On March 16, President Joe Biden called Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin a war criminal. How is this different from the white-supremacist Sen. Lindsey Graham demanding Putin’s assassination?

One week later, Biden ordered flags lowered to half-mast across the United States upon the death of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Albright has been called an unindicted war criminal. Albright was known as the Butcher of Serbia.

In the former Yugoslavia, the 1998-1999 conflict there is called by some “Madeleine’s War.” Albright, a key member of the Clinton administration, championed the 78-day bombardment of Yugoslavia by NATO — which started exactly 23 years ago this month.

Before that in Iraq. Here’s what Albright, then Clinton’s Secretary of State, said in 1996 on the CBS show “60 Minutes” in an interview with Lesley Stahl:

Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Madeleine Albright: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it”.

The actual figure given by a U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization report in 1995 was that 567,000 Iraqi children under the age of five had died as a result of the U.S. sanctions. But to war criminal Albright, “the price is worth it.”

Children died because Iraq was forbidden by sanctions to import so-called dual-use items like chlorine, which is used to purify water and treat sewage. As a result typhoid and other water-borne diseases soared.

The notorious interview is known around the world for its defense of mass murder. But you won’t find any mention of it in the New York Times’ obituary of Albright. 

This is the great, liberal New York Times, that claims to include “all the news that’s fit to print.” Nobody should trust its coverage of the war drive against Russia.

The 81 million people who voted against Trump and racism shouldn’t trust Joe Biden, either. Racist Lindsey Graham is trying to stop Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson from becoming the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court.

But when it comes to Russia, Biden and Graham see eye-to-eye.

Why aren’t Kissinger, Cheney & Bush arrested?

If Biden is so concerned about war criminals, why hasn’t he had Henry Kissinger arrested? The former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor committed war crimes on three continents.

Millions more people were killed in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam because Kissinger and Nixon refused to sign a peace treaty until 1973. If they had signed the same treaty in 1969 ― as Vietnam asked them to ― 20,000 less GIs would have come home in a box.

Kissinger gave the go ahead for the original 9/11, the bloody overthrow of the elected socialist Chilean president Salvador Allende on Sept. 11, 1973.

“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” said Kissinger. “The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” 

That’s self-determination according to the U.S. State Department and Wall Street.

“You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende,” Kissinger told the dictator Pinochet, who had thousands tortured to death. 

Kissinger also gave a green light for the Indonesian dictator Suharto to invade East Timor. One out of three people in East Timor were killed.

Kissinger wanted to invade Cuba for its military support of the People’s Republic of Angola in defeating the Nazi army of then-apartheid South Africa.

Angola saved thousands of African lives by sending the CIA mercenary Costas Georgiou to the firing squad and thus intimidating other killers for hire.

U.S. and NATO-paid mercenaries have flocked to Ukraine. Alongside fascist gangs like the Azov Battalion, they are propping up Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has banned every political party except his own.

Let’s not forget the war crimes of Dick Cheney and the Bush family. Former Vice President Cheney called the torture of thousands of Muslims to be “enhanced interrogation.” Cheney’s sidekick ― befuddled White House occupant George W. Bush ― presided over a million people killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

George’s daddy ― President George H.W. Bush ― invaded Panama. The Pentagon never revealed the number of people killed there.

Earlier as CIA director, Daddy Bush had Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 bombed on Oct. 6, 1976. All 73 people on board were killed; it was a revenge murder for Cuba’s support of African liberation.

Capitalism built on war crimes

War crimes made America “great.” Over a hundred Indigenous nations were invaded.

Massacres started with the Pilgrims and extended beyond Wounded Knee. Keeping the political prisoner-of-war Leonard Peltier in jail for 46 years is a war crime.

The African Holocaust never stopped either. U.S. and world capitalism was built upon it.

Wall Street became the country’s financial center by being the banking house for Southern slave owners. While today New York City has municipal green markets, it once operated a slave market on Wall Street.

By recognizing Belgian King Leopold’s “Congo Free State,” U.S. President Chester Arthur provided political cover for murdering 8-to-15 million Africans for rubber profits. President Dwight Eisenhower ordered the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.

Locking up 2.2 million people is a war crime. As a U.S. Senator, Joe Biden pushed through the 1994 “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act” that guaranteed imprisoning hundreds of thousands more Black, Indigenous and Latinx people.

Stealing half of Mexico was a war crime. In the so-called Mexican-American War of 1846-48, a slave-holders’ army invaded Mexico, which was an abolitionist nation. General Zachary Taylor’s artillery pounded the city of Matamoros, killing hundreds of civilians. Villages were pillaged and plundered. In the end the U.S. occupied and took all or parts of the current states of California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico and Arizona. Millions of acres of Mexican land were stolen from the Indigenous Peoples and Mexican farmers who lived there; more than a hundred thousand died. South Carolina’s John Calhoun, speaking in praise of the seizure of Mexican land, declared, “Ours is the government of the white man!”

A rerun of Yugoslavia?

President Biden was directed to call President Putin a war criminal because the Pentagon wants a rerun of the Yugoslavia tragedy.

NATO planes bombed Yugoslavia, the last socialist country in Europe, for 78 days in 1999. Yugoslavia’s elected President Slobodan Milošević was kidnapped and framed on war crimes charges because he resisted NATO.

Milošević died suddenly just as it looked like he could win an appeal. For some observers this was reminiscent of Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassin Jack Ruby dying suddenly after he was granted a new trial.

The Pentagon wants to give President Putin the same treatment or just be assassinated. To the banksters that run the United States, it’s intolerable that the six million square miles of the Russian Federation isn’t occupied by U.S. and NATO troops.

Neither Joe Biden nor the New York Times has ever denounced the deaths of over 14,000 people in the Donbass. This real war crime was committed at the hands of a Ukrainian regime supported by the U.S. and NATO.

The Russian Federation is giving indispensable help to anti-fascists in Ukraine. Don’t be fooled by the capitalist media. Hands off Russia and the Donbass!

Trans people, and especially youth, are under attack in state capitols across the U.S. And the most egregious attack so far has come in a state that is a stronghold of the neofascist takeover of the Republican Party – Texas.

On Feb. 17, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a “nonbinding opinion” that gender-affirming treatment for trans children and youth amounted to “child abuse.” Paxton’s outrageous claim came on the heels of the failure of a bill with similar language to advance in the state legislature.

The very next day, Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order giving Paxton’s “opinion” the weight of law, and ordering the Department of Family and Protective Services to begin investigating families and healthcare providers of trans children on suspicion of “child abuse.” 

Abbott also ordered state employees – including teachers and health-care workers – to report any known trans children to DFPS or face firing and prosecution themselves.

Texas authorities immediately began an aggressive and very public campaign to threaten trans children’s families and health providers, including one mother who is herself an employee of the DFPS. She was placed on leave while an inquiry was opened into her 16-year-old’s case. 

A judge temporarily halted the investigations on March 11 in response to a legal challenge brought by the family of a trans teenager. Abbott immediately appealed the decision.

Meanwhile, hospitals like UT Southwestern in Dallas have moved to end all gender-affirming care for trans children and youth, in the same way many public and private clinics and hospitals have ended reproductive services for women out of fear of being prosecuted (and losing profits) under Texas’ Draconian abortion ban that went into effect last year.

What happens in Texas

Texas has become ground zero for some of the most reactionary and divisive laws in the United States: against the voting rights of Black people, against women’s right to choose, against the right to teach a shred of truth about U.S. history – and now, against trans children and their families.

What happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas. It becomes a template for the far-right across the country, and helps to push the entire mainstream political ecosystem to the right – since spineless Democratic Party bosses respond to the desires of Wall Street, Big Oil and the military industry, rather than the people who vote for them.

A prime example is Oklahoma, where the state legislature is poised to enact an abortion ban similar to the one imposed in Texas last year. Like Texas, the Oklahoma measure “rewards” people for turning in their neighbors and healthcare providers.

NBC News reported March 20: “State lawmakers have proposed a record 238 bills that would limit the rights of LGBTQ Americans this year — or more than three per day — with about half of them targeting transgender people specifically.”

The transparent goal of these laws, piling one upon the other, is to divide and atomize the working class so that we cannot fight back as capitalists and their political agents drive up prices and drive down wages, erode union rights and terrorize communities of color. 

To achieve their ends, these proponents of “traditional family values” are only too happy to sacrifice children and their families as they whip up hate and division.

Democrats like Joe Biden, who gave lip service to trans rights in his war-mongering State of the Union address, have proven over and over that they can’t be relied upon to do anything to protect people’s rights – just as they have done nothing serious to defend voting rights or the right to abortion.

We won’t go back!

Fortunately, people are fighting back. They’re taking to the streets, in Texas and elsewhere, to defend the rights of trans children and their families.

Hundreds of people converged on the governor’s mansion and state capitol in Austin March 13 for a protest called “Trans Children Cry for HELP!” The event was loud, colorful and militant, with families, activists, kids and elders united against Abbott’s attack.

“Kids wearing trans- and rainbow-pride flags as capes ran around under the warm afternoon sun, while adults held signs that proclaimed ‘this teacher will not comply’ and ‘Abbott is a useless clownish bully,’” the Dallas News reported.

“Tracy and Matt, a couple who declined to give their last name for fear of investigation, came to the rally from nearby Schertz to show support for their 12-year-old transgender son. ‘We came for our son, who was too scared,’ Tracy said.”

The protesters created a human wall to shield children and families from provocations by supporters of Alex Jones’ far-right “InfoWars” outfit.

Protests to defend trans children in Texas and everywhere must continue and grow. And the working-class movement must urgently take up the task of defending all the communities under attack by building a united fight-back movement that can sweep away the neo-Nazis and their enablers from Austin to Washington, D.C.

MARCH 25 AT 5 PM – 6:30 PM
No War on Russia & Donbass! Stop the War Lies!
Martin Luther King Blvd & Mulberry St., Baltimore

Some using the “Russia is an imperialist power” line are also weaponizing the fact of homophobia in Russia, as they do when referring to the Stalin period in the Soviet Union. This is one way that they stigmatize opponents as “tankies” and “Stalinists.”

Yes, I’m gay. And yes, I uphold the Soviet Union’s role as the bulwark that supported socialist and liberation movements throughout the world for the majority of the 20th century.

This was true even with a relatively conservative (socially and economically) leadership at the head of the first lasting workers’ state. The Soviet leadership did retreat from the most progressive gender and sexuality advances made in the early days of the revolution, just as they retreated from international revolutionary commitments. 

But when push came to shove, the Soviet Union beat back fascism and especially its most virulent form, Nazism. Fascism was arguably the biggest organized threat to LGBTQ2S people in history, after classical colonialism. And the Soviet Union provided critical support throughout the world to national liberation movements, thereby being essential to the overthrow of direct colonialism almost everywhere.

The Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact ensured that there was no war in Europe from the late 1940s until well into the 1990s. The vibrant queer cultures in West Germany, not to mention the German Democratic Republic and elsewhere, were possible in part because war and far-right movements were no longer ravaging the continent.

All of this — the gains made by socialism undermining the basis of various oppressions, including abolishing the root causes of imperialist war; defeating fascism and colonialism — were essential to every aspect of LGBTQ2S liberation, and we are all the beneficiaries.

The main threat in the world today is the U.S. imperialist-led camp. Everywhere they have supported right-wing death squads, Islamists against progressive movements and governments, austerity that hurts and even kills the most vulnerable, including LGBTQ2S people. 

Everything that the U.S. imperialists have supported worldwide has turned the tide against movements for liberation. They’ve bombed the infrastructure of countries into non-existence and allowed for the return of warlordism and slave markets.

The supposedly “good” countries of Eastern Europe (i.e., not Belarus) are a playground for neo-Nazi forces. In these countries, there has been an erosion of LGBTQ2S rights, through the period of alliance with Washington.

If capitalist Russia today has its internal problems with homophobia and transphobia, this in no way negates the fact that U.S. imperialism is the biggest danger in the world and that it is crucial to defeat the NATO/fascist advance in Eastern Europe.

Calling anyone who upholds the revolutionary legacy of the Soviet Union an anti-LGBTQ2S “Stalinist” is also completely disingenuous. There are some of these homophobic elements in our midst. But plenty of LGBTQ2S people understand the importance of defending the various 20th century revolutions and that these revolutions are the backdrop to every contemporary advance in gender and sexuality politics.

So I really do not take seriously the superficial dismissals in the form of, “Don’t you know that Stalin was socially conservative? That’s what you support whether you know it or not.”

The Dontesk People’s Republic (DPR) militia claimed on Tuesday to have found a neonazi torture dungeon after capturing Mariupol airport, as battle continues to rage in the besieged Ukrainian city.

According to the DPR press service, the prison was discovered by its people’s militia after it had defeated gunmen from the far-right Azov Battalion at the airport.

Large quantities of weapons, ammunition and food were found and airport terminals had been turned into makeshift barracks, the militia said.

“A prison was found where they had kept and tortured people; supposedly it was the notorious secret prison ‘Biblioteka,’ the agency said.

“Iron doors with slots for passing food and conversations; there were several such rooms and an area for walks in the end of the windowless corridor, with barbed wire at high ceilings,” the DPR militia said.

“Ukrainian nationalists set up a veritable prison on the airport premises where they had tortured to death innocent people.”

Investigations into alleged war crimes are ongoing, the militia said, although no details were given and it is not thought that any prisoners were found.

Mariupol has been under siege for weeks, amid growing reports of starvation and civilians being denied access to water and medicine.

Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky has described the Russian encirclement of the Black Sea port city as a war crime, alleging that some 90 per cent of the city has been reduced to rubble.

Reports from those who have managed to escape the city, however, claim that members of the Ukrainian armed forces have threatened to shoot anyone that leaves.

They accused the Azov Battalion of using them as human shields, placing military equipment in their homes and other civilian areas.

Footage circulating online showing Roma people in Lviv with their faces painted green and tied to lampposts has caused outrage.

In the disturbing images, families are seen tied up, with individuals being beaten for alleged crimes of pickpocketing and looting.

Some groups have sought to play down the incidents, suggesting that Russia is using them as propaganda to portray Ukraine as under the control of far-right forces.

Source: Morning Star

En el 19° aniversario de la Guerra de Irak:
El gobierno de EUA mintió sobre Irak y miente sobre Rusia y Ucrania

EXPONGAMOS LAS MENTIRAS

El 20 de marzo se cumplen 19 años desde la invasión estadounidense de Irak, basada en una mentira sobre “armas de destrucción masiva”. Estados Unidos siempre miente sobre sus guerras. Aquí se muestra cómo Washington y la OTAN provocaron el conflicto entre Ucrania y Rusia.

Mentira #1: Rusia es el agresor contra Ucrania

Rusia no empezó la guerra. Ucrania ha estado en guerra durante ocho años contra las repúblicas del Donbass, Donetsk y Lugansk. La guerra de Ucrania ha costado más de 14.000 vidas en Donbass. Al igual que en Yemen, los medios estadounidenses ignoraron el costo humano y el papel de EUA en el conflicto. Durante meses, Washington presionó a Ucrania para que volviera a invadir Donbass. Rusia solo intervino para detener un baño de sangre y poner fin a la guerra, así como para garantizar la neutralidad de su vecino. Ucrania continúa cometiendo crímenes de guerra diarios en Donbass, incluyendo un ataque con misiles el 14 de marzo que mató a más de 20 personas en Donetsk.

Mentira #2: Ucrania es una democracia que debe ser defendida

En 2014, un violento golpe de Estado derrocó al gobierno elegido legalmente de Ucrania, que intentaba mantener relaciones amistosas tanto con Occidente como con Rusia. El golpe fue apoyado por funcionarios estadounidenses y políticos republicanos y demócratas. El nuevo gobierno prohibió los partidos políticos, impidió que las minorías nacionales usaran sus idiomas y emprendió la represión contra periodistas y opositores. Los grupos neonazis jugaron un papel importante en el golpe, y hoy infestan el estado ucraniano de arriba abajo. Estos grupos trabajan con supremacistas blancos en EUA y Europa y representan un peligro para las personas en todas partes.

Mentira #3: Estados Unidos es un espectador inocente

Estados Unidos echó gasolina, encendió el fósforo y avivó las llamas de la guerra. Biden envió cientos de toneladas de armas a Ucrania y arrinconó a Rusia. ¿Por qué? Para justificar una mayor expansión de la OTAN, socavar la soberanía de Rusia y aumentar las ganancias sancionando las exportaciones rusas. Washington ignoró las serias preocupaciones de Rusia sobre la neutralidad de Ucrania y la expansión de la OTAN durante décadas. Estados Unidos saboteó los acuerdos de Minsk destinados a mantener la paz en la región. Presionó a sus “socios” de la UE para destruir un acuerdo de oleoducto con Rusia y así beneficiar las grandes petroleras estadounidenses y los bancos de Wall Street.

Mentira #4: Las/os pobres y las/os trabajadores deberían sacrificarse

La presidenta de la Cámara de Representantes Nancy Pelosi, justificó cortar dinero del presupuesto para luchar contra COVID porque “Tenemos una guerra en Ucrania”. El Congreso coincide: hay mucho dinero para la guerra. Mientras tanto, los precios de la gasolina, la comida y los alquileres se están disparando. Las escuelas públicas están en crisis. Millones se enfrentan al desalojo por el fin de las protecciones contra la pandemia, mientras que el dinero continúa financiando la supremacía blanca patrocinada por el estado. La brutalidad policial y la represión contra las/os inmigrantes continúan sin cesar, mientras que el presidente Biden impulsa la violencia racista con llamados a “financiar a la policía”, al mismo tiempo que financia las fuerzas armadas dirigidas por los nazis en Ucrania. Rechazamos la política bipartidista de guerra contra las personas en este país y en el exterior.

Ayudemos a exponer las mentiras. ¡Construyamos un movimiento para las necesidades de las personas, no para la guerra!

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U.S. Indo-Pacific commander Admiral John Aquilino has recently complained about China’s militarization of the South China Sea. He has accused China of placing anti-aircraft and anti-ship systems along with other military facilities on islands scattered throughout the South China Sea.

 The Guardian in an article titled, “China has fully militarized three islands in South China Sea, U.S. admiral says,” would claim:

 “Over the past 20 years we’ve witnessed the largest military buildup since world war two by the PRC,” Aquilino told the Associated Press in an interview, using the initials of China’s formal name. “They have advanced all their capabilities and that buildup of weaponization is destabilizing to the region.” 

The article would go on to explain how the U.S. has positioned its own military in the region, challenging Chinese territorial claims despite having no claims over the South China Sea itself. The Guardian would note that nations like the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei have overlapping claims with China, along with the current break-away administration of Taiwan.

The Guardian notes that approximately $5 trillion in trade passes through the South China Sea but fails to note which nation above all others would benefit least from disrupting trade in the region – and which nation would benefit most.

The U.S., not China, threatens trade in the South China Sea

 The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) – a policy think-tank funded by the U.S. government, its allies, as well as large corporations including weapons manufacturers – maintains the China Power project. In an article published on the project’s website titled, “How Much Trade Transits the South China Sea?,” it would be revealed that China above all other nations depends on the safety and stability of the South China Sea regarding trade, noting that $874 billion in Chinese exports transit the region accounting for over a quarter of all trade through it.

Nations including South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam also account for significant trade through these waters and it must also be kept in mind that each of these nations count China as their main trade partner.

China’s military build-up in the South China Sea isn’t just in reaction to America’s unwarranted and significant military presence in the region, thousands of kilometers from American shores, but also in reaction to the specific threat America’s military presence poses to maritime trade for China and the rest of Asia (who primarily trades with China).

The threat the U.S. poses to Chinese maritime trade is not a figment of Beijing’s imagination but a threat articulated explicitly in U.S. policy papers regarding potential war with China within a closing window of opportunity the U.S. has to use its remaining advantage in military might to fight and win a conventional war with China and thus prevent it from surpassing the U.S. economically, militarily, and diplomatically.

The 2016 RAND Corporation paper, “War with China,” specifically mentions deliberately transforming waters through which China’s trade flows into a war zone. The paper notes that amid a U.S.-Chinese conflict:

…much of the Western Pacific, from the Yellow Sea to the South China Sea, could become hazardous for commercial sea and air transport. Sharply reduced trade, including energy supplies, could harm China’s economy disproportionately and badly. 

The disruption of China’s economy, in fact, is seen as the only realistic way for the U.S. to “win” in a conflict with China. The RAND Corporation paper would note:

The prospect of a military standoff means that war could eventually be decided by nonmilitary factors. These should favor the United States now and in the future. Although war would harm both economies, damage to China’s could be catastrophic and lasting: on the order of a 25–35 percent reduction in Chinese gross domestic product (GDP) in a yearlong war, compared with a reduction in U.S. GDP on the order of 5–10 percent. Even a mild conflict, unless ended promptly, could weaken China’s economy. A long and severe war could ravage China’s economy, stall its hard-earned development, and cause widespread hardship and dislocation. 

The paper also notes that the U.S. need not even specifically blockade various straits Chinese shipping depends on. The paper points out:

This suggests very hazardous airspace and sea space, perhaps ranging from the Yellow Sea to the South China Sea. Assuming that non-Chinese commercial enterprises would rather lose revenue than ships or planes, the United States would not need to use force to stop trade to and from China. China would lose a substantial amount of trade that would be required to transit the war zone. 

Since this paper was written in 2016, the U.S. has incrementally implemented policies to prepare for the conflict described by the RAND Corporation.

By 2021, U.S. State Department-funded media Radio Free Asia in an article titled, “U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Proposes New Missile Capabilities to Deter China,” would note (emphasis added):

The assessment calls for “the fielding of an Integrated Joint Force with precision-strike networks” along the so-called first island chain — referring to missile strike capabilities — and integrated air missile defense in the second island chain, U.S.NI News reported. The document also calls for “a distributed force posture that provides the ability to preserve stability, and if needed, dispense and sustain combat operations for extended periods.” 

Extended military operations is precisely what the RAND Corporation called for in its 2016 paper. Additionally, the U.S. has transformed its Marine Corps into a “ship-killing” force equipped to deny China naval access to various territories across the Indo-Pacific region including straits vital for trade.

Defense News in its 2020 article, “Here’s the U.S. Marine Corps’ plan for sinking Chinese ships with drone missile launchers,” would report:

The U.S. Marine Corps is getting into the ship-killing business, and a new project in development is aimed at making their dreams of harrying the People’s Liberation Army Navy a reality.

The article also cited Lieutenant General Eric Smith, chief of the U.S. Marine Corps’ requirements and development, noting:

“They are mobile and small, they are not looking to grab a piece of ground and sit on it,” Smith said of his Marine units. “I’m not looking to block a strait permanently. I’m looking to maneuver. The German concept is ‘Schwerpunkt,’ which is applying the appropriate amount of pressure and force at the time and place of your choosing to get maximum effect.” 

What the U.S. has prepared to do across the Indo-Pacific is implement the RAND Corporation’s “War with China” policy recommendations, implementations aimed at crippling Chinese maritime shipping, strangle its economy, and eventually collapse its government. In other words, the U.S. is creating in the Indo-Pacific region, an existential threat to China’s continued existence as a nation-state.

U.S. Marines are also currently present on Taiwan, according to Voice of America – Taiwan being territory considered by Beijing to be part of China – a fact even the U.S. itself recognizes through the “One China Policy.” Thus, the positioning of U.S. missiles across the region, the navigating of U.S. naval vessels near territory claimed by China, and the placing U.S. military personnel on Taiwan, are all meant to incrementally encircle and encroach upon China – pushing ever closer to, or even crossing over red lines established by China in the interest of basic self-preservation.

Just as the U.S. has done to Russia through Ukraine it is now doing to China through the South China Sea and Taiwan. When conflict eventually breaks out between China and either the U.S. itself or one of its proxies in the region – most likely the administration of Taiwan – it will be a conflict provoked entirely by the United States on the other side of yet another ocean, yet again thousands of kilometers away from American shores, and again endangering the lives of hundreds of millions of people toward the preservation of American hegemony and at the expense of another region’s sovereignty and perhaps even self-preservation.

U.S. Indo-Pacific commander Admiral John Aquilino left all of this very important context out of his observations that China is overseeing a major military build-up –  ignoring entirely the major military threat the U.S. has placed at China’s doorstep.

Source: NEO

Reading U.S. reports on the deadly Russian rocket attack on the so-called International Peacekeeping and Security Center in western Ukraine, one could be excused for thinking that the Russians might have been destroying some UN peacekeeping base.

In fact, the deceptively named target, as a few U.S. news reports on the attack did note, is actually a joint NATO/Ukrainian military base near the border of NATO member Poland that has specifically long been where U.S. and NATO military trainers have worked with Ukrainian troops, teaching them the finer points of handling the lethal equipment being supplied to them by the U.S. and some NATO nations like France, Germany, Britain and Turkey.  (400 Florida National Guard troops were doing just that before being hustled back to Florida as Russia began threatening an invasion into Ukraine a few weeks ago.)

A day before the rocket attack, and just after the Biden administration announced approval of another tranche of $200 million worth of weapons for Ukraine, Russia warned that any arms shipments coming into Ukraine would (of course!) be considered fair targets for attack. This warning was typically described by the jingoistic corporate-owned media in the U.S. as increasing  the risk of a wider war, though the actual supplying of more lethal weapons to Ukraine by the U.S. and its NATO allies was not so labeled.

NATO meanwhile is typically described as a defensive treaty organization of countries that have a mutual assistance pact to come to each other’s aid with military force if any member is attacked.

But NATO is hardly a “defensive organization.”

Indeed, from its founding NATO has been an aggressive alliance designed to hem in the then Soviet Union, and to to threaten it with destruction by U.S. nuclear weapons which were and still are stored in member countries, sometimes actually mounted on missiles and available for rapid loading onto U.S. and NATO bombers parked on air bases all over Europe. That hemming-in process today, following decades of further expansion of NATO following the Soviet Union’s collapse,  includes adding members located right up on the Russian border in countries like Poland, Estonia and Latvia (where U.S. rockets and nuclear-capable planes are minutes away from critical Russian targets like army and air bases, as well as major navy ports.

NATO was founded in early April, 1949 when the Soviet Union didn’t even have a single  nuclear weapon and was not expected by U.S. scientists and security people to get  one for another 5-10 years. Yet the organization was also founded at a time that the U.S., which was working round the clock to industrialize production of its new, initially hand-made atomic bombs, had already assembled and stockpiled over 200 of these city-destroying weapons. That is a pretty awesome arsenal for a country that at that time had no rival in destructive capability.

Add to that reality the fact that the U.S. was also already well on the way to producing a vastly more powerful hydrogen bomb (a project that Los Alamos scientists  began almost immediately working on right after the August 1945 surrender of Japan). Significantly, in the late 1940s the Pentagon, on President Truman’s orders,  had re-activated the assembly-line for producing B-29 bombers — the only plane at the time able to deliver its atomic weapons — while also developing more powerful heavy bombers like the B-36 and B-52. Why the rush? Because there were plans to launch a preemptive nuclear blitz on the Soviet Union. These plans, updated as the U.S. arsenal of atom bombs expanded towards the 300-400 number that Pentagon strategists advised Truman would be needed to destroy the U.S.SR as an industrial society. The succession of operational plans for that attack had such cringe-inducing names as Operation Sizzler, Scorch, Broiler and Dropshot. (The only reason such a genocidal first-strike on the Soviet Union never happened in the early ’50s when the U.S. stockpile finally reached that attack goal of over 300 ombs bombs, was that on Aug. 29, 1949, the  U.S.SR successfully exploded its first atom bomb, shocking the U.S. war department and leading to cancellation of any Washington plans for an early attack.)

Three years later, on Nov. 1, 1952, the U.S. successfully exploded its first thermonuclear bomb, a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

NATO’;s creation has to be viewed in the historical context of America’s astonishing power at that time.  Knowing it had the only atom bombs in the world, making it unopposable, the treaty with western European nations was clearly set up to allow the U.S. to keep troops in Europe indefinitely and more important, to stockpile and prepare to launch nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union from locations a short distance from the Soviet capital and industrial heartland.

Any American political figure who claims NATO is or ever was  a “defensive” alliance and :”not an offensive threat” to Russia is either ignorant or a liar. And calling he military base that was just hit with Russian missiles, killing 34 and injuring another  135 people, a  “peacekeeping” center is as laughable as naming the incredibly deadly MX missile with its ten 300-kiloton independently targetable nuclear warheads, the “Peacekeeper,” as that professional huckster President Reagan did.

Source: This Can’t Be Happening

If you happen to be in downtown Los Angeles and come across Skid Row, everywhere you look there is evidence of suffering from the humanitarian war crime of capitalism and homelessness. I’m reminded of the tens of thousands facing the same fate due to low wages, joblessness and rents driven up by perfectly legal exorbitant increases. If you’re not already homeless, you may be soon if this economic war against us continues to spread, like the unchecked virus enabled by capitalism.

The 7.9% inflation rate doesn’t help. The main culprits being food, rent and especially – thanks to the U.S.-NATO proxy war in Ukraine – gas. Not only that, the $16 billion COVID-relief fund was cut for this war.

But, no problem. Working-class folks, even those facing desperate circumstances, understand sacrifice for the sake of others, especially children’s lives.

The reality, however, is that our sacrifice for this war is not for children, but for the profits of those in the U.S. whose existence depends on the expansion of war and misery.

But, what about all the news reports of civilians being targeted by the Russians and that “crazy” Putin?

The first thing that occurs when plans for imperialist war are finally implemented (see Ukraine: It was all written in the Rand Corp plan 3 years ago) is the vilification of the latest targets of U.S. imperialism, and the individuals that represent those targets.

In 1915, when Britain wanted to escalate war with Germany during World War I, they launched the British cruise liner Lusitania, traveling from New York to Liverpool, England, through a declared maritime war zone. Germany had already made it very clear on numerous occasions that any British ship in that zone would be considered an enemy vessel and would be attacked. So, it was attacked and thousands died. The tragedy was used to justify the U.S. entrance into the war two years later. The New York Times prominently featured photos of those killed. The U.S. used this coverage as a primary tool for propaganda and military recruitment.

After World War I, it was exposed that the sunken Lusitania was also carrying 50 tons of ammunition. This kind of tactic is being used again to sell the current war, but first let’s get some context.

From 1990 to 1991 the Soviet Union was given assurances from the U.S. and Western European countries that an expansion of the U.S.-led anti-Soviet military alliance, NATO, would not happen — and especially not move eastward towards them (NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard). The Soviet Union in 1991 therefore unilaterally dissolved their military alliance – the Warsaw Pact. Eight years later, with no Warsaw Pact to protect them, the U.S. directed a NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia that destroyed tens of thousands of homes, roads, hospitals, crowded markets, passenger trains, and the Chinese Embassy, killing three Chinese journalists. This was followed by bombings of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and many more NATO operations on the continent of Africa in the years following.

For the last 20 years NATO has doubled its member armies, expanding eastward and surrounding Russia.

Yet, in spite of the Russian government’s repeated warnings against turning Ukraine, which borders them, into another NATO member state with possible nuclear weapons, the U.S. poured more gas on the fire. They not only orchestrated a coup in 2014 to put in an anti-Russian, pro-NATO regime, but also began sending billions of dollars in funds, weapons and training to openly Nazi battalions that are now official sections of the Ukrainian military. In February, the U.S. then pushed those Nazi forces to escalate bombings of the Donbass region against a Russian-speaking minority population.

This was the Lusitania-like provocation, by the U.S. Those in the Donbass region pleaded for help from the Russian government to save their children. Since 2014 they have endured eight years of torture and bombings, with 14,000 killed. Then in February came this increased genocidal assault by the main terrorist Nazi threat, the Azov Batallion. Russia then decided it had no choice but to answer the call of the people in the Donbass and stop an existential threat on its borders – the possibility of a U.S.-led NATO state with nuclear weapons controlled by a Nazi-led military.

This is what the U.S. government with bipartisan support has done – they’ve pushed the world into a conflict that could start World War III, gambling the futures of our children and those abroad solely for the sake of profits.

These wars are, again, eased through with stories to push our buttons of evil men and evil deeds you’re just now finding out about. We’ve been here before and a look at the history of just one “newspaper of record” shows how the media has been an essential part of the Pentagon arsenal. Take this headline in the New York Times in August 1964: “REDS DRIVEN OFF; Two Torpedo Vessels Believed Sunk in Gulf of Tonkin.” The article begins:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 4—The Defense Department announced tonight that North Vietnamese PT boats made a “deliberate attack” today on two United States destroyers patrolling international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam.

Although the story was a total lie, it served to begin the U.S.-escalated war on Vietnam. On the day it was published, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This  authorized a war on Vietnam (without a formal declaration of war), giving the President broad authority in the use of military force, which escalated by 1968 to a half-million U.S. troops occupying Vietnam. More than 2 million civilians in both North and South Vietnam were killed during the war. In addition, the use of millions of gallons of the chemical weapon Agent Orange, sprayed throughout by the U.S. military from 1961 to 1971, killed or maimed another 400,000. Some 500,000 children were born with chemical warfare-caused birth defects.

Six months before the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan, in 1979 the Carter Administration began funding the new “freedom fighters” – the Mujahideen, which became the Taliban – in a war against a revolutionary government that, among other progressive reforms, had established for the first time laws mandating the equality of women. The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, overwhelmed by U.S. military armed and funded Mujahideen, requested help from the Soviet Union. The Soviets were also worried about the threat of a possible U.S.-sponsored Mujahideen regime on their border. Sound familiar? This created the endless war in Afghanistan.

Nevermind that. Quick, look over there! An evil dictator in Iraq must be stopped now!

Here’s more headlines from the “newspaper of record”: Czechs Confirm Iraqi Agent Met With Terror Ringleader; December 20, 2001: Iraqi Tells of Renovations at Sites for Chemical and Nuclear Arms; April 21, 2003: Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert; and here’s a big one on April 24, 2003: U.S.-Led Forces Occupy Baghdad Complex Filled with Chemical Agents.

The problem with all these stories, and admitted by the New York Times in a published apology, is that none of them are true. They say it was the result of bad information with little verification. We’re just looking at the New York Times here but, you could look into the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, CNN, or any corporate newspaper and find the same misinformation passed off as truth and accepted as such by politicians, talk-show hosts, Hollywood scripts, celebrity campaigns and most of us during whatever latest war they point our heads toward.

The reporter on that last story and many of these stories was Judith Miller and this is what Miller had to say about the numerous unchecked lies in numerous unchecked articles selling a U.S. war that killed 500,000 children: “My job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.”

In that “apology” from the editors of the Times they correctly stated that the fault was not just of the journalists reporting the story but the verification process – a process that accepted without question information lining up with the narrative of the State Department. Unfortunately, like racism, that process is very much a component of the military industrial complex.

In 1996 Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes interviewed then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright about the death of children in Iraq due to the U.S. war: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Albright replied calmly: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.” This, based on evidence her administration knew was a lie. One of the definitions of evil in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is “something that brings sorrow, distress, or calamity.” Even evil seems too soft of a word to describe U.S. imperialism and its enablers.

Today, along with the corporate media, Congress is again playing its part in the war drive – Congress just approved $800 million more for the Ukrainian government and their Nazi battallions, which, again since it’s never mentioned, has been bombing the eastern region and committing war crimes against civilians in Lugansk and Donetsk FOR MORE THAN 8 YEARS, killing at least 14,000 civilians.

This faith in the U.S. State Department’s information comes in spite of the knowledge of contradictory news being suppressed in Ukraine. Three television stations were closed for not reporting coverage favorable to the Ukrainian government. Much information came out in Ukraine exposing the Azov Battalion when they took over hospitals, schools and apartment buildings in Mariupol that were then shown in the U.S. media as civilian buildings and not Azov Battalion outposts. Doctored and mislabeled videos and photos were prevalent during the beginning of the Russian intervention, even showing Israeli bombings and Palestinian resistance as “evidence” of Russian brutality and Ukrainian resistance.

The bombing by Nazi-led forces of the center of the city of Donetsk, killing over 20 civilians waiting at an ATM machine, was verified by various organizations in Donetsk, media outlets and independent journalists in the Donbass region. But, you never saw that report because the TV reporters and news publications in Ukraine that report those types of stories have been closed down. The journalists or activists who have reported this missile attack on civilian Donetsk, like Alexander Matyushenko from the Levitsa Association in Dnipropetrovsk (Dnipro), or the 37 other journalists detained in early March, have been jailed. In Kiev, arrests began even earlier. On Feb. 27, brothers Mikhail Kononovich and Aleksandr Kononovich, leaders of the Ukrainian Communist Youth, members of the World Federation of Democratic Youth as well as ethnic Belarusians, were seized and are being imprisoned along with members of other organizations we in the Socialist Unity Party and Struggle-La Lucha have been working with in Donbass. Last week I was communicating with someone from one of those organizations.

All of those detained are held on dubious charges with little explanation from authorities and are being denied legal representation.

The children who died in Iraq are just the tip of the iceberg of victims of U.S. and NATO wars, including the millions killed in Vietnam, Korea, Yugoslavia, Libya and Yemen. Now in Libya, because of the war by the Obama administration and destruction of civil society, slavery exists – a reality that undoubtedly is destroying the lives of children. In Yemen, the U.S. proxy war led by Saudi Arabia is now causing the starvation of millions of children, according to UN estimates.

If only those corporate editors of the media were as dedicated to exposing the war on children as they are in pushing for illegal and inhumane wars and proxy wars by the U.S., like the war in Ukraine now.

John Parker, of the Socialist Unity Party, is on the ballot as a candidate for the U.S. Senate from California in the June primary of Election 2022. He is part of the Left Unity Slate of the Peace and Freedom Party and has been endorsed by the Green Party.