Until this very moment, I think I’ve believed that all human life was equally worthy, that no-one has more of a right to be here than anyone else, that no-one has the right to pass judgment on the value of another human life. When I saw the news that Amal Hussain – the seven-year-old Yemeni girl whose photo in the New York Times had drawn attention to the war-induced famine in Yemen – had died, and looked at the photo of her face, I realized that I don’t believe that at all. Amal Hussain’s life was worth a million times more than the lives of the people who recklessly and completely selfishly inflicted the violence that caused her death.

This is not a partisan issue. This isn’t Trump (even though it is), it’s not Obama or Hillary (even though it was), and it’s not Bush (even though it was.) This is the machine called the nation state, and it will go on turning other parts of the world into graveyards, giving birth to massive refugee crises, and spawning new generations of “terrorists” who seek collectivist revenge on the innocent people of our countries, just as those who rule our countries murder innocents in theirs.

If you still don’t get it, here’s the point: It is not nation against nation, or race against race, or religion against religion. It is all of humanity against the violent nation state.

And if you still want to believe in the goodness or the necessity of the nation state, then ask yourself why. Ask yourself why whatever it is you think you stand to gain from the state is worth THIS. Why it is worth the senseless, needless death of this beautiful child.

For fuck’s sake.