Author: Murray Polner

The late, great Murray Polner penned this op-ed for Antiwar.com on February 9, 2015. That’s roughly one year after the US-backed coup in Kiev, about two years before President Donald Trump began providing “lethal” aid to the Ukrainian regime, and seven years before Russia’s invasion.

As if seeing clearly into the future, Polner blasts the war party’s hubris for dragging us into yet another costly, illegal, potentially catastrophic conflict with not just another country, but with nuclear-armed Russia.

He criticizes the American media which refuses their obligation to expose the foreign extremists Washington chooses to align with, in this case neo-Nazis like the Azov Battalion. He also highlights the increasingly erratic nature of the Blob in its insatiable campaign for world dominance, fueled by imperial hubris.

They’re taking on Vladimir Putin’s Russia “as if Iraq, Syria, ISIS, Iran, Cuba, Yemen, [and] Obama’s anti-China [Asia Pivot]“ wasn’t enough.

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“Who came down from the mountain and said the U.S. must police the globe from the South China Sea to the jungles of Peru”? ~ Eric S. Margolis

For my sins, I’ve just finished reading the latest report by three of Washington’s centrist think tanks, “Preserving Ukraine’s Independence, Resisting Russian Aggression.” From their peaceful, safe and posh offices they urge President Obama to get tough with Moscow and supply “defensive” weapons to Ukraine, while sanctimoniously concluding, as LBJ and Bush Junior’s echo chambers did in 1965 and 2003, that “assisting Ukraine to …. defend itself is not inconsistent with the search for a peaceful political solution.”

Continue reading “Murray Polner asked: Are You Ready To Fight Putin’s Russia?”

This originally appeared at Antiwar.com on May 4, 2015

It’s been 45 years since draft-deferred Ohio National Guardsmen aimed their M-1 rifles and .45 pistols at unarmed Ken State College students, killing four and wounding nine on May 4, 1970. You have to be well into middle age now to remember that day. My memory is stirred whenever I look at three photos: John Filo’s striking shot of teenager Mary Ann Vecchio on her knees weeping as she bends over student Jeffrey Miller’s body, I photo I took of Jeffrey’s grieving mother for a magazine my son Alex once edited, and a picture of two of the forever crippled in wheelchairs, KSU student Dean Kahler and wounded Marine Vietnam vet Ron Kovic of Born on the Fourth of July fame.

On the 41st anniversary of the shootings in 2011, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the state’s largest newspaper, concluded, “There has never been a completely satisfactory explanation for why the Guard fired.” In fact, it went on, “The central unresolved question in the Kent State affair has been why several dozen Ohio Guardsmen pivoted in unison and fired” and for 13 agonizing seconds killed and wounded so many of their peers. The previous year the paper had reported the finding of an audio recording where a Guard office was said to shout, “All right, prepare to fire.” This led to an editorial urging the state to take another look “and give full account of that tragic day.”

Continue reading “Kent State 1970: We Need a Serious Look at What Happened and Why”

It was all reminiscent of that historic American milestone in 2004 when President George W. Bush, wearing an Air Force suit that made him resemble a genuine combat veteran, stood proudly on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln under a banner triumphantly heralding another "Mission Accomplished" for the world’s "indispensable" nation.

So too in November 2015 when Ashton (Ash) Carter, our Defense Secretary, was on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt warning the Chinese that the US means business if they dare interfere with freedom of navigation in the South China Sea and our domination of the region now and into the future.

The US had recently dispatched a guided missile destroyer within 12 nautical miles of a Chinese islet in the Spratly Archipelago, some of whose barren and rocky islets are claimed by the Chinese but also by other Southeastern Asian nations who expect the US military and its "boots on the ground" to fight and if necessary die on their behalf in the event of war.

"Teddy Roosevelt’s presence there and our visit is a symbol of our commitment to our rebalance [to Asia] and the importance of the Asia-Pacific to the United States," Carter declared, somehow overlooking that the real Teddy loved war, I mean he LOVED it, that is until his son died in WWI.

Continue reading “Sorry, But It’s No Longer Boxer Rebellion Time”

The struggle over the Iran Agreement reminds me of the seventeen years I spent as editor of Present Tense, a liberal Jewish-oriented magazine, published by the American Jewish Committee.

In 1990, we featured a detailed investigative piece, "Speaking for the Jews." Our cover blurb read: "A growing number of American Jews, including many inside the Jewish establishment, are fed up with the hard-line views of Jewish leaders whom they did not elect and who, in any case, do not speak for them." Some members of The Lobby were quite upset and Present Tense was shut down soon after for debatable reasons. Even so, the article’s writer, Robert Spero, and the magazine’s editors, were absolutely on target in 1990 and even more so today. In short, the Israel Lobby doesn’t speak for American Jews.

In addition to the fabrications and fantasies concocted by PM Netanyahu’s Israel and endlessly repeated by his followers, it is that for the first time in memory a foreign country – Israel – is publicly fighting an American president’s foreign policy on American soil. Israel’s allies include Obama-hating Republicans, intimidated, largely Jewish, Democratic politicians, and Bibi-supporting Jewish and Christian Zionist lobbies – none of whom have ever offered any lucid or rational alternatives, and many of them empowered by a few mega-rich and hawkish American Jews.

Continue reading “Iran, Israel, and American Jews”