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De Facto By facilitating US flights through Shannon, we bear guilt over Iraq.
Playing our part in war and Death Row
De Facto Liamy MacNally There are no victors in war, just the dead and the living dead. The dead are the lucky ones. They go to their eternal reward believing God is on their side or at least on the side of their political leaders. The living dead are left to claim a victory from the blood-filled chalice of chance and circumstance. There but for the grace of God … For most of us war is confined to an emotive outburst of some deep-seated venting of anger and frustration. The reality of war is quite different. There is the sound of a bullet whizzing by en route to its target, thudding the life force out of a body of energy. The whistle of speeding sound suddenly stops with a shout. The flesh and blood absorb the poisoning, weighted lead. The thump into the body is its death knell. Speed kills. The last intake of breath gulps as the soul closes down, preparing to release the spirit. To some people this is freedom. For others, death comes creeping slowly. Death envelopes like the tentacles of an octopus. It is not clean-cut and clear, but messy, tangled and gruesome. It strikes, tears, rips and ruptures. It is not a text book death but an excruciating extraction of life, pulled from its organs unwillingly, painfully and slowly. Accompanied by the rattle of the pain of death that pierces through to a part of the psyche untouched before, death’s sound lingers there for eternity. The living who hear that sound will fear it, praying never to hear it again.
DEATH PEDDLERS Those who dispense death on the sidewalks that lead to its thoroughfare have a lot to answer for. It is said that the effect of one young person dying stops a trickle of life for seven generations. In this country we are on the sidewalk. We do not allow the death penalty. We do not watch the body swaying from the gallows or smell the burning flesh of the Electric Lady. Such expressions of democracy are reserved for the bastion of democracy, America, and its so-called enemies in readily labelled totalitarian or ‘extremist’ regimes. The end results are the same! Death is death, regardless of the terms. Our Boston rather than Berlin allegiance aligns us with America. Daily we step on the sidewalk of death as we steer war planes across the tarmac at Shannon. There is no point in thinking that we do not have any responsibility for the death and destruction in Iraq, we do. There is no point in thinking that we have no responsibility for the dastardly actions of a corrupt American regime that is taking young men off the streets, paying them a lump sum, giving them a little training and shipping out as nothing more than death squads to Iraq. Producing death fodder has an effect on all of us. We are part of that fatal food chain. We are as much part of the ‘end game’ for all the times we remained silent when Bush and his crooked cronies weaved their wicked web of deceit about Iraq. It is still strange to think that not one Iraqi was involved in 9/11 yet Iraq has paid the price. The guilty were from Saudi Arabia. Some Saudis were spirited out of America when there was a ban on flying after 9/11. They were whisked back to their country where even today justice is still dispensed, execution-style. A ROTTEN AND ROTTING UNDERBELLY America’s underbelly is putrid, rotted and rotting to the core of its being by its central government that has wreaked destruction in its wake. It can count among its victims, not just the innocent people of Iraq, but many other innocent people from many countries. Yankee arrogance abounds in the shape of the executioner’s face that is always well hidden. It has become the master of war and war is any society’s greatest failure. America will emerge as the greatest dinosaur of the modern world. Its law is the law of the jungle – evidenced abroad and at home in many American states where Death Row is still the main street. Its leaders hide behind the protectionism of religion with the Christian right as the greatest supporters. These saints of sorrow should do to their god what they do to others in the name of their god. Their god is not a god worthy of capital letters but a god of deceit, made in the image and likeness of their own egos. The best service they could perform is to crucify their god. Perhaps then they will leave the way open for the God of Christianity which many of them profess. That God is an embodiment of love, not war, not death row bellowing or bureaucratic lying. This God has forgiveness at the core of His understanding, anything less reduces the relationship at the heart of Christianity to a figment of the imagination.
DARRELL GRAYSON RIP Recently, in The Irish Times of August 4, Denis Staunton wrote a poignant article on being present for the execution by lethal injection of Darrell Grayson by the Alabama state at Holman Correctional Facility. He was on Death Row for 25 years. Questions were still raised at the last moment about his guilt. Almost half of Alabama’s 200 Death Row inmates are black. African-Americans make up only a quarter of the state’s population. He described the mixture of three chemicals usually used to kill inmates. Some states have stopped using lethal injections because medical studies have shown that ‘inadequate dosing meant some prisoners may have died painful deaths by asphyxiation’. Darrell Grayson’s death, ‘in this empty chamber, surrounded by hostile faces’, brought the reporter back to his own father’s death. “I remembered my father’s death long ago, how I held his hand and spoke to him as he drew his last breaths among those he loved. I pictured my own death and wondered if I would face it with the same grace shown by this poor convict,” wrote Denis Staunton. After 9/11, laws were introduced ‘to protect’ people. These laws would root out ‘those against us’ everyone was told. All these laws do is to shore up fear and allow those in power more power to continue on the road to barbarism. To hear Bush and his posse call on God is an aberration. All this ‘God bless America’ jargon is not working. God is not listening! America is being cursed and cursed greatly by this current administration. Its role as the centre of democracy is a contradiction. Democracy is about freedom, not fear. There is more freedom in the countries that Bush calls the ‘axis of evil’. He is at the core of the axis of evil with his policies. He is destroying, not just America, but the world. And he has his little helpers, those who sing, ‘Hi! Ho! Hi! Ho! It’s off to work we go’. We are all in that chorus line, led by Bertie Ahern, the pied piper of Shannon Airport. Where are the voices of restraint among those we elect? We are all co-workers in the game of death.
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