On this auspicious anniversary, let’s take a journey into my mind palace. Can you imagine, with me, how things could have been? Imagine if, in 2008, by which time the true cause and nature of the war was obvious, we’d fired every journalist that was part of the human centipede that shat out lie after lie about the desperate need to invade Iraq. How about if we’d defenestrated every politician and official who pushed for the war, if every pundit who shilled for it had been hurled into the Thames. Just think for a minute about how much smarter and more interesting our public discourse would be, and how much better run our country would be, if opposing the transparently fraudulent ur-disaster of the 21th century was a litmus test for credibility.
Continue reading “It’s the 15th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq”
Terrorism, Imperialism and “Permissible” forms of government
James Matthews, a British man who has fought against ISIS with the Syrian Democratic Forces has just been charged with terror offences by our government. He’s not done anything wrong in the two years he’s been back in the UK, and he was fighting on the side of progressive Syrian Muslims allied to the United States against some of the most sadistic and depraved enemies imaginable, but the home office is suddenly extremely concerned that he might have learned violent habits.
This stands in stark contrast to the treatment of Salman Abedi. This was a guy who Theresa May sent out of the county to fight alongside extremists in Libya, who were armed by the British Government after the fall of Gadaffi a few years back. When he’d finished helping his new friends set up their open air slave markets, he returned to the UK and despite five different community leaders and relatives contacting the police about his alarming behaviour, he was left to his own devices right up until he blew up over twenty people outside the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.
This isn’t an isolated case, either – it happens on an international scale. The latest chapter of the war in Syria is a dark one – with ISIS on the verge of defeat, president Erdogan of Turkey has shaved the beards off some of the jihadi fighters who fled across his border, and is now using them to invade Afrin in North Syria. These are people who, keeping their old habits, have released videos of them torturing, mutilating and beheading people they’ve captured, while openly announcing their intention to commit a genocide in the region and settle there. Their targets, on the other hand, were the guys that with the help of the United States drove ISIS from the country, have sheltered hundreds of thousands of refugees from the war in the south and were setting up a progressive, socialist and feminist regional government until they started getting bombed last month with the best weaponry NATO can buy.
Protests against this obviously illegal war of aggression are banned in Germany. Theresa May cannot send the Turks enough weapons, and when it was suggested to her that we condemn them for openly sponsoring ISIS 2.0, she pulled that grimace where she looks like someone stuffed a lemon up a dog’s asshole, and changed the subject. Trump and his friends have indicated that they’re going to abandon their former allies and allow Turkey to crush them. Why?
Don’t worry, friends, I’ll tell you fuckin’ why.
Continue reading “Terrorism, Imperialism and “Permissible” forms of government”