CounterPunch, 3.7.2022

The following is cut and pasted from interactions with fellow antiwar lefties on so-called social media. Statements preceded by a plus sign (+) were written by me. Statements preceded by a cross hatch (#) are written by online correspondents. Quote marks are used for all statements by others but not for the author’s comments.

Monday, February 28: Sorcerers of Death’s Construction

+ Street: Soon, perhaps, the madmen running the world will have us saying our last goodbyes to the ones we love:

If the sky fell down

And the moon went out

I’d just be a few feet away from you

If the sky fell down

And the moon went out

I’d just be a few feet away from you

-Otis Taylor, “Few Feet Away From You”

Generals gathered in their masses

Just like witches at black masses

Evil minds that plot destruction

Sorcerer of death’s construction

In the fields, the bodies burning

As the war machine keeps turning

Death and hatred to mankind

Poisoning their brainwashed minds

-Ozzie Osbourne, “War Pigs”

+ Street: CNN is live with migrant and refugee Black young men reporting that they were denied access to trains out of the country. They were told “If you’re Black and you’re trying to get out you’re wasting your time.” Black women and children also being denied access to trains and buses. Don Lemon skipped right past the discomfort of that little story and didn’t miss a beat going over to war pig Clapper, who said that images of the Russian convoy make him “drool” at the thought of attacking the Russian trucks with bombs and fighter jets

Tue, March 1: James Clapper “Drools” for Another Highway of Death

+ Street: War master James Clapper (former US Director of National Intelligence) was talking to imperial talking head Don Lemon last night. He looked at CNN footage of the giant Russian convoy heading towards Kiev and said that the images made him “drool” over how much damage US war planes could inflict on the convoy. One could almost read his mind saying “damn: if only we didn’t have to worry about setting off World War III!” Make no mistake about what Clapper’s historical reference point is here: the barbarous ferocity of the “Highway of Death,” where the “global policeman’s” forces massacred tens of thousands of surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait on Feb. 26 and 27, 1991. Journalist Joyce Chediac testified that:

U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. ‘It was like shooting fish in a barrel,’ said one U.S. pilot. On the sixty miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun … for 60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No survivors are known or likely. … ‘Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,’ said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer. … U.S. pilots took whatever bombs happened to be close to the flight deck, from cluster bombs to 500-pound bombs. … U.S. forces continued to drop bombs on the convoys until all humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created an aerial traffic jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions. … The victims were not offering resistance. … [I]t was simply a one-sided massacre of tens of thousands of people who had no ability to fight back or defend.

+ Street: It’s just a parade of high-level US war criminals like Clapper at the cable networks.

#Terry Thomas responds: “Retired generals, CIA operatives, and national security bureaucrats all making a nice second income these days, spouting their ‘expertise’ on various cable news networks. Even have the retired generals at interactive maps of Ukraine…. And talking heads just grovel before these people.”

+ Street: Watching Biden’s SOTUA: Oh goodie, more barrels of oil released from the strategic reserve. Let’s keep cranking carbon into the environment on an ever-escalating scale! Let us run faster into the planetary Greenhouse Gas Chamber!

Wednesday, March 2: White Skin, Black Fuel

+ Street: Notice the disparity between the extreme Western concern over Russia’s attack on the Ukrainian people and widespread Western silence over Israel’s continuing horrific U.S.-backed war on the Palestinians, Saudi Arabia’s continuing horrific US-backed war on Yemen, and the continuing horrific US war on Somalia. The standard response from a Western liberal confronted with this contrast is of course that the Ukraine Crisis involves a major nuclear weapons power, Russia, and therefore raises the specter of a Superpower conflict that could lead to global nuclear winter – World War III. But, with all due respect, it’s not clear that Putin and/or the US see much profit or imperial gain in ending all life on Earth, and it is important to note the racial dimension of how Western media-politics culture distinguishes “worthy” from “unworthy” victims. The majority white and white-ruled West is shocked at the sight of white people being menaced with imperial invasion. The pain and suffering experienced by nonwhite people being killed and maimed by US and US-allied militaries, invaders, and occupiers – or for that matter by Russian or Chinese forces – do not evoke remotely comparable empathy despite the far greater casualties and devastation experienced by the brown and Black victims. Ukrainian refugees will of course find far less resistance to settlement in Europe and North America than their Arab, Pashtun, African, and Latin American counterparts. Why? Because of their whiteness. Yes, whiteness, that powerful drug that contributes so strongly to Western fossil-capitalist/-fascist climate denial by reassuring Europeans and North Americans that they don’t need to get all crazy about climate change because global warming’s worst effects fall first on the majority nonwhite global periphery – this even while the white majority core states are the main generators of the climate plague. (This post is not meant to suggest any support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine or any illegitimacy in human empathy for Ukrainian victims of that invasion. I continue to be nauseated by many online “left” folks’ bizarre inability to properly hate two things at the same time.)

+ Street: Ukrainian politicos keep calling for a No-Fly Zone. Nope. Sorry. WWIII holds little appeal.

+ Street: Coal Mine Manchin is going on Fatherland Business Channel to use the Ukraine Crisis to advocate the acceleration of climate ruin through the accelerated extraction and burning of Black (fossil) fuel.

+ Street: My goodness, so many liberals ready to applaud Ukrainians for making Molotov cocktails but won’t step out their front door to protect women’s right to an abortion or young Black men’s right not to be shot down in the streets by racist white cops

Thursday, March 3rd: More Than One Imperialism & “What’s Left of the ‘Far Left.’”

# Alessandro M writes:

“Here [below in italics] is the position of the Alliance for Global Justice (AFGJ) on Ukraine, which they just emailed out. No mention of Russian fascists, Russia’s bombs, or the fact that Russia is an imperialist country. And as I understand, this is the same AFGJ which dropped sponsorship of the Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund a few years back, because the AFGJ did not want to be associated with ‘Bob Avakian’ (horror of horrors that prisoners might be requesting literature by BA to read while confined within Amerika’s hellholes). So Paul Louis Street and others, what is your sense of this position put out by AFGJ?”

‘The roots of the war in Ukraine lie in decades of NATO expansion that seeks to extend US hegemony over the entire world. This is imperialism, pure and simple. We see the expansion of fascism in Ukraine, the US, UK, and many parts of the European Union. The ugly alliance between fascism and imperialism is a global threat. This threat expands beyond Eastern Europe and threatens sovereignty of many nations especially in Latin America and throughout the Global South….

End NATO expansions that threaten Russia. The Russian state, as do other nations, has a right to sovereignty and secure borders.

Uphold Minsk Protocols.

No US troops on ground in Ukraine region.

End the use of civilians as fodder for proxy wars between global powers.

End targeting of civilians by either side.

We demand the immediate cessation of racist/fascist behavior in Ukraine and at its borders.

We call for mediation by the world community of nations.

We call for total nuclear disarmament.’”

+Street response to Allesandro M: I’d have to know more about this specific group than I do. They seem to have no grasp of what post-Soviet Russia and the Putin regime are about (not to suggest that Soviet Russia was a great model) and they may be caught up in geopolitical campism and the whole “enemy of my enemy is my friend” trip. These types of folks seem to go through life wanting Lenin Prizes for figuring out that the US is an evil imperialist state. They seem so focused on Superpower USA that they can’t recognize other and competing if lesser imperialisms. As for freaking out over Avakian, sounds excessively sectarian to say the least. Beyond whatever nasty experiences they have had with RCPers, they may know that Avakian often writes in ways understood and dug by some prisoners. This would be threatening to them.

#Allesandro M back to Street et al: “Both good observations. Yes, this is the default position in what’s left of the ‘far left’— Russia is helping states like Cuba and Venezuela and Syria that the US wants to destroy, therefore, Russia is not imperialist (or, solidarity with Russia against NATO!). Enemy of my enemy. Multipolar world= good. Lenin’s ‘imperialism’ definition doesn’t apply to Russia or to today’s world, because back when it was written there was no superpower on the scale of US imperialism. This is really how these groups think! so much nationalism, third worldism, realpolitik. People who think the BRICS are a rising alternative to the US-dominated world order have referred to Russia over the years as a ‘sub-imperialist’ power— I saw this at the World Social Forum, in Tunis. It’s all an excuse for siding with one imperialist ruling class against another. At this point the ‘far left’ and ‘anti imperialists’ accuse anyone of criticizing Iran, Syria, Putin as being ‘CIA agents’ or as ‘objectively helping the CIA.’ When did the world get this crazy?! Was it the failure of virtually any socialist revolution to break through after the 1990s which led to such pessimism? Was it Wikileaks that definitively re-drew the political map, with Greenwald and possibly Assange embracing elements of the Right out of hatred for the Dems or out of calculated attempt to de-escalate nuclear war? Isn’t it shrewd how Putin cultivates relationships with far-right parties as well as far leftists in the West?!]’

+ Street: Comrades, resist the temptation to get excessively sucked into inter-imperialist conflicts and keep your focus on the need for people’s revolution. You know who most and best needs to defeat and overthrow Putin? The Russian people. Guess who most and best needs to defeat and overthrow the US-American Empire? The US-American people. Who needs to defeat the eco-cidal world capitalist-imperialist system: the people of the world. Young Marx and Engels in 1848: “The working people have no country…. Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.”

+ Street: Message for (a) online “leftists” (LOL) who think it is anti-imperialism to spread imperial Kremlin talking points and (b) imperial liberals calling for a NATO to flirt with World War III by establishing No Fly Zone over Ukraine: A PLAGUE ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES. When and if you finally get sick of what about-ism (as you should) think about embracing revolutionary eco-socialist and proletarian internationalism.

# Dan H writes:

“The more I look at certain of Vladimir’s speeches and the writings of ‘Putin’s brain,’ the wretched ‘Traditionalist’ (deep fascist) philosopher, Alexander Dugin (Vlad’s closest adviser), the clearer it becomes that:

1. Vlad and his microcell of advisers do not consider Ukraine a sovereign or even a *distinct* people. Ukrainians are sufficiently dehumanized in Vlad’s brain to permit bloodbath and wanton slaughter. (To Americans, this is bracingly familiar, after the dehumanization of Muslims post-9/11 and preceding the forever wars and their attendant war crimes).

2. Robert J. Lifton has argued that ‘a claim to virtue’ accompanies the committing of any atrocity. The ‘denazification’ and ‘demilitarization’ rhetoric of a Vladimir is intended to serve that purpose. However, it’s not evident that this rhetoric is even convincing many of his Russian conscripts. Nonetheless, it is Vladimir’s attempt at proffering a claim to virtue for the atrocities he has begun to commit.”

+ Street response to Dan H: I agree 100% with you and Lifton on this. BTW, Putin saying that Ukraine isn’t a real country matters. His “left” friends argue that all he wants is for Ukraine to pledge to stay out of NATO. Actually, he appears to think Ukraine doesn’t have a right to exist.

+ Street: I just drone-bombed yet another knuckle-dragging moron who thinks that being concerned for ordinary Ukrainians and about potential WWIII means that one didn’t fight against the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, didn’t oppose the US/NATO war on Libya, doesn’t oppose the racist US police state, doesn’t oppose Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, doesn’t oppose the US Saudi war on Yemen, doesn’t oppose US and NATO imperialism ..and so on. I’m aware that plenty of folks do exhibit precisely the racialized imperial double standard alleged in this narrative. But the people I’m unloading aren’t making a proper distinction between those sorts of folks and left antiracist anti-imperialists like myself and others.

#David M responds: “I see and hear this imbecile line every day. Large sectors of ‘the Left’ have lost their minds… many of them are operationally right wing. It is demoralizing.”

+ Street response to DM: I’d say a good 20% or more of those who identify as “Left” nowadays are complete idiots. It’s tragic.

+ Street: Sounds like Putin is unleashing some truly nasty and indiscriminate shit. CNN just did a live interview with a manager of the biggest nuke in Europe. The insane Russians are shooting weapons at the plant. There is damage to structures around two reactors by numerous accounts. Live footage shows the planet being shelled. There’s no elevated radiation reported yet. Dear Vlad, the wind is blowing west to east. I was very uneasy with news reports earlier today of Ukrainians having come out en masse to guard this nuke. What bothered me was that this seemed to suggest a coming battle over the plant, not an appetizing thought. The US media portrayed this is as heroic but all I could think was “we don’t want armed conflicts over and around nuclear power plants.”

Friday, March 4: Multiple Imperialisms, No Nukes, and Little Stevie Warmonger

+ Street: Inability and refusal to see multiple imperialisms (imperialisms other than US and Western imperialism) + “enemy of enemy is my friend” thinking + moral decrepitude + conspiratorialism and other forms of extreme intellectual failure (including never reading anything other than “social” media posts) = a whole slew of frankly sick- f*#k “leftists” aligning themselves with Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine. I say this as a longstanding and ongoing harsh critic of US imperialism, of course. Take note of your fellow “leftists” who have shown themselves “ok” with the murder of everyday Ukrainian women and children by the capitalist-imperialist butcher Putin.

+ Street: There’s no nuance permitted when minds become radically polarized between competing imperialisms. In this intellectual dead-zone one fully acknowledges the role and context of US and NATO imperialism and still gets accused of being a US and NATO imperial apologist because one dares to oppose Putin’s crimes. Conversely one fully denounces Putin’s criminal invasion and yet still gets accused of being a Putin apologist because one dares to mention the context of US and NATO imperialism.

+ Street: Regarding the insane Russian attack on Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine last night: I got political around the time of Three Mile Island and No Nukes. We all read Barry Commoner and (at one point) this book (linked) from South End Press. One of the many strong arguments against nuclear power plants was their potentially disastrous vulnerability to war and to terrorist attack.

+ Street: Are people aware of the shit that Bruce Springtseen’s old back-up Stevie Van Zandt is saying on Twitter? The man is crossing into War Pig/Masters of War/Dr. Strangelove territory. StevieVanZandt: “Until when? Want to give him Latvia? Estonia? Lithuania? How about Poland? Because they’re next. Everybody is acting like if there’s a WW3 Russia would win it! It’s suicide and his generals and oligarchs know it. He will never be allowed to push that button.” Little Stevie is actually telling people not to be afraid of WWIII. I am not making this up. After this, in another tweet, SVZ said the West is “do[ing] nothing.” Actually, the economic sanctions are epic. And the West is sending in weapons like crazy. The former Sopranos’ actor (he played mobster “Silvio Dante”) wants Joey Bidenzo to send in some hit men and take out Vladdy Corleone.

# Benjamin F responds: “He’s melting down harder than a Russian reactor. He was basically saying night before last it’s better to die in a nuclear war than slow by radiation from that building on fire near the UKR nuke plant.”

+ Street response to Benjamin F: he’s yet another old white male who’s gone off the rails. He’s had a cool life for many decades. How about no WWIII so kids can grow up to be rockers too?

+Street: Sorry but sending NATO planes to directly engage Russian jets over Ukraine would not be an especially sane move.

# JM responds: “Would play right into Putin and give him the high ground. Not to mention ratcheting it up many notches.”

# Frank H responds: “Zelinsky is becoming completely unhinged. He’s going to speak to Congress to demand no fly zone tomorrow. Besides the weapons merchants, energy interests, and our atrocious media, he’s been the biggest winner in the whole disaster. From the verge of being ousted for his corruption and incompetence to international rockstar. He’s going to play his hand right to WW3 if he thinks it serves his interest.”

# Allan K responds:

“‘Sane’!! Since when can we use that word for US foreign policy or the US military?? I’m superannuated enough to remember the missile crisis that almost got the world blown up. And then onto the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ Vietnam War, which I always thought was better expressed as the ‘tunnel at the end of the light,’ the bombing of Cambodia (which, of course, created the conditions for the Khmer Rouge), the oil-tinged, unnecessary first American war on Iraq, which led…to the second war on Iraq, with its imaginary weapons of mass destruction.:

+ Street: In other unfortunately not fake news, a Canadian fascist-trucker-inspired Freedom Convoy heading to DC includes freaks who think “Trump and Putin are secretly working together to stop bioweapons from being made by Dr. Anthony Fauci in Ukraine and that shelling in Ukraine has targeted the secret laboratories.”

+ Street: One US war master after another is going on MSNBC and CNN to express their horror at Putin’s imperialist crimes in Ukraine by making analogies with war-driven European humanitarian disasters in the 1930s and WWII. They also call for antiwar protests. Unthinkable, of course, that they would mention the US Crucifixion of SE Asia (which killed 3-5 million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians between 1962 and 1975) or the mass-murderous US invasion of Iraq (more than a million killed) or the mass protests held against those monumentally criminal US wars. No mention of the US-backed Indonesian invasion of East Timor or of the ongoing US-backed war on Palestinians or the US-backed Saudi war on Yemen, all vast humanitarian disasters committed by people on the right side of the US Empire. Eurocentric and transparently white at all? I am not doing “what about-ism” here because I am not offering any rationalizations or excuses at all for Putin’s criminal and heinous invasion. I don’t say this to undermine opposition to Putin’s crime. I say this to suggest that we need to oppose imperialism as such, not just this or that imperialism but all imperialisms, and that one’s credibility as an anti-imperialist is called into severe question when one’s anti-imperialism and one’s related sense of worthy victims is applied selectively and with obvious racist overtones.

# Terry Thomas responds:

“These veterans of every despicable US intervention of the last 60 years gravely inform the audience that Russian (dis)information is all propaganda, none of it true. And of course, they are more or less right. But of course, they should know all about propaganda. They, and their talking head apologists, are masters of the craft. Remember The Washington Post expose on the US invasion of Afghanistan? Basically, everything the American public was told was a lie. And basically no one at CNN, MSNBC, etc. etc. paid any attention. You know, those are our lies and those are different, because they are for a noble cause. Killing innocent people to make them free or to disabuse them of inappropriate ideas or whatever. We are quite good at rationalizing ridding the world of the various ‘isms’ we don’t like. Also, has anybody noticed at least some of the nations that are in the same category as Russia now finds itself in? At least two of them on the list (Cuba and Venezuela), and there are a couple of others (Iran, N. Korea), are in the that position not because they did anything to the US; they are in that category simply because they exist, and the US and its propaganda machine can’t tolerate that. The masters of the realm are not all alike: Putin is certainly different from Biden or Macron. However, they are nonetheless all masters, and they all must lie/prevaricate to hide who they really are.”

# Sarah R responds: “I dunno. Why would you want those things brought up in that specific context? I’m seriously asking, as in, what particular point would they be employed in making?…. What is it you think that people need to be taking away here that they’re not being well led to? How would you be using the opportunity?”

+Street responds to Sarah R: Have you read Chomsky and Herman on worthy v. unworthy victims in US and Western media? Denying/deleting/forgetting/airbrushing/skipping past your own crimes undermines your legitimacy as a reputable critic of others’ crimes, not matter real those others’ crimes may be.

Saturday, March 5: Against the Reckless Call for a No-Fly Zone

+ Street: Zelensky and Stevie Van Zandt need to STFU about No-Fly Zones. I mean I get the cry for help but there’s 2.2 billion children to try to spare from nuclear winter on planet Earth. MSNBC anchor (Joy Reid substitute whose name I did not catch, young Black female war hawk) is interviewing former CIA agent Navid Jamali, pressing him on why “we can’t just send in troops and impose a no-fly zone.” What irresponsible and reckless broadcast conduct.

# Terry Thomas responds:

“Here’s one I just heard: According to Alexander Vindman, the US can do a lot more for Ukraine, including establishing a no-fly zone, because Putin is not suicidal. Here’s the thinking: Putin knows US planes would kick shit out of Russian planes and Vindman said that’s been proved by poor performance of Russian planes so far against Ukrainians. As a result of this, Russian planes would just stop flying over Ukraine the minute US planes appear. And if you might think a frustrated and emasculated Putin might respond with nuclear weapons? Vindman’s answer is obviously no. That’s where the Putin’s not suicidal thing comes in. He doesn’t want nuclear war with US because he doesn’t want to die. Okay. Let’s get them planes in the air. They like Vindman because he went after Trump, source really of first impeachment, so he’s all over the two networks now. Can do no wrong, no matter how ridiculous or dangerous.”

+Street responds to Terry Thomas: what reckless insanity. Courtesy of CN(unclear)N(ightmare) or MSN(unclear)B(last)C(atastrophe)?

#Cole M responds: “Vindman said he couldn’t believe in this day and age that a leader like Zelenski could be targeted for assassination. If hypocrisy were a poison gas, we’d all have been dead a long time ago. I know. But that takes your breath away.” (P.S: Yes, Biden recently claimed that US special forces assassinated an ISIS chief in Syria and Trump openly assassinated Iran’s top military leader in January of 2020 – just two examples of numerous assassinations carried out overseas by the United States in this and the previous century.)

+ Street: I suppose by now everyone has seen the video of the Ukrainian nuclear scientists telling Russian forces to “Stop shooting at a nuclear hazardous facility.” I suppose there’s folks left in my “friends” list who think this is Western propaganda manufactured in Hollywood. LOL

+ Street: My latest response to Little Stevie Van Zandt in Twitter: “You’ve had a cool life for many decades. How about no WWIII so some kids (there’s 2.2 billion on planet latest count) can grow up to be rockers too? Speaking of rockers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY5nYmTUfnQ”

+ Street: It’ll cost fifteen years behind bars – the near ruination of a young life – in Russia even for tweeting against the Russian war crime. Journalists are forbidden to accurately describe it as a “war” or an “invasion.” Who can ever forget Tolstoy’s great novel “Special Military Operation and Peace?”

+ Street: CNN and MSNBC talking war heads are really over-using the word “unprovoked.” I am against the Russian invasion but, to quote Joe Biden, “come on, man.”

#Cole M responds:

“Professor John Mearshimer makes a strong argument about US culpability in pushing continued NATO expansion right up to Russia’s ‘doorstep.’. It views NATO expansion as an existential threat (remember Reagan warned us that Nicaragua was just a few days marching distance from Harlingen, Texas!) Now that Russia has invaded, it cannot lose the war. He predicts that Russia will do to Ukraine’s cities exactly what the US did to Fallujah and Mosul (and Russia to Grozny and parts of Syria). Absolutely hideous. But if it appears that Russia will lose, Moscow and NYC could wind up looking like Hiroshima on August 7, 1945. Probably won’t happen, but boy oh boy has the table been set.”

Sunday, March 6: Dangerous People, Possibly Including Zelensky

+ Street: My guess is that among other things Putin is expecting the US news cycle to move on to a new obsession. The most likely candidate is an epic mass shooting, for which this Armed Madhouse is frankly overdue. US media slaves have the political attention spans of a distracted housefly.

+Street: I’ve seen CNN and MSNBC anchors proceed with no apparent sense of national shame to ask US war masters to draw lessons from the (criminal and mass-murderous) US invasion and occupation of Iraq for understanding Russia’s (criminal and mass-murderous) invasion of Ukraine.

#Terry Thomas responds:

“And these people are very dangerous. Biden is a weak president and very much influenced by what is said on the Democrat cable news, and the talking heads and their retired generals are starting to inch into some really explosive territory. Last night saw Ret. General Wesley Clark minimize the nuclear threat posed by the Russians and argue it shouldn’t infringe on our response to the Ukrainian crisis. Said basically Putin is always threatening that kind of stuff and at some point we will need to call his bluff. Moreover, Clark said, if we allow Putin to conquer Ukraine, he’ll be incentivized to take Moldova and the Baltics. And of course, the Baltic countries are members of NATO, so we might as well get used to the idea of nuclear war, though Clark assured the audience Putin is most likely ‘only’ talking ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons and those basically don’t end the world. I am not reassured by that sort of thinking.”

# Sally FR responds: “It’s unbelievable level-10 bullshit—I’ve never seen such hypocrisy and mendacity.”

+Street responds to Sally FR: Well, I think Putin trying to sell his current invasion as a repeat of the Great Patriotic War against Fascism 1939-45 is up there too.

+ Street: The cult of Zelensky and the related exaggeration of Ukraine resistance power seems to have the potential to get one helluva lot of people killed. A No- Fly Zone would mean the significant upping of the war pig ante for the generals gathered in their masses just like witches at black masses.

# Frank H: responds: “Except for the weapons merchants Zelensky has been the biggest winner of the recent events. He’s gone from a corrupt and inept politician on the cusp of being run out of office to an international ‘hero.’. He looks increasingly unhinged by the hour and is using his recent celebrity to push the world to the brink of WWIII.”

+Street: A Johns Hopkins academic just built on years of scholarship to inform MSNBC’s Alex Witt that “Vladimir Putin is not a communist.”

#David C responds: “I have debated fraudulent socialists who think supporting Putin will get you closer to Lenin. No joke ‘Putin is trying to free Ukraine from NATO.’ F’ing painful!” (David C adds an excellent photo showing an anarchist banner proclaiming “Don’t Stand with Putin. Don’t Stand with NATO. Stand with the People.”)

+ Last Word: All these unbelievable messes are what we get for having so many more important things to do than make popular revolutions to create a sane, just, sustainable, egalitarian, educated, caring, balanced, and decent, post-capitalist/post-imperialist world.