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Category: Militarism

  • BAE Systems had more meetings with prime ministers than ANY OTHER private company

    A major new report by Campaign Against Arms Trade and World Peace Foundation details the disturbing level of influence the arms industry has on UK government.  

    The revolving door of the UK arms industry and government

    Key findings from the report, From revolving door to open-plan office: the ever-closer union between the UK government and the arms industry, include:

    • BAE Systems had more meetings with ministers, and more with prime ministers, than any other private company. Two other arms companies, Airbus and Rolls-Royce, were also high on these lists.
    • Over 40% of top-ranked military officers and civilian Ministry of Defence (MoD) personnel took roles in the arms and security industry upon leaving public service, including as employees, board members, and independent consultants to the industry, including a clear majority working in procurement.
    • On average, between 2009-19, senior government officials and ministers met with their arms industry counterparts 1.64 times a day.

    The report shows how the arms industry influences government policy, and how it has developed such a close relationship with government over the years that the lines between the two have been virtually erased.

    The consequences of this include a broken MoD procurement system, that nonetheless ensures steady profits for the UK’s top arms companies, and a lax arms export control regime that has allowed the industry to continue fuelling atrocities in Yemen and Palestine, while evading accountability for severe corruption.

    Two channels

    Two key channels of influence for the arms industry are identified in the report.

    The continued Revolving Door between government and the arms industry –  principally from the MoD, but also other departments, including:
    • An analysis of lists of senior MoD personnel found that over 40% of top-ranked military officers and civilian MoD personnel took roles in the arms and security industry upon leaving public service, including as employees, board members, and independent consultants to the industry.
    • This included a clear majority of those who worked in procurement roles, the part of the MoD that works most closely with industry.
    • While the revolving door is far from unique to the arms industry, separate research by Transparency International shows that the revolving door is far more common for the arms industry than others.
    An unparalleled level of access for the arms industry to the top levels of government, including:
    • Joint government-industry advisory bodies, where arms industry chiefs regularly meet with ministers.
    • A dedicated arms export promotion agency within the Department of Business and Trade.
    • Regular meetings between arms companies and ministers and top civil servants on a variety of topics. On average, between 2009-19, senior government officials and ministers met with their arms industry counterparts 1.64 times a day.
    • Analysis of data from a Transparency International open data portal, shows that from 2012-23, BAE Systems had more meetings with ministers, and more with prime ministers, than any other private company. Two other arms companies, Airbus and Rolls-Royce, were also high on these lists.

    The ‘ever closer union’ and the ‘open-plan office’

    While all industries seek to influence the government, the arms industry is unique in the closeness of its relationship at the highest levels. This is not simply the result of industry efforts, but as the report documents a deliberate policy by successive governments to draw the industry into a tighter embrace.

    As the MoD has come to see its relationship with industry less as one of customer and supplier, and more as one of partners and allies, the report asserts that this has increasingly blurred or even erased the lines between the two. This is especially true of BAE Systems, which dominates the UK industry, and which has become almost a privately-owned branch of the state. The report argues that the flow of personnel between the government and industry is not so much a ‘revolving door’, as an ‘open-plan office’, a natural move from one part of the national security establishment to another.

    Impacts on MOD procurement and arms exports

    MoD procurement: The top arms companies, such as BAE Systems, Rolls Royce, QinetiQ, Babcock, and Leonardo UK, receive a very high proportion of their MoD revenue – sometimes as high as 90% – through non-competitive contracts. Moreover, they continue to receive these contracts and enjoy strong, consistent profits, in spite of a long litany of delays, cost overruns, and under-performance. The House of Commons Defence and Public Accounts Committees regularly describe the MoD’s procurement system as ‘broken’ – but while it is broken for the taxpayer and the armed forces, it is far from broken for the arms industry. The report argues that perennial efforts to reform MoD procurement are doomed to failure unless they address this far too cosy relationship.

    Arms exports: The report shows how key decisions on arms exports over the years have consistently come down on the side of allowing exports and protecting industry profits, even in the face of overwhelming evidence of human rights abuses and attacks on civilians, as by Saudi Arabia in Yemen and Israel in Gaza. The government has consistently interpreted or even bent rules so as to permit exports, and has even been willing to sacrifice the UK’s reputation for anti-corruption, as when it cancelled a Serious Fraud Office investigation into corruption in arms sales to Saudi Arabia. BAE Systems in particular has often been the key beneficiary of these decisions.

    UK arms industry is a ‘broken system’

    The report’s author, CAAT’s research coordinator Dr. Sam Perlo-Freeman, said:

    This is a broken system. No industry should have this level of influence over government, especially one that deals in death and destruction. This level of influence is profoundly undemocratic and means that shareholder profits are protected at all costs  –  even if this means complicity in appalling war crimes. Radical measures are urgently needed to break the arms industry’s stranglehold on government policy.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Our friends at Stop the War Coalition need YOUR help to continue

    The following is a message from Stop The War Coalition

    Israel’s genocide in Gaza could engulf the entire Middle East and the war in Ukraine is currently at a precipice. There is a very real danger of direct war between NATO and Russia, while increasing militarisation in the Pacific has placed the region on high alert.

    The new Labour Party government has no plans to move away from the disastrous foreign policy of recent decades, indeed it has pledged to increase military spending to unprecedented levels.

    Starmer’s Labour has also enabled the far right and the rise in Islamophobia through its deeply racist election campaign and subsequent smearing of pro-Gaza Muslim MPs. It continues to show utter indifference to the suffering of Palestinians and to threaten the civil liberties of those who protest to demand a more peaceful and just world.

    Help us campaign to break with the cycle of violence, hate, militarism and forever wars and to fight for a society based on justice, solidarity and peace.

    This past year Stop the War Coalition has helped organise an unprecedented number of demonstrations and played a vital role in the Palestine movement. We have continued to campaign against the war in Ukraine and increased military spending. But campaigning requires money and we have little.

    We urgently need to expand our office and output and have set our appeal target at an ambitious £60,000. Please donate generously and help fund the fight for peace.

    You can donate to Stop The War Coalition here.

    Featured image via Stop The War Coalition

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Gaza Received Little Mention at Debate. Here’s What Trump and Harris Didn’t Say.

    Kamala Harris won the debate. The banner headline across the top of the New York Times home page — “Harris Puts Trump on Defensive in Fierce Debate” — was accurate enough. But despite the good news for people understandably eager for Trump to be defeated, the Harris debate performance was a moral and political tragedy. “An estimated 40,000 Palestinians are dead…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US Militarism Is a Leading Cause of the Climate Catastrophe

    This week marks 23 years since George W. Bush declared a U.S.-led “war on terror” and the people of Afghanistan and Iraq are still suffering its consequences. After the U.S. invaded Iraq, an estimated half a million Iraqis were killed and at least 9.2 million were displaced. From 2003-2011, more than 4.7 million Iraqis suffered from moderate to severe food insecurity. Over 243,000…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Remote Southwest Communities Resist Dangerous Combat Flight Training Expansion

    The area from Cochise County, Arizona, to Hidalgo County, New Mexico, is largely remote and highly biodiverse. This part of the Southwest is home to national monuments like the Chiricahua Mountains, national forests and endangered species. It is also home to ranching communities, small towns built around the natural beauty of the area and tribal communities, including the Tohono O’odham…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Who Wants to Kill and Die for the American Empire?

    “It’s brave to admit your fears” – Ukrainian recruiting poster. Photo credit: Ministry of Defense, Ukraine.

    The Associated Press reports that many of the recruits drafted under Ukraine’s new conscription law lack the motivation and military indoctrination required to actually aim their weapons and fire at Russian soldiers.

    “Some people don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing position in trenches but don’t open fire. … That is why our men are dying,” said a frustrated battalion commander in Ukraine’s 47th Brigade. “When they don’t use the weapon, they are ineffective.”

    This is familiar territory to anyone who has studied the work of U.S. Brigadier General Samuel “Slam” Marshall, a First World War veteran and the chief combat historian of the U.S. Army in the Second World War. Marshall conducted hundreds of post-combat small group sessions with U.S. troops in the Pacific and Europe, and documented his findings in his book, Men Against Fire: the Problem of Battle Command.

    One of Slam Marshall’s most startling and controversial findings was that only about 15% of U.S. troops in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. In no case did that ever rise above 25%, even when failing to fire placed the soldiers’ own lives in greater danger.

    Marshall concluded that most human beings have a natural aversion to killing other human beings, often reinforced by our upbringing and religious beliefs, and that turning civilians into effective combat soldiers therefore requires training and indoctrination expressly designed to override our natural respect for fellow human life. This dichotomy between human nature and killing in war is now understood to lie at the root of much of the PTSD suffered by combat veterans.

    Marshall’s conclusions were incorporated into U.S. military training, with the introduction of firing range targets that looked like enemy soldiers and deliberate indoctrination to dehumanize the enemy in soldiers’ minds. When he conducted similar research in the Korean War, Marshall found that changes in infantry training based on his work in World War II had already led to higher firing ratios.

    That trend continued in Vietnam and more recent U.S. wars. Part of the shocking brutality of the U.S. hostile military occupation of Iraq stemmed directly from the dehumanizing indoctrination of the U.S. occupation forces, which included falsely linking Iraq to the September 11th terrorist crimes in the U.S. and labeling Iraqis who resisted the U.S. invasion and occupation of their country as “terrorists.

    A Zogby poll of U.S. forces in Iraq in February 2006 found that 85% of U.S. troops believed their mission was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks,” and 77% believed that the primary reason for the war was to “stop Saddam from protecting Al Qaeda in Iraq.” This was all pure fiction, cut from whole cloth by propagandists in Washington, and yet, three years into the U.S. occupation, the Pentagon was still misleading U.S. troops to falsely link Iraq with 9/11.

    The impact of this dehumanization was also borne out by court martial testimony in the rare cases when U.S. troops were prosecuted for killing Iraqi civilians. In a court martial at Camp Pendleton in California in July 2007, a corporal testifying for the defense told the court he did not see the cold-blooded killing of an innocent civilian as a summary execution. “I see it as killing the enemy,” he told the court, adding, “Marines consider all Iraqi men part of the insurgency.”

    U.S. combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan (6,257 killed) were only a fraction of the U.S. combat death toll in Vietnam (47,434) or Korea (33,686), and an even smaller fraction of the nearly 300,000 Americans killed in the Second World War. In every case, other countries suffered much heavier death tolls.

    And yet, U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan provoked waves of political blowback in the U.S., leading to military recruitment problems that persist today. The U.S. government responded by shifting away from wars involving large deployments of U.S. ground troops to a greater reliance on proxy wars and aerial bombardment.

    After the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military-industrial complex and political class thought they had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome,” and that, freed from the danger of provoking World War III with the Soviet Union, they could now use military force without restraint to consolidate and expand U.S. global power. These ambitions crossed party lines, from Republican “neoconservatives” to Democratic hawks like Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

    In a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in October 2000, a month before winning a seat in the U.S. Senate, Hillary Clinton echoed her mentor Madeleine Albright’s infamous rejection of the “Powell Doctrine” of limited war.

    “There is a refrain…,” Clinton declared, “that we should intervene with force only when we face splendid little wars that we surely can win, preferably by overwhelming force in a relatively short period of time. To those who believe we should become involved only if it is easy to do, I think we have to say that America has never and should not ever shy away from the hard task if it is the right one.

    During the question-and-answer session, a banking executive in the audience challenged Clinton on that statement. “I wonder if you think that every foreign country– the majority of countries–would actually welcome this new assertiveness, including the one billion Muslims that are out there,” he asked, “and whether or not there isn’t some grave risk to the United States in this–what I would say, not new internationalism, but new imperialism?”

    When the aggressive war policy promoted by the neocons and Democratic hawks crashed and burned in Iraq and Afghanistan, this should have prompted a serious rethink of their wrongheaded assumptions about the impact of aggressive and illegal uses of U.S. military force.

    Instead, the response of the U.S. political class to the blowback from its catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was simply to avoid large deployments of U.S. ground forces or “boots on the ground.” They instead embraced the use of devastating bombing and artillery campaigns in Afghanistan, Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, and wars fought by proxies, with full, “ironclad” U.S. support, in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and now Ukraine and Palestine.

    The absence of large numbers of U.S. casualties in these wars kept them off the front pages back home and avoided the kind of political blowback generated by the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The lack of media coverage and public debate meant that most Americans knew very little about these more recent wars, until the shocking atrocity of the genocide in Gaza finally started to crack the wall of silence and indifference.

    The results of these U.S. proxy wars are, predictably, no less catastrophic than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. domestic political impacts have been mitigated, but the real-world impacts in the countries and regions involved are as deadly, destructive and destabilizing as ever, undermining U.S. “soft power” and pretensions to global leadership in the eyes of much of the world.

    In fact, these policies have widened the yawning gulf between the worldview of ill-informed Americans who cling to the view of their country as a country at peace and a force for good in the world, and people in other countries, especially in the Global South, who are ever more outraged by the violence, chaos and poverty caused by the aggressive projection of U.S. military and economic power, whether by U.S. wars, proxy wars, bombing campaigns, coups or economic sanctions.

    Now the U.S.-backed wars in Palestine and Ukraine are provoking growing public dissent among America’s partners in these wars. Israel’s recovery of six more dead hostages in Rafah led Israeli labor unions to call widespread strikes, insisting that the Netanyahu government must prioritize the lives of the Israeli hostages over its desire to keep killing Palestinians and destroying Gaza.

    In Ukraine, an expanded military draft has failed to overcome the reality that most young Ukrainians do not want to kill and die in an endless, unwinnable war. Hardened veterans see new recruits much as Siegfried Sassoon described the British conscripts he was training in November 2016 in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer: “The raw material to be trained was growing steadily worse. Most of those who came in now had joined the Army unwillingly, and there was no reason why they should find military service tolerable.”

    Several months later, with the help of Bertrand Russell, Sassoon wrote Finished With War: a Soldier’s Declaration, an open letter accusing the political leaders who had the power to end the war of deliberately prolonging it. The letter was published in newspapers and read aloud in Parliament. It ended, “On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realize.”

    As Israeli and Ukrainian leaders see their political support crumbling, Netanyahu and Zelenskyy are taking increasingly desperate risks, all the while insisting that the U.S. must come to their rescue. By “leading from behind,” our leaders have surrendered the initiative to these foreign leaders, who will keep pushing the United States to make good on its promises of unconditional support, which will sooner or later include sending young American troops to kill and die alongside their own.

    Proxy war has failed to resolve the problem it was intended to solve. Instead of acting as an alternative to ground wars involving U.S. forces, U.S. proxy wars have spawned ever-escalating crises that are now making U.S. wars with Iran and Russia increasingly likely.

    Neither the changes to U.S. military training since the Second World War nor the current U.S. strategy of proxy war have resolved the age-old contradiction that Slam Marshall described in Men Against Fire, between killing in war and our natural respect for human life. We have come full circle, back to this same historic crossroads, where we must once again make the fateful, unambiguous choice between the path of war and the path of peace.

    If we choose war, or allow our leaders and their foreign friends to choose it for us, we must be ready, as military experts tell us, to once more send tens of thousands of young Americans to their deaths, while also risking escalation to a nuclear war that would kill us all.

    If we truly choose peace, we must actively resist our political leaders’ schemes to repeatedly manipulate us into war. We must refuse to volunteer our bodies and those of our children and grandchildren as their cannon fodder, or allow them to shift that fate onto our neighbors, friends and “allies” in other countries.

    We must insist that our mis-leaders instead recommit to diplomacy, negotiation and other peaceful means of resolving disputes with other countries, as the UN Charter, the real “rules based order,” in fact requires.

    The post Who Wants to Kill and Die for the American Empire? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Students protest university’s complicity with Israel’s supply of deadly F-35s from Lockheed Martin

    Students in Greece have taken a stand against a university’s complicity with Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Namely, they’ve called out the university’s ties to Lockheed Martin – the company that provides Israel with its F-35 war planes.

    Lockheed Martin: F-35 complicit in genocide

    Lockheed Martin is the manufacturer of the F-35 bombers. As the Times of Israel reported:

    Israel’s Defense Ministry on Tuesday officially signed a deal with the United States to procure a third F-35 fighter jet squadron.

    The ministry said a delegation to the US signed a letter of agreement for the $3 billion deal that included 25 advanced stealth fighters built by Lockheed Martin.

    The planes would begin to be delivered starting in 2028, in batches of three to five per year, the ministry said. The aircraft would bring the Israeli Air Force’s F-35I fleet to 75 in the coming years. Only 39 of Israel’s original order of 50 F-35s have so far been delivered.

    Of course, the UK’s complicity in this is well-known. As the Canary previously reported, just this week the Labour government refused to block the the ‘Open General’ licence relating to the F-35 combat aircraft, 15% of which is produced in the UK.

    It comes as the Lockheed Martin F-35 has been linked to a potential war crime by Israel. Danish news outlet Information, together with NGO Danwatch, revealed that, for the first time, it has been possible to definitively confirm the use by Israel of an F-35 stealth fighter to carry out a specific attack in Gaza.

    The attack took place on 13 July, on an Israeli-designated ‘safe zone’ in Al-Mawasi in southern Gaza, killing 90 people and injuring at least 300. The Israeli military claims that the target of the attack was Mohammed Deif, head of Hamas’s military wing.

    Athens sees students push back

    Over in Greece, and students have also been pushing back against Lockheed Martin.

    On 2 September, students held a protest against the collaboration of the University of Athens with Lockheed Martin. It happened first outside the Dean’s Office of the School of Sciences of the University of Athens:

    The students demanded to stop immediately the cooperation of the university with the company that arms NATO with weapons and plays a key role in supplying Israel with weapons and war systems, so that the genocide of the Palestinian people continues. Athens University works with Lockheed Martin under its ‘Aerospace Systems Management’ course.

    The students said in a statement:

    Students from all over Greece have made it clear through their mobilizations and decisions that they are on the side of Palestine and will not tolerate any cooperation of the Universities with any company whose weapons are bombing the people of Palestine.

    Under the determined stance of the students’ unions, the Dean himself stated that he disagrees with this cooperation, and that he does not want the university to become a participant in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

    The students obtained a commitment that the issue will be discussed in the next meeting of the Dean’s Office of the Faculty so that it will take an official position. This will be held in the next few days, with the participation of the student unions.

    To this end, the protests and pressure from students over Lockheed Martin continued during the week:

    Lockheed Martin Israel Athens F-35

    Featured image and additional images via PAME International 

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Labour will STILL allow exports of F-35 parts to Israel – just as new evidence of its war crimes complicity emerges

    On Monday 2 September, foreign secretary David Lammy today made a statement to parliament on the results of a review of arms export licences to Israel, announcing the suspension of 30 export licences for use by the Israeli military that could be used in Gaza. However, he stated that the ‘Open General’ licence relating to the F-35 combat aircraft, 15% of which is produced in the UK, and for which Israel is one of the recipient countries, would be exempted.

    The UK will continue to export F-35 parts, just as Israel uses them for war crimes

    This statement came on the same day that Danish news outlet Information, together with NGO Danwatch, revealed that, for the first time, it has been possible to definitively confirm the use by Israel of an F-35 stealth fighter to carry out a specific attack in Gaza.

    The attack took place on 13 July, on an Israeli-designated ‘safe zone’ in Al-Mawasi in southern Gaza, killing 90 people and injuring at least 300. The Israeli military claims that the target of the attack was Mohammed Deif, head of Hamas’s military wing.

    The attack involved three GBU-31 2000lb bombs, which have a ‘lethal radius’ of 360m, and are thus certain to kill large numbers of civilians when used in highly-populated areas. Such attacks are clear violations of the International Humanitarian Law (IHL) principles of proportionality and distinction, and are likely war crimes.

    The use of F-35s by Israel in the attack on Gaza has been confirmed since the beginning of the war, including their use to deliver 2000lb bombs. However, it has rarely if ever been possible to establish which type of aircraft was used to attack which targets.

    Parts from the UK

    In this case, Danwatch uncovered an article describing Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant personally going to an F-35 base to thank the pilots involved, and the Israeli military has since confirmed in response to a request by Information and Danwatch that an F-35 carried out the attack.

    The use of such advanced aircraft in intensive combat operations requires a constant supply of spare parts, The US says it has been moving at ‘breakneck speed’ to increase the supply since the start of the war. This supply will certainly include spare parts from the UK.

    Exports of parts for the F-35, whether for their manufacture or for spare parts, do not require individual export licences as they are covered by an “Open General” licence. Therefore, their supply is thus not recorded in regularly-published government information on export licences.

    Breaching international law via F-35 parts?

    In his statement, Lammy highlighted concerns around disrupting the global supply chain for the F-35, which the UK and its allies also use. However, there is nothing to preclude the government from simply removing Israel from the list of approved recipients for the Open General licence.

    Sam Perlo-Freeman, research coordinator for Campaign Against Arms Trade said:

    The government’s statement today that it is suspending 30 arms export licences to Israel is a belated, but welcome move, finally acting upon the overwhelming evidence of Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

    But exempting parts for Israel’s F-35 is utterly outrageous and unjustifiable.

    These are by far the UK’s most significant arms supplies to the Israeli military, and just today we have confirmation that they have been used in one of the most egregious attacks in recent months. The government has admitted that there is a ‘clear risk’ that Israel is using fighter aircraft among other weapons to violate international humanitarian law. How can this ‘clear risk’ not apply to the F-35s? The only right and legal course of action is to end the supply of F-35 parts to Israel, along with the rest of UK arms sales.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • War Diary: An Appreciation of Legacies

    Actually, I limit my exposure to daily media considerably. My experience as a journalist, when there was still some conventional meaning assignable to that term, began in school. I had become the news editor of the school paper. Whereas previously the monthly student production was devoted to athletic events and other entertainments, I introduced reporting on issues both in the school and those off the school grounds that nonetheless were relevant for pupils and the routines to which we were all subject. My model in those days was The Economist, still published in the UK and reasonably free from cant. Our school paper received several prizes from the journalism school at the state university that I would later attend. There, I tried to write for the university paper. However the closer one got to the ambitious professionals, the less interest in substance was to be found. The pinnacle of my experience was a two-year tour as an accredited freelance journalist in the UN Headquarters, New York. That was back in the ancient 80s when the regime over which Ronald Reagan nominally presided made its ownership of the United Nations more explicit than it had been since using it to cover its war against Korea (and China). I attended innumerable press conferences including those held by such luminaries as Margaret Thatcher, Rajiv Gandhi, Roland Dumas and some figures from states that receive less attention.

    It was the year when then New Zealand prime minister David Lange accused France of state terrorism before the entire General Assembly—a speech French foreign minister Dumas told me he had not heard. 1985 was a jubilee in which the United Nations organisation celebrated that it had reached 45 years of age. Heads of state and government accumulated in the East Side nest donated by the Rockefeller dynasty to house that august preserver of the world’s peace and prosperity—as the United States defined. There was still a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and a German Democratic Republic. The CIA was still waging counter-insurgency throughout Central America and all was Right in the world. That is to the extent one still could imagine what Left meant.

    Through accident or design, I travelled to Brazil the following year and studied the process of apparent return to civilian rule after the 1964 military coup the US initiated. In 1989, I drove to Berlin for a common weekend visit only to find that by 10 November the last meaningful preservative of Eastern European sovereignty was to be removed. In 1991, I was again surprised. I had booked my flight to South Africa before the announcement of Nelson Mandela’s release. What I witnessed in the first half of that year was prescient. Twenty years later, the book I wrote about that experience has been re-published. Whether it will get any more notice today is anyone’s guess.

    In other words, I have been fortunate enough to enjoy proximity to noteworthy political personalities, remarkable historical events, and those whose ostensible task was to report on them for many years. As I have said to my sporting friends, I prefer observant participation to the spectacles. My cricketing skills are minimal. Yet I would rather play than just watch. Of course I am no politician, “playing” for me is personal observation, not following what others tell me is important.

    This year the war commenced among the imperial powers of the Western peninsula of Eurasia, led by the British Empire and its vassals, has been waged for more than a century, 120 years to be precise. In his 1947 book, The Future in Perspective, German historian Sigmun Neumann called the era 1914-1945 the “second Thirty Years War”. Perhaps we should call the era in which we live the “second Hundred Years War”. That would still only cover a small part of the events of the past century. Given the present situation the most comprehensive designation I can imagine is the “second Fourth Crusade”.

    In 2001, the latent policies that had shaped the previous ten decades of malice and belligerence were articulated in the language most closely resembling the decrees of Innocent III. By 2020 those policies had become manifest in every aspect of Western political, military, economic and social practice. The Global War on Terror was successfully transformed from an episodic campaign against brown people associated with Islam to a general campaign to reduce the world’s population and subordinate the East, beginning with the successor to Orthodoxy in the Christian world. An incident in Wuhan in 2019 was exploited to create conditions for an expanded version of the Opium Wars against China—a war concealed by duplicity and hypocrisy that puts the Arrow incident to shame.

    The journalism to which so much reference is made—as to its virtues and failings—is scarcely able to imagine, let alone report, the era in which we live. Journalism as it has been taught and imitated dwells on the immediate or the fiction of the immediate to be exact. With the contraction of memory and the dissolution of the traditional forms of time and space, the journalist responds by limiting the scope of an already truncated perceptual scheme.

    Although the war being waged by Ukraine against Russia is based on consistent Western policies and methods, the bulk of the discussion and the reporting that feeds it focusses either on the battlefield (now called battlespace in military jargon) or on the relationships between Russia and Ukraine and NATO. At the beginning of Russia’s Special Military Operation, the Russian government stated that one of its key objectives is the de-Nazification of Ukraine. The journalistic response in the West has been mainly to ignore the substance upon which this aim is based. Of course there are references among the reasonably sane to the embarrassing or criminal inclusion of formations in the Ukrainian military that are “neo-Nazi”, the most notorious of these is the Azov Division/ Battalion. Although the US/ NATO spokespersons assert that these are not neo-Nazi elements, it has been necessary to downplay the appearance of NS insignia (not foreign to elements of US Forces either) in order to retain this fiction. A recent RIAS video, obtained from Italian journalists embedded in the Ukrainian units that invaded Kursk, shows a Ukrainian soldier wearing a fatigue cap with an NS badge. Shocked attention is given to the SS runes on the cap — see screenshot below.

    To illustrate how the journalistic microscope functions, the shock is focused on the rune “bacillus”. However the petri dish in which this bacillus was found is largely ignored. The SS runes may catch the superficially informed as formally objectionable national socialist (NS) symbols that make a good cause look bad. For those that oppose the war they may see this as proof that the Ukrainian regime is unscrupulous, willing to use anyone to fight its war. From this follow conclusions like, the NS symbols should be prohibited and purged (without addressing why they are worn in the first place) or the Ukrainian war is wrong because it is being fought by neo-Nazis.

    If the microscope is abandoned and higher magnification is applied, then we find a curious confirmation of the foregoing description of continuous war against the East. First of all, the cap badge the soldier is wearing is that of the SS-Leibstandart “Adolf Hitler”. This formation was an element of the II SS Panzer Gruppe, commanded by Paul Hausser, which waged the 1943 battle of Kursk in which the German Wehrmacht and SS paramilitary divisions were defeated. The Azov Battalion/ Division adopted the standard of the Waffen SS-Division “Das Reich” (also once under Hausser’s command). This could be interpreted as evidence that the vanguard of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is essentially composed of the reconstituted Waffen-SS. The organisation, training and operational deployment of these units is entirely consistent with the manner in which the Waffen-SS was created and deployed in the war against the Soviet Union, a war that only ended with latter’s dissolution.

    These are not neo-Nazi formations. They are fascist units created by the same forces that armed and deployed German military might against the Soviet Union in 1941. They were created from the legacy of the SS units rescued and conserved by the Anglo-American Empire since 1944. Seen in this way these insignia are the inheritance of the regimental history they claim as their own. The British Imperial Government and the United States Government both organized the rescue of at least 1,000 paramilitary men of the Waffen-SS Division Galizia in Italy. With the services of the Gehlen Org (the precursor to the Bundesnachrichtendienst, Federal Germany’s CIA franchise) and the ODESSA, Waffen-SS officers and men were provided with all manner of escape to safe havens, e.g. in North and South America. Officially the SS was declared to be a criminal organisation under the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany after 1945. Even the display of insignia associated with the NSDAP (Nazi Party) and its infrastructure was made a crime. Occasionally, conspicuous trials were held, when unavoidable, to preserve the myth of Western innocence in the creation of the NS regime and conceal its complicity in Operation Barbarossa.

    SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer and Waffen-SS Generaloberst (deemed by the NSDAP regime equivalent to general officer rank in the regular army) Paul Hausser, in his capacity as spokesman for the Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit (HIAG), a benevolent organisation (and lobby) devoted to the promoting the interests of Waffen-SS veterans, pled until his death in 1972 for the rehabilitation of the Waffen-SS; that they be treated on a par with the Wehrmacht veterans. Regular soldiers retained their pension and other benefits. These were denied to members of the Waffen-SS because in the view of the established military they were not soldiers and their organisation had been declared criminal as a whole. The law was cynically applied like much of so-called “de-Nazification” since civil servants who obtained “Persilscheine”, certificates of de-Nazification named after the leading laundry detergent Persil, were not only retained in office but continued their careers, even if they had been NSDAP members. German journalist Bernt Engelmann in his Roman à clef, Grosses Bundesverdienstkreuz (1974) and his 1975 Schwarzbuch: Strauß, Kohl und Co. and 1986 Schwarzbuch. Das Kohl & Co-Komplott, traced the careful erection of West Germany’s regime by the US intelligence services using first generation NSDAP functionaries like Franz-Joseph Strauss and second-generation fascists nurtured by the Heidelberg SS clique around Fritz Ries, including Hans-Martin Schleyer, e.g., the galleon figure for the final assault on the Soviet Union, Helmut Kohl. The first years of this story, including the Gladio terrorist operations of the early 1980s, were dramatized by GDR television in the series Das Unsichtbare Visier in the 1970s and 1980s. It was not until the 1990s that the BBC aired a documentary showing that most of the European “left-wing terrorism”, including the Bologna railway station bombing and the murder of Aldo Moro, were under the direction of the NATO Gladio operation, based on the structures imported from the Gehlen Org. None of this is ever even mentioned when trying to explain the curiously self-destructive policies of the current Berlin government.

    Hausser’s central argument, for which he also published in 1953 the book Waffen-SS im Einsatz (the Waffen-SS in battle) and in 1966 Soldaten wie andere auch (Soldiers like any other), was that the Waffen-SS was a true multi-national force which had honourably served in the defence of “European ideals.” Hausser’s personal defence was no doubt related to the fact that he had been a regular army officer prior to joining the SS. Until the end of the GDR and the Soviet Union, Hausser’s books and all those who followed in his train were attacked officially and in the German mass media for “historical revisionism”. In fact, as late as 1995, the so-called “Wehrmachtausstellung” produced by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, caused a major scandal in military circles with documentary evidence to punch a huge hole in the “clean” Wehrmacht myth. It was also accused of incorrect attribution and captioning of photographs however the essential message was never fully rebutted. If the Waffen-SS was the vanguard of the West’s war of annihilation in the East, the Wehrmacht as a force was necessary for that war to be waged with due ferocity. While until 1990 historical revisionism was the technical term for defending the war in the East (against the Soviet Union), Hausser’s version of history has become the official doctrine of Berlin and Brussels. Today’s Ukrainian Armed Forces are praised as a multi-national force defending Europe. If one listens to any high imperial official, especially Mr Stoltenberg and Ms von der Leyne (NATO and EU, i.e. military and civil households of the Anglo-American Empire), the Ukrainian Armed Forces, commanded nominally from Kiev, are fighting “Europe’s fight”. HM’s Canadian Government in Ottawa even applauded the prior service of a Waffen-SS veteran because he too had been fighting for such ideals as a young man in SS paramilitary uniform. The barely implied declaration is that Russia is not Europe and certainly has no European “ideals”.

    Since the Anglo-American Empire and its vassals in western Eurasia are fully committed to Ukraine, it can be no surprise therefore that they are also fully committed to the IDF slaughter and conquest of Palestine, in absolute defence of European “ideals”. The declared “war of annihilation” (how else can one characterize the boldly proclaimed objectives of the Tel Aviv regime?) underway since 2023 is merely the “sacred right of self-defence”—with which no other state in the region is endowed. It takes enormous strains of the intellect not to compare the rhetoric today with that in NSDAP-ruled Germany from 1939 until 1945. However, the legions of scribes and megaphone operators in journalism assembled are obviously up to the task. Would anyone dare to compare the more than fifty standing ovations the head of that regime received in a joint session of the US Congress with the news reel footage of Reichstag sessions? Would anyone even understand such a comparison were it made?

    Two of the great propaganda slanders of the past hundred years are that the leader of the Soviet Union started the war to expand communism throughout the world—provoking the defensive-offensive response of the West through (its proxy) the National Socialist regime in Germany. Another version of that slander is that Stalin and Hitler were essentially the same, intending to divide the European peninsula between them. The other is that the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Amin al-Husseini, represented the nascent Arab war against Jews. These and other fabrications or distortions of the historical record are in part preserved by the overwhelming control of the world’s mass media and educational/ indoctrination system by the Anglo-American (in widest sense of that term) Establishment. The Establishment history of the past century either exaggerates casualties/ fatalities on its own side or minimises/ ignores them on the side of the victims of Western aggression. One only has to consider the Normandy farce and the refusal of “Western allies” to commemorate the Russian victory over the fascist invasion—not incursion. (Here note that journalists report about the Russian “invasion” of Ukraine but not about the Ukrainian “incursion”.)

    The Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of Western (Nazi) invasion at a cost of more than 20 million dead plus untold destruction, rightly demanded war crimes trials in London. Britain and the US reluctantly conceded. However in Nuremberg the Soviet Union had to be content with the trial of NS officials for crimes against Jews and not war crimes against the citizens of the Soviet Union. By 1967, everyone in the world knew the number “six million”, while scarcely anyone knew about the 20 million plus in the Soviet Union. This omission was so egregious that after a major, prime time 26-episode British documentary about the war between 1941 and 1945, entitled World at War (1973), with narration by Lawrence Olivier, had been broadcast throughout the English-speaking West with almost no mention of the Eastern front, massive protest by the Soviet Union forced the production and broadcast in 1978 of The Unknown War, another twenty episodes, narrated by Bruce Lancaster, to show where the war was really fought and won (episode 7 describes the Battle of Kursk). At least twenty million deaths in China were not counted at all. In a little country like Portugal a typical bookstore has more books on display about the Western theatre of that war, in which Portugal was neutral, and the NSDAP than books about its own national history.

    To this day the only casualties that are universally recognized from that phase of the “second Hundred Years War” are six million non-combatant forced labourers in the occupied East—where the war was fiercest. That fundamental disproportionality is also an essential part of the overall distortion and deception (along with a variety of serious commercial and criminal enforcement penalties) which prevents the daily journalist and his readership from seeing the “second Fourth Crusade” being waged from the Baltic Sea to the Gulf of Aden. It prevents them from recognizing the age in which we live and the conditions that have made it what it is.

    In an article titled, “The Crusade is Over” (The Unz Review, 7 September 2023), Laurent Guyénot argues that the Christian crusade constituted an innovation. He writes:

    The Crusade introduced a new way of individual salvation: penitential warfare. God, speaking through His vicar on earth, now granted full remission of sins (thence a place in Heaven) to whoever would swear to travel to the Holy Land and kill infidels or be killed by them. According to the historian Orderic Vitalis, writing around 1135, “the pope urged all who could bear arms to fight against the enemies of God, and on God’s authority he absolved all the penitent from all their since from the hour they took the Lord’s cross”.

    This idea survived even in the Protestant deviation. The Church militant hymn, The Son of God goes forth to war is just one gory example.

    When the Global War on Terror was proclaimed, the rechristening of the second Hundred Years War as the second Fourth Crusade, penitential warfare needed no mention. On the contrary, the justification offered by all those who preached the crusade was that something or some people embodying “radical Islam” or “Islamists” had sworn to fight the West to the death. A powerful propaganda strategy has always been to accuse the target of the acts, omissions, or policies one is covertly pursuing. Thus the target is seen as the author of the very aggression launched against him.

    Negotiation, both overt and covert, can be used to amplify this drama of guilt and enmity as the target is deceived into acts he believes will end hostilities, which are then shaped to enhance them. Analyst-participants like Scott Ritter—to mention someone everyone probably recognises—have been eyewitness to these deceits, even if late in recognizing them. With such overwhelming control over the world propaganda media for a century now, it is almost impossible for targets to expose the deceptions to which they have been subject. The few journalists who notice and try to report them are no better situated to alter the signal to noise ratio in favour of the defence.

    Details reported may help to correct errors of fact. However, without a fundamental orientation, including a critical, cultural historical point of view—one that necessarily extends beyond the horizon of daily news or even intensive analysis—it is very easy to remain a captive of marketing and info-fashion. New things—newly reported or learned—excite but without context obstruct rather than promote information. Joseph Weizenbaum, in his continued critique of AI before he died, insisted on the distinction between data and information. Information is the product of judgement. Data can be anything. Weizenbaum insisted that judgement can and ought only to be exercised by humans—not machines. Journalism functions as a soft machine. It generates data and packages it so that it appears without judgement or is saturated with judgements. Transfats were developed to enhance the shelf life of processed foods. Transfacts enhance the credibility of processed synthetic data. Like a drug it induces a kind of euphoria (dysphoria) called “being informed”. The actual exercise of judgement requires a level of sobriety that standard journalism—regardless of ideological orientation—was not designed to sustain.

    A great many terms used in reporting or discussing what happened, happens or may happen in our world are unanalysed. “Interests” is perhaps one of the worst but there are many others. To illustrate just how useless this term is consider the following substitution: “the person whom one has seized in the process of setting fire to one’s home, or perhaps with a douse of petrol to one’s self, was merely pursuing his interests.” This is not an absurd use. Another version of this is that a person who engages in a cash transaction on a public thoroughfare and is robbed in the process must expect that there are people who have an interest in theft where they believe it is possible. It is only the occasional enforcement of the criminal code that makes it probably safe to say that these kinds of “interest” are generally termed “criminal” and subject to punishment. However, once the word is applied to corporate or state entities, these actions are beyond judgement. The same applies to such terms as “right of self-defence” or “national security”. This shorthand is readily absorbed as a mark of sophistication when it is really a screen to obscure activities from scrutiny.

    While the objective blockade of Gaza that has been in place for two decades, only to be intensified by the centrally managed mass murder of the population that commenced October 2023, is occasionally mentioned, the compulsion to produce “news” leads to notices of IDF homicidal attacks on every form of food, medical or other relief to the besieged as if these were weather reports. A recent report that the WHO, a private-public partnership (euphemism for fascist parastatal), will launch an experimental polio inoculation campaign on the IDF’s targets of annihilation ought to remind people of the use to which Africans have been put by pharmaments manufacturers with misanthropic funds, or even the medical experiments conducted against captives during the war in the 20th century. Alas, not even the enormous fallout from the 2021-22 global injection terror is compared.

    Journalists swim in a cesspool with just enough water to distort their vision, especially their sense of distance. The “news” demands the appearance of unique data, unusual events or angles. Supposedly repetition is bad for the “news”. What is really meant is that “news” is based on titillation, combining voyeurism, desire, fear and what the Germans call Schadensfreude (enjoying when others are injured, a kind of abstract vengefulness). Of course, repetition is essential to the effect of the “news”. Redundancy in signalling serves to amplify a message as well as to squelch noise (undesired signals/ messages). The inability to accurately assess distance and engage critically is also aggravated by the addiction to unanalysed jargon, sometimes due to the journalist’s ignorance or laziness, but also because of infection with the culture of the powerful and their agents. This culture is transmitted not only by education but also by the rewards and punishments, the seduction and promotion, as both Philip Agee and the late Udo Ulfkotte explained, when one belongs to the scrivener guild at court. The economic and social privilege that accrues when one has been permitted into anterooms of power is hard to dismiss. The proximity to authority lends the charisma of authority. Even the opposition scribe can become complicit in this spectacle, out of vanity or because his benefits accrue (even if the ultimate sources are concealed). That is part of the power of pageantry and the miracle of philanthropy. Salvation is promised if one is willing to take up the cross or pay someone else to do so. The warriors have always had their chroniclers. At the end of the day all we have on which to base our judgements—and judgements we must make—are the legacies, the chronicles and the wasteland.

    The post War Diary: An Appreciation of Legacies first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel Used US Arms to Commit at Least 20 Likely War Crimes Since October 7

    The Biden administration recently approved five major arms sales to Israel for F-15 fighter aircraft, tank ammunition, tactical vehicles, air-to-air missiles, mortar rounds, and related equipment for each. Though technically sales, most if not all of this matériel is paid for by U.S. taxpayers — Israel uses much of the military aid Congress approves for it effectively as a gift card to buy U.S.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Political Matrix Sustains the Illusion of Freedom

    What you smell is the stench of a dying republic.

    Our dying republic.

    We are trapped in a political matrix intended to sustain the illusion that we are citizens of a constitutional republic.

    In reality, we are caught somewhere between a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) and a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens).

    For years now, the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the American people, letting us enjoy just enough freedom to think we are free but not enough to actually allow us to live as a free people.

    In other words, we’re allowed to bask in the illusion of freedom while we’re being stripped of the very rights intended to ensure that we can hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution.

    We’re in trouble, folks.

    This is no longer America, land of the free, where the government is of the people, by the people and for the people.

    Rather, this is Amerika, where fascism, totalitarianism and militarism go hand in hand.

    Freedom no longer means what it once did.

    This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from militarized police invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ commitment to the American experiment in freedom.

    Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.

    My friends, we’re being played for fools.

    On paper, we may be technically free.

    In reality, however, we are only as free as a government official may allow.

    We only think we live in a constitutional republic, governed by just laws created for our benefit.

    Truth be told, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy where all that we own, all that we earn, all that we say and do—our very lives—depends on the benevolence of government agents and corporate shareholders for whom profit and power will always trump principle. And now the government is litigating and legislating its way into a new framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.

    With every court ruling that allows the government to operate above the rule of law, every piece of legislation that limits our freedoms, and every act of government wrongdoing that goes unpunished, we’re slowly being conditioned to a society in which we have little real control over our lives.

    As Rod Serling, creator of the Twilight Zone and an insightful commentator on human nature, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

    Indeed, not only are we developing a new citizenry incapable of thinking for themselves, but we’re also instilling in them a complete and utter reliance on the government and its corporate partners to do everything for them—tell them what to eat, what to wear, how to think, what to believe, how long to sleep, who to vote for, whom to associate with, and on and on.

    In this way, we have created a welfare state, a nanny state, a police state, a surveillance state, an electronic concentration camp—call it what you will, the meaning is the same: in our quest for less personal responsibility, a greater sense of security, and no burdensome obligations to each other or to future generations, we have created a society in which we have no true freedom.

    Freedom, or what’s left of it, is being threatened from every direction.

    The threats are of many kinds: political, cultural, educational, media, and psychological. However, as history shows us, freedom is not, on the whole, wrested from a citizenry. It is all too often given over voluntarily and for such a cheap price: safety, security, bread, and circuses.

    This is part and parcel of the propaganda churned out by the government machine.

    That said, what we face today—mind manipulation and systemic violence—is not new. What is different are the techniques used and the large-scale control of mass humanity, coercive police tactics and pervasive surveillance.

    We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

    By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

    Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

    If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

    So, what’s the answer?

    For starters, stop tolerating corruption, graft, intolerance, greed, incompetence, ineptitude, militarism, lawlessness, ignorance, brutality, deceit, collusion, corpulence, bureaucracy, immorality, depravity, censorship, cruelty, violence, mediocrity, and tyranny. These are the hallmarks of an institution that is rotten through and through.

    Stop holding your nose in order to block out the stench of a rotting institution.

    Stop letting the government and its agents treat you like a servant or a slave.

    You’ve got rights. We’ve all got rights. This is our country. This is our government. No one can take it away from us unless we make it easy for them.

    You’ve got a better chance of making your displeasure seen and felt and heard within your own community. But it will take perseverance and unity and a commitment to finding common ground with your fellow citizens.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re making it way too easy for the police state to take over.

    So, stop being an accessory to the murder of the American republic.

    The post The Political Matrix Sustains the Illusion of Freedom first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Future of Our World by Noam Chomsky

    Noam Chomsky (95) famous dissident and father of modern linguistics, considered one of the world’s leading intellectuals, is recovering from a stroke he suffered at age 94 and now living with his wife in Brazil. According to a report in Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now d/d July 2, 2024, this past June Brazilian President Lula personally visited Chomsky, holding his hand, saying: “You are one of the most influential people of my life” personally witnessed by Vijay Prashad, co-author with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal (The New Press).

    Indeed, Noam Chomsky is established as one of the most influential intellectuals of the 21st century.

    A pre-stroke video interview with Chomsky conducted at the University of Arizona is extraordinarily contemporary and insightful with a powerful message: What Does the Future Hold Q&A With Noam Chomsky hosted by Lori Poloni-Staudinger, Dean of School of Behavioral Sciences and Professor, School of Government and Public Policy, University of Arizona.

    Chomsky joined the School of Behavioral Sciences in 2017 and taught “Consequences of Capitalism.”

    This article is a synopsis of some of Chomsky’s responses to questions, and it includes third-party supporting facts surrounding his statements about the two biggest risks to humanity’s continual existence.

    What Does the Future Hold?

    Question: geopolitics, unipolar versus multipolar

    Chomsky: First there are two crises that determine whether it is even appropriate to consider how geopolitics will look in the future: (1) threat of nuclear war (2) the climate crisis.

    “If the climate crisis is not dealt with in the next few years, human society is essentially finished. Everything else is moot unless these two crises are dealt with.”

    (This paragraph is not part of Chomsky’s answer) Regarding Chomsky’s warning, several key indicators of the climate crisis are flashing red, not green. For example, nine years ago 195 nations at the UN climate conference Paris ‘15 agreed to take measures to mitigate CO2 emissions to hold global warming to under 1.5°C pre-industrial. Yet, within only nine years of that agreement amongst 195 nations, according to Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), global temperatures exceeded 1.5°C (2.7°F) above preindustrial for the first time in human history for a 12-month period from February 2023 to January 2024 and now fast approaching danger zones. Obviously, nations of the world did not follow their own dictates, and if not them, who will?

    Paleoclimatology has evidence of what to expect if the “climate crisis,” as labeled by Chomsky, is not dealt with (The following paragraph is also not part of Chomsky’s answer): “While today’s CO2-driven climate change scenario is unprecedented in human history, similar circumstances existed in the geological record that give us an idea of what to expect in the way of global sea level rise, and the process that will get us there. About 3.2 million years ago, during the Pliocene epoch, CO2 levels were about 400 ppm (427 ppm today) and temperatures were 2-3°C above the “pre-industrial” temperatures of 1850-1880. At the same time, proxy data indicate global sea level was about 52 feet (within a 39-foot to 66-foot range) higher than today.” (Source: The Sleeping Giant Awakens, Climate Adaptation Center, May 21, 2024)

    Maybe that is why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) strongly suggests keeping temperatures ideally below 1.5°C and certainly not above 2.0°C pre-industrial.

    Chomsky on World Power: Currently the center of world power, whether unipolar or multipolar is very much in the news. This issue has roots going back to the end of WWII when the US established overwhelming worldwide power. But now the Ukraine war has the world very much divided with most of world outside of the EU, US and its allies calling for diplomatic settlement. But the US position is that the war must continue to severely weaken Russia.

    Consequently, Ukraine is dividing the world, and it shows up in the framework of unipolar versus multipolar. For example, the war has driven the EU away from independent status to firm control by the US. In turn the EU is headed towards industrial decline because of disruption of its natural trading partners, e.g., Russia is full of natural resources that the EU is lacking, which economist have always referred to as a “marriage made in heaven,” a natural trading relationship that has now been broken. (footnote: EU industrial production down 3.9% past 12 months)

    And the Ukrainian imbroglio is cutting off EU access to markets in China e.g., China has been an enormous market for German industrial products. Meanwhile, the US is insisting upon a unipolar framework of world order that wants not only the EU but the world to be incorporated within something like the NATO system. Under US pressure NATO has expanded its reach to the Indo-Pacific region, meaning NATO is now obligated to take part in the US conflict with China.

    Meantime, the rest of the world is trying to develop a multipolar world with several independent sectors of power.  The BRICS countries Brazil, Russia, India, China, Indonesia, South Africa, want an independent source of power of their own. They are 40% of world economy that’s independent of US sanctions and of the US dollar.

    These are developing conflicts over one raging issue and one developing issue. Ukraine is the raging issue; the developing issue is US conflict with China, which is developing its own projects in Eurasia, Africa, Middle East, South Africa, S9uth Asia, and Latin America.

    The US is determined to prevent China’s economic development throughout the world. The Biden administration has “virtually declared a kind of war with China” by demanding that Western allies refuse to permit China to carry out technological development.

    For example, the US insist others do not all0w China access to any technology that has any US parts in it. This includes everything, as for example, Netherlands has a world-class lithographic industry which produces critical parts for semi-conductors for the modern high-tech economy. Now, Netherlands must determine whether it’ll move to an independent course to sell to China, or not… the same is true for Samsung, South Korea, and Japan.

    The world is splintered along those lines as the framework for the foreseeable future.

    Question:  Will multinational corporations gain too much power and influence?

    Chomsky suggests looking at them right now… US based multinationals control about one-half of the world’s wealth. They are first or second in every domain like manufacturing and retail; no one else is close. It’s extraordinary power. Based upon GDP, the US has 20% of world GDP, but if you look at US multinationals it’s more like 50%. Multinationals have extraordinary power over domestic policy in both the US and in other capitalistic countries. So, how will multinationals react when told they cannot deal with a major market, like China?

    How does this develop over future years? The EU is going into a period of decline because of breaking relationships in trade and commercial business with the East. Yet, it’s not sure that the EU will stay subordinate to the US and willingly go into decline, or will the EU join the rest of the world and move into a more complex multipolar world and integrate with countries in the East? This is yet to be determined. For example, France’s President Emmanuel Macron (2017-) has been vilified and condemned for saying that after Russia is driven out of Ukraine, a way must be found to accommodate Russia within an international system, an initial crack in the US/EU relationship.

    Threat of nuclear war question: Russia suspended the START Nuclear Arms Treaty with the US and how important is this to the threat of nuclear war?

    Chomsky: It is very significant. It is the last remaining arms control treaty, the new START Treaty, Trump almost cancelled it. The treaty was due to expire in February when Biden took over in time to extend it, which he did.

    Keep in mind that the US was instrumental in creating a regime which somewhat mitigates the threat of nuclear war, which means “terminal war.” We talk much too casually about nuclear war. There can’t be a nuclear war. If there is, we’re finished. It’s why the Doomsday Clock is set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s been.

    Starting with George W. Bush the US began dismantling arms control. Bush dismantled the ABM Treaty, a missile treaty very significantly part of the arms control system and an enormous threat to Russia. So, the dismantling allowed the US to set up installations right at the border of Russia. It’s a severe threat to Russia. And Russia has reacted.

    The Trump administration got rid of the INF Treaty, the Reagan-Gorbachev treaty of 1987 which ended short-range missiles in Europe. Those missiles are now back in place on the borders of Russia. Trump, to make it clear that we meant business, arranged missile launches right away upon breaking of the treaty.

    Trump destroyed the Open Skies Treaty which originated with Eisenhower stating that each side should share information about what the other side was doing to reduce the threat of misunderstanding.

    Only the new START Treaty remains. And Russia suspended it. START restricts the number of strategic weapons for each side. The treaty terminates in 2026, but it’s suspended by Russia anyway. So, in effect there are no agreed upon restraints to increasing nuclear weapons.

    Both sides already have way more nuclear weapons than necessary; One Trident nuclear submarine could destroy a couple hundred cities all over the world. And land based nuclear missile locations are known by both sides. So, if there is a threat, those would be hit immediately. Which means if there’s a threat, “you’d better send’em off, use’em or lose’em.” This obviously is a very touchy, extraordinarily risky situation because one mistake could amplify very quickly.

    The new START Treaty that’s been suspended by Russia did restrict the enormous excessive number of strategic weapons. So, we should be in negotiations right now to expand it, restore it, and reinstitute the treaties the US has dismantled, the INF Treaty, Reagan-Gorbachev treaty, ABM Treaty, Open Stars Treaty should all be brought back.

    Question: Will society muster the will for change for equity, prosperity, and sustainability?

    Chomsky: There is no answer. It’s up to the population to come to grips with issues and say we are not going to march to the precipice and fall over it. But it’s exactly what our leaders are telling us to do. Look at the environmental crisis. It is well understood that we may have enough time to control heating of the environment, destruction of habitat, destruction of the oceans which is going to lead to total catastrophe. It’s not like everybody will die all at once, but we’re going to reach irreversible tipping points that becomes just a steady decline. To know how serious it is, look at particular areas of the world.

    The Middle East region is one of the most rapidly heating regions of the world at rates twice as fast as the rest of the world. Projections by the end of the century at current trajectories show sea level in Mediterranean will rise about 10 feet.

    Look at a map where people live, it is indescribable. Around Southeast Asia and peasants in India are trying to survive temperatures in the 120s where less than 10% of population has air conditioning. This will cause huge migrations from areas of the world where life will become unlivable.

    Fossil fuel companies are so profitable that they’ve decided to quit any sustainable efforts in favor of letting profits run as fast and as far as possible. They’re opening new oil and gas fields that can produce another 30-40 years but at that point we’ll all be finished.

    We have the same issue with nuclear weapons as with the environment. If these two issues are not dealt with, in the not-too-distant future, it’ll be all over. The population needs to “have the will” to stop it.

    Question: How do we muster that will?

    Chomsky: Talk to neighbors, join community organizations, join activist’s groups, press Congress, get out into the streets if necessary. How have things happened in the past? For example, back in the 1960s small groups of women got together, forming consciousness-raising groups and it was 1975 (Sex Discrimination Act) that women were granted the right of persons peers under US domestic law, prior to that we’re still back in the age of the founding fathers when women were property  Look at the Civil Rights movement. Go back to the 1950s, Rosa Parks refused to move from her seat on a bus that was planned by an organized group of activists that led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, big change… in 1960 a couple of black students in No. Carolina decided to sit in at a lunch counter segregated. Immediately arrested, and the next day another group came… later they became organized as SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinated Committee. Young people from the North started to join. Next freedom buses started running to Alabama to convince black farmers to cast a vote. It went on this way, building, until you got civil rights legislation in Washington.

    What’s happening right now as an example of what people can do? The Biden administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, IRA. It’s mostly a climate change act. The only way you can get banks and fossil fuel companies to stop destroying the world is to bribe them. That’s basically our system. But IRA is not the substantial program that Biden presented. It is watered down. The original came out of Bernie Sander’s office. As for the background for that, young people, from the Sunrise Movement, were active and organizing and sat in on Congressional offices. AOC joined them. A bill came out of this, but Republican opposition cut back the original bill by nearly 100% They are a denialist party. They want to destroy the world in the interest of private profit.  The final IRA bill is nowhere near enough.

    Summation: Chomsky sees a world of turmoil trying to sort out whether unipolar or multipolar wins the day with the Ukrainian war serving as a catalyst to change. Meanwhile, the EU carries the brunt of its impact. Meantime, nuclear arms treaties have literally dissolved in the face of a tenuous situation along the Russia/EU borders with newly armed missiles pointed at Russia’s heartland. In the face of this touch-and-go Russia vs. the West potentially explosive scenario, the global climate system is under attack via excessive fossil fuel emissions cranking up global temperatures beyond what 195 countries agreed was a danger zone.

    Chomsky sees a nervous nuclear weapons-rattling high-risk world flanked by unmitigated deterioration of ecosystems that global warming steadily, assuredly takes down for the count, as global temperatures set new records. He calls for individuals to take action, do whatever necessary to change the trajectory of nuclear weaponry and climate change to save society. Chomsky offered several examples of small groups of people acting together, over time, turning into serious protests and ultimately positive legislation.

    AmThis article covers the first 34 minutes of a 52-minute video: Noam Chomsky: About the Future of Our World.

    “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” (Margaret Mead, Anthropologist)

    The post The Future of Our World by Noam Chomsky first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Something’s Coming, We Don’t Know What It Is But It Is Going To Be Bad

    With a click, with a shock
    Phone’ll jingle, door’ll knock, open the latch
    Something’s coming, don’t know when but it’s soon . . .

    — “Something’s Coming,” West Side Story, lyrics by S. Sondheim, music by L. Bernstein.

    Shock should not be the word, but when World War III breaks fully loose many who are now sleeping will be shocked.  The war has already started, but its full fury and devastation are just around the corner.  When it does, Tony’s singular fate in West Side Story will be the fate of untold millions.

    It is a Greek tragedy brought on by the terrible hubris of the United States, its NATO accomplices, and the genocidal state of Israel and the Zionist terrorists who run it.

    Tony felt a miracle was due, but it didn’t come true for him except to briefly love Maria and then get killed as result of a false report, and only a miracle will now save the world from the cataclysm that is on the way, whether it is initiated by intent, a false report, an accident, or the game of nuclear chicken played once too often.

    Let us hope but not be naïve.  The signs all point in one direction.  The gun on the wall in the first act of this tragic play is primed to go off in the final one.  Every effort to avoid this terrible fate by seeking peace and not war has been rejected by the U.S. and its equally insane allies.  Every so-called red line laid down by Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinians, and their allies has been violated with impunity and blatant arrogance.  But impunity has its limits and the dark Furies of vengeance will have their day.

    “It is the dead, not the living,” said Antigone, “who make the longest demands.”  Their ghostly voices cry out to be avenged.

    I wish I were not compelled by conscience to write this, but it seems clearly evident to me that we stand on the edge of an abyss.  The fate of the world rests in the hands of leaders who are clearly psychotic and who harbor death wishes.  It’s not terribly complex.  Netanyahu and Biden are two of them.  Yes, like other mass killers, I think they love their children and give their dog biscuits to eat.  But yes, they also are so corrupted in their souls that they relish war and the sense of false power and prestige it brings them.  They gladly kill other people’s children.  They can defend themselves many times over, offer all kinds of excuses, but the facts speak otherwise.  This is hard for regular people to accept.

    The great American writer who lived in exile in France for so many years and who was born 100 years ago this month, James Baldwin, wrote an essay – “The Creative Process” – in which he addressed the issue of how becoming a normal member of society dulls one to the shadow side of personal and social truths.  He wrote:

    And, in the same way that to become a social human being one modifies and suppresses and, ultimately, without great courage, lies to oneself about all one’s interior, uncharted chaos, so have we, as a nation, modified or suppressed and lied about all the darker forces in our history.

    And lie and suppress we still do today.

    Imagine, if you will, that Mexico has invaded Texas with the full support of the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian governments.  Their weapons are supplied by these countries and their drone and missile attacks on the U.S. are coordinated by Russian technology.  The Seven Mile Bridge in Florida has been attacked.  The U.S. Mexican border is dotted with Russian troops on bases with nuclear missiles aimed at U.S. cities.

    It’s not hard to do.  That is a small analogy to what the U.S./NATO is doing to Russia.

    Do you think the United States would not respond with great force?

    Do you think it would not feel threatened with nuclear annihilation?

    How do you think it would respond?

    The U.S/NATO war against Russia via Ukraine is accelerating by the day.  The current Ukrainian invasion of Russia’s Kursk region has upped the ante dramatically.  After denying it knew in advance of this Ukrainian invasion of Russia, the demented U.S. President Joseph Biden said the other day when asked about the fighting in Kursk, “I’ve spoken with my staff on a regular basis probably every four or five hours for the last six or eight days. And it’s — it’s creating a real dilemma for Putin.  And we’ve been in direct contact — constant contact with — with the Ukrainians.”  Do you think Kamala Harris was kept in the dark?

    Now how do you think the Russians are going to respond?  How many red lines will they allow the U.S. to cross without massive retaliation?  And what kind of retaliation?

    Switch then to the Middle East where the Iranians and their allies are preparing to retaliate to Israel’s attacks on their soil. No one knows when but it seems soon.  Something is coming and it won’t be pretty.  Will it then ignite a massive war in the region with the U.S. and Israel pitted against the region?  Will nuclear weapons be used?  Will the wars in Ukraine/Russia and the Middle East join into what will be called WW III?

    While the U.S. continues to massively arm Israel, Russian is arming its ally Iran and likely training them in the use of those weapons as the U.S. is doing in Ukraine. The stage is set.  We enter the final act.

    Natanyahu wants and needs war to survive.  So he thinks.  Psychotic killers always do.

    The signs all point in one direction.  No one should be shocked if the worst comes to pass.

    “Phone’ll jingle, door’ll knock, open the latch.”

    If you have time.

    The post Something’s Coming, We Don’t Know What It Is But It Is Going To Be Bad first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Free the Leftist, Anti-War, and Anti-Nationalist Political Prisoners in Ukraine

    Above: Political prisoner in Ukraine, Inna Ivanochko sits in a dock in a court. Inna Ivanochko is the head of the Lviv organisation of Opposition Platform — For Life, which was Ukraine’ second largest party in parliament until it was persecuted and then banned. She is facing up to 15 years in prison for expressing her political views in the years before the war started – which the Ukrainian regime have now retrospectively deemed to have been in the service of Russia. Her supposed “offences” include allegedly participating in a September 2015 protest rally over living standards grievances and violations of constitutional rights, taking court action in 2018 against a city council decision to knock down a monument to Soviet World War II soldiers and advocating turning Ukraine into a federal state during a 2018 television interview.
    Photo: Supplied

    In late April 2024, the Albanese Labor government in Australia announced yet another $100 million in “aid” to Ukraine. The new “aid” package includes air-dropped bombs and drones. The package was announced by deputy prime minister, Richard Marles during a visit to Ukraine where he encouraged the Ukrainian regime to continue its war against Russia. Marles also affirmed the continued participation of Australian soldiers in an operation training Ukrainian troops in Britain. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops have already been trained in this U.K.-led operation. The U.S. and European NATO powers and their allies, like the Australian imperialist regime, are prepared to fight to the last drop of Ukrainian blood to advance their proxy war against Russia.

    As millions of low-paid workers, working-class youth, unemployed workers and pensioners suffer under soaring rents, Australian governments have failed to provide adequate funding for the public housing that could help drive down rents across the rental market. Meanwhile, governments of all stripes refuse to substantially boost the crushingly low Jobseeker payments. They say that there is a need to be “prudent” to avoid fueling inflation. Yet, when it comes to fueling death and destruction in distant lands to shore up Western imperialist domination of the world, successive federal governments have had no trouble finding large financial resources. The April announcement brings the Australian regime’s total military assistance to its Ukrainian counterparts to $880 million. Earlier announced Australian military support included the provision of armoured vehicles, six M777 155mm howitzers and artillery shells.

    This military assistance is backed by all the parties in the Australian parliament, the entire mainstream media and all of Australia’s influential political think tanks. Yet despite this and the ruling class’ intense propaganda campaign supporting the proxy war against Russia, many Australians do not buy the government’s “rationales” for its military support to its Ukrainian counterparts. Indeed a poll conducted this month by the Australian government-controlled ABC news outlet found that a (small) majority of Australians actually want the government to wind back or end support for Ukraine.

    One of the main narratives that Australia’s ruling class and other Western imperialist ruling classes use to justify their massive military backing of Ukraine is their claim that they are “defending a fellow democracy against an authoritarian power.” However the Ukrainian capitalist regime is no “democracy” of any kind! Fascist forces play a prominent role in Ukraine’s state organs. For example, a key part of Ukraine’s National Guard and prominent part of the regime’s ultra-nationalist folklore is the fascist Azov Assault Brigade. Formed in 2014 by neo-Nazi politician Andriy Biletsky, the Azov Assault Brigade sports Nazi regalia and trains its members in white supremacist and neo-Nazi ideology. It is notorious for murdering, raping and assaulting numerous leftists, members of ethnic minorities and civilians sympathetic to Russia. The character of the Ukrainian regime can also be seen from the fact that in 2015 it made two Nazi-collaborating, anti-Soviet paramilitary groups (the UPA and the OUN), “heroes of Ukraine.” During World War II, the UPA and OUN between them murdered 100,000 Polish people and tens of thousands of Jewish people, while helping their Nazi allies to carry out the Holocaust. The Ukrainian regime has also renamed many streets after the fascist leader of the OUN, Stepan Bandera; and have also erected numerous statues and other monuments to this Nazi-allied war criminal.

    Capitalism and Democracy

    Of course, the Western regimes using Ukraine are hardly true “democracies” themselves. To be sure Western governments are elected and citizens are theoretically able to advance their political views. However, in practice it is the wealthy capitalists, in great disproportion to their small numbers that have the means to shape public opinion and hence steer election outcomes. It is they who own the media, establish and finance the political think tanks, provide much of the funding for political parties and political NGOs and have the financial resources to pay for expensive political advertising and lobbyists. Thus in terms of political influence, “democracies” under capitalism run more on “one dollar, one vote” rather than the nominal, “one person, one vote.” Moreover, due to their tremendous wealth and control of the economy, the capitalists are able to ensure that all the key state institutions remain tied to them by thousands of threads irrespective of which political party is elected to govern. Therefore, in all nominally “democratic” capitalist countries, the form of “democracy” masks the reality that the system is in fact just a form of dictatorship of the capitalist class. To the extent that there is any real democracy it is only that the different capitalists and pro-capitalist factions are able to freely and “democratically” debate their differences and arrive at a majority decision about which policies best serve the interests of their class. Moreover, just as in more openly authoritarian forms of capitalist rule, whenever the rule of the capitalist class faces a serious challenge, the ruling class will resort to the most brutal authoritarian repression to protect their interests.

    Nevertheless, as far as the working-class and other oppressed are concerned, this pseudo-“democratic” form of administering capitalism is preferable to other forms of capitalism – like fascism, military dictatorship etc – because it allows the masses comparatively greater freedoms with which to organise resistance against capitalist exploitation. That is why in capitalist parliamentary democracies like Australia, we oppose every attack of the ruling class on the limited democratic rights that the masses do have. And as decaying, late-stage capitalism is increasingly unable to meet the needs of the masses, in nearly every capitalist parliamentary “democracy” around the world the worried capitalist class is chipping away at the political rights that it had previously conceded to the masses. Just look at the hardline anti-protest laws that have been enacted in NSW and other Australian states and the federal government’s draconian “foreign interference” laws which are aimed at suppressing expressions of sympathy for socialistic China.

    Teacher from Kiev, Alla Dushkina. (Photo: Supplied). She spent three months in a Ukrainian jail for correspondence with an acquaintance from Russia, in which she expressed doubts about the correctness of Ukraine’s political course. Later, she was granted bail and managed to leave the country without waiting for the verdict. Ukrainian journalist Pavel Volkov managed to interview her. Here is an excerpt from what Alla Dushkina told the journalist:

    I was arrested with my son in Khmelnitskiy [a city in Western Ukraine].
    Five cars surrounded us, and then they interrogated me for 72 hours, trying to get a confession. I didn’t sign anything, we were beaten, wrapped in a black and red flag [the flag of the Nazi-collaborating OUN-UPA]. I had to confess that I made some marks [for Russian bombs and missiles] and that I had given shelter to Kadyrovites [Chechens who are fighting for Russia], whom I had never seen in my life. And they took fingerprints, and forced me to pass a lie detector, and threatened to take me in the city square with an announcement that I was putting tags [was a missile gunner] so that the mothers of the murdered soldiers would beat me. Then they realized that I wouldn’t sign anything, put bags on my son and me and started leading us somewhere. They brought us to Kiev, my son was shoved into the basement in front of me, they demanded from him to say that I had killed people, pressed on my conscience, threatened. I was taken to the SSU building on Askold Lane, then to the Lukyanovo pre—trial detention center. The jailer showed me videos on her phone every morning – as far as I can understand, she was instructed to do this – how in both men’s and women’s buildings people were beaten, dipped their heads in the toilet, bullied. They demanded a confession from me to avoid the fate of people on these videos.

    Today’s Ukraine – Not Any Kind of Democracy At All

    Today’s capitalist Ukraine does not even have the truncated, “democratic” form of the dictatorship of the capitalist class that exists today in Australia, the U.S., France and other so-called “Western democracies.” Political parties and activists genuinely opposed to the Ukrainian government’s policies face severe and brutal repression. Such repression greatly intensified after a 2014 far-right coup, engineered by Washington and the European imperialist powers. That coup overthrew the elected government of Viktor Yanukovych who attempted to simultaneously maintain friendly ties with both Russia and the EU. Yanukovych’s government was replaced by a rabidly Ukrainian nationalist regime that was as fiercely anti-Russia as it was pro-Western. The new regime enacted laws discriminating against the Russian-speaking populations in the east of Ukraine as well as against other non-Ukrainian minorities. When the post-2014 regime inevitably met with opposition – especially in the east and south of the country – this was met with extreme repression supplemented by the terror of fascist gangs. In 2015, the regime banned the sizable Communist Party of Ukraine and two smaller other, nominally communist parties. Meanwhile the regime jailed or threatened political opponents and journalists.

    Some Ukrainians have made courageous efforts to detail the persecution that others are facing at the hands of the Ukrainian regime. Among these is Ukrainian journalist Pavel Volkov. Volkov was himself imprisoned from 2017 for thirteen months for merely writing articles critical of the 2014 right-wing coup and for sympathising with the plight of the people of the eastern, mostly Russian-speaking, Donbass region who were attacked for their opposition to the new ultra-nationalist order. For this, he was accused of “separatism,” “terrorism,” and “collaboration with the enemy”. Due to the efforts of out of court supporters and a dedicated team of lawyers, Volkov eventually proved the charges false in court. However, this was a very rare case where the Ukrainian regime’s trumped-up charges against opponents have been defeated in the regime’s courts. Most of those targeted end up in prison or worse. Pavel Volkov described what he observed in the years 2018-2020:

    … people have been tried under `separatist’ and `terrorist’ articles for laying flowers at the Soviet monuments; paying taxes for DPR (Donetsk People’s Republic) [a pro-Russia rebel government that was established in the eastern Donetsk region by opponents of the post-2014 far-right regime]; organizing `Pushkin Balls,’ and so on. Any activity that can be interpreted as the glorification of the Soviet past, the valorization of the Russian culture, or the recognition of the authorities of rebellious Donbass came to be acknowledged as ‘separatist’ and ‘terrorist.’

    Ukrainian journalist, Pavel Volkov, in court.
    Photo: Supplied

    Since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war in February 2022, the Ukrainian regime has used the cover of the war and the mantra of “defending national security against treason” to persecute its opponents to a yet more extreme degree. In June 2022, the regime banned the biggest opposition party, the Opposition Platform — For Life, a party which just 17 months before had been leading Ukraine’s opinion polls. Similarly, the regime banned several other parties – accusing all of either “collaborating with Russia” or “violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine” or “destabilising the social and political situation in Ukraine”. Among the parties that the Ukrainian regime banned include Viktor Yanukovych’s former party, the Party of Regions as well as Derzhava, Nashi, Opposition Bloc, Socialist Party of Ukraine and Union of Left Forces.

    Anyone in Ukraine who expresses even the mildest sympathy for Russia or who advocates peace talks is targeted. Other dissidents are falsely accused of pro-Russia sympathies in order to silence them. As journalist, Pavel Volkov put it:

    Today, there are thousands of civilian prisoners in Ukraine who are deprived of their liberty and human rights for ‘likes’ under ‘incorrect’ social-media posts, Internet discussions of projectile impact location, frank correspondence with relatives in Russia via messengers, performing professional duties (like teaching) in the territories occupied and then abandoned by Russia, and so on. The retreats of the Russian Armed Forces from the Kiev region, parts of the Kharkov region, and parts of the Kherson region in later 2022 were marked by mass arrests, which continue to this day. This is what the SSU [Security Service of Ukraine] calls `the stabilization measures.’ Only in the summer of 2022, as a result of these `measures’ – apartment-by-apartment sweeps – 700 people were detained in Vinnytsa and Nikolaev – two regional centers in the southern part of Ukraine bordering the Odessa region.

    Although Volkov himself was forced to flee Ukraine in the latter part of 2022, he and his colleagues have since then painstakingly analysed the open source data of the various enforcement agencies of the Ukrainian regime in order to estimate the number of political prisoners there. They found that from the time of the 2014 far-right coup to the start of the Russian intervention in early 2022, the Ukrainian Prosecutor’s Office brought 643 cases to the court on political charges. This repression then escalated such that in 2022 and 2023 alone the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office and regional prosecutor’s offices opened up 26,821 cases on political matters of which 4,315 have already been brought to the court with an indictment. Moreover, when the cases brought by the Ukrainian National Police and the SSU secret police are also included, Volkov and Co. found that the Ukrainian regime had opened up over 74 thousand criminal cases on politically motivated charges. This means that the number of people in today’s Ukraine who are in either prison or pre-trial detention on the basis of political charges is likely to be in the tens of thousands.

    Among the laws that Ukrainian regime have used to persecute dissidents is Article 436-2 of Ukraine’s criminal code which nominally prosecutes people for: justification, recognition as legitimate or denial of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine or glorification of its participants. Articles 110 and 110-2 of Ukraine’s criminal code also targets people for expressing dissident views but does so under the official charge of: trespass against the territorial integrity or inviolability of Ukraine or financing of such actions. Volkov’s research shows that under these three articles of the criminal code alone, Ukrainian prosecutors in 2022 and 2023 have opened up 14,411 political cases of which more than 1,400 were already brought to court during that period. Under the likes of these type of pretexts, Professor Sergey Shubin from the Nikolayev region was sentenced to 15 years in prison for merely making reflections in his personal diary on what life would be like in the region if it were occupied by the Russian army. A pensioner from Sumy region Lyudmila Vazhinskaya was sentenced to six months jail for advocating peace talks between Ukraine and Russia while talking with people in a queue for milk. In a high-profile case, Inna Ivanochko, the head of the Lviv (city in western Ukraine) organisation of Ukraine’ second biggest parliamentary party (until it was persecuted and then banned), Opposition Platform — For Life, was arrested in August 2022 and has been in pre-trial detention ever since. She is facing up to 15 years in prison for expressing her political views in the years before the war started. These include allegedly participating in a September 2015 rally against low pensions, increased tariffs and violations of constitutional rights, taking legal action in a Lviv court (!) against the 2018 decision of the Lviv City Council to knock down a monument to Soviet World War II soldiers and advocating turning Ukraine into a federal state (an idea which is branded “separatism” in contemporary Ukraine) in a television interview in 2018. Outrageously, the three lawyers who defended Inna Ivanochko have also all been arrested. The latest of her lawyers to be arrested was Svetlana Novitskaya who was seized on February 20 of this year and has been imprisoned ever since. She is accused of violating Article 436-2 of Ukraine’s criminal code, “denying the military aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine” … for her statements in court defending her client, Inna Ivanochko! Defence lawyers imprisoned for their submissions in court defending their clients – such is the “democracy” that the Australian and other Western capitalist rulers say that they are “defending” through sending huge quantities of weapons to their proxy!

    Volkov’s research found that in 2022 and 2023 Ukrainian prosecutors had also opened 3,126 cases of suspicion of “High treason” under Article 111 of its criminal code and 7,058 cases on “Collaborationism” under Article 111-1. Most of the people imprisoned under such charges are those who worked in public institutions in the areas occupied by the Russian army. After the Russian troops withdrew from some of the areas, these public sector workers have been persecuted as “traitors” and “collaborators”. People like Anatoliy Miruta, a man from the Kiev region who was jailed for 10 years for negotiating with the Russian military to take local residents to the hospital and distributing Russian humanitarian aid. Or like, Valentina Ropalo, a resident of Volchansk in the Kharkov region, who was hit with a five year prison sentence for working as the head of the housing and communal services department while the Russian army was in her city, which was deemed to be “collaboration with the enemy”. Meanwhile, Olga Galanina, Deputy Chairman of the Berdyansk Administration for Humanitarian Affairs, is facing a life sentence because she agreed to continue her work in Berdyansk, Zaporozhye region, under the Russian administration. SSU officers kidnapped her student son in Dnepropetrovsk, illegally held him in detention, forcing his mother to come to the territory controlled by Ukraine, where she was arrested.

    In addition to the political prisoners in Ukraine who have either been officially sentenced to jail or are in pre-trial detention, are a large number of others who have been abducted by the regime or its fascist auxiliaries. Among them is Sergey Chemolosov, a resident of the village of Ivanovka in the Kharkov region. Chemolosov had been distributing Russian humanitarian aid and helped restore the village’s electricity supply during the stay of Russian troops there. On 7 September 2022, Ukrainian military officers kidnapped Chemolosov and took him to an unknown destination. On September 9, Kirill Tymoshenko, the deputy head of the office of President Zelensky, published on Facebook a photo in which Chemolosov, with marks showing that he was severely beaten in custody, is sitting blindfolded with his hands tied. What later happened to Chemolosov or whether he is even still alive is unknown. It is also unknown the exact number of political prisoners that the Ukrainian regime has similarly abducted and is illegally detaining at secret locations.

    9 September 2022: Sergey Chemolosov, a resident of the village of Ivanovka in Ukraine’s Kharkov region, is shown in a Facebook post, celebrating his detention, made by the deputy head of the office of President Zelensky, Kirill Tymoshenko. Chemolosov is blindfolded, with his hands tied behind his back and with marks indicating that he was beaten in custody. Two days earlier, Ukrainian military officers had abducted Chemolosov and taken him to an unknown location. Chemolosov’s “crime” is that he had been distributing Russian humanitarian aid and helped restore the village’s electricity supply during the stay of Russian troops in his village. What later happened to Chemolosov is unknown.

    Down With the Ukrainian Regime’s Persecution of Leftists!

    The pro-Western Ukrainian regime has especially targeted avowed communists, leftists and others with sympathy for the former Soviet Union. Thus Pavel Volkov’s research shows that among the politically motivated criminal cases that Ukrainian prosecutors have opened up in 2022 and 2023 are 600 cases of suspected violation of Article 436-1 of Ukraine’s criminal code, which bans the production and distribution of communist symbols and propaganda sympathetic to communist “totalitarian regimes” (which is mostly aimed at supporters of the former Soviet Ukraine and the former Soviet Union). Already 322 people have been brought before the courts on these charges. Formally, Article 436-1 also bans Nazi symbols and propaganda sympathetic to Nazi regimes. However, that part of the law is never applied – especially since support for Stepan Bandera and his Nazi-allied OUN is a key part of the official ideology of the Ukrainian regime. Article 436-1 of Ukraine’s criminal code was indeed never meant to target neo-Nazi elements. The proscription of Nazi symbols in Article 436-1 was included purely to obscure the stridently anti-communist nature of the law.

    Many of the leftists imprisoned have been prosecuted under trumped-up charges under other articles of Ukraine’s criminal code. Among them is left-wing activist from Zaporozhye, Yuriy Petrovsky who was hit with a 15 year jail term for allegedly providing assistance to the Russian military. Also imprisoned is Bogdan Syrotiuk, a leader of the Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists and who is associated with the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). Syrotiuk was arrested eight weeks ago on trumped charges of “treason” because of his opposition to both the Ukrainian and Russian side in the war. If convicted by Ukraine’s thoroughly biased courts, Syrotiuk is threatened with a prison sentence of 15 years to life. The ICFI have held rallies outside Ukraine embassies in several cities demanding freedom for Bogdan Syrotiuk, including a June 14 protest in Canberra conducted by the ICFI’s Australian section, the Socialist Equality Party (SEP). We in Trotskyist Platform add our voice to the demand for immediate freedom for 25 year-old Bogdan Syrotiuk.

    Trotskyist Platform demands the immediate release of all those imprisoned by the Ukrainian regime for expressing pro-Soviet, communist and other leftist sympathies. We say: Immediately scrap the anti-communist Article 436-1 of Ukraine’s criminal code! We also call for the immediate release of all those imprisoned in Ukraine for advocating peace in the war of for expressing sympathy for Russia or merely admiration for Russian culture. Those public sector workers branded as “traitors” and “collaborators” for performing their duties during Russian control of their villages and cities must also be immediately freed. Down with the Ukrainian regime’s mafia-style abductions of dissidents and those-branded as “Russian collaborators”! Lift the regime’s ban on the Communist Party of Ukraine! Lift the Ukrainian regime’s ban on all other leftist, anti-nationalist, anti-war and other opposition parties!

    It should be noted that we support the campaign to free ICFI-associated Bogdan Syrotiuk despite our profound political differences with the ICFI and the SEP. Not least among our differences with the ICFI/SEP is our objection to their decision to “denounce the Russian military intervention in Ukraine” in February 2022 – a point which they have been reiterating of late – which undercuts their nominal position of opposition to both sides in the war and slants towards a position of partially defending Ukraine (a true defeatist on both sides stance would not have taken a position on the question of the February 2022 Russian intervention). Today, recognising that Ukraine’s war with Russia has become subordinate to the Western imperialist tyrants of the world, we in Trotskyist Platform call for the defence of Russia (despite its reactionary capitalist rulers) against imperialism and its Ukrainian proxies. In contrast, the SEP and ICFI continue to take a stated position of opposition to both sides in the war.

    Ukrainian journalist, Pavel Volkov, pictured during his 13 month period of imprisonment, starting in 2017, for writing articles critical of the Ukrainian regime. Since his release, he and his colleagues have analysed open source data revealing thousands of cases of political persecution in his country. Pictured sitting on the left is defence lawyer, Svetlana Novitskaya, who herself has been in pre-trial detention since 20 February 2024. Novitskaya is being persecuted for her defence of many high-profile political prisoner cases. She is accused of violating Article 436-2 of Ukraine’s criminal code, “denying the military aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine” during her statements in court defending her client, opposition politician, Inna Ivanochko!
    Photo: Supplied

    Extreme Political Repression in Ukraine a Result of the
    Early 1990s Capitalist Counterrevolution

    The political repression in today’s Ukraine is far more intense and brutal than any repression that occurred in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic during the last four decades of the socialistic Soviet Union. To be sure, in the mid-late 1930s when the, by then bureaucratised, leadership of the Soviet worker state, under the impact of profound international defeats for the socialist movement, moved to the right in many areas – from international policy, to economic and social policies, to backsliding on Lenin’s 100% correct insistence on being sensitive to the national rights of the Ukrainian and other non-Russian peoples – the Stalin-led bureaucracy sought to muzzle potential resistance to this rightist turn with murderous persecution of the most devoted and thoughtful communists. Soviet Ukraine was especially hard hit by this repression for a several year period. However, from the late 1950s onwards, the jailing of political dissidents in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (and indeed the whole Soviet Union) became relatively rare. Moreover, the political prisoners that did exist in Soviet Ukraine during this period were largely not leftists. Rather, Soviet Ukraine’s repression mostly targeted opponents of socialistic rule – something which even a workers state operating under the ideal form of workers democracy may be compelled to do during the transition to full socialism if it is facing a world where the richest, most economically powerful countries of the world continue to be under capitalist rule.

    All this is important to understand because the fanatically anti-Soviet Ukrainian regime and its imperialist masters present today’s Ukraine as “democratic” as opposed to the “totalitarian” Soviet period. Similarly, they portray the period of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as an unending series of horrors in which the Ukrainian people were supposedly “oppressed” by Russians. However, during the Soviet Union’s hey days in the late 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, the masses of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic enjoyed full employment, free high-quality education, free health care and a rich cultural, entertainment and sporting life. The 1917 great October Socialist Revolution not only freed all the toilers of the former Russian empire from capitalism but it liberated the people of Ukraine from the intense national oppression that they faced in the pre-Soviet days when they were under the thumb of Russian imperialist rulers. To be sure, during certain periods of Stalin’s administration of the Soviet Union, there were bouts of partial re-institution of policies offending the Ukrainian people’s legitimate national feelings. However, from the late 1950s onwards, although there remained a degree of Russian centredness in the Soviet bureaucracy, the culture of the minority nationalities of the socialistic USSR again flourished with renewed vigour along with the economic standard of living of their peoples. It could not be said that the people of Ukraine were nationally oppressed in this period. Indeed, by the latter days of the Soviet period, the average life expectancy in Soviet Ukraine was nearly a year and a half higher than in Soviet Russia.

    However, the Soviet workers state faced intense hostility from the considerably richer imperialist powers. The immense external pressure that capitalism exerted upon the Soviet Union resulted in a conservative bureaucracy being squeezed up to the top of the workers state. The rule of this bureaucracy, with its petty privileges, politically and economically weakened the workers state. Through suppressing workers democracy, the bureaucracy retarded the Soviet Union’s socialist planned economy from reaching its full and tremendous potential. Eventually, under the relentless pressure of the imperialist powers and the economic stagnation that this caused, the bureaucracy started making more and more international and domestic concessions to capitalism. This encouraged a layer of petty capitalists and speculators and highly educated, mostly younger, people – who were seduced by the promise that capitalism would bring them the standard of living enjoyed by the upper and upper-middle classes in the West along with “democracy” – to push for outright capitalist counterrevolution. They spearheaded their push under the cover of fighting for “democracy”. In Ukraine this was supplemented with virulent Ukrainian nationalism. Yet despite their promises and the massive backing they were gaining from the U.S.-led imperialists, most of the people of Soviet Ukraine did not support these counterrevolutionaries. In a March 1991 Soviet-wide referendum on whether or not to maintain the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, more than 71% of the people of Soviet Ukraine voted to maintain the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in a referendum that had a nearly 84% turnout in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. However, although the majority of the people of Soviet Ukraine – and indeed the whole Soviet Union – were wary of those who wanted to overthrow socialistic rule, lacking authentic leadership and being depoliticised by decades of bureaucratic rule, they were confused as to what to do and, to an extent, were even unclear about the need to forcibly resist the emerging counterrevolution. As a result, a relatively small layer of imperialist-backed counterrevolutionaries were able to destroy the greatest victory the working classes of the world have ever achieved, while the working-class masses watched on by.

    A comparison of life expectancy of Ukraine and China from 1989 to 2021. In 1989, the year before Ukraine and the rest of the Soviet Union started diving rapidly towards its 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution, the average life expectancy in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was three years higher than in socialistic China (which then still had a long way to go to catch up from the terrible poverty of its pre-1949, semi-colonial capitalist times). But after capitalist counterrevolution, the life expectancy in Ukraine collapsed along with the people’s living standards. Three decades later, in 2021 (which was the year before the war started), the life expectancy in Ukraine was still less than it was near the end of her socialistic days in 1989, despite all the advances in global medical science over the last three decades. By contrast, China, which has remained under socialistic rule has continued to see a strongly rising life expectancy. From having an average life expectancy that was three years below that of Soviet Ukraine in 1989, socialistic China’s average life expectancy by 2021 was more than eight years higher than in, now, capitalist Ukraine (it is today almost 11 years higher).
    Source: World Bank

    The 1991-1992 capitalist counterrevolution and the resulting conversion of collectively-owned, public enterprises into the private ownership of a few was a disaster for the toiling masses of Ukraine. Indeed it was a catastrophe for all the masses of the former Soviet Union. Unemployment soared, people were driven into poverty, industries were dismantled, the social position of women diminished and ethnic tensions intensified. And far from the “democracy” that the leaders of the capitalist counterrevolution promised, every part of the former Soviet Union saw political persecution of opponents. In October 1993, pro-Western “democratic” Russian president, Boris Yeltsin unleashed tanks against protesters and his own parliament, killing nearly 150 people.

    Such political repression in all ex-Soviet countries is driven by two inter-related factors. Firstly and most importantly, the capitalist counterrevolution reduced the living standards of much of the population. Bitter about their position and having known a better life in the Soviet days, the masses could not be held back from opposing the new social “order” through propaganda and nationalism alone. The new capitalist rulers also needed to unleash brutal political repression to keep the masses in check.

    Secondly, the political repression in the now capitalist countries existing in the lands of the former Soviet Union is partly connected with the particular forms of capitalism that arose from the capitalist counterrevolution. In the lands that have never been workers states, capitalism emerged from feudalism (except in some settler colonies when it was brutally imposed on first peoples often living in egalitarian hunter-gatherer type societies) as a higher, more progressive social system than the one that it replaced. Then, after having exhausted its initially progressive content, now decaying capitalism brought only suffering to the masses, social reaction, imperialism and catastrophic inter-imperialist wars; while still containing elements of its ability to develop the productive forces further than the feudalism that it had replaced. However, when capitalism was re-introduced to the lands of the former Soviet Union, it had absolutely no traces of the young, initially relatively progressive, capitalism that replaced feudalism. Instead, the capitalism that was transplanted into the lands of the former Soviet Union was entirely the decrepit, reactionary capitalism of the late 20th century. Moreover, this capitalist rule was not replacing a still more oppressive feudalism but replacing a higher, more progressive social order – one based on collective ownership of the means of production and working-class rule. Therefore, inevitably, the new capitalist ruling classes dreamt not mainly of expanding the productive forces to boost profits but of looting the productive capacity that was already there and of making a killing by dismantling and selling off the former Soviet Union’s massive industrial base. The capitalism installed into the lands of the former Soviet Union was an especially corrupt and venal form of capitalism. Alongside the plunge in the masses standard of living caused by the reversion to a reactionary social system, capitalist restoration in the lands of the former Soviet Union led to a retrogression in the moral substance of the people. The destruction of a collectivist-based economic system and its replacement with one-based on exploitation and dog-eat-dog competition – especially in conditions of newly arisen poverty – has pushed many to abandon some of the caring, mutually aiding outlook that Soviet people were famous for in favour of a ruthless jostling for scarce jobs and assets. For all these reasons, the capitalism that arose on the ashes of the Soviet workers state has been a mafia-style capitalism, characterised by the close inter-twining of capitalists with criminal gangs and collaboration between state agencies and criminal groups. The brutality of the state organs in the now capitalist, ex-Soviet countries is then in part driven by their “need” to defend the interests of the particular capitalists-criminals that they are collaborating with by mercilessly suppressing the objections of both rival mafia capitalists and those citizens daring to challenge this corruption.

    However, at the same time, more far-sighted elements within the capitalist classes in ex-Soviet countries see the need to bring order to their capitalism in order to ensure the efficiency and viability of their system. They seek a political force – typically centred around a “strongman” – to achieve this task. When such a political force is pushed into power by the dominant elements of the capitalist class, this force uses ruthless repression to make particular capitalists – and the sections of the masses that these bigwigs have brought around them – sacrifice some of their short-term criminal-linked plunder in order to ensure the overall interests of the capitalist class as a whole and the long-term survival of the capitalist order. This is the role played in Russia by Putin. The fact that he performs this function reasonably effectively is the reason why he has been backed by the majority of Russia’s capitalist exploiting class for so long – despite his occasional crackdowns on particular oligarchs. To be sure, the discipline to capitalism that such strongmen bring often does not apply to their closest friends and relatives within the capitalist class! That is why the capitalists closest to Putin are given favoured treatment – as long as they don’t drift into opposition to him (like late Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin did!).

    Yet, even amongst the repressive capitalist regimes in the countries of the former Soviet Union, today’s Ukrainian one is especially brutal. There are several reasons for this. One reason is that the people of Ukraine have suffered from capitalist counterrevolution especially hard. Notably, despite all the advances in modern health science over these last three decades, Ukraine’s average life expectancy in the year before the recent war began (2021) was actually lower than it was in 1989, the year before Ukraine and the rest of the USSR started sliding rapidly towards capitalist restoration! Moreover, whereas at the end of the Soviet times in 1990, Ukraine’s GDP per capita (as determined by the more relevant PPP – Purchasing Power Parity – method) was 95% of Russia’s, i.e. basically the same despite being far more resource poor than Russia; by 2021, the year before the war began, her per capita income was less than half that of Russia’s (46% of Russia’s to be exact). By the way, this comparison alone should smash the notion that Ukraine was a “subjugated” nation in Soviet times that became “liberated” through the destruction of the Soviet Union! However, the main point for us here is that the working-class masses of Ukraine have suffered even more cruelly from the capitalist counterrevolution than the masses of Russia. Therefore, the regime enforcing capitalist rule in Ukraine has been compelled to use still more brutal repression to keep the unhappy masses in line.

    The second reason why repression is particularly severe in Ukraine is because the regime there took an especially fanatical anti-Soviet turn after the 2014 right-wing coup. They began knocking down monuments to the Soviet Union and to the Red Army’s victory over Nazi Germany. The regime even passed a law banning, under the threat of up to five years imprisonment, any singing of the Communist Internationale or the Ukrainian Soviet and Soviet anthems and any flying of the flags of the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the former Soviet Union! Yet a considerable proportion of Ukraine’s population is either old enough to remember how much better life was in Soviet times or at least old enough to hear such accounts from their parents and their aunts and uncles. To people who remember fondly and are proud of the achievements of the Soviet Union and of the Red Army’s heroic victory over Nazi Germany, the extreme anti-Sovietism of Ukraine’s ruling elite and its hailing of anti-Soviet, Nazi collaborators are unbearably offensive. This is especially true for the peoples of the southern and eastern parts of Ukraine, who have been less blinded by extreme nationalism than peoples in the western Galician region generally have. Thus to enforce its anti-Soviet laws, practices and ideology, the regime has had to use naked repression and intimidation against the significant percentage of pro-Soviet minded people in the country.

    Thirdly, given that a significant part of Ukraine’s population speak Russian as well as other non-Ukrainian languages – including Hungarian, Moldovan and Romanian – as their first language, the post-2014 Ukrainian regime’s discrimination against the use of non-Ukrainian languages inevitably provoked strong resistance. Such discrimination is itself a result of the majority of the capitalist class realising that it could only protect itself from the wrath of the masses, discontented as they are over high unemployment and poor living standards, through diverting their anger onto Russian-speakers and ethnic minorities. Ukraine’s rulers are hardly the only capitalist ruling class to enact language discrimination in order to divide the working-class masses and prevent united multi-ethnic mass struggle against themselves. And they are hardly the only regime to face a revolt as a result of such discriminatory language policies! For example, in Sri Lanka, the majority of the capitalist ruling class, terrified by a massive 1953 general strike, which united workers from both the majority Sinhala ethnicity and the minority Tamil ethnicity, in the following years introduced language laws that ostentatiously discriminated against Tamil speakers. It was this discrimination against Tamil language speakers that in good part eventually led to the rise of the Tamil armed national liberation struggle. And similar to Sri Lanka, the Ukrainian regime’s language and other social discrimination against non-Ukraine speakers can only be enforced with brutal state repression against those who resist.

    Fourth, and in good part for the above three reasons, a significant part of Ukraine’s population does not want to fight a war with Russia. Many even sympathise with Russia, which is seen as less oppressive of pro-Soviet sentiment than the Ukrainian regime as well as obviously being more tolerant of Russian speakers. Terrified by this reality, the Kiev regime unleashes hysterical repression and violence against dissidents – both real and perceived.

    Political prisoner, Professor Sergey Shubin in the dock of a Ukrainian court. The Ukrainian regime sentenced Shubin to 15 years in prison for merely making reflections in his personal diary on what life would be like in his Nikolayev region if it were occupied by the Russian army.
    Photo: Supplied

    Fifth, the Ukrainian regime has a sizable support base of fanatical nationalists from which to launch repression against its opponents. Although a significant part of Ukraine’s population rejects the regime’s extreme anti-Soviet and anti-Russian hostility, there is also a sizable part of Ukraine’s self-employed and middle class population who have fallen for the extreme Ukrainian nationalism that they have been fed by the majority of the country’s capitalist class. They have bought the ruling class’ lying anti-Soviet propaganda. However, there is also a genuine fear amongst Ukrainian people that they will be subordinated by a new Russian empire as the Ukrainian people truly were in pre-Soviet, Tsarist times. These fears are born of the reality that today’s Russian Army is not the Soviet Red Army that liberated Ukraine from the Nazi invasion (and from Bandera and other Nazi collaborators). And today’s Russia is no longer a Soviet Russia that proclaims “Friendship of the Peoples” but a capitalist Russia whose rulers openly hail the expansionist, Great Russian chauvinist, Tsarist times. Ukraine’s capitalist rulers manipulate their people’s fear of being subjugated by Russia and inject into those legitimate fears ultra-right-wing nationalism, fanatical anti-Sovietism and loyalty to the program of Bandera and other Nazi collaborators.

    In summary, capitalist counterrevolution has not brought the masses in the former Soviet lands any of the prosperity and “democracy” that the counterrevolutionaries promised – not even the token form of “democracy” that exists in Western capitalist countries. Indeed, it has brought the very opposite! This is true throughout all the lands of the former Soviet Union – and is especially true in today’s Ukraine.


    Above, Ukraine, July 2022: Prime minister Albanese meets with Ukrainian leaders during a visit aimed at encouraging the Ukrainian regime to maintain their war against Russia. Albanese is here holding a model of the Antonov An-225, the world’s largest aircraft that was sadly destroyed during the early days of the war. Ukrainian officials had presented the AN-225 model to Albanese as a symbol of Ukrainian national pride. The people of Ukraine should indeed be proud of the magnificent AN-225. Except the AN-225 was not made during the period of the post-Soviet, capitalist Ukraine but was manufactured in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, with components and design also contributed by various other parts of the Soviet Union (Below: The AN-225 in Soviet times carrying the Soviet spacecraft the Buran). Yet today’s fanatically anti-Soviet, Ukrainian regime, that outlaws any use of Soviet symbols, ended up presenting to Albanese what is in reality a tribute to this marvel of Soviet engineering excellence! Inadvertently, that is an admission of how much more Ukraine achieved in Soviet times. For Ukrainian officials simply could not find any symbol of achievement from the more than three decades of post Soviet, capitalist Ukraine’s existence that was worthy of being presented as a gift to a foreign “dignitary”. For, given the extreme hostility to the Soviet Union of this Ukrainian regime, if there actually was such a symbol of achievement from post-Soviet Ukraine, they would have presented it, rather than having to claim as their own the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic’s – and broader Soviet Union’s – fabulous aircraft. In Soviet times, Ukraine was known for its aircraft manufacturing and other advanced industries, its beautiful tourist destinations and its hospitable people. In contrast, post-Soviet, capitalist Ukraine has been most known by the outside world as one of the scam capitals of the world; and even more so as a place from where large numbers of women facing poverty and lack of opportunity would seek to become “mail-order-brides” to men living in richer countries; or sex workers in the West (many of whom would end up being cruelly exploited by sex industry bosses). Capitalist counterrevolution has been an absolute disaster for most people in Ukraine and most people in all of the former Soviet Union.
    Photo (top): X/Twitter @ukraine_world.
    Photo (below): Peter Volek/JetPhotos.Net

    Defend Russia Against Imperialism and its Ukrainian Proxies!

    The Ukrainian regime’s imprisonment of tens of thousands of political prisoners blows to smithereens the claims of the Australian and other Western capitalist governments that they are backing Ukraine’s war in order to “defend democracy.” So what then is actually driving Ukraine’s war with Russia? When Russia first intervened in February 2022, the war was mostly an inter-capitalist squabble for territory. Ukraine wanted to forcibly keep lands in the eastern Donbass region where the majority of residents, mostly Russian speakers enraged at the fanatically anti-Soviet and anti-Russian character of the post-2014 regime, no longer wanted to be part of Ukraine. On the other hand, the Russian regime, encouraged by the ethnic/cultural solidarity of many of its people with the embattled Russian-speaking population in the Donbass region, wanted to not only grab the clearly pro-Russia portions of Ukraine but to gain additionally territory in regions where the majority of residents did not want to be part of Russia. Both the Ukrainian and Russian governments were driven by the needs of the respective capitalist classes that they serve to maximise the size of their guaranteed markets and the extent of raw materials under their control by maximising their country’s territory. For this reason, when Russia first entered Ukraine in February 2022, we called for opposition to both sides. At the same time, given that our “own” capitalist rulers and its U.S. senior partners were clearly backing Ukraine, we had a tilt that especially emphasized opposition to Ukraine. We demanded an end to all Western sanctions against Russia and an end to all Western military aid to Ukraine.

    However, even from the first days of the Russian intervention there was another aspect to the conflict. The Western imperialist powers wanted to extend NATO to Russia’s borders in order to intimidate her. The imperialist powers wanted to prevent Russia from becoming a potential great power rival and hoped that they could instead, one day, again reduce Russia to the humiliated and dependent status that she had in the first decade after the capitalist counterrevolution. The imperial powers also hoped to pressure Russia into abandoning her friendly ties with socialistic China so that they could advance their main global strategic goal – to overthrow the Chinese workers state. Ideally, the imperialist powers hoped that through exerting pressure on Russia they could foster a “colour revolution” there that would bring to power a Western subservient regime – like the Yeltsin-Putin regime of the 1990s or the Ukrainian regime of today. Against these plans, Russia’s rulers understandably wanted to retard the encroachment of NATO to its borders.

    Initially we judged that this driving force of the conflict was less a factor than the inter-capitalist squabble for territory. However, in our initial detailed coverage of the conflict, we foreshadowed the possibility that the antagonism between the Western imperialist powers and Russia could become the main aspect of the war. Within several weeks into the conflict, this is what indeed occurred. This was shown in late March-early April 2022 when Ukraine and Russia were on the verge of agreeing to a peace deal. However, that was scuttled by not only pressure on Zelensky from Ukraine’s fascist groups but by the diktats that the Western powers made to Kiev. Indeed on 9 April, then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a surprise visit to Kiev where he publicly told the Ukrainian government that no peace deal should be made with Russia. The following month, the U.S. announced a package of arms to Ukraine that was on a qualitatively greater scale than earlier military backing. It had become clear that although the element of inter-capitalist squabble between Ukraine and Russia remained, this was now the minor factor in a war that had become largely a conflict between Western imperialism and Russia, with Ukraine the proxy of the former. Although Russia’s capitalist rulers themselves long to build a new imperialist empire, they currently have neither the capital to do so nor the alliance of a wealthy imperialist power that could allow them to gain a stake in imperialist lootings through acting as a military enforcer for their ally. Therefore, what we now have is a proxy war between the real imperialist plunderers of the world and a capitalist but not imperialist Russia. Therefore, we in Trotskyist Platform called to defend Russia in the conflict, headlining in an article outlining our updated position: “Don’t Let the Western Capitalist Rulers Reinforce Their Tyranny Over the World! Defeat U.S., British, Australian and German Imperialism’s Proxy War to Weaken and Stifle Russia!” As our article explained:

    Such a defeat would weaken the ability of the imperialists to mobilise further predatory interventions abroad. It would also deter their plans to use Taiwan as a proxy to pressure socialistic China or even to incite a world war against the socialistic giant. Moreover, any setback for the U.S. imperialists and their allies in this proxy war would give encouragement to the resistance struggles of all those being subjugated by the U.S. and its allies elsewhere, like the Palestinian people suffering under incessant Israeli terror. More generally, a defeat for the Western powers in their Ukraine proxy war could only encourage the toiling masses of Africa, Latin America, the South Pacific and most of Asia to resist in their own lands the various Western capitalists that super-exploit labour, plunder natural resources, leach loan interest repayments, seize markets and manipulate and stand over governments. Within the Western countries themselves, a defeat for the capitalist ruling classes in their proxy war would weaken their authority. It would thus open opportunities for the working class and oppressed to wage mass resistance against soaring rents and food and fuel prices, plummeting real wages, the incessant expansion of insecure work forms and brutal racist oppression of persecuted communities.

    Our updated position meant that we were no longer calling for the Russian working-class to oppose the war effort of its own rulers – we were only making such an appeal to the Ukrainian masses. But for our work in Australia, the updated line did not change our fundamental slogans on the war. What it did do is to increase the urgency to oppose Australian military support to Ukraine as part of opposing the entire U.S.-NATO-led proxy war against Russia. As part of this it is necessary to campaign to free all leftist, anti-war, anti-nationalist and other political prisoners in Ukraine. This is not only to save tens of thousands of people from terrible suffering or even torture and death but to expose the lie of the Australian and other Western rulers that they are “working to defend democracy in Ukraine”.

    Free the Political Prisoners in Australia Too!

    It is possible through a campaign of exposure and agitation in Australia and other Western countries to make headway in winning the release of the political prisoners in Ukraine. This is because the Western regimes ability to make their own populations accept military aid to Ukraine depends on convincing their own populations that the arms are going to “defend a democracy against authoritarianism”. Therefore, exposure of the anti-democratic nature of the Ukrainian regime could significantly embarrass their Western masters and force the latter to push the Ukrainian regime to try and improve its image by releasing some of its political prisoners. In a similar but slightly different way that is how opponents of Cold War McCarthysim, demanding freedom for pro-North Korea political prisoner in Australia, Chan Han Choi and an end to the broader McCarthyist persecution of supporters of socialistic states, ended up pressuring the Australian regime to give Choi a much shorter sentence than the regime had been planning. Since attacking socialistic North Korea and its socialistic Chinese ally over “human rights” is the key method that the Australian rulers use to mobilise their own populations behind their Cold War drive against these countries, our agitation, exposing how the Australian rulers were violating the human rights of a North Korea supporter and how this was symptomatic of both the bogus character of the regime’s claims to stand for “human rights” and of the biased, anti-working class nature of its “justice system”, was very politically damaging to them. And it is only when our struggle against the capitalist exploiting class – and the state organs that enforce their interests – does political damage to them does the capitalist ruling class ever retreat. So let us fight to win freedom for political prisoners in Ukraine by politically damaging the Australian and other Western rulers through exposing the mass incarceration of dissidents by their supposedly “democratic”, Ukrainian proxies.

    We cannot call for freeing political prisoners in Ukraine without also calling to free the political prisoners in Australia. The latest of these is David McBride, the whistleblower who was last month despicably sentenced to 5 years and 8 months in prison for passing information to the media that had the effect of exposing a large number of horrific war crimes by Australian special forces troops in Afghanistan. The other three political prisoners here are victims of the Australian ruling class’ enthusiastic participation in imperialism’s Cold War drive against socialistic China. The latest of these political prisoners to be jailed was Di Sanh Duong. Duong was outrageously sentenced to nearly three years in prison for supposedly “preparing to conduct foreign interference” on behalf of China, because he … publicly donated money to a Melbourne public hospital charity! Additionally, many Aboriginal people in prison, although not formally political prisoners, are in practice facing a political persecution. For they have been hit with not only over-policing but with especially harsh punishments because of the enduring racist nature of the Australian regime.

    So we demand: Free the Aboriginal victims of Australia’s racist “justice system”! Free David McBride! Free Di Sanh Duong and fellow Cold War prisoners in Australia, Daniel Duggan and Alexander Csergo! Free the thousands of leftist, anti-war, anti-nationalist and other political prisoners in Ukraine!

    The post Free the Leftist, Anti-War, and Anti-Nationalist Political Prisoners in Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Look away from Israel’s crimes, they say, blame Iran

    They say Iran “masterminded” a Canadian student encampment and is “destabilizing” West Asia. But these crude ‘blame Iran’ claims are nothing more than pathetic attempts to legitimate genocidal Zionism.

    Recently, various commentators, politicians and Zionist groups promoted a deranged report Iran “masterminded” the student divestment encampment at McGill. Seeking to frame student opposition to their university’s complicity with Israel’s holocaust as Iranian interference, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, Canada Proud, MP Kevin Vuong, senator Leo Housakos, conservative candidate Neil Oberman, influencer Yasmine Mohammed, journalist Sam Cooper, Hampstead mayor Jeremy Levi and others shared an Iran International report headlined “Iran masterminded anti-Israel protest in Canadian university”. Drawing from an analysis by an unnamed official at US cyber company XPOZ, the article claims large numbers of social media posts about the McGill encampment were in Farsi and may have come from Iranian government aligned accounts. A National Post article “Disinformation experts warn Iran, Russia and others encouraging anti-Israel protests in Canada” used the same data though it was slightly more circumspect in concluding Iran “masterminded” the encampment. It was shared by Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre.

    As someone who went to the encampment regularly and has followed activism at McGill for a quarter century it’s hard to not laugh at the absurdity. In the lead up to the encampment several students went on a two-month hunger strike to pressure the university to divest and there were a number of large anti-genocide protests on campus during the last academic year. For a decade there have been referendums on Palestine and in November 78.7% of undergraduates called on the administration to sever ties with “any corporations, institutions or individuals complicit in genocide, settler-colonialism, apartheid, or ethnic cleansing against Palestinians.” It was the largest referendum turnout in the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) history.

    The broader context in which the encampment grew out of also demonstrates the silliness of the ‘blame Iran’ claim. The students who set up the McGill encampment were quite obviously mimicking the tactics of their US counterparts. And the tactic had little to do with social media. I doubt the reliability of the data quoted by Iran International and the National Post but even if lots of Farsi language Iranian government bots promoted the encampment what impact did this have on a physical occupation of a campus in Montreal?

    At a higher level of ‘blame Iran’ idiocy, foreign affairs minister Melanie Joly is claiming Iran is “destabilizing” the region. A statement she released on Sunday regarding rising tensions in the region concluded, “I reiterated our call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, for the immediate release of all hostages, and demand that Iran and its proxies refrain from destabilizing actions in the region.” On July 26 Canada, Australia and New Zealand released a joint statement with a similar formulation. It noted, “We condemn Iran’s attack against Israel of April 13-14, call on Iran to refrain from further destabilizing actions in the Middle East, and demand that Iran and its affiliated groups, including Hizballah, cease their attacks.”

    Canadian officials never refer to Israel as “destabilizing” the region even though that country has killed hundreds of thousands in Gaza and stolen ever more Palestinian land in the West Bank all the while repeatedly attacking Lebanon and Syria and assassinating the Palestinians’ main ceasefire negotiator in Iran.

    As part of its blame Iran nonsense, Ottawa has ignored Israel’s recent assassination of the Hamas leader in Tehran and top Hezbolah military commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut. But they will no doubt denounce Iran or Hezbollah when they respond.

    Four months ago, Ottawa remained silent when Israel damaged Canada’s embassy in Damascus while murdering eight Iranian officials at the country’s diplomatic compound. Then the Canadian government condemned Iran when it responded to Israel’s flagrant war crime.

    As part of this blame Iran mantra Ottawa recently joined the US in designating the 100,000-member Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist organization. Listing the IRGC bolsters Israeli violence in the region.

    Canada continues to strengthen Israel as it commits horrific crime after horrific crime across the region. As death from illness and malnutrition grows due to 10 months of IOF barbarism in Gaza, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently said it may be “justified and moral” to starve 2 million Palestinians but the world won’t let Israel do it. At the same time, Knesset members are openly debating the legitimacy of raping the 10,000 Palestinian hostages Israel holds in what a recent B’tselem report refers to as “torture camps”.

    But instead of focusing on Israel’s crimes we’re told to look away. At first, we were told Israel’s genocide was all Hamas’ fault. Now it’s Iran that is to blame.

    Israel and its supporters are like 4-year-olds caught with their hands in the cookie jar. It’s always someone else’s fault. Except this is not about a stolen sweet. This is about the world watching a genocide in real time and doing nothing about it.

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    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Military Has Polluted Guam for Decades. This Year, It Could Get Even Worse.

    Naek Flores’s day-to-day life in Guam has always been shadowed by the U.S. military. The U.S. military owns about one-third of Guam, where it stations three important bases in which about 10,000 military personnel are located. For the Pentagon, Guam is one of its most strategic locations in the Pacific, while the CIA credits military operations as being “the island’s most important…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • New Marching Orders

    No wonder there is a recruitment crisis in the US military.

    The post New Marching Orders first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Labour government confusing EVERYONE over arms exports to Israel

    The following article is a comment piece from Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT)

    The government must clarify its position on issuing Israel arms exports and new licences. Amid media reports that export licensing officials have suspended the processing of new applications for arms exports to Israel, government has repeatedly been quoted as stating there has been “no change” in its approach.

    This failure to clearly articulate the current status of the UK’s arms export licencing regime compounds impunity for Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, and is against the public interest.

    Israel arms exports: what is going on?

    Despite what some reports have claimed, the UK does not have an “arms embargo” in place, and continues to supply UK components and equipment for use in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.

    As long as the government refuses to sufficiently explain its position, it allows incorrect reports of an embargo to spread while UK continues to supply arms and components to Israel. Most importantly, existing licences in place include the Open General licence that allows unlimited deliveries of components for Israel’s F-35 combat aircraft, which they are using on a daily basis to bomb Gaza, including with 2000lb bombs.

    A suspension of export licences should have been initiated as soon as the UK government was aware of reports of Israel’s violations of international law, ten months ago.

    Foreign secretary David Lammy has said the government are seeking new legal advice regarding Israel’s compliance with international law in their war in Gaza, to inform their decisions on whether to halt some or all arms exports to Israel.

    It has been reported that this review includes attempting to link specific weapons to specific incidents. Such a review should not be necessary, in the face of the overwhelming evidence of Israeli war crimes presented by the UN and numerous organisations on the ground.

    The International Criminal Court’s Chief Prosecutor has requested arrest warrants for Israeli leaders for war crimes including “extermination”, while the ICJ has ruled that Israel’s actions could plausibly amount to genocide. Israel is continuing to obstruct the flow of aid to Gaza, leading to horrific levels of hunger and disease.

    Stop the “obscene slaughter”

    CAAT’s research coordinator Sam Perlo-Freeman said:

    The case for an immediate arms embargo has been overwhelming for months, and the government’s review appears to be an exercise in kicking the can down the road, while desperately digging for some excuse to maintain the flow of F-35 components, by far the most significant of UK arms sales to Israel.

    A possible suspension of processing of new licence applications could indicate at least that the government is serious in its intent to consider a change in policy. CAAT urges the government to implement a full two-way arms embargo on Israel immediately, as the most concrete step the UK can take to bring an end to this obscene slaughter.

    Featured image via Amnesty

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Military Rule and the Disappearing Critics

    Democracy can be considered a commodity with multitude of varieties. Each elite ruling class claims theirs is the best suitable for its people, and thus imposes it on them. Mind you, not pure democracy — government of the people, by the people, for the people” — because that would amount to nothing less than socialism. The “democracy” that countries profess to practice is nothing but an interpretation of the ruling class in those countries with the aim to control its general populace.

    India has Modi-cracy where one man, Narendra Modi, is running the show. A year ago, he boasted: “India is the mother of democracy.” If India is the mother of democracy, then Modi must be the illegitimate father of democracy who was till last month busy Hindu-izing the country. (He did not get a simple majority in the June 2024 elections, so his Hindu-ization project has slowed down, but it remains doubtful he’ll give up so easily. He could instigate a war with Pakistan, declare an emergency, and assume extraordinaire power. Never underestimate the power of elected fascists.)

    England has monacracy and the taxpayers bear the burden of monarchy which can’t be called a true democracy.

    The United States has oligacracy where a small group of extremely wealthy people decide the fate of more than 335 million common people in the name of democracy. Biden could fight the proxy war against Russia or support the genocide of Palestinians and nothing changes; but he loses a debate against Trump and the wealthy halt $90 million in donations.

    Military Power

    Then there is Pakistan’s militocracy. The military has ruled that country, directly or indirectly, for most of that nation’s existence. When the military favors a politician, that person becomes the prime minister but has to be subservient because the rein (important portfolios such as foreign policy, defense, etc.) is always determined by the military. When the premier tries to control the entire government machinery, that person is deposed and could be sent to prison. Politicians are at the army’s mercy.

    The Pakistan military and governments constantly plead and beg the IMF, Saudi rulers, and UAE rulers for a billion dollars or more.

    The military torpedoed Nawaz Sharis’s past efforts to improve relations with India. But it now wants better relations. The increase in trade with India can help Pakistan to overcome its dire economic and financial condition.

    The 2018 election saw cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party become the Prime Minister, with the military’s blessing . But when Khan tried to do things his own way, a vote of no-confidence was engineered and Khan was ousted in 2022. At present, he’s in jail with over 100 cases registered against him. Even when a case is dismissed, police or some agency person issues another arrest warrant and he gets re-arrested. Khan, his wife Bushra Bibi, and some PTI members are entangled in this vicious cycle.

    After more than a year in various prisons all over Pakistan, Sanam Javed of PTI was released on July 10, 2024 by the Lahore High Court (in Punjab province) but soon after the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) arrested her and took her to Islamabad. On July 14, she was let go but was re-arrested by the police of Balochistan. She was freed on July 15 by the Islamabad High Court which restrained police from arresting her till July 18. The IHC justice asked her to “avoid unnecessary rhetoric” or else the court would reverse its order. In other words, keep your mouth shut. Her lawyer guaranteed that she would refrain from such language. On June 18, the IHC considered her arrest to be illegal and she was set free. Immediately, the Punjab government challenged IHC verdict.

    While in power, Khan had visited Russia the day it had launched the special military operation into Ukraine. Khan was also critical of the US. The US is never too busy not to interfere in other countries’ affairs. David Lu, the Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, asked Pakistan’s then ambassador to the US, Asad Majeed, to get rid of Khan.

    The army’s open hostility and its tactics to break up Khan’s party PTI by levying various charges and arresting and re-arresting PTI members, including Khan, saw Khan’s supporters out on the streets on May 9, 2023; they did some damage to military installations. The army in response, came up with an event called Youm-e-Takreem Shuhada-e-Pakistan or Martyrs’ Reverence Day to be celebrated on May 25 every year to remember the soldiers who lose their lives while serving.

    Seven and a half months after Khan was ousted, in November 2022, the retiring army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa conceded the army’s meddling in politics.

    “… our army which day and night remains busy in serving the nation, is often made the subject of criticism.” “A major reason for this is the army’s interference in politics for the last 70 years which is unconstitutional.

    “This is why in February last year [2021] the army, after great deliberation, decided that it would never interfere in any political matter. I assure you we are strictly adamant on this and will remain so.”

    One wonders why leaders accept their lies and mistakes, or talk peace and the danger of military-industrial complex, etc only when they’re leaving or have left. Bajwa was lying.

    Today, the army is still omnipresent. The current army Chief Asim Munir meets with the business community, invites winning athletes, issues regular statements, and so on. The current Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) took over power after military approval. His older brother and former three-incomplete-term prime minister Nawaz Sharif came back from exile with military’s approval.

    Disappearing Critics

    The intelligence agencies in Pakistan such as MI (Military Intelligence), IB (Intelligence Bureau), ISI (Inter Services Intelligence), etc. take care of the critics — journalists and common people — who write, speak, or protest against the military interference in government affairs.

    Sometimes they are abducted, tortured, and then released. Other times they are killed with no clues left.

    In 2011, the Islamabad Bureau Chief of Asia Times, Syed Saleem Shahzad was tortured and murdered. News anchor and journalist Arshad Sharif, a critic of military, was shot dead in 2022, by police in Nairobi, Kenya. In May 2024, four journalists were murdered. Since 1992, more than 60 journalists have lost their lives. Then there are those who have disappeared and never reappeared. In many instances, the victims are harassed and blackmailed, their phones are tapped, and they are detained illegally. The agencies never issue any kind of statement because that would be tantamount to accepting guilt.

    Thousands of people are missing in Pakistan, without any clue as to where they are. The number of enforced disappearances in 2023 was 51.

    Then there is the Pakistani province of Balochistan — a vast land mass with the smallest population that is underdeveloped and ignored by governments. This has caused resentment among the Balochis that has resulted in insurgency. The first six months of 2024 saw 197 persons missing — most of them Balochis. On July 28, three persons died and eight were injured during a clash between Balochistan Yakjehti Committee (BYC) and security forces. People from the province overcame roadblocks set up by the authorities and met at Gwader’s Marine Drive for the Baloch Rajee Muchi (Baloch National Gathering). BYC leader Dr Mahrang Baloch asked security officials to free the apprehended protestors. She proclaimed:

    “Until the release of our people, the sit-in will continue at Marine Drive.”

    More than 5,000 Balochis are missing. Families of missing and/or killed Balochis demonstrate holding photos of victims every now and then but to no avail. In protests, Baloch women are in the forefront. They live in a tortured state of mind not knowing whether their sons, husbands, fathers are alive or not. In January 2024, Pakistan’s caretaker prime minister, Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar, got mad at Baloch protestors and called supporters and “relatives of those fighting against the state” as “advocates of terrorists in Balochistan.” Kakar himself hails from Balochistan.

    On the night of May 14, 2024, the Kashmiri poet, journalist Ahmed Farhad Shah was kidnapped by four men outside his home while returning from a dinner. A petition from his family was filed with Islamabad High Court (IHC) saying that Shah was abducted for his criticism of ISI. According to his wife, Syeda Urooj Zainab, the agencies felt that Shah was a PTI and Imran Khan supporter, so they were after him. Zainab refutes that impression and says he has also supported PML-N when it was under pressure by the Pakistan’s military. One of the judges at IHC, Justice Mohsin Akhtar Kayani, initiated an enquiry and ordered that Shah be found and produced before the court. Two weeks later, it was reported that he was in police custody. But then the federal government asked the IHC on June 1 to close the case. On June 4, his bail was rejected by an anti-terrorism court in Azad Jammu and Kashmir. Critics are treated as terrorists! Since then, there has been no news on Shah, it is doubtful if they’ve found him.

    The Advocate Imaan Zainab Mazari-Hazir, a Baloch, who is Shah’s counsel, has herself been harassed, threatened, arrested, re-arrested, for calling the Pakistan army “terrorists” and for supporting the protesting Baloch students.

    Ahmed Farhad Shah is a poet whose poems are critical of the army. Here is the translation of one of his poems originally written in Hindi/Urdu.

    he thinks of his own freewill

    he thinks of his own freewill, pick him up
    he’s somewhat different than our henchmen, pick him up
    the arrogant ones we abducted before him, pick him up
    he’s is enquiring about them, pick him up
    he was clearly ordered what to speak and what not to, but he speaks his own mind, pick him up
    the minions whom we honored with positions and rewards, he’s laughing at those clever souls, pick him up
    he questions why there’s peace and security problem, he is the peace and security problem, pick him up*
    he was told to see only what we show him, but he uses his own discretion, pick him up
    this lunatic is questioning extent of our power, he has crossed the line, pick him up

    * Farhad reminds his audience that just for raising the question of peace and security, fifty people were imprisoned.

    The post Military Rule and the Disappearing Critics first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Don’t Believe the Rampant Disinformation Over Israel’s Escalation in Lebanon

    Israel has been trading strikes with Hezbollah, the Lebanese political party and armed group, ever since October. So far, the strikes have killed at least 542 people in Lebanon, including 114 civilians and at least 22 soldiers and 25 civilians in northern Israel and Israeli-occupied territory. But one recent back-and-forth has heightened the tension at the border between the two countries…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • CND will be marking 79 years since the US dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

    Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) groups across Britain will start to hold nationwide commemorations from this weekend to mark the 79th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    CND: marking 79 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki

    On Tuesday 6 August, CND general secretary Kate Hudson will attend the annual Hiroshima Day event in Tavistock Square, London, starting at 12pm. She will honour the hundreds of thousands of victims whose lives were cruelly taken in an instant and warn about the heightened nuclear dangers caused by the war in Ukraine and the ongoing crisis in the Middle East.

    This year’s commemoration comes as nuclear weapons states surge ahead with modernising and expanding their arsenals. Nuclear proliferation and escalation also remain a major risk: the US is bringing nuclear weapons back to Britain for the first time since 2008; Russia has moved its own nuclear weapons to Belarus, and in some quarters of Europe there is talk of developing Europe’s very own nuclear weapons system.

    In the Middle East, the ongoing aggression in Gaza by nuclear-armed Israel has left the entire region teetering on the brink of a wider regional war. CND calls on the British government to take positive action to reduce these tensions and nuclear risks.

    ‘Such acts of barbarity must never be allowed again’

    Hudson said:

    CND groups will be gathering across the country to honour the victims of the atrocities that occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki 79 years ago, and we invite members of the public to join us at these commemorations.

    It is important that we remind ourselves that such acts of barbarity must never be allowed to happen again, and that we must take action to prevent another nuclear catastrophe.

    London Region CND chair Carol Turner said:

    The world has never been closer to nuclear war. Remembering the victims of the atomic bombing of Japan in 1945 is a sobering reminder of just what nuclear war would mean to people and planet.

    Across the country, events are taking place.

    Get involved with CND

    CND groups organise events to mark the anniversaries of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Why not attend your local one to pay your respects, and meet other like-minded people who want a world without these weapons of mass destruction? There is an interactive map with all the events here.

    Or, get your town signed up to a nuclear ban. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) entered into force in 2021. Countries across the world support this historic agreement which bans nuclear weapons in participating states. Towns and cities around the world – including Washington, Paris, Edinburgh and Manchester – are bypassing their governments’ opposition and becoming Nuclear Ban Communities as they sign up to support the TPNW. Find out how you can campaign to make your area a Nuclear Ban Community here.

    CND is a movement that campaigns for a world without nuclear weapons, so that we’ll never see another Hiroshima or Nagasaki again. Join the group here.

    Featured image via CND

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • As The Racket is re-released, Matt Kennard tells the Canary we have an ‘Anglo-American empire’

    Around the re-release of his book The Racket, Declassified UK co-founder Matt Kennard spoke to the Canary about the way the US empire works, and the role the UK plays in that.

    The Racket

    Kennard once worked inside the establishment media and got comments directly from people at the top of the US-dominated global economic system. He then broke away to tell people about what was going on, via his book The Racket.

    After setting up Declassified UK alongside historian Mark Curtis, he dove deeper into the role of British foreign policy in the world.

    And in The Racket’s updated second edition, which came out recently, he described how Britain didn’t simply pass the baton of imperialism on to the USA after World War Two. Instead, he said, it “became a “junior partner” to the US hegemon”:

    The City of London’s role as the world’s financial capital which spreads neoliberalism around the world, the UK’s vast network of military bases, alongside its corporate giants like BP and BAE Systems, showed Britain still served a critical imperial role for its senior partner.

    ‘Establishment journalists allow the Anglo-American empire to operate in secret’

    In The Racket, Kennard spoke about his realisation in recent years that “the infrastructure of the US empire which had colonized so much of the world had also colonized my home country”. And actually, he stressed, Britain “appeared to be more completely under the control of its American ally than any country I’d looked into around the world for this book”.

    He continued by asserting that “The hidden fist of the US empire which I’d seen deployed all over the developing world – the massive American military – was also occupying Britain”. In particular, he said:

    I found the US Air Force (USAF) had 9,730 personnel permanently deployed throughout Britain, a number which was increasing rapidly. Britain, in fact, hosted the third highest level of USAF personnel of any country in the world, ahead of historic US military outposts like South Korea and Italy.

    Kennard explained to the Canary the key role of the US military in Britain, insisting that “UK territory effectively operates as US territory”. He emphasised that:

    The US military presence in Britain is extremely important for the American imperial project. Bombing missions to Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, have taken off from the US bases in the UK. Over 12,000 US military personnel are permanently stationed in our country, across 11 so-called RAF sites.

    But we are not allowed to know anything about what happens there, they are black sites for the US military, which is again a huge boon for it as it can operate in complete secret in a way it can’t at home.

    There is also a massive US intelligence presence, from the CIA at RAF Croughton to the NSA at GCHQ Bude in Cornwall. Probably thousands of American spies are deployed in Britain and again what they do is completely secret.

    It’s unclear if the UK government even knows, or asks to know, what they do. UK territory effectively operates as US territory, there is no discernable distinction between them in terms of governance of military and intelligence matters.

    But perhaps more importantly, how the UK retains importance for its senior partner in this Anglo-American influence is to allow the Americans unrestricted access to its overseas bases, from Cyprus to Bahrain to Gibraltar.

    The US Air Force has been using our base on Cyprus to ship weapons to Israel during the Gaza genocide, for example. But it is impossible to get any information about this. The UK government says it doesn’t comment on allies’ movements, and the Pentagon refuses to answer questions.

    This goes for all Britain’s far-flung overseas bases. This is an Anglo-American empire, which is allowed to operate in secret because journalists don’t touch it.

    ‘The US works non-stop to keep UK politicians loyal to the empire’

    In The Racket, Kennard said “The colonization by the US empire of Britain became particularly clear when the Labour Party elected Jeremy Corbyn leader in September 2015”. Corbyn “was dangerous to the rule of the British establishment, but also the ability of the US to retain the UK as a vassal state”.

    So tolerance of his popularity and power was unacceptable. As Kennard told the Canary:

    The most shocking thing for me was having the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo come to London in June 2019, six months before the general election, and be recorded saying privately that the US government would “do its level best” to stop Jeremy Corbyn get elected.

    I’m not aware of clearer evidence of a foreign power explicitly promising to interfere in the British electoral system. We clearly don’t know what Pompeo meant when he said this, but he was director of the CIA from 2017-18, and in this role had overseen plans to “kill or capture” Julian Assange who had asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

    These stories show the US sees Britain as its 51st state, and works non-stop to keep the political class loyal to the American empire. Another shocking revelation was that Ruth Smeeth (now Anderson) who was one of the most relentless public critics of Corbyn as leader of Labour was a “strictly protect” informant for the US embassy in London. This was revealed by WikiLeaks in 2010.

    Most shocking of all, though, is this interference by the US in Britain is not covered at all by the British media. The Pompeo comments made the papers for a day, but there was no follow up, no investigation of what these promises meant. On the Ruth Anderson revelations, it’s never made the papers.

    ‘Pushing British progressives into a pro-US position’

    Propaganda efforts both in the media and in politics, meanwhile, have sought to corral would-be left-wingers into pro-imperialist worldviews. Kennard mentioned in The Racket both the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the British-American Project (BAP) as organisations active in this campaign. And he explained that:

    The US was integral to building a British political system that made a “different way” next to impossible.

    Speaking to the Canary, he said:

    The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was set up in 1983 to do what the CIA had up until then done covertly—and do it overtly. The CIA had come along under a lot of pressure in the 1970s, with various scandals and revelations from the Church Committee of 1975. The NED was meant to guard against this.

    So the NED in Britain acts like an overt CIA. It funds media and civil society groups, with the intention of subsuming them into the Atlantacist, pro-US empire political framework of our country. It mostly funds “liberal” or “progressive” groups and uses nice language to describe its projects, words like “freedom” and “openness” and “democracy”.

    These were concepts that were grounded in the cultural Cold War, but continue today.

    NED has funded groups from Index on Censorship (which was next to silent on Julian Assange) and Bellingcat (which is next to silent on US/UK crimes), so its priorities are clear.

    The British-American Project was founded two years later, in 1985, and its aim was to push back against the anti-imperialist current in Labour which had actually got into the leadership during Michael Foot’s leadership from 1980 to 1983.

    The aim was to cultivate the left away from these anti-imperialist positions by establishing a network, focused on progressive individuals, and putting them alongside military, corporate and intelligence figures.

    It is still very much going 40 years later, and many of the most prominent critics of Corbyn were or are members, including Peter Mandelson, Trevor Phillips, Anas Sarwar, Alison McGovern, Sadiq Khan, and many more. It also focuses on signing journalists up to the American imperial project, including particularly the BBC.

    The NED, as Kennard and Curtis reported in Declassified UK in 2022, had “ploughed over £2.6m into seven British independent media groups over the past five years”. Kennard also outlined in 2022 that the BAP had long “worked on recruiting dozens of influential British journalists from across the media” such as BBC “leading lights Jeremy Paxman and Jane Hill”.

    Change the media, challenge the racket

    In The Racket, Kennard described how the US empire has finely honed its techniques, which it applies around the world (including in the UK) to ensure subservience to elite interests. And the establishment media plays a key role in propping up this system.

    Kennard explained how “liberal and left parts of the mainstream media are as compromised by corporate money and private interests as their conservative rivals, perhaps even more so”. However, the growth of independent media in the age of the internet “scares the establishment senseless”. And that’s the hope we have to wield against the powerful, intricate system of control the empire has set up.

    As Kennard told the Canary:

    I think Britain is one of the most interesting places in the world for independent media. We have loads of exciting and quality outlets now, from the Canary to Double Down to Electronic Intifada to Declassified UK to Middle East Eye to Alborada, which make it much easier to bypass the mainstream media which often acts as just an adjunct to British establishment power.

    Building its capacity and influence is a long-term project but it is a vital task because if we ever get another leader like Corbyn who rises up we need to have an infrastructure in place that can support him and combat the inevitable lies and distortion. During the Corbyn years, the Canary came under wide-ranging attack because it was maybe the only outlet that was reaching enough people to worry the powers that be.

    Corbyn was a lonely figure getting hammered by the billionaire-owned press, and the Guardian, and it was tough to fight back. Next time, we will have an arsenal of independent and rigorous independent media that tell the truth and push back against the attacks which are inevitable in our system, which is a media-sustained oligarchy.

    We need a democracy.

    Featured image via Bloomsbury Publishing and Politics Joe – YouTube

    By Ed Sykes

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • “Militarism Isn’t a Solution”: Rami Khouri on Rocket Attack in Golan Heights, Israeli Vow of Revenge


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • “Militarism Isn’t a Solution”: Rami Khouri on Rocket Attack in Golan Heights, Israeli Vow of Revenge

    Seg4 golanheights attack rami 5

    Israel has vowed to retaliate against Hezbollah after blaming the Lebanese group for a rocket attack Sunday in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in Syria that killed 12 children at a soccer field. Hezbollah has denied responsibility for the attack in the village of Majdal Shams, home to members of the Druze community, an Arab-speaking minority group. Israel claimed the victims were Israeli citizens, though many Druze in the area do not have Israeli citizenship and are in fact Syrian citizens. The deadly attack has further stoked fear of a wider regional war. Palestinian American journalist Rami Khouri says that while the rocket attack looks as though it could have been an accident, there is still risk of more violence. “The danger is always there that an accident could spark a bigger confrontation,” he says. “Militarism isn’t a solution. Militarism is part of the problem.”


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Gun Violence and the Marketing of Militarism

    Image by Heather Mount.

    Between armed violence and fascism within the United States and the US government’s support for genocide abroad, manufacturers of weapons are profiting wildly. Within the US, arms producers are responsible for fueling war crimes in Gaza and mass shootings across the United States. The profit models of these companies are the same: more violence means more customers. Stoke the fear, fury, and legitimacy of conflict to sell more of your product. Generate a public culture receptive to the idea of weapons as the answer to insecurity, including through the construction and entrenchment of gender and racial power dynamics.

    Profitmaking requires marketing. Enter the so-called militainment industry—the marketing of guns and militarism through films, television, video games, and now social media influencers. Gun manufacturers and military agencies, especially in the United States, have long had an outsized influence on the entertainment industry, and they use gendered and racialized tropes to promote gun sales along with a wider culture of militarism, war, and armed violence. But over the last two decades, the methods by which gun manufacturers and other military contractors have been able to influence people across many geographies—in particular young, white, cisgendered, heteronormative men—have become increasingly insidious. And the ramifications for violence are profound.

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    The post Gun Violence and the Marketing of Militarism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ray Acheson.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The World Court has cleared the fog hiding western support for Israel’s crimes

    Don’t be fooled. The ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 19 July that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is unlawful is earth-shattering. Israel is a rogue state, according to the world’s highest court.

    For that reason, the judgment will be studiously ignored by the cabal of western states and their medias that for decades have so successfully run cover for Israel.

    Doubters need only watch the reception Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu receives during his visit to the United States this week.

    Even though he is currently being pursued for war crimes by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, the US Congress will give him a hero’s welcome when he addresses its representatives on Wednesday.

    The warm handshakes and standing ovations will be a reminder that Netanyahu has had the full backing of western powers throughout the nine-month slaughter of at least 16,000 Palestinian children in Gaza – with another 21,000 missing, most of them under rubble.

    The welcome will be a reminder that western capitals are fully on board with Israel’s levelling of Gaza and the starvation of its population – in what the same court concluded way back in January amounted to a “plausible genocide”.

    And it will serve as a heavy slap in the face to those like the World Court committed to international law – reminding them that the West and its most favoured client state believe they are untouchable.

    Western politicians and columnists will keep emphasising that the World Court is offering nothing more than an “advisory opinion” and one that is “non-binding”.

    What they won’t point out is that this opinion is the collective view of the world’s most eminent judges on international law, the people best positioned to rule on the occupation’s legality.

    And it is non-binding only because the western powers who control our international bodies plan to do nothing to implement a decision that doesn’t suit them.

    Nonetheless, the ruling will have dramatic consequences for Israel, and its western patrons, even if those consequences will take months, years or even decades to play out.

    ‘Top secret’ warning

    Last week’s judgment is separate from the case accepted in January by the ICJ that put Israel on trial for genocide in Gaza. A decision on that matter may still be many months away.

    This ruling was in response to a request from the United Nations General Assembly in December 2022 for advice on the legality of Israel’s 57-year occupation.

    That may sound more mundane a deliberation than the one on genocide, but the implications ultimately are likely to be every bit as profound.

    Those not familiar with international law may underestimate the importance of the World Court’s ruling if only because they had already assumed the occupation was illegal.

    But that is not how international law works. A belligerent occupation is permitted so long as it satisfies two conditions.

    First, it must be strictly military, designed to protect the security of the occupying state and safeguard the rights of the occupied people.

    And second, it must be a temporary measure – while negotiations are conducted to restore civilian rule and allow the occupied people self-determination.

    Astonishingly, it has taken 57 years for the world’s highest court to deliver a conclusion that should have been staring it – and everyone else – in the face all that time.

    The military nature of the occupation was subverted almost from the moment Israel occupied the Palestinian territories in June 1967.

    Within months, Israel had chosen to transfer Jewish civilians – mostly extreme religious nationalists – into the occupied Palestinian territories to help colonise them.

    Israel knew that this was a gross violation of international law because its own legal adviser warned it of as much in a “top secret” memo unearthed by the Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg some two decades ago.

    In a declaration enlarging on the ICJ’s reasoning, Court President Nawaf Salam specifically referenced the warnings of Theodor Meron, who was the Israeli foreign ministry’s legal expert at the time.

    In September 1967, his memo cautioned that any decision to establish civilian settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories “contravenes explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention”. Those provisions, he added, were “aimed at preventing colonization”.

    Nine days later, the Israeli government rode roughshod over Meron’s memo and assisted a group of young Israelis in setting up the first settlement at Kfar Etzion.

    Sham peace-making

    Today, hundreds of illegal settlements – many of them home to what amount to armed militias – control more than half of the West Bank and much of East Jerusalem.

    Rather than protecting the rights of Palestinians under occupation, as international law demands, the Israeli military assists Jewish settlers in terrorising the Palestinians. The aim is to drive them off their land.

    In the words of the Israeli government, the settlements are there to “Judaise” Palestinian territory. In the words of everyone else, they are there to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population.

    Which brings us to Israel’s second violation of the laws of occupation. In transferring hundreds of thousands of settlers into the occupied territories, Israel intentionally blocked any chance of a Palestinian state emerging.

    The settlements weren’t makeshift encampments. Some soon developed into small cities, such as Ariel and Maale Adumim, with shopping malls, parks, public pools, synagogues, factories, libraries, schools and colleges.

    There was nothing “temporary” about them. They were there to incrementally annex Palestinian territory under cover of an occupation that Washington and its European allies conspired to pretend was temporary.

    The whole Oslo process initiated in the early 1990s was a switch-and-bait exercise, or a “Palestinian Versailles”, as the Palestinian scholar Edward Said warned at the time.

    Israel was never serious about allowing the Palestinians meaningful statehood – a fact the then-Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, admitted shortly before he was killed by a far-right settler in 1995.

    Oslo’s sham peace-making was designed to buy more time for Israel to expand the settlements – while also binding the Palestinians into endless contractual obligations that were never reciprocated by Israel.

    In his incensed response to the court’s decision last week, Netanyahu gave the game away. He said: “The Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land, including in our eternal capital Jerusalem nor in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], our historical homeland.”

    His is a bipartisan view in Israel. All the Jewish parties in the Israeli parliament take the same position.

    Last week they voted to reject any possibility of creating a Palestinian state on the grounds it would be an “existential threat” to Israel. Only a handful of legislators – all belonging to Israel’s Palestinian minority – dissented.

    Apartheid rule

    The World Court’s ruling is most significant in that it permanently blows apart western states’ cover story about Israel.

    The judges point out that Israel’s permanent occupation of the territories, and its transfer of Jewish settlers into them, has necessitated the development of two separate and distinct systems of laws.

    One is for the Jewish settlers, enshrining for them the rights enjoyed by Israelis. Palestinians, by contrast, must submit to the whims of an alien and belligerent military regime.

    There is a word for such an arrangement: apartheid.

    Over the past decade, a consensus had already emerged in the world’s human rights community – from Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch – that Israel was an apartheid state.

    Now the world’s highest judicial body has declared that it agrees.

    Apartheid is a crime against humanity. This means that Israeli officials are war criminals, quite aside from the crimes they are currently committing in Gaza.

    That was why the Israeli media reported panic inside the Israeli government at the ICJ ruling.

    Officials fear that it will leave the International Criminal Court, its sister court, with no option but to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, as already requested by its chief prosecutor.

    It is also likely to strengthen the ICC’s resolve to prosecute more senior Israeli officials for crimes associated with Israel’s settlement programme.

    A former Israeli foreign ministry official told the Haaretz newspaper that the World Court ruling had punctured Israel’s claim to be a western-style state: “The democratic aura is no longer protecting us as it did before.”

    Acts of aggression

    The ICJ has concluded that Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians – as well as the ethnic cleansing policies implemented by its settler militias – are acts of aggression.

    The West’s depiction of a “conflict” between Israel and the Palestinians, with efforts to resolve this “dispute”, is wilfully muddled. Its depiction of Israel’s rampage in Gaza as a “war against Hamas” is a lie too, according to this ruling.

    The ICJ has effectively ridiculed the claim by Israel and its western allies that the occupation of Gaza ended when Israel pulled its soldiers to the perimeter fence and soon afterwards instituted a siege on the enclave by land, sea and air.

    Israel is judged to be fully responsible for the suffering of Palestinians before 7 October as well as after.

    It is Israel that has been permanently attacking the Palestinians – through its illegal occupation, its apartheid rule, its siege of Gaza, and its incremental annexation of territory that should comprise a Palestinian state.

    Palestinian violence is a response, not the inciting cause. It is the Palestinians who are the ones retaliating, the ones resisting, according to the judgment. The western political and media establishments have cause and effect back to front.

    There are further consequences to the ICJ’s ruling. You don’t compromise on apartheid. No one suggested meeting apartheid South Africa halfway.

    The racist foundations of such a state must be eradicated. Apartheid states must be reconstituted from scratch.

    The World Court demands that Israel not only pull its occupation forces out of the Palestinian territories and halt its settlement expansion but also dismantle the settlements in their entirety. The settlers must leave Palestine.

    The judges call too for “reparations” for the Palestinians for the enormous harm done to them by decades of occupation and apartheid.

    That includes allowing those Palestinians who have been ethnically cleansed since 1967 a right to return to their lands, and it requires Israel to pay large-scale financial compensation for the decades-long theft of key resources.

    Complicit in war crimes

    But the implications don’t just apply to Israel.

    In referring the case to the ICJ, the UN General Assembly requested the court advise on how its 192 member states should respond to its findings.

    If Israeli leaders are war criminals, then supporting them – as western capitals have been doing for decades – makes those states complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity.

    For western powers, the ruling makes their continuing arms sales, diplomatic cover and the preferential trade status they give Israel collusion in the crime of prolonged occupation and apartheid.

    But there’s more. It also means that western states must not only stop harassing, and even jailing, those who seek to penalise Israel for its crimes – supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement – but should take up that very cause as their own.

    They are now under an implied legal obligation to join in such actions by imposing sanctions on Israel for being a rogue state.

    Already, Britain’s weaselly new Labour government has tried to shift attention away from the ruling and onto discursive terrain that better suits Israel.

    It responded with a statement that “the UK is strongly opposed to the expansion of illegal settlements and rising settler violence”.

    But as former British ambassador Craig Murray noted, that was not what the ICJ decided. “It is not the expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements that is at issue. It is their existence,” he wrote.

    Similarly, the Biden administration bemoaned the court’s ruling. In an act of spectacular mental gymnastics, it argued that ending the occupation would “complicate efforts to resolve the conflict”.

    But as noted previously, according to the ICJ’s judgment, there is no “conflict” except in the self-serving imaginations of Israel and its patrons. There are occupation and apartheid – permanent acts of aggression by Israel towards the Palestinian people.

    Further, the US warned other states not to take “unilateral actions” against Israel, as the ICJ ruling obliges them to do. Washington claims such actions will “deepen divisions”. But a division – between the upholders of international law and lawbreakers such as Israel and Washington – is precisely what is needed.

    The World Court’s ruling upends decades of linguistic slippage by the West whose goal has been to move the ideological dial in favour of Israel’s incremental annexationist agenda.

    It is vitally important that activists, legal and human rights groups keep holding the feet of the British and US governments to the ICJ’s fire.

    The fog clears

    Israel’s supporters will take comfort from the fact that an earlier judgment from the World Court on Israel was roundly ignored by both Israel and its western patrons.

    Asked for an advisory opinion, the judges ruled in 2004 that, under cover of security claims, Israel was illegally annexing swaths of territory by building its 800km-long “separation wall” on Palestinian land.

    Israel did not dismantle the wall, though in response it did re-route parts of it and abandoned construction in other areas.

    But that two-decade-old ICJ ruling was much narrower than the present one. It was restricted to a specific Israeli policy rather than address the entirety of Israel’s rule over Palestinians. It did not impugn Israel’s political character, identifying it as an apartheid state. And there were few obvious implications in the ruling for Israel’s western patrons.

    And perhaps most importantly, Israeli officials were in no danger 20 years ago of being put in the dock by the International Criminal Court charged with war crimes, as they are now.

    The World Court decision tightens the legal noose around Israel’s neck, and makes it hard for the ICC to continue dragging its feet on issuing arrest warrants for Israeli officials.

    And that will put multinational corporations, banks and pension funds in an ever harder legal position if they continue to ignore their own complicity with Israel’s criminality.

    They may quickly find themselves paying a price with their customers too.

    Adidas could be one of the first victims of just such a backlash after it caved into Israeli pressure on 19 July to drop the Palestinian-American model Bella Hadid as the face of a new ad campaign – paradoxically, on the same day the World Court announced its ruling.

    There will also be ramifications for domestic courts in the West. It will be hard for judges to ignore the World Court’s opinion when their governments seek to punish Palestinian solidarity activists.

    Those promoting boycotts and sanctions on Israel, or trying to stop companies supplying Israel with weapons, are doing what, according to the World Court, western governments should be doing of their own accord.

    But, maybe most importantly of all, the ruling will decisively disrupt the West’s intentionally deceitful discourse about Israel.

    This ruling strips away the entire basis of the language western powers have been using about Israel. A reality that’s been turned upside down for decades by the West has been put firmly back on its feet by the World Court.

    The occupation – not just the settlements – is illegal.

    Israel is legally defined as an apartheid state, as South Africa was before it, and one engaged in a project of annexation and ethnic cleansing.

    The Palestinians are the victims, not Israel. It’s their security that needs protecting, not Israel’s. They are the ones who are owed financial assistance, in the form of reparations, not Israel.

    As a result, the West’s pretend peace-making stands starkly revealed for the sham it always was. Continuing with this kind of duplicity – as British leader Keir Starmer, for example, appears determined to do – will serve only to highlight the bad faith of those engaged in such exercises.

    On the flip side, western powers that help Israel continue its work of segregating, dispossessing and ethnic cleansing the Palestinians will be exposed as complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity.

    Words have power. They are our route to understanding reality. And the World Court has just cleared away the fog. It has wiped clean the mist on the window.

    The West will do its level best once again to shroud Israel’s crimes. But the World Court has done the Palestinians and the rest of mankind a service in unmasking Israel for what it is: a rogue, criminal state.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post The World Court has cleared the fog hiding western support for Israel’s crimes first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Farnborough Airshow facing protests over complicity with Israel’s genocide

    On 24 July, delegates attending the Farnborough Airshow will be met with protesters from Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), Greater Rushmoor Action for Peace and East Berkshire Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

    Farnborough Airshow: stop the horror show

    The protest, ‘Say No to the Horrorshow’, is timed with Farnborough’s military day:

    It will highlight the airshow’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as well as conflicts fuelled by the arms trade across the globe. Local groups are also highlighting the impact the airshow has on the local community, including forcing schools to close early.

    One of the planes marketed at Farnborough Airshow is the F35 combat aircraft. Israel is currently using F35s to bombard Gaza. Since 7 October, Israel has killed 39,670 Palestinian people including over 15,000 children. Save the Children reported in June that on top of the more than 15,000 killed another 21,000 Palestinian children are missing in Gaza. And 4,000 of those are trapped under the debris.

    UK industry makes 15% of every F35 in business that has been worth at least £368m to UK industry since 2016.

    Companies exhibiting at Farnborough Airshow include some of the world’s worst arms dealers, including BAE Systems, Elbit Systems, Leonardo, and Lockheed Martin. All these companies are profiting from, and are complicit in, Israel’s genocide against Palestinian people.

    CAAT’s media coordinator Emily Apple said:

    It is obscene that Farnborough is marketing the exact same aircraft Israel is using in its genocide in Gaza. This is an aircraft that is dropping massive bombs on civilians and devastating lives. Farnborough is a horrorshow; a marketplace for death merchants to peddle their horrific wares and profit from war crimes.

    Julia from Greater Rushmoor Action for Peace said:

    We’re especially worried about the impact on local school children, noting that some schools need to close early because of the event. Speaking as a mum, I worry that children attending the “Pioneers of Tomorrow” day are being influenced to join the arms trade without a clear understanding of what that means.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Tempting Armageddon as a national strategic policy

    If you want to get ahead in Washington, devise the most dangerous, reckless, merciless and destructive plan for US world domination. If it kills millions of people (especially if they are mostly women and children), you will be called a bold strategist. If tens of millions more become refugees, it will be even more impressive. If you find a way to use nuclear weapons that would otherwise be gathering dust, you will be hailed as brilliant. Such is the nature of proposals for dealing with Russia, China and Iran, not to mention smaller nations like Cuba, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, North Korea, etc. Can a plan to decimate humanity and scorch the earth be far behind?

    How did we get here? This is not the world that was envisioned in the years following the greatest war in history.

    If you consider yourself a hammer, you seek nails, and this seems to be the nature of US foreign policy today. Nevertheless, when WWII ended in 1945, the US had no need to prove that it was by far the most powerful nation on the planet. Its undamaged industrial capacity accounted for nearly half the economy of an otherwise war-torn and devastated world, and its military was largely beyond challenge, having demonstrated the most powerful weapons the world had ever known, for better or worse.

    That was bound to change as the world recovered, but even as the rebuilding progressed, it did so with loans from the US and US-dominated institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which added international finance as another pillar of US supremacy. The loans built markets for US production, while creating allies for its policies in the postwar period.

    It wasn’t all rosy, of course. But the war and its immediate aftermath introduced greater distribution of wealth, both in the US and much of the world, than had hitherto been the case. Highly graduated income taxes – with rates greater than 90% on the highest incomes – not only funded the war effort, but also assured relative social security and prosperity for much of the working class in the postwar period. In addition, the GI Bill provided funds for college education, unemployment insurance and housing for millions of returning war veterans. Although a main purpose of the legislation may have been to avoid the scenes of armed repression against unemployed and homeless war veterans, as occurred with a much smaller number of veterans after WWI, it had the effect of ushering many of them into middle class status. Another factor was the introduction of employee childcare and health insurance benefits during the war, in order to entice women into the work force and make it possible for them to devote more of their time to war production. These benefits (especially health insurance) remained widespread and even increased after the war, contributing to higher living standards compared to the prewar era.

    Internationally, wider distribution of wealth was seen as a means of deterring the spread of Soviet-style socialism by incorporating some of the social safety net features of the socialist system into a market economy that nevertheless preserved most of the power base in capitalist and oligarchical hands.

    Unfortunately, many of the wealthy and powerful may have seen these developments as temporary measures to avoid potential social disorder, and a means of fattening the cattle before milking, shearing and/or butchering. One of the earliest rollbacks was the income tax structure, which saw a decades-long decline in taxation of corporations and the wealthy, as well as features in the tax code that allowed many of the wealthy to dodge income taxes altogether.

    Similarly, savings and loan institutions, designed to serve the financial needs of the middle class, became a means to exploit them, thanks to changes in chartering rules engineered by the lobbyists of the wealthy to profit from speculative trade in mortgage securities. The most egregious consequence of this was the crash of 2008, resulting in the greatest transfer of wealth in US history to the top 1% (or even 0.1%) in such a short time. By then the neighborhood savings and loan was a memory, having been devoured by investment bankers to satisfy (unsuccessfully) their insatiable appetites.

    In the international dimension, another important development was the uncoupling of the US dollar from the gold standard in 1971. This ended the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, and made the untethered dollar the standard, rendering its value equivalent to whatever purchasing power it might possess at any given time, and placing the United States in unprecedented control of international exchange.

    A further instrument of postwar power was NATO, an ostensibly voluntary defensive alliance of nonsocialist western European and North American nations, to which the socialist countries reacted with their own Warsaw Pact. Both were voluntary to roughly the same imaginary degree, and justified each other’s existence. But both were also a means for the great powers of the US and the USSR to dominate the other members of their respective alliances. The defensive function of these alliances became obsolete with the dissolution of both the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact in 1991. NATO then became an offensive alliance, functioning to preserve, enhance and expand US hegemony and domination in the face of its descent into internal dysfunction and external predation.

    These transfers of wealth and power, both domestically and internationally took place even as US industrial and manufacturing power waned. This was due not only to competition from the expected postwar recovery of powers destroyed during the war (as well as newly rising ones), but also to the unmanaged voracious appetites of US speculators and venture capitalists, who replaced vaunted US industrial capacity with cheap foreign (“offshore”) sources. This eventually converted the US from a major production economy to a largely consumer one. It also helped to transfer middle and lower class wealth from the American masses to its upper echelons, as well-paying union and other full-time jobs were replaced by menial minimum wage and part-time ones, or by unemployment, welfare and homelessness. The service industries, construction, entertainment, finance, military, government and agriculture usually remained relatively stronger than industry and export, but less so than during the 1950s, and were increasingly funded by expansion of the national debt, rather than a strong economic base.

    Of course, concentration of wealth is commensurate with concentration of power, and although the wealthy always have greater political power than the less wealthy, the transition to an increasingly oligarchical US society got a major boost in 2010 with the Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which granted corporations and other associations unprecedented power to use their vast financial resources to control the outcome of elections. It was a bellwether: despite the fact that Supreme Court justices are unelected officials, it is hard to imagine such a decision taking place a half century earlier (during the Warren Court, for example), when popular power in the US (though never as great as proclaimed) was perhaps at its peak, and which was reflected in the composition of the court and its decisions in that era. Citizens United gave corporations and well financed interest groups virtually unlimited control over US domestic and international policy.

    The coalescing of these trends has resulted in a power structure and decision-making procedure (or lack thereof) that accounts for the astonishing headlong rush toward Armageddon described in the introductory paragraph of this article. The US is currently considered the only remaining superpower, but what is the basis of that power? It is not industrial or economic power, which the US abandoned for the sake of short-term profits in “offshore” manufacturing, as previously stated.

    It is not even military power, much of which has been invested in extremely expensive air and sea forces that are now becoming obsolete, as second and third tier powers like Russia and Iran develop cheaper mass drone architecture, untouchable hypersonic missiles and electronic systems that make traditional weaponry less relevant. An extreme example of such irrelevance can be seen in the strategies of Hamas and its Palestinian allies, armed largely with low-tech self-developed weapons designed to exploit the vulnerabilities of massively armed Israeli forces laying waste to the Palestinian population and infrastructure above ground, while the resistance forces remain relatively invulnerable below ground, and able to attack effectively and indefinitely from their hundreds of miles of deep reinforced tunnels.

    Similarly, the irrelevance and obsolescence of US arms became evident in the Ukraine war, as the US, and indeed all of NATO, proved themselves incapable of manufacturing more than a fraction of the artillery, shells and armored vehicles that Russia produces, with a military budget hardly more than a tenth that of the US, much less the combined NATO budget.

    The US aim in the Ukraine war was and is ostensibly to defeat Russia. But it will consider the war a success even if (as seems certain) this objective fails. This is because the more immediate US goal is to assure and reinforce the subjugation of the western NATO countries, as well to expand to the rest of Europe. In effect, the Ukraine war solves the problem perceived by US policymakers that the dissolution of the USSR removed much of the justification for a defensive alliance which was no longer facing a threat of the sort against which it was created to defend.

    But that question was apparently raised mainly if at all by academics at the time, not diplomats. Perhaps a partial explanation was inertia: why change what seemed to be keeping both peace and prosperity (for its members)? The US also found missions for NATO from the Balkans to 9/11 response to West Asia to Afghanistan and North Africa. But all of these paled in comparison to its previous function of deterring the Soviet Union. In order to justify the continued existence of NATO, a new, similar threat was needed, not merely “police actions”. This was manufactured by the US, starting with expansion of NATO to eastern Europe, in violation of its promises in 1991 to the leadership of the dissolving Soviet Politburo not to expand “an inch beyond the eastern border of [East] Germany.” Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined in 1999. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004. In 2009, Albania and Croatia also joined, followed by Montenegro in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020. Finland joined in 2023 followed by Sweden in 2024.

    The purpose of the expansion, while giving the appearance of relevance, was not so much to respond to a perceived threat as to manufacture one, and Russia was selected to be the threat, despite the fact that it had posed no apparent strategic threat to NATO for more than two decades after the end of the Soviet Union. It even discussed the possibility of joining the Alliance. But the US had other intentions. Without a credible common threat, NATO might cease to be a defensive military alliance, with the eventual possibility of defections by members that no longer saw a significant benefit to their otherwise exorbitant and oppressive membership. Furthermore, many western European nations were finding common interests with Russia, most notably the Nordstream pipelines providing cheap, plentiful and reliable Russian natural gas to the European economies.

    Obviously, this was intolerable for the US and its plan to dominate all of western and eastern Europe combined. Russia soon understood that the expansion of NATO was intended as a strategic threat to Russia’s security. As successor of, and inheritor to, the Soviet nuclear arsenal and its delivery systems, Russia could not afford to have NATO nuclear strike systems sitting on its doorstep any more than the US could accept nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962. The US therefore chose to threaten Russia’s existence through Ukraine.

    Ukraine was the perfect weapon to prod the Bear. It was poor and corrupt, and it had a substantial racist and ultranationalist anti-Russian Nazi and Fascist minority, with origins dating to collaboration with Nazi Germany. These elements hated Ukraine’s large ethnically and linguistically Russian population, who had a strong traditional link with Russia and its history, including Ukrainian cities founded by Russia. With well-placed undercover money, arms and expert CIA covert manipulation, a small but violent uprising, a coup d’état and civil war might turn Ukraine into a security threat to Russia that could be used to seal NATO under US control.

    Under the stewardship of Hillary Clinton’s handmaiden, Victoria Nuland, laden with $5 billion (actually, with unlimited funds), this is exactly what happened in 2013-14. The newly installed Ukrainian coup government promptly began the repression of its ethnically Russian population, which mounted a resistance movement to defend itself, as intended by the US/NATO covert operators. Over the next eight years, the US funded, armed and trained its Ukrainian puppet, all the while amplifying the repression against the ethnic Russians, whose resistance groups Russia supported with arms and training. Negotiated agreements in 2014 and 2015 (the Minsk accords) to end the fighting were only partially and temporarily effective, and as German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted in an interview with Die Zeit in 2022, they were only an attempt to gain time [to strengthen the Ukrainian military until they were ready to take on Russia].

    That time was February, 2022, when – on cue from its US puppeteers – Ukraine escalated its attacks on its Russian minority in Lugansk and Donetsk oblasts (provinces), instantly raising the daily casualty toll from dozens to hundreds. As intended, this prompted Russia to intervene directly with a “Special Military Operation”, ostensibly limited mainly to ending the massacres and defending the population that was under attack, but also to driving Ukraine to the negotiating table.

    It worked. At the end of March, the two countries reached a ceasefire agreement at negotiations in Istanbul, under the auspices of the Turkish government. But this was not what the US had in mind, so British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was promptly dispatched to Istanbul, to remind the Ukrainians that puppets are controlled by the hands of their masters. From then on, the war escalated until it engaged more than a million armed combatants and resulted in more than a half million casualties. And in case some NATO member might be tempted to explore reconciliation with Russia, the US destroyed the Nordstream pipelines, breaking a major foundation of Russia’s peaceful economic bonds with the rest of Europe, and with them much of Europe’s heretofore economic success, on the assumption that weaker partners are more dependable than strong ones (and constitute weaker economic competition, as well).

    The US thus became the undisputed hegemon of Europe by means of a conventional proxy war with Russia. But their original plan included the defeat of Russia, as well, both militarily and economically, the latter by means of sanctions that would deny markets and world trade to the Russian economy. This part of the plan was a miserable failure, as Russia found prosperity in new markets, and invested in an astonishingly productive, innovative and efficient strategic defense industry, mainly at its robust defense complex in the Ural mountains. No matter. War, destruction and wanton slaughter had nevertheless proven to be effective strategies for European domination, even without defeating Russia. In addition, the US had shown that, despite its industrial limitations, it could impose its will through proxies bought, trained and supplied with its most powerful weapon, which it had in unlimited supply: the mighty US dollar.

    I therefore return to the question of the basis of US power. What enables a country with a declining industrial base and stagnating military production, a shrinking working and middle class and an expanding homeless population to expend vast sums of money to hire and arm proxy fighting forces, purchase and develop foreign political parties, overthrow governments, maintain a military budget that is the equal of the next nine countries combined, and an intelligence budget that is larger than the entire defense budget of every other country except China and Russia?

    Part of the answer is that the US increases its national debt by whatever amount it wishes, usually paying low but reliable rates of interest, depending on the market for US Treasury notes. Currently, the debt is roughly $35 trillion, more than the annual US GDP. The only other time in history that debt has exceeded GDP was in WWII, which hints at profligate borrowing. But the US is not worried about the size of the debt or about finding takers for its IOUs. As mentioned earlier, the dollar was uncoupled from the value of gold in 1971. The untethered dollar is therefore the basis for most currencies in the world. As a result, the  entire world is heavily invested in the dollar and in maintaining its value, and will buy US Treasury notes as needed to assure that it remains stable and valuable. This enables the US to outspend all other countries to maintain and augment its power throughout the globe. Some have accused the US of treating this system of funding as “the goose that lays the golden egg”.

    Others have accused it of coercing or “shaking down” other countries to participate in this financing scheme or face unpleasant consequences. The same accusation has sometimes been leveled with respect to the purchase of US “protection services” and expensive military hardware as part of the NATO member “contributions” that bring US installations and personnel to those countries, and to other US satellite countries around the globe.

    The other major basis of US power is the use of unlimited dollar resources to visit extreme violence, death, war and destruction upon countries and societies that do not accept subordinate status, or even those who do, but whose destruction may be seen as a necessary object lesson to those who might otherwise step out of line. This is a commitment to use totally disproportionate force with little or no effort at diplomatic efforts to reach strategic goals. The Israelis call this the “Dahiyeh Doctrine”, in reference to turning entire suburbs (“dahiyeh” in Arabic) or cities and their populations into smoldering ruins for the sake of intimidation. In the case of Ukraine, the US/NATO, has raised the stakes in the destructiveness of the weapons being used against Russia, as well as the choice of increasingly deeper targets inside Russia, while refusing negotiated diplomatic solutions. Threats to use low yield nuclear weapons have also been suggested.

    This is, in effect, the insanity ploy, “We are unreasonable and capable of anything. Do what we say or accept terrible consequences.” It is the Armageddon strategy, “We are willing to go to any lengths.” It is the strategy of those who think they are invincible, and who demand complete obedience from, and dominance of, potential rivals. It is the strategy of those who think that they can do whatever they want without serious consequence to themselves. The direct origin of this strategy is the Wolfowitz Doctrine, first issued by Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in 1992, and submitted to his superior, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. The basis of the doctrine is that any potential rival to US power must be destroyed or reduced to size.

    Cheney and Wolfowitz are part of the neoconservative political movement that began during the Vietnam war. It is a movement of warmongers and autocrats who believe that the control of US foreign policy must be kept in the hands of “experts” (themselves) and out of the hands of elected officials who don’t support them. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was in their eyes a vindication of their influence in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, and their “success” led to the founding of the short-lived Project for a New American Century think tank during the latter part of the Clinton presidency.

    The Project for a New American Century in turn became a springboard for neocon saturation of the George W. Bush administration in the major foreign policy arms of the government – the cabinet, the National Security Agency, the State Department, the intelligence services, and eventually the military. Since then, neoconservative control has only broadened and deepened in the U.S. To a large extent they are the unelected cabal that run US foreign policy and related agencies, with support from the interests that profit from war and exploitation, including weapons manufacturers, petroleum and mineral companies, and, of course, the similarly-minded Israel Lobby.

    It is in these circles that arrogance knows no bounds, that no risk is too great, and that no amount of death and destruction is inconceivable, because you are not invited to participate unless you consider yourself too intelligent and powerful to make a mistake, and because Armageddon can only happen if you will it so.

    The post Tempting Armageddon as a national strategic policy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The US is going to store its nukes in the UK again – but people are pushing back

    CND general secretary Kate Hudson will address a rally outside the main gate of the US-controlled RAF Lakenheath airbase in Suffolk on Saturday 20 July, in opposition to the return of US nuclear weapons to Britain.

    Lakenheath to host US nuclear weapons

    As BBC News reported:

    Plans to deploy American nuclear weapons to an airbase in Suffolk have progressed, according to a US Department of Defence (DoD) notice.

    A contract , externalto build shelters to protect troops that would defend storage facilities at RAF Lakenheath has been awarded.

    The document states the work was in preparation for the base’s “upcoming nuclear mission”.

    The US Air Force (USAF) has yet to respond to a request for comment.

    The Ministry of Defence said there was a longstanding agreement among NATO partners not to comment on the location of nuclear weapons.

    In March 2023, a document, external from the US Office of the Under Secretary of Defense disclosed how $50m (£39m) had been earmarked to build a facility known as a “Surety Dormitory” at RAF Lakenheath.

    This phrase is understood to refer to nuclear weapons storage, external.

    The Canary has previously covered CND and other group’s objections to the plans – with a legal challenge being launched to it. Now, people have taken their objections to US nukes on UK soil one step further.

    A peace camp

    A 24/7 vigil and peace camp was established outside the main gate of the base on Monday 15 July by members of the Lakenheath Alliance for Peace after a three-day march from Norwich; the camp will run until Thursday 25 July:

    Predictably, military police were not too far behind:

    https:/twitter.com/LakenheathAfP/status/1813511819472109936

    CND groups and members from across Britain will be among supporters joining the rally on 20 July, which will begin at 12 noon and run until 2:30pm. A full programme of events can be found here.

    The rally comes after Hudson gave evidence to the Undercover Policing Inquiry on Monday. CND is a ‘core participant’ in the Inquiry, owing to the fact that it was infiltrated by undercover police officers during the 1980s at the height of CND’s mass campaigning against US cruise missiles in Britain.

    This activity included the setting up of peace camps and the use of non-violent direct action (NVDA) by campaigners at bases like Greenham Common.

    While British intelligence reported early in the 1980s that CND did not pose a threat to national security, evidence produced at the Inquiry exposed “a clear and deeply alarming use of political undercover policing by the then Conservative government” and the “most explicit example of subverting parliamentary democracy uncovered” by the inquiry so far.

    Taking decisive action at Lakenheath

    CND general secretary Kate Hudson said:

    Having taken decisive action to stop the outbreak of nuclear war in the 1980s, Greenham Common women are among those protesting against the return of US nuclear weapons to Britain.

    Peace camps and NVDA are important parts of the anti-nuclear movement and have long been effective in raising awareness of nuclear dangers. Peace camps form a rallying point for all those who favour peace over war and CND encourages everyone to come and visit the camp for Saturday’s rally.

    CND calls on the new British government to stop hiding behind the tired excuse of neither confirming nor denying the presence of NATO nuclear weapons in this country. It’s time for a new agenda for peace, which starts with publicly refusing the US permission to host their weapons of mass destruction in Britain.

    Featured image via CND

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The Pacific Lands and Seas Are Neither Forbidden nor Forgotten


    Mahiriki Tangaroa (Kūki ’Airani), Blessed Again by the Gods (Spring), 2015.

    Since May, a powerful struggle has rocked Kanaky (New Caledonia), an archipelago located in the Pacific, roughly 1,500 kilometres east of Australia. The island, one of five overseas territories in the Asia-Pacific ruled by France, has been under French colonial rule since 1853. The indigenous Kanak people initiated this cycle of protests after the French government of Emmanuel Macron extended voting rights in provincial elections to thousands of French settlers in the islands. The unrest led Macron to suspend the new rules while subjecting islanders to severe repression. In recent months, the French government has imposed a state of emergency and curfew on the islands and deployed thousands of French troops, which Macron says will remain in New Caledonia for ‘as long as necessary’. Over a thousand protesters have been arrested by French authorities, including Kanak independence activists such as Christian Tein, the leader of the Coordination Cell for Field Actions (Cellule de coordination des actions de terrain, or CCAT), some of them sent to France to face trial. The charges against Tein and others, such as for organised crime, would be laughable if the consequences were not so serious.

    The reason France has cracked down so severely on the protests in New Caledonia is that the old imperial country uses its colonies not only to exploit its resources (New Caledonia holds the world’s fifth largest nickel reserves), but also to extend its political reach across the world – in this case, to have a military footprint in China’s vicinity. This story is far from new: between 1966 and 1996, for instance, France used islands in the southern Pacific for nuclear tests. One of these tests, Operation Centaure (July 1974), impacted all 110,000 residents on the Mururoa atoll of French Polynesia. The struggle of the indigenous Kanak peoples of New Caledonia is not only about freedom from colonialism, but also about the terrible military violence inflicted upon these lands and waters by the Global North. The violence that ran from 1966 to 1996 mirrors the disregard that the French still feel for the islanders, treating them as nothing more than detritus, as if they had been shipwrecked on these lands.

    In the backdrop of the current unrest in New Caledonia is the Global North’s growing militarisation of the Pacific, led by the United States. Currently, 25,000 military personnel from 29 countries are conducting Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC), a military exercise that runs from Hawai’i to the edge of the Asian mainland. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research worked with an array of organisations – a number of them from the Pacific and Indian Oceans – to draft red alert no. 18 on this dangerous development. Their names are listed below.

    They Are Making the Waters of the Pacific Dangerous

    What is RIMPAC?

    The US and its allies have held Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercises since 1971. The initial partners of this military project were Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which are also the original members of the Five Eyes (now Fourteen Eyes) intelligence network built to share information and conduct joint surveillance exercises. They are also the major Anglophone countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO, set up in 1949) and are the members of the Australia-New Zealand-US strategy treaty ANZUS, signed in 1951. RIMPAC has grown to be a major biennial military exercise that has drawn in a number of countries with various forms of allegiance to the Global North (Belgium, Brazil, Brunei, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, the Philippines, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Tonga).

    RIMPAC 2024 began on 28 June and runs through 2 August. It is being held in Hawai’i, which is an illegally occupied territory of the United States. The Hawai’ian independence movement has a history of resisting RIMPAC, which is understood to be part of the US occupation of sovereign Hawai’ian land. The exercise includes over 150 aircraft, 40 surface ships, three submarines, 14 national land forces, and other military equipment from 29 countries, though the bulk of the fleet is from the United States. The goal of the exercise is ‘interoperability’, which effectively means integrating the military (largely naval) forces of other countries with that of the United States. The main command and control for the exercise is managed by the US, which is the heart and soul of RIMPAC.


    Fatu Feu’u (Samoa), Mata Sogia, 2009.

    Why is RIMPAC so dangerous?

    RIMPAC-related documents and official statements indicate that the exercises allow these navies to train ‘for a wide range of potential operations across the globe’. However, it is clear from both US strategic documents and the behaviour of the US officials who run RIMPAC that the centre of focus is China. Strategic documents also make it clear that the US sees China as a major threat, even as the main threat, to US domination and believes that it must be contained.

    This containment has come through the trade war against China, but more pointedly through a web of military manoeuvres by the United States. This includes establishing more US military bases in territories and countries surrounding China; using US and allied military vessels to provoke China through freedom of navigation exercises; threatening to position US short-range nuclear missiles in countries and territories allied with the US, including Taiwan; extending the airfield in Darwin, Australia, to position US aircraft with nuclear missiles; enhancing military cooperation with US allies in East Asia with language that shows precisely that the target is to intimidate China; and holding RIMPAC exercises, particularly over the past few years. Though China was invited to participate in RIMPAC 2014 and RIMPAC 2016, when the tension levels were not so high, it has been disinvited since RIMPAC 2018.

    Though RIMPAC documents suggest that the military exercise is being conducted for humanitarian purposes, this is a Trojan Horse. This was exemplified, for instance, at RIMPAC 2000, when the militaries conducted the Strong Angel international humanitarian response training exercise. In 2013, the United States and the Philippines cooperated in providing humanitarian assistance after the devastating Typhoon Haiyan. Shortly after that cooperation, the US and the Philippines signed the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (2014), which allows the US to access bases of the Philippine military to maintain its weapons depots and troops. In other words, the humanitarian operations opened the door to deeper military cooperation.

    RIMPAC is a live-fire military exercise. The most spectacular part of the exercise is called Sinking Exercise (SINKEX), a drill that sinks decommissioned warships off the coast of Hawai’i. RIMPAC 2024’s target ship will be the decommissioned USS Tarawa, a 40,000-tonne amphibious assault vessel that was one of the largest during its service period. There is no environmental impact survey of the regular sinking of these ships into waters close to island nations, nor is there any understanding of the environmental impact of hosting these vast military exercises not only in the Pacific but elsewhere in the world.

    RIMPAC is part of the New Cold War against China that the US imposes on the region. It is designed to provoke conflict. This makes RIMPAC a very dangerous exercise.


    Kelcy Taratoa (Aotearoa), Episode 0010 from the series Who Am I? Episodes, 2004.

    What is Israel’s role in RIMPAC?

    Israel, which is not a country with a shoreline on the Pacific Ocean, first participated in RIMPAC 2018, and then again in RIMPAC 2022 and RIMPAC 2024. Although Israel does not have aircraft or ships in the military exercise, it is nonetheless participating in its ‘interoperability’ component, which includes establishing integrated command and control as well as collaborating in the intelligence and logistical part of the exercise. Israel is participating in RIMPAC 2024 at the same time that it is waging a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Though several of the observer states in RIMPAC 2024 (such as Chile and Colombia) have been forthright in their condemnation of the genocide, they continue to participate alongside Israel’s military in RIMPAC 2024. There has been no public indication of their hesitation about Israel’s involvement in these dangerous joint military exercises.

    Israel is a settler-colonial country that continues its murderous apartheid and genocide against the Palestinian people. Across the Pacific, indigenous communities from Aotearoa (New Zealand) to Hawai’i have led the protests against RIMPAC over the course of the past 50 years, saying that these exercises are held on stolen ground and waters, that they disregard the negative impact on native communities upon whose land and waters live-fire exercises are held (including areas where atmospheric nuclear testing was previously conducted), and that they contribute to the climate disaster that lifts the waters and threatens the existence of the island communities. Though Israel’s participation is unsurprising, the problem is not merely its involvement in RIMPAC, but the existence of RIMPAC itself. Israel is an apartheid state that is conducting a genocide, and RIMPAC is a colonial project that threatens an annihilationist war against the peoples of the Pacific and China.


    Ralph Ako (Solomon Islands), Toto Isu, 2015.

    Te Kuaka (Aotearoa)
    Red Ant (Australia)
    Workers Party of Bangladesh (Bangladesh)
    Coordinadora por Palestina (Chile)
    Judíxs Antisionistas contra la Ocupación y el Apartheid (Chile)
    Partido Comunes (Colombia)
    Congreso de los Pueblos (Colombia)
    Coordinación Política y Social, Marcha Patriótica (Colombia)
    Partido Socialista de Timor (Timor Leste)
    Hui Aloha ʻĀina (Hawai’i)
    Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation (India)
    Federasi Serikat Buruh Demokratik Kerakyatan (Indonesia)
    Federasi Serikat Buruh Militan (Indonesia)
    Federasi Serikat Buruh Perkebunan Patriotik (Indonesia)
    Pusat Perjuangan Mahasiswa untuk Pembebasan Nasional (Indonesia)
    Solidaritas.net (Indonesia)
    Gegar Amerika (Malaysia)
    Parti Sosialis Malaysia (Malaysia)
    No Cold War
    Awami Workers Party (Pakistan)
    Haqooq-e-Khalq Party (Pakistan)
    Mazdoor Kissan Party (Pakistan)
    Partido Manggagawa (Philippines)
    Partido Sosyalista ng Pilipinas (Philippines)
    The International Strategy Center (Republic of Korea)
    Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (Sri Lanka)
    Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
    Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Socialist)
    CODEPINK: Women for Peace (United States)
    Nodutdol (United States)
    Party for Socialism and Liberation (United States)

    When the political protests began in New Caledonia in May, I hastened to find a book of poems by Kanak independence leader Déwé Gorodé (1949–2022) called Under the Ashes of the Conch Shells (Sous les cendres des conques, 1974). In this book, written the same year that Gorodé joined the Marxist political group Red Scarves (Foulards rouges), she wrote the poem ‘Forbidden Zone’ (Zone interdite), which concludes:

    Reao Vahitahi Nukutavake
    Pinaki Tematangi Vanavana
    Tureia Maria Marutea
    Mangareva MORUROA FANGATAUFA
    Forbidden zone
    somewhere in
    so-called ‘French’ Polynesia.

    These are the names of islands that had already been impacted by the French nuclear bomb tests. There are no punctuation marks between the names, which indicates two things: first, that the end of an island or a country does not mark the end of nuclear contamination, and second, that the waters that lap against the islands do not divide the people who live across vast stretches of ocean, but unite them against imperialism. This impulse drove Gorodé to found Group 1878 (named for the Kanak rebellion of that year) and then the Kanak Liberation Party (Parti de libération kanak, or PALIKA) in 1976, which evolved out of Group 1878. The authorities imprisoned Gorodé repeatedly from 1974 to 1977 for her leadership in PALIKA’s struggle for independence from France.

    During her time in prison, Gorodé built the Group of Exploited Kanak Women in Struggle (Groupe de femmes Kanak exploitées en lutte) with Susanna Ounei. When these two women left prison, they helped found the Kanak National Liberation and Socialist Front (Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste) in 1984. Through concerted struggle, Gorodé was elected the vice president of New Caledonia in 2001.


    Stéphane Foucaud (New Caledonia), MAOW! (2023).

    In 1985, thirteen countries of the south Pacific signed the Treaty of Rarotonga, which established a nuclear-free zone from the east coast of Australia to the west coast of South America. As French colonies, neither New Caledonia nor French Polynesia signed it, but others did, including the Solomon Islands and Kūki ‘Airani (Cook Islands). Gorodé is now dead, and US nuclear weapons are poised to enter northern Australia in violation of the treaty. But the struggle does not die away.

    Roads are still blocked. Hearts are still opened.

    The post The Pacific Lands and Seas Are Neither Forbidden nor Forgotten first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.