Memory-Hole.

An extract from the article, The Mass-Media Memory Hole.  

          Knowledge that sheds light on how the world operates politically and economically is kept to a minimum by the ‘mainstream’ media. George Orwell’s famous ‘memory hole’ from ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ signifies the phenomenon brilliantly. Winston Smith’s work for the Ministry of Truth requires that he destroys documents that contradict state propaganda:

‘When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building’.

(Orwell, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, 1949, Penguin edition, 1982, p. 34)

The interests of power, hinging on the domination of an ignorant population, are robustly maintained:

          Australian political analyst Caitlin Johnstone noted recently that:

‘Arguably the single most egregious display of war propaganda in the 21st century occurred last year, when the entire western political/media class began uniformly bleating the word “unprovoked” in reference to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.’

          Pointing out that the West ‘provoked’ Russia is not the same as saying that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was justified. In fact, we were clear in our first media alert following the invasion:      

  ‘Russia’s attack is a textbook example of “the supreme crime”, the waging of a war of aggression.’

        As Noam Chomsky pointed out, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was totally unprovoked, but:

        ‘nobody ever called it “the unprovoked invasion of Iraq.” In fact, I don’t know if the term was ever used; if it was, it was very marginal. Now you look it up on Google, and hundreds of thousands of hits. Every article that comes out has to talk about the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Why? Because they know perfectly well it was provoked. That doesn’t justify it, but it was massively provoked.’

         Bryce Greene, a media analyst with US-based Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), observed that US policy makers regarded a war in Ukraine as a desirable objective:
        

‘One 2019 study from the RAND Corporation—a think tank with close ties to the Pentagon—suggested that an effective way to overextend and unbalance Russia would be to increase military support for Ukraine, arguing that this could lead to a Russian invasion.’

          The rationale was outlined in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by John Deni of the Atlantic Council, a US think tank with close links to the White House and the arms industry, headlined ‘The Strategic Case for Risking War in Ukraine’. Greene summarised the logic:

            ‘Provoking a war would allow the US to impose sanctions and fight a proxy war that would grind Russia down. Additionally, the anti-Russian sentiment that resulted from a war would strengthen NATO’s resolve.’

        Greene added:

         ‘The consensus among policymakers in Washington is to push for endless conflict, no matter how many Ukrainians die in the process. As long as Russia loses men and material, the effect on Ukraine is irrelevant. Ukrainian victory was never the goal.’

          As Johnstone emphasised in her analysis:  

     

  ‘It’s just a well–documented fact that the US and its allies provoked this war in a whole host of ways, from NATO expansion to backing regime change in Kyiv to playing along with aggressions against Donbass separatists to pouring weapons into Ukraine. There’s also an abundance of evidence that the US and its allies sabotaged a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine in the early weeks of the war in order to keep this conflict going as long as possible to hurt Russian interests.’

She continued:      

"We know that western actions provoked the war in Ukraine because many western foreign policy experts spent years warning that western actions would provoke a war in Ukraine.’

         But you will search in vain for substantive reporting of such salient facts and relevant history – see also this piece by FAIR – in ‘mainstream’ news media.

 

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Neo-Nazi?

 

          The following is a comment from an article on the war in Ukraine. It is always good to hear as many opinions as possible and come to a some sort of decision about  the £millions of British tax payers money that is being thrown into this blood bath of youth. What kind of regime are we supposedly bolstering with weapons and money, how many of Ukrainian's youth will be sacrificed to support the lie that it all about democracy.

Realist · 1 day ago

Image courtesy of The Independent.

         In order to accept the amount of violence and death incurred by our Ukrainian proxy pawns, most Americans must reflexively assume that the "other side" in all these wars that America deliberately provokes or starts never has a legitimate thing to say or point of view to defend. They are assumed wrong, guilty of moral deficiencies and undeserving of any more life simply by fact of not being Americans. Non-American lives carry no value whatsoever. As many lives as you like may be slaughtered slowly and methodically or stamped out in one fell swoop.
       It is never wrong to hoodwink these poor fools into basically serving as nothing more than cannon fodder to further the international policies of the American government, which in the case of Ukraine is simply to do damage of some kind to the Russian state or its assets, which happens to stand as a slight impediment to absolute American hegemony on the planet. Nobody gets to influence even their own neighborhood on the other side of the world unless we say so. Savage actions like the industrial scale murder of half a million young men representing virtually the entire next generation for the people of Ukraine is callously thought "worth it" or justified to achieve these goals versus the oh-so-evil Russians.
      The facts that the government of Ukraine, which we helped install illegitimately through a coup d'etat, are dedicated Nazis who still worship actual historical Nazis from WWII, who practice no semblance of actual democracy in their own governance, and who deliberately and methodically spent 8 entire years repressing the resident ethnic Russians within the borders of Ukraine, disenfranchising, censoring and conducting genocide against them until at least 15,000 such victims had been killed.
      All those actions, which might be considered heinous crimes if committed by some other population, are just readily brushed aside because the killing is not being done by Americans and the dying is nearly entirely being done by i) a people (the Ukies) whom we do not care about whatsoever and ii) a people (the Russkies) whom we hate for no reasons that ever have to be honestly admitted or logically explained. We are the exceptional ones and need offer no explanations. They are the Untermenschen and unworthy of life, let alone competing in this world with the glorious USA. Now where have we heard the likes of all that before? 

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Not Stupid.

 

Image courtesy of Youtube.

 

           The war in Ukraine, call it what you will, U$A proxy war, Russian invasion of another country, but one thing is clear, we in the West do not get the full facts of the situation. We are never informed of where the rumblings of the conflict started, what factors were at play that erupted onto the bloody conflict we are witnessing now. We are treated as stupid by our lords and masters, and their mouthpiece the mainstream media. To them it is preached as good and evil, we of course are the good, Russia is the evil, we are supposed to swallow this simplistic explanation of a complex situation of power and resources, of world domination and the supremacy of the West 

 

Image courtesy of The Communist.

 

         Two interesting comments from Anarchist News shows the disparity of explanations of this bloody conflict in which, as usual, the ordinary people pay the price in blood and suffering, while the power mongers gather the blood soaked benefits.

Submitted by Wayne Price (not verified) on Tue, 08/01/2023 - 14:44

            This Anon reduces the issue to that of the inter-imperialist conflict, "the geopolitical interests of their local ruling class." It doesn't seem to occur to them that the Ukrainian people (mostly workers and farmers, not just their "local ruling class") are fighting for their lives, their existence as a people, their language, and their freedoms (limited as these are in a capitalist democracy), against an invading enemy which is smashing their villages and cities, blowing up their infrastructure, massacring their people, raping their women, and kidnapping their children. To them it is not simply a matter of the Ukrainian rulers not of the imperialist states from which they have gotten arms. Most of the anarchists of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarusia can see this, even if you can't. reply

 Their lives? their existence
Submitted by anon (not verified) on Tue, 08/01/2023 - 19:56

Their lives? their existence as a people?
          The Russians are not a horde of Orcs out to rampage and murder indiscriminately Wayne, it's a political war for the control of territory and resources, and in a large sense it's a civil war, as a bulk of the so-called "Russian" forces are actually so-called Ukrainians, scared kids who were forcefully conscripted from the donbass region to fight other scared conscripted kids. The ethnic/genetic differences between "white" russians and ukrainians is absolutely negligible, almost everybody has close relatives from both countries.

Their language?
           The bulk of the devastation is unfolding in territories where the populations are majority russian speaking and culturally russian. These were regions that voted against leaving the USSR and later became footholds of the "pro-russian" federalist Party of Regions. All the major industrial infrastructure in these regions date back to the soviet times. Since the Maidan coup in 2014 the Ukrainain state has been openly belligerent against its "own" civilian populations in these regions, intermittantly bombing residential areas and carrying out terror campaigns led by Banderist, Right Sektor and Azov neo-nazis. Some western-ukrainian nationalist politicians and TV commentators have openly called for making an ethnic purge and population replacement the whole region, citing that they are unambitious an not productive enough. Almost 300 children were killed by ukrainian bombs, bombs launched by their "own" nation before the outbreak of the russian intervention.

Their freedoms? democracy?
        There is no political freedom. Since the outbreak of the war the Ukrainian state has outlawed all left-wing parties and indefinitely suspended elections. Because of general conscription males are forced to hide or flee if they do not want to become cannon fodder for the defense of the current regime. Soliders and police patrol the streets hunting for evaders. It's cool the Zelenskyy wants to legalize weed though I guess.

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Act of War.

           In this crazy capitalist world of drive for domination, war is the main tool. In today's hi-tech world there are more than one way of waging war. Today we have U$A and NATO's proxy war in Ukraine, fought with Western weaponry but uses Ukrainian blood. However, the U$A's war against China takes a different shape, it is a sanctions war being fought to try to strangle China's further advances in the hi-tech world and so destroy its economy.

 

 

An interesting article from Struggle-La-Lucha.

         

  The July 12 New York Times Magazine headlined: “‘An Act of War’: Inside America’s Silicon Blockade Against China.”
          The report is about the October 2022 “export controls” against China:
           “Last October, the United States Bureau of Industry and Security issued a document that — underneath its 139 pages of dense bureaucratic jargon and minute technical detail — amounted to a declaration of economic war on China. …
           “The Oct. 7 controls essentially seek to eradicate, root and branch, China’s entire ecosystem of advanced technology. ‘The new policy embodied in Oct. 7 is: Not only are we not going to allow China to progress any further technologically, we are going to actively reverse their current state of the art,’ [Gregory] Allen [of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington] says. C.J. Muse, a senior semiconductor analyst at Evercore ISI, put it this way: ‘If you’d told me about these rules five years ago, I would’ve told you that’s an act of war — we’d have to be at war.’”
          The U.S. export controls (the act of war) on computer chips aim to cripple China’s ability to produce or purchase high-end chips, which are crucial for the development of advanced technologies such as supercomputers and artificial intelligence (AI). Some call this a Silicon Curtain in the New Cold War against China. The U.S. controls (again, an act of war) are not narrowly targeted at curbing Chinese military development, as claimed by the Biden administration. On her recent visit to China, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen seemed openly insincere when she tried to say the controls were not aimed at the broader economy. China’s Premier Li Qiang, who met Yellen, told her that she was “overstretching.”
       The export controls are broad. As the New York Times reports, they seek to undermine China’s entire ecosystem of advanced technology, including its AI industry. The semiconductor industry is seen as a means to achieve this goal.
       The semiconductor industry is a global industry that the U.S. has dominated and controlled, as U.S. Big Oil has dominated the global energy industry.
The Pentagon’s semiconductor project
       The semiconductor industry began as a project of the Pentagon’s Semiconductor Technology Advanced Research Network (STARnet), part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The industry in the U.S. was and is, to this day, heavily financed by the Pentagon and the U.S. government.
         The CHIPS Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Biden in August 2022, pumped an additional $280 billion in new funding for the research and manufacture of semiconductors in the U.S. That was followed by a DARPA announcement in January 2023 that it was putting almost half a billion dollars into a project to help advance the semiconductor industry in the U.S. None of this, by the way, was created or developed by any capitalist entrepreneur. Capitalism does not create anything on its own; it just finds a way to exploit new technology to make a profit. And many of the biggest, highest profit-making capitalist industries were created and funded by the government in various ways, including most of the technology industry, the internet, the pharmaceutical industry, the automobile industry, and even Big Oil.
          The semiconductor industry is a knowledge-intensive industry. It is built on shared knowledge and resources. Initially, semiconductor companies were built on open innovation. Because of its complexity, development, and production required the collaboration of research centers, universities, scientists, engineers, and many others to develop the techniques and methodologies required. The pace of innovation in the semiconductor industry has been incredibly rapid. New chip designs are constantly being developed, and the capabilities of chips are constantly increasing. This is due to a number of factors, including:

Continue READING.

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Anti-war.

            How low will the U$A war pimps stoop to prolong the blood bath in Ukraine? The latest statement of insanity from the prince of death Biden, is that he is considering sending cluster munitions to Ukraine, despite these weapons being banned by well over 100 countries, due to their extremely high risk of causing civilian injuries and deaths, years after the conflict has stopped. This is just another step in the U$A's desire to weaken the Russian military and ruin its economy to try and prolong Americas dollar dominance in the world. 

                                                       Image courtesy of Al Jazeera

             Day and daily we hear about the billions U$A is giving to Ukraine to prop up its dictator and his fascist regime. What is not made clear is that the money doesn't go to Ukraine. The way the system works is that U$A send Ukraine its old munitions and military hardware, the money then goes to the U$A military to hand over to the American military industrial complex to deliver new and more advanced weaponry to replace their dated weaponry that has been shipped to Ukraine. The con trick of getting tax payers money straight to the arms industry without touching the ballooning arms budget. So the arms industry gets two bites at the cherry and prays that the war continues, and it will, since most of those in power in the U$A are in love with the arms industry as it makes them millions.
         The blood shed in Ukraine could have been avoided if the U$A and NATO had wished so, and it could end likewise by negotiation. However that road doesn't suit the U$A's desire for world domination with the dollar the weapon, backed up by military might. 

Image courtesy of Tridni Valka

 

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Ukraine.

 

          Russia is the largest country in the world, it is a land rich in resources, more so than any other country on the planet. It has abundant supplies of oil, natural gas, timber and valuable minerals, such as copper, diamonds, lead, zinc, bauxite, nickel, tin, mercury, gold and silver. The value of these resources is probably immeasurable. America has long had its eye on these resources and has worked hard to bring about the demise of Russia, and hand those resources to the dollar corporate empire. The latest U$A endeavour to bring about the fall of Russia is to fight a war with Russia without useing American troops. The U$A and its puppets will fund the war and supply intelligence and hardware, the Ukrainians can supply the blood and misery. Unfortunately in wars the manpower gets depleted, so all the sophisticated weaponry becomes useless if you don't have the manpower to use them. This is what is happening in Ukraine today. Ukraine is losing a vast amount of troops and that is unsustainable, of course Russia too is losing vast numbers of its troops, but there is a vast population difference between these two countries. This bloodshed will rumble on to the inevitable end, Ukraine will be obliterated, or America and its band of puppets will send in the cavalry and turn the world into on vast blood bath. Only if sanity returns and a vast anti-war movement forces some sort of negotiated settlement, will this mayhem cool down.

The following from Arrezafe.

          Put these four things together: tremendous and unsustainable losses of soldiers; terrifying and indefensible asymmetries of military power; inability to stock up on even conventional defensive weapons; and support completely reduced to that of its main sponsors.
         Sounds like the formula for winning a war? Obviously not. It is the formula to lose it, which is why Von der Leyen, Macron, Scholz and Blinken are already preparing the exit. The tide is turning out for Zelensky. 

 Source: Robert Freeman , We've Reached Peak Zelensky. Now What?

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Fog of War.

 

 

        There are webs of illusions about this war in Ukraine, the theme being that Ukraine is fighting Russia. The truth is that America is fighting Russia, with assistance of its European minions, useing Ukraine as its platform, that way no collateral damage in U$A or Europe. The Ukrainian  people will shed their blood for the master. From the point of view of military aid to Ukraine, America has just announced a $1.1 billion arms package for Ukraine. This bring to just short of $17 billion in military aid by America to Ukraine since the start of the conflict.
        On the matter of boots on the ground, it is shrouded in the fog of illusion. Recently the CIA increased massively the number of CIA agents in Ukraine. Europe is not innocent in this bloodshed, supplying commandos as well as other support. All this is of course not spread wildly on our mainstream media.
       We should realise that this a war between America and its European minions against Russia, in an attempt to keep America the top dog, or top gun would probably be more appropriate. 

 

Image courtesy of News Click.

The following extract from Responsible Statecraft.

          The Central Intelligence Agency is operating in Kyiv and has been for some time, according to new reporting by the New York Times. So, while Biden has insisted on “no U.S. boots on the ground” in Ukraine, there are soft-soled operatives, otherwise known as American spies, providing intelligence and other tactical assistance to Ukraine in its war with Russia.

Sounds like Americans are in this war, like it or not.

         The news, based on sourcing from current and former U.S. government officials, is part of a broader report about a “stealthy network” of U.S. and European commandos and spies in “cells” run by the Pentagon’s European Command “to speed allied assistance to Ukrainian troops.” Much of this is operating from military bases in France and Germany and elsewhere. But as the NYT points out, there are European commandos and CIA agents working on the inside.

Read the full article HERE: 

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Majority??

            When the arrogant U$A and EU mouthpieces spout about representing the international community in this bloodshed in Ukraine, they are of course lying or delusional. In fact they only represent approximately 15% of the global population. Some proof of this was the recent zoom conference called by Fuehrer Zelensky to get all 55 nations of the African Union onboard. After much persuasion, 4 leaders of the African Union turned up for the conference. How's that for support. This is a proxy war between U$A, its NATO puppets and a few hangers on. The vast majority of the world wants no part in this brutal squabble to maintain the perceived supremacy that the U$ believes it has a God given right to wield.

The following extract from Multi Polarista:

 

      

       The United States and European Union frequently claim that they are acting on behalf of the “international community,” but events like this demonstrate that when Washington and Brussels say international community, they actually just mean the roughly 15% of the global population in the West and their loyal allies in Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan.
       Multipolarista detailed in a report in March how the vast majority of the world’s population, which resides in the Global South, has remained neutral over the Western proxy war in Ukraine.
       Countries with some of the largest populations on Earth, such as China, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Mexico, and Vietnam, have remained neutral.
       Many more nations in the Global South, such as South Africa, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, and Eritrea, have openly blamed NATO and the United States for causing the war in Ukraine.

 

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NATO.

              So the bureaucrats of that patch of the planet called Sweden have jumped from being a so called neutral nation to a member of the American imperialist war machine, NATO. Though with confidence we can say that not all who live there are in favour of their being dragged into this NATO war machine. There are those who see it for what it is, a tool for American dominance of the planet, an institution for the furtherance of Western corporate capitalism, and they will make their voices heard.

The following from Act For Freedom Now:

“FUCK NATO

        Some anarchists invaded the hometown of the Swedish Minister of Defence, the Social Democrat Peter Hultqvist. We vandalized several of the Social Democrats’ premises. Locks were glued and messages were painted: FUCK NATO!
        Neither the U.S. Club for Imperialism, nor the petty politicians, own us. You are trying to force decisions on us. Instead, we force ourselves on you. No defense alliance can protect you.

A new time prevails. Anarchy reigns.

Against your wars, your nationalism… FUCK OFF”

via: unoffensiveanimal

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Biased Media.

 

           Day and daily we are exposed to the horrors of the ongoing disaster in Ukraine, our media show all the misery and horror being inflicted on the people of Ukraine, and it is horror and devastation on a massive scale. However it is the biased way in which these wars are reported, this is a Russian invasion so the media show it up for the horror that it is, but where were these same reporters when the Bush-Blair war mongering duo were inflicting their "Shock & Awe"  in 2003, on the innocent people of Iraq. During that U$A and the NATO's illegal destruction of Iraq, we saw no weeping women, no injured children, no scenes of schools and hospitals being blow to smithereens, no badly injured Iraqi soldiers. It was all about our "smart" bombs and our phony illusion that we were only doing it to save the Iraqi people from an evil dictator. Totally biased bullshit from the subservient media.
         Another brutal attack on innocent people by the peace loving U$A and its NATO war partner, was reported as saving people from violence, that the West has successfully erased for the public consciousness, is the devastation brought down on the people of Yugoslavia in 1999. Again a subservient media painted the picture that the war mongers wanted, as with Iraq, they took the handouts as truth and called it reporting.

Yugoslavia 1999.

                                                Image courtesy of TeleSur.

 The following is taken from Arrezaf.

       

10 jun 2022 - People’s Daily: Today marks the 23rd anniversary of the end of NATO’s bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. After an international legal team filed lawsuits against NATO on behalf of 3,000 victims over the horrific consequences of up to 15 tons of depleted uranium bombs NATO dropped in 1999, NATO responded by saying it has immunity from prosecution. Do you have any comment?
        Zhao Lijian: Twenty-three years ago, US-led NATO blatantly bombarded the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia for 78 days without the approval of the UN Security Council. In total, NATO dropped nearly 420,000 bombs weighing 22,000 tons, including 15 tons of depleted uranium bombs. Over 2,500 people including 79 children were killed and more than one million people became refugees as a direct result of the bombings. 
      What is more heart-wrenching is that death and agony brought by the war lingered for generations till this day. As noted by experts, exposure to radiation emitted by depleted uranium bombs can show no symptom for years and depleted uranium bombs have long-term impact on the environment and human food-chain. In the 10 years after the bombing, about 30,000 people in Serbia developed cancer, among whom 10,000 died. According to the Institute of Public Health of Belgrade, by the end of 2019, the number of registered cancer patients in Serbia was as high as 97,000. A study of the Serbian emergency center shows that among children born in Serbia after 1999, many aged between one and five suffered from ectodermal tumors, many aged between five and nine contracted hematological malignancies, and there is a clear uptick in the morbidity rate of brain cancer among those aged between nine and 18. Besides, by May 2019, 366 Italian military personnel who participated in the NATO military operations have died of cancer, and 7,500 have fallen sick. 
        However, till this day, the US -- the country that sent military aircraft to drop depleted uranium bombs over Serbia and the inventor of this type of bombs as well as the only country that has ever used them -- continues to deny that depleted uranium bombs can directly cause Gulf War syndrome and Kosovo syndrome. During the Gulf War, the US dropped far more depleted uranium bombs over Iraq. NATO is also trying to get away with it by claiming immunity from prosecution. Such moves by the US-led NATO are shocking. Neither the Serbian people, nor people elsewhere in the world seeking justice, will ever agree to this. The US-led NATO should earnestly reflect on its war crimes, and provide a reasonable explanation and compensations to the victims of depleted uranium bombs as soon as possible. NATO must also seriously learn the lesson and stop creating new turmoil and division across the world. 

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Choices!

           As the world stumbles and lurches inextricably to a world war situation, what should we the ordinary people of this broken and bleeding world do? We have to find that answer quickly as time is running out, the choices being offered by the system will not bode well for us the ordinary people, or for the planet. We have to think outside this corrupt, unjust and brutal system of capitalism.

A message from Liverpool NWBCW

 

No War but the Class War
LIVERPOOL
          Russia's invasion of Ukraine is bringing the world ever closer to its boiling point. Once again the working class across the world are being asked to take sides in a conflict from which we have nothing to gain and everything to lose. On the one hand Russia, attempting to reclaim what it has lost since the collapse of the USSR. On the other hand NATO, attempting to draw Ukraine further into its sphere of influence. In the background, imperialist line ups are solidifying, with the EU states rallying behind the US, and Russia turning to China. While the war in Ukraine represents an escalation in the drive to generalised war, it is not the only battleground right now. Whether it's Syria, Yemen or Palestine, the capitalist class are pitting workers against each other across the world. All in search for financial revenues, raw materials and cheap labour power.
        Nationalism – that ideological weapon of divide and rule – calls us to kill and die for a cause which is not ours. Alongside military conflict, we are in the midst of a class war with our living and working conditions as the sacrifice on the altar of profitability. Through austerity we were forced to pay for the 2008 financial crash. But the global economy has never quite recovered. Even before the pandemic properly arrived, billions were being pumped into markets every day to keep them afloat and another recession was being predicted. The pandemic was only the spark that lit the flame. Now under the cover of restructuring, we are once again expected to pay for the crisis. Across workplaces we are seeing wages falling behind inflation, sackings, fire and rehire, pension and benefit cuts, and various other assaults on our class.
        Meanwhile at home we face food and fuel price rises, higher rents, more bills and more taxes. All the while the rich grow richer. And the war, as it upsets supply chains even further, will make the situation even worse. Finally, let's not forget the climate crisis. Floods, fires and extreme weather events are gradually making whole swathes of the planet uninhabitable. The ruling class continues to treat the planet like their private backyard with little consideration for the biodiversity and environmental underpinnings of life on earth. And, let's face it, the capitalist conditions which created Covid 19 and allowed it to spread, killing millions, are still in place. The threat of future pandemics looms large. War, poverty, crisis and disease are creating whole generations of people scarred by a system tending towards barbarism: refugees, friends and families of those fallen ill, maimed and killed, the unemployed and the homeless. This is a war on multiple fronts against all workers and the future of humanity. But we can resist. Attempts to defend our living and working conditions can sow the seeds of a wider movement which recognises that capitalism – the current system of production characterised by the existence of private property, wage labour, money and states – is the source of the problem.

Read the full article HERE: 

 

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NATO.

     NATO is Western imperialism's war machine, dominated and controlled by U$A. Any illusion that it is some sort of defence arrangement, is based on illusion and propaganda. There is nothing defensive in the make up of this mega imperialist military machine, and it is all funded by our tax money to the tune of  $1.2 trillion, 2021, the largest military budget in the world, up 24.9% since 2014. After the U$A, the UK is the biggest contributor to the NATO war budget with a whopping £56+billion, what would that do for social services? Think of $1.2 trillion being paid into world health and welfare budgets. The choice is ours if we would only take the steps to organise and stop this imperialist insanity.

The following is an extract from Struggle la Lucha:

           As the U.S. and its NATO satellites, particularly Germany, Britain and France, flood weapons into Ukraine, NATO is being “transformed” into a fighting force capable of direct wars on Russia and China, says NATO General-Secretary Jens Stoltenberg. NATO formally launched a 40,000-strong rapid response force targeting Russia in February. This was in addition to the 175,000 NATO troops already on Russia’s border. Also to be noted is President Joe Biden’s shift away from the “no first use” of nuclear weapons, with the Pentagon announcing March 29 that the U.S. would consider first use of nuclear weapons.
          In an interview with the Telegraph, Stoltenberg said NATO is in the process of making a “fundamental” shift from engaging in what he called “tripwire deterrence” to “be transformed into a major force capable of” direct warfare. Stoltenberg made clear that China is as much a target as Russia. “We are finalizing the work on the new strategic concept that will be agreed at the NATO summit in June. … And there, I expect China to be an important part.” Stoltenberg adds: “It is also of concern that we see that Russia and China are working more and more closely together.”
         Since 2014, Stoltenberg said, “We have implemented the biggest reinforcement of NATO since the end of the Cold War.” Following the overturn of the Soviet Union, NATO has expanded from 16 countries to 30. NATO expansion technically means that the member-nation’s armed forces are “integrated” into the NATO military command. NATO takes command, with the U.S. dominating. No NATO member-state can act without U.S. approval.
NATO expansion into Eastern Europe
         For the last two decades, NATO has been expanding into Eastern Europe. In 1999, NATO took in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. In 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia were incorporated. In 2009, Albania and Croatia. In 2017, Montenegro. In 2020, North Macedonia. Finland and Sweden are reported to be “within weeks” of deciding to join NATO.
          Meanwhile, the U.S. is expanding its proxy war in Ukraine, as Leon Panetta, who was CIA director and then secretary of defense in the Barack Obama administration, so clearly put it. The United States and its NATO military operation is in a proxy war against Russia, with Ukraine as the battlefield. The U.S. role, Panetta said, is to provide more and more weapons faster and faster with Ukraine doing the fighting, bolstered by foreign mercenaries. It’s a matter of military fact that in the Ukrainian proxy war, more military-technical assistance has been dispatched by the U.S. and its NATO satellites, in a larger amount and in a shorter time, than in any previous military conflict in history.
Stop arming Ukraine
           “Russia warns U.S. to stop arming Ukraine,” the Washington Post reported April 14. The Post says: “Russia this week sent a formal diplomatic note to the United States warning that U.S. and NATO shipments of the ‘most sensitive’ weapons systems to Ukraine were ‘adding fuel’ to the conflict there and could bring ‘unpredictable consequences.’” The diplomatic note, titled “On Russia’s concerns in the context of massive supplies of weapons and military equipment to the Kiev regime,” was forwarded to the State Department by the Russian Embassy in Washington. In it, Russia accuses NATO of trying to “pressure Ukraine to abandon peace negotiations with Russia in order to continue the bloodshed.” The U.S. has sent more than $2.6 billion worth of arms and other military aid to Ukraine since Russia launched its military action in February. The Pentagon explained, “The United States has now committed more than $3.2 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of the Biden administration.”
           NATO’s military budget accounts for the majority of military spending worldwide. NATO military spending in 2021 was $1.2 trillion ($1,200,000,000,000), up 24.9% since 2014.
U.S. commands NATO 

          As noted by the Pentagon, NATO is the primary force for U.S. dominance and control in Europe.

Read the full article HERE: 

 

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NATO.

 

          It is always good to hear some news that our NATO friendly and Western imperialism biased media doesn't mention. So I'll post Loam's comment in full. In posting this it should not be seen as my endorsement of the Russian invasion into Ukraine, more a sample of the American backed Western NATO organisation's continual push east. It seems that when it comes to, arms shipments, most states believe in "No Borders" but for migrants, borders are to be impenetrable.

April 2nd. 2022 4:54 p.m

         Armored vehicles and tanks are currently being reloaded in the Greek trading port of Alexandroupolis in order to transport them to Eastern European NATO countries. Railway employees do not want to support this and are now being pressured by employers.
        The Greek commercial port of Alexandroupoli is an important loading port for both goods and fuel because it is close to the Greek-Turkish borders, connected to the port terminal by sea and has an international airport. It is also connected to the railways and the main European motorways.
         Since the beginning of military events in Ukraine, more than 3,000 US soldiers and hundreds of armored vehicles and tanks have been transferred to the Greek port of Alexandroupoli. From there it continues by train to Romania and other Eastern European NATO member states, according to Greek news site In.gr reported. This is what the article says:
         “American tanks belonging to the NATO forces, unloaded from the huge ferry ‘Liberty Passion’ in the port of Alexandroupoli, were transported by rail through the Evros prefecture to Eastern European countries. The tanks of the NATO troops were transported by rail transported from Alexandroupolis via Bulgaria to Romania.”
         The Greek media site Imerodromos reported on April 1 that the further delivery of armored vehicles from the Greek port of Alexandroupolis to the borders of Ukraine is currently in jeopardy, since some employees of the railway company TrainOSE refused to “actively support arms transports”.
          Now the pressure on the employees of the machine factory in Thessaloniki is said to have increased to move to Alexandroupolis to help out there.
          The Information Portal of the Greek Communist Party (KKE) informed adding that US armored vehicles had been delivered to Alexandroupolis by sea and then transported to Poland. On March 30th, “three full trains in this direction” had already been moved via rail traffic. The Greek railway workers loudly refused media details, to reload the material and “to provide technical support for the transport”. The KKE reported that employers “relyed on the employment contract, which states that employees are to work where the company needs them”. According to the KKE:
         “For about two weeks there has been pressure on the employees of the machine factory in Thessaloniki to go to Alexandroupoli. We condemn the employer’s threats against the TrainOSE workers who refused to take part in the maintenance of the trains and took off the NATO tanks to the port of Alexandroupoli.”
         After the intervention of the local unions, the threats against the railway workers had stopped. A dozen local associations published a resolution promising not to take part in the passage of the “war machine” through the country, according to information from Imerodromos. The resolution states:
        “It’s a mockery when an employer says: ‘You don’t have to care what the trains transport, it’s your job and you have to ride it.'”
         The pamphlet goes on to say: “We will not be complicit if the war machine rolls through our country’s territories. No use of the railways to transport war material abroad.
          The locomotives used for this purpose are to return to their base. No threat to a railway worker who refuses to agree to the transfer of NATO war material from our country.”
         The KKE resolution was supported by a dozen and a half local unions, including “chemical industry workers in northern Greece, private employees of the city of Thessaloniki, construction workers, workers in telecommunications and IT, the food industry, local authorities and municipal companies, hotels and public utilities”.

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Lies and Wars.

      I, like every decent human being with a shred of humanity, condemn the war in Ukraine. However I can't stomach the the phoney outrage at this slaughter in Ukraine, by the bosses of NATO and the nations that support that vast war machine. In this war in Ukraine, they report every building destroyed, every casualty, with crocodile tears, as if this is different from any other war, their memory doesn't stretch back enough to remember March 24th. 1999, when NATO unleashed a totally illegal vicious bombardment of Yugoslavia. 

The following extract from Struggle-la-Lucha:

        

  

       Exactly 23 years ago, NATO countries, without UN Security Council authorization, ordered their troops to bomb the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as part of an offensive operation named Allied Force, under the pretext of a supposed humanitarian intervention to prevent genocide” of Kosovar Albanians.
The air strikes lasted 78 days, beginning on March 24 and ending on June 10, 1999. During that time, more than 1,000 aircraft were used to drop more than 3,000 cruise missiles and about 80,000 tons of bombs on the territory of the Balkan country (which at that time consisted of Serbia and Montenegro). The number of dead, most of them civilians, ranges between 2,500 and 3,500 people. 89 were children, which means that, on average, NATO killed one child every day during the bombing. Some 10,000 people were seriously wounded. Most of the victims were Serbs.
     Both military and civilian installations were hit. Hospitals, bridges, oil refineries, power plants, political party headquarters, railways, schools and even the Chinese embassy in Belgrade were bombed.
      In total, NATO’s military intervention resulted in the destruction of 25,000 residential buildings, 450 kilometers of roads, almost 600 kilometers of railroads, nearly 40 bridges, 100 schools and kindergartens, 30 hospitals and 14 airfields. The material damage is quantified at about 100 billion dollars.

        Let's not forget America and its puppets' "Shock and Awe" on Iraq, savagery based on lies.

The following extract from Open Democracy: 

Baghdad ablaze on the first night of the Shock and Awe coalition bombing

| Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo 

          Since the invasion, Iraq Body Count has recorded between 185,000 and 209,000 civilian deaths as a result of violence. The number grows to 288,000 when combatants are included.
        The coalition alone has killed over 24,000 Iraqi civilians, and that number grows to 33,000 when we include those killed by Iraqi state forces.
        During the 2003-2017 period, Iraq Body Count recorded the killings of over 7,000 Iraqi children, among them 932 are attributed to the Islamic State, while twice as many were killed by the US-UK coalition. Estimates suggest that over 7,400 Iraqi children have been killed up to 2021, with over 1,000 deaths attributed to the Islamic State, and twice as many killed by the US-UK coalition.
        The mass killings of Iraqis commenced on 19 March 2003, with the ‘shock and awe’ bombing of Baghdad. Millions sat transfixed before their TV screens, watching as bombs and missiles exploded. The reports came with the warning that they contained flashing images. True enough, the sky over Baghdad flashed orange and golden, the sounds of war filling our ears. The narrative of terror that began that day was to last for years: terror from the sky, terror on the ground, terror from the foreign soldier, terror from one’s neighbour.
        The victims were people from all walks of life: shepherds, fishermen, construction workers, street cleaners, doctors, clerics, journalists, politicians, policemen, housewives… killed as they walked, slept, drove, or changed a tyre.
        Images of the last 20 years include wooden coffins, bodies in white shrouds, the names and faces of those killed – some smiling in old photographs – and many blown-out cars. There are also stories of heroes, like 18-year-old vendor Ahmed Draiwel, who picked up a bomb and ran with it, away from the busy market, in Sadr City in March of 2007. He was the only one who died when it exploded.
       Thousands of civilians have been killed each year, since the night of the flashing images. At its peak, the terror claimed 29,027 in 2006; at its calmest, 902 in 2020. but 18 years on, the deaths continue.

       We must stand against all wars, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Palestine, no matter where, and bring down the system that ferments wars and profits from wars. Wars are savagery that produces wealth and power to a powerful and privileged few, paid for by the blood of ordinary people, who play no part in these barbaric power games except as cannon fodder.

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