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Anti-war Movement

Stop US Wars: MLK Week Of Actions – Jan 13 – 22, 2023

As Martin Luther King, Jr. so correctly reminded us, the U.S. is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.  Since WWII, the US has initiated more than 60 military interventions in foreign countries.  The US/NATO proxy war in Ukraine, whose origins reside in the 2014 US-backed-fascist led coup that replaced the elected Ukrainian government, brings the US in direct confrontation with a major nuclear power as does the U.S. provocation against China over Taiwan. 

‘Say NO To US Wars!’: Back To The Streets, October 15-22

Today working people face escalating costs of food and energy, recession, growing insecurity and attacks on efforts to unionize. The continuing wars and military provocations have brought us to the brink of nuclear war. Yet, during this election period, imperialist foreign policy has been getting little attention.  It is time for us to be back in the streets to demand an end to US wars and provocations. While the U.S. pours more weapons into the proxy war in Ukraine–holding open the possibility of direct confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia - the war fanatics in Washington seem determined to start even more fires around the world.

The Poor Peoples Campaign Dishonors Martin Luther King

On April 4, 1967 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave one of the most significant speeches of his career. In “Beyond Vietnam - Time to Break Silence ” King declared his unequivocal opposition to the war in Vietnam. His very public break with Lyndon Johnson was greeted with derision, including from his own allies, who believed that the president was an ally who should not be attacked. The NAACP board passed a resolution calling King’s statement a “serious tactical mistake” that would neither “serve the cause of civil rights nor of peace.” The media joined in the condemnation, with the New York Times characterizing his comments as “facile” and “slander.” Even Black newspapers such as The Pittsburgh Courier judged his remarks to be “tragically misleading.”

An Antidote To The ‘Split’ In The US Peace Movement: Anti-interventionism

Massachusetts Peace Action, a venerable part of the US Peace Movement, has been around since the 1980s and its predecessors date back to the 1950s.  Its voice is heeded and it represents most of the shared opinions of the liberal and progressive US peace movement. A recent piece by its Assistant Director, Brian Garvey,  provides an astute analysis of the ideological differences in the progressive part of the US peace movement and properly criticizes its inability to unite around a common program.  He asks the two crucial questions: “What do we do now? and “How do we make a difference?” “Making a difference” to end the war is crucial.  We in the US peace effort want to be effective.

Breaking: Activists Scale Roof Of Raytheon Facility To Protest Wars

Right now a group of activists with Resist and Abolish the Military Industrial Complex (RAM INC) are taking over the roof of Raytheon's facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Raytheon’s parking garage has also been blockaded and there is a disruption happening in the facility's main lobby. They are there to demand that Raytheon stop profiting from war, genocide and colonial violence. Raytheon is the largest producer of guided missiles in the world and is the second largest military contractor. They have made billions in profits from Israel’s occupation of Palestine, Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They also have numerous contracts with ICE and other border enforcement agencies around the world.

The Antiwar Movement That Wasn’t Enough

When I urge my writing students to juice up their stories, I tell them about “disruptive technologies,” inventions and concepts that end up irrevocably changing industries. Think: iPhones, personal computers, or to reach deep into history, steamships. It’s the tech version of what we used to call a paradigm shift. (President Biden likes to refer to it as an inflection point.) Certain events function that way, too. After they occur, it’s impossible to go back to how things were: World War II for one generation, the Vietnam War for another, and 9/11 for a third. Tell me it isn’t hard now to remember what it was like to catch a flight without schlepping down roped-off chutes like cattle to the slaughter, even if for most of the history of air travel, no one worried about underwear bombers or explosive baby formula. Of course, once upon a time, we weren’t incessantly at war either.

Desmond Tutu Opposed Capitalism, Israeli Apartheid And US/UK Imperialism, Too

Being a leader in the movement to end apartheid in South Africa was probably the greatest achievement of the man's life work, and it should come as a surprise to no one that this is the focus of his many obituaries, along with the Nobel he was awarded in 1984.  After Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, he was remembered by the establishment in much the same way, as a leader of the movement against apartheid in the US.  The fact that he had become one of the most well-known and well-loved voices of the antiwar movement in the United States and around the world at the time of his death has largely been written out of the history books, a very inconvenient truth.

What Will It Take To Transform Canada’s Foreign Policy For The Better?

This Thursday will mark one year since Canada was defeated in its bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council. The Trudeau government’s loss marked a rejection of its pro-Washington, militaristic and anti-Palestinian policies. In the months before the vote, a half-dozen activists launched #NoUNSC4Canada. The social media campaign criticized Canada’s climate, nuclear and mining policies as well as its destructive role across the Global South in countries like Bolivia, Haiti and Venezuela. The campaign also included a widely circulated public letter focused on Canada’s anti-Palestinian policies as well as letters sent to African and Caribbean ambassadors critical of Canada’s role in those regions.

Whatever Happened To Americans’ Moral Compasss

The Vietnam War is one of many heinous stains on American history that to this day often is told through a revisionist lens or outright ignored. Yet the truth remains beneath the layers of whitewashing that the U.S. government sent thousands of Americans to slaughter and be slaughtered over a conflict that had everything to do with Cold War ideologies and nothing to do with justice or freedom. The death tolls are still shocking to read: it is estimated that 2 million Vietnamese civilians were killed during the war, along with 1.1 million  North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters and 58,220 American soldiers. The conflict also inspired an anti-war movement described as “one of the largest and most successful youth-led resistance movements in American history” in the 2020 film “The Boys Who Said NO!”

The Antiwar Movement Must Not Go Back To Sleep During The Biden Presidency

On Saturday, members of the administrative committee of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC), on which I serve, spoke on a webinar about the importance of building and strengthening the antiwar, anti-imperialist movement during Biden's presidency. UNAC was founded during the summer of 2010 as it became clear that the antiwar movement in the US was faltering under the nation's first black president. Peace groups allied with the Democrats were reluctant to criticize the president and donations declined as people wrongly assumed the new Nobel Peace Prize winner was pro-peace.

The Return Of The Anti-Antiwar Left

In the writings of Dreyfuss, The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg, Mother Jones’ David Corn, The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer, New York magazine’s resident dolt Jonathan Chait, and many more besides, we can see the emergence of the anti-anti-Cold War Left, there has also reemerged alongside it the very vocal and ravenously unscrupulous anti-antiwar Left. And it is on the issue of the Syrian war on which the anti-antiwar Left has coalesced, inexplicably arguing for the wholesale takeover of a secular police state by the very same Islamist radicals who, if given the chance, would turn around and immediately kill them on the grounds of apostasy. In Syria, the protests that began in 2011 were quickly overtaken by armed jihadists whose motto was “Christians to Beirut, Alawis to the grave.” Before he was murdered by Syrian rebels, the Jesuit missionary Father Frans vans der Lugt observed that “From the start the protest movements were not purely peaceful. From the start I saw armed demonstrators marching along in the protests, who began to shoot at the police first. Very often the violence of the security forces has been a reaction to the brutal violence of the armed rebels.”

US War Against Mexico: Prelude To Empire

The 1846 U.S. invasion of Mexico — popularly, if misleadingly, dubbed the Mexican-American War — must rate as an acute pivot point in the young nation’s history. The Mexican-American War, seen in the context of America’s current contemporary never-ending wars in the Greater Middle East, is more relevant than ever. Constituting the first successful conquest of another country (Canada had been unsuccessfully invaded twice), the war in Mexico included the U.S. Army’s first major amphibious operation and its first experience with prolonged occupation duty. The war, like the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was also sold to a naïve public on demonstrably false pretexts. The blowback from that realization, along with the conflict’s mounting casualties, coalesced into America’s first-ever widespread anti-war movement.

How The West Violates International Law By Using ‘Humanitarian’ Intervention’

Dan Kovalik has packed this readable and well-researched work with an abundance of invaluable information and insight into the imperial war machine, the imperial diplomatic and PR juggernaut, the extensive predatory machinations reducing the rest of the world to rubble so that America’s corporations and its ravenous banking system can subjugate and exploit their populations and extract their material wealth. No More War is a powerful, informative book. While the well-crafted prose reads comfortably, conferring it with NYT bestseller potential, its erudition demands that it be taken seriously. This invaluable volume begs to be used as a textbook for university peace study courses. For we can’t very well chart the right course without fully understanding where we’ve gone wrong . . . so very very wrong.

Building The New Antiwar Movement

Is a genuine antiwar movement reemerging in the U.S., the citadel of military worship? Will we witness the revival of an anti-imperialist bloc, a cohort of Americans who take a principled stand against U.S. empire and its proliferating wars of choice?

War Is An Enormous Threat To The Climate Movement

In Australia, unprecedented bushfires tore across a total area the size of Virginia, killing at least 29 people and an estimated one billion animals, and destroying 2,000 homes. The news was flooded with images of thousands of people taking refuge on Australia’s southeastern coastline, the sun blocked by thick smoke, children wearing surgical masks, in a crisis whose severity is unambiguously tied to climate change. On January 3, the Trump administration brought the United States to the brink of war when it assassinated Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force and a ranking official of Iran. Iran responded by bombing a U.S. base in Iraq, and the world watched in horror to see what President Trump would do next.

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

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