Reaping the Whirlwind

May 10, 2014 

This will be a short post this week as I have spent most of the day looking at videos and pictures from the terrible Trade Union Building fire that took so many lives in Odessa, Ukraine, over a week ago.

I do not know the people in those pictures and videos, but they are horrifying. There was video of people in a crowd in front of the burning building lobbing more fire bombs into the building, chanting and shouting over and over; video of a man coming to an upper window of the building, only to be shot or shot at by someone in that crowd; one of a man at a back or side door, hustling men armed with sticks and other weapons into the burning building.

There were still pictures of bodies – said to have been found inside the building after the fire. One was of a man on his back, hands curled in agony, with only his head and hands burned; another of a woman with that same pattern of burned head and hands, her skirt thrown up above her naked body and her legs spread as though she had been raped; a third was of a very pregnant woman – said to have been one of the workers in the building – bent backward over her desk with what looked to be a cord of some kind tightened around her neck. The text said she had been strangled to death.

I don’t know who did these things. I do know that when the victims of the fire were finally identified by local officials, they were not the “Russian operatives” some of our press reported, but were identified as local Odessians.

I also know, the Empire, along with the EU and NATO, has had its fingers in the pie, there in the Ukraine, for years.  Our Assistant Secretary of State for European affairs, our Ambassador to the Ukraine, at least one Senator, the Vice President and the Director of the CIA have all made trips to the Ukraine to support (or use) the Maidan uprising, make plans as to who we wanted for, or to stand with, our “hand picked” and unelected replacement of the democratically elected Prime Minister, (who we helped oust, in the usual name of “Peace and Democracy”™).

I am not saying we did this particular act. I am saying that everywhere the Empire plants its bloody boots in the name of “peace and democracy”, shit like this, or worse, happens – from the Eastern European countries, down through Africa, the Middle East, Central and South America and Asia. Everywhere we have sown to the wind, they have reaped a whirlwind of internal hatred and violence.

But Russia and China, against whom we have released these latest whirlwinds in our eagerness to “contain” them, control world resources and maintain our worldwide hegemony, are not small and helpless countries on the verge of bankruptcy. They have the power to hurt us back and our imperial allies; they have the power to release their own whirlwinds.

I can’t get those images from Odessa out of my mind; I don’t want to get them out of my mind. As much as I despise the Empire and its ruthlessness, I do love this country. I don’t ever want to see the kinds of pictures and videos that I saw from Odessa being released from some future United States on YouTube.

But unless we can look at those people around the world, that we’ve so arrogantly harmed, with the same horror and heartbreak that we would feel if they were our loved ones, they will be our loved ones one of these days.

No empire lasts forever. Neither will this one. Right now, the Empire is in grave danger of having taken a step to far, of sowing one too many seeds to the wind and unless we find the will to stop them, it will be our turn to reap the whirlwind, this time.