When I lived in Vietnam, I met hundreds of Vets who felt driven to come back to the site of their trauma. They were all painfully disoriented to find the battle ground that had haunted them for 20 years was a vibrant, peaceful, and increasingly prosperous country that looked and felt nothing like the place that their minds had been stuck in since they left.

They weren’t happy to find a better place. They were bewildered. And often the response was fairly catastrophic.

I really cannot help but see a very disturbing parallel to 1930’s Germany, where the Nazi party actively sought out and recruited WWI veterans who were traumatised by their war experiences, and then brainwashed by the idea that they would have won the war had it not been for the Jews who, somehow - it’s never very coherent - sold Germany out to their enemies.

And after he was made, he was used, in all his diseased mind, by this Administration, who I would argue were not only aware of the kind of men they’re employing, but in fact, choose them specifically for the disturbed psyches they possess.

I wonder how much of what we are seeing now - so many people who cleave to Trump and MAGA and Jan 6th can be traced back to the abject failure to address the damage done to men’s psyches fighting an absolutely pointless war. And, most importantly, one America lost.

My instinct is to not give a shit about his history, not to humanize him.

But that would also be to let a whole society, a whole political trajectory, off the hook for creating the man who murdered Renee Good.

But he was made.

Further thoughts on the murderer of Renee Good:
After returning from Iraq, where he served as a machine gunner on a ‘gun truck’, he chooses a career that mirrors the hierarchy of military life and mirrors an organisational culture that encourages an us vs them framing of the world. Then he joins ICE in 2016. There is an eerie repetition here - in terms of power played out through violence, of militaristic hierarchical structures, of framing others as enemy.

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"Having brought Maduro to America, the Trump administration is also bringing his politics. Yet the shadow over Minneapolis is not just Maduro’s, but that of all modern tyrannies. The cycle is known. The lie that justifies the violence, the violence as the excuse for repeating the lie. The truth alone will not set is free, but truth is the first step.”

https://snyder.substack.com/p/maduro-in-minneapolis

RE: https://flipboard.com/@gizmodo/tech-fknh6odjz/-/a-7S34iiGBQSyGlJ25fgW3cg%3Aa%3A1876139665-%2F0

"It’s okay, I’m not mad at you…”

The psychopathy of someone who shoots a woman 3 times in the head and then calls her a fucking bitch… is hard to overstate.

@rufustheduck Bring it on, Rufus!

MOAR CATS!!!

And welcome. @dillyd

@brianbilston Yup. I’ll have some of this, also.

First - the reasons given.

Drugs: If the Trump regime cared about drug trafficking, they would not have pardoned the Honduran ex-president convicted of it.

The attacks on Venezuelan ‘drug boats’ were spectacle and priming. For months, the media helped prime the public for what happened yesterday.

But how does kidnapping Maduro and his wife stop cocaine being trafficked to the US? It doesn’t. But Trump supporters cannot think in abstracts. They’ve been fed an image of Maduro as Tony Montana.

A longish thread on the invasion of #Venezuela.

We are again watching world media be willingly manipulated. Parroting the propaganda they’ve been fed. Normalising international criminality. Sane-washing what is patently not so, and ignoring globally irresponsible behaviour.

A case in point is watching them bend over backwards to try and make coherent the patently incoherent, contradictory rationale the Trump administration has given for its actions in Venezuela.

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