Saturday, December 31, 2016

Happy New Year Hypocrites!

Happy 2017.

I am going to start this blog off in the way that I don't see many doing on their first ever post, contentious. Usually people thank you for reading and ask you to remember and subscribe to their blog. That's not ever been my style and I am not known to pander. I digress.

Most of you are hyprocrites. Why? Simple: I sat around and watched people posting about the genocide tragedy in Aleppo for darn near two weeks before it finally died off.  It is not a genocide. I could get into that, but it would detract from the conversation. I kept my mouth shut like a good boy and contained myself as long as I could. Then some famous person died and silence.

What mostly annoys me about this and the reason I am accusing you all of being hypocrites is twofold:

First, I posted a lengthy social media post almost 5 years ago about how the Syrian civil strife (we weren't quite calling it a war at that point) was likely to be the biggest conflict of a generation, much like Vietnam or World War II, and not only was the post not received not a single person liked, faved, retweeted, shared, reposted, or even engaged in the post. However, now we should all be concerned about Aleppo. Now is the time for us to be upset.

I know people read my social media posts because when I post something controversial enough to piss people off it gets a lot of likes and a lot of angry keyboard warriors accusing me of one thing or another. It's pretty interesting the sociology of it all. I post something controversial and people jump all over it. I post something that's way ahead of it's time and you can hear the crickets outside chirping. Heinlein even said "being right too soon is socially unacceptable." He had no idea how prophetic that would be in the age of social media.

Second, you all are so self absorbed and entertainment driven that the moment you hear something has happened to famous people you drop whatever it is that's important to be concentrating on and pay attention to that. Ironically many of my liberal leaning friends who are guilty of this exact thing can thank that precise mentality for getting President-elect Trump in office (Don't comment on this part of the story we'll get to Trump in another blog post.) The Syrian conflict is still happening and it's been almost 3 weeks since I saw someone posting about it. You've moved on.

The Syrian civil war is serious business. It's a tragedy on multi-faceted levels. It's a human tragedy, a foreign policy tragedy, and a cultural tragedy. The conflict is also extremely complicated. There are as many as 15 factions currently. Some of them more well known than others. There are your Kurds, your ISIS fighters, and of course the Syrian government, but there are others including the FSA (Free Syrian Army,) Al-Qaeda, and many many others. For a list of just how many Syrian factions there are click here.

Right now there are 5 million refugees all over the world because of this conflict. Internally there are between 4 and 8 million people that are displaced because of this. These are people who didn't ask for this, probably didn't want this, and are desperately seeking a way out of their current situation. The map of their country is pretty screwed up and if you think this is going to just end when Aleppo falls into the Syrian government's hands you're wrong. To call it anything less than a human tragedy would be at the least a disservice and more accurately an insult to those people and their struggle.

Red/Pink - Syrian government controlled territory
Yellow - Kurdish territory
Green - Free Syrian Army territory (FSA)
Black - Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant territory. (ISIL)



















Make no mistake about it. If you're an American you need to know this is our country's fault. Specifically the foreign policy decision making of President Obama's administration. We can go back to former President Bush's Iraq war if you'd like, but the fact is this is a failure to act on the shoulders of the current outgoing administration. Ask anyone who works in the intelligence services whether they thought it was a good idea to arm unvetted rebels with US arms. You think ISIS just got humvees and anti aircraft missiles out of thin air? Hell no, President Obama authorized us sending 'rebels' weapons. The problem with the term rebels is that it identifies every group that isn't the Syrian government. This could have been prevented or, at the very least, mitigated to a point that we didn't have 5 million displaced refugees and 750,000 dead bodies in Syria.

You might not know this, and I'm going to assume you don't, but Aleppo is one of the oldest cities in the world. It was first settled in 5000 BCE and has been continuously populated since. That makes it a little over 7000 years old. There are, or I should type, were tons of culturally significant buildings and sites within and around the city. There is a very good possibility that many of them have been annihilated. You know, with the war and all.

I want you to enjoy your new year, and I want you to make sure that Kanye and Kim are doing ok, because 2016 was a rough year from what everyone keeps posting on social media, just make sure to keep your mouth shut about Aleppo because it's obvious you don't really give a damn about it or you'd have screamed at your representatives and President to do something about it long before the first couple of weeks in December. Remember, March will be year 6 of the Syrian civil war and you've not been doing much about it. Let's all keep praying that Betty White makes it through the rest of today because 2016 would be a REAL bummer if she didn't make it.

Oh, make sure you subscribe to my blog.