Tag Archives: Yemen

Political Rants

Thine is the power and the story

As of this writing, the Saudis and Yemen have pulled together a tentative truce for Ramadan. As Ryan Grim reports in Deconstructed, the podcast by The Intercept, it’s essentially the first one in seven years of brutal war that has left almost 400,000 Yemenis dead. It’s quite possible that, by the time you read this, the Saudis will have resumed their merciless campaign of destruction, but I, for one, hope not.

There is truly nothing so invisible as a war promoted by your own government. In Russia, they need to make it a crime to refer to the war in Ukraine as a “war”. Over here, that’s not necessary. There are other ways to manipulate public opinion in a formal republic; as Orwell wrote, educated, thoughtful people understand that there are some things it simply would not do to say. No need for brute force – just a compliant professional/managerial class eager to get ahead.

Hidden in plain sight

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is being covered like practically no other conflict in my lifetime. That is a good thing. I just wish they would cover all wars, including the ones we start, with the same dedication to detail. I think the principle at work here is largely that of proximity to power. Ukrainians are culturally close to white Americans. Their attacker is an official enemy, a rival power. Those two factors, broadly speaking, drive the coverage.

Yemen is the opposite. The victims are not like “us” (i.e. white, christian, western people). They are being attacked by official allies – Saudi Arabia, UAE – with our help. They are friends with an official enemy (Iran). Those factors keep them off of the front pages. There are many horrific stories that can be told about the Yemen war, and we Americans have heard almost none of them. On the other hand, I have heard wrenching stories of suffering from Ukraine on a daily basis, many of them multiple times. This is not an accident – it is a reflection of power.

The limits of compassion

We are encouraged to empathize with our enemies’ victims. In the case of Afghanistan, the official argument for twenty years of war was partly built on concern for the fate of women and girls. That was during the war. Now that the war is over, however, we apparently couldn’t care less. The country is on the brink of starvation. They have been frozen out of the banking system and have no access to their own reserves. Even international aid organizations cannot operate effectively in Afghanistan under the current sanction regimes.

You will notice, also, that Afghanistan is not in the news all that much. That was the case during most of the 20-year American war. It only hit the headlines when Biden pulled out last year, and now it’s gone again. The news splash was mostly an expression of the war party in America (Republicans and Democrats) who were against withdrawing American troops from the country. Indeed, it was hard to find voices in favor of the withdrawal at the time.

Like a compass needle

I’ve said this about NPR in the past, but it’s basically true of all major media: they know where power resides in this country, and that is their true north star. Their compass needle will always point that way, regardless of the consequences.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

While you were looking over there

As Russia continues to do what Russia always does, this time in Ukraine, other atrocities try to keep pace. The Saudis put 81 people to death this past week in one of their execution sprees. Ali AlAhmed shared some photos of the victims on Twitter, and it’s worth scrolling through the list just to afford these people a small portion of the humanity being accorded, quite rightly, to Ukrainians.

Then, of course, there’s Yemen – still Yemen. Over the weekend, UNICEF reported that almost 50 children were killed or maimed in January alone, adding to the more than 10,000 child casualties recorded since the war began, with our nod and crucial material support, in 2015. Yemen remains among the worst humanitarian crises in the world, and yet it has fallen from the front page, particularly in America.

Proximity, proximity is everything

It’s not surprising or outrageous that the mainstream corporate media, and much of the independent media, spends most of their time on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s a huge story, and it should be reported on. But some crises fail to command the attention that Ukraine has garnered over the past three weeks. Yemen is chief among them, but certainly not the only instance.

The reason? Impossible to be precise, but it’s not hard to discern a pattern. If an atrocity is being committed by an official enemy, it is all over the media. If, on the other hand, the atrocity is being committed by us or by a close ally, it gets much, much less coverage, by and large. Count the number of stories about the war in Yemen that have run in U.S. major media. You will have fingers left over. Now compare that with this wall-to-wall Ukraine coverage.

Conclusion: Ukraine is being attacked by someone we don’t like; Yemen is being attacked by an ally who’s dependent on our help to conduct the war. The less likely it is that we can stop a war, the more likely it is that our media will focus on it.

Sticking to what you know

Russia’s military, at Putin’s behest, is doing what they know how to do: blowing things up. That’s how they get people to bend to their will. It’s the sharpest imperial tool in their toolbox by far. They destroy whole cities and drive people into the wilderness. That’s all they know.

Bombs, missiles, shells, and bullets are what’s available to Putin. But he doesn’t have a corner on imperialism. The United States, on the other hand, has more than one way to skin a country. When we put a nation under sanction, it hurts very badly. We can shut off access to international financial institutions. We can starve whole populations and ruin their public health infrastructure. This is what we did to Iraq in the 1990s and early 2000s, between two spates of bombing. That’s how we bent them to our will.

Russia doesn’t have that. If they sanction someone, it doesn’t mean much. They don’t have anywhere near the leverage of the U.S. in international finance. All they have is the bombs.

Finding the exit

Maddeningly, this attack on Ukraine, all in the space of a few weeks, is doing what was done in Yemen, in Syria, in Iraq at the height of those conflicts – destroying societal infrastructure on a massive scale. Much as you have to admire the Ukrainians’ courage and stubbornness, I hope the sides aren’t getting so entrenched that some settlement can’t be reached.

This war will end. The question is, how much of Ukraine will survive that long? If Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and others are any indication, it’s better to find a way to settlement sooner rather than later. I think that’s one channel by which the international community can help.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Stop The damn War.

We’ve entered a presidential transition, sort of. Sure, one candidate is crying foul and trying to foment a coup d’etat in the most ham-fisted way imaginable, but inasmuch as our short-attention-span culture has already all but normalized this insane behavior, we can consider ourselves well into the process of transition. And no, I don’t mean the the current president is transitioning to some new identity. I mean that he is in the process of being replaced by his general election opponent, who won the November election kind of hands down, despite all the noise.

Given that Biden is busily appointing members of his executive team – some okay, others pretty bad – this seems like a good time to make our policy preferences known to the President-Elect. Everyone’s getting their two cents in, whether it comes in the form of suggesting new policy directions or pushing potential nominees forward. I personally think people on the left should pick an issue or two and start shouting about it, figuratively speaking (or literally, if you prefer), so that Biden can hear us loud and clear. We will all have our preferences as to what demand should come first, what second, etc. I can tell you where I would like to start: STOP THE DAMN WAR.

As of October of 2021, we will have been engaged in this insane war on terror for twenty years. Obama indicated that he would stop it, and he didn’t. Trump said he would stop it, and he hasn’t. Biden is making some similar noises, but I think we can guess that the same political pressures that were brought to bear on his two predecessors will be applied to him as well. The longer we wait, the harder it gets – the conflict has metastasized to encompass other nations, from Iraq to Somalia to Yemen to Libya to Syria, and with each new “front” comes new bogus justifications for why we can’t leave now, new sets of facts on the ground, new twists and turns in the logic of imperialism. Enough. We need to get out now – that’s what Biden should hear from us.

There’s no question but that Trump has made the process of forging an agreement with other nations more fraught with difficulty. Who will sign on to a treaty with us when they know it may be ripped up by the current president’s successor? Nevertheless, I think we need to act on the knowledge that most Americans are sick of the war in Afghanistan, load our troops onto trucks and planes and head for the border. If we don’t, it will just never end.

That’s my ask. What’s yours?

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.