Geneva Convention? That’s for losers
Ok, here’s a new low. Trump has tweeted that we should commit a war crime to stop terrorism. (Joke’s on him: war crimes are terrorism.)
President Donald Trump appeared to cite an apocryphal story about an American general executing dozens of Muslim prisoners in the Philippines and defiling their bodies with pig blood in the wake of a deadly terror attack in Barcelona, Spain, Thursday.
After first condemning the attack and offering the United States’ support, the president said to “study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught,” an apparent reference to a debunked legend about World War I-era General John J. Pershing that Trump repeatedly recounted in his speeches on the campaign trail.
Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017
The story about Pershing is apocryphal, but Trump apparently believes it. (Now there’s a surprise.)
“He took fifty bullets, and he dipped them in pig’s blood,” Trump said at a rally in South Carolina in February 2016. “And he had his men load his rifles and he lined up the fifty people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the fiftieth person he said ‘You go back to your people and you tell them what happened.’ And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem, okay?”
Historians says there’s no evidence for that.
Trump said at the time the moral of the story was: “We better start getting tough and we better start getting vigilant, and we better start using our heads or we’re not gonna have a country, folks.”
And by “tough” he means we’d better murder a bunch of people as an example and defile them for good measure and then tell their friends at home we did it. A war crime; a deliberate calculated war crime meant to instill terror.
Trump’s tweet came hours after a car crashed into a crowd in Barcelona, Spain. Authorities there have labeled the incident a terrorist attack and taken a suspect into custody.
In addition to celebrating what would be tantamount to a war crime, Trump’s claim that such tactics ended terrorism is also inaccurate. The unrest he cited continued long afterwards and was rooted in conflict over colonial rule.
Ok but it would be so much fun.
https://twitter.com/ezlusztig/status/898256679833227264
https://twitter.com/ezlusztig/status/898256839749414912
https://twitter.com/ezlusztig/status/898257036592390144
But what do people use to deter Trump from destroying the United States? Pig’s blood isn’t going to work. I can’t imagine him being any more defiled than he already is, and that by his own doing.
Well, since he believes rumors, myths and the like, how about threatening to use saltpeter?
YNNB, I’d suggest the blood of poor, black women, if I didn’t suspect that that is what he bathes in.
As many have noted, Trump’s Pershing story is apocryphal. The tell-tale is that Gen. Pershing was said to have left one of the Filipinos alive.
As contemporary observer Mark Twain noted in his 1901 essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” American practice was to kill ’em all. He quotes the letter of an American soldier in the Philippines to his mother, printed in an American newspaper of the time: “WE NEVER LEFT ONE ALIVE. IF ONE WAS WOUNDED, WE WOULD RUN OUR BAYONETS THROUGH HIM.” (Caps in original.)
And in a 1906 essay about the massacre of some 1,000 Filipino Muslim men, women and children known as the Moros, Twain wrote:
General Wood was present and looking on. His order had been, “Kill or capture those savages.” Apparently our little army considered that the “or” left them authorized to kill or capture according to taste, and that their taste had remained what it had been for eight years in our army out there–the taste of Christian butchers.
The American response to criticism of the Moro massacre set the pattern for conflicts to this day: 1) women and children died because fighters used them as human shields, and 2) women and children were collateral damage from an artillery barrage. You can see a photo of what Trump recommends doing to Muslims here. (Warning: it’s gruesome.)
Now we know what Trump means when he says Make America Great Again.
I’ve often heard this idea that covering corpses in pig’s blood would deter terrorists. I very much doubt that people who believe that they will go to Paradise (complete with ever-renewable virgins) when they die will be deterred by this. However, the deliberate insult to their religious sensibilities would only inflame tensions further. In a way, it glorifies the terrorism more, putting focus on the perpetrators and feeding the narrative that they are martyrs rather than mass murderers.