Raging Against The War Machine!

A coalition of small parties combine as a fist against the war!

People in the US are bucking the mainstream narrative about the Ukraine war because the lies are becoming egregious. That mainstream narrative of lies has had to be constantly reinforced by the corporate media and government officials to keep it from falling apart. The double speak is causing a whiplash. At the beginning of an article Ukraine will be winning against an inept Russia but by the end they are being slaughtered in a meat grinder of overwhelming Russian force. The holes in the narrative are many. Despite more being able to see through it, their voices aren’t heard crying out against it. This is insidiously the way the official narrative reinforces it’s dominance by punitively attacking those that tell the truth. Fortunately, we finally have a big coalition driving forward an anti-war rally to give people the cover and the courage to keep standing up and speaking truth to power! It’s time to begin taking the bold actions necessary towards turning our swords into plowshares!

“Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.” -JFK, speech before the UN, September 25th, 1961

Shocking revelations made by the Pulitzer Prize winning Seymour Hersh on Wednesday, describe, in detail, how President Biden went about blowing up the Nordstream pipelines. The planning of this act of state terrorism began in December 2021, two months before the war even began. Biden’s decision could be seen as an act of war against Russia and against Germany as well.

I’ve written my grave concerns about Hersh’s Nord Stream in a past post. For now I’d only like to encourage people to listen to JFK’s speech before the United Nations in 1961. It is very much relevant today. Contrast JFK with Biden and see that Biden is not worthy of any support.

If stopping the US war machine was easy, then there wouldn’t be 900 US troops in Syria today. If stopping the US war machine was easy, then it wouldn’t have taken the Taliban over 20 years to defeat the US in Afghanistan. The children of US citizens are the ones that will pay the debt of the past 20+ years of that US defeat. The anti-war movement within the US did not stop the war in Afghanistan, it did not stop the war in Iraq, it did not stop the NATO bombing of Libya, it did not stop boots on the ground in Syria and it hasn’t stopped the US proxy war against Russia. The efforts of the past at stopping the wars, we must learn from them, then we must do what never has been done, to succeed where success has rarely been found.

The Green Party FINALLY endorsed!

Jill Stein had agreed since the beginning to speaking at this event, but, it appears, the US Green Party only endorsed last night in a close vote. This means that this could be the start of a historic coalition of independent parties in the US against the war. However, the GP Presidential candidate in the last election, Howie Hawkins, was pushing the US Green Party to be a party for the war instead. Howie Hawkins had signed on to a newly formed, but already discredited, Ukraine Solidarity Network. This group is in support of sending endless weapons and billions to Ukraine. The main purpose of this group is to tow the Democratic Party line, attack the real anti-war movement and actively discourage all debate through campaigns of cancellation, lies and smears. Meanwhile the Doomsday Clock has moved 60 seconds to midnight. This is a betrayal to peace by Howie Hawkins, a betrayal to the US Green Party and the world.

Americans are swimming in a sea of disinformation put out by Democrat and Republican war mongers. People are seeking independent parties that show courage, principle and honesty. This is a defining issue. I stand 100% against sending one more bullet to Ukraine. The weapons & media are the fuel, the money & politicians are the oxygen. When combined together upon Ukraine, there is no victory, only death and destruction.

I’ll be in solidarity with this rally and Jill Stein. I’ll be on the street in Olympia that day spreading the word. Many people who considered themselves in support of the GP in the past will do the same. Those people will not vote or support a Green Party that fuels this war. The US Green Party has a choice, cast it’s lot in with the war mongers or cast the war mongers out of the party! Endorsing “Rage Against the War Machine” was a great first step but they need to make it clear to the GP by pushing their endorsement to educate the membership!

Finally, the US Green Party must shame the German Green Party for being a party of war.

Our values are better represented being AGAINST the US funding and arming of Ukraine.

I understand many of you rushed to show a Ukrainian flag in support of what seemed, early on in the conflict, as the moral choice. With the anniversary of the Russian invasion coming, expect a new deluge of media crafted to tug your heart strings. This should be seen as an advertising campaign, not the truth. It is the process of MANUFACTURING CONSENT. Don’t fall for it!

In the beginning, people were drawn in by headlines that reinforced the western indoctrination to hate Russia. It’s a systemic hate, taught through the media, compounded over time. All questioning voices of dissent were forbidden, blocked and canceled. The media pundits, the paid influencers, the retired generals whoring for the military industrial complex all made certain you never heard real debate. They built straw men they relentlessly demonized and then beat, but they never let you decide.

It’s been almost a year, despite the propaganda and silencing, more people know that they are being deceived. Real people have engaged in the real work of critical independent thinking on the matter. These voices of dissent are penetrating. Pushed forward by the importance of their message. There is raucous debate on many details still, but for everyone who has authentically engaged, the conclusion is the same. Stopping the US sending weapons means saving thousands of lives. Allowing the weapons to continue means killing thousands. Most likely killing of tens of thousands, likely in actuality hundreds of thousands, potentially a million, possibly tens of millions, there is a small chance of hundreds of millions and the best chance there has ever been in the history of humanity of billions being killed.

The nature of war is change through force, but some refer to it as politics by other means. Americans generally think of war in an abstract way, unless they are refugees from war or were soldiers, like a movie or a video game. I have never been to war, I never would want to on foreign soil. The way it is fought today is an industrial nightmare. The desire is to be firing from further away than your opponent can fire, to reload faster than your opponent can reload, to avoid surprises by seeing more of the battlefield and protect your troops, equipment and supplies better than your opponents. The vast majority of Ukrainians have been killed by artillery shells. The ones who survive are damaged and traumatized.

Every day a similar scenario: gruesome pointless death.

Imagine, one second you are walking on the path towards the bunker with your fellow soldiers, the next you are lying on the ground waking up to smoke and screaming. As your ear ringing and blurry eyes become more clear, you see before you the body parts of five other friends strewn across the field. One person screaming in pain between sputtering blood and gasping breaths. You cry out his name and begin to move to help them, but when you move a pain like you have never felt courses over your body so bad you vomit. Looking down you’re missing your right leg completely. In the horror you tie it off and try not to pass out, only closing your eye when you hear your friend sputter his last breath. Your last thoughts, you are a 19 year old Ukrainian, you were drafted, you didn’t want to fight but didn’t want to go to jail and be called a traitor, you had only been on the front lines for four hours, you never even fired your gun or saw a Russian. You think of your mom and sister and how they were right, that you should have run, hid or gone to jail. You think what was the point?

In the context of this hypothetical scenario, repeated tens of thousands of times in some ways for the last year of a young man in the Ukrainian war, I wonder what he thinks. A 19 year old told since he was maybe 10 years old that Russia was his enemy and that he should stop speaking Russian and instead learn to speak Ukrainian. I think about his confusion, that maybe he imagines that one day Ukrainians like him will be rich like Americans. Maybe before he entered combat after 3 weeks of training to go to the frontlines, he was working as an app developer through a gig company. The war was towards the east, he hadn’t seen any Russian tanks except glimpsed at a distance outside of Kiev in the first 6 weeks, which made him worried. When they pulled out, he cheered and was buoyed by all the promises from the west of support. Finally his country was seen positively by the rich westerners!

For months, till the late fall, the war slipped into the background. He read in October of great Ukrainian victories but on the street he hears whispers that families haven’t heard from their children for months and the army tells the families they are fine. In late November, as occasional blackouts began to be more frequent, he was drafted off the street. His training was brief, intense and cold. By the end he barely knew how to fire his gun, he only fired it ten times in training to save bullets. He traveled hundreds of kilometers to a staging area, as he was coming in he saw many pulling out their eyes sunken, many injured. Supposedly he was to be on a rear line but the next day his group of green soldiers were ordered to go to the front line instead. As they got closer to the battlefield, the near constant booming got louder and louder. Within hours his group is told to move to another place on the line a kilometer away. That’s when his group is struck.

If the boy wakes up in the hospital. The world will seem very different. I wonder what he will think his role was. I wonder if he believes the Ukrainian government and western leaders on the media talking of wonder weapons and Russian weakness. As he is forced to recover in a cot in a hallway in an overcrowded hospital, will he believe the reports that few Ukrainians have died? Or that more Russians had actually died? I wonder if he believes that Ukraine will join the EU soon and that he will be rich? Maybe he begins to think that his sister was right when she told him that Zelensky had become a dictator and the US was using Ukraine for it’s own purposes. That the US and the EU, that they don’t care about us.

It’s a sad scenario, I wonder how his thoughts have changed. A young Ukrainian man, deep in thought and anger, seeing himself as having been lied to by his own government and media. That he had been used as a pawn by the US and the Oligarchs that have always robbed his people. I imagine he is given reading material by a fellow soldier recovering on a gurney, a revolutionary zine, the sort of thing he’d never read before. Likely put together by the now banned Ukrainian communists. Within it is the sort of thing his grandfather would sometimes grumble about that he never paid attention to. But it’s a young Ukrainian like him who clearly wrote it.

The zine is carefully explaining how America is not the shining city on the hill he had thought from watching American movies. He learned about Manifest Destiny, the genocide of natives, the enslavement of Africans and the imperialism of colonies and things like the Monroe Doctrine. It mentions how the Americans didn’t need to drop the first nuclear bomb, much less the second upon Japan. He learned the truth of wars that happened in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. It speaks of the use of propaganda and the flood of money that preceded the 2014 Maidan, $10 billion from the US, how they selected the President and many in the cabinet. He had never heard of it this way, he was too young when it happened. Instead he was taught in school that all the problems of Ukraine were the product of Russia, a backwards, stupid and violent people. He recalls on Victory Day, as an 11 year old, telling his Grandfather that he shouldn’t speak Russian. The look of anger of his Grandfather for these words, now he could understand.

Most revealing, he reads about how things aren’t as good as they seem in America. Apparently the US has millions of people living homelessness even as a few have wealth beyond one hundred billion dollars. He learns that American democracy is ruled by the money of oligarchs as well. He resonates with a quote from a US radical from 1965, an American he had never heard of. An American who also felt that the rulers of America had gained great wealth by using and abusing his people who were Americans as well but treated as second class citizens. The quote said, “We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”

A fictional story. When it comes to Ukraine, much told is fiction. Keep that in mind.