Dissent, Protests Continue To Grow In Maine

UU Church members in Topsham, April 15, 2023

You meet the nicest people when you engage in peace building work. In fact, that’s how I met my husband twenty years ago, and we’re still at it.

Luke is a new friend while Regis and I have known each other for years. I appreciated this opportunity to talk about how the U.S. public perceives the U.S./NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine based on where they seek information, and how we’re bringing our messages of dissent to the general public on Saturdays in Maine.

Interested in learning more about anti-nuclear war ambassador Samantha Smith and her diplomacy with the U.S.S.R.? Check out her page and the educational project associated with her memory on the website Americans Who Tell The Truth.

Belfast, May 20, 2023

Throwing Rocks Under Russia’s Skates

When I was a kid, police knocked on my door in Los Angeles responding to a complaint by neighbors that I had attacked their son. I explained that the older boy had been throwing rocks under my skates repeatedly despite my demands that he stop. After my busy mother declined to intervene, I grabbed a curtain rod from my garage to make him stop. The police accepted my self-defense argument and went away.

The rock throwing stopped after that, for good.

My toddler grandson started at a new day care recently. The care provider told us that any time a child in her care feels threatened by another child coming too close or trying to grab a toy they’re playing with, she teaches the child to say “SPACE!” accompanied by an outstretched, talk-to-the-hand gesture. “It’s not a question,” she explained. “It’s a demand, and it needs to be respected.”

It seems to me, and to the U.S. intelligence veterans listed below their recent full page ad in the New York Times, that the Russian Federation has been demanding “SPACE!” with regards to NATO since the fall of the Soviet Union. In other words, for decades.

Alice Slater’s cogent response to the recent G7 summit held in Hiroshima as an ominous warning of continued U.S. nuclear belligerence included this reminder:

U.S. allies in nuclear crime include five NATO countries with U.S. nuclear bombs on their territory—Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Turkey—and Japan of all nations, ironically, under its nuclear umbrella which is abandoning its Peace Constitution under US pressure and will become a NATO affiliate instead of urging that all the G7 nations join the new Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons which they have all boycotted and rejected. [emphasis mine]

“The US leads the way in dishonoring its Non-Proliferation Treaty obligation for “good faith efforts” for nuclear disarmament and has never acted in “good faith”.

China is now also having rocks thrown under its skates in Taiwan and the South China Sea. Any response it makes beyond demanding “SPACE!” will be misrepresented in the corporate press most in the U.S. rely on, as a method of building the case for a proxy war on the Belt and Road Initiative leader now commanding the world’s economy.

The U.S. could not subdue insurgents in Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, but pretends it can win against military powers like Russia and China.

Nuclear weapons are likely to be the only way the U.S. could prevail over a Russia-China alliance currently supported by most of the Global South.

And the G7 met in nuclear victim city Hiroshima to remind us, not so subtly, of that grim fact.