John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ROBERT COHEN IN MONDOWEISS
“From ‘Vision for Peace’ to ‘Normalization’ — 2020 is the year of forgetting”
Politics certainly is given to the misuse of words, generally their deliberate misuse.
The “Normalization” in the Middle East now being heavily publicized is the most grotesque example of that we have seen in a while.
What possibly can be normal about a situation where millions of people are being held against their will with no rights, no votes, and no hope?
Of course, what is being "normalized" is a relationship between a few 13th century-style monarchs in the Persian Gulf and the government that keeps those millions under perpetual occupation.
You might more accurately call it the normalizing of tyranny.
Its tangible benefits include a fresh round of American heavy-weapon sales into a fragile region. Israel has already placed a truly massive new order, something like you might expect from France or Germany, eight billion dollars worth of the latest stuff. The Gulf Monarchs also have wish lists for death machines.
And of course, earlier, Saudi Arabia placed a record-setting order, the same Saudi Arabia busy killing thousands of poor people in Yemen, subsidizing terror in places like Syria, executing record numbers of its own citizens, and employing kidnapping, extortion, and murder in the affairs of state.
The principle that Israel must always be kept well ahead of any Arab State in armaments combined with the new concept of bribing some Arab States into accepting “normalization” by giving them access to American weapons – which is exactly what the United States has just done – is like a deliberately constructed regional arms race, one from which America receives all the sales orders.
It is a creative and promising scheme for a region top-heavy with tyranny and injustice and poverty and division. Just the kind of creative solution you expect from a man like Trump.
Another benefit is a new proposed intelligence and surveillance system to be constructed in a region with only authoritarian governments. The forces of Enlightenment just keep marching ahead.
My God, what a disastrous set of policies, but you would never sense that from the words of our press and politicians.
Orwell’s “1984” was about Stalin’s Russia, but it just as well applies to the Middle East under American influence.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
