Dear Friends,                                                                Return of the mass-murderers

Remember this?

Well you don’t need to remember, it’s happening again, now, in the skies over Tehran.

I was naïve enough to think that I would never have to see that letter and number together again: B-52. The B-52 is a killing machine and a terror machine. It has no other purpose than to flatten whatever is beneath it. “Military targets”, right, but the carpet bombing approach will never just hit those. All life around them will die. The B-52 is first of all a murderer of civilians.

There are a number of things that I thought we would not have to see again. One of them was “strategic bombing”, that is, terror bombing. Man, was I ever wrong. Here we go again. I even thought that the US, with Britain the creator of terror bombing, wouldn’t have occasion to dust off the B-52s and send them out re-awakened angels of death. Not out of that benevolence usually so lacking in American foreign policy, but because American interests could largely be secured by economic power.

Well that’s all gone. And, yes, what’s happening above Tehran is the free choice of a stupid, ignorant, vindictive man who thinks of nothing other than his own gratification. He didn’t come out of nowhere, he’s the product, almost machine-made, of the capitalist mode of production in its latest phase. And let’s face it, he won’t kill nearly as many people as the Democratic and Republican presidents who presided over the US invasion of Vietnam. (And let’s not forget, the Democrats started it.)

But this is now. We’re supposed to be just a tiny bit further along on the long road to humanity. Why is this war happening? Because of two people. The president of Israel, Netanyahu, does indeed want it to stay out of the slammer. In addition, though, and I think this is what most excites his desire to kill, he has a suicidal devotion to the Crusader State mentality, Israel must be the new Kingdom of Jerusalem. This is a catastrophe for Israel, for the people of Israel.

Trump is a patsy. He never makes decisions on his own – he shirked the responsibility for deciding who to fire on The Apprentice. But he desperately needs to appear strong, and because of his very crude notion of strength, to be ruthless, and violent. Make no mistake, for Trump, self-gratification comes before anything else. Yes, Big-Macs are very important here. But inflicting misery, pain and death on others is just as important, in fact they go together.

All of the “military” adventures on which Trump has engaged were completely unnecessary, made the world worse not better. This is the biggest.

When you send out the B-52s you have no concern whatsoever for the human beings beneath them. But aren’t we supposed to be supporting the people of Iran in their struggle against a tyrannical government (and yes, it is brutal and tyrannical)? How is this supposed to help? Iranians are dying every day, and the rate is increasing. The mass-murderers have hardly started, just wait until they really get going.

Junking every remaining B-52 – put them through that machine that reduces cars to a little cube of metal in Bond movies – is a wonderful idea. The B-52s can do things that even the most advanced new weapons can’t, above all, they can carry far more bombs and missiles than anything around: they can kill even more people. But the new stuff all together is even worse.

Junking every remaining B-52 is not purely symbolic … at least it would not be if it opened the doors for ridding ourselves of all the death machines. How likely is that?

Now, call to mind, seriously and passionately, the names we all know, or, we should know: Nanking, Guernica, Coventry, Berlin, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Aleppo, Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran. The first that come to mind, many, many others. Can you justify even one of them?

To stop the bombing in one particularly place – right now it’s Tehran – we must call up, bring into the present, all the horrors of the past, all the dead in all those ruined cities. Call on the dead to speak to us. Do you have an answer for them?

Love and solidarity,

            Bobby

The Federal government no longer exists.