Australian Conference On Massive War Maneuvers Talisman Sabre
Above photo: Greenleft.org.au. With over 30,000 U.S. and Australian military forces and representatives from 11 other countries conducting in the
militarism
Georgia State Students Demand The University Denounce Cop City
We, the Georgia State University Student Coalition Against Policing & Militarism, write this letter to express our solidarity with the Stop Cop City movement. We demand that the university end its sprawling investments in carceral projects, including, but not limited to, Cop City.
The university heavily invests in policing, surveillance, and other forms of state violence that disproportionately impact racially-oppressed students, both historically and in our contemporary time, who comprise most of the school's population. Further, while the institution increases funding for GSU Police Department (GSUPD), which enacts racialized violence against its students, departments face budget cuts that reduce the educational capacity of the university.
Culture-Jamming The War Machine
In the drizzling rain, I yank up the military recruitment sign and throw it into the tall grasses on the side of the road. If anyone asks, I didn’t “destroy” government property. I merely relocated it. Think of me like a windstorm. A peace-loving, nonviolent windstorm countering military recruitment.
Who knows how many lives I saved with this simple action? Perhaps it saved the teens that were considering enlisting as they rode the school bus past these signs twice a day. Perhaps it will help some innocent civilians overseas who so often bear the brunt of our nation’s addiction to war. Maybe it will slow down the profiteering warmongering of military industrial complex to realize they can’t count on enlistment rates.
The military recruitment sign was one of two shoved into the sides of the main road in my rural community.
The Death Of A Capable Revisionist
Last night some man with a self build gun killed the former prime minister of Japan Shinzo Abe.
Adhering to family tradition Shinzo Abe has been an Japanese imperialist. As Peter Lee wrote about him back in 2013:
Myth: Shinzo Abe is a leading member of the team of world and Asian democracies standing up to China in the name of universal values like “freedom of navigation” and to help ensure the shared peace and prosperity of Asia.
Reality: Shinzo Abe is a revisionist nationalist using friction with China to pursue Japanese national interests, put Japan on the right side of a zero-sum economic equation opposite the PRC, maximize Japan’s independence of action as a regional hegemon, hopefully peacefully, but if not...
NU Dissenters: Northwestern Is Complicit In US Militarism
We are Northwestern Dissenters.
We are a revived campaign in which previous students laid the foundation for the fight against militarism on campus.
Dissenters is a national anti-militarist, anti-imperialist and abolitionist organization leading a generation of young people to take back what has been robbed of us from the war industry, reinvest in life-giving institutions and mend our relationships with the earth. Dissenters is building chapters of young people on college campuses all across Turtle Island that stigmatize militarism and force powerful elites and elected officials to divest from death and invest in life and healing.
Militarism has infiltrated the world, but we are the generation who can remedy the harm it has inflicted.
Somehow This Madness Must Cease
It was appropriate today, as we mark the national holiday for Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, to re-read ‘A Time to Break the Silence,’ his most powerful speech, given on April 4, 1967, just a year before his tragic murder in Memphis. It is a speech that stands the test of time; much of it is as relevant today as it was in 1967, when war was raging in Vietnam. I would urge people to read or listen (link above) to that profound and prophetic speech in its entirety. He said, “There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.” With climate catastrophe and nuclear madness moving at a rapid rate towards a potential apocalypse for all humanity, King’s words resonate with, as he said, “the fierce urgency of now.”
The African Lion Is Looking For New Predators
The African Lion, the largest military exercise on the African Continent planned and led by the US Army, has begun. It includes land, air, and naval maneuvers in Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, and adjacent seas – from North Africa to West Africa, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. 8,000 soldiers are taking part in it, half of them is American with about 200 tanks, self-propelled guns, planes, and warships. African Lion 21 is expected to cost $ 24 million and has implications that make it particularly important.
This political move was fundamentally decided in Washington: the African exercise is taking place for the first time in Western Sahara i.e. this year in the territory of the Sahrawi Republic, recognized by over 80 UN States, whose existence Morocco denied and fought against by any means.
How Portland Police Came to Be Armed With Military-Grade Rifles
For two decades, the Portland Police Bureau has armed its officers with AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, the result of a tough-on-crime policy that equipped officers with firearms most people associate more with mass shootings than community policing.
In response to a records request from WW, the bureau revealed last week that it owns 238 Colt AR-15 rifles.
Today, 168 Portland police officers—about 20% of the force—are trained to operate the semi-automatic weapon, which allows for greater accuracy and the ability to shoot with precision from upward of 100 yards, or about a city block away.
That means AR-15 rifle operators outnumber the 146 Portland officers who are certified to respond to mental health crises through the Enhanced Crisis Intervention Team—established following the city’s settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice.
Reclaiming The Radical Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
In the last years of his life, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rejected duopoly politics and challenged the roots of the crises we face, what he called the triple evils of racism, capitalism and militarism. As many people active in the Civil Rights Movement moved into the Democratic Party, Dr. King taught that the movement must be independent of political parties and be "the conscience" of them. For this, Dr. King was shunned and hated. In this interview from MLK Day in 2015, Kevin Zeese and I spoke with Kymone Freeman, co-founder of We Act Radio in Washington,DC, JasiriX, an activist and artist out of Pittsburgh, PA, and Cat Brooks, an activist in Oakland, CA about the revival of the radical Dr. King and how they are continuing his work in their communities.
Critical Lessons From Dr. Martin Luther King For These Times
This week, we celebrate the life of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and witness the inauguration of our next president, Joe Biden. This inauguration will be unique, first, for being held during a pandemic and, second, for its heightened security in fear of another attack by Trump supporters. Downtown Washington, DC is normally secured during an inauguration and people must pass through checkpoints to get into the Mall and parade route, but this time is different.
There are 25,000 members of the National Guard on duty in the city to protect the President and Members of Congress. But even this does not guarantee security.
Martin Luther King’s Revolutionary Dream Deferred
We kill the most beautiful among us—anyone, it seems, who reveals the nastier, brutish elements of American society and has the audacity to imagine, demand even, a better path: peace, unity and tolerance. Abraham Lincoln, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King and so many others.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of King’s tragic assassination, and though countless publications will brim with commemorations and retrospectives of this misunderstood icon, most will miss the mark. Long ago co-opted and sanitized by mainstream political figures, the King of memory bears little resemblance to the radical, complex man himself.
We Can’t Vote ‘Em Out
It doesn’t matter when you read this, the assholes will still be in power. I know that because here in America we can’t vote out the assholes. We can trouble them, scare them, annoy them, and sometimes even pressure them into doing some small thing that’s mildly progressive.
But we can’t vote out the assholes.
Of course, right now, if you’re a Joe Biden supporter, you’re yelling out loud to your laptop or phone, “That’s not true! We just DID! We just did vote out the assholes!” And I’m not arguing that Donald Trump and his motley squad of parasitic shit stains aren’t awful.
Colombians Question Deployment Of US Security Forces
Colombian soldiers and military brass have been implicated in a string of human rights violations in recent weeks. On May 1, Semana magazine reported that the Colombian military illegally used U.S. military aid to spy on journalists and human rights defenders, including U.S. citizens. On June 4, Colombian armed forces carried out forced eradication of illicit crops and injured six farmers. On June 25, seven soldiers confessed to gang-raping a 13-year-old Emberá girl in Northern Colombia.
Yet the United States is only deepening its relationship with the Colombian military. On May 28, the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) announced the deployment of the U.S. Security Force Assistance Brigade (SFAB) to Colombia to advise and train Colombian units in anti-narcotic missions. Colombians have spoken out against the security agreement, and the U.S. role in the country’s militarized drug policy.
Bastille Day: Protests As France Gives Tribute To Health Workers
Healthcare staff protested in France as the country celebrated Bastille Day, marked by a ceremony celebrating frontline workers during the coronavirus outbreak.
Unions called for demonstrations after they said a new deal that gives a pay rise to health and care workers did not go far enough to help the sector.
Protests for improved wages and investment in public hospitals took place in Paris on Tuesday, where nurses in white coats replaced the usual uniformed soldiers in the capital’s Bastille Day celebration, as the country paid tribute to frontline workers in the fight against Covid-19.
In the 14 July ceremony, medical staff stood silently as lengthy applause rang out over the Place de la Concorde from around 2,000 guests, including Emmanuel Macron, the French president, and the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The Democrats’ Disastrous, Militarist Climate Plan
Don’t believe for a minute that the Democrats climate plan even means what it says. Its solutions include disastrous scams like “biofuels” and nuclear energy. It proposes no fundamental change in lifestyle, no reduction in personal consumption, and no halt or reduction in eating meat (but renewable energy production on land used for livestock, so that the same land can mitigate the unacknowledged damage it is doing). It offers no proposed federal budget with any major moving of the money to where it’s needed, and no plan to extract any resources from billionaires and corporate giants.
This plan has been criticized for largely ignoring 96% of humanity in order to address a global problem as an isolated country. That’s not quite right. It’s actually a plan built around hostile violence toward the world and the imperative to occupy the world with military forces. Here’s a bit of it:
“The U.S. military is the world’s largest consumer of energy from fossil fuels. Among federal agencies, the Department of Defense (DOD) is responsible for 77% of the federal government’s total energy use.”