JANICE KORTKAMP— Her summary of the war against Syria is succint, mordant and spot on: “It is: A terrorist-proxy war. An economic siege war. A political war to undermine the sovereignty and legitimacy of the Syrian state. An attrition war. A media propaganda war. A divide and conquer war…”
SERAPHIM HANISCH—They recalled that in August 2005, the Ukrainian Ministry of Health and the US Department of Defense signed an agreement on cooperation in preventing the proliferation of technologies, pathogens and knowledge that can be used to develop biological weapons. The document provides for the collection and storage of all dangerous pathogens on Ukrainian territory in laboratories funded by Washington, and also obliges, at the request of the American side, to transfer copies of dangerous strains to the United States for further research. Medvedchuk believes that the facilities in Ukraine that are subordinate to the Pentagon and carry out their assigned tasks are de facto US military bases, which is expressly prohibited by article 17 of the Ukrainian constitution.
RICHARD SANDERS—For centuries, self-righteous state myths have depicted the imperial Canadian project as a victory for democracy and human rights. Despite Canada’s long record of genocide, land plunder, and war profiteering, official narratives about noble “Canadian values” still reign in this imagined “peaceable kingdom.” Canada’s ethnonationalist propaganda demonized First Nations as hostile sub-humans to be enslaved, imprisoned on reservations and made Christian in residential schools. This White-Power racism served imperialist containment policies designed to turn “Red Indian” enemies into captive nations. By the early 1950s, then-external affairs minister Lester Pearson was pioneering a new containment policy. During the transition to the new world order of the Cold War, he rallied his powerful allies in Canada’s racist old-boys’ clubs.
DIANA JOHNSTONE—This snide and incoherent broadside against genuine independent anti-imperialist writers comes at a time when Washington’s aggressiveness is reaching new levels of intensity and many antiwar writers are confronted with growing attempts at marginalization and even censorship. It is so timely to brand them all with the label “anti-imperialism of fools.”
To reply to the labelers in their language, let me say that the promoters of this despicable letter are practicing the imperialism of foolers. The gambit is to fool people into seeing imperialism in so many places that it is neutralized. The United States has a military budget that exceeds that of all its major adversaries and allies put together, operates nearly a thousand bases all around the world, destroys countries one after the other by sanctions and subversion, clearly wants to change regimes even in Russia and China, and practices nuclear war games on their borders. Its world hegemonic pretensions are blatant and frightening.
AJIT SINGH—The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has been central to the rising international prominence of the Uyghur separatist movement. In 2020, the NED boasted that it has given Uyghur groups $8,758,300 since 2004 (including $75,000 in annual funding to the UAA) and claimed to be “the only institutional funder for Uyghur advocacy and human rights organizations.”
“As a result of NED’s support, the Uyghur advocacy groups have grown both institutionally and professionally over the years,” said Akram Keram, a program officer and regional expert at NED. “These groups played critical roles in introducing the Uyghur cause in various international, regional, and national settings against China’s false narratives, bringing the Uyghur voice to the highest international levels, including the United Nations, European Parliament, and the White House. They provided firsthand, factual resources documenting the atrocities in East Turkistan, informing and inspiring the introduction of relevant resolutions, sanctions, and calls for action to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable.”