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| Aleppo, Syria |
On 23 April 2016, the United Nations and Arab League Envoy to Syria put out an estimate of 470,000 that had died in the war.
These cold numbers are the first thing that hit you about Syria. Figures telling of a
human catastrophe on a scale hard to compute. Suffering on a level to
which any rational response seems inadequate – 470,000 people killed,
according to the latest estimates; 11.5 percent of the population
injured; 45 percent of a country of 22 million made homeless; 4 million
refugees and 6.36 million internally displaced persons. Life expectancy
is down from 70.5 years in 2010 to an estimated 55.4 years in 2015.
Welcome to the Syrian civil war.
The Syrian conflict has become worse than a
nightmare, because after a nightmare you usually wake-up to some kind of
normality, instead this is an ongoing nightmare, from which you never wake
up.
In the meantime, the global political establishment, our political leaders,
representing different so-called "power blocks", blame everything and
everyone, except themselves, as they fuel this war with weapons from
their weapons industry and that from around the world.
Worse still, is that these weapons purchases are financed with money from mostly ignorant and misinformed taxpayers.
Taxpayers
usually are more interested in using an App on their smartphone, or in
finding out on social media, like Facebook,what a friend is doing, or
even why his or her dog prefers a certain type of dog food above
another. Being concerned about whatever does not directly affect him or
her is the last thing on the agenda.
In Europe the war in Syria hardly ever is looked at
as a human tragedy, or has anyone ask who the real culprits are of this
tragedy, but sadly equated to what kind of impact the large number of
refugees will have on European living standards.
Former US President Dwight Eisenhouwer once said about the weapons industry: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not
fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not
spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the
genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… This is not a way
of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war,
it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron ".
Yes indeed, arms dealers and their government cabinet-level cronies always profit from a war.
On top of that there is now also a perverse logic that pervades restrictions. Military
aid and arms sales by the US, but certainly not restricted to them alone, are now approved to formerly off-limits regimes.
Of the 67 countries which have received or are set to receive U.S. military
aid, 32 were previously identified by the State Department as having "poor"
or worse human rights records.
Obviously, the central question
is: does this make the world a safer place for anyone but arms manufacturers
and the politicians who love and have them funded ?
Every
academic in the world will tell you, Syria today is the most awful
humanitarian catastrophic drama to hit the Levant since World War II. Do
politicians realize that and make an effort to remedy it? No, not at
all.
Whole families with small children ‒ some people terribly wounded by the
bombings ‒ living in olive groves under the elements, with neither shelter nor
provisions.
And the drama continues. Russia used its Security Council veto at the UN to prevent any concerted
action against the regime. Moscow also keeps the weapons and bombs coming.
Turkey,
a NATO member, whose leader has his own aspirations for the area,
supports whoever can help him diminish the Kurdish influence in the
area, even ISIS.
The
Iranians use their expertise in crowd control to help Assad control the
demonstrations against his regime, and the Americans are funding and
supplying a Kurdish proxy army and different rebel groups to fight Assad
forces, in addition to also bombing so-called "enemy targets".
Our
global political establishment has had chance after chance to remedy
the situation, but greed and hypocricy within a defunct political world
order has made that impossible.
Syria and the
surrounding region is now the epicenter of what is still to come - it is
the beginning of cataclysmic developments around the world that will
clarify to the world at large, "who was", "who is", and "who will come".
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EU-Digest
