You got to put something real on the table if you hope to get our votes anymore....
Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.
He offers his own reflections on organizing and the state of America's declining empire....
You got to put something real on the table if you hope to get our votes anymore....
"How can this be intimidating for Jewish people if Jewish people participate in this demonstration?"
Protesters in Amsterdam have gathered to rally against Israel's genocide in Gaza, despite a demonstration ban put in place after Israeli football fans triggered violence across the city.
Hundreds of protesters gathered in the city’s Dam Square, amidst a large police presence, there to quash the demonstration.
Police in riot gear intervened against protesters in the afternoon, detaining dozens, who were later taken into buses and transported to another location in the city.
So much for the supposed great EU democracy that the 'uncivilized world' should wish to emulate.
Ōriwa Tahupōtiki Haddon (Ngāti Ruanui), Reconstruction of the Signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, c. 1940. |
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
For the past few weeks I have been on the road in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia at the invitation of groups such as Te Kuaka, Red Ant, and the Communist Party of Australia. Both countries were shaped by British colonialism, marked by the violent displacement of native communities and theft of their lands. Today, as they become part of the US-led militarisation of the Pacific, their native populations have fought to defend their lands and way of life.
On 6 February 1840, Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi) was signed by representatives of the British Crown and the Māori groups of Aotearoa. The treaty (which has no point of comparison in Australia) claimed that it would ‘actively protect Māori in the use of their lands, fisheries, forests, and other treasured possessions’ and ‘ensure that both parties to [the treaty] would live together peacefully and develop New Zealand together in partnership’. While I was in Aotearoa, I learned that the new coalition government seeks to ‘reinterpret’ the Treaty of Waitangi in order to roll back protections for Māori families. This includes shrinking initiatives such as the Māori Health Authority (Te Aka Whai Ora) and programmes that promote the use of the Māori language (Te Reo Maori) in public institutions. The fight against these cutbacks has galvanised not only the Māori communities, but large sections of the population who do not want to live in a society that violates its treaties. When Aboriginal Australian Senator Lidia Thorpe disrupted the British monarch Charles’s visit to the country’s parliament last month, she echoed a sentiment that spreads across the Pacific, yelling, as she was dragged out by security: ‘You committed genocide against our people. Give us our land back! Give us what you stole from us – our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people. … We want a treaty in this country. … You are not my king. You are not our king’.
With or without a treaty, both Aotearoa and Australia have seen a groundswell of sentiment for increased sovereignty across the islands of the Pacific, building on a centuries-long legacy. This wave of sovereignty has now begun to turn towards the shores of the massive US military build-up in the Pacific Ocean, which has its sights set on an illusionary threat from China. US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall, speaking at a September 2024 Air & Space Forces Association convention on China and the Indo-Pacific, represented this position well when he said ‘China is not a future threat. China is a threat today’. The evidence for this, Kendall said, is that China is building up its operational capacities to prevent the United States from projecting its power into the western Pacific Ocean region. For Kendall, the problem is not that China was a threat to other countries in East Asia and the South Pacific, but that it is preventing the US from playing a leading role in the region and surrounding waters – including those just outside of China’s territorial limits, where the US has conducted joint ‘freedom of navigation’ exercises with its allies. ‘I am not saying war in the Pacific is imminent or inevitable’, Kendall continued. ‘It is not. But I am saying that the likelihood is increasing and will continue to do so’.
In 1951, in the midst of the Chinese Revolution (1949) and the US war on Korea (1950–1953), senior US foreign policy advisor and later Secretary of State John Foster Dulles helped formulate several key treaties, such as the 1951 Australia, New Zealand, and United States Security (ANZUS) Treaty, which brought Australia and New Zealand firmly out of British influence and into the US’s war plans, and the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, which ended the formal US occupation of Japan. These deals – part of the US’s aggressive strategy in the region – came alongside the US occupation of several island nations in the Pacific where the US had already established military facilities, including ports and airfields: Hawaii (since 1898), Guam (since 1898), and Samoa (since 1900). Out of this reality, which swept from Japan to Aotearoa, Dulles developed the ‘island chain strategy’, a so-called containment strategy that would establish a military presence on three ‘island chains’ extending outward from China to act as an aggressive perimeter and prevent any power other than the US from commanding the Pacific Ocean.
Over time, these three island chains became hardened strongholds for the projection of US power, with about four hundred bases in the region established to maintain US military assets from Alaska to southern Australia. Despite signing various treaties to demilitarise the region (such as the South Pacific Nuclear Free Treaty, also known as the Treaty of Rarotonga in 1986), the US has moved lethal military assets, including nuclear weapons, through the region for threat projection against China, North Korea, Russia, and Vietnam (at different times and with different intensity). This ‘island chain strategy’ includes military installations in French colonial outposts such as Wallis and Futuna, New Caledonia, and French Polynesia. The US also has military arrangements with the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau.
While some of these Pacific Island nations are used as bases for US and French power projection against China, others have been used as nuclear test sites. Between 1946 and 1958, the US conducted sixty-seven nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands. One of them, conducted in Bikini Atoll, detonated a thermonuclear weapon a thousand times more powerful than the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Darlene Keju Johnson, who was only three years old at the time of the Bikini Atoll detonation and was one of the first Marshallese women to speak publicly about the nuclear testing in the islands, encapsulated the sentiment of the islanders in one of her speeches: ‘We don’t want our islands to be used to kill people. The bottom line is we want to live in peace’.
Yet, despite the resistance of people like Keju Johnson (who went on to become a director in the Marshall Islands Ministry of Health), the US has been ramping up its military activity in the Pacific over the past fifteen years, such as by refusing to close bases, opening new ones, and expanding others to increase their military capacity. In Australia – without any real public debate – the government decided to supplement US funding to expand the runway on Tindal Air Base in Darwin so that it could house US B-52 and B-1 bombers with nuclear capacity. It also decided to expand submarine facilities from Garden Island to Rockingham and build a new high-tech radar facility for deep-space communications in Exmouth. These expansions came on the heels of the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS) partnership in 2021, which has allowed the US and the UK to fully coordinate their strategies. The partnership also sidelined the French manufacturers that until then had supplied Australia with diesel-powered submarines and ensured that it would instead buy nuclear-powered submarines from the UK and US. Eventually, Australia will provide its own submarines for the missions the US and UK are conducting in the waters around China.
Over the past few years, the US has also sought to draw Canada, France, and Germany into the US Pacific project through the US Pacific Partnership Strategy for the Pacific Islands (2022) and the Partnership for the Blue Pacific (2022). In 2021, at the France-Oceania Summit, there was a commitment to reengage with the Pacific, with France bringing new military assets into New Caledonia and French Polynesia. The US and France have also opened a dialogue about coordinating their military activities against China in the Pacific.
Yet these partnerships are only part of the US ambitions in the region. The US is also opening new bases in the northern islands of the Philippines – the first such expansion in the country since the early 1990s – while intensifying its arm sales with Taiwan, to whom it is providing lethal military technology (including missile defence and tank systems intended to deter a Chinese military assault). Meanwhile the US has improved its coordination with Japan’s military by deciding to establish joint force headquarters, which means that the command structure for US troops in Japan and South Korea will be autonomously controlled by the US command structure in these two Asian countries (not by orders from Washington).
However, the US-European war project is not going as smoothly as anticipated. Protest movements in the Solomon Islands (2021) and New Caledonia (2024), led by communities who are no longer willing to be subjected to neocolonialism, have come as a shock to the US and its allies. It will not be easy for them to build their island chain in the Pacific.
Japanese native and professional translator Rachel Clark does a fine interview about US-NATO preparations for war with China.
She led a VfP delegation on one of my trips to Okinawa some years ago as our guide and translator.
She also organizes VfP speaking delegations to Japan each year in order to help break the silence there about US-Japan collaboration in preparing for war with China.
On Thursday night, supporters of the Israeli team Maccabi Tel Aviv caused significant unrest in the Dutch capital.
What really happened in Amsterdam?
And why is mainstream media only telling part of the story?
No wonder people around the world are getting fed up with the arrogance and vulgarity of the zionists cabal in Israel.
November 9
Major! Qatar officially announces its suspension of participation in mediation to cease fire in Gaza due to Netanyahu’s failure of all efforts over the course of a whole year.
The zionists may think they have just won a little skirmish in Amsterdam, but the result of that is, they cannot go there any longer. Who is the fool? They have to stay in Israel and fight for Netenyahu.
🔹🔹🔹🔹
We make an urgent appeal to our people in Morocco from Gaza, as we are exposed to death every minute, to go out immediately to demand the return of the American ships carrying weapons on their way to the Zionist occupation to kill us in Gaza. The ships loaded with weapons are now in the port of Tangier, and Spain has rejected them. We ask the free and honorable people in Morocco to move immediately, as we have always known you 🇲🇦🇵🇸
November 8
Amsterdam has woken up. The zionists eventually went too far. Amsterdam free from Zionism! For a total boycott — globalize the intifada!
“The people of Amsterdam declared last night that Zionism will not be tolerated here. Amsterdam is a Zionism-free city. And if it is not yet, we will make it so. And no, anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. This movement is made up of people of all backgrounds, religions and ethnicities. This movement is a popular movement that is against genocide and wants to liberate Palestine from the river to the sea. This movement is not led by one or even several organizations. It is the masses of Amsterdam and the Netherlands, the so-called “ordinary, hard-working Dutch people,” who defended the city against fascist hooligans last night.
We call for the immediate release of all those arrested and the dropping of all charges against them. This is the moment to escalate the fight against genocide and for the liberation of Palestine. Together against Dutch support for “Israel” and for the total isolation of the Zionist regime, in sports and all other arenas.
Now is the time to defeat Zionism in Palestine — and its birthplace, Europe!
For a total boycott of the Zionist entity!
Freedom for all prisoners of the Intifada, from Amsterdam to Palestine!”
🔹🔹🔹🔹
“F* you, Germany!” — Outrage erupted outside the German embassy in Tokyo as protesters condemned Germany’s deep-seated complicity in Israel’s war of annihilation against Palestine. Across the globe, more and more people are waking up to Germany’s intensifying lethal support for Israel—not only abroad but domestically as well, where state power is clamping down on pro-Palestinian movements with unsettling force.
🔹🔹🔹🔹
https://t.me/TheIslanderNews/25109
Turkish activists staged a sit-in inside the German ship MV Kathrin, which is accused of carrying explosives to Israel, when it arrived at the Haydarpaşa Port in Istanbul.
🔹🔹🔹🔹
Spain denies stopover to US cargo ships with weapons destined for Israel
The Spanish Government has prohibited two US cargo ships with weapons for Israel from stopping at the port of Algeciras.
In this way, the Executive responded to a complaint filed this week by the United Left (IU) before the Attorney General’s Office, which specifically pointed to the transit through Algeciras, Cadiz, of ships from the US with weapons and military supplies destined for Israel.
This Thursday the Spanish Foreign Ministry stated that no ship carrying war material to Israel will stopover in Spain, including the two mentioned ships that were due to stopover in Algeciras next week.
The deputy for the Sumar group, Enrique Santiago, who is a figure of IU, indicated in his complaint to the prosecutor’s office that he was aware that at least 1,185 ships carrying weapons and military supplies for Israel from the US have passed through that port.
🔹🔹🔹🔹
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot denounced an incident in Jerusalem involving Israeli security forces entering the Eleona church compound, a French-administered site, without prior authorization. Barrot canceled his planned visit to the site, calling the incident a breach of France’s authority in Jerusalem and an unacceptable act that undermines diplomatic efforts.
(This is what happens if Trump gives Jerusalem and the occupied Golan to the zionists. It was not his to give, and Jerusalem is under international law a city that is to be shared by the world.)
The crowd at weekly standouts in Saco, Maine at General Dynamics' bomb factory across the street from an elementary school continues to grow. There were 26 of us yesterday around the time that the shift and the nearby schools let out providing a big drive by audience (and they have stopped keeping the kids in at recess so there's that audience, too). When autonomous groups arrive at dawn to block the incoming shift we expect fewer people because of the hour, but those actions have been growing in numbers, too.
Diversity of messaging and associations makes for unity of fields!
Yesterday my friend Bruce Gagnon wrote:
Good turn out tonight in Saco - at least 26 spread out over both sides of road with 2 bullhorns raising chants. Chief of police came up and asked me how long these protests will go on - I said I don't see them stopping as long as the U.S. keeps supplying the zionists with money and weapons.
I also told him about how U.S. space tech is helping Israel target people in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria.
Why ask Bruce rather than one of the people on the bullhorns? Bruce has served as police liaison before (see his post about how angry the chief was last time he did this).
You meet the nicest people doing this kind of work. Yesterday two newish readers of my blog and I talked about my process: get up at dawn and read the news until I feel like my head is going to explode from stress and cognitive dissonance. Process by writing a blog post, and survive to be in action another day.
A motorist stopped to taunt one of us yesterday warning that now that 47 was coming back to the White House that our kind would soon be feeling the effects. Several veiled threats of violence followed until our friend ran the guy off with a feigned gesture of contempt that seemed to frighten him. He was so frightened that he called the police and filed a complaint. If he was trying to impress us with what a tough guy he is, it was an epic fail.
Some
of us are old, but most of us are young. Some of us are veterans, but
most of us declined to enlist in the imperial wars. We're here, and some
of us are queer. Get used to it!
Putin questions US intentions: Strategic defeat or stability talks?
The United States aims to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia while simultaneously wanting to engage in dialogue on strategic stability, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated.
"The United States has set itself the goal of delivering a strategic defeat to Russia. What does it mean to achieve a strategic defeat of a specific country? Well, if not to destroy it, then to reduce it to nothing, to an insignificant role... And at the same time, they want to have a dialogue with us about strategic stability. How is that possible?" the president asked at a session of the Valdai International Discussion Club.
... ad nauseam about Europe.
Here are the Democrat total vote count figures for the last six elections:
Notice anything?
When two young American Jews raised to support Israel unconditionally witness the way Israel treats Palestinians, it changes their lives. They join a movement of young American Jews campaigning to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel and reveal a deepening generational divide over modern Jewish identity.
Israelism sparked huge debate on American campuses even before the events of October 7, 2023. It follows Simone Zimmerman, who visited Israel as a teenager, and Eitan who joined the Israeli army after graduating from high school as they discover the reality for Palestinians and radically revise their views.
It includes interviews with academics and political activists, including Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Lara Friedman and a former director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abe Foxman.
Contributors suggest the narrative that young American Jews are fed almost entirely erases the existence of the Palestinians through education and advocacy, sometimes involving groups that organise free trips to Israel partially funded by the Israeli government.
This film describes how influential this narrative is in shaping attitudes to Israel, not just in the United States but across the world.
Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova on the Collapse of Germany’s Coalition Government:
“The collapse of Germany’s governing coalition has laid bare the primary flaw in the modern political system of the Federal Republic of Germany – it’s now a classic ‘banana republic’,” Zakharova told reporters.
“Incidentally, this is an American term first used by [short fiction writer] O. Henry back in 1904,” she noted. “No other nation in the world has begun to reshuffle its own government in the wake of the US election’s outcome on the same day. Except Germany.”
“What did you expect? Berlin failed to secure the vital Russian gas supply essential for its citizens and industrial complex, lost the opportunity to maintain economic growth, and passively watched its businesses and industries relocate to the US – all just to please Washington,” Zakharova continued.
“To top off this self-destructive behavior, Berlin has stopped even pretending that the German government possesses any autonomy or pretending that it is not merely a representative of American neoliberals within the European Union.”
The signs are growing around the world that western support for the war on Russia, using Ukraine as the hammer, is cracking. This protest in Greece is just one more piece of evidence. The story below from South Korea is another. Trump's campaign promises to end the war are still another. The truth is despite all the previous western media lies about Russia losing the war - they are not. Zelensky is in big trouble. He needs to surrender while he still can. |
False report of 40 NK casualties prompts Seoul to warn against Ukrainian disinformation
South Korean intelligence officials have adopted a skeptical stance when it comes to reports from Ukraine
“North Korean troops haven’t engaged in fighting yet, so how are there deaths?”
This was the reaction from a South Korean intelligence official upon hearing the news that the night before 40 North Korean soldiers were discovered dead in Ukraine.
On Monday night, domestic media outlets reported that 40 North Korean soldiers died in combat. Earlier in the afternoon that day, Andrii Kovalenko, head of the Center for Countering Disinformation at the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, posted on Telegram: “The first North Korean troops have already come under fire in Kursk Oblast.” Shortly afterward, a high-ranking figure in the Ukrainian presidential office told a South Korean media outlet that North Korean soldiers had begun fighting, and that deaths had already occurred.
What’s important is that the initial report came from the head of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council’s Center for Countering Disinformation. Disinformation refers to doctored or false information deliberately propagated by a state actor to maliciously influence another country. In the initial stages of the war, the Ukrainian government posted a video of the “Ghost of Kyiv,” a legendary fighter pilot who allegedly shot down six Russian fighter jets in 30 hours. Yet the actual existence of such a pilot has never been confirmed.
Considering such developments, South Korean intelligence officials have adopted a skeptical stance when it comes to reports from Ukraine. It’s gotten to the point where Korean intelligence officials are telling reporters to hold off on relaying reports about North Korean troops from Ukrainian officials until they receive third-party confirmation, because Ukraine makes “fake news” at the state level. This means we have to carefully consider the source of the information and the intentions behind it.
People who have experience in gathering military intelligence say that when it comes to reports about North Korean soldiers fighting in Ukraine, it’s only when Russian and North Korean authorities officially confirm them that we can accept them as fact.
However, we can make exceptions under the following conditions: If troops at the company or battalion level or higher participate in the fighting and the identities of North Korean troops are confirmed among the dead; if a North Korean prisoner of war directly testifies about North Korean troops fighting in Ukraine; if North Korean military documents containing operational orders, combat orders, or tactical training plans are confiscated; or if wiretaps containing confirmation about North Korean troops in combat are leaked.
~ By Kwon Hyuk-chul, senior staff writer; Seo Young-ji, staff reporter
~ See more on this story here
In atrocious weather "Flux12" a B52H Stratofortress from Barksdale AFB in Louisiana arrives at RAF Fairford in England on the 5th November 2024.
Visibility was almost at minimums as it approached the airfield.
The Pentagon is pointing the loaded gun at Iran's head for sure.
Our statewide antiwar coalition will bring its monthly protest series back to Farmington in November.
Student organizers from UMF will join us and I'm sure we'll get an update on their ongoing efforts to pressure the U Maine system to divest from Israel.
News of atrocities in northern Gaza continue to horrify the world as well as airstrikes in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen with many innocent victims.
The U.S. response? Tell reporters that Israel has the "right" to target civilians meanwhile sending the THAAD missile "defense" system and U.S. troops to operate it!
Our demands:
Peace in Ukraine - No weapons, no money for the Ukraine War
Abolish NATO – End U.S. militarism & sanctions!
Fund people’s needs, not the war machine!
No war with China!
Protect Earth's environment from the deadly insult of war!
End U.S. aid to racist apartheid Israel!
Fight racism & bigotry not war!
U.S. hands off Haiti!
End AFRICOM
Co-sponsors:
Global
Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, Maine Natural
Guard, PeaceWorks of Greater Brunswick, Communist Party of Maine, Maine
Green Independent Party, Citizens Opposing Active Sonar Threats (COAST),
Party for Socialism & Liberation Maine, Libertarian Party of Maine,
People’s Party of Maine, Peace & Justice Center of Eastern Maine,
Veterans for Peace - National, United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC),
and Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights (MVPR).
The US continues to build up forces in the Middle East, increasing escalation in the region.
According to Pentagon, the United States were going to send B-52H bombers, fighter jets, tanker aircraft and destroyers to the region after preparing for the withdrawal of an aircraft carrier strike group led by the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) from the region. The group has been in operation in the region since the beginning of August and will have to leave it by mid-November.
At least four US B-52H strategic bombers came to the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar in early November.
On November 4th, two more B-52H strategic bombers of the 5th Bomb Wing home base at Minot AFB, North Dakota were deployed to the strategically important air base in Qatar. This was confirmed by air monitoring sources. Thus, the total number of US bombers in Qatar reached six aircraft.
The B-52 is a long-range, subsonic, jet-powered strategic bomber. It can carry up to 32 tons of weapons and has a typical combat range of around 14,200 kilometers without aerial refueling.
Pentagon spokesman Air Force Major General Patrick Ryder in a statement, “made it clear that should Iran, its partners, or its proxies use this moment to target American personnel or interests in the region, the United States will take every necessary measure to defend our people.”
The deployment came amid heightened tensions with Iran which is vowing to respond to the October 26 Israeli attack on its territory. The U.S. showed support to Israel ahead of the attack by reinforcing its air defenses with a THAAD ballistic missile defense system.
The deployment of the B-52s appears to be a clear threat from the U.S. to Iran. Israel has for long been thought to need the heavy firepower of U.S. strategic bombers in any strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, which were not targeted during the last attack.
There are not many elections where you can vote for someone and not regret it.
It was good to have voted for Jill Stein. This was my 3rd time doing so.
Both the Dems and Repubs work for Israel, the war machine and Wall Street.
The media is run by the CIA.
Have people forgotten the war crimes by Dick Cheney in Iraq in 2003?
I am done with the corporate war machine.
Bruce