We live in a post-satire world.

There is no more glaring example of this than the opening of the Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology, in Riyadh, where US president Donald Trump visited to participate in this Orwellian photo-op.

Seriously, the idea of Saudi Arabia, the worlds leading sponsor of terrorism, having a center for combatting terrorism is so mind-bendingly surreal that we have clearly passed into a new reality.

What’s truly astounding in a sort of The Emperor’s New Clothes way is that everyone knows that the Saudi’s are the worlds biggest supporters of terrorism, yet everyone pretends otherwise.

For example, in 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton complained in a diplomatic memo made public by Wikileaks that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”

And, Vice President Joe Biden told a Harvard audience that “the Saudis, the emirates, etc. … were so determined to take down [Syrian President Bashar al-] Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war … [that] they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of military weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad, except the people who were being supplied were Al Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.” (Quote starts at 53:30.)

Here’s what intelligence analyst Bernhard at Moon of Alabama, has to say about such developments.

“All these attacks by Takfiris, in Paris, in Brussels, Berlin and Manchester as well as in Libya, Syria and Iraq, have their ideological roots in Wahhabism, the extreme version of Salafist Islam promoted in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The roots of such terrorism are in Riyadh and Doha and will have to be fought there.

But the Saudi and Qatari rulers pay extraordinary amounts of protection money in the form of weapon purchases from British and U.S. companies. As long as they keep doing so they will be kept in place as useful props in the bigger scheme.“

Like I’ve stated repeatedly, the war-on-terror is a sick joke, a never-ending conflict against an unconventional means of warfare. Meanwhile, the occasional terror attacks like Manchester, (which should be understood as blowback from the deployment of Sunni-terrorists to carry out western foreign policy), are supremely useful for keeping Americans in a state of perpetual fear. The war-on-terror, however, is the cash cow of the military/industrial/complex and they will give it up when we pry their cold dead hands from it.

The corporate media bombards us daily with the meme that the Russians have untoward control over the US government, without ever acknowledging the much more sinister Saudi influence.

If we really want to honor my fellow service members who gave their lives to defend us on this Memorial Day we should acknowledge what the war-on-terror has wrought.

Update: OK, maybe satire is not completely dead.