Rachel Maddow, who fed America a steady stream of “Russiagate” lies for the past six or so years, let loose with a slanderous blue streak about the Rage Against the War Machine rally. Literally everything Maddow said in her post-rally rant was objectively false and her mischaracterization of rally participants as “weird” was devious. She falsely claimed that the rally was full of “white supremacists,” “Proud Boys,” and “anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists.”
On February 19th, the National Mall in Washington, DC saw its largest antiwar rally in 20 years. The speakers list included four former US presidential candidates and a broad and diverse collection of antiwar activists from beyond the left and right.
The aptly-named “Rage Against War Machine” rally drew thousands of attendees, however many pro-war advocates eagerly pointed out that it did not match in size some of the larger rallies against the Iraq war 20 years ago.
To that I say, “who cares”? The US mainstream media engages in war propaganda non-stop, with the only exception being Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. So I think it’s a miracle anyone had the courage to travel to the heart of the war machine in Washington, DC to make their voices heard! We don’t need a majority to fight back – an educated and dedicated minority will do quite nicely. And we certainly had that at the rally!
As I sat in the green room waiting to speak, I had the opportunity to visit with former Democrat presidential candidates Tulsi Gabbard and Dennis Kucinich and former Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Political commentators Jimmy Dore and Chris Hedges were there, along with many leading and well-spoken libertarians. Everyone backstage carried the same message: we must put aside our differences to build a new, broad coalition against this war!
I believe the antiwar movement is starting to catch fire both at home and overseas. The DC rally was followed by much larger antiwar rallies in Paris, Berlin, London, and elsewhere.
Several recent polls, including by Pew and AP, show that American support for Ukraine is evaporating. Even in the EU, new polls show a public turning sharply against their governments’ support for the war. According to a recent Ipsos poll, less than half of Germans support continuing to send weapons to Ukraine. Change is in the air.
The antiwar movement, the anti-imperialist movement of America, has nothing to apologize for and obediently doing so now is tantamount to facilitating our own systematic demonization, silencing, and persecution.
There were notable analysts in the independent media, antiwar orbit who called this correctly, predicting a Russian attack, leaving the door wide open to an invasion as a major possibility. Those who apparently assumed American policymakers would choose diplomacy and not ultimately risk the deaths and displacement of millions of Ukrainians and Russians, a possible global economic meltdown, catastrophic destabilization in Europe, or all out brinksmanship between the two greatest nuclear superpowers were unfortunately mistaken.
However, the U.S. antiwar scene has always opposed America’s hostile post-Soviet Union policy of coups, color revolutions, NATO’s eastward expansion menacing the Bear, ringing Russia’s borders and coasts with NATO troops, bases, missiles, tanks, bombers, and warships.
The reason for this is not simply because these policies are plainly unnecessary for American security, abhorrently costly, polluting, and aggressive. These new Cold War policies are condemned rightly because they inevitably lead to war, or more likely nuclear war.
For instance, the George W. Bush government’s decisions to tear up the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and place dual use “anti-missile” launchers capable of firing hydrogen bomb-tipped Tomahawks in Poland as well as Romania were not in any way authored by non-interventionist libertarian writers and thinkers.
Likewise, the Bush regime made the unprecedented choice to—in the midst of killing countless Somalis and Afghans plus more than one million Iraqis—expand the NATO Article 5 umbrella to include Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Romania. If we maintain our hostility with Russia, this expansion is destined to lead to World War III. For decades, old right conservatives and libertarians alike have opposed U.S. involvement in NATO and this later eastern European policy. This has nothing to do with America’s interests properly understood. There is nothing “sacred” about collectively pledging to blow up the whole world with nuclear bombs for Riga, Vilnius, Tallinn, or even London.
In 2014, Barack Obama launched the Maidan coup in Ukraine. Following the “Orange Revolution,” this was the Washington regime flipping Ukraine’s government for the second time in a decade. The government installed by coup plotter Victoria Nuland, the neoconservative Project for a New American Century founder Robert Kagan’s soulmate, was infested with anti-Russian Nazis. Nuland teamed up with then Vice President Joe Biden, who helped lead the coup from the White House.
This illegal overthrow of a duly elected government led to a brutal war in eastern Ukraine which has killed more than 14,000 people. This is the war that precipitated the crisis we see today. The ethnic Russian people of the Donbas region, the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, refused to be ruled by an anti-Russian coup junta. Kiev launched a merciless so-called war on terror against them. Nazis and jihadists attacked the people of the Donbas. Putin then sent deniable, clandestine forces to support the republics’ autonomy. But he refused to recognize their independence for seven years.
Five years ago, Donald Trump began arming Ukraine with anti-tank missiles. As with Biden’s administration, the Trump regime poured weapons into Ukraine, which fell into the hands of Nazi security forces. The arms were sent to Kiev and used in the east to mass murder ethnic Russians in a violent effort to consolidate control of the divided country. Though they knew well that thousands of people were dying in numbers far higher than anything we have seen thus far during Russia’s war, Washington continued to funnel tons of weapons into the country including armed patrol boats, rocket launchers, sniper rifles, and more missiles.
Trump bombed Russian mercenaries in Syria while American troops illegally occupied the eastern third of that country, itself a key Russian ally, explicitly to steal its oil resources. He also expanded NATO and continued the GOP tradition of ripping up critical arms treaties such as the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and Open Skies.
Beginning with the Obama government, CIA paramilitaries and the Pentagon’s Special Forces were deployed to train militants to carry out Kiev’s war. Concurrently, the CIA has been training these same forces at a secret base in the southern United States.
…So how does our political system address this? By throwing gasoline on the fire, in the form of another national election in 2020. That looming contest already tells a story, it’s not about healing or coming together. Today the political class is more open about its desire to hurt and punish opponents; in fact, revenge and punishment feature prominently in the political narratives that fill our media feeds.
Hillary Clinton recently quipped that maybe she should run against Donald Trump in 2020 and “beat him again,” openly positioning her personal vendetta as the rationale for seeking the presidency. “The issues,” such as they are, take a distant backseat to her more pressing goal of defeating both Trump and his voters in a visceral way. Her 2020 candidacy, should it materialize, will coalesce around revenge:…
These presidential aspirants, like Trump, no longer care to maintain a facade of representing all Americans or smoothing over divisions when elections are over. Nobody runs for president to represent all Americans, and of course, nobody could in a far-flung country of 330 million people. Candidates who give lip service to the idea, as Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang have, gain little traction in the media-driven bloodsport…
Murray Rothbard said in Power and Marketthat “ballots are hailed as substitutes for bullets.” But in modern America, politics leads us closer to war, not closer to peace and justice and comity. Why should we accept weaponized mass politics when we have civil society, markets, and non-state institutions?
We need an anti-politics movement just as surely as we need an antiwar movement.
MCViewPoint 