During the month of April We Are Not Your Soldiers traveled remotely to educational institutions in three states: New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Our speakers – Joy Damiani, Miles Megaciph and John Burns – also were located in three different states but all our “voyages” worked well via Zoom.

At age 14, I decided the Democrats were the "war party," having only looked at WWII and the wars on Korea and Vietnam. Then R. Nixon and H. Kissinger considered using nukes to hold onto Vietnam and threaten China, and I was persuaded the Republicans are every bit as bad.

Since 2005, every time I write to World Can't Wait supporters about how dangerous the party in power is, I get responses saying, essentially - wait, the other party is worse!

While the victims of U.S. wars are nameless, U.S. media is 24/7 on the tragic death Russia is bringing to Ukraine. Children, pregnant women, elderly have all died there, just as they have in Yemen by the Saudis with U.S. weapons, as they died in Libya by U.S./NATO forces.

People have written us with a legit point: People around the globe have suffered historically from reactionary violence backed by the U.S. and its allies - right now in Yemen for instance - but these aggressive acts get mostly ignored by U.S. politicians and press, while the Russian attack on Ukraine is 24/7 news. But then, no one has proved that the U.S. isn't #1 in hypocrisy.

This war is dangerous for humanity and the planet! We shouldn't support either "side."

It's no exaggeration to say that the showdown between Russia and the U.S./NATO bloc has profound dangers for the people of Ukraine. Millions are already facing death and displacement from the immediate incursion of the Russian military. Russia doesn't want NATO at its borders in its mission to control Eastern Europe.

Many hundreds of millions more are endangered by the U.S. missile launchers recently installed in Poland and Romania, on the border of Russia. These are MK 41's, the same weapon the U.S. used thousands of times on people of Iraq, Syria and Yugoslavia. The U.S. wants to encircle Russia with NATO countries in its mission to maintain imperialist dominance.

The tsunami of U.S. coverage of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, almost completely through the lens of people killed in the U.S. or in fighting "for" the U.S., needs to be answered with the force of our understanding and commitment. Buried beneath the rubble of America-first jingoism, historians, thinkers and activists contributed much this week. Rather than summarize, we are sharing links to what really got our attention:

Nazia Kazi, the anthropologist who wrote ..., produced a snappy graphic story published on The Nib last week, What We Forget, with Anuj Shrestha.

It is Sunday night, around 9:00 PM on March 14, 2021 in Portland, Oregon. In two days, it will be the 53rd Anniversary of the My Lai Massacre. Since I was a soldier in the Central Highlands of Viet Nam, I have made three trips back to Viet Nam, which included three trips to the My Lai Massacre site in Quang Ngai Province. Those trips were made in 1994, 2016, and 2018 for the 50th Anniversary.

Since I was in Viet Nam, 50 years have passed – half a century. I have spent most of my adult life recovering from the Viet Nam War (or The American War as the Vietnamese call it). This time of year is always difficult for me, and I am sure it is for countless people I know, whether they were in the military or not. When the My Lai Massacre was first revealed in 1969, and 1970, it drastically changed the course of American opinion about the war, even though some of those changes came slowly, because denial camouflages the Lie. It would take three more years before American troops started coming home, with the official ending of the war on April 30, 1975.

In a welcome development, Biden has announced US plans to re-enter the Iran nuclear agreement, reversing Trump's withdrawal from the agreement negotiated under Obama. He also announced the US will end support for Saudi Arabia's offensive actions against Yemen.

The people of both countries have suffered horribly from US imperialist intervention.

In Iran, domestic tyranny has been strengthened by US sanctions against that country. Iran's prisons are bulging with political prisoners who are opponents of the Islamic Republic while uncounted hundreds of thousands have died from lack of food, medicines and other essentials caused by US sanctions.

The US has actively supported Saudi aggression on Yemen. Over 100,000 Yemenis have died in the Saudi war -- from airstrikes, coordinated and paid for by the US, and spreading famine and disease.

In fact, two Yemeni families have filed a petition against the US government to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights over the “unlawful” killing of 34 relatives, including nine children, in counterterrorism operations between 2013 and 2018.

These conditions have made the Covid epidemic far worse in each country.

To understand what the U.S. does to exert its power around the world, you have to look beyond the public words and actions, to the covert actions that are often even more decisive and revealing of U.S values than overt wars, and certainly more true than diplomacy carried out as subterfuge.  Mike Pompeo, then director of the CIA said in 2017 that it “must be aggressive, vicious, unforgiving, relentless.” That wasn't exactly news to anyone who's followed it since 1947, through its role in dozens of coups overthrowing elected governments not favored by the U.S.  The largest targeted drone killing program of the two decade "war of terror" is probably the CIA's, launched by Bush, expanded by Obama and then more so by Trump. 

It is truly amazing how some progressives and self-described radicals pull the wool over their own eyes when it comes to Donald Trump’s foreign policy. They blithely buy into and peddle the dangerous myth that, for all his ravings and unpredictability, Trump is an “antiwar” isolationist who wants to shrink the U.S. global military footprint and is ill-disposed to getting bogged down in endless wars. Describe him as you will... but a war monger he is not, they say. Wrong, deadly wrong.

U.S. media counts the dead in "America," meaning the United States, leaving deaths uncounted and mostly not noted, in the rest of the globe, save Europe and other "allies." 

But when we think of the pandemic, our thoughts go to those globally in most danger: people in prisons and detention, those without homes to shelter in, those who have to work everyday, the refugees and people in war zones who have no protection.