America's virtue signaling over civilians suffering

Remember when Americans cared about the fate of Afghani civilians?
If you blinked you would have missed it. It happened when Biden committed to withdrawing from Afghanistan and ending the war. After 20 years of war and occupation in which 47,600 civilians were killed and more than double that number injured, the western media suddenly cared about Afghani civilians.
Then we pulled out of Afghanistan, and the western media forgot about those civilians.

Did the suffering in Afghanistan end? Nope, it increased.

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When President Joe Biden decided to withdraw the U.S. military from Afghanistan last year, much of America's news media came down on him like a ton of bricks. Republicans piled on, calling the withdrawal an “unmitigated disaster.”
But getting out was the right move.

In fact, the real mistake was the opposite: The Biden administration did not end the war, but continued it by other means, which are turning out to be more violent and destabilizing. The economic sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies are causing widespread, severe hunger in this desperately poor country.
Unless those sanctions are soon reversed, it is estimated that more people will die from the economic impact of sanctions over the next year than the number who died in 20 years of war.

It's hard to imagine a disaster hitting Afghanistan that was bigger than our invasion of the country, but that it what we are looking at. Tens of thousands of Afghanis are about to die.

As many as 95 percent of the country’s 38 million people don’t have enough to eat or money to buy the food.

Shelley Thakral, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program, said that food prices in Afghanistan rose nearly 40 percent over the last eight months. The WFP has spent $1 billion feeding millions of Afghans this year but needs another $1.6 billion, Thakral added.
...
A Human Rights Watch report released Thursday said that since January, about 13,000 newborns have died from malnutrition and hunger-related diseases in Afghanistan and 3.5 million children need nutritional support.

13,000 infants! All of them dead from something preventable, like hunger.
People are having to make horrific choices.

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Fortunately this can all be stopped for just $1.6 Billion. If only Afghanistan had $1.6 Billion to spare. Oh wait! They did have that and more...before we stole it from them.

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There is nothing to eat: Most of your family’s crop failed last year, your livestock are gone. And now your child, a toddler, is sick. There is nowhere to take her.

You are among 23 million people unable to eat every day in your country, and this year you may join the nine million people facing outright famine.

Where is the cash? A foreign superpower, with massive wealth of its own, has taken it and plans to distribute half to some of its own people while your family starves in front of you.

The cruelty of this policy is incomprehensible and obscured by the bureaucratic language of executive orders. Yet this is current U.S. policy toward Afghanistan.
...That’s unlucky for anyone trying to stay alive in Afghanistan, since the Taliban are a designated terrorist organization targeted by economic sanctions dating back to their previous rule. Moreover, the U.S. is unable or unwilling to explain whether these old sanctions apply to any Taliban regime or individuals previously named.

The Biden Administration has decided to split $7 billion in frozen Afghanistan funds in the U.S. banking system to compensate 9/11 victims.
No Afghani was on the planes on 9/11. Even 9/11 families know this is wrong.

All over America right now, people are signaling their virtue through outrage over Russia's crimes in Ukraine. Those are real crimes, but there is little that we can do about it short of risking WWIII.

At the exact same time America is actively causing suffering and death on a scale that dwarfs that happening in Ukraine. Even more importantly, we have all the power we need to stop tens of thousands of Afghani children from dying, but we won't. Why? Because Americans don't really care about the people of Afghanistan or of Ukraine. It's just fashionable to pretend like we do.
And this doesn't even address our complicity in the genocide in Yemen.

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snoopydawg's picture

mass murders in Afghanistan, Yemen, Venezuela and other countries that he has sanctioned haven’t they? It’s this hypocrisy that I find fcking galling. It’s what Caitlin has been saying. If you only call out one mass murder, but not the other ones you should do some deep thinking of your values. Where are the republicans who said that we couldn’t pull out of Afghanistan because of what would happen to the women and children?

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17 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

shaharazade's picture

about Afghanistan cause they we're 'terrist's who are gonna kill yer family'. No one bothers to look at what the USA and the globalized free market does to humans who are not Americans. Afghanistan was the place where Empires died. Why didn't ours? Would be good riddance to bad rubbish. This BS with the Russians did it has gone on far too long. Bejeezuz I'm an old coot and have never not heard the Russians are coming or the Russians did it. Enough! How surreal to keep pumping this BS. Propaganda. Even when I was a kid and had to duck and cover I knew this was bogus. Get rid of NATO. Get rid of the security state their bad news. Stop blaming Russia and wise up people. Take a good look historically and currently at what the US is up to. Don't get caught in the political minutiae. They all lie. They all work for the same people who are not people but psycho's with money and power.

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@shaharazade
"duck and cover" drills in school? When I was in the 6th grade (1960), I somehow had heard about such drills but in my California public schools we'd only ever done fire drills. So, I asked my teacher why we never did the duck and cover drill. She said that we don't waste time on such useless things.

What I got from her in that brief exchange was an awareness that I didn't know what I was talking about. That she couldn't say more. And as I grew up it was up to me to learn the why of her answer.

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@Marie Watched films in assemblies with all the kids in the school. I remember at least 2 drills where we marched 2 blocks to the to the courthouse, where the basement was the civil defense emergency space. Like, a town of 800 people would all fit into that 1 room.
How I figured out it was ludicrous to prepare for post-nuke was a waste of time is beyond me. We had it drilled into us that we could.
And, if we were the ones dropping them, we had a solid plan.
That is how stupid our policies have been all my life.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

lotlizard's picture

@on the cusp  
where the emergency broadcast will give you instructions…

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/washington/01civil.html

And in those days, Kenneth, the frequency was 640 / 1240 kilocycles. Not “kilohertz” — none of that foreign commie metric-system stuff for us

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@lotlizard Commies were mass murderers, making that fight to stop the spread made it much easier to get into the Viet Nam conflict, and to sanction Cuba into permanent stall out. I lost count on how many attempts to murder Fidel Castro our CIA tried. Lots of sad that the attempts were so unsuccessful.
I do not recall any history or other course that taught the virtues of capitalism until I took a senior level course in history post WWII. The professor smeared Soviets, smeared their lack of religion, smeared them for proving jobs making tractors that had a 5 year production scheduling from start to finish, making the workers conditioned to be lazy. I hated that course.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

@on the cusp
International Business. Didn't learn a damn thing other than that the professor was a rabid anti-communist and loathed the USSR. (He was an immigrant from Pakistan.)

Walking into the final exam with a couple of classmates, I said hope we don't get a question about Russia. One of the men said, I'll just write that they're evil, no-good, and I really hate them. I replied that that was a good way to pass the course. but I just couldn't do that. Fortunately no such question appeared on the exam.

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gulfgal98's picture

@Marie in elementary school. Even then I questioned how getting under my desk and putting one arm across my face and the other behind my neck was going to protect me from a bomb. It did not make sense even to a seven year old child.

Later in high school, we were required to pass a course called Americanism versus Communism in which we were lectured on how bad communism and how good capitalism was. The course focused particularly on the evil Russians and was required in the state of Florida in order to graduate from high school.

All my life, I have been propagandized and indoctrinated in the evils of everything not American.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

TheOtherMaven's picture

@gulfgal98

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

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Gawd bless these people

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gulfgal98's picture

@gjohnsit What an enlightened crowd! I know from experience just how hard it is to get people to understand how evil war is for all sides.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

@gulfgal98 @gulfgal98
it was just a few days ago from what I understand
[edit]
I found it.

The Red Star club, which was the symbol of the Yugoslav people against Hitler’s Germany in World War II, signed an anti-war movement in the Rangers match.

While the famous tribune group of Red Star, Delije, opened many banners about the military interventions of the USA in more than 20 countries, the front banner featured a quote from John Lennon’s song “Give peace a chance”.

This reaction of the Red Star supporters was interpreted as a response to the Western societies that opposed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. UEFA is expected to penalize the Serbian team.

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@gulfgal98

https://euronews.al/en/balkans/2022/03/18/give-peace-a-chance-serbian-fa...

Serbian fans raised on Thursday a banner mocking the military interventions carried out by the United States since the 50s.

Serbia’s Crvena Zvezda was playing against the Scottish Glasgow Rangers at the Rajko Mitic stadium in Belgrade for a qualifying Europa League match.

The banner was a timeline of all the conflicts to which the US, as well as NATO, had sent its army, including the attack on Serbia in 1999 and Afghanistan after 9/11.

The banner ended with a sarcastic message All We Are Saying Is Give Peace A Chance”.

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@Linda Wood

to do with US/NATO bombing Serbia and breaking it apart in the 1900s.

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@Linda Wood

This is the second time since the start of the Ukraine War that Serbian hooligans convey politically motivated messages on the football field.

"Hooligans"! Hooligans? For calling for peace?

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Russia is bad for illegally invading, occupying and trying to overthrow another nations government.

Well that's exactly what we are doing right now in Syria

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lotlizard's picture

@gjohnsit  
The West’s elite caste, which sets foreign policy, not only suffers from a pathological lack of self-awareness; being a member in good standing demands it.

The development that its elite educational institutions have all “gone woke” has not alleviated this lack of self-awareness; on the contrary, it represents a doubling-down on the narcissism by sacralizing feelings and subjectivity / “personal truth.”

It’s like the German Green party acting as if, now that they’re back in power, global warming is only important to the extent it can be blamed on Putin, or unhip autochthonous white cis deplorables.

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lotlizard's picture

@gjohnsit  
(Any of us who hang out or lurk at WotB regularly will probably have already seen this…)

https://www.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/comments/tjtjaq/what_questions_tha...

That is why, in this letter, I would like to ask you a few respectful questions to help us better understand the happiness of being guided and protected under your protective wing:

  1. Why is Russia's invasion of Ukraine worse than the US invasion of Iraq?
  2. Why is the break-up of Kosovo from Serbia and the independence of Kosovo is legitimate and the break-up of the Donbas from Ukraine and the independence of Donbas illegitimate?
  3. Why was your 20-year war for the "detalibanization" of Afghanistan legitimate, but is the "denazification" of Ukraine illegitimate?
  4. Why was the death of more than 1 million civilians in the Iraq war not a drama, but the death of several hundred civilians in Ukraine is the end of the world?
  5. Why did the US not bear any sanctions for the bombing of Yugoslavia and Belgrade, but does Russia bear unheard-of sanctions on the ground for bombing Ukraine?
  6. Why is the bombing of some hospitals by the Americans much less serious than the bombing of some hospitals by the Russians?
  7. Why are you allowed to have weapons of mass destruction, but others are not allowed?
  8. Why are the US and its Ukrainian friends allowed to own biological and chemical weapons laboratories and factories, but Syria (for example) is not allowed?
  9. Why is Israel allowed to have the atomic bomb, but the US claims that Iran is not allowed?
  10. Why are Palestinian children dying under bombs not a drama, but Ukrainian children are?
  11. Why are you imposing sanctions on the occupation of Crimea, but not imposing any sanctions on the occupation of the West Bank and the "occupied territories" by Israel?
  12. Why were the Syrian emigrants, children and women, evil and undesirable, but the Ukrainians are wonderful?
  13. Why are Russian oligarchs bad and American oligarchs good?
  14. Why should the poor Romanian country streets be destroyed under the wheels of American tanks and armored vehicles and not use the Bechtel highway for which the Romanian state has paid billions of dollars?
  15. Why does Romania have to pay billions of dollars to the United States every year for "virtual" weapons to protect us from aliens, but does not find 0.5 billion to save the lives of thousands of children with cancer?
  16. Why was no one held accountable for the war crimes committed by the Americans in Vietnam, Korea, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, etc., but for the crimes in Ukraine, the Russians must be found guilty?
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@lotlizard

If it is at WayOfTheBern, is there any way of knowing what Senator Sanders would say in response?

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