If you don’t know Jeremy Scahill, you’re living under a rock. He is the best journalist to follow our foreign policy. He covered the Drone War and its effects. He’s reported on the front lines. He’s covered the mercenaries who murder in our name, and he has also been on corporate media as one of the few voices of dissent they let on.
Now he has a can’t miss podcast, Intercepted.
Before I get into my comments, let me just add my 2-cents on the Bill Maher controversy: Nobody should go on or watch the show, Bill Maher is a racist. I don’t care that he invited a fellow racist on his show, even if that racist is also a Nazi pedophile. Maher should have retired years ago so we don’t have this show with a host who makes racist jokes, explores the faux intellectualism of Islamophobia, and who gives pedophile Nazis a national platform. Scahill should not have gone on Bill Maher, not because of the Nazi pedophile, but because of Bill Maher.
Also, auto correct keeps changing Scahill’s name to Swahili.
America, you can argue, has been the greatest exporter of terrorism since our founding. So it’s no wonder that when the traitor Nathan Bedford Forrest lost a war he’d help form an insurgency group called the Ku Klux Klan. Their behavior makes ISIS look tame. They’d skin people and hang them. People would take scraps of flesh that was taken from their victims to turn into book marks for their Bibles. These often became family heirlooms.
It was Lyndon B. Johnson that said “The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships are all symbols of human failure.” They are also the recruitment tool of terrorism.
I grew up reading comics, and Hydra fascinated me with their allusions to ancient Greece and their motto “If a head is cut off, two more shall take its place.” Every bomb dropped is more than human failure, it is a recruitment tool for foreign terrorists. Every innocent killed on our war on terror is a poster for every terrorist operation and like Hydra, for every terrorist killed two more takes its place.
Since the beginning of the conflict in Syria there is one simple answer to stop radicalizing the people on the ground: support the people.
We don’t need to have a Clinton/McCain-esque proxy war with Russia, we don’t need to kill people with Drones, like Obama, we don’t need Bush’s endless wars and we certainly don’t need Donald Trump giving comfort and aid to ISIS by dropping the Mother of all Bombs.
What we need to do is simple: supply the people of Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and every other country we bomb with food. If need be, we protect them from any strong men and allow them to stand on their own, then we can break ISIS, al Qaeda and every other anti-American foreign terrorist organization.
To end the KKK, Alt-Right, Three Percenters, Cliven Bundy supporters, and so on, is just as simple. With the new Peace Dividend for not bombing people we invest in America, and we do it better than the New Deal, because we won't need to worry about getting the Dixiecrats on board, so we won't have the racism that helped only white people in the New Deal.
Once we have a more equal society, then the resentments that the Bill Mahers and the Donald Trumps use to divide us won't have the hold that they do.
Once we have a more equal society then people like Donald Trump can’t get elected because we would have eroded his base from both ISIS and the KKK.
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