https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_Fh49glBaM
Monday, March 7, 2022
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George Monbiot: NATO’s witchfinder
Chris Marsden
4 March 2022
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/04/ixlx-m04.html
Guardian columnist George Monbiot this week earned himself a special place in hell.
The war in Ukraine has been accompanied by a McCarthyite smear campaign against anyone who refuses to parrot uncritically the pro-NATO apologetics that fill every edition of the Guardian and the rest of the world’s media. It is not enough to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, nor even the regime of Russian oligarchs led by President Vladimir Putin.
Anyone who does not explicitly back the NATO powers’ use of Ukraine to wage a proxy war against Russia, who warns against this war rapidly becoming an imperialist war for regime change in Moscow and the catastrophic consequences of a clash between nuclear powers, is the target of vicious denunciations and slanders.
Monbiot at a Make Poverty History rally in Edinburgh, July 2005 (Creative Commons)
In this sordid climate, sections of the educated middle class in the media, liberal politics and academia have lost their heads—uncritically accepting the narrative that the war in Ukraine has simply happened because Putin is pursuing an expansionist policy against his east European neighbours. Such individuals conveniently forget everything they know about the decades-long US-led policy, since the end of the USSR, of NATO encroachment on former Soviet territories, as well as the endless series of bloody wars waged by Washington and its allies—for which it is hoped they will one day be deeply ashamed.
Monbiot is a yet more politically despicable individual. Someone who advances himself as an investigative journalist, he has a very long record of uncritically regurgitating the propaganda of the imperialist powers and denouncing anyone who doesn’t do the same. He now offers his services as a witchfinder for British imperialism in identifying its critics and declaring them to be political stooges of Putin.
The March 2 edition of the Guardian features his column, “We must confront Russian propaganda—even when it comes from those we respect”.
“Yes there is something we can do,” he begins, referring to his proposed contribution to NATO’s war effort. He urges the circles in which he moves to join him in combating a “propaganda war” he maintains is only being waged by Russia in order “to confuse and misdirect people overseas and bolster support at home.”
“In doing so we could, in our very small way, help the resistance in Ukraine.”
Monbiot feigns facing a moral dilemma. “This puts me in a difficult place. Among the worst disseminators of Kremlin propaganda in the UK are people with whom I have, in the past, shared platforms and made alliances. The grim truth is that, for years, a segment of the ‘anti-imperialist’ left has been recycling and amplifying Putin’s falsehoods.”
What follows is the identification of the first batch of Monbiot’s proposed targets, including everyone associated with the Stop the War Coalition, and several named leading figures including former Labour MP Chris Williamson. But the most well-known names cited as disseminators of Putin’s propaganda are world renowned journalists John Pilger, Seymour Hersh and the now deceased Robert Fisk.
Monbiot’s breast-beating about being in a “difficult place” is necessary camouflage for someone who knows very well that he is identifying those who are already facing an organised campaign of character assassination. He may speak of a duty to “debunk and contest misleading justifications”. But the reality is that dissenting voices are already being silenced and careers will be destroyed, while Monbiot and his ilk will be elevated.
He is right to be concerned for his “reputation”. He has long railed against Marxism as he flits between various parties, but still claims to be of “the left”. However, his column appeared with a graphic, rendered in shades of red, making its political character abundantly clear. It showed a figure with a camera for a head, surrounded by computers with skulls for brand insignias and a tablet, all showing images supplied by the Kremlin. Its anti-communist message was underscored by no less than five hammer and sickle insignias rendered in yellow as the content of the film being broadcast and speech bubbles emanating from other devices.
Monbiot was so embarrassed that he contacted the Guardian to have the insignias changed to the Russian coat of arms.
The anti-communist message of Monbiot's Guardian piece was underscored in a now replaced graphic showing no less than five hammer and sickle insignias rendered in yellow as the content of the film being broadcast and speech bubbles emanating from other devices. (source: screenshot-Guardian)
In everything he writes Monbiot accepts what pro-Western sources report as gospel and on this basis alone denounces his opponents. Regarding Ukraine, one of Monbiot’s attacks on Pilger is to cite a tweet from December 2021 stating that “it was the US that overthrew the elected govt in Ukraine in 2014, allowing Nato to march right up to Russia’s western border”. Monbiot makes no attempt to refute this well documented fact, other than to call it a “standard Kremlin talking point.”
“Ukraine, of course, is not a Nato member,” he adds sagely, as if everyone is blissfully unaware that Kiev’s army is funded and supplied with advanced weaponry by the NATO powers who have sent thousands of additional troops to Ukraine’s neighbouring states and are waging economic warfare against Russia.
In the same vein, he asserts that “while Putin’s sense of threat seems to have been heightened by Nato expansion and mission creep [!]” NATO’s growth is in fact a response to Russian aggression by states who all “fear attack”. Therefore “it’s ridiculous to suggest that Russia is not the aggressor”. This is the political equivalent of a bully saying of his victim, “I hit him so he wouldn’t hit me first.”
The “investigative journalist” Monbiot pointedly fails to record any of Pilger’s tweets since the invasion of Ukraine, such as his comment on February 27 describing it as “lawless” and that on March 1 stating, “I have reported many wars and witnessed their horrors. Whatever the reason for a war, whatever the grievances of its ‘cause’, one truth is constant: a war is impossible to control. The invasion of Ukraine must be stopped now or we all are at grave risk.”
Monbiot’s pretence of being recently convinced of the need to confront the “pro-Putin left” is a fraud, disproved by his links to articles stretching back to the CIA-backed regime change war in Syria. He cites two articles published in 2016 and one written by himself from November 15, 2017, “A lesson from Syria: it’s crucial not to fuel far-right conspiracy theories”.
Monbiot asserts, “Harmful as this propaganda is, leftist support for another of Putin’s projects has even more serious implications,” accusing Pilger, Fisk and Hersh of helping to “airbrush some of the world’s worst atrocities” such as “well-attested reports of [Bashir al] Assad’s use of chemical weapons” and attacks on the “White Helmets”—an opposition “civil defence” group funded by Western governments with hundreds of millions of dollars.
Monbiot’s 2017 article condemns Hersh, Noam Chomsky and others for questioning whether the Assad regime was the author of an alleged April 4 chemical weapons attack on Khan Sheikhoun in Syria’s Idlib province, a charge for which the US and its allies provided no substantive evidence and which was used as justification for American warships firing 59 cruise missiles on Syria’s Shayrat air base, killing 15 people, the majority civilians.
The WSWS explained Monbiot and the Guardian’s political role in a prescient comment on his 2017 article:
Aligning himself openly with the political and military-intelligence apparatus in the US and Britain, Monbiot focuses on legitimising the intervention of the imperialist powers in Syria—both direct and using Islamist proxies—aimed at replacing the government of Bashar al-Assad with a client regime. He brands reputable and high-profile journalists and political commentators as the purveyors of fake news…
To portray the entirely valid criticisms of the official line on the Khan Sheikhoun attack as fuelling far-right conspiracy theories is politically criminal. It is a transparent attempt by the Guardian to block any challenge to the military operations, overt and covert, carried out by US and British imperialism and their regional allies in the Middle East under cover of “humanitarian” concerns and the ‘responsibility to protect.”
The WSWS concluded:
The Guardian speaks for the nominally liberal bourgeoisie. While it claims to stand for progressive opinion, its real role is to police public discourse and support the strategic imperatives of imperialism. That is why it has come out and attacked “some of the world’s most famous crusaders against propaganda,” thereby declaring that any criticism of US and British war plans is beyond the pale and cannot be tolerated. The Guardian’s role is to help create the necessary political climate to further an agenda of war, censorship and domestic repression.
The evolution of a broad swathe of the formerly liberal petty-bourgeoisie into apologists for imperialist militarism and war has deep social roots. Living generally easy lives and possessing substantial personal wealth, they are for the most part content with their lot, if a little bitter and jealous when confronted with those far richer than themselves.
They are as interested in rising share and property values as are the objects of their envy in the financial oligarchy. They still complain about various social problems—poverty, racism, climate change and the like—but with no intention of biting the hand that feeds them. The police should be more accountable, less misogynist, etc. But they must keep the leafy suburbs safe. NATO may need reforming so that Washington respects its European allies, and we can argue about how much it costs. But it is a generally “good thing” as the guarantor of a social order that provides us with our creature comforts.
Alienated from the broad mass of working people they view with disdain they march behind their ruling class headlong towards disaster.
Democrats deepen embrace of Israeli apartheid
Michael F. Brown
Lobby Watch
4 March 2022
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/michael-f-brown/democrats-deepen-embrace-israeli-apartheid
The Democratic Party has an apartheid problem. And it’s getting worse.
Eight congressional Democrats went to Israel last month yet I could find no public record of any of them speaking out against Israel’s practice of apartheid, meticulously documented in Amnesty International’s recent landmark report.
More members joined a tour sponsored by the Israel lobby group AIPAC later in February – run through its subsidiary, the American Israel Education Foundation – including 27 Republicans and 14 Democrats. Representative Ted Deutch did double duty for Israeli apartheid by attending both trips.
Deutch, a Florida Democrat, will depart Congress within a year to head the American Jewish Committee, a major Israel lobby group. That work will begin in October.
He’s clearly qualified for the job: Before the trips, he was on record lambasting the Amnesty report as “full of the same mischaracterizations, false accusations and biased language that have been hurled at Israel and its advocates for decades.”
He didn’t mention Palestinians a single time in his Twitter thread.
Notwithstanding his anti-Palestinian position, indeed likely because of it, Democrats have elevated him to the position of chair for the Subcommittee on the Middle East, North Africa and Global Counterterrorism.
On the second trip, AIPAC showed him extolling the virtues of American and Israeli “shared values.”
While systemic racism remains pervasive in the United States, Jim Crow was at least formally abolished. Israel, on the other hand, continues to entrench a dual system of law – and extrajudicial violence and discrimination – that subjects Palestinians to life with inferior rights in an ethnonationalist state.
As Amnesty noted last month, “since its establishment in 1948, Israel has pursued an explicit policy of establishing and maintaining a Jewish demographic hegemony and maximizing its control over land to benefit Jewish Israelis while minimizing the number of Palestinians and restricting their rights and obstructing their ability to challenge this dispossession.”
Yet US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, on 16 February, that Israel’s creation was “the greatest political achievement of the 20th century.”
Words that no present-day Democrat would venture about apartheid South Africa are gladly proffered on behalf of apartheid Israel.
The statement ignores the Palestinian experience of dispossession and apartheid – in effect, celebrating them – and suggests an acceptance of racial discrimination provided it remains of a socially acceptable kind.
Casual anti-Palestinian racism remains the norm for congressional Democrats. Consequently, anti-racist positions on other matters of concern to the Democratic Party must be seen as potentially little more than a pose – pandering for votes.
Economic peace, once again
During his junket, Congressman Ro Khanna, who represents part of Silicon Valley, met with people at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.
“Some of them spoke about the joint ventures where Palestinians are being employed or are participating even in joint economic activity, all of which I think are promising places to explore,” he told Jewish Insider.
This tech-washing of Israeli apartheid is no different from how former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, promoted “economic peace.”
The basic idea – which re-emerges every few years – is that the denial of the most basic rights of the Palestinian people can be sidestepped by providing shopping malls, consumer goods and other distractions.
The late Desmond Tutu, a hero of the anti-apartheid movement, called this polishing the chains of the oppressed.
“We don’t want our chains comfortable,” Tutu said in 1984 at the height of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. “We want them removed.”
But polishing Israel’s chains on the Palestinian people is exactly what Khanna is proposing – a bit more tech here, a few less checkpoints there.
Freedom and equal rights for Palestinians are tellingly absent.
Khanna acknowledges mere “places of disagreement” with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett over “forced evictions” and the need “to open up Gaza in terms of economic activity.”
His phrasing indicates an unwillingness to grapple with the underlying reality of apartheid and the discriminatory denial of political rights.
AIPAC, meanwhile, was eager to showcase the delegates’ bipartisan and interracial support for Israel – apologists all for Israeli apartheid.
The organization has long been concerned that support for Israel among progressives and young people of color is slipping.
The organization quickly touted Democratic delegates’ meeting with Member of Knesset Mansour Abbas, who is treading close to being the Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi of Israeli politics.
Abbas’ small party props up Israel’s coalition.
A Zulu leader, Buthelezi was widely reviled by the anti-apartheid resistance movement for working with the racist South African government.
Abbas does much the same in providing a veneer of legitimacy to Israel’s apartheid system, where a small number of Palestinian citizens of Israel are represented as tokens but exercise no real power and most certainly not in regard to stopping Israeli military violence against Palestinians.
In a February appearance at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank affiliated with AIPAC, Abbas said in response to a question implicitly about Amnesty’s report: “I would not call it apartheid.”
He added, “I am within the coalition,” though he surely must be aware by now of how frequently he is used by conservative and liberal defenders of Israel to make the case that apartheid doesn’t exist there, even as he actively votes to uphold it.
Whatever justifications he may give for supporting the government of an apartheid state, Abbas is clearly happy to be used as a propaganda prop by the pro-apartheid lobby for Israel.
International law when convenient
Republicans, for their part, made clear their belief that international law applies only when convenient.
As Russia attacks Ukraine to widespread condemnation in Washington, Republicans visited the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights – recognized in 2019 by President Trump, in complete disregard to international law, as being under Israeli sovereignty.
AIPAC retweeted an Israeli propaganda group showing off their presentation to Republicans in the occupied Golan Heights.
The maps used by the propaganda group clearly depict the illegally annexed Golan Heights as part of Israel.
Democrat Kathleen Rice of New York, also explicitly put the Golan Heights in Israel.
The message is that territorial conquest is acceptable in some situations provided it is American allies doing the taking.
That double standard from the US has been obvious to many observers over the past few days regarding occupied Syrian and Palestinian territory as opposed to Ukrainian territory.
Congressman Ritchie Torres, also a New York Democrat, bragged about his visit to the “City of David” in occupied East Jerusalem.
This is a theme park built on land Israel seized from Palestinians. It is part of Israel’s efforts to change the demographics of the city and scrub its Arab, Muslim and Christian history and identity while imposing an exclusively Jewish identity.
Torres and other Democrats visited more parts of East Jerusalem with the Israeli occupiers assisting the trip, disregarding the Palestinians whose land and rights Israel is usurping.
Palestinians made clear what they think of such visits, through the words of the BDS National Committee, the steering group for the Palestinian-led, boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
“We condemn the current US Congress delegation whitewashing Israel’s regime of military occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid. This delegation crosses our nonviolent Palestinian BDS picket line and harms our struggle for freedom, justice and equality.”
More alcohol, less brain: Association begins with an average of just one drink a day
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220304090349.htm
Even light-to-moderate drinking is associated with harm to the brain, according to a new study. Researchers analyzed data from more than 36,000 adults that found a link between drinking and reduced brain volume that begins at an average consumption level of less than one alcohol unit a day -- the equivalent of about half a beer -- and rises with each additional drink.
The research, using a dataset of more than 36,000 adults, revealed that going from one to two drinks a day was linked with changes in the brain equivalent to aging two years. Heavier drinking was associated with an even greater toll. The science on heavy drinking and the brain is clear: The two don't have a healthy relationship. People who drink heavily have alterations in brain structure and size that are associated with cognitive impairments.
But according to a new study, alcohol consumption even at levels most would consider modest -- a few beers or glasses of wine a week -- may also carry risks to the brain. An analysis of data from more than 36,000 adults, led by a team from the University of Pennsylvania, found that light-to-moderate alcohol consumption was associated with reductions in overall brain volume.
The link grew stronger the greater the level of alcohol consumption, the researchers showed. As an example, in 50-year-olds, as average drinking among individuals increases from one alcohol unit (about half a beer) a day to two units (a pint of beer or a glass of wine) there are associated changes in the brain equivalent to aging two years. Going from two to three alcohol units at the same age was like aging three and a half years. The team reported their findings in the journal Nature Communications.
"The fact that we have such a large sample size allows us to find subtle patterns, even between drinking the equivalent of half a beer and one beer a day," says Gideon Nave, a corresponding author on the study and faculty member at Penn's Wharton School. He collaborated with former postdoc and co-corresponding author Remi Daviet, now at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Perelman School of Medicine colleagues Reagan Wetherill -- also a corresponding author on the study -- and Henry Kranzler, as well as other researchers.
"These findings contrast with scientific and governmental guidelines on safe drinking limits," says Kranzler, who directs the Penn Center for Studies of Addiction. "For example, although the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism recommends that women consume an average of no more than one drink per day, recommended limits for men are twice that, an amount that exceeds the consumption level associated in the study with decreased brain volume,"
Ample research has examined the link between drinking and brain health, with ambiguous results. While strong evidence exists that heavy drinking causes changes in brain structure, including strong reductions in gray and white matter across the brain, other studies have suggested that moderate levels of alcohol consumption may not have an impact, or even that light drinking could benefit the brain in older adults.
These earlier investigations, however, lacked the power of large datasets. Probing massive quantities of data for patterns is the specialty of Nave, Daviet, and colleagues, who have conducted previous studies using the UK Biobank, a dataset with genetic and medical information from half a million British middle-aged and older adults. They employed biomedical data from this resource in the current study, specifically looking at brain MRIs from more than 36,000 adults in the Biobank, which can be used to calculate white and gray matter volume in different regions of the brain.
"Having this dataset is like having a microscope or a telescope with a more powerful lens," Nave says. "You get a better resolution and start seeing patterns and associations you couldn't before."
To gain an understanding of possible connections between drinking and the brain, it was critical to control for confounding variables that could cloud the relationship. The team controlled for age, height, handedness, sex, smoking status, socioeconomic status, genetic ancestry, and county of residence. They also corrected the brain-volume data for overall head size.
The volunteer participants in the Biobank had responded to survey questions about their alcohol consumption levels, from complete abstention to an average of four or more alcohol units a day. When the researchers grouped the participants by average-consumption levels, a small but apparent pattern emerged: The gray and white matter volume that might otherwise be predicted by the individual's other characteristics was reduced.
Going from zero to one alcohol units didn't make much of a difference in brain volume, but going from one to two or two to three units a day was associated with reductions in both gray and white matter.
"It's not linear," says Daviet. "It gets worse the more you drink."
Even removing the heavy drinkers from the analyses, the associations remained. The lower brain volume was not localized to any one brain region, the scientists found.
To give a sense of the impact, the researchers compared the reductions in brain size linked with drinking to those that occur with aging. Based on their modeling, each additional alcohol unit consumed per day was reflected in a greater aging effect in the brain. While going from zero to a daily average of one alcohol unit was associated with the equivalent of a half a year of aging, the difference between zero and four drinks was more than 10 years of aging.
In future work, the authors hope to tap the UK Biobank and other large datasets to help answer additional questions related to alcohol use. "This study looked at average consumption, but we're curious whether drinking one beer a day is better than drinking none during the week and then seven on the weekend," Nave says. "There's some evidence that binge drinking is worse for the brain, but we haven't looked closely at that yet."
They'd also like to be able to more definitively pin down causation rather than correlation, which may be possible with new longitudinal biomedical datasets that are following young people as they age.
"We may be able to look at these effects over time and, along with genetics, tease apart causal relationships," Nave says.
And while the researchers underscore that their study looked only at correlations, they say the findings may prompt drinkers to reconsider how much they imbibe.
"There is some evidence that the effect of drinking on the brain is exponential," says Daviet. "So, one additional drink in a day could have more of an impact than any of the previous drinks that day. That means that cutting back on that final drink of the night might have a big effect in terms of brain aging."
In other words, Nave says, "the people who can benefit the most from drinking less are the people who are already drinking the most."
Reagan R. Wetherill is a research assistant professor of psychiatry in the University of PennsylvaniaPerelman School of Medicine.
Henry R. Kranzler is the Benjamin Rush Professor in Psychiatry and director of the Penn Center for Studies of Addiction at Penn's Perelman School of Medicine.
Gideon Nave is the Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz Assistant Professor in the Wharton SchoolDepartment of Marketing and the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative at Penn.
Remi Daviet is an assistant professor of marketing in the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Daviet was first author and Wetherill, Nave, and Daviet were co-corresponding authors on the paper.
Other coauthors were Kanchana Jagannathan, Nathaniel Spilka, and Henry R. Kranzler of Penn's Perelman School of Medicine; Gökhan Aydogan of the University of Zurich; and Philipp D. Koellinger of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The study was supported by the European Research Council (Grant 647648), National Science Foundation (Grant 1942917), National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (Grant AA023894), and Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center at the Crescenz VA Medical Center
Story Source:
Materials provided by University of Pennsylvania. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
Remi Daviet, Gökhan Aydogan, Kanchana Jagannathan, Nathaniel Spilka, Philipp D. Koellinger, Henry R. Kranzler, Gideon Nave, Reagan R. Wetherill. Associations between alcohol consumption and gray and white matter volumes in the UK Biobank. Nature Communications, 2022; 13 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-28735-5
Guatemalan Water Defenders Celebrate Ten Years Of Resistance
https://popularresistance.org/guatemalan-water-defenders-celebrate-10-years-of-resistance/
An Attempted Assassination, Criminalization, And Violent Eviction In 2014 Didn’t Stop The Peaceful Resistance Of La Puya In Guatemala, Which Won Legal Action Suspending Harmful Mining Activities.
In Central America, as in many other parts of the world today, communities are being thrust into life and death struggles up against powerful interests to ensure clean water and health for their future generations. This is often the case where mining companies seek to dig up gold, silver, iron ore or other metals and minerals, disrupting or destroying precious water supplies in the process, and leaving behind massive quantities of toxic waste on the land.
With national and international laws designed to privilege such harmful activities in the name of so-called development and progress, it is vital to celebrate the milestones of people fighting against all odds to protect their lives and lands from such threats.
Today, March 2, many will honor the life of Berta Cáceres and reaffirm their commitment to the fight for justice for her brutal murder in her home six years ago. Her leadership in the resistance to megaprojects in Honduras, including a hydroelectric dam and mining concessions on Indigenous Lenca territory, continues to inspire many. Today also marks ten years of inspirational, peaceful resistance to gold mining at a place known as La Puya, just north of Guatemala City. The freedom of eight water defenders in Tocoa, Honduras is also being celebrated this week where there are important signs that resistance to mining is gaining traction at the national level following the inauguration of President Xiomara Castro.
A Decade of Water Defense in Guatemala
Celebrating ten years of resistance in Guatemala, the Peaceful Resistance “La Puya” began on March 2, 2012 with a 24-hour protest camp in front of the entrance to a gold mine site operated by Nevada-based mining company Kappes, Cassiday & Associates (KCA) just north of Guatemala City. This week, over fifty Guatemalan and international organizations sent their congratulations to La Puya for its tenacious and ongoing struggle.
Over the course of the past decade, as a result of their resistance, members have suffered acts of intimidation, an attempted assassination, criminalization, as well as a violent eviction in May 2014 in order to enable the mine to start operating.
According to Guatemalan courts, KCA’s operations were always illegal. The company never had local support, lacked a construction license to build the mine, and violated environmental regulations. Legal action led to the mine suspension in 2016, upheld by the Constitutional Court in 2020, until which time a consultation has been undertaken with the community.
Despite having failed to respect Guatemalan law and much less the communities’ human rights, KCA is now suing the state of Guatemala for over $400 million dollars at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) under the terms of the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. (DR-CAFTA). KCA’s case against the Guatemalan government is part of an increasingly common strategy used by transnational corporations to bully foreign governments into approving projects that lack community support or otherwise extract their profits through compensation.
In its arbitration defense, despite the Guatemalan government having backed the company to get the mine up and operating in 2014, it acknowledges the legitimate resistance of La Puya to protect already scarce water supplies from contamination and depletion. It also argues that the company’s environmental impact study was incomplete, failed to abide by Guatemalan standards, let alone international norms, and never should have been approved. Meanwhile, the Guatemalan government also claims that the company failed to abide by at least 50% of its environmental obligations according to national regulations.
The Guatemalan defense team even goes so far to recognize that the injustice of this case is further evidence of the injustice of the international arbitration system: “The people of Guatemala should not now be asked to pick up the tab for Claimants, if at all that they suffered any business losses. Otherwise, this Tribunal would be rewarding an imprudent investor at the expense of causing doubt on the fairness of the investor-state dispute settlement system.”
It is only the stalwart persistence of the Peaceful Resistance La Puya and their careful documentation of their struggle and the company’s violations that have kept mining out of their communities so far and brought these local and international injustices to light.
Hard Fought Freedom for Defenders in Honduras
In Honduras, late the night of February 24th, six water defenders were finally reunited with their families after being illegally held for two and a half years in pretrial detention. Two other water defenders were released earlier in February.
Their crime? Having participated in peaceful protests against contamination of their rivers from an open-pit iron oxide project operating within a protected area upstream of the water they rely on. After two and a half years of legal work and campaigning to build support for the freedom of the water defenders, including from solidarity groups, faith, environmental and human rights organizations, as well as UN bodies, the men were finally released. They were received with fireworks, applause, and hugs from their family members, supporters and members of the Municipal Committee in Defense of the Commons and Public Goods of Tocoa, recipient of the recipient of the 2019 Letelier-Moffitt International Human Rights award.
Honduran company Los Pinares Investments holds two mining concessions within the Carlos Escaleras National Park, the headwaters of 34 rivers. In 2013, the limits of the central area of the park were redrawn so that the project would remain within the buffer zone in which such mining is permitted. The company, owned by Honduran elite that enjoyed a cozy relationship with the now former dictatorship of Juan Orlando Hernández – recently arrested for his narcotrafficking ties –, has received investment from the large US steel company Nucor. Nucor reported ending its investment in the project in 2019, but two of its executives still appear as directors of a Panamanian subsidiary that is part of the Honduran business group.
The Municipal Committee continues to challenge the illegality of the iron oxide project, which went into operation in 2021. It is possible that with the recent inauguration of Honduras’ first female President Xiomara Castro that their complaints seeking the project’s closure could gain traction.
Notably, prior to being ousted in a military backed coup in 2009, under Castro’s husband and former president Mel Zelaya, a proposed bill was awaiting debate that sought to prohibit open pit mining and put other constraints on this toxic activity. This bill came about as a result of the difficult struggles of movements and mining-affected communities in Honduras, such as in the Siria Valley where communities faced health harms from the San Martín gold mine, owned by Goldcorp (now Newmont).
In echo of this earlier proposal, on February 28, the Honduran Secretary of Energy, Natural Resources and Mines issued a communiqué stating that no further permits will be issued for extractive projects as a result of being a threat to public health, water and natural resources, declaring Honduras free of open pit mining. The statement further indicates that the authority will “proceed with the review, suspension and cancelation of environmental licenses, permits and concessions.”
While applying such measures to existing mining projects and permits in the country is sure to face a fight and require continued organizing from Honduran water defenders and their allies, this declaration is potent evidence of the tremendous efforts that have already taken place by land and water defenders on the frontline.
Celebrating water defenders and their long-term struggles is part of learning from one another. While La Puya and many other communities in Guatemala continue to stave off precious metal mining, as Hondurans forge a path to be mining free, and as the Salvadoran people also fight to maintain their ban on metallic mining since March 2017, they remind us about how through collective efforts and tenacity important victories can be won for the health of people and the planet.
How Greensboro Massacre Survivor Taught The Next Generation To Fight
By People's Dispatch. March 5, 2022
https://popularresistance.org/how-greensboro-massacre-survivor-marty-taught-the-next-generation-to-fight/
The Ku Klux Klan murdered five of her comrades and the father of her six-month-old child.
She remained undeterred in her activism for the rest of her life.
On November 3, 1979, Marty Nathan, Mike Nathan, and other members and supporters of the Communist Workers’ Party were stationed along the route of a “Death to the Klan” march in Greensboro, North Carolina. This multiracial working-class movement’s success organizing textile and hospital workers had attracted the attention of the Ku Klux Klan; “not surprisingly,” Marty explained, “the Klan began to rise in 1979 … [in places] where hard-hitting union organizing and strikes were occurring.” Not only were workers and organizers faced with resistance and threats from employers – they were also confronted with the Klan’s virulent racism, violence, and its efforts to spread fear and confusion as the Klan ran their own recruiting drives in the textile mills to split up the unions and grow its base.
The march, in Marty’s words, “was a response to a threat against unionization by the Klan, which would historically split up workers, black and white, threaten the leaders and essentially act on behalf of the corporate owners.” One of the key organizers of the march, Reverend Nelson Johnson, added that “it was absolutely necessary to have some expression of opposition to racism as manifest by the Klan in order to continue with the work of labor organizing in the textile industry and in order to continue with the work of uniting people from different racial backgrounds.” So, on November 3, 1979, the CWP organized a conference about the Klan and labor organizing, kicked off by the Death to the Klan march.
Marty and her comrades would later find out that the Klan had worked with the Greensboro police, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agent, and an FBI informant beforehand, which provided the Klan with the route of the march and encouraged them to carry arms while the police mandated that the protestors be unarmed. Before long, the Klan descended upon the march, at that point embedded in the predominantly black neighborhood Morningside, with no police in sight – in fact, a rank and file officer responding to an unrelated call in the neighborhood had been told to clear the area hours before the attack.
As protestors stood on the street, a caravan of nine cars decorated with confederate flags and other paraphernalia approached. The klansmen attacked the protestors, first with sticks and then opening fire, killing five of them and injuring ten others. Marty and her husband Mike Nathan were both doctors stationed at the march to provide medical assistance if needed; she was posted at a later point along the march route running the first aid car when the attack took place and survived the massacre, but Mike, stationed in Morningside, did not. She would rely on her comrades to find out what happened to her husband that day.
In Marty’s words, the premeditated attack killed people who “were organizing unions. They were revolutionaries. They were socialists. And they knew that in order to change society, you have to have an organized working class.” Not only did this movement unite white and black workers with a clear vision, but it understood the importance of internationalism; after the massacre, the survivors linked this “North American death squad” to the death squads in Central America, North America, and South Africa, up to the genocidal violence perpetrated under Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil taking place today (later in life, Marty would at times wear a ring from Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement that had been gifted to her “on my middle finger, which I give to Trump,” she told me).
“After you lose somebody, there’s nothing else that you can lose. But what you can hope in all this is that you can change the future. For victims of racist violence, white supremacist violence, that’s the goal,” Marty told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman on the 40th anniversary of the massacre. “In a time of climate change, threat of nuclear war, and increasing economic disparity, we all have to be in the streets, and we do not want to get shot,” she said. Marty continued to fight against racism and imperialism and for justice even in her last days before passing away on November 29, 2021 from lung cancer and heart disease; she was profoundly shaped by her work with the CWP and by the massacre, and those experiences continued to shape the people around her throughout her life.
Anyone who knew Marty would not be surprised to know that she was undeterred by the attack of the KKK that murdered five of her comrades and took away the father of their then six-month-old child. She fought tirelessly alongside the other survivors and their comrades to expose the direct connection between the KKK, the police, the FBI, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, which also had an informant embedded in the Klan and was aware of the attack before it happened but failed to take any steps to prevent it.
Not only had the police given the protestors’ march route to the klansmen; they were present at the massacre in the tenth car following the caravan in an unmarked police vehicle but did nothing to stop the massacre. Marty and the other survivors successfully proved this and other acts demonstrating the complicity of the police, city, and FBI in the massacre, finally winning a $351,000 civil lawsuit in 1985 after having lost two criminal trials in which the prosecution was more focused on prosecuting the communist victims and survivors of the massacre than the Klan. Only in 2020 would they receive a long overdue apology from the City of Greensboro. Though Marty and her daughter were the only ones awarded money in the settlement, Marty gave her settlement to the other survivors and co-founded the Greensboro Justice Fund in 1980 and, in 2009, the Markham Nathan Fund (MNF) in Mike’s memory to fund grassroots organizations to carry the work forward.
By the time Marty passed away in November 2021, she had fundamentally shaped the organizing landscape in her home of Western Massachusetts, where she moved in 1995. Even when people couldn’t stand each other, everyone seemed to love Marty. She believed in uniting people from a wide range of perspectives, but she never compromised her politics in moments of disagreement. She canvassed for the re-election of Congressman Jim McGovern along with other local officials, and when it came time to hold people to account, she did so unapologetically.
Even as her health faltered in the months and years before she passed away, Marty joined other anti-imperialist activists to call on Congressman McGovern to shift his position on Palestine and to work to lift the sanctions against Venezuela or, in her words, “to inhabit his own skin … – an understanding and compassionate one – … and tell him that he has to follow through because this is not a theoretical issue. This is an issue of people in Venezuela dying everyday… because of the sanctions.” It is in large part thanks to Marty’s work that Congressman McGovern did just that in a letter dated the day of that rally, cited as “the best letter that we’ve ever seen out of Congress on sanctions period” by Alexander Main of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a leading source of research and data on the sanctions.
Not only was Marty a fierce and dogged leader and mentor: she was also the people’s doctor. During her days in the CWP, she ran clinics at Duke Hospital to treat textile workers with brown lung disease caused by the cotton particles they inhaled on the job. In the weeks before her death, she stood with migrant workers at a press conference not only as a speaker but as a doctor, rushing over to a ditch to mend someone’s twisted ankle during the event. After moving to Massachusetts, she co-founded La Cliniquita, where she worked as a doctor primarily for immigrants and undocumented patients for 18 years, building an infrastructure to provide quality care that did not exist until she moved to the area for communities that had been systematically deprived of health care. At her memorial service, her former patients spoke about what she meant to them not only as a doctor but as a friend to whom she opened her home over the years. In 2012, she co-founded Climate Action Now as well as the climate justice group 2degrees and went on to help win the decades-long fight against a proposed biomass plant in Springfield, MA in 2021, always keeping climate justice at the heart of her work and revolutionary organizing at the heart of her life.
Marty’s list of accolades is unending, but those who knew her know that her ability to bring people together and lift up and mentor those around her, her refusal to give up no matter the obstacles or danger that she faced, and her unrelenting determination to fight for justice are irreplaceable. As Marty said, “after you lose somebody, there’s nothing else that you can lose. But what you can hope in all this is that you can change the future.”
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