US wars kill more civilians as a percentage than ever before, continuing a pattern that we've seen since world war 1 with each new generation of warfare becoming more and more deadly to civilians. The Obama regime started lying about the numbers because they showed 90%+ civilian casualty rate.
As the contradictions of Capitalism metastasize, each successive war becomes more and more-so a war waged along class lines. The lines of demarcation between partisans, insurgents, and civilians blurs, but the need for empire to impose order upon its subjects never ceases.
i remember when bush left the white house, my mom was angry at him she called him the devi for his wars and the mass deportations, and she was happy that Obama won because then there would have been change, nowdays my mom hates obama as much as bush
Progress is slow. My mom used to love Bush and hate Obama. Now she likes both of them. You take what you can get.
Lol at least that's a consistent ideology. Little victories?
Progress is slow
dont worry my mom is a socialism since pinochet, she just thought the US could be a force for good
My parents voted for Obama in 2008 and then I watched them nearly lose everything in the recession and had to see them go from disappointed to angry, to now the bitter aging people they are. They hate this man more than they ever did Bush.
...so what did he think the bad thing even was? Whatever, fuck Obama.
"the problem is it starts giving you the illusion that it is not war."
:obama-drone:
oh no, killing civilians with drone strikes doesnt feel like war? how awful for you! fucking monstrous
well, yes, the fact that the u.s population feels even more abstracted from our brutal foreign policy is undoubtedly good for the dems.
but how fucking cynical, to lament the "feelings" of war being absent, and thus a lack of outcry, instead of the act of murdering civilians which you participated in
peak armchair psychology
yeah it absolutely is, but when youre right, youre right.
imagine a mass murderer going around lamenting the lack of public outcry against his weapon of choice.
oh wait, you dont need to imagine, it just fucking happened
yep. no remains to clean up either. nothing disgusting. just a fine red mist, a devastated country, and a generation of traumatized children. very clean.
yea. hes also factually incorrect. the u.s has been murdering civilians at fucking unprecedented rates because drones are zero-risk murder machines.
bombed a wedding? oh well, we got the guy we think was maybe bad! all the people at his cousins wedding were obviously enemy combatants, otherwise they wouldnt have been in a war zone!
if he does, thats just really pathetically sad, and if he doesnt, its incredibly cynical.
so idk take your pick i guess
buried up to the neck in sand out in the desert would be fine
👁️ 💔 👁️ cataglyphis hungers
The problem with drones is that you eventually run out of civilians to kill
:obama-drone: cant run out of civilians if you never acknowledge they were civilians
I find that hard to judge. Like Bush was monstrous, industrialized torture, slave labor, war crimes, a million dead Iraqis and so on and so on. Obama committed his share of war crimes but he was the serene face of dignity replacing the smirking yokel who knows you think he's smarter them him but he has the power. What I can't get over with Obama is how he crushed hope and change as concepts. You would have to be a sick madman to pay attention to politics after he proved to everyone how fucking gullible they are. Trump said correctly of the 2016 election he was going to suck the air out of the room in the debates. I feel like Obama has sucked the air out of the room for the next 40 years. He revitalized thatcherism with better branding.
I don't understand this idea Obama keeps promulgating, that he had no choice in his actions. What exactly do you elect a president for, if not to make choices? Which fucking demon sat across from him and held a gun to his head and made him sign the Drone Strike order? Obama, especially in the Trump era, keeps talking about how being a good person involves admitting fault, but he never fucking shuts up about how his acts weren't really something you could blame on him.
Obama did not perceive himself as having a choice because the kind of person who would rise in this political system doesn't get there by questioning the consensus, especially the bipartisan foreign policy consensus. All the smart people said it was the only option. These decisions are made by the Blob and the president just signs off on them. Someone who would challenge these decisions would not become president the conventional way like Obama did.
Watch Yes, Minister or Yes, Prime Minister to get the British satire of this process. Presidents and politicians in general aren't without agency, but they are at the center of vast machinery that is filled with intelligent and experienced people, people who are basically supposed to be the court advisors of the President, his eyes and ears, but can just as easily manipulate and guide his action. So far I think the Obama book is actually pretty good just because he gives what seem like authentic glimpses into his frustrations with this, even though he also obviously accepted it as indomitable reality a long time ago. He was surrounded by institutions and interests that he clearly felt incapable of realistically fighting because the web of relationships between those institutions and interests, their own spheres of control and power and how they overlapped, constitutes all of American society and government. Somebody like Obama, if you were even to suggest to him the aggressive path out of the insanity of that situation, which in a sense he himself does several times in his book by lapsing into regrets and curses at how powerless he felt, ends up simply feeling vulnerable. I'd guess that even regarding what was past the horizon of that possibility would make someone like Obama see himself as an imposter in his social role, because even as all of society treats his office as though it were the king of America, the uncertainty and isolation of going against the American machine from such a position would suddenly expose exactly how contingent its power is. You could flip from being adored and respected to being treated like Nero in an instant.
So out of self-interest Obama does what every responsible President in America does, what the system expects him to do, he becomes its spokesperson. He becomes the branded image of it, he takes responsibility for its failures and successes for a while. He simplifies the reality of the thing "for the good of the country" or something like that. I'm sure he is a self-conscious asshole too, they all are to some extent, they all must know in a cynical way that a part of the bargain is that in exchange for the prestige and wealth afforded by being a President of the US they have to be secretive and manipulative of the public. I'm sure they all take an amount of pride in being so savvy. But I also think someone like Obama still sees himself as a good person on a certain level, or a well-meaning one, and that he is just a realist. In that sense, being the spokesperson of America is a part of the well-meaning part of it. If he "exposed" the American state for what it was, that would cause chaos, and it would also end his career and maybe his life. He thinks nothing good would come of it. So the responsible thing to do is to pretend and follow the rules of conduct.
The showrunner for Yes, Minister was an adherent to public choice theory, which basically argues that the government can't do anything to improve people's lives because bureaucrats only look out for their own interests and are not responsive to constituents. The response to this observation by proponents of public choice theory is to promote the private sector, which they believe to be responsive to the people through market signals. The politics of Yes, Minister and the Thatcher government were responses to this observation and are driven by similar ideological impulses. Public choice theory is the theoretical basis of austerity. It's unfortunate that an ideology with such pernicious consequences is basically correct at least when it comes to the national security state.
Privatization of the state is just one of the many bad solutions you get when you mix "there is no alternative" with bourgeois democracy. I think the whole framing of Yes, Minister, being that politicians and career bureaucrats have a self-interest divorced from the general public, along with the notion that politicians are often kind of bewildered dumbasses who are guided by convenience, is basically correct, but that is just the reality of bourgeois democracy. The problem average people tend to have is that their political imaginations are still constrained by the symbols of the system that exists, so to them "democracy" may as well be roughly equivalent to what we have, if not amenable to some changes. The consequence is that people become politically misanthropic, blaming the sorry state of the country on other average people who are too stupid or vile to vote correctly. But further than that many people begin to feel that, since this is basically what "democracy" is, that government must be fatally flawed in that you can't really trust politicians to not lie to you and cheat you once they get into office for their own benefit. So you come back to neoliberalism/reaganism/thatcherism etc. as an out, because for better or worse it appears that you can't trust the government to actually help you. But of course privatization is no solution, because the market itself is made up of shadowy unaccountable figures out for their self-interest, and their self-interest has no innate moral compass either. More often than not when average people vote for somebody who is shouting about how politicians suck and they want to just leave you alone or whatever, they're voting on the premise that they agree that they don't like politicians much, rather than specifically wanting all the roads to become toll roads. As long as people's ideology is constrained by the state of things now, they'll find themselves confused by (or resigned to) their entrapment in getting toyed with by institutions much bigger than themselves with many motivations to abuse, pilfer and disregard them.
Neon lights, a Nobel Prize
Then a mirror speaks, the reflection lies
You don't have to follow me
Only you can set me free
I sell the things you need to be
I'm the smiling face on your T.V.
I'm the cult of personality
I exploit you still you love me
Yeah who gives a fuck if they aren’t our guys being shot and killed. That’s why there’s so many mercenaries and private contractors overseas because no one cares if they die. But if a soldier gets shot then it’s a tragedy. Now we are so far into the quagmire of both Iraq and Afghanistan (not to mention special ops in Africa and the rest of the Middle East) that no one really cares unless it is a lot of troops. And everyone has forgotten about the Afghanistan papers that fucking showed this is all a waste. (I say this as a vet)
Obama: "collateral damage ". Wrong: "Collateral Murder." https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/ https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/09/07/collateral-murder-post-script/
Given the devastation and crimes committed by american ground troops he's probably right, but he's still missing the point by a million fucking miles.
