The suffering of the Syrians, who were already struggling due to the civil war (not to mention the US’s role in it), has amplified by the earthquake which has been called as “one of the deadliest this decade.”
Roger Musson, an honorary research associate at the British Geological Survey, said the death toll “will be in the thousands, and could be in the tens of thousands.”
With a country being torn apart by a decade-long civil war; with an economy being ravaged by sanctions; and an earthquake acting like salt on the wound, it would be as difficult to try to contain the current suffering of Syrians in a mere article as trying to start fire underwater.
We can’t change what has already happened, but we can definitely reduce the suffering caused by past happenings if right actions are taken in the present. Yes, you have guessed it right. We are going to talk about the sanctions and the crippling impact they have over the country’s economy, and therefore, over the innocent human beings.
On Feb 7, the NYT published an article whose subtitle said, “Syria is not able to receive direct aid from many countries because of sanctions,” but it wasn’t long enough before the subtitle was changed to “As the Syrian government tightly controls what aid it allows into opposition-held areas, border crossings with Turkey have been a lifeline” because working at any mainstream US media outlet, your only job is to blame other countries for the wrongdoings of your master - the US administration.
To put it as bluntly as I can: Sanctions are an economic warfare that the US empire uses against the dissident nations when the coup attempts fail. When the US administration fails to take down the dissident governments via color revolutions, the second option it goes to is about building a metaphorical wall around the country in order to prevent it from trading internationally and stagnate its economy, assuming that there would come a time when the economic pain will get too severe to bear and as a result, people will rise up and overthrow the government themselves.
If it hasn’t made your blood boil yet, let me emphasize the sociopathy behind this: Because they have a monopoly over the global financial system, the criminals in the White House torture the people living in the foreign countries financially as long as they don’t succeed in what the US administration failed at - overthrow the government that doesn’t bow down to the imperial agendas of the US empire.
I can’t think of something eviler and viler than this.
I call this eviler than dropping bombs and viler than sending tanks because sanctions are the peaceful way of declaring war over a nation; it goes beyond the conventional understanding of war. We tend to think that war is when the buildings are leveled, when two sides fire rockets at each other, when there are tanks and boots on the ground, etc.
Yes, that’s war but that ALONE is not war. Sanctions are an act of war too.
It’s a war when you deliberately starve the people of other nation.
It’s a war when you lock people in an economic prison.
It’s a war when you deprive them of medical treatment.
It’s a war when you are forced to migrate for financial reasons.
When you invade a country and kill its people, you are supposed to receive both international and domestic outcry, but when you sanction a country, nobody notices because this type of war doesn’t make noise. It kills people silently and slowly, and a slow death is infinitely more torturous than an instant death.
Media might show you the buildings being collapsed, streets being blooded, and people being maimed by the war of invasion, but hardly will it ever show you the inner buildings being targeted, streets being full of sick people, people being starved by the war of sanctions.
The war of sanctions is a unique way to have your agendas fulfilled. It doesn’t need the manufacturing of weapons; it doesn’t need the government to manufacture public consent; it doesn’t need the mobilization of troops, but it does inflict suffering; it does break the nation; it does kill the people.
That’s why people might show some resistant to the war of invasion, but no meaningful resistance is shown to the war of sanctions.
Alfred de Zayas, a former secretary of the UN Human Rights Council, said in his report: “Modern-day economic sanctions and blockades are comparable with medieval sieges of towns……… Twenty-first century sanctions attempt to bring not just a town, but sovereign countries to their knees.”
Not only in Syria, but the weapons of sanctions are also deployed in Iran, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela.
In case of Iran, a US official bragged about the impact of sanctions on the Iranians:
“The sanctions are working. The currency is going to nothing. We see signs of young men and women saying: “Give me some food.” We saw sign of a man trying to sell his internal organs for 500 American dollars. These are kind of conditions that lead to successful revolutions.”
And the audience clapped…….
In case of Venezuela, tens of thousands of people died as a direct result of cruel sanctions.
A paper published by economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs got some media coverage (but it has now been removed). In that paper, the economists argued that 40,000 people died as a direct result of sanctions between 2017 and 2018, and more than 300,000 Venezuelans were at health risk due to a lack of access to medicine or treatment.
In case of North Korea, US-imposed sanctions are having as deadly of an impact over the civilians, if not more, as over the ones in the above-mentioned countries.
Rex Tillerson, in interview with Condoleezza Rice, expressed the demonic nature of sanctions in a rather comfortable way. He said that many of the North Koreans who went out to fish were found floating as dead bodies over the Japanese waters, and they were fishing in winter because there were food shortages in their home. Also, some of those who survived have to starve to death in the sea because they didn’t have enough fuel to go back.
It’s not to say that the US is the sole perpetrator of seize warfare in the modern times, as another criminal administration - Saudi Arabia - is well-known for its blockade of Yemen. Yes, it’s that Yemen which has been called “the worst humanitarian crisis” by the UN, as 14 million Yemenis are at the risk of famine.
Generally, it’s the US administration that comes to mind when the word “sanction” is heard because it has a monopoly over the global financial system and only it has the ability to destroy nations without firing a shot. No other nation possesses that power and that’s what makes US the strongest nation to have ever existed, and more broadly, the strongest empire to have ever existed.
Any country is as likely to be destroyed by sanctions as it is by Tomahawk missiles, yet it never occurs to the people that the former deserves as much resistance as the latter. If Iraq was only sanctioned, instead of invaded, I doubt Bush would be receiving as much hate as he does today for his viciousness. Why?
Not because the sanctioned Iraqis would have to suffer less, but because our minds don’t quite understand how the sanctions work.
And when people don’t comprehend the hell that sanctions create, the US government gets a green light to sanction any country it wants and expect no accountability in return. Another reason might be that the people in the Western world don’t oppose sanctions as much as they oppose invasion because the latter is funded by their own pockets while the former doesn’t stress them even a bit.
It’s more likely that the statement “We have sanctioned Iran” would create a picture of something financial in your mind than it would create a picture of people’s bones coming out of their skin, and the least likely would come the image of people drowning in the sea due to sanctions.
But it has to change.
All the anti-war activists must not only oppose the invasion or proxy wars but also the siege warfare. When we oppose war, what we are really oppose is the unnecessary human suffering, and if that suffering is created by something else, then that must also enter our rage list.
Our opposition to the weapons won’t bring any good to the people who can be easily sanctioned. Nor would it bring any meaningful resistance to the imperial approach of the US government, because as shown, sanctions work fine when it comes to having the imperialism’s yoke tightened around the country’s neck.
SANCTIONS. KILL. PEOPLE.
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Washington DC is the manifestation of the Throne of LUCIFER.