The cats sit on the windowsills and watch the dancing snowflakes outside. I watch the snowflakes too. We are safe and warm here in our comfortable home at the edge of a beautiful, mysterious forest.
How privileged we are.
In my imagination the snowflakes often turn into something else, as the powerless and useless words in my head come together and one by one form powerful and useful thoughts.
Sometimes the dancing snowflakes turn into the little souls of the countless animals who stopped living because humans destroyed their homes and made life unbearable for them. The little souls have floated in heaven for some time but they are tired now and they slowly descend down to earth to rest there in peace eternally.
Sometimes the dancing snowflakes turn into pieces of paper. They turn into advertising leaflets, flyers, brochures of plans that were never realized or political promises that were never fulfilled. They turn into worthless stock and bond certificates, worthless securities, broken contracts, documents of bankrupt firms or personal documents of people who have died a long time ago.
The paper pieces fall down, blanketing the ground and slowly turning into dust. We produce a lot of useless paper and the whole world is our dustbin.
Every now and then the dancing snowflakes turn into something dangerous, ominous, menacing. They turn into tiny devils disguised as angels. When the tiny devils reach the ground they burn and kill everything around them. These dancing snowflakes are deadly, they are agent orange, white phosphorus, depleted uranium projectiles, cluster boomlets (of the kind the Israeli Air Force used so successfully to blow Lebanese children into pieces).
There was heavy snowfall in the last days and people prefer to stay home and do all the things that they otherwise would defer till the end of time. I just read: “Heavy snowfall is blanketing Europe.” I also read: “Heavy snow has brought Europe to a standstill.”
This heavy snowfall is the first and foremost reason I’m about to write a blog post now, because normally I would spend my time walking with the cat family in the adjacent forest.
I don’t intend to blame my feline friends for the many thorough musings and exhaustive considerations that are forgotten and lost forever because they are never written down. It would be unjust and dishonest to put the blame on them. Of course, I prefer walking with my cat companions in the wood to sitting on the computer, but I have to confess that I’m also an enthusiastic procrastinator.
With my heavy duty wellies I still can go out and walk around but the snow is so high now that my little friends cannot make it. The more dedicated walkers try to follow me by jumping from one of my footprints into the next but this method of moving forward is very exhausting and in addition to that the poor cats are completely wet after a few meters, with icicles hanging from their fur.
So we stay at home and gather around the stove, looking into the fire and dreaming. This is a modern stove with a glass window and one can watch as the wood is burning and the flickering flames create all kind of surreal patterns. The cats like to watch the flames.
And we all let our imagination roam.
There is heavy snowfall and people prefer to stay home, only the climate change deniers have come out from their caves into which they had to retreat because of overwhelming scientific and factual evidence. The climate change deniers are jubilant and they roam the snow covered lanes singing: “Climate change is a hoax, climate change is a hoax!”
As I hear their singing from a distance (they don’t come close to the forest, they hate forests) it appears as if they also would sing and chant: “God is great, god is great.”
I know of course that “god is great” is not a prominent battle cry of the climate change deniers, maybe they are singing: “Oil is great, oil is great”?
On the other hand, they have so much in common with their brothers in mind, the radical Islamists, why shouldn’t they use the same chants? Both groups are irresponsible, lunatic, destructive psychopaths, both don’t care about nature and the loss of human lives, both are callous, apathetic idiots.
The religious right in the USA is practically identical with the climate change deniers. These are the people who deny evolution, who deny climate change, who don’t believe in science at all. These are the people who believe in god. God is great, god is great!
While impatiently revving their SUVs the climate change deniers are probably fretting about not being properly equipped by the CIA. They are in all likelihood severely annoyed that they are not pampered like their brothers in mind from Misrata and Benghazi, who helped to kill Muammar Gaddafi.
They only forget, that the environmentalists are a minority in most countries, and if they are not a minority, they are still powerless, outmaneuvered and ignored by the political leaders. Muammar Gaddafi on the other hand was a real threat to the sanctity of oil profits, as he had nationalized the Libyan oil companies, had refused to increase oil extraction, and even planned to create an African Central Bank and to end the influence of IMF and World Bank (Gold Dinar Plan).
This was serious and Gaddafi had to go. The environmentalists are nowhere near that kind of activities, they are no danger. If governments would impose real measures to reduce CO2 emissions and reduce oil consumption, if they would nationalize finance, industry, and public services, if they would throw out corporations, cancel free trade agreements, and abandon consumerism as a whole, it would be a different story.
Then the CIA would start shipping assault rifles, RPGs, and advanced telecommunications equipment to the climate change denier militias, NATO would impose no-fly zones and deploy fighter jets, cruise missiles, and drones to bomb wind turbines, solar power installations, and hydroelectric power plants.
Who would get the Peace Nobel Price for this operation? The EU already got their price for the Libya kill, therefore it cannot be nominated a second time.
Gaddafi fortunately (or unfortunately?) used the oil revenue for infrastructure improvements instead for the military. The Libyan army was one of the smallest in the Middle East and it took not long to overpower it. Only 40,000 Libyans had to die, this is small change compared with the one million Iraqis who perished in the war for oil that was fought from 2003 till 2011.
For a long time I was convinced that the Iraq war claimed about 200,000 lives, but in the last year there has a consensus emerged, that the real number of victims is rather one million. For me even the lower number of 200,000 death appeared incredible and unimaginable, one million is completely outside my perception.
And yet there are people who openly declare that it was worth it. Securing the oil supply, securing Western hegemony was worth one million lives!
They love their oil, they love their power, they are incurable oil addicts and incurable power addicts. They are the most dangerous psychopaths one can think of.
They are imaginable (if one tries hard enough) but indescribable. They are monsters. I don’t have any other word at my disposal to characterize them appropriately and I repeat: They are monsters.
Will they ever face justice?
There are people who are sentenced to death for one murder. There are people who are wrongful convicted and put to death. Others are responsible for thousand of deaths and never face justice. Saddam Hussein was hanged for the killing of 148 Iraqi Shi’ites.
Who will be taken to account for the one million Iraqis? Will Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell ever face trial? Will the fighter pilots who dropped depleted uranium bombs and white phosphorus onto Fallujah ever be convicted? Will the gunners in the Apache attack helicopters and in the Abrams tanks ever be convicted?
The Iraq war veterans will maybe convicted when they slay their disobedient spouse or undesirable neighbors in lack of cheap Iraqi lives.
People think that Donald Rumsfeld was entertaining with his occasional forays into epistemology (the unknown unknowns). For me his legacy is defined by the participation in one of the biggest warcrimes in modern history. George W. Bush was always a joke, though a deadly one.
These perpetrators will not face justice, why should they?
As I wrote already in earlier blog posts, justice is only an abstract construction in our minds and in the best of scenarios justice is a practical means to keep society intact. In the best of scenarios the justice system and a legal framework are used to secure the social contract which makes it possible that humans live in bigger groups together.
Unfortunately this kind of justice is rare and human history shows us in countless examples, that justice, as it is described in the paragraph above, ends as soon as a ruling class emerges, because the rulers will break the social contract and use the justice system to secure their position, preserve the status quo, and keep the population in check. In the worst of scenarios justice is the justice of the powerful, the justice of the victors. Justice of this kind cannot give moral guidance, is worthless, hollow, and meaningless by definition.
You can guess which kind of justice we are observing right now, though this is a separate matter to be discussed in another blog post.
The fire in the stove has burned down and there is only a faint glimmer left. Is it a glimmer of hope? Tomorrow I will incite another fire, but for today it is enough. The cats are yawning, it is time to switch off the computer and go to bed.
P.S. As I lay down it comes to my mind that the monsters would maybe not have committed their terrible crimes if they would have been surrounded by wonderful, lovely cats. The cats would maybe have kept them sane.
But this mission would have been risky, very risky, because some of the monsters are unpredictable, and all of them are insensitive and therefore maybe not responsive to a cats charm. They could have mistreated the cats or even killed them, like they kill everything else.
Stay here, my beautiful cats, don’t go to the monsters. Stay here, comfort me, calm me, purr me into sleep.
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