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The dismal conflict that erupted this week between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren should never have happened. But now that it has, supporters must provide grassroots leadership to mitigate the dangerous mess.

The argument that broke out between Warren and Sanders last weekend and escalated in recent days is already history that threatens to foreshadow tragedy. Progressives cannot afford to give any more aid and comfort to the forces behind corporate contenders Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, or the plutocratic $54 billion man Michael Bloomberg waiting in the wings.

In a sense, this moment calls for Sanders and Warren supporters to be better than their candidates, who’ve descended into an avoidably harsh conflict that hugely benefits corporate power and corporate Democrats -- and will do so even more to the extent that it doesn’t subside.

So much is at stake that Sanders and Warren must be called upon to look beyond their own anger, no matter how justified. A demolition derby between the two -- or their supporters -- won’t resolve who’s right. But it will help the right wing.

Why has the hash tag #CNNisTrash been popular since this week’s presidential primary debate? There was nothing new about the corporate, militarist, anti-progressive slant of the debate “moderation.” What was new was the level of blatant bias so extreme that even viewers who knew nothing about the issues couldn’t miss it, plus the amount of time CNN focused on expressing its hostility toward a single candidate, Bernie Sanders.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win . . . or so the saying goes. The Bernie Sanders campaign is well into stage 3 out of 4.

For a remarkably well-done, thoroughly realistic WWI battle scene, I hope that readers of this column will watch the 6 minute video: https://genius.com/Sabaton-the-price-of-a-mile-lyrics.

The video portrays a scene from World War I, in which German infantrymen defend against a French attack across No Man’s Land, The attack is “successfully” repelled (with French “surrender monkeys” eventually running away to their trenches), only to see the German “Master Race” soldiers foolishly counter-attack - going “over the top” - only to see the attack fail miserably, The final scene shows the Germans “running away” back to their trenches. Powerful imagery revealing the futility of war.

At the end of the video, the following quote appears, from Erich Maria Remarque, the author of “All Quiet on the Western Front”:

There really only is one option when it comes to nuclear weapons, and that is to do everything we can to abolish them before they abolish us. New York City Council will be voting on January 28, 2020, to do its part by voting on two measures that already have enough sponsors to give them veto-proof majorities.

One thing that becomes clear to me when I wander into the world, and the minds, of geopolitical professionals—government people—is how limited and linear their thinking seems to be.

When I do so, an internal distress signal starts beeping and won’t stop, especially when the issue under discussion is war and mass destruction, i.e., suicide by nukes, which has a freshly intense relevance these days as Team Trump plays war with Iran.

What doesn’t matter, apparently, is any awareness that we live in one world, connected at the core: that the problems confronting this planet transcend the fragmentary “interests” of single, sovereign entities, even if the primary interest is survival itself.

At a talk I delivered in Northern England in March 2018, I proposed that the best response to falsified accusations of antisemitism, which are often lobbed against pro-Palestinian communities and intellectuals everywhere, is to draw even closer to the Palestinian narrative.

In fact, my proposal was not meant to be a sentimental response in any way.

“Reclaiming the Palestinian narrative” has been the main theme in most of my public speeches and writings in recent years. All of my books and much of my academic studies and research have largely focused on positioning the Palestinian people - their rights, history, culture, and political aspirations - at the very core of any genuine understanding of the Palestinian struggle against Israeli colonialism and apartheid. 

Extended Excerpts (with some editing) from a Democracy Now! Interview with Retired Army Lt. Col Lawrence Wilkerson – January 13, 2020 (2436 words)

http://www.democracynow.org/2020/1/13/lawrence_wilkerson_american_empire_war

Bases, Demilitarization, Myth of Benefits, World

By David Swanson, Executive Director of World BEYOND War, January 15, 2020

South Korea cannot choose to make peace with North Korea without the consent of a foreign power that keeps thirty thousand troops in South Korea, makes South Korea pay much of the cost of housing them, commands the South Korean military in war, holds veto power at the United Nations, and is not accountable to the International Criminal Court or the International Court of Justice.

If one seriously seeks to understand how delusional policymakers in Washington are it is only necessary to examine the responses by the president and Congress to the assassination of Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani. The first response came in the form of a Donald Trump largely incoherent nine-minute self-applauding speech explaining what he had done and why. It was followed by a House of Representatives War Powers non-binding resolution that was all theater and did nothing to limit the president’s unilateral ability to go to war with the Islamic Republic.

At long last, Fatou Bensouda, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has uttered the long-anticipated conclusion that “all the statutory criteria under the Rome statute for the opening of an investigation (into alleged war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories) have been met”.

Bensouda’s verdict has been in the making for a long time and should, frankly, have arrived much earlier. The ICC preliminary investigations into Israeli war crimes began back in 2015. Since then, many more such war crimes have been committed, while the international community persisted in its moral inertia.