VFP-111 Supports WWU Student Demands
for Divestments from Genocide, Apartheid, or War -
and Their Rights to Express Them
for Divestments from Genocide, Apartheid, or War -
and Their Rights to Express Them
On Friday, March 3, WWU students presented demands for divestment from war profiteers in solidarity with Occupied Palestine. Read the here,and follow @studentsinsolidaritywwu on Instagram for updates.
May 3, 2024
Dear,
President Dr. Sabah Randhawa,
Western Washington University’s Board of Trustees,
Students, Faculty and Staff
We write this letter as a diverse and rapidly growing coalition of student organizations, led by Western Washington University’s Jewish Voice for Peace and Arab Student Association. We are united in our unshakeable demand for a free and liberated Palestine. Thus, we invoke the power of our position as students to demand Western Washington University to cut ties with and divest from Israel’s genocidal, settler-colonial occupation of Palestine, and all institutions implicated in supporting the apartheid regime.
As we make these demands for the decolonization of Palestine and an end to the genocide of the Palestinian people, we recognize that we live and study on stolen land. We stand in solidarity with the struggles of the Indigenous peoples of these lands and waters, the Nooksack, Lummi, and other Coast Salish peoples, and their decolonization movement. These movements for liberation and decolonization are intertwined and require attention as we fight for the liberation
of all peoples.
These are our demands:
1. ACKNOWLEDGE HARM AND CORRECT WRONGS - Publicly acknowledge the harm
that the University has inflicted upon Arab and Arab-American students on campus through lack of support, silence during the genocide of Palestinian people, and demonization of the Arab and Arab-American students. The administration has continually failed to protect Arab and Arab-American students from harassment and has actively spread misinformation about the word Intifada and other protest chants, endangering Arab and Arab-American students. This is unacceptable and must be acknowledged publicly. ULTIMATELY, Western must collaborate with
students and faculty to adopt an institutional definition of antisemitism that clearly distinguishes antisemitism and anti-Zionism, protects the right to condemn Zionism as a racist endeavor, and the right to condemn the existence of the apartheid, settler-colonial state that is Israel.
2. FULL FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE - Disclose all direct and indirect investments,
agreements, and contracts with companies and institutions complicit in Israel’s illegal settler-colonial occupation of Palestine. This includes but is not limited to all weapons manufacturing companies and all companies on the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) list.
3. COMPLETE DIVESTMENT FROM ISRAEL - End All direct and indirect investments, agreements, and contracts with companies and institutions complicit in Israel’s illegal settler-colonial occupation of Palestine. This includes all direct and indirect investments in weapons manufacturing companies and companies on the BDS list. This requires the termination of all academic and financial relationships with Boeing. Remove Sabra Hummus from the dining halls and campus markets. Cut all ties with The Hewlett-Packard (HP) Company. Immediately and permanently cancel the study abroad program at Haifa University and cancel all current and future forms of cooperation with Israeli academic institutions.
4. INVEST IN COMMUNITY - Ensure the success of the Ethnic Studies department launch in Fall 2024 by creating three additional visiting positions for the 2024-2025 academic year with the possibility of renewal (in the areas of decolonial studies, global liberation struggles, postcolonial studies, post-imperial studies and transnational feminisms). Create a permanent line item in the university budget to fund an annual faculty teach-in that centers a decolonialist approach to academia. This must include material that centers the racist history of the United States’ academic institutions through the perpetuation of colonization on Turtle Island and
abroad. Finally, provide funding for a quarterly workshop focused on movement building and solidarity amongst various student groups, facilitated by an individual approved by the Ethnic Studies Department.
5. SCHEDULE AN EMERGENCY BOARD OF TRUSTEES MEETING by Monday, May
6th, 2024 to implement our demands. This meeting must happen before Friday, May 10th, 2024.
…
Western Washington University’s Endowment is managed by an investment company called Russell Investments, in Seattle. WWU provides no transparency to where our money is invested. Read our “expanded demands” and learn more about WWU’s ties to the egregious war crimes and apartheid regime Israel imposes on Palestinians.
…
We draw strength and resolve from the long history of anti-Zionist organizing and solidarity work, and we make these demands with the knowledge that the dignity and liberation of Palestinian people and Jewish people are irrevocably intertwined. We believe in the necessity of critiquing and holding the State of Israel accountable for their egregious crimes against humanity and willful violations of international law. We vehemently reject the narrative that Judaism and Zionism are one and the same, and we stand firm in our commitment to the Palestinian liberation movement and to Judaism beyond Zionism.
In 1948, Zionist militias violently and forcibly displaced over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, claiming their land for Israel and denying Palestinians the right of return in violation of Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Human rights experts at the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other major organizations have identified the discrimination against Palestinians under the Israeli occupation as an apartheid system, citing the systematic oppression of Palestinians through 65+ discriminatory laws. For
the last 16 years, the IOF has implemented a military blockade on Gaza, controlling and preventing the entry of food, water, medical supplies, and electricity and separating families. The most recent aggression on Gaza that began over 6 months ago, in October 2023, is the escalation of a decades-long ethnic cleansing project implemented through this apartheid regime, by means
of the construction of illegal settlements, military control checkpoints, kidnapping, and surveillance. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, at least 34,183 people have been killed and 77,084 have been wounded in Israeli attacks since October 2023. Since October, the U.S. has sent billions of dollars in aid to the Israeli government. The U.S. media continues to dehumanize the Palestinian people and justify the violence against them.
Generations of students at Western have been catalysts for change at our university by speaking their demands to our administration clearly and unequivocally; we follow in their legacy and state once again that it is far overdue for WWU to commit to materially supporting its students and investing in morality and ethics. We stand firmly in solidarity with the demands of students that have gone unanswered by the administration. Neither the silence of our president, our board of trustees, nor our own will protect us.
Following the intensified and abhorrent bombardment of the Gaza Strip over the past 7 months, Jewish, Arab, and Arab-American student-led groups, alongside the support of many others, coordinated actions and teach-ins to mobilize our community into action and demand outrage at a genocide that is taking the lives of thousands of parents, children, and other loved ones in Palestine. We have come together again and again to refuse business as usual as we see this
U.S.-funded genocide unfolding in front of our eyes. In response, the WWU administration has failed to protect Palestinian, Arab, Arab-American, and Muslim students from escalating hatred and misrepresentation. The WWU administration has failed to acknowledge the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, misinformed the student body about the meaning of the Arabic word “Intifada”, and failed to denounce the Bellingham Herald’s spreading of misinformation about the WWU ASA, allowing this harm to go unchecked. This clearly demonstrates that the struggle against oppression in Palestine has personal and political ramifications in our city.
We write to you today because we reject the normalcy of genocide. We built these demands out of frustration and outrage as Western continues to not only disengage and ignore the calls of students to stand against Israeli apartheid, but actively normalize this genocide by sustaining relationships with weapons manufacturers and targeting and doxxing the voices of Arab students, who have worked tirelessly for liberation amidst a hostile backdrop that refuses to acknowledge their efforts, existence, and history.
It has been made explicitly clear that we as students are only welcome at this University if we comply with the status quo of silence and militarization; a status quo by which genocide and the incessant violence unleashed by the IOF and the Israeli government is legitimized. We not only fight for a future that sees the people of Palestine liberated, but a future that sees all people free from oppression, exploitation, imperialism, and occupation. We entrust this university with our lives and our futures, and therefore we must demand that WWU invests in a future we can accept.
We deserve an education that does not fund genocide, apartheid, or war. We deserve an education that does not rely on the exploitation and destruction of others. We deserve an education that does not fan the flames of hate and spread divisive lies and destructive historical omissions. People in Palestine deserve to live. We demand that our tuition dollars be divested from the genocide of Palestinian people. None of us are free until all of us are free.
Dear,
President Dr. Sabah Randhawa,
Western Washington University’s Board of Trustees,
Students, Faculty and Staff
We write this letter as a diverse and rapidly growing coalition of student organizations, led by Western Washington University’s Jewish Voice for Peace and Arab Student Association. We are united in our unshakeable demand for a free and liberated Palestine. Thus, we invoke the power of our position as students to demand Western Washington University to cut ties with and divest from Israel’s genocidal, settler-colonial occupation of Palestine, and all institutions implicated in supporting the apartheid regime.
As we make these demands for the decolonization of Palestine and an end to the genocide of the Palestinian people, we recognize that we live and study on stolen land. We stand in solidarity with the struggles of the Indigenous peoples of these lands and waters, the Nooksack, Lummi, and other Coast Salish peoples, and their decolonization movement. These movements for liberation and decolonization are intertwined and require attention as we fight for the liberation
of all peoples.
These are our demands:
1. ACKNOWLEDGE HARM AND CORRECT WRONGS - Publicly acknowledge the harm
that the University has inflicted upon Arab and Arab-American students on campus through lack of support, silence during the genocide of Palestinian people, and demonization of the Arab and Arab-American students. The administration has continually failed to protect Arab and Arab-American students from harassment and has actively spread misinformation about the word Intifada and other protest chants, endangering Arab and Arab-American students. This is unacceptable and must be acknowledged publicly. ULTIMATELY, Western must collaborate with
students and faculty to adopt an institutional definition of antisemitism that clearly distinguishes antisemitism and anti-Zionism, protects the right to condemn Zionism as a racist endeavor, and the right to condemn the existence of the apartheid, settler-colonial state that is Israel.
2. FULL FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE - Disclose all direct and indirect investments,
agreements, and contracts with companies and institutions complicit in Israel’s illegal settler-colonial occupation of Palestine. This includes but is not limited to all weapons manufacturing companies and all companies on the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) list.
3. COMPLETE DIVESTMENT FROM ISRAEL - End All direct and indirect investments, agreements, and contracts with companies and institutions complicit in Israel’s illegal settler-colonial occupation of Palestine. This includes all direct and indirect investments in weapons manufacturing companies and companies on the BDS list. This requires the termination of all academic and financial relationships with Boeing. Remove Sabra Hummus from the dining halls and campus markets. Cut all ties with The Hewlett-Packard (HP) Company. Immediately and permanently cancel the study abroad program at Haifa University and cancel all current and future forms of cooperation with Israeli academic institutions.
4. INVEST IN COMMUNITY - Ensure the success of the Ethnic Studies department launch in Fall 2024 by creating three additional visiting positions for the 2024-2025 academic year with the possibility of renewal (in the areas of decolonial studies, global liberation struggles, postcolonial studies, post-imperial studies and transnational feminisms). Create a permanent line item in the university budget to fund an annual faculty teach-in that centers a decolonialist approach to academia. This must include material that centers the racist history of the United States’ academic institutions through the perpetuation of colonization on Turtle Island and
abroad. Finally, provide funding for a quarterly workshop focused on movement building and solidarity amongst various student groups, facilitated by an individual approved by the Ethnic Studies Department.
5. SCHEDULE AN EMERGENCY BOARD OF TRUSTEES MEETING by Monday, May
6th, 2024 to implement our demands. This meeting must happen before Friday, May 10th, 2024.
…
Western Washington University’s Endowment is managed by an investment company called Russell Investments, in Seattle. WWU provides no transparency to where our money is invested. Read our “expanded demands” and learn more about WWU’s ties to the egregious war crimes and apartheid regime Israel imposes on Palestinians.
…
We draw strength and resolve from the long history of anti-Zionist organizing and solidarity work, and we make these demands with the knowledge that the dignity and liberation of Palestinian people and Jewish people are irrevocably intertwined. We believe in the necessity of critiquing and holding the State of Israel accountable for their egregious crimes against humanity and willful violations of international law. We vehemently reject the narrative that Judaism and Zionism are one and the same, and we stand firm in our commitment to the Palestinian liberation movement and to Judaism beyond Zionism.
In 1948, Zionist militias violently and forcibly displaced over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, claiming their land for Israel and denying Palestinians the right of return in violation of Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Human rights experts at the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other major organizations have identified the discrimination against Palestinians under the Israeli occupation as an apartheid system, citing the systematic oppression of Palestinians through 65+ discriminatory laws. For
the last 16 years, the IOF has implemented a military blockade on Gaza, controlling and preventing the entry of food, water, medical supplies, and electricity and separating families. The most recent aggression on Gaza that began over 6 months ago, in October 2023, is the escalation of a decades-long ethnic cleansing project implemented through this apartheid regime, by means
of the construction of illegal settlements, military control checkpoints, kidnapping, and surveillance. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, at least 34,183 people have been killed and 77,084 have been wounded in Israeli attacks since October 2023. Since October, the U.S. has sent billions of dollars in aid to the Israeli government. The U.S. media continues to dehumanize the Palestinian people and justify the violence against them.
Generations of students at Western have been catalysts for change at our university by speaking their demands to our administration clearly and unequivocally; we follow in their legacy and state once again that it is far overdue for WWU to commit to materially supporting its students and investing in morality and ethics. We stand firmly in solidarity with the demands of students that have gone unanswered by the administration. Neither the silence of our president, our board of trustees, nor our own will protect us.
Following the intensified and abhorrent bombardment of the Gaza Strip over the past 7 months, Jewish, Arab, and Arab-American student-led groups, alongside the support of many others, coordinated actions and teach-ins to mobilize our community into action and demand outrage at a genocide that is taking the lives of thousands of parents, children, and other loved ones in Palestine. We have come together again and again to refuse business as usual as we see this
U.S.-funded genocide unfolding in front of our eyes. In response, the WWU administration has failed to protect Palestinian, Arab, Arab-American, and Muslim students from escalating hatred and misrepresentation. The WWU administration has failed to acknowledge the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, misinformed the student body about the meaning of the Arabic word “Intifada”, and failed to denounce the Bellingham Herald’s spreading of misinformation about the WWU ASA, allowing this harm to go unchecked. This clearly demonstrates that the struggle against oppression in Palestine has personal and political ramifications in our city.
We write to you today because we reject the normalcy of genocide. We built these demands out of frustration and outrage as Western continues to not only disengage and ignore the calls of students to stand against Israeli apartheid, but actively normalize this genocide by sustaining relationships with weapons manufacturers and targeting and doxxing the voices of Arab students, who have worked tirelessly for liberation amidst a hostile backdrop that refuses to acknowledge their efforts, existence, and history.
It has been made explicitly clear that we as students are only welcome at this University if we comply with the status quo of silence and militarization; a status quo by which genocide and the incessant violence unleashed by the IOF and the Israeli government is legitimized. We not only fight for a future that sees the people of Palestine liberated, but a future that sees all people free from oppression, exploitation, imperialism, and occupation. We entrust this university with our lives and our futures, and therefore we must demand that WWU invests in a future we can accept.
We deserve an education that does not fund genocide, apartheid, or war. We deserve an education that does not rely on the exploitation and destruction of others. We deserve an education that does not fan the flames of hate and spread divisive lies and destructive historical omissions. People in Palestine deserve to live. We demand that our tuition dollars be divested from the genocide of Palestinian people. None of us are free until all of us are free.
History Rhyming with a Vengance
May 1,2024
May 1,2024
History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Today marks a historic occasion. By seizing control of Hamilton Hall, students at Columbia University have anchored in historical memory the nexus between the horrors inflicted in Vietnam that was the hallmark of my generation with the horrors inflicted in Gaza that is the hallmark of the new generation. It is testament to the majesty of these young people that they have risked their futures for the sake of a poor, powerless people halfway around the world in order to uphold that sacred principle that every life is worthy and the murder of none shall pass in silence. As Abraham Lincoln famously quoted, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." The right of the people of Gaza to live is an eternal truth. May the young soldiers in Hamilton Hall be honored and blessed for not countenancing, come what may, its extinguishment.
Norman Finkelstein
Norman Finkelstein
Long-time Peace Activist and Former NH Peace Action ED Selected to Lead Veterans For Peace
At the board meeting last Saturday Will Hopkins was selected to become the new Executive Director of Veterans For Peace. Will is an Army veteran of the Iraq War, 2004-2005, a VFP life member, a former VFP board member, and served as Executive Director of New Hampshire Peace Action, New Hampshire’s largest and only statewide peace group since 2009. He will replace outgoing VFP Interim ED Mike Ferner, who has done a fabulous job of pulling VFP from the brink of financial and emotional disaster over the past 13 months.
Will is a lifelong New Hampshire resident who served for six years in the New Hampshire National Guard and was decorated for valor during a year-long tour in Iraq as an Infantryman which included the fall 2004 Fallujah offensive.
By way of introducing Will, please watch this four-minute video from a few years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUurt8K8DEs.
Will is a lifelong New Hampshire resident who served for six years in the New Hampshire National Guard and was decorated for valor during a year-long tour in Iraq as an Infantryman which included the fall 2004 Fallujah offensive.
By way of introducing Will, please watch this four-minute video from a few years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUurt8K8DEs.
After a lengthy delay, the House has approved a “foreign aid” package that includes an additional $60 billion for the Ukraine proxy war.1
The infusion of US weaponry, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed, “will keep the war from expanding, save thousands and thousands of lives, and help both of our nations to become stronger.”
In assessing Zelensky’s pronouncements, it is worth recalling that his own aides, in a Time cover story last fall, complained that he “deludes himself” in what they described as an “immovable” and near-“messianic” belief in Ukrainian victory and refusal to negotiate with Russia. Meanwhile, no one has been able to articulate how another $60 billion will change the course of the fight on the ground. Ukraine’s counteroffensive last year – undertaken with even more Western support than the new bill allocates – was a resounding failure, and has been followed by Russian advances.
“We’re already seeing things on the battlefield begin to shift a bit in Russia’s favor,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned Congress last week. On the eastern front, according to Ukrainian military leader Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukrainian positions have “worsened significantly in recent days.”
Even if, miraculously, the US and its partners can overcome Ukraine’s disadvantage in artillery shells and air defenses, no amount of money can manufacture the soldiers needed to fire them. “While thousands volunteered to fight early in the war, few who have not already signed up want to now,” the Washington Post noted earlier this month. According to Romanian authorities, more than 6,000 Ukrainian men have attempted to swim over to their side of the border since Russia’s invasion of Feb. 2022, some dying in the process. “That thousands of Ukrainian men have chosen to risk the swim rather than face the dangers as soldiers on the eastern front highlights the challenge for [Zelensky],” the New York Times observed.
Read complete article on Substack.
The infusion of US weaponry, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed, “will keep the war from expanding, save thousands and thousands of lives, and help both of our nations to become stronger.”
In assessing Zelensky’s pronouncements, it is worth recalling that his own aides, in a Time cover story last fall, complained that he “deludes himself” in what they described as an “immovable” and near-“messianic” belief in Ukrainian victory and refusal to negotiate with Russia. Meanwhile, no one has been able to articulate how another $60 billion will change the course of the fight on the ground. Ukraine’s counteroffensive last year – undertaken with even more Western support than the new bill allocates – was a resounding failure, and has been followed by Russian advances.
“We’re already seeing things on the battlefield begin to shift a bit in Russia’s favor,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned Congress last week. On the eastern front, according to Ukrainian military leader Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukrainian positions have “worsened significantly in recent days.”
Even if, miraculously, the US and its partners can overcome Ukraine’s disadvantage in artillery shells and air defenses, no amount of money can manufacture the soldiers needed to fire them. “While thousands volunteered to fight early in the war, few who have not already signed up want to now,” the Washington Post noted earlier this month. According to Romanian authorities, more than 6,000 Ukrainian men have attempted to swim over to their side of the border since Russia’s invasion of Feb. 2022, some dying in the process. “That thousands of Ukrainian men have chosen to risk the swim rather than face the dangers as soldiers on the eastern front highlights the challenge for [Zelensky],” the New York Times observed.
Read complete article on Substack.
VFP members Ann Wright, Elliott Adams, Barry Riesch, Jayson Mizula, and Bellingham's Michael Jacobsen, and VFP associate members Medea Benjamin, Tighe Barry, Lisa Fithian, Coleen Rowley, and Arla Ertz will be voyaging together on this latest Boat to Gaza. Learn more about this action-packed adventure by listening to David Swanson's interview with Ann Wright on his April 8 Talk World Radio show.
To donate to support the flotilla by check or credit card go to US Boats for Gaza.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
Gaza Destruction Data
Gaza Destruction Data
Moving Back from the Brink
Pacific Northwest organizers join a global campaign to abolish all nukes and push for a city council resolution to start
Gene Marx
Apr 04, 2024
Pacific Northwest organizers join a global campaign to abolish all nukes and push for a city council resolution to start
Gene Marx
Apr 04, 2024
At 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, a flash “brighter than a thousand suns” lit the Alamogordo desert in New Mexico. General Leslie Groves, the overseer of the Manhattan Project estimated the explosive force of Trinity, the first full scale test of the implosion-type atomic fission bomb, “in excess of the equivalent of 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT.”
Grove’s report continued to describe “a fireball brighter than several midday suns;” a stratospheric mushroom cloud over 41,000 feet; and an explosive force resulting in a crater 1,200 feet in diameter and shattering windows 125 miles away.
According to War Secretary Henry Stimson, President Truman was giddy, “tremendously pepped up,” confident and invigorated enough to call the annihilation of Hiroshima three weeks later to the sailors on the USS Augusta while returning from Potsdam “the greatest thing in history.”
Today, a mere lifetime and thousands of Trinities later, nine nuclear nations control the futures of billions of global inhabitants. The cataclysmic potential of more than 13,000 nuclear weapons in 2024, each with unimaginable destructive power, are but a single miscalculation, false flag attack or accident away from ravaging the planet.
Grove’s report continued to describe “a fireball brighter than several midday suns;” a stratospheric mushroom cloud over 41,000 feet; and an explosive force resulting in a crater 1,200 feet in diameter and shattering windows 125 miles away.
According to War Secretary Henry Stimson, President Truman was giddy, “tremendously pepped up,” confident and invigorated enough to call the annihilation of Hiroshima three weeks later to the sailors on the USS Augusta while returning from Potsdam “the greatest thing in history.”
Today, a mere lifetime and thousands of Trinities later, nine nuclear nations control the futures of billions of global inhabitants. The cataclysmic potential of more than 13,000 nuclear weapons in 2024, each with unimaginable destructive power, are but a single miscalculation, false flag attack or accident away from ravaging the planet.
Recently, longtime antinuclear activist, Dr. Helen Caldicott described the medical effects of a single 20-megaton bomb dropped on an American city, New York or maybe Boston:
Russian 20-megaton bomb would enter at 20 times the speed of sound exploding with the heat of the sun, digging a hole three-quarters of a mile wide and 88 feet deep, converting all buildings, people and earth shot up into the air as a mushroom cloud. Twenty miles from the epicenter, all humans would be killed or lethally injured, some converted to charcoal statues. Winds of 500 mph turn people into missiles traveling at 100 mph. A massive conflagration would follow covering 300 square miles and the fires would coalesce across the nation.
As cities burn across the world, a massive cloud of toxic black smoke will elevate into the stratosphere blocking out the sun for ten years inducing a short ice age nuclear winter when all humans and most plants and animals will perish.
Closer to home, the Pacific Northwest is a major nuclear, strategically targeted region in any war, if only to include the 1,300 nuclear warheads at Kitsap Bangor Naval Base and submarine communications base, Naval Radio Station Jim Creek, near Oso, both within 73 and 58 miles, as eagles fly, from Bellingham, both listed as primary U.S. ground zeros for Russia’s crosshairs. Doing the cataclysmic math for a strike on Oso, the City of Subdued Excitement and most of Skagit County would be consumed in less than fifteen minutes in a mega-inferno, and finished off by shockwaves and Carl Sagan’s “witches brew of radioactive particles” raining down as fallout.
Those lucky enough to have survived will realize within minutes they are entirely on their own. No 911. No FEMA. Just struggling to self-survive.
While individual and cultural psychic-numbing provides most of the post-Cold War populace with a much-needed coping mechanism to keep from being overwhelmed. Many of the rest of us remember all too well nuclear annihilation threats from U.S. presidents and Soviet leaders, the inefficacies of civil defense exercises and the Cuban Missile crisis, and most refuse to check out, just yet.
Read complete article on Substack.
Those lucky enough to have survived will realize within minutes they are entirely on their own. No 911. No FEMA. Just struggling to self-survive.
While individual and cultural psychic-numbing provides most of the post-Cold War populace with a much-needed coping mechanism to keep from being overwhelmed. Many of the rest of us remember all too well nuclear annihilation threats from U.S. presidents and Soviet leaders, the inefficacies of civil defense exercises and the Cuban Missile crisis, and most refuse to check out, just yet.
Read complete article on Substack.
Ralph Nader says it matters greatly whether the aggregate toll so far, and counting, is three, four, five, six times more than the Gaza Health Ministry’s undercount.
Since the Hamas raid penetrated the multi-tiered Israeli border security on October 7, 2023 (an unexplained collapse of Israel’s defensive capabilities), 2.3 million utterly defenseless Palestinians in the tiny crowded Gaza enclave have been on the receiving end of over 65,000 bombs/missiles plus non-stop tank shelling and snipers.
The extreme right-wing Netanyahu regime has enforced its declared siege of, in its genocidal words, “no food, no water, no electricity, no fuel, no medicine.”
The relentless bombing has destroyed apartment buildings, marketplaces, refugee camps, hospitals, clinics, ambulances, bakeries, schools, mosques, churches, roads, electricity networks, critical water mains – just about everything.
The U.S.-equipped Israeli war machine has even uprooted agricultural fields, including thousands of olive trees on one farm, bulldozed many cemeteries and bombed civilians fleeing on Israeli orders, while obstructing the few trucks carrying humanitarian aid from Egypt.
With virtually no healthcare left, no medications, and infectious diseases spreading especially among infants, children, the infirm and the elderly, can anybody believe that the fatalities have just gone over 30,000? With five thousand babies born every month into the rubble, their mothers wounded and without food, healthcare, medicine and clean water for any of their children, severe skepticism about the Hamas Health Ministry’s official count is warranted.
Netanyahu and Hamas, which he helped over the years, have a common interest in lowballing the death/injury toll. But for different reasons. Hamas keeps the figures low to reduce being accused by its own people of not protecting them, and not building shelters. Hamas grossly underestimated the savage war crimes by the vengeful, occupying Israeli military superpower fully and unconditionally backed by the U.S. military superpower.
Read complete article on Consortium News.
Aaron Bushnell Burned Himself Alive To Make You Turn Your Eyes To Gaza
Caitlin Johnstone
February 26, 2024
Caitlin Johnstone
February 26, 2024
A woman writes on a sheet as hundreds of people, including Jews, gather in front of the Israeli Embassy to collectively mourn the US airman Aaron Bushnell, 25, an active-duty member of the US Air Force, who died after setting himself ablaze in protest of Israel's ongoing war in Gaza on February 26, 2024, in Washington, DC. People lay flowers, light candles and write on the sheets as they pay their respects.
(Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images)
I watched the uncensored video of US airman Aaron Bushnell self-immolating in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington while screaming “Free Palestine”. I hesitated to watch it because I knew once I put it into my mind it’s there for the rest of my life, but I figured I owe him that much.
I feel like I’ve been picked up and shaken, which I suppose was pretty much what Bushnell was going for. Something to shake the world awake to the reality of what’s happening. Something to snap us out of the brainwashed and distracted stupor of western dystopia and turn our gaze to Gaza.
The sounds stay with you more than the sights. The sound of his gentle, youthful, Michael Cera-like voice as he walked toward the embassy. The sound of the round metal container he stored the accelerant in getting louder as it rolls toward the camera. The sound of Bushnell saying “Free Palestine”, then screaming it, then switching to wordless screams when the pain became too overwhelming, then forcing out one more “Free Palestine” before losing his words for good. The sound of the cop screaming at him to get on the ground over and over again. The sound of a first responder telling police to stop pointing guns at Bushnell’s burning body and go get fire extinguishers.
He remained standing for an unbelievable amount of time while he was burning. I don’t know where he got the strength to do it. He remained standing long after he’d stopped vocalizing.
Bushnell was taken to the hospital, where independent reporter Talia Jane reports that he has died. It was about as horrific a death as a human being can experience, and it was designed to be.
Shortly before his final act in this world, Bushnell posted the following message on Facebook:
I feel like I’ve been picked up and shaken, which I suppose was pretty much what Bushnell was going for. Something to shake the world awake to the reality of what’s happening. Something to snap us out of the brainwashed and distracted stupor of western dystopia and turn our gaze to Gaza.
The sounds stay with you more than the sights. The sound of his gentle, youthful, Michael Cera-like voice as he walked toward the embassy. The sound of the round metal container he stored the accelerant in getting louder as it rolls toward the camera. The sound of Bushnell saying “Free Palestine”, then screaming it, then switching to wordless screams when the pain became too overwhelming, then forcing out one more “Free Palestine” before losing his words for good. The sound of the cop screaming at him to get on the ground over and over again. The sound of a first responder telling police to stop pointing guns at Bushnell’s burning body and go get fire extinguishers.
He remained standing for an unbelievable amount of time while he was burning. I don’t know where he got the strength to do it. He remained standing long after he’d stopped vocalizing.
Bushnell was taken to the hospital, where independent reporter Talia Jane reports that he has died. It was about as horrific a death as a human being can experience, and it was designed to be.
Shortly before his final act in this world, Bushnell posted the following message on Facebook:
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’
“The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
Aaron Bushnell has provided his own answer to this challenge. We’re all providing our own right now.
I would never do what Bushnell did, and I would never recommend anyone else does either. That said, I also can’t deny that his action is having its intended effect: drawing attention to the horrors that are happening in Gaza.
I know this is true because everywhere I see Aaron Bushnell being discussed online I see a massive deluge of pro-Israel trolls frantically swarming the comments in a mad rush to manipulate the narrative. They all understand how destructive it is to US and Israeli information interests for people to be seeing an international news story about a member of the US Air Force self-immolating on camera while screaming “Free Palestine”, and they are doing everything they can to mitigate that damage.
As I write this, there are with absolute certainty people digging through Bushnell’s history searching for dirt that can be spun as evidence that he was a bad person, that he was mentally ill, that he was steered astray by pro-Palestine activists and dissident media — whatever they can make stick. If they find something, literally anything, the smearmeisters and propagandists will run with it as far as they can.
That’s what they’re choosing to do at this point in history. That’s what they would have done during slavery, or the Jim Crow south, or apartheid. That’s what they’re doing while their country commits genocide right now. People are showing what they would have done with their response to Gaza, and they’re showing what they would have done with their response to the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell.
I’m not going to link to the video here; watching it is a personal decision on which you should probably do your own legwork to make sure it’s really what you want. Whether you watch it or not, it happened, just like the incineration of Gaza is happening right now. We each own our personal response to that reality. This is who we are.
I would never do what Bushnell did, and I would never recommend anyone else does either. That said, I also can’t deny that his action is having its intended effect: drawing attention to the horrors that are happening in Gaza.
I know this is true because everywhere I see Aaron Bushnell being discussed online I see a massive deluge of pro-Israel trolls frantically swarming the comments in a mad rush to manipulate the narrative. They all understand how destructive it is to US and Israeli information interests for people to be seeing an international news story about a member of the US Air Force self-immolating on camera while screaming “Free Palestine”, and they are doing everything they can to mitigate that damage.
As I write this, there are with absolute certainty people digging through Bushnell’s history searching for dirt that can be spun as evidence that he was a bad person, that he was mentally ill, that he was steered astray by pro-Palestine activists and dissident media — whatever they can make stick. If they find something, literally anything, the smearmeisters and propagandists will run with it as far as they can.
That’s what they’re choosing to do at this point in history. That’s what they would have done during slavery, or the Jim Crow south, or apartheid. That’s what they’re doing while their country commits genocide right now. People are showing what they would have done with their response to Gaza, and they’re showing what they would have done with their response to the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell.
I’m not going to link to the video here; watching it is a personal decision on which you should probably do your own legwork to make sure it’s really what you want. Whether you watch it or not, it happened, just like the incineration of Gaza is happening right now. We each own our personal response to that reality. This is who we are.
Never tune in to an update from a Pentagon spokesperson and expect to come out of it unscathed. Last night, after actively listening to Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh fielding questions concerning recent deliberate escalation efforts by U.S. forces in the Middle East, I felt ready for an NFL concussion protocol after Singh’s “word jarble.” Her words.
After a cringable start - certainly not up to U.S. war machine mouthpiece John Kirby gaslighting standards - a simple two-part question from Reuter reporter Idrees Ali piqued my attention:
Hey, Sabrina. Is it now fair to say that the U.S. is at war in Yemen? And secondly, there are some reports about a U.S. MQ-9 being shot down over Iraq by Iranian-backed militia. Is that something you're tracking?
I expected the usual dose of warspeak word-salad, but nothing like this:
In terms of your first question, no, we don't seek war. We don't think that we are at war. We don't want to see a regional war. The Houthis are the ones that continue to launch cruise missiles, antiship missiles at innocent mariners, at commercial vessels that are just transiting an area that sees, you know, 10 to 15 percent of world's commerce.
The U.S. is -- what we are doing with our partners is self-defense. We certainly don't want to see this widen out to a regional war and we don't want to see this continue, which is why you have seen the action that we've taken. And as the secretary has stated before, we will continue to take that action if we need to.
Side-stepping end goal and casualty assessments, Singh’s clunky, war-state doublespeak continued for more than a half hour without a mention of the catastrophic Yemeni civil war, launched by Saudi Arabia and backed by the West. More than 377,000 deaths through 2021, with at least 4 million people displaced. Yemen was leveled, and the Houthis have absolutely nothing to lose.
Today the U.S. Central Command reported striking eight more Houthi installations in Yemen. It is the second time British bombers have taken part in the operation, now known as “Poseidon Archer”, suggesting a more organized and potentially long-term approach to the operations in Yemen.
Obviously more CENTCOM “self-defense” and “de-escalation through escalation” for the long haul, if we have that long.
Today the U.S. Central Command reported striking eight more Houthi installations in Yemen. It is the second time British bombers have taken part in the operation, now known as “Poseidon Archer”, suggesting a more organized and potentially long-term approach to the operations in Yemen.
Obviously more CENTCOM “self-defense” and “de-escalation through escalation” for the long haul, if we have that long.
1948: Creation & Catastrophe
Through riveting and moving personal recollections of both Palestinians and Israelis, 1948: Creation & Catastrophe reveals the shocking events of the most pivotal year in the most controversial conflict in the world. It tells the story of the establishment of Israel as seen through the eyes of the people who lived it. But rather than being a history lesson, this documentary is a primer for the present. It is simply not possible to make sense of what is happening in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today without an understanding of 1948. This documentary was the last chance for many of its Israeli and Palestinian characters to narrate their first-hand accounts of the creation of a state and the expulsion of a nation.
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Update -
Bellingham City Council
unanimously passes resolution calling
for permanent cease-fire in Gaza
It took nine years and a do-over,
but perseverance and peaceful protest win out
Bellingham City Council
unanimously passes resolution calling
for permanent cease-fire in Gaza
It took nine years and a do-over,
but perseverance and peaceful protest win out
On Monday, Bellingham, Washington’s City Council unanimously passed a resolution supporting an “Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza, Israel and Palestine,” crafted by Whatcom (County) Families for Justice, Whatcom Peace & Justice Center, and Veterans for Peace Chapter 111. Interestingly, Bellingham’s latest successful resolution effort is a do-over from Operation Protective Edge in 2014, when a similar Gaza resolution calling for an end to violence on both sides, failed for the simple lack of a second. The Israeli tactic of “mowing the grass” in the Gaza Strip nine years ago, resulting in more than 2,000 Palestinian deaths, including 500 children, was not enough to move the measure forward. Threats, intimidation and political expediency won out.
But that was then.
Almost a decade later, visibly affected Council Members passed the latest version of the resolution during its preliminary Committee of the Whole discussion. Following measured revisions to the original draft submitted by local activists, an impassioned Council recognized the urgency of the 2023 carnage in Gaza and voted unanimously to support its passage during that evening’s business meeting.
Read complete piece on Substack.
But that was then.
Almost a decade later, visibly affected Council Members passed the latest version of the resolution during its preliminary Committee of the Whole discussion. Following measured revisions to the original draft submitted by local activists, an impassioned Council recognized the urgency of the 2023 carnage in Gaza and voted unanimously to support its passage during that evening’s business meeting.
Read complete piece on Substack.
In the Grip of Contempt
Coping with inner conflicts and soaring body counts of near total collapse in Gaza
Gene Marx
Dec 10, 2023
Coping with inner conflicts and soaring body counts of near total collapse in Gaza
Gene Marx
Dec 10, 2023
There is an old parable about a Cherokee elder who was teaching his grandchild about life. You might have heard it. The grandfather said,
“A fight is going on inside you. It is a terrible fight between two wolves. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, greed, arrogance, and ego. The other stands for joy, peace, love, hope, kindness, generosity, and faith. The same fight going on inside you is inside every other person too.” The child thought about it for a minute, then asked, “Which wolf will win?” The old man replied, “The one you feed.”
One would think joy and peace would win out this Yuletide, but with the world poised at the nexus of catastrophe and coexistence, my own enraged, fearful wolf rarely goes hungry nowadays.
And can you sense pervasive angst? As endemic as Covid, it is throbbing with each new predictable fissure in Biden’s “rules-based” world order. A malaise of fear and contempt is keeping many of us up nights, ever since the invasion of Ukraine kicked off in the middle of a global pandemic, as if choking in an overwhelmed ER or vaporizing in a thermonuclear Armageddon were not enough.
To make matters worse, have you noticed a sense of greater or lesser uncertainty or worse, an urge to measure each word before weighing in on a controversy? The fear of losing another “friend” or colleague in a cancel culture of toxic bipartisanship drives or stifles most discourse. Those who have chosen dissent, or even regularly sound off against our exponential spiral, are tagged as radical or conspiratorial for coloring outside the lines of approved pro-war narrative. Sunk cost dissenter epithets include apologist (Saddam, Asad et al), Kremlin agent (for my Jill Stein votes), Putin puppet (a favorite catch-all), and incredibly or not, a white supremacist (you read correctly) for speaking and writing, with a heightened sense of urgency regarding US/Russia nuclear threats, all of them de facto deflections from much-needed dialogue.
And now, we’re antisemitic, for unequivocally supporting an end to Palestinian oppression and the ongoing carnage in Gaza, in spite of Jerusalem Declaration support for “the Palestinian demand for justice and the full grant of their political, national, civil and human rights, as encapsulated in international law.”
On Friday, the U.S. vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, but antiwar “radicals” like me are slammed publicly in the commons or surreptitiously from the safety of social media mobs.
More red meat for my inner Canis lupus.
The U.S. Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations Robert A. Wood told the council he was the singular raised hand against “an imbalanced resolution that was divorced from reality that would not move the needle forward on the ground in any concrete way.” After more than 42 Security Council vetoes in support of unchecked Israeli occupation and oppression, I would guess the U.S. gave up on a reality-based assessment of Palestinian oppression pogroms ago.
Wood might also be right about moving the needle on the ground, in any direction, but what right do peace “radicals” have to back off now? The long-term consequences would be apocryphal, but no less devastating than one. more. dead. child.
And can you sense pervasive angst? As endemic as Covid, it is throbbing with each new predictable fissure in Biden’s “rules-based” world order. A malaise of fear and contempt is keeping many of us up nights, ever since the invasion of Ukraine kicked off in the middle of a global pandemic, as if choking in an overwhelmed ER or vaporizing in a thermonuclear Armageddon were not enough.
To make matters worse, have you noticed a sense of greater or lesser uncertainty or worse, an urge to measure each word before weighing in on a controversy? The fear of losing another “friend” or colleague in a cancel culture of toxic bipartisanship drives or stifles most discourse. Those who have chosen dissent, or even regularly sound off against our exponential spiral, are tagged as radical or conspiratorial for coloring outside the lines of approved pro-war narrative. Sunk cost dissenter epithets include apologist (Saddam, Asad et al), Kremlin agent (for my Jill Stein votes), Putin puppet (a favorite catch-all), and incredibly or not, a white supremacist (you read correctly) for speaking and writing, with a heightened sense of urgency regarding US/Russia nuclear threats, all of them de facto deflections from much-needed dialogue.
And now, we’re antisemitic, for unequivocally supporting an end to Palestinian oppression and the ongoing carnage in Gaza, in spite of Jerusalem Declaration support for “the Palestinian demand for justice and the full grant of their political, national, civil and human rights, as encapsulated in international law.”
On Friday, the U.S. vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, but antiwar “radicals” like me are slammed publicly in the commons or surreptitiously from the safety of social media mobs.
More red meat for my inner Canis lupus.
The U.S. Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations Robert A. Wood told the council he was the singular raised hand against “an imbalanced resolution that was divorced from reality that would not move the needle forward on the ground in any concrete way.” After more than 42 Security Council vetoes in support of unchecked Israeli occupation and oppression, I would guess the U.S. gave up on a reality-based assessment of Palestinian oppression pogroms ago.
Wood might also be right about moving the needle on the ground, in any direction, but what right do peace “radicals” have to back off now? The long-term consequences would be apocryphal, but no less devastating than one. more. dead. child.
Last week CUNY professor Diana B. Greenwald posted on X (formerly known as Twitter),
"Perhaps I am naïve, but I am just starting to grasp that for some of Israel’s supporters, including many Americans, many I have known in various capacities, even those I have called friends, there is simply no number of Palestinian deaths that will cause them to call for an end to this onslaught.
If the number wasn’t 5,000, if it wasn’t 10,000, if it isn’t 15,000, then there is no number.
Maybe I am wrong. Maybe when we get to 20,000, or 25,000, or 30,000, their attitudes will shift. But how can we be asked to “hope” for this?
How can we — no, how can the millions of homeless, dehydrated, hungry, wounded, ill, and traumatized in Gaza — be asked to abide this?"
In spite alternative media graphic content warnings of ravaged neighborhoods, mass graves, child and toddler amputees, the number that resonates with me is the lonely number One - a single Gazan kid in his father's arms being rushed into the ruins of a bomb-shattered clinic in Gaza City. I see him most nights, a final wakeful intrusion. Wide-eyed, dead - the top of his skull missing but for a crown of shards - but no longer afraid. At first I'm overwhelmed, with an inner wolf alpha status sadly in question.
Read complete piece on Substack.
Read complete piece on Substack.
Following a city council meeting on Tuesday evening, Seattle became the largest US city to demand a ceasefire in Israel/Palestine, where nearly 15,000 Palestinians have died, including 6,000 children, following Hamas' Oct 7 attack, which killed more than 1,200 Israelis. The council’s resolution ultimately passed 6 to 0, with Council members Sara Nelson, Alex Pedersen, and Andrew Lewis abstaining.
The resolution specifically called for “a long-term ceasefire in Israel and occupied Palestine, the return of all hostages, and the delivery of humanitarian aid,” and included language condemning Antisemitism and Islamophobia. The City will shoot that message up to Washington’s Congressional delegation, who—with the exception of Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal—will continue to wait for their spines to develop as they watch the Israeli military bomb hospitals, slaughter civilians en masse, and permanently displace 2 million people in a genocidal campaign against Palestinians.
Council Member Kshama Sawant got this whole ball rolling a couple weeks ago when she introduced a resolution calling for a ceasefire, a hostage exchange, humanitarian aid, an end to the occupation, and an end to US funding of Israel’s war machine. At that time, no one on council seconded the motion, which prevented the body from even discussing it. Nevertheless, Sawant and the antiwar movement in general kept the pressure on.
In the intervening weeks, Palestinian community members from groups such as Baladna met with Aneelah Afzali, who runs the American Muslim Empowerment Network (MAPS-AMEN), to discuss and chart a path forward. Earlier this month, Afzali worked with a group of Jews, Muslims, and Christians in crafting the Washington Solidarity Statement for Peace and Justice in Israel/Palestine, which currently boasts more than 2,500 individual signatories and over 150 organizational signatories.
Ultimately, those Palestinian community members decided to work with their allies on an amendment with Council Member Teresa Mosqueda, who brought on Council President Debora Juarez and Council Member Lisa Herbold as sponsors. Mosqueda’s amendment did not include language demanding an end to US funding to Israeli’s military and an end to the occupation wholesale, but it did have support of a majority of council members. Members of the multi-faith coalition that pushed the Washington Solidarity Statement for Peace and Justice in Israel/Palestine also reviewed and commented on the language.
After publishing a Guest Rant in The Stranger urging people to pack City Hall, Sawant indeed packed City Hall and the public comment Zoom lines. Commenters, some of whom were also from Muslim and Palestinian communities, called for the Council to pass Sawant’s version of the resolution. As the commenters argued their points on behalf of justice and the mounting war dead, some critiqued the politicians for appearing in chambers remotely, a common if irksome practice for those who really want to feel heard by their representatives. Sawant was the only member present on the dais.
When the two hours of public comment came to a close, the Council eventually voted 7 to 1 (with Nelson abstaining) to consider Mosqueda’s amendment in place of Sawant’s resolution, and then they passed Mosqueda’s amendment.
The whole situation arguably put ceasefire supporters in a tough place. Watering down Sawant's resolution flies in the face of any coherent and principled stance on the issue. That said, no offense, but a resolution is already a glass of water. That said, as cities such as Atlanta and Detroit pass similar resolutions, a loss in Seattle could mean a major setback to the broader antiwar movement. Washington’s Congressional delegation, which is currently composed of eleven jellyfish plus Pramila Jayapal, could point to a failure as a reason to maintain their current opposition to a permanent ceasefire. That said, the failure would expose certain council members and the Democratic Party as lemmings who are unwilling to act decisively in the face of an ethnic cleansing campaign, and hasten an end to their political reign. That said, those same council members could point to process disputes as cover, and even win support in more hawkish circles, etc. etc. etc.
Either way, in a statement, Sawant declared victory: "Our movement will claim this historic victory today and fight on. What we won today is a reflection of the balance of forces right now, and it shows we need an even stronger movement in order to address the root causes of the conflict—the Israeli occupation and the US military aid that facilitates the brutalization of the Palestinian people."
Read comments in thestranger.com.
The resolution specifically called for “a long-term ceasefire in Israel and occupied Palestine, the return of all hostages, and the delivery of humanitarian aid,” and included language condemning Antisemitism and Islamophobia. The City will shoot that message up to Washington’s Congressional delegation, who—with the exception of Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal—will continue to wait for their spines to develop as they watch the Israeli military bomb hospitals, slaughter civilians en masse, and permanently displace 2 million people in a genocidal campaign against Palestinians.
Council Member Kshama Sawant got this whole ball rolling a couple weeks ago when she introduced a resolution calling for a ceasefire, a hostage exchange, humanitarian aid, an end to the occupation, and an end to US funding of Israel’s war machine. At that time, no one on council seconded the motion, which prevented the body from even discussing it. Nevertheless, Sawant and the antiwar movement in general kept the pressure on.
In the intervening weeks, Palestinian community members from groups such as Baladna met with Aneelah Afzali, who runs the American Muslim Empowerment Network (MAPS-AMEN), to discuss and chart a path forward. Earlier this month, Afzali worked with a group of Jews, Muslims, and Christians in crafting the Washington Solidarity Statement for Peace and Justice in Israel/Palestine, which currently boasts more than 2,500 individual signatories and over 150 organizational signatories.
Ultimately, those Palestinian community members decided to work with their allies on an amendment with Council Member Teresa Mosqueda, who brought on Council President Debora Juarez and Council Member Lisa Herbold as sponsors. Mosqueda’s amendment did not include language demanding an end to US funding to Israeli’s military and an end to the occupation wholesale, but it did have support of a majority of council members. Members of the multi-faith coalition that pushed the Washington Solidarity Statement for Peace and Justice in Israel/Palestine also reviewed and commented on the language.
After publishing a Guest Rant in The Stranger urging people to pack City Hall, Sawant indeed packed City Hall and the public comment Zoom lines. Commenters, some of whom were also from Muslim and Palestinian communities, called for the Council to pass Sawant’s version of the resolution. As the commenters argued their points on behalf of justice and the mounting war dead, some critiqued the politicians for appearing in chambers remotely, a common if irksome practice for those who really want to feel heard by their representatives. Sawant was the only member present on the dais.
When the two hours of public comment came to a close, the Council eventually voted 7 to 1 (with Nelson abstaining) to consider Mosqueda’s amendment in place of Sawant’s resolution, and then they passed Mosqueda’s amendment.
The whole situation arguably put ceasefire supporters in a tough place. Watering down Sawant's resolution flies in the face of any coherent and principled stance on the issue. That said, no offense, but a resolution is already a glass of water. That said, as cities such as Atlanta and Detroit pass similar resolutions, a loss in Seattle could mean a major setback to the broader antiwar movement. Washington’s Congressional delegation, which is currently composed of eleven jellyfish plus Pramila Jayapal, could point to a failure as a reason to maintain their current opposition to a permanent ceasefire. That said, the failure would expose certain council members and the Democratic Party as lemmings who are unwilling to act decisively in the face of an ethnic cleansing campaign, and hasten an end to their political reign. That said, those same council members could point to process disputes as cover, and even win support in more hawkish circles, etc. etc. etc.
Either way, in a statement, Sawant declared victory: "Our movement will claim this historic victory today and fight on. What we won today is a reflection of the balance of forces right now, and it shows we need an even stronger movement in order to address the root causes of the conflict—the Israeli occupation and the US military aid that facilitates the brutalization of the Palestinian people."
Read comments in thestranger.com.
DOHA, Qatar: I am in the studio of Al Jazeera’s Arabic service watching a live feed from Gaza City. The Al Jazeera reporter in northern Gaza, because of the intense Israeli shelling, was forced to evacuate to southern Gaza. He left his camera behind. He trained it on Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex. It is night. Israeli tanks fire directly towards the hospital compound. Long horizontal red flashes. A deliberate attack on a hospital. A deliberate war crime. A deliberate massacre of the most helpless civilians, including the very sick and infants. Then the feed goes dead.
We sit in front of the monitors. We are silent. We know what this means. No power. No water. No internet. No medical supplies. Every infant in an incubator will die. Every dialysis patient will die. Everyone in the intensive care unit will die. Everyone who needs oxygen will die. Everyone who needs emergency surgery will die. And what will happen to the 50,000 people who, driven from their homes by the relentless bombing, have taken refuge on the hospital grounds? We know the answer to that as well. Many of them, too, will die.
There are no words to express what we are witnessing. In the five weeks of horror this is one of the pinnacles of horror. The indifference of Europe is bad enough. The active complicity by the United States is unfathomable. Nothing justifies this. Nothing. And Joe Biden will go down in history as an accomplice to genocide. May the ghosts of the thousands of children he has participated in murdering haunt him for the rest of his life.
Israel and the United States are sending a chilling message to the rest of the world. International and humanitarian law, including the Geneva Convention, are meaningless pieces of paper. They did not apply in Iraq. They do not apply in Gaza. We will pulverize your neighborhoods and cities with bombs and missiles. We will wantonly murder your women, children, elderly and sick. We will set up blockades to engineer starvation and the spread of infectious diseases. You, the “lesser breeds” of the earth, do not matter. To us you are vermin to be extinguished. We have everything. If you try and take any of it away from us, we will kill you. And we will never be held accountable.
We are not hated for our values. We are hated because we have no values. We are hated because rules only apply to others. Not to us. We are hated because we have arrogated to ourselves the right to carry out indiscriminate slaughter. We are hated because we are heartless and cruel. We are hated because we are hypocrites, talking about protecting civilians, the rule of law and humanitarianism while extinguishing the lives of hundreds of people in Gaza a day, including 160 children.
Israel reacted with indignation and moral outrage when it was accused of bombing the al-Ahli Arab Christian hospital in Gaza, which left hundreds of dead. The bombing, Israel claimed, came from an errant rocket fired by Palestine Islamic Jihad. There is nothing in the arsenal of Hamas or Islamic Jihad that could have replicated the massive explosive power of the missile that struck the hospital.
Those of us who have covered Gaza have heard this Israel trope so many times it is risible. They always blame Hamas and the Palestinians for their war crimes, now attempting to argue that hospitals are Hamas command centers and therefore legitimate targets. They never provide evidence. The Israeli military and government lie like they breathe.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), which has staff working in Al-Shifa, issued a statement saying patients, doctors and nurses are "trapped in hospitals under fire." It called on the “Israeli government to cease this unrelenting assault on Gaza’s health system.”
“Over the past 24 hours, hospitals in Gaza have been under relentless bombardment. Al-Shifa hospital complex, the biggest health facility where MSF staff are still working, has been hit several times, including the maternity and outpatient departments, resulting in multiple deaths and injuries,” the statement read. “The hostilities around the hospital have not stopped. MSF teams and hundreds of patients are still inside Al-Shifa hospital. MSF urgently reiterates its calls to stop the attacks against hospitals, for an immediate ceasefire and for the protection of medical facilities, medical staff and patients.”
Three other hospitals in northern Gaza and Gaza City are encircled by Israeli forces and tanks, in what a doctor told Al Jazeera was a “day of war against hospitals.” The Indonesian Hospital has reportedly also lost power. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that 20 of 36 hospitals in Gaza no longer function.
Israel and Washington’s cynicism is breathtaking. There are no differences in intent. Washington only wants it done quickly. Humanitarian corridors? Pauses in the shelling? These are vehicles to facilitate the total depopulation of northern Gaza. The handful of aid trucks allowed through the border at Rafah with Egypt? A public relations gimmick. There is only one goal – kill, kill, kill. The faster the better. All Biden officials talk about is what comes next once Israel has finished its decimation of Gaza. They know Israel’s slaughter will not end until Gazans are living in the open without shelter in the southern part of the strip and dying because of a lack of food, water and medical care.
Gaza before Israel’s ground incursion was one of the most densely populated spots on the planet. Imagine what will happen with 1.1 million Gazans from the north piled on top of over 1 million in the south. Imagine what will take place when infectious diseases such as cholera become an epidemic. Imagine the ravages of starvation. The pressure will build to do something. And that something, Israel hopes, will be to push the Palestinians over the border into the Sinai in Egypt. Once there, they will never return. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza will be complete. Its ethnic cleansing of the West Bank will begin.
That is Israel’s demented dream. To achieve it, they will make Gaza uninhabitable.
Ask yourself, if you were a Palestinian in Gaza and had access to a weapon what would you do? If Israel killed your family, how would you react? Why would you care about international or humanitarian law when you know it only applies to the oppressed, not the oppressors? If terror is the only language Israel uses to communicate, the only language it apparently understands, wouldn’t you speak back with terror?
Israel’s orgy of death will not crush Hamas. Hamas is an idea. This idea is fed on the blood of martyrs. Israel is giving Hamas an abundant supply.
Read Chris Hedges in Substack.
We sit in front of the monitors. We are silent. We know what this means. No power. No water. No internet. No medical supplies. Every infant in an incubator will die. Every dialysis patient will die. Everyone in the intensive care unit will die. Everyone who needs oxygen will die. Everyone who needs emergency surgery will die. And what will happen to the 50,000 people who, driven from their homes by the relentless bombing, have taken refuge on the hospital grounds? We know the answer to that as well. Many of them, too, will die.
There are no words to express what we are witnessing. In the five weeks of horror this is one of the pinnacles of horror. The indifference of Europe is bad enough. The active complicity by the United States is unfathomable. Nothing justifies this. Nothing. And Joe Biden will go down in history as an accomplice to genocide. May the ghosts of the thousands of children he has participated in murdering haunt him for the rest of his life.
Israel and the United States are sending a chilling message to the rest of the world. International and humanitarian law, including the Geneva Convention, are meaningless pieces of paper. They did not apply in Iraq. They do not apply in Gaza. We will pulverize your neighborhoods and cities with bombs and missiles. We will wantonly murder your women, children, elderly and sick. We will set up blockades to engineer starvation and the spread of infectious diseases. You, the “lesser breeds” of the earth, do not matter. To us you are vermin to be extinguished. We have everything. If you try and take any of it away from us, we will kill you. And we will never be held accountable.
We are not hated for our values. We are hated because we have no values. We are hated because rules only apply to others. Not to us. We are hated because we have arrogated to ourselves the right to carry out indiscriminate slaughter. We are hated because we are heartless and cruel. We are hated because we are hypocrites, talking about protecting civilians, the rule of law and humanitarianism while extinguishing the lives of hundreds of people in Gaza a day, including 160 children.
Israel reacted with indignation and moral outrage when it was accused of bombing the al-Ahli Arab Christian hospital in Gaza, which left hundreds of dead. The bombing, Israel claimed, came from an errant rocket fired by Palestine Islamic Jihad. There is nothing in the arsenal of Hamas or Islamic Jihad that could have replicated the massive explosive power of the missile that struck the hospital.
Those of us who have covered Gaza have heard this Israel trope so many times it is risible. They always blame Hamas and the Palestinians for their war crimes, now attempting to argue that hospitals are Hamas command centers and therefore legitimate targets. They never provide evidence. The Israeli military and government lie like they breathe.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), which has staff working in Al-Shifa, issued a statement saying patients, doctors and nurses are "trapped in hospitals under fire." It called on the “Israeli government to cease this unrelenting assault on Gaza’s health system.”
“Over the past 24 hours, hospitals in Gaza have been under relentless bombardment. Al-Shifa hospital complex, the biggest health facility where MSF staff are still working, has been hit several times, including the maternity and outpatient departments, resulting in multiple deaths and injuries,” the statement read. “The hostilities around the hospital have not stopped. MSF teams and hundreds of patients are still inside Al-Shifa hospital. MSF urgently reiterates its calls to stop the attacks against hospitals, for an immediate ceasefire and for the protection of medical facilities, medical staff and patients.”
Three other hospitals in northern Gaza and Gaza City are encircled by Israeli forces and tanks, in what a doctor told Al Jazeera was a “day of war against hospitals.” The Indonesian Hospital has reportedly also lost power. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that 20 of 36 hospitals in Gaza no longer function.
Israel and Washington’s cynicism is breathtaking. There are no differences in intent. Washington only wants it done quickly. Humanitarian corridors? Pauses in the shelling? These are vehicles to facilitate the total depopulation of northern Gaza. The handful of aid trucks allowed through the border at Rafah with Egypt? A public relations gimmick. There is only one goal – kill, kill, kill. The faster the better. All Biden officials talk about is what comes next once Israel has finished its decimation of Gaza. They know Israel’s slaughter will not end until Gazans are living in the open without shelter in the southern part of the strip and dying because of a lack of food, water and medical care.
Gaza before Israel’s ground incursion was one of the most densely populated spots on the planet. Imagine what will happen with 1.1 million Gazans from the north piled on top of over 1 million in the south. Imagine what will take place when infectious diseases such as cholera become an epidemic. Imagine the ravages of starvation. The pressure will build to do something. And that something, Israel hopes, will be to push the Palestinians over the border into the Sinai in Egypt. Once there, they will never return. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza will be complete. Its ethnic cleansing of the West Bank will begin.
That is Israel’s demented dream. To achieve it, they will make Gaza uninhabitable.
Ask yourself, if you were a Palestinian in Gaza and had access to a weapon what would you do? If Israel killed your family, how would you react? Why would you care about international or humanitarian law when you know it only applies to the oppressed, not the oppressors? If terror is the only language Israel uses to communicate, the only language it apparently understands, wouldn’t you speak back with terror?
Israel’s orgy of death will not crush Hamas. Hamas is an idea. This idea is fed on the blood of martyrs. Israel is giving Hamas an abundant supply.
Read Chris Hedges in Substack.
Remembrance and the Butcher's Bill
A generation sacrificed to the fallacy that war can end war.
Gene Marx
Nov 10, 2023
A generation sacrificed to the fallacy that war can end war.
Gene Marx
Nov 10, 2023
One of the last rounds of the Great War was fired at 10:59 a.m. on November 11, 1918, part of a 5-round burst from a German machine gun. A charging 23-year-old private Henry Gunther, with fixed bayonet, was dead before he hit the ground, nearly six hours after the armistice to end the Great War was signed at 5 in the morning. After four contentious days of negotiations at a railroad siding in Compiègne, France, the beleaguered combatants settled the butcher’s bill with the Germans still pleading for a cease-fire, but the armistice would not take effect until 11:00 a.m.
The guns went silent at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, but only after British, French and American commanders issued orders that the fighting continue until the last minute. Private Gunther never made it, cut down with thousands of others from both sides and surpassing the highest daily average death toll on the Western Front. Historian Adam Hochschild wrote in American Midnight that U.S. Army General John Pershing ordered “there should be absolutely no let-up in carrying out the original plans until 11 o’clock.”
“Since the armies tabulated their casualty statistics by the day and not the hour, we know only the total toll for November 11, 1918: 2,738 men from both sides were killed, and 8,206 left wounded or missing. But it was still dark at 5:00 a.m., so the great majority of these casualties clearly happened after the Armistice had been signed…incurred to gain ground that Allied generals knew the Germans would be vacating within days, or even hours after the cease-fire.”
While the guns were allowed to cool, the last American KIA, Private Henry Gunther from Baltimore, charging bewildered Germans with fixed bayonet, would never know - or more, why - both sides were yelling and waving at him to stop.
The guns went silent at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, but only after British, French and American commanders issued orders that the fighting continue until the last minute. Private Gunther never made it, cut down with thousands of others from both sides and surpassing the highest daily average death toll on the Western Front. Historian Adam Hochschild wrote in American Midnight that U.S. Army General John Pershing ordered “there should be absolutely no let-up in carrying out the original plans until 11 o’clock.”
“Since the armies tabulated their casualty statistics by the day and not the hour, we know only the total toll for November 11, 1918: 2,738 men from both sides were killed, and 8,206 left wounded or missing. But it was still dark at 5:00 a.m., so the great majority of these casualties clearly happened after the Armistice had been signed…incurred to gain ground that Allied generals knew the Germans would be vacating within days, or even hours after the cease-fire.”
While the guns were allowed to cool, the last American KIA, Private Henry Gunther from Baltimore, charging bewildered Germans with fixed bayonet, would never know - or more, why - both sides were yelling and waving at him to stop.
Nations mourning their dead collectively called for an end to the butchery of all wars. Armistice Day was officially recognized in 1919 and designated as “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated." My own father, having fought in two wars, had to have wondered why we even bothered: like Private Gunther, never knowing peace and dying way too young.
Read complete article in Substack.
Read complete article in Substack.
Dear child. It is past midnight. I am flying at hundreds of miles an hour in the darkness, thousands of feet over the Atlantic Ocean. I am traveling to Egypt. I will go to the border of Gaza at Rafah. I go because of you.
You have never been in a plane. You have never left Gaza. You know only the densely packed streets and alleys. The concrete hovels. You know only the security barriers and fences patrolled by soldiers that surround Gaza. Planes, for you, are terrifying. Fighter jets. Attack helicopters. Drones. They circle above you. They drop missiles and bombs. Deafening explosions. The ground shakes. Buildings fall. The dead. The screams. The muffled calls for help from beneath the rubble. It does not stop. Night and day. Trapped under the piles of smashed concrete. Your playmates. Your schoolmates. Your neighbors. Gone in seconds. You see the chalky faces and limp bodies when they are dug out. I am a reporter. It is my job to see this. You are a child. You should never see this.
The stench of death. Rotting corpses under broken concrete. You hold your breath. You cover your mouth with cloth. You walk faster. Your neighborhood has become a graveyard. All that was familiar is gone. You stare in amazement. You wonder where you are.
You are afraid. Explosion after explosion. You cry. You cling to your mother or father. You cover your ears. You see the white light of the missile and wait for the blast. Why do they kill children? What did you do? Why can’t anyone protect you? Will you be wounded? Will you lose a leg or an arm? Will you go blind or be in a wheelchair? Why were you born? Was it for something good? Or was it for this? Will you grow up? Will you be happy? What will it be like without your friends? Who will die next? Your mother? Your father? Your brothers and sisters? Someone you know will be injured. Soon. Someone you know will die. Soon.
At night you lie in the dark on the cold cement floor. The phones are cut. The internet is off. You do not know what is happening. There are flashes of light. There are waves of blast concussions. There are screams. It does not stop.
When your father or mother hunts for food or water you wait. That terrible feeling in your stomach. Will they come back? Will you see them again? Will your tiny home be next? Will the bombs find you? Are these your last moments on earth?
You drink salty, dirty water. It makes you very sick. Your stomach hurts. You are hungry. The bakeries are destroyed. There is no bread. You eat one meal a day. Pasta. A cucumber. Soon this will seem like a feast.
You do not play with your soccer ball made of rags. You do not fly your kite made from old newspapers.
You have seen foreign reporters. We wear flak jackets with the word PRESS written on it. We have helmets. We have cameras. We drive jeeps. We appear after a bombing or a shooting. We sit over coffee for a long time and talk to the adults. Then we disappear. We do not usually interview children. But I have done interviews when groups of you crowded around us. Laughing. Pointing. Asking us to take your picture.
I have been bombed by jets in Gaza. I have been bombed in other wars, wars that happened before you were born. I too was very, very scared. I still have dreams about it. When I see the pictures of Gaza these wars return to me with the force of thunder and lightning. I think of you.
All of us who have been to war hate war most of all because of what it does to children.
I tried to tell your story. I tried to tell the world that when you are cruel to people, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, when you deny people freedom and dignity, when you humiliate and trap them in an open-air prison, when you kill them as if they were beasts, they become very angry. They do to others what was done to them. I told it over and over. I told it for seven years. Few listened. And now this.
There are very brave Palestinian journalists. Thirty-nine of them have been killed since this bombing began. They are heroes. So are the doctors and nurses in your hospitals. So are the U.N. workers. Eighty-nine of whom have died. So are the ambulance drivers and the medics. So are the rescue parties that lift up the slabs of concrete with their hands. So are the mothers and fathers who shield you from the bombs.
But we are not there. Not this time. We cannot get in. We are locked out.
Reporters from all over the world are going to the border crossing at Rafah. We are going because we cannot watch this slaughter and do nothing. We are going because hundreds of people are dying a day, including 160 children. We are going because this genocide must stop. We are going because we have children. Like you. Precious. Innocent. Loved. We are going because we want you to live.
I hope one day we will meet. You will be an adult. I will be an old man, although to you I am already very old. In my dream for you I will find you free and safe and happy. No one will be trying to kill you. You will fly in airplanes filled with people, not bombs. You will not be trapped in a concentration camp. You will see the world. You will grow up and have children. You will become old. You will remember this suffering, but you will know it means you must help others who suffer. This is my hope. My prayer.
We have failed you. This is the awful guilt we carry. We tried. But we did not try hard enough. We will go to Rafah. Many of us. Reporters. We will stand outside the border with Gaza in protest. We will write and film. This is what we do. It is not much. But it is something. We will tell your story again.
Maybe it will be enough to earn the right to ask for your forgiveness.
You have never been in a plane. You have never left Gaza. You know only the densely packed streets and alleys. The concrete hovels. You know only the security barriers and fences patrolled by soldiers that surround Gaza. Planes, for you, are terrifying. Fighter jets. Attack helicopters. Drones. They circle above you. They drop missiles and bombs. Deafening explosions. The ground shakes. Buildings fall. The dead. The screams. The muffled calls for help from beneath the rubble. It does not stop. Night and day. Trapped under the piles of smashed concrete. Your playmates. Your schoolmates. Your neighbors. Gone in seconds. You see the chalky faces and limp bodies when they are dug out. I am a reporter. It is my job to see this. You are a child. You should never see this.
The stench of death. Rotting corpses under broken concrete. You hold your breath. You cover your mouth with cloth. You walk faster. Your neighborhood has become a graveyard. All that was familiar is gone. You stare in amazement. You wonder where you are.
You are afraid. Explosion after explosion. You cry. You cling to your mother or father. You cover your ears. You see the white light of the missile and wait for the blast. Why do they kill children? What did you do? Why can’t anyone protect you? Will you be wounded? Will you lose a leg or an arm? Will you go blind or be in a wheelchair? Why were you born? Was it for something good? Or was it for this? Will you grow up? Will you be happy? What will it be like without your friends? Who will die next? Your mother? Your father? Your brothers and sisters? Someone you know will be injured. Soon. Someone you know will die. Soon.
At night you lie in the dark on the cold cement floor. The phones are cut. The internet is off. You do not know what is happening. There are flashes of light. There are waves of blast concussions. There are screams. It does not stop.
When your father or mother hunts for food or water you wait. That terrible feeling in your stomach. Will they come back? Will you see them again? Will your tiny home be next? Will the bombs find you? Are these your last moments on earth?
You drink salty, dirty water. It makes you very sick. Your stomach hurts. You are hungry. The bakeries are destroyed. There is no bread. You eat one meal a day. Pasta. A cucumber. Soon this will seem like a feast.
You do not play with your soccer ball made of rags. You do not fly your kite made from old newspapers.
You have seen foreign reporters. We wear flak jackets with the word PRESS written on it. We have helmets. We have cameras. We drive jeeps. We appear after a bombing or a shooting. We sit over coffee for a long time and talk to the adults. Then we disappear. We do not usually interview children. But I have done interviews when groups of you crowded around us. Laughing. Pointing. Asking us to take your picture.
I have been bombed by jets in Gaza. I have been bombed in other wars, wars that happened before you were born. I too was very, very scared. I still have dreams about it. When I see the pictures of Gaza these wars return to me with the force of thunder and lightning. I think of you.
All of us who have been to war hate war most of all because of what it does to children.
I tried to tell your story. I tried to tell the world that when you are cruel to people, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, when you deny people freedom and dignity, when you humiliate and trap them in an open-air prison, when you kill them as if they were beasts, they become very angry. They do to others what was done to them. I told it over and over. I told it for seven years. Few listened. And now this.
There are very brave Palestinian journalists. Thirty-nine of them have been killed since this bombing began. They are heroes. So are the doctors and nurses in your hospitals. So are the U.N. workers. Eighty-nine of whom have died. So are the ambulance drivers and the medics. So are the rescue parties that lift up the slabs of concrete with their hands. So are the mothers and fathers who shield you from the bombs.
But we are not there. Not this time. We cannot get in. We are locked out.
Reporters from all over the world are going to the border crossing at Rafah. We are going because we cannot watch this slaughter and do nothing. We are going because hundreds of people are dying a day, including 160 children. We are going because this genocide must stop. We are going because we have children. Like you. Precious. Innocent. Loved. We are going because we want you to live.
I hope one day we will meet. You will be an adult. I will be an old man, although to you I am already very old. In my dream for you I will find you free and safe and happy. No one will be trying to kill you. You will fly in airplanes filled with people, not bombs. You will not be trapped in a concentration camp. You will see the world. You will grow up and have children. You will become old. You will remember this suffering, but you will know it means you must help others who suffer. This is my hope. My prayer.
We have failed you. This is the awful guilt we carry. We tried. But we did not try hard enough. We will go to Rafah. Many of us. Reporters. We will stand outside the border with Gaza in protest. We will write and film. This is what we do. It is not much. But it is something. We will tell your story again.
Maybe it will be enough to earn the right to ask for your forgiveness.
12 Reasons America Doesn’t Win Its Wars
Too many parties now benefit from perpetual warmaking for the U.S. to ever conclude its military conflicts.
Jon Basil Utley
Jun 12, 2015
Too many parties now benefit from perpetual warmaking for the U.S. to ever conclude its military conflicts.
Jon Basil Utley
Jun 12, 2015
America doesn’t “win” its wars, because winning a war is secondary to other goals in our war making. Winning or losing has little immediate consequence for the United States, because the wars we start, Wars of Choice, are not of vital national interest; losing doesn’t mean getting invaded or our cities being destroyed. The following are some of the interests Washington has in not winning, reasons for our unending wars.
1) War sustains the (very) profitable log-rolling contracts for supplies in key congressional districts, grants for university faculties to study strategy, new funding for new weapons. During wartime who dares question almost any Pentagon cost “to defend America?”
2) Continued conflict postpones hard decisions about cutting defense spending such as closing surplus bases, cutting duplicate systems, and focusing on waste. See 16 Ways to Cut Defense. Shakespeare put it well, advising a king to have lots of foreign wars in order to have tranquility at home.
3) Starting wars is the historic way for kings (and presidents) to gain popularity and avoid doing tough domestic reforms for problems that cry out for solutions. War lets them be postponed. Think of George W. Bush winning election on promises to balance the budget, have health care reform, reform our bankrupt social security commitments, tackle the EPA, take on the teachers’ unions, rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, and such. Instead, with war, all those issues were swept aside. He won his re-election by having even bigger deficit warfare/welfare spending and increasing the national debt by trillions.
4) Private “contractors” profit from continuing crises. They don’t get paid in peacetime like ordinary soldiers, rather profiting from war, or at least from America having more enemies to guard against. In Iraq and Afghanistan we had hundreds of thousands of them, very well paid (often former military) and now largely in lesser-paid jobs.
Read complete article on theamericanconservative.com.
Sep 27 • 33M
The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with Professor Jeffrey Sachs on his book "To Move the World: JFK's Quest for Peace" and the disastrous consequences of the permanent war machine.
The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with Professor Jeffrey Sachs on his book "To Move the World: JFK's Quest for Peace" and the disastrous consequences of the permanent war machine.
John F. Kennedy’s last battle, cut short by his assassination, was the effort to build a sustainable peace with the Soviet Union. Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics at Columbia University, in his new book “To Move the World” chronicles the campaign by Kennedy from October 1962 to September 1963 to curb the arms race and build ties with his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev. Sachs looks at the series of speeches Kennedy gave to end the Cold War and persuade the world to make peace with the Soviets. Kennedy implemented the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. But Kennedy’s vision was not shared by many Cold warriors in the establishment, including some within his administration. Joining Chris to discuss ”To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace” is Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
https://substack.com/inbox/post/137452950
https://substack.com/inbox/post/137452950
One year later, why is the Nord Stream attack still a mystery? As investigations appear to get too close for comfort, mainstream interest in the story has waned.
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
Sep 26, 2023
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
Sep 26, 2023
After news of the reported explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines broke a year ago today, the media was ablaze with speculation, mostly in the direction of the Russian government.
“Everything is pointing to Russia,” blared a POLITICO headline two days after the explosions. Quoted in the piece were a number of foreign commentators including the former president of the German Federal Intelligence Service, saying that only Russia had the means and motives to do it.
“We still don’t know 100 percent that Russia was responsible,” said Olga Khakova, deputy director for European energy security at the Atlantic Council. “But everything is pointing to Russia being behind this.” U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told BBC on Sept. 30 that it "seems" Russia was was behind the sabotage.
By October the Washington Post Editorial Board was raising the alarms about more attacks against “the West.”
"This is the kind of capability usually wielded by a state actor, though NATO did not say officially what everyone suspects unofficially: The author of this strike against Europe’s stability and security was Russia. Now, the United States and its allies must meet a new challenge: threats to critical infrastructure, just as they are about to try to get through winter without Russian oil and gas."
Aside from a Twitter-impulsive former Polish foreign minister gleefully suggesting the U.S. did it, the mainstream media commentariat had no inhibitions about openly blaming Russia through the fall of 2022.
A year later, however, the world still does not know “who done it.” Some critics suggest the probes may be getting into politically uncomfortable territory, with recent German reports pointing to a Ukrainian military connection to the blasts.
“Whether it’s instinctive or by direction, there is a clear attempt to simply bury this story completely,” said Anatol Lieven, the director of the Quincy Institute’s Eurasia Program, comparing the seeming lack of U.S. media interest to George Orwell’s “memory hole” in the novel “1984.”
“Obviously that is because the main theories that have been advanced for the responsibility of the sabotage, if true, would be imminently embarrassing for Western governments.”
Germany, Denmark, and Sweden have been conducting separate investigations. In a joint statement on Sept. 30, Denmark and Sweden told the United Nations Security Council in a letter that the leaks were caused by at least two detonations with "several hundred kilos" of explosives. By late last year, however, European sources were quietly dismissing Russia’s role in what was being deemed as a sabotage, saying there was “no conclusive evidence” that would lead to Moscow.
Since then there has been reporting by Sy Hersh that the United States
coordinated the attacks, using a secret expert U.S. Navy diving team. This was largely ignored, refuted and scoffed at by the mainstream media and officials in the West. Soon after, it was revealed that German investigators were pursuing a second theory: that it was the work of a pro-Ukrainian outfit, either rogue or Ukrainian government-connected. Swedish investigators believe, by the way, that the attack could only be the work of a state actor.
Read complete article on Responsible Statecraft.
“Everything is pointing to Russia,” blared a POLITICO headline two days after the explosions. Quoted in the piece were a number of foreign commentators including the former president of the German Federal Intelligence Service, saying that only Russia had the means and motives to do it.
“We still don’t know 100 percent that Russia was responsible,” said Olga Khakova, deputy director for European energy security at the Atlantic Council. “But everything is pointing to Russia being behind this.” U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told BBC on Sept. 30 that it "seems" Russia was was behind the sabotage.
By October the Washington Post Editorial Board was raising the alarms about more attacks against “the West.”
"This is the kind of capability usually wielded by a state actor, though NATO did not say officially what everyone suspects unofficially: The author of this strike against Europe’s stability and security was Russia. Now, the United States and its allies must meet a new challenge: threats to critical infrastructure, just as they are about to try to get through winter without Russian oil and gas."
Aside from a Twitter-impulsive former Polish foreign minister gleefully suggesting the U.S. did it, the mainstream media commentariat had no inhibitions about openly blaming Russia through the fall of 2022.
A year later, however, the world still does not know “who done it.” Some critics suggest the probes may be getting into politically uncomfortable territory, with recent German reports pointing to a Ukrainian military connection to the blasts.
“Whether it’s instinctive or by direction, there is a clear attempt to simply bury this story completely,” said Anatol Lieven, the director of the Quincy Institute’s Eurasia Program, comparing the seeming lack of U.S. media interest to George Orwell’s “memory hole” in the novel “1984.”
“Obviously that is because the main theories that have been advanced for the responsibility of the sabotage, if true, would be imminently embarrassing for Western governments.”
Germany, Denmark, and Sweden have been conducting separate investigations. In a joint statement on Sept. 30, Denmark and Sweden told the United Nations Security Council in a letter that the leaks were caused by at least two detonations with "several hundred kilos" of explosives. By late last year, however, European sources were quietly dismissing Russia’s role in what was being deemed as a sabotage, saying there was “no conclusive evidence” that would lead to Moscow.
Since then there has been reporting by Sy Hersh that the United States
coordinated the attacks, using a secret expert U.S. Navy diving team. This was largely ignored, refuted and scoffed at by the mainstream media and officials in the West. Soon after, it was revealed that German investigators were pursuing a second theory: that it was the work of a pro-Ukrainian outfit, either rogue or Ukrainian government-connected. Swedish investigators believe, by the way, that the attack could only be the work of a state actor.
Read complete article on Responsible Statecraft.
Profits of War: Corporate Beneficiaries of the Post-9/11 Pentagon Spending Surge
The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University
Pentagon spending has totaled over $14 trillion since the start of the war in Afghanistan, with one-third to one-half of the total going to military contractors.
A large portion of these contracts -- one-quarter to one-third of all Pentagon contracts in recent years -- have gone to just five major corporations: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. The $75 billion in Pentagon contracts received by Lockheed Martin in fiscal year 2020 is well over one and one-half times the entire budget for the State Department and Agency for International Development for that year, which totaled $44 billion.
Weapons makers have spent $2.5 billion on lobbying over the past two decades, employing, on average, over 700 lobbyists per year over the past five years. That is more than one for every member of Congress.
Numerous companies took advantage of wartime conditions—which require speed of delivery and often involve less rigorous oversight—to overcharge the government or engage in outright fraud. In 2011, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimated that waste, fraud and abuse had totaled between $31 billion and $60 billion.
As the U.S. reduces the size of its military footprint in Iraq and Afghanistan, exaggerated estimates of the military challenges posed by China have become the new rationale of choice in arguments for keeping the Pentagon budget at historically high levels. Military contractors will continue to profit from this inflated spending.
READ FULL PAPER
A large portion of these contracts -- one-quarter to one-third of all Pentagon contracts in recent years -- have gone to just five major corporations: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. The $75 billion in Pentagon contracts received by Lockheed Martin in fiscal year 2020 is well over one and one-half times the entire budget for the State Department and Agency for International Development for that year, which totaled $44 billion.
Weapons makers have spent $2.5 billion on lobbying over the past two decades, employing, on average, over 700 lobbyists per year over the past five years. That is more than one for every member of Congress.
Numerous companies took advantage of wartime conditions—which require speed of delivery and often involve less rigorous oversight—to overcharge the government or engage in outright fraud. In 2011, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimated that waste, fraud and abuse had totaled between $31 billion and $60 billion.
As the U.S. reduces the size of its military footprint in Iraq and Afghanistan, exaggerated estimates of the military challenges posed by China have become the new rationale of choice in arguments for keeping the Pentagon budget at historically high levels. Military contractors will continue to profit from this inflated spending.
READ FULL PAPER
A war veteran's story of survivor's guilt
---and redemption
---and redemption
Over two decades of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, much research has explored the psychological toll suffered by the men and women who serve. A phenomenon that is perhaps less well understood is survivor’s guilt. Adam Linehan was an Army medic in both wars and is now a journalist who recently wrote about the agony of seeing others die. He talks to Nick Schifrin about his story and recovery.
Beneath the still waters of Puget Sound, submarines loaded with nukes patrol the Kitsap Peninsula and beyond.
Farther east, at Joint Base Lewis-McChord on Interstate 5 near Tacoma, is the only U.S. military unit to call for transportation of nuclear weapons by air.
Even farther east, in Richland, is the Hanford Site, historically the nation's biggest producer of plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Washington state has been home to nuclear weapons-related projects for decades — some well-known, others shrouded in secrecy. These projects have contributed to a robust nuclear presence in the military, a booming nuke industry — and death and injury to hundreds of thousands of people in Washington state and across the Pacific.
Washington “has been at all levels a cornerstone of the U.S. nuclear enterprise,” said Hans Kristensen, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project.
Farther east, at Joint Base Lewis-McChord on Interstate 5 near Tacoma, is the only U.S. military unit to call for transportation of nuclear weapons by air.
Even farther east, in Richland, is the Hanford Site, historically the nation's biggest producer of plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Washington state has been home to nuclear weapons-related projects for decades — some well-known, others shrouded in secrecy. These projects have contributed to a robust nuclear presence in the military, a booming nuke industry — and death and injury to hundreds of thousands of people in Washington state and across the Pacific.
Washington “has been at all levels a cornerstone of the U.S. nuclear enterprise,” said Hans Kristensen, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project.
Puget Sound is home to around one-third of the nation’s active nukes.
Bangor Submarine Base on the Kitsap Peninsula, near Poulsbo, has around 720 nuclear warheads, according to a Federation of American Scientists’ report. These nukes are loaded into Trident missiles, then aboard eight submarines that roam the waters.
Each warhead could destroy a city, kill millions, and jeopardize the environment and future generations through “long-term catastrophic effects,” according to a United Nations web page.
Bangor Submarine Base on the Kitsap Peninsula, near Poulsbo, has around 720 nuclear warheads, according to a Federation of American Scientists’ report. These nukes are loaded into Trident missiles, then aboard eight submarines that roam the waters.
Each warhead could destroy a city, kill millions, and jeopardize the environment and future generations through “long-term catastrophic effects,” according to a United Nations web page.
J. Overton, public affairs officer for Navy Region Northwest, said these submarines provide “constant strategic deterrence.”
Deterrence is the theory that the threat of nuclear weapons prevents violence and war — including nuclear war. The logic: If a nuclear nation attacks another, or its allies, counterattack is certain — so why risk it?
Next door to the Bangor base is a nonprofit that advocates for the abolition of nukes, Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action. Leonard Eiger, a member of the group, said that deterrence theory is a sham, and any use of nukes would likely provoke all-out nuclear war, “causing an unimaginable number of immediate deaths and apocalyptic radioactive fallout.”
“It’s only a question of time before either accidentally or intentionally, the weapons are used,” Eiger said. “What security is there in that?”
J. Overton responded that the Navy takes security around these nukes “very seriously,” but declined to comment on specifics.
Read complete article on kuow.org.
Combined VFP111 & Alternatives to Military Service Meet Monthly
Veterans for Peace Chapter 111 and Alternatives to Military Service are combining efforts to fight militarism together. Our next combined meeting is Monday, October 2, 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM at the Whatcom Peace & Justice Center (1220 Bay St).
The biggest Vietnam War story that Americans don’t talk about
South Korea’s government is finally being held to account for the carnage its mercenary troops inflicted on Vietnamese civilians. But no one seems to be reckoning with our complicity in the atrocities.
By John Summers Updated August 11, 2023, 2:59 a.m.
South Korea’s government is finally being held to account for the carnage its mercenary troops inflicted on Vietnamese civilians. But no one seems to be reckoning with our complicity in the atrocities.
By John Summers Updated August 11, 2023, 2:59 a.m.
One day after my mother informed my father of her pregnancy with me, he received orders from the US Marine Corps to report to Vietnam. One month later, he was patrolling Quảng Nam Province with a brigade of South Korean Marines nicknamed the “Blue Dragons.” I’ve long yearned to piece together a story of how the faraway events coinciding with my gestation shattered our family after his return. The war’s brutality has never been anybody’s secret. By now, the 50th anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords, no aspect of any feature of the conflict would seem to remain unexplored. Yet my boyhood quest to mine the details of what my father did in Vietnam has foundered over the first and most general question: What were South Korean Marines doing there?
A clue tapped me on the shoulder earlier this year. In February, a district court in Seoul ordered the government of South Korea to pay compensatory damages to Nguyễn Thi Thanh, a Vietnamese woman, in a lawsuit she brought over an event that had taken place 55 years earlier, nearly to the day. On the morning of Feb. 12, 1968, about 100 combat troops from the Republic of Korea’s 2nd Marine Brigade poured into Phong Nhị in Quảng Nam Province. The Blue Dragons set homes ablaze and then proceeded to shoot, stab, drown, and hack to death 70 women, children, and infants. The butchery left no uninjured survivors. Nguyễn, 8 years old, took a bullet to the stomach. The rest of her family perished.
The South Korean government has appealed the verdict, which marked the first time any court in South Korea had attributed culpability for a massacre of Vietnamese civilians. More such lawsuits are likely to be brought. Since 1999, journalists, scholars, and veterans in Seoul have documented more than 80 similar massacres of a total of (at least) 9,000 civilians in three provinces. “There’s a strong sense among the survivors that the problem has to be resolved before their generation passes on,” Ku Su-jeong of the Korean-Vietnamese Peace Foundation said in 2016.
Only a few US news outlets reported Nguyễn’s victory. The silence bespeaks a curious subtraction of memory.
Between 1965 and 1972, South Korea contributed 325,517 combatants at our behest. (Australia’s 60,000 rated the next highest contribution by an American ally. Some 2.7 million Americans served.) South Korean belligerents formed the largest phalanx of foreign fighters in Vietnam other than ours, and they even outnumbered ours in the final two years. Most Americans today, however, have forgotten the little our predecessors learned about this feature of the conflict at the time. Of tens of thousands of books in English about the Vietnam War, not one is dedicated to South Korea’s participation.
The Vietnam commitment marked the first time in Korea’s 4,000-year history that its fighters left the peninsula to wage war. The American and South Korean governments conspired to make it appear as if these deployments answered a call that came directly from South Vietnam. But in 1970 a US Senate committee detailed a mercenary motive in 2,000 pages of documents appended to its report of hearings into the matter.
Read complete article in the Boston Globe archive.
A clue tapped me on the shoulder earlier this year. In February, a district court in Seoul ordered the government of South Korea to pay compensatory damages to Nguyễn Thi Thanh, a Vietnamese woman, in a lawsuit she brought over an event that had taken place 55 years earlier, nearly to the day. On the morning of Feb. 12, 1968, about 100 combat troops from the Republic of Korea’s 2nd Marine Brigade poured into Phong Nhị in Quảng Nam Province. The Blue Dragons set homes ablaze and then proceeded to shoot, stab, drown, and hack to death 70 women, children, and infants. The butchery left no uninjured survivors. Nguyễn, 8 years old, took a bullet to the stomach. The rest of her family perished.
The South Korean government has appealed the verdict, which marked the first time any court in South Korea had attributed culpability for a massacre of Vietnamese civilians. More such lawsuits are likely to be brought. Since 1999, journalists, scholars, and veterans in Seoul have documented more than 80 similar massacres of a total of (at least) 9,000 civilians in three provinces. “There’s a strong sense among the survivors that the problem has to be resolved before their generation passes on,” Ku Su-jeong of the Korean-Vietnamese Peace Foundation said in 2016.
Only a few US news outlets reported Nguyễn’s victory. The silence bespeaks a curious subtraction of memory.
Between 1965 and 1972, South Korea contributed 325,517 combatants at our behest. (Australia’s 60,000 rated the next highest contribution by an American ally. Some 2.7 million Americans served.) South Korean belligerents formed the largest phalanx of foreign fighters in Vietnam other than ours, and they even outnumbered ours in the final two years. Most Americans today, however, have forgotten the little our predecessors learned about this feature of the conflict at the time. Of tens of thousands of books in English about the Vietnam War, not one is dedicated to South Korea’s participation.
The Vietnam commitment marked the first time in Korea’s 4,000-year history that its fighters left the peninsula to wage war. The American and South Korean governments conspired to make it appear as if these deployments answered a call that came directly from South Vietnam. But in 1970 a US Senate committee detailed a mercenary motive in 2,000 pages of documents appended to its report of hearings into the matter.
Read complete article in the Boston Globe archive.
Steel Rain
for the U.S. Moral High Ground
The U.S. National Security State touting U.S. "moral authority" to promote a banned submunitions shipment to Ukraine is a colossal nonstarter.
Gene Marx
Jul 20, 2023
for the U.S. Moral High Ground
The U.S. National Security State touting U.S. "moral authority" to promote a banned submunitions shipment to Ukraine is a colossal nonstarter.
Gene Marx
Jul 20, 2023
As I force myself to do - infrequently, I perused last Sunday morning’s national narrative talk shows and came across recently demoted Meet the Press propagandist Chuck Todd wrapping up an interview with the Biden Administration’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan during his defense of Biden’s “very difficult” decision to ship DPICM (Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions) cluster munitions to Ukraine. As there were no surprises, and of course no push-back from Todd, I was hard-pressed to stifle a coffee spit-take when a phlegmatic Sullivan shamelessly leaned on the tired rationale of U.S. “moral authority” …four times before sign off.
“Our moral authority has not derived from being a signatory to the Convention Against Cluster Munitions. We are not, we have not been, at any point since that convention came into effect, neither has Ukraine.”
After this cluttered start, Sullivan continued:
“Most members of NATO have signed on to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, an international agreement that bans the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of these weapons because of the risk they pose to civilians. But the U.S. has not signed the treaty, and neither has Russia or Ukraine.”
And for the record, we are not holding our collective breath.
“Our moral authority and Ukraine’s moral authority in this conflict comes from the fact that we are supporting a country under a brutal, vicious attack by its neighbor with missiles and bombs raining down in its cities, killing its civilians, destroying its schools, its churches, its hospitals.”
As if on cue, more Security State double-speak:
“And the idea that providing Ukraine with a weapon in order for them to be able to defend their homeland, protect their civilians, is somehow a challenge to our moral authority — I find questionable.”
Even more questionable is why a pimp for war like Jake Sullivan would unabashedly toss around a term like “moral authority” to justify more Ukrainian civilians being shred for democracy. More accurately, an immoral certainty is the deadly gift cluster munitions will keep on giving, with countless hectares of Ukraine accumulating for expanding the indiscriminate killing of civilians, typically young innocents, regardless of post-war concessions.
If Sullivan’s phony claims of solidarity weren’t cringe-worthy enough, he had likely forgotten U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Colin Kahl’s claims the cluster bombs now in Ukrainian stockpiles having a failure rate of no more than 2.35%. In fact, the Pentagon reported the dud rates for these bomblets had been observed at 14 and 23% in real-world conditions.
Military analyst for PAX Marc Galasco, a known supporter of the Ukrainian fight, pushed back on the Biden Administration decision in RollingStone, decrying the moral atrocity of this saturation weapon’s lethality and its inevitable “indiscriminate wide-area effects” of what he described in his commentary as “steel rain.”
“I have been researching DPICMs for 20 years, first seeing them in Iraq in 2003 and most recently used by the Russians in Syria and Ukraine. In my research, the typical dud rate is at least 20 percent. When you combine the high dud rate with a lot of bombs you get huge minefields. If we use just the low-end test number of 14 percent, then every single artillery shell produces ten duds. Ukraine is going to be getting hundreds of thousands of shells. For every 100,000 shells that is 1 million unexploded bombs littering Ukraine.”
According to Global Times, cluster munitions were used extensively by the U.S. to carry out airstrikes on targets in Southeast Asia between 1964 and 1973, with 260 million tons of cluster bombs dropped on Laos alone with less than 1% of the duds having been cleared. The International Red Cross reported more than forty years later Laos was still contaminated by about 80 million cluster submunitions, affecting all 17 provinces and resulting in 300 yearly casualties. Even today, death and amputation are pervasive.
The U.S. ceded its mythological moral high ground decades ago.
Globally, more than 94% of cluster munition casualties have been civilian, with the numbers of the dead ranging from 55,000 to 90,000 since the Nazis dropped the first prototype on Guernica in 1937, and 40 to 50% of the victims children, a grim legacy with no end in sight.
Ahead the Biden announcement, Sera Koulabdara of the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines and Cluster Munitions Coalition urged Ukrainian and U.S. leaders "to look at history and for the United States of America, our own history in countries like Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq."
"You learn from the impacts and the legacies of wars that this will have on human lives," Koulabdara said, "lives of civilians who have a name, who have mothers, who have fathers who cares about them."
So, as we continue to be dragged up the escalation ladder in Ukraine, past HIMARs, anti-tank missiles, the bombings of Nordstream 2 and the Kerch Bridge, depleted uranium artillery, U.S. approval of F-16 use, now cluster munitions, will American boots on the ground, even low-yield nuclear weapons be more inevitable rungs on the ascent, despite National Security State versions of moral authority?
“Our moral authority has not derived from being a signatory to the Convention Against Cluster Munitions. We are not, we have not been, at any point since that convention came into effect, neither has Ukraine.”
After this cluttered start, Sullivan continued:
“Most members of NATO have signed on to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, an international agreement that bans the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of these weapons because of the risk they pose to civilians. But the U.S. has not signed the treaty, and neither has Russia or Ukraine.”
And for the record, we are not holding our collective breath.
“Our moral authority and Ukraine’s moral authority in this conflict comes from the fact that we are supporting a country under a brutal, vicious attack by its neighbor with missiles and bombs raining down in its cities, killing its civilians, destroying its schools, its churches, its hospitals.”
As if on cue, more Security State double-speak:
“And the idea that providing Ukraine with a weapon in order for them to be able to defend their homeland, protect their civilians, is somehow a challenge to our moral authority — I find questionable.”
Even more questionable is why a pimp for war like Jake Sullivan would unabashedly toss around a term like “moral authority” to justify more Ukrainian civilians being shred for democracy. More accurately, an immoral certainty is the deadly gift cluster munitions will keep on giving, with countless hectares of Ukraine accumulating for expanding the indiscriminate killing of civilians, typically young innocents, regardless of post-war concessions.
If Sullivan’s phony claims of solidarity weren’t cringe-worthy enough, he had likely forgotten U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Colin Kahl’s claims the cluster bombs now in Ukrainian stockpiles having a failure rate of no more than 2.35%. In fact, the Pentagon reported the dud rates for these bomblets had been observed at 14 and 23% in real-world conditions.
Military analyst for PAX Marc Galasco, a known supporter of the Ukrainian fight, pushed back on the Biden Administration decision in RollingStone, decrying the moral atrocity of this saturation weapon’s lethality and its inevitable “indiscriminate wide-area effects” of what he described in his commentary as “steel rain.”
“I have been researching DPICMs for 20 years, first seeing them in Iraq in 2003 and most recently used by the Russians in Syria and Ukraine. In my research, the typical dud rate is at least 20 percent. When you combine the high dud rate with a lot of bombs you get huge minefields. If we use just the low-end test number of 14 percent, then every single artillery shell produces ten duds. Ukraine is going to be getting hundreds of thousands of shells. For every 100,000 shells that is 1 million unexploded bombs littering Ukraine.”
According to Global Times, cluster munitions were used extensively by the U.S. to carry out airstrikes on targets in Southeast Asia between 1964 and 1973, with 260 million tons of cluster bombs dropped on Laos alone with less than 1% of the duds having been cleared. The International Red Cross reported more than forty years later Laos was still contaminated by about 80 million cluster submunitions, affecting all 17 provinces and resulting in 300 yearly casualties. Even today, death and amputation are pervasive.
The U.S. ceded its mythological moral high ground decades ago.
Globally, more than 94% of cluster munition casualties have been civilian, with the numbers of the dead ranging from 55,000 to 90,000 since the Nazis dropped the first prototype on Guernica in 1937, and 40 to 50% of the victims children, a grim legacy with no end in sight.
Ahead the Biden announcement, Sera Koulabdara of the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines and Cluster Munitions Coalition urged Ukrainian and U.S. leaders "to look at history and for the United States of America, our own history in countries like Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq."
"You learn from the impacts and the legacies of wars that this will have on human lives," Koulabdara said, "lives of civilians who have a name, who have mothers, who have fathers who cares about them."
So, as we continue to be dragged up the escalation ladder in Ukraine, past HIMARs, anti-tank missiles, the bombings of Nordstream 2 and the Kerch Bridge, depleted uranium artillery, U.S. approval of F-16 use, now cluster munitions, will American boots on the ground, even low-yield nuclear weapons be more inevitable rungs on the ascent, despite National Security State versions of moral authority?
The Era of Nukes and No Diplomacy:
‘Crossing a Rubicon to Armageddon’
by EditorJuly 7, 2023
Professor Jackson Lears warns the Ukraine war has wrought “the ultimate technocratic fantasy: a winnable nuclear war.”
‘Crossing a Rubicon to Armageddon’
by EditorJuly 7, 2023
Professor Jackson Lears warns the Ukraine war has wrought “the ultimate technocratic fantasy: a winnable nuclear war.”
The Doomsday Clock continues to tick toward nuclear war, but at its fastest pace ever. Professor Jackson Lears, a former naval officer serving on a U.S cruiser carrying tactical nuclear weapons, considers the current moment more frightening than at any time during the Cold War. Then, there was intense alarm for the fate of the earth and the survival of the human race. Today, rather than diplomacy or negotiation, talk revolves around new weapons shipments, disappointment in Ukraine’s counteroffensive failures, and even drone strikes in Moscow. But far less attention has been paid to the prospect of nuclear war between Russia and the U.S that threatens to end all life on this planet as we know it. That is the alarm sounded by cultural historian and author Jackson Lears who joins host Robert Scheer to discuss Lears’s essay for Harper’s Magazine, “Behind the Veil of Indifference.”
Lears’s piece warns that despite the public indifference, a “winnable nuclear war” has entered the minds of American strategists and politicians once again, undermining years of work towards nuclear disarmament. Lears tells Scheer that it is similar to the attitudes from the Cold War, yet this time, there is an eerie disinterest from the American side about even talking to someone like Vladimir Putin. “[T]his is, in a sense, a return to the worst kind of confrontations of the early 1960s but there’s a big difference because even Kennedy and even Reagan, cold warriors that they were, were eager to create common ground ultimately between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. And that common ground no longer exists between the U.S. and Russia, and there is no interest in diplomacy at all,” Lears said.
Scheer and Lears highlight a critical factor in shaping public perception: the Russiagate controversy and the media’s role in complying with government demands for secrecy, beginning in the late 1970s, while also promoting narratives that fostered consent for war with Russia. Scheer said, “if you even dare suggest there’s some complexity to this issue, or that the other side might have a point of view, or there’s something even worth negotiating about, you’re now considered unpatriotic.” Lears agreed: “We have former directors of the CIA who have perjured themselves before Congress, now posing as professional wise men and professional truth tellers on MSNBC and CNN.”
Wrapping up the discussion, Lears gives an insight into his latest book, Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street. In it, Lears explores the history behind thinkers in America who honed in on vitalism rather than the restrictive nature of traditional cultures involving religion, science and commercialization.
JFK's Commencement Address at American University, Washington, D.C., June 10, 1963
President John F. Kennedy
June 10, 1963
President Anderson, members of the faculty, board of trustees, distinguished guests, my old colleague, Senator Bob Byrd, who has earned his degree through many years of attending night law school, while I am earning mine in the next 30 minutes, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen:
It is with great pride that I participate in this ceremony of the American University, sponsored by the Methodist Church, founded by Bishop John Fletcher Hurst, and first opened by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914. This is a young and growing university, but it has already fulfilled Bishop Hurst's enlightened hope for the study of history and public affairs in a city devoted to the making of history and the conduct of the public's business. By sponsoring this institution of higher learning for all who wish to learn, whatever their color or their creed, the Methodists of this area and the Nation deserve the Nation's thanks, and I commend all those who are today graduating.
Professor Woodrow Wilson once said that every man sent out from a university should be a man of his nation as well as a man of his time, and I am confident that the men and women who carry the honor of graduating from this institution will continue to give from their lives, from their talents, a high measure of public service and public support.
"There are few earthly things more beautiful than a university," wrote John Masefield in his tribute to English universities--and his words are equally true today. He did not refer to spires and towers, to campus greens and ivied walls. He admired the splendid beauty of the university, he said, because it was "a place where those who hate ignorance may strive to know, where those who perceive truth may strive to make others see."
I have, therefore, chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived--yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.
What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children--not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women--not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.
I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.
Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use them is essential to keeping the peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles--which can only destroy and never create--is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.
I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war--and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.
Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world disarmament--and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude--as individuals and as a Nation--for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward--by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the cold war and toward freedom and peace here at home.
First: Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable--that mankind is doomed--that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.
We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade--therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable--and we believe they can do it again.
I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. I do not deny the value of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal.
Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace-- based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions--on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace--no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process--a way of solving problems.
With such a peace, there will still be quarrels and conflicting interests, as there are within families and nations. World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor--it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.
And history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors.
So let us persevere. Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable. By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all peoples to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly toward it.
Second: Let us reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union. It is discouraging to think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write. It is discouraging to read a recent authoritative Soviet text on Military Strategy and find, on page after page, wholly baseless and incredible claims--such as the allegation that "American imperialist circles are preparing to unleash different types of wars . . . that there is a very real threat of a preventive war being unleashed by American imperialists against the Soviet Union . . . [and that] the political aims of the American imperialists are to enslave economically and politically the European and other capitalist countries . . . [and] to achieve world domination . . . by means of aggressive wars."
Truly, as it was written long ago: "The wicked flee when no man pursueth." Yet it is sad to read these Soviet statements--to realize the extent of the gulf between us. But it is also a warning--a warning to the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.
No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements--in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage.
Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation's territory, including nearly two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland--a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago.
Today, should total war ever break out again--no matter how--our two countries would become the primary targets. It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours. And even in the cold war, which brings burdens and dangers to so many nations, including this Nation's closest allies--our two countries bear the heaviest burdens. For we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons.
In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race. Agreements to this end are in the interests of the Soviet Union as well as ours--and even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations, and only those treaty obligations, which are in their own interest.
So, let us not be blind to our differences--but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.
Third: Let us reexamine our attitude toward the cold war, remembering that we are not engaged in a debate, seeking to pile up debating points. We are not here distributing blame or pointing the finger of judgment. We must deal with the world as it is, and not as it might have been had the history of the last 18 years been different.
We must, therefore, persevere in the search for peace in the hope that constructive changes within the Communist bloc might bring within reach solutions which now seem beyond us. We must conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists' interest to agree on a genuine peace. Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy--or of a collective death-wish for the world.
To secure these ends, America's weapons are nonprovocative, carefully controlled, designed to deter, and capable of selective use. Our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self- restraint. Our diplomats are instructed to avoid unnecessary irritants and purely rhetorical hostility.
For we can seek a relaxation of tension without relaxing our guard. And, for our part, we do not need to use threats to prove that we are resolute. We do not need to jam foreign broadcasts out of fear our faith will be eroded. We are unwilling to impose our system on any unwilling people--but we are willing and able to engage in peaceful competition with any people on earth.
Meanwhile, we seek to strengthen the United Nations, to help solve its financial problems, to make it a more effective instrument for peace, to develop it into a genuine world security system--a system capable of resolving disputes on the basis of law, of insuring the security of the large and the small, and of creating conditions under which arms can finally be abolished.
At the same time we seek to keep peace inside the non-Communist world, where many nations, all of them our friends, are divided over issues which weaken Western unity, which invite Communist intervention or which threaten to erupt into war. Our efforts in West New Guinea, in the Congo, in the Middle East, and in the Indian subcontinent, have been persistent and patient despite criticism from both sides. We have also tried to set an example for others--by seeking to adjust small but significant differences with our own closest neighbors in Mexico and in Canada.
Speaking of other nations, I wish to make one point clear. We are bound to many nations by alliances. Those alliances exist because our concern and theirs substantially overlap. Our commitment to defend Western Europe and West Berlin, for example, stands undiminished because of the identity of our vital interests. The United States will make no deal with the Soviet Union at the expense of other nations and other peoples, not merely because they are our partners, but also because their interests and ours converge.
Our interests converge, however, not only in defending the frontiers of freedom, but in pursuing the paths of peace. It is our hope-- and the purpose of allied policies--to convince the Soviet Union that she, too, should let each nation choose its own future, so long as that choice does not interfere with the choices of others. The Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today. For there can be no doubt that, if all nations could refrain from interfering in the self-determination of others, the peace would be much more assured.
This will require a new effort to achieve world law--a new context for world discussions. It will require increased understanding between the Soviets and ourselves. And increased understanding will require increased contact and communication. One step in this direction is the proposed arrangement for a direct line between Moscow and Washington, to avoid on each side the dangerous delays, misunderstandings, and misreadings of the other's actions which might occur at a time of crisis.
We have also been talking in Geneva about the other first-step measures of arms control designed to limit the intensity of the arms race and to reduce the risks of accidental war. Our primary long range interest in Geneva, however, is general and complete disarmament-- designed to take place by stages, permitting parallel political developments to build the new institutions of peace which would take the place of arms.
The pursuit of disarmament has been an effort of this Government since the 1920's. It has been urgently sought by the past three administrations. And however dim the prospects may be today, we intend to continue this effort--to continue it in order that all countries, including our own, can better grasp what the problems and possibilities of disarmament are.
The one major area of these negotiations where the end is in sight, yet where a fresh start is badly needed, is in a treaty to outlaw nuclear tests. The conclusion of such a treaty, so near and yet so far, would check the spiraling arms race in one of its most dangerous areas. It would place the nuclear powers in a position to deal more effectively with one of the greatest hazards which man faces in 1963, the further spread of nuclear arms. It would increase our security--it would decrease the prospects of war. Surely this goal is sufficiently important to require our steady pursuit, yielding neither to the temptation to give up the whole effort nor the temptation to give up our insistence on vital and responsible safeguards.
I am taking this opportunity, therefore, to announce two important decisions in this regard.
First: Chairman Khrushchev, Prime Minister Macmillan, and I have agreed that high-level discussions will shortly begin in Moscow looking toward early agreement on a comprehensive test ban treaty. Our hopes must be tempered with the caution of history--but with our hopes go the hopes of all mankind.
Second: To make clear our good faith and solemn convictions on the matter, I now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so. We will not be the first to resume. Such a declaration is no substitute for a formal binding treaty, but I hope it will help us achieve one. Nor would such a treaty be a substitute for disarmament, but I hope it will help us achieve it.
Finally, my fellow Americans, let us examine our attitude toward peace and freedom here at home. The quality and spirit of our own society must justify and support our efforts abroad. We must show it in the dedication of our own lives--as many of you who are graduating today will have a unique opportunity to do, by serving without pay in the Peace Corps abroad or in the proposed National Service Corps here at home.
But wherever we are, we must all, in our daily lives, live up to the age-old faith that peace and freedom walk together. In too many of our cities today, the peace is not secure because the freedom is incomplete.
It is the responsibility of the executive branch at all levels of government--local, State, and National--to provide and protect that freedom for all of our citizens by all means within their authority. It is the responsibility of the legislative branch at all levels, wherever that authority is not now adequate, to make it adequate. And it is the responsibility of all citizens in all sections of this country to respect the rights of all others and to respect the law of the land.
All this is not unrelated to world peace. "When a man's ways please the Lord," the Scriptures tell us, "he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him." And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights--the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation--the right to breathe air as nature provided it--the right of future generations to a healthy existence?
While we proceed to safeguard our national interests, let us also safeguard human interests. And the elimination of war and arms is clearly in the interest of both. No treaty, however much it may be to the advantage of all, however tightly it may be worded, can provide absolute security against the risks of deception and evasion. But it can--if it is sufficiently effective in its enforcement and if it is sufficiently in the interests of its signers--offer far more security and far fewer risks than an unabated, uncontrolled, unpredictable arms race.
The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough--more than enough--of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on--not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.
University of Chicago Professor
John Mearsheimer Predicts "Frozen Conflict" for Ukraine
John Mearsheimer Predicts "Frozen Conflict" for Ukraine
Important recent talk by John Mearsheimer on current status of Ukraine War and what’s likely to happen next. Mearsheimer is the leading scholar of International Relations, and his predictions about the conflict have been highly accurate going back a decade.
Update from National VFP: Ukraine statement;
Unauthorized “VFP for Ukraine Working
Group”; and Use of VFP Logo
Unauthorized “VFP for Ukraine Working
Group”; and Use of VFP Logo
Statement on the War in Ukraine
Adopted by the VFP National Board
April 15, 2023
Veterans For Peace is an organization of military veterans and allies who use our experiences and lift our collective voice in an effort to build a culture of peace. We inform the public of the true causes of war and the enormous costs of wars and highlight our obligation to heal the wounds of wars.
As the fighting and dying in Ukraine continues with no visible end, we at Veterans For Peace call on the American people, President Biden and the Congress to end this evil and terrible war against humanity.
We call for an end to the suffering of Ukrainian civilians under siege, and the damage to millions of refugees. We call for a congressional investigation into the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines and the militarization of Europe. We must stop the war-related food shortages in Africa and the war’s devastation of the environment and all living things, contributing to the existential threat of climate catastrophe.
We are angry about the waste of resources needed here at home for healthcare, social services, adequate housing and education that instead are used for death and destruction abroad. We are especially alarmed by the growing possibility of a nuclear war, which could bring a horrifying end to all living things on this planet.
In the face of these compounding disasters and threats, the world’s people are confronted by the apparent readiness of Russia, Ukraine, the United States and NATO to continue this war.
Veterans For Peace has consistently expressed our opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. War is never an answer, especially in our age of nuclear proliferation. And we remain opposed to U.S./NATO moves that set the stage for this war: surrounding rival Russia with hostile military forces and nuclear weapons systems and supporting the 2014 coup in Ukraine and attacks on Russian-speaking populations in eastern Ukraine. The Biden administration has escalated this war by sending more and more lethal weaponry to Ukraine, while blocking negotiations that might have ended hostilities earlier. The United States is pursuing its own war against Russia, if not to defeat it militarily, then to “weaken Russia,” as stated by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
As veterans who have experienced the carnage of war, we feel great empathy for the young soldiers on both sides of this bloody war, who are being killed and injured in the tens of thousands. We know all too well that the survivors of armed conflict will be traumatized and scarred for life.
We demand urgent, good faith diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine, not more U.S. weapons, advisors, and endless war. And certainly not a nuclear war. We want those billions of dollars going for climate correction, jobs, healthcare and housing, not for the profiteers who manufacture weapons for death and destruction.
As soldiers who participated in U.S. wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, we support war resisters, including Conscientious Objectors, draft resisters, deserters and all who refuse to participate in killing other human beings. We encourage U.S. military personnel to examine their consciences and refuse to participate in training, arming, advising or directly engaging in this and other wars of empire. The United States must end its many interventions and withdraw our troops from over 850 military bases around the world. We demand an end to the alarming U.S. preparations for war with China.
It is time to drop the weapons and embrace diplomacy and peace. For the people of Ukraine, the people of Russia, the people of Europe, the United States and China. For the children, for the civilians, for the soldiers, for all living things: We demand Diplomacy, Not War. We demand Peace in Ukraine.
________________________________
Statement on the Unauthorized “VFP for Ukraine Working Group”
Adopted Unanimously by the VFP Executive Committee
As Veterans For Peace, we raise our collective voice to build a culture for peace. As the fighting and dying in Ukraine continues, we call for an end to this evil and terrible war against humanity and all living things. We call for an end to the suffering of the Ukrainian people under siege and the refugees who flee for their lives. VFP has consistently expressed our opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as we are also opposed to sending more and lethal weaponry to Ukraine.
As soldiers who participated in U.S. wars abroad, we support war resisters who refuse to participate in killing other human beings. We support victims of war and those who provide relief and humanitarian aid to them. It is time to drop the weapons, embrace diplomacy and peace. For the people of Ukraine and Russia; the people of Europe and the United States; for the children, civilians, and soldiers; for all living things, we demand diplomacy, not war. We demand Peace in Ukraine.
The VFP National Board of Directors has denied the creation of a “VFP Ukraine Working Group” and/or caucus at multiple National Board meetings, as well as any further use of or references to the “Veterans For Peace For Ukraine” or variations thereof; they are not authorized to use the “Veterans For Peace” or “VFP” name or logo, and there is no such officially authorized entity as the “Veterans for Peace For Ukraine Working Group” or variations thereof.
Postings by “Veterans For Peace For Ukraine”and comments by the group’s leader Jeff Paterson and others claim that VFP National has treated them unfairly and discriminated against them. This is factually untrue.
Some relevant points:
Jeff Paterson’s current formation, he says, is based on "promises" made by Board members in Board meetings. But in fact, these were suggestions by individual board members as possible avenues to discuss ways to compromise, not promises made by the Board. The Board voted decisively against his group; it was clear that no authorization was granted his group in any form.
Those suggestions for compromise included not just changing the name and logo of Paterson's group, but also acting within the same parameters as all other working groups. Jeff has clearly not done so, and by intent, not by misunderstanding or miscommunication.
One of the key parameters for all working groups is Board approval prior to the official formation or public action of any working group. No other group took publication or publicly announced its presence prior to approval by the National Board.
Susan Schnall, President
Veterans For Peace
________________________________________
Motion on Use of VFP Logo
Adopted unanimously by the VFP National Board
May 20, 2023
“As members of Veterans For Peace (Full and Associate) we stand unified in our opposition to war in all its manifestations.
In particular, our Statement of Purpose commits us to “Restrain our government from intervening overtly and covertly, into the internal affairs of other nations.”
If we allow ourselves to be torn apart from the inside because of divisiveness on issues related to war contrary to our Statement of Purpose, we stand a chance of damaging our integrity as a voice of non-violence and opposition to war. Veterans For Peace is the largest national veterans' organization whose primary purpose is abolishing war. It would be a grave mistake if we lost our effectiveness and voice.
All members of VFP are free to think and speak whatever they want in their personal lives but in regard to war we ask that if any member is speaking contrary to our Statement of Purpose, to not identify themselves as a member of Veterans For Peace nor use our VFP logo.
Also, any unsanctioned members or working groups identifying themselves as Veterans For Peace while speaking contrary to our Statement of Purpose, have created websites, are conducting webinars, etc.shall immediately shut down such sites and cease and desist.
Susan Schnall, President
Veterans For Peace
Adopted by the VFP National Board
April 15, 2023
Veterans For Peace is an organization of military veterans and allies who use our experiences and lift our collective voice in an effort to build a culture of peace. We inform the public of the true causes of war and the enormous costs of wars and highlight our obligation to heal the wounds of wars.
As the fighting and dying in Ukraine continues with no visible end, we at Veterans For Peace call on the American people, President Biden and the Congress to end this evil and terrible war against humanity.
We call for an end to the suffering of Ukrainian civilians under siege, and the damage to millions of refugees. We call for a congressional investigation into the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines and the militarization of Europe. We must stop the war-related food shortages in Africa and the war’s devastation of the environment and all living things, contributing to the existential threat of climate catastrophe.
We are angry about the waste of resources needed here at home for healthcare, social services, adequate housing and education that instead are used for death and destruction abroad. We are especially alarmed by the growing possibility of a nuclear war, which could bring a horrifying end to all living things on this planet.
In the face of these compounding disasters and threats, the world’s people are confronted by the apparent readiness of Russia, Ukraine, the United States and NATO to continue this war.
Veterans For Peace has consistently expressed our opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. War is never an answer, especially in our age of nuclear proliferation. And we remain opposed to U.S./NATO moves that set the stage for this war: surrounding rival Russia with hostile military forces and nuclear weapons systems and supporting the 2014 coup in Ukraine and attacks on Russian-speaking populations in eastern Ukraine. The Biden administration has escalated this war by sending more and more lethal weaponry to Ukraine, while blocking negotiations that might have ended hostilities earlier. The United States is pursuing its own war against Russia, if not to defeat it militarily, then to “weaken Russia,” as stated by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
As veterans who have experienced the carnage of war, we feel great empathy for the young soldiers on both sides of this bloody war, who are being killed and injured in the tens of thousands. We know all too well that the survivors of armed conflict will be traumatized and scarred for life.
We demand urgent, good faith diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine, not more U.S. weapons, advisors, and endless war. And certainly not a nuclear war. We want those billions of dollars going for climate correction, jobs, healthcare and housing, not for the profiteers who manufacture weapons for death and destruction.
As soldiers who participated in U.S. wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, we support war resisters, including Conscientious Objectors, draft resisters, deserters and all who refuse to participate in killing other human beings. We encourage U.S. military personnel to examine their consciences and refuse to participate in training, arming, advising or directly engaging in this and other wars of empire. The United States must end its many interventions and withdraw our troops from over 850 military bases around the world. We demand an end to the alarming U.S. preparations for war with China.
It is time to drop the weapons and embrace diplomacy and peace. For the people of Ukraine, the people of Russia, the people of Europe, the United States and China. For the children, for the civilians, for the soldiers, for all living things: We demand Diplomacy, Not War. We demand Peace in Ukraine.
________________________________
Statement on the Unauthorized “VFP for Ukraine Working Group”
Adopted Unanimously by the VFP Executive Committee
As Veterans For Peace, we raise our collective voice to build a culture for peace. As the fighting and dying in Ukraine continues, we call for an end to this evil and terrible war against humanity and all living things. We call for an end to the suffering of the Ukrainian people under siege and the refugees who flee for their lives. VFP has consistently expressed our opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as we are also opposed to sending more and lethal weaponry to Ukraine.
As soldiers who participated in U.S. wars abroad, we support war resisters who refuse to participate in killing other human beings. We support victims of war and those who provide relief and humanitarian aid to them. It is time to drop the weapons, embrace diplomacy and peace. For the people of Ukraine and Russia; the people of Europe and the United States; for the children, civilians, and soldiers; for all living things, we demand diplomacy, not war. We demand Peace in Ukraine.
The VFP National Board of Directors has denied the creation of a “VFP Ukraine Working Group” and/or caucus at multiple National Board meetings, as well as any further use of or references to the “Veterans For Peace For Ukraine” or variations thereof; they are not authorized to use the “Veterans For Peace” or “VFP” name or logo, and there is no such officially authorized entity as the “Veterans for Peace For Ukraine Working Group” or variations thereof.
Postings by “Veterans For Peace For Ukraine”and comments by the group’s leader Jeff Paterson and others claim that VFP National has treated them unfairly and discriminated against them. This is factually untrue.
Some relevant points:
Jeff Paterson’s current formation, he says, is based on "promises" made by Board members in Board meetings. But in fact, these were suggestions by individual board members as possible avenues to discuss ways to compromise, not promises made by the Board. The Board voted decisively against his group; it was clear that no authorization was granted his group in any form.
Those suggestions for compromise included not just changing the name and logo of Paterson's group, but also acting within the same parameters as all other working groups. Jeff has clearly not done so, and by intent, not by misunderstanding or miscommunication.
One of the key parameters for all working groups is Board approval prior to the official formation or public action of any working group. No other group took publication or publicly announced its presence prior to approval by the National Board.
Susan Schnall, President
Veterans For Peace
________________________________________
Motion on Use of VFP Logo
Adopted unanimously by the VFP National Board
May 20, 2023
“As members of Veterans For Peace (Full and Associate) we stand unified in our opposition to war in all its manifestations.
In particular, our Statement of Purpose commits us to “Restrain our government from intervening overtly and covertly, into the internal affairs of other nations.”
If we allow ourselves to be torn apart from the inside because of divisiveness on issues related to war contrary to our Statement of Purpose, we stand a chance of damaging our integrity as a voice of non-violence and opposition to war. Veterans For Peace is the largest national veterans' organization whose primary purpose is abolishing war. It would be a grave mistake if we lost our effectiveness and voice.
All members of VFP are free to think and speak whatever they want in their personal lives but in regard to war we ask that if any member is speaking contrary to our Statement of Purpose, to not identify themselves as a member of Veterans For Peace nor use our VFP logo.
Also, any unsanctioned members or working groups identifying themselves as Veterans For Peace while speaking contrary to our Statement of Purpose, have created websites, are conducting webinars, etc.shall immediately shut down such sites and cease and desist.
Susan Schnall, President
Veterans For Peace
Rebutting Memorial Day Mythology
A counterargument to unwitting disconnects in support of U.S. militarism
Gene Marx
May 29, 2023
A counterargument to unwitting disconnects in support of U.S. militarism
Gene Marx
May 29, 2023
Now, I wouldn’t know Dr. John Mandrola if I fell on him, but I occasionally read his posts on Substack, Sensible Medicine. Today, Memorial Day 2023, Dr. Mandrola appropriately paused, in his words, “to remember and honor those who gave their life in the service of this country.” Having “served” in Vietnam as a Naval Aviator, his submission on this occasion piqued my interest.
My comment:
"Sadly, it appears Dr. Mandrola has bought into the bill of goods our citizens have been sold for decades to propagate U.S. hegemony under the guise of fighting and dying for freedom. Not a single one of our country’s founders supported pre-emptive wars of aggression. In fact, they warned repeatedly against entanglements abroad.
Like many surviving Vietnam combat veterans, I dread Memorial Day, but observe it in reverence nonetheless. However, I honor and mourn the loss of not only my friends - like me, mindless tools of U.S. interventionist war-making policies - but also the countless, brave Vietnamese fighters who actually did die for their country and their sovereign freedoms."
"Sadly, it appears Dr. Mandrola has bought into the bill of goods our citizens have been sold for decades to propagate U.S. hegemony under the guise of fighting and dying for freedom. Not a single one of our country’s founders supported pre-emptive wars of aggression. In fact, they warned repeatedly against entanglements abroad.
Like many surviving Vietnam combat veterans, I dread Memorial Day, but observe it in reverence nonetheless. However, I honor and mourn the loss of not only my friends - like me, mindless tools of U.S. interventionist war-making policies - but also the countless, brave Vietnamese fighters who actually did die for their country and their sovereign freedoms."
Let me respond further, as if it wouldn’t be a total waste of time.
Just two points:
· I didn’t “serve” anyone during my deployment in the Gulf of Tonkin, except the war-making foreign policies of the U.S. government. As I’m reminded by a fellow Veterans for Peace activist, I was a “mindless f**king tool of empire.” We all were and should have known better.
· Additionally, I never met a single veteran who “fought for democracy” or for any American’s freedom. During today’s wreath laying ceremony at Arlington Joe Biden remarked that my friends “dared all and gave all’ in defense of America. Not a single friend of mine on Panel 2W of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial “gave their life” during our failed, immoral invasion of Vietnam. Each life was ripped from them by war-makers who couldn’t care less.
Well-meaning, or not, we are deluged this week with posts, submissions and emotive disconnects of past sacrifices and current wars, as contributors deliberately or unwittingly, in Dr. Mandrola’s case, perpetuate the inevitabilities and savageries of the next.
My dead friends deserve so much more, in the true spirit of Memorial Day.
Just two points:
· I didn’t “serve” anyone during my deployment in the Gulf of Tonkin, except the war-making foreign policies of the U.S. government. As I’m reminded by a fellow Veterans for Peace activist, I was a “mindless f**king tool of empire.” We all were and should have known better.
· Additionally, I never met a single veteran who “fought for democracy” or for any American’s freedom. During today’s wreath laying ceremony at Arlington Joe Biden remarked that my friends “dared all and gave all’ in defense of America. Not a single friend of mine on Panel 2W of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial “gave their life” during our failed, immoral invasion of Vietnam. Each life was ripped from them by war-makers who couldn’t care less.
Well-meaning, or not, we are deluged this week with posts, submissions and emotive disconnects of past sacrifices and current wars, as contributors deliberately or unwittingly, in Dr. Mandrola’s case, perpetuate the inevitabilities and savageries of the next.
My dead friends deserve so much more, in the true spirit of Memorial Day.
Never Too Late to Shout About It
”In the next war the survivors will envy the dead.” If there was ever a time for antiwar dialogue, engagement, resistance, it’s right now.
Gene Marx
February 10, 2013
”In the next war the survivors will envy the dead.” If there was ever a time for antiwar dialogue, engagement, resistance, it’s right now.
Gene Marx
February 10, 2013
“All acts of healing and love – and the defiance of war is an affirmation of love – allow us to shout out to the vast powers of the universe that, however broken we are, we are not helpless. However we despair we are not without hope, however weak we may feel, we will always, always, always resist.”
Chris Hedges, War is the Greatest Evil
Chris Hedges, War is the Greatest Evil
Respectfully, I have been all in for hope for as long as I can remember, but never a devotee. During the chaotic 60s of my shamelessly irresponsible youth, hope was an emotional default. Despite the radicalization of my generation, historic levels of civil unrest, and friends ending up as human remains in US issue body bags, hope was just a coping mechanism to counter undercurrents of dread and the white noise of Lyndon Johnson’s falling dominoes. Most of my draft-age fodder peers could never begin to imagine an end to the killing, but Congressional opposition to the genocide in Southeast Asia caught on and LBJ was driven out of office. Democrats and Republicans alike – Pete McCloskey, Mike Mansfield, Charles Mathias and Mike Gravel and others – challenged the pro-war narrative. Eugene McCarthy primaried LBJ. Bobby Kennedy joined the fray. It turned out my hope was more than a thing with feathers.
In sharp contrast to today’s 118th Congress, lawmakers recognized a regrettable debacle when they saw one.
In sharp contrast to today’s 118th Congress, lawmakers recognized a regrettable debacle when they saw one.
That was a lifetime ago, when wars ended, for everyone but the survivors.
A half century later, after escaping in one piece, from my own war to end all wars, a flailing American empire is now poised on the brink of direct confrontations with the world’s largest nuclear superpowers. As if a viral pandemic and planetary climate collapse weren’t enough, NATO and the US National Security State are trying to kill us all, including the very last man in Ukraine in America’s latest proxy war. And if the new Ukrainian conscription policy - lowering the draft age to 16 –and reports of a 4-hour life expectancy for new untrained troops in the Donbass are true, that poor grunt bastard’s days are numbered.
But, in a brutally frank, nightmare scenario, so are ours.
But, in a brutally frank, nightmare scenario, so are ours.
With global alliances for the Ukraine conflict set in stone and diplomatic entreaties more unlikely or unthinkable, the possibility of a massive nuclear exchange becomes more thinkable with each new weapon shipped to Zelenskyy forces by the collective West. Still, 100 US tactical nukes in Europe, intractable war power rhetoric, cornered adversaries with nothing to lose and the unfettered hubris of US foreign policy neocons is a recipe for a maelstrom, but barely gets a mention anywhere, from anyone.
An exchange of tactical nuclear devices in Eastern Europe - by accident or design - would result in counterattacks from all sides. We have been warned since Trinity, but while American support for the conflict in Ukraine has flat-lined, the escalation ladder of US and NATO weapons continues to, well, escalate. Still, no one with or without agency is talking or, better yet, shouting about it. For uncensored, unbridled antiwar dialogue, alternative media is our last best hope – there’s that word again – against unrelenting war propaganda.
“This threat is largely ignored by politicians and the mainstream media,” writes nuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott, “who continue to practice psychic numbing as we stumble blindly toward our demise.” For many progressives self-censorship became a safe place. Whoever countered the pro-NATO narrative continue to be labeled alarmists or Kremlin agents at the mere mention of a diplomatic off ramp. (Read: Peace).
And JFK’s 1963 warning at American University couldn’t have been more prescient:
“Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy--or of a collective death-wish for the world.”
And JFK’s 1963 warning at American University couldn’t have been more prescient:
“Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy--or of a collective death-wish for the world.”
Incredibly, we would joke about nuclear annihilation in 1965, as we sang singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer’s satirical piece “So Long, Mom, I’m off to Drop the Bomb,” a much-needed musical respite from the psychotrauma of the Cuban Missile Crisis. When the laughter died, this rendition of a Cold War musical deflection had a short shelf life.
Dr. Helen Caldicott would later write:
“Knowing man’s propensity to fight, why in God’s name did the U.S. Government and Soviet Union authorize the brilliant scientists and weapons makers to construct thousands of nuclear weapons during and after the Cold War, culminating in more than 70,000 nuclear weapons during the '70s and '80s?"
No one should be breathing any easier today with over 13,000 warheads distributed among the nine nuclear armed states - United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. One targeting miscalculation or false flag provocation could result in a global crossette of destruction lasting an hour, give or take, eventually eradicating billions with the survivors envying the dead, as JFK would often quote Nikita Khrushchev.
Read complete article on Geno's Stuff Box.
Dr. Helen Caldicott would later write:
“Knowing man’s propensity to fight, why in God’s name did the U.S. Government and Soviet Union authorize the brilliant scientists and weapons makers to construct thousands of nuclear weapons during and after the Cold War, culminating in more than 70,000 nuclear weapons during the '70s and '80s?"
No one should be breathing any easier today with over 13,000 warheads distributed among the nine nuclear armed states - United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. One targeting miscalculation or false flag provocation could result in a global crossette of destruction lasting an hour, give or take, eventually eradicating billions with the survivors envying the dead, as JFK would often quote Nikita Khrushchev.
Read complete article on Geno's Stuff Box.
66 Nations at UN say
‘End War in Ukraine’
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies
Common Dreams
September 29, 2022
‘End War in Ukraine’
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies
Common Dreams
September 29, 2022
"Too much blood has been spilled” — Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies highlight a few of the many under-reported appeals made at the General Assembly for peaceful negotiations.
We have spent the past week reading and listening to speeches by world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly in New York. Most of them condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a violation of the U.N. Charter and a serious setback for the peaceful world order that is the U.N.’s founding and defining principle.But what has not been reported in the United States is that leaders from 66 countries, mainly from the Global South, also used their General Assembly speeches to call urgently for diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine through peaceful negotiations, as the U.N. Charter requires. We have compiled excerpts from the speeches of all 66 countries to show the breadth and depth of their appeals, and we highlight a few of them here.
African leaders echoed one of the first speakers, Macky Sall, the president of Senegal, who also spoke in his capacity as the current chairman of the African Union when he said, “We call for de-escalation and a cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, as well as for a negotiated solution, to avoid the catastrophic risk of a potentially global conflict.”
Read complete article on Consortium News.
VFP-111 Co-Sponsors WPJC's Annual
IDP Commemoration
IDP Commemoration
WPJC Honors 20 Years of Peace and Justice
For the 19th year in a row, Whatcom Peace & Justice Center is hosting Bellingham’s International Day of Peace celebration.
International Day of Peace is WPJC's main fundraising and educational event of the year, raising critical funds to support the ever more critical work of the Center in advocating for peace and against wars & militarized systemic violence at home and abroad.
This year features a series of hybrid events including the presentation of our annual Lifetime Peacemaker Award, a new Youth Peacemaker Award, and a historical conversation with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz honoring 20 years of resistance to endless wars, systemic violence, and the need for an international, intergenerational and intersectional peace movement.
Group Think for Discourse
Fear-based or ideological consent to discourse management in Facebook
Gene Marx
April 26, 2022
The danger of government-tied monopolistic tech platforms controlling worldwide speech far outweighs the danger of whatever voice you might happen to dislike at any given moment.
Caitlin Johnstone
Fear-based or ideological consent to discourse management in Facebook
Gene Marx
April 26, 2022
The danger of government-tied monopolistic tech platforms controlling worldwide speech far outweighs the danger of whatever voice you might happen to dislike at any given moment.
Caitlin Johnstone
On April 14, Veterans For Peace Advisory Board Member and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern along with long-time VFP member and Global Network coordinator Bruce Gagnon joined former Pentagon analyst F. Michael Maloof on Peter Lavelle's Cross Talk for a much-needed, nuanced conversation of the Ukraine conflict timeline. Both Ray and Bruce had spent considerable time in Donbass, as well as other parts of Ukraine, which made their contributions to this Cross Talk episode, Heading Toward War, all the more absorbing. and Facebook shareable.
Oddly enough, though not totally unexpected, the VFP Discussion Group moderators determined that the content of this panel discussion, posted on April 22 by a lifetime VFP member on this private Facebook group site, did not make the cut for generating a nuanced discussion. Labeled "A sober analysis of the Ukrainian debacle, including the escalating potential for a nuclear exchange," the post apparently did not comply with group protocols. So it was arbitrarily removed. Disappeared. Gone.
The moderators' wobbly attempt at feedback: "RT has been identified as a not credible source in recent years, but rather a state run Russian mis and dis-information operation." The implication being that a long list of RT contributors like Ray McGovern, Bruce Gagnon, VFP Advisory Board member Chris Hedges, Lee Camp, Joe Lauria and others had been collaborative, even ceding to Kremlin misinformation. Or could it be more accurately called a fear-based or ideological acquiescence to the pro-war narrative managers?
In a recent interview piece with VFP Advisory Member Chris Hedges, Matt Taibbi describes the Hedges/RT affiliation:
"By the 2010s, one of the last places where media figures pushed off the traditional career track could pick up a paycheck was Russia Today. In an arrangement Hedges plainly describes as a cynical marriage of convenience, the Russian state was happy to give voice to figures covering structural problems in American society, and those quasi-banned voices were glad for the opportunity to broadcast what they felt is the truth, even understanding the editorial motivation.”
Needless to say, with the advent of the Ukraine debacle, the entire six-year archive of Chris Hedges’ RT America interview show On Contact was removed by YouTube, as he suggests, ”in the name of censoring Russian propaganda.”
“They know it is not Russian propaganda,” says Hedges. “We rarely mentioned Russia or Putin, and the few times we did it was not in flattering terms. It's much more pernicious than that. RT gave a platform to a critic such as myself...It was a show that gave a voice to critics of the United States ruling class and the US empire. They knew I was not disseminating Russian propaganda, unless critiquing the ills of American society serves Russia's interest. To an extent it does. That's of course why RT gave me a show. But in a functioning democracy with a free press, that is the precise role of the press.”
So when - if ever - was a Pentagon imprimatur a prerequisite for any Veterans For Peace discourse in cyberspace? Yet, regrettably, this is how far down the thought policing rabbit hole liberals, even self-censoring antiwar progressives, are apparently willing to descend.
As luck would have it, this post will be shared even more widely. Maybe. You never know. McGovern and Gagnon will continue to inspire and inform as tireless antiwar contributors at any venue giving them a voice, upholding the first provision of the VFP Statement of Purpose: "To increase public awareness of the causes and costs of war."
And truth, always the first casualty of war, is still indisputably the truth, no matter its origin or social media platform.
Read more of what matters on Substack.
"By the 2010s, one of the last places where media figures pushed off the traditional career track could pick up a paycheck was Russia Today. In an arrangement Hedges plainly describes as a cynical marriage of convenience, the Russian state was happy to give voice to figures covering structural problems in American society, and those quasi-banned voices were glad for the opportunity to broadcast what they felt is the truth, even understanding the editorial motivation.”
Needless to say, with the advent of the Ukraine debacle, the entire six-year archive of Chris Hedges’ RT America interview show On Contact was removed by YouTube, as he suggests, ”in the name of censoring Russian propaganda.”
“They know it is not Russian propaganda,” says Hedges. “We rarely mentioned Russia or Putin, and the few times we did it was not in flattering terms. It's much more pernicious than that. RT gave a platform to a critic such as myself...It was a show that gave a voice to critics of the United States ruling class and the US empire. They knew I was not disseminating Russian propaganda, unless critiquing the ills of American society serves Russia's interest. To an extent it does. That's of course why RT gave me a show. But in a functioning democracy with a free press, that is the precise role of the press.”
So when - if ever - was a Pentagon imprimatur a prerequisite for any Veterans For Peace discourse in cyberspace? Yet, regrettably, this is how far down the thought policing rabbit hole liberals, even self-censoring antiwar progressives, are apparently willing to descend.
As luck would have it, this post will be shared even more widely. Maybe. You never know. McGovern and Gagnon will continue to inspire and inform as tireless antiwar contributors at any venue giving them a voice, upholding the first provision of the VFP Statement of Purpose: "To increase public awareness of the causes and costs of war."
And truth, always the first casualty of war, is still indisputably the truth, no matter its origin or social media platform.
Read more of what matters on Substack.
VFP-111 & WPJC Join
Global Day of Action, Sunday, March 6,
No to War in Ukraine
Global Day of Action, Sunday, March 6,
No to War in Ukraine
- This Sunday, March 6th, VFP-111 is co-hosting with the Whatcom Peace & Justice Center and the local peace community a downtown gathering (near Bayou on the Bay) to call for the U.S. to reject war with Russia over Ukraine. We will be standing in solidarity with other local and international peace communities to support the GlobalDay of Action for Peace/Against War in Ukraine. Come join us for a while - from 12 to 1 or as long as you can stay.
- If you can't make the gathering on Sunday, plan to attend the Peace Vigil on Friday, March 4th, from 4 to 5, at Magnolia & Cornwall. No war in Ukraine, No to NATO expansion!
- Also, on Saturday, March 5th there will be an information and sharing circle at the north end of Boulevard Park at 12pm.
Wait a Minute, We Got in This Ukrainian Mess...How?
By Dianne Foster • Feb 20, 2022
I am writing with urgency to correct the mainstream media’s disinformation about Ukraine and supposed Russian aggression there. I clearly remember taking a group of peace activists including Occupy Bellingham, Veterans for Peace, and Whatcom Peace and Justice, into Representative Rick Larsen’s office after the February 2014 United States-backed coup in Ukraine. We helped overthrow the democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovich, and installed the neo-Nazi Svoboda and Right Sector parties into power. Yanukovich’s election in 2010 had been validated by the U.N. as fair and square.
The image of then U.S. Secretary of European Affairs Victoria Nuland, a Dick Cheney appointee promoted by Hillary Clinton, standing on the stage in Kiev’s Maiden Square, throwing cookies out to the mobs of neo-Nazi’s and encouraging them to riot, is imprinted in my memory. On the stage behind her stood John McCain and Joe Biden, she had requested Obama send them as “point men” in this putsch. Shots were fired, Yanukovich left in haste for Russia, and millionaire Petro Poroshenko was selected to lead the country. Even Henry Kissinger, the king of “regime change” operations, protested in a Washington Post editorial, that this was over-the-top and Ukraine deserved their own sovereignty. Notably, Nuland’s husband, Robert Kagan, was a leading neocon architect of the Iraq War.
It was no surprise, therefore, that Putin took back the historically Russian seaport of Crimea, the Black Sea gem that was bequeathed to Ukraine, for uncertain reasons, by Ukrainian-born former Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1954.
Then there’s the history of the Svoboda and Right Sector political parties during WW2 in Ukraine: it is horrific. They were notorious for heinous crimes such as carving up Jewish children. Even today they are carrying out anti-Semitic pogroms, primarily by the Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi paramilitary group that is now incorporated into the Ukraine National Guard. Although Congressman Ro Khanna attempted to insure that no American aid went to that organization, it has unfortunately been funded in an attempt to oppose Russian interests there.
The neo-Nazi-leaning Ukraine government has been bombing the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine since the 2014 coup, prompting nationalist leaders in Russia to push Putin into some action to take back the entire country, though current CIA Director William Burns does not believe Putin will do it. During April of 2014, we Democrats in the 40th Legislative District passed a resolution condemning this coup, in accordance with the Whatcom Dems platform that states: “Our government should not engage in overt or covert efforts to destabilize other nations’ governments.”
As someone whose father was a POW in Nazi Germany, I have spent much of my academic and personal life researching and opposing fascist movements. Many people forget that it was Russia and the Russian people who suffered the most in World War II, and without Russian leadership we would have lost to Hitler. If they hadn’t won the war in Europe, I wouldn’t be here today.
It should also be noted that when President Mikhail Gorbachev voluntarily ended the Cold War in 1990 by lowering the Berlin Wall, the U.S. promised in return that the West would not bring former Soviet states into NATO, thereby guaranteeing a safety zone around Russia. How would we feel if Russia incorporated Mexico or Canada into their sphere of influence? By 1994, President Clinton reneged on that promise, as one country after another was admitted to NATO, whose purpose at that time was to perpetrate a new Cold War. For a brief period, Clinton proposed a “peace dividend” that would divert money from the military to social needs. It appeared the military-industrial complex was not too happy with that idea. Thus we have had “endless wars” and regime changes; one of the most tragic was in Afghanistan. I am, however, optimistic to see countries like Chile and Honduras reversing the trend and moving away from neoliberal imperial domination.
What is most disturbing about this narrative is that President Biden was there, in Ukraine: he participated in that coup, and is now blaming it on the Russians. We cannot have real diplomacy based on lies. I plan to call the White House and my congressional representatives and encourage them to tell the truth. They are provoking a potential nuclear war that would end history. I have attached the Veterans for Peace resolution that was passed nationally in March of 2014 by that organization; it provides accurate details.
See NWCitizen.com for related links.
Dianne Foster guest wrote this opinion article for NW Citizen about our involvement today with Ukraine. She has a B.A. political science/international relations from the U. of W., and is a former “PCO of the Year” with the Whatcom Democrats.
War Threats on Russia,
How the Peace Movement Responds
How the Peace Movement Responds
Zoom call with speakers
Today, Feb 22 at 5:30 PT
Please click on the link below to register for the meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ 10cVDLQuQR6T3WPeAkJwtw
Join us for this important meeting and discussion with leaders from the antiwar movement including (in alphabetical order):
Leela Anand – ANSWER coalition
Ajamu Baraka – Black Alliance for Peace
Medea Benjamin – CodePink
Sara Flounders – International Action Center
Margaret Flowers – Popular Resistance
Bruce Gagnon – Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
Joe Jamison – US Peace Council
Margaret Kimberley – Black Agenda Report
Jeff Mackler – United National Antiwar Coalition
Nancy Price - Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (US)
Susan Schnall – Veterans For Peace
David Swanson – World Beyond War
Joe Lombardo will chair. Ajamu Baraka will give an opening statement
Only a few short months after the chaotic US defeat in Afghanistan, the US is pushing a war with Russia, a major nuclear power. US officials insist that the Russians will invade Ukraine. Russia has repeatedly denied this.
In recent days the US and some of their allies have closed their embassies and asked their nationals to leave Ukraine. [The US and allies moved their embassies to Lvov in western Ukraine where Nazis predominate.]
The Ukrainian military has a force of 150,000 troops, that are U.S. trained and armed with modern US weapons, near the Russian border and the independent regions in Donbass. These independent regions have taken a stand in opposition to the right-wing, coup government in Kiev, since 2014. The Ukrainian military has started heavy shelling of the independent areas of Donbass, which have returned the fire.
Every U.S. war in our lifetime has been based on false information, repeated relentlessly by the corporate media. There is deep apprehension that the US and the Ukrainian government are preparing a “false flag” incident that could lead to a major conflict.
The US has tens of thousands of troops in Europe, it is putting troops on high alert and sending more. They are not only arming the Ukrainian military, but they are expanding NATO bases and sending additional arms and missiles to other NATO countries in the region.
It is important that the US antiwar movement come together to oppose these dangerous war moves. Please join us on TONIGHT.
Today, Feb 22 at 5:30 PT
Please click on the link below to register for the meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ 10cVDLQuQR6T3WPeAkJwtw
Join us for this important meeting and discussion with leaders from the antiwar movement including (in alphabetical order):
Leela Anand – ANSWER coalition
Ajamu Baraka – Black Alliance for Peace
Medea Benjamin – CodePink
Sara Flounders – International Action Center
Margaret Flowers – Popular Resistance
Bruce Gagnon – Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
Joe Jamison – US Peace Council
Margaret Kimberley – Black Agenda Report
Jeff Mackler – United National Antiwar Coalition
Nancy Price - Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (US)
Susan Schnall – Veterans For Peace
David Swanson – World Beyond War
Joe Lombardo will chair. Ajamu Baraka will give an opening statement
Only a few short months after the chaotic US defeat in Afghanistan, the US is pushing a war with Russia, a major nuclear power. US officials insist that the Russians will invade Ukraine. Russia has repeatedly denied this.
In recent days the US and some of their allies have closed their embassies and asked their nationals to leave Ukraine. [The US and allies moved their embassies to Lvov in western Ukraine where Nazis predominate.]
The Ukrainian military has a force of 150,000 troops, that are U.S. trained and armed with modern US weapons, near the Russian border and the independent regions in Donbass. These independent regions have taken a stand in opposition to the right-wing, coup government in Kiev, since 2014. The Ukrainian military has started heavy shelling of the independent areas of Donbass, which have returned the fire.
Every U.S. war in our lifetime has been based on false information, repeated relentlessly by the corporate media. There is deep apprehension that the US and the Ukrainian government are preparing a “false flag” incident that could lead to a major conflict.
The US has tens of thousands of troops in Europe, it is putting troops on high alert and sending more. They are not only arming the Ukrainian military, but they are expanding NATO bases and sending additional arms and missiles to other NATO countries in the region.
It is important that the US antiwar movement come together to oppose these dangerous war moves. Please join us on TONIGHT.
Is the U.S. Provoking War with Russia?
Margaret Kimberley
January 27, 2022
Margaret Kimberley
January 27, 2022
The corporate media always carry water for the state, and they are never more dangerous than when the nation is on a war footing. Right now the United States government is sending weapons to Ukraine. One wouldn’t know that because of constant references to “lethal aid.” The euphemisms and subterfuge are necessary for a very simple reason. Everyone except the Washington war party knows that provoking war with Russia is extremely dangerous.
Joe Biden is picking up where he left off, as Barack Obama’s Ukraine viceroy. He and his incompetent foreign policy team have spun a tale about a pending Russian attack on Ukraine. In reality, it is the U.S. that is ginning up war by provoking the Ukrainians to start a fight that they can’t win. In 2014 a U.S. backed coup put a far-right clique in power. The people of the Donbass region in the east, largely ethnic Russians, wanted no part of the new anti-Russian government and sought autonomy. The resulting war has killed some 30,000 people.
Now the Biden team who publicly insulted the Chinese government and withdrew from Afghanistan without even being able to secure a major airport, have moved on to opening the proverbial can of whoopass with the world’s other major nuclear power. They are using Ukraine in an ill-advised effort to instigate what could lead to disaster.
The 2014 coup against an elected Ukrainian president took place in part because the Russians underestimated the extent of U.S. and NATO determination. They roused themselves quickly however and Crimeans, who are mostly of Russian origin, voted to rejoin the nation they had been a part of until 1954. The U.S./NATO regime change effort came at a steep price for Ukraine. Thanks to Atlanticist meddling it is now the poorest country in Europe that won’t get the NATO and EU membership it was promised. It remains a pawn between two powerful countries.
The U.S. is pulling all the hybrid warfare schemes out of the tool box. For months they claimed that Russian troops were massed on the border, ready to invade. They have engaged in diplomacy but only to try and get their way. Russia has held firm on a guarantee of no further NATO encroachment and the removal of missiles from their border. The French and Germans are feckless and do what Washington wants. They should be pressuring Ukraine to live up to the Minsk II Agreement which requires talks with the breakaway Donbass region.
None of this information is conveyed to the American people who live in ignorance orchestrated by republicans, democrats, and their friends in corporate media. Republican senators who want to run for president outdo one another with nonsense about stopping the Nord Stream II gas pipeline that Germany, a U.S. ally, asked the Russians to build. Winter is coming, quite literally, and Europe needs Russia’s gas. But unless they stop following Uncle Sam’s bullying they will end up with nothing.
Now Washington is pulling the same ploy they attempted in Ethiopia. They have declared that the Russians are coming and have even announced an evacuation of embassy personnel families from the capital city of Kyiv. Vassal states Australia and the United Kingdom have followed suit, but a European Union official demurred , “We are not going to do the same thing because we don’t know any specific reasons.” The Ukrainian government, a de facto U.S. colony, wasn't happy and called the evacuations “premature.”
If the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing, then one can only conclude that big lies are being told. The U.S. has been hoisted on its own petard and now has little more than dangerous bluster to get its own allies in line.
Biden himself is a part of this problem of his own making. In a recent press conference he declared that Russia was on the verge of invading but then said a little invasion wouldn’t be so bad after all. It isn’t clear if he was speaking from his usual state of confusion or if he really meant what he said.
The Russians certainly mean what they say. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken rushes from Moscow to Berlin to London to Moscow, seemingly making things up as he goes along, the Russians dig in their heels and make clear that their days of being pushovers are in the past. The most committed puppet states like the U.K. go along with whatever Washington wants. They can be counted on to repeat an unsourced story of a Russian plan to overthrow the Ukrainian government or something else equally nonsensical. The people most likely to use a false flag event to justify going to war, instead claim that the other side will do so. The result is a situation that could go badly over the slightest provocation or even a perceived provocation.
Read complete article on LA Progressive.
Joe Biden is picking up where he left off, as Barack Obama’s Ukraine viceroy. He and his incompetent foreign policy team have spun a tale about a pending Russian attack on Ukraine. In reality, it is the U.S. that is ginning up war by provoking the Ukrainians to start a fight that they can’t win. In 2014 a U.S. backed coup put a far-right clique in power. The people of the Donbass region in the east, largely ethnic Russians, wanted no part of the new anti-Russian government and sought autonomy. The resulting war has killed some 30,000 people.
Now the Biden team who publicly insulted the Chinese government and withdrew from Afghanistan without even being able to secure a major airport, have moved on to opening the proverbial can of whoopass with the world’s other major nuclear power. They are using Ukraine in an ill-advised effort to instigate what could lead to disaster.
The 2014 coup against an elected Ukrainian president took place in part because the Russians underestimated the extent of U.S. and NATO determination. They roused themselves quickly however and Crimeans, who are mostly of Russian origin, voted to rejoin the nation they had been a part of until 1954. The U.S./NATO regime change effort came at a steep price for Ukraine. Thanks to Atlanticist meddling it is now the poorest country in Europe that won’t get the NATO and EU membership it was promised. It remains a pawn between two powerful countries.
The U.S. is pulling all the hybrid warfare schemes out of the tool box. For months they claimed that Russian troops were massed on the border, ready to invade. They have engaged in diplomacy but only to try and get their way. Russia has held firm on a guarantee of no further NATO encroachment and the removal of missiles from their border. The French and Germans are feckless and do what Washington wants. They should be pressuring Ukraine to live up to the Minsk II Agreement which requires talks with the breakaway Donbass region.
None of this information is conveyed to the American people who live in ignorance orchestrated by republicans, democrats, and their friends in corporate media. Republican senators who want to run for president outdo one another with nonsense about stopping the Nord Stream II gas pipeline that Germany, a U.S. ally, asked the Russians to build. Winter is coming, quite literally, and Europe needs Russia’s gas. But unless they stop following Uncle Sam’s bullying they will end up with nothing.
Now Washington is pulling the same ploy they attempted in Ethiopia. They have declared that the Russians are coming and have even announced an evacuation of embassy personnel families from the capital city of Kyiv. Vassal states Australia and the United Kingdom have followed suit, but a European Union official demurred , “We are not going to do the same thing because we don’t know any specific reasons.” The Ukrainian government, a de facto U.S. colony, wasn't happy and called the evacuations “premature.”
If the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing, then one can only conclude that big lies are being told. The U.S. has been hoisted on its own petard and now has little more than dangerous bluster to get its own allies in line.
Biden himself is a part of this problem of his own making. In a recent press conference he declared that Russia was on the verge of invading but then said a little invasion wouldn’t be so bad after all. It isn’t clear if he was speaking from his usual state of confusion or if he really meant what he said.
The Russians certainly mean what they say. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken rushes from Moscow to Berlin to London to Moscow, seemingly making things up as he goes along, the Russians dig in their heels and make clear that their days of being pushovers are in the past. The most committed puppet states like the U.K. go along with whatever Washington wants. They can be counted on to repeat an unsourced story of a Russian plan to overthrow the Ukrainian government or something else equally nonsensical. The people most likely to use a false flag event to justify going to war, instead claim that the other side will do so. The result is a situation that could go badly over the slightest provocation or even a perceived provocation.
Read complete article on LA Progressive.
Veterans Release Nuclear Posture Review
The U.S.-based international organization Veterans For Peace has released its own assessment of the current global threat of nuclear war, ahead of the anticipated release of the Biden Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review. The Veterans For Peace Nuclear Posture Review warns that the danger of nuclear war is greater than ever and that nuclear disarmament must be vigorously pursued. Veterans For Peace plans to deliver their Nuclear Posture Review to the President and Vice President, to every member of Congress, and to the Pentagon.
With the first anniversary of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) on January 22, the Veterans For Peace Nuclear Posture Review calls on the U.S. government to sign the treaty and to work with other nuclear-armed states to eliminate all the world’s nuclear weapons. The TPNW, approved by a vote of 122-1 in the UN General Assembly in July of 2017, reflects the international consensus against the existence of such weapons.
Veterans For Peace Nuclear Posture Review also calls for measures that would reduce the risk of nuclear war, such as implementing policies for No First Use and taking nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert.
As early as this month, President Biden is expected to issue a United States Nuclear Posture Review, prepared by the Department of Defense in a tradition started in 1994 during the Clinton Administration and continued during the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations. Veterans For Peace anticipates that the Biden Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review will continue to reflect the unrealistic goals of full spectrum dominance and justify the continuing expenditure of billions of dollars on nuclear weapons.
“Veterans have learned the hard way to be skeptical of our government’s military adventures, which have led us from one disastrous war to another,” said Ken Mayers, a retired Marine Corps major. “Nuclear weapons are a threat to the very existence of human civilization,” continued Mayers, “so the U.S. nuclear posture is too important to be left to the cold warriors at the Pentagon. Veterans For Peace has developed our own Nuclear Posture Review, one that is consistent with U.S. treaty obligations and reflects the research and work of many arms control experts.”
The 10-page document prepared by Veterans For Peace reviews the nuclear posture of all the nuclear-armed states – the U.S., Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. It makes a number of recommendations for how the U.S. could provide leadership to begin a process of worldwide disarmament.
“This is not rocket science,” said Gerry Condon, a Vietnam-era veteran and former president of Veterans For Peace. “The experts make nuclear disarmament seem impossibly difficult. However, there is a growing international consensus against the existence of such weapons. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was approved overwhelmingly by the UN General Assembly in July 2017 and went into effect on January 22, 2021. It IS possible and necessary to eliminate all nuclear weapons, as 122 nations of the world have agreed.”
LINK to the Veterans For Peace Nuclear Posture Review
With the first anniversary of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) on January 22, the Veterans For Peace Nuclear Posture Review calls on the U.S. government to sign the treaty and to work with other nuclear-armed states to eliminate all the world’s nuclear weapons. The TPNW, approved by a vote of 122-1 in the UN General Assembly in July of 2017, reflects the international consensus against the existence of such weapons.
Veterans For Peace Nuclear Posture Review also calls for measures that would reduce the risk of nuclear war, such as implementing policies for No First Use and taking nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert.
As early as this month, President Biden is expected to issue a United States Nuclear Posture Review, prepared by the Department of Defense in a tradition started in 1994 during the Clinton Administration and continued during the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations. Veterans For Peace anticipates that the Biden Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review will continue to reflect the unrealistic goals of full spectrum dominance and justify the continuing expenditure of billions of dollars on nuclear weapons.
“Veterans have learned the hard way to be skeptical of our government’s military adventures, which have led us from one disastrous war to another,” said Ken Mayers, a retired Marine Corps major. “Nuclear weapons are a threat to the very existence of human civilization,” continued Mayers, “so the U.S. nuclear posture is too important to be left to the cold warriors at the Pentagon. Veterans For Peace has developed our own Nuclear Posture Review, one that is consistent with U.S. treaty obligations and reflects the research and work of many arms control experts.”
The 10-page document prepared by Veterans For Peace reviews the nuclear posture of all the nuclear-armed states – the U.S., Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. It makes a number of recommendations for how the U.S. could provide leadership to begin a process of worldwide disarmament.
“This is not rocket science,” said Gerry Condon, a Vietnam-era veteran and former president of Veterans For Peace. “The experts make nuclear disarmament seem impossibly difficult. However, there is a growing international consensus against the existence of such weapons. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was approved overwhelmingly by the UN General Assembly in July 2017 and went into effect on January 22, 2021. It IS possible and necessary to eliminate all nuclear weapons, as 122 nations of the world have agreed.”
LINK to the Veterans For Peace Nuclear Posture Review
The British Want America To Go to War
and Used The Beatles as Ammo
Peace Activists Should Fight Back With Music Too
by Doug Bandow Posted on December 29, 2021
Almost every US ally claims to be a friend because of America’s military. It’s really not shared values or even interests. Other nations like being defended by a superpower, so they need not spend much on their militaries.
The result is that America has a couple score spoiled, entitled, and obnoxious "allies" who under-invest in their militaries, whine if the US looks anywhere else, demand constant "reassurance" that Washington will forever protect them even if they do nothing for themselves, and insist that it is in America’s interest to create a permanent defense dole for the indolent, disinterested, irresponsible, and greedy among them – which of course is most of them.
The Europeans tend to be the worst. Which ensures endless scheming to retain Uncle Sam as their consigliere, responsible for their defense. Such has been the approach of the United Kingdom, which is determine to drag Washington into defending Ukraine even though London made clear that it would not put its own troops at risk.
Ben Wallace, the Secretary of State for Defense appears to be most enthused with the US as global policeman, but Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is the more accomplished schemer. Reported The Times of London: "The Foreign Office hired a tribute act to the Fab Four called the Cheatles in an effort to woo Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, and stiffen the resolve of Britain’s partners against aggression from Moscow at the G7 summit of foreign ministers in Liverpool this weekend. Truss and Blinken discovered a shared love of Lennon and McCartney when they dined together at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow last month. Truss would like America to take as tough a line as possible to deter Putin from ordering more than 90,000 troops into Ukraine."
At least Truss didn’t try to use the Beatles’ music to sell war with Russia. The Fab Four never went over the top with politics. However, the song Imagine did have the lines: "Imagine there’s no countries; It isn’t hard to do; Nothing to kill or die for; and no religion, too; Imagine all the people: Living life in peace." Sounds essentially anti-war, though it remains pretty ethereal.
Another major hit was American Woman by the Guess Who. Group members disagreed over its political nature, with Randy Bachman claiming that it targeted the draft and Vietnam war. Only one line explicitly mentions the military ("I don’t need your war machines"), but many people perceived it to be critical of the US, with "American woman" representing the country.
Much more direct was Edwin Starr’s intense, punchy, energetic War. It was a number one hit and left no one doubting its meaning:
War, huh, yeah
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, uhh
War, huh, yeah
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Say it again, y’all
Finish article in antiwar.com.
and Used The Beatles as Ammo
Peace Activists Should Fight Back With Music Too
by Doug Bandow Posted on December 29, 2021
Almost every US ally claims to be a friend because of America’s military. It’s really not shared values or even interests. Other nations like being defended by a superpower, so they need not spend much on their militaries.
The result is that America has a couple score spoiled, entitled, and obnoxious "allies" who under-invest in their militaries, whine if the US looks anywhere else, demand constant "reassurance" that Washington will forever protect them even if they do nothing for themselves, and insist that it is in America’s interest to create a permanent defense dole for the indolent, disinterested, irresponsible, and greedy among them – which of course is most of them.
The Europeans tend to be the worst. Which ensures endless scheming to retain Uncle Sam as their consigliere, responsible for their defense. Such has been the approach of the United Kingdom, which is determine to drag Washington into defending Ukraine even though London made clear that it would not put its own troops at risk.
Ben Wallace, the Secretary of State for Defense appears to be most enthused with the US as global policeman, but Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is the more accomplished schemer. Reported The Times of London: "The Foreign Office hired a tribute act to the Fab Four called the Cheatles in an effort to woo Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, and stiffen the resolve of Britain’s partners against aggression from Moscow at the G7 summit of foreign ministers in Liverpool this weekend. Truss and Blinken discovered a shared love of Lennon and McCartney when they dined together at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow last month. Truss would like America to take as tough a line as possible to deter Putin from ordering more than 90,000 troops into Ukraine."
At least Truss didn’t try to use the Beatles’ music to sell war with Russia. The Fab Four never went over the top with politics. However, the song Imagine did have the lines: "Imagine there’s no countries; It isn’t hard to do; Nothing to kill or die for; and no religion, too; Imagine all the people: Living life in peace." Sounds essentially anti-war, though it remains pretty ethereal.
Another major hit was American Woman by the Guess Who. Group members disagreed over its political nature, with Randy Bachman claiming that it targeted the draft and Vietnam war. Only one line explicitly mentions the military ("I don’t need your war machines"), but many people perceived it to be critical of the US, with "American woman" representing the country.
Much more direct was Edwin Starr’s intense, punchy, energetic War. It was a number one hit and left no one doubting its meaning:
War, huh, yeah
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, uhh
War, huh, yeah
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Say it again, y’all
Finish article in antiwar.com.
National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund
On July 19, 2012, one year after the death of Rep. John Lewis, Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts became the new sponsor of the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Bill, H.R. 4529. "To affirm the freedom of taxpayers who are conscientiously opposed to participation in war, to provide that the income, estate, or gift tax payments of such taxpayers be used for nonmilitary purposes, to create the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund to receive such payments, to improve revenue collection, and for other purposes."
This bill "directs the Department of Treasury to establish in the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund for the deposit of income, gift and estate taxes paid by or on behalf of taxpayers: (1) who are designated conscientious objectors opposed to participation in war in any form based upon their sincerely held moral, ethical, or religious beliefs or training (within the meaning of the Military Selective Service Act); and (2) who have certified their beliefs in writing."
"Amounts deposited in the Fund shall be allocated annually to any appropriation not for a military purpose. Treasury shall report to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees on the total amount transferred into the Fund during the preceding fiscal year and the purposes for which such amount was allocated. The privacy of the individuals using the Fund shall be protected."
Please sign this petition to move your Congressional representatives to support this bill.
This bill "directs the Department of Treasury to establish in the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund for the deposit of income, gift and estate taxes paid by or on behalf of taxpayers: (1) who are designated conscientious objectors opposed to participation in war in any form based upon their sincerely held moral, ethical, or religious beliefs or training (within the meaning of the Military Selective Service Act); and (2) who have certified their beliefs in writing."
"Amounts deposited in the Fund shall be allocated annually to any appropriation not for a military purpose. Treasury shall report to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees on the total amount transferred into the Fund during the preceding fiscal year and the purposes for which such amount was allocated. The privacy of the individuals using the Fund shall be protected."
Please sign this petition to move your Congressional representatives to support this bill.
April 21, 2021
Support the
Tropes
How media language encourages the left to support wars, coups and intervention
Alan MacLeod
Support the
Tropes
How media language encourages the left to support wars, coups and intervention
Alan MacLeod
In an earlier piece (FAIR.org, 3/3/21), we explored some country case study examples of how the press helps to manufacture consent for regime change and other US actions abroad among left-leaning audiences, a traditionally conflict-skeptical group.
Some level of buy-in, or at least a hesitancy to resist, among the United States’ more left-leaning half is necessary to ensure that US interventions are carried out with a minimum of domestic opposition. To this end, corporate media invoke the language of human rights and humanitarianism to convince those to the left of center to accept, if not support, US actions abroad—a treatment of sorts for the country’s 50-year-long Vietnam syndrome.
What follows are some of the common tropes used by establishment outlets to convince skeptical leftists that this time, things might be different, selling a progressive intervention everyone can get behind.
Think of the women!
The vast majority of the world was against the US attack on Afghanistan that followed the 9/11 attacks in 2001. However, the idea had overwhelming support from the US public, including from Democrats. In fact, when Gallup (Brookings, 1/9/20) asked about the occupation in 2019, there was slightly more support for maintaining troops there among Democrats than Republicans—38% vs. 34%—and slightly less support for withdrawing troops (21% vs. 23%).
Media coverage can partially explain this phenomenon, convincing some and at the least providing cover for those in power. This was not a war of aggression, they insisted. They were not simply there to capture Osama bin Laden (whom the Taliban actually offered to hand over); this was a fight to bring freedom to the oppressed women of the country. As First Lady Laura Bush said: We respect our mothers, our sisters and daughters. "Fighting brutality against women and children is not the expression of a specific culture; it is the acceptance of our common humanity—a commitment shared by people of goodwill on every continent…. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women."
Wars are not fought to liberate women (FAIR.org, 7/26/17), and bombing people is never a feminist activity (FAIR.org, 6/28/20). But the New York Times was among the chief architects in constructing the belief in a phantom feminist war. Within weeks of the invasion (12/2/01), it reported on the “joyful return” of women to college campuses, profiling one student who strode up the steps tentatively at first, her body covered from face to foot by blue cotton. As she neared the door, she flipped the cloth back over her head, revealing round cheeks, dark ringlets of hair and the searching brown eyes of a student.
The over-the-top symbolism was hard to miss: This was a country changed, and all thanks to the invasion.
Time magazine also played heavily on this angle. Six weeks after the invasion (11/26/01), it told readers that “the greatest pageant of mass liberation since the fight for suffrage” was occurring, as “female faces, shy and bright, emerged from the dark cellars,” casting off their veils and symbolically stomping on them. If the implication was not clear enough, it directly told readers “the sight of jubilation was a holiday gift, a reminder of reasons the war was worth fighting beyond those of basic self-defense.”
“How much better will their lives be now?” Time (12/3/01) asked. Not much better, as it turned out.
A few days later, Time‘s cover (12/3/01) featured a portrait of a blonde, light-skinned Afghan woman, with the words, “Lifting the Veil. The shocking story of how the Taliban brutalized the women of Afghanistan. How much better will their lives be now?”
This was representative of a much wider phenomenon. A study by Carol Stabile and Deepa Kumar published in Media, Culture & Society (9/1/05) found that, in 1999, there were 29 US newspaper articles and 37 broadcast TV reports about women’s rights in Afghanistan. Between 2000 and September 11, 2001, those figures were 15 and 33, respectively. However, in the 16 weeks between September 12 and January 1, 2002, Americans were inundated with stories on the subject, with 93 newspaper articles and 628 TV reports on the subject. Once the real objectives of the war were secure, those figures fell off a cliff.
Antiwar messages were largely absent from corporate news coverage. Indeed, as FAIR founder Jeff Cohen noted in his book Cable News Confidential, CNN executives instructed their staff to constantly counter any images of civilian casualties with pro-war messages, even if “it may start sounding rote.” This sort of coverage helped to push 75% of Democratic voters into supporting the ground war.
As reality set in, it became increasingly difficult to pretend women’s rights in Afghanistan were seriously improving. Women still face the same problems as they did before. As a female Afghan member of parliament told Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies (CounterSpin, 2/17/21), women in Afghanistan have three principal enemies:
"One is the Taliban. Two is this group of warlords, disguised as a government, that the US supports. And the third is the US occupation…. If you in the West could get the US occupation out, we’d only have two."
However, Time managed to find a way to tug on the heartstrings of left-leaning audiences to support continued occupation. Featuring a shocking image of an 18-year-old local woman who had her ear and nose cut off, a 2010 cover story (8/9/10) asked readers to wonder “what happens if we leave Afghanistan,” the clear implication being the US must stay to prevent further brutality—despite the fact that the woman’s mutilation occurred after eight years of US occupation (Extra!, 10/10).
Vox (3/4/21) asserted that the US occupation of Afghanistan has meant “better rights for women and children” without offering evidence that that is the case.
The trick is still being used to this day. In March, Vox (3/4/21) credulously reported that Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Mark Milley made an emotional plea to Biden that he must stay in Afghanistan, otherwise women’s rights “will go back to the Stone Age.” It’s so good to know the upper echelons of the military industrial complex are filled with such passionate feminists.
In reality, nearly 20 years of occupation has only led to a situation where zero percent of Afghans considered themselves to be “thriving” while 85% are “suffering,” according to a Gallup poll. Only one in three girls goes to school, let alone university.
And all of this ignores the fact that the US supported radical Islamist groups and their takeover of the country in the first place, a move that drastically reduced women’s rights. Pre-Taliban, half of university students were women, as were 40% of the country’s doctors, 70% of its teachers and 30% of its civil servants—reflecting the reforms of the Soviet-backed government that the US dedicated massive resources to destroying.
Today, in half of the country’s provinces, fewer than 20% of teachers are female (and in many, fewer than 10% are). Only 37% of adolescent girls can read (compared to 66% of boys). Meanwhile, being a female gynecologist is now considered “one of the most dangerous jobs in the world” (New Statesman, 9/24/14). So much for a new golden age.
The “think of the women” trope is far from unique to Afghanistan. In fact, 19th century British imperial propagandists used the plight of Hindu women in India and Muslim women in Egypt as a pretext to invade and conquer those countries. The tactic’s longevity is perhaps testament to its effectiveness.
Read complete article on FAIR.
Some level of buy-in, or at least a hesitancy to resist, among the United States’ more left-leaning half is necessary to ensure that US interventions are carried out with a minimum of domestic opposition. To this end, corporate media invoke the language of human rights and humanitarianism to convince those to the left of center to accept, if not support, US actions abroad—a treatment of sorts for the country’s 50-year-long Vietnam syndrome.
What follows are some of the common tropes used by establishment outlets to convince skeptical leftists that this time, things might be different, selling a progressive intervention everyone can get behind.
Think of the women!
The vast majority of the world was against the US attack on Afghanistan that followed the 9/11 attacks in 2001. However, the idea had overwhelming support from the US public, including from Democrats. In fact, when Gallup (Brookings, 1/9/20) asked about the occupation in 2019, there was slightly more support for maintaining troops there among Democrats than Republicans—38% vs. 34%—and slightly less support for withdrawing troops (21% vs. 23%).
Media coverage can partially explain this phenomenon, convincing some and at the least providing cover for those in power. This was not a war of aggression, they insisted. They were not simply there to capture Osama bin Laden (whom the Taliban actually offered to hand over); this was a fight to bring freedom to the oppressed women of the country. As First Lady Laura Bush said: We respect our mothers, our sisters and daughters. "Fighting brutality against women and children is not the expression of a specific culture; it is the acceptance of our common humanity—a commitment shared by people of goodwill on every continent…. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women."
Wars are not fought to liberate women (FAIR.org, 7/26/17), and bombing people is never a feminist activity (FAIR.org, 6/28/20). But the New York Times was among the chief architects in constructing the belief in a phantom feminist war. Within weeks of the invasion (12/2/01), it reported on the “joyful return” of women to college campuses, profiling one student who strode up the steps tentatively at first, her body covered from face to foot by blue cotton. As she neared the door, she flipped the cloth back over her head, revealing round cheeks, dark ringlets of hair and the searching brown eyes of a student.
The over-the-top symbolism was hard to miss: This was a country changed, and all thanks to the invasion.
Time magazine also played heavily on this angle. Six weeks after the invasion (11/26/01), it told readers that “the greatest pageant of mass liberation since the fight for suffrage” was occurring, as “female faces, shy and bright, emerged from the dark cellars,” casting off their veils and symbolically stomping on them. If the implication was not clear enough, it directly told readers “the sight of jubilation was a holiday gift, a reminder of reasons the war was worth fighting beyond those of basic self-defense.”
“How much better will their lives be now?” Time (12/3/01) asked. Not much better, as it turned out.
A few days later, Time‘s cover (12/3/01) featured a portrait of a blonde, light-skinned Afghan woman, with the words, “Lifting the Veil. The shocking story of how the Taliban brutalized the women of Afghanistan. How much better will their lives be now?”
This was representative of a much wider phenomenon. A study by Carol Stabile and Deepa Kumar published in Media, Culture & Society (9/1/05) found that, in 1999, there were 29 US newspaper articles and 37 broadcast TV reports about women’s rights in Afghanistan. Between 2000 and September 11, 2001, those figures were 15 and 33, respectively. However, in the 16 weeks between September 12 and January 1, 2002, Americans were inundated with stories on the subject, with 93 newspaper articles and 628 TV reports on the subject. Once the real objectives of the war were secure, those figures fell off a cliff.
Antiwar messages were largely absent from corporate news coverage. Indeed, as FAIR founder Jeff Cohen noted in his book Cable News Confidential, CNN executives instructed their staff to constantly counter any images of civilian casualties with pro-war messages, even if “it may start sounding rote.” This sort of coverage helped to push 75% of Democratic voters into supporting the ground war.
As reality set in, it became increasingly difficult to pretend women’s rights in Afghanistan were seriously improving. Women still face the same problems as they did before. As a female Afghan member of parliament told Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies (CounterSpin, 2/17/21), women in Afghanistan have three principal enemies:
"One is the Taliban. Two is this group of warlords, disguised as a government, that the US supports. And the third is the US occupation…. If you in the West could get the US occupation out, we’d only have two."
However, Time managed to find a way to tug on the heartstrings of left-leaning audiences to support continued occupation. Featuring a shocking image of an 18-year-old local woman who had her ear and nose cut off, a 2010 cover story (8/9/10) asked readers to wonder “what happens if we leave Afghanistan,” the clear implication being the US must stay to prevent further brutality—despite the fact that the woman’s mutilation occurred after eight years of US occupation (Extra!, 10/10).
Vox (3/4/21) asserted that the US occupation of Afghanistan has meant “better rights for women and children” without offering evidence that that is the case.
The trick is still being used to this day. In March, Vox (3/4/21) credulously reported that Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Mark Milley made an emotional plea to Biden that he must stay in Afghanistan, otherwise women’s rights “will go back to the Stone Age.” It’s so good to know the upper echelons of the military industrial complex are filled with such passionate feminists.
In reality, nearly 20 years of occupation has only led to a situation where zero percent of Afghans considered themselves to be “thriving” while 85% are “suffering,” according to a Gallup poll. Only one in three girls goes to school, let alone university.
And all of this ignores the fact that the US supported radical Islamist groups and their takeover of the country in the first place, a move that drastically reduced women’s rights. Pre-Taliban, half of university students were women, as were 40% of the country’s doctors, 70% of its teachers and 30% of its civil servants—reflecting the reforms of the Soviet-backed government that the US dedicated massive resources to destroying.
Today, in half of the country’s provinces, fewer than 20% of teachers are female (and in many, fewer than 10% are). Only 37% of adolescent girls can read (compared to 66% of boys). Meanwhile, being a female gynecologist is now considered “one of the most dangerous jobs in the world” (New Statesman, 9/24/14). So much for a new golden age.
The “think of the women” trope is far from unique to Afghanistan. In fact, 19th century British imperial propagandists used the plight of Hindu women in India and Muslim women in Egypt as a pretext to invade and conquer those countries. The tactic’s longevity is perhaps testament to its effectiveness.
Read complete article on FAIR.
Israel-Palestine: The names of Palestinians and Israelis killed during the violence
At least 274 people were been killed between 7 and 21 May, including at least 71 children and 41 women
At least 274 people were been killed between 7 and 21 May, including at least 71 children and 41 women
By
MEE staff
Published date: 21 May 2021 15:40 UTC
Israel and the Palestinian movement Hamas reached a ceasefire early on Friday after two weeks of violence that have left hundreds dead and thousands more injured across the region. The hostilities began amid Israeli authorities’ crackdown on Palestinians in Jerusalem, first in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, then at al-Aqsa Mosque.
According to the latest official information from Palestinian and Israeli sources, at least 274 people were been killed between 7 and 21 May, including at least 71 children and 41 women.
The vast majority were Palestinian: Israeli air strikes on the besieged Gaza Strip killed at least 243 Palestinians, while a further 29 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Another two Palestinian citizens of Israel have been reported killed by Israeli fire. In Israel, 12 people have been reported killed by rockets launched from Gaza by Hamas, among them two children, two Palestinian citizens of Israel, and two Thai citizens. One person was also killed by Israeli forces in southern Lebanon during a protest in solidarity with Palestinians.
During the past two weeks, Middle East Eye has compiled a list of names, ages and genders of those killed, using available information from official Palestinian and Israeli sources, including the Gaza Ministry of Health, and MEE’s own reporting on the ground.
This list is far from exhaustive. The chaos that has hit the region means that many people have yet to be publicly identified; for some – especially in Gaza – the date of death has yet to be released. It has not yet been possible to ascertain exactly which of those killed in Gaza were Hamas and Islamic Jihad members, though the vast majority are thought to be civilians.
The list will be updated as more details emerge.
Read list update and complete article on Middle East Eye.
MEE staff
Published date: 21 May 2021 15:40 UTC
Israel and the Palestinian movement Hamas reached a ceasefire early on Friday after two weeks of violence that have left hundreds dead and thousands more injured across the region. The hostilities began amid Israeli authorities’ crackdown on Palestinians in Jerusalem, first in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, then at al-Aqsa Mosque.
According to the latest official information from Palestinian and Israeli sources, at least 274 people were been killed between 7 and 21 May, including at least 71 children and 41 women.
The vast majority were Palestinian: Israeli air strikes on the besieged Gaza Strip killed at least 243 Palestinians, while a further 29 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Another two Palestinian citizens of Israel have been reported killed by Israeli fire. In Israel, 12 people have been reported killed by rockets launched from Gaza by Hamas, among them two children, two Palestinian citizens of Israel, and two Thai citizens. One person was also killed by Israeli forces in southern Lebanon during a protest in solidarity with Palestinians.
During the past two weeks, Middle East Eye has compiled a list of names, ages and genders of those killed, using available information from official Palestinian and Israeli sources, including the Gaza Ministry of Health, and MEE’s own reporting on the ground.
This list is far from exhaustive. The chaos that has hit the region means that many people have yet to be publicly identified; for some – especially in Gaza – the date of death has yet to be released. It has not yet been possible to ascertain exactly which of those killed in Gaza were Hamas and Islamic Jihad members, though the vast majority are thought to be civilians.
The list will be updated as more details emerge.
Read list update and complete article on Middle East Eye.
'I Get Scared': 10-year-old Girl Makes Gut-wrenching Plea For Israel-Hamas Violence To End
In the heart-wrenching video, Palestinian girl can be seen weeping as she points towards the destruction and wondered what she could do to fix the situation.
A heartbreaking video of a 10-year-old Palestinian girl, narrating the situation around her, has gone viral on social media. The 1.19-minute video, which was filmed by Middle East Eye, features the young Nadine Abdel-Taif standing around a pile of rubble after the Israeli airstrikes.
In the footage, the visibly emotional Nadine questioned why she and the people around her are being attacked. "I’m always sick. I can’t do anything. I am only 10," she can be heard saying in the viral clip. "What am I supposed to do? Fix it? I’m only 10. I can’t even deal with this anymore," said the young Gaza resident tearing up.
"I just want to be a doctor or anything to help my people. But I can’t. I’m just a kid. I don’t even know what to do. I get scared, but not really that much. I’d do anything for my people. But I don’t know what to do," she adds. Watch the video here.
Read complete article here.
In the footage, the visibly emotional Nadine questioned why she and the people around her are being attacked. "I’m always sick. I can’t do anything. I am only 10," she can be heard saying in the viral clip. "What am I supposed to do? Fix it? I’m only 10. I can’t even deal with this anymore," said the young Gaza resident tearing up.
"I just want to be a doctor or anything to help my people. But I can’t. I’m just a kid. I don’t even know what to do. I get scared, but not really that much. I’d do anything for my people. But I don’t know what to do," she adds. Watch the video here.
Read complete article here.
Lenny Helfgott ¡Presente!
Leonard Michael Helfgott (Lenny), age 83, died in his home on April 8, 2021 with his wife, three children, and eldest grandchildren by his side following a nine-year struggle with cancer.
Lenny was born in 1937 in Baltimore, Maryland to Anna Helfgott (Altshul) and Isidore (Isser) Helfgott. After attending public schools in Baltimore, Lenny enrolled at the University of Maryland, earning a B.A. and M.A. and later returning to earn a Ph.D in history in 1972. After a short post-college stint in the army, Lenny received a Fulbright scholarship to Iran. He then returned to Maryland where he met Kathryn Anderson. The urban Jewish radical and the Iowa farmers' daughter were not a typical match in 1968, but they quickly merged their lives and the two married in San Francisco on September 10, 1971. Kathryn would be his partner to the end. Together, Kathryn and Lenny participated in the civil rights and anti-war movements and maintained life-long commitments to fostering social justice.
Lenny moved to Bellingham with Kathryn in 1970 to join the faculty of Western Washington University, where he spent over 40 years teaching, mentoring and inspiring generations of students. Primarily a professor of Middle Eastern History, Lenny also introduced the teaching of film as history and Jewish history to the Western history department. Over time, some students began referring affectionately to his classes as "story time with Uncle Lenny."
In 1994, Lenny's book Ties that Bind: A Social History of the Iranian Carpet was published by the Smithsonian Institution Press. He also published articles on Middle Eastern history and tribalism, American radicalism, the Jewish immigrant experience, and popular culture. Friends, colleagues, and grandchildren marveled at the expanse of his curiosity and the depth of his knowledge. At his death, Lenny was working on a book about the Jewish immigrant experience in his hometown of Baltimore. In the early-1970's he served on the board of the magazine Socialist Revolution (later named Socialist Review).
Over the years, stimulated by his scholarly work on oriental rugs, Lenny developed a deep interest in the arts with a particular focus on indigenous arts. His eye for beauty was unparalleled. He had an uncanny ability to spot the most beautiful object in any flea market or garage sale. He built a formidable collection of Northwest native arts and was keenly interested in supporting living artists, buying from galleries that worked directly with artists and commissioning works from artists directly.
Later in life, Lenny developed a love of bluegrass music and began studying banjo and finger-picking guitar, passions he shared by teaching the younger generations. Ever one to make friends in any community he entered, Lenny developed deep ties within the bluegrass community and frequently opened his home to musicians traveling through Bellingham, offering a meal, a bed, and lively conversation on their way through town.
Lenny joined Veterans For Peace in 2006 and served with distinction on the Veterans For Peace Chapter 111 Board of Directors since August 2017.
Later in life, Lenny developed a love of bluegrass music and began studying banjo and finger-picking guitar, passions he shared by teaching the younger generations. Ever one to make friends in any community he entered, Lenny developed deep ties within the bluegrass community and frequently opened his home to musicians traveling through Bellingham, offering a meal, a bed, and lively conversation on their way through town.
Lenny joined Veterans For Peace in 2006 and served with distinction on the Veterans For Peace Chapter 111 Board of Directors since August 2017.
From the ambassadors down to the low level, (they all say) we are doing a great job. Really? So, if we’re doing such a great job, why does it feel like we are losing?
Gen. Michael Flynn, Afghanistan Papers, 2019
Even before Joe Biden’s announcement of the US withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan by September 11th reviews were mixed. Surprisingly – or maybe not, double-amputee combat veteran Senator Tammy Duckworth, in her best Donald J. Trump, was way less than enthusiastic when asked on Fox News about leaving our wholly warranted foothold in the dustbin of history. "Well, I don’t believe in artificial timelines. I want our troops to come home, absolutely. But, I want them to come home in a way that we don’t have to send them back three months later, six months later."
Not so surprising was a rebuke from the Senate floor by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, calling such an exit "reckless" and "a grave mistake…retreat in the face of an enemy that has not yet been vanquished and abdication of American leadership." Leaving out "precipitous" was a welcome relief. Such spurious grandstanding from Congressional hawks unabashedly brings to mind a perfect retort from Aliens’ Trooper Hudson during a futuristic Marine blunder: "Hey, maybe you haven’t been keeping up with current events, but we just got our asses kicked pal!"
Clearly, it would seem McConnell and war profiteering colleagues have not been paying attention to current events in the Afghanistan theater of operations. After nearly 6,400 US dead service personnel and contractors and over $2.26 trillion, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute, the last of nearly 800,000 de facto “vanquished” will be gone on September 11, if Biden is to be believed. As if to underscore such futility, former Army platoon leader Erik Edstrom wrote in Un-American: A Soldier’s Reckoning of Our Longest War: "It would become harder and harder to find meaning in a war so meaningless."
While harsh to measured blowback for the pullout was notably bipartisan, there were also accolades. In a Washington Post op-ed Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna were even cautiously optimistic the withdrawal could be a pivot to diplomacy, a "foreign policy tool of first resort." Short of their inclusion of "protection of women in Afghanistan" as a top US diplomatic priority, perennial red meat for condition-based opposition, their analysis drew praise from progressives.
Surprisingly, while promoting the controversial pullout, Sanders even gave Donald Trump a virtual shoutout on CNN for getting the process started. "I applaud what the president has done; and in truth…what President Biden is doing is picking up on the negotiated agreement that President Trump put together."
Read complete article in antiwar.com.
Gen. Michael Flynn, Afghanistan Papers, 2019
Even before Joe Biden’s announcement of the US withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan by September 11th reviews were mixed. Surprisingly – or maybe not, double-amputee combat veteran Senator Tammy Duckworth, in her best Donald J. Trump, was way less than enthusiastic when asked on Fox News about leaving our wholly warranted foothold in the dustbin of history. "Well, I don’t believe in artificial timelines. I want our troops to come home, absolutely. But, I want them to come home in a way that we don’t have to send them back three months later, six months later."
Not so surprising was a rebuke from the Senate floor by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, calling such an exit "reckless" and "a grave mistake…retreat in the face of an enemy that has not yet been vanquished and abdication of American leadership." Leaving out "precipitous" was a welcome relief. Such spurious grandstanding from Congressional hawks unabashedly brings to mind a perfect retort from Aliens’ Trooper Hudson during a futuristic Marine blunder: "Hey, maybe you haven’t been keeping up with current events, but we just got our asses kicked pal!"
Clearly, it would seem McConnell and war profiteering colleagues have not been paying attention to current events in the Afghanistan theater of operations. After nearly 6,400 US dead service personnel and contractors and over $2.26 trillion, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute, the last of nearly 800,000 de facto “vanquished” will be gone on September 11, if Biden is to be believed. As if to underscore such futility, former Army platoon leader Erik Edstrom wrote in Un-American: A Soldier’s Reckoning of Our Longest War: "It would become harder and harder to find meaning in a war so meaningless."
While harsh to measured blowback for the pullout was notably bipartisan, there were also accolades. In a Washington Post op-ed Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna were even cautiously optimistic the withdrawal could be a pivot to diplomacy, a "foreign policy tool of first resort." Short of their inclusion of "protection of women in Afghanistan" as a top US diplomatic priority, perennial red meat for condition-based opposition, their analysis drew praise from progressives.
Surprisingly, while promoting the controversial pullout, Sanders even gave Donald Trump a virtual shoutout on CNN for getting the process started. "I applaud what the president has done; and in truth…what President Biden is doing is picking up on the negotiated agreement that President Trump put together."
Read complete article in antiwar.com.
As the US plans its Afghan troop withdrawal,
what was it all for?
what was it all for?
Unlike most US presidents, Joe Biden did not come to the White House with many fixed ideological positions. He did, however, come with fixed values. Chief among them is understanding how US policies impact working American families.
In his nearly half century of experience in and around Washington, Biden was known to ask any staffers using academic or elitist language to pick up your phone, call your mother, read her what you just told me […] If she understands, we can keep talking.
The debate about the nearly 20-year US presence in Afghanistan has challenged three prior US presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Yet Biden, as the first US president in 40 years to have had a child who served in combat, sees things differently.
There undoubtedly remains a strategic argument — albeit shared by increasingly fewer Americans — for maintaining a US presence in Afghanistan. Namely, that it would continue to prevent terrorists from once again making safe haven there.
But Biden’s announcement that he would withdraw the remaining US troops by September essentially meant he saw no way of making the parent of another soldier killed in Afghanistan understand such an argument. As he said,
"Our reasons for remaining in Afghanistan have become increasingly unclear."
Shifting US support for the war
Today, most Americans agree with him.
When the longest war in American history began, 83% of Americans were in favour of it. But by 2019, 41% of Americans simply had no opinion on whether the US had accomplished its goals in Afghanistan. Perhaps clearer than the US rationale for maintaining troops in Afghanistan is the fact Americans are dramatically less concerned about terrorism than they were 20 years ago.
Read complete article on the conversation.
In his nearly half century of experience in and around Washington, Biden was known to ask any staffers using academic or elitist language to pick up your phone, call your mother, read her what you just told me […] If she understands, we can keep talking.
The debate about the nearly 20-year US presence in Afghanistan has challenged three prior US presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Yet Biden, as the first US president in 40 years to have had a child who served in combat, sees things differently.
There undoubtedly remains a strategic argument — albeit shared by increasingly fewer Americans — for maintaining a US presence in Afghanistan. Namely, that it would continue to prevent terrorists from once again making safe haven there.
But Biden’s announcement that he would withdraw the remaining US troops by September essentially meant he saw no way of making the parent of another soldier killed in Afghanistan understand such an argument. As he said,
"Our reasons for remaining in Afghanistan have become increasingly unclear."
Shifting US support for the war
Today, most Americans agree with him.
When the longest war in American history began, 83% of Americans were in favour of it. But by 2019, 41% of Americans simply had no opinion on whether the US had accomplished its goals in Afghanistan. Perhaps clearer than the US rationale for maintaining troops in Afghanistan is the fact Americans are dramatically less concerned about terrorism than they were 20 years ago.
Read complete article on the conversation.
A Global Demand to 35 Governments:
And a Thank You to 7 That Already Have
And a Thank You to 7 That Already Have
The governments of Albania, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mongolia, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, UK, and US all still have troops in Afghanistan and need to remove them. These troops range in number from Slovenia's 6 to the United States' 2,500. Most countries have fewer that 100. Apart from the United States, only Germany has over 1,000. Only five other countries have more than 300.
Governments that used to have troops in this war but have removed them include New Zealand, France, Jordan, Croatia, North Macedonia, Ireland, and Canada.
We plan to deliver a big THANK-YOU to every government that removes all of its troops from Afghanistan, along with the names and comments of every signer of this petition.
We plan to deliver a demand to remove all troops to every government that has not done so, along with the names and comments of every signer of this petition.
The U.S. government is the ring-leader, and the bulk of its killing is done from the air, but — given the deficiency in democracy in the U.S. government, which is now on its third president who promised to end the war but hasn't — it is critical that other governments withdraw their troops. Those troops, present in token numbers, are there to legitimize behavior that could otherwise be recognized as lawless and outrageous. A government lacking the courage to reject U.S. pressure has no business sending any number of its residents to kill or risk dying in a U.S./NATO war.
This petition will be signed by people in each nation involved in the war, including the nation of Afghanistan.
Please sign the petition, add comments if you have anything to add, and share with others. If you want to be part of delivering the petition to a particular government, contact World BEYOND War.
Governments that used to have troops in this war but have removed them include New Zealand, France, Jordan, Croatia, North Macedonia, Ireland, and Canada.
We plan to deliver a big THANK-YOU to every government that removes all of its troops from Afghanistan, along with the names and comments of every signer of this petition.
We plan to deliver a demand to remove all troops to every government that has not done so, along with the names and comments of every signer of this petition.
The U.S. government is the ring-leader, and the bulk of its killing is done from the air, but — given the deficiency in democracy in the U.S. government, which is now on its third president who promised to end the war but hasn't — it is critical that other governments withdraw their troops. Those troops, present in token numbers, are there to legitimize behavior that could otherwise be recognized as lawless and outrageous. A government lacking the courage to reject U.S. pressure has no business sending any number of its residents to kill or risk dying in a U.S./NATO war.
This petition will be signed by people in each nation involved in the war, including the nation of Afghanistan.
Please sign the petition, add comments if you have anything to add, and share with others. If you want to be part of delivering the petition to a particular government, contact World BEYOND War.
Tell Congress to Stop Ignoring Veterans who are Sick & Dying from Toxic Burn Pits!
To: House of Representatives, Senate, White House, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Defense
Tell Congress to stop ignoring veterans who are sick and dying from toxic burn pits
Campaign created by
Jon Stewart and John Feal
Hundreds of tons of waste produced on military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan were doused with jet and diesel fuels and burned in massive burn pits—as American soldiers lived, worked, and slept next to the toxic fumes. Now that they are home, hundreds of thousands veterans are sick and dying from lung diseases, cancers, and respiratory illnesses.
The Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense continue to ignore our veterans’ suffering and deaths caused by their neglect despite their own statistics which show burn pits as the source of these health problems.
Sign our petition to tell Congress it must pass a bipartisan bill so veterans will no longer be denied the care and benefits our government owes them for their service.
Why is this important?
There’s a reason it’s against the law to burn hazardous waste in your own backyard in America.
It’s common sense. Burning regular household waste releases carcinogens, neuro-disruptors, and heavy metals that can have devastating effects on the lungs, heart, brain, thyroid, and immune system.
It’s also a scientific fact. Federal and state government agencies compiled decades of research linking toxins from burn pits to diseases and birth defects.
But the US military paid private companies like Halliburton subsidiary KBR billions of dollars from taxpayer funds to burn human waste, aerosols, Styrofoam, medical waste, bio-hazardous materials, body parts, trucks, and explosives in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then troops got sick and started dying. It’s haunting and a reminder that these forever wars have long-lasting consequences.
For every soldier returning with horrific health defects, there are untold numbers of service members who continue to be subjected to burn pit sites and toxic smoke to this day. The DoD and VA must acknowledge the reality and gravity of the problems toxic chemicals from burn pits have caused and take immediate action to end the use of the active burn pits once and for all.
In addition, Congress must make health care and compensation available to veterans and service members who are suffering exposure-related health effects. And, we must pass legislation that grants surviving families of deceased veterans the benefits they deserve.
We have worked together to pressure Congress to acknowledge the bipartisan need to care for the 9/11 community suffering from cancers and other health problems after those deadly attacks nearly 20 years ago. Washington moves too slow for the families who need our government’s help. We only got that done last year, and it took all the help people like you were able to provide signing petitions, making phone calls, chipping in to cover costs, and organizing in your local communities.
We’re taking this fight about burn pits to Congress and want to work even more quickly. We want to work together with anyone willing to help those who served in the military and came home feeling abandoned after their government used them to fight wars and risk their lives.
Sign the petition as one step to help provide health care and compensation to those suffering from exposure to toxic burn pits. Let’s fix this and stick up for the families who are fighting for health care and accountability from the same government that sent them into harm’s way.
We will update you on the upcoming bill and other actions you can take as the campaign develops so please stay tuned.
Tell Congress to stop ignoring veterans who are sick and dying from toxic burn pits
Campaign created by
Jon Stewart and John Feal
Hundreds of tons of waste produced on military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan were doused with jet and diesel fuels and burned in massive burn pits—as American soldiers lived, worked, and slept next to the toxic fumes. Now that they are home, hundreds of thousands veterans are sick and dying from lung diseases, cancers, and respiratory illnesses.
The Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense continue to ignore our veterans’ suffering and deaths caused by their neglect despite their own statistics which show burn pits as the source of these health problems.
Sign our petition to tell Congress it must pass a bipartisan bill so veterans will no longer be denied the care and benefits our government owes them for their service.
Why is this important?
There’s a reason it’s against the law to burn hazardous waste in your own backyard in America.
It’s common sense. Burning regular household waste releases carcinogens, neuro-disruptors, and heavy metals that can have devastating effects on the lungs, heart, brain, thyroid, and immune system.
It’s also a scientific fact. Federal and state government agencies compiled decades of research linking toxins from burn pits to diseases and birth defects.
But the US military paid private companies like Halliburton subsidiary KBR billions of dollars from taxpayer funds to burn human waste, aerosols, Styrofoam, medical waste, bio-hazardous materials, body parts, trucks, and explosives in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then troops got sick and started dying. It’s haunting and a reminder that these forever wars have long-lasting consequences.
For every soldier returning with horrific health defects, there are untold numbers of service members who continue to be subjected to burn pit sites and toxic smoke to this day. The DoD and VA must acknowledge the reality and gravity of the problems toxic chemicals from burn pits have caused and take immediate action to end the use of the active burn pits once and for all.
In addition, Congress must make health care and compensation available to veterans and service members who are suffering exposure-related health effects. And, we must pass legislation that grants surviving families of deceased veterans the benefits they deserve.
We have worked together to pressure Congress to acknowledge the bipartisan need to care for the 9/11 community suffering from cancers and other health problems after those deadly attacks nearly 20 years ago. Washington moves too slow for the families who need our government’s help. We only got that done last year, and it took all the help people like you were able to provide signing petitions, making phone calls, chipping in to cover costs, and organizing in your local communities.
We’re taking this fight about burn pits to Congress and want to work even more quickly. We want to work together with anyone willing to help those who served in the military and came home feeling abandoned after their government used them to fight wars and risk their lives.
Sign the petition as one step to help provide health care and compensation to those suffering from exposure to toxic burn pits. Let’s fix this and stick up for the families who are fighting for health care and accountability from the same government that sent them into harm’s way.
We will update you on the upcoming bill and other actions you can take as the campaign develops so please stay tuned.
VFP-111 Proudly Co-Sponsors
23rd Annual MLK Conference
23rd Annual MLK Conference
SAVE THE DATE: The Whatcom Human Rights Task Force presents the 23rd Annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Human Rights Conference Thursday, January 14th – Saturday, January 16th.
Online Event Planning for the 23rd Annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Human Rights Conference is underway. The theme of the 2021 Conference is Recapturing the Revolutionary Spirit: Dangerous Unselfishness , which Dr. King referenced in his April 3rd, 1968 address, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” , delivered in Memphis less than 24 hours before he was assassinated. His message remains as urgent today as it did over 50 years ago.
Now in its twenty-third year, the Conference provides a space for the community to come together and renew our commitment to the ideals that Dr. King held dear and believed deeply that this country could attain only by working together and acknowledging our shared history: ideals of equity, freedom, and self-determination. The Conference offers a rare opportunity for people of all ages and walks of life to share our stories, lift our voices to call out injustice, and take actions that will help make Dr. King’s ideals reality.
The 2021 conference will look quite different from the previous ones, taking place online over several days. It will feature a range of presentation formats including performance art, films, and caucuses, in addition to standard workshop fare. As always, the conference will be free and open to all, and we anticipate that clock hours will be available for educators and continuing education units will be available for social workers, mental health counselors, and marriage and family therapists.
Conference Partners: Bellingham Public Schools, Whatcom Community College
We express our deep appreciation to this year’s conference sponsors: Chuckanut Health Foundation, WWU Foundation, Community Food Co-op, National Association of Social Workers, Bellingham Unitarian Fellowship, Pickford Film Center, Veterans for Peace Chapter 111, Indivisible Bellingham, Whatcom Peace & Justice Center, A1 DesignBuild, Village Books.
Online Event Planning for the 23rd Annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Human Rights Conference is underway. The theme of the 2021 Conference is Recapturing the Revolutionary Spirit: Dangerous Unselfishness , which Dr. King referenced in his April 3rd, 1968 address, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” , delivered in Memphis less than 24 hours before he was assassinated. His message remains as urgent today as it did over 50 years ago.
Now in its twenty-third year, the Conference provides a space for the community to come together and renew our commitment to the ideals that Dr. King held dear and believed deeply that this country could attain only by working together and acknowledging our shared history: ideals of equity, freedom, and self-determination. The Conference offers a rare opportunity for people of all ages and walks of life to share our stories, lift our voices to call out injustice, and take actions that will help make Dr. King’s ideals reality.
The 2021 conference will look quite different from the previous ones, taking place online over several days. It will feature a range of presentation formats including performance art, films, and caucuses, in addition to standard workshop fare. As always, the conference will be free and open to all, and we anticipate that clock hours will be available for educators and continuing education units will be available for social workers, mental health counselors, and marriage and family therapists.
Conference Partners: Bellingham Public Schools, Whatcom Community College
We express our deep appreciation to this year’s conference sponsors: Chuckanut Health Foundation, WWU Foundation, Community Food Co-op, National Association of Social Workers, Bellingham Unitarian Fellowship, Pickford Film Center, Veterans for Peace Chapter 111, Indivisible Bellingham, Whatcom Peace & Justice Center, A1 DesignBuild, Village Books.
When Will America Free Itself From War?
“POWs Never Have A Nice Day.” That sentiment was captured on a button a friend of mine wore for our fourth grade class photo in 1972. That prisoners of war could never have such a day was reinforced by the sad face on that button. Soon after, American POWs would indeed be released by their North Vietnamese captors as the American war in Vietnam ended. They came home the next year to a much-hyped heroes’ welcome orchestrated by the administration of President Richard Nixon, but the government would never actually retire its POW/MIA (missing-in-action) flags. Today, almost half a century later, they continue to fly at federal installations, including the U.S. Capitol as it was breached and briefly besieged last week by a mob incited by this country’s lame-duck president, ostensibly to honor all U.S. veterans who were either POWs or never returned because their bodies were never recovered.
We’re all part of a culture that continues to esteem war, embrace militarism, and devote more than half of federal discretionary spending to wars, weaponry, and the militarization of American culture.
Remembering the sacrifices of our veterans is fitting and proper; it’s why we set aside Memorial Day in May and Veterans Day in November. In thinking about those POWs and the dark legacy of this country’s conflicts since World War II, however, I’ve come to a realization. In the ensuing years, we Americans have all, in some sense, become prisoners of war. We’re all part of a culture that continues to esteem war, embrace militarism, and devote more than half of federal discretionary spending to wars, weaponry, and the militarization of American culture. We live in a country that leads the world in the export of murderous munitions to the grimmest, most violent hotspots on the planet, enabling, for example, a genocidal conflict in Yemen, among other conflicts.
True, in a draft-less country, few enough Americans actually don a military uniform these days. As 2021 begins, most of us have never carried a military identification card that mentions the Geneva Convention on the proper and legal treatment of POWs, as I did when I wore a uniform long ago. So, when I say that all Americans are essentially POWs, I’m obviously using that acronym not in a legal or formal way, but in the colloquial sense of being captured by some phenomenon, held by it, subjected to it in a fashion that tends to restrict, if not eliminate, freedom of thought and action and so compromises this country’s belief in sacred individual liberties. In this colloquial sense, it seems to me that all Americans have in some fashion become prisoners of war, even those few “prisoners” among us who have worked so bravely and tirelessly to resist the phenomenon.
Ask yourself this question: During a deadly pandemic, as the American death toll approaches 400,000 while still accelerating, what unites “our” representatives in Congress? What is the only act that draws wide and fervent bipartisan support, not to speak of a unique override of a Trump presidential veto in these last four years? It certainly isn’t providing health care for all or giving struggling families checks for $2,000 to ensure that food will be on American tables or that millions of us won’t be evicted from our homes in the middle of a pandemic. No, what unites “our” representatives is funding the military-industrial complex to the tune of $740.5 billion in fiscal year 2021 (though the real amount spent on what passes for “national security” each year regularly exceeds a trillion dollars). Still, that figure of $740.5 billion in itself is already higher than the combined military spending of the next 10 countries, including Russia and China as well as U.S. allies like France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Not only that, but Congress added language to the latest defense bill that effectively blocked efforts by President Trump before he leaves office on January 20th to mandate the withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan (and some troops from Germany). Though it’s doubtful he would have accomplished such goals anyway, given his irresolute nature, that Congress worked to block him tells you what you need to know about “our” representatives and their allegiance to the war complex.
That said, an irresolute Trump administration has been most resolute in just one area: selling advanced weaponry overseas. It’s been rushing to export American-made bombs, missiles, and jets to the Middle East before turning over government efforts to shill for America’s merchants of death to President Joe Biden and his crew of deskbound warriors.
Speaking of Biden, that he selected retired General Lloyd Austin III to be his secretary of defense sends the strongest possible signal of his own allegiance to the primacy of militarism and war in American culture. After all, upon retiring, General Austin promptly cashed in by joining the board of directors of United Technologies from which he received $1.4 million in “stock and other compensation” before it merged with giant weapons-maker Raytheon and he ended up on the board of that company. (He holds roughly $500,000 in Raytheon stock, a nice supplement to his six-figure yearly military pension.)
How better than selecting him as SecDef to ensure that the “military” and the “industrial” remain wedded in that famed complex? America’s secretary of defense is, of course, supposed to be a civilian, someone who can exercise strong and independent oversight over America’s ever-growing war complex, not a lifelong military officer and general to boot, as well as an obvious war profiteer.
Finish article on LAProgressive.
“POWs Never Have A Nice Day.” That sentiment was captured on a button a friend of mine wore for our fourth grade class photo in 1972. That prisoners of war could never have such a day was reinforced by the sad face on that button. Soon after, American POWs would indeed be released by their North Vietnamese captors as the American war in Vietnam ended. They came home the next year to a much-hyped heroes’ welcome orchestrated by the administration of President Richard Nixon, but the government would never actually retire its POW/MIA (missing-in-action) flags. Today, almost half a century later, they continue to fly at federal installations, including the U.S. Capitol as it was breached and briefly besieged last week by a mob incited by this country’s lame-duck president, ostensibly to honor all U.S. veterans who were either POWs or never returned because their bodies were never recovered.
We’re all part of a culture that continues to esteem war, embrace militarism, and devote more than half of federal discretionary spending to wars, weaponry, and the militarization of American culture.
Remembering the sacrifices of our veterans is fitting and proper; it’s why we set aside Memorial Day in May and Veterans Day in November. In thinking about those POWs and the dark legacy of this country’s conflicts since World War II, however, I’ve come to a realization. In the ensuing years, we Americans have all, in some sense, become prisoners of war. We’re all part of a culture that continues to esteem war, embrace militarism, and devote more than half of federal discretionary spending to wars, weaponry, and the militarization of American culture. We live in a country that leads the world in the export of murderous munitions to the grimmest, most violent hotspots on the planet, enabling, for example, a genocidal conflict in Yemen, among other conflicts.
True, in a draft-less country, few enough Americans actually don a military uniform these days. As 2021 begins, most of us have never carried a military identification card that mentions the Geneva Convention on the proper and legal treatment of POWs, as I did when I wore a uniform long ago. So, when I say that all Americans are essentially POWs, I’m obviously using that acronym not in a legal or formal way, but in the colloquial sense of being captured by some phenomenon, held by it, subjected to it in a fashion that tends to restrict, if not eliminate, freedom of thought and action and so compromises this country’s belief in sacred individual liberties. In this colloquial sense, it seems to me that all Americans have in some fashion become prisoners of war, even those few “prisoners” among us who have worked so bravely and tirelessly to resist the phenomenon.
Ask yourself this question: During a deadly pandemic, as the American death toll approaches 400,000 while still accelerating, what unites “our” representatives in Congress? What is the only act that draws wide and fervent bipartisan support, not to speak of a unique override of a Trump presidential veto in these last four years? It certainly isn’t providing health care for all or giving struggling families checks for $2,000 to ensure that food will be on American tables or that millions of us won’t be evicted from our homes in the middle of a pandemic. No, what unites “our” representatives is funding the military-industrial complex to the tune of $740.5 billion in fiscal year 2021 (though the real amount spent on what passes for “national security” each year regularly exceeds a trillion dollars). Still, that figure of $740.5 billion in itself is already higher than the combined military spending of the next 10 countries, including Russia and China as well as U.S. allies like France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Not only that, but Congress added language to the latest defense bill that effectively blocked efforts by President Trump before he leaves office on January 20th to mandate the withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan (and some troops from Germany). Though it’s doubtful he would have accomplished such goals anyway, given his irresolute nature, that Congress worked to block him tells you what you need to know about “our” representatives and their allegiance to the war complex.
That said, an irresolute Trump administration has been most resolute in just one area: selling advanced weaponry overseas. It’s been rushing to export American-made bombs, missiles, and jets to the Middle East before turning over government efforts to shill for America’s merchants of death to President Joe Biden and his crew of deskbound warriors.
Speaking of Biden, that he selected retired General Lloyd Austin III to be his secretary of defense sends the strongest possible signal of his own allegiance to the primacy of militarism and war in American culture. After all, upon retiring, General Austin promptly cashed in by joining the board of directors of United Technologies from which he received $1.4 million in “stock and other compensation” before it merged with giant weapons-maker Raytheon and he ended up on the board of that company. (He holds roughly $500,000 in Raytheon stock, a nice supplement to his six-figure yearly military pension.)
How better than selecting him as SecDef to ensure that the “military” and the “industrial” remain wedded in that famed complex? America’s secretary of defense is, of course, supposed to be a civilian, someone who can exercise strong and independent oversight over America’s ever-growing war complex, not a lifelong military officer and general to boot, as well as an obvious war profiteer.
Finish article on LAProgressive.
Webinar: Ending the War on Afghanistan
Video: Watch the Webinar Just Held on Ending the War on Afghanistan
Reclaim Armistice Day:
A VFP Event to Return to the Original Vision of Ending War
Featured speakers: Ann Wright, Rory Fanning, Matt Hoh, Peggy Akers, Doug Rawlings, Danny Sjursen, Jan Barry,
Eamon (Ed) Horgan (VFP Ireland), Ben Griffin (VFP-UK) and others
Armistice Day Cringe
November 11, 2020
By Gene Marx
November 11, 2020
By Gene Marx
If you - like me - spent your prime of life in the ranks of some branch of the military and people know it, there is absolutely no escaping the cringe-worthy platitude “Thank you for your service.” I usually go out of my way to avoid any exchange at all, but if unavoidable, my usual reply is “Thanks, but I didn’t serve, I was used.”
Look, I am a Vietnam veteran, OK. And long before I completed nearly 100 combat missions, I realized that I was not one of the good guys. I was an unwitting interventionist with Navy Wings of Gold, flying cover for an invasion force. I should have known better from the start but, like my father before me, I “served,” like a mindless tool.
Forbes Magazine would have its social media readership come to more marketable concepts of 21st century military service. In short, a Veterans Day article by Diana Rau broad brushed generations of US service members. Rau meant well but her piece read like a USAA commercial. The title alone, What I Really Mean When I Say Thank You for Your Service, was enough to turn my laptop into a COVID self-isolation projectile because I knew what was coming.
“Dear Veteran, we celebrate you…thank you for creating the space for me, and so many others, to dream fearlessly.”
Let’s hope yours come without night sweats or heart-pounding triggers.
“What I mean is because of your actions and service, I don’t worry about roadside bombs enroute to meetings or the safety of my family and friends while I’m at work.”
That, Diana, is because bombs are meant for Muslim villages in the Middle East or Asia.
“My ability to experience joy and wonder are because you protected and created the space for me to appreciate life's beauty without fear.”
Believe me, “life’s beauty”, yours or anyone else’s, never entered our collective minds.
Surprisingly, the piece neglected to include, but implied nonetheless “Thank you for our freedom.”
Breaking news! There is not a single veteran, from Okinawa to Kandahar, who served and or fought for anyone’s freedom. Go ahead, ask one.
Sadly, most veterans today owe their military career “opportunities” to an economic draft resulting from the lip service and empty promises of unbloodied Congressional war hawks. A full-time job program, medical and educational benefits, steady salaries, all for targeting supposed insurgents or reasonable facsimiles in countries that many could not spell or find on a map before, or even after, signing up. I was there, one of them, in 1972 in Southeast Asia, but an unraveling empire in the age of endless war and COVID will be an equal employment opportunity on steroids, until the next Resistance takes notice of the true costs of war.
Veterans Day, formerly Armistice Day in the US, often takes me back to a ceremony in 2003 held in honor of a local soldier killed on the last day of WWI. His granddaughter asked me to accompany her son to his gravesite at Arlington, his headstone was corrected with the proper date and the correct spelling of his name. In a remote, lonely corner of Arlington it was just the two of us. A few words, a couple of salutes, two coins left in remembrance and we were done. I'm guessing that was more ceremony than the young Texas private received in 1918.
And neither of us thanked him for his service. We knew better.
Look, I am a Vietnam veteran, OK. And long before I completed nearly 100 combat missions, I realized that I was not one of the good guys. I was an unwitting interventionist with Navy Wings of Gold, flying cover for an invasion force. I should have known better from the start but, like my father before me, I “served,” like a mindless tool.
Forbes Magazine would have its social media readership come to more marketable concepts of 21st century military service. In short, a Veterans Day article by Diana Rau broad brushed generations of US service members. Rau meant well but her piece read like a USAA commercial. The title alone, What I Really Mean When I Say Thank You for Your Service, was enough to turn my laptop into a COVID self-isolation projectile because I knew what was coming.
“Dear Veteran, we celebrate you…thank you for creating the space for me, and so many others, to dream fearlessly.”
Let’s hope yours come without night sweats or heart-pounding triggers.
“What I mean is because of your actions and service, I don’t worry about roadside bombs enroute to meetings or the safety of my family and friends while I’m at work.”
That, Diana, is because bombs are meant for Muslim villages in the Middle East or Asia.
“My ability to experience joy and wonder are because you protected and created the space for me to appreciate life's beauty without fear.”
Believe me, “life’s beauty”, yours or anyone else’s, never entered our collective minds.
Surprisingly, the piece neglected to include, but implied nonetheless “Thank you for our freedom.”
Breaking news! There is not a single veteran, from Okinawa to Kandahar, who served and or fought for anyone’s freedom. Go ahead, ask one.
Sadly, most veterans today owe their military career “opportunities” to an economic draft resulting from the lip service and empty promises of unbloodied Congressional war hawks. A full-time job program, medical and educational benefits, steady salaries, all for targeting supposed insurgents or reasonable facsimiles in countries that many could not spell or find on a map before, or even after, signing up. I was there, one of them, in 1972 in Southeast Asia, but an unraveling empire in the age of endless war and COVID will be an equal employment opportunity on steroids, until the next Resistance takes notice of the true costs of war.
Veterans Day, formerly Armistice Day in the US, often takes me back to a ceremony in 2003 held in honor of a local soldier killed on the last day of WWI. His granddaughter asked me to accompany her son to his gravesite at Arlington, his headstone was corrected with the proper date and the correct spelling of his name. In a remote, lonely corner of Arlington it was just the two of us. A few words, a couple of salutes, two coins left in remembrance and we were done. I'm guessing that was more ceremony than the young Texas private received in 1918.
And neither of us thanked him for his service. We knew better.
Armistice Day 103
November 11,
2020
By World BEYOND War, October 14, 2020
November 11, 2020, is Armistice Day 103 — which is 102 years since World War I was ended at a scheduled moment (11 o’clock on the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 — killing an extra 11,000 people after the decision to end the war had been reached early in the morning).
In many parts of the world this day is called Remembrance Day and should be a day of mourning the dead and working to abolish war so as not to create any more war dead. But the day is being militarized, and a strange alchemy cooked up by the weapons companies is using the day to tell people that unless they support killing more men, women, and children in war they will dishonor those already killed.
For decades in the United States, as elsewhere, this day was called Armistice Day, and was identified as a holiday of peace, including by the U.S. government. It was a day of sad remembrance and joyful ending of war, and of a commitment to preventing war in the future. The holiday’s name was changed in the United States after the U.S. war on Korea to “Veterans Day,” a largely pro-war holiday on which some U.S. cities forbid Veterans For Peace groups from marching in their parades, because the day has become understood as a day to praise war — in contrast to how it began.
The story from the first Armistice Day of the last soldier killed in the last major war in which most of the people killed were soldiers highlights the stupidity of war. Henry Nicholas John Gunther had been born in Baltimore, Maryland, to parents who had immigrated from Germany. In September 1917 he had been drafted to help kill Germans. When he had written home from Europe to describe how horrible the war was and to encourage others to avoid being drafted, he had been demoted (and his letter censored). After that, he had told his buddies that he would prove himself. As the deadline of 11:00 a.m. approached on that final day in November, Henry got up, against orders, and bravely charged with his bayonet toward two German machine guns. The Germans were aware of the Armistice and tried to wave him off. He kept approaching and shooting. When he got close, a short burst of machine gun fire ended his life at 10:59 a.m. Henry was given his rank back, but not his life.
November 11, 2020, is Armistice Day 103 — which is 102 years since World War I was ended at a scheduled moment (11 o’clock on the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 — killing an extra 11,000 people after the decision to end the war had been reached early in the morning).
In many parts of the world this day is called Remembrance Day and should be a day of mourning the dead and working to abolish war so as not to create any more war dead. But the day is being militarized, and a strange alchemy cooked up by the weapons companies is using the day to tell people that unless they support killing more men, women, and children in war they will dishonor those already killed.
For decades in the United States, as elsewhere, this day was called Armistice Day, and was identified as a holiday of peace, including by the U.S. government. It was a day of sad remembrance and joyful ending of war, and of a commitment to preventing war in the future. The holiday’s name was changed in the United States after the U.S. war on Korea to “Veterans Day,” a largely pro-war holiday on which some U.S. cities forbid Veterans For Peace groups from marching in their parades, because the day has become understood as a day to praise war — in contrast to how it began.
The story from the first Armistice Day of the last soldier killed in the last major war in which most of the people killed were soldiers highlights the stupidity of war. Henry Nicholas John Gunther had been born in Baltimore, Maryland, to parents who had immigrated from Germany. In September 1917 he had been drafted to help kill Germans. When he had written home from Europe to describe how horrible the war was and to encourage others to avoid being drafted, he had been demoted (and his letter censored). After that, he had told his buddies that he would prove himself. As the deadline of 11:00 a.m. approached on that final day in November, Henry got up, against orders, and bravely charged with his bayonet toward two German machine guns. The Germans were aware of the Armistice and tried to wave him off. He kept approaching and shooting. When he got close, a short burst of machine gun fire ended his life at 10:59 a.m. Henry was given his rank back, but not his life.
2020 Annual VFP Convention
First Ever Virtual Gathering
First Ever Virtual Gathering
This year we have an entirely separate convention website.
Click here to check it out!
Having trouble with registration? Check out our step-by-step guide on how to complete your registration!
Click here to check it out!
Having trouble with registration? Check out our step-by-step guide on how to complete your registration!
Vietnam War Veteran & VFP Co-Founder Lee Thorn Dies
The Vietnam War left a terrible mark on Lee Thorn, searing him with post-traumatic stress disorder from guilty memories of loading bombs onto jets to rain fiery death upon Laos. So he committed himself to peace — first by co-founding Veterans for Peace and then working to try to heal the nation he helped devastate.
In 1998, Thorn read a newsletter article by Bounthanh Phommasathit, a Laotian woman who had fled the village of Phon Hong in the 1970s to become a social worker in Ohio. She wanted to help her people back home. Thorn and a friend delivered medical supplies to Phon Hong, and soon after he founded the Jhai Foundation with Phommasathit’s help.
Thorn expanded his efforts in Laos to pedal-powered wireless computers, exporting coffee beans to America, installing wells, and supporting efforts to clear unexploded U.S. bombs and mines from the countryside.
“I tried to do the best I could to make up for what we’d done there,” he told The Chronicle by phone from his hospice bed at the San Francisco VA Medical Center, where he died of cancer at 77 on June 25. “I wish I could have done a lot more.”
Read more.
Listen to Peter Hartlaub’s interview with Lee Thorn and his son, podcast host Jesse Thorn.
DoD - Defund, or Dismantle
June 17, 2020
June 17, 2020
Before the smoke and tear gas have even cleared from the next militarized police de-escalation failure, Americans should be gearing up for the annual Theatre of the Absurd on Capitol Hill, known formerly as the Senate and House Armed Services Committee markup discussions for the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). But they’re mostly not.
The thing is, most Americans don’t follow this Civics 101 process, or could care less. Perhaps if they knew that 63% of the US discretionary budget is allocated to the arms industry so our military can obliterate brown people for our freedom, they might pay closer attention. A lot of us have either succumbed to grounded prospects and the futility of dealing with the Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex or caved to the bloated economics of media fear cards and the military elite narrative. The rest of us are still pushing our boulders uphill, futilely persisting with Sisyphean expectations of reasonable reductions (read: crumbs) to Pentagon spending. On the other hand, things might be looking up. With an economy on life support in the middle of a global pandemic, with streets convulsing with police abuse and racial protests, and no end in sight, at least it’s taken our minds off of our catastrophic climate collapse. And so far, no threat of an asteroid collision.
Here’s a bizarre concept for a new normal. What if our empathetically bereft House and Senate Armed Service Committee number crunchers ignored Defense industry donors for once and threw the rest of us, including the marginalized, the poor, and the disenfranchised, some of those reallocated domestic crumbs? There has never been a more fitting time. Social distancing or no social distancing, a tsunami of righteous indignation is a clear indicator that enough has never been more than enough than now, today, if the smoke ever clears.
And here are just a few of the numbers, reasonable reductions to the Trump Pentagon budget that could significantly fulfill domestic priorities, thanks to People Over Pentagon and a bill introduced in the House this week by Representatives Barbara Lee, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Pramila Jayapal to cut $350 billion worth of waste from the Pentagon budget to invest in our local communities.
At $740 billion per year, this year’s budget for the Pentagon and related agencies is at one of its highest levels since World War II – more than the next seven nations in the world combined, five of which are US allies.
Just as we are exposing the rot in our militarized police and calling for its defunding and dismantling, so we must expose the rot in our interventionist foreign policy and call for the moral imparity of defunding the Pentagon. Decreasing Pentagon funds would allow for greater investments at home – healthcare and infrastructure, confronting militarism and racism, quality education, affordable housing, renewable energy and more. Recent polling indicates that a majority of American voters finally agree.
Mark Twain wrote of US interventionism, “Trampling on the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.”
Today enduring with apathy is no longer an option for the donor class. A sincere social compact with working people and marginalized communities can be readily achieved by legitimate Congressional oversight and annual reallocations of Pentagon funds. This new normal will end wasteful spending that only benefits Pentagon contractors and their wealthy shareholders, resulting instead in human security for the rest of us. With the murder of George Floyd and its justifiable outcry, the near and future ramifications of dismissing such a compact now and in a post-pandemic world, are clearer now than ever before - with or without an asteroid.
Comment on Tipping the Scale.
The thing is, most Americans don’t follow this Civics 101 process, or could care less. Perhaps if they knew that 63% of the US discretionary budget is allocated to the arms industry so our military can obliterate brown people for our freedom, they might pay closer attention. A lot of us have either succumbed to grounded prospects and the futility of dealing with the Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex or caved to the bloated economics of media fear cards and the military elite narrative. The rest of us are still pushing our boulders uphill, futilely persisting with Sisyphean expectations of reasonable reductions (read: crumbs) to Pentagon spending. On the other hand, things might be looking up. With an economy on life support in the middle of a global pandemic, with streets convulsing with police abuse and racial protests, and no end in sight, at least it’s taken our minds off of our catastrophic climate collapse. And so far, no threat of an asteroid collision.
Here’s a bizarre concept for a new normal. What if our empathetically bereft House and Senate Armed Service Committee number crunchers ignored Defense industry donors for once and threw the rest of us, including the marginalized, the poor, and the disenfranchised, some of those reallocated domestic crumbs? There has never been a more fitting time. Social distancing or no social distancing, a tsunami of righteous indignation is a clear indicator that enough has never been more than enough than now, today, if the smoke ever clears.
And here are just a few of the numbers, reasonable reductions to the Trump Pentagon budget that could significantly fulfill domestic priorities, thanks to People Over Pentagon and a bill introduced in the House this week by Representatives Barbara Lee, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Pramila Jayapal to cut $350 billion worth of waste from the Pentagon budget to invest in our local communities.
- Don’t create a Space Force—save $2.6 billion. Does the US really need a Starship Fleet Command before we join the United Federation of Planets and actual choose to conduct deep space exploration, research, defense, peacekeeping, and diplomacy. Creating a new space bureaucracy will undermine effectiveness and increase costs and is unlikely to significantly add to US capabilities in this domain.
- Eliminate the Overseas Contingency Operations account—save $68.8 billion to $174 billion. There is bipartisan consensus that the overseas contingency operations account has become nothing more than a slush fund for Pentagon programs that have no connection to emergencies or contingencies.
- Cut service contracting by 15 percent—save $26 billion. Several analyses, including one conducted by the Project on Government Oversight, have found that hiring private contractors to perform work that would otherwise be performed by civilians, or not at all, has increased costs.
- End use-it-or-lose-it contract spending—save $18 billion. Branches of the military are afraid that if they spend less than their budget allows, Congress might send them less money in the next year. They often try to spend everything that’s left instead of admitting they can operate on less.
- Defer or cancel development of the B-21 Bomber—save $3 billion. The Air Force currently operates a fleet of 157 long-range bombers, which will be able to keep flying until at least 2040. The Air Force estimates the new B-21 would begin operating about five to ten years from now. This manned bomber would be entirely irrelevant, looking for a mission.
- Replace future F-35s with F-16s and F-18s—save $2.4 billion. The F-35 program has already fallen nearly a decade behind schedule with a price tag that has more than doubled, $80 to $100 billion per. Nothing is slowing down the acquisition of the most expensive lemon in DOD history, despite flaws and huge cost overruns.
- Cancel the Ford-class carrier program—save $1 billion. Knowing the role carriers play in projecting power, US adversaries have been developing and deploying weapons to keep them at bay. Aircraft carriers are sitting ducks to adversaries’ anti-ship missiles, placing more than 5,000 US sailors in enemy crosshairs in every potential confrontation.
- Authorize a Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process—save $2 billion per year. Multiple administrations have requested that Congress authorize a BRAC round to improve capabilities and get rid of excess capacity. Any BRAC round should also include adequate funding for the Office of Economic Adjustment to help affected communities transition.
- Reduce our active troop presence in Europe to 40,000—save $1.5 billion. Cold War I is so over. The Soviet “Evil Empire” has collapsed, Eastern Europe has switched sides, and America’s European allies now possess a collective GDP and population larger than the US. Why are American military personnel still stationed on the continent?
At $740 billion per year, this year’s budget for the Pentagon and related agencies is at one of its highest levels since World War II – more than the next seven nations in the world combined, five of which are US allies.
Just as we are exposing the rot in our militarized police and calling for its defunding and dismantling, so we must expose the rot in our interventionist foreign policy and call for the moral imparity of defunding the Pentagon. Decreasing Pentagon funds would allow for greater investments at home – healthcare and infrastructure, confronting militarism and racism, quality education, affordable housing, renewable energy and more. Recent polling indicates that a majority of American voters finally agree.
Mark Twain wrote of US interventionism, “Trampling on the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.”
Today enduring with apathy is no longer an option for the donor class. A sincere social compact with working people and marginalized communities can be readily achieved by legitimate Congressional oversight and annual reallocations of Pentagon funds. This new normal will end wasteful spending that only benefits Pentagon contractors and their wealthy shareholders, resulting instead in human security for the rest of us. With the murder of George Floyd and its justifiable outcry, the near and future ramifications of dismissing such a compact now and in a post-pandemic world, are clearer now than ever before - with or without an asteroid.
Comment on Tipping the Scale.
Barbara Lee Unveils Plan to Cut Up to $350 Billion From Pentagon
Jake Johnson,
Common Dreams
Published
June 16, 2020
Jake Johnson,
Common Dreams
Published
June 16, 2020
Demanding that Congress “prioritize our safety and our future, not more war,” Rep. Barbara Lee on Monday unveiled a resolution proposing up to $350 billion in cuts to the Pentagon budget by closing U.S. military bases overseas, ending ongoing conflicts, scrapping weapons programs, and eliminating President Donald Trump’s Space Force.
“Redundant nuclear weapons, off-books spending accounts, and endless wars in the Middle East don’t keep us safe,” the California Democrat said in a statement. “Especially at a time when families across the country are struggling to pay the bills — including more than 16,000 military families on food stamps — we need to take a hard look at every dollar and reinvest in people. It’s time to cut weapons of war and prioritize the well-being of our troops, anti-poverty programs, public health initiatives, and diplomacy.”
Lee’s resolution (pdf) comes as the House of Representatives is scheduled to begin marking up the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2021 next week. The Senate version of the NDAA calls for $740.5 billion in military spending, a budget Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has proposed cutting by 10%.
Read complete article on Truthout.
“Redundant nuclear weapons, off-books spending accounts, and endless wars in the Middle East don’t keep us safe,” the California Democrat said in a statement. “Especially at a time when families across the country are struggling to pay the bills — including more than 16,000 military families on food stamps — we need to take a hard look at every dollar and reinvest in people. It’s time to cut weapons of war and prioritize the well-being of our troops, anti-poverty programs, public health initiatives, and diplomacy.”
Lee’s resolution (pdf) comes as the House of Representatives is scheduled to begin marking up the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2021 next week. The Senate version of the NDAA calls for $740.5 billion in military spending, a budget Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has proposed cutting by 10%.
Read complete article on Truthout.
Deploying Federal Troops in a War at Home Would Make a Bad Situation Worse
June 2, 202
By Zoltan Grossman
June 2, 202
By Zoltan Grossman
As the George Floyd Uprising intensified in Minneapolis on Friday and Saturday, President Trump asked Acting Defense Secretary Mark Esper for options to deploy federal troops to the city. He signaled to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, “We have our military ready, willing and able if they ever want to call our military, and we can have troops on the ground every quickly.” Military Police soldiers from Fort Bragg (North Carolina), Fort Drum (New York), Fort Carson (Colorado), and Fort Riley (Kansas) were ordered to be ready to deploy for crowd and traffic control duties, if the state National Guards could not quell the unrest.
On Monday, Trump put Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Mark Milley “in charge,” lambasted state governors, and said he would soon order active-duty federal troops into U.S. cities to “quickly solve the problem for them.” He also indicated that he would soon be deploying active-duty military forces in the District of Columbia, where he has the direct authority to do so.
Although the National Guard has often been used against civil rebellion, deploying federal military forces within the U.S. is a drastic and historically rare move. I’ve studied the history and geography of U.S. military interventions from the “Indian Wars” to the Middle East, and have documented only a handful of times that Army, Marines, or federalized National Guard forces have been used against U.S. citizens over the past century. For Trump to take such a profound leap would be an admission, as Gov. Walz stated, that a conflict at home is being equated to an “overseas war.” Sending in soldiers trained for combat will only make a bad situation worse, by launching a war at home against domestic dissent.
Finish article in Counterpunch.
On Monday, Trump put Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Mark Milley “in charge,” lambasted state governors, and said he would soon order active-duty federal troops into U.S. cities to “quickly solve the problem for them.” He also indicated that he would soon be deploying active-duty military forces in the District of Columbia, where he has the direct authority to do so.
Although the National Guard has often been used against civil rebellion, deploying federal military forces within the U.S. is a drastic and historically rare move. I’ve studied the history and geography of U.S. military interventions from the “Indian Wars” to the Middle East, and have documented only a handful of times that Army, Marines, or federalized National Guard forces have been used against U.S. citizens over the past century. For Trump to take such a profound leap would be an admission, as Gov. Walz stated, that a conflict at home is being equated to an “overseas war.” Sending in soldiers trained for combat will only make a bad situation worse, by launching a war at home against domestic dissent.
Finish article in Counterpunch.
Memorial Day Remembrance In Isolation:
For George
May 24, 2020
By Gene Marx
For George
May 24, 2020
By Gene Marx
have thought a lot about George lately, one of my ghosts from a past that has been lucky enough to span decades. Luckily, George has never been a triggered recollection, just a benign spectral from my misdirected youth. And at least for now, for this letter to the Wall, just call him George, although his full name and rank are etched in black granite on Panel 26E, Line 48.
I almost never know what prompts my high school version of George to show up. I was listening to some Stones and Creedence last week from a favorite Vietnam era playlist…perfect self-isolation rock. Also Memorial Day is coming up, so who knows? Our lifelines barely crossed, only once as a matter of fact, in the summer of 1965. We were both non-essential workers, stuck in a fast food restaurant, slogging out our last summer at minimum wage before we had to take LBJ’s draft seriously. Neither of us were Fortunate Sons, obviously, both just navigating the grinds of adolescence, topped off by the daily preoccupations and upheavals of a foreshadowed war in Vietnam.
Aside from the shared angst of uncertain futures we had virtually nothing in common. Hometown parents and teachers must have loved George, a reserved, hard-working math-club type, straight A student, from a no-frills, Catholic family. Two years older, my life was his parallel universe in miniature. I was an unbridled college freshman, committed to nothing more than a draft-deferred C+ average, the next weekend, and a military aviation career like my father. Nonetheless, a year at Tech and the suspect worldliness that went with it were street credentials enough for George to look up to me.
After hours of flipping burgers and scraping grease, our idle conversation occasionally touched on our tenuous prospects, like this one time. “Hey, man, thought about where you’re going to college?” A National Honor Society and California Scholarship Federation standout like George should be able to write his own ticket.
“I think I’m going to help my folks out, Gene, and sign up with the Marines.” Scholarship or not, things were tight at home and George thought the extra bucks and the GI Bill would really help. The sky was the limit after that, and he was probably right.
“George, come on, man. You gotta be shitting me!” It was all I could come up when I could take a breath. Tact was not a strong suit of mine at nineteen. “George, do the math, that’s your thing. Nam’ll be history before you can even graduate. Get your ass in Berkeley, or Notre Dame, wherever, for chrissake. Wait it out.”
I think he said he had five or six brothers and sisters, that it was just not that easy. It made me feel like I actually was “a fortunate son…the fortunate one.” The way things turned out who could argue? Decades later I still wish I would have pushed the issue, but given George’s circumstances, would it have made any difference? Probably not. I knew damn well, though, that there was a gunny sergeant out there, somewhere, who would eat him alive, scholarship or no scholarship.
It was two years later when I read of George’s death - “Killed in action from small-arms fire September 10 in Quang Tri, South Vietnam” - in a casualty listicle below the fold of our local daily. By that time, a dispassionate subscriber would also learn that George “served as a rifleman with an unknown unit...his remains were recovered.” Always missing were the details that mattered: the impact on his family, shattered dreams, the untapped potential. Barely nineteen, George had been in Vietnam for less than a month.
Years ago in an alternate reality, my generation was engulfed by another geopolitical pandemic, one tracked not by epidemiologists but militarists, and spread by the lies of American hubris. While the Vietnam War was nothing more than a nightly news distraction at first, over time it mutated into a more dominant strain, finally killing millions. Some, like George, and so many others sharing a common betrayal, are arrayed in Constitution Gardens. Like COVID-19, there was never an end in sight and surviving such random chaos seemed like just as much of a crap shoot then, as it is now…but with much better music.
Article can also be found on ANTIWAR.
I almost never know what prompts my high school version of George to show up. I was listening to some Stones and Creedence last week from a favorite Vietnam era playlist…perfect self-isolation rock. Also Memorial Day is coming up, so who knows? Our lifelines barely crossed, only once as a matter of fact, in the summer of 1965. We were both non-essential workers, stuck in a fast food restaurant, slogging out our last summer at minimum wage before we had to take LBJ’s draft seriously. Neither of us were Fortunate Sons, obviously, both just navigating the grinds of adolescence, topped off by the daily preoccupations and upheavals of a foreshadowed war in Vietnam.
Aside from the shared angst of uncertain futures we had virtually nothing in common. Hometown parents and teachers must have loved George, a reserved, hard-working math-club type, straight A student, from a no-frills, Catholic family. Two years older, my life was his parallel universe in miniature. I was an unbridled college freshman, committed to nothing more than a draft-deferred C+ average, the next weekend, and a military aviation career like my father. Nonetheless, a year at Tech and the suspect worldliness that went with it were street credentials enough for George to look up to me.
After hours of flipping burgers and scraping grease, our idle conversation occasionally touched on our tenuous prospects, like this one time. “Hey, man, thought about where you’re going to college?” A National Honor Society and California Scholarship Federation standout like George should be able to write his own ticket.
“I think I’m going to help my folks out, Gene, and sign up with the Marines.” Scholarship or not, things were tight at home and George thought the extra bucks and the GI Bill would really help. The sky was the limit after that, and he was probably right.
“George, come on, man. You gotta be shitting me!” It was all I could come up when I could take a breath. Tact was not a strong suit of mine at nineteen. “George, do the math, that’s your thing. Nam’ll be history before you can even graduate. Get your ass in Berkeley, or Notre Dame, wherever, for chrissake. Wait it out.”
I think he said he had five or six brothers and sisters, that it was just not that easy. It made me feel like I actually was “a fortunate son…the fortunate one.” The way things turned out who could argue? Decades later I still wish I would have pushed the issue, but given George’s circumstances, would it have made any difference? Probably not. I knew damn well, though, that there was a gunny sergeant out there, somewhere, who would eat him alive, scholarship or no scholarship.
It was two years later when I read of George’s death - “Killed in action from small-arms fire September 10 in Quang Tri, South Vietnam” - in a casualty listicle below the fold of our local daily. By that time, a dispassionate subscriber would also learn that George “served as a rifleman with an unknown unit...his remains were recovered.” Always missing were the details that mattered: the impact on his family, shattered dreams, the untapped potential. Barely nineteen, George had been in Vietnam for less than a month.
Years ago in an alternate reality, my generation was engulfed by another geopolitical pandemic, one tracked not by epidemiologists but militarists, and spread by the lies of American hubris. While the Vietnam War was nothing more than a nightly news distraction at first, over time it mutated into a more dominant strain, finally killing millions. Some, like George, and so many others sharing a common betrayal, are arrayed in Constitution Gardens. Like COVID-19, there was never an end in sight and surviving such random chaos seemed like just as much of a crap shoot then, as it is now…but with much better music.
Article can also be found on ANTIWAR.
VFP-111 Co-Hosts Online Webinar
US Sanctions on Venezuela and Iran in the time of Covid-19
Sunday at 3 – 4:30 PM
US Sanctions on Venezuela and Iran in the time of Covid-19
Sunday at 3 – 4:30 PM
We hope to build a strong northwest movement in Washington State and Oregon to change US policy towards Latin America. Please join us as we focus this discussion on the history of sanctions on Venezuela and Iran and the current crisis that these peoples are suffering under this pandemic caused by covid-19. What can we do to change US foreign policy into a more humane policy? What can we do to strengthen our movement? How can we build an intersectional movement in this period of covid-19? Register on Zoom here.
John Prine’s lyrical one-liners could take your breath away
Steve Kolowich
April 8, 2020 at 7:26 a.m. PDT
John Prine once had a job dusting pews and shoveling snow at an Episcopal church. Walking to work early one Sunday to clear the steps after a snowfall, he heard sirens near the train tracks. An altar boy, heading to serve Mass at a different church, had been lost in a reverie and was struck from behind by a slow-moving commuter train.
Anxious confusion colored the scene. “There was a bunch of mothers that didn’t know where their kids were, and they didn’t know — they hadn’t identified the kid yet,” Prine recalled a few years ago. “And that’s stuck in my mind.”
He eventually wrote that memory into a song called “Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrow).” It’s about maintaining your center of gravity while moving through a world that bombards you with senseless tragedies: “You can gaze out the window, get mad and get madder, throw your hands in the air and say what does it matter, but it don’t do no good to get angry — so help me, I know.”
Those words stick in our minds today as we gaze out at the wreckage of the coronavirus pandemic: thousands dead, thousands more hospitalized. An economy in the icehouse. Millions huddled in debt and in doubt. The train crept up while we were in a daydream, and now a new victim has been identified: John Prine died on Tuesday of complications from covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. He was 73.
Before he was an American songwriting legend, Prine was a mailman with a hobby. He gigged around Chicago and one night, at a saloon in Old Town, he managed to impress Kris Kristofferson. Later, when Prine was in New York, Kristofferson invited him to play to a star-making crowd at a Greenwich Village club. Prine sang three songs, including “Sam Stone,” a song about a heroin-addicted Vietnam War veteran that has maybe the most brutal couplet in the American songbook: “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes; Jesus Christ died for nothin’, I suppose.”
Prine mastered the art of shrinking tragedy and comedy down to where he could balance both on his tongue at the same time. His most iconic songs were bar-napkin sketches of uncanny depth, featuring at least one casually brilliant phrase that would jump out at you from the blind corner of a rhyme.
“Father, forgive us for what we must do; you forgive us, we’ll forgive you.”
“My head shouted down to my heart, ‘You’d better look out below!’ ”
“Ain’t it funny how an old broken bottle looks just like a diamond ring.”
Ain’t it funny. It’s less a question than a riddle that runs down the spine of human experience, and through Prine’s body of work. He wrote silly lines into sad songs and vice versa. “The airlines lost the elephant’s trunk,” he laments on “Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone,” a bleak and bizarre song about the child actor from “The Elephant Boy” being sent on a publicity tour to the Midwest in winter. Does Prine take the opportunity to rhyme “child actor” with “wind chill factor”? You bet. But the smirk in his voice is imperceptible.
He didn’t shrink from darkness but seemed at home in the light. “Life, to me, in general, is humorous,” he told Peter Cooper in a 2014 interview at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. “The world is humorous.”
Death, too — the idea of it, anyway. On “Please Don’t Bury Me,” Prine imagines arriving in heaven unexpectedly. A receiving party (angels, presumably) informs him of what happened: He slipped on the kitchen floor and hit his head. Just like that. The rest of the song is an ode to organ donation via wordplay: He bequeaths his knees to the needy, his feet to the footloose, his ears to the deaf — that is, “if they don’t mind the size.”
All the funnier: a death wish. On “That’s the Way the World Goes ’Round,” the radiator fails while Prine is having a bath; freezing and in despair, he hopes for death to deliver him from the tub where he sits, “naked as the eyes of a clown.” Just as suddenly, sunlight breaks through the window and corrects the temperature — oops, cancel that death! And cue the chorus: “That’s the way that the world goes ’round: you’re up one day, the next you’re down, it’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown.”
And now? The coronavirus has collapsed the distance between panic and actual danger: Covid-19 might amount to a half an inch of water for some, but if it’s in your lungs then you might really drown. The world has stopped on its axis, and we’re left to gaze out the window and wonder how Prine would have spun it.
Maybe he would be drawn to the light, if only for balance. “If I can make myself laugh about something that I should be crying about, that’s pretty good,” Prine told NPR two years ago. The hospitals are overflowing with stories as maddening as the altar boy’s train-track trauma, as numbing Sam Stone’s lonely overdose. Elsewhere, the social distancing protocols — God bless their lifesaving, curve-flattening effects — have produced a positively absurd state of affairs. We’re dodging each other like lepers on a sunny spring day, prospecting for toilet paper in the grocery aisles, washing our hands until they become wounds unto themselves. We’re tormented by facial itches we dare not scratch, driven insane by constant proximity to the loved ones we fear to lose. Ain’t it funny.
Felled by the bat flu, that’s rich. Prine had beaten cancer twice. Once in the late ’90s, although it cost him a chunk of his neck and some nerves in his tongue; then again nearly two decades later when it showed up in a lung. His enunciations lost some detail and his vision of the afterlife gained some. On “When I Get to Heaven,” from his 2018 album, “The Tree of Forgiveness,” he laid out a whole plan: He’d wear out God with gratitude, pour a vodka and ginger ale, smoke a gigantic cigarette, kiss a girl on a carnival ride, start a band, spend time with family. Funny, the afterlife seemed to resemble the one he’d enjoyed here on Earth. Maybe that’s the idea.
He departed a world that, like Prine with his cigs, has temporarily given up certain pleasures for health reasons. The clubs are quiet. The pews are gathering dust. We wait for the morning when we can rise with our shovels and start digging out. For now, we cultivate our memories.
Here’s one: In 2017, Prine played DAR Constitution Hall, in Washington, and it was hard not to wonder about how much life he had left. Though a warm presence onstage, he appeared to have become his own statue — body calcified by age, voice creaky, chin drooping to his chest. Then, as the band was jamming on its last song before the encore, the old man slipped off his guitar, placed it on the stage and started to dance. He was light on his feet, wiggling his hips and flirtatiously circling his instrument. Caught by surprise, the audience whooped and cheered him on. Prine sashayed out of view. The joke was on us.
Steve Kolowich
April 8, 2020 at 7:26 a.m. PDT
John Prine once had a job dusting pews and shoveling snow at an Episcopal church. Walking to work early one Sunday to clear the steps after a snowfall, he heard sirens near the train tracks. An altar boy, heading to serve Mass at a different church, had been lost in a reverie and was struck from behind by a slow-moving commuter train.
Anxious confusion colored the scene. “There was a bunch of mothers that didn’t know where their kids were, and they didn’t know — they hadn’t identified the kid yet,” Prine recalled a few years ago. “And that’s stuck in my mind.”
He eventually wrote that memory into a song called “Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrow).” It’s about maintaining your center of gravity while moving through a world that bombards you with senseless tragedies: “You can gaze out the window, get mad and get madder, throw your hands in the air and say what does it matter, but it don’t do no good to get angry — so help me, I know.”
Those words stick in our minds today as we gaze out at the wreckage of the coronavirus pandemic: thousands dead, thousands more hospitalized. An economy in the icehouse. Millions huddled in debt and in doubt. The train crept up while we were in a daydream, and now a new victim has been identified: John Prine died on Tuesday of complications from covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. He was 73.
Before he was an American songwriting legend, Prine was a mailman with a hobby. He gigged around Chicago and one night, at a saloon in Old Town, he managed to impress Kris Kristofferson. Later, when Prine was in New York, Kristofferson invited him to play to a star-making crowd at a Greenwich Village club. Prine sang three songs, including “Sam Stone,” a song about a heroin-addicted Vietnam War veteran that has maybe the most brutal couplet in the American songbook: “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes; Jesus Christ died for nothin’, I suppose.”
Prine mastered the art of shrinking tragedy and comedy down to where he could balance both on his tongue at the same time. His most iconic songs were bar-napkin sketches of uncanny depth, featuring at least one casually brilliant phrase that would jump out at you from the blind corner of a rhyme.
“Father, forgive us for what we must do; you forgive us, we’ll forgive you.”
“My head shouted down to my heart, ‘You’d better look out below!’ ”
“Ain’t it funny how an old broken bottle looks just like a diamond ring.”
Ain’t it funny. It’s less a question than a riddle that runs down the spine of human experience, and through Prine’s body of work. He wrote silly lines into sad songs and vice versa. “The airlines lost the elephant’s trunk,” he laments on “Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone,” a bleak and bizarre song about the child actor from “The Elephant Boy” being sent on a publicity tour to the Midwest in winter. Does Prine take the opportunity to rhyme “child actor” with “wind chill factor”? You bet. But the smirk in his voice is imperceptible.
He didn’t shrink from darkness but seemed at home in the light. “Life, to me, in general, is humorous,” he told Peter Cooper in a 2014 interview at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. “The world is humorous.”
Death, too — the idea of it, anyway. On “Please Don’t Bury Me,” Prine imagines arriving in heaven unexpectedly. A receiving party (angels, presumably) informs him of what happened: He slipped on the kitchen floor and hit his head. Just like that. The rest of the song is an ode to organ donation via wordplay: He bequeaths his knees to the needy, his feet to the footloose, his ears to the deaf — that is, “if they don’t mind the size.”
All the funnier: a death wish. On “That’s the Way the World Goes ’Round,” the radiator fails while Prine is having a bath; freezing and in despair, he hopes for death to deliver him from the tub where he sits, “naked as the eyes of a clown.” Just as suddenly, sunlight breaks through the window and corrects the temperature — oops, cancel that death! And cue the chorus: “That’s the way that the world goes ’round: you’re up one day, the next you’re down, it’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown.”
And now? The coronavirus has collapsed the distance between panic and actual danger: Covid-19 might amount to a half an inch of water for some, but if it’s in your lungs then you might really drown. The world has stopped on its axis, and we’re left to gaze out the window and wonder how Prine would have spun it.
Maybe he would be drawn to the light, if only for balance. “If I can make myself laugh about something that I should be crying about, that’s pretty good,” Prine told NPR two years ago. The hospitals are overflowing with stories as maddening as the altar boy’s train-track trauma, as numbing Sam Stone’s lonely overdose. Elsewhere, the social distancing protocols — God bless their lifesaving, curve-flattening effects — have produced a positively absurd state of affairs. We’re dodging each other like lepers on a sunny spring day, prospecting for toilet paper in the grocery aisles, washing our hands until they become wounds unto themselves. We’re tormented by facial itches we dare not scratch, driven insane by constant proximity to the loved ones we fear to lose. Ain’t it funny.
Felled by the bat flu, that’s rich. Prine had beaten cancer twice. Once in the late ’90s, although it cost him a chunk of his neck and some nerves in his tongue; then again nearly two decades later when it showed up in a lung. His enunciations lost some detail and his vision of the afterlife gained some. On “When I Get to Heaven,” from his 2018 album, “The Tree of Forgiveness,” he laid out a whole plan: He’d wear out God with gratitude, pour a vodka and ginger ale, smoke a gigantic cigarette, kiss a girl on a carnival ride, start a band, spend time with family. Funny, the afterlife seemed to resemble the one he’d enjoyed here on Earth. Maybe that’s the idea.
He departed a world that, like Prine with his cigs, has temporarily given up certain pleasures for health reasons. The clubs are quiet. The pews are gathering dust. We wait for the morning when we can rise with our shovels and start digging out. For now, we cultivate our memories.
Here’s one: In 2017, Prine played DAR Constitution Hall, in Washington, and it was hard not to wonder about how much life he had left. Though a warm presence onstage, he appeared to have become his own statue — body calcified by age, voice creaky, chin drooping to his chest. Then, as the band was jamming on its last song before the encore, the old man slipped off his guitar, placed it on the stage and started to dance. He was light on his feet, wiggling his hips and flirtatiously circling his instrument. Caught by surprise, the audience whooped and cheered him on. Prine sashayed out of view. The joke was on us.
'Collateral Murder’
10 Years Later: Who Among You Forgets?
It was the hope of traumatized veterans that we would learn from the Wikileaks video, but sadly the lessons seem lost.
10 Years Later: Who Among You Forgets?
It was the hope of traumatized veterans that we would learn from the Wikileaks video, but sadly the lessons seem lost.
April 6, 2020|
6:04 pm
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
Ten years ago this week—April 5, 2010 in fact—Wikileaks published a 2007 video that depicts three consecutive strikes by two American Apache helicopters tearing into a group of people on the ground in Baghdad, Iraq. When the smoke cleared there were at least 12 people dead, including two Reuters journalists. Others were wounded, including two children who had been riding in a minivan that had pulled up to assist the victims. It is probably one of the eeriest visual depictions of U.S. empire in the 21st Century (aside from Lynndie England holding that leash): an imperious slaying from a few hundred feet above. It’s a minimalist presentation—the crackle of the communications and gunship pilots’ macabre banter, the view of the scattered individuals through the cockpit camera, the spray of fire. The remains.
Read complete article on theamericanconservative.com.
6:04 pm
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
Ten years ago this week—April 5, 2010 in fact—Wikileaks published a 2007 video that depicts three consecutive strikes by two American Apache helicopters tearing into a group of people on the ground in Baghdad, Iraq. When the smoke cleared there were at least 12 people dead, including two Reuters journalists. Others were wounded, including two children who had been riding in a minivan that had pulled up to assist the victims. It is probably one of the eeriest visual depictions of U.S. empire in the 21st Century (aside from Lynndie England holding that leash): an imperious slaying from a few hundred feet above. It’s a minimalist presentation—the crackle of the communications and gunship pilots’ macabre banter, the view of the scattered individuals through the cockpit camera, the spray of fire. The remains.
Read complete article on theamericanconservative.com.
Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
A Time to Break Silence, also referred as the Riverside Church speech, is an anti–Vietnam War and pro–social justice speech delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before he was assassinated. The major speech at Riverside Church in New York City, followed several interviews and several other public speeches in which King came out against the Vietnam War and the policies that created it. Some, like civil rights leader Ralph Bunche, the NAACP, and the editorial page writers of The Washington Post and The New York Times called the Riverside Church speech a mistake on King's part. The New York Times editorial suggested that conflating the civil rights movement with the anti-war movement was an oversimplification that did justice to neither, stating that "linking these hard, complex problems will lead not to solutions but to deeper confusion." Others, including James Bevel, King's partner and strategist in the Civil Rights Movement, called it King's most important speech. It was written by activist and historian Vincent Harding.
US veterans confront Joe Biden over his record of supporting war
|
Joe Biden owns Iraq, and he continues to shamelessly use his son Beau to cover his complicity. This confrontation between Biden and an angry anti-war vet should be the scene everyone remembers from Super Tuesday. Biden should be remembered for his role in making sure the Iraq war and occupation happened. He did not just vote for it, he led the effort as Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. If he had opposed it, it would not have happened, instead, he pushed to make the war happen. |
THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS
A Secret History of the War
In a cache of previously unpublished interviews and memos, key insiders reveal what went wrong during the longest armed conflict in U.S. history.
By Craig Whitlock, Leslie Shapiro and Armand Emamdjomeh Dec. 9, 2019
A Secret History of the War
In a cache of previously unpublished interviews and memos, key insiders reveal what went wrong during the longest armed conflict in U.S. history.
By Craig Whitlock, Leslie Shapiro and Armand Emamdjomeh Dec. 9, 2019
For 18 years, America has been at war in Afghanistan. As part of a government project to understand what went wrong, a federal agency interviewed more than 400 people who had a direct role in the conflict. In those interviews, generals, ambassadors, diplomats and other insiders offered firsthand accounts of the mistakes that have prolonged the war.
The full, unsparing remarks and the identities of many of those who made them have never been made public — until now. After a three-year legal battle, The Washington Post won release of more than 2,000 pages of “Lessons Learned” interviews conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Those interviews reveal there was no consensus on the war’s objectives, let alone how to end the conflict.
To augment the previously undisclosed interviews, The Post also obtained hundreds of confidential memos by former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld from the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research institute. Known as “snowflakes,” the memos are brief instructions or comments that the Pentagon leader dictated to his underlings as the war unfolded.
Together, the interviews and the Rumsfeld memos reveal a secret, unvarnished history of the conflict and offer new insights into how three presidential administrations have failed for nearly two decades to deliver on their promises to end the war.
Read complete article on washingtonpost.com.
The full, unsparing remarks and the identities of many of those who made them have never been made public — until now. After a three-year legal battle, The Washington Post won release of more than 2,000 pages of “Lessons Learned” interviews conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Those interviews reveal there was no consensus on the war’s objectives, let alone how to end the conflict.
To augment the previously undisclosed interviews, The Post also obtained hundreds of confidential memos by former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld from the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research institute. Known as “snowflakes,” the memos are brief instructions or comments that the Pentagon leader dictated to his underlings as the war unfolded.
Together, the interviews and the Rumsfeld memos reveal a secret, unvarnished history of the conflict and offer new insights into how three presidential administrations have failed for nearly two decades to deliver on their promises to end the war.
Read complete article on washingtonpost.com.
By
Andrea Mazzarino, TomDispatch
Published
November 25, 2019
There is some incongruity between my role as an editor of a book about the costs of America’s wars and my identity as a military spouse. I’m deeply disturbed at the scale of human suffering caused by those conflicts and yet I’ve unintentionally contributed to the war effort through the life I’ve chosen.
I am the co-editor with Catherine Lutz of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a new volume of social science research from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. At the same time, I am a practicing therapist-in-training and I specialize in working with veterans who have post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Through the scholarly research I review and the veteran clients I have seen, I am committed professionally to bearing witness to the human costs of America’s forever wars, and to alleviating suffering where I can.
I am also married to a submarine officer in the Navy. We are so fortunate in so many ways. We have two beautiful children, pets, loving friends, and extended family. We both have graduate degrees. While our finances take hits from relocations without adequate job and childcare support, we don’t face the continuous fears that many military families experience when a loved one is sent into a war zone. In many respects, my family’s life does not look like that of most American military families profiled in my book.
And yet I have misgivings.
During one of my husband’s deployments, I was relieved to hear our 2-year-old son talk about war in a way that, despite his innocence, was more nuanced than the usual tales of “sacrifice,” “honor,” and “fighting terror” that one hears routinely in the mainstream media and in local command newsletters.
It was spring 2017 and we had just seen Kim Jong-un displaying one of North Korea’s new missiles on the TV news. Our son asked me what a war is. I gave my best explanation and his reply, undoubtedly garnered from preschool discussions about conflict resolution, was: “They don’t use words? They hit?”
Sort of, I told him. I did my best to explain what a weapon was, a description I suspect that many of my liberal mom friends would balk at. In our military community, however, such imagery is all around us. Real missiles and replicas are, for instance, often used as decorations lining the streets of naval bases or as lampposts or even wall hangings in military family households.
My son did his best to take it in. Later, at the waterfront near our home, he tossed a piece of his donut into the ocean and told me it was for his father who, he insisted, was under the water “playing hide-and-seek.” Of course, he doesn’t connect the relentless training and deployments characteristic of our military life with the fighting of war itself, though our family feels the strain and implicit sense of danger in our daily lives.
In writing my recent book on the costs of this country’s post-9/11 wars, I learned about Afghan war widows who use heroin to make it morally possible to live amid grief and poverty after seeing their spouses and children killed; about NGO workers who leave their own families, facing threats of kidnapping and death, to aid refugees in the Pakistani-Afghan borderlands. And I read about the experiences of the million war-wounded, ill, or traumatized American combat veterans, the sorts of patients my therapy will someday (I hope) help, who have sought health care and social support and so often come up desperately short.
As I do this, there’s always a low buzz of guilt somewhere in my gut, even about my own voluntary, unpaid work in support of other military spouses, even after I’ve relinquished travel assignments in my work as an activist that would have compromised my husband’s security clearance, even as I abide by harsh security restrictions in my personal life. I worry, in other words, about aiding the very military that, 18 years after the 9/11 attacks, still continues to rack up war’s costs without an end in sight.
The Costs of War at Home
I see firsthand trends affecting all military communities in the United States. Deployments during these wars have come more frequently and often last longer than in past American wars. The specter of death by suicide hangs over all our lives, because everyone in such communities knows someone who has died that way or has threatened to do so.
In 2012, for the first time in our history, American service members began to die by suicide at higher rates than civilians. Today, they are more likely to take their own lives than to perish in combat. As anthropologist Kenneth MacLeish points out, military suicides are most prevalent among those who have deployed to our war zones just once or not at all, or who left the military involuntarily with a “bad paper discharge” or other than honorable discharges of some kind. Moreover, mental illness is rampant among active-duty military service members. According to the nonprofit National Alliance on Mental Illness, in 2014 roughly one in four active-duty service members showed signs of mental illness, including mood and trauma disorders such as PTSD, depression, and anxiety (though this figure is conservative, given that the study did not include the prevalence of traumatic brain injuries among combat vets. Many soldiers seek relief from the stresses of training and combat through alcohol and other drugs and, in our military community, it’s common knowledge that seeking professional support for such problems can place you at risk of social stigma.
Read complete article on TomDISPATCH.
Andrea Mazzarino, TomDispatch
Published
November 25, 2019
There is some incongruity between my role as an editor of a book about the costs of America’s wars and my identity as a military spouse. I’m deeply disturbed at the scale of human suffering caused by those conflicts and yet I’ve unintentionally contributed to the war effort through the life I’ve chosen.
I am the co-editor with Catherine Lutz of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a new volume of social science research from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. At the same time, I am a practicing therapist-in-training and I specialize in working with veterans who have post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Through the scholarly research I review and the veteran clients I have seen, I am committed professionally to bearing witness to the human costs of America’s forever wars, and to alleviating suffering where I can.
I am also married to a submarine officer in the Navy. We are so fortunate in so many ways. We have two beautiful children, pets, loving friends, and extended family. We both have graduate degrees. While our finances take hits from relocations without adequate job and childcare support, we don’t face the continuous fears that many military families experience when a loved one is sent into a war zone. In many respects, my family’s life does not look like that of most American military families profiled in my book.
And yet I have misgivings.
During one of my husband’s deployments, I was relieved to hear our 2-year-old son talk about war in a way that, despite his innocence, was more nuanced than the usual tales of “sacrifice,” “honor,” and “fighting terror” that one hears routinely in the mainstream media and in local command newsletters.
It was spring 2017 and we had just seen Kim Jong-un displaying one of North Korea’s new missiles on the TV news. Our son asked me what a war is. I gave my best explanation and his reply, undoubtedly garnered from preschool discussions about conflict resolution, was: “They don’t use words? They hit?”
Sort of, I told him. I did my best to explain what a weapon was, a description I suspect that many of my liberal mom friends would balk at. In our military community, however, such imagery is all around us. Real missiles and replicas are, for instance, often used as decorations lining the streets of naval bases or as lampposts or even wall hangings in military family households.
My son did his best to take it in. Later, at the waterfront near our home, he tossed a piece of his donut into the ocean and told me it was for his father who, he insisted, was under the water “playing hide-and-seek.” Of course, he doesn’t connect the relentless training and deployments characteristic of our military life with the fighting of war itself, though our family feels the strain and implicit sense of danger in our daily lives.
In writing my recent book on the costs of this country’s post-9/11 wars, I learned about Afghan war widows who use heroin to make it morally possible to live amid grief and poverty after seeing their spouses and children killed; about NGO workers who leave their own families, facing threats of kidnapping and death, to aid refugees in the Pakistani-Afghan borderlands. And I read about the experiences of the million war-wounded, ill, or traumatized American combat veterans, the sorts of patients my therapy will someday (I hope) help, who have sought health care and social support and so often come up desperately short.
As I do this, there’s always a low buzz of guilt somewhere in my gut, even about my own voluntary, unpaid work in support of other military spouses, even after I’ve relinquished travel assignments in my work as an activist that would have compromised my husband’s security clearance, even as I abide by harsh security restrictions in my personal life. I worry, in other words, about aiding the very military that, 18 years after the 9/11 attacks, still continues to rack up war’s costs without an end in sight.
The Costs of War at Home
I see firsthand trends affecting all military communities in the United States. Deployments during these wars have come more frequently and often last longer than in past American wars. The specter of death by suicide hangs over all our lives, because everyone in such communities knows someone who has died that way or has threatened to do so.
In 2012, for the first time in our history, American service members began to die by suicide at higher rates than civilians. Today, they are more likely to take their own lives than to perish in combat. As anthropologist Kenneth MacLeish points out, military suicides are most prevalent among those who have deployed to our war zones just once or not at all, or who left the military involuntarily with a “bad paper discharge” or other than honorable discharges of some kind. Moreover, mental illness is rampant among active-duty military service members. According to the nonprofit National Alliance on Mental Illness, in 2014 roughly one in four active-duty service members showed signs of mental illness, including mood and trauma disorders such as PTSD, depression, and anxiety (though this figure is conservative, given that the study did not include the prevalence of traumatic brain injuries among combat vets. Many soldiers seek relief from the stresses of training and combat through alcohol and other drugs and, in our military community, it’s common knowledge that seeking professional support for such problems can place you at risk of social stigma.
Read complete article on TomDISPATCH.
Vietnam v. Afghanistan - Reflections on Matched Mayhem and Ceaseless War
By Gene Marx
November 15, 2019
By Gene Marx
November 15, 2019
Between the fading bugles of Veterans Day weekend and the crass rants of Black Friday, my day-long musings invariably return to Vietnam, but this year there was a new wrinkle to my abstractions. You see, my granddaughter, Kaya, turns 14 next week and she has never lived in a time when her country wasn’t waging an unrelenting interventionist war somewhere. Not for one single moment, and I couldn’t let it go.
So, what does that have to do with Vietnam? Well, as I grew up and unavoidably served in combat, I never thought “my war” was ever going to end. Never. It was always the mainspring of my very existence, and that of my contemporaries. It was also a monster with an insatiable appetite that devoured friends, relationships, plans and dreams, and no one could – or would – kill it, not a diplomat, not an elected Congress or President, no one.
Today we know our bloody intervention in Indochina was also very much like its evil twin, the disastrous war in Afghanistan - an illegal occupation to prop up a corrupt government, fueled on hubris, with no discernible end state. Still, US forces avoided calling the war in Vietnam unwinnable 50 years ago, just as Pentagon talking points mandate for its ongoing Afghanistan mess. Such military myopia is incessant, but when I first set foot in Da Nang in 1971, it was clear to me the best and the brightest had failed. The American military by any standards had lost in ignominy, thousands of US lives before I had even arrived, with still no end in sight.
Moreover, as historian and retired Army colonel Andrew Bacevich emphasized in a recent op-ed, “With the sole exception of Vietnam, the ongoing Afghanistan war represents the greatest failure in U.S. military history. Today, all but a few diehards understand that Vietnam was a debacle of epic proportions. With Afghanistan, it’s different: In both political and military circles, the urge to dodge the truth remains strong.”
Not surprisingly, dodging the truth is still paramount for the perpetrators. Selling even a hopelessly failed Afghan war continues to fuel exponentially the war machine’s bottom line, House and Senate campaign coffers and burgeoning defense budgets. Yet, after eighteen years, untold casualties, and $1 trillion in the short term – another trillion over the next 40 years for post 9/11 veterans’ care - it would seem the “master” planners and unbloodied patriots on Capitol Hill owe the rest of us a long-overdue explanation, if not an apology. But don't hold your breath. Neither outreach is expected, while the repercussions of unrestrained hegemony continue to plunder future generations.
Just recently, as if a reverberation from my Vietnam reveries, social justice and environmental activist Jean-Louis Bourgeois noted, “For Americans to withdraw from Afghanistan is not a reason for shame. This is not about America; in fact, this is where American exceptionalism gets us into trouble. The shame is to deny the reality of the situation.”
Someday, when the existential consequences of perpetual war are well beyond catastrophic, culpable elders will be tasked with explaining to my granddaughter Kaya and her contemporaries why once again, a half century after Vietnam, those that could – elected Chief Executives, Congress and all the Presidents’ men and women, as well as a shamelessly complicit corporate media - did nothing to kill their monster.
So, what does that have to do with Vietnam? Well, as I grew up and unavoidably served in combat, I never thought “my war” was ever going to end. Never. It was always the mainspring of my very existence, and that of my contemporaries. It was also a monster with an insatiable appetite that devoured friends, relationships, plans and dreams, and no one could – or would – kill it, not a diplomat, not an elected Congress or President, no one.
Today we know our bloody intervention in Indochina was also very much like its evil twin, the disastrous war in Afghanistan - an illegal occupation to prop up a corrupt government, fueled on hubris, with no discernible end state. Still, US forces avoided calling the war in Vietnam unwinnable 50 years ago, just as Pentagon talking points mandate for its ongoing Afghanistan mess. Such military myopia is incessant, but when I first set foot in Da Nang in 1971, it was clear to me the best and the brightest had failed. The American military by any standards had lost in ignominy, thousands of US lives before I had even arrived, with still no end in sight.
Moreover, as historian and retired Army colonel Andrew Bacevich emphasized in a recent op-ed, “With the sole exception of Vietnam, the ongoing Afghanistan war represents the greatest failure in U.S. military history. Today, all but a few diehards understand that Vietnam was a debacle of epic proportions. With Afghanistan, it’s different: In both political and military circles, the urge to dodge the truth remains strong.”
Not surprisingly, dodging the truth is still paramount for the perpetrators. Selling even a hopelessly failed Afghan war continues to fuel exponentially the war machine’s bottom line, House and Senate campaign coffers and burgeoning defense budgets. Yet, after eighteen years, untold casualties, and $1 trillion in the short term – another trillion over the next 40 years for post 9/11 veterans’ care - it would seem the “master” planners and unbloodied patriots on Capitol Hill owe the rest of us a long-overdue explanation, if not an apology. But don't hold your breath. Neither outreach is expected, while the repercussions of unrestrained hegemony continue to plunder future generations.
Just recently, as if a reverberation from my Vietnam reveries, social justice and environmental activist Jean-Louis Bourgeois noted, “For Americans to withdraw from Afghanistan is not a reason for shame. This is not about America; in fact, this is where American exceptionalism gets us into trouble. The shame is to deny the reality of the situation.”
Someday, when the existential consequences of perpetual war are well beyond catastrophic, culpable elders will be tasked with explaining to my granddaughter Kaya and her contemporaries why once again, a half century after Vietnam, those that could – elected Chief Executives, Congress and all the Presidents’ men and women, as well as a shamelessly complicit corporate media - did nothing to kill their monster.
Listen with VFP-111 as Assumption Church bells ring to celebrate end of World War I and Reclaim Armistice Day
My birthday is tomorrow (November 12), which makes Veteran’s Day (November 11) “special” to me, because when I was a young lad, caught up in probative masculinity and Cold War propaganda, I joined the Army and volunteered for the Infantry in Vietnam. This set me on a course, circuitous at times, to becoming a lifer , a career military man, who would go to seven other conflict areas between January 1970 and February 1, 1996, when I was officially retired out of 3rd Special Forces Group. When I enlisted, and every time I re-enlisted afterward, I took this oath to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
It’s a pro forma exercise, or the entire military would have to go on strike — because in Vietnam, Guatemala, Grenada, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, Somalia, and Haiti . . . others can chime in from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria . . . I never met a single enemy of the Constitution of the United States. In every single instance, I had one small role or another in prosecuting wars against poor people.
November 11th was originally a celebration of the end of war — WWI specifically — and it was celebrated by pacifists for that very reason. I wish we could do that now, and maybe use the day to reflect on the curse, the malignancy, the abomination of war and remember its victims . . . most of whom are not combatants at all. Like an international day of contrition.
Originally called All Veterans Day, to indicate veterans of more than one war and one nation, and it explicitly honored veterans, living and dead . . . as human beings, among many, who had perished or survived in a horrific folly. But after WWII, the US changed the name to Veterans Day, and turned it into a celebration of jingo militarism.
I wonder if we’ll ever have a Civilian Casualties Day, honoring those who were killed, maimed, driven mad, or displaced by war for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, being the wrong nationality, or just being handy when some pack of grunts decides they want to engage in thrill-kills, rape, and arson.
But this is not all veterans, you may say, and I agree. It happens far more often than you think, unless you’re one of us whose seen it, even experienced it . . . the fact that war morally degrades us. Why, then, “veterans”?
Why are veterans — all veterans, regardless of what they did in the military, or what they didn’t do — celebrated based on the single criterion of having a DD-214? “Veterans” is a slippery trope, and when we look more closely at it and how it is used, we begin to apprehend the hypocrisy of Veterans Day and the rot at the center of this thing called the United States of America.
Is it because of risk, or in the sacramental language of American nationalism, “sacrifice” and “service”? Nope.
Military members, on average, are killed in job-related activity at an annual rate of 41 per 100,000 since 1980. Loggers are killed at a rate of 136/100,000/yr. Commercial fisherfolk are killed at a rate of 86/100k/yr. Aircraft pilots and flight engineers are killed at a rate of 55/100,000/yr. Roffers are killed at a rate of 48.6. Why don’t we have Logger’s Day, a Commercial Fishing Day, a Pilot’s Day, or a Roofer’s Day? Is a nation not better served by lumber, fish, and roofs than it is by deploying troops at trememdous expense to destroy the materials, food, and homes of strangers on the other side of the world?
It’s a pro forma exercise, or the entire military would have to go on strike — because in Vietnam, Guatemala, Grenada, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, Somalia, and Haiti . . . others can chime in from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria . . . I never met a single enemy of the Constitution of the United States. In every single instance, I had one small role or another in prosecuting wars against poor people.
November 11th was originally a celebration of the end of war — WWI specifically — and it was celebrated by pacifists for that very reason. I wish we could do that now, and maybe use the day to reflect on the curse, the malignancy, the abomination of war and remember its victims . . . most of whom are not combatants at all. Like an international day of contrition.
Originally called All Veterans Day, to indicate veterans of more than one war and one nation, and it explicitly honored veterans, living and dead . . . as human beings, among many, who had perished or survived in a horrific folly. But after WWII, the US changed the name to Veterans Day, and turned it into a celebration of jingo militarism.
I wonder if we’ll ever have a Civilian Casualties Day, honoring those who were killed, maimed, driven mad, or displaced by war for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, being the wrong nationality, or just being handy when some pack of grunts decides they want to engage in thrill-kills, rape, and arson.
But this is not all veterans, you may say, and I agree. It happens far more often than you think, unless you’re one of us whose seen it, even experienced it . . . the fact that war morally degrades us. Why, then, “veterans”?
Why are veterans — all veterans, regardless of what they did in the military, or what they didn’t do — celebrated based on the single criterion of having a DD-214? “Veterans” is a slippery trope, and when we look more closely at it and how it is used, we begin to apprehend the hypocrisy of Veterans Day and the rot at the center of this thing called the United States of America.
Is it because of risk, or in the sacramental language of American nationalism, “sacrifice” and “service”? Nope.
Military members, on average, are killed in job-related activity at an annual rate of 41 per 100,000 since 1980. Loggers are killed at a rate of 136/100,000/yr. Commercial fisherfolk are killed at a rate of 86/100k/yr. Aircraft pilots and flight engineers are killed at a rate of 55/100,000/yr. Roffers are killed at a rate of 48.6. Why don’t we have Logger’s Day, a Commercial Fishing Day, a Pilot’s Day, or a Roofer’s Day? Is a nation not better served by lumber, fish, and roofs than it is by deploying troops at trememdous expense to destroy the materials, food, and homes of strangers on the other side of the world?
We are not celebrating veterans — a very diverse group with little in common except a DD-214 and the ability to march in formation. We celebrate war and the national masculinity. We celebrate martial nationalism — the truest religion of the United States.
Religion? you ask.
Read complete article on medium.com.
Religion? you ask.
Read complete article on medium.com.
Bellingham’s Veterans For Peace Celebrate Armistice Day 2019
Monday, November 11, 10:30 AM
at the Church of the Assumption, 2116 Cornwall
Of the war that, in retrospect, ended peace, Winston Churchill said, “Both sides, victors and vanquished, were ruined.”
On Monday, November 11 at 10:30 AM Bellingham's Veterans For Peace and supporters of peace will be gathering in tribute to commemorate the anniversary of the end of the First World War, across the street from the Church of the Assumption, 2116 Cornwall Ave.
Over one hundred years ago this month the world celebrated peace as a universal principle. All the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War went silent during the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of that eleventh month. Nations mourning their dead collectively called for an end to the butchery of all wars. Armistice Day was born and designated as “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated." On June 28, 1919 Germany and the Allied powers signed the Treaty of Versailles, declaring an end to “the war to end all wars.”
After World War II, the U.S. Congress decided to rename and designate November 11 as a national holiday, Veterans Day. Sadly, commemorating a forever end to hostilities eventually morphed into glorifying military service and justifying the next war. Armistice Day was flipped from a day for peace into a day for displays of militarism.
Next Sunday thousands of churches at home and abroad, including Bellingham’s Church of the Assumption, will ring their bells 11 times slowly in solemn remembrance at 11 in the morning to mark the end of the war that, in retrospect, ended peace. With the US now waging seemingly endless war, it’s time now, more than ever, for Americans to reclaim Armistice Day.
Join us once more in silent commemoration, with worldwide millions.
VFP-111 and Whatcom Peace & Justice Center to Co-Host Documentary
An Endless War? Getting OUT Of Afghanistan
“For Americans to withdraw from Afghanistan is not a reason for shame. This is not about America, in fact this is where American exceptionalism gets us into trouble. The shame is to deny the reality of the situation.”
VFP Chapter 111 and Whatcom Peace & Justice Center are co-hosting award-winning filmmaker Bob Coen’s latest release An Endless War? Getting OUT of Afghanistan in Bellingham Food Co-Op Community Connections Classroom 103, on Friday, November 15 at 6:00 PM.
The 1 hour-long documentary deconstructs the reasons why the Afghanistan conflict was doomed to fail from its start more than 18 years ago and why it has dragged on for so long. The film features interviews with former commanding officers of the US military, combat veterans, political analysts and American and Afghan peace activists – including FCNL’s Shukria Dellawar, Congressman Walter Jones and IPC Fellow Matthew Hoh. Director Coen and executive producer Jean-Louis Bourgeois also offer solutions on how the United States can exit Afghanistan and not make this an endless war.
The screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmaker and experts featured in the documentary.
Parking is available behind the Community Connections Building.
October 10, 2019
Major Media Bury Groundbreaking Studies of Pentagon's Massive Carbon Bootprint
Joshua Cho
In 2010, Project Censored (10/2/10) found that the US military is responsible for the most egregious and widespread pollution of the planet, yet this information and accompanying documentation goes almost entirely unreported.
Almost a decade later, Project Censored’s observations are still applicable, with two major studies published in June remaining buried by most major media outlets. The first study, Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War, by Neta Crawford for Brown University’s Costs of War Project, confirmed previous findings that the US military is “the single-largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world,” and that the Pentagon is responsible for between “77% and 80% of all US government energy consumption” since 2001, and that from the beginning of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to 2017, the US military emitted approximately 1.2 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent.
The second study, “Hidden Carbon Costs of the ‘Everywhere War’: Logistics, Geopolitical Ecology, and the Carbon Bootprint of the US Military,” published by Oliver Belcher, Benjamin Neimark and Patrick Bigger from Durham and Lancaster universities in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (6/19), found 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.”
Read complete article in fair.org.
Major Media Bury Groundbreaking Studies of Pentagon's Massive Carbon Bootprint
Joshua Cho
In 2010, Project Censored (10/2/10) found that the US military is responsible for the most egregious and widespread pollution of the planet, yet this information and accompanying documentation goes almost entirely unreported.
Almost a decade later, Project Censored’s observations are still applicable, with two major studies published in June remaining buried by most major media outlets. The first study, Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War, by Neta Crawford for Brown University’s Costs of War Project, confirmed previous findings that the US military is “the single-largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world,” and that the Pentagon is responsible for between “77% and 80% of all US government energy consumption” since 2001, and that from the beginning of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to 2017, the US military emitted approximately 1.2 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent.
The second study, “Hidden Carbon Costs of the ‘Everywhere War’: Logistics, Geopolitical Ecology, and the Carbon Bootprint of the US Military,” published by Oliver Belcher, Benjamin Neimark and Patrick Bigger from Durham and Lancaster universities in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (6/19), found 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.”
Read complete article in fair.org.
Susan Schnall Has Been Resisting War Since Dropping Antiwar Leaflets From A Plane
By Courage to Resist
August 25, 2019
By Courage to Resist
August 25, 2019
While on active duty, Lt. Susan Schnall dropped antiwar leaflets over five military installations and an aircraft carrier from a small plane, held a press conference, and lead a mass peace march while in uniform. She’s been resisting war ever since.
“It became more and more obvious to me as I took care of these guys and physically got them better that I couldn’t heal them psychologically, and I certainly couldn’t heal their souls. And I thought, “I’ve become a part of the military. I need to do something about this, and we need to end this war.”
“It became more and more obvious to me as I took care of these guys and physically got them better that I couldn’t heal them psychologically, and I certainly couldn’t heal their souls. And I thought, “I’ve become a part of the military. I need to do something about this, and we need to end this war.”
TRANSCRIPT
Susan Schnall: It became more and more obvious to me as I took care of these guys and physically got them better that I couldn’t heal them psychologically, and I certainly couldn’t heal their souls. And I thought, “I’ve become a part of the military. I need to do something about this, and we need to end this war.”
Matthew Breems: This is the Courage To Resist Podcast. My name is Matthew Breems. This Courage to Resist Podcast is produced in collaboration with the Vietnam Full Disclosure Effort of Veterans For Peace. Susan Schnall is the guest today. Susan served in the Navy as a nurse throughout the Vietnam conflict. As she cared for GIs returning from Vietnam, she quickly became an antiwar activist. Susan began coordinating peace rallies and volunteering at GI coffeehouses. Her activism continues today through her involvement with Veterans for Peace and working towards legislation for individuals exposed to Agent Orange.
Susan, I’m excited to be talking with you this evening and to hear your story and your involvement in the antiwar movement. Why don’t you take us back? How did you come to a place where resisting the war, specifically the Vietnam War, became such a life obsession for you?
Susan Schnall: Let me start by talking about war, because it is an entity that I’ve lived with my whole life. My dad was in the Marine Corps in the Second World War and was killed on the island of Guam, 1944. I went into the Navy as a nurse and felt that I would be taking care of those who were harmed and hurt in a war in Southeast Asia. I was never someone who was for the war, because I went into nursing to heal and to take care of those who were injured.
I joined in 1965 when I was going to Stanford Nursing School. I graduated in 1967 and went to, I guess it was Officers’ Indoctrination School. They had us nurses, and they wanted to teach us how to be members of the military. Then I was sent to Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California, where I took care of the guys who were coming back from Vietnam, from Southeast Asia. And I heard their stories, their pain. I heard their stories of how they viewed the Vietnamese and heard how they were trained to be killers and trained to hate people who looked different from the way that they did.
I don’t know why I was so naïve, but I didn’t quite expect that, and I was very much a peace activist before I went into the Navy. I had taken part in antiwar demonstrations. But it seems that that was not important to the Navy, and they heard about my history and still sent me on to Oak Knoll Naval Hospital. It was startling to me, and it was an education to me to hear stories first hand from men who had been to war. They were young; they were 18, 20, 21 years old. They told me their stories, that they had participated in war, how some of them had learned to hate “the enemy.”
And there were other stories I heard from young guys who were in the Navy, who worked with the civilian population, who didn’t have that fear and hatred. But I also heard very much their physical and psychological pain. We had one unit that was called the Amputee Unit, and I will never forget it. It was an open ward that had about 30, 35 young men on it. They all had amputations, whether upper extremity or legs, and what was left, their stumps were hanging by butcher-like contraptions that held their limbs aloft. They were in pain, they were terribly infected, and I would hear their cries from one end of the unit to the next, when they would cry out for pain medication.
Read complete interview and listen to podcast on Vietnam Full Disclosure.
Susan Schnall: It became more and more obvious to me as I took care of these guys and physically got them better that I couldn’t heal them psychologically, and I certainly couldn’t heal their souls. And I thought, “I’ve become a part of the military. I need to do something about this, and we need to end this war.”
Matthew Breems: This is the Courage To Resist Podcast. My name is Matthew Breems. This Courage to Resist Podcast is produced in collaboration with the Vietnam Full Disclosure Effort of Veterans For Peace. Susan Schnall is the guest today. Susan served in the Navy as a nurse throughout the Vietnam conflict. As she cared for GIs returning from Vietnam, she quickly became an antiwar activist. Susan began coordinating peace rallies and volunteering at GI coffeehouses. Her activism continues today through her involvement with Veterans for Peace and working towards legislation for individuals exposed to Agent Orange.
Susan, I’m excited to be talking with you this evening and to hear your story and your involvement in the antiwar movement. Why don’t you take us back? How did you come to a place where resisting the war, specifically the Vietnam War, became such a life obsession for you?
Susan Schnall: Let me start by talking about war, because it is an entity that I’ve lived with my whole life. My dad was in the Marine Corps in the Second World War and was killed on the island of Guam, 1944. I went into the Navy as a nurse and felt that I would be taking care of those who were harmed and hurt in a war in Southeast Asia. I was never someone who was for the war, because I went into nursing to heal and to take care of those who were injured.
I joined in 1965 when I was going to Stanford Nursing School. I graduated in 1967 and went to, I guess it was Officers’ Indoctrination School. They had us nurses, and they wanted to teach us how to be members of the military. Then I was sent to Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California, where I took care of the guys who were coming back from Vietnam, from Southeast Asia. And I heard their stories, their pain. I heard their stories of how they viewed the Vietnamese and heard how they were trained to be killers and trained to hate people who looked different from the way that they did.
I don’t know why I was so naïve, but I didn’t quite expect that, and I was very much a peace activist before I went into the Navy. I had taken part in antiwar demonstrations. But it seems that that was not important to the Navy, and they heard about my history and still sent me on to Oak Knoll Naval Hospital. It was startling to me, and it was an education to me to hear stories first hand from men who had been to war. They were young; they were 18, 20, 21 years old. They told me their stories, that they had participated in war, how some of them had learned to hate “the enemy.”
And there were other stories I heard from young guys who were in the Navy, who worked with the civilian population, who didn’t have that fear and hatred. But I also heard very much their physical and psychological pain. We had one unit that was called the Amputee Unit, and I will never forget it. It was an open ward that had about 30, 35 young men on it. They all had amputations, whether upper extremity or legs, and what was left, their stumps were hanging by butcher-like contraptions that held their limbs aloft. They were in pain, they were terribly infected, and I would hear their cries from one end of the unit to the next, when they would cry out for pain medication.
Read complete interview and listen to podcast on Vietnam Full Disclosure.
Letter to the Editor of the Irish Examiner:
Shannon Airport is a 'de facto US military base'
Shannon Airport is a 'de facto US military base'
Sir,
Since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and Afghanistan before that, transport aircraft, chartered by the US military, have shuttled almost 3 million troops through Shannon Airport. My youngest son and his gun truck company made the stopover trips to the carnage twice, in 2003 and 2004; even disembarking for the terminal lounge in full battle dress while their aircraft was being refueled. There was never an attempt by the soldiers to hide this unwitting disregard for Irish neutrality. To my son’s knowledge there was never a search of the planes and his troops were armed to the teeth, in violation of not only the Irish constitution but also the Hague Convention.
Last St. Patrick’s Day two US veterans, longtime anti-war activists and Veterans For Peace members Ken Mayers and Tarak Kauff, attempted to expose this clear breach of international law at Shannon by unfurling a large banner on the apron that read Respect Irish Neutrality, U.S. War Machine Out of Shannon Airport! As one would expect, my peace-vet friends were abruptly apprehended by airport security and Gardaí, and long story short, their passports were confiscated and they are still in Ireland awaiting trial. More than four months now, one excruciating delay after another with no end in sight. It’s as if the US Justice Department’s treatment of dissidents might be rubbing off on the Irish courts. My great-great-grandfather Mícheál Smyth of County Mayo has got to be freaking out.
Your readership deserves far more coverage of this international law violation than it has received thus far. Polls continue to show that nearly six out of every ten Irish citizens oppose the U.S. military co-opting Shannon Airport, “a de facto American military base,” in Dublin TD Clare Daly’s words. The Irish government however seems content to allow this occupation of County Clare to continue, with not only Irish neutrality at stake but Ireland’s rich heritage of resisting imperialism the obvious collateral damage.
It is far past time to end this thing. Please support the VFP veterans’ bail to include a promise to return. Rest assured they’ll be back. There is nothing they would like more now than a trial.
Gene Marx
Past National Board of Directors Secretary, Veterans For Peace
Bellingham, Washington
America
Since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and Afghanistan before that, transport aircraft, chartered by the US military, have shuttled almost 3 million troops through Shannon Airport. My youngest son and his gun truck company made the stopover trips to the carnage twice, in 2003 and 2004; even disembarking for the terminal lounge in full battle dress while their aircraft was being refueled. There was never an attempt by the soldiers to hide this unwitting disregard for Irish neutrality. To my son’s knowledge there was never a search of the planes and his troops were armed to the teeth, in violation of not only the Irish constitution but also the Hague Convention.
Last St. Patrick’s Day two US veterans, longtime anti-war activists and Veterans For Peace members Ken Mayers and Tarak Kauff, attempted to expose this clear breach of international law at Shannon by unfurling a large banner on the apron that read Respect Irish Neutrality, U.S. War Machine Out of Shannon Airport! As one would expect, my peace-vet friends were abruptly apprehended by airport security and Gardaí, and long story short, their passports were confiscated and they are still in Ireland awaiting trial. More than four months now, one excruciating delay after another with no end in sight. It’s as if the US Justice Department’s treatment of dissidents might be rubbing off on the Irish courts. My great-great-grandfather Mícheál Smyth of County Mayo has got to be freaking out.
Your readership deserves far more coverage of this international law violation than it has received thus far. Polls continue to show that nearly six out of every ten Irish citizens oppose the U.S. military co-opting Shannon Airport, “a de facto American military base,” in Dublin TD Clare Daly’s words. The Irish government however seems content to allow this occupation of County Clare to continue, with not only Irish neutrality at stake but Ireland’s rich heritage of resisting imperialism the obvious collateral damage.
It is far past time to end this thing. Please support the VFP veterans’ bail to include a promise to return. Rest assured they’ll be back. There is nothing they would like more now than a trial.
Gene Marx
Past National Board of Directors Secretary, Veterans For Peace
Bellingham, Washington
America
Letter to the Wall 2019: Lies Redux
Gene Marx
May 24, 2019
In 2012 President Barack Obama announced his government was willing to spend $63 million on a series of commemorations of the American War in Vietnam stretching over a decade, we in Veterans For Peace knew we had to respond.
Part of a Veterans For Peace campaign to counter the Pentagon’s effort to rewrite history includes a letter writing campaign. Over the past four years we have collected and delivered, on Memorial Day, 400 letters written to The Wall. We print the letters out and then put them into envelopes marked "Please Read Me." At 10:30am on Memorial Day we descend into The Wall in Washington, DC to solemnly place these letters where they belong at the feet of the names on that memorial. They are read by visitors to The Wall throughout the weekend and then are placed into the National Parks Archives. We take this ceremony very seriously. It is not a political gimmick. It is an act of reverence.
So, if you reading this, that’s a good start. Let me tell you something about this sacred place, something you would have never known otherwise. For me it begins with line 122 of the panel you’re facing, knee-high and to your left. That’s where my name should be, somewhere close to my best friend, had another detonation taken place. But that’s a much longer story.
My friend Captain Richard C. Halpin was never going to have a long story, much like every name arrayed on these polished granite panels to your left and right. His was ended instantaneously by a surface-to-air missile on March 29, 1972, near Tchepone, Laos. (I ran into one of Dick’s wingmen years later and learned that Dick had volunteered to fly this sortie in place of a fatigued roommate.) His combat tour was over. His bags - as it turned out, his personal effects - were packed for home. He was listed as missing in action for years until teeth fragments of his were found in 1986.
Dick had dreams. Survive this deployment, get home to California in one piece, catch up with friends, do some surfing, and eventually teach high school history. Like most of us, he was behind the power curve. He had a lot of catching up to do, but he’d have been great. Unlikely famous, but his students would have never forgotten “Mr. Halpin,” a funny, engaging guy, always piquing their curiosities. What a waste.
Gene Marx
May 24, 2019
In 2012 President Barack Obama announced his government was willing to spend $63 million on a series of commemorations of the American War in Vietnam stretching over a decade, we in Veterans For Peace knew we had to respond.
Part of a Veterans For Peace campaign to counter the Pentagon’s effort to rewrite history includes a letter writing campaign. Over the past four years we have collected and delivered, on Memorial Day, 400 letters written to The Wall. We print the letters out and then put them into envelopes marked "Please Read Me." At 10:30am on Memorial Day we descend into The Wall in Washington, DC to solemnly place these letters where they belong at the feet of the names on that memorial. They are read by visitors to The Wall throughout the weekend and then are placed into the National Parks Archives. We take this ceremony very seriously. It is not a political gimmick. It is an act of reverence.
So, if you reading this, that’s a good start. Let me tell you something about this sacred place, something you would have never known otherwise. For me it begins with line 122 of the panel you’re facing, knee-high and to your left. That’s where my name should be, somewhere close to my best friend, had another detonation taken place. But that’s a much longer story.
My friend Captain Richard C. Halpin was never going to have a long story, much like every name arrayed on these polished granite panels to your left and right. His was ended instantaneously by a surface-to-air missile on March 29, 1972, near Tchepone, Laos. (I ran into one of Dick’s wingmen years later and learned that Dick had volunteered to fly this sortie in place of a fatigued roommate.) His combat tour was over. His bags - as it turned out, his personal effects - were packed for home. He was listed as missing in action for years until teeth fragments of his were found in 1986.
Dick had dreams. Survive this deployment, get home to California in one piece, catch up with friends, do some surfing, and eventually teach high school history. Like most of us, he was behind the power curve. He had a lot of catching up to do, but he’d have been great. Unlikely famous, but his students would have never forgotten “Mr. Halpin,” a funny, engaging guy, always piquing their curiosities. What a waste.
Capt. Richard Halpin’s name should have never been in this death pool, for so many reasons. The crewman he replaced has lived with his own moral injury for decades, having co-opted Dick’s slot in history. And family and friends will continue to die a little every time they visit Panel 2 West. Most of the other visitors to other panels on future Memorial Days will never understand why anyone fought and died in that faraway conflict. Why Vietnam? Who lost, who won. Go ahead, ask someone. I couldn’t have told you in 1972, not really, Dick either. It was just our war, but the lies and treachery of Truman to Nixon fed the grinder.
Just walk away; knowing full well that The Wall is the last memorial of its kind. Our 21st century interventionist conflicts are much too numerous to even track, much less memorialize future KIAs. Soon a Global War on Terrorism Memorial, not far from where you’re standing, will serve as an altar to this country’s first multigenerational war without end. Our first living war memorial, built on the same lies.
Now do yourself and your family a favor. Read two books, David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest and Kill Anything that Moves by Nick Turse.
You’re welcome.
The author of this post is Gene Marx from Bellingham, Washington. Gene is a Vietnam veteran and former Naval Flight Officer with VAQ-135 aboard the USS Coral Sea in 1971-72. Past Secretary of the VFP National Board of Directors, Gene is currently a member of VFP-111. Letters to The Wall is a project of VFP's Vietnam Full Disclosure campaign.
Just walk away; knowing full well that The Wall is the last memorial of its kind. Our 21st century interventionist conflicts are much too numerous to even track, much less memorialize future KIAs. Soon a Global War on Terrorism Memorial, not far from where you’re standing, will serve as an altar to this country’s first multigenerational war without end. Our first living war memorial, built on the same lies.
Now do yourself and your family a favor. Read two books, David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest and Kill Anything that Moves by Nick Turse.
You’re welcome.
The author of this post is Gene Marx from Bellingham, Washington. Gene is a Vietnam veteran and former Naval Flight Officer with VAQ-135 aboard the USS Coral Sea in 1971-72. Past Secretary of the VFP National Board of Directors, Gene is currently a member of VFP-111. Letters to The Wall is a project of VFP's Vietnam Full Disclosure campaign.
War With Iran Must Be Stopped at All Costs
Maj. Danny Sjursen
May 21, 2019
This piece originally appeared on anti-war.com.
What if they called a war and no one came? Well, now’s the time folks. The apparent march to war with Iran represents a pivotal moment in the historical arc – the rise and fall – of our republic come empire. This potential war is so unnecessary, so irrational, that it borders on the absurd. Still, since the U.S. now fields a professional, volunteer military, few citizens have “skin in the game.” As such, they could hardly care less.
Unlike in past wars – think Vietnam – there is no longer a built in, established antiwar movement. This is unfortunate, and, dangerous for a democracy. See the US Government operates with near impunity in foreign affairs, waging global war without the consent of the people and, essentially, uninterested in what the people have to say at all. It should not be thus in a healthy republic. People should not fear their government; governments should fear their people.
So let me propose something seemingly ludicrous. It’s this: since Americans only trust the military among various branches of government, and since that military is both over adulated and ultimately responsible for waging these insane wars, it is within the military that active dissent must begin. That’s right, to stop the war America needs clean cut, seemingly conservative, all-American soldiers and officers to start refusing to fight. The people will back them; trust me. These guys are heroes after all, right? I mean few will pay attention to some aging hippie protester – even if he or she is correct – but even Republicans might tune in to hear what a combat vet has to say.
Remember, we soldiers take an oath not to a particular president or a certain government but to the Constitution. And that constitution has been violated time and again for some 75 years as US presidents play emperor and wage unilateral wars without the required, and clearly stipulated, consent of Congress, I.e. the people’s representatives. Thus, one could argue – and I’m doing just that – that a massive military “sit-down-strike” of sorts would be both legal and moral.
Sure, it’s a long shot. But there is historical precedence for dissent within the US military. It is an unknown but vibrant history worthy of a brief recounting. Back in the mid-19th century, many US Army officers were so appalled by the futility and brutality of the three American attempts to subjugate the Seminole tribe in Florida that a staggering portion of the young subalterns simply resigned.
There was also dissent in the ranks during the Mexican-American War of conquest. Though they did their duty, many officers were appalled by the blatant aggression of their country. A young lieutenant – and future general / president – named US Grant stated that he knew “the struggle with my conscience during the Mexican War. I have never altogether forgiven myself for going into that. I had very strong opinions on the subject. I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.” It’s unlikely that very many Americans even know that prominent statesmen, too, have often been against wars.
Read complete opinion piece on Truthout.
May 21, 2019
This piece originally appeared on anti-war.com.
What if they called a war and no one came? Well, now’s the time folks. The apparent march to war with Iran represents a pivotal moment in the historical arc – the rise and fall – of our republic come empire. This potential war is so unnecessary, so irrational, that it borders on the absurd. Still, since the U.S. now fields a professional, volunteer military, few citizens have “skin in the game.” As such, they could hardly care less.
Unlike in past wars – think Vietnam – there is no longer a built in, established antiwar movement. This is unfortunate, and, dangerous for a democracy. See the US Government operates with near impunity in foreign affairs, waging global war without the consent of the people and, essentially, uninterested in what the people have to say at all. It should not be thus in a healthy republic. People should not fear their government; governments should fear their people.
So let me propose something seemingly ludicrous. It’s this: since Americans only trust the military among various branches of government, and since that military is both over adulated and ultimately responsible for waging these insane wars, it is within the military that active dissent must begin. That’s right, to stop the war America needs clean cut, seemingly conservative, all-American soldiers and officers to start refusing to fight. The people will back them; trust me. These guys are heroes after all, right? I mean few will pay attention to some aging hippie protester – even if he or she is correct – but even Republicans might tune in to hear what a combat vet has to say.
Remember, we soldiers take an oath not to a particular president or a certain government but to the Constitution. And that constitution has been violated time and again for some 75 years as US presidents play emperor and wage unilateral wars without the required, and clearly stipulated, consent of Congress, I.e. the people’s representatives. Thus, one could argue – and I’m doing just that – that a massive military “sit-down-strike” of sorts would be both legal and moral.
Sure, it’s a long shot. But there is historical precedence for dissent within the US military. It is an unknown but vibrant history worthy of a brief recounting. Back in the mid-19th century, many US Army officers were so appalled by the futility and brutality of the three American attempts to subjugate the Seminole tribe in Florida that a staggering portion of the young subalterns simply resigned.
There was also dissent in the ranks during the Mexican-American War of conquest. Though they did their duty, many officers were appalled by the blatant aggression of their country. A young lieutenant – and future general / president – named US Grant stated that he knew “the struggle with my conscience during the Mexican War. I have never altogether forgiven myself for going into that. I had very strong opinions on the subject. I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.” It’s unlikely that very many Americans even know that prominent statesmen, too, have often been against wars.
Read complete opinion piece on Truthout.
Trump Vetoes Yemen War Powers Resolution
Trump vetoes bill to end US military support for Saudi-led war in Yemen
Bipartisan resolution passed by Senate in March was seen as rebuke of Trump’s alliance with Saudi forces
Guardian staff and agencies
Tue 16 Apr 2019 20.42 EDT
Donald Trump has vetoed a bill passed by Congress to end US military assistance in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.
The Senate had passed a bipartisan resolution on 13 March in a 54-to-46 vote, in a move that was largely seen as a rebuke of Trump’s alliance with the Saudi forces leading military action in Yemen. The House voted on the resolution in early April, passing it with 247 votes to 175.
“This resolution is an unnecessary, dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional authorities, endangering the lives of American citizens and brave service members, both today and in the future,” Trump wrote in explaining his veto.
Read complete article on theguardian.com.
Two VFP Veterans Bailed from Limerick Prison
Veterans for Peace members Tarak Kauff and Ken Mayers out on bail, restricted from airports
Veterans for Peace members Tarak Kauff and Ken Mayers out on bail, restricted from airports
Updates on Tarak Kauff and Ken Mayers
March 29, 2019
Action Points
Resources
Photos
Tarak and Ken walked out of jail at about 12:35 Irish time–Ed Horgan was literally waiting outside the jail for hours after all the paperwork was done.
Tarak spoke briefly with Ellen Davidson and said they were very glad to be out, but that they had made some good friends in the prison, among both the guards and the prisoners. “The memory of 1916 is very real to them,” said Tarak, “and both guards and prisoners encouraged us to keep protesting.” They will probably be busy in the upcoming days–the Irish Times has been asking for an interview with them, and there will be other media as well.
Their passports, as was expected, have been confiscated and they have been told they must stay in Ireland for the trial. We will be organizing support for a campaign to bring them all the way home in the next weeks, but we need to get a clearer picture from the lawyer about what it will take. In the meantime, they will be housed and fed by our great allies on the ground over in Ireland.
Their next hearing is Wednesday, April 3, but it is not related to their bail conditions. It will be an important hearing, however, because the lawyers are going to make the case that the trial should be moved to Dublin, since it’s clear that there is no justice in County Clare for anyone protesting at Shannon (the U.S. military refueling stops are quite lucrative, and Shannon Airport is a major economic driver in the region). There is precedent for moving such cases, as Ed Horgan and three other activists have had their venues changed for this reason.
For now, it’s a celebration, but there’s going to be more organizing needed to get them out of Ireland and home. Watch this space!
March 29, 2019
Action Points
Resources
Photos
Tarak and Ken walked out of jail at about 12:35 Irish time–Ed Horgan was literally waiting outside the jail for hours after all the paperwork was done.
Tarak spoke briefly with Ellen Davidson and said they were very glad to be out, but that they had made some good friends in the prison, among both the guards and the prisoners. “The memory of 1916 is very real to them,” said Tarak, “and both guards and prisoners encouraged us to keep protesting.” They will probably be busy in the upcoming days–the Irish Times has been asking for an interview with them, and there will be other media as well.
Their passports, as was expected, have been confiscated and they have been told they must stay in Ireland for the trial. We will be organizing support for a campaign to bring them all the way home in the next weeks, but we need to get a clearer picture from the lawyer about what it will take. In the meantime, they will be housed and fed by our great allies on the ground over in Ireland.
Their next hearing is Wednesday, April 3, but it is not related to their bail conditions. It will be an important hearing, however, because the lawyers are going to make the case that the trial should be moved to Dublin, since it’s clear that there is no justice in County Clare for anyone protesting at Shannon (the U.S. military refueling stops are quite lucrative, and Shannon Airport is a major economic driver in the region). There is precedent for moving such cases, as Ed Horgan and three other activists have had their venues changed for this reason.
For now, it’s a celebration, but there’s going to be more organizing needed to get them out of Ireland and home. Watch this space!
Veterans For Peace Stands In Solidarity with Central American Asylum Seekers
November 30, 2018
Members of San Diego Veterans For Peace marched to the border with Tijuana, Mexico on Sunday, November 25, as part of a San Diego coalition expressing solidarity with and support for thousands of Central American asylum seekers. VFP members were on both sides of the border and joined in with a march of asylum seekers on the Mexican side. So we had a good look at the crisis which was contrived by the Trump administration to make it look like there was indeed an "invasion" of "criminals" and "terrorists."
A perfectly peaceful march turned into chaos when the legal entry point to where the asylum seekers were headed was closed off by Mexican authorities, presumably at the request of Homeland Security. When some marchers then surged toward the border wall, Customs and Border Protection (CPB) officers wasted no time in firing multiple CS (tear gas) canisters across the border into Mexico, causing great chaos as mothers fled with their choking children. As if on cue, U.S. authorities then totally shut down the busiest border crossing in North America, an exercise they had been practicing during the week. Soon Marine helicopters were landing on the railroad tracks next to the border, and Marines, apparently armed, were fanning out along the border fence. At the same time, 300 Army soldiers with shields and clubs stood menacingly behind CPB officers.
A number of arrests were reportedly made on both sides of the border. Curiously, the U.S. says the 46 people it arrested will not be prosecuted. Mexican police, who were noted for the low key presence and nonviolence during this contrived event, also reported arresting several dozen people whom they say will be deported back to their home countries in Central America (primarily Honduras, where government death squads and violent gangs await their return).
In the meantime, rains and a shortage of food and shelter for the asylum seekers in Tijuana are turning an already difficult into a serious humanitarian crisis. As many as one-third of the 6,000 or so asylum seekers are suffering from respiratory and other illnesses. Mexico's federal government has provided no aid, and the mayor of Tijuana says that the city can provide little further assistance.
NGO's on both sides of the border are doing what they can to help, but so far their efforts are insufficient. The Unified U.S. Deported Veterans chapter of Veterans For Peace has also been helping asylum seekers who are camped out at the border, only about a half-block from their office. The Deported Veterans have experience with this, as they have helped previous caravans of asylum seekers as well. They are supplying food, water, blankets, and now seek to provide much needed tarps. San Diego VFP is helping out with this. Ultimately, they would like to provide backpacks filled with essential items.
Most needed are dollars, which can be used to purchase essential items in Mexico.
You can donate directly through a special link on the VFP website. Just indicate that your donation is for the asylum seekers.
VFP members who work with the Deported Veterans to assist the asylum seekers will be welcomed in Tijuana. San Diego Veterans For Peace will also be participating in a series of solidarity actions at the border, along with immigration justice groups, human rights groups, churches, peace groups and the Poor People's Campaign. VFP members will also be reaching out to soldiers and Marines to let them know they will have our support if they refuse to obey immoral or illegal orders.
Tucson Veterans For Peace will be part of a coalition of groups who will protest outside the Davis-Monthan Airforce Base in Tucson (Saturday, Dec. 1, 9-11 am) that is also housing Army troops that Trump has deployed to the border.
There are also discussions about organizing a Christmas holiday vigil outside the children's detention center at El Paso, Texas. All of these plans are in formation. VFP members who are interested in joining border actions in California, Arizona or Texas should email Gerry Condon at gerrycondon@veteransforpeace.org or phone him at 206-499-1220.
Members of San Diego Veterans For Peace marched to the border with Tijuana, Mexico on Sunday, November 25, as part of a San Diego coalition expressing solidarity with and support for thousands of Central American asylum seekers. VFP members were on both sides of the border and joined in with a march of asylum seekers on the Mexican side. So we had a good look at the crisis which was contrived by the Trump administration to make it look like there was indeed an "invasion" of "criminals" and "terrorists."
A perfectly peaceful march turned into chaos when the legal entry point to where the asylum seekers were headed was closed off by Mexican authorities, presumably at the request of Homeland Security. When some marchers then surged toward the border wall, Customs and Border Protection (CPB) officers wasted no time in firing multiple CS (tear gas) canisters across the border into Mexico, causing great chaos as mothers fled with their choking children. As if on cue, U.S. authorities then totally shut down the busiest border crossing in North America, an exercise they had been practicing during the week. Soon Marine helicopters were landing on the railroad tracks next to the border, and Marines, apparently armed, were fanning out along the border fence. At the same time, 300 Army soldiers with shields and clubs stood menacingly behind CPB officers.
A number of arrests were reportedly made on both sides of the border. Curiously, the U.S. says the 46 people it arrested will not be prosecuted. Mexican police, who were noted for the low key presence and nonviolence during this contrived event, also reported arresting several dozen people whom they say will be deported back to their home countries in Central America (primarily Honduras, where government death squads and violent gangs await their return).
In the meantime, rains and a shortage of food and shelter for the asylum seekers in Tijuana are turning an already difficult into a serious humanitarian crisis. As many as one-third of the 6,000 or so asylum seekers are suffering from respiratory and other illnesses. Mexico's federal government has provided no aid, and the mayor of Tijuana says that the city can provide little further assistance.
NGO's on both sides of the border are doing what they can to help, but so far their efforts are insufficient. The Unified U.S. Deported Veterans chapter of Veterans For Peace has also been helping asylum seekers who are camped out at the border, only about a half-block from their office. The Deported Veterans have experience with this, as they have helped previous caravans of asylum seekers as well. They are supplying food, water, blankets, and now seek to provide much needed tarps. San Diego VFP is helping out with this. Ultimately, they would like to provide backpacks filled with essential items.
Most needed are dollars, which can be used to purchase essential items in Mexico.
You can donate directly through a special link on the VFP website. Just indicate that your donation is for the asylum seekers.
VFP members who work with the Deported Veterans to assist the asylum seekers will be welcomed in Tijuana. San Diego Veterans For Peace will also be participating in a series of solidarity actions at the border, along with immigration justice groups, human rights groups, churches, peace groups and the Poor People's Campaign. VFP members will also be reaching out to soldiers and Marines to let them know they will have our support if they refuse to obey immoral or illegal orders.
Tucson Veterans For Peace will be part of a coalition of groups who will protest outside the Davis-Monthan Airforce Base in Tucson (Saturday, Dec. 1, 9-11 am) that is also housing Army troops that Trump has deployed to the border.
There are also discussions about organizing a Christmas holiday vigil outside the children's detention center at El Paso, Texas. All of these plans are in formation. VFP members who are interested in joining border actions in California, Arizona or Texas should email Gerry Condon at gerrycondon@veteransforpeace.org or phone him at 206-499-1220.
Community Celebrates 100th Armistice Day
Veterans for Peace and allies stand across from the Church of Assumption in silence
By Alexia Suarez
November 14, 2018
Veterans for Peace and allies stand across from the Church of Assumption in silence
By Alexia Suarez
November 14, 2018
The bells at the Church of Assumption in downtown Bellingham rang 11 times at 11 a.m. on Sunday, November 11. Their slow, rhythmic beats commemorated the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day. Local activist organization Veterans for Peace and Armistice Day supporters stood in silence across the street, flags for peace waving in the crisp autumn air.
The first Armistice Day at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of November 1918 signaled the halt of World War I and the start of a new era of peace, said Stan Parker, Army veteran and a member of the Veterans for Peace Board of Directors.
The Bellingham celebration was organized by the Veterans for Peace Chapter 111. Among them was Gene Marx, a Vietnam Navy veteran and Veterans for Peace local communication coordinator.
“I’d like people to realize Armistice Day’s original intent was to venerate peace; this was supposedly the war to end all wars,” Marx said. “And as it turns out, it was the war that ended all peace.”
Parker said he came to the rally in remembrance of those who lost their lives in war and also those affected by war. His call-to-action: war is not the answer to the problems of the world.
“There was a time in the world’s history when we really believed we could have world peace, where war was not the answer, and world peace was possible,” Parker said.
Today, Armistice Day is celebrated in countries across the world. Across the Canadian border on Sunday, crowds of citizens wore red poppy pins as they gathered. The flower is a symbol of remembrance of the emotional and physical expenses of war. The United States made the decision to replace Armistice Day with Veterans Day in 1968, even moving the holiday to a Monday to encourage commerce, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Lisa Distler, whose late husband, Bill Distler, was a Vietnam veteran and a founding member of Veterans for Peace, said the message of Armistice Day is one simply of peace; to put one’s arms down and come to an agreement that we as humans shouldn’t kill one another to solve our issues. She believes the newer U.S.-coined holiday has lost that message.
She said Veterans Day glorifies the act of going to war which is counterproductive to having a more inclusive and peaceful world, or recognizing the trauma that violence can inflict.
Daniel Kirkpatrick describes himself as a lifelong pacifist who comes from a long line of pacifists. His father was a conscious objector to World War II – his brother, an objector to the Vietnam War.
“We need a shift in a big way, we need a huge shift in our patterns of funding and supporting militarism and we need to shift towards a peace orientation that will bring prosperity to people across the world,” Kirkpatrick said.
The community remains optimistic.
“Until we get to the point where we want to have peace and our congressional representatives worry more about having peace, more than they’re concerned with their profits, then we will have an end to the fighting,” Marx said. “I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t believe peace couldn’t be attainable.”
Veterans for Peace meets on the third Friday of each month at the Community Connections building, part of the Community Food Co-op downtown. More information can be found on their website, www.vfpbellingham.org.
The first Armistice Day at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of November 1918 signaled the halt of World War I and the start of a new era of peace, said Stan Parker, Army veteran and a member of the Veterans for Peace Board of Directors.
The Bellingham celebration was organized by the Veterans for Peace Chapter 111. Among them was Gene Marx, a Vietnam Navy veteran and Veterans for Peace local communication coordinator.
“I’d like people to realize Armistice Day’s original intent was to venerate peace; this was supposedly the war to end all wars,” Marx said. “And as it turns out, it was the war that ended all peace.”
Parker said he came to the rally in remembrance of those who lost their lives in war and also those affected by war. His call-to-action: war is not the answer to the problems of the world.
“There was a time in the world’s history when we really believed we could have world peace, where war was not the answer, and world peace was possible,” Parker said.
Today, Armistice Day is celebrated in countries across the world. Across the Canadian border on Sunday, crowds of citizens wore red poppy pins as they gathered. The flower is a symbol of remembrance of the emotional and physical expenses of war. The United States made the decision to replace Armistice Day with Veterans Day in 1968, even moving the holiday to a Monday to encourage commerce, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Lisa Distler, whose late husband, Bill Distler, was a Vietnam veteran and a founding member of Veterans for Peace, said the message of Armistice Day is one simply of peace; to put one’s arms down and come to an agreement that we as humans shouldn’t kill one another to solve our issues. She believes the newer U.S.-coined holiday has lost that message.
She said Veterans Day glorifies the act of going to war which is counterproductive to having a more inclusive and peaceful world, or recognizing the trauma that violence can inflict.
Daniel Kirkpatrick describes himself as a lifelong pacifist who comes from a long line of pacifists. His father was a conscious objector to World War II – his brother, an objector to the Vietnam War.
“We need a shift in a big way, we need a huge shift in our patterns of funding and supporting militarism and we need to shift towards a peace orientation that will bring prosperity to people across the world,” Kirkpatrick said.
The community remains optimistic.
“Until we get to the point where we want to have peace and our congressional representatives worry more about having peace, more than they’re concerned with their profits, then we will have an end to the fighting,” Marx said. “I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t believe peace couldn’t be attainable.”
Veterans for Peace meets on the third Friday of each month at the Community Connections building, part of the Community Food Co-op downtown. More information can be found on their website, www.vfpbellingham.org.
VFP-111 Pays Tribute to Armistice Day Centennial
Silent Tribute During Annual Ringing of the Bells at the Church of the Assumption
Bellingham's Veterans For Peace, with more than twenty other supporters of peace, gathered on a brisk, sunny morning last Sunday in solemn commemoration of the 100th year anniversary of the end of the First World War. At 11 am - the 11th hour of the 11th month - the bells of the Church of the Assumption slowly tolled, along with thousands across the country. Heads were bowed in tribute in remembrance of the millions slaughtered needlessly in the "War to End All Wars".
An annual observance by VFP-111, this year's observance was part of the VFP International Reclaiming Armistice Day campaign This education effort was initiated to call attention not only to end of hostilities in 1918 but also to the fact that Armistice Day, originally designated to the cause of world peace, was co-opted by the US government and renamed Veterans Day, now a national holiday venerating not peace but military service in our endless wars.
True words of inspiration that resonated on this solemn occasion came from founding member Bill Distler's widow, Lisa:
I feel, this Armistice Day anniversary is a most profound moment, for us to stop for even one moment, a possible, sacred sixty seconds, that might allow us to silence the cyclonic, squall of insanity that portends our own Manchurian reality.
So for this weekend, give us peace. Lay down the fear of all that desperately conspires to destroy our peace of mind, sanity, and courage. Ring the Bells!!! That is the only sound I think most of us might be able to really hear, right now.
To VFP - Thank you kindly for making this happen.
Silent Tribute During Annual Ringing of the Bells at the Church of the Assumption
Bellingham's Veterans For Peace, with more than twenty other supporters of peace, gathered on a brisk, sunny morning last Sunday in solemn commemoration of the 100th year anniversary of the end of the First World War. At 11 am - the 11th hour of the 11th month - the bells of the Church of the Assumption slowly tolled, along with thousands across the country. Heads were bowed in tribute in remembrance of the millions slaughtered needlessly in the "War to End All Wars".
An annual observance by VFP-111, this year's observance was part of the VFP International Reclaiming Armistice Day campaign This education effort was initiated to call attention not only to end of hostilities in 1918 but also to the fact that Armistice Day, originally designated to the cause of world peace, was co-opted by the US government and renamed Veterans Day, now a national holiday venerating not peace but military service in our endless wars.
True words of inspiration that resonated on this solemn occasion came from founding member Bill Distler's widow, Lisa:
I feel, this Armistice Day anniversary is a most profound moment, for us to stop for even one moment, a possible, sacred sixty seconds, that might allow us to silence the cyclonic, squall of insanity that portends our own Manchurian reality.
So for this weekend, give us peace. Lay down the fear of all that desperately conspires to destroy our peace of mind, sanity, and courage. Ring the Bells!!! That is the only sound I think most of us might be able to really hear, right now.
To VFP - Thank you kindly for making this happen.
Reclaiming Armistice Day: A Day to Perpetuate Peace
As a veteran, I will not be misled and victimized once more by the militarists and war profiteers.
By Camillo Mac Bica
September 30, 2018
As a veteran, I will not be misled and victimized once more by the militarists and war profiteers.
By Camillo Mac Bica
September 30, 2018
Following World War One, up until then the bloodiest and most destructive war in the history of humankind, many of the beleaguered belligerent nations resolved, at least temporarily, that such devastation and tragic loss of life must never happen again. In the United States, on June 4, 1926, Congress passed a concurrent resolution establishing November 11th, the day in 1918 when the fighting stopped, as Armistice Day, a legal holiday, the intent and purpose of which would be to “commemorate with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations.”
In accordance with this resolution, President Calvin Coolidge issued a Proclamation on November 3rd 1926, “inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches or other places, with appropriate ceremonies expressive of our gratitude for peace and our desire for the continuance of friendly relations with all other peoples."
Disappointingly, despite its designation as “the war to end all wars,” and the intent of Armistice Day to make November 11th a day to celebrate peace, the resolve of nations to ensure that “good will and mutual understanding between nations” prevail, all too quickly faltered. Following another equally “destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war,” World War Two, and the “police action” in Korea, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued a Proclamation that changed the designation of November 11th from Armistice Day to Veterans Day.
“I, Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States of America, do hereby call upon all of our citizens to
observe Thursday, November 11, 1954, as Veterans Day. On that day let us solemnly remember the
sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to
preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring
peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.”
Though some continue to question Eisenhower’s decision to change the designation, upon analysis, his motivation and reasoning become apparent. Though far from being a pacifist, as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force during World War II, he knew and abhorred the destruction and tragic loss of life that war entails. Eisenhower’s Proclamation, I would argue, is an expression of his disappointment and frustration with the failure of nations to follow through with their Armistice Day resolve to avoid war and seek alternative means for conflict resolution. In changing the designation, Eisenhower hoped to remind America of war’s horror and futility, the sacrifices of those who struggled in its behalf, and the need to reassert a commitment to an enduring peace. Though the name was changed, the promise to promote friendly relations between all nations and all people of the world remained the same.
Finish the article on Common Dreams.
In accordance with this resolution, President Calvin Coolidge issued a Proclamation on November 3rd 1926, “inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches or other places, with appropriate ceremonies expressive of our gratitude for peace and our desire for the continuance of friendly relations with all other peoples."
Disappointingly, despite its designation as “the war to end all wars,” and the intent of Armistice Day to make November 11th a day to celebrate peace, the resolve of nations to ensure that “good will and mutual understanding between nations” prevail, all too quickly faltered. Following another equally “destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war,” World War Two, and the “police action” in Korea, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued a Proclamation that changed the designation of November 11th from Armistice Day to Veterans Day.
“I, Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States of America, do hereby call upon all of our citizens to
observe Thursday, November 11, 1954, as Veterans Day. On that day let us solemnly remember the
sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to
preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring
peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.”
Though some continue to question Eisenhower’s decision to change the designation, upon analysis, his motivation and reasoning become apparent. Though far from being a pacifist, as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force during World War II, he knew and abhorred the destruction and tragic loss of life that war entails. Eisenhower’s Proclamation, I would argue, is an expression of his disappointment and frustration with the failure of nations to follow through with their Armistice Day resolve to avoid war and seek alternative means for conflict resolution. In changing the designation, Eisenhower hoped to remind America of war’s horror and futility, the sacrifices of those who struggled in its behalf, and the need to reassert a commitment to an enduring peace. Though the name was changed, the promise to promote friendly relations between all nations and all people of the world remained the same.
Finish the article on Common Dreams.
Micro Militarism
Michael Schwalbe
My ATM receipts now tell me, beneath my checking account balance, that the North Carolina State Employees’ Credit Union SUPPORTS THE TROOPS! The classical music station I listen to runs a dedication to “the men and women of our armed forces, who work so hard to protect us; without their sacrifices, none of our freedoms would be possible.”
When I browse for information about public universities in North Carolina, an ad pops up showing a young man in camouflage combat fatigues, holding a laptop computer. The text of the ad reads, “Advance Your Military Career with an MBA.” The ad is for an online MBA program at the University of North Carolina.
A few months ago the home page of my university, NC State, greeted viewers with an image of a young man in the cockpit of a U.S. air force fighter jet. The text, as I recall, was to the effect that NC State is training tomorrow’s leaders today. The fall issue of the university’s alumni magazine ran an adoring profile of army general Ray Odierno, a 1986 graduate.
The local weekly independent newspaper, which fashions itself as alternative and leftish, runs a feature called the “social activist calendar.” Events are grouped under headings such as Community, Environment, Politics, Government, and LGBTQ. In a recent issue, four events were listed under Troop Support.
Though the requests have abated lately, for a time earlier this year cashiers in grocery stores and gas stations consistently asked if I wanted to donate a dollar to support the troops.
The above are examples of what can be called micro militarism: pro-military practices squeezed into small cultural spaces. Any one such practice might seem trivial. Yet on the whole micro militarism does much to normalize militarism on a large scale.
Militarism on a large scale is what the U.S. is all about. This is militarism on the scale of foreign invasions and occupations; on the scale of maintaining hundreds of military bases around the world; on the scale of drone fleets used to carry out political assassinations wherever the enemies of empire might roam; on the scale of spending half of our nation’s collective wealth every year to pay for weapons and war; on the scale of an economy in which the profits of nearly every major corporation, and many small ones, derive in part from military contracts.
From the standpoint of political and economic elites, militarism on a large scale is a fine thing. It is how wealth is transferred from the working class to the capitalist class via taxes to pay for “defense systems.” It is also how U.S. corporations maintain access to raw materials, cheap labor, and markets around the world. The problem is that, absent the fever of war, large-scale militarism generates popular resistance.
After a while, people begin to wonder why their sons and daughters are being killed and maimed in countries half a world away, countries that have not attacked us and with which we are not at war. People begin to wonder about the competence and morality of politicians who engage in imperial adventures that seem to have no clear purpose, no clear endpoint, and no clear benefits for anyone who doesn’t stand to make a profit on weapons, military supplies, mercenary services, or someone else’s natural resources.
People begin to wonder why there is not enough money for schools, public transportation, libraries, parks, and health care. They begin to wonder where our collective wealth is going, and why there is always enough money for the tools of war but not enough for the things that give regular people security and prosperity at home.
Read entire article on Counterpunch.
Michael Schwalbe
My ATM receipts now tell me, beneath my checking account balance, that the North Carolina State Employees’ Credit Union SUPPORTS THE TROOPS! The classical music station I listen to runs a dedication to “the men and women of our armed forces, who work so hard to protect us; without their sacrifices, none of our freedoms would be possible.”
When I browse for information about public universities in North Carolina, an ad pops up showing a young man in camouflage combat fatigues, holding a laptop computer. The text of the ad reads, “Advance Your Military Career with an MBA.” The ad is for an online MBA program at the University of North Carolina.
A few months ago the home page of my university, NC State, greeted viewers with an image of a young man in the cockpit of a U.S. air force fighter jet. The text, as I recall, was to the effect that NC State is training tomorrow’s leaders today. The fall issue of the university’s alumni magazine ran an adoring profile of army general Ray Odierno, a 1986 graduate.
The local weekly independent newspaper, which fashions itself as alternative and leftish, runs a feature called the “social activist calendar.” Events are grouped under headings such as Community, Environment, Politics, Government, and LGBTQ. In a recent issue, four events were listed under Troop Support.
Though the requests have abated lately, for a time earlier this year cashiers in grocery stores and gas stations consistently asked if I wanted to donate a dollar to support the troops.
The above are examples of what can be called micro militarism: pro-military practices squeezed into small cultural spaces. Any one such practice might seem trivial. Yet on the whole micro militarism does much to normalize militarism on a large scale.
Militarism on a large scale is what the U.S. is all about. This is militarism on the scale of foreign invasions and occupations; on the scale of maintaining hundreds of military bases around the world; on the scale of drone fleets used to carry out political assassinations wherever the enemies of empire might roam; on the scale of spending half of our nation’s collective wealth every year to pay for weapons and war; on the scale of an economy in which the profits of nearly every major corporation, and many small ones, derive in part from military contracts.
From the standpoint of political and economic elites, militarism on a large scale is a fine thing. It is how wealth is transferred from the working class to the capitalist class via taxes to pay for “defense systems.” It is also how U.S. corporations maintain access to raw materials, cheap labor, and markets around the world. The problem is that, absent the fever of war, large-scale militarism generates popular resistance.
After a while, people begin to wonder why their sons and daughters are being killed and maimed in countries half a world away, countries that have not attacked us and with which we are not at war. People begin to wonder about the competence and morality of politicians who engage in imperial adventures that seem to have no clear purpose, no clear endpoint, and no clear benefits for anyone who doesn’t stand to make a profit on weapons, military supplies, mercenary services, or someone else’s natural resources.
People begin to wonder why there is not enough money for schools, public transportation, libraries, parks, and health care. They begin to wonder where our collective wealth is going, and why there is always enough money for the tools of war but not enough for the things that give regular people security and prosperity at home.
Read entire article on Counterpunch.
“Imagine there’s no heaven…and no religion too.”
A more useful line when it comes to our current wars may be “Imagine there’s no duopoly.” It’s hard to fault John Lennon for his idealism, of course. In his day, many blamed religion on the wars of history. But a much bigger obstacle right now, at least in the U.S., is partisanship. The two major political parties, in power and out, have been so co-opted by the war machine that any modern anti-war movement has been completely subsumed and marginalized—even as American troops and killer drones continue to operate in or near combat zones all over the world.
Aside from the very early days of the Iraq war, the anti-war movement has been a small, ineffectual pinprick on the post-9/11 landscape. A less generous assessment is that it’s been a bust. After liberals helped elect the “anti-war” Barack Obama, the movement all but disappeared, even though the wars did not. By putting a Nobel Peace Prize-winning Democratic face on his inherited wars, Obama expanded into new conflicts (Libya, Syria, Yemen) with little resistance, ultimately bombing seven different countries during his tenure. By 2013, Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin lamented, “We’ve been protesting Obama’s foreign policy for years now, but we can’t get the same numbers because the people who would’ve been yelling and screaming about this stuff under Bush are quiet under Obama.”
Read the rest of the article in the The American Conservative.
A more useful line when it comes to our current wars may be “Imagine there’s no duopoly.” It’s hard to fault John Lennon for his idealism, of course. In his day, many blamed religion on the wars of history. But a much bigger obstacle right now, at least in the U.S., is partisanship. The two major political parties, in power and out, have been so co-opted by the war machine that any modern anti-war movement has been completely subsumed and marginalized—even as American troops and killer drones continue to operate in or near combat zones all over the world.
Aside from the very early days of the Iraq war, the anti-war movement has been a small, ineffectual pinprick on the post-9/11 landscape. A less generous assessment is that it’s been a bust. After liberals helped elect the “anti-war” Barack Obama, the movement all but disappeared, even though the wars did not. By putting a Nobel Peace Prize-winning Democratic face on his inherited wars, Obama expanded into new conflicts (Libya, Syria, Yemen) with little resistance, ultimately bombing seven different countries during his tenure. By 2013, Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin lamented, “We’ve been protesting Obama’s foreign policy for years now, but we can’t get the same numbers because the people who would’ve been yelling and screaming about this stuff under Bush are quiet under Obama.”
Read the rest of the article in the The American Conservative.
Whatcom Peace & Justice Looking for AMS Volunteers
Interested in joining the Whatcom Peace & Justice Alternatives to Military Service volunteer crew? WPJC could really use veteran perspectives. The time commitment is up to you -- some folks volunteer for 2 hours per semester, and others put in more than 20.
Come and learn how to table with AMS and then sign up for shifts that work for you.
Whatcom Peace & Justice Center
1220 Bay St
Interested in joining the Whatcom Peace & Justice Alternatives to Military Service volunteer crew? WPJC could really use veteran perspectives. The time commitment is up to you -- some folks volunteer for 2 hours per semester, and others put in more than 20.
Come and learn how to table with AMS and then sign up for shifts that work for you.
Whatcom Peace & Justice Center
1220 Bay St
VFP-111 Supports Original Intent of Veterans Day
Veterans For Peace calls for the observance of November 11 to be in keeping with the holiday’s original intent as Armistice Day, to be “a day dedicated to the cause of world peace," as it was celebrated at the ending of World War I when the world came together to recognize the need for lasting peace. That desire for peace led ten years later to the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War (Kellogg-Briand) which made war illegal. The U.S. ratified the treaty and is bound by its terms pursuant to Art. 6 of the Constitution. After World War II, the U.S. Congress decided to rebrand November 11 as Veterans Day. Honoring the warriors quickly morphed into honoring the military and glorifying war. Armistice Day, as a result, has been flipped from a day for peace into a day for displays of militarism.
This year with a rise of hate and fear around the world it is as urgent as ever to ring the bells of peace. We in the U.S. must press our government to end reckless rhetoric and military interventions that endanger the entire world.
Instead of celebrating militarism, we want to celebrate peace and all of humanity. We demand an end to all forms of hate, patriarchy and white supremacy and we call for unity, fair treatment under the law and equality for all. We call for a tearing down of walls between borders and people. We call for an end to all hostilities at home and around the globe.
This year with a rise of hate and fear around the world it is as urgent as ever to ring the bells of peace. We in the U.S. must press our government to end reckless rhetoric and military interventions that endanger the entire world.
Instead of celebrating militarism, we want to celebrate peace and all of humanity. We demand an end to all forms of hate, patriarchy and white supremacy and we call for unity, fair treatment under the law and equality for all. We call for a tearing down of walls between borders and people. We call for an end to all hostilities at home and around the globe.
The Hidden Tragedy of the Vietnam War with Investigative Journalist Nick Turse
On Contact's Chris Hedges discusses the hidden tragedy of the Vietnam War with author of Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.
On Contact's Chris Hedges discusses the hidden tragedy of the Vietnam War with author of Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.
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Waging Peace
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