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Professor Hixson has written numerous books, among them two books about the Israel Lobby: Israel’s Armor (2019) and Architects of Repression (2021). He is also a columnist and contributing editor for the magazine, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.  Q & A will follow Professor Hixson’s remarks.

This event is free and open to the public. Prior registration is requested.

Contact Mark Weber – 216-870-1594 – laboraction2000@gmail.com

Walter L. Hixson is a diplomatic and cultural historian and author of several books and articles primarily focused on American foreign relations. His books include Architects of Repression: How Israel and Its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of US Middle East Policy (Institute for Research: Middle East Policy, 2021); Israel’s Armor: The Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2019); American Settler Colonialism: A History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and US Foreign Policy (Yale University Press, 2008); Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961 (St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Witness to Disintegration: Provincial Life in the Last Year of the USSR (University Press of New England, 1993); George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast (Columbia University Press, 1989); and the textbook American Foreign Relations: A New Diplomatic History (Routledge, 2016). In 2020 Hixson retired as distinguished professor at the University of Akron.

This hybrid program, on Zoom and at Parma Public Library, should not be missed. It powerfully deconstructs the seemingly unwitting way the U.S. keeps waging wars.

Mainstream media narratives of Middle East conflicts are often false or incomplete. Even as the U.S. “withdraws” from the region, the extent and depth of its Middle East presence and influence is profound. Our presenter Oliver Boyd-Barrett will discuss how U.S. military and covert presence in the region (with particular reference to Syria and Iran) continues to seriously damage both the region and U.S. long-term interests.

Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Professor Emeritus at Bowling Green University, is an expert on communications, media, and U.S. foreign policy and how taxpayers, Congress, and other world leaders are manipulated into supporting war and occupation around the world. Boyd-Barrett has written or edited some 25 books and 150 scholarly articles. Here’s his bio

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Steve Cagan’s very informative talk last night got me to thinking. He mentioned that the United States was less of a presence in Colombia now than in years past. In the early 2000’s there was in South America what journalists dubbed the “pink tide.” In countries like Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, and Venezuela socialist or left populists came to power. Most famous was the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela led by Hugo Chavez. The United States feared that Colombia might be “lost” as well. Insurgent forces in Colombia controlled almost half of the country. I think these were mainly the FARC and the ELN, the two largest groups of insurgents at that time. The United States was determined to keep Colombia as an ally. U.S. representatives worked with then President Uribe (elected in 2002). The result was an agreement called Plan Colombia coupled with counterinsurgency training, which resulted in a spike in U.S. assistance making Colombia the highest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel. With an increase in military aid and funds for aerial  spraying of some coca growers in the remote parts of the country, Colombia moved much closer to the top of the U.S. strategic priority list. The aerial spraying program was and continues to be a failure.

However, Plan Colombia called for and Uribe implemented a kind of “militarization” of the entire country. This partly resulted in turning the tide in the ongoing civil war with the insurgents led by the FARC. In 2012, the U.S. Congress passed the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement and then in 2016, the Colombian Government under the successor to Uribe, President Santos, signed a “peace agreement” with the FARC. In Washington, Colombia was seen as being on the road to “normalization.” In addition the “pink tide” has now receded with right-wing victories in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and in Colombia as Uribe’s puppet, Ivan Duque, succeeded Santos after narrowly beating a leftist candidate who was once a member of the insurgent group M-19. In addition, the ongoing economic and political crisis in Venezuela has taken Colombia out of the political spotlight. Of course, as Steve’s presentation powerfully asserted: Colombia remains an unhappy land with a decline in insurgent fighting but with a rise in targeted killings and other forms of localized violence against citizens whose only agenda is a better life.

Colombia, a South American nation of about 43 million people is seldom in the news. It is a beautiful country endowed with a biodiversity exceeded only by that of Brazil. However, it is a nation with the worst human rights record in the world. More targeted killings occur in Colombia than the rest of the world combined. Together, an oligarchy of the military, the large landowners, the church, narco-traffickers,  and conservative business elite run the country through a combination of selective enforcement of the law and outright intimidation up to and including murder. Colombia is a worn-torn nation that has just emerged from a 55-year-old civil war with several insurgent groups…Most notably the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the National Liberation Front (ELN).

In 2016, then President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia signed a “peace agreement” with the FARC. Now almost three years since the signing of the treaty, violence has increased in the rural areas of Colombia due to a demand for a return to targeted killings by the new right-wing president, Ivan Duque. Since the treaty, more than 150 former insurgents, who laid down their arms, have been assassinated. On another front, even though the U.S. and Colombia signed a “labor plan of action” to help protect workers in Colombia, the rate of murder of trade unionists continues and has actually gotten worse. Since 2016, 180 trade union workers or organizers have been murdered or have disappeared. Another oppressed sector of the Colombian economy is the campesino or small farmer. Activists who champion  the rights of small producers have received death threats and close to one hundred have been killed or are listed as “missing.”

From May 25-June 3, I participated in a Witness For Peace/Solidarity Collective delegation to Colombia. We spent most of our  time in the Department of Cauca in Southwest Colombia not far from the border with Ecuador. Using the city of Popoyan as a base, we met with victims of state violence…. campesinos, trade unionists and Afro-Colombians. We journeyed into the mountains to make contact with former FARC insurgents who have given up their guns but who are under regular attack by right-wing para-military groups (death squads) who carry out targeted killings on behalf of the oligarchy. We also visited campesinos who grow Coca and Cannabis because they cannot make a living growing “normal” crops such as corn, sugar cane, or yucca. Aerial spraying of their fields by the Colombian government (but funded by the United States) has destroyed their legal crops, killed farm animals, and sickened children Since the fields of the large narco-traffickers are not sprayed because of their political influence within the oligarchy, the so-called war on drugs amounts to a war on poor people. 

This was my sixth trip to Colombia and my fifth to the Department of Cauca in southwest Colombia. In all sectors of the population (except the elite) the level of violence has increase even though the government is supposedly “at peace” with the FARC insurgents.

I would argue that all U.S. aid to Colombia should be suspended until the Colombian government honors both the terms and conditions of the Labor Plan of Action (2012), to protect workers and the terms of the 2016 peace treaty with the FARC so that peace and stability can be restored to a nation that has been at war since the early 1960’s.

peaceactioncleveland.org

Contact: Mark Weber  –  216.870.1594 –  laboraction2000@gmail.com

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Statement from Cleveland Peace Action on Provocative U.S. Actions Toward Venzuela and Iran

 The United States is trying to orchestrate a coup to oust socialist President Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela and install a pro-U.S. regime headed by Juan Guaido.  Guaido has already called for U.S. military intervention in Venezuela. He has declared himself to be “interim president” and openly courts a military attack on his country.

At the same time, the United States is dispatching warships to the Middle East to threaten Iran. Pressured by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, the U.S. government is weighing its military options. The Trump Administration has systematically alienated the government in Tehran beginning with the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear treaty negotiated during the Obama Administration.

 Neoconservative foreign policy adviser John Bolton is championing BOTH regime change in Venezuela and an attack on Iran or Iranian interests.

Cleveland Peace Action demands that the United States keep its hands off Venezuela and that there be no war with Iran. #

Cleveland Peace Action regrets the deaths of four U.S. citizens including two servicemen, one Department of Defense civilian, and one contractor, who were killed in a bomb blast in northern Syria on Wednesday, January 16, 2019. The U.S. should never have stationed troops in Syria without congressional approval and with “regime change” as its goal. It was under the Obama Administration that military supervisors were first placed in Syria for that very purpose and promoting the interests of Israel: to contain Syria’s benefactor, Iran, and to deter Iran from gaining nuclear parity with Israel’s clandestine nuclear arsenal. At some point, the official stated purpose for U.S. intervention in Syria shifted from “Assad must go” to a battle against the Islamic State of Iraq (ISIL or ISIS). Arbitrary and shifting justifications for military action are a recipe for endless war.

Cleveland Peace Action welcomes the announcement by the Trump Administration that U.S. troops will be withdrawn from Syria by mid 2019. We concur with National Peace Action’s statement https://www.peaceaction.org/2018/12/19/trump-is-right-to-withdraw-from-syria-should-also-step-up-diplomacy-and-aid/
that “President Trump is right to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria. President Obama deployed U.S. soldiers to Syria in violation of international law, and the ongoing U.S. presence there only serves to prolong the war and fuel the risk of confrontation with Russia, Iran, and other parties to the conflict.” 

The U.S. should contribute to a better future for the people of Syria by releasing funds for reconstruction and humanitarian aid. The Trump Administration should also rethink its anti-refugee policies – increase the number of refugees allowed into the United States rather than continuing to deny Syrians fleeing violence that the U.S. helped inflame.
The Trump Administration should also begin withdrawal of U.S. forces from the 17-year-old war in Afghanistan, and from the disastrous Saudi-led war in Yemen. The U.S. has been feeding rapacious wars for decades, wasting trillions of dollars and costing countless lives, with no benefit to the general population. We need a security strategy that employs cooperation and diplomacy to work for international justice and peace. The new Congress should reclaim its authority on peace and war so that these critical decisions are deliberated by our elected representatives and not left to one person.

Physics Professor Bill Fickinger explains what we can do to avoid nuclear war

Don Bryant answers in this one minute video.