Ukrainian socialist Hanna Perekhoda discusses Russia’s relationship with Ukraine, the role of language in the conflict and the realities of the Donbas.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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The latest screen adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, exposes the brutality, bloodshed and chaos of World War I trench warfare. Alex Salmon reviews.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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Maree F Roberts reviews The Stasi Poetry Circle — a thought-provoking approach to the Cold War’s culture wars in the former German Democratic Republic.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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It has been a year in which the far-right threat across Europe has been getting ever worse, writes John Mullen. Marine Le Pen’s party in France has had a series of successes and is hoping to build further in coming months. Determined opposition will be crucial.
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The European Union’s Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell is not particularly perceived by the EU’s political elite or mainstream media as a rightwing ideologue or warmonger. But seen through a different, non-western prism, it is hard not to mistake him for one.
Borrell’s recent comments that “Europe is a garden” and that “the rest of the world is a jungle” were duly condemned as ‘racist’ by many politicians around the world, but mostly in the Global South. Borrell’s remarks, however, must also be viewed as an expression of superiority, not only of Borell personally, but of Europe’s ruling classes as a whole.
Particularly interesting about the EU top diplomat’s words are these inaccurate depictions of Europe and its relationship with the rest of the world: “We have built a garden”, “everything works” and “the jungle could invade the garden”.
Without delving too deep into what is obviously an entrenched superiority complex, Borell speaks as if an advocate of the so-called ‘Replacement Theory’, a racist notion advocated by the West’s – Europe especially – rightwing intellectuals, which sees refugees, migrants and non-Europeans as parasites aiming to destroy the continent’s supposedly perfect demographic, religious and social harmony.
If stretched further into a historical dimension, one also feels compelled to remind the EU leadership of the central role that European colonialism, economical exploitation, political meddling and outright military intervention have played in turning much of the world into a supposed ‘jungle’. Would Libya, for example, have been reduced to the status of a failed state if the West did not wage a major war starting in March 2011?
The imagined ‘jungle’ aside, Europe’s past and present reality strongly negates Borell’s ethnocentric view. Sadly, Europe is the birthplace of the most horrible pages of history, from colonialism and slavery to the nationalistic, fascist and nihilistic movements that defined most of the last three centuries.
Despite the desperate attempt to rewrite or ignore history in favor of a more amiable narrative focused on great splendors, technological advancement and civilizational triumph, Europe’s true nature continues to smolder underneath the ashes, ready to resurface whenever the geopolitical and socioeconomic factors take a wrong turn. The Syrian and Libyan refugee crisis, the Covid pandemic and, more recently, the Russia-Ukraine war are all examples of the proverbial wrong turn.
In fact, Borrell’s words, aimed to reassure Europe of its moral superiority, are but a foolhardy effort meant to conceal one of the most dramatic crises that Europe has experienced in nearly a century. The impact of this crisis on every aspect of European life cannot be overstated.
In an editorial published last September on the European Environment Agency (EEA) website, Hans Bruyninckx described the “state of multiple crises” that characterizes the European continent at the moment. “It seems as if we have been living through one crisis after another — a pandemic, extreme heatwaves and drought due to climate change, inflation, war and an energy crisis,” he wrote.
Instead of taking responsibility for this impending catastrophe, Europe’s ruling elites choose a different, though predictable route: blame others, especially the inhabitants of the non-European ‘jungle’.
Naturally, ordinary people throughout Europe who are already experiencing this harrowing reality hardly feel reassured by Borrell’s proclamation that “everything works”.
The risk of the resurgence of the far-right movements in Europe is now a real possibility. This danger was relatively mitigated by the setback of the extremist ‘Alternative for Germany’ and the victory of the Social Democrats in last year’s elections. Germany, however, is not the exception, as the European far-right is now back, virtually everywhere, and with a vengeance.
In France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right party gained a record 41% of the total vote (over 13 million) in April. True, Emmanuel Macron managed to hold off the advance of Le Pen’s National Rally, but his coalition has lost its parliamentary majority, and his leadership has been significantly weakened. Currently, the country is rocked by massive rallies and strikes, all protesting the soaring prices and deepening inflation.
Sweden is another example of the determined rise of the far-right. A right-wing coalition, which won the general elections last September, now dominates the country’s parliament. On October 17, it elected a new prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, whose government was made possible because of the support of the Sweden Democrats, a party with neo-Nazi roots and a harsh anti-immigration agenda. SD was crucial in determining the victory of the coalition and it is now suited to play the role of the kingmaker in critical decisions.
In Italy, too, the situation is dire. A future government is expected to bring together Giorgia Meloni – the leader of Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) – former right-wing Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s party, Forza Italia, and the extremist Matteo Salvini’s La Lega. Meloni’s party is rooted in the post-fascist tradition of the Italian Social Movement, which was formed in the aftermath of World War II by fascist politicians after their party was officially outlawed by the country’s progressive 1948 Constitution.
The shifting political grounds in Germany, France, Italy and Sweden have little to do with the ‘jungle’, and everything with the illusory European ‘garden.’ Europe’s extremism is a by-product of exclusively European historical experiences, ideologies and class struggles. Blaming Asians, Arabs or Africans for Europe’s “state of multiple crises” is not only self-deluding, indeed spiritless, but also obstructive to any healthy process of change.
Europe cannot fix its problems by blaming others, and the European ‘garden’, if it ever existed, is actually being ravaged by Europe’s own ruling elites – rich, detached and utterly dishonest.
• Romana Rubeo, an Italian journalist, contributed to this article.
The post “Nothing Works”: Europe Must Stop Blaming Others for Its Own Crises first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Deep chasm emerges between long-time polluting rich states and developing countries on second full day of summit
Money! Money! Money! dominated the second full day of Cop27, with a deep chasm emerging between long-time polluting rich states and developing countries that need finance to deal with devastating extreme weather events while also cutting emissions.
Meanwhile, Egypt will realise it cannot hold such a significant international conference without its dire human rights record being thrust into the limelight.
The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, urged the global north to follow the EU’s example of committing climate finance to the global south.
A report by the renowned climate economist Nicholas Stern showed $2tn a year (£1.75tn) would be needed by developing countries (excluding China) by 2030 to cut their greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the effects of climate breakdown.
However, civil society climate experts called out “America’s decades-long game plan of denial, delay and deception” when it comes to loss and damage funds.
In one such stark example, Shehbaz Sharif, the prime minister of Pakistan, said his country needed more than $30bn in flood relief “despite our very low carbon footprints”.
The Barbados prime minister, Mia Mottley, celebrated that loss and damage had been added to the agenda of Cop27.
The family of the jailed British-Egyptian hunger striker Alaa Abd el-Fattah voiced fears that Egyptian officials may be torturing him behind closed doors through force-feeding. A pro-government Egyptian MP confronted Abd el-Fattah’s sister, Sanaa Seif, outside the conference.
The release of Abd el-Fattah has become the defining issue for British-Egyptian relations, the former British ambassador to Egypt John Casson said.
For the first time in years, Egypt has unblocked access to the Human Rights Watch website, a day after the Guardian described how delegates at Cop27 were unable to access it.
A UN group set up to crack down on the greenwashing of net zero pledges by industry and government has called for “red lines” to stop support for new fossil fuel exploration and overuse of carbon offsets.
Tuvalu has become the first country to use United Nations climate talks to demand an international fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty, which would phase out the use of coal, oil and gas.
Temperatures in Ireland were so mild this autumn that trees were producing new growth before they shed their leaves, according to the Irish taoiseach, Micheál Martin.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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The Kurdish-led administration in North and East Syria hit back after Sweden’s foreign minister implied he would distance his country from the self-governing region in order to appease Turkey, reports Medya News.
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British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s coming to power is a perfect statement of the leader estranged and continentally distant from voters, writes Binoy Kampmark.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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For years the world saw Putin as almost a figure of fun – while in Russia he was already meting out brutality to dissidents and LGBTQ+ activists
Last night I saw Pussy Riot, on the Hackney leg of their Riot Days European tour to raise money for a children’s hospital in Ukraine. Their sound guy, Alexander Cheparkhun, came on stage to introduce them. I guess he was about my age, I couldn’t be precise because I didn’t have my glasses. He vibed the sort of age, where you can’t see things without glasses. He described how he met Maria Alyokhina (who also goes by Masha Alekhina), one of the founding members of the band who was first imprisoned in 2012 and then under constant surveillance, harassment, house arrest, arrest-arrest and persecution, until she escaped from Russia to Iceland earlier this year. When her sentence was handed down 10 years ago, he said, it was the first time in his life he had witnessed the political imprisonment of artists.
This was a useful bit of context, or rather, a glass of cold water to the face, after years of somnambulance: no one is laughing at Vladimir Putin now, of course, but for years, he was almost a figure of fun, with his bare-chested, horse-riding photoshoots and florid turn of phrase. On the world stage, he was the uncle who might say dodgy things, but got invited anyway: what was the worst that could happen? This indulgent, pretty feckless view of Putin was overlaid by the sense that Russia merely did things differently; perhaps the state was a bit thin-skinned and hotheaded, maybe it didn’t prioritise human rights as much as one would like, but this was a cultural thing, probably related to the weather. If we had maybe expressed that view out loud more often, Russian citizens could have said: “No, actually, punk bands sentenced to hard labour for protest actions is very much a now thing, rather than an always thing.”
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, passed a bill on October 27, to outlaw the promotion of “non-traditional sexual relations”. Not one of the 400 MPs opposed it, reports Dick Nichols.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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Speaking from Kyiv, Denys Pilash — a political scientist and activist with the Ukrainian democratic socialist organisation Social Movement — addressed Green Left’s Ecosocialism 2022 conference.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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The Oppn described the reversed decision to attend as Sunak being
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
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Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, speaks at a gathering of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress in a Winnipeg Delta Hotel, on October 28, 2022. Image Credit: CBC/Google Images
Written by: Daniel Xie
During the Second World War, the Canadian government appealed for Canadians to buy war bonds to fight fascism in Europe. This came only after Hitler came into conflict with Britain and France before the Soviet Union, with Canada’s government previously being an enthusiastic support of Fascism in the 1930s. In 2022, the Canadian government has once again reintroduced war bonds, this time for a Nazi-infested Ukrainian government used by NATO to wages a proxy war against Russia.
Appeals for war bonds during the Second World War manifested through calls for Canadians to buy “Victory loans” funding Canada’s war effort. From 1941 to 1945, there were nine victory loans with total cash sales totaling almost $12 billion. The Canadian Encyclopedia notes that “about 52% of these bonds were bought by corporations and the rest by individuals.”
On October 28 2022, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a plan to raise further money for Ukraine as the eight year NATO-led proxy war against Russia rages on. This plan involves Canada selling a government backed 5-year bond for Ukraine, NATO’s primary means used to target Russia. Canada calls it a “Ukrainian Sovereignty Bond”. Trudeau’s plan would also in turn make Canada the first country to provide war bonds to Ukraine.
This time around, the war bonds are meant to help the Ukrainian government “continue operations”, while targets of this money would include “providing essential services to Ukrainians, like pensions, and purchasing fuel before winter.” The Canada Files reached out to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to ask: “Can you guarantee that none of the funds raised from these bonds will go to the Ukrainian military or police?” We have not received a response. Regardless, a Canadian government bond has been created to support a Nazi-infested government in Ukraine.
In a meeting with the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Trudeau discussed how Canadians can now “go to major banks to purchase their sovereignty bonds which will mature after five years with interest”. These bonds will support the government of Ukraine in fighting NATO’s proxy war against Russia and allow it to continue further operations targeting the Russian Special Military Operation in the Donbass.
In addition to a war bonds for the Ukrainian government, the Canadian government also announced a new round of sanctions targeting various senior Russian officials. These senior Russian officials were tied to the Russian energy sector, including Gazprom and its subsidiaries. Furthermore, Canada plans to impose even further sanctions on Russian justice and security sectors building off of the sanctions for Gazprom. Canada’s announcement of these sanctions signifies further commitment to NATO’s strategy of economically strangling Russia by isolating Russia from the global market. This is to be carried regardless of the effectiveness of these sanctions or the imminent consequences for Europe as the winter commences.
A Very Canadian history of working with Ukrainian Nazi Collaborators
Canada’s preparation of war bonds for the Nazi-Infested Ukrainian government is yet another instance of Canada’s collaboration with pro-fascist elements of the Ukrainian diaspora in establishing an anti-Russian foreign policy. This collaboration with fascist elements of the Ukrainian diaspora goes back to the end of the Second World War. Following the end of the Second World War and the start of the Cold War, Canada provided refuge to Ukrainian Nazi collaborators fleeing the Soviet Union. These Nazi collaborators belong to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, specifically the OUN-B faction of the movement. The OUN-B, headed by Stephan Bandera, sought to create an ‘ethnically pure’ Ukraine, purged of all Jews, Russians, and Poles. During the Second World War, they enthusiastically collaborated with the Nazis to exterminate both Communists along with Ukraine’s Jewish, Polish, and Slavic populations. Some members of the OUN collaborated with the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier division. The 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier division was responsible for the massacre of more than 1,000 Polish civilians in Huta Peniatska in 1944.
These fascist groups would find a new home in Canada as anti-Communism became an integral part of Canadian foreign policy in the Cold War. According to investigative historian Peter Vronsky, US-financed groups such as the Canadian Christian Council for the Resettlement of Refugees lobbied the Canadian government to take in former SS collaborators in the war against Communism.
The Canadian government would admit more than 2,000 members of the Galician Waffen SS Division in order to crush the left wing of the Ukrainian-Canadian diaspora. In many cases, simply showing an SS tattoo to officials was enough to be admitted in Canada. These Nazi collaborators worked with the Canadian government and Canadian corporations to suppress leftist movements in Canada. The RCMP paid suspected war criminals such as Radislav Grujicic to provide intelligence reports on left-wing immigrants. Canadian mining companies such as INCO would use Ukrainian Nazi collaborators to purge unions of leftist militants.
The Ukrainian Nazi collaborators settling in Canada would set up various organizations to spread their ideology. These organizations included the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) and the League of Ukranian Canadians (LUC), both of which glorify Nazi collaborators such as Bandera and his right-hand man, Yaroslav Stetsko. The UCC would even go as far to consider Bandera one of Ukraine’s national heroes. In addition to setting up organizations promoting Ukrainian ultranationalism, the ultranationalist elements of the Ukrainian diaspora wouldalso erect memorials to various Nazi collaborators. These memorials include a monument commemorating the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division in Oakville, as well as a statue of Nazi collaborator Roman Shukhevych in Edmonton.
Trudeau continues Canada’s history anti-Russia collaboration with Ukrainian Ultranationalists
The Canadian government’s collaboration with the Ukrainian-Canadian far right would continue under Justin Trudeau. As prime minister, Trudeau would appoint Ukrainian ultranationalist Chrystia Freeland as foreign minister and later as deputy prime minister and minister of finance. Freeland was the granddaughter of Michael Chomiak, who ran a Nazi propaganda newspaper in Ukraine. Freeland has both defended the US-instigated Maidan coup and whitewashed her grandfather’s willing complicity in the Holocaust, along with his efforts to spread far-right ideas within the Canadian Ukrainian diaspora.
In addition to the appointment of Freeland, the Trudeau government both permitted the sale of light arms to Ukraine and continued Operation UNIFIER. Operation UNIFIER was the Canadian Armed Forces’ mission providing military training for the Neo Nazi-infiltrated Ukrainian army as they waged war on the Russian population of Ukraine. While Operation UNIFIER was started under the Harper government, it would be extended twice by the Trudeau government. The first extension of Operation UNIFIER occurred in March 2019, when it was extended to March 2022, and the second extension occurred in January of 2022, when the mission was extended to March of 2025. As tensions worsened between Russia and Ukraine, the Trudeau government prepared the further expansion of sanctions in February of 2022 targeting Russia.
With the commencing of Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine, the Canadian government would push for immediate escalation of the conflict. On March 3, 2022 the Canadian government would place sanctions on Russian companies Rosneft and Gazprom. This would be followed by the removal of Russia and Belarus from favored nation status, thereby imposing a mandatory 35 per cent tariff on all imports from the two countries. In addition to increasing sanctions, Canada would provide artillery and light armored vehicles for Ukraine. On April 7, 2022, the Canadian parliament would also echo trumped-up claims from the Ukrainian government that Russian actions in Ukraine constituted an act of genocide.
Canada’s attempts to escalate the Ukrainian conflict drives world closer to Nuclear War
The Canadian government’s decision to provide war bonds for Ukraine is yet another indication of its willingness to work with Ukrainian ultra-nationalists in fermenting an anti-Russia foreign policy. For decades since they were offered refuge in Canada, pro-Nazi elements of the Ukrainian diaspora have worked with the Canadian government and Canadian corporations against first the Canadian left and the USSR, and now the Russian government. In the years following the Maidan coup, Canada has escalated tensions further with both sanctions on Russia and military support for Ukraine both before and after the Russian Special Military operation.
As the NATO-instigated proxy war in Ukraine against Russia drives the world closer to nuclear war, an anti-imperialist movement in Canada is needed more than ever to oppose further escalation of the war in Ukraine by the Canadian government.
Editor’s note: The Canada Files has spent nearly three years doing critical investigative reporting on Canada’s imperialist foreign policy. We’ve established a clear track record of exposing the truth Canada’s political establishment hides from you. Currently we are at $673 CAD per month in support. There’s so much more we can do, but only with your financial support.
Please consider setting up a monthly or annual donation through Donorbox.
Daniel Xie is a firm anti-imperialist, who writes about the need for an anti-imperialist and independent Canadian foreign policy. He serves as the Associate Editor of The Canada Files.
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This post was originally published on Articles – The Canada Files.
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The ocean is in crisis. Global warming is taking a severe toll on the ocean, as are plastics and agricultural pollution. Fishing, or more specifically overfishing, is also ravaging the ocean. According to the United Nations (UN) Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), over 35% of fish populations face extraction at unsustainable levels.
Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing contributes to overfishing. The Pew Trusts reported that around one in every five fish is caught illegally. A recent report has dug into the question of who is behind the practice.
The Financial Transparency Coalition (FTC) asserts that companies from European nations are among the top offenders. Moreover, it says that IUU vessels are excessively targeting African waters, where millions of people are dependent on small-scale fishing for food and livelihoods.
Extensive analysis of IUU fishing
The FTC is a global network of civil society organisations. The network released its report, titled Fishy networks: uncovering the companies and individuals behind illegal fishing globally, on 26 October. FTC said that its findings are the result of the “most extensive analysis of IUU fishing cases to date”.
The report asserted that almost half of the industrial and semi-industrial vessels it identified target Africa. This is the case with West Africa in particular, it said, with 40% operating there. The FTC named 10 top companies allegedly involved in IUU fishing. It highlighted that these companies:
own 23.7 percent of total vessels involved in IUU fishing for which the beneficial owners were identified
Beneficial ownership means the ultimate owner or controller of a company or asset. The companies include Spain’s Albacora SA, a tuna giant, along with eight Chinese companies and one from Panama.
In its research, FTC found almost a thousand industrial and semi-industrial fishing vessels between 2010 and May 2022 that were reported to be operating illegally. Overall, 54.7% of those detected carried flags for Asian countries. Additionally, 16.1% had flags for Latin American countries, 13.5% for African countries, and 12.8% for European nations, including the UK.
These flags don’t, however, always indicate the country from which a fishing fleet originates. Vessels may fly what are called flags of convenience, where they register to fly a flag of a different nation. 8.76% of the vessels the FTC identified in its analysis used flags of convenience.
In a comment to the Guardian, Albacora SA said:
IUU fishing is a very grave matter, which this company takes very seriously. We deny any accusations related to this.
IUU fishing is robbing nations of income
IUU fishing encompasses a number of different practices. These include illegal activity, such as operating in contravention of the relevant national and international laws. The term also covers the failure to report fishing activity where necessary. It further refers to vessels fishing in areas beyond the jurisdiction of any individual nation or regional fishing authority, in a manner that violates their country’s conservation responsibilities under international law.
The practice can, to some extent, involve small-scale fisheries. The FTC report stated that:
IUU fishing is driven largely by expanding foreign distant water fishing (DWF) fleets from industrialised countries which, having depleted fish stocks in domestic waters, are moving further afield to meet the rising demand for seafood.
The elicit trade is robbing many poorer nations and regions of income, the report further highlighted. Africa alone is losing out on up to $11.49bn, with West Africa suffering the bulk of those losses. Executive director of the FTC Matti Kohonen said:
Illegal fishing is a massive industry directly threatening the livelihoods of millions of people across the world, especially [those] living in poor coastal communities in developing countries already affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis and the impact of climate change
This can have knock-on effects for other environmental and health issues. A 2016 study highlighted that overfishing by foreign vessels has led to the increased hunting of wildlife in some instances, as communities seek out alternative protein when their fish catches are reduced. This, in turn, can put them at greater risk of contracting zoonotic diseases.
Transparency is vital
Some international measures to tackle the problem of IUU fishing are meant to be forthcoming. The World Trade Organisation (WTO), for example, agreed a deal on fishing subsidies in June this year. WTO members still need to ratify the deal, but it would ban subsidies for IUU fishing. It would also ban subsidies for fishing on the high seas, meaning all of the ocean that lies over 200 miles from shores.
However, China Dialogue Ocean reported that countries failed to reach an agreement on stopping subsidies that “contribute to overfishing and overcapacity”. These subsidies can enable extensive fishing by industrial vessels in distant places, in essence facilitating overfishing.
Nations have also been negotiating a high seas treaty at the UN that could potentially impact some industrial fishing. Member states have yet to conclude an agreement on this, however, with further negotiation needed.
The FTC argued that it’s also imperative that countries increase transparency in the fishing industry. Kohonen said FTC’s probe indicated that with few countries requiring ownership information for vessels and licences, their beneficial owners operate with:
complete impunity, using complex company structures and other schemes to hide their identity and evade prosecution
The network singled out the US, Europe and Japan for having a particular responsibility to enforce robust registries on vessel ownership. Lakshmi Kumar, from FTC member Global Financial Integrity, pointed out that:
The US, EU, and Japan together account for over 50% of global seafood consumption and therefore directly contribute to the shocking food insecurity and natural resource depletion that this report highlights.
We need wholesale change
IUU is a serious problem that urgently needs resolving. The industry overall desperately requires an overhaul in terms of its practice, governance and regulation.
Only around 7% of fish populations face extraction at levels below what authorities allege is the maximum they can withstand. This means that most fish populations are extracted at the highest level possible, with many already being fished at much higher levels. And that’s without taking the climate crisis, and the added resilience fish populations need to survive that, into account.
Nonetheless, as FTC highlighted, authorities don’t even categorise fishing as an extractive industry. This only goes to show how far we are from getting real about our relationship with – and impact on – the ocean.
Featured image via Adam Vowles / Flickr, cropped to 770×403, licensed under CC BY 2.0
This post was originally published on Canary.
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Editor’s note: This article from Historicly was republished after news broke on October 25, that Canadian journalist Duncan Kinney, who operates the site Progress Report, was charged (not convicted) by the Edmonton Police Service with mischief under $5,000. Police allege Kinney vandalized the monument to Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Roman Shukhevych, located at the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex in Edmonton. Kinney would write an article about the Skukheyvch statue having the words “Actual Nazi” spraypainted onto it, after receiving pictures of this monument on August 10, 2021. Kinney and allies deny the charges laid by Edmonton police, whom Kinney has written many critical articles on.
The Memorial to the Victims of Communism in Canada’s capital city, Ottawa, had a brick dedicated to Roman Shukhevych, which prompted Historicly to produce this article, which we have republished.
Update: Since we have written our article, they have decided to remove his name from the brick. You can still find the original dedication archived in the wayback when machine. Right now, the brick has been purged of his name.
For every brick, we [Historicly] shall bring their story in this special December Series called “Featured Victims of Communism”
This article was originally published on Historicly.
Written by: Esha K. and M. Fergus Gabhainn
What they said:
In memory of General Roman Shukhevych (1907 – 1950) who, in 1943, formed and led the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which fought to rid Ukraine of enslavement from Soviet communist rule. Shukhevych died in battle with Soviet security forces on March 4, 1950.
What they omitted
The map of the world before World War 1 looked vastly different. Most of Ukraine was part of Tsarist Russia except for an area in the west known as “Galicia” which was a “protectorate” of the Austria-Hungarian empire.
Inspired by the Bolshevik revolution, soldiers in the Austria-Hungarian empire simply “checked out”, leading to the collapse of the Austria-Hungarian empire. Modern countries were carved out with a whip of a pen as to maximize profits for the France-US-UK (“Faukus”) alliance. While carving out countries with no regards to people, their families, their ethnicities and historic ties, the Faukus alliance also tried to balkanize as much of Tsarist Russia as possible, to preserve these areas for their capitalist and imperialistic profits.
France had armed and trained petty industrialist Jozef Piłsudski for carving out what is modern day Poland. In what is now considered modern Ukraine, Faukus alliance armed Anton Denniken and his White Armies. Denniken’s antisemitism was so outrageous that Winston Churchill had to warn him to tone it down or else he may not be able to get continued support:
[M]y task in winning support in Parliament for the Russian Nationalist cause will be infinitely harder if well-authenticated complaints continue to be received from Jews in the zone of the Volunteer Armies.
Luckily, the Bolsheviks were able to defeat the White Armies in the region that is now known as Ukraine. Finally, Soviet Russia signed a peace treaty called Brest-Litovosk, where once again, the borders changed. The allies who were very supportive of “self-determination” for Ukraine became shocked at what many Ukranians themselves, determined. In 1920, Soviet Galicia was declared and it was short lived.
Worried about more people being able to “self-determine,” the allies gave their explicit blessing for Piłsudski’s armies to fight and carve out as much land as possible for his Polish Republic. During this process, Piłsudski’s armies engaged in a campaign of “Polification” which entailed the wholesale genocide of anyone who was not Polish(catholic). Despite this, the leader of what was left of the “White Ukrainian armies” Simon Petlura made a deal with the proverbial devil. According to the CIA:
The Ukrainian National Directory with Simon Petlura at the head was left completely to itself in these fateful struggles; at the end of 1919 it had to clear the battlefield and seek an alliance with the newly created state of Poland, whose head, Pilsudski [sp], had a great understanding of the danger from the east. In April 1920, Poland and the Ukraine concluded s treaty in conjunction with a military convention, A joint Ukrainian and Polish campaign led to the liberation of Kiev in May 1920, but it had to be abandoned soon and the joint armies had to clear the Ukraine. Poland deserted its Ukrainian ally in the peace treaty at Riga in 1921 when it recognized the Soviet government in the Ukraine. The regular war between the Ukraine and Moscow ended at that time.
Finally, in 1923, Faukus alliance officially recognized Poland’s annexation of Galicia, thereby forcing these Ukrainian nationalists to reap what they sowed.
Under this backdrop, Roman Shukhevych became part of the Second Republic of Poland. He managed to graduate from Politechnika Lwowska with a degree in Civil Engineering. Soon, he and fellow students, formed an illegal organization to “fight” for an “independent Ukraine.” But, that is a joke. If they truly wanted an independent Ukraine, nothing prevented from using their white armies to support to Soviet Galicia. In reality, what they wanted was a restoration of the feudal relationships when Galicia was a “protectorate” of the Austria Hungarian empire.
In 1931, Roman Shukevych became the head of the “militant” wing of the OUN known as UPA. Their organization engaged in petty terrorism where they mostly assassinated random government officials in the Second Polish Republic.
After the Nazi party came to power in Germany in 1933, hundreds of Ukrainians were recruited and trained by the Abwehr. We know this because during the war, many of the captured Wehrmacht soldiers immediately spilled the details about their collaborators. Abwehr General, Erwin Stolze, during this interrogation, recounted:
Making preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union, German intelligence was inteerested in using the “Ukrainian nationalists,” who were an active spy-terrorist organization already proven to serve the interests of the German General Staff.
He further continued,
In 1937, with the intensification of preparations for an attack on Poland, contacts with the KONOVALTS organization were renewed.
When asked about how they assisted in the invasion of the USSR, General Stolze said,
At my direction, BANDERA began to organize insurgent groups in Ukraine, with the task of armed struggle against the Red Army and the seizure of some important objects, including the Drogobych oil sources.
At first it was assumed that by a single password given over the radio, the groups would begin open armed action. However, this was deemed inexpedient and I, together with BANDERA, decided that the groups’ action was to begin automatically with the invasion of the Soviet territory by the German troops.
According to Abwehr, the UPA’s “offensive” was to coincide with the Wehrmacht’s Operation Barbarosa. On June 30, 1941, Yaroslav Stetsko (the man pictured in the left with Ronald Reagan and on the right with George Herbert Walker Bush), proclaimed an independent Ukrainian State.
He said:
The restored Sobornoye Ukraina (Cathedral Ukrainian State) will cooperate closely with National Socialist Great-Germany, which under Adolf Hitler creates a new order in Europe and the world and helps the Ukrainian people to break free from the Moscow occupation. Long live the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, may the guide of the OUN Stepan Bandera live on!”
After this proclamation of their “own state,”members of the OUN went on an orgy of violence. According to eyewitnesses:
pregnant women were hit or kicked in the stomach.
stripped a twenty-year-old Jewish woman, lodged a baton in her vagina
Jews were forced to kneel and scream out loyalties to the OUN.
Most of the sadism is available on film with just a google search. They are too graphic to display on our website.
A week later, on the night July 6, 1941, the Nachtigall battalion followed a path from l’vov to Vinnitisa, spilling as much blood as possible. In their first city of Zolochiv, Soviet prisoners of war were deprived of food and water. Their rotten corpses were displayed to incite terror among the local population. In Satanov, they engaged in some gratuitous acts of sadism by setting fire to synagogues and forcing the Jewish citizens to say affirmations to Christ and pretend that they were filled with joy.
Members of the nightingale proudly boasted about their deeds. According to a Nachtigall fighter Viktor Kharkiv “Khmara” during this July march:
At the time of our march eastwards we saw with our own eyes the victims of the Judeo-Bolshevik terror, and the sight so strengthened our hatred of the Jews that in two villages we shot all the Jews we encountered. I recall one example. At the time of our march through one village we saw many vagrant people. Asked where they were going they answered that the Jews were threatening them and that they were afraid of spending the night in their houses. As a result of that, we shot all the Jews we encountered there.
The Nachtigall’s reign of terror continued until August 13, 1941. They were transported back to Frankfurt an der Order where they were given enhanced military training for “pacification” campaigns. On October 21, 1941, these same soldiers were reorganized as the 201st Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft Battalion also known as (“201”). Roman Shukhevych’s title was that of Hauptmann (captain) of the first company and deputy commander of the legion.
Anti-Partisan “Pacification”
The “blitzkrieg” strategy use of overwhelming force, with their advanced Luftwaffe (Air Force) to rush over Soviet territory and level as much of it as possible, corroding the landscape and civilization with indiscriminate bombing campaigns.
This total-annihilation approach to warfare drove rural villagers into undeveloped wooded areas; soon irregular militias known as “partisans” were formed, each resisting Nazi occupation in their own way, resulting in a kind of asymetric warfare. Hitler likened the partisans to the US’s “struggle” against the “red Indians.”1
Despite a massive technology deficit, the Belarussian partisans were comparatively successful: Partisan Nina Litwinczyk, obtained a job as a typist in the Gestapo headquarters, soon compiling a list of names of every national who had collaborated with the Nazis — this detailed exposure of the rat-line rendered the subsequent extermination campaign relatively effortless.
Another Partisan, Elena Mazanik, managed to infiltrate the house of Wilhelm Kube, planted a bomb under his bed scheduled to go off at around midnight — the component parts of the bomb so precisely attuned that come the end of its countdown, Wilhelm Kube was successfully erased from the mortal plain while his pregnant wife was left undisturbed until morning.
Roman Shukheyvich’s 201st Battalion was to eliminate partisans, apprehend saboteurs as well as administer the Reichskommissariat — Nazi colonial outposts. Einsatzgruppen reports catalog daily operations in benign terminology rooted in the exact bare minimum amount of truth to escape designation as euphemism: “fought partisans,” “quelled banditry,” etc. belied the accompanment of savagery.
A pack of attack dogs used to track and tear apart partisans, their tactics compensated a lack of sophistication for primal terror. A standard program of no quarter given; policy handed down from on high from Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel that “attacks on soldiers in the East should be met by putting to death 50 to 100 Communists for one German soldier,” adding that “human life was less than nothing in the East.” The 201st Battalion followed to the letter and exemplified this decree, in a manner that chilled the bones of the “proper” Nazis:
Ukrainian militia on horseback, armed with pistols, rides and lang, straight cavalry swords, ‘vere riding wildly inside and around the town park. As far as lve could make out, they were driving people along before their horses; men, women, and children. A shower of bullets was then fired at this human mass. Those not hit outright were struck down with the swords. Like some ghostly aparation, this horde of Ukrainians, let loose and commanded by SS officers, trampled savagely over human bodies, ruthlessly killing innосent children, mothers and old people whose only crime was that they had escaped the great mass murder, so as to be eventually shot or beaten to death like wild animals. (Testimony of Erwin Bingel)
In their first mission, they were dropped off by their German detachments near Lake Domzharitskoe, located in the Vitebsk region. For the first few days, the 201st Battalion did pursue the partisans, unsuccessfully, albeit. Instead, they decided to engage in “Plan B” – killing and destroying everyone in the villages.
They began in a town called Logoisk. According to a survivor (who maybe the only one), she and five others hid under a bush until nightfall. And then either a Russian or a Belarussian approached them and warned them against returning to the village. They said, ” Run. They’ve killed everyone”
Another Partisan diary states, “On September 2 this year, Hitler’s bandits broke into the village of Khrapovichi, Vitebsk district, they burned down 78 houses of the collective farmers, 97 outbuildings, all public yards and the secondary school building. They also destroyed the church.
Another survivor in a village in their rampage Maxim Kozlovsky recounts they “brought us all together in one place, then ordered us to go into a house eight at a time and began to shoot us. My wife and I went into one house, and my children into another. The forester’s wife and her infant child begged not to be killed. Then the punisher snatched the child from her and hit her head against the corner of the house and shot her. They killed my two sons in front of my eyes and I ran away with my third son. We ran into the house, but the punishers found us there, shot me, wounded me in the back. I ran to the forest, I was ambushed, they shot at me, but I managed to escape. In the village, a woman and two other children hid my son under the floor. The child cried, the soldier shot, killed one boy, then set fire to this house.”
In the course of Swamp Fever, the fascist managed to kill 10,013 Soviet Citizens and 1,217 were forcibly relocated to one of the forced labor camps. This wasn’t all. He continued into massacres in Poland and Russia. In fact, he was a Forest Brother, engaging in acts of terrorism until he shot himself in 1950.
The sick joke and grand irony stitched into the border of the red curtain that closed on Roman Shukheyvich’s wretched life is that he can so easily be touted as a “Victim of Communism” despite no one cut from this man’s cloth, guilty of these crimes, having any reasonable claim to being cast as a victim of anything at all, is precisely because of his prowess as the harvester of sorrow he was. Per the autobiography of a subordinate regarding the movements of the Nachtigal detachment through the Ukrainian SSR:
“During our march, we saw traces of the Jewish-Bolshevik terror, this so strengthened our hatred of the Jews that in two villages we shot all the Jews we met.”
The NKVD’s “massacres” and “victims” references the killing of Nazis and their collaborators at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, apparently some kind of misdeed when performed by Communist hands—tell the same story: as these harbingers of death made their way through the west of Ukraine, if they encountered evidence of antifascist activity in a village, it was used as the impetus and rationale to slaughter all Jews in sight, sometimes entire villages.
The numbers bear this out: starting from the Nachtigall Battalion and the 4,000 Jews killed in their pogroms in Lviv and throughout the remainder of Western Ukraine as they moved towards the center and took Kyiv, “liquidating” over 30,000 Jews — when this human plague reached the land east of the Dnieper, “the Jewish Problem” was ‘solved’ by the ‘liquidation’ of over 4,000 Jews with those left being taken slave and cordoned off into groups of up to 1,000 at a time.2
Following this trail of blood and brutality blazed by the Nachtigall detachment in response to seeing “traces of the Jewish-Bolshevik terror,” by the time Roman Shukheyvich was in Belarus with the 201st Battalion waging a terror campaign against the partisans. When Oberkommando Wilhelm Keitel issued the decree on September 16th 1941 that 50 to 100 Belarussians should be slaughtered for every Nazi killed by a partisan, he was merely elevating the savagery somehow both rabid in practice yet rational in calculation established by Shukheyvich’s Nachtigall detachment in Ukraine to the level of an official policy that would greatly contribute to Belarus losing 25% of its population.
We know of this through investigations into the morbidity—literal corpse-counting—records released long after the fact, statements from perpetrators themselves — conducting thorough research in multiple languages revealed a distinct absence of living witnesses that were not directly responsible for this terror. The comparison made by Hitler himself to what was done to the “red Indians” by the US was disgusting and yet thoroughly warranted. This was a full scale, unbridled extermination campaign to clear the land for settlement by foreign invaders and the results are reflective of that.
Bust of Roman Shukhevych in Edmonton Canada
And Roman Shukheyvich, as with those involved with the extermination of the indigenous in what is now the US, is memorialized and glorified on the basis of galling omissions, glaring obfuscations and outright denials of historical reality within cults of personality built by ghouls seeking reassurances of an alleged right of supremacy held by a “race” that reproduces itself on barbarism alone and condemns its victims with all of its own faults.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in propaganda campaigns operating organs like Victims of Communism to whitewash the legacies of some of the most brutal men history has on offer because that is the level of energy and resources that must be spent to validate their ideology of the ravenous devouring of the world itself.
An organization like “Victims of Communism” exists because without someone to invent the reality where any exist, we would never see them, without an organization in which time and energy, and above all, money could be spent converting slave owners and genociders into sympathetic figures in the crusade against an ideology built on the principle that every human has the right to be fed, clothed, educated and live indoors, we would notice we are permanently surrounded by Victims of Capitalism.
References
1: Philip W. Blood — “Hitler’s Bandit Hunters: The SS and the Nazi Occupation of Europe,” pp. 79)
2: Second Day, Wednesday, 11/21/1945, Part 04″, in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal. Volume II. Proceedings: 11/14/1945-11/30/1945. [Official text in the English language.] Nuremberg: IMT, 1947. pp. 98-102.)
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Man says state prison failed to provide adequate diet, in appeal joined by former psychiatric patient
Switzerland has been challenged at the European court of human rights over a failure to provide adequate vegan diets to a prisoner and a patient at the psychiatric ward of a hospital, in a case that could lead to veganism being interpreted as a protected characteristic under the right of freedom of conscience across geographic Europe.
The court, which is part of the Council of Europe and not the EU, this week formally asked its member state Switzerland to respond to the two complaints that Swiss state institutions had failed to provide a totally vegan diet to two applicants while they were in prison and in a hospital psychiatric unit respectively.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Anti-war activists and workers should view with suspicion and be very wary of any further Australian military intervention in the war in Ukraine, argue Alex Bainbridge and Peter Boyle.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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IEA energy outlook report’s scenario is based on prevailing policy settings that see a definitive peak in global demand for fossil fuels
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
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Sydney Stop the War Coalition released a statement opposing the deployment of Australian Defence Force trainers and raising concerns about the lack of parliamentary oversight, reports Kerry Smith.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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Last week, Alex Nunns, author of The Candidate – Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path To Power and former Corbyn speechwriter, described the current assault on democracy within the Labour Party:
‘What’s happening in the Labour Party is new. The Labour right, having had the shock of their lives in 2015, are now intent on eradicating the left entirely. This isn’t how their predecessors thought. It’s a new departure in Labour history that’ll have long term consequences.’
‘Previous generations of Labour right bureaucrats accommodated the left not because they were nicer than the current lot but because 1) the left was part of a power bloc which they needed to advance their own ends & 2) they were confident in containing the left within that bloc.
‘This generation of Labour right bureaucrats acts differently because 2) has changed, but 1) hasn’t. Their predecessors weren’t all stupid, so there will be a long-term cost.’
In other words, the Labour right is ‘eradicating the left entirely’ because, as the Corbyn near-miss in 2017 showed, the level of public support for left policies is now so high that it threatens to surge uncontrollably through any window of opportunity.
This rings true, and not just for the Labour Party. What we have often called the ‘corporate media’, but which in truth is a state-corporate media system, has followed essentially the same path for the same reasons.
Where once the likes of John Pilger, Robert Fisk and Peter Oborne were granted regular columns in national newspaper and magazines, and even space for prime-time documentaries, their brand of rational, compassionate dissent has been all but banished. Pilger commented recently:
‘In recent years, some of the best journalists have been eased out of the mainstream. “Defenestrated” is the word used. The spaces once open to mavericks, to journalists who went against the grain, truth-tellers, have closed.’
In October 2019, Peter Oborne published an article on ‘the way Boris Johnson was debauching Downing Street by using the power of his office to spread propaganda and fake news’.1. The media response:
‘This article marked the end of my thirty-year-long career as a writer and broadcaster in the mainstream British press and media. I had been a regular presenter on Radio 4’s The Week in Westminster for more than two decades. It ceased to use me, without explanation. I parted company on reasonably friendly terms with the Daily Mail after our disagreement…
‘The mainstream British press and media is to all intents and purposes barred to me.’ (p. 132 and p. 133)
As with the Labour Party, the reason is that the game – and it always was a game – has changed. In the age of internet-based citizen journalism – heavily filtered by algorithms and ‘shadow-banning’ though it is – elite interests can no longer be sure that the truth can be contained by the ‘free press’ and its obedient ranks of ‘client journalists’.
In our media alert of 26 July 2002, we wrote:
‘This does not mean that there is no dissent in the mainstream; on the contrary the system strongly requires the appearance of openness. In an ostensibly democratic society, a propaganda system must incorporate occasional instances of dissent. Like vaccines, these small doses of truth inoculate the public against awareness of the rigid limits of media freedom.’
That was true two decades ago when we started Media Lens. But, now, the state-corporate media system relies less on inoculation and more on quarantine: inconvenient facts, indeed whole issues, are simply kept from public awareness. We have moved far closer to a totalitarian system depending on outright censorship.
An example was provided by a remarkable leading article in the Observer, titled, ‘The Observer view on the global escalation of Russia’s war on Ukraine’. The title notwithstanding, this October 9 article made no mention at all of the terrorist attacks on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines just two weeks earlier, on September 26. But why?
The pipelines are multi-national projects operated by Swiss-based Nord Stream AG, with each intended to supply around 55 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually from Russia to Europe through pipelines laid beneath the Baltic Sea connecting to a German hub. Completed a decade ago, Russian gas giant, Gazprom, has a 51 percent stake in the project that cost around $15 billion to build. US media watch site, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), made the key point:
‘Any serious coverage of the Nord Stream attack should acknowledge that opposition to the pipeline has been a centerpiece of the US grand strategy in Europe. The long-term goal has been to keep Russia isolated and disjointed from Europe, and to keep the countries of Europe tied to US markets. Ever since German and Russian energy companies signed a deal to begin development on Nord Stream 2, the entire machinery of Washington has been working overtime to scuttle it.’
The evidence for this is simply overwhelming. For example, FAIR noted that during his confirmation hearings in 2021, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told Congress he was ‘determined to do whatever I can to prevent’ Nord Stream 2 from being completed. Months later, the US State Department reiterated that ‘any entity involved in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline risks US sanctions and should immediately abandon work on the pipeline’.
If that doesn’t make US hostility to the pipelines clear enough, President Joe Biden told reporters in February:
‘If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.’
Asked by a reporter how the US intended to end a project that was, after all, under German control, Biden responded:
‘I promise you, we will be able to do that.’
No surprise, then, that, following the attack, Blinken described the destruction of the pipelines as a ‘tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy,’ adding that this ‘offers tremendous strategic opportunity for years to come’.
Former UN weapons inspector and political analyst Scott Ritter commented:
‘Intent, motive and means: People serving life sentences in U.S. prisons have been convicted on weaker grounds than the circumstantial evidence against Washington for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines.’
In a rare moment of ‘mainstream’ dissent echoing Ritter’s conclusion, Columbia University economist, Jeffrey Sachs, surprised his interviewer by saying:
‘I know it runs counter to our narrative, you’re not allowed to say these things in the West, but the fact of the matter is, all over the world when I talk to people, they think the US did it. Even reporters on our papers that are involved tell me, “Of course [the US is responsible],” but it doesn’t show up in our media.’
Sachs added: ‘there’s direct radar evidence that US helicopters, military helicopters that are normally based in Gdansk were circling over this area’.
Despite all of this, FAIR reported of US corporate media coverage:
‘Much of the media cast their suspicions towards Russia, including Bloomberg (9/27/22), Vox (9/29/22), Associated Press (9/30/22) and much of cable news. With few exceptions, speculation on US involvement has seemingly been deemed an intellectual no-fly-zone.’
Thus, the possibility of US involvement has been intellectually quarantined. Instead, US media have been tying themselves in knots trying to find alternative explanations. The New York Times wrote:
‘It is unclear why Moscow would seek to damage installations that cost Gazprom billions of dollars to build and maintain. The leaks are expected to delay any possibility of receiving revenue from fuel going through the pipes.’
In Britain, the Guardian affected similar confusion:
‘Nord Stream has been at the heart of a standoff between Russia and Europe over energy supplies since the start of the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine, but it is not immediately clear who stands to benefit from the destruction of the gas infrastructure.’
If not ‘immediately clear’, it surely becomes clear after a moment’s honest reflection. Another Guardian report commented:
‘Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic states and the US – including its former president Donald Trump – have been fierce critics of the Nord Stream pipeline, and Germany has announced its intention to wean itself off Russian gas completely and Gazprom has wound down deliveries to almost zero.
‘For a Nato ally to have carried out an act of sabotage on a piece of infrastructure part-owned by European companies would have meant much political risk for little gain, but for Russia to destroy its own material and political asset would also seem to defy logic.’
The risk is not, in fact, that great in a world where politicians and media like the Guardian refuse to point the finger of blame at the world’s sole superpower. As we have seen, the assertion that an attack by a Nato ally would be ‘for little gain’ was publicly contradicted by Blinken’s own comment that the destruction of the pipelines ‘offers tremendous strategic opportunity for years to come.’
The Guardian added:
‘Some European politicians suggested Russia could have carried out the blasts with the aim of causing further havoc with gas prices or demonstrating its ability to damage Europe’s energy infrastructure.’
But as the Guardian acknowledged, this ‘logic’ seemed ‘to defy logic’ and suggested journalists were burying their heads in the sand at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. A further Guardian report noted:
‘A senior Ukrainian official also called it a Russian attack to destabilise Europe, without giving proof.’
Or any reasoning. The report continued:
‘British sources said they believed it may not be possible to determine what occurred with certainty.’
How convenient. The Telegraph reported:
‘Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, said that if it was confirmed it was an act of sabotage by Russia it would be “in nobody’s interest”.’
Again, a statement directly contradicted by Blinken himself. His ‘in nobody’s interest’ comment was the main focus of most media coverage.
FAIR discussed a tweet from a Polish member of the European Parliament, Radek Sikorski – a one-time Polish defence minister as well as a former American Enterprise Institute fellow, who was named one of the ‘Top 100 Global Thinkers’ in 2012 by Foreign Policy. FAIR reported:
‘Sikorski tweeted a picture of the methane leak in the ocean, along with the caption, “As we say in Polish, a small thing, but so much joy.” He later tweeted, “Thank you, USA,” with the same picture.’
These comments were occasionally reported in the UK press, but Sikorski later tweeted against the pipeline, noting:
‘Nord Stream’s only logic was for Putin to be able to blackmail or wage war on Eastern Europe with impunity.’
He added:
‘Now $20 billion of scrap metal lies at the bottom of the sea, another cost to Russia of its criminal decision to invade Ukraine. Someone…did a special maintenance operation.’
This was clearly an ironic reference to the term ‘special military operation’ used by Russia to describe its illegal invasion of Ukraine.
Significantly, the Telegraph reported some but not all of this:
‘Sikorski posted a photo of the Nord Stream methane bubbling to the Baltic’s surface, with the brief message: “Thank you, USA.”
‘Sikorski has since deleted his tweet, and has not since elaborated on it… [but] it was widely seized upon by pro-Russian media seeking to make the case for American sabotage.’
But as we have seen, Sikorski certainly had elaborated on it; and media didn’t need to be ‘pro-Russian’ to believe the comments pointed towards Western sabotage.
The Daily Mail also struggled to understand:
‘On Twitter Radoslaw Sikorski posted a picture of a massive methane gas spill on the surface of the Baltic Sea with the comment: “Thank You USA”. The hawkish MEP later tweeted that if Russia wants to continue supplying gas to Europe it must “talk to the countries controlling the gas pipelines”.
‘Whatever did he mean?’
In fact, Sikorski had been very clear about what he meant.
In a single, casual comment in the Mail on Sunday, Peter Hitchens may be the only ‘mainstream’ journalist to actually affirm the likely significance of Sikorski’s comments:
‘Radek Sikorski may have given the game away. First, he tweeted “Thank you, USA” with a picture of the gas bubbling up into the Baltic. Then, when lots of people noticed, he deleted it. That made me think he was on to something.’ 2
Curiously, non-corporate journalists like Jonathan Cook, Caitlin Johnstone, Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Maté, Bryce Green, even hippy Russell Brand, were able to find all the evidence and arguments omitted by ‘mainstream’ journalists supported by far greater resources.
And this makes the point with which we began this alert: there is now so much high-quality journalism exposing the establishment outside the state-corporate ‘mainstream’, that the task of the ‘mainstream’ now is to protect the establishment by acting as a buffer blocking citizen journalism from public awareness.
The Observer editorial which failed to even mention this major terror attack on civilian infrastructure talked of a ‘Putin plague’, describing the Russian leader as ‘a pestilence whose spread threatens the entire world. Ukraine is not its only victim’. That’s the Bad Guy. So who are the Good Guys in this fairy-tale? The editors added:
‘In this developing confrontation, much more is at stake than Ukraine’s sovereignty. On life support, it seems, is the entire postwar consensus underpinning global security, nuclear non-proliferation, free trade and international law.’
It is easy to understand why the Observer would prefer to quarantine the possibility of US involvement in a terror attack that would make a nonsense of the editors’ lofty rhetoric about a ‘postwar consensus’ based on ‘international law’.
Also no surprise, the Observer once again found answers in the favoured, fix-all solution beloved of the Western press – regime change:
‘If the Putin plague is ever to be eradicated, if the war is ever to end, such developments inside Russia, presaging a change of leadership, full military withdrawal from Ukraine and a fresh start, represent the best hope of a cure.’
• Part 2 to follow shortly.- Peter Oborne, The Assault on Truth, Simon & Schuster, 2021, p. 130
- Hitchens, ‘How could I know…’ Mail on Sunday, 2 October 2022.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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The plan calls for the sale of cannabis to adults at licensed outlets, and the aim is to combat the black market
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
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The former chancellor will then make his first prime ministerial address on the steps of 10 Downing Street
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
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One of the wealthiest politicians in Westminster, Sunak will become the country’s first leader of colour
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
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Charities and trade unions among those calling on new PM to shelve bill that would scrap EU-era legislation protecting workers’ rights and the environment
Employers, trade unions, lawyers and environmentalists are calling on Rishi Sunak to scrap Jacob Rees-Mogg’s legislation that would sweep away 2,400 laws derived from the EU.
The retained EU law (revocation and reform) bill is due for its second reading in the House of Commons on Tuesday, which would scrap protections including the ban on animal testing for cosmetics, workers’ rights and environmental measures.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Exclusive: Guardian hears of ordeal in first major interview given by any of the women freed in last week’s prisoner swap
It was like something from the cold war. After five months in the most notorious jail in occupied Ukraine, Alina Panina, 25, had found herself, without explanation, at the foot of a bridge over a river in no man’s land with 107 fellow female Ukrainian prisoners of war.
Behind Panina lay Russian-occupied territory and her experiences of the siege of Mariupol’s Azovstal steelworks, the subsequent surrender and then captivity in Olenivka prison in Donetsk. There she was witness to the aftermath of an explosion that killed 53 male prisoners, a blast said by Kyiv to have been engineered by Moscow to silence the victims of torture.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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The Freedom for Hungary memorial in Toronto, Ontario (a Canadian city). Image credit: Hungarian Heritage in Canada
Written by: Daniel Xie
On the shores of Lake Ontario, bordering Toronto’s Sunnyside neighborhood, there’s a little-known space called Budapest Park. The most important structure within the Canadian park is a monument titled the “Freedom for Hungary” monument. This monument was erected in 1966, 10 years after a failed uprising against socialist rule in the Hungarian People’s Republic. It was created by Victor Tolgesy, who participated in the uprising himself. The monument commemorated the 10th anniversary of the so-called “Hungarian freedom fight”. In 2008, two Totem poles were added to the monument by Canadian Rakoczi Foundation, both also commemorating the “fallen freedom fighters” that fell during the uprising.
Today is the 76th anniversary of the attempted fascist counter-revolution in Hungary.
Freedom for Hungary Monument whitewashes Fascist Counter-Revolution
The Hungarian Uprising of 1956, which the Budapest Park memorial commemorates, has been often portrayed by the western media as a democratic revolution against Soviet Communism. This sentiment is shared by elements of the anarchist and anti-Marxist Leninist left as well, who view the Hungarian uprising as a democratic socialist uprising against the supposedly “authoritarian” USSR. The reality surrounding the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 is far more sinister. While there were legitimate grievances elements of the uprising did put forward, the uprising was dominated by anti-Communist and outright Fascist groups. The most influential element of the uprising was the right-wing, anti-communist Smallholder’s Party. Another party involved in the counter-revolutionary uprising was the Social Democratic Party. Both parties gained legal status (explain this?) during the 1956 uprising. Anti-Communist Catholic priest József Mindszenty played an important role in leading the demonstrations.
The fascist nature of the uprising was further demonstrated in the actions of the participants themselves. Counter-revolutionaries destroyed memorials to the Red Army, lynched Jewish Hungarians and Communists, burned communist literature and removed communist iconography from buildings. Even the CIA would admit that fascist ideology drove the Hungarian counter-revolution. According to the CIA, participants in the uprising adhered to Hungarian ultranationalism, which is defined by anti-Semitism, Catholic Fundamentalism, and Slavophobia. These were also the ideological tenets of the Fascist Arrow Cross Party, which dominated Hungary in the last years of the Second World War before Hungary’s liberation by the Soviets. Under Arrow Cross rule, 565,000 Jews were murdered as the regime worked with Nazi Germany in perpetuating the Holocaust.
Radio Free Europe (RFE), a CIA funded anti-Communist news organization operating in Eastern Europe, would also play a role in the counter-revolutionary uprising. RFE encouraged the counter-revolutionaries to fight the Soviets. Western support in the uprising was promised to the counter-revolutionaries by RFE. That support never came — RFE’s rhetoric was seen to be too escalatory even for the US government at the time, as the Eisenhower administration refused to militarily support the uprising.
While elements of the Hungarian Communist Party under Imre Nagy supposedly formed the face of the uprising, they sought to leave the Warsaw Pact. This, combined with the anti-Communist ideology of the uprising’s participants, put Hungary in a situation where it could fall into NATO’s sphere of influence. The threat of Hungary falling into the NATO camp spurred Soviet intervention into Hungary, which led to collapse of the counter-revolutionary forces. When Soviet troops entered Hungary, Mindszenty and other counterrevolutionaries demanded that the UN (in reality meaning NATO) intervene in Hungary. Only the decision of the Eisenhower administration to not intervene in Hungary, prevented World War III from breaking out. While the fascist counter-revolution was ultimately crushed, US media outlets whitewashed the uprising as a pro-democratic revolution. Time Magazine would deem Hungarian “Freedom Fighters” as the 1957 “Man of the Year”.
While the US would choose not to risk nuclear war over Hungary, US intelligence operations such as RFE would continue to incite anti-communist uprisings. Two major instances of this in Eastern Europe were the 1968 Prague spring, which was also suppressed, along with the 1989 ‘revolutions’, which led to the downfall of socialism in Eastern Europe.
Following the restoration of capitalist rule in Hungary, decades of socialist gains were reversed and living conditions changed for the worse. Between 1990-1996, the unemployment rate skyrocketed from 1.7 per cent to 11 per cent. 50,000 Hungarians lost their homes and preventable diseases such as tuberculosis increased substantially from 1990-1999. Today, Hungary is under the rule of Viktor Orban and the far-right Fidesz party. Fascists have been rehabilitated and their role in the Holocaust whitewashed by the Hungarian government. Meanwhile, openly organizing Communist parties has been deemed illegal under Hungarian law, forcing Hungarian Communists to rebrand themselves to survive politically.
A very-Canadian History of allowing Fascist Collaborators and Apologists to memorialize themselves
After the Hungarian counter-revolution was crushed, many anti-Communists fled Hungary for the west. The Canadian government would take in 37,500 of them. The majority of Hungarian anti-Communists, arriving via a streamlined immigration process, settled in urban areas such as Toronto, Vancouver, and Montréal.
It was no accident that Canada took in Hungarian fascists and allowed a memorial to be built commemorating their counter-revolution attempt. In fact, this memorial is not the first memorial of its kind honoring anti-Communists to be built in Canada.
On July 17, 2020, it was reported that the St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Cemetery has been vandalized. The words “Nazi war monument” was sprayed onto the monument. This cemetery was indeed a Nazi war monument, built to commemorate the Ukrainian Galician Division of the Waffen-SS. The Ukrainian Galician Division, along with its parent organization, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), enthusiastically collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War. The OUN and the Galician Division were responsible for horrific atrocities against Jews, Russians, and Poles. The Galician Division in particular, would massacre more than 1,000 Polish civilians in Huta Peniatska in 1944. Following the end of the Second World War, the Canadian government would allow 1,200-2,000 members of the Galician Division to settle in Canada.
These Ukrainian Nazis would spread Ukrainian ultranationalism within the Ukrainian-Canadian diaspora. They would form associations such as the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and the League of Ukrainian Canadians to spread far-right ideas. Both groups glorify OUN-B leader Stepan Bandera and other Ukrainian Nazi collaborators. The UCC is connected with deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who whitewashes both Bandera and her Nazi collaborating grandfather, Michael Chomiak, as anti-Communist freedom fighters. Freeland has also sought means to escalate the 8-year war in the Ukraine as a member of Trudeau’s cabinet. She would support in 2017 expanding Operation UNIFIER, the Canadian Armed Forces’ mission in Ukraine to provide training to the Neo Nazi-infiltrated Ukrainian army.
Soon after Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine began, Freeland openly posed with the flag of the Nazi collaborating Ukrainian Insurgent Army at a pro-Ukrainian rally. When confronted on social media, she tried to hide her links to the Ukrainian far-right by re-tweeting a picture of her at the rally without the UPA flag. In addition, Freeland would also push for sanctions on the Russian Central Bank with the rest of the G7 countries in order to punish Russia for its’ opposition to NATO expansionism.
The Canadian government has also sought to build their own memorials honoring far-right anticommunists. In 2010, the Canadian government planned for a memorial for “Victims of Communism”. Planning for this monument was the result of lobbying by a group called “Tribute to Liberty”.
The concept behind this memorial is rooted in the trumped-up statistics presented by the Black Book of Communism. The Black Book of Communism alleges that 100 million perished under Communist regimes. It counts Nazis, along with anti-Semitic tsarists and White Army officers killed in battle with Communists among the death toll. This whitewashing of Fascists as “innocent” victims of Communism whitewashes the horrific crimes of Fascism and implies Communists were worse for fighting reactionary anti-Communists. Contributors to the Black Book themselves admit that Stephane Courtois fabricated the numbers to arrive at the death toll of 100 million. Already, fascist apologists in Canada have been drawn to a potential monument that could whitewash the crimes of Fascism and demonize Communism. In July 23, 2021, it was reported that donors to the memorial have donated bricks dedicated to Croatian, Hungarian, and Ukrainian fascists.
Oppose further glorification of Fascists
The “Freedom for Hungary Monument” in Budapest Park is yet another memorial built on Canadian soil commemorating fascist counter-revolutionaries under the banner of anti-communism. It is not the first memorial of its kind, memorials in Canada have already been built for Ukrainian Nazi collaborators, and plans are in place for a memorial to the “Victims of Communism” based on the false statistics of the Black book of Communism. All of these memorials whitewash Fascism and its atrocities by presenting its adherents as giving their lives to stop the supposedly more “dangerous” ideology of Communism.
Canada and NATO’s support for the Nazi-infested regime in Ukraine can potentially escalate the conflict into nuclear war. At this time, it’s especially important for Canadians to oppose the attempt of Canadian fascist-sympathizers and apologists to whitewash history, under the banner of demonizing Communism.
Editor’s note: The Canada Files has spent nearly three years doing critical investigative reporting on Canada’s imperialist foreign policy. We’ve established a clear track record of exposing the truth Canada’s political establishment hides from you. Currently we are at $673 CAD per month in support. There’s so much more we can do, but only with your financial support.
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Daniel Xie is a firm anti-imperialist, who writes about the need for an anti-imperialist and independent Canadian foreign policy. He serves as the Associate Editor of The Canada Files.
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