You can read more great Ukraine coverage by both staff and community members here.
Try and imagine a world in which Sen. Bernie Sanders is a war-mongering neocon shill for the military industrial complex.
I dare you, try!
Not happening? Well, that’s because you’re not a pro-Putin tankie.
Yesterday, Code Pink claims eleven of its members were arrested after causing mayhem in Sanders’ office.
This yahoo is “horrified” at Sanders supporting assistance for Ukraine, saying, “Vermonters want peace.” She added, “I watched the carnage going on over there and how can anyone say this is good?”
Have you seen anyone say that the war is good? I certainly haven’t. But it is telling that Code Pink and this woman would rather protest Bernie’s office than target the people actually responsible for the carnage: Russia. Why aren’t they protesting outside the Russian embassy? If anything calls for splattering red paint on the sidewalks of a diplomatic mission, it’s this ongoing genocide.
Code Pink’s co-founder, Jodie Evans, was among the arrested:
And since Ukraine gives us nearly daily reminders of the horseshoe theory of politics, in which the far left and the far right are closer to each other than to the political center, there’s this:
That pretty much tells us all we need to know, doesn’t it?
Remember, none of these people, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have protested the Russians for their actions. They objectively approve of Russia’s actions. They are explicitly pro-Putin. They want to disarm Ukraine so that Russia can rape and pilage its way across the country.
As a refresher, a tankie is a leftist who believes that the root of all evil in the world is American (and to a lesser extent, European) imperialism. No one in the world has agency. Everyone and everything is a pawn of evil Americans and their CIA.
A tankie will argue that Russia didn’t invade Ukraine; rather, it was forced to defend itself because something something America. The “something something” can be pretty much anything! NATO was pushing east to Ukraine! (No it wasn’t.) America ousted the pro-Russian government in the 2014 Maidan revolution. (No it didn’t.) America was denying Russia’s historical borders! (Well, yes on that one, but still doesn’t make it America’s fault.)
Tankies are called as such because they defended the Soviet Union’s use of tanks to violently repress rebellions in Hungary in 1956 and Prague in 1968, desperately clinging to their fantasies of a communist Soviet utopia. They still can’t let go of their love of Russia and other authoritarian regimes to this very day. I’ve written about them regularly as part of my Ukraine war coverage, and you can find all of those stories in the tankie tag.
Evans, along with her Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin, are among this country’s top tankies. This write-up has a great overview of their activities, like their rabid support for Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, even defending his elimination of the nation’s free press. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
There’s Benjamin’s participation in a conference in Tehran, Iran, that “included a panel titled ‘Mossad’s Role in the 9/11 Coup d’Etat,’ and it hosted figures like Randy Short, who claims that ‘Boko Haram was created and funded by the CIA,’ and Wayne Madsen who has declared that 9/11 attacks were carried out by Mossad together with CIA and Saudi intelligence. The event also hosted German neo-Nazis Manuel Ochsenreiter & Kevin Barrett, and in 2018 one of the keynote speakers at New Horizon was one Aleksander Dugin.”
You might remember Dugin as the ultra-right-wing Russian nationalist who has advocated for Ukraine’s genocidal elimination, and whose up-and-coming media darling daughter was assassinated with a car bomb in Moscow.
In 2019, Code Pink spent several months cavorting in Iran. The results were truly cringe, as reported by the Jerusalem Post:
Despite being an anti-war group, several members appeared to praise the military in Iran. One activists was quoted in Fars News as saying that the US military is “aware of the strength of the Iranian army” and that Iran was a country of 80 million people. “The anti-war activists emphasized Iran’s right to missile defense, adding that since the US has military bases around Iran, it is Iran’s right to upgrade its defense capability.” Another activist “said the US government was not allowed to criticize the Zionists in response to a question about the unequivocal support of the US government for the Zionist regime.”
The group appeared in awe of their experience. “It was quite amazing to have a chance to speak for an hour and a half to the foreign minister,” Benjamin told Democracy Now. She claimed they had “incredible” meetings, including with women and minorities.
As a reminder, this is the same Iranian government that is executing protesters for challenging the repressive Islamic regime over the murder of Mahsa Amin, a Kurdish woman, for not properly wearing her hijab. But we can all be sure that whatever women the government allowed Code Pink to meet with offered truly unvarnished information, right?
A search for “Mahsa Amin” and “Code Pink” brings up zero hits.
And what kind of “peace group” encourages the militarization of a region?
Just as they show little concern about the fate of Iranian girls and women, don’t expect them to care about the Chinese genocide of the Uyghur minority. In fact, Code Pink are active participants in the Chinese-funded effort to whitewash their crimes. According to a New Lines Magazine investigation, China has funneled $65 million into nonprofits downplaying or denying China’s human rights violations through a single man—Neville Roy Singham—who also happens to be Evans’ partner. The two certainly share an affinity for supporting murderous regimes.
In 2020, Code Pink initiated a campaign titled “China Is Not Our Enemy” in which the organization advocates for the U.S. to adopt a thoroughly conciliatory approach toward China. It calls on supporters to lobby members of Congress and hosts podcasts and webinars advancing the same argument.
Code Pink’s website also includes an FAQ section on the Uyghurs. “Our concern is that it is being used as a tool to drive the U.S.’s hybrid war on China,” it states, “instead of a human rights issue that needs to be addressed as such.” This page provides links to “helpful resources” on the topic, one of which appears to treat the plight of the Uyghurs as a human rights nonissue: A video featuring Evans and British academic John Ross shows the latter characterizing the Uyghur genocide allegation as “farcical” and a “total lie.”
To be clear, the United Nations itself has confirmed “serious human rights violations” in Xinjiang province, where the Uyghurs live. This isn’t controversial. So as you can imagine, Code Pink is a favorite source of Chinese state media whenever they want Americans to bash the United States.
Likewise in Syria, Code Pink is a fan of murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad. In her book on the Ukraine War, Benjamin whitewashes Russia’s leveling of entire Syrian cities as simply helping out a friend, and continues to cast doubt on Assad’s well-documented use of chemical weapons against civilians.
“On page 17, they write: ‘In 2011, the United States and its allies began supporting and arming Al-Qaeda-linked groups in Syria in a proxy war to overthrow President Assad, a close Russian ally. In its first military response to Western war-making, Russia intervened militarily to defend its Syrian ally,’” said journalist Bill Weinberg in a podcast review of the book. “So making excuses for Russian massive aerial bombardment of Syrian civilians as ‘defending an ally,’ and dismissing the Syrian revolutionaries as mere proxies in condescending manner—and, it’s not even accurate. The US was supporting (if indeed the reports of support to the rebels are to be believed, of which I am very skeptical) the Free Syrian Army—which was secular-nationalist and led by defectors from the Assad regime itself. And when al-Qaeda-linked elements later got involved in the conflict, with the formation of the Nusra Front, the US didn’t back them—the US bombed them. Not as aggressively as Russia was bombing the Free Syrian Army and its allies—but nonetheless bombed them. Not backed them. A reversal of reality.”
Code Pink has been just as aggressively and objectively pro-repression and murder in Ukraine. Benjamin talked to RT (Russia Today) commentator Chris Hedges to claim that NATO was “meddling” in Ukraine, that there were “a lot of CIA agents on the ground [in Ukraine],” that Ukrainians were “far right” neo-Nazis, and that in threatening the leader of a “powerful nuclear nation,” the world was courting a nuclear armageddon—all of them talking points straight out of Russia’s propaganda playbook.
Benjamin was supposed to speak at a Rage Against the War Machine rally of right-wing nuts and tankies (horseshoe theory!) like Jimmy Dore, Tara Reade, Kim Iverson, Jason Hinkle, Scott Ritter (who is also a convicted child sexual predator), and Max Blumenthal. However, pressure from her own people forced her to back out.
Don’t worry, she still attended, and she is still defending teaming up with the right wing, because, you know, horseshoe theory.
Now, they’ve decided that freakin’ Bernie is the enemy. How far gone do you have to be to make him a poster boy of the military industrial complex?
The replies to their arrest videos are a window into an alternate reality. Here’s a sampling:
“Bernie is an enemy of the people. Both foreign and domestic’ says the constitution. Treason”
“Bernie Sanders has completely sold out to the military industrial complex.”
“bernie sanders is a cuck”
“Bernie Sanders had eleven peace protestors arrested in the Capitol for daring to ask him to negotiate peace in Ukraine.The Military Industrial Complex only wants war, not peace.”
“Wow, what a complete and utter fall from grace by @SenSanders. It’s crazy I ever gave a cent of my money to this fraud.”
“Bernie has gone full fascist.”
It goes without saying that there is one country that can bring peace to Ukraine, and that is Russia. No one else can. The U.S. and Europe could quit their support today, and the war would continue much as it has since 2014. Russia won’t be satiated until it has brought Ukraine to heel, and Ukraine has the means to prevent that from happening indefinitely.
There is one way to end the war, and one way only: Give Ukraine what it needs now to decisively defeat Russia on the battlefield, so that Russia can’t hope for a second Donald Trump presidency to bail Vladimir Putin out.
That’s it.
The death toll is now 51. The town had a population of 330. This genocidal carnage is brought to you by the Republican Party and Code Pink.
This is downright cinematic:
As I watched Ukrainian armor pound Russian positions in a tree line, it struck me that the winter will help Ukraine. Right now, Russia is on the defensive, using foliage to camouflage their defensive positions in those ubiquitous tree lines. Winter will strip those trees of that camouflage, allowing Ukrainian artillery and drones to better eliminate Russian defenses.
And the mud? This is no longer an armor war, it’s an infantry and artillery one. Mud will only be tangentially relevant.
