peace for whom?
When people speak of the post-war era as being an era of “relative peace,” I have to wonder, a peace for whom? Does a war only count as “peace-breaking” when it's white people who are the targets? Warring never stopped, and it certainly never stopped being funded by white upholders of the postcolonial order. It's just that now white people have to contend with the fragility of this glorious order they've created and held over our head as the pinnacle of political evolution, which is quite upsetting indeed. It’s upsetting because those who matter, as it turns out, also don’t matter. It’s upsetting because the systems capable of othering and dehumanizing others are also capable of othering and dehumanizing them. The same systems capable of invading the Middle East and installing permanent outposts like Israel are also, as it happens, capable of invading Greenland or Ukraine. Shocker, I know.
Does it only anger you because it came back to bite you in the ass? Or do you think the reason why we of the so-called Global South have been plagued by war, famine and poverty is because we are just barbarians incapable of peaceful coexistence? Your “elected officials” were elected to bomb us. Your “elected officials” passed legislation after legislation to expand their military’s already expansive capability of bombing or assisting in bombing us. This is the product of the system you created, that villainized and victimized people like me who came before me for generations for daring to fight it. How dare we not like the taste of the boot? How does it feel to taste it now yourself? Not so nice, I presume.
How can you—in good faith—reconcile peace with guns? How can you reconcile freedom with systemic subjugation of soldiers of your own or untermenschen like me to their superiors’ will? How can you reconcile justice with building an economy around (causing) disasters? Why are you so surprised that doing all the before produced this outcome? I guess my lineage hasn’t blessed me with your genes of supreme wisdom and my dumb monkey brain cannot comprehend these contradictions, unlike you.
I will relish in my schadenfreude because these fucked up concepts of “war crime,” “international law,” or “law-based order” were never there to protect anyone but give the oppressor a (thin) veil to hide behind. There is no “war crime,” war is the fucking crime. Militaries exist to invade new lebensraum and to protect the interests of the oppressors, of the capitalists, and everyone capable of bending another’s will to their own; never the “common man.” Militaries exist to kill. Their existence is the gravest crime there ever was. You brought this onto yourselves. Reap what you sowed for once.