About that war...
I've been toying with this one in my head for a few days now, and I'm not sure that I'm going to get it right, but I think its worth a try. Keep in mind that I have no special knowledge of anything at all, I'm just a girl who likes to read and talk shit. And I live in a happy safe bubble where no bombs are falling (yet) and so it's easy for me to say all this.
What's going on in the Middle East is incredibly scary. Reading the news of watching TV has become harrowing, and the mix of guilt and fear and terror and pity is really tough. The destruction of Lebanon is a crime and morally reprehensible, and god even knows what's happening now in Gaza, and Ethiopia and Somalia and Iran and North Korea and Iraq and Syria and maybe Egypt and ugh, I can't help it but I've got that 'this is it - we're all going to die' voice in the back of my head. It's all really, really scary.
But.
It seems callous to say this but this kind of shit has been happening in that part of the world forever. Conflict is the norm. There's been a little lull recently, but really - war is not new in Beirut. The thing I want to point out is the direction that the alarmism is coming from. Then you notice that all the "OMG IT'S WORLD WAR III" talk is coming from Fox News and the far right. It's Gingrich, Hannity. O'Reilly and Co. that keep repeating it, and that can only mean that it's a GOP Talking Point. Comic genius and sexpot Stephen Colbert has a clip of a bunch of blowhards who got the memo:
So you have to stop and think. From the very beginning of this situation, I've noticed that the papers on the left and the international press (I tend to read
Le Monde and The Guardian and struggle through La Repubblica, all left of center-ish) have had a different take. They say that this is a very serious issue, and a humanitarian crisis, and possibly even a war crime. They say that this is horrible and scary. They also say that there is little chance that this conflict will spread beyond the region. In essence, this is chapter MCXII of the same old story.
Why the discrepancy? For some reason the right wants us to think that This Is It. To be honest, I don't know exactly why. I don't know whether it's some sort of crazy Book of Revelations end times shit, or whether it has to do with making money for defense contractors or whether its just the same damn fearmongering so a cowed populace will vote republican. I wonder whether terrorism turned out to be not as big a deal as they had claimed and so they need to amp it up in order to keep their sweet sweet military contracts. I wonder whether it's, if not part of the plan, at least a side bonus that more terrorists are being created, so we will can live in fear forever. Because one thing is very clear to me - they (you know, Them) want us to be afraid. Always. When we act out of fear we act out of our lizard brains - our old, reactionary self-preservation easily manipulated brains. It is fear that is keeping their machine running - fear of terror (a bit of a tautology, if you think about it), fear of gays, people of color, immigrants, it doesn't matter - fear. And the thing with fear is that after a while, if you've lived with the same threat for long enough, you're no longer afraid of it. You learn to adapt. So there needs to be some new threat. Something else to keep you on edge. The more terrorists there are, the more people across the world who shout and demonstrate and hate us, the better it is for the GOP. Search your feelings - you know it be true.
Also - notice we're not talking too much about that other place too much lately, what's it called? Iraq. What a coinky-dinky.
So whatever the reason I think it's really important to try and keep a little bit of a cool head and realize that the panic is being whipped up by the right and to be terrified - to think that this is the beginning of WWIII - is exactly what they want.
That said, yes it's fucking scary.
What's going on in the Middle East is incredibly scary. Reading the news of watching TV has become harrowing, and the mix of guilt and fear and terror and pity is really tough. The destruction of Lebanon is a crime and morally reprehensible, and god even knows what's happening now in Gaza, and Ethiopia and Somalia and Iran and North Korea and Iraq and Syria and maybe Egypt and ugh, I can't help it but I've got that 'this is it - we're all going to die' voice in the back of my head. It's all really, really scary.
But.
It seems callous to say this but this kind of shit has been happening in that part of the world forever. Conflict is the norm. There's been a little lull recently, but really - war is not new in Beirut. The thing I want to point out is the direction that the alarmism is coming from. Then you notice that all the "OMG IT'S WORLD WAR III" talk is coming from Fox News and the far right. It's Gingrich, Hannity. O'Reilly and Co. that keep repeating it, and that can only mean that it's a GOP Talking Point. Comic genius and sexpot Stephen Colbert has a clip of a bunch of blowhards who got the memo:
So you have to stop and think. From the very beginning of this situation, I've noticed that the papers on the left and the international press (I tend to read
Le Monde and The Guardian and struggle through La Repubblica, all left of center-ish) have had a different take. They say that this is a very serious issue, and a humanitarian crisis, and possibly even a war crime. They say that this is horrible and scary. They also say that there is little chance that this conflict will spread beyond the region. In essence, this is chapter MCXII of the same old story.
Why the discrepancy? For some reason the right wants us to think that This Is It. To be honest, I don't know exactly why. I don't know whether it's some sort of crazy Book of Revelations end times shit, or whether it has to do with making money for defense contractors or whether its just the same damn fearmongering so a cowed populace will vote republican. I wonder whether terrorism turned out to be not as big a deal as they had claimed and so they need to amp it up in order to keep their sweet sweet military contracts. I wonder whether it's, if not part of the plan, at least a side bonus that more terrorists are being created, so we will can live in fear forever. Because one thing is very clear to me - they (you know, Them) want us to be afraid. Always. When we act out of fear we act out of our lizard brains - our old, reactionary self-preservation easily manipulated brains. It is fear that is keeping their machine running - fear of terror (a bit of a tautology, if you think about it), fear of gays, people of color, immigrants, it doesn't matter - fear. And the thing with fear is that after a while, if you've lived with the same threat for long enough, you're no longer afraid of it. You learn to adapt. So there needs to be some new threat. Something else to keep you on edge. The more terrorists there are, the more people across the world who shout and demonstrate and hate us, the better it is for the GOP. Search your feelings - you know it be true.
Also - notice we're not talking too much about that other place too much lately, what's it called? Iraq. What a coinky-dinky.
So whatever the reason I think it's really important to try and keep a little bit of a cool head and realize that the panic is being whipped up by the right and to be terrified - to think that this is the beginning of WWIII - is exactly what they want.
That said, yes it's fucking scary.
posted by chiniqua at 8:57 PM
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