Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
March 20, 2022
Hello All – How can we help the people of Ukraine? Their suffering is horrible. Ukraine's leaders ask the United States and NATO to establish a "no fly zone" to stop the bombing. Many people in the United States support this idea. We say no.
A "no fly zone" is not a magic formula using magic words. It is a deadly military operation. It would be a major escalation of the war, bringing NATO into direct conflict with Russia. And it would not stop Russian artillery or cruise missiles, now the main source of Ukrainian civilian casualties. In the real world, establishing a "no fly zone" means destroying the enemy's anti-aircraft artillery and radar. A "no fly zone" is not possible if planes that enforce it can be easily shot down. Many Russian air defenses capable of shooting down planes over Ukraine are located in Russia. If US or NATO planes were to attack military targets in Russia, this would quickly escalate the war, possibly resulting in a nuclear war. The end of human civilization.
Amidst the clamor for a "no fly zone," many experts and veteran military people have been raising warnings of caution. On March 10th 78 foreign policy experts sent an open letter to the Biden administration warning that such a "reckless" policy would risk bringing the United States into a "shooting war with Russian forces" as they ramp up their assault on their neighbor. "A no-fly zone would expand the war, not stop it," the statement said. One of the organizers of the statement, Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, spoke at length about these dangers on Democracy Now! A similar warning came from Veterans for Peace; and Rep. Ilhan Omar made an impassioned speech in the House of Representatives in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, while also warning about the dangers that a "no fly zone" would entail. [link].
The way to bring peace to Ukraine is not by expanding or further militarizing the war, but by working for a cease fire and supporting negotiations. This is the cruel truth of this war.
Some useful reading on the Russia-Ukraine war
(Video) The Best Way to Help Ukraine Is Diplomacy, Not War & Increased Militarization
From Democracy Now! [March 17, 2022]
---- President Biden announced $800 million in new military aid for Ukraine on Wednesday, just days after Congress cleared a $1.5 trillion spending bill that included nearly $14 billion for Ukrainian humanitarian aid and security assistance. Experts warn that sending more lethal weapons could escalate war and result in more losses for Ukraine. "The cost on civilian lives is horrific," says Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, who says increasing military aid in Ukraine could thwart peace talks between Russia and Ukraine — which appeared to be making progress in the past few days. Her latest piece is headlined "The Best Way to Help Ukraine Is Diplomacy, Not War." [See the Program]
How Ukraine Is Clarifying the Costs of America's Middle East Alliances
By Sarah Leah Whitson and Tawakkol Karman, Democracy in Exile [March 17, 2022]
---- Russia's invasion of Ukraine should be a defining moment for the global struggle for democracy and the rule of law. Instead, it has starkly revealed how U.S. support for authoritarian governments like those in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and an apartheid government in Israel, have undermined international laws meant to shield the world from the belligerency of a leader like Vladimir Putin. The war has also exposed the illusory benefits of America's support for these unsavory allies and partners in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as they seek to force nefarious concessions from the Biden administration during an international crisis. [Read More]
Chomsky: Peace Talks in Ukraine "Will Get Nowhere" If US Keeps Refusing to Join
An interview by C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout [March 14, 2022]
C.J. Polychroniou: What do you think of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's response to Vladimir Putin's four core demands, which were (a) cease military action, (b) acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory, (c) amend the Ukrainian constitution to enshrine neutrality, and (d) recognize the separatist republics in eastern Ukraine?
Noam Chomsky: Before responding, I would like to stress the crucial issue that must be in the forefront of all discussions of this terrible tragedy: We must find a way to bring this war to an end before it escalates, possibly to utter devastation of Ukraine and unimaginable catastrophe beyond. The only way is a negotiated settlement. Like it or not, this must provide some kind of escape hatch for Putin, or the worst will happen. Not victory, but an escape hatch. These concerns must be uppermost in our minds. I don't think that Zelensky should have simply accepted Putin's demands. I think his public response on March 7 was judicious and appropriate. In these remarks, Zelensky recognized that joining NATO is not an option for Ukraine. He also insisted, rightly, that the opinions of people in the Donbas region, now occupied by Russia, should be a critical factor in determining some form of settlement. He is, in short, reiterating what would very likely have been a path for preventing this tragedy — though we cannot know, because the U.S. refused to try. [And much more.] [Read More]
Also of interest – "Stop the Fighting in Ukraine: Now is the time to begin the search for a lasting peace," by Michael T. Klare, The Nation [March 17, 2022] [Link]; "Will the United States Empower Zelenskyy to Negotiate an End to the War?" by Ryan Grim, The Intercept [[Link]; "Is Putin heading toward a partition of Ukraine?" by Zoltan Grossman, Znet [March 17, 2022] [Link]; and "Ukrainians took to the streets to avert a nuclear disaster. Will Americans do the same?" bMarch 9, 2022] [Link].
News Notes
Today is the 19th anniversary of the US attack/invasion of Iraq. It's a useful date to remember, amidst all the mainstream media moralizing about Russia and international law, human rights violations, and war crimes. For an interesting take on then and now, read "Iraq War Lesson: the seduction may be sweet but the hangover is hell Peter Van Buren, Responsible Statecraft [March 18, 2022] [Link].
And Tuesday, March 22nd, is World Water Day, co-sponsored by the Westchester chapter of the United Nations Association. Among the speakers will be CFOW's Marcia Brewster. To join the Zoom program (7 pm), register at this link.
Recommended by Nada Khader at WESPAC is Jordan Copeland's video presentation on the history of Black people in Edgemont, in Greenburgh, a scene of recent racial conflicts. To watch the program, go here, and use the password GS?tf$s0.
Finally, CFOW friend Vanessa Agudelo is running for NYS Assembly in District 95, which runs from Ossining to north of West Point, along the Hudson River. We first met Vanessa in the fight to stop the Algonquin pipeline, which carries high-pressure fracked gas next to Indian Point. She then became the youngest person ever to be elected to the Peekskill City Council, and most recently has been the Westchester organizer for the New York Immigration Coalition. To learn more about her and her campaign (and to donate!), here is her website
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather/covid permitting, we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) A "Black Lives Matter/Say Their Names" vigil will be held on Monday, April 4th from 5:30 to 6:00 pm in Yonkers at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. If you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Rewards!
Did comedian Volodymyr Zelensky come out of nowhere to become Ukraine's president in 2019? Not exactly. Before the war, before his shakedown by President Trump, Zelensky practiced for his role as the Winston Churchill of Ukraine by playing a president in the hit Ukrainian comedy "Servant of the People." [h/t AD] Now it has come to Netflix; see the trailer here. Also putting Ukraine on the pop culture map is the punk group Beton, with their cover of a Clash favorite, now retitled "Kyiv Calling." Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
(Video) Global South Faces Brunt of Soaring Food Prices Amid War in Ukraine, World's "Breadbasket"
From Democracy Now! [March 18, 2022]
---- The United Nations is warning Russia's invasion of Ukraine could lead to a "hurricane of hunger and a meltdown of the global food system" that would be especially devastating for the Global South. Wheat and fertilizer prices have soared since the war began three weeks ago. Global food prices could jump by as much as 22% this year as Russia's invasion of Ukraine disrupts exports from two of the world's largest producers of wheat and fertilizer. Rising fuel prices will also contribute to higher food prices. To talk more about how Russia's war in Ukraine is leading to a global food crisis, we are joined by Raj Patel, author of "Stuffed and Starved" and a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who explains how farmers and working-class people around the world will face the brunt of the impact of growing food prices. He notes the coronavirus, climate change, conflict and capitalism are working to compound one another and underscore the necessity to transition to sustainable, agroecological farming. [See the Program] For more information on this topic, read "Ukraine War Threatens to Cause a Global Food Crisis," New York Times [March 20, 2022] [Link].
How Much Less Newsworthy Are Civilians in Other Conflicts?
By Julie Hollar, FAIR [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting] [March 18, 2022]
---- As US news media covered the first shocking weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some media observers have noted their impressions of how coverage differed from wars past, particularly in terms of a new focus on the impact on civilians. To quantify and deepen these observations, FAIR studied the first week of coverage of the Ukraine war (2/24–3/2/22) on ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News. We used the Nexis news database to count both sources (whose voices get to be heard?) and segments (what angles are covered?) about Ukraine during the study period. Comparing this coverage to that of other conflicts reveals both a familiar reliance on US officials to frame events, as well as a newfound ability to cover the impact on civilians—when those civilians are white and under attack by an official US enemy, rather than by the US itself. … Making the impact on civilians the focus of the story, and featuring their experiences, encourages sympathy for those civilians and condemnation of war. But this demonstration of news media's ability to center the civilian impact, including civilian casualties, in Ukraine is all the more damning of their coverage of wars in which the US and its allies have been the aggressors—or in which the victims have not been white. [Read More]
War & Peace
For Washington, War Never Ends
By Diana Johnstone, Consortium News [March 16, 2022]
---- It goes on and on. The "war to end war" of 1914-1918 led to the war of 1939-1945, known as World War II. And that one has never ended either, mainly because for Washington, it was the Good War, the war that made The American Century: why not the American Millennium? The conflict in Ukraine may be the spark that sets off what we already call World War III. But this is not a new war. It is the same old war, an extension of the one we call World War II, which was not the same war for all those who took part. The Russian war and the American war were very, very different. … In short, after 1945, for Russia, World War II was over. For the United States, it was not. What we call the Cold War was its voluntary continuation by leaders in Washington. It was perpetuated by the theory that Russia's defensive "Iron Curtain" constituted a military threat to the rest of Europe. … Gorbachev dreamed of "our common European home" living some sort of social democracy. In the 1990s, Russia asked only to be part of the West. What happened next proved that the whole "communist scare" justifying the Cold War was false. A pretext. A fake designed to perpetuate military Keynesianism and America's special war to maintain its own economic and ideological hegemony. There was no longer any Soviet Union. There was no more Soviet communism. There was no Soviet bloc, no Warsaw Pact. NATO had no more reason to exist. But in 1999, NATO celebrated its 50th anniversary by bombing Yugoslavia and thereby transforming itself from a defensive to an aggressive military alliance. [Read More]
(Video) A Tale of Two Wars: Biden Decries Russian Atrocities in Ukraine While Backing Saudi/UAE War in Yemen
From Democracy Now! [March 16, 2022]
---- As the U.S. and U.K. push for Saudi Arabia to increase oil production to offset a rise in global energy prices amid sanctions on Russia, the kingdom on Saturday announced it had executed 81 people — the country's largest mass execution in decades. Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, says the muted criticism of Saudi abuses reveals a double standard when it comes to how Western countries deal with the absolute monarchy, which has been waging a brutal assault on neighboring Yemen for almost seven years with U.S. support. If the U.S. wants the world to oppose Russia's brutal war in Ukraine, "then it's got to stop supporting the war in Yemen," says Whitson, who adds that disparate coverage of the wars in Ukraine and Yemen point to "inherent racism" in Western media. [See the Program]
The Climate Crisis
Three years after the first global school strike, signs of the youth climate movement's success are everywhere
By March 17, 2022]
---- Three years ago this week — on March 15, 2019 — an estimated 1.4 million young people and supporters in 128 countries skipped school or work for what was then the largest youth-led day of climate protests in history. That record was soon eclipsed by even larger demonstrations later that year, with 1.8 million joining a May 24 day of action, and 7.6 million protesting for the climate over the course of Sept. 20 and the week that followed. The school strikes for climate movement, launched by 15-year-old Greta Thunberg of Sweden in late 2018, had reinvigorated the global climate movement and brought public participation to levels never seen before. By early 2019, thousands of young people were already skipping school to protest for the climate each week in Europe, but the school strikes had only just begun to catch on in the United States. March 15 of that year was arguably when Thunberg's campaign truly became a global phenomenon, with large demonstrations in cities all over the world. The youth-led strikes went on to revolutionize and grow the climate movement, helping to popularize concepts like the Green New Deal and grab the attention of policymakers and the media. Three years on, it's a good time to assess what this flood of activism accomplished and how the youth climate movement has adapted to the challenges of the early 2020s. [Read More]
Israel/Palestine
West's response to Russian invasion demolishes excuses for rejecting BDS against Apartheid Israel
---- Palestinians are watching with empathy the suffering of millions of Ukrainians facing war, particularly the over two million refugees seeking safety in neighboring countries. In harmony with the absolute majority of humanity living in the Global South, the Palestinian BDS National Committee, the largest coalition in Palestinian society that leads the global BDS movement, opposes war, whether it is Russia's illegal aggression in Ukraine today, which violates the UN Charter regardless of persistent NATO provocations, or the many patently illegal and immoral US- or NATO- led wars of the past decades which have devastated whole nations and killed millions. We see in the West's warm reception of Ukraine's white refugees an example for how all refugees escaping the ravages of war, economic devastation, or climate injustice should be treated by the West, particularly when these calamities are primarily caused by Western imperialism. This warmth, however, stands in sharp contrast with how these same countries have treated Brown and Black refugees arriving at their shores and borders, with racism, walls, "push-backs," forced family separations, even drownings – the same bigotry that non-white refugees from Ukraine have experienced. This Western double standard is painful, enraging, and humiliating for people in the Global South, including for Palestinians. After all, Israel's decades-old regime of military occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid is not only "Made in the West," but is still armed, funded and shielded from accountability by that same deeply colonial and racist West, in particular the US, UK and EU. [Link]
Our History
We Can Thank the Wobblies for the Biggest Labor Story of the Year [Starbucks workers]
By Malcolm Harris, The Nation [March 17, 2022]
---- When the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, whose members are often dubbed "Wobblies") launched a campaign to unionize Starbucks baristas in 2004, the idea was so quixotic it seemed more like performance art designed to comment on the labor movement itself than an earnest attempt to organize shops. Unionizing Starbucks baristas was like unionizing the Death Star storm troopers: both impossible and pointless. Now, as I write in the spring of 2022, workers at over 100 locations nationwide have petitioned for recognition and the Starbucks Workers United campaign is the labor story of this young year. What changed? … The Wobblies formed an unusual union, one based in the fundamental fellowship of all workers rather than the narrow advantages of certain craftsmen. The IWW asked workers to join the "one big union," even if they were not citizens, "skilled," English-speaking, white, or male. Any worker can join, even dues-paying members of other unions. [Read More] Also of interest is "US unions see unusually promising moment amid wave of victories" by Steven Greenhouse, The Guardian [March 16, 2022] [Link].
