Rage Against the War Machine in D.C. today (link to livestream)
"There are no permanent allies, only permanent power."
Some of my favorite independent journalists are in Washington, D.C. for the Rage Against the War Machine rally. Among them are Jimmy Dore, Aaron Mate’, and Christopher Hedges. The event got underway about an hour and a half ago and is being livestreamed on YouTube.
Dore made a video yesterday explaining the reasons Americans should be against this war. I suppose I still have some readers who have been sold on the “Putin plans to march across Europe” narrative and who don’t understand that Ukraine has been a money-laundering pit for the United States for years, and who haven’t accepted that the U.S. is determined to continually fight unnecessary wars because these are highly profitable. It’s that simple.
The event has drawn together anti-war voices—politicians, personalities, pundits—from every wing in the vast and poorly secured political madhouse. The terms “left-wing” and “right-wing” have been blurred and battered into incoherence, the combined result of profligate overuse, reckless aim, and the transformation of the Democratic Party into a clone of the Republican Party of two decades ago. But it’s still fair to say that today’s event has produced some quirky bedfellows.
Here’s Hedges’ matter-of-fact essay on the urgency of this movement and how it is being stymied by petty and easily dissolved, but powerful, differences between putative allies. This is mostly resistance from the anti-everyone Wokish “left,” not a refusal of MAGA Republicans to potentially be identified as the philosophical allies of homosexual, Jesus-free flag-burners.
Related to all of this: Glenn Greenwald did a System Update episode earlier this week about U.S. officials publicly boasting of their intent to destroy the Nord Stream pipeline, their recent bragging about having done so, and the media’s bizarre but furious effort in the face of this to deny that the U.S. was responsible through its smearing of Seymour Hersh.
The United States is supposed to be a government of the country’s people, not a collection of 330 million servants of corporate power controlled by a few hundred shadowy, lying, avaricious psychopaths. That’s not what it is anymore, and it blows.
But no matter how you feel about the U.S. involvement in this war and why you feel that way, hopefully you haven’t been convinced along with millions of others that it’s off-limits to express opposition to it. For example, PayPal, the open campaign for Zionism doubling as an online wallet, suspended payments last year to anti-war voices, and based on the clips I can tolerate viewing, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News do nothing but lie about this war every time they talk about it.