By Olivia Pierson
[First published on Incite Politics 18/4/18]

After the United States, France and Britain intervened in Syria’s civil war this past weekend, over Bashar al Assad’s use of chemical weapons on innocent civilians, the question that is repetitively raised is why draw the ‘red-line’ over these weapons and not over civilians dying by other horrible means such as bombings, shootings or beheadings? Aside from being against international law as agreed by the Geneva Protocol (which Syria signed in 1968), what is it about the use of chemical weapons that makes everyone erupt into loud, moral convulsions of horror?

It’s an understandable question and one worthy of some kind of explanation.  

As I understand it, chemical weapons, along with biological and nuclear weapons, are classified as weapons of mass destruction, which means they are designed specifically for indiscriminate killing on a large scale well beyond the confines of any battlefield (compared with today’s asymmetrical warfare trend, even the very concept of a battlefield now has a slight whiff of the romantic). 

Weapons of mass destruction can contaminate territory and ecology with toxic residue, damaging the terrain for any future occupiers, yet this seems almost trivial in comparison with the future horrors such weapons can wreak on survivors in the form of chronic illnesses and cancers, and worse – birth defects in tomorrow’s children. These weapons extend the pain of a war beyond the duration of its dark night and immediate casualties, as if they aren’t bad enough. The effects make themselves felt as a vicious menace long after the war has been won or lost.

Unexpected, creeping, and often scentless and soundless, chemical weapons are more akin to a terror tactic than a war tactic, thus perpetuating an insidious form of psychological trauma. Once deployed there is absolutely no possible way to defend oneself or fight back. During WWI soldiers who were subject to gas attacks in the trenches not only suffered from shell shock, they also suffered from chronic anticipatory fear after the ‘silent green fog’ of mustard gas caused their fellow combatants to die agonising deaths as their skin and eyes burned while their lungs blistered and filled with fluid, drowning them. Gas masks were invented as an effective protective measure.

Today, because of the excellent protective gear that soldiers are assigned, chemical weapons are not considered such an effective weapon to kill combatants, which means that any regime stockpiling them intends them to be used on non-combatants; a particularly unwarrior-like tactic that breaks all the modern codes of humane warfare (yes, such an apparent oxymoron still exists). As the regime of Saddam Hussein showed us with his Anfal campaign in Halabja, March 1988, stockpiles of chemical weapons are usually intended for genocide.

After the Great War, where chemical gases were used with tragic abandon, the Geneva Protocol was set up to ban the use of chemical weapons in armed conflicts. This remarkable treaty echoed a distant time from 250 years earlier when, in 1675, France and Germany (along with other European allies and enemies) agreed formally to a signed treaty that any soldier who used poisoned bullets in his munitions would be severely punished. This first international ban on using chemical weapons was the Strasbourg Agreement, and it was binding for the duration of the war. 

Despite the many times it has been flagrantly ignored by some signatories, the Geneva Protocol is still international law for good reason, and for laws to be worth a damn they have to be enforced. 

Genocidal maniacs need to be restrained and if that means that Team America has to act like the World Police in order for that to happen, then I say bravo.

​If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" ​​​​​​

By Olivia Pierson
[First Published on Incite Politics 10/4/18]

Syria’s civil war has all the hallmarks of a sustained foreign entanglement that may make Afghanistan look like a kindergarten picnic in contrast.

The catastrophe has been acute for seven years now and is nowhere close to any kind of amelioration – in fact, the malady is really just becoming chronic, for it’s sucking in so many outside actors from some very significant nations.

The crisis started inside Syria in 2011 when Bashar al Assad cracked down on pro-democratic protests and opened up his hellish prisons, like Saidnaya, to unleash the most malevolent of captured Al Qaeda operatives on to his population so that, in the eyes of the world, he would have the resemblance of the indispensable strongman staving off terror in his country. After watching Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi be toppled by western powers, Assad assumed he’d be next on the list (and in an ideal world he should’ve been). By 2013 the fledgling Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (Al Qaeda rebranded) appeared. As cynical as this sounds – and it is diabolically cynical in fact – Assad encouraged and facilitated a full Islamic revolt to stay in power, hence the shockingly rapid expansion of ISIS and other terrorist militias inside Syria.  

Iran, always panting to fight Sunni Arabs with their own forces and those of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, support Assad fully; we know he is their proxy puppet guaranteeing them a bridge of land from the Iran-Iraq border all the way through to the Mediterranean Sea and Israel.

Israel, Iran’s greatest foe, the one Iran keeps declaring they’ll wipe off the world map, cannot abide, nor should it have to abide, Iranian drones infiltrating Israeli airspace. In February of this year Israel shot down an Iranian drone before having one of its F-16s shot down by Syrian forces in retaliation. So long as Iran denies Israel’s right to exist, Israel will not suffer an Iranian presence near the Golan Heights.

In the last 24 hours Israel has again conducted missile strikes on the Iranian T4 airbase in Syria, a major airbase near Homs that has a strong Russian military presence.

The United States is in Syria to annihilate the Islamic State using pro-western Syrian Kurds as boots on the ground. But now Turkey is making war on the Kurds in Afrin, Northern Syria, as they will never accept Kurdish efforts for total sovereignty given that Turkey has over 15 million Kurds within its population. So, Kurdish militias are now also fighting a NATO ally, though how long Turkey can be tolerated to remain in NATO is anyone’s guess.

The United States has already unleashed a missile bombardment on Assad’s airforce for their use of chemical weapons on Syrian civilians in Khan Shaykhun last year. Now Assad has done it again in a suburb east of Damascus. We are awaiting President Trump’s reaction and that of his hawkish and newly minted National Security Advisor John Bolton.

Russia has thrown its power behind Assad, with the blessing of Iran, of course. Longing to be the lead super-power actor in the Middle East, as Russia was before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Putin uses his regular forces and mercenary troops on the ground, as well as sustained airpower to keep propping up Assad’s despicable regime. Syria protects Putin’s only Mediterranean port in Tartus, which harbours some of his powerful warships and nuclear vessels.

The United States and Russia have already had a vicious clash in Deir al-Zor, eastern Syria, where Russian, Syrian and Iranian forces were attacked by US forces and their allies in February this year. The American media were too focused on the bogus story of Trump/Russia collusion to take much notice that America conducted air and drone strikes killing or wounding 300 Russian fighters in a theatre of war. So much for the much-touted Trump–Putin bromance.

This war in Syria has already heavily impacted the West through the refugee crisis, which has seen hundreds of thousands of them seek asylum in Western countries. Over four million have fled and are hosted in Turkey. When Erdogan feels he isn’t getting what he wants from European leaders, he threatens to unleash more refugees into their nations.
​
I hope I happen to be profoundly wrong, but it looks as though this is all shaping up to be a far more sustained struggle than Afghanistan has proved to be; there are just so many significant outside actors involved. President Trump is on record as saying that he wants American troops to leave Syria as soon as the Islamic State is fully defeated, as Bush Senior withdrew from Kuwait leaving Saddam in place in Iraq after the mission to liberate Kuwait had been achieved. It can easily be argued that America paid a very heavy price for that half measure; the Iraqi Kurds and the Marsh Arabs sure as hell did. Assad is as evil as Saddam was. Scratch a Baathist dictator and find a malignant tyrant.

For now, the war criminal Assad has blatantly used chemical weapons again on women, children and babies, a gross breach of Geneva Protocol. I cannot see President Trump turning his back on a staunch reprisal… so, we wait to see in the coming days what that may look like, if indeed anything happens at all.


[Update: since writing this piece, the U.S, France and Britain conducted targeted strikes on Syria's chemical weapons facilities on April 14th, 2018]


If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" ​​​​​​

By Olivia Pierson
[First published on Incite Politics]


The quest to remove American monuments and memorials is a curious assault on America’s dramatic history. 

A whole slew of monuments have already been removed, with some having been relocated to less prominent places where fewer people will see them. Christopher Columbus, General Robert E Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, General Thomas (Stonewall) Jackson, Supreme Court Justice Roger Tayney and monuments to various Confederate soldiers have already been dismantled and hauled away. After yesterday the list now includes President William McKinley, who fought against slavery and the Confederacy, but has nonetheless been condemned because he enacted territorial expansion resulting in the deaths of Native Americans. 
 
We are told that monuments of Thomas Jefferson, author of the American Declaration of Independence, are on the hit list because he was a slaveholder. Unbelievably, Abraham Lincoln is also on the list, even though it was his action that brought about the emancipation of black slaves. 

At New York’s Hofstra University, a protest was organised by students called ‘Jefferson Has Gotta Go!’ This particular anti-Jefferson mission is co-sponsored by a number of dubious campus organisations with absurd names, such as: Campus Feminist Collective, Collegiate Women of Colour, Queer & Trans People of Colour Coalition, Student Advocates of Safer Sex, The Gender Identity Federation and The Pride Network of Hofstra University. What a flock of odd-balls.

The pleasing thing is that more students came to protest against the removal of Hofstra’s Jefferson monument, than came to protest for its removal. It seems that the memory of Jefferson still attracts many young admirers, and rightly so when one considers that his elevated words uplifted the whole tone of human existence, not just American civilisation: Quo
te:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men…” End of quote.
Even as a slaveholder, a state which he was born into and inherited, slavery caused Jefferson some personal anguish because he actually believed the words he had written and he knew the power of those words would someday result in a dark measure of consequences if they were applied to all men in his country – and so it came to pass only 34 years after his death.  The Civil War was unprecedented in its brutality and heavy loss of American life. Jefferson’s anxiety that America deserved a strong reprisal for slavery was reflected in his letter to a friend:  
Quote:
“…but this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union… I can say with conscious truth that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would, to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way… but, as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.E
nd of quote.
In another instance, Jefferson again pondered the great evil of slavery and wrote these words: 

“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever:.. I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.” End of quote.
Neither the “consent of the masters” nor “their extirpation” was to occur; a bloody civil war did instead.

Nobody was a more devout student of Jefferson’s writings than Abraham Lincoln. This devotion helped him to see his great opportunity to announce the Emancipation Proclamation on the basis of the extraordinary war powers he held as commander-in-chief: Q
uote
“To take any measure which may subdue the enemy.” End
of quote. 
He seized this unusual chance constitutionally to emancipate black slaves in rebel states, then in all states.

But Lincoln’s achievement (and sacrifice) won’t assuage the ahistorical nihilists who are commonplace in America today, especially on university campuses. What they hate about today’s monuments is that they represent ‘white supremacy’ – and if that reason is good enough in the eyes of the various state officials who are now responsible for taking them down, we can all prepare ourselves to witness the monuments of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein being removed too. Both these men were rather superior to most people around them by the standards of nature’s meritocracy, hence becoming people renowned for their utterly exceptional achievements – and they also happened to be white. So, that just about clinches the coming ill fate of their monuments if the revisionist oddballs get their way. 

How does taking down these statues differ in any way from the barbaric animus that fuelled the Islamic State’s frenzy of hate toward the ancient ruins of Palmyra because they were “un-Islamic” i.e, either built in a time before Islam was even a twinkle in any Ishmaelite’s eye, or a symbol representing an idea that runs contrary to Islamic orthodoxy as written in the Koran, Sunna or Hadith? That was ISIS’ way of saying: these ancient symbols are morally subversive and disgusting. Yet, what these modern American PC stalwarts are concluding is exactly that same atavistic impulse: these symbols must be removed because in their single-minded, orthodox little view of the world they are morally subversive and disgusting by today’s pious standards. (Who would have ever thought we would be tossed lessons in virtuous standards by fat, ugly, body-pierced, tattooed, man-hating, gender-neutral freaks with blue hair who stomp around in jackboots?)

Compare today’s statue topplers with the Iraqis in 2003, who ripped down statues of Saddam Hussein as the coalition forces rolled in to liberate them from his grip, but here lies the difference: they were tearing down the image of a cruel dictator who in their very lifetimes had unleashed his secret police squads to terrorise their families, their children, their friends and society – barely a single Iraqi didn’t know personally an acquaintance, a friend or a family member who had been executed or tortured by Saddam’s henchmen. The type of immediate animus that smashes a real symbol of evil oppression in this context is entirely fitting as an overthrow unfolds.

But, what we are seeing today in America is manufactured outrage theatrically on display after centuries of developed existence between our own time and a time that was not under the weird, short-sighted scrutiny of today’s standards, or very often the lack of them. Rather than a culture of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, this all reeks to high heaven of a fragile self-righteousness combined with a victim-obsessed vicariousness that denotes existential anguish and a life of unimaginable boredom.
​
Africans practised slavery often, and many still do (especially if they are Muslim). Native Americans practised slavery often, but they never get tired of smugly condemning white people who indulged in slavery well over a hundred and fifty years ago. They still like to put up a big boohoo song and dance about it without ever referencing their own ancestors’ shameful practices. This one-sided view of transgressions discloses their marked insincerity. 


If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" ​​​​​