Disobey.

          We all know that governments start wars, always preceded with the usual bubblegum and popcorn patriotic propaganda about standing up to evil, defending democracy and other phoney bullshit. No matter the trumpeting before the slaughter, the aim is always the same, power and control over resources, defending the wealth, power and privileges of the pampered parasites that control our lives. We also know that it entails the slaughter of the targeted civilian population, of course labelled a just and good cause.

 

         Why do we continue to be fooled by this smoke and mirrors of the state, we know wars never benefit the ordinary people of the aggressor state, nor of the people at the receiving end of the bloodshed, and we know that the ordinary people's blood is shed on both sides, but not that of the psychopaths that plan, gain from and execute these barbaric acts.

 I shall not serve.

          Wars only happen if we obey, so why obey, so many willingly serve this savagery and as long as we have those who serve we will have leaders and wars. Servitude and all its attendant evils disappear if we just walk away and disobey. We could do well to remember the words of Étienne de La Boétie.

            “The fundamental political question is why do people obey a government. The answer is that they tend to enslave themselves, to let themselves be governed by tyrants. Freedom from servitude comes not from violent action, but from the refusal to serve. Tyrants fall when the people withdraw their support.”

 

Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info     

NATO, Western Imperialism's Nuclear War Machine.

        NATO is held up as the defender of democracy, but in fact it is nothing more than the war machine of the Western imperialist corporate juggernaut. State financed by our tax money, it is a wonderful customer of the arms industry, feeding billions of pounds into their coffers.

     Its main duty is to safeguard Western imperialism's resources, plundered from various part's of the globe. Also it is there to snatch valuable resources it feels will benefit the corporate power mongers of the West, and to maintain the West's strangle hold on the world's economy.

     It comprises of 29 nation states, I say nation states, simple because not all the population of those nations states are in favour of this nuclear armed war machine. Each of the member states have continuous protests against its existence. Some of the member states were dragged in kicking and screaming from their population.

      Iceland saw mass demonstrations on the announcement that they would become part of this war machine:

Wikipedia:

        The Icelandic NATO riot of 30 March 1949 was prompted by the decision of Alþingi, the Icelandic parliament, to join the newly formed NATO, thereby involving Iceland directly in the Cold War, opposing the Soviet Union and re-militarizing the country.
The protesters first convened behind a school in the centre of Reykjavík and then marched on Austurvöllur, a small park in front of the parliament building, where a throng of people had already arrived positioning themselves between the parliament and the rioters, intending to defend it.
        At first the demonstrators were calm, but when a leading member of the Socialist Party announced over a loudspeaker that the leader of his party was held hostage inside the Parliament building, things became violent.
        Rocks were tossed at the building, some breaking the windows and one narrowly missing the head of the Parliamentary president, until the Reykjavík police force, aided by volunteers from the Independence Party intervened, beating rioters down and eventually launching tear gas grenades at the rioters.
No official estimate exists of the number of participants, but photographic evidence clearly shows that thousands of people were present.

       The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was a military operation against the Serbian people and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) during the Kosovo War. It was the first time that the organisation used military force without the approval of the UN Security Council. The air strikes lasted from March 24 to June 10, 1999.



       Those sitting in the marble halls of power, making the decisions, as how and when their war machine should move into action, are, as usual, not the ones that will do the fighting, and dying. That part of the plan falls on the ordinary citizens. Some, foolishly, will do the bidding of the lords and masters of the war machine, others will be at the receiving end of the slaughter. The spoils of the bloodshed will, of course, not be shared by those who did the dirty part of the plunder and slaughter, it all goes to the CEOs of that greed driven Western capitalist juggernaut.

      If world peace is what you desire, you will have to see NATO as part of the problem, you have to think of how to eliminate nation states, and their war machines, dismantle capitalism, and replace it with a sustainable system of mutual aid, based on the needs of all our people, freed from the profit motive.
      States, power blocks, and an economic system of greed and exploitation, can only deliver war and inequality.

Visit ann arky's home at radicalglasgow.me.uk

      

Depleted Uranium, A War Crime.

          I wrote the following article some years ago, to highlight the scandal of depleted uranium, being acted out in Europe, Iraq and elsewhere, and at the Dundrennan firing range near the Solway Firth in south west Scotland, but due to the fact that the US has used depleted uranium in the present illegal Syrian invasion, I thought it would be worth repeating. Once again, the state shows itself, in its savagery of war, to have little to no regard for humanity.

 Remember him? UN ambassador for peace in the Middle East!!!

          Depleted Uranium, (DU) is a radioactive waste product which is also chemically toxic and is used by the military in armour piercing shells and bullets. When it hits a hard target it ignites and aerolizies into a fine mist of radioactive particles, if inhaled or ingested can cause cancer, leukaemia, birth defects, Gulf War Syndrome and other illnesses. It can also enter the food chain through water and/or soil. The wind can send particles in all directions over a wide area. The area near the Dundrennan base in Scotland, where depleted uranium weaponry is tested, has the highest incidence of Leukaemia in the UK.

        The UK MOD claim that they don’t hit hard targets at the range but only fire into the Solway Firth. Around 20-30 tons of DU waste is lying on the Solway seabed with the MOD making no attempt to retrieve this danger. As DU is a radioactive waste, it is in breach of the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping Wastes and other Matter, 1972. The MOD are therefore in breach of international law through the dumping of radioactive waste in the Solway Firth. There are also claims that they are creating environmental and health problems by hitting hard targets with DU weapons.

        After the NATO invasion in former Yugoslavia evidence was found that NATO forces used DU on 8 sites. Seven of these sites were in the Republic of Serbia and one in the Republic of Montenegro. Remains of weapons with DU were taken from the soil in these regions and contaminated soil was registered in each of these regions. It is difficult to establish the amount of DU that contaminated these sites. However, Yugoslav Army reports compiled during the war, plus investigation of projectile fragments and data about these types of weapons and how they are used, it can be estimated that NATO fired approximately 3,000-5,000 shells which is the equivalent 1-1.5 tons of uranium 238.
        After the US operation Anaconda in Afghanistan in the region of Tora Bora, it was found that urine samples taken from the local population contained uranium amounts 200 times higher than the population at large.
         These weapons were also used in both attacks on Iraq. The Gulf War 1 in 1991 resulted in 350 metric tons of DU being deposited in the environment and 3-6 million grms of DU being released into the atmosphere. Its legacy to the troops involved in the war, Gulf War Disease, a progressive, incapacitating, multiorgan system disorder, its symptoms include, incapacitating fatigue, musculoskeletel and joint pains, headaches, neuropsychiatric disorders, confusion, visual problems, changes in gait, lose of memory, respiratory impairment, impotence and urinary tract morphological and functional alterations. The understanding of the disease is far from adequate. Uranium isotopes have been detected in urine samples of Gulf War veterans 10 years after inhalation exposure.
          Rageh Omaar, a BBC journalist reporting from Basra stated that Iraqi doctors reported a 20-fold increase in cancers since the end of the 1st Gulf war. Internal contamination with DU isotopes were detected in British, American and Canadian veterans 9 years after inhalation exposure to radioactive dust in Gulf War 1. DU isotopes were also identified in a Canadian veteran’s autopsy samples of lung, liver, kidney and bone. DU danger is illustrated by the following example. In February 1980 a court order from the State of New York forced National Lead Industries, a manufacturer of DU tips, to stop production as they had exceeded the proscribed monthly limits of discharging radioactive material into the air of 150Ci. This value corresponds to 387g of DU. The tip of one shell in a 30mm gun contains 298g. Some time later in a letter to the Atomic Scientists’ Bulletin, Mr Dietz asks if the authorities were worried about discharges that were the monthly equivalent of the particles from 1 or 2 uranium projectiles, why wasn’t the US government worried about the effects of tens of thousands of projectiles fired in the several days of the Gulf War?
        The US Army’s radiology unit suggested press releases should be issued to prevent possible negative international reaction to the use of DU due to public concerns. The report offers the use of tungsten or titanium as an alternative, stating that the only reason to use DU was a cheap way of getting rid of waste. It also outlines ways in which “using arms with depleted uranium is in violation of the basic principles of international law.”

       It is obvious that DU is a highly dangerous substance and is indiscriminate in where it blows and who it affects. The fact that the states that use it are aware of this but continue to use it and put their own troops and the local populations at risk to further their own imperialist gains is just another example of the State’s disregard for the people. War is an arm of the state and it needs ordinary people as cannon fodder but has little interest in the resultant suffering. If we wish to put an end to war and its suffering we have to find a way round the state. We have to eliminate its power by organising at community level, bring power into the hands of the people, work in federation with other communities, creating a world of mutual aid, not profit, of co-operation, not competition, seeing to need, not greed.

Visit ann arky's home at radicalglasgow.me.uk

IT IS SLOW GENICIDE.

       So what is new in this latest show of Israeli aggression? It is part and parcel of the Zionist aims to have all the land that God promised them. Yes, according to the Zionist, away back thousands of years ago, when they were an ancient roaming tribe, God told them that this land was theirs. The problem being that there are millions of people living on these lands, so they have to be removed. And there will be no peace as long as this idiotic claim is at the root of their Zionist government policy. Bit by bit the land of Palestine is disappearing and being settled by fundamentalist Jews, the Palestinian people are the problem, to have God's promise fulfilled, these people have to go, be destroyed, eliminated or call it what you will. This latest onslaught against the Palestinian people is just another step in that direction. In my way of thinking, the word genocide seems to fit. 

Of course you need God's blessing before you kill.

      The last major Israeli assault on the Palestinian people of Gaza was December 27 2008, in what the Israeli state called Operation Cast Lead. As usual with the Israeli state, the action was claimed to be in response rockets being fired from Gaza, and as usual the response was totally and utterly disproportionate. It was state blanket repression of an entire people. It was referred to in most places a a massacre. It involved a co-ordinated attack by land artillery, air bombardment and shelling from the sea. On January 3 the      Israeli state ground forces moved in and attacked many densely populated areas. Gaza was literally cut in two. The operation was ended on January 18 and the withdrawal of Israeli ground forces was complete by January 21. In that short period of brutal overwhelming firepower, it is estimated that 1,400 Palestinians died and 13 Israelis.

      In the 2006 Israeli invasion of the Lebanon, Israel declared all of Lebanon south of the Litani River a kill zone. Within this entire twenty mile area of Lebanon, anyone who was in a vehicle would be targeted and destroyed by the Israeli state terrorist forces. People in villages across the south of the country, who were already without food or water, were unable to flee the bombing or get medical aid.

         Between 1968 and 1974, the Lebanese government registered 3,000 attacks on Lebanon by the Israel state apparatus, which resulted in the brutal murder of 880 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians.

           Of course the attacks on Lebanon by the Israeli state did not start in 1968 with the attack on Beirut airport and the destruction of the Lebanese civilian air fleet. The Israeli aggression started much earlier. Between 1949 and 1964 there were 140 Israeli attacks on Lebanese villages and towns. Some of these attacks include, on July 24th. 1950 a Lebanese civilian plane shot down by Israeli planes, October 1950, Israeli state forces fired on Lebanese civilians killing four at the village of Yarun. In 1959 Israeli state forces hijacked three planes, two civilian planes and one Lebanese military jet, and forced them to land in Israel On August 27th. 1959 Israeli state forces killed one woman and destroyed two houses and three bridges during an Israeli terrorist infiltration into South Lebanon. June 14th 1968 saw the Israeli state terrorists bomb Mays Al-Jabal in South Lebanon and injured 56 people. After the Israeli state terrorist attack on Beirut airport in 1968 their occupation forces killed 11 Palestinians in the ‘Arqub region.

        After 1968 the Israeli state terrorist attacks became so numerous that they would fill the pages of a Glasgow telephone directory. The Israel state apparatus has been attacking and killing Lebanese and Palestinians long before the formation of Hezbollah and the PLO.

         The 2006 Israeli aggression, saw more than 1,000 bombs dropped on 9th August 2006 on Khiyam alone, destroyed the entire infra-structure of Lebanon, killed over 1,000 Lebanese, mainly women and children, children making up almost 50% of those murders. Lets not forget the countless children killed in Gaza over the years of Israeli aggression. During this period the Israeli deaths are in the low hundreds mostly soldiers.

         This is the record of a state that is held up by the Western states as the only democratic state in the Middle East. If this is democracy, who wants it. This is the usual state imperialism doing what it always does, expand and control, brute force while proclaiming democracy, killing while waving the flag of peace. Territory and resources are the aim, people are expendable.

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