Syria: There is no method to this tragic madness as the global political establishment "implodes"- by RM

Aleppo, Syria

On 23 April 2016, the United Nations and Arab League Envoy to Syria put out an estimate of 470,000 that had died in the war.  

These cold numbers are the first thing that hit you about Syria. Figures telling of a human catastrophe on a scale hard to compute. Suffering on a level to which any rational response seems inadequate – 470,000 people killed, according to the latest estimates; 11.5 percent of the population injured; 45 percent of a country of 22 million made homeless; 4 million refugees and 6.36 million internally displaced persons. Life expectancy is down from 70.5 years in 2010 to an estimated 55.4 years in 2015. Welcome to the Syrian civil war. 

The Syrian conflict has become worse than a nightmare, because after a nightmare you usually wake-up to some kind of normality, instead this is an ongoing nightmare, from which you never wake up.

In the meantime, the global political establishment, our political leaders, representing different so-called "power blocks", blame everything and everyone, except themselves, as they fuel this war with weapons from their weapons industry and that from around the world. 

Worse still, is that these weapons purchases are financed with money from mostly ignorant and misinformed taxpayers. 

Taxpayers usually are more interested in using an App on their smartphone, or in finding out on social media, like Facebook,what a friend is doing, or even why his or her dog prefers a certain type of dog food above another. Being concerned about whatever does not directly affect him or her is the last thing on the agenda. 

In Europe the war in Syria hardly ever is looked at as a human tragedy, or has anyone ask who the real culprits are of this tragedy, but sadly equated to what kind of impact the large number of refugees will have on European living standards.

Former US President Dwight Eisenhouwer once said about the weapons industry: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron ".   

Yes indeed, arms dealers and their government cabinet-level cronies always profit from a war.

On top of that there is now also a perverse logic that pervades restrictions. Military aid and arms sales by the US, but certainly not restricted to them alone, are now approved to formerly off-limits regimes.

Of the 67 countries which have received or are set to receive U.S. military aid, 32 were  previously identified by the State Department as having "poor" or worse human rights records.

Obviously, the central question is: does this make the world a safer place for anyone but arms manufacturers and the politicians who love and have them funded ?

Every academic in the world will tell you, Syria today is the most awful humanitarian catastrophic drama to hit the Levant since World War II. Do politicians realize that and make an effort to remedy it? No, not at all.

Whole families with small children ‒ some people terribly wounded by the bombings ‒ living in  olive groves under the elements, with neither shelter nor provisions.

And the drama continues. Russia used its Security Council veto at the UN to prevent any concerted action against the regime. Moscow also keeps the weapons and bombs coming.

Turkey, a NATO member, whose leader has his own aspirations for the area, supports whoever can help him diminish the Kurdish influence in the area, even ISIS. 

The Iranians use their expertise in crowd control to help Assad control the demonstrations against his regime, and the Americans are funding and supplying a Kurdish proxy army and different rebel groups to fight Assad forces, in addition to also bombing so-called "enemy targets".

Our global political establishment has had chance after chance to remedy the situation, but greed and hypocricy within a defunct political world order has made that impossible.

Syria and the surrounding region is now the epicenter of what is still to come - it is the beginning of cataclysmic developments around the world that will clarify to the world at large, "who was", "who is", and "who will come".

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EU-Digest 

Syria: Total Failure Of Industrialized World Political System - by RM

It is a tragedy to see how self-centered and seemingly disorganized the powers of the world are - and we all know who these powers are.

More than 100,000 people have been killed in the conflict so far, according to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. UN agencies say the number of children forced to flee Syria has reached one million, describing the figure as "a shameful milestone".

The use of chemical weapons  is brought up by both parties, but left up to outsiders instead of the UN to determine which side you want to believe, to  find out who the culprit is.

In the meantime some countries are now calling for direct involvement, while being nebulous about what they consider under direct action,  or worse,  what the consequences will be.

It's high time this charade stops and that the two major players in the conflict - Russia and the US, lay aside their ideological differences, call their "lackeys", and hammer out a deal. .

At least than can we start having some confidence in our political leaders again. 

EU-Digest

Biblical Teaching Also Applicable To Todays Political Leaders - by Apostle Paul

Apostle Paul in Arabia

^"24 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. ²⁵ Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. ²⁶ So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. ²⁷ But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified."

1  Corinthians verse 24-27

(PART ONE) Politics: If you believe the EU has political leadership problems look at the US - by Stephen Goldstein

Has American public life always been dominated by Lilliputians? Have we always had more shlemiels than heroes? If not, who were some of our relatively recent larger-than-life leaders, what did they have in common, and why don't we have (m)any equal to them today? Those are questions I ask myself and that I hear other people asking — except for the part about the Lilliputians.

Of course, the answer to my first two questions is a resounding No: Greatness and American have gone together in our past. I always think of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and one incident among many in her life. In 1939, when the Daughters of the American Revolution wouldn't let the African-American singer Marian Anderson perform before an integrated audience in its Constitution Hall, Mrs. Roosevelt publicly resigned from the DAR and arranged for Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial.

True leaders always accept responsibility for their actions. As President Truman rightly said, "the buck stops here." They seem to have a centeredness that makes them choose the right thing to do, not poll-tested messages and strategies. But tragically, no First Lady today would dare do anything as principled as Eleanor Roosevelt did. Contrast Truman's stand with Bill Clinton's fiasco enacting Don't Ask Don't Tell and President Obama's gyrations overturning it. Create a federal highway system and make space exploration a top priority today? We're too poor! Today, our answer to civil rights is voter suppression.

But why have we sunk so low? First, we emerged from the Second World War as the richest and most powerful nation on earth — and boasted of it. But since we lost the Vietnam War, President Nixon resigned in disgrace, and we went through the wrenching social dislocations of the 1960's, the country has suffered from clinical depression, from which we have yet to recover. Second, money has replaced morality in politics, and would-be leaders happily sell themselves. Third, we have not been able to adjust to our changing domestic diversity and our role as one among many equals in the world. In short, we are at war with ourselves because we no longer know who we are.

Writing fiction, Jonathan Swift engineered Gulliver's escape from the Lilliputians. Our plight is real and existential, but fixable: We have met the Lilliputians, and they are us — and only we can save us from ourselves.

Read more: America is lacking a larger-than-life leader - South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com