Ol’ Blind Joe
By Stirling Hamilton
I SHOULDN’T read and watch so much about what’s going on in the world but I recently found myself struck by what I can only call a heart spew after watching the genocide of the Rohingya people of Myanmar (formerly Burma) and the continued massacre of innocent Arab citizens in Yemen and Syria.
It’s like feeling yourself fit to burst into tears over the blatant inhumanity that is going on everywhere, every day, and struggling to hold down your emotions.
Read moreMore than 400,000 Rohingya children now live in refugee camps in Bangladesh after fleeing genocide in Myanmar.
Thousands are orphans, and many have been coerced into the sprawling sex trade after having been greeted in their flight by utter poverty and rape.
My boss has got these two bulls that I watch through the window and he’s got a trough of grain to fatten them up in a covered trailer so the sheep can’t get to it.
The dominant one I call Eric, as in America, and the other one is Oz, as in shnozz because Oz always has its nose up Eric’s posterior, licking away like there’s no tomorrow and frankly, there probably isn’t.
And then there’s an alpaca I call Al, as in Alpacapitalism, who is even fatter than the others yet no use to anyone.
The sheep are all just sitting under a tree in the corner of the paddock watching MasterChef and wondering what the hell meat is.
It’s as if we’re all in training to be sociopaths as we fence ourselves off from the pain of other creatures and cultures.
US human rights activist Martin Luther King Jr said “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly”.
US President Donald Trump is just a sideshow to occupy the masses while the real shit goes down in a myriad of agencies working behind the scenes.
They’ve got Iran in the crosshairs and bad times are ahead – remember, sanctions aren’t just some ephemeral thing.
Half a million Iraqi children died from sanctions before we went in to destroy their infrastructure and fracture their society – the intent seems to be to fragment the Middle East and essentially the entire world.
Eric has been busy and got dozens of countries suffering from sanctions, which means no medicine, no investment and no parts for planes or cars, etc..
Why do you think Cubans are driving around in 70-year-old bombs?
And just look at the basket case Venezuela has become due to sanctions because they dared to defy Eric’s power.
Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander and retired US four-star Army General Wesley Clark dropped into the Pentagon to see former US Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and then visited a colleague from the Joint Chiefs of Staff who showed him an order from on high.
“Global Warfare: We’re going to take out seven countries in five years – Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”
It is worth noting that six of these seven countries (with the exception of Lebanon) are now the object of President Trump’s travel ban on Muslims entering the US.
Washington, London and Tel Aviv have long preferred the chaos, violence and dispersed power of insurgent Muslim ‘rebels’ to nationalist (usually secular leftist) governments in the region.
These same actors enjoy cozy relations with a Saudi regime that ideologically motivates and materially funds thousands of Sunni militants to oppose Iran and its allies.
Don’t forget, 15 of the 17 terrorists who flew passenger airliners into New York’s doomed World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001 were Saudi nationals.
US interventions – one after the other in Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, North Africa and Ukraine – keep their gaze on Russia as the ultimate prize, especially after nationalist President Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000.
It is Russian independence – not its military threat – that Washington considers a major obstacle to world dominance.
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) recently released thousands of documents detailing how in 1953 it engineered a coup in Iran against democratically elected former leader Mohammed Mossadegh for daring to nationalise that country’s oil industry.
A similar thing happened two decades later in Chile when former leftist president Salvador Allende adopted a new policy to nationalise Chilean industry.
With CIA support, the Chilean military moved on 11 September 1973 to oust Allende in a coup d’état.
As armed troops surrounded the presidential La Moneda Palace, Allende gave his last speech vowing not to resign but later that day allegedly committed suicide with an assault rifle.
New military leader General Augusto Pinochet refused to return authority to a civilian government, ending more than 40 years of democratic government in Chile.
He suspended Chile’s constitution, dissolved congress and embarked on a bloody campaign of kidnap, torture and murder against thousands of political dissidents and Allende supporters.
Pinochet remained Chile’s military dictator until he stepped down in 1990 and died in 2006 facing hundreds of charges of human rights violations.
“America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without.” – Walt Whitman (1819-1892) US essayist, poet and journalist.