TIME TO GO

This is an article written by the Canadian Peace Congress, who don't seem to completely grasp the way capitalist imperialism works. I, for one, am not surprised at kkkanada's drift towards a more aggressive foreign policy. This is an imperialist country that is competing with other aggressive imperialist countries. All of that aside, this is a decent article. Read it.

Why Canada Should Get Out of NATO

By Canadian Peace Congress

Global Research, March 30, 2019

Canadian Peace Congress

Region: Canada

Theme: US NATO War Agenda

 7 

  2  0 

 

  11

Concerns are growing across this country about the disturbing tilt in Canadian foreign policy toward increasing militarization and aggression – about our participation in foreign wars and US-led ‘regime change’ operations abroad, and about burgeoning defence budgets and rearmament programs, while funding for vital services like education, healthcare and environmental protection are frozen and even cutback.

At the same time however, there is little or no debate at all about Canada’s continuing membership in the NATO military alliance. Neither the parties in parliament nor the mainstream media are prepared to seriously question our NATO status. And yet it is precisely our NATO membership – and the ‘obligations’ that entails – which is the mechanism driving increased military spending and preparations for more aggression and war.

As the NATO generals and their governments prepare to celebrate the 70th anniversary of this aggressive military alliance, it is high time that the peace forces across Canada, and their allies in the labour and people’s movements, put this issue back on the front burner, and begin to build up a grassroots campaign across the country to demand Canada’s withdrawal, and the dissolution of this dangerous military pact as a whole.

NATO’s long and sordid history

Ever since its founding in April 1949, NATO has served as the vehicle to spur the arms race in the name of ‘peace through strength’. In that very same year, the Truman Administration in the United States secretly developed “Operation Dropshot’ to launch a devastating ‘first-strike’ against the former Soviet Union to completely obliterate that country. Throughout the ‘cold war’ years, the U.S. and its NATO allies always maintained an overwhelming military superiority over the USSR and the Warsaw Pact – a fact that they cynically concealed from public view at the time, but now readily admit.

The US-ROK Military Alliance: South Korea Caught in NATO’s Web

Following the 1991 dissolution of the USSR, NATO – which always professed itself as a ‘defensive shield’ – has instead expanded its military reach right up to the borders of the Russian Federation, throughout Northern Africa and the Middle East, and elsewhere around the globe. It led an illegal 78-day assault on Yugoslavia in 1999 which killed thousands and caused over $100 billion in damages. The imperialist war and occupation of Afghanistan, began in 2001, was undertaken under a NATO mandate. And the 2011 war on Libya – which was once again justified under the pretext of “humanitarian interventionism” – was likewise under the flag of NATO.

Canadian air and ground forces were directly involved in all of these acts of aggression, as part of our ‘commitment’ as a NATO member. And Canadian troops are also stationed in NATO base in Eastern Europe and are helping the pro-fascist regime in Ukraine.

In fact, NATO has now emerged as the primary military instrument of U.S. imperialist domination around the world. It recently recruited Colombia, and has invited Brazil – two of the most right-wing governments in Latin America – to be ‘global partners’, no doubt to increase pressures on the besieged Maduro government in Venezuela.

NATO’s Price Tag

The 2017 announcement  by the Trudeau government to raise the annual military budget to $32.7 billion – an increase of over 70% – by 2026, and to commit over $150 billion for the purchase of new warships and fighter jets, is directly connected to our NATO ‘commitment’ to increase annual defence spending to 2% of GDP.  U.S. President Trump has called on its NATO partners to further increase defence expenditure to 4% of national GDP, which would mean a staggering annual military expenditure of well over $80 billion for Canada.

Such vast allocations can only be met through massive increase in taxes, or debilitating cuts to social programs for Canadians, or a combination of both. Is this a price working people should be expected to pay – not for defending our shores, but rather to wage aggressive wars abroad?

NATO & Canadian Sovereignty

Every time peace activists raise demands to cut military spending, or to get Canda to sign the UN Treaty to abolish nuclear weapons, or to oppose Canadian arms deals with Saudi Arabia or support other peace initiatives, we are told the same thing by Ottawa and the military-corporate-complex it serves – that this would violate our ‘obligations’ under NATO.

That is why withdrawing from this aggressive military alliance is such a central and pressing priority if we are ever to win a truly sovereign and independent foreign policy based on peace and disarmament, not militarism and war. Of course, withdrawal would be only the first step in winning a fundamentally new program for Canada, but it is a necessary and vital step in that direction.

Canada’s membership in NATO is the ‘pink elephant in the room’ that everyone knows is there but no one wants to acknowledge. It’s time to change that!

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

The original source of this article is Canadian Peace Congress

Copyright © Canadian Peace Congress, Canadian Peace Congress, 2019

AND TO REINFORCE THE POINT

GET ANOTHER JOB

We hear over and over again how the pigs are " just doing their jobs " when they continue to brutalize and murder people every fucking day ,  and when someone does get prosecuted, they get the lightest sentence possible, or just get fired. For fucking murder. Fuck them and their system.

 “Just Doing Their Job”

One Month in SF Bay Area: Pigs Kill a Man for Shoplifting, and Other Pigs Walk for Cold-Blooded Murders

March 25, 2019 | revcom.us

Just in the month of March in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is not yet over as of this writing, police in one city shot down a man for supposedly stealing from a thrift store, and other killer cops were allowed to walk for previous murders. This is on top of the failure to indict the cops who murdered Stephon Clark in Sacramento, shooting him in the back in his grandmother’s backyard for holding a cell phone these cops say they thought was a gun.

The Murder of Charles Ballard

On March 13, just outside the border of Oakland, Charles Ballard, a 41-year-old Black man, was shot and killed in a thrift store parking lot. Alameda County sheriff’s deputies fired “at least” two dozen shots, killing Ballard and seriously injuring a woman in the car he was driving. The supposed reason? The pigs suspected Ballard of shoplifting from the thrift store, and were supposedly in danger when he tried to pull out of the parking lot.

The Murder of Chinedu Okobi

On March 1, across the bay from Oakland, San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe announced that no charges would be filed against the police who tased Chinedu Okobi to death last year. Okobi, an immigrant from Nigeria, had been jaywalking, according to police, when pigs went after him in cars and on foot, knocked him to the ground, and tased him repeatedly. On a video of the incident, Okobi can be heard calling out “What did I do?” and “Get them [taser wires] off me!” The cops tased him again and again, until he died. All of this is on video.

The DA declared that deputies acted within California law and had been under department orders to enforce jaywalking laws more stringently. The fact that the cops lied about what happened and later admitted that they lied (after the video came out) didn’t make any difference to the DA. Under the state law in California, if someone resists police and tries to flee, even if fleeing for their life from a band of murderous thugs as Okobi did, the police are supposedly justified in using force. And under this system, it is the DA’s job to back this up.

The Murder of Joshua Pawlik

On March 6, Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley said she would not file criminal charges against four Oakland cops for shooting and killing a homeless white man, Joshua Pawlik, last year. Pawlik was lying asleep in an alley near the MacArthur BART station. The police came up on Pawlik and started yelling orders at him: “Take your hand off the gun,” and “Don’t move.” When he finally woke and started to sit up, police immediately fired 22 shots. Police said he had reached for a gun nearby. Oakland Police Chief Anne E. Kirkpatrick reviewed the case in an internal investigation, and only “lightly disciplined” the officers involved. Kirkpatrick ignored the video from cops’ own body cams that showed that Pawlik had not even reached for the gun—he was just waking up, startled, when he was hit with a hail of bullets. The cops’ whole story was a lie.

Apparently, this complete whitewash of the crime did not sit well with the federal monitor of the Oakland Police Department, which has been under federal oversight for the past 15 years. The federal monitor criticized the OPD chief’s decision to give only a slap on the wrist to the cops who murdered Pawlik as “disappointing and myopic.” The message is that the chief should not have been so crude in the exoneration of the murdering cops, particularly in light of the video showing what actually happened.

So what was the result of this federal intervention? The pigs caught on video brutally shooting and killing a homeless man were suspended from the force, and may face termination, rather than just “lightly disciplined.” In other words, just another slap on the wrist for the killer cops who “serve and protect” this oppressive system.

FREEDOM FOR WHO ?

The u.s. and israel have had a mafia type of relationship since the founding of that state after ethnically cleansing the land of almost one million Palestinians. For all of their talk of democracy, the u.s. supports  ( with billions in military aid ) one of the most racist and oppressive regimes on the planet. If anyone dares to criticize israel, they are met with amerikkkan threats and lies.

U.S. Backs Israel’s Annexation of Golan Heights:
“Blessing” More Genocidal Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and a Mafia-Style Message to Russia

March 25, 2019 | revcom.us

On March 21, Trump declared “it is time” for the U.S. to “fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty” over the Golan Heights—a militarily strategic region of Syria seized by Israel in a war in 1967. A story on the announcement in a leading Israeli newspaper was headlined, “Trump’s Golan Declaration: Blessing for Netanyahu, Message to Russia.” What that article didn’t say is that this “blessing” has genocidal implications for the Palestinian people. And the “message to Russia” is a Mafia-style provocation and threat that ratchets up the danger of war.

A “Blessing” with Genocidal Implications

Israel is literally built on the blood and bones of the Palestinian people, whose land was stolen through terrorist ethnic cleansing. In 1948, almost a million Palestinians were violently forced from their land, villages, and homes, fleeing with only the possessions they could carry. First-hand accounts by the founders of Israel document that Palestinians were raped, tortured, and killed in that orgy of terror (see the special issue of Revolution on Israel). Since then, the violent ethnic cleansing has continued.

In a one-sided war in 2008-2009, Amnesty International concluded that Israel killed 1,400 people in Gaza, including some 300 children and several hundred other unarmed civilians. Three Israeli civilians were reported killed in that “war.” In an even more deadly massacre in 2014, Israel killed more than 2,000 people in Gaza, including targeting people seeking refuge in United Nations schools. The UN estimated that 65 percent of those killed by Israel in 2014 were civilians. These massacres were carried out against people who have been locked down in a densely packed, open-air prison, denied construction materials, electricity much of the time, and ability to travel for medical care, education, or to see loved ones even in other parts of Palestine. And in the West Bank region of Palestine, degrading checkpoints, terror by Israeli settlers and dehumanizing and violent abuse by the Israeli authorities are a daily fact of life.

Trump’s “blessing” for Netanyahu was that the timing of this announcement was taken by all as an endorsement of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition in Israel’s upcoming elections. That coalition is increasingly dominated by fanatic Jewish fundamentalists who openly call for the violent extermination of the Palestinian people. As documented in the New York Times, this includes forces with “a long history of expressing support for violence against Palestinians, expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories, and a ban on intermarriage or sex between Jews and Arabs,” and whose “platform calls for annexing the occupied territories, rejecting a Palestinian state, [and] expelling ‘enemies’ of Israel—a euphemism for Arabs.” This is the coalition Trump “blessed” with his endorsement of the annexation of the Golan Heights.

Beyond that, Trump’s announcement has specific, ominous implications for the 2.8 million Palestinians living in the “occupied territories” of the West Bank, territory seized by Israel in the 1967 war. It was a signal to the Israeli right to pursue their agenda of annexing some or all the West Bank. Netanyahu’s ruling coalition includes hard-core Zionist fascists who demand, and are organizing to carry out, the violent expulsion of all Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories. Israeli annexation of any or all of the West Bank would dramatically ratchet up the danger of a whole new level of genocidal ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

And Trump’s “blessing” was accompanied by a literal blessing by Trump’s Christian fascist, “end times” lunatic secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who posed in an interview with the Christian Broadcast Network that it was possible that God raised Donald Trump to be president of the United States in order to protect Israel from Iran, and who declared “the Lord is at work” in Trump’s announcement.

A Mafia-Style “Message” to Russia

The “message to Russia” in Trump’s announcement is that as the war in Syria winds down, the U.S. will aggressively defend and expand its domination of the Middle East. The bloodbath in Syria involved a wide range of competing reactionary forces including ISIS and other fundamentalist jihadist forces; pro-Iranian militias from Lebanon; Iranian military operatives; Russian airstrikes; Israeli airstrikes; groups organized and armed by the U.S.; and U.S. troops. This was, on all sides, a massive crime against humanity and the people of Syria in particular. Framing this hellish mix was contention between Russia (which has a very significant military base in Syria) and Iran, on the one hand, and the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia on the other.

Trump’s backing for Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights—land conquered from Syria in 1967—is a slap in the face to Russia. And this move by Trump comes as the U.S. rulers have Iran in their crosshairs. They see it as a major threat to their domination of the Middle East. Trump’s message to Russia, which has close relations with Iran, is that of one Mafia boss to a rival: don’t stand in the way of whatever moves we make against Iran.

And this “message to Russia” comes from a demented bully in the White House with his finger on the nuclear button. It ratchets up the danger of a potentially catastrophic war in the Middle East and beyond.

If you were expecting outrage from the Democrats in the face of Trump’s endorsement of Netanyahu and his genocidal allies, and his trampling on international law, their muted—at most—response tells you something about their fundamental unity with Trump even as they have differences in how best to prop up Israel and contend with rival imperialists. Some Democrats, mainstream commentators, and “non-partisan” former U.S. diplomats complained that in trampling on international law that is supposed to prohibit countries from annexing territory seized in war, Trump took away a diplomatic weapon the U.S. needs, for example to use against Russia’s seizure of a part of Ukraine. They fear what might come of tearing up global norms that have served to keep the U.S. at the top of a world of exploitation and oppression for decades. And they argue that Trump’s uncritical embrace of the most openly racist and genocidal forces in Israel endangers the stability of Israel and its ability to portray itself as a bastion of enlightenment while it serves as a regional fortress and global hit man for the U.S. empire.

But again, these disagreements with Trump are over how to maintain Israel as a vicious, nuclear-armed power to dominate the Middle East, because the U.S. empire does need Israel as a vicious, nuclear-armed hit man for its interests in the region and around the world.

The Interests of Humanity

For the Palestinian people, for the people of the Middle East, and for the vast majority of the seven-plus billion people on this planet, Trump’s backing of Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights is an obscene endorsement of crimes committed by, and worse crimes coming from, Israel. And it accelerates the threat of an utterly unjust war that could be a disaster for humanity.

Those crimes must be exposed and opposed, especially by people in the U.S.—not because they cut against the interests of “our” country but because we live in the belly of the beast that needs Israel to serve as a vicious hit man to continue to crush bodies and spirits around the world to feed it. And as we expose and oppose Israel’s crimes, and U.S. backing for them, we are called on by humanity to do this as part of seriously organizing and preparing for the actual revolution that will do away with the oppression of whole peoples, wars of empire, armies of occupation and crimes against humanity.

The following, on why Israel is such a key ally for the U.S. in the Middle East, is from Bringing Forward Another Way, a talk given by Bob Avakian in 2006. This groundbreaking analysis, made during the George W. Bush years, continues to be very relevant, especially in the context of sharpening contradictions centered in the Middle East and aggressive U.S.-led moves against Iran. This work is an illustration of applying the scientific method to approaching international conflicts and understanding social and political contradictions—and identifying where the fundamental interests of humanity lie, providing concrete leadership and guidance for the strategic repolarization for revolution and a thoroughly internationalist orientation. Given the current situation in the world, we urge our readers to study, discuss and share the entire important work.

If you look at any other regimes in the region, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are big allies of the U.S. But in Saudi Arabia and in Egypt, the situation is very unstable and potentially very volatile: there are serious tremors beneath the throne, so to speak—there is the growing danger of "social earthquakes" that could threaten to topple, or actually topple, those regimes. You don't have that in Israel. Hopefully, as things develop overall, there will not be just a "loyal opposition peace movement" among Israelis but the development of a much more powerful progressive movement with a much more radical view in Israel—and this is something that progressive people in Israel, or with ties to people in Israel, should work to foster and develop. But right now a positive and truly radical movement of that kind does not exist in Israel, and the dynamics with regard to Israel are not now such that the more that the regime in Israel is hard-core, the more it is going to run into antagonism with the bulk of its population. In the short term, the dynamic is essentially the opposite, unfortunately

REACTIONARY FOOLS

Now I can just hear these reactionary fools saying, “Well, Bob, answer me this. If this country is so terrible, why do people come here from all over the world? Why are so many people trying to get in, not get out?”...Why? I’ll tell you why. Because you have fucked up the rest of the world even worse than what you have done in this country. You have made it impossible for many people to live in their own countries as part of gaining your riches and power.

Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:14

AMERIKKKAN LIVES

THEIR DEMOCRACY

The amerikkkans bray on and on about freedom and democracy while constantly being involved in and preparing for wars. They do not care about civilian deaths , the rights of women and children, or even their lies about democracy. They are about control and theft , and will stop at nothing to get whatever it is they want. They are not the good guys. They are the biggest mass murderers the world has ever known.

War Crimes: 10 Children Killed by US Airstrike in Afghanistan. UN

By Asharq Al-Awsat

Global Research, March 26, 2019

Asharq Al-Awsat 25 March 2019

Region: Asia

Theme: United Nations, US NATO War Agenda

In-depth Report: AFGHANISTAN

 5 

  5  0 

 

  10

Ten children, part of the same extended family, were killed by a US airstrike in Afghanistan, along with three adult civilians, the United Nations said on Monday.

The airstrike early on Saturday was part of a battle between the Taliban and combined Afghan and US forces that lasted about 30 hours in Kunduz, a northern province where the Taliban is strong, Reuters reported.

The children and their family had been displaced by fighting elsewhere in the country, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said in releasing its preliminary findings about the incident.

UNAMA said in a statement that it is verifying that all 13 civilian casualties occurred around the time of the airstrike.

Three other civilians were injured.

The incident happened in the Telawka neighbourhood near Kunduz city, Reuters said.

Sgt. Debra Richardson, spokeswoman for the NATO-led Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan, confirmed on Sunday that US forces carried out the airstrike. She said the mission aims to prevent civilian casualties, while the Taliban intentionally hides among civilians.

A record number of Afghan civilians were killed last year as aerial attacks and suicide bombings increased, the United Nations said in a February report. Child casualties from airstrikes have increased every year since 2014.

Fighting has accelerated during a period of recurring talks between US and Taliban officials aimed at ending Afghanistan’s 17-year war

STILL BEING USED

It might be naive of me to think this way, but I find it astounding that there are women in the world today who believe that keeping amerikkkan troops in Afghanistan will actually contribute to the furthering of women's rights there. Where and when has this ever been the case ? Read this to see what the fuck I'm talking about.

Imperialist Feminism Rears Its Ugly Head Yet Again

March 25, 2019 | revcom.us

As the U.S. negotiates with the Taliban working towards a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the New York Times is reporting that some feminists and women's rights advocates in the U.S., like Eleanor Smeal of the Feminist Majority, are pleading with Congress to have the Trump regime and the UN include Afghan women's rights in the agenda of the “peace” talks with the Taliban.

Smeal had earlier co-signed a letter to the New York Times in February advocating against immediate U.S. withdrawal, saying it “... will result in the deaths and abuse of hundreds of thousands of women, among them a new generation of educated women who have taken on positions of leadership in business and government.”¹

Let's look at what happened in the first round of this, of appeals and rallying around the U.S. ruling class, on the issue of Afghan women's rights: 

Within days of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Bush regime began targeting the Taliban in Afghanistan. This included what the New York Times described as “an unusual international offensive” to “publicize the plight of women in Afghanistan”² in order to justify the war the U.S. was about to launch.

Top Bush officials began courting American feminists who were long-time critics of Taliban abuses against women.³ “The White House (which had just abolished the office of women’s ‘initiatives’) began contacting women’s rights organizations and asking them to seek ‘common ground’ with the administration that had iced them since its inception,” author Susan Faludi wrote.⁴

Many American feminists took the bait. Days after U.S. B-52s began pounding Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, prominent feminists hailed the Bush regime for “taking action.” For example, Smeal, even then the head of the Feminist Majority, declared at Congressional hearings on the status of women in Afghanistan, “We have real momentum now in the drive to restore the rights of women." The organization circulated a petition thanking the Bush regime for supposedly promoting women’s rights in Afghanistan.⁵ 

On May 24, 2002, 20 prominent feminists and women’s organizations—including Smeal’s Feminist Majority, Gloria Steinem, Eve Ensler, Meryl Streep, National Organization of Women, and others—published an “Appeal to George W. Bush, President of The United States” in the New York Times. It called on Bush to “keep his promise” to send more troops and aid to Afghanistan in order to “protect the lives and secure the future of Afghan women.” It stated American women had supported the war in Afghanistan “in large part because they believed your promises that it would liberate Afghan women from abuse and oppression…The war against terrorism will only be successful if the struggle for peace and democracy succeeds."⁶

A “Fig Leaf” for War—A Cruel Reality for the Women and People of Afghanistan

As Susan Chira of the New York Times writes this weekend:

Afghan women were never at the heart of American strategic interests, said Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert at New York University who worked on Afghan issues in the Obama administration. Military goals come first. 

“You do things for people in order to get a permissive environment to help your military operation.” [emphasis ours]⁷

There you go: an American ruling class figure focused on national security is stating, as plain as day, what their main imperatives were, that their concern for Afghan women was but a “a fig leaf, a way to make military intervention more palatable to the American public via photographs of girls going to school,” said Chira, articulating the sentiment of an Afghan women's rights activist. 

Appeals from American women's rights advocates to the Bush regime, despite their sincerity and intent, were based on and reinforce a profoundly upside-down view of reality.

Bob Avakian gets to the heart of the matter:

The essence of what exists in the U.S. is not democracy but capitalism-imperialism and political structures to enforce that capitalism-imperialism. What the U.S. spreads around the world is not democracy, but imperialism and political structures to enforce that imperialism. (BAsics 1:3)

The U.S. imperialists are not only incapable of uprooting Afghanistan’s oppressive traditional economic and social relations—including patriarchy and the reactionary Dark Ages culture and religious strictures—but they never intended to do so. Their goal was extending U.S. domination, with means consistent with that.

In his 2006 talk Bringing Forward Another Way, Bob Avakian makes clear the imperialist motives behind the U.S. war. And in pursuit of those aims, the U.S. made alliances with pro-U.S. Islamic fundamentalists, reactionary militias, and feudal power brokers in Afghanistan who represented the same oppressive relations the Taliban did. And in that light, it was not in the interests of the U.S. imperialists to push for an actual uprooting of the oppressive relations keeping women in chains. Similarly, the U.S. has firmly backed the Saudi monarchy, a major strategic ally, as it has enforced medieval laws and regulations against women for decades.

What has all this meant for Afghan women? Despite a few cosmetic changes in their formal legal status, Afghan women remain imprisoned in oppressive traditional relations and Islamic strictures. In many ways they’re far worse off than ever.

The constitution endorsed by the new pro-U.S. “Islamic Republic of Afghanistan” in 2003 enshrined Sharia (Islamic) law as coequal in shaping Afghan life—in other words, brutal, oppressive male right and patriarchy. This U.S.-backed regime in 2009 tried to pass a law legalizing a husband’s “right” to rape his wife, before an international outcry forced it to back down. And in 2014, the regime attempted to push through another law to enable men to abuse and rape female relatives.⁸

Some two-thirds of Afghan girls do not attend school, and 87 percent are illiterate.⁹ At least 70-80 percent face forced marriage, many before the age of 16. Afghanistan has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.¹⁰ Nearly 90 percent of Afghan women are victims of domestic abuse.¹¹

The support of American feminists for the U.S. war not only helped legitimize these horrors in Afghanistan but also the whole global “war on terror”—which is actually a war for empire that has caused rivers of blood of millions of people to flow around the world.

However horrific these realities, the Taliban—as an even more reactionary Islamic fundamentalist force—represents something potentially more grotesque. Now, as America's negotiations with the Taliban are in full swing, the Trump regime has dispensed with the niceties and the “fig leaves” and are not even talking about women's rights. Yet, people like Eleanor Smeal seem to be at it again, pleading with Congress and the UN, advocating against immediate U.S. withdrawal, while the U.S. imperialists have made and continue to make their goals and means clear. 

What the women of Afghanistan are confronting is a horrific crime against humanity, and a crime of this system—that all people of conscience should be part of resisting, in the U.S., in Afghanistan and all over the world. But any attempts to do this by appealing to those very powers that rule over and enforce this system further contributes to this and perpetuates these horrors. 

The New York Times article quotes another Afghan policy expert saying, “Women were pawns in the game in 2001. And now they are again.”

This is and will be the horrific reality … going on and on … as long as U.S.-dominated capitalism-imperialism maintains and exercises its monstrous grip on the world. What is needed is to sweep this away at the soonest possible time through an ACTUAL revolution.

---

1. Letter: “Should the U.S. Pull Out of Afghanistan,” New York Times, February 7, 2019.  [back]

2. “A NATION CHALLENGED: SHAPING OPINION; First Lady to Speak About Afghan Women,” New York Times, November 16, 2001. The Bush regime’s campaign included a November 17 national radio address by Laura Bush, in which she claimed the war was “also a fight for the rights and dignity of women,” and appearances by a who’s who of war criminals from Vice President Dick Cheney to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell.  [back]

3. In the 1980s, the U.S. armed and organized Mujahideen fighters and helped create Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Under Taliban rule in the 1990s, which the U.S. supported in certain ways, women were banned from going to school and working. They were not allowed to leave their homes without a male relative or be seen in public without a burqa. For defying the regime's repressive laws, women were openly flogged and executed.  [back]

4. T. Redtree, “The Hypocrisy of “Newly Minted Feminists”… And David Horowitz’ Dangerous Agenda,” revcom.us, October 21, 2007.  [back]

5. Smeal also stated, “There is no way to wipe out terrorism and establish a civil society there without the inclusion of women.” Congressional Testimony of E. Smeal on the Plight of Afghan Women - Part I, Part 2, Feminist Majority, October 10-11, 2001.  [back]

6. “Appeal to George W. Bush, President of The United States,” Equality Now, May 24, 2002; see also, “Women Leaders Call for Expansion of International Peace Troops and More U.S. Funds to Restore the Rights of Afghan Women,” Feminist Majority, April 8, 2002.  [back]

7. Susan Chira, “Women Here Are Very, Very Worried,” New York Times, March 22, 2019.  [back]

8. “A law that would permit Afghan men to hurt and rape female relatives,” Guardian, February 6, 2014.  [back]

9. Afghanistan: Girls Struggle for an Education, Human Rights Watch.  [back]

10. Afghanistan’s maternal mortality rate addressed at national health conference, USAID, April 6, 2017.  [back]

11. Afghanistan is Failing to Help Abused Women, Foreign Policy, May 1, 2015.