By Anna Von Reitz
We had barely raised our breath to explain why currency speculation in Zim has unhealthy overtones, owing to the means used to secure control of the mineral wealth of Zimbabwe and the foreign interests being served, when someone pointed out that the same conditions apply to currency speculation in Dinar and Dong, too.
They are right; although the smog of war somewhat obscures the details of the underlying political manipulations and resource confiscations involved, the end result is the same.
The situation in Zimbabwe is simply more recent in our memory, and carries a more civilian and political overtone, as the foreign mercenary interference in the internal process of the country -- like that in Ukraine -- came like a clap of thunder on a clear day, and was so directly in response to the discovery of the extent of Zimbabwe's mineral wealth.
However these things have happened, and whether via a massive "war" effort with hundreds of thousands of troops and equipment, or with a squad of terrorist mercenaries planning a coup in a cheap hotel room, the result is the same:
The currency of the country is unreasonably devalued, leaving a potential for currency speculators to "make a killing" based on the literal killing that has already been done.
Because people have been murdered and contracts have been forced on the survivors, nothing about any of these currency speculations is moral; any profit realized is unjust enrichment.
Unfortunately, our foregoing of the "investment" opportunity doesn't stop this injustice and does nothing to comfort or cure it; having been created, speculators will benefit from the opportunity and whether they, individually, are moral or immoral, ceases to be the object of this exercise in social conscience.
The real issue is interference in the internal affairs of other nations to their detriment. The real issue is profiteering from war and violence.
Whether our soldiers, unknowingly acting as mercenaries, wear our uniforms in the light of day, or appear in mufti in the middle of the night, makes no actual difference.
Our men are still being used by foreign interests to do the dirty work; and while our country is not the beneficiary of all this crime, and is not the actual Perpetrator, "America" catches the blame for it just the same.
Just as Americans are unaware of what went on in Iraq, for example, Iraqis are, generally speaking, unaware of what has gone on here, too.
The news blackout swings both ways.
So we are unaware of the fact that Senator Harry Reid contrived to empty fifty years' worth of nuclear waste out of the salt caves in Nevada and Utah and to load it into artillery shells that were exploded throughout the Middle East.
In the process of polluting the Middle East with our nuclear waste, thousands of American service members were exposed to poisonous levels of radiation right along with their victims.
Those of us who heard about this and who reacted in horror, were patted on the shoulder and told that it really wasn't as bad as all that --- when it was; and only God knows what the Iraqi people were told or not told.
If we assume business-as-usual in the British Dogpile we've been living in for the past hundred and sixty years, the victims were blamed for the sudden uptick in cancer deaths, birth defects, and not-so-mysterious symptoms of radiation poisoning: hair loss, loss of teeth, skin eruptions, burns, degradation of the stomach lining, adrenal failure, sterility....
Certainly, when our service members have appeared at the Veterans Administration Hospitals complaining of all these obvious symptoms of radiation poisoning, the doctors and nurses have shrugged and treated the symptoms without a word.
Nobody owns up and says, hey, look, you dumped all the radioactive waste from the storage facilities in Utah and Nevada all over the Mideast. You've been poisoned and there's no cure for it--- not for you and not for the Iraqis who are still living with it, breathing it, drinking it, and being poisoned by it every day.
Crimes against humanity? Genocide? These Perps, men like Harry Reid and John McCain, have killed Americans and Iraqis with equal glee --- and lack of accountability; they've gotten away with calling these mercenary conflicts "wars" and tatted them up with lies that would make Nero blush.
It has only gotten worse.
Remember Dubyah Bush intoning the words, "weapons of mass destruction" in his peculiar whiny nasal Texas twang, and mentally compare that to Donald Trump's New York-accented voice saying, "Operation Warp Speed".
When it comes to the government, we get what we tolerate; we have tolerated this behavior and abuse of our country and our people for far too long.
Both for our own sakes and the world's sake, we have to wake up.
Is it wrong in our opinion to take advantage of the artificially devalued status of the Zim, Dinar, and Dong? Yes. It is. People need to think about how this "something for nothing" opportunity has come about.
And reflect with us that there really is no free lunch.
Someone is paying for that investment opportunity.
The someone(s) paying are the people of countries who have suffered brutal war and political takeovers, people whose natural resources are being pillaged and plundered to generate those mammoth profits that everyone else is slavering over.
For us, the spectre of Vietnam hangs heavy in our memory. All we have to do is shut our eyes and we are awash in the warm humid air and scent of wisteria. That beautiful, mysterious, endlessly varied country where our own generation suffered, has had a remarkable economic and social comeback in the years following the war. We're glad for that.
The veterans of both sides have suffered the damages of Agent Orange and DDT and all the unexploded mine fields of the heart; the shareholders of Monsanto, Dow Chemical, and Bayer have yet to feel the hurt.
We believe that these corporations and the men and women who sat in Congress and those who moved the cogs and sent the planes should be held accountable --- must--- be held accountable, in courts of law and in the marketplace, and most of all, in our hearts and minds, we must see the evil they committed in our names.
And we must respond.
Maybe it's a stupid, small, and short-sighted thing to forgo an investment in Dong -- a sort of pyrrhic sacrifice to pass on our slice of that pie, but we can't quite get past our impulse to vomit and cry at the same time.
We remember the terror of the draft and the terror of the IRS and all these same evils that a new generation of Congressional imposters is rabidly seeking to impose on our grandsons and granddaughters.
And we silently glance at each other and pass the hat and what we are thinking is simply this --- over our dead bodies.
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