#war on terror

[mikedawwwson]

"The Good War on Terror" written by Christopher Hayes.

I will be producing a print 'zine of this in the coming months. Join my Monthly 'Zine Club to get the first copies automatically sent your way!

#september 11 #9/11 #saving private ryan #steven spielberg #greatest generation #tom hanks #george w. bush #war on terror

[hussyknee]

History isn't a disparate collection of stories from long ago. It's the necessary context for the present moment and the forecast for the future. All histories are intertwined, and the narratives of power and privilege, oppression and resistance, adversity and triumph are as constant in their patterns as the laws of physics.

#free palestine #black lives matter #landback #civil rights movement #war on terror #fascism #imperialism #colonization #genocide #colonialism #indigenous sovereignty #climate change #military industrial complex #current events #labour rights #trans genocide #eugenics #this describes literally every political struggle going on right now #and western leftists and liberals are like pikachu face and handwringing every damn time and I AM TIRED #you dont even need to know the entire history of palestine and israel #you just need to understand how colonization and ethnic cleansing and fascism WORKS #you are morally obliged to actively seek education and have a unequivocal stances against violation and annihilation #knee of huss

[probablyasocialecologist]

Israel has thus fully embraced the “war on terror” and richly profited from it. One of the most successful though bloody counterinsurgency battles of the early twenty-first century was the Sri Lankan government’s destruction of the Tamil Tigers militant group. Israel played a key, though largely unpublicized, part in Colombo’s successful campaign in a civil war that killed and disappeared more than 200,000 people, mostly Tamils, over a quarter-century that ended in 2009. Israel sold Kfir fighter jets and trained the Special Task Force, a brutal unit of the Sri Lankan police. Sri Lanka borrowed the Israeli playbook during the last stages of the civil war and ignored calls by NGOs, human rights organizations, and foreign governments to cease violence. The military stopped when the Tamil Tigers were completely decimated and Velupillai Prabhakaran, its leader, killed. Israel also helped generations of Sinhalese politicians build and maintain Sinhalese enclaves in the north and east of Sri Lanka, areas where most Tamils live. The aim was to create buffer zones around Tamil-majority areas and establish an unofficial occupation of Tamil territory. These plans continued after 2009 and Sinhala colonization has never stopped. These ideas were directly taken from Israel’s presence in the West Bank, where Palestinian sovereignty is denied with numerous fortified Jewish colonies. Israel signed a US$50 million deal with Sri Lanka in 2021 to upgrade the country’s Kfir jets.

Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

#sri lanka #tamil tigers #israel #war on terror #The Palestine Laboratory

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

I've seen a lot of folks talk about how in-universe things would be different in a modern AU, but I'm curious if you have any thoughts about how Animorphs and its world building would be if it were being written now in a (post?-) war on terror world rather than a post-Vietnam War world.

So this'd be speculation, but. But a lot has changed since 1996. We'd probably get YA Animorphs if published today (sigh), and we'd definitely get 6 or 12 oversized tomes rather than 54 slim paperbacks. On the plus side, we'd get canon queer rep, especially Tobias and Marco, and we'd get updated animal facts.

And then there's the War on Terror. Controversial opinion: I think it wouldn't change that much about Animorphs, because it's obvious in hindsight that Applegate saw the foreverwar coming.

Like, look at Marco's speech in MM2 about how the U.S. is "always on the lookout for new enemies... Enemies 'R Us, EnemyMart, J.C. Enemy. Don't worry, we'll find one." Or his point in #46 about how "global warfare is a thing of the past. That’s what people think, anyway" and the inherent danger in war becoming this glorious abstraction to too many Americans. Look at Visser's point about how humans "tear down a living man but revere a dead one" and use tragic deaths to forward the political agenda, whatever that might be. Look at Jake's job in #54, developed because "terrorism had grown... religious extremists... antigovernment paranoids... latter-day racists."

And then look at the andalites. "Police force of the galaxy" (#8), "Meddlers of the galaxy" (HBC), who often do more harm than good to the planets they try to save. They try to use their tech and military advantages responsibly... but not so responsibly that they're willing to give up even an iota of power to save lives. We first meet the andalites as the absolute good guys, and then over the course of the series that foundation crumbles (#8), and crumbles (#18), and crumbles (#19), and crumbles (#38), until Jake and Eva are "making deals with taxxons and yeerks to gain a victory fast enough to keep the andalites from deciding... to blast the entire planet out of existence and take out the bulk of the yeerk race along with the human race" (#53). Sound like any countries you know?

Anyway, Animorphs shows the Afghanistan War wasn't caused by the Sept. 11 murders any more than World War I was caused by Franz Ferdinand's murder. Applegate was writing in a U.S. itching for any moral-looking excuse to go to war, and clearly she knew it.

#animorphs #k.a. applegate #u.s. politics #war on terror #u.s. imperialism #violence #war #terrorism

[shiftythrifting]

*~war on terror uwu~* 🙄

Ohio Valley Antique Mall

#shiftythrifting #thrifting #thrift finds #playing cards #blast from the past #politics #war on terror #iraq war #antique store #admin ten’s finds #war shit #issued to all military and every flea market

[rednblacksalamander]

#bush #reagan #politics #political cartoon #capitalism #socialism #anarchism #war on drugs #war on terror

[ophilosoraptoro]

Just because I don't like it, doesn't mean it's propaganda.

Just because I like it, doesn't mean it isn't propaganda.

#propaganda #government propaganda #government #war on terror #media distraction #deep state #politics #new world order #media manipulation

[jasontoddsthickthigh]

#free palestine #palestine #free gaza #gaza strip #israel #gaza #genocide #gaza genocide #justice for palestinians #ethnic cleansing #afganistan #war on terror #israeli war crimes #veterans #a war with no weapons of mass destruction

[minu-moni]

Today an excellent video was recommended to me on YouTube about homonationalism. It came at the perfect time too, because I honestly had never heard of the term until the genocide started.

The fact that it’s from one year ago too is just the icing on the cake.

It’s very easy to understand and I recommend to people who wanna understand better what homonationalism is and why queers in the army isn’t as liberating and progressive as people think it is.

#homonationalism #video essay #video recommendation #propaganda #war on terror #Islamophobia #lgbtphobia #Youtube

[eelhound]

"Sometimes I see people darkly warning that prosecuting Trump could set a precedent that would be used to prosecute Democratic presidents for their crimes. My response to this warning is best expressed in the title of a classic song by the band Panic! at the Disco: 'Don’t threaten me with a good time.'

I would love to see President Barack Obama, for example, face criminal prosecution for the many drone strikes he ordered around the world — including the strikes that killed radical imam Anwar al-Awlaki and his sixteen-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, both of whom were US citizens. These strikes amounted to extrajudicial executions of terrorism suspects who hadn’t been convicted of any crime and who were nowhere near anything that could remotely be construed as a battlefield. In the case of al-Awlaki, there’s reason to think that it was an extrajudicial execution not even for clearly illegal acts but for the inflammatory words in his sermons.

And that brings us to the real double standard here. Trying to overturn an American election is the kind of crime the Justice Department takes seriously. Extrajudicially slaughtering scary Muslims in a foreign country, even ones with US citizenship, is not. Even George W. Bush invading Iraq based on lies doesn’t count. Hundreds of thousands of people died and millions became refugees, but those were the wrong kind of victims for our justice system to take an interest in them.

The solution to that double standard, though, isn’t to let Trump off the hook for conspiring to overturn a democratic election. It’s to indict George W. Bush. One president finally being subject to prosecution for some of his crimes isn’t nearly enough, but it’s a start."

- Ben Burgis, from "Donald Trump Being Prosecuted for His Crimes Is Good, Actually." Jacobin, 4 August 2023.

#ben burgis #quote #quotations #american imperialism #war crimes #american history #war on terror #jurisprudence #george w. bush #barrack obama #trump

[mikedawwwson]

"It's Hard To Imagine"

At my present age, my life feels very much bifurcated by 9/11. I have twenty years and change of conscious memory before that date, and now I have twenty years and change after. I used color in this comic, to show different time-periods. For me, riding that Q train home was when one era ended and the next began.

I have sent my brand new 'zine, THE GOOD WAR ON TERROR, out to the printer's. This is a reformatted and fully revised print edition of the webcomic I've published previously, adapting (with permission), an essay by the same name written by Chris Hayes. This diary comic pairs well with that piece, and is included in the 'zine.

Join my Almost Monthly 'Zine Club today, and I'll instantly send you some comics in the mail, and you'll also receive this brand new 'zine as soon as it arrives at my house in the first week of January. I think it's going to be a really special comic, and I'm looking forward to sharing it.

#comics #Chris hayes #9/11 #politics #war on terror #diary comics

[marxism-absurdism]

🇺🇲Army of the United States🇺🇲: a military lookbook

PART III(FINAL)

1980s - Early 2000s: Woodland Camouflage BDUs. The Army continued to use the BDU pattern into the 1980s. It featured a distinctive woodland camouflage pattern.

Gulf War & Desert Storm(1990-91): The Desert Storm uniform featured a distinctive desert camouflage pattern that included various shades of tan, brown, and light green. This pattern was designed to blend in with the desert terrain, making it harder for the wearer to be spotted.

Early 2000s - Present: ACUs (Army Combat Uniform). Introduced in the early 2000s, ACUs replaced the BDUs. They featured a digital camouflage pattern and were available in both a temperate and arid version.

2010s - Present: Operational Camouflage Pattern (OCP). The OCP, also known as Scorpion W2, is the current standard uniform. It includes a pattern with subdued green, tan, and gray colors and is worn with the rank and name tapes on a Velcro patch.

Once again, credits to @viktorviolettaenterprises for his wonderful CC without which this lookbook wouldn't have been possible

#sims 4 #sims 4 cc #ts4 history challenge #ts4 lookbook #ts4 military #ts4 cc #ts4 historical #ts4 simblr #ts4cc #sims 4 historical #sims 4 military #militarycc #military lookbook #war on terror #gulf war #afghanistan #iraq war #pride #us army #viktorviolettaenterprise

[probablyasocialecologist]

Deaths from terrorism in Africa have skyrocketed more than 100,000 percent during the U.S. war on terror according to a new study by Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. These findings contradict claims by U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) that it is thwarting terrorist threats on the continent and promoting security and stability. Throughout all of Africa, the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks in 2002 and 2003, resulting in a combined 23 casualties. At that time, the U.S. was just beginning a decades-long effort to provide billions of dollars in security assistance, train many thousands of African military personnel, set up dozens of outposts, dispatch its own commandos on a wide range of missions, create proxy forces, launch drone strikes, and even engage in ground combat with militants in Africa. Most Americans, including members of Congress, are unaware of the extent of these operations — or how little they have done to protect African lives. Last year, fatalities from militant Islamist violence in Africa rose by 20 percent — from 19,412 in 2022 to 23,322 — reaching “a record level of lethal violence,” according to the Africa Center. This represents almost a doubling in deaths since 2021 and a 101,300 percent jump since 2002-2003.

#usa #africa #war on terror #pentagon

[hussyknee]

Every time I think white and Western leftists can't disappoint me more, they prove me wrong.

Y'all memefied the threat of war with Iran following the assassination of Soleimani, the Australian wildfires that razed Aboriginal communities to the ground, Black Lives Matter, the fall of Afghanistan, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Putin, and the mass protests in Sri Lanka. The No Fly List has been leaked for the first time since 2014, showing that the majority of it are in there for the crime of having Muslim and Russian names, taking part in anti-war protests and being a child while Muslim. And now y'all have started merchandising the memes?

Every single time we point out that the suffering of diasporas and the Global South is not yours to joke about, we are inundated with screeching about how y'all need them to '''''cope'''' with having woken up to the fact that other people have been living in a fascist dystopia, that memes spread "awareness", that it's unfair to take the jokes to mean you don't care, and "we can be concerned about two things at once". Meanwhile, the jokes and memes and white coping drown out the voices of BIPoC and Eastern Europeans almost entirely. Then you forget all about us and eventually say that nothing we did made any difference, fighting the state is hopeless, and meme some more.

At this point I can only imagine that you wander into random people's funerals, crack jokes about the dead guy to his family and sell funeral t-shirts in exchange for telling everyone else that they're dead. "Well why can't we celebrate and uplift queer people?" – you mean white and Western queer people, because it's sure as hell not our queer people who're getting profiled and bombed and starved.

"That's not my experience of what we did" – we do not care. Your experience of your own actions, of how events unfolded for you and of our hurt and our suffering is utterly irrelevant. You do not get a say on whether you're hurting us. You don't get to police our tone and wording and anger. You don't get to weigh in with your white guilt and white defensiveness and Western and white privilege and pathological need to be the Main Character in every situation. "Why is this so guilt-tripping" that's your white guilt, Karen. The fact that you only just woke up to all the ways you've been asleep is your white privilege. Your inability to boost our voices and center us without any commentary and not speak for us is white supremacy. Your consistent focus on valorizing activists and advocates and centering white saviours is white supremacy. Your making money and fame off "raising awareness" and "educating" other people about our suffering is capitalist exploitation and white supremacy. You are not living through a "major historical event", we are. Every damn day.

Those of you who don't behave like this will never chime in and tell your racist fellows "hey stop that, that's fucked up! That's racist! Shut up!" You dont look for resources yourself, dont accept that maybe we can't provide solutions every time we raise concerns, that maybe your allyship should be about self-reflection and learning how to handle your own emotions without taking up all the air in a room.

This shit is fucking constant. Every single time. We are suffocating. Even with all of that, do you have any idea of the amount of patience and understanding and forebearance we have tried to give you?

Edit: btw the trans femme of colour who uses it/its pronouns that said "please stop memeing about our very serious issue, go read these sources, pay attention to this bill, if you care then act like it"? Y'all sent it so much racist hate that it had to deactivate. But yeah, y'all care about queer people. Lmao.

#racism #white supremacy #anti-blackness #white privilege #western imperialism #usamerican imperialism #social justice #colonialism #capitalism #holy fucking bingle #no fly list #war in ukraine #black lives matter #climate change #climate justice #sri lanka protests #war on terror #police state #fascism #white people #western leftists #current events #us politics #eastern europe #global south #knee of huss

[dailyhistoryposts]

On This Day In History

March 19th, 2003: US President George W. Bush orders air strikes on Baghdad., beginning the US-Iraqi War.

This war would last over 8 years and failed to find any supposed weapons of mass destruction or connection between Iraq and the terrorist attacks in 9/11/2001. The war directly resulted in the death of an estimated 300,000 civilians, and indirectly more due to factors like poorer healthcare, increased lawlessness, and degrading infrastructure. The created power vacuum also contributed directly to the rise of the terrorist group the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL/Da'ish).

#history #war on terror #us history #iraqi history #isis #isil #islamic state #war #death

[theexodvs]

Even if Spain was responsible for the destruction of the USS Maine (it wasn't), the Spanish-American War was worse.

Pearl Harbor was bad. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were worse.

The policies Allende would have implemented would have been bad. The US installing Pinochet was worse.

What David Koresh did was bad. What the FBI did in response was worse.

9/11 was bad. The War on Terror is worse.

Many of the things Sadaam did were bad. Bush's lies about WMDs, and the war these lies justified, were worse.

What Hamas did was bad. What the IDF is doing in response is worse.

This isn't hard, people.

#disproportionate retribution #spanish american war #USS Maine #Pearl har #Nagasaki #Hiroshima #Salvador All #augusto pinochet #Pinochet #David K 0 resh #Waco Siege #War on Terror #Sadaam #George Bush #Bush 43 #War in Iraq #WMD #israel hamas war