Phillip Agee was a CIA operative based in Mexico who resigned in 1968 to protest US meddling & overthrowing Latin American governments. He was unable to return to the US & was hounded by the CIA from one country to the next until he found asylum in Cuba where he died in 2008.
Compare the punitive treatment he received to that of those ‘retired’ CIA, FBI, State Department & Pentagon officials who now lead the US antiwar movement. Colleen Rowley, Ann Wright, Ray McGovern & several others receive generous pensions & have received no punitive or vindictive treatment from the US government. Is it because they remain, by their own admission, in contact with active duty colleagues? A sting operation writ large?Who’s really running the US antiwar movement, such as it is?
This is a shell-shocked family in Idlib who have thus far survived Syrian & Russian carpet bombing, including by barrel bombs (oil drums filled with explosives & shrapnel). They are not terrorists.
Most civilians in Syria die in the rubble of Syrian, Russian, & US-coalition bombing punished for the crime of rising up against a brutal dictatorship.
Not to be outdone in racism & xenophobia by Donald Trump or the Dalai Lama, Vladimir Putin sarcastically weighed in on the refugee crises in Europe: “The migrants can kill, plunder, & rape with impunity because their rights as migrants must be protected. The liberal idea has become obsolete.” Not to be outdone by Adolph Hitler, he defended Russia’s persecution of homosexuals, saying: “Traditional {family} values are more stable & more important for millions of people than this liberal idea” of homosexuality.
Russian intervention into US elections is small potatoes compared to his racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia regarding refugees or his homophobia. So would all those who mocked Russiagate & who defend Russian bombing in Syria care to explain or defend this monster’s views on refugees & homosexuals so arrogantly propounded just one week ago?
You can’t tell the Stalinists from the fascists now. They began with worshipping Stalin & end up worshipping Assad, Suu Kyi, Duterte, Maduro, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Hassan Rouhani, Trump. In the struggle between tyranny & freedom, they can’t help themselves from worshipping autocratic power & hating resistance to it. In fascism, they have found their natural habitat & have come home to rot.
Since the beginning of the Syrian Arab Spring in March 2011, the Assad regime has subjected tens of thousands, including women, children, Palestinian refugees, to arbitrary arrests, unlawful detentions, forcible disappearances, torture including rape & sexual humiliation, death by hanging. The gulag is an extensive network of secret detention facilities, what Human Rights Watch calls “an archipelago of torture centers” scattered throughout Syria. Hundreds of thousands have passed through these torture centers since 2011. Nearly 128,000 have never emerged from Assad’s gulag & are presumed to be either dead or still in custody, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.
This is a video about 25,000 photos called the Caesar collection taken within Assad’s prisons by a military photographer who defected. He said the bodies of prisoners arrived in such numbers that they ran out of refrigerated units in the morgue & began dumping them in the garage where army vehicles were repaired. For those who question the veracity of these photos or for propagandists who claim they are staged, there is also the testimony of thousands among those who survived the gulag on whom Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Syrian Network for Human Rights & other Syrian human rights groups have based their investigations.
A Syrian woman runs with her infant to escape Syrian & Russian bombing of Idlib including with barrel bombs (oil drums filled with explosives & shrapnel). The corrupted antiwar movement does not just remain silent on this carnage but supports it, marching lockstep with Assad propagandists & other fascists. It’s all over for that so-called antiwar movement. Time for them to limp off the stage of history into oblivion.
This is a scene on May 26th from Syrian & Russian bombing of Idlib where today they are bombing several cities & towns. The corrupted international antiwar movement has not held a single protest against this carnage nor has any of them said a single word of protest. If you go to the social media walls of leading figures, they are talking about a US threat to the Galapagos, defending that abandoned embassy in DC, the candidacy of Tulsi Gabbard or Bernie Sanders, the vagaries of British electoral politics, denouncing the Hong Kong protests as anti-capitalist malcontents, the latest publicity stunt of Medea Benjamin to make herself the center of attention.
For so long we hoped the carpet bombing of civilians, the endless massacres with barrel bombs, Assad’s gulag where thousands have been tortured & hung to death would bring people to their senses & reawaken their political principles to oppose the bombing of civilians & repudiate their political degeneration calling for self-determination for a dictator. But they have dug in their heels & continue to support dictatorship & death squads over the Syrian Arab Spring uprising.
A new principled antiwar movement must be built & the time to start doing that is now, even if it’s one person at a time standing against this carnage.
We should take a moment to honor the protesters of Kashmir who, like Palestinians, are vilified as ‘jihadis’ but brave the threat of arrest, disappearance, torture, disability & disfigurement by pellet guns, or death from live ammunition to fight one of the most important freedom struggles in the world.
Borrowing from the Latin American political tradition to honor those in Kashmir who have died fighting for freedom: Presente! You are here with us, you are not forgotten, the struggle continues in your name.
Go back India, go back!
(Photo from April 2019 protest in Srinagar by Sakib Makhdoomi)
