The wind whispers of fear and hate. The war has killed love. And those that confess to the Angkar are punished, and no one dare ask where they go. Here, only the silent survive. ~Dith Pran, The Killing Fields
...
We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world, a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we'll kill you. Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us; they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them. ~Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom Of Fear (2004)
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And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God ~Matthew 19:24
I saw this yesterday, not long after I got done writing yesterday's post.Tucker Carlson, literally asking some old white man in an interview "Why does he have to hate Bashar Assad?"
If the images coming out of Syria in general, and that place in particular, are not enough to make you hate Bashar Al-Assad then you have no soul.
If the testimonies of systematic human rights abuses and the ongoing documentation and investigation of torture almost more fucked up than what the fucking Nazis did (not least because Syria's system of repression appears to have been designed by a leftover Nazi, Alois Brunner, who thought that the Third Reich's "Final Solution" did not go far enough) are you even a goddamn human in there??
If the videos of people being released, or of that human bag o' bones found under a blanket who had seen neither food, water or sunlight for three months but was somehow still alive, or of the families come with pictures to see if they can find any trace of their loved ones who went in there and never came out do not move the needle for you...then I suspect probably nothing is going to and you're fine with any level of suffering by other humans as long as you think it serves your ideology or wealth.
If your addiction to money or power or smirking frat-boy political fuckery is that serious, you're probably not gonna wanna be saved. You have to want to be human, apparently.
Now, between where I've lived and what I've done, my military service and strangely enough...having done ferret rescue...I've seen a lot of the human capacity for cruelty. It usually comes down to ego and ideology, power and wealth...and America has a lot of shitty little addicts and narcissists who aren't rich that are perfectly willing to allow a ferret to suffer in its cage without enough food or water, lonely, miserable and in pain...while they do drugs and play video games.
And right now rich people...who are fairly open about wanting Americans to suffer and die of neglect on an industrial scale while they do drugs, and all for nothing more than their own imagined profits...who are like that are coming into power, and the American ideal as any of us has previously known it is basically a rescue ferret in a cage, sure, there's a few people willing to advocate and fight for it, make it better and set it free again...but at least half of America, including a non-zero percentage of Democrats could apparently give a shit.
And at least in the case of New York City, there's those whose main goal appears to be defending the billionaires, since some nut shot a CEO.
And I've been listening to and seeing American elitist media be in an absolute moralist panic over that shit for days.
(Meanwhile, the common person to whom the response of a health insurance company is rather less than "Three bags full, Sir" gives them and the damn CEO the finger.)
You think people who something like that would even occur to are, really, all that far from the basic idea of creating an American version of Sednaya Prison?? Just to try and intimidate Americans...a free people without the history of authoritarian rule that places like Syria have...into some kind of compliance and not resisting Power...if not into giving up their freedom on a permanent basis so that the builders of and voters for such a prison can enjoy the benefits and shitty little thrills of bowing and scraping for profit and bending over for debased Calvinist authoritarian rulers??
And yes, at the end of the day it's shit like Puritan Calvinism being a part of our national DNA that even makes crap like this imaginable to anyone, the idea that Some are Saved and Some are Not based on nothing more than the capricious opinion of some "god" who's little more than the Big Fascist In The Sky (and if you haven't seen it, it's hard to describe the priapistic joy of a Calvinist describing the infinite sadistic cruelty of their version of God) almost always with a side of the Priesthood being willing to declare any rich asshole who gives them money to be one of the Saved...and whatever God thinks of it be damned...is actually behind most of our national sins from the Indian Wars and Slavery to the Gilded Age and support for Latin American dictators and dirty wars.
And it's going to get worse.
You could have voted to keep your freedom, America.
Now you'll have to fight for it, and you're going to have to fight against these smirking snide freaks to get it back.
The civil war that these freaks want to start will also be a class war, and they'll call you a Communist if you believe that your Mom should be able to keep the Social Security that she paid into and earned, and they'll call you a terrorist if you resist their Power, and call you a freeloader if you expect to eat or have clean water. You want to be something other than super-rich and survive??
You're going to have to ignore the bright lights and the media spin and lock in and fight for your right to exist.
The world these fucking people want to live in is nothing more than the Killing Fields of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, but with a mall.
It's really that damned simple, and you were warned before.
It's the Christmas season, and we've handed ourselves over to the kind of people who'd have arrested Mary, Joseph and Jesus for vagrancy because they've criminalized being homeless, and they'd gladly send all three to a place like Sednaya Prison on that basis alone.
And then they don't want you to hate the dictator that came up with the shit.
Think on that.
Слава Україна!
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning.
I turn this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran
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