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Category: Europe

  • The West’s blueprint for goading China was laid out in Ukraine

    The West is writing a script about its relations with China as stuffed full of misdirection as an Agatha Christie novel.

    In recent months, US and European officials have scurried to Beijing for so-called talks, as if the year were 1972 and Richard Nixon were in the White House.

    But there will be no dramatic, era-defining US-China pact this time. If relations are to change, it will be decisively for the worse.

    The West’s two-faced policy towards China was starkly illustrated last week by the visit to Beijing of Britain’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly – the first by a senior UK official for five years.

    While Cleverly talked vaguely afterwards about the importance of not “disengaging” from China and avoiding “mistrust and errors”, the British parliament did its best to undermine his message.

    The foreign affairs committee issued a report on UK policy in the Indo-Pacific that provocatively described the Chinese leadership as “a threat to the UK and its interests”.

    In terminology that broke with past diplomacy, the committee referred to Taiwan – a breakaway island that Beijing insists must one day be “reunified” with China – as an “independent country”. Only 13 states recognise Taiwan’s independence.

    The committee urged the British government to pressure its Nato allies into imposing sanctions on China.

    Upping the stakes

    The UK parliament is meddling recklessly in a far-off zone of confrontation with the potential for incendiary escalation against a nuclear power, a situation unrivalled outside of Ukraine.

    But Britain is far from alone. Last year, for the first time, Nato moved well out of its supposed sphere of influence – the North Atlantic – to declare Beijing a challenge to its “interests, security and values”.

    There can be little doubt that Washington is the moving force behind this escalation against China, a state posing no obvious military threat to the West.

    It has upped the stakes significantly by making its military presence felt ever more firmly in and around the Straits of Taiwan – the 100-mile wide waterway separating China from Taiwan that Beijing views as its doorstep.

    Senior US officials have been making noisy visits to Taiwan – not least, Nancy Pelosi last summer, when she was house speaker. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is showering Taiwan with weapons systems.

    If this weren’t enough to inflame China, Washington is drawing Beijing’s neighbours deeper into military alliances – such as Aukus and the Quad – to isolate China and leave it feeling threatened. The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, describes this as a policy of “comprehensive containment, encirclement and suppression against us”.

    Last month, President Biden hosted Japan and South Korea at Camp David, forging a trilateral security arrangement directed at what they called China’s “dangerous and aggressive behavior”.

    Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s “Pacific Defence Initiative” budget – chiefly intended to contain and encircle China – just keeps rising.

    In the latest move, revealed last week, the US is in talks with Manila to build a naval port in the northernmost Philippine islands, 125 miles from Taiwan, boosting “American access to strategically located islands facing Taiwan”.

    That will become the ninth Philippine base used by the US military, part of a network of some 450 operating in the South Pacific.

    Dirty double game

    So what’s going on? Is Britain – along with its Nato allies – interested in building greater trust with Beijing, as Cleverly argues, or backing Washington’s escalatory manoeuvres against a nuclear-armed China over a small territory on the other side of the globe, as the British parliament indicates?

    Inadvertently, the foreign affairs committee’s chair, Alicia Kearns, got to the heart of the matter. She accused the British government of having a “confidential, elusive China strategy”, one “buried deep in Whitehall, kept hidden even from senior ministers”.

    And not by accident.

    European leaders are torn. They fear losing access to Chinese goods and markets, plunging their economies deeper into recession after a cost-of-living crisis precipitated by the Ukraine war. But most are even more afraid of angering Washington, which is determined to isolate and contain China.

    That divide was highlighted by French President Emmanuel Macron following a visit to China in April, when he urged “strategic autonomy” for Europe towards Beijing.

    “Is it in our interest to accelerate [a crisis] on Taiwan? No. The worse thing would be to think that we Europeans must become followers on this topic and take our cue from the US agenda and a Chinese overreaction,” he said.

    Macron soon found himself roundly rebuked in Washington and European capitals.

    Instead, a dirty double game is being played. The West makes conciliatory noises towards Beijing, while its actions turn ever more belligerent.

    Cleverly himself alluded to this deceit, observing of relations with China: “If there is ever a situation where our security concerns are at odds with our economic concerns, our security concerns win out.”

    After Ukraine, we are told, Taiwan must be the locus of the West’s all-consuming security interest.

    Cleverly’s meaning is barely veiled: Europe’s clear economic interests in maintaining good relations with Beijing must be suborned to Washington’s more malevolent agenda, masquerading as Nato security interests.

    Forget Macron’s “autonomy”.

    Notably, this game of misdirection draws on the same blueprint that shaped the long build-up to the Ukraine war.

    Moscow cornered

    Western politicians and media repeat the preposterous claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” only because they created a cover story beforehand, as they now do with China.

    I have set out in detail before how these provocations unfolded. Bit by bit, US administrations eroded Ukrainian neutrality and incorporated Russia’s large neighbour into the Nato fold. The intention was to covertly turn it into a forward base, capable of positioning nuclear-tipped missiles minutes from Moscow.

    Washington ignored warnings from its most senior officials and Russia experts that cornering Moscow would eventually provoke it into a pre-emptive strike against Ukraine. Why? Because, it seems, that was the goal all along.

    The invasion provided the pretext for the US to impose sanctions and wage its current proxy war, using Ukrainians as foot soldiers, to neutralise Russia militarily and economically – or “weaken” it, as the US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin explicitly terms Washington’s key aim in the Ukraine war.

    Moscow is seen as an obstacle, alongside China, to the US maintaining “full-spectrum global dominance” – a doctrine that came to the fore after the Soviet Union’s collapse three decades ago.

    Using Nato as sidekick, Washington is determined to keep the world unipolar at all costs. It is desperate to preserve its global, imperial military and economic might, even as its star wanes. In such circumstances, Europe’s options for Macron-style autonomy are non-existent.

    Peace talks charade

    The public’s continuing ignorance of Nato’s countless provocations against Russia is hardly surprising. Reference to them is all but taboo in Western media.

    Instead, the West’s belligerent manoeuvrings – as with those now against China – are overshadowed by a script that trumpets its faux-diplomacy, supposedly rebuffed by “madman” Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    This disingenuous narrative was typified by western double-dealing over accords signed in 2014 and 2015 in the Belarussian capital Minsk – after negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv to stop a bloody civil war in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donbass.

    There, Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and separatist Ukrainians of Russian origin began facing off in 2014, immediately after yet more covert meddling. Washington assisted in the overthrow of an elected Ukrainian government sympathetic to Moscow. In response, ethnic Russians demanded greater autonomy from Kyiv.

    The official story is that, far from inflaming conflict, the West sought to foster peace, with Germany and France brokering the Minsk accords.

    One can argue about why those agreements failed. But following Russia’s invasion, a disturbing new light was shed on their context by Angela Merkel, German chancellor at the time.

    She told Die Ziet newspaper last December that the 2014 Minsk agreement was less about achieving peace than “an attempt to give Ukraine time. It also used this time to get stronger, as you can see today… In early 2015, Putin could easily have overrun them [areas in Donbas] at the time. And I very much doubt that the Nato countries could have done as much then as they do now to help Ukraine.”

    If Russia could have overrun Ukraine at any time from 2014 onwards, why did it wait eight years, while its neighbour grew much stronger, assisted by the West?

    Assuming Merkel is being honest, Germany, it seems, never really believed the peace process it oversaw stood a chance. That suggests one of two possibilities.

    Either the initiative was a charade, brokered to buy more time for Ukraine to be integrated into Nato, a path that was bound to lead to Russia’s invasion – as Merkel herself acknowledges. Indeed, she accepts that Ukraine’s accession process into Nato launched in 2008 was “wrong”.

    Or Merkel knew that the US would work with Kyiv’s new pro-Washington government to disrupt the process. Europe could do little more than delay an inevitable war for as long as possible.

    Neither alternative fits the “unprovoked” narrative. Both suggest Merkel understood Moscow’s patience would eventually run out.

    The theatre of the Minsk accords was directed at Moscow, which delayed invading on the assumption the talks were in good faith, but also at western publics. When Russia did finally invade, they could be easily persuaded Putin never planned to embrace western “peace” overtures.

    Economic chokehold

    As with Ukraine, the cover story concealing the West’s provocations towards China has been carefully directed from Washington.

    Europeans like Cleverly are parading around Beijing to make it look like the West desires peaceful engagement. But the only real engagement is the crafting of a military noose around China’s neck, just as a noose was crafted earlier for Russia.

    The security rationale this time – of protecting far-off Taiwan – obscures Washington’s less palatable aim: to enforce US global dominance by smashing any economic or technological threat from China and Russia.

    Washington can’t remain military top dog if it doesn’t also maintain a chokehold on the global economy to fund its inflated Pentagon budget, equivalent to the combined spending of the next 10 nations.

    The dangers to Washington are only underscored by the rapid expansion of Brics, a bloc of emerging economic powers headed by China and Russia. Six new members will join the current five in January, with many more waiting in the wings.

    An expanded Brics offers new security and economic axes on which these emerging powers can organise, profoundly weakening US influence.

    The new entrants are Argentina, Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. China already brokered an unexpected reconciliation between historic foes Iran and Saudia Arabia in March, in preparation for their accession.

    Brics+ will only strengthen their mutual interests.

    That will be no comfort in Washington. The US has long favoured keeping the two at loggerheads, in a divide-and-rule policy that rationalised its continuous meddling to control the oil-rich Middle East and favoured Washington’s key regional military ally, Israel.

    But Brics+ won’t just end the US role in dictating global security arrangements. It will gradually loosen Washington’s stranglehold on the global economy, ending the dollar’s dominance as the world reserve currency.

    Brics+ now controls a majority of the world’s energy supplies, and some 37 percent of global GDP, more than the US-led G7. Opportunities to trade in currencies other than the dollar become much easier.

    As Paul Craig Roberts, a former official in Ronald Reagan’s treasury, observed: “Declining use of the dollar means a declining supply of customers for US debt, which means pressure on the dollar’s exchange value and the prospect of rising inflation from rising prices of imports.”

    In short, a weak dollar is going to make bullying the rest of the world a considerably more difficult prospect.

    The US isn’t likely to go down without a fight. Which is why Ukrainians and Russians are currently dying on the battlefield. And why China and the rest of us have good reason to fear who may be next.

    • First published at Middle East Eye

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Germany says it ended training of Saudi border forces after abuses reported

    Statement comes amid concern about allegations Saudi forces have killed hundreds of migrants

    Germany ended a training programme for Saudi border forces, who have been implicated in the mass killing of migrants at the country’s border with Yemen, after it was alerted to reports of “possible massive human rights violations”, the German interior ministry has said.

    In a statement to the Guardian, the ministry said training undertaken by the federal police service for the Saudi border force had been “discontinued after reports of possible massive human rights violations became known and, as a precaution, are no longer included in the current training programme [for Saudi security forces]”.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Human Rights Defenders in Europe fear George Soros retreat

    Philip Oltermann on 19 August 2023 reports that ΗRDs fear the billionaire’s legacy will be lost as his Open Society Foundations curbs its activities across the EU

    Soros survived the Nazi occupation of his native Hungary, made a fortune on Wall Street and became one of the most steadfast backers of democracy and human rights in the eastern bloc. But human rights activists and independent media fear the legacy of billionaire philanthropist George Soros, 93, could be about to be undone in his homelands, as his donor network announced it will curb its activities across the EU from 2024.

    Several beneficiaries of Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF), chaired since the start of this year by his son Alex, told the Observer they would struggle without its support amid an authoritarian rollback.

    “When the Open Society Foundations left Budapest under severe political pressure in 2018, they said they would lose their physical presence but not their focus on the region,” said Márta Pardavi, co-chair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a Budapest human rights NGO supported by the foundations. But she added: “Has there really been such a positive shift in Europe over the last five years that that promise has become less relevant?”

    In a July email to staff, the OSF management announced a “radical redesign to help us deliver more effectively on our mission”. “Ultimately, the new approved strategic direction provides for withdrawal and termination of large parts of our current work within the European Union, shifting our focus and allocation of resources to other parts of the world,” it said.

    While 40% of the charity’s global staff will be laid off, cuts will be severest in Europe, with the 180 headcount at its Berlin headquarters cut by 80%. Staff remaining in the German capital will mainly administer the foundation’s funds in Switzerland.

    Its Brussels offices will be downsized, while a branch in Barcelona will be closed by the end of the year. Of an erstwhile seven branches in the post-Soviet area only three remain in Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine and Moldova.

    Many European NGOs, think tanks and research groups working on issues ranging from media freedom and migrants’ rights to state surveillance and digital regulation rely on the foundations, which spent $1.5bn on philanthropic causes in 2021.

    As traditional European media outlets have struggled to live up to their role amid a drop in advertising revenue, OSF has stepped in to support independent news projects including the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Forbidden Stories, an encrypted online platform that allows threatened journalists to securely upload their work and be continued by others.

    Alex Soros, who grew up and was educated in the US, said: “The Open Society Foundations is changing the way we work, but my family and OSF have long supported, and remain steadfastly committed to the European project.”

    The foundations say they will continue support for European Roma communities. Even critical employees expressed confidence the foundations could commit more to longer-term projects, just fewer of them.

    Yet while a profound change to the structure of the organisation has long been signalled by Soros senior, the decision to achieve this via drastically reducing its headcount seems to have only emerged has been a priority under its new board of directors. Once jokingly referred to by employees as Soros’s “reading group”, the board has been slimmed down to a tighter unit dominated by family members since the baton was passed to Soros junior.

    “The OSF is one of the few bodies that hand out unrestricted core funding,” said one grantee, who asked to remain anonymous amid uncertainty over the foundation’s future strategy. “It’s what keeps the light on for human rights defenders in Europe.”

    Berlin has been the hub of the foundations’ European operations after the 2018 closure of the Budapest branch under pressure from the government of strongman Viktor Orbán, once a recipient of Soros’s support.

    Last week the Hungarian prime minister’s political director Balázs Orbán (no relation) posted a message on social network X, formerly known as Twitter, in which he called the Open Society Foundation “the Soros empire”. “We only truly believe that the occupying troops are leaving the continent when the last Soros soldier has left Europe and Hungary,” he said.

    “If you invest in democracy, you can never expect it to yield quick returns,” Márta Pardavi said. “The need for democracy-building never really goes away. And I think George Soros knew that.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/19/george-soross-retreat-from-europe-could-turn-off-the-lights-for-human-rights

  • Suella Braverman restates wish for UK to leave European court of human rights

    Home secretary calls the court ‘politicised’ and refuses to rule out mass tagging of asylum seekers

    Suella Braverman has reiterated her wish to leave what she called the “politicised” European court of human rights (ECHR) and refused to rule out the mass tagging of asylum seekers, a move one refugee charity said would treat people as “mere objects”.

    Marking a return to the political fray after a summer recess in which a series of Home Office policy hiccups prompted speculation she could be replaced as home secretary, Braverman said the government would “do whatever it takes” to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘Orphaned by decree’: Italy’s same-sex parents react to losing their rights

    Rightwing PM Giorgia Meloni has demanded councils register only biological parents on birth certificates, leaving partners in legal limbo

    Whether it is school runs or doctors’ visits, Maria Silvia Fiengo and Francesca Pardi have always shared in the raising of their four children. But in recent months – after Italy’s rightwing government began cracking down on the listing of same-sex parents on birth certificates – the life they have forged together has been thrust into uncertainty.

    “We’re a bit worried. You never know what is going to happen,” said Fiengo. “Our children have had two parents from the very first moment they were dreamed of and brought into the world. But we’re not protected by any law.”

    Continue reading…

  • On the Use and Misuse of the Term “Jewish supremacist”

    Should a person who defends and promotes a state that actively endorses Jewish supremacy be called a Jewish supremacist?

    In the recent Globe and Mail commentary “Canada must rethink its friendship with Israel” establishment commentator Thomas Juneau noted that the current hard-right Israeli government “includes Jewish supremacists”. In response Norman Levine tweeted, “the term ‘Jewish supremacists’ borders on antisemitism. I’m shocked the editors at Globe and Mail allowed an article including that term to be published.”

    While Levine’s objection is nonsense, Juneau’s use of the qualifier “includes” is absurd. Is anyone in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government not an aggressive Jewish supremacist?

    Years before forming his current extremist government, Netanyahu declared that Israel was “not a state of all its citizens”. Referencing a 2018 law he wrote, “according to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and only it.” In recent days the Knesset adopted legislation that in certain circumstances gives Jewish Israelis milder punishment for rape and sexual assault than Palestinian citizens of Israel. They also passed a law – by a large margin – effectively allowing communities to exclude non-Jews.

    According to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, more than 65 Israeli laws discriminate against non-Jews. Additionally, the World Zionist Organization, Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund, which has quasi state status, are constitutionally committed to serving and promoting the interests of Jews and only Jews. In 2021 leading Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem published “A regime of Jewish supremacy between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea: this is apartheid.”

    This Jewish supremacy isn’t new. Zionist ethnic cleansing in 1947–48 targeted Christian and Muslim Palestinians in a successful bid to remake the territory’s demographics into being  majority Jewish. Through the 1950 Law of Return, my longtime friend in Vancouver, Michael Rosen — who hasn’t been to Israel, has no familial connection to the country and has never even been religious — can emigrate to Israel. On the other hand, Noor Tibi, a woman I met at Concordia University in Montreal whose grandfather fled Zionist ethnic cleansing from Haifa in 1948, could not enter (let alone live in) Israel until she got a Canadian passport. Justified as an affirmative action measure to protect besieged Jewry, the Law of Return becomes patently racist when Israel refuses to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland.

    Despite Israel/Zionism having always been based on Jewish supremacy, many deny it. Over the years I’ve heard leftists argue that Israel’s dominant characteristic is something more kin to white supremacy than Jewish supremacy.

    A branch of the European colonial movement, history suggests that Zionism was in large part an attempt by European Jews to benefit from and participate in colonialism. The Theodore Herzl led Zionist movement was spurred by the nationalist and imperialist ideologies then sweeping Europe. After two centuries of active Protestant Zionism and two millennia in which Jewish restoration was viewed as a spiritual event to be brought about through divine intervention, Zionism took root among some Jews as the European “scramble” carved up Africa and then the Middle East. (Europeans controlled about 10 percent of Africa in 1870 but by 1914 only Ethiopia was independent of European control. Liberia was effectively a US colony). At the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903 Herzl and two thirds of delegates voted to pursue British Secretary of State for the Colonies Joseph Chamberlain’s proposal to allocate 13,000 square km in East Africa as “Jewish territory … on conditions which will enable members to observe their national customs.”

    The European colonial nature of Zionism is important, but its Jewish character is central.

    Answering my opening question isn’t complicated. If you defended and promoted apartheid South Africa you were a white supremacist. If you defend and promote apartheid Israel you are a Jewish supremacist.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Muharram processions, Majlis being held across the world including the US with religious reverence

    New York: Mournful processions and Majalis of Muharram-ul-Haram are being held across the world including the United States,with Muslim devotees paying homage to Imam Hussain (AS) and his loyal companions who rendered their lives in the soil of Karbala for the noble cause of humanity, justice and restoration of the glory of Islam.

    The Muharram-ul-Haram gatherings and mourning processions are also being held with devotion and respect in Africa, Middle East, Iran, South Asia including Pakistan and India.

    The main Muharram procession in Dallas and Houston will be held downtown on the 10th of Muharram, July 28, while the series of congregations will continue in various imambargahs and private residences.

    A large number of Muslim devotees of Imam Hussain (AS), the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad PBUH, (the last messenger of Allah Almighty) participated in the Muharram gatherings at Houston’s Al-Ghadeer Imambargah, Dalles’ Imambargah Momin Center and Dar-e-Hussain.

    While series of Majalis also being organized wherein Zakirs and religious scholars are describing the incident of Karbala.

    Azadar echoed like Labbaik Ya Hussain everywhere, participating in these gatherings organized in memory of the great sacrifice of the grandson of Prophet Muhammad.

    Mourning events are ongoing in many other cities of Texas, the largest state of America, including Houston and Dallas.

    Men, women and children are actively participating in these meetings.

    The post Muharram processions, Majlis being held across the world including the US with religious reverence first appeared on VOSA.

    This post was originally published on VOSA.

  • Melissa Crow on Asylum Restrictions, Dave Zirin on NYT’s Vanishing Sports Section

     

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    Razor wire deployed by Texas in the Rio Grande to injure migrants

    Houston Chronicle (7/11/23)

    This week on CounterSpin: Listeners may have heard that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott installed barrels wrapped in razor wire in some parts of the Rio Grande to block migrants from crossing and harm those that try. As revealed by the Houston Chronicle, Texas troopers have been ordered to push people back into the river, and to deny them water. The cruelty is obvious; the Department of Justice is talking about suing.

    But there are other ways for immigration policy to be inhumane. Advocates have long declared that Biden’s asylum restrictions (which look a lot like Trump’s asylum restrictions) are not just harmful but unlawful. And a federal judge has just agreed. We learn about that from a participant in the case, Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies.

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    NYT: Why The Athletic Wants to Pillage Newspapers

    New York Times (10/23/17)

    Also on the show: In October 2017, the New York Times ran a story headlined “Why the Athletic Wants to Pillage Newspapers,” that began, “By the time you finish reading this article, the upstart sports news outlet called the Athletic probably will have hired another well-known sportswriter from your local newspaper.” In January 2022, the Times bought the Athletic for $550 million, saying that “as a stand-alone product…the Athletic is a great complement to the Times.”

    It’s now July 2023, and the New York Times has announced it’s shutting down its sports desk, outsourcing that reporting to…the Athletic. Dave Zirin joins us to talk about that; he’s sports editor at The Nation, host of the Edge of Sports podcast, and author of many books, including A People’s History of Sports in the United States.

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    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at some recent press coverage of Europe’s economy.

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    The post Melissa Crow on Asylum Restrictions, Dave Zirin on NYT’s Vanishing Sports Section appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Twisting Statistics to Fake the Collapse of Europe

     

    Unjustified doomsaying is one of corporate media’s favorite pastimes. And they often practice this hobby in their economic coverage of Europe. Corporate outlets commonly warn of crumbling European economies, contrasting the supposed misery of social welfare states with the United States.

    Fox: Liberals love to fawn over Europe, even when it's collapsing

    “Europe in many ways is collapsing,” claimed Fox‘s Laura Ingraham (7/21/22). “Life for normal, working people there is increasingly miserable.”

    Around this time last year, Fox News‘s Laura Ingraham (7/21/22) claimed that “Europe in many ways is collapsing.” The continent, alleged Ingraham, is “a total basket case” with life for “normal working people” becoming “increasingly miserable.” From this premise, she launched into a triumphalist monologue:

    Even with all of our problems [in the United States], our economy is still stronger… still more resilient than Europe’s. Now, in 2021, our GDP was about $23 trillion or so. The GDP for the entire EU, which has…27 member states, was just over $17 trillion.

    The Financial Times (6/19/23) used the same statistics to reach a parallel conclusion regarding American supremacy. “Europe has fallen behind,” asserted chief foreign affairs commentator Gideon Rachman, and “cannot compete with” the United States. The proof? Gross domestic product.

    In 2008, the EU and the US economies were roughly the same size. But since the global financial crisis, their economic fortunes have dramatically diverged.

    Rachman then approvingly quoted Jeremy Shapiro and Jana Puglierin of the European Council on Foreign Relations, who said:

    In 2008 the EU’s economy was somewhat larger than America’s: $16.2 trillion versus $14.7 trillion. By 2022, the US economy had grown to $25 trillion, whereas the EU and the UK together had only reached $19.8tn. America’s economy is now nearly one-third bigger. It is more than 50 per cent larger than the EU without the UK.

    Using the wrong yardstick

    Financial Times: Europe has fallen behind America and the gap is growing

    The Financial Times (6/19/23) bills itself as “the worldʼs leading global business publication,” but it hopes that its readers don’t know what exchange rates are.

    But these statistics are misleading. Both Fox and the Financial Times strategically use nominal GDP figures, which are based on how much it would cost to buy all of a nation’s outputs on the world market. This is a measure that makes Europe look good in 2008, when it took a record-high $1.47 to buy one euro, and makes the US look much better in 2022, when you only needed $1.05 to buy a euro.

    To compare living standards, however, you need to use what’s called Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) GDP. This adjusts for the fact that exchange rates are not always a true measure of a currency’s domestic purchasing power; it’s PPP that tells you how much a given nation can purchase in total goods and services, which is what determines its standard of living.

    According to World Bank data adjusted for purchasing power, the US and EU have roughly equivalent GDPs: $25.5 trillion vs. $24.3 trillion. Include Britain as well, and Europe’s economy is nearly $2.5 trillion larger than the US’s.

    This adjustment also reverses the supposedly diverging trends cited by the Financial Times. Standardizing price levels reveals that the European Union actually grew faster than the United States from 2008 to 2022. In terms of how much Europeans can actually buy, its GDP expanded by nearly 14% over the period, whereas the United States only grew 12.5%.

    No, they’re not worse off

    WSJ: Europeans Are Becoming Poorer. ‘Yes, We’re All Worse Off.’

    The Wall Street Journal headline (7/17/23) gets it completely backwards: In terms of actual purchasing power, European economies are growing faster than the US.

    That didn’t stop the Wall Street Journal (7/17/23) from slamming Europe’s ostensibly sluggish growth rates. Under the headline, “Europeans Are Becoming Poorer. ‘Yes, We’re All Worse Off,’” reporter Tom Fairless condemned the continent where “an aging population with a preference for free time and job security over earnings ushered in years of lackluster economic and productivity growth”:

    Life on a continent long envied by outsiders for its art de vivre is rapidly losing its shine as Europeans see their purchasing power melt away.

    The French are eating less foie gras and drinking less red wine. Spaniards are stinting on olive oil. Finns are being urged to use saunas on windy days when energy is less expensive.

    But to back up these claims about the supposedly worsening living standards of Europeans, the Journal uses wages measured in dollars—looking, once again, from the cherry-picked year of 2008 to 2022. If Europeans traded in the euros they earned for dollars, they would have done very well in 2008, and much worse in 2022—but this is completely irrelevant to how many domestic products (like red wine and olive oil) Europeans can buy. To gauge that, you need to use PPP, and that measure shows that European purchasing power is definitely not “melt[ing] away.”

    Beyond buying 

    US News: Best Countries to Live in the World

    According to US News, the US has a similar quality of life to European countries with roughly half the per capita GDP.

    Of course, GDP itself is only a rough proxy for standard of living. It merely sums the market value of final goods and services produced within a country in a given year. This means an ambulance ride, which can cost thousands in the United States, would boost GDP by that amount. But, of course, overcharging for essential medical services makes the average person’s life worse—not better.

    To attempt a broader comparison of well-being across countries, the United Nations created the Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index—a measure that combines income, education and life expectancy, and accounts for how these are distributed among the population. Every nation in the top 10 is European. The United States doesn’t appear until No. 25—tied with Cyprus. It comes in below even Malta and Estonia, which are hardly Europe’s richest locales.

    US News & World Report’s annual Quality of Life ranking tells a similar story. Using a composite of access to essentials, civic freedom and more, the company lists which “countries treat their citizens” best. European countries occupy seven of the top eight spots, with Canada the only exception. Of the top 20, a whopping 16 are in Europe. The United States lands at No. 21—sandwiched between Portugal and Poland.

    ‘Green policies killing Europe’

    Yet corporate media outlets readily ignore these facts and run with the narrative that Europe is dying. The ultimate target of this campaign is not the continent itself. Rather, the attacks on Europe are really about discrediting social democracy and progressivism more broadly.

    We can see this by noting what these hit pieces blame for Europe’s supposed economic death. Fox, for example, took particular aim at environmentalism. “Green policies,” it says, “are killing Europe.” The Journal claimed “popular healthcare services and pensions” are unfit “for fixing the problem” of European decline. The Journal further suggested that high tax rates are intolerably squeezing increasingly poor European consumers—a veiled call for austerity.

    Let none of this skewed coverage convince you that progressive social policy is a failed experiment. The reports of Europe’s death are greatly exaggerated. By relevant metrics, it remains a better place to live than the United States.

     

    The post Twisting Statistics to Fake the Collapse of Europe appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • If Everybody’s Going to Join NATO, Then Why Have the United Nations?

    Bassim Al Shaker (Iraq), Symphony of Death 1, 2019

    The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) held its annual summit on 11–12 July in Vilnius, Lithuania. The communiqué released after the first day’s proceedings claimed that ‘NATO is a defensive alliance’, a statement that encapsulates why many struggle to grasp its true essence. A look at the latest military spending figures shows, to the contrary, that NATO countries, and countries closely allied to NATO, account for nearly three-quarters of the total annual global expenditure on weapons. Many of these countries possess state-of-the-art weapons systems, which are qualitatively more destructive than those held by the militaries of most non-NATO countries. Over the past quarter century, NATO has used its military might to destroy several states, such as Afghanistan (2001) and Libya (2011), shattering societies with the raw muscle of its aggressive alliance, and end the status of Yugoslavia (1999) as a unified state. It is difficult, given this record, to sustain the view that NATO is a ‘defensive alliance’.

    Currently, NATO has thirty-one member states, the most recent addition being Finland, which joined in April 2023. Its membership has more than doubled since its twelve founding members, all countries in Europe and North America that had been part of the war against the Axis powers, signed its founding treaty (the Washington Treaty or the North Atlantic Treaty) on 4 April 1949. It is telling that one of these original members – Portugal – remained under a fascist dictatorship at the time, known as Estado Novo (in place from 1933 until 1974).

    Article 10 of this treaty declares that NATO members – ‘by unanimous agreement’ – can ‘invite any other European state’ to join the military alliance. Based on that principle, NATO welcomed Greece and Turkey (1952), West Germany (1955), and Spain (1982), expanding its membership at the time to include sixteen countries. The disintegration of the USSR and communist states in Eastern Europe – the purported threat that compelled the need for NATO to begin with – did not put an end to the need for the alliance. Instead, NATO’s increasing membership has doubled down on its ambition to use its military power, through Article 5, to subdue anyone who challenges the ‘Atlantic Alliance’.

    Nino Morbedadze (Georgia), Strolling Couple, 2017.

    The ‘Atlantic Alliance’, a phrase that is part of NATO’s name, was part of a wider network of military treaties secured by the US against the USSR and, after October 1949, against the People’s Republic of China. This network included the Manila Pact of September 1954, which created the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO), and the Baghdad Pact of February 1955, which created the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO). Turkey and Pakistan signed a military agreement in April 1954 which brought them together in an alliance against the USSR and anchored this network through NATO’s southernmost member (Turkey) and SEATO’s westernmost member (Pakistan). The US signed a military deal with each of the members of CENTO and SEATO and ensured that it had a seat at the table in these structures.

    At the Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia in April 1955, India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru reacted strongly to the creation of these military alliances, which exported tensions between the US and the USSR across Asia. The concept of NATO, he said, ‘has extended itself in two ways’: first, NATO ‘has gone far away from the Atlantic and has reached other oceans and seas’ and second, ‘NATO today is one of the most powerful protectors of colonialism’. As an example, Nehru pointed to Goa, which was still held by fascist Portugal and whose grip had been validated by NATO members – an act, Nehru said, of ‘gross impertinence’. This characterisation of NATO as a global belligerent and defender of colonialism remains intact, with some modifications.

    Slobodan Trajković (Yugoslavia), The Flag, 1983.

    SEATO was disbanded in 1977, partly due to the defeat of the US in Vietnam, and CENTO was shuttered in 1979, precisely due to the Iranian Revolution that year. US military strategy shifted its focus from wielding these kinds of pacts to establishing a direct military presence with the founding of US Central Command in 1983 and the revitalisation of the US Pacific Command that same year. The US expanded the power of its own global military footprint, including its ability to strike anywhere on the planet due to its structure of military bases and armed flotillas (which were no longer restricted once the 1930 Second London Naval Treaty expired in 1939). Although NATO has always had global ambitions, the alliance was given material reality through the US military’s force projection and its creation of new structures that further tied allied states into its orbit (with programmes such as ‘Partnership for Peace’, set up in 1994, and concepts such as ‘global NATO partner’ and ‘non-NATO ally’, as exemplified by Japan and South Korea). In its 1991 Strategic Concept, NATO wrote that it would ‘contribute to global stability and peace by providing forces for United Nations missions’, which was realised with deadly force in Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2003), and Libya (2011).

    By the Riga Summit (2006), NATO was confident that it operated ‘from Afghanistan to the Balkans and from the Mediterranean Sea to Darfur’. Nehru’s focus on colonialism might seem anachronistic now, but, in fact, NATO has become an instrument to blunt the global majority’s desire for sovereignty and dignity, two key anti-colonial concepts. Any popular project that exerts these two concepts finds itself at the end of a NATO weapons system.

    Shefa Salem al-Baraesi (Libya), Kaska, Dance of War, 2020.

    The collapse of the USSR and the Eastern European communist state system transformed Europe’s reality. NATO quickly ignored the ‘ironclad guarantees’ offered by US Secretary of State James Baker to Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in Moscow on 9 February 1990 that NATO’s ‘forces would not move eastward’ of the German border. Several states that bordered the NATO zone suffered greatly in the immediate period after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with economies in the doldrums as privatisation eclipsed the possibility for their populations to live with dignity. Many states in Eastern Europe, desperate to enter the European Union (EU), which at least promised access to the common market, understood that entry into NATO was the price of admission. In 1999, Czechia, Hungary, and Poland joined NATO, followed in 2004 by the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, and Slovakia. Eager for investments and markets, by 2004 many of these countries waltzed into the Atlantic Alliance of NATO and the EU.

    NATO continued to expand, absorbing Albania and Croatia in 2009, Montenegro in 2017, and North Macedonia in 2020. However, the breakdown of some US banks, the waning attraction of the US as the market of last resort, and the entry of the Atlantic world into a relentless economic depression after 2007 changed the context. No longer were Atlantic states reliable as investors or as markets. After 2008, infrastructure investment in the EU declined by 75% due to reduced public spending, and the European Investment Bank warned that government investment would hit a twenty-five-year low.

    ArtLords (including Kabir Mokamel, Abdul Hakim Maqsodi, Meher Agha Sultani, Omaid Sharifi, Yama Farhard, Negina Azimi, Enayat Hikmat, Zahid Amini, Ali Hashimi, Mohammad Razeq Meherpour, Abdul Razaq Hashemi, and Nadima Rustam), The Unseen Afghanistan, 2021.

    The arrival of Chinese investment and the possibility of integration with the Chinese economy began to reorient many economies, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, away from the Atlantic. In 2012, the first summit between China and central and eastern European countries (China–CEEC summit) was held in Warsaw (Poland), with sixteen countries in the region participating. The process eventually drew in fifteen NATO members, including Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (in 2021 and 2022, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania withdrew from the initiative). In March 2015, six then-EU member states – France, Germany, Italy, Luxemburg, Sweden, and the UK – joined the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Four years later, Italy became the first G7 country to join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Two-thirds of EU member states are now part of the BRI, and the EU concluded the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment in 2020.

    These manoeuvres towards China threatened to weaken the Atlantic Alliance, with the US describing the country as a ‘strategic competitor’ in its 2018 National Defense Strategy – a phrase indicative of its shifting focus on the so-called threat of China. Nonetheless, as recently as November 2019, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that ‘there [are] no plans, no proposal, no intention to move NATO into, for instance, the South China Sea’. However, by 2020, the mood had changed: a mere seven months later, Stoltenberg said, ‘NATO does not see China as the new enemy or an adversary. But what we see is that the rise of China is fundamentally changing the global balance of power’. NATO’s response has been to work with its partners – including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea – ‘to address… the security consequences of the rise of China’, Stoltenberg continued. The talk of a global NATO and an Asian NATO is front and centre in these deliberations, with Stoltenberg stating in Vilnius that the idea of a liaison office in Japan is ‘on the table’.

    The war in Ukraine provided new life to the Atlantic Alliance, driving several hesitant European countries – such as Sweden – into its ranks. Yet, even amongst people living within NATO countries there are groups who are sceptical of the alliance’s aims, with the Vilnius summit marked by anti-NATO protests. The Vilnius Summit Communiqué underlined Ukraine’s path into NATO and sharpened NATO’s self-defined universalism. The communiqué declares, for instance, that China challenges ‘our interests, security, and values’, with the word ‘our’ claiming to represent not only NATO countries but the entire international order. Slowly, NATO is positioning itself as a substitute for the UN, suggesting that it – and not the actual international community – is the arbiter and guardian of the world’s ‘interests, security, and values’. This view is contested by the vast majority of the world’s peoples, seven billion of whom do not even reside in NATO’s member countries (whose total population is less than one billion). Those billions wonder why it is that NATO wants to supplant the United Nations.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Cycles and Spirals of Capitalism

    Orientation

    How long has capitalism existed? Has it always been with us all the way back to tribal societies or is it a product of the modern age? Is there any pattern to its evolution? Is it cyclic,  spiral-like  or random? What is the nature of capitalist crises? Why does capitalism grow flush in certain parts of the world, die out in others and yet seemingly reignite itself in another part of the world? What can world-systems theory tell us about the current battle between the Anglo-American empire and the multipolarists of China, Russia and Iran?

    What is capitalism?

    Capitalism is a historical economic system that arose in Europe in the 15th century.  Over a 600-year period its leading hegemons were first the Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice. In the 17th century these city-states were superseded by the Netherlands. The British overtook the Dutch in the 18th century and the United States crowded out the British well before World War I. Capitalism is characterized by a law-enforced right of private property (as opposed to state or community ownership) in the areas of:

    • raw materials (land)
    • means of production (tools and methods of harnessing energy)
    • labor (who uses the tools and the methods of harnessing energy to work on raw materials)
    • commodities (finished products and services)
    • money which is transformed into capital – stocks, bonds and derivatives
    • power settings in which decisions about the economy are made (political settings). These include The National Association of Manufacturers and The Business Round Table. Internationally the Council of Foreign Relations, the World Economic Forum and the G7 are examples.

    The purpose of capitalism is to make a profit which is unlimited in scope, protected by law, and if necessary, by the military. According to world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein capitalists derive their profits by two processes:

    • broadening its reach, colonizing the periphery counties for its natural resources, inducing it to produce a single cash crop while paying wages far below wages of the workers in the core countries.
    • deepening its reach into core countries through increased commodification of previously uncommodified land and labor, automation, withdrawal of investment in military and finance capital

    Trends in capitalism

    Trends within capitalism over a 600-year period include:

    • a tendency towards a concentration of capital
    • a tendency to expand around the globe through transnational corporations
    • a movement from scattered territories to larger territorial control
    • phases in investing in merchant, agricultural (slavery), industrial, military and finance capital which become cycles
    • these become Kondratieff waves of expansion and contraction which occur every 55 years.
    • the end of a cycle is characterized by bifurcation points, crisis which occur at shorter and shorter intervals
    • crises points fuel increasing anti-systemic opposition
    • capitalist crises which accumulate to produce both the possibility of abundance, shorter work week and an accumulation of crisis of unresolved problems of previous cycles including ecological devastation
    • greater variety of resources

    Where are we headed?

    I begin my article by comparing world-systems theory to modernization theory across seven categories.  Next, I compare the characteristics of the three zones in world-systems theory – core, periphery and semi-periphery. While we can imagine capitalism over a 600-year period as a movie, we also want to take “snapshots” of the world-system on four separate occasions. Probably the most important part of the article is in describing Giovanni Arrighi’s cycles and spirals of capitalism over the last 600 years up to the close of the 20th century. In the last section in the piece I identify all the revolutionary changes that are happening to the 21st century world-system. The battle between the Anglo-American empire and the multipolarists will be framed from a world-systems perspective.

    What is World-systems Theory?

    In the 1950s, political science and international relations was dominated by an anti-communist “modernization theory”. In the 1960s the conservativism of modernization theory was first challenged by something called “dependency theory” led by Andre Gunder Frank and later by the “world-systems theory” of Immanuel Wallerstein. World-system theories were socialist but they were critical of the state socialism of Russia, China and Cuba. They argued that those countries were state capitalist. They strove to apply Marx’s theory of capitalism to the whole world as opposed to just single nation states as many Marx did. They challenged Lenin’s theory of imperialism as the last stage of capitalism as being too linear. In their perspective, imperialism is part of the end of each of the four cycles and was common for the Italians, the Dutch, the English and now the Yankees.

    World-systems theory was criticized by more traditional Marxists like Robert Brenner because he felt they did not emphasize enough the class struggle within nation states. World-systems theory seemed to be more interested in the political economy of the dynamics of three zones (core countries, peripheral countries and the semi-peripheral countries) rather than the class struggle within each zone.  I’ll discuss these zones in detail shortly.

    Modernization Theory vs World-systems theory

    Are nation-states primarily independent or interdependent?

    For modernization theory, nation states are independent and internally driven. The responsibility for their past, present and future direction is strictly determined by their foreign policy. In world-systems theory, nation-states are subordinate to an international system of capitalism and have only relative control over their foreign policy.

    Therefore, modernization theorists would look at poor countries in the world (what world-systems theory might call the periphery) and say their poverty was due to a failure to build modern institutions such as science or capitalism. They are dismissed as irrational tribalists marred by superstition. World-systems theorists would say countries on the world periphery are poor because they have been colonized and exploited by the core countries. Because nation-states are understood to be autonomous, capitalists are thought to be loyal patriotic servants of their nation-states. For world-systems theorists, capitalists are the most unpatriotic class of all. They are committed to making profits anywhere in the world. They will feign patriotism when they need foot soldiers to fight wars against other capitalist countries but otherwise they have no loyalties.

    What is the relationship between politics and economics?

    For modernization theorists’, politics and economics are separate. As you can well see, throughout the 1950s and even after modernization theory was criticized in the 1960s in political science classes, economics was never a serious part of a discussion. It would be like saying political meetings in Congress are strictly determined by the political ideologies of liberalism or conservatism. Money has no part in it. At the same time, the teachers of economics courses act like capitalist economics has no political dimension. This would be like saying the economic decisions of transnational corporations would not be influenced by political turmoil or a revolution in a periphery country in which they had large investments. Speaking internationally, for modernization theory, all wars are about political ideology.

    For world-systems theorists, there is only political economy. All economics is political and all political acts have economic aspects to it. For world-systems theory, wars have mostly to do with battles over natural resources. They also can be political but when a socialist country gains power in a war the trade relations become more unfavorable for capitalists.

    How is social evolution understood?

    Modernization theories imagine social evolution as progress. They say there is something inherently progressive about Western societies that older civilizations such as China and India lack. The wealth produced by capitalist societies is distributed somewhat unevenly because some people work harder than others. All roads in social evolution lead to the West with the pinnacle being Western Europe and the United States. Progress is linear, and modernization theory imagines that tribal societies are just dying to be modernized, blaming themselves for their situation. Modernization theory fails to account for complex societies’ disintegration and going backward (Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies) or Jared Diamond (Why Societies Collapse). Even when socialist societies are industrialized they are not considered modern because state control over the economy and one-party rule lack democracy.

    World-systems theory argue that progress in the history of human society has been uneven. They are willing to admit that the egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherers is admirable. They are well aware that an increase in the productive forces through technology, in fact, leads to more work for the lower classes rather than less. While world-systems theory acknowledges the benefits of science and some of the wealth produced by capitalism, it also points out the exploitation and misery it produces for working-class people as a result of class stratification.

    Rate and type of change

    Generally speaking, modernization theory understands the rate of social change to be gradual, evolutionary and relatively harmonious across social classes. For world-systems theory, like all Marxist theories, political and economic change is sudden, discontinuous, filled with conflict and driven by class struggle. For modernization theory instabilities are temporary and part of “business cycles” which settle back down into equilibrium and homeostasis. For world system theory, capitalist crisis is no static equilibrium model. Capitalism today will turn into a terminal crisis from which it will not recover. Whether it is the tendency of the rate or profit to fall, profit squeeze theory or under-consumption theory, the days of capitalism are numbered.

    While for modernization theory all roads start and end in Western Europe and the United States, for world-systems theorists, modernization may have begun in Europe, but it by no means is it likely to stay there. As we can see today, the world-system is shifting operations to China, the new center of the world-economy.

    Attitudes towards socialism

    As I mentioned before, modernization theorists are anti-communist. The only socialism for modernization theorists is Stalinism. Even when socialist societies industrialize, modernization theorists deny they are a modern system, because they lack bourgeois rights and a two-party system. They see socialist societies as some kind of throwback to Karl Wittfogel’s Orientation Despotism. While world-systems theorists essentially call themselves socialist, they criticize Stalinism as state capitalist, and Cuba and China as bureaucratic states. They look more favorably to Nordic evolutionary socialism, especially Sweden in the 20th century up to around 1980.

    Modernization theory understands capitalism and socialism as two separate systems. It imagines the rebellions of the 1960s as rebellions against socialist regimentation. It has been difficult for them to explain why an entire generation would rebel against the fleshpots of capitalist modernization in Western Europe and the United States. On the other hand, world-systems theorists understand that the existing socialist countries, including the state socialist countries, are part of a broad anti-systemic movement against capitalism which includes the various Leninist parties, social democrats and anarchists.

    For modernization theorists’ socialism has been tried and failed. Case closed. They would support Fukuyama’s claim that after the fall of the Soviet Union, history is over and capitalism has won. “Not so fast” say world-systems theorists. Capitalism is 500 years old and has only achieved economic and political dominance in the 19th century. Socialism is about 170 years old. It is too soon to tell whether socialism is a realistic alternative.

    Place and misplace of foreign aid

    For modernization theorists aid to poor or peripheral countries may be driven by a combination of self-interest at worst, and at best creating win-win situations. Foreign aid is given in the hopes that with the help of the West poor countries will industrialize, shed their backward ways and become competitive partners. For world- systems theorists the relation between core and peripheral countries is not neutral but imperialistic. Rich countries exploit poor countries for their land and labor and turn them into one crop-producing colonies. As Andre Gunder Frank quipped, the core countries underdeveloped the peripheral countries. Furthermore, world capitalist banks like the World Bank or the IMF do not give loans that will enable peripheral countries to build scientific institutions along with engineers. One reason is because scientists and engineers may discover new resources that might undermine the resources of core countries such as oil. This is one reason why fundamentalist religious institutions always seem to grow in peripheral countries because they are of no threat to capitalism. The CIA always finds money for them.

    Theoreticians

    As I’ve said, modernization theorists were most prevalent in the 1950s. They included Walt Rostow and Lucian Pye. Daniel Lerner specialized in telling the story of how tribal societies got on the road to modernization. Samuel Huntington is more contemporary with works like The Clash of Civilizations along with Francis Fukuyama, with his book The End of History.

    Early world-systems theorists were Oliver Cox who looked at race and caste from an international perspective. Immanuel Wallerstein provided a foundation for world-systems theories, drawing on the work of Fernand Braudel. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Tom Hall extended a world-systems perspective all the way back to tribal societies. Giovanni Arrighi took a deep look at the history of capitalism (to be covered shortly) and Samir Amin has been a kind of watchdog always trying to keep world-systems theory from being too Eurocentric. Beverly Silver made a study of workers movements from a world-systems perspective. Lastly Christopher Chase Dunn and Terry Boswell located the history of workers’ movements over a 600-year period of capitalism, not as isolated in nation-states (as traditional Marxists have done) but as part of the dark side of the cycles and spirals of capitalism.

    Characteristics of the Three Zones

    In world-systems theory, there are three regions of the world — the core, the periphery and the semi periphery. In the 20th century the core countries were the wealthy countries of Yankeedom, Western Europe and Japan. The Scandinavian countries are cases of successful state-capitalism. Most of the periphery countries were the heavily colonialized states of Africa. In the semi-periphery were Russia, China, Eastern Europe, most of Latin America and Southeast Asia.

    Economics and politics

    Contrary to what Marx predicted, there are no countries in the core of the world- system that are socialist. In the semi-periphery there has arisen both capitalist and state socialist societies. Most of the periphery countries are operating with a combination of tribal or state redistributive system combined with exploited low wage workers at the beck-and-call of imperialists in the core.  In terms of political power, core countries have developed their own bourgeois representative systems without any political pressure outside the core. Peripheral countries have the least political power. Many of the core countries have installed dictatorships there in the hopes of controlling peripheral economies. Home-grown leaders of peripheral countries are often anti-imperialist revolutionaries agitating to overthrow imperialism in their country.

    Countries in the semi-periphery have a moderate degree of autonomous political power but their elections are closely watched by the deep state in core societies because they have more technological self-rule and could get out of control. In state socialist countries, political power is highly concentrated at the top. Socialist societies cannot afford to have many political parties. Those smaller parties are subject to manipulation by the deep state within core countries which works to overthrow socialism. Because peripheral countries have been exploited by imperialism they are poor. World capitalist banks offer loans at interest rates so high that it is rare for peripheral countries to get out of debt. The loans received from these banks are only for raw materials and for cash crop agriculture. No loans are made for education or building infrastructures.

    Energy bases, commodities and wages

    The energy bases of core countries are electronic-industrial. The semi-periphery countries are industrial-agricultural while in the periphery they are mostly agricultural or horticulture in the sub-Sahara Africa. The technology in the core countries draws on inanimate sources of energy and machine-based. In the periphery, work is labor intensive using mostly animal and wind power. In the semi-periphery capitalists implement hand-me-down machines from core countries. As might be expected, wages are highest in core countries because unions have been institutionalized. In the periphery, because there is very little industry, there are no unions and it is here where wages are lowest. Typically, workers might work part-time in industry, also working in garment industry, as water carriers, day laborers with some cash crop planting. In the semi-periphery there is some unionization and in state-socialist societies wages might be good.

    Commodities and economic policy: free trade vs protective tariffs

    Because of their colonial relations with the periphery core counties import raw materials cheaply and export manufactured goods, which are more expensive. In peripheral countries, they export raw materials, mostly cash crops and import goods from the West at higher prices, keeping them in a dependent relationship.

    The economic policy of the core countries is “free trade” which, of course, is not free but gives them a license to go wherever they want, exploiting land and labor where there is little or no resistance. Countries in the semi-periphery, when driven by their population or the vision of their leaders, may adopt protective tariffs in the hopes of protecting the growth of their home industries. On the periphery, the economic policy is forced free trade with colonialists. Often one of the major efforts in peripheral liberation movements is to elect leaders who follow protective tariffs to attempt to build up home industries. Semi-periphery countries are somewhat dependent on core countries but they in turn also exploit the periphery to a less extent. These semi-periphery countries use their surplus to invest more in their domestic economy. They export peripheral-like goods to the core and export core goods to the periphery.

    Class, race, ethnic and regional conflicts

    For most of the 20th century in the core countries the conflicts between groups were class conflicts and in the United States, race conflicts. However, regional conflicts still smolder in Yankeedom between North and South. In Europe regional loyalties smolder in Spain, Northern Ireland, Belgium among others. The semi-periphery has similar class and regional problems. The periphery is torn apart between tribal loyalties and loyalties to the newly formed states which were once part of national liberation movements.

    Role of the military

    Lastly, we turn to the role of the military. After two world wars over colonies, core states have agreed not to attack each other and the military is rarely involved in its domestic politics. The military of core countries is mostly employed in attempting to control the political life in the semi-periphery and the periphery. The military in semi-periphery countries is more volatile because core countries are concerned about the domestic policies there since these countries have the resource base – the science and engineers – to undermine the resource base of the core. The military in the semi-periphery gets involved, either as right-wing dictators or to bring in a left-wing military leader such as Hugo Chavez. The most direct military involvement is in the periphery because colonialists want to maintain control of the cheap land and labor they exploit. The military also tries to impose order in clashes within the domestic population between tribes, ethnic groups and state loyalists.

    Snapshots of the History of the World-system

    In his book An Introduction to the World-system perspective, Thomas Shannon introduces four “snapshots” (maps) of the world-system:

    • world-system from 1450-1620 (merchant capital)
    • world-system in 1763 (agricultural, slave capitalism)
    • world-system in 1900 (industrialization)
    • the contemporary world system in 20th century (finance capital, electronics)

    What might be confusing is that the world-system, though it has the “world’ in it, does not mean it is a global society. For most of the history of world-system, the core, periphery and semi periphery only covered part of the globe. The fact is in the world system of 1450-1620 most of the world system was concentrated in Europe – Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France and England. The periphery consisted of the Scandinavian countries and central and South America. The United States was not even in the world-system while Russia, China and India were part of agricultural empires.

    In the 1763 snapshot, the core countries are Great Britain and  France, with the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal slipping into minor core status. The semi-periphery then consisted of the North Italian city-states and Prussia. Thanks to colonialization by the British, the United States and West Africa were now on the periphery of the world system. Poland and Russia were now in the periphery. China and India were still outside the world system.

    By 1900 Great Britain and France remained as core countries but they were now joined by late developing Germany and the United States.  By 1900 most of the globe was now in the world-system, with Russia moving to the semi-periphery and China now on the periphery. This was the age of colonialism as all of Africa, China and South America were on the world capitalist periphery.

    By the 20th century the world-system was rocked by two world wars which hollowed out Europe and reduced them to minor core status. The rise of Japan in the late 19th century and early 20th century catapulted it into core status. The first three quarters of the 20th century were the time of Yankeedom. The 20th century saw the emergence of the first socialist states in Russia, China and Cuba. Russia maintained its semi-peripheral status while Cuba and China continued to be poor and in the periphery of the world-system.

    Capitalist Cycles and Their Leading Hegemons

    In 1994 Giovanni Arrighi wrote a great book with a bad title, The Long 20th Century.

    The heart of the book is the tracing of the history of capitalism through four cycles. Instead of looking at capitalism as a linear line moving from merchant capitalism to agricultural capitalism, to industrial, to finance capitalism and imperialism, Arrighi analyzed capitalism as a series of four cycles which played themselves out through leading hegemons throughout Europe. Through each cycle there were mercantile, agricultural, industrial and financial phases, but they weren’t all of the same weight.

    Italian city-states

    For example, the first place the cycles occurred were in the city-states of Genoa and Venice between 1450 and 1640. They made profits based on merchant capital through trading. Being city states, they didn’t make much profit on agriculture and what industry existed was small. However, when their profits were made on finance and wars, that was the end of their power. As we shall see throughout all hegemon rulers, when profits are made on war and finance they are on their way out.

    Dutch sea trade

    After the Italian wars and the discovery of new trade routes West, the Italian city-states lost their core status. Dutch sea power arose in the 17th century. Again, the Dutch profits were based on merchant trade but trade on a much larger scale than the Italians. They were led by East Indian and West Indian monopoly companies. There were at least five reasons the Dutch superseded Genoa and Venice.

    • scale of operation – the Dutch had greater commercial and financial networks
    • financial base of the Dutch monopoly companies are less vulnerable to competing trade countries
    • Dutch interest clashed more dramatically with central authorities of medieval world. This drove them to be more independent from religion
    • Dutch war-making was superior
    • the Dutch had greater state-making capacity

    The end of the line for the Dutch was also when money houses became a greater source of profit than trade. Dutch hegemony ended in wars with the English beginning in 1781. England was also a great sea power at this time and were also better colonizers than the Dutch.

    The sun never sets on the British empire

    The secret to British hegemony in the 19th century was the industrial revolution. Here profits were made rebuilding cities with railroads and textile factories. While Britain made profits on trade (merchant capital), while it derived profits from cash crops and slavery (agricultural capital), what made it distinct was the industrial revolution and the harnessing of coal and steam. For Britain the end came towards the end of the 19th century when it shifted its wealth from industry to finance, The British empire was with the wars over colonies with Germany, Italy and Japan.

    The American century 1870-1970

    The United States made profits off its sea power and its planters made profits on agricultural slavery working with the British. But its greatest profits derived from industry. By the second half of the 19th century the United States became an industrial powerhouse, competing directly with the British. Besides coal, the oil Barons made a fortune on the railroads in this ascendent phase of capitalism. In the two world wars that followed, the United States became the only core country standing. After World War II it was the sole core power. Between 1948-1970 it peaked.

    However, in the 19th and 20th centuries capitalist countries were racked by depressions in 1837, 1873 and 1896 and then the Great Depression of 1929-1939. Capitalists in the United States noticed that it was investment in military arms that got the US capitalist economy out of the depression more than Roosevelt’s programs. After World War II, the defense industry became an ongoing investment even in peace-time. Then it began to sell arms around the world to fight communism.

    Lastly, investing in finance capital – stocks, bonds and derivatives – gave quicker turn-around profits than investing in industry. Once Japan and Germany had recovered from World War II, the United States faced real competition. Instead of investing in infrastructures, it invested in finance capital. Instead of investing in its workers, it pulled industries out of the United States and relocated in peripheral countries where land and labor were cheap. This was the beginning of the end. So began a 50-year decline.

    Trends in the History of Capitalism

    From investing in the physical economy to investment in finance

    In describing these trends as a whole, Arrighi takes some liberties with Marx’s C-M-C; M-C-M formula. He says that in the ascendant phase of capitalism the M-C moment of capitalism is pronounced. That means that money is invested in commodities, trade, production and expansion. Money is invested in solid material. When a hegemon’s days are numbered C-M commodities are invested in money, the capitalist economy is contracting and capital is invested in finance capital, profits made on stocks and bonds can easily be moved around (liquidity).

    Shortening of cycles

    The four cycles Arrighi analyzes are not evenly distributed in time across the hegemons. The pace of rise and fall speeds up. The rise and fall of the Italian city-states was 220 years; the United Dutch provinces lasted 180 years; the British heyday lasted 130 years and the United States 100 years from 1873-1973. Meanwhile the cycles do not just end and resume again without accumulating consequences.

    Some twentieth century trends

    • artificial intelligence which has the potential to shorten the work week
    • the opportunity to live longer – thanks to science
    • the chance to colonize space
    • an increase in rebellion over the centuries including the rise of socialism in the second half of the 19th century among workers and peasants
    • the impact of ecology with increasing pollution and severe weather
    • the deterioration of health due to genetically modified foods and pharmaceutical drugs.

    Revolution in the World-system in the 21st Century

    Rise of an alliance between semi-periphery countries

    When the Soviet Union collapsed around 1990 it looked as if, despite its declining power, Yankeedom would continue to be the hegemon into the 21st century. But a funny thing happened in the first two decades of the 20th century. One was the rise of nationalism in Russia under Putin. The other was the emergence of a powerhouse economy in China. This was predicted  by Arrighi in his later book Adam Smith in Beijing and Andre Gunder Frank’s book ReORIENT.

    From a world-systems perspective, the rise of a semi-peripheral country like China is no surprise, as world-systems theory has always argued that the semi-periphery countries have the most revolutionary potential. This is because they are wealthy enough to support scientists and engineers who potentially can produce an economic policy separate from the core countries. What seems unprecedented is the alliance of two semi-peripheral countries (Russia and China) with a deep alliance which cuts across military and economic cooperation.

    In fact, the rise of BRICS as a challenge to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is noteworthy because virtually every country in BRICS is a semi-peripheral country. The multipolar world is composed of semi-peripheral countries unified by the New Silk Road. Furthermore, if China continues to grow the way it has been, in the next twenty years it will become the first core country since the beginnings of capitalism not located in the West. Secondly, under the leadership of the Communist Party and state-owned enterprises, China clearly has a socialist end in mind. It would be the first time a core country in the world-system was socialist. Third, China has not pressured Russia, Iran or any country in the multipolar orbit to become socialist. So whatever political and economic tensions might develop in the multipolar world, it is not likely to be the old capitalism vs socialism battle.

    The United States and Europe

    In the new multipolar world-system, the United States will sink to the status of a semi-peripheral country because its capitalists will not invest in rebuilding its abandoned infrastructure. It is likely to live on as a home of finance capitalists giving loans to other decimated capitalists countries or in supplying military arms to countries which have not joined in the multipolar world. These lost countries could be in South or Central America or in Middle Eastern countries which are not part of the Belt Road initiative.

    Europe has been vassal of the United States for 80 years. Up until the last couple of years, Germany was the only European country which was an industrial powerhouse. But this has changed since the US has insisted that Europe abide by its sanctions of Russia. There is not a single European county with the exception of Hungary that has stood up to the United States. As the United States continues its decent from core to semi-periphery, Europe will follow with England being the weakest country. Once it slowly dawns on the European rulers that Yankeedom will not save them, they may attempt to make back-room deals with Russia and China in terms of natural gas and other sources of energy. It might be that in the next 50 years the old European core countries may regain their balance and occupy a semi-peripheral status in the new multipolar system.

    The Middle East and South America

    To the extent that China can diplomatically integrate Saudi Arabia and Iran and the Middle Eastern countries with oil, they will remain in the semi-periphery of the world’s new multipolar system. Expect Israel to degenerate as Mordor will be less able to help them and they will be surrounded by hostile Arab states with scores to settle. In South America Argentina and Chile will join Brazil in the semi-periphery. Venezuela will finally be spared from Mordor’s intervention and be protected by China as a fellow socialist society.

    Global South

    The refusal of African states to do the bidding of Mordor against Russia speaks volumes for the end of their hopes to ever get a fair deal from the United States or its financial institutions. There has been an openness to project proposals from China and Russia for building railroads and schools. Some African states like Nigeria or Sudan might, over the course of a generation, build their countries up to a semi-periphery status the way Libya was when Gaddafi was in power.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Heatwave hits southern Europe, US and China | Channel 4 News | 17 July 2023 | Just Stop Oil


    This content originally appeared on Just Stop Oil and was authored by Just Stop Oil.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • China Sees Record-Breaking Temperatures as Europe Faces Historic Heat This Week

    The world is in the grips of a dangerous heat wave that has sent temperatures skyrocketing to deadly levels throughout Asia, Europe and the Americas. Unless urgent action is taken to reduce carbon emissions, the United Nations says, Earth could pass a temperature threshold in the next decade when climate disasters are too extreme to adapt to. We speak with longtime climate journalist Jeff Goodell…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • How NATO makes Europe dependent on the United States


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • ‘Where does it end?’ Far-right’s gains raise fears for LGBTQ+ freedoms in Spain

    Rights groups in region where Vox is in government warn voters in run-up to snap general election

    Pride celebrations have long been a small but raucous affair in the northern Spanish city of Valladolid. Setting off from a singular triangle-shaped plaza, a dozen drummers lead hundreds through the narrow streets of the largest city in Castilla y León.

    But this year – after the region became a showcase for the far right’s first foray into Spanish government since the Franco dictatorship – the shift in tone was palpable.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Another Act of Terror: How the Media do PR for Biden and Zelensky

    The hypocrisy gets starker by the day. The same western media that strains to warn of the dangers of disinformation – at least when it comes to rivals on social media – barely bothers to conceal its own role in purveying disinformation in the Ukraine war.

    In fact, the propaganda peddled by the media grows more audacious by the day – as two stories last week from the frontlines illustrate only too clearly.

    Dominating headlines has been the environmental catastrophe created by the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam under Russian control. Flood waters from the Dnipro river have ruined vast swathes of land downriver from the dam and forced many tens of thousands to flee their homes.

    Rightly, the wrecking of the dam is being called an act of “ecological terrorism” – the second major one associated with the war, following last September’s blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines supplying Russian gas to Europe.

    The costs associated with keeping this war going and avoiding peace talks so that Russia can be “weakened”, as Biden administration officials insist is the priority, have grown much steeper than most people could have imagined.

    This is why a clear understanding of what is going on – and what interests are being served by fuelling the fighting rather than resolving the war – is so vitally important.

    There have always been at least two narratives in Ukraine, even if western audiences are rarely exposed to the Russian one – outside of mocking commentary from western reporters.

    In the immediate aftermath of the breaching of the Kakhovka dam, the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, Steve Rosenberg, visibly sneered as he reported that Russian media were insisting Ukrainian “terrorists” were behind the destruction. Russians, he suggested, were being brainwashed by their government and media.

    He obviously failed to spot the irony that his own reporting, like that of colleagues, has served to reinforce the impression that the only plausible culprit in the dam’s ruin – despite a lack of evidence so far – is Moscow. Like the Russian media, Rosenberg has been hawking precisely the line his own government, and its Nato allies, want from him.

    Pall of fog

    The BBC recently launched its Verify service, ostensibly to root out disinformation. In similar vein, western media have started appending to any report of Russian assertions the warning: “This claim could not be verified.”

    Like a nervous tic, the media added just such an alert to Russian statements that large numbers of Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in what looked like the first stages of Kyiv’s so-called “counter-offensive”.

    But no such warnings have been attached to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s claims that Russia blew up the dam.

    Instead, reporters have been quick to regurgitate, unverified, his self-serving assertions that Moscow caused the destruction, supposedly to ward off the imminent counter-offensive, and that only western help evicting Russia from the areas it has occupied can prevent further “terrorist” acts.

    As has so often been the case in this war, a thick pall of fog is likely to shroud what happened at the Kakhovka dam for the foreseeable future.

    Which means that, if the media is determined to recycle speculation, what it should be doing at this stage – apart from keeping an open mind and investigating for itself – is applying the principle of “cui bono?” or “who profits?”

    And if it bothered to do that properly, it might be far more reluctant to pin responsibility on Russia.

    Rallying support

    As Scott Ritter, a former US marine and United Nations weapons inspector, has noted, the chief beneficiary of the attack has been Ukraine, both militarily and politically.

    After all, the western media has been documenting a series of fortifications – from trenches and mines to concrete spikes – that the Russian army has constructed along its front lines during the long wait for the Ukrainian counter-offensive. As has often been pointed out, they are so extensive, they can easily be seen from space.

    And yet if it did blow up the dam, Moscow just washed away all its carefully built defences in a key area that Ukraine has set its eyes on recapturing – and just at the time Kyiv is said to be preparing for a dramatic military offensive.

    Further, the swollen river behind the dam was a significant obstacle to Ukrainian forces crossing the Dnipro river for many tens of miles. It will be much less of a barrier now its waters have receded as the river gushes into the Black Sea. The dam explosion punches a surprise hole in a key, natural part of Russia’s defensive line.

    Another critical concern for the Kremlin will be that the explosion poses a direct threat to water supplies to the arid Crimean peninsula – the first piece of Ukrainian territory Russia annexed. After a US-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s government in 2014, Russia made a priority of securing Crimea, long the site of a strategic, warm-water naval base.

    And to top it all, Russia’s control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, upstream of the dam, has already come under renewed international scrutiny as questions are raised about Moscow’s ability to cope with a possible meltdown there as water supplies, needed for cooling, dramatically diminish.

    There are political advantages in the dam’s destruction for Kyiv too. As Ritter observes: “There is a lot of ‘Ukraine fatigue’ right now. The world is just tired of Ukraine, of funding Ukraine… What Ukraine needs is a catastrophic event that rallies international support around Ukraine by blaming Russia for something big.”

    The dam blast does just that. It thrusts the war back into the spotlight, it casts Moscow as a “terrorist” threat not just to Ukraine but to wider humanity, and it will prove a very effective tool to justify yet more weapons and aid to “weaken” Russia, even if Ukraine’s counter-offensive proves a damp squib.

    Reckless ‘test’ strike

    The western media has not only largely ignored these factors, it has also drawn a veil over its own recent reporting that might implicate Ukraine as chief culprit in blowing up the dam.

    As the Washington Post reported back in December, the Ukrainian military had previously considered plans to destroy the Kakhovka – in other words, to carry out what is universally understood now as a major act of ecological terrorism. At the time, the plan barely raised an eyebrow in the West.

    The preparations included what now looks like a reckless “test strike” with a HIMARS missile – supplied courtesy of the US – “making three holes in the metal [of the floodgates] to see if the Dnieper’s water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages”.

    “The test was a success,” the Post reported Maj Gen Andriy Kovalchuk, a Ukrainian commander, saying back in December. “But the step [of destroying the dam] remained a last resort.”

    Might that “test” or a similar one – possibly in preparation for a Ukrainian offensive – have accidentally undermined the dam’s integrity, making it gradually crumble from the pressure of the water?

    Or could the dam’s destruction have been intentional – part of Ukraine’s offensive – spreading chaos to areas under Russian control, either to force Moscow to redirect its energies away from countering a Ukrainian attack, or deflect western public attention away from any difficulties Kyiv may have launching a credible military operation?

    And why, anyway, would Moscow decide to destroy the dam, forfeiting control over water flow, when it could have simply opened the gates to flood areas downstream at any time of its choosing, such as when faced with an attempt to cross the river by the Ukrainian military?

    These questions aren’t even being posed, let alone answered.

    James Bond mission

    There has been an established pattern with the media during the Ukraine war, one that may serve as a guide in understanding how the story of the breaching of the dam will unfold.

    The reticence of western outlets to ask basic questions, contextualise with relevant background, or pursue obvious lines of inquiry has been equally glaring in another act of ecological terrorism: the explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines back in September. They released enormous quantities of the prime global-warming gas methane.

    Again, the media spoke as one. First, they echoed western officials in ascribing the explosions to Moscow, without a shred of evidence and even though the blasts were a huge blow to Russia.

    The Kremlin lost the bountiful income stream that came from supplying Europe with natural gas. Meanwhile, diplomatically, it was stripped of its chief leverage over its biggest energy customer, Germany – leverage it might have used to induce Berlin to break with the West’s sanctions policy.

    All of this was hard to obscure. Soon the western media simply dropped the Nord Stream story entirely.

    Interest surfaced again only much later, in March, when the New York Times and a German publication, Die Zeit, published separate and quite preposterous accounts, based on unnamed intelligence sources.

    According to these accounts, a group of six rogue Ukrainians chartered a yacht and blew up the pipelines off the coast of Denmark in a James Bond-style mission. The story was widely amplified by the western media, even though independent analysts ridiculed it as wildly implausible and technically unfeasible.

    ‘Ukraine did it’

    The problem the media has faced is that a very much more plausible account of the Nord Stream blasts had already been produced by the legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in February. His unnamed intelligence source offered a far more credible and detailed account, and one that blamed the US itself.

    The circumstantial evidence for US responsibility – or at least involvement – was already substantial, even if the media again ignored it.

    From Joe Biden downwards, US officials either expressed a determination beforehand to stop more Russian gas from reaching Europe through Nord Stream or celebrated the pipelines’ destruction after the fact.

    The Biden administration also had a prime motive for blowing up Nord Stream: a desire to end Europe’s energy dependence on Russia, especially when Washington wanted to line up Moscow and Beijing as the new targets in its permanent “war on terror”.

    Hersh’s source argued that the explosives were placed by special US Navy divers, with Norwegian assistance, during an annual naval exercise, Baltops, and remotely detonated three months later.

    The media studiously ignored this version. When it was referenced on the odd occasion, the story was dismissed because it was attributed to a single unnamed source. None of the media, however, appeared to have similar reservations about the fantastical yacht version, also supplied by an unidentified intelligence source.

    Hersh’s account has refused to go away, gaining ever more traction on social media so long as no credible alternative emerged.

    And so – bingo! The fantastical claim that a group of amateurs was able to locate and blow up the pipelines deep on the ocean floor has been dropped.

    Last week the Washington Post reported that an unnamed European intelligence service had warned the Biden administration of an impending attack on the Nord Stream pipelines three months before it took place. According to this account, a small crack team sent by the Ukrainian military carried out the “covert” operation – again acting, it was stressed, without Zelensky’s knowledge.

    The Post reported that “officials in multiple countries” confirmed that the US had received advance warning.

    White House lied?

    The story raises all kinds of deeply troubling questions – none of which the media seem interested in addressing.

    Not least, if true, it means that the Biden administration has blatantly lied for months in promoting a fiction: that Russia carried out the attack. The White House and European capitals knowingly misled the western media and publics.

    If Biden officials have indeed conspired in maintaining a grand lie about such a momentous act of industrial terror – one that caused untold environmental damage and is contributing to a mounting recession in Europe – what other lies have they been telling? How can anything they claim about the Ukraine war, such as who is responsible for the Kakhovka dam’s destruction, be trusted?

    And yet the western media – which, according to this new account, was deceived for months – seems completely unconcerned.

    Further, if Washington knew of the impending act of terror – which was directed at European energy sources as much as at a nuclear-armed Russia – why did it not intervene?

    The media’s coverage of this new version largely frames the US as impotent, incapable of stopping the Ukrainians from blowing up the pipelines.

    But Washington is the world’s sole superpower. Ukraine is entirely dependent on its support – financially and militarily. If the US withdrew its backing, Ukraine would be forced to engage in peace talks with Russia. The idea that Washington could not have stopped the attack is no more credible than the claim a group of sailing enthusiasts blew up the pipelines.

    If this latest account is true, Washington had the leverage to stop the attack on Europe’s energy infrastructure but failed to act. By any reasonable assessment, it should be considered to have willed the pipelines’ destruction, despite the devastating toll on Europe and the environment.

    And thirdly, based on this account, Ukraine – or at least its military – has proven itself quite capable of committing the most heinous act of terrorism, even against its allies in Europe. Why should anyone, least of all the media, now be so dismissive of Russian claims of Ukrainian war crimes, including destroying the Kakhovka dam?

    ‘Good Nazis’

    The truth, however, is that the western media are not concerned by the implications of this latest account, any more than they are by Hersh’s earlier one – not if it means turning the US and its allies into the bad guys. The story was reported cursorily, and will be filed away as another piece of a puzzle no one has any interest in solving.

    The western media’s role in foreign affairs is to prop up a narrative that turns our leaders into good people doing their best in a bad world, one that forces on them difficult, sometimes morally compromised, choices.

    But what if Biden and Zelensky aren’t really heroes, or even good people? What if they are just as ignoble, just as callous and inhumane, as the foreign leaders we so readily dismiss as the “new Hitler”? It’s just that they receive far better public relations from our complicit media.

    Coverage of the destruction of the Kakhovka dam and Nord Stream pipelines alludes to a double problem: that western leaders and their allies may be implicated in the most terrible crimes, but we can rarely be sure because our media are so determined not to find out.

    This week, the New York Times finally admitted on its pages something that it and the rest of the western media once openly acknowledged but have cast as a taboo since Russia’s invasion: that the Ukrainian military is awash with neo-Nazi symbols.

    However, even as the paper of record admitted what it had previously condemned as “disinformation” whenever it appeared on social media, the New York Times insisted on an absurd distinction.

    Yes, the paper agreed that Ukrainian soldiers are proud to decorate themselves in Nazi insignia. And yes, much of wider Ukrainian society commemorates notorious Nazi figures from the Second World War such as Stepan Bandera. But no, Ukraine’s prolific use of Nazi symbols does not translate into any attachment to Nazi ideology.

    This is the argument being made by western publications that at the same time have taken seriously claims that a rock star, Roger Waters, is antisemitic for performing a track from his four-decade-old album The Wall satirising a fascist dictator… dressed as a fascist dictator.

    Waters’ real crime is that now Jeremy Corbyn has been ousted from the Labour Party, he is the most visible supporter of Palestinian rights in the western world.

    If the New York Times and the rest of the western media are willing to give Ukrainian Nazis a makeover, making them look good, what are they doing for Biden, Zelensky and European leaders?

    One thing we know for sure: we cannot look to the western media for an answer.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Tunisia should not get ‘€1bn on a silver plate’ in migration deal, says MEP

    Critics of deal say EU funds should have conditions attached related to human rights and democracy

    The EU should not be allowed to sign off on a controversial migration pact with Tunisia without intervening over human rights breaches and a “breakdown” in its democracy, European parliamentarians have argued.

    The French MEP Mounir Satouri said it was not right that Tunisia should be given “€1bn on a silver plate”. “That cannot happen,” he said, outlining the European parliament’s role as co-legislator in the EU.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Canadian ‘aid’ program set the table for post-Maidan coup land privatization drive

    A screenshot taken from an ATIP cited in this The Canada Files investigation. Image credit: Aidan Jonah/Editor-in-Chief of The Canada Files.

    Chinese (Simplified)EnglishFrenchGermanItalianPortugueseRussianSpanish

    Written by: Aidan Jonah

     

    The pre-Maidan coup times

    In Peter Korotaev’s article for The Canada Files about Canada’s influence in Ukraine, Korotaev said: “The west’s desire to assert control over Ukraine’s court system is such a priority because plenty of Ukrainian judges have their own conception of Ukraine’s interests, which diverge sharply from that of the west.”

    A legacy of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic is the amount of communal or state-owned land which the Ukrainian people are the ultimate masters of. One may think that the wave of privatization that swept over former Eastern Bloc nations would’ve fully consumed Ukraine as well, but this is not the case. Naturally, capitalism in Ukraine saw privatization over several governments, but even coming into the 2010s, the West and Ukrainian capitalists had failed to obtain near absolute privatization of communal and state-owned land.

    A Canadian aid program, funded by the Canadian International Development Agency, and administered by the National Judicial Institute (NJI), began a project to ‘modernize’ elements of Ukraine’s legal system in 2012, while elected President Victor Yanukovych was still in power. Documents obtained by The Canada Files reveal that two previously unknown focuses of the project existed: to develop courses for Ukraine’s judge school which included sections on “property rights with a focus on Land Law and Statutory Interpretation” and to break down judicial resistance to privatizing communal and state-owned land.

    The NJI admits openly in these documents, that it met between one to two times a month with a USAID funded group, the Fair, Accountable, Independent, and Responsible (FAIR) Judiciary Program, and had quarterly meetings with them “to exchange relevant project documentation and information, review candidate judge involvement, project progress, strategic planning plans and activities and address other coordination and implementation issues as they arise.”

    The NJI had gripes with Ukrainian judges and their decisions on the “application of property laws,” claiming that “at the level of the judiciary, the application of property laws continues to be fragmented and inconsistent, and judges require substantive and skills-oriented education in the area of land and property rights, and interpretation and application of the current body of laws relating to this subject area.”

    Going further, the NJI admits that it was seeking to ‘encourage’ judges to have an “emphasis on logic rather than intuitive interpretations of statutes (the latter of which has been the case in Ukraine)”. Since as Korotaev notes, “plenty of Ukrainian judges have their own conception of Ukraine’s interests, which diverge sharply from that of the west”, the West has worked to pressure judges to drop their conceptions of Ukraine’s interests which come from “intuitive interpretations of statues”, which have gotten in the way of land privatization.

    The training that the NJI led the development of, proposed a course module for land law that explicitly backs up what this author stated above:

    • “Module 1: Acquisition of Rights to Land by Citizens and Legal Entities including production of the materials such as the Framework for Granting State-Owned and Communal Lands to Individuals and Legal Entities. “

    One of the core focuses of this program, though the NJI would never admit it, was breaking down resistance to privatization of communal and state-owned land. Since even the NJI admitted that there was a risk that “Ukrainian judges reject all or some of the new ideas/approaches being introduced”, developing a course which would shape future Ukrainian judges to be sympathetic to the Western ideas about Ukrainian land law and privatization, would be an effective way to get around resistance from active judges.

    The documents showcase the veracity of this idea:

    • “[Redacted] also suggested that, in outreach activities, we target young judges. Other judges in other regions have to be made aware of this practice. It is a rather small detail in the scheme of court processes and procedures, but it has the potential to yield great results and make a significant impact on caseflow, reduce the caseload and increase trust in the system.”

    The NJI’s attitude towards the Ukrainian judges school, which it needed to follow through and teach the land law segments of courses the NJI was developing, can be summed up in this way: “You (Ukrainian judges school) are being led by us (Canada), we are in charge. The section on “Progress Towards Results During Reporting Period” makes this clear:

    “The Canadian expert team drafted recommendations for the NSJ (the National School of Judges of Ukraine [NSJ]). Both Ukrainian partner will be required to confirm and to identify areas for improvement, gather improvement, gather institutional performance data and assess performance.”

    The documents also hinted at a willingness to go after the Ukrainian government led by President Yanukovych, if it took steps to oppose the secretive push to open the door for a land privatization drive, stating that: “CIDA to work with other donors to businesses promote with appropriate Ukrainian government officials the necessity of building an independent judiciary”.

     

    A post-Maidan Ukraine: The West’s privatization drive in progress

    After the violent Maidan coup overthrew the elected Ukrainian government in 2014, a Nazi-filled pro-Western government was installed into power by the US, with their preferred choice Arseniy Yatsenyuk conveniently becoming the first post-coup president.

    The NJI noticed that there was significant distrust in the new Ukrainian government and the judiciary which they could shape, stating that “JEEG [the name of the program the NJI was in charge of] observes that public confidence [in the judiciary] is affected by the fall of the government and judicial system that was associated with it.”

    The West was quick to take advantage of its coup in Ukraine, with the NJI cooperating with “the USAID-funded Agrolnvest project,” that was supporting development “of a manual on the history of land law[8] that will be utilized as a core resource for this [the NJI led] course”. The documents show that “The Manual is anticipated to be included as a resource in the piloting of the Land Law course at a regional branch of the NSJ in early 2015.” The long-term desire to privatize more Ukrainian land couldn’t be more clear.

    The secretive efforts to enable a future privatization drive would pay off under a complaint Western puppet government of Ukraine, with the ProZorro project focused on streamlining purchases of communal and state-owned land being introduced in May 2014, only two months after the Maidan coup had succeeded. Korotaev notes that ProZorro was created by “George Soros’ Transparency International”, but takes 60 per cent of its funding from foreign affairs departments of Western nations including Canada. Prozorro wasn’t even controlled by the Ukrainian government until mid-2019, rather by Transparency International Ukraine.

    Korotaev notes that in addition to communal and state-owned land, “ProZorro is also used to auction off agricultural land. Since this land is the collateral of bankrupt banks, it can be sold in large quantities without being impacted by Ukrainian restrictions on buying and selling land. ProZorro uses a peculiar mechanism in auctioning off this land.”

    Prozorro’s stated purpose is to “that any business can have a clear process of pricing and transfer of state, municipal and big corporates’ ownership.” But the reality of the program is far different than what it claims to be. Korotaev noted that “Maksym Nefyodov, [former Ukrainian] deputy minister of economic development and trade, boasted that ProZorro is one of “many services already present in Ukraine to help Canadian сompanies do business here and thrive”.

    Ukrainian journalist Roman Gubrienko found that “through ProZorro, prime plots of land are sold for far lower than the normal price.” Gubrienko noiced that extreme discounts for land were common, with the “average estimated price of each plot of land” being “valued at over 1 million hryvnias, while the actual selling price was only 80 000 to 100 000 hryvnias (around $3,000 to 4,000 USD).”

    Prozorro mostly operates by ‘Dutch auction’, which works in this way: “The starting price of the lot during the entire auction is gradually reduced from 100 per cent to 20 per cent at certain intervals in automatic mode. The reduction will continue until one of the players ‘gets nervous’ and presses the ‘buy’ button.” The excuse for using this system is when “it is different to determine the minimum market price of the lot”, which Gubrienko denounces, and says was used to sell off “prime agricultural land close to the capital of Kyiv” for dirt cheap.

    Korotaev explained that “Gubrienko’s research reveals that many of these dramatically discounted land deals went to affiliates of Soros’ business network, as well as to other western capitalists.”

    Canada did its very best to ensure ProZorro’s use spread across Ukraine. A $19 million Canadian ‘aid’ project (Partnership for Local Economic Development and Democratic Governance), lasting between 2015 and 2021, managed to get ProZorro implemented in 16 Ukrainian cities. Global Affairs Canada doesn’t like awareness of the program though, deleting the record of the program on CIDA’s search portal for aid projects soon after The Canada Files filed ATIP requests into the aid project, on August 17, 2022. Something they’d want to hide perhaps?

    The reasoning around the long-term western plot to conduct a mass privatization drive of Ukrainian land, and the sneaky machinations of the Canadian judge training ‘aid’ program to target younger judges-in-training for complaint adjudicators of land law, was to overcome the ‘risk’ of Ukrainian judges being opposed to Western styling rulings around land law. That ‘risk’ is showcased by a 2020 court battle, explained by Korotaev:

    “This battle in the court system has been particularly stark the fight to privatize Ukrainian agriculture. In late 2020, the constitutional court accepted an appeal by 48 Ukrainian parliamentarians to investigate whether the privatization of agricultural land pushed through by Zelensky was unconstitutional. They cited Ukraine’s constitution, which states that ‘Land is the main national wealth, which is under special concern of the State’.  A representative of the constitutional court stated in an interview that the court could take the decision to recognize Zelensky’s privatization of land as unconstitutional. Regarding the constitutional court and the privatization of agricultural land, Zelensky’s minister of agricultural policy, Roman Leshchenko stated:

    ‘The Constitutional Court is not a problem. If the Constitutional Court cancels the law, I give you my word that the Verkhovna Rada will vote for it again. The reason is that the process is irreversible. The right to own land will come to be. ….we have the requirements of the European Court of Human Rights – the decision in the case of Zelenchuk and Tsyutsyura v. Ukraine, where the European organization requires Ukraine to ensure the implementation of the European Convention on Human Rights regarding the right to own land by 7 million of our fellow citizens’

    An impressive crystallization of the logic whereby capitalist reforms in Ukraine are ‘irreversible’. No matter what Ukraine’s constitutional court says, what Europe says about the right to own property is more important.”

    The National Judicial Institute emphasized the need to be prepared to pressure the Ukrainian government to ensure judicial independence, back in 2012, and CIDA was tasked with this responsibility soon after the Maidan coup (though the risk of no judicial independence was removed from the risks section at this point, but still mentioned as a concern).

    Yet, Canada didn’t care in the slightest about this example of the Ukrainian government’s mockery of its constitutional court, which faced another assault in 2020, after “the constitutional court began investigating whether the west’s ‘anti-corruption reforms’ (which are generally used to prevent Ukrainian state economic intervention and maintain neoliberalism) contradict Ukraine’s constitution”.

    Korotaev explained that after this process began, “Zelensky officially asked parliament to give him the right to fire all of the constitutional judges. Unsurprisingly, the constitutional court described this as an attempt to stage an anti-constitutional coup. While his plan did not work at the time, throughout 2022 under cover of wartime most of the ‘problematic’ constitutional judges have since left – or fled – their posts, with Zelensky old enemy Aleksandr Tupitsky (the head of the constitutional court) declared under arrest in May 2022.”

    Now constitutional judges are selected by “a committee of six juridicial experts: three of which are ‘independent experts’ (ie. domestic western lackeys), and the remaining are selected by the government, parliament, and other judges,” according to Korotaev.

     

    Canada couldn’t care less about Ukrainians

    Canada was greasing the wheels for a privatization drive all the way back in 2012, while elected Ukrainian President Yanukovych was still in office. Simply put, this privatization drive would’ve been combatted and likely crushed by Ukrainian judges who dared to put Ukraine’s interest and its constitution as top priority, as evidenced by the Ukrainian constitutional court’s resistance to land privatization and the Western imposed ‘anti-corruption reforms’ even in 2020, six years after the Maidan coup saw the imposition of a Western puppet government and puppet ‘civil society’.

    Ukrainians were not desperate for privatization and complete Western control of their nation, but Canada still helped enable the Western coup in Ukraine, and has exploited Ukraine for maximum value, yet claims to be a friend of Ukraine. As Peter Korotaev explained, this is a bald-faced Canadian lie.

    One has to ask the question, did the Western planning for the coup truly only begin in Fall 2013, when Yanukovych rejected a trade deal with the EU in favour of a stronger Russian offer that ensured the maintenance of lower energy costs for Ukrainian citizens? Or did this planning begin earlier into President Yanukovych’s term, with Canada’s ‘aid’ program working to influence Ukrainian judges’ interpretation of land law, being just one part of a plot to grease the wheels for desired Western changes made to Ukrainian law after a coup?

    We don’t know at present, but frankly, the question should be asked.

    ATIPs

    Editor’s note:  The Canada Files is the country’s only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We’ve provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support. 
    Please consider setting up a monthly or annual donation through Donorbox.

    Aidan Jonah is the Editor-in-Chief of The Canada Files, a socialist, anti-imperialist news outlet founded in 2019. Jonah has broken numerous stories, including how the Canadian Armed Forces trained neo-Nazi “journalist” Roman Protasevich while he was with the Azov Battalion, and how a CIA front group (the NED) funded the group (URAP) which drove the “Uyghur genocide” vote in parliament to pass this February. Jonah recently wrote a report for the 48th session of the UN Human Rights Council, held in September 2021.

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    This post was originally published on Articles – The Canada Files.

  • Attackers break Russian journalist’s fingers and stab human rights lawyer in Chechnya

    Elena Milashina and Alexander Nemov were on their way to the sentencing of a human rights activist in Grozny when they were assaulted

    Assailants have carried out a brutal attack on a human rights lawyer and a prominent Russian journalist in Chechnya, leaving them with stab wounds, broken fingers and head wounds.

    The brazen assault on journalist Elena Milashina and lawyer Alexander Nemov in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, was the most vicious in recent memory, leading even to a rare rebuke from the Kremlin which called it a “very serious attack that requires rather energetic measures”. Similar attacks in Chechnya, however, have gone unpunished for years.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • The Delta of Bucharest review – Ceaușescu-era brutalities healed by urban oasis

    Eva Pervolovici movingly juxtaposes the tragic history of women held in a Romanian communist jail with the beautiful wetlands area that the site is today

    A Romanian millennial based in Paris, film-maker Eva Pervolovici felt disconnected from the communist past of her home country until the arrival of an unexpected parcel ignited her curiosity. Lena, a family friend, sent Pervolovici a beautiful piece of hand-stitched tapestry: a colourful artwork that opened a portal to a bleak and tragic history. Under the Ceaușescu regime, Lena was held at the notorious Văcăreşti prison in Bucharest, charged with anticommunist activities – the same vague accusations that forced numerous other women into incarceration.

    Featuring intimate interviews with former inmates, this poignant documentary honours these brave souls who endured unimaginable hardship and pain. Many of the women gave birth during their imprisonment, and were forced to part with their children.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Canadian Armed Forces complicit in supporting fascist Muslim paramilitaries in Yugoslavia

    Serbian demonstrations against the arrest of Ratko Mladic. The current Vucic government handed him over to the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) in exchange for candidate status to the EU in 2011. Courtesy of The New York Times.

    Chinese (Simplified)EnglishFrenchGermanItalianPortugueseRussianSpanish

    Written by: Marthad Shingiro Umucyaba

    Classified documents from the Canadian Armed Forces and an interview reveal the longstanding and criminal tactic of using Nazi/fascist forces to incite cultural divisions in Eastern Europe. The documents originally appearing in Canada Declassified, and a prominent Serbian socialist’s knowledge and first-hand experience, reveal that this tactic was used before Ukraine. 

    These tactics culminated in the artificial creation of Kosovo, in violation of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244, which only recognizes Serbia. They’ve also been used to invent justification for Canada’s current and active participation in the continued plot of propping up the artificial state of Kosovo to this day, much to the dismay of, and against the will of, the Serbians still living there.

    Nazi origins of the NATO puppet of Bosnia 

    Vladimir Krsljanin, the current secretary of the Serbian committee of the Slobodan Milosevic International Committee and the International Relations Secretary of the Socialist Party of Serbia during its reign in 1992, agreed to speak with The Canada Files. 

    Krsljanin revealed that the president of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992 was particularly favoured by NATO due to his and his army’s Nazi origins.

    Alija Izetbegovic, the ‘founding president’ of Bosnia and Herzegovina, also helped found the Young Muslims organisation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Young Muslims incidentally had reached out to Amin Al-Husseini, the rabid anti-semitic and pro-Nazi imam, to get the favour of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini towards their own plans for an independent Islamic region of the Bosnik part of then-Yugoslavia. This culminated in the largely Muslim contingent known as the 13th Waffen SS Handschar division, of which primary recruits were Young Muslims members, including Alija Izetbegovic himself.

     

    Alija Izetbegovic’s anti-communist activism

    Izetbegovic was held accountable for the war crimes he was connected to in 1946, when Tito’s communist partisans took over Yugoslavia and imprisoned him for said association for three years, according to Krsljanin. In 1970, Izetbegovic once again got into trouble with the communist state for his Islamic Fundamentalist manifesto, Islamic Declaration. Izetbegovic had the favour of US and NATO for the liberal, capitalist, and anti-communist aspects of it, who then helped obtain more Islamist recruits. The manifesto was banned in Yugoslavia for having statements like this:

    “There can be neither peace nor coexistence between Islamic religion and non-Islamic social and political institutions.” (page 28)

    However, Izetbegovic finally managed to get the attention and ‘sympathy’ of the west in 1983, after Amnesty International and Helsinki Watch’s denunciations of ‘communist propaganda’ to ‘justify his arrest’. These organisations were controlled explicitly by the CIA at the time with Operation Mockingbird. This came around the time of his Bosnian Nationalist agitation and subsequent imprisonment for twelve years, commuted to five with the introduction of multi-party politics, the breakup of Yugoslavia, and what would later be characterised as the Bosnian war.

    Influential among Al-Qaeda sympathisers, NATO, and other radical Islamists, assembled during the CIA’s Operation Gladio , Izetbegovic ascended to the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the early stages of the 1992 civil war.

    NATO’s Strategy

    NATO had just secured the collapse of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic a year earlier in 1990, and the Soviet Union, in 1991, while having successfully implemented ‘eternal divide and rule’ tactics, according to Krsljanin. NATO would press their advantage with the ascension of Izetbegovic and the fostering of Croat Nationalist sentiment, as part of the larger operation Gladio, by the CIA and NATO, the divide and rule tactic thus splitting Yugoslavia into three parts. NATO explicitly sided with Bosnia and Herzegovina from the start, knowing full well it was a proxy army fostered by them, through Operation Gladio, the infamous plan to support fascists and Nazis in socialist states and help them stay underground.

    Serbia and Montenegro, also known as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, was sanctioned as early as April 1992, in response to the Croatian War of Independence. Show trials were also set up by the NATO controlled UN to prosecute and convict the Serbian side, while conveniently ignoring the massacres committed by the Croatians and Albanians; the Croatians having requested the UNPROFOR mandate, which ostensibly was to ‘create the conditions for peace and settlement’ of the civil war. Going forward, after successfully splitting off the Croatians, the next move was to split off the Bosnians.

     

    The Complicity of NATO in War Crimes 1992-1996

    Throughout the war, as if to reflect on their Nazi origins, and radical Islamic fighting ‘traditions’, the Bosnia and Herzegovina forces engaged in multiple false flag operations, which The Grayzone’s Kit Klarenberg showed to include detonating bombs close to residential areas and attributing those bombings to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Serbian separatists.

    NATO forces, and especially the Canadians, would publicly denounce the Serbs while secretly being aware of the reality of what was actually happening, in order to justify continued sanctions. The sanctions unjustly dragged the Serbian population as a whole into a state of poverty. The sanctions also left them vulnerable to the predations of their NATO backed enemies in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially, since it became much more difficult to purchase or manufacture arms.

     

    NATO’s 1999 bombing Campaign of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the ICTY

    The forces fostered during Operation Gladio, in other words, the Nazi/fascist elements revived by NATO, were used to push the Orthodox Christian Serbians into engaging in internal security operations negatively affected by NATO’s agent provocateurs, who encouraged aggressive measures and war crimes to reinforce NATO propaganda, according to Vladimir Krsljanin. This gave NATO the pretext to engage in bombing operations in which 33 percent of all casualties were civilians in civilian infrastructure, which even included the killing of three Chinese journalists at the Chinese Embassy.

    It should be noted, however, that unlike the Bosnian war, there was no UN mandate to engage in the operation. It was done unilaterally, and criminally. Canada, in particular, despite being only one of 13 countries to have participated in the operation, flew an inordinate 10 per cent of all sorties on what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.  

    Slobodan Milosevic, was executed in prison before having a chance to appear before the Hague at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, after exposing damning evidence of the criminal nature of the bombing campaign to the tribunal. Milosevic has been smeared as a genocidal maniac targeting Albanians and other ethnic groups with no evidence.

    Even the post-humous trial of the government Milosevic was governing, saw Serbia cleared of genocide in 2007. Lies about Milosevic and the equation of Serbian actions to genocide became less convenient to push, since their main goals were then to capture general Ratko Mladic and eventually bring Serbia into the European Union.

     

    Canada’s complicity in the current project of ‘Kosovo’ 

    Kosovo, which declared independence in 2008, has turned into nothing more than a pretext for ‘Bondsteel’, the US/NATO military base, and is now the poorest region in all of Europe. Canada shamelessly recognized its independence in direct defiance of UN Resolution 1244. According to Vladimir Krsljanin, more than half of the population there has emigrated. They’ve fled ethnic violence and an economy with poor prospects, ruled by criminals and terrorists influenced by Al-Qaeda, a known CIA asset.

    Canada currently continues to provide logistical support to the troops and security forces occupying the region. The Canadian Forces, along with NATO, are also active in suppressing and subjugating the Serbian ethnic minority there. According to Krsljanin, NATO forces have even allowed the Albanian security forces to subjugate the Kosovo Serbs for a time before intervening, culminating in the mass protests in the northern part of Kosovo on May 29, 2023. Krsljanin asserted that the NATO forces were ‘playing a double game’.

     

    The Colonial Project 

    The far-right forces in Europe and around the world have consistently been propped up by the US, Canada, and their allies since the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The first head of the European Commission was a Nazi. The first head of NATO, Adolf Heusinger, was also a Nazi. And of course, Nazis were used as underground disrupters of the socialist members of the Warsaw Pact.

    The countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) all have a dark history of colonialism, fostering ethnic conflict both internally and externally, and ethnic cleansing. That is where they find common cause with Nazi ideology, Italian fascism, and the antiquated imperialism of Japan.

    They seek to impose capitalism on the world under the false guise that it allows freedom and prosperity for the majority of the world’s people, of which half are now living on less than $1 USD a day.

    Wealth has been concentrated in the NATO member countries for nearly two centuries, at the expense of the rest of the world, which continue to be subjected to the eradication of their cultural identities, historical diversity, and freedom to articulate their own values, principles, and beliefs.

    In defence of their own ill-gotten wealth, Western colonialism is continuing in countries like Ukraine, and in provocations designed with the goal of weakening, containing, and eventually destroying the socialist state of China. This is an explicitly colonial policy of imposing capitalist ideology on the rest of the world. As has been shown, there has never been a more racist, genocidal, and criminal foreign policy in the history of humanity than the colonial one.

    Editor’s note:  The Canada Files is the country’s only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We’ve provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support. 
    Please consider setting up a monthly or annual donation through Donorbox.

    Marthad Shingiro Umucyaba (formerly referred to as Christian Shingiro) is a Rwandan-born naturalized Canadian expat. He is known for his participation in Communist/anti-imperialist national and international politics and is the radio show host of The Socially Radical Guitarist.

    He is also a freelance web developer in Hong Kong, China, striving to provide “Socially Radical Web Design at a socially reasonable price”.

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    This post was originally published on Articles – The Canada Files.

  • The Geopolitics of Industrial Policy

    A discussion featuring Yakov Feygin, Daniela Gabor, Ho-fung Hung, Thea Riofrancos, and Quinn Slobodian.

  • UN says Russian forces have tortured and executed civilians in Ukraine

    Report details widespread and systematic torture with summary executions of more than 70 people

    Russian forces have carried out widespread and systematic torture of civilians detained in connection with their attack on Ukraine, summarily executing more than 70 of them, the UN human rights office said on Tuesday.

    It interviewed hundreds of victims and witnesses for a report detailing more than 900 cases of civilians, including children and elderly people, being arbitrarily detained in the conflict, most of them by Russia. The vast majority of those interviewed said they were tortured and in some cases subjected to sexual violence during detention by Russian forces, the head of the UN human rights office in Ukraine said.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • The Fall of the West

    In his bestselling book of 1987, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, historian Paul Kennedy chronicles the rise of western power and its world dominance from 1500 to the present. He reports that the rise was not due to any particular event, nor even an unusual series of events. It was, in fact, neither foreseen nor even recognized until it was already well under way, although it may be accurately ascribed to multiple factors, which Kennedy discusses. The same may be said of the ongoing fall of western power.

    Although the decline of the West is rapidly becoming more evident to informed observers of current events, the start of that decline is less easy to pinpoint, in part because it seemed less inevitable and more reversible until quite recently. Was the high point the Austro-Hungarian Empire? Victorian England? The U.S. Eisenhower administration? Some might date it from the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, marking the beginning of the truncated “New American Century.”

    That “century” appears to be ending in the manner of so many other powers that fill the pages of Kennedy’s book – through imperial overreach, excessive military spending, lagging economic productivity and competitiveness, and failure to invest in the physical, technical and human resources necessary to remain a dominant power. In short, the West is flagging.

    The signs for this are too evident to ignore. The industrial base of the West is withering. Post-WWII, the U.S. dominated because it was the only major industrial power to survive unscathed, and its investment in western Europe and Japan increased the wealth of all three. Over the last half of the 20th century, however, these economies began to shift much of their industry to countries with cheaper labor and more efficient production, such that by the 21st century much of their manufacturing capability had vanished, and they became mainly consumer societies.

    2023 has become a watershed year for the power shift, due to dramatic western weaknesses exposed by the Ukraine war. The war revealed that a relatively modest economy (Russia) had the capability to outproduce the U.S. and all the NATO countries combined in war materiel. The U.S. “arsenal of democracy” and its European partners proved unable to provide more than a fraction of the weapons and ammunition that Russia’s factories produced. Ukrainian soldiers supplied by NATO countries found themselves vastly outnumbered in tanks, artillery, missiles, unmanned and manned aircraft, and even the latest hypersonic and electronic weapons that were arrayed against them in seemingly limitless supply. The U.S. and European NATO partners could only cobble together small numbers of incompatible weapons from their diminishing inventories, and make promises of future deliveries after months or years.

    But the U.S. and its allies were not counting on physical weapons alone. They weaponized the U.S. dollar, through seizures of Russian accounts in U.S., European and other banks totaling more than $300 billion, and through application of economic sanctions, including expulsion of Russian banks from the SWIFT dollar trading system. This also backfired.

    First, Russia retaliated by seizing U.S. and European assets within Russia, in equal or greater amounts. Second, they “pivoted east,” negotiating new trading partnerships with China, India and other countries. Third, they and their new partners, including other targets of U.S. sanctions, began to develop financial agreements to displace or reduce the use of SWIFT. Even countries that had heretofore not been threatened with asset seizure or economic sanctions, like Brazil, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia, joined these agreements, in order to expand their trading base, and as insurance against use of the USD for financial pressure or threats. The result was that the Russian economy proved astonishingly resilient – moreso even than many of the NATO countries. The Russian GDP fell by less than 2% in 2022 and is expected to rise by up to 2% in 2023, despite the war and sanctions. Russia has opted for a sustainable but inexorable war with less than 1/6 the casualties of Ukraine. Visitors report that it hardly feels like a country at war. The annual St. Petersburg Economic Forum attracted 17,000 participants from 130 countries and concluded 900 deals and contracts worth 3.9 trillion rubles ($46 billion).

    The decline of Europe was further illustrated by the consequences of the US bombing of the Nordstream gas pipelines in September, 2022, and the sanctions on Russian natural gas and petroleum products imposed by NATO. Together, these ended the competitiveness of the European economies, which had hitherto thrived on accessibility to cheap Russian fuel. As predicted by Radek Sikorsky, MEP, this meant

    … double-digit inflation, skyrocketing energy prices, and electricity shortage, … Germany will be deindustrialized, … German industries, scientists and engineers will move to the US, who will generously accept them.

    And Europe will be set back a couple of decades. Already, most European countries — France, Italy, Spain etc. — have had zero growth in GDP-per-capita for more than a decade. Add in inflation, the standard of living will soon be down 30-40%.

    In effect, the U.S. had defeated its NATO “partners” (mainly Germany) and cannibalized their industries for the sake of its own benefit, potentially short-lived.

    But the United States believed that its mighty dollar could offset its faded industry and increasingly toothless military – that it could be printed in unlimited amounts without losing value, and could become its most powerful weapon. The history of this dollar began in 1971, when President Richard Nixon announced that, in effect, the U.S. dollar would no longer be backed by gold, but rather by whatever the dollar could purchase in the U.S., i.e. by the U.S. economy itself. This became widely accepted because a) the U.S. was the world’s largest economy, b) the two great international regulatory financial institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, were also based on the dollar, and c) nearly all the world’s countries outside of the Soviet Union and other socialist societies used the dollar as the reserve currency for their own money. In addition, the world shed fixed exchange rates, with their troublesome periodic revaluations, for floating rates, which generally made the changes more gradual and more stable for the major currencies, and especially the dollar.

    The effect of so many dollars circulating so widely was to invest most of the world in protecting its value. The more a country’s non-dollar currency became based on the dollar as its reserve currency, the more the incentive for that country to defend the dollar. Later, as the U.S. began to lose its industry, it came to depend on this value to maintain its economy. It marketed its debt to other countries and “persuaded” other countries to fund U.S. bases on their territories for the purpose of “mutual defense.” This is part of the reason the U.S. now has more than 800 military bases worldwide. Although the U.S. national debt is, at time of writing, more than $33 trillion, the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board seem to think that they can continue to unload it without limit onto other countries.

    Decision makers in the U.S. seem to think that they have found the goose that lays the golden egg: when they need more money, they have only to borrow indefinitely and market their IOUs to buyers, many of whom don’t really have the option of saying no. Thus, for example, it used unlimited borrowing to fund without hesitation a very costly Ukraine war by more than $100 billion in 2022 alone, while denying basic services to its own citizens.

    But borrowing is not the only way that the U.S. raises funds. Given the stability of the dollar, many countries store or invest them in the U.S. But when a country has a disagreement with the U.S., or chooses a leadership or policies not approved by the U.S., the U.S. is not above confiscating those funds. In 2011, this is what it did with $32 billion of Libyan funds, the largest but by no means the only such confiscation of another nation’s funds at that time. Since then, similar confiscations have occurred with Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Afghanistan and other nations. Eclipsing Libya, however, was the confiscation of Russia’s $300 billion by the U.S and its mostly NATO allies, an estimated $100 billion of it by the U.S. alone.

    Recently, however, other countries are becoming wary of the U.S. and choosing other options that reduce their participation in what they view as a Mafia-style protection racket as well as their placement of assets in places where they could be confiscated in case of disagreement. As noted earlier, a growing number of countries are opting to either bypass the dollar-based SWIFT system, or to complement it with new agreements where goods are paid in another currency or with multiple currencies. Even Saudi Arabia has begun accepting payment in Chinese Yuan and paying Russia in rubles. In addition, China and other countries have decided to limit or reduce their USD exposure. So far, this has had no appreciable effect on the value of the USD. But if the dollar starts to become less desirable, it may become a questionable investment, in which case the U.S. risks losing its status as a world power – even a modest one. At that point, having demolished German and other European access to cheap fuel, the U.S. will join the rest of the west in its decline, leaving the rising economies of China, India, Brazil, Russia and other countries in Asia, Latin America and possibly Africa to displace them.

    Is the Dollar overvalued? By the laws of supply and demand, one could argue that it is not. But it is a fair question when the supply is enormous and growing, and the demand is artificial and coerced. What will happen when the dollar’s near monopoly as an exchange medium ends? The dollar has not always been the preeminent tool for pricing international transactions. At the turn of the 20th century, the British pound sterling was literally the gold standard. But the British economy was fading, and the pound continued to fall against both gold and the USD. Now, although it is still a major currency, it is a mere shadow of its former self. If or when the many dollars worldwide come home to claim their true value, we may discover that they buy little more than castles of sand.

    When world power has shifted elsewhere, the U.S., Great Britain, Germany, France and the entire West may come to depend for glory upon their historical and cultural treasures, like the ones of other bygone civilizations that western tourists once visited so widely.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Can the European Leg of the Triad Break Free from the Atlantic Alliance?

    Zoulikha Bouabdellah (Algeria), Envers Endroit Geometrique (‘Geometric Reverse Obverse’), 2016.

    Zoulikha Bouabdellah (Algeria), Envers Endroit Geometrique (‘Geometric Reverse Obverse’), 2016.

    It is difficult to make sense of many events these days. France’s behaviour, for instance, is hard to square. On the one hand, French President Emmanuel Macron changed his mind to support Ukraine’s entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). On the other hand, he said that France would like to attend the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) summit in South Africa in August. Europe is, of course, not an entirely homogeneous continent, with problems afoot as Hungary and Turkey have refused to ratify Sweden’s desire to enter NATO at its annual summit in Vilnius (Lithuania) in July. Nonetheless, the European bourgeoisie looks westward to Wall Street’s investment firms to park its wealth, yoking its own future to the regency of the United States. Europe is firmly wedded to the Atlantic alliance with little room for an independent European voice.

    At the No Cold War platform, we have been carefully studying these elements of Europe’s foreign policy. Briefing no. 8, which will form the bulk of this newsletter, has been drafted along with European Parliament member Marc Botenga of the Workers’ Party of Belgium, or PTB–PVDA. You will find it below.

    The war in Ukraine has been accompanied by a strengthening of the US’s grip and influence on Europe. An important supply of Russian gas was replaced by US shale gas. European Union (EU) programmes originally designed to fortify Europe’s industrial base now serve the acquisition of US-made weapons. Under US pressure, many European countries have contributed to escalating war in Ukraine instead of pushing for a political solution to bring about peace.

    At the same time, the US wants Europe to decouple from China, which would further reduce Europe’s global role and run counter to its own interests. Instead of following the US’s confrontational and damaging New Cold War agenda, it is in the interests of Europe’s people for their countries to establish an independent foreign policy that embraces global cooperation and a diverse set of international relations.

    Europe’s Growing Dependence on the US

    The Ukraine war, and the ensuing spiral of sanctions and counter sanctions, led to a rapid decoupling of EU-Russia trade relations. Losing a trade partner has limited the EU’s options and increased dependence on the US, a reality that is most visible in the EU’s energy policy. As a result of the war in Ukraine, Europe reduced its dependence on Russian gas, only to increase its dependence on more expensive US liquefied natural gas (LNG). The US took advantage of this energy crisis, selling its LNG to Europe at prices well above production cost. In 2022, the US accounted for more than half of the LNG imported into Europe. This gives the US additional power to pressure EU leaders: if US shipments of LNG were diverted elsewhere, Europe would immediately face great economic and social difficulty.

    Reza Derakhshani (Iran), White Hunt, 2019.

    Reza Derakhshani (Iran), White Hunt, 2019.

    Washington has started pushing European companies to relocate to the US, using lower energy prices as an argument. As German Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action Robert Habeck said, the US is ‘hoovering up investments from Europe’ – i.e., it is actively promoting the region’s deindustrialisation.

    The US Inflation Reduction Act (2022) and the CHIPS and Science Act (2022) directly serve this purpose, offering $370 billion and $52 billion in subsidies, respectively, to attract clean energy and semiconductor industries to the US. The impact of these measures is already being felt in Europe: Tesla is reportedly discussing relocating its battery construction project from Germany to the US, and Volkswagen paused a planned battery plant in Eastern Europe, instead moving forward with its first North American electric battery plant in Canada, where it is eligible to receive US subsides.

    EU dependence on the US also applies in other areas. A 2013 report by the French Senate asked unambiguously: ‘Is the European Union a colony of the digital world?’. The 2018 US Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act and the 1978 US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allow US companies extensive access to EU telecommunications including data and phone calls, giving them access to state secrets. The EU is being spied on continuously.

    Clement Jacques-Vossen (Belgium), Lockdown, 2020.

    Cle?ment Jacques-Vossen (Belgium), Lockdown, 2020.

    Rising Militarisation Is Against the Interests of Europe

    EU discussions on strategic vulnerabilities focus mostly on China and Russia while the influence of the US is all but ignored. The US operates a massive network of over 200 US military bases and 60,000 troops in Europe, and, through NATO, it imposes ‘complementarity’ on European defence actions, meaning that European members of the alliance can act together with the US but not independently of it. Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously summarised this as ‘the three Ds’: no ‘de-linking’ European decision-making from NATO, no ‘duplicating’ NATO’s efforts, no ‘discriminating’ against NATO’s non-EU members. Furthermore, in order to guarantee dependence, the US refrains from sharing the most important military technologies with European countries, including much of the data and software connected to the F-35 fighter jets they purchased.

    For many years, the US has been calling for European governments to increase their military spending. In 2022, military spending in Western and Central Europe surged to €316 billion, returning to levels not seen since the end of the first Cold War. In addition, European states and EU institutions sent over €25 billion in military aid to Ukraine. Prior to the war, Germany, Britain, and France were already amongst the top ten highest military spenders in the world. Now, Germany has approved €100 billion for a special military upgrading fund and committed to spend 2% of its GDP on defence. Meanwhile, Britain announced its ambition to increase its military spending from 2.2% to 2.5% of its GDP and France announced that it will increase its military spending to around €60 billion by 2030 – approximately double its 2017 allocation.

    This surge in military spending is taking place while Europe experiences its worst cost of living crisis in decades and the climate crisis deepens. Across Europe, millions of people have taken to the streets in protest. The hundreds of billions of euros being spent on the military should instead be redirected to tackling these urgent problems.

    Decoupling from China Would Be Disastrous

    The EU would suffer from a US-China conflict. A significant part of EU exports to the US contains Chinese inputs, and conversely, EU goods exports to China often contain US inputs. Tighter export controls imposed by the US on exports to China or vice versa will therefore hit EU companies, but the impact will go much further.

    The US has increased pressure on a variety of EU countries, companies, and institutions to scale down or stop cooperation with Chinese projects, in particular lobbying for Europe to join its tech war against China. This pressure has borne fruit, with ten EU states having restricted or banned the Chinese technology company Huawei from their 5G networks as Germany considers a similar measure. Meanwhile, the Netherlands has blocked exports of chip-making machinery to China by the key Dutch semiconductor company ASML.

    In 2020, China overtook the US’s position as the EU’s main trading partner, and in 2022, China was the EU’s largest source for imported goods and its third largest market for exported goods. The US push for European companies to restrict or end relations with China would mean limiting Europe’s trade options, and incidentally increasing its dependence on Washington. This would be detrimental not just to the EU’s autonomy, but also to regional social and economic conditions.

    Georgi Baev (Bulgaria), Name, 1985.

    Georgi Baev (Bulgaria), Name, 1985.

    Europe Should Embrace Global Cooperation, Not Confrontation

    Since the end of the Second World War, no single foreign power has wielded more power over European policy than the US. If Europe allows itself to be locked into a US-led bloc, not only will this reinforce its technological dependence on the US, but the region could become de-industrialised. Moreover, this will put Europe at odds not only with China, but also with other major developing countries, including India, Brazil, and South Africa, that refuse to align themselves with one country or another.

    Rather than follow the US into conflicts around the world, an independent Europe must redirect its security strategy towards territorial defence, collective security for the continent, and building constructive international links by decisively breaking away from paternalistic and exploitative trade relations with developing countries. Instead, fair, respectful, and equal relationships with the Global South can offer Europe the necessary and valuable diversification of political and economic partners that it urgently needs.

    An independent and interconnected Europe is in the interests of the European people. This would allow vast resources to be diverted away from military spending and towards addressing the climate and cost of living crises, such as by building a green industrial base. The European people have every reason to support the development of an independent foreign policy that rejects US dominance and militarisation in favour of embracing international cooperation and a more democratic world order.

    Aida Mahmudova (Azerbaijan), Non-Imagined Perspectives, 2018.

    Aida Mahmudova (Azerbaijan), Non-Imagined Perspectives, 2018.

    The No Cold War briefing above asks an important question: is an independent European foreign policy possible? The general conclusion, given the balance of forces that prevail in Europe today, is no. Not even the far-right government in Italy, which campaigned against NATO, could withstand pressure from Washington. But, as the briefing suggests, the negative impact of the Western policy of preventing peace in Ukraine is being felt daily by the European public. Will the European people stand up for their sovereignty or will they continue to be the frontline for Washington’s ambitions?

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Canadian sanctions on Russia: Powerless rage with a boomerang effect

    Russian President Vladimir Putin on the left, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the right. Image credit: Institute for Peace and Diplomacy.

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    Written by: Valeriy Krylko

    Canada has repeatedly imposed sanctions packages on Russia, both before and after the special military operation (SMO) began. Canada’s recent seizure of a Russian an-124 cargo plane, which had been delivering COVID supplies when it was grounded in February 2022 at Pearson Airport (it was forced to pay a fee for every minute, despite being trapped there), is another sanction among many others.

    This is not surprising, as Canada and the UK obediently follow Washington’s policies. Canada has a large Ukrainian diaspora, including descendants of the Nazi SS Division Galicia, many of whom actively support Zelensky’s regime. Moreover, Chrystia Freeland, the deputy prime minister of Canada and the recent Minister of Foreign Affairs, is the maternal granddaughter of Mikhailo Khomyak, who during the Second World War worked as the editor of the Nazi newspaper “Krakovskie vesti” in Nazi-occupied Poland. The newspaper glorified the Third Reich and justified the extermination of the Jews. According to the media, Chomiak worked under the organizer of the Holocaust on Polish soil, the governor-general of the executioner Hans Frank. Freeland has honoured Chomiak and refused to condemn him. So who orders the Canadian anti-Russian sanctions is a rhetorical question. Another thing is, do they actually work?

    The regime of anti-Russian sanctions after Russia’s annexation of Crimea has been in place in Canada since 2014, and these sanctions were periodically tightened until the SMO began in February 2022. However, for example, in March 2021, Ivan Timofeev, program director of the Russian Council on Foreign Affairs (now director general of RIAC), stated that “Canada’s new sanctions against Russia over Crimea are harmless for the Russian economy. At the time, he assessed these sanctions as “a political irritant for Russian-Canadian relations.”  Timofeev explained that “these measures will not change anything and in general they can be considered symbolic. The gesture is harmless, but unpleasant.”

    Although these sanctions were strengthened by Canada after the SMO began, in September 2022, Canadian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland  said that anti-Russian sanctions were negatively affecting Canada’s own economy. 

    “Yes, the sanctions regime is having an impact and it’s affecting Canadians,” Freeland said. According to her, sanctions are affecting Europe much more seriously than Canada. As for the Russian fertilizer ban and the prospects for lifting it, Freeland said, “we have to look at the specifics of what we’re doing to help and assist our agricultural producers.

    In February 2023, Stephane Bergeron, Canadian Member of Parliament (MP) and vice-chairman of the Canadian parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, said that some of Canada’s economic sanctions against Russia were counterproductive and should be reconsidered:

    “Canada is one of the few, if not the only country that has imposed sanctions on grains and seeds shipped from Russia. As a result, our agricultural producers are at a disadvantage, while Russian goods are much more productive and profitable in international markets. This is utter stupidity!” 

    Bergeron demanded that the committee reconsider the sanctions against Russia so that they would not harm Canada.

    During the same month, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Canadian House of Commons, apparently doubting the effectiveness of the anti-Russian sanctions, demanded that the government regularly report to Parliament on how effective the mechanism of sanctions imposed on Russia was. However, MPs have heard from experts and the Ukrainian ambassador to Canada, that it is unclear whether the sanctions are really having an impact and about the extent to which Russian oligarchs are circumventing the restrictions.

    Ottawa also imposed another package of anti-Russian sanctions that month. At that time, 129 individuals and 63 organizations were blacklisted, including Russian deputy prime ministers, ministers, other members of the Russian presidential administration, along with Soviet cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova and Svetlana Savitskaya. A number of power and security agencies were subject to restrictions. In addition, Canadian authorities banned exports to Russia of certain chemicals used in the production of electronics.

    At the same time, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that the new sanctions against Russia, imposed by the U.S. administration and the Canadian government subordinate to Washington, had no prospects and were as thoughtless as the Western demands for “strategic defeat of Moscow. In her view, the Canadian authorities, in order to serve the U.S., have “overdone the plan” of aggressive and senseless Russophobia. These comments came just after Canada imposed sanctions against world-renowned hockey player Vyacheslav Tretiak and female cosmonauts Tereshkova and Savitskaya.

    On February 25, 2023, Senator Alexander Bashkin of Russia’s Federation Council Committee on Constitutional Legislation and Nation Building, said that Canada’s new sanctions against Russia have no effect and are evidence of powerless rage: “They (sanctions) have become so numerous and incomprehensible that everyone has stopped paying attention to them. There is no commentary on these sanctions. Because it makes sense to comment on things that have some impact on people, on life, on industries – but this has nothing: it is evidence of a powerless rage that sanctions do not work, do not help.” 

    Bashkin noted that Canada is very far from Russia and even the pre-sanctions level of relations with it was insignificant. “Next time they will impose sanctions on Korney Chukovsky, and then on sterile bandages in Russian pharmacies,” the parliamentarian added.

    Bashkin stressed that the Western countries themselves have chosen such a path, “it is their idea, it is their economic experiment, it is their, one might say, evolutionary experiment.

    “So the Western world is experimenting on its economy, on its citizens, on its voters. The time will come, and their voters will evaluate these idiotic actions,” he concluded.

    On March 10, 2023, Ottawa imposed an embargo on aluminum and steel supplies from Russia.  now forbidden to import raw aluminum and finished aluminum products, iron, semi-finished and finished steel products into Canada. The updated list of sanctions against Moscow also includes materials for the construction of railway and tramway tracks and for rolled pipes.

    However, Moscow’s reaction to these sanctions is conveyed quite characteristically in commentary by economist and political scientist Alexander Dudchak:

    “Of course, when traditional economic ties are interrupted, this does not make anyone better off. On the other hand, what do we lose? Foreign currency proceeds that we can hardly spend? But we keep the resources, and they keep their banknotes. Who has a better situation in this regard?”

    Dudchak explained that Canada faces imminent deficits and rising steel and aluminum prices. In such a discomforting environment, Russia needs to quickly reorient itself to new markets.

    “Now there are resources for development within the country, for industries that need these raw materials. In addition to finding new markets, we need to adapt this resource, which did not find a place in Western markets, inside the country. Under these conditions, the state could take on additional responsibilities and create industries whose aim would not be private profit, but the realization of goals and objectives in the interests of the state and the population of the country. If you approach it from this point of view, it’s a win-win situation,” Dudchak said.

    According to the Russian Ministry of Industry, Canada imported $208 million (USD) worth of steel products from Russia and $44 million worth of Russian aluminum in 2021. In 2022, respectively, $79 million and $16 million. The Industry Association of Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, which includes 2,500 companies from across the country, noted that Russia ranked 21st for steel imports to Canada and 22nd for aluminum. Not surprisingly, William Pellerin, a lawyer with the international trade company McMillan, stated that the commercial consequences of this ban would be “very modest.” At the same time, Russian Ambassador to Canada Oleg Stepanov said that for his country, Canada “has never been a significant market for aluminum and steel”.

    It was roughly the same with Canada’s total ban on imports of Russian energy resources. This was an even more symbolic measure, since according to various estimates Canada imported no more than three per cent of its oil products from Russia.

    Russia’s retaliatory counter-sanctions, on the other hand, did not affect Canada in a symbolic way. For example, the closure of Russian airspace seriously affected Canadian airlines. Because of the need to fly around Russia, Canadian carriers have faced an increase in flight times and fuel costs, which has led to a significant increase in ticket prices for passengers.
    “The optimal flight route between Canada and Southeast Asia and everything in between involves flying through part of Russia’s airspace,” acknowledged former Air Canada chief operating officer Duncan Dee. According to analyst Helen Becker, for North American airlines, “it’s definitely a problem.”

    Cirium data shows that the cost of an Air Canada one-way ticket from Vancouver to Hong Kong rose 41 per cent from January 2019 to January 2023, and from Toronto to Delhi rose 47 per cent. At the same time, the average cost of a flight from Vancouver to Hong Kong during the same period decreased by 22 per cent and from Toronto to Delhi increased by 25 per cent. These routes are used by carriers that include China Airlines, Cathay Pacific and Air India, all of which are not banned from using Russian airspace and have lower flight costs.

    Ross Eimer, a former pilot and CEO of Aero Consulting Experts, noted that this situation puts Air Canada and other banned airlines “at a competitive disadvantage.”

    According to Air Canada spokesman Peter Fitzpatrick, many of the airline’s routes to Asia, India and the Middle East have been “partially changed,” and some, such as Vancouver-Delhi, have been suspended because of Russian measures.

    However, the purpose of Canadian sanctions is not even assistance to the Zelensky regime in Ukraine, but “regime change” in Moscow. Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly stated this in the spring. Thus, to please the United States and Canadian descendants of the Nazi SS and the nationalist-Banderites, the Canadian government declared its goal to forcibly change the government in Moscow. Canada only hurts its people in the process.

    Editor’s note:  The Canada Files is the country’s only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We’ve provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support. 
    Please consider setting up a monthly or annual donation through Donorbox.

    Travis Ross is a teacher based in Montreal, Québec. He is also the co-editor of the Canada-Haiti Information Project at canada-haiti.ca . Travis has written for Haiti Liberté, Black Agenda Report, TruthOut, and rabble.ca. He can be reached on Twitter.

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    This post was originally published on Articles – The Canada Files.

  • This is the latest in a chain of wrecks in #Greece and Europe that could have been prevented 💔


    This content originally appeared on Amnesty International and was authored by Amnesty International.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Not just ‘techy AI regulation’: EU rules to hit economy-wide

    A landmark step in the world’s first law governing the use of artificial intelligence in Europe has been welcomed by experts, who say the upcoming law will apply widely and help put human rights and transparency back into development and use. A similar approach in Australia would need to be tailored and must start by…

    The post Not just ‘techy AI regulation’: EU rules to hit economy-wide appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • Landmark AI rules take major step forward in EU

    World-first artificial intelligence laws have cleared a major hurdle in Europe, with lawmakers agreeing to draft rules that could serve as a model for other countries grappling with the rapid rise of generative AI. As consultations on similar regulations get underway in Australia, the European Parliament on Wednesday night agreed to the text of the…

    The post Landmark AI rules take major step forward in EU appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • ‘All pregnant women are in danger’: protests in Poland after expectant mother dies in hospital

    Ombudsman rules that hospital in Nowy Targ failed to tell Dorota Lalik, 33, that her life was in danger and could be saved by an abortion

    “Stop killing us,” protesters across Poland chanted this evening, demanding the legalisation of abortion, after reports reached the media of a pregnant woman’s death in a hospital in May.

    On Monday, Poland’s patients’ rights ombudsman, Bartłomiej Chmielowiec, said that the John Paul II hospital should have told 33-year-old Dorota Lalik that her life could be saved through an abortion. The hospital violated her rights by withholding the information, the ombudsman ruled.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.