Wednesday, 21 June 2023

Scotland for Palestine - all along the waterfronts

A small ship of humanity will soon drop anchor in the River Clyde. 


Sailing around various European ports, Handala, a vessel funded and launched by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) is to dock in Glasgow (24th - 27th June 2023) as part of its continuing ‘For the Children of Gaza’ voyage to the stricken Strip


The international-based expedition is the latest courageous attempt to break Israel’s illegal blockade of the long-suffering Palestinian enclave. 


Previous maritime efforts have been brutally intercepted and hijacked in international waters by Israeli forces, most notably with the infamous storming of the Mavi Marmara in 2010, in which 10 civilians were murdered and over 50 more injured. Israel has never accepted responsibility, or been held to proper account, for this appalling massacre.  


Thirteen years later, much of the same high-seas piracy can be expected. One hopes and prays for the crew's safe passage. But before any such showdown, the FFC's tour of Euro harbours is serving to build public awareness of Gaza’s terrible situation. 


Contrary to Israel’s oft-repeated claim to have ‘withdrawn’ from Gaza in 2005, the regime still controls every access point for its over 2 million inhabitants, one of the most densely populated places on earth. 


Encircled and controlled by land, air and sea, an imprisoned people are denied the most basic rights to life, including the freedom to sail to and from their own shores. 


Consequently, Israel remains, according to the UN and other major human rights bodies, the primary occupying force, directly responsible for the protection and well-being of Gaza’s people:

 “Although Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005, the Commission notes that Israel continues to occupy the territory by virtue of the control it exercises over, inter alia, the airspace and territorial waters of Gaza, as well as its land crossings at the borders, supply of civilian infrastructure, including water and electricity, and key governmental functions such as the management of the Palestinian population registry.”

In flagrant denial of its legal obligations, Israel has continued to bomb, punish and contain the population, with merciless disregard for international law. 


In particular, this latest flotilla is seeking to highlight the plight of Gaza’s children. As the Coalition’s explanatory info reminds us, over half of Gaza’s population are children and minors. They endure chronic shortages of basic human resources, including drinkable water, nutritious food, normal medical supplies, decent schooling, safe homes and ongoing electricity. Years of relentless bombing by Israel has left thousands injured and homeless, an entire generation scarred and traumatised. 


During the recent March of Return protests along Israel’s weapons-laden fence, the regime showed no restraint in shooting dead 49 defenceless children and injuring over 6000 more, half of them requiring serious hospital treatment. 


Other horrific crimes include the May 2021 mass bombing of Gaza, which saw 256 killed, including 66 children. Nine members of the Abu Hatab family, all women and children, were killed at Gaza City’s Beach refugee camp.

In addition, 2022 saw the largest number of Palestinians killed in the West Bank since 2004, a level likely to be surpassed, with over 120 killed in the first half of 2023, including the murder of two-year-old Mohammad Tamimi, shot in head by Israeli soldiers.

More children have been killed this year in indiscriminate bombing raids over Gaza's tightly-packed streets and houses. Six died in May during Israel’s air attacks, part of the twenty seven murders of children (to early June) this year alone across the West Bank and Gaza. 



The callous indifference of the Israeli regime, with its daily slayings in the West Bank and regular ‘mowing the lawn’ in Gaza, is mirrored only by the cowardly complicity of its international allies in turning a blind-eye to such atrocities. 


Hopefully, the Flotilla’s visit to Glasgow will help highlight the true extent of Israel's violence, shame a service media into reporting it, and generate even greater support for Palestine from Scotland’s shores. 


Waters of the Clyde


In similar spirit, along the same banks of the River Clyde, the admirable Roger Waters has just performed his magnificent This is Not a Drill show.  



Accompanying an evocative Waters/Pink Floyd catalogue - with nods to his own Scottish heritage - the performance featured a stunning set of mass-screen images, from anti-war statements and indictments of neoliberal capitalism, to Israel's brutal apartheid wall, and the relentless suffering of Palestinians. 


In another great expression of solidarity, Waters and his tour management gave special dispensation for two groupings to campaign within and around the arena: one in support of Palestine and the Flotilla sailing; the other against the wicked incarceration of Julian Assange


In brave defiance of the Israel lobby’s spurious claims in trying to close down his concerts, it was inspiring to witness Waters sending out such resolute messages from this waterfront to Palestinians living under occupation and siege between their river and sea.    


And in an exemplary display of how to confront the establishment forces trying to take him down - as they did to the great humanitarian hope and Palestine advocate Jeremy Corbyn - Waters has shown the most shining resolve in denouncing the lobby's mendacious efforts to smear him and his show as ‘antisemitic’. 


In a truly remarkable piece-to-camera for Double Down News, Waters provides a veritable blueprint for how to handle his assailants, and the lying charlatans trying to get him cancelled. If anyone is in any remaining doubt about the futility of trying to appease the pro-Israel crowd, please watch this masterclass in assertive resistance.   


Nor, facing the same establishment vilification, is Waters sparing in his condemnation of the prevailing proxy-war propaganda, denouncing the Western arms advocates with his damningly reprised The Bravery of Being Out of Range.


Spreading support in Scotland


With fortunate timing, Waters’ heroic show has also coincided with the release of Asa Winstanley’s outstanding new book, Weaponising Anti-Semitism, a quite brilliant, forensic account of how the same dark forces deployed their fabricated narrative to bring down Corbyn. 

Again, like Waters, Winstanley perfectly understands the need to take a critically offensive, rather than pleadingly defensive, position against such reactionary elements. 


This vital message was further reinforced by Winstanley in joining Scottish-based journalist Yvonne Ridley (member of a 2008 flotilla that did make it to Gaza), Israeli dissident Ronnie Barkan, and a host of other fine activist/cultural voices in a recent series of pro-Palestine public meetings across Glasgow, Edinburgh and other Scottish locations.  


In marking the cold-blooded execution of esteemed Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, Ridley and Winstanley also talked about the false and distorted language used by ‘mainstream’ media in serving to shield the public from the regime’s true criminality. 

Israel only gets to commit such acts knowing that it can expect impunity from its international patrons, and silence from a craven media.


Another key theme to emerge from Barkan's and other discussions was just how tenuous Israel's hold over the Palestinians is becoming, as it lurches towards an even more extreme form of theocratic fascism, and potential implosion, much to the alarm of its liberal Zionist defenders. 


Of course, the zealous capacities of the Israel lobby, and establishment at large, cannot be understated. 


Witness Keir Starmer’s own ruthless purging of the Labour left, coupled with his display of unconditional service to Israel. 

Indeed, Starmer’s own shameful letter denouncing Waters as ‘antisemitic’, despite all obvious evidence to the contrary, shows just how low this establishment-approved figure has descended as a McCarthyite witch-hunter, flag-bearing jingoist and warmongering authoritarian in the Blairite mould.  


Nor, alas, does there appear to be any sincere or decisive support for the Palestinian cause here from the SNP-led Scottish government. Despite Humza Yousaf's marital family ties to Gaza, the new First Minister has paid mere lip-service to the issue, even refusing to endorse open declarations from Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and B'Tselem that Israel is an apartheid state. 


Yet, as with the breaking of apartheid South Africa, it is sustained grass-roots activism that's driving the Palestinian case - all, of course, as supplementary support to the Palestinians' own agency and rightful resistance. 


Backed by international law, increasing artistic boycotts, and growing support from the global south, the same critical tipping point is coming for this unsustainable entity. 


Indeed, as the internal contradictions of Israel’s fortress system plays out, the crisis of its settler-colonial project is becoming all too apparent for many disillusioned Jews, now leaving Israel for Western shores, and for many, too, watching with growing detachment from them.


The sight of any such return for occupied, corralled and exiled Palestinians may seem a more distant prospect. But it is no less a reality than the receding horizon of Israel's failed state.       


The search for one land of equality, dignity and democracy for all goes on, as the only real, just and durable solution. 


As it does, we can take good heart from the resilient body of pro-Palestine solidarity organisations, human rights campaigns and other stalwart supporters here in Scotland advocating for that one true country. 


In the same onward spirit as Roger Waters' tour, the Flotilla's crew will soon set sail from Glasgow in its brave endeavour to break the siege of Gaza, a fatal waterfront where fishermen risk their livelihoods, and very lives, in taking their boats beyond Israel’s illegally-imposed nautical limit


And who can forget Israel’s brutal slaying of the four little boys in 2014 - nine-year-old Ismail Muhammad Subhi Bakr, ten-year-old Ahed Atef Ahed Bakr, ten-year-old Zakariya Ahed Subhi Bakr and eleven-year-old Muhammad Ramez Ezzat Bakr - playing football on Gaza’s beach?

In memory of them and all the other small souls taken by this savage regime. 

Wishing those aboard the good ship Handala a safe passage, much publicity for their worthy expedition, and best wishes in their honourable quest to save Palestinian lives.    




Friday, 10 March 2023

Continuity conversations or decisive action: will SNP members seize this moment to make independence a reality?

Nicola Sturgeon's sudden resignation, prompting the current SNP leadership contest, has now revealed multiple seeping conflicts, hitherto contained by her once highly-disciplined party machine. It feels not so much the end of an era, as the unravelling of an entire, self-entitled fiefdom.    

Behind the SNP's ultra-polished presentation, Sturgeon’s exit from office and literal rush from the resignation podium resembles the flight of a prime suspect from the crime scene, with forensic investigators left picking over the real reasons for her hasty departure. And as the political intrigues and police enquiries unfold, she leaves behind not just a deeply-riven party, but a paltry record. 

Beyond the gushing plaudits from party peers, teary staffers and celebrity acolytes, this is a corporate-captured party that's not only failed to drive serious progressive change, but taken Scotland backwards in cravenly neoliberal and reactionary ways. 

Contrary to crafted claims and media spin, Sturgeon has presided over a dismal domestic record - on health care, social justice, poverty reduction, homelessness, drug deaths, and much more. She has overseen the basement-price privatisation of the country's abundant wind resources. Her big promise of a National Public Energy Agency in 2017 came to nought. She has yet to account for her tragic covid-mishandling, in sending infected old souls into care homes, having followed the same disastrous course as Johnson’s UK government. She introduced a Hate Crime Act so authoritarian and invasive of free speech, it's still awaiting full implementation. The Sturgeon inner circle also connived in the most devious ways to smear, stitch-up and imprison Alex Salmond. The scandals following that momentous failure include a trail of missing party money, corrupt cover-ups and possible criminal charges. After the mass support she inherited from Salmond, post 2014, Sturgeon has somehow managed to split her party, with mass members leaving, lost and disenchanted at the extent of centralised control. We've also seen the calamitous pushing of a Gender Recognition Reform bill, causing major upheaval, wasting parliamentary resources, and alienating mass sections of the female populace. Sturgeon departs office, too, bent in prostration to the US/UK/NATO war machine, including, quite alarmingly, having come out as the foremost proponent of a no-fly-zone over Ukraine. And, most damningly, after multiple election wins and a pile of prized mandates, she leaves with precisely nothing to show for the cause or deliverance of independence. All told, a truly bereft social, economic and political legacy. 

Humza Yousaf now carries the justified label of Sturgeon’s ‘continuity candidate’. He has co-piloted and inherits her lamentable policies, while also pledging to pursue her obsessive and failed GRR bill through the courts. Most dutifully, he now carries the baton on Sturgeon's wilful independence evasions. Like his 'brilliant mentor', Yousaf talks effusively about 'building for independence' rather than showing any proactive plan for achieving it. If elected, he will also kick the proposed special party conference on independence into the same wildly overgrown grass. Instead of seizing the moment with imaginative initiatives, Yousaf and his 'gradualist' cohort are fervently trying to dampen down expectations, insisting there's no quick route to independence. We might call this the 'catch-22 path to indy': independence can only be achieved, they claim, by showing continued good governance, convincing a settled majority of people to make it a priority; but this requires the SNP's continued tenure as proof of that good governance, rather than ever prioritising and campaigning to deliver independence. Thus, the 'success' of SNP devolution means that it will always supplant the actual need for independence. Sturgeon's evasions and party power safely continued. 

Which all means business-as-usual for the Westminster and Holyrood gravy-trainers, none of whom have advanced independence one iota. With her once ‘heir apparent’ Angus Robertson out of contention, citing ‘family duties', all Sturgeon's 'graduate gradualists' have now fallen in line for Yousaf. The endorsements have been dutifully ringing out, from British state asset Stewart McDonald - now pitching 2050 as the next indy 'target date' - to Nicola cheerleaders Alyn Smith, Ian Blackford and Mhairi Black. Behind them, the entire party hierarchy and backroom machine have been working feverishly to install Yousaf. And with Sturgeon's own spouse and troubled party CEO, Peter Murrell, overseeing an already deeply compromised election process, the Sturgeon 'handover' would appear to be imminent. 

However, it's possible that, with Yousaf damaged by his mishandling of the gay marriage vote issue, and viewed more widely as an unpalatable figure by the general public, SNP members may opt for the 'more presentable' Kate Forbes. In contrast to Yousaf, Forbes is a model of probity, who didn't at any time seek to hide her 'contentious' religious beliefs. Yet her open admission that she would have voted against gay marriage - but would never challenge the existing legislation - has been a ‘principle too far’ for many of the Nicola/Yousaf notables and staffers. McDonald’s own ‘regretful distancing’ from Forbes typifies the rejection. Incredibly, many also wanted Forbes suspended for ‘violating’ the party’s code on ‘misgendering’, having dared to insist that a trans woman is really a biological male who identifies as a woman. After a week or so of this controversy, Forbes seemed to have 're-set' her campaign with fluent hustings performances. 

Yet none of this can mask the real problems of her candidacy. The first main concern with Forbes isn't her personal theology - that's her rightful choice - it's her neoliberal conformity. How many of those Humza followers incensed over Forbes' religious conservatism ever thought to question her economic conservatism? Alongside Sturgeon, Forbes has faithfully embraced the whole Growth Commission doctrine, as pushed by Andrew Wilson, Charlotte Street Partners and the party's other corporate 'elect'. As we've seen, there's been nothing remotely left-thinking or radical flowing from this unholy alliance. In office, the ‘solid financial figure’ of Kate Forbes is really just another kind of minister serving the same rigid 'church' of neoliberal orthodoxy. 

The other key problem is Forbes' rather less than 'sacred' commitment to independence. How many of either her own backers or Humza detractors have sought to question Forbes' crucial failure of 'commitment' to the independence cause? Beyond well-delivered hustings lines, there's nothing from the Forbes lectern that takes us anywhere beyond the same Sturgeon-Yousef continuity gospel. Again, the Humza camp's ‘immutable red lines’ here seem more drawn on 'principles' of identity than on the party’s own supposed principal task of indy deliverance.

Ash Regan, in contrast, is a soft-left progressive with perhaps more radical potential. One watches and hopes - though, after Sturgeon's showbiz anointment, policy failures and abuses of high office, we should be forever wary of placing any kind of undivided trust in any leader. Parties and their heads should be seen as openings for change, not bodies and figures to be lionised. 

However, unlike Yousaf and Forbes, Regan has laid down a credible marker for immediate and decisive action on independence, with firm intentions to establish an independence convention on day one of her election, and to re-connect the Yes movement. With no prospect of the British state ever conceding a Section 30 referendum consent, Regan wishes to treat all forthcoming elections as effective ballots for independence, with any 50+1 majority deemed validation for initiating formal negotiations with Westminster. Regan is also the only candidate to declare for a separate currency, as the essential medium of financial independence. 

Whatever the Humza naysayers and Unionist establishment may claim, all of this is completely viable. The immediate task is to make the actual effort in taking it to a new pivotal point, in testing the electorate, gaining majority consent and facing down the British state. If we sit forever in fear of doing something, we end up with a relentless nothing. Only Regan displays any serious sign of being prepared to move the dial.    

Predictably, Regan has been subjected to sustained attack by the gradualists. She's also been demonised by the party’s ‘trans-set’ over her open refusal to back the GRR bill - which lead to her principled ministerial resignation. In effect, the Yousaf axis will sacrifice the most proactively promising candidate for independence over fear of their own party positions, and on the altar of identity politics. The relentless hounding of MP Joanna Cherry, an advocate of Regan, in defending women’s rights, is a similar example of this pernicious intolerance. 

Aside from her stance on GRR, the Humza backers’ other great antipathy to Regan concerns her ‘collusion’ with the wider Yes movement, most notably in extending an effective olive branch to Alex Salmond and Alba. One of Regan’s other 'cardinal crimes' was to be seen talking to indy stalwart, Common Weal author and SNP critic Robin McAlpine. It’s remarkable to think that a party supposedly birthed as the primary agent of independence could be so virulently hostile to such independence forces.

Nor is it any seeming coincidence that many of the SNP's trans advocates aren't seriously interested in independence - or in wider leftist causes - at all. The party has become a safe career haven, instead, for identity causes. And for all their casting of those opposed to GRR as 'social conservatives', the inverse truth is that the current face of ‘trans rights’ itself looks much more like a manifestation of neoliberal market individualism - ‘my atomised freedoms’, ‘my product choice’, ‘my personal branding’, 'my pronouns', ‘my identity on demand’ - than any coherent leftist collectivism or class-based politics. Alas, much of the left itself have fallen for this posturing agenda. 

Lamentably, trans activism has morphed into an irrational anti-science, a defiance of science, which refuses to recognise the immutable biological reality of the human species. The entire 'trans issue' has not just been politicised, but evangelised as a ‘progressive crusade’, with many leftists caught in the seductive net. Now captured and turned into a baying 'cause', it has served neither susceptible gender-affected people, nor considered the legitimate concerns and established rights of women. 

It's depressing to see those offering rational, educational and considerate reminders of what constitutes an adult human female being scorned as 'TERFS' and 'transphobes'. Many trans people do, of course, experience fear, anxiety and marginalisation. Yet, are we to believe that women's groups, asserting their own valued rights and protections, really harbour deep hatred of, or wish harm upon, trans people? Are trans people really being denied equality before the law? Did Sturgeon and those pushing GRR really not see the massive implications for women in turning trans 'social identity' into self-decided legal ID? 

Even Stonewall's formative campaigners have come to warn that adding the 'T' to 'LGB' has distorted their original cause, threatened women's enshrined rights, and offered no true empathy or support for trans people at large. Many major organisations, including Ofcom and the BBC, have also now withdrawn from Stonewall’s ‘Diversity Champions’ scheme, concerned at its over-intensive ‘training’, and the perceived breaking of their own 'impartiality' codes. The Scottish Government still eagerly approves and funds Stonewall.

As others leaving the organisation came to see, Stonewall has made a disastrous decision in seeking to compare the historic persecution and social suffering of LGB people with the more specific problems faced by contemporary trans people. They are quite different groupings, with diverse experiences, views and concerns. As understood by many across this spectrum, gender dysphoria-affected people, particularly developing children and young adults, require, most importantly, compassionate care and supportive guidance, not the invasive prescriptions of trans ideologues. With dark irony, the toxicity now over GRR has only subjected many vulnerable trans people to even more anxious exposure. 

It's also worth noting here that, unlike the laudable Equal Marriage bill brought by Alex Salmond in a free parliamentary vote, GRR was pushed through by Sturgeon on a whipped instruction. In bravado voice, Yousaf now claims he's 'standing up' to the British state, by pledging to challenge the UK's Section 35 veto over GRR and 'defend Holyrood from Westminster power grabs'. Of course, the real way to do that is to deliver independence, which nullifies any such threats at source. Yet that holds little attraction or immediacy for much of the Humza base. Their ‘priority’ for a First Minister couldn’t be any clearer: GRR before independence. In similar vein, the Green-SNP coalition isn’t likely to survive any Regan or even Forbes victory. 

Whatever the arguments over Westminster's blocking of this bill, the whole SNP/Green-driven GRR legislation has now been exposed as legally ill-conceived, ideologically loaded, and carrying little public support. As such, it should be abandoned in lieu of real collective health-based, ethical and social evaluations - perhaps even, as Regan suggests, given over to a citizens assembly for proper, diligent consideration. Again, it's remarkable to think that the 'politically astute' Sturgeon could ever have made this such a hill issue to die on. Is Yousaf's continued, zealous pursuit of it now leading him up the same slippery slope?

Amid all this caustic debate, it’s worth returning to just why the case for independence is such a vital and urgent concern. We're locked into not just perpetual Tory rule - including the right-wing penury potentially to come of Starmer's now establishment-captured Labour - but inside a form of political occupation precisely designed to normalise our lower expectations of change. 

Power maintained from on high is change denied to those below. We need to bring the enabling institutions of power down to the lowest possible level of civil participation and control. Westminster rule and the entire British establishment is predicated on the precise opposite of true democratic engagement and reform. Nothing radical can flow from the sclerotic accord we so readily accept as 'devolution'. 

Raising our expectations and political game in breaking-up this hegemonic construct would not only empower people in Scotland to run their own affairs - including the inviolable rights and ability to shape and determine all the aforementioned issues - it would, in ending the shackling Union, generate a whole new impetus for meaningful change across these broader, afflicted isles. 

Ultimately, for SNP-voting members, it comes down to a question of priorities: do you really want independence; and how might your vote help expedite it? It should be demonstrably clear by now that a Yousaf tick means continuity Sturgeonism, with independence being consigned to the same infinite wilderness of 'process' and 'conversation'. A Forbes vote might bring relatively more 'rightful attention' to the matter, but with little indication of serious action. In contrast, only an endorsement for Regan offers any kind of hope in raising independence to immediate prominence. Even if the Regan strategy remains to be tested through the ballot box and thereafter, her pledge to hold an immediate convention, draw-in supporting civil and political forces, and directly confront the institutions of the British state, offers a crucial new opening for party members and fellow Yes advocates. It's a straight choice between making independence a coming reality or another set of false promises blowing in the devolution wasteland. 





Monday, 16 January 2023

Ukraine and the sabotaged Minsk Accords: the duplicity of European diplomacy


Please view and read these truly damning accounts of German and French bad-faith ‘diplomacy’ over the Minsk peace and security accords. 

They reveal how in 2014/15 and beyond, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande knowingly played along in a pretence peace and regional security deal with Russia and Ukraine, all the while working to a stalling agenda which would allow time for built-up, NATO-backed Ukrainian forces to escalate their war on the Russian-identifying Donbas. 

We also learn how then Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko played his own duplicitous part in the sham ‘negotiations’.   

Alas, we’re now witnessing the tragic consequences of this dark 'statecraft'. In what will come to be seen as an historic act of betrayal, Europe’s leading figures were now engaged in a complicit strategy not to broker peace, but to prevent it.     

Building on decades of US/NATO provocation, and the US-driven coup of 2014, the Minsk subterfuge laid the way open for Russia’s eventual, and arguably inevitable, 2022 invasion. Instead of cultivating this vital opportunity to settle the Donbas issue and avert further conflict - as Zelensky himself was elected on an overwhelming mandate to do in 2019 - we’re now watching the calamitous spectacle of full-scale war and mass, useless loss of life. 

Predictably, none of the grand deceit behind these ill-fated accords, or Ukraine's green-light escalation of war on the Donbas from 2014, are being covered by the Western 'mainstream' media. No longer can the same past reporting of Ukraine’s deadly assaults on these regions, and the neo-Nazi forces leading them, be seriously aired, as they no longer fit the US/Western proxy war narrative.

Again, it’s being left to truly independent outlets and journalists to shine a critical light on these vital deceptions and their disastrous fallout.    

Tuesday, 10 January 2023

Only the supply of real revelatory truths will help end the US/NATO proxy war in Ukraine

January 2023, and with war in Ukraine now entering its ninth year, the prospects for any realistic resolution and avoidance of many more uselessly sacrificed lives looks continually dim.


Such pessimism is underscored by the reality that so much of the public still wouldn't even know that an armed conflict, with thousands of deaths, has been going on there since 2014, rather than 2022. 


Nor, thanks to an almost uniform media war narrative, would they have the slightest comprehension that the present crisis has been over three decades in the making, culminating in Russia's invasion. 


How much more convenient to maintain the simplistic demonisation story of 'Putin the crazy', leading his country into an 'impetuous' and 'unprovoked aggression' against an 'innocent bystander' state. 


Never have the antecedents of a war, with so much at stake for people and planet, been so resolutely avoided. Never have the core causes of a conflict been so wilfully misrepresented. 


As Benjamin Abelow helpfully contextualises it in a recent, essential read: 

“The underlying cause of the war lies not in an unbridled expansionism of Mr. Putin, or in paranoid delusions of military planners in the Kremlin, but in a 30-year history of Western provocations, directed at Russia, that began during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and continued to the start of the war.”


In a superb new article, Jonathan Cook lays out the epic deceptions behind this media-peddled proxy war narrative, and how the US is funding and pursuing another "forever war":
 “Last month, the US Congress approved a mammoth top-up of largely military "support" for Ukraine, bringing the official total to some $100bn in less than a year, with doubtless much more of the costs hidden from public view. That is far in excess of Russia’s total annual military budget of £65bn. Washington and Europe have been pouring weapons, including ever more offensive ones, into Ukraine. Emboldened, Kyiv has been shifting the field of battle ever deeper into Russian territory. US officials, like their Ukrainian counterparts, speak of the fight against Russia continuing until Moscow is "defeated" or Putin toppled, turning this into another "forever war" of the very kind Biden had just forsworn - this one in Europe rather than the Middle East.
This is an administration intent on leading and prolonging an untenable, expansionist war rather than securing an achievable, enduring peace; a militarist-minded monolith gorging its profits-soaring arms corporations rather than aiding its struggling and destitute citizens with basic food and heat. 

Likewise for Washington’s lackey UK and EU states, its populations now facing historic cost of living and energy crises. 

Across Europe, citizens are now coming to terms with the harsh realities of disconnected cheap energy supplies from Russia, and their new geo-economic dependency on price-inflated US gas. Rendered a taboo story by the Western media, is there any remaining doubt about the real perpetrators and beneficiaries of the bombed Nord Stream gas pipelines? 

In 2023, Britain will match its 2022 £2.3 billion military-related spending to Ukraine. While Johnson before him helped deliver the West's decisive block on any proto-peace deal, Sunak has followed with unwavering support for the war, pledging to sign the cheques for zealot Zelensky's now bombastic demands for increased weaponry.      

All told, it's an ongoing political imposition of mass, unnecessary suffering, loftily proclaimed as 'worth it' so that the 'good war' can continue. 'Our great moral sacrifice' paying for 'their noble fight to the death'. Was there ever a more cynical selling of such a mendacious proxy war?  

As so many disastrous US/Western 'interventions' and war fundings have shown: 
“There is no military solution to the crisis in Ukraine. The policy of flooding Ukraine with weapons will lead to a greater loss of life and destruction.”

Beyond the relentless blanket of Western war propaganda being fed to a duped public sits a veritable wealth of revelatory information and critical analysis helping to reinforce that essential truth. 


Rather than the death-sustaining supply of rockets and guns, this output should be viewed as real aid, a truly life-caring and educational form of support, gifted in the actual service of peace and human security against the insatiable lies of war-obsessed leaders, posturing politicians and service media.  


As Western publics slowly start to understand the staggering nature and scale of the US/NATO deception, it's only the greater supply and distribution of these resources that will help bring about the necessary pressure for an eventual end to this appalling, nuclear-threatening war, with some hopefully durable resolution, and help avert future escalations of Empire-driven violence. 


Please read and disseminate widely.  


Jonathan Cook: Russia-Ukraine war: How the US paved the way to Moscow's invasion   


Benjamin Abelow: How the West Brought War to Ukraine


Aaron Mate: Urging peace with Russia, top US general challenges DC's proxy war

Branco Marcetic: NATO expansion and the origins of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

Branco Marcetic: Today’s Hawkish Discourse Makes the Cuban Missile Crisis’s Nuclear Brinkmanship Seem Sane 


Who Blew Up Nord Stream (YouTube video)


Media Lens: Wicked Leaks – Part 1: How The Media Quarantined Evidence On Nord Stream Sabotage 


The United States is Waging a New Cold War: a Socialist Perspective 


Jonathan Cook: How the left became cheerleaders for US imperialism 




Andre Damon: US expands military presence near Russian border 


Jonathan Cook: Can Europe afford to turn a blind eye to evidence of a US role in pipeline blasts? 


Ali Abunimah: The growing risk of nuclear armageddon cannot be ignored 


Transcend Media: The Time to Negotiate Peace in Ukraine Is NOW 


Thomas Fazi: Will America end Zelenskyy’s dream? 


Bryce Greene: US Media’s Intellectual No-Fly-Zone on US Culpability in Nord 


Aaron Mate: The endless proxy war, by design 


Jack F Matlock Jnr: Why the US must press for a ceasefire in Ukraine 


Clare Daly: MEP Clare Daly: "Why don't we support Palestine with weapons as we supported Ukraine?"



John Mearsheimer: The World After the Ukraine War