Anti-American Art: Anti-Imperialist Circus Act

Showing an American jet crashing through the hoops formed by the number 1000, this stamp was issued by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1966 to mark the 1,000th US aircraft shot down over Vietnam.

This past May 19 was also the 120th anniversary of the birth of Ho Chi Minh, the leader of Vietnam in its war against French colonialism in the 1940s and 1950s and against American aggression in the 1960s. Although Ho Chi Minh did not live to see the defeat of the US--he died in 1969--he led his small nation in a valiant fight against the most powerful military machine on the face of the planet.

Here's an excerpt from his 1967 letter to US President Lyndon Johnson:

"On February 10, 1967, I received your message. This is my reply. Vietnam is thousands of miles away from the United States. The Vietnamese people have never done any harm to the United States. But contrary to the pledges made by its representative at the 1954 Geneva conference, the U.S. has ceaselessly intervened in Vietnam, it has unleashed and intensified the war of aggression in North Vietnam with a view to prolonging the partition of Vietnam and turning South Vietnam into a neocolony and a military base of the United States. For over two years now, the U.S. government has, with its air and naval forces, carried the war to the Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam, an independent and sovereign country.

The U.S. government has committed war crimes, crimes against peace and against mankind. In South Vietnam, half a million U.S. and satellite troops have resorted to the most inhuman weapons and most barbarous methods of warfare, such as napalm, toxic chemicals and gases, to massacre our compatriots, destroy crops, and raze villages to the ground. In North Vietnam, thousands of U.S. aircraft have dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs, destroying towns, villages, factories, schools. In your message, hyou apparently deplore the sufferings and destruction in Vietnam. May I ask you: Who has perpetrated these monstrous crimes? It is the United States and satellite troops. The U.S. government is entirely responsible for the extremely serious situation in Vietnam....The U.S. government has unleashed the war of aggression in Vietnam. It must cease this aggression. This is the only way to restoration of peace."

Which One the War Hero, Which One the Criminal?

There's been a big flap over John McCain and his war record. It started when former U.S. general (and now Democrat) Wesley Clark stated that McCain's years in a prison camp in Vietnam after being shot down didn't automatically grant him the experience necessary for the office of president. While some people--mostly right-wingers--went on to suggest some duplicity in McCain's POW time, most everybody, including Democratic candidate Obama went on to laud McCain's service and say it should never be questioned or criticized. McCain's time as a POW and veteran makes him a hero, they said.

Well I for one would beg to differ.

What, exactly, was John McCain doing when he was shot down over North Vietnam during the U.S. war of aggression? Was he delivering humanitarian messages? Dropping toys and candies to babies? Perhaps enlightening Vietnamese with peace propaganda? I think not. John McCain was a military officer on a bombing mission aimed at killing innocent people and destroying Vietnam's civilian infrastructure. He owes the debt of his life, saved by Vietnamese rescuers who McCain continued to call "Go*ks" well into his post-war political life, to those he was mercilessly trying to murder.

In my opinion this does not qualify McCain for the role of hero. He was not some unfortunate draftee forced to serve thousands of miles from home. He was a career military man, an officer not an enlisted man, a member of military management, if you will, plotting and carrying out the near genocidal war the US waged against the Vietnamese using all manner of weapons including chemical weapons and weapons that had no possible intended function but the maxiumum extermination of civilian life. McCain belongs not in the white house but in prison.

Nguyen Van Troi (1947-1964) was a young South Vietnamese man who, acting for the National Liberation Front--the so-called Viet Cong--attempted to assassinate Robert McNamara, then Secretary of Defense, and Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, who were both visiting Vietnam scheming to increase US military commitments to the corrupt South Vietnamese dictatorship. Van Troi was executed at the age of 17.

Now THAT is a hero of the Vietnam war.

Anti-American Art: What Flies Over Must Come Down

"4000 American planes shot down" over Vietnam celebrates these stamps issued by North Vietnam in 1972. The special cancellation has a clever iconic interpretation of flames and a falling plane. The stamps show Vietnamese defence fighters using anti-aircraft guns and missiles. Two months after these stamps were issued came the notorious Christmas bombings, when Nixon ordered B-52s over North Vietnam to wage a campaign of terror bombing of civilian targets in North Vietnamese cities. "In Hanoi and the northern port city of Haiphong, the bombing was staggering. More than 1,600 civilians died, 70 U.S. airmen were killed or captured and many Americans were left to wonder what price Nixon was willing to pay for 'peace with honor'," from an AP article on the 25th anniversary of the bombings.

Anti-American Art: A Warning to Invaders

This stamp from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, then only North Vietnam, issued in 1967, marks the 2,000th American aircraft shot down over the north. It shows a handcuffed POW being led from his burning aircraft by a female member of a civil defense militia. About 1,000 American POWs, including the war criminal-turned-politician John McCain, were released in 1973 following the Geneva peace accords which ended an active American military role in the war against Vietnam.

Bang Bang

Thoroughly a creature of cities, and a child of polite middle-class intellectuals, I was not raised around guns. The only time I saw them in real life was in the holsters of cops. I didn't grow up around hunters, in a military family, around criminals, or around people excessively paranoid around criminals. I was raised by pacifists, and was taught that there was something profoundly unnecessary about having a relationship with guns. And I grew up in the years of the Vietnam War, of police massacres of Black Panthers, of Kent and Jackson State, of assassins: The people with the guns were the bad guys.

I've had three personal encounters with guns.

When I was a young leftist, a number of left-wing activists and members of a rival left-wing sect were shot down -- murdered -- at a rally in cold blood by armed Klansmen in Greensboro, North Carolina. The group I was with made a point of protesting KKK and Neo-nazi rallies in the Chicago area and around the midwest, and at the time there were a lot of these. So we were a bit terrified: it could have been us. It was decided not that we should arm ourselves, or start carrying weapons around with us, but that we should at least know how to shoot a gun. We all went to a shooting range to get a lesson in how to do it. I guess we thought this was some kind of protection, some kind of power. A couple of my comrades were familiar with guns and they showed us what to do. I will never forget how all of a sudden what had been abstract to me felt in my hand: surprisingly heavy, much more substantial than a staple gun. And jesus if you pointed it the wrong way you could kill somebody or yourself. I don't remember if I was a good shot -- I doubt it -- but I remember feeling like I had my hand around a powerful writhing serpent struggling to get away from me. And it was loud. It wasn't very much fun, and I didn't want to do it again.

Flash forward a few years and I had moved to New York City. I was riding an empty subway late at night with a friend when a guy came up to us with what appeared to be a gun draped in a handtowel. He pointed it at us and mumbled something. We were, for a flash, terrified, until the "gun" started to droop beneath its cloth. It wasn't a gun at all but a length of rubber tubing. The three of us watching this happen were silent for a moment when me and my friend laughed disdainfully and our would-be assailant slunk sheepishly away. He had no power and we had no fear.

In the late 1980s I lived in a neighborhood in Brooklyn that went from being quietly residential to being violently stricken by crack. One night I went to my local Chinese takeout place to get a late dinner. I placed my order through a roughly-cut hole in a thick plastic partitition and sat in the untidy waiting area. There was this complex little arrangement where the food would be placed on a turntable with an inner door closed and an outer one opened. It was creepy; but the owner of the place had been badly beaten up in a robbery a couple years before. Two teenage kids were also waiting for their order. They were playing around with each other loudly, but like buddies do, and certainly without anger. One was waving around a 5-dollar bill. His friend jokingly snatched the bill out of his hand. At which point the other guy reached into his coat and pulled out a pistol and pointed it at his friend. No longer joking. He was going to kill his best friend for playing a little joke. While I was watching. While the Chinese family behind the partition was watching. I didn't wait for my food. And I left that neighborhood within a couple months.

Which brings us to the "Tucson Massacre" and the shooting of Rep. Giffords by Jared Loughner.



There's a really creepy video that went up this morning in which Sarah Palin calls herself a victim of "liberal blood libel" for the insinuation that teabagger rhetoric -- her rhetoric -- was in some way to blame for the shooting. Hilariously she suggests that people should be held to their words: "Each individual is accountable for his actions." Her narcissism and denial and manipulative opportunism is in full display. It's extraordinary. And frankly, frightening.

It's true that we don't (yet?) really know exactly what was going on this latest political murderer's probably deranged head. We know that he owned and used a handgun and thought it would be okay to go out and kill a bunch of people. We also know the culture around him: the culture of the state of Arizona, of much of white America, of people who love conspiracy theories, of people who want to own guns, of people who grow up loving guns.

I have acquaintances -- not apparently crazy nor rightwingers -- who claim to love and enjoy guns. But I don't love guns. I don't want to own one, for hunting, for supposed protection, or for anything else. And frankly I don't entirely trust people who do love guns. I certainly don't like or trust Sarah Palin. And if her crosshairs campaign poster was in such good taste, so far removed from the actual shooting that came to take place, why was it so completely scrubbed from her website?

Everything about Sarah Palin's world of patriotic posing, of fake reverence, of faux down-home just folksiness disgusts me. As her relationship to guns disgusts me. As her offensive posture in the wake of the Tucson shootings disgusts me.

But if only it stayed that simple. The world, whether we like it or not, is indeed at times a violent and terrible place. For all the guns in the hands of the wrong people, it must be said that sometimes the good guys having guns has ended very very well. The heroic people of Vietnam whose propaganda art I have featured here for much of the past year learned to love guns. Those guns gave them liberation.

For all the moral beauty of the teachings and commitments of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Mahatma Gandhi and Tich Nhat Hanh, we seem as a species to lack the necessary patience for the doctrine of nonviolence to win out over the armies of evil men armed to the teeth. And how sad that the attempts by King and Gandhi to write nonviolence on a large canvas were cut short not by the forces of evil empire but by small men alone with their guns.



And as we ponder guns, it's hard, ultimately, knowing about the terrible war machines slumbering in bunkers and silos and occasionally unleashed upon sleeping innocents to think that the biggest problem in the world today are laws allowing an occasional crazy person to buy a handgun and start killing people. I don't want to be the innocent bystander visiting a shopping mall in Arizona -- or a Chinese takeout joint in Brooklyn -- to pay the price for somebody's combined antisocial behavior and gun ownership. I don't want to pay the price for Sarah Palin's irresponsibility, for the rhetoric of the teabaggers. But I'm not sure where the small actions of living our lives and trying to escape being shot for whatever reason fits into that large canvas.

And here's the ugliest reality: President Obama who gave a moving speech in Tucson this evening touching on cosmic themes like love and innocence; this thoughtful intelligent man preaching respect has his finger on the button and has ordered his armies to steal the lives of many more innocent people on the other side of the world than the six who lost their lives last weekend. It's cold comfort that his intelligence and professed compassion is a blessing compared to what Sarah Palin might do with her fingers on that same button, her orders going out to the brute force of gun lovers that is the U.S. war machine. It makes me sad that Obama, who I often like, especially when he gives a speech like tonight's, is in some scary way closer to the world that Sarah Palin lives in than the one I want to live in. I don't want to be the innocent victim -- or not-so-innocent enabler -- of a rain of missiles or predatory drones or attack helicopters sent by President Obama, who I voted for, or by Sarah Palin who I dread.

I can't condemn the people in this world who have used weapons, violence, to free themselves from oppression and tyranny. But I can't help feeling that we are deluding ourselves to focus on the weapons of deranged individuals and not on our failure to notice something systemic and foundational about our allegedly free society. Hint: America is not the innocent bystander.

crazy AND bloodthirsty

So when asked about Iran on a recent campaign stop, aging senator John McCain began to sing "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann". this is an international disgrace. apparently this veteran of the imperialist debacle in Vietnam is having fond flash backs to the days he was shot down bombing the heroic people of Vietnam. Sadly, he will no doubt die before being brought up on war crimes charges. If the united states attacks Iran, it deserves anything it gets. I just hope I have time to step out of the way.

meanwhile, John McCain needs to check himself into a rest home and refrain from bloodthirsty inhumane calls to slaughter.

pray for peace.

Embrace of the War Criminals

Americans seem to have a dangerous weakness for doddering old fools.

It needs to be said, Senator John McCain is not some kind of liberal republican maverick. He is a dangerous right-wing scumbag. John McCain was bombing civilian and military targets in North Vietnam during the American war of aggression against Vietnam. When he was shot down, he was rightfully and justly imprisoned. Neck deep in the blood of murdered innocent Vietnamese--who he proudly called "Gooks" until just a few years ago--John McCain is not some war hero but a war ciminal.

McCain's recent and repeated comment about Al Qaeda returning to Iran to rearm and retrain is not an excusable confusion, it is either senile dementia, stupidity, or more of the same duplicitous manipulation of American ignorance about the world that we've had from 8 years of the corrupt Bush regime.

Over and over again John McCain has shown a willingness to embrace the worst of nascent American fascism, the so-called "conservative" movement. LIkely to die in office before his term is up, he is clearly also a kind of trojan horse for dengerous right-wing forces. Look to his vice presidential candidate to see who, in fact, the Blackwater/Oil company corporate axis truly seeks to entrust with the reins of corrupt corporate state power.

Beware.

Anti-American Art: Redirected Flights

It's a little cartoonish to begin with, and poorly printed at that, but this wartime stamp from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam is part of a series marking their military successes against the U.S. and its puppet regime in the south in the period 1966-1967. This particular one marks the 1800th American aircraft shot down by the Vietnamese defenses. The scene of mortarman with the burning wreckage of Air Force and Navy aircraft leads me to believe the illustration is another depiction of the attack on Bienhoa airfield. In any case shooting down American airplanes where they didn't belong was a regular feature of North Vietnamese postage stamps. Seems like the Vietnamese had an effective way of dealing with terrorist aviation.

Click on the image to see it larger.

Anti-American Art: Shot Down and Pasted Up

Another example of anti-imperialist clip-art from cultural-revolution era China in the 1960s, showing National Liberation Front of South Vietnam fighters triumphant on the wing of a downed US airplane. This is from one of the hundreds of booklets of approved propaganda images distributed by government publishers for re-use by local (and international) media.

(I colorized and adapted this design and added the famous quote from Che Guevara "Two, Three, Many Vietnams" at my Cafepress propaganda mill. You can get it on a tee-shirt, cloth bag or even a decorative tile from The Scarletmenace.)

Iraq crisis: the people suffer, US vultures circle

This article originally appeared on The Kasama Project on 14 June 2014. Reposting here to preserve a broken link. It can also be accessed here.


By ISH

Imperialism's chickens are coming home to roost in Iraq, and once again it is the people of the region who will pay the price.

In a week of events that is in some ways shocking and in other ways not even slightly surprising, a radical Islamic fundamentalist group called the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, sometimes translated as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or referred to by the Arabic name Da'ish) seized Iraq's second largest city of Mosul, and capturing more cities along the way, has advanced as far as Baquba, just 50 kilometers from Baghdad, the Iraqi capital.

In the face of a sudden advance by the black-clad, black-flag bearing fighters, lightly armed and driving around in open trucks, the massively US-funded and trained Iraqi army melted away. The unravelling of the Iraqi army in the north seems to have been a combination of demoralization and, at least according to some sources, a revolt by former Baathists loyal to the deposed Saddam Hussain.
In any case ISIS seized control of city government, immediately announced the imposition of a strict Islamic law, and reportedly began executions of civilians and other opponents. It also apparently seized millions of dollars from Mosul banks. Hundreds of thousands of civilians including the large Iraqi Christian population of Mosul reportedly fled immediately to the neighboring semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan Region.
Fighters from that Iraqi Kurdistan Region quickly seized the moment and occupied the nearby city of Kirkuk, strategically located amidst the northern oilfields and long coveted by Kurdistan as its capital, despite being one of the most multi-ethnic cities in Iraq. Iraqi Kurdistan first carved out some autonomy in the 1990s after the first US war against Iraq; it's been pushing towards possible independence ever since. (Kurdish independence would certainly be just, despite the massive oil-company induced corruption that now rules the autonomous zone.)

In the face of the ISIS surge, the central Iraqi government led by Nouri al-Maliki has been seemingly paralyzed. Its parliament has been unable to make a quorum. The leaders of Iraq's Shi'a Muslim community have started to rally support to defend Baghdad: Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr have called for Iraqi Shi'ites to form militias to defend Shi'ite-populated cities against the ISIS advance. And the government of the neighboring Islamic Republic of Iran, ironically now the chief backer of the Maliki government, is reportedly already sending in troops to defend its fellow Shi'ites from the ISIS attack. One report suggested that Iraqi soldiers lining up to defend the Baghdad “Green Zone” are wearing civilian clothes under their uniforms should they need to make a hasty retreat and discard any signs of allegiance to the government.

What is ISIS?

ISIS is one of the militias that has come out of the bloody civil war in neighboring Syria. While apparently funded by wealthy interests in the Gulf, it competes in the civil war against the Syrian government with forces like the so-called Free Syrian Army, and while it shares a Sunni Muslim identity and a hard right-wing sectarian ideology, it has been deemed too extreme even by Al-Qaeda. It has also been opposed by the Syrian Kurdish movement. Its goal is a unified Islamic state across a wide swath of what is now several different countries.

While from a communist perspective one might be tempted to welcome the success of ISIS against corrupt capitalist governments and former US puppets, it is clear its ideology and practice is deeply sectarian and brutally repressive against the people. Disturbing videos can be seen online showing that ISIS has a policy of horrifying, random terror against those deemed to be its enemies. One video, shot from inside an ISIS vehicle, shows fighters in a speeding car randomly gunning down passing civilians.

ISIS's advance in the north of Iraq is not actually their first major victory. They already control portions of northern Syria, and most of Iraq's Anbar province, having seized the long-suffering city of Fallujah several months ago. Fallujah was of course the scene of brutal battles between Iraqi Sunni insurgents and the US occupation army; it's notorious for being dosed by “depleted uranium” weapons which have left a horrible legacy of health problems for the local population.

Triple legacy of imperialism, Zionism and revisionism

When British and French imperialism co-opted the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire a hundred years ago during WWI, they created a patchwork of states that didn't really correspond to real ethnic or religious divisions in the Middle East. States like Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq were created to the advantage of imperialism, which understood the growing importance of oil and therefore their strategic imperatives in the region. As in Africa, divide and conquer was their watchword. Soon nationalism and anti-colonialism grew in response to the regional imperialist mandates, forces of rebellion appeared all over the Middle East. Communist parties and militant labor movements blossomed.

But with the creation of the Zionist entity of Israel in the late 1940s, suddenly the obvious divisions of class were not the only faultlines. Palestine was occupied and a whole nation dispersed. Iraq before Israel had a large Jewish population, and this population was a backbone in fact of the Iraqi Communist Party. As Israel insisted on the “Israeliness” of Jewish Arabs, suddenly sectarian identity became crucial, pushing rifts in contradictory societies to the fore. Jewish Arabs fled to Israel en masse. Arab nationalist forces kicked out direct imperialist rule across the Middle East and tried to forge secular societies, often using at least the rhetoric of socialism. Leftists (perhaps best identified as “revisionists”) subordinated their politics to those of the nationalists in country after country, and over the decades found themselves in turn co-opted or brutally repressed. Meanwhile, the State of Israel, opposed by radicalizing, communist-influenced guerrilla armies of Palestinian fedayeen, quietly began to foster the development of Islamic social movements to subvert the influence of secular nationalism and communism.

But with the victory of the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 and the collapse of Soviet influence in the region ten years later, nationalism and leftism buckled ineffectively against the continued injustice and brutality of the Zionist state. All of a sudden the sectarian and ethnic tensions began to flare, first with the Lebanese civil war, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, then the Iran-Iraq war, and eventually three invasions by US imperialism. Islamic fundamentalism gained new legitimacy as an effective form of opposition to local corruption, to imperialism and to some extent Zionism, and suddenly secular ideologies, including Marxism, seemed irrelevant. (Islamic fundamentalism also gained a fortune in aid from the US as it positioned itself against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan; even Osama bin Laden was America's best friend for a hot minute in the 1980s).

ISIS, like Al-Qaeda, is a product of this new reality. Social revolution, though vastly different than what how we communists define it, is now the watchword of the religious far right. Of course the Middle East is not the only place where that is increasingly true: there's a serious warning embedded here for leftist revolutionaries. The social revolution promised by ISIS involves a repressive, deeply conservative view of Islam.

Today's Iraqi government was created by US imperialism in the aftermath of its unprovoked invasion in 2003. The government was set up in a power-sharing arrangement between Iraq's Sunni, Shi'ite, and Kurdish populations, inverting the dominance from Sunni under Saddam to Shi'a under al-Maliki. The US stopped a Sunni insurgency through a combination of mass violence and bribery. And then the US left.

The blood-soaked arrogance of US imperialism

Let's be direct: responsibility for the violence in Iraq can now be laid squarely at the feet of US imperialism. The US broke and shattered the country of Iraq by invading and dismantling the existing secular state. Without shedding tears for the anti-communist dictator Saddam, it's important to recognize what happened when the most powerful country in the world (allied with a host of the world's reactionary forces from British imperialism to local reactionaries like the Saudi Arabian monarchy) steamrolled over Iraq. By destroying nation-states and replacing them with cesspools of corruption they have unleashed the worst kind of intercommunal violence.

American media, pundits, and most politicians all cheered the drive to war in the aftermath of 9/11. They ignored the simple fact that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11; they wrapped themselves up in falsified evidence and lies; and they ignored a mass antiwar movement inside the US. So sure of themselves and their superiority in a one-superpower world, they lead the US into a war that cost uncountable thousands of Iraqi lives, and made the daily lives of the Iraqi people a dangerous hell. They bolstered the reactionary Al-Qaeda they claimed to be fighting, sending thousands of Iraqis into its arms as a rallying point for resistance.

The US adventure in Iraq was simply a failure for imperialism. Aside from its atrocious but futile toll in Iraq itself, it had a devastating effect on the US economy. It damaged US hegemony over Europe. And the weakness it revealed in US imperialism's resolve to sustain an extended conflict has emboldened a resurgence of Russian imperialism, which seems to no longer be particularly concerned about US intimidation, witness events in Syria and Ukraine. And now the US is faced with the ignoble prospect of simultaneously bullying and threatening Iran over its nuclear program while watching Iranian ground forces forestall an ISIS sweep into Baghdad. And as further evidence of the wreckage of imperialist policies, US allies have poured millions into Syria to arm reactionary armies including ISIS that the US is now trying to figure out what to do about.

When ISIS swept Iraq last week, all the familiar stinking vultures of the US political scene started squawking. Everybody from ideologue-fantasist Kenneth Pollack and disgraced government media agent Judith Miller who both stoked the 2003 invasion to actual war criminal John McCain have started to offer their opinions and demand US action. The Republican speaker of the house, John Boehner, virtually called President Obama a “lazy ni**er” for failing to send in the bombers. When Obama finally spoke up, he outrageously lectured the Iraqi government about how it should be respecting Iraq's religious diversity better. He says he has not yet decided how to respond to the ISIS advance. It is certainly possible he will unleash his war machine, which is good news for nobody but imperialism.

Obama was elected in large part due to his vote against the Iraq war; and while he has long ago come to own the US adventure in Iraq and Afghanistan, he knows that as disinterested in international affairs as Americans seem, they're not eager to put up with another military adventure that puts boots on the ground; especially on the same ground that so many lives were already thrown away. Probable presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who voted in favor of George Bush's 2003 invasion, has also chosen the grotesque path of lecturing the Iraqi government. She dared to say, “Because you’d be fighting for a dysfunctional, unrepresentative, authoritarian government and there’s no reason on earth that I know of that we would ever sacrifice a single American life for that.”

Really these politicians are shameless, disgusting pigs. Their path is a nightmare for the people of the Middle East and indeed the whole world.

No US intervention!

US imperialism cares absolutely nothing for the people of Iraq. They don't care how many lives are wasted. They don't care if their victims are Shi'ite or Sunni or atheist. They just care about their power. We must stop any further US intervention in Iraq: no invasion, no bombing, no drones, no proxies or "contractors," no mercenaries, no "no fly zones," no advisers, no bases.

The antiwar movement after 9/11 was significant. It dissipated in the face of the 2004 elections. Occupy in 2011 was a significant challenge to the domestic status quo. It dissipated in the face of the 2012 elections (and in the face of coordinated repression directed from Washington). President Obama went from being a supposedly anti-war candidate to the master of drones that have killed thousands of civilians in over a half dozen countries across the Middle East and Africa. Hillary Clinton's record of support for war is perfectly clear. Liberal darling Elizabeth Warren has already indicated her hawkishness on Iran and Israel.

The next elections, including the upcoming 2014 midterms and the following 2016 president elections are a loser's game where the people are guaranteed to lose no matter who wins. Just like the previous elections, they're a trap for social movements in the US.

It's time to stop worrying about those creepy, lying politicians and start to build and sustain a real anti-war movement to stop the machinations of the empire. The best way those of us inside the belly of this beast can help the beleagured Iraqi people is to destroy US imperialism from within. The mess imperialism has left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan suggests how weak imperialism actually is. It's dangerous, it's intimidating, but it's not invincible. We need to stand up and oppose any further US intervention in the middle east, Africa, or anywhere else.

The movement against the Vietnam war back in the 1960s and 1970s revolutionized US society. It obviously wasn't successfully transformed into a movement to defeat capitalism itself, but it shows us how things can begin.

Are you as disgusted at what's happening now as I am? Let's get to work!