Archive for the ‘antiwar’ Category
SOLIDARITY! FBI Raid Victims Get New Grand Jury Subpoenas
Posted by Mike E on November 20, 2010
Posted in antiwar, imperialism, police, repression, war on terror | 8 Comments »
Must Study: How Feds Target International Connections
Posted by Mike E on November 11, 2010
“…last June in Holder v. the Humanitarian Law Project [the Supreme Court] decided that non-violent First Amendment speech and advocacy ‘coordinated with’ or ‘under the direction of’ a foreign group listed by the Secretary of State as ‘terrorist’ was a crime.”
“In 1996, Congress made it a crime then punishable by 10 years, later increased to 15 years, to anyone in the U.S. who provides “material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization or attempts or conspires to do so.” The present statute defines “material support or resources” as:
- ‘any property, tangible or intangible, or service, including currency or monetary instruments or financial services, lodging training, expert advice or assistance, safe houses, false documentation or identification, communications equipment, facilities, weapons, lethal substances, explosives, personnel and transportation except medicine or religious materials.’”
* * * * * *
Each of us needs to understand the implications and dangers of these developments.
First that we need to expose and help defeat attempts to criminalize internationalism.
Second, while important solidarity work remains legal and urgent – such efforts should not be “coordinated with” international groups. I.e.Specific international connections and coordination are being made legally “radioactive” and internationalist work within needs to be carefully independent (in planning, conception and finances) from people outside the country — no casual communications, no back and forth flow of suggestions, no appearance of mutual consultation on plans, no exchange of seemingly innocent help (skills, money, etc.) Any international communications by solidarity participants should be limited and careful scrutinized with these legal constraints in mind. Anyone who is approached by someone claiming to be from a proscribed group who claims to have suggestions (however innocent) should report the incident and not pursue the conversation — entrapment is a real tactic of sinister forces.
Posted in antiwar, civil liberties, cointelpro, imperialism, police, political prisoners, war on terror | 2 Comments »
Israel Challenged: Colonialism and Apartheid are not Legitimate
Posted by redflags on November 10, 2010
graphic by Big Character Media
Responding to the growing international campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) to isolate Israel’s apartheid regime, 38 Nobel Laureates have issued a statement opposing the call from Palestinian civil society for an academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions. Predominantly doctors, economists and natural scientists, their statement argues,
“Academic and cultural boycotts, divestments and sanctions in the academy are: antithetical to principles of academic and scientific freedom, antithetical to principles of freedom of expression and inquiry, and may well constitute discrimination by virtue of national origin. Instead of fostering peace, these boycott and divestment efforts are likely to be counterproductive to the dynamics of reconciliation that lead to peace.”
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel responded with the basic facts of the conflict:
“The establishment of a settler-colonial regime in Palestine after the expulsion of most of the indigenous people is the basic and defining moment, and until Israel respects the spirit and the letter of the numerous United Nations resolutions on Palestine and abides by the many stipulations of international law and international humanitarian law in dismantling its system of occupation, apartheid, and colonialism, it should expect to be isolated in the global community as apartheid South Africa was.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in >> analysis of news, >> International, anti-racist action, anti-semitism, antiwar, art, BDS, Boycott, civil liberties, Divestment, Human rights, imperialism, Israel, Palestine, racism, Sanctions, social networking, trade unions, USA, Zionism | Tagged: academic boycott, BDS, Boycott Divestment Sanctions, International solidarity, Israel, Israeli academic and cultural institutions, Palestine, secular democracy, Zionism | Leave a Comment »
Voices & Faces of the Raided
Posted by Mike E on October 27, 2010
Posted in antiwar, fascism, police, political prisoners, repression | 5 Comments »
First of May Anarchist Alliance on FRSO-FB Raids: We Have Their Backs
Posted by Mike E on September 29, 2010
Kasama received the following statement.
Hands off the Anti-War movement! Defend FRSO
Anarchist Solidarity against the Political Police
We stand firmly opposed to the raids carried out by the FBI, America’s political police, against a number of anti-war and labor activists across the country on Friday, September 24th, 2010. We give our solidarity to those threatened by these raids and to those subpoenaed to appear before a government Grand Jury next month. These attacks must be resisted.
The FBI claims the raids were done in order to combat terrorism. We reject
that lie. We know many of the activists attacked personally and have
shared the frontlines with them in struggles against war and poverty and
for freedom and justice. We have had, and will continue to have, serious
disagreements with them. But let no one doubt – WE HAVE THEIR BACKS.
Posted in >> analysis of news, anarchism, antiwar, Barack Obama, police, repression, war on terror | 5 Comments »
Iraq War Propaganda: Manufacturing Ignorance
Posted by Mike E on September 21, 2010
The following piece first appeared on Dissident Voice.
The “Right Thing” in Iraq? A Depressing Statistic
by Gary Leupp / September 20th, 2010
Fox News recently reported that 58% of U.S. residents believe that the U.S. “did the right thing” in going to war in Iraq. This reflects the fact that most have been persuaded that combat is over, the troops having succeeding in toppling a dictator and establishing a democracy.
I don’t know how accurate the statistic is, but my gut feeling is that it’s probably pretty accurate. And profoundly depressing. Have people forgotten that this war was fought, not for such reasons, but to destroy Saddam Hussein’s (alleged) weapons of mass destruction and end his (supposed) cooperation with al-Qaeda?
Have they forgotten how terrified the Bush administration made them, with carefully calculated talking points? (For example: “Let’s hope the smoking gun isn’t a mushroom cloud over New York City.”) With all the insane color-coded threat advisories, and all the Orwellian manipulation, in the background? With the “Information Awareness Office” under Adm. Poindexter, seemingly modeled after the surveillance system in the former East Germany, making all thinking people uneasy? With Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer saying–after comedian Bill Maher opined matter-of-factly that whatever else they were the 9-11 hijackers weren’t “cowards”–“All Americans need to watch what they say”?
Posted in antiwar, capitalism, Gary Leupp, imperialism, Iraq | 8 Comments »
Glad Iraq War is Over? Meet “Post-Combat U.S. Gunfire”
Posted by Mike E on September 12, 2010
Supposedly a picture of the last U.S. combat troops leaving Iraq. Apparently those now in combat don't count.
Thanks to Hegemonik. This appeared in the New York Times (September 13). Note the concept in the headline “Post-Combat U.S. Gunfire…” Hmmmm.
More Post-Combat U.S. Gunfire in Iraq
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
BAGHDAD – American military units fired on insurgents while supporting Iraqi troops northeast of the capital on Sunday, Iraqi officials said. It was the second such episode since the United States declared an end to its combat operations in Iraq less than two weeks ago.
There were no American casualties in the fighting in Hudaidy, a village about 50 miles from Baghdad that has long harbored members of the Sunni insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
Iraqi security officials said three people were killed: an Iraqi soldier, an Iraqi police officer and an insurgent. Ten people were wounded.
The United States military did not confirm its role in the fighting. An American military spokeswoman said Sunday in an e-mail that she was awaiting “releasable information.”
Posted in antiwar, Barack Obama, Iraq, military, war on terror | Leave a Comment »
Remembering Hiroshima
Posted by Tell No Lies on August 6, 2010
65 years ago today, at 8:15 a.m, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Posted in antiwar, Japan, World War II | 2 Comments »
The Case of World War 2: Nukes, Scientists & the Tasks of a Revolutionary Core
Posted by Mike E on June 15, 2010
The atomic explosion over Hiroshima -- a historic crime
“We need to fight U.S. imperialism — and not concoct crude or sophisticated justifications for not doing so. …We communists need to promote a culture of strategic courage — of being willing to risk prison, public demonization, , and even worse in serving the people and advancing the revolution…
“And we need … a core movement of revolutionaries that can help ‘create favorable conditions through struggle’ — so that the resistance that emerges is coordinated, coherent, conscious, visible, effective, and connected (in sophisticated ways) to the project of revolution.”
* * * * * * * *
In a parallel thread, we have been discussing the role of communists in the Manhattan Project — the vast secret World War 2 scientific operation that produced the atomic weapons dropped by the U.S. on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is perhaps not widely known, but progressive, leftist and even communist scientists played important (even crucial) roles in the development of these American super-weapons. And our sister Joan Hinton (who recently died) was one of those physicists, who went on to play a quite internationalist role in revolutionary China for much of her life.
“[These scientists were] often sincere in their attempt to ‘do the right thing.’ And virtually their whole generation was won over to the idea that they needed to make an alliance with U.S. imperialism against a greater evil (Nazi Germany) — especially in order to defend the Soviet Union. And this played a huge role in the nuclear program, where quite a few of the scientists were rather radical and left — and yet threw themselves into the work of giving this monstrous weapon to the U.S. government.
“History shows that many of their hopes were betrayed: this was not used to defeat Nazi Germany (after all) or defend the Soviet Union. It was dropped on Japan in a genocidal way, and was an attempt to intimidate the revolutionary forces of China and the USSR. And it gave the U.S. imperialists an unprecedented power to use — in harvesting a new global empire out of the chaos of World War 2.“
Bob H raises a series of questions about what kind of stand scientists could have taken during World War 2. David_D takes up the issues of “united front against fascism.” The following is my own friendly exploration of those questions.
Posted in antiwar, atomic bomb, comintern, genocide, Mike Ely, World War II | 12 Comments »
The Radical Roots of Mother’s Day
Posted by Tell No Lies on May 9, 2010
Julia Ward Howe, Abolitionist and Anti-War Activist
Julia Ward Howe (May 27, 1819 – October 17, 1910) was a prominent American abolitionist, social activist, and poet most famous as the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In 1870, Julia Ward Howe took on a new issue and a new cause. Distressed by her experience of the realities of war, determined that peace was one of the two most important causes of the world (the other being equality in its many forms) and seeing war arise again in the world in the Franco-Prussian War, she called in 1870 for women to rise up and oppose war in all its forms. She wanted women to come together across national lines, to recognize what we hold in common above what divides us, and commit to finding peaceful resolutions to conflicts. She issued a Declaration, hoping to gather together women in a congress of action.
Mother’s Day for Peace Proclamation
by Julia Ward Howe
Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.
Posted in >> Art and Culture, antiwar, slavery, women | 1 Comment »
May 4 Plus 42 years: Remembering Kent State
Posted by kasama on May 6, 2010
by Jim Dorenkott (As It Ought to Be)
May 4th 1970 — I am sitting in my classroom at college after getting out of the Navy. Students come running in up to my desk and almost whisper: “They just shot 4 students at Kent State.”
Our voices become louder and the teacher interrupts us. We start telling the class and he lets us go on for a few minutes. Then he says we can either get back to the lessons or take it out in the hall.
Of course we couldn’t think of anything else. They had just shot 4 American kids, our generation at Kent State, gunned them down in broad daylight and they were unarmed. No way were we going to go back to “lessons.”
A group of us went into the hall and started interacting with the growing number of students who had heard. We agreed to go back into our classes and lead discussions about it. If the teachers stopped us we would lead a walkout and meet outside and continue the discussion. So it continued till the school was at a standstill about 2 periods later.
Many teachers not much older than us had just dismissed their classes or changed it to focus on the war and the shootings.
The next move was to tie into the rapidly growing network of colleges and schools reacting. Our college radio stations were keeping us informed of growing walkouts and resistance across the country. Within a couple of days this was organized into a network of several hundred radio stations which broadcast updates and status reports on various walkouts, shutdowns and protests against the shootings, the war and the escalation into Cambodia and Laos.
We organized demonstrations to the local town, but most of our activity was setting up a parallel university with our own campus. Some were taught by teachers and others by students. They were relevant to the struggles of the war and of the better world we constantly talked about wanting to build. Instead of sticking to the textbooks we used more current and more radical pamphlets and books.
Posted in >> history, antiwar, organizing, students, Vietnam, Vietnam War | 2 Comments »
Kent & Jackson State 1970: A Firestorm They Could Not Contain
Posted by Mike E on May 4, 2010
Fire on the Mountain has called on gray heads to remember the days when Ohio National Guardsmen shot dead four of us on Kent State campus. I’m grateful for the initiative.
Here is my small piece of a much larger picture.
By Mike Ely (Kasama Project)
May 1970. Forty years have passed. It is history now in the eyes of the world. But for me, and many others, it is raw and alive. It always will be.
I won’t tell the well known details – if you don’t know them, look them up. But I will tell you what it felt like, and looked like to a teenage boy who wanted desperately to see the liberation of the Vietnamese and Black people in America.
May Day for Bobby Seale — New Haven 1970
On May First 1970, I was in New Haven, Connecticut. Bobby Seale, the chairman of the Black Panther Party was facing a murder trial in New Haven. They had first bound and gagged him in the courtroom of the Chicago 8, then shipped him to Connecticut to lock him up for life. We were determined to free him.
Students came from all over the East coast to turn the city upside down. On my campus, we had worked day and night to explain the attack on the Black Panther Party – and to mobilize busloads to go New Haven.
Posted in >> analysis of news, anti-racist action, antiwar, Black Panthers, communism, Mao Zedong, Maoism, mass line, Mike Ely, New Com. Movement, revolution, Vietnam | 5 Comments »
On the 40th Anniversary of Jackson & Kent State
Posted by Tell No Lies on May 4, 2010
Posted in >> analysis of news, African American, antiwar, video, Vietnam War | 1 Comment »
U.S. Flag Recalled After Causing 143 Million Deaths
Posted by Tell No Lies on April 14, 2010
Unfortunate casualties of Old Glory's near-continuous 230-year use.
from The Onion
WASHINGTON—Citing a series of fatal malfunctions dating back to 1777, flag manufacturer Annin & Company announced Monday that it would be recalling all makes and models of its popular American flag from both foreign and domestic markets.
Representatives from the nation’s leading flag producer claimed that as many as 143 million deaths in the past two centuries can be attributed directly to the faulty U.S. models, which have been utilized extensively since the 18th century in sectors as diverse as government, the military, and public education.
“It has come to our attention that, due to the inherent risks and hazards it poses, the American flag is simply unfit for general use,” said Annin & Company president Ronald Burman, who confirmed that the number of flag-related deaths had noticeably spiked since 2003. “I would like to strongly urge all U.S. citizens: If you have an American flag hanging in your home or place of business, please discontinue using it immediately.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in >> analysis of news, >> Art and Culture, antiwar, imperialism | 4 Comments »
US-led Forces Execute Handcuffed Children in Afghanistan
Posted by Tell No Lies on April 12, 2010
From Truthout
Afghanistan’s My Lai Massacre
by Dave Lindorff
When Charlie Company’s Lt. William Calley ordered and encouraged his men to rape, maim and slaughter over 400 men, women and children in My Lai in Vietnam back in 1968, there were at least four heroes who tried to stop him or bring him and higher officers to justice. One was helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr., who evacuated some of the wounded victims, and who set his chopper down between a group of Vietnamese and Calley’s men, ordering his door gunner to open fire on the US soldiers if they shot any more people. One was Ron Ridenhour, a soldier who learned of the massacre and began a private investigation, ultimately reporting the crime to the Pentagon and Congress. One was Michael Bernhardt, a soldier in Charlie Company, who witnessed the whole thing and reported it all to Ridenhour. And one was journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke the story in the US media. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in >> analysis of news, Afghanistan, antiwar | Leave a Comment »
Alexander Cockburn: Afghanistan Cover-Ups That Exploded
Posted by Mike E on April 10, 2010
Two shocking leaks are eroding the picture of Afghanistan as the “good war.” Evidence of U.S. atrocities are echoing in ways similar to the Abu Ghraib pictures that “pulled the covers” on U.S. operations in Iraq.
The following appeared on CounterPunch Diary April 9 – 11, 2010
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
The Pentagon is reeling after two lethal episodes uncovered by diligent journalism show trigger-happy U.S. Army helicopter pilots and U.S. Special Forces slaughtering civilians, then seeking to cover up their crimes.
The worldwide web was transfixed on Monday when Wikileaks put up on YouTube a 38-minute video, along with a 17-minute edited version, taken from a U.S. Army Apache helicopter, one of two firing on a group of Iraqis in Baghdad at a street corner in July of 2007. Twelve civilians died, including a Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and a Reuters driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40.
At a press conference in Washington, D.C., Wikileaks said it had got the footage from whistle-blowers in the military and had been able to break the encryption code. The Pentagon has confirmed the video is genuine.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the U.S. military has finally admitted that Special Forces troops killed two pregnant Afghan women and a girl in a February, 2010, raid, in which two Afghan government officials were also killed. Brilliant reporting by Jerome Starkey of The Times of London has blown apart the U.S. military’s cover-up story that the women were killed by knife wounds administered several hours before the raid.
Posted in Afghanistan, antiwar | 1 Comment »
A Response to Mike Ely: Where’s the Antiwar Strategy?
Posted by Mike E on April 7, 2010
Police formation in response to anti-war protest at the Port of Oakland in April 2003
The following first appeared on the Advance the Struggle. Katy is responding to Mike Ely’s recent piece on the state of the anti-war movement
“…people are in pain, and people are aware, if not of the direct suffering of the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, then of the way jobs are being lost, services shut down, homes foreclosed, and so on. Drawing the link between these immediate social problems in US communities and the engagement in war and militarism is not, as Ely suggests, a frivolous and self-centered activity. It may be troubling to confront the fact that many people are not motivated to action based on a strict anti-imperialist line, but I would argue that it is less about the line, and more about the actual, objective effectiveness of our tactics that will embolden folks to participate in a revitalized anti-war movement.”
By Katy R
I hope I’m not being facile, but it seems to me that regardless of what kind of united front one enters, or whether the slogan on one’s banner calls out economic issues, Obama, or the murder of Iraqis, the anti-war movement loses or gains effectiveness based on other strategic and tactical questions.
It is simply objectively true that we cannot vote, nor march, nor wave signs out of any imperialist war. I believe that deep down, people who are at the very least sympathetic to the anti-war position don’t see the value of participating in any more symbolic sheep-crawls, and for the last several years (with some notable and short-lived exceptions) that has been the face of the anti-war movement.
Posted in Afghanistan, antiwar, Iraq, Mike Ely, military | 30 Comments »
Carl Davidson Engaging FRSO: Don’t Blame Obama on Antiwar Movement
Posted by Mike E on April 6, 2010
Kasama recently posted an article by Freedom Road, “The Anti-War Movement Seven Years After Shock and Awe” (written by Dennis O’Neil and Eric See). And is now posting responses (including by Mike Ely).
“This blames Obama’s campaign for our problems. If you had said something about ‘the inability of much of the antiwar movement to respond creatively to the Obama campaign,’ you would have a fruitful position to develop.”
by Carl Davidson
Here’s my response to the FRSO piece, probably from what some here would consider ‘from the right.’ But these days, there’s no significant left antiwar formation standing in the way of anyone projecting what they might consider a correct approach.
United For Peace and Justice [UFPJ, one of the existing U.S. antiwar coalitions], as it once was, is gone. ANSWER and allies have shrunk. World Can’t Wait (WCW) isn’t doing too well, and so on. The conditions have shifted significantly, and any new leadership will have to figure the best way to take them into account, as I argue below.
But if you have a correct path forward, show us how its done. Meanwhile, some of the best exposures of Obama and ‘The Long War’ are being published by Tom Hayden on former ‘Progressives for Obama’ sites and more widely elsewhere, as they were before, during and after the 2008 campaign.
Response by Carl Davidson to Dennis O’Neil and Eric See (submitted to the initial posting sites):
While I share the problem and appreciate your effort here, I think you’re missing or discounting a number of critical points. And if we’re off base on these, there’s little hope of making progress on the tasks at hand.
Posted in antiwar, Barack Obama, Carl Davidson, Democratic Party, labor | 2 Comments »
Mike Ely Engaging FRSO: To Oppose War, We Need to Expose the War-Makers
Posted by Mike E on April 5, 2010
Imperialist occupiers in Afghanistan and their commander
Kasama recently posted an article by Freedom Road, “The Anti-War Movement Seven Years After Shock and Awe” (written by Dennis O’Neil and Eric See). Kasama posts a number of different views on such matters, and none of them (including this one) should be assumed to represent the views of this site as a whole.
By Mike Ely
Let’s start with points of agreement: It is extremely important to build a powerful antiwar movement in the U.S. And it borders on criminal that so many years into these brutal colonial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan there is such a shameful silence here.
And we should welcome the attempt by Dennis O’Neil and Eric See to sum up the recent history and put forward their programmatic plans. (And it should be noted that both of them are tireless antiwar activists and have placed their time and energy into the effort against these wars.)
Their article ends with a simple assertion:
“This isn’t rocket science. We know how to do it. Let’s get going.”
Let’s start our discussion of disagreements there.
To tell the truth: I don’t think that much of the current activist world has a clue how to end a war or mobilize people. Sincere people are at a loss.
Posted in >> analysis of news, antiwar, Barack Obama, election, imperialism, Mike Ely, war on terror | 11 Comments »
Support the Troops? How About Now?
Posted by Tell No Lies on April 5, 2010
From Collateral Murder
WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the killing of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff.
Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.
Posted in >> analysis of news, antiwar, imperialism, Iraq, Iraq war, USA | 5 Comments »
