Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
June 6, 2022
Hello All – On Democracy Now! this morning, Katrina vanden Heuval, the publisher of The Nation magazine, spoke of the "one-sided debate" in our mainstream media about the war in Ukraine, claiming that it "fanned the flames of war." Is this true? And if so, why are our mainstream media maintaining a unified stance in support of the war, in what is after all a very complicated situation?
We note that the US mainstream media has always supported the war du jour at the outset; and in the case of Vietnam for many years. Though the mainstream media eventually soured on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it took years of military failure to make the media reconsider, and in the main their regrets were that the wars were not being won, rather than that they were immoral and/or misguided from the start.
The nearly unanimous mainstream media support for President Biden's policies in the Ukraine war also builds on two decades of demonizing the person of Vladimir Putin, as well as a century of anti-Russia/anti-communist propaganda. We need not pause to evaluate whether this propaganda was justified, but only to note that anti-Russians policies and statements of the government and in the media are pushing on an open door.
As Katrina vanden Heuval and the authors linked below also note, over the last several weeks declared US policy toward the war has evolved from defending Ukraine to crippling Russia. This issue is addressed below by Noam Chomsky; and his concern (and ours) is not to negate the importance of providing Ukraine with an adequate military defense, but to do so in the absence of visible support for negotiations, something that France and Germany seem to be favoring.
As the US political elite, and US policy, "fan the flames of war," it would be easy for the Russians to conclude that NATO's goal in this proxy war is to destroy the "great-power" status of Russia. In response to the most recent shipment of advanced weapons to Ukraine (now underway), the Russian response is to vow a similar escalation. Unless and until the USA decides that its best interests are to terminate the war, escalation and counter-escalation will continue, destroying much of Ukraine and threatening the world with nuclear destruction.
Some useful reading/viewing about the war in Ukraine
Noam Chomsky: "We Must Insist That Nuclear Warfare Is an Unthinkable Policy," an interview with C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout [June 2, 2022] [Link]
(Video) Anatol Lieven on "Why the U.S. Must Avoid a "Permanent Crusade Against Russia" over Ukraine" - From Democracy Now! [June 2, 2022] [Link]
"The War in Ukraine May Be Impossible to Stop. And the U.S. Deserves Much of the Blame," by Christopher Caldwell, New York Times [May 31, 2022] [Link].
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather 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 is held each Monday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm in Yonkers at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. To learn about our new project, "Beauty as Fuel for Change," go here; and to make a financial contribution, go here. 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!
This week's Reward for stalwart readers is a video posted a few days ago by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in which she speaks informally to her supporters about her feelings of frustration re: the mainstream political process in the wake of the murder of 19 school children and two teachers in Texas. She is truly a remarkable thinker and speaker. [Link].
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
Guernica and Bucha
---- Guernica (Gernikara in Basque) is a city of 17,000 located in the province of Biscay in the Basque Autonomous Community of Spain. It has a recorded history that goes back almost a thousand years and for centuries has been at the center of Basque culture and politics. But the town is best known because of Picasso. When people today speak of Guernica, they see it through the lens of Picasso's Guernica. In 1937, the most famous artist in the world – a Spaniard from Málaga — made a mural sized painting depicting the recent destruction of Guernica by German Luftwaffe bombers. The painting was controversial. The Communists thought it too abstract; they wanted socialist realism. The liberals thought it was too political; they wanted beauty. The fascists and Nazis thought it was degenerate; they wanted it burned. But following its initial exhibition at the Spanish pavilion of the Paris World's Fair of 1937, the picture's stature and renown grew. … The picture became a cipher, its meaning dependent upon the perspective of the viewer and the historical circumstance of spectatorship. With each succeeding generation, Guernica's exalted position solidified – especially in progressive circles — until it became what the art historian Karl Werckmeister called an "icon of the left." [Read More]
(Video) Belonging to the land [Israel/Palestine]
ByJune 4, 2022] [10 minutes]
---- Muna Shaheen, a Palestinian environmentalist and climate activist and co-founder of One Climate, tells the story of how Israel changed the face of nature in order to distance and alienate Palestinians from their land and identity. She also discusses how she is mobilizing Palestinians to reconnect with nature, and become more active in the fight against the climate crisis. As told to producer/director Ghousoon Bisharat and cinematographer/editor Thomas Dallal on the southern slopes of the Carmel Mountains south of Haifa, where numerous Palestinian villages existed before the 1948 Nakba. [See the Video]
Poor People Gonna Rise Up [Marches and rallies, June 18th!]
By Rev. Dr. William Barber II and Rosalyn Pelles, The Poor Peoples Campaign [June 3, 2022]
---- Two years ago, when millions of people marched in U.S. cities for racial justice, corporations ran ads praising "Black Lives Matter" while continuing to back politicians who pass policies that do not value Black lives. The converging movements for voting rights, living wages, ecological justice, and public investments call for real commitments to racial justice. We will not settle for an ad campaign; we demand a revolution of values…. On June 18, the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival will host its second Mass Poor People's and Low-Wage Workers' Assembly on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. Ahead of the midterm elections, we are determined to create a national platform from the fusion of grassroots movements that are emerging to confront a political economy that ignores poverty and an electoral process that has not engaged poor and low-income voters. If the nation has a chance to see and hear the people we have met across this land, we believe our fellow Americans will not only see, but act. If those who face the worst this nation can offer have come together, maybe we all can unite to revive the heart of democracy and reconstruct a society that works for all of us. [Read More]
War & Peace
War Is a Form of Terrorism
By Andrea Mazzarino, Cost of War Project [June 2, 2022]
---- Anyone who grew up in my generation of 1980s kids remembers G.I. Joe action figures—those green-uniformed plastic soldiers you could use to stage battles in the sandbox in your backyard or, for that matter, your bedroom. In those days, when imagery of bombed-out homes, bloodied civilians, and police violence wasn't accessible on TV screens or in video games like Call of Duty, war in children's play took place only between soldiers. No civilians were caught up in it as "collateral damage." We kids had no way of faintly grasping that, in its essence, war actually involves civilian deaths galore. And why should we have? … Having lived through more than a century and a half of relative peace in our homeland while fighting endless conflicts abroad, only in the past 20 years of America's post-9/11 war on terror, waged by US troops in dozens of countries around the world, have some of our children begun to grapple with what it means to kill civilians. [Read More]
Ten Domestic Injustices Worsened by War
---- In recent years, the US has seen great numbers of people and mass movements take to the streets to challenge the status quo. While domestic outrage grows, resistance to the US war machine remains limited, even as President Biden is looking to pass a military budget of $813 billion. This bloated budget proposal comes as inflation makes basic products unaffordable and funds for the ongoing pandemic are gutted. The militaristic and imperialist foreign policy of the United States has negative consequences for every aspect of life in the US and abroad. As long as we're investing so much in the military, not only will we not have the money to invest in better things, but we are also exacerbating countless problems on a global level. In order to create the world we want and need, US social movements must take up the struggle against militarism. Here are just ten ways that injustices in the United States are fueled by the war machine. [FB – "Police violence is armed by the Pentagon"; "The war on terror has fueled the criminalization of immigrants"; and 8 more.] [Read More]
9/11 Families and Others Call on Biden to Confront Afghan Humanitarian Crisis
By Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept [June 6, 2022]
---- In the midst of the humanitarian disaster triggered by the Biden administration's decision to seize Afghanistan's $7 billion in banking reserves, an unlikely coalition of family members of 9/11 victims, Afghan diaspora organizations, and diplomats appointed by the former Afghan government are calling for the U.S. government to take urgent steps to help the Afghan economy. Meanwhile, the largest beneficiaries of President Joe Biden's action are likely to be lawyers rather than 9/11 victims. Releasing some of the funds to the Afghan central bank, those calling on the administration argue, would be a means of mitigating the catastrophe now playing out. Though billions of Afghan reserves are now earmarked for the potential benefit of a group of 9/11 victim families who had previously filed lawsuits against the Taliban, other families say that confiscating the savings of ordinary Afghans would be an inappropriate way of obtaining justice for their loved ones. [Read More]
The Climate Crisis
'Racing at Top Speed Towards Global Catastrophe': NOAA Says CO2 Levels Highest in Human History
By Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams [June 3, 2022]
---- There is more carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere than at any time in the past four million years, as the world's continued dependence on fossil fuels keeps humanity hurtling toward a "global catastrophe," officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned on Friday. NOAA reports its Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory in Hawaii measured CO2 levels averaging 420.99 parts per million (ppm) in May, an increase of 1.8 ppm over levels at this time last year, while scientists at the San Diego-based Scripps Institute of Oceanography, which also tracks atmospheric CO2, calculated a monthly average of 420.78 ppm. … Adequately reducing global CO2 emissions would require a dramatic shift in human activity—especially by the world's wealthiest 1%, who according to a September 2020 study by Oxfam emit more than twice as much CO2 as the poorest 50% of humanity. [Read More]
The State of the Union
US mass shootings will continue until the majority can overrule the minority
By Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian [UK] [May 30, 2022]
---- The dots are easy to connect, because they're so close together, and because they're the entry and exit wounds inflicted on US society by the subculture whose sacrament is the gun. Texas, while tightening restrictions on abortion, has steadily loosened them on guns. These weapons are symbols of a peculiar version of masculinity made up of unlimited freedom, power, domination, of a soldier identity in which every gunslinger is the commander and anyone is a potential target, in which fear drives belligerence, and the gun owner's rights extend so far no one has the right to be safe from him. Right now it's part of a white-supremacist war cult. Anyplace its weapons are wielded is a war zone, and so this can be racked up as another way the United States is in the grip of a war that hardly deserves to be called civil. The rest of us are supposed to accommodate more and more high-powered weapons of war never intended for civilian use but used over and over against civilians in mass shootings across the country, including earlier this week when 19 fourth-graders and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, were murdered by someone whose 18th birthday made him eligible to buy the semiautomatic and hundreds of rounds of ammunition he used. [Read More]?
Israel/Palestine
This is how Israel plans to annex the occupied West Bank
By Dr Ramzy Baroud, Middle East Monitor [May 30, 2022]
---- Israel's Supreme Court has decided that the Palestinian region of Masafer Yatta in the southern hills of Hebron is to be appropriated entirely by the Israeli military and that the local population of more than 1,000 Palestinians is to be expelled. The court's decision on 4 May was hardly surprising. Israel's military occupation is not only enforced by soldiers with guns, but also elaborate political, military, economic and legal structures, all of which are dedicated to the expansion of illegal Jewish settlements and the slow — and sometimes not-so-slow — expulsion of the Palestinians. When Palestinians say that the Nakba ("Catastrophe"), which led to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and the establishment of the state of Israel on its ruins, is an ongoing unfinished project, they mean exactly that. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from East Jerusalem and the endless torment of Palestinian Bedouins in the Naqab, and now in Masafer Yatta, are all testament to this reality. [Read More] Also of interest – "Israel's targeted assassinations should become part of mainstream exposure of its violence,} by Ramona Wadi, Middle East Monitor [May 31, 2022] [Link]
Our History
Learning in the Dark [Meredith Tax and The Rising of the Women]
By Avi Steinberg, Jewish Currents [June 1, 2022]
---- When I started this book in 1970, I was immersed in feminist organizing, and many of my friends and I had a strong need to know what had come before us. I was in Bread and Roses, which worked on women's issues, and also supported socialist movements abroad and the Black liberation movement here, especially the Panthers. We were trying to figure out a women's program that would fit within those politics, but we didn't even know what a program was. We didn't understand strategy. … When I started working on the book, I had a rather romantic approach to class. It was my assumption that the working class people were all good; the middle class people, well, you couldn't really trust them; and the upper class people, forget it. But in studying the papers of the Women's Trade Union League [a national organization for women workers active from 1903–1950]—the interactions between middle class women and the working class women who they wanted to help to organize, and the reactions of the working women themselves, how each group perceived the other—I realized, "It's complicated!" So I kept going deeper into the archives, to learn about a past that we were never told about and barely even really knew existed. [Read More]
