Friday, January 12: "Rules-Based Order"
The "trial of the century" is getting intentionally ignored by the west
Yesterday, South Africa kicked off the biggest humanitarian trial in decades, not that you’d know looking at western news outlets. As the war crimes of the apartheid state were listed and exposed, one after another, outlets like CNN and MSNBC were keeping busy focusing their coverage on other breaking news stories, like winter weather forecasts and the lead-up to the Iowa caucuses.
Joe Biden decided to celebrate the end of the workweek by violating Article I of the constitution and carrying out airstrikes in Yemen without prior congressional approval. The president that people claimed would be the “lesser of two evils” is now bombing civilian cities in Yemen, because Yemenis had the gaul to interrupt shipping lanes without hurting anyone. The secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, apparently gave the orders for the bombings from his hospital bed, monitoring the violence as he recovers from treatment for prostate cancer. (Personally, I’m rooting for the cancer).
This is yet another chapter in the oldest story in American foreign policy: The US chooses to bomb another country, escalating violence in the name of “de-escalation”, once again making a larger problem by “trying to solve a problem”. This country happily thrusts itself into conflicts it doesn’t understand by using massive violence against people whose politics, history and culture it knows nothing.
Yemen acted honorably and fulfilled the basic duty of any reasonable nation by interfering with a genocide and blocking shipments to the apartheid regime. The US is now bombing them for daring to interfere with the flow of capital in the US-supported genocide in Gaza. The US and UK are making abundantly clear that they care far more about shipping lanes in the Red Sea than living, breathing, innocent human beings in Gaza. Let that knowledge wash over you and radicalize you.
To their credit, the Yemeni response to these airstrikes is a level of resolve I’ve never seen before. The Deputy Head of the Media Authority for Ansar Allah, Nasr al-Din Amer said, "Now, we (Yemen) are relieved to get bombed like Gaza; we used to be ashamed in front of the Palestinian people that they got bombed and we didn’t." These are the types of adversaries that cannot be defeated. No amount of ammunition can break the spirit of their resistance. History will remember the actions of Yemen and South Africa during this awful chapter in human history.