Activists must connect all the dots....

 

By Ian DiMartino

 Protesters Must Confront the Empire - Including in Ukraine & China - to Free Palestine

If the anti-genocide protesters across the United States want a truly free Palestine, they need to expand their horizons to confront the American Empire as a whole, particularly in its actions against Russia in Ukraine and China in Taiwan.

The anti-genocide protests that are disrupting the Democratic Convention in Chicago, have occupied college campuses, and continue to attract large crowds in the United States’ biggest cities have been, understandably, focused on the ongoing genocide and not on the other wars and provocations that the United States is involved in.

That seemingly makes tactical sense from the protester’s perspective. The genocide in Gaza is significantly less popular than the NATO proxy war in Ukraine. And Taiwan, despite the ever-increasing tensions in the area, is not a significant concern for most people at all, because there isn’t any active fighting going on. So it would make sense to focus on the conflict that is the most unifying and has the most attention.

But this is a mistake. Morally, the proxy war in Ukraine should horrify any anti-war activist. Men young and old are being forcibly grabbed off the street to die in a conflict that the United States knows is already lost.

The dead don’t include nearly as many women and children, but these are human lives being snuffed out and in numbers even higher than in Gaza.

The war is continuing only to prevent Washington from admitting defeat before they're ready and to kill as many Russians as possible. If Gaza is the most immoral action the American Empire is engaged in, then Ukraine is undoubtedly the second. 

“These protests outside the DNC should [also] be protesting the insanity of [a] potential World War III and this hawkish, irrational, anti-Russia fervor that gripped the Democratic Party in the last decade,” Jeremy Kuzmarov, the managing editor of Covert Action Magazine argued on Sputnik's The Final Countdown.

Like Gaza, Ukraine also has the possibility of escalating into World War III, but the NATO proxy war is a direct confrontation with the world’s largest nuclear power. Gaza is among the most dangerous things the empire is doing, but Ukraine is undoubtedly the first. Taiwan, likewise, has the potential to end civilization as we know it, all for an island less than a hundred miles off the coast of mainland China.

 

“And, what in return are American taxpayers getting? They're just getting [the] deaths of the eastern Ukrainian people and potential World War III with these dangerous provocations into Russia. So there should be great outrage about that alongside the weapons to Israel, alongside the situation with Taiwan,” Kuzmarov said. 

“The US has been arming Taiwan to the teeth and building up [its] military base network, including in the Pacific Islands, for a potential war with China, and that would be a devastating war,” Kuzmarov continued. “They’re threatening three major [wars] at a time when there’s huge problems domestically, where there’s armies of homeless in American cities, where the education system is in crisis.”

In March, US President Joe Biden approved a new strategic plan that includes preparations for a simultaneous nuclear war with Russia, China and North Korea. This is where the war in Ukraine and the United States’ provocations of China has led us. 

 

“I think it's a recognition of how much the aggressive US policy of primacy and hegemony and poking all of these countries in their own backyards has led to them acting enough together in strategic military partnerships that the US feels it would be necessary, if a nuclear war breaks out, to engage with all three of them,” international relations and security analyst Mark Sleboda told the Sputnik’s The Critical Hour. “That is something I believe that the US has very much provoked.”

“The US views [this] as an inevitable Thucydides trap war with China in the short term, something in roughly around the next five or so years,” Sleboda warned.

Even if the protests are successful in obtaining a ceasefire or even an arms embargo on Israel, without confronting the empire, those victories will be temporary –even if we ignore that a nuclear war will make everything else a moot point. If the goal is to end US support of Israel indefinitely, establish a Palestinian state and prevent the US from funding genocide again, then confronting the empire –the entirety of the empire– is critical.

This is the same military apparatus that gave Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and Ngô Đình Diệm weapons and later killed them. It is the same military apparatus that funded a 34-year genocide in Guatemala and supported apartheid in South Africa until the very end. If a ceasefire is achieved, who doubts that the United States government will continue to support Israel for as long as it exists? Who doubts that the United States will be first in line to assist the Israelis in their “relocation” efforts of the Palestinian people?

 

“At the end of the day, if they’re getting the arms from the United States, that’s all they need. And the United States is not going to really threaten sanctions or something that would really make life difficult for the Israelis and hinder the operations,” Kuzmarov explained.

There are a lot of young people on the streets in support of Gaza. More than that, there are a lot of people who are realizing for the first time what their government is truly capable of. Many seem to still be operating under the belief that Gaza is a black mark on American history and not what it is: a continuation of what the empire has always done. There are also a lot of old heads out there. Those who became aware of what America really is when they saw Vietnam, South Africa, Grenada, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, or a litany of other countries. They should know better and should start talking about it before this protest movement dissipates like the Vietnam protests did: before getting any real reforms other than an end to one particular conflict among many.

"The protesters have to put all this together. And we need a vast social movement for a change in the US government away from warfare and toward a government that works for its people," Kuzmarov concluded.