Playing reckless politics on the rim of a volcano

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/08/pers-m08.html

David North
@davidnorthwsws


6 hours ago




On July 23, 1939, Leon Trotsky, exiled in Mexico, met with journalists and gave his appraisal of the international situation. Though confined within the walls of a villa in Coyoacan, Trotsky’s grasp of world politics was unequaled.

Speaking in English, Trotsky told the assembled reporters: “The capitalist system is in a state of impasse. From my side, I do not see any normal, legal, peaceful outcome of this impasse. The outcome can only be created by a tremendous historic explosion.

“Historic explosions are of two kinds—wars and revolutions. I believe we will have both.” All governments and the established mass parties were being overwhelmed by events. In a striking metaphor, Trotsky compared their actions to “child’s play on the sloping side of a volcano before an eruption.”

Trotsky’s analysis was soon vindicated. The volcano of the second imperialist world war erupted just five weeks later.

Trotsky’s description of the world on the very eve of World War II acquires extraordinary relevance in the present situation. All the governments are behaving with staggering recklessness.

But the most reckless of all the governments is that of the United States. Its leaders have climbed up the volcano’s side all the way to its rim and are dropping explosives into the red hot and bubbling core.

President Joe Biden meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Wednesday, June 16, 2021, in Geneva, Switzerland. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)


Having driven Russian President Vladimir Putin into a corner with the intention of leaving him with no choice except a disastrous invasion of Ukraine, US President Joe Biden has set into motion military, economic, political and social processes that he cannot control and the outcome of which he cannot foresee.

This level of recklessness can only be explained as the action of a regime that is resorting to war as a means of diverting attention from and counteracting the buildup of extreme social tensions within the US itself.

The United States has been in the throes of a domestic crisis that is without parallel since the era of the Civil War. There are four principal elements of this crisis.

1) The COVID-19 pandemic, which ravaged the country, with the official death toll approaching one million.

2) A political crisis of a magnitude equaled only by the Civil War. On January 6, 2021, an attempt was made by the sitting president to violently overthrow the Constitution and prevent the accession of the new duly elected president.

3) The increasing fragility of an economic system that is sustained by parasitic speculation, fueled by the unlimited infusion of liquidity by the Federal Reserve. In the beginning of 2022, price inflation could no longer be contained.

4) After four decades of its suppression, the class struggle reemerged in 2021. Major industrial strikes broke out which assumed the form of an insurrection against the bureaucratic and pro-corporate unions. It is evident that the working class is becoming radicalized.

The interaction of these crises has produced a high level of anxiety and disorientation within the ruling elite. This is a major factor in the decision of the Biden administration to provoke the Ukraine-Russian War, hoping that it will generate a sense of “national unity.”

But the incitement of war will have precisely the opposite effect. It will intensify all elements of the US crisis and, above all, accelerate and expand the class struggle. The relentless war propaganda has had little effect upon the working class, which—in the midst of a social crisis within the United States—is opposed to the diversion of social resources and expenditure of lives in yet another military crusade.

The anti-Russian hysteria is not an accurate barometer of social sentiment in the United States. It is, rather, a thermometric measurement of the war fever gripping the affluent and reactionary upper middle class.

The basic tendencies of social life will assert themselves as workers are driven into open struggle in defense of their own interests. These struggles will take on an international character, and they form the social foundation of an anti-war movement.

This is the analysis upon which the Socialist Equality Party bases its opposition to war.

Minnesota Workers United Organizes Support For Upcoming Teachers’ Strike

https://popularresistance.org/minnesota-workers-united-organizes-support-for-upcoming-teachers-strike/



By Fight Back News. March 7, 2022




Minneapolis, MN – On Saturday March 5 rank-and-file union members along with parents, teachers and students held a press conference in support of the teachers, education support professionals (ESPs) and education assistants who will begin a strike Tuesday in Minneapolis and Saint Paul public schools.

More than 93% of the Minneapolis educators voted to authorize the upcoming open-ended strike, along with a 78% strike vote from Saint Paul educators. In the week after the educators’ votes, food service workers in the Minneapolis school system also authorized a strike by a 98% vote. The food service workers’ strike is expected to start soon after the educators’ strike begins.

The press conference was organized by Minnesota Workers United (MWU) which is coordinating community and labor support for the strike on the Minneapolis side of the river, and also stands in support of the Saint Paul educators. Minnesota Workers United are rank-and-file union members who work to build a fighting labor movement through things like strike support, fundraising for strikes and organizing labor and community actions both in support of strikes as well as around broader community issues that affect the working class.

Some of MWU’s more notable previous actions have included things like a large rally downtown Minneapolis when the supreme court issued an anti-union ruling on the Janus versus AFSCME case which made public sector jobs effectively right to work, organizing a protest at Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freemans house in Minneapolis after the murder of George Floyd, a successful fundraiser and strike support event for the 2016 Minnesota nurses strike, as well as organizing strike support for the Saint Paul Federation of teachers when they nearly went on strike two contracts ago.

Along with MWU, the press conference featured participation by labor federations including the Minneapolis Regional labor Federation, the AFL-CIO, and Education Minnesota, AFSCME Locals 2822 and 3800, CWA Local 7250, SEIU Local 284, and more. Additionally, there were speakers from Twin Cities Coalition for Justice For Jamar, along with parents, students and community members.

At the press conference MWU released a sign-on letter in support of the Minneapolis teachers and ESP’s demands calling for a living wage for ESPs, improvements to attract and retain oppressed nationality educators, mental health supports for kids, smaller class sizes, and better compensation for educators. The sign on letter was signed by 47 organizations including the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation and the Minnesota AFL-CIO.

On Sunday March 6 at 5 p.m. MWU will be holding a rally at the Minneapolis Public Schools building in support of the educators.

Venezuela: Communard Union Holds Founding Congress, Elects Leadership

https://popularresistance.org/venezuela-communard-union-holds-founding-congress-elects-leadership/





By Ricardo Vaz,
Venezuelanalysis.

March 7, 2022


The growing grassroots network vows to expand popular power and move forward in the construction of socialism.

Caracas ‒ Venezuelan communards gathered on March 3 and 4 to officially launch a national organization.

More than 450 delegates were present in El Maizal Commune, Lara State, for the founding congress of the Communard Union. The collective aims to build a network of social organizations throughout the country.

The delegates, representing 48 communes and 12 other social movements, approved the organization’s political program and internal statutes, which include a political structure and mechanisms for new organizations to join. The founding documents were collated by a provisional leadership following more than three years of meetings and grassroots work.

A number of flagship communes, among them El Maizal, Che Guevara (Mérida state) and Luisa Cáceres (Anzoátegui state), held several gatherings before launching the Communard Union in early 2020.

In February and March, 2020, dozens of communes held five regional meetings to discuss the organization’s mission, internal dynamics and political character. The Covid-19 pandemic largely halted progress, with a pro tempore structure setting up brigades to bring further communes on board. Efforts regained steam in late 2021 with renewed regional gatherings leading up to the founding congress.

After the documents’ approval, the delegates split up to elect the members of the newly approved instances. Four regions (Center-Capital, Center-West, East and the Andes) elected three spokespeople each for the Communard Union’s national board and regional officers for eight different sectors, among them production, education and security.

A fifth region, the Llanos, did not have as much preparatory work and elected a promotional team to contact more organizations before choosing its structures like the others in the coming months.

The organizations and activists present pledged to set up productive and trade ties as well as to expand the Communard Union in their territories.

“We have not failed (former President) Chávez,” El Maizal spokesperson Ángel Prado told those in attendance. “This is a Bolivarian and Chavista movement!”

The popular leader, who was also elected mayor in the local Simón Planas municipality last November, urged grassroots organizations to not remain isolated.

“We are growing step by step in this very difficult moment for the country,” he added. “If we remain isolated, the counterrevolution will destroy us.”

Prado stressed that the Nicolás Maduro government “is not an enemy” but that social organizations had their own interpretation of Chávez’s Homeland Plan and should look to continue building alliances.

On Friday, the communard meeting had a visit from newly appointed Commune Minister Jorge Arreaza.

“I want communes to work side by side with our team, to give us ideas,” he said. Arreaza served as foreign minister for several years and lost a governorship electoral re-run in Barinas state in January. He pledged to work with other ministries to implement policies favoring communes and grassroots organizations.

“Popular power is the guarantee for a transition towards socialism in Venezuela. We need its voice to be listened to and taken into account,” the minister concluded.

Former President Hugo Chávez proposed communes as the “unit cells” for the construction of socialism in the Caribbean nation. They are assembly-driven organizations envisioned as local self-governments before setting up larger networks to build the so-called Communal State.

Following their official launch in 2009, communes grew and expanded across the country, acquiring or taking over land and other means of production. However, the years-long economic crisis and US sanctions saw popular power collectives struggle to remain active, while social leaders have denounced efforts by state institutions to curtail grassroots autonomy.

According to the Venezuelan government, there are around 3,000 officially registered communes.

A Proposed Solution To The Ukraine War

https://popularresistance.org/a-proposed-solution-to-the-ukraine-war/





By Greg Mello,
Consortium News.

March 7, 2022


An end to the invasion and war in Ukraine can only be guaranteed if Russia’s security is itself guaranteed.

Security is largely indivisible. Security for one state requires security for others, says the Los Alamos Study Group.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, what was a regional conflict has become a global hybrid war with ever-greater stakes, not least the risk of nuclear war.

Perhaps the greatest danger lies in the difference of motives between parties, which is also the fundamental cause of this war: Russia seeks security, while the U.S. and its NATO allies have been using Ukraine to deny that security — to “break Russia,” in Henry Kissinger’s 2015 phrase. The U.S. does not want peace, unless it be the peace of a conquered Russia. That is why there is no obvious end to the escalations and counter-escalations. The U.S. and NATO see opportunity in the war they have been trying so hard to provoke.

The tragedy is that few people seem to understand that at the root of the Ukraine crisis is a specific strategy known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine, named after Paul Wolfowitz who, as under secretary of defense in the administration of George H. W. Bush, was one of the authors of a 1992 document that laid out a neo-conservative manifesto aimed at ensuring American dominance of world affairs following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“Our first objective,” stated the document, “is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival [to the United States], either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere. … This is a dominant consideration underlying [a] regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

The Wolfowitz Doctrine triggered the post-Cold War use of NATO as an instrument of bloody aggression against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. It declared, in effect, that diplomacy was dead and that American power ruled by violence if necessary. A resurgent Russia led by Vladimir Putin was next, and on the horizon, a risen China.

The 2014 Washington-engineered coup in Ukraine that removed an elected leader who sought to reinforce his country’s relationship with neighboring Russia, was a product of the 1992 Doctrine and the extremism it represented. Victoria Nuland, a neo-conservative ideologue and President Barack Obama’s “point person” in Ukraine, has played the same role in President Joe Biden’s State Department.

The 1992 Doctrine is elaborated in an infamous RAND study on how to overextend and, in Kissinger’s words, “break Russia.” This is U.S. foreign policy today: a fact well understood by the Russian leadership who regard their country as effectively under siege by the United States.

The potential of American missiles pointed at Moscow from former Soviet satellite countries, together with NATO troop deployments, is the reality they see. A militarized and virulently anti-Russian Ukraine being used as a tool by the U.S., with an expressed wish for nuclear weapons, on the brink of invading Russian-sympathizing provinces on the Russian border — all that was too much for Russia. What, do you suppose, the U.S. would do if such a situation arose in Mexico or Canada?

Since 2014, the Las Alamos Study Group has made it part of our business to understand the conflict in Ukraine and its significance for the world. In that year we held public meetings and teach-ins discussing it and since then have tried to examine developments as we could. In the Obama Administration, we took our concerns to the offices of the National Security Council — and were appalled by the lack of knowledge and understanding we found there.

Many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have taken positions on this conflict. In our view, most (not all) of their statements are superficial, and/or omit the causes of the invasion as Russia understands them, or are in lock-step with U.S. and NATO propaganda.
The Study Group’s Basic Conclusions
Understanding why Russia invaded is not condoning the invasion. Russia’s view is that of existential dangers to its very existence. The sincerity of that view is evident in the grave risks Russia is taking in this invasion which, again, we need neither justify nor condemn. Russia’s view has to be respected, whether or not we agree with it. Failure by the U.S. and NATO over the course of decades to respect Russia’s position, and to provide a humane and reasonable provision for Russia’s security needs is the main if not the only material cause of the present conflict.
Telling Russia what to do is the problem, not the solution. We in NATO countries and in the West more broadly, and in peace-oriented groups, should confine our imperatives and judgments to what we ourselves can do, in our own countries and in relation to NATO. It is imperative to bring peace to Ukraine as best we can and to not inflame or broaden this conflict further. Our words can kill, or heal.
An end to the invasion and war in Ukraine can only be guaranteed if Russia’s security is itself guaranteed. Security is largely indivisible. Security for one state requires security for others. This is a core principle of European security which Russia rightly insists upon. The U.S. should honor that. The fundamental cause of the current conflict is the desire of the U.S. to weaken or “break” Russia.
Human rights, including the right of political self-determination, are pillars of Western values and institutions. The government of Ukraine has denied human rights and political self-determination to the peoples of the Donbass. Some 13,000 people have died during the eight years since the 2014 coup, according to the United Nations. The Ukrainian government has overtly genocidal policies toward Russian minorities. Since the 2014 U.S. sponsored coup, the U.S. and its European allies have used Ukraine to undermine Russian security.
Nazi and neo-Nazi formations and ideologies in Ukraine present a clear danger to human rights and human life everywhere.
Peace and nuclear disarmament organizations should be alarmed by NGO support for U.S. efforts to demonize and destabilize Russia.
What the Study Group Wants
We want a negotiated peace at the earliest possible time. In our own countries, every effort should be made to achieve this. We do not see those efforts.
We want an end to further escalation and broadening of the conflict, which threatens the well-being and security of the whole world. None of our countries should be introducing or transporting arms or conducting military activities or providing training or support of any kind in Ukraine. Peace groups should oppose all such escalation. “Helping Ukraine” with military “aid” is just a way of getting more people killed in the service of long-term U.S. aims to destroy the Russia.
Weapons should not be provided to civilian individuals, gangs, criminals, children, and “stay-behind,” guerrilla, or *Volkssturm*groups. This only inflicts needless suffering and damages prospects for peace now and in the long run. There is no honor or legitimacy in such tactics in the present circumstances.
All economic sanctions – which hurt ordinary citizens more than elites – should be lifted. Economic sanctions are weapons of mass destruction, with global effects.
We want measured, just, de jure de-nazification of the Ukrainian government and laws.
The independence of the Donbass region within pre-conflict administrative boundaries should be accepted by all peace organizations and states.
The democratic decision of Crimea to rejoin Russia should be accepted by all peace organizations and states.
Peace groups should support a neutral, demilitarized (i.e. without heavy weapons or force projection capability) Ukraine, which is similar if not identical to the outcome sought by Russia.
Civilian areas must not be used as military staging or artillery bases. This is illegal, in fact. There is evidence that the Ukrainian Armed Forces are engaging in this odious practice.
Ukraine should not be allowed to join NATO. That was a capital demand of Russia and one that we should all support.
NATO should disband. The largest military alliance in the world, NATO consumes more resources than all the world’s militaries combined, and has conducted multiple wars of aggression, in violation of the U.N. Charter and Nuremberg principles. NATO is also a nuclear weapons alliance.
The U.S. and the five states that host U.S. nuclear weapons should, jointly or individually, end nuclear hosting arrangements, as well as end the training of non-U.S. pilots in nuclear weapons use and the prospective use of non-U.S. dual-capable aircraft for nuclear missions.
Clearly, all of the above is urgent if the killing is to end, and there is to be a lasting peace in Europe.

Worthy And Unworthy Victims

https://popularresistance.org/worthy-and-unworthy-victims/



By Chris Hedges,
Scheer Post.

March 7, 2022




Dividing the world into worthy and unworthy victims is a tactic used to justify our crimes and demonize our enemies.

Conflicts will not be solved until all nations abide by international law and all victims are deemed worthy.

Rulers divide the world into worthy and unworthy victims, those we are allowed to pity, such as Ukrainians enduring the hell of modern warfare, and those whose suffering is minimized, dismissed, or ignored. The terror we and our allies carry out against Iraqi, Palestinian, Syrian, Libyan, Somali and Yemeni civilians is part of the regrettable cost of war. We, echoing the empty promises from Moscow, claim we do not target civilians. Rulers always paint their militaries as humane, there to serve and protect. Collateral damage happens, but it is regrettable.

This lie can only be sustained among those who are unfamiliar with the explosive ordinance and large kill zones of missiles, iron fragmentation bombs, mortar, artillery and tank shells, and belt-fed machine guns. This bifurcation into worthy and unworthy victims, as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,” is a key component of propaganda, especially in war. The Russian-speaking population in Ukraine, to Moscow, are worthy victims. Russia is their savior: The 1.5 million refugees and the millions of Ukrainian families cowering in basements, car parks and subway stations, are unworthy “Nazis.”

Worthy victims allow citizens to see themselves as empathetic, compassionate, and just. Worthy victims are an effective tool to demonize the aggressor. They are used to obliterate nuance and ambiguity. Mention the provocations carried out by the western alliance with the expansion of NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, a violation of promises made to Moscow in 1990; the stationing of of NATO troops and missile batteries in Eastern Europe; the U.S. involvement in the ouster in 2014 of Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych, which led to the civil war in the east of Ukraine between Russian-backed separatists and Ukraine’s army, a conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, and you are dismissed as a Putin apologist.

It is to taint the sainthood of the worthy victims, and by extension ourselves. We are good. They are evil. Worthy victims are used not only to express sanctimonious outrage, but to stoke self-adulation and a poisonous nationalism. The cause becomes sacred, a religious crusade. Fact-based evidence is abandoned, as it was during the calls to invade Iraq. Charlatans, liars, con artists, fake defectors, and opportunists become experts, used to fuel the conflict.

Celebrities, who, like the powerful, carefully orchestrate their public image, pour out their hearts to worthy victims. Hollywood stars such as George Clooney made trips to Darfur to denounce the war crimes being committed by Khartoum at the same time the US was killing scores of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. The war in Iraq was as savage as the slaughter in Darfur, but to express outrage at what was happening to unworthy victims was to become branded as the enemy, who of course, like Putin or Saddam Hussein, is always the new Hitler.

Saddam Hussein’s attacks on the Kurds, considered worthy victims, saw an international outcry while Israeli persecution of the Palestinians, subjected to relentless bombing campaigns by the Israeli air force and its artillery and tank units, with hundreds of dead and wounded, was, at best, an afterthought. At the height of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, worthy victims were the Republicans battling the fascists in the Spanish civil war. Soviet citizens were mobilized to send aid and assistance. Unworthy victims were the millions of people Stalin executed, sometimes after tawdry show trials, and sent to the gulags.

While I was reporting from El Salvador in 1984, the Catholic priest Jerzy Popiełuszko was murdered by the regime in Poland. His death was used to excoriate the Polish communist government, a stark contrast to the response of the Reagan administration to the rape and murder of four Catholic missionaries in 1980 in El Salvador by the Salvadorean National Guard. President Ronald Reagan’s administration sought to blame the three nuns and a lay worker for their own deaths. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s Ambassador to the United Nations, said, “The nuns were not just nuns. The nuns were also political activists.” Secretary of State Alexander Haig speculated that “perhaps they ran a roadblock.”

For the Reagan administration, the murdered churchwomen were unworthy victims. The right-wing government in El Salvador, armed and backed by the United States, joked at the time, Haz patria, mata un cura (Be a patriot, kill a priest). Archbishop Óscar Romero had been assassinated in March of 1980. Nine years later it would gun down six Jesuits and two others at their residence on the campus of Central American University in San Salvador. Between 1977 and 1989, death squads and soldiers killed 13 priests ****in El Salvador.

It is not that worthy victims do not suffer, nor that they are not deserving of our support and compassion, it is that worthy victims alone are rendered human, people like us, and unworthy victims are not. It helps, of course, when, as in Ukraine, they are white. But the missionaries murdered in El Salvador were also white and American and yet it was not enough to shake US support for the country’s military dictatorship.

“The mass media never explain why Andrei Sakharov is worthy and Jose Luis Massera, in Uruguay, is unworthy,” Herman and Chomsky write. “The attention and general dichotomization occur ‘naturally’ as a result of the working of the filters, but the result is the same as if a commissar had instructed the media: ‘Concentrate on the victims of enemy powers and forget about the victims of friends.’ Reports of the abuses of worthy victims not only pass through the filters; they may also become the basis of sustained propaganda campaigns. If the government or corporate community and the media feel that a story is useful as well as dramatic, they focus on it intensively and use it to enlighten the public.”

“This was true, for example, of the shooting down by the Soviets of the Korean airliner KAL 007 in early September 1983, which permitted an extended campaign of denigration of an official enemy and greatly advanced Reagan administration arms plans,” Herman and Chomsky write. “As Bernard Gwertzman noted complacently in the New York Times of August 31, 1984, US officials ‘assert that worldwide criticism of the Soviet handling of the crisis has strengthened the United States in its relations with Moscow.’ In sharp contrast, the shooting down by Israel of a Libyan civilian airliner in February I973 led to no outcry in the West, no denunciations for ‘cold-blooded murder,’ and no boycott. This difference in treatment was explained by the New York Times precisely on the grounds of utility in a 1973 editorial: ‘No useful purpose is served by an acrimonious debate over the assignment of blame for the downing of a Libyan airliner in the Sinai Peninsula last week.’ There was a very ‘useful purpose’ served by focusing on the Soviet act, and a massive propaganda campaign ensued.”

It is impossible to hold those responsible for war crimes accountable if worthy victims are deserving of justice and unworthy victims are not. If Russia should be crippled with sanctions for invading Ukraine, which I believe it should, the United States should have been crippled with sanctions for invading Iraq, a war launched on the basis of lies and fabricated evidence.

Imagine if America’s largest banks, J.P Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America and Wells Fargo were cut off from the international banking system. Imagine if our oligarchs, Jeff Bezos, Jamie Diamond, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk, as venal as Russian oligarchs, had their assets frozen and estates and luxury yachts seized. (Bezos’ yacht is the largest in the world, cost an estimated $500 million and is about 57 feet longer than a football field.) Imagine if leading political figures, such as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and US “oligarchs” were blocked from traveling under visa restrictions. Imagine if the world’s biggest shipping lines suspended shipments to and from the United States. Imagine if US international media news outlets were forced off the air. Imagine if we were blocked from purchasing spare parts for our commercial airlines and our airliners were banned from European air space. Imagine if our athletes were barred from hosting or participating in international sporting events. Imagine if our symphony conductors and opera stars were forbidden from performing unless they denounced the Iraq war and, in a kind of perverted loyalty oath, condemned George W. Bush.

The rank hypocrisy is stunning. Some of the same officials that orchestrated the invasion of Iraq, who under international law are war criminals for carrying out a preemptive war, are now chastising Russia for its violation of international law. The US bombing campaign of Iraqi urban centers, called “Shock and Awe,” saw the dropping of 3,000 bombs on civilian areas that killed over 7,000 noncombatants in the first two months of the war. Russia has yet to go to this extreme.

“I have argued that when you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime,” a FOX News host said (with a straight face) recently to Condoleezza Rice, who served as Bush’s National Security adviser during the Iraq War.

“It is certainly against every principle of international law and international order and that is why throwing the book at them now in terms of economic sanctions and punishments is also a part of it,” Rice said. “And I think the world is there. Certainly, NATO is there. He’s managed to unite NATO in ways that I didn’t think I would ever see after the end of the Cold War.”

Rice inadvertently made a case for why she should be put on trial with the rest of Bush’s enablers. She famously justified the invasion of Iraq by stating: “The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Her rationale for preemptive war, which under post-Nuremberg laws is a criminal war of aggression, is no different than that peddled by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who says the Russia invasion is being carried out to prevent Ukraine from obtaining nuclear weapons.

And this brings me to RT America, where I had a show called “On Contact.” RT America is now off the air after being deplatformed and unable to disseminate its content. This was long the plan of the US government. The invasion of Ukraine gave Washington the opening to shut RT down. The network had a tiny media footprint. But it gave a platform to American dissidents who challenged corporate capitalism, imperialism, war, and the American oligarchy.

My public denunciation of the invasion of Ukraine was treated very differently by RT America than my public denunciation of the Iraq war was treated by my former employer, The New York Times. RT America made no comment, publicly or privately, about my condemnation of the invasion of Ukraine in my ScheerPost column. Nor did RT comment about statements by Jesse Ventura, a Vietnam veteran and former Minnesota governor, who also had a show on RT America, and who wrote: “20 years ago, I lost my job because I opposed the Iraq War and the invasion of Iraq. Today, I still stand for peace. As I’ve said previously, I oppose this war, this invasion, and if standing up for peace costs me another job, so be it. I will always speak out against war.”

RT America was shut down six days after I denounced the invasion of Ukraine. If the network had continued, Ventura and I might have paid with our jobs, but at least for those six days they kept us on air.

The New York Times issued a formal written reprimand in 2003 that forbade me to speak about the war in Iraq, although I had been the newspaper’s Middle East Bureau Chief, had spent seven years in the Middle East and was an Arabic speaker. This reprimand set me up to be fired. If I violated the prohibition, under guild rules, the paper had grounds to terminate my employment. John Burns, another foreign correspondent at the paper, publicly supported the invasion of Iraq. He did not receive a reprimand.

My repeated warnings in public forums about the chaos and bloodbath the invasion of Iraq would trigger, which turned out to be correct, was not an opinion. It was an analysis based on years of experience in the region, including in Iraq, and an intimate understanding of the instrument of war those in the Bush White House lacked. But it challenged the dominant narrative and was silenced. This same censorship of anti-war sentiment is happening now in Russia, but we should remember it happened here during the inception and initial stages of the invasion of Iraq.

Those of us who opposed the Iraq war, no matter how much experience we had in the region, were attacked and vilified. Ventura, who had a three-year contract with MSNBC, saw his show canceled.

Those who were cheerleaders for the war, such as George Packer, Thomas Friedman, Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier and Nick Kristof, who Tony Judt called “Bush’s useful idiots,” dominated the media landscape. They painted the Iraqis as oppressed, worthy victims, who the US military would set free. The plight of women under the Taliban was a rallying cry to bomb and occupy the country. These courtiers to power served the interests of the power elite and the war industry. They differentiated between worthy and unworthy victims. It was a good career move. And they knew it.

There was very little dispute about the folly of invading Iraq among reporters in the Middle East, but most did not want to jeopardize their positions by speaking publicly. They did not want my fate to become their own, especially after I was booed off a commencement stage in Rockford, Illinois for delivering an antiwar speech and became a punching bag for right-wing media. I would walk through the newsroom and reporters I had known for years looked down or turned their heads, as if I had leprosy. My career was finished. And not just at The New York Times but any major media organization, which is where I was, orphaned, when Robert Scheer recruited me to write for Truthdig, which he then edited.

What Russia is doing militarily in Ukraine, at least up to now, was more than matched by our own savagery in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Vietnam. This is an inconvenient fact the press, awash in moral posturing, will not address.

No one has mastered the art of technowar and wholesale slaughter like the US military. When atrocities leak out, such as the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians or the prisoners in Abu Ghraib, the press does its duty by branding them aberrations. The truth is that these killings and abuse are deliberate. They are orchestrated at the senior levels of the military. Infantry units, assisted by long ranger artillery, fighter jets, heavy bombers, missiles, drones, and helicopters level vast swaths of “enemy” territory killing most of the inhabitants. The US military during the invasion of Iraq from Kuwait created a six-mile-wide free-fire zone that killed hundreds if not thousands of Iraqis. The indiscriminate killing ignited the Iraqi insurgency.

When I entered southern Iraq in the first Gulf War it was flattened. Villages and towns were smoldering ruins. Bodies, including women and children, lay scattered on the ground. Water purification systems had been bombed. Power stations had been bombed. Schools and hospitals had been bombed. Bridges had been bombed. The United States military always wages war by “overkill,” which is why it dropped the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs on Vietnam, most actually falling on the south where our purported Vietnamese allies resided. It unloaded in Vietnam more than 70 million tons of herbicidal agents, three million white phosphorus rockets — white phosphorus will burn its way entirely through a body — and an estimated 400,000 tons of jellied incendiary napalm.

“Thirty-five percent of the victims,” Nick Turse writes of the war in Vietnam, “died within 15 to 20 minutes.” Death from the skies, like death on the ground, was often unleashed capriciously. “It was not out of the ordinary for US troops in Vietnam to blast a whole village or bombard a wide area in an effort to kill a single sniper.”

Vietnamese villagers, including women, children, and the elderly, were often herded into tiny, barbed wire enclosures known as “cow cages.” They were subjected to electric shocks, gang raped and tortured by being hung upside down and beaten, euphemistically called “the plane ride,” until unconscious. Fingernails were ripped out. Fingers were dismembered. Detainees were slashed with knives. They were beaten senseless with baseball bats and waterboarded. Targeted assassinations, orchestrated by CIA death squads, were ubiquitous.

Wholesale destruction, including of human beings, to the US military, perhaps any military, is orgiastic. The ability to unleash sheets of automatic rifle fire, hundreds of rounds of belt-fed machine-gun fire, 90 mm tank rounds, endless grenades, mortars, and artillery shells on a village, sometimes supplemented by gigantic 2,700-pound explosive projectiles fired from battleships along the coast, was a perverted form of entertainment in Vietnam, as it became later in the Middle East. US troops litter the countryside with claymore mines. Canisters of napalm, daisy-cutter bombs, anti-personnel rockets, high-explosive rockets, incendiary rockets, cluster bombs, high-explosive shells, and iron fragmentation bombs — including the 40,000-pound bomb loads dropped by giant B-52 Strarofortress bombers — along with chemical defoliants and chemical gases dropped from the sky are our calling cards. Vast areas are designated free fire zones — a term later changed by the military to the more neutral sounding “specified strike zone” — where everyone in those zones is considered the enemy, even the elderly, women, and children.

Soldiers and marines who attempt to report the war crimes they witness can face a fate worse than being pressured, discredited, or ignored. On Sept. 12, 1969, Nick Turse writes in his book “Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam,” George Chunko sent a letter to his parents explaining how his unit had entered a home that had a young Vietnamese woman, four young children, an elderly man, and a military-age male. It appeared the younger man was AWOL from the South Vietnamese army. The young man was stripped naked and tied to a tree. His wife fell to her knees and begged the soldiers for mercy. The prisoner, Chunko wrote, was “ridiculed, slapped around and [had] mud rubbed into this face.” He was then executed.

A day after he wrote the letter, Chunko was killed. Chunko’s parents, Turse writes, “suspected that their son had been murdered to cover up the crime.”

All of this remains unspoken as we express our anguish for the people of Ukraine and revel in our moral superiority. The life of a Palestinian or an Iraqi child is as precious as the life of a Ukrainian child. No one should live in fear and terror. No one should be sacrificed on the altar of Mars. But until all victims are worthy, until all who wage war are held accountable and brought to justice, this hypocritical game of life and death will continue. Some human beings will be worthy of life. Others will not. Drag Putin off to the International Criminal Court and put him on trial. But make sure George W. Bush is in the cell next to him. If we can’t see ourselves, we can’t see anyone else. And this blindness leads to catastrophe.

Useful Idiots Monday Mourning with Katie Halper and Aaron Maté

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ6K4B4Fx1E

 

 

"Pay or Die" : The Diabetic Reality

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWQ8qWnN05Y