War talk

 Volodymyr Zelensky will make a virtual address to Congress on Wednesday.  No doubt they will give him a standing ovation, as the British House of Commons did last week.  Then they will do nothing.

Just like the League of Nations in 1936.

That's Emperor Haile Selassie of Abyssinia, which had been invaded by Mussolini's Italy.  By coincidence Ethiopia (as it's now known) has been engaged in a civil war for the last two years in the Tigray region.  Bombing, civilian casualties, war crimes all around, but we don't hear much about it.  Those Africans, at it again.

Not far away in Yemen a civil war has raged since 2011, when an authoritarian named Saleh had to hand the keys to one named Hadi.  Then the Houthi moved in, formally called Ansar Allah or Partisans of God, which is never good.  It's the ancient Shia/Sunni divide, plus lots of oil and lots of starving people.  Arabs, huh?

Somalia.  All the above and drought.  This is the place we bomb from time to time.  Breakaway region called Somaliland.  American consciousness of the place can be gauged from Google's "People also ask" question "Is Somalia a poor city?"  Pirates.

If you want to see eyes roll, bring up the endless conflict between Israel and Palestine.   Hard-liners, two-staters, "settlers," apartheid, antisemitism, Hamas, Likud, Holocaust, Nakba, it's practically a found poem of buzz-words at this point, each one triggering a visceral response from somebody.  No American who wants a political career beyond the local zoning commission will talk about Palestine.  It's the most populous country on earth that doesn't exist.

In all these places and more -- I haven't even tried to figure out what's happening in Latin America -- people are fleeing, children are frightened and disoriented, men with assault weapons are menacing old ladies, women are being raped, and the western media are thin on the ground.  The villains don't have faces as recognizable as Putin's and the "issues" sometimes go back centuries.  We should remember.