Apocalypse August 2021
Mission Creep
Time passed. We’ll put it down to pandemic time dilation. Seem to be a lot of disasters happening at once all over the world. According to one tweet I read, today marks the end of western global influence. The baton has gone to China and Russia. I don’t know, we’ll see how things unfold. The US in its deadly bungled exit from Afghanistan made the world reevaluate Operation Enduring Freedom, and what western interventions achieved, and did not achieve. There’s no way they’re sending troops back in. Like Vietnam, the cost got increasingly politically unpopular at home until, after 20 years of diminishing returns, when the lie of winning no longer held, they abruptly withdrew. A country ruled by fate, for for-profit military contractors. Innocent civilians are getting killed, displaced, or forced to live with scorched earth, violence, brutal rule. American client state. Graveyard of empires. Biden, asked about the parallels, said no, none whatsoever, zero…
The Taliban will respect the rights of women in Afghanistan, their spokesperson said. How did the widow with only daughters, who had lost her husband, father, uncles, brothers and every male relative in successive wars manage to get out to buy food to feed her family? (1) 70% of Afghans are under the age of 25. Even so. First we invade and then we are invaded, broadcasts Tucker Carlson. Macron vows EU initiative to protect against migrant flows from Afghanistan. If you don’t want refugees, stop creating them, reads a placard held up by a young woman in protest.
Explosions at Kabul airport. To those who carried out the attack, Biden said, We will not forgive, we will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay. It’s all feeling rather nostalgic, like we can’t break out of a loop. Society has a short memory. What is society for? Price-gouging by the Big. Private interest changes, demolitions. Political spillover of extreme weather events. Again, again. Society must demand a revaluation of values. We owe it to the future. Not just giving a shit but walking the walk, the biggest challenge we’ve ever faced with knock-on effects for decades, centuries, or even millennia. 100 companies responsible for 70 percent of global warming, many headquartered in Dublin, where they don’t have to pay any corporation taxes. We need to demand the politically impossible. Take money from profits and give it to wages. Hold global heating to 1.5 C if we’re aggressive, if we act now at the scale that is necessary.
We’re not really enfranchised in the working of democracy, so is it a democracy? The people get a chance, every four years or so and it’s gamed and rigged by every trick in the book by people oh so close to the people in power, that write and prosecute the law. The information imbalance creates power imbalance. Doesn’t matter if they believe it; that’s what they’re saying. But there is a growing grassroots coalition no longer satisfied with Reaganism or neoliberalism. They understand that they are struggling while the people at the top are doing very, very well (2). The youth, the least-racist, most-idealistic generation in modern history, demand a transformation of ambition, a whole-of-society effort. This is the moment, of the highest priority. Make that moment now.
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(1) Kim Willsher
(2) Bernie Sanders
