Solstice, Bloody Solstice: Thoughts on the Darkest Day

What the Romans called “the new sun” has risen. The seed catalogs are arriving and while the wood stove’s fire struggles against the strengthening cold, a new year is being born. This theme of death and rebirth, ebb and the flow has long occupied human thought and practice. Huge stones, hauled great distances and erected with astronomical precision at places like Stonehenge, for ritual observance testify to the long fascination this season has held for we shivering tenants, squatting on the “third stone from the sun.”

As Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) organized they tended to displace such “pagan” observance while appropriating their important ceremonial dates. Thus, we flock to stores rather than stones to ritualize the Christmas convention. Theoretically the jealous Sky God is pleased.

Meanwhile, Gazan children, mothers, doctors, nurses and “relief” workers die in the thousands from gleefully delivered U.S. munitions, while “excess deaths” and falling life expectancies are “delivered” stateside to our distracted and downscale population. Ralph Nader has argued that in Gaza, “The probative evidence …. points to over 300,000 deaths and almost the entire population of 2.3 million Palestinians sick or injured without medical treatment, shelter, food, clean water, electricity and fuel.”

Nader and the organization he founded, Public Citizen, have been reporting on and organizing against corporate criminality for decades. Yet here the story is similar to Gaza in some ways. In January 2023 the annual “point-in-time” count set a record of 653,104 Americans “experiencing” homelessness.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office reports that 26 million of us are “experiencing” life without health insurance—— which translates into what the wonks call “worse health outcomes” —— more sickness, early death, pain, and suffering.

In more civilized countries (not subject to US sanctions,  bombing, partition, and resource theft) universal healthcare, housing and education are broadly shared. Lately the media have been enthusing about allegedly good news from Syria, where (reportedly woke) jihadi forces have taken power.

On August 31, 2013, Barack Obama issued a presidential “Finding,” (based on alleged use of WMD) officially committing the United States to the removal of Syria’s  secular government. He pledged to “support the Syrian people (sic) through our pressure on the Assad regime.” He pledged support to what he called “the opposition” which consisted mostly of Islamist fighters, Kurdish separatists and “color revolutionists.” Almost 10 years later, it  apparently all worked out.

Back in 2016, I stumbled across a piece by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Politico; “Why the Arabs Don’t Want Us In Syria.” He began, “Because my father was murdered by an Arab, I’ve made an effort to understand the impact of U.S. policy in the Mideast….”

Kennedy went on to recite a pretty straightforward (William Blum-style) history of hope-killing largely unknown to Americans but well understood in the Arab world. “The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949——barely a year after the agency’s creation. Syrian patriots had…. created a fragile secularist democracy based on the American model. But in 1949 Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Quwatli, hesitated to approve the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria.” The CIA, in typical fashion engineered a coup (see “Legacy of Ashes,” by CIA historian Tim Weiner). More coups and counter-coups followed. By 1955, CIA Director  Dulles declared that, “Syria is ripe for a coup” again. He dispatched Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt and “Rocky” Stone, fresh from their coup against the elected president of Iran, Mohammed Mosaddegh and the installation of a ruthless king/“Shah” Reza Pahlavi on his “Peacock Throne.”  Mosaddegh’s Iran, you see, had “nationalized” its oil and was bent on using the proceeds to benefit its population: An unpardonable sin also committed by Iraq, Libya, Venezuela and other upstart nations.  But I digress.

In his 2016 Politico piece Kennedy argued that “We should let the Arabs govern Arabia and turn our energies to…. nation building at home.” That’s not what we did—— exactly.

But now that our Islamist proxy HTS has taken Damascus journalist Kit Klarenberg reports (SeeScheerPost 12/18/24) that, “one thing seems assured——the country will be broken open to Western economic exploitation at long last.”

“Syria’s economic independence and strength ….and the benefits reaped by average citizens,…. were never acknowledged in the mainstream before or during the decade-long proxy war. Yet, countless reports from major international institutions underline this reality…now vanquished, never to return. For example, an April 2015 World Health Organization document noted how Damascus  “had one of the best-developed healthcare systems in the Arab world.”

“Per a 2018 UN investigation, ‘universal, free healthcare was extended to all Syrian citizens  who ‘enjoyed  some of the highest levels of care in the region.’” (Klarenberg)

In 2022 HTS pledged to “open up local markets to the global economy.” Their “free-market model” promises big profits for insurance corporations and a climate-killing trans-Syrian pipeline at last.

Happy  (bloody) Solstice.

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