[Peace-discuss] More on people taken to be peaceful but stumped for war

[J.B. Nicholson]

Ben Norton (now independently of The Grayzone on his own channel, "Multipolarista") 
has a video -- https://youtube.com/watch?v=_QHoW8Vf8wg -- where he discusses "neocon 
'right-wing populism' scam" (Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and Glenn Greenwald are 
mentioned) with his guest Robbie Martin (https://twitter.com/FluorescentGrey) brother 
of Abby Martin (Empire Files).

Unfortunately the video is 2h 13m and doesn't get into presenting evidence until 40m 
in. The same topic, in different hands, would take far less time to present evidence 
of people from the recent past saying pro-war things or challenging obviously true 
things (such as Greenwald challenging Norton on .

There are good points made along the way. One of the themes is that almost all of the 
examples contain information how we shouldn't understand the people shown to be 
anti-war but stumping for different wars. Don't take someone who objects to one war 
(say, the US war against Russia via Ukraine) to be anti-war. They might object to one 
war and want war somewhere else; internecine conflicts within the ruling class and 
those who do the bidding of the ruling class exist.



Here's one example I found on Martin's tweets. All of the webpages listed below can 
be fed to yt-dlp for downloading and viewing offline if desired.

Tulsi Gabbard from July 27, 2014
https://www.msnbc.com/taking-the-hill/watch/should-us-be-involved-in-ukraine-conflict--312796739629 
in which over 1,000 Palestinians were killed.

These remarks were copied from the captions.

> IT'S SUCH A DIFFICULT AND HEARTBREAKING SITUATION FOR ALL OF US TO SEE WHAT IS
> HAPPENING THERE FOR THE PEOPLE ON BOTH SIDES WHO ARE BEING AFFECTED BY THIS
> CONFLICT. AND IT'S DIFFICULT TO SEE A WAY THROUGH IT BECAUSE YOU HAVE A SITUATION
> WHERE ISRAEL IS DEALING WITH THE TERRORIST ORGANIZATION WHOSE STATED MISSION IS TO
> OBLITERATE ISRAEL AND ISRAEL'S POSITION OF STANDING AND NEEDING TO DEFEND ITSELF
> AND ITS PEOPLE.
Then Rep. Gabbard goes on in this way in this show. She also brought up Ukraine's 
sovereignty and said that she said (remarks hand transcribed):

> We've gotta look at Russia's incursion on Ukraine, Ukraine sovereignty, and the
> fact that any conventional warfare tactics that Russia employs in invading Ukraine
> can't be countered by Ukraine; they can't go mano-a-mano on this. So we've gotta
> look to see what support we can give through taking action through very harsh
> financial and economic sanctions against Russia but also seeing what kind of
> military aid and training and equipment that we can provide to both the Ukrainian
> people but also the others -- Baltic states and others who are nearing Russia --
> so they can counter these conventional tactics with unconventional warfare because
> that's the only way that Russia will start to get the message that this is not
> something they're going to walk in the front door on without any cost to their own
> people and their own families.

Robbie Martin in https://twitter.com/FluorescentGrey/status/1524086636488773633
> a creepy reminder that in 2015 Tulsi Gabbard was not only trying to out-hawk Obama
> and Biden on Ukraine/Russia + was still being a total Israel apologist blaming
> massive Palestinian civilian casualties on Palestinian 'terrorists' not Israel

and in https://nitter.42l.fr/FluorescentGrey/status/1524087520576692224
> what continues to impress me about Tulsi's followers is that absolutely none of
> them hold her accountable for anything she said in the past, the clock 'starts'
> pretty much as soon as she 180'd into saying very generic boiler plate anti-war
> stuff
Which I found to be true as well, hence my own blog post about Gabbard's statements 
I've referred to here multiple times. Gabbard now says different things which sound 
more or less critical of US policy including the regime change war against Russia in 
https://youtube.com/watch?v=m8kHJ2-D5uA and https://youtube.com/watch?v=MTx6JCCESFI 
for example (Gabbard commented on Pres. Biden saying "For god's sake, this man 
[Putin] cannot remain in power" was no gaffe). In 
https://youtube.com/watch?v=pbk5KghrD3I she compared Biden/Harris' DHS publication 
vetting to be a "ministry of truth" comparable to what happens in dictatorships. 
Gabbard is out of power now, hence she's more free to be critical of policies chosen 
by the party to which she's clearly loyal.




There are mentions of other people in power -- Pete Buttigieg, for example -- and 
their neoconservative-supporting past but it's not clear where the information passed 
on to us comes from. It is disappointing because it doesn't take long to quote a post 
to twitter.com.

Norton & Martin make other allegations about talk show hosts (Tucker Carlson, Saagar 
Enjeti) and reporters (Matt Stoller, Glenn Greenwald) which I take to be less 
important because these people aren't in power. Rep. Gabbard whose comments above 
were made when she was in Congress. Some of the claims are far less compelling 
because the claims are raised without clips or pointers to published information. It 
would have been far better to gather the evidence, organize clips/posts by person, 
and present the themes afterwards.