a brief interlude

Summer is heating up for the millions of people violently displaced from their homes in the Middle East. Clocking 44c in Baghdad (111f), the tens of thousands quite suddenly fleeing Ramadi face this heat and oncoming Ramadan without a choice otherwise. On the run from empire’s rockets and explosions, the contras’s IEDs and suicide bombers, they join those in Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen and Palestine who are suddenly refugees. See, if you have eyes to see:

Libya thrown into chaos at the end of a NATO onslaught in 2011 remains not only a failed state in certainly the most academic sense of the word, but a source of people on the run, people drowning in the Mediterranean and dying in the deserts.

Syria, the jewel of the Arab world, a name that brings tears to the eyes when people speak of how it was just four years ago. Her people filling camps in every neighboring country.

Yemen, the people poor, starving and screaming under chemical weapons. The poorest, most helpless country in the region torn to pieces by the richest and most powerful.

Palestine, a long burning fire in the stomach, a constant humiliation.

Egypt – cruelly disciplined.

Iraq, now 35 long years suffering from war.

It’s impossible to express in human language the absolute horror in this part of the world. It’s more expressed in the nine-day fever of a child at a refugee camp, the terror of not knowing where the planes dropping bombs on your head are coming from. The nihilistic certainty, as you flee your home, that no one who is responsible for this cares about you, because no one who is responsible will ever taste this sort of pain.

To get letters from home is surreal, as people care and care and care about a Bernie Sanders run for president of the United States. They care about a television show. They care about food allergies and vaccines. The core adopts a posture of hipster indifference while the periphery writhes under the knife of empire.

“They were killing woman and children.”

“We’ve been waiting for six days sleeping in the street here, but so far we haven’t got permission to enter Kurdistan,” he said, lowering his voice as the checkpoint commander approached.

The commander declined to give his name but was quick to offer an explanation for the delay.

“We respect them. We give them food. We deal with them like humans,” he said. “But we’ve got to investigate before we let them through.”

– RUDAW

Are there communists forgotten in Ukraine? Are there communists alive today? A red banner hangs from a fence surrounding an impromptu refugee camp not a mile from where I write these words. It’s an accusatory shade of red. There is no argument that we have been outmaneuvered. The question is: how do we win at a game of Go in which we have been cornered?

(The matrix of control) works like the Japanese game of Go. Instead of defeating your opponent as in chess, in Go you win by immobilizing your opponent, by gaining control of key points of a matrix so that every time s/he moves s/he encounters an obstacle of some kind.

And this perhaps explains this brief interlude. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off again.