Ukraine: A Conversation With Scott Ritter

 



https://popularresistance.org/ukraine-a-conversation-with-scott-ritter/






Margaret Flowers and Joe Lombardo of the United National Antiwar Coalition host a conversation with Scott Ritter regarding the situation in Ukraine and its broader implications for the realignment of global power, security and economic structures. Ritter discusses the provocations that led Russia to launch a military operation, the humanitarian situation, including what happened in Bucha, how Russia is winning, and the propaganda being used to build popular support for war.

Scott Ritter was the UN weapons inspector who, during the Iraq War told the truth that we found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He became outspoken about this, which undercut the main reason the US used to invade and occupy Iraq. As with the Iraq War, Scott Ritter is outspoken about the present war in Ukraine, in which we are again hearing US lies about the reasons for, and the events happening in the Ukraine War. His vast experience and knowledge working in the military and with various international agencies helps expose the truth about what is happening in Ukraine.
Read the UNAC Statement on Ukraine:

The United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) remains steadfast in its opposition to the United States/NATO imperialist project. The people of Ukraine are now suffering in a war zone because of the actions of the United States, beginning with the 2014 coup which violently ousted an elected president. The goal then as now was to use Ukraine as a weapon to target Russia militarily. We point out that the current conflict is not the first for Ukraine. More than 14,000 people living in the eastern Donbas region have died in an eight-year long war because they refused to accept the coup government imposed by the U.S.

There have been many opportunities to peacefully resolve this conflict. The US could have announced that Ukraine would not be admitted into NATO, but it would not. The MinskII Agreement signed in 2015 by Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France was unanimously approved by the United Nations Security Council. MinskII called for the end of hostilities between Ukraine and the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in Donbas. Ukraine was required to engage in negotiations and provide constitutional recognition for this region. But far right forces prevented implementation and three American presidents saw an advantage in not implementing the agreement.

The result was a continuation of bloodshed and the strengthening of right wing and neo-Nazi forces. Ukraine is now a haven for white supremacist groups and has invited mercenaries from across Europe, the United States, and other nations. This capture by the right wing is by design and is yet another means of maintaining a dangerous status quo. It is both naive and dangerous to deny the existence of these far-right forces and to ignore the hold they have on Ukrainian politics. They will not only unleash violence in Ukraine, but they will inevitably bring racist violence back to their home countries.

The Biden administration sends weapons and prolongs the conflict. The U.S. further enriches the military industrial complex with its actions with money that should be used for the good of the people. The promised Build Back Better bill is in limbo and the monies promised for renewing the Child Tax Credit and providing covid relief instead are used to stoke the conflict in Ukraine.

UNAC calls on the antiwar community to join in opposing NATO plans to expand further eastward. Not only should NATO cease integrating new members, but it should be dismantled altogether. It is not the defensive force that it claims to be and has wrought destruction from Ukraine to Libya to Afghanistan. NATO is the expression of U.S. global dominance and can only do great harm around the world.

Congress and the Biden administration approved $15 billion to fund militarism in Ukraine in the same week that providers of free covid testing, vaccination, and treatment for the uninsured were informed their services would no longer be reimbursed. The military industrial complex gets billions of dollars while the people’s needs go unmet. The uninsured and unhoused go without help while the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion gets money with the blessings of Congress.

The calls for a so-called “no-fly zone” would in fact create an air war that would heighten the risk of nuclear conflict. Sanctions are war by other means and should be universally condemned by all in the antiwar movement.

The displacement of millions of people in Ukraine is a repeat of what the US and NATO have wrought elsewhere. UNAC appeals to antiwar forces in this country to join in making consistent demands for peace in Ukraine, an end to the NATO imperialist structure, and a system which meets public needs and not those of defense contractors.

We demand:

US/NATO hands off Ukraine: No weapons, No military “advisors,” No Mercenaries, No “Volunteers.”

Humanitarian aid to Ukraine and resettlement of all refugees and displaced persons

Keep Ukraine out of NATO

Expulsion of all foreign white supremacist and neo-Nazi forces from Ukraine

Reparations to civilians in Ukraine and the Donbas independent regions

Dismantle NATO and establish a military neutral zone from Western Russia through Ukraine and Baltic states

U.S. government renounce doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance

 

 

This Is Not The Age Of Certainty

By Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
April 8, 2022



https://popularresistance.org/this-is-not-the-age-of-certainty-we-are-in-the-time-of-contradictions/





We Are in the Time of Contradictions.

It is hard to fathom the depths of our time, the terrible wars, and the confounding information that whizzes by without much wisdom. Certainties that flood the airwaves and the internet are easy to come by, but are they derived from an honest assessment of the war in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russian banks (part of a broader United States sanctions policy that now afflicts approximately thirty countries)? Do they acknowledge the horrific reality of hunger that has increased due to this war and the sanctions? It appears that much of the ‘certainties’ are caught up in the ‘Cold War mentality’, which views humanity as irreversibly divided on two opposing sides. However, this is not the case; most countries are struggling to craft a non-aligned approach to the US-imposed ‘new Cold War’. Russia’s conflict with Ukraine is a symptom of broader geopolitical battles that have been waged over decades.

On 26 March, US President Joe Biden defined some certainties from his perspective at the Royal Castle in Warsaw (Poland), calling the war in Ukraine ‘a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force’. These binaries are wholly a fantasy of the White House, whose attitude towards ‘rules-based order’ is not rooted in the UN Charter but in ‘rules’ that the US pronounces. Biden’s antinomies culminated in one policy objective: ‘For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power’, he said, meaning Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. The narrowness of Biden’s approach to the conflict in Ukraine has led to a public call for regime change in Russia, a country of 146 million people whose government possesses 6,255 nuclear warheads. With the US’s violent history of controlling leadership in several countries, reckless statements about regime change cannot go unanswered. They must be universally contested.

The principal axis of Russia’s war is not actually Ukraine, though it bears the brunt of it today. It is whether Europe can be permitted to forge projects independently of the US and its North Atlantic agenda. Between the fall of the USSR (1991) and the world financial crisis (2007–08), Russia, the new post-Soviet republics (including Ukraine), and other Eastern European states sought to integrate into the European system, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Russia joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace process in 1994, and seven Eastern European countries (including Estonia and Latvia that border Russia) joined NATO in 2004. During the global financial crisis, it became evident that integration into the European project would not be fully possible because of vulnerabilities in Europe.

At the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, President Vladimir Putin challenged the US’s attempt to create a unipolar world. ‘What is a unipolar world?’, Putin asked. ‘No matter how we beautify this term, it means one single center of power, one single center of force, and one single master’. Referring to US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 (which he had criticized at that time) and the US’s illegal Iraq War in 2003, Putin said, ‘Nobody feels secure anymore because nobody can hide behind international law’. Later, at the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest (Romania), Putin warned about the dangers of NATO’s eastward expansion, lobbying against the entry of Georgia and Ukraine into the military alliance. The next year, Russia partnered with Brazil, China, India, and South Africa to form the BRICS bloc as an alternative to Western-driven globalization.

For generations, Europe has relied on imports of natural gas and crude oil first from the USSR and then from Russia. This dependence on Russia has increased as European countries have sought to end their use of coal and nuclear energy. At the same time, Poland (2015) and Italy (2019) signed onto the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Between 2012 and 2019, the Chinese government also formed the 17+1 Initiative, linking seventeen central and Eastern European countries in the BRI project. The integration of Europe into Eurasia opened the door for its foreign policy independence. But this was not permitted. The entire ‘global NATO’ feint – articulated in 2008 by NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer – was part of preventing this development.

Fearful of the great changes occurring in Eurasia, the US acted on commercial and diplomatic/military fronts. Commercially, the US tried to substitute European reliance on Russian natural gas by promising to supply Europe with Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) from both US suppliers and Gulf Arab states. Since LNG is far more expensive than piped gas, this was not an enticing commercial deal. Challenges to Chinese advancements in high-tech solutions – particularly in telecommunications, robotics, and green energy – could not be sustained by Silicon Valley firms, so the US escalated two other instruments of force: first, the use of War on Terror rhetoric to ban Chinese firms (claiming security and privacy considerations) and second, diplomatic and military maneuvers to challenge Russia’s sense of stability.

The US’s strategy was not entirely successful. European countries could see that there was no effective substitute for both Russian energy and Chinese investment. Banning Huawei’s telecommunications tools and preventing NordStream 2 from certification would only hurt the European people. This was clear. But what was not so clear was that the US concurrently began to dismantle the architecture that held in place confidence that no country would begin a nuclear war. In 2002, the US unilaterally abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and, in 2018–19, they left the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. European countries played a key role in establishing the INF Treaty in 1987 through the ‘nuclear freeze’ movement, but the abandonment of the treaty in 2018–19 was met with relative silence from Europeans. In 2018, US National Security Strategy shifted from its focus on the Global War on Terror to the prevention of the ‘re-emergence of long-term, strategic competition’ from ‘near-peer rivals’ such as China and Russia. At the same time, European countries began to carry out ‘freedom of navigation’ exercises through NATO in the Baltic Sea, the Arctic Sea, and South China Sea, sending threatening messages to China and Russia. These moves effectively brought China and Russia very close together.

Russia indicated on several occasions that it was aware of these tactics and would defend its borders and its region with force. When the US intervened in Syria in 2012 and Ukraine in 2014, these moves threatened Russia with the loss of its two main warm water ports (in Latakia, Syria and Sebastopol, Crimea), which is why Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and intervened militarily in Syria in 2015. These actions suggested that Russia would continue to use its military to protect what it sees as its national interests. Ukraine then shut down the North Crimean canal that brought the peninsula 85% of its water, forcing Russia to supply the region with water over the Kerch Strait Bridge, built at enormous cost between 2016 and 2019. Russia did not need ‘security guarantees’ from Ukraine, or even from NATO, but it sought them from the United States. There was fear in Moscow that the US would place intermediate range nuclear missiles around Russia.

In light of this recent history, contradictions rattle the responses of Germany, Japan, and India, amongst others. Each of these countries needs Russian natural gas and crude oil. Both Germany and Japan have sanctioned Russian banks, but neither German Chancellor Olaf Scholz nor Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida can cut energy imports. India, despite being part of the US-backed Quad along with Japan, has refused to join the condemnation of Russia and the sanctions on its banking sector. These countries have to manage the contradictions of our time and weigh up the uncertainties. No state should accept the so-called ‘certainties’ that reinforce Cold War dynamics, nor should they neglect the dangerous outcomes of externally influenced regime change and chaos.

It is always a good idea to reflect on the quiet charm of the poems of Tōge Sankichi, who watched the atomic bomb fall on his native Hiroshima in 1945, and then later joined the Japanese Communist Party to fight for peace. In his ‘Call to Action’, Sankichi wrote:


stretch out those grotesque arms
to the many similar arms
and, if it seems like that flash might fall again,
hold up the accursed sun:
even now it is not too late.

Biden Kills The Demand To Defund Police

By Netfa Freeman, Black Agenda Report.
April 8, 2022



https://popularresistance.org/biden-kills-the-demand-to-defund-police/


The same people who wanted to defund policing voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden.

But Biden not only rejects cutting police budgets but announced a proposal to give police departments $30 billion. Once again, a mass movement died at the hands of electoral politics.

There is no better contemporary proof that reformism is poison to social justice, than what has happened to the demand for “defund the police”. This emerged as a slogan amidst the George Floyd uprisings. In many ways Donald Trump’s militarized police crackdown on the mobilizations actually served to embolden them.

But the indignation the people felt in the face of Trump’s bombast was quickly exploited by corporate media cheerleaders of the Democratic party wing of neoliberal settler-colonial duopoly to win control over the US presidency and both legislative branches of government. The Democratic party is notorious for exploiting left leaning but essentially reformist mobilizations. The Biden-Harris campaign platform played up a “police reform” that hijacked much of the political logic of those calling for defunding the police . While Biden, at the same time, made it perfectly clear that if elected he would not defund the police but would instead do the opposite.

Currently moves are being made on federal and local levels to beef up police departments nationwide with a simultaneous and all out media blitz to discredit the demand to defund police. Biden’s administration recently proposed a budget that would allocate at least $30 billion in new police spending. At the same time capitalist media manipulates concerns about violent crime and demonstrably false notions that police prevent crime and are under obligation to do so. In most incidents of violent crime, police are responding after it has already taken place.

This week the Mayor of the nation’s capital, Muriel Bowser, zealously announced a budget that would re-fund and expand police ranks by 4000 over the next decade, after the city trimmed the police budget 2 years ago in response to the George Floyd uprisings.

In his March 1, 2022 State of the Union address, the 1994 crime bill sponsoring President Biden declared , “We should all agree: The answer is not to defund the police. The answer is to fund the police.”

While it is important to remember that police do not prevent crime, it is just as important if not crucial to understand the root causes of the low level crimes plaguing US settler colonial society. Low level crime is a product of a class based society that perpetuates despair and frustration.

US settler-colonial institutions of policing are themselves a human rights violating industrial complex yielding huge superprofits. Policing as a whole consists not only of the courts, prisons, the US Department of “Injustice,” it has internationally reaching tentacles like the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) . It consists of unions, fraternal organizations, and associations like the Fraternal Order of Police, National Association of Police Organizations, and the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA, AFL-CIO). IUPA is actually chartered by the AFL-CIO. These uphold the facade that police are laborers who deserve the legal rights of workers.

In actuality policing under the oligarchy of capitalism serves to repress the working class and their interests and in the US this includes preserving the white supremacy of US settler colonialism.

Charisse Burden-Stelly, co-coordinator of research and political education for the Black Alliance for Peace, called out the Biden move in an interview with NBC News saying, “He’s trying to convey that he’s tough on law and order, that he’s supporting policing, which is a slap in the face and a complete disregard for the people who are organizing on the ground, primarily people who have a history of being brutalized by police and continue to be so.”

This slap in the face demonstrates the impotency of demand slogans like “defund the police” in a white supremacist society.

When we start from the premise that the enclaves where Black people live fit every characteristic of a colonized people then the logical objective is decolonization. Consequently a demand slogan is not actually something you expect the colonizers to adhere to. Demands must reflect the conditions under which we live and call for peoples-centered solutions.

The purpose of the demand slogan should not be to get the oppressor class to do something they will never do. Its purpose is to politically educate and galvanize the oppressed masses into radical protracted organization for power; the ability to envision, directly enact and implement policies in the interest of the colonized and the ability to protect this outcome. This is decolonization and anti-capitalist revolution.

Non-profit logic will have us believe that a demand must be something winnable in the short term, meaning something those in power will concede to. Such logic assumes the legitimacy of the oppressive ruling white supremacist capitalists.

Demand slogans must be incorruptible. As an example, freedom fighter and former Black Panther Party leader Dhoruba bin-Wahad explained the difference between imploring slogans like “Black Lives Matter”” or defund the police” versus the radical call for “power to the people”. Black Lives Matter is susceptible to corrupting by declarations like “All Lives Matter” or even, “Blue Lives Matter.” There is now even the Blue Lives Matter Act , making the assault of a police officer a hate crime and thus a federal offense.

But for the oppressors to say “power to the police” would, on its face, be ridiculous when referring to an institutional force that already has the ultimate power to take our lives extrajudicially with impunity.

Advocates of defunding police describe the strategy behind it to be divesting funds from police departments and reallocating them to non-policing forms of public safety and community support, such as social services, youth services, housing, education, healthcare and other community resources.

Lost in this description is the “who” that would enact, implement, and protect such a reallocation that is diametrically opposed to the neoliberal logic of this society and the settler colonial oligarchy.

The neo-fascism that now defines the US needs to both bombard the public with confusion, while also imposing a censorship of the truth and people’s centered analysis. It is in a state of desperation and must hide this fact from the people, among whom it has lost all legitimacy.

The US settler colonialist regime promotes the “need” for beefing up its domestic police forces (bemoaning the intracommunity violence caused by its capitalist white supremacy) in the same way it promotes the “need” to increase its global militarism; to fight violent terrorist extremist caused by its military occupations and exploitation.

Moves to channel more funds to police in the midst of this economic crisis must be seen for what they are: acts of desperation by a system in crisis and opportunities to organize Black and Brown working class to further delegitimize the rulers and their system.

People(s)-Centered Human Rights framework and demands expose the contradictions and provide a local foundation for community base-building work that addresses the material and political needs of Black and Brown people. It is not based on advocacy but on building community control of all the structures and institutions in our communities. It is self-determination in practice – including building self-governing community councils.

Greek Railroad Workers Block Delivery Of US Tanks To Ukraine

https://popularresistance.org/greek-railroad-workers-block-delivery-of-u-s-tanks-to-ukraine/







By Simon Zinnstein, Left Voice.


April 8, 2022
Resist!

In a clear signal to the workers of Europe, railroad workers in Greece managed to block a shipment of U.S. tanks to Ukraine for more than two weeks.

Workers at TrainOSE, a Greek railroad company, have been refusing to transport U.S. tanks destined for Ukraine from Alexandroupoli, a port in the northern part of the country. After workers there refused, bosses tried to force railroad workers from elsewhere to take on the work.

“For about two weeks now,” the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) said in a statement, “there has been pressure on the employees of the engine room in Thessaloniki to go to Alexandroupoli.”

The bosses’ desperate effort to find workers who would move the transport forward was unsuccessful. The argument from employers that they should have no specific interest in what they are transporting came to nothing, even with a threat regarding the workers’ contract, which states, “An employee can be deployed according to the needs of the company.” Further threats of dismissal also proved fruitless.

As this developed, the unions intervened, demanding that Greek railroad workers not be used to transport military equipment and an end to the threats against those who refused to move NATO armaments. A union statement states,


No participation of our country in military conflicts in Ukraine, which are committed in the interests of the few at the expense of the peoples. In particular, we demand that our country’s railway rolling stock not be used to transfer the U.S.-NATO arsenal to neighboring countries.

The statement puts the union at odds not only with the bosses, but also with U.S. president Joe Biden. Just last Monday, Biden announced that the United States would spend 6.9 billion euros on Ukraine and NATO member states to “enhance the capabilities and readiness of U.S. forces, allies, and regional partners in the face of Russian aggression.”

Unfortunately, the TrainOSE bosses managed to bring in scabs, and the weapons were eventually moved along — but not without a final action by the striking workers, who doused the tanks with red paint.

This boycott of a weapons delivery shows once again that workers are capable of ending the war. Elsewhere, as in Pisa, Italy, airport workers have refused to deliver weapons, ammunition, and explosives to Ukraine. In Belarus, too, railroad workers have refused to deliver urgently needed supplies for the Russian army. Now Greek workers have joined this international call. They are showing everyone that everyday workers can stop the war. It’s a model for German railroad workers who have already demonstrated, with an initial rally in Berlin against arms deliveries, that they oppose the war in Ukraine.

From the revolutionary Left, we encourage worldwide mobilizations against the war that demand the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine and denounce NATO’s role and the rearmament of Western imperialist powers. We must fight to ensure that opposition to the Russian invasion, expressed by those demonstrating against the war across the globe and particularly in Europe, does not become a mechanism for promoting militarism and the rearmament of the imperialist powers. International working-class unity, which is more necessary than ever, can be developed by only intervening in this way in the struggles that are now in full swing.

Thomas Sankara assassination trial | Hadi steps down

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phGqNCPD58o

 

 

Eat NATO for Breakfast #10 with Marco Siracusa

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PJ5bnu3phk

 

 

Honest Government Ad | Carbon Credits & Offsets

 

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