Happy Birthday, Empire – Fawzy Zablah

July 3, 2025

“The Gaza Strip should be flattened, and for all of them there is but one sentence, and that is death,” Yitzhak Kroizer, a member of national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit party, said in a radio interview.

Back to the 1980s and the civil war in El Salvador. I remember when José Napoleón Duarte was elected president in 1984. Thinking back I can still picture the green flag of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC) with the Jesus Fish smack in the middle. I remember that particular election being ardently discussed at my grandmother’s house; everybody talking over each other like characters in a James Joyce book yelling about Charles Parnell.

I also remember the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero which came four years before. Also the shots that rang out during his funeral procession and I have vague memories of my mom ordering me and my brother under our beds. My grandmother’s house was near the US embassy.

Why did they kill Romero? Well, because he was a critic of America’s crimes against the poor. The war machine needed another Vietnam and El Salvador was the perfect continuation of that but the American public got tired of the same story being told to them.

In 1986, as an impressionable nine year old, I moved to Miami with my mother and brother.

The Gulf War started under Bush Sr., and thankfully, in opposition to the neocons, we did not stay in Iraq. Or at least that’s what I heard. I was really excited about this war. I was 13 or 14 and CNN was all over it, and they made it sound exciting and WW2-like. I had seen all the Vietnam movies: Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill, Platoon, Apocalypse Now and even watched the show China Beach on ABC. I knew what America was about now. I was sipping that delicious Kool-Aid. Let’s do this baby. Let’s get that oil.

But Bush Sr. knew the heart of the beast, and he didn’t want never ending wars and pulled out of Iraq like a high school star athlete scared he’d knock up his girlfriend and ruin his future.

For his disobedience, he was replaced by Clinton with the assistance of Ross Perot. Ross Perot was definitely a Deep State asset. I mean would Clinton have won without Perot?

So we get Clinton who does a fake “peace in the middle east” show on the White House lawn with Rabin and Arafat signing the Oslo Accords. It didn’t lead to real peace, it only led to the assassination of Rabin and the brief unmasking of the sick Zionist mind.

Lord only knows what Clinton was really distracting us from by getting swallowed by Monica Lewinsky with her infamous blue dress. He loved her so much, he left his stain on that dress. But he recuperated because he had charm, apparently.

Then the 9/11 attacks happen and “the whole shithouse goes up in flames” — but does it really? Or was it all theater? Read Cat’s Cradle and you will understand this.

We can blame the Dancing Saudi Arabians, oops, I mean Israelis. But really, it was CIA asset Osama bin Laden. He was the new Hitler. We needed a new Hitler scarier than the old Hitler.

The Hollywood-style terror attacks with our own planes compelled us into more wars, wars of the future that are meant to never end and the end of privacy for all.

Pay attention: Never ending wars=End of your privacy.

All this right before the internet exploded into our phones and over all of our lives and they had to get ahead of it.

I couldn’t vote for Obama because I was not yet a US citizen. But I did volunteer for his campaign. I canvassed on Eighth Street (Calle Ocho) and had many doors slammed in my face calling me a communist. 

So where am I now in the spectrum of politics? Moderate? Conservative? An uninformed voter? A communist because I watch Midwestern Marx videos? Apolitical?

Nothing stops this train. The Gaza holocaust. The killing fields re-entered our national vernacular this last week.

The futility I feel against the horrors of this world has revealed me to myself: I am plankton.