The exact same people who defend Assad against charges of using sarin gas & napalm against civilians are now vigorously defending Putin against charges of poisoning Russian operatives. Who knew fascists & their guppies had so many forensics specialists!? What’s just as telling is that those who defend Assad & Putin also defend Suu Kyi, Duterte, Maduro, Xi Jinping. Maybe it isn’t about forensics but really about political compromise & corruption.

A young boy grieves his family buried in rubble from Russian & Syrian bombing of Idlib. But the antiwar movement led by “retired” CIA, FBI, & Pentagon officials vilify him & his family as terrorists, human shields for terrorists, actors, & dolls & are triumphal because Russian & Syrian bombers & ground forces have saved Assad’s national sovereignty.

The political integrity of the antiwar movement has been wallowing in sectarian dry rot for a long time but is now buried in the rubble of Syria. There will be no phoenix rising from the ashes. It must be rebuilt on a principled basis of opposition to the bombing of civilians for any reason whatsoever.

Stand with the civilians of Syria & demand the immediate cessation of Syrian, Russian, & US coalition bombing in Syria & the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces from Syria.

(Photo from Twitter)

Children of Eastern Ghouta: an apocalypse:

At least Tariq Ali, Jonathan Cook, & Vijay Prashad have enough good sense to refrain from publicly supporting the bombing of civilians in Syria. Or does their deafening silence speak more to indifference? But fascist propagandists Bartlett & Beeley, sycophants like Rania Khalek, blowhards like Jeff Mackler, & sycophant/blowhards like Max Blumenthal have no such reticence & are vigorously campaigning for Russian & Syrian bombing of civilians in Eastern Ghouta who they claim are really US-backed terrorists, human shields for terrorists, actors, or dolls. It’s no surprise that these fascists & their fellow travelers have become the darlings of Fox News. It’s only a matter of time before they’re all writing for Global Research & David Icke where the most disreputable fascists, Islamophobes, & anti-Semites find a home & go to rot.

Stand with the children & civilians of Syria & demand the immediate cessation of Syrian, Russian, & US coalition bombing of civilians & the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces from Syria.

(Photo of Syrian child injured in bombing from Nino Fezza on Twitter)

The career fate of G-man McCabe is of no consequence; the reputation of porn star Stormy Daniels of less consequence. What matters is that Trump has made sordid the gestalt of US politics rather than war, poverty, inequality, refugee rights.

Apocalypse in Eastern Ghouta:

With Syrian & Russian barrel bomb & napalm attacks, it must seem like an apocalypse to the civilians of Ghouta. But when they understand such savagery was necessary to protect Assad’s national sovereignty, that they have to be bombed because terrorists are using them as human shields, that the White Helmets rescuing them are agents of American imperialism, all their furies will be resolved in gratitude to the führer. All you have to do is show them videos of Rania Khalek talking marble-mouthed about “head-chopping Wahhabis,” Bartlett & Beeley croaking paeans to the Syrian Army, or Jeff Mackler citing Stalin quotes to prove the necessity of Assad’s dictatorship & they will feel shame for grieving the losses of beloved family, friends, & neighbors.

Stand with the Syrian people & demand the immediate cessation of Russian & Syrian bombing of civilians in Ghouta, US coalition bombing in Syria, & the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces from Syria.

(Photo from Nino Fezzai)

Ghouta’s children: a requiem.

While Assad propagandists are on a frenzied campaign to portray the civilians of Eastern Ghouta as terrorists, human shields for terrorists, actors, & dolls, Russian & Syrian war planes have turned the area into a killing field, into an apocalypse.

Stand with the children of Ghouta & demand the immediate cessation of Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians & the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces from Syria.

(Photos from Shehab News Agency)

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to my Irish friends. Unless the celebrations there are as humiliating as they are in the US. It’s the only day I claim to be Norwegian, an admirable, good-looking people with much more dignified cultural celebrations. In my youth, the St. Paul St. Patrick’s Day committee asked me to be in their beauty pageant to lead the march but I was already old enough to know that a young woman has to fight for dignity & can’t let a second-rate honorific like playing queen for a day take it away. But hat’s off to St. Patrick who chased the snakes out of Ireland & sent them to the US where they morphed into politicians like Paul Ryan.

Trump has his Kellyanne Conway. Assad has his Rania Khalek. First the Bowling Green Massacre & then those “head-chopping Wahhabi/Salafis.” The idiot brigade taking up the ass-end of history.

Father protecting his baby from the rain in Srinagar:

Posted for no other reason than the joy of seeing parental love.

(Photo by Basit Zargar)

Today is the 50th anniversary of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War. It certainly wasn’t the first military massacre of civilians in US history, nor even the worst. Monstrosities on a colossal scale are the very nature of colonialism & war which characterize the last 500 years of human history, including the extermination of indigenous peoples in the Americas. What distinguished My Lai & made it a political turning point was the Vietnamese struggle against US military might & massive international opposition to US intervention. The Vietnamese anti-colonial struggle succeeded where others failed because it had a regular army combined with irregular forces experienced by 40 years of fighting French colonialism & because support for their struggle actively involved millions of people in every country.

For a generation raised on the glorification of colonialism & war, descriptions of what happened at My Lai were a rude awakening to reality. The antiwar movement, along with the civil rights movement, emerged in the 1960s & broke the chokehold of the McCarthy witch-hunt which suppressed all political dissent in the US. The combination of antiwar & civil rights was a double-whammy to the colonial mentality. The US army in Vietnam was a conscription army with thousands of mostly young men forced to deploy against their wills. It became an antiwar army & Black & Latino soldiers played no small part in making it so.

When My Lai happened in 1968, it took over a year for three soldiers who tried to expose the massacre to be heard. Seymour Hersh, then a reporter for the NY Times, is attributed with breaking the story of My Lai & toured campuses speaking about it. But it was in fact helicopter crewmen Hugh Thompson, Glenn Andreotta, & Lawrence Colburn who intervened to save villagers, to expose the crime, & to get the soldiers involved prosecuted. Hersh gained fame while Thompson, Andreotta, & Colburn were vilified as traitors for nearly three decades. It might be added that in his campus lectures, antiwar activists had to rebuke Hersh for blaming My Lai solely on the psychological perversities of the lieutenant in charge & not criticizing the US government for deploying troops in Vietnam.

My Lai remains an issue because there has never been justice for the over 500 unarmed Vietnamese men, women, & children who were raped, mutilated, tortured, & murdered. It didn’t just change consciousness about the character of war but it changed the way the US conducts war. Which is why the Pentagon works tirelessly for security agreements in Afghanistan & Iraq to give impunity to US soldiers for war & human rights crimes.

Photo is bodies of mostly women & children after My Lai massacre.

(Photo taken by US Army photographer Ronald L. Haeberle on March 16 1968)