When the president of thepoorest,most corrupt nation in Europe is feted with multiple standing ovations by the combined Houses of Congress, and his name invokedin the same breath as Winston Churchill, you know we’ve reached Peak Zelensky.
It’s a farcical, almost psychotic over-promotion, probably surpassed only by the media’s shameful, hyperbolic railroading of the country into war with Iraq, in 2003. Paraphrasing Gertrude from Hamlet, “Methinks the media doth hype too much.”
Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity.
Let’s remember that before ascending to his country’s presidency, Volodymyr Zelensky’s greatest claim to fame was that he could play the piano with his penis. I’m not joking. And he ran on a platform to unite his country for peace, and for making amends with Russia. Again, I’m not joking.
Now, he’s Europe’s George Washington, FDR, and Douglas MacArthur all rolled into one and before whom the mighty and powerful genuflect.
Please. The only place to go from here is down. And, that is surely coming. Soon.
Consider some inconvenient facts that the fawning media, which is essentially the public relations arm of the weapons industry, doesn’t want you to know.
The European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen,recently let slip that the Ukrainian army has lost more than 100,000 troops in the eight months since the beginning of the war. Over the nine-year span of the Vietnam War, the U.S. with a population six times that of Ukraine, lost a total of 58,220 men.
In other words, on a per day, per capita basis, Ukraine is losing soldiers at a rate 141 TIMES that of U.S. losses in Vietnam. The U.S. lost the public on Vietnam when middle class white boys began coming home in body bags. Does anybody with half a brain believe such losses in Ukraine are sustainable? Does anybody have another plan to avert such slaughter?
Von der Leyen is among the shrewdest public figures in the world. What she is doing is laying the predicate for Western withdrawal from Ukraine and ending the War. If you look at the facts on the ground, not the boosterish propaganda ladled out by the media, you can understand why.
In a matter of weeks, Russia, with its hypersonic missiles, destroyed half of Ukraine’s electrical power infrastructure. This, as winter is coming on. It can just as easily take out the other half, effectively bombing Ukraine back into the Stone Age. Is that what anybody wants?
The startling, indeed, terrifying part of this is that neither Ukraine nor the West have any defense against these hypersonic missiles. They travel so fast, and on variable trajectories, they cannot be shot down, even by the most advanced Western systems. They represent one of the greatest asymmetries in deliverable destructive power in the history of warfare, probably dwarfed only by the U.S.’s possession of atomic bombs at the end of World War II.
Again, there is no effective defense against them. The Russians have them. The Ukrainians don’t. Game over. Can you understand why leaders in the West are beginning to wake up?
On the conventional front, the Ukrainians are having trouble securing even conventional weapons to defend themselves. U.S. arms suppliers are working around the clock to replace their own stocks and the stocks that European countries have given to Ukraine. But the backlog is running into years. A recent headline from The Wall Street Journal stated, “Europe is Rushing Arms to Ukraine but Running Out of Ammo.”
Finally, the U.S. has committed $112 billion to Ukraine. That includes $45 billion just slipped into the omnibus funding bill against the likelihood that a Republican-controlled House will cut such funding, almost certainly substantially.
That’s more than $10 billion per month since the war started in February. And that doesn’t even count the subsidies, both material and financial, from the EU which amount to billions of dollars more per month.
Without such subsidies, Zelensky would not have lasted a month in the war. How many hours do you think he is going last once that flow dries up? And it surely is.
The Europeans are coming to realize that their continent is being de-industrialized, literally moved backwards an entire epoch in economic terms, because of their willingness to serve as the doormat for the U.S.’ imperial war against Russia. Not even they, with their supine fealty to U.S. domination, are willing to commit collective economic suicide on behalf of the U.S.
France’s Macron and Germany’s Scholz are suggesting that accommodations to Russian interests must be devised in order to bring about a peaceful settlement of the war.
Macron suggestedin a television address to his nation that an antagonized Russia is not in the security interests of Europe. “We need to prepare what we are ready to do…to give guarantees to Russia the day it returns to the negotiating table.”
Scholz was even more specific. In anarticle in Foreign Affairs he declared, “We have to go back to the agreements which we had in the last decades and which were the basis for peace and security order in Europe.”
This is a direct repudiation of the U.S.’s maximalist position before the start of the War, that Russia’s security needs were of no interest to a marauding NATO.
Even U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is now mooting the idea that territorial concessions must be on the table. In aWall Street Journal article, Blinken stated that, “Our focus is…to take back territory that’s been seized from [Ukraine] since February 24th.”
Notice, that this is a significant climb down from the U.S.’ earlier position that all Russian gains since 2014, including Crimea, must be reversed before negotiations could begin. And this is just Blinken’s opening hand. More concessions are sure to follow as Russian gains become greater and their likelihood of being reversed, lesser.
Put these four things together: staggering, unsustainable losses of soldiers; terrifying, indefensible asymmetries of destructive power; inability to supply oneself with even conventional defensive weapons; and categorically reduced support from your most important backers.
Does that sound like the formula for winning a war? It is not. It’s the formula for losing the war, which is why von der Leyen, Macron, Scholz, and Blinken are now laying pipe for getting out. The tide is going out under Zelensky. He will soon be remembered as a Trivial Pursuits question, or an answer on Jeopardy: “The only modern head of state known to be able to play the piano with his penis.” Ding. “Contestant #3?” “Who is Volodymyr Zelensky?”
A peace will soon be declared. Russia will keep the Donbas and Crimea in recognition of the facts on the ground. Both sides will be better off for this. The Donbas is ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and culturally Russian, which is why it voted overwhelmingly for assimilation into Russia. Besides, if Kiev loved them so much, it wouldn’t have murdered 14,000 of them over the past eight years and resumed massive shelling in early February of this year, before the Russian invasion.
Ukraine will foreswear any future affiliation with NATO. This is Putin’s highest priority and what he asked for–and was denied–in his request to the U.S. and NATO last December, before the invasion was launched. If Russia begins its much-feared winter offensive, as many expect, Ukrainian generals will dispatch Zelensky in a coup rather than send their few remaining soldiers to certain annihilation.
U.S. grain and pharma conglomerates will buy up Ukrainian farmland—some of the best in the world—for pennies on the dollar. This is the standard MO of U.S. multinational vultures coming in after the kill to pick apart the carcasses. U.S. weapons makers will look for and help provoke the next feeding frenzy, much as they materialized Ukraine barely a year after the humiliating U.S. defeat in Afghanistan derailed their last gravy train.
Russia and China, driven together by U.S. bullying, will continue to constellate the nations of the Global South into an anti-Western bloc committed to collaborative, mutually profitable, peaceful development. The U.S. and its closest allies will cower behind the walls they’ve constructed of the ever-shrinking share of the global economy that they can manage to hold as their own.
Ukraine will prove a turning point in the dismantling of U.S. hegemony over global affairs that it has enjoyed—and, let’s be honest, often abused–since 1945. The U.S. public is not psychically prepared for such a come down. But that is the cost of living in the fantasy world that the media lavishes up to keep that self-same public ignorant, fearful, confused, entertained, and distracted.
Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity. We need to be on the lookout for their next gambit to pillage the treasury and advance their own private interests above those of the nation. It will surely come.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
On December 27 2022, both Russia and Ukraine issued calls for ending the war in Ukraine, but only on non-negotiable terms that they each know the other side will reject.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Kuleba proposed a “peace summit” in February to be chaired by UN Secretary General Guterres, but with the precondition that Russia must first faceprosecution for war crimes in an international court. On the other side, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov issued a chillingultimatum that Ukraine must accept Russia’s terms for peace or “the issue will be decided by the Russian Army.”
There is no moral high ground in relentless, open-ended mass slaughter, managed, directed and in fact perpetrated by people in smart suits and military uniforms in imperial capitals thousands of miles from the crashing of shells, the cries of the wounded, and the stench of death.
But what if there were a way of understanding this conflict and possible solutions that encompassed the views of all sides and could take us beyond one-sided narratives and proposals that serve only to fuel and escalate the war? The crisis in Ukraine is in fact a classic case of what International Relations scholars call a “security dilemma,” and this provides a more objective way of looking at it.
A security dilemma is a situation in which countries on each side take actions for their own defense that countries on the other side then see as a threat. Since offensive and defensive weapons and forces are often indistinguishable, one side’s defensive build-up can easily be seen as an offensive build-up by the other side. As each side responds to the actions of the other, the net result is a spiral of militarization and escalation, even though both sides insist, and may even believe, that their own actions are defensive.
In the case of Ukraine, this has happened on different levels, both between Russia and national and regional governments in Ukraine, but also on a larger geopolitical scale between Russia and the United States/NATO.
The very essence of a security dilemma is the lack of trust between the parties. In the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Cuban Missile Crisis served as an alarm bell that forced both sides to start negotiating arms control treaties and safeguard mechanisms that would limit escalation, even as deep levels of mistrust remained. Both sides recognized that the other was not hell-bent on destroying the world, and this provided the necessary minimum basis for negotiations and safeguards to try to ensure that this did not come to pass.
After the end of the Cold War, both sides cooperated with major reductions in their nuclear arsenals, but the United States gradually withdrew from a succession of arms control treaties, violated itspromises not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe, and used military force in ways that directlyviolated the UN Charter’s prohibition against the “threat or use of force.” U.S. leaders claimed that the conjunction of terrorism and the existence of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons gave them a new right to wage “preemptive war,” but neither the UN nor any other country ever agreed to that.
U.S. aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere was alarming to people all over the world, and even to many Americans, so it was no wonder that Russian leaders were especially worried by America’s renewed post-Cold War militarism. As NATO incorporated more and more countries in Eastern Europe, a classic security dilemma began to play out.
President Putin, who was elected in 2000, began to useinternational fora to challenge NATO expansion and U.S. war-making, insisting that new diplomacy was needed to ensure the security of all countries in Europe, not only those invited to join NATO.
The former Communist countries in Eastern Europe joined NATO out of defensive concerns about possible Russian aggression, but this also exacerbated Russia’s security concerns about the ambitious and aggressive military alliance gathering around its borders, especially as the United States and NATO refused to address those concerns.
In this context, broken promises on NATO expansion, U.S. serial aggression in the greater Middle East and elsewhere, and absurd claims that U.S. missile defense batteries in Poland and Romania were to protect Europe from Iran, not Russia, set alarm bells ringing in Moscow.
The U.S. withdrawal from nuclear arms control treaties and its refusal to alter its nuclear first strike policy raised even greater fears that a new generation of U.S. nuclear weapons were beingdesigned to give the United States a nuclear first strike capability against Russia.
On the other side, Russia’s increasing assertiveness on the world stage, including its military actions to defend Russian enclaves in Georgia and its intervention in Syria to defend its ally the Assad government, raised security concerns in other former Soviet republics and allies, including new NATO members. Where might Russia intervene next?
As the United States refused to diplomatically address Russia’s security concerns, each side took actions that ratcheted up the security dilemma. The United States backed the violent overthrow of President Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014, which led to rebellions against the post-coup government in Crimea and Donbas. Russia responded by annexing Crimea and supporting the breakaway “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Even if all sides were acting in good faith and out of defensive concerns, in the absence of effective diplomacy they all assumed the worst about each other’s motives as the crisis spun further out of control, exactly as the “security dilemma” model predicts that nations will do amid such rising tensions.
Of course, since mutual mistrust lies at the heart of any security dilemma, the situation is further complicated when any of the parties is seen to act in bad faith. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently admitted that Western leaders had no intention of enforcing Ukraine’s compliance with the terms of the Minsk II agreement in 2015, and only agreed to it tobuy time to build up Ukraine militarily.
The breakdown of the Minsk II peace agreement and the continuing diplomatic impasse in the larger geopolitical conflict between the United States, NATO and Russia plunged relations into a deepening crisis and led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Officials on all sides must have recognized the dynamics of the underlying security dilemma, and yet they failed to take the necessary diplomatic initiatives to resolve the crisis.
Peaceful, diplomatic alternatives have always been available if the parties chose to pursue them, but they did not. Does that mean that all sides deliberately chose war over peace? They would all deny that.
Yet all sides apparently now see advantages in a prolonged conflict, despite the relentless daily slaughter, dreadful and deteriorating conditions for millions of civilians, and theunthinkable dangers of full-scale war between NATO and Russia. All sides have convinced themselves they can or must win, and so they keep escalating the war, along with all its impacts and the risks that it will spin out of control.
President Biden came to office promising anew era of American diplomacy, but has instead led the United States and the world to the brink of World War III.
Clearly, the only solution to a security dilemma like this is a cease-fire and peace agreement to stop the carnage, followed by the kind of diplomacy that took place between the United States and the Soviet Union in the decades that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which led to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and successive arms control treaties. Former UN official Alfred de Zayas has also called for UN-administeredreferenda to determine the wishes of the people of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk.
It is not an endorsement of an adversary’s conduct or position to negotiate a path to peaceful coexistence. We are witnessing the absolutist alternative in Ukraine today. There is no moral high ground in relentless, open-ended mass slaughter, managed, directed and in fact perpetrated by people in smart suits and military uniforms in imperial capitals thousands of miles from the crashing of shells, the cries of the wounded and the stench of death.
If proposals for peace talks are to be more than PR exercises, they must be firmly grounded in an understanding of the security needs of all sides, and a willingness to compromise to see that those needs are met and that all the underlying conflicts are addressed.
Draft text of the congressional omnibus spending bill released last week reveals a proposed $25 million increase in funding to the National Labor Relations Board, which would bring the agency’s 2023 federal fiscal year budget to $299 million. Its funding has otherwise been frozen at $274 million for the past nine years; when inflation is taken into account, this effectively amounts to a budget decrease of 25% since 2014, according to calculations cited in an NLRB news release.
The proposed hike is well below what leaders from unions like Communications Workers of America and Unite Here have been calling for, and falls short of the (already meager) $319 million President Joe Biden requested.
Any failure to robustly fund the NLRB hurts workers’ attempts to win formal union recognition and protect their basic rights, a key reason why anti-union lawmakers have kept the NLRB’s budget slim. Union representation petitions were up 53% in the 2022 fiscal year, and unfair labor practice charges spiked 19%, according to the NLRB. Meanwhile, the proposed budget increase — at just 9% — is not a meaningful raise above the current rate of inflation.
Let’s dig into what the NLRB actually does. The NLRB is the agency that interprets and enforces labor law for most U.S. workers, unions, and employers in the private sector (companies, corporations, nonprofits and other, non-government businesses). The NLRB performs essential functions under U.S. labor law in support of the union-organizing process. Workers petition the NLRB when they want to hold an election in their workplace for union representation by submitting signed membership cards. The NLRB then verifies the accuracy of those cards, and it determines the “appropriate bargaining unit” (the specific pool of workers who can participate in the representation election and, if a union is certified, would be represented by the union and covered by the union’s contract with the employer) prior to each election. The agency then holds representation elections for workers to decide whether they want a union to represent them. If a majority of workers vote in favor of union representation, the NLRB certifies the union as the exclusive representative of that group of workers, and it legally compels the employer to begin negotiating with the union.
Studies have shown that delay at any stage of this process — but especially between filing the petition and the election, when unions and employers are openly campaigning for or against the union — benefits employers. Every day that passes during this period gives employers more time to exert pressure on workers to vote against the union, which we know not uncommonly includes illegal threats and intimidation (see: Starbucks and Amazon worker-organizers who have been fired). With a massive wave in new union organizing, an understaffed NLRB may not be able to hold representation elections in a timely manner.
The NLRB also adjudicates disputes between unions and employers and enforces labor law. When workers or unions believe their rights have been violated by an employer under labor law, they can file an unfair labor practice charge with the NLRB. NLRB field staff investigate these charges to determine if they have merit, and if they do, NLRB attorneys represent unions and workers in pursuing legal action against employers. Unfair labor practices are often very time-sensitive — for example, when an employer is illegally interfering in a union organizing campaign, or when they illegally fire an employee for organizing at work.
To understand just how starved the NLRB’s budget actually is, it can be helpful to compare the agency with another federally funded entity: the U.S. military apparatus. Mainstream attitudes in Washington would likely posit that it is ridiculous to compare NLRB spending with “defense” spending, as the latter performs a vital, nonnegotiable service whose massive funding is a given and workers’ rights, on the other hand, are considered dispensable. Regardless, the comparison provides useful insights into the moral priorities of our political system.
Earlier in December, bipartisan members of Congress overwhelmingly passed an $858 billion military and weapons spending bill — the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) — now awaiting signature on Biden’s desk. That bill is a whopping $45 billion above what Biden requested (already a staggering number). That’s billion with a B, which means just the difference between what Biden proposed and what Congress granted for “defense” spending amounts to 150 times the entire proposed NLRB budget.
During the past nine years — since 2014 — that the NLRB’s funding has been frozen (effectively an annual budget cut, accounting for inflation), the war budget has been sky-high. In fact, adjusting for inflation, “defense” spending for fiscal year 2022 was 13% higher than it was during fiscal year 2014, according to calculations provided to Workday Magazine and In These Times by Lindsay Koshgarian, program director for the National Priorities Project, which researches the military budget. What these numbers mean is that, during the same nine years the NLRB’s funding was effectively cut 25%, “defense” spending was increasing 13%.
But percentage increases don’t capture the full picture, given how drastically different the size of the two budgets are. Since 2014, “defense” spending has increased a total of $252 billion, or $150 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. The NLRB’s funding is minuscule in comparison. The “defense” increase alone (not adjusted for inflation), of $80 billion from 2022 to 2023, is 3,200 times the NLRB increase for 2023, assuming both of these budgets go through. Adjusted for inflation, the “defense” spending increase from 2022 to 2023 ($65 billion) is 217 times the entire 2023 NLRB budget.
The spending approved for 2023 includes $816.7 billion for the Department of Defense and $30.3 billion for “national security programs” under the purview of the Department of Energy. An important caveat: These numbers do not capture the overall “militarized budget,” as the National Priorities Project puts it. When Homeland Security, incarceration, and law enforcement are considered, the dollar amount jumps much higher.
It’s completely legitimate to oppose this military and weapons spending in its own right; one does not have to compare Pentagon to NLRB funding to be incensed. According to the estimates of Stephen Semler, co-founder of the left-leaning research organization Security Policy Reform Institute, $452 billion of the 2023 “defense” bill funds will end up in the pockets of military contractors. The budget stipulates huge expenditures on weapons, including $32.6 billion for Navy ships and nuclear “modernization,” a euphemism for investment in nuclear weapons. It also continues the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, which further militarizes the Asia-Pacific region. Overall, these funds go toward entrenching and expanding a military apparatus that unleashes tremendous harm and violence across the world, from oppressive military bases to support for the Saudi-led war on Yemen to belligerent footing toward China.
But comparing the NLRB budget with war spending is useful, especially, because the juxtaposition offers insights into what lawmakers in Washington view as important. “For years, these budgets have acted as if there wasn’t room for this $25 million increase the NLRB is getting, which is minuscule, while the Pentagon is getting tens of billions more every year,” Koshgarian says. “Whether it’s protecting workers’ rights or nutrition programs or healthcare or Covid-19 spending, we hear we can’t afford these tiny incremental increases to make people’s lives better. But there is no end to the billions more the Pentagon gets.”
Biden, meanwhile, is squandering the opportunities provided by the leadership of Jennifer Abruzzo — his own appointed NLRB general counsel and the most aggressively pro-worker general counsel in recent memory — and undercutting his own stated commitment to workers’ rights — which he betrayed when he denied rail workers the right to strike — as long as he underfunds the agency.
The NLRB and the broader regime of U.S. labor and employment law are not, of course, perfect tools in the service of workers; both are deeply flawed. For example, when an employer commits an unfair labor practice against a worker, the NLRB cannot award punitive damages to the worker. The U.S. lags far behind other industrialized democracies in labor standards. However, there is no question that the NLRB should be fully funded so that it can fulfill its modestly protective mandate. The negative consequences of underfunding are not theoretical. “We are stretched thin,” Noor Alam, an NLRB field attorney in Denver, recently told the Washington Post. “I have cases that I know are really important on union campaigns where lead organizers have been fired and [union] elections are pending, but I’ve been forced to put things that can’t wait on the back burner. Justice is being delayed.”
It is difficult to overstate these stakes. Around 160 million people have jobs in the United States. Each employer profoundly impacts the lives of the working people — jobs determine one’s ability to financially survive and obtain healthcare, and shape one’s basic sense of wellbeing and agency. In the United States, there’s no such thing as guaranteed democracy in the workplace. As the political philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has argued, “under U.S. law, employers are dictators of their workplaces.” Unions are a key counterweight to top-down control, precarity, and low wages. Yet, even amid a wave of union momentum, union density is not great in relative historical terms, currently just a smidge above 10%. In a country where wage theft is rampant and inequality is stuck at high levels, the material protection of those workers fighting to build unions and organize for their rights has both direct and indirect consequences for millions.
We are talking about the U.S. workplace. Why on Earth is it a given that military spending should remain bloated while worker institutions shrivel?
Like the NDAA, the omnibus bill is commonly referred to as must-pass, and if the latter doesn’t go through by December 23, some government services might be disrupted. Meanwhile, countless workers are taking tremendous risks to mobilize in warehouses and meatpacking houses and kitchens, and offices to unionize their workplaces, or to stand up against egregious abuses. And when they reach out for protection of their basic rights, they are met with a federal government that cares more about war-making than protecting the vulnerable, exploited, and abused. The wide gap in proposed funding levels between the military apparatus and the NLRB gives us an opportunity to reflect on the moral content — and moral compass — of how public funds are used.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Draft text of the congressional omnibus spending bill released this weekreveals a proposed $25 million increase in funding to the National Labor Relations Board, which would bring the agency’s 2023 federal fiscal year budget to $299 million. Its funding has otherwise been frozen at $274 million for the past nine years; when inflation is taken into account, this effectively amounts to a budget decrease of 25% since 2014, according tocalculations cited in an NLRB news release.
Comparing the NLRB budget with war spending is useful, especially, because the juxtaposition offers insights into what lawmakers in Washington view as important.
The proposed hike is well below what leaders from unions like Communications Workers of America and Unite Here have been calling for, andfalls short of the (already meager) $319 million President Joe Biden requested.
Any failure to robustly fund the NLRB hurts workers’ attempts to win formal union recognition and protect their basic rights, a key reason why anti-union lawmakers have kept the NLRB’s budget slim. Union representation petitions were up 53% in the 2022 fiscal year, and unfair labor practice charges spiked 19%, according to the NLRB. Meanwhile, the proposed budget increase—at just 9%—is not a meaningful raise above the current rate of inflation.
Let’s dig into what the NLRB actually does. The NLRB is the agency that interprets and enforces labor law for most U.S. workers, unions and employers in the private sector (companies, corporations, nonprofits and other, non-government businesses). The NLRB performs essential functions under U.S. labor law in support of the union-organizing process. Workers petition the NLRB when they want to hold an election in their workplace for union representation by submitting signed membership cards. The NLRB then verifies the accuracy of those cards, and it determines the “appropriate bargaining unit” (the specific pool of workers who can participate in the representation election and, if a union is certified, would be represented by the union and covered by the union’s contract with the employer) prior to each election. The agency then holds representation elections for workers to decide whether they want a union to represent them. If a majority of workers vote in favor of union representation, the NLRB certifies the union as the exclusive representative of that group of workers, and it legally compels the employer to begin negotiating with the union.
Studieshave shown that delay at any stage of this process—but especially between filing the petition and the election, when unions and employers are openly campaigning for or against the union—benefits employers. Every day that passes during this period gives employers more time to exert pressure on workers to vote against the union, which we know not uncommonly includes illegal threats and intimidation (see:Starbucks andAmazon worker-organizers who have been fired). With a massive wave in new union organizing, an understaffed NLRB may not be able to hold representation elections in a timely manner.
The proposed budget increase—at just 9%—is not a meaningful raise above the current rate of inflation.
The NLRB also adjudicates disputes between unions and employers and enforces labor law. When workers or unions believe their rights have been violated by an employer under labor law, they can file an unfair labor practice charge with the NLRB. NLRB field staff investigate these charges to determine if they have merit, and if they do, NLRB attorneys represent unions and workers in pursuing legal action against employers. Unfair labor practices are often very time-sensitive—for example, when an employer is illegally interfering in a union organizing campaign, or when they illegally fire an employee for organizing at work.
To understand just how starved the NLRB’s budget actually is, it can be helpful to compare the agency with another federally funded entity: the U.S. military apparatus. Mainstream attitudes in Washington would likely posit that it is ridiculous to compare NLRB spending with “defense” spending, as the latter performs a vital, nonnegotiable service whose massive funding is a given and workers’ rights, on the other hand, are considered dispensable. Regardless, the comparison provides useful insights into the moral priorities of our political system.
Earlier in December, bipartisan members of Congress overwhelmingly passed an $858 billion military and weapons spending bill—the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)—now awaiting signature on Biden’s desk. That bill is a whopping $45 billion above what Biden requested (already a staggering number). That’s billion with a B, which means just the difference between what Biden proposed and what Congress granted for “defense” spending amounts to 150 times the entire proposed NLRB budget.
During the past nine years—since 2014—that the NLRB’s funding has been frozen (effectively an annual budget cut, accounting for inflation), the war budgethas been sky-high. In fact, adjusting for inflation, “defense” spending for fiscal year 2022 was 13% higher than it was during fiscal year 2014, according tocalculations provided to Workday Magazine and In These Times by Lindsay Koshgarian, program director for the National Priorities Project, which researches the military budget. What these numbers mean is that, during the same nine years the NLRB’s funding was effectively cut 25%, “defense” spending was increasing 13%.
But percentage increases don’t capture the full picture, given how drastically different the size of the two budgets are. Since 2014, “defense” spending has increased a total of $252 billion, or $150 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. The NLRB’s funding is minuscule in comparison. The “defense” increase alone (not adjusted for inflation), of $80 billion from 2022 to 2023, is 3,200 times the NLRB increase for 2023, assuming both of these budgets go through. Adjusted for inflation, the “defense” spending increase from 2022 to 2023 ($65 billion) is 217 times the entire 2023 NLRB budget.
The spending approved for 2023 includes $816.7 billion for the Department of Defense and $30.3 billion for “national security programs” under the purview of the Department of Energy. An important caveat: These numbers do not capture the overall “militarized budget,” as the National Priorities Projectputs it. When Homeland Security, incarceration and law enforcement are considered, the dollar amount jumps much higher.
It’s completely legitimate to oppose this military and weapons spending in its own right; one does not have to compare Pentagon to NLRB funding to be incensed. According to theestimates of Stephen Semler, co-founder of the left-leaning research organization Security Policy Reform Institute, $452 billion of the 2023 “defense” bill funds will end up in the pockets of military contractors. The budget stipulates huge expenditures on weapons, including $32.6 billion for Navy ships and nuclear “modernization,” a euphemism for investment in nuclear weapons. It also continues the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, which further militarizes the Asia-Pacific region. Overall, these funds go toward entrenching and expanding a military apparatus that unleashes tremendous harm and violence across the world, fromoppressive military bases tosupport for the Saudi-led war on Yemen tobelligerent footing toward China.
But comparing the NLRB budget with war spending is useful, especially, because the juxtaposition offers insights into what lawmakers in Washington view as important. “For years, these budgets have acted as if there wasn’t room for this $25 million increase the NLRB is getting, which is minuscule, while the Pentagon is getting tens of billions more every year,” Koshgarian says. “Whether it’s protecting workers’ rights or nutrition programs or healthcare or Covid-19 spending, we hear we can’t afford these tiny incremental increases to make people’s lives better. But there is no end to the billions more the Pentagon gets.”
Biden, meanwhile, is squandering the opportunities provided by the leadership of Jennifer Abruzzo—his own appointed NLRB general counsel and the mostaggressively pro-worker general counsel in recent memory—and undercutting his own stated commitment to workers’ rights—which hebetrayed when he denied rail workers the right to strike—as long as he underfunds the agency.
For years, these budgets have acted as if there wasn’t room for this $25 million increase the NLRB is getting, which is minuscule, while the Pentagon is getting tens of billions more every year,” Koshgarian says.
The NLRB and the broader regime of U.S.labor andemployment law are not, of course, perfect tools in the service of workers; both are deeply flawed. For example, when an employer commits an unfair labor practice against a worker, the NLRB cannot award punitive damages to the worker. The U.S. lagsfar behind other industrialized democracies in labor standards. However, there is no question that the NLRB should be fully funded so that it can fulfill its modestly protective mandate.
The negative consequences of underfunding are not theoretical. “We are stretched thin,” Noor Alam, an NLRB field attorney in Denver, recentlytold the Washington Post. “I have cases that I know are really important on union campaigns where lead organizers have been fired and [union] elections are pending, but I’ve been forced to put things that can’t wait on the back burner. Justice is being delayed.”
“I have cases that I know are really important on union campaigns where lead organizers have been fired and [union] elections are pending, but I’ve been forced to put things that can’t wait on the back burner. Justice is being delayed.”
It is difficult to overstate these stakes. Around 160 million people have jobs in the United States. Each employer profoundly impacts the lives of the working people—jobs determine one’s ability to financially survive and obtain healthcare, and shape one’s basic sense of wellbeing and agency. In the United States, there’s no such thing as guaranteed democracy in the workplace. As the political philosopher Elizabeth Anderson hasargued, “under U.S. law, employers are dictators of their workplaces.” Unions are a key counterweight to top-down control, precarity and low wages. Yet, even amid a wave of union momentum, union density is not great in relative historical terms, currently just a smidge above 10%. In a country where wage theft is rampant and inequality is stuck at high levels, the material protection of those workers fighting to build unions and organize for their rights has both direct and indirect consequences for millions.
We are talking about the U.S. workplace. Why on Earth is it a given that military spending should remain bloated while worker institutions shrivel?
Like the NDAA, the omnibus bill is commonly referred to as must-pass, and if the latter doesn’t go through by December 23, some government services might be disrupted. Meanwhile, countless workers are taking tremendous risks to mobilize in warehouses and meatpacking houses and kitchens and offices to unionize their workplaces, or to stand up against egregious abuses. And when they reach out for protection of their basic rights, they are met with a federal government that cares more about war-making than protecting the vulnerable, exploited and abused. The wide gap in proposed funding levels between the military apparatus and the NLRB gives us an opportunity to reflect on the moral content—and moral compass—of how public funds are used.
This article is a joint publication of In These Times andWorkday Magazine, a non-profit newsroom devoted to holding the powerful accountable through the perspective of workers.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The year 2022 confirmed yet again that accepting massive military budget increases in exchange for a smattering of social benefits funding — a common devil’s bargain struck by Democrats in Congress — will never deliver the kind of world we dream of. The military budget deal just reached by Congress will put Pentagon spending at $858 billion — more than $118 billion higher than when President Biden…
It’s now more than 300 days since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the conflict has intensified rather than subsided, with Ukrainian leaders expressing fears of impending mass infantry attacks from Russia and U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken announcing this week that the U.S. will send Ukraine $1.8 billion in military aid, including a Patriot missile battery. On December 21…
To encourage Congress to authorize the largest defense budget ever, the Pentagon just released its annual report on China, which dangerously misrepresents the country’s defense strategy. Such deliberate lies about China to drum up justification for more US war spending need to be urgently addressed.
Let’s debunk these lies:
On Nuclear Weapons: The Pentagon reports that China possesses around 400 nuclear warheads with no clear plan on how to use them. If this estimation of China’s arsenal is correct, it’s still trivial compared to the US’s almost 6,000 warheads. China is the only nuclear power with an unconditional “no first use” policy, and has been clear that it only intends to use its nuclear power for assurance and defense. Meanwhile, the United States is the only country to have used nuclear weapons in war and has also flirted with escalating tensions into a nuclear war with Russia this year. Who is preparing for war?
On Global Military Presence: The Pentagon reports that since China established its first overseas military base in Djibouti, it has ambitions to expand its military presence globally. At the same time, the United State has more than 750 military bases in around 80 countries. This includes more than 250 bases in the Asia-Pacific encircling China with 375,000 personnel in the Indo-Pacific Command, while China has no military presence in the Western Hemisphere. Who is preparing for war?
On International Order: The Pentagon reports that China may challenge the US in the international arena. It is true that China is taking the lead internationally in economic development, in technological innovation, and in fighting climate change. Other countries around the world are happy for its support in growing their capacities to be independent of United States hegemony in their regions. China builds relationships through economic cooperation and good diplomacy. In contrast, the United States asserts its global dominance through direct or proxy war, occupation, crippling sanctions, and regime-changing coups. The international order that the United States seeks to maintain is rooted in violence and destruction. Let’s invest in peace, not war!
While the United States is desperately pursuing its outdated policy of enforcing global hegemony, the rest of the world is already moving towards a multilateral sphere, which ensures the greatest chance for peace. Escalating tension with China was a mistake, and building a colossal military budget is doubling down on this mistake. We must be vigilant about the warmongering lies about China. “China is not our enemy” is not a hollow slogan but firm ground that peacemakers stand on.
War was inevitable outcome of 2014 U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine
Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in an interview with Die Zeit, published on December 7, that “the 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give time to Ukraine. It…used this time to become stronger as can be seen today. The Ukraine of 2014-2015 is not the modern Ukraine.”
These comments echoed those of Petro Poroshenko, the former president of Ukraine, who came to power in snap elections after the 2014 coup d’état. Regarding his signing of the Minsk Accord, Poroshenko repeated in a Deutsche Welle interview last June his previous admission: “Our goal was to, first, stop the threat, or at least to delay the war—to secure eight years to restore economic growth and create powerful armed forces.”
Meaning that Ukraine had no real intention of following the accords, but wanted to buy time while Ukraine built fortifications and developed a military strong enough to wage a war of aggression against the Russian-tilted Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which had demanded autonomy from the Ukrainian government installed in the February 2014 coup.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych (2010-2014) became a target for regime change when he spurned an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan and instead drew his country closer to Russia.
When protesters backed by the U.S. did not have enough signatures for Yanukovych’s impeachment, they overthrew his government by force and hunted down Yanukovych’s supporters. The new Ukrainian government further tried to impose draconian language laws and attacked the people of eastern Ukraine after they voted for their autonomy after the coup—an attack that began right after then-CIA director John Brennan visited Ukraine.1
People cast ballots at polling station in Donetsk following U.S.-backed coup in May 2014. [Source: newsweek.com]
Signed originally on September 5, 2014, by Ukraine, Russia, rebel leaders in eastern Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), with mediation by leaders in France and Germany, the Minsk agreement had followed a twelve-point protocol advocating for a cease-fire in the fighting between the Ukrainian military and Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics and to decentralize power, giving those Republics autonomy which they had voted for in popular referenda.
October 17, 2014: Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, in talks with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, right, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (foreground) and French President Francois Hollande (center back). [Source: consortiumnews.com]Map of the buffer zone established by the Minsk protocol. [Source: wikipedia.org]
Additional provisions included the withdrawal of illegal armed groups and mercenaries from Ukraine, the release of hostages and illegally detained persons, the establishment of security zones and independent monitoring of the conflict zones, prosecution and punishment of war criminals, and continuance of inclusive national dialogue.
Unfortunately, the Minsk protocol was never followed, and conflict in eastern Ukraine persisted, leading to the signing of the Minsk II protocol in February 2015.
This protocol reaffirmed many aspects of the first Minsk agreement, including the promotion of decentralization and autonomy for the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics, which was to be enshrined in a new Ukrainian constitution that was to recognize the diversity of religions, languages and cultures within Ukraine.2
The Ukrainian right sector, however, vowed not to follow Minsk II, claiming that it was unconstitutional and the U.S. State Department accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of violating the protocol by deploying Russian Armed Forces around the contested city of Debaltseve to assist the Donetsk Army. (Putin’s spokesman denied this and said that Russia could not assist in the implementation of Minsk II because it was not involved in the conflict.)
When a law was passed in the Ukrainian parliament granting Donetsk and Luhansk partial autonomy, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the “law was a sharp departure from the Minsk agreements because it demanded local elections under Ukrainian jurisdiction.”
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Angela Merkel’s comments on December 7 were nothing short of the testimony of a person who openly admitted that everything done between 2014 and 2015 was meant to “distract the international community from real issues, play for time, pump up the Kyiv regime with weapons, and escalate the issue into a large-scale conflict.”
Merkel’s statements “horrifyingly” reveal in turn that the West uses “forgery as a method of action,” and resorts to “machinations, manipulation, and all kinds of distortions of truth, law, and rights imaginable.”
Loss of Trust
Russian President Vladimir Putin for his part told journalists at a Eurasian Union Summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, on December 103 that he had thought the leader of the Federal Republic of Germany, even though Germany was on Ukraine’s side, had been sincere in negotiating the Minsk agreements, but now it was apparent that “they were deceiving us. The only purpose was to pump arms into Ukraine and get it ready for hostilities. We are seeing this, yes. Apparently, we got our bearings too late, frankly. Perhaps we should have started all this sooner, but we still simply hoped to come to terms under these Minsk peace agreements.”
For Putin, Merkel’s admission shows that “we did everything right by starting the special military operation. Why? Because it transpired that nobody was going to fulfill these Minsk agreements. The Ukrainian leaders also mentioned this, in the words of former President Poroshenko, who said he signed the agreements but was not going to fulfill them.”
Putin addressing Merkel’s revelations at press conference following Eurasian Union Summit meeting. [Source: en.kremlin.ru]
According to Putin, now the issue of “trust is at stake. Trust as such is already close to zero, but after such statements, the issue of trust is coming to the fore. How can we negotiate anything? What can we agree upon? Is it possible to come to terms with anyone, and where are the guarantees? This is, of course, a problem. But eventually we will have to come to terms all the same. I have already said many times that we are ready for these agreements, we are open. But, naturally, all this makes us wonder with whom we are dealing.”
Fitting a Larger Pattern of Deception
James A. Baker with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 in Moscow making a false promise. Gorbachev should have known from U.S. history never to trust an American leader. [Source: nsarchive.gwu.edu]
Western treachery over the Minsk agreements is far from a historical anomaly.
But in 1998, the Clinton administration certified NATO expansion into Romania, Poland and Hungary, triggering a new Cold War.
Decades earlier, the United States had deceived the Soviets by failing to abide by the Yalta agreements when it covertly armed neo-Nazis to try to foment counter-revolutions in pro-communist governments that were being established in Eastern Europe.
When the U.S. invaded Russia with six other countries in 1918 following the Bolshevik Revolution, President Woodrow Wilson deceived his own commanding General, William S. Graves, who was told that he was going to Russia to protect the Trans-Siberian Railway and a Czech military delegation when his real purpose was to support Czarist military officers intent on re-establishing the old order in Russia.4
Benjamin Abelow’s new book, How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How U.S. and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe (Great Barrington, MA: Siland Press, 2022), demonstrates that the official U.S. narrative about the war in Ukraine is not only wrong but “the opposite of truth.”
A lecturer in medicine at Yale University with a degree in European history who lobbied Congress on nuclear weapons policy, Abelow writes that “the underlying cause of the war lies not in an unbridled expansionism of Mr. Putin, or in paranoid delusions of military planners in the Kremlin, but in a 30-year history of Western provocations, directed at Russia, that began during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and continued to the start of the war.”5
The key U.S./Western provocations detailed by Abelow are:
The expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a hostile anti-Russian military alliance, over a thousand miles eastward, pressing it toward Russia’s borders in disregard of assurances previously given to Moscow.
Withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the placing of anti-ballistic launch systems that could accommodate and fire offensive nuclear weapons such as nuclear-tipped Tomahawk cruise missiles at Russia, from newly joined NATO countries.
The Obama administration’s laying the groundwork for and possibly directly instigating an armed, far-right coup in Ukraine, which replaced a democratically elected pro-Russian government with an unelected pro-Western one that had four high-ranking members who could be labeled neo-fascist.
The conducting of countless NATO military exercises near Russia’s border, including ones with live-fire rocket exercises whose goal was to simulate attacks on air-defense systems inside Russia.
The assertion that Ukraine would become a NATO member.
Withdrawal by the U.S. from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, increasing Russia’s vulnerability to a U.S. first strike.
The U.S.’s arming and training of the Ukrainian military through bilateral agreements and holding of regular joint military training exercises inside Ukraine.
Leading the Ukrainian leadership to adopt an uncompromising stance toward Russia, further exacerbating the threat to Russia.6
Abelow makes clear that, if the situation were reversed and Russia or China carried out equivalent steps near U.S. territory, the U.S. would surely respond with a preemptive military attack on the aggressors that would be justified as a ‘matter of self-defense.’
So why should Russia be maligned when it is acting as any country would under similar circumstances? And why is it so hard for Americans to stand against their government’s reckless, deceitful and criminal policies that have greatly heightened the risk of nuclear war?
Kees van der Pijl, Flight MH17: Ukraine and the new Cold War: Prism of Disaster (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 103.
Russian expert Nicolai Petro noted at the time that there was one major omission to Minsk II—an end to anti-terrorist operations against the East, which would not have passed the Kyiv parliament. Van der Pijl, Flight MH17, 146.
At this summit, Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko presented proposals to strengthen the Eurasian Economic Union consisting of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia, including by promoting development of modern industries and subsidizing interest rates on loans for industrial projects. Lukashenko stated: “We need to improve, at all costs, the blood circulatory system of our union…. It is already clear to everyone that the era of dollar dominance is coming to an end. The future belongs to trade blocs, which will be made in national currencies. Belarus and Russia are no longer using the U.S. dollar in their main settlements. It is important that other partners actively join this process.”
Years after Graves came back to the U.S., he wrote a scathing memoir, America’s Siberian Adventure, 1918-1920 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith Publishers Inc., 1931) and was accused in turn of being a communist sympathizer.
Benjamin Abelow, How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How U.S. and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe (Great Barrington, MA: Siland Press, 2022), 7.
Abelow should add that the ultimate goal of U.S. policy is to trap Russia into a quagmire and bankrupt the country by ratcheting up sanctions, resulting in the growth of civil unrest and overthrow of Vladimir Putin, who is hated because he restored Russia’s economic sovereignty following the misrule of Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and tightened Russian economic integration with Germany, threatening to undermine Anglo-American dominance in Central and Eastern Europe. See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Repeating ’70s Strategy of Grand Chess-Master Brzezinski: Biden Appears to Have Induced Russian Invasion of Ukraine to Bankrupt Russia’s Economy and Advance Regime Change,” CovertAction Magazine, March 1, 2022; Van der Pijl, Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War, 3.
Forcefully opposing the warmongering and imperialism of your rulers is the very first step toward political morality. It’s not the only step, but it is the first step, because if you haven’t taken that step then no other ostensibly moral politics you might espouse are meaningful.
Your anti-capitalism is meaningless if you’re not aggressively opposing your government’s mass military murders for power and profit. Your anti-racism is meaningless if you’re not aggressively opposing your government’s butchery and exploitation of brown-skinned people overseas. If you’re not forcefully opposing your government’s warmongering and imperialism, then the rest of your politics are irrelevant, because they are false. A sincerely antiwar right-winger with all the wrong positions on all other issues is still a much better person than you are.
When I see a lefty voicing solid perspectives without also aggressively opposing the warmongering, militarism and imperialism of their rulers, I personally just ignore them, because their failure in that one area has made a lie of their successes in all the other areas.
If this seems strange or not obvious to you, it’s simply because you have not spent enough time sincerely contemplating the immense suffering and savagery that is inflicted upon our world by war and imperialism, or learned enough about who the worst offenders are on that front. Literally the only reason western warmongering isn’t met with a backlash of horror and outrage is because it’s been so normalized and propaganda-distorted for us. If we could see what our rulers are doing to people with fresh eyes, we would fall to our knees and scream with rage.
War is the single worst thing in the world. It’s the most insane thing humans do. The most ruinous. The most traumatizing. The least sustainable. And the US-centralized power alliance is its most egregious perpetrator, by a massive margin.
There’s no excuse for ignoring this.
❖
Saying a US politician is bad on foreign policy but good on domestic policy is like saying a serial killer was nice to his family. It’s like, okay, who gives a fuck? They’re mass murderers and you should hate them.
❖
It’s a bit nutty how the term “Old Left” gets used to describe lefties who oppose war and distrust the US intelligence cartel instead of simply acknowledging that the real left has been effectively stomped out by propaganda and psyops.
“You’re the Old Left. Those people over there cheering internet censorship and proxy warfare and nuclear brinkmanship, they’re the left now.”
Are you sure? Are you sure they’re not just a bunch of brainwashed dupes? Because they look an awful lot like brainwashed dupes.
❖
The ruling class has near-perfect class solidarity. Their only differences are on questions like “When is it time to transition civilization to new industries” or “Just how hard can we squeeze the public before the guillotines come out,” which are always resolved fairly amicably. That’s generally about as far as it goes in terms of “power struggles” within the oligarchy or whatever you want to call it. Their class solidarity is so good that the working class struggles to even imagine it; they imagine a lot more conflict among those ranks than there is.
If the working class had even a fraction of the class solidarity as the ruling class, revolutionary change would be inevitable. Which is why the ruling class pours so much energy into making sure that never happens; they understand the power of class solidarity better than we do.
❖
“Anti-wokeness” is just as much of an establishment-serving energy sink as hyperfixation on identity politics is. It’s a very mainstream narrative push that mainstream conservative politicians are all campaigning on and mainstream right wing pundits are all advancing, clearly geared toward herding the public into mainstream conservative factions. Fixating on either side of the culture war necessarily plays into the same power-serving dynamics you think you’re opposing.
❖
Increasing right-wing panic about communism is based on three major delusions:
That actual communists are anywhere remotely close to having power or taking power in the west.
That entirely capitalist things like the World Economic Forum, the Democratic Party, and the Biden administration are “communist”.
That China is a threat.
Rightists are panicking about communism more and more because they have been trained to panic about communism by the propaganda they consume. They have been trained to panic about communism because we’re in a new cold war and their panic serves the empire’s information interests. In reality panicking about communism in the west right now makes as much sense as panicking about ghosts or space aliens, but the illusion of a threat is made to feel real by the three delusional narratives I just listed.
❖
There really isn’t enough respect for just how much better the US is at propaganda than other nations. It’s completely incomparable in its power and effectiveness. Comparing Russian and Chinese propaganda to US propaganda is comparing baby scribbles to da Vinci.
❖
Perhaps the most toxic brain poison around right now is the common belief that we have some kind of patriotic duty to facilitate the information interests of our government. You see this in the way any criticism of western militarism gets labeled “propaganda” for a foreign government. If criticizing your government’s foreign policy gets you called a propagandist for Russia or China, what that means is that people believe anything other than alignment with your government’s information interests is dangerous enemy information activity which should be opposed.
Baked into that position is the assumption that everyone needs to operate as pro bono propagandists for your government, and that anyone who does not do so is a treasonous friend of the enemy. This belief is prevalent in both the political/media class and the mainstream rank-and-file. If people didn’t feel duty bound to protect the information interests of their government, you wouldn’t see so much mindless bleating of “Russian propagandist!” and “CCP propagandist!” at anyone who criticizes the most dangerous foreign policy objectives of their government.
And it just says so much about the power of the propaganda machine of the US-centralized empire that people not only believe the Official Lines, and they not only parrot the Official Lines, but they actively condemn anyone who calls the Official Lines into question.
This is brain poison. Can you think of a belief system more toxic for important critical thought than one which says you must forcefully attack any dissent against the most dangerous agendas of the most powerful people in your world? I can’t. It’s a great way to keep people stupid, quiet and obedient.
❖
People defend their rulers for the same reason cultists defend their cult leader: because they’ve been indoctrinated. And usually by the same psychological manipulation techniques.
❖
The least likely outcome for humanity’s future is that we continue along the same trajectory we’ve been on without having to drastically change ourselves and our behavior. That is the least likely thing to happen. We’re headed for massive changes fairly soon, one way or another.
The humanity of the not-too-distant future operates very differently from the humanity of today, either because it learned to work in cooperation with itself and with its ecosystem or because it’s an extinct species, yet most visions for our future imagine we’ll remain the same. We need to abandon the notion that the humanity of the future will move and operate in more or less the same way as the humanity of today, just with better technology. That is the very least likely of all possible outcomes.
________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
According to a December 6th report by the Congressional Research Service, the United States Government is, and since May has been, offering inducements to foreign countries that are not yet bases from which the U.S. is being allowed to position and launch missiles against Russia and/or China, to become such bases, which would make those nations become additional targets for Russian and/or Chinese missiles. The U.S. is seeking to spread Russia’s and China’s military targets to countries that aren’t yet such targets. Doing this would increase the amounts of weaponry that are being sold, and that would especially benefit American weapons-manufacturers because America is the world’s largest manufacturer of military weapons, and also because the second and third largest such manufacturers, Russia and China, have weapons-producers that are majority-owned by their Government itself, and therefore the weapons-makers there don’t respond primarily to investors, but instead to the nation’s actual and authentic national-defense needs (the Government’s needs). America’s ‘Defense’ firms, such as Lockheed Martin, fund the careers of and thereby control its politicians and Government and its ‘defense’-policies, in order to be able to control their own markets, which are mainly the U.S. Government but also the U.S.-allied Governments (which likewise are controlled largely by such private investors in military-related firms), but in both Russia and China, which still retain socialism regarding their military manufacturers, the Government controls its “Defense” firms; and, so, their defense-policies are strictly for defense (that national, instead of private, purpose), whereas in America and its allied countries, the ‘defense’-firms are for aggression (because producing wars is what benefits the investors in those firms, which control their own Government and its ‘allies’ or vassal-Governments).
Reportedly, in May 2022, the Secretary of the Army stated the Army did not yet have basing agreements for longrange systems but “discussions were ongoing” with a number of countries in the Indo-Pacific region. Given the importance of basing, Congress might examine ongoing efforts to secure Army long-range precision fires unit basing in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific region.
These Governments “in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific region” are close enough to Russia, and to China, so that if the United States goes to war against Russia and/or China directly (instead of, as now, indirectly — such as it does in both Ukraine on Russia’s border, and Taiwan on China’s border) to conquer Russia and/or China, then those missiles, which will be targeted against one or both of those two countries, will be within range of either Moscow or else Beijing, and will, therefore, become assets adding to America’s likelihood of entirely controlling a post-WW-III world. Largely because military weapons are, in the U.S. and its ‘allied’ countries, controlled by private investors (basically by U.S.-and-allied billionaires), the U.S. Government’s main objective is to control a post-WW-III world. In other words: that Government’s main objective is aggression (defense is actually only secondary). By contrast, in both Russia and China, the entire militaries are designed and function solely for the purpose of national defense, which means preventing, instead of winning, a WW III. In both Russia and China, the ONLY objective of the military, and the MAIN objective of all OTHER policies, is, in fact, defense of the nation. In the U.S. and its ‘allied’ nations, the MAIN objective of the entire Government is expansion of the U.S. empire for it to control ultimately every nation — which means the conquest of every nation that isn’t already part of it. Whereas the top objective of the U.S. Government is imperial — notto prevent but to win a WW III — the top objective of its targeted nations (or ‘enemies’) is instead national (actually to prevent a WW III). And this explains the respective foreign (including military and diplomatic) policies, on each of the two sides: imperialistic versus anti-imperialistic. That is how to interpret and understand each side: it is the difference in perspective — that of the predator (on America’s side), versus that of its prey (on the side of the predator’s intended victims).
A commonly expressed view by proponents of the predator’s side in international relations is that if its side becomes defeated or fades, then there will be no basic change except the identity of the predator. That viewpoint (everyone’s being psychopathic) might be universally true in the state of nature, but not necessarily in the state of civilization. Both Russia and China have repeatedly condemned, on a moral basis — an anti-imperialistic basis — the predatory perspective in international relations, the win-lose or “zero-sum-game” view, and have — at least verbally — promised that if and when the U.S. becomes defeated or simply fades-out, both Russia and China will move forward ONLY on a win-win (i.e., anti-imperialistic) basis regarding all other nations. America’s President Franklin Delano Roosevelt passionately expressed, repeatedly, both in private and in public, the same commitment, to an only win-win future, that Russia and China now express: a repugnance and rejection of any and all imperialism. However, his immediate two successors, Truman and Eisenhower, despised FDR and promptly committed the U.S., on 25 July 1945, to America’s ultimately conquering the entire world. America has been on that path ever since (to win WW III), and the Biden Administration is especially obsessively so. (Perhaps Biden fears he’ll die soon and wants to be around to see America controlling the entire world, so is rushing things along; but, in any case, he is turning out to be a terrific performer for the people who invested in him, among the mega-donors, including, for example, a former Vice Chairman and top investor in Lockheed Martin who helped organize Biden’s billionaires, and — as a Democrat, which means hypocrite — had said publicly that “I frankly believe that both Democrats and Republicans [referring only to members of Congress — the people whom people such as he himself buy] … are overly influenced by the defense industry in this country.” Biden keeps his secret promises to his mega-donors, but ignores his public promises to his voters. That’s the way America’s ‘democracy’ works.)
In the imperial world of government-by-corruption, government is for sale always to the highest bidders, and in the vassal-nations it means that “ongoing efforts to secure Army long-range precision fires unit basing in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific region” will — since that will necessarily mean their own nation’s becoming targeted by the missiles of Russia and/or China — a “public/private partnership” or legal bribe being paid to the vassal-nation’s leaders in order for the U.S. Government to be able to win that ultimate sacrifice of the given vassal-nation. Of course, such bribes are private, not public, since those are vassal-nations and their ‘democracy’ is only a mockery of the real thing.
On 15 November 2022, during the G20 summit in Bali (Indonesia), Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told journalists that his country ‘seeks a stable relationship with China’. This is because, as Albanese pointed out, China is ‘Australia’s largest trading partner. They are worth more than Japan, the United States, and the Republic of Korea… combined’. Since 2009, China has also been Australia’s largest destination for exports as well as the largest single source of Australia’s imports.
For the past six years, China has largely ignored Australia’s requests for meetings due to the latter’s close military alignment with the US. Now, in Bali, China’s President Xi Jinping made it clear that the Chinese-Australian relationship is one to be ‘cherished’. When Albanese was asked if Xi raised the issue of Australia’s participation in several military pacts against China, he said that issues of strategic rivalry ‘[were] not raised, except for in general comments’.
Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd recently said that the impetus for the deep freeze between Australia and China six year ago was the ‘US doctrine of strategic competition’. This outlook is clarified in the 2022 US National Security Strategy, which asserts that China ‘is America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge’. In Bali, US President Joe Biden said that the US and China must ‘manage the competition responsibly’, which suggested that the US might take a less belligerent posture towards China by not pressuring them through US military pacts in Asia and by reducing the intensification of the crisis over Taiwan. Rudd suggests that Biden’s shift in tone might have given Albanese the opportunity to ‘reset’ relations between Australia and China.
Before Albanese left for Bali, however, news broke about a plan to station six US B-52 bombers, which have nuclear weapons capability, in northern Australia at the Tindal air force base. Additionally, Australia will build 11 large storage tanks for jet fuel, providing the US with refuelling capacity closer to China than its main fuel repository in the Pacific, Hawaii. Construction on this ‘squadron operations facility’ would start immediately and be completed by 2026. The $646 million upgrade includes new equipment and improvements to the US-Australian spy base at Pine Gap, where the neighbouring population in Alice Springs worries about being a nuclear target in a war that they simply do not want.
These announcements come as no surprise. US bombers, including B-52s, have visited the base since the 1980s and taken part in US-Australian training operations since 2005. In 2016, the US commander of its Pacific air forces, General Lori Robinson, said that the US would likely add the B-1 bomber – which has a longer range and a larger payload capacity – to these exercises. The US-Australian Enhanced Air Cooperation (2011) has already permitted these expansions, although this has routinely embarrassed Australian government officials who would prefer more discretion, in part due to the anti-nuclear sentiment in New Zealand and in many neighbouring Pacific island states who are signatories of the 1986 Treaty of Rarotonga that establishes the region as a nuclear-free zone.
Minnie Pwerle (Australia), Bush Melon Seed, 1999.
The expansion of the Tindal air base and the upgrades to Pine Gap spy base are part of the overall deepening of military and strategic ties between the US and Australia. These ties have a long history, but they were formalised by the Australia-New Zealand-United States (ANZUS) Security Treaty of 1951 and Australia’s entry into the Five Eyes intelligence network in 1956. Since then, the two countries have tightened their security linkages, such as by facilitating the transfer of military equipment from the US arms industry to Australia. In 2011, US President Barack Obama and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard agreed to position a few thousand US Marines in Darwin and Northern Australia and allow US bombers frequent flights to that base. This was part of Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’, which signalled the US pressure campaign against China’s economic advancement.
Two new security alignments – the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad, restarted in 2017) and AUKUS (2021) – further enhanced these ties. The Quad brought together India and Japan with Australia and the US. Since 1990, Australia has hosted Exercise Pitch Black at Tindal, a military war game on which it has collaborated with various countries. Since India’s air force joined in 2018 and Japan participated in 2022, all Quad and AUKUS members are now a part of this large airborne training mission. Australian officials say that after Tindal’s expansion, Exercise Pitch Black will increase in size. In October 2022, Prime Minister Albanese and Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida updated their 2007 bilateral security pact. The new ‘reciprocal access agreement’ was signed in response to ‘an increasingly severe strategic environment’, according to Kishida, and it allows the two countries to conduct joint military exercises.
China’s foreign ministry responded to news of the expansion of Tindal and Pine Gap by saying, ‘Such a move by the US and Australia escalates regional tensions, gravely undermines regional peace and security, and may trigger an arms race in the region’.
Qiu Zhi Jie (China), Map of Mythology, 2019.
Albanese walked into the meeting with Xi hoping to end China’s trade restrictions on Australia. He left with optimism that the $20 billion restrictions imposed in 2020 would be lifted soon. ‘It will take a while to see improvement in concrete terms going forward’, he said. However, there is no word from China about removing these restrictions, which limit the import of Australian barley, beef, coal, cotton, lobsters, timber, and wine.
These restrictions were triggered by then Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrison’s insinuation that China was responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Even before that, in 2018, Australia’s government banned two Chinese telecommunications firms (Huawei and ZTE) from operating in its jurisdiction. This was not a trivial policy change, since it meant a drop from $19 billion in Australia’s trade with China in July 2021 to $13 billion in March 2022.
Fu Wenjun (China), Red Cherry, 2018.
During the meeting in Bali between Albanese and Xi, the Australian side presented a list of grievances, including Beijing’s restrictions on trade and Australia’s concerns about human rights and democracy in China. Australia seeks to normalise relations in terms of trade while maintaining its expanded military ties with the United States.
Xi did not put anything on the table. He merely listened, shook hands, and left with the assurance that the two sides would continue to talk. This is a great advance from the ugly rhetoric under Scott Morrison’s administration.
In October 2022, China’s ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, gave an address in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Australia and China, which will be celebrated on 21 December. During this talk, Ambassador Qian asked his Australian counterparts if they saw China as ‘a champion or a challenger’ of the international order. Australia’s government and press, he suggested, sees China as a ‘challenger’ of the UN Charter and the multilateral system. However, he said, China sees itself as a ‘champion’ of greater collaboration between countries to address common problems.
The list of concerns that Albanese placed before Xi signals that Australia, like the US, continues to treat China as a threat rather than a partner. This general outlook towards China makes any possibility of genuine normalisation difficult. That is why Ambassador Qian called for Australia to have ‘an objective and rational perception’ of China and for Canberra to develop ‘a positive and pragmatic policy towards China’.
Zeng Shanqing (China), Vigorous Horse, 2002.
Growing anti-Chinese sentiment within Australia poses a serious problem for any move towards normalisation. In July 2022, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that Australia would have to ‘correct’ several of its views on China before relations could advance. A recent poll shows that three-quarters of Australia’s population believes that China might be a military threat within the next two decades. The same survey showed that nearly 90% of those polled said that the US-Australia military alliance is either very or fairly important. At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore earlier this year, Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles said that countries must engage each other through dialogue and diplomacy. ‘China is not going anywhere. And we all need to live together and, hopefully, prosper together’, he noted.
That Albanese and Xi met in Bali is a sign of the importance of diplomacy and dialogue. Albanese will not be able to get the trade benefits that Australia would like unless there is a reversal of these attitudes and the US-Australia military posture towards China.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is generating debate amongst southern Europe’s pacifist and progressive forces, who all turned out for a massive anti-war protest in Rome last month, reports Dick Nichols.
The Biden administration is again pushing for military intervention in Haiti, in part due to the fear of Haitian immigrants coming to the United States, but also as a result of an imperialist mindset that is focused on physically controlling Haiti. The U.S. mainstream media constantly present Haiti as a country that is collapsing without presenting geopolitical, colonial and structural contexts…
The United States’s already colossal and record-breaking defense budget is about to get even bigger, with congressional negotiators slated to propose a staggering $847 billion for defense for 2023, new reporting finds — a $45 billion increase over President Joe Biden’s already massive defense budget request.
Four people familiar with negotiations told Politico that House and Senate lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have come to a “compromise” on the budget, which could balloon as high as $858 billion when programs outside of the congressional armed services committees are included. $847 billion is equal to the Senate Armed Services Committee’s proposal from earlier this year.
If approved, this would be the largest-ever defense budget, building upon previous years’ already unfathomably large allotments for U.S. militarism. As in previous years, the defense budget is likely to pass — no matter how absurdly high it gets — as it is deemed a “must-pass” budget item every year by both Democratic and Republican war hawks.
Antiwar and progressive advocates have strongly condemned the proposed budget, saying that it is an absurd amount of money to spend in a time of great economic inequality and a largely-unmitigated climate crisis.
“People are worried about being able to pay rent, about affording groceries, and about being able to afford healthcare. $847 billion for the Pentagon, over half of which goes directly to companies like Lockheed Martin, is a slap in the face to every constituent of every member of Congress that votes in favor of it,” CODEPINK National Co-Director Danaka Katovich said in a statement to Truthout.
“It shows a lack of care. It shows a fundamental difference in the interests working people hold versus the people that govern us,” Katovich continued.
Lindsay Koshgarian, director of the National Priorities Project, added that lawmakers are often deficit hawks for proposals to help the working class, but roll over for the defense budget, no matter the figure.
“The same legislators who refused to continue child tax credits that cut child poverty in half are now choosing to add tens of billions of dollars to an already-enormous Pentagon budget,” Koshgarian told Truthout. “The bonus for the Pentagon is more than the entire annual climate investment under the Inflation Reduction Act. The only ones who will benefit are the corporations that sell weapons to the U.S. and around the world.”
If this budget request goes through, the U.S. will have allocated $1.67 trillion toward military spending during the Biden administration alone. At this rate — with Biden’s increasing defense requests, and Congress’s repeated escalation of those requests — a $1 trillion annual budget for the Pentagon could soon be in sight.
Progressives, frustrated with the incessant increases to the military budget, have said time and time again that just fractions of the amount that the U.S. spends on defense each year could fund other urgent priorities.
Progressive lawmakers fiercely criticized Biden’s defense request earlier this year.
“It is simply unacceptable that after the conclusion of our longest war and during a period of Democratic control of both chambers of Congress, the president is proposing record high military spending,” said Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) this spring.
“Appropriators and advocates are constantly called to answer for how we will afford spending on lowering costs and expanding access to healthcare, housing, childcare services, on fighting the Covid-19 pandemic, and on combating climate change — but such concerns evaporate when it comes to the Pentagon’s endlessly growing, unaudited budget,” Jayapal continued.
Indeed, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has never passed an audit. Critics point out that over half of the defense budget goes toward private contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, resulting in huge profits for these companies; in the first three quarters of 2022, while the public has been suffering due to inflation, Lockheed Martin made over $4.2 billion in profit, while Raytheon reported an operating profit of over $3.9 billion.
On December 6, Purdue University President Mitch Daniels and former U.S. President George W. Bush will appear together on a Purdue stage at an event billed by the university as a conversation on “leadership and citizenship.” Daniels is completing a nearly 10-year term as Purdue president. Previously, Daniels served from 2001-2003 as director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Bush White House. The event is meant to celebrate both of their legacies.
Plans are underway for Daniels and Bush to be greeted that night by Purdue students, faculty and community members there for a different reason: to protest Bush and Daniels’s roles in the murderous U.S. war against the people of Iraq in the name of the “war on terror.”
As president, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, supposedly in retaliation for 9/11. As his budget director, Daniels priced the war for him at $50-60 billion. The subsequent U.S. onslaught produced devastation for the Iraqi people. More than 200,000 civilians died and more than 9.2 million Iraqis were displaced by the U.S. war. Kali Rubaii, a Purdue professor of anthropology, has documented high rates of birth defects in Iraq that may be the result of uranium and heavy metal exposure from U.S. weapons and burn pits meant to destroy the detritus of war. At least 800,000 Iraqi children were made orphans by the war. And despite Daniels’s original low projections, the U.S. has now spent approximately $2 trillion to date on the Iraq war, while more than 4,500 U.S. soldiers have lost their lives fighting it. All of this carnage against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. Even U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s notorious allegations of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” were later admitted by Powell himself to have been the result of deceitful intelligence.
The Bush-Daniels summit meeting at a public university seeking to glorify and whitewash Iraq’s apocalypse might be seen as a parable for the rise of what Henry A. Giroux has called the “Military-Industrial-Academic Complex” (MIAC). In his 2007 book, The University in Chains, Giroux documented how since the Cold War the U.S. academy had been a recurring site for research, investment and collaboration with the U.S. military-state in proliferating war and war profiteering across the planet. This trend was massively jumpstarted by 9/11. The Department of Homeland Security, created by the Bush administration, distributed billions of dollars to universities to support national security research and programming.
In January 2006, at the University Presidents Summit, then-President Bush announced the “National Security Language Initiative,” funneling millions of dollars from the Departments of State, Education and Defense to promote the study of Arabic as a part of the state’s Islamophobic security apparatus. In 2008, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates launched the “Minerva Research Initiative,” providing university grants for social science research that focuses “on areas of strategic importance to the U.S. national security policy.” To date, the initiative has funded hundreds of university faculty projects intended to improve “our basic understanding of security.” Funded faculty projects include “Combatting Chinese Influence in Contested and Non-Contested Territories” and “Foreign Military Training: Building Effective Armed Forces in Weak States.”
For Giroux, the MIAC’s function has been not only to support the advent and advance of U.S. wars, but to link the privatization of public education to the eradication of critical thinking about the contours of U.S. political and economic empire. Indeed, Daniels’s reign at Purdue is a continuation of the university’s own long promotion of academic militarization. In 2002, it opened the Purdue Homeland Security Institute, one of the first in the United States. The institute partners with U.S. military branches, the Department of Homeland Security, the Indiana Department of Homeland Security and Indiana State Police to conduct research into topics like “active shooter” situations. It also offers no-cost graduate education to active-duty military officers.
Since Daniels’s arrival as president in 2013, the university has further muscled up its military bona fides. In 2019, the Swedish manufacturer Saab announced it would build the airframe for the T-7A Redhawk fighter jet at Purdue’s Discovery Research Park to help train the “next generation of fighter and bomber pilots.” Daniels extolled the collaboration as a chance for Purdue to lead in “protecting the security of Americans.” In February 2021, Purdue received Department of Defense funding to participate in a consortial research project into advancing the adoption of lead-free electronics in defense systems. More recently, in August 2022, Department of Defense Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks was given a tour of the campus’s research and development facilities, including its nanotechnology. “We are investing heavily in the infrastructure, human and physical, to design, test and develop the systems necessary to protect the freedoms Americans enjoy,” said Daniels of the visit.
Daniels’s enthusiasm for war-making in the name of empire is a grisly but logical evolution of his role preparing the budget for a national war his then-boss President Bush described as “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” But as Giroux has argued, the militarization of the American state and the militarization of the American university are symptomatic of other forms of racial, political and economic violence at work in the U.S.
Daniels, for example, earned himself the nickname “The Blade” while working as White House budget director for his alleged budget-balancing feats and commitment to austerity. Yet many students at Purdue, especially students of color, will tell you that Daniels’s weaponized nickname cuts in more than one way.
For example, in November 2019, Daniels drew national fire for telling a group of Black students that the university was recruiting “one of the rarest creatures in America,” a leading Black scholar. Daniels later apologized for the comment, but it reminded many students that the university leader had been conspicuously unsupportive when openly white supremacist posters were found tacked up on the university campus in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s election. Daniels first said of the posters it was “not at all clear what they mean” despite their use of classic Nazi imagery. Demanding a stronger condemnation of the posters, students occupied the university administration building. When the president refused to meet with them, they remained in the building throughout the spring term.
Student vulnerabilities reflected the general rise of racist militarization on college campuses in the U.S., such as the white nationalists who began their murderous feats at the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 with a torch-lit march across the University of Virginia campus. Trump as a presidential candidate frequently invoked 9/11, then enacted a Muslim ban once elected. International student applications to the U.S. dropped accordingly.
Trump’s Department of Education sustained the Islamophobic project of 9/11 by demanding that the Duke-University of North Carolina Consortium for Middle East Studies (CMES) revise its curriculum or risk losing federal funding. A letter sent from the Education Department read, “It seems clear foreign language instruction and area studies advancing the security and economic stability of the United States have taken ‘a back seat’ to other priorities at the Duke-UNC CMES.” The letter also said that the CMES was inappropriately promoting the “positive aspects of Islam.”
Organizers at Purdue are using this poster (and its QR code) to spread awareness of the protest planned for December 6.Courtesy of Bill V. Mullen
Episodes like these are reminders that the MIAC is both a structural and lived experience, especially for non-white and non-Christian denizens of U.S. universities, and that a true legacy of the war on terror within the United States has been an increasing atmosphere of racial policing, surveillance and academic militarization. Indeed, rhetoric of academic diversity and liberal multiculturalism on university campuses now easily coexists with rising militarism. When Purdue and Saab announced their partnership to build fighter planes, both highlighted that the “Red Tail” design on the aircraft was an ode to the Tuskegee Airmen, the first Black aviators in the U.S. Air Force Army Corps in World War II. The use of racial diversity to promote U.S. warfare is a mask for the human costs of war — for both its victims and those who fight it.
More senior students on campus worry too that Bush’s role in the war on terror and the war on Iraq itself have been erased from historical memory for the current generation. Paige Frazier, a Ph.D. student in Purdue’s American Studies Program who plans to protest, said:
Many in Purdue’s undergraduate class are too young to remember Bush as a war criminal. George Bush lied to the American people, spent trillions of tax dollars on an unjust war, and caused immeasurable pain and suffering in Iraq and here at home. It is appalling that Mitch Daniels and other Purdue leaders believe that George W. Bush’s presence on campus will be somehow beneficial for our student body.
In the meantime, the MIAC has become big business. U.S. News and World Report now lists and ranks “Homeland Security Programs” across U.S. universities while the Office of Homeland Security boasts an Office of University Programs which “harnesses the intellectual power of America’s universities to provide innovative research, development, and education to the Homeland Security Enterprise (HSE).” College Factual meanwhile estimates that at least 7,000 degrees in Homeland Security were granted in the academic year 2021-2022, with an average starting salary of $52,000. Purdue Global University meanwhile offers an “Online Master’s Degree in Homeland Security and Emergency Management.” Purdue Global is itself a new Frankensteinian entry into the MIAC, a public online university built from Purdue’s 2018 purchase — for one dollar — of the for-profit online Kaplan University. Purdue Global is operated by the Purdue Board of Trustees and described as a “public benefit corporation.” It expands the MIAC footprint into a global market of thousands of virtual degree consumers both inside and outside of the U.S.
It is these sprawling conditions spawned by and through the war on terror — and its bedfellow Military-Industrial-Academic Complex — that activists, organizers and people of conscience will be protesting as George W. Bush and Mitch Daniels take the stage at Purdue. One faculty member joining the protest who requested anonymity for fear of retribution said of the event:
It is inappropriate for a man who deceived the American public to launch an illegal invasion, ignored the mass protests of his own citizens and sent thousands of Iraqis and Americans to their deaths, to be speaking at a public university that prides itself on integrity. We take this as an opportunity to do a teach-in to educate ourselves about the history and costs of militarism in our lives.
And said one local Democratic Socialists of America organizer who plans to protest:
George W. Bush and his administration represent corruption, lawlessness and militarism. This legacy is the complete opposite of the things a university should dedicate itself to. We hope that all members of the community will turn out to demonstrate their opposition to this ill-conceived invitation.
The organizers and activists will hold a teach-in and speak-out on December 6 as part of their protest. Their organizing efforts include this petition to protest Bush’s appearance and circulating the scannable QR code on the poster accompanying this story. The protesters’ rally will be in solidarity with other national movements to demilitarize university campuses, like the national Cops Off Campus Coalition and Dissenters, a group committed to reclaiming resources from the war industry. These movements align with ongoing battles to demilitarize K-12 education as documented in Scott Harding and Seth Kershner’s 2015 book, Counter-Recruitment and the Campaign to Demilitarize Public Schools. The protest efforts also fall under the broad banner of the contemporary abolitionist movement, which seeks restorative justice and a redistribution of public goods from death-making institutions like war and prisons to life-making activities like schools. Those protesting the Bush-Daniels summit will thus be fighting both in memory of those martyred by the U.S. war against Iraq and for a world that includes the right to live and build alternatives to state violence, racism and empire.
This is a rite of passage that needs to go the way of the Dodo.
Mercenaries, and now, we have a blue blood son, grandson to Robert Kennedy, heading out to Ukraine with some sad sack ideas about what he in the name of Hell is going to do in that country?
Yep, RFK Jr., let out the news recently, on Megyn Kelly. The newspapers picked it up:
“He felt that he shouldn’t be arguing about it unless he was willing to have skin in the game and take his own risk,” Kennedy said on “The Megyn Kelly Show” of his son’s decision to go to the war-torn country.
Kennedy said his son signed up for the Foreign Legion at the Ukrainian Embassy and was a drone pilot before he was promoted to a “machine gunner.”
“He didn’t have any military experience and kind of talked his way into the unit,” he added. “He’s been in firefights, mainly nighttime, and a lot of artillery fights with the Russians.”
“He had a job for a law firm, a really good law firm in Los Angeles, and I was looking forward to him living with me for the summer,” he said of his son’s initial plans.
When probing him further about Conor Kennedy’s plans, his son said, “I’m not going. I want to talk to you. I don’t want you to ask me what I’m doing.”
“I was like, ‘Um…,’” he explained. “And he said, ‘I will explain it to you at some point, but I do not want you to ask me now, and if you could just respect that it would mean a lot to me.’ So I did.”
We can discuss what the role of parenting has to do with bringing up children who might find it necessary to shoot at people to get skin in the game. Now, Conor is 28, that is, 28 years old, not months, yet as a teacher of many souls over four decades, I can say he is most certainly arrested developed (so many American men are), and this whole idea of having skin in the game is beyond insane. Kind reader, what were you doing at age 28? Wanting skin in the game? Which game? Hmm, I went to Central America before age 28, and I was working with refugees in Arizona in my 19 to 21 years of age time frame. I was involved in journalism, too, young, at 17, and then reporting on some things like El Salvadorans perishing in the desert near where I was headquartered, and some on the drug tunnels down also near Bisbee. Also, reporting on the military putting up aerostat balloons along the border to try and capture undocumented workers. I even did a story on some of those Posse Comitatus folk, the border patriots (sic) who went out there armed and lock ‘n’ loaded.
Nope, no blue blood in my line. Yep, plenty of military around me with an old man in cryptology in the Air Force and then Army. Germany, France, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Yes, and I am named after a grandfather who was a WWI pilot in the Germany navy-air force, flying triple-wing planes. He was in post-WWI Germany, seeing the wheelbarrows of Deutsche Marks for a loaf of bread. He also — before the German loss — in the Battle of Jutland, on a ship, the Rostock, that was hit and distressed with hundreds dead. He floated on the flotsam of war and watched the battle ensue and then the two sides with white flags came into the war theater to pick up the wounded and dead.
And, of course, I had Irish and Scottish and English and Canadian family in that war, but also in WWII. Uncle Ian was on a submarine for the British, and German family members on the Russian front, and alas, relatives who survived the bombing of Dresden.
Yeah, I heard stories about Paul Haeder’s exploits on a tall sail ship learning how to be a soldier, and listened intently his war experiences, and learned about his post-WWI life, and his life in Iowa and South Dakota (my grandfather ended up in Iowa and South Dakota as the last of seven brothers who hit Ellis Island before WWI). Paul found work as a former lieutenant impossible — coal mining and “working” the food trains with orders to shoot fellow Germans, per the Pinkerton outfit, if they rushed the trains for food, bread, foodstuffs. That wasn’t Paul Haeder’s ethos, so he never did the dirty deeds of shooting Germans hungrier than rabid dogs.
Now, of course, forgotten history of that putrid, Patton and MacArthur, and their dirty deeds killing their own veterans:
In 1932, 17,000 former soldiers marched on Washington, D.C. to demand wartime pay owed to them. The Great Depression ravaged the country, and a president took desperate measures to disperse the angry veterans.
Tanks rolled down the streets. Soldiers held people at bayonet-point. Veterans and their families took lungs full of tear gas. People died.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur — then the U.S. Army’s Chief of Staff — led the 12th Infantry Regiment and the 3rd Cavalry Regiment into the fray.
The cavalry regiment contained six Renault FT tanks commanded by Maj. George Patton. The Army troops, with bayonets affixed to their rifles, charged into the shanty town and launched tear gas into the crowds. (source)
Skin in the game? Hmm. So, growing up on air force bases, army posts and outside Paris, on SHAPE and NATO compounds, I was truly interested in the stories of men and women, and the accounts of dudes who were in Vietnam, or hanging onto my old man’s Korea stories and his recalling about what happened in Vietnam, though he was pretty much a zipped up mouth on those wars. He worked in NATO caves in France and Germany, as a signal corps warrant officer, and we all in the family had to have FBI-level background checks.
I wonder what a 13-year-old is doing learning about Black Panthers, Cesar Chavez, Che Guevara, and much much more? That was me. I learned about Ho Chi Minh from some of my older sister’s friends who had come back from Vietnam, mentally wounded, hooked on smack, some wounded physically, and most anti-American, anti-War.
No blue blood in my family.
Look, yes, I am trauma informed, and this image, or these two, are full of context and whatever this Conor believes in, in terms of killing humans, Russians, and some of them, if he was a drone operator, civilians, that would be an interesting discussion and debate.
So, listening to RFK, Junior, Conor’s dad, I stuck with him throughout the wide-ranging two-hour Megyn Kelly interview, which in my mind is less of a journalistic interview and more of the same old celebrity cultish thing a multimillionaire Kelly was doing (interviewing) with another multimillionaire, RFK, Jr.
I wrote this to a fellow writer I respect, and who publishes many amazing pieces. He’s a bit older than I am, I believe. Here:
Yeah, ECC, we have this fascination with blue blood, the Kennedys, Bush, those coming out of Ivy League schools, who are millionaires who hang with billionaires.
His son, well, has to be judged on what he was doing, and alas, Ukraine is the most corrupt nation in the world, in some sense. So, there are many issues tied to what the quality of his character is.
He’s a mercenary, and this is war porn. He wasn’t even in any military. He talked his way into the Mercenary Legions. Lied. Oh, he is an athlete, which is a big Kennedy thing.
The entire thing will give this kid a cleared pipeline to multi-millions, and his book will be coming out soon, Oprah-approved, soon.
The kid (man, age 28) wouldn’t even tell his parents where he was going, what he was up to. That is something deeply troubling to me because I have friends and a spouse who have been estranged by their children. There are Facebook groups with the title “Mothers of Estranged Children.” Many of these women were just hard working single mothers, and something snapped in the children. There are 70 year old women who have never met children’s children, and even great grandkids. This is pretty deeply ingrained in my own background in trauma informed case management with homeless civilians and veterans and those hooked on drugs and those just released from prison.
I’m 65, been to Central America as a journalist, covered the US-Mexico border, been with US military as a college instructor at the Sergeant Major Academy at Fort Bliss. My old man was in 32 years. Air Force and then Army. Clandestine stuff, crypto stuff. We ended up in the Azores and then Germany and France and UK. I got to see and hear a lot of stuff. I am, was early, anti-military on so many levels
Very young (13) I was already seeing the destruction of the world through the military state, through corporate malfeasance, through the professional managerial class, and the lawyer class. This kid (man) at this age, 28, is really going to be part of the problem for socialists and social-environmental-cultural warriors like myself, and anyone who might come up as decent, smart and thoughtful adults in our current generation. We have a lot of work to do, and putting one’s effort into machismo, into this trip into a corrupt place, thinking Putin is a Gangster, well, what sort of upbringing did he have?
FYI: In the Megyn interview RFK admits he got the mRNA, and so did his children, 7.
Whew. Amazing, no, ECC.
Trauma, man. So much trauma in the Kennedy family. Epigenetic, and who the hell knows what kind of trauma is in Conor’s immediate family. I am trauma informed, so I can’t judge too much on that level.
Then, Aaron and Gabor Mate, an older interview, on the trauma, the mental illnesses and pain that propelled people to believe in Russia Gate.
Thanks, ECC. A real interview with you one of these days?
Here’s the show’s low down blurb:
Megyn Kelly is joined by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., author of “A Letter to Liberals,” to discuss COVID pandemic orthodoxy, the need for discussion and debate, the elimination of freedoms due to the COVID pandemic, Dr. Fauci demanding blind faith in authority, the important issue of whether the COVID vaccines prevent transmission, myocarditis risk from COVID and from vaccines, rise in “unexplained” deaths in a post-COVID vaccine world, the truth about how many lives COVID vaccines saved and lost, the lack of important data needed to understand the rise in deaths post-COVID, what Fauci said about vaccines that could have an adverse effect before the COVID vaccines were available, the absurdity of the new booster which was only tested on eight mice and no humans, Pfizer’s involvement in the Trump administration, Alex Berenson and tech censorship, RFK’s disbanded “vaccine safety” commission, Scott Gottlieb and our supposed medical elite, American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendations, problems with the VAERS system, personal backlash from family and friends, his views of Donald Trump then and now, Herschel Walker and our politics today, the war in Ukraine, American imperialism, RFK’s personal connection to the war as his son Conor was fighting in the country, and more.
Look, these issues need to be discussed. In the interview, there is discussion about Trump, about politicians’ public lives versus private lives, and how we weigh the bad people perpetrate in their families, in their own house and jobs, their personal personas, against the good their policy and governance might come off as part of their public life. My writer friend was upset that RFK, Jr. calls Putin a thug and gangster, while at the same time, RFK JR does speak out against the cancel left, against the war drumming and against the endless pit of money and arms for nothing to ZioLensky. Kennedy laments that there is $7 a gallon of gasoline in California, equating that to the war/Putin (?), but really, the USA is (has been for decades) in a major free-fall, and, people are struggling with double-triple-quadruple cost of living; i.e., food, coffee, drugs, and now Pfizer, who got the jab approved by CDC for children’s yearly vaccination, well, they also announced the company will be upping the price of the dirty jab, to $110 a shot, which is four times the current price.
I wonder what these lawyers working for these outfits have in terms of skin in the game? Will they head to Yemen to see what it’s like to have USA-UK supplied bombs to Saudi Arabia. Skin in the game in Haiti stealing that country’s resources and stealing the coffers? Which skin in the game will the American put forth who wants to know what it is to take on a stand on any issue psychologically and intellectually without having to put one’s ass in the game?
It is a blue in the face routine now attempting to talk about Nuland and Maidan, about the Donbass and the ethnic cleansing? All of the history of Putin wanting diplomacy, wanting to be part of the Eurozone, to be on good terms with Germany, and to advance nuclear weapon decommissioning.
The thuggery and gansterism RFK Jr. and Conor Kennedy espouse about Putin, that’s way off, sort of brainwashed opinion. Putin is a million times more informed and sensible than Biden or Blinken. They have skin in the game, a la Raytheon et al.
Here, trauma, and what exactly is-was-continues to go on in the minds of Russia Gate freaks:
GABOR MATÉ: What does it say about American society that so many people are actually enrolled in believing that this man could be any kind of a savior? What does that say about the divisions and the conflicts and the contradictions and the genuine problems in this culture? And how do we address those issues?
You can look at that. Or you can say there must be a devil somewhere behind all this, and that devil is a foreign power, and his name is Putin, and his country is Russia. Now you’ve got a simple explanation that doesn’t invite you or necessitate that you explore your own pain and your own fear and your own trauma.
So I really believe that really this Russia gate narrative was, on the part of a lot of people, a sign of genuine upset at something genuinely upsetting. But rather than dealing with the upset, it was an easier way to in a sense draw off the energy of it in to some kind of a believable and comforting narrative. It’s much more comforting to believe that some enemy is doing this to us than to look at what does it say about us as a society.
I mean there was a massive denial of the actual dynamics in American society that led to the election of this traumatized and traumatizing individual as President, number one.
AARON MATÉ: Because you think Donald Trump himself is traumatized?
GABOR MATÉ: Oh, Donald Trump is a clearest example of a traumatized politician one could ever see. He’s in denial of reality all the time. He is self aggrandizing. His fundamental self concept is that of a nobody. So he has to make himself huge and big all the time and keep proving to the world how powerful and smart, what kind of degrees he’s got and how smart he is. It’s a compensation for terrible self image. He can’t pay attention to anything, which means that his brain is too scattered because it was too painful for him to pay attention.
What does this all come down to? The childhood that we know that he had in the home of a dictatorial child disparaging father, and a very weak
AARON MATÉ: Fred Trump, his father.
GABOR MATÉ: Who demeaned his children mercilessly. One of Trump’s brothers drank himself to death. And Trump compensates for all that by trying to make himself as big and powerful and successful as possible. And, of course, he makes up for his anger towards his mother for not protecting him by attacking women and exploiting women and boasting about it publicly. I mean, it’s a clear trauma example. I’m not saying this to invite sympathy for Trump’s politics. I’m just describing that that’s who the man is. And the fact that such a traumatized individual can be elected to the position of what they call the most powerful person in the world speaks to a traumatized society.
And like individuals can be in denial, a society can be in denial. So this society is deeply in denial about its own trauma, and particularly in this case about the trauma of that election. So one way to deal with trauma is denial of it. The other way is to project onto other people things that you don’t like about yourself.
Now, it’s only a matter of historical fact. And no serious person, no serious student of history can possibly deny how the United States has interfered in the internal politics of just about every nation on earth.
There is lots of skin in the game for all of us surviving in various stages and steps trauma. How many countries has the USA bombed, sanctioned, proxied, and stolen from? That is another fun thing, right, visiting those countries and donating some mutual aid support — skin in the game — by planting trees, feeding children, digging water systems. But putting on combat gear and playing tin soldier with live rounds and drones, hmm, that is an interesting skin in the game.
Here, Jim Chambers, from the rich and famous Cox news-cable family, he too went to Ukraine, Donbass, as a reporter:
When I asked him about his perspectives on the conflict now, versus when he made the decision to come over, his repeated emphasis was that he had been “extremely uninformed” when he was still in Alabama and relying on the narrative being spun by Western media. “I can tell you that I was very surprised to see most women and children still at home and living normally in all the major Ukrainian cities I went to. And when I was detained here in Donetsk, it was the first time I had been able to speak to any Russians or Russian-speakers from Donbass. There’s a side of the story that we’re not getting in America.” He noted that even from his cell in Donetsk, he had been hearing constant explosions, every day, coming from Ukrainian shelling of the city, something he had never anticipated. “Nothing in the Western media shows you that this is a civil war, and one that’s been going on a long time.” He didn’t go as far as disavowing the Ukrainian state, or endorsing the Russian “special military operation,” but he repeatedly said to me, “If I had known the truth about what was going on over here, I would never have made the decision to come. I regret it.”
Feelings of sympathy for a man in a life-and-death predicament, who at face value seems to have been duped into his decision, above all else, are completely understandable. But some on the Donetsk side of the conflict aren’t shedding many tears for him, or for similar detainees. Russell “Texas” Bentley is a U.S.-born veteran of the DPR armed forces, having served from 2014 to 2017, and he is a resident of Donetsk. Bentley shared with me his thoughts on Drueke and those like him.
“Yeah, a lot of these punks were just too big for their britches, and that’s almost forgivable. But what they wanted to do was come here to kill, and if the shoe had been on the other foot, they wouldn’t have hesitated. I was behind Ukrop [Ukrainian] lines twice, and didn’t fire a shot either time. Every single battle I was ever in was defensive. We held a position, and the Ukrops came to attack us, and they’d have killed us all if they could have. So, it will be an educational experience for them, hopefully give them a bit of a head start in their next life.” (source — ‘I Regret’ Being a Mercenary in Ukraine: Conversation with U.S. POW Detained in Donbass)
“Here is Texas Russell Bentley: From Texas to Donbass: Meet the American fighting Ukrainian fascists”
I used to show lots of movie clips to my students in Texas, New Mexico, Washington and Oregon. Lots of controversial (sic) books, and tons of articles and professional journal studies. Controversial, in their face, and much of it was during Reagan’s illegal wars, Panama, Bush One and Kuwait and Iraq, Bush Two, Iraq, Clinton, even Obama. Many many complaints about exposing youth and older students to things that went boom in their heads. Everything was on-limits, no holds barred. We talked, debated and then I got students to research and think critically and with the right tools of rhetoric, a la centuries of clear thinking, proposing, comparing and contrasting, looking at causes and effects, all of the ways we classify, argue, persuade, define and connotate and how we engage in those techniques of propaganda, and how to get through with objectivity and then what powerful tools narrative writing can give us. Pat Tillman — Conor, ever see him?
Look, RFK Jr. did say that we are imperfect, that is, the human race. He was stating how Hershel Walker can be candidate X, antiabortion vis-à-vis policy, but in his own life, having been a part of abortions with his spouses and partners, that is just the contradictory way of politics. It all makes sense as a Catholic who believes in redemption. I am not going to knock that. Conor, becoming a high priced lawyer one day, well, maybe he will do great things for humankind.
Maybe doing the mercenary thing in Ukraine will give Conor better perspectives. Now, Russell Bentley, I have had email exchanges with him. Yes, he has hit some of the same places I have hit — El Paso, Tucson, etc. He went to Donbass, and he married a Ukrainian-Russian, and he lives in the Donbass and reports from the Donbass. Yes, he sent me his memoir:
Robert Kennedy said he is not doctrinaire or hard-headed, and that he learns and changes over time. He repeats how he was working as an environmental lawyer, and that he was part of Riverkeeper, for which there are over 350 rivers around the world with a keeper testing water, supporting the river life and acting as a pied piper for a healthy river. He was suing over poisons in the rivers, mercury. He stated that he was dogged by some women at one of his talks. One woman gave him a stack of briefs and reports on mercury preservatives in Vaccines and other issues tied to vaccine injuries. The vaccine fight he was not a part of for years, until persistent citizens and a medical doctor brought it to his attention. I understand that old saw, “No one is perfect . . . Homo Sapiens is a messy, troubled species.”
That’s a given And we all have skin in the game when it comes to peace, life, truth, and reconciling our own trauma with healing and loving thy neighbor. The whole Putin is a Gangster thing is interesting, for sure, and alas, Capitalists Are Gangsters, sure, I get to deploy that one all the time. Murder Incorporated, the Value of Nothing, the Sociopathic Rich, and so much more I can also utilize as descriptors of the USA, then and now. Did Conor take in that book, War is a Racket? Did he weigh Butler’s words with the reality of Russia wanting Minsk II to be abided by before signing up for weaponizing his idea of skin in the game? What was Nuland doing in Kiev? Biden and Hunter? Are we all going to default on redemption for any sin? That we are all imperfect souls? Did Conor have real deep talks with people outside the frame of Putin is a Gangster?
I recommend reading, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). The book, and now, a 2022 German movie of the book:
“But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony — Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”
Remarque’s novel saw censorship outside of Germany as well. In the United States, the English translation was banned in Boston on grounds of obscenity; and in Chicago, U.S. customs had seized any volumes which had not been expurgated. Austrian soldiers were forbidden to read the novel, Czech military libraries removed copies from their shelves, while Italy banned the novel entirely due to its anti-war, pacifist agenda. Despite its success, or perhaps because of it, Remarque had his German citizenship revoked and was forced into exile. Just before the onset of World War II in Europe, Remarque and his wife left Switzerland for the United States. They became official U.S. citizens in 1947. (source)
Now? The sides, that is, the many sides, to Ukraine and Nazis and Bandera and Zelensky and Coups and USA and CIA, and then, Putin and Russian demands for stopping the existential threat of NATO moving east with all their bombs bursting in air. John Pilger stated it correctly recently:
Much of this propaganda originates in the US, and is transmitted through proxies and ‘think-tanks’, such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by zealous journalists such as Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald, who labeled those spreading Chinese influence as ‘rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows’ and called for these ‘pests’ to be ‘eradicated’.
News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and south east Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are loaded guns aimed point blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a ‘noose’.
Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the ‘conflict’ of ‘two narratives’. The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable.
The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople. While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisors working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.
This brainwashing by omission has a long history. The slaughter of the First World War was suppressed by reporters who were knighted for their compliance and confessed in their memoirs. In 1917, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott, confided to prime minister Lloyd George: ‘If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they don’t know and can’t know.’ (‘Silencing the Lambs — How Propaganda Works‘)
Then, on a sad and inspiring (for some) note tied to other types of humans who might be coming to Donbass to fight what they believe is the good fight.
That’s Alex Castillo, who was a fighter in Donbass since 2014. From Spain, but born in Columbia. It’s a tough comparison, right, Kennedy and Castillo. This man had skin in the game, family in the game, was there to defend the people of Donbass being murdered by Ukraine, vis-a-vis USA material and training and NATO beefing up.
He was a communist, too, which is contrary to the bleeding heart liberals who are wrapped in blue and yellow and demand more more more for Zelensky, who has rounded up communists. Russia, by the way, isn’t communist, since so many Americans I will send this article to might need some reminding.
Russell Bentley is in Donbass and was in the fighting groups with Castillo. Bentley is a communist, colorful, sometimes bombastic, but not afraid to call a spade a spade, and he has that robust energy still in his older age days (63) of someone critical of USA, of Ukraine and of Russia’s decision makers who Russell believes have really messed up the fight against the AFU and Azov folk in Donbass region.
But he has tributes for Castillo, just recently killed in fighting:
Alexis was a true Communist, and a real Internationalist. He often spoke of going to Syria or Venezuela or Cuba after our victory here in Donbass, to defend the people and the socialism there. He did not love war, not by any means, he hated it, as we all do here, as all decent people do, but he was good at the job, and the job needed to be done. As all combat veterans know, we are all born with only so much luck, and the more time you spend in the places where the bullets fly, the closer you get to the day your luck runs out. Alexis spent 8 years as a front line soldier, a sniper in a Spetsnaz unit, and he never, ever hesitated when it was his turn to go. And when his time came to meet death, two weeks after our good friend Elia was killed, Alexis met it like a hero, advancing on the enemy with a weapon in his hand. Alexis was truly a Che Guevara of the 21st century, and Alexis had said, as did Che, “I do not care if I fall, as long as another ear hears my battle cry, and another hand picks up my gun.” (“Adios, Alex Castillo: A Donbas hero falls on Oct. 28″).
Any sort of tribute to a fighter like Castillo in the circles I intersect with is verboten, literally. Cancelled, called a traitor, called a Putin lover, called a Trumpster, called any number of names that are completely antithetical to who and what I am. Or, you might end up in a Michigan Democratic rally, with Obama stumping, and god forbid you confront Obama about his administration’s work in Ukraine in 2014, and not only will you get the swarmy and bs Obama folksy retort — “We are all friends here . . . you’ll have time to speak” — but you will get those blue democrats, men, women, children, old and young, hating on Russia and just not ready for any pushback against their multimillionaire-soon-to-be-a-pro-basketball-team-owner Obama. Yelling, “Down with Russia . . . Putin is our enemy.” You know, no antiwar chants, or chants of peace talks, or chants against escalation, of nuclear saber rattling by Biden. Obama is truly a stump. These are his rallies in Michigan, and he was in Oregon, stumping for the democratic candidate for governor. What’s that got to do with ex-President’s multimillionaire package?
I know it’s “only” Jimmy Dore below covering that Michigan event, but heck, no pushback from mainstream media, so here, watch Democratic Party rally with Obama pushed through the Dore seive: “Peace Activists Heckle Obama Over Nuclear War”
All those dead Ukrainians, and Russians, and fighters like Castillo, and this is the end result for so many of them — what they leave behind:
We are in some very sick and strange times —
Deep Critical Analysis Needed EVERY Veterans’ Day, USA’s National Holiday, November 11!
A new Bloomberg article titled “‘Sloppy’ US Talk on China’s Threat Worries Some Skeptical Experts” discusses the dangerous cycle in which pressures in the US political establishment to continually escalate hostilities with Beijing provokes responses that are then falsely interpreted as Chinese aggression.
Bloomberg’s Iain Marlow writes:
The hawkish narrative “limits room for maneuver in a crisis,” said M. Taylor Fravel, director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Any effort to defuse tension could be characterized as “conciliatory or not tough enough,” he said.
China has been consistent on Taiwan and there’s little public evidence to suggest it’s sped up the timeline to take Taiwan, said a former senior US official who worked on China policy but asked not to be identified.
The former official said the hawkish tone in DC has contributed to a cycle where the US makes the first move, interprets Chinese reactions as a provocation, and then escalates further.
Bloomberg quotes Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund, who says this cycle of self-reinforcing escalation could “end up provoking the war that we seek to deter.”
Good article on how the US's approach to China makes war more likely.
"[It's a] cycle where the US makes the first move, interprets Chinese reactions as a provocation, and then escalates further. [We'll] end up provoking the war that we seek to deter"https://t.co/Vf1jQmjavB
We just saw this same self-perpetuating cycle of military escalation exemplified against North Korea, where tensions have again been flaring after a long pause. The US and South Korea initiated a provocative military drill designed to menace the DPRK, Pyongyang responded by launching missiles in its own show of strength, and the Pentagon announced an extension of the drills in response to that response.
The US and South Korea are extending massive aerial war games after North Korea put on a massive show of force in response to the drills.
Washington and Seoul started their Vigilant Storm exercises on Monday, which were initially scheduled to run 24 hours a day for five days. This year’s Vigilant Storm is the largest-ever iteration of the drills, involving nearly 100 American warplanes and 140 South Korean aircraft, and about 1,600 planned sorties.
Pyongyang made it clear it would respond to the Vigilant Storm drills, and it launched 23 missiles on Wednesday, which is said to be the most North Korea has fired in a single day. North Korea also fired over 100 artillery rounds on the same day and launched six more missiles on Thursday.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced the extension of Vigilant Storm after a meeting with his South Korean counterpart, Lee Jong-sup. “I’ve consulted with Minister Lee and we’ve decided to extend Vigilant Storm, which is our long-scheduled combined training exercise, to further bolster our readiness and interoperability,” Austin said.
“So they launch these war games, provoke a bunch of North Korean missile launches and then say they have to extend the war games because of the missile launches,” tweeted DeCamp.
DeCamp quotes another DPRK official who warns that the extension of the US-ROK war games may provoke further escalations, saying “The irresponsible decision of the US and South Korea is shoving the present situation, caused by provocative military acts of the allied forces, to an uncontrollable phase.”
So they launch these war games, provoke a bunch of North Korean missiles launches and then say they have to extend the war games because of the missile launches… https://t.co/PIWXywmRUO
We’ve been seeing this same cycle repeated year after year: US military expansionism and aggression in a given part of the world receives pushback from the people who live there, and the US responds to that pushback with more military expansionism and aggression. The official narrative is that the US is responding to unprovoked aggressions from the other side, conveniently omitting its own antecedent aggressions and provocations — a manipulation tactic the western media are always happy to facilitate.
In reality it’s not hard to determine who the aggressor is when one party is flying to the other side of the planet to menace the borders and security interests of the other, especially when ramping up militarism in more and more parts of the world facilitates both the US military-industrial complex and the unipolarist objectives of US empire managers. But because the US empire has the most sophisticated narrative control system ever devised, enough people in enough places that matter swallow the official story despite its self-evident absurdity.
A system which perpetuates and exacerbates itself while pretending to solve the problems it creates is often called a self-licking ice cream cone. Because that type of system is promoted by those serving the most powerful and belligerent power structure on earth, one might call US militarism a self-licking boot.
We’ve been watching the self-licking boot of US militarism exemplified for decades in the “war on terror” scam, where US military interventionism destabilizes geostrategically crucial parts of the world and makes the locals who’ve suffered under US bombings want to harm their persecutors, and the response is to ramp up military expansionism in those parts of the world in the name of fighting terrorists and protecting US troops.
Tens Of Millions Of People Displaced By The ‘War On Terror’, The Greatest Scam Ever Invented
A new report has found that at least 37 million people (a conservative estimate) have been displaced as a result of America's so-called “war on terror” since 9/11https://t.co/MsFul5zf7L
And we’ll be sure to see more and more of it as the US accelerates toward global conflict on two fronts simultaneously while mainstream media pundits cheer it on, despite all available evidence indicating that we are witnessing something profoundly stupid and crazy. The US will continue ramping up aggressions against Moscow and Beijing, those governments will respond, and we will be told that the US must respond to these outrageous provocations by ramping up aggressions.
Repeat ad nauseum.
Lick, lick.
_______________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
The Independent and Peaceful Australia Network is hosting its national conference as well as launching the results of its people’s inquiry into militarism. Bevan Ramsden reports.
British trade unions and a section of the broader labour movement have a military-shaped blind spot. When that blind spot is visible, we should all pay attention – accepting the militarist status quo is a major weakness. Militarism is anti-working class. It chews up generations of young people in wars, it allows for massive defence budgets which would be better spent on human needs, and it normalises state violence as a way of resolving problems.
The big British trade unions are, of course, status quo organisations. They are often conservative and aim to tweak the economy a little, rather than ending the extractive violence of capitalism. Some go as far as campaigning for defence spending hikes. In effect, this is lobbying for the arms industry.
The Queen’s death
Recently, the RMT – which is doing great work in other areas – backed down on a strike day following the death of the Queen. Fair play, some may feel. We don’t want to lose support. In fact, RMT general secretary Mick Lynch himself explained at The World Transformed in Liverpool in October 2022:
We cancelled the strikes because many of our members would want to do that.
He told the audience that he himself was from an Irish Republican background, but that many RMT members were ex-military and liked the queen.
This is an example of what we might call militarist realism. Supporting or avoiding conflict with militarist ideology because there might be a backlash. Just because militarism is a force in British politics, doesn’t mean we can just skip over it to save hassle. Socialists should openly and confidently oppose militarism (and right-wing nationalism) wherever they find it.
The British Legion
More recently, the RMT has come into conflict with the Royal British Legion (RBL). The Legion is the most monolithic of the military charities. Despite claims to the contrary, the Legion has embodied right-wing, establishment politics from its foundation in the early 1920s.
One of the main figures associated with it was field marshal Haig, known as the ‘Butcher of the Somme’ because of the massive death toll of his WW1 battles. As I explained in my book, Veteranhood: Hope and Rage in British Ex-Military Life, the Legion was a bulwark against radical working class politics. Haig wanted veterans of WW1 “back under their officers” – not engaged with the left-wing politics of the day.
One trade union leader of the time called the Legion “Haig’s White Guards” after the anti-Bolshevik forces fighting to crush the Russian Revolution. Elements within the Legion also wanted to help break the 1926 General Strike. And, as I reported in Veteranhood, the legion tried to have jobs performed by foreign and women workers given to veterans. So, the British Legion has always been a right-wing organisation.
RMT vs the Legion
On 21 October, the Legion announced that Poppy Day would not go ahead because of an RMT strike set for 3 November. Poppy Day is used to fundraise for the Legion ahead of Remembrance Day. The Legion complained that up to £1m in donations could be lost:
This from a charity which is, in effect, a large corporation. Figures from a 2019 report suggest the Legion had an income of over £160m, with reserves of £70m last year.
The Legion announcement saw far-right and Tory twitter condemn the RMT. But the RMT quickly offered to have the charity collectors on the pickets alongside striking workers:
This is such a shame @PoppyLegion as an alternative to cancelling London Poppy Day, we would love you to stand shoulder to shoulder with @RMTunion members on our picket lines and collect alongside us? #PoppyAppealhttps://t.co/0htUgZa5wq
The RMT eventually backed down, announcing the strike would go ahead on 9 October instead:
RMT update on national rail strike days Having been made aware of Royal British Legion @PoppyLegion London Poppy day on November 3rd, @RMTunion NEC has decided to re-arrange strike action for the 9th.https://t.co/dYQE5VBwyz
Moving a strike by a few days to avoid some negative headlines is not necessarily massively damaging to trade union’s aim. It is also true that the tendency to defer to the sacred cows of British national identity – the royals and the military – is a road to nowhere.
In the end, you can be for workers or you can be for militarism and monarchy – you cannot be for both. It is the job of the left to question and critique these institutions. This starts from the political position that militarism divides and harms workers at home and abroad.
thank god for eels, marine science, the probing minds of people who want the world to be better
Yeah, I met this guy, Mork X Twain, at an auto parts shop. He was in his planetary orbit, and his home-van was disabled in Newport, at a Burger King parking lot. I told him I’d drive him to his van, try a jump and then from there, who knows? So, there you have it — a van he lives in, going from Newport to the Bay Area, and he said he’s 82, and estranged from his children but has contact with grandkids. The starter was kaput, so I took him to a starter-battery place, and they were reluctant to work on a vehicle that is also a home (their policy) but I talked them into it. Could have been $300, and the tow, that was $85 plus $6 a mile. He lives on Social Security. He wanted to pay me $20 for the help, but I declined.
Mork says he’s writing a collection of essays, tied to the next planetary synergy. China, Russia, Trump and other issues, and he wants a grand socialism, of sorts (he kept bringing up Michael Moore and his movie where he plants a flag in Finland and France cuz of their supposed social programs). He’s pretty smart, and who knows what that life was before 82, before he adopted Mork from Mork and Mindy, X from Malcolm X, and Twain, from Samuel Clemens. He has no phone, and he gave me a PO Box at a copy-postal center in Lincoln City.
I collect stories, and whew, I get embroiled in some interesting narratives of people who are traveling through the slipstream that is life. Mork is one of ten thousand!
I’m also thinking about my sister, Roberta, who hit the pavement near Kamloops, when she was 23, on her way on her new Harley to Tucson. Two other people were on their bikes, and some asshole fell asleep at the wheel, and crossed the line and ended Robbie’s life.
What could have been, and my mom and I went to Hyder, Alaska to be with her boyfriend and friends and spread her ashes in the ocean. I was 20 years old. My younger sister was 10. My old man was on his way to Saudi Arabia. US military.
I’m on this beach (below) a lot, following the tide charts, looking for agates, jasper and plenty of birds. Time to think, time to get caught up in my own slipstream, this aging out of this American Life, and, alas, thinking about just how damaged the world is around me, and then, de facto, how damaged I am now from absorbing plenty of wins and losses, ups and downs.
Then thinking of those eels. Amazing, really: “First direct evidence of adult European eels migrating to their breeding place in the Sargasso Sea,” (source, Scientists Track Eels to Their Ocean Breeding Grounds in World-First).
All the way to the Sargasso sea, these reverse anadromous fish ( which migrate from the sea up — Greek: ἀνά aná, “up” and δρόμος drómos, “course” — into fresh water to spawn, such as salmon, striped bass, and the sea lamprey), are actually, catadromous fish who migrate from fresh water down — Greek: κατά kata, “down” and δρόμος dromos, “course”) into the sea to spawn, such as eels.
The point of pointing out these incredible animals, eels, is to point to that human compassion and passion, where people study earth, the amazing life histories of the very animals we take for granted, and those we eat, too. And, I was a kid with my family in the Azores where European eels ended up on their way from UK, say, or Germany, to the Sargasso Sea to breed.
A sharp decline in European eel (Anguilla anguilla) numbers since the 1980s has only made the task all that much harder, and more urgent.
But don’t underestimate these enigmatic creatures. European eels migrate between 5,000 and 10,000 kilometers (3,100 to 6,210 miles) to spawn at sea, after which their larvae drift back towards land and the relative safety of rivers.
Using satellite tags, the researchers behind this latest discovery obtained tracking data from 21 female European eels as they navigated the last leg of their epic journey, southwest from the Azores, a volcanic archipelago in the North Atlantic Ocean, far west of Portugal.
Contrast these amazing biologists and such, with the Takers, and the absolute amount of trauma they — Homo Sapiens, Homo Consumopithecus, Homo Retailerectus — inflict on our own species. This war here, this famine there, this corporation poisoning this land there, these murderers and thieves doing what they can to be at the top of their manure piles here and there and everywhere.
It’s simple calculus, but Homo Anglo-Saxon-Bellum will do what it has to, with the puppet masters of folks like Nuland, Kagan, Blinken and Super Goy Zionists goading and propping up this actual subhuman, ZioLensky.
So it’s difficult to absorb the news of these neocons, these billionaires, these propagandists, these lockdown impresarios, these AI-VR-AR surveillance panopticons, and then take some respite in the woods or on a beach, but it is a must, to detoxify, like an spiritual elimination diet, finding which inflammatory ingredient in capitalism and Western culture culls joints or flurries brain fog. Imagine, this propaganda-violence, with that comic above in fake military drab, joking, and positing dirty bombs, and the Bucha lies, and bombing markets while helping with a Vogue Magazine layout.
The fog/miasma is great, in what is the 21st Century’s Sadistic, Broken, Chaotic, Propagandistic, Orwellian New Normal, ranging from SARS-CoV2 gain of function hell — that DARPA darling — to the lockdowns and forced vaccinations (sic), ghosting, confiscation of PayPal accounts and money, to stealing billions from Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and now, even, this nuclear saber rattling by the USA and the Dirty Bomb Boy ZioLensky, and the almost complete empty-headed bending over for their masters in Europe.
Here, that Neocon-Neoliberal cloning:
The latest edition of the aforementioned articles was recently released and titled “Renewing America’s Advantages: Interim National Security Strategic Guidance.” Perhaps, the president, who will sign it, is a devout Catholic because the document starts with a confession, which in Judeo-Christian tradition is a necessary step to obtain forgiveness: The U.S. will no longer resort to military coups when it wants to replace a regime in a foreign country.
Biden – or the authors Blinken, his Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who is Robert Kagan’s wife, and Kathleen Hicks, deputy secretary of defense, also an Obama alumnus but not a neocon because she is a true conservative from the Henry Kissinger contingent – promises to chart a new route for the U.S. in international politics in the first three pages of the document. But the document then continues describing how the new U.S. administration will follow the beaten path devised by the Bush-Obama-Trump teams.
“I confessed all the sins committed before on behalf of my country, my Lord,” it reads, like a psalm, leaving the U.S. free to commit the same sins for future presidents to repent for. The Biden administration admits that previous administrations failed to use democracy to impact the policies of foreign countries they opposed, falling back on military coups and interventions, often soliciting them.
The U.S. is known for its controversial stance on Latin American coups and we, in Turkey, understand the Latin American people. Biden personally begged the White House not to issue a statement of support for the civilian government on the fateful night of July 15, 2016, hoping that “our boys could still prevail.”
Let bootlickers like CNN’s Fareed Zakaria and the New York Times’ David Brooks cheer the “changes the Biden team started implementing already” as we witness the administration attempt to implement the same military policy in the Middle East.
The document says that “we do not believe that military force is the answer to the region’s challenges,” but Biden’s National Security Coordinator for the Middle East, Bret McGurk, had already begun fortifying the military garrisons he was building in Syria until he was stopped by Trump.
No wonder the 7,000-word new national security bible features the term “diplomacy” 10 times but the tally for “military” is double!
This man, both, in foreground and then Biden Always Seeking the Background, are 21st Century monsters:
Here is one reaction from American Jewry: “We are proud of the fact that this slate of nominees includes multiple Jewish Americans and others whose family history represents the rich tapestry of American society,” the Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA) said in a statement. “Their understanding of our past will help build a stronger future.”
That response reflects pride that Jews have risen high in the government ranks, and that the new appointees’ understanding of Jewish values will infuse policy.
Contrast that with a tweet from Makor Rishon editor-in-chief Hagai Segal: “There is no need to attribute too much importance to the appointment of Jews in Biden’s administration. There are also a lot of Jews in J Street,” Segal wrote, in reference to the left-wing lobby that has played a leading role in legitimizing and mainstreaming harsh criticism of Israeli policies by both elected and nonelected US officials.(source)
Again, the fog of Western Civilization and the degrading lack of diplomacy and the hard liners in USA running the world aground, and the militaristic attitude, and the racism against Russia/Russians, all of this is important, for sure, and who knows what demographic percentages really mean, what diversity loading can achieve, and what we as thinkers and radicals can do with Anti-Russia people in our midst, the Anti-Chinese attitudes in this society, the amazing Anti-African American racism, and, well, Anti-Semitism, too, which is not even close to being smart about and against Israel’s apartheid state, and their Zionism gone amok. Below, overtly skewed, but then, we do not have open discussions amongst radicals and socialists on what the Biden Cabinet is and what it means to USA and the world.
Very interesting, the power of that occupied land to set the torches ablaze in the world, but these folk never get the mic:
In keeping with Israel’s policy of maintaining WMD ambiguity, Israel “has never made a public policy statement on biological weapons (BW)” and is reluctant to participate in regional and international fora on WMD disarmament. Preferring to address disarmament and arms control in a regional context, Israel has not signed the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Conventions (BTWC), and believes that progress in advancing the treaty’s goals in the region would require significantly improved political stability, discourse, and confidence building in the region. However, Israel has taken steps to strengthen its export control regulations on dual-use biotechnologies and is also examining ways to improve security at sensitive Israeli laboratories. In terms of BW research, development, and deployment, Israel maintains reticence and ambiguity about its activities and capabilities. However, Israeli defensive BW research regularly appears in open publications. The U.S. government offers conflicting assessments of Israel’s BW activities. Given the overall scarcity and ambiguity of official assessments and policy statements, reconstructions of Israel’s BW history, status, and capabilities can provide only partial and interpretive depictions.
Cohen focuses on a two-decade period from about 1950 until 1970, during which David Ben-Gurion’s vision of making Israel a nuclear-weapon state was realized. He weaves together the story of the formative years of Israel’s nuclear program, from the founding of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission in 1952, to the alliance with France that gave Israel the sophisticated technology it needed, to the failure of American intelligence to identify the Dimona Project for what it was, to the negotiations between President Nixon and Prime Minister Meir that led to the current policy of secrecy. Cohen also analyzes the complex reasons Israel concealed its nuclear program—from concerns over Arab reaction and the negative effect of the debate at home to consideration of America’s commitment to nonproliferation. Israel and Chemical/Biological Weapons: History, Deterrence, and Arms Control by Avner Cohen. Israel and the Bomb, exactly!
Again, priorities, and amazing how rotting we Homo Sapiens have become, from our decent tribal roots, our hunter and gatherer roots, to this, really, trillions for Blackrock, for Oil, for War, and so much time and lifetime lives expended on the Takers in the Complex — military-medical-pharma-mining-chemical-media-entertainment-legal-ag-prison-surveillance-finance-banking COMPLEX. Crazy days, man, at this point of drinking our own sewer water: “America’s western water crisis is so bad that Colorado is going to start drinking recycled sewage: Colorado’s water quality agency unanimously approved regulating direct potable reuse. It’s pending a final vote in November.” (source)
[Eric Seufert, owner and manager of 105 West Brewing Co., poses for a photo at his brewery room Tuesday, October 18, 2022, in Castle Rock, Colo. He brewed a test batch of beer in 2017 with water from recycled sewage. AP Photo/Brittany Peterson]
Oh, that incredible lightness of being. Ismael, the book, the ape (gorilla):
Why “Mother” Culture?
Culture is a mother everywhere and at every time, because culture is inherently a nurturer—the nurturer of human societies and lifestyles. Among Leaver peoples, Mother Culture explains and preserves a lifestyle that is healthy and self-sustaining. Among Taker peoples she explains and preserves a lifestyle that has proven to be unhealthy and self-destructive.
If culture is a mother among the Alawa of Australia and the Bushmen of Africa and the Kayapo of Brazil, then why wouldn’t she be a mother among the Takers? (To confirm the notion that “culture is a mother everywhere,” check foreign language dictionaries for the word CULTURE. In languages that recognize “masculine” and “feminine” nouns—French, Italian, Latin, and so on—the noun CULTURE is invariably feminine.) [source]
Working tribally, as a community, small scale, cooperative, that is, being LEAVERS, versus totalitarian everything, the TAKERS. Below, November 1998 Daniel Quinn and biologist Alan D. Thornhill met in dialogue with a small group in Houston, Texas, to forge a new tool designed to unseat the unexamined conventional wisdom that typically shapes all discourse on the subject of population. This program, Food Production and Population Growth, is that tool.
What is that end game. Pretending we have hope doesn’t work. Derrick Jensen a long time ago: End Game. If we do not go through a voluntary transformation, what do we do? Imagine all the minerals, metals, plastics, time and energy put into those weapons, and then the dead, the dying, the witnesses bearing the pain. Can civilization be sustainable?
This toxic culture, and trauma, and Gabor Mate does it well explaining how this Taker Culture takes us all down, in his books, and here on The Real News Network, Chris Hedges:
No matter where you stand on Donbass, on Ukraine, on the Nazis, on Minsk II, it’s the trauma trauma trauma that will continue with each generation, young and old and unborn. Deadly.
At the United Nations General Assembly on 24 September 2022, Haiti’s Foreign Minister Jean Victor Geneus admitted that his country faces a serious crisis, which he said ‘can only be solved with the effective support of our partners’. To many close observers of the situation unfolding in Haiti, the phrase ‘effective support’ sounded like Geneus was signalling that another military intervention by Western powers was imminent. Indeed, two days prior to Geneus’s comments, TheWashington Post published an editorial on the situation in Haiti in which it called for ‘muscular action by outside actors’. On 15 October, the United States and Canada issued a joint statement announcing that they had sent military aircraft to Haiti to deliver weapons to Haitian security services. That same day, the United States submitted a draft resolution to the UN Security Council calling for the ‘immediate deployment of a multinational rapid action force’ into Haiti.
Ever since the Haitian Revolution won independence from France in 1804, Haiti has faced successive waves of invasions, including a two-decade-long US occupation from 1915 to 1934, a US-backed dictatorship from 1957 to 1986, two Western-backed coups against the progressive former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991 and 2004, and a UN military intervention from 2004 to 2017. These invasions have prevented Haiti from securing its sovereignty and have prevented its people from building dignified lives. Another invasion, whether by US and Canadian troops or by UN peacekeeping forces, will only deepen the crisis. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the International Peoples’ Assembly, ALBA Movements, and the Plateforme Haïtienne de Plaidoyer pour un Développement Alternatif (‘Haitian Advocacy Platform for Alternative Development’ or PAPDA) have produced a red alert on the current situation in Haiti, which can be found below and downloaded as a PDF.
What is happening in Haiti?
A popular insurrection has unfolded in Haiti throughout 2022. These protests are the continuation of a cycle of resistance that began in 2016 in response to a social crisis developed by the coups in 1991 and 2004, the earthquake in 2010, and Hurricane Matthew in 2016. For more than a century, any attempt by the Haitian people to exit the neocolonial system imposed by the US military occupation (1915–34) has been met with military and economic interventions to preserve it. The structures of domination and exploitation established by that system have impoverished the Haitian people, with most of the population having no access to drinking water, health care, education, or decent housing. Of Haiti’s 11.4 million people, 4.6 million are food insecure and 70% are unemployed.
Manuel Mathieu (Haiti), Rempart (‘Rampart’), 2018.
The Haitian Creole word dechoukaj or ‘uprooting’ – which was first used in the pro-democracy movements of 1986 that fought against the US-backed dictatorship – has come to define the current protests. The government of Haiti, led by acting Prime Minister and President Ariel Henry, raised fuel prices during this crisis, which provoked a protest from the trade unions and deepened the movement. Henry was installed to his post in 2021 by the ‘Core Group’ (made up of six countries and led by the US, the European Union, the UN, and the Organisation of American States) after the murder of the unpopular president Jovenel Moïse. Although still unsolved, it is clear that Moïse was killed by a conspiracy that included the ruling party, drug trafficking gangs, Colombian mercenaries, and US intelligence services. The UN’s Helen La Lime told the Security Council in February that the national investigation into Moïse’s murder had stalled, a situation that has fuelled rumours and exacerbated both suspicion and mistrust within the country.
Fritzner Lamour (Haiti), Poste Ravine Pintade, ca. 1980
How have the forces of neocolonialism reacted?
The United States and Canada are now arming Henry’s illegitimate government and planning military intervention in Haiti. On 15 October, the US submitted a draft resolution to the United Nations Security Council calling for the ‘immediate deployment of a multinational rapid action force’ in the country. This would be the latest chapter in over two centuries of destructive intervention by Western countries in Haiti. Since the 1804 Haitian Revolution, the forces of imperialism (including slave owners) have intervened militarily and economically against people’s movements seeking to end the neocolonial system. Most recently, these forces entered the country under the auspices of the United Nations via the UN Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which was active from 2004 to 2017. A further such intervention in the name of ‘human rights’ would only affirm the neocolonial system now managed by Ariel Henry and would be catastrophic for the Haitian people, whose movement forward is being blocked by gangs created and promoted behind the scenes by the Haitian oligarchy, supported by the Core Group, and armed by weapons from the United States.
Saint Louis Blaise (Haiti), Généraux (‘Generals’), 1975.
How can the world stand in solidarity with Haiti?
Haiti’s crisis can only be solved by the Haitian people, but they must be accompanied by the immense force of international solidarity. The world can look to the examples demonstrated by the Cuban Medical Brigade, which first went to Haiti in 1998; by the Via Campesina/ALBA Movimientos brigade, which has worked with popular movements on reforestation and popular education since 2009; and by the assistance provided by the Venezuelan government, which includes discounted oil. It is imperative for those standing in solidarity with Haiti to demand, at a minimum:
that France and the United States provide reparations for the theft of Haitian wealth since 1804, including the return of the gold stolen by the US in 1914. France alone owes Haiti at least $28 billion.
that the United States return Navassa Island to Haiti.
that the United Nations pay for the crimes committed by MINUSTAH, whose forces killed tens of thousands of Haitians, raped untold numbers of women, and introduced cholera into the country.
that the Haitian people be permitted to build their own sovereign, dignified, and just political and economic framework and to create education and health systems that can meet the people’s real needs.
that all progressive forces oppose the military invasion of Haiti.
The common sense demands in this red alert do not require much elaboration, but they do need to be amplified.
Western countries will talk about this new military intervention with phrases such as ‘restoring democracy’ and ‘defending human rights’. The terms ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ are demeaned in these instances. This was on display at the UN General Assembly in September, when US President Joe Biden said that his government continues ‘to stand with our neighbour in Haiti’. The emptiness of these words is revealed in a new Amnesty International report that documents the racist abuse faced by Haitian asylum seekers in the United States. The US and the Core Group might stand with people like Ariel Henry and the Haitian oligarchy, but they do not stand with the Haitian people, including those who have fled to the United States.
In 1957, the Haitian communist novelist Jacques-Stéphen Alexis published a letter to his country titled La belle amour humaine (‘Beautiful Human Love’). ‘I don’t think that the triumph of morality can happen by itself without the actions of humans’, Alexis wrote. A descendent of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, one of the revolutionaries that overthrew French rule in 1804, Alexis wrote novels to uplift the human spirit, a profound contribution to the Battle of Emotions in his country. In 1959, Alexis founded the Parti pour l’Entente Nationale (‘People’s Consensus Party’). On 2 June 1960, Alexis wrote to the US-backed dictator François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier to inform him that both he and his country would overcome the violence of the dictatorship. ‘As a man and as a citizen’, Alexis wrote, ‘it is inescapable to feel the inexorable march of the terrible disease, this slow death, which each day leads our people to the cemetery of nations like wounded pachyderms to the necropolis of elephants’. This march can only be halted by the people. Alexis was forced into exile in Moscow, where he participated in a meeting of international communist parties. When he arrived back in Haiti in April 1961, he was abducted in Môle-Saint-Nicolas and killed by the dictatorship shortly thereafter. In his letter to Duvalier, Alexis echoed, ‘we are the children of the future’.
One of the best ideas to come out of the Corbyn era will be dropped if a new motion from a pro-arms trade union is passed. A 2017 motion to diversify the ‘defence’ sector could be replaced by a much more militarist one proposed by the GMB union. Diversification would see workers reassigned to socially useful jobs, instead of producing arms. But, this is set to be abandoned.
If approved at the Trade Union Congress (TUC), the motion would see the TUC lobbying for increased defence spending and cancel the 2017 position on diversification. Additionally, the motion instrumentalises the war in Ukraine and makes reference to AUKUS. AUKUS is a much-hyped military alliance between Australia, the UK, and the US.
Congress believes that the world is becoming less safe and the policy carried in 2017 in favour of diversifying away from defence manufacturing is no longer fit for purpose.
Congress recognises that defence manufacturing cuts have hindered the UK’s ability to aid the Ukrainian people under brutal assault from Putin’s regime.
The motion demands that the TUC general council:
campaign for immediate increases in defence spending.
It also recognises that:
there is welcome potential for manufacturing orders under the Aukus agreement.
Defence policy
Diversifying the defence economy is a key argument from campaign groups in the UK. However, only under Corbyn’s leadership did it become a firmer policy proposal. As early as 2015, CND lauded Corbyn’s plans to repurpose the nuclear weapons industry:
As the only anti-Trident leadership contender, Jeremy Corbyn is not only giving a voice to the many Labour members who oppose nuclear weapons but is also setting out practical plans to transition the high-skilled workforce away from nuclear weapons production.
A Britain without nuclear weapons will contribute to a more peaceful world – and one that can build a sustainable, high-skilled economy with secure, socially productive jobs.
Unions
A major barrier to greener, more forward-thinking policy has been the synergy between certain trade unions and the military sector. GMB and other some other unions represent workers in the defence sector and, understandably, this is reflected in their resistance to change.
As Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) points out:
Employment in local areas heavily dependent on the defence industry is especially vulnerable to downturns in national military spending, or the ending of major contracts for the UK military, or for export abroad.
This is a critical contradiction at the heart of UK manufacturing. Because of a national commitment to producing weapons, workers and unions are forced into a militarist position. Even though the weapons they produce are often exported to authoritarian regimes which can harm other workers – usually in the Global South.
Urgent need
The British arms trade is supported by institutions of all stripes. This includes the nuclear weapons industry and the maintenance of the fleet. Organised workers in that industry are thus forced into a militarist position to protect their interests.
What should be happening, given the climate crisis, is a move away from skilled engineers and other workers building arms. They should be re-roled to build the ethical and green technologies we need for a just transition.
This latest motion reflects the problem. The big British trade unions are essentially conservative status quo organisations. It’s a bizarre situation when a trade union is arguing in favour of flooding Ukraine with arms, and for more lobbying for defence spending. This is a major barrier that must be overcome in order to move towards a more equitable and secure world.
Introductory annotation by Patrice Greanville, editor of the Greanville Post:
As we could reliably predict, the Western media are self-righteously denouncing Moscow and rending their garments in an orgy of hypocrisy over what they frame as an act of “depraved terror”. Unfortunately, the hundreds of millions in the captive audience have nowhere to turn (or know how) to find out the truth and the proper historical context for the Ukraine war, the first thing the Western media suppressed even before the war formally began last February.
It must be noted that this sudden “rain of missiles” is virtually inexplicable if we follow Western media reports. The explanation for this contradiction is given by Moon of Alabama, who, with great irony but with 100% accuracy, headlines its 10 October dispatch, “Russia, Having ‘Run Out Of Missiles’, Launches Barrage On Ukraine,” adding,
Back in March I had warned that Lies Do Not Win Wars. Here is another practical example.
After allegedly having ‘run out of missiles’ and, more importantly, patience, the leadership of the Russian Federation decided to de-electrify Ukrainian cities with a ‘barrage of missile strikes’.
MoA then lists no less than 25 examples of Western media proclaiming with great seriousness that Putin was about to run out of missiles. This pathetic campaign (see a sample from MoA below), one of many strands pushed by the West’s Big Lie ministry, which has been simply totalitarian when “covering” the Ukraine conflict, went on from March to the present. We expect it to now finally halt, if for sheer decency, which they apparently lack, for no other reason than the impossibility of denying the obvious:
BUT, since objectivity is for Journalism School chumps and not serious matters like imperial propaganda, the press is wasting no time to milk the latest news for maximum Russophobic effect. Unsurprising then to find CBS, a major US engine of shameless disinformation in the global news machinery, covering the story thusly (we have bolded some of the more revoltingly tendentious passages and terms):
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Monday people were killed and injured in multiple missile strikes on cities across Ukraine, including the first bombardment of the capital in months. CBS News senior foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata1 said the strikes, which could signal a major escalation in the eight-month-old war, appeared to be entirely punitive — retaliation meant to terrorize Ukrainian civilians2 in densely-populated urban neighborhoods, close to government buildings, with one even hitting a children’s playground.
Ukraine’s national police later said at least 10 people were killed and about 60 others injured by the missile strikes early Monday morning.
Russia’s strongman leader Vladimir Putin acknowledged the barrage of missiles, which Russia claimed targeted only energy infrastructure, was retaliation for an apparent Ukrainian attack on a key bridge over the weekend. Putin warned Monday that if Ukraine continued to mount “terrorist attacks” on Russia, his regime’s response would be “tough and proportionate to the level of threats.”
“Unfortunately there are dead and wounded. Please do not leave the shelters,” Zelenskyy told Ukraine’s citizens on social media earlier Monday, accusing Russia of wanting to “wipe us from the face of the Earth.”
Rescue workers survey the scene of a Russian attack on Kyiv, Ukraine on Oct. 10, 2022. Several explosions rocked the city early in the morning following months of relative calm in the Ukrainian capital.ADAM SCHRECK / AP
The explosions in Kyiv and other cities came just a day after Putin blamed Kyiv for a massive explosion on a 12-mile bridge connecting Crimea with Russia. Crimea is a large Ukrainian peninsula that Russia occupied and then unilaterally annexed eight years ago during a previous invasion. The annexation of that territory, like Putin’s recent land grab3 of four Ukrainian regions that he declared Russian soil last week, have been condemned as illegitimate and illegal by Ukraine, the United Nations, the U.S. and other Ukrainian partners.
The CBS report could not avoid calling the attack a “war crime”, standard appellation for anything done by Russia and Putin in this conflict. They conveniently forget that it is US military doctrine (seen repeatedly in recent Gulf wars, etc.) to attack electricity power grids on the very first day of the onslaught, immediately condemning the country to severe stress due to lack of running water, heat, and the multitude of vital activities that electricity permits in modern society. (See more on this in our attached John Helmer report).The CBS report however grudgingly admitted that Moscow had apparently accomplished its purpose:
As the European Union condemned Russia’s attack and said the targeting of civilians amounted to “a war crime,” Russia’s Defense Ministry confirmed the “massive strike with long-range precision weapons.” It claimed the missiles had targeted “objects of the military command and control, communications and energy systems of Ukraine” and that “all assigned objects were hit.”
Meantime, Kiev, who, like the West, places great stock on the wiles of hybrid war, virtually acknowledged its hand in the terrorist strike on the Crimea bridge by circulating a stamp that gloated over the incident. The stamp appeared almost immediately after the bridge was blown up.
In the propaganda war the Ukrainian-supplied western media, led by Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, have just announced the discovery of a box of gold teeth “in a suspected [sic] Russian torture chamber, prompting claims [sic] they were wrenched from victims [sic] of President Putin’s occupying forces in Kharkov [sic].”
They are concealing that the Ukrainians of Kharkov whose teeth are fully intact inside their mouths can no longer operate their electric toothbrushes. There’s no electricity. Not for torture. Just enough for the allegations to be fabricated, published, and transmitted on the internet.
According to Ukrainian sources, about 1,700 cities, towns and villages, with about 1 million consumers, were without power in mid-March; the most seriously affected were the regions of Sumy, Chernigov, Nikolaev and Donetsk. On May 3, Ukrainian and western media reported a missile strike against power plants in the western Galicia region capital of Lvov; sub-stations supplying electricity to the railway system in the region were also hit. The biggest of the Russian attacks on Ukrainian electricity plants was reported in the western press, again quoting Kiev sources, on September 11-12. Power plants in Kharkov, Sumy, Poltava and Dnipropetrovsk regions were stopped.
A report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), issued on October 6, confirms there was a sharp fall in consumer demand for electricity following these attacks; this appears as a gap in the data chart between September 11 and 13. Kiev officials claimthat the generating plants were repaired and power restored. The IEA report, which relies upon and repeats data provided by the state utility Ukrenergo, claims that just before the Russian strikes, demand was running at 9.07 GW on Saturday, September 10, and that by the following Tuesday it was 13.56 GW.
According to the IEA, “Ukraine’s electricity demand has fallen by about 40% since Russia’s invasion with no sign of recovery. Demand keeps decreasing slowly every week. The resulting decline in power generation has mainly taken place in nuclear. But coal-fired generation has also decreased.” An IEA chart of power generation figures shows that from a peak of 21.87 GW on January 25, the production of electricity reported on October 5 had fallen to 11.41 GW – a cut of 48%.
However, the same IEA report claims that since a low point was reached on June 26 of 9.13 GW, Ukrenergo has also been managing to restore output by 25%.
A North American military specialist in infrastructure demolition and salvage, now retired, says these data are being faked by Ukrenergo. “The Russian strikes also interrupt data recording and reporting. The Ukrainians are not too keen to show weakness as they are anxious to be seen as a reliable supplier of electricity.”
Slowly but surely, but also secretly, the war is destroying the electric generation on which the Ukraine depends for everything – trains, water pumps, sewage treatment, light, heat, mobile telephones, refrigerators, radio and television, not to mention production lines in factories, in abattoirs, sausage making and other farm and food processing.
However, there remains electricity for the Ukrainian military operations to continue on the eastern front, and for cross-border trains to run into Lvov from Poland with fresh arms, ammunition, and rotating allied military staff advisers, together with NATO politicians and journalists keen to advertise their support.
In the wake of the attack on the Crimean Bridge, the electric war can now be expected to escalate.
In this Ukrainian report of March 2022, the “base installed generating capacity” of the country was reported at 56 GW at 2020 — 64% from thermal power plants, 25% nuclear and 10% hydro. The remaining 1%, offset by some hydro storage, was accounted for by solar, wind and other small generators.
Source: Olga Sushyk, Deputy Director of the Centre for European Studies at the Educational and Scientific Institute of Law, and Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv: “Ukraine’s Power System: Power and War”, published on March 17, 2022.
Source for enlarged view: file:///D:/Backups/Downloads/
Source: Lyudmila Vlasenko, Head of Electricity Sector Development Unit, Ukrainian Ministry of Energy and Coal Sector – report titled “Power System of Ukraine: Today and Tomorrow”, July 2013. Since July of this year DTEK, the generation company owned by Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, has reported that “about 90% of Ukraine’s wind capacity and 30% of solar parks are offline because they are in occupied territories.”
The Sushyk-Shevchenko report says that “due to damage to the electricity infrastructure, as of March 16, 2022, more than 1,679 Ukrainian localities remained without electricity – that’s about 928,000 consumers. The worst situation with electricity supply is in Sumy, Chernigov, Nikolaev, Kiev, and Donetsk regions.”
An earlier background briefing paper from the International Energy Agency (IEA), dated 2021, confirms the pre-war details. Here’s IEA’s backgrounder on Ukrainian electricity generation, apparently as of 2018.
The IEA also publishes daily updated charts of the collapse of Ukrainian electricity production; these are based on data supplied by Ukrenergo. These charts show the losses up to October 9.
The same source also shows this chart of Ukrainian electricity demand; demand responds to the cutoff of coal, gas and nuclear-fired generating plants by increasing use of domestic electrical heaters and back-up electrical generators.
Since 2014 Ukraine has lost a third of its energy generation which had been located in the breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk regions. Another 10 power plants were lost in 2014-2015, and seventeen more in 2022, according to a new assessment published last Friday in Vzglyad of Moscow by Nikolai Storozhenko.
“Zaporozhye NPP [Nuclear Power Plant] stands out among them, of course. But this does not mean that the others are not worth attention. For example, the Zaporozhye thermal power plant (Energodar) has an installed capacity of more than 3,500 MW and can potentially produce 23-25 billion kWh (the annual plan for the NPP for 2022 was 37 billion kWh). In other words, the loss of this energy supply is a hole which, practically, the Ukraine can do nothing to close, and which will largely determine the problems of the Ukrainian winter of 2022/23.”
“Ukraine lost another 4% of electricity generation as a result of the fighting from February to September, according to the assessment of the National Council for the Restoration of Ukraine. However, it is obvious that these data do not take into account the blows to the energy infrastructure which were inflicted on September 11-12 (Kharkov CHPP-5, Zmievskaya CHPP, Pavlodar CHPP-3, Kremenchug CHPP). In general, the damage and reduction in the capacity of the energy system looks enormous for Ukraine and it is not entirely clear how Zelensky manages to sell electricity to Europe against this background.”
“But, firstly, sales [to Europe] will soon stop, which Zelensky has already warned Europe about, declaring recently: ‘We will not have enough volume to heat our homes, and this time is approaching.’ Secondly, Ukraine’s energy system is losing power simultaneously with a decrease in consumption…Yury Korolchuk, an expert at the Institute of Energy Strategies [Kiev], is urging consumers to be ready for five to six-hour rolling blackouts. Rolling blackouts are not news for Ukraine, but the realities of the last few years. Moreover, this year in the reports on the procurement of fuel for the winter, firewood began to appear…and the mayor of Lvov said in August that the city is buying and stocking wood for fuel.”
“What about gas supply? In the summer, Naftogaz asked for several billion dollars to purchase 5-7 billion cubic meters of gas – to bring reserves to 19 billion cubic meters. But there was no money for this – and to date, only 14 billion cubic meters have been accumulated. On the one hand, the situation for gas is about the same as with electricity: consumption is falling. Kherson, Zaporozhye, Donetsk, Lugansk and Kharkov regions are either completely written off…, or their supplies will be cut to a minimum. In most cities of Kharkov, Donetsk, Nikolaev, Sumy, Chernigov regions and Zaporozhye there will be no heating. There will be no gas in winter, there will be light periodically — such a frightening forecast was published in the Telegram channel…half of this source’s forecasts come true – and they shout loudly about them. The second half does not come true – and no one remembers about them.”
“But in this case, the forecast is not groundless….[Ukrainian state] Naftogaz is delaying the conclusion of gas supply contracts with the gas distribution companies in the Kharkov and Dniepropetrovsk regions. At this point, it is worth remembering how, back in early summer, Zelensky’s office directly told the residents of the Donetsk region: go wherever you want, there will be no heating in winter.”
“In other words, the Ukrainian strategy is something like this. There are the combat areas and those adjacent to them. There the population has already dispersed or has greatly decreased; there is a risk of attacks on the facilities themselves and fuel depots. So, it is in these areas that it will be hardest to winter. It will be more comfortable for Kiev which has its own thermal power plants and there is an opportunity to add power from western Ukrainian nuclear power plants, and for the Galician region of western Ukraine [Lvov]. Also, there are about three to four million internally displaced people in Ukraine who have resettled mainly in these regions. Who should be kept without electricity and gas: the half-empty areas of the Zaporozhye region or Kiev? The choice is obvious.”
This is how the Ukrainian energy experts view their choice from Kiev. The strategic options for the Russian General Staff and Kremlin remain secret, if not undecided.
In the aftermath of the Crimean Bridge attack, Moscow television figures like Vladimir Soloviev have broadcast calls to extend the military campaign westward to Lvov and the Polish border. “It is obvious,” Soloviev said on Saturday, “that the NATO command took part in the development of this [Crimean Bridge] sabotage… What is our plan? Not to follow the enemy’s scenario, but to disrupt their plans, striking unexpected blows in directions where the enemy is not anticipating them. Ukraine should be plunged into dark times. Bridges, dams, railways, thermal power plants, and other infrastructure facilities should be destroyed throughout the territory of Ukraine. There should be no administrative office building operating in both Kiev and Lvov. And not only that.”
Left: a screen shot of a Kharkov substation after the September 11-12 attacks. Centre: Vladimir Soloviev, Moscow broadcaster and advocate for escalation. Russian and Crimean government officials are quieting the tone by announcing that train traffic on the Crimean Bridge has already resumed; that one road span is undamaged and will resume operation shortly; and replacement of the damaged road span will follow.
A combined US and European Union (EU) plan to link the Ukrainian electricity grid to the EU system, and thus provide supply back-up in case the Ukrainian grid was attacked by the Russian Army, has already failed. A US publication headlined the attempt “The Race to Rescue Ukraine’s Power Grid From Russia”; click to read.
“The test was years in the making, one of the final rituals in a drawn-out courtship between the Ukrainian and European power grids known as “synchronization.” But before it could join with Europe, Ukrenergo first had to prove it could keep the lights on without its connections to Belarus and Russia—in ‘island mode.’ The plan was to reconnect with its neighbours after a few days. Then in 2023 it would switch on the links with Europe.”
“That’s not what happened. Instead, on February 24, the same day as the test, Russia invaded. Since noon that day, Ukraine—in coordination with its southern neighbour Moldova—has been powering itself solo. It’s a balancing act. Changing where the power comes from and where it goes means some lines suddenly get clogged with electrons while others dry up. It can be difficult to maintain balance for any length of time. So far, the Ukrainian grid is humming along at a frequency of 50 Hertz—stable, in other words—a Ukrenergo spokesperson told WIRED by email. But it’s risky to continue that way indefinitely, especially during a war. When stuff breaks in the power grid, the whole system has to absorb the shock and rebalance. And right now, a lot is breaking across Ukraine…Last week, Kadri Simson, the European commissioner for energy, said the group representing the region’s transmission operators, will come to the rescue, potentially within weeks.”
This was wishful thinking on the part of the Latvian official in Brussels. For Simson’s record of faking on the EU’s gas substitution schemes, and the Russian response, read this report from October 2021.
The assessment of the North American expert on military operations against energy infrastructure focuses on the Russian side’s strategy until now, before considering the military options for the future. In addition to covering up the evidence of power generation losses by the Ukrainians which the source reports from Urkrenergo and IEA, he says the Russians have limited their attacks until now to “a form of reconnaissance by force. Their purpose”, he believes, ” has been to determine what generating capacity remains, what can be repaired, how to interdict the human repair logistics, what is irreparably lost, and then to attrite the remaining Ukrainian materiel and human resources as the winter season approaches.”
“It appears to me that the Ukrainians are extremely hard-pressed to maintain and restore their electrical grid, most especially in the eastern regions. They are just as concerned to the point of adding and testing back-up generators at key nodes of the grid, especially in Kiev. By the way, the precedent for the Russian General Staff and Kremlin for destroying a country’s electrical grid was set during the NATO bombing of Serbia and then by the US air bombing of Iraq.”
For a history of US Air Force (USAF) strategy in attacking electric generation and distribution grids, read this USAF University thesis, entitled “Strategic Attack of National Electrical Systems”, dated 1994: “The USAF has long favoured attacking electrical power systems. Electric power has been considered a critical target in every war since World War II, and will likely be nominated in the future… The evidence shows that the only sound reason for attacking electrical power is to affect the production of war materiel in a war of attrition against a self-supporting nation-state without outside assistance.”
Left: Major Thomas Griffith’s USAF study of 1994. Centre: Iraqi electric relay unit bombed by the US Air Force in Operation Desert Storm in 1990-91. Right: Serbian generating plant damage after the USAF and European bombing campaign of May 1999.
The western military source again: “War is war, whether you want to use terms like hybrid war or proxy war. It means destroying the enemy’s capacity to make war. Shutting off the power in the rump Ukrainian state will do just that to the Ukrainians. If they then start to flee for refuge to Poland and Germany, this will be a disaster unparalleled in recent European history. Just the attendant collapse in telecommunications will make the place a madhouse. You can well imagine the rest. Already there are queues for water in Nikolaev, and who knows where else. How does queueing for water, if there is any, in temperatures of minus-20C to minus-40C sound? This won’t be like the blackouts from US sanctions and attacks in Cuba or Venezuela – there they didn’t have to worry about freezing to death, the pipes bursting, or irreparable damage being done to billions of dollars’ worth of pumping, electrical, and other equipment due to freezing.”
“How many people realize that a sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) circuit breaker, commonly used in electrical substations, requires an electric heating blanket to be functional in sub-zero weather? Most westerners don’t. They are common in high-voltage substations which ultimately feed the grid lines with power. In the Ukrainian case, I suspect there is a mixture of those and older style oil circuit breakers (OCB), along with oil-filled large power transformers (LPT), which are essential to electrical distribution. And guess where most of the oil comes from to fill these devices?”
“I suspect that most of Zelensky’s officials and officials in the supporting EU governments have persuaded themselves with their own propaganda. They aren’t daring to think through these questions, any more than they care to understand that the housing of the pumps delivering their water and treating their sewage will freeze and split apart if they are not heated via electrical means. Even if the gas is on — and it won’t be — electricity is needed to ignite, then control, furnaces. How many of these officials understand the long lead times, compounded by manufacturing shutdowns due to high energy costs, which you must have to replace and restore everything?”
“Who then will ‘stand with Ukraine’ when the gas and electricity rationing and unpayable consumer bills roll over the Ukrainian border and into Poland, Germany, France, and the UK, as they are already doing?”
“The Russians have been hitting the Ukrainian electrical distribution system for months now. As we know, they started with the rail traction power yards which are largely branches of the wider electric grid. Now they have moved to the substations and so-called ‘thermal power’ plants, hitting them in what seems to be pellmell fashion. I expect that the Russians are gathering intelligence now on repair times, re-equipment availability, deliveries, repair crew composition and coordination.”
Source: https://transformers-magazine.com
“So let’s imagine this. Winter arrives. The power is cut in Kharkov, Dniepropetrovsk, Pavlovsk, Nikolaev etc. and due to the unavailability of spares, repair crews, respite from attack, or all three, the outlook for the power outage is indefinite. What do people do? They migrate to where there is power, running water, heat etc… For millions this means west. So off they go. And when enough of them get there, bam! the power goes off there too.”
Reading the grid maps of the Ukraine, the source says “it is obvious that the real vulnerability, in my estimation, lies in the approximately 88 substations for 330 kV distribution and 33 substations for 220 kV distribution. Note the nodes or junctions. Those are substations connecting the distribution lines which crisscross the Ukraine. These substations contain large power transformers, switchgear, DCS equipment [Distributed Control System] and other power quality and control equipment, spares etc. Widespread coordinated strikes on these substations will quickly overwhelm the Ukrainian ability to effect repairs and re-balance the loads on the generation stations. This will create a cascade effect whereby overloaded power plants and distribution gear will ‘trip out’ over wide swathes of the country – if the protection between the Ukrainian and EU grids does not operate in time, or there is wild voltage/frequency oscillations there could be large interruptions in the EU countries being fed from Ukrainian sources.”
“Any repair efforts will also be severely hampered, if not crippled, if utility yards where spare cables and other gear, as well as vehicles (bucket and line trucks, cranes, etc.), are stored and parked are struck. Personnel losses among the finite number of utility crew members due to follow-up attacks and the inevitable mishaps that come with interacting with damaged or compromised high voltage electrical equipment, will quickly mount. If the attacks are launched during the hard winter months, the impact will be exponential, increasingly unmanageable and catastrophic as the hours go by.”
A professional disinformer, identical to thousands of colleagues who work on Western media to produce and spread lies according to the given script from the State Dept. or other power centers in the Western ruling class.
The pot calling the kettle black. This from a media platform that like the rest of the US-controlled media around the world, ignored and covered up the deliberate shelling of Donbas cities for eight long years by a Nazi-infested Ukrainian army built, trained and directed by NATO. The dead by now amount to more than 14,000. They are almost all civilians, including many women and children. Throughout this period, Kiev’s military was also engaged in the deliberate shelling of schools, medical facilities and vital infrastructure: water plants, power stations and so on. Tell us, again, who started this nice clambake? Russia or Washington through its color revolutions and many vassal/accomplices?
Yes, tell us about land grabs, please. More glaring examples of double-standard based on US exceptionalism. Since the turn of the 20th century, the US has invaded and occupied many nations, after subjecting them to brutal military attacks and repression. The annexed regions in Donbas were all heavily Russian, historically and culturally, something we can hardly say about the US grabbing the Philippines in the 1900s, or setting itself up for generations in Korea, or illegally occupying one-third of Syria, a nation Washington has been trying to regime-change now for a generation via dirty war using terrorist proxies. We don’t have to mention here in detail the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq, two nations that the US and its NATO vassals invaded, occupied and destroyed for at least 30 years, with untold victims, before liberation came to the former thanks to their unrelenting struggle against the “crusader army”, with Iraq still attempting to get rid of the Washington infection. Of course, no mention is made here that these regions rejoined Russia not as a result of some perverse Putin whim, but after a formal referendum, whose validity is certainly no worse and probably a damn sight better than US elections.
A few years after WW I, the poet T.S. Eliot opened his famous poem “The Wasteland” with these words: “April is the cruelest month … “ I think he may be wrong, for this October may be the cruelest month of all, followed by November. Unprecedented. You can hear the clicking and grating of spades if your antennae are attuned.
We are on the brink of ominous events created by the U.S. war against Russia. Yet so many people prefer to turn away and swallow the lies that the U.S. wants peace and not war and is the aggrieved party in the crisis.
A friend of mine, who is constantly charging me with having turned right-wing because of my writing that accuses many traditional liberal/leftists of buying the national security state’s propaganda on the JFK assassination, “9/11,” Syria, Ukraine, Covid-19, censorship, the “New” Cold War, etc., and whose go-to news sources are The Guardian, CNN, The New York Times, NPR, ABC, seems oblivious to the fact that right and left have become useless terms and that these media are all mouthpieces for the CIA and their intelligence allies in the new Cold War; that the so-called right and left are joined at the hip with their obsession with Pax Americana.
There are no right and left anymore; there are only free and independent voices or those of the caged parrots repeating what they have been taught to say:
“Polly wants a war!” “Polly wants a war.”
I am afraid that I will never convince this dear friend otherwise and I find that depressing. Yet I know such views are shared by millions of others and that even if nuclear war breaks out their minds will not change. Propaganda runs very, very deep into their psyches, and they desperately want to believe. Hitler said it clearly in Mein Kampf:
The masses … are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.
Hitler learned so much about “manufacturing consent” from his American teachers Edward Bernays, Walter Lippmann, et al., who accomplished so much brainwashing of the American people. They were all masters of the lie and millions continue to believe their followers.
If nuclear weapons are again used (and everyone knows the only country to have used them), these believers will blame their use on Russia, even though Russia has made it very clear that it would only resort to such weapons if the country’s existence were threatened, while the U.S. continues affirming its right to preemptively use nuclear weapons when it so chooses.
And even if nuclear weapons are not used, the recent sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines and the bombing of the Crimean Bridge, both clearly the work of U.S./NATO/Ukrainian forces, have raised the ante considerably. The door to hell has just been opened wider, and I suspect not by accident, as the U.S. elections approach.
In his recent television talk, Vladimir Putin made Russia’s nuclear position very clear, mentioning nuclear weapons only in the context of Western threats of using them, as Moon of Alabamareported. Putin said:
They [the U.S./NATO/Ukraine] have even resorted to the nuclear blackmail. I am referring not only to the Western-encouraged shelling of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, which poses a threat of a nuclear disaster, but also to the statements made by some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO countries on the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction – nuclear weapons – against Russia.
I would like to remind those who make such statements regarding Russia that our country has different types of weapons as well, and some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have. In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.
The citizens of Russia can rest assured that the territorial integrity of our Motherland, our independence and freedom will be defended – I repeat – by all the systems available to us. Those who are using nuclear blackmail against us should know that the wind rose can turn around.
When the long-planned U.S. war against Russia, so obvious to anyone who sees past the propagandist headlines and studies the matter, soon explodes into full-scale open war for all to see in horror, as it will, these true believers will dig in their heels even more. They will find new reasons to justify their faith, and it is akin to religious faith. The infamous Rand Corporation’s 2019 report cited above, “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia,” cites the following as part of the war process, as summarized in the Strategic Culture article, but it will have no impact on the faithful believers:
Providing lethal military aid to Ukraine
Mobilizing European NATO members
Imposing deeper trade and economic sanctions
Increasing U.S. energy production for export to Europe
Expanding Europe’s import infrastructure to receive U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies
I keep thinking of the U.S. false flag Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964 and how effective that was in convincing the gullible population and the complicit U.S. Congress – by a vote of 88 to 2 in the Senate and 414 to 0 in the House of Representatives (try to imagine such criminals) – that U.S. destroyers were innocently attacked by the North Vietnamese and that Lyndon Johnson should be given the authority to respond to repel “communist aggression,” which, of course, he did by bombing North Vietnam and sending 500,000 troops to savagely destroy Vietnam and Vietnamese nearly 9,000 miles from the United States. Johnson simply lied to wage war and Biden is doing the same today. But far too many people love their leaders’ lies because it allows them to secretly feel justified in the lies they themselves tell in personal matters. And what may be true of the distant past, can’t be true today.
In 1965, the folk singer Tom Paxton put Johnson’s lies to music with “Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation“. In those days, art was used as a weapon against U.S. propaganda.
Today we can ask: Where have all the artists gone?
We know that the U.S. has, for the time being, abandoned sending hundreds of thousands of troops into another country; now it is drones, air warfare, special forces, the CIA, mercenaries, terrorists, and intermediaries such as the Ukrainian conscripts, Azov Nazis, and NATO surrogates. Such was the lesson of Vietnam when the draft led to massive protests and resistance. Now war is waged less obviously and the propaganda is more extensive and constant as a result of digital media.
There are many such examples of U.S. treachery, most notably the attacks of September 11, 2001, but such history is only open to those who take it upon themselves to investigate.
Now there is the corrupt Ukrainian U.S. puppet government, which is nearly 6,000 miles from the United States, and must be defended from Russian “aggression,” just like the corrupt South Vietnamese U.S. puppet government was.
To those who buy the mass media propaganda, I ask: Why is the U.S.A. always fighting to kill people so far from its shores? Doesn’t it sound a bit odd that our wonderful leaders destroyed Libya, Vietnam, Serbia, the Philippines, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc., countries so far away, and now that Russia defends itself from U.S./NATO encroachment a few miles from its borders, it is accused of being the evil aggressors and Vladimir Putin called another Hitler like all the leaders of the countries we attacked? Have you completely lost your ability to think? Or do you, like little children, actually believe the disembodied newsreaders who deliver your prepackaged television propaganda?
If I ask such an obvious question, does that make me a “right-winger”?
If I state two facts: that Donald Trump – whom I consider despicable and part of the divide and conquer game as Biden’s flip side, and have said so – did not start a war against Russia and that Russia-gate was a Democratic propaganda stunt and is false, does that make me a right-winger? My friend would say so. Do telling facts define your political allegiances, whether they be facts about Republicans or Democrats?
No. I will tell you what it makes me: A disgusted human being sickened by all the lies and people’s gullibility after decades of evidence that should have awakened them to the truth about all these politicians and the war against Russia underway. I have lost patience with it. For decades I have been writing about such propaganda to no avail. Yes, those who tended to agree with me might have moved a little closer to my arguments, but the vast majority have not budged an iota.
I wish it were different. It is my desire. Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan sage of the Americas, who knew what was up and what was down when he wrote Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World in 1998, said this about Desire:
A man found Aladdin’s lamp lying around. Since he was a big reader, the man recognized it and rubbed it right away. The genie appeared, bowed deeply, and said, ‘At your service master. Your wish is my command. But there will be only one wish.
Since he was a good boy, the man said, ‘I wish for my dead mother to be brought back.’
The genie made a face. ‘I’m sorry, master, but that wish is impossible. Make another.’
Since he was a nice guy, the man said, ‘I wish the world would stop spending money to kill people.’
The genie swallowed. ‘Uhh … What did you say your mother’s name was?’
The desire for peace and security is a universal dream. Sometimes it is hidden in people’s hearts because they have swallowed the lies of the evil ones who wish to wage war against those who insist on security for their country, as Russians are demanding today.
It is very frustrating to try to wake people out of their manufactured consent and the insouciance that follows as we are being led into the abyss.
But I will not stop trying. Galeano did not. He left us these words of universal resistance:
We shall be compatriots and contemporaries of all who have a yearning for justice and beauty, no matter where they were born or when they lived, because the borders of geography and time shall cease to exist.
Speech by KJ Noh at the Friends of Socialist China webinar “China encirclement and the imperialist build-up in the Pacific,” held on 24 September 2022.
The event addressed the rising aggression of the US and its allies in the Pacific region, including the Biden administration’s increased support for Taiwanese separatism; Western power projection in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straits; the hysteria surrounding China’s security agreement with the Solomon Islands; the AUKUS nuclear pact; developments in Korea and Japan; and more.
People from the Danish Defence Academy, other military experts – e.g. those of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation – most major Danish media and – of course – the Ukrainian President’s advisor uniformly point – to Russia as the saboteur of the Nordstream gas pipelines near Bornholm, the Danish island south of Sweden.
The Danish Prime Minister Frederiksen and Defence Minister Bødskov, however, are a little lower than usual on Russia, pointing out how important – and difficult – it is to get clarity on this kind of thing so far down on the ocean bed.
Here’s UPI’s take on the EU: “Sept. 28 (UPI) – The European Union on Wednesday said breaches in the Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines happened because of a “deliberate act” but stopped short of blaming Russia for the leaks.”
How interesting they stopped short. For once.
This is, of course, a political water-cycle ride into the blue deep sea.
Surely, Russia has a tap – the kind you know you have on your kitchen sink – with which to stop the gas? Why take the big risk with such a difficult and profound espionage attack? And if it was a signal to Denmark, why do it in international waters?
As usual, the Danish media seem unfamiliar with web search engines. And if they do, it must be that they are not reporting everything they have seen and are thus engaging in a rather narrow public education – leaving out what they believe that the citizens, for political reasons, do not need to know.
You can search for yourself – don’t use Google because that’s part of US foreign policy – but e.g. DuckDuckGo – with the words “Biden on no Nordstream 2” and there are tons of references to Biden and his famous promise at a press conference with German chancellor Schilz that “we’ll bring an end to it” – Nordstream 2 – if Russia invades Ukraine.
That was February 7 of this year – 3 weeks before Putin’s international law-breaking invasion in response to the provocation Russia perceives NATO’s 30-year systematic build-up of Ukraine as a future NATO country to be.
Here’s a Reuters video of the already then sensational plan, which Biden clearly doesn’t want to explain and Chancellor Scholz looks a bit befuddled about:
It’s also clear that Madam “Fuck-the-EU” Victoria Nuland – Biden’s Under-Secretary of State – has said the same thing just as unequivocally – see this video on Twitter. And on YouTube:
I wish Frederiksen and Bødskov, the Danish underwater military experts and divers as well as the Danish media all the best with the difficult, lengthy investigation into the suspected Russian terrorist attack.
The introduction of an Israeli Mossad agent as the latest Marvel movie character crosses the line, even by Hollywood’s poor moral standards. However, the Israeli superhero, Sabra, must be understood within the rational progression of the Israelification of Hollywood, a phenomenon that is surprisingly new.
Sabra is a relatively old character, dating back to a Marvel comic, the Incredible Hulk, in 1980. On September 10, however, it was announced that the Israeli character will be included in an upcoming Marvel film, ‘Captain America: New World Order’.
Expectedly, many pro-Palestine activists in the United States and around the world fumed. It is one thing to introduce an ordinary Israeli character, with the mere aim of normalizing Israel, an unrepenting apartheid state, in the eyes of Marvel’s impressionable young audiences; but it is far more sinister to normalize a state intelligence agency, the Mossad, known for its numerous bloody assassinations, sabotage and torture.
By adding Sabra to its cast of superheroes, Marvel Studios has shown its complete disregard for the massive campaign by millions of fans around the world who, in 2017, protested the inclusion of a former Israeli soldier, Gal Gadot, as Marvel’s Wonder Woman. Gadot is a vocal supporter of the Israeli government and military.
In response to the news, many rightly highlighted Hollywood’s inherent bias, starting in the 1960’s movie, Exodus, by Otto Preminger, with Paul Newman as the lead actor, which provided pseudo-historical justification for the colonization of Palestine by the Zionists. Ever since, Israel has been elevated, celebrated and included in an ever-positive context by Hollywood, while Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians continue to be vilified.
Although Israel was represented in a positive light by Hollywood filmmakers, the Israelis themselves were quite marginal in the content creation process. Until recently, the Israel construct was mostly built on behalf of Israel, not by Israel itself. “Things began to change in 1997,” wroteBrian Schaefer in Moment Magazine. It was then that the L.A. Federation’s Entertainment Division and the Jewish Agency launched the project, the ‘Master Class’, which, “for nearly 15 years … brought countless actors, directors, producers, agents, managers and top studio and network executives to Israel, introducing many of them to the country for the first time, and taught Israelis how to pitch their projects.”
The indoctrination of American actors and filmmakers through these visits and the introduction of many Israeli actors and filmmakers to Hollywood paid dividends, leading to a major change of narrative on Israel. Instead of simply communicating Israel to American and international audiences using references to historical victimization, positive association or even humor, Israelis began to make their case through Hollywood directly. And, unlike the haphazardness of past messages – good Israel, bad Arabs – the new messages are far more sophisticated, tailored around specific ideas, and designed with full awareness of the politics of each era.
Steven Spielberg’s movie, Munich (2005), was released within the cultural context of the US invasion of Iraq as part of Washington’s so-called ‘war on terror’, where human rights were violated on a global scale. Munich was a selective ‘historical’ account of the supposedly difficult choices that Israel, namely the Mossad, had to make to fight its own ‘war on terror’. That was the era when Tel Aviv tirelessly underscored its affinity to Washington, now that both countries are purportedly victims of ‘Islamic extremists’.
Unlike Munich, the widely popular TV series Homeland was not just another pro-Israel American argument that justifies Israeli wars and violence. The series itself, one of the most racist, islamophobic shows on television, was entirely modeled after the Israeli show HaTufim – ‘Prisoners of War’ or ‘Abductees’. The writer and director of the Israeli show, Gideon Raff, has been included in the American version of the show, serving as an executive producer.
The change in the ownership of the narrative may seem superficial – as pro-Israel Holywood propaganda is being replaced by organic Israeli propaganda. However, this is not the case.
The pro-Israel agenda of the past – the romanticization that followed the creation of Israel in 1948 – did not last long. The Israeli defeat of Arab armies in 1967 – thanks to the massive US military support of Tel Aviv – replaced the image of nascent, vulnerable Israel with that of the brave Israeli army, capable of defeating several militaries at once. It was then that Israeli soldiers toured US colleges and schools talking about their heroism on the battlefield. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent massacres, like that of Sabra and Shatila, forced a rethink.
Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, Israel largely existed in Hollywood as a comic relief, from shows like Friends, Frasier and, more recently, the Big Bang Theory. References to Israel were often followed by a laugh – a clever, and effective way of linking Israel with positive, happy associations.
The ‘war on terror’, starting in 2001, coupled with the creation of the ‘Master Class’ project, allowed Israel to return to the Hollywood universe, not as an occasional reference, but as a staple, with Israeli shows, or joint US-Israeli productions, defining a whole new genre: making difficult choices to fight terrorism and ultimately save the world.
The exploitation of Israeli women on Magazine covers – for example, Maxim – was a whole different shady business, catering to a different audience. The half-naked Israeli army girls have succeeded, in the minds of many, in justifying war through sexual imagery. This genre became particularly popular following the bloody Israeli wars on Gaza, which killed thousands.
Israel’s growing influence on the Marvel movies is a combination of all of these elements: the sexualization of the supposedly strong, empowered woman, the normalization of those who carry out Israeli crimes – Gadot, the soldier, Sabra, the Mossad agent – and the direct injection of Israeli priorities as part of everyday American reality.
Yet, there is a silver lining. For decades, Israel has hidden behind false, romanticized historical notions, making its case to the US and other western public, often indirectly. The wars on Gaza, the exponential growth of the Palestinian boycott movement and the proliferation of social media have, however, forced Israel out of hiding.
The new Hollywood Israel is now a warrior, often forced to make difficult moral choices, but it is, like its American counterpart, ultimately a force for good. Whether Israel will succeed in maintaining this image will depend on several factors, including the pro-Palestinian communities’ ability to counter such falsehood and hasbara.
After 12 bleak years of various Conservative governments, led by inadequate Prime Ministers, the UK is on its knees. Democracy is under attack like never before; the disaster of Brexit, which has resulted in a catalogue of negatives including social polarization, isolationism and rabid tribalism.
Years of grinding austerity, underinvestment in public services, frozen wages and staggering levels of incompetence have culminated in the unmitigated mess we see before us: A country in terminal decline, poverty growing, inequality entrenched, and to cap it all The Wicked Witch of the raving Right, Liz Truss, has now been elected leader of the Conservatives, and, as they are in office, the new Prime Minister. A totally undemocratic electoral process, but hey, ‘that’s the way it’s always been’.
She was voted in, in a country of around 69 million people, by 81,326 (57.4% of the total gaggle) Conservative members. A tiny group, overwhelmingly old, posh, white, male, anti-Europe, anti-immigrant, anti-environment – pro-fossil fuels, backward-looking nationalists. A crazy bunch operating within a dysfunctional system that, like much of the UK parliamentary structure and the primordial electoral model, desperately needs reforming.
The revolting campaign rhetoric spouted by Truss, was we hoped, just that, ranting rhetoric aimed solely at the conservative golf club nobs. Alas, in her first pronouncements as PM, surrounded by baying Tory sycophants, it was clear that Truss lives not in the real world at all, but in a crumbling castle for one, built on a foundation of Neo-Liberal doctrine, situated further to the right than any UK Prime-Minister in recent years.
Despite decades of disappointment, whenever a new PM/government takes office, naivety gives rise to a prickle of optimism: surely now things will improve, surely social justice will be prioritized, peace and environmental action imperatives. Well, PM Truss swiftly crushed any such childish hopes with her first speech in parliament and her wooden responses during Prime Minister’s Questions. Arrogance masquerading as certainty imbued every cruel statement of policy intent, and, as opposition parties shook their heads in disbelief, people around the country, millions of whom are struggling to pay rising energy bills and increased food prices, were again crushed.
Truss, her cabinet, and thanks to a purge of moderate voices undertaken by Boris Johnson to quieten dissent, most, if not all of the parliamentary party, is now firmly wedded to an extreme version of Neo-Liberalism and the failed doctrine of Trickle Down economics. After forty years of most boats being sunk by the rising tide, the Ideology of Injustice has been shown to deepen inequality, intensify poverty and further concentrate wealth in the pockets of The Already Wealthy.
In addition to economic plans designed to benefit corporations and, by her own admission, intensify inequality (‘I’m not interested in re-distribution’ she told the BBC), she plans to increase military spending, allow global energy companies to restart gas extraction in the North Sea, end the moratorium on fracking and abolish green levies, which are used to fund energy efficiency and renewable electricity. She despises labor rights and the Trades Union movement, peaceful public protest and immigrants, all of which she is threatening to criminalize or clutter with so much bureaucracy as to make such human rights unenforceable.
Her policies, dogmatism and the doctrine that underpin them are, in many ways, terrifying. And with the suspension of parliament and consequently, any form of scrutiny, resulting from the death of The Queen, there is a danger, or for her, an opportunity, that she attempts to introduce legislation under cover of national mourning. If Truss and her gang get their way, the limited form of democracy that exists in the UK will become a distant memory, rather as ethics and honesty in public office, compassion and honoring international commitments have in recent years.
Rising misery
The list of national crises that the Truss government inherits, most if not all of which she had a grubby hand in causing, is long, and growing. As is public anger. It is a list resulting from ideological obsession, gross incompetence and absenteeism.
The National Health Service (NHS) is in crisis – years of underfunding, lack of training and Brexit, which saw thousands of NHS workers from Europe leave the UK, have led to around 135,000 vacancies, including 40,000 nurses and over 8,000 doctors in England alone. The service has the longest waiting lists for routine treatments on record; if you dial 999 for an ambulance, it could be hours, or in extreme cases, days before it arrives. Social care is dysfunctional; there is a housing crisis, property prices are sky high, rents are unaffordable, tenancies offer no security, homelessness is increasing – according to Government figures, “between January to March 2022, 74,230 households were assessed as homeless or threatened with homelessness,”up 5.4% in the same period in 2021, a further 38,000 were regarded as at “risk of homelessness”.
Inflation is at 10.1% and rising, recession predicted, poverty booming. Thousands of people/families (many of whom are in full-time employment) rely on food banks for basic supplies – over two million people visited a food bank last year, and this doesn’t include independent providers – local charities, churches etc. Ten years ago food banks barely existed in the UK, now there are estimated to be 2,572, and constitute a growth area.
The privatization of utility companies including water in 1989 under Thatcher, has led to energy and water companies making huge profits for shareholders (£72bn in dividends), but neglecting consumers and failing to invest. Since water was privatized no new reservoirs have been commissioned (in 33 years), and, The Guardianreports,“2.4bn liters [of water] a day on current estimates have been allowed to leak away.” Airports including Heathrow, have had to limit the number of flights due to lack of staff; the airport authorities and airlines use the ‘It’s not us, it’s Covid’ excuse, so loved by companies and government agencies who laid off too many employees during the pandemic and either haven’t re-hired enough, or employees refused to return unless wages and conditions improved.
The judiciary is in crisis, as is the prison system and the police, particularly in London; childcare and nursery education is shambolic, unaffordable for most, hard to find, limited places, particularly for those on average incomes; again due in part to lack of properly trained staff. It is, it seems, an endless list, shameful and intensely depressing, There may, however, be a glimmer of light within the storm; a positive effect of this cacophony of chaos is a growing movement of resistance to economic injustice, and Trades Union industrial action.
Enough is Enough
Wages for most people in the UK have been effectively frozen for years; and now, with rising inflation income is reducing in value, economic hardship intensifying, fury rising. Unions, which have been greatly weakened in the last thirty years through restrictive legislation, have rediscovered their courage and purpose, and in response to members’ demands have organised strikes in a number of areas. Most notably, railway and Transport for London workers have withdrawn their labor on a number of occasions in disputes over pay and conditions; refuse workers in Scotland have been on strike over pay; postal workers have also been striking; junior barristers are on indefinite strike over pay; workers at the UK’s largest container port, Felixstowe, recently withdrew their labour for eight days in another dispute about pay. Nurses and doctors working in the NHS are threatening industrial action, as are teachers.
The leader of the RMT union, Mick Lynch, who has emerged as a leading voice for the people, has suggested that, “unions are on the brink of calling for ‘synchronized’ strikes over widespread anger at how much soaring inflation is outpacing wages.” If such a positive step were taken, it would be a powerful act of resistance against years of exploitation and injustice, and may further empower working people, who for years have been silenced.
In parallel with the workers revolt is a social movement of defiance. Initially triggered by high energy bills, rising costs and low wages, the scope of disquiet is expanding to include outrage at huge profits for energy companies and other corporations, increasing payments to shareholders whilst the majority struggle to feed themselves and their families; i.e., it’s about social injustice, exploitation and greed. Two movements of resistance and change have emerged from the widespread disquiet – ‘Don’t Pay’, which aims to empower people to not pay increased energy bills, and ‘Enough is Enough’, which is a broader social movement founded by union leaders and MPs.
The appearance of these groups is deeply encouraging and could prove to be a pivotal moment. Many people, the majority perhaps, are worn down, ashamed of where the country finds itself, and have had enough. Enough of being ignored and manipulated; of being told to ‘tighten their belts’ and ‘carry on’, whilst corporations, public/private companies including energy firms, pay out huge dividends and government ministers, spineless, unprincipled puppets, who live in the silk-lined pockets of big business, including most notably the media barons, lie and lie and lie again.
In the face of increasing levels of social injustice, government duplicity and economic hardship, eventually the people must unite and revolt. If, after the endless pantomime of the Queen’s funeral, people do come together, refuse to pay rising energy costs; refuse to work, refuse to be exploited and marginalized; refuse to stand by while the natural world is vandalised; if the unions do take coordinated action, and many of us would support such a progressive act, there is a chance, slim, but real, that years of frustration and anger, can be turned into empowerment and hope.
If every single high-profile journalist, politician and priest is currently expressing heartfelt devotion to Britain’s deceased, 96-year-old monarch, it is not because she ‘served’ her country diligently in doing her ‘duty’ for 70 years. The powerful interests that determine Britain’s political and media agenda are not sentimentalists; they do not impose ‘managed democracy’ as a kind of game. Propaganda blitzes are always pragmatic.
It could hardly be more obvious that earlier propaganda campaigns defining the Iraq war, the Libya war, the Syria war, Jeremy Corbyn, and now NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, were shaped to serve those same interests.
It is no accident that damning claims – many of them simply fabricated – relentlessly target enemies of state from the front pages of every newspaper, from every TV and touch screen. And it is no accident that corporate editors and journalists are united now in expressing deep affection for the late Queen. When everyone clearly feels obliged to say the same thing, it means they are deferring to a key requirement of elite control.
This latest blitz should be no surprise, because wherever there is royalty, there is militarism, organised religion, bipartisan political agreement, patriotism and, of course, concentrated wealth. After all, as Peter Oborne reminded his readers, the Queen was ‘head of state; head of the Anglican Church; head of the judiciary; head of the armed forces, head of the Commonwealth; and ultimate fount of honour in the British state’.
All of these roles rest on a series of interlinked, mutually supportive deceptions. The monarchy roots autocratic rule in esoteric ‘tradition’ which, lost in the mists of time, presents elite control as ‘the natural order of things’. Organised religion extends the same illusion to a cosmic King sanctifying His earthly representatives who thus rule by ‘divine right’. Military power, swathed in the same esoterica, protects this system in the name, not just of the monarch, but of God. Who would dare challenge the will, not just of the King, but of God Himself?
As Harold Pinter liked to say, these deceptions are almost ‘witty’ in their audacity.
‘She set an example of selfless duty which, with God’s help and your counsels, I am resolved faithfully to follow.’
The ideal, endlessly repeated, is not to discover Truth, Happiness and Freedom for ourselves as creative, free-thinking individuals. Rather, it is to reject our personal needs and interests – rejected as ‘narrow’ and ‘selfish’ – to focus on ‘service’, on performing a ‘duty’ pre-defined for us by the mumbo-jumbo of patriotic ‘tradition’. Tolstoy captured his moment and ours exactly:
‘All these people do what they are doing unconsciously, because they must, all their life being founded upon deceit, and because they know not how to do anything else… Moreover, being all linked together, they approve and justify one another’s acts – emperors and kings those of the soldiers, functionaries, and clergymen; and soldiers, functionaries and clergymen the acts of emperors and kings, while the populace, and especially the town populace, seeing nothing comprehensible in what is done by all these men, unwittingly ascribe to them a special, almost a supernatural, significance.’ 1
‘Her Majesty showed us that when we build our lives on God’s faithfulness, we are on the solid ground of eternity that cannot be shaken.’
There is indeed nothing comprehensible here. Alas, human folly is such that many of us find these comments all the more impressive for that reason – we are surely in the presence of truth so profound that it escapes our feeble understanding.
‘The Moment History Stops’
It is ironic indeed that a classic feature of the Western propaganda system involves depicting citizens of Official Enemies as having succumbed to a Cult of Personality. We, in the West, are encouraged to scoff at those poor lost souls who glorify leaders with hagiographic portraits and statues; and militarised patriotic festivals and grand commemorative events.
These countries are identified as belonging to their respective heads of state. It’s ‘Putin’s Russia’, ‘Xi Jinping’s China’, ‘Kim Jong-un’s North Korea’, ‘Gaddafi’s Libya’, ‘Saddam’s Iraq’.
The death of Queen Elizabeth II on 8 September was a salient reminder that ‘our’ propaganda system is a vital cog in the British social machine that upholds elite privilege and domination over the majority of the population.
BBC News runs continuous live-streams on its channels, its website is draped in black, featuring ‘news’ stories with titles such as:
There was even a BBC News piece titled ‘Death of Queen Elizabeth II: The moment history stops’. The power of the British monarchy is such that history itself stops!
‘Royal correspondent’ Jonny Dymond gushed:
‘This is the moment history stops; for a minute, an hour, for a day or a week; this is the moment history stops.
‘Across a life and reign, two moments from two very different eras illuminate the thread that bound the many decades together. At each a chair, a desk, a microphone, a speech. In each, that high-pitched voice, those clipped precise vowels, that slight hesitation about public speaking that would never quite seem to leave her.’
The BBC purple prose continued:
‘One moment is sun-dappled, though the British people were suffering through a terrible post-war winter. A young woman, barely more than a girl really, sits straight-backed, her dark hair pulled up, two strings of pearls around her neck. Her youthful skin is flawless, she is very beautiful. A life opens out ahead of her.’
‘Grief is the price we pay for love’ (Daily Telegraph)
‘Thank you’ (Daily Mirror’)
‘Our beloved Queen is dead’ (Daily Express)
‘We loved you Ma’am’ (The Sun)
The Sun’s headline adorned one of the most brutal, cynical, loveless, soulless gutter tabloids on the market. Does The Sun have any idea what the word ‘love’ means?
As for the Telegraph’s declaration, ‘Grief is the price we pay for love’; this is a paper that reflexively supports every blood-drenched Western war going, that waged merciless propaganda war on Corbyn, incinerated Assange, and mocked the climate crisis threatening all humanity for decades. But their hearts are full of love for the icon of unlimited wealth.
Anyone still harbouring illusions that the Guardian might offer a modicum of republican scepticism would have been disabused by the acres of royal-friendly coverage on display. The day after her death, the print edition of the paper led with fully 19 pages on the Queen plus a 20-page supplement. By painful contrast, a news piece titled, ‘World on brink of five “disastrous” climate tipping points – study’, was buried on page 25. The following day, the Guardianpublished a 40-page special supplement on the Queen. That paired example captures exactly the imposed insanity of the ‘mainstream’ media that are leading us to disaster.
High-profile Guardian columnist, Gaby Hinsliff, wrote a piece packed with references to ‘grandmotherly manner’, ‘female power’, ‘rare trick for a woman’, ‘a woman in charge’, ‘“ultimate feminist”’, ‘a legacy for women’, ‘ultimate matriarch’, ‘Matriarchal power’, and so on.
‘Ok, ok, gender matters! But so does medieval authoritarianism, militant patriotism and 0.1% control.’
As we noted, Hinsliff’s dismal piece garnered 12 retweets and 71 likes in the first 16 hours. Six days since publication, the tally stands at just 14 retweets and 72 likes.
As for the Labour party, any hint of republican sentiment has long been well and truly expunged from statements issuing from its corporate HQ. Sir Keir Starmer, Knight Commander of the Order of Bath and the Leader of the ‘Opposition’, declared:
‘For seventy years, Queen Elizabeth II stood as the head of our country. But in spirit, she stood amongst us.’
Party managers have clearly been working hard on Keir’s ‘compassionate’ facial expression, but his delivery is still devoid of genuine human feeling. He continued in his now trademark robotic delivery:
‘Queen Elizabeth II created a special, personal relationship with us all. A relationship based on service and devotion to her country.’
This is the standard narrative being rammed down the throats of the British, indeed global, audience.
Starmer added:
‘And as the world changed around her, this dedication became the still point of our turning world.’
Our world revolved around the Queen? Really?
In glaring contrast to the obsequious royalist coverage elsewhere, the Morning Star’sfront page ran with:
‘Truss’s energy boon – for the fuel fat cats’
So, in case anyone ever wondered to what extent we are living in a deeply propagandised society, the front pages of the ‘free press’ provided a clear answer. Ash Sarkar of Novaramedia noted:
‘The fact that every single newspaper and broadcaster in the country is united in waving though the accession of an unelected head of state makes the “no one tells us what to write” stuff all the more embarrassing.’
The Unquestioned Institution Of The Monarchy
Former diplomat Craig Murray also highlighted the absurdity of the notion of media ‘impartiality’ when press and broadcasting are so blatantly pro-monarchy:
‘Think seriously on this. 29% of the population want to abolish the monarchy. Think of all the BBC coverage of the monarchy you have seen over the last decade. What percentage do you estimate reflected or gave an airing to republican views? Less than 1%?’
He continued:
‘Now think of media coverage across all the broadcast and print media.
‘How often has the media reflected the republican viewpoint of a third of the population? Far, far less than a third of the time. Closer to 0% than 1%. Yes, there are bits of the media that dislike Meghan for being black or are willing to go after Andrew. But the institution of the monarchy itself?’
Murray concluded:
‘There can be no clearer example than the monarchy of the unrelenting media propaganda by which the Establishment maintains its grip.
‘The corporate and state media are unanimous in slavish support of monarchy. Thailand has vicious laws protecting its monarchy. We don’t need them; we have the ownership of state and corporate media enforcing the same.’
‘The UK is now a pointless entity, existing solely to protect entrenched privilege and continue the transference of the country’s resources to a global elite.’
The Queen sat atop this unjust system of extreme inequality, just as her eldest son, King Charles, does now. She was the figurehead of an unhealthy and divided British society, corrupted by hereditary wealth, degraded by the racist and exploitative legacy of Empire, and scarred by a highly-stratified class structure in which most people are struggling to obtain a decent standard of living.
‘Please take this moment to study, really study, the journalists working for the BBC, ITV and Ch4. Do they seem like fearless, independent, objective observers of the world, or more like fawning courtiers? This is the moment when the mask slips. Drink it in deeply…’
Australian political analyst Caitlin Johnstone observed:
‘British media are even more servile and sycophantic than American or Australian media, which is truly an impressive feat.’
And, indeed, live coverage in particular was, at times, hugely revealing of the mindset and priorities of these ‘fearless’ journalists. Shortly before the Queen’s death, BBC News presenter Clive Myrie declared that the crisis in rising energy costs ‘is, of course, insignificant now’ given ‘the gravity of the situation’ regarding the Queen’s health. Even Myrie’s colleague, Damian Grammaticus, reporting live from Buckingham Palace, felt compelled to respond:
‘Well, certainly overshadowed, Clive’.
Anna Soubry, former Tory minister, revealed a similarly bizarre mindset as Myrie when she tweeted:
‘Everything pales into insignificance as our thoughts and best wishes are with Her Majesty the Queen and her family.’
Everything? Climate breakdown? Rising energy and food bills? Poverty? War?
This is a form of fanaticism that would be ridiculed in the West if it had come from a former member of government in Russia, China or North Korea.
The Forgotten History Under The Royal ‘Legacy’
There have been reams of cringing rhetoric about the Queen’s ‘legacy’ after seven decades of reigning the UK and the Commonwealth. The deeply-scrubbed and sanitised version of history was highly revealing. BBC News Africa tweeted a clip lasting 4 minutes, 35 seconds, taking ‘a look back at Queen Elizabeth II’s longstanding relationship with Africa.’ It was imbued with patriotic sentiment throughout:
‘Queen Elizabeth visited more than 20 countries in Africa. She developed a close relationship with the continent during her reign.’
As a South Africa-based Twitter user pointed out, the BBC was essentially:
‘rebranding colonialism as long-standing relationship.’
Another Twitter user compiled an incomplete list of the UK’s crimes around the world under Elizabeth II’s reign. These included Kenya:
‘In 1952 Churchill argued Kenya’s fertile highlands should only be for white people and approved the forcible removal of the local population. Hundreds of thousands of Kenyans were forced into camps.’
‘In 1953, Britain under Churchill ordered the overthrowing of the democratically elected leader of “British Guiana”. He dispatched troops and warships and suspended their constitution, all to put a stop to the [British Guianan] government’s nationalisation plan.’
‘On 19th August 1953, Britain leads a coup d’etat that overthrows democracy in Iran known as Operation Ajax which overthrows democratically-elected PM Mossadegh. Coded messages were put on the BBC to let the Shah know democracy was overthrown.’
‘On 30th Jan 1972, the Bloody Sunday massacre was perpetrated by the parachute regiment of the British Army who killed 14 civilians at a peaceful protest march. Following the massacre the British lied about the victims.’
‘Britain under Blair invaded Iraq and killed over 1 million people, displaced millions more, brought unknowable depths of suffering to the Iraqi people & gave birth to ISIS.’
‘Pictured here is Prince Harry, Elizabeth’s grandson who boasted he killed in Afghanistan. He flew Apache helicopters and coordinated jets to drop 500lb bombs on people he called “Terry Taliban”.’
‘Pictured here is what Libya was transformed into after 6 months of NATO bombing which assisted thousands of terrorists backed by Britain. The British gov played an integral role in ensuring the most developed country in Africa as per the UN’s Human Development Index was crushed.’
In the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland opined that the Queen ‘made scrupulous neutrality appear easy’ with ‘vanishingly few intrusions by the monarch into politics’. John Pilger made a nonsense of these claims:
‘The dark power of royalty. In 1971, the Chagos Islanders were expelled by the British to make way for a US base. This was made possible by a meeting of the Queen’s Privy Councillors (advisers) and approved in person by the Queen. Using the same power, Blair invaded Iraq in 2003.’
‘The day after Prince Charles donned traditional robes and joined Saudi princes in a sword dance in Riyadh, Britain’s biggest arms company announced that agreement had finally been reached on the sale of 72 Typhoon fighters sold to the Gulf kingdom.’
The Guardian cited Andrew Smith, spokesman for the Campaign Against the Arms Trade:
‘It is clear that Prince Charles has been used by the UK government and BAE Systems as an arms dealer.’
According to the Guardian, Prince Andrew has performed a similar role.
You will be hard pushed to find ‘mainstream’ mentions of the above egregious examples of British history under Elizabeth II’s ‘reign’ (belated rare exceptions can be found here and here). Instead, there is a saturation level of elegies across the supposed ‘spectrum’ of national news media about how she and the royal family have provided ‘stability’, ‘held this country together – held countries together’2, ‘the rock on which modern Britain was built’ (Prime Minister Liz Truss), ‘unwavering dedication and devotion’, and so on.
Mark Easton, BBC News Home Editor, even referred to the Queen as the nation’s ‘comforter-in-chief’ whose ‘calming presence’ was often required during ‘bewildering days’. As though citing Tolkien, Easton added:
‘The new king and new prime minister, both only days into their roles, must find a way to guide an unsettled kingdom through troubling times.’
At times, media reporting descended into preposterous rhapsodising about Mother Nature mourning the death of the Queen. The Daily Mail actually published photographs of clouds in the sky under the headline:
‘Astonishing moment a cloud resembling Queen Elizabeth floats over English town just hours after she died’
One tweeter japed, posting a picture of a fuzzy oblong cloud, saying:
‘Just saw a cloud that looked like a document advocating for a republic’
Other reports waxed lyrical about a double rainbow over Buckingham Palace ‘as crowds gather to mourn Queen’. Respectfully dressed in black, Russell Brand, author of a book titled, Revolution, said the rainbows had ‘curiously’ appeared. The Daily Mirror’s chief reporter deemed the rainbow story worthy of a tweet.
Imagine how journalists would respond to such supernatural mawkishness about the heads of state in North Korea, Russia, China, Iran, Syria or Venezuela. There would, of course, be a tsunami of Western scorn.
The extremist combination of idolatry and ideology pervades the ‘mainstream’, with dissent or even open discussion, seemingly banned. We are all supposed to wallow in grief or, at the very least refrain from saying anything that might be considered ‘unseemly’.
‘The demand for silence is not a politically neutral act. It is a demand that we collude in a corrupt system of establishment rule and hierarchical privilege.
‘The establishment has a vested interest in enforcing silence and obedience until the public’s attention has moved on to other matters. Anyone who complies leaves the terrain open over the coming weeks for the establishment to reinforce and deepen the public’s deference to elite privilege.’
‘It was only when they declared Charles to be “King Charles III” that I called out “Who elected him?” I doubt most of the people in the crowd even heard me. Two or three people near me told me to shut up. I didn’t insult them or attack them personally, but responded by saying that a head of state was being imposed on us without our consent.’
Police then took hold of him:
‘I was outraged that they were leading me away, but was taken aback when they told me they were arresting me.’
Hill was driven home in a police van:
‘Eventually, on the way home, I was told that I had been arrested under the Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Act 2022 (the outrageous act passed earlier this year) for actions likely to lead to “harassment or distress”.’
Climate scientist Bill McGuire provided some vital perspective:
‘The second Elizabethan age was one of rampant, free market capitalism and the raping of our planet. The ages that follow will see us, our children, and those who follow, reaping the whirlwind of catastrophic climate collapse.’
He linked to a disturbing news report – the report relegated to page 25 in the Guardian, mentioned above – about a scientific study showing the world is on the brink of five ‘disastrous’ climate tipping points:
‘Giant ice sheets, ocean currents and permafrost regions may already have passed point of irreversible change.’
One of the study’s researchers, Professor Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, warned that the Earth is:
‘on course to cross multiple dangerous tipping points that will be disastrous for people across the world. To maintain liveable conditions on Earth and enable stable societies, we must do everything possible to prevent crossing tipping points.’
In a recent article, John Pilger described how he once met Leni Riefenstahl, one of Hitler’s leading propagandists ‘whose epic films glorified the Nazis’. Pilger wrote:
‘She told me that the “patriotic messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the German public.
‘Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked. “Yes, especially them,” she said.
‘I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies.’
You only have to observe the deranged level of royalist propaganda, and the serious dearth of rational analysis of today’s societal crises, to see this for yourself.
Leo Tolstoy, Writings On Civil Disobedience and Non-Violence, New Society, 1987, p. 109.
Nick Robinson, BBC Radio 4 Today, 9 September 2022
On the evening of September 20, 2001, then-President George W. Bush addressed the American public and laid the political, military and ideological groundwork for the “war on terror,” a global campaign of allied security forces to end domestic and international terrorism, a term so loosely defined that it soon became a container for anyone from al-Qaeda militants to teenage school shooters to January 6 rioters to leftists and human rights activists. In the same way that the world eventually realized the catastrophic failure of the “war on drugs,” more and more people are realizing that the war on terror is also an unwinnable war against a constantly shifting enemy.
In this address, Bush promised what followed would not be an age of terror, but “an age of liberty, here and across the world.” Twenty-one years after September 11, this “age of liberty” has ushered in an expanded surveillance apparatus, bloated defense budgets, military invasions and occupations, and the death and displacement of millions of people from Iraq to Somalia. While the Middle East is seen as the locus of the war on terror, one of the most ruthlessly pummeled frontiers of this war is the African continent.
In 2007, in a post-9/11 political and psychological landscape, President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, then secretary of defense, launched U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), which oversees all Department of Defense military operations on the continent in order to “monitor and disrupt violent extremist organizations and protect U.S. interests” because of the continent’s growing strategic importance. Initially based in Stuttgart, Germany, AFRICOM was formed without the input or support of any African leaders, many of whom decried its formation and described it as an attempt to establish more U.S. military bases on the continent. In response, U.S. officials said AFRICOM was meant to provide humanitarian assistance and support peace and stability because “a safe, stable, and prosperous Africa is an enduring American interest.” But critics pointed out that Iraq and Afghanistan, twin targets of the war on terror, serve as clear examples of the disastrous consequences of the U.S.’s militarized “humanitarian” efforts.
AFRICOM has not created the “safety and stability” invoked by U.S. leaders, but it has expanded the U.S. military’s footprint. During the Obama administration, AFRICOM quickly expanded its reach and influence on the continent through military-to-military trainings, joint counterterrorism operations, foreign aid, and other surreptitious methods that created dependence on AFRICOM for the defense needs of African states. Despite the fact that the U.S. is not at war with any African country, there are 46 U.S. military bases and outposts spanning the continent, with the greatest concentration in the Horn of Africa. Camp Lemonnier, the U.S. base in Djibouti, a small East African nation with a poverty rate of 79 percent, serves as the current home to AFRICOM in the Horn. In 2014 the U.S. government secured a 20-year lease for $63,000,000 a year.
As AFRICOM’s presence across the continent grows, so does the terrorism it is meant to curb. The 2006 U.S.-backed overthrow of the Union of Islamic Courts in Somalia paved the way for a more militant group, al-Shabab, to grow in rank and reach. This is just one example of how power vacuums caused by U.S. military intervention fortify the political will and strength of terrorist groups.
In October 2017, in the one of the deadliest terror attacks in Somalia’s history, a truck bombing in Mogadishu killed over 500 civilians, injuring several hundred more. In August 2022, a deadly siege and 30-hour standoff between al-Shabab militants and the Somali security forces at Hotel Hayat in the city center left dozens dead. These attacks point to the country’s fragile security apparatus despite persistent counterterrorism offensives and $243,309,000 in security assistance from the United States in 2022 alone. The U.S.’s decades-long presence has not led to a decrease in terrorist activity but has only caused increased instability in the region and enabled such violence to flourish.
A 2019 report released by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies found terrorist activity doubled from 2012 to 2018, and the number of countries experiencing attacks increased by 960 percent during that time period. Moreover, there was a ten-fold increase in violent events, jumping from 288 incidents in 2009 to 3,050 in 2018. From Boko Haram’s growth in Nigeria, to al-Shabab’s territorial advancements across Somalia, to Daesh’s reappearance in Libya, by all metrics, the war on terror has been an abysmal failure in Africa. The African people, caught in the nexus of the catastrophic violence of terrorism and ensuing counterterrorism efforts, bear the weight of this failed war.
While AFRICOM training has not helped African security forces curb terrorism, it has enabled them to repress civilian protests against reactionary African leaders who align with U.S. interests, as evidenced by the crackdown on #EndSARS protesters in Nigeria in 2020. SARS, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, a notorious western-trained unit of the Nigerian Police, has a documented history of human rights abuses. The war on terror not only created the conditions that enabled the U.S. and its allies unfettered collaboration on security and surveillance through shared counterinsurgency tactics, but the development of a shared language and logic. From Lagos to Minneapolis, the designation of terrorist is frequently deployed against individuals or group that challenge the U.S. imperial project or any of its puppet regimes. President Joe Biden’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism is a domestic example of how the state has used the war on terror to criminalize and prosecute protesters and activists.
The one thing AFRICOM has dramatically succeeded at is boosting corporate profits associated with the lucrative counterterrorism industry that the war on terror has made possible. A 2021 report from Brown University’s Cost of War Project revealed that one-third to one-half of all Pentagon contracts since 9/11 have gone to five transnational weapons corporations: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. From 2001 to 2020, these five companies earned $2.1 trillion from Pentagon contracts. Terrorism is a manufactured political crisis. Unsurprisingly, it is global weapons manufacturers that are tasked with selling the solution.
On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, George W. Bush lauded the courage and resilience of the American people and said if they ever needed hope or inspiration in the aftermath of the attack, they should “look to the skies” for a reminder of all they have overcome. Meanwhile, a year before Bush delivered this speech at the Flight 93 memorial service, thousands of miles away in southern Somalia, on a clear and sunny day, the air hummed with the sound of U.S. drones flying overhead. A man named Kusow Omar Abukar was eating dinner with his family when they were attacked from the sky. His daughter, Nurto, died. His family’s life was changed forever. The U.S. military claimed there were no civilian causalities and called the strike a success. But even as the U.S. public is encouraged to find comfort and salvation in the heavens, the children of the world live in fear of what the U.S. might unleash from up above. “I no longer love blue skies,” 13-year-old Zubair of North Waziristan told Congress in 2012. “In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey.”
In his first address to the nation on the evening of 9/11, a solemn Bush asked the American people to pray “for all those who grieve, for those children whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security have been threatened.”
![How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How U.S. and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe by [Benjamin Abelow]](https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/how-the-west-brought-war-to-ukraine-understanding.jpeg?resize=159%2C244&ssl=1)
