It should thus not be overly startling, perhaps, when US soldiers conditioned to operate in such fashion and to view human life as devoid of value turn their guns on fellow military personnel - and on themselves. In fact, these episodes could be construed as symbolic of the military institution's contributions to individual dehumanisation and alienation from humanity.
By "in such fashion," she means the culture of violence in which military personnel are trained and continue to exist. She rambles on:
Although Specialist Lopez's [the alleged Fort Hood shooter) precise circumstances aren't known, his reported "behavioural and mental health issues" can't be seen as occurring in a vacuum - as much as the US political-military establishment likes to portray such incidents as the isolated fallout of individual defectiveness rather than as evidence of a diseased system.
In her post, she laments how our first instinct is to credit the attack to terrorism*, but she apparently has no similar compulsion to blame a "diseased system" for the actions of an individual. Even though the first Food Hood (calculated) attack by Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan that killed 13 and injured 32, was indeed a terrorist attack. .
Some people will go to any lengths to feed their knee-jerk ideology.
*The trotting out of the possibility of terrorist connivance in the incident is, of course, unsurprising. In fact, the terrorist menace has become so institutionalised in US discourse and analysis that one half-expects to open the newspaper in the morning to find reports to the effect of: "A collision on such-and-such highway killed four people last night. Terrorism did not appear to be the motive."
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Perhaps rather than commenting on the militarization of the US and it's contribution to this incident, Ms Fernadez should take some time to examine and comment on the death cult that is Islam.
Islam is not a 'death' cult' any more than Christianity is. You reference a small extreme element to demonize the vast majority of Muslims.
But the author has no problem referencing an even smaller (what 3 or 4 in 5 years?) sample of individuals to blame all of the US military? Radical Islam teachings preach the value of suicide missions. Please show me a SINGLE US military officer who has ever promoted this type of action.
As General Sherman once said "War is Hell." To look at it otherwise is to deny its brutalizing and debilitating effects on its participants.
So the US military is to blame when one or two soldiers go on a suicide mission over a period of years, but when, in the same time frame hundreds, if not thousands of Muslims do the same thing, the teachings of radical Islam aren't to blame? How does that work?
Have you been following the "ethnic cleansing" of Muslims by Christian militias in the Central African Republic? Hundreds, if not thousands of Christians are killing Muslims or driving them out of their homes. Would you blame Christianity for this?