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| Aleppo, Syria |
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
