Neocon publication The Atlantic has an article out titled “The Rise of the Liberal Hawks” which is infuriating as much for its sycophantic empire apologia as for how much of it is entirely correct.

“Progressives typically see war as inherently murderous and dehumanizing — sapping progress, curtailing free expression, and channeling resources into the ‘military-industrial complex,’” says the article’s author, Dominic Tierney.

 

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com

 

“The left led the opposition to the Vietnam War and the Iraq War and condemned American war crimes from the My Lai massacre to Abu Ghraib. Historically, progressive critics have charged the military with a litany of sins, including discrimination against LGBTQ soldiers and a reliance on recruiting in poor communities.”

“Then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” writes Tierney. “No foreign conflict since the Spanish Civil War has so captured the imagination of the left.”

“Russian President Vladimir Putin is the antithesis of everything the left stands for,” Tierney adds.

“Not only did he launch an unprovoked attack on a sovereign democratic nation, but he has also disparaged LGBTQ rights, multiculturalism, and immigration, and claimed that ‘the liberal idea’ has ‘outlived its purpose.’ Zelensky, in contrast, has built bridges with the global left. He addressed the Glastonbury music festival, in the U.K., where the revelers chanted his name to the tune of The White Stripes’ ‘Seven Nation Army.’ In Germany, the Green Party led the charge to supply weapons to Kyiv, overturning decades of German wariness about intervening in foreign wars. LGBTQ protesters in Berlin also demanded that Germany step up arms shipments to Ukraine, so that a Pride parade can, one day, be held in the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol. Ukrainian liberals—artists, translators, teachers, filmmakers—have joined the struggle. As one writer put it: ‘All our hipsters in Ukraine fight.’”

 

Tierney concedes that “there’s a leftist fringe in the United States that still considers America the world’s evil empire and remains deeply hostile to its military power,” but says “the bulk of the left has shown remarkable solidarity with the Ukrainian cause.”

“Liberals who once protested the Iraq War now urge Washington to dispatch more rocket launchers to defeat Russian imperialism,” Tierney says. “Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, a member of the progressive caucus, tweeted: ‘We unequivocally stand with the global Ukrainian community in the wake of Putin’s attack.’”

Again, what makes Tierney’s triumphant militarist smut so annoying isn’t how he’s wrong, it’s how he’s right. You can take issue all you like with his use of the word “left” to describe liberal supporters of capitalism and empire who just want the empire to be a bit less embarrassing and maybe forgive their student loans, but that’s the fault of the generations of psyops that have gone into sabotaging the left and destroying its memory, not Tierney’s. 

What he is saying about liberals who once protested the Iraq invasion now supporting U.S. proxy warfare in Ukraine is broadly true, including throughout the Bernie Sanders/AOC “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party.

It’s just a fact that in 2022, liberals are gaga for U.S. interventionism. Because this war can be (falsely) marketed as an “unprovoked” invasion by evil Bad Guys fighting against the virtuous Good Guys of the U.S./NATO/Ukraine partnership, and because it’s not our sons and daughters getting thrown into the gears of war, people who would normally be more skeptical of militarism and interventionism have indeed jumped aboard the proxy war train.

This war has in that sense become the Gulf War of the 2020s: a “good war” that rehabilitates the image of U.S. interventionism for a war-weary public. Just as the 1990 Gulf War was used to get Americans over what warmongers called the “Vietnam syndrome” — a healthy aversion to interventionism following the horrific disaster of the Vietnam War — the war in Ukraine is being used to wear down the public’s collective immune response to interventionism built up after the 2003 Iraq invasion.

“It’s a proud day for America, and by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,” the elder President Bush said after winning his war/propaganda operation in the Middle East.

Of course, we all remember what happened after that, don’t we? A decade later came 9/11, and a public now re-warmed to the idea of beneficent military interventionism overwhelmingly consented to two full-scale ground invasions of two separate nations on the promise of swift victory where the troops would be greeted as liberators. What followed was some 6 million deaths — roughly 2,000 times the number killed on 9/11 — while trillions of dollars were siphoned from the American public to the war industry amid an era of unbridled military expansionism.

The public has again been won back over to the idea of military interventionism, using an unprecedented narrative management push which saw coverage of the foreign war in Ukraine eclipse wars in which the U.S. has directly participated. They used different tactics and different narratives, as they always do, but the end result in the 2020s is the same as it was in the 1990s.

And now the public is enthused about foreign interventionism once again, and we get to just wait and see what happens after the empire architects give us our next 9/11.

 

 

Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes.  For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.

This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com and re-published with permission.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

 

 

 

READ MORE:

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/08/caitlin-johnstone-ukraine-the-triumph-of-militarism/

 

THE WESTERN LEFT HAS LOST THE PLOT, INLCUDING JACOBIN....

 

THE OBVIOUS IS STARING EVERYONE IN THE FACE, BUT NO-ONE THERE WANTS TO SEE. GUS LEONISKY SOMETIMES FEELS QUITE LONELY ON HIS QUEST TO EXPLAIN REALITY WHICH IS DISTORTED DAILY BY FORMER US GENERAL — THE ONES WHO HAVE LOST MORE WARS THAN YOU CAN COUNT ON YOUR FINGERS AND LEFT A MESS EVERYWHERE THEY DUG LATRINES...

BUT THANKS TO PEOPLE LIKE Caitlin Johnstone ONE DUMB CARTOONIST SINCE 1951 CAN STILL KEEP A STEADY COURSE.

 

AS WELL, WE CAN CONTINUE:

 

How to Respond to Common Misconceptions in the US About Ukraine

 

BY Marcy Winograd

 

As the war in Ukraine drags on, advocates for negotiation, not escalation are often met with resistance from those who repeat claims spun by military pundits, media outlets, Congress and the White House. Below are rebuttals to common assertions that, if not refuted, risk leading us down the path to nuclear war, further climate degradation, global famine and economic ruin. The Peace in Ukraine Coalition (www.peaceinukraine.org), which includes CODEPINK, World BEYOND War, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom-US and a host of other organizations, will be engaging in dialogue around these claims during its Week of Action, Sept. 12-15, when people are encouraged to contact the White House and State Department and organize meetings and rallies with members of Congress and the media to demand a ceasefire in Ukraine, diplomacy and a freeze on weapons shipments.

Role Play–Responses to Common Statements

(S) Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unjustified AND unprovoked.

(R) Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an unjustified war that violates the UN Charter requiring UN member states to refrain from the “use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. The United States, however, provoked the Russian invasion of Ukraine by supporting the expansion of NATO, a hostile military alliance, backing a coup to overthrow a democratically elected President, and sending arms to Ukraine since 2014. This made Ukraine, in the eyes of Russia, an armed camp and existential threat.

Background on NATO

In the early 90s, as the Soviet Union collapsed, NATO should have dissolved.

Sec. of State James Baker promised Russian leader Gorbachev that NATO would “not move one inch eastward.”

Under Presidents Clinton, Obama and Trump, however, NATO expanded from 12 countries at the fall of the Soviet Union to 30 countries, including countries that share a border with Russia, from northern Norway, eastern Latvia and Estonia to Poland and Lithuania around Russia’s Kaliningrad region.

Putin made it clear that Ukraine joining NATO was a red line that must never be crossed as Ukraine’s membership in NATO was an existential threat to Russia. Still, with US encouragement, in 2019 Ukraine enshrined in its constitution a commitment to join NATO.

(S) You can’t negotiate with Putin. Negotiations will never lead anywhere.

(R) If Putin and Zelenskyy can negotiate the flow of grain exports, prisoner exchanges and international inspections of a nuclear plant in Ukraine, they can negotiate an end to this war. In fact, Russia and Ukraine already agreed to a 15-point peace plan brokered by Turkey in March. Russia agreed to withdraw from areas under Ukrainian government control before the invasion, in exchange for Ukraine agreeing not to join NATO and adopting a position of neutrality. Talks to work out the details were derailed when then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson went to Kyiv and persuaded Zelensky to abandon the negotiations, telling him the UK/US and NATO saw a chance to “press” Russia and wanted to make the most of it.

Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the two countries signed the 2015 Minsk Accord, a peace deal that established a ceasefire, a commitment to elections in the Donbas and semi-autonomy for the region, as well. The agreement fell apart as the US encouraged Ukraine, from 2014 on, to join NATO and funneled billions of dollars of weapons to fuel the civil war in the east between neo-Nazi nationalists and Russian separtartists.

Also, the US negotiated the START arms control treaty with Russia, which is still in effect. This treaty limits the number of nuclear warheads to 1500 that the US and Russia can deploy. It was the US, not Russia, that refused to reaffirm the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, abandoned under Trump, that required the United States and the Soviet Union to eliminate and permanently forswear all of their nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. The treaty marked the first time the superpowers had agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals, eliminate an entire category of nuclear weapons, and employ extensive on-site inspections for verification. As a result of the INF Treaty, the United States and the Soviet Union destroyed a total of 2,692 short-, medium-, and intermediate-range missiles.

 (S) If you negotiate a diplomatic settlement, you are rewarding Putin for the invasion.

The Department of Defense estimates Russia has lost 60-80,000 men in the fighting, as of August, 2022. This is not a reward. If you negotiate a diplomatic settlement, you are rewarding the US taxpayer.

The US has spent $40 billion in the last year to fuel this conflict, which is leading to inflation and a slowdown in the supply chain here and in Europe, where 70,000 recently marched in Czechoslovakia to demand their country not impose sanction on Russia . What could $40 billion buy in the United States? According to the National Priorities Project trade off calculator,  that same amount of money for a one year period could pay for:

350-thousand registered nurses

430-thousand elementary school teachers

1-million college scholarships

The longer the war drags on, the more likely it will last for years and years, costing more death and destruction in Ukraine, exacerbating the climate crisis, causing famine in the Middle East and Africa, disrupting economies and pushing us to the brink of nuclear war.

(S)  It’s not up to the US to decide the fate of Ukraine.

The US is already deciding the fate of Ukraine by shipping $40-50 billion worth of weapons and military aid in the last six months, that’s over $110  million dollars a day, to escalate this war, starve millions in Africa and the Middle East, worsen the climate crisis, send inflation skyrocketing and risk nuclear war between the two most heavily armed nuclear nations–the US and Russia. Scientists say a nuclear war between the US and Russia would likely result in the death of 5-billion people, 60% of the human population. Those who survived would suffer in subzero sunless winters of famine.

We are now witnessing a proxy war–bordering on a direct war— between the US and Russia, the two countries sitting on 90% of the world’s nuclear stockpile. The US government wants to maintain domination of a unipolar world–this is the reason Congress and the White House are sending Ukraine rockets and missiles and providing intelligence to sink Russian ships. It’s not about democracy versus autocracy; it’s about US global domination.

As for the role of the US in negotiating a peace settlement, it is now incumbent upon us, the country that provoked this war, to support a diplomatic agreement.

(S) We must keep sending weapons to Ukraine to support that country’s right to self-determination.

(R) The question is self-determination for who? For the last decade the US has undermined the right of Ukrainians in the east, those most aligned with Russia, to exercise self-determination. Instead of supporting implementation of the MINSK II Accord to promote peace, the US funneled billions of dollars worth of weapons to fuel a war in the east between those aligned with right-wing nationalist neo-Nazi forces and those aligned with Russia. In 2019, Ukraine passed legislation banning the use of Russian in the public sector workforce. The law also required TV and film distribution firms to ensure 90 percent of their content was in Ukrainian.

A civil war in the Donbass resulted in 14,000 deaths prior to the Russian invasion, so the conflict did not start on Feb. 24th, but has been ongoing since 2014.

As for the right of self-determination, the world has a right to choose life over death and the longer this war continues, the greater the risk to the entire world.

(S) This is a war between autocracy and democracy, and we must defend democracy around the world.

(R) While it’s true we have some semblance of democracy–some people can vote–in the United States, the fight to defend democracy must begin at home, where neo-fascists legislate to limit voting rights, storm the capitol, spread race hatred and back abortion bans to deny women control over their own bodies and send doctors who assist them to prison for life. Rather than hurling taxpayer money to defend a corrupt government in Ukraine, where neo-Nazis are an official wing of the military, we should focus our attention on defending democracy at home. Moreover, freedom of the press is under attack, not just in Russia and Ukraine, but here in the United States, where the Biden administration–following in Trump’s footsteps– insists on extraditing journalist Julian Assange for publishing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. If Assange is extradited and prosecuted, this will have a chilling effect on all journalists in the United States. Without a free press, there is no democracy.

 

READ MORE:

https://scheerpost.com/2022/09/08/how-to-respond-to-common-misconceptions-in-the-us-about-ukraine/

 

 

BUT THE US SUPPORT FOR THE KIEVE REGIME (NAZI/FASCIST) HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH UKRAINE... IN ALL REALITY, RUSSIA WILL NEVER ABANDON THE DONBASS REPUBLICS NOR CRIMEA. SO WHAT'S THE HUBRIS BY DICK-PIANO PLAYING VOLODYMYR? IF WE BELIEVE THE WESTERN PROPAGANDA, THE UKRAINIAN ARMY IS NOW 3 TIMES THE SIZE OF WHAT IT WAS BEFORE THE RUSSIAN INTERVENTION. THIS IS TO SAY THAT THE UKRAINIAN ARMY, NOT COUNTING THE DOGS AND THE GOATS, BUT INCLUDING THE LGBTi DANCING GIRLS, BOASTS 1.2 MILLION SOLDIERS. MEANWHILE ACCORDING TO THE SAME PROPAGANDA, RUSSIA HAS LOST UP TO 80,000 TROOPS, WHICH IS TO SAY ITS ORIGINAL ARMY OF "INTERVENTIONISTS" HAS GONE DOWN FROM 120,000 TO BARELY 40,000 TROOPS. HELLO?...

ZELENSKYY-YY, THE DICK-PIANO PLAYING COMIC IS ROLE PLAYING, ON BEHALF OF THE ANGLO/SAXONS FINAL ASSAULT ON THE HEARTLAND (I know I repeat myself, but not enough). PRESENTLY EUROPE HAS BECOME FASCIST WITHOUT KNOWING IT (Germany! What have you done!!!?), UNDER THE OVERT AND COVERT INFLUENCE OF THE US EMPIRE.... BUT ONE CAN SAY THIS FACT CLEARLY, THE EUROPEANS WILL ALL BLAME PUTIN BECAUSE THEIR LITTLE BRAINS HAVE BEEN HOLLYWOODED. HEY, THEY DON'T PRODUCE "TOP GUNS — MAVERICK" FOR FUN, DO THEY? THEY DO THESE MOVIES/SHOWS/SERIALS AS PART OF FRAMING THE US EMPIRE PROPAGANDA, WHICH IS TO PROMOTE THE EMPIRE AS THE "GOOD GUY"... IT'S NOT. IT'S AN ALL CONQUERING WAR MACHINE, BY ANY MEANS, INCLUDING GETTING OTHERS, SUCH AS UKRAINIAN SOLDIERS KILLED.... 

 

SO. HOW TO CONCLUDE THIS "WAR" IN A MOST MINIMALIST WAY? NEGOTIATE NOW. SPLIT UKRAINE INTO TWO REGIONS/COUNTRIES AS INDICATED MANY TIMES ON THIS SITE, LIKE EIRE (IRELAND) AND THE UK. WE KNOW HOW WW2 ENDED: BERLIN GOT FLATTENED AND HITLER COMMITTED SUICIDE. THIS WE DON'T WANT TO SEE: KIEV DESTROYED. PUTIN DOES NOT WANT THIS EITHER. YET, NO MATTER WHAT, RUSSIA WILL NOT LET GO OF THEIR COMRADES IN THE DONBASS AND CRIMEA. FULL STOP. LITTLE ZELENSKYYY, THE DICK-PIANO PLAYING COMIC, DOES NOT HAVE TO COMMIT SUICIDE. HE CAN NOW LEAVE TO FLORIDA OR ISRAEL... LET'S FACE IT, THE MONEY THROWN AT UKRAINE THAT IS INCREASING THE US DEFICIT AT A RATE OF KNOTS IS ENCOURAGED BY THE JEWISH MAFIA THAT RUNS THE FEDERAL RESERVE BANK AND THE CITY OF LONDON....

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW..............................

 

GUSNOTE: The "upside-down" cartoon at top represents the dangerous west attitude towards Russia. I did not want to post yet another image with dead innocent people in it.... Zelensky is the culprit here. He is far from being Snow White... He's no more than a DICK-PIANO PLAYING COMIC... Sad.