#to Armenia; still standing strong even though il y a péril en la demeure

[northwest-by-a-train]

Today, one of the leading cable news hosts just asked the French justice minister about reopening penal colonies in French Guyane and New Caledonia. Today, as the USA announced a deal that would see El Salvador become a penal colony. Later that day, Trump, next to genocidaire Netanyahu, announced his plan to turn Gaza into a U.S. protectorate. Italy is sending its unwanted migrants to Albania. Russia is using shock troops from Siberia and North Korea and causing government crises all across the Caucasus. The U.K. had plans to send its migrants to Rwanda and paid good money to do so. Rwanda's Kagame is using Western money and arms to wage a genocidal war on Congo. The EAU are the ones fueling death in Sudan. The BJP is doing mass ethnic cleansings and massacres based on religious and ethnic criteria. To say nothing of the blight that is Israel.

This is fascism, yes, but it's also the resurgence of Victorian Era politics. Colonialism, "spheres of influence" geopolitics, protectionism and trade wars. This tells us this about our enemy: their politics were defeated at every single turn. This is not about the arc of the moral universe bending towards us, this is about the enemy being spectacularly weak and exposing itself to ruin. The past century is a record of those defeats. Yes, the enemy is resurgent, but it has learned nothing, and we have 150 years of learning accessible to us.

These are grim times. Yet the past victories of the oppressed peoples of the earth tell us it is not only possible to defeat our enemy, it is the safest bet you're ever going to make in this lifetime.