The death of ISIS front man Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi has got the flag-waving, “America F– Yeah!” crowd in a tizzy. They’re over the moon that this person they know nothing about, and who has never set foot within a thousand miles of the United States, “died like a dog”, “whimpering”, etc. They rejoiced at their President strutting, sky-hooting, and affecting airs of a phony machismo while he celebrated the death in front of the nation, as if he had anything to do with Baghdadi’s death. “We’re winning the War on Terror!” many editorials exclaimed, with an unspoken “finally” somewhere in there. But, are we? Let’s think about it. This now-deceased person headed a terrorist organization, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, popped up seemingly out of nowhere in 2014. Convenient timing for the U.S., as there were few terrorist groups big enough or threatening enough to justify America’s continued predatory presence in the Mideast. ISIS arrived, and the Warfare State breathed a sigh of relief.
The point is that ISIS didn’t exist in 2001, when Bush launched his misbegotten War on Terror. ISIS arose out of the chaos and carnage that our government created. It is a testament to the immortal arrogance of our race that it believes it can remake an entire social order in its image with no harmful effects. Well, we now have several textbook examples of what happens when the most powerful military the world has ever known attempts it. Iraqi civilization, ancient, complex, and beautiful, disintegrated in a matter of just a few years. The social order tore itself apart, and a once-beautiful, thriving desert society effectively died. Ancient, priceless architecture was reduced to dust by American forces, who, with Philistine abandon, decimated lives, culture, and history. How many innocents died? Hundreds of thousands. Do there lives count for anything?
What about Libya, where a similarly beautiful culture and civilization was utterly ruined? It’s now a failed state, whatever civilization resides there now exists in a prehistoric, ‘red in tooth and claw’ form. Thousands died at the hands of US bombs, too. Why don’t their lives matter?
Syria has been no different, another regime-change war launched on false pretense, with the explicit purpose of ousting Assad. Syria, home to Damascus, the history of civilization itself, a civilization far more beautiful and charming than the vulgar mass consumerism that Americans open their doors to every morning. Millions displaced, hundreds of thousands of innocents dead. An irreplaceable culture utterly ruined, never to return.
The flying, armed robots of the drone war has done so much damage, killed many thousands of innocents throughout the Mideast. What about those lives?
And here we are, vulgar Americans, personified in the most vulgar of Presidents, holding a national hootenanny for a single death that occurred on the other side of the globe.
I’m reminded of a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche:
“The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it – what it costs us.”
What in gods name have we allowed our government to do? Our military has run amok, shooting and bombing indiscriminately, cutting a wide swath of gore across arguably the most beautiful, complex, civilized culture on earth. A culture we base, vulgar Americans could’ve possibly learned something from. What is our culture other than a debased, materialistic nihilism? We feed on everything like pigs, be it food, television, the latest Apple gadget, “pop culture”, dumping it all in a trough and shoving our snout in, gorging until overfull. Could American society be more aptly described than that of a never-ending trough? There is nothing elevated, or civilized about this. And few aspects of real culture or civilization have remained untouched by this base materialism. And yet many believe it to be the duty of our government to spread the panacea to people who see it for what it is and want nothing of it.
There is nothing honorable in celebrating Baghdadi’s death, someone who never set foot in America, much less attempted to invade and occupy it. The mindless, primitive celebration of his death, the utter unconcern with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of the innocent of the Mideast, combined with the complete lack of concern about what our own government has done to those abroad is a sign of terminal infection.
We’ve allowed our government to rack up a cosmic tab and then skip out on the bill. We citizens will be the ones to pay it off, to re-balance the scales, and we will finally face the cost of all the wanton death and destruction that we turned a blind eye to, because it didn’t affect us directly anyway.
