MARCH 25, 2022
Roaming Charges: Both Ends Burning
Image: Kenneth J. Schubert.
“I was born near Ypres in 1917 on the western front. The first thing I really remember about my father was him waking up screaming in the middle of the night, having one of his recurring nightmares about the war.”
– John Berger
+ The tributes to Madeleine Albright, who died this week at 84, are sickening to read. The lede for her obituary should read very simply: Chief architect of a sanction regime that killed 500,000 Iraqi children, whose deaths she said were “worth it.”
+ In our identity-obsessed political culture, Madeleine Albright finally proved that American woman (the Israelis and Brits had demonstrated this quality decades earlier) are fully capable of supervising mass death without flinching or showing the tiniest twinge of regret or remorse.
+ It is the ultimate moral crime to target for misery, pain and death those least responsible for the offenses of their tyrannical rulers. Yet this is the very policy Madeleine Albright made Standard Operating Procedure for US diplomacy.
+ The “soft power” of economic sanctions don’t prevent war. After Ms. Albright’s sanctions on Iraq killed 1 million civilians, half of them children, the US still invaded Iraq, toppled their government, occupied their country for the next 17 years and continues to bomb it at will.
+ Albright may be dead. But her policy of “hands-off” killing through sanctions continues to function as the most lethal weapon in the US arsenal. Look no further than Afghanistan where upwards of 175 newborns are dying every day as a consequence of crippling sanctions. The moral stench of her policies is made more ghoulish by the fact that Albright justified the deaths of children, women, the old, the infirm and the destitute on humanitarian grounds. Few people in history have overseen the deaths of so many civilians they claimed they were acting to protect.
+ Jason Motz: “She’ll be greatly missed…at The Hague.”
+ And by the press…
+ And still Kissinger lives. Would someone check the vintage of the serum vials in Henry’s fridge…A, B or O-Neg?
+ Apparently, even the deepest precincts of Hell have rejected Kissinger.
+ If there weren’t neo-Nazis in Mariupol before, there will be now. If a century of aerial bombardments has taught us anything, it’s that bombing radicalizes the bombed. They may go far left or far right, but they’re not going to forget or forgive and they’ll re-emerge wanting payback.
+ In the first three days of the Iraq War, the US launched 1,700 air sorties and 504 cruise missiles…
+ Many people are wondering why Russia hasn’t conducted saturation bombing of major Ukrainian cities, as the US did in Iraq and Russia did in Syria. But unlike in Syria, where Russia hoped to get reconstruction contracts for what the buildings, streets and infrastructure their bombs and missiles leveled, the point of the invasion of Ukraine is to occupy it. If they succeed, Moscow would be on the hook for rebuilding what they’ve pulverized.
+ When one capitalist country invades another blame…Karl Marx?
+ The Russian invasion of Ukraine has already created a flood of nearly 10 million refugees, 20 percent of the entire Ukrainian population. Sanho Tree: “What makes the crisis in Ukraine so extraordinary is the speed & scale of the catastrophe. More than 3 million have fled the country and nearly 6.5 million are IDPs (internally displaced persons). In comparison, it took Colombia FIVE DECADES of civil war to reach 7 million IDPs.”
+ At least seven wildfires are now burning in the Chernobyl radioactive exclusion zone, near the site of the world’s worst nuclear calamity. The fires, which have been documented by satellite photos, are currently exceed by ten-times the level of Ukraine’s emergency classification standard. Meanwhile, the radiation-monitoring system in the Chernobyl zone has been disabled.
+ The Russian forces are losing general officers at a faster rate in Ukraine than in any war since World War II. Of course, most of the Russian generals killed during (and just before) WW II were offed by Stalin, who had nearly 1000 Russian generals executed during the Red Army purges. The Nazis only succeeded in killing about 600. (See Adam Hochschild’s The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin.)
+ Not exactly the speech Kutuzov made the night before the Battle of Borodino…
+ Who am I to dispute Einstein? But it’s looking more and more likely to me that WW4 will be fought with NFTs…
+What tends to happen when Europe goes to war with itself: In France, half the men who were between the ages of 22 and 30 in 1914 were dead by the war’s end in 1918.
+ The first major battle with modern weapons was fought in 1897 at Omdurman where British troops under Lord Kitchener enfiladed Sudanese peasants with Maxim machine guns capable of firing 600 rounds a minute. In a single day, 12,000 Sudanese were killed and 15,000 wounded and maimed for life. The Brits lost a total of 46 men. Thus was “Chinese” Gordon revenged. The Maxim Gun was designed specifically to suppress and terrorize rebellious colonial populations in Africa, India and Ireland. But less than two decades after Omdurman, Europe’s imperial powers would be turning these new mechanized weapons of mass slaughter on themselves, resulting in carnage beyond the limits of human imagination. More than a century later, the super powers that dictate the world are still perfecting techniques for mass murder, including thermobaric bombs that melt the lungs of all breathing beings. Thus were the Sudanese revenged.
+ There was justifiable concern this week after Russia reiterated that it reserved the right to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war if it felt threatened by NATO. Yet this newfound nuclear anxiety is late in coming, since this has been Russia’s policy
+ The long-standing justification for supporting Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war on Yemen, which has remained consistent from Obama to Trump to Biden, is that the Saudis are fighting a defensive war that helps to protect the 70,000 American citizens living in the oil kingdom. But a new analysis from the Quincy Institutedemolishes this rationale. Since 2015, the Saudi-led coalition has carried out more than 24,600 air raids, an average of almost 10 each day with each air raid encompassing hundreds of individual airstrikes or bombs. These air raids have killed almost 9,000 civilians and wounded more than 10,000. In contrast, the Houthis have launched a total of 430 missiles and 851 drones at Saudi Arabia since the start of the war in March 2015, killing 59 civilians for an average of one attack every other day.
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