Humankind has exploited it’s own species for as long as recorded history.  We’ve enslaved, colonized, worked for low wages-without-benefits the hapless, the unlucky, the victims of circumstance.  This is an old story from the construction of the pyramids along the Nile, to the cotton fields of the antebellum South, to Amazon warehouses across America today.  An empire is a multi-generational system of exploitation, the accumulation of wealth and power by a class of humans rationalizing injustice by reference to religion, or patriotism, or capitalism.  Members of the ruling class, the beneficiaries believe themselves to be innocent — even if, especially when they wear the military uniform of the occupying power.  The colonized, the “under-employed” can believe whatever they please — they simply do not have the means to assert themselves.  Likely they have been seduced to think that the status quo is inevitable…

Exploitation, injustice is an unbalanced social equation.  A principle of renewal is absent.  The decision makers, the overlords take more, much more than they give — for as long as they can.  They are mesmerized by the sheen of wealth, by the efficiency of power.  Adept in a bubble into which they have been born, they believe the status quo will endure.  No matter the cost in treasure, the cost in blood — of the policy decisions of their predecessors, or of themselves.   Maybe they just do not care. 

Nothing lasts forever. 

When viewing this photograph, I shuddered at the concentration of human suffering. 

A U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III safely evacuated some 640 Afghans from Kabul late Sunday, according to U.S. defense officials and photos obtained by Defense One.

That’s believed to be among the most people ever flown in the C-17, a massive military cargo plane that has been operated by the U.S. and its allies for nearly three decades. Flight tracking software shows the plane belongs to the 436th Air Wing, based at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

The C-17, using the call sign Reach 871, was not intending to take on such a large load, but panicked Afghans who had been cleared to evacuate pulled themselves onto the C-17’s half-open ramp, one defense official said. 

Instead of trying to force those refugees off the aircraft, “the crew made the decision to go,” a defense official told Defense One.  “Approximately 640 Afghan civilians disembarked the aircraft when it arrived at its destination,” the defense official said.

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An alternative title for this post:  Empire’s Nightmarish Cost