Even a songwriter agrees with me on the AFG debacle and military leadership:
From an article on National Review
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morn ... ghanistan/
A New Protest Song from John Ondrasik
Singer-songwriter John Ondrasik raises a good point about “Blood on My Hands,” his new protest song about the plight of Afghans, which criticizes President Joe Biden and the U.S. withdrawal from that country. The pertinent question is not why he’s so outspoken about the horrors witnessed in Afghanistan over the past six weeks; the better question is why the rest of the music industry is so uncharacteristically quiet about a brutal regime that is literally killing people for the crime of creating music.
In late August, Afghan folk singer Fawad Andarabi was dragged from his home and killed by the Taliban. One of Afghanistan’s most prominent pop singers fled to Istanbul, leaving on a US military-evacuation plane to a base in Doha, Qatar. The Afghanistan National Institute of Music is closed, with no word on whether it will ever reopen. The Taliban are banning music in public again, like the last time they ruled the country, deeming it un-Islamic. Members of an internationally renowned orchestra of Afghan women and girls remain stuck in Afghanistan, after an attempt to get them out through Kabul’s airport in the last days of the U.S. war failed. Ondrasik himself has heard from those still in Afghanistan about a music school that was burned to the ground.
“To this day, I don’t understand the lack of an outcry, especially from the music community,” Ondrasik said in a Monday morning interview. “Where are the benefit concerts? Where are the protest songs, the protests outside the White House? This is why I think tribalism has corroded our souls. . . . Why isn’t Fawad [Andarabi] on the cover of Rolling Stone?”
Ondrasik said the inspiration for “Blood on My Hands” came at three distinct points during the early weeks of the crisis in Afghanistan. The first was the horrific sights of the chaotic evacuations in the first days after the fall of Kabul. The second came during a phone call from a friend whom Ondrasik describes as spending her career involved with humanitarian work all around the globe.
“She said, ‘I’m organizing evacs for AmCits, LPRs, and SIVs,’ and she’s spitting out all these acronyms,” Ondrasik recalled. “I asked, ‘What’s an AmCit?’ and she said, ‘That’s an American citizen.’ I said, ‘You’re going to risk your life, and private citizens like you are going to do the same, to rescue Americans we left behind?’ And this is a tough person, and she started crying, and she said yes. I thought, ‘What is happening? What world are we living in?’”
“The song sort of wrote itself when the president came out and gave his ‘extraordinary success’ speech,” at the end of August, Ondrasik said. “Most of us were insulted. It’s hard for someone like me to criticize the military. [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark] Milley and [Secretary of Defense Lloyd] Austin, I figured they would say, ‘this is not an extraordinary success, but here’s the plan.’ And then they didn’t. They echoed what Biden said, and that was scary. I’ve always felt that our presidents may not have the greatest intentions, but that the military were the adults in the room. When I saw that, I realized, this is spouting the company line, like some hack in the basement.”
Indeed, “Blood on my Hands” calls out members of Biden’s cabinet as much as the president himself.
Winkin’ Blinken
Can’t you look in my eyes?
Willy Milley
Tell me when did you decide
‘This we’ll defend’
Your sacred motto
Now means . . .
‘Never Mind’
General Austin
Is there no honor in shame
Can you spell Bagram
Without the letters in Blame
The fact that Milley and Austin played along with Biden’s implausibly rosy assessment “really made me angry, more at Milley, and Austin and [Secretary of State Antony] Blinken than at Biden,” Ondrasik said. “To me, it is inexcusable that there have been no resignations, and no one has been fired, the lack of accountability.”
Ondrasik said the song has already garnered a strong and supportive reaction, although it is not really a song that can be enjoyed.