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Category: Cold War

  • Today’s Emergencies Act, and Anti-Russian False Flags Echo the Gouzenko Hoax That Unleashed the Cold War

    Today, a new coordinated psychological operation has been sprung to convince every living patriot across the Five Eyes sphere of influence that the enemy of the free world who lurks behind every conspiracy to overthrow governments, and western values are Russia and China.

    Over the past months, slanderous, and often conjectural stories of Chinese and Russian subversion have repeatedly been fed to a gullible western audience desperate for an enemy image to attach to their realization that an obvious long-term conspiracy has been unleashed to destroy their lives. While the left has been fed with propaganda designed to convince them that this enemy has taken the form of the Kremlin, the conservative consumers of media have been fed with the narrative that the enemy is China.

    The reality is that both Russia and China together have a bond of principled survival upon which the entire multipolar order is based. It is this alliance which the actual controllers of today’s empire wish to both destroy and ensure no western nation joins… especially not the USA.

    Every day we read that secret lists of millions of Chinese communist party members have infiltrated western national governments or that espionage honey pots have targeted politicians, or Russia is subverting western democracies, and preparing false flags to invade its neighbors.

    In all cases, the stories pumped out by mainstream media rags reek of 1) Five Eyes propaganda psy-op techniques, and often unverified accusations, while 2) deflecting from the actually verifiable British Intelligence tentacles caught repeatedly shaping world events, regime change, infiltration, assassination and conspiracies for over a century including the push to overthrow Trump under a color revolution.

    Among the most destructive of these conspiracies orchestrated by British Intelligence during the past century was the artificial creation of the Cold War which destroyed the hopes for a multipolar world of win-win collaboration guided by a U.S.-China-Russia alliance as envisioned by FDR and Henry Wallace.

    When reviewing how this perversion of history was manufactured, it is important to hold firmly in mind the parallels to the current anti-China/anti-Russian operations now underway.

    Cold War Battle Lines are Drawn

    Historians widely acknowledge that the actual catalyst for the Cold War occurred not on March 5, 1946, but rather on September 5, 1945. It was at this moment that a 26-year-old cipher clerk left the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa with a list of code names for supposed spies planted within the British, Canadian and American governments controlled by the Kremlin. In total this young defector took telegram notes attributed to his boss Colonel Zabotin and 108 other strategic documents that supposedly proved the existence of this Soviet conspiracy to the world for the first time.

    The young clerk’s name was Igor Gouzenko, and the scandal that emerged from his defection not only created one of the greatest abuses of civil liberties in Canadian history, but a sham trial based on little more than hearsay and conjecture. In fact, when the six microfilms of evidence were finally declassified in 1985, not a single document turned out be worthy of the name (more to be said on that below).

    The outcome of the Gouzenko Affair resulted in the collapse of all U.S.-Canada-Russia alliances that had been fostered during fires of anti-fascist combat of WWII.

    Voices like Henry Wallace (former Vice-President under FDR) watched the collapse of potential amidst the anti-Communist hysteria and sounded the alarm loudly saying:

    Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.

    In “Soviet Mission Asia,” Wallace revealed the true agenda for the conspiracy that would infiltrate nation states of the west and orchestrate the next 75 years of history saying:

    Before the blood of our boys is scarcely dry on the field of battle, these enemies of peace try to lay the foundation for World War III. These people must not succeed in their foul enterprise. We must offset their poison by following the policies of Roosevelt in cultivating the friendship of Russia in peace as well as in war.

    This fight against those actual top-down controllers of fascism whom Wallace had bravely put into the spotlight would sadly not prove successful. Between 1945 and the collapse of Wallace’s Progressive Party USA presidential bid in 1948, those strongest anti-Cold War voices both in the USA and in Canada were promptly labelled “Russian agents” and saw their reputations, careers and freedoms destroyed under the CIA-FBI managed spectre of the Red Scare and later McCarthyism. In Canada, Wallace’s Progressive Party co-thinkers took the form of the Labor Progressive Party (LPP) then led by Member of Parliament Fred Rose, LPP leader Tim Buck and LPP National Organizer Sam Carr — all three would represent the anti-Cold War fight to save FDR’s vision in Canada and all of whom would figure prominently in the story of Igor Gouzenko.

    The Gouzenko Hoax Kicks Off

    When Prime Minister King heard those claims made by Gouzenko, he knew that it threatened the post war hopes for global reconstruction and for this reason was very hesitant to make the unverifiable claims public for many months or even offer the defector sanctuary for that matter.

    After the story was eventually strategically leaked to American media, anti-communist hysteria skyrocketed forcing King to establish the Gouzenko Espionage Royal Commission on February 5, 1946 under Privy Council Order 411. Earlier Privy Council Order 6444 had already been passed extending the War Measures Act beyond the end of the war and permitting for detention incommunicado, psychological torture and removing Habeus Corpus of all those who would be accused of espionage.

    By February 15, 1946 the first 15 targets were arrested and held for weeks in isolation in Ottawa’s Rockliffe Military Barracks without access to family or legal counsel. All those arrested without charge suffered weeks of psychological torture, sleep deprivation and were put on suicide watch with no communication with anyone but inquisitors from the Royal Commission. Both Judges who presided over the show trial were rewarded with Orders of Canada and were made Supreme Court Justices in the wake of the affair.

    With a complete disregard for any notion of civil liberties (Canada still had no Bill of Rights), lead counsel E.K. Williams blatantly argued for the creation of the Royal Commission “because it need not be bound by the ordinary rules of evidence if it considers it desirable to disregard them. It need not permit counsel to appear for those to be interrogated by or before it”.

    During the show trial, none of the defendants were allowed to see any evidence being used against them and everyone involved including RCMP officers were threatened with 5 years imprisonment for speaking about the trial publicly. The only person who could speak and write boundlessly to the media was the figure of Igor Gouzenko himself. Whenever appearing on TV or in court, Gouzenko who was to charge over $1000 for some interviews and received generous book deals, and government pensions for life, always appeared masked in a paper bag on his head. Even though this cipher clerk never actually met any of the figures standing trial, his testimony against them was treated like gold.

    By June 27, 1946 the Royal Commission released its final 733 page report which, along with Gouzenko’s own books, became the sole unquestionable gospel used and re-used by journalists, politicians and historians for the next decades as proof of the vast Russian plot to undermine western values and steal atomic secrets. There was, in fact, nowhere else to go for a very long time if a researcher wished to figure out what actually occurred.

    As it so happened, all trial records were either destroyed or “lost” in the days after the commission disbanded, and if people wanted to look at the actual evidence they would have to wait 40 years when it was finally declassified.

    The result of the trials?

    By the end of the whole sordid affair, 10 of the 26 arrested were convicted and imprisoned for anywhere from 3-7 years. While these convictions are themselves often cited as “proof” that the Gouzenko evidence must have been valid, on closer inspection we find that this is merely the effect of a game of smoke and mirrors.

    It must first be noted that of the 10 found guilty, not one indictment or conviction of espionage was found. Instead, five defendants were found guilty of assisting in the acquisition of fake passports during the 1930s which were used by Canadian volunteers to fight with the MacKenzie-Papineau Battalions in the Spanish Civil War against Franco’s fascist coup while the other five were convicted of violating Canada’s Official Secrets Act during WWII entirely on Gouzenko’s testimony. The other 16 targets were released without ever having been charged of a crime. The two leaders of the supposed spy ring that received the longest sentences were Labor Progressive Party leaders Fred Rose and Sam Carr who had been the loudest advocates of FDR’s international New Deal and the exposure of the financial sponsors of fascism that aimed at world empire (more to be said on this in an upcoming report).

    When the Gouzenko evidence was finally declassified in 1985, Canadian journalist William Reuben wrote a fascinating analysis called “The Documents that Weren’t There” where he noted the absence of anything one could reasonably call “evidence” among the thousands of items.

    After spending weeks investigating the six reels of declassified microfilm, Reuben found only what could be described as “a hodgepodge, reminiscent of one of Professor Irwin Corey’s double talk monologues”.

    Listing the vast array of telephone directories from 1943, RCMP profiles, lists of travel expense vouchers and passport applications, Reuben asked:

    What is one to make of this jumble? With no indication as to when any of the exhibits were obtained by the RCMP, how they related to espionage or any wrongdoing and for the most part, no indication of when they were placed in evidence at the hearings it is impossible to determine their significance, authenticity or relationship to other evidence.

    In short, not a single piece of actual evidence could be found.

    Additionally when reviewing the 8 handwritten telegrams of Russian notes outlining the spy code names and instructions from the Kremlin which Gouzenko originally took from his embassy in 1945, no forensic evidence was ever attempted to match the handwriting with Colonel Zubatov to whom it was attributed and who always denied the accusation.

    Reuben goes further to ask where are the 108 secret documents that Gouzenko famously stole and upon which the entire case against the accused spies was based? These documents were not part of the declassified microfilms, and so he noted: “as with the eight telegrams, there is no physical evidence to prove that the originals existed or came from the Soviet Embassy”.

    He also asked the valid question why it was only on March 2, 1946 (six months after Gouzenko’s defection) that any mention was made of the 108 documents?

    Could the lack of evidence and the long gap in time be related to Gouzenko’s five and a half month stay at Ottawa’s Camp X spy compound under the control of Sir William Stephenson before his defection was made public? Could those apparent 108 documents used by Gouzenko’s dodgy dossier have anything to do with the Camp X Laboratory which specialized in forging letters and other official documents?

    If you find yourself thinking about the parallels of this story to the more recent case of the Brookings Institute’s Igor Danchenko who was found to be the “source” of the dodgy dossiers used to create RussiaGate by MI6’s Christopher Steele, Richard Dearlove and Rhodes Scholar Strobe Talbott, then don’t be shocked. It means you are using your brain.

    What was Camp X?

    Camp X was the name given to the clandestine operations training center in the outskirts of Ottawa Canada on December 6, 1941.

    It was created by the British Security Cooperation (BSC) headed by Sir William Stephenson- a spymaster who worked closely with Winston Churchill. BSC was created in New York in 1940 as a covert operation set up by the British Secret Service and MI6 to interface with American intelligence. Since the USA was still neutral in the war, Camp X was used to train the Special Operations Executive, as well as agents from FBI’s Division 5 and OSS in the arts of psychological warfare, assassination, espionage, counter-intelligence, forgeries and other forms of covert action.

    The leadership cadre that was to survive the purge of OSS in October 1945 and go on to lead the new CIA when it was formed in 1947 were all trained in Camp X.

    In his book Camp X: OSS, Intrepid and the Allies’ North American Training Camp for Secret Agents, historian David Stafford notes that Gouzenko’s attempts to contact media and government offices on the night of September 5, 1945 were met with cold shoulders and even Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King himself wanted nothing to do with the man, writing in his diary: “if suicide took place let the city police take charge and secure whatever there was in the way of documents, but on no account for us to take the initiative.”

    It was only due to the combined direct intervention of Stephenson and Norman Robertson (head of External Affairs and leading Rhodes Scholar) after an emergency meeting, that King was persuaded to give Gouzenko sanctuary. King had not even known about Camp X’s purpose at the time.

    While King wished to defend FDR’s vision for a post-war world of cooperation with Russia, Stafford notes:

    Stephenson vigorously opposed King’s view. Like SIS headquarters in London, BSC (British Security Cooperation) for most of the war had operated a counter espionage section to keep an eye on Communist subversion… he was convinced, even before the Gouzenko affair, that BSC could provide the nucleus of a post-war intelligence organization in the Western Hemisphere. The cipher clerk’s defection provided him a golden opportunity. 1

    Canadian Journalist Ian Adams had reported that Gouzenko’s “defection came at a wonderful time when there was tremendous resistance from the scientists involved in developing the atomic bomb. They wanted to see an open book on the development of nuclear power with everybody collaborating so that it wouldn’t become the ungodly arms race that it did become and is today. So if Gouzenko hadn’t fallen into the western intelligence services’ lap, they would have had to invent somebody like him.”

    A Final Word on the Real Infiltration of Western Governments

    As Henry Wallace and FDR understood all too well, the real subversive threat to world peace was not the Soviet Union, or China… but rather the supranational financial-intelligence-military architecture that represented the globally extended British Empire that had orchestrated the dismemberment of Russia during the Crimean War, the USA during the Civil War and China during two Opium Wars. This was and is the enemy of the Labour Progressive Party of Canada that took the form of the Fabian Society CCF run by 6 Rhodes Scholars and it was this Rhodes Scholar/Round Table agency that was resisted by Canadian nationalists O.D. Skelton and Ernest Lapointe, and which fully took over Canada’s foreign ministry with their deaths in 1941.

    This story was told in my Origins of the Deep State in North America.

    This same hive of Rhodes Scholars and Fabians increasingly took control of American foreign policy with the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the ouster of Wallace and the rise of the new Anglo-American Special Relationship manufactured by Churchill, Stephenson and their lackies in the USA. This is the beast that infiltrated and undermined labor unions across the Five Eyes during the Cold War and ensured that pesky patriots like Paul Robeson, John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and many others who resisted, would not be long for this world.

    This is the structure whose hands have shown themselves time and again behind the dodgy dossiers that started the Iraq War, to the false intelligence used to justify wars in Libya, and Syria. It is the same structure which has been caught managing the regime change in the USA since 2016 with its assets cooking up dodgy dossiers accusing Russia of putting their puppet into the White House, to orchestrating mass vote fraud in the elections of 2020.

    This is the same operation which has always aimed at dismembering the USA, Russia, China and every other nation state who may at any time utilize the power of their sovereignty to declare political and economic independence from this supranational parasite and choose to work together to establish a world of win-win cooperation rather than tolerate a new technocratic feudal dark age.

    • First published in Matt Ehret’s Insights

    1. Stephenson immediately flew two of his top SIS officials in from the BSC HQ in New York to manage the Gouzenko affair for the next 8 months: Peter Dwyer (head of counter-espionage for BSC) and Jean-Paul Evans. Evans is an interesting figure whose SIS successor was none other than triple agent Kim Philby who replaced him when he left his post as British liaison to the FBI and CIA in 1949. Evans himself went onto work with leading Round Table controller and soon Governor General Vincent Massey in the creation of a new system of promoting the arts in Canada pouring millions of dollars into modernist/abstract art, music and drama under the Canada Council which grew out of the Massey-Levesque Royal Commission for the Arts in Canada. This body founded in 1957 took over the reins of control from the CIA and Rockefeller Foundations who had formerly enjoyed a near monopoly sponsoring such things as part of the post-WWII cultural war against communism. Stafford notes that “the man who impressed Ottawa with his love of the arts had also played an important part in the history of Anglo-Canadian secret intelligence.”
    The post Today’s Emergencies Act, and Anti-Russian False Flags Echo the Gouzenko Hoax That Unleashed the Cold War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • President JFK’s Murder Is Graphic Proof of Entrenched Cold War Ideology and Why Peace Eludes U.S.-Russia Relations

    The Cold War is back with a vengeance. The current impasse between the United States and Russia over the Ukraine crisis is running the risk of an all-out war in Europe, a war that could escalate into nuclear Armageddon. The crisis is wholly manufactured by Washington’s geopolitical power calculations – claims made against Russia about planning to invade Ukraine are baseless if not absurd. The impasse reflects an impoverishment of diplomacy and respect for international law, and a reckless tendency to militarize bilateral relations. This is the manifestation of Cold War thinking, primarily on the U.S. side.

    In the following interview, Martin Schotz, a respected Massachusetts-based author on the assassination of President John F Kennedy, explores the systematic basis for Cold War logic. He contends that the United States’ political class is locked in an entrenched Cold War mentality that serves its hyper-militarized economy. Cold War politics necessitates conflict and war in international relations, which is all too clearly demonstrated by the present crisis over Ukraine between the U.S. and Russia.

    The depth of this Cold War logic of the accompanying national security state is illustrated by the shocking murder of President John F Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. His murderers and the institutional coverup that followed were motivated by Kennedy’s growing opposition to the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The fact of JFK’s murder and the systematic denial by media is an indication of how deeply engrained Cold War thinking is in the American political establishment. That embedded logic explains why U.S. relations with Russia continue to be dominated by seemingly irrational hostility. Why do peaceful relations seem so elusive, so relentlessly thwarted? Is it really because of malign Russians?

    The inability of the Biden administration, or any U.S. administration for that matter, to conduct normal, peaceful, diplomatic relations with Russia within the bounds of the UN Charter and international law is down to the intransigent Cold War logic of the American imperial state. More than 58 years after the brutal murder of Kennedy, the imperial state persists more than ever as can be seen in the reckless hostility by Washington towards Moscow, as well as towards Beijing, Tehran, Havana, Bogota and others designated as “enemies” of presumed U.S. hegemony.

    Martin Schotz co-authored the seminal book History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy (1996). It is widely acclaimed as a definitive record of how and why the state murdered Kennedy.

    Schotz, MD, retired, previously practiced psychiatry in Boston. He has a BA in Mathematics from Carleton College, and an MD from the University of Pennsylvania. Following training in Adult and Child Psychiatry at Boston University Medical Center, he was a graduate student in the University Professors Program at Boston University. In addition to practicing psychiatry, he is a playwright, essayist, short story writer, and amateur jazz drummer.

    He writes for the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord, as well as Massachusetts Peace Action. A recent article is entitled “Understanding and Resisting the New Cold War”.

    An important theme for Schotz is the political and societal effects on the United States from the mass denial that continues in relation to Kennedy’s murder. From his 1996 book cited above is this profound insight which is as relevant today as it ever was:

    As citizens who have turned away for thirty years [now nearly sixty years] from the truth of the murder of our elected head of state, we should not be surprised that today we find our nation in intellectual, political, and moral chaos. Confronting the truth of President Kennedy’s assassination and its coverup is but one small step on a long path out of that chaos and toward healing, a path along which we must confront the true nature of our democracy and the reality of what our nation has become for its own citizens and for people throughout the world. Such a process of healing is not pleasant. It is a difficult and painful path, but it is a necessary one. History will not absolve us.

    Interview

    Finian Cunningham: You are a long-time observer of Cold War politics between the United States and the former Soviet Union. How would you compare the current deterioration and tensions in relations between the U.S.-led Western states and Russia?

    Martin Schotz: I’m afraid, if anything, I would say matters are worse because of the deterioration of conditions in the United States. On the one hand, we have the ever-growing control of the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Think Tank Complex. Both major parties are wedded to the military establishment and espouse Cold War propaganda with little dissent. When you combine this with the weakening influence of the liberal establishment and the growing openly fascist movement that combines the Republican Party and white supremacy there seems to be tremendous potential for instability in this country. The peace movement, such as it is, needs to reach out for support and allies wherever it can. And we need to keep in mind Martin Luther King Junior’s concept of “agape”, that is, faith in the capacity of your enemy to be transformed.

    FC:  The Cold War was supposed to have ended nearly 30 years ago with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Why do you think it persists three decades on in the form of fraught and hostile relations between Washington and Moscow?

    MS: In my opinion, it is a myth that the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Cold War from the beginning was always about U.S./Western hegemony. No other system can be permitted to exist that might be an alternative to the capitalist system. When the Soviet Union collapsed, somehow Cuba didn’t. And because Cuba represents another way – another economic and political system, true national sovereignty, etc., – the U.S. continued to demonize Cuba and kept its embargo intact. To me, this is evidence that the Cold War didn’t end. At the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it wasn’t so clear what direction China would be moving in. And the Cold Warriors probably thought they might be able to bring China into the U.S.-dominated capitalist system. Of course, they assumed that Russia would be part of the system with Yeltsin and his successors. But when China decided to pursue its own course and Russia re-emerged under Vladimir Putin, the Cold War, which had been up to then somewhat quiet, suddenly flared up again. There is a quote from prominent Cold War diplomat and historian George Kennan from the 1980s in which he deplored the establishment’s negative view of the USSR that could be written today. All you have to do is take the passage and substitute “Russia” for “Soviet Union”. Here is a long quote from Kennan’s book The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age (1982):

    I find the view of the Soviet Union that prevails today in large portions of our governmental and journalistic establishments so extreme, so subjective, so far removed from what any sober scrutiny of external reality would reveal, that it is not only ineffective but dangerous as a guide to political action.

    This endless series of distortions and oversimplifications; this systematic dehumanization of the leadership of another great country; this routine exaggeration of Moscow’s military capabilities and of the supposed iniquity of Soviet intentions: this monotonous misrepresentation of the nature and the attitudes of another great people – and a long-suffering people at that, sorely tried by the vicissitudes of this past century; this ignoring of their pride, their hopes – yes, even of their illusions (for they have their illusions, just as we have ours, and illusions too, deserve respect); this reckless application of the double standard to the judgment of Soviet conduct and our own, this failure to recognize, finally, the communality of many of their problems and ours as we both move inexorably into the modern technological age: and the corresponding tendency to view all aspects of the relationship in terms of a supposed total and irreconcilable conflict of concerns and of aims; these, I believe, are not the marks of the maturity and discrimination one expects of the diplomacy of a great power; they are the marks of an intellectual primitivism and naivety unpardonable in a great government. I use the word naivety, because there is the naivety of cynicism and suspicion, just as there is the naivety of innocence.

    And we shall not be able to turn these things around as they should be turned, on the plane of military and nuclear rivalry, until we learn to correct these childish distortions – until we correct our tendency to see in the Soviet Union only a mirror in which we look for the reflection of our own virtue – until we consent to see there another great people, one of the world’s greatest, in all its complexity and variety, embracing the good with the bad, a people whose life, whose views, whose habits, whose fears and aspirations, whose successes and failures, are the products, just as ours are the products, not of any inherent iniquity but of the relentless discipline of history, tradition, and national experience. If we insist on demonizing these Soviet leaders – on viewing them as total and incorrigible enemies, consumed only with their fear and hatred of us and dedicated to nothing other than our destruction – that, in the end, is the way we shall assuredly have them, if for no other reason than that our view of them allows for nothing else, either for them or for us.

    FC: As the author yourself of a ground-breaking book on the assassination of President John F Kennedy, you argue that he was murdered by powerful U.S. state elements precisely because Kennedy was beginning to seriously challenge Cold War policies. Can you elaborate on some of the peace initiatives that he was embarking on with his Soviet counterparts?

    MS: Kennedy went through a gradual and ultimately radical transformation over the three years of his presidency. He initially as a senator had made a speech against colonialism that had raised some eyebrows, but during the campaign for the presidency, he seemed to be attacking Nixon from the right. Eisenhower as he was leaving office had warned of the growing influence of the military-industrial complex, and once Kennedy was in office it didn’t take long before he began to tangle with the CIA and the military. His refusal to allow U.S. forces to rescue the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961 was the first example. He tried to fire Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, over Dulles’ deceit in the incident. But as David Talbot’s book on Dulles, The Devil’s Chessboard, demonstrates in great detail Dulles, in fact, continued to meet with his associates even though Kennedy had officially removed him as director of the agency. Then you had a little-known agreement signed between a representative of Kennedy and a representative of then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev known as the McCloy-Zorin Agreement. This outlined a plan for complete worldwide disarmament in stages. It was brought to the UN and unanimously endorsed by the UN General Assembly. At the time, I am not sure how seriously Kennedy took this agreement. But you also have at this time the private correspondence that Kennedy and Khrushchev were conducting, which allowed them to get a better understanding of each other out of public view. Then you have the Cuban Missile Crisis during October 1962. The pressure on Kennedy to launch a war against Cuba and possibly a first strike on the Soviet Union was enormous. But he resisted, showing great independence, and was able to resolve the crisis by negotiating with Khrushchev. That crisis was a real turning point. Kennedy saw how callous his military advisors were to the possibility of millions of deaths in a war. The turning point was quite radical. At this stage, I think the McCloy-Zorin Agreement really started to mean something. Kennedy was reportedly pressing his aides for plans for general disarmament in stages. Then in June 1963, you have the American University speech. This speech was a profound attempt on the part of the president to start educating the American people on the subject of world peace. To me it is perhaps the greatest speech by an American president and the principles articulated in that speech are universal and eternal. Those principles of mutual peace and coexistence, disarmament and an end to militarism, are as relevant today as ever.

    FC: You have pointed to the bold declaration of peace by Kennedy in the American University speech in Washington DC on June 10, 1963, as a watershed moment. In that 27-minute address, President Kennedy talked about the pursuit of peace and an end to futile Cold War animosity. Do you think that was the moment he signed his own death warrant in the eyes of U.S. political enemies?

    MS: After the speech was delivered, Khrushchev was so impressed by it that he had it reprinted throughout the Soviet Union, so virtually every Soviet citizen knew about it. That is something that needs to happen in the United States today. Amongst other things, Kennedy announced in the speech a moratorium on nuclear testing in the atmosphere and followed it by negotiating a test ban treaty. Though the U.S. public opinion was initially solidly against the treaty, Kennedy’s organizing and speeches won people over and the treaty was approved by the Senate. So you have here a leader, the president of the United States who is really part of the establishment and has someone like John McCloy working on the one hand and he has Norman Cousins working with him on the other hand. McCloy was as establishment as you can get, and Cousins was one of the founders of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. Cousins was Kennedy’s personal emissary between himself, Pope John XXIII and Khrushchev. Cousins’ book, The Improbable Triumvirate, is an important record of what was going on in 1963. Cousins was a co-author of the American University speech. Well, you can see what a radical turn was being taken against the Cold War. And the CIA and the Military establishment were not about to have it. You know if Kennedy had been given more time and the American people had really gotten more of a taste for peace, a certain momentum might have developed.

    FC: The JFK assassination is a profoundly shocking revelation of U.S. state power; that an elected American president was murdered by agents of the state on the grounds that he wanted to normalize bilateral relations with the Soviet Union and genuinely end the Cold War. Does that shocking, brutal elimination of a U.S. president by his own state explain why bilateral relations have remained dominated and distorted ever since by Cold War dogma?

    MS: Well, we not only have the president murdered by his own national security state, but we have the government issue an obviously fraudulent report, the Warren Report. We also have the established institutions of society, the media, the universities, and so on, they all turn away and ignore the fact that this has happened. The President is murdered and the government issues an obviously fraudulent report that is accepted. What does that say about our society? John McCloy, one of the Warren Commission members, was quoted as saying: “The primary purpose of the Warren Commission was to prove that the United States was not a banana republic, where a government could be changed by conspiracy.”

    FC: Was there something of an echo of this systematic hostility when former President Donald Trump vowed to pursue more normal relations with Russia? His official encounters with President Putin elicited howls of condemnation across the U.S. media. On the surface, this disapproval of Trump’s outreach was said to be due to “Russiagate” and alleged Russian interference in the U.S. 2016 presidential election, but would you agree that it was more due to a deeper American state intransigence simply towards any kind of normalization of relations between Washington and Moscow?

    MS: Nothing that Trump says means anything as far as I am concerned. From my point of view, he can hardly keep an idea in his head for more than a few minutes. So I don’t want to give him any attention. “Russiagate” was a Democratic Party concoction that was aimed at distracting from serious attention to how Hillary Clinton had managed to lose to an imbecile. The real reason for her loss was the abandonment over decades by the Democratic Party of its working-class base. “Russiagate”, as Putin himself said, was really a matter of U.S. domestic politics in which Russia was being used as a scapegoat.

    FC: It seems the United States’ modern political formation is inherently and relentlessly driven by Cold War thinking. Russia, China and other foreign states are designated enemies by Washington often without credible justification. There seems to be a permanent ideology of hostility and war in the U.S. as a nation-state. What are the underlying causal reasons for this systematic mindset?

    MS: Over the years, the U.S. economy has been increasingly militarized. So there needs to be a narrative that justifies this war economy and that’s what we have. Military spending is everywhere. It is in Hollywood. It is “defense contractors”, aka “merchants of death”, buying congressional representatives. Then the service that the military performs is to make the world safe for unbridled corporate activity. It is a very daunting problem.

    FC: Do you ever see the U.S. transcending its fixation on Cold War politics? What needs to change to make that happen?

    MS: What needs to happen is the political leadership coming to the conclusion that we cannot dominate the world, that we need the United Nations and we need international law. Can they come to understand that none of the problems that are facing humanity can be solved with military weapons? It is not beyond the realm of possibility that sanity could reign. And it is the task of the peace movement to reach as many people at all levels with this message.

    The post President JFK’s Murder Is Graphic Proof of Entrenched Cold War Ideology and Why Peace Eludes U.S.-Russia Relations first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Only Fuzzbrained Human Livestock Fret About Communism

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    “REMINDER: We are in a dire situation now. The only thing that matters is Anti-Communism. Unless these people are defeated, we’re all toast. So the Right must unite. Every branch of it. Unite and we can win. We’ll work out the differences once the communists are defeated.”

    So reads a recent viral tweet by conservative radio host Jesse Kelly, who last month told Tucker Carlson’s massive audience that American soldiers should be “Type A men who want to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls.”

    This bizarre 1950s-throwback anti-communist hysteria is growing more and more common on the western right, particularly in the United States with its uniquely sophisticated and aggressive propaganda engine. This despite the fact that the US and its allies are no closer to coming under communist rule than they were in the nineties after the end of the first cold war.

    Even if you believe everything the TV tells you about communism and accept it as a given that efforts to eliminate class must always necessarily lead to tyranny and suffering, those of us who live within the US-centralized power alliance are so very, very, very far from living under a communist government or seeing any communist revolution that it makes more sense to spend your time worrying about being struck by lightning or being eaten by sharks than to spend it worrying about communists.

    Yet the red-under-the-bed hysteria continues to swell, aided by so-called “right populist” pundits like Carlson and the sweeping propaganda campaign that’s currently greasing the wheels for the new cold war against China. US conservatives are currently flocking to the new social media site GETTR which until recently was an anti-CCP forum owned by exiled Chinese billionaire and Steve Bannon ally Guo Wengui. The site now has, in the words of radio host Garland Nixon, “More anti-china, anti communism/socialism propaganda than CIA.gov.”

    Anti-communist hysteria is also being pushed along in rightist circles by pundits spinning authoritarian Covid measures and World Economic Forum “Great Reset” agendas as evidence of a global communist takeover, despite neither of those things having anything to do with communism whatsoever; the former is a conflation of authoritarianism with communism and the latter is just capitalists doing capitalism.

    A lot of the confusing of World Economic Forum agendas with communism comes from an article published on on the WEF website which received so much backlash that it was subsequently removed in which Danish politician Ida Auken imagined a future in which automation has made much work unnecessary and the ability to have items like pasta makers and crepe cookers ordered and delivered when they’re needed made keeping them in your cupboards unnecessary. Auken says she wrote the article not as a utopian ideal but “to start a discussion about some of the pros and cons of the current technological development.”

    This idea was later presented in a WEF video as a forecast that in the future “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy,” which can be spun as a communist value if you pretend that renting a waffle iron from some futuristic Amazon-like drone delivery service would be anything like an abolishment of capitalism. So I constantly run into rightists telling me that WEF Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab wants to take away everyone’s private property and install a global Marxist world order, when really it was just one article written by one person and given lots of rightist spin, and all Schwab is really doing is helping to ensure the survival and expansion of capitalism and oligarchic power.

    Again, fretting about communism is a nonsensical position within the western empire. If you are reading this it’s because you speak English, and if you speak English it’s likely because you live in an English-speaking nation, and if you live in an English-speaking nation there is so much violent force holding the infrastructure of capitalism in place and so much narrative management going into preventing a communist uprising that it makes more sense for you to spend your time worrying about being harmed by lions or electric eels than by communists.

    But that’s not to say your concerns about communism don’t accomplish anything; they accomplish a great deal. What they accomplish is making you so hysterical about communism that you will support anything your government wants to do to stop the rise of China on the global stage. Even if it means crippling important parts of the economy. Even if it means greatly diminishing your quality of life. Even if it means impoverishing you. Even if it means sending your sons and daughters off to war over Taiwan. Even if it means risking nuclear armageddon.

    The US can only maintain its planetary hegemony by aggressively subverting China and the nations who support it like Russia, and it can only do that by manufacturing consent to ensure that the public never awakens from its propaganda-induced coma and throws off the chains of oppression. They don’t pour so much energy and wealth into manufacturing consent because it is fun, they do it because they need to.

    What this means is that by joining in this mounting hysteria about communism, you are directly facilitating some of the most dangerous agendas of the most powerful people on earth. You are letting the propagandists turn you into fuzzbrained human livestock marching mindlessly along to the beat of their world-threatening game of planetary domination.

    Don’t march along. Open your eyes and perceive lucidly. Don’t let them play you like that.

    _________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Great power rivalry and capitalist crisis

    Thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War the promised peace and harmony has been illusive, writes William Briggs.

     

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Chomsky: Outdated US Cold War Policy Worsens Ongoing Russia-Ukraine Conflict

    Ukrainian soldiers walk along the front lines with Russia-backed separatists, not far from town of Avdiivka in the Donetsk region of Ukraine on December 11, 2021.

    The tension on the Russia-Ukraine border represents an ongoing conflict between two nations with many cultural affinities, but is also part of a much larger rivalry between the U.S. and Europe on one side, and Russia on the other. As Noam Chomsky reminds us in the exclusive interview for Truthout that follows, in 2014, a Russia-supported government in Ukraine was forcefully removed from power by a coup supported by the U.S. and replaced by a U.S. and European-backed government. It was a development that brought closer to war the two main antagonists of the Cold War era, as Moscow regards both U.S. and European involvement in Ukraine and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) continued eastward expansion as part of a well-orchestrated strategy to encircle Russia. The strategy of encirclement is indeed as old as NATO itself, and this is the reason why Russian President Vladimir Putin issued recently a list of demands to the U.S. and NATO with regard to their actions in Ukraine and even parts of the former Soviet space. In the meantime, senior-level Russian officials have gone even further by warning of military response if NATO continues to ignore Moscow’s security concerns.

    As Chomsky notes below, the Russia-Ukraine conflict is a solvable problem, but one wonders if the U.S. will remain dedicated to a “zombie policy” that could produce potentially awful consequences in the event of a diplomatic failure.

    Noam Chomsky is internationally recognized as one of the most important intellectuals alive. His intellectual stature has been compared to that of Galileo, Newton and Descartes as his work has had tremendous influence on a variety of areas of scholarly and scientific inquiry, including linguistics, logic and mathematics, computer science, psychology, media studies, philosophy, politics and international affairs. He is the author of some 150 books and recipient of scores of highly prestigious awards, including the Sydney Peace Prize and the Kyoto Prize (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), and of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from the world’s most renowned universities. Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and currently Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona.

    C.J. Polychroniou: Following the undoing of the USSR between 1980-1991, people in Ukraine voted overwhelmingly in 1991 to declare independence from the crumbling communist empire. Since then, Ukraine has sought to align closely with the European Union (EU) and NATO, but Moscow has objected to such plans, as it has always considered Ukraine to be part of Russia, and, accordingly, continued to meddle in the country’s internal affairs. In fact, Ukraine became a battleground in 2014 when Putin decided to annex Crimea, which he called the “spiritual source” of the Russian state, and, since then, tensions between the two countries have been very hard to diffuse. In your own view, what’s really behind the conflict between Russia and Ukraine?

    Noam Chomsky: There’s more to add, of course. What happened in 2014, whatever one thinks of it, amounted to a coup with U.S. support that replaced the Russia-oriented government by a Western-oriented one. That led Russia to annex Crimea, mainly to protect its sole warm water port and naval base, and apparently with the agreement of a considerable majority of the Crimean population. There’s extensive scholarship on the complexities, particularly Richard Sakwa’s Frontline Ukraine and more recent work.

    There’s an excellent discussion of the current situation in a recent article in The Nation by Anatol Lieven. Lieven argues realistically that Ukraine is “the most dangerous [immediate] problem in the world,” and “also in principle the most easily solved.” The solution has already been proposed and accepted — in principle: the Minsk II agreement, adopted by France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine in 2015, and endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council. The agreement tacitly presupposes withdrawal of George W. Bush’s invitation to Ukraine to join NATO, reaffirmed by Barack Obama, vetoed by France and Germany, an outcome that no Russian leader is likely to accept. It calls for disarmament of the separatist Russia-oriented region (Donbas) and withdrawal of Russian forces (“volunteers”), and spells out the key elements of settlement, with “three essential and mutually dependent parts: demilitarization; a restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty, including control of the border with Russia; and full autonomy for the Donbas in the context of the decentralization of power in Ukraine as a whole.” Such an outcome, Lieven observes, would not be unlike other federations, including the U.S.

    Minsk II has not been implemented because of disagreements about timing of its various measures. The issue has been “buried” in U.S. political circles and media, Lieven writes, “because of the refusal of Ukrainian governments to implement the solution and the refusal of the United States to put pressure on them to do so.” The U.S., he concludes, has been keeping to “a zombie policy — a dead strategy that is wandering around pretending to be alive and getting in everyone’s way, because U.S. policy-makers have not been able to bring themselves to bury it.”

    The imminent dangers make it imperative to bury the policy and adopt a sound one.

    To overcome the impasse will not be easy, but as Lieven observes, the only alternatives are too horrendous to consider. The essentials are understood: Austrian-style neutrality for Ukraine, which means no military alliances or foreign military bases, and an internal resolution in the general terms of Minsk II.

    “The most dangerous problem in the world” can therefore be solved with a modicum of rationality.

    The broader context reaches back to the collapse of the Soviet Union 30 years ago. There were three contrasting visions of the global order that should be established in the wake of its collapse. All accepted that Germany would be unified and would join NATO — a remarkable concession by Russia, considering that Germany alone, not part of a hostile military alliance, had virtually destroyed Russia twice in the past century, a third time joining with the West (including the U.S.), in the “intervention” immediately after the Bolsheviks took power.

    One proposal was Mikhail Gorbachev’s: a Eurasian security system from the Atlantic to Vladivostok, with no military blocs. The U.S. never considered that as an option. A second proposal was offered by George H.W. Bush and his Secretary of State James Baker, endorsed by West Germany: NATO would not move “one inch to the East,” meaning East Berlin; nothing beyond was contemplated, at least publicly. The third was Bill Clinton’s: NATO would move all the way to the Russian border, carry out military maneuvers in the states adjoining Russia, and place weapons on the Russian border that the U.S. would certainly regard as offensive weapons in the (inconceivable) event that it would even tolerate anything remotely comparable anywhere in its vicinity. It was the Clinton Doctrine that was implemented.

    The asymmetry is far more deeply rooted. It is a core component of the “rule-based international order” that the U.S. advocates (while by coincidence, setting the rules), replacing the supposedly archaic UN-based international order that bans “the threat or use of force” in international affairs. The latter condition is unacceptable to rogue states that demand the right to employ the threat of force constantly, and to resort to force at will. An important topic that we have discussed before.

    One crucial illustration of the rule-based asymmetry that should be familiar is President Kennedy’s response to Nikita Khrushchev’s sending of nuclear missiles to Cuba — in reaction to the threat of invasion as the culmination of JFK’s terrorist war against Cuba, and to his huge arms buildup in response to Khrushchev’s offer for mutual reduction of offensive weapons even though the U.S. was far in the lead. The critical issue that almost led to devastating war was the status of U.S. nuclear-armed missiles aimed at Russia in Turkey. As the crisis moved ominously close to war, the key issue was whether the missiles should be publicly withdrawn (as Khrushchev requested) or only secretly (as Kennedy demanded). In fact, the U.S. had already ordered them withdrawn to be replaced by far more menacing Polaris submarines, so there was no withdrawal at all, only escalation.

    The crucial asymmetry is presupposed, an inviolable principle of world order, established more extensively as the Clinton’s NATO Doctrine was imposed.

    It should be recalled that this was only one component of a more expansive Clinton Doctrine, which accords the U.S. the right to use military force “unilaterally when necessary” to defend vital interests such as “ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources.” No one else can claim such a right.

    There is extensive scholarly debate about the status of the Bush-Baker proposal. The agreement was only verbal, as argued in justification when Washington instantly violated it, moving troops to East Berlin. But the basic facts are not seriously in doubt.

    NATO was founded in response to the alleged threat posed to Western democracies by the Soviet Union. Yet, NATO not only did not disappear after the end of the Cold War, but continued its expansion eastwards and, as a matter of fact, regards Ukraine today as a potential member. What is the relevance of NATO today, and to what extent is it responsible for escalating tensions on Russia’s borders and for potentially ushering in a new Cold War?

    The expansion to the East, including regular military maneuvers and threatening weapons systems, is clearly a factor in escalating tensions, the offer to Ukraine to join NATO even more so, as just discussed.

    In thinking about the acutely dangerous current situation, it’s useful to bear in mind the founding of NATO and the “alleged threat.” There’s a good deal to say about that topic, specifically about how the Russian threat was actually perceived by planners. Inquiry shows that it was quite different from the fevered rhetoric employed “to scare the hell out of the country” in a manner “clearer than truth” (Sen. Arthur Vandenberg and Dean Acheson, respectively).

    It is well-known that the influential planner George Kennan considered the Russian threat to be political and ideological, not military. He was, in fact, sent out to pasture early on for failure to join in the largely manufactured panic. Still, it’s always instructive to see how the world is perceived at the dovish extreme.

    As head of the State Department planning staff, Kennan was so concerned about the threat from postwar Russia in 1946 that he felt that partition of Germany might be necessary in violation of wartime agreements. The reason was the need to “rescue Western zones of Germany by walling them off against Eastern penetration,” not, of course, by military force, but by “political penetration,” where the Russians had the advantage. In 1948, Kennan advised that, “The problem of Indonesia [is] the most crucial issue of the moment in our struggle with the Kremlin,” even though the Kremlin was nowhere in sight. The reason was that if Indonesia falls under “Communism” it could be an “infection [that] would sweep westward” through all of South Asia, even endangering U.S. control of the Middle East.

    The internal record is littered with similar illustrations of oblique, sometimes quite explicit, recognition of reality. In general, “The Kremlin” became a metaphor for anything that might fall out of U.S. control — until 1949, when the “Sino-Soviet conspiracy” could sometimes fill the bill.

    Russia was indeed a threat, within its Eastern European domains, just as many around the world can attest to threats of the U.S. and its Western allies. There should be no need to sample that awful history. NATO had little role in it.

    With the collapse of the USSR, the official justification for NATO was gone, and something new had to be devised. More generally, some new pretext had to be devised for violence and subversion. One device, quickly seized upon, was “humanitarian intervention.” This was soon framed within the doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P). Two versions were formulated. The official version was adopted by the UN in 2005. It keeps to the strictures of the UN Charter banning the threat or use of force in international affairs apart from conditions irrelevant to R2P, proceeding beyond only in calling on states to observe humanitarian law.

    That’s the official version of R2P. A second version was formulated by the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty on Responsibility to Protect (2001), produced under the initiative of former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans. It departs from the official version in one crucial respect: a situation in which “the Security Council rejects a proposal or fails to deal with it in a reasonable time.” In that case, the Report authorizes “action within area of jurisdiction by regional or sub-regional organizations under Chapter VIII of the Charter, subject to their seeking subsequent authorization from the Security Council.”

    In practice, the right to intervene is reserved to the powerful — in today’s world, to the NATO powers, which are also unilaterally able to determine their own “area of jurisdiction.” They did in fact do so. NATO unilaterally determined that its “area of jurisdiction” includes the Balkans, then Afghanistan, and well beyond. NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer instructed a NATO meeting in June 2007 that, “NATO troops have to guard pipelines that transport oil and gas that is directed for the West,” and more generally have to protect sea routes used by tankers and other “crucial infrastructure” of the energy system. NATO’s area of jurisdiction is therefore worldwide.

    To be sure, some do not agree; in particular, the traditional victims of the kind tutelage of Europe and its offshoots. Their opinion, as always dismissed, was made explicit in the first meeting of the South Summit of 133 states (April 2000). Its declaration, surely with the recent bombing of Serbia in mind, rejected “the so-called ‘right’ of humanitarian intervention, which has no legal basis in the United Nations Charter or in the general principles of international law.” The wording of the declaration reaffirms earlier UN declarations to the same effect, and is mirrored in the official version of R2P.

    Standard practice since has been to refer to the official UN version as justification for whatever is done but to keep to the Evans Commission version for determination of choice of action.

    There are indications that Russia is building capacity to attack Ukraine, with some military analysts claiming that this could happen in the first couple months of the new year. While it is not likely that NATO would intervene militarily in a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, a Russian invasion of Ukraine would surely bring about a dramatic transformation of the international landscape. What would be the most realistic solution to the Ukraine conflict?

    The indications are real, and ominous. Most serious analysts doubt that Putin would launch an invasion. He would have a great deal to lose — maybe everything if the U.S. reacted with force, as we all might. At best from his perspective, Russia would be engaged in a bitter “endless war” and subjected to very severe sanctions and other harsh measures. I presume that Putin’s intention is to warn the West not to disregard what he takes to be Russian interests, with some justice.

    There is a realistic solution: the one that Anatol Lieven outlined. As he discusses, it is not easy to imagine another one. And none has been proposed.

    Fortunately, this solution is within reach. It is of great importance to keep popular opinion from being inflamed by all-too familiar devices that have led to catastrophe in the past.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Big Threats Are The Ones We Can’t Come Back From: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    NATO expansionism and provocations in Ukraine have caused Russia to issue warnings that it will begin creating counter-threats to those escalations if they are not scaled back, which can easily lead to another Cuban Missile Crisis-like standoff (which we barely survived by sheer dumb luck last time). Nothing about our insane cold war environment suggests western leaders will navigate this situation safely.

    ❖

    Anti-China propaganda is not any more complicated than other western propaganda narratives, but many who’ve seen through other narratives still buy into the anti-China ones. This is likely due to the fact that anti-China propaganda has been going for generations, plus the added factors of racism, anti-communism, and anxiety about what’s going to happen after the inevitable collapse of the US empire.

    ❖

    It’s amazing how many arguments I encounter that boil down to “China is bad. Therefore everything bad I hear about China is probably true.”

    It’s an extremely widespread species of brain worm. “China is bad. Everything bad I hear about China is therefore probably true. Everyone who disputes any of those bad things is therefore wildly biased toward China. Because China is bad, nobody could possibly be biased toward it is unless they’re a paid shill. I’m good at thinking.”

    ❖

    It is true that western media are greatly exaggerating the threat of an unprovoked attack on Taiwan or Ukraine by China or Russia, respectively. But even if they weren’t, going to war with Russia or China over who governs Taiwan or Ukraine would only be supported by crazy morons.

    People often object to this position saying, “So you’re saying we should just let China/Russia invade Taiwan/Ukraine??”

    And the answer is “Yes. Of course we should. What are you a fucking idiot?”

    ❖

    The US is the absolute last government on earth we should want making decisions which threaten the very existence of our species. Its interventions are consistently disastrous, consistently based on lies, consistently fail to accomplish what their proponents claim, and are never based on what’s in the highest interest for everyone.

    ❖

    Hey remember when everyone pretended to believe Jeremy Corbyn was a closet Nazi just to keep the left from gaining a foothold in the UK? And how saying he isn’t a Nazi made you a Nazi? Saying they were cynically pretending to believe he’s a Nazi also made you a Nazi. Everyone was a Nazi except those who pretended to believe Corbyn was a Nazi. That was some wild shit.

    And now they’re all gone. There was a giant Nazi epidemic, couldn’t throw a stone without hitting a Corbyn-loving Nazi, and now they’re all gone.

    Where have all the Nazis gone?

    Image

    ❖

    You simply cannot understand international controversies without understanding the propaganda spin that goes into them and having an acute awareness that your own society participates in those propaganda operations. You just can’t. If you don’t get this, you don’t get anything.

    People get annoyed at me for pointing this out; they try to act like you can discuss this or that story about an empire-targeted nation without addressing the fact that it’s happening in the context of an aggressive western propaganda campaign. And you can’t. Doing so is absurd.

    ❖

    “That western narrative is false.”

    ‘Oh yeah? Prove it!’

    “Here’s a link.”

    ‘Ha! THAT outlet? You can’t cite THAT outlet!’

    “Why not?”

    ‘That outlet always disputes western narratives!’

    “Yeah that’s why I cited it.”

    ‘No. You can only cite outlets that never dispute western narratives.’

    ❖

    It’s such a trip how CIA veterans and Israeli operatives are trying to push the Biden administration into a military confrontation with Iran and the public response has not been for everyone to grab these people and throw them into the ocean.

    ❖

    For many months people have been yelling at me for focusing on world-threatening nuclear brinkmanship instead of Covid authoritarianism. Now the brinkmanship has gotten far more dangerous, and those same people often tell me these cold war escalations are a hoax.

    There’s so much sloppy thinking on this front. People have literally told me that world powers are repositioning their military arsenals as a “distraction” from the Covid issue; not just once but many times. And they’ll cite the US, China and Russia having some degree of overlap in their Covid policies as proof that they’re all acting under a one-world government and therefore on the same side.

    To my mind the rising risk of nuclear war in the next few years is the single most urgent threat in the world, and each escalation makes it more likely. I am glad that I have not been successfully cajoled into dismissing this primary threat by sloppy thinkers with bad media consumption habits.

    ❖

    The only ultimate threats to humanity are those we can’t fix later on. Nuclear annihilation. Environmental collapse. Dystopia where total information control and automated weaponry make revolution impossible. On anything else we can always course correct after realizing our mistake. We’re only really locked in if we make a mistake that we can’t come back from.

    ________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Noam Chomsky: US-China Cooperation Is Essential to Avert a New Cold War

    President Joe Biden folds his hands and looks forward as President Xi Jinping is seen speaking on a screen to Biden's left

    We live at a critical juncture in world history. In spite of immense progress in some areas of human civilization, the prospects of annihilation caused by interstate conflict among competing powers with unimaginably destructive weapons continue to haunt human relations in the early part of the 21st century even when challenges such as climatic catastrophes may end up being disastrous for all forms of life on planet Earth. A few decades ago, it was the U.S.-USSR conflict that threatened to blow up the planet, thanks to the imperial ambitions of a newly emerged empire in world history to remake the world in its own image. Today, it is the U.S.-China conflict that threatens us with a futuristic scenario of global annihilation as the Western empire in decline continues to insist upon dictating the direction of world affairs according to its own image and interests.

    In the interview below, one of our most esteemed public intellectuals of the last half century, whose intellectual stature has been compared to that of Galileo, Newton and Descartes, offers us his own views and assessment of the increasingly dangerous tension between the United States and China. Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and currently Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona. The recipient of scores of highly prestigious awards, including the Sydney Peace Prize and the Kyoto Prize (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from the world’s most renowned universities, and author of some 150 books on linguistics, politics, international affairs, history and media studies, Chomsky has had tremendous influence on a variety of areas of scholarly and scientific inquiry, including linguistics, logic and mathematics, computer science, psychology, media studies, philosophy, politics and international affairs.

    C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, the U.S.-China relationship has gone through ups and downs over the course of the last 30 or so years. Clearly, the sort of relationship that exists today between the two countries is far more antagonistic than it was even 10 years ago. In your own view, what forces or processes are responsible for the increasing tensions we are witnessing today in U.S.-China relations?

    Noam Chomsky: After the fall of the USSR, there was much euphoria about the end of history with “liberal democracy” (a code word for the U.S.) having achieved total victory. A corollary was that China could now be brought within the “rule-based international order.”

    The latter is a now-conventional phrase, one worth pondering. It refers to an international order in which the U.S. sets the rules, displacing the international order established by the United Nations, which the U.S. deems antiquated and irrelevant. The UN Charter is the Supreme Law of the Land under the U.S. Constitution, constantly violated, a matter of no concern to those who pledge reverence for the Holy Text. Its provisions have been considered inappropriate for the modern world ever since the U.S. lost control of the UN with decolonization, and occasional backsliding among the privileged as well. UN members no longer know “how to play,” to borrow Thomas Friedman’s ridicule of France when it failed to support the benign U.S. invasion of Iraq, accompanied by his call for the miscreant to be deprived of its permanent membership in the Security Council. The self-described “world’s greatest deliberative body” contented itself with renaming French fries as “Freedom fries” in the Senate cafeteria.

    Right-thinking people understand that the outdated UN-based international order is to be replaced by the rule-based order, including such constructions as the highly protectionist “free-trade agreements,” right now yielding such pleasures as barring a “people’s vaccine” that would alleviate the COVID disaster. The Clintonites were particularly enthusiastic about incorporating a well-disciplined China within this forward-looking rule-based order.

    It didn’t work as planned. China refuses to play when it doesn’t want to. Worse still, it can’t be intimidated. It goes its own way. That way is often ugly, but that’s of no relevance to the rule-based order, which easily tolerates vicious crimes by the righteous — notably the Master — with equanimity and often approval.

    China is not Europe. The countries of Europe may fume when the U.S. decides to destroy the joint agreement with Iran (the JCPOA) and to impose harsh sanctions to punish Iran for Washington’s demolition of the agreement. They may even proclaim that they will develop ways to avoid the murderous U.S. sanctions. But in the end, they go along, not willing to incur the wrath of the Godfather, or his punitive measures, such as expulsion from the international financial system, controlled by Washington. Same in many other cases.

    China is different. It insists on the UN-based system (which it violates when it chooses to). As former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating explained, the much-heralded “China threat” reduces to the fact that China exists and is successfully defying the rules.

    It is not the first to do so. The charge of “successful defiance” comes from the annals of the U.S. State Department in the 1960s. It was directed against the “Cuban threat,” namely, Cuba’s “successful defiance” of U.S. policies dating back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which declared Washington’s intention to dominate the hemisphere once the British nuisance had been removed. That was anticipated by the great grand strategist John Quincy Adams, intellectual author of Manifest Destiny. He instructed his cabinet colleagues that U.S. power would increase while Britain’s declined, so that Cuba (indeed the hemisphere) would fall into U.S. hands by the laws of “political gravitation” as an apple falls from a tree. That happened in 1898 when the U.S. intervened to prevent Cuba’s liberation from Spanish rule, turning Cuba into a virtual colony, events recorded in properly sanitized history as Washington’s “liberation” of Cuba.

    Cuba has been punished viciously for this successful defiance, including John F. Kennedy’s terrorist war, which almost brought about terminal nuclear war, and a crushing blockade. U.S. punishment of Cuba is opposed by the whole world: 184-2 in the latest UN vote, with Israel alone voting with its U.S. protector. But Europe obeys, however reluctantly.

    Sometimes China’s practices sink to almost indescribable depths of evil. Once Washington realized that China is successfully defying the rules, it turned to the project of impeding China’s technological development — harming itself in the process, but overcoming the “China threat” is of transcendent importance. One aspect of the campaign to impede Chinese development is to keep others from using Chinese technology. But the devious Chinese are defying the rule-based international order by “setting up a network of vocational colleges around the world [to] train students in dozens of countries in technical areas … on Chinese technology with Chinese standards as part of a full court press to globalize Chinese tech. It is a component of a bigger effort to tighten the economic linkages between China and the Global South, which Beijing sees as key to competition with the United States,” according to foreign policy scholars Niva Yau and Dirk van der Kley. Worse still, they note, “the Chinese government has been willing to listen to host countries,” and is training local instructors who will upgrade the skills of the local trainees and be able to develop their own societies, within the Chinese orbit and using Chinese technology.

    These projects fall within the broader Chinese global policy framework now being realized most extensively throughout Eurasia, probably soon reaching to Turkey and on to Eastern and Central Europe. If Afghanistan can survive U.S. sanctions, it too will probably be brought within the orbit of the China-based Shanghai Cooperation Organization, joining Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran and the Central Asian states. China might manage to shift Afghanistan’s economy from opium export, the staple when it was under U.S. control, to exploiting its considerable mineral resources, to China’s benefit. Chinese economic initiatives also extend to Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East (including Israel) and even to Washington’s backyard in Latin America, despite strenuous U.S. efforts to block such intrusion.

    Critics of these initiatives “accuse China of pursuing a policy of ‘debt-trap diplomacy’: luring poor, developing countries into agreeing [to] unsustainable loans to pursue infrastructure projects so that, when they experience financial difficulty, Beijing can seize the asset, thereby extending its strategic or military reach.” Perhaps, but the charges are contested by reputable Western sources, including a Chatham House study that “demonstrates that the evidence for such views is limited,” and studies by U.S. researchers assert that these charges, including those leveled by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo, are baseless and that, “Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country,” in particular, the prize example in the charges, a port in Sri Lanka.

    Nonetheless, debt traps are a concern, one that the U.S. understands well. Right now, for example, Washington is deeply concerned about a debt trap afflicting Cambodia, which is under pressure to repay a loan as it easily can, the lender claims, also arguing that it “would set a bad precedent for other states” if the debt were cancelled.

    The lender is, of course, Washington. The debt was incurred by the government the U.S. was supporting (or more realistically, had imposed), in the early 1970s, when official U.S. policy, in Henry Kissinger’s immortal words, was “massive bombing campaign in Cambodia.… Anything that flies on anything that moves,” a call for genocide that would be hard to match in the archival record. The consequences were, predictably, horrendous. The perpetrator is greatly honored. The victims must repay their debts. We wouldn’t want to set a bad precedent.

    Occasionally, depravity reaches such a level that words fail.

    The report on Cambodia’s debt trap adds that, “if Washington were to wipe out a large chunk of the debt, it would only do so if it believed this gesture was met by good-faith reciprocity from Phnom Penh. Frankly, there’s zero reason for such a belief now. A case in point occurred last month, when, after [U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy] Sherman’s visit to Phnom Penh, the Cambodian government allowed the defense attaché at the U.S. Embassy, Marcus M. Ferrara, to tour the Ream Naval Base.… Yet he turned up to find that he was only allowed to visit parts of the site. Phnom Penh was in its rights to limit Ferrara’s visit, yet it did nothing to absolve U.S. fears that Cambodia is hiding something.”

    It might be hiding a deal with China, which never ceases its malevolence.

    As we have discussed earlier, much of the frenzied rhetoric about the China threat concerns alleged threats off the coast of China, where the U.S. military advantage is overwhelming (and a small fraction of the U.S. military advantage worldwide). That was so even before the recent U.S.-U.K. decision to provide Australia with a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines to confront China’s four old noisy diesel submarines bottled up by U.S. power in the South China Sea.

    The U.S. claims to be defending freedom of navigation with its military maneuvers in China’s Exclusive Economic Zone — pure fraud, as we have already discussed. There are actually serious issues concerning Chinese abuses of the Law of the Sea, which has been ratified by all maritime powers except one: the usual outlier, the U.S. These should be addressed by diplomacy led by the regional powers, not by highly provocative acts that increase the threat of escalation to full-scale war.

    Taiwan has returned as one of the thorniest issues in U.S.-Chinese relations. The Chinese military has stepped up its activities in the Taiwan Strait and, according to some military experts, is even acquiring the equipment necessary for an invasion. In fact, Taipei has warned that China is getting ready to invade the island by 2025, although one would have to assume that such a scenario is most unlikely because of the impact that it would have on China’s relations with the rest of the world. Still, would it be likely, as president Biden stated in late October during a CNN “town hall,” that the U.S. would defend Taiwan if China invaded? And is there really a “Taiwan agreement” between the U.S. and China, as Biden also seems to have suggested earlier in that month?

    The critical agreement is the “one-China” doctrine that has been held for over 40 years. It is kept ambiguous. The rational policy now is for both the U.S. and China to refrain from provocative acts, and for Taiwan to adhere to the ambiguous agreement, the best outcome that can be hoped for at this point.

    As China is bent on expanding its nuclear arsenal, the U.S. appears willing now to push for arms-control talks. What are the lessons from the Cold War era to help us feel confident that a U.S.-China arms race can be prevented?

    The main lesson from the Cold War era is that it’s a virtual miracle that we have survived. There should be no need here to run through the record once again, but it is worth remembering how many opportunities to reduce the dangers radically were lost.

    The most instructive case I think was 60 years ago. Nikita Khrushchev understood well that Russia could not carry out the economic development he hoped for if it was trapped in an arms race with a far richer and more powerful adversary. He therefore proposed sharp mutual reductions in offensive weapons. The incoming Kennedy administration considered the offer and rejected it, instead turning to rapid military expansion, even though it was already far in the lead. The prominent international relations scholar Kenneth Waltz described what happened at the time: the Kennedy administration “undertook the largest strategic and conventional peace-time military build-up the world has yet seen … even as Khrushchev was trying at once to carry through a major reduction in the conventional forces and to follow a strategy of minimum deterrence, and we did so even though the balance of strategic weapons greatly favored the United States.”

    As often has been the case, the policy harmed national security while enhancing state power, what really matters to Washington.

    By now it’s widely recognized — including a joint statement by Henry Kissinger, Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz, the Senate’s leading specialist on armaments Sam Nunn and former Secretary of Defense William Perry — that we should move expeditiously to eliminate nuclear weapons, a process that the signers of the nonproliferation treaty are obligated to undertake. The UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons entered into force this year. Though not yet implemented because of U.S. interference, nuclear weapons-free zones have been established in much of the world.

    In brief, there are ways to greatly enhance security.

    China so far has held back in nuclear weapons development. It would be wise to continue this policy. The U.S. can facilitate it by ending its highly provocative actions and moving towards an arms-control agreement with China. There are feasible means, outlined by arms control specialists. While the Republican administrations since 2000 have been dismantling the arms control regime that has been laboriously constructed over the past 60 years, even Trump’s wrecking ball didn’t manage to demolish all of them; Biden was able to rescue the New Start Treaty just before its expiration. The system can be resurrected and carried forward to the point where this scourge is removed from the Earth.

    The essential conclusion is simple: either the U.S. and China will work together on the critical issues that we all face, or they will expire together, bringing the rest of the world down with them.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Erm I Know You’re Busy But Nuclear War Is Getting Increasingly Likely

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    While mainstream western media have been spending their time concern trolling about a “missing” Chinese tennis player who is not actually missing, hardly any coverage has gone toward NATO’s announcement that if the new German government does not continue to allow US nuclear weapons on its soil those weapons will be relocated to the east of Germany. This would put them closer to Russia’s border, a major provocation of Moscow and yet another step forward in the western empire’s steadily escalating game of nuclear brinkmanship.

    “Germany can, of course, decide whether there will be nuclear weapons in (its) country, but the alternative is that we easily end up with nuclear weapons in other countries in Europe, also to the east of Germany,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said last week.

    “Should NATO decide to move U.S. nuclear weapons to Poland, for example, that would likely be seen as a step towards angering Moscow by bringing them closer to the Russian border,” Reuters reports.

    Meanwhile the US is considering sending more weapons to Ukraine as tensions mount between Moscow and Kiev, and Vladimir Putin is warning that western powers are ignoring Russia’s red lines which are meant to serve as a deterrent to prevent escalation into full-blown nuclear war. The cold war against China has been continually ramping up as well and appears likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

    Half of Americans would now reportedly favor going to war against Russia in defense of Ukraine and a majority would now favor going to war with China in defense of Taiwan. These drastic spikes in opinion are not an accident; the consent has been forcefully manufactured by an aggressive propaganda campaign against those two nations. They are not manufacturing that consent for fun; they are doing it for a reason.

    And I just keep tripping on how weird it is that so few people see the US empire’s headlong charge into cold war conflict with two separate nuclear-armed nations as the single most urgent concern of our day. It probably doesn’t even make most people’s top ten. Very few people seem to believe the most pressing threat to humanity might be all those armageddon weapons we’ve been stockpiling and how increasingly irresponsibly our leaders are treating them.

    I write about this issue a lot because to me it seems obvious that when you really look at the facts of the matter it’s the most worrying thing of all worrying things in this world. It is entirely possible that climate chaos causing heat spikes and flash freezes which destroy plant life could be the thing which sends us the way of the dinosaur, or it could be the reckless development of weaponized artificial intelligence, but those fates are a bit further down the track. There’s only one threat facing us which could technically wipe us all out tomorrow, and it’s the rapidly increasing likelihood of boring old nuclear holocaust.

    I write about it a lot, but it’s never shared particularly well. I could get a lot more traction telling people the most urgent threat of the day is government abuses related to Covid, or white supremacists, or one of the two mainstream political factions which so much energy goes into amplifying the enmity between. But when I write about what I see as the actual greatest threat to our world it’s like yelling into the wind. People don’t want to hear it. My words get swallowed up by a big black hole in the ground and their energy just kind of fizzles.

    A big part of it is probably due to the fact that this isn’t something which fits neatly into any of the partisan filters we’ve been trained to view the world through. Detente is no longer an issue promoted by the mainstream parties which present themselves as the “left” end of the spectrum; when aggressions against Russia or China come up it’s usually in an argument over which one we should hate more. Nobody’s self-reinforcing ideological social media echo chamber is going to help them amplify the message that we’re getting way too close to nuclear war; it’s even a back burner issue for most socialists and anti-imperialists.

    Another reason is that people simply aren’t being told about the rising threat of nuclear war with any regularity. Western mass media exist first and foremost to protect and promote the interests of the US-centralized empire, and it’s in that empire’s interests not to have the public too keenly aware of the fact that it is gambling the life of every terrestrial organism on geostrategic agendas of unipolar global domination.

    Another part of it is just garden variety psychological compartmentalization from an uncomfortable idea; nobody likes to think of everyone they know and love being vaporized or dying of nuclear radiation.

    Another part might be because people simply cannot wrap their heads around the idea of billions of people dying and what that would mean. It’s been pointed out that most people lack an intuitive understanding of how much more a billion is than a million, which is often cited to highlight the extreme difference between a billionaire and a common millionaire. But it also applies to human lives; we can barely wrap our minds around the idea of a million lives having been snuffed out in the Iraq invasion, much less billions perishing in nuclear war.

    Perhaps the biggest part of it, though, is the fact that this threat has been around a long time. I can’t tell you how many older people I’ve had pish-poshing my concerns saying “Bah, I remember doing duck-and-cover drills as a kid! Turned out to be a whole lotta nothing.”

    But it was never nothing. We came extremely close to wiping ourselves out multiple times in the cold war between the US and the Soviet Union because nuclear brinkmanship is an inherently unpredictable affair with far too many small moving parts to control, any one of which could set off an apocalyptic chain of events due to something as simple as miscommunication, technical malfunction, or misinterpretation by any of the thousands of individuals involved amid the chaos and confusion of escalating aggressions.

    It just doesn’t sit well with people’s understanding of the world that it could all end through the same nuclear armageddon scenario their grandparents used to worry about. If two men were holding guns to each other’s heads it would be experienced as very dangerous at first, but after a while if nobody pulled the trigger the emotional tension would begin to diminish. If years went by and the men got older it would diminish even further. If they got so old they couldn’t hold the guns anymore and had their children take over for them, and then their children’s children years later, the emotional experience of the standoff would be all but forgotten.

    But the guns never got any less deadly. And now the grandchildren of those who initiated the standoff are starting to get careless.

    I keep having this scene go through my head where something happens and the nukes start flying and everyone’s surprised, because of all the things they’ve been herded into worrying about the idea that actual nuclear war could happen was nowhere near the forefront of their awareness. And someone looks out the window and sees a mushroom cloud growing on the horizon and says “What?? This is how it all ends? With all those weapons we’ve been deliberately building with the full knowledge that they can end it all?”

    I mean, how stupid would we feel for having missed that one?

    And now there’s a massive push to weaponize space to stay ahead of Russia and China, opening up a whole new dimension of unpredictable moving parts where things can go cataclysmically wrong. You’d think our place on such a precipice would be drawing us all together, but because we’re so manipulated by such deeply malignant forces, we’re instead more divided than ever.

    __________________________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Armistice Day Turned into Love-a-killer-Navy-SEAL Day

    I’m rushing this since it is officially, November 11, the dreaded day of dishonor we call Veterans Day. Parades, ceremonies, and a fake day off—Veterans Day, observed on November 11 each year, is one of the country’s 12 Congressionally designated federal holidays. Make now bones about it — this holiday is distinct from Memorial Day: more nonsense with roots from a Civil War-era tradition of decorating the graves of deceased soldiers.

    Veterans Day didn’t always celebrate all military veterans. Once tagged as Armistice Day, November 11 has roots in one of the most perverted and destructive rich man’s conflicts in history.

    Go back to 1918, when a world of direct and collateral damaged souls wanted an end of what was commonly called the “Great War.” World War I had slashed and burned European landscapes, but it was the beginning of that use of deadly new scientifically-approved technology — poison gas — which got things going from thereon out, war-wise. Ecocide, genocide, and entire industries on exploding things and projectiles from space. More than 30 nations were dragged into this ugly great war of planes, tanks, bombs hitting all fronts with trenches and clouds of chlorine gas against galloping horse Cavalries. Revolutions had upended the governments of many of the combatant countries, and an influenza pandemic was sweeping the world.

    On November 11, 1918 at 11:00 a.m. Paris time, an armistice came into effect.

    World War I was over, but wars implanted in other countries were just beginning. 10 million men were killed in action, and another 20 million were wounded worldwide. The U.S. threw into the conflict in 1917, but it alone had lost over 116,000 lives and seen about 320,000 other casualties. These are just the ledger counts, because capitalists do not count the epigenetic trauma, the death by slow PTSD, the collective horror, guilt, shame and disease of war’s multiple fronts, victims and tragedies.

    The bell tolled and silence rang at 11 a.m. Armistice day was nationwide. Multiple governors declared legal holidays. All those rah-rah veterans’ associations and groups made plans to commemorate the occasion with ceremonies, religious ceremonies, and fundraising for the American Red Cross. On November 11, 1919, the New York Times noted that people around the world would hold moments of silence at 11:00 a.m.

    No great speeches on peace, no great conferences on structural violence, or why blockades are deadly, or how the financial felons of war keep on taking, or what sort of torture would be befitting of the war profiteers, or no great treatises on Wall Street’s hand in things. No War is a Racket intimations, that is, in the public at large, until, well, until 1935!

    I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

    ― Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket

    Personal History Does Not Determine Outcomes

    I’m named after a grandfather, Paul Haeder, who was a lieutenant in the German Navy during World War. He was one of seven brothers, and his life in Dortmund changed when he was recruited at age 17 into the Navy, as he lived on a German tall ship, where he would spend a year learning the trade of militarism, German style. Many ports that ship went to, and alas he ended up in a tri-plane, fighting the British and French. They carried hunting rifles with them to shoot at the pilots and engines. They carried round rocks to drop on the cloth wings. They had grenades to toss on trucks and soldiers below. There was no synchronized propellers for front mounted machine guns, hence the hunting rifles.

    I did grow up on the Azores (USAF father) and then in France (same father, but officer, US Army). I spent time with aunts and uncles and cousins in Scotland, England and Germany. For a child — I was precocious and always around smart people who had at least THAT history under their belts. I was in the middle of old wise adults, war survivors, and young adults with education under their belts. It was an international upbringing. I was anti-military even though I was forced to be a military brat. My father was shot twice in Vietnam, and he was wounded in Korea as a 19 year old. He was a socialist, but he was also so tied to the military — cryptography — that I blasted his philosophy out of my life. He was always supportive of my education, and he threw in bucks when I needed things to survive in college. He was not a hard-ass like myself, and alas, I did the ROTC thing with my long hair while working as a journalist for the college daily rag. I wanted to learn the insights of war makers to be a revolutionary. Look where that got me, now age 64, aging out of all relevance in this by hook or by crook country.

    So, that grandfather’s brothers had all emigrated to the US, Iowa and South Dakota, and Minnesota. My grandfather was in post-WWI German, trying to survive, trying his hand at anything, including Pinkerton guard on the trains (bread trains they called them) in order to shoot to kill Germans who were starving. He didn’t last long doing that, nor did he last long in the coal mines.

    Ironically, he was on the Rostock, in the Battle of Jutland.

    SMS Rostock - Wikipedia

    It was a huge battle off Denmark. My grandfather was on the ship being transported to another front to fly. The ship was hit, he broke his jaw, and he held up a seaman with a broken arm and shoulder and watched that war theater between the Germans and British.

    Battle of Jutland - Wikipedia

    The point is that war is more than just messy. You can read about the Rostock and Jutland in Wikipedia. Whoever wrote the entry loves naval war.

    Rostock also participated in the Battle of Jutland, on 31 May 1916. She served as the leader of the torpedo boat flotillas, flying the flag of Kommodore Andreas Michelsen. The flotilla was tasked with screening for the battle squadrons of the High Seas Fleet. As the German fleet reached the engagement between the British and German battlecruiser squadrons at 17:30, a pair of destroyers, HMS Nestor and Nicator attempted to attack the German battle line. Rostock and a number of the battleships engaged the destroyers, which were both disabled by the heavy German fire.[5] The battleships destroyed Nestor and Nicator and their crews were picked up by German torpedo boats.[6]

    At 19:32, Rostock and several torpedo boats crossed through the German line and began to lay a smoke screen to cover the withdrawal of the German fleet. Some twenty minutes later, Michelsen detached several torpedo boats to assist the badly damaged battlecruiser Lützow. By the time the German fleet had assumed its night cruising formation, Rostock fell in with the light cruisers of IV Scouting Group on the port side of the fleet. Shortly before midnight, Rostock and IV Scouting Group came into contact with the 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron. Shortly after midnight, the British 4th Destroyer Flotilla attacked the German line, where Rostock was positioned. She joined the cannonade directed against the destroyers as they pressed home their attack. The destroyers launched several torpedoes at the Germans, forcing Rostock and the other cruisers to turn away to avoid them; this pointed the ships directly at the battleships in I Battle Squadron. Rostock successfully passed through the formation, but the cruiser Elbing was rammed by one of the battleships and disabled.[7]

    In the chaos of the night engagement, Rostock’s search lights illuminated the destroyer Broke. Gunfire from Rostock and the battleships Westfalen and Rheinland smothered the British destroyer; although heavily damaged, she managed to limp back to port.[8] The ship was attacked by the destroyers Ambuscade and Contest; the two ships each fired a single torpedo at high-speed settings at a range of about 1,000 yd (910 m). One torpedo struck Rostock at 1:30, though it is unknown which destroyer launched it. Rostock was also hit by three 4 in (100 mm) shells, probably from the destroyer Broke. The disabled Rostock called the destroyer S54 to join her; S54 took Rostock in tow, at times making up to 10 kn (19 km/h; 12 mph). The pair was subsequently joined by the destroyers V71 and V73, which had been detached from the flotilla to escort Rostock back to port.[9][10]

    At around 03:55 on 1 June, the four German ships encountered the British cruiser Dublin. The three destroyers went alongside the crippled cruiser and evacuated her crew, while flashing the first two letters of the British signal challenge. Smoke screens were laid to obscure the identity of the German warships. After about ten minutes, S54 departed with Rostock’s crew aboard, while V71 and V73 remained. Scuttling charges had been set in the cruiser, but to ensure Rostock sank faster, the two destroyers fired a total of three torpedoes into the ship. Rostock sank bow-first at approximately 04:25, after which V71 and V73 made for Horns Reef at high speed. Of Rostock’s crew, 14 men were killed and 6 were wounded during the battle.[11] In the course of the battle, Rostock fired some 500 rounds of 10.5 cm ammunition, more than any other German ship.[10] A second Rostock, of the Cöln class, was launched in April 1918, but was not completed before the end of the war.[12]

    So, back in the USA, the Haeders — all those brothers and their families — believed that the eldest brother, Paul, had perished in the Battle of Jutland. They even held a memorial for him in Waterloo, Iowa. News back then did not travel fast.

    This legacy of war is in a box. Iron Cross and other German awards. The two purple hearts and one slug dug out of my old man’s chest when his helicopter was shot down in Vietnam. Bronze star, all sorts of medals, and the tri-folded American Flag given to his wife (divorced, my mom) at his graveside service at Fort Huachuca where his ashes are in a cemetery near where I used to go javelina hunting when I was still a meat eater (age 17).

    Ironically, everything in my life has been anti-war, anti-imperialism, and yet, I was a college teacher in Texas, New Mexico and Washington, working on military bases teaching college composition and literature. Before that, I was a reporter for newspaper in Southern Arizona, with one of my many beats being the US military, Fort Huachuca and the aerostat balloons in the first part of militarizing the border around drugs and immigrants.

    I even taught college courses at Biggs Field, Texas, at the Sergeants Major Academy. My entire life has been pulling the scales off the eyes of my students, whose vision is infused with propaganda and false history of this country, from sea to shining sea. Many of my students agreed with Butler’s short book on the racket of war. I did get some off-the-record detailed accounts of many of those soldiers’ dealings in Vietnam, the Middle East, Central America, Africa.

    What this country is all about is this smoke and mirrors gambit, facades, a disjointed fake right-left divide. What this country does around the military is more than criminal. Right from the playbook of the Roman Empire. But on steroids. So much more entangled in everything, now that the world runs on finance, trillions held in BlackRock and Blackstone and 100 banks. A world where media — books, history texts, TV, film, radio, Internet — are controlled by a dozen outfits. Who owns the world are those who need public and private armies to keep us, the 80 percent, in line. It’s keeping us in line with chaos of information, with disjointed fears, with people at each other’s throats.

    Here, William Blum, in a 2014 interview on a book dealing with Obama, et al — William Blum Discusses his book, America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy

    That’s the same task faced by every agency of the government which has a connection to foreign policy. The same task faced by the mainstream media. They want to make it look good. They never use the word imperialism. They never say this is a big lie or it’s totally immoral, so they’re all on the same side. They all have to find ways of putting it in the best light. That’s the joint task of all these institutions. It’s as bad as World War I. These young people, they have little idea of the extreme acts of terrorism carried out by our Al Qaeda types. I’m sure the average American shares this view that suicide bombings are inhuman, but one can raise the same questions about the average American soldier. What’s been done to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan is as horrible as anything done by Al Qaeda. So, we don’t have to look for Islamic brainwashing, we have American brainwashing.

    We know about Blum’s writing tied to the number of interventions (wars, killings) the US had engaged in from 1945 to 1999, when Blum’s book concludes: Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. Portions of the book can be read at: this site:

    Here, his words in an article, “A Brief History of U.S. Interventions: 1945 to the Present” Z Magazine, June 1999

    The engine of American foreign policy has been fueled not by a devotion to any kind of morality, but rather by the necessity to serve other imperatives, which can be summarized as follows:

    * making the world safe for American corporations;

    * enhancing the financial statements of defense contractors at home who have contributed generously to members of congress;

    * preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model;

    * extending political and economic hegemony over as wide an area as possible, as befits a “great power.”

    This in the name of fighting a supposed moral crusade against what cold warriors convinced themselves, and the American people, was the existence of an evil International Communist Conspiracy, which in fact never existed, evil or not.

    The United States carried out extremely serious interventions into more than 70 nations in this period.

    The Triplane Fighter Craze of 1917

    That war debt for Germany was so crushing it took 92 years after the defeat in WWI to pay off. That is the racket of the slimy ones — the bankers, the psychologists, the propagandists, the marketers, the offence weaponry corporations, the entire system propped up by royalty of all brands, as well as the elite, the money hoarders, the purveyors of death who use soldiers, civilians, crops, rivers, hospitals, schools, industries as weapons, as the casualties of war. Don’t forget about the inept media (but really stealth and capable tools for oligarchs and militarists). The Military Industrial Complex is so much more than rivets, TNT, missile parts, bombers, napalm.

    Again, back to Rusty Nelson, who was asked to speak at a commencement, and he was part of the Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane, and he worked hard at anti-war activism, and activism tied to environmental and educational justice. He said a few words in that address which got him promptly scolded by the superintendent and banned from ever stepping foot on a Spokane campus (K12) again.

    This is from 2005 — Pacific Northwest Weekly Inlander, my old rag:

    This issue led to an insurrection in Seattle last spring. Parents at Garfield High School didn’t want recruiters targeting kids just because they are low-income or black, and the parent-teacher-student association voted to keep recruiters out.

    “One piece of research I did was to find out how many times recruiters go to Lakeside, which is our (Seattle School District’s) prep school,” says Amy Hagopian, president of the Garfield PTSA. “And recruiters don’t go there. The guy I talked to, in 10 years as a career counselor, said he’s never seen Lakeside kids join the regular military. They go to the academies, like West Point. They don’t just join the Marines.”

    There appears to be a similar dynamic in Spokane. Military recruiters visit Lewis and Clark High School as little as once a year, even though they are allowed in the building as many as four times a year.

    At Rogers High, the recruiters come once a month. Rogers is also the only Spokane high school with an ROTC program.

    There isn’t the same sense of outrage, however, that the district isn’t sticking up for more options for the kids at Rogers.

    “The Peace and Justice Action League has a campaign to educate high school students about the pitfalls of recruiting. But it hasn’t taken off. We are not seeing the interest we expected from students or parents,” says Rusty Nelson of PJALS.

    “Each school is different. Some schools say come anytime you want. Others say come once a quarter,” says Capt. John Richardson, an Army recruiter in Spokane.

    In Spokane, a more conservative and more low-income city than Seattle, military careers have long been an honorable choice for high school grads. The military has seen little falloff in enlistments here, Richardson says: “Our enlistments have not changed over historic numbers.”

    The continuing war in Iraq and the stepped-up search for recruits “has not been a concern for the school district,” says Emmett Arndt, director of teaching and learning for Spokane Public Schools. “We perceive that a military career is a viable and high-interest career for students.”

    But parents and groups such as Spokane’s Peace and Justice Action League say the pressure to get recruits has increased in recent years, and students need to be shielded from high-pressure sales.

    The nation’s 7,500 recruiters had a “stand-down” day on May 20 for retraining and refocus in the wake of embarrassing, and widely publicized, ethical lapses. There were no such lapses in the Spokane office, Richardson says.

    Rusty and Nancy Nelson retired from the PJALS in 2009. Both people I considered friends during my 10 year stint in Spokane. Things in the MIC and the embedded encircling business and finance realm are so so much worse in 2021. An explosion of perversity and crime in the entire offence weapon game, and the tethered industries of oppression. All those collateral casualties are worth it not just in the mind of Albright, but in the minds of all those bankers and hedge fund and politicians, et al. All of them, every single one of them. who supports and defends this country.

    This image is what the robber barons and the money changers and the depopulation gurus want in every country: “During a period of hyperinflation in 1920s Germany, 100,000 marks was the equivalent one U.S. dollar.”

    Inflation in Germany

    This story of war, this history of lies, this ramping up of rah-rah rot, oh, I could go on and on, but I am on my own deadlines, hoping Dissident Voice runs this through today on the United States of Armaments’ holy day, Veterans Day, a mental place where there are no peace colleges, no peace studies (mandatory) in K12. Yes, without that version of humanity — peace, ending cold and hot wars, stopping the deadly sanctions and blockades and financial dirty dealings — our youth are handcuffed by lie after lie after lie.

    Armistice — “an agreement made by opposing sides in a war to stop fighting for a certain time; a truce.”

    Ahh, 16 years ago — “War and Peace In Vietnam” by Paul Haeder, The Inlander.

    Oh, do the Google gulag thing, and try and find any robust, true, four year or graduate program on “peace studies.” You know, antiwar studies, teaching teachers or thinkers to pursue the antiwar ethos, the entire complicated message of getting war out of everything. There is no antiwar movement, and you will not find Peace Colleges, but you will find War Colleges, and you will find ROTC units on Jesuit campuses. Crocodile tears for mercenaries, and SEAL teams with knives and C4 explosives. This is our guy, our book seller, our celebrity, our pardoned fellow, our hero. Chief Petty Office Gallagher, US Navy:

    See the source image

    Not in the brig for long, for  murdering prisoners — see him wrist-cuffed?

    Chief Gallagher

    And, it wouldn’t be Disneyland, La-La Land, America, without a murderer blessed by a wannabe murderer, Trump:

    Convicted SEAL Eddie Gallagher thanks President Trump with a “little gift” from Iraq

    Other heroes —

    See the source image

    Our boys in uniform —

    See the source image

    Our girls, too —

    See the source image

    Our women in civilian clothes running amok, running the racket — “How women took over the military-industrial complex: For the first time, the nation’s defense hierarchy is no longer dominated by men” !! Below — Donald Trump shakes hands with Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson as Chief Test Pilot Alan B. Norman watches during an event in July at the White House. Hewson is one of four women to serve atop four of the nation’s five largest defense contractors. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

    Donald Trump shakes hands with Marillyn Hewson at the White House

    Kathy Warden
    President and CEO, Northrop Grumman
    Effective Jan. 1, 2019

    Marillyn Hewson
    President and CEO, Lockheed Martin
    Effective Jan. 1, 2013

    Phebe Novakovic
    Chairman and CEO, General Dynamics
    Effective January 2013

    Leanne Caret
    President and CEO, Boeing Defense, Space & Security
    Effective February 2016

    Ellen Lord
    Undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment
    Effective August 2017

    Heather Wilson
    Secretary of the Air Force
    Effective May 16, 2017

    Lisa Gordon-Hagerty
    Administrator, National Nuclear Security Administration
    Effective Feb. 22, 2018

    Andrea Thompson
    Undersecretary of state for arms control and international security
    Effective June 19, 2018

    Amen! May they all go the way of the Dodo, and I mean that figuratively. Because we know what harsh minds they have, what machinations are brewing in their violent brains, and how their violent tendencies are washed away with Georgetown and Harvard university MBA’s/JD’s and inside their rich lives and with their jet-setting ways, all part of the War is a Racket formula, updated AI and Drone and Pathogens and Satellite style, 2021.

    This General,

    See the source image

    Turned into this, thank goodness —

    See the source image

    Ahh, Butler, stopping a coup against Roosevelt, against the elected (sic) president, and, of course, a Bush in Hand is involved:

    In 1934, a colossal claim reached the American news media: There had been a plot to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in favor of a fascist government. Supposedly in the works since 1933, the claims of the conspiracy came from a very conspicuous and reliable source: Major General Smedley Butler, one of the most decorated war heroes of his time. Even more unbelievable were his claims of who was involved in the plot – respected names like Robert Sterling Clark, Grayson M.P. Murphy, and Prescott Bush. While news media at the time mocked Butler’s story, recently discovered archives have revealed the truth behind Major General Butler’s claims. (light reading source)

    Costs of War

    U.S. BUDGETARY COSTS: $8 TRILLION

    The vast economic impact of the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere is poorly understood by the U.S. public and policymakers. This paper estimates the budgetary costs of war, including past expenditures and future obligations to care for veterans of these wars.

    HUMAN COST: OVER 929,000

    The number of people killed directly in the violence of the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere are approximated here. Several times as many civilians have died due to the reverberating effects of these wars. The methods of accounting are described in this paper.

    GEOGRAPHIC REACH: OVER 85 COUNTRIES

    From 2018 to 2020, the U.S. government undertook what it labeled “counterterrorism” activities in at least 85 countries, in an outgrowth of President George W. Bush’s “Global War on Terror.” This map displays air/drone strikes, on-the-ground combat, “Section 127e” programs, military exercises, and operations to train and/or assist foreign forces.

    PEOPLE DISPLACED: 38 MILLION

    38 million people have been displaced by the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines.

    The post Armistice Day Turned into Love-a-killer-Navy-SEAL Day first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • US Military Interests Are Promoting a Culture of Fear With China

    Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley listens to a question during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on September 28, 2021, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

    Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley recently called China’s testing of a hypersonic missile designed to evade U.S. nuclear defenses “very close” to a “Sputnik moment” for the United States. The comments underscore an ongoing pattern on the part of the U.S. government and corporate media structure that reinforces and instigates dangerous preexisting geopolitical tensions with China, a rhetorical theme unnecessarily produced by a Sinophobic bipartisan U.S. political elite.

    In this interview, international relations scholar Richard Falk provides the historical context of Sputnik and summarizes U.S. interests in promoting a culture of fear with China. Falk also outlines how prospects for a new Cold War could ultimately subside due to increased focuses about the climate emergency and COVID, thus rendering geopolitics less relevant, which is both fortunate and unfortunate for its own sets of reasons.

    Daniel Falcone: On Bloomberg Television, Gen. Mark Milley referred to China’s hypersonic weapons test as close to a “Sputnik moment” that has our attention. Can you comment on the meaning of this language and provide historical context?

    Richard Falk: I interpret General Milley’s remark as primarily intended to raise security concerns relating to the deepening geopolitical rivalry with China, or perhaps as a reflection of these. To call the hypersonic weapons test by China “close to a Sputnik moment” was suggesting that it was posing a systemic threat to American technological supremacy directly relevant to national security and the relative military capabilities of the two countries. The reference to a Sputnik moment was a way of recalling an instance when the geopolitical rival of the day, which in 1957 was of course the Soviet Union, suddenly caught the U.S. by surprise, becoming the first sovereign state with the capacity to send a satellite into space with an ability to orbit the Earth, and possibly in the future by this means dominate the political life of the entire planet.

    This capacity was not in of itself a threat but was taken to mean that the Soviet Union was more technologically sophisticated than was understood by the public, and apparently even by the U.S. intelligence. It was politically used as a spur to increased investment in space technology, and it led some years late to a triumphant moment for the United States when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969, enabling the U.S. to reclaim the lead in the space dimension of the Cold War rivalry and to indirectly recover confidence in its military prowess. In retrospect, the actual relevance of the Sputnik moment was in the domain of symbolic geopolitics without real relevance to the course or outcome of the Cold War.

    Supposedly the aim of the Chinese test is to develop a supersonic missile capable of encircling the Earth with a spatial orbit and a flexible reentry capability, which is perceived as having the ability to evade radar and existing defense systems currently in use to intercept incoming missiles. In that sense, Milley’s pronouncement in the course of the Bloomberg interview can best be understood as an intensification of the slide toward geopolitical confrontation with China, a set of circumstances that already possesses many features of a second Cold War, although occurring under radically different historical circumstances than the rivalry with the Soviet Union.

    It will likely become the beginning of agitation and a campaign to increase the bloated defense budget still further, which is as always likely to find a receptive and gullible bipartisan audience in the U.S. Congress. No recent statement by a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has enjoyed such success as Milley in setting off national security alarm bells, uncritically highlighted by mainstream media.

    What I found surprising, yet in keeping with the mobilization of anti-China public opinion, was the failure of both Milley and the commentary to suggest a different twist to this news. It could have been presented a dangerous and expensive technological threshold that calls for mutual restraint and possibly agreements limiting further developments. President Joe Biden or Secretary of State Antony Blinken could have used the occasion to declare that the world at this stage could not afford such costly and risky distractions, as an all-out arms race in space.

    It seems that this Sputnik moment by an imaginative military leader could have turned to an opportunity for peace rather than a threat of future war. It might have provided a dramatic moment to embark upon a path of reconciliation with China that would benefit not only the two countries but humanity in general. Of course, such a turn would be viciously attacked by the militarists in both parties as weakness instead of strength. Remember the derision heaped on President Barack Obama for daring “to lead from behind” in the 2011 North Atlantic Treaty Organization intervention in Libya. Given the mess resulting from that military operation, there is reason to view Obama’s reluctance as a show of strategic wisdom as well as prudence.

    Is this a political statement in your estimation, or a sober comment by high-ranking official?

    I do consider Milley’s statement, made without qualifications and accompanying comments, as providing the basis for two possible lines of response: a geopolitical reflex of alarm and heightened tensions in keeping with the confrontational character of recent American foreign policy, or a measured reaction that urged mutual restraint and a search for a cooperative framework with respect to the militarization of space in the interests of world peace, but also with respect to the avoidance of an expensive and highly uncertain extensions of arms competition.

    The fact this “road not taken” was not even mentioned by Milley as an alternative is deeply disappointing, although in keeping with the prevailing mood in Washington. As well, the feverish media reportage of his provocative sounding of Sputnik alarm bells suggests that public policy debate is taking place in an atmosphere of ideological closure if the issue involves China. This should be deeply worrying.

    President Biden recently participated in a CNN “town hall” and again instigated China. China does not seem to be intimidated by the United States. Can you elaborate on how that reality impacts heads of state overall?

    We are witnessing once again a superpower interaction that threatens to dominate international politics — this time in a global setting still trying to recover from the COVID pandemic and faced with dire warnings in the form of a consensus from climate experts that if more is not done with a sense of urgency to address climate change, catastrophic harm will result. In this new configuration of global social, political and ecological forces, if rationality prevails, geopolitics will be moved to the sidelines so as to focus on challenges that cannot be ignored any longer. It is unfortunate that that political will in the U.S. remains mainly geared toward addressing real and imagined traditional security threats stemming from conflict and nothing else when it comes to foreign policy.

    Some advocates for peace are worried that a failed or stalled infrastructure legislative package will force liberal Democrats into more hawkish positions in order to show “resolve.” Can you comment on the validity of this concern?

    A persisting shadow hovering over American politics is the sobering realization that there seems to be no down side for hawkishness by a politician when it comes to embracing the warped logic of geopolitical rivalry or military spending. Whether this will have an impact upon the bargaining component of the search for sufficient support in Congress to fund a domestic infrastructure program is not knowable at this time, but it would come as no surprise. Many liberal Democrats do not depart from the bipartisan mainstream if the issues at stake are defense, Israel and now China, especially when a favored domestic program seems in jeopardy.

    NPR has reported on how “Secretary of State Antony Blinken called on countries to support Taiwan’s participation in the United Nations. The self-governed island has not been a member of the body since October 1971, when the U.N. gave Beijing a seat at the table and removed Taiwan.” What are the regional implications of the Taiwan factor regarding Biden’s and Milley’s remarks? How is this pertinent and what is happening here?

    It was a most unfortunate departure from the Shanghai Communique of 1972 establishing relations between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak in favor of giving Taiwan a more active role in the UN system. First, it seemed contrary to the spirit of what was agreed upon with respect to Taiwan in 1972, centering on an acceptance by Washington of a “One China” policy. As Henry Kissinger has argued, the language used deliberately avoided endorsing the PRC view of “One China,” leaving open the interpretation followed by Washington that Beijing could only extend its territorial sovereignty to Taiwan by way of a diplomatic agreement with Taiwan (formerly, the Republic of China, which had lost the right to represent China at the UN).

    Despite efforts by Taiwan to gain diplomatic recognition as a separate political entity, it has only managed to secure a favorable response from 15 countries, and not one “important” country among them, with even the United States refraining. At one point, Taiwan did attempt to become a member of the UN, but the effort was firmly rejected by the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, relying on UN General Assembly Resolution 2756, which set the terms of Chinese representation in 1971, relegating Taiwan (what had been represented by China at the UN until that time as the Republic of China) as “the province of Taiwan” within the larger reality of China. A strenuous U.S. effort in 1971 to retain the Republic of China as a participant in UN activities was rejected, leaving the PRC as the sole representative of China.

    What makes the Blinken comment doubly inflammatory is that it occurred in the midst of increasing overall U.S.-China tensions with a growing focus on the security of Taiwan. With China apparently testing the nerves of Taiwan and the resolve of the United States by a naval buildup and air intrusions, for Blinken to choose this moment to support an increased independent status for Taiwan is either misguided or clearly meant to be provocative. Such irresponsible talk was further amplified by Biden’s implications that the U.S. would defend Taiwan if attacked rather than calling for a tension reducing diplomatic conference. Then comes General Milley’s “Sputnik moment” remark, as if the Chinese security challenge has crossed a threshold of strategic threat to the United States that it dares not ignore. Further signals of hostility were sent to China by activating the QUAD informal alliance (U.S., Japan, India and Australia) some months ago, and more recently establishing the AUKUS alliance, which included Australian development of nuclear-powered submarines.

    There are two lines of structural threat that seem to be creating an atmosphere of pre-crisis confrontation: firstly, the so-called Thucydides Trap by which a hitherto dominant power faces an ascending challenger and opts for war while it still commands superior military capabilities rather than waiting until its rival catches up or gains the upper hand; the Milley comment and reaction must be viewed in this light. And secondly, the insistent belligerent assertion that what is at stake with Taiwan is the larger ideological struggle going on in the region and world between those governments that are democracies and those that are authoritarian. The Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-wen, in a recent article in Foreign Affairs stridently articulated this theme, and so imparted larger meaning to what was at stake by keeping Taiwan safe and independent.

    From a longer temporal perspective, the right-wing of the political class in Washington has never gotten over the trauma of “losing China” as if it were the U.S.’s to lose! It is the persistence of this geopolitical hubris that edges Taiwan tensions ever closer to an armed encounter, with true losers on both sides. A further reason to favor diplomatic de-escalation while there is still time is the apparent realization that the U.S. cannot match China in the South China Sea by relying on conventional weapons and can only avoid defeat by having recourse to nuclear weaponry. This is not alarmism. It has been openly declared by leading voices in the Pentagon.

    This geopolitical context should not lead the world or the region to overlook the well-being of the 23.5 million people of Taiwan. Given what is at stake, the best approach would be to restore the “constructive ambiguity” that was deliberately written into the Shanghai Communique, and work for an atmosphere where Taiwan and the PRC can negotiate their futures on the basis of common interests. Although the recent experience in Hong Kong suggests that this, too, is a treacherous path, but less so than flirting with a geopolitical flare-up that could easily get grotesquely out of hand.

    This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Biden Administration Is Building Back to the Brink of a New Cold War

    Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrison and U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin walk past a military honor guard as they walk inside for a meeting at the Pentagon on September 22, 2021, in Arlington, Virginia.

    Before it’s too late, we need to ask ourselves a crucial question: Do we really — I mean truly — want a new Cold War with China?

    Because that’s just where the Biden administration is clearly taking us. If you need proof, check out last month’s announcement of an “AUKUS” (Australia, United Kingdom, U.S.) military alliance in Asia. Believe me, it’s far scarier (and more racist) than the nuclear-powered submarine deal and the French diplomatic kerfuffle that dominated the media coverage of it. By focusing on the dramatically angry French reaction to losing their own agreement to sell non-nuclear subs to Australia, most of the media missed a much bigger story: that the U.S. government and its allies have all but formally declared a new Cold War by launching a coordinated military buildup in East Asia unmistakably aimed at China.

    It’s still not too late to choose a more peaceful path. Unfortunately, this all-Anglo alliance comes perilously close to locking the world into just such a conflict that could all too easily become a hot, even potentially nuclear, war between the two wealthiest, most powerful countries on the planet.

    If you’re too young to have lived through the original Cold War as I did, imagine going to sleep fearing that you might not wake up in the morning, thanks to a nuclear war between the world’s two superpowers (in those days, the United States and the Soviet Union). Imagine walking past nuclear fallout shelters, doing “duck and cover” drills under your school desk, and experiencing other regular reminders that, at any moment, a great-power war could end life on Earth.

    Do we really want a future of fear? Do we want the United States and its supposed enemy to once again squander untold trillions of dollars on military expenditures while neglecting basic human needs, including universal health care, education, food, and housing, not to mention failing to deal adequately with that other looming existential threat, climate change?

    A U.S. Military Buildup in Asia

    When President Joe Biden, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared their all-too-awkwardly named AUKUS alliance, most of the media focused on a relatively small (though hardly insignificant) part of the deal: the U.S. sale of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia and that country’s simultaneous cancellation of a 2016 contract to buy diesel-powered subs from France. Facing the loss of tens of billions of euros and being shut out of the Anglo Alliance, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called the deal a “stab in the back.” For the first time in history, France briefly recalled its ambassador from Washington. French officials even cancelled a gala meant to celebrate Franco-American partnership dating back to their defeat of Great Britain in the Revolutionary War.

    Caught surprisingly off guard by the uproar over the alliance (and the secret negotiations that preceded it), the Biden administration promptly took steps to repair relations, and the French ambassador soon returned to Washington. In September at the United Nations, President Biden declared that the last thing he wants is “a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs.” Sadly, the actions of his administration suggest otherwise.

    Imagine how Biden administration officials would feel about the announcement of a “VERUCH” (VEnezuela, RUssia, and CHina) alliance. Imagine how they’d react to a buildup of Chinese military bases and thousands of Chinese troops in Venezuela. Imagine their reaction to regular deployments of all types of Chinese military aircraft, submarines, and warships in Venezuela, to increased spying, heightened cyberwarfare capabilities, and relevant space “activities,” as well as military exercises involving thousands of Chinese and Russian troops not just in Venezuela but in the waters of the Atlantic within striking distance of the United States. How would Biden’s team feel about the promised delivery of a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines to that country, involving the transfer of nuclear technology and nuclear-weapons-grade uranium?

    None of this has happened, but these would be the Western Hemisphere equivalents of the “major force posture initiatives” U.S., Australian, and British officials have just announced for East Asia. AUKUS officials unsurprisingly portray their alliance as making parts of Asia “safer and more secure,” while building “a future of peace [and] opportunity for all the people of the region.” It’s unlikely U.S. leaders would view a similar Chinese military buildup in Venezuela or anywhere else in the Americas as a similar recipe for safety and peace.

    In reaction to VERUCH, calls for a military response and a comparable alliance would be rapid. Shouldn’t we expect Chinese leaders to react to the AUKUS buildup with their own version of the same? For now, a Chinese government spokesperson suggested that the AUKUS allies “should shake off their Cold War mentality” and “not build exclusionary blocs targeting or harming the interests of third parties.” The Chinese military’s recent escalation of provocative exercises near Taiwan may be, in part, an additional response.

    Chinese leaders have even more reason to doubt the declared peaceful intent of AUKUS given that the U.S. military already has seven military bases in Australia and nearly 300 more spread across East Asia. By contrast, China doesn’t have a single base in the Western Hemisphere or anywhere near the borders of the United States. Add in one more factor: in the last 20 years, the AUKUS allies have a track record of launching aggressive wars and participating in other conflicts from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya to Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines, among other places. China’s last war beyond its borders was with Vietnam for one month in 1979. (Brief, deadly clashes occurred with Vietnam in 1988 and India in 2020.)

    War Trumps Diplomacy

    By withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the Biden administration theoretically started moving the country away from its twenty-first-century policy of endless wars. The president, however, now appears determined to side with those in Congress, in the mainstream foreign policy “Blob,” and in the media who are dangerously inflating the Chinese military threat and calling for a military response to that country’s growing global power. The poor handling of relations with the French government is another sign that, despite prior promises, the Biden administration is paying little attention to diplomacy and reverting to a foreign policy defined by preparations for war, bloated military budgets, and macho military bluster.

    Given the 20 years of disastrous warfare that followed the George W. Bush administration’s announcement of a “Global War on Terror” and its invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, what business does Washington have building a new military alliance in Asia? Shouldn’t the Biden administration instead be building alliances dedicated to combating global warming, pandemics, hunger, and other urgent human needs? What business do three white leaders of three white-majority countries have attempting to dominate that region through military force?

    While the leaders of some countries there have welcomed AUKUS, the three allies signaled the racist, retrograde, downright colonial nature of their Anglo Alliance by excluding other Asian countries from their all-white club. Naming China as its obvious target and escalating Cold War-style us-vs.-them tensions risk fueling already rampant anti-Chinese and anti-Asian racism in the United States and globally. Belligerent, often warlike rhetoric against China, associated with former President Donald Trump and other far-right Republicans, has increasingly been embraced by the Biden administration and some Democrats. It “has directly contributed to rising anti-Asian violence across the country,” write Asia experts Christine Ahn, Terry Park, and Kathleen Richards.

    The less formalized “Quad” grouping that Washington has also organized in Asia, again including Australia as well as India and Japan, is little better and is already becoming a more militarily focused anti-Chinese alliance. Other countries in the region have indicated that they are “deeply concerned over the continuing arms race and power projection” there, as the Indonesian government said of the nuclear-powered submarine deal. Nearly silent and so difficult to detect, such vessels are offensive weapons designed to strike another country without warning. Australia’s future acquisition of them risks escalating a regional arms race and raises troubling questions about the intentions of both Australian and U.S. leaders.

    Beyond Indonesia, people worldwide should be deeply concerned about the U.S. sale of nuclear-propelled submarines. The deal undermines efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons as it encourages the proliferation of nuclear technology and weapons-grade highly enriched uranium, which the U.S. or British governments will need to provide to Australia to fuel the subs. The deal also offers a precedent allowing other non-nuclear countries like Japan to advance nuclear-weapons development under the guise of building their own nuclear-powered subs. What’s to stop China or Russia from now selling their nuclear-powered submarines and weapons-grade uranium to Iran, Venezuela, or any other country?

    Who’s Militarizing Asia?

    Some will claim that the United States must counter China’s growing military power, frequently trumpeted by U.S. media outlets. Increasingly, journalists, pundits, and politicians here have been irresponsibly parroting misleading depictions of Chinese military power. Such fearmongering is already ballooning military budgets in this country, while fueling arms races and increasing tensions, just as during the original Cold War. Disturbingly, according to a recent Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey, a majority in the U.S. now appear to believe — however incorrectly — that Chinese military power is equal to or greater than that of the United States. In fact, our military power vastly exceeds China’s, which simply doesn’t compare to the old Soviet Union.

    The Chinese government has indeed strengthened its military power in recent years by increasing spending, developing advanced weapons systems, and building an estimated 15 to 27 mostly small military bases and radar stations on human-made islands in the South China Sea. Nonetheless, the U.S. military budget remains at least three times the size of its Chinese counterpart (and higher than at the height of the original Cold War). Add in the military budgets of Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and other NATO allies like Great Britain and the discrepancy leaps to six to one. Among the approximately 750 U.S. military bases abroad, almost 300 are scattered across East Asia and the Pacific and dozens more are in other parts of Asia. The Chinese military, on the other hand, has eight bases abroad (seven in the South China Sea’s Spratley Islands and one in Djibouti in Africa), plus bases in Tibet. The U.S. nuclear arsenal contains about 5,800 warheads compared to about 320 in the Chinese arsenal. The U.S. military has 68 nuclear-powered submarines, the Chinese military 10.

    Contrary to what many have been led to believe, China is not a military challenge to the United States. There is no evidence its government has even the remotest thought of threatening, let alone attacking, the U.S. itself. Remember, China last fought a war outside its borders in 1979. “The true challenges from China are political and economic, not military,” Pentagon expert William Hartung has rightly explained.

    Since President Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” the U.S. military has engaged in years of new base construction, aggressive military exercises, and displays of military force in the region. This has encouraged the Chinese government to build up its own military capabilities. Especially in recent months, the Chinese military has engaged in increasingly provocative exercises near Taiwan, though fearmongers again are misrepresenting and exaggerating how threatening they truly are. Given Biden’s plans to escalate his predecessors’ military buildup in Asia, no one should be surprised if Beijing announces a military response and pursues an AUKUS-like alliance of its own. If so, the world will once more be locked in a two-sided Cold-War-like struggle that could prove increasingly difficult to unwind.

    Unless Washington and Beijing reduce tensions, future historians may see AUKUS as akin not just to various Cold-War-era alliances, but to the 1882 Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. That pact spurred France, Britain, and Russia to create their own Triple Entente, which, along with rising nationalism and geo-economic competition, helped lead Europe into World War I (which, in turn, begat World War II, which begat the Cold War).

    Avoiding a New Cold War?

    The Biden administration and the United States must do better than resuscitate the strategies of the nineteenth century and the Cold War era. Rather than further fueling a regional arms race with yet more bases and weapons development in Australia, U.S. officials could help lower tensions between Taiwan and mainland China, while working to resolve territorial disputes in the South China Sea. In the wake of the Afghan War, President Biden could commit the United States to a foreign policy of diplomacy, peace-building, and opposition to war rather than one of endless conflict and preparations for more of the same. AUKUS’s initial 18-month consultation period offers a chance to reverse course.

    Recent polling suggests such moves would be popular. More than three times as many in the U.S. would like to see an increase, rather than a decrease, in diplomatic engagement in the world, according to the nonprofit Eurasia Group Foundation. Most surveyed would also like to see fewer troop deployments overseas. Twice as many want to decrease the military budget as want to increase it.

    The world barely survived the original Cold War, which was anything but cold for the millions of people who lived through or died in the era’s proxy wars in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Can we really risk another version of the same, this time possibly with Russia as well as China? Do we want an arms race and competing military buildups that would divert trillions of dollars more from pressing human needs while filling the coffers of arms manufacturers? Do we really want to risk triggering a military clash between the United States and China, accidental or otherwise, that could easily spin out of control and become a hot, possibly nuclear, war in which the death and destruction of the last 20 years of “forever wars” would look small by comparison.

    That thought alone should be chilling. That thought alone should be enough to stop another Cold War before it’s too late.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The New Black Internationalism

    The Movement for Black Lives has developed an incipient internationalist language and vision, with the potential to remap America’s place in the world.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Are the Motives of War Profiteers Driving Us to the Brink of a New Cold War?

    Royal Australian Navy submarine HMAS Rankin is seen during a biennial maritime exercise between the Royal Australian Navy and the Indian Navy on September 5, 2021, in Darwin, Australia.

    “The United States will compete, and will compete vigorously, and lead with our values and our strength,” President Biden told the UN General Assembly on Tuesday. “We’ll stand up for our allies and our friends and oppose attempts by stronger countries to dominate weaker ones, whether through changes to territory by force, economic coercion, technological exploitation or disinformation. But we’re not seeking — I’ll say it again — we are not seeking a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs.”

    This was the only part of Biden’s speech where he said the words “Cold War.” They stood out; last everyone had heard, the U.S. was engaged in a “war on terror” that, thanks to the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), could conceivably run on until the stars burn out. The Cold War is black-and-white television, Ike, Nixon, Kennedy, the Cuban Missile Crisis, duck-and-cover drills, Ronald Reagan scaring the hell out of everyone, and finally a wall falling on my 18th birthday, seemingly a thousand years ago.

    Biden did not say “China” in that particular passage either — though China was mentioned several times elsewhere in his remarks — but that country was most certainly the intended recipient of that specific message. Biden was speaking amid a diplomatic meltdown between the U.S. and long-time ally France over a new Australia/United Kingdom/United States (AUKUS) strategic alliance, and specifically over the sale of at least eight nuclear submarines to Australia by the U.S.

    France was perturbed because it only learned of the new AUKUS alliance after Australia publicly announced it. This was an open-handed slap from Australia’s conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a man any modern U.S. Republican would embrace on sight, to the more left-leaning French prime minister, Emmanuel Macron. France was legitimately outraged over having been excluded from such important, high-level discussions and the French ambassador to the U.S. was immediately called home.

    Why the sudden reversal? Nuclear subs are more expensive to maintain and operate, and New Zealand does not allow anything nuclear within its territorial waters, which from a strategic standpoint leaves a huge swath of Australia’s west coast exposed. The Pacific is a massive ocean, to be sure, but what set of circumstances exist that would lead Australia — and the U.S. — to believe that nation needs at least eight of the most fearsome weapons platforms ever devised?

    Answer: The “pivot to Asia,” an Obama-era recasting of global strategic imperatives which was exacerbated by Donald Trump’s blizzard of nonsense tariffs against China. “Until this week, the so-called ‘pivot to Asia’ by the United States had been more of a threat than a reality for Europe,” reports The New York Times. “But that changed when the Biden administration announced a new defense alliance against China that has left Europe facing an implicit question: Which side are you on?”

    “We are not seeking a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs,” Biden said at the UN.

    But the sudden new AUKUS alliance (a rigid bloc?), and the placement of U.S.-made nuclear submarines into that portion of the Pacific, seems vividly at odds with the president’s placating words. Indeed, it is beginning to feel as if a new Cold War is off and running.

    Deploying U.S.-made subs in that part of the Pacific Ocean is a big, deliberate thumb in China’s eye, an act provocative enough to motivate UN Secretary-General António Guterres to speak words of warning a day before Biden’s speech. “We need to re-establish a functional relationship between the two powers,” Guterres told the Associated Press. “We need to avoid at all cost a Cold War that would be different from the past one, and probably more dangerous and more difficult to manage.”

    At bottom, however, the argument between France and the U.S. was as much over money as it was national pride. France had already inked a deal with Australia to sell a dozen diesel-powered submarines, and the AUKUS nuclear sub deal blew all that up. The collapse of the deal cost France tens of billions of euros — France is the United States of Europe when it comes to global arms sales, and France’s leaders take the arms trade as seriously as U.S. leaders do — which could translate into a whole slew of lost jobs if that money is not recouped. (French defense contractor Naval Group, which is partially owned by France and was already building the diesel subs, intends to bill Australia for the lost revenue.)

    It would surprise me not one single bit if the AUKUS agreement, and specifically the sub sale pivot from France to the U.S., first came into being after a few phone calls to some officers in “defense” procurement from lobbyists for General Dynamics and/or Huntington Ingalls, the only two shipbuilders in the U.S. with shipyards capable of building nuclear submarines. The cost to build one of these monstrously deadly machines runs, on average, around $3 billion per unit.

    “Why are you letting France get that money?” would have almost certainly been the crux of such a call. “Don’t you love America?” And away we go.

    Money. Cold Wars, you see, are notoriously expensive (read: wildly lucrative for the various war profiteers that circle the Pentagon like so many carrion birds).

    The average military spending during “peacetime” in the Cold War ran about $285.4 billion per year. The first hot Cold War conflict in Korea, according to Richard M. Miller Jr. of Praeger Security International, cost $678 billion. The cost of the Korean Conflict spanning from 1951 to 2000 is over $1 trillion. The Vietnam War cost another $1 trillion. Benefits to the veterans and veteran families of those wars runs into the tens of billions of dollars per year. The total cost of the Cold War from 1948 to 1991 is estimated to be $13.1 trillion, including $5.8 trillion for the development and maintenance of a vast nuclear arsenal.

    These eye-popping numbers, all pegged as closely as possible to current dollar values, scarcely tell the tale of the present moment. The “Black Budget” cost of the national security state, born during World War II and massively expanded during the Cold War, is unknown… well, someone knows, but they ain’t telling. The Pentagon, for its part, currently has a $35 trillion hole in its accounting. Nobody seems to know just where that money went… but somebody knows, and again, they ain’t telling. Meanwhile, despite our “withdrawal” from Iraq and Afghanistan, the war on terror grinds on relentlessly, and expensively.

    U.S. politicians and the corporate “news” media have a casually self-destructive way of discussing military spending: They don’t. If someone goes on TV and says we have to feed the poor, ten voices will be raised howling “How much will that cost?” and “We can’t afford it!” A president flips 20 missiles into a foreign country, at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars from construction to deployment to launch, and “How much did that cost?” never seems to come up.

    It comes down to this: Every bullet, every bomb, every attack helicopter, every destroyer, every fighter jet, every field meal, every tent, every rifle, every pistol, every grenade, every land mine, every missile, every submarine (!), every uniform, every pair of boots, every body bag, every coffin, every everything that goes into the U.S. war-making machine is money flooding into some “defense” contractor’s bank account and stock portfolio.

    It has been 73 years since the onset of the first Cold War, and the “terror” war is not quite the money spigot it was for the last two decades. Still, 53 cents of every tax dollar goes to the fighting of and preparation for war already, and a new Cold War with China would dramatically increase that.

    It goes entirely without saying that a new Cold War with China is an astonishingly terrible idea, an undermining of nuclear nonproliferation efforts and a good reason for China to harm the U.S. by way of the massive share of our economy they already own and control. The potential cost in human life is nigh incalculable… but ask yourself this: When was the last time you can remember the warmakers actually thinking things through when massive profits were in play? I’m stumped.

    There is also this: Among the many things the Cold War is remembered for, inflicted popular fear and mass control stand out. Here in the “free” U.S., the groupthink inspired by enmity toward the Soviet Union destroyed lives and constrained liberty for decades. It inspired two lucrative shooting wars, one of which technically never ended and another that lasted 20 years, along with a dozen proxy skirmishes around the world. All of this invigorated the fury and paranoia of enforced patriotism, and did great and lasting damage to those who did not take up the standard of war.

    As we enter an era of unrest, amid racist police violence and state efforts to repress the popular uprising against it, a fascist authoritarian surge in the halls of government everywhere, and a climate preparing to show us all who is really in charge around here, a new Cold War with all attendant mechanisms of enforced control would be just the ticket for those looking to make a buck while avoiding actual solutions to these concerns.

    “If you want a picture of the future,” wrote George Orwell, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” I am forced to wonder if future years will have us looking back on this seemingly insignificant submarine deal between the U.S. and Australia the way historians today regard George Kennan’s “Long Telegram”: One diplomat’s long transatlantic missive that is now widely regarded as the seedcorn for U.S. Cold War policy toward the U.S.S.R. — along with all its consequences — for the next five decades. It had to start somewhere. It always does.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Empire’s Last Stand

    In the early months of 1947, President Harry Truman and Dean Acheson, his secretary of state, made up their minds to prop up Greece’s openly fascist monarchy against a popular revolt they had cast as a Soviet threat. After much hand-wringing, Truman went to Congress on March 12 to ask for $400 million in aid, not quite $5 billion today when adjusted for inflation.

    Truman and Acheson knew the Greek intervention would be a hard sell: Congress was in no mood to spend that kind of money, and the war-weary public harbored hope for FDR’s vision of a postwar order built on the principle of peaceful coexistence. As the speech went through its multiple drafts, Arthur Vandenberg, Republican senator from Michigan and a presence in the planning of America’s postwar posture, offered advice that must be counted elegantly forthright, if diabolic in its cynicism.

    The post The Empire’s Last Stand appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Who Was Dag Hammarskjöld?

    Dag Hammarskjöld set the standard for integrity and independence that all United Nations secretaries-general are judged against. He pioneered direct diplomacy by a secretary-general to defuse crises, and created U.N. peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld forged an independence between the Cold War powers that upset both and may have led to his death 60 years ago on Saturday.

    The post Who Was Dag Hammarskjöld? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Talkin’ About Armageddon: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The fact that our world is hurtling toward man-made obliteration on multiple fronts should probably occupy more of our conversational bandwidth than it does.

    ❖

    My basic overall position is that humanity is about to end itself via climate chaos or nuclear war due to global capitalism and oligarchic imperialism, that propaganda prevents people from rising up to stop this, and our only path out is a mass-scale psychological transformation.

    If you’ve ever been curious why I don’t write more about this or that subject, it’s usually because the above is my area of focus. Everything I write points to this in some way. That’s what I do here.

    ❖

    There are a lot of narratives circulating about what’s really happening between the US and China and whether the aggressions are actually as dangerous as they seem, and all of these narratives are rendered moot by the undeniable buildup of US military weaponry around China.

    ❖

    If you’re more concerned about China’s domestic affairs than your own country’s aggressive foreign policy toward China it’s because you’ve been propagandized. Change your media consumption habits accordingly.

    ❖

    Not even the craziest imperialists want a hot war with China. They’d much rather China to bow and be absorbed into the US-centralized empire as so many other nations before, or to collapse and fragment after a decades-long subversion campaign à la the USSR. In that order.

    The empire will happily make life miserable for Chinese people in coming decades to pressure Beijing into accepting that it’s in the people’s interests that the PRC kiss the ring. The problem of course is that China will be resisting these maneuvers in ways that can easily blow up in catastrophic ways. It’s entirely possible for any of the planned escalations and proxy conflicts geared toward undermining nuclear-armed China to provoke a response which causes a chain reaction from which there is no return.

    A simple miscommunication, misfire or weapons malfunction could do it. In a steadily intensifying “great power competition” that imperialists are saying will likely consume the entire 21st century, that’s a lot of chances for something to go catastrophically wrong. We repeatedly came close to this happening in the last cold war.

    And none of this insane brinkmanship is necessary. There’s no reason the US and China can’t simply get along and work toward the benefit of the world together. The only obstacle to this is a few western imperialists deciding US unipolar hegemony must be preserved at all cost. There’s no legitimate reason the life of every terrestrial organism must be gambled over some moronic geostrategic agenda which benefits none of us, just because a few people with too much power got some idiotic ideas between their ears.

    Don’t consent to the new cold war. They’re working so hard to manufacture the consent of the public for this bullshit because they require that consent. So don’t give it to them. Fight the unleashing of this omnicidal horror every step of the way.

    ❖

    ❖

    “Why is there a labor shortage?”

    There’s not a labor shortage, there’s a paying people enough to live shortage.

    “So people aren’t coming to work because they’re tired of being robbed by the boss?”

    Yep. The problem with capitalism is you eventually run out of other people’s money.

    ❖

    Most of us intuitively understand that our true enemies are the powerful and not other rank-and-file members of the public, and most of us immediately forget this understanding the instant we log on to social media.

    ❖

    You don’t own your comrades. A lot of people will get angrier about a political ally disagreeing with them on one percent of total issues than a political enemy disagreeing with them on 99 percent.

    ❖

    Most people navigate social interactions like novice poker players: they bluff the opposite of whatever hand they’re holding. If they feel inferior they act superior. If they feel small they act big. If they feel vulnerable they act invincible. If they feel dumb they act like they’re smarter than you. Don’t buy into their bluffs. Be gentle.

    ❖

    If you resolve on a deep level to get real with reality, to want the truth at all cost whatever it is, it will turn your life upside down. You’ll lose careers, relationships, you’ll experience white-knuckle terror. But you’ll also give life a chance to astonish you with miracles.

    ❖

    Science tells us that matter and time don’t exist in the way our minds perceive them and what we’re actually experiencing are our own conceptual models of something that isn’t actually there. So, you know, feel free to change your own story in whatever way works for you and start over whenever you want.

    _____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Biden’s Defense of Afghanistan Withdrawal Had a Side-Serving of Pro-War Rhetoric

    Joe Biden stands in front of glittering chandeliers

    On Tuesday, an American president said the words: “The war in Afghanistan is now over.” One president started it, three presidents shared it and sustained it, and now a fourth president has dropped the curtain at enormous political cost.

    Twenty years of sacrifice beyond comprehension, tens of thousands of civilian and military lives lost, including the scores laid low by the Kabul airport bombing. “$300 million a day for two decades,” President Biden explained on Tuesday, a fortune squandered that could have funded health care, child care, housing, education, clean energy exploration. A fortune squandered that could have provided reasons for our youngest generations to look forward to the future instead of down in despair.

    After days of merciless pummeling from wildly hypocritical Republicans, a number of purple-district Democrats and a “news” media that was instrumental in foisting this fiasco on us in the first place, Biden rose forcefully to his own defense. “By the time I came to office, the Taliban was in its strongest military position since 2001,” he explained, “controlling or contesting nearly half of the country. The previous administration’s agreement said that if we stuck to the May 1 deadline that they had signed on to leave by, the Taliban wouldn’t attack any American forces. But if we stayed, all bets were off.”

    “So we were left with a simple decision,” Biden continued. “Either follow through on the commitment made by the last administration and leave Afghanistan, or say we weren’t leaving and commit another tens of thousands more troops. Going back to war. That was the choice, the real choice. Between leaving or escalating. I was not going to extend this forever war. And I was not extending a forever exit.”

    Addressing the chaotic final days of the war, the president stated flatly, “I take responsibility for the decision.” Following this declaration was Biden’s apologia — not apology — for the mayhem of the withdrawal. He painted a picture of a security situation that would have fallen into chaos no matter what plans were executed. While there is a good degree of truth to this, the fact remains that the Biden administration pulled the string on withdrawal while this country’s immigration/refugee assistance programs were in a deplorable state of disrepair. Thanks in large part to the vandalism of prior administration officials including national security adviser and vivid fascist Stephen Miller, our government was ill-prepared for an influx of help/rescue requests from fleeing Afghan civilians. Our allies were similarly unprepared.

    Not every voice has been raised against Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. “Unlike his three immediate predecessors in the Oval Office, all of whom also came to see the futility of the Afghan operation, Biden alone had the political courage to fully end America’s involvement,” writes David Rothkopf for The Atlantic. “Although Donald Trump made a plan to end the war, he set a departure date that fell after the end of his first term and created conditions that made the situation Biden inherited more precarious. And despite significant pressure and obstacles, Biden has overseen a military and government that have managed, since the announcement of America’s withdrawal, one of the most extraordinary logistical feats in their recent history.”

    The American public appears to agree. Recent surveys show that a solid majority supports the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and a supermajority believes this country failed to achieve its goals in that country. Politically, Biden is laying a huge and thoroughly tactical wager on those numbers. While the administration expects another round of brutal news cycles as the Afghanistan situation is folded into the 20th anniversary of September 11, “they assume that attention will shift back again to the coronavirus pandemic, the president’s proposals for large public works projects and social welfare programs, and a dozen other issues that will absorb the public more than far-off Afghanistan,” according to The New York Times.

    It would not have been a speech by an American president without providing a side-serving of menace. “And to ISIS-K,” he growled in an eerie echo of George W. Bush. “We are not done with you yet.” What does that mean? Biden spoke of “the war on terror” and of “over-the-horizon capabilities,” hedged his bets on “boots on the ground,” and made it abundantly clear that the war paradigm which has burdened these last two decades will not be altered by his administration any time soon.

    Russia and China were not spared the treatment, as Biden rattled the chains for the possible onset of the next Cold War. “The world is changing,” he said. “We’re engaged in a serious competition with China. We’re dealing with the challenges on multiple fronts with Russia.” Nothing about this was demonstrably aggressive, but American leaders seem to do their best politically when the people have a clear and identifiable enemy to seethe at (and be distracted by). In this, the president was old-school normative establishment right down the line.

    Notably, the speech also failed to even wink at one likely reason the war lasted so long: the trillions of dollars in mineral, gas and oil deposits lying fallow in Afghanistan. This is a rarely spoken answer to why we remained there for so long after the Taliban was defeated, after al-Qaeda was shattered, and after Osama bin Laden was killed: If the country could be brought under some semblance of control, there were riches to be plundered beyond the dreams of avarice. This, then, was another goal our efforts failed to achieve.

    Here — the threats, the vague vocabulary of eternal war, the proffered example of existential menace, all wrapped in a dark fog surrounding our true goals that a thoroughly compromised corporate “news” media appears entirely unwilling or unable to penetrate — are the seeds that, if allowed to germinate again, will make the future look very much like the ash-coated battlegrounds of the present and past.

    Biden’s speech on Tuesday was remarkable for one thing: Despite the occasional bouts of bog-standard bombast, it did not bristle with exuberant confidence, or ooze self-congratulation as if such feelings were an unquestioned birthright. It entirely lacked the glossy veneer of “American exceptionalism” that has scarred so many political speeches over the last 20 years and beyond. The president did not say, “We lost the war,” but that solemn message underscored almost every word he spoke.

    When he was finished on Tuesday, Biden turned away from the podium, giving his back to a hail of questions from the assembled press. He paused, turned and retrieved a black face mask from the podium. Plodding slowly down the red-carpeted hall, he donned the mask before receding from view. Thus do we all plod into an uncertain future, again, but one with one less war to fight. We hope.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • More Than 750 US Military Bases Remain Around the World

    The Bagram Airfield base after all U.S. and NATO forces evacuated in the Parwan province of eastern Afghanistan, on July 8, 2021.

    It was the spring of 2003 during the American-led invasion of Iraq. I was in second grade, living on a U.S. military base in Germany, attending one of the Pentagon’s many schools for families of servicemen stationed abroad. One Friday morning, my class was on the verge of an uproar. Gathered around our homeroom lunch menu, we were horrified to find that the golden, perfectly crisped French fries we adored had been replaced with something called “freedom fries.”

    “What are freedom fries?” we demanded to know.

    Our teacher quickly reassured us by saying something like: “Freedom fries are the exact same thing as French fries, just better.” Since France, she explained, was not supporting “our” war in Iraq, “we just changed the name, because who needs France anyway?” Hungry for lunch, we saw little reason to disagree. After all, our most coveted side dish would still be there, even if relabeled.

    While 20 years have passed since then, that otherwise obscure childhood memory came back to me last month when, in the midst of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Biden announced an end to American “combat” operations in Iraq. To many Americans, it may have appeared that he was just keeping his promise to end the two forever wars that came to define the post-9/11 “global war on terror.” However, much as those “freedom fries” didn’t actually become something else, this country’s “forever wars” may not really be coming to an end either. Rather, they are being relabeled and seem to be continuing via other means.

    Having closed down hundreds of military bases and combat outposts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon will now shift to an “advise-and-assist” role in Iraq. Meanwhile, its top leadership is now busy “pivoting” to Asia in pursuit of new geostrategic objectives primarily centered around “containing” China. As a result, in the Greater Middle East and significant parts of Africa, the U.S. will be trying to keep a far lower profile, while remaining militarily engaged through training programs and private contractors.

    As for me, two decades after I finished those freedom fries in Germany, I’ve just finished compiling a list of American military bases around the world, the most comprehensive possible at this moment from publicly available information. It should help make greater sense of what could prove to be a significant period of transition for the U.S. military.

    Despite a modest overall decline in such bases, rest assured that the hundreds that remain will play a vital role in the continuation of some version of Washington’s forever wars and could also help facilitate a new Cold War with China. According to my current count, our country still has more than 750 significant military bases implanted around the globe. And here’s the simple reality: unless they are, in the end, dismantled, America’s imperial role on this planet won’t end either, spelling disaster for this country in the years to come.

    Tallying Up the “Bases of Empire”

    I was tasked with compiling what we’ve (hopefully) called the “2021 U.S. Overseas Base Closure List” after reaching out to Leah Bolger, president of World BEYOND War. As part of a group known as the Overseas Base Realignment and Closure Coalition (OBRACC) committed to shutting down such bases, Bolger put me in contact with its co-founder David Vine, the author of the classic book on the subject, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World.

    Bolger, Vine, and I then decided to put together just such a new list as a tool for focusing on future U.S. base closures around the world. In addition to providing the most comprehensive accounting of such overseas bases, our research also further confirms that the presence of even one in a country can contribute significantly to anti-American protests, environmental destruction, and ever greater costs for the American taxpayer.

    In fact, our new count does show that their total number globally has declined in a modest fashion (and even, in a few cases, fallen dramatically) over the past decade. From 2011 on, nearly a thousand combat outposts and a modest number of major bases have been closed in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in Somalia. Just a little over five years ago, David Vine estimated that there were around 800 major U.S. bases in more than 70 countries, colonies, or territories outside the continental United States. In 2021, our count suggests that the figure has fallen to approximately 750. Yet, lest you think that all is finally heading in the right direction, the number of places with such bases has actually increased in those same years.

    Since the Pentagon has generally sought to conceal the presence of at least some of them, putting together such a list can be complicated indeed, starting with how one even defines such a “base.” We decided that the simplest way was to use the Pentagon’s own definition of a “base site,” even if its public counts of them are notoriously inaccurate. (I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that its figures are invariably too low, never too high.)

    So, our list defined such a major base as any “specific geographic location that has individual land parcels or facilities assigned to it… that is, or was owned by, leased to, or otherwise under the jurisdiction of a Department of Defense Component on behalf of the United States.”

    Using this definition helps to simplify what counts and what doesn’t, but it also leaves much out of the picture. Not included are significant numbers of small ports, repair complexes, warehouses, fueling stations, and surveillance facilities controlled by this country, not to speak of the nearly 50 bases the American government directly funds for the militaries of other countries. Most appear to be in Central America (and other parts of Latin America), places familiar indeed with the presence of the U.S. military, which has been involved in 175 years of military interventions in the region.

    Still, according to our list, American military bases overseas are now scattered across 81 countries, colonies, or territories on every continent except Antarctica. And while their total numbers may be down, their reach has only continued to expand. Between 1989 and today, in fact, the military has more than doubled the number of places in which it has bases from 40 to 81.

    This global presence remains unprecedented. No other imperial power has ever had the equivalent, including the British, French, and Spanish empires. They form what Chalmers Johnson, former CIA consultant turned critic of U.S. militarism, once referred to as an “empire of bases” or a “globe-girdling Base World.”

    As long as this count of 750 military bases in 81 places remains a reality, so, too, will U.S. wars. As succinctly put by David Vine in his latest book, The United States of War, “Bases frequently beget wars, which can beget more bases, which can beget more wars, and so on.”

    Over the Horizon Wars?

    In Afghanistan, where Kabul fell to the Taliban earlier this week, our military had only recently ordered a rushed, late-in-the-night withdrawal from its last major stronghold, Bagram Airfield, and no U.S. bases remain there. The numbers have similarly fallen in Iraq where that military now controls only six bases, while earlier in this century the number would have been closer to 505, ranging from large ones to small military outposts.

    Dismantling and shutting down such bases in those lands, in Somalia, and in other countries as well, along with the full-scale departure of American military forces from two of those three countries, were historically significant, no matter how long they took, given the domineering “boots on the ground” approach they once facilitated. And why did such changes occur when they did? The answer has much to do with the staggering human, political, and economic costs of these endless failed wars. According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, the toll of just those remarkably unsuccessful conflicts in Washington’s war on terror was tremendous: minimally 801,000 deaths (with more on the way) since 9/11 in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen.

    The weight of such suffering was, of course, disproportionately carried by the people of the countries who have faced Washington’s invasions, occupations, air strikes, and interference over almost two decades. More than 300,000 civilians across those and other countries have been killed and an estimated nearly 37 million more displaced. Around 15,000 U.S. forces, including soldiers and private contractors, have also died. Untold scores of devastating injuries have occurred as well to millions of civilians, opposition fighters, and American troops. In total, it’s estimated that, by 2020, these post-9/11 wars had cost American taxpayers $6.4 trillion.

    While the overall number of U.S. military bases abroad may be in decline as the failure of the war on terror sinks in, the forever wars are likely to continue more covertly through Special Operations forces, private military contractors, and ongoing air strikes, whether in Iraq, Somalia, or elsewhere.

    In Afghanistan, even when there were only 650 U.S. troops left, guarding the U.S. embassy in Kabul, the U.S. was still intensifying its air strikes in the country. It launched a dozen in July alone, recently killing 18 civilians in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. According to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, attacks like these were being carried out from a base or bases in the Middle East equipped with “over the horizon capabilities,” supposedly located in the United Arab Emirates, or UAE, and Qatar. In this period, Washington has also been seeking (as yet without success) to establish new bases in countries that neighbor Afghanistan for continued surveillance, reconnaissance, and potentially air strikes, including possibly leasing Russian military bases in Tajikistan.

    And mind you, when it comes to the Middle East, the UAE and Qatar are just the beginning. There are U.S. military bases in every Persian Gulf country except Iran and Yemen: seven in Oman, three in the UAE, 11 in Saudi Arabia, seven in Qatar, 12 in Bahrain, 10 in Kuwait, and those six still in Iraq. Any of these could potentially contribute to the sorts of “over the horizon” wars the U.S. now seems committed to in countries like Iraq, just as its bases in Kenya and Djibouti are enabling it to launch air strikes in Somalia.

    New Bases, New Wars

    Meanwhile, halfway around the world, thanks in part to a growing push for a Cold War-style “containment” of China, new bases are being constructed in the Pacific.

    There are, at best, minimal barriers in this country to building military bases overseas. If Pentagon officials determine that a new $990 million base is needed in Guam to “enhance warfighting capabilities” in Washington’s pivot to Asia, there are few ways to prevent them from doing so.

    Camp Blaz, the first Marine Corps base to be built on the Pacific Island of Guam since 1952, has been under construction since 2020 without the slightest pushback or debate over whether it was needed or not from policymakers and officials in Washington or among the American public. Even more new bases are being proposed for the nearby Pacific Islands of Palau, Tinian, and Yap. On the other hand, a locally much-protested new base in Henoko on the Japanese island of Okinawa, the Futenma Replacement Facility, is “unlikely” ever to be completed.

    Little of any of this is even known in this country, which is why a public list of the full extent of such bases, old and new, around the world is of importance, however difficult it may be to produce based on the patchy Pentagon record available. Not only can it show the far-reaching extent and changing nature of this country’s imperial efforts globally, it could also act as a tool for promoting future base closures in places like Guam and Japan, where there at present are 52 and 119 bases respectively — were the American public one day to seriously question where their tax dollars were really going and why.

    Just as there’s very little standing in the way of the Pentagon constructing new bases overseas, there is essentially nothing preventing President Biden from closing them. As OBRACC points out, while there is a process involving congressional authorization for closing any domestic U.S. military base, no such authorization is needed abroad. Unfortunately, in this country there is as yet no significant movement for ending that Baseworld of ours. Elsewhere, however, demands and protests aimed at shutting down such bases from Belgium to Guam, Japan to the United Kingdom — in nearly 40 countries all told — have taken place within the past few years.

    In December 2020, however, even the highest-ranking U.S. military official, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, asked: “Is every one of those [bases] absolutely positively necessary for the defense of the United States?”

    In short, no. Anything but. Still, as of today, despite the modest decline in their numbers, the 750 or so that remain are likely to play a vital role in any continuation of Washington’s “forever wars,” while supporting the expansion of a new Cold War with China. As Chalmers Johnson warned in 2009, “Few empires of the past voluntarily gave up their dominions in order to remain independent, self-governing polities… If we do not learn from their examples, our decline and fall is foreordained.”

    In the end, new bases only mean new wars and, as the last nearly 20 years have shown, that’s hardly a formula for success for American citizens or others around the world.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Afghanistan’s Promising Socialist Future Killed Off By U.S. Imperialism

    Since the horrific events of Sept. 11, much has been said about the desperate situation of the Afghani people now crushed under the heel of the theocratic, dictatorial Taliban, and about the role of the Northern Alliance and other Taliban opponents who now figure in Washington’s plans for the region. There has been talk, most of it distorted, about the role of the Soviet Union in the years from 1978 to 1989. There has been talk, most of it understated, about the role of the U.S. in building up the Mujahideen forces, including the Taliban.

    The post Afghanistan’s Promising Socialist Future Killed Off By U.S. Imperialism appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • UFO Report Provides No New Information But Plenty Of Fodder For Cold Warrior Policymakers

    The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released its hotly anticipated UFO report, which at nine pages in length with no new information is about as spectacular a letdown for UFO enthusiasts as you could possibly get. It does however contain multiple lines which will likely be useful for cold warrior policymakers going forward, just as we forecast earlier.

    In summary:

    • The ODNI says there do appear to be unidentified objects in US airspace behaving in ways the government can’t yet explain.
    • No direct mention is made of the possibility that these objects could be extraterrestrial in origin.
    • Direct mention is made of the possibility that UFOs could be highly advanced Russian or Chinese technology.
    • UFOs “pose a hazard to safety of flight” and could be a national security threat.

    Those last two points are the only ones which US policymakers of any significance are going to pay attention to.

    “UAP [Unidentified Aerial Phenomena] clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security,” the report says. “Safety concerns primarily center on aviators contending with an increasingly cluttered air domain. UAP would also represent a national security challenge if they are foreign adversary collection platforms or provide evidence a potential adversary has developed either a breakthrough or disruptive technology.”

    “UAP pose a hazard to safety of flight and could pose a broader danger if some instances represent sophisticated collection against U.S. military activities by a foreign government or demonstrate a breakthrough aerospace technology by a potential adversary,” the report adds.

    “Some UAP may be technologies deployed by China, Russia, another nation, or a non-governmental entity,” it also says.

    While the authors of the report also say they “currently lack data to indicate any UAP are part of a foreign collection program or indicative of a major technological advancement by a potential adversary,” the fact that Russia or China magically leapfrogging US technology by centuries seventy years ago has been validated as a possibility by the report is a gift to cold warriors eager to ramp up aggressions and inflame a high-budget arms race against those nations.

    Among those cold warriors is Senator Marco Rubio, one of the handful of individuals behind this strange new UFO narrative’s entry into mainstream attention. Rubio released the following statement shortly before the report was published:

    “For years, the men and women we trust to defend our country reported encounters with unidentified aircraft that had superior capabilities, and for years their concerns were often ignored and ridiculed. This report is an important first step in cataloging these incidents, but it is just a first step. The Defense Department and Intelligence Community have a lot of work to do before we can actually understand whether these aerial threats present a serious national security concern.”

    As I’ve been saying repeatedly, the odds of this new UFO narrative entering mainstream consciousness courtesy of the Pentagon, military/intelligence operatives, and corrupt warmongering politicians at the same moment the US begins implementing a new cold war against Russia and China is far too convenient for mere coincidence to be a likely explanation. We can expect to see the hawkish agendas of warmongers like Marco Rubio further advanced by this new UFO narrative going forward.

    _________________________

    Sorry for no audio on this one; we’re out of town today.

    The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Why Democracies in G7 and NATO Should Reject U.S. Leadership

    Photo credit: BPM Media – Protest at G7 summit in Cornwall UK

    The world has been treated to successive spectacles of national leaders gathering at a G7 Summit in Cornwall and a NATO Summit in Brussels.

    The U.S. corporate media have portrayed these summits as chances for President Biden to rally the leaders of the world’s democratic nations in a coordinated response to the most serious problems facing the world, from the COVID pandemic, climate change and global inequality to ill-defined “threats to democracy” from Russia and China.

    But there’s something seriously wrong with this picture. Democracy means “rule by the people.” While that can take different forms in different countries and cultures, there is a growing consensus in the United States that the exceptional power of wealthy Americans and corporations to influence election results and government policies has led to a de facto system of government that fails to reflect the will of the American people on many critical issues.

    So when President Biden meets with the leaders of democratic countries, he represents a country that is, in many ways, an undemocratic outlier rather than a leader among democratic nations. This is evident in:

    – the “legalized bribery” of 2020’s $14.4 billion federal election, compared with recent elections in Canada and the U.K. that cost less than 1% of that, under strict rules that ensure more democratic results;

    – a defeated President proclaiming baseless accusations of fraud and inciting a mob to invade the U.S. Congress on January 6 2021;

    – news media that have been commercialized, consolidated, gutted and dumbed down by their corporate owners, making Americans easy prey for misinformation by unscrupulous interest groups, and leaving the U.S. in 44th place on Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index;

    – the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, with over two million people behind bars, and systemic police violence on a scale never seen in other wealthy nations;

    – the injustice of extreme inequality, poverty and cradle-to-grave debt for millions in an otherwise wealthy nation;

    – an exceptional lack of economic and social mobility compared to other wealthy countries that is the antithesis of the mythical “American Dream”;

    – privatized, undemocratic and failing education and healthcare systems;

    – a recent history of illegal invasions, massacres of civilians, torture, drone assassinations, extraordinary renditions and indefinite detention at Guantanamo—with no accountabllity;

    – and, last but not least, a gargantuan war machine capable of destroying the world, in the hands of this dysfunctional political system.

    Fortunately, though, Americans are not the only ones asking what is wrong with American democracy. The Alliance of Democracies Foundation (ADF), founded by former Danish Prime Minister and NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, conducted a poll of 50,000 people in 53 countries between February and April 2021, and found that people around the world share our concerns about America’s dystopian political system and imperial outrages.

    Probably the most startling result of the poll to Americans would be its finding that more people around the world (44%) see the United States as a threat to democracy in their countries than China (38%) or Russia (28%), which makes nonsense of U.S. efforts to justify its revived Cold War on Russia and China in the name of democracy.

    In a larger poll of 124,000 people that ADF conducted in 2020, countries where large majorities saw the United States as a danger to democracy included China, but also Germany, Austria, Denmark, Ireland, France, Greece, Belgium, Sweden and Canada.

    After tea with the Queen at Windsor Castle, Biden swooped into Brussels on Air Force One for a NATO summit to advance its new “Strategic Concept,” which is nothing more than a war plan for World War III against both Russia and China.

    But we take solace from evidence that the people of Europe, whom the NATO war plan counts on as front-line troops and mass casualty victims, are not ready to follow President Biden to war. A January 2021 survey by the European Council on Foreign Affairs found that large majorities of Europeans want to remain neutral in any U.S. war on Russia or China. Only 22% would want their country to take the U.S. side in a war on China, and 23% in a war on Russia.

    Few Americans realize that Biden already came close to war with Russia in March and April, when the United States and NATO supported a new Ukrainian offensive in its civil war against Russian-allied separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Russia moved tens of thousands of heavily-armed troops to its borders with Ukraine, to make it clear that it was ready to defend its Ukrainian allies and was quite capable of doing so. On April 13th, Biden blinked, turned round two U.S. destroyers that were steaming into the Black Sea and called Putin to request the summit that is now taking place.

    The antipathy of ordinary people everywhere toward the U.S. determination to provoke military confrontation with Russia and China begs serious questions about the complicity of their leaders in these incredibly dangerous, possibly suicidal, U.S. policies. When ordinary people all over the world can see the dangers and pitfalls of following the United States as a model and a leader, why do their neoliberal leaders keep showing up to lend credibility to the posturing of U.S. leaders at summits like the G7 and NATO?

    Maybe it is precisely because the United States has succeeded in what the corporate ruling classes of other nations also aspire to, namely, greater concentrations of wealth and power and less public interference in their “freedom” to accumulate and control them.

    Maybe the leaders of other wealthy countries and military powers are genuinely awed by the dystopian American Dream as the example par excellence of how to sell inequality, injustice and war to the public in the name of freedom and democracy.

    In that case, the fact that people in other wealthy countries are not so easily led to war or lured into political passivity and impotence would only increase the awe of their leaders for their American counterparts, who literally laugh all the way to the bank as they pay lip service to the sanctity of the American Dream and the American People.

    Ordinary people in other countries are right to be wary of the Pied Piper of American “leadership,” but their rulers should be too. The fracturing and disintegration of American society should stand as a warning to neoliberal governments and ruling classes everywhere to be more careful what they wish for.

    Instead of a world in which other countries emulate or fall victim to America’s failed experiment in extreme neoliberalism, the key to a peaceful, sustainable and prosperous future for all the world’s people, including Americans, lies in working together, learning from each other and adopting policies that serve the public good and improve the lives of all, especially those most in need. There’s a name for that. It’s called democracy.

    The post Why Democracies in G7 and NATO Should Reject U.S. Leadership first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Media Converges On The Narrative That UFOs May Be Russian/Chinese Threat

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    So in case you haven’t been keeping up it’s been pretty thoroughly confirmed that the US government’s highly anticipated UFO report due this month won’t contain any significant revelations and certainly won’t verify anyone’s ideas about these phenomena being extraterrestrial in origin, but it absolutely will contain fearmongering that UFOs could be evidence that the US has fallen dangerously behind Russian and Chinese technological development in the cold war arms race.

    Unknown US officials have done a print media tour speaking to the press on condition of anonymity (of course), with first The New York Times reporting their statements about the contents of the UFO report and then CNN and The Washington Post. Each of these outlets reported the same thing: the US government doesn’t know what these things are but is very concerned they constitute evidence that Russia and/or China have somehow managed to technologically leapfrog US military development by light years. All three mention these two nations explicitly.

    This narrative was then picked up by cable news, with MSNBC inviting former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta on to explain to their audience that the US government should assume UFOs are Russian or Chinese in origin until that possibility has been exhausted.

    “Is it your assumption that it is Russia or China testing some crazy technology that we somehow don’t have, or are we sort of over-assuming the abilities of China and Russia and that the only other explanation is that if it is not us ourselves then it is something otherworldly?” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd asked Panetta.

    “I believe a lot of this stuff probably could be countries like Russia, like China, like others, who are using now drones, using the kind of sophisticated weaponry that could very well be involved in a lot of these sightings,” Panetta replied. “I think that’s the area to go to very frankly in order to identify what’s happening.”

    “It sounds like you think we should exhaust that out, exhaust that hypothesis first before you start dealing with other hypotheses,” Todd said.

    “Yeah, absolutely,” said Panetta, who for the record is every bit as much of a tyrannical, thuggish imperialist cold warrior as any other CIA director.

    This UFOs-as-Chinese/Russian-threat narrative has quickly been picked up and thrust into mainstream orthodoxy by all the major branches of the mass media, from Fox News to Reuters to The Guardian to Today to the BBC to USA Today. Whenever you see the imperial media converge to this extent upon a single narrative, that’s the Official Narrative of the empire. We can expect to see a lot more of this going forward.

    Interestingly, the only mass media segment I’ve seen on this topic since the New York Times story broke which doesn’t promote the UFOs-as-Chinese/Russian-threat narrative is a guest appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight by Lue Elizondo, the military intelligence veteran who got the ball rolling on the new UFO narrative which emerged in 2017. Elizondo goes out of his way to tell Carlson (who himself has been promoting the idea that UFOs may be a foreign adversarial threat with cartoonish melodrama) that there’s no way these could be Russian or Chinese aircraft.

    Elizondo, who seems to favor the UFOs-as-extraterrestrials narrative, argues that there are extensive records of military encounters with these phenomena stretching back seventy years, which rules out China since it could barely keep its head above water back then and rules out Russia because it shared its UFO knowledge with the US after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

    I don’t know what’s going on with that last bit; I see no reason to trust that an American spook is acting in good faith on such an easily manipulated topic, but it is entirely possible that Elizondo set out on this road out of a sincere desire for government disclosure on UFOs and is now trying to regain control of the narrative now that he sees the cold war arms race direction it has taken.

    Chris Melon, another major player in the new UFO narrative, recently complained on Twitter that “some important information was not shared” with the public in the UFO report. So who knows, maybe the initiators of this new UFO narrative were acting in good faith and their efforts were just swiftly hijacked by forces beyond their control to advance preexisting cold war agendas.

    Regardless of whether or not that’s true, it was always inevitable that this strange new rabbit hole of UFOs going mainstream was going to lead to more cold war propaganda. I’ve been interacting a bit with the online UFO community for the first time ever, and it seems like they’re mostly decent people with good intentions and a lot of hope for this new governmental investigation. But it also seems like they’re largely a community which mostly just talks to itself and is only just beginning to meet the cold harsh light of day that is the impenetrable depravity of the US war machine.

    The US government is pure swamp; you can’t use the swamp to fix the swamp. Democrats were never going to use a Special Counsel to remove Trump, Trump was never going to take down the Deep State, and the US government isn’t going to investigate itself and tell everyone that aliens are real.

    If there are indeed extraterrestrials and they are indeed flying around our world in strange aircraft, we are more likely to get the truth about this from the extraterrestrials themselves than from the US military. The war machine only does killing and destruction; it’s not going to suddenly develop an interest in truth and transparency. The sooner UFO enthusiasts realize this the better.

    __________________

    The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • MSM Wastes No Time Using Senate UFO Report To Promote Arms Race

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    The New York Times has published an article on the contents of the hotly anticipated US government report on UFOs, as per usual based on statements of anonymous officials, and as per usual promoting narratives that are convenient for imperialists and war profiteers.

    Together with one voice, the anonymous US officials and the “paper of record” which is supposed to scrutinize US officials assure us definitively that the mysterious aerial phenomena that have reportedly been witnessed by military personnel are certainly not any kind of secret US technology, but could totally be aliens and could definitely be a sign that the Russians or Chinese have severely lapped America’s lagging military development.

    “The report determines that a vast majority of more than 120 incidents over the past two decades did not originate from any American military or other advanced U.S. government technology,” NYT was reportedly told by the officials. “That determination would appear to eliminate the possibility that Navy pilots who reported seeing unexplained aircraft might have encountered programs the government meant to keep secret.”

    Oh well if the US government has ruled out secret US government weaponry programs, hot damn that’s good enough for me. Great journalism you guys.

    “Intelligence officials believe at least some of the aerial phenomena could have been experimental technology from a rival power, most likely Russia or China,” the Times reports. “One senior official briefed on the intelligence said without hesitation that U.S. officials knew it was not American technology. He said there was worry among intelligence and military officials that China or Russia could be experimenting with hypersonic technology.”

    “Russia has been investing heavily in hypersonics, believing the technology offers it the ability to evade American missile-defense technology,” NYT adds. “China has also developed hypersonic weaponry, and included it in military parades. If the phenomena were Chinese or Russian aircraft, officials said, that would suggest the two powers’ hypersonic research had far outpaced American military development.”

    The article goes on to describe how the US military have been “unsettled” by aircraft moving and behaving in ways known technologies cannot explain. The implication of scary foreign adversaries having “outpaced American military development” to such an extent is of course that the US military is going to require a far bigger budget with far more intensive weapons development.

    This would be the same New York Times that has consistently supported all of the US military’s devastating acts of mass murder around the world, by the way.

    This won’t be the last time we hear the imperial media warning us that UFOs may be a sign of a frightening gap in technology leaving the US defenseless against far more powerful foreign foes, and they’ve already been priming us for it. Republican Rachel Maddow aka Tucker Carlson has been shrilly pushing this narrative for weeks now and demanding that the US government do more to address the fact that in alleged encounters with these aircraft, “our military was completely outmatched technologically by whatever these were.”

    “UFOs, it turns out, are real, and whatever else they are, they’re a prima facie challenge to the United States military,” Carlson said on a segment last month. “They’re doing things the U.S. military does not allow, and they’re doing it with impunity. And they appear to be focused on the U.S. military.”

    “Why isn’t the Pentagon more focused on this? It seems like a threat if there ever was one,” Carlson huffed.

    In another segment Carlson had on military intelligence veteran Luis Elizondo, a leading figure in the steadily intensifying new UFO narrative which kicked off in 2017, claiming the aforementioned Senate report on the subject will reveal “an intelligence failure on the part of the US intel community on the level of 9/11.”

    “If there’s a foreign adversary that can put a nuclear warhead within moments over Washington DC, okay, that’s a problem,” Elizondo told Carlson’s Fox News audience.

    All this over some completely unverifiable testimony, and a few videos being confirmed by the Pentagon which can all be explained by easily identifiable mundane phenomena.

    I can’t predict the future, but I won’t be at all surprised if we begin seeing this arms race angle become the dominant aspect of this UFO story in the coming months/years. It would certainly fit the pattern of the US war machine and mass media promoting completely unverifiable allegations about foreign governments to justify further cold war escalations.

    In the early sixties President John F Kennedy falsely promoted the “missile gap” narrative, telling the public that the Soviet Union had surpassed the United States in nuclear weapons when he knew full well the US nuclear arsenal had always far surpassed the USSR’s in number, quality and deployment. Kennedy used this hawkish narrative to win an election and advance the largest peacetime expansion of US military power ever, leading directly to the events which gave rise to the Cuban Missile Crisis which came far closer to ending our world than most of us like to think about.

    I have no idea what if anything is going on with these UFO phenomena, but I do know the world-threatening new cold war the US is waging against Russia and China is insane. There is no valid reason our planet’s dominant power structures cannot at the very least cease brandishing armageddon weapons at each other and begin collaborating toward a better world together.

    Reject the propagandists and cold warriors, no matter how elaborate or bizarre their manipulations become. Keep an eye on these bastards, and help spread awareness of what they’re about.

    _______________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • “If There Are Enough Shovels to Go Around”

    “Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top. . . . It’s the dirt that does it. . . . . If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it.” This bit of cheery advice was offered by Thomas K. (“T.K.”) Jones, deputy undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, strategic and theater nuclear forces in a 1982 interview with Robert Scheer of The Los Angeles Times. Jones’ assurance that a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union could be survived with a little sweat and ingenuity, allowing for two to four years recovery time, reflected the optimism of his boss, President Ronald Reagan, before Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev talked some sense into him.

    The conviction that the U.S. could win a nuclear war was key to the nuclear policy early in the Reagan administration. Not only could such a war be survived, it would present a potential opportunity for the victor. With the deployment of Pershing II and other tactical nuclear weapons, the U.S. and the Soviets might even conduct a nuclear exchange confined to Europe, entirely outside their borders. “I could see where you could have the exchange of tactical (nuclear) weapons against troops in the field without it bringing either one of the major powers to pushing the button,” Reagan suggested in 1981.

    While the best hopes around Reagan’s and Gorbachev’s Reykjavik summit of October 1986 for the elimination of nuclear weapons were never realized, the more modest areas of agreement defined there may have at least given us extra time. Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 dark comedy, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was hardly fiction at all, we now know and it is astonishing that humanity survived the cold war.

    There is a resurgence of the delusional belief in the winnable nuclear war by U.S. war planners, evidenced in the June, 2019, report by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Nuclear Operations,” that again threatens life on this planet. “Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability,” the joint chiefs’ document says. “Specifically, the use of a nuclear weapon will fundamentally change the scope of a battle and create conditions that affect how commanders will prevail in conflict.” In the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and T.K. Jones revealed the insanity of U.S. war plans, millions of people around the world took to the streets in protest. Their massive dissent was at least as decisive in stepping back from the brink of destruction as Reagan’s and Gorbachev’s détente. The present relapse into madness, on the other hand, seems to “alarm” only a few “experts.”

    While T.K. Jones’ plan to dig holes to survive a nuclear war really amounted to nothing more than incipient victims digging their own graves, international activists are giving a new, hopeful and proactive meaning to the concept of having enough shovels to survive a nuclear war. “Digging for Life” is an action idea for Büchel Air Base in Germany near Cochem on the Mosel River, for July 19, 2021.

    At the Büchel Air Base, about 20 U.S. nuclear bombs are stored, which NATO wants to replace in the coming years with new B61-12 bombs. Around the airbase there is a highly armed fence with surveillance cameras, motion sensors and a deep concrete foundation. Previous civil disobedience actions there deliberately cut through the perimeter fence, but this time activists will not go through the fence, but under it. The activists converging on the base with shovels painted pink will not be digging holes to hide and die in. Their goal will be to reach the runway and prevent the launching of Tornado fighter bombers to practice nuclear war.

    “We have a vivid picture in front of our eyes, in which each and every one can go as far as their own determination allows. You can join in digging until the police ask you to stop and hand over your shovel to another, you can peacefully continue to dig until arrested, you can picnic near the diggers and be a witness,” reads the invitation to the nonviolent event. “If you plan to join in for the digging, we ask you to arrive no later than Saturday July 17th 4 pm at the peace camp to get to know each other, do a nonviolence training, make affinity groups, paint shovels and other preparations. This action is part of the international week of action from 12 – 20 July of the campaign ‘Büchel ist überall! atomwaffenfrei.jetzt!’ (‘Büchel is everywhere!’ ‘End nuclear weapons now!’) so you could also come earlier than Saturday to the peace camp.”

    Activists in the United States might feel a special obligation to dig with our European sisters and brothers and it is hoped that the predicted opening of Germany to summer tourists will allow us to attend. Please contact ten.efil-rof-gniggidnull@ofni to register or for more information.

    “If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it!”

    The post “If There Are Enough Shovels to Go Around” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Elbowed and Hustled: Australia’s Yellow Peril Problem

    With the babble about Cold War paranoia becoming a routine matter in Canberra, the treacherous ground for war with China is being bedded down and readied.  The Yellow Peril image never truly dissipated from Australia’s politics.  It was crucial in framing the first act of the newly born Commonwealth in 1901: the Immigration Restriction Act.  Even as China was being ravaged and savaged by foreign powers and implosion, there was a fear that somewhere along the line, a reckoning would come.  Charles Henry Pearson, a professor of history at King’s College London, penned his National Life and Character: a Forecast (1893) with fear in mind.  The expansion of the West into all parts of the globe and its claims to progress would soon have to face a new reality: the threat posed by the “Black and Yellow races”.

    Pearson fastened on various developments.  The population of China was booming.  The Chinese diaspora, the same, making their presence felt in places such as Singapore.  “The day will come and perhaps is not far distant, when the European observer will look round to see the globe girdled with a continuous zone of the black and yellow races, no longer too weak for aggression or under tutelage, but independent, or practically so, in government, monopolising the trade of their own regions, and circumscribing the industry of the Europeans”.  Europeans would be “elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked down upon as servile and thought of as bound always to minister to our needs.”

    The work’s effect was such as to have a future US President Theodore Roosevelt claim in a letter to Pearson that “all our men here in Washington … were greatly interested in what you said.  In fact, I don’t suppose that any book recently, unless it is Mahan’s ‘Influence of Sea Power’ has excited anything like as much interest or has caused so many men to feel like they had to revise their mental estimates of facts”.

    Anxiety, and sheer terror of China and the Chinese became part of the political furniture in Washington and in Britain’s dominions.  In Australia, such views were fastened and bolted in the capital.  The country’s first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, drew upon Pearson’s work extensively in justifying the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901.  The White Tribe had to be protected.

    In 1966, the Australian historian Donald Horne noted the continuing sense of impermanence for those living on the island continent, that “feeling that one morning we shall wake up to find that we are no longer here”.   He recalled the views of an unnamed friend about China’s political aspirations, voiced in 1954.  By 1957, he predicted, Southeast Asia would have fallen to its soldiers.  Australia would duly follow, becoming a dependency. “Because of the submerged theme of impermanence and even catastrophe in the Australian imagination,” observed Horne, “the idea of possible Chinese dominance is ‘believable’ to Australians”.

    There was a hiatus from such feeling through the 1980s and 1990s.   The view in Australia, as it was in the United States, was that China could be managed to forget history, disposing itself to making money and bringing its populace out of poverty.  But historical amnesia failed to take hold in Beijing.

    Australian current actions in stoking the fires of discord over China serve a dual purpose.  There is a domestic, electoral dimension: external enemies are always useful, even if they are mere apparitions.   Therein lies the spirit of Barton, the besieged White tribe fearing submergence.  The other is to be found in the realm of foreign policy and military security.  Australian strategists have never been entirely sure how far the ANZUS Treaty could be relied upon.

    One moment of candour on what might happen to trigger ANZUS obligations took place in 2004.  Australia’s Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, on a trip to Beijing, pondered the issue of how a security relationship with China might affect US-Australian ties.  Asked by journalist Hamish McDonald whether Australia had a treaty obligation to assist the US in defending Taiwan, the minister stated that the treaty was “symbolic” and would only be “invoked in the event of one of our two countries, Australia or the United States, being attacked.  So some other military activity elsewhere in the world, be it in Iraq or anywhere else for that matter does not automatically invoke the ANZUS Treaty.”   Its provisions, he observed, had only been invoked once: when the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001.

    This startlingly sound reading did not go down well.  The press wondered if this cast doubt over “ANZUS loyalties”.  The US Ambassador to Canberra John Thomas Schieffer leapt into action to clarify that there was an expectation that Australia muck in should the US commit forces to battle in the Pacific.  “[T]reaty commitments are that we are to come to the aid of each other in the event of either of our territories are attacked, or if either of our interests are attacked, our home territories are attacked or if either of our interests are attacked in the Pacific.”  One cable from the Australian government attempted to pacify any fears about Australia’s reliability by suggesting that, “Some media reporting had taken elements [of Downer’s comments] out of context.”

    The argument has now been turned.  Discussion about Taiwan, and whether Australian blood would be shed over it, has much to do with keeping Washington focused on the Asia- and Indo-Pacific, finger on the trigger.  If Canberra shouts loudly and foolishly enough that it will commit troops and weapons to a folly-ridden venture over Taiwan, Washington will be duly impressed to dig deeper in the region to contain Beijing.  This betrays a naivety that comes with relying on strategic alliances with little reflection, forgetting that Washington will decide, in due course, what its own interests are.

    So far, the Morrison government will be pleased with what the Biden administration has said.  Australia could be assured of US support in its ongoing diplomatic wrangle Beijing.  In the words of US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, “the United States will not leave Australia alone on the field, or maybe I should say alone on the pitch, in the face of economic coercion by China.  That’s what allies do.  We have each other’s backs so we can face threats and challenges from a position of collective strength.”

    Australia’s anti-China rhetoric has its admirers.  Michael Shoebridge of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute – a US security think tank in all but name – dismisses the value of words such as “major conflict,” preferring the substance of action.  He talks about “honesty” about China, which is grand coming from a member of an outfit which is less than frank about its funding sources and motivations.  That honesty, he assumes, entails blaming China for belligerence.  “Reporting what [President] Xi says and what the PLA and other Chinese armed forces do is not ‘stoking the drums of war’; it’s noticing what is happening in our region that affects our security.”

    Thankfully, former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans is closer to the sane fringe in noting that words, in diplomacy, are bullets.  He reminds us of “the immortal wisdom of the 1930s Scottish labour leader Jimmy Maxton: ‘If you can’t ride two horses at once, you shouldn’t be in the bloody circus.”

    The post Elbowed and Hustled: Australia’s Yellow Peril Problem first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Truth Commission Details Horrible Crimes Akin To Native American Genocide And Slavery

    With a new Cold War heating up between the U.S. and Russia and China, Witness for Peace Southwest, Addicted to War and CodePink organized a Truth Commission on the original Cold War on March 21st, which brought together the testimony of historians, activists and others who lived through the period.

    Following a hearing three years ago, the Zoom event was hosted by Frank Dorrel, publisher of the popular anti-war text Addicted to War, and Rachel Bruhnke, a high school Spanish teacher and member of Witness for Peace Southwest. In her opening remarks, Bruhnke emphasized that the Cold War should rank as one of three great crimes in U.S. history, the first two being the genocide of the native Americans, and enslavement of African-Americans.

    The post Truth Commission Details Horrible Crimes Akin To Native American Genocide And Slavery appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Nuclear Weapons Blazing: Britain Enters the US-China Fray

    Boris Johnson’s March 16 speech before the British Parliament was reminiscent, at least in tone, to that of Chinese President Xi Jinping in October 2019, on the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of China.

    The comparison is quite apt if we remember the long-anticipated shift in Britain’s foreign policy and Johnson’s conservative government’s pressing need to chart a new global course in search for new allies – and new enemies.

    Xi’s words in 2019 signaled a new era in Chinese foreign policy, where Beijing hoped to send a message to its allies and enemies that the rules of the game were finally changing in its favor, and that China’s economic miracle – launched under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping in 1992 – would no longer be confined to the realm of wealth accumulation, but would exceed this to politics and military strength, as well.

    In China’s case, Xi’s declarations were not a shift per se, but rather a rational progression. However, in the case of Britain, the process, though ultimately rational, is hardly straightforward. After officially leaving the European Union in January 2020, Britain was expected to articulate a new national agenda. This articulation, however, was derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the multiple crises it generated.

    Several scenarios, regarding the nature of Britain’s new agenda, were plausible:

    One, that Britain maintains a degree of political proximity to the EU, thus avoiding more negative repercussions of Brexit;

    Two, for Britain to return to its former alliance with the US, begun in earnest in the post-World War II era and the formation of NATO and reaching its zenith in the run up to the Iraq invasion in 2003;

    Finally, for Britain to play the role of the mediator, standing at an equal distance among all parties, so that it may reap the benefits of its unique position as a strong country with a massive global network.

    A government’s report, “Global Britain in a Competitive Age”, released on March 16, and Johnson’s  subsequent speech, indicate that Britain has chosen the second option.

    The report clearly prioritizes the British-American alliance above all others, stating that “The United States will remain the UK’s most important strategic ally and partner”, and underscoring Britain’s need to place greater focus on the ‘Indo-Pacific’ region, calling it “the centre of intensifying geopolitical competition”.

    Therefore, unsurprisingly, Britain is now set to dispatch a military carrier to the South China Sea, and is preparing to expand its nuclear arsenal from 180 to 260 warheads, in obvious violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The latter move can be directly attributed to Britain’s new political realignment which roughly follows the maxim of ‘the enemy of my friend is my enemy’.

    The government’s report places particular emphasis on China, warning against its increased “international assertiveness” and “growing importance in the Indo-Pacific”. Furthermore, it calls for greater investment in enhancing “China-facing capabilities” and responding to “the systematic challenge” that China “poses to our security”.

    How additional nuclear warheads will allow Britain to achieve its above objectives remains uncertain. Compared with Russia and the US, Britain’s nuclear arsenal, although duly destructive, is negligible in terms of its overall size. However, as history has taught us, nuclear weapons are rarely manufactured to be used in war – with the single exception of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The number of nuclear warheads and the precise position of their operational deployment are usually meant to send a message, not merely that of strength or resolve, but also to delineate where a specific country stands in terms of its alliances.

    The US-Soviet Cold War, for example, was expressed largely through a relentless arms race, with nuclear weapons playing a central role in that polarizing conflict, which divided the world into two major ideological-political camps.

    Now that China is likely to claim the superpower status enjoyed by the Soviets until the early 1990s, a new Great Game and Cold War can be felt, not only in the Asia Pacific region, but as far away as Africa and South America. While Europe continues to hedge its bets in this new global conflict – reassured by the size of its members’ collective economies – Britain, thanks to Brexit, no longer has that leverage. No longer an EU member, Britain is now keen to protect its global interests through a direct commitment to US interests. Now that China has been designated as America’s new enemy, Britain must play along.

    While much media coverage has been dedicated to the expansion of Britain’s nuclear arsenal, little attention has been paid to the fact that the British move is a mere step in a larger political scheme, which ultimately aims at executing a British tilt to Asia, similar to the US ‘pivot to Asia’, declared by the Barack Obama Administration nearly a decade ago.

    The British foreign policy shift is an unprecedented gamble for London, as the nature of the new Cold War is fundamentally different from the previous one; this time around, the ‘West’ is divided, torn by politics and crises, while NATO is no longer the superpower it once was.

    Now that Britain has made its position clear, the ball is in the Chinese court, and the new Great Game is, indeed, afoot.

    This article was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2021 at 6:03pm and is filed under Arms Race, Boris Johnson, China, Cold War, Imperialism, Militarism, NATO, South China Sea, Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), UK Military, United Kingdom, US Pivot to Asia, Xi Jinping.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Nuclear Weapons Blazing: Britain Enters the US-China Fray

    Boris Johnson’s March 16 speech before the British Parliament was reminiscent, at least in tone, to that of Chinese President Xi Jinping in October 2019, on the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of China.

    The comparison is quite apt if we remember the long-anticipated shift in Britain’s foreign policy and Johnson’s conservative government’s pressing need to chart a new global course in search for new allies – and new enemies.

    Xi’s words in 2019 signaled a new era in Chinese foreign policy, where Beijing hoped to send a message to its allies and enemies that the rules of the game were finally changing in its favor, and that China’s economic miracle – launched under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping in 1992 – would no longer be confined to the realm of wealth accumulation, but would exceed this to politics and military strength, as well.

    In China’s case, Xi’s declarations were not a shift per se, but rather a rational progression. However, in the case of Britain, the process, though ultimately rational, is hardly straightforward. After officially leaving the European Union in January 2020, Britain was expected to articulate a new national agenda. This articulation, however, was derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the multiple crises it generated.

    Several scenarios, regarding the nature of Britain’s new agenda, were plausible:

    One, that Britain maintains a degree of political proximity to the EU, thus avoiding more negative repercussions of Brexit;

    Two, for Britain to return to its former alliance with the US, begun in earnest in the post-World War II era and the formation of NATO and reaching its zenith in the run up to the Iraq invasion in 2003;

    Finally, for Britain to play the role of the mediator, standing at an equal distance among all parties, so that it may reap the benefits of its unique position as a strong country with a massive global network.

    A government’s report, “Global Britain in a Competitive Age”, released on March 16, and Johnson’s  subsequent speech, indicate that Britain has chosen the second option.

    The report clearly prioritizes the British-American alliance above all others, stating that “The United States will remain the UK’s most important strategic ally and partner”, and underscoring Britain’s need to place greater focus on the ‘Indo-Pacific’ region, calling it “the centre of intensifying geopolitical competition”.

    Therefore, unsurprisingly, Britain is now set to dispatch a military carrier to the South China Sea, and is preparing to expand its nuclear arsenal from 180 to 260 warheads, in obvious violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The latter move can be directly attributed to Britain’s new political realignment which roughly follows the maxim of ‘the enemy of my friend is my enemy’.

    The government’s report places particular emphasis on China, warning against its increased “international assertiveness” and “growing importance in the Indo-Pacific”. Furthermore, it calls for greater investment in enhancing “China-facing capabilities” and responding to “the systematic challenge” that China “poses to our security”.

    How additional nuclear warheads will allow Britain to achieve its above objectives remains uncertain. Compared with Russia and the US, Britain’s nuclear arsenal, although duly destructive, is negligible in terms of its overall size. However, as history has taught us, nuclear weapons are rarely manufactured to be used in war – with the single exception of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The number of nuclear warheads and the precise position of their operational deployment are usually meant to send a message, not merely that of strength or resolve, but also to delineate where a specific country stands in terms of its alliances.

    The US-Soviet Cold War, for example, was expressed largely through a relentless arms race, with nuclear weapons playing a central role in that polarizing conflict, which divided the world into two major ideological-political camps.

    Now that China is likely to claim the superpower status enjoyed by the Soviets until the early 1990s, a new Great Game and Cold War can be felt, not only in the Asia Pacific region, but as far away as Africa and South America. While Europe continues to hedge its bets in this new global conflict – reassured by the size of its members’ collective economies – Britain, thanks to Brexit, no longer has that leverage. No longer an EU member, Britain is now keen to protect its global interests through a direct commitment to US interests. Now that China has been designated as America’s new enemy, Britain must play along.

    While much media coverage has been dedicated to the expansion of Britain’s nuclear arsenal, little attention has been paid to the fact that the British move is a mere step in a larger political scheme, which ultimately aims at executing a British tilt to Asia, similar to the US ‘pivot to Asia’, declared by the Barack Obama Administration nearly a decade ago.

    The British foreign policy shift is an unprecedented gamble for London, as the nature of the new Cold War is fundamentally different from the previous one; this time around, the ‘West’ is divided, torn by politics and crises, while NATO is no longer the superpower it once was.

    Now that Britain has made its position clear, the ball is in the Chinese court, and the new Great Game is, indeed, afoot.

    The post Nuclear Weapons Blazing: Britain Enters the US-China Fray first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Reply to Kevin Mattson

    By failing to assemble a coalitional politics that went beyond the ideology and logic of security, Cold War liberals became unwitting participants in liberalism’s decline.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Virtues of Cold War Liberalism: A Response to Michael Brenes and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

    We need to be cautious when we start discarding parts of our intellectual and political toolkit. We might toss things overboard that could inform our political sensibilities today.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.