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Category: Militarism

  • Polish Brinkmanship: De Facto Leader Settling Score with Putin

    In a highly symbolic move expressing solidarity with Ukraine, the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia traveled together to the embattled Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on March 15.

    The three leaders took hours-long train trip on their journey from the west Ukrainian city of Lviv to the capital Kyiv, allegedly “endangering their lives” due to security risks involved in traveling within a war zone, though there was no risk to their lives as such because they had requested prior permission for the official visit from the Kremlin, which was graciously granted keeping in view diplomatic conventions.

    Accompanying the trio of premiers was a “special guest” of the Ukraine government, Jaroslaw Kaczynski—the deputy prime minister of Poland, the head of Law and Justice (PiS) Party to which the president and prime minister of Poland belong and the infamous “puppet master” who hires and fires government executives and ministers on a whim.

    Jaroslaw Kaczynski is the twin brother of the late President Lech Kaczynski, who died in a plane crash at Smolensk, Russia, in 2010 along with 95 other Poles, among them political and military leaders, as they traveled to commemorate the Katyn massacre that occurred during the Second World War.

    Subsequent Polish and international investigations led by independent observers conclusively determined that the crash-landing was an accident caused by fog and pilot error. Still, Kaczynski, 72, has long suspected that Russian President Vladimir Putin had a role in provoking the accident, and is harboring a personal grudge against the Russian president.

    Speaking alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at Kyiv, Kaczynski said: “I think that it is necessary to have a peace mission—NATO, possibly some wider international structure—but a mission that will be able to defend itself, which will operate on Ukrainian territory.”

    Kaczynski’s escalatory rhetoric isn’t merely a verbal threat, as a secret plan for a “peacekeeping mission” involving 10,000 NATO troops from the member states surreptitiously occupying Lviv and the rest of towns in western Ukraine and imposing a limited no-fly zone is allegedly being prepared by the Polish government that could potentially trigger an all-out war between Russia and the transatlantic military alliance.

    The plan is seemingly on hiatus due to a disagreement between figurehead Polish President Andrzej Duda and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, as Duda wanted Washington’s approval before going ahead, whereas Kaczynski appeared keen to obtain political mileage from the Ukraine crisis and was also desperate for settling personal score with Putin, even if his impulsive and capricious attitude risked triggering a catastrophic Third World War.

    In another diplomatic fiasco involving Kaczynski’s shady hand in the Polish policymaking, Secretary of State Tony Blinken suggested early this month that Poland could hand over its entire fleet of 28 Soviet-era MiG-29s to Ukraine, and in return, the United States government would “backfill” the Polish Air Force with American F-16s.

    “We are looking actively now at the question of airplanes that Poland may provide to Ukraine, and looking at how we might be able to backfill it should Poland decide to supply those planes,” Blinken told a briefing in Chisinau on March 6.

    The transfer might have been possible if the deal was kept under wraps, but that became impossible after Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign affairs and security policy chief, declared unequivocally to reporters on Feb. 27 that the bloc would provide Ukraine with fighter jets.

    The Ukraine government heard the proposal and ran with it, producing infographics claiming they were about to receive 70 used Russian fighter jets from Poland, Slovakia and Bulgaria. A Ukrainian government official told Politico that Ukrainian pilots had even traveled to Poland to wrap up the deal and bring the planes back over the border.

    Upon getting wind of the illicit deal, Russian defense spokesman Igor Konashenkov issued a stark warning that any attempt by an outside power to facilitate a no-fly zone over Ukraine, including providing aircraft to Kyiv, would be considered a belligerent in the war and treated accordingly.

    Hours after the Russian warning, the Polish Foreign Ministry issued an emphatic denial, saying providing aircraft to Ukraine was out of question as the MiG-29 fleet constituted the backbone of the Polish Air Force.

    The deal was categorically scuttled on March 3 by Polish President Andrzej Duda: “We are not sending any jets to Ukraine because that would open military inference in the Ukrainian conflict. We are not joining that conflict. NATO is not party to that conflict,” Duda said.

    In a bizarre turn of events overriding its own president’s categorical statement, the Polish government announced on March 8 that it was ready to transfer the aircraft to the Ramstein Air Base in Germany at the disposal of the United States which could then hand them over to Ukraine.

    Clearly, there was a disagreement between Poland’s figurehead President Duda and de facto leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski over the aircraft transfer deal, too. Ultimately, Kaczynski prevailed and the Polish government announced it was ready to transfer the aircraft to Ukraine via an intermediary.

    The denouement of the comedy of errors, however, came a day later on March 9, after the United States, while occupying a high moral ground, unequivocally rejected the “preposterous” Polish offer, initially made on Warsaw’s behalf by none other than the EU’s foreign affairs head and the US secretary of state.

    The prospect of flying combat aircraft from NATO territory into the war zone “raises serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance,” the Pentagon sanctimoniously revealed on March 9. “It is simply not clear to us that there is a substantive rationale for it,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby dignifiedly added.

    The only conclusion that could be drawn from the reluctant Polish offer of transferring its entire fleet of MiG-29s to Ramstein at the disposal of the United States is that it was simply a humbug designed to provide face-saving to its NATO patron while it was already decided behind the scenes that Washington would spurn Poland’s nominal offer.

    Nonetheless, CNN reported March 6 Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley visited a week before an undisclosed airfield near the Ukraine border that has become a hub for shipping weapons. The airport’s location remains a secret to protect the shipments of weapons, including anti-aircraft and anti-armor missiles, into Ukraine. Although the report didn’t name the location, the airfield was likely in Poland along Ukraine’s border.

    “US European Command (EUCOM) is at the heart of the massive shipment operation, using its liaison network with allies and partners to coordinate ‘in real time’ to send materials into Ukraine, a Defense official said. EUCOM is also coordinating with other countries, including the United Kingdom, in terms of the delivery process ‘to ensure that we are using our resources to maximum efficiency to support the Ukrainians in an organized way,’ the official added.”

    Besides deploying 15,000 additional troops in Eastern Europe last month, total number of US troops in Europe is now expected to reach 100,000. “We have 130 jets at high alert. Over 200 ships from the high north to the Mediterranean, and thousands of additional troops in the region,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told CNN.

    A spokesman for US European Command told CNN the United States was sending two Patriot missile batteries to Poland, and was also considering deploying THAAD air defense system, a more advanced system equivalent in capabilities to Russia’s S-400 air defense system.

    Famous for hosting CIA’s black sites where alleged al-Qaeda operatives were water-boarded and tortured before being sent to Guantanamo Bay in the early years of the war on terror, in Poland alone the US military footprint now exceeds 10,000 troops as the majority of 15,000 troops sent to Europe last month went to Poland to join the 4,000 US troops already stationed there.

    The airfields and training camps in the border regions of Poland have a become a hub for transporting lethal weapons and heavily armed militants to Lviv in west Ukraine, who then travel to the battlefields in Kyiv and east Ukraine.

    President Biden arrived in Poland Friday and spoke to American troops bolstering NATO’s eastern flank. Biden shared a meal with soldiers from the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division stationed in southeastern Polish city Rzeszow, which has been acting as a staging area for NATO’s military assistance to Ukraine while also serving as a waypoint for refugees fleeing the violence.

    Ahead of the NATO summit attended by President Biden Thursday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced the transatlantic military alliance would double the number of battlegroups it had deployed in Eastern Europe.

    “The first step is the deployment of four new NATO battlegroups in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia, along with our existing forces in the Baltic countries and Poland,” Stoltenberg said. “This means that we will have eight multinational NATO battlegroups all along the eastern flank, from the Baltic to the Black Sea.”

    NATO issued a statement after Thursday’s emergency summit attended by Joe Biden and European leaders: “In response to Russia’s actions, we have activated NATO’s defense plans, deployed elements of the NATO Response Force, and placed 40,000 troops on our eastern flank, along with significant air and naval assets, under direct NATO command supported by Allies’ national deployments. We are also establishing four additional multinational battlegroups in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia.”

    In an interview with CBC News on March 8, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned that a Russian attack on the supply lines of allied nations supporting Ukraine with arms and munitions would be a dangerous escalation of the war raging in Eastern Europe. “Russia is the aggressor and Ukraine is defending itself. If there is any attack against any NATO country, NATO territory, that will trigger Article 5.”

    Reminiscent of the Three Musketeers’ motto “all for one and one for all,” Article 5 is the self-defense clause in NATO’s founding treaty which states that an attack on one member is an attack on all 30 member nations. “I’m absolutely convinced President Putin knows this and we are removing any room for miscalculation, misunderstanding about our commitment to defend every inch of NATO territory,” Stoltenberg said.

    NATO chief said there’s a clear distinction between supply lines within Ukraine and those operating outside its borders. “There is a war going on in Ukraine and, of course, supply lines inside Ukraine can be attacked,” he said. “An attack on NATO territory, on NATO forces, NATO capabilities, that would be an attack on NATO.”

    On March 13, Russian forces launched a missile attack at Yavoriv Combat Training Center in the western part of the country. The military facility, less than 25 km from the Polish border, is one of Ukraine’s biggest and the largest in the western part of the country. Since 2015, US Green Berets and National Guard troops had been training Ukrainian forces at the Yavoriv center before they were evacuated alongside diplomatic staff in mid-February.

    The training center was hit by a barrage of 30 cruise missiles launched from Russian strategic bombers, killing at least 35 people, though Russia’s defense ministry claimed up to 180 foreign mercenaries and large caches of weapons were destroyed at the training center.

    International diplomacy is predicated on the principle of quid pro quo. Russia evidently has no intention of mounting an incursion into NATO territory. But if the duplicitous Polish leadership is hatching treacherous plots to clandestinely occupy western Ukraine and impose no-fly zone over it, then Russia obviously reserves the right to give a befitting response to perfidious henchmen and their international backers, irrespective of the “sacrosanct and inviolable red lines” etched in the institutional memory of servile lickspittles of the transatlantic military alliance.

    The post Polish Brinkmanship: De Facto Leader Settling Score with Putin first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Ukraine: War and the Challenge of Human Rights in the United States and Beyond

    Images of burnt flesh from napalm bombs, wounded and dead soldiers, scenes of U.S. soldiers burning the simple huts of Vietnamese villages, eventually turned the public against the war in Vietnam and produced the dreaded affliction, from the ruling class point of view, known as the “Vietnam syndrome.” This collective Post Traumatic Stress Disorder made it impossible for the public to support any foreign military involvement for years.

    It took the rulers almost three decades to finally cure the public of this affliction. But the rulers were careful.

    The brutal reality of what the U.S. was doing in Afghanistan and Iraq was whitewashed. That is why the images now being brought to the public by the corporate media are so shocking. It has been more than two generations since the U.S. public was exposed to the horrific images of war.

    In the 1960s the rulers inadvertently allowed themselves to be undermined by the new television technology that brought the awful reality of imperialist war into the homes of the public. Now, the ruling class operating through its corporate media propaganda arms has been effectively using Ukraine war propaganda, not to increase Anti-war sentiment but to stimulate support for more war!

    Incredibly also, the propagandists are pushing a line that essentially says that in the name of “freedom” and supporting Ukraine, the U.S. public should shoulder the sacrifice of higher fuel and food prices. This is on top of the inflation that workers and consumers were already being subjected to coming out of the capitalist covid scandal that devastated millions of workers and the lower stratums of the petit bourgeoisie.

    But the war, and now the unfair shouldering of all of the costs of the capitalist crisis of 2008 – 2009, and the impact of covid by the working classes in the U.S., amounts to a capitalist tax. It is levied by the oligarchy on workers to subsidize the defense of the interests of big capital and the conditions that have produced obscene profits, even in the midst of the covid crisis and now, the Ukraine war.

    These policies are criminal. While the U.S. continues to pretend that it champions human rights around the world, the failure of the state to protect the fundamental human rights of the citizens and residents in the U.S. is obvious to all, but spoken about by the few, except the Chinese government.

    For those who might think that the Chinese criticism of the U.S. is only being driven by politics, and it might be,  just a cursory, objective examination of the U.S. state policies over just the last few years reveals a shocking record of systematic human rights abuses that promise to become even more acute as a consequence of the manufactured U.S./NATO war in Ukraine.

    The Ongoing Human Rights Crisis

    The U.S. working class, and Black working class in particular, never recovered from the economic crisis of 2008 before it was once again ravaged in 2020 with the global capitalist crisis exacerbated by covid. On the heels of those two shocks, today millions of workers are experiencing a permanent state of precarity with evictions, the continued loss of medical coverage, unaffordable housing and food costs, and a capitalist-initiated inflation. The rulers are operating under the belief that with the daily bombardment of war images, U.S. workers and the poor will embrace rising costs of gas and even more increases in the cost of food.

    Doesn’t the state have any responsibility to ensure that the economic human rights of the people are fulfilled? No, because liberal human rights practice separates fundamental human rights – such as the right to health, food, housing, education, a means to subsist at an acceptable level of material culture, leisure, and life-long social security – from democratic discourse on what constitutes the human rights responsibility of the state and the interests it must uphold in order to be legitimate.

    The non-recognition of the indivisibility of human rights that values economic human rights to an equal level as civil and political rights, exposed the moral and political contradictions of the liberal human rights framework. The massive economic displacements with hunger, unemployment, and unnecessary deaths among the population in the United States, with a disproportionate rate of sickness and hospitalization among non-white workers and the poor in the U.S., were never condemned as violations of human rights.

    War and Economic Deprivation the Systemic Contradictions of the Western colonial/capitalist Project

    The war being waged against global humanity by the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination is a hybrid war that utilizes all the tools it has at its disposal – sanctions, mass incarceration, coups, drugs, disinformation, culture, subversion, murder, and direct military engagement to further white power. The Eurocentrism and “White Lives Matters More Movement” represented by the coverage of the war in Ukraine stripped away any pretense to the supposed liberal commitment to global humanity. The white-washing of the danger of the ultra-right and neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian military and state and the white ethno-nationalism that the conflict generated across the Western world demonstrated, once again, how “racialism” and the commitment to the fiction of white supremacy continues to trump class and class struggle and the ability to build a multi-national, class based anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist opposition in the North.

    It is primarily workers from Russia, the Donbas and Ukraine who are dying. But as in the run-up to the first imperialist war in Europe, known as World War One, workers with the encouragement of their national bourgeoisie, are lining up behind their rulers to support the capitalist redivision taking place, a redivision that can only be completed by war as long as capitalism and capitalist competition continues. Yet, instead of “progressives and radicals” joining forces to resist the mobilization to war, they are finding creative ways to align themselves with the interests of their ruling classes in support of the colonial/capitalist project.

    In the meantime, the people of Afghanistan are starving, with thousands of babies now dying of malnutrition because the U.S. stole their nation’s assets. Estimates suggest that unless reversed, more people there will die from U.S./EU imposed sanctions than died during the twenty year long war. And the impact of the war in Ukraine with the loss of wheat exports from Ukraine and Russia resulting not only in rising food prices globally but in some places like East Africa, resulting in death from famine.

    In the U.S. where we witness the most abysmal record of covid failure on the planet, the virus will continue to ravage the population, with a disproportionate number who get sick and die being the poorest and those furthest from whiteness.

    The lackeys of capital playing the role of democratic representatives claim that there is no money to bring a modicum of relief to workers represented in the mildly reformist package known as Build Back Better. Yet, the Brown University Costs of War Project estimates that the wars waged by the United States in this century have cost $8 trillion and counting, with another $8 trillion that will be spent over the next ten years on the military budget if costs remain constant from the $778 billion just allocated.

    No rational human being desires war and conflict. The horrors of war that the public are finally being exposed to because it was brought to Europe again, the most violent continent on the planet, should call into question all of the brutal and unjustified wars that the U.S. and its flunky allies waged throughout the global South over the last seventy years. Unfortunately, because of the hierarchy of the value of human beings, the images of war in Ukraine are not translating into a rejection of war, but instead a rejection of war in Europe and on white Europeans.

    This means that the wars will continue and we must fight, often alone, because as Bob Marley said in his song “War”:

    Until the philosophy which hold one race superior
    And another
    Inferior
    Is finally
    And permanently
    Discredited
    And abandoned
    Everywhere is war
    Me say war

    The post Ukraine: War and the Challenge of Human Rights in the United States and Beyond first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • In the World, There Are Many Traps, and It Is Necessary to Shatter Them

    Jaider Esbell (Brazil), The Intergalactic Entities Talk to Decide the Universal Future of Humanity, 2021.

    Jaider Esbell (Brazil), The Intergalactic Entities Talk to Decide the Universal Future of Humanity, 2021.

    On 31 March 1964, the Brazilian military initiated a coup d’état against the democratically-elected progressive government of President João Goulart. The next day, Goulart was deposed and, ten days later, the 295 members of the National Congress handed the state over to General Castello Branco and a military junta. The military ruled over Brazil for the next twenty-one years.

    The Brazilian military is an institution with deep roots in society and constitutes the second largest military force in the Americas, after the United States. The 1964 coup was not the first time that the military left the barracks and seized power over the state. Along with its role in overthrowing the Brazilian Empire (1822–1889), the military entered to remove President Washington Luís in the Revolution of 1930, replacing him with Getúlio Vargas, and then intervening in 1945 to end Vargas’ Estado Novo, also known as the Third Brazilian Republic. The nine presidents that followed in Brazil’s civilian era included one general, Eurico Gaspar Dutra (1946–1951), and the return of Vargas, men in civilian clothes who upheld the interests of the elites and their close allies in the United States. Goulart attempted to break part of the old compact, driving a social democratic agenda to benefit the Brazilian masses; this irritated the US government which felt that Goulart would deliver Brazil to communism.

    A glance through the archives of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States shows its deep involvement in the 1964 coup. Less than a year after Goulart took office in September 1961, US President John F. Kennedy met with his advisor Richard Goodwin and US Ambassador to Brazil Lincoln Gordon in July 1962 to discuss their concerns about the Brazilian president. Gordon told Kennedy and Goodwin that Goulart was seeking to transform the military, having replaced several military commanders and threatening to replace others. ‘How far he goes on those changes depends a little bit on the resistance of the military. I think one of our important jobs is to strengthen the spine of the military. To make it clear, discreetly, that we are not necessarily hostile to any kind of military action’. Why should the United States act against Goulart? ‘He’s giving the damn country away to…’, Gordon started to say, when Kennedy interrupted him, ‘Communists’. ‘The military’, Ambassador Gordon said, ‘I can see that they are very friendly to us, very anti-Communist, very suspicious of Goulart’. The coup was part of what the US government called Operation Brother Sam, to ensure Brazil remained pliant to the aims of the multinational corporations.

    The United States delivered aid to the Brazilian military, along with the clear message that Washington would support a military coup. When the Brazilian military left their barracks on 31 March, a telegram from the US embassy in Rio de Janeiro alerted the US navy to station a flotilla of warships off the Brazilian coastline. Declassified documents now show us the minute-by-minute coordination between the US President Lyndon B. Johnson, the CIA, and the Brazilian military in the execution of the coup.

    The army generals that ruled Brazil for the following twenty-one years drew their ‘geo-strategy’ from Brazil’s highest-ranking war college Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG), a perspective founded on the view that the United States and Brazil would jointly control the Americas. The generals opened the doors to the Brazilian economy, welcoming North American banks and mining companies to invest and repatriate their profits (in 1978, 20% of Citicorp’s profits were from Brazil, more than it made in the United States). Concessions to multinational corporations structured the rule of the generals, with wages kept below the growth of labour productivity and inflation climbing from 30% (1975) to 109% (1980). By 1980, Brazil had the highest level of debt ($55 billion) in the Global South; President João Figueiredo (1979–1985) said that there was ‘nothing left over for development’.

    Mass struggles of workers, students, indigenous communities, religious communities, and a range of other sections of the population pressured the decadent military regime to hand over governmental authority in 1985. However, the transition was carefully managed by the military, which ensured that it did not see any meaningful attrition in its power. The democratic movement pushed back against the rigidities of the Brazilian class structure which had been strengthened by the military and made significant gains, led by the Workers’ Party (1980), the Movement of Landless Rural Workers or MST (1984), and others. The high point of this democratic movement in the electoral domain were the Workers’ Party presidencies of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff from 2003 to 2016. During this period, the state drove a massive wealth redistribution programme centred around the eradication of hunger and absolute poverty (through the family allowance programme Bolsa Família); the enhancement of social security programmes; the increase in the minimum wage; the reinvigoration of the health care system; and the democratisation of higher education. All of these advances began to be eroded with the US-supported lawfare coup against Dilma in 2016.

     

    At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, our researchers have been carefully examining the role of the Brazilian military in the post-2016 period and, in particular, during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro. Not only has Bolsonaro glorified the military dictatorship (1964–1985), but he has effectively built a ‘Military Party’ to govern the country. Our latest publication, The Military’s Return to Brazilian Politics (Dossier no. 50, March 2022), closely assesses the militarisation of Brazilian politics and society. The key argument of this dossier is that Brazil’s military has grown, not to confront any external threat, but to deepen the control of Brazil’s oligarchy – and its multinational allies – over society. The armed forces routinely use violence against ‘internal enemies’, groups which are deeply committed to democratising Brazil’s society, economy, and military.

    The coup against Dilma and the lawfare against Lula are part of the gradual attrition of democracy in Brazil and the slide towards militarisation. In a few months, Brazil will face an important presidential election. Current polls show that Lula (40%) is ahead of Bolsonaro (30%), with the wind behind Lula’s sails. Our dossier attempts to understand the social ground that lies beneath the political debates currently taking place in the country; it is an invitation to a dialogue on the role of the military in public, both within Brazil and globally.

    The art in the dossier and in this newsletter, reflects on the argument that Brazil’s armed forces are geared more to internal repression than defence at the country’s borders. That is why the images evoke the brave people who have fought to democratise their country and faced the wrath of the military.

    Before he could return to Brazil from exile in Argentina, Goulart died in 1976. Later, high officials in Brazil said that Goulart had been assassinated as part of the US government’s Operation Condor. From our office in Buenos Aires, in collaboration with Editorial Batalla de Ideas, comes a new publication, The New Condor Plan: Geopolitics and Imperialism in Latin America and the Caribbean, a collection of articles on the latest manifestations of Operation Condor in Latin America and the Caribbean.

    Our dossier ends with the following paragraphs:

    Our past is also a key part of our future; without settling scores with a past marked by slavery and dictatorship, it will not be possible to build a democratic future in which the armed forces are wholly subordinated to the sovereignty of the people and their institutions and are exclusively destined for external defence and no longer used against their own people. This requires confronting the crimes committed during the 1964 dictatorship as well as its authoritarian legacy, which has shaped the state and the political culture up to the present day. Giving new meaning to patriotic symbols, such as the Brazilian flag, should be part of this process.

    Lastly, we must resist the idea that preparing for war is necessary for building peace. To the contrary: in order to build peace, the priority must be placed on a programme that centres the wellbeing of humankind and the planet by eliminating hunger, guaranteeing safe and secure housing as well as universal, quality health care, and defending the right to a dignified quality of life.

    These words remind us of the words of writers such as the communist poet Ferreira Gullar (1930–2016), whose poetry dreams of a socialist Brazil. In his No mundo há muitas armadilhas (‘In the world, there are many traps’), published in 1975, Gullar writes,

    In the world, there are many traps
    and what is a trap could be a refuge
    and what is a refuge could be a trap

    ….

    The star lies
    the sea is a sophist. In fact,
    humans are tied to life and need to live
    humans are hungry
    and must eat
    humans have children
    and need to raise them
    In the world, there are many traps and
    it is necessary to shatter them.

    The post In the World, There Are Many Traps, and It Is Necessary to Shatter Them first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • O’ahu Organizers Are Defending the Earth Against US Militarism

    Oʻahu Water Protectors gather with signs protesting the U.S. Navy and the Red Hill bulk fuel station.

    “The Pentagon has a blanket exemption from all global climate agreements — in effect, a license to kill the natural world without consequence,” says Kelly Hayes. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Kelly and Kawenaʻulaokalā Kapahua discuss the U.S. military’s role in environmental devastation and explore lessons from the campaign to shut down the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility on the island of O’ahu — and what activists and organizers can learn from this struggle.

    Music by Son Monarcas and Amaranth Cove

    TRANSCRIPT

    Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

    Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about things you should know if you want to change the world. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are going to talk about a struggle that you may or may not have heard about, because it has been woefully underreported. Organizers with the Shut Down Red Hill Coalition saw a huge victory on March 7, when the U.S. military announced it would drain and decommission the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility on the island of O’ahu in Hawaii. Reporters at the press conference where this historic concession was made seized the opportunity to ask military officials questions about Ukraine, but showed little interest in the announcement itself. Most media outlets have barely acknowledged this struggle, or the tremendous victory that organizers have won here. That’s a big problem. For one thing, this is a story about activists who were up against one of the most intractable opponents on Earth — the U.S. military — and they won. The fight is not over, as we are going to discuss; but for the U.S. military to agree to shutter a facility it previously claimed was essential to national security due to a grassroots pressure campaign — that is something we all have to learn from.

    This is also a story that shows us the true character of the U.S. military. We need to grapple with the realities of U.S. militarism, right now, because people have a habit of thinking in binaries. The fact that we are watching another world power cause havoc and destruction with their military does not change the character of the U.S. military, or its destructive role in the world. There’s also a lot of deeply important history tied to this campaign that I think we should all know and consider as we weigh our own choices about the future. The struggle for sovereignty and self determination in Hawaii is inextricably bound to the struggle against militarism and the defense of water and wildlife. Those kinds of connections exist everywhere, but they too often go unseen and unacknowledged, and they rarely inform the strategy of movements. So I think it’s important to talk about work that’s being done by people who are making those connections and who are, in this case, also winning important victories.

    To begin, I asked Kawenaʻulaokalā Kapahua, who is an organizer with the Oʻahu Water Protectors, to give us some background and an update on the Red Hill struggle.

    Kawenaʻulaokalā Kapahua: So my name is Kawenaʻulaokalā Kapahua. I’m a Hawaiian independence activist here in Hawaii, and a water protector. Hawaii was an independent nation up until 1893, when it was illegally overthrown by U.S. Marines in a coup and it resulted in the creation of the state of Hawaii. Around World War II, the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility was created. A brief history of this is just that this massive fuel storage facility was created around the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. It could hold up to 250 million gallons of fuel. The tanks are about 20 stories high and about 100 feet wide. So these are massive tanks that are pill shaped, they’re buried underground and the original idea was that would prevent them from being bombed because a lot of the U.S. fuel during Pearl Harbor was stored in open air facilities so they were worried about it getting destroyed.

    And so they built it underground 100 feet above our primary source drinking aquifer. For those of you who don’t know what an aquifer is, basically, it’s this way the water system works. In Hawaii it rains and because we live on volcanic islands, the rock is porous lava rock and so basically rain falls onto the islands and filters through this very porous rock down through the ground, and takes about 20 years to do that and when it reaches a certain level, it’s basically pristine. It’s clean, the rock has filtered it naturally of any contaminants and it exists in this underground, kind of not quite cavern, this underground space underneath the islands that acts as an aquifer, which is basically a massive water tank that’s under our island, it’s just naturally created. And that is where we draw the most of our, if not all of our drinking water from.

    So basically this 250 million gallons of jet fuel was stored just a hundred feet above that water. I’ve been in the facility. You can look down to the hole, you can look down into the water from, and there’s no physical barriers between the fuel, besides the tanks themselves, the fuel and the water. And basically in 2014, there was a massive leak that spilled out of the tanks. The military tried to cover it up. The word got out and there was major political pitfalls over that and blowback. We started mobilizing in order to remove the tanks and shut down the facility. Hawaiians have been pushing for the end of this facility for a long time. Not only because it threatens our water, but because it sits on stolen Hawaiian land that the U.S. military condemned and took from our people and all of these things.

    Then, in 2021 in May, there was a major fuel leak that the Navy originally tried to cast as just being a little under 2000 gallons, which was completely false, incorrect — they were lying and they didn’t tell anybody. They knew the facility leaked in May, they didn’t tell anyone. They knew the water was contaminated by July. They continued to hide it, cover up and not tell anyone. And then, just after Thanksgiving in November 2021, people started smelling fuel coming out of their taps. People started ending up at the hospital. Over 5,000 people ended up in ER. Over 93,000 people couldn’t drink the water there, it was making them sick. Their homes were basically unlivable.

    The Navy continued and the U.S. military at large continued to lie about it up until the last momen when they could no longer deny the fact that the Red Hill Field Storage Facility had failed catastrophically, leaked into the water and poisoned thousands of people. Since then, we’ve been fighting to ensure that this facility is shut down permanently. There is no way to fix this facility, it has catastrophically failed. It cannot be allowed to remain counter to what the U.S. military has said for years, decades even.

    They regularly claimed it’s for national security that they need this. Defense Secretary Austin and Secretary of the Navy Del Toro came to visit Hawaii, and basically it was a PR catastrophe for them. Del Toro made an epic statement of saying that it wasn’t the fuel in the tanks that was making people sick, it was the fuel in the water, as if the two were different somehow. Talking about how he wouldn’t choose between jet fuel and water to live, despite the fact that you need one of them to sustain your regular body functions and we’ve existed without the other for thousands of years as a race, as a species.

    That’s a brief history of the Red Health Fuel Storage Facility. Just a couple weeks ago, the Pentagon finally announced, after sustained and massive community pressure and community organizing and political blowback, that they were going to permanently shut down this facility. This came amidst massive protests and massive outrage and continuous pressure from the community to stop this and to pay for remediation.

    But that doesn’t mean an end to this crisis, primarily because basically that was 77 percent of our water that was just contaminated. Currently, three wells that service over 400,000 people on the island of O’ahu have been shut down. They may be shut down permanently. We may never be able to drink from this water source ever again, which means that the entire metropolitan area of Honolulu no longer has water wells within its vicinity. We’re pulling water from other areas on the island.

    Which means that we’ve just lost 77 percent of our water. We’re obviously making up a tiny portion of that now. As we move into the summer months, that means we’re going to have water shortages and the way our water system works, it means that certain areas may turn on the tap this summer and nothing’s going to come out. That’s an unprecedented crisis here in Hawaii. It’s absolutely ridiculous that one of the most rain rich places on earth is going to be facing a water crisis because for 80 plus years, military officials decided they were willing to poison everybody on this island and make life very difficult on this island, simply so they could use this fuel to wage war.

    KH: The United States military is the world’s largest single consumer of energy. Every year, the U.S. military consumes more than a hundred million barrels of oil. If the military were a country, its emissions would rank among the top 25 percent of nations. But as Indigo Oliver wrote in 2019, “The Pentagon’s environmental footprint cannot be measured in emissions alone. Razed cities, contaminated soil, death, disease and famine are far more perceptible and lethal than the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere to those who have experienced warfare.”

    As Kawenaʻulaokalā mentioned, military rehearsals for warfare have also caused extensive damage. The Navy has admitted to leaving large amounts of depleted uranium in U.S. coastal waters. The Navy also plans to dump 20,000 tons of heavy metals, plastics and other toxic compounds over the next two decades in oceans where it conducts its war games. The Pentagon has a blanket exemption from all global climate agreements — in effect, a license to kill the natural world without consequence. However, when contemplating the climate crisis, most people don’t think about the impact of the military, and that’s a major problem.

    KK: I think one may only need look at the water crisis we’re facing this summer, the fact that Hawaii is, like I said, one of the wettest place on earth, we see some of the highest levels of rainfall of anywhere on earth and this summer we’re going to turn on the tap and nothing’s going to come out. That’s a major crisis for an island of almost a million people, for us to be out of water is absolutely insane.

    So basically I think that alone should prove the threat that the U.S. military provides to the world in terms of the climate crisis. They’re one of the largest polluters out there as is evident by the fact they polluted the water for 400,000 people and then made water scarce for over a million. And the fact that they basically got away with this for decades, politicians in Hawaii told us for years that we should just drop it, Red Hill was not a threat, that we were never going to get the military back down, that we were never going to get this facility shut down. We got it shut down in four months since the major leak that poisoned people came to light basically. But the U.S. military represents the greatest threat to life anywhere in the world but especially here in Hawaii.

    We live in a very ecologically fragile environment that has been devastated due to colonialism and capitalism. The longer the U.S. military persists in this world, but especially here in Hawaii, the longer our way of life for remains at threat. The U.S. military has bombed many islands here in Hawaii, particularly the island of Kahoʻolawe, which they bombed so hard they cracked the water table. And what I mean by that is they bombed so hard they cracked the island open and all of fresh water within it, spilled out into the ocean. So there’s no longer drinkable water on Kahoʻolawe because of what they did.

    They have scattered toxic chemicals all over the Hawaiian Islands. Pearl Harbor, for example, one of their famous military bases used to be a major fishing ground for the Hawaiian people. You couldn’t pay me to eat a fish out of that water now, it’s so polluted. They’ve stored chemical weapons, such as mustard gas on our land, in our water. They’ve left unexploded ordnance all over the land. This kind of pollution and this kind of contributions to the climate crisis are astronomic. Hawaii is a small microcosm of what they’ve done globally. So if they’ve poisoned our water here, you can only imagine the impact their military campaigns have had in say, Iraq, Afghanistan. The military campaigns they’ve had in terms of the pollution that’s created by their ships, running all around the world, their fighters, and aircraft flying all over the place.

    The U.S. military with one of the most obscene budgets in the planet says it’s too expensive to care about the climate crisis. Whereas, I don’t know about you, but I think it’s too expensive to have to worry about our water and the fact that we’re going to be making a long-term investment in military rather than in clean environment and clean water. That’s too high a price to pay for our future, not only our future, but our children and our grandchildren’s future.

    KH: Many people think of Hawaii as a paradisiacal tourist destination, but in the words of journalist Millicent Cummings:

    Most tourists would be hard-pressed to imagine 500 tons of TNT blasting into a pristine shoreline or toxic sewage flowing into the waters of Waikiki or whales beaching themselves to escape Navy sonar testing … Hawaii is, however, the “endangered species capital of the world.” It stands to reason that the United States military, being the greatest polluter and largest emitter of carbon dioxide on the planet, might have something to do with that unacceptable fact.

    Cummings called Hawaii “the most militarized group of islands in the world.” That characterization does not jive well with popular depictions or perceptions of Hawaii, and that disconnect is largely the product of historical erasure.

    KK: Hawaii was an independent country up until 1893, when U.S. Marines stormed Iolani Palace, over through the government and imprisoned our queen in one bedroom, one room solitary confinement to herself for months. And I think that was the start of this really large scale military history that Hawaii has endured. So over the course of 130 years of occupation, the U.S. military has seized massive portions of Hawaiian land. The U.S. military is one of the largest landholders in Hawaii. On the island of O’ahu alone, the military holds 26 percent of all land, so over a quarter. Which is an absolutely insane amount of land for them to hold, especially on an island, we don’t have that much land to go around already.

    Almost all of the land they hold has been turned into Superfund sites. For those who don’t know, Superfund sites are sites that are so contaminated there may be no remediation for them. They’re contaminated to a massive extent by the military. This is through unexploded ordnance, this is through destroying of chemical weapons, the live fire operations, jet fuel contamination, like we’re seeing at Red Hill. So basically wherever the military has gone in Hawaii it has brought death, it has brought contamination and it has brought pollution and it’s brought evictions. So Red Hill is just one area that they condemned the land in that area, to claim it for themselves, they’ve also done it in other areas and seized other portions of land. Almost every U.S. military base in Hawaii, people lived there before the U.S. military came and kicked them out.

    One other example is Makua Valley, which has been a fight for decades, almost 60 years to get this sacred valley back that the U.S. military — basically the community that lived there, a whole town, the U.S. military kicked them out one day, told them that they needed their homes for a military exercise and then bombed them with planes. They bombed the church, they bombed people’s homes. No one lives in that valley anymore. The people who lived there were made homeless and many of them have been scattered. We’re still fighting to get that valley back.

    Other areas such as Kahoʻolawe, like I mentioned earlier, have been bombed so hard they broke water table, that island was forcibly taken from us. We forced the military to give it back in 1990s through massive protests and massive risks of life and two deaths to get that island back. The military said they would clean up. They didn’t. Other areas including Pearl Harbor, like I mentioned earlier, which is so contaminated that you couldn’t pay me to eat a fish out of there even though it was one of the major fishing grounds for our people. There are fishing shrines all over that area. The reason it’s called Pearl Harbor is because it used to be home to an abundance of pearl-producing oysters, which are now extinct due to the U.S. military.

    One of the other large areas near my hometown of Kailua is Marine Corps Base, which was called Mokapu, it’s a really important site for Hawaiians. A lot of sacred sites, a lot of ancient temples are there, a lot of sacred burial sites and the U.S. military has turned this into a Marine Corps base. The community that lived there was also evicted. And the burial sites there have been sites to use — they’ve been excavated, they’ve been destroyed, they’ve been used to practice invasions and run tanks over. It’s absolutely insane. And this is just a small trend.

    Agent Orange was produced here in Hawaii for the U.S. military and then practiced or tested on our forests before taking it to Vietnam, to utilize on the people there. Every two years the U.S. military hosts the RIMPAC [Rim of the Pacific] military exercises here in Hawaii, which is some of the largest military exercises in the world. They invite over 26 countries to come and take part in the war games here. Most of them, countries and regimes with horrible human rights records, including the Israeli IDF, the Indonesian military, which is committing genocide and West Papua in the Philippines, the military of the Philippines, which is constantly killing journalists, teachers, activists. So if you want to look at the military history of Hawaii, it is extensive. Constantly our land is not only destroyed for our use, but it’s also utilized to train other oppressive regimes around the world to go and commit genocide and other hallmarks of the U.S. military on people across the planet.

    KH: In late November, when military families were sickened by fuel ingestion, organizers moved quickly, mounting a massive campaign to decommission the facility. There had been litigation around the fuel tanks in recent years, but nothing like the massive people-powered mobilization that won this campaign. So I asked Kawenaʻulaokalā if he felt there were lessons that the rest of us should glean, as activists and organizers, from the work that happened here.

    KK: Well, for one, don’t trust politicians, like I said. Which should be, I think that’s rule number one of political organizing a grassroots campaign, but just in case people didn’t get it. Hawaiian politicians have been basically lap dogs for the military since the state of Hawaii was set up. Daniel Inouye, hailed as a war hero, hailed as one of the greatest U.S. senators of all time, an absolute corrupt maniacal politician who sold out Hawaiian people and Hawaiian land, who empowered the military-industrial complex and made millions off of it. He’s one of the primary reasons Red Hill still exists. Mazie Hirono, Brian Schatz, Ed Case, current politicians for Hawaii all are also major reasons why Red Hill existed all the way up until today because they pushed back and fought really hard against the community to silence our voices and to ensure the military got as much funding as they wanted to ensure that they could continue carrying out their pollution campaign here in Hawaii.

    So if you’re an organizer and you’re fighting for your land or you’re fighting the U.S. military, understand that the politicians are not going to be your friend. Only overwhelming political pressure is going to force them to do anything. Primarily just because the deep pockets the military has, the military-industrial complex has in terms of campaign donations to people. And in running this kind of campaign, it required mass mobilization. I mean it meant that the fact, one of the things the U.S. military has done here in Hawaii is trying to disconnect people from their understanding of our land and the way our land is an interconnected system. So a lot of people were, the military was just trying to say, “Oh, this isn’t a problem. This isn’t a problem.” Then when it finally was a problem, they were only saying it was a problem for their areas that they were under control of. Making sure to hide from people that this aquifer that they poisoned services 400,000 people, most of them civilians, not all of them military, most of them just families and working class people trying to get by.

    So that was one of the really important impacts of this was to make sure that we focused very heavily upon this. And we’re still focusing very heavily upon this, that yes, the military families are the ones who’ve been poisoned, yes, they’ve seen severe harm. Some of them are going to have lifelong health effects because of this. The military needs to compensate them, it needs to care for them, it needs to make sure that these people are taken care of forever because it is ridiculous that they ever had to put up with this. The fact that the U.S. military claims it protects its own and then absolutely poisoned them. But also the working-class people of Hawaii are going to see the hardest impacts of this because it’s their water that’s going to be cut off first. It’s our water that is going to be contaminated long term, but it’s us who is going to have the lowest access to clean water when the taps stop running. And we have the least options when it comes to that.

    I think focusing on the impacts among the most vulnerable members of society is important because we have the most immediate need. And so I think that was one of the most important things here was making sure that the people who were going to be the most affected by this were in the know. So we ran extensive canvassing campaigns, we were going up and down through whole communities, passing out information, getting people in the know, like making sure people were up to date about what was going on. People who lived on the other side of the island from Pearl Harbor and Red Hill were not in the dark about the fact that this crisis absolutely affected them and would impact their water.

    As far as lessons for other organizers, if you’re going to fight the military, you have to fight them hard. Understand that they have goals that are completely contradictory to life on earth, completely contradictory to the betterment of the working class, betterment of average people, the betterment of literally anybody but themselves and their very wealthy military-industrial complex corporations. So if you’re going to fight them, be ready for stiff resistance. And for the fact that the only thing that will overcome them is grassroots community organizing, massive unity and solidarity and aggressive escalation and taking the fight to them. I think one of the most important things that we did here in terms of forcing the military out, luckily, and also unfortunately, the Hawaiian movement has a lot of history in confronting the military. It took us years to get Kahoʻolawe back over 20 years to get back that entire island.

    Luckily we were able to force Red Hill back into the hands of the people within four months, but it took massive risks, including protesting outside one of the largest U.S. military bases on the planet. And basically coming up to the gates and confronting guards and all this other stuff. And so I think in terms of lessons for everyone, if you’re going to fight the most powerful empire on the planet, you have to be willing to stand up to power and you have to be willing to organize across communities. You have to be willing to get your hands on the ground basically. And run an extensive ground game because the only thing that overcomes massive capital and massive military power is massive community solidarity.

    KH: I think this campaign is a beautiful example of what’s possible when people are willing to leverage collective power for the sake of collective survival. It is not unusual for the military’s actions to simultaneously harm the communities it occupies, the natural world, and its own employees and their families. It is highly unusual for people to turn that interconnected suffering into collective action — but that doesn’t have to be remarkable. There are many points in our societies where, if we prioritized our collective opposition to what’s killing us, we could halt a lot of harm. And if we continued to build upon that power, and those priorities, we could rattle, upend and crack open the systems that oppress us.

    One question that I like to ask activists and organizers is, “What gives you hope?” In this case, I was pretty sure I already knew the answer, but I still wanted to hear it.

    KK: The fact that we shut down this massive, what the U.S. military called state-of-the-art facility in four months, gives me a lot of pride. Primarily it gives me a lot of hope because we’re at a time when the U.S. is absolutely committed to a new Cold War, it’s absolutely committed to massive further militarization. Biden just approved the largest military spending budget ever, I want to say, I believe so, just an obscene amount of money. The fact that they’re committing more and more money to this. I mean, Biden’s whole presidency has been ignoring what people are calling for and funding the violent, tyrannical and oppressive programs. The U.S. runs, funding them even more, whether it be police, which murdered people of color on a regular basis or funding the U.S. military, which commits genocide, where ever it goes, commits pollution and basically is sending our entire planet hurtling toward in uninhabitability.

    And so what gives me hope in all of this is the fact that every day random people were willing to stand up and fight this, many of them military families. A lot of the people who were poisoned were children and as horrible as that is, it meant that mothers, military spouses who had children, were some of the fiercest fighters on this because the U.S. military, their employer, let me remind everyone that the U.S. military is their employer, poisoned it’s employees. And if they were any other workspace or workplace, that would be massively criticized for harming their employees. But some of these mothers were some of the most fiercest fighters for their children and to protect the water because their children were some of the first affected. But also the fact wherever Indigenous communities are, they fight back against militarism and capitalism.

    And here we’re seeing another example of this. At a time when the U.S. is heightened in its violence and heightened in its aggression, that an Indigenous community like Hawaiian people was able to confront that and basically pushed the U.S. out of this facility it’s held for 80 years, in four months is a massive win. And it means that if we can basically take down a facility, if the U.S. said it was critical to its national defense or its strategy in Pacific to hold the Pacific hostage, it was critical to the U.S. military strategy to project force into Asia, to threaten other countries, and we were able to basically rip that facility from their hands and force them to shut it down. That’s huge.

    If we can accomplish that, we can accomplish ending militarism and saving our planet because at the end of the day, all of us need water to drink. I don’t know of a single person on the planet would drink jet fuel. I don’t know of a single person on the planet who can breathe in toxic fumes and not see horrible health impacts. I think there’s a lot of power in the fact that everyday people, ordinary working class people are willing to stand up to these master powers that be and win regularly. Keeping that momentum up and using it to build new fights, I think has been giving me a lot of hope lately.

    KH: When I was a child, the U.S. declared its first war on Iraq, claiming that its neighbor Kuwait must be defended. The country was fixated, but the visuals were highly curated — a lesson learned from the Vietnam war. There would be no body counts, but we did get trading cards and video game-like imagery of missile launches. By the time the U.S. was waging war on Afghanistan, people here had learned to ignore war in the same way they ignore prisons. Now, a war is raging, the world is watching, and another country is the aggressor, so every impact is emphasized rather than concealed from camera view — and the victims are white. So, some people are reacting as though the horrors of war, including environmental impacts, have just been born. But it’s crucial that we remember that war is always the work of hell-making and the creation of deathscapes, and for the U.S. military, there is no peace time. Because people whose land is occupied, whose water is poisoned, who watch the world around them die, for the sake of military emissions, fuel storage, war games and more, are not experiencing peace. They are experiencing violence. If we want to fight for the future, we must recognize these systems for what they are. We also need to uplift stories that will help people understand the truth of these systems and how to fight back. That’s why Red Hill’s story is so important to tell amid media silence.

    KK: Red Hill is not the only piece of Hawaiian land that has been illegally taken and occupied and used against the Hawaiian people by the U.S. military. It’s just one of them. And so as we go forward into the rest of this year, this story has been really underreported. Most major news sources have given it maybe one story. In the press conference when the press secretary for the Secretary of Defense, Austin, said this, there was all these major reporters in the room, not a single one asked any questions about this. They immediately started asking about Ukraine, which obviously is a very important ongoing crisis, but no one seemed to bother with this issue at all. So I think it’s important to keep eyes on issues that seem to be underreported or underrepresented like Red Hill, just because it placed a massive factor in the U.S.’s overall brand strategy here in the Pacific.

    But also Red Hill’s not the only land that we need back. We need all of it back. All of the land back in Hawaii because the U.S. military is not a new steward of it. It has been nothing but detrimental to our people. And so the longer this goes on here in Hawaii, the more detrimental effects we’re going to see, not only here in Hawaii but across the world. And so if average Americans need to know anything about Hawaii, it’s that there is a need for massive solidarity on the U.S. continent to help demilitarize Hawaii and help de-occupy us and get our land back so that our people can live on their ancestral lands again, so that our ancestors no longer have their bones desecrated. So our water is still drinkable. So our non-human relatives and animals have a chance to live and thrive here and are not bombed out of existence by the U.S. military.

    I think if there’s anything for people to keep their mind on it’s the fact that this summer, when everyone is thinking that COVID is over and that people are trying to go on vacation and all that stuff, especially people coming to Hawaii, that people are living here without water because of the fact the U.S. military decided they were willing to poison our water. The longer this goes on, the more of us are going to suffer and the more of us are going to go without water. And that if they can do this to us, they’ll do this to anyone. So to be prepared for that and to fight before it happens to you, kind of thing. The best time to get into the streets was yesterday and the second best time is today. And so get involved and start fighting for your community before this happens to it.

    KH: This fight is not over, and it is, of course, only one chapter in a much larger struggle, but it is a victorious story, and we need those. Over 70 groups, and large numbers of everyday people, came together in Hawaii, and despite their many differences they waged a phenomenal pressure campaign and beat the god damn U.S. military. We lose a lot more than we win in this work, but every once in a while, people pull something off that makes me sit upright in my chair and think, “That’s right. That’s what people can do.” I am so grateful for those moments and for the people who create them, because we need to be reminded that human potential runs in more than one direction. We need to be reminded of our power, and to be challenged by the knowledge that it’s there, if we are willing to act collectively.

    If you want to learn more about what’s happening with Red Hill and the military’s environmental violence in Hawaii, I recommend checking out local coverage. Honolulu Civil Beat has some great pieces on this issue, including Christina Jedra’s recent article, “How Hawaii Activists Helped Force The Military’s Hand On Red Hill.” For updates on what’s happening with the situation at Red Hill, you can also follow Oʻahu Water Protectors on Twitter at @oahuWP.

    I do want to let our regular listeners know that “Movement Memos” will be on pause for a couple of weeks while I tend to some things that have come up in my life. As always, I appreciate your understanding and support as we all try to navigate these times.

    I want to thank Kawenaʻulaokalā Kapahua for talking with me about the powerful work that’s happening in Hawaii. I’m sure I’m not the only one who learned a lot from our conversation. I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

    Show Notes

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • War Crimes, Mental Molestation and Language Rape

    The incredible market for human slaughter called war existed thousands of years ago but it was a corner grocery store compared to the multi-trillion dollar moral sewer that represents modern mass murder. Part of what enables imperial and even lesser powers to slaughter at will is a rule book drawn up long ago when there might have been a possibility to just have military personnel chopping one another to bits while leaving the general populace out of the bloodletting. That certainly ended before the 20th century but what has transpired since then and up to the present is, to cite a couple of over-used therefore recognizable labels, a genocidal holocaust that has burned, bombed, shot, stabbed, smothered and shattered bodies, reducing humans to unrecognizable bloody pulp by the hundreds of millions.

    The hideous reality of war and its public relations and adverting departments that allegedly inform us about it has people accepting its horror as some sort of natural occurrence like sunset, tides, weather, rather than seeing it as caused by ruling powers battling over their wealth struggles which reduce humanity to commit mass murder under the pretense of it being the natural order of things. Further, rules have been drawn by upper class educated folks with doctoral degrees legalizing mass murder who teach us just what is the proper way to bash in skulls, burn people to death and rape and murder in a supposedly civilized way.

    The alleged morality of humans accepting one form of insanely hysterical murder as long as it adheres to a guidebook on the proper form of slaughter should make us all grateful there is no judgmental, vindictive old testament deity or we’d all have been destroyed after the second world war let alone after our profitable feasts of death since then when we’ve murdered even more.

    This closely guarded secret that humanity suffers in wars but only when rationalizations of bloody filth called “war crimes” are committed is currently being used and abused in a form of language, thought and moral degeneracy that may finally end when human consciousness, especially American, rejects the degenerate advertising and public relations blitz posing as reporting to blame Russians for what is called by language perverts their “war crime” against the Ukrainian government. Said government is a product of a U.S. financed insurrection that dumped an elected president who favored Russia for a western political pimp favoring market forces, which include some modern Nazis.

    While he has become a celebrity among morals free political employees of ruling power by informing everyone to send him weapons so that there can be more bloodshed of the loving, violence free western kind, the western world has increased military spending to record breaking figures. Our rulers, media employee shepherds, see to it that our population is reduced to sheep as much of the world is angrier than ever at the machinations of the warfare business though you’d never know it if all you had was the western media called a free press. They create mentally brutalized souls into paying hundreds of dollars for taco-pizza-burgers and calling it free food.

    While Ukrainians have been dying by the thousands for the past eight years, subject to a US/NATO financed and controlled assault, Americans and the west have known absolutely nothing of what was going on and not until Russian retaliation have we heard repeated use of words like brutal, savage, slaughter and worse, to condemn what under normal American circumstances would be called a form of legal police action to purify the world and see to it that peace, love and tranquility would prevail as we slaughtered. Maybe after everyone was dead?

    A nation that leads all others in conducting wars against weaker countries and murdering hundreds of thousands, at the least, and millions, at the worst, is not only bellowing murderous nonsense but manipulating good, well meaning people into swallowing editorial garbage that has some decent folks almost ready to pawn their pets to send money to suffering Ukrainians. Even worse, some perverted by venomous outpourings of what would be called vicious hate speech if conducted by anyone else, are ready to accept the potential of nuclear war in order to stop the horrible slaughter which mostly exists between the ears and comes out of the mouths of our thought police working overtime for our ruling powers.

    A recent story headlined a murderous, bloody, brutal assault by Russians, which had killed two people at the time the story was filed. Sadly but horrendously over-stated in a nation which kills 4-5 Americans every hour in our private transport system of undeclared road wars to get us to work, shop, school, and conduct other freedom loving democratic economic action. This while the sanctions against Russia are causing serious economic pain the world over, including to Americans, while military spending and the mass murder business that is the backbone of our incredibly gross national product is growing faster and more dangerously and fossil fuel interests profit more than ever as environmental destruction proceeds at a more menacing pace.

    This assault on reason, combined with the rape of language and the reduction of public consciousness to the level of a nation of insects, is really only an update of what has been going on for more than 100 years concerning Russia. The assault on that nation began in 1917 when the Russian revolution threatened capitalism, its global center then as now in the United States. America immediately invaded along with a group of its future lapdogs which eventually became NATO after the Second World War. The idea of a return to humanity’s roots by building a society based on communal cooperation rather than competitive actions which created wonderful benefits for some but only by reducing others to dreadful lives was too much for fanatics of the fundamentalist church of capital.

    Our primitive communistic survival in the days before we destroyed hunter-gatherer people meant that when the hunt was successful, everyone ate meat and when it wasn’t, everyone ate what was gathered. This was thousands of years before vegan diets and anti-meat worship among good people who comfortably house 136 million pets in a nation where more than 500,000 humans are without shelter. The pet business was good for more than 104 billion in 2020, a mass of economic clout but still chump change compared to the 778 billion for war, which involves 750 American bases in 80 foreign countries for something calling itself “defense”. This protected folks like George Floyd from the brutal, savage, bloodthirsty fiend Putin, but was totally helpless to defend him from a few Americans with badges.

    A communist ideal which held that a thousand people and a thousand loaves of bread should mean a loaf of bread for everyone sickened rich capitalists who insisted that some should get ten loaves each and the rest be damned, which is the gross foundation dressed in economic jargon that would make a house of prostitution a citadel of love. Capital said that just as sex workers made a decent living by using their private parts to make private profits for their pimps, workers of all kinds could live comfortably if they just did their jobs and didn’t ask any questions. Their media saw to it that unquestioners became everyday people.

    The social seeds planted by people like Marx and Engels in the 19th century came to fruition early in the 20th in Russia, and the vicious assault on that nation began, then as now, from its headquarters in America. After 70 years of continuous physical and mental assault finally helped cause a breakdown of the Soviet Union and a return to capitalism, that was still not enough and the U.S. and its imperial lackeys kept up the war and its present experience which threatens the worst outcome for humanity. This will hopefully not only bring China and Russia closer but the people of the USA and global humanity together to transcend the danger by helping to end the degeneracy of warfare and create peace via the end of an imperial crusade to further enrich billionaires and their upper class servants while increasing mass poverty and the environmental threat to us all.

    With daily by the minute assaults on consciousness reducing other wise good people to hateful idiocy demanding death for the savage Putin and evil Russians, there is glee among the perverted political economic leadership of the war business. They number a tiny group with power supposedly democratic while they brainwash people into believing autocracy – a term most hardly understand – is in charge everywhere but where it exists; in what we have been taught to believe is the free world. Benign (?) America billionaires become malevolently evil (ominous background music) Russian oligarchs, according to our mind shapers who neglect to point out they keep their wealth in the same banks – mostly American or at least using American dollars – to perform as charming space travelers or deranged killers, depending on national origin.

    This perverse market freedom continues to mean imperial abuse by one nation, ours, while taxpayers absorb a debt of 30 trillion dollars paying for the empire which is bringing us all closer to a point at which we will have little time left as a human race. We need to begin acting like one very soon. That means far more than waving a Ukrainian flag and sending paychecks to the pimps of war, but no longer accepting their crimes against nature and beginning to act like what we are: a human race badly in need of global democracy to stop all wars, not just those we are told are the wrong way to butcher humans, and begin life. That calls for the end of the post World War II domination of the American empire and this present horror is hopefully a sign that it will be so. We need to turn off the anti-social media that insure further private profit and ultimate public loss and turn on humanity’s original instinct for cooperation. And hurry.

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  • President Joe Biden seeks to Destroy Russia and Punish the Russian People

    Who, really, is the War Criminal?

    So what does President Joe Biden want the sanctions imposed on Russia to do? Think back to the 1990s and what the US-NATO imposed no-fly zone and sanctions did to the people of Iraq?  The results were almost 1 million Iraqis dead, according to the website GlobalIssues.org.

    Over at truthout.org, Jake Batinga reported that President Joe Biden strongly supported those sanctions as a US Senator and recently has turned a blind eye to the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Afghanistan:

    Senator Biden strongly supported the sanctions and advocated for even more aggressive policies toward Iraq. Biden was not then, and is not now, known for his humanitarian impulses or dovish foreign policy stances.

    Batinga also notes that:

    More Afghans are poised to die from US sanctions over the next few months alone than have died at the hands of the Taliban and US military forces over the last 20 years combined — by a significant margin. Yet, as journalist Murtaza Hussain recently wrote, US establishment politicians and intellectuals who decried the humanitarian crisis during the fall of Kabul are seemingly unbothered by imminent mass starvation, imposed by us.

    The Biden administration — which routinely laments human rights violations perpetrated by China, Iran, Russia, and other adversaries — is ignoring desperate pleas from humanitarian organizations and UN human rights bodies, choosing instead to maintain policies virtually guaranteed to cause mass starvation and death of civilians, especially children. Yet it is important to note, and remember, that as a matter of policy, this is not particularly new; the US has often imposed harsh economic sanctions, causing mass civilian death. A previous imposition of sanctions resulted in one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes, one largely forgotten in mainstream historical memory.

    In 1990, the US imposed sanctions on Iraq through the UN following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. These sanctions continued for more than a decade after Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, and had horrific humanitarian consequences eerily similar to the imminent mass starvation of Afghan civilians. The sanctions regime against Iraq — which began under President George H.W. Bush but was primarily administered by President Bill Clinton’s administration — froze Iraq’s foreign assets, virtually banned trade, and sharply limited imports. These sanctions crashed the Iraqi economy and blocked the import of humanitarian supplies, medicine, food, and other basic necessities, killing scores of civilians.

    BRIC’s Made of Straw

    The BRIC nations, Brazil, Russia, India and China have been in the news lately and for good reason. There is talk, and talk is cheap, of course, of China and Russia creating an alternative payment system to the US dollar dominated international payments system SWIFT.

    Already Russia has joined China’s Cross Border Interbank Payment System as an alternative to SWIFT, along with joining China’s UnionPay credit card system which serves as an alternative to Visa and Master Card who, along with dozens of other Western country businesses (Europe, USA plus Japan and South Korea), bolted Russia’s marketplace after its military operation got started in Ukraine in late February.

    India apparently is trading with Russia in a rupee, ruble swap but that seems ad hoc, at best. And there is news of Saudi Arabia cutting a deal with China to use the yuan as an exchange currency. Brazil has enough internal problems to deal with: crime, disease, Amazon deforestation.

    Chinese leaders must realize that if Russia falters in Ukraine which means it is unable to liberate the Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, gain international recognition of Crimea—and maintain territorial gains made on the coast of the Black and Azov Seas—and/or President Putin is removed from office and Russia destabilizes, the United States will chop up Russia into separate republics, steal its resources and cancel the billions in deals signed with China for oil, gas, and grains

    The United States will bring the NATO military alliance to China’s doorstep and likely put on show trials in the International Criminal Court arguing that Putin and his general staff are war criminals, which would be utter nonsense given US policies and actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen.

    China is trying to placate the US because it still fears US economic and military power. Its party officials probably figure that they can keep building up the People’s Liberation Army, Navy, Air Force and Strategic nuclear capability and when there is enough firepower, will be able to challenge US dominance in the Pacific. But how?

    The PLA forces have no modern combat experience to speak of and their plan seems to be; well, no plan at all. They are faced with the combined forces of the USA that are building new aircraft carriers, submarines and long distance B-21 bombers, along with upgrading all three legs of its nuclear TRIAD.

    Which brings us back to Russia and the economic support it needs so that Biden’s sanctions don’t end up killing a million Russians. Because that is what Biden intends and his track record on supporting sanctions is disturbingly clear. When China looks at what the USA-NATO have done to the Russian economy, they are looking at their own future.

    Hypocrisy

    Joe Scalice at the World Socialist Website notes the hypocrisy of the USA-NATO and the compliant MSM Western media:

    The wars of aggression of Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump contained the accumulated evil of the torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the drone bombing of children at play, villages leveled by precision missiles and refugees drowned in the Mediterranean. Baghdad crumbled beneath the shock and awe of unstinting US bombing; Fallujah burned with white phosphorus.

    The American mass media is complicit in these crimes. They never challenged the government’s assertions, but trumpeted its pretexts. They whipped up a war-frenzy in the public. Pundits who now denounce Putin were ferocious in demanding that the United States bomb civilians.

    Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times in 1999 of the bombing of Serbia under Clinton, “It should be lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted… [W]e will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.” [Biden supported bombing Belgrade]

    Biden labels Putin a war criminal in the midst of a new media hysteria. Never referring to the actions of the United States, never pausing for breath, the media pumps out the fuel for an ever-expanding war. Hubris and hypocrisy stamp every statement from Washington with an audacity perhaps unique in world history. Its hands bathed in blood up to the elbows, US empire gestures at its enemies and cries war crimes.

    Tactics

    Indeed, the media has capitulated to the war propaganda narrative of the Biden Administration. The US MSM relies almost exclusively on Ukrainian sources for its error filled reporting. If you are reading the New York Times or the Washington Post, you aren’t getting the full story. Pro-Russia sites like Southfront, Newsfront, War Gonzo and others tell a different story. For example, the Retroville Mall destruction on March 21 was reported in the West as a wanton and random attack on a shopping place. In fact, the below-building parking lot was home to Ukrainian military vehicles clearly shown by a set of photos that appeared on Newsfront. Residential buildings are clearly being used by the Ukrainian forces to hide their weapons or launch anti-tank attacks from apartment building roofs or top floor apartments. That’s a tactic that makes sense. The Russians know that.

    You’ve got to look at all the news sources, even the ones you don’t want to view, in order to be informed about this conflict.

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  • US to Use Ukraine as Stepping Stone toward Taiwan Provocation

    The US is planning to provoke conflict with China through Taiwan just as it has done to Russia through Ukraine. A similar process of replacing both governments in 2014 and then preparing both territories for war has been underway since.

    US policy papers have called for the encirclement and containment of both Russia and China for decades and ultimately, stopping China requires first isolating it from its largest, most powerful ally, Russia.

    The post US to Use Ukraine as Stepping Stone toward Taiwan Provocation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Sick and Sicker, Dumb and Dumber, Rich and Richer

    Quote — “The US will likely end up supplying Ukraine with Switchblade loitering munitions. The system poses a real threat. Nevertheless, the Russian military will likely use the tactics we saw in Syria to neutralize this threat.” (Southfront)

    And, well, it is tax time, and these beasts of a nation — Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, MSM — they rally around the military offensive murdering complex for, well, billions thrown at the Nazi regime of Ukraine. And I have to pay more taxes on my subpar wages? Give me a few of those drones, please! Billions of dollars thrown at the most corrupt and evil of them all (well, there are many evil ones, so see this as hyperbole). One contract with this outfit, AeroVironment. Looking into that company, I find its current president to be an interesting man:

    Wikipedia — Nawabi is an Afghan sub clan mega Barakzai the majority of this clan played an important role during the Barakzai dynasty – such as Ismail Khan Nawabi.

    The name Nawabi is borrowed from the Arabic, being the honorific plural of Naib or “deputy”. The name Nawab is mostly used among South Asians. In Bengal it is pronounced Nowab. The English adjective nawabi (from the Urdu word nawwābī) describes anything associated with a nawab.

    He says AeroVironment is a great place to work because: “There is no place like AeroVironment where a group of honorable, smart, and hardworking people can make such a big and positive impact on our lives and society. I am excited and honored to lead such a team in order to help all of our 3 stakeholders Proceed with Certainty.”

    Wahid Nawabi

    Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer

    Yes, the face of the military murdering complex is a smile, a wink, and even a diversity statement validation.

    As President and Chief Executive Officer at AEROVIRONMENT INC, Wahid Nawabi made $2,524,773 in total compensation. Of this total $632,319 was received as a salary, $535,513 was received as a bonus, $0 was received in stock options, $1,333,024 was awarded as stock and $23,917 came from other types of compensation. This information is according to proxy statements filed for the 2021 fiscal year. President and Chief Executive Officer. AEROVIRONMENT INC

    So, the wink and a nod, all those stock options, all of that base pay, all of it, all predicated on, hmm, contracts. Yes, US GI Joe fed contracts. And, well, a contract is a contract, whether Mario Puzo is writing about it, or if one of the slick female heads of the war complex companies is drafting and signing it. This is one company, which I have previously discussed in general and specifically is really not just one in Santa’s Serial Murder workshops, but one represents dozens of companies (contracted) relying on those contracts for these drones with payloads: wires, optics, diodes, motherboards, paint, metal, gears, etc. Kamikaze drones, what a lovely thing to be proud of, and this company is just one of thousands that makes money off of blood.

    The officials told the outlet that the White House is currently considering supplying Ukraine with Switchblades, as part of a new package of military aid. However, they noted that no decisions on the matter have been made, yet.

    There are two available variants of the loitering munition, the Switchblade 300 and the 600. The 300 was designed to target personnel and unarmored vehicles. It has a range of 10 kilometers and an endurance of 10 minutes. The larger 600 was designed to destroy armored vehicles, like battle tanks. This version has a range of 80 kilometers and an endurance of up to 20 minutes. (source)

    Please, kind reader, look at these people — the website of their team: Aerovironment. For me, they are scary people, for sure, in that they are the paper-pushers and state college grads from engineering programs; they are the marketers, the CPAs and the HR folk. These are what I have faced my entire life teaching — people who have no reservation about making money selling drugs that kill (Big Pharma) or booze that kills or anything that kills, both human or environment. Look at their biographies on the “About Us” page above. This is the banality of evil, and I am afraid, that evil is much much deeper engrained than Hannah Arendt could have conjured up because there is no “great war,” no great global war against Nazis and fascists, as in WWII. It’s all transactional, money for blood, weapons ‘r us!

    Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

    — Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958

    I’m not sure she was thinking of the pure structural/sanctions-led/financial tyranny of capitalism, that soft tyranny of western consumerism, the constant inverted tyranny in a world where most First World folk eat, drink, sleep oil. A world that is run by business men and business women, under the umbrella of the Deep State and government thugs. I do not think she was in the know around how pernicious the marketing of lies and evil doing was under the guidance of a fellow Jew, Edward (Freud) Bernays. But she was onto something, for sure:

    In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

    ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

    You see, the totalitarianism is in the marketing of these spoils of war, and the war minders, and the war industry. Look at this company’s founder, Paul MacCready. Check him out on Wikipedia — Paul B. MacCready Jr. (September 25, 1925 – August 28, 2007) was an American aeronautical engineer. He was the founder of AeroVironment and the designer of the human-powered aircraft that won the first Kremer prize. He devoted his life to developing more efficient transportation vehicles that could “do more with less.”

    In so many ways, MacCready represents the best and the brightest of his generation, the hope for mankind, the genius of the American System producing tools of war, tools of profit. He represents the undying American work ethic, with only the heavens (err, he said sky, as he was an avowed atheist) as his limit.

    That is it, really — the biography of a military industrial complex tool of death, all started in the twinkle of a 15-year-old MacCready’s eye when he was designing planes and gliders in 1940. Now? Every sort of munition and payload delivered in the fuselages of those toys. Heck, why not drone-carrying bugs injected or engineered with viruses?

    CNBC 3/16/2022: “Stocks making the biggest moves midday: Alibaba, AeroVironment, Boeing and more”. Again, success at the start of the trading and the end of the day bell on Wall Street! Get US taxpayer contract in the millions, and see you stock rise rise rise like sour dough bread,

    Dark Side of Delivery: The Growing Threat of Bioweapon Dissemination by Drones —

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  • Putin and the War in Ukraine

    President Vladimir Putin is not a military general. He is a modernist leader, a trained spymaster and strategist who understands that war is a continuation of politics by other means (Clausewitz). Accordingly, if we want to grasp Putin’s motives we should refrain from trying to assess Russia’s military campaign in terms of ‘strict military objectives.’  We should instead look at the military campaign as a political instrument that is set to mobilize a global  and regional geopolitical shift and on a mammoth scale.

    It is clear that Putin’s army is doing its best to avoid civilian casualties. It uses siege tactics as opposed to the barbarian American  ‘Shock and Awe’  doctrine. Furthermore, the Russian military works hard not to dismantle the Ukrainian military.  Instead it encircles cities and is cutting out the Ukrainian army in the East and South of the country. The Russian military has dismantled Ukraine’s ability to regroup, let alone counter attack.  Western military analysts have agreed that clear evidence of the Ukrainian army’s growing disability is that Ukraine’s army didn’t manage to seriously damage the 60 km Russian convoy on its way to Kyiv despite the fact that the convoy stood still for more than 10 days. In the last 24 hours, Russia has made it clear to the West that any Western military supply to Ukraine will be treated as a legitimate  military target. In other words, the elite Ukrainian army in the East is now a defunct military force; it can defend the cities, it can mount guerrilla attacks on stretched Russian military logistics but it cannot regroup into a fighting force that can alter the battleground.

    Putin’s army, as military experts agree, enjoys massive firepower. It is hardly a secret that Russia’s artillery is a deadly force and there is no force that can match it anywhere in the world. The military rationale for this is plain. The USSR never trusted the quality and the loyalty of its foot soldiers. While it counted on the soldiers’ mass impact, their sheer numbers, it also invented the means, the technology, the tactics and the doctrine  to win the battle from afar in preparation for the masses to move in. It was Red artillery that knocked down the 3rd Reich Army. Similarly, flattening enemy cities is something the USSR and modern Russia are famous for. Russia enjoys this power, but it has refrained, so far,  from deploying this ability in Ukraine. Russia has displayed this  capability rather than deploying it. According to military analysts, Russia hasn’t  even begun to utilize its superior air power other than assuring its total air superiority over Ukraine.

    The Russian army’s tactic has been to mount pressure on cities’ outskirts, demonstrating Russian military might and then opening  corridors for humanitarian convoys. And this is the trick. Russia is creating a flood of refugees to the west. Due to the Ukrainian government ban on men 18-60 leaving the country, we are talking about women and children. So far there are about 2.5 million Ukrainian refugees but this number could increase dramatically. And the question follows: will Germany be happy to accept another million refugees that aren’t a working force? What about France and Britain, the USA, Canada, all those countries that pushed Zelensky and Ukraine into a war but were quick to leave the Ukrainian people to their fate?

    Sooner or later, Putin believes, Europe will accept his entire list of demands and will lift the list of sanctions, and may even compensate him for his losses on oil sales all in a desperate attempt to stop the tsunami of Ukrainian refugees. By the time the guns cool down, many Ukrainians may actually prefer to stay in Germany, France, Britain and Poland. This will lead, at least in Putin’s mind, to a demographic shift in the ethnic balance in favor of the Russian ethnic groups in Ukraine. Within the context of such a shift, Putin will be able to dominate the situation in his neighbour state by political and even democratic means.

    Putin’s plan is not new.  It already succeeded in Syria.

    When the West realised that Syria was on foot to Europe, it was very quick to allow Putin to win the battle for Assad at the expense of America’s hegemony in the Middle East. Putin now deploys basically the same tactics. He may be cruel or even barbarian but stupid or irrational he isn’t.

    The main question is how is it possible that our Western political and media elite are clueless about Putin and Russia’s moves?  How is it possible that not one Western military analyst can connect the dots and see through the fog of this horrid war? The reason is obvious: no gifted people see a potential career in military or public service these days. Gifted people prefer the corporate world, banks, high tech, data and media giants. The result is that Western generals and intelligence experts are not very gifted. The situation of our Western political class is even more depressing. Not only are our politicians those who weren’t gifted enough to join the corporate route, they are also uniquely unethical. They are there to fulfill the most sinister plans of their globalist masters and they do it all at our expense.

    I have little doubt that an experienced politician like Angela Merkel wouldn’t have let the Ukraine situation escalate into a global disaster. She, like Putin, was properly trained for her job, understanding the deep distinction between strategy and tactics.  She, like Putin, was trained to think five steps ahead. As far as I can tell there is no one in the West who understands Putin, who can read his mind. Instead they attribute to the Russian leader psychotic characteristics in a desperate attempt to hide the depth of the  hopeless and tragic  situation the West inflicted on itself and on Ukraine in particular.

    Meanwhile Putin is taking the most spectacular measures to protect his life and his regime. We in the west find it ‘laughable,’  but Putin knows very well that the only way the West can deal with its own incapacity is to eliminate him and his regime one way or another.

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  • Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine May Have Disastrous Cascading Effects for Climate

    People walk amid destruction as they evacuate from a contested frontline area between Bucha and Irpin on March 10, 2022, in Irpin, Ukraine.

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has completely upended European military spending and the global energy market. The disruptions in both sectors could have massive ramifications for how the world addresses climate change. Already, Germany’s decision to increase its defense budget to 100 billion euros, and the move by the United States and its allies to release 60 million barrels of oil from their strategic reserves, are only the first of what is likely to be a huge reshuffling of global priorities and supply lines in reaction to the military attack instigated by Vladimir Putin.

    In the United States, President Joe Biden announced a ban on importing Russian oil, which had previously been exempt from the harsh sanctions imposed since the beginning of the war. Only about 8 percent of U.S. petroleum imports came from Russia in 2021, but even the small decline in supply could contribute to increasing gas prices. Europe hasn’t imposed its own ban, as the continent is far more reliant on Russia for oil and natural gas imports. Although European leaders have committed to decreasing their dependency on Russian energy, that transition will take years, as Russia supplies the continent with 40 percent of its gas and 25 percent of its oil.

    The United States is already the world’s largest energy producer, with Saudi Arabia and Russia close behind. The growth of U.S. energy production has been a largely bipartisan affair, even as Republicans push for more and Democrats pay lip service to reining in oil and gas extraction in the name of slowing global warming. U.S. oil lobbyists are using Russia’s invasion, and the subsequent energy supply uncertainties, to push for increased fossil fuels production in the name of “energy security.”

    More traditional understandings of security have also been upended since Russia’s invasion. Germany announced it would send weapons to Ukraine, a first in the post-WWII era, and it increase its military spending to 2 percent of GDP. Those moves, along with canceling the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, would have been unthinkable only several weeks ago, according to European defense experts. The United States and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries have long pressured Germany to increase its military spending, and although the new posture is a radically different approach domestically, the international implications aren’t clear.

    Since the end of World War II, Europe has depended on the United States for its military defense capabilities through NATO, as have Japan and South Korea. Both of those countries have defense treaties with the United States, unlike Ukraine.

    Some NATO critics on the left have called for Europe to move away from its reliance on the United States for defense. Those who make this argument say that if Europe were less militarily dependent on the United States, there could be an opportunity to unwind NATO and perhaps even scrap the alliance at some point in the future. That position may make sense in the abstract, but it cuts against the broader goal of decreasing militarism worldwide. Certainly, right now, it’s almost impossible to imagine dissolving NATO, as Russia’s invasion has united the alliance in ways the world hasn’t seen in decades.

    Also, increased military spending out of Europe is unlikely to result in a decrease in Pentagon funding in the United States, regardless of which party controls Congress or the White House. The likely result, then, of Russia’s actions is a significant net increase in military spending from the U.S. and Europe. On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed a $13.6 billion aid package for Ukraine, including $6.5 billion in military aid. U.S. lawmakers are also negotiating next year’s Pentagon budget, which is set to exceed the $740 billion they had previously agreed to, far above the $715 billion the Biden administration had initally requested. Setting aside what that could mean for future wars, it is almost certainly bad news from a climate perspective.

    Military spending is a notorious contributor to carbon emissions. The U.S. military is the “the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world,” according to a 2019 Cost of War study from Brown University. Another study from the same year showed “that if the US military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal.”

    The broad trend is true for other militaries, according to research from Stuart Parkinson of Scientists for Global Responsibility. “I estimate that the carbon emissions of the world’s armed forces and the industries that provide their equipment are in the region of 5% of the global total,” Parkinson wrote in 2020. When factoring in the effects of war — including fires, deforestation and post-conflict reconstruction — the toll rises even higher. In total, Parkinson estimates that militaries and their industrial partners are a greater polluting sector than civil aviation, which contributes roughly as much to global warming as Germany or Japan.

    We’re forced to rely on estimates because, as a result of U.S. lobbying during the Kyoto protocols, militaries are exempt from disclosing their carbon emissions to the United Nations. The Paris climate accords also don’t require countries to report their military’s carbon footprint, resulting in a massive loophole that countries can exploit. “With military spending rapidly rising, this loophole is set to grow at a time when other emissions are falling,” Parkinson told The Guardian late last year. “The seriousness with how these nations deal with this issue will affect action in other sectors and in other nations.”

    As is the case with most of Biden’s agenda, his record on climate change is decidedly uneven at best. Last month, the federal government recently auctioned off areas in New York and New Jersey for a record $4.37 billion to be used for wind farms that could ultimately power up to 2 million homes. More broadly, in Biden’s first year, he articulated a robust climate policy, by U.S. standards, as part of his Build Back Better spending plan. That plan, and its green energy components, has stalled in Congress thanks to opposition from all Republicans and two Senate Democrats: Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. (Manchin has joined Republicans in calling for Biden to increase U.S. oil and gas production.)

    Biden’s actual climate policies, however, bear little resemblance to his rhetoric recognizing the world historic catastrophe that climate change presents. Under his watch, the Interior Department “processed more oil and gas drilling permits during Biden’s first year in office than three of the four years of the Trump administration,” according to Politico. The United States has also drastically ramped up exports of liquified natural gas (LNG), becoming the world’s largest exporter.

    Germany is also looking to increase its use of LNG to offset its dependence on Russian energy exports, as well as possibly extending its use of coal plants. Last year, the country embarked on an ambitious plan to use only renewable energy by 2035. It’s not clear whether Russia’s actions will accelerate that timeline or disrupt it, but in the short run Germany’s new reliance on LNG is a lateral move at best. U.S. LNG exporters are already seeing record export levels, as European countries look to offset their energy shortages. A recent report from the Natural Resources Defense Council found “that LNG exports have, at best, little climate benefit compared to other options,” and that “compared to clean, renewable energy sources, LNG falls far short.”

    For as much as oil lobbyists and their partners in Congress are exploiting Russia’s actions to ramp up drilling, there’s also the possibility that this moment could lead to a more widespread public awareness of the dangers that arise from reliance on fossil fuels and petrostates. Sen. Ed Markey has said a Green New Deal would be a “pathway for peace.”

    The massive refugee flows we’re seeing out of Ukraine right now come after more than a decade of similar displacement from war, poverty and climate crisis. More global spending on militaries, and a doubling down on fossil fuel extraction, will make additional migration and conflict more likely. If the world takes this opportunity to recommit to renewable energy, the worst can be avoided, but the last week does not give much cause for optimism.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Morrison’s ‘arc of autocracy’ or arch hypocrisy?

    The rules-based order so admired by the Morrison government has a certain confected aura about it argues William Briggs. In fact, the first of these rules is that the US rules.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • You Are Also a Victim of War like Us

    Daniela Edburg (Mexico), Atomic Picnic, 2007.

    Daniela Edburg (Mexico), Atomic Picnic, 2007.

    On 27 February, Russian President Vladimir Putin met the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov and the Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu. ‘The top officials of the leading NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organisation] countries have made aggressive statements against our country’, Putin said. Therefore, he told his top officials ‘to transfer the deterrence forces of the Russian army to a special mode of combat duty’. The last phrase, reasonably cloaked in bureaucratic language, means that Russia’s nuclear arsenal will move to high alert. Meanwhile, Russian forces appeared to have seized the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. Early reports that the power plant was on fire were false, although it was sufficiently chilling to hear that there had been fighting at the site.

    More than 90% of the world’s 12,700 nuclear weapons are owned by the United States and Russia; the rest are found in seven other countries. About 2,000 of these warheads – held by the US, Russia, Britain, and France – are on perpetual high alert, which means that they are ready to be used at a moment’s notice. The United States has stationed nuclear weapons not only on its own territory but across the world, including in Europe; roughly 100 of its B61 nuclear gravity bombs are based in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Turkey – all NATO member states. In 2018-19, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, an arms control agreement with Russia, which promptly followed suit. The abandonment of the treaty means that each country can now deploy ground-launched missiles with a range of up to 5,500 kilometres, seriously weakening the security architecture in and around Europe. It is undeniable that the INF withdrawal is part of the reason why the Russians believe that the United States seeks proximity to its borders in order to deploy such missiles and reduce the strike time to Russian cities. On top of this, the United States is building a new $100 billion missile system called the GBSD (ground-based strategic deterrent) that can travel nearly 10,000 kilometres; this missile can carry nuclear weapons and strike any place on the planet in minutes.

    Elliott McDowell (USA), Tony at Yucca Flats, 1982.

    Elliott McDowell (USA), Tony at Yucca Flats, 1982.

    These dangerous developments – the withdrawal from the INF, the development of the GBSD, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – came after the world voted ‘yes’ on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (2017) which went into force on 22 January 2021. An overwhelming number of United Nations member states, 122, voted in favour of this treaty; only one member (the Netherlands) voted against it. However, 69 countries abstained, including all nine of the nuclear weapons states and all NATO members (except the Netherlands). The Russian military action in Ukraine is a reminder, at the very least, of why a global nuclear weapons ban is necessary, and why every single country must commit to disarming and disposing of its nuclear weapons arsenal.

    There is a practical method to take the global desire for the abolition of nuclear weapons forward: the expansion of the Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zones (NWFZ).

    Maria Prymachenko (Ukraine), May That Nuclear War Be Cursed!, 1978.

    Maria Prymachenko (Ukraine), May That Nuclear War Be Cursed!, 1978.

    Since the early 1960s, Mexico’s representative to the United Nations, Alfonso García Robles, led the fight to develop a NWFZ in the Americas. If these regional zones are created and expanded, García Robles said at the UN in 1974, eventually the area ‘from which nuclear weapons are prohibited [will reach] a point where the territories of Powers which possess those terrible weapons of mass destruction will become something like contaminated islets subject to quarantine’. García Robles spoke with the prestige afforded to Mexico for its leadership in passing the Treaty of Tlatelolco in 1967. This treaty created the first NWFZ, which included 33 of the 35 countries of the American hemisphere; only Canada and the United States remained outside the zone.

    Four other NWFZs have been created since the Treaty of Tlatelolco: in the South Pacific (Treaty of Rarotonga, 1985), in Southeast Asia (Treaty of Bangkok, 1995), on the African continent (Treaty of Pelindaba, 1996), and in Central Asia (Treaty of Semipalatinsk, 2006). Together, these five NWFZs include 113 countries, comprising 60% of the member states of the United Nations and every country on the African continent. The main legal agreements related to nuclear weapons, such as the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT, 1968), allow for the establishment of these Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zones; for example, article VII of the NPT states, ‘Nothing in this Treaty affects the right of any group of States to conclude regional treaties in order to assure the total absence of nuclear weapons in their respective territories’. The UN General Assembly has regularly called for the establishment of additional NWFZs.

    Pavel Pepperstein (Russia), Bikini 47, 2001.

    Pavel Pepperstein (Russia), Bikini 47, 2001.

    None of the nuclear weapons states have joined these treaties. This is not from lack of interest. In 1966, Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin told the UN’s Disarmament Committee that his government was willing to include a clause into the NPT that would prohibit ‘the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear States parties to the treaty which have no nuclear weapons in their territory’. The next year, the Soviet Ambassador to the Disarmament Committee Alexei Roshchin said that his government hoped that the NPT should be considered as a ‘first step towards the cessation of the nuclear arms race, towards the elimination of nuclear weapons’.

    These sentiments from Kosygin and Roshchin followed the plan that was proposed to the United Nations by Polish Foreign Minister Adam Rapacki on 2 October 1957 for the creation of a denuclearised central Europe. The Rapacki Plan suggested that a NWFZ be established in Poland and the two Germanys, with the hope that it be extended into Czechoslovakia. The plan was supported by the Soviet Union, along with all the countries of the Warsaw Pact (Albania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and the German Democratic Republic).

    Objection to the Rapacki Plan came from NATO and in particular from the United States. At the Paris meeting of the NATO council in December 1957, the military alliance decided to continue their nuclear weapons build-up, arguing that the Soviet Union would wield an advantage over European countries relying on ‘arms of the preatomic age’. Two weeks later, the Polish Foreign Ministry discussed NATO’s decision and formulated a reasonable response toward the creation of a second draft of the Rapacki Plan. The four new elements of the plan included:

    1. To guarantee that the nuclear-free zone would not be attacked by nuclear weapons.
    2. To be prepared to reduce and balance conventional armed forces.
    3. To develop a control plan in the zone for all types of weapons.
    4. To develop a legal form for a nuclear-free zone treaty.

    NATO would not take any of these proposals seriously. The Rapacki Plan died a quiet death and has been largely forgotten. Today, there is no discussion about a Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone in any part of Europe even though it is ground zero for the nuclear trigger.

    Faiza Butt (Pakistan), Get Out of My Dreams I, 2008.

    Faiza Butt (Pakistan), Get Out of My Dreams I, 2008.

    Suggestions for Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zones for other parts of the world abound. Iran has been one of the proponents for a NWFZ in the Middle East. This was first raised at the UN in 1974 and was proposed in the UN General Assembly by Egypt and Iran each year from 1980 to 2018 and is adopted each year without a vote. But that proposal has been dead in the water because Israel refuses to accept it. In September 1972, Pakistan’s representative to the UN Atomic Energy Conference Munir Ahmad Khan proposed a NWFZ in South Asia, but the idea was set aside when India tested nuclear weapons in May 1974. Here and there, countries raise the issue of an Arctic NWFZ or a Pacific Ocean NWFZ, but none of these have come to pass. The main adversaries to these proposals are the nuclear weapons states, with the United States in the lead.

    Akiko Takakura (Japan), A Woman Driven by Unbearable Thirst Tried to Catch the Black Raindrops in Her Mouth, c. 1974.

    The fighting in Ukraine which is taking place in and around nuclear power plants and the loose comments made by powerful men about nuclear weapons remind us of the great dangers we face.

    When I was a child, Indian schools commemorated Hiroshima Day on 6 August with great solemnity. Our school was given a lecture about the brutality and then we went to our classes and either made a drawing or wrote a story about what we had learned. The point of the exercise was to imprint a great hatred for war in our young minds. It strikes me that we – as a human civilisation – have forgotten about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the terrible weapons dropped upon their populations by the United States in 1945.

    I have spent years reading the words of the hibakusha, the survivors of those attacks, and re-reading the journalism of Wilfred Burchett, John Hersey, and Charles Loeb and the writings of Kenzaburō Ōe, Kōbō Abe, Masuji Ibuse, Michihiko Hachiya, Sankichi Tōge, Shinoe Shōda, Tamiki Hara, Yōko Ōta, Yoshie Hotta, and others. These writers illuminate the terror of war and the amnesia inflicted on the world by those who want to continue to drag us into conflict after conflict.

    In this reading, I encountered the exchange between Günther Anders, a German Marxist philosopher, and Claude Eatherly, one of the US pilots who flew as part of the squadron that bombed Hiroshima. Anders wrote to Eatherly in 1959, beginning a correspondence that resulted in a broken Eatherly writing for forgiveness to the people of Hiroshima. The response from thirty young hibakusha women to Eatherly moved me deeply, as I hope it will move you too:

    We have learned to feel towards you a fellow-feeling,
    thinking that you are also a victim of war
    like us.

    It is as if the hibakusha women were channelling the sentiments that first created International Working Women’s Day over a hundred years ago, a day which, in 1917, was the spur to the revolution in Tsarist Russia. Of war and its divisions, one of the day’s founders Clara Zetkin wrote, ‘The blood of the killed and the wounded must not be a stream to divide that which unites the present distress and the future hope’.

    The post You Are Also a Victim of War like Us first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Crisis in Ukraine is a Planetary Crisis Provoked by the U.S. that Threatens Nuclear War

    Let us begin a conversation in response to what currently qualifies as the most profound question, the one that needs most urgently to be addressed if we are to have any chance of understanding what we conveniently refer to as the “Ukraine crisis.” This is, more accurately, a planetary crisis—close in magnitude to the near-certainty of species extinction within the next century, but in some ways ahead of secondary catastrophes such as the obscene, raging inequality between peoples and nations unleashed by President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s, and the global conglomerations of immense corporate and plutocratic power.

    Why is it, then, that the three most important power alliances of the Western and Eurasian worlds—North America, led by the United States alongside its “Trudeauesque” poodle and with the problematic connivance of Mexico’s López Obrador; the European Union and post-Brexit UK; and the Russian Federation, in wobbly alliance with China—consider it worthwhile to suffer intensification of the risks of nuclear annihilation? This, in the face of an abundance of routes available for peaceful settlement, given a minimum of goodwill and genuine humanitarian concern?

    In the case of Russia, we know very well what these reasons are because Russia has told us—clearly, consistently, loudly, and transparently—for more than 15 years. First and foremost, Russia resents the West’s violation of its unmistakable and supremely important pledge to President Gorbachev in 1990 that the power of NATO would not move one further inch eastward. Secretary of State James Baker gave this commitment at least three times on February 9 that year. This was in return for Russian acquiescence to the tragic error of German reunification, paving the way for an accelerating renaissance of an aggressively militarized and potentially neo-Nazi European hegemon.

    President George H. W. Bush (left) with the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and U.S. Secretary of State James Baker (right) in 1989. (Credit: theguardian.com)

    Yet in place of the 16 members of NATO that existed in 1990, we today have 30, and Ukraine is more and more desperately knocking on the door, conceivably to be followed by Georgia, Finland and Sweden. Current U.S. President Joe Biden, whose son enjoyed a senior place on the board of Ukraine energy giant Burisma, played a key role in that process of enlargement. The U.S. and Russia possess more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, around 4,000 each.

    But the United States has deployed its weapons far closer to Russia than Russia has deployed weapons close to the U.S. (each power also has fleets of nuclear submarines: in 2018 the U.S. had 14, against Russia’s 12). The United States has positioned nuclear defense/offense capabilities close to Russian borders in countries such as Poland and Romania. There are between 160 and 240 U.S. atomic bombs in NATO countries, of which 50 to 90 are stored in Turkey, a NATO member. Britain (225) and France (300) have their own sizeable nuclear arsenals.

    (Source: atlanticcouncil.org)

    Although it is commonly presumed that a nuclear exchange would quickly move from incremental (if there is any moderation at all) to massive, assessments as to how a nuclear war would actually pan out are extremely complicated for both technological and geopolitical reasons. It is not beyond comprehension that a conflict might be confined to so-called low-yield nuclear bombs or mini-nukes. Nor is it at all certain that nuclear weapons will all work as they are supposed to (in fact, it is reasonable to presume they will not). Many uncertainties attend the newest generation of hypersonic missiles. And the functionality of so-called missile defense systems is perhaps most of all in question.

    In addition, there is the issue of the weaponization of nuclear reactors, which is to say their conversion into weapons by missile or other form of strike, whether intentional or otherwise. There are 15 reactors in Ukraine, and another 123 in Europe. The U.S. has 93, Russia 38. Not least is the danger of nuclear accident, which almost certainly increases in the context of accelerating tensions between countries at least one of which possesses nuclear weapons or countries that can strike the nuclear facilities or reactors of other countries. There have been at least a dozen or so near misses since the U.S. dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

    Although their deliberate use by the United States that year is the only time that nuclear weapons have actually been fired in conflict, there have been many instances in which the use of nuclear weapons has been seriously considered. Peter Kuznick and Oliver Stone, in their book The Untold History of the United States, relate several instances in which U.S. presidents have given serious consideration to their use. This featured in Winston Churchill’s Operation Unthinkable, formulated within weeks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It contemplated a nuclear strike against Soviet Russia.

    The Pentagon developed at least nine such first-strike nuclear war plans before the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb in 1949. The 1949 Dropshot plan envisaged 300 nuclear bombs and 20,000 tons of conventional bombs on 200 targets in 100 urban areas, including Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Fortunately, the U.S. did not have sufficient weaponry for the purpose at that time.

    (Source: express.co.uk)

    In the United States and its allies, Russia confronts an adversary which is the only country ever to have used nuclear weapons on another, although this made little concrete difference to the outcome of the Second World War. This is also an adversary which has many times since considered using nuclear weapons again, which tolerates the acquisition of nuclear weapons by its closest allies (e.g., Britain, France, Israel) and bitterly opposes even the faintest possibility of their acquisition by its opponents (e.g., North Korea and Iran).

    It is an adversary which fails to keep even its most important promises (e.g., about not allowing NATO to expand), a country which abrogates important treaties (as did Bush in abrogating the ABM treaty in 2002), and which has crowned itself as the rightful hegemon, entitled to crush any power, global or regional, that would dare challenge its hegemonic status (as in the “Wolfowitz doctrine” 1992, progenitor of the Bush doctrine in 2002 by which the U.S. entitles itself to preemptive war).

    Paul Wolfowitz (Source: geopoliticsca.ru)

    The U.S.’s credibility in international relations is profoundly undermined by: a long history of invasions and occupations of other powers—most egregiously, perhaps, in the case of Afghanistan 2001-2021, or that of Iraq (2003-2021), which can be counted along with many dozens of other instances since World War Two; overt and covert military interventions, with or without the consent of legitimate authorities, often reckless and cruel; fomenting of regime-change “color revolutions” as in Ukraine 2004 and 2014; and universal meddling with elections and political processes as in the activities of organizations such as Cambridge Analytica, and its parent Strategic Communications Limited, and the National Endowment for Democracy.

    Not least is its equally long-established history of lying, just about everything, but particularly in matters of war. The Pentagon Papers, exposed by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 with respect to the Vietnam War, or the so-called Afghanistan Papers, gathered into book form by Craig Whitlock in 2021, should be sufficient cause for considerable alarm in this respect.

    There is a context here of a profound U.S.-led, multi-media and multi-targeted anti-Russia propaganda campaign that dates to the accession to the Russian presidency of Vladimir Putin in 1999-2000. It builds on previous relentless Cold War propaganda against the Soviet Union (which had us all thinking this titanic struggle was all about capitalism versus communism when it was really just about who could steal the most from the developing world), and on an even more distant anti-Russian campaign stretching back at least as far as the Crimean War of 1853-56—all chronicled by Gerald Sussmann, among others, in 2020.

    (Source: Russia-now.com)

    To this must now be added recent unfounded or presumptive anti-Russian harassment regarding an incessant and unlikely litany of all manner of accusations. These include the shooting down of MH17 in 2014; the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in 2018; purported collusion with Syrian President Assad over the use of chemical weapons; and, the most dramatic fable of all, alleged Russian hacking of DNC/DCCC servers and interference in the 2016 U.S. elections.

    Russia has had every reason for deep distrust of the United States and its NATO and European allies. In addition, as I have chronicled elsewhere, we must take account of US/EU/NATO abetment to the illegal Euromaidan coup d’état of 2014 that was staged against a democratically elected president in 2014, just months away from scheduled elections, and whose muscle was provided by long-established Ukrainian neo-Nazi movements implicated in the assassinations of hundreds of protestors in Kiev and Odessa. To secure “legitimacy” and to stuff the coup legislature with their own people, the new leaders were obliged to ban the country’s major political parties, including the Party of the Regions and the Communist Party.

    Scene from the 2014 Euromaidan coup. (Source: inquiriesjournal.com)

    Terrified by the anti-Russian threats of the coup leaders, the largely pro-Russian population of Crimea (including Sebastopol, Russia’s major Black Sea port, held on long-lease from Ukraine and where Russia was entitled to maintain thousands of soldiers) voted to secede from Ukraine and to seek annexation by Russia.

    In the significantly pro-Russian Donbass, citizens established the independent republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. Kiev has never deigned to negotiate directly with the republics, with its own citizens, but has instead, having lost the initial war, violently subjected residents to extensive shelling (with most of the casualties taking place in the republics) and spitefully withdrawn all social security protections.

    Workers bury the dead in Slovyansk in Eastern Ukraine where mass graves were found (Source: hrw.org)

    The republics did not seek annexation by Russia, nor did Russia entertain annexation. Instead, Russia negotiated the Minsk agreements through the “Normandy Round” in 2015-2016. This sought and agreed to greater autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk within Ukraine. Unwilling or unable to combat its neo-Nazi extremists, Kiev proved unable to implement Minsk, nor did the international community, other than Russia, exert pressure on Kiev to make it happen.

    It would have taken unusual credulity and naivety on the part of Russian leaders not to have concluded by 2022 that the U.S. and, with some exceptions, its NATO and EU allies, were resolutely and unforgivingly hostile to Russia.

    Russia, having explored the possibility of accession to NATO in the 1990s and been rejected, resigned to the provocative continuation of NATO not just beyond the collapse of the Soviet Union—the very reason for NATO’s existence—but even beyond the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991. It has been targeted close to its borders by U.S./NATO nuclear weapons that are mockingly and ludicrously described as defenses against Iran’s (non-existent) nuclear missiles, and routinely humiliated and threatened by massive annual NATO military exercises along its borders and the Black Sea.

    Members of the U.S. Marine Corps perform military exercise in (now Russian-occupied) Kherson on July 28, 2021 (Source: reuters.com)

    Further, it has to listen to Ukrainian President and former clown Volodymyr Zelensky plead for speedier access of Ukraine to NATO membership (extending just days ago to a demand for the placement of nuclear weapons in Ukraine) and for a no-fly zone.

    As such it could have had no reasonable hope ever to be freed of the scourge of U.S./EU/NATO salivation for the break-up of the Russian Federation and unregulated freedom for Western capital, as prelude to the Western world’s ultimate confrontation with China.

    Whether Russian military exercises on the Russian side of the border with Ukraine from the end of 2021 were intended from the beginning as a platform for invasion is not clear. The invasion may have been provoked by the intensification of Ukrainian army assaults against the Donbass.

    Incessant, even hysterical, U.S. warnings of a Russian invasion may themselves have provoked exactly that outcome if it seemed to Russia that the United States was determined to stage any kind of provocation that would have made it impossible for Russia to resist.

    Presuming, surely correctly, that the U.S./NATO has long expected and salivated for a conflict that would provide sufficient pretext for the extermination of the Russian Federation, Russia decided on a measure of preemptive advantage at a singular moment when Russia possibly enjoys nuclear superiority over the West because of its further advance (at budgets a small fraction of those enjoyed by its adversary, whose military procurement practices are rife with corruption) of hypersonic missiles and a developing alliance with China.

    Putin has indicated willingness to keep moving until Russia conquers the entire territory of Ukraine. The more he can acquire, the more he can negotiate with. At the time of writing the areas under control resemble the buffer zone created by Turkey along its border with northwestern Syria and by the U.S. along Syria’s northeastern border. This seizure of the land of a sovereign nation to add to Turkish security from what it regards as the Kurdish threat, and which it is using to hold the most extremist jihadist groups that the West and others have exploited in their efforts to destabilize the Syrian government, did not occasion the squeals of indignation from Western media that we now hear from them with regard to Ukraine.

    Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine as of March 1, 2022 (Source: bbc.com)

    Nor did the U.S. grab for Syria’s oil fields, and for its most fertile agricultural land, under proxy Kurdish control. And when the refugees from the U.S. wars of choice in Iraq, Syria and Libya reached the gates of Europe they were inhumanely humiliated and turned away (even allowing for a surprising measure of German generosity). Unlike whiter refugees from Ukraine into Poland and other neighbors. The oozing hypocrisy of Western self-righteousness is merely par for the course.

    These considerations therefore help us to understand Russian preparedness to risk nuclear conflict. Indeed, it is possible that for Russia there is now no going back on the path to potential Armageddon. The decision to avert catastrophe has been thrown resolutely into the Western court. But what about the U.S. and its European allies? They are not in too great a hurry for the ultimate wet dream of Russian dissolution, although sooner would likely be more gratifying than later. For the moment, the conflict is well worth it, for as long as it is only Ukrainians who pay the ultimate price. Zelensky’s greatest folly has been to recklessly offer his country and its people as ground zero for World War Three.

    Volodymyr Zelensky (Source: marca.com)

    Short-term benefits for the West include a potential fillip to Joe Biden’s otherwise steep decline in domestic popularity. War has been the eternal answer to internal instability. It is too soon to say that the Ukraine crisis will help bridge the gulf between Democrats and Republicans, but there is a chance of some measure of healing, perhaps just enough to weaken the hold of the pro-Trump wing of the Republican Party.

    This in turn could be deeply reassuring to the military-industrial complex (or, as Ray McGovern calls it, the MICIMATT—the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academic-think tank complex) whose distrust for Trump’s wavering on Putin provided fertile ground for the success of the Clinton campaign’s fabrication of the Russiagate saga.

    Although Biden followed up on a shockingly incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021—alongside signs of a final exit from Iraq and from Syria—with a multi-billion dollar increase in the military budget, he has since advocated a further increase of 8% in 2022-2023.

    Since this is close to the rate of inflation, the weapons lobby will doubtless require another 4% or so, if they are being modest (unlikely), and a sharp increase in European tension will not only boost their cause for a further budget increase but will greatly incentivize the demand for weapons for years to come.

    The bloated U.S. 17-agency Intelligence community and its underworld of private contractors will be delighted that, for the first time in a generation, their intelligence (on the Russian invasion, at least) has been perceived by many to be correct, and that, for the first time in a generation, it is not a U.S. war of choice that must be lied about. Such a glorious moment of self-righteousness will go far in the propaganda business. So long as Intelligence can manipulate and coopt corporate, plutocratic, mainstream media, the extent and depth of previous U.S. evils need never prove an obstacle to beating the drums for perpetual war. The mainstream media can be relied upon to foreshorten the narrative, pull in the context, focus on only one side, demonize and personalize. Intelligence will always help with fabrication of what counts as “real.”

    The Ukraine crisis upends the energy markets in a way that puts even broader smiles on the faces of fossil-fuel bosses. The forced closure of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia to the rest of Europe will create an involuntary European appetite for (more expensive) U.S. LNG exports.

    (Source: nationalworld.com)

    The brunt of energy price increases will be suffered more by Europe than by the United States. Combined with growing European dependence on the U.S., the impoverishment of Europe is to the U.S.’s advantage, under the scope of the Wolfowitz doctrine, and sustains the buffer between Russia and the continental U.S. Pressure on the U.S. to return to a policy of self-sufficiency in energy will reinvigorate public tolerance for fracking and drilling, for pipelines and spills and fires (if the world is going to end in any case.).

    On the downside, from a U.S. perspective, higher energy prices will boost the Russian economy and sustain its servicing of Chinese and other Asian markets, provided they can work around U.S. sanctions (they will).

    Ukraine is a test of Chinese resolve in its move toward Russia, reminding it of the economic threats to Chinese interests from U.S. sanctions in countries of the Belt and Road initiative. But this will not be sufficient to shift China from what must surely be its conclusion that the United States is irredeemably wedded to the vision of a perpetually unipolar U.S. world.

    In Europe, the crisis will help Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson escape decapitation over the embarrassment of the “Partygate” scandal. It has already enhanced President Macron’s bid to appear statesmanlike in the face of upcoming elections in April, and his ability to ward off threats from the extreme right. But mainly, the crisis will benefit Germany which, in recent years, has broken free of its punitive post-war chains not only to burnish its long-established economic primacy but to rebuild and modernize its military, and to send arms to Ukraine. The sleazy proto-fascist governments of several new East European and former Soviet Union governments will feel similarly enabled and justified.

    But all these short-term outcomes notwithstanding, nobody should discount the possibility, short of a robust peace agreement, of nuclear war. If not a nuclear war, then prepare for a protracted global recession, if not depression.

    The sorrowful-but-gritty public faces of Europe’s equivalent to MICIMATT—Europe’s financial, plutocratic, military and intelligence elites—are President of the European Union Ursula von der Leyen, and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. Along with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and French President Emmanuel Macron, it will be their faces we need to first scrutinize for a heads-up as to whether, finally, there is to be a public climb-down in the face of Russia’s nuclear checkmate. For that, indeed, is what it appears to be.

    • First published in CovertAction Magazine

    The post The Crisis in Ukraine is a Planetary Crisis Provoked by the U.S. that Threatens Nuclear War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • When Did the Ukraine War Begin?

    Viewing the Ukraine war as starting with the current Russian invasion leads to very different conclusions than if you consider that the starting point of this war was the 2014 US-orchestrated coup in Ukraine. The coup, which had elements of an authentic popular revolt, has been used by outside powers to pursue geopolitical ends.

    The conception that the war started on February 24 of this year is like viewing the “invasion” by the US and its allies of Normandy in June 1944 against the “sovereign” and “democratic” Vichy French as the start of World War II. Never mind that the Vichy government was a puppet of the Nazis; that the opportunities to negotiate had long been rejected; that the war had been raging for years; and that the only option for stopping the Nazis was militarily.

    The US imperial army

    NATO, it should be understood, is an army in the service of the US empire. Viewing it simply as an alliance of nominally sovereign entities obscures that it is commanded as a tool of US foreign policy in its stated quest of world dominion; that is, “full spectrum dominance.” The “alliance” members must fully integrate their militaries under that command along with purchasing US war equipment and offering up their own citizens as troops.

    After the implosion of the Soviet Union and the supposed end of the first cold war, instead of NATO being disbanded, the opposite occurred. There was no “peace dividend” and no honoring of the promise that NATO would not expand any further. Instead, NATO stampeded east towards the borders of the Russian Federation adding fourteen new members of former USSR republics and allies.

    Even before the 2014 coup, the US’s fateful decision in 2006 to draw Ukraine into NATO posed an existential threat to Russia. By December 2021, according to “realpolitik” international relations scholar John Mearsheimer, a US-armed Ukraine had become a de facto member of NATO, crossing a red line for Russia. Mearsheimer concludes, “the west bears primary responsibility for what is happening today.”

    Failure of peaceful negotiations

    Speaking before the UN on March 2, the Venezuelan representative identified the breach of the Minsk Protocols, with the encouragement of the US, as the precursor of the present crisis in Ukraine.

    After the 2014 coup in Ukraine, the Minsk Protocols were an attempt at a peaceful settlement through “a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front line, release of prisoners of war, constitutional reform in Ukraine granting self-government to certain areas of Donbas, and restoring control of the state border to the Ukrainian government.” Moscow, Kyiv, and the eastern separatists were all parties to the agreements.

    The Russian perception of negotiations with the western alliance in the run-up to the invasion, as reported by the New York Post, was described using insensitive terminology as “like the mute with the deaf” by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on his meeting with his British counterpart. (NOTE: the NYP, even in the updated version of the article, refers to Lavrov as the “Soviet” Foreign Minister, forgetting that the USSR hasn’t been around for over 30 years.)

    Following the latest round of “sweeping” US-imposed sanctions on Russia, their Foreign Ministry announced, “we have reached the line where the point of no return begins.” Such sanctions are a form of warfare as deadly as bombs.

    Upsides of war for the US and the downsides for everyone else

    War is a great diversion for Joe Biden, whose popularity has been slipping due to a lackluster domestic performance. The US empire has much to gain: further unifying NATO under US domination, reducing Russian economic competition in the European energy market, justifying increasing the US war budget, and facilitating sales of war material to NATO vassals.

    NATO has dumped over a trillion dollars in arms and facilities into the border countries next to Russia and continues to this day to pour lethal weapons into Ukraine. The leader of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi C14 recently bragged on YouTube (while other voices are censored): “We are being given so much weaponry not because as some say ‘the west is helping us,’ not because it is best for us. But because we perform the tasks set by the west…because we have fun, we have fun killing.”

    More than 14,000 people have been killed in the eastern Ukraine region of Donbas in warfare between ethnic Russians and Ukrainian regular military/right-wing paramilitaries in the eight years since the coup. The self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, beleaguered enclaves in the Donbas of largely ethnic Russians, seceded from Ukraine and were recognized by Russia on February 21.

    The semi-governmental (over 80% US government funded) Rand Corporation’s playbook for the US and its allies says it all: “pursue across economic, political, and military areas to stress – overextend and unbalance – Russia’s economy and armed forces and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad.”

    The conflict could have ruinous consequences for the Russian Federation, according to western sources and even some people who identify as left in Russia. As a bonus for the US, according to Juan S. González, the US National Security Council’s senior director for the Western Hemisphere, the sanctions against Russia are “by design” intended to hurt Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, all targeted by Washington for regime change. And, of course, for Ukrainians of all ethnicities there is no winning in a war.

    It is difficult to think what other options Russia has to defend itself. Perhaps there are some, but surely they are slim. It should be clear that the US has continually been the aggressor even if some do not agree with the Russian response. As Phyllis Bennis with the Institute for Policy Studies argues, the US provoked this war.

    Severing Russia from Europe

    The peaceful integration of Russia with the rest of Europe would be a great threat to the US empire. A unified or even a cordial Europe could truly herald the end of US hegemony. The long-game geopolitical goal of preventing the unification of Europe may well be the fundamental aim of US foreign policy in that continent.

    What would become of “US strategic interests” if peace were to break out in Europe, and Russia would become partners with Germany, France, and Italy? A potentially more independent Europe, including Russia, would challenge the US-dominated Atlanticist project.

    The extreme hostility that the US took to the Nord Stream 2 project, which would have piped Russian natural gas under the Baltic Sea directly to Germany, went beyond the narrow economism of favoring US liquefied natural gas (LNG) suppliers. Where Washington’s earlier efforts of imposing illegal unilateral economic sanctions on its NATO ally faltered, the current conflict will surely discourage any rational and cooperative economic association of Russia with its western neighbors.

    The severing of Russia from the rest of Europe is a tremendous victory for the US imperial project. This is especially the case, when there were recent moves in the direction of economic, cultural, and political exchange, which have now been reversed.

    Spheres of Influence and inter-imperialist rivalry

    Russia shares a 1,426-mile border with Ukraine and considers that region within its security perimeter, vital to its national security. The US, which is 5,705 miles from Ukraine, considers the world its sphere of influence. Clearly, there is a conflict of interest.

    The contemporary geopolitical dynamic has evolved from the one Lenin described in 1916 in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which was then characterized as one of inter-imperialist rivalry. This theory is not entirely adequate to understand today’s world dominated by a single superpower (with its European Union, British, and Japanese junior partners). Surely, national centers of capital continue to compete. But over-arching this competition is a militantly imposed unipolar pax Americana.

    There is just one superpower with hundreds of foreign military bases, possession of the world’s reserve currency, and control of the SWIFT worldwide payment and transaction system. Simply reducing the conflict to one of contesting capitalists obscures the context of empire.

    Further, even if one just understands the present situation as one of a clash of two imperialist camps, that does not preclude taking sides. Surely World War II was an inter-imperialist war, but that did not prevent socialists from opposing the Axis pole and supporting the allies. The US is ever more aggressively stirring up the pot, not only in Ukraine, but also Taiwan, Africa, and elsewhere.

    Asymmetry of the Forces

    The forces are asymmetrical in this contest. Russia and the US may have comparable nuclear arsenals, but Russia has no bases of any kind in North America compared to at least six nuclear and many more conventional bases for the US in Europe. The US military budget is 11.9 times the size of Russia’s, not to mention the war chests of Washington’s NATO allies. Similarly, the US economy is 12.5 times as large as Russia’s. Of the Fortune 500 top international corporations, only four are Russian compared to 122 from the US. Russia’s labor productivity is only 36% of the US’s. In terms of finance capital, the US has 11 of the world’s top 100 banks; Russia has one. Far from being a key exporter of capital, Russia is a leader in capital flight, in part owing to sanctions imposed by the US and its allies.

    As analyst Stansfield Smith concludes, Russia “plays very little part in the quintessential imperialist activity: the export of capital to the periphery and the extraction of profit from developing countries’ labor and resources.” Russia is a target of US-led imperialism; Ukraine is caught in the crossfire.

    Hypocrisy of the “international community”

    If only the outrage over the Russian invasion had some ethical grounding by what is misleadingly called the “international community,” but is in reality the US and its subalterns. Biden’s touted “rules based order” is one where the US makes the rules and the rest of the world follows its orders, in contradiction to the Charter of the UN and other recognized international law.

    From Cuba, journalist Ángel Guerra Cabrera laments: “our region witnessed flagrant US violations of those principles in Guatemala, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Grenada and Panama, the last three through direct invasions. Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua are current examples of a US policy that flatly denies its assertion, not to mention Puerto Rico.”

    International law expert Alfred de Zayas reminds us that the so-called “international community seems to have accepted egregious violations of Art. 2(4) [of the UN Charter] by the US against Cuba, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela; by NATO countries against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yugoslavia; by Israel against all its Arab neighbors, including the Palestinians and Lebanese; by Saudi Arabia against Yemen; by Azerbaijan against Nagorno Karabakh, by Turkey against Cyprus, etc.”

    How this war will end

    Regardless of how one sides – or not – in the new cold war, it is instructive to understand the context of the conflict. This is especially so when views outside the dominant US narrative, such as those of Russian outlets Sputnik and RT that hosted US intellectuals like Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, are being silenced.

    This article addressed how this war began. How it will end or even if it will end is another story. The world is spiraling into a new cold war, emanating from a region formally at peace under socialism.

    Expressing a view from the standpoint of the Global South, former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva commented: “we do not want to be anyone’s enemy. We are not interested, nor is the world, in a new cold war…which is for sure dragging the whole world into a conflict that could put humanity in danger.” If there is a lesson to be learned, it is that the end of endless war will come with end of the US imperial project that provoked this crisis.

    The post When Did the Ukraine War Begin? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Why It’s Hard for Most People in the US to Talk About War

    Hundreds of anti-war protesters are gathered at the Times Square in New York City, United States on February 26, 2022, to protest against Russian attacks on Ukraine.

    When former U.S. President George W. Bush released a statement on Ukraine — “condemning Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine,” and calling on the American people to “stand in solidarity with Ukraine and the Ukrainian people as they seek freedom and the right to choose their own future” — I thought to myself, Not now, man. You’re hurting more than you’re helping. And that’s because, as very few Americans will need reminding, the Bush administration took advantage of the public’s emotional vulnerability after the 9/11 militia attacks and preexisting racial dynamics to successfully fabricate the bogeyman of “weapons of mass destruction” and lead the United States to invade and occupy Iraq and Afghanistan in the name of fighting terror.

    As Russia is bombing Ukraine under the purported banner of “de-nazification,” so too is the U.S. still dropping bombs in the name of combating “terror.” According to the monitoring group Airwars, the United States Coalition in Iraq and Syria is responsible for at least one civilian death in Syria, AFRICOM declared a strike in Somalia, and the U.S. is alleged to have made a strike in Yemen — all this year. To underscore the devastation these airstrikes can have on local communities, The New York Times recently published a detailed report investigating this and how supposed Pentagon accountability measures are not actually functioning.

    I think of statements like Bush’s as sort of “moral lemons” — stances that might look good at first glance, but actually don’t take you anywhere if you buy them. The U.S.’s “moral lemons” are actually a key part of the Russian disinformation strategy. Platforms like RT, Ruptly, Soapbox, Redfish, Breakthrough News, and more take advantage of the lack of accountability around U.S. war crimes to pump out social-media-friendly content on the subject alongside Kremlin disinformation.

    Such disinformation includes claims that, for example, Syrian first responders are actually terrorists, or that NATO is entirely to blame for the invasion of Ukraine, or that distort legitimate concerns about the far right in Ukraine into sweeping claims aimed at justifying the military invasion. It’s remarkably successful, including with many people who are vocally against the “war on terror” and other U.S. wars and interventions — an issue area that is resource-scarce, shame and guilt-driven, and prone to burning people out. But it cannot be emphasized enough: The U.S.’s own imperialist hypocrisy is in a symbiotic relationship with Russian imperialist propaganda. They feed off each other as a means to stir up their own nationalism.

    But left-oriented commentators are not the only ones who struggle to talk about war. Many more people will struggle to talk about war in a way that doesn’t reflect their own racial biases. For example, CBS News Foreign Correspondent Charlie D’Agata was swiftly condemned and later apologized for saying: “ [Ukraine] is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully too — city, where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen.”

    Nick Bilton at Vanity Fair said in a now-deleted tweet: “This is arguably the first war we’ve seen (actually seen in real-time) take place in the age of social media,” seemingly forgetting how the Syrian struggle against authoritarianism was so well-documented online, it directly led to dramatic growth in open-source intelligence investigation as a field.

    And as Dalia Hatuqa pointed out on Twitter in response to a tweet by the AP regarding Ukraine and Gaza, biases go down to the prepositional level. “Notice the use of ‘in’ and ‘on’ here,” she says, illustrating how framing Israeli airstrikes as happening “in” Gaza as opposed to “on” Gaza makes it harder for the reader to suss out power dynamics underlying the occupation.

    Indeed, most people in the U.S. have no idea how to talk about war. And in a country that pours investments into producing sophisticated drone weapons, developing and exporting policing methods, and recruiting young people into the military — not to mention killing millions of people through our military operations — conversations about war these days are relatively few and far between, except in moments like this one, when the issue tops international headlines.

    Still, with the rise in popularity of the phrase “end endless wars,” it seems that most people in the United States say they don’t like war: An AP poll finds that 66 percent of Americans don’t believe the war in Afghanistan was worth fighting, for example, while a majority also don’t want the U.S. to take a major role in Russia’s assault on Ukraine. Despite the fact that war, weapons, and security are a foundational part of our culture and a primary financial priority (half of U.S. income taxes go directly to the Pentagon, where we collectively outspend the world on defense), people in the U.S. are currently unenthusiastic about war. So why can’t most of us talk about this central element of our society in useful terms?

    To put it simply: Not liking war is not the same as being antiwar. Where war involves a style of conflict engagement that is rooted in domination, subjugation and armament, being antiwar involves a style of conflict engagement that is rooted in cooperation, collaboration and disarmament. This means many things, on the practical and spiritual level. For example, there are literal campaigns for nonproliferation and weapons disarmament. There is also the ability of disarming someone emotionally in order to de-escalate conflict.

    But to help you imagine what antiwar work looks like on a societal level: The 2020 summer protests calling to defund and abolish police were under the politics of abolition, which itself is also antiwar, as abolition seeks to change the way we understand and engage in conflict, security and safety. Also consider the level of civil mobilization we witnessed in the lead-up to Biden’s inauguration: Almost every sector of society made a statement backing the peaceful transfer of power. The idea that an election could be stolen was so widely repugnant, it forced even “nonpolitical” organizations to take a stance.

    Today, the level of civil noncompliance with the Russian state in support of Ukrainian sovereignty is astounding: In sports, banking, media, in meeting rooms and on the streets, people are speaking up and refusing to go along with “business as usual.” I cheer loudly for noncompliance against Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian state in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, and not without emotion: Russian bombing raids decimated Ghouta, Douma, Aleppo and many other cities in Syria.

    And so, because I detest war, I have to push for the same treatment to be applied to all militarized offenses, from Yemen to Occupied Palestine to Syria to Myanmar and beyond. Call for a ceasefire and disarmament. Amplify strategic messaging on how to desert the army. Freeze assets of the wealthiest state backers. Pressure companies to drop contracts. And so on. This would mean noncompliance with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, the Assad regime and the Myanmar state, to name a few states, until disarmament.

    This would, of course, mean noncompliance with the United States. And this brings us back to the heart of the issue of why it’s difficult to talk about war in this country. One point that people who are rightly skeptical of the United States struggle with goes something like this: Yes, Russian imperialism is bad, but I am in the United States and I am only responsible for the United States. Everything that is happening is all very sad, but we have to focus on resisting our own state’s aggression, since it’s being done in our name and is our primary responsibility.

    Questions of the moral responsibility that U.S. citizens bear in regards to war, and their duty to act and in what ways, have been debated for many decades. But my instinct is that contemporary manifestations of this sentiment are influenced in no small part by the protests leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and protests continuing after the fact. Notably, on February 15, 2003, over 800 cities worldwide mobilized against the U.S. war on Iraq. It did not stop the United States. One glaring difference between this effort to stop war and other case studies is the degree to which we see the usual “neutral” or “nonpolitical” power players take a stance. I don’t believe we saw Coca-Cola cutting contracts with the U.S. military, or sports teams refusing to play the U.S. on the world stage — and it’s worth asking why. In a way, people are saying: We tried noncompliance with war before and it wasn’t enough to stop one of the most hellish campaigns wrought in our name.

    While I can understand why any person might conclude “People in the U.S. only have to worry about the imperialism done in our names,” I do not advise anyone to stay there ideologically, as it’s a position rooted often in fear and is ultimately isolationist. Consider for example, that within our own country are people who have fled wars started by other imperial states — should we tell them to check their political realities at the border? Consider also that states themselves collaborate on policing, surveillance and military campaigns. Consider that wealth and capital also operate transnationally. And consider that people from war zones and the so-called “Global South” have been writing explicitly to U.S. left commentators criticizing our navel-gazing, or as Volodymr Artiukh called it in his recent letter, “U.S.-splaining.”

    So, what should a U.S. antiwar left do today? Take advantage of this moment to educate on Putinism and Russian state propaganda. Acknowledge how the role of NATO is fitting into the conversation today, dispel myths, and offer resources to help more people learn about what it is. Promote the idea of Russians leaving or deserting the army while in battle, and amplify cases of Russian dissent. Connect with former Soviet Union organizations who share the same principles against war and work together on narrative strategy. Educate about the racial inequities of war — of how racial hierarchies play out at borders, of how Russia’s devastating years’ long military campaign in Syria was normalized. Update your geopolitical map: Russia is still bombing Syria, also has a military presence in Libya, backs Ethiopia in its war on Tigray and is the leading arms supplier to the Modi regime.

    And at the same time, we must pour more resources into antiwar work, because without accountability, reparations and reconciliation for U.S. war crimes, it will continue to be challenging for us to talk about war. I’m particularly inspired by the youth-led energy of Dissenters, which is “building local teams of young people across the country to force our elected officials and institutions to divest from war and militarism” and working collaboratively to create new antiwar ecosystems. In addition to materially supporting groups like these, let’s also agitate at our workplaces to make it easier for workers to donate our time to antiwar work and thereby build more vibrant antiwar cultures.

  • Doubling Down On Double Standards: The Ukraine Propaganda Blitz

    The American population was bombarded the way the Iraqi population was bombarded. It was a war against us, a war of lies and disinformation and omission of history. That kind of war, overwhelming and devastating, waged here in the US while the Gulf War was waged over there.’ ((Howard Zinn, ‘Power, History and Warfare’, Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, No. 8, 1991, p. 12.))

    What a strange feeling it was to know that the cruise missile shown descending towards an airport and erupting in a ball of flame was not fired by US or British forces.

    Millions of Westerners raised to admire the ultimate spectacle of high-tech, robotic power, must have quickly suppressed their awe at the shock – this was Russia’s war of aggression, not ‘ours’. This was not an approved orgy of destruction and emphatically not to be celebrated.

    Rewind to April 2017: over video footage of Trump’s cruise missiles launching at targets in Syria in response to completely unproven claims that Syria had just used chemical weapons, MSNBC anchor Brian Williams felt a song coming on:

    ‘We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two US navy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean – I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen: “I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons” – and they are beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments making what is, for them, a brief flight…’

    TV and newspaper editors feel the same way. Every time US-UK-NATO launches a war of aggression on Iraq, Libya, Syria – whoever, wherever – our TV screens and front pages fill with ‘beautiful pictures’ of missiles blazing in pure white light from ships. This is ‘Shock And Awe’ – we even imagine our victims ‘awed’ by our power.

    In 1991, the ‘white heat’ of our robotic weaponry was ‘beautiful’ because it meant that ‘we’ were so sophisticated, so civilised, so compassionate, that only Saddam’s palaces and government buildings were being ‘surgically’ removed, not human beings. This was keyhole killing. The BBC’s national treasure, David Dimbleby, basked in the glory on live TV:

    ‘Isn’t it in fact true that America, by dint of the very accuracy of the weapons we’ve seen, is the only potential world policeman?’1

    Might makes right! This seemed real to Dimbleby, as it did to many people. In fact, it was fake news. Under the 88,500 tons of bombs that followed the launch of the air campaign on January 17, 1991, and the ground attack that followed, 150,000 Iraqi troops and 50,000 civilians were killed. Just 7 per cent of the ordnance consisted of so called ‘smart bombs’.

    By contrast, the morning after Russia launched its war of aggression on Ukraine, front pages were covered, not in tech, but in the blood of wounded civilians and the rubble of wrecked civilian buildings. A BBC media review explained:

    ‘A number of front pages feature a picture of a Ukrainian woman – a teacher named Helena – with blood on her face and bandages around her head after a block of flats was hit in a Russian airstrike.

    ‘“Her blood on his hands” says the Daily Mirror; the Sun chooses the same headline.’

    ‘Our’ wars are not greeted by such headlines, nor by BBC headlines of this kind:

    ‘In pictures: Destruction and fear as war hits Ukraine’

    The fear and destruction ‘we’ cause are not ‘our’ focus.

    Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook noted:

    ‘Wow! Radical change of policy at BBC News at Ten. It excitedly reports young women – the resistance – making improvised bombs against Russia’s advance. Presumably Palestinians resisting Israel can now expect similar celebratory coverage from BBC reporters’

    A BBC video report was titled:

    ‘Ukraine conflict: The women making Molotov cocktails to defend their city’

    Hard to believe, but the text beneath read:

    ‘The BBC’s Sarah Rainsford spoke to a group of women who were making Molotov cocktails in the park.’

    For the entire morning of March 2, the BBC home page featured a Ukrainian civilian throwing a lit Molotov cocktail. The adjacent headline:

    ‘Russian paratroopers and rockets attack Kharkiv – Ukraine’

    In other words, civilians armed with homemade weapons were facing heavily-armed elite troops. Imagine the response if, in the first days of an invasion, the BBC had headlined a picture of a civilian in Baghdad or Kabul heroically resisting US-UK forces in the same way.

    Another front-page BBC article asked:

    ‘Ukraine invasion: Are Russia’s attacks war crimes?’

    The answer is ‘yes,’ of course – Russia’s attack is a textbook example of ‘the supreme crime’, the waging of a war of aggression. So, too, was the 2003 US-UK invasion and occupation of Iraq. But, of course, the idea that such an article might have appeared in the first week of that invasion is completely unthinkable.

    Generating The Propaganda Schwerpunkt

    On 27 February, the first 26 stories on the BBC’s home page were devoted to the Russian attack on Ukraine. The BBC website even typically features half a dozen stories on Ukraine at the top of its sports section.

    On 28 February, the Guardian’s website led with the conflict, followed by 20 additional links to articles about the Ukraine crisis. A similar pattern is found in all ‘mainstream’ news media.

    The inevitable result of this level of media bombardment on many people: Conflict in Ukraine is ‘our’ war – ‘I stand with Ukraine!’

    Political analyst Ben Norton commented:

    ‘Russia’s intervention in Ukraine has gotten much more coverage, and condemnation, in just 24 hours than the US-Saudi war on Yemen has gotten since it started nearly 7 years ago… US-backed Saudi bombing now is the worst since 2018’

    This is no small matter. Norton added:

    ‘An estimated 377,000 Yemenis have died in the US-Saudi war on their country, and roughly 70% of deaths were children under age 5’

    Some 15.6 million Yemenis live in extreme poverty, and 8.6 million suffer from under-nutrition. A recent United Nations report warned:

    ‘If war in Yemen continues through 2030, we estimate that 1.3 million people will die as a result.’

    Over half of Saudi Arabia’s combat aircraft used for the bombing raids on Yemen are UK-supplied. UK-made equipment includes Typhoon and Tornado aircraft, Paveway bombs, Brimstone and Stormshadow missiles, and cluster munitions. Campaign Against the Arms Trade reports:

    ‘Researchers on the grounds have discovered weapons fragments that demonstrate the use of UK-made weapons in attacks on civilian targets.’

    Despite the immensity of the catastrophe and Britain’s clear legal and moral responsibility, in 2017, the Independent reported:

    ‘More than half of British people are unaware of the “forgotten war” underway in Yemen, despite the Government’s support for a military coalition accused of killing thousands of civilians.

    ‘A YouGov poll seen exclusively by The Independent showed 49 per cent of people knew of the country’s ongoing civil war, which has killed more than 10,000 people, displaced three million more and left 14 million facing starvation.

    ‘The figure was even lower for the 18 to 24 age group, where only 37 per cent were aware of the Yemen conflict as it enters its third year of bloodshed.’

    The Independent added:

    ‘At least 75 people are estimated to be killed or injured every day in the conflict, which has pushed the country to the brink of famine as 14 million people lack a stable access to food.’

    On Twitter, Dr Robert Allan made the point that matters:

    ‘We as tax paying citizens and as a nation are directly responsible for our actions. Not the actions of others. Of course we can and should highlight crimes of nations and act appropriately and benevolently (the UK record here is horrific). 1st – us, NATO, our motives and actions.’

    We can be sure that Instagram, YouTube and Tik Tok will never be awash with the sentiment: ‘I stand with Yemen!’

    As if the whole world belongs to ‘us’, our righteous rage on Ukraine is such that we apparently forget that we are not actually under attack, not being bombed; our soldiers and civilians are not being killed. Nevertheless, RT (formerly Russia Today), Going Underground and Sputnik have been shut down on YouTube and Google as though the US and UK were under direct attack, facing an existential threat.

    Certainly, we at Media Lens welcome the idea that powerful state-corporate media should be prevented from promoting state violence. It is absurd that individuals are arrested and imprisoned for threatening or inciting violence, while journalists regularly call for massive, even genocidal, violence against whole countries with zero consequences (career advancement aside). But banning media promoting state violence means banning, not just Russian TV, but literally all US-UK broadcasters and newspapers.

    Confirming the hypocrisy, The Intercept reported:

    ‘Facebook will temporarily allow its billions of users to praise the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi military unit previously banned from being freely discussed under the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, The Intercept has learned.’

    In 2014, the Guardian’s central and eastern Europe correspondent, Shaun Walker, wrote:

    ‘The Azov, one of many volunteer brigades to fight alongside the Ukrainian army in the east of the country, has developed a reputation for fearlessness in battle.

    ‘But there is an increasing worry that while the Azov and other volunteer battalions might be Ukraine’s most potent and reliable force on the battlefield against the separatists, they also pose the most serious threat to the Ukrainian government, and perhaps even the state, when the conflict in the east is over. The Azov causes particular concern due to the far right, even neo-Nazi, leanings of many of its members.’

    The report continued:

    ‘Many of its members have links with neo-Nazi groups, and even those who laughed off the idea that they are neo-Nazis did not give the most convincing denials.’

    Perhaps the hundreds of journalists who attacked Jeremy Corbyn for questioning the removal of an allegedly anti-semitic mural – which depicted a mixture of famous historical and identifiable Jewish and non-Jewish bankers – with the single word, ‘Why?’, would care to comment?

    According to our ProQuest search, the Guardian has made no mention of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in the last week – as it most certainly would have, if Ukraine were an Official Enemy of the West. ProQuest finds a grand total of three mentions of the Azov Battalion in the entire UK national press – two in passing, with a single substantial piece in the Daily Star – in the last seven days. ‘Impressive discipline’, as Noam Chomsky likes to say.

    ‘Russia Must Be Broken’

    Britain and the US have been waging so much war, so ruthlessly, for so long, that Western journalists and commentators have lost all sense of proportion and restraint. Neil Mackay, former editor of the Sunday Herald (2015-2018), wrote in the Herald:

    ‘Russia must be broken, in the hope that by breaking the regime economically and rendering it a pariah state on the world’s stage, brave and decent Russian people will rise up and drag Putin from power.’

    If nothing else, Mackay’s comment indicated just how little impact was made by the deaths of 500,000 children under five when the US and Britain saw to it that the Iraq economy was ‘broken’ by 13 years of genocidal sanctions.

    For describing his comment as ‘obscene’, Mackay instantly blocked us on Twitter. His brutal demand reminded us of the comment made by columnist Thomas Friedman in the New York Times:

    ‘Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation… and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverising you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.’

    We can enjoy the ‘shock and awe’ of that comment, if we have no sense at all that Serbian people are real human beings capable of suffering, love, loss and death exactly as profound as our own.

    On Britain’s Channel 5, BBC stalwart Jeremy Vine told a caller, Bill, from Manchester:

    ‘Bill, Bill, the brutal reality is, if you put on a uniform for Putin and you go and fight his war, you probably deserve to die, don’t you?’

    Unlike his celebrated interviewer, Bill, clearly no fan of Putin, had retained his humanity:

    ‘Do you?! Do kids deserve to die, 18, 20 – called up, conscripted – who don’t understand it, who don’t grasp the issues?’

    Vine’s sage reply:

    ‘That’s life! That’s the way it goes!’

    We all know what would have happened to Vine if he had said anything remotely comparable of the US-UK forces that illegally invaded Iraq.

    MSNBC commentator Clint Watts observed:

    ‘Strangest thing – entire world watching a massive Russian armor formation plow towards Kyiv, we cheer on Ukraine, but we’re holding ourselves back. NATO Air Force could end this in 48 hrs. Understand handwringing about what Putin would do, but we can see what’s coming’

    The strangest thing is media commentators reflexively imagining that US-UK-NATO can lay any moral or legal claim to act as an ultra-violent World Police.

    Professor Michael McFaul of Stanford University, also serving with the media’s 101st Chairborne Division, appeared to be experiencing multiple wargasms when he tweeted:

    ‘More Stingers to Ukraine! More javelins! More drones!’

    Two hours later:

    ‘More NLAWs [anti-tank missiles], Stingers (the best ones), and Javelins for Ukraine! Now!’

    Echoing Mackay, McFaul raved (and later deleted):

    ‘There are no more “innocent” “neutral” Russians anymore. Everyone has to make a choice— support or oppose this war. The only way to end this war is if 100,000s, not thousands, protest against this senseless war. Putin can’t arrest you all!’

    Courageous words indeed from his Ivy League office. Disturbing to note that McFaul was ambassador to Russia under Barack Obama, widely considered to be a saint.

    ‘Shockingly Arrogant Meddling’ – The Missing History

    So how did we get here? State-corporate news coverage has some glaring omissions.

    In February 2014, after three months of violent, US-aided protests, much of it involving neo-Nazi anti-government militias, the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, fled Kiev for Russia. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) provide some context:

    ‘On February 6, 2014, as the anti-government protests were intensifying, an anonymous party (assumed by many to be Russia) leaked a call between Assistant Secretary of State [Victoria] Nuland and US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. The two officials discussed which opposition officials would staff a prospective new government, agreeing that Arseniy Yatsenyuk — Nuland referred to him by the nickname “Yats” — should be in charge. It was also agreed that someone “high profile” be brought in to push things along. That someone was Joe Biden.’

    The BBC reported Nuland picking the new Ukrainian leader:

    ‘I think “Yats” is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience.’

    FAIR continues:

    ‘Weeks later, on February 22, after a massacre by suspicious snipers brought tensions to a head, the Ukrainian parliament quickly removed Yanukovych from office in a constitutionally questionable maneuver. Yanukovych then fled the country, calling the overthrow a coup. On February 27, Yatsenyuk became prime minister.’

    We can read between the lines when Nuland described how the US had invested ‘over $5 billion’ to ‘ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine’.

    In a rare example of dissent in the Guardian, Ted Galen Carpenter, senior fellow for defence and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, wrote this week:

    ‘The Obama administration’s shockingly arrogant meddling in Ukraine’s internal political affairs in 2013 and 2014 to help demonstrators overthrow Ukraine’s elected, pro‐​Russia president was the single most brazen provocation, and it caused tensions to spike. Moscow immediately responded by seizing and annexing Crimea, and a new cold war was underway with a vengeance…’

    Carpenter concluded:

    ‘Washington’s attempt to make Ukraine a Nato political and military pawn (even absent the country’s formal membership in the alliance) may end up costing the Ukrainian people dearly.

    ‘History will show that Washington’s treatment of Russia in the decades following the demise of the Soviet Union was a policy blunder of epic proportions. It was entirely predictable that Nato expansion would ultimately lead to a tragic, perhaps violent, breach of relations with Moscow. Perceptive analysts warned of the likely consequences, but those warnings went unheeded. We are now paying the price for the US foreign policy establishment’s myopia and arrogance.’

    Within days of the 2014 coup, troops loyal to Russia took control of the Crimea peninsula in the south of Ukraine. As Jonathan Steele, a former Moscow correspondent for the Guardian, recently explained:

    ‘NATO’s stance over membership for Ukraine was what sparked Russia’s takeover of Crimea in 2014. Putin feared the port of Sevastopol, home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, would soon belong to the Americans.’

    The New Yorker magazine describes political scientist John Mearsheimer as ‘one of the most famous critics of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War’:

    ‘For years, Mearsheimer has argued that the U.S., in pushing to expand NATO eastward and establishing friendly relations with Ukraine, has increased the likelihood of war between nuclear-armed powers and laid the groundwork for Vladimir Putin’s aggressive position toward Ukraine. Indeed, in 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea, Mearsheimer wrote that “the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for this crisis.”’

    Mearsheimer argues that Russia views the expansion of NATO to its border with Ukraine as ‘an existential threat’:

    ‘If Ukraine becomes a pro-American liberal democracy, and a member of NATO, and a member of the E.U., the Russians will consider that categorically unacceptable. If there were no NATO expansion and no E.U. expansion, and Ukraine just became a liberal democracy and was friendly with the United States and the West more generally, it could probably get away with that.’

    Mearsheimer adds:

    ‘I think the evidence is clear that we did not think he [Putin] was an aggressor before February 22, 2014. This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him. My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument…’

    In 2014, then US Secretary of State John Kerry had the gall to proclaim of Russia’s takeover of Crimea:

    ‘You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.’

    Senior BBC correspondents somehow managed to report such remarks from Kerry and others, without making any reference to the West’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

    The pattern persists today. When Fox News recently spoke about the Russia-Ukraine crisis with former US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, one of the key perpetrators of the illegal invasion-occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, she nodded her head in solemn agreement when the presenter said:

    ‘When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.’

    The cognitive dissonance required to engage in this discussion and pass it off as serious analysis is truly remarkable.

    Noam Chomsky highlights one obvious omission in Western media coverage of Ukraine, or any other crisis involving NATO:

    ‘The question we ought to be asking ourselves is why did NATO even exist after 1990? If NATO was to stop Communism, why is it now expanding to Russia?’

    It is sobering to read the dissenting arguments above and recall Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s warning to MPs last week:

    ‘Let me be very clear – There will be no place in this party for false equivalence between the actions of Russia and the actions of Nato.’

    The Independent reported that Starmer’s warning came ‘after leading left-wingers – including key shadow cabinet members during the Jeremy Corbyn-era key, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott – were threatened with the removal of the whip if their names were not taken off a Stop the War letter that had accused the UK government of “aggressive posturing”, and said that Nato “should call a halt to its eastward expansion”’.

    Starmer had previously waxed Churchillian on Twitter:

    ‘There will be dark days ahead. But Putin will learn the same lesson as Europe’s tyrants of the last century: that the resolve of the world is harder than he imagines and the desire for liberty burns stronger than ever. The light will prevail.’

    Clearly, that liberty does not extend to elected Labour MPs criticising NATO.

    In the Guardian, George Monbiot contributed to the witch-hunt, noting ominously that comments made by John Pilger ‘seemed to echo Putin’s speech the previous night’. By way of further evidence:

    ‘The BBC reports that Pilger’s claims have been widely shared by accounts spreading Russian propaganda.’

    Remarkably, Monbiot offered no counter-arguments to ‘Pilger’s claims’, no facts, relying entirely on smear by association. This was not journalism; it was sinister, hit and run, McCarthy-style propaganda.

    Earlier, Monbiot had tweeted acerbically:

    ‘Never let @johnpilger persuade you that he has a principled objection to occupation and invasion. He appears to be fine with them, as long as the aggressor is Russia, not Israel, the US or the UK.’

    In fact, for years, Pilger reported – often secretly and at great risk – from the Soviet Union and its European satellites. A chapter of his book, ‘Heroes’, is devoted to his secret meetings with and support for Soviet dissidents (See: John Pilger, ‘Heroes’, Pan, 1987, pp.431-440). In his 1977 undercover film on Czechoslovakia, ‘A Faraway Country’, he described the country’s oppressors as ‘fascists’. He commented:

    ‘The people I interview in this film know they are taking great risks just by talking to me, but they insist on speaking out. Such is their courage and their commitment to freedom in Czechoslovakia.’

    Three days before Monbiot’s article was published in the Guardian, Pilger had tweeted of Ukraine:

    ‘The invasion of a sovereign state is lawless and wrong. A failure to understand the cynical forces that provoked the invasion of Ukraine insults the victims.’

    Pilger is one of the most respected journalists of our time precisely because he has taken a principled and consistent stand against all forms of imperialism, including Soviet imperialism, Chinese imperialism (particularly its underpinning of Pol Pot), Indonesian imperialism (its invasion of East Timor), and so on.

    Conclusion – ‘Whataboutism’ Or ‘Wearenobetterism’?

    Regardless of the history and context of what came before, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a major international crime and the consequences are hugely serious.

    Our essential point for over 20 years has been that the public is bombarded with the crimes of Official Enemies by ‘mainstream’ media, while ‘our’ crimes are ignored, or downplayed, or ‘justified’. A genuinely free and independent media would be exactly as tough and challenging on US-UK-NATO actions and policies as they are on Russian actions and policies.

    To point out this glaring double standard is not to ‘carry water for Putin’; any more than pointing out state-corporate deceptions over Iraq, Libya and Syria meant we held any kind of candle for Saddam, Gaddafi or Assad.

    As Chomsky has frequently pointed out, it is easy to condemn the crimes of Official Enemies. But it is a basic ethical principle that, first and foremost, we should hold to account those governments for which we share direct political and moral responsibility. This is why we focus so intensively on the crimes of our own government and its leading allies.

    We have condemned Putin’s war of aggression and supported demands for an immediate withdrawal. We are not remotely pro-Russian government – we revile Putin’s tyranny and state violence exactly as much as we revile the West’s tyrannical, imperial violence. We have repeatedly made clear that we oppose all war, killing and hate. Our guiding belief is that these horrors become less likely when journalism drops its double standards and challenges ‘our’ crimes in the same way it challenges ‘theirs’.

    Chomsky explained:

    ‘Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing.’

    Our adding a tiny drop of criticism to the tsunami of Western global, billion-dollar-funded, 24/7 loathing of Putin achieves nothing beyond the outcome identified by Chomsky. If we have any hope of positively impacting the world, it lies in countering the illusions and violence of the government for which we are morally accountable.

    But why speak up now, in particular? Shouldn’t we just shut up and ‘get on board’ in a time of crisis? No, because war is a time when propaganda messages are hammered home with great force: ‘We’re the Good Guys standing up for democracy.’ It is a vital time to examine and challenge these claims.

    What critics dismiss as ‘Whataboutism’ is actually ‘Wearenobetterism’. If ‘we’ are no better, or if ‘we’ are actually worse, then where does that leave ‘our’ righteous moral outrage? Can ‘compassion’ rooted in deep hypocrisy be deeply felt?

    Critics dismissing evidence of double standards as ‘whataboutery’, are promoting the view that ‘their’ crimes should be wholly condemned, but not those committed by ‘Us’ and ‘Our’ allies. The actions of Official Enemies are to be judged by a different standard than that by which we judge ourselves.

    As we pointed out via Twitter:

    Spot all the high-profile commentators who condemn Russia’s aggression against Ukraine…

    …and who remain silent about or support:

    * Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq

    * NATO’s destruction of Libya

    * Saudi-led coalition bombing of Yemen

    * Apartheid Israel’s crushing of Palestinians

    The question has to be asked: Is the impassioned public response to another media bombardment of the type described by Howard Zinn at the top of this alert a manifestation of the power of human compassion, or is it a manifestation of power?

    Are we witnessing genuine human concern, or the ability of global state-corporate interests to sell essentially the same story over and over again? The same bad guy: Milosevic, Bin Laden, Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad and Putin; the same Good Guys: US, UK, NATO and ‘our’ obedient clients; the same alleged noble cause: freedom, democracy, human rights; the same means: confrontation, violence, a flood of bombs and missiles (‘the best ones’). And the same results: control of whole countries, massively increased arms budgets, and control of natural resources.

    Ultimately, we are being asked to believe that the state-corporate system that has illegally bombed, droned, invaded, occupied and sanctioned so many countries over the last few decades – a system that responds even to the threat of human extinction from climate change with ‘Blah, blah, blah!’ – is motivated by compassion for the suffering of Ukrainian civilians. As Erich Fromm wrote:

    ‘To be naive and easily deceived is impermissible, today more than ever, when the prevailing untruths may lead to a catastrophe because they blind people to real dangers and real possibilities.’2

    1. Quoted, John Pilger, Hidden Agendas, Vintage, 1998, p.45.
    2. Fromm, The Art Of Being, Continuum, 1992, p. 19.
    The post Doubling Down On Double Standards: The Ukraine Propaganda Blitz first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Ukraine No-Fly Zone “could lead to end of human civilization”

    Canadians calling for a no-fly zone over Ukraine have lost the plot. Unless their real aim is nuclear war.

    Recently, former Conservative cabinet minister Chris Alexander, New Brunswick education minister Dominic Cardy and former Chief of the Defence Staff Rick Hillier have raised the idea of creating a “no-fly zone” (NFZ) over Ukraine. “We’re calling on all governments of the world to support creating a no fly zone over Ukraine,” declared Michael Shwec, president of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, at a rally in Montréal. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and US Congressman Adam Kinzinger have also called for NATO to adopt a NFZ.

    A NFZ over Ukraine means war with Russia. It would force the US or NATO to shoot down Russian planes.

    A war between Russia and NATO would be horrendous. Both the US and Russia have thousands of nuclear weapons. Highlighting the dangers, Paul Street wrote on Counterpunch that “any elected official calling for a No-Fly Zone over Ukraine should be forced to rescind that call or resign for advocating a policy that could lead to the end of human civilization.”

    Fortunately, Canada’s defence minister Anita Anand and White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki have rejected the idea of an NFZ. “It would essentially mean the US military would be shooting down planes, Russian planes,” said Psaki. “That is definitely escalatory, that would potentially put us in a place where we are in a military conflict with Russia. That is not something the president wants to do.”

    Even when the target is not a nuclear power, Canadian-backed NFZs have created death, destruction and escalation. After killing thousands of Iraqis in 1991 the US, UK, France and Canada imposed a NFZ over northern and southern Iraq. Over the next 12 years US and British warplanes regularly bombed Iraqi military and civilian installations to enforce the NFZs.

    On different occasions Canada sent naval vessels and air-to-air refueling aircraft to assist US airstrikes. Canadian air crew on exchange with their US counterparts also helped patrol the NFZs.

    After a September 1996 US strike to further destroy Iraq’s “air-defence network” Prime Minister Jean Chretien said the action was “necessary to avert a larger human tragedy in northern Iraq.” Five years later Chretien responded to another bombing by stating, “if the Iraqis are breaking the agreement or what is the zone of no-flying, and they don’t respect that, the Americans and the British have the duty to make sure it is respected.”

    Twelve years after enforcing the NFZs the US/UK launched a full-scale invasion of Iraq. Hundreds of thousands were killed.

    In March 2011, Washington, Paris and some other NATO countries convinced the United Nations Security Council to endorse a plan to implement a NFZ over Libya (China, Germany, Russia, Brazil and Turkey abstained on the vote). Begun under the pretext of saving civilians from Muammar Gaddafi’s terror, the real aim was regime change. The UN “no-fly zone” immediately became a license to bomb Libyan tanks, government installations and other targets in coordination with rebel attacks. With a Canadian general leading the mission, NATO also bombed Gaddafi’s compound and the houses of people close to him. The military alliance defined “effective protection” of civilians as per the UN resolution, noted Professor of North African and Middle Eastern history Hugh Roberts, as “requiring the elimination of the threat, which was Gaddafi himself for as long as he was in power (subsequently revised to ‘for as long as he is in Libya’ before finally becoming ‘for as long as he is alive’).” Thousands, probably tens of thousands, died directly or indirectly from that conflict. Libya has yet to recover and the conflict spilled south into the Sahel region of Africa.

    While they may sound benign, NFZs have generally elicited violence. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a terrible violation of international law that is likely to have deleterious consequences for years to come. But escalating the conflict through a no-fly zone will only make it worse. It could lead to a cataclysmic nuclear war.

    • On March 4 I will be participating in a panel on “Cutting through the Spin: Russia’s invasion, NATO’s provocation and Canada’s complicity”. 

    The post Ukraine No-Fly Zone “could lead to end of human civilization” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Arms Industry Sees Ukraine Conflict as an Opportunity, Not a Crisis

    A Ukrainian Military Forces serviceman stands in front of tanks of the 92nd separate mechanized brigade of Ukrainian Armed Forces, parked in their base near Klugino-Bashkirivka village, in the Kharkiv region on January 31, 2022.

    In February, a photograph of Russian President Vladimir Putin sitting hunched over a 13-foot table with French President Emmanuel Macron circulated the globe. News about their sprawling table and sumptuous seven-course dinner was reminiscent of a Lewis Carroll story. But their meeting was deadly serious. Macron arrived to discuss the escalating crisis in Ukraine and threat of war. Ultimately, their talk foundered over expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), yielding little more than the bizarre photograph.

    Yet the meeting was surreal for another reason. Over the past year, Macron, the leading European Union (EU) peace negotiator, has led an ambitious arms sales campaign, exploiting tensions to strengthen French commerce. The trade press even reported that he hoped to sell Rafale fighter jets to Ukraine, breaking into the “former bastion of Russian industry.”

    Macron is not alone. NATO contractors openly embrace the crisis in Ukraine as sound business. In January, Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes cited “tensions in Europe” as an opportunity, saying, “I fully expect we’re going to see some benefit.” Likewise, CEO Jim Taiclet of Lockheed Martin highlighted the benefits of “great power competition” in Europe to shareholders.

    On February 24, Russia invaded Ukraine, pounding cities with ordnance and dispatching troops across the border. The sonic boom of fighter jets filled the air, as civilians flooded the highways in Kyiv, attempting to flee the capital. And the stock value of arms makers soared.

    The spiraling conflict over Ukraine dramatizes the power of militarism and the influence of defense contractors. A ruthless drive for markets — intertwined with imperialism — has propelled NATO expansion, while inflaming wars from Eastern Europe to Yemen.

    Selling NATO

    The current conflict with Russia began in the wake of the Cold War. Declining military spending throttled the arms industry in the United States and other NATO countries. In 1993, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Perry convened a solemn meeting with executives. Insiders called it the “Last Supper.” In an atmosphere heavy with misapprehension, Perry informed his guests that impending blows to the U.S. military budget called for industry consolidation. A frantic wave of mergers and takeovers followed, as Lockheed, Northrop, Boeing and Raytheon acquired new muscle and smaller firms expired amid postwar scarcity.

    While domestic demand shrunk, defense contractors rushed to secure new foreign markets. In particular, they set their sights on the former Soviet bloc, regarding Eastern Europe as a new frontier for accumulation. “Lockheed began looking at Poland right after the wall came down,” veteran salesman Dick Pawlowski recalled. “There were contractors flooding through all those countries.” Arms makers became the most aggressive lobbyists for NATO expansion. The security umbrella was not simply a formidable alliance but also a tantalizing market.

    However, lobbyists faced a major obstacle. In 1990, Secretary of State James Baker had promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that if he allowed a reunited Germany to join NATO, the organization would move “not one inch eastward.” Yet lobbyists remained hopeful. The Soviet Union had since disintegrated, Cold War triumphalism prevailed, and vested interests now pushed for expansion. “Arms Makers See Bonanza In Selling NATO Expansion,” The New York Times reported in 1997. The newspaper later noted that, “Expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — first to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic and then possibly to more than a dozen other countries — would offer arms makers a new and hugely lucrative market.”

    New alliance members meant new clients. And NATO would literally require them to buy Western military equipment.

    Lobbyists poured into Washington, D.C. fêting legislators in royal style. Vice President Bruce Jackson of Lockheed became the president of the advocacy organization U.S. Committee to Expand NATO. Jackson recounted the extravagant meals that he hosted at the mansion of the Republican luminary Julie Finley, which boasted “an endless wine cellar.”

    “Educating the Senate about NATO was our chief mission,” he informed journalist Andrew Cockburn. “We’d have four or five senators over every night, and we’d drink Julie’s wine.”

    Lobby pressure was relentless. “The most interested corporations are the defense corporations, because they have a direct interest in the issue,” Romanian Ambassador Mircea Geoană observed. Bell Helicopter, Lockheed Martin, and other firms even funded Romania’s lobbying machine during its bid for NATO membership.

    Ultimately, policy makers reneged on their promise to Gorbachev, admitting Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO in 1999. During the ceremony, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright — who directly cooperated with the Jackson campaign — welcomed them with a hearty “Hallelujah.” Ominously, the intellectual architect of the Cold War, George Kennan, predicted disaster. “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion,” Kennan cautioned.

    Few listened. Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Chas Freeman described the mentality of policy makers: “The Russians are down, let’s give them another kick.” Relishing victory, Jackson was equally truculent: “‘Fuck Russia’ is a proud and long tradition in US foreign policy.” Later, he became chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which paved the way for the 2003 invasion, the biggest industry handout in recent history.

    Within two decades, 14 Central and Eastern European countries joined NATO. The organization originally existed to contain the Soviet Union, and Russian officials monitored its advance with alarm. In retrospect, postwar expansion benefited arms makers both by increasing their market and stimulating conflict with Russia.

    Targeting Ukraine

    Tensions reached a new phase in 2014 when the United States backed the removal of President Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine. Yanukovych had opposed NATO membership, and Russian officials feared his ouster would bring the country under its strategic umbrella. Rather than assuage their concerns, the Obama administration maneuvered to slip Ukraine into its sphere of influence. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland coordinated regime change with brash confidence. Nuland openly distributed cookies to protesters, and later, capped a diplomatic exchange with “fuck the EU.” At the height of the uprising, Sen. John McCain also joined demonstrators. Flanked by leaders of the fascist Svoboda Party, McCain advocated regime change, declaring that “America is with you.”

    By then, newly minted NATO members had bought nearly $17 billion in American weapons. Military installations, including six NATO command posts, ballooned across Eastern Europe. Fearing further expansion, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula and intervened in the Donbas region, fueling a ferocious and interminable war.

    NATO spokespeople argued that the crisis justified expansion. In reality, NATO expansion was a key inciter of the crisis. And the conflagration was a gift to the arms industry. In five years, major weapons exports from the United States increased 23 percent, while French exports alone registered a 72-percent leap, reaching their highest levels since the Cold War. Meanwhile, European military spending hit record heights.

    As tensions escalated, Supreme Commander Philip Breedlove of NATO wildly inflated threats, calling Russia “a long-term existential threat to the United States.” Breedlove even falsified information about Russian troop movements over the first two years of the conflict, while brainstorming tactics with colleagues to “leverage, cajole, convince or coerce the U.S. to react.” A senior fellow at the Brookings Institution concluded that he aimed to “goad Europeans into jacking up defense spending.”

    And he succeeded. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute registered a significant leap in European military spending — even though Russian spending in 2016 equaled only one quarter of the European NATO budget. That year, Breedlove resigned from his post before joining the Center for a New American Security, a hawkish think tank awash in industry funds.

    The arms race continues. After European negotiations gridlocked, Russia recognized two separatist republics in the Donbas region before invading Ukraine this February. Justifying the bloody operation, Putin wrongly accused Ukrainian authorities of genocide. Yet his focus was geopolitical. “It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries,” he said. “In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns. Its military machine is moving and, as I said, is approaching our very border.”

    In retrospect, three decades of industry lobbying has proved deadly effective. NATO engulfed most of Eastern Europe and provoked a war in Ukraine — yet another opportunity for accumulation. Alliance members have activated Article 4, mobilizing troops, contemplating retaliation and moving further toward the brink of Armageddon.

    Yet even as military budgets rise, European arms makers — like their American counterparts — have required foreign markets to overcome fiscal restraints and production costs. They need clients to finance their own military buildup: foreign wars to fund domestic defense.

    Yemen Burning

    Arms makers found the perfect sales opportunity in Yemen. In 2011, a popular revolution toppled Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had monopolized power for two decades. His crony, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, became president the next year after easily winning the election: He was the only candidate. Thwarted by elite intrigue, another uprising ejected Mansour Hadi in 2015.

    That year, Prince Salman became king of Saudi Arabia, but power concentrated into the hands of his son, Mohammed bin Salman, who feared that the uprising threatened to snatch Yemen from Saudi Arabia’s sphere of influence.

    Months later, a Saudi-led coalition invaded, leaving a massive trail of carnage. “There was no plan,” a U.S. intelligence official emphasized. “They just bombed anything and everything that looked like it might be a target.”

    The war immediately attracted NATO contractors, which backed the aggressors. They exploit the conflict to sustain industrial capacity, fund weapons development and achieve economies of scale. In essence, the Saudi-led coalition subsidizes the NATO military buildup, while the West inflames the war in Yemen.

    Western statesmen pursue sales with perverse enthusiasm. In May 2017, Donald Trump visited Saudi Arabia for his first trip abroad as president, in order to flesh out the details of a $110 billion arms bundle. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, arrived beforehand to discuss the package. When Saudi officials complained about the price of a radar system, Kushner immediately called the CEO of Lockheed Martin to ask for a discount. The following year, Mohammed bin Salman visited company headquarters during a whirlwind tour of the United States. Defense contractors, Hollywood moguls and even Oprah Winfrey welcomed the young prince.

    Yet the Americans were not alone. The Saudi-led coalition is also the largest arms market for France and other NATO members. And as the French Ministry of the Armed Forces explains, exports are “necessary for the preservation and development of the French defense technological and industrial base.” In other words, NATO members such as France export war in order to retain their capacity to wage it.

    President Macron denies that the coalition — an imposing alliance that includes Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Sudan and Senegal — uses French weapons. But the statistics are suggestive. Between 2015 and 2019, France awarded €14 billion in arms export licenses to Saudi Arabia and €20 billion in licenses to the United Arab Emirates. CEO Stéphane Mayer of Nexter Systems praised the performance of Leclerc tanks in Yemen, boasting that they “have highly impressed the military leaders of the region.” In short, while Macron denies that the coalition wields French hardware in Yemen, local industrialists cite their use as a selling point. Indeed, Amnesty International reports that his administration has systematically lied about its export policy. Privately, officials have compiled a “very precise list of French materiél deployed in the context of the conflict, including ammunition.”

    Recently, Macron became one of the first heads of state to meet Mohammed bin Salman following the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Like Trump’s trip, Macron’s diplomatic junket was a sales mission. Eventually, Macron clinched a deal with the United Arab Emirates for 80 Rafale fighters. The CEO of Dassault Aviation called the contract “the most important ever obtained by French military aerospace,” guaranteeing six years of work for a pillar of its industrial base.

    French policy is typical of NATO involvement in Yemen. While denouncing the war, every Western producer has outfitted those carrying it out. Spanish authorities massage official documents to conceal the export of lethal hardware. Great Britain has repeatedly violated its own arms embargo. And the United States has not respected export freezes with any consistency.

    Even NATO countries in Eastern Europe exploit the war. While these alliance members absorb Western arms, they dump some of their old Soviet hardware into the Middle East. Between 2012 and July 2016 Eastern Europe awarded at least €1.2 billion in military equipment to the region.

    Ironically, a leading Eastern European arms exporter is Ukraine. While the West rushes to arm Kyiv, its ruling class has sold weapons on the black market. A parliamentary inquiry concluded that between 1992 and 1998 alone, Ukraine lost a staggering $32 billion in military assets, as oligarchs pillaged their own army. Over the past three decades, they have outfitted Iraq, the Taliban and extremist groups across the Middle East. Even former President Leonid Kuchma, who has led peace talks in the Donbas region, illegally sold weapons while in office. More recently, French authorities investigated Dmytro Peregudov, the former director of the state defense conglomerate, for pocketing $24 million in sales commissions. Peregudov resided in a château with rolling wine fields, while managing the extensive properties that he acquired after his years in public service.

    The Warlords

    Kuchma and Peregudov are hardly exceptional. Corruption is endemic in an industry that relies on the proverbial revolving door. The revolving door is not simply a metaphor but an institution, converting private profit into public policy. Its perpetual motion signifies the social reproduction of an elite that resides at the commanding heights of a global military-industrial complex. Leading power brokers ranging from the Mitterrands and Chiracs in France, to the Thatchers and Blairs in Britain, and the Gonzálezes and Bourbons in Spain have personally profited from the arms trade.

    In the United States, the industry employs around 700 lobbyists. Nearly three-fourths previously worked for the federal government — the highest percentage for any industry. The lobby spent $108 million in 2020 alone, and its ranks continue to swell. Over the past 30 years, about 530 congressional staffers on military-related committees left office for defense contractors. Industry veterans dominate the Biden administration, including Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin from Raytheon.

    The revolving door reinforces the class composition of the state, while undermining its moral legitimacy. As an elite rotates office, members insulate policymaking from democratic input, taint the government with corruption and mistake corporate profit with national interest. By 2005, 80 percent of army generals with three stars or more retired to arms makers despite existing regulations. (The National Defense Authorization Act prohibits top officers from lobbying the government for two years after leaving office or leveraging personal contacts to secure contracts. But compliance is notoriously poor.) More recently, the U.S. Navy initiated investigations against dozens of officers for corrupt ties to the defense contractor Leonard Francis, who clinched contracts with massive bribes, lavish meals and sex parties.

    Steeped in this corrosive culture, NATO intellectuals now openly talk about the prospect of “infinite war.” Gen. Mike Holmes insists that it is “not losing. It’s staying in the game and getting a new plan and keeping pursuing your objectives.” Yet those immersed in its brutal reality surely disagree. The United Nations reports that at least 14,000 people have died in the Russo-Ukrainian War since 2014, and over 377,000 have perished in Yemen.

    In truth, the doctrine of infinite war is not so much a strategy as it is a confession — acknowledging the violent metabolism of a system that requires conflict. As a self-selecting elite propounds NATO expansion, military buildup and imperialism, we must embrace what the warlords most fear: the threat of peace.

    The author would like to thank Sarah Priscilla Lee of the Learning Sciences Program at Northwestern University for reviewing this article.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Our Fight for Disability Justice Must Also Confront War and Militarism

    This picture taken on May 13, 2013, shows 89-year-old Zhang Shijie, a Chinese man who says he was forced to perform hard labor in Japan during World War II, speaking to the media before he and other protesters hand over their demands to the Japan side outside the Japan embassy in Beijing.

    Militarism has rarely been part of disability rights organizations’ policy priorities or discussions. Instead, most of the mainstream disability community’s advocacy efforts related to the military have centered around veteran rights, having disability inclusion in military service, or disabled refugee rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act. While these priorities may benefit individual rights, they do not tackle deeper issues of militarized violence against marginalized communities, how militarism divests community resources, and the broader cycle of injustice and inequity in which militarism and colonialism are active participants.

    Within disability rights organizations, the presence of board members and corporate partners who have contributed to and profited from militarism can act as an obstacle to having intersectional discussions and actions around militarism and ableism. A central example is Mitsubishi, a group of Japanese multinational companies that also has headquarters in the U.S., which frequently appears as a sponsor or partners with various disability organizations in the U.S. In 1991, the Mitsubishi Electric America Foundation (MEAF) was established with a $15 million endowment from Mitsubishi Electric Corporation and the Mitsubishi Electric U.S. group companies and provided grants to multiple disability programs in the U.S. For example, from 2002 to 2013, and 2016 to 2021, MEAF awarded total $1,433,000 grant to American Association of People with Disabilities for its summer internship program and alumni network. However, Mitsubishi is well-known for its engagement in militarism in collaboration with Japanese colonialism and imperialism: It has contributed to militarized violence across the globe.

    Imperial Japan’s War Economy Was Dependent on Forced Labor

    In the early Meiji era, beginning in 1868, the Japanese government initiated Western-style industrialization and instituted industrial enterprises under its ownership. By the 1880s, these factories and shipyards were sold to emerging entrepreneurs who later established zaibatsu. Zaibatsu were giant family-owned trusts, dominating Japan from the industrialization period in the late 19th century until the end of World War II. The four largest were Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Sumitomo and Yasuda. Private big businesses played critical roles in war production in all major Allied and Axis countries (with the exception of the Soviet Union) during World War II. Mitsubishi was one of the top munitions manufacturers and had 200 companies in various sectors including electric power, shipbuilding, mining, marine engineering, dockyards, finance, aircrafts, military vehicles, chemicals, glass, and more. They constructed mines and factories overseas in places such as Korea, China, Russia and the Philippines, and subjugated the agricultural production and distribution in Southeast Asian and Pacific Islands under Japanese colonial rule.

    Similar to Nazi Germany’s economy, Imperial Japan’s political economy was militarized and dependent zaibatsu that relied on the use of forced labor. Coercive labor recruitment and exploitation in Japan’s war industry took a number of different forms in multiple geographical locations. The term “coerced mobilization” is helpful in understanding how this took place. The Foundation for Victims of Forced Mobilization by Imperial Japan defines coerced mobilization as “a mobilization by physical restraint and intimidation as well as mental restraint and conciliation by Japanization education, persuasion, arbitrary decision, employment fraud, and legal enforcement.” From 1938 to 1945 it is estimated around 6.5 million Koreans were forced to work for private companies in Japan under the National Mobilization Law, on top of 60,668 as civilian laborers in the military and 209,279 as military combatants. Other forced laborers included Filipinx, Americans, Chinese, and more. In her book, Unjust Enrichment, Linda Goetz Holmes shared a list of 50 Japanese firms that are known to have used 12,000 American prisoners of war between 1942 and 1945, where the primary users were Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Nippon Steel. Six prisoner-of-war camps in Japan were linked to the Mitsubishi conglomerate during the war, and they held 2,041 prisoners, more than 1,000 of whom were American. In the final years of World War II, around 40,000 Chinese men were forced to work for the Japanese companies, and more than roughly 8,000 lives were lost due to maltreatment and abuse. For the Mitsubishi mining company alone, 3,765 Chinese people were enslaved, according to a survey by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

    Policing, imprisonment and punishment were routinely used to control, exploit and dehumanize the forced laborers. This not only created debilitation and disablement among the laborers, it also distinguished between “desirable” and “non-desirable” laborers, and disposed of those who were deemed no longer profitable after gaining disabilities. In these hazardous work environments, without access to adequate food, rest, water and medical care, and being subject to harsh physical punishments by the armed employees or military personnel, forced laborers developed psychological and physical disabilities over the time. According to a report by Foundation for Victims of Forced Mobilization by Imperial Japan in 2019, the laborers in coal mines suffered severe pneumoconiosis and other respiratory diseases, and even after returning to their home countries, the symptoms persisted and eventually led to their deaths. Escaping was nearly impossible as the worksites and living spaces were strictly controlled by the military. Barriers such as barbed wire — or water, like the case of Hashima Island where several Korean laborers tried escaping by swimming and holding onto wood panels but ended up drowning — prevented escape.

    While disabled people were not primarily targeted by the mobilization process, under colonial rule, there was little or no infrastructure to support them, and they became subject to forced institutionalization, sterilization under the Eugenic Protection Law and exploitative labor. Most of the survivors faced lifelong disabilities and shared their experiences upon returning home, which ignited international push toward remembrance and reparations.

    Requests for reparations and sincere apologies have risen since the 1990s, spearheaded by Korean survivors, their families and their allies. Unlike the cases with Chinese and American survivors, Mitsubishi did not make apologies or compensations to the Korean victims and their families. In November 2018, the Supreme Court of South Korea ordered Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to compensate 100-150 million won (between $89,000 and $133,000) to each of five women. Mitsubishi appealed against the decision; the appeal was dismissed in 2021.

    Meanwhile, Mitsubishi has not fully acknowledged its history of militarized coercion, exploitation and violence. In 2016, the company made an apology to Chinese victims of forced labor and agreed to pay about $15,000 to each person. However, Kang Jian, an attorney for the Chinese victims, pointed out that the company avoided mentioning critical facts in the agreement in relation to the forced labor such as the use of torture, and said she would “continue to defend the truth and the rights of those who have been hurt.” In 2015, Hashima Island, called “Hell Island” by Korean forced laborers, was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site representing the Meiji Industrial Revolution. The Korean government, civic groups and allies in Japan condemned the decision, saying, “designating such a place as a World Heritage site violates the dignity of the survivors of forced labor as well as the spirit and principles of the UNESCO Convention.” In 2018, UNESCO included a requirement to state the full history of the site, including forced labor for public education, and reiterated this in 2021 as the Japanese government failed to follow the provision.

    After World War II, Mitsubishi was disbanded and broken up into smaller enterprises whose stocks were sold to the public. For several years, these companies were banned from collaborating with each other as well as using the name and trademarks. However, as the Korean War broke out and the U.S. Army needed an industrial supply base in Japan, such restrictions were lifted in 1952. Mitsubishi also did not experience serious loss of the wartime managerial executives, who were not purged or returned from the expulsion. From the 1950s to 1960s, Mitsubishi contributed to the economic growth of Japan, transforming into an enormous keiretsu, a massive publicly traded corporation with many divisions operating separately but connectedly, including steel, shipbuilding, mining, oil and natural gas. Mitsubishi and Japan both benefited from the war in neighboring Korea and military industrialization as a result of it.

    Mitsubishi continued to evolve, expanding its fields to aviation, space development, surveillance, data communication and defense manufacturing. However, such proliferation was obstructed due to a legal restriction in 1967, which was enhanced in 1976 (the Three Arms Exports Ban), following domestic and international criticism of Japan’s profiting from the Vietnam War by selling military supplies to the U.S. and South Vietnam. This banned the country from exporting arms to three groups: communist bloc countries, countries subject to arms exports embargo under the United Nations Security Council’s resolutions, and countries that were involved or likely to be involved in international conflicts. On April 1, 2014, Japan’s Abe administration ended the ban based on the policy guidelines of its National Security Strategy shared in December 2013 and resumed the arms export.

    According to the Arms Industry Database by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Mitsubishi’s revenue in 2020 was $5.34 billion, which includes sales from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries ($4.42 billion) and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation ($920 million). In recent years, Mitsubishi initiated partnerships with several U.S.-based defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing to advance their technology and equipment, and has invested in military-related research institutions like the RAND Corporation.

    Militarism Is Antithetical to Disability Justice

    Mitsubishi is one of many examples showing how the entanglement of capitalism and militarism perpetuate and exacerbate ableist politics of desirability, profitability, disposability and productivity. This conjunction is deadly and pervasive, continuously evolving, expanding and diversifying. Anti-militarism work may take different shapes and forms depending on the context, needs and values of each community, but fundamentally, it aims to restore dignity of people and planet, eradicate the society’s reliance on militarism, and prevent and end any wars — goals that are interlinked with the principles of disability justice. The U.S., especially, has a long history of inflicting militarized violence against disparate marginalized communities and also on Indigenous peoples’ stolen lands. Meanwhile, disability rights, with its legalistic approach, may provide access to resources and status to some communities but face limitations in radically transforming the societal conditions that have created and contributed to such violence.

    Abolishing militarism is an essential part of disability futures. Beyond publishing statements, there should be more in-depth conversations centering those who are directly impacted by the issues and addressing the intersections of militarism, capitalism and ableism. I urge disability rights and justice organizations to support local and national anti-militarism grassroots efforts, learn from the work and critically reflect to integrate into the organizing. Anti-militarism movements should also be accessible and build disabled leadership. Making such connections should go beyond the critique of such systems: It should require examining how and with whom we may work to abolish the systems that contain, harm and disappear communities in the long term.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • New Cold War Conflict over Ukraine

    Potential hotspots between Russia and Ukraine, 2021. Panther Media GmbH / Alamy Stock Vector

    There is an adage that the first casualty in a war is the truth. The US and NATO allege that Putin’s Russia is a malevolent aggressor against neighboring Ukraine.  They assert that the US and NATO are simply defending the rights of an oppressed nation. Meanwhile, what the sycophantic legacy news media convey to the public is a gross distortion of the reality in this current Ukraine crisis. Some relevant facts which Western government spokespersons and the media almost invariably falsify or omit altogether.

    1. NATO. In exchange for needed Soviet consent to the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990, the US and NATO promised that NATO would not expand into former Warsaw Pact countries in central Europe. Said promise proved worthless as every US President, beginning with Bill Clinton in 1999, has violated that commitment even to the point that NATO now includes three former Soviet Republics and has plans to bring in two more (Ukraine and Georgia). Background:

    1. NATO was formed (in 1949) at the behest of the US and Britain as an anti-Soviet military alliance to fight Communism in postwar Europe, both: to prevent its spread to capitalist countries where Communist Parties were winning some elections, and (it was hoped) to undermine and rollback Communism in countries where Communist Parties held state power.  Assertions that NATO was a defensive alliance against the threat of a Soviet invasion of western Europe is pure fantasy; the USSR had been devastated by the War and very much wanted peaceful coexistence with the capitalist West.  In fact, Stalin and his successors always prioritized Soviet security over the spread of Communism.  With the disintegration of the USSR (in 1991) and the embrace of capitalism by Russia and all other former Warsaw-Pact member countries, NATO’s principal raison d’être ceased.
    1. With crony-capitalist President Boris Yeltsin in control of the dysfunctional corruption-ridden Russian state following the collapse of the USSR, both Yeltsin and the US wanted to align Russia with the capitalist West.  However, the US could not resist the temptation to expand the military component of its Western Empire so as to increase US hegemony over Europe as well as create new profit opportunities for US and west European transnational capital (including military contractors)  In so doing, the West disrespected and alienated Russia.
    1. As an increasingly antagonized Russia refused to comply with US and NATO dictates, the US placed intermediate-range missile batteries (planned from 2008, deployed in 2018) in new-NATO-member countries (Poland and Romania). Thus, the US increased the threat to Russian national security, apparently hoping to intimidate a weakened Russia into being more submissive. Said deployment also violated the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces [INF] Treaty.
    1. More recently, the US and NATO have conducted offensive military exercises in new-NATO-member states along Russia’s border, simulating preparations for an attack on Russia. Russian military exercises and deployments, as well as its diplomatic demands, are very much in response to threatening NATO actions.

    The US, NATO, and the legacy news media portray NATO as an instrument for maintaining peace and democracy in Europe. However, while NATO seeks to expand to the very borders of Russia, Russia is explicitly excluded from admission to membership. In fact, NATO is (as always) a key military force for Western imperialism; and that now includes actions to confine Russia so as to prevent it from having influence anywhere beyond its own borders.

    2. New NATO members. Most countries in central and eastern Europe have historically been antagonistic toward Russia. During much of the interwar period; Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states were ruled by usually-autocratic right-wing regimes which permitted their territories to serve as bases for infiltration (by France, Britain, and other anti-Soviet states) of assassins, saboteurs, spies, and other covert wrecking operatives into the Soviet Union. Moreover, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Baltic-state governments joined Nazi Germany in the War against the USSR. Further, former Warsaw-Pact countries are poor by comparison with western Europe. By joining the EU and NATO while claiming a need for protection against a purported Russian threat, they have been able to obtain considerable economic aid and benefits. As for the alleged Russian threat, it should be noted that the USSR consistently respected the postwar independence and territorial integrity of bordering capitalist Finland (which remained neutral in the Cold War). Moreover, despite the post-Soviet Baltic states often mistreating their ethnic Russian minorities, Russia has consistently respected their independence and territorial integrity.

    3. Russia. Most US and NATO-ally political leaders (including nearly every member of Congress from both parties) “justify” their hostility toward Putin’s Russia by claiming that it is an autocratic regime seeking to recreate the Russian Empire. In fact, the Russian government, like its US and other NATO counterparts, is a multi-party electoral regime. Is there repression?  There is; but there is also repression and political prisoners in the US (Leonard Peltier, Ricardo Palmera, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Edward Poindexter, Veronza Bowers, and several others). Is there some election rigging? There is; but that is true also of the US (electoral college, partisan gerrymanders, felon disfranchisement and other voter suppression practices directed especially at racial minority voters). Is the Putin regime semi-autocratic?  It is; but so are NATO allies Poland and Hungary, while NATO ally Turkey is much worse. Moreover, however deficient Russia is as a liberal democracy, Ukraine is far worse. Further, the US has no hesitation in supporting absolutely autocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia. Do capitalist oligarchs exploit workers and national resources in Russia? They do, but that is so also in the US and its NATO allies. Self-righteous US and NATO disparagement of Russia as an “anti-democratic” outlier is the height of hypocrisy. Does Russia seek to maintain a sphere of influence (in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and a few other allies)? It does; but Russia’s foreign policy is primarily defensive, and its imperialism pales to insignificance in comparison with that of the US-led West. We do not have to approve of the Putin regime in Russia; but those who brand Russia as the aggressor, based upon nothing more than its commonplace deficiencies as a liberal “democracy”, are making a pretext to “justify” their stance as apologists for Western imperialism.

    4. Ukraine’s government. The US (thru NED and CIA) has funded (since the 1990s) pro-Western anti-Russian groups in Ukraine (and also in Belarus) in hopes of bringing it into the EU and NATO. This has emboldened chauvinistic ethnic-Ukrainian nationalists and fueled intense ethnic and partisan conflict within the ethnically diverse Ukrainian populace. Further, the US incited and supported the illegal 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych (in response to his decision to reject an EU economic proposal which would have aligned Ukraine with the West rather than maintain a more beneficial neutrality between Russia and the West). In fact, US State Department Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland and other US government leaders (including Senator John McCain) attended anti-Yanukovych rallies in Kyiv and urged them to overthrow their elected government.  Ukrainian factions which spearheaded the violence in this coup d’etat consisted of anti-Russia neo-Nazi factions including the Right Sector paramilitary organization and the Svoboda Party .  Moreover, while the current regime outlaws the Communist Party and even criminalizes the use of Communist symbols, it embraces and erects monuments to wartime Nazi collaborators including Stepan Bandera whose OUN [Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists] participated in the mass murder of Ukrainian Jews. The coup regime subsequently incorporated neo-Nazi paramilitaries into its national armed forces (Azov Battalion) for use against rebel forces in the Donbas. The US and NATO now have a repressive racist client regime in Kyiv which is a pawn in their new cold war against Russia.

    • Note regarding the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).  NED was created by Congress in 1983 and receives virtually all of its funding from the US government.  While NED’s purported mission is the promotion of “democracy”, this is construed to mean: (1) support for opposition groups (media and civil society organizations) in countries with governments (including popularly elected governments) which oppose US foreign policy and the abuses perpetrated by transnational capital, and (2) provision of its funding and other assistance only to organizations which are pro-Western and supportive of private-enterprise capitalism.  NED, which like the CIA operates throughout the world, has funded partisan media and “civil society” organizations in scores of countries (Ukraine, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Syria among them).  It does not engage in democratic advocacy in autocratic US allies (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar).  Meanwhile, the US government offers no more than lip-service concern for the victims of repression by Western-backed client regimes.

    5. New cold war. With the need for a unified international response to: impending climate catastrophe, the Covid-19 pandemic, the new nuclear arms race, and other existential issues; one would hope that the US would work cooperatively with other countries (including: Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, DPRK, and so forth) to deal effectively with these threats. Why then this US determination to treat these other countries as enemies rather than as partners?  Said new cold war (along with another against China) provides “justification” for hugely excessive US military expenditures (providing huge profits to capitalist military contractors as well as to fossil fuel companies which provide huge amounts of product for US military operations). Moreover, any country which refuses to comply with Western imperial dictates sets an unpalatable example which undermines US world-domination and the neoliberal world order (which enables transnational capital to reap most of its profits). New cold wars (and false-pretense regime-change wars against vulnerable countries [e.g. Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011] which refuse to submit to Western imperial dictates) also provide opportunities for careerist foreign policy officials (in the State and Defense Departments, CIA, NSA, et cetera) and for major-party politicians (funded by capitalist interest groups) to bolster their credentials as hawkish champions of purported US “national security interests” (which are defined to include preserving the US position as the dominant superpower).

    6. Strife within Ukraine. Upon seizing state power, the US-backed coup regime in Ukraine acted to suppress language rights for the 29% of the population for whom Russian was their native language. The ousted President Yanukovych had been a proponent of making Russian the second state language of Ukraine (as it had been prior to the breakup of the USSR). Immediately after the coup, the new regime acted to repeal a 2012 Yanukovych-era law which gave language rights to all locally-sizable minorities (not only Russian-speakers) in regions with such minority populations. That repeal action provoked popular protests in southern and eastern Ukraine. The US-backed regime has subsequently enacted new legislation: substantially reducing the language rights of minorities, and also suppressing the use of Russian in education and the media. In 2016, the regime even imposed restrictions on the importation of Russian-language books (which, until then, had constituted 60% of such imports). Consequences of the anti-Russian and anti-minority policies: the 2014 secession of the (officially autonomist) Crimea region which soon after sought and obtained reintegration into Russia, and the current Ukrainian civil war between the central government and the breakaway Donbas regions. The US fuels this civil conflict: by denouncing Russia and the Donbas rebels, and by arming the central government as it seeks to crush said Donbas rebellion thru brute force.  The US portrays the Donbas rebels as separatist pawns of Russia; but, in fact, although the hostility of the anti-Russian regime in Kyiv has undoubtedly produced much separatist sentiment in the Donbas breakaway regions; their longstanding demand, consistently endorsed by Russia (until losing patience in 2022), was for autonomy within a unified Ukraine. Moreover, the Kyiv regime agreed to such autonomy in the 2014 and 2015 Minsk accords (which the US supported in a unanimous UN Security Council vote in 2015); but, yielding to pressure from anti-Russian chauvinists, Kyiv (with US acquiescence) has persistently refused to implement it.

    7. Crimea. The US and NATO use a double standard to justify their hostility toward Russia by branding the secession of Crimea from Ukraine and its subsequent re-unification with Russia, in defiance of the will of the US-supported client-regime, as a Russian aggression in violation of international law. However, the US exhibited a complete disregard for such purported international law when it intervened (1999) in Serbia with armed force to separate Kosovo (with the approval of its ethnic Albanian majority) from Serbia in defiance of the will of the Serbian government. Hence, a hypocritical double standard.  The West also evades the relevant fact that Crimea had a long history as part of Russia. In fact, sovereignty over Crimea had been transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954 by a decision (of disputed legality) by Soviet leader Khrushchev without the consent, and contrary to the wishes, of Crimea’s predominantly ethnic Russian population; and most of the Crimean population welcomed their 2014 reunification with Russia.

    Ω.  Conclusion.  If the US and NATO had really cared about what was best for the people of Ukraine, they would have urged its government to make peace with Russia, Crimea, and the Donbas rebels: by accepting the secessionist will of the Crimeans, by implementing the promised autonomy for the breakaway Donbas regions, by committing to respect the language and other human rights of its minorities, by suppressing its neo-Nazi and allied hate groups, and by rejecting NATO membership and other anti-Russian policies.  In fact, the Western powers have cynically used Ukraine as a pawn in their new cold war against Russia.  In their arrogance they have pushed nuclear-armed Russia to the point that it has concluded that it must respond with military force.  The West’s new cold wars may be a boon for powerful sectors of transnational capital (especially military contractors and fossil fuel producers); but it is detrimental for the peoples of Ukraine, Russia, and much of the EU.

    The post New Cold War Conflict over Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Youth Are Challenging the US War Machine as Tensions Escalate With Russia

    People participate in a protest in Grand Central Station in the borough of Manhattan against war in Ukraine on February 19, 2022, in New York City.

    “What we cannot do is rally our compassion on the basis of whether or not we think the U.S. war machine can drop some bombs and make it better. Making things better is not what the war machine is for,” says Kelly Hayes. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Hayes talks with organizer Yaira Matos from the youth antiwar group We Are Dissenters about militarism, international solidarity, and why the U.S. war machine cannot be made good.

    Music credit: Son Monarcas and David Celeste

    TRANSCRIPT

    Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

    Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about things you should know if you want to change the world. We talk a lot on this show about organizing and what solidarity demands of us. Today, we are going to talk about militarism and antiwar organizing, because when we talk about the potential for U.S. military intervention in any scenario, no matter how disturbing or tragic, we need to remember the nature and history of the apparatus being discussed. Right now, warmongering pundits and U.S. officials are rhetorically trying to position the U.S. military as a potential force for good, arguing that Putin must be stopped. But in the face of this rhetoric, we cannot forget the nightmarish havoc caused by U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Haiti, and beyond. History has shown us again and again that the United States military cannot be made good – it is structurally invested in domination and extraction, and its interventions inevitably result in devastation. That is the context we need to consider when we hear about potential U.S. military interventions anywhere in the world. And to elaborate on that context a bit, we are going to talk with Yaira Matos from the antiwar group We Are Dissenters, an organization led by young people who are challenging U.S. militarism and educating the public about how these systems really work.

    Yaira Matos: Dissenters is a youth-led, anti-militarism organization that is leading a generation of young people to reclaim our resources from the war industry, and reinvest in life-giving services and in solidarity with people across the world that are fighting for different liberation struggles. So we’re really grounding ourselves in the belief that these really bloated military budgets that we see every single year, every single new administration is time and time again reinforcing investing in death and violence and the development of war machinery, incarceration tactics, and policing, deportation, immigration apparatus. All of these things that fall in line with militarization are things that we know time and time again the government chooses to invest in.

    Dissenters is really saying that as young people, we are kind of taking charge of the right to be able to have ownership of the resources that we create, of the communities that we are a part of, and re-steward those resources towards community and technologies that support solidarity and life-giving and these radical acts of unity as opposed to continual separation and war.

    KH: When we talk about U.S. militarism, we need to start from a place of understanding that preventing people from dying and suffering is never the issue for the United States government, nor is it the result, no matter what we are being told. As Noam Chomsky recently told Truthout, “For many years, there has been a striking correlation between U.S. military aid and torture, massacre, and other severe human rights abuses.” Growing up, Yaira became politicized as she became more curious about the dynamics, details and consequences of imperial warfare.

    YM: I think as a very young child, I was very engrossed in the images around war. I remember being very young and watching the news and seeing these images of, for example, after 9/11, these bombs being dropped and these very catastrophic events that were placed elsewhere, it was very clear to me that these things were not happening here, that these things were happening in other parts of the world that I didn’t necessarily have direct access to. I always had a lot of curiosity about what does this mean? Who are the people that are being impacted by this? What does it mean when we see images of children starving or of people with mutilated limbs? Why is this not the story that’s being told? Why is it just kind of a flash on the screen that the real impacts of war are affecting people in their day-to-day lives?

    So around the time that I was in high school, I believe — yeah, I was about to graduate high school — was when the government was really ramping up its assessment of Syria. That was really the first time that I had… I think I spent years developing a sense of consciousness around political violence and the complexities of war and what it meant as somebody living in the United States, that my government had an outsized hand in the affairs of other countries. So that was really the first time that I was able to actually participate in an antiwar action outside of my state senator’s office.

    I was mostly joined by people from the Peace Action group in the state that I live in and Veterans for Peace, these kinds of organizations that have existed for a really long time. They really kind of nurtured and supported me in developing a stronger assessment of the situation and kind of grounding me in these ideas around anti-militarism and antiwar and exchanging stories with me about their trajectories, in terms of going from being people that at one point were usually enlisted in the military to then people that were actively protesting against any further invasions.

    So they really kind of took me under their wing and wanted to support me, largely because there was such a dearth of young people involved in this type of organizing for a lot of different reasons. We’re in school. We are having to work multiple jobs or having to have our focus elsewhere. And I’ve found particularly with international organizing, there’s a huge confidence issue around people feeling like, “Well, I can’t take a stance unless I know every single thing there is to know about politics and every single thing there is to know about the country that is in the news right now, or the war or the issue that’s happening.”

    So that was when I realized that there weren’t a lot of peers for me to engage with in the antiwar movement. It was a lot of people that were veterans of the Vietnam war and some people that had done organizing against the original invasion of Afghanistan. As I continued to kind of explore what was out there with organizing, I decided to study international relations in school, and what my education was teaching me really was how to be a war hawk and how to analyze the world from a perspective of strictly geopolitics or strictly the United States is the bastion of freedom and liberty and democracy, and the only person that can decide how a country should operate, and what’s within their best interest?

    So I very quickly realized I’m in the wrong discipline. This isn’t what I want to learn. This isn’t what’s going to help me realize a vision for a better future. So I started to explore other questions and other realms that were looking more at the people.

    So as the years have gone on, it’s become very evident to me that what Martin Luther King [Jr.] had said about poverty, racism and militarization being the three societal ills really reigns true and continues to be the areas that I believe and I would argue most of us in Dissenters believe really underlies an analysis of what we want to see in the future. So joining Dissenters, for me, was really about being able to be around peers, being able to be around other young people of color that were doing this work as well, who historically our families may have been victim to occupation or have been displaced from their countries because of militarization, domestically or externally.

    So being able to be in a space that is oriented towards looking at militarism as a set of social relations and not just as these acts of war really reinforces that the solution is going to be people to people engagement. It’s going to be solidarity. It’s going to be learning. It’s going to be connecting. It’s not going to be about a paternalistic stance of I’m going to sit down and write a policy, because I went to American University, and so that means that I de facto know exactly how to handle foreign policy.

    We’re saying this isn’t even a question of using the tools that we’ve been provided. It’s about totally orienting ourselves towards a toolkit that’s looking at how do we honor the collective struggles in different countries? How do we learn about what is going on? We’re doing that work in the International Solidarity Committee. We’re really thinking about how do we build these relationships so that we are learning, so that we are amplifying, and so that ultimately we are aligning ourselves and supporting movements for liberation that are also seeking to shift resources to people and really make sure that everybody has access to a safe and long dignified life with opportunities for work for communities and lives free of violence, and ultimately free of neocolonial efforts and imperialism.

    KH: The idea of militarism as a set of social relations is an important one. In 1970, almost ten years after Eisenhower warned of the creeping threat of the military-industrial complex, there were approximately 22,000 prime contractors doing business with the U.S. Department of Defense. By 2008, there were over 47,000 prime contractors and over a hundred thousand subcontractors, forming what journalist Noah Shachtman has called a “massive conglomerate touching nearly every sector of society.” While nearly a third of Pentagon contracts go to five major weapons contractors, those expenditures amount to $4.4 trillion of a $14.1 trillion budget. As Nick Turse wrote in The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives:

    The Pentagon payroll is a veritable who’s who of the top companies in the world: IBM; Time-Warner; Ford and General Motors; Microsoft; NBC and its parent company, General Electric; Hilton and Marriott; Columbia TriStar Films and its parent company, Sony; Pfizer; Sara Lee; Procter & Gamble; M&M Mars and Hershey; Nestlé; ESPN and its parent company, Walt Disney; Bank of America; Johnson & Johnson; among many other big-name firms…. As this list suggests, Pentagon spending is reaching into areas of American life previously neglected: entertainment, popular consumer brands, sports. This penetration translates into a remarkable variety of forms of interaction with the public.

    Militarism is not a self-contained phenomenon. It envelops and flows through nearly everything.

    YM: There’s no real way in our day-to-day lives for us not to participate in what is happening … So a lot of us are implicated in militarism as being de facto residents of states that have the power to wage war. And so, militarism is…. It’s important to look at it, not just as the state is deciding to take up arms, to send in troops, or to drop a bomb, it’s also a set of ideas, policies and institutions that can be critiqued. It’s a series of social relations that are intimately entangled with and make up our identities, our value systems, our everyday practices, and our modes of interaction.

    And so, what you’re really understanding is that when you are taking part in anti-militarist organizing, you’re also vying for a world that hasn’t really been made yet, that doesn’t really exist yet. And so, you’re having to ask these questions and think critically about how do we try not to reproduce the same violences that we’re exporting or that we are enacting domestically or abroad, how do we try to shift away from any of the dominant narratives that privilege other forms of knowledge and heads of state as those who are the only decisive actors for peace-making and for sharing that communities abroad are taken care of or are safe from harm, and how we relate to each other and who gets to put our collective messages forth is an experience that we haven’t had a lot of say in.

    So, throughout any of the invasions that the United States has taken part in, we’ve seen people try to wage war in the names of women’s rights, or human rights, or these concepts that I think many of us feel connected to because we do value our fellow humans and we don’t want to see people being hurt or killed for, be it their gender, their race, their class, or any of these factors.

    But what we don’t always know how to do is really actually connect with one another and be able to lend these messages of support and solidarity and say, “We see you. We hear you. We know you’re experiencing this and we want to support you.” And so, really, it’s so important to circle back to this idea that we are responsible for one another. We’re trying to build a collaborative and connected world in which there isn’t a need to have these governments doing the vying for us. We’re able to speak directly to one another and aid one another in the various liberation movements that we’re all struggling with.

    KH: Given the larger discussion that’s happening, I also asked Jaira about how We Are Dissenters is approaching the situation with Russia and Ukraine. (And I do want to note for our listeners that this response was recorded prior to Russia’s recent attacks on Ukraine.)

    YM: So I think it would be good to defer to a partner organization that we work with often, the Black Alliance for Peace. They have an incredibly incisive and sharp analysis on international relations across the board. And I would say that we align pretty closely with some of their messaging and ideas around this. And, ultimately, what it comes down to is, we often see these vies for war and for intervention arise when the United States is in a position to need… I don’t know how other way to phrase it other than an ego boost, almost. Whenever there is a low approval rating for a president, whenever things are taking a turn in the country, suddenly, we see threats arise from China, from Russia, from Latin America and the Caribbean. And we start to receive this propaganda and this messaging that is attempting to demonstrate that there is a power out there that is at risk of unseating the United States of America as the dominant enforcer of the world order.

    And so, really, with these calls for intervention, with these reinforcements of NATO, with conversations around what is the threat that Russia poses to us and why do we need to defend our allies, it again reinforces this idea that the United States is the only arbitrator of peace and of democracy.

    And we’ve seen repeatedly that it is rarely in good faith. We’ve seen repeatedly that the United States oftentimes is already positioned to be prepared for war. And that war is, in fact, the first option, not the second, third. It’s the first thing that we’re prepared to do. And so, with Ukraine and Russia, this is a situation that has been in the making for several years now, through small and large instances. And the United States has certainly taken a position and, at this point, has very decidedly stated that any kind of affront to Ukraine is an affront to America. And so, there is no separation there. We should be seeing them as an extension of us, which, again, reinforces the colonial-thinking, and then is ultimately engaging in this proxy war and saying, “We must defend our people, our right, our resources, our democracy, our freedom.” And there hasn’t been deep engagement from many U.S. senators, say, I know that there’s been two that have opined on it, and both have stated very similar things in terms of we must protect American democracy.

    And so, with a situation like this, again, it just reveals that this isn’t a process that citizens of the United States or of any country get to meaningfully engage with. Things are being done in our name around ideological lines that are ultimately causing further division and just reinforcing that our resources are going to sending troops and continuing to send weapons. And the weapons trade is a big target of Dissenters because we’re aware of the Big Five who, at this point, are taking billions of dollars in federal contracts to produce weapons. And they have existed for years just profiting off of war, profiting off of these instances of inflamed tension.

    And so, just to name-drop the big five are Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Raytheon. And so, these companies, like I said, they profit off of the federal government inciting these instances of fear and of propaganda. And when the troops get deployed, it’s these people who are the first to support and to mobilize our resources in service of empire. And so, really, Dissenters is primarily interested in naming that people are profiting from any type of invasion that may happen, from naming that these instances of inciting fear and terror in our populace are used to further trap us into this… And I just want to also shout out your podcast episode on security and how much that also ties very much into Dissenters’ mission to reinvest in real safety, because we know that the United States saying, “Russia’s going to come here and they’re going to take over the world and hurt us first,” is also a vie for the desire for safety. And people will cling onto that and will just decide Russia’s the enemy and we must run with this narrative.

    And that really deeply impacts our ability to actually connect to each other, and to see each other, and to actually build solidarity with one another, if we are believing that the threat is outside of us, and it’s coming in the way of a country that hasn’t actually ever really explicitly made a clear threat, if anything, has attempted to negotiate with the United States on several occasions. But because we can manufacture these stories and these ideas about the imminent threat that a country like Russia poses to us, it puts us in a position of being fearful, of being dependent on this government to use strong arms and this very paternalistic stance towards the rest of the world that says, “You will not be safe unless we have boots on the ground. And unless the Ukrainian people are free and safe from intimidation from Russia.”

    KH: It is especially interesting to me that Biden’s willingness to mount a military response in Ukraine is being held up as a measure of his willingness or ability to defend democracy. As we have discussed on this show, the electoral system in the U.S. is being stolen out from under the Democrats in real time. Democrats have proven unable to mount any meaningful defense of voting rights in the United States. They are in the process of losing their own country, in a manner that may not be legally revocable. But this situation with Russia and Ukraine is suddenly the measure of Biden’s relationship with democracy.

    The United States has a long history of overthrowing democratically elected governments, so obviously, nothing our leaders say about defending democracy in other countries can be taken seriously. But as Yaira mentioned, when things are not looking good for a president, war is always a viable PR option. If we are all focused on the fact that Biden has more fire power than any other man on Earth, and that he may throw bombs around in the name of democracy, we are not talking about how Biden can’t seem to stop the right-wing overthrow of the electoral system in the U.S. Generally speaking, the idea that the United States has any regard for the sanctity of democracy is so ahistorical as to be offensive. Historically, the U.S. has supported the overthrow of any government, whether it was democratically elected or dictatorial, for the sake of U.S. interests.

    Fundamentally, the idea that the United States government can ever be trusted as an arbiter or enforcer of international justice must be rejected on its face. At any given time, people are being killed, tortured and forced to flee their homes due to U.S. policy. U.S. foreign policy does not prioritize preventing those outcomes; rather, U.S. political and military decisions are almost always structured in pursuit of maintaining U.S. hegemony rather than opposing injustice or human suffering, so when our government talks about those things, we can always be assured that there’s something else at stake. We are going to hear many calls for war with Russia and China in the coming days, months and years, and those calls will not be about improving or saving the lives of the people impacted by Russia or China’s policies or actions. They will be about arm wrestling for terrain, power and resources, and resisting the formation of a new global pecking order, where the U.S. is not on top anymore.

    YM: We have the House Foreign Affairs Committee that gets to decide, and interrogate, and investigate events that happen abroad that primarily endanger U.S. interests. And so, it’s also important to name that. That, right now, foreign policy in international relations is predicated on the interests of the United States. And, again, in recent years, there’s been a turn. Where, in the past, the theatrics were much more about human rights, women’s rights.

    All of these issues around international development were brought into the scheme and you still see it today in what we write into our budgets; we’ll say we’re sending all of this money to Peru to support in developing infrastructure for water. And written into that is that the people that are going to be building this infrastructure for water are going to be profiting off of the development of this dam that’s going to, likely, displace an Indigenous community, and they’re going to take their time really building a culture of repression. And if they need to, they’re going to wipe out the local mayor that would like to retain control over this water. And so, there’s such a fine print that, over the years, has begun to surface.

    And, now, we’re seeing the government be pretty straightforward in terms of saying, “Hey. Actually, we have interests in Chile,” and “No, we’re not particularly interested in Chile,” rewriting their constitution. And if they do rewrite their constitution, we’re going to start planting stories in the media that is going to try to discredit this effort, or is going to be critical of this effort, or we’re going to start seeing stories arise about organizers in Chile doing things that the media can paint easily as against American values, or leadership is incompetent and they’re about to destroy their whole country because they’re taking on this feat.

    And so, it’s really important to name that the media, the narrative, this all feeds into this theatrical presentation that is given every time where we become prepared to incite some type of militarist action. It’s always going to be about, who is our enemy? What are we fighting for? What’s the historical precedent for whatever is happening? Why do we need to fear this? And then, who stands to benefit? And in the past, these things were somewhat obscured.

    But now, I think we’re moving into a place where it’s easier to read between the lines and to say like, “Hey, the United States has intervened in so many different countries. Domestic politics has replaced leaders, has killed social movement leaders, has pretty tacitly named that they will not accept a strong leftist leader anywhere because they don’t want to see capitalism be on its knees.” And so, it’s not conspiracy. It’s not this desire to plant ideas that aren’t real in people’s heads. It’s [that] these are the priorities of the United States. Economic prosperity, economic growth. And all of these things are at odds with a healthy and strong environment and with healthy and strong communities.

    And so, Dissenters is also very organized around reclaiming the right to relationship with land, with the earth, with the environment. And naming that militarism, again, it’s not simply about these acts of very outright warfare, it’s also about displacing Indigenous people from their land. It’s also migration and the fact that these things tend to happen because people’s domestic countries become inhospitable through these acts of aggression and deliberate attempts to remake states.

    And so, all of these efforts that get done, and when militarization is ramping up, are all things that then we do experience the blowback firsthand, and we respond in kind by incarcerating people, by building these detention camps at the border, by enacting stronger borders again, and continuing to try to use fear to keep us as divided as possible.

    KH: When our solidarity is constrained by prison fences or borders, the system is working exactly as intended. If our understanding of structural violence is not global, we cannot begin to fathom what we are up against. Internationalism is seriously lacking in our movements, and this both hurts our analysis and hinders our potential. What we cannot do is rally our compassion on the basis of whether or not we think the U.S. war machine can drop some bombs and make it better. Making things better is not what the war machine is for. We cannot afford to forget that, even for a moment.

    YM: So one thing I want to mention is that my entry point, or I should say my understanding of a lot of militarization has come from Latin America and largely the Spanish-speaking Caribbean or… Yeah, my understanding of Latin American politics in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean as well. And so throughout the years, we’ve seen that be a site of total and deliberate destabilization, environmental destruction, political interference by the way of shipping policy, predatory loans with the IMF and the World Bank, and taking all sorts of extreme ends to try to prevent the spread of communism. Latin America and the Caribbean has also been implicated in these kinds of experiences around continuing the genocide of Indigenous populations, finding ways to extinguish and erase Afro descendant populations, and really go through this whole whitewashing process that ultimately is catered to remaining dependent on the United States as a source of legitimacy, politically, as well as a financial incentive.

    So this region really has been such a great example of the different tools and tactics that the United States employs and has also been a great example of this question around nationalism and the role of nation states in how we undergo internationalist organizing, because what we’re seeing is, the way that the story of one campesino in Guatemala eventually becomes the story of somebody that is trying to cross the border into the United States and gets apprehended by ICE, and then gets let go and is allowed to work as they have this ongoing case where they can’t always articulate the structural experiences of violence that led them to choose to migrate. And then as they are working, they obviously don’t have the same labor rights and protections. They can be here for years contributing meaningfully to our society, and all it takes is one small act that gets read, or rather, is criminalized for them to then enter the deportation machine, which can result in a number of different interruptions for them individually, within their community, within their family. It’s all the way around devastating.

    When you look at the singular, the sole immigrant as a case study, what you’re really looking at is the ability to erase the structural oppression, the ability to erase the context that really matters in terms of how we are choosing to advocate for this person. So when you see the immigrant rights movement make a lot of these concessions around who gets to stay and who gets to go, like, “At this point, we’ve decided there’s a good immigrant, there’s a bad immigrant. If you break the law, then yeah, you should be deported. If you don’t then you get to stay, but you’re still not going to be the right person for us to try to give citizenship to because citizenship is this thing that is given to a certain type of person.” The hoops are never ending, every step of the process existing in the United States, forces you to have to divide yourself and to break apart your story in a way to simply get through the next hoop and continue to have this lapse of memory around what you actually experienced.

    KH: As I told Yaira, I am a child of the ’80s, and this country’s relationship with war has transformed over the course of my lifetime. When it announces itself loudly, U.S. warfare is steeped in sanctimony, and dissent is punishable by ruin, but more often, in this day and age, war is background noise.

    YM: When you were talking about your experience with the 80s, the first thing that came up for me of course, was Reagan. In Latin America at the time, there was El Salvador, there was Nicaragua and these places were experiencing extreme collective trauma in that there were these civil wars happening in which, again, Indigenous communities were being subjected to genocidal acts of warfare, where labor unions and teachers unions and farmers were being massacred or being executed en masse for largely being the people organizing in resistance to state violence. And the United States was arming these repressive governments. The United States was fully backing and offering propaganda to assure that nobody was going to actually be looking at what was happening.

    So understanding that within the context of even the drug wars and how that has also been turned into a war and a site of militarization that Latin America and the Caribbean has been subjected to, all of this, it’s background noise because we’ve been able to obfuscate it with these questions around morality, with these questions around citizenship and legality, and these little technicalities that the state can use to, again, further divide and further criminalize anybody who dare question the right of the nation state to have its ability to protect itself. So this kind of protective stance that the United States takes and then that other countries take, and that are taught to take because the United States also trains this exchange program that we see with Israeli police and police in the United States being taught the same tactics. We also saw this with Haiti and Columbia, and then we saw Haiti’s President assassinated by several Columbia nationals. So these exchanges that are happening have very real implications and they’re all happening in ways that are not legible to us because we’re seeing it through a very different lens. We’re seeing it as stopping the drug war or as a really wholesome display of international learning and teaching that police are getting to learn these tools and these tricks from the best government of the most democratic place in the world.

    So a big cornerstone around Dissenters as well is that we are in solidarity with people and movements. So we’re not looking to legitimize the ability of a government to decide what is a cause worth fighting for and what’s not. Because every time we see this, they’re not advocating for people, they’re not advocating for the provision of resources to the most oppressed. So we’re interested really in making sure that when we align ourselves with different movements, they’re choosing their own form of liberatory resistance, and we are really showing that, putting that in the forefront, listening and learning and saying, not necessarily, “This is wholesale what we endorse and we think this is the right way to go about things.”

    It’s more about saying, in this context, in this part of the world, people that are not being adequately represented or even people that are targeted by the state are in need of amplification and are in need of solidarity so that they know that their movements are supported, are seen and are going to be brought to the forefront by people in the United States who do have a whole lot of sway over what happens in many countries, be it through these kind of vanity projects. There’s a lot of countries that simply do not want to have to be in the news because they’re violating human rights. They don’t want an Amnesty International report written on them. So knowing that there are U.S. eyes on them oftentimes does prevent human rights atrocities from happening.

    There’s a real way that we, as people, that are in the heart of empire, do and can influence how people are talking and thinking about things, and that’s a key practice that Dissenters is looking to really start to grow into with our storytelling committee as well. Really looking at how do we bring these things out from the shadow? And when the noise starts to get really loud or when things start to die out in today’s media cycle, and as well as the social media cycle, how do we continue to build bonds and build relationships so that, for example, our friends in Sudan who have been organizing, for quite a while now, a rebellion against their government, so that when that’s no longer a social media hashtag, when that’s no longer on the news, they still have avenues and channels to get tapped into communities here that are interested in making sure that their message is heard and that their cause is heard, and that they are not just the going to fade off into the background because it’s not trendy anymore.

    It’s really important that with the limited attention and time that we all have, when we’re thinking about what’s happening in different parts of the world, it’s not about simply spreading a hashtag and simply engaging in these kinds of acts that do spread awareness, but it’s also, how do we actually bear responsibility as well or how do we share responsibility for making sure that people caught in the crosshairs of different violent forces have space to speak, to share, to collaborate and to ultimately say, “This is what we need of you in order to feel supported and connected in this time of struggle”?

    KH: So what can you, our listeners, do about all of this? Fortunately, anti-militarism takes many shapes, and there is a place for all of us within the scope of this work. We often need to start by listening, learning and appreciating that we don’t know what we don’t know.

    YM: Anti-imperialist organizing and activism really relies on the ability of activists and organizers to listen to what is being said by people creating and launching these liberatory movements. We are not encouraging people to not be critical or to not have their own ideas and opinions about how people are going about these things, but the importance is in understanding the limitations of our scope as people living in the United States or wherever listeners are living. It’s really important to acknowledge that liberation struggle cannot fully take form in the United States or in the west because as I mentioned earlier, we are so deeply embedded within the different forms of relations that take place for militarization to be possible that we are constantly having to be on the offense in a way that really limits our ability to understand what openings exist for liberatory struggle.

    And so understanding humbly that what we read here, what we see here, these images, these articles, the podcasts, everyone’s favorite podcast, “The Daily,” you must be very critical of everything you are reading about foreign affairs because it is always in service of U.S. empire. You must listen as if things are in service of U.S. empire and ask yourself “who is this conflict benefiting? Who is this coverage benefiting?” Even if it’s a super sad story, if it’s a story that is really appealing to human rights or women’s rights or children’s rights, time and time again, we see that when you peak behind the veil, what we find is that this is often a ploy to demonize, to propagandize, or to otherwise frame another nation and their people as the enemy to us.

    And so being able to assess media and understand that we are being taught that we have the answers, that we are correct, that our think tanks, that our data is the correct way to view the world, to see the world, to assess the world really helps in beginning to unravel the imperialist mindset that we’ve all been given — that we are kind of this untouchable country that has all of the answers in terms of how to mitigate conflict or how to create peace and create peace in the world.

    And then engaging in political education — that’s a big value of Dissenters as well. In order to advance this vision, we must be educated about the histories, the context, and the current events that are happening because of these things. And so the more that you are able to listen to the people on the front lines of these experiences and really understand what’s at risk for them, what they’re saying and why they believe that this struggle that they’re mounting is the correct response, the more that we’re able to pivot our attention away from these very kind of shallow acts of solidarity in order to really say, I will put your interests alongside mine. I will understand that our legacies are deeply connected to each other. And so what happens to you in Honduras or in Puerto Rico or in Sudan or in Nigeria deeply affects what happens to me and really taking ownership of one another in that way and imagining solidarity to be something that is built and practiced and modified over time.

    So it’s not going to be signing one petition and moving on with your life. It’s a continual sense of engagement with this question or this topic. And I also want to name that a huge reason why a lot of people shy away from internationalist organizing is because there’s so much going on. I hear that all the time. But there’s so much going on. There’s so many different things going on. How am I supposed to be attentive to all of them and care about all of them? And the answer to that is always that the call is made and you respond. So it’s not about sitting down at home and reading every single book on every single country in the world that is going through some type of event, some type of uprising, or is at risk of being invaded by the United States. It’s heeding the call of those who say right now what we really need is to be heard. Right now what we really need is to spread the messages about what’s happening in our country. Can you spread that message? Can you listen to us?

    And this isn’t to say don’t be proactive in thinking about what’s happening in other parts of the world, but it’s important that when you’re doing anti-imperialist organizing, you aren’t just becoming a talking head. It’s incredibly important that you remain connected to a practice and principles that keep you connected to other people so that there is a sense of accountability there. And we cannot be accountable to every single human being in every single country across the world. It’s important to honor that if you’re going to deeply engage in supporting a liberation struggle, you’re going to do that from a place of understanding that there is an alliance being forged, and that means trust, right?

    We talked about the social relations aspect of this. We want to get away from this idea that the United States is the arbitrator of knowledge and can just give out all of these policy ideas. We’re not here to inform. We’re not here to say, “I know exactly how we’re going to fix this issue or in the United States what we do is we go to our legislator’s office and we do a direct action.” That’s not the direction we want to take things in. We want to meet people where they’re at and really see their struggle as a part of this larger interconnected struggle and then work from there. What resources and tools do you have to offer and what resources are they in need of and what asks do they have for us?

    And so Dissenters is always offering trainings on Anti-Militarism 101 in order to really ground yourself in what this means and in who we’re targeting, who are the people that are really behind these efforts? We have student training programs on college campuses and we have this new International Solidarity Committee that is going to be kind of leading the work of doing this relationship building and ensuring that what we’re doing is in alignment with our values, our vision, and ultimately with the direction of our partners.

    KH: As Yaira said, we cannot follow or track everything. But I believe that breakthroughs happen when our solidarity is not constrained or deflected by borders or the zoning of disposal and sacrifice. To build a new future, we must have politics that are internationalist and anti-imperialist. We have been conditioned to think of ourselves in isolation because our collective power is a threat to the people who are killing us. As my friend Brendan McQuade emphasized in a recent episode, “We’re social creatures and as such, we’re collaborative, we’re not alone.” I think that’s a good thought to hold onto right now: We are not alone. We have been divided from each other in countless ways, but so many of the barriers between us can be undone. Our solidarity can scale prison walls and build coalitions across borders – and sometimes, the work of reaching for one another changes everything.

    I want to thank Yaira Matos for talking with me about We Are Dissenters, militarism and anti-imperialist organizing. If you want to learn more about We Are Dissenters you can hit up their website at wearedissenters.org or follow them on Twitter or Instagram at @wearedissenters. You can also check out the show notes of this episode on our website at truthout.org for more information about how you can get involved and support the cause. I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

    Show Notes

    • You can sign We Are Dissenters’ petition demanding the city of Chicago cancels its contract with Boeing as a step towards divesting from the war industry. (You can learn more about that campaign here or search the hashtag #BoeingArmsGenocide.)
    • We Are Dissenters is also running a campaign called #DivestFromDeath aimed at getting U.S. colleges to sever ties with the military industrial complex. You can learn more about that campaign here. If you would like to start a #DivestFromDeath campaign, you can email Dissenters at info@wearedissenters.org.
    • We Are Dissenters has also been working to get cops off campus, in addition to running #RecruitersOffCampus campaigns. If you want to get involved, you can email them at info@wearedissenters.org.
    • You can follow and subscribe to We Are Dissenters’ Youtube channel for webinars and political education.
    • You can follow We Are Dissenters on Instagram and Twitter for updates on their organizing, actions and workshops at @wearedissenters.

    Further Reading

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The US and NATO Cross a Line

    One major nuclear war catastrophically interrupts the progress of human civilization and ushers in God only knows how many decades of dystopian madness. Pray that NATO’s march on Moscow doesn’t make Napoleon look like a genius and Hitler a brilliant military strategist. Bonaparte’s retreat during the winter of 1812? A walk in the park compared to a nuclear winter. The Battle of Stalingrad? A minor skirmish compared to the destruction attendant upon a major nuclear conflagration.

    At a moment when wise leaders would spare no effort to move heaven and earth to find and implement new ways to encourage all of us to work together to solve the several potentially existential threats — all of them of mankind’s own making — to the uninterrupted continuity and progress of human civilization, instead we find ourselves on the brink of a nuclear war.

    Donald Trump has declared that Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine strategy is a stroke of “genius.” Apropos Trump, one might observe that even a stopped clock is right twice a day but to do so would give the former US president too much credit and misrepresent both changing political and geopolitical realities and Russia’s options as Putin no doubt understands them.

    Wise statesmen have an ability to understand their opponents’ perspectives. American politicians have typically failed to understand Putin or appreciate the gravity of his concerns, which he has often sought to make quite clear. Post-WWII American leaders have too often seen themselves as masters of the geopolitical universe despite the ignominious defeat of U.S. forces in Vietnam and more recent debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and wars in Libya and Yemen that have further destabilized Southwest Asia and Africa and flooded much of Europe and even Australia with refugees (never mind the refugee crisis on our own southern border). Putin addressed those issues and more quite frankly in his speech at the United Nations on Sept. 28, 2015 asking, “Do you realize what you have done?”

    In his August 30, 2017 article for War on the Rocks, Prof. Ian Johnson noted, “For President Vladimir Putin, the war remains personal. Putin’s older brother, whom he never met, died during the Siege of Leningrad. His father was maimed in the war. Much of his extended family died in the conflict. Putin himself has repeatedly attended the wreath-laying ceremony at Stalingrad’s central monument to the battle at Mamaev Kurgan. In 2014, he also said he favored a referendum to consider renaming the city Stalingrad. He has also used the historical memory of the war to shore up his own base of power and to justify his foreign policy worldview.”

    On the face of it, given Russia’s history of horrendously destructive military invasions from the West, why would anyone be surprised that Putin or any other Russian leader would take a very dim view of what, to them, looks very much like a US-organized NATO march on Moscow? What should Putin make of assurances by then-US Secretary of State James Baker and other Western leaders that, in return for Russian agreement to the reunification of Germany, NATO would advance “not one inch eastward,” as documented by Mr. Seppo Neimi on December 6, 2021?

    Does anyone suppose that Russian leaders have forgotten the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, brought about by the presence of Soviet missiles in what US leaders considered their “back yard,” which brought the US and the USSR to the brink of nuclear war? Would any Russian leader sit silently and acquiesce to NATO expansion into Ukraine and, presumably, US missiles in Russia’s “front yard”?

    Ukraine is a fight that Russia did not want. The US forced the issue, inciting a coup d’etat in Ukraine in 2014. Thank Victoria Nuland for that, reported Gary Leupp on Jan. 25, 2021: “Nuland is perhaps best known for her pithy ejaculation: ‘Fuck the EU!’ in a telephone call with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in 2014. In that year, while Nuland built support for the coup in Kiev (Feb. 18 to 21), she boasted openly that the U.S. had invested $5 billion in supporting ‘the Ukrainian people’s European aspirations.’  (This referred to the support of some Ukrainians for the violent overthrow of the democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, on the basis of his alleged pro-Russian policies and his opposition to European Union affiliation under the conditions the EU was then offering.) To state the matter honestly: the U.S. spent $5 billion to install a government in Kiev that would request NATO membership (ostensibly to protect it from always aggressive, always expanding Russia) and bind it forever to the U.S. military-industrial complex and ‘Free World.’”

    On the heels the coup d’etat Nuland orchestrated in Ukraine, her former boss, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at a political fundraiser/campaign event in California, compared Putin, who lost family members in the Nazi invasion of his homeland, to Adolph Hitler. How about that for pouring salt in a wound?

    Both Mikhail Gorbachev and President Putin had previously proposed or inquired about Russian membership in NATO. Moreover, after the terror attacks of 9/11/2001, Putin was the first foreign leader to call then-President George W. Bush. On Nov. 15, 2001 Putin visited the site of the terrorist attack that destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Putin followed up by directly aiding “the U.S.-led military operation in Afghanistan — where the Taliban had shielded Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who was behind the 9/11 attacks — by opening Russian airspace for U.S. humanitarian flights, sharing intelligence, and acquiescing to U.S. deployments in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, which Russia still considers part of its sphere of influence.”

    The closer one looks at the situation, the more difficult it becomes to avoid the realization that the US government and NATO are aggressors in relations with Russia, that the fight over Ukraine is one Official Washington’s first family of war has picked and is determined to pursue even at the real risk of nuclear war.  It is a strategy some say reeks of deception and desperation. Israel, enjoying lavish and slavish US support and always anxious to expand its yet to be officially declared borders, would benefit should a withdrawal of Russian forces from Syria become necessary because a hot war in Ukraine strained Russian military capabilities.

    The post The US and NATO Cross a Line first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Push to Expand NATO Could Cost Countless Lives. It’s Time to Stop It.

    NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, European Council President Charles Michel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen hold a news conference at NATO headquarters, after their meeting on Russia's military intervention in Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, in Brussels, Belgium.

    Nearly 60 years ago, Bob Dylan recorded “With God on Our Side.” You probably haven’t heard it on the radio in a very long time, if ever, but right now you could listen to it as his most evergreen of topical songs:

    I’ve learned to hate the Russians
    All through my whole life
    If another war comes
    It’s them we must fight
    To hate them and fear them
    To run and to hide
    And accept it all bravely
    With God on my side

    In recent days, media coverage of a possible summit between Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin has taken on almost wistful qualities, as though the horsemen of the apocalypse are already out of the barn. Fatalism is easy for the laptop warriors and blow-dried studio pundits who keep insisting on the need to get tough with “the Russians,” by which they mean the Russian government. Actual people who suffer and die in war, meanwhile, easily become faraway abstractions.

    “And you never ask questions / When God’s on your side.”

    During the last six decades, the religiosity of U.S. militarism has faded into a more generalized set of assumptions — shared, in the current crisis, across traditional political spectrums. Ignorance about NATO’s history feeds into the good vs. evil bromides that are too easy to ingest and internalize.

    On Capitol Hill, it’s hard to find a single member of Congress willing to call NATO what it has long been: an alliance for war (Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya) with virtually nothing to do with “defense” other than the defense of vast weapons sales and, at times, even fantasies of regime change in Russia.

    The reverence and adulation gushing from the Capitol and corporate media (including NPR and PBS) toward NATO and its U.S. leadership are wonders of thinly veiled jingoism. About other societies, reviled ones especially, this would be deemed “propaganda.” Here the supposed truisms are laundered and flat-ironed as common sense.

    Glimmers of inconvenient truth have flickered only rarely in mainstream U.S. media outlets, while a bit more likely in Europe.

    “Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized — NATO enlargement — there has been no American diplomacy at all,” Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Financial Times as this week began. “Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”

    As Sachs noted, “Russia has adamantly opposed NATO expansion towards the east for 30 years, first under Boris Yeltsin and now Putin. Neither the U.S. nor Russia wants the other’s military on their doorstep. Pledging “no NATO expansion” is not appeasement. It does not cede Ukrainian territory. It does not undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty.”

    Speaking Monday on Democracy Now, Katrina vanden Heuvel — editorial director of The Nation and a longtime Russia expert — said that implementing the Minsk accords could be a path toward peace in Ukraine. Also, she pointed out, “there is talk now not just of the NATO issue, which is so key, but also a new security architecture in Europe.”

    A new European security framework, to demilitarize and defuse conflicts between Russia and U.S. allies, is desperately needed. But the same approach that for three decades pushed to expand NATO to Russia’s borders is now gung-ho to keep upping the ante, no matter how much doing so increases the chances of a direct clash between the world’s two nuclear-weapons superpowers.

    The last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union before it collapsed, Jack Matlock, wrote last week: “Since President Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.” But excluding Russia from security structures, while encircling it with armed-to-the-teeth adversaries, was a clear goal of NATO’s expansion. Less obvious was the realized goal of turning Eastern European nations into customers for vast arms sales.

    A gripping chapter in “The Spoils of War,” a new book by Andrew Cockburn, spells out the mega-corporate zeal behind the massive campaigns to expand NATO beginning in the 1990s. Huge Pentagon contractors like Lockheed Martin were downcast about the dissolution of the USSR and feared that military sales would keep slumping. But there were some potential big new markets on the horizon.

    “One especially promising market was among the former members of the defunct Warsaw Pact,” Cockburn wrote. “Were they to join NATO, they would be natural customers for products such as the F-16 fighter that Lockheed had inherited from General Dynamics. There was one minor impediment: the [George H. W.] Bush administration had already promised Moscow that NATO would not move east, a pledge that was part of the settlement ending the Cold War.”

    By the time legendary foreign-policy sage George F. Kennan issued his unequivocal warning in 1997 — “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era” — the expansion was already happening. As Cockburn notes, “By 2014, the 12 new members had purchased close to $17 billion worth of American weapons.” If you think those weapons transactions were about keeping up with the Russians, you’ve been trusting way too much U.S. corporate media. “As of late 2020,” Cockburn’s book explains, NATO’s collective military spending “had hit $1.03 trillion, or roughly 20 times Russia’s military budget.”

    So let’s leave the last words here at this solemn time to Bob Dylan, from another song that isn’t on radio playlists: “Masters of War.”

    Let me ask you one question
    Is your money that good?
    Will it buy you forgiveness
    Do you think that it could?

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Salt of the Earth and Foot Soldiers

    Context of this Article

    This article didn’t just arise from nowhere. It is preceded by decades of my researching and writing about America’s “corpocracy,” or what I call the “Devil’s Marriage” between the superior power elite of corporate America, particularly throughout eleven sectors of organized endeavor, and the subordinate power elite of government America in firstly its shadow government and secondarily in the Oval Office and in the other branches of the government. The corporate elite tell the government elite what to spend from the taxpayers’ pockets, what do with the money, and what to say.

    About the Title

    Yes, it’s an odd title. Let’s turn to Merriam-Webster for definitions. “Salt of the Earth:” — “a very good and honest person or group of people,” and “foot soldiers:” — “a person likened to an infantryman especially in doing active and usually unglamorous work in support of an organization or movement.” I have several synonyms for foot soldiers: functionaries, lackeys, toadies, water carriers, and courtiers. Whatever we name them, they have in common doing the biding of people in power, or the power elite.

    Where the Salt of the Earth Work

    They are most likely to work in benign jobs that do not require any wrongdoing or evildoing. Typical jobs include trades’ people such as carpentry, plumbing, electricians, retail clerks, and sanitation workers. Sanitation workers are by far the most indispensable but typically are the most unappreciated and taken for granted. Without sanitation workers, however, we would all sink in our own detritus.

    Profile of Foot Soldiers’ Work

    Foot soldiers work primarily in 11 sectors of organized endeavors to be identified shortly. Over time I have compiled hundreds of examples of foot soldiers in action in those 11 sectors. The actions described range from “ordinary” wrongdoing such as incompetent and slothful behavior, to heinous evil doing, such as deliberately killing millions of people. Bear in mind that it was the power elite in each sector that ordered directly or obliquely the actions carried out by the foot soldiers usually far removed from the power elite’s locations.

    For this article I have picked some examples from each sector. The harm done ought to be implicitly recognized. It is beyond the scope of this article to include descriptions of the consequences such as up and close personal depictions like the narrative of a real foot soldier suffering the post-traumatic syndrome just before he committed suicide.

    I want to emphasize that there are exceptions to my listings. Not every CEO, for instance, fits the typical profile of the power elite who authorize wrongdoing and evildoing. Some earn their wealth honestly and live honestly. For instance, I knew personally very well one member of the power elite who was a very good and honest person, Robert Allen (1935-2016), the late CEO of AT&T. Bob was a high school classmate of mine.

    1. Agriculture, Chemical and Food Sector

    Conducts false tests of products.

    Uses unsafe antibiotics and growth hormones on animals.

    Manufactures unhealthy pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers for feed production.

    To get their genetically modified products approved, coerces, infiltrates and bribes government officials around the globe.

    1. Ammunition, Gun and War Sector

    Promotes gun sales by stoking fear and racism.

    Makes and sells products deliberately intended to kill.

    Contractors’ personnel torture captives at secret overseas bases.

    Abandons contractor waste at military bases dotting the globe

    Leaves land mines and cluster bombs behind.

    Contaminates air, soil and drinking water supplies with toxics.

    Drone operators guide armed, pilotless planes to bomb targeted sites

    1. Communication and Entertainment Sector

    Hollywood produces movies glorifying war.

    Publishes ads designed to look like news.

    Shows commercials disguised as talk shows, panel discussions, self-improvement seminars, etc.

    Plays to the lowest common denominator of audience/readership with sensationalism, sex, and violence.

    Dupes and distracts the American people.

    1. Education Sector

    Dumbs down the teaching of children, such as, for example, teaching the what of history but avoiding the why.

    After the draft was abolished by Congress to avoid the recurrence of massive protests against the Vietnam War, recruiters swarm high school hallways recruiting poorly educated students from impoverished homes who would otherwise be jobless eventually.

    1. Energy Sector

    Operating carelessly built and maintained nuclear power plants that leak radioactive waste.

    Digging and operating offshore oil rigs that leak huge amounts of pollutants into the water and adjacent land.

    Running pipelines through sacred Native American land.

    Operating tar sands fracking.

    1. Financial Sector

    Peddles falsified debt documents to collection firms.

    Gets default payments by filing thousands of collection lawsuits against consumers expecting them not to contest the claims.

    Preys on customers, hiding costs and penalties, downplays the effects of variable rates, and issues unaffordable loans for the purchase of fraudulently overvalued homes.

    Constantly raises deductibles while shrinking coverage.

    Auto insurers coerce car repair shops to use cheap and sometimes dangerous parts.

    Asks claims adjusters to lie to customers and to overestimate their losses and vastly overprice premiums.

    Soaks credit card holders with excessive rates.

    Finances wars, even on both sides.

    Launders drug money.

    1. Government Sector

    Breaks its own laws (e.g., Articles 1 and 3 of the Constitution; 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th Amendments; all laws protecting human nature such as homicidal laws against murder; and international laws such as the 1928 Kellogg–Briand Peace Pact.

    Refuses to join the International Criminal Court.

    Lies to the American people.

    Forcefully enters homes with falsified warrants.

    Detains citizens without trial.

    Established an extra judicial court to rubber stamp illegal activities.

    Maintains data on over one million Americans.

    1. Health Care Sector

    Blood testing labs pay doctors a percentage on the business they refer.

    Health insurance companies try to avoid insuring people needing care or deny as many insurance claims as possible.

    HMOs covertly screen out any Medicare applicant viewed as a high risk.

    Prior to accreditation inspections, hospital alters in-house records of problems.

    1. Pharmaceutical Sector

    Uses improper techniques to test drugs.

    Intimidates and threatens their in-house scientists.

    Fabricates drug safety data and lies to the FDA.

    Routinely bribes doctors with luxury vacations and paid speaking gigs.

    Provides drugs to doctors at a discount so they can be sold to patients at a big profit.

    Markets a drug that is more expensive than alternative drugs and deadly among adults and children.

    Compounds drugs that are often too weak or too strong.

    Dilutes cancer drugs to boost profits.

    Mislabels and adulterates several of its drugs used by millions of consumers and then masterminds a massive cover up of its wrongdoing.

    1. Spiritual Sector

    There has never been a war that organized religion did not start, promote, or tolerate.

    Children are taught to see what they believe.

    1. Transportation Sector

    A financially ailing airline routinely ignored vital repairs and maintenance to minimize downtime of planes and then falsified records to make it appear as if the work had been done.

    Airline, knowing a flight departure will be delayed, boards passengers anyway to prevent them from seeking alternative flights.

    Car maker stages a large truck being dropped from a crane onto a new model without telling viewers the car had been reinforced to withstand the impact.

    Automaker sets back the odometer settings and sells the cars as new to dealers.

    Automakers sometimes instruct their dealers to fix certain common defects free of charge or at reduced cost but only if auto owners demand that the repair be made under warranty.

    Imposes demanding and unrealistic schedules on truck drivers.

    Skimps on truck fleet maintenance overhauls.

    Two Foot Soldiers Up Close and Personal

    My graduate school advisor, Dr. Carroll Shartle (1903-1993) personified the foot soldier — and so did I without realizing it. He had a research grant from the U.S. Airforce, the source of my stipends as one of Dr. Shartle’s research assistants. Both my master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation were underwritten by this grant. Dr. Shartle then became chief behavioral scientist for the U.S. Department of Defense War. To my credit, I entered graduate school to maintain my student deferment from being drafted into the Vietnam War, which I loathed. To my discredit, near the end of my graduate school tenure I worked for an aircraft plant making low altitude flying jets for bombing Vietnam and at the same time taught a course for airmen at a nearby air force base. I then took a job with the U.S. government and muted my criticism of the war. It was only after I retired that I became an “armchair” activist for peace and social economic justice.

    In Closing

    My hunch is that by not having sold their soul to any company store the salt of the earth do not experience my kind of guilt feelings over having sold my soul more than once.

    The post Salt of the Earth and Foot Soldiers first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Manufacturing Savagery: U.S. Military Training In West Africa And Beyond

    On January 24th, Burkina Faso bore witness to its third destabilizing coup in less than a decade. It also marked the eighth successful putsch American soldiers launched in multiple West African countries since 2008. The Intercept reports that Ouagadougou’s new leader, Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, took part in many United States led AFRICOM (Africa Command) exercises and an American sponsored military intelligence course. This disturbing pattern raises serious questions about what the U.S. army is teaching its African allies.

    The U.S. developed an alarming habit for training individuals likely to commit horrendous crimes after the outbreak of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. The School of the Americas (renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001) based in Fort Benning, Georgia spent decades teaching the dark arts of torture and counterinsurgency warfare to thousands of Central and Latin American soldiers and aspiring dictators keen to annihilate socialist or peasant movements. Distinguished alumni include Bolivian autocrat Hugo Banzer, Panamanian strongman turned drug lord Manuel Noriega, and El Salvadoran Colonel Domingo Monterrosa. Monterrosa led battalions that slaughtered a thousand civilians in the village of El Mozote, according to anthropologist Lesley Gill.

    Guatemalan SOA students enjoyed exceptional careers as well. Proud graduates like dictators Efraín Rios Montt, General Fernando Lucas García, and various members of Guatemala’s feared D-2 intelligence agency terrorised the indigenous and impoverished Mayan community into submission over a nearly four decade-long civil war. Devastating scorched earth campaigns, which reached their apogee in the early eighties, wiped out hundreds of Mayan villages and almost all their inhabitants. Journalist Zach El Parece noted that a member of the infamous “Kaibiles” Special Forces, a unit that bludgeoned children to death with hammers for being communist sympathisers in the village of Dos Erres, among many others, later became an instructor at the SOA.

    The Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) concluded that the Guatemalan army was responsible for displacing 1.5 million people and murdering or vanishing most of the war’s 200,000 victims. The CEH deemed the army’s atrocities so severe that they amounted to acts of genocide against the Mayan population. The report even singled out the United States’ crucial role in reinforcing Guatemala’s homicidal “national intelligence apparatus and for training the officer corps in counterinsurgency techniques, key factors which had significant bearing on human rights violations…”

    The U.S. government also paid millions to train Indonesian soldiers implicated in Jakarta’s barbaric occupation of East Timor. Amnesty International revealed that approximately 7,300 Indonesian officers took part in IMET (International Military Education and Training) courses at U.S.-based army, navy, and air-force schools between 1950 and the early nineties. Washington promised to cancel military aid to Indonesia after the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre, during which Indonesian troops killed 271 protesters at a peaceful pro-independence rally in the Timorese capital of Dili. However, they secretly continued to train elite Kopassus troops. This regiment, according to the Guardian, indulged in “some of the worst human rights violations in Indonesia’s history”.

    Prabowo Subianto, Indonesia’s current Minister of Defence, trained at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, finished first in his class, and re-joined the Kopassus after returning home. Historian Gerry van Klinken and journalist Jill Jolliffe believe it is highly likely that Subianto participated in the brutal suppression of the East Timorese uprising of 1983-84. A former Indonesian intelligence employee alleged that Subianto directed anti-insurgent operations that butchered hundreds of innocent civilians. Soldiers executed surrendering women and children on sight, while countless others endured starvation, torture, sexual abuse, and arbitrary detention in overcrowded concentration camps. Moreover, reporter David Jenkins claims the Kopassus eagerly adopted tactics the shadowy U.S. Phoenix program perfected during the Vietnam War—a program that assassinated thousands of Vietnamese peasants with impunity. The abhorrent methods of U.S. trained “Contra” death squads in Nicaragua proved quite influential among the Kopassus as well.

    Scholar Noam Chomsky asserts that Jakarta’s invasion of East Timor incurred “perhaps the greatest death toll relative to the population since the Holocaust…” Approximately 200,000 East Timorese perished in the Indonesian onslaught, while survivors still suffer the long-term effects of napalm and chemical weapon poisoning. The Commission for Reception, Truth, and Reconciliation in East Timor issued a damning verdict: the U.S. backed Indonesian military deliberately imposed unbearable conditions of life which almost exterminated the East Timorese. A genocide in paradise, to borrow Matthew Jardine’s haunting phrase.

    U.S. Special Forces also trained the Tutsi RPA (Rwandan Patriotic Army) in the late nineties as it decimated refugee camps and massacred Hutu exiles fleeing into the jungles of eastern Congo. Many of them were sickly and starving civilians that had nothing to do with the Tutsi genocide of 1994. Le Monde and the Irish Times cited French intelligence findings and Pentagon papers stating that U.S. instructors and mercenaries provided combat training to dozens of Rwandan officers. Some reports even alleged that U.S. advisers accompanied the RPA as it expanded its rampage into the Congo. These destructive incursions marked the opening salvo in the DRC’s (Democratic Republic of the Congo) endless “world war”—a cataclysmic conflict that has caused, thus far, the deaths of millions.

    Historians and authors like Filip Reyntjens, René Lemarchand, and Judi Rever largely agree that the RPA, along with the Ugandan and Burundian-backed AFDL (Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire) rebel group, killed tens of thousands of Rwandan and Congolese Hutus in the DRC between 1996-97. A United Nations report released in 2010 insisted that in most cases perpetrators did not carry out these atrocities unintentionally in the heat of battle and may be guilty of “crimes of genocide”.

    Yet the U.S. is not alone in enabling, unwittingly or otherwise, regimes prone to committing egregious crimes. In December 2008, Guinean Army Captain Moussa Dadis Camara spearheaded the “German Coup” which brought a military junta into power in Conakry. Deutsche Welle reported that Camara and his co-conspirators received extensive training from the German Armed Forces in Bremen. German-trained paratroopers unleashed a wave of extreme violence against peaceful protestors in Conakry Stadium less than a year after Camara suspended the Guinean constitution and threadbare republican institutions.

    Amnesty International said that security forces murdered more than 150 people, wounded hundreds more, and raped or assaulted dozens of women and girls with sticks, bayonets, rifle butts, and batons in broad daylight. A failed assassination attempt quickly disposed Camara, only for another ruthless soldier—the Moroccan, French, and Chinese trained Sékouba “The Tiger” Konaté—to take his place. To this day, undiscerning European Union member states continue to provide military training and weapons to African countries hampered by weak civilian governments and very powerful armies. It is a recipe for disaster.

    Ideally, massive grassroots movements in both the U.S. and West Africa should try to convince representatives to bring a permanent end to these borderline colonial military exchanges. Following that, Congress must enact more legislation that would strengthen background checks for future trainees. Furthermore, any manuals, textbooks, or instructors advocating torture and other unlawful or inhumane tactics need to be removed and replaced with courses that seek to improve civic-military relations.

    However, adding human-rights awareness or international law modules to military curricula is by no means an effective solution. Political scientist Jacob Ricks worries that promoting courses or practices geared towards professionalizing and enhancing the social responsibilities of the military is a lackluster strategy. Survey data demonstrates that many high-ranking Siamese soldiers, already among the largest recipients of US IMET programs now replete with professionalizing courses, are statistically more likely to support a coup or greater military interference in Siamese politics and society. Thailand has weathered 19 coup attempts since 1932. Teaching soldiers to respect the sanctity of human life, democracy, and the rule of law, although necessary and beneficial, is clearly not enough to curb such vicious tendencies.

    West African politicians and civil society groups need to be more creative and ambitious if they ever hope to tame their often unruly armies. Professor Kwesi Aning, head of academic affairs and research at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Ghana, told University World News that African states keep sending troops abroad for training because they do not possess the resources or facilities required to properly train them at home. This breeds a dangerous imbalance of power as foreign-trained troops, imbued with delusions of superiority and entitlement after studying in the U.S., France, or Germany, could return home with a burning desire to take control. Depending on the lessons, especially in the U.S., foreign-trained soldiers might begin to perceive fellow citizens not as ordinary people who need protection but as potential or internal enemies to be eradicated.

    Constructing homegrown, truly sovereign, and well-funded military academies, devoted to teaching civic-military cooperation and unencumbered by harmful relations with exploitative armies in the Global North, would be a step in the right direction. To paraphrase Colonel Jahara Matisek, West African nations must develop military institutions steeped in their own histories and cultures. Only then can trustworthy armies emerge and the coup curse finally fade.

      First published at OWP.
    The post Manufacturing Savagery: U.S. Military Training In West Africa And Beyond first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Memo to Congress: Diplomacy for Ukraine Is Spelled M-i-n-s-k

    Peace protest at the White House – Photo credit: iacenter.org

    While the Biden administration is sending more troops and weapons to inflame the Ukraine conflict and Congress is pouring more fuel on the fire, the American people are on a totally different track.

    A December 2021 poll found that a plurality of Americans in both political parties prefer to resolve differences over Ukraine through diplomacy. Another December poll found that a plurality of Americans (48 percent) would oppose going to war with Russia should it invade Ukraine, with only 27 percent favoring U.S. military involvement.

    The conservative Koch Institute, which commissioned that poll, concluded that “the United States has no vital interests at stake in Ukraine and continuing to take actions that increase the risk of a confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia is therefore not necessary for our security. After more than two decades of endless war abroad, it is not surprising there is wariness among the American people for yet another war that wouldn’t make us safer or more prosperous.”

    The most anti-war popular voice on the right is Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has been lashing out against the hawks in both parties, as have other anti-interventionist libertarians.

    On the left, the anti-war sentiment was in full force on February 5, when over 75 protests took place from Maine to Alaska. The protesters, including union activists, environmentalists, healthcare workers and students, denounced pouring even more money into the military when we have so many burning needs at home.

    You would think Congress would be echoing the public sentiment that a war with Russia is not in our national interest. Instead, taking our nation to war and supporting the gargantuan military budget seem to be the only issues that both parties agree on.

    Most Republicans in Congress are criticizing Biden for not being tough enough (or for focusing on Russia instead of China) and most Democrats are afraid to oppose a Democratic president or be smeared as Putin apologists (remember, Democrats spent four years under Trump demonizing Russia).

    Both parties have bills calling for draconian sanctions on Russia and expedited “lethal aid” to Ukraine. The Republicans are advocating for $450 million in new military shipments; the Democrats are one-upping them with a price tag of $500 million.

    Progressive Caucus leaders Pramila Jayapal and Barbara Lee have called for negotiations and de-escalation. But others in the Caucus–such as Reps. David Cicilline and Andy Levin–are co-sponsors of the dreadful anti-Russia bill, and Speaker Pelosi is fast-tracking the bill to expedite weapons shipments to Ukraine.

    But sending more weapons and imposing heavy-handed sanctions can only ratchet up the resurgent U.S. Cold War on Russia, with all its attendant costs to American society: lavish military spending displacing desperately needed social spending; geopolitical divisions undermining international cooperation for a better future; and, not least, increased risks of a nuclear war that could end life on Earth as we know it.

    For those looking for real solutions, we have good news.

    Negotiations regarding Ukraine are not limited to President Biden and Secretary Blinken’s failed efforts to browbeat the Russians. There is another already existing diplomatic track for peace in Ukraine, a well-established process called the Minsk Protocol, led by France and Germany and supervised by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

    The civil war in Eastern Ukraine broke out in early 2014, after the people of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces unilaterally declared independence from Ukraine as the Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) People’s Republics, in response to the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev in February 2014. The post-coup government formed new “National Guard” units to assault the breakaway region, but the separatists fought back and held their territory, with some covert support from Russia. Diplomatic efforts were launched to resolve the conflict.

    The original Minsk Protocol was signed by the “Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine” (Russia, Ukraine and the OSCE) in September 2014. It reduced the violence, but failed to end the war. France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine also held a meeting in Normandy in June 2014 and this group became known as the “Normandy Contact Group” or the “Normandy Format.”

    All these parties continued to meet and negotiate, together with the leaders of the self-declared Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) People’s Republics in Eastern Ukraine, and they eventually signed the Minsk II agreement on February 12, 2015. The terms were similar to the original Minsk Protocol, but more detailed and with more buy-in from the DPR and LPR.

    The Minsk II agreement was unanimously approved by the U.N. Security Council in Resolution 2202 on February 17, 2015. The United States voted in favor of the resolution, and 57 Americans are currently serving as ceasefire monitors with the OSCE in Ukraine.

    The key elements of the 2015 Minsk II Agreement were:

    –           an immediate bilateral ceasefire between Ukrainian government forces and DPR and LPR forces;

    –           the withdrawal of heavy weapons from a 30-kilometer-wide buffer zone along the line of control between government and separatist forces;

    –           elections in the secessionist Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) People’s Republics, to be monitored by the OSCE; and,

    –           constitutional reforms to grant greater autonomy to the separatist-held areas within a reunified but less centralized Ukraine.

    The ceasefire and buffer zone have held well enough for seven years to prevent a return to full-scale civil war, but organizing elections in Donbas that both sides will recognize has proved more difficult.

    The DPR and LPR postponed elections several times between 2015 and 2018. They held primary elections in 2016 and, finally, a general election in November 2018. But neither Ukraine, the United States nor the European Union recognized the results, claiming the election was not conducted in compliance with the Minsk Protocol.

    For its part, Ukraine has not made the agreed-upon constitutional changes to grant greater autonomy to the separatist regions And the separatists have not allowed the central government to retake control of the international border between Donbas and Russia, as specified in the agreement.

    The Normandy Contact Group (France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine) for the Minsk Protocol has met periodically since 2014, and is meeting regularly throughout the current crisis, with its next meeting scheduled for February 10 in Berlin The OSCE’s 680 unarmed civilian monitors and 621 support staff in Ukraine have also continued their work throughout this crisis. Their latest report, issued February 1, documented a 65% decrease in ceasefire violations compared to two months ago.

    But increased U.S. military and diplomatic support since 2019 has encouraged President Zelensky to pull back from Ukraine’s commitments under the Minsk Protocol, and to reassert unconditional Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea and Donbas. This has raised credible fears of a new escalation of the civil war, and U.S. support for Zelensky’s more aggressive posture has undermined the existing Minsk-Normandy diplomatic process.

    Zelensky’s recent statement that “panic” in Western capitals is economically destabilizing Ukraine suggests that he may now be more aware of the pitfalls in the more confrontational path his government adopted, with U.S. encouragement.

    The current crisis should be a wake-up call to all involved that the Minsk-Normandy process remains the only viable framework for a peaceful resolution in Ukraine. It deserves full international support, including from U.S. Members of Congress, especially in light of broken promises on NATO expansion, the U.S. role in the 2014 coup, and now the panic over fears of a Russian invasion that Ukrainian officials say are overblown.

    On a separate, albeit related, diplomatic track, the United States and Russia must urgently address the breakdown in their bilateral relations. Instead of bravado and one upmanship, they must restore and build on previous disarmament agreements that they have cavalierly abandoned, placing the whole world in existential danger.

    Restoring U.S. support for the Minsk Protocol and the Normandy Format would also help to decouple Ukraine’s already thorny and complex internal problems from the larger geopolitical problem of NATO expansion, which must primarily be resolved by the United States, Russia and NATO.

    The United States and Russia must not use the people of Ukraine as pawns in a revived Cold War or as chips in their negotiations over NATO expansion. Ukrainians of all ethnicities deserve genuine support to resolve their differences and find a way to live together in one country – or to separate peacefully, as other people have been allowed to do in Ireland, Bangladesh, Slovakia and throughout the former U.S.S.R. and Yugoslavia.

    In 2008, then-U.S. Ambassador to Moscow (now CIA Director) William Burns warned his government that dangling the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine could lead to civil war and present Russia with a crisis on its border in which it could be forced to intervene.

    In a cable published by WikiLeaks, Burns wrote, “Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

    Since Burns’s warning in 2008, successive U.S. administrations have plunged headlong into the crisis he predicted. Members of Congress, especially members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, can play a leading role in restoring sanity to U.S. policy on Ukraine by championing a moratorium on Ukraine’s membership in NATO and a reinvigoration of the Minsk Protocol, which the Trump and Biden administrations have arrogantly tried to upstage and upend with weapons shipments, ultimatums and panic.

    OSCE monitoring reports on Ukraine are all headed with the critical message: “Facts Matter.” Members of Congress should embrace that simple principle and educate themselves about the Minsk-Normandy diplomacy. This process has maintained relative peace in Ukraine since 2015, and remains the U.N.-endorsed, internationally agreed-upon framework for a lasting resolution.

    If the U.S. government wants to play a constructive role in Ukraine, it should genuinely support this already existing framework for a solution to the crisis, and end the heavy-handed U.S. intervention that has only undermined and delayed its implementation. And our elected officials should start listening to their own constituents, who have absolutely no interest in going to war with Russia.

    The post Memo to Congress: Diplomacy for Ukraine Is Spelled M-i-n-s-k first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Claims Over Broken Promises About NATO Simmer at the Heart of the Ukraine Crisis

    U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet during the U.S.-Russia summit at Villa La Grange on June 16, 2021, in Geneva, Switzerland.

    In the continuing conflict between the United States and Russia, the central issue has always been the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from its original boundaries in Central Europe during the Cold War. Recent efforts to incorporate Ukraine into NATO have greatly aggravated Russian suspicions, contributing to Russia’s rationale for their massing of troops on Ukrainian borders.

    It is true that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a repressive leader with a poor human rights record, but that is no reason for the U.S. to risk undertaking a war. On the issue of NATO expansion, Putin has a legitimate complaint. If Ukraine were to join NATO, it would establish a U.S. ally on Russia’s southern border with the potential of U.S. military bases being aimed against Russia. We must consider this counterfactual: How would the U.S. respond if Russia were planning a military alliance with Mexico or Canada? There is no way of getting around the fact that NATO’s expansion has been profoundly destabilizing.

    It is important to consider the historical context of Russian grievance: It is a matter of record that in 1990, the U.S. Secretary of State James Baker promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that it would not expand NATO into the formerly communist states of Eastern Europe. In exchange, Gorbachev agreed not to oppose the upcoming reunification of Germany. Gorbachev fulfilled his part of the deal — Germany was reunified without Soviet objection — but then the U.S. promptly began laying plans to expand NATO. By 1999, the former communist states of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic all joined NATO, disregarding the promises made to Gorbachev. Then, NATO continued expanding into most of Eastern Europe, as well as three former Soviet states, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Russian officials have repeatedly objected to what they describe as U.S.’s bad faith regarding its past promises not to expand NATO.

    Some former officials contest this history. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently stated: “The idea that we somehow crossed some line with the Russians, I think, is a figment of Vladimir Putin’s imagination, just like the idea that somehow Jim Baker, all the way back in 1990, said we would never move east. What we were talking about at the time was East Germany… Nobody was even imagining Czechoslovakia or Poland or Hungary at that time.” These claims are very doubtful. The National Security Archive at George Washington University has released a large number of previously classified documents that strongly suggest that — as Russian leaders have argued — the U.S. did indeed promise not to expand NATO, and that this promise extended beyond East Germany. I will quote from the summary of the documents, written by Archive staff:

    The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels. [Emphasis added.]

    Clearly, present-day Russian complaints about U.S. deceptions regarding NATO’s expansion have a foundation in the historical record.

    The U.S. expansion of NATO reflected an attitude of recklessness and hubris. According to former Defense Secretary William Perry, the predominant view of Russia in the Clinton administration was: “Who cares what they think? They’re a third-rate power.”

    At least some senior figures were alarmed by the U.S.’s arrogance. Former CIA Director Robert Gates later criticized NATO’s eastward expansion, arguing that it was a bad move since Gorbachev was “led to believe that wouldn’t happen.”

    In 1995, 20 former U.S. officials wrote an open letter stating that NATO’s planned expansion risked “convincing most Russians that the United States and the West are attempting to isolate, encircle, and subordinate them.” The letter also stated that the Russians “pose no threat to any state to the west, nor is there any evidence of an imperialistic surge among the Russian people.” Even Paul Nitze — an architect of the Cold War and a longstanding anti-Soviet hardliner — signed the letter. Then in 1997, veteran Soviet expert George F. Kennan declared, “Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era.” U.S. policymakers were warned about the likely consequences of their actions.

    Given the central importance of NATO in the current conflict, one might wonder: Why was the alliance even necessary after the end of the Cold War? During the early 1990s, no one really knew what NATO was for, and the whole alliance was becoming a bit of a joke. It was a “security” organization in search of a mission, without any real security threat. In 1992, a headline in Jane’s Defense Weekly declared, “NATO Seeks Significance in a Post-Cold War Climate.”

    The real reason for preserving NATO — and ultimately expanding it — was to promote U.S. prestige and power, and also to benefit vested interests associated with what President Dwight D. Eisenhower once termed the military-industrial complex. In 1993, retired U.S. Admiral Eugene Carroll spoke with remarkable frankness about NATO’s real purpose:

    Let me tell you one of the reasons you keep hearing so many contrived arguments for continuing the NATO alliance. It has been very, very good for the militaries of the countries involved…. If NATO goes away, all those jobs go away; all those lovely chateaus, and chauffeurs and railroad cars go away. It’s something that has been very enjoyable for a good many years, and the fact that there is no longer any requirement for it doesn’t mean they don’t want to keep a good thing going.

    NATO’s expansion benefited the U.S. military, U.S. weapons manufacturers, and their counterparts in Western Europe. Eastern European states were eager to join what many viewed as a “prestigious” organization as a symbol that they had finally arrived on the world stage.

    None of this had anything to do with security in any meaningful sense, since Russia was, for the most part, acting in accord with U.S. and Western interests. Indeed, Boris Yeltsin, the Russian president at the time, was widely viewed as a pro-U.S. stooge. U.S. officials were so appreciative of Yeltsin that they intervened in Russia’s 1996 election to ensure that Yeltsin won. Time magazine even produced a caricature of Yeltsin on the cover, holding a U.S. flag, under the title “Yanks to the Rescue.” The Time subtitle read: “The Secret Story of How American Advisors Helped Yeltsin Win.” Russians have long resented this U.S. interference in their electoral processes.

    In undertaking these interventions, the U.S. was laying the groundwork for future conflicts with Russia. If U.S. officials were looking for trouble and seeking to increase global insecurity, they could not have done a better job.

    Given all these historical affronts, it should come as no surprise that the Russian people longed for a more authoritarian leader — like Putin — who would stand up to the increasingly distrusted U.S. Despite his authoritarian style, Putin has been inarguably popular and has dominated Russian politics since first coming to power in 2000.

    U.S. officials cannot go back in time to correct past mistakes; in all probability, they will never regain Russia’s trust. However, we do have an opportunity to deescalate tensions. The key Russian demand is a firm U.S. guarantee that Ukraine will not be allowed to join NATO. U.S. officials should be open to this demand, as a basis for a full settlement, and should forgo their obsession with relentlessly projecting U.S. power through NATO. Surely this outcome would be better than a new Cold War with a nuclear-armed Russia, which is becoming a serious risk.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Chomsky: US Approach to Ukraine Has “Left the Domain of Rational Discourse”

    U.S. troops deploy for Europe from Pope Army Airfield at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on February 3, 2022. The U.S. plans to deploy 3,000 troops to fortify NATO forces in Eastern Europe amid fears Russia could invade Ukraine, the Pentagon said Wednesday.

    The Russia-Ukraine crisis continues unabated as the United States ignores all of Russian President Vladmir Putin’s security demands and spreads a frenzy of fear by claiming that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is imminent.

    In a new exclusive interview for Truthout on the ongoing Russia-Ukraine crisis, world-renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky outlines the deadly dangers of U.S. intransigence over Ukrainian membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) even when key Western allies have already vetoed earlier U.S. efforts in that direction. He also seeks to shed some light on the reasons why Republicans today seem to be divided on Russia.

    Chomsky — whose intellectual contributions have been compared to those of Galileo, Newton and Descartes — has had tremendous influence on a variety of areas of scholarly and scientific inquiry, including linguistics, logic and mathematics, computer science, psychology, media studies, philosophy, politics and international affairs. He is the author of some 150 books and recipient of scores of highly prestigious awards including the Sydney Peace Prize and the Kyoto Prize (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), as well as dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from the world’s most renowned universities. Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and currently Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona.

    The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

    C.J. Polychroniou: Tensions continue to escalate between Russia and Ukraine, and there is little room for optimism since the U.S. offer for de-escalation fails to meet any of Russia’s security demands. As such, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that the Russia-Ukraine border crisis stems in reality from the U.S.’s intransigent position over Ukrainian membership in NATO? In the same context, is it hard to imagine what might have been Washington’s response to the hypothetical event that Mexico wanted to join a Moscow-driven military alliance?

    Noam Chomsky: We hardly need to linger on the latter question. No country would dare to make such a move in what former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Secretary of War Henry Stimson called “Our little region over here,” when he was condemning all spheres of influence (except for our own — which in reality, is hardly limited to the Western hemisphere). Secretary of State Antony Blinken is no less adamant today in condemning Russia’s claim to a “sphere of influence,” a concept we firmly reject (with the same reservation).

    There was of course one famous case when a country in our little region came close to a military alliance with Russia, the 1962 missile crisis. The circumstances, however, were quite unlike Ukraine. President John F. Kennedy was escalating his terrorist war against Cuba to a threat of invasion; Ukraine, in sharp contrast, faces threats as a result of its potentially joining a hostile military alliance. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s reckless decision to provide Cuba with missiles was also an effort to slightly rectify the enormous U.S. preponderance of military force after JFK had responded to Khrushchev’s offer of mutual reduction of offensive weapons with the largest military buildup in peacetime history, though the U.S. was already far ahead. We know what that led to.

    The tensions over Ukraine are extremely severe, with Russia’s concentration of military forces at Ukraine’s borders. The Russian position has been quite explicit for some time. It was stated clearly by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at his press conference at the United Nations: “The main issue is our clear position on the inadmissibility of further expansion of NATO to the East and the deployment of strike weapons that could threaten the territory of the Russian Federation.” Much the same was reiterated shortly after by Putin, as he had often said before.

    There is a simple way to deal with deployment of weapons: Don’t deploy them. There is no justification for doing so. The U.S. may claim that they are defensive, but Russia surely doesn’t see it that way, and with reason.

    The question of further expansion is more complex. The issue goes back over 30 years, to when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was collapsing. There were extensive negotiations among Russia, the U.S. and Germany. (The core issue was German unification.) Two visions were presented. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proposed a Eurasian security system from Lisbon to Vladivostok with no military blocs. The U.S. rejected it: NATO stays, Russia’s Warsaw Pact disappears.

    For obvious reasons, German reunification within a hostile military alliance is no small matter for Russia. Nevertheless, Gorbachev agreed to it, with a quid pro quo: No expansion to the East. President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker agreed. In their words to Gorbachev: “Not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well, it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.”

    “East” meant East Germany. No one had a thought about anything beyond, at least in public. That’s agreed on all sides. German leaders were even more explicit about it. They were overjoyed just to have Russian agreement to unification, and the last thing they wanted was new problems.

    There is extensive scholarship on the matter — Mary Sarotte, Joshua Shifrinson, and others, debating exactly who said what, what they meant, what’s its status, and so on. It is interesting and illuminating work, but what it comes down to, when the dust settles, is what I quoted from the declassified record.

    President H.W. Bush pretty much lived up to these commitments. So did President Bill Clinton at first, until 1999, the 50th anniversary of NATO; with an eye on the Polish vote in the upcoming election, some have speculated. He admitted Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to NATO. President George W. Bush — the lovable goofy grandpa who was celebrated in the press on the 20th anniversary of his invasion of Afghanistan — let down all the bars. He brought in the Baltic states and others. In 2008, he invited Ukraine to join NATO, poking the bear in the eye. Ukraine is Russia’s geostrategic heartland, apart from intimate historic relations and a large Russia-oriented population. Germany and France vetoed Bush’s reckless invitation, but it’s still on the table. No Russian leader would accept that, surely not Gorbachev, as he made clear.

    As in the case of deployment of offensive weapons on the Russian border, there is a straightforward answer. Ukraine can have the same status as Austria and two Nordic countries throughout the whole Cold War: neutral, but tightly linked to the West and quite secure, part of the European Union to the extent they chose to be.

    The U.S. adamantly rejects this outcome, loftily proclaiming its passionate dedication to the sovereignty of nations, which cannot be infringed: Ukraine’s right to join NATO must be honored. This principled stand may be lauded in the U.S., but it surely is eliciting loud guffaws in much of the world, including the Kremlin. The world is hardly unaware of our inspiring dedication to sovereignty, notably in the three cases that particularly enraged Russia: Iraq, Libya and Kosovo-Serbia.

    Iraq need not be discussed: U.S. aggression enraged almost everyone. The NATO assaults on Libya and Serbia, both a slap in Russia’s face during its sharp decline in the ‘90s, is clothed in righteous humanitarian terms in U.S. propaganda. It all quickly dissolves under scrutiny, as amply documented elsewhere. And the richer record of U.S. reverence for the sovereignty of nations needs no review.

    It is sometimes claimed that NATO membership increases security for Poland and others. A much stronger case can be made that NATO membership threatens their security by heightening tensions. Historian Richard Sakwa, a specialist on East Europe, observed that “NATO’s existence became justified by the need to manage threats provoked by its enlargement” — a plausible judgment.

    There is much more to say about Ukraine and how to deal with the very dangerous and mounting crisis there, but perhaps this is enough to suggest that there is no need to inflame the situation and to move on to what might well turn out to be a catastrophic war.

    There is, in fact, a surreal quality to the U.S. rejection of Austrian-style neutrality for Ukraine. U.S. policy makers know perfectly well that admission of Ukraine to NATO is not an option for the foreseeable future. We can, of course, put aside the ridiculous posturing about the sanctity of sovereignty. So, for the sake of a principle in which they do not believe for a moment, and in pursuit of an objective that they know is out of reach, the U.S. is risking what may turn into a shocking catastrophe. On the surface, it seems incomprehensible, but there are plausible imperial calculations.

    We might ask why Putin has taken such a belligerent stance on the ground. There is a cottage industry seeking to solve this mystery: Is he a madman? Is he planning to force Europe to become a Russian satellite? What is he up to?

    One way to find out is to listen to what he says: For years, Putin has tried to induce the U.S. to pay some attention to the requests that he and Foreign Minister Lavrov repeated, in vain. One possibility is that the show of force is a way to achieve this objective. That has been suggested by well-informed analysts. If so, it seems to have succeeded, at least in a limited way.

    Germany and France have already vetoed earlier U.S. efforts to offer membership to Ukraine. So why is the U.S. so keen on NATO expansion eastward to the point of treating a Russian invasion of Ukraine as imminent, even when Ukrainian leaders themselves don’t seem to think so? And since when did Ukraine come to represent a beacon of democracy?

    It is indeed curious to watch what is unfolding. The U.S. is vigorously fanning the flames while Ukraine is asking it to tone down the rhetoric. While there is much turmoil about why the demon Putin is acting as he is, U.S. motives are rarely subject to scrutiny. The reason is familiar: By definition, U.S. motives are noble, even if its efforts to implement them are perhaps misguided.

    Nevertheless, the question might merit some thought, at least by “the wild men in the wings,” to borrow former National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy’s phrase, referring to those incorrigible figures who dare to subject Washington to the standards applied elsewhere.

    A possible answer is suggested by a famous slogan about the purpose of NATO: to keep Russia out, to keep Germany down and to keep the U.S. in. Russia is out, far out. Germany is down. What remains is the question whether the U.S. will be in Europe — more accurately, should be in charge. Not all have quietly accepted this principle of world affairs, among them: Charles de Gaulle, who advanced his concept of Europe from the Atlantic to the Ural’s; former German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik; and French President Emmanuel Macron, with his current diplomatic initiatives that are causing much displeasure in Washington.

    If the Ukraine crisis is resolved peacefully, it will be a European affair, breaking from the post-World War II “Atlanticist” conception that places the U.S. firmly in the driver’s seat. It might even be a precedent for further moves toward European independence, maybe even moving toward Gorbachev’s vision. With China’s Belt-and-Road initiative encroaching from the East, much larger issues of global order arise.

    As virtually always in the past when it comes to foreign affairs, we see a bipartisan frenzy over Ukraine. However, while Republicans in Congress are urging President Joe Biden to adopt a more aggressive stance toward Russia, the proto-fascist base is questioning the party line. Why, and what does the split among Republicans over Ukraine tell us about what is happening to the Republicans?

    One cannot easily speak of today’s Republican Party as if it were a genuine political party participating in a functioning democracy. More apt is the description of the organization as “a radical insurgency — ideologically extreme, scornful of facts and compromise, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” This characterization by political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise is from a decade ago, pre-Donald Trump. By now it’s far out of date. In the acronym “GOP,” what remains is “O.”

    I don’t know whether the popular base that Trump has whipped up into a worshipful cult is questioning the aggressive stance of Republican leaders, or if they even care. Evidence is skimpy. Leading right-wing figures closely associated with the GOP are moving well to the right of European opinion, and of the stance of those who hope to retain some semblance of democracy in the U.S. They are going even beyond Trump in their enthusiastic support for Hungarian President Viktor Orban’s “illiberal democracy,” extolling it for saving Western civilization, no less.

    This effusive welcome for Orban’s dismantling of democracy might bring to mind the praise for Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini for having “saved European civilization [so that] the merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history”; the thoughts of the revered founder of the neoliberal movement that has reigned for the past 40 years, Ludwig von Mises, in his 1927 classic Liberalism.

    Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson has been the most outspoken of the enthusiasts. Many Republican senators either go along with him or claim ignorance of what Orban is doing, a remarkable confession of illiteracy at the peak of global power. The highly regarded senior Sen. Charles Grassley reports that he knows about Hungary only from Carlson’s TV expositions, and approves. Such performances tell us a good deal about the radical insurgency. On Ukraine, breaking with the GOP leadership, Carlson asks why we should take any position on a quarrel between “foreign countries that don’t care anything about the United States.”

    Whatever one’s views on international affairs, it’s clear that we’ve left the domain of rational discourse far behind, and are moving into territory with an unattractive history, to put it mildly.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US Militarism Is a Cause of Tension in Eastern Europe, Not a Solution

    Ground personnel unload weapons, including Javelin anti-tank missiles, and other military hardware delivered on a National Airlines plane by the United States military at Boryspil International Airport near Kyiv on January 25, 2022, in Boryspil, Ukraine.

    The rising tensions between Ukraine, Russia, the United States and other NATO countries — and the resulting discourse in U.S. media — show that American leaders love an international crisis.

    In a crisis, the American public is often discouraged from asking questions — and when they do, militarism is usually the answer.

    Even as Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky discourages panic and downplays the idea that a Russian invasion is imminent, American officials are portraying armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine as inevitable — and U.S. military support of Ukraine as necessary.

    “What’s the alternative?” asked retired Brigadier General and former Defense Attaché to Moscow Peter Zwack in an interview on NPR. “Do we just let them get invaded, or do we make the cost so high on the ground-level military — but also the diplomatic and the economic?”

    The choice being put forward is between military action or inaction; to opt for “inaction” is presented as an abandonment of Ukraine. Zwack’s prescription is “lethal weapons” — specifically Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

    And the U.S. is delivering. In just over a week, the U.S. made four shipments of weapons to Ukraine — a move that has U.S. arms manufacturers anticipating soaring profits for their shareholders.

    The particular kind of crisis story that American officials are deploying in the situation with Ukraine is a familiar one: An underdog faces a threat from an authoritarian regime, so the United States must come to the rescue with a military response.

    In an interview on NPR, Republican Representative and Chair of Congress’s Ukraine Caucus Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania offered a historical analogy often invoked by American officials to justify military action.

    “When we defended Kuwait in Operation Desert Shield,” Fitzpatrick said, “we sent a message to the world that you cannot violate the territorial integrity of an independent nation. And Ukraine should be no different. We have to send a very strong and unequivocal message to Vladimir Putin, which would also be a message to Xi Jinping, to Kim Jong Un and other bad actors around the world that this is not OK to do.”

    Fitzpatrick’s interviewer didn’t question his response. But his example of U.S. military action in Iraq in 1991 shows exactly why it’s critical to question the narrative being pushed by U.S. media, especially during times of crisis.

    In Fitzpatrick’s account of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the U.S. appears to be a bystander responding to Iraqi actions. But his story conveniently omits the fact that just prior to its invasion of Kuwait, Iraq counted the U.S. as an ally — one that supplied it with weapons during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. It also ignores that the story did not end with Desert Shield.

    The U.S. quickly shifted its supposed defense of Kuwait into its own invasion — Operation Desert Storm — of Iraq. In that assault, the U.S. killed some 100,000 Iraqis and shattered the country. It then imposed catastrophic economic sanctions on Iraq, which were responsible for the deaths of another million Iraqis. It accompanied this policy with air patrols of Iraq, and bombed the country intermittently over the next decade. And finally, the U.S. invaded once again in 2003, occupied Iraq after and maintains about 2,500 troops there to this day.

    Cherry-picking past examples of U.S. intervention excludes vital context and falls short of telling the whole story. Narratives like these obscure ongoing, longstanding military operations and other policies that make the world more dangerous and which have no end in sight.

    Still, there are moments when officials share details that unintentionally reveal that U.S. involvement in the crisis on the Ukrainian border is far more complicated than they have been acknowledging.

    With 8,500 U.S. troops readied for deployment, a journalist asked during a White House press conference if sending forces to the countries that NATO counts as its “Eastern Flank” might escalate the situation rather than calm it. “We’ve had troops in the Eastern Flank countries for decades,” Press Secretary Jen Psaki replied.

    Indeed, the U.S. maintains an enormous, nuclear armed military presence in Europe — and in the years leading up to the current crisis, it has spent millions of dollars arming Ukraine in particular.

    Since the 2014 conflict in Ukraine, in which Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, the U.S. has sent hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Ukraine — in 2015, 2018, 2019 and 2020 — including its celebrated Javelin missiles.

    Psaki’s admission begs some follow-up questions: If U.S. troops and weapons have already been in Ukraine for years — and in Europe for decades — but their presence has not deterred Russia from mobilizing troops to the Ukrainian border, why does the Pentagon think that more weapons and troops will do so now? And could it be, perhaps, that this same U.S. militarism is a cause of rising tension in Eastern Europe, rather than its solution?

    It would be wrong to minimize the potential devastation of a Russian invasion of Ukraine should one occur. But U.S. actions are raising tensions rather than resolving them. While they speak of Ukrainian sovereignty, it is clear that U.S. officials are primarily preoccupied with Russian military aggression that they see as threatening a world order that the U.S. presides over. And as Representative Fitzpatrick makes clear, they also want to send a message to China and other states that they consider hostile.

    Ultimately, increased U.S. militarism in Eastern Europe — as history has repeatedly made clear — will only make the situation worse.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Requiem for a People-Centered World Dream

    My dream is to invite a reader into a room and pour a nice cup of tea . . . and then nail the door shut.

    — author Charles Bowden, 2010 NPR interview

    There is so much daily that expresses so much about the slippery slopes we are in globally because of predatory-penury-parasitic-pugilistic capitalism.

    In the USA, on this continent, north, and south of those colonial and Manifest Destiny “borders,” the amount of both absurdity and abomination is magnified in a world of protracted panic.

    It’s there, truly, the panic. Young people are offing themselves with Narcan and with opiates. There are more dreams not only deferred, but dreams turned into nightmares by a thousand cuts.

    We have a world where getting into uniform, with a rifle, with a joystick for murder incorporated, is the new abnormal. Hitch up in the killing machine US Army for $50K.

    If this isn’t blasphemy, then, you know we have lathered ourselves on that slippery slope of the multi-pronged Faustian Bargain.

    Then, more mercenaries recruited for big bonuses: Make that the disgusting US Army,

    You know how messed up the USA is, from A to Z, and the news continues to illustrate the dying empire. Paying punks to enlist in the killing machine!

    FORT CAMPBELL, KY — The U.S. Army is offering its largest bonus ever for new recruits with up to $50,000 available to qualified individuals who sign on for a six-year active-duty enlistment.

    The total incentive package for a new recruit is based on a combination of incentives offered for the selected career field, individual qualifications, length of the enlistment contract, and the ship date for training.

    In the past, enlistment incentives for full-time soldiers could not exceed $40,000.

    The Army is competing for the same talent as the other services as well as the private sector and must have the ability to generate interest in the current employment environment, according to Maj. Gen. Kevin Vereen, who leads U.S. Army Recruiting Command in its mission to fill full-time and part-time vacancies in about 150 career fields in the regular Army and the Army Reserve.

    “This is an opportunity to entice folks to consider the Army,” said Brig. Gen. John Cushing, who serves as the deputy commanding general for operations under Vereen at USAREC. “We’ve taken a look at the critical (military occupational specialties) we need to fill in order to maintain the training bases, and that is where we place a lot of our emphasis.”

    Now run that up against The Man who coined the term Military Industrial Complex, and a new book written by, well, shall we call that person part of the elite, part of the chosen people from Ivy League and East Coast silver spoon roots. And, in the magazine that for many is a sell-out, for sure, Jacobin: Here, the article reviewing the man and the book.

    Crisscrossing the country, Butler denounced US warmaking abroad and ruling-class violence at home as two sides of the same bloody coin, telling audiences from Racine to Roanoke that America was divided into “two classes”:

    On one side, a class of citizens who were raised to believe that the whole of this country was created for their sole benefit, and on the other side, the other 99 percent of us, the soldier class, the class from which all of you soldiers came.

    Butler published a short book, War Is a Racket, collecting the key themes of his orations in 1935. Later, in an essay in the socialist magazine Common Sense, Butler confessed to having been a “racketeer for capitalism,” elaborating that, as “a member of our country’s most agile military force,” he had served as “a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers.” In 1936, Marine Corps informants sent to spy on the ex-general observed him speaking on a panel alongside self-identified Communists and reported that “the General appeared to us to be either insane or an out and out traitor.”

    [Major General John A. Lejeune, head of the Marine Corps, calls on General Smedley Butler in camp at Frederick, Maryland in 1922. (Bettmann / Getty Images)]

    And, as an aside, but a big ASIDE, we are in a time of collective cholera of the conscious, in this remote work, remote being, remote news world. Just watching the fake left, Amy Goodman, daily (M-F) with an absolute stiff arm to authority, as the Democracy Now newsroom in New York is with Goodman, solo, while her correspondents, including Juan Gonzalez, are stuck in their homes with their laptops and tiny cameras and mic delivering their fear porn.

    Young Lords logo.png

    Imagine this happening today, 2022 — Verboten, again, in the Zoom Doom of Dead Consciousness. Mask up, sit on your toilet, tune into Zoom, if you are lucky:

    [Students at the University of California at Berkeley filing in to listen to Smedley Butler’s Peace Day address in 1939. (Library of Congress)]

    I analyzed Juan’s book, News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, a while back. Remember, Juan was once in the radical group, the Young Lords.

    Luís Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway, said “…in Murder City Charles Bowden plunges in head-first, without a parachute. There are moments when the book threatens to burst into flames and burn your hands.”

    We are in a time of cholera of the consciousness, of infantalized masses following the dictates of a few chosen people, men and women of those classes, those groupings, the vetted and vaunted few, the ones who have been knighted by the lords of finance insurance real estate, and, more than FIRE, but the complex: Butler, War is a Racket.

    Of course, it isn’t put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and “we must all put our shoulders to the wheel,” but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket — and are safely pocketed. Let’s just take a few examples:

    Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people — didn’t one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. It wasn’t much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let’s look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.

    Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump — or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!

    Or, let’s take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.

    There you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let’s look at something else. A little copper, perhaps. That always does well in war times.

    Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910-1914 of $10,000,000. During the war years 1914-1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year.

    Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910-1914 period. Jumped to an average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.

    Let’s group these five, with three smaller companies. The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910-1914 were $137,480,000. Then along came the war. The average yearly profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000.

    A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent.

    Read the short book, then scale it up to today! Trillions stolen from US taxpayers, and all the apps, all the services of the private money hecklers who have gotten sweetheart contracts with every branch of the government you and I supposedly fought for. All those trillions in bribes and bailouts. Imagine that, a Trump LLC and then a CitiBank Biden BBB. And before these two scoundrels? Do the history, look at the administrations, and figure it out. Here, just one short diatribe featuring one hell of a Satan, Kissinger. Beware of the verbiage I deploy to singe this fellow and those presidents who have utilized this war criminal. I have already gotten emails threatening me for the Blog Post. And notice all those cozy photos of Henry Kissinger with all the tribes of descrutive capitalism, a la war. War on us, war on societies, war on nations, war on children, war on ecology, war on thought, war on agency, war on the human body, war on thought.  “Tribalism Rules.”

    So here we are, now, the kernel of this diatribe today — our faces. Oh, how we give up more and more each day, until the chip is in the back of the neck, and those bots are gathered in our organs with graphene building blocks to our souls.

    Again, I harp on this one blasphemey, IRS demanding facial recognition — and that agency is for us, right? A truly representative form of democracy demands we the people have a huge say in what happens to us, and that’s not just idiotic voting, but again, “War is a Racket” is now “Banking-AI-Pharma-Med-Entertainment-Science-Education-Prisons-Law-Congress-Energy-Transportation-Chemicals-Engineering-Space-Data” ARE the Racket.” This is yet another single story that comes to us via the Net which is yet another chink in the armor of humanity plucked from our souls:

    The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the US will require people to submit a facial scan through a third party provider to make payments or file taxes online. The system raises obvious privacy concerns.

    Currently, users only require a username and password to log into their IRS accounts. But starting the summer of 2022, users will need to verify their identity through a third-party identity verification company called ID.me. The change was first noticed by Krebs on Security.

    So you dig a bit, and find out who these millionaires and hedge funders and social impact investors are behind this “third party” (gouging, sick profiteers) outfit, ID Me!

    Nader’s good, but he can only go so far. Yesterrday, 1/20, on Democracy Now, a rare media visit for Ralph Nader, who has been locked out of board rooms, out of newsrooms, locked out of so much for decades, when his memory, his insight, his analyses are vital to institutional memory and his own sort of harping against the profiteers.

    He has to beat those dead horses, multiple times, year after year . . . dead horses tied to the fact there are no real journalists in the legacy media, and that there are no cops working the FTC or DoJ or EPA or FDA. He is spot on, but he never gets on NPR or PBS or Fox or CBS. Nader is spot on about Republicans being fascistic and messianic. They are, of course, worse:

    And the reporters didn’t take him to task there. The reporters, either they’re not doing their homework or they’re full of taboos. I mean, they never raise the corporate supremacy over our country. There isn’t a single agency in the federal government that isn’t influenced maximally by corporate lobbies. And Congress is swarmed by corporate lobbies. You have 500 drug company lobbyists full-time assigned to Congress, and there are 535 members of Congress. And these corporations are strategically commercializing every aspect of our society, commercializing childhood, strategically planning the tax system, the food system, the health system, fighting global warming remedies, the fossil fuel industry, ExxonMobil. They’re planning our genetic inheritance. Commercializing childhood should be a left-right issue, conservative issue. The press never asks about it. The self-censorship of the press is overwhelming. That’s why we have to have a more independent media.

    We have to have — I mean, look at the coverage of Ukraine. As Katrina pointed out, if our country was invaded in a span of 40 years from the north, with 50 million casualties, what do you think we would do? Do you think we would just station troops on the northern border? We would have taken over the northern country and annexed it. And that’s why dictator Putin can get away with what he’s doing now, in terms of public opinion of the impoverished Russian people, is because they remember. They have their casualties in their families from the western frontiers, started with Napoleon.

    And here we are, expanding a military alliance for arms sales for the military-industrial complex, because, as was pointed out, a condition of joining NATO is to buy the F-16 and other weapons in Eastern European countries. NATO is a military alliance organized against the Soviet Union. And now they’re expanding it in Eastern Europe and putting troops there. It’s, here we go again, a completely preventable conflict. What Putin really wants is Ukraine never to join NATO, no strategic offensive weapons in the Ukraine. He’s asking for ending strategic weapons in Europe — that is not going to happen.

    But the press asks war-inciting questions. NPR asked it. David Sanger asked it. They asked war-inciting questions. It’s like Vietnam all over again. It’s like Iraq all over again. They don’t ask peace-inciting questions about diplomacy. And this is a dangerous situation, and the press just isn’t doing its job. It isn’t just Biden.

    He can’t communicate how the GOP is opposed to everything that’s defined as human. You don’t make moral appeals to the GOP, like Senator Warnock just did. You show that they are opposed to sending $250 and $300 monthly checks to 65 million children, which has stopped now, and the GOP will not expand it. I mean, that’s a good political item to communicate to the American people. Those 65 million children come from conservative and liberal families who are both deprived. He doesn’t know how to communicate. The GOP knows what it wants. It’s messianic. It’s fascistic. It’s driven. And the communication from the Democrats, from the DNC to the White House, is weak. It’s anemic. And the public senses that. (source)

    See the source image

    Finally, a story NOT covered in legacy media or left wing media. Ralph doesn’t get it yet. He still believes in his book title, how billionaires will save the world.

    See the source image

     

    He’s dead wrong about the above statement/title of one of his books. And, here it is, again, social impact investing, and the soul of humanity, especially youth, being sucked up by the ultra rich and investment teams for their data and their compliance — The Internet of Bodies and Human Capital Futures Bets In Brazil

    In the coming years, global financiers, will attempt to meld dynamic pricing and mobile payments with biometric digital identity, Internet of Body sensors, and blockchain smart contracts and then weave it all into an expansive spatial web meant to control our social and economic relations in both the material world and, through digital assets, rights and privileges, in the Metaverse, as well. Click here to listen to an interview I did with Bonnie Faulkner of Guns and Butter that goes into more detail about how impact investing connects to digital twins, and mixed reality.

    Surely it is twisted to view communities as resource deposits of untapped data, but that is the logic of end-stage capitalism. The infrastructure needed to scale human capital finance profit are ICT (Individual Communication Technology) devices including phones, tablets, and inexpensive computers like chrome books; wearable technologies and biosensors; and 5-6G used in combination with data-dashboards that verify impact data against predictions and success metrics laid out in the terms of the deals. These are all things one finds in recreation centers in the United States now, and given inroads made by the Aspen Institute, Stanford, Harvard and the like, they will very likely become standard issue in the favelas, too. Not because any of it is good for children, but because the children’s data has value, and their compliance has value.

    The Metaverse will be populated by compliant avatars. Beyond social impact, the conditioning of the young to cyborg life is going full throttle. Meanwhile for portfolio managers, children’s futures are just tranches of investment – data commodities. It’s only business. — Alison McDowell, Wrench in the Gears (dot) com!

    Most people I talk with do not have the bandwidth or wherewithal to understand this next stage, end stage, capitalism into our very souls, which is fascism, inverted totalitarianism, all bunched up in a world of chaos, all drawn and quartered on the backs of us, vis-a-vis all these scams of Build Back Better variety, or UN’s sustainability goals and Universal Basic Income propaganda, and the 4IR and WEF — the fourth industrial revolution is part and parcel of the Great Reset.

    This sort of stuff Alison writes about does get under many of our skins, but for the most part, I know so many people who have given up, who think that we all are data mined anyways, that we have all our info in the banking-IRS-DMV-insurance-medical-education superhighway of giving up all agency, anyway, so what’s the big deal we are being tracked, and what’s the big deal that our kids are being watched and what’s wrong with our ovaries and prostates and such being monitored by the Internet of Bodies and Nano-Things when we just have to lean back and enjoy this new world?

    And I have harped for 17 years here at Dissident Voice, and decades before, in newsrooms, in classrooms, in homeless shelters, in programs for the disenfranchised, on stage, at conferences for sustainability, on my radio show, elsewhere. I have harped and harped about the false flags, about the overlords drilling into our very being, about more and more of our agency stripped from us daily, not as part of a huge democratically controlled system of community building, power to the people organizing, or we are the 80 Percent movements, but to mine our souls so we are ghosts in their machines.

    The agency we have given up was with that passport, all those sick people who pressed my ass at various border control passings. Strip searched and body cavity groped twice. Then, all the shot records needed to go here and go there. All the proof of life in school (Iowa IQ tests), the SAT, the LSAT, all the tests (run by the chose people, millionaires) and all the records of accomplishment, of criminal involvement, all the credit scores and all the car blunders, all of that kept for THEM, the Complext, the Insurance, Real Estate, Finance, FIRE, millionaires who get legislation in THEIR favor passed through the tricks of pimping and prostituting and arm twisting and outright bribery.

    Imagine, protests and cops rounding us up, and then court cases, appearances, the hassles, the humiliations. Try it out for size.

    How many arguments have I had with MD’s who know squat about nutrition and each time challenged me and my vegetarianism? Me, running 6 miles a day, biking 30 and scrambling underwater and up hills?

    How man dirty arguments about “that” history, versus a new and improved revisionist history vital to a population from which to rise up and take on the paymasters, the body snatchers, the mind thieves?

    Until we are here, 2022, in a chamber of stupidity, all the dumb and worthless stuff out there, all the racists and white-priviledged perspectives out there pounding it in the heads of unsuspecting youth, K12, TikTok, YouTube, all of the Net and WWW. All the Ivy League and Oxford-trained scum who determine not only our futures, but write our histories, and what they write is almost always semi-dead wrong. Because without the voices of the oppressed, those on the streets, in homeless camps, those suffering poverty and the inflammatory disease of capitalism; i.e., fines-tolls-fees-surcharges-service fees-handling charges-tickets-code violations-late fees-taxes-triple taxations-levies-processing fees-mortgages-ball on payments-PayDay loan rigged systems — without their voices at the forefront, and in the newsrooms, inside schools, and in the publishing houses and the actual process of writing their own stories, then we have the tin ear writers and prognosticators and anthropologists and psychologists, the elite, the highly connected, the bias of the white man and white woman writing about us.

    They get it wrong 90 percent of the time!

    Now, if this graphic doesn’t run chills up and down your spine, then, you are not following the overlords’ script. Catch up please!

    UNSIF 17 UNSDGs

    Dig down and listen, watch, read: And it’s not pretty, and it’s not slick, and it’s not all east coast, Ivy League, London Bridges Falling Down stuff.

    Finally, I was reading about Charles Bowden last night. Found a piece in Literary Hub, and then went backwards to see one of his talks. Rough guy, but an amazing chronicler of people.”Eulogy for a Visionary: On the Grim Narrative Introspection of Charles Bowden — Leath Tonino Considers His Brief Correspondence with the Author of Murder City”

    The piece was written and published December 2021, even though Chuck died in 2014.

    Here, a gravel-voiced Chuck talking to the California Commonwealth Club. Mostly about the lies around the war on drugs.  I talked with Chuck years ago, in the 199os, in Juarez and El Paso. I was working on things for the two newspapers, and he was working the narcotraficante stories. That’s a whole other story, of my life maybe some autofiction is due, but for now, here, from the young writer who wanted to interview Chuck in Tucson, but never got the chance since Chuck died at 69 in his sleep. His piece is from the heart, and good.

    My first thought: Murder City, solid title.

    It was 2011 and I was scraping by in San Francisco, spending hours at the public library, tinkering with writing projects, browsing the stacks during breaks. The name on the book’s spine—Charles Bowden—was familiar yet unfamiliar; essayist Rebecca Solnit, a neighbor with whom I’d recently taken a long walk, had referenced Bowden, telling me that “he could make your skin crawl by describing a Q-tips factory.” Uncertain what that meant, but eager to learn, I slipped Murder City from the shelf, intending to start it when I got home, sip some vodka, have myself a relaxed Friday evening.

    Little did I know that Bowden, a veteran investigative reporter from the South-west, author of twenty-five-plus books about polluted rivers, crooks in silk suits, flies swarming over pooled blood, collapsing communities, contract killers, rattlesnakes, and desire, had a slightly different plan. In a 2010 NPR interview, he summarized his approach to crafting stories on the page: “My dream is to invite a reader into a room and pour a nice cup of tea . . . and then nail the door shut.”

    So, I end with a dead man, his words not dead, the voice alive on YouTube, and what an interesting conversation it would be with him now, as it would be with Andre Vltchek, with Kevin Zeese,  with David Graeber. So many others, long gone, or just gone. Even Gonzo Thompson.

    I have been coming to this city [Ciudad Juárez] for thirteen years, and naturally, I have, like everyone here, an investment in the dead. And the living. Here is a story, and like all stories here, like Miss Sinaloa, it tantalizes and floats in the air, and then vanishes. — From Murder City

    More from Bowden, at the Lannan Foundation.

    Charles Bowden (1945-2014) was the author of scores of books including A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior; Down By the River: Drugs, Money, Murder and Family; Juárez: The Laboratory of our Future; and Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America.  In Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields, he presented a devastating chronicle of a city in collapse where not just the police and drug cartel members die as violence infects every level of society. Luís Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway, said “…in Murder City Bowden plunges in head-first, without a parachute. There are moments when the book threatens to burst into flames and burn your hands.” Bowden was a contributing editor for GQ and Mother Jones, and also wrote for Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, and Aperture. Winner of a 1996 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction, he lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

    Post Script — One story is worth a thousand points of stabbing (not lights). Two here to end this missive. If you haven’t figured out how ugly the overlords and then the Eichmann’s are, then, gain, read, live, walk the streets:

    The queen and her minimum wage payout, oh those billionaires! The pay for the 20-hour-per-week job is £9.50, or the equivalent of $12.96 an hour. That reflects the U.K.’s new minimum wage, which will rise from £8.91 an hour now to £9.50 an hour in April.

    Queen Elizabeth II tours Queen Mother Square on October 27, 2016, in Poundbury, England.

    70C375A3-2DFF-4D1D-99EC-3B2FE40524D9

    “I apologize to the person who appeared before me and to our entire community for having failed to meet the high standards that we expect of our judicial officers, and that I expect of myself,” Alexis Krot said in a statement posted on the court’s website.

    The statement was dated Tuesday, days after she ordered Burhan Chowdhury to pay $100 for failing to get rid of weeds and other vegetation at the rear of his property. The judge’s apology followed a TV report about the case and criticism about how she treated the man.

    “Shameful! The neighbors should not have to look at that. You should be ashamed of yourself,” Krot said during the online hearing. “If I could give you jail time on this, I would.”

    Chowdhury, a native of Bangladesh, explained that he was weak with cancer. A son, Shibbir Chowdhury, said he helps his father with the yard but was out of the country at the time last year.

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