Yesterday’s rally against the Trump administration in Washington, D.C., a vast and confused hodgepodge of liberal groups, snuck in one notable “progressive” demand: that Trump take his hands off NATO.

Since its founding, NATO has served as a belligerent enforcer of Western hegemony, one which fuels militarization, enforces neocolonial domination, and provokes global conflicts—from Yugoslavia to Ukraine—while serving arms dealers and empire.

Its post-Cold War expansion encircled Russia, violating past promises, and its illegal wars under “humanitarian” pretenses have devastated nations like Libya and Afghanistan.

Even if he wanted to, the figurehead Donald Trump would never be allowed to put his hands on NATO.

I also have to wonder, because this otherwise seems like a pretty ok protest, who snuck in the “NATO” part here, since in some other posters for this event it was actually not included:

    • Nakoichi [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      17 days ago

      Yeah I have a lot of experience with this indivisible group, they’re the fucking worst. A bunch of boomer wannabe activists.

  • RedCheer@lemmygrad.ml
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    17 days ago

    Lots of Ukraine and USA flags there. Liberals for sure. It was at best a popular front event. Agitate and recruit potentials to mass socialist organizations. That’s all.

    • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      17 days ago

      Lots of Ukraine and USA flags there.

      Okay, that sounds like it was even worse than i initially assumed. I thought someone just snuck in the NATO part on the poster, but apparently this was way more of a lib fest than i thought.

      I was looking up more about this event and saw a bunch of photos of people with signs calling Trump a “Putin puppet” and “Moscow agent”. That plus the Ukraine flags and the “we’re the real American patriots” flag-waving jingoism, makes apparent that the pro-NATO poster is not an accident at all but absolutely intentional.

      And the absence of pro-Palestinian messaging that others are also pointing out is a massive red flag that there is some co-opted bullshit going on here rather than genuine grassroots protest.

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    17 days ago

    Palestine also conspicuously missing. Indivisible has always been Democrats trying to dig in like a tick to co-opt and neutralize popular rage against the government. It’s trying to replicate the Obama campaign model of co-opting popular rage against Bush and the terror war, then neutralizing it from above to preserve all the policies people were fighting against.

    I was reading MSM articles yesterday that noted with confusion that these protests seem to skew much older than larger mass gatherings in recent memory, and seem to have more overt displays of “patriotism”. No mention of the students out here the whole time getting kidnapped off the street while every DNC-aligned institution cheered. No mention of the crackdowns on the popular uprisings against police brutality under Biden. No mention of all the people acquitted for shooting unarmed protestors in the past several years. I can’t imagine where young people would have gotten the idea that peacefully standing around an American flag respecting the sanctity of police, private property, and non-violence would be a waste of time at best and suicidal at worst.

    • Nakoichi [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      17 days ago

      Yeah I have been involved in local organizing and activism for a long time and the Indivisible folks are a relatively new development and are painfully obviously coopted from the start.

    • Rom [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      17 days ago

      And the media is entirely ignoring the Palestine rally and focusing on the “hands off” rally instead. Really curious that one of the points that the Palestine rally made was that the media is complicit in this genocide.

  • Alaskaball [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    17 days ago

    Sounded more like an active cooptation of the western-left organized anti-genocide protest that was scheduled to occur that day before the “hands off” shitlib thieves coincidentally chose the same day to Harry Potter army duck march themselves out to the streets

  • lorty@lemmy.ml
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    16 days ago

    Are we really surprised the vote blue no matter who crowd wants to rein in a bit of the protests?