IMPERIALISM

TOM CARTER—It is not a question of “speaking ill of the dead” but of maintaining a standpoint of independence and objectivity, and of not getting swept away by the deluge of official propaganda. These campaigns of official mourning are a ritualized spectacle of American political life. The deceased is inevitably held up as an “icon,” a “towering figure” and a “legend.” Every bourgeois politician and media personality is expected to line up to render the proper obeisance, with each individual politician “paying respects” becoming a news item in itself. The accomplishments of the decedent, sometimes real and sometimes invented, are spun out of all proportion to reality. The propaganda campaign functions as a sort of loyalty test, with anyone who is not willing to recite the official slogans flagged as a possible traitor.

CYNTHIA CHUNG—According to WWII historian and authority on Nazi Germany Gerhard Weinberg, the German military’s own figures show that ten thousand Russian prisoners of war were shot or killed by hunger and disease EVERY SINGLE DAY for the first seven months of the war. This amounts to two million, adding one million Soviet citizens who died during this period, 3 million Russians died in the first seven months of the war.

Rania Khalek and Anya Parampil pay tribute to their friend Kevin Zeese, a long time organizer and anti-war activist in DC.

KEVIN ZESSE—You know, wealth inequality and inequality generally has been a driving issue. In fact, that’s what started the Occupy Movement. Remember the 99% versus the 1%. But over the last decade that inequality has gotten worse rather than better despite people wanting to see change and amelioration of that problem. It just keeps getting worse. We have not built the power necessary to make the changes we need. If you look at the taxes in the last couple of years, you see with this Trump Republican deformed tax system, which is the worst tax system in our history, the wealthiest actually are paying less than working-class people and major corporations, the Fortune 500 companies, are not paying any taxes at all.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—A nation that cannot exist without ceaseless war is not actually a nation at all: it’s an ongoing military operation with some suburbs and schools mixed in. A nation that cannot exist without constant war is like a house that can’t exist without constant construction: if your house needed 24/7/365 construction work in order to remain standing, you’d either completely redesign the way it’s built or you would move. This is true of Israel, and on a larger scale it is true of the globe-spanning, empire-like oligarchic world order that is loosely centralized around the United States.