All conflicts are now either overtly or covertly
about resources. One hesitates to call them wars as that suggests equivalent
forces on either side. The 21st century is marked by aggressors
attempting to grab what is someone else’s when they think they can overcome the
other side with fear and overwhelming short-term violence and the complicity of the lazy comfortable West – even if – in Russia's case – they turn out to be not quite right.
The current ‘war’ in Gaza so called by the legacy
media, is anything but. It is a slaughter. Bush and Blair’s ‘war on terror’ was
anything but. The irony there had to be that if the rich bros genuinely thought
Iraq had WOMD ready they might not have gone in for their horrible adventure so
costly in the lives of other people’s children.
As an aside – while many in the UK, orchestrated by
The Telegraph and Daily Mail etc, bitch about migrants from their sofas, the flaccid response of more
moderate media has led to a dull acceptance that the migration debacle is a
problem that sprang from nowhere and is nothing to do with government foreign
policy or domestic incompetence. In fact, decades (centuries) of wealthy
countries stealing resources and messing things up in other people’s back yards
- white mischief in Africa and contributing to chaos in the Middle
East, is having a NOW effect.
Possibly mad Vlad Putin was encouraged by Trump’s
lunatic administration and the UK Conservative party's love of Russian oligarch money
plus the moron Boris Johnson who openly sneered when his military advisors told
him that Russian tanks could be crossing the Ukraine border any day.
What, I wonder, must it have taken for Zelensky to
allow the blithering blonde blob to constantly pose next to him for photo ops
with that brain fart in the background?
China wants Taiwan, Venezuela wants
Guyana’s oil meanwhile the world is allowing Trump and Netanyahu
to use their country’s precious time, energy, lives and assets in a game called
‘keep me in the spotlight and out of prison’.
In the olden days it was less complicated for top predators to grab stuff and commit genocide. America was taken from the Native
Americans. Australia from the Aborigines. Britain and America both decided it
would be convenient to pretend black people were sub-human for a few hundred
years so they could literally ‘steal’ people; their lives, their families,
their labour, their dignity, their pasts and futures.
I would wonder if the above atrocities
could have happened in the full glare of daily as-it-happens social media but
Gazagedon has answered that question.
Biden’s costly misstep over Gaza in
unquestioningly accepting that the horrors of October 7th equalled day1 of
this conflict will haunt him and possibly the world.
And put simply – the THING that is wrong is
inequality. Gross inequality. We are on this brink
because we’ve ignored the environment crisis and continued abusing the planet
so that those with everything could have more.
The real solution to sustainable and secure living is so
unpalatable that the answer seems to be – grab what someone weaker has. But –
unlike the olden days – those resources are running out and the planet is
weary.
Inequality is destabilising. Extreme inequality is
catastrophic. We know this.
Every dystopian movie and novel you could name – and
some you couldn’t - like my own offering Zero One Zero Two - teaches us this very obvious
disastrous lesson, as does history. Without equality we are all doomed. You
can’t buy your way out of the flames.
All us Cassandra’s out here are getting mightily
tired of seeing the bleeding obvious come to pass.
Let 2024 be the year we wake the fuck up.
And by the way welcome to the New Year. For my
regular readers thank you for your patience – this is my first proper post in 7
months but I aim to get back to regular weekly posts.
*
As always – please check out novels,
novellas, children’s books and poetry anthologies either HERE or other main online stores. The silly you tube vids that go with Fun Poems for Children are still avail. Thank you.
Finally, as regular readers know, I’m happily lodged in the Stone Age and have never had any kind of social media account (I don’t even have a smartphone) but if you’ve read the letters sections over the last two decades in –
The Guardian
The independent
The New European
The Glasgow Herald
The Daily Record
The National
The Scotsman
The Times (a couple of times)
The New Statesman (once)
a couple of the smaller papers in New York
The Jamaica Observer
plus a handful of others (even one in Wales once!)
then YES that ‘Amanda Baker Edinburgh’ banging on about stuff, using
a quill pen – IS ME 😊