Life is a process. We are never the same person we were born as, as this process ebbs and flows culminating into the legacy we leave as we depart this world. Such is the case of Francis Marion, an officer in the Continental Army who escaped capture by the British due to his being at his home nursing a injured ankle due to his “character”!
So, I am sure you are wondering about that last line. What could his character have to do with his injured ankle? Apparently, it was common practice of senior officers in the military to hold a drinking party in their home and lock the doors so fellow officers could not leave until they were all plastered, king of a 1700s version of a “team-building” event! Francis Marion, as of 20 January 1780 a Lt. Col., commands the 2nd South Carolina Regiment. On the night of 19 March 1780 at a party on Tradd St. in Charleston being more of a ‘man of moderation’ he decided to exit the party and therefore slipped (no pun intended) out of a window and fell to the street injuring or breaking his leg or ankle. As a result, he returned to his home in Pond Bluff which is 50 miles north of Charleston.
The British decided in early 1780 to redouble their shift in their focus to the southern colonies where they believed they had much more support and then roll up through Virginia and cornering the balance of the Continentals under George Washington near New York City in quick fashion. The British had already captured Savannah, Georgia early in the war in December 1778 after it had failed to capture Charleston on 28 June 1776 when British attacked Sullivan’s Island from the sea while Francis commanded the guns at Fort Sullivan (later called Fort Moultrie). The British naval attack failed when the palmetto logs held against bombardment.
Francis Marion also participated in the attempt to retake Savanna, Georgia in the fall of 1779 but the Continentals and militia failed in their siege. So early in 1780 the British captured and occupied Beaufort, South Carolina on 03 February 1780 and then turned its focus on Charleston.
Starting 28 March 1780 the British laid siege to Charleston and by 12 May 1780, Charleston surrendered. Maj. Gen. Benjamin Lincoln surrendered all of the existing Continental Army in SC, plus much of the SC militia and NC Militia. Most of the Continental Army officers and men were captured, over 5000 men in all, and signed documents stating that they would not take up arms against the British ever again.
In the days after this the British moved into the South Carolina back country as they had the momentum as news spread causing many people to switch allegiances and now back the British. On 29 May 1780 Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton and his Legion bayoneted 113 Continental soldiers of Col. Abraham Buford’s Virginia unit. Subsequent captures included South Carolina strategic locations such as Moncks Corners, Cheraw, Orangeburgh, Ninety-Six, and Dorchester. A month later on 11 July 1780 they also occupied Georgetown on the South Carolina coast as well, getting very close to Francis Marion’s plantation near St. Stephens.
Francis Marion is 48 years old at this point in time and is 5′ 2″ tall. His ability to lead men mainly on horseback over the next 24 months will be critical to the success of South Carolina and the rest of the colonies to finally break with the largest empire in the world.
When you think of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Syria (all adversely impacted by US foreign policy) and then consider the region’s powers of Israel, Saudi Arabia and UAE that are pitted against Iran, it all becomes a bit more clear. Israel desires to be a permanent fixture in the Middle East in spite of its illegitimate birth at the expense of native Palestinians. To preserve their place in the Middle East, they have become more desperate in their quest to control the narrative as well as the lands outside their true borders (i.e. Golan Heights, West Bank as well as Gaza).
Paranoid to a fault, they have used the United Kingdom and the United States of America for seven decades since they were given partial ownership of land in this region after the Zionist movement gained UK support three decades prior to that.
From AntiWar comes a fair synopsis [ Titled: “Making Sense of US Moves in the Middle East” by Rebecca Gordon and Tom Engelhardt] of the region’s neighbors who have been decimated by US foreign policy working towards protecting Israel at all costs.
Starting with the US’s longest undeclared war to date, Afghanistan, the article points out:
The report was devastating – or would have been, if anyone here had noticed it. “Between 2001 and 2017,” it concluded, “U.S. government efforts to stabilize insecure and contested areas in Afghanistan mostly failed.”
If you think this has nothing to do with Israel, you are sorely mistaken. Israel has seen Iran (used to be Iraq) as it’s biggest enemy in the region since it has Saudi Arabia and UAE as allies.
Of course the US would like the world to believe that Iran is threatening the US but in reality just its existence WITHOUT any nukes it threatens Israel which has 100 nukes. Iran is not really an offensive powerhouse with its 40 year old military equipment mainly from the US before the Shah of Iran (US puppet) was overthrown.
So $2T to date has been spent in Afghanistan with 2,000 US soldiers dying there as well as 100,000 Afghans to date. The fact that the poppy-market (Opium) market there is thriving makes the country fantastic in funding CIA black budget towards its black ops worldwide as well as being lucrative for the Military Industrial Complex.
The background on Afghanistan and how it became a target after 9/11 is an interesting one:
In 1998, the Afghan anti-Communist movement Taliban and a western oil consortium led by the US firm UNOCAL signed a major pipeline deal. UNOCAL lavished money and attention on Taliban, flew a senior delegation to Texas, and also hired an minor Afghan official, one Hamid Karzai.
Enter Osama bin Laden. He advised the unworldly Taliban leaders to reject the US deal and got them to accept a better offer from an Argentine consortium, Bridas. Washington was furious and, according to some accounts, threatened Taliban with war.
In early 2001, six or seven months before 9/11, Washington made the decision to invade Afghanistan, overthrow Taliban, and install a client regime that would build the energy pipelines. But Washington still kept up sending money to Taliban until four months before 9/11 in an effort to keep it “on side” for possible use in a war or strikes against Iran.
The 9/11 attacks, about which Taliban knew nothing, supplied the pretext to invade Afghanistan. The initial US operation had the legitimate objective of wiping out Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida. But after its 300 members fled to Pakistan, the US stayed on, built bases — which just happened to be adjacent to the planned pipeline route
So with that unpleasant fact out of the way (i.e. rationale for invading Afghanistan), let’s take a look at the West Bank before we turn our eyes to Syria.
Early on, Israel has made a point to solidify it’s grip on ALL the land promised the Hebrews and given to the Zionists (close enough for government work right?) by the UK and US after WWII:
From the AntiWar article mentioned above:
… the United States has often been Israel’s sole ally as, in direct contravention of international law, that country has used its own settlements to carve Palestinian territory into a jigsaw puzzle of disparate pieces, making a contiguous Palestinian state a near impossibility.
Then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon explained Israel’s plan for the Palestinian people in 1973 when he said, “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them.” Promising to insert “a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank,” he insisted that “in 25 years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.”
Forty-five years later, his strategy has been fully implemented, as Barack Obama reportedly learned to his shock when, in 2015, he saw a State Department map of the shredded remains of the land on which Palestinians are allowed to exist on the West Bank.
The “pastrami sandwich” strategy has effectively killed any hope for a two-state solution.
How convenient for Israel, and now in its effort to solidify this even more (as they are in fact now the minority class in Israel in terms of shear population), they are doing this (again from the AntiWar article):
.. as the number of non-Jews begins to surpass that of Jews in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, that country once again confronts the inherent contradiction of a state that aims to be both democratic and, in some sense, Jewish. If everyone living in Israel/Palestine today had equal political and economic rights, majority rule would no longer be Jewish rule. In effect, as some Israelis argue, Israel can be Jewish or democratic, but not both.
A solution to this demographic dilemma – one supported by present Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – is to legislate permanent inequality through what’s called “the basic law on Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people,” which is now being debated in the country’s parliament, the Knesset. Among other provisions, that “basic” law (which, if passed, would have the equivalent of constitutional status) will allow citizens “to establish ‘pure’ communities on the basis of religion or ethnicity.” In other words, it will put in place an official framework of legalized segregation. [Editor’s note: The Jewish Nation-State bill described here was passed early Thursday morning. This article was written before passage.]
Apartheid .. segregation .. a last ditch effort to strong arm its way in a region that is hostile to its own paranoid agenda. Acting like the US Empire as a world’s bully, not even allowing UN inspectors in Israel while it demands Iran to have total transparency in the world’s court.
Blowback is a bitch, but the current Zionist leaders only care about themselves and not their kids when they use this method to coexist in this world.
So while the US has given the Israeli military almost every toy the US has in its inventory as well as $134.7B (current, or non-inflation-adjusted) dollars in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding and promising $39B more in the next ten years it appears that GOP, Democrats and Zionist Christians are falling all over themselves to aid in this intimate partnership for the long term. The world is NOT impressed.
Lastly, what is up with Syria?
Meanwhile, if it weren’t for Yemen (see below), it might be hard to imagine a more miserable place in 2018 than Syria. Since 2011, when a nonviolent movement to unseat Assad devolved into a vicious civil war, more than half the country’s pre-war population of 22 million has become internally displaced or refugees, according to numbers from the U.N. High Commission on Refugees. Actual casualty figures are impossible to pin down with any exactitude. In April 2018, however, the New York Timesreported that the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the number of directly caused deaths at 511,000, including fighters and civilians.
Death and destruction have come from all sides: al-Qaeda-linked terror groups and the Islamic State killing civilians; the Syrian military, which is presently driving opposition forces out of the southern city of Dara’a, where the original uprising began (creating a quarter-million refugees with literally no place to go); and U.S. bombs and other munitions – 20,000 of them – reducing the city of Raqqa to rubble in a campaign to liberate it from ISIS militants. Add it all up and the war, still ongoing, has destroyed millions of homes and businesses, along with crucial infrastructure throughout an increasingly impoverished country.
So with Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria all smarting from Israel’s lover, the US, all to protect Israel (more than US citizens when you understand the $20T debt, $200T unfunded liabilities and the loss of freedoms across the spectrum the American people have suffered (out of ignorance they would not understand this sentence)) .. what else is there? Yemen!!!
Saudi Arabia with US weapons and assistance have decimated Yemen towards a genocidal disaster. It is almost as if the US is getting Saudi Arabia up to speed to be another useful puppet in the region to protect Israel .. yes, you heard that right .. in fact, the US/Israel/Saudi Arabia team were the proud parents of ISIS.
With U.S. logistical and financial support, Saudi Arabia has waged a cruel air war against the Houthis, a home-grown movement that in 2015 overthrew the government of president Ali Abdullah Saleh. What is the Saudi interest in Yemen? As in their support for a potential UAE-Israel-Russia-U.S. alliance in Syria, they’re intent on fighting a proxy war – and someday perhaps via the U.S. and Israel, a real war – with Iran.
In this case, however, it seems that the other side in that war hasn’t shown up. Although, like the Iranian government and most Iranians, the Houthi are Shi’a Muslims, there is little evidence of Iranian involvement in Yemen. That hasn’t stopped the Saudis (with American support) from turning that country into “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.” Their destruction of infrastructure in rebel-held areas has collapsed a once-functioning public health system, touching off a cholera epidemic, with the World Health Organization reporting a total of 1,105,371 suspected cases between April 2017 and June 2018. The infection rate now stands at 934 per 10,000 people.
Even worse than the largely unchecked spread of cholera, however, is Yemen’s man-made famine. Photographs from the country display the familiar iconography of widespread hunger: children with stick-like limbs and blank, sunken eyes. As it happens, though, this famine was not caused by drought or any other natural disaster. It’s a direct result of a brutal Saudi air campaign and a naval blockade aimed directly at the country’s economic life.
Before the war, Yemen imported 80% of its food and even today, despite a disastrous ongoing Saudi/UAE campaign to blockade and take the port of Hodeidah, Yemen’s main economic center, there is actually plenty of food in the country. It now simply costs more than most Yemenis can pay. Because the war has destroyed almost all economic activity in Houthi-controlled areas, people there have no money with which to buy food. In other words, the Saudi offensive against Hodeidah is starving people in two ways: directly by preventing the delivery of international food aid and indirectly by making the food in Yemen unaffordable for ordinary people.
Nice … am I right? American exceptionalism at its finest! A nation under God right?
The author summarizes with this statement of hope (she is young, so you will have that):
For more than 70 years, Americans have largely ignored the effects of U.S. foreign policy in the rest of the world. Rubble in Syria? Famine in Yemen? It’s terribly sad, yes, but what, we still wonder, does it have to do with us?
That Part of the World doesn’t wonder about how U.S. actions and policies affect them. That Part of the World knows – and what it knows is devastating. It’s time that real debate about future U.S. policy there becomes part of our world, too.
Fat chance on the US really having a debate on foreign policy as the only export this country really has anymore is weapons and a bully military.
Again, blowback will be a bitch someday. I just with my generation would have learned from Vietnam and thought more like Thomas Paine:
No surprise .. from supporting ISIS to supporting neo-Nazis .. they ain’t anything like Israel 1.0 .. or at least what God intended for Israel 1.0.
Azov Battalion online propaganda shows Israeli-licensed Tavor rifles in the fascist group’s hands
Neo-Nazis supported by Israel 2.0? No, get out, I thought they only supported ISIS …
The rifles are produced underlicence from Israel Weapon Industries, and as such would have been authorized by the Israeli government.
OK, so what would be the motive?
When the civil war began in eastern Ukraine against Russian-backed separatists, the new western-backed government began to arm Azov. The militia soon fell under the jurisdiction of the Ukrainian interior ministry, and saw some of the most intense frontline combat against the separatists.
The group stands accused in United Nations and Human Rights Watch reports of committing war crimes against pro-Russian separatists during the ongoing civil war in the eastern Donbass region, including torture, sexual violence and targeting of civilian homes.
Today, Azov is run by Arsen Avakov, Ukraine’s interior minister. According to the BBC, he pays its fighters, and has appointed one of its military commanders, Vadym Troyan, as his deputy – with control over the police.
Avakov last year metwith the Israeli interior minister Aryeh Deri to discuss “fruitful cooperation.”
Azov’s young founder and first military commander Andriy Biletsky is today a lawmaker in the Ukrainian parliament.
As journalist Max Blumenthal explained on The Real News in February, Biletsky has “pledged to restore the honor of the white race” and has advanced laws forbidding “race mixing.”
There it is … Israel HEARTS this …
Israel’s military aid to Ukraine and its neo-Nazis emulates similar programs by the United States and other NATO countries including the UK and Canada.
So obsessed are they with defeating a perceived threat from Russia that they seem happy to aid even openly Nazi militias – as long as they fight on their side.
This is also a throwback to the early Cold War, when the CIA supported fascists and Hitlerites to infiltrate from Austria into Hungary in 1956, where they began slaughtering Hungarian communist Jews and Hungarian Jews as “communists.”
.. and when the US supported Bin Laden as a freedom fighter in the late 1970s .. what can go wrong when you chose sides like your “enemy’s enemy is your friend” mantra.
Israel has historically acted as a useful route through which US presidents and the CIA can circumvent congressional restrictions on aid to various unsavory groups and governments around the world.
In 1980s Latin America, these included the Contras, who were fighting a war against the left-wing revolutionary government of Nicaragua, as well as a host of other Latin American fascist death squads and military dictatorships.
The US and Israel, a couple that overtly or covertly bring their violence to the world at large .. while all the time claiming to either being the world’s policeman or the nation that God favors yet again.
Holding the UN accountable is _____? Yeah, no official body of any government really holds anyone accountable for the numbers they generate .. out of thin air.
This is where Moon of Alabama and others like this website are willing to spend hours to get down in the weeds and validate (or invalidate) the claims of these bureaucracies:
Neither the OCHA map nor the UN report explain how, when or why 164,000-171,000 people are supposed to have moved the few miles towards the Israel occupied Golan Heights. There is no evidence that this claimed movement of IDPs, who may or may not exist, happened at all.
Where does the OCHA claim come from?
The nearly unreadable fine-print of the OCHA map says about the “Map Data Source(s)”:
The data of this map has a limited number of sources, including parties of the conflict. The data has not been independently verified and is subject to error or omission, deliberate or otherwise, by the various sources.
There is the explanation for the unbelievable high refugee numbers the UN is peddling around. They are based on claims made by the Islamic State, the al-Qaeda offshoot Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and various other sectarian “rebel” groups and their propaganda outlets. These claims have not be verified at all. Whoever made up that map did not even ask if the numbers were plausible or made any sense. They obviously don’t.
It is irresponsible that UN spokespersons come out and make claims of an extreme refugee flow when only some dubious ‘rebel’ sources say that these happened and no reasonable explanation exists why such a movement might have taken place at all.
There has so far only been moderate fighting during the three weeks of the Daraa campaign. Most of the affected towns reconciled with the Syrian army without any fight. The real recent refugee flow in the whole Daraa governorate is thus more likely in the order of ten-thousands than in the order of hundred-thousands.
The UN must stop to distribute such alarming numbers that evidently can not be backed up at all. Otherwise its credibility and long term efficiency will be severely damaged.
Yeah, it has come to the point where EVER government and/or international organization is going to give data that supports their agenda but never gives the people the truth. You probably already support a government (and UN indirectly) with your tax money .. why not search out true researchers and support them as well?
The struggle is real, and if the current momentum is sustained, anyone who was in the military can imagine how much MORE ineffective our forces will be in the next five years and beyond. Even the basics, the logistics, the radio communications and such will all fall apart as PC reigns supreme.
Military forces will not be able to survive in peacetime. Considering that we have been at war 222 of 239 years .. maybe THIS will make “empire” not sustainable as it seems that the amount of debt we create does not slow the US down.
