Dissident Voice

1. The Australian Defence Formula: Spend! Spend! Spend!

The skin toasted Australian Minister of Defence, Richard Marles, who resembles, with each day, the product of an overly worked solarium, was adamant.  Not only will Australians be paying a bill up to and above A$368 billion for nuclear powered submarines it does not need; it will also be throwing A$100 billion into the coffers of the military industrial complex over the next decade to combat a needlessly inflated enemy.  Forget diplomacy and funding the cause (and course) of peace – it's all about the weapons and the Yellow Peril, baby.

On April 18, Marles and Defence Industry Pat Conroy barraged the press with announcements that the defence budget would be bulked by A$50.3 billion by 2034, with a A$330 billion plan for weapons and equipment known as the Integrated Investment Program.  The measures were intended to satisfy the findings of the Defence Strategic Review.  "This is a significant lift compared to the $270 billion allocated for the 10-year period to 2029-30 as part of the 2020 Defence Strategic Update and 2020 Force Structure Plan," crowed a statement from the Defence Department.

Such statements are often weighed down by jargon and buoyed by delusion.  The press were not left disappointed by the insufferable fluff.  Australia will gain "an enhanced lethality surface fleet and conventionally-armed, nuclear-powered submarines", an army with "littoral manoeuvre" capabilities "with a long-range land and maritime strike capability", an air force capable of delivering "long-range intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance" with "an enhanced maritime, land and air-strike capability" and "a strengthened and integrated space and cyber capability".  The glaring omission here is the proviso that all such policies are being essentially steered by Washington's defence interests, with Canberra very  much the obedient servant.

The defence minister was firmly of the view that all this was taking place with some speed.  "We are acting very quickly in relation to [challenges]," Marles insists.  "I mean, the acquiring of a general-purpose frigate going forward, for example, will be the most rapid acquisition of a platform that size that we've seen in decades."  Anyone who uses the term "rapid" in a sentence on military acquisition is clearly a certified novice.

The ministers, along with the department interests they represent, are certainly fond of their expensive toys.  They are seeking a fourth squadron of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters as replacements for the F/A-18 Super Hornets.  The EA-18G Growler jets are also being replaced.  (That said, both sets of current fighters will see aging service till 2040.)  Three vessels will be purchased to advance undersea war capabilities, including the undersea drone prototype, the Ghost Shark.

The latter hopes to equip the Royal Australian Navy "with a stealthy, long-range autonomous undersea warfare capability that can conduct persistent intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and strike."  Importantly, such acquisitions and developments are always qualified by how well they will work in tandem with the imperial power in question.  The media release from the Department of Defence prefers a more weasel-worded formula.  The Ghost Shark, for instance, "will also enhance Navy's ability to operate with allies and partners."

The new militarisation strategy is also designed to improve levels of recruitment.  Personnel have been putting down their weapons in favour of other forms of employment, while recruitment numbers are falling, much to the consternation of the pro-war lobby.  A suggested answer: recruit non-Australian nationals.  This far from brilliant notion will, Marles suggests, take some years.  But a good place to start would be the hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders resident in Australia.  Sheer genius.

The announcement was also meant to offer budget trimmers a barely visible olive branch, promising "to divest, delay or re-scope projects that do not meet our strategic circumstances." (They could start with the submarines.)  A$5 billion, for instance, will be saved from terminating naval transport and replenishment ships intended to refuel and resupply war vessels at sea.

Hardly appropriate, opined some military pundits keen to keep plucking the money tree.  Jennifer Parker of the National Security College suggested that, "The removal of the Joint Support ship means there is no future plan to expand Australia's limited replenishment capability of two ships – which will in turn limit the force projection capability and reach of the expanded surface combatant fleet if the issue is not addressed."

The focus, as ever, is on Wicked Oriental Authoritarianism which is very much in keeping with the traditional Australian fear of slanty-eyed devils moving in on the spoils and playground of the Anglosphere.  Former RAAF officer and executive director of the Air Power Institute, Chris McInnes, barks in aeronautical terms that Australia's air power capability risks being "put in a holding pattern for the next 10 years."  Despotic China, however, was facing no such prospects.  "There is a risk of putting everything on hold.  The People's Liberal Army is not on hold.  They are going to keep progressing their aircraft."  (The air force seems to do wonders for one's grammar.)

China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian was cool in his response to the latest promises of indulgent military spending Down Under.  "We hope Australia will correctly view China's development and strategic intentions, abandon the Cold War mentality, do more things to keep the region peaceful and stable and stop buzzing about China."  No harm in hoping.

The post The Australian Defence Formula: Spend! Spend! Spend! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

2. The Immense Hunger

Like all living creatures, people need to eat to live.  Some people, eaten from within by a demonic force, try to deny others this basic sustenance.  All across the world people are starving because the powerful and wealthy create economic and political conditions that allow their wealth to be built on the backs of the world's poor.  It is an old story, constantly updated.  It is one form of official terrorism.

From the Irish famine with its terrible aftermath created by the imperialist British government in the nineteenth century that caused the death of between one and two million Irish and the forced emigration of more than a million more between 1846 and 1851 alone, to today's savage Israeli genocide and forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, the stories of politically motivated famine are legion.

In their wake, as the historian Woodham-Smith wrote in 1962 of the Irish famine, it "left hatred behind. Between Ireland and England the memory of what was done and endured has lain like a sword."  This Irish bitterness toward the English was strong even in my own Irish-American childhood in the northern Bronx more than a century later.  Ethnic cleansing has a way of leaving a livid legacy of rage toward the perpetrators, especially in the Irish case when talk of one's ancestors' perilous forced emigration on the Coffin Ships was ever broached.

Today's Israeli government leaders must be historically ignorant or suicidal, for the Irish rage at the British led to the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and the eventual establishment of the Republic of Ireland, where today in Dublin, its capital, huge throngs march in support of the Palestinian people and their fight against Israel. Do the Israeli leaders think that they can evade the lessons of history, lessons that oppressed people everywhere learned from the irrepressible Irish rebels?  Like their arrogant British imperialist counterparts, they have self-anointed themselves a chosen people so they can inflict death and suffering on the unchosen ones, the animal people, those disgusting creatures not deserving of life, land, or liberty.

But starve, torture, and slaughter people enough and the flaming sword of revenge will exact a heavy price.  Dark furies will descend.

Dehumanize people enough, take their land, and the day always comes when the wretched of the earth rise up against their racist colonialist settlers.

Deny the bread of life to people long enough so that they watch their emaciated children die in their arms or search for their body parts beneath the bombed rubble and you will find that the terrified have become terrifying.

Frantz Fanon wrote accurately about the link between bread and land: "For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity."

Without bread to eat, as Marx and Victor Hugo told us in their different ways, the desperate become desperadoes.

The poet Patrick Kavanaugh, in his haunting long poem, "The Great Hunger," concluded it thus: "The hungry fiend/Screams the apocalypse of clay/In every corner of this land."  Lines that with a slight difference pertain to every land where famine is used as a weapon of war.

But why is this so?  What is this demonic force that drives some human animals to oppress others?

I think we can agree that humans have animal needs of hunger, thirst, sex, etc. that need to be satisfied, but that we also are symbolic creatures – angels with anuses as Ernest Becker has said so pungently in his classic book, The Denial of Death.  We live in a world of symbols, not merely matter.  Unlike other animal species, we have made death conscious and must deal with that consciousness one way or another.  We have beliefs, ideas, symbol systems and get our sense of self-worth symbolically.  Of course, the anuses are the problem because they remind us that despite all our highfalutin fantasies of omnipotence of the symbolic sort, what goes in one hole comes out the other and like those backdoor hole deposits we too are destined for underground holes in the earth.

But this is unacceptable.  The thought of it drives many savagely crazy – individuals, groups, and nations.  So, as Becker writes, "An animal who gets his feeling of worth symbolically has to minutely compare himself to those around him, to make sure he doesn't come off second best."  Herein lies the root of competition and the desire to be successful and hoist the symbolic trophies that declare us winners.  And if there are winners, there must be losers.  If I win and you lose, then I can feel superior to you and "good about myself," at least in the realm where we compete.  Equality is a problem for humans, whom Nietzsche termed "the disease called man."  This sense of competition can be relatively harmless or deadly.

History is replete with the latter type, where the fear of not being immortal leads to the extermination of others, as if to say: "See, we are number one."  You die but we live.  This is the case with the present Israeli policy of genocide of the Palestinians through famine, bombs, and guns.  The chosen enemy is always considered dirt, pigs, reduced to animal status not worthy to exist, and in a transference of existential trepidation emanating from a deep sense of insecurity masked as triumphalism, must be eliminated because their very existence threatens the oppressors God-like sense of themselves.

There is physical hunger and there is symbolic hunger.  Each needs satisfaction.  In a just and equitable world, the hunger for bread would be easy to satisfy.  It is the symbolic hunger for an answer to death that poses the deeper problem and causes the former.  For in a world where people could recognize their fears and deep-seated anxieties and stop transferring them to others, the bread of truth might reign.  We might stop slaughtering and starving others to purge ourselves of the self-hate and insecurity that drives us to feel the love of our fellow victimizers but the hate of our victims.  No one would be Number One.  All would be chosen and feast as equals at the table of the bread of life.

If only the Israeli and U.S. government leaders were wise enough to read, they might read Herman Melville's Moby Dick and turn from the path of their joint obsession to obliterate the world for a trophy that they will never hoist.  Ishmael might reach them with his words: "For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men."  And they might seek peace, not an expansion of war.

If only. . . . but I dream, for they have chosen war, and the dark furies lay in wait.

The post The Immense Hunger first appeared on Dissident Voice.

3. The Two-state Solution Lives Only in the Delusions and Cynicism of Western Politicians and Diplomats

My wife is currently cancer free, but her chemotherapy caused her to gain a lot of weight, which she wants to lose. She says that she doesn't have the will and self-discipline to change her diet or start an exercise routine. Instead, she seeks cures and promises from advertisers on social media for expensive fake remedies in a bottle. Of course, these never work as advertised. I warn her that, "If it sounds too good to be true, it is."

Such is the two-state solution. It has been a fake and a fantasy built on a contradiction from the day that Theodore Herzl proposed a Jewish state in Der Judenstaat in 1895. The contradiction is based on the fact that in order to create a Jewish state, enough Jews needed to be gathered in one place in order to create it.

How many is enough? According to Herzl, enough would be when Jews become the dominant ethnicity in the territory designated for the state. He recognized that this would mean not only gathering Jews, but also removing or otherwise reducing the non-Jewish population. Later Zionist leadership defined it as an 80% or more proportion of the desired ethnicity and a 20% or less proportion of the undesired ethnicity in the population. This is never workable in the long run without perpetual ethnic cleansing, because whenever the Jewish state is in danger of including too many non-Jews, it must find a way to reduce the number. In practice, this means that even the smaller remaining non-Jewish minority must also be repressed, so as to limit both their numbers and their power within the Jewish state.

How does this fit into the two-state solution? The answer is that it does not, no more than a "separate but equal" apartheid policy was a solution for preserving a white state in South Africa. Or, as articulated by US president Abraham Lincoln in 1858, such a state "…cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free." A supremacist state cannot endure anywhere; not in South Africa, not in the US, not in Nazi Germany and not in Palestine. It will always regard the non-members of the preferred population as a threat.

Israeli proponents of the two-state solution have always required the Palestinian state to have less sovereignty than the Jewish state. To the extent that such a state was acceptable at all, it needed to be disarmed and controlled, and its territory severely compromised. But in fact, Israel never accepted a Palestinian state. The most it accepted was a "road map" to a state, which allowed Israel to pay lip service to the idea while gobbling up Palestinian land, moving Zionist settlers onto it, strangling Palestinian movement and development, and stealing the natural resources. The negotiations were merely a ruse to displace Palestinians while gradually taking more of everything they had.

Of course, even that wasn't enough. Although the land held by Palestinians was being confiscated, their population kept increasing, eventually motivating the current Israeli genocide. Israel was simply unable to control Palestinian numbers any other way. As Arnon Sofer expressed it in 2004, " …if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill.  All day, every day."

This will not change with a two-state solution. If one of the two is a supremacist state — which is central to the ideology of political Zionism — then there will never be equality between the two, because the Zionist state will not permit it, and the non-Zionist Palestinian state and its citizens will always be considered a threat. But Israel has become more honest. It now openly rejects a Palestinian state of any kind, while the UN and most of its member states continue to insist upon the two-state fantasy, the only function of which is to prevent any solution at all, and to continue to enable Israel to implement its conquest of the rest of Palestine, as well as all or parts of Lebanon, Syria, the Sinai (Egypt), the East Bank (Jordan), and even parts of Saudi Arabia.

The two state "solution" to which every western politician pledges allegiance is a worse than useless quest for a fantasy that cannot be maintained because none of the concerned population really wants it. There are no Palestinians who would not prefer a one-state solution without Zionism, only a minority willing to accept half a loaf for fear of losing the other half. The Zionist two-staters, on the other hand, are either among the dwindling number of peaceniks, or cynical negotiators, making sure that Palestinians never quite concede enough to satisfy them, thus keeping the solution just out of reach while Israel completes its ethnic cleansing. Most Zionists would prefer no state except theirs, and no Palestinians at all.

If this is reminiscent of South Africa, it is because Israel also is also an exclusivist state based on racial or ethnic identity. The solution is the same: to abolish the offending racist ideology – whether apartheid or Zionism – and create one state with equal rights for all, and restoration or compensation to Palestinians for their losses. The nonviolent 2018-19 Great March of Return attempt to move toward such a solution was thwarted by Israel's murderous reaction to it and the world's indifference. The October 7, 2023 armed initiative by Hamas and the rest of the Palestinian resistance is therefore the predictable (but unpredicted) Clausewitzian reaction, and it appears to be succeeding, despite the enormous sacrifices of the Palestinian people. In fact, it is hard to imagine how this is not the beginning of the end for the Zionist dream. The genocidal horrors that Israel is committing will isolate it from most of the world for the foreseeable future, and even much of the world Jewish community will also abandon it, if they have not done so already. A racist supremacist Jewish colonial state is an anachronism that belongs in the past. Only the restoration of a Palestinian state for all who consider it their home and are willing to respect its laws and standards can be the future.

The post The Two-state Solution Lives Only in the Delusions and Cynicism of Western Politicians and Diplomats first appeared on Dissident Voice.

4. Warrantless Surveillance Makes a Mockery of the Constitution

Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference … The Thought Police would get him just the same … the arrests invariably happened at night … In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.

— George Orwell, 1984

The government long ago sold us out to the highest bidder.

The highest bidder, by the way, has always been the Deep State.

What's playing out now with the highly politicized tug-of-war over whether Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gets reauthorized by Congress doesn't just sell us out, it makes us slaves of the Deep State.

Read the fine print: it's a doozy.

Just as the USA Patriot was perverted from its stated intent to fight terrorism abroad and was instead used to covertly crack down on the American people (allowing government agencies to secretly track Americans' financial activities, monitor their communications, and carry out wide-ranging surveillance on them), Section 702 has been used as an end-run around the Constitution to allow the government to collect the actual content of your conversations (phone calls, text messages, video chats, emails and other electronic communication) without a warrant.

Now intelligence officials are pushing to dramatically expand the government's spying powers, effectively giving the government unbridled authority to force millions of Americans to spy on its behalf.

Basically, the Deep State wants to turn the American people into extensions of Big Brother.

As Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) explains:

"If you have access to any communications, the government can force you to help it spy. That means anyone with access to a server, a wire, a cable box, a Wi-Fi router, a phone, or a computer. So think for a moment about the millions of Americans who work in buildings and offices in which communications are stored or pass through.

After all, every office building in America has data cables running through it. The people are not just the engineers who install, maintain, and repair our communications infrastructure; there are countless others who could be forced to help the government spy, including those who clean offices and guard buildings. If this provision is enacted, the government can deputize any of these people against their will, and force them in effect to become what amounts to an agent for Big Brother—for example, by forcing an employee to insert a USB thumb drive into a server at an office they clean or guard at night.

This could all happen without any oversight whatsoever: The FISA Court won't know about it, Congress won't know about it. Americans who are handed these directives will be forbidden from talking about it. Unless they can afford high-priced lawyers with security clearances who know their way around the FISA Court, they will have no recourse at all."

This is how an effort to reform Section 702 has quickly steamrollered into an expansion of the government's surveillance powers.

We should have seen this coming.

After all, the Police State doesn't relinquish power easily, the Surveillance State doesn't look favorably on anything that might weaken its control, and Big Brother doesn't like to be restricted.

What most Americans don't get is that even without Section 702 in play, the government will still target the populace for warrantless, suspicionless mass surveillance, because that's how the police state maintains its stranglehold on power.

These maneuvers are just the tip of the iceberg.

For all intents and purposes, we now have a fourth branch of government.

This fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military.

It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful.

It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.

The government's "technotyranny" surveillance apparatus has become so entrenched and entangled with its police state apparatus that it's hard to know anymore where law enforcement ends and surveillance begins. They have become one and the same entity.

The police state has passed the baton to the surveillance state.

On any given day, the average American is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by the U.S. government's vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.

Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government's choosing.

Privacy, as we have known it, is dead.

Whether you're walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking you. This doesn't even begin to touch on the complicity of the corporate sector, which buys and sells us from cradle to grave, until we have no more data left to mine. These corporate trackers monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere and share the data with the government.

Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to collect data and spy on the American people. Then there are the fusion and counterterrorism centers that gather all of the data from the smaller government spies—the police, public health officials, transportation, etc.—and make it accessible for all those in power.

These government snoops are constantly combing through and harvesting vast quantities of our communications, then storing it in massive databases for years. Once this information—collected illegally and without any probable cause—is ingested into NSA servers, other government agencies can often search through the databases to make criminal cases against Americans that have nothing to do with terrorism or anything national security-related.

Empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector, police have become particularly adept at sidestepping the Fourth Amendment.

Talk about a system rife for abuse.

Now, the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying program because they're only looking to get the "bad" guys who are overseas.

Don't believe it.

The government's definition of a "bad" guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.

Indeed, the government has become the biggest lawbreaker of all.

It's telling that even after it was revealed that the FBI, one of the most power-hungry and corrupt agencies within the police state's vast complex of power-hungry and corrupt agencies, misused a massive government surveillance database more than 300,000 times in order to target American citizens, we're still debating whether they should be allowed to continue to sidestep the Fourth Amendment.

This is how the government operates, after all: our objections are routinely overruled and our rights trampled underfoot.

It works the same every time.

First, the government seeks out extraordinary powers acquired in the wake of some national crisis—in this case, warrantless surveillance powers intended to help the government spy on foreign targets suspected of engaging in terrorism—and then they use those powers against the American people.

According to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the FBI repeatedly misused Section 702 in order to spy on the communications of two vastly disparate groups of Americans: those involved in the George Floyd protests and those who may have taken part in the Jan. 6, 2021, protests at the Capitol.

This abuse of its so-called national security powers is par for the course for the government.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, intelligence agencies conduct roughly 200,000 of these warrantless "backdoor" searches for Americans' private communications each year.

No one is spared.

Many of the targets of these searches have done nothing wrong.

Government agents have spied on the communications of protesters, members of Congress, crime victims, journalists, and political donors, among many others.

The government has claimed that its spying on Americans is simply "incidental," as though it were an accident, but it fully intends to collect this information.

As journalist Jake Johnson warns, under an expanded Section 702, U.S. intelligence agencies "could, without a warrant, compel gyms, grocery stores, barber shops, and other businesses to hand over communications data."

According to the Wall Street Journal, "The Securities and Exchange Commission is deploying a massive government database—the Consolidated Audit Trail, or CAT—that monitors in real time the identity, transactions and investment portfolio of everyone who invests in the stock market."

Journalist Leo Hohmann reports that the government is also handing out $20 million in grants to police, mental health networks, universities, churches and school districts to enlist their help in identifying Americans who might be political dissidents or potential "extremists."

Ask the government why it's carrying out this far-reaching surveillance on American citizens, and you'll get the same Orwellian answer the government has been trotting in response to every so-called crisis to justify its assaults on our civil liberties: to keep America safe.

What this is really all about, however, is control.

What we are dealing with is a government so power-hungry, paranoid and afraid of losing its stranglehold on power that it is conspiring to wage war on anyone who dares to challenge its authority.

When the FBI is asking banks and other financial institutions to carry out dragnet searches of customer transactions—warrantlessly and without probable cause—for "extremism" indicators broadly based on where you shop, what you read, and how you travel, we're all in trouble.

You don't have to do anything illegal.

For that matter, you don't even have to challenge the government's authority.

Frankly, you don't even have to care about politics or know anything about your rights.

All you really need to do in order to be tagged as a suspicious character, flagged for surveillance, and eventually placed on a government watch list is live in the United States.

As long as the government is allowed to weaponize its 360 degree surveillance technologies to flag you as a threat to national security, whether or not you've done anything wrong, it's just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it won't be long before Big Brother's Thought Police are locking us up to "protect us" from ourselves.

At that point, we will disappear.

The post Warrantless Surveillance Makes a Mockery of the Constitution first appeared on Dissident Voice.

5. The North American Peace Movement at an Inflection Point

The North American peace movement is contesting ongoing US wars in Ukraine and Palestine and preparations for war with China. Out of the fog of these wars, a clear anti-imperialist focus is emerging. Giving peace a chance has never been more plainly understood as opposition to what Martin Luther King, Jr., referred to as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world: my own government."

Palestinian, Muslim and Arab, and anti-Zionist Jewish groups have been in the forefront of the anti-imperialist peace movement. With strong youth components, they are not confused by either relying on sell-out liberal Democrats (e.g., anti-Iraq War) or by utopian calls for leaderless organizations without concrete demands (e.g., Occupy). Nor have been distracted by individualistic expressions of anger by trashing small businesses or in adventuristic confrontations with the police.

The Palestinian resistance has radicalized millions worldwide. The popular demand for a permanent ceasefire in Palestine is leading to a still larger project to cease the US-led imperialist order.

The overall consciousness of the resurgent peace movement reflects the normalization of anti-imperialism as a leading current; antiwar sentiment is becoming explicitly anti-imperialist.

Evolving understanding of the Ukraine conflict

The peace movement recognizes that, although Hamas's action of October 7 came as a surprise, it did not simply erupt out of the blue. The uprising had a 75-year gestation starting with the Nakba of 1948 and the establishment of the settler colonialist State of Israel.

Initially, there was less clarity regarding the events in Ukraine of February 24, 2022. With research and reflection, most of the movement came to understand the conflict did not begin that day. The supposedly "unprovoked" Russian intervention in Ukraine was sparked by NATO moving closer and closer to the Russian border, the 2014 Maidan coup, the sabotage of the Minsk agreements, etc.

A consensus is maturing in the antiwar movement that Ukraine is a proxy war by the US and its NATO allies to weaken Russia. Even key corporate press and government officials now recognize the conflict as a "full proxy war" by the US designed to use the Ukrainian people to mortally disable Russia.

Likewise, opinions are coalescing around recognizing that there is just one superpower with hundreds of foreign military bases, possession of the world's reserve currency, and control of the SWIFT worldwide payment and transaction system. Simply reducing the conflict to one of contesting capitalists obscures the context of empire.

The antiwar movement may differ on whether to call February 24 an invasion, an incursion, or a special military operation to protect ethnic Russian regions of Ukraine under attack. But unity has been forged that the solution to the conflict is a negotiated settlement and that the US/NATO project of "winning" the war is a threat to world peace. The outlier is the Ukraine Solidarity Network (USN).

Still using the language of anti-imperialism, USN's  left-leaning intellectuals and activists are opposed to a negotiated peace but champion a "victory" backed by the US and NATO. Further, they uphold the "right" of the US to fund what they personalize as a war against Putin. Their statement on the second anniversary of the war accuses Washington of having a "double standard" for supporting imperialism in Palestine but being on the side of justice in Ukraine. Other peace activists see USN's opposition to the US involvement in Palestine, but not to its complicity in Ukraine, as a double standard.

The USN's call for a Ukraine victory is consonant with the Democratic Party's. In contrast, for example, the United National Antiwar Coalition's (UNAC) position on Ukraine is: "No to NATO's proxy war and Biden's $80 billion military aid to Ukraine! No to Ukraine's joining NATO!" Similarly, the Peace in Ukraine Coalition demands: ""STOP the weapons! START the talks!"

The emerging anti-imperialist peace movement sees the nature of US imperialism as systematic and not elective. The US empire is fundamentally imperialist; it is not a matter of choice.

First major antiwar conference since the Covid pandemic

In the first major antiwar conference since the Covid pandemic, UNAC brought together 400 activists in Saint Paul, MN, on April 5-7, under the banner of "decolonization and the fight against imperialism."

Among the some fifty groups participating were the Alliance for Global Justice, American Muslims for Palestine, Black Alliance for Peace, CodePink, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, US Palestinian Community Network, and Workers World Party. Local organizations included Students for Justice in Palestine, Twin Cities Students for a Democratic Society, and the venerable Women Against Military Madness, who have been protesting weekly in the streets since 1982.

The immediacy of militant organizing was reported by Danaka Katovich of CodePink, Cody Urban of the Resist US Wars, Wyatt Miller of the Minneapolis Antiwar Committee, and a number of other youthful leaders.

Palestinian liberation against colonialism was a major focal point of the conference. Mnar Adley, editor of MintPress News, movingly described her experience of living under Israeli suppression. Today, she explained, "the Intifada has been globalized," adding that the Palestinian resistance and the movement in its support have exposed the Democrats as the "bloodthirsty war-hungry party that it is."

With the US presidential election imminent, conference participants had no illusions that either corporate party stands for peace. The initiative to cast ballots in the Democratic primary for "uncommitted" (to signify opposition to Biden's complicity in the war on Gaza and to demand a ceasefire) received considerable support. Spontaneous chants of "shame" erupted throughout the conference whenever the Democrats' conduct was raised.

K.J. Noh of Pivot for Peace warned about US preparations for war against China. Michael Wong of Veterans for Peace described the world struggle as not one of democracy versus authoritarianism but of national liberation versus imperialism.

Ambassadors Lautaro Sandino from Nicaragua, whose government is taking Germany to the World Court for facilitating Israel's genocide, and Dr. Sidi M. Omar of the Polisario Front of Western Sahara addressed the conference. International solidarity was affirmed in workshops on Zones of Peace in Our Americas, opposition of coercive economic measures, and NO to NATO.

Combating repression against the movement was highlighted by Efia Nwangaza's presentation on the campaign to "Stop Kop Cities" and Dr. Aisha Fields' on resisting the attacks on the African People's Socialist Party. Mel Underbakke addressed FBI frame ups of Muslims, and FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley briefed the conference on the mobilization for Julian Assange. Lessons were also drawn by speakers from the successful defenses of the Antiwar 23 and the freeing of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab.

Tasks ahead

Janine Solanki with the Mobilization Against War and Occupation in Vancouver spoke about the "unfolding antiwar and pro-Palestine movement that has a potential to go beyond the Vietnam antiwar movement." She advised that what has been a mass spontaneous movement now needs to progress into a more coordinated and structured form. "We have humanity on our side…our role is to really organize these forces."

Black Agenda Report (BAR) executive editor Margaret Kimberley concluded the conference with the mandate to stop the wars at home and abroad. The current context is a neoliberal economic regime failing to meet basic domestic needs and a global pax Americana becoming increasingly contested. In reference to the workshop on climate change, she observed, "we are in a battle for survival; that's not hyperbole."

In short, the conference was indicative of the larger movement that is melding youthful demographics – buoyed by the mass protests against the war on Palestine – with the mature understanding of the gravity of the tasks ahead. Kimberly closed with the guidance to "engage in principled struggle with our comrades; if you're not struggling with someone you're not doing enough work."

Prospects for the anti-imperialist movement

Will the Democratic Party's formula of "Trump trumps everything" quash the antiwar initiative? Back in 2015, the late BAR editor Glen Ford presciently wrote: "The Democrats hope the Black Lives Matter movement, like the Occupy Wall Street movement, will disappear amid the hype of the coming election season." What will happen to the 2024 antiwar protest movement when another US presidential election looms five months from now?

Resisting being absorbed into what Ford called the Democratic election blitz to bury the movement will be the People's Conference for Palestine, May 24-26, in Detroit, which will bring together anti-imperialist groups including the Palestine Youth Movement, National Students for Justice in Palestine, Al-Awda, and Healthcare Workers for Palestine. The ANSWER Coalition, associated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, is a leading element. ANSWER and some of these other groups had also been instrumental in building major pro-Palestine demonstrations in Washington DC, the biggest ever in the US.

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world, is among the faith-based groups that have carved out a new and implicitly anti-imperialist identity for their followers. Surely JVP, along with other Jewish activist organizations, like IfNotNow and International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, will continue to militantly protest US support for Israel's apartheid system in unity with Palestinian and other activist groups.

Come this summer, CodePink, Bayan, and others will be confronting the largest joint war exercises in the world with Cancel RIMPAC. Protests are also scheduled for NATO's 75th anniversary summit, July 6-7, in Washington DC; the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, July 15-18; and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, August 19-22.

The post The North American Peace Movement at an Inflection Point first appeared on Dissident Voice.

6. We’re Still Breathing: Amhara Genocide in Ethiopia Official Trailer

Award Winning Documentary Film by Graham Peebles

Ignored by western governments and largely overlooked by media a genocide is taking place in Ethiopia. The Amhara people, a large ethnic group, are being ethnically cleansed from the region of Oromia, the largest region in the country.

Tens of thousands of Amhara have been killed by Oromo fanatics (estimates range from 30,000 – 50,000); over three million have been displaced, homes, land and livestock stolen.

The Oromo Liberation Front (OLF or Shene) together with the Oromo regional militia are responsible for the carnage, with the support of the Oromo Regional Authority and the federal government.

In addition to mass murder and wholesale displacement, estimates claim that more than 300,000 Amhara have been arrested. Journalists, human rights workers, parliamentarians, academics, protestors and students, are all among those interned without trial, often in undisclosed locations. In detention, torture and execution is reportedly widespread.

Hundreds of Amhara men and boys have been herded into industrial detention centres (that some are calling concentration camps), where they are held without charge and injected with contagious diseases.

At the request of an Ethiopian human rights group (Amhara Association of America) I travelled to Ethiopia in June 2023 to make a short documentary. We spent time in Internal Displacement Camps and met some of the people affected. Their stories were deeply distressing: children murdered in front of their parents; young men slaughtered en masse; pregnant women attacked, their bellies stabbed, the baby killed. Whole communities eradicated.

The purpose of the film is to raise awareness of this appalling issue, and to add our voice to those calling on western governments (the US, EU and UK in particular), to apply pressure on the Ethiopian Government, led by Prime-Minister Abiy Ahmed.

Screenings of the award winning documentary (Best Documentary at the Global Film Awards and Best Human Rights Film at the World Film Festival in Cannes) have taken place in Washington DC, Dallas, Toronto, Canada. More screenings are planned in April/May/June in the US.

The post We're Still Breathing: Amhara Genocide in Ethiopia Official Trailer first appeared on Dissident Voice.