One of the truths of being a lefty these days is just the lack of real fight. I mean you can pen all sorts of wonderful words and make a lot of fluff. Yet I would say I don’t see various figures as some kind of enemy or opposition. Like for example I don’t see much difference between different presidents of the US who are supposedly opposed to each other or to the various poles of politics in my own country. 

Some are more likable than others, yet some I have liked I don’t agree with their policies and some I don’t like I find their general policies don’t irk me as much. In Australia recently the opposition was saying we need to be digging more holes in the ground and ramping up extraction. Yet there are already a lot of mines and extraction going on that are highly productive and highly profitable. Few people ask where the money goes?

Are our current extractive industries delivering what the country needs? So in a way the opposition is saying no, we must have more. Yet the problem is more for who and what? If a handful of people are making big money already and the country still hasn’t got what it needs will more extraction deliver? Of course both sides of politics will claim it will when they need to. This discourse between opposing views is just different gear changes of the same engine.

Some like to run their engines hot and others want to cruise. Yet it is the same machine going in the same direction. Say we go back to the US for a moment, a study claimed that sanctions the US imposed from 1971 until 2021 had killed over 30 million people through imposed famines, poverty and whatever else. Yet you can’t pin that to one person or one administration. It is the whole system. So if that kind of horror has gone on for that long why are we shocked now?

There are many reasons and even though we live under quite strict censorship overall everyone has a phone with powerful cameras and there are various platforms that operate around the world. In some countries for example I had heard that if you were caught filming during air raids you could be jailed for quite a few years. Yet me writing all of this isn’t really doing much. I am just writing. Mocked at times, ignored mostly and I do have a few people who have a peek.

What is it though that sets the scene and is a good indicator of the people we choose to either love or hate. Behaviour. If we say humanity we have missed the point because the sanctions are anti-human. Say the invasion and semi-colonised state of China by Japan that lasted 14 years. US scholars say the Japanese killed 20 million Chinese, some other scholars say 30 million and the Chinese say 35 million.

The US would blame Mao for famines that the Japanese had caused by the Chinese flooding out the Japanese army which caused a famine. For the US it is just convenient to blame Mao, they know it isn’t factual and for the Chinese they respect that it was a hard decision to drive out the Japanese and in the process lose their own people. Who would you blame? Well the Japanese get zero blame from the US but the US knew they could nuke them and get away with it because essentially they knew the bigger picture. The key is control. Who will stay in control? One indicator is behaviour.