Ask Bucko

When we look back into recent history two names appear as the authors of most of the world’s woes. There have been other, smaller catastrophes, but how do we overlook Gaza, Lebanon and Iran?

We could divert our attention and concentrate on the rise of AI, or the global climate disasters accumulating daily, but look closely enough and you will see the visible blood-stained hands of these two. Think a modern re-run of Stalin and Hitler, and you get a taste of the evil brew these old alchemists are making.

There is no need to unearth the evidence. Like the earlier monsters these men do not even bother to hide their crimes against humanity. They are open and unashamed. Let us count the ways …

Some of Trump’s damage

Before he took to murdering fishermen in the Eastern Pacific, Trump and his puppetmasters closed down U.S.A.I.D. Since then “estimates regarding the deaths attributable to the dismantling and funding cuts of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2025 vary based on studies, with some projections indicating hundreds of thousands to over a million deaths in the short term, and over 14 million by 2030.”

These deaths are really just a guess, but they include people suffering from HIV/AIDS, malaria, dengue fever and chikungunya, malnutrition in children, even soup kitchens supplying necessary food for refugees around the Sudanese civil war.

These deaths are of real people, really dying. And yet Trump’s evangelical Christian followers do not see any fault in his behaviour. A twisted reading of Christ’s teaching at the very least.

Of course we cannot ignore his allowing RFK Jnr’s allowing measles back into circulation, nor can we overlook Trump’s negligence and callous indifference to the earlier COVID-19 deaths, which he directly caused.

I reckon these deaths are up there with Stalin’s deliberate starvation of the Ukrainian people in 1932 – 33, but adding up millions of deaths against millions of deaths seems bloodless, when you read about it. But it happened, and U.S.A.I.D. is still shut down.

Some of Netanyahu’s greatest hits

It is impossible to go past Gaza if you want to see documented and verified genocide. They say 70,000 Palestinians have been killed, which is of itself a stupendous number, until you realise that at least 20,000 of that number were children. with thousands more “buried under the rubble”. If you re-read that phrase, it reminds us that they also made Gaza uninhabitable forever. As a grace note, we have that noted humanitarian Trump wanting to build a resort over the destruction. What a find for future archaeologists, should the human race survive these two.

And just recently …

As if they were not being noticed, they decided, jointly it seems, that on the last day of February they would bomb Iran and Lebanon. Bomb can sound relatively painless, but it is not. Wonder how the good burghers of Jerusalem and Austin felt when their ‘champions’ decided to unleash hell on Tehran and Beirut.

Was it ‘cleansing’ to inflict instant pain and suffering on civilians? Was there a sense of righteous achievement that women and children were again dodging missiles, and wandering in a search for safety? If you think my rhetoric is too harsh, it is your supposedly democratically elected representatives acting out their teenage fantasies, IN YOUR NAME. So maybe you should own it. If you don’t approve, make them stop. They work for you.

How the rest of us are made to suffer

So the Americans jump from excuse to excuse, trying to justify Trump’s actions. There are no reasons for attacking Iran, other than boredom and hubris. As for Netanyahu, he has gone from victim to imperialist. Now he wants an empire, built on stolen land, but it is only stolen from Arabs, so in the great tradition of overt racism, take it however you like. They’re ‘only Arabs’.

And what of the rest of the nations which are not a part of the new “axis of evil”? We will probably go through another global recession, similar to the last one in 2008, and similarly caused by America’s exceptionalism. You know, where they are so powerful that they are free to cause mayhem and chaos, and no recriminations.

Even Australia, so far away as to be immune from global ructions? No way. We are paying the price as well, with fuel and housing costs already soaring, and our own spineless government not daring to cast the blame, where it so obviously belongs.

What about the ‘rogue states’?

Well, there will be relief in Moscow, because sanctions have been lifted on their oil sales, so they can continue to murder Ukrainian women and children. Beijing will be relieved, because Trump is using up all his missiles, and China can continue to monster Taiwan.

And the evil twins continue to meet weekly, plotting more self-aggrandisement. Heaven save us from narcissistic twits.