Tag Archives: war making

The world’s top ten most polluted places

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The Blacksmith Institute’s top ten most polluted places tells an interesting story. One can’t help but note that five of the top ten worst spots are in regions of the former Soviet Union. The business community of the US and their conservative ideological supporters will certainly point the finger at ‘communism’ for this. But let’s take a closer look, too. Worldwide, what are the activities that most pollute our planet, no matter what kind of economy is involved? The answers would be; mining and war making.

Now, in the context of that information, what happened in the former Soviet Union that produced so much mining and war making? The 20th Century started out for Russia being in a war with Japan. Shortly after that war terminated, the Czarist government dragged Russia into World War 1 which led to terrible devastation and huinger, out of which came the Russian Revolution. World War 1 continued inside of Russia and in the surrounding territories, even as it ended elsewhere. The capitalist countries of the world did not want a non capitalist Russia, so they continued to supply their allies within Russia itself, continuing the bloodshed.

Even when peace finally came, it barely lasted over a decade, as capitalist and fascist Nazi Germany invaded Russia, causing a horrible devastation and destruction to that country, now called the Soviet Union. The Russians fought the foreign invaders,and eventually threw them back outside of Soviet boundaries. The Americans came in at the end and gave the knockout blow to an already knocked down Germany. Result, the Americans immediately began the misnamed Cold War against the Soviet Unon, with the powerful message delivered by 2 dropped atomic bombs.

The Soviet Union got no peace post their victory over the Nazis, but immediately began to have to defend themselves from the threat of an American instituted atomic attack. Trillions of dollars spent on this so-called Cold War later, the Soviet Union collapsed, defeated at last by its own party bureaucracy, and the imperialist capitalsit allies they began to court under the direction of Gorbachev. So what did decades of war and mining to support those wars leave behind? Part of the answer is, that it left behind 5 out of 10 of the world’s most polluted areas.

The top ten list by the Blacksmith Institute clearly shows the interconnection between war and mining, and how that makes for horrible toxic dumps. Capitalism aggravates industrial pollution by its constant surge to producing warfare for private profit. The military uses much of the chemicals and metals that contaminate our world. If you want a Green America, a Green Mother Earth, then you must work to help stop the rampant militarism that infects every facet of our current society. Until we do, the cesspool that is already made will just continue to keep getting nastier, nastier, and nastier. Until we kill ourselves.

Democracy Now’s adulatory interview with Gen. Wesley Clark, war criminal

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America’s ruling elite have split about whether Bush’s decision to expand the War to Steal Iraq’s Oil into the neighboring countries of Syria, Lebanon, and Iran is likely to succeed or not. Wesley Clark, Clinton’s mad war criminal bomber of Yugoslavia, certainly is on the side that fears future failure by the Bush Administration.

He even has his own website dedicated to trying to stop the expansion of US government started warfare into Iran. But in the Amy Goodman interview, it appears that he actually wanted to attack Iran, and not Iraq, first. Now he feels that it is a mistaken strategy to do this attack he previously supported, after 6 years of Bush’s bungling, incompetence, and failure.

Amy Goodman all but begged Wesley Clark to run for president, echoing the incomprehensible stupidity of Michael Moore in the previous election. These liberals seem to be looking for some Dwight Eisenhower type to latch on to? How pathetic, since Wesley Clark is absolutely nothing more than a war criminal who started a war with a sovereign country illegally, and sat quiet as Clinton/ Gore killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi innocents through economic sanctions and continual bombings of Iraq during the 8 years of that Administration. These are the type of imperialist liberals who now talk of helping citizens of Sudan out, when during their time in office they were bombing illegally targets in that country, specifically one of Africa’s largest pharmaceutical factories. Clark, and his Slick Commander Clinton, sat and twiddled their thumbs, while hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were cut down. The US and French could easily have stopped that slaughte, but they were occupied with ‘stopping the Serbs’.

After much of the interview with Clark by Goodman conducted on a chit-chat friendly level, Goodman eventually felt the need to let Clark pretend to respond somewhat adequately to his record of continually bombing Yugoslav civilian infrastructure when he was top general in command of the Clinton war of Aggression Against Yugoslavia. This record includes the deliberate bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, also bombing the Serbian television station in that city killing journalists and and other civilians at work there, and bombing various factories along the Danube River, thereby contaminating that important waterway for years afterwards with toxic chemicals, as well as killing workers and neighborhood residents. The few parts of his miserable terrorist record Clark was asked to account for by Goodman, was predictably blamed on Milosevic and the Serbs themselves. Goodman made no effort to illustrate the dishonesty of his responses.

Further, Clark went on to support the continued US use of nuclear weapons and cluster bombs in US war making. Amy Goodwin let him walk on all of this, absolutely free as a breeze. How very sad to see this desperate desire for allies against the neocons turned into Goodman’s covert prompting of Clark towards a run for US presidency by this war criminal. Shame on you, Amy. I respect your show immensely but felt ashamed for you Friday night. Don’t let these rats off the hook when they try to desert the ship that Bush is trying to run aground. These imperialist just want a better vessel at hand to continue their imperialist aggressions against other countries. Certainly everything about Wesley Clark points towards continued disaster if he were actually to gain the presidency in 2008. Why prompt for more capable imperialists to regain command? Wesley Clark couldn’t even muster up a call for the impeachment of Bush or a description of the invasion and occupation of Iraq as being illegal. I guess not, since that would have been to illustrate how he himself had carried out and commanded an illegal war against Yugoslavia.

Just how stupid is the American public?

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A recent Washington Post poll reports that over half the US public believes that in the last 4 years of war waged by the US against Iraq, that only 10,000 or less Iraqi civilians have lost their lives!

True, polls often claim to be accurate opinion takers when they are not, but this one seems to ring true. The poll goes on to report, that now, still less than 6 out of 10 believe that the US made a mistake by assaulting Iraq with its troops, which would make sense if over half of Americans also believe that less than 13,000 people (Iraqi civilians and American military personnel combined) have lost their lives, in 4 years of a war that has blown away more than a trillion dollars of US and Iraqi money when combined resources are put together. Or maybe they think that there have been ten to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi combatants killed, while all the civilians got off relatively Scot free? This illogic is not ignorance, but stupidity.

This is more than willful ignorance, too, but actually is just pure gross stupidity. Actually willful ignorance as Americans practice it routinely, over the long run will produce pure stupidity over time. How on earth would any rational person believe that so much money for war making could produce so little civilian casualties? It’s not like the money was going towards Iraqi reconstruction, because it is widely known that nothing works there. Not the oil lines, not the potable water, not the hospitals, not the electrical power grid, not the sewage systems. It takes pure stupidity to believe that all that Pentagon power only killed less than 10,000 civilians in 4 years. Not even Bush and Cheney would state that! So we are left with a population where over 1/2 of the people are even stupider than are the lies they receive from the charlatan liars in the highest offices.

What can we ever do with such a stupid population at hand? It’s not as if we can give half the US population brain transplants. to remedy the situation. It’s not mathematical ignorance that leads so many to add up 2+2 and not get 4, but rather it is lack of any brain power at all. And how many in the US believe the world is only 10,000 or so years old? How many believe in ghosts? Just how stupid is the US public? PLENTY.

Made in the US- Iraq’s wave of refugees

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WalMart may be as Chinese as rice these days, but there is still one product that’s made still in the US of A. Our government still leads the world in making refugees out of people. Let’s look at Iraq alone, where 2,000,000 have fled outside the country’s, and 2,000,00 more are internal refugees at ‘home’. Iraq’s population was only about 27,000,000. One out of seven then, have been made refugees by the violence of the US invasion and occupation.

Before that, when the US gave Afghanistan the Taliban and Osama, 1/5 of the population there had already become refugees. I don’t know how they can even do a count there now? It is hopeless, after decades of US warmaking there, to even try. And US war making in South America has made about 1,000,000 Colombians internal refugees, though that number may be down at moment. And who can forget how US foreign policy has kept 4,500,000 Palestinian refugees in place, and who can forget the refugees of SE Asia? Those of Central America? So many everywhere…. US made.

From time to time there are contenders to our throne, especially form locales like the Congo and Sudan. But the US has always been a leader in Africa at refugee making, too. The US heyday was back when it was supporting the South African and Rhodesian Apartheid regimes, as they waged wars across half the continent. Millions became refugees due to that US African foreign policy, in just Angola and Mozambique alone. And the US vs Russia in the horn of Africa? Well who can count them?

One strategy of the US to stop the iraqis from fighting the theft of their oil underground? Shoot! Well why not just make ALL THE COUNTRY refugees? Totally depopulate it then! Maybe that’s what’s really behind Bush’s hidden strategy, The Surge? Like a tsunamai wave on shore, all to wash all out to sea! Brilliant! Made in America, the 21st Century refugee. How proud can we be, with the American production of this product of our Great Society? Go for Iran, too?

The Silent Death

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Malachi Ritscher 1954-2006, his own obituaryI have tried to write this commentary all day, yet each time I began, depression overtook me. On November 3, less than 3 weeks ago, a man set himself ablaze in Chicago to protest the US government’s wars. In effect, he was protesting against the American people too, for allowing these wars to be continued over and over again.
 
At age 52, Malachi Ritscher certainly had seen his country repeatedly ignore the suffering that its politicians and generals were inflicting on the other peoples of the world. He had been an antiwar protester for years, and yet the American people seemed little to have changed during his lifetime.

He hoped to help change all that with the dramatic sacrifice of his life. That decision and action, as gruesome and horrible as his death certainly was, is not alone what has me depressed though. It is simply that we have failed him once again, even though through his efforts he hardly could be said to have failed others, as he tried repeatedly to change the horrible society we live in through less dramatic means.

So why have we not hear about this courageous and totally desperate act? That is quite simple. The corporate media decided to keep it secret from us. Yet word begins to leak out, and IndyMedia is now helping inform people about what was done by Malachi to try to move us out of our pathetic cynicism and apathy. Word is being whispered here and there about what Malachi did, and the secret will come back to haunt those who kept it silent.

What was the media’s excuse to hide this man’s sacrifice away from us all? Simple. They treated his protest of our society’s war making and criminality, as if it was merely the action of a suicidal madman killing himself because of personal depression. No protest there, doesn’t mean anything what he did! How sorry are they, these assholes, to decide for us the meaning of this man’s actions! How much more does it say about their own motivations, than about Malachi Ritscher’s? How sick and controlled we have become for this silence and censorship to be let stand? How sad, that even this act of setting oneself on fire, fails to move us. Or at least to move those in the corporate world that control information flow and news.

It makes me yet more ill to think that the decision to keep this man’s protest hidden from us, was made principally to not effect the US mid-term elections that were to be happening a couple of days later. How petty, how disgraceful, the real reasons and real motivation of the US media to not broadcast news of what Malachi had done to himself. Malachi took his final action out of self sacrifice, and his drive to make a statement, simply in order to try to move our country into action to stop the Iraqi madness. Keep it local, keep the meaning of it distorted, all so that Bush and his minions might fare better at the polls! That was the counter response from the media. Make Malachi look sick and deranged, instead of a very decent human being. That’s what makes me so very depressed. I’m depressed because the US seems so hopeless, and this sad event just goes to underline our societal decay, yet once again.

Malachi Ritscher posterHis friends have organized a campaign to get news of his death out to the press. Write to the local rags and see if it helps since all we can do is keep trying? It is a shame that with Malachi Ritscher gone, we have one activist less. We have one genuine human being less. We have one less person who cares about others. He tried to change things, and many of us do care. It’s just that neither our press, nor our politicians, nor our economic elites care. It is common folk like Malachi Ritscher that actually do concern themselves most often about others in the world and not just themselves. And they desperately try to find ways to make a change possible. They are the true patriots, not the war mongers.

What is the purpose of the ‘War on Terrorism’, and when did it start?

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When did this war start that is now called ‘The War on Terrorism’ and what is its purpose? The answers to both questions would seem rather simple and obvious to Americans, but on closer examination are not what would be most considered. Why the war on terrorism’s purpose is to stop attacks from terrorists on our country and the world, would certainly be the most common reply. And the war started, of course, on September 11, 2001.

But are these 2 simple answers really the true answers here? And we really should ask yet a third question to get to the bottom of this issue. Is Osama bin Laden the original ‘terrorist’ that had the US government launch its ‘War on Terrorism’? Actually, the “War on Terrorism’ was launched by the US government on January 17, 1991. The terrorist then was considered to be Saddam Hussein, dictator of Iraq. His victim was considered to be not the United States, but the country of Kuwait that had just been occupied by the Iraqi military forces under the command of Hussein.

The war to stop terrorism was then labeled the ‘War to Liberate Kuwait’. To those Americans under 35 or so, this might be new history, of sorts. And to those under about 46, the decade plus before the launching of this war of liberation from Saddam Hussein, the ‘terrorist’, must seem like almost unknowable ancient history. So let’s review it some. Let’s review from February 11, 1979 (fall of the US backed Iranian dictator, the Shah of Iran) to February 7, 1990 (fall of the Soviet Union).

Pre “War on Terrorism’, the US favored the ‘terrorists world wide. They used them to fight 3 major proxy wars against their enemies. First off, the US spent billions that was sent to irregular forces who used the money to fund terrorist actions against the Soviet backed government of Afghanistan. This is where the US recruited Osama bin Laden and made him their ally. Second group of irregular recruits of terrorists was made in Central America, where the US funded terrroism against Nicaragua. Third use of terror by the Americans was when the US backed Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War, when Iraq attacked Iran. It was only when Hussein later attacked and occupied Kuwait, that the media campaign began to call his war making terrorism. Before then, the media remained totally silent about Hussein’s use of terrorism.

So why did the US go from making terrorism ( in the eighties) its strategy, to making its strategy the fight against ‘terrorism’ (in the nineties onwards), so to speak? That would have to be from the negative publicity that the US got from using terrorism repeatedly against Nicaragua. This put a bad mark against the US in international circles. So propagandists within the uS government began to react from trying to defend terrorists as being so-called ‘freedom fighters’, to themselves attacking the supposed ‘terrroism’ of others. The fight to ‘liberate the Kuwaits’ was what launched the US continual ‘War Against Terrorism’. Nobody under about 45 can remember much being said one way or the other about Kuwaitis. But those 45 and older can remember how America became suddenly bombarded about how supposedly virtuous the Kuwaitis were supposed to all be. Kuwait being raped by Saddam Hussein, the terrorist! Babies being thrown to the ground even!

I personally heard American after American who claimed to know a Kuwaiti or two. They all told of what a wonderful folk they were in the most graphic manner! In the Arab world, the Kuwaitis had horrible reputations. The Kuwait citizens were the mionority of the population in their own country, yet employed huge numbers of other Arabs from around the Middle East who they treated like slaves. The women of Kuwait had absolutely no rights what-so-ever. Yet, the American press began a gigantic propaganda campaign to ‘liberate Kuwait’ from the Iraqi ‘terrorist’, Hussein! That is the reason, that even today so many Americans believe that Saddam Hussein had some sort of role in the toppling of the World Trade Towers. The US launch of the ‘War Against Terrorism’ began with plans to ‘liberate Kuwait’, and continued with the let’s get Hussein campaign.

But George Bush Senior was a smart man. Who was he going to have as ‘terrorist’ foil if he actually caught Hussein? So Kuwait was ‘liberated’, but the most evil ‘terrorist’ was not caught. That unfortuantely left the Democrats as the leaders in the ‘fight against terrorism’ when Bush unexpectly did not make it a second term. But what to do since the victim of terroism, Kuwait, was already ‘liberated’? Could a new victim be found? Well, yes it was soon found. The victim was potential, as Hussein was claimed to be developing nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, and biological weapons! And of course, the potential victim could only be ourselves, us the poor US citizens, so the terrorist had to be stopped! Eight years of the ‘War Against Terrorism’ was then fought by Clinton and Gore against the people of Iraq, where hundreds of thousands weree killed by economic sanctions designed solely to stop the ‘terrorist’.

Now we know, all of that was the big lie. The Democrats actaully have the nerve to credit Bush Junior with lying about that! Takes some gall, it sure does. But with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, communists could no longer be the offical enemy, so ‘terrorism’ had to be it. The fall of the Soviet Union was over 10 years before 9/11, and Saddam Hussein was the big guy bad guy, before we ever began to think about Osama. Fast forward to now, where terrorists are all over, and all ephemeral.

We now know when the ‘War Against Terrorism’ started, but what has been the purpose? To stop terrorists from harming us? Why NO, that’s not it at all. To catch Osama? No, he has been killed already, more than likely. NO, the real purpose is to provide an official enemy that can camoflage 2 countries’ needs to steal from others. One Holy Land needs to steal land, and the other needs to steal oil. Together they have allied themselves to fight a continual conflict, that they now call, a “War Against Terrorism’. Even as it’s fought, we create yet more of the official enemy to fuel our production of war equipment. Oil and industry for us, and stolen land for our ally. That’s the purpose that makes our leaders march us like so many sheep, into this war against the shadows they create.

The ‘War Against Terrorism’ cannot be stopped, until the land is stolen, and the oil supplies are ours.

Oaxaca and Iraq- The people have a right to self defense

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Oaxaca and Iraq demonstrate that the people have a right to self defense against state terrorism. Today, the Mexican police were assaulting the students holding a radio station use in their self defense against the governmental death squads that have been terrorizing the population of Oaxaca. When captured and jailed, the protesters have been severely tortured. What would the mealy mouthed, American Christian pacifist communkity have them do during the military assault on them? Turn the other cheek? Not throw rocks to stave off the capture of the one piece of media available to the Oaxacan community; the university radio station? Not to set fire to barricades to hold the government thugs back from capturing the protesters, and then jailing and torturing them? The American ‘peace’ pacifists would lecture them about the supposed lessons of Gandhi and non-violence, no doubt, as if self defense was some sort of violence itself! The US pacifist community certainly live with a surreal mindset lacking in clarity and reality. And what would they have the Iraqis do as the Pentagon terrorizes that nation? Sit down in the streets and pray? With their constant prattle about the need to be ‘non-violent’ martyrs, the pacifist community tries to deny that people under attack have the right to resist, by any means necessary, as Malcolm X would have stated it.

The resistance of the Iraqi and Oaxacan communities are two examples of the need to RESIST oppression with self defense, and not just the silly pacifism of overly religious folk. It is not just church mice that bring about justice, but real people using real tactics to defend their rights, and not just always spouting Jesus-Gandhi talk. All the ‘peace and justice’ pacifism that bogs down our Left activism in the US, is a denial of solidarity with those folks under the gun. They are also our heros, and not just US Quakers and US Catholic nuns who might accept arrest here at home. Peace with justice can only come about through united resistance of all types, including armed resistance of some type or other.

I am not advocating picking up the gun and going after ‘them’. But what I am saying is that the message and tone of pacifism is a bunch of religious babble, in general. It does not help in building a US antiwar movement to only talk about Jesus, ‘nonviolence’, and Gandhi. The religious message is not our only one, and should not even be our dominant one. It hinders our ability to communicate with the US community at large to always emphasize only this liberal religious sermonizing about ‘peace’. An antiwar community is about much more than just ‘peace’.

I am overjoyed that there are peoples around the globe that are defending themselves against our government violence, and the violence of their death squad allies around the globe. They are doing it with rocks, molotov cocktails, guns, and bombs. They are doing it peacefully if they can, and not peacefully if that avenue is cut off to them. One just gets sick of Englsih speaking (principally) pacifists saying that that is wrong. Let’s tell the truth here. Much of Anglo pacifist sermonzing is pure bullshit. The people have a right to resist and defend themselves no matter what the pacifists in imperialist countries might say.

Let’s say it straight. We want this government organized, US imperialist army defeated. And it is because the US army is wrong in their battle on behalf of the imperial Super Rich in this PARTICULAR war, not just because all battles and all warfare is wrong to fight. It is not just pacifists that are anti US war making. Non-pacifists also hate this US governmental war making, too. Let’s open up the US antiwar community to those of our population that are not religiously motivated by pacifism and spouting non-violence all the time. A ‘peace’ movement that is only trying to convert folk to liberal religous faith is self limiting. There has got to be more message than that.

May the people of Iraq and Mexico push the forces of US hegemony aside, and build themselves a better world.