Veterans For Peace Chapter 111
  • Home
  • Tipping the Scale Blog
  • Events and Announcements
  • CO Program
  • Media
  • Contacts
  • Mission
  • Chapter Minutes
  • Chapter Bylaws
  • Charter
  • Newsletters
  • Newsletters

Pushback in the Ranks of Antiwar Vets

10/28/2024

0 Comments

 
Sounding off against the Duopoly and misplaced advocacy in the ranks of Veterans For Peace

Gene Marx
Oct 28, 2024
Picture
Today, in the antiwar Veterans for Peace organizational Listserv, a member of Veterans For Peace surprisingly - or maybe not so surprisingly considering the fear-based tactics of both POTUS candidates - advocated for the Harris/Walz ticket in swing states.
As feckless and corporate as they usually are, they are still much better on women's rights, civil rights, anti-trust, voting rights, the environment and much else
There would be far fewer women success stories, and a far smaller black middle class were it not for the Dems.  

All of that could be lost.  
If you live in a swing state, I advise a vote for Harris/Walz; in a non-swing state knock yourself out voting for an alternative to the duopoly.

Peace,
*Martin

Most of us steer clear of electoral politics in deference to 501(c)(3) rules set forth by law regarding nonprofit election activity, but I just couldn’t let this go.
Hey Martin*,

How does a Veterans For Peace member "serve the cause of world peace" and work with others "to abolish war as an instrument of national policy," as mandated by our Statement of Purpose, yet deliberately cast a vote for anyone "who is pledged to help operate the [Empire's] slaughter machine, and ...not see any would-be operators of that machine as meaningfully different from any other," to quote Caitlin Johnstone in her Substack piece today? The candidate you recommend for swing-state voters, Kamala Harris, is a willful accomplice to the ongoing US/Israeli slaughter of hundreds of thousands in the Middle East and pledges to keep the killing going, wherever and however possible, with "the most lethal fighting force in the world." I could not help but respond to you in this thread after reading Caitlin's piece, which resonates with so many independent, uncompromisingly pro-peace voters, particularly this quote:

"Americans are the most propagandized population on this planet, and their propaganda indoctrination is at its most intensive during the quadrennial performance ritual known as the US presidential race. The whole thing is geared toward falsely exaggerating the differences between the two candidates while drawing emphasis away from the 99 percent of the issues on which they are indistinguishable from each other. And those 99 percent similarities happen to be on all the most murderous and tyrannical behaviors of the US government."

BTW, most of the electoral concerns you cited are easily dispelled, but I vote third party or independent rather than endorse a warmongering agenda from either legacy party campaign to safeguard my domestic comfort. And as far as VP Harris goes, it's a simple case of payback for me.
Picture
EXCOMM MEETS IN WEST WING Sky V pinterest.com
Finally, today marks the 62nd anniversary of the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, with Nikita Khruschev conceding the dismantling and removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. Analysts like Peter Kornbluh conclude it owes its successful resolution to JFK's commitment to negotiate and find common ground in a dangerous nuclear world. Could any of us realistically consider either one of these doofuses, Trump or Harris, engaging with Khrushchev or the Joint Chiefs in the West Wing ExComm? With Curtis Lemay? McNamara, Bundy? We would have been starshine for decades by now.
Picture
China May Be Putting Its Nukes on Hair-Trigger Alert popularmechanics.com
Or in a similar global crisis today, with thousands of nuclear weapons on trigger alert, Putin, or Xi?

Finally, it will not matter which POTUS candidate is eventually inaugurated in January 2025. The hawkish Democratic foreign policy establishment, totally embraced by Joe Biden for more than fifty years, will still be running the show and calling the shots well after he has been packed off to assisted care. Barring a foreign policy catastrophe inflicting lasting damage to its core or leveraging for the demise of the Duopoly through the electoral process for a more diverse source of peaceful expertise and experience, it is likely to be a long haul.

So, strap in and brace for impact.


Peace, someday soon?
Gene


*Alias

0 Comments

Terrified Democrats and the Political Cost of Genocide

10/12/2024

0 Comments

 
Picture

OK, in just 24 days the US electorate will decide who will be the next suitable figurehead for a cadre of power brokers that have been manipulating government policy and politicians since long before 9/11. Soon, no more ads, no more inane rhetoric, with millions of Blue and Red team faithful casting votes as if their ballots were relevant outside of swing states.

While the GOP, even independents, close ranks behind Trump, campaign polls still teem with terrified Democrats hoping to stop the Orange Man, if it takes a Cheney family endorsement to do it.

Even with the timely demise and incongruity of the "lesser of two evils argument" and Jill Stein gaining ground in Michigan and Wisconsin, voters are still told the Harris/Walz ticket will not only save what's left of our democracy but will be 'better' for Muslims.
Journalist and geopolitical analyst Sami Hamdi, provides a devastating counter to The Thinking Muslim's Muhammad Jalal for those who would still dismiss a third party vote while the US/Israeli bipartisan slaughter continues unrestrained in Palestine.

0 Comments

Israel will eventually pay price for Gaza genocide going on for a year: Turkish President Erdogan

10/8/2024

0 Comments

 
Anadolu English
Anadolu Agency Official YouTube Channel Broadcasting in English

On October 7th, the Turkish government released a stunning 2-minute video summary of how Turkiye and so much of the rest of the world view the past year of Israel's genocidal madness. Stepping outside the Western bubble and away from the collective West's propagandist narrative, the rest of the world will always remember the slaughter in Palestine in only one way.
0 Comments

On This Day in Particular

10/7/2024

0 Comments

 
Caitlin Johnstone
Oct 07, 2024

Picture
On this day in particular, I would like to express my deepest sympathies for the victims of Israeli murderousness over the past year.

On this day in particular, I would like to mourn the thousands upon thousands of children who have been killed by western-supplied bullets and bombs in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon over the last twelve months.

On this day in particular I would like to express my sincerest condolences to the Palestinian parents who have had to bury their children, or pieces of their children, or bags of shapeless carnage they’ve been told were their children — if those parents are still alive themselves.

On this day in particular I would like to lift up my heart to the people who are being ethnically cleansed from northern Gaza right at this very moment, and the people in southern Lebanon who are being subjected to daily Israeli massacres.

I wish I could bring myself to express sympathy for other groups on this particular day, like the Israelis who were killed in the Hamas attack one year ago. But I think there’s been enough of that. I really do.

Sympathy for Israel has been used over this past year to manufacture consent for the slaughter of mountains of human beings in advancement of land grabs and military agendas that were planned long before the seventh of October 2023. The sympathy which Israel received after the Hamas attack was immediately weaponized in advancement of those agendas, and has been weaponized every single day since.
 
When someone is using a weapon to hurt people, a good person will take their weapon away, and won’t give them any more weapons. This is true of actual, physical weapons like the ones the western empire has been pouring into the Israeli war machine, and it is true of the weaponized sympathy that Israel apologists have been using to justify its genocidal atrocities.

Expressing sympathy for Israel on this particular day would be like expressing sympathy for a mother with Munchausen syndrome by proxy who is poisoning her children in order to garner sympathy and attention from her community. That sympathy — which would normally be a very healthy response to the deaths and trauma of others — is in this case the actual problem.

And even if this were not the case, Israel has received more than enough sympathy already. It is an extensively documented fact that the western press have been vastly more sympathetic toward the Israeli victims of the Hamas attack than they have been to Israel’s victims in Gaza, despite the victims of Israeli atrocities being orders of magnitude greater in number. This discrepancy in sympathy is so extensive that it can only be called journalistic malpractice, which is only made possible by the fact that Arabs are not recognized as fully human under the rules of the western empire.

So on this day in particular I will be expressing sympathy for the populations upon whom Israel has inflicted many, many times more death and trauma than it received one year ago — and for those populations only.

Read complete article on Substack, and listen to a recording of this article below.





0 Comments
    The VFP-111 Tipping the Scale blog is not an elite space, reserved for experts or professional bloggers. This is a blog for real people who are willing to share themselves honestly and vulnerably.

    Archives

    May 2025
    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    November 2021
    October 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    January 2021
    November 2020
    August 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    November 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    November 2018
    September 2018
    June 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    October 2017
    September 2017
    July 2017
    May 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014

Proudly powered by Weebly