Tag Archives: Intervention

Lessons from Zoe’s Ark about ‘Saving’ Darfur

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Zoe’s Ark is the French Christian group that decided to ship some kids from the Darfur region to France for adoption. These missionaries to ‘Save Darfur’ say that they thought those kids were orphans, and they are now themselves accused by the government of Chad as being kidnappers. Currently they are on a hunger strike saying that it was all an innocent mistake on their part.

These Christian religious people seem pretty convincing to us Westerners but here are the Muslim parents of the ‘orphans’ saying what happened. It seems that the children were not orphans at all but had very caring parents! Assuming that the Zoe’s Ark branch of the ‘Save Darfur’ herd were not deliberately committing a criminal act as they state they weren’t, then just what did they think they were doing in Chad?

Actually, they thought they were doing good deeds like the ‘Save Darfur’ advocates of US locally think they are doing right here in Colorado Springs when they advocate interventionism. But the Zoe’s Ark people were wrong and so are our local enthusiasts of this ‘Save Darfur’ cause.

It seems that Zoe’s Ark folk didn’t even know how to tell real orphans from kidnapped children in that region of the world! Yet the even more ignorant local advocates of ACTION on this issue know even less about Darfur, Chad, and Sudan than they do. How can they think they know so much about what is really going on in Darfur, as they most certainly think they do, when they actually know next to nothing?

Good intentions are all fine, but ignorance can get you into trouble especially when you arrogantly think that you should have the final word about the affairs of people totally different from you living on the other side of the world. Another example of this, was the good intentioned liberal woman who recently allowed one of her Sudanese kids to name a stuffed animal Mohammed. She got jailed for several weeks and run out of the country, and she was lucky for just that.

I know some of the Colorado Springs ‘Save Darfur’ liberals who go bananas advocating that we ‘push’ our government into intervening against the Sudanese government. To tell the truth, I don’t think these folk have a clue to what’s going on even in our own country let alone what’s happening in a remote region of Sudan. I’m sure I would NOT trust them to even be allowed to work for Child Protective Services- Colorado lest they make some major errors in judgment about kids and their parents equally as big as those made by members of Zoe’s Ark while in Chad and France.

Lessons here? Don’t stick your nose into the affairs of other peoples that you nothing absolutely nothing about. And don’t try to ‘sanction’ others when those economic sanctions actually are a form of waging war against them. Don’t ask your government to kick somebody else’s ass when your own government is made up of gangsters.

On not inciting a lynch mob

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Do you know about the atrocities being committed in Darfur? Is the extent of your reaction being weighed as evidence about how much you know (ie. not enough)? If you are not calling for UN peacekeeper intervention, does it mean you have not exposed yourself sufficiently to the suffering of the Sudanese?
 
This would appear to be the logic of those advocating action/intervention. Surely you are a heartless do-nothing if you are not urging the tugging of every heartstring until a collective decision can prompt swift action. Cool heads might not prevail against a revenge-driven mob mentality, but why split hairs, they are hairs on the necks of Arabs.

When agitators urge action, if even they caution it to be non-violent action, the challenging endeavor of creating non-violent dialog and diplomacy can easily appear to stagnate in the “inaction” category.

The bigger picture about Sudan is that Europe and the US now face an eastern power vying for Africa’s remaining resources. To continue to dominate Africa, they have to mobilize opinion to favor a reversal of what has been a de-colonization consensus granting indigenous peoples their regional autonomy. To this end, grassroots activist mechanisms are being co-opted to manufacture public consent for re-shouldering the white man’s burden. A critical distinction for those concerned for the Sudanese is that western intervention is not the only solution. TO SAY NO TO MILITARY INTERVENTION IS NOT TO ADVOCATE DOING NOTHING. It is fine to raise awareness about the suffering in Darfur but maybe not if the common denominator response is an agitated public crying for blood.

You’d be the odd man out, trying to talk a lynch mob out of meting out justice to the Jesse James Gang. Where would you stand as you saw tempers becoming raised in response to heightened emotional manipulation? No one wants to deny the crimes committed, but what of the mechanisms of a civil society meant to preempt our baser compulsion to vigilante justice?

What if as well, the James Gang members the crowd was after were only the small fry? What if incredibly, the chief mob rouser was Jesse James himself? Perhaps even Jesse James would not have such gall, he would have to work through deputies like think-tank and media mouthpieces, or more insidiously through funding-starved non-profits, and tragically through unknowing surrogates with the best of intentions.

Ideologically it shouldn’t make a difference who is behind justice or before it. No one should be victim to a mob’s wrath. That’s not the point. What if you were working the crowd, trying to build an awareness that the Jesse James Gang was in their midst wreaking disaster of unfathomable consequence? Meanwhile the attention of that populace was being diverted to a humanitarian crisis which was in fact entirely a symptom and not a cause.

The Darfur crisis, begun in 2003, far from being ignored by our media, has successfully been used to obscure the million people killed by the US in Iraq, and the Israeli incursions into Lebanon and Palestine, both of which have been labeled genocides. Neither the ethnic cleansing in Lebanon nor in Palestine have drawn criticism from the lobbyists behind Save Darfur or the Genocide Intervention Network. What outlaws!

Selective intervention of genocide

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Areas of concern for the Genocide Intervention Network exclude Iraq and PalestineA chief backer of such films as DARFUR NOW and SAND AND SORROW is the GENOCIDE INTERVENTION NETWORK, who urge us “Never Again,” invoking the myth of western indifference to the tragedy of Rwanda. Through films like SAND AND SORROW they criticize American passivity in the face of their call to intervene. Actor George Clooney asks viewers to dial the GIN’s 1-800-GENOCIDE hotline for talking points to urge congress to action. He calls Darfur “the 21st Century’s first genocide.”
 
Despite the predominant focus on Darfur, the website features a map of other “areas of concern.” Notice anything missing? Palestine? Iraq? In fact the map would appear to exclude concern for the victimization of Muslims in Indonesia, Ceylon and the Philippines too.

The ‘Save Darfur’ PR scam

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Alternet today published The Black Agenda Report’s commentary calling the ‘Save Darfur’ a US interventionist PR scam. Ten Reasons to Suspect “Save Darfur” is a PR Scam ‘Humanitarian intervention’ is getting to be a more and more difficult sale for the government to make.

It reminds me even of a new and used car dealership I once ran into. The salesman had this gigantic 3 foot by 2 foot Bible on his desk. Don’t buy it!

And don’t buy that the US government is some how the agent for progressive intervention anywhere around the globe. It just is not. Too bad that it is this way, but it just is.

Want to help the people of the world out? Then fight against giving this country’s government permission to go into other peoples’ territories to run their affairs. The ‘Save Darfur’ campaign is in great part a government funded PR scam that does the complete opposite of that. It wants our government to tell others just what to do, to do it our way, and to punish any of those who get in the way. It is a campaign to provide rationale for military interventionism into important parts of Africa that our corporate government wants to control.

The Lost Boys?

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Lost boys want youIt’s amazing. The US has killed a lot of people through our life times, and yet there has never been another group of children from these devastated countries torn apart by US foreign policy made terrorism, flown to families in France, Britain, and the US like the Sudanese ‘Lost Boys’ have been.

I guess there were no ‘Lost Boys’ in Iraq, Lebanon, or Afghanistan, nor from Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Vietnam to save? It seems, the US only goes for taking in ‘Lost Boys’ when they seem to come from countries that have supposed villains that are not our own government leaders. But is the newest set of ‘Lost Boys’ even lost, or are they actually the ‘Stolen Boys’?

The latest 103 of these supposedly ‘Lost Boys’ were said to have been found in Darfur, and not Chad. But an international scandal has broken out where the people carrying these kids off are now accused of being kidnappers themselves. In short, they are accused of stealing these kids. See the BBC report… Chad case children ‘not orphans’

Did they do this deliberately? Were they misled? Were they in cahoots with pro-interventionist propaganda groups like the so-called ‘Save Darfur’ who wanted to use these kids to urge their governments to intervene against Sudan with occupation troops and economic warfare? Will we ever find out for sure the truth in this case?

Personally, I think that the truth may lie somewhere in between. Maybe the people were trying to help these kids just escape from their poverty, and didn’t really care that the stories they were giving these European Bleeding Hearts that were to carry them out were all untrue? After all, how often does the Developed World come to aid some of the kids of Africa? How often does one get a free ticket to immigrate? Here in the US, we round up immigrants like they were stray dogs and cats.

Promoting foreign intervention into Third World countries is big business, and if 103 kids were needed to push that cause, then 103 kids were rounded up. Who cares about the details since these kids were getting a bargain? Something to think about when you hear a ‘Lost Boy’ story in the weeks and years ahead. Maybe the ‘Lost Boy’ was not so lost to begin with, but his family or themselves simply found a ticket to ride out of a bad locale into a much nicer one? Who could blame them?

But YES, it does turn out that there is a ‘Save Darfur’ group connection with the French group Zoe’s Ark that was taking these 103 kids out of Africa. The two groups are part of the same effort to supposedly ‘rescue’ 10,000 kids (‘orphans’) from Darfur to safety in the US and Western Europe. See Reuters’ Factbox about Zoe’s Ark

Why not just push these First World countries to save the children of Africa by giving back some of the hundreds of billions of wealth stolen from that continent? But then how would they get the troops in? Picture of ‘orphans’ are needed for that.

Darfur

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Darfur AID not sanctionsYesterday’s Colorado College rally (October 29) by the interventionist group, ‘Save Darfur’, was quite an educational event. There, we got to see a train load of comfortable American speakers demand that we begin an economic war against a Fourth World country, Sudan, to be carried out by US corporations and the US government.

How could anybody be against that, their puzzled faces questioned those few of us that were there with signs against the increasing US military presence in Africa? Don’t you want to help the people of Darfur? As a matter of fact, we do, and that is precisely why we oppose groups like ‘Save Darfur’. They do not advocate economic assistance to Africans, but rather they advocate ‘policing’ them and dominating them from Washington D.C.

Not a word was said about opposing AFICICOM, the new Pentagon intervenionist command center designed to terrorize Africa. Not a word was said about the US use of Ethiopian troops to invade Somalia and overthrow the government there. The Eritrean government is predicting an attack on their country backed by the US government since they opposed, and continue to oppose, US actions against the people of Somalia. Not a word was said against US military aggression in Africa at the rally.

The mention of the US genocide against the Iraqi people met a shout from the crowd to ‘stay on focus’ about Darfur. Nobody talked about the need to end the US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq by the Pentagon. Nobody talked about the genocide of the Palestinians by the combined US and Israeli governments’ aggression. Not a word was said against the what is being done in Gaza and Lebanon, Pakistan and Iran by current US foreign policy. Not a word was said in opposition to the so called ‘War on Terror’, a made-in-the-US war that breeds terror, and celebrates terror and torture everywhere. Not a word was said against US government torture and rendition of POWs to be tortured by other countries.

Instead, we were exhorted by the speakers to begin a campaign to blame China for African bloodshed! This campaign is to be brought to bear on the Sudanese government and China from the countries that have terrorized Africans for centuries! Nobody in the pro interventionist rally crowd seemed to see anything much wrong with this? Instead they acted as if their actions were some how saintly and divine.

They talked about genocide a lot, though even Jimmy Carter has just declared most recently that the killings in Sudan do not meet the defintion of being a genocide. We agree. See the Christiian Science Monitor report ‘Elders’ criticize West’s response to situation in Darfur…Brahimi says West ‘pampered’ rebels, while Carter calls US’s use of term ‘genocide’ to describe violence ‘unhelpful.’ We too want to see the civil war and bloodshed in Sudan to come to an end, but do not agree with the activities of the group ‘Save Darfur’.

The US has spent at least $2.5 trillion in tearing apart Iraq and Afghanistan. We call on the US to spend that sort of money to end poverty, war, and disease in Africa. Why isn’t ‘Save Darfur’ doing the same? Instead they are calling for troops to be sent in, economic war to be begun against an impoverished country, and blame to be cast on the developing country of China. We find this to be shameful, and say that the Peace Movement should not put its stamp of approval on this campaign by the misnamed ‘Save Darfur’.

Peace Now. Spend the war budget on human needs. End the bloodshed by holding our own government responsible, instead of calling for it to increase its intervention into other countries’ affairs. We demand that the US start an economic aid package, without strings attached, that gives billions of dollars of reparations for the crimes that our government has done to Africans over several centuries. Forgive all of Africa’s foreign debt now. That’s how you help the people of Darfur, not by urging US power plays to control African resources.

Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission must demand no more US intervention into the affairs of other nations.

The Blame China pro US interventionists come to town today

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The group Save Darfur comes to town with their Blame China pro-US interventionist campaign today at Colorado College. This campaign is heavily backed by the Democratic Party and is designed to take the heat off the Democrats for backing Bush’s genocide against the Iraqi people. Many people unfortunately seem to be falling for the con.

It is disgraceful that the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission is also slipping this antiChinese campaign onto its list of events to promote. Why? The Chinese are about the last nation to be blaming for all the bloodshed that European colonialism backed up by US imperialism has brought to the African continent. Instead of concentrating on the misdeeds of our own American government, some in the PPJPC seem intent on promoting US interventionism into Africa instead.

Sure, the liberal interventionists take great pains to hide their true program. They say they are trying to save lives, not trying to push US military interventionism in Sudan. But that that is not so is clear by their entire lack of any campaign to get the US out of Africa. Instead, they play the US government blame game and encourage its campaign against China.

Shame on you Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission! If there was any sort of democratic discussion and decision making inside this organization, maybe a stop could be put to this local push for US interventionism? But the organization seems totally undemocratic in structure, and little is being done to change that despite so many promises to do so.

It is time for this organization decide whether they will continue to encourage doing pro intervention work in favor of greater US involvement into African affairs, or not. It is one thing if individual members on their own bring in their signs and banners For US Intervention, but quite another when the organization as a whole encourages participation as a whole in these pro US interventionist campaigns.

US Out of Africa Now! It’s time to reign in the US military and not to call for yet more aggression against foreign countries. It’s time for the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission to stop playing dumb on the issue of US interventionism into other countries’ affairs, even when the media says it is all for a good cause.

The Darfur Deception

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‘In trying to spur action, some humanitarian groups are framing the conflict as a too-simple contest between good and evil.’ By David Rieff October 7, 2007

The Darfur Deception is a good read on the current situation. Note that while the author does not doubt the good intentions of most people concerned about the issue, he does title his article as he does, and uses the word ‘deception’ to describe how the ‘Save Darfur’ people go about propagandizing to get the US-European military intervention moving into gear.

This is the key, since most pro-interventionists claim to not be calling for military intervention at all, when in reality they are. This is the real DECEPTION they practice.

It is totally similar to how many Leftists demanded intervention into the Balkans while Clinton was president, all the while claiming that they were equally against Milosevic and NATO. You don’t hear a word from them opposing NATO today though, even as NATO moves into new corners of the world.

Yes, there is a ‘Darfur Deception’ being practiced.

Nicaragua, US made basket case

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Pity Nicaragua, and pity Haiti. The US has screwed up both places royal through its ‘interventions’ time after time, and yet hardly an American seems to care. What a totally immoral country we live in!

Today, these are the 2 poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere due to what our country has done to them and continues to do.

I have been visiting a friend in immigration lockup in Aurora about once a week for the last month. He feels that INS (ICE) will jail him for about 6-9 months before they deport him back to a country where 50%PLUS of the population is now living on less than $1 a day. Our rich folk’s laws in the US say that he has no right to be here and that he acted illegally in entering their country which happens to be my US. Go figure?

The US entered his country illegally and blew off one of my friend’s arms back when he was still a kid, and turned the country he lived into a total basket case which it already was. The last American intervention just got it turned into yet an even worse basket case than the previous US intervenion had made it into. With each US intervention they just fucked up things worse for the Nicaraguans.

These American rich people that went and pulverized Nicaragua over and over again, always talk about how the poor need to take personal responsibility for their actions yet they themselves never take any personal responsibility for turning another man’s country into a total shit hole of poverty, like what has been done to Nicaragua. These rich imperialist supporters are mean, stupid, and uncaring beyond belief.

I would much rather that our own rich were deported to Hell where they belong than that my friend get deported from where I live. What the Hell is wrong with so many of my neighbors that they actually see poor immigrants, like my friend, as being some sort of threat to their own well being?

I wish my friend the best, and am disgusted with the country that is my own. I would leave it myself except that the US has screwed up most of the rest of the world anyway. America, love it or leave it? Get real… America the way it is just plain sucks and its stench is smelled throughout the world and there is no getting away from it.

There just is nowhere to run from the odor. I am ashamed of the people we have become. Just look at how many places we have destroyed. Is there any current hope for Nicaragua? It is hard to tell.

France sneaks its troops into Chad

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The advance US- European troops have arrived to ‘Save Darfur’. All along, all the liberal proponents of interventionism have denied that they favor military interventionism, even as they propagandized for it.

Now, they remain silent as the thuggish Bush allied French government of Sarkozy sneaks its troops into neighboring Chad. Time for the Europeans to ethnic cleanse and juggle boundaries once again on the way to gaining better control over Third World resources.

All this was done under the name of the United Nations Security Council which is almost always the front that US and Western Europeans use for sending in UN troops to countries they want control over.

Student Zionist group, Hillel, and Darfur

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Hillel, the US’s most prominent student Zionist group, is actively pushing for US intervention against and into Sudan. On their web site which passes itself off as progressive and green, you will not find any concern for the people of Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Somalia, or Afghanistan. All these being countries currently being torn apart by US interventions into their affairs.

Instead, Hillel is all into encouraging the notion that US and British imperialism is a benign humanitarian thing for the peoples of Sudan to experience, just as so many other colonized and semi-colonized peoples have. Onward Christian and Jewish soldiers, I guess?

One local activist who is often times connected with the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission through his work at Springs Action Alliance, is now celebrating Hillel’s work over at the University of Colorado in Boulder. There some students have erected a ‘shanty town’ to ‘call attention to Darfur’. Some of these folk were Hillel sutdents for sure.

The Springs Action Alliance’s most recent newsletter called our attention to this ‘shanty town’ constructed by a few students over at the UC at Boulder. This activist is concerned about Darfur. Good. He wanted us to know about this ‘shanty town’ build for us to try to get our support for intervention into Sudan.

I guess though that this individual has forgotten about the segregated shanty towns of White Apartheid South Africa that Zionist groups like Hillel enouraged Israel and the US to accept for decades? He, and other local liberal Darfur fetishists seemingly are blind to the allies they sometimes keep, it seems. They focus on Darfur alongside at many times a rather mixed crowd, Zionists included. These Zionists of today want us to forget about Apartheid shanty towns, and to think that Muslims are putting people into shanty towns instead of Christian Whites, or Jews.

These liberals that push us to become more concerned about Darfur don’t seem to understand that we already are concerned about the violence there. We don’t need Hillel to ‘inform’ us of the problem. We don’t need the Carter Center folk either. We, too, are concerned with all the dying that is going on in that region of Sudan.

We don’t need Zionist backed construction of fake ‘shanty towns’ at UC-Boulder to prompt our interest. We are against the continued bloodshed in that sad region of Sudan, Darfur, with or without Zionists and Israel pushing the issue.

Unlike the Zionists, both Jewish and Christian in the US, we don’t primarily hold the mainly Muslim government of Sudan to be alone responsible for the killing that has occurred there. We also don’t think that an increase in US-British govenrment directed intervention is the solution to what decades of British colonialism in the region has brought about.

More Imperial directed colonialism is not the solution to problems accruing from several centuries of European colonialism, even if it comes disguised as UN or African Union intervention instead of directly Brit and American.

Hillel and Darfur? How sweet their concern for Africa certainly is. It’s just not very sincere though. Instead, it’s little more than a propaganda tool they hope to use to gain support for more Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians off more of the Palestinian’s land.

Who are they really going to fool long term here? Their concern about any killing going on in Sudan is nothing more than a distracting device, to help keep people’s attention away from Israel’s own crimes committed with the help of the US government. If they want to worry about shanty towns, then worry some about those refugee camps both Israel and the US have created all over the Middle East. Until then, their concern about shanty towns in Sudan rings a little too false to me.

Faith in UN intervention in Darfur misplaced

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Stephen Gowans’, Faith in UN intervention in Darfur Misplaced, explains well why demanding supposedly humanitarian interventions from one’s own imperialist country is a real loser.

Often times the people doing this, do not directly call for their own government to directly intervene but rather for it to use the United Nations to do so. They think that by doing this, it will somehow change the whole character of what is going on when Great Powers boss weaker countries around! They refuse to acknowledge that the United Nations is strictly a tool controlled by the US and the Western European powers to legitimize their own colonial-imperialism.

Activists in World Powers, such as the US is, should not demand that their governments intervene in the affairs of weaker nations, even when the reasons to do so might seem totally compelling. Instead they should be trying to disassemble the militaries used by their own reactionary governments, rather than trying to find reasons to mobilize them.

It is pure pretense to believe that our corporate governments will ever do ‘relief’ projects ‘right’, whether it be in Darfur, or in New Orleans. Surely, calling for one’s own government to rebuild New Orleans ‘right’ should come well before trying to convince our own failed government to take their profit-making mayhem into another spot on the globe. The Army Corps of Engineers couldn’t even build the levee system right in New Orleans, let alone be relied upon to save people in Darfur.

The United Nations is totally an imperial Frankenstein at this point. We should have no faith that it will do anything other than do as its masters will have it do. The UN record at guaranteeing world peace is quite appalling. It is a totally failed institution.

Israel to grant citizenship to hundreds of refugees

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I am a member of the local Colorado Springs ‘PEACE’ group, the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission. A couple of weeks ago, this group organized a benefit for ‘Darfur’.

The most active promoter and organizer of this event was a young Jewish woman who has told me that she had supported the US attack on Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from being the head of that country. Of course, we know that a long US occupation of Iraq has followed. Now, it seems she has made her principle passion and work stirring up support for Western intervention against the current government of Sudan.

I find all this quite interesting in line of today’s news item. It stated that Israel was to grant citizenship to hundreds of refugees. Very interesting indeed. And where do these refugees come from?

My first thought was of course the Palestinian refugees that settler Jews in Israel created. Nah, that couldn’t be it, I thought. But what about the Lebanese refugees?

Israel had just recently invaded and deliberately destroyed the civilian infrastructure of that country, all contrary to international law. But then I thought… maybe it was the millions of Iraqi refugees created by the Israeli Jewish policy of supporting the US occupation of that country? Wrong again, it seems…

In a photo press shot, the Jewish government of Israel is granting citizenship to refugees from Sudan, of all places! I thought originally that these refugees from genocide might be from Armenia? But dumb me. Israel doesn’t think so much that a genocide ocurred in Turkey, a country whose government allies with the US government. Why then such concern from these theologicalrectically ‘Jewish’ thugs that run Israel for some Sudanese poh folk?

The answer is quite simple. Many Jews in Israel support claiming that there is a genocide in Sudan because they support the US’s goals to colonize Africa to block out Chinese access to African oil. Paranoid and delusional me no doubt! I should just naturally believe that Jewish government Israel is just a nice group of folk that are humanitarians.

We live in less than a perfect world. Who am I to doubt the motives of others? Jewish government Israel kills Palestinian children on an almost daily basis but their adopt a poor Black person program from Sudan must be so sincere. These are nice people, and so is the J&P’s Jewish comrade here in Colorado Springs. Save Darfur! Rah, rah, rah…

(PS- I am sending this post to the ‘Save Darfur’ activist I mention. That’s only fair. Let’s hear what she has to say about this news item? She really is a nice person.)

NATO sails to South Africa

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Six NATO ships sailed into South African waters yesterday to play war games with the South African government. This is certainly far away from the North Atlantic, is it not? This is certainly far away, too, from being a defense alliance.

If the local peace troop can tear itself away from demanding intervention into Sudan, is there any chance they could protest these new waters newly found for NATO ‘sailboats’? I rather doubt it though, since it’s not on the TV news and our liberal coed friends over at Colorado College can’t pose much for such a news unworthy cause as to fight to contain NATO’s feverish militarism.

US Out of Africa! Hasn’t that continent been fucked over enough by imperialism already? See NATO in South Africa news item

How the Far Right targets Africa

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Let’s face it, the US Antiwar Movement has had an abysmal record for mobilizing people to oppose the military-industrial complex. Over a decade and a half since the US first militarily attacked Iraq, the killing still goes on. And the record in regards to Africa is much worse, despite the fact that the US has a large African American population that should potentially be easy to mobilize support against US military interventionism on that continent.

For decades, the US used Portugal and South Africa as its subordinate clients in ruling Africa, much in the same way that it now uses Israel to help it rule the Middle East, but these regimes were ultimately forced to disassemble themselves. Now the US has a plan to bully into formation a new group of subordinate African client regimes. This is an interesting article about what led to the formation of AFRICOM, the new Pentagon command system or African interventionism. How the Far Right targets Africa In it, we discover the role of the Heritage Foundation.

If we don’t begin to pay some attention to what’s really going on in Africa, we will soon become bogged down there with US troops in the same way as has occurred quite recently in Muslim Asia and the Balkans in Eastern Europe.

Darfur is not 2 sides fighting each other

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The false version, put out by the ‘Save Darfur’ pro- do something folk, is that Darfur is a matter of 2 sides, a good side of Black victims and a bad side of Arab murderers. This couldn’t be farther from the truth though, yet this ‘Black and Arab’ view is very useful for prompting US interventionism into the region.

In truth, the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan is just one regional conflict amongst many throughout Sudan and neighboring countries. It isn’t even the deadliest of these wars. Both the conflicts in the Horn of Africa and those throughout Congo and the countries to the East of Congo hav been far more deadlier in loss of life.

Even in Darfur itself, the conflict is far more complex than Western ears usually hear about. Darfur is much more than the land of the Fur people, since there are several other ethnic groups living in Darfur than the just the Fur themselves.

The Fur themselves live in not just Sudan, but also in Chad and the Central African Republic. Those who want intervention from the US and Europeans, paint a picture of Arab horsemen from outside the region, raiding and raping into Dafur to genocidally wipe Blacks of the Fur off the face of the map to take over the region for themselves.

Here is another picture of the conflict that is quite different. Darfur Conflict Takes Unexpected Turn

In Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and the Balkans, we have begun to see the dangers of plopping ourselves down inside multi-ethnic conflicts that our society poorly understands. It certainly is good for the munitions industry that supplies ‘our troops’ when we do get involved in these conflicts. They make a killing.

Our own US population foots the bill for the killing fields ‘our troops’ involve themselves in creating…. the killing fields that benefit nobody outside those who have jobs or stock portfolios in the military-industrial complex.

Incredibly, many liberal Democrats have positioned themselves in favor of some sort of interventionism into Sudan, while the Bush Administration has actually, in this case, tried some to avoid it, though they favor interventionism throughout other parts of Africa (like in Somalia). We should be quite aware, though, that all calls for humanitarian intervention easily and quickly morph into calls for ‘humanitarian intervention’ delivered by military forces. In fact, Blackwater is already in Sudan, supposedly carrying out relief operations in the southern portion of that country. We need to get them out of there.

Condoleezza Rice pushes for US into Sudan intervention

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The liberals pushing for US/ European ‘action’ on Darfur seem totally delusional. Right now, they are pressuring Rice and Bush to do what Rice and Bush want to do anyway, which is to push US governmental intervention into Sudan. The Save Darfur crowd thinks that necessary to stop genocide.

And who’s to stop US genocide against the Iraqis and Palestinians? In a decade and half of US intervention in Iraq, 10 times the number of Iraqis have lost their lives compared to those lives lost in the Darfur conflicts. Two million+ Iraqis have lost their lives while the US has lost less than 5,000 dead. In Darfur, several hundred thousand have lost their lives inside their own country of Sudan. It is a civil war, unlike the Iraqi vs US War/ Invasion/ Occupation.

GENOCIDE, that is what the US has been about for decades now. Not just in Iraq, too. How stupid to ask genocidists like the American government to intervene, supposedly all to stop a supposed genocide. It is crazy to be doing just that.

Next weekend, the CS Justice and Peace group will be holding a ‘benefit for Darfur’. I will be there with a sign that demands that the USNATO stay out of Darfur. Those inside will be demanding that the US take ‘action’. That’s what Condoleezza Rice plans to do. See BBC commentary about the Paris Summit and Rice and the result will be a US firmly planted in Africa and yet more bloodshed across that continent.

Vacation en Nicaragua

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This post is dedicated to a good friend who got me thinking of Central America once again. It is about a vacation to Nicaragua and more. Let’s start with a beautiful concert at the height of Hope in the early ’80s, before the US government crushed that hope by its horrible imperialist military interventionism. Nicaragua Nicaraguita sung by the great Left folk singer of Nicaragua, Carlos Mejia Godoy.

Then let’s cut almost 1/4 century later, to see a beautiful vacation film in a visit back home to his country and family made by a Nicaraguan in exile far North. The beautiful music of the Colombian salseros, Grupo Niche, is followed in the second half of the film with more music by Carlos Mejia Godoy once again. A beautifully made film that shows Nicaragua at its best. The music is great and worth listening to on its own merits.

‘Save Darfur’ interventionists seem bloody ignorant about Africa, its culture, and its history- Save Lado, too, Comrades!

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Free Tibet, Stop Genocide in Kosovo, Liberate East Timor, and now Save Darfur with that ‘genocide’ tag being thrown around again. And lots of vitriol against Arabs and China mixed in. There seems to be all sorts of poorly thought out comments and ill considered positions going around town concerning this issue of ‘Darfur’, currently in the national spotlight ala Paris Hilton.

One local activist recently claimed on his web site that the Sudanese government was a US puppet state. Talk about getting it totally backwards! The reality is it’s the independence of the Sudanese government from DC control that Another activist here in the Springs was cheer-leading Democratic Party Colorado Governor Ritter for taking steps to firm up the US campaign beginning an economic war against Sudan. Colorado will not do bizness with bad Africans! Oh, Whoopee, Guvnor! I’ll bet my bottom dollar that you will do business helping your political buddies commit GENOCIDE against Palestinians and Iraqis, though. Am I right?

Right now, the Colorado Springs pro-peace people seem to be stumbling around in the dark on many fronts. The police attack on the St Patrick’s Day parade participants has them stumbling, and the anemia of the national Pro Peace folk hasn’t helped either. So why not jump on the ‘Save Darfur’ bandwagon? It makes sense. I guess there is just not enough problems on the home-front at this time? So let’s go save some Black folk from the evil Arabs and Chinese! And we’ll be led by Dubya, who will correct his problems in Iraq by changing a letter and nuking Iran.

The Justice and Peace had ourselves up a booth at Juneteenth today. They placed us right next to our old buddies, the storm troopers under the command of Police Chief Liars Myers. We’re getting to be almost family at this point. And on our nice little table we had some lit about Saving Darfur.

No, nobody had brought any material saying it might be nice saving all of Africa by getting the US the fuck out of their. I felt in a genteel mood and just sat for a while chitchatting and smelling the bbq. The Gazette was Heiled as being so very generous for poor Black folk by having ‘given generously’ with the publicity. It felt so good, so why be contentious? I just couldn’t…

I had my sign ‘Stop US War on Somalia’ with me, but Aw Shucks. Why confuse folk still trying to decide whether the Dar is for the Fur, or the Fur is for the Dar? And every body’s Albanian is still not much up to par And what’s the national language of island nation of East Timor anyway? Uh sorry, I meant the half island nation of East Timor. Hey, why shouldn’t we demand liberation and independence for West Timor, too? And what’s the next half-island down the shore? The world is complex, but you can speed read it if you are a liberal interventionist, for sure! I would have felt like a simpleton with my sign at the picnic.

There were some pamphlets to help you out on this with Darfur on our table. Did you know that Darfur was once an independent nation? Until the British defeated them of course.

Believe me, you will never learn this sort of stuff from the ‘Save Darfur’ crowd. They just don’t know it. That’s right. Darfur was pasted onto Sudan by the British. Those who paste on may want to peel the paste on back off, though. For humanitarian reasons, no doubt. From Blair to Brown to Save Darfur!

By the way, I am thinking of starting up a Colorado Springs society to save the Lado people. Don’t know about them? Hey, they’re just right down the road from Darfur. And guess what? They are victims of genocide, too. Save Lado! Is it pronounced like in Spanish, or like ‘lad oh!’ in English? It’s always fun when nobody can pronounce the name of the place we’re headed to ‘intervene’ into. Makes it more fun to watch the TV news!

I’m not making this up, so do the research on your own and let’s then get together and start a group (or 2 or 3) at Colorado College and get some sweet chickens (let me know if the use of ‘chickens’ here is not pc, like headless chickens) to help us out. What do you say? This is America, is it not? Anything can happen. We’re a good people for sure. So let’s do something for the Lado people right now! Start the propaganda, uh I meant ‘education’ going and we’ll get the troops in as soon as we can!

Meanwhile, let the conservatives increase the military budget a tad more, so that we’ll all then be ready to move into action together.

Save Lado!

‘Global Fleet Stations’, AFRICOM, and demanding intervention

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West Africa: U.S. Navy Plans Six-Month Regional Training Mission is to be done under AFRICOM direction. Both AFRICOM and this US militarization program for Africa that also includes bombing, invading, and occupying Somalia must be OK for all the activists calling for intervention into the Sudan. Why do I say this? It is simply because they want the US and Europe to intervene in Africa, rather than stop intervening there.

In fact, none of these groups speak out against these current activities of the Pentagon on the African continent. This is not an oversight at all. Many in the supposed world ‘peace’ camp actually unfortunately are not all that anti- US military use at all. They are what might be termed pseudo pacifists. These people just seem to think that it would be better for them to direct the war machine, and not Bush. That will not be the case though. The US war machine will bring about more suffering and bloodshed, and not greater peace, in Africa, if allowed by us to be used there.

Do not go along with all this call for intervention against Sudan. Intervene against your own reactionary government first.

The real targets of perpetual US war making are China and Russia

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President Putin and Gorbachev have been in the news, both denouncing the US’s military expansionism and encirclement of Russia. Also in the news, is the increased US government interventionism into Africa. Assisting them in this effort, is the interventionist liberal Left that helps hype the US government case against ‘Arabs, China, and genocide’, linking all 3 into excuses for supporting their own government’s imperial interests in Africa.

China gets one third of its oil from Africa, and the US wants to lock that off. White American and British liberals want to help Blacks out, just not so much in the home countries. It’s a touchy feely thing for them, and especially also for the Hollywood types, that seem so drawn to the liberal interventionist cause. And liberal think tanks like the Carter Center and Bill Gates Foundation, too. Darfur is now celebrity cause #1, edging out Tibet, celebrity cause from the past.

Of particular comic interest, has been the Condi Rice response to Putin’s and Gorbachev’s remarks against NATO and the US government. Rice accuses them of being locked into prolonging the past’s antagonisms, and chides them for not still believing that the US Right Wing imperialists are just mighty good friends of Russia!

This sort of line shows how determined that the US is to crush Russia, and is believable only to American six packers watching Fox for their propaganda feeds. And maybe some of the nitwits that work for the Gazette management team, perhaps? There, they are locked in a heroically stupid battle to convince their readers that the earth’s environment is being well protected by corporate interests. Good luck, Nitwits. lol…

Meanwhile at home in the proPeace camp, all seemed to be hypnotized by concentrating all their attention on just 2 things: Iraq and Darfur. That’s good prep for the coming elections for them no doubt. Then, the Media and the Democratic Party will turn that focus into trying to get us to cheer lead Hillary against Rudy, or some other such nauseating carnival. Activists around cheer leading a DP candidate will try to convince all the Peace Movement that the best hope for Darfur and Iraq will lie in voting into office the Democratic Party pushed Saviour.

All this makes one wanna weep, as the Pentagon, CIA, and legions of US/ British/ Israeli mercenaries continue their project of winning the destruction of China’s and Russia’s future in our new and drained corporate-led world ecological fall.

Mad Max beyond belief, and even Biblical in proportions. Yet another Great Flood perhaps is under way? This time with toxic and radioactive waters, too…

ZNet on Darfur

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ZNet has published 3 thoughtful and recent commentaries about Darfur that also examine the demands of the interventionist Western liberal Left. 1) The Sudan and the Crisis in Darfur and 2) About Saving Darfur; Reflections on the Carrot and the Stick and 3) Where anti-Arab prejudice and oil make the difference

NATO Out of Somalia and Sudan Now!

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Last night, a nice person called me up and wanted to assure me that she and other pro-Peace activists in Colorado Springs had not called for military interventionism into Darfur when they recently met at Poor Richards. I was half asleep and there was background noise on her end of the line, so the conversation didn’t really go on for too long. But for several hours now I have been thinking of this call. What to make of it?

Actually, it brought me back to the days of when so many nice liberals (and socialists, too) were demanding that Clinton do what he wanted to do anyway. They demanded that he intervene against Yugoslavia. They always made it clear that they were not calling for NATO to bomb the living day lights out of Yugoslavia, but that is just exactly what they helped accomplish. Today a US military base stands in Kosovo, and it has been deemed Europe’s Guantanamo since American held POWs are sent there to be tortured and held in secret.

Even worse, by being complicit in the NATO and US campaign against Yugoslavia, the liberal supporters of ‘action against Milosevic’, essentially sat on their butts for 8 years, while the Clinton gang killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and spread lies that Bush later used about there being WOMD in that country, all just waiting to be used to kill millions elsewhere. Today, Iraq is occupied with American troops. Surprise!

Fast forward a few months to Africa… NATO is in Sudan, and is now being considered for use in Somalia. And this good person who called me wants to reassure me that no Peace activists are pushing that this be the case. Yes, but it is the case, so why not ask (demand) that NATO get out of Africa? Instead, what is it the ‘action’ that is actually being demanded of by ‘Save Darfur’ folk?

I just don’t get this?! They are demanding that economic war be waged against Sudan as NATO troops intervene in country after country as forces of occupation and reaction! Why in the world would Peace activists want economic ‘sanctions’ to be applied to any country in the world by Britain and the US, 2 horrible imperialist and genocidal powers?

I am going to call this woman back up and ask that she, or any of the people who met at Poor Richard’s, write to explain on this blog what ‘action’ they want, and to explain their reasoning. I just don’t get it? I would think they would be more thoughtful about asking for ‘action’, when their allies on this taking of ‘action’ are Dubya, Condi, Madelyn Albright, and Tom Tancredo. I just don’t get it? The best action that can be taken is to demand that the US and Britain, NATO and the UN just get out of all of Africa. And while we are at it, how ’bout demanding getting these troops out of the Balkans and Afghanistan, too?

US bloodies up Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camp

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Nahr el-Bared, one of Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camp continues to be battered by the US-allied Lebanese government of ‘Prime Minister’ Saniori. The attack on this refugee camp was made in Washington DC, and Bush is sending in tons of military equipment in to the US controlled Lebanese government at this very moment. All to use on the Palestinian refugees in this camp.

Tens of thousands have already fled the bombardment, and Bush fully intends to terrorize these refugees yet more in the days to come. Yet the cowardly American corporate press is hiding away the details of American initiation of this attack and details of Bush’s political game plan to spread the US War Against Iraq into more and more neighboring countries. Rather than this just being an effort to clean out some extremists connected with al qaeda, this attack is nothing more than a direct US intervention into the internal political affairs of the Lebanese nation.

Once again, the US is helping Israel do its dirty work for it. In turn, Israel will be expected to continue to help the US do its dirty work of stealing out total control over the Middle East’s oil resources for itself. Meanwhile, how many amongst the circles of US soldiers, their families, and their friends know the full reasons of why American soldier’s lives are being (or were) put to risk on this Memorial Weekend? Their sacrifices are/were made in a war of the US rich against the World’s poor. And wounding and killing new thousands of destitute in Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps is about par for the course.

Blackwater USA out of Sudan!

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Last night, some misguided peace activists in Colorado Springs got together at ‘Poor Richards’ to call for more US-UN-EU intervention into Sudan. They want to stop the bloodshed in Darfur but seem oblivious to the actual realities of US global interventionism. Their get together comes just days after Joseph Biden, a Democratic Party presidential candidate, called for US troops to be sent into Sudan.

So what in effect we have, are Colorado Springs pacifists calling for US military intervention into an African country! It is companies like Blackwater USA who will actually carry out this intervention, along with other outfits from the USA like the Louis Berger Group.

US Out of Africa, not further into it! Blackwater USA Out of Sudan!