Great tribute to Jackie Robinson across major league baseball yesterday. 75 years ago Jackie broke baseball’s color line. A moment to celebrate for sure, but also to take stock of where we are as a country in our journey down freedom road.

The peace and anti-imperialist movement will never get much of a hearing from the American people, as long as it spends more time critiquing Biden and NATO than unambiguously condemning Putin and the immoral, illegal, and indefensible Russian invasion of Ukraine.

It seems like Putin’s order to invade Russia rested on some flawed assumptions of his and his underlings. The first – and the biggest – was an underestimation of the fighting morale and capacity of the Ukrainian people. Another was the depth and spread of a distinct Ukrainian nationality since 2014. Still another the reaction of the countries, comprising NATO. Instead of setting them once against another, as Putin anticipated, the invasion drew them together in common purpose to oppose Russian invasion. A fourth assumption was a misreading of how negatively the world would react to Russia’s invasion and war crimes. Finally, the level of resistence in Russia to the invasion, despite state organized repression of protesters and tight control of the media, was greater than anticipated.

Some days the sun shines, social boundaries are crossed, and freedom and justice ring!

It’s peculiar that the peace movement in the US and Europe doesn’t call for the complete withdrawal of Russian troops from all Ukrainian territory. From what I see, its main demands are a ceasefire, negotiations, and de-escalation. All well and good, but, by themselves, they don’t get to the heart of this bloody war – Russian troops on Ukrainian territory. Why is that?