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Category: Militarism

  • Circus Politics Are Intended to Distract Us

    There is nothing more dangerous than a government of the many controlled by the few.

    — Lawrence Lessig, Harvard law professor

    It is easy to be distracted right now by the bread and circus politics that have dominated the news headlines lately, but don’t be distracted.

    Don’t be fooled, not even a little.

    We’re being subjected to the oldest con game in the books, the magician’s sleight of hand that keeps you focused on the shell game in front of you while your wallet is being picked clean by ruffians in your midst.

    This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

    What characterizes American government today is not so much dysfunctional politics as it is ruthlessly contrived governance carried out behind the entertaining, distracting and disingenuous curtain of political theater. And what political theater it is, diabolically Shakespearean at times, full of sound and fury, yet in the end, signifying nothing.

    We are being ruled by a government of scoundrels, spies, thugs, thieves, gangsters, ruffians, rapists, extortionists, bounty hunters, battle-ready warriors and cold-blooded killers who communicate using a language of force and oppression.

    The U.S. government now poses the greatest threat to our freedoms.

    More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, even more than the perceived threat posed by any single politician, the U.S. government remains a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.

    No matter who has occupied the White House in recent years, the Deep State has succeeded in keeping the citizenry divided and at each other’s throats.

    After all, as long as we’re busy fighting each other, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny in any form.

    Unfortunately, what we are facing is tyranny in every form.

    The facts speak for themselves.

    We’re being robbed blind by a government of thieves. Americans no longer have any real protection against government agents empowered to seize private property at will. For instance, police agencies under the guise of asset forfeiture laws are taking Americans’ personal property based on little more than a suspicion of criminal activity and keeping it for their own profit and gain. In one case, police seized more than $17,000 in cash from two sisters who were trying to start a dog breeding business. Despite finding no evidence of wrongdoing, police held onto the money for months. Homeowners are losing their homes over unpaid property taxes (as little as $2300 owed) that amount to a fraction of what they have invested in their homes. And then there’s the Drug Enforcement Agency, which has been searching train and airline passengers and pocketing their cash, without ever charging them with a crime.

    We’re being taken advantage of by a government of scoundrels, idiots and cowards. Journalist H.L. Mencken calculated that “Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels; two-thirds, more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.” By and large, Americans seem to agree. When you’ve got government representatives who spend a large chunk of their work hours fundraising, being feted by lobbyists, shuffling through a lucrative revolving door between public service and lobbying, and making themselves available to anyone with enough money to secure access to a congressional office, you’re in the clutches of a corrupt oligarchy. Mind you, these same elected officials rarely read the legislation they’re enacting, nor do they seem capable of enacting much legislation that actually helps the plight of the American citizen. More often than not, the legislation lands the citizenry in worse straits.

    We’re being locked up by a government of greedy jailers. We have become a carceral state, spending three times more on our prisons than on our schools and imprisoning close to a quarter of the world’s prisoners, despite the fact that crime is at an all-time low and the U.S. makes up only 5% of the world’s population. The rise of overcriminalization and profit-driven private prisons provides even greater incentives for locking up American citizens for such non-violent “crimes” as having an overgrown lawn. As the Boston Review points out, “America’s contemporary system of policing, courts, imprisonment, and parole … makes money through asset forfeiture, lucrative public contracts from private service providers, and by directly extracting revenue and unpaid labor from populations of color and the poor. In states and municipalities throughout the country, the criminal justice system defrays costs by forcing prisoners and their families to pay for punishment. It also allows private service providers to charge outrageous fees for everyday needs such as telephone calls. As a result people facing even minor criminal charges can easily find themselves trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of debt, criminalization, and incarceration.”

    We’re being spied on by a government of Peeping Toms. The government, along with its corporate partners, is watching everything you do, reading everything you write, listening to everything you say, and monitoring everything you spend. Omnipresent surveillance is paving the way for government programs that profile citizens, document their behavior and attempt to predict what they might do in the future, whether it’s what they might buy, what politician they might support, or what kinds of crimes they might commit. The impact of this far-reaching surveillance, according to Psychology Today, is “reduced trust, increased conformity, and even diminished civic participation.” As technology analyst Jillian C. York concludes, “Mass surveillance without due process—whether undertaken by the government of Bahrain, Russia, the US, or anywhere in between—threatens to stifle and smother that dissent, leaving in its wake a populace cowed by fear.”

    We’re being ravaged by a government of ruffians, rapists and killers. It’s not just the police shootings of unarmed citizens that are worrisome. It’s the SWAT team raids gone wrong—more than 80,000 annually—that are leaving innocent citizens wounded, children terrorized and family pets killed. It’s the roadside strip searches—in some cases, cavity searches of men and women alike carried out in full view of the public—in pursuit of drugs that are never found. It’s the potentially lethal—and unwarranted—use of so-called “nonlethal” weapons such as tasers on children for “mouthing off to a police officer. For trying to run from the principal’s office. For, at the age of 12, getting into a fight with another girl.”

    We’re being forced to surrender our freedoms—and those of our children—to a government of extortionists, money launderers and professional pirates. The American people have repeatedly been sold a bill of goods about how the government needs more money, more expansive powers, and more secrecy (secret courts, secret budgets, secret military campaigns, secret surveillance) in order to keep us safe. Under the guise of fighting its wars on terror, drugs and now domestic extremism, the government has spent billions in taxpayer dollars on endless wars that have not ended terrorism but merely sown the seeds of blowback, surveillance programs that have caught few terrorists while subjecting all Americans to a surveillance society, and militarized police that have done little to decrease crime while turning communities into warzones. Not surprisingly, the primary ones to benefit from these government exercises in legal money laundering have been the corporations, lobbyists and politicians who inflict them on a trusting public.

    We’re being held at gunpoint by a government of soldiers: a standing army. As if it weren’t enough that the American military empire stretches around the globe (and continues to leech much-needed resources from the American economy), the U.S. government is creating its own standing army of militarized police and teams of weaponized, federal bureaucrats. These civilian employees are being armed to the hilt with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment; authorized to make arrests; and trained in military tactics. Among the agencies being supplied with night-vision equipment, body armor, hollow-point bullets, shotguns, drones, assault rifles and LP gas cannons are the Smithsonian, U.S. Mint, Health and Human Services, IRS, FDA, Small Business Administration, Social Security Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Education Department, Energy Department, Bureau of Engraving and Printing and an assortment of public universities. There are now reportedly more bureaucratic (non-military) government civilians armed with high-tech, deadly weapons than U.S. Marines. That doesn’t even begin to touch on the government’s arsenal, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, and the speed with which the nation could be locked down under martial law depending on the circumstances.

    Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly no friend to freedom.

    To our detriment, the criminal class that Mark Twain mockingly referred to as Congress has since expanded to include every government agency that feeds off the carcass of our once-constitutional republic.

    The government and its cohorts have conspired to ensure that the only real recourse the American people have to hold the government accountable or express their displeasure with the government is through voting, which is no real recourse at all.

    Consider it: the penalties for civil disobedience, whistleblowing and rebellion are severe. If you refuse to pay taxes for government programs you believe to be immoral or illegal, you will go to jail. If you attempt to overthrow the government—or any agency thereof—because you believe it has overstepped its reach, you will go to jail. If you attempt to blow the whistle on government misconduct, you will go to jail. In some circumstances, if you even attempt to approach your elected representative to voice your discontent, you can be arrested and jailed.

    You cannot have a republican form of government—nor a democratic one, for that matter—when the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution.

    We no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

    Rather, what we have is a government of wolves.

    For too long, the American people have obeyed the government’s dictates, no matter now unjust.

    We have paid its taxes, penalties and fines, no matter how outrageous. We have tolerated its indignities, insults and abuses, no matter how egregious. We have turned a blind eye to its indiscretions and incompetence, no matter how imprudent. We have held our silence in the face of its lawlessness, licentiousness and corruption, no matter how illicit.

    How long we will continue to suffer depends on how much we’re willing to give up for the sake of freedom.

    For the moment, the American people seem content to sit back and watch the reality TV programming that passes for politics today. It’s the modern-day equivalent of bread and circuses, a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

    As French philosopher Etienne de La Boétie observed half a millennium ago:

    “Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books.”

    The bait towards slavery. The price of liberty. The instruments of tyranny.

    Yes, that sounds about right.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “We the people” have learned only too well how to be slaves.

    The post Circus Politics Are Intended to Distract Us first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The War Drive Against China

    When will this hate-filled nonsense stop? Surveillance balloons treated like evocations of Satan and his card-carrying followers; other innumerable unidentified phenomena that, nonetheless, remain attributable in origin, despite their designation; and then the issue of spying cranes. In the meantime, there has been much finger pointing on the culprit of COVID-19 and the global pandemic. Behold the China Threat, the Sino Monster, the Yellow Terror.

    In this atmosphere, the hawkish disposition of media outlets in a number of countries in shrieking for war is becoming palpable. The Fairfax press in Australia gave a less than admirable example of this in their absurd Red Alert series, crowned by crowing warmongers warning Australia to get ready for the imminent confrontation. The publications were timed to soften the public for the inevitable, scandalous and possibly even treasonous announcement that the Australian government would be spending A$368 billion in local currency on needless submarines against a garishly dressed-up threat backed by ill-motivated allies.

    For days, the Australian press demonstrated a zombie-like adherence to the war line that had been fed by deskbound generals no doubt suffering from piles and deranged civilian strategists desperate to justify their supper. It is a line that always assumes the virtue of war; that going into battle, much like US President Theodore Roosevelt thought, will always outdo the tedium of peace in a haze of phosphorescent glory. It is only in the morgues and the crowded cemeteries that we find a worthy patriotism. Go out and kill, you noble sons and daughters. Do your nation proud, however stupidly.

    The desperation of such a measure is also a reflection of how public opinion rejects the war drive. In a 2022 poll by the Lowy Institute think tank, 51% of Australians said they preferred their country to remain “neutral” in a conflict between the US and China over Taiwan. This was not a bad return, given the repetitious insistence by various Australian government ministers that joining a war with the United States over Taiwan was simply assumed.

    In the US, the Wall Street Journal was also doing much the same thing, plumping for great power competitions that can only end badly, rather than great power cooperation which, when it goes well, spares us the body bags, the funerals and the flag fluttering.

    The introductory note of one article in that Rupert Murdoch-owned organ was not encouraging. “Since 2018, the [US] military has shifted to focus on China and Russia after decades fighting insurgencies, but it still faces challenges to produce weapons and come up with new ways of waging war.”

    The obsession with war scenarios rather than diplomatic ones is hardening. It elevates the game to level pegging with peace overtures. In fact, it goes further, suggesting that such measures are to be frowned upon, if not abandoned in their entirety. Rather than considering discussions with China, for instance, on whether some rules of accommodation and observance can be made, the attitude from Washington and its satellites is one of excoriation, taking issue with any restrictions on the growth of the US defence complex. Acid observations are reserved for the Budget Control Act of 2011, which supposedly “hampered initiatives to transform the military, including on artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous systems and advanced manufacturing.”

    As defence analyst William Hartung writes, the Pentagon has never been short of cash in its pursuits, though it has been more than wasteful, obsessed with maintaining a global military presence spanning 750 bases and 170,000 overseas troops, not to mention the madness of shovelling $2 billion into developing a new generation of nuclear weapons. Far from encouraging deterrence, this is bound to “accelerate a dangerous and costly arms race.”

    The same must be said of AUKUS, the triumvirate alliance that is already terrifying several powers in the Indo-Pacific into joining the regional arms race. Here we see, yet again, the Anglosphere enthralled by protecting their possessions and routes of access, directly or indirectly held.

    In the red mist of war, lucid voices can be found. Singaporean diplomat and foreign policy intellectual Kishore Mahbubani is one to offer a bracing analysis in observing that China is hardly going to undermine the very order that has benefitted it. The Chinese, far from wishing to upend the rules-based system with thuggish glee, saw it as a gift of Western legal engineering. “So the paradox about the world today is that even though the global rules based order is a gift of the west, China embraces it.”

    He also has this to say about the US-China relationship. “China has been around for 5,000 years. The United States has been around for 250 years. And it’s not surprising that a juvenile like the United States would have difficulty dealing with a wiser, older civilisation”.

    Mahbubani, ever wily but also penetratingly sharp, also offers a valuable point: that the notion of a remarkable weapon (the nuclear-propelled submarine is not so much remarkable as cumbersomely draining and costly) must surely come a distant second to the attainment of economic prosperity. “Submarines are stealthy, but trade is stealthier,” he writes with a touch of serene sagacity. Both provide security, in a fashion: the former in terms of raw deterrence; the latter in terms of interdependence – but the kind of security created by trade, he is adamant, “lasts longer”. To date, that realisation seems to have bypassed the AUKUS troika.

    The post The War Drive Against China first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Patriotism and Sinophobia

    People such as former US military men like Scott Ritter and Douglas MacGregor provide excellent analysis on the geopolitics and warring in Ukraine. Ritter and McGregor are two Americans apparently able to relay a perspective based on their own take of a situation, a take independent of government pronouncements and home media reports. Nonetheless, despite reporting their government’s involvement in a proxy war and being well aware of US imperialism and war crimes, these men feel the need to profess their love of country. This is despite their country stirring up wars abroad; stealing oil and wheat in Syria; withholding money that belongs to the poor people of Afghanistan; having overthrown or trying to overthrow governments in Ukraine, Venezuela, Iran, Bolivia, Peru, Russia, etc.; leaving Americans without healthcare to fend for themselves as well as the homeless and destitute; carrying out a slow-motion assassination of Julian Assange; forcing Edward Snowden to live in exile; and a war against several other whistleblowers, Chelsea Manning, John Kiriakou, to name a few. So why the need to express an undying love for country?

    One must not be harsh, as one can assume that to not declare an unwavering patriotism would put these independent speakers at risk of a harsh backlash.

    I admire Ritter and MacGregor for their independent streak. (I also appreciate the analysis of former US marine Brian Berletic who does not engage in rah-rah for the United States, but then he is an ex-pat).

    Of course, that an ex-military man can provide excellent military analysis does not mean that views expressed outside one’s bailiwick are equally profound. Such views may even be deserving of criticism or censure.

    In a recent video, MacGregor is interviewed by Stephen Gardner (who displays a large Star and Stripes in the background). MacGregor imparts a perspective that is at odds with that trotted out by his government and the US monopoly media concerning warring in Ukraine.

    However, a final question that Gardner posed to MacGregor was rather revealing in a very negative light.

    Gardner tendentiously asks (around 29:25), “You mentioned that the humane thing would be for the United States to step in and say this war is over; let’s be done. Don’t you feel like China is trying to fill that vacuum, where they are now saying, ‘Oh Saudi Arabia and Iran, there’s a lot of money to be made, let’s broker peace. Russia, Ukraine, hey, the United States is not going to step in; we are going to step in and broker peace.’ Is this one more way for China to try to eclipse the United States on the world stage?”

    What basis does Garner have for posing such a loaded question? Gardner ascribes selfish motives to China’s seeking to broker peace. One assumes that making war is preferable in Garner’s estimation. When has China ever boasted that it aspires to eclipse any country or be top dog? China eschews hegemony, and it consistently states its preference for a multipolar world, a world of peace, and developing win-win relationships with countries. Africans, long pillaged by Europeans and the Anglo diaspora, know this well.

    MacGregor responded well, at first, “Well, first of all, I do not subscribe to the view that China wants to eclipse us.” Fine, but this was immediately and emphatically followed by: “They know they can’t.” This comes across as chest thumping, USA, USA, USA, from a former military man.

    This is followed by a several assertions: “They [China] have serious problems internally, as well.” He opines that China “is too big to do more than it has already done.” He asserts that China’s chairman Xi Jinping wakes everyday wondering how to hold the country together. He does not cite one example to substantiate what he says. Under Xi, China eliminated extreme poverty and it is on the path to moderate prosperity. If only the US could come close to such monumental achievements for its citizenry. China is forging ties with nations from around the world with its Belt and Road initiative. This is what Xi thinks about each day – not the nonsense MacGregor espouses.

    Most disturbingly, MacGregor reveals himself in the video to be a Sinophobe by making all kinds of wild racist assertions; e.g., (at 32:14) “No one in central Asia trusts the Chinese; no one in Asia beyond the China’s borders trusts the Chinese [followed by snickering].”

    “People… are all very concerned about the Chinese… the Chinese do what they have always done, if you leave it on the table, they’ll steal it. That’s what they do; they’ve been doing it for thousands of years.”

    Now replace the word “Chinese” with “Jews” and imagine the torrent of outrage that would flow in the West.

    The post Patriotism and Sinophobia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Spent Matters: The AUKUS Nuclear Waste Problem

    When Australia – vassal be thy name – assumed responsibilities for not only throwing money at both US and British shipbuilders, lending up territory and naval facilities for war like a gambling drunk, and essentially asking its officials to commit seppuku for the Imperium, another task was given. While the ditzy and dunderheaded wonders in Canberra would be acquiring submarines with nuclear propulsion technology, there would be that rather problematic issue of what to do with the waste. “Yes,” said the obliging Australians, “we will deal with it.”

    The Australian Defence Department has published a fact sheet on the matter, which, as all such fact sheets go, fudges the facts and sports a degree of misplaced optimism. It promises a “sophisticated security and safety architecture” around the nuclear-powered submarine program, “building on our 70-year unblemished track record of operating nuclear facilities and conducting nuclear science activities.”

    This record, which is rather more blemished than officials would care to admit, does not extend to the specific issues arising from maintaining a nuclear-powered submarine fleet and the high-level waste that would require shielding and cooling. In the context of such a vessel, this would entail pulling out and disposing of the reactor once the submarine is decommissioned.

    Australia’s experience, to date, only extends to the storage of low-level waste and intermediate-level waste arising from nuclear medicine and laboratory research, with the low-level variant being stored at over a hundred sites in the country. That situation has been regarded as unsustainable and politically contentious.

    The department admits that the storage and disposal of such waste and spent fuel will require necessary facilities and trained personnel, appropriate transport, interim and permanent storage facilities and “social license earned and sustained with local and regional communities.” But it also notes that the UK and the US “will assist Australia in developing this capability, leveraging Australia’s decades of safely and securely managing radioactive waste domestically”.

    That’s mighty good of them to do so, given that both countries have failed to move beyond the problem of temporary storage. In the UK, the issue of disposing waste from decommissioned nuclear submarines remains stuck in community consultation. In the US, no option has emerged after the Obama administration killed off a repository program to store waste underneath Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. The reasons for doing so, sulked Republicans at the time, were political rather than technical.

    Where, then, will the facilities to store and dispose of such waste be located? “Defence – working with relevant agencies including the Australian Radioactive Waste Agency – will undertake a review in 2023 to identify locations in the current or future Defence estate that could be suitable to store and dispose of intermediate-level waste and high-level waste, including spent fuel.”

    The various state premiers are already suggesting that finding a site will be problematic. Both Victoria and Western Australia are pointing fingers at South Australia as the logical option, while Queensland has declared that “under no circumstances” would it permit nuclear waste to be stored. “I think the waste can go where all the jobs are going,” remarked Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. “I don’t think that’s unreasonable, is it?”

    Western Australia’s Mark McGowan, in furious agreement, suggested that a site “somewhere remote, somewhere with very good long-term geological structure that doesn’t change or move and somewhere that is defence lands” narrowed down the options. “[T]hat’s why Woomera springs to mind.”

    South Australia’s Premier, Peter Malinauskas, insists that the waste should go “where it is in the nation’s interest to put it” and not be a matter of “some domestic political tit-for-tat, or some state-based parochial thing.”

    When it comes to storing nuclear waste, parochialism is all but guaranteed. The Australian government is already facing a legal challenge from traditional owners regarding a 2021 decision to locate a nuclear waste site at Kimba in South Australia. The effort to find a site for the National Radioactive Waste Management Facility intended for low and intermediate radioactive waste produced by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation at Lucas Heights, New South Wales, took three decades.

    According to members of the First Nations group opposing the decision, the proposed facility risks interfering with a sacred site for women. Dawn Taylor, a Barngarla woman and Kimba resident, told the ABC that, “The Seven Sisters is through that area.” She feared that the waste facility would end up “destroying” the stories associated with the dreaming.

    The federal resources minister, Madeleine King, has stated with little conviction that a cultural heritage management plan “informed by the research of the Barngarla people” is in place. “There are strict protocols around the work that is going on right now to make sure there is no disturbance of cultural heritage.”

    Local farmers, including the consistently vocal Peter Woolford, are also opposed to the project. “We just can’t understand why you would expose this great agricultural industry we have here in grain production to any potential risk at all by having a nuclear waste dump here.”

    The Australian security establishment may well be glorifying in the moment of AUKUS, itself an insensibly parochial gesture of provocation and regional destabilisation, but agitated residents and irate state politicians are promising a good deal of sensible mischief.

    The post Spent Matters: The AUKUS Nuclear Waste Problem first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Not-So-Winding Road from Iraq to Ukraine


    U.S. soldiers breaking into a home in Baquba, Iraq, in 2008   Photo: Reuters
     
    March 19 marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq. This seminal event in the short history of the 21st century not only continues to plague Iraqi society to this day, but it also looms large over the current crisis in Ukraine, making it impossible for most of the Global South to see the war in Ukraine through the same prism as U.S. and Western politicians.
     
    While the U.S. was able to strong-arm 49 countries, including many in the Global South, to join its “coalition of the willing” to support invading the sovereign nation of Iraq, only the U.K., Australia, Denmark and Poland actually contributed troops to the invasion force, and the past 20 years of disastrous interventions have taught many nations not to hitch their wagons to the faltering U.S. empire.
     
    Today, nations in the Global South have overwhelmingly refused U.S. entreaties to send weapons to Ukraine and are reluctant to comply with Western sanctions on Russia. Instead, they are urgently calling for diplomacy to end the war before it escalates into a full-scale conflict between Russia and the United States, with the existential danger of a world-ending nuclear war.
     
    The architects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq were the neoconservative founders of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), who believed that the United States could use the unchallenged military superiority that it achieved at the end of the Cold War to perpetuate American global power into the 21st century.
     
    The invasion of Iraq would demonstrate U.S. “full spectrum dominance” to the world, based on what the late Senator Edward Kennedy condemned as “a call for 21st century American imperialism that no other country can or should accept.”
     
    Kennedy was right, and the neocons were utterly wrong. U.S. military aggression succeeded in overthrowing Saddam Hussein, but it failed to impose a stable new order, leaving only chaos, death and violence in its wake. The same was true of U.S. interventions in Afghanistan, Libya and other countries.
     
    For the rest of the world, the peaceful economic rise of China and the Global South has created an alternative path for economic development that is replacing the U.S. neocolonial model. While the United States has squandered its unipolar moment on trillion-dollar military spending, illegal wars and militarism, other countries are quietly building a more peaceful, multipolar world.
     
    And yet, ironically, there is one country where the neocons’ “regime-change” strategy succeeded, and where they doggedly cling to power: the United States itself. Even as most of the world recoiled in horror at the results of U.S. aggression, the neocons consolidated their control over U.S. foreign policy, infecting and poisoning Democratic and Republican administrations alike with their exceptionalist snake oil.
     
    Corporate politicians and media like to airbrush out the neocons’ takeover and continuing domination of U.S. foreign policy, but the neocons are hidden in plain sight in the upper echelons of the U.S. State Department, the National Security Council, the White House, Congress and influential corporate-funded think tanks.
     
    PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and was a key supporter of Hillary Clinton. President Biden appointed Kagan’s wife, Victoria Nuland, a former foreign policy adviser to Dick Cheney, as his Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the fourth most senior position in the State Department. That was after she played the lead U.S. role in the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which caused its national disintegration, the return of Crimea to Russia and a civil war in Donbas that killed at least 14,000 people.
     
    Nuland’s nominal boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, was the staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, during its debates over the impending U.S. assault on Iraq. Blinken helped the committee chairman, Senator Joe Biden, choreograph hearings that guaranteed the committee’s support for the war, excluding any witnesses who did not fully support the neocons’ war plan.
     
    It is not clear who is really calling the foreign policy shots in Biden’s administration as it barrels toward World War III with Russia and provokes conflict with China, riding roughshod over Biden’s campaign promise to “elevate diplomacy as the primary tool of our global engagement.” Nuland appears to have influence far beyond her rank in the shaping of U.S. (and thus Ukrainian) war policy.
     
    What is clear is that most of the world has seen through the lies and hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy, and that the United States is finally reaping the result of its actions in the refusal of the Global South to keep dancing to the tune of the American pied piper.
     
    At the UN General Assembly in September 2022, the leaders of 66 countries, representing a majority of the world’s population, pleaded for diplomacy and peace in Ukraine. And yet Western leaders still ignore their pleas, claiming a monopoly on moral leadership that they decisively lost on March 19, 2003, when the United States and the United Kingdom tore up the UN Charter and invaded Iraq.
     
    In a panel discussion on “Defending the UN Charter and the Rules-Based International Order” at the recent Munich Security Conference, three of the panelists–from Brazil, Colombia and Namibia–explicitly rejected Western demands for their countries to break off relations with Russia, and instead spoke out for peace in Ukraine.
     
    Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira called on all the warring parties to “build the possibility of a solution. We cannot keep on talking only of war.” Vice President Francia Márquez of Colombia elaborated, “We don’t want to go on discussing who will be the winner or the loser of a war. We are all losers and, in the end, it is humankind that loses everything.”
     
    Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila of Namibia summed up the views of Global South leaders and their people: “Our focus is on solving the problem…not on shifting blame,” she said. “We are promoting a peaceful resolution of that conflict, so that the entire world and all the resources of the world can be focused on improving the conditions of people around the world instead of being spent on acquiring weapons, killing people, and actually creating hostilities.”
     
    So how do the American neocons and their European vassals respond to these eminently sensible and very popular leaders from the Global South? In a frightening, warlike speech, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told the Munich conference that the way for the West to “rebuild trust and cooperation with many in the so-called Global South” is to “debunk… this false narrative… of a double standard.”
     
    But the double standard between the West’s responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and decades of Western aggression is not a false narrative. In previous articles, we have documented how the United States and its allies dropped more than 337,000 bombs and missiles on other countries between 2001 and 2020. That is an average of 46 per day, day in day out, for 20 years.
     
    The U.S. record easily matches, or arguably far outstrips, the illegality and brutality of Russia’s crimes in Ukraine. Yet the U.S. never faces economic sanctions from the global community. It has never been forced to pay war reparations to its victims. It supplies weapons to the aggressors instead of to the victims of aggression in Palestine, Yemen and elsewhere. And U.S. leaders–including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden—have never been prosecuted for the international crime of aggression, war crimes or crimes against humanity.
     
    As we mark the 20th anniversary of the devastating Iraq invasion, let us join with Global South leaders and the majority of our neighbors around the world, not only in calling for immediate peace negotiations to end the brutal Ukraine war, but also in building a genuine rules-based international order, where the same rules—and the same consequences and punishments for breaking those rules—apply to all nations, including our own.

    The post The Not-So-Winding Road from Iraq to Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The AUKUS Submarine Announcement

    History is filled with failed planners and plans, threats thought of that did not eventuate, and threats unthought of that found their way into the books. The AUKUS agreement is an attempt to inflate a threat by developing a number of fictional capabilities in an effort to combat an inflated adversary.

    The checklist of imminent failure for this security pact between the United States, the UK and Australia is impressive and comically grotesque. In terms of the nuclear-powered submarine component, there are issues of expertise, infrastructure, hurdles of technology transfer, the hobbling feature of domestic politics, and national considerations. There are also matters of irresponsible costs, of the exhaustion of public money best spent elsewhere.

    To put it bluntly, Australia and all its resources spanning across a number of industries will be co-opted in this enterprise against a phantom enemy, subjugating an already subordinate state to the US war-making enterprise.

    All of this was laid bare at San Diego’s Point Loma Naval Base on March 13, where the US imperium, backed up by a number of lickspittles from Australia and the United Kingdom, betrayed the cause of peace and announced to the world that war with China was not only a possibility but distinctly probable.

    Central to the project is a staggering outlay of A$368 billion for up to thirteen vessels over three decades. Canberra will purchase at least three US-manufactured nuclear submarines while contributing “significant additional resources” to US shipyards. (Bully for the US builders.) Given that the United States is unable to make up its own inventory of Virginia class nuclear submarines at this stage, the purchase will be second hand, a point which is bound to niggle members of Congress. Two more vessels are also being thrown in as a possibility, should the “need” arise.

    During this time, design and construction will take place on a new submarine dubbed the SSN-AUKUS, exploiting the work already undertaken by the UK on replacing the Astute-class submarines. It will be, according to the White House, “based upon the United Kingdom’s next generation SSN design while incorporating cutting edge US submarine technologies, and will be built and deployed by both Australia and the United Kingdom.”

    This point was also reiterated by the UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. “The Royal Navy will operate the same submarines as the Australian Navy and we’ll share components and parts with the US Navy.” Five of these are intended for the Royal Australian Navy by the middle of the 2050s, with one submarine being produced every two years from the early 2040s.

    The speech by the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, was more than a touch embarrassing. It certainly did its bit to bury conventional understandings of sovereignty. “This will be an Australian sovereign capability, commanded by the Royal Australian Navy and sustained by Australians in Australian shipyards, with construction to begin within the decade.” The lexically challenged are truly in charge.

    And what about the submarine personnel themselves? Australian submariners as yet unacquainted with nuclear technology would be trained in the US. “I am proud to confirm that they are in the top 30 per cent of their class.” Can the Australians do a bit better than that?

    The US President could only express satisfaction at such displays of unflagging, wobbly free obedience. “Today, as we stand at the inflection point of history, where the hard work of announcing deterrence and enhancing stability is going to reflect peace and stability for decades to come, the United States can ask for no better partners in the Indo-Pacific where so much of our shared future will be written.”

    As the White House statement promises, visits by US nuclear submarines to Australia will begin this year, with Australian personnel joining US crews for “training and development”. The UK will take its turn at the start of 2026.

    Australia promises to become even busier on that front, with a US-UK rotational presence commencing in 2027 which will be named the “Submarine Rotational Force-West” (SRF-West). One UK Astute class submarine, and as many as four Virginia class submarines will find themselves at HMAS Stirling near Perth.

    The effusive punditry on the Australian morning proved indigestible. For those inclined towards peace, this must have seemed like a chance to initiate a few citizen arrests. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, who also holds the defence portfolio, was a quivering sight. He remarked about the scale of the enterprise, justifying it against “the biggest conventional military build-up” in the region – those sneaky authoritarians in Beijing again – in an environment hostile to the “international rules-based order”. Failure to do so would see Australia “condemned”. (No mention here that the US military budget remains the largest on the planet.)

    As for the issue of budgetary costs, Marles bizarrely and brazenly suggested that these would be “neutral” in the context of defence, despite the likelihood that cuts will have to be made, and various policy priorities jettisoned.

    For morning viewers already fearing for their lives, there was a beaming South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas thrilled that his state would eventually be producing the SSN-AUKUS at the as yet non-existent Submarine Construction Yard in Adelaide. The fact that his state has neither the resources, infrastructure nor the personnel for such a task, was hardly reason to spoil the flag fluttering show. “There are smiles all around,” he beamed to the hosts of the ABC Breakfast show.

    US commentators, notably Charles Edel of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, emphasised that Australian defence was being vastly improved, or “augmented”, along with its military industrial base. Blame China, suggested Edel, for exploiting a “permissive security environment” and exciting such urges on the part of the three countries. The US Ambassador to Australia, Caroline Kennedy, even thought that this colossal waste of resources would add to the quotient of regional prosperity.

    The opposite is very much the case: a profligate exercise that serves to turn Australia into a multi-generational garrison state at the beckon call of Washington’s war machine that will host, at stages, nuclear weapons. The latter aspect is bound to fly in the face of the Treaty of Rarotonga, otherwise known as the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty. But the Alice in Wonderland quality to the AUKUS agreement is bound to paper over that inconvenience. For a warring peace is exactly what awaits.

    The post The AUKUS Submarine Announcement first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Realities of the International Power Struggle

    Events continue to unfold at a quickening pace. Facing an alarming escalation in tensions around the world, we asked Michael T. Klare for his current thoughts.

    Michael Klare is a Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts; defense correspondent of The Nation magazine; and author of The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources (2012), Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (2009), and Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum (2000). He has a BA and MA from Columbia University, and a PhD from Union Institute & University.

    We focus on the realities of the international power struggle unfolding in real time, specifically addressing the role of the U.S. in the tensions and its capacity to reduce them. We are looking for paradigm-shift ideas for improving the prospects for peace. His responses below of are exactly as he provided.

    Here is what Michael had to say.

    Q: We hear a lot of terms and acronyms bandied about. ‘Deep State’ … ‘MIC’ … ‘FIRE sector’ … ‘ruling elite’ … ‘oligarchy’ … ‘neocons’. Who actually defines and sets America’s geopolitical priorities and determines our foreign policy? Not “officially”. Not constitutionally. But de facto.

    Michael T. Klare: From my experience, US foreign policy is set by what some have called the “blob” – the unelected, bipartisan, self-replicating network of senior Washington policymakers (NSC, DoD, CIA) plus the chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees; engaged former generals, admirals, and ambassadors; major defense contractor lobbyists; and key think-tank and media pundits (usually interchangeable with the other categories).

    Q: We’ve had decades of international tensions. Recent developments have seen a sharp escalation in the potential for a major war. The U.S. apparently cannot be at peace. “Threats” against the homeland are allegedly increasing in number and severity. The trajectory of our relations with the rest of the world appears to be more confrontations, more enemies, more crises, more wars.

    Is the world really that full of aggressors, bad actors, ruthless opponents? Or is there something in our own policies and attitudes toward other countries which put us at odds with them, thus making war inevitable and peace impossible?

    MK: I believe that the United States, like all major military powers, strives for global hegemony in competition with other major military powers. This “great-power competition,” as the military calls it, is built into the DNA of major US political institutions and has full bipartisan support. It means that when America’s strategic overseas interests clash with those of another great power, say in Ukraine or over Taiwan, tensions are bound to rise and the risk of war increases.

    Q: Our leaders relentlessly talk about our “national interests” and our “national security”, warning that both are under constant assault. Yet, we spend more than the next nine countries combined on our military. Why does such colossal spending never seem to be enough?

    MK: The United States is, at present, the only so-called great power which seeks to exert its power on a global basis, on every continent. This requires lots of troops, planes, ships, and overseas bases. Maintaining this global military presence is very, very expensive. No other nation is event attempting to replicate this posture, so they needn’t spend so much on defense.

    Q: It’s evident that you, and the many individuals who follow you and support your work, believe that America’s direction in both the diplomatic sphere and in the current conflict zones represents exercise of government power gone awry. Can you paint for us in broad strokes the specific changes in our national priorities and policies you view as necessary for the U.S. to peacefully coexist with other nations, at the same time keeping us safe from malicious attacks on our security and rightful place in the world community?

    MK: The United States is not the only major power that is well-armed and threatening regional and global stability – China, Russia, and even India and Turkey are doing so as well. So the U.S. priority must be to manage international competition in ways that reduce the risk of a major war. This means pursuing additional arms control measures and installing conflict-avoidance and crisis-management measures. In particular, it means working with China to reduce the risk of war over Taiwan.

    Q: The general public, especially when it’s aware of the self-sabotaging results of our current foreign policies and military posturing, clearly wants less war and militarism, preferring more peaceful alternatives on the world stage and greater concentration on solving the problems at home. As peace activists, we are thus more in line with the majority of citizens on issues of war and peace, than those currently in power.

    What happens if we determine that those shaping current U.S. policy don’t care what the citizenry thinks, are simply not listening to us? What if we conclude that our Congress, for example, is completely deaf to the voice of the people? What do we do? What are our options then? What are the next concrete steps for political activists working toward a peaceful future?

    MK: Calling for diplomacy, not war with China.

    *****

    We are grateful to Michael T. Klare for sharing his valuable and thought-provoking views. The interview was arranged by John Rachel, Director of the Peace Dividend Project. The Peace Dividend strategy is not a meme or a bumper sticker. It is an end-to-end methodology for challenging the political establishment and removing from power those compromised individuals who work against the interests of the great majority of U.S. citizens. The only hope for our hyper-militarized nation is each and every one of us having a decisive voice in determining the future we want for ourselves and our children.

    The post The Realities of the International Power Struggle first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The US Should be ASHAMED of What They’re Doing in Syria

    The House of Representatives voted not to end the U.S. occupation of Syria on Wednesday. This is disappointing but not surprising. Although all is not lost, 103 leaders voted for it with 56 Democrats joining 47 Republicans to vote in favor of the bill, showing that there is at least some appetite for peace. Opponents of the bill said that they feared that troop withdrawal would revive terrorist groups n the region. Which is a good joke because the U.S. has backed terrorists groups in the region by supporting the al-Qaeda affiliated al-Nusra since the Obama administration.

    The post The US Should be ASHAMED of What They’re Doing in Syria first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Imperial Narrative Managers Always Try To Make Peace Seem Unnatural

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    I’ve been ranting all week about the shocking war-with-China propaganda escalation in Australian mainstream media, and I feel like I could easily scream about it for another month without running out of vitriol for the disgusting freaks who are pushing this filth into the consciousness of my countrymen. One really really can’t say enough unkind things about people who are openly trying to pave the way toward an Atomic Age world war; in a remotely sane world such monsters would be driven from human civilization and die cold and alone in the wilderness with nothing but their bloodlust to keep them company.

    One of the most obnoxious things said during this latest propaganda push appeared in the joint statement provided by the five “experts” (read: empire-funded China hawks) recruited by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age to share their obscenely hawkish opinions in an official-looking media presentation. This paragraph has been rattling around in my head since I first read it:

    “Australia must prepare itself. Most important of all is a psychological shift. Urgency must replace complacency. The recent decades of tranquillity were not the norm in human affairs but an aberration. Australia’s holiday from history is over. Australians should not feel afraid but be alert to the threats we face, the tough decisions we must make and know that they have agency. This mobilisation of mindset is the essential prerequisite to any successful confrontation of China.”

    Do you see what they’re doing there? These professional China hawks are explicitly trying to frame peace as a strange “aberration”, and war as the status quo norm. They’re saying Australians require a “psychological shift” and a “mobilisation of mindset” from thinking peace is normal and healthy to thinking war is normal and healthy.

    Which is of course ass-backwards and shit-eating insane. Every normal, healthy person regards peace as the default position and violence as a rare and alarming aberration which must be avoided whenever possible.

    We know this is true from our normal human experience of our own personal lives. None of us spend the majority of our time getting into fist fights, for example; anyone who spends most of their waking life physically assaulting people has probably been locked up a long time ago. If you have ever been in a fist fight you will recall that it was experienced as a rare and alarming occurrence, and everything in your body was screaming at you that this was a freakish and unnatural thing which must end as quickly as possible the entire time. In healthy people violence is experienced as abnormal, and its absence is experienced as normal.

    This normal, baseline position is what imperial narrative managers spend their time trying to “psychologically shift” everyone away from, propagandizing us instead into accepting continuous conflict and danger as the norm. Such a shift is beneficial to the empire, to war profiteers, and to professional war propagandists, and is entirely destructive to everyone else. It causes us to accept material conditions which directly harm our own interests, and it makes us crazy and neurotic as a civilization.

    You see it all the time though, like whenever there’s a push to withdraw imperial troops from some part of the Middle East they’ve been in for years, or the slightest discussion of maybe not raising the military budget this year, or skepticism that pouring weapons into a violence-ravaged part of the world is the wisest and most helpful thing to do.

    Any time we see the slightest beginnings of the tiniest movement toward stepping away from the path of nonstop warmongering and militarism, pundits and politicians begin bleating words like “isolationism” and “appeasement” in an attempt to make calls for de-escalation, demilitarization, diplomacy and detente look freakish and abnormal in contrast to the sane, responsible status quo of hurtling toward nuclear armageddon at full tilt.

    Their job is to abnormalize peace and normalize war, which means our job as healthy human beings is to do the exact opposite. We must help everyone understand the horrors of war and the unfathomable nightmares that can be unleashed by reckless brinkmanship, and help people to understand that peace is what’s healthy and to imagine a future where it is the norm.

    The bad news is that we are pushing against a narrative-manufacturing apparatus that is backed by the might of a globe-spanning empire. The good news is that our vision is the one that’s based on truth, and deep down everyone can sense it. All we need to do to get people viewing peace as normal and war as abnormal is to remind people of what they already know inside.

    _________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Total Worldwide Disarmament: Security Must Be for All Countries

    Read Parts 1, 2, and 3.

    A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.

    — Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1980

    All people opposed to war must be anti-imperialist. To not be anti-imperialist would render a declared antiwar position as a contradiction.

    Scott Ritter, steeped in military knowledge, has compellingly put forth the legal argument that Russia’s special military operation against the Ukrainian forces is legal. Ritter contends that the Russians are fighting the war with kid gloves, bending over backwards to limit civilian casualties. Ritter has gravitas since he was a US Marines intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector. Said Ritter,

    … the military imperative, the military necessity of shutting this [conflict] down is real, but Russia didn’t do it. Why? Because Russia isn’t viewing this as we viewed the war against the Iraqis. Russia is viewing this as a special military operation — people make fun of that word — but it’s not war because if it was war, Ukraine would be gone today, eliminated… [view from 49:16]

    To Rid the World of Warmaking, Target the Apex of Warmaking

    If one truly wants to rid the world of war, one needs to target the warmaker, the aggressor, the initiator of violence: the United States. The violence of the US even gave pause to the pacifist sentiments of Martin Luther King, Jr who said:

    … I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.

    Noted linguist Noam Chomsky ridiculed the Orwellian notion of a defense department in the US:

    … the Pentagon is in no sense a defense department. It has never defended the United States from anyone: it has only served to conduct aggression, and I think the American people would be better off without a Pentagon.

    The world would be better off without a Pentagon. To rid the world of war, as the preeminent superpower and rogue nation, the US has the moral obligation to seek a worldwide demilitarization. This will require full transparency verified through monitoring and compliance enforced by an independent and empowered body. After that, those entities and individuals responsible for US aggression and other war crimes should stand trial and be prosecuted, as should all responsible individuals in all nations that perpetrate war crimes.

    Of Course, War Should be Abolished

    Most people will distinguish between offensive warmaking and warring in self-defense. To draw an equivalency in criticism between an aggressor and and a war of resistance to attack is, palpably, wrongheaded. Worse, it provides succor to the aggressor since it fares no worse than its targeted enemy. Thus, a principled antiwar position would abjure scapegoating and falsely assessing equivalency in blame to a country that only seeks mutual security yet finds itself cornered by a hegemon. As T.P. Wilkinson compellingly argued:

    … the claim that Russia should not have violated Ukrainian sovereignty is based on the erroneous belief that Ukraine was invaded. This assertion is based on ignorance. Quite aside from the international-law issues posed by the sovereign claims of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR), and hence whether they could exert sovereign rights to conclude treaties and hence invite military aid, there is the long-standing original threat and active aggression of NATO in and through Ukraine’s governments. The recognition of sovereignty does not outweigh the right of self-defense.

    Prominent antiwar activist David Swanson wrote, “But unless we get back to disarmament, the long-term prospects for humanity are grim.

    I agree with Swanson’s assessment. As for disarmament, that is what Russia is carrying out right now in Ukraine. Weapons companies won’t be happy about that. However, it is high time that the Kellogg-Briand Pact be adhered to.

    Swanson continues, “Of course, NATO and everyone else have always wanted a neutral Ukraine, so this shouldn’t be such a huge hurdle.”

    This is puzzling. If NATO had wanted a neutral Ukraine all along, then why did NATO say yes to future Ukraine membership, albeit without specifying a date for joining? NATO even recognized Ukraine as an “enhanced opportunity partner.” Moreover, if the US-financed military biological program in Ukraine becomes verified, then it puts an emphatic kibosh to any talk of NATO having wanted a neutral Ukraine.

    Regarding the Russian demands, Swanson writes, “Of course, it is a horrible precedent to meet the demands of a warmaker.”

    But Ukraine is also a “warmaker” according to Swanson’s definition because it also wages war with Russia. Question: Did Swanson ever call Ukraine a “warmaker” back in 2014 for shelling Donbass? And just who made the war in Ukraine? Why did Russia “invade” Ukraine? Was it not Ukraine’s shelling of Donbass that precipitated an exodus of ethnic Russians into Russia and Ukraine’s refusal to abide by the Minsk Agreements that caused Russia, exasperated at the infidelity of its negotiating partners, to recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics? Was it not Ukraine that made war — specifically, that was the initiator of making war? Was Ukraine not undermining Russian state security by seeking NATO membership and being loaded up with NATO weaponry? Ukraine became a proxy of the US. In actuality, the initiator of warmaking is not Ukraine but the US. Swanson has failed to point this out.

    And why does a wide swath of antiwar types focus inordinately on Russia in Ukraine? Israel (an occupier of historical Palestine) has been aggressing Palestine, Syria, Iran, Lebanon for several years. The US is occupying a large chunk of Syria and stealing its oil and wheat. The US military refuses to remove its military from Iraq although ordered to do so by the Iraqi parliament — in essence, a de facto military occupation. Meanwhile the continental US sits in occupation of Indigenous nations territory, in occupation of Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, Guantánamo Bay, Guam, Saipan, the ethnically cleansed Chagos archipelago. How do Israel and the US escape sanctions and continual censure for their warmaking?

    Yet, by “invading” Ukraine, Russia is poised to very quickly become a war-ender. The timetable for the war from the Russian side is undisclosed, but it appears Russia has been proceeding slowly to ensure minimal civilian casualties. This is not a prediction, however, with Ukraine becoming militarily depleted, it is not out of the question that by summer Russia will have ended a war that has raged since 2014 between Ukraine and Donbass.

    Swanson’s final paragraph reads: “One way to negotiate peace would be for Ukraine to offer to meet all of Russia’s demands and, ideally, more, while making demands of its own for reparations and disarmament. If the war goes on and ends someday with a Ukrainian government and a human species still around, such negotiations will have to happen. Why not now?”

    Fine, peace now would be great. But what is the reasoning behind Swanson’s demand that Russia should pay for reparations and disarmament to Ukraine? Will Swanson also demand that Ukraine pay reparations to Donbass? Will Ukraine pay reparations to Russia for dragging it into the mess it created at the behest of the US?

    If Ukraine should be demanding reparations, then it should be demanding them from US-NATO that in an abjectly cowardly manner abandoned (and thank goodness it did) its prospective NATO member to face Russia alone. And Swanson would do well to argue that the US-NATO pay reparations to Ukraine, Donbass, and Russia. And then the US should be demanded to pay reparations to a historical list of countries that it has criminally devastated.

    Nonetheless, I find it strange that the US warmaker extraordinaire and a neo-Nazi-infiltrated Ukraine are glanced over while blame is laid on Russia.

    Although I may dissent on the facts and logic proffered on the warring, I am unequivocally in solidarity with worldwide disarmament and ending war forever. That day, unfortunately, has not arrived yet.

    A Principled Antiwar Coalition

    The United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) appears to have reached a principled antiwar position. I posed some questions based on their statement of Principles:

    Kim Petersen: “UNAC holds that the U.S. government…” From this I understand that the US military-industrial-governmental-etc nexus is the primary obstacle to a world without war. Is this correct?

    UNAC: Yes, the US government is the main imperialist power in the world and the main cause of war. It has about 20 times the number of foreign military bases as all other countries in the world and has a military budget that represents about 45% of the total military budget of all other countries. It has militarily intervened in other countries over 65 times in the past several decades. It is the only country that has used nuclear weapons on people.

    KP: “We support the right of all oppressed peoples, including colonized and formerly colonized countries, to determine their own road to liberation.” Does this grant the oppressed peoples the right to violently resist (at least equivalent to) the violence of oppression to liberate themselves?

    UNAC: Yes, the countries that the US has attacked and provoked have the right to defend themselves against US/NATO military aggression. The problem is that the US military has been much stronger than the countries it attracted until now.  This time, however, Russia is winning the proxy war against the combined might of the US-NATO and countries around the world are seeing that the “West” can be defeated. Even with its strong military, the people of Vietnam and Afghanistan were about to defeat the US military. Today to avoid the people of the US turning against their wars, they conduct proxy wars where others fight the battles. This was true in Libya, Syria and now they are showing their willingness to fight the war in Ukraine to the last Ukrainian.

    KP: Since UNAC supports “Mutual self-defense” how does UNAC view the denial of mutual security sought by Russia as justification to gain security through a special military operation?

    UNAC: The denial of Russian security was a deliberate strategy on the part of the US to provoke the war we are seeing today. The US thought that the war and the sanctions would cause regime change and the break-up of Russia. It is proving to be a mistake. The US provoked them by moving NATO up to their border, despite pledges not to do so. They have conducted “war games” on the Russian border and put nuclear capable missiles close to their borders. They created a coup in Ukraine to get rid of a government that wanted good relations with its neighbor and built the Ukraine military to the strongest in Europe. They trained them, armed them, gave them logistic support and paid for their military, all to try and defeat the Russian military. The US has never been interested in stability in the region or in Russian security. This has led to the war in Ukraine.

    *****
    If there is a warmaker or warmakers, then there must be a war-ender or war-enders. If by resisting a warmaker that one ends a war, then that should be, if not applauded, then, at least, tolerated by antiwar types. This holds especially true in the case of serial warmakers like the US. They say the bigger they are, the harder they fall. It appears that the US warmaking colossus is tottering toward an ungraceful fall in Ukraine. If so, then the peacemakers worldwide can breathe easier.

    The Antiwar Costa Rican Example

    In 1946, the pacifist physicist Albert Einstein wrote in a letter: “You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war. The very prevention of war requires more faith, courage and resolution than are needed to prepare for war. We must all do our share, that we may be equal to the task of peace.”

    In 1949, the Central American country of Costa Rica courageously embraced the logic expressed by Einstein. Costa Rica set the example for other genuinely antiwar countries to follow when it abolished its army.

    Worldwide disarmament is required. This will, undoubtedly, be a most difficult fight — dismantling the military-industrial complex in the US and disassembling other militaries abroad. Yet peace would be the glorious reward for people everywhere. Imagine what could be achieved with military spending redirected to job creation, healthcare, education, infrastructure construction and maintenance, social security, environmental protection and enhancement, space exploration, a living wage, etc. Is a perpetual state of spending on killing really what people should accept from their governments?

    The post Total Worldwide Disarmament: Security Must Be for All Countries first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Ron DeSantis for President? Among His Qualifications, War Crimes?

    Ron DeSantis was there watching us. We were crying, screaming. We were tied to the feeding chair. And he was watching. He was laughing. Our stomachs could not hold this amount of Ensure. They poured one can after another. So when he approached me, I said, “This is the way we are treated!” He said, “You should eat.” I threw up in his face. Literally on his face.”

    – Mansoor Adayfi, held without charge at Guantanamo Bay, 2002-2016, describing force feeding used by guards to break hunger strike

    The official website for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis does not mention his time at the Guantanamo prison camp. His military records released by the Navy in 2018 were heavily redacted. His official site notes his graduating from Yale with honors as a history major and earning a law degree with honors from Harvard Law School. The official site says only this about his active military service:

    While at Harvard, he earned a commission in the U.S. Navy as a JAG [Judge Advocate General’s Corps] officer. During his active-duty service, Ron deployed to Iraq as an adviser to a U.S. Navy SEAL commander in support of the SEAL mission in Fallujah, Ramadi and the rest of Al Anbar province. His military decorations include the Bronze Star Medal for Meritorious Service and the Iraq Campaign Medal.

    In March 2006, when DeSantis first went to Guantanamo, he was a 27 year old graduate of two elite universities. He was a Navy officer, sworn to uphold the Constitution. He was a JAG lawyer dealing with illegally held prisoners in an illegal concentration camp in the midst of an illegal “war on terror.” Like every other American participant in these crimes against humanity, he has not been held accountable.

    Mansoor Adayfi (aka Mansur Ahmad Saad al-Dayfi) is a Yemeni citizen who was 18 when he was captured by warlords in Afghanistan and sold to the US as a “terrorist.” He was held without charges in Guantanamo from February 2002 until July 2016, when he was transferred to Serbia and released. In 2021 he published “Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo,” a book recounting his years of torture and resistance at the criminal camp that still holds innocent prisoners. In November 2022, Monsoor Adayfi joined the Eyes Left podcast hosted by Iraq War veteran Mike Prysner, who promotes this episode as a “journey into Ron DeSantis’s shadowy military career reveals shocking new details about his complicity in illegal torture. Featuring exclusive never-before-heard testimony from former Guantanamo prisoner Mansoor Adayfi….” An edited version of that ten minute interview appears in the March 2023 issue of Harper’s magazine. Ron DeSantis’s office did not respond to Harper’s requests for comment.

    For all that the DeSantis campaign for President is much in the news currently, Harper’s appears to be the only mainstream media outlet taking notice of his role in torturing Guantanamo prisoners. Some alternative media, such as The Real News Network (Dec. 2, 2022) and Florida Bulldog (Jan. 26, 2023), have reported the story in depth, with no response from DeSantis.

    In the mainstream, there has been some intense criticism of DeSantis in Vanity Fair (Jan. 2, 2023) and The Nation (Feb. 27, 2023), but with no mention of Guantanamo. [In 2018, when DeSantis was running for Governor, the Miami Herald asked what DeSantis did in Guantanamo, got no answer from DeSantis, got puffery from the Navy, talked to no detainess, and left the question unanswered.] Diane Ravitch in her blog (Feb. 27, 2023) doesn’t refer to torture even though she makes DeSantis’s education policy sound like force-feeding children’s minds:

    … this audacious attempt to put the governor of the state in charge of whatever is taught in his state. What DeSantis is doing is not conservative. It is radical. It is authoritarian. He shows no respect for critical thinking or debate. He is unwilling to allow students to learn anything he does not like. His desire for control of what can be taught or learned is dangerous to democracy. He is attempting to establish a dictatorship and has a super-majority of both houses in the [Florida] legislature who will give him whatever he wants.

    Failing to address the known war crimes that DeSantis is known to have been a part of allows mainstream media to normalize him. This is a form of deceit by omission. A representative example is this New York Times op ed by Damon Linker on February 27 focused on the essentially meaningless question of whether a DeSantis Presidency would be worse than another Trump Presidency. Linker writes:

    The case against Mr. DeSantis is rooted in his policy commitments. During his time as Florida’s chief executive, he has governed from the hard right, taking aggressive aim at voting rights, pursuing politicized prosecutions, restricting what can be taught in public schools and universities, strong-arming private businesses, using refugees as human props to score political points and engaging in flagrant demagogy about vaccines. Before that, as a congressman, he supported cuts to Social Security and Medicare and voted for a bill that would have severely weakened Obamacare. All of that provides ample reason to rally against him should he end up as the Republican nominee in 2024. But none of it makes Mr. DeSantis worse than Trump….


    Linker concludes that comparisons with Trump are distractions, because “Calling Mr. DeSantis bad should be good enough.” And that’s without even considering war crimes, which both have committed. In its odd way, this approach is a form of “critique” as whitewash.

    In last November’s Eyes Left podcast, Mansoor Adayfi described conditions at Guantanamo, which De Santis supervised, without intervening. As a JAG officer, DeSantis would have been, or should have been, aware that he was participating in torture, clear violations of internationsl law. According to Monsoor Adayfi:

    They used to restrain us in that feeding chair. They tied our head, our shoulders, our wrists, our thighs and our legs. They put some kind of laxative in the feeding liquid. We were shitting ourselves all the time. Then we were moved to solitary confinement – really cold cells. It was live five times a day. It wasn’t feeding. It was just torture. Five times a day. You can’t possibly handle it. They just kept pouring the Ensure. In one week, they broke all the hunger strikers. And he [Ron DeSantis] was there. All of them were watching. They used to beat us. And if we screamed or were bleeding out of our nose and mouth, they were like, “Eat.” The only word they told us was “eat.” We were beaten all day long. Whatever they were doing – they just beat you. Pepper spray, beating, sleep deprivation. That continued for three months. And he [Ron DeSantis] was there. He was one of the people that supervised the torture, the abuses, the beatings.

    The fundamental reality is that 2006 was a year of military depravity at Guantanamo. Even the UN human rights agency criticized the place. Three detainees died there that year, hanged – the Navy said they were suicides, but the Navy sent their bodies home without major organs, making any autopsy impossible. DeSantis was there through all of that. The official story is that his job was to make sure the US military was abiding by the laws of war.

    But what did DeSantis actually do at Guantanamo? Did he object to or intervene in the military torture program? Did he do anything to mitigate the suffering of prisoners held illegally, without charges? Did he participate in any way in torturing these prisoners? Or did he, as alleged, do exactly the job he was expected to do, talk to prisoners as a “friend” about what distressed them most, then report back to his superiors, so that they could increase the most stressful torture techniques, while keeping the whole process secret?

    Whatever DeSantis did in Guantanamo, the Navy saw fit to send him next to Iraq, as a JAG officer tasked with advising Seal Team One how to follow the rules of war. In 2007, DeSantis was assigned to Anbar province, which experienced some of the worst American atrocities and war crimes, especially in Fallujah and Ramadi. As in Guantanamo, whatever DeSantis accomplished in Anbar, he did not effectively protect human rights. He did get a medal. And he’s running for President? With most of his service record is still shrouded in secrecy? Who benefits from that?

    The post Ron DeSantis for President? Among His Qualifications, War Crimes? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Tens of thousands across Europe protest Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one year on

    The biggest European anti-war protest marking one year since Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine was held in Berlin on February 25, where according to Tariq Ali, some 50,000 people turned out in freezing conditions, reports Susan Price.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • To See Real Foreign Influence, Check out Canada’s Military

    If you believe the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and Conservatives, the Chinese own a backbench Liberal MP, which has been front page news recently. But no one mentions Washington’s possession of our military.

    According to a leak reportedly from CSIS, the Chinese consulate in Toronto assisted Han Dong win the Liberal party nomination for the riding of Don Valley North. A source in the intelligence agency claims the consulate bused Chinese international students and seniors to vote for Han during a tightly contested Liberal party vote in 2019. Conservative MP Blaine Calkins, National Post columnist Terry Glavin and others have openly labeled Han an “agent of China”.

    But Han and the Liberal Party deny the claims. Additionally, Karen Wen Lin Woods, a harsh critic of the Chinese government, points out that Han’s main competitor for the nomination, Jiang Banggu, was “also very China Friendly. So essentially, the Chinese Consulate had no skin in the game whether or not Han or Jiang wins in the end, they will get a ‘pro China’ Liberal MP.” (Or to put it differently, the Chinese speaking community in that riding is not hostile to Beijing and wanted a candidate to reflect that.)

    Other peculiarities about this story are how and why the information was released. One of the principal reporters in relaying CSIS’ recent claims about Chinese interference, Robert Fife, also quoted unnamed CSIS sources to justify the imprisonment of Maher Arar. In the official “Report of the events relating to Maher Arar”, former Associate Chief Justice of Ontario Dennis R. O’Connor, concluded the purpose of a leak Fife relayed was to “influence public opinion against Mr. Arar at a time when his release from imprisonment in Syria was being sought by the Government of Canada, including the Prime Minister.”

    The recent uproar about Chinese interference seems to be part of a broader campaign CSIS has joined to contain China’s rise. Its partner in the Five Eyes intelligence arrangement, the US National Security Agency (NSA) pressed Ottawa to ban Chinese-owned Huawei from Canada’s 5G network and Ottawa recently followed the US in banning TikTok from government devices.

    As part of laying the groundwork for more conflictual relations with China, the House of Commons unanimously endorsed a resolution last month reiterating its claim that China was committing genocide in Xinjiang and calling for Canada to accept 10,000 Uyghur refugees. The group driving the initiative was the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, which said on its website the “Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project is funded by the Washington-based National Endowment Fund for Democracy for its Advocacy work in Canada.” Other Canadian organizations are also funded by the US government to target China.

    Connecting the dots draws a picture of much larger US interference in Canadian affairs than Chinese. But to only consider direct US interventions into Canadian politics is to miss the forest for the trees. From top-40s music to Hollywood blockbusters, best-selling books to news outlets, Canada’s cultural and media sphere is massively influenced by the US. Ditto the economy.

    Probably the most important institution pushing an anti-China outlook — Canada’s military — offers a unique window into US influence. “Over the last 15 years or more, there has not been one Chief of Staff who has not been vetted or trained by the U.S. Armed Forces”, wrote Tony Seed in a 2017 article titled “‘Interoperability’ — Euphemism for integration and annexation of Canadian Forces in the service of empire-building.”

    Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) from 2005-08, Rick Hillier graduated from the US Army War College and was the first Canadian Deputy Commander of General III Corps, which is based in Texas. The next CDS, Walter Natynczk, also attended US Army War College and became Deputy Commanding General III Corps. Through this role Natynczk helped plan the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq from Kuwait and then served as Deputy Commanding General of the Multi-National Corps in Baghdad in charge of 35,000 troops. Natynczk’ successor as CDS was Tom Lawson who led the military until 2015. Deputy Commander of NORAD in Colorado Springs in 2011–2012, Lawson previously attended the United States Air Force Air Command and Staff College and United States Air Force Air War College. The current CDS Wayne Eyre was Deputy Commanding General of Operations for the US Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps and was the first non-American deputy commander of the US-led United Nations Command in South Korea.

    A March 2017 dispatch from the US embassy in Ottawa to the State Department in Washington entitled “Canada Adopts ‘America First’ Foreign Policy” highlighted Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs (Canada-US Relations) Andrew Leslie’s close ties to the US military. The former Chief of Transformation and Chief of the Land Staff, reports the memo, “has extensive ties to U.S. military leaders from his tours in Afghanistan.”

    (The “Canada Adopts ‘America First’ Foreign Policy” cable also notes that Chrystia Freeland was appointed foreign minister “in large part because of her strong U.S. contacts”. Uncovered through a freedom of information request, the memo notes that Freeland’s “number one priority” was working closely with Washington.)

    From the weapons it employs to its doctrine, the US greatly influences Canada’s military. Through NORAD the US Commander of the alliance has de facto control over a number of military installations in Canada. In some circumstances US forces are authorized to enter Canada under that country’s command. During the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, for instance, US troops were quietly deployed. Canadian military leaders have repeatedly instigated secret discussions to further integrate the two countries’ militaries, which politicians have often had to restrain. 

    The depth of the Canada-US military alliance is such that if US forces attacked this country it would be extremely difficult for the Canadian Forces to defend our soil. In fact, given its entanglements with their southern counterparts the CF, would likely enable a US invasion. As with the 2003 invasion of Iraq — which Ottawa officially opposed — some Canadian troops on exchange in the US might march north and, as is the norm when the US invades another country, Canadian officers would likely operate NORAD systems aiding the aggression.

    Unpalatable as it may be to some, the USA is the only nation that could realistically invade Canada. In 1812 Britain/Canada fought a war with the US. In the decades after the War of 1812 border disputes led to the 1846 Oregon Treaty and Irish Fenians attacked Canada from the US in the 1860s. In 1848 the US seized more than half of its southern neighbour’s territory.

    In 1898 a 200-man Yukon Field Force was created out of fear the US might seek to seize the region in the wake of the Klondike Gold Rush. During that decade Canadian officials feared war between the US and Britain because they were in conflict over a Venezuela-Guyana territorial dispute. Through the 1920s and 30s US military planners crafted detailed invasion plans. Ostensibly for a war with Britain, Canada War Plan Red included abolishing the Canadian government and holding territory “in perpetuity”. A 1928 draft of the plan added, “it should be made quite clear to Canada that in a war she would suffer grievously.” The invasion plans, which were approved by the Secretary of War and Secretary of Navy, remained current until WWII.

    Today, the US and Canada have multiple territorial disputes. Most significantly, Washington doesn’t recognize Canadian control over the North West passage.

    Directly and indirectly, the hullabaloo about China is largely an outgrowth of US influence. On Twitter Alex Boykowich recently noted, “‘Chinese interference’ in Canadian elections or politics is really American interference.” That’s not far from the mark.

    The post To See Real Foreign Influence, Check out Canada’s Military first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Is Maintaining Tensions With North Korea to Draw in Allies Against China

    The U.S. military encirclement of China threatens to escalate into an Asia-Pacific war, with the Korean Peninsula at the focal point of this dangerous path. Garrisoned with nearly 30,000 combat-ready U.S. forces manning the astonishing 73 U.S. military bases dotting its tiny landmass, South Korea is the most critical frontline component of U.S. military escalation in northeast Asia.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Why Biden Snubbed China’s Ukraine Peace Plan


    Photo credit: GlobelyNews

    There’s something irrational about President Biden’s knee-jerk dismissal of China’s 12-point peace proposal titled “China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis.”

    “Not rational” is how Biden described the plan that calls for de-escalation toward a ceasefire, respect for national sovereignty, establishment of humanitarian corridors and resumption of peace talks.

    “Dialogue and negotiation are the only viable solution to the Ukraine crisis,” reads the plan. “All efforts conducive to the peaceful settlement of the crisis must be encouraged and supported.”

    Biden turned thumbs down.

    “I’ve seen nothing in the plan that would indicate that there is something that would be beneficial to anyone other than Russia if the Chinese plan were followed,” Biden told the press.

    In a brutal conflict that has left thousands of dead Ukrainian civilians, hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers, eight million Ukrainians displaced from their homes, contamination of land, air and water, increased greenhouse gasses and disruption of the global food supply, China’s call for de-escalation would surely benefit someone in Ukraine.

    Other points in China’s plan, which is really more a set of principles rather than a detailed proposal, call for protection for prisoners of war, cessation of attacks on civilians, safeguards for nuclear power plants and facilitation of grain exports.

    “The idea that China is going to be negotiating the outcome of a war that’s a totally unjust war for Ukraine is just not rational,” said Biden.

    Instead of engaging China–a country of 1.45 billion people, the world’s largest exporter, the owner of a trillion dollars in US debt and an industrial giant–in negotiating an end to the crisis in Ukraine, the Biden administration prefers to wag its finger and bark at China, warning it not to arm Russia in the conflict.

    Psychologists might call this finger-wagging projection–the old pot calling the kettle black routine. It is the US, not China, that is fueling the conflict with at least $45 billion dollars in ammunition, drones, tanks and rockets in a proxy war that risks–with one miscalculation–turning the world to ash in a nuclear holocaust.

    It is the US, not China, that has provoked this crisis by encouraging Ukraine to join NATO, a hostile military alliance that targets Russia in mock nuclear strikes, and by backing a 2014 coup of Ukraine’s democratically elected Russia-friendly president Viktor Yanukovych, thus triggering a civil war between Ukrainian nationalists and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, regions Russia has more recently annexed.

    Biden’s sour attitude toward the Chinese peace framework hardly comes as a surprise. After all, even former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett candidly acknowledged in a five-hour interview on YouTube that it was the West that last March blocked a near-peace deal he had mediated between Ukraine and Russia.

    Why did the US block a peace deal? Why won’t President Biden provide a serious response to the Chinese peace plan, let alone engage the Chinese at a negotiating table?

    President Biden and his coterie of neo-conservatives, among them Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, have no interest in peace if it means the US concedes hegemonic power to a multi-polar world untethered from the all-mighty dollar.

    What may have gotten Biden unnerved—besides the possibility that China might emerge the hero in this bloody saga—is China’s call for the lifting of unilateral sanctions. The US imposes unilateral sanctions on officials and companies from Russia, China and Iran. It imposes sanctions on whole countries, too, like Cuba, where a cruel 60-year embargo, plus assignment to the State Sponsor of Terrorism list, made it difficult for Cuba to obtain syringes to administer its own vaccines during the COVID pandemic. Oh, and let’s not forget Syria, where after an earthquake killed tens of thousands and left hundreds of thousands homeless, the country struggles to receive medicine and blankets due to US sanctions that discourage humanitarian aid workers from operating inside Syria.

    Despite China’s insistence it is not considering weapons shipments to Russia, Reuters reports the Biden administration is taking the pulse of G-7 countries to see if they would approve new sanctions against China if that country provides Russia with military support.

    The idea that China could play a positive role was also dismissed by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who said, “China doesn’t have much credibility because they have not been able to condemn the illegal invasion of Ukraine.”

    Ditto from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who told ABC’s Good Morning America, “China has been trying to have it both ways: It’s on the one hand trying to present itself publicly as neutral and seeking peace, while at the same time it is talking up Russia’s false narrative about the war.”

    False narrative or different perspective?

    In August of 2022, China’s ambassador to Moscow charged that the United States was the “main instigator”of the Ukraine war, provoking Russia with NATO expansion to Russia’s borders.

    This is not an uncommon perspective and is one shared by economist Jeffrey Sachs who, in a February 25, 2023  video directed at thousands of anti-war protesters in Berlin, said the war in Ukraine did not start a year ago, but nine years ago when the US backed the coup that overthrew Yanukovych after he preferred Russia’s loan terms to the European Union’s offer.

    Shortly after China released its peace framework, the Kremlin responded cautiously, lauding the Chinese effort to help but adding that the details “need to be painstakingly analyzed taking into account the interests of all the different sides.” As for Ukraine, President Zelinsky hopes to meet soon with Chinese President Xi Jinping to explore China’s peace proposal and dissuade China from supplying weapons to Russia.

    The peace proposal garnered more positive response from countries neighboring the warring states. Putin’s ally in Belarus, leader Alexander Lukashenko, said his country “fully supports” the Beijing plan. Kazakhstan approved of China’s peace framework in a statement describing it as “worthy of support.” Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán–who wants his country to stay out of the war– also showed support for the proposal.

    China’s call for a peaceful solution stands in stark contrast to US warmongering this past year, when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, a former Raytheon board member, said the US aims to weaken Russia, presumably for regime change–a strategy that failed miserably in Afghanistan where a near 20-year US occupation left the country broke and starving.

    China’s support for de-escalation is consistent with its long-standing opposition to US/NATO expansion, now extending into the Pacific with hundreds of US bases encircling China, including a new base in Guam to house 5,000 marines. From China’s perspective, US militarism jeopardizes the peaceful reunification of the People’s Republic of China with its break-away province of Taiwan. For China, Taiwan is unfinished business, left over from the civil war 70 years ago.

    In provocations reminiscent of US meddling in Ukraine, a hawkish Congress last year approved $10 billion in weapons and military training for Taiwan, while House leader Nancy Pelosi flew to Taipei – over protests from her constituents–to whip up tension in a move that brought US-China climate cooperation to a halt.

    A US willingness to work with China on a peace plan for Ukraine might not only help stop the daily loss of lives in Ukraine and prevent a nuclear confrontation, but also pave the way for cooperation with China on all kinds of other issues–from medicine to education to climate–that would benefit the entire globe.

    The post Why Biden Snubbed China’s Ukraine Peace Plan first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • US Exceptionalism and the Wars in Syria and Ukraine

    Syria has been at war since 2011. The conflict is in a stalemate. US troops control nearly a third of the country. The US finances the operation and a secessionist army with oil and wheat they take from the area. It funds them and deprives the Syrian government from their own resources. In the northern province of Idlib, the Syrian version of Al Qaeda is in control, receiving the majority of aid from Europe while the 90% of Syrians who live in government controlled areas go hungry and have electricity only three hours per day.

    Meanwhile in Ukraine, the bloodshed continues as Russian troops battle Ukrainian soldiers while the US and NATO pour in weapons. Russian troops have taken control of much of the eastern region, the Donbass.

    How did we get here and what is driving the process?

    The Rise of the US Exceptionalism

    After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, influential neoconservatives said it was time for US interests and priorities to be dominant. There was only one superpower. This was to be a New American Century with no challengers. This perspective went from being a fringe element to increasingly influential. Over the course of the 1990s, it took hold and became US foreign policy. They said it explicitly: The US should not permit any country to challenge US supremacy and dominance.

    With the Soviet Union gone and Russia in disarray, there was no counter-force in international organizations or the United Nations. The US manipulated existing agencies and created new institutions to its advantage. History and international agreements were rewritten. For example, with US and Israeli pressure, the UN resolution affirming that Zionism is a form of racism was overturned.

    US foreign policy became increasingly aggressive. Sanctions on Iraq, aimed to drive the country into total submission, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Children were especially vulnerable to sickness from contaminated water. Chlorine for purification was prohibited while the US hailed itself a leader in gender equality with the first female Secretary of State, Madeline Albright.

    Recalcitrant countries were subject to attack. The multi-ethnic country of Yugoslavia was a prime target. Divisions were promoted while the CIA funded an extremist separatist army. NATO went on the attack, bombing Serbia without authorization from the UN Security Council. The plan was clear: divide and conquer.

    Simultaneously, the creation of the European Union in 1993 made it harder for individual countries to act in their own best interests and easier for the US to dominate the whole.

    The military alliance binding them together is NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Although this is a military alliance, there is no doubt which country is paramount. The US spends more than all others combined.

    The September 11 attacks in 2001 were a watershed moment. The attacks provided a “Pearl Harbor” moment and justification for increased US aggression abroad. The official explanation of who carried out the attacks and why has been seriously challenged. Whoever perpetrated the attacks, neoconservatives used 9-11 to push their agenda. The US commenced their attack and occupation of Afghanistan.

    The next major violation of international law was the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Iraq was devastated, extremism and sectarianism exploded. Today, US troops remain there despite the Iraqi parliament and government requesting they leave.

    Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction as claimed by US “intelligence”. Instead, a form of chemical weapons was created in Iraq by the US military. Dust from depleted uranium bullets and missiles vaporized and mixed with the environment. Iraq has experienced a huge increase in birth defects and cancer.

    Russia Restabilizes

    While this was happening, Russia was starting to restabilize under the Putin administration. After a decade of chaos, corruption and the collapse of the communist safety net, Russia was getting back on its feet in the early 2000s. The standard of living and life expectancy started to increase. Western advisors were no longer in charge. Oligarchs were no longer able to rob at will.

    Even though the Warsaw Pact has ceased to exist, NATO refused to disband. On the contrary, despite promises to Russian leaders, NATO expanded in 1999, 2004 and 2009.

    When NATO invited Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO in 2008, Russia loudly said NO. They said that would cross a red line for them. NATO was clearly an OFFENSIVE alliance and to permit it on the Ukraine border less than 500 miles from Moscow would jeopardize Russian security. Russia kept asking that security for ALL be considered.

    War in Libya and Syria

    Unrest in Libya erupted in early 2011. Western media started propagating stories of pending massacres and the UN Security Council, with China and Russia abstaining, authorized a “no fly zone” and “necessary measures to protect civilians”. This became the pretext for the US plus NATO and other allies to attack Libyan government forces. They overthrew the Libyan government and unleashed a civil war that continues to today. Later evidence revealed the sensational claims of rape and pending massacre were falsehoods, just like in the past.

    At the same time, the West and allies Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey were funding, training and supporting extremists and foreigners travelling to Syria. After the overthrow of the Libyan government, the CIA took control of Libyan military arsenals and started sending weapons to jihadists in Syria.

    Extremists were trained in camps in Turkey on the Syrian border. Weapons were flown into Incirlik US Air Base in southern Turkey. Thus started the US war on Syria which continues to today.

    In the Fall of 2013, a sarin gas attack killed hundreds of civilians in outer Damascus. Neocons were itching to attack Syria as they had attacked Libya and Iraq. President Obama claimed, “We know the Assad regime was responsible.” He also said “I believe we should act. That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional.”

    The US attack was deterred after Russia persuaded Syria to give up all their chemical weapons – which had been developed as a deterrent against Israel’s nuclear weapons. Russian Putin praised the agreement but cautioned, “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.”

    Later, Seymour Hersh revealed that the chemical attacks were not carried out by the Syrian government as claimed by Obama. Rather, they had been perpetrated by Syrian extremists with Turkish support. The purpose was to provide a pretext for US and NATO direct attacks on Syria.

    War in Ukraine

    Meanwhile, 1200 miles north of Damascus, protests in the Maidan main square of Kyiv Ukraine were growing in intensity. There was a combination of peaceful protesters and a small but violent faction of ultra nationalist extremists. Western billionaires and US agencies were instrumental in promoting pro-western organizations and the Ukraine protests. US politicians and officials such as Victoria Nuland and John McCain showed up to offer symbolic and tangible support.

    On February 7, 2014, Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador planned who would take leadership after the pending Ukraine coup. Nuland summed it up: “Yats is the guy” (Arseny Yatsenyuk). Referring to a compromise agreement preferred by European leaders, Nuland said, “Fuck the EU.” From the conversation, we also know that Jake Sullivan (current National Security Advisor) and then Vice President Biden were involved. US neoconservatives were not satisfied with a mixed Ukraine. They wanted an anti-Russia Ukraine.

    With the Winter Olympics in Sochi Russia drawing toward a close, someone decided to expedite the coup. Timing is important. On February 20, snipers killed over 50 protesters and police to ignite the events. Ukrainian-Canadian Professor Ivan Katchanovoski of the University of Ottawa has rigorously researched the events and shows that the shootings were by snipers located in opposition controlled buildings.

    On the first day of the coup government, on 27 February, they removed Russian as an official language despite 30% of the population having it as a first language. It would be comparable to a coup in Ottawa Canada with the coup government removing French as an official language of Canada. The new leader was the same Arseny Yatsenyuk as planned by Nuland weeks earlier.

    Opponents of the coup government were attacked with 42 killed in Odessa. In Crimea, they quickly organized a referendum on whether to secede from Ukraine. With 83% turnout, 97% of the population said they wanted to join the Russian Federation. In eastern Ukraine north of Crimea, called the Donbas, there was also a majority of the population deeply opposed to the coup and coup government. They confronted the authorities and many military units defected to join the secessionists. The regions were cut off by the Kiev government, with pensioners no longer receiving retirement checks and government services stopped. The Ukrainian Army attacked and thousands died. The regions were excluded from national elections. Eventually they organized themselves as the Donetsk and Lugansk Peoples Republics. Thus the war in Ukraine did not begin one year ago; it began nine years ago, in February 2014.

    In late 2014 and again in 2015, peace agreements to resolve the civil war in Ukraine were signed in Minsk. France and Germany were to help insure the implementation. Russia supported this as a way to resolve the conflict. The UN Security Council passed a resolution endorsing the agreement.

    Instead of implementing this, Kiev ignored their promises while the US and NATO began arming and training the Ukraine Army. In effect, Ukraine became an unofficial member. The arming and NATO-ization continued and escalated. First it was only “defensive” weapons. Then, under Trump, they began supplying “offensive” weapons.

    NATO plans to destabilize and weaken Russia were explicit. The Pentagon thinktank, the RAND Corporation, published reports discussing strategic options to weaken and destabilize Russia. The longer term goal: to break it up as plotted by Brzezinkski in his US foreign policy bible The Grand Chessboard.

    It has recently been revealed by the former Ukrainian, French and German leaders that the 2015 Minsk peace agreement was a ruse. By their own statements and admissions, it was never a genuine effort to peacefully resolve the civil war in eastern Ukraine. The goal was to stall for time while NATO trained and equipped the Ukrainian Army, to solidify the anti Russian attitude and crush those not in agreement.

    NeoCons do not want peace in Ukraine

    The neocons driving Washington’s foreign policy do not want to end the Ukraine war; they want to prolong it. They dream of repeating what happened in the 1980’s when Russian intervention in Afghanistan led to the weakening and ultimate breakup of the Soviet Union. The former boss of Jake Sullivan, Hillary Clinton, said explicitly in March “That [Afghanistan] is the model that people are now looking toward.”

    The immorality of US policy is breathtaking. Afghanistan went through hell beginning in 1979 as the US and Saudi Arabia supported and armed religious fanatics to destabilize Afghanistan and create trouble for the Soviet Union. Afghanistan has endured over four decades of conflict and extremism and is still suffering.

    Today, US neocons running foreign policy are sacrificing Ukraine with the same goal of undermining Russia. They could not live with a neutral Ukraine and have promoted and allied with ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi Ukrainian elements. Previously Washington did not want anything to do with the neo-Nazis but this has changed.

    NeoCons and Syria

    The US has also allied with extremists in Syria. In late 2014 and early 2015, ISIS and Nusra (the Syrian Al Qaeda) made major assaults. Syrian and foreign extremists poured across the Turkish border. There were dozens of Canadians, hundreds of Brits, thousands of Europeans and North Africans. The Canadian and British secret services were well aware of the plans of their citizens who were being recruited by Al Qaeda and ISIS. They did nothing because, as Jake Sullivan said, “AQ [Al Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.”

    With weapons and training from western military and intelligence forces, the extremists were able to capture a large area of northern Syria and the outskirts of Damascus.

    In September 2015 Russia came to the assistance of the Damascus government. They provided airplanes and pilots to attack the advancing extremists. Uninvited, the US began also overflying Syria and then establishing US bases in the east and south. They rarely attacked ISIS but attacked Syrian troops at critical times. Then they began cultivating Kurdish secessionist elements. They rebranded them as the “Syrian Democratic Forces”. They are still there today – stealing the Syrian nation’s wealth in oil and wheat. The US has imposed draconian sanctions on the majority of the country. The dirty war on Syria continues.

    Neoconservative belief in US supremacy and impunity are exemplified by former Deputy Director of the CIA, Michael Morell. In an 2016 interview, he was outraged that Russia supported the Syrian government resisting extremist attacks. In a 2016 interview, Morell publicly suggested “covertly” killing Russians who are on the ground in Syria. “They got to pay a price for what they’re doing. Just like we made the Russians pay a price in Afghanistan …. We have to make them want to go home.”

    Russian Intervention in Ukraine

    One year ago, Russia troops went into Ukraine with the stated goal of de-nazifying and de-militarizing the country. Many Ukrainian civilians have fled the fighting with more that 3 million going to Russia, by far the most of any country.

    Did Russia have a choice? They could have continued waiting, hoping for a change in attitude by the US and NATO. They tried. In December 2021 Russia proposed peace treaties with the US and NATO. Instead of negotiating, the US and NATO dismissed the proposals out of hand.

    The US-Ukraine Stategic Partnership, signed in November 2021, made it clear there was no intention to respect the will of the overwhelming majority of people in Crimea or to implement the Minsk Agreement to resolve the eastern Ukraine conflict peacefully. On the contrary, Ukraine with US support was building its forces to attack the Donbass and perhaps Crimea.

    After 30 years of NATO provocations and escalating threats, Russia acted. While this has been condemned in the West, there is widespread understanding and support for their position in the Global South. A recent poll indicates that a big majority continue to feel positively about Russia.

    What happens in Ukraine will have a profound impact on the globe. The “New American Century” dreamed by US hawks has been challenged.

    It is high time to end US delusions of superiority and exceptionalism. The USA should become a normal nation.

    We need a multipolar world with respect for the UN Charter and international law.

    Let the people in Crimea and the Donbass choose their destinies. Let the war end and Ukrainians recover and prosper in an independent country which is neither a tool of the US or Russia. Let Syria rebuild and recover without the cruel US sanctions.

    Let the US turn from fomenting conflicts, undermining and attacking other countries to reforming and improving itself.

    The post US Exceptionalism and the Wars in Syria and Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • US Ambassador To China: “We’re The Leader” Of The Indo-Pacific

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    A recent US Chamber of Commerce InSTEP program hosted three empire managers to talk about Washington’s top three enemies, with the US ambassador to China Nicholas Burns discussing the PRC, the odious Victoria Nuland discussing Russia, and the US ambassador to Israel Tom Nides talking about Iran.

    Toward the end of the hour-long discussion, Burns made the very interesting comment that Beijing must accept that the United States is “the leader” in the region and isn’t going anywhere.

    “From my perspective sitting here in China looking out at the Indo-Pacific, our American position is stronger than it was five or ten years ago,” Burns said, citing the strength of US alliances, its private sector and its research institutions and big tech companies.

    “And I do think that the Chinese now understand that the United States is staying in this region — we’re the leader in this region in many ways,” Burns added emphatically.

    The “Indo-Pacific” is a term which has gained a lot of traction in geopolitical discourse in recent years, typically describing the vast multi-continental region between Australia to the south, Asia to the north, Africa to the west, and the middle of the Pacific Ocean to the east. It contains half the Earth’s population, and it very much includes China.

    After making the rather audacious claim of being “the leader” of a region which China is a part of but the United States is not, Burns went on to claim the US does not want any kind of confrontation with the Chinese government.

    “We want a future of peace with China,” Burns said. “As President Biden makes clear every time he talks about this, we don’t want conflict, but we’re gonna hold our own out here. And I feel optimistic, just concluding my first year as ambassador, about the American position in this country and in this region.”

    Again, Burns is saying this from China, so by “in this country” he means in China.

    Burns supported the Iraq war and is on record saying that “China is the greatest threat to the security of our country and of the democratic world,” and he was appointed to his current position for a reason. Though especially hawkish and American supremacist, his comments are entirely in alignment with official US foreign policy; here’s an excerpt from a White House strategy published last year titled “Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States“:

    The United States is an Indo-Pacific power. The region, stretching from our Pacific coastline to the Indian Ocean, is home to more than half of the world’s people, nearly two-thirds of the world’s economy, and seven of the world’s largest militaries. More members of the U.S. military are based in the region than in any other outside the United States. It supports more than three million American jobs and is the source of nearly $900 billion in foreign direct investment in the United States. In the years ahead, as the region drives as much as two-thirds of global economic growth, its influence will only grow—as will its importance to the United States.

    …

    In a quickly changing strategic landscape, we recognize that American interests can only be advanced if we firmly anchor the United States in the Indo-Pacific and strengthen the region itself, alongside our closest allies and partners.

     

    This intensifying American focus is due in part to the fact that the Indo-Pacific faces mounting challenges, particularly from the PRC. The PRC is combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological might as it pursues a sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific and seeks to become the world’s most influential power. The PRC’s coercion and aggression spans the globe, but it is most acute in the Indo-Pacific. From the economic coercion of Australia to the conflict along the Line of Actual Control with India to the growing pressure on Taiwan and bullying of neighbors in the East and South China Seas, our allies and partners in the region bear much of the cost of the PRC’s harmful behavior. In the process, the PRC is also undermining human rights and international law, including freedom of navigation, as well as other principles that have brought stability and prosperity to the Indo-Pacific.

     

    Our collective efforts over the next decade will determine whether the PRC succeeds in transforming the rules and norms that have benefitted the Indo-Pacific and the world. For our part, the United States is investing in the foundations of our strength at home, aligning our approach with those of our allies and partners abroad, and competing with the PRC to defend the interests and vision for the future that we share with others. We will strengthen the international system, keep it grounded in shared values, and update it to meet 21st-century challenges. Our objective is not to change the PRC but to shape the strategic environment in which it operates, building a balance of influence in the world that is maximally favorable to the United States, our allies and partners, and the interests and values we share.

    As we discussed recently, history’s unfolding has shown us that the US empire’s plan to “shape the strategic environment” in which China operates has meant continuing to encircle China with war machinery in ways the US would never permit itself to be encircled. So when men like Joe Biden and Nicholas Burns claim the US does not seek a confrontation with China, what they really mean is that they hope China just sits back without responding to the confrontation the US is already inflicting upon it.

    The way US empire managers talk about “leading” ostensibly sovereign states with ostensibly independent governments shows you they really do think they own the world. We see this in news stories like US officials admonishing Brazil for permitting Iran to harbor military ships thousands of miles away from the US coastline, while continually shrieking about China asserting a small sphere of influence over the South China Sea which the US continually transgresses by sailing and flying its own war machinery right through it.

    We also see US empire managers claiming ownership of the entire planet in instances like when they drew a “red line” on China providing Russia with military assistance even as the US and its allies pour weapons into Ukraine, or the time Biden said that “everything south of the Mexican border is America’s front yard,” or the time then-Press Secretary Jen Psaki remarked on the mounting tensions around Ukraine that it is in America’s interest to support “our eastern flank countries”, suggesting that the eastern flank of the United States is eastern Europe and not its own geographic eastern coastline.

    They claim ownership over the entire planet while pretending that they do not seek confrontation with the nations they try to subjugate, and interpret any refusal to be subjugated as an unprovoked act of aggression. This is taking our world in a very dangerous direction, and we need to do something to stop it.

    ______________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • United States ramps up threats against China, Russia

    What began as an overblown diplomatic response by Washington to a Chinese surveillance balloon that drifted across the continental United States, before being shot down over the Atlantic Ocean, has morphed into a major confrontation, writes Barry Sheppard.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Quoth the Vultures “Evermore”


    Photo: frame:BOYS WHO SAID NO / helicopter:MIKE HASTIE

    On the short roof outside the bedroom window, two black vultures sit, staring in. They have come to remind me of something. I put my book down and peer back at these strange looking creatures. The book: Our War: What We Did in Vietnam and What It Did to Us by David Harris. I had read it when it was first published in 1996 and it has stuck with me, as has the utterly savage U.S. war against Vietnam that killed so many millions, what the Vietnamese call The American War.

    I am of the same generation as Harris, the courageous draft resister and anti-war campaigner who died on February 6. Like him, many of us who were of draft age then have never been able to extricate the horror of that war from our minds. Most, I suppose, but surely not those who went to Vietnam to fight, just moved on and allowed the war to disappear from their consciousness as they perhaps tried to think of it as a “mistake” and to live as if all the constant American wars since weren’t happening. As for the young, the war against Vietnam is ancient history, and if they learned anything about it in school, it was erroneous for sure, a continuation of the lie.

    But it was no mistake; it was an intentional genocidal war waged to torture, kill, and maim as many Vietnamese as possible and to use drafted (enslaved) American boys to do the killing and suffer the consequences.  It’s Phoenix Program, the CIA’s assassination and torture operation, became the template for Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, CIA black sites, hybrid wars, terrorist actions, etc. up to today.  Harris writes:

    [that] …. “calling the war a mistake is the fundamental equivalent of calling water wet or dirt dirty…. Let us not lose sight of what really happened.  In this particular ‘mistake,’ at least 3 million people died, only 58,000 of whom were Americans.  These 3 million people died crushed in the mud, riddled with shrapnel, hurled out of helicopters, impaled on sharpened bamboo, obliterated in carpets of explosives dropped from bombers flying so high they could only be heard and never seen; they died reduced to chunks by one or more land mines, finished off by a round through the temple or a bayonet through the throat, consumed by sizzling phosphorous, burned alive by jellied gasoline, strung up by their thumps, starved in cages, executed after watching their babies die, trapped on the barbed wire calling for their mothers.  They died while trying to kill, they died while trying to kill no one, they died heroes, they died villains, they died at random, they died most often when someone who had no idea who they were killed them under the orders of who had even less idea than that.

    That’s the truth. Unvarnished. But such historical truth hurts to consider, for it reminds us that the belief in the U.S.A.’s good intentions is a delusion. The war against Vietnam was immoral, but even that word fails to grasp it. Pure evil is truer.  And to consider that war on military terms alone, one must accept the fact the U.S. lost the war despite all its military technology.

    Time, that truly mysterious bird, forces us back to the past as it perpetually opens to the future – all in the meditative present. I look out the window and think how each of us lives in the time circles of our days, morning till night and then the same again and again as these small carousels carry us like arrows to the day time runs out for us. Time is a circle and an arrow within a circle and … pure mystery. It encloses us. And when we are gone, as is dear David Harris, the circle game goes on and on as yesterday’s wars are resurrected today. An unbroken circle of human madness. Yet many carry on in hope because conscience calls. And now is all the time we have.

    I am writing this on Ash Wednesday, the day Christians begin Lent and take ashes on our foreheads to remind us of our mortality – dust to dust. Six weeks later comes Easter, the Resurrection from the dead, the day of hope. Six circular weeks celebrated every spring within the circle of every year on a calendar that moves straight ahead with the clicking of the numbers. Death, hope, and resurrection, even as history suggests it is hopeless to stop wars. That the vultures always triumph. Yet many carry it on in hope because conscience calls. And all time is now.

    Yes, I look out and the vultures’ gaze reduces me to a cataleptic state for a few moments. Then the thought of David Harris and his book on the table transports me back to the past, while my vulture visitors mouth the words “Evermore, Evermore” to remind me that the same war vultures are here now and are eager for prey in the future.  They devour the dead. They have never left, just as the truth about the U.S. war against Vietnam has not, if one allows it to sink in. It is a lesson not too late for the learning, for the United States warfare state has continued to wage wars all around the world.  None are mistakes. It would be a terrible mistake to think so.

    Cuba, Iraq, Serbia, Nicaragua, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Chile, Indonesia, China, Afghanistan, Philippines, Yemen, Somalia, Russia via Ukraine, etc. – all intentional and all based on lies. It’s the American Way, just as it was for Vietnam.

    Quoth the vultures “Evermore.”

    Like David Harris, I refused to go to the war but the war came to me.  When I became a conscientious objector from the Marines, I avoided killing Vietnamese but their killing by my countrymen has haunted me to this day. Unlike David, who was far more courageous than I, I didn’t go to prison, although I was prepared to do so. But I learned then, and have never forgotten, that my country is controlled by blood-thirsty vultures.

    Flying back in time, I remember a conversation I had with a friend on the plane to Marine boot camp at Parris Island, that infamous torture chamber in South Carolina where boys are made into professional killers. I told him how confused I was since I hadn’t been raised to kill people.  Actually the opposite. As a good Catholic boy, I was taught to love others, not to kill them. No one I knew ever said they saw a contradiction.  Yet here I was going to do that. It was insane. I kept conflating the slogan “The Marines Build Men: Body, Mind, and Spirit” with the advertising jingle I grew up hearing from the New York Yankees’ announcer, Mel Allen, who would intone the sponsor’s (Ballantine Beer) slogan: remember fans “The Three Ring Sign: Purity, Body, and Flavor – So Ask the Man for Ballantine.” Then there was the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: let us pray; men built by the Marines; purity and impurity, body, God’s body, bodies denied and maimed, killing other bodies, “In the Name of the Father and the Son and… “  It all felt so bizarre and my mind was a confused whirligig of contradictions.  What the hell was I doing on that plane, I thought. Whose life was it anyway?

    October 6, 1966.  Zippo Squads on CBS News, setting fire to peasant huts in Vietnam.  When I was younger, a Zippo lighter seemed so cool and manly.  Silvery and clicky, a cigarette in the corner of my mouth.  A real tough guy.  John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart.

    These boys were on a flatbed truck with their plastic guns as they
    presented themselves at a Veterans Day Parade

    in Albany, Oregon in 1991. This parade was a few months after the U.S.
    Military won Gulf War I, otherwise know as “Desert

    Storm.” The people at the parade were overwhelmed with joy that the U.S.
    had “ won ” another war. Little did they know

    that the war was a slaughter. Like Viet Nam, the U.S. War Machine went
    berserk with their systematic killing and

    destroying infrastructure. Every time you buy a boy a war toy, you
    trample his soul. In the film “ All Quiet On The

    Western Front,” the key word in this title for me is the word, “ Quiet.”
    Soldiers stayed quiet about the horrors of war, as

    they were too traumatized to talk about it. The truth is never passed
    down to the next generation. When it comes

    their time to go to war, they are a patriotic blank slate. The
    entertainment of violence in the United States is a

    malignant disease. When boys come home from war, they stop growing
    emotionally. PTSD is a state of being in

    which the emotions have failed to grow to the stature of the intellect.
    Without help, it is a slow death sentence.

    — Mike Hastie

    Memories.  That’s what vultures can do.  One look and you are gone.

    In the 1960s, things were simpler.  Although there were many newspapers then, and people read much more, it was television with its few major networks that fixated people.  Unlike today, when there is no military draft, the realities of U.S. wars are hidden from television viewers, and the internet is regularly scrubbed of the grizzly truth of our wars, in the 1960s, bloody images from Vietnam became a staple of the evening news shows.  Harris writes:

    We must not forget: it was a more simpleminded age, the information superhighway was still a deer trail, and network television was taken as reality, giving the folks back home a vivid, utterly riveting look at what some of their boys were going through, a kind of visceral access available to no previous generation of Americans.

    To accompany those sights and sounds, the folks back home were also given a running explanation of what was going on from their government. And the latter created the war’s second front.  Unprecedented visibility ensured that in this war, the government fought one war in the paddies against its NLF and North Vietnamese adversaries and another over the U.S. airwaves, trying to put the appropriate spin on events and convince America that there really was some important reason for going through all this. There wasn’t enough political support for the war to do otherwise, and television had too much impact. The obvious consequence was that Lyndon Johnson and then Richard Nixon spent a good deal of their energy playing to the cameras, just trying to make the war look like what America thought its wars should look like.

    More simpleminded it may have been, but that so-called simplemindedness together with the visual imagery from Vietnam – despite all the government propaganda – did help turn many people against the war despite Nixon’s ruthless ability to keep it running so long.

    Everything is different today, except for the propaganda and the wars.  A look back to Vietnam is crucial for understanding what’s happening now, for it makes absolutely clear that the U.S. government has no compunction about killing millions of innocent people for its evil ends, whatever they may be.

    Then, it would destroy a village in order to save it; today, it will destroy the world in order to save it.  It is the logic of madmen in the grip of evil beyond description. Yet most people repress the thought that nuclear war is very close.

    All the mainstream media headlines about Ukraine echo the U.S. propaganda about the American War against Vietnam. Just substitute the word Russian for National Liberation Front or Viet Cong. They are suffering extraordinary casualties. The tide is turning.  “The enemy was being taught the hard way,” writes Harris, “that aggression does not pay. We were steadily destroying their capacity to fight…. Victory was just around the corner.”

    It’s easy to laugh at the parallels until a vulture comes calling. The seeming unreality of their visitation is only equaled by the delusional nature of what passes for news today.

    Quoth the Vultures “Evermore.”

    David Harris was right about the 1960s when he said, “All that craziness had compromised the nation’s epistemology, rendering our accustomed patterns of knowing dysfunctional.” This is true a thousand times over today. If the ‘60s were simpler times, the digital internet revolution and AI have scrambled many people’s minds into a morass perfectly suited for today’s government lies. “Not only was it hard to know what was really going on,” he writes of Vietnam, “but it was even hard to know how we would know what was really going on if we stumbled over it.”

    Then came a shocking surprise: the Tet Offensive that began on January 31, 1968 when everything became quite clear. This massive attack by the NFL and VC was “the mother of all such epiphanies.”  All official lies were exposed and any prominent dissenter to these lies about the war had to be eliminated, thus Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated in quick order by the government that would go on for seven more years to wage its genocidal war against the Vietnamese and neighboring Cambodia and Laos.

    That was long ago and far away, but it’s worth contemplating. No one knows what exactly is around the corner in Ukraine. But then, I didn’t expect two vultures to visit me with their warning.

    I’m just passing on their message. Epiphanies happen. But so do cataclysms.

    All time is now.

    Although David Harris has died, he and the many others, such as Randy Kehler, who were caged in federal prisons for resisting the draft and opposing the war against Vietnam, live on to inspire us to believe that if we resist the warmongers, someday all free birds might chant in unison “Nevermore.”

    Here’s their story, a revelatory film about David and those who refused the siren song of evil: The Boys Who Said No

    True patriots.

    The post Quoth the Vultures “Evermore” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Highway of Death

    “Persons taking no active part in hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, color, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.” (Common Article 3 to the four 1949 Geneva Conventions of 1949)

    High above a swamp, over 60 miles of coastal Highway 8 from Kuwait to Iraq, a division of Iraq’s Republican Guard withdrew on February 26-27, 1991.

    Baghdad radio had just announced Iraq’s acceptance of a cease-fire proposal and, in compliance with UN Resolution 660, retreating Iraqi troops were ordered to withdraw to positions held before August 2, 1990.

    Nonetheless, President George H.W. Bush derisively called the announcement “an outrage” and “a cruel hoax.”

    The Home of the Brave™, it seems, wasn’t quite ready to stop the massacre.

    “U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours,” says Joyce Chediac, a Lebanese-American journalist.

    “It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” one U.S. pilot said.

    Randall Richard of the Providence Journal filed this dispatch from the deck of the U.S.S. Ranger: “Air strikes against Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait were being launched so feverishly from this carrier today that pilots said they took whatever bombs happened to be closest to the flight deck. The crews, working to the strains of the Lone Ranger theme, often passed up the projectile of choice because it took too long to load.”

    “When you see the battlefield littered with dead bodies as far as you can see and there’s smoke swirling around, and the smell of the dead bodies, the ammunition, the fuel, the explosions; it’s very overpowering,” said Paul Sullivan, a combat veteran from Operation Desert Storm who went on to create the National Gulf War Resource Center.

    Sullivan later described the so-called “Highway of Death” as “miles and miles and miles of charred trucks, tanks, blown up buildings, pieces of arms, pieces of legs every which way.”

    “Many of those massacred fleeing Kuwait were not Iraqi soldiers at all,” adds U.S. Attorney General-turned-peace activist, Ramsey Clark, “but Palestinians, Sudanese, Egyptians, and other foreign workers.”

    “Every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments,” Chediac reported after visiting the “Highway of Death” scene in 1991. “No survivors are known or likely. The cabs of trucks were bombed so much that they were pushed into the ground, and it’s impossible to see if they contain drivers or not. Windshields were melted away, and huge tanks were reduced to shrapnel.”

    “At one spot,” Bob Drogin reported in the Los Angeles Times, “snarling wild dogs had reduced two corpses to bare ribs. Giant carrion birds picked at another — only a boot-clad foot and eyeless skull are recognizable.”

    “Even in Vietnam, I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,” said Army intelligence officer and eyewitness, Major Bob Nugent.

    When you’re talking about America, it’s not pathetic… it’s policy.

    The post Highway of Death first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Avalon Militarism

    The global pandemic was not completely catastrophic in its effects. It led to the cancellation, and postponement, of wasteful projects and events. It spared public money. But as the pandemic slides into the shadow of policy-making, bad habits have returned. The profligates are here to stay.

    One such habit is the Avalon air show, a celebration of aeronautical militarism in the southern hemisphere best done without. In 2021, the organisers announced with regret that the event would be cancelled due to COVID-19 restrictions and uncertainty. Last October, however, organisers promised a return to form in 2023. Those with tickets “can look forward to a whole new program with jaw-dropping aerial displays, a refreshed food and beverage offering, and live entertainment.”

    Also known as the Australian International Airshow and Aerospace and Defence Exposition, Avalon2023 promises to “showcase” much in the “dynamic world of aviation, aerospace and space, new materials, fuels and ways of flying”.

    The program features both a specialist dimension and complimentary conferences “open to any accredited Trade Visitor”. The specialist aspect will feature presentations from, among others, the Royal Australian Air Force, Australian International Aerospace Congress, Australian Association for Unscrewed Systems (AAUS), Australian Industry Defence Network (AIDN), and the Australian Airports Association.

    With this military bonanza unfolding on February 28, the Australian Defence Minister, Richard “Call me Deputy Prime Minister” Marles, has tooted his justifications for more hardware, more military merchandise and more engagement with the defence industry. His address to the Avalon 2023 Defence and Industry Dinner revealed a boyish credulity typical in so many who lead that portfolio. The boys-with-toys credo becomes all seducing. Air forces, he noted, “are the coolest part of any military.” Trying to amuse, he called Top Gun Maverick “an important and insightful documentary”.

    With that treacly tribute out of the way, Marles could get down to the business of frightening Australians and delighting the military industrial mandarins. Australia faced “the most challenging and complex set of strategic circumstances we’ve seen since the Second World War.” The “global rules-based order” had been placed “under immense pressure”, largely due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “The post-Cold War era – a period of democratic expansion and unprecedented integration of global trade and investment – is now over.”

    The scriptwriter had evidently gone to sleep in drafting such words. The post-Cold War era was streaked by brutal invasions and interventions (Iraq and Libya, to name but two instances), supposedly by the rules-abiding types in Washington, London and Canberra. The Russian invasion did feature the imposition of will by a larger state on a smaller neighbour using “power and might”, but the US-led invasion that kicked the hornet’s nest of sectarian violence in 2003 came from the same stable of thought.

    The speech then follows a familiar pattern. First, call out the Russians. Then highlight the Oriental Armed Scourge to the North. “In the Indo-Pacific, China is driving the largest conventional military build-up we’ve seen anywhere in the world since the Second World War. And much of this build-up is opaque.”

    Australia’s security, assured by its remote location and geography, could no longer be taken seriously. “Today we face a range of threats – including longer-range missiles and hypersonics and cyber-attacks – which render our geographic advantages far less relevant.”

    The enemy could do damage from afar, causing harm “without ever having to enter our territorial waters or our air space.” It was therefore important to place Australian defence upon the footing of “being able to hold any potential adversaries at risk much further from our shores.”

    This was a rather devious way of laying the ground for more cash and larger budgets, ignoring the clear point that Australia has no truly mortal enemies, but wishes to make them as Washington’s obedient deputy.

    One particular product is meant to take centre stage. The Australian Defence Force is lagging in the department of murderous drone technology. One promises to be unveiled at Avalon. As reported by the national broadcaster, “The unscrewed air system has been developed by BAE Systems Australia and is designed to be stored in shipping containers.” The device is allegedly capable of carrying a lethal payload in excess of 100 kilograms.

    Australia’s Chief of Air Force, Air Marshal Robert Chipman, has made no secret of his desire for low-cost killer drones. “We’ve seen a proliferation of low-cost drones and loitering munitions delivering both ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] and fires to great effect,” he told a Melbourne audience filled with foreign air force chiefs and senior officials, “they don’t replace the roles of contemporary combat aircraft, but they might serve as a useful complement.”

    With that in mind, the RAAF was “considering the potential of low-cost drones that bring mass to our air combat system, and we’re considering what new measures are necessary to defend against them.” Such views thrilled the war mongering offices at The Australian, which expressed satisfaction that Australian military policy was finally “moving in the right direction.”

    Chapman has been particularly busy in the leadup to the Avalon airshow, walking the tightrope of defence propaganda. Self-praise and capability must be balanced against a fear of achievement on the part of an adversary.

    In an interview with the Australian Financial Review last week, the Air Marshal revealed that the RAAF had also joined the hysteria about targeting high altitude surveillance balloons. He also defended the merits of the F-35 fighter jet, praising their pilots as having “retained an edge over drones or other unscrewed platforms despite advances in technology.”

    China, however, was causing jitters in the area of hypersonic missiles, capable of delivering a warhead at five times the speed of sound with extreme manoeuvrability. “I think China is in front when it comes to hypersonics […] and that is something we are actively working to address.” Thank goodness, then, for the Avalon Air Show, even if the organisers were not sagacious enough to invite both Chinese and Russian manufacturers.

    The post Avalon Militarism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Protesters tell Richard Marles to scrap AUKUS

    Protesters told Minister for Defence Richard Marles to scrap AUKUS and spend the money on health, education and welfare. John Quelch reports.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Democrats Praise Bush, Want More Small-Business War Profiteers

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Well it’s another big day for Democrats doing Democraty things.

    At a Friday event commemorating the 20th anniversary of the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) hosted by the George W Bush Institute, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke glowingly of the president who instituted the program in 2003 at the same time he was preparing to launch an invasion which would inflict unfathomable horrors upon our world which continue to unfold to this day.

    “I’ll just say this honestly, that the Bush family, it’s because of their humanity, their faith, their generosity of spirit, their compassion,” said Pelosi. “Once again, it’s an honor to be associated with President Bush in this.”

    Pelosi then pointed to the former president, who was also joined by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and oligarch Bill Gates, with video appearances by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Bono of U2 fame.

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    Pelosi: "The Bush family it's because of their humanity, their faith, their generosity of spirit, their compassion. Once again, it's an honor to be associated with President George W. Bush in this." pic.twitter.com/NrIqLxc8Ck

    — Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 24, 2023

    Also on Friday we witnessed what Glenn Greenwald described as the “most Elizabeth Warren tweet ever,” in which the Massachusetts senator took a bold stand against Big War Profiteering to advocate on behalf of the little guy (by which I mean Small War Profiteering).

    “In the 1990s, America had 51 major contractors bidding for defense work,” tweeted Warren from her government account. “Today, there are only five massive companies remaining. Defense contracting should be reworked to break up the massive contracts awarded to the big guys and create opportunities for firms of all sizes.”

    Yeah that’s the real problem, Liz. It’s not that the war industry reaps huge profits from global militarism and nonstop warmongering, it’s that the war industry doesn’t include enough plucky small businesses. Won’t somebody please think of the mom and pop war profiteers? They’ve been forced to close their small community military-industrial complex shops by Walmartian “big guys” like Raytheon and Northrop Grumman!

    This is almost as embarrassing as Warren’s 2019 push to convert the US war machine to clean energy, saying “We don’t have to choose between a green military and an effective one” on the campaign trail during her run for president.

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    The Pentagon is the single largest government consumer of energy, and it’s dependent on fossil fuels. To improve military readiness and help us achieve a #GreenNewDeal, the Pentagon should achieve net zero carbon emissions for all its non-combat bases and infrastructure by 2030.

    — Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) May 15, 2019

    Because that’s what being a progressive Democrat means in 2023: backing the imperial war machine to the hilt and gushing about how wonderful and compassionate the Bush family is while calling for sustainably powered aircraft carriers and more small businesses in the military-industrial complex. A Ukrainian flag on an electric car. This is as far left as you’re allowed to go in the political landscape of the most powerful nation on earth without being branded a treasonous Kremlin operative.

    This is the Democratic Party’s true face. This is the Democrats telling you who they really are. Their whole function is to divert all meaningful leftward movement away from inconvenient areas like demilitarization and economic justice and toward convenient areas like whether there should be solar panels on Abrams tanks. And toward that end they have been very, very successful.

    The sooner Americans stop falling for the fake two-party puppet show and begin pushing for real change, the sooner our world can move toward health. These people do not care about you.

    ___________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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  • Our Children Are Experiencing Militarization of the US Up Close and Personally

    During a Veterans Day celebration in my small Maryland community, a teacher clicked through a slideshow of smiling men and women in military uniforms. “Girls and boys, can anyone tell me what courage is?” she asked the crowd, mostly children from local elementary schools, including my two young kids. A boy raised his hand. “Not being scared?” he asked. The teacher seized on his response: “Yes!”…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Chomsky: A Stronger NATO Is the Last Thing We Need as Russia-Ukraine War Turns 1

    The war in Ukraine is almost a year old, with no end in sight to the fighting, suffering and destruction. In fact, the war’s next phase could turn into a bloodbath and last for years, as the U.S. and Germany agree to supply Ukraine with battle tanks and as Volodymyr Zelenskyy urges the West to send long-range missiles and fighter jets. It is becoming increasingly obvious that this is now a U.S./

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Reminder: Jimmy Carter Was Just Like All the Other Presidents

    Former president Jimmy Carter is back in the news. His ongoing illness has surely caused him and his loved ones much distress and grief. For that, I wish them peace as the 39th president nears the end of his life.

    However, this is also an important opportunity to recognize that corporate media whitewashing is yet again in full effect — painting Carter as a peace-loving saint who deserved a Nobel Peace Prize.

    As with all U.S. politicians — regardless of party — it remains as dangerous as ever to ignore historical reality.

    During the Carter Administration, the U.S. had a president who claimed that human rights were “the soul of our foreign policy” despite making an agreement with the brutal dictator, “Baby Doc” Duvalier, to not accept the asylum claims of Haitian refugees.

    His duplicity, however, was not limited to our hemisphere; Carter also started earning his Nobel Peace Prize in Southeast Asia.

    In Cambodia, Carter and his national security aide, Zbigniew Brzezinski, made “an untiring effort to find peaceful solutions” by initiating a joint U.S.-Thai operation in 1979 known as Task Force 80, which for ten years, propped up the notorious and lethal Khmer Rouge.

    Interestingly, just two years earlier, Carter displayed his deep respect for human rights when he explained how the U.S. owed no debt to Vietnam. He justified this belief because the “destruction was mutual.”

    (Hmm…do any of you recall being bombarded with napalm and/or Agent Orange here in the Home of the Brave™?)

    Moving further southward in Carter’s efforts to advance democracy and human rights, we have East Timor. This former Portuguese colony was the target of a relentless and murderous assault by Indonesia since December 7, 1975. That assault was made possible through the sale of U.S. arms to its loyal client state, the silent complicity of the American press, and then-Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s skill at keeping the United Nations uninvolved.

    Upon relieving Gerald Ford — but strategically retaining the skills of fellow Nobel peacenik Henry Kissinger — Carter authorized increased military aid to Indonesia in 1977 as the death toll approached 100,000. In short order, over one-third of the East Timorese population (more than 200,000 humans) lost their lives due to war-related starvation, disease, massacres, or atrocities.

    Closer to home, the Rockefeller/Trilateral Commission ally also bared his “gentle soul” in Central America. As historian William Blum detailed, in 1978, the former peanut farmer attempted to create a “moderate” alternative to the Sandinistas through covert CIA support for “the press and labor unions in Nicaragua.”

    After the Sandinistas took power, Blum explained, “Carter authorized the CIA to provide financial and other support to opponents.”

    Also in that region, one of Carter’s final acts as president was to order $10 million in military aid and advisors to El Salvador.

    A final glimpse of “international cooperation based on international law” during the Carter Administration brings us to Afghanistan, the site of a Soviet invasion in December 1979. It was here that Carter and Brzezinski aligned themselves with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to exploit Islam as a method to arouse the Afghani populace to action.

    With the CIA coordinating the effort, some $40 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars were used to recruit “freedom fighters” like (wait for it) Osama bin Laden.

    The rest, as they say, is history.

    Was Jimmy Carter, as Chomsky once said, “the least violent of American presidents”? Perhaps. But have our standards dropped to the point where we meticulously rank the criminals who inhabit the White House?

    Will we ever eschew electoral deceptions and instead recognize and accept and name the big-picture problems?

    If you think Jimmy Carter was ever the answer, you’re asking the wrong questions.

    The post Reminder: Jimmy Carter Was Just Like All the Other Presidents first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Dictators Bent on Building Military Empires

    Autocrats only understand one word: no, no, no. No you will not take my country, no you will not take my freedom, no you will not take my future… A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease the people’s love of liberty. Brutality will never grind down the will of the free.

    — President Biden

    Oh, the hypocrisy.

    To hear President Biden talk about Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, you might imagine that Putin is the only dictator bent on expanding his military empire through the use of occupation, aggression and oppression.

    Yet the United States is no better, having spent much of the past half-century policing the globe, occupying other countries, and waging endless wars.

    What most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military industrial complex that has its sights set on world domination.

    War has become a huge money-making venture, and the U.S. government, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.

    America’s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine has already cost taxpayers more than $112 billion and shows no signs of abating.

    Clearly, it’s time for the U.S. government to stop policing the globe.

    The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world.

    American troops are stationed in Somalia, Iraq and Syria. In Germany, South Korea and Japan. In Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. In Niger, Chad and Mali. In Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

    Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

    Incredibly, America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

    The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

    This is how a military empire occupies the globe.

    After 20 years of propping up Afghanistan to the tune of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, the U.S. military may have finally been forced out, but those troops represent just a fraction of our military presence worldwide.

    In an ongoing effort to police the globe, American military servicepeople continue to be deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere.

    This is how the military industrial complex, aided and abetted by the likes of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and others, continues to get rich at taxpayer expense.

    Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad aren’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

    War spending is bankrupting America.

    Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.

    In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

    The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

    Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.

    Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.

    In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.

    Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

    Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.

    Unfortunately, even if we were to put an end to all of the government’s military meddling and bring all of the troops home today, it would take decades to pay down the price of these wars and get the government’s creditors off our backs.

    As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

    War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors. Indeed, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”

    Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.

    A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:

    $71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

    That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.

    Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.

    Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.

    That needs to change.

    The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.

    The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback.

    The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback.

    The U.S. military’s ongoing drone strikes will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people.

    The war hawks’ militarization of America—bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield—is also blowback.

    James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

    We are seeing this play out before our eyes.

    The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

    Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.

    At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

    The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

    This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

    Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

    We failed to heed his warning.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, war is the enemy of freedom.

    As long as America’s politicians continue to involve us in wars that bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much closer to eventual collapse, “we the people” will find ourselves in a perpetual state of tyranny.

    The post Dictators Bent on Building Military Empires first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • What We Know About The US Air Force’s Balloon Party So Far

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    You know, everyone’s always talking about how the US military is only ever used to kill foreigners for resource control and generate profits for the military-industrial complex, but that’s not entirely true. Turns out the US military is also used for shooting down party balloons.

    In an article titled “Object downed by US missile may have been amateur hobbyists’ $12 balloon,” The Guardian’s Richard Luscombe reports the following:

    The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade says one of its hobby craft went “missing in action” over Alaska on 11 February, the same day a US F-22 jet downed an unidentified airborne entity not far away above Canada’s Yukon territory.

     

    In a blogpost, the group did not link the two events. But the trajectory of the pico balloon before its last recorded electronic check-in at 12.48am that day suggests a connection – as well as a fiery demise at the hands of a sidewinder missile on the 124th day of its journey, three days before it was set to complete its seventh circumnavigation.

     

    If that is what happened, it would mean the US military expended a missile costing $439,000 (£365,000) to fell an innocuous hobby balloon worth about $12 (£10).

    “The descriptions of all three unidentified objects shot down Feb. 10-12 match the shapes, altitudes and payloads of the small pico balloons, which can usually be purchased for $12-180 each, depending on the type,” writes Steve Trimble for Aviation Week, who first broke the Bottlecap Balloon Brigade story.

    This information would put a bit of a wobble on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s comments to ABC’s This Week on Sunday that all three of the balloons shot down through the weekend were Chinese surveillance devices, saying “the Chinese were humiliated” by the US catching them in their sinister espionage plot. If the US air force did in fact just spent millions of dollars shooting down American party balloons, it wouldn’t be the Chinese who are humiliated.

    And it looks like that is indeed what happened. On Tuesday the National Security Council’s John Kirby said the “leading explanation” for the three unidentified flying objects that were shot down is that they were “balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose.” On Thursday President Biden told the press that “The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation, or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research.”

    And this all comes out after US officials told The Washington Post that the “Chinese spy balloon” which started this historically unprecedented multi-day frenzy of aerial kinetic warfare over North America was probably never intended for surveillance of the United States at all. Experts assess that the balloon was blown over the continent entirely by accident, trying to reconcile that narrative with the contradictory US government claims of intentional Chinese espionage by suggesting that perhaps the Chinese had intended for the balloon to be used for spying on US military forces in the Pacific or something.

    So to recap, the US air force shot down a Chinese balloon which US officials have subsequently admitted was only blown over the US by accident, then went on a spree of shooting things out of the sky which it turns out were probably civilian party balloons. The entire American political/media class has been spending the month of February furiously demanding more militarism and more cold war escalations over what is in all probability four harmless balloons.

    And what’s really crazy is that they’re probably going to get those increases in militarism and cold war escalations they’ve been calling for, despite the entire ordeal originating primarily in the overactive imaginations of the drivers of the US empire. The shrieking hysterical panic about “Chinese spy balloons” has dwarfed the coverage of the revelations contradicting that narrative, and China hawks have been using the occasion to argue for increases in military spending. The Atlantic’s Richard Fontaine got all excited and wrote a whole article about how the threat of Chinese spy balloons can be used “to rally public concern and build international solidarity” against China.

    These are the people who rule our world. They are not wise. They are not insightful. They are not even particularly intelligent. The US empire is a Yosemite Sam cartoon character who at any time can just flip out and start firing Sidewinder missiles at random pieces of junk in the sky, screaming “I’ll blast yer head off ya varmint!” If the US war machine was a civilian human, their family would be quietly talking amongst themselves about the possibility of conservatorship.

    These are the last people in the world who should be running things, and they are the last people in the world who should be armed with nuclear weapons. But that’s exactly where we find ourselves in this bizarre slice of spacetime. God help us all.

    ____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Irresponsible Politics: Australia’s B-52 Nuclear Weapons Problem

    It is not farfetched to make the point that delivery systems capable of deploying nuclear weapons will lead to them carrying those very same weapons. Whatever the promises made by governments that such delivery systems will not carry such loads, stifling secrecy over such arrangements can only stir doubt.

    That is the problem facing the AUKUS alliance which makes Australia a central point of reference for Washington and its broader ambitions in curbing China. The alliance is increasingly being characterised by a nuclear tone. First came the promise to furnish Australia with nuclear powered submarines, absent nuclear weapons. Then came the announcement to deploy six B-52 bombers to the Northern Territory’s Tindal airbase, south of Darwin.

    Australia, in being turned into a US garrison state, is very likely going to be a site where nuclear weapons are hosted, though pedants and legal quibblers will dispute what, exactly, constitutes such hosting. Whether this is done so transiently, or whether this will be an ongoing understanding, is impossible to say. Any such arrangement is bound to make a nonsense of the South Pacific Nuclear-free Zone Treaty, otherwise known as the Treaty of Rarotonga, to which Australia is a party.

    The Albanese government is doing little to clarify the matter, and, in so doing, drawing even more attention to itself. In Senate estimates hearings held on February 15, the Greens pressed for clarification on the issue of nuclear weapons on Australian soil. Senator David Shoebridge asked whether Canberra was complying with the Treaty of Rarotonga, and whether visiting B-52s could carry nuclear weapons.

    The latter question was almost a moot point, given that all B-52Hs are nuclear capable. The only issue is the type of nuclear enabled weapon they might carry. The nuclear gravity bomb days of the aircraft are over, but they are more than capable of being armed with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

    In his response, Department of Defence Secretary Greg Moriarty manufactured a state of compliance with international obligations. The circle could thereby be squared. “I think more generally, it is clear stationing of nuclear weapons in Australia is prohibited by the South pacific nuclear free zone treaty, to which Australia is fully committed.”

    The same, however, could not be said about visiting “foreign aircraft to Australian airfields or transit of Australia’s airspace, including in the context of our training and exercise programs, and the Australia and the Australian force posture cooperation with the United States.”

    Disconcertingly, Moriarty went on to acknowledge that the practice of carrying nuclear weapons on US aircraft, if it had been going on, was entirely consistent with Australia’s own commitments to both the Treaty of Rarotonga and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. “US bomber aircraft have been visiting Australia since the early 1980s and have conducted training in Australia since 2005. Successive Australian governments have understood and respected the longstanding US policy of neither confirming nor denying the presence of nuclear weapons on particular platforms.”

    Moriarty went on to acknowledge that, “Australia will continue to fully comply with our international obligations, and the United States understands and fully respects Australia’s international obligations with respect to nuclear weapons.”

    Shoebridge, less than content with the secretary’s response, shot back with another question: “So, Mr. Moriarty, do I understand from that answer that defence does not believe that there is a restraint under Australia’s current treaty obligations [permitting] nuclear armed B-52 bombers to be present in Australia, provided it’s not a permanent presence?”

    Moriarty never got a chance to respond. Left with an opportunity to correct the outlandishly servile, not to mention opaque nature of US-Australian security relations, Foreign Minister Penny Wong became stroppy. The tradition of Master Washington and Servant Canberra would not be bucked. “I’m the minister, and I’m responding.”

    In responding, thereby channelling the self-interested voice of the US imperium, an irritated Wong deferred the issue in its entirety to Washington’s judgment, accepting the principle of “warhead ambiguity”. “It is part of ensuring we maintain that interoperability that goes to us making Australia safe. We have tried to be helpful in indicating our commitment to the South Pacific nuclear free zone treaty. We are fully committed to that. And we’ve given you the answer that the secretary has given you.”

    It was, the Senator continued to elaborate, beneath the minister to “engage in any more hypotheticals” – what Shoebridge was wishing to do, she accused, was “drum up concern, and I don’t think it’s responsible.” What, then, was the appropriate response in the world according to Wong? “The responsible way of handling this is to recognise that the US has a ‘neither confirm nor deny position’ which we understand and respect.”

    This stubbornly irresponsible approach by the Australian government and its public servants means that the Australian public, at no point, can know whether US aircraft or delivery systems will have nuclear weapons, even if they transit through airspace or are based, for however long, on Australian soil. As Australian Greens Senator and Foreign Affairs spokesperson Jordon Steele John described it, “Australians have resisted the nuclearization of our military for decades and now the Albanese government is letting the Americans do it for us.”

    This ingloriously subservient status to Washington has been laid bare yet again, and along with that, the increasingly likely prospect of being targeted in any future conflict that involves the United States. Hardly a responsible state of affairs, and one on the verge of being treasonous.

    The post Irresponsible Politics: Australia’s B-52 Nuclear Weapons Problem first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Let the Bandwagon Play On!

    How do I then deftly move from housing as a human right (my last piece in DV is about housing, a job, my interviews, and getting the boot, i.e., not getting hired for a job I am perfect for — What’s It All About, Alfie?), and from the discrimination of this culture on all levels, but also in housing, against the non-White non-Hispanic, into the next and the next topic on my mind?

    Vaccination Bandwagon gone rogue

    How will I be able to tie in what I have expressed in THAT piece into something around the issues, say, confronting the County where I live giving students-parents until Wednesday to prove their kiddos are up-to-date on vaccinations, or some sort of exception? While the Covid Crack Shots are not mandatory, anymore, that is, but really, it’s the bandwagon effect that makes them “mandatory” (why now have your children NOT gotten that life affirming, life saving mRNA?). Imagine what sorts of shots these kids have received outside of the mRNA madness, and to be honest, most kids have been double boosted.

    Oregon requires immunization against 11 vaccine-preventable diseases. They are given in many iterations, many boosters, and, well, go to the CDC here: Birth to 15 Months and then scroll two inches to here: 18 Months to 18 Years

    • Tetanus
    • Pertussis (whooping cough)
    • Polio
    • Varicella (chickenpox)
    • Measles
    • Mumps
    • Rubella
    • Hepatitis B
    • Hepatitis A
    • Hib (Haemophilus influenzae type B) – only for children under five years old

    Those listed above are only a fraction of what the CDC lists. It is absolutely scary. You do not need RFK, Jr., to tell you why so many jabs mixed in with other jabs at birth and during the first 6 years of life are bad news bears. (Oh, man, the anti-RFK, Jr., bandwagon is huge!)  And it’s not just about a perservative:

    Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak

    I covered a new documentary, in French w/ English subtitles, over at Hormones Matter: “Injecting Aluminum: Documentary Questions Vaccine Safety“:

    Injecting-Aluminum-Meme-Quote-Yehudi_preview

    A new film airing in May, Injecting Aluminum, looks at a specific aspect of the vaccine “debate” through what easily is the one giant Gordian knot metaphor of the entire vaccine injury and death history – the adjuvant aluminum hydroxide developed in the 1920s as the “best” optimizer of the immune response when injecting the disease.

    The subtitle of 90-minute film by director Marie-Ange Poyet, How Toxic are Vaccines?, really takes the air out of the sails of the pro-vaccine-and-never-question-the-vaccinologist zealots. In fact, it’s the Gordian knot we can cut away: disentangling an impossible knot but cutting that damned thing, or finding a loophole through creative and robust outside the box thinking:

    Turn him to any cause of policy,
    The Gordian Knot of it he will unloose,
    Familiar as his garter

    — Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 1 Scene 1. 45–47

    Any critical thinking around what goes into a hypodermic needle and injected into baby’s body, that then is the new Labelling Questioners as Anti-Science Bandwagon!

    Covid19 (SARS or MERS, anyone) Bandwagon

    logo - Americares

    Source: The COVID-19 Global Pandemic

    Get into the weeds to understand this SARS-MERS thing, the Covid 19 thing, those bio-tech untested mRNA jabs: “When ‘Mutated Lab Made Viruses’ Are Used on Captive Monkeys…

    Don’t judge! Science is hard. Sasha Latypova

    Less humorous explanation of the monkey business: the C-19 potions are designed, financed, and made by DARPA/DOD/BARDA and related clown agencies via consortia of defense contractors including Pfizer who are paid huge sums of money, are not in control of the entire supply chain and product, and are promised protection by the government. The paperwork Pfizer submitted to the FDA reflects this fact: it is a prop in a play called “vaccine development and approval” and that’s why it looks so unprofessional, full of gaping holes and obvious fraud. The FDA is of course fully complicit in this and continues to pretend to “authorize” these military biowarfare agents as pharmaceuticals.

    *****

    But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.

    — Ludwig Feuerbach (Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity)

    Even Hegel understood the problems engendered by Capitalism. And in the sixties Debord tracked the direction of western capitalism and sketched with remarkable clarity the history and also created a sense of aesthetics that felt innately radical and subversive. Seeing the fundamental sickness of the Capitalist system was not new. Today, nothing is left of that radical quality, certainly not in the arts or academia. Increasingly there is a rote reflexive hatred of Marx, Freud, Communism, Mao, Stalin, and Fidel. The Frankfurt School is attacked, more from the left than the right, and self identifying left publications embrace the most reactionary of positions (Jacobin comes to mind, of course) on the pandemic protocols. And capitalism is viewed as if it is Nature, a god created fact. — John Steppling

    Pre-employment Google Check Bandwagon & the All-Female Band?

    But, in the end, this latest job rejection, what is it all about, Haeder, many ask? Do they Google you and find THESE anti-this, anti-that, pro-this, pro-that articles and then see you/ME are/is not part of their band wagon?

    I have been interviewed more than a dozen times here in Lincoln County (Pop. 50,000) the last 24 months. Every interview “team” has been comprised of 100 percent female (she, her, hers) about 90 percent of the time, and then other times, six out of seven, she-her-hers.

    I grew up with strong women — my mom had to divorce her first husband because he had Vancouver, BC mafia after him for gambling debts. She was an amazing force in Paris when we were kids over there, and amazing in Tucson, when she ended up there after divorcing my father, US Military. She had to bury her daughter at 23 after she was struck on her motorcycle in Kamloops. My grandmother Kirk, another strong Scottish woman, who ended up in Canada working her tail off. Aunt who opened a fancy restaurant with two other strong women. Aunts that were midwives, and aunt who was a nurse who managed her husband’s surgical and general medicine practice. Strong women left and right. My wife is an incredibly strong woman on many levels, not just because she puts up with me, but her entire life has been struggle and trauma and success!

    Ahh, but now, in my world, with so many not-so-strong women in my midst interviewing me, which is a form of critical judgement, and to be truthful, the fix is in when it comes to me, one lone guy, now older, applying for case managers and non-profit this or that position, and the team that interviews me and for which would be working with the new hire are all women.

    Band Wagons, man. Circle those wagons from whichever self-righteous perch you and your clan find yourself in.

    Again, this is all speculation, but you gotta be me to know speculation is also reality! Even when it comes to vaccinations and what the band wagon effect does to society (today, 2/12, that big band wagon event — Love it, or Leave us Star Spangled Banner, F-18 Super Bowl Flyover).

    But, here I am, working with mostly women, as a special Olympics basketball coach. And, while I get turned down for a four-county kick-ass job I am more than passionate about and qualified for, I am on the Special Needs bus to learn how to drive that bus and get to know the routes and students.

    So, this essay shifts to the band wagons within the female persuasion clan.

    Now now, there are many parents coming out to support these teams, and while there are two-gender homes, many of the special youth have been growing up with moms, aunts, grandmothers.

    Facts: The unfortunate correlation between a child with special needs and a marriage, though, is that the amount of participation from each parent can vary based upon how they are handling the issue emotionally. Tragically, there is a high rate of men who simply focus on work while leaving a mother to raise the child at home, creating a distance. This is not true for all fathers. However, far too often we receive phone calls from mothers who find themselves addressing their child’s needs on their own, either due to divorce or simple emotional distance.

    Not all men are the ones who cave and leave, that’s for sure. But I am seeing over several states a majority of women caregivers, parental figures, and social services providers, aides, teachers, and such.

    I wouldn’t exchange all the rewarding work I have done with both youth and adults with developmental disabilities for this kick-ass job I just got “railroaded out of.” You see, the job I applied for was compliance worker for Fair Housing Coalition of Oregon. That was Oct. 2022. No word until two weeks ago, 2/2/2023. Asking me if I’d put my resume and cover letter into the ring for this outreach specialists since the person writing me thought I was definitely qualified to do the job.

    WAR Bandwagon (Crocodile Tears When They Strike up the Band, Super Bowl Sunday!)

    Oh that web so many people have woven in their personal and work lives. Tangled when we practice to deceive is what Walter Scott had as one famous lines in Scott’s epic poem, Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field. My entire life has been that complicated web, but not because I have gone out to deceive, but because I have not set forth deception, and I have been true to myself, honest with others, and forthright in a world where more and more people are “acting” and playing roles with a modicum of heart in their work if it involves social work. There are great people in social services, don’t get me wrong. But more and more the world of that arena is all about acting, Thespian crap, show and tell, bells and whistles, and now “Your Zoom Presence — How to Make Yourself into a Star” is what rules.

    I could go on and on, but this is a minor speed bump in my road called life. Pissed off? Sort of, but not really, though angry at the systems of repression and oppression and how the world I sort of run in is now made up of the ghosting and cancelling and intolerance of this modern end game of confirmation bias and only listening to what one bandwagon is blasting on its Propaganda Speakers.

    Until I am still working as a school bus trainee in progress. With old people with their biases and backward thinking, and me, again, not on their bandwagon. Imagine, old guys telling me they hate Russia and Russians. No, they are not from Russia, nor did they have anyone from Russia or who fought in the Great Patriotic War. They just hate people they have never met, rendezvoused with or broke bread with. All those horrific propaganda movies, all that Russia Gate lunacy (Bandwagon), and yet, these 77-year-old truckers who are now school busing, hate a people and country they never knew or will never know.

    Oh,my,  they are equal opportunity racists, because they hate China and Chinese equally. That is one earth-killing nuclear war bandwagon!

    And theses bus drivers hate their $19 an hour part-time bus driving gig, with precious K12 cargo, and hate the three cameras in the buses and the smart tablet that tracks acceleration, idling, route, stops, hard stops, but they will never begrudge a dollar to the obscene pimps of war: This is America’s Biggest band playing in that Bandwagon called MIC:

    All that money going to new nuclear missiles, strategic bombers (the newly revealed B-21), submarines and so on, which in total will cost $1.7 trillion, according to congressional numbers—all in all an impressive escalation. So, $1 billion for each bomber made by Northrop Grumman (the Air Force began planning for the B-21 in 2011 and awarded the major development contract in 2015. The B-21 is expected to make its first flight in 2023 and enter service by 2027) is no big deal. Imagine that, one guy has to pay for hearing aids, at age 77, to the tune of $7000 or $9000 for a pair. Imagine the cognitive dissonance and retrograde thinking and imploding critical analyses skills with that two plus two equals three equation.

    So it goes, sisters and brothers. You get older, you get more radical with each day, you get tired of lies, fakes, faux concepts, marketing, and merchandizing death and co-option, and then you, or I, become not jaded or cynical, but emancipated. Or even more decoupled from the fraudulent nature of almost every angle and every silo this sad sack of a country has propped up to destroy the world.

    You realize you have never been on any bandwagon, so, as James Howard Kunstler states, we are in a Cluster Fuck Nation Bandwagon.

    Final Run of that Big Bandwagon — DoD!

    This is 24 years behind the times: “A Brief History of U.S. Interventions: 1945 to the Present” by William Blum, June 1999. And I know several of the parents today wondered why I left my cap on, turned away from the American flag, bowed my head, and looked sad when the stupid Star Spangled Banner came on the speakers at the beginning of the tourney. I was already standing in the bleachers, but I usually sit, bow my head, and leave my hat or cap on.

    One of Blum’s last points in 2017: “The Anti-Empire Report #153: Cold War Number One: 70 years of daily national stupidity Cold War Number Two: Still in its youth, but just as stupid”

    The Cold War strategist, George Kennan, wrote prophetically: “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”6

    Writer John Wight has described the new Cold War as being “in response to Russia’s recovery from the demise of the Soviet Union and the failed attempt to turn the country into a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington via the imposition of free market economic shock treatment thereafter.”

    And there this rambling essay ends. Stupidity and cancel culture and ingrained hatred of Russia and Venezuela and Cuba and Nicaragua and Iran and Chine and North Korea, those are the drools coming from a half-brained rabid society. The spiritual rabies crosses all political boundaries, all camps, all silos.

    The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

    ― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature.

    Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.

    ― W.E.B. DuBois

    It’s liberty or death. It’s freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody. …. I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation.

    — Malcom X

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