercenary “boots on the ground” to protect their corporate “investments”. So far there have only been negative returns on the investments of US taxpayers, whose borrowed money (“lent” to the Pentagon, so as not to raise taxes, by billionaires, corporations and large institutions who will theoretically be reaping interest income for decades to come (because of “the full faith and credit” of the financially shaky, credit-unworthy US government).

The upshot is that tomorrow’s doomed-to-be-impoverished, imprisoned, malnourished, under-educated and over-entertained children will be somehow be responsible for paying off the debt.


Every time the US military invades or, euphemistically “places advisors in” another sovereign nation, dominating or subduing it against its will, the response of many of the citizens of the invaded country is always, in so many words, “Yankee Go Home!!”

Military invasions, with war’s inherent and inevitable - and not necessarily figurative - “raping, killing and pillaging” (of the resources and the innocent civilians of the invaded nation) are always advertised to the “patriotic sheeple” back home as “defending the Homeland” or some other noble patriotic effort, such as liberation of the oppressed (a la Operation Iraq Liberation – OIL), retaliation for prior attacks - often staged in false flag operations - or even lamer cover stories that will be eagerly expanded on and justified by the media.

Aggressive invasions always go wrong. That is why they are considered war crimes. The invaders are never really welcomed for long by the peace-loving citizens of the occupied territories (who somehow always seem to be cursed – and coveted - with marketable natural resources). And if the armies are initially seen as liberators, that attitude soon changes with the confiscations of private property, the so-called “collateral damage” that is inevitable in modern war (see  HYPERLINK “http://www.collateralmurder.com” www.collateralmurder.com), their new refugee status and the abuse, arrogance and the lack of cultural understanding of the occupying troops.

The desire of any sovereign people is
for the invaders toleave them alone

“Go back to from where you came” was certainly the cry of the Native Americans to the barbaric “Dogs of War” that Columbus and the other conquistadors unleashed upon the innocent, over-powered, essentially defenseless aboriginal people starting in 1492. The first order of business for Columbus’ sex-starved sailors was to rape the aboriginal women.

” Go back home” was certainly the cry that the later invading white European colonizers heard from the Native Americans. Many of the Europeans physically survived only because of the compassion and nurturance of the Native Americans in what was to become New England. And then, with extreme prejudice and cruelty, (and superior weaponry) these white men ruthlessly turned on the lawful inhabitants of North America and, over the next 500 years, committed wholesale slaughter of the non-whites from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Historians tell us that 90% of America’s indigenous population (over 100,000,000 people) was killed off by the invaders and their armies. And the contagious effects of that genocide continues through the generations to destroy the members of the tribes who are barely surviving the psychological and spiritual trauma inflicted on them in the notorious crimes of church, state, police and multinational corporations (see.  HYPERLINK “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpTsn23V7gc&feature=share” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpTsn23V7gc&feature=share, www.hiddennolonger.com or  HYPERLINK “http://www.itccs.org” \t “_blank” www.itccs.org).

Similarly (and rather ironically), the white American colonists who had ignored the “go home” pleas from the Indians, and then turned around and pleaded with their British overlords, ultimately declaring independence from them, said:  “If you, King George, insist on taxation without representation and unwanted military occupation, then we want your Redcoats to go back home to England where you belong - and send your mercenary Hessian soldiers back to Prussia where they came from.”

What would we Americans do if some corporate-controlled,

anti-democracy groups gutted the US Constitution,

destroyed the economy and took control of our government

– and did it with our money?

Hopefully the response from real American patriots in the homeland would be the same if powerful anti-democratic, corporate-supported groups and their billionaires gutted the US Constitution, destroyed the economy, killed off the unions, militarized the nation, demonized its nonviolent protesters, locked up its conscientious objectors to war and killing and took away our liberty, equality, freedom and the pursuit of happiness, all the while using somebody else’s money (ours). Whatever aware, courageous anti-fascists there remained among us would hopefully say to the anti-democracy types: “You have exceeded your share of the oxygen, so go home to wherever you came from and leave our democracy alone.”

Why does it surprise us when the suffering and deprived ones whom we have invaded fight back? The resistance fighters our politicians and assorted other militarists demean (by calling them “terrorists” or “insurgents”) justifiably consider themselves to be heroic freedom-fighters struggling against tyrannical powers, whose obedient, invading soldiers have the overwhelming advantage of killing with expensive high-tech weaponry like the cowardly long-range missiles, cowardly high-altitude bombers or cowardly un-manned drones that are flown from some safe distant location rather than fighting fairly, hand to hand and eye to eye, like real warriors.

What do most freedom fighters want to do with
homicidally violent, undocumented alien invaders and occupiers?

These resistance fighters in Afghanistan and Iraq are not ”terrorists”. They, having seen that the undocumented alien invader terrorists from America have ignored their pleas to go home, have logically gone to the next escalating step - retaliatory violence - a more emphatic way of convincing the enemy that they want them off their property and away from their vulnerable young women.

Most historically-illiterate Americans, contentedly following in the footsteps of such anti-intellectual non-readers-of-history like George W. Bush, seem totally content with also not knowing anything about world history, world religions, psychology, sociology, philosophy or geography.  They have been easily and cunningly kept in the dark about what really happens on the ground when sanctions (and then lethal military non-solutions) are applied to nations like Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Palestine, etc. They have never heard the screams or seen the blood and guts when the shooting and killing begins, and they are not allowed, by presidential edict, to see or smell the body bags when the soldiers come home to Dover Air Force base. We prefer to simplistically call the physically and psychologically traumatized veterans “heroes” and then quickly leave the casualties among them behind to their own devices, ignoring them, except on patriotic holidays or when their “surviving” buddies come home upright at the end of their current deployments.

And what is worse, most Americans, including the politicians, generals, pundits and other war-supporters don’t even want to know about the suffering of their own soldier-victims who are kept well-hidden in VA hospitals, nursing homes, half-way houses, parent’s basements, homeless shelters or as trip-wire vets out in the bush away from civilization.

Most patriotic Americans don’t want to know about the long-term consequences of war, the permanently legless, permanently emasculated, blinded, burned, radiation-poisoned, brain-injured, psychologically-traumatized and/or spiritually-dead cannon fodder soldiers who were never adequately warned about what might happen to them in the killing fields. It is a well-hidden fact that many of them will never ever get over the war. Essentially they have been left for dead, ignored by the Pentagon, kept invisible, except for an occasional posthumous medal-granting ceremony or funeral with military honors.

The Afghanistan and Iraq wars are coming back to haunt us

We pampered, distracted and hence unaware American civilians (aka the “American Idiots” described in the song by that name and sung by the musical group Green Day) are kept diverted from the reality of the horrors of places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Those wars are already coming back to haunt us with the astronomical incidence of war-casualties like active duty soldier suicides, combat-induced PTSD, traumatic brain injuries, prescription drug-induced brain disorders, criminality, drug abuse, alcoholism, homicides, soul-destruction and marital failures - and, of course the huge incidence of suicidality among veterans of all previous wars.

And don’t say we peacemakers and antiwar activists didn’t warn the warmongers. They chose not to listen largely because of the pro-war hysteria that enabled the deaf, dumb and blind patriotism that America is famous for.

Most Americans seem to be distracted by the incessant, 24/7 pseudo-news on TV and talk radio, where we are inundated with tales of “heroic” and sanitized battles from the latest “embedded” reports from the war zone. And that pro-war propaganda alternates with celebrity news, mindless TV reality, “got talent” and game shows, the minute-to-minute weather reporting, the hourly, meaningless Dow Jones Industrial Average reports, the falsely low unemployment rates and the endless and contrived political controversies that confuse, disgust and demoralize the electorate.

Most Americans aren’t even recognizing the signs of planetary and national collapse because we are swallowing too many neurotoxic, psychotoxic, addicting, brain-disabling, brain-altering psychotropic drugs. We are irradiating under-developed, immature brains with cell phones, shopping and being entertained into oblivion with our home entertainment centers and we are consuming stuff, like the ubiquitous, poisonous, brain-disabling junk food that is mal-nourishing way too many American bodies and brains.

Or we are too busy getting fixes for our addictions to professional sports, drugs and shopping. Or we are too busy being influenced unthinkingly by Wall Street, Madison Avenue and the “talking heads” that seem to succeed in falsely reassuring us that “everything is OK”, to “trust us, we’re the experts” or “ignore the war and just keep on shopping and keep the wobbly consumer-dependent economy (just barely) alive”.

The pleas of “Yankee Go Home” from the displaced, homeless, starving and terrorized victims of war fall on deaf American ears. The “Support the Troops by Bringing them out of Harm’s Way” from the pro-peace, anti-war, anti-fascist groups, should make good economic sense to our financially bankrupt American economy, which is somehow, through sleight-of-hand by Bernanke’s Federal Reserve banking system, paying out two billion wasted dollars per day for our bloated military, its wars, healthcare for the permanently disabled veterans and hundreds of billions of dollars of annual interest payments on the war debt, which goes to any number of the corporate war profiteers and investment banks. And nobody is claiming ANY positive “return on investment”, except for the plunderers of the oil resources of Iraq, that were lavishly given to various multinational oil cartels – with nothing left for us taxpayers except for the debt obligation that our progeny will have to pay for the endless Cheney/Bush wars.

The NeoCon’s multi-trillion dollar “pay later” credit

card war “investment” predictably led to the financial

collapse of theUS economy

Afghanistan was the first post-9/11 target of the nefarious right-wing, NeoConservative think tank called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The military misadventures for global domination that PNAC called for had been planned on paper for years before 9/11 was orchestrated (which the PNAC called “the New Pearl Harbor”). Those plans were approved of by the late, lamented Cheney/Rove/Bush/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Rice White House, which eagerly went along with the plans for the so-called “retaliatory invasion” of Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the costs of the wars and occupations didn’t go as they had planned. The PNAC ChickenHawks like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld naively expected the US invasion forces to be welcomed as liberators. They certainly didn’t expect the vehement “Yankee Go Home” attitude. What they got, with their multi-trillion dollar “pay later” credit card “investment” was the predictable financial collapse of the US economy.

And now we are mired in it, sort of like getting stuck to the Tar Baby of the Uncle Remus stories, always getting more stuck with every attempt to “surge”, every increase in troop strength or every “realignment of strategy”, trying everything except the rational steps that would solve the problems: declare victory (or admit defeat) and do what the colonized victims have been saying to us since the beginning: “Go Home, You Damn Yankees”, and leave our oil wells to us, which is exactly the sentiment that Americans would express to any army that was invading the US.

Of course, “Go Home” is exactly what we Americans should be saying to any group of treacherous, remorseless, war-profiteering, obscenely rich, multinational (and therefore non-American and also unAmerican) corporate One Percenters that are intent on extracting the resources that we of the 99% should benefit from, while they plan on laying to waste our planet and our wealth, water, air, soil and creatures.

Dr. Kohls is a retired physician who has painfully witnessed in his practice the soul- and psychic-devastation of war, domestic violence, punitive parenting, malnutrition, homelessness, poverty and the serious dangers of the chronic use of psychotropic drugs. In his essays he tries to warn his readers about some of the physical, neurological, psychological and spiritual consequences of all those forms of violence.