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Category: Militarism

  • Militaries and arms companies can reduce emissions, but you can’t greenwash an industry of mass murder and destruction

    The Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) could soon become a corporate partner with one of the world’s leading professional bodies for sustainability. As previously reported, the Canary received a tip off that the UK Ministry of Defence-sponsored nuclear weapons company is seeking membership with the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA).

    The thing is, arms companies, and militaries more broadly, can’t greenwash away their industry’s mass murder. The idea of a “green military” is a farcical oxymoron. How many green initiatives add up to the countless people killed by the military industrial complex? Trick question – they never could.

    AWE is set to join a who’s who of corporate criminals. IEMA’s partner directory hosts a compendium of some of the worst companies for polluting the planet, violating human rights, and risking the safety of workers en masse.

    It’s also no surprise then that AWE wouldn’t be the first arms manufacturer to receive membership. IEMA includes military and aerospace companies BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, and Babcock Group in its corporate partner directory. Additionally, a range of contractors and outsourcing businesses which offer services to defence projects also hold membership.

    That some of the biggest companies – profiteering off of a trade in killing people – have a corporate badge of sustainability, epitomises everything that’s wrong with green capitalism. Crucially, it brings the harms of the military-industrial-complex – on both people and the planet – into sharp relief.

    Yet what it all comes down to is: this is an industry that simply should not exist. No amount of green flourishes or reductions in carbon emissions can take away from this fact. Nor is it possible to extricate the climate and biodiversity crises from their inherent origin in colonial fossil fuel capitalism.

    It’s about more than emissions

    Even so, in early July, Reuters reported on a new campaign to hold world militaries accountable for their greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Environmental groups Tipping Point North South and the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS) have teamed up with scientists from multiple UK universities. The coalition is pushing for greater transparency and reporting of military GHGs.

    One 2019 study estimated that if the US military was a country, its fuel usage alone would place it ahead of 140 other nations for carbon emissions. However, information on the true scale of the US’s GHG emissions is patchy. CEOBS has highlighted that for many countries, there is a “military emissions gap”. This refers to a nation’s omission in the reporting of their military’s GHG output.

    As a result, militaries around the world have evaded scrutiny on their greenhouse gas emissions. Highlighting the inordinate scale of their climate-wrecking fossil fuel consumption is therefore laudable work.

    But it misses the bigger picture. Calling for militaries and arms companies to ‘green’ and decarbonise will simply offer a new layer of vindication for an industry that deals in death and devastation. In other words, it is an exercise in greenwashing for a murderous and ecocidal industry.

    Decarbonising doesn’t deal with the environmental aftermath of heavy artillery. Nor does it address the unjust devastation of communities. Moreover, the environmental pollution and harms of war can continue to hurt marginalised people for years after. There can be nothing ‘sustainable’ about this industry – nor should we try to sustain it in a world where we avert the worst climate futures.

    Carbon neutral isn’t morally neutral

    For its six cents, AWE has promoted its efforts to reduce its carbon footprint and hit “net zero”. Setting aside the issues with “net zero” as a concept, this only covers its scope 1 and 2 emissions. These are GHGs just from its operations – not, for example, from emissions generated by its end products. Of course, like most corporations and governments across the globe it’s also enamoured with the likely too little, too late 2050 target.

    Conversely, some military establishments have set more ambitious targets. Yet, this is still greenwashing for an unconscionable industry. For instance, in 2021 the UK’s RAF announced plans to reduce its carbon emissions. It pledged to meet “net zero” by 2040. This is a decade earlier than the UK’s legal countrywide climate target. It primarily plans to achieve this through converting its air fleet to greener fuels. This involves a mixture of ethanol, waste oil-based sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), and synthetic fuels for its aircraft.

    In effect then, ‘green’ militaries will swap out a fossil fuel-powered fighter jet with a death plane that flies on vegetable juice or dead animal fat, and pat themselves on the back for being carbon neutral. Meanwhile, that plane will continue to rain down destruction on already marginalised people in the Global South. Naturally, arms manufacturers will capitalise on the opportunity to devise these greener munitions of mass murder and misery.

    Climate plans that consolidate power

    Author Amitav Ghosh has argued that climate denialism is no longer the main barrier to climate action. In his book The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, he suggests that military nations have long accepted the scientific basis of the climate crisis. However, what they do not welcome is the necessary relinquishment of their geopolitical influence and monetary power. In short, they make a political choice to not envisage an end to the era of fossil fuels.

    Moreover, Ghosh has pointed out that extreme climate-exacerbated weather disasters have become a new source of militarisation. Everything from the military intrusion into disaster relief, to the racist borderisation of many aspects of society are, in effect, climate plans. They just happen to be climate strategies that maintain the military’s role in upholding colonial and capitalist dynamics of power.

    The militarised border policies of fortress Europe and the racist racist policing of Black and Brown communities throughout the UK are part and parcel of the right-wing response to an intensifying climate crisis. As climate-fuelled disasters force people from their homes in search of safety, military nations like the UK have doubled down on sickening immigration policies. This is all intentional.

    As Ghosh succinctly put:

    The job of the world’s dominant military establishments is precisely to defend the most important drivers of climate change—the carbon economy and the systems of extraction, production, and consumption that it supports. Nor can these establishments be expected to address the unseen drivers of the planetary crisis, such as inequities of class, race, and geopolitical power: their very mission is to preserve the hierarchies that favour the status quo.

    It’s also no secret that world powers from the Global North have started wars for oil. To overlook this well-documented connection is to give the military-industrial-complex a free pass. Moreover, it also makes IEMA complicit in its crimes. Badging arms manufacturers and the UK’s Ministry of Defence with its corporate partnership pours fuel on the climate fire.

    And that’s the rap. Suiting up weapon-makers and warmongers in ostentatious displays of supposed sustainability – be it membership of leading environmental bodies, or grandiose pledges to convert entire munitions to greener technologies – cannot hide one key fact: so long as the military-industrial-complex continues to exist, so too will the systems of economic dominance and ecological ruin destroying the planet. There can be no climate justice without its abolition.

    Feature image via Sgt Pete Mobbs/Wikimedia, resized and cropped to 1910 by 1000, licensed under OGL v1.0

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Ukraine justifies massive nukes and Western ‘way of war’ spending increase, military claims

    Ukraine highlights the need for nuclear weapons and affirms the ‘western way of war’, a new report claims. This report comes as the Tories announced a £6bn hike in nuclear warhead spending over the next six years.

    But, critics are not having it. Anti-war leaders said the decision was counter to peace and social justice, and would not deliver security or stability in any meaningful sense.

    This announcement of the report was made by defence secretary Ben Wallace, who is due to retire. But a brief look at the rogue’s gallery of Tories touted to replace him bodes poorly for real peace and stability.

    Contested world

    A new command paper outlines the UK view on war and nuclear weapons. Titled “Defence’s response to a more contested and volatile world”, the paper claims:

    The war in Ukraine highlights the importance of the credibility of our capabilities, both conventional and nuclear, on the earth or in space or cyberspace, to deter threats against us. It affirms the modern western way of warfare…

    However, it also indicated that the Tories would spend an extra £6bn over six years on the UK’s so-called nuclear deterrent. Outlining the command paper in parliament on 18 July, Wallace said Ukraine had taught new lessons to the West:

    As Defence Secretary it is important to import the lessons learned from the conflict to our own forces. While I wish such lessons were generated in a different way, the conflict has become an incubator of new ways of war.

    Crumbling services

    However, critics of UK militarism were having none of it. They expressed shock that once again the magic money tree had turned up billions for war, while the country is crumbling. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s (CND’s) Kate Hudson pointed to collapsing services here at home. She said the new hike would deny:

    crumbling public services vital funds while spending billions of pounds on maintaining and investing in these weapons of mass destruction.

    She added:

    A week ago, the Prime Minister was announcing a below-inflation pay rise for public-sector workers, insisting it was their best and final offer.

    Now, the Defence Secretary is finding billions of pounds of new money for nuclear weapons seemingly without any pushback.

    Hospitals not nuclear weapons

    Stop the War Coalition’s Lindsey German said it was typical of the current Tory regime to deny wages while splashing vast amounts on war. She added that the increase “does nothing to make the world a safer space”.

    German called for real security for the population:

    If we want security it should start with a decent housing, health and education spending – not weapons of mass destruction.

    Wallace has also announced he will retire ahead of the next cabinet reshuffle. Favourites to replace him include foreign secretary James Cleverly, security minister Tom Tugendhat, and Commons leader Penny Mordaunt.

    What unites them is that they have all, like Wallace, spent time in military uniform: Tugendhat and Cleverly as army officers and Mordaunt with a brief stint as a naval reservist.

    This increasing militarisation of democracy should concern us all. It’s true, ex-military MPs might have insights into service life. But the lesson of the recent batch of veterans-turned-politicians is that if you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

    And in a contested, nuclear weapon-filled world, that mindset carries its own dangers.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/bodgerbrooks, cropped to 1910 x 1000, licenced under CC BY 2.0.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Artists pull out of Latitude Festival over its sponsorship from apartheid-supporting Barclays

    The Latitude Festival announced Barclaycard as its headline sponsor this year. A quick browse of its website shows the company’s name splattered everywhere. However, some artists due to perform at the festival are not having it – and have cancelled their appearances. This is because Barclays itself is a serial abuser of people and planet – not least, indirectly supporting apartheid Israel in its violent colonialism against the Palestinian people.

    Barclays: propping up apartheid Israel

    Barclays is a prominent funder of arms companies which profit from Israel’s occupation of Palestine. As the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) said in a press release:

    Research published by Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Campaign Against Arms Trade, and War on Want last year has identified that Barclays holds over £1 billion in shares and provides over £3 billion in loans and underwriting to 9 companies whose weapons, components, and military technology have been used in Israel’s armed violence against Palestinians. This year, over 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in military invasions, assassinations and bombing campaigns. Barclays has faced ongoing protests over these financial ties, with campaigners calling on the bank to ‘Stop Banking on Apartheid’.

    Moreover, since 2015 Barclays has financed more than $150 billion in fossil fuel extraction, making it the largest such financier in Europe. A range of climate justice groups have called on the bank to immediately end these ties.

    The Canary has documented Barclays many crimes against people and planet. From its support for fracking, to oil pipelines, via investing in union-busting companies, and the not-small matter of its former boss’s ties to child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein – Barclays is one of the most notorious corporations on the planet.

    However, Latitude Festival has seen fit to get Barclays to be its main sponsor. Other corporate partners this year include union-busting and deforestation-supporting Starbucks; palm oil ecocide-enablers Pepsi, and likely tax avoiders Bacardi.

    So, the How To Catch A Pig (HTCAP) collective has taken the decision to withdraw from the festival.

    How To Catch A Pig

    HTCAP is an artists, activists, and organisers collective, fronted by Liv Wynter. They are a trans and working class grassroots organiser and performer based in London. They create live art, sometimes alone but more often with bands and collectives. Wynter’s sellout night, HTCAP, is a celebration of creatives who also organise against the state with a focus on queer and trans performers.

    They spent 2022 touring stadiums with Queer House Party, playing Secret Garden Party, Boomtown, Wilderness, Latitude, and Sziget – and being banned from the Southbank Centre. They are currently in residence at the Museum of Homelessness.

    The collective holds nights across the country, focusing on political and social art, spoken word, and music. For example, in their current work with the Museum of Homelessness, they’ve organised a workshop for “riotstarters” on 28 July. Latitude would have been an important gig for HTCAP. However, it, and the 20 artists involved, have now pulled out due to Barclays’ involvement.

    Latitude: the moral compass appears to have malfunctioned

    Wynter said:

    HTCAP is a collective of activists and organisers as well as artists, and we are sad and angry that Latitude has decided to partner with Barclays for the next 5 years. We encourage all artists who are able to, to reconsider playing Latitude, and to commit to not working with Barclays, who finance major arms companies and fossil fuel companies and projects who invest in Israeli apartheid. As creatives we cannot be turn a blind eye to how our industry is used to legitimise and disguise these issues – we must speak up, speak out, and boycott!

    Director of PSC Ben Jamal said:

    We welcome the principled stance of artists withdrawing from Latitude over Barclays sponsorship of the festival. This adds to the body of pressure being applied to Barclays to end its support for Israel’s apartheid regime, and its financing of the climate crisis.

    Allegedly, Latitude used to have a reputation for, to quote the website Music Gateway:

    its commitment to the environment and sustainability. They launched initiatives, such as the Love Thy Planet campaign, to promote eco-friendly practices and raise awareness about environmental issues.

    You could say it was also always a bit left wing – not afraid to feature political and social artists (like HTCAP). However, the festival is actually run by US events monolith Live Nation’s UK arm. Little wonder, then, that Barclays is actually centre stage.

    So, clearly, money talks – and Latitude’s organisers happily teaming up with Barclays, as well as the rest of the corporates on its partner roster, says a lot their own moral compass – or distinct lack of it.

    Featured image via Latitude Festival – YouTube

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Nuclear weapons firm AWE latest corporate criminal to seek membership of prominent sustainability body

    The UK’s main manufacturer of nuclear warheads could soon become a corporate partner to a leading global sustainability organisation. The Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) is allegedly seeking membership of the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA).

    IEMA is a UK-based not-for-profit that offers environmental and sustainability accreditation, membership, and training to individuals and businesses. It claims to be:

    the professional organisation at the centre of the sustainability agenda, connecting business and individuals across industries, sectors and borders.

    The global professional body has over 20,000 individual members. It also partners with over 300 organisations.

    An anonymous source recently approached the Canary with information suggesting that the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) will soon join its large corporate members.

    The AWE maintains and manufactures the UK’s nuclear warheads. It is also responsible for the UK’s Continuous At Sea Deterrence (CASD). The Ministry of Defence sponsors the company’s work.

    AWE to become a corporate partner

    IEMA offers companies the opportunity to apply for affiliation. Once a member, the company will be listed on its corporate partner directory.

    In its corporate partnership guide, it states that:

    IEMA Partnership Programmes can position your organisation as forward-thinking, sustainable and competitive.

    Further to this, it details a range of services that IEMA provides to showcase the corporate partner’s sustainability work. For example, the organisation supports corporate members to write posts for the IEMA blog, which it promotes on its social media channels. The guide details a range of cushy networking benefits for its corporate clientele. IEMA has designed these to help businesses “expand” their reach.

    The Canary’s anonymous source has indicated that nuclear weapons firm AWE will soon join this programme.

    Moreover, previous collaboration between IEMA and the AWE could corroborate this. In July 2014, IEMA hosted an employer forum “made up of organisations that employ significant numbers of IEMA members”.

    A majority of the companies it listed can be found in its current corporate partner directory. Notably, it stated that representatives from AWE participated in the forum.

    In addition, companies with links to AWE already hold membership. For example, two of AWE’s construction contractors, Costain and Balfour Beatty, can also be found in the registry.

    AWE would join the ranks of over 200 large companies that have acquired IEMA membership. Of course, it’s just the latest in IEMA’s long list of partners who are corporate criminals.

    Extractive and destructive industry partners

    Given its purported sustainability remit, partnering with some of the world’s most environmentally destructive companies would appear deeply hypocritical. Yet time and again, IEMA has done exactly that. Planet-wrecking multinationals and firms developing ecocidal projects grace the IEMA corporate partner hall of infamy

    For instance, Nestlé, of multiple pollution and human rights violation notoriety, boasts inclusion on the list. HS2 and two of its key contractors, Skanska and Costain, are also corporate partners – the latter incidentally is also a construction company for AWE.

    As the Canary has consistently reported, HS2 is an environmental and ecological disaster.

    If you were looking to build a network of environment and sustainability practitioners, these companies would be the last place you’d look. Invariably, IEMA hasn’t been discerning in its choice of large corporate partners.

    Sustainable fossil fuel companies?

    Of course, standout mention goes to prolific polluter and climate criminal BP.

    By the time IEMA had begun publicising its corporate partners on its website in 2015, BP was already on the list. Evidently, causing one of the largest environmental disasters in history is no barrier to IEMA membership.

    Moreover, in the US BP tops the list of parent companies that have committed environmental offences. Violation Tracker records show that the company has 279 environment-related offences to its name, totaling over $34bn in penalties. This also doesn’t seem to matter to IEMA.

    It begs the question: what exactly precludes a company of partnership? If it isn’t decades worth of climate denial, delay, and environmental devastation, what would it take to drop them from the list?

    In February, BP also rowed back on its decarbonisation commitments. Nonetheless, IEMA maintains the oil giant as a corporate partner.

    Needless to say, BP has benefitted from this membership. In BP’s 2021 sustainability report, the company highlighted its collaboration on a biodiversity initiative with IEMA and the International Chamber of Commerce UK.

    Alongside other big polluters, BP was an early proponent of biodiversity offset schemes that multiple studies have shown to be a sham. For example, two BP forest carbon programmes in California have generated 24m worthless carbon credits. Unsurprisingly, fossil fuel majors like BP have used these false climate solutions to maintain their oil and gas operations.

    Despite all this, somehow BP still fits the sustainability bill. In early July, BP’s token solar offshoot boasted an increase in biodiversity around its UK solar sites. The independent auditor used the IEMA’s biodiversity principles to assess ten BP solar farms. In essence, nevermind the many ecocidal projects it operates accelerating climate chaos – because IEMA attests to its biodiversity credentials.

    No stranger to greenwashing

    Consequently, without what seems like a shred of irony, IEMA has hosted multiple webinars on ‘The associated risk to businesses from Greenwashing’. In one article on its blog, it even helpfully highlighted the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition which states that greenwash is:

    disinformation disseminated by an organisation so as to present an environmentally responsible public image.

    Moreover, in a 2012 blog, IEMA wrote about BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster. Notably, the post focused on the reputational ‘cost’ to the company and others from large-scale environmental pollution incidents:

    The problem for these companies, and others involved in high-profile environmentally and socially damaging incidents, is that it’s not only about money… its tarnished corporate reputation will take much longer to repair.

    Significantly, the blog perhaps gets to the heart of what IEMA means when it refers to ‘sustainability’. It stated that:

    Reputation is the ultimate indication of corporate sustainability.

    In other words, it seems IEMA is primarily concerned with a company’s survival in the face of reputational ruin. Reinforcing this, CEO Sarah Mukherjee opined in the introduction to the corporate partner guide that sustainability will:

    make your business more resilient, more competitive and better prepared for what’s to come, both in terms of changes in legislation and our rapidly changing climate.

    A who’s who of corporate criminals

    Ostensibly, it all suggests that IEMA’s priority in terms of ‘sustainability’ is to shield corporations from business risks and reputational damage. Naturally, this tracks with IEMA’s partnerships through other notable corporations that hold chequered histories on human rights.

    IEMA has welcomed morally contentious companies like Serco to its registry. As the Canary has previously reported, the British multinational has profiteered off a litany of corporate failures and reprehensible misdeeds. It almost goes without saying that it rakes in profits through industries harming some of the most marginalised groups.

    For example, the outsourcing company operates the Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre, where detainees have repeatedly reported human rights abuses.

    IEMA also already features arms companies like BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce among its corporate partners. Corporations like Balfour Beatty (also an AWE contractor), that are swimming in workers’ safety and rights violations, pepper the list.

    A nuclear weapons company will be right at home. Moreso given its history of alleged union-busting activities and multiple fines for health and safety offences. As recently as 6 July, a worker died in a serious incident at an AWE nuclear site in Reading.

    There simply doesn’t appear to be any stringent criteria for partnership. In fact, as far as the Canary could establish, there is no specific criteria at all. It’s the Elon Musk Twitter verification scheme equivalent for climate criminals. Pay to become a partner, and wherever you are on your “sustainability journey”, welcome to the club.

    Public relations for polluters?

    The Canary approached IEMA for comment. In response to the allegations, the organisation replied that:

    IEMA, the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment, is a not-for-profit professional membership body representing over 20,000 individuals and 300 organisations working, studying or interested in the environment and sustainability sector. We provide resources, tools, research and knowledge and offer training and qualifications to meet the real-world needs of our members.

    We work with our corporate partners, through their individual members, to develop the environmental awareness and skills of their workforce and to enhance their internal capability to address the sustainability challenges they face. Whilst we don’t comment on individual cases, we believe that organisations making the commitment to upskill their workforces and embedding the professional best practices that IEMA develops can only be a positive step.

    As an organisation, we are here to provide support, skills, training and resources. Environmental and sustainability challenges are ultimately pan-economy, so we believe that it is imperative to work with organisations of all shapes and sizes to address them.

    Naturally, working “with organisations of all shapes and sizes” includes partnering with corporate criminals and nature desecrators alike. Referring to our finding that it doesn’t stipulate any stringent criteria for membership, IEMA also said that:

    We have a code of practice for our corporate members which stipulates all members must adhere to a professional code of conduct, available to read here IEMA – Code of conduct. We believe that in order to transition to a green economy, everyone must play their part.

    This appears to be little more than a standard workplace code of conduct for employees. It calls for members to “apply high ethical standards” and “protect & enhance the environment”. Ironic given the inethical, environmentally destructive behaviour and activities of the corporate partners it hosts in its directory.

    Better yet, to the Canary’s accusations of greenwashing, the not-for-profit stated:

    Corporate members receive IEMA core benefits and any articles they submit are subject to an editorial process. Using the IEMA corporate partner logo is recognition that they are aligned to IEMA’s professional standards, training of staff and code of conduct.

    IEMA is little more than a glorified public relations firm, badged with not-for-profit status and peddling in corporate greenwashing. It talks big on ‘sustainability’ but partners with some of the planet’s most heinous climate and environment offenders. Accordingly, you don’t need morals to be sustainable capitalists. In fact, you don’t even need to be sustainable.

    Feature image via GetArchive/U.S. Navy, resized and cropped to 1910 by 1000, image in the public domain. 

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Looking to Sell Weapons, Military Contractors Push Arms Race With China

    Manufacturing in China has long supported the relatively high standard of living of millions of U.S. residents while helping U.S. corporations profit handsomely. Apple, Tesla, General Motors, Nike, Texas Instruments and Qualcomm have significant manufacturing operations in China. Meanwhile the Chinese government invests in U.S. Treasury and government agency bonds, having purchased about a…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • How would Canadians perceive Russian troops on its border?

    The Canadian government’s plan to double its semipermanent military force on Russia’s border ratchets up tensions that should be reduced. It highlights the West’s betrayal of promises made to Soviet officials and Canada’s addiction to stationing troops in Europe.

    On Monday Justin Trudeau announced that Canada will ramp up its military presence in Latvia. The government will add about 1,200 military personnel to the nearly 1,000 Canadians already deployed on Russia’s border. As part of the announcement Trudeau committed $2.6 billion over three years to expand Latvia-focused Operation REASSURANCE. “Canada will also procure and pre-position critical weapon systems, enablers, supplies and support intelligence, cyber, and space activities”, the prime minister said in a statement. Last month Ottawa announced the deployment of 15 Leopard 2 battle tanks to Latvia.

    In 2017 Canada took charge of one of four Eastern European NATO battle groups. In June 2021 Canada opened a $19 million headquarters in Latvia and by the end of the current commitment Canadian Forces will have been stationed there for a decade.

    The semi-permanent stationing of Canadian forces on Russia’s border represents a flagrant violation of the promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev at the end of the Cold War. In 1990 the Soviet/Russian leader agreed not to obstruct German reunification, to withdraw tens of thousands of troops from the east and for the new Germany to be part of NATO in return for assurances that the alliance wouldn’t expand “one inch eastward”. A 1990 Ottawa Citizen wire article quoted West Germany’s foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, saying, “the West is agreed that with a unification of Germany, there will not be any eastward extension of NATO”, which was ostensibly a defence arrangement against the Soviet Union.

    As I’ve detailed, Ottawa led the charge for NATO expansion despite the promises made to Gorbachev. Soon after taking office in 1993 Prime Minister Jean Chretien began promoting Poland’s adhesion to NATO and Ottawa has led the push to double the size of the alliance by expanding into eastern and northern Europe. Ottawa has also promoted Ukraine’s adhesion to the alliance and has trained its military to be interoperable with NATO.

    Alongside ending the stated objective for NATO, the dissolution of the Soviet Union undercut Canada’s rationale for stationing troops in Europe. From the early 1950s to 1990s over one hundred thousand Canadian troops rotated through bases in France and Germany. In the late 1960s the Royal Canadian Air Force had over 250 US atomic bombs at its disposal in Europe.

    Incredibly, the US-led war in Korea was the initial justification for stationing Canadian troops in Europe (and rearming the colonial powers as they suppressed independence movements with Canadian NATO mutual assistance program weaponry). According to defence minister Brooke Claxton, “NATO owes the fact that it was built-up to the Communist aggression in Korea … To meet the challenge of Korea required a buildup of our forces comparable to what was needed to meet our commitments to Europe.” As per the Washington/Ottawa storyline, the North Korean leadership’s effort to unite the country under its direction in mid 1950 was part of a worldwide communist conspiracy. Who controlled the distant, impoverished, country was of limited import to most North Americans so US/Canadian decision makers claimed Moscow stoked the conflict in Korea to divert attention from its plan to invade Western Europe. In response, thousands of Canadian troops were dispatched to France and Germany in 1951. They would remain in Europe until 1993.

    Of course, Canada previously sent large numbers of troops to Europe during World War I and II. Between 1917 and 1920 six thousand Canadian troops invaded Russia. About 600 Canadians fought in Murmansk and Archangel where the British used chemical agent diphenylchloroarsine, which causes uncontrollable coughing and individuals to vomit blood.

    Decades earlier Canadians fought the Russians. Much of the British garrison in Canada left for Crimea during the 1853-56 war and many Canadians also volunteered for British units fighting Russia. In “How the Crimean War of 1853 helped shape the Canada of today” historian C.P. Champion describes how the naval base on Vancouver Island was greatly expanded in response to the war. He also quotes historian John Castell Hopkins explaining that the Militia Act of 1855, which formed the basis for today’s army, was “a result of the feeling aroused by the Crimean War.”

    Canada has a history of belligerence towards Russia. Given that, this country stationing its troops near Russia’s border is perceived as threatening by Moscow. Remember that Russia shipping some missiles to Cuba resulted in an American naval blockade and almost caused a nuclear holocaust in the early 1960s.

    A nation committed to peace must try to understand the viewpoint of potential adversaries. A nation planning war increases tension and prolongs every military standoff. Exactly the way Canada has acted towards Russia for many decades.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Daniel Ellsberg is Lauded in Death by the Same Media that Lets Assange Rot in Jail

    Rightly, there’s been an outpouring of tributes to Daniel Ellsberg following the announcement of his death last Friday, aged 92. His leaking of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 revealed that Washington officials had systematically lied for decades about US military conduct in Vietnam.

    The disclosure of 7,000 pages of documents, and subsequent legal battles to stop further publication by the New York Times and Washington Post, helped to bring the war to a close a few years later.

    As an adviser to US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara in the 1960s, Ellsberg had seen first-hand the Pentagon’s brutal military operations that caused mass civilian casualties. Entire villages had been burned, while captured Vietnamese were tortured or executed. Deceptively, the US referred to these as “pacification programmes”.

    But most of those today loudly hailing Ellsberg as an “American hero” have been far more reluctant to champion the Ellsberg of our times: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

    For years, Assange has been rotting in a London high-security prison while the Biden administration seeks his extradition on charges that ludicrously equate his publication of the Afghan and Iraq war logs – a modern Pentagon Papers – with “espionage”.

    Like Ellsberg, Assange exposed the way western states had been systematically lying while they perpetrated war crimes. Like Ellsberg, he was fraudulently labelled a threat to national security and charged with espionage. Like Ellsberg, if found guilty, he faces more than 100 years in jail. Like Ellsberg, Assange has learned that the US Congress is unwilling to exercise its powers to curb governmental abuses.

    But unlike Ellsberg’s case, the courts have consistently sided with Assange’s persecutors, not with him for shining a light on state criminality. And, in a further contrast, the western media have stayed largely silent as the noose has tightened around Assange’s neck.

    The similarities in Assange’s and Ellsberg’s deeds – and the stark differences in outcomes – are hard to ignore. The very journalists and publications now extolling Ellsberg for his historic act of bravery have been enabling, if only through years of muteness, western capitals’ moves to demonise Assange for his contemporary act of heroism.

    Docile lapdogs

    The hypocrisy did not go unnoticed by Ellsberg. He was one of the noisiest defenders of Assange. So noisy, in fact, that most media outlets felt obliged in their obituaries to make reference to the fact, even if in passing.

    Ellsberg testified on Assange’s behalf at a London extradition hearing in 2020, observing that the pair’s actions were identical. That was not entirely right, however.

    Assange published classified documents passed to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning, just as the New York Times published the secrets handed to them by Ellsberg. Given that media freedoms are protected by the US First Amendment, whereas whistleblowing by an official is not, Assange’s treatment is even more perverse and abusive than Ellsberg’s.

    In contrast to his case, Ellsberg added, the WikiLeaks founder could never receive a fair hearing in the US. His trial has already been assigned to a court in the eastern district of Virginia, home to the US intelligence agencies.

    Late last year, as Assange’s prospects of extradition to the US increased, Ellsberg admitted that he had been secretly given a backup copy of the leaked Afghan and Iraq war logs, in case WikiLeaks was prevented from making public the details of US and UK criminality.

    Ellsberg pointed out that his possession of the documents made him equally culpable with Assange under the justice department’s draconian “espionage” charges. During a BBC interview, he demanded that he be indicted too.

    If the praise being lavished on Ellsberg in death demonstrates anything, it is the degree to which the self-professed watchdogs of western state power have been tamed over subsequent decades into being the most docile of lapdogs.

    In the Assange case, the courts and establishment media have clearly acted as adjuncts of power, not checks on it. And for that reason, if no other, western states are gaining greater and greater control over their citizenry in an age when mass digital surveillance is easier than ever.

    Spied on day and night

    For those reluctant to confer on Assange the praise being heaped on Ellsberg, it is worth remembering how similarly each was viewed by US officials in their respective eras.

    Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and then secretary of state, called Ellsberg the “most dangerous man in America”.

    Mike Pompeo, President Donald Trump’s director of the Central Intelligence Agency, declared Assange and WikiLeaks a “non-state, hostile intelligence service”. Pompeo’s CIA also secretly plotted ways to kidnap or assassinate Assange in London.

    Both Ellsberg and Assange were illegally surveilled by government agencies.

    In Ellsberg’s case, Nixon’s officials wiretapped his conversations and tried to dig up dirt by stealing files from his psychiatrist’s office. The same team carried out the Watergate break-in, famously exposed by the US media, that ultimately brought Nixon down.

    In Assange’s case, the CIA spied on him day and night after he was given political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, even violating his privileged conversations with his lawyers. Astonishingly, this law-breaking has barely been remarked on by the media, even though it should have been grounds alone for throwing out the extradition case against him.

    Nixon officials tried to rig Ellsberg’s trial by offering the judge in his hearings the directorship of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

    In Assange’s case, a series of judicial irregularities and apparent conflicts of interest have plagued the proceedings, again ignored by the establishment media.

    This month, High Court judge Jonathan Swift rejected what may amount to a last-ditch attempt by Assange’s legal team to halt his extradition. Swift’s previous career was as a government lawyer. Looking back on his time there, he noted that his “favourite clients were the security and intelligence agencies”.

    Above the law

    But if the modern White House is as hostile to transparency as its predecessors – and armed with more secret tools to surveil critics than ever before – the media and the courts are offering far less remedy than they did in Ellsberg’s time.

    Even the Obama administration understood the dangers of targeting Assange. His relationship to Manning was no different from the New York Times’ to Ellsberg. Each publicised state wrongdoing after classified documents were divulged to them by a disenchanted official.

    Prosecuting Assange was seen as setting a precedent that could ensnare any publisher or media outlet that made public state secrets, however egregious the crimes being exposed.

    For that reason, Obama went full guns blazing against whistleblowers, locking up more of them than all his predecessors combined. Whistleblowers were denied any right to claim a public-interest defence. State secrecy was sacrosanct, even when it was being abused to shield evidence of criminality from public view.

    Asked whether Obama would have pursued him through the courts, as Nixon did, Ellsberg answered: “I’m sure that President Obama would have sought a life sentence in my case.”

    It took a reckless Trump administration to go further, casting aside the long-standing legal distinction between an official who leaks classified documents in violation of their employment contract, and a publisher-journalist who exposes those documents in accordance with their duty to hold the powerful to account.

    Now Biden has chosen to follow Trump’s lead by continuing Assange’s show trial. The new presumption is that it is illegal for anyone – state official, media outlet, ordinary citizen – to disclose criminal activity by an all-powerful state.

    In Assange’s case, the White House is openly manoeuvring to win recognition for itself as officially above the law.

    Disappeared from view

    In the circumstances, one might have assumed that the courts and media would be rallying to uphold basic democratic rights, such as a free press, and impose accountability on state officials shown to have broken the law.

    In the 1970s, however imperfectly, the US media gradually unravelled the threads of the Watergate scandal till they exposed the unconstitutional behaviour of the Nixon administration. At the same time, the liberal press rallied behind Ellsberg, making common cause with him in a fight to hold the executive branch to account.

    Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, charged Ellsberg with espionage and accused the New York Times of the same. Claiming the paper had undermined national security, he threatened it with ruinous legal action. The Times ignored the threats and carried on publishing, forcing the justice department to obtain an injunction.

    The courts, meanwhile, took the side of both Ellsberg and the media in their legal battles. In 1973, the federal court in Los Angeles threw out the case against Ellsberg before it could be put to a jury, accusing the government of gross misconduct and illegal evidence gathering against him.

    Meanwhile, the Supreme Court prioritised freedom of the press, denying the government prior restraint. Ultimately, these cases and others forced Nixon from office in disgrace.

    The contrast with Assange’s treatment by the media and the courts could not be starker.

    The media, even “liberal” outlets he worked with on the Afghan and Iraq logs, including the New York Times and the Guardian, have struggled to show even the most rudimentary kind of solidarity, preferring instead to distance themselves from him. They have largely conspired in US and UK efforts to suggest Assange is not a “proper journalist” and therefore does not deserve First Amendment protections.

    These media outlets have effectively partnered with Washington in suggesting that their collaboration with Assange in no way implicates them in his supposed “crimes”.

    As a result, the media has barely bothered to cover his hearings or explain how the courts have twisted themselves into knots by ignoring the most glaring legal obstacles to his extradition: such as the specific exclusion in the UK’s 2007 Extradition Treaty with the US of extraditions for political cases.

    Unlike Ellsberg, who became a cause celebre, Assange has been disappeared from public view by the states he exposed and largely forgotten by the media that should be championing his cause.

    Shortening Odds

    Ellsberg emerged from his court victory over the Pentagon Papers to argue: “The demystification and de-sanctification of the president has begun. It’s like the defrocking of the Wizard of Oz.”

    In this assessment, time has proved him sadly wrong, as he came to recognise.

    In recent months, Ellsberg had become an increasingly voluble critic of US conduct in the Ukraine war. He drew parallels with the lies told by four administrations – those of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson – to hide the extent of Washington’s involvement in Vietnam before the US went public with its ground war.

    Ellsberg warned that the US was waging a similarly undeclared war in Ukraine – a proxy one, using Ukrainians as cannon fodder – to  “weaken the Russians“.  As in Vietnam, the White House was gradually and secretly escalating US involvement.

    As also in Vietnam, western leaders were concealing the fact that the war had reached a stalemate, with the inevitable result that large numbers of Ukrainians and Russians were losing their lives in fruitless combat.

    He called former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s hidden, early role in stymying peace talks between Russia and Ukraine “a crime against humanity.”

    Referring to history repeating itself, he observed: “It’s an awakening that’s in many ways painful.”

    Most of all, Ellsberg feared that the West’s war machine – addicted to Cold War belligerence, obscured under the supposedly “defensive” umbrella of Nato – wanted once again to confront China.

    In 2021, as the Biden administration intensified its hostile posturing towards Beijing, Ellsberg revealed that back in 1958 Eisenhower’s officials had drawn up secret plans to attack China with nuclear weapons. That was during an earlier crisis over the Taiwan Strait.

    “At this point, I’m much more aware of… how little has changed in these critical aspects of the danger of nuclear war, and how limited the effectiveness has been to curtail what we’ve done,” he told an interviewer shortly before he died.

    What Ellsberg understood most keenly was the desperate need – if humanity was to survive – both for more whistleblowers to come forward to expose their states’ crimes, and for a tenacious, watchdog media to give their full backing.

    Watching the media abandon Assange to his persecutors, Ellsberg could draw only one possible conclusion: that humanity’s odds were shortening by the day.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Sweden’s membership hinging on a row over fighter jets is peak NATO

    Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the US are embroiled in a row over fighter jets. It’s not unusual for states to haggle and bargain over deals for military hardware, even if they are allies. But this disagreement says something important about NATO.

    Sweden’s membership had been held up by Turkey. And now, despite approving Sweden’s membership of NATO, Erdoğan seems to be leveraging his position to push through the fighter jet deal.

    Hold-up

    Al-Jazeera reported that the fighter jet deal is not unrelated to Turkey acquiescing to Sweden’s entry into NATO:

    Hours after Ankara said it would allow Stockholm into the bloc, the US said it will proceed with the transfer of F-16 fighter jets to Turkey, the likely trade-off for Ankara’s green light.

    However, the outstanding multi-billion-dollar deal for F-16 fighters is not complete yet. Erdoğan told reporters that, ultimately, the decision would be down to Turkish parliament. Turkish parliament, however, is on recess until October.

    Alper Coskun, a former deputy permanent representative for Turkey to NATO, told Al-Monitor:

    We’re not as close as we thought whenever Erdogan initially made the statement that he will greenlight this

    Coskun seemed to suggest Erdoğan was dragging his feet over the issue to ensure progress on the fighter deal:

    While Erdogan has greenlit this, what he greenlit is sending it to parliament.

    Coskun said Erdoğan “will be signalling to the US that unless there’s progress on the F-16s, it might be more difficult for parliament” to approve Sweden’s membership.

    US jet denials

    The US officially denies that the jets are related to the slow progress on Swedish NATO membership. However, according to Al-Monitor, US officials accept the two are related. Furthermore, America is also trying to use the deal to leverage Swedish membership:

    But privately, US officials told Turkey that Sweden’s stalled NATO application was the primary obstacle to congressional approval of the long-delayed $20 billion sale, sources close to the Turkish government said.

    Given that NATO likes to portray the appearance of unity, not least with the Ukraine war raging, the hold-up is significant. The fact that it is an arms deal, rather than some point of principle, which seems to be dictating if and when a new member can join arguably captures the essence of this military alliance.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Aldo Bidini, cropped to 1910 x 1000.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The UK is a weaponry ‘Amazon’ for Ukraine and a Supermarket Sweep for dictators.

    UK defence secretary Ben Wallace has railed against the idea that the UK is an Amazon shopping service for weaponry. His comments were aimed at Ukraine, whose officials he said once confronted him with a shopping list of arms.

    But there’s a problem with his claim that the UK isn’t simply Amazon for arms and ammunition. It’s that the UK sort of … is Amazon for arms and ammunition.

    Even a brief investigation shows that the UK would sell lethal military hardware to anyone, including your nan if she had the money. This includes people with appalling human rights records, and I don’t mean your nan there. In fact, customers include nations on UK human rights watchlists and states which are long-term rivals.

    Ukraine summit

    Wallace was speaking ahead of a G7 summit to discuss Ukraine joining NATO. He told reporters he wanted to see more gratitude from Ukraine for British support. He also said he had told Ukraine before that their demands for arms in their war with Russia must be carefully framed:

    You know, my counsel to the Ukrainians is sometimes, ‘Look, you are persuading countries to give up their own stocks and yes, your war is a noble war and we see it as you waging a war not just for yourselves but for our freedoms’.

    And he said of British contributions to the war effort:

    We are not Amazon… I told them that last year, when I drove 11 hours to be given a list

    Arms emporium

    One can spend all day debating the Ukrainian approach to lobbying for support. But one thing is clear: if Ben Wallace doesn’t want the UK to be treated like arms and ammunition Amazon, it could try being be less like Amazon.

    UK military support for Ukraine has been belligerent from the start of the war. The Canary has reported on the dangers and risks inherent to the government’s commitment to arming Ukraine. In fact, we only recently reported on arms giant BAE System’s nefarious plans to turn post-war Ukraine into an arsenal.

    Then, we must consider that arms licences to Saudi Arabia and Israel since 2015, for example, come to £8.2bn and £472m respectively. This is despite serious human rights concerns about both countries. Interestingly, UK governments have also approved £103m in arms sales to Russia and £304m to China since 2008. This is despite the latter two being long-term power rivals of the UK and its allies.

    And we note that all the countries mentioned here (and many others the UK has licenced arms to) feature on the government’s own human rights priority list. You can use Campaign Against the Arms Trade’s (CAAT) export data tracker to compare.

    So, Wallace might not like the UK being seen as a sort of weaponry Amazon by Ukrainian leaders, but in reality, that’s what it is. This country is nothing more than a Supermarket Sweep for dictators, albeit with Ben Wallace rather than Dale Winton urging eager shoppers around dank aisles of exploding death.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/UK Government, cropped to 1910 x 1000, licenced under CC BY 2.0.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • “Madness of Militarism”: Biden OKs Cluster Bombs for Ukraine Despite Risk of Civilian Casualties

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

  • Roger Waters calls for the release of activists who shut down an arms manufacturer

    A group of nearly 80 public figures have issued a statement in support of activists for disrupting the UK operations of Elbit Systems – an Israeli weapons manufacturer. Elbit Systems has drawn significant controversy – not least for “marketing their weapons on the grounds that they have been “‘battle-tested‘ in the Gaza Strip” on Palestinians.

    Imprisoned political activists

    According to a press release from Palestine Action:

    From inside Israeli jails, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement has issued a statement demanding the freedom of Palestine Action prisoners held in British jails. Six activists from Palestine Action are currently detained, and over 100 more are facing custodial sentences, for disrupting the British manufacture of Israeli weaponry.

    As the Canary previously reported, one of the jailed activists is Mike Lynch-White. In June 2021, he took part in the occupation of company APPH’s premises. It is a supplier of drone landing gear to Elbit Systems. He and others covered APPH’s building in red paint, scaled the roof, and destroyed equipment so Israeli forces could no longer use it to kill people in Palestine.

    However, cops and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) charged Lynch-White and two others over the action. In May, a judge sentenced him to 27 months in prison.

    Solidarity from public figures

    So, in response, Palestine Action organised around 80 “public figures” to release a statement. It’s in support of the imprisoned activists. The statement reads:

    We demand the charges are dropped against those already incarcerated and at risk of prison over their work to disrupt the criminal production of Israeli weapons on British soil.

    Signatories to the statement include:

    • Musicians Roger Waters and British rapper Lowkey.
    • Palestinian writer and activist Mohammed el-Kurd.
    • Professor Rabab Abdulhadi.
    • South African MP and Nelson Mandela’s grandson, Chief Nkosi Zwelivelile Mandela.
    • MEPs Mick Wallace and Clare Daly.

    The group adds:

    Palestine Action are calling for a day of action in support of the prisoners and the campaign to shut Elbit down on Saturday 22nd July. Elbit Systems supplies 85% of Israel’s military drone fleet and land based equipment. Recently, Elbit drones were used to assassinate Palestinians in Jenin and Gaza.

    There are currently approximately 5,000 Palestinian political prisoners, including 1,083 jailed without charge or trial under “administrative detention”. Just as the arms industry of occupation is directly tied to the British weapons industry and colonialism in Palestine, the imprisonment of Palestine Action activists is part of the same framework of colonial repression. We urge all supporters of Palestine to follow in the footsteps of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement and push for the freedom of Palestine Action prisoners.

    Details on the day of action can be found on the Palestine Action site.

    ‘Sincere appreciation’

    A statement from the Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement reads:

    The British government currently imprisons several members of the Palestine Action movement, which takes action to challenge companies that are directly complicit in the ongoing Zionist occupation of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people….

    Accordingly, we affirm the following:

    First: We express our sincere appreciation for the efforts made by the Palestine Action movement, which led to the closure of several sites belonging to Elbit Systems, which specialises in producing drones and weaponry supplied to the fascist Zionist occupation, in addition to confronting the supply chains of the company and others that supply bulldozers and weaponry to the occupation to demolish Palestinian homes.

    Second: The Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement condemns Elbit Systems and all British and other companies marketing their weapons on the grounds that they have been “battle-tested” in the Gaza Strip and throughout occupied Palestine.

    Third: We condemn the British authorities’ arrest of members of the Palestine Action movement and call on all international legal and human rights organizations to take a serious position, and to take official and popular action to pressure the British government to immediately release the remaining activists, as well as to bring an end to the British complicity with the Zionist apartheid regime, from the issuing of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 until the present day.

    ‘Community organising and militant direct action’

    The Canary has reported extensively on the actions against Elbit Systems, including the eventual loss of UK contracts and closure of UK sites. Writing in January 2022, Tom Anderson said:

    On Monday 10 January, campaigners announced that Elbit – Israel’s biggest private drone maker – will close its Ferranti factory in Oldham. The company has sold Ferranti business despite a massive £6m drop in resale value.

    The shutting down of Elbit’s Ferranti factory in Oldham is the culmination of years of campaigning by local organisers in solidarity with Palestinians and Kashmiris.

    The victory in Oldham should be a reminder of how powerful the combination of community organising and militant direct action can be.

    And – for me – it reminded me of the people I’ve met whose lives have been torn apart by Israeli drones, and who have been calling for these factories to be closed down for years.

    Featured image via Andres Ibarra – Wikimedia

    By The Canary

  • Kenyan government to launch inquiry into alleged murder of Agnes Wanjiru by British troops

    Kenyan politicians have approved an inquiry into the alleged murder of a Kenyan woman by British troops. Agnes Wanjiru’s body was found stuffed into a hotel septic tank near a British army base in the country. But now, the Kenyan National Assembly has voted for an investigation into the 2012 killing.

    Disrespectful

    Agnes was last seen alive in March 2012 leaving a bar with two British soldiers. Her body was found behind a hotel room where the soldiers stayed. Nobody has ever been charged or convicted, though a British soldier is wanted in connection with the case.

    Residents of the Laikipia area, where the UK military base is situated, have spoken out about the killing and the impact British troops have on their lives. One anonymous resident told the iPaper:

    If there is a crime committed by a [British soldier in Kenya], why can’t they be dealt with, as a criminal, rather than you know, getting immunity and being treated in a special way?

    Another said soldiers deployed to Kenya ignored rules and acted disrespectfully towards local people:

    In the set-up of a club, you find them [British soldiers] really dominating the locals. They would not respect the place.

    The resident added:

    Like in a non-smoking zone, some would go ahead and smoke or in a place where they were told no firearms, some will come with firearms.

    Kenya’s colonial past and present

    Kenya was a British colony up until independence in 1963. And the British legacy there is of violent counter-insurgency and exploitation. Yet the British Army Training Unit Kenya (BATUK) is still used to train thousands of UK troops every year.

    Environmental damage is done to wilderness areas and many locals have been injured by unexploded ordnance that litter the ground. In 2015, unexploded ordnance horrifically wounded one 13-year-old boy near BATUK.

    Kenya may no longer technically be a UK colony. However, the continued and damaging presence of British troops against the will of local people is ultimately a continuation of the same violent colonial dynamic.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Cpl Jamie Hart, cropped to 1910 x 1000, licenced under Open Government Licence.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • A Bankrupt Calculus: Sending Cluster Munitions to Ukraine

    There is a certain desperation in the logic of those who argue that a depraved solution has merit because it’s only slightly less depraved than that of the opponent.  Torture is bad but should still be used because your adversary feels free to resort to it. Only do so, however, via judicial warrant.  Bombing hospitals is terrible, but when done, select those with military personnel.  Before long, one’s moral compass does not so much adjust as vanish into a horizon of relativist horror.

    Much of this is evident in the Ukraine War, notably regarding weapons supply and deployment.  Ukraine, the Biden administration has announced, will receive cluster munitions, despite their appalling record as, in the words of a coalition of civil society organisations, “indiscriminate weapons that disproportionately harm civilians, both at the time of use and for years after a conflict has ended.”  Some detail of this was provided in a July 7 White House press briefing by the National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan.

    According to Sullivan, Washington based its “security assistance decision on Ukraine’s needs on the ground, and Ukraine needs artillery to sustain its offensive and defensive operations.”  It all came down to the sustained use of artillery in the conflict.  “Ukraine is firing thousands of rounds a day to defend against Russian efforts to advance and also to support its own efforts to retake its sovereign territory.”

    Preference shown by Sullivan for the “they do it, so we can” argument, a vagabond’s reasoning.  In an effort to minimise culpability, he reasons that the US has better cluster munitions than those of the Russian military.  (Such a marvellous difference and bound to excite those keen on flimsy moral calculi.)  First, Sullivan makes the claim that Russia had “been using cluster munitions since the start of this war to attack Ukraine.”  No mention is made of claims by Human Rights Watch that Ukraine has already deployed cluster bombs, notably on Russian-controlled areas in and around Izium in 2022.

    A point is also made that Russian forces had been using munitions with a failure rate of between 30 and 40 percent.  “In this environment, Ukraine has been requesting cluster munitions in order to defend its own sovereign territory.  The cluster munitions that we would provide have dud rates far below what Russia is doing – is providing – not higher than 2.5 percent.”  The admission is telling, if only because US law and regulations prohibit the transfer of cluster munitions with “dud rates” higher than 1 percent.

    Kyiv has also wooed Washington with an undertaking that it will de-mine the residual remains of the munitions in question.  Again, reasons Sullivan, such de-mining would have to take place in any case, given Russia’s own resort to their use.

    Only briefly in such casuistry does Sullivan mention the contentious, hideous nature of the munitions.  “We recognize,” he told the press briefing, “that cluster munitions create a risk of civilian harm from unexploded ordnance.  This is why we’ve deferred – deferred the decision for as long as we could.”  President Joe Biden reiterated the sentiment to CNN, claiming that it was “a very difficult decision on my part” to make.  “I discussed this with our allies. I discussed this with our friends on the [Capitol] Hill.”  But White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby was probably closer to the mark in deeming these weapons “innovative” in curbing Russia’s military efforts.

    The Biden administration has done much to avoid the stern disapproval of the use of such munitions in international law, hiding behind notions of grave duty.  The 2008 United Nations Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) outlines state party obligations to “never under any circumstances” use such munitions; develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer to anyone, directly or indirectly, those same munitions; and assist encourage or induce anyone to engage in any activity prohibited to a State Party under the convention.

    Article 3 also notes a State Party’s obligations to “destroy or ensure destruction of all cluster munitions […] as soon as possible but not later than eight years after the entry into force” of the CCM.  Inability to do so can lead to the convening of state parties, a review conference for an extension of the deadline, or, in some exceptional cases, an extension of four years.

    The number of parties to the convention, including a number of European states aiding Ukraine, has reached an impressive 123.  That said, three relevant absentees from the list stand out: Washington, Moscow and Kyiv.  While Biden claims to have had discussions with lawmakers on his decision, 19 members of the House of Representatives have demurred in a statement rebuking the transfer, reiterating the call for the US to “join global allies and sign on to that UN Convention”.

    The signatories also note that “there is no such thing as a safe cluster bomb – and using or transferring them for use hurts the global effort to eradicate these dangerous munitions, taking us down the wrong path.”  Past blemishes are also cited as a haunting reminder about what such weapons do.  “The US history of using cluster munitions – particularly the legacy of long-term harm to civilians in Southeast Asia – should prevent us from repeating the mistakes of our past.”  The difference now is that Ukraine has become the designated proxy for using such crude weaponry and is being given encouragement into the bargain.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • SAS members must be named in Afghanistan war crimes inquiry

    SAS soldiers implicated in war crimes should be named, a lawyer for alleged victims has said. In the opening session of an inquiry into the deaths during the Afghan war, the lawyers argued that blanket anonymity should not be given to members of the secretive unit.

    One SAS soldier is said to have personally killed 35 Afghans. Legal representatives for the families claim soldiers carried out around 80 extrajudicial killings at the height of the war between 2010 and 2013.

    Secret war crimes

    Ministry of Defence (MoD) lawyers argued that identifying SAS soldiers would put them at risk. Further, they claimed that the MOD itself was expert enough at national security matters to say so. The inquiry is being led by lord Justice Haddon-Cave.

    Defence secretary Ben Wallace made a rare move by acknowledging that the SAS were present in Afghanistan. Parliamentary convention is to never comment on special forces activity.

    Allegations of a cover-up by the military have also circulated in the press. The NGO Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) said:

    The inquiry also examines accusations of a systematic cover-up involving the highest echelons of the SAS and military investigators.

    Referring to an earlier war crimes investigation conducted by the Royal Military Police named Operation Northmoor, AOAV said:

    Upon being asked by Operation Northmoor investigators to examine the main computer server at the SAS headquarters in London, SAS commanders initially resisted. Subsequent orders to preserve all data were reportedly defied, with a significant quantity of data allegedly being erased before investigators could examine it.

    Justice, finally?

    Law firm Leigh Day is representing the families involved. When the MoD announced the inquiry in 2022, lawyer Tessa Gregory said:

    Our clients have been fighting for years to find out what happened to their loved ones.
    She said the military had tried to make sure the allegations never saw the light of day:

    When they first issued these judicial review proceedings the Secretary of State for Defence contended that our clients’ pleas for a fresh investigation into the killings of their relatives were unarguable and sought to have their claims dismissed outright.

    But ultimately, it had been the MoD’s own records which forced the statutory inquiry into existence, Gregory said:
    Those documents show that members of the British army, including at the highest level, were raising serious and sustained concerns that UK Special Forces were carrying out extrajudicial killings in Afghanistan.

    The MoD wants the inquiry heard in secret wherever possible. However, the BBC, Guardian, and others are currently pursuing a legal challenge in the interests of transparency. Other nations like Australia have had major trials around Afghan war crimes. However, the UK is yet to address these issues seriously.

    This has an obvious deleterious effect on UK credibility. If British politicians want, for example, to point to other nations’ war crimes, they must be willing to hold themselves to the same standard.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Sgt Steve Blake, cropped 1910 x 1000, licenced under Open Government Licence.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Palestinian organisation calls for sanctions on Israel over Jenin attack

    Israel’s military has launched its biggest attack on a city in the West Bank since the second Palestinian uprising (or ‘intifada’) in the 2000s. Israeli troops have been attacking the city of Jenin since the early hours of Monday 3 July. The Israeli army had killed ten Palestinians as of Tuesday 4 July at 2pm BST.

    The attack is the latest in a series of murderous Israeli raids on Jenin. The Israeli army has now given their offensive a name, ‘Operation Home and Garden’.

    Israeli forces have been met with strong resistance from people in Jenin. Palestinian journalist Ali Abunimah told Al Jazeera:

    Jenin has been consistently a centre of armed resistance against the occupation, you can say a thorn in the side of the occupiers.

    He continued, commenting on the strength of Jenin’s resistance:

    What we are seeing – and which is of course very heartening – is stiff resistance from the resistance in the camp.

    In Abunimah’s opinion:

    That’s extremely good news for the people of Jenin and the people of Palestine generally, to see the resistance fighting back so strongly against this invasion force.

    Israeli military orders camp residents to leave

    On the night of 3 July, Israeli soldiers ordered residents of Jenin refugee camp to leave. Palestinian legal advocacy organisation Al Haq reported that camp residents were given just two hours to evacuate their homes:

    Social media footage shows camp residents fleeing their homes, flanked by heavily armoured vehicles.

    Many commentators have warned of history repeating itself. Israeli forces carried out a massacre in the Jenin refugee camp in 2002, and levelled homes using the same Caterpillar D9 military bulldozers that Israeli forces deployed on 3 July. Several camp residents were crushed to death under the rubble of their homes during the 2002 invasion.

    Increased use of heavy weaponry

    As well as military bulldozers, the Israeli military has used armed drones in its attack on Jenin.

    Drone strikes have been a regular Israeli tactic in the besieged Gaza Strip since the late 2000s. However, the Israeli military has predominantly only used them for surveillance in the West Bank. The Israeli army has reportedly not carried out a drone strike in the West Bank since 2006.

    The use of heavy weaponry in general in the West Bank has been steadily increasing. Israeli pilots used Apache helicopters to fire missiles during the last full-scale raid on Jenin in June. It was the first time missiles had been fired from Apaches in the West Bank in 20 years.

    Far-right Israeli politicians have been pressuring the army to increase its use of violence in the West Bank. On 19 June, Israel’s extreme right-wing finance minister called for the military to use airpower and armoured forces in West Bank cities.

    Demand for sanctions

    Palestinian organisations have been calling on the US, EU, and other states to place military sanctions on Israel for decades. Yesterday, Al Haq renewed these demands. The organisation, which was itself made illegal by the Israeli state last year, made this statement via Twitter:

    It’s high time to impose sanctions and an arms embargo on Israel. It’s high time to address the root causes of the Palestinian struggle: denial of self-determination, settler-colonialism, apartheid, and illegal occupation. Hold Israel accountable, demand justice.

    The mainstream media has minimised and sanitised the brutal Israeli attack on Jenin as just the latest round of ‘bloodletting’. Similarly Volker Türk of the United Nations said the violence was ‘spiralling out of control’. But as Abunimah pointed out to Al Jazeera, this makes what is happening seem like a natural disaster that no one can do anything about. He says that the reality is the opposite. The violence is spiralling ‘in control’. What is happening is being tightly controlled by the Israeli state.

    The Israeli state knows exactly what it is doing by escalating the use of force in Jenin refugee camp. It is deliberately creating a more violent situation, in order to stamp out any resistance to its colonisation of the West Bank.

    Palestinians have been calling for years for states to take action to stop Israel’s war crimes against them. In general, international leaders don’t listen. However, when people around the world have united in support of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle we have won successes. The Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement has won a series of important battles against state and corporate complicity in Israel’s occupation policies.

    Just recently, multinational company G4S pulled out of its final contracts with the Israeli police, after an international struggle of more than a decade. That struggle was participated in by people all over the world. These victories raise the morale of our comrades in Palestine, and show that Palestinians are not alone.

    This week’s escalation of Israeli state aggression should be a wake-up call that we need to redouble our solidarity efforts. We need to show clearly that we share the grief for those killed in Jenin, and that we will stand with the Palestinian people against this new phase of colonial violence.

    Featured image via Screenshot / Al Jazeera

    By Tom Anderson

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Passing of Peace Activist and Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg

    Daniel Ellsberg marches in the San Francisco Pride Parade to free whistleblower Chelsea Manning, June 29, 2014 (Photo by R.D. Harris)

    Daniel Ellsberg died on June 16, fighting to the end to warn of the existential threat of nuclear war. The 92-year-old whistleblower left a legacy of peace activism dating to his courageous release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Given the advancing security state and the atrophying peace movement, could his accomplishments be repeated today in this time of war in Ukraine?

    From “defense intellectual” to peace activist

    Daniel Ellsberg started his career as a brilliant “defense intellectual” working for the military and quasi-state think tanks. He helped plan, among other things, nuclear first strikes against the Soviet Union with China as a secondary target. However, with access to top secret information, he came to understand that the Vietnam War was unwinnable and the government – surprise, surprise – was lying to the US public that it could and would prevail.

    Ellsberg’s geopolitical posture underwent a sea change from being a master of war to a warrior for peace. This was in the 1960s, and the transformation did not happen in isolation.

    Ellsberg reportedly attended his first peace demomonstration in 1965, while still working for the RAND Corporation. He was especially inspired by the example of Randy Kehler, a draft resister willing to go to prison for his beliefs. By May 1971, the to-be whistleblower participated in a mass demonstration against the Vietnam War in an “affinity group” with known radicals Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky.

    Could an analyst with access to top secret information also associate with nationally prominent dissidents, attend rallies against the military, yet go undetected and undeterred by today’s surveillance state apparatus? Not likely.

    Also not likely, regrettably, is the revival of a political milieux like that of the sixties. This year, the Rage Against the War Machine demonstration, organized principally by the Libertarian and People’s parties, managed to attract only a few thousand to Washington on February 19. A few weeks later, another coalition led by ANSWER, UNAC, and others staged an anti-war rally on March 18 with similarly low turnout. Since then, there has not even been an attempt to mount a national demonstration against the ever escalating war in Ukraine.

    Pentagon Papers purloined and published

    Back in 1969, besides attending anti-war demos on his time off, Ellsberg was busy at work photocopying what were to become known as the Pentagon Papers, revealing the truth of the US imperial effort. To be sure, such a 7,000-page duplication feat could not be accomplished undetected under present security arrangements.

    By 1970, Ellsberg was contacting sympathetic Democratic Party senators such as J. William Fulbright, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and George McGovern. They could release the papers on the floor of the Senate and still enjoy immunity from prosecution. They refused, but kept the liaison confidential.

    After entrusting the Pentagon Papers with New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, the Times began publishing excerpts on June 31, 1971, without Ellsberg’s prior consent. Ellsberg also provided the Washington Post and other outlets with the papers, which published excerpts.

    While the Times and the Post have long practiced follow-the-flag journalism, the fourth estate was still not yet quite the stenographers for the State Department and mouthpieces for the security agencies that they are now.

    And today, unlike Fulbright and especially McGovern who were questioning the Vietnam War effort, not a single Democrat in either house opposes a war in Ukraine that is heading toward a nuclear exchange. Oddly, the contemporary politicians that could most nearly pass for peaceniks on Capitol Hill are far-right Republicans.

    Fugitive Ellsberg

    Once the Pentagon Papers went public, Ellsberg went on the lamb, precipitating the largest FBI “manhunt” since the Lindbergh kidnapping of 1932. But the feds never caught him. After thirteen days, Ellsberg simply turned himself in.

    Such a hide-and-seek scenario would be impossible these days with our every move recorded on ubiquitous surveillance cameras. Eluding the 21st century police state is no longer an option.

    Case dismissed due to government misconduct

    Ellsberg went to trial on January 3, 1973, charged with theft and conspiracy under the 1917 Espionage Act. He faced 115 years in prison.

    His defense was that the documents were illegally classified to keep them from the American public, not from a foreign enemy. That defense was disallowed.

    The government was meanwhile busy collecting evidence against him. Operatives from the Nixon White House illegally broke into his psychiatrist’s house. The perpetrators included G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, who weren’t caught then. But a year later the “plumbers,” which were initiated to get Ellsberg, got their comeuppance when they were implicated in the Watergate scandal. The FBI also illegally wiretapped Ellsberg’s phone and then claimed the recordings had been lost.

    In light of such government misconduct, the Nixon-appointed judge on the case, William Byrne, was compelled to dismiss the case on May 13, 1973. The back story is that while the trial was in progress, the judge was offered the directorship of the FBI, which he wanted but had to wait until the trial was concluded before accepting.

    Ellsberg went free and went on to be a leading voice for peace. Byrne never got the FBI appointment.

    Shifting partisan views on the security state and war

    Today, with modern surveillance techniques and the NSA collecting every citizen’s electronic communications, the FBI would have no need to wiretap as they did with Ellsberg. And federal court judges no longer impartially dismiss cases of whistleblowers who dare to defy the state, as with Obama prosecuting more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous presidents combined.

    According to polls over the last decade, partisan views on the growing surveillance state have flipflopped. The majority of Republicans now oppose the security state while most Democrats embrace it. Likewise, the Democrats are the new party of war.

    The Armageddon-loving crazies in the Pentagon now serve as a calming counterpoint to the White House and the neo-con warriors in the State Department. Compared to Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland, the baddie generals of the past look like pacifists.

    Nixon and Kissinger conspired to split the socialist bloc, pitting People’s China against the Soviets. In contrast, the current somnambulist in the Oval Office is working overtime to forge a union of these two supposed enemy states, while preparing for nuclear war against them both.

    And no one in official circles seems the least bit concerned that the juggernaut to planetary annihilation has a fatal design flaw; no brakes to stop it.

    We are living in times when the likes of far-right Republican Tucker Carlson are the ones making reasonable critiques of the unfettered security state and of the continual provocations against Russia.

    Barbara Lee and the whole lot of once peace-promoting Democrats have learned to love war, voting nearly unanimously for every military appropriation to the proxy conflict on Russia’s border. Unfortunately, the fear of fascism by putative liberals does not extend to actual Nazis in Ukraine.

    Progressive Democrats

    How about the strategy of progressives working within the Democratic Party to move it to the left? In practice, Bernie Sanders and the Squad have worked tirelessly from one celebrity ball to next to prove that the term “progressive Democrat” is an oxymoron. Yes, the senator from the Green Mountain State is still a cut above Mitch McConnell. But that is not a very high bar.

    That same Vermont career politician is now a significant cut below the maverick crusader who had in more auspicious times run for the presidency in 2016 and 2020 on the platform that the whole system was rigged including the Democratic Party. In so doing, he proved the DNC was indeed rigged. And then he proceeded to unreservedly join the Democrats, sheep-dogging Our Revolution into the party.

    When the Democrats held a trifecta of the executive, House, and Senate, Mr. Sanders’ $200 billion healthcare package was off the table. Yet when the House went Republican, Bernie revived the initiative knowing that it would be defeated.

    To be fair, blame for the demise of liberalism must be shared with its constituents who have become so deranged by the specter of Donald Trump that they will swallow anything the Democrats feed them. Even formerly liberal publications like The Nation run hit pieces against RFK Jr., terrified that the pro forma presidential primaries might include someone questioning party orthodoxy.

    Meanwhile, they remain clueless that working class Americans are not wildly enthusiastic about another four years of Kamala Harris and her running mate. The Democrat’s frontrunner currently has a dismal 40% approval rating.

    The Vietnam and Ukraine wars

    The release of the Pentagon Papers revealed that the state was cognizant of the futility of the Vietnam venture and was maliciously willing to continue at a horrific cost to US troops and a still greater toll of Vietnamese lives. The paper’s publication was credited with contributing to a growing domestic disenchantment with imperial war.

    Saigon “fell” two years after Ellsberg’s case was dismissed. On April 30, 1975, the Vietnamese successfully repelled the aggressor on the battlefield. With the anti-war movement mounting and the troops resisting, Washington was forced to accept defeat.

    Now the US is embroiled in yet another horrific war, but a war of a different kind. The Ukraine War is a proxy war without a major commitment of US troops. However, similar to the exposés of the Pentagon Papers, it is now known that:

    – The war in Ukraine was deliberately provoked by the US.

    – The Minsk accords were a cynical ploy to buy time to arm Ukraine.

    – US boots are being deployed on the ground.

    – The US intends to eschew any negotiated peace.

    – The war is unwinnable.

    – The carnage is about maintaining empire, not preserving democracy.

    Why haven’t those revelations mobilized the peace movement? One contributing factor is its connections to the Democrats who have wholesale converted into a party of war.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A State of Martial Law: America Is a Military Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy

    What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?

    —Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787, in Papers of Jefferson, ed.

    The government is goosestepping all over our freedoms.

    Case in point: America’s founders did not want a military government ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.

    Yet sometime over the course of the past 240-plus years that constitutional republic has been transformed into a military dictatorship disguised as a democracy.

    Most Americans seem relatively untroubled by this state of martial law.

    Incredibly, when President Biden bragged about how the average citizen doesn’t stand a chance against the government’s massive arsenal of militarized firepower, it barely caused a ripple.

    As Biden remarked at a fundraising event in California, “I love these guys who say the Second Amendment is—you know, the tree of liberty is water with the blood of patriots. Well, if [you] want to do that, you want to work against the government, you need an F-16.  You need something else than just an AR-15.”

    The message being sent to the citizenry is clear: there is no place in our nation today for the kind of revolution our forefathers mounted against a tyrannical government.

    For that matter, the government has declared an all-out war on any resistance whatsoever by the citizenry to its mandates, power grabs and abuses.

    By this standard, had the Declaration of Independence been written today, it would have rendered its signers extremists or terrorists, resulting in them being placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely, stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants.

    This is no longer the stuff of speculation and warning.

    For years, the government has been warning against the dangers of domestic terrorism, erecting surveillance systems to monitor its own citizens, creating classification systems to label any viewpoints that challenge the status quo as extremist, and training law enforcement agencies to equate anyone possessing anti-government views as a domestic terrorist.

    A 2008 Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report goes on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

    Subsequent reports by the Department of Homeland Security to identify, monitor and label right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) have manifested into full-fledged pre-crime surveillance programs. Almost a decade later, after locking down the nation and spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.

    Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that is colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.

    The events of recent years have all been part of a master plan to shut us up and preemptively shut us down: by making peaceful revolution impossible and violent revolution inevitable.

    The powers-that-be want an excuse to lockdown the nation and throw the switch to all-out martial law.

    This is how it begins.

    As John Lennon warned, “When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you—pull your beard, flick your face—to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you.”

    Already, discontent is growing.

    According to a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll, 7 out of 10 Americans believe that American democracy is “imperiled.”

    Americans are worried about the state of their country, afraid of an increasingly violent and oppressive federal government, and tired of being treated like suspects and criminals.

    What we’ll see more of before long is a growing dissatisfaction with the government and its heavy-handed tactics by people who are tired of being used and abused and are ready to say “enough is enough.”

    This is what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent.

    Our backs are against the proverbial wall.

    We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’ve been on that fast-moving, downward trajectory for some time now.

    When the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution, then you no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

    Brace yourselves.

    There is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.

    Any time you have an entire nation so mesmerized by political theater and public spectacle that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.

    Any time you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.

    And any time you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

    The architects of the police state have us exactly where they want us: under their stamping boot, gasping for breath, desperate for freedom, grappling for some semblance of a future that does not resemble the totalitarian prison being erected around us.

    The government and its cohorts have conspired to ensure that the only real recourse the American people have to express their displeasure with the government is through voting, yet that is no real recourse at all.

    Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, what is unfolding before us is not a revolution. This is an anti-revolution.

    We are at our most vulnerable right now.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel has approved a massive new colonisation of the West Bank

    The Israeli state approved the construction of over 5,623 new housing units in the West Bank this week, in an escalation of its colonisation. The United Nations (UN) has condemned the move.

    Israeli forces have illegally occupied the West Bank since 1967. They have been colonising it ever since. At least 620,000 Israeli settlers live in over 200 illegal settlements in the occupied territory.

    Last week, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave extreme right-winger Bezalel Smotrich sole control of the approval of new settlements. Smotrich has already announced his intention to double the number of settlements within the next few years.

    It’s clear that this new wave of colonisation will be facilitated by a ramping up of military repression. Smotrich has publicly denied the existence of Palestinians as a people, and last week he called for the use of airpower and heavy weaponry in West Bank cities.

    Military force is already escalating. Israeli forces fired missiles from helicopter gunships in the city of Jenin last week. This was the first time this type of weaponry had been used in the West Bank for twenty years.

    Working hand-in-hand with the colonists

    Settler violence continued last week in the West Bank following a Palestinian resistance attack on the settlement of Eli, which killed four settlers. The Palestinian attack was in response to the deadly Israeli raid on Jenin, which killed seven Palestinians.

    The Israeli army stood by and watched as the violence against Palestinian civilians escalated. Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem pointed out that this is part of a systematic Israeli state policy. It tweeted:

    These events are not a single, isolated failure of the military or state, but a clear expression of Israel’s policy in the OpT [Occupied Palestinian Territories]. As part of this policy, Israel arms gangs of settlers and allows and even encourages them to attack Palestinians.

    B’Tselem gave a detailed description of what happened. It said that, beginning on the afternoon of 20 June, Israeli settlers attacked and burnt homes, cars, and property in Palestinian villages and towns.

    Two of the first places to be attacked by settlers were Huwarra and al-Lubban al-Sharqiyah. When residents tried to stop the attacks, the Israeli army fired at them with rubber-coated steel bullets and live ammunition. Similar incidents occurred in Beitin, al-Lubban al-Gharqiyah, Burqah, Yasuf, Turmusaya, and many other places. B’Tselem commented that:

    These events don’t reflect a single, isolated failure of the military or the state, but rather a clear expression of Israel’s policy in the occupied territories for many years. As part of this policy, Israel arms gangs of settlers and allows, and even encourages them, using inciting language, to attack Palestinians. As if that were not enough, in some of these cases, soldiers and police officers remain idle, assist the attackers or even harm Palestinians who are trying to protect themselves.

    The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) tweeted:

     

    An attempt at a new wave of colonisation

    It’s clear that the approval of these thousands of new settler housing units is a serious threat by the Israeli state. It is a threat that comes alongside a major escalation of Israeli military force in the West Bank, and the encouragement of violence by Israeli settlers.

    Palestinians are calling for solidarity in their anticolonial struggle. You can read more about the Palestinian campaign for Boycott Divestment, and Sanctions against Israeli militarism here. Alternatively, click here to find out about the Palestinian-led ISM, which is calling for international volunteers to join it in Palestine to support the popular grassroots resistance to the occupation.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Justin McIntosh, resized to 770×403 under license CC BY 2.0

    By Tom Anderson

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • 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.

  • Prigozhin’s Wagner Coup in Russia

    RT talks with Carl Zha about the Wagner PMC group leader Prigozhin’s bid for power by launching a coup against the Russian government, from RT studio in Moscow.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Civil War in Russia? Wagner Troops Rebellion

    Coup attempt in Russia.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Mediterranean Shipwreck Tragedy Was an Outcome of Militarism

    Through a WhatsApp message from Portugal, my friend Eunice Neves asked to share a moment with me. She was with an Afghan couple, Frishta and Mohammad, and their baby son, Arsalan. The young family has resettled in Mértola, a small city in southern Portugal. They looked forward to celebrating World Refugee Day as part of a project which the Portuguese government lauds as a model for refugee…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Calls for solidarity, as Turkish drones assassinate members of the Kurdish women’s movement

    The Turkish military assassinated Yusra Darwish, the co-chair of Qamişlo canton council in Northeast Syria, on 20th June. Missiles fired from a Turkish drone killed Yusra, who was also a prominent member of the Kurdish women’s movement.

    A revolution has been underway in Rojava, Northeast Syria since 2012, based on the ideas of women’s freedom, grassroots democracy, and an ecological society. The Turkish state is opposed to this revolution, and has been trying to destroy it since it began.

    The drone strike also killed Leyman Shiweish, Yusra’s deputy co-chair, and the driver of the car, Farat Touma. Thousands of people attended their funeral in Qamişlo.

    Rojava’s Democratic Union Party (PYD) said that Leyman was one of the first women to join the Kurdistan revolution, and that she spent 38 years fighting as a guerilla in the Kurdish mountains. They concluded:

    The enemy should know that the struggle started by comrade Rihan [Leyman] will continue at any cost.

    ‘Our answer will be the women’s revolution’

    This is by no means the first time the Turkish state has used assassination attacks against the Kurdish women’s movement. Zehra Berkel, Hebûn Mele Xelîl, and Emina Weysi were members of the Kongreya Star women’s federation. The Turkish military murdered them in another drone attack in 2020. Last year Nagîhan Akarsel, co-editor of Jineoloji magazine, was assassinated in an attack on her house in Suleimaniye in Iraqi Kurdistan. Jineoloji carries out decolonial dissemination of knowledge in the social sciences of, by, and for women. It is associated with the ideas of the Kurdish women’s movement. Kongreya Star wrote at the time:

    the Turkish state has persistently tried to weaken the struggle. But the persistence, will and strength of the freedom-loving women will not be weakened or broken. Our answer will be the victory of the women’s revolution all over the world.

    The Turkish state’s attacks on the revolutionary women of the Kurdish Freedom Movement are systematic and long-established. To read Kongra Star’s dossier on the assassinations of their comrades click here.

    UK group condemns the killings

    Kurdistan Solidarity Network (KSN) is a UK group which supports the revolutionary politics of the Kurdish Freedom Movement and the Rojava revolution. KSN Jin, the autonomous women’s structure of the KSN, made the following statement:

    Kurdistan Solidarity Network – Jin condemn these and all other attacks the Turkish state is carrying out in its attempt to destroy, piece by piece, the work of building a democratic, ecological and peaceful future for North and East Syria. We stand with our sisters in Kurdistan and beyond and raise our voices in solidarity, defiance and shared pain. 

    Yusra Darwish joined the Rojava Revolution in 2012 and worked for many years as a teacher, school principal and active member in the field of education. She was elected co-chair of the Amudê Education Committee  before becoming co-chair of the Qamishlo-Canton Council in November 2022.

    KSN Jin went on to speak about Leyman Shiweish:

    Leyman Shiwish

    Leyman Shiweish, who is also known as Reiyhan Amude, has been working for peace, democracy and women’s liberation for years and has played an important role in the women’s revolution in Rojava since it began.

    The statement continued:

    Both women worked tirelessly for social change and the organization of social, community and political activities in the canton since the beginning of the revolution.

    The killings of Yusra, Leyman and Farat are part of a Turkish military campaign of drone strikes and shelling. Turkish drones have killed at least 21 people over the past weeks.

    The European Kurdish Democratic Societies Congress (KCDK-E) have called for international solidarity against Turkish aggression. They said that the Turkish state wants to occupy and ethnically cleanse more of Northeast Syria:

    It is necessary to see that the invading Turkish army has a very serious and clear goal of occupying and dekurdifying the region. It also replaces the Kurdish population by people from other places in the region.

    KCDK-E called for people around the world to stand up against the Turkish attacks. People in Suleimaniye, Brussels, and Bern have already held demonstrations against the attacks. You can follow Kurdistan Solidarity Network to find out about solidarity events in the UK.

    Featured image via Kongra Star

    By Tom Anderson

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • 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.

  • Israeli military uses Apaches in Jenin, as far-right minister calls for more air attacks on West Bank cities

    On Monday 19 June, Israeli forces deployed Apache helicopter gunships and carried out airstrikes on the West Bank city of Jenin.

    The Israeli military’s assault on Jenin included snipers and at least 120 armoured vehicles, as well as the air attacks. The Palestinian Red Crescent said that Israeli forces directly attacked ambulances.

    Journalists reporting on the raid also came under fire. Israeli forces shot journalist Hazem Nasser while he was doing his job. Medics rushed him to hospital.

    In total, Palestinian media is reporting that six people died and 100 were injured in the Israeli attack.

    Those killed by Israeli forces include a 15-year-old boy named Ahmed Yousef Saqr.

    Palestinian resistance fighters confronted the attacking Israeli forces with considerable force. They reportedly injured eight Israeli soldiers and targeted military vehicles with explosives.

    Palestinian journalist Rania Zabaneh tweeted:

    The aerial attack was the first of its kind in 20 years in the West Bank.

    Jenin has been suffering increased attacks from Israeli forces since March 2022. However, this is the biggest assault since since 26 January 2023, when Israeli troops killed 10 Palestinians in a deadly raid on Jenin’s refugee camp.

    Palestinian group Stop the Wall called for a military embargo in response to the attack on Jenin. It tweeted:

    Far-right minister threatens more colonial violence

    Later, on 19 June Bezalel Smotrich – the far-right Israeli finance minister – called for the continued use of airpower and armoured vehicles in the West Bank.

    Smotrich said:

    the time has come to utilise air forces and armoured forces.

    He has also previously denied the existence of Palestinians as a people. His threat of increased military force goes alongside Israeli government plans to rapidly increase the rate of colonisation in the West Bank. Smotrich has further pledged to double the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank in a matter of years.

    On top of this, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu just gave Smotrich’s colonial ambitions the green light by handing him sole control of the approval of new settlements. The Israeli state is already planning 4,000 new settlement housing units.

    Calls for a military embargo

    Many on Israel’s left have responded with dismay. Anti-occupation veterans’ organisation Breaking the Silence tweeted:

    Palestinian group Stop the Wall‘s call for a military embargo was echoed by the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. BDS Movement pointed out the complicity of European company Airbus in arming Israel:

    You can read more about the Palestinian campaign of BDS against Israeli militarism here. Alternatively, click here to find out about the Palestinian-led International Solidarity Movement, which is calling for international volunteers to join it in Palestine to support the popular grassroots resistance to the occupation.

    Featured image via screenshot

    By Tom Anderson

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Groups are coming together to resist this year’s Armed Forces Day in Cornwall

    This year’s Armed Forces Day is on Saturday 24 June. The main “public show” (perhaps the most grotesque uses of the phrase imaginable) will be in Cornwall. However, local and national campaigners are not taking this display of militarism lying down. In fact, they’re planning a counter-event to show the public’s resistance.

    Armed Forces Day: state-sanctioned propaganda

    Armed Forces Day is a state-sanctioned event. As the Soldiers’ Charity noted, it was the brainchild of Tony Blair’s Labour Party:

    Plans for the event were announced in February 2006 by Gordon Brown, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, with the aim of ensuring that the contribution of our Armed Forces was never forgotten. First known as Veterans’ Day, the first event was held on Saturday 27th June 2006. The date was chosen as it came the day after the anniversary of the first investiture of the Victoria Cross in Hyde Park, London, in 1857.

    The event became Armed Forces Day in 2009, and is now held annually on the last Saturday in June.

    Naturally, the day is less about the public showing support for vets, and more about the state pushing creeping militarism. As the Canary previously wrote, campaign group ForcesWatch published a report in 2019. It detailed how the state uses Armed Forces Day to push the idea that war is normal to the public – and that we should support both it and continued militarisation:

    Warrior Nation: War, militarisation and British democracy, published by ForcesWatch, details a “militarisation offensive” launched against the British public by the military, political and media establishments. Warrior Nation argues that events like Armed Forces Day are part and parcel of a creeping militarism and militarisation of British society, designed to suppress dissent and ensure long-term support for war.

    The report finds that engineering widespread support for military action among the British public has not been very successful. But militarism has nonetheless had an incredibly corrosive effect upon social norms and liberties. Attempting to create a society that accepts a state of permanent war, the establishment has sought to suppress multiculturalism, freedom of speech, and the right to dissent.

    Of course, the current authoritarian Tory government is making all this worse. However, people are resisting across the UK. And specifically, for Armed Forces Day’s national event in Falmouth, groups are coming together to push back.

    Cornwall will resist

    The official Armed Forces Day website states that Falmouth:

    will play proud host to a packed programme of events and activities including a military parade, marching bands, military displays, live music, flying displays and fireworks.

    If you think that sounds insidious and nauseating, then you can join in a counter-event. Campaign Against The Arms Trade (CAAT) said in a press release that:

    Local and national organisations are uniting to show their opposition to Armed Forces Day, due to be held in Falmouth on 24th June. Groups involved include Campaign Against Arms Trade, the Peace Pledge Union, ForcesWatch, Demilitarise Education, Cornwall Resists and local and national Quaker organisations. All groups say that we should be giving peace a chance rather than glorifying the military. Events planned include talks, stalls, street theatre, banners, protests and more.

    CAAT has various concerns about Armed Forces Day. For example, it said in a press release that:

    Armed Forces Day has cost Cornwall Council at least £300,000 during a cost of living crisis. Local groups are appalled that this money has been spent promoting militarism when local services have been cut to the bone.

    It also added that:

    The day is also taking place at the same time the Bibby Stockholm refugee prison ship is likely to still be in Falmouth. It is currently in the dry docks to double its capacity to house 500 refugees and asylum seekers in accommodation the size of parking spaces. This ship is a wider manifestation of the border violence that is enacted on people seeking sanctuary, many of whom are fleeing conflicts either caused by the British military, or the devastation caused by bombs made by British arms companies such as BAE.

    Furthermore, one of its major concerns is over what the day’s objectives are.

    The UK state: recruiting kids to kill

    As the Canary reported in 2019, the state actively encourages kids to participate in events. This includes even pushing Armed Forces Day onto toddlers:

    a British soldier encouraged children to wear military gear in a nursery school in Lincolnshire. The nursery celebrated the event on Facebook and published 18 photos of very young children wearing body armour and helmets.

    At the time:

    The Peace Pledge Union (PPU) released a statement blasting the “shocking” example of “everyday militarism”. It also pointed out that other Armed Forces Day events “have seen primary school aged children invited to handle real weapons”. In 2018 The Canary also published an article about Armed Forces Day targeting children by letting them handle weapons.

    So, as CAAT said in a press release:

    The UK is one of only 17 countries, and the only one in Europe, which allows for the military recruitment of children [under 18 years]. The United Nations Child Rights Committee recently called on the UK government to raise the age of recruitment to 18 and prohibit the targeting of children in military advertising. Since 2008, there has been a concerted push by the armed forces to engage with school children, especially those in deprived areas, with visits to 10,000 schools a year.

    Pushing back against capitalist militarism

    On top of all of this, weapons manufacturer BAE Systems is sponsoring some of this year’s events. Of course, it suits the company to promote things like this. The more the public support the state’s militarism, the more government contracts companies like BAE Systems will get. However, as the Canary‘s Joe Glenton previously wrote:

    The ultimate winners when it comes to defence spending are not the public, in whose name these vast sums are lavished on war. It’s the arms firms and defence firms who making a killing. In the case of the UK, our vast spending comes amid a cost of living crisis.

    So, Cornwall will resist on 24 June. ForcesWatch coordinator Luke Starr said in a press release:

    While presented as a celebration of veterans and service personnel, Armed Forces Day is also a huge opportunity to normalise military action and run recruitment activities.

    A spokesperson for Quakers in Britain said:

    Quakers believe that all life is precious. We have always tried to ‘live in that life and power which takes away the occasion of all wars.’

    Instead of pretending that Armed Forces Day is a family-friendly celebration of their peace-keeping work, the British government should stop recruiting children into the military and stop recruiting the wider society to be war ready. We should be investing in education for peace, not war.

    With the Labour Party under Keir Starmer renewing their engagement with Armed Forces Day, it’s down to campaign groups like CAAT to resist. The perpetual militarisation of societies across the planet is one of the mainstays of corporate capitalism – where people’s lives are treated as profit margins, and wholly expendable.

    Armed Forces Day is a sick reflection of this, dressed up as a patriotic celebration. However, theres nothing patriotic about celebrating death, maiming, and the destruction of people’s lives and the planet.

    Feature image via Cornwall Council – YouTube

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The Silent Slaughter of the Flower of Ukraine’s Youth

    “Plans love silence. There’ll be no announcement of the start.” Photo credit: Ukraine Defense Ministry

    As Ukraine prepared to launch its much heralded but long delayed counteroffensive, the media published a photograph of a Ukrainian soldier with his finger on his lips, symbolizing the need for secrecy to retain some element of surprise for this widely telegraphed operation.

    Now that the offensive has been under way for two weeks, it is clear that the Ukrainian government and its Western allies are maintaining silence for quite a different reason: to conceal the brutal cost Ukraine’s brave young people are paying to recover small scraps of territory from Russian occupation forces, in what some are already calling a suicide mission.

    Western pundits at first described these first two weeks of fighting as “probing operations” to find weak spots in Russia’s defenses, which Russia has been fortifying since 2022 with multiple layers of minefields, “dragon’s teeth,” tank-traps, pre-positioned artillery, and attack helicopters, unopposed in the air, that can fire 12 anti-tank missiles apiece.

    On the advice of British military advisers in Kyiv, Ukraine flung Western tanks and armored vehicles manned by NATO-trained troops into these killing fields without air support or de-mining operations. The results have been predictably disastrous, and it is now clear that these are not just “probing” operations as the propaganda at first claimed, but the long-awaited main offensive.

    A Western official with intelligence access told the Associated Press on June 14, “Intense fighting is now ongoing in nearly all sectors of the front… This is much more than probing. These are full-scale movements of armor and heavy equipment into the Russian security zone.”

    Other glimpses are emerging of the reality behind the propaganda. At a press conference after a summit at NATO Headquarters, U.S. General Milley warned that the offensive will be long, violent and costly in Ukrainian lives. “This is a very difficult fight. It’s a very violent fight, and it will likely take a considerable amount of time and at high cost,” Milley said.

    Russian videos show dozens of Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles lying smashed in minefields, and NATO military advisers in Ukraine have confirmed that it lost 38 tanks in one night on June 8, including newly delivered German-built Leopard IIs.

    Rob Lee of the Foreign Policy Research Institute explained to the New York Times that the Russians are trying to inflict as many casualties and destroy as many vehicles as possible in the areas in front of their main defensive lines, turning those areas into lethal kill zones. If this strategy works, any Ukrainian forces that reach the main Russian defense lines will be too weakened and depleted to break through and achieve their goal of severing Russia’s land bridge between Donbas and Crimea.

    Russia’s Ministry of Defense reported that Ukraine’s forces suffered 7,500 casualties in the first ten days of the offensive. If Ukraine’s real losses are a fraction of that, the long, violent bloodbath that General Milley anticipates will destroy the new armored brigades that NATO has armed and trained, and serve only to escalate the gory war of attrition that has destroyed Mariupol, Sievierodonetsk and Bakhmut, killing and wounding hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians and Russians.

    A senior European military officer in Ukraine provided more details of the carnage to Asia Times, calling Ukraine’s operations on June 8 and 9 a “suicide mission” that violated the basic rules of military tactics. “We tried to tell them to stop these piecemeal tactics, define a main thrust with infantry support and do what they can,” he said. “They were trained by the British, and they’re playing Light Brigade,” he added, comparing the offensive to a suicidal charge into massive Russian cannon fire that wiped out Britain’s Light Cavalry Brigade in Crimea in 1854.

    If Ukraine’s “Spring Offensive” plunges on to the bitter end, it could be more like the British and French Somme Offensive, fought near the French River Somme in 1916. After 19,240 British troops were killed on the first day (including Nicolas’s 20-year-old great-uncle, Robert Masterman), the battle raged on for more than four months of pointless, wanton slaughter, with over a million British, French and German casualties. It was finally called off after advancing only six miles and failing to capture either of the two small French towns that were its initial objectives.

    The current offensive was delayed for months as Ukraine and its allies grappled with the likelihood of the outcome we are now witnessing. The fact that it went ahead regardless reflects the moral bankruptcy of U.S. and NATO political leaders, who are sacrificing the flower of Ukraine’s youth in a proxy war they will not send their own children or grandchildren to fight.

    As Ukraine launches its offensive, NATO is conducting Air Defender, the largest military exercise in its history, from June 12 to 23, with 250 warplanes, including nuclear-capable F-35s, flying from German bases to simulate combat operations in and over Germany, Lithuania, Romania, the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. The exercise has led to at least 15 incidents between NATO and Russian aircraft in the skies near Lithuania.

    It seems that nobody involved in NATO has ever stumbled over the concept of a “security dilemma,” in which supposedly defensive actions by one party are perceived as offensive threats by another and lead to a spiral of mutual escalation, as has been the case between NATO and Russia since the 1990s. Professor of Russian history Richard Sakwa has written, “NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence.”

    These risks will be evident in the upcoming NATO Summit in Vilnius on July 11-12, where Ukraine and its eastern allies will be pushing for Ukraine membership, while the U.S. and western Europe insist that membership cannot be offered while the war rages on and will instead offer “upgraded” status and a shorter route to membership once the war ends.

    The continued insistence that Ukraine will one day be a NATO member only means a prolongation of the conflict, as this is a red line that Russia insists cannot be crossed. That’s why negotiations that lead to a neutral Ukraine are key to ending the war.

    But the United States will not agree to that as long as President Biden keeps U.S. Ukraine policy firmly under the thumbs of hawkish neoconservative desk warriors like Anthony Blinken and Victoria Nuland at the State Department and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan at the White House. Pressure to keep escalating U.S. involvement in the war is also coming from Congress, where Republicans accuse Biden of “hemming and hawing” instead of “going all in” to help Ukraine.

    Paradoxically, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies are more realistic than their civilian colleagues about the lack of any military solution. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, has called for diplomacy to bring peace to Ukraine, and U.S. intelligence sources have challenged dominant false narratives of the war in leaks to Newsweek and Seymour Hersh, telling Hersh that the neocons are ignoring genuine intelligence and inventing their own, just as they did to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

    With the retirement of Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, the State Department is losing the voice of a professional diplomat who was Obama’s chief negotiator for the JCPOA with Iran and urged Biden to rejoin the agreement, and who has taken steps to moderate U.S. brinkmanship toward China. While publicly silent on Ukraine, Sherman was a quiet voice for diplomacy in a war-mad administration.

    Many fear that Sherman’s job will now go to Nuland, the leading architect of the ever-mounting catastrophe in Ukraine for the past decade, who already holds the #3 or #4 job at State as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

    Other departures from the senior ranks at State and the Pentagon are likely to cede more ground to the neocons. Colin Kahl, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, worked with Sherman on the JCPOA, opposed sending F-16s to Ukraine, and has maintained that China will not invade Taiwan in the near future. Kahl is leaving the Pentagon to return to his position as a professor at Stanford, just as China hawk General C.Q. Brown will replace General Milley as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs when Milley retires in September.

    Meanwhile, other world leaders continue to push for peace talks. A delegation of African heads of state led by President Ramaphosa of South Africa met with President Zelenskyy in Kyiv, and President Putin in Moscow on June 17th, to discuss the African peace plan for Ukraine.

    President Putin showed the African leaders the 18-point Istanbul Agreement that a Ukrainian representative had signed back in March 2022, and told them that Ukraine had thrown it in the “dustbin of history,” after the now disgraced Boris Johnson told Zelenskyy the “collective West” would only support Ukraine to fight, not to negotiate with Russia.

    The catastrophic results of the first two weeks of Ukraine’s offensive should focus the world’s attention on the urgent need for a ceasefire to halt the daily slaughter and dismemberment of hundreds of brave young Ukrainians, who are being forced to drive through minefields and kill zones in Western gifts that are proving to be no more than U.S.- and NATO-built death-traps.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Readouts Point to a Disjuncture between US and China

    Secretary Antony Blinken on Twitter: "Today, I met with People's Republic of China State Councilor and Foreign Minister Qin Gang in Beijing and discussed how we can responsibly manage the relationship between

    During the economic crisis in 2008, the United States sought China’s aid. US treasury secretary Hank Paulson conferred with Chinese officials, and China agreed to increase the value of the RMB and to stop selling US T-bills which it had been doing at that time.

    Paulson said, “It is clear that China accepts its responsibility as a major world economy that will work with the United States and other partners to ensure global economic stability.” But the notion that China was acting in a selfless fashion was also dispelled by Paulson who stated China helps when it is in their own interest.

    Paulson depicted the US position during the crisis as “dealing with Chinese from a position of strength…”

    That same attitude was repeated by the US State Department in March 2021 during the first face-to-face meeting with president Joe Biden’s administration in Anchorage, Alaska: “America’s approach will be undergirded by confidence in our dealing with Beijing — which we are doing from a position of strength — even as we have the humility to know that we are a country eternally striving to become a more perfect union.” [emphasis added]

    Given the baleful US shenanigans against China, Chinese high-ranking officials were ill-disposed to meet with their American counterparts. Chairman Xi Jinping was not interested in meeting with Biden after the US shot down a Chinese weather balloon. The Pentagon sought a meeting between defense secretary Lloyd Austin and China’s minister of national defense Li Shangfu, but the latter reportedly ghosted Austin in Singapore.

    Finally, secretary of state Antony Blinken managed to secure a meeting with his Chinese counterpart Qin Gang in Beijing. The official readouts for each country, however, reveal a glaring gap between them.

    The Chinese readout noted that “China-U.S. relations are at their lowest point since the establishment of diplomatic ties…” Other excerpts read:

    China has always maintained continuity and stability in its policies towards the United States, fundamentally adhering to the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation proposed by President Xi Jinping. These principles should also be the shared spirit, bottom line, and goal that both sides uphold together.

    Qin Gang pointed out that the Taiwan question is at the core of China’s core interests, it is the most significant issue in China-U.S. relations, and it is also the most prominent risk. China urges the U.S. side to adhere to the one-China principle and the three China-U.S. Joint Communiqués, and truly implement its commitment not to support “Taiwan independence”.

    That the US and China were not on the same page was clear from the oft-heard banality in the American readout:

    The Secretary made clear that the United States will always stand up for the interests and values of the American people and work with its allies and partners to advance our vision for a world that is free, open, and upholds the international rules-based order.

    That the US side made no comment on China’s core interest was a glaring brush off. Instead the US side pushed its “international rules-based order,” which is about rules defined by the US for others to follow. In other words, China does not decide what rules apply to its province of Taiwan.

    The readouts made crystal clear that China and the US view the world through different lenses.

    China is about peaceful development and win-win trade relations. The US is about waging war, sanctions, bans on trading, and an immodest belief in its indispensability. Because of this, China and Russia with the Global South are each forging their own way, a way that respects each country’s sovereignty. In future, it will be increasingly difficult for the US to use loans to impoverish other nations and plunder their wealth through the IMF’s financial strictures. Sanctions, freezing assets, and blocking financial transactions through the SWIFT system have pushed countries away and toward de-dollarization, joining BRICS, taking part in the Belt and Road Initiative, and using other financial institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank based in Beijing. Even companies in countries nominally aligned with the US are pulling back from the harms of adhering to US trading bans. The US pressure tactics have resulted in blowback, and there is sure to be growing apprehension within empire.

    The US is a warmaker. It flattened Iraq, Libya, and would have done the same to Syria had not Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah intervened at the invitation of the Syrian government. Nevertheless, the US still illegally occupies an enormous chunk of Syria and plunders its oil, revealing its true nature to the world.

    China is a peacemaker; for example, the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement, the Syrian-Arab League reunion, a ceasefire between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, a proposal for peace between Russia and Ukraine that was rejected by the US, and currently China is playing an honest broker to try and solve the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, something the US has failed miserably at solving (not that it was ever interested in solving this besides, perhaps, a brief interregnum under Jimmy Carter).

    China has stood steadfastly with Russia during its special military operation in Donbass and Ukraine. China knows that if the US-NATO would succeed in their proxy war, the plan is “regime change” and a carve up of Russia to exploit its resource wealth. This would pave the way for further “regime change” in China.

    The Blinken-Qin meeting has been an abysmal failure in diplomacy. Communist China is ascendant, and the capitalist US is in economic decline, but it still believes that it can bully and fight its way to the top by keeping the others down.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Emergence of a New Non-Alignment

    Sahej Rahal (India), Juggernaut, 2019.

    A new mood of defiance in the Global South has generated bewilderment in the capitals of the Triad (the United States, Europe, and Japan), where officials are struggling to answer why governments in the Global South have not accepted the Western view of the conflict in Ukraine or universally supported the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in its efforts to ‘weaken Russia’. Governments that had long been pliant to the Triad’s wishes, such as the administrations of Narendra Modi in India and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Türkiye (despite the toxicity of their own regimes), are no longer as reliable.

    Since the start of the war in Ukraine, India’s Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar has been vocal in defending his government’s refusal to accede to Washington’s pressure. In April 2022, at a joint press conference in Washington, DC with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Jaishankar was asked to explain India’s continued purchase of oil from Russia. His answer was blunt: ‘I noticed you refer to oil purchases. If you are looking at energy purchases from Russia, I would suggest that your attention should be focused on Europe… We do buy some energy which is necessary for our energy security. But I suspect, looking at the figures, probably our total purchases for the month would be less than what Europe does in an afternoon’.

    Kandi Narsimlu (India), Waiting at the Bus Stand, 2023.

    However, such comments have not deterred Washington’s efforts to win India over to its agenda. On 24 May, the US Congress’s Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party released a policy statement on Taiwan which asserted that ‘[t]he United States should strengthen the NATO Plus arrangement to include India’. This policy statement was released shortly after the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, where India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with the various G7 leaders, including US President Joe Biden, as well as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

    The Indian government’s response to this ‘NATO Plus’ formulation echoed the sentiment of its earlier remarks about purchasing Russian oil. ‘A lot of Americans still have that NATO treaty construct in their heads’, Jaishankar said in a press conference on 9 June. ‘It seems almost like that is the only template or viewpoint with which they look at the world… That is not a template that applies to India’. India, he said, is not interested in being part of NATO Plus, wishing to maintain a greater degree of geopolitical flexibility. ‘One of the challenges of a changing world’, Jaishankar said, ‘is how do you get people to accept and adjust to those changes’.

    Katsura Yuki (Japan), An Ass in a Lion’s Skin, 1956.

    There are two significant takeaways from Jaishankar’s statements. First, the Indian government – which does not oppose the United States, either in terms of its programme or temperament – is uninterested in being drawn into a US-led bloc system (the ‘NATO treaty construct’, as Jaishankar put it). Second, like many governments in the Global South, it recognises that we live in ‘changing world’ and that the traditional major powers – especially the United States – need to ‘adjust to those changes’.

    In its Investment Outlook 2023 report, Credit Suisse pointed to the ‘deep and persistent fractures’ that have opened up in the international order – another way of referring to what Jaishankar called the ‘changing world’. Credit Suisse describes these ‘fractures’ accurately: ‘The global West (Western developed countries and allies) has drifted away from the global East (China, Russia, and allies) in terms of core strategic interests, while the Global South (Brazil, Russia, India, and China and most developing countries) is reorganising to pursue its own interests’. These final words bear repeating: ‘the Global South… is reorganising to pursue its own interests’.

    In mid-April, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs released its Diplomatic Bluebook 2023, in which it noted that we are now at the ‘end of the post-Cold War era’. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States asserted its primacy over the international order and, along with its Triad vassals, established what it called the ‘rules-based international order’. This thirty-year-old US-led project is now floundering, partly due to the internal weaknesses of the Triad countries (including their weakened position in the global economy) and partly due to the rise of the ‘locomotives of the South’ (led by China, but including Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Nigeria). Our calculations, based on the IMF datamapper, show that for the first time in centuries, the Gross Domestic Product of the Global South countries surpassed that of the Global North countries this year. The rise of these developing countries – despite the great social inequality that exists within them – has produced a new attitude amongst their middle classes which is reflected in the increased confidence of their governments: they no longer accept the parochial views of the Triad countries as universal truths, and they have a greater wish to exert their own national and regional interests.

    Nelson Makamo (South Africa), The Announcement, 2016.

    It is this re-assertion of national and regional interests within the Global South that has revived a set of regional processes, including the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa) process. On 1 June, the BRICS foreign ministers met in Cape Town (South Africa) ahead of the summit between their heads of states that is set to take place this August in Johannesburg. The joint statement they issued is instructive: twice, they warned about the negative impact of ‘unilateral economic coercive measures, such as sanctions, boycotts, embargoes, and blockades’ which have ‘produced negative effects, notably in the developing world’. The language in this statement represents a feeling that is shared across the entirety of the Global South. From Bolivia to Sri Lanka, these countries, which make up the majority of the world, are fed up with the IMF-driven debt-austerity cycle and the Triad’s bullying. They are beginning to assert their own sovereign agendas.

    Interestingly, this revival of sovereign politics is not being driven by inward-looking nationalism, but by a non-aligned internationalism. The BRICS ministers’ statement focuses on ‘strengthening multilateralism and upholding international law, including the purposes and principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations as its indispensable cornerstone’ (incidentally, both China and Russia are part of the twenty-member Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter). The implicit argument being made here is that the US-led Triad states have unilaterally imposed their narrow worldview, based on the interests of their elites, on the countries of the South under the guise of the ‘rules-based international order’. Now, the states of the Global South argue, it is time to return to the source – the UN Charter – and build a genuinely democratic international order.

    Leaders of the Third World at the first conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade, 1961.
    Credit: Museum of Yugoslavia, Belgrade.

    The word ‘non-aligned’ has increasingly been used to refer to this new trend in international politics. The term has its origins in the Non-Aligned Conference held in Belgrade (Yugoslavia) in 1961, which was built upon the foundations laid at the Asian-African Conference held in Bandung (Indonesia) in 1955. In those days, non-alignment referred to countries led by movements rooted in the deeply anti-colonial Third World Project, which sought to establish the sovereignty of the new states and the dignity of their people. That moment of non-alignment was killed off by the debt crisis of the 1980s, which began with Mexico’s default in 1982. What we have now is not a return of the old non-alignment, but the emergence of a new political atmosphere and a new political constellation that requires careful study. For now, we can say that this new non-alignment is being demanded by the larger states of the Global South that are uninterested in being subordinated by the Triad’s agenda, but which have not yet established a project of their own – a Global South Project, for instance.

    As part of our efforts to understand this emerging dynamic, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research will be joining with the No Cold War campaign, ALBA Movimientos, Pan-Africanism Today, the International Strategy Center (South Korea), and the International Peoples’ Assembly to host the webinar ‘The New Non-Alignment and the New Cold War’ on 17 June. Speakers will include Ronnie Kasrils (former minister of intelligence, South Africa), Sevim Dagdelen (deputy party leader for Die Linke in the German Bundestag), Stephanie Weatherbee (International Peoples’ Assembly), and Srujana Bodapati (Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research).

    In 1931, the Jamaican poet and journalist Una Marson (1905–1965) wrote ‘There Will Come a Time’, a poem of hopefulness for a future ‘where love and brotherhood should have full sway’. People in the colonised world, she wrote, would have to pursue a sustained battle to attain their freedom. We are nowhere near the end of that fight, yet we are not in the position of almost total subordination that we were in during the height of the Triad’s primacy, which ran from 1991 to now. It is worthwhile to go back to Marson, who knew with certainty that a more just world would come, even if she would not be alive to witness it:

    What matter that we be as cagèd birds
    Who beat their breasts against the iron bars
    Till blood-drops fall, and in heartbreaking songs
    Our souls pass out to God? These very words,
    In anguish sung, will mightily prevail.
    We will not be among the happy heirs
    Of this grand heritage – but unto us
    Will come their gratitude and praise,
    And children yet unborn will reap in joy
    What we have sown in tears.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Taiwan’s US Representative Not “Satisfied” with Biden’s Support

    Bi-khim Hsiao, Taiwan’s Representative in the United States, is a familiar figure in the halls of power but she does not often make public speeches. So a recent talk and press conference by Ms. Hsiao deserve some attention.

    The One China Policy, endorsed by the US and UN, does not recognize Taiwan Island as an independent country but as part of China, with the government in Beijing providing the official ambassadors to the US and UN. Hence Hsiao is not an “ambassador” but a “representative,” and her organization is known as the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO). Her presence and activities in the US are sensitive points in the US-China relationship, which is why she does not often make public appearances.

    We might expect therefore that Hsiao had something of considerable consequence to communicate to an American audience. And so she did, but her message did not center exclusively on Taiwan. Hsiao and the reporters in attendance wished to discuss a country over 8000 km away from Taiwan, almost at the opposite end of Eurasia – Ukraine.

    The “Tragedy” of Ukraine in the eyes of Taipei’s Representative

    In her opening remarks, Hsiao stated: “The Ukraine war has actually generated a lot more attention and interest in … Taiwan’s defense needs. And so there has been an increase in… initiatives to find ways to support Taiwan so that that tragedy will not be repeated in our scenario.”

    “Tragedy” indeed. Hsiao, like everyone else in the world, is well aware of the devastation that has been visited on Ukraine as a result of Biden’s cruel proxy war on Russia using Ukrainians as cannon fodder. The “tragedy” of Ukraine has focused not only Hsiao’s mind but mightily distressed all the people of Taiwan Island. This led to the landslide defeat in the 2022 local elections of Hsiao’s Party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which is the home of secessionist sentiment and hostility to Beijing. The DPP was soundly thrashed by the Kuomintang (KMT), the Party that wishes to maintain the status quo with the mainland, leave in place the “strategic ambiguity” of the One China Policy and take a peaceful approach to Beijing.

    The first thing that struck me about the press conference was the unreality of Hsiao’s purpose, bordering on insanity. Here we had Taiwan’s envoy discussing war with Mainland China which has the largest PPP-GDP in the world and 18% of all of humanity. Taiwan’s population is 24 million, and it is the size of Maryland.

    The bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor, and host of the event, expressed a similar incredulity, asking in the opening question: “Russia versus Ukraine is one thing, but China versus Taiwan is a much more extreme example in terms of proportions…. How do you fight back against that?” The unstated assumption is that Taiwan can succeed with the support of the US. But just how true is that? How sound is Biden’s support for Ukraine?

    Asked whether she was “satisfied” with Biden’s commitment to Taiwan, Hsiao demurred

    Was she “satisfied” with Joe Biden’s commitment to defend Taiwan, queried another reporter. Hsiao demurred, did not answer “yes,” but instead opined that “in the long run, nothing is ever completely satisfactory.” Here Hsiao seemed to be channeling Volodymyr Zelensky, always demanding more, ever disappointed. Such is the unenviable position of a proxy whose function in the end is to be used, not championed.

    Hsiao sounded very much like someone who had doubts about US support – doubts perhaps aroused after the resounding and very bloody defeat of the US proxy, Ukraine, in Bakhmut. We can be sure that the same doubts are cropping up in the minds of the Taiwan electorate. And such doubts are likely to play a decisive role in the upcoming elections in 2024 for President and Legislative Yuan, the unicameral legislature for the entire island. Will the more pacific policies supported by the electorate in the 2022 local elections prevail again in choosing island wide officials in 2024?

    US arms to Taiwan Island, a provocation to war, must end

    Several reporters raised the question whether the US arming of Taiwan Island could be seen as a provocation. In itself this is a step forward for the US press which might be awakening to the fact that US tactics did indeed provoke the war as in Ukraine. Hsiao dodged that question by ignoring the US dimension and speaking instead of Taiwan’s efforts at increased militarization. Of course, little Taiwan acting on its own can scarcely be seen as a threat or serious provocation to China. But it is quite a different story when the weapons and personnel come from the US. After all the US has an enormous military presence in the region and has declared as a matter of policy that its aim is to bring down China. In this circumstance US weapons, military personnel and actions in Taiwan can be a serious provocation indeed.

    Although Hsiao spoke in terms of defense not provocation, she herself undermined that way of regarding the US on Taiwan Island. Asked by another reporter whether there was any evidence for Chinese preparation of an invasion of Taiwan Island, Hsiao said there was none. This is hardly surprising since China’s policy is to re-unite peacefully with the Island, a long-term goal.

    One clear and simple lesson of the Hsiao press conference is that Mainland China quite reasonably perceives the US arming of Taiwan as a threat and provocation. Thus, the way to peace is to end the US arming of Taiwan. This should be a top priority in the US peace movement, but unfortunately, it does not often receive so much as a mention.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.