OK, so I know I don’t exactly live in Sachsen, but I am in your minds a Putin-Freund and historically I have been oh so definitely a Fortschrittsfeind. Lash me, Sachsen Grüne Frauen! You know you want to. Make it hurt so good. You two are hot.

Reuters:

The Biden administration is willing to work with Congress to potentially impose sanctions against international criminal court officials over the prosecutor’s request for arrest warrants for Israeli leaders over the Gaza war, Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, said on Tuesday.

At a Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing, Republican Lindsey Graham told Blinken he wanted to see renewed US sanctions on the court in response to the move announced by ICC prosecutor Karim Khan on Monday.

“I want to take actions, not just words,” Graham said to Blinken. “Will you support [a] bipartisan effort to sanction the ICC, not only for the outrage against Israel but to protect, in the future, our own interest?”

“I welcome working with you on that,” Blinken said.

Ursula von der Leyen:

Georg Rammer, Ossietzky:

Die USA mobilisierten eine »hemmungslose Kriegspropaganda-Maschinerie« (Ulrike Guérot), und Deutschland und die EU folgten. Als wäre ein Damm gebrochen, entlud sich eine gewaltige Welle von Kriegspropaganda von Regierung, CDU/CSU und Leitmedien. Dabei handelte es sich nicht um (berechtigte) Verurteilung des russischen Überfalls, schon gar nicht um Suche nach Lösungsstrategien. In ihrer Radikalität und Emotionalität fegte die aufgeregte und aufpeitschende Stimmung jede vorsichtige Mahnung zur Deeskalation oder zum Denken in Kategorien gemeinsamer Sicherheit hinweg. Ein Überbietungs­wettbewerb an Putin-feindlichen Tiraden, eskalierenden Forderungen nach Lieferung immer schwererer Waffen brach los: Feindbilder schaffen, Krieg nach Russland tragen, EU-Atombombe stationieren. Wir müssen kriegstüchtig werden – inzwischen auch die Kinder. Eine Enthemmung, irrational und gefährlich.

Die aggressive Sprache in tendenziösen Nachrichten und Politikerstatements gleicht Hassbotschaften in digitalen Medien. Sie soll Stimmung erzeugen, ohne Rücksicht auf Konsequenzen und sachliche Richtigkeit; Russland soll als Feind gebrandmarkt und ruiniert werden. Baerbock, Kiesewetter, Habeck, Strack-Zimmermann, Hofreiter, Röttgen zielen nicht auf Information und diplomatische Lösungen, sie wollen die zögernde Bevölkerung mental aufputschen. In Nachrichten, Talkshows, Interviews und Zeitungsberichten bekommen die Militarismus-Prediger und -Predigerinnen reichlich Gelegenheit für ihre Kriegspropaganda: eine dröhnende Echokammer.

Michael Hardt & Sandro Mezzadra, New Left Review:

The incessant parade of armed confrontations, large and small, serve to prop up a militarized governance structure that takes different forms in different places, and is guided by a multi-level structure of forces, including the dominant nation-states, the supranational institutions and competing sectors of capital, which sometimes align and sometimes conflict.

Ω Ω Ω

In opposing the global war regime, calls for ceasefires and arms embargos are essential, but the present moment also demands a coherent internationalist politics. What is needed are coordinated practices of desertion through which people can depart radically from the status quo.

Ω Ω Ω

How can one desert such a variegated structure? Local and individual gestures have little effect. The conditions for an effective praxis must involve collective refusal organized in international circuits. The mass protests against the US invasion of Iraq, which took place in cities across the world on 15 February 2003, correctly identified the supranational formation of the war machine and announced the possibility of a new internationalist, anti-war actor. Though they failed to stop the assault, they created a precedent for future practices of mass withdrawal.

It must not be supposed that the officials in charge of education desire the young to become educated. On the contrary, their problem is to impart information without imparting intelligence. Education should have two objects: first, to give definite knowledge—reading and writing, languages and mathematics, and so on; secondly, to create those mental habits which will enable people to acquire knowledge and form sound judgments for themselves. The first of these we may call information, the second intelligence. The utility of information is admitted practically as well as theoretically; without a literate population a modern State is impossible. But the utility of intelligence is admitted only theoretically, not practically; it is not desired that ordinary people should think for themselves, because it is felt that people who think for themselves are awkward to manage and cause administrative difficulties. Only the guardians, in Plato’s language, are to think; the rest are to obey, or to follow leaders like a herd of sheep. This doctrine, often unconsciously, has survived the introduction of political democracy, and has radically vitiated all national systems of education.

—Bertrand Russell, Free Thought and Political Propaganda, Conway Memorial Lecture delivered on March 24, 1922.