It's interesting to me that as an article of faith in some of the darker corners of the so-called progressive blogosphere what's going on now, under the Trump Regime, nothing is to be said about the ongoing killing and destruction by the unleashed military -- unless it can be directly blamed on "Obomba" or even better, on The Hag "Clintoon." For some bizarre but unknown reason, Trump and His Generals are blameless, uninvolved, and apparently barely aware of what's going on, and that has been going on under Trump's watch. There are still individuals convinced he's winding down the many wars against rebellion when in fact he's been ramping them up and starting new ones.
One of the primary characteristics of these anti-Rebel actions is the utter destruction left in their wake. City after city, particularly in Iraq and Syria, has been utterly destroyed, their populations massacred or dispersed. Some of the cities have been destroyed for the third or fourth time since the start of the Imperial wars of aggression after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon so many years ago now.
I count at least a dozen cities in Iraq and at least that many more in Syria that have been partially or completely leveled in the last year or so, most of them during the Trump Regime, but not all of them.
Ramadi, for example, was destroyed in May of 2016.
Mosul's destruction began in October of 2016. It was completed, with enormous numbers of civilian casualties (by some counts 40,000 or more) in July of 2017.
Fallujah was destroyed -- again -- in 2016 while Tikrit suffered destruction in 2015 and 2017.
Tal Afar was destroyed in August 2017.
The list of cities destroyed in Iraq -- some in 2015, some in 2016, some in 2017, with the destruction continuing today -- goes on and on. The number of cities destroyed in Syria is nearly endless, Raqqa being only one recent example of many.
Cities are being destroyed as we speak in the Yemen, parts of Africa, and in the far-distant Philippines, and who knows where else that hasn't been reported? "They make a desert and call it peace." Indeed.
As these cities are destroyed, their populations are dispersed as refugees or are annihilated in uncounted numbers. They're killed by the bombs dropped from above by our Imperial forces, they're killed by epidemics, they're killed by street fighting, by death squads; they're killed by starvation and lack of water. They're killed by heat and suffocation and fear and hopelessness. No one hears the dead and no one counts them, either. It is as if they never were.
The toll of death and destruction has been mounting exponentially since Trump assumed the throne of the Empire and unleashed His Generals from the restraints that had chafed them so under Obama. They are now free to kill and destroy at will without "interference" from the White House and without accountability for what they and their allied forces and mercenaries do.
The excuse is the necessity for "Victory" at any cost to please the Emperor. We can argue all we want that this is merely a continuation of anti-rebel policies and actions that have been going on for decades, under Reagan, BushI Clinton, BushII, and Obama. We're supposed to believe there's nothing "new" and so accept the accelerating toll of slaughter and destruction as "normal." Trump himself is not the cause. As if that were the point.
No, what if we don't accept what's going on as "normal" or anything close to it, and what if we didn't accept its prior iterations under previous rulers, either? What if we see this situation for what it is -- murder of indiscriminate targets, total destruction of cities where uncounted civilians are forced to stay or are unable to escape to be slaughtered at will, all to control or kill a relative handful of rebels against the Empire.
The fact that it has been going on as long as it has does not in any way excuse the current occupant of the White House and his current crop of Generals for their actions, and yet that has become the default position of many of those who simply cannot bring themselves to acknowledge what's going on now.And that includes a whole cohort of "objectively pro-Trump" so-called progressives.
I guess the theory is that whatever he does is OK as long as he doesn't do what The Hag was sure to do: start a nuclear war with Russia.
To my mind, this is insanity. But that's how far down the rabbit hole our political lives have descended.
Excusing whatever is going on now (if it's even noticed) as necessary to "heighten the contradictions" and so -- eventually, maybe, could be -- bring down the Empire as if this were Tsarist Russia in the throes of WWI is morally repugnant and it's not likely to work in any case. The contradictions are not being heightened, they being reinforced as is the power of the Empire. This is not the time to overlook the crimes of the Emperor and Empire. This is the time to highlight them relentlessly. If, of course, the objective is to bring the edifice down. But I don't think that is the objective at all.
I'll try to get into that another time.
Meanwhile, Feliz Dia de los Muertos.
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