Ukraine, Gaza Show Americans Will Accept Anything
23:44 GMT 26.09.2024 (Updated: 17:20 GMT 27.09.2024)
© AP Photo / Julia Nikhinson
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On Tuesday, ProPublica reported that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected findings from two US agencies that Israel blocked US humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza, thereby allowing US weapons to continue flowing into Tel Aviv. On Thursday, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) called for Blinken’s resignation, the only member of Congress to do so.
It is not only the US government that is happy to look the other way as the military-industrial complex leads the country into insanity and destruction, the American people have likewise decided that their comforts outweigh genocide and the possible end of civilization as we know it.
26 September, 05:15 GMT
The US secretary of state lied to Congress to protect a government that was and continues to perpetuate genocide while blocking US taxpayer-funded humanitarian aid to keep the weapons enabling that genocide to continue and mainstream media outlets barely make a peep and it looks unlikely to alter the outcome of the coming presidential election. The reaction outside Tlaib and advocacy groups seem to be an apathetic shrug. The American people, the media and even Congress expect such evil acts from the upper echelons of power.
“[To] any of us who were watching it closely at the time, not even that closely, this is not a surprise,” explained Daniel McAdams, the executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity told Sputnik’s Fault Lines. “We saw it happening. We saw aid workers getting killed. We saw food kitchens being blown up. We saw people being assassinated. We saw food trucks being stopped and emptied out. It wasn’t a surprise to anyone who wanted to see it. But the US government and a lot of Americans didn’t want to see it.”
McAdams added that it was a “very serious stain on the US” and he hopes “Blinken’s name will go down in history as one of the most evil secretaries of state we’ve had.”
Meanwhile, the “elderly man with a poor memory” who still technically occupies the White House met with Ukraine’s apparent leader-for-life Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington to announce an $8 billion surge in aid and make the declaration that “Ukraine will prevail” in opposition to every observable fact and rational analysis.
As with Blinken, the lie is blatant to anyone with even a passing curiosity about the subject, but no one in the world expected US President Joe Biden to say anything else. Had he, it would have been a massive controversy and front-page news across the country. “The President Tells the Truth About Ukraine” would make national headlines, though it’s unlikely they’d use that framing.
Again, we expect our leaders to lie to us and we project that expectation onto other world leaders. When the man in charge of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal tells us NATO planning and coordinating attacks deep inside Russia would be seen as an attack by those countries– and changes his country’s nuclear doctrine to match– our leaders tell us that Vladimir Putin is lying just like our leaders lie to us, and the obtuse public believes them.
The meeting was said to have included Zelensky’s so-called “victory plan” which was expected to include permission to use long-range NATO weapons to strike deep into Russia.
Zelensky is “a comedian, but he’s not funny anymore,” explained McAdams. “From what we’ve seen of [the plan], is basically all the stuff we’ve been doing for two and a half years that doesn’t work. Let’s double down on it, and it’ll work. Let me into NATO tomorrow and I can invoke Article 5 and force all of you guys to go to war with Russia and have a nuclear war. I mean, that’s how dumb it is.”
Outside of some Palestinian protests, which have seemingly decreased in size as the election nears, there is scant outrage against the government spending trillions of dollars to fight destructive wars while people suffer on the streets of American cities.
“China has pulled 200 million people out of poverty. That’s literally more than half of the [population of] the United States over the last 20 years. They haven’t been spending their money on wars,” Jamarl Thomas, co-host of Radio Sputnik’s Fault Lines pointed out. “For us, we spent $7 trillion on Iraq, $3 trillion on Afghanistan. That’s $10 trillion on just war… you don’t have a health care system. You don’t have high-speed rail. You don’t have free education.”
China now maintains the world’s largest high-speed rail system. From 2008 to 2015, China spent roughly $370 billion on high-speed rail according to the World Bank. By that time, they had completed well over 15,000 km of high-speed rail, already the most extensive in the world.
“What are we spending this money on? And how is it benefiting us as Americans?” asked Thomas. “For whatever reason, that's off the table in regards to that politics. It's super bizarre.”
While polling shows that the majority of American people oppose Israel’s actions in Palestine, it is likely to continue because polling also indicates that the vast majority of the voting public plans to vote for a candidate –either Vice President Kamala Harris or Trump– who promise to continue that support.
“But neither you nor I write hundred million dollar checks to candidates,” noted McAdams.
“People may care about it but they don’t seem to care about it to the point of being able to pressure their politicians,” Thomas argued. “The majority of people that care about it are Democrats, but you even get a large share of Republicans saying this is unfortunate, but from their point of view, if Kamala Harris loses, it’s not worth that, meaning I don’t want to hit her and push her on this because I don’t want her to lose.”
“It kills me,” Thomas concluded. “This idea that genocide is no longer a redline.”
