This article was written exclusively for Steemit!
I recently attended the 2018 Women’s March in Los Angeles with a crew of awesome journalists, including Derrick Broze & Ford Fischer, both fellow Steemians. This was an interesting and frustrating experience for a group of anarchists. We tried our best to stay calm while navigating hundreds of thousands of people who believe their 'voting is their superpower.'
Regardless of my ‘radical’ philosophy of non-aggression, all morning I listened to the crowd cheer and scream raucously for immigrants’ rights, women’s rights, and the prospect of voting to liberate themselves from the tyrannies of Donald Trump (the attendees were evidently unconscious of the fact that they, too, were seeking to control others).
But when a single speaker made a passing reference to the war economy and how it needed to be stopped, the crowd fell silent. Literally crickets. It almost seemed like they didn’t even understand the term, which was clearly a reference the military-industrial complex.
So when did this:
Become this?
Donald Trump has set a record for the number of bombs he’s dropped in just a year in office. He’s slaughtering civilians left and right and continuing illegal occupations he inherited from past presidents. Surely the left has every right and reason to protest authoritarian Donald Trump’s crimes against humanity and his expansion of the evil empire. They could easily seize this shining opportunity to stew in and express their hatred for him.
Yet as the so-called resistance goes on and on about fighting for entitlement programs, tolerance, and justice, they are completely oblivious to and apathetic toward what’s been the biggest drain on taxpayer dollars and humanity at large for decades: the American military empire they keep funding.
How could this be?
It’s simple. Barack Obama killed the anti-war left.
Despite boastful claims from the former president and the mainstream left that he ended the Iraq war, in reality, he only wound down troop levels — in line with a Bush-era plan — after attempting to leave 10,000 troops in the war-torn country. He imposed a surge in Afghanistan. He exponentially increased drone warfare, imposing policies that could easily amount to war crimes. His administration bombed weddings and funerals and used a “double tap” strategy where a drone wages one onslaught and then circles back to attack first responders tending to victims. This tactic has been deemed terroristic. Under Obama, the definition of “combatants” was expanded to encompass any military-aged male. The hope and change leader presided over the bombing of a hospital in Afghanistan and facilitated arms deals with Saudi Arabia, a misogynistic, authoritarian regime that routinely slaughters women and children in Yemen (Trump followed suit, making yet another weapons deal with them).
Nevertheless, in some of my videos where I point out that America’s problems didn’t start with Trump and are a result of more widespread systemic corruption, I’m often told that it doesn’t matter what Obama did anymore because he’s no longer president. But is that true? What has changed? To me, his actions as president are just relevant as George W. Bush, and Clinton before him, and Bush before him, and so on and so forth — they are hammering home the same agenda.
Regardless, Trump is carrying out the same foreign policy objectives, and the left is silent. Are they concerned that Obama set a precedent for assassinating American citizens without trial, and now Trump wields that same power should he choose to use it? I haven’t heard a peep. They complain about his fascism, his mean remarks, his racism, his sexism — everything but the biggest driving force of oppression the U.S. government commits.
When I asked a marcher holding an impeach Trump sign if she had any thoughts on the current president continuing past policies of Obama’s, in particular arming the extremist Saudis and perpetuating drone warfare and other forms of militarism, her response was simple: “No.” (I wish I had the video of this interview but my camera failed to record – aka, me, it was me, I forgot to hit record. Sad!). She did not care to comment on the glaring similarities between her enemy and the previous president.
And why didn’t she care?
Because Obama made war seem soft and fuzzy and humanitarian and heroic. When he ousted Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, where terrorists now run rampant and rape and slavery are part of everyday life amid the power vacuum Barack, Hillary Clinton, and NATO created, his followers insisted it was for the good of humanity. Gaddafi had to go because he was a dictator… just like… Saddam — the same dictator the left once passionately protested toppling (to some people’s credit, there was a wave of protest against Obama’s push for war in Syria in 2013, but that dissolved a year later when ISIS became a major source of fear for Americans).
Obama made war cool — he removed it further and further from the scope of the national conversation after using it to get himself elected, and his supporters followed suit because the partisan programming in this country is so powerful that people are more capable of rejecting their principles than their propagandized political heroes.
Of course, there are many factors that have converged to make the left amenable and open to war — it’s not just Obama. Hollywood’s constant glorification of military violence (and government in general) percolates into the minds of the masses, and the CIA’s infiltration of and influence on the news media has undoubtedly created narratives that condition the public into tolerance for war.
But during the Bush years, when even liberal-leaning outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times were gunning for the Iraq invasion, liberals appeared to know better. Unfortunately, the subsequent Obama years showed this was probably only because a Republican was president.
At the women’s march this year, I looked around for anti-war signs, for any recognition that the military empire is unjust and antithetical to the values of peace and tolerance the left still claims to champion. But aside from one banner discouraging nuclear war, I didn’t see a single sign. For a single hopeful moment I thought I saw a sign that said “No War on Yemen,” but upon getting a better view, it simply said “No War on Women” (incidentally, imperial wars also amount to wars on women, who also die among men and children).
Those who believe they’re part of the resistance against Donald Trump and don’t know or care what countries he’s bombing, what terrorist factions the U.S. military is assisting, and how much of their tax dollars are going to fund this violence, are, to put it plainly, not part of any resistance at all.
They’re simply bickering over crumbs while the government they’re claiming to dissent against goes on with business as usual, using their money to inflict violence (its only enforcement tool) just like Obama did while they sat silently and starry-eyed, bowing to their false idol.
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