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Category: Russia

  • France, Germany, UK Push to Reimpose UN Sanctions on Iran, Make War More Likely

    France, Germany, and the UK (E3) have announced they will trigger snapback sanctions on Iran at the United Nations. This will launch a 30-day process that will likely culminate in the full reinstatement of all U.N. sanctions lifted under the 2015 nuclear deal. The move will carry four major consequences. First, the U.N. Security Council will formally adopt the demand — pushed by Israel — that…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Leftist Vermont Rep Tanya Vyhovsky Toured Ukraine. Here’s What She Learned. 

    Wednesday night, Russia staged its largest attack on Ukraine since President Donald Trump started the so-called peace process. Moscow launched 598 drones and 31 missiles on targets in Ukraine. Most of them were shot down, but many others still evaded Ukraine’s air defense systems, hitting over 20 locations in the capital, Kyiv, and severely damaging a building next to the European Union mission.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A New Foreign Policy for Europe

    The European Union needs a new foreign policy based on Europe’s true economic and security interests. Europe is currently in an economic and security trap of its own making, characterized by its dangerous hostility with Russia, mutual distrust with China, and extreme vulnerability to the United States. Europe’s foreign policy is almost entirely driven by fear of Russia and China—which has resulted in a security dependency on the United States.

    Europe’s subservience to the U.S. stems almost entirely from its overriding fear of Russia, a fear that has been amplified by the Russophobic states of Eastern Europe and a false narrative about the Ukraine War. Based on the belief that its greatest security threat is Russia, the EU subordinates all its other foreign policy issues—economic, trade, environmental, technological, and diplomatic—to the United States. Ironically, it clings close to Washington even as the United States has become weaker, unstable, erratic, irrational, and dangerous in its own foreign policy toward the EU, even to the point of overtly threatening European sovereignty in Greenland.

    To chart a new foreign policy, Europe will have to overcome the false premise of its extreme vulnerability to Russia. The Brussels-NATO-UK narrative holds that Russia is intrinsically expansionist and will overrun Europe if the opportunity arises. The Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1991 supposedly proves this threat today. This false narrative badly misconstrues Russian behavior in both the past and present.

    The first part of this essay aims to correct the false premise that Russia poses a dire threat to Europe. The second part looks ahead to a new European foreign policy, once Europe has moved beyond its irrational Russophobia.

    The False Premise of Russia’s Westward Imperialism 

    Europe’s foreign policy is premised on Russia’s purported security threat to Europe. Yet this premise is false. Russia has repeatedly been invaded by the major Western powers (notably Britain, France, Germany, and the United States in the past two centuries) and has long sought security through a buffer zone between itself and the Western powers. The heavily contested buffer zone includes modern-day Poland, Ukraine, Finland, and the Baltic states. This region in between the Western powers and Russia accounts for the main security dilemmas facing Western Europe and Russia.

    The major Western wars launched against Russia since 1800 include:

    • The French invasion of Russia in 1812 (Napoleonic Wars)
    • The British and French Invasion of Russia in 1853-1856 (Crimean War)
    • The German declaration of war against Russia on August 1st, 1914 (World War I)
    • The Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1918-1922 (Russian Civil War)
    • The German invasion of Russia in 1941 (World War II)

    Each of these wars posed an existential threat to Russia’s survival. From Russia’s perspective, the failure to demilitarize Germany after World War II, the creation of NATO, the incorporation of West Germany into NATO in 1955, the expansion of NATO eastward after 1991, and the ongoing expansion of U.S. military bases and missile systems across Eastern Europe near Russia’s borders have constituted the gravest threats to Russia’s national security since World War II.

    Russia has also invaded westward on several occasions:

    • Russia’s attack on East Prussia in 1914
    • The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact in 1939, dividing Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union and annexing the Baltic States in 1940
    • The invasion of Finland in November 1939 (the Winter War)
    • The Soviet Occupation of Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1989
    • The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022

    These Russian actions are taken by Europe as objective proof of Russia’s westward expansionism, yet such a view is naïve, ahistorical, and propagandized. In all five cases, Russia was acting to protect its national security—as it saw it—not undertaking westward expansionism for its own sake. This basic truth is the key to resolving the Europe-Russia conflict today. Russia is not seeking westward expansion; Russia is seeking its core national security. Yet the West has long failed to recognize, much less respect, Russia’s core national security interests.

    Let us consider these five cases of Russia’s purported westward expansion.

    The first case, Russia’s attack in East Prussia in 1914, can be immediately put aside. The German Reich had moved first to declare war on Russia on August 1st, 1914. Russia’s invasion of East Prussia was in direct response to Germany’s declaration of war.

    The second case, Soviet Russia’s agreement with Hitler’s Third Reich to divide Poland in 1939, and the annexation of the Baltic States in 1940, is taken in the West as the purest proof of Russian perfidy. Again, this is a simplistic and mistaken reading of history. As historians such as E. H. Carr, Stephen Kotkin, and Michael Jabara Carley have carefully documented, Stalin reached out to Britain and France in 1939 to form a defensive alliance against Hitler, who had declared his intention to wage war against Russia in the East (for Lebensraum, Slavic slave labor, and the defeat of Bolshevism). Stalin’s attempt to forge an alliance with the Western powers was completely rebuffed. Poland refused to allow Soviet troops on Polish soil in the event of a war with Germany. The Western elite’s hatred of Soviet Communism was at least as great as their fear of Hitler. Indeed, a common phrase among British right-wing elites in the late 1930s was “Better Hitlerism than Communism.”

    Given the failure to secure a defense alliance, Stalin then aimed to create a buffer zone against the impending German invasion of Russia. The partition of Poland and annexation of the Baltic States were tactical, to win time for the coming battle of Armageddon with Hitler’s armies, which arrived on June 22nd, 1941, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. The preceding division of Poland and the annexation of the Baltic States may well have delayed the invasion and saved the Soviet Union from a quick defeat by Hitler.

    The third case, Russia’s Winter War with Finland, is similarly regarded in Western Europe (and especially in Finland) as proof of Russia’s expansionist nature. Yet once again, the basic motivation of Russia was defensive, not offensive. Russia feared that the German invasion would come in part through Finland, and that Leningrad would quickly be captured by Hitler. The Soviet Union therefore proposed to Finland that it swap territory with the Soviet Union (notably ceding the Karelian Isthmus and some islands in the Gulf of Finland in return for Russian territories) to enable the Russian defense of Leningrad. Finland refused this proposal, and the Soviet Union invaded Finland on November 30th, 1939. Subsequently, Finland joined Hitler’s armies in the war against the Soviet Union during the “Continuation War” between 1941 and 1944.

    The fourth case, the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe (and continued annexation of the Baltic States) during the Cold War, is taken in Europe as another bitter proof of Russia’s fundamental threat to Europe’s security. The Soviet occupation was indeed brutal, but it too had a defensive motivation that is completely overlooked in the Western European and American narrative. The Soviet Union bore the brunt of defeating Hitler, losing an astounding 27 million citizens in the war. Russia had one overriding demand at the end of the war: that its security interests be guaranteed by a treaty protecting it from future threats from Germany and the West more generally. The West, led now by the United States, refused this basic security demand. The Cold War is the result of the Western refusal to respect Russia’s vital security concerns. Of course, the history of the Cold War as told by the Western narrative is just the opposite—that the Cold War resulted solely from Russia’s belligerent attempts to conquer the world!

    Here is the actual story, known well to historians but almost completely unknown to the public in the United States and Europe. At the end of the war, the Soviet Union sought a peace treaty that would establish a unified, neutral, and demilitarized Germany. At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, attended by the leaders of the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and the United States, the three allied powers agreed to “the complete disarmament and demilitarization of Germany and the elimination or control of all German industry that could be used for military production.” Germany would be unified, pacified, and demilitarized. All of this would be secured by a treaty to end the war. In fact, the U.S. and UK worked diligently to undermine this core principle.

    Starting as early as May 1945, Winston Churchill tasked his military Chief of Staff with formulating a war plan to launch a surprise attack against the Soviet Union in mid-1945, code-named Operation Unthinkable. While such a war was deemed impractical by the UK military planners, the notion that the Americans and the British should prepare for a coming war with the Soviet Union quickly took hold. The war planners deemed that the likely timing for such a war was the early 1950s. Churchill’s aim, it appears, was to prevent Poland and other countries in Eastern Europe from falling under a Soviet sphere of influence. In the United States too, top military planners came to view the Soviet Union as America’s next enemy within weeks of Germany’s surrender in May 1945. The U.S. and UK quickly recruited Nazi scientists and senior intelligence operatives (such as Reinhard Gehlen, a Nazi leader who would be supported by Washington to establish Germany’s postwar intelligence agency) to begin planning the coming war with the Soviet Union.

    The Cold War erupted mainly because the Americans and the Brits rejected German reunification and demilitarization as agreed at Potsdam. Instead, the Western powers abandoned German reunification by forming the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, or West Germany) out of the three occupation zones held by the United States, United Kingdom, and France. The FRG would be reindustrialized and remilitarized under the American aegis. By 1955, West Germany was admitted to NATO.

    While historians ardently debate who did and did not live up to the agreements at Potsdam (e.g., with the West pointing to the Soviet refusal to allow a truly representative government in Poland, as agreed at Potsdam), there is no doubt that the West’s remilitarization of the Federal Republic of Germany was the key cause of the Cold War.

    In 1952, Stalin proposed a reunification of Germany based on neutrality and demilitarization. This proposal was rejected by the United States. In 1955, the Soviet Union and Austria agreed that the Soviet Union would withdraw its occupying forces from Austria in return for the latter’s pledge of permanent neutrality. The Austrian State Treaty was signed on May 15th, 1955, by the Soviet Union, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, together with Austria, thereby leading to the end of the occupation. The goal of the Soviet Union was not only to resolve the tensions over Austria but also to show the United States a successful model of Soviet withdrawal from Europe coupled with neutrality. Once again, the United States rejected the Soviet appeal for ending the Cold War based on Germany’s neutrality and demilitarization. As late as 1957, the American doyen of Soviet affairs, George Kennan, was appealing publicly and ardently in his third Reith Lecture for the BBC for the United States to agree with the Soviet Union on a mutual withdrawal of troops from Europe. The Soviet Union, Kennan emphasized, was not aimed at or interested in a military invasion of Western Europe. The U.S. Cold Warriors, led by John Foster Dulles, would have none of it. No peace treaty was signed with Germany to end World War II until German reunification in 1990.

    It is worth underscoring that the Soviet Union respected the neutrality of Austria after 1955, and indeed of the other neutral countries of Europe (including Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal). Finnish President Alexander Stubb has recently declared that Ukraine should reject neutrality based on Finland’s adverse experience (with Finnish neutrality ending in 2024, when the country joined NATO). This is a bizarre thought. Finland, under neutrality, remained at peace, achieved remarkable economic prosperity, and shot to the very top of the world leagues in happiness (according to the World Happiness Report).

    President John F. Kennedy showed the potential path to end the Cold War based on mutual respect for the security interests of all sides. Kennedy blocked the attempt by German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to acquire nuclear weapons from France and thereby assuaged the Soviet concerns over a nuclear-armed Germany. On that basis, JFK successfully negotiated the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with his Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev. Kennedy was most likely assassinated several months later by a group of CIA operatives as the result of his peace initiative. Documents released in 2025 confirm the long-held suspicion that Lee Harvey Oswald was being directly handled by James Angleton, a top CIA official. The next U.S. overture towards peace with the Soviet Union was led by Richard Nixon. He too was brought down by the Watergate events, which also have signs of a CIA operation that have never been clarified.

    Mikhail Gorbachev eventually ended the Cold War by unilaterally disbanding the Warsaw Pact and by actively promoting the democratization of Eastern Europe. I was a participant in some of those events and witnessed some of Gorbachev’s peacemaking. In the summer of 1989, for example, Gorbachev told the communist leadership of Poland to form a coalition government with the opposition forces led by the Solidarity movement. The end of the Warsaw Pact and the democratization of Eastern Europe, all steered by Gorbachev, led quickly to the calls by the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl for the reunification of Germany. This led to the 1990 reunification treaties between the FRG and GDR, and to the so-called 2+4 Treaty between the two Germanys and the four Allied powers: the U.S., UK, France, and Soviet Union. The United States and Germany clearly promised Gorbachev in February 1990 that NATO “would not shift one inch eastward” in the context of German reunification, a fact that is now widely denied by the Western powers but that is easily verified. That key promise not to proceed with NATO enlargement was made on several occasions, but it was not included in the text of the 2+4 Agreement, since that agreement concerned German reunification, not NATO’s eastward expansion.

    The fifth case, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, is once again regarded in the West as proof of Russia’s incorrigible westward imperialism. The favorite word of Western media, pundits, and propagandists is that Russia’s invasion was “unprovoked,” and therefore is proof of Putin’s implacable quest not only to reestablish the Russian Empire but to move further westward, meaning that Europe should prepare for war with Russia. This is a preposterous big lie, but it is repeated so often by the mainstream media that it is widely believed in Europe.

    The fact is that the Russian invasion in February 2022 was so thoroughly provoked by the West that one suspects it was indeed an American design to lure Russians into war to defeat or weaken Russia. This is a credible claim, as a long streak of statements by numerous U.S. officials confirms. After the invasion, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared that Washington’s aim was “to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine. Ukraine can win if it has the right equipment, the right support.”

    The overriding American provocation of Russia was to expand NATO eastward, contrary to the 1990 promises, with one important aim: to surround Russia with NATO states in the Black Sea region, thereby rendering Russia unable to project its Crimean-based naval power into the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. In essence, the U.S. aim was the same as the aim of Palmerston and Napoleon III in the Crimean War: to banish the Russian fleet from the Black Sea. NATO members would include Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia, thereby forming a noose to strangle Russia’s Black Sea naval power. Brzezinski described this strategy in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, where he asserted that Russia would surely bend to the Western will, as it had no choice but to do so. Brzezinski specifically rejected the idea that Russia would ever align with China against Europe.

    The entire period after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 is one of Western hubris (as historian Jonathan Haslam entitled his superb account), in which the United States and Europe believed that they could drive NATO and American weapons systems (such as Aegis missiles) eastward without any regard for Russia’s national security concerns. The list of Western provocations is too long to provide in detail here, but a summary includes the following.

    First, contrary to promises made in 1990, the United States began NATO’s eastward enlargement with then-President Bill Clinton’s announcements in 1994. At the time, Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, William Perry, considered resigning over the recklessness of the U.S. actions, contrary to previous promises. The first wave of NATO enlargement occurred in 1999, including Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. In that same year, NATO forces bombed Russia’s ally Serbia for 78 days to break Serbia apart, and NATO quickly placed a new major military base in the breakaway province of Kosovo. In 2004, the second wave of NATO’s eastward expansion included seven countries, including Russia’s direct neighbors in the Baltics, and two countries on the Black Sea—Bulgaria and Romania. In 2008, most of the EU recognized Kosovo as an independent state, contrary to the European protestations that European borders are sacrosanct.

    Second, the United States abandoned the nuclear arms control framework by unilaterally leaving the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002. In 2019, Washington similarly abandoned the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Despite Russia’s strenuous objections, the U.S. began to place anti-ballistic missile systems in Poland and Romania, and in January 2022, reserved the right to place such systems in Ukraine.

    Third, the United States deeply infiltrated Ukraine’s internal politics, spending billions of dollars to shape public opinion, create media outlets, and steer Ukraine’s domestic politics. The 2004–2005 election in Ukraine is widely regarded as a U.S. color revolution, in which the United States used its covert and overt influence and financing to steer the election in favor of the U.S.-backed candidates. In 2013-2014, the United States played a direct role in financing the Maidan protests and in backing the violent coup that toppled the neutrality-minded President Viktor Yanukovych, thereby paving the way for a Ukrainian regime supporting NATO membership. Incidentally, I was invited to visit the Maidan soon after the violent February 22nd, 2014 coup that toppled Yanukovych. The role of American financing of the protests was explained to me by a U.S. NGO that was deeply involved in the Maidan events.

    Fourth, beginning in 2008, over the objections of several European leaders, the United States pushed NATO to commit to enlarging to Ukraine and Georgia. The U.S. ambassador to Moscow at the time, William J. Burns, wired back to Washington a now-infamous memo titled “Nyet Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines,” explaining that the entire Russian political class was deeply opposed to NATO enlargement to Ukraine and that it worried such an effort would lead to civil strife in Ukraine.

    Fifth, following the Maidan coup, the ethnic Russian regions of Eastern Ukraine (Donbas) broke away from the new Western Ukrainian government installed by the coup. Russia and Germany quickly settled on the Minsk Agreements, according to which the two breakaway regions (Donetsk and Lugansk) would remain part of Ukraine but with local autonomy, modeled on the local autonomy of the ethnic-German region of South Tyrol, Italy. Minsk II, which was backed by the UN Security Council, could have ended the conflict, but the government in Kyiv, with the support of Washington, decided not to implement autonomy. The failure to implement Minsk II poisoned the diplomacy between Russia and the West.

    Sixth, the United States steadily expanded Ukraine’s army (active plus reserve) to around one million soldiers by 2020. Ukraine and its right-wing paramilitary battalions (such as the Azov Battalion and the Right Sector) led repeated attacks against the two breakaway regions, with thousands of civilian deaths in the Donbas from Ukraine’s shelling.

    Seventh, at the end of 2021, Russia put on the table a draft Russia-U.S. Security Agreement, calling mainly for an end to NATO enlargement. The United States rejected Russia’s call to end NATO’s eastward enlargement, recommitting to NATO’s “open-door” policy, according to which third countries, such as Russia, would have no say regarding NATO enlargement. The U.S. and European countries repeatedly reiterated Ukraine’s eventual membership in NATO. The U.S. Secretary of State also reportedly told the Russian Foreign Minister in January 2022 that the United States maintained the right to deploy medium-range missiles in Ukraine, despite Russia’s objections.

    Eighth, following the Russian invasion on February 24th, 2022, Ukraine quickly agreed to peace negotiations based on a return to neutrality. These negotiations took place in Istanbul with the mediation of Türkiye. At the end of March 2022, Russia and Ukraine issued a joint memorandum reporting progress in a peace agreement. On April 15th, a draft agreement was tabled that was close to an overall settlement. At that stage, the United States intervened and told the Ukrainians that it would not support the peace agreement but instead backed Ukraine to continue fighting.

    The High Costs of a Failed Foreign Policy

    Russia has not made any territorial claims against Western European countries, nor has Russia threatened Western Europe aside from the right to retaliate against Western-assisted missile strikes inside Russia. Up until the 2014 Maidan coup, Russia made zero territorial claims on Ukraine. After the 2014 coup, and up through late 2022, Russia’s only territorial demand was Crimea, to prevent Russia’s naval base in Sevastopol from falling into Western hands. Only after the failure of the Istanbul peace process—torpedoed by the United States—did Russia claim annexation of Ukraine’s four oblasts (Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia). Russia’s stated war aims today remain limited, including Ukraine’s neutrality, partial demilitarization, permanent non-NATO membership, and transfer of Crimea and the four oblasts to Russia, constituting roughly 19 percent of Ukraine’s 1991 territory.

    This is not evidence of Russian westward imperialism. Nor are they unprovoked demands. Russia’s war aims follow more than 30 years of Russian objections to the eastward expansion of NATO, the arming of Ukraine, the American abandonment of the nuclear arms framework, and the deep Western meddling in Ukraine’s internal politics, including support for a violent coup in 2014 that put NATO and Russia on a direct collision course.

    Europe has chosen to interpret the events of the past 30 years as evidence of Russia’s implacable and incorrigible westward expansionism—just as the West insisted that the Soviet Union alone was responsible for the Cold War, when in fact the Soviet Union repeatedly pointed the way to peace through the neutrality, unification, and disarmament of Germany. Just as during the Cold War, the West chose to provoke Russia rather than to acknowledge Russia’s wholly understandable security concerns. Every Russian action has been interpreted maximally as a sign of Russian perfidy, never acknowledging Russia’s side of the debate. This is a vivid example of the classic security dilemma, in which adversaries completely speak past each other, assuming the worst and acting aggressively on their faulty assumptions.

    Europe’s choice to interpret the Cold War and the post-Cold War from this heavily biased perspective has come at enormous cost to Europe, and the costs continue to mount. Most importantly, Europe came to view itself as wholly dependent on the United States for its security. If Russia is indeed incorrigibly expansionist, then the United States truly is Europe’s necessary savior. If, by contrast, Russia’s behavior has in fact reflected its security concerns, then the Cold War could most likely have ended decades earlier on the Austrian neutrality model, and the post-Cold War era could have been a period of peace and growing trust between Russia and Europe.

    In fact, Europe and Russia are complementary economies, with Russia rich in primary commodities (agriculture, minerals, hydrocarbons) and engineering, and Europe home to energy-intensive industries and key high technologies. The United States has long opposed the growing trade links between Europe and Russia that resulted from this natural complementarity, viewing Russia’s energy industry as a competitor to the U.S. energy sector, and more generally viewing close German-Russian trade and investment ties as a threat to American political and economic predominance in Western Europe. For those reasons, the United States opposed the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines well before there was a conflict over Ukraine. For this reason, Biden explicitly promised to end Nord Stream 2—as happened—in the event of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. opposition to Nord Stream, and to close German-Russian economic ties, was on general principles: the EU and Russia should be kept at arm’s length, lest the United States lose its clout in Europe.

    The Ukraine War and Europe’s split with Russia have done great damage to the European economy. Europe’s exports to Russia have plummeted, from around €90 billion in 2021 to just €30 billion in 2024. Energy costs have soared, as Europe has shifted from low-cost Russian pipeline natural gas to U.S. liquefied natural gas, which is several times more expensive. Germany’s industry has declined by around 10 percent since 2020, and both the German chemical sector and automobile sector are reeling. The IMF projects EU economic growth of just 1 percent in 2025 and around 1.5 percent for the balance of the decade.

    German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has called for a permanent ban on reestablishing Nord Stream gas flows, but this is almost an economic suicide pact for Germany. It is based on Merz’s view that Russia aims for war with Germany, but the fact is that Germany is provoking war with Russia by engaging in warmongering and a massive military buildup. According to Merz, “a realistic view of Russia’s imperialist aspirations is needed.” He states that “Part of our society has a deep-rooted fear of war. I don’t share it, but I can understand it.” Most alarmingly, Merz has declared that “the means of diplomacy have been exhausted,” even though he has apparently not even tried to speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin since coming to power. Moreover, he seems willfully blind to the near success of diplomacy in 2022 in the Istanbul process—that is, before the United States put a stop to the diplomacy.

    The Western approach to China mirrors its approach to Russia. The West often attributes nefarious intentions to China that are, in many ways, projections of its own hostile intentions toward the People’s Republic. China’s rapid rise to economic preeminence during 1980 to 2010 led American leaders and strategists to regard China’s further economic rise as antithetical to U.S. interests. In 2015, U.S. strategists Robert Blackwill and Ashley Tellis clearly explained that the U.S. grand strategy is American hegemony, and that China is a threat to that hegemony because of China’s size and success. Blackwill and Tellis advocated a set of measures by the United States and its allies to hinder China’s future economic success, such as excluding China from new trade blocs in the Asia-Pacific, restricting the export of Western high-technology goods to China, imposing tariffs and other restrictions on China’s exports, and other anti-China measures. Note that these measures were recommended not because of specific wrongs that China had committed, but because, according to the authors, China’s continued economic growth was contrary to American primacy.

    Part of the foreign policy vis-à-vis both Russia and China is a media war to discredit these ostensible foes of the West. In the case of China, the West has portrayed it as committing a genocide in Xinjiang province against the Uyghur population. This absurd and hyped charge came without any serious attempt at evidence, while the West generally turns a blind eye to the actual ongoing genocide of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza at the hands of its ally, Israel. In addition, the Western propaganda includes a host of absurd claims about the Chinese economy. China’s highly valuable Belt and Road Initiative, which provides financing for developing countries to build modern infrastructure, is derided as a “debt trap.” China’s remarkable capacity to produce green technologies, such as solar modules that the world urgently needs, is derided by the West as “overcapacity” that should be curtailed or shut down.

    On the military side, the security dilemma vis-à-vis China is interpreted in the most ominous manner, just as with Russia. The United States has long proclaimed its capacity to disrupt China’s vital sea lanes but then calls China militaristic when it takes steps to build its own naval capacity in response. Rather than seeing China’s military buildup as a classic security dilemma that should be resolved through diplomacy, the U.S. Navy declares that it should prepare for war with China by 2027. NATO increasingly calls for active engagement in East Asia, directed against China. European allies of the United States generally conform with the aggressive American approach towards China, both regarding trade and the military.

    A New Foreign Policy for Europe 

    Europe has backed itself into a corner, making itself subservient to the United States, resisting direct diplomacy with Russia, losing its economic edge through sanctions and war, committing to massive and unaffordable increases in military spending, and cutting long-term trade and investment links with both Russia and China. The result is rising debts, economic stagnation, and a growing risk of major war, which apparently does not frighten Merz but should terrify the rest of us. Perhaps the most likely war is not with Russia but with the United States, which under Trump threatened to seize Greenland if Denmark wouldn’t simply sell or transfer Greenland to Washington’s sovereignty. It’s quite possible that Europe will find itself without any real friends: neither Russia nor China, but also not the United States, the Arab states (resentful of Europe’s blind eye to Israel’s genocide), Africa (still smarting from European colonialism and post-colonialism), and beyond.

    There is, of course, another way—indeed a highly promising way, if European politicians reassess Europe’s true security interests and risks, and reestablish diplomacy at the center of Europe’s foreign policy. I propose 10 practical steps to achieve a foreign policy that reflects Europe’s true needs.

    First, open direct diplomatic communications with Moscow. Europe’s palpable failure to engage in direct diplomacy with Russia is devastating. Europe perhaps even believes its own foreign policy propaganda, since it fails to discuss the key issues directly with its Russian counterpart.

    Second, prepare for a negotiated peace with Russia regarding Ukraine and the future of European collective security. Most importantly, Europe should agree with Russia that the war should end based on a firm and irrevocable commitment that NATO will not enlarge to Ukraine, Georgia, or other eastward destinations. Moreover, Europe should accept some pragmatic territorial changes in Ukraine in Russia’s favor.

    Third, Europe should reject the militarization of its relations with China, for example by rejecting any role for NATO in East Asia. China is absolutely no threat to Europe’s security, and Europe should stop blindly supporting American claims to hegemony in Asia, which are dangerous and delusional enough even without Europe’s support. To the contrary, Europe should strengthen its trade, investment, and climate cooperation with China.

    Fourth, Europe should decide on a sensible institutional mode of diplomacy. The current mode is unworkable. The EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy serves mainly as a mouthpiece for Russophobia, while actual high-level diplomacy—to the extent that it exists—is confusingly and alternatively led by individual European leaders, the EU High Representative, the President of the European Commission, the President of the European Council, or some varying combination of the above. In short, nobody speaks clearly for Europe, since there is no clear EU foreign policy in the first place.

    Fifth, Europe should recognize that EU foreign policy needs to be disassociated from NATO. In fact, Europe does not need NATO, since Russia is not about to invade the EU. Europe should indeed build its own military capacity independent of the United States, but at far lower cost than 5 percent of GDP, which is an absurd numerical target based on the utterly exaggerated assessment of the Russian threat. Moreover, European defense should not be the same as European foreign policy, though the two have become utterly confused in the recent past.

    Sixth, the EU, Russia, India, and China should work together on the green, digital, and transport modernization of the Eurasian space. Eurasia’s sustainable development is a win-win-win-win for the EU, Russia, India, and China, and cannot occur other than through peaceful cooperation among the four major Eurasian powers.

    Seventh, Europe’s Global Gateway, the financing arm for infrastructure in non-EU countries, should work together with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Currently, the Global Gateway is pitched as a competitor to BRI. In fact, the two should join forces to co-finance the green energy, digital, and transport infrastructure for Eurasia.

    Eighth, the European Union should step up its financing of the European Green Deal (EGD), accelerating Europe’s transformation to a low-carbon future, rather than squandering 5 percent of GDP on military-related outlays of no need or benefit for Europe. There are two benefits of increased outlays for the EGD. First, it will deliver regional and global benefits in climate safety. Second, it will build Europe’s competitiveness in the green and digital technologies of the future, thereby creating a new viable growth model for Europe.

    Ninth, the EU should partner with the African Union on a massive expansion of education and skill-building through the AU member states. With a population of 1.4 billion rising to around 2.5 billion by mid-century, compared with the EU’s population of around 450 million, Africa’s economic future will profoundly affect Europe’s. The best hope for African prosperity is the rapid buildup of advanced education and skills.

    Tenth, the EU and the BRICS should tell the United States firmly and clearly that the future world order is not based on hegemony but on the rule of law under the UN Charter. That is the only path to Europe’s, and the world’s, true security. Dependency on the U.S. and NATO is a cruel illusion, especially given the instability of the United States itself. Reaffirmation of the UN Charter, by contrast, can end wars (e.g., by ending Israel’s impunity and enforcing ICJ rulings for the two-state solution) and prevent future conflicts.

    The post A New Foreign Policy for Europe first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump’s Contronymal “Peace” with Russia

    They didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors.  It’s hard to explain.

    –  J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

    With all the hullabaloo about President Donald Trump’s “peace” gestures toward Russia over Ukraine and the resetting of U.S.-Russia bi-lateral relations, it is worth remembering the “pivot to Asia” announced by the Obama administration in 2011 and the coup d’état it carried out in Ukraine in 2014.  For those who might not remember, I would recommend two films: John Pilger’s The Coming War on China and Oliver Stone’s Ukraine on Fire.

    They are two prongs of a long-term U.S. strategy to maintain American preeminence throughout the world by countering Russia and China simultaneously, if not equally at once. Such strategy is not determined by someone like President Donald Trump speaking or acting impulsively, as is his wont, but by bankers, financiers, éminences grises, and pale-faced scholarly guns-for-hire in stately buildings reserved for such deliberations.

    Despite rhetoric to the contrary, there is a consistent foundational foreign policy strategy from one American presidential administration to the next with necessary little detours here and there, and arguments within the ruling class about tactics. Long-term strategy is capacious enough to include sudden seeming shifts in policies that are couched in cover stories that beguile even the smartest people. Wishes fuddle the minds of the most astute. They serve to obscure the interests of U.S. dominance of the world, a dominance that is now threatened, and one that Trump is not abandoning, even as he adjusts American tactics on the fly.

    The Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and its magazine, Foreign Affairs are where the ruling elites of the United States debate and determine American foreign policies from administration to administration, regardless of political party. The CFR is the preeminent U.S. think tank; it is over one hundred years old, financed by the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Foundations and its members have included former CIA Director Allen Dulles, McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and many other high government and financial figures, including David Rockefeller, who served as  chairman between 1970-1985.

    “Largely unbeknownst to the general public, executives and top journalists of almost all major US media outlets have long been members of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).” It is evidence of why the corporate mainstream media is an adjunct of the U.S. propaganda system. To become a member is to be baptized into the U.S. ruling establishment and its vast propaganda network that includes, as former CIA analyst Ray McGovern describes it: the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex, MICIMATT.

    Donald Trump is a headline grabber who ultimately follows orders. He is not, as claimed, an outlier. Unusual he may be – bizarre in many ways – but he has his supporters within the dueling factions of the ruling elites. Nothing could clarify this more than the events of the past weeks, from his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska to his meeting in the White House with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenski, his fellow entertainer, and his European entourage of jugglers and clowns. They didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors.

    “Whenever I take up a newspaper,” the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote in his play Ghosts, “I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.”

    Such is what I see when I read today’s press about Trump, the peacemaker. Having been around a few years, his actions strike no shock of the new in me, but rather bring to mind a walk down a city street where old ghosts meet to whisper a description I once read of most corporate mainstream journalists – “No ideas and the ability to express them.” Or to put it another way – only ideas they have been fed and the ability to regurgitate them. So Trump is either described as a traitor who has been manipulated by Putin or a man genuinely seeking the end of America’s efforts to surround and crush Russia.

    Neither is true. We are captives in a contronymal game (a contronym being a word having contradictory meanings, such as “refrain”: to desist from doing something or to repeat).

    Someone is playing someone. Who is playing whom and why I will leave as a question for readers’ research. See, for example, the work of another key think tank – the Rand Corporation’s 2019 study, “Extending Russia,” – that cooly sets out various options for the U.S. to use in undermining Russia as if it were suggesting possible menu items at a restaurant. Without a knowledge of history, Donald Trump appears to be a radical departure from past American presidents. That he opened a dialogue when he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska seems significant. It is true that talking is better than walking away, but only when the intentions that underlie it are honorable, and in this case, I find that doubtful.

    Let me use an analogy that may at first seem “by the way” and therefore not apt. I think it is. When it came to the assassination of President Kennedy, the CIA and its media mouthpieces weaponized the term “conspiracy theory” to besmirch the names of those who questioned the Warren Commission Report. The corporate mainstream media (MSM) have echoed this ever since and thus the term came to be one applied to dissenters of all sorts, even those who believe the most outlandish things, such as Elvis didn’t die but was taken up by aliens where he now commands a spaceship called Suspicious Minds, named for one of his hit songs.

    Conspiracists were those who had these insane thoughts that there were elements within the government, notably within the CIA, FBI and Pentagon, who would assassinate their own leaders and those devoted to peace. Over the years this term came to be mixed with that of “the deep state,” shadow government, rogue network, etc. The “official” position was that such conspiratorial thinking was undermining the official good government and was the work of lunatics; it assumed that the government didn’t conspire to commit crimes, only lone nuts did, and then crazier nuts tried to pin it on elements within the government such as the CIA. These people were said to be paranoid.

    But over the decades scholars have clearly shown that many of the claims of the “conspiracy theorists” were correct despite the best efforts of MICIMATT to create fantastically absurd “conspiracy” stories that they have used to ridicule serious thinkers and researchers. This mode of attack was weakening and along popped Donald Trump “straight” out of the TV screen. A larger than life big mouth who appealed to voters who felt that they were being screwed by the elite elites, which they were and are (Trump, after all, is a super-rich New York City real estate tycoon that no one except the most astute propagandist would choose to run for the presidency). Trump promised he would get to the bottom of many of the “conspiracy theories” – such as the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and the events of September 11, 2001, etc. – but he never will. He was going to expose the crooks, clean out the swamp, and make government as pellucid as a pristine mountain stream. Like all the charlatan presidents, he campaigned as a peacemaker and then waged war directly or through barely concealed proxies (war being the lifeblood of the U.S. economy) – Ukraine, Israel, Syrian “rebels” (i.e. terrorists), etc. The charade of his “peacemaking,” although weakening, still casts a spell over many people who fail to understand who formulates American foreign policy strategy.

    If there is a so-called deep state responsible for the aforementioned assassinations, etc. and it controls U.S. presidents, then it controls Donald Trump. If Trump is truly trying to end the U.S. proxy war via Ukraine against Russia and establish good relations with its long-term arch-enemy, either the “deep state” has decided this is the best long-term strategy to try to maintain world dominance and it has tricks up its sleeve to attempt to do so, or else it will prevent Trump from carrying out his ostensible intent.

    However, if there is no hidden “deep state,” just the official U.S. public state whose policies are largely determined in the dens of the aforementioned think tanks whose works are openly available, a government that does what it wants under various cover stories – two most significant ones being “the deep state” and “conspiracy theory” – then Trump may be its most fantastic contronymal creation, the epitome in his person of what Orwell meant by Doublethink:

    Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them…. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.

    It is important to remember how all the rhetoric surrounding the term “deep state” has been so craftily used and mixed with that of “conspiracy theory” that it is worth considering it part of a very sophisticated propaganda campaign to scramble minds.

    Few would dispute the fact that there is a ruling class in the United States and that its interests are not those of ordinary Americans. This is so obvious I will elide further comments about it. Everyone knows how wealth controls the electoral system; that it has corrupted it beyond repair.

    Logic suggests that if a “deep state” is posited opposed to the official “open” government, and if it can be eliminated by a “good” politician, then the good guys will be back in charge and a return to the status quo effected.

    So we must ask the question: What is the opposite of a contronym?

    The post Trump’s Contronymal “Peace” with Russia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Ukraine’s Future; A ‘Steppe Corridor’, A Neutral, Transit-Oriented State

    While Russia is confidently prosecuting the war in Ukraine towards its inevitable end.

    Meanwhile the ‘West’ is still negotiating with itself about the conditions under which it will have to capitulate.

    Discussions continue about ‘security guarantees’ for Ukraine even as the only serious ones are those that Russia is willing to give.

    The confused arguments about ‘guarantees’ are reflected in the reports of them. Consider this nonsense:

    A security guarantee could encompass a wide range of issues. In return for Russia ending its invasion, a security pact could include a pledge of U.S. air support for any European-led operations should Russian troops resume their assault.

    If Russia ends the war NATO like ‘security guarantees’ are to be given to Ukraine as a reward?

    The post Ukraine’s Future; A ‘Steppe Corridor’, A Neutral, Transit-Oriented State appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • What Do We Know About Zelensky and the Seven Dwarfs Visit to the White House?

    With the usual qualifier that I could be entirely wrong, my sense is that both the Alaska Summit and Monday’s meeting at the White House were reality checks. They revealed that Putin was finally able to convince the “collective Trump” (Gilbert Doctorow’s term), that the war in Ukraine did not begin with the Russian invasion of February 2022 but with the February 2014 Maidan coup in Kiev that overthrew the democratically elected Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych. It was part of the neocon’s grand strategy of using Ukraine in a proxy war to bleed Russia before taking on China.1 This faction of the permanent government or Deep State has been defeated on the battlefield.

    The filter to which to view recent events is that the other faction of the US ruling elite, the one to which Trump is nominally connected, “only” wants domination of one-third of the globe and they have correctly concluded that Russia has already won the war in Ukraine. Trump does not want to be associated with a war that ends like Vietnam or Afghanistan. Putin was offering Trump an exit and he pulled the plug onUkraine or, to mix metaphors, took Ukraine off the neocon’s global chessboard.

    At Monday’s White House meeting, the now neutered and obsequious Zelensky (who at least wore a coat) set a world record for uttering the words “Thank you, Mr. President”and the fact the Trump despises the back-stabbing, groveling European vassals was on full display as he humiliated them. I was reminded of disobedient school children sitting in the principal’s office. In any case, as each one offered his or her portion of the prepared script, the high (or low) point was when Merz pitifully raised the dead letter “ceasefire” demand for the umpteenth time and Trump pretended to listen before offering an offhand patronizing comment.

    The question arises why these Europeans will feverishly continue to sabotage the peace process? There might be a few leaders who believe the nonsense about a “Russian threat” but as Vijay Prashad  has cogently argued, “European elites are primarily interested in protecting their legitimacy. They have invested too much political capital in their goal of ‘victorious peace’ to walk away.” As I’ve noted in previous posts, how else can the European ruling class justify massive increases in arms spending which requires dismantling the welfare state if they can’t maintain the narrative that the Kremlin plans to invade Europe? More critically, how can they maintain their power and privilege if ordinary citizens realize they’ve been lied to over so many decades? In sum, this is the “existential threat” facing European governing elites and they’re living on borrowed time.

    In the near future, Putin will meet with Ukrainian negotiators, probably in Istanbul but because both sides are so far apart, no compromise is possible. Putin will enforce a resolution of the conflict on Zelensky which will be a surrender, a capitulation. Trump won’t be there because he wants to evade responsibility when everything collapses.

    Finally, Alaska and Washington were limited but positive first steps in transforming US-Russia relations and that’s good news for those aware of the real danger of nuclear war. Further, there’s a better than fifty percent chance that the Ukraine war will end in the near future and that tens of thousands of lives will be spared. And lest I be misunderstood, this isn’t because Trump is a “good guy” or US imperialism is softening but because of the aforementioned, array of highly unusual circumstances the US was forced to retreat. If there are folks out there who miss the truth that at this narrow, isolated point in time that’s a positive development, I can only say “pity on them.” Of course this “good news” must be quickly tempered by the fact that US “Project Ukraine” has already cost the lives of 1.1 million Ukrainians and Russians in a totally unnecessary war.

    Note: The entirely disingenuous question of so-called “security arrangements” must be taken up another day.

    ENDNOTE:

    The post What Do We Know About Zelensky and the Seven Dwarfs Visit to the White House? first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    Thomas I. Palley, “The War in Ukraine — A History: How the US Exploited Fractures in the Post-Soviet Order,” New Left Review, June 1, 2025; John J. Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault. Foreign Affairs, September/October 2014. We know now there was a covert CIA plan to invade Ukraine by special forces as early as 1957. See, Kit Klarenberg, “Declassified: CIA’s Covert Ukrainian Invasion Plan,” MRonline, Aug 19, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • They Shall Not Pass: Our Call Against Fascism

    A walk through the Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance against Japanese Aggression in Beijing makes one despise war and everything about militarism. The museum is not far from the Marco Polo (or Lugou) Bridge, where the Chinese people began their war to liberate their country from the Japanese occupation in the north. The most striking parts of the museum are those that demonstrate the ugly violence of Japanese militarism, such as the Nanjing Massacre (1937–1938); the horrendous biological and chemical warfare and unspeakable human experimentation conducted by Unit 731 in the northeastern city of Harbin (1936–1945); and the prisons for ianfu (‘comfort women’) that the Japanese military established to hold sex slaves for their soldiers.

    The post They Shall Not Pass: Our Call Against Fascism appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • White ‘Supremacy’s’ Subjective Identification Of War Criminals Reveals Deeper Psychopathology

    Last week the world witnessed the geopolitical spectacle that took place in Anchorage, Alaska when Presidents Trump and Putin met to discuss ending the feckless, unnecessary, and fossil-fueled war between the Russian Federation and Ukraine that’s been ongoing for three years. Unsurprisingly, the three hour discussion between the leaders led to no comprehensive agreement that would, in Trump’s words, “stop the killing.” However, while the Trump/Putin meeting failed to result in an armistice, it did elucidate profound hypocrisies and revealed that when it comes to who is considered a war criminal it largely depends on who the victims are.  

    The post White ‘Supremacy’s’ Subjective Identification Of War Criminals Reveals Deeper Psychopathology appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • U.S. Out of Africa: Voices from the Struggle

    Is Russia an agent of destabilization in Africa or a lifeline for nations seeking sovereignty? In this second installment of our extended conversation with Dr. Gerald Horne, we challenge Western historical narratives and explore the hard truths behind Africa’s security challenges, the transition from the Wagner Group to the Africa Corps, and the shared grievances that are drawing Moscow and the continent closer.

    AFRICOM Watch Bulletin spoke with Professor Gerald Horne for a special two-part exploration of the Russia-Africa relationship. Professor Horne holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston.  He is the author of more than 30 books, including most recently The Capital of Slavery: Washington D.C. from 1800-1865, a regular guest on the Horne Report, which airs on Black Power 96 Radio Sundays at 3:30 PM EST, and host of Freedom Now on KPFK Los Angeles, Saturdays at 11 AM PST.

    AFRICOM Watch Bulletin: When people discuss Russia in Africa these days, the primary focus is on security relationships.  From the West (which is to say the US and most of the rest of NATO,) the narrative is that Russia is an agent of destabilization, whereas for many Africans, Russia is a lifeline providing arms and materiel that the NATO camp has either refused to or offered only with onerous conditions attached.  Can you speak to this discrepancy?

    Dr.Gerald Horne: Well, it’s obvious that the North Atlantic camp, they do not want the African nations to have allies.  They want to be able to feast on Africa without Africa being able to call on Russia for assistance.  That particularly is the case with regard to the Sahel nations, speaking of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger who are trying to move in a progressive direction, witness the recent trips to Moscow of the leaders of both Bamako and Ouagadougou, the latter being Ibrahim Traore, who of course was in Moscow on May 9th, 2025, the holiest day on the Russian calendar, marking the victory over fascism.  This was the 80th anniversary marked in 2025.  And so it reminds me of North Atlantic nations and their relationship to China as well. I mean, [the] United States is in hot to the people’s bank in Beijing, and if you go to Walmart or most major US retail establishments, a good deal of the merchandise is made in China, but at the same time, hypocritically, they turned to African nations and say, don’t deal with China! Well, of course, the African nations might well say, Physician heal thyself! When you break relations with China, we will consider it. But until then, you should shut up, basically, and mind your own business. So we really can’t take seriously these complaints in the North Atlantic camp about Russia’s relations with Africa. African nations are sovereign nations. They’re allowed to make their own decisions. The North Atlantic nations, of course, they don’t necessarily listen to the instructions from Africa, and Africa therefore reciprocates by not listening to the instructions from the North Atlantic nations.

    AFRICOM Watch Bulletin: Much of Russian military activity on the continent over the last several decades has occurred through private entities ranging from the Bout network, to PMC Wagner. Especially in light of the documented relationship between Viktor Bout and the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, coupled with the fact that RSF (Rapid Support Forces) in Sudan is reportedly being supported by both Wagner and the UAE where Bout had much of his operation based, (notwithstanding  Russia making overtures to the Sudanese armed forces at the same time,) are private military contractors a fundamentally destabilizing force?  Do victories such as the retaking of Kidal in November of 2023 challenge this thesis?

    Dr.Gerald Horne: Well, I would say that it was probably a step forward when Moscow decided in the wake of the death of Mr. Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner Group, to seek to restrain shall we say euphemistically the Wagner Group and to fold its operations into the government, the Ministry of Defense in Moscow, because I think that these private military groups in some ways are an expression of some of the unfortunate post-Soviet trends.  You might recall that in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, December 25th, 1991, there was a kind of free-for-all in terms of the looting of natural resources creating billionaires for example, some of whom had to be reigned in subsequently by Mr. Putin to the consternation of Washington and London. And the Wagner group in particular, although as you suggested, was able to accomplish certain victories that could very well be deemed to be progressive, this sort of security for minerals proposition which they embodied was not necessarily a step forward, speaking in euphemisms. In fact, you see another expression of security for minerals with regard to these recent deals cut by US imperialism with the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  And of course when you talk about these private military groups, we have to bring up Eric Prince, a comrade of Mr. Trump, who has sent forces most recently into Haiti for example in the wake of the apparent failure by Kenyan police forces to reign in what are called gangs in Haiti. And now Eric Prince and his band of thugs was supposed to accomplish that goal. So I think it would be good for Black Alliance for Peace to look skeptically at these minerals for security/security for minerals deals, to look skeptically at these private military groups. But notice that I said look skeptically.  I think that presumption and opposition to them can be overcome, but there has to be a considerable weight of evidence to overcome that particular presumption.

    AFRICOM Watch Bulletin: After the 2023 death of Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, we are seeing the transition from Wagner to the newly inaugurated Africa Corps which is run by the Russian Ministry of Defense.  Does national attribution bode to increase accountability and how would you compare and contrast Africa Corps with AFRICOM? Is there a reason why African nations could not forgo both for the much vaunted but seemingly ephemeral APSA (African Peace and Security Architecture?)

    Dr.Gerald Horne: Well, with regard to the latter, that is something to consider. The problem with the latter is whether or not the Pan-African bodies have the muscle and the resources to combat these malign forces. I mean, for example, to cut to the chase, you mentioned Sudan and you mentioned the United Arab Emirates. My own supposition, and I would like your crack research team to look into this more deeply, is that a number of the Gulf monarchies are interfering grievously in the internal affairs of African states, not only Sudan, but I would argue that the religious zealots who are seeking to destabilize the Sahel nations also have a lifeline that leads back to the Persian Gulf.  That creates contradictions because on the one hand, US imperialism, as referenced by Mr. Trump’s recent trip to that part of the world, he is clearly in bed with the Gulf monarchies, witness the ill-fated, ill-advised Abraham Accords whereby some of these monarchies were warming relations with Israel, and of course that stretches all the way to Morocco. At the same time, these religious zealots, the contradiction is that they can easily destabilize US allies. Speaking of Cote D’Ivoire, for example, speaking of Northern Nigeria for example. But in any case, I think that the Gulf monarchies, they’re trying to satisfy internal domestic issues with regard to religious zealotry in their own homelands by allowing them to run amuck in Africa. They’re sort of exporting the issue to the continent, which they think will allow them to continue in their merry way.  But in any case, my point is, I’m not sure if Pan-African bodies have the resources to confront the complexities of what I’ve just outlined which therefore causes them to call upon external allies such as Moscow to help them to resolve these tensions and contradictions reference my speaking to the trips to Moscow, Traore, Goita, et cetera.

    AFRICOM Watch Bulletin: Widening our aperture, how do you assess Russia’s overall relationship with the continent? Considering multilateral entities such as BRICS, or perhaps energy affairs, what are Russia’s interests, what are Africa’s, and do they appear congruent?

    Dr.Gerald Horne: I think so.  I think that obviously the African nations have historic and contemporary grievances with regard to the North Atlantic countries. Russia, as I’ve tried to indicate, has historic grievances with regard to the North Atlantic countries. And at this point, let me issue a footnote that is rarely addressed, but I think it’s important, which is that with the breakup of the Soviet Union, and here advert to what I said about how even defeats can lead to contradictions that are difficult to resolve, you saw that Russia or the Soviet Union, it was disrupted.  You created these independent states. Now on the one hand, this allows for the North Atlantic countries, for example, to try to turn Azerbaijan against Russia, to try to turn the Baltic republics against Russia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The breakup of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp in Eastern Europe then allows for the attempt to turn or to enhance and exacerbate Polish tensions with Russia. Of course Poland has talked about creating a Fort Trump, for example, which would be useful to that end, even Bulgaria, which traces its sovereignty to 1877/1878 when Russia intervenes to try to rescue it from the clutches of Ottoman Turkey has been moving in that Polish, Baltic, Azerbaijan direction.  So that’s on one side of the ledger. It creates enormous complexities and complications, not only for Russia, but I would say for international peace and security. But at the same time, the breakup of the Soviet Union created new contradictions for the North Atlantic camp. I mean, for example, you have geostrategic analysts going back to the beginning of the 20th century who suggested that the fulcrum of planet Earth rests in Central Asia, in the ‘Stans’ for example, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, et cetera, once part of the Soviet Union, now close to Russia and close to China. So if you had honest analysts of US imperialism, they would look into that and draw appropriate conclusions. But of course, you cannot expect honesty from thieves. I should also say that, to put this in language that Wall Street can understand, in many ways Russia was subsidizing many of these other republics. And so when the Soviet Union breaks up, that curtails, if not ceases, the subsidies which helps to explain the economic growth of Russia despite sanctions by the North Atlantic countries, and that’s not even to mention the fact that the Ukraine proxy war has driven Russia and China closer together and geostrategic analysts from the beginning of the 20th century through Henry Kissinger have thought that that would be a nightmare for US imperial interests. But in the footnote, now to return to the question, I would say that the interests of Africa and Russia are parallel insofar as both have a common grievance with regard to the North Atlantic countries. However, given the fact that post 1991 Russia is not the same as the Soviet Union, you have billionaires, you have profit making enterprises, inevitably there are going to be contradictions between certain interests of Russia and certain interests of sovereign and independent Africa. But as the BRICS example tends to illustrate, BRICS includes not only South Africa, but Ethiopia and Egypt, I think that those contradictions can be overcome. It’s not as if they’re the same as the contradictions between say the African nations and the North Atlantic camp.

    AFRICOM Watch Bulletin: Finally, if we avoid tired US tropes, do there remain any exploitative conditions deserving of challenge in the name of African sovereignty and self-determination?

    Dr.Gerald Horne: It depends on what you mean. I mean, for example, both Africa and Russia, or raw material exporters heavily dependent upon the export of oil;  if you look [at] in the case of Russia, Nigeria, Angola, Gabon, for example, the export of energy, energy including natural gas; Russia, Algeria, for example, the export of precious resources; platinum in the case of South Africa and Russia; diamonds in the case of Namibia and Russia; uranium in the case of Namibia and Niger. And so the OPEC example, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which is the exporting countries banding together for mutual benefit, in some ways that sheds light on the parallel interests between Africa and Russia. That is to say, the parallel interests are seeking reasonable prices for their commodities being exported and therefore taking it out of the pockets of the importing countries, speaking of the North Atlantic countries. And therefore you begin to see the contradiction because the North Atlantic countries would like to pay lower prices for the aforementioned commodities. Russia and the African nations would like to see higher prices. The latter then unites Russia and Africa on a common platform. For example, Russia and Africa would like to see the rampant and rampaging interference of North Atlantic countries in the internal affairs of sovereign nations be circumscribed, to put it mildly. And the North Atlantic countries would like to continue that because they think that it’s to their benefit, and certainly US imperialism thinks it’s to their benefit at least up to July, 2025.

    The post U.S. Out of Africa: Voices from the Struggle first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The Ukraine War Is Over And Ukraine Lost (To The USA) In 2014

    Even some of my readers have Ukraine derangement, where they think the Empire that has been wrong about every war happens to be right about this one. It ain’t true. Ukraine is just one front of the war White Empire is waging on the world, and I hope they lose. Thankfully albeit tragically (by Russia’s own admission), they are. Ukraine is simply exhausted and Empire is bored. Ukraine’s men have been thrown around like toy soldiers and, like the meme goes, America is saying I don’t want to play with you no more. That’s the meaning behind all this talk of negotiations. They’re meaningless. All that’s left is surrender.

    You have to consider negotiations in this context. Trump has said Ukraine is not his war and he visibly dressed down the already illegitimate (no elections) Zelensky.

    The post The Ukraine War Is Over And Ukraine Lost (To The USA) In 2014 appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Russia Bad America Good

    The demonization of Russia among Western journalists has gotten so perverse, if Vladimir Putin were to jump in an erupting volcano and rescue a family of four Americans, carrying them on his back hobbling along on the melted stumps of his legs to a hospital 50 miles away, the mainstream media in the U.S. would report that Vlad the Impaler in some disconnected attempt to reconstruct the Soviet Empire had personally kidnapped four defenseless U.S. citizens and was holding them in a labor camp in the Siberian tundra.

    Nothing good about Russia ever makes the cut these days, only the bad, much of it fabricated by the U.S. government itself. Even indisputable facts of history take a back seat to vilifying everything Russian. With appalling disrespect, Western leaders snubbed Russia by refusing to take part in the 70th anniversary celebrations of victory over Germany held in Moscow in 2015. Likewise with the recent 80th anniversary victory day celebrations, attended by many top leaders from all over the world. Then at equivalent ceremonies in Europe, scant mention was even made of the Russian campaigns, which resulted in the deaths of over 10 million Russian soldiers. If you bother to check the record, you will discover it was not France, England, and the U.S. which defeated Hitler. It was Russia.

    I don’t say this because I’m a Russia lover or a Putin apologist. This is a matter of historical record. Maybe to the propagandists in the West with their highly focused, patently obtuse agenda, facts don’t matter. But to you and I, if we are to have any shot at embracing harmony in the world, facts are vital to a greater appreciation of a nation of 146 million people whose government is armed with over 5,000 nuclear warheads.

    Here are some more facts. Feel free to check the historical record:

    1) Joseph Stalin proposed in 1952 that Germany be reunited as a single neutral country with free elections. A central condition was that Germany not be part of a NATO alliance, which it viewed as a military threat. Russia was under enormous pressure economically after being ravaged by World War II and wanted to reduce the growing tensions between the East and the West.

    Of course, by ignoring and ultimately rejecting this proposal, it would take another forty years of Cold War hostility and posturing to reunite Germany, then as an loyal ally and military stronghold of the U.S., though ironically, Germany for decades — until fairly recently — has been one of Russia’s most important European trading partners.

    2) Prior to the 1963 Cuban missile crisis, Nikita Khrushchev for almost a decade proposed substantial reductions in offensive weapons. While America was implementing the largest peace time military build-up in history, Russia was in fact reducing its military capability.

    Khrushchev finally became convinced, especially after the U.S. placed in nearby Turkey nuclear-tipped Jupiter missiles which could easily reach Russia, that America was bent on attacking the Soviet Union. This was the underlying reason for deploying nuclear missiles in Cuba, precipitating one of the most dangerous crises in history. Perhaps not the wisest thing to do, given the level of tensions the U.S. maintained with its constant “better dead than Red” fear mongering, nevertheless the missiles in Cuba were basically the Soviet’s attempt to achieve some sort of parity, at least a minimal acceptable level of mutually assured destruction with America.

    3) In 1983, the U.S. risked starting World War III with provocative and unnecessary probing of Soviet air defenses, a military exercise called Able Archer. This was purely a strategic and psychological maneuver intended to bolster support Reagan was soliciting from Congress and U.S. allies for his Star Wars missile defense system. Because at this same time the U.S. was deploying nuclear-tipped Pershing II missiles in Europe which only had a 5-minute flight time to key targets in Russia, Soviet leadership understandably viewed Star Wars not as a defensive system but as the means for establishing a first-strike capability. And it suspected the probing of its air space and testing of its defense systems via Able Archer, was a prelude to an attack. Speculation about a first-strike nuclear attack on Russia continues to this day. Extremely dangerous!

    4) Reagan and Gorbachev in the end were quite sincere about totally eliminating nuclear weapons by the end of the 20th Century, thus their verbal agreement during a summit in Reykjavik, Iceland to work toward eliminating the nuclear arsenals of both Russia and the U.S. was quite authentic. It was not posturing. Moreover, the whole idea for eliminating the entire nuclear arsenals of both countries was initiated by Soviet Premier Gorbachev in a letter sent to President Reagan January 14, 1986. It was actually his idea.

    5) Russia only has nine foreign military bases. This is in contrast to what many estimate to be 700-800 in at minimum 80 countries by the U.S. A cursory glance at a world map shows that a substantial number of these bases form a ring around Russia. Even the most impartial observer would not view this as a coincidence and would at least appreciate why Putin and company see much of what America does as provocative, if not blatantly confrontational — why some analysts on both sides conjecture that America is preparing to launch a “preemptive” nuclear attack on Russia, begging the question what such an attack would preempt other than the continuation of the human species.

    6) Contrary to headlines which screamed foul in the American media, Russia never invaded Crimea. The simple fact is that there were 16,000 troops already stationed there, as per a standing treaty with the Ukrainian government. When the elected President of the Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych — certainly corrupt and questionable in his own right, like most Ukrainian politician — was driven out of the country by street thugs, these troops were instructed to protect key physical assets in the region, as well as make sure that the many native Russians who were living there remained safe. There was no firefight, no resistance. After 97% of voters demanded in an internationally-monitored referendum to rejoin Russia, the region which had been part of Russia going back to 1786, returned to Russian authority — hardly an invasion by any stretch of the imagination. No troops stormed over the border. No shots were fired.

    7) Far from being the instigator of the current crisis in the Ukraine, Putin has consistently played peacemaker and attempted to defuse the situation, even as native Russians came under threat from the new government in Kiev, and now Russian civilians are still being attacked daily with drones. Battalions of neo-Nazi fighters now comprise key sectors of Ukraine’s military forces. These were among the shock troops which originally rampaged through the eastern regions, attacking Donetsk and Lugansk, two strongholds of pro-Russian separatists and home to a majority of Russians, after the Maidan uprising.

    8) Contrary to the narrative being pushed by the White House — obviously the creation of neocon ideologues swarming like locusts at all levels of the bureaucracy, especially in the State Department and think tanks within the beltway — the evidence is quite clear that the entire coup was engineered and directed by the U.S., using agent provocateur NGOs, funded by National Endowment for Democracy. Senator John McCain and Asst. U.S. Secretary of State Victoria Nuland were even on the front lines during the demonstrations. This is, of course, not what you were being told by the American press, which still leads the charge in continuing to pin all blame on Russia and Putin.

    Now am I making a one-sided case here? Of course not. For over six decades, extending right up till the present, there have been gross deceptions and blunders on both sides. I bring up the above examples because the collective memory of the American public seems to be very short. Or more likely, many well-meaning Americans may not even be familiar with these particular facts in the first place. Anything good about the Soviets — and now the Russians — tends to be overwhelmed and replaced by the fiercely promoted and much easier to embrace “black hat” characterization we hear regurgitated over and over.

    What I am saying is there has already been so much misunderstanding, miscalculation, and missed opportunities, that to compound our bleak and tendentious relationship with Russia with yet more misunderstanding, miscalculation, and missed opportunities, is courting disaster. It’s that simple. What’s been going on is not working. Time for a new approach.

    And I am also saying that America lately bears more than its share of responsibility for the distortions, the slander, the disinformation, which has aggravated hostility toward Russia both by American and European leaders in their official capacities, and by American citizens, who never seem to run out of foreign peoples to fear, mistrust, even hate.

    Let me throw something else into the mix here. This is probably the most important factor whenever we look at Russia and try to gauge her motives and intents.

    The Soviet Union lost more than 27,000,000 people in World War II. Most were killed in the Russian homeland itself as a result of the overwhelming German Nazi blitz. Over a half million died in the Battle of Stalingrad alone.

    That is why they are fearful of having troops and/or ballistic missiles on their borders — as in the Ukraine or Georgia. They have been gritting their teeth as NATO has edged its way closer and closer to Russia — contrary, by the way, to reassurances given right after the fall of the Berlin wall and the reunification of Germany. America lost 420,000 soldiers during all of World War II, fighting on two fronts, in Europe and the Far East. If we had seen 27,000,000 Americans killed, the blood of the majority spilled right here on our own soil, how would we feel about having troops, nuclear-tipped tactical missiles, and ballistic missile defense radars and interceptors arrayed along the Canadian or Mexican borders? How would we read the intention of any nation insisting on putting these on our borders?

    As they say, this is not rocket science.

    What might require the intellectual aptitude of a rocket scientist is trying to understand what America’s strategic planners have in mind in promoting this agenda. It undermines any possibility of peace between the two great powers and risks thermonuclear war.

    Am I a Russia lover?

    An America hater?

    Neither.

    I just think that before we kill a few more million people or destroy the world, we might want to look at both sides of each issue, maybe mentally trade places, try to be fair and reasonable, give our all to try to understand exactly what is going on.

    And a big part of understanding issues is knowing history, taking into consideration what has been occurring for decades, sometimes even centuries. To paraphrase George Santayana: “Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes.”

    Yet, the drama continues and intensifies. Confrontation and intimidation of Russia is ongoing. Massive military exercises on Russia’s borders have become frequent: Griffin Lightning, Operation Hedgehog, Nordic Response, Dynamic Front 25. These follow numerous previously held on Russia’s borders in Poland and substantial increases in troops and equipment in Poland and the Baltic states. A new ABM system was deployed in Romania back in 2016. Romania is now in the final stages of constructing the largest NATO military base in Europe. In 2024, NATO opened a new missile defense base in Redzikowo, Poland. Military war games are also held in the Black Sea, like Sea Breeze 2015 and Sea Breeze 2021, sailing war ships and aircraft carriers into the “Russian lake”, surveilling and testing Russia’s littoral defenses.

    While all of this display of firepower is allegedly to prepare for a Russian offensive, it only serves to provoke Russia and test its patience. Propaganda from the West would have it that Russia is aggressively re-building the Soviet Empire and is preparing to attack Europe. Looking at what comes out of U.S. think tanks would suggest the opposite, that it is the US/UK/EU/NATO which is preparing to attack and dismember Russia, then plunder its vast resources.

    Russia does not want war with Ukraine, the US, or any country in Europe. Recognize, no one can point at any actual aggression on Russia’s part, other than the trumped up and discredited accusations of fighting in eastern Ukraine and having invaded and seized control of Crimea and four oblasts. Russia’s coming to the defense of the people there is completely understandable. The people in these five regions are mostly Russian. Ukraine has systematically targeted them for elimination. Even before the 2022 Special Military Operation began, over 14,000 were killed in Donbas alone. These five zones have been actively wanting to leave Ukraine and join Russia since 2014. They each held referendums and by huge majorities — 97% in Crimea! — voted to do just that.

    Now the rhetoric from the U.S. and NATO is becoming even more skewed and provocative. At the July 2016 NATO meeting in Warsaw, Russia was declared the major threat to peace and stability in Europe. Nothing has changed except to get worse. Great Britain is talking about sending its troops to Ukraine. Germany, the Baltic and Scandinavia nations, and the UK open talk about having a war with Russia. These people are relentless. And apparently merciless. They are willing to sacrifice the lives of their citizens in a major war that need not happen. All Russia wants is a neutral Ukraine — free of US/EU/NATO troops, no missiles and other lethal weaponry pointed at Russia — and a Ukrainian government which is free of Russia-hating neo-Nazis.

    Russia has made clear its position over and over. Putin, forcefully and frankly, expressed his concerns about NATO expansion in 2007 in his historical address at the Munich Conference. The West was then and still is unable to listen. Or simply refuses.

    The reality is, facts don’t discourage western politicians and U.S. media from beating the drums of war, increasing tensions, and risking a major military confrontation. When you wear a white hat, you alone get to decide who the black hats are.

    Frankly, it’s shocking what comes out of the mouths of the spokespersons for the U.S. government. There is no equivalent that I can see coming from the Russian side. Russians tend to be restrained, diplomatic, and at least on the public side very respectful and statesmanlike. Trump, and Biden and Obama before him have, for example, in a number of high-visibility public forums made it their personal mission to insult Vladimir Putin and propagate what are proven lies about Russia. If our political leaders believe any of this stuff, then instead of attending foreign policy and intelligence briefings, they must have been reading comic books or getting their information from Garry Kasparov’s website. But to be honest, I’ve concluded they know the truth and these endless propaganda assaults are quite intentional. The big plan is still to destroy Russia, break it up into little pieces, a loot its rich national resources and treasures.

    Back to Russia …

    Despite the barrage of vituperation and insults from the West, you cannot find one instance of Putin, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, former Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, current Defense Minister Andrei Belousov, Director of Information and Press Department Maria Zakharova, Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov, or any other high official in the ranks of power in Russia, conducting themselves with anything other than extreme courtesy and professionalism.

    Frankly, it’s often embarrassing to see the way U.S. diplomats swagger around like they’re on their way to a barroom brawl in America’s Old West. The contrast with Russia’s spokespersons is stark and revealing.

    Final thoughts …

    It would be one thing if the feud between the U.S. and Russia were just some schoolyard scrap between two pubescent boys. But these two major countries armed to the teeth with nuclear missiles, burdened with almost seven decades of bad blood between them, much of the bad blood alarmingly the product of gross misunderstanding.

    The price of more of the same aggravation and contentiousness is at best wasting valuable resources and energy which could be devoted to other mounting crises — climate change, the rapid destruction of the oceans, the spread of antibiotic-resistant disease, desertification of farmland, depletion of water resources throughout the world, increasing risk of widespread famine, the urgent need to secure vast stockpiles of nuclear weapons from access by terrorists — at worst an epic nuclear holocaust which puts the human race in a giant coffin.

    Isn’t it time to stop the name-calling?

    Isn’t it time to put away the gang colors?

    The black hats and the white hats?

    Russia Bad! America Good!

    Nothing is that simple.

    Unless you’re simpleminded.
    [ This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, America’s Hijacked Peace Dividend, available late October or November at fine bookstores across the globe. ]
    The post Russia Bad America Good first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Self-Determination for Eastern Ukraine?

    Completely absent in any of the governmental efforts for the last three and a half years to end the war in Ukraine is the issue of self-determination as it relates concretely to where the on-the-ground war and the huge percentage of casualties are primarily happening.

    The principle of nations having the right to make decisions about the form and nature of their governments goes back over 100 years and has long been upheld by the United Nations and most of the world’s governments.

    When it comes to the Russia/Ukraine war, this principle clearly applies to Ukraine’s efforts to defend its territory, economy, and form of government from Russia’s 2022 military invasion, intended to extinguish Ukraine as a self-determining country.

    But so far, neither the United Nations nor any other country has applied the concept of self-determination to the reality that it is in eastern Ukraine, the four provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, where the path to a just and peaceful end to this terrible war lies. Following a ceasefire and other necessary steps to prepare for them, there should be binding referendums under United Nations supervision so that each of these four provinces can decide whether they want to be part of Russia or part of Ukraine.

    It would be essential that these referendums be under the auspices of a neutral entity, which is why the United Nations is the logical choice.

    Is this point of view pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian? It seems to me it is neither. Neither side wants to risk losing territory it considers to be its own via a popular vote, which would put the stamp of political legitimacy on the results. Of course, the alternative seems to be a continuation for years, if not decades, of destructive and dangerous military conflict, tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars wasted, and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of additional deaths.

    Would the implementation of such a deal set a precedent for situations elsewhere in the world where there is conflict over territory between more-or-less distinct peoples? It probably would, but is such a precedent a bad thing? In a world where democracy is under threat by fascists and authoritarians, a successful application of the democratic principle of self-determination would be a ray of light, a hopeful development.

    Is there an alternative that is more just, more likely to succeed, more likely to end this brutal, destructive, and dangerous war and allow for positive economic and social rebuilding? That must be the objective.

    The post Self-Determination for Eastern Ukraine? first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ted Glick.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Russia Advances Near Pokrovsk On Motorcycles, Ukraine Strikes Back | Front Line Update


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Trump Says He’s Working To Arrange A Meeting Between Putin And Zelensky

    President Trump said on Monday that he was working on arranging a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, comments that came after a day of hosting the Ukrainian leader and several European officials at the White House.

    “At the conclusion of the meetings, I called President Putin, and began the arrangements for a meeting, at a location to be determined, between President Putin and President Zelensky,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

    Trump said that once Putin and Zelensky meet, he would join them for a three-way talk. “After that meeting takes place, we will have a Trilat, which would be the two Presidents, plus myself,” he wrote.

    The post Trump Says He’s Working To Arrange A Meeting Between Putin And Zelensky appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Declassified: CIA’s Covert Ukraine Invasion Plan

    On August 7th, US polling giant Gallup published the remarkable results of a survey of Ukrainians. Public support for Kiev “fighting until victory” has plummeted to a record low “across all segments” of the population, “regardless of region or demographic group.” In a “nearly complete reversal from public opinion in 2022,” 69% of citizens “favor a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible.” Just 24% wish to keep fighting. However, vanishingly few believe the proxy war will end anytime soon.

    The reasons for Ukrainian pessimism on this point are unstated, but an obvious explanation is the intransigence of President Volodymyr Zelensky, encouraged by his overseas backers – Britain in particular.

    The post Declassified: CIA’s Covert Ukraine Invasion Plan appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • French monitor: Ukraine, NATO provoked Russia in Donbas war


    This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Russia Expert Katrina vanden Heuvel on Trump Summits with Putin, Zelensky


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Russia Expert Katrina vanden Heuvel on Trump Summits with Putin, Zelensky


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Russia Expert Katrina vanden Heuvel on Trump Summits with Putin, Zelensky


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Russia Expert Katrina vanden Heuvel on Trump Summits with Putin, Zelensky


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • America Meets Its Hidden Destiny

    Healthy societies revel in who they are. Unhealthy societies view themselves in terms of either an ignominious past, current enemies who endanger them, or internal elements degrading the true, virtuous nature of the commune and sapping its strength. The United States through most of its history was in the first category. Today, it is clearly in the second. Therein lies our national tragedy – and our precipitous slide into Fascism American style.

    This historic shift – with profound implications – has not been driven by tangible factors, originating within itself or externally, but strikingly by intangibles. The country has not experienced any traumatic shocks. No ruinous, humiliating wartime defeat and occupation. No economic crash. No civil war. No deeply rooted conflicts between Church and secular forces. Think of inter-war Europe: by comparison, the United States has been living in a benign environment. American exceptionalism.  Stresses and strains, yes – nothing, though, of the magnitude that could explain so drastic a transformation.

    YET, there is a pervasive feeling that things are not quite right, vague feelings of dread hover, that something awful may happen that we can neither anticipate, avert nor cope with, that America is ‘losing it.’ Free floating unease and apprehension. A United States that senses it is losing control, losing mastery of its environment and of itself, naturally will look for scapegoats. Why? Corrective action to straighten out what’s gone wrong requires constructive ideas, rigorous thinking, self-confidence. They don’t exist. Little is positive or constructive. Tearing down, destruction, perverting, corrupting predominate instead.1 The negative prevails. Let’s look at current scene – at public discourse, politics, the dominant themes, the level and type of citizen engagement.

    What marks the landscape are: emotions eclipsing thought, intellectual aridity, the erasure of all boundaries to words or actions, the triumph of crude willpower. The rapid success of the Trump-led MAGA movement in putting in place the building blocks for a quasi-fascist regime is stunning testimony to how potent are the forces of negativity, to how pathetically weak the resistance of institutions, of organized political opposition, of civil society.

    Instead of deliberate reflection, we round on “enemies” – abroad and at home.

    Abroad

    Today, there is near unanimity in the vilification of Russia cast as a reincarnate Soviet Union, in portraying China as a menace bent on supplanting the U.S. as a global hegemon by foul and illicit means, in denouncing Iran as fanatically dedicated in its attacks on American interests. Then, there are the Arab terrorists – an all-purpose label to be stuck on whichever groups in the Greater Middle East fight against American/Israeli domination and defy American dictation: inter alia Hezbollah, Hamas, ISIS, the Houthis, al-Shabab. Al-Qaeda, which authored the trauma and humiliation of 9/11, has lost its pride of place on the enemies list now that Washington has joined with its Syrian branch to topple Assad, head of Syria’s anti-Israel Arab nationalist government.

    They are the hostiles who we say are conniving to bring America low. They represent an unprecedentedly multi-pronged threat to the national interest, to American self-esteem. They are assailing us ruthlessly in ever domain – military security, commerce and finance, our moral authority, even the political integrity of our impeccably democratic system by campaigns to disrupt and manipulate its workings.

    These propositions enjoy the allegiance of almost the entire American political class. Nary a single influential member of the Congress (Sanders, Yes; AOC, No) disputes them – as evinced by endorsement of Trump’s arbitrary sanctions warfare despite a Constitutional stipulation that only Congress has the authority to impose sanctions, by drastic boosts in the Pentagon/Intelligence budgets, by sustained applause for the homicidal fanatic who has lured us into a genocidal campaign against Palestine’s Muslim Arabs, and by blanket support for war preparations against the PRC. Not a single MSM outlet submits this hard core of the nation’s foreign policy precepts to skeptical examination. The major think tanks supply endless justifications. The only debates focus on tactics and priorities. Moral considerations are banned by common – silent – consent.

    [Stroll along Washington’s think tank rows of Massachusetts Avenue and ‘K’ Street and an attentive ear hears one uninterrupted declamation issuing from the minds that shape and propel American thinking about the world.]

    Noticeably absent is the ideological component. In the Cold War, the historic contest between democratic capitalism and Communism overshadowed all else. In its place, we have the contrived effort to promote a specious – and mortal – combat between Democracy vs Autocracy. In the American camp are such paragons of democracy as Netanyahu, Bolsonaro, Zelensky, Bukele (el Salvador), Mohammed bin-Salman, the Gulf sheikhs, and Abu Mohammad al-Jalani – ex-al-Qaeda emir installed as President of Syria. Democrat Netanyahu bombed Democrat Jalani’s capital Damascus a week ago. If Washington does anything to calm that intramural ruckus, Trump no doubt would cite it as the capstone to his fabulous record as peacemaker to claim the Nobel Prize. Donald Trump is the lodestar for all of these faux democrats, the cynosure of Democratic values.

    American elites and the citizenry overall seem to have no inkling as how far the country’s standing in the world has fallen – that we are seen as moral hypocrites and bullies everywhere outside the Collective West (its political class, anyway). That our reputation as a model of enlightened government and generator of public goods is shattered beyond restoration.

    We are living in a fantasy world of our own imaginings that is only tenuously connected to reality. In that fictitious domain, fixed consensus exists in believing the most outlandish – and reckless – notions. So, we are mistreated to an extraordinary array of misconceptions about declared foes and what we can do to subdue them. Most dangerous of these unsupportable propositions are those that vastly exaggerate – indeed, misrepresent – the threat that they pose. Those articles of faith, in turn, evoke extraordinarily extreme actions and plans for war. In the former category, we find these gems: Putin’s ambition is to wash his boots in the English Channel; Russia will crumble under the stress of sanctions and defeat by Ukraine’s ‘liberation’ forces; Putin’s regime will be replaced by a West-friendly, oligarch-led sober version of the Yeltsin-era set-up; Russian weaponry is significantly inferior to American weaponry; Russia can be split away from China and/or China split away from Russia. China is weaker than it looks; Beijing can be coerced into yielding its claim to Taiwan as an integral part of China – an agreed principle dating back 50 years, abrogated unilaterally by Washington; the U.S. has the upper hand in any economic duel with the PRC; therefore, we can impose a Maginot line of technological deprivation that will put an end to China’s challenge to American global dominance. A prideful India will hamstring its growing economy by boycotting Russian energy supplies at Washington’s command; prideful Indians eagerly will sign up as Sepoy auxiliaries in the American campaign to yolk China. Unlimited, unqualified backing for Israel’s imperial ambitions serves American national interests; there is no reason to modify that judgment in the face of its genocide of the Palestinians – nor should it be modified in the face of its military aggressions in Lebanon, Syria and its unrelenting (successful) attempt to embroil the U.S. in an all-out war with Iran. The answer to Iran’s resistance to Israeli-American hegemony in the Middle East is regime change in Tehran. Airborne attacks will trigger a popular uprising. American precision weapons can destroy Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles, its centrifuges and related nuclear facilities. {They have not. They never reached the inner chamber where the centrifuges were located – according to the most astute, neutral scientific assessment. Anyway, the High Enriched Uranium (HEU) and most of the centrifuges probably had been removed beforehand. Claims to the contrary emanating from the White House, the National Intelligence Agency (Tulsi Gabbard) and the Pentagon (Pete Hegseth) are outright lies referencing no pertinent data. Closer to home, there is the convenient belief that America’s drug addiction problem will disappear if we could dam the flow of narcotics from Mexico.

    Our faith-based supposition is that the outcome of these intertwined projects will be a stronger, more secure United States; elimination or grave weakening of our enemies; and enhanced respect/influence round the world. The exact opposite has occurred.

    Actions to achieve that outcome match the extremity of ambition. Policy elites are monolingual – they know only the lexicon of coercion, especially military coercion. Diplomacy is a dirty word, negotiations abhorrent.  We dictate, we make demands, we intimidate, we set deadlines – we don’t discuss. We envision the outcome of a successful negotiation as resembling the Japanese surrender on the deck of the Missouri in Tokyo Bay. An unwitting parody of Tom Lehrer’s “Send In The Marines.” Failure – repeated, ignominious failure – is filtered out.

    The consequences have been dire: costly for American well-being, murderously destructive out there, disintegrating of those international institutions and accords, arduously accomplished, that have lent a modicum of order and stability to inter-state dealings, and portents of nuclear war.

    Let’s turn our attention to the last mentioned. Over the post-war years, the great powers came to the common conclusion that there was no such thing as victory in a nuclear war. Therefore, they bent to the task of controlling “The Bomb,” i.e. taking concrete measures to ensure that there could be no activation of nuclear weapons by miscalculation, technical error, or accident. Stability and control were the aims codified in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTB), the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) and the follow-on Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty – all now abandoned or ignored by Washington.

    They were complemented by clear understanding that the ‘rules of the road” governing their rivalry called for extreme caution in avoiding conflictual situations involving the U.S., the USSR or – later – China. Proxy wars, yes, but with restrictions. There was only one episode of Russian and American forces exchanging fire. That occurred in occasional dog fights between jets over the Yalu River separating Korea and the PRC. (A famous participant was Ted Williams of baseball legend).

    Today, Washington leaders – civilian and military – have deviated from the path of prudence. Senior officials speak openly about the inevitability of a Sino-American war over a Taiwan Straits crisis. That scenario tops the list of the Pentagon’s strategic planning aims and purposes. Military budgets and force structures reflect it. A slew of articles and documents are emerging from government security bodies, affiliated think tanks (e.g. the Hudson Institute), institutes and Establishment journals like Foreign Affairs that analyze in minute details how that war could be conducted under diverse circumstances. Most often, the prospect of it escalating to the level of strategic nuclear exchanges is minimized. Some even talk about which side would have an advantage in the event.

    The hard truth is that any conflict that entails American munitions hitting China proper has something like a 90% chance of escalating to nuclear war; 95% if the scatterbrained psychopath is in the Oval Office.2 That should be the premise incorporated in any plan for war against China. The casual way that these ‘strategists’ contemplate great power combat testifies to the fact that once minds, and emotions, take up residence in a fanciful universe of their imagining the prospect grows of their divorcing totally from reality.

    [“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; if the bomb blast don’t get you, the fallout must” – pithy words of a renowned nuclear strategist]

    In regard to Iran, the United States has markedly increased the likelihood of its building a nuclear capability by giving up the international controls incorporated in the JPOA, by our implacable hostility and sanctions, and now by the heavy attack on Iran itself, an attack that has done little damage to Tehran’s nuclear capabilities while vastly strengthening incentives for it to go nuclear.

    Most alarming are the unprecedented American strikes against Russia proper. At this moment, and as has been the case for two years at least, serving officers physically in Ukraine play the critical role in the launching of a variety of missiles supplied by the U.S.: HIMARs, (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) and ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System). They provide the critical targeting Intelligence, they insert the codes that activate the weapons, and initiate the firing. Ukrainian military men do nothing more than “press the button.” In short, we are waging war against Russia – carrying out direct attacks. on Russian soil. Moreover, we have encouraged the British, the French and the Germans to do exactly the same – some employing American provided weapons whose use requires explicit approval from Washington. It is the Kremlin’s restraint that has prevented this provocation from leading to dangerous escalation – up until now.

    Set in this context, it should have been apparent that the Trump administration could not accept the humiliating defeat represented by a Ukraine settlement on any terms that met Russia’s core demands; nor could it engage seriously with Iran; nor could it consider reining in Israel; nor could it address China as an equal. No more than Biden or Trump in his first term.

    At Home

    The domestic scene offers a variation of this dismal reality. The Trump-led corps of suited militants and disciples are using coercive force of various kinds in random acts of destruction propelled by emotional drives for unfettered power, control and domination. The United States is being pushed down the path of Fascism American-style with stunning rapidity. Already, in critical respects we have ceased to be a Constitutional democracy.

    Daily, the Trump Falange takes truthless, arbitrary actions that defy the law and the Constitution, that shut down entire departments of government duly established by Congress, that suppress programs dedicated to preserve public health and other citizens’ services, that reject guarantees of due process at every level of government. The Bill of Rights is being gutted – the 1st and 4th Amendments already are null and void.  Trump cavalierly uses the Department of Justice as a weapon in vendettas against whomever he dislikes.

    These literally mindless assaults on state infrastructure put in place over more than a century are accompanied by attacks on scientific knowledge, on our most notable research institutions, on our universities. Trump and his henchman are literal “know-nothings” who indeed know nothing, and don’t want to know since knowledge is a constraint on the destructive impulse and the lust for absolute ‘freedom’ to do as they please. It follows that there is no tolerance for an official who speaks factual truth without first checking that it conforms to whatever wavelength the boss is on that day. Thus, Tulsi Gabbard is admonished that she will walk the plank unless she immediately contradicts herself on the “obliteration” of Iranian nuclear facilities. She, another D.C. careerist, obliges without hesitation. Both parties are pleased by the outcome. Thus, Erika McEntarfer – the poor woman who directed the Bureau of Labor Statistics – is kicked out unceremoniously because she innocently believed that arithmetic is politically uncontroversial. One party is pleased by the outcome.

    This rampage subjugates one institution after another like the German blitzkrieg overrunning hapless cities. In Congress, the Republicans are cowed into regimented automatons who resemble Prussian infantry or deputies to the old Supreme Soviet; the Democrats have reached the terminal point of their passive political suicide – comatose for so long that one barely notices their vanishing act; Barack Obama, who was the nation’s leader for 8 years, amuses himself  producing documentaries for Netflix while the country descends into perdition; the Supreme Court majority under John Roberts are a tacit, yet vital accomplice – rewriting the Constitution as suits them; the economic powerhouses – financial barons, business moguls, Silicon Valley buccaneers – are licking their chops at the feast spread before them by the Trump-Musk-Bessent pillage of the national economy; the MSM are shills or neutered; church denominations and civic society play mute or mumble sotto voce; Trump’s lucrative extortion-protection racket targeting blue chip law firms and Ivy League schools would make Vito Genovese blush; universities in particular are disgracing themselves in their abject surrender. The great debates at the highest reaches of our elite universities appear to be on whether to deal with Trump from a kneeling position or a supine position.

    A striking feature of this descent into unbridled autocracy, is that there is no ideological passion fueling it, no doctrine, no philosophy, no religious zeal. It is all about discharging emotions spawned in the depths of their roiled psyches. Just raw, crude tantrums committing flagrant acts of destruction and hurt. We must keep in mind that it is not only Trump. He has ignited and assembled a crew of wackos and misfits such a Robert Kennedy jr. who seemingly spends his waking hours devising ways to impair the health of Americans: cannibalizing the Center for Disease Control, slashing the National Institute of Health, restricting development and distribution of vaccines, suppressing scientific research at universities, demeaning those who actually know what they are talking about. Not surprisingly, this is someone who was diagnosed with worms in his brain and whose previous acts of civic behavior include strewing parts of a dismembered bear around Central Park in NYC Civilization has experienced nothing like this since the Dark Ages dropped the curtain on classical learning in the 6th and 7th centuries.

    [The Democrats, for their part, are equally non-ideological. They offer no coherent refutation of Trump’s amputations of the national government or his recission of every enlightened federal program initiated over the past 90 years. This tragic turn was foreshadowed by Bill Clinton’s public declaration in 1997 that “the era of big government is over,” and his promotion of the Bowles-Simpson Commission’s plan to cut deeply into Social Security and Medicare in his 2012 speech at the Democratic Convention renominating Barack Obama. Today, their message in opposition is nothing more than an anti-Trump screed.]

    Instead of ideology or doctrine we have a perverted Americanism. An artless blend of myth, doctored history and chauvinism, it has been inflated into an encompassing revelation that explains all, inspires all, justifies all. A one-size-fits-all creed cum faith that embraces every person, every circumstance, every act. Americanism acts as a Unified Field Theory of self-identity, collective enterprise, and the Republic’s enduring meaning. When one element is felt to be jeopardy, the integrity of the whole edifice becomes vulnerable. The drama of the American experience, our collective pageant of progress, used to be the great booster of morale and imparter of meaning. That tonic has lost much of its potency- in good part because it’s not the same country, and we no longer reign supreme in the world. So, crude attempts at restoration become the imperative for a shaky collective identity and impoverished individual self-esteem.  In the past, American mythology energized the country in ways that helped it to thrive.  Today, it is a dangerous hallucinogen that traps Americans in a time warp more and more distant from reality.

    [At the psychological level, this approach is understandable since it plays to the United States’ strength: overweening self-confidence coupled to military power – thereby perpetuating the national myths of being destined to remain the world’s No. 1 forever, and of being in a position to shape the world system according to American principles and interests. The tension for a nation so constituted encountering objective reality does not favor heightened self-awareness or a change in behavior. Today, there is no foreign policy debate whatsoever. In addition, our vassal governments in Europe and elsewhere either have a national interest in preserving the warped American view of the world (Israel, Poland) or have been so denatured over the decades that they are incapable 0f doing other than to follow Washington obediently – despite already having tumbled over a number of cliffs and staring at a potentially fatal abyss re. China and Russia]

    MAGA Dynamics

    To understand what forces are turbocharging the MAGA war on pre-Trump America, one must face squarely the abnormal elements in the movement’s make-up.

    A.      A cult-like movement such as MAGA can do without a god “but never without a devil.”3 For the neo-Fascist, the devil(s) on whom you focus your wrath is far more important than a prophet who offers a vision of a New Jerusalem or some other utopia. Just as the gratification of destruction eclipses any impulse to construct – other than restoration of some starry-eyed vision of an America that never existed.

    B.      There are Devils galore. Enemy states, clandestine networks of evil-doers at home and abroad, the racial “them,” and all who manipulate or facilitate them by not joining the paranoid crusade to purge those malignant forces. In a bizarre way so it is with the Palestinians whose tragic fate is to become the surrogate for all the above objects of scorn – permitting our complicity in their inhumane treatment. They are stand-ins for every social grouping that we – or some segment of us – hate, fear, despise, scapegoat. At once Islamo-terrorists, the Iranian mullahs, Russian saboteurs, Commies, drug cartels, illegal immigrants from inter alia Mexico, South America, Haiti, Afghanistan, Somalia, blacks, gays & transgenders, liberal elitists, abrasive feminists etc. etc. etc. All loom behind the Palestinian face in the mind’s eye of those in thrall to the demons of violent prejudice. When the mix of inchoate emotions reaches a critical mass, and demands discharge, they find a substitute for whatever fixates them. The unrecognized Palestinian becomes a blank canvas on which to paint the bête noir that obsesses you. In a bitter coda to this tale of depraved humanity, might there be vestigial bigots – in Europe and America – who in their twisted psyche project onto the anonymous Palestinian an image of “The Jew” – getting his comeuppance? For most, it is remarkable good fortune that the murderers and torturers are Jews – thus shielding them from stray pangs of conscience since we can congratulate ourselves on making up for the 2,000-years persecution of them.

    C. Displays of belligerence in word and deed tug on the emotional strings of those in the movement – even those who themselves lack the courage to act. Hence, the heroic savior is encouraged to raise the level of hostility and castigation of enemies in the rhetoric. He knows that “violence breeds fanaticism begets violence.”4

    D. The unspeakable has become the vernacular for Trump, his henchmen, his shock troops. Aggressive, hostile words – like violent deeds – nourish the lusts of the initiates while emboldening their prophet. Blind trust in the demagogic leader requires no collateral.

    E. In the light of the above, a fanatical mass movement can only intensify and reach new heights of extremity. It can be suppressed – but it cannot moderate. Once it reaches a certain threshold its own momentum will propel it to a climax of one sort or another – invariably a destructive climax.

    Conclusion

    Fascism or neo-Fascism does not emerge spontaneously from the depths like The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Conditions must be ripe, the ground prepared: combustible militants nursing their resentments must reach a critical mass, an inert populace must be numbed, a political class turned in on themselves, innate moral instincts sublimated, conventional norms of decency discredited. In this sense, Trump’s MAGA is the culmination of a degenerative process – not its cause.5

    We seem to have experienced a unique case of an auto-immune political cataclysm. The body politics’s instinctive mechanisms for reacting against (false) signs of a (fictitious) threatening invader become disoriented and begin to attack the host itself. A case of self-generated – if unintended – iatrogenic suicide. What was the perceived/felt threat catalyzing this process? 9/11 twenty-four years ago? There’s the puzzle.

    In truth, there are no tangible, overt threats to the American body politic which, by any reasonable measure, should cause such an extreme reaction. We must look elsewhere – into the minds and emotions of a disturbed society. One with a defective gyroscope. One where nihilism has blurred cultural and social reference marks, fostering a cult of selfishness – one of whose manifestations is the fashioning of fantasy worlds wherein delusional imaginings have no consequences – backing Trump as a sort of projected wish fulfillment – just as millions embark on a project of self -reinvention or play games of make-believe like ‘Fantasy Football.’ Those are the conditions that have generated the perversions, and the infirmities, that have led to the present perilous state-of-affairs.

    To be clear, we are not dealing with flaws of structure or procedure that could be remedied, mistaken policies that could be corrected, or sins that could be atoned. Rather, it is a pervasive corruption of our country’s societal software.

    If this interpretation is correct, there is little chance of a reversal or of rectifying the situation. Societies are incapable of close critical self-examination except, with great rarity, under the most extreme circumstances. A complete breakdown as Germany and Japan experienced in WW II. In those cases, it was made possible by the guiding hand of a relatively benevolent external party. We Americans are on our own – tragically, we are lacking the self-awareness to ward off disaster and to regenerate a measure of collective construction.

    Endnotes:

    The post America Meets Its Hidden Destiny first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    Nazism was a death cult. A very peculiar kind of death cult. For it reversed a Phoenix-like sequence by first announcing itself in grandiose construction projects, building autobahns, designing Albert Speer’s monumental public buildings as well as putting the Wehrmacht on steroids. Only then did it launch itself on the path of total destruction. First, the destruction of others; then the destruction of themselves and Germany. Throughout, its signature was the death head – Totenkopf – still seen as the emblem of Ukraine’s Azov units and among some Trumpite militants. Hitler’s own psyche entwined the drive for grandiose totems of power with intimations of self-annihilation. So, too, for many of his closest confidantes and fanatical followers. The Nazis are an extreme case both in the strength of their murderous impulses and in their readiness to enter into a danse macabre with Death.

    Aggressive cults dedicated to destruction without the suicidal element are more common.
    2    The other idea that has surfaced in academic strategic writing concerns nuclear warfighting. This hardy perennial has risen Phoenix-like from the critical dust several times. The latest iteration is set in the context of a conventional war between China and the United States. The analyst postulates that a “losing” China could revert to the use of Tactical Nuclear Weapons (TNWs). This scenario defies credibility on multiple counts.

    Above all, the idea that nuclear exchanges could be constrained below a certain (undefined) threshold is unrealistic in the light of what we know about human behavior. The absence of any rules means that confidence margins in the assessment of escalation probabilities are extremely wide. In addition, it is nearly impossible to imagine a situation whereby the United States military defeats Chinese forces to the point of making the country vulnerable to American occupation or dictation of terms (whatever they may be). A credible enforcement of submission to any specific diktat from Washington would have to entail either occupation or threat to strike cities. The Army that had its hands full pacifying Baghdad is in no position to rule 1.5 billion Chinese. As to the possible attack on high value targets, it could be deterred by the strategic nuclear capabilities that China would retain.

    Nuclear strategy is a bit like Marxism or Freudian analysis or market fundamentalist economics. A lot of superior minds deploy their talents to concoct ingenious elaborations of received Truth that spin exercises in impressive abstract logic – but their conclusions are only tangentially related to reality. Thus, reputations and careers can be made – and much mischief done.
    3    Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, 1951, p. 85.
    4    Hoffer, p. 99.
    5    In 1968, Governor Ed Muskie, who was the frontrunner for the Democrats presidential nomination, saw his campaign collapse when he shed a tear in public in response to reports of how a critic had made slurs against his wife’s ethnicity. Similarly, Governor George Romney saw his candidacy for the Republican nomination falter after a remark that his earlier support for the Vietnam war had been due to a “brainwashing” by U.S. military and diplomatic officials in Saigon. Nowadays, the country elects – for the second time – a clownish Fascist psychopath who instigated, and pardoned, a violent assault on the Capitol. The United States manifestly is a degraded polity.

    [In Romney’s case, as Gene McCarthy quipped, a quick rinse would have sufficed]

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump’s Tariffs Backfire: India Moves Closer To China

    US President Donald Trump is a very contradictory leader. He constantly implements policies that go against his stated goals.

    The perfect example of this is how Trump has treated BRICS, the Global South-led organization that now represents the majority of the planet.

    Trump sees BRICS as a major threat to US hegemony, and, in particular, the dominance of the US dollar as the global reserve currency.

    The US president has openly threatened members of BRICS to try to stop them from seeking alternatives to the dollar.

    In a press conference at the White House on July 8, Trump complained (emphasis added):

    BRICS was set up to hurt us. BRICS was set up to degenerate our dollar, and take our dollar as the standard, take it off as the standard.

    The post Trump’s Tariffs Backfire: India Moves Closer To China appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • US-Russia Talks: the Choice Between Peace and Escalation

    Photo: AFP via Getty Images

    Donald Trump came into office promising to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Now, six months later, his high stakes meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska may have put the United States and Russia on a new path toward peace, or, if this initiative fails, could trigger an even more dangerous escalation, with warhawks in Congress already pushing for another $54.6 billion in weapons for Ukraine.

    After emerging from the meeting, Putin correctly framed the historical moment: “This was a very hard time for bilateral relations and, let’s be frank, they’ve fallen to the lowest point since the Cold War. I think that’s not benefiting our countries and the world as a whole. Sooner or later, we have to amend the situation to move on from confrontation to dialogue.”

    Trump said he will follow up by talking to NATO leaders and Zelenskyy, as if the U.S. is simply an innocent bystander trying to help. But in Ukraine, as in Palestine, Washington plays the “mediator” while pouring weapons, intelligence, and political cover into one side of the war. In Gaza, that has enabled genocide. In Ukraine, it could lead to nuclear war.

    Despite protests from Zelenskyy and European leaders, Trump was right to meet with Putin, not because they are friends, but because the United States and Russia are enemies, and because the war they are fighting to the last Ukrainian is the front line of a global conflict between the United States, Russia and China.

    In our book, War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, which we have now updated and revised to cover three years of war in Ukraine, we have detailed the U.S. role in expanding NATO up to Russia’s borders, its support for the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, its undermining of the Minsk II peace accord, and its rejection of a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine after only two months of war in 2022.

    We doubt that Donald Trump fully grasps this history. Are his simplistic statements alternately blaming Russia and Ukraine, but never the United States, just a public façade for domestic consumption, or does he really believe America’s hands are clean?

    At their first meeting in Saudi Arabia on February 18, senior U.S. and Russian negotiators agreed on a three-step plan: first to restore U.S.-Russian diplomatic relations; then to negotiate peace in Ukraine; and finally to work on resolving the broader, underlying breakdown in relations between the United States and Russia. Trump and Putin’s decision to meet now was a recognition that they must address the deeper rift before they can achieve a stable and lasting peace in Ukraine.

    The stakes are high. Russia has been waging a war of attrition, concentrating on destroying Ukrainian forces and military equipment rather than on advancing quickly and seizing a lot more territory. It has still not occupied all of Donetsk province, which unilaterally declared independence from Ukraine in May 2014, and which Russia officially annexed before its invasion in February 2022.

    The failure of peace negotiations could lead to a more aggressive Russian war plan to seize territory much faster. Ukrainian forces are thinly spread out along much of its 700 mile front line, with as few as 100 soldiers often manning several miles of defenses. A major Russian offensive could lead to the collapse of the Ukrainian military or the fall of the Zelenskyy government.

    How would the U.S. and its Western allies respond to such major changes in the strategic picture? Zelenskyy’s European allies talk tough, but have always rejected sending their own troops to Ukraine, apart from small numbers of special operations forces and mercenaries.

    Putin addressed the Europeans in his remarks after the Summit:

    We expect that Kyiv and the European capitals will perceive [the negotiations] constructively, and that they won’t throw a wrench in the works, will not make any attempts to use some backroom dealings to conduct provocations to torpedo the nascent progress.

    Meanwhile, more U.S. and NATO troops are fighting from the relative safety of the joint Ukraine-NATO war headquarters at the U.S. military base in Wiesbaden in Germany, where they work with Ukrainian forces to plan operations, coordinate intelligence and target missile and drone strikes. If the war escalates further, Wiesbaden could become a target for Russian missile strikes, just as NATO missiles already target bases in Russia. How would the United States and Germany respond to Russian missile strikes on Wiesbaden?

    The U.S. and NATO’s official policy has always been to keep Ukraine fighting until it is in a stronger position to negotiate with Russia, as Joe Biden wrote in the New York Times in June 2022. But every time the U.S. and NATO prolong or escalate the war, they leave Ukraine in a weaker position, not a stronger one. The neutrality agreement that the U.S. and U.K. rejected in April 2022 included a Russian withdrawal from all the territory it had just occupied. But that was not good enough for Boris Johnson and Joe Biden, who instead promised a long war to weaken Russia.

    NATO military leaders believed that Ukraine’s counter-offensive in the fall of 2022 achieved the stronger position they were looking for, and General Milley went out on a limb to say publicly that Ukraine should “seize the moment” to negotiate. But Biden and Zelenskyy rejected his advice, and Ukraine’s failed offensive in 2023 squandered the moment they had failed to seize. No amount of deceptive propaganda can hide the reality that it has been downhill since then, and 69% of Ukrainians now want a negotiated peace, before their position gets even worse.

    So Trump went to Alaska with a weak hand, but one that will get weaker still if the war goes on. The European politicians urging Zelenskyy to cling to his maximalist demands want to look tough to their own people, but the keys to a stable and lasting peace are still Ukrainian neutrality, self determination for the people of all regions of Ukraine, and a genuine peace process that finally lays to rest the zombification of the Cold War.

    The whole world celebrated the end of the Cold War in 1991, but the people of the world are still waiting for the long-promised peace dividend that a generation of corrupt, war-mongering leaders have stolen from us.

    As negotiations progress, U.S. officials must be honest about the U.S. role in provoking this crisis. They must demonstrate that they are ready to listen to Russia’s concerns, take them seriously, and negotiate in good faith to achieve a stable and lasting agreement that delivers peace and security to all parties in the Ukraine war, and in the wider Cold War it is part of.

    The post US-Russia Talks: the Choice Between Peace and Escalation first appeared on Dissident Voice.


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • John Mearsheimer vs. Matt Duss: A Debate on Trump-Putin Summit, Ukraine, Russia & Paths to Peace


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • John Mearsheimer vs. Matt Duss: A Debate on Trump-Putin Summit, Ukraine, Russia & Paths to Peace

    Mearsheimer dussdebate

    As U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet in Alaska for a high-stakes summit to discuss a possible ceasefire in Ukraine, we host a debate between two foreign policy thinkers about the war, its causes and how it could be brought to a conclusion.

    John Mearsheimer is an international relations theorist at the University of Chicago, known for his realist perspective. He has long argued that Western policies are the main cause of the Ukraine crisis. “There’s overwhelming evidence that it was NATO expansion into Ukraine that drove this train,” says Mearsheimer.

    Matt Duss is executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and the former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders. He says that despite Western missteps, Russia is ultimately the main cause of the current war, which Putin started in 2022 with a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “Putin has made clear that he has a pretty grandiose historical conception of what he sees as a kind of renewed Russian empire,” he says.

    Both Mearsheimer and Duss say Ukraine’s war effort is flagging and that the best way out is to “make the best peace they can,” even if it means conceding territory to Russia.


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Russia Broke Through In The Battle For Pokrovsk, Major Setback For Ukraine | Front Line Update


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Ukraine: WE TOLD YOU SO

    I hate to say I told you so. It’s obnoxious, really. But sometimes it is an important point. In this case, the point is this: the people who are always right about wars were right about the war in Ukraine, whereas the “experts” who are always on television and in government were, as usual, wrong.

    Which of the following statements about the war with Russia comes closest to your personal views?

    • Ukraine should continue fighting until it wins the war
    • Ukraine should seek to negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible

    —

    Gallup asked that question three years ago, two years ago, one year ago, and this year. It asked it of Ukrainians. The first time, 72% of Ukrainians wanted Ukraine to continue fighting and only 22% to negotiate an end to the war. Most recently, 24% want to continue fighting and 69% want to negotiate an end to the war.

    If you’re a good U.S. news consumer and follower of weapons-funded “leaders,” then you know perfectly well that Ukraine must keep fighting until it wins the war. After all, Putin will be invading Idaho by Thursday if an end to the war is negotiated. Or even if that doesn’t happen, the rule of law will collapse — it will be as if someone had destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq, fueled a genocide in Gaza, and sanctioned international courts for doing their jobs — total lawlessness!

    That’s not a terrible argument — absurdly hypocritical and blinkered, but still a fair point in there somewhere. Only that’s not why you used to tell me that Ukrainians needed to fight on. Do you remember what the reason was? You told me it hundreds of times. Has it slipped your mind? It was that Ukrainians said in polls that they wanted the war to continue, and who THE HELL did I think I was to dare to suggest otherwise?! I mean, it’s not as if I lived on the planet that a nuclear war would render uninhabitable. This was a decision for UKRAINIANS. UKRAINIANS! Why couldn’t I get that through my thick skull?

    But now, after years of pointless killing, dying, wounding, traumatizing, and destroying, we’ve got 69% of Ukrainians telling pollsters they think an end to the war should be negotiated as soon as possible. I’m willing to bet that most, if not every last one, of those expressing that wise opinion would also now agree that such a negotiated end should have been achieved years ago. Nobody but war profiteers, sadists, and politicians clinging to power with rightwing support (yes, on both sides of this war) is better off for the now-desired negotiated end having been delayed so miserably long. Less than two years into Afghanistan and Iraq, a majority in the U.S. said those wars should never have been started — including millions of people who had fervently denounced war protests months before. It’s not hard to predict something that happens over and over again.

    The Ukrainian ruler says the war must go on, presumably because of democracy. This may be difficult to hear, but there’s not a democracy in Ukraine or within 500 million miles of Ukraine. If we had actual democracies, these wars would never have started. If we even thought in democratic terms, our priorities would be ending the mass killing and destruction, halting the arms trade to redirect resources into human needs, and devising credible means by which the residents of various sections of Ukraine — and not the Ukrainian or Russian government — can collectively make the best of the disaster they’ve been handed.

    So, how can I claim that those who were for peace prematurely were “right” and those who didn’t want to sit down and end the war until years later were “wrong”? Because we said, over and over and over, that a negotiated peace would have to come sooner or later and better sooner, that people would come to understand this fact eventually — but by then we’d have more corpses and orphans, and that endless proclamations of victory just around the corner from both sides of an endless war are reasons to end the thing, not reasons to wave flags and cheer for the war machine.

    “Helping Ukraine” has done exactly what we said shipping weapons to a slaughterhouse would do. It has hurt Ukraine. It has hurt Ukraine deeply, militarized much of the world, and thrown global agendas and priorities wildly out of whack. The way to help Ukraine was always going to begin by negotiating an end to the war. Don’t believe me? Ask the Ukrainians! I’m not sure how you dare to defy their will.

    Originally on https://worldbeyondwar.org/ukraine-we-told-you-so/

    The post Ukraine: WE TOLD YOU SO first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Zelensky Rejects Idea Of Ceding Territory To Russia

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has rejected the idea of ceding territory to Russia to end the war in Ukraine, as President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are preparing for a summit that will be held this Friday, August 15, in the US state of Alaska.

    “Ukrainians will not gift their land to the occupier,” Zelensky said in a video address on Saturday. “We will not reward Russia for what it has perpetrated.

    Zelensky’s comments came after The Wall Street Journal reported that Putin told US envoy Steve Witkoff that he would agree to a full ceasefire if Ukraine withdrew its forces from Donetsk, one of the two oblasts in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. Russia controls most of Donetsk and virtually all of Luhansk, the other half of the Donbas region.

    The post Zelensky Rejects Idea Of Ceding Territory To Russia appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Dancing with the Devil: Is It Possible to Evaluate Stalin Dialectically?

    Orientation
    Boogey men on parade
    “How can you like Putin? He is a dictator who has been in power for 20 years. There is no democracy in Russia. Besides, Russia is not a socialist country, so why are you rooting for him?” Here is another one. “Venezuela is a failed country run by drug cartels. There is no democracy. Maduro is an incompetent strongman who suppresses freedom of speech. Finally, Gaddafi: “He dresses like a king and wants to control all the African gold. He murders his own people”. Here we have three different countries on three different continents but the leaders have the same characteristics: authoritarian, one party, lacking democracy, poverty stricken, lacking human rights. In fact all these terms are loaded vice words concocted by the CIA in the early 1950s and still being circulated though their application applies less and less. In this article I will do an in-depth analysis of perhaps the biggest boogey man in the world, Joseph Stalin. My purpose is to show that if we understand the complexities of the Soviet Union between 1921 and 1956 we might better understand what Putin and Maduro are up against now as well as what Gaddafi was up against before he was murdered. So too, the real evolution of these men and their states will predicably be distorted, exaggerated, denied and censored.

    Fights between socialists
    Among Marxists there is no more polarizing revolutionary than Vladimir Lenin. The social democrats draw the line with him and claim that Leninism was authoritarian and undemocratic. The anarchists point to the killing and betrayal of their comrades during the Russian and Spanish revolutions.
    Council communists like Pannekoek and Gorter claimed that Leninism had little to do with Marxism. They say that Marxism is about worker-self organization and that Marx never talked about a vanguard party. All three groups claim that what took place in Russia was not socialism.

    For Marxist-Leninists, the key figure is Stalin. To what extent did he follow Marxist practice and in what ways did he depart? Trotskyists imagine that Stalin took Marxist-Leninism in the wrong direction and they claim they are the true inheritors of Lenin’s legacy. Stalinists claim that Social Democrats are not real socialists because they compromise with capitalism by advocating for a market even within socialism, and siding with imperialists internationally. Anarchists are dismissed as being unrealistic in expecting a revolution to occur without parties, hierarchies or the state. Council communists are dismissed because they don’t see the importance of a vanguard party. Lenin’s book Left-Wing Communism: An infantile Disorder deals fully council communism.

    Liberal and conservative anti-communism
    For liberals and conservatives Stalin is the devil incarnate. He is a monster who advocated for a totalitarian, one party rule. They say Stalin caused peasant famines, was responsible for the infamous show trials of the 1930s and killed millions of people. In this article I try to take the heat out of Stalinism. I attempt to say, most of the claims made by liberal and conservative historians against Stalin are either exaggerated or completely wrong, products of anti-communism. The book I will use to defend Stalin against his attackers is Ludo Martens’ book Another View of Stalin. But neither will I claim that Stalin did nothing wrong. I will save council communist criticism of Stalin until the end of this article.

    Lenin’s Legacy
    Lenin was a great politician in the 20  years he was most active from 1903 to his death in 1924. He was manipulative and very realistic about what was possible for communism. He was very smart in how he dealt with the Western powers when he took Russia out of World War I. It was under the lead of Lenin and Trotsky that Russia was pulled out of the Czarist Middle Ages. A Communist party could only be secret in a country that had no constitution and not even a liberal party. It took 10 years, but the lives of peasants and workers improved compared to life under the Czars. Martens says that compared to Belgium and France, the majority of peasants in 1900 lived as if they were in the fourteenth century. One third did not have a horse or oxen to work the land. The harvest was done with a scythe.

    Socialism in One Country vs Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution
    There  was a major struggle between Stalin and Trotsky as to who would inherit the leadership of the Bolshevik party after Lenin. Both agreed that in the best possible world there would be a revolution in Germany because then Germany could help Russia industrialize. When the German revolution failed, Russians were on their own. Stalin took the stance of attempting to build socialism in one country as best he could. This meant normalizing relations with capitalist countries. Trotsky wanted to foment revolution all over the world. Trotsky did not want to give up on Russia, but he had no illusions about the limitations of socialism without a strong industrial base coming from the West. In hindsight, Stalin was right. The life for workers in Russia would improve faster if the socialist state could pay full attention to them. Socialism would be much harder to build anywhere if there was no home base and simply batches of revolutionary parties and their followers isolated inside capitalist states. However, because Russia was the only socialist country in the world at the time, most of Stalin’s industrialization process was producing for real and anticipated wars with capitalist imperialists. Much industry for consumer was not implemented.

    Lenin’s Will
    Trotsky tried to denigrate Stalin’s revolutionary past but Stalin did have a revolutionary past. He met Lenin in 1905 and he led the radical wing of socialist democracy in Russia. He was arrested five times and he was imprisoned for five years between 1912-1917. Trotsky only joined the Bolsheviks in 1917. Before than he was sympathetic to the Mensheviks (social democrats). As far back as 1904, Trotsky called Lenin a fanatic, a dictator who wanted to substitute himself for the proletariat. Trotsky did everything he could to depict Stalin as a dictator ruling over the party. Yet when Lenin created the Bolshevik party, Trotsky accused him of creating an orthodox theocracy and autocratic Asiatic centralism. Martens says Trotsky was individualistic and had disdain for cadres. His leadership was authoritarian and his taste for military discipline frightened many party members. Lenin picked no clear successor.

    Trotsky had his moment in 1919 commanding the Red Army during the Civil War. Besides fighting the imperialist countries of the West, Trotsky led the suppression of the sailors’ strike in Kronstadt and fought a civil war in the countryside against Nestor Makhno and the anarcho-peasants. Trotsky was a great military leader but he was not shrewd politically. Between 1921-1923 Stalin was second in command in Russia. Lenin suffered his first stroke in 1922 and another in December of that year. The doctors told Bukharin, Stalin and Kamenev that any further excitement would be fatal. The Politburo made Stalin responsible for relations with Lenin, not Trotsky. Lenin judged the five main leaders of the party and criticized them all. Stalin was perceived by Lenin as too heavy-handed; Trotsky was too bureaucratic; Bukharin the most capable theorist, but scholastic in his theoretical orientation. The relations between Stalin and Lenin’s partner, Krupskaya, were not good. She complained about Stalin that he needed to be more polite and less blunt in dealing with the ailing Lenin. However, because Lenin or Krupskaya might have found Stalin psychologically crude does not mean Lenin favored Trotsky to lead the party. Lenin was critical of all the major leaders.

    The Struggle Against a Bureaucracy
    It was filled with reactionaries and careerists

    To lead a giant, complex country still trying to catch up on its industrial backwardness was an extremely difficult task. Trotsky invented the term bureaucracy in 1927. He called it the “Soviet Thermidor”, analogous to the French counter- revolution where right-wing Jacobins executed the left-wing Jacobins. Quoting Trotsky, the higher levels of the bureaucracy lived approximately the same kind of life as the well-to-do bourgeois of the US and other capitalist countries. The enemy is the new aristocracy, the new Bolshevik bourgeoise. In reality, Russia was a poor country. They hardly produced enough material wealth to live high on the hog as the Western upper classes. The Russian bureaucracy contained Tsarist elements and other reactionary classes, but those classes’ presence was not Stalin’s fault. The Soviet Union desperately needed people who could read and write to build up a coherent state. Stalin could not renounce them for revolutionary purity. He had to take what he could get. In fact, as was pointed out, Stalin’s purges were designed to get rid of these hangers-on.

    What Trotsky ignored in his analysis of the Russian bureaucracy was that the Bolsheviks had to retake part of the old Tsarist state apparatus which had only partially been transformed in a socialist direction. Those with a certain capacity for organization were immediately accepted into the party. In 1917 the party had 30k members; 1922, 600k; 1929, 1.5 million and in 1932 2.5 million. One fourth of the members did not meet the most elementary requirements of a communist. Communists could not be fussy about who was helping to run the state. Trotsky would have faced the same dilemma had he come to power.

    The Charge of Totalitarianism
    The term “totalitarian” was an anti-communism word that was used after World War II to equate Communism and fascism. The term has been discredited in research theories of politics but still circulates in mass media and the CIA which ignores the scientific research. Usually the charge of “totalitarianism” includes at least the following:

    • Abolition of the right to freedom of speech, assembly and religious worship
    • Elimination of all political parties other than the ruling party
    • Subordination of all economic and social life to structural control of the single party bureaucracy
    • Liquidation of free enterprise
    • Destruction of all independent trade unions and creation of labor organizations servile to the totalitarian state
    • Establishment of concentration camps and the use of slave labor
    • Utter disregard for an independent judicial system
    • Social demagogy around race and class
    • Expansion of the military
    • Reduction of parliamentary bodies to rubber-stamp status
    • Establishment of a system of nationwide espionage and secret police
    • Censorship of the press and media
    • Disregard for the rights of other nations and disregard of treaties
    • Maintenance and encouragement of fifth columns abroad

    It could be argued that Soviet Russia aspired to do some of these things and to some extent it was successful. But the charge of totalitarianism as having iron control over all these processes is ludicrous — in Russia or anywhere else. Take a look at a map of Russia. Far and away, it is the largest country in the world. Russia had neither the communication system nor a transportation system to pull this off. The Communist party may have exercised control over some of the largest Russian cities but they had little control of the peasantry over vast tracks of land. Their spying systems and secret police might have some control over cities but most of Russian land is agricultural and the Communist Party had some influence over peasant life. However, as we shall see, much of peasant life remained untouched just as before the Czar. Try as they might the Communist Party could not abolish capitalism. Many of the other characteristics above, like international and domestic espionage, expansion of military and control of mass media are just as prevalent in the United States and Western Europe. In fact the control over mass media in the United States is for more totalitarian in breadth and depth than anything the Communist party came up with. By comparison, the Catholic Church had a much more expanded and integrated totalitarian system.

    The Collective Farms
    Did Stalin destroy the peasantry in his drive towards collectivization?
    According to Martens, collectivization began in 1929, a period of bitter and complex struggles. To begin with, there were three kind of peasants who were subjected to the collectivization process. The kulaks were the highest class of peasants who had better farms, better horses and better machinery. They hired agricultural workers. Below them were the middle and poor peasants. Why liquidate the kulaks as a class?

    The kulaks aggressively resisted collectivization. In response they burned crops and houses, set buildings on fire and killed militant Bolsheviks. All the work done on the farm was with draft animals. The kulaks killed half the draft animals rather than cede their cattle to the collectives. They killed them and incited middle peasants to do the same. There were over 34 million horses in the country in 1928.  There remained 15 million in 1932. By Martens’ perspective the Communist party was justified in putting an end to this. I agree

    How many upper middle class kulaks were killed?
    Robert Conquest (a self-described “cold warrior” who worked with the CIA) calculated 6.5 million kulaks were massacred and 3.5 million in Siberian camps. Martens  says these figures are ridiculous. During the most violent period of the collectivization in 1930-31, the peasants expropriated 381,000 kulaks and sent their families to unplowed land in the East. The number of kulaks  in the colonies never exceeded 1,317,000. The repression of this class and the reactionaries who supported them was absolutely necessary for collectivization to have taken place. Furthermore, only those who were guilty of terrorist or counter-revolutionary activity would be executed. Even with all this, Stalin and Molotov signed an agreement to liberate 50% of the people sent to work camps during collectivization. Furthermore, once collectivism was firmly established, peasants were allowed to cultivate a private plot and raise livestock. This is are hardly a process of a crazed, totalitarian dictator.

    Additionally, the essential urge for collectivization came from the most oppressed peasants. The party could not prevent deep antagonisms (of the lower classes) against the kulaks who oppressed them long before the revolution and the backward state of the countryside. What the party did was to destroy the economic bases for the kulaks. In 1928 the state seized the wheat of the kulaks to avoid famine in the cities. The liquidation of the kulaks as a class was due to their capitalist exploitations, not the physical end kulaks as peoples.

    Was collectivization imposed by the party leadership and by Stalin and implemented through terror?
    The state had neither the organizational infrastructure nor the manpower to enforce its voice or ensure its best implementation policy. Between 1929-1933 the Soviet State did not have the technical means, the required personnel and the sufficient Communist leadership to direct collectivization in a planned and orderly manner. In 1930 there were 339,000 communists among a rural population of about 120 million people. That meant there were 28 Communists for a region of 10,000 inhabitants. The Communist Party was in no position to impose its will. They had their hands full with the kulaks alone.

    Treachery of social democrats and Trotsky in relationship to collectivization
    The kulaks were supported by social democrats in Belgian, German and French Social Democracy. Kautsky, turned right-wing social democrat said that a democratic revolution was necessary against the Soviet aristocracy. He called for a wide, united front with the Russian right for a democratic, parliamentary republic. Trotsky’s domestic program in the 1920s after being expelled from the party, was to systematically chose positions opposed to that of the Party. He denounced accelerated collectivization and liquidation of kulaks.

    Peasant Economic and social creativity
    The central committee of the Communist Party called up 25,000 experienced industrial workers from the large factories to go to the countryside and help with collectivization. They were told they were the eyes and ears of the central committee, thanks to their physical presence on the front lines. They were told they would have to judge the Communist quality of the party functionaries and if necessary, purge the party of undesirable elements. The decision was in the hands of industrial workers within the party not the upper echelons of the Communist Party.

    Poor peasants had no idea about how to implement collectivization. There was no inventory of machinery, tools or spare parts, no stables or fodder reserves. The city workers introduced regular work days with morning roll call. They invented a system of payment by piecework and wage levels. They set up worker tribunals where violation of rule and negligence were judged. These workers would send agricultural equipment, generators, books and newspapers to the peasants. Needless to say, their system had problems but the problems were due to inexperience and the fact they were trying to set up an entirely different social system, not one to be of a terroristic Stalinist bureaucracy. Nevertheless, it did end the periodic crises which characterized earlier market relations between city and countryside

    Instead, revolutionary creativity was shown by the workers, peasants, the cadres and party leaders. Most of the traits were invented during the 1929-31 period. By 1929 most of the tractors were in the hands of the agricultural cooperatives.  A decree dated in 1933 placed the different agricultural tasks in seven renumeration categories. The most difficult or arduous work paid three times as much as the easiest or lighter work. The total number of tractors increased steadily during the 1930s, from 210,900 in 1933 to 276,400 in 1934; 360,000 in 1935; 422,700 in 1936 and 522,000 in 1940. Collectivization was not imposed by force. Even the Catholic Church, operating over the centuries, with more money, a highly developed bureaucracy, deployed all over Europe was unable to stomp out magic in the countryside. The Communist Party with less than 20 years of state control under its belt could never have turned the peasants into mindless Communists. In 1930-1935 the Soviet Union was short of labor. Why would they kill men who were working the land by sending them to Siberia or Kazakhstan?

    Famine and Black Propaganda
    The causes of the famine
    The first cause was due to kulaks and the treachery of lingering aristocrats hoping for the return of the czar. There was a famine in 1932-1933 caused by the struggle that the Ukrainian far right was leading against socialism and the collectivization of agriculture—the  killing of horses and cattle—to attack Soviet agriculture. Horses dwindled from 30 million to less than 15 million; cattle from 79 million to 38 million. A similar proportionate of numbers was lost numbers in sheep, goat and hogs. The second cause of the famine was a drought that hit certain areas of Ukraine in 1930. The third cause was typhoid epidemic that ravaged Ukraine. The fourth cause of the famine was the inevitable disorder provoked by the reorganization of agriculture and the upheaval of economic and social relations. Lastly, there was a lack of experience which resulted in improvisation and a lack of preparation.

    The number of deaths during the famine
    Martens reports that the numbers of one to two million dead from the famine are clearly important. However, they are largely due to the ferocious opposition of the exploiting classes to the reorganization and modernization of agriculture on a socialist basis. The figure of one to two million should be compared to the 9 million dead caused by the 1921-1922 famine that was provoked by military intervention of eight imperialist powers and the support they gave to reactionary armed groups. These figures of the death of communists at the hands of white reactionary forces is conveniently left off of bourgeois statistics as to why things were so difficult under communist rule.

    Bourgeois reliance on fascist sources on Soviet famine
    Robert Conquest had worked for the disinformation services of the British secret service. In his book the Great Terror he claimed collectivization accounted for 5-6 million dead. During the Reagan years of anti-communist hysteria, they needed figures exceeding most of those 6 million Jews to make Stalin appear worse than Hitler. Conquest dutifully revised his estimate to 14 million dead. One problem with Conquest’s sources is that over half the references came from extreme right wing Ukrainian emigres including the youth movement of Stefan Bandera. Furthermore, Conquest cites interviews from Harvard Refugee Interview Project which was financed by the CIA. In short, lies about Stalin. The holocaust of Ukrainian people was created by Hitler.

    Suppressed Neo-Nazi crimes against Russians
    Furthermore  Neo-Nazi revisionism around the world revises history to justify above all the barbaric crimes of fascism against communists.

    • It denies the crimes it committed against the Soviet Jews.
    • They invent holocausts supposedly perpetuated by communists.

    Thousands of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators entered the US and testified as victims of communist barbarity. In one book, Black Deeds of the Kremlin, fake photographs of Tsarist killings were transferred to Stalin. He gave high estimates of 4-7 million dead. But the two low estimates came from US journalists in Moscow known for their professionalism. One spoke of 1 million-2 million due to famine.

    Conquest’s film propaganda
    The 1983 Film Harvest of Despair was made for the masses. However, the 1986 Harvest of Sorrow was made for the intellectuals by Robert Conquest. The eye witness accounts are made by German Nazis who hate communists. This disproves the fact of the anti-Ukrainian genocide by Russians that could parallel Hitler’s antisemitic holocaust. Ludens points out:

    The formula against Hitler and against Stalin served to invent Stalin’s crimes and holocausts to better cover up and deny Hitler’s monstrous crimes against Russians. To anyone who understands the Soviets’ desperate need for manpower shortage in these years, the notion that its leaders would deliberately reduce that scarce resource of people is absurd. (103)

    The Purges
    Purge of 1928-1931
    Between 1928-1931 the Party accepted 1.4 million new members — including political illiterates, kulaks, and old Tsarist officers who easily succeeded in infiltrating the party. These factors all lend to problems with bureaucratic degeneration. What bureaucratic degeneration existed was not Stalin’s fault. It was at the intermediate level that careerists and opportunists could most easily set up and hide. Stalin called on the leadership and base to mobilize and hound out the bureaucrats from above and below.  According to Ludens, Stalin devoted a lot of energy to the struggle against bureaucracy within the party and the state apparatus.

    1933 Purge
    In 1933 there was a new purge of bureaucrats which lasted two years. The Party’s control mechanisms were so weak that it wasn’t even possible to plan and effect a verification campaign. Eventually 18% of the party was expelled. They included:

    • Kulaks, white officers, counter-revolutionaries
    • Corrupt and overly ambitious people
    • People who ignored party discipline and the Central committee
    • People who had committed crimes like drunkenness and sexual abuse

    In order to organize a new society, culture and education were necessary. So Intellectuals from the old society, both young and old who were sufficiently able and flexible people recognized the opportunities. Yet many of these people were trojan horses who had infiltrated the communist fortress with no intention of building socialism. J. Arch Getty, in his brilliant study, Origins of the Great Purges, writes that local party leaders were no longer political leaders but economic administrators. They resisted political control from above and below.

    At the regional level, since the beginning of the twenties, individuals and clans had solidly entrenched themselves in the Party Even massive anti-bureaucratic campaigns could not budge them. Cadres had forgotten the capitalist encirclement at the beginning of the revolution and the increasing bitterness of the class struggle. Many had become submerged by little management questions and no longer preoccupied themselves with the major issues of national and international struggle. The bureaucratic and arbitrary attitude of the men in provincial apparatuses was enforced by petty management questions and had virtual monopoly on administrative experience. In sum the real danger of bureaucratization came from the parts of the administration that were in no sense communist that wanted to get rid of the party controlling it and acquire privileges and benefits of all kinds for itself.

    The anti-bureaucratic revolution
    Geographical conditions made centralization unrealistic as much as the Party tried. In a regional committee, there was lack of attention to the economic development of the region, and the leadership had with no connection with the base. In the May 1937 electoral campaign there were 54,000 Party base for which we have data and 55% of the directing committee was replaced. In the Leningrad region, 48% were replaced. According to Getty, this was the most important, most general and most effective anti-bureaucratic campaign that the Party ever affected. This was crucial for the Red Army to later defeat fascist Germany. Stalin’s second consideration was to deepen the political education within the party. Training had to be increased from four to eight months for all the cadres, from cell leaders all the way to the highest leaders.  Stalin also attacked the “family atmosphere” of the bureaucracy in which there can be no place for criticism for defects in the work or for self-criticism of the work.

    The Great Purge of 1937-1938
    No episode in Soviet history has provoked more rage from the old bourgeois world than the purge of 1937-38. Yet there are few periods of Soviet history that have been studied so superficially including Conquest, Deutscher, Schapiro, and Fainsod. This purge of 1937-38 was completely different from the previous periods. It focused mainly on cadres. During the previous years, elements that have nothing to do with communism–common criminals, drunkards and undisciplined people constituted the majority of the expelled. Ludens points out that just because someone is an “old Bolshevik” doesn’t mean that they can’t change for the worse. Certain party leaders proved to be careless, complacent, naïve and lacked vigilance with response to enemies of communists who had infiltrated the party.

    Old Bolsheviks Social Democratic tendencies in the 20s: Bukharin
    The next great ideological struggle was led by Bukharin’s rightist deviation which developed during collectivism period. He put forth a social democratic line and class reconciliation protecting the kulaks. Bukharin’s group was a very powerful part of the party and his political influence was great. He had great influence in the Soviet scientific community and in the Academy of Sciences. During 1928-1930 Bukharin was bitterly criticized for his social democratic ideas, including:

    • His opposition to collectivization (supporting individual ownership)
    • His policy of social peace with the kulaks
    • His attempt to slow down the industrialization process with light industry
    • His advocation of state-capitalism

    Bukharin and the military conspiracy
    In 1935-36 Bukharin developed closer links with groups of military conspirators plotting to overthrow the party leadership. He admitted during his trial in front of the tribunal that in 1918 after the Brest-Litovsk Treaty there was a plan to arrest Lenin and Stalin and to form a new government composed of left communists and social revolutionaries. Bukharin colluded with all sorts of clandestine opponents some of whom were dedicated anti-communists. Incapable of leading open political struggle, he placed his hopes in a coup resulting from a military plot that might result from a mass revolt. Bukharin allowed himself to be approached by enemies who were planning to overthrow the Bolshevik regime. He did not take a principled stand against the prospect of a directed anti-Bolshevik attack from abroad. In Paris, he paid a visit to Menshevik Theodore Dan to whom he confided that “Stalin was not a man but a devil.” Martens says Bukharin’s confessions allow us to later understand the latter appearance of Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev.

    Trotsky and military conspiracies
    Martens claims that among others Trotsky was conducting negotiations with the Germans and promised them territorial concessions, including Ukraine. In 1932 there was an attempt to create an oppositional block that included Trotsky and Zinoviev. There was proof that a plot existed to overthrow the party and put into power the oppositional leadership

    Oppositional leaders have their say
    Despite all these machinations almost all oppositional leaders—Trotsky, Radek, Preobrazhensky, Zinoviev and Bukharin-who remained in important positions were invited to the 17th congress where they made speeches. It is patently false that Stalin did not allow other leaders to express themselves freely and that he ruled like a tyrant. Debates took place openly and over an extended period of time. Stalin really believed in the honesty of self-criticisms.

    Were all old Bolsheviks eliminated?
    In general, the purges within the Red Army are presented by anti-communists as acts of foolish, arbitrary and blind repression. The accusations were all set-ups, according to the anti-communists, and were diabolically prepared to ensure Stalin’s dictatorship. One of the best-known slanders claims that the purge was intended to eliminate the Old Bolsheviks. However, in 1934 there were 182,600 old Bolsheviks (members who joined no later than 1920). In 1939 there were 125,000. Therefore 69% were still in the party. Some died of natural causes, others were expelled and others executed.

    According to Getty, from November 1936-39 there were fewer than 180,000 expulsions from the party. Before 1938 there were 53,000 appeals against expulsions. After 1938 there were 101,223 appeals. At that time, out of a total of 144,933, the party committees had examined 85,273 appeals and 54% were readmitted No other information could better give the lie to the statement that the purge was blind, terror, without appeal, organized by an irrational dictator.

    The reality of the plot against the Stalin
    Four years before the purges, in 1934 there was a plot to start a revolution by arresting the whole of the Stalinist-packed 17th Congress of the Party. A comrade from the group proposed in mid-1936 to kill Stalin. Tukhachevsky was pro-German. Even Deutscher admits there was a plot among the Germans. The discovery of such a plot at the head of the Red Army, which had links with the opportunistic factions within the party, provoked complete panic on Stalin’s part. Getty concludes that entrenched officeholders were destroyed from above and below in a chaotic wave of voluntarism and revolutionary puritanism. The actual purge was decided upon after the revelation of the Tukhachevsky military conspiracy. The decision to physically eliminate this fifth column was not a sign of a dictator’s paranoia.

    The degree of anarchy within the purges
    The purge was often characterized as maniacal and relentless which was hardly the case.

    The purges were inefficient and chaotic. There were cadres of infiltrated enemies. These enemies hiding within the party led conspirators to expel the greatest possible numbers of loyal communist cadres. Lastly, there was the presence of communists who were only concerned with their careers.  Yes, some communists were unjustly hit and crimes were committed during the purge. Yet Stalin wanted to include an individualized approach to questions of expulsions.

    Myths and reality about the purges
    Martens points out that the 1934 Robert Conquest counted 5 million political detainees. In fact, there were between 127,000 and 170,000. The exact number of all detained in work camps, political and other security organizations combined was 510,307. The political prisoners formed only 25%-35% of the detainees. Conquest added 4,850,000. Annually Conquest estimated an average of 8 million detainees. Medvedev wrote it was 12-13 million. The reality was between 127,000 in 1934 to 500,000 during the two war years of 1941-42. The real figures were exaggerated by 15-26 times. As I said earlier, most of those politically detained were Nazi collaborators.

    Necessity of purges before the showdown with Germany
    The purge within the Red Army had a great deal to do with the imminent war with Germany.

    Stalin was successful in getting rid of all the opposition circles within the army and he succeeded in making sure that there would be no counter-revolutionary currents within that army against the Germans. Yehova signed an executive order condemning to death 75,959 individuals whose hostility to the Soviet Union were known to be common criminals, kulaks counter-revolutionaries or spies. Most of the men and women in the Nazi 5th column fell during the purge. When the fascists attacked the USSR, there were few collaborates within the state or the party apparatus.

    The great disarray and extreme confusion provoked by the first defeats against the Nazi invasion created a very precarious political situation. Bourgeois nationalists, anti-communist and anti-Jewish racists all thought that their time had come. What would have happened if the purge had not firmly been carried out, if an opportunist opposition had held important positions? The party launched a campaign educating the workers about what was going on in newspapers, films and theaters. It was precisely because of the purge and the education campaigns that accompanied it that the Soviet people found the strength to resist and defeat the fascists.

    Trotsky’s Role on the Eve of Second World War
    Trotsky was one of the first to put forward the Cold War liberal idea that Bolshevism and fascism were interchangeable. Secondly, he supported any opposition against Stalin. He made no distinction between capitalists, the heads of foreign states and military plotters and schemers. Despite not having much of a following in Russia, from 1934 on Trotsky called over and over for the overthrow of the Communist Party. He was calling on the Red Army to effect a coup. In fact, he planned his insurrection for when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union.

    Western Treachery Against the Soviet Union During the Two World Wars
    Western historians and their naïve publics present the Soviet-Hitlerian pact as a bolt-from-the-blue, a betrayal that had neither rhyme not reason. Here we  are told we have the secret truth we’ve should have known all along: Fascism and Communism were the same thing. In truth, before Hitler even came to power, Great Britain had led the crusade against the Soviet Union. It was in 1918 that Churchill mobilized armies in 14 countries to attack the Soviet Union.

    During the Spanish Civil war, Italy and Germany sent their troops to Spain in support of fascism to fight the republican government. France and England adopted a non-intervention policy and did not help the Soviet Union fight in Spain. In fact, Britain and France reassured Hitler that he could march against Stalin without being worried about the West attacking Germany. In fact, from June to August of 1939 there were secret talks between Britain and Germany. The deal was:

    • Germany promises not to interfere in British empire affairs
    • Britain promises to give up the present negotiations for a pact with the Soviet Union

    England’s ultimate goal was to embroil Russia and Germany with each other and thus escape scot-free herself. Even when France and Britain were forced to declare war on Germany, on the Western Front not single bomb was used against the Nazis. They kept hoping the Nazis could defeat the Russians. Stalin’s reached out to Germany only after having been rejected by the West. The Soviet Union had succeeded in signing with Japan a non-aggression pact that held until the defeat of fascism. Stalin’s pact with Germany was crucial to winning WWII. The pact was a turning point that allowed for the preparation of the necessary conditions in order for the German defeat when it was invaded.

    Did Stain Prepare Poorly for the Anti-Fascist War?
    This ludicrous claim is what Khrushchev said about Stalin. Stalin had to maneuver against all the Western powers who were anti-Russian. This included not only fascist Germany, Italy and Spain, but also, England, France and the United States. Against all of them Russia defeated Germany and preserved the Soviet Union. Does this sound like an incompetent leader? In 1921 in almost all areas of military production they had to start out from nothing. During the years of the first and second five year plans the party made sure that the war industries would grow faster than the other industries. During the third 5 year plan between 1938 and 1940, industrial production increased 13% annually. Furthermore, Stalin prepared the defense of the USSR by having more than 900 factories built between 1928-1941.

    Khrushchev’s image of Stalin as a lone man who leans on no-one is falsified by an event during the war in the beginning of August 1941. In general, Stalin proceeded with extreme caution, weighing the pros and cons of what to do. Stalin called in responsible people directly in charge of the problem. The central committee politburo and army leadership always relied on collective decision-making. One general said Stalin did not like to decide for himself important questions about the war. Furthermore, he would not tolerate hit and miss answers or not being familiar with the situation on the map or in exaggerating situations. He wanted the utmost accuracy and clarity. He had a knack of detecting weak spots in reports and documents. He had a tenacious memory. He was extremely exacting, a quality essential during wartime. He never forgave carelessness in work or failure to finish a job the right way. Stalin fully criticized bureaucratic and formalist leadership methods. During the war Stalin firmly fought against any irresponsible or bureaucratic attitude. He insisted on real presence on the ground. He would demand that military action be carried out in a creative way, with a full account of military science. Even Averell Harriman, US imperialism’s representative, admitted his high intelligence, a fantastic grasp of detail, his shrewdness and his sensitivity. Harriman says, “I found him better informed than Roosevelt, more realistic than Churchill. In some ways the most effective of the war leaders.” He was hardly the blind dictator.

    Nazis’ Attack on Russia
    On September 30, the Nazis began their final offensive to take Moscow. In Moscow, some 450,000 inhabitants of the city, including 75% women, were mobilized to build fortifications and anti-tank defensives. Moscow was bombed by German aviation. Panic began to seize the city population. The Nazis were only 80 kilometers away. Part of the administration was evacuated, but Stalin decided to remain in Moscow. He needed to stay at the general headquarters but he visited the fronts regularly. The battles became more and more fierce. The first extermination campaigns, in fact the biggest, were against the Soviet people, including Soviet Jews. The people of the USSR suffered the most and endured the greatest number of dead at 23 million. The Hitlerian aggression drenched the Soviet Union in a bath of blood and steel that surpassed all the horrors that the world had ever previously seen. The reality of the unbelievable terror that the Nazis practiced in the Soviet Union is almost systematically covered up or minimized in the bourgeois literature. Even this year, 2025, on the celebration of the Russia defeat of the Nazis, Western leaders boycotted the celebration. Clearly the West prefers fascism to communism.

    Russia Defeats the Nazis
    In early November, the Nazi offense was stopped. After having consulted all of his commanders, Stalin decided on a large counter-attack which began on December 5. Some 720,000 Red soldiers pushed back 800,000 fascists to 100—300 kilometers. For the first time, the invincible German troops were defeated. The fascists lost more than 500,000 men, 1300 tanks and 2,500 canons. The Russians showed utter determination and amazing heroism. These Germans has to face adversaries that were fighting to the last man

    Germany’s Final Solution of Jews came about after German defeats in Russia

    The exterminating rage of the Nazi’s emerged with their first massive losses. When the fascist beast started to bleed under the Red Army blows, it dreamed up a final solution for the Soviet people. In a remarkable book Arno Mayer explains that the extermination of the Jews only began once the Nazis suffered great losses. Without operation Barbarossa, there would and could have been no Jewish systematic annihilation. Once the Nazis had to face the defeats on the Russian front, they decided on a global and final solution of the Jewish population. Many rich Jews succeeded in escaping to the US. After the war they went to work for American imperialism and its beachhead, Israel. The great majority of poor Jews were gassed.

    Russia 1947-1953
    Positive aspects
    Between 1939 and 1940 the Soviet Union had an annual rate of industrial production of 16.5 %. Some said it would take decades to recover from what the fascists did to its industrial apparatus. Yet after three incredible years, 1948 industrial production surpassed that of 1940. In 1950, at the end of the 4th year of a five year plan, industrial production was 73% above that of 1940. Stalin’s foreign policy with regard to western states was peaceful co-existence. The Communist parties throughout the world were not agitating to overthrow western rulers. In the United States, either Communists were to run their own candidates in elections or they were to support the Democratic Party. To the extent that it was possible Stalin helped revolutionary movements of different countries in providing arms, funding industrialization and offering technological know-how. Stalin supported colonized peoples who sought independence and encouraged a vast international movement for peace. During the same period the US military plans called for the building of numerous military bases. In reaction to this, in 1947 the Soviet Union built its own nuclear weapons, breaking US “nuclear nightmare” diplomacy.

    Negative aspects
    Despite the rapid industrialization it would have been better to have mixed some of this with lighter industry and more consumer goods. It is a great deal to ask of people to produce for war rather than for goods that would make their lives a little better. As early as 1951, Stalin was seriously worried about the state of the Party. The most important tendencies that Stalin had to fight against in the 20s and 30s were:

    • Trotskyism
    • Bukharinism
    • Militarist professional tendencies within the army technocrats that were substantially reinforced
    • Bourgeois Russian nationalism

    They all continued between 1945-1953

    Khrushchev’s Revisionist Groups and a Conservative Bureaucracy

    With Stalin’s death, two revisionist tendencies within the Party arose. Beria wanted better international relations with the West and restoration of relations with Tito in Yugoslavia. Khrushchev had Beria executed after Stalin’s death and then assumed power. With the division of the Party leadership that followed, the control mechanisms over the bureaucracy were weakened, the military’s own interests and values emerged into the open and became stronger.

    Under Khrushchev the bureaucrats no longer had to fear threats from either serious communist in the higher echelons of the party of from the working or middle classes from below. There was bureaucratic intolerance of criticism which came from below. The bureaucrats stifled criticism and settled scores with those who dared criticize them. They had a smug complacency. Leaders turned meetings into vainglorious displays, into cases of self-laudation. These were not communist revolutionaries. They strove for a self-satisfied and tranquil life. These bureaucrats forgot that they were running state enterprises and tried to turn them into their own private domain. They ignored any attempts to advance communism in the Soviet Union. Circles would form around Khrushchev and Brezhnev, completely estranged from revolutionary, popular action.

    Meanwhile, the reformist socialist state rehabilitated opportunists and enemies who had been purged. Khrushchev allowed the resurrection of social democratic and Tsarist ideological currents. Enemies of Leninism who were sent to Siberia were rehabilitated by Khrushchev.  He fished Solzhenitsyn out from a work camp who made an alliance with Khrushchev to combat Stalinism. Solzhenitsyn has become the official voice of the 5% of Tsarists, bourgeois, speculators and kulaks.  He hated socialism. By the mid-1980s Gorbachev denounced the division of the world into socialism and capitalism and converted himself to universal values. He initiated social democracy while provoking the collapse of the Soviet State.

    Summing Up

    As I said in the introduction, the purpose of this evaluation is to move beyond dualistic arguments which either condemn Stalin as the worst political figure of the 20th century next to Hitler or blindly praise him as mindless dogmatic Stalinists are apt to do.  What I tried to do in this evaluation is to say that most of the bourgeois attacks on Stalin are the product of anti-communist propaganda which are either black propaganda lies or exaggerations compared to what really happened.

    A second purpose of this evaluation is as a prediction that any leaders today, socialist or not who oppose decaying western capitalist imperialism will be called the same kind of names as Stalin. What are the similarities between the names Gaddafi was called and Stalin? What about the name calling of Stalin and Nicolas Maduro? What about Vladimir Putin: dictator, authoritarian, kills his own people? So we can expect that also the real evolution of these men and their states will be distorted, exaggerated, denied and censored just as Stalin was.

    Nevertheless, author Ludo Martens failed to address the following criticisms coming from the left communists about the Soviet Union.

    Left Communists’ Evaluation of Ludo Martens’ Book Stalin: Another View
    Can workers only achieve trade union consciousness?
    My first criticism of Stalinism is not focused on the specific political actions Stalin took as much as they are criticisms of Leninism in which Stalinism is a variant. The Bolsheviks claim that by themselves workers can only achieve a trade union consciousness has been disproven numerous times by the Paris Commune of 1871; the Russian Soviets in 1905, the Russian factories during the 1917 revolution and the anarcho-communism of the Ukrainian peasantry under Nestor Makhno. The greatest example of the workers self-management was in the cities and countryside of Spain during the revolution between 1936-1939. Martens mentions nothing about the contradiction between what the Bolsheviks said about workers on their own only achieving trade union consciousness and what the workers actually did.

    Did Marx advocate the forming of a vanguard party?

    The second problem is the presence of a secret vanguard party to lead the revolution. This is something that Marx and Engels never talked about. This is because they believed that the socialist revolution would break out in an advanced capitalist country first where socialist parties would be legal. For them the work of the Communist Party was to embed themselves in workers’ movements; organize and systematize all workers struggles under a single program, not lead the workers with a program of their own. I have no problem with Lenin developing a secret vanguard party in Russia because of the conditions in Russia at the time. At that time in Russia there was no constitution and not even a liberal party. My problem with a secret vanguard party is when it was applied to capitalist countries in the West when it was possible to organize in the open along with a mass political party, not a party with paid, full-time revolutionaries. Marx and Engels never talked about vanguard parties. In fact, as I recall, they made fun of the secret societies of Auguste Blanqui.

    Socialism in one country and subordination of all Communist parties to Russia in peacetime

    I agree with Stalin’s decision to build socialism in one country and against Trotsky’s naïve proposal for permanent revolution everywhere given that there was no industrial revolution in Germany. The Communist movement needed a home base to have a chance to really develop new forms even if they were limited because of being surrounded by hostile capitalist countries. I also agree that in times of war, communist parties around the world should subordinate themselves to the Russian Communist Party. My problem with Stalinism is to insist on subordination of communist parties in times of peace. Golden opportunities were missed for Communist parties all over the world to experiment with new forms based on local conditions.

    This policy robbed the Communist parties all over the world of adapting themselves to local conditions rather than following a single country. An example of this was in the movie Reds, when John Reed argued fruitlessly with the Central Committee of the Communist Party that the Communist Party endorse working with the radical Industrial Workers of the World. Instead, the Russian Communist Party insisted that any proto-communist party in the United States join the AF of L, the most conservative of all American unions. Within the United States between 1926 and 1956 the American Communist Party was dragged through all of Moscow’s changed lines, swerves and backtracking with no opportunity to develop its own program based on its unique understanding of Yankee conditions. Up until the Russian Revolution, the Socialist Party of America had a much better understanding of the working conditions in Yankeedom. But the Russian Communist Party did not care to learn anything from the American Socialist party.

    Undermining the Spanish Revolution

    In Spain between 1936 and1939 during the revolution, under the direction of the CNT, the anarchists had Barcelona organized under worker self-management. In the countryside, the worker collectives involved one third of a million people. The Communist Party in Spain was small and not influential, and the Spanish revolutionaries were also fighting fascist Franco in their country. The Communist Party offered weapons to help the collectives fight the fascists in exchange for influence. The Communist Party of Russia was not interested in a socialist revolution in Spain, they just wanted to defeat fascism. As part of defeating the fascists they also turned on the self-management collectives and destroyed them. Since this hostility to workers’ self-management occurred during both Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin’s time it seems fair to say that hostility to workers councils is a characteristic of Leninism and cannot be laid solely at Stalin’s doorstep. Martens never writes about this or the international justification for the suppression of the collectives. It was clear that the self-managed collectives were absolutely committed to socialism and could not be manipulated by capitalists, either domestically or internationally. In my opinion the reason they were attacked is because the Communist Party imagined it had the lock and key to everything and saw socialist rivals as enemies. It is understandable that the social democrats (the Mensheviks) became enemies because part of their program was to restore capitalism, but the anarchist collectives posed no such threat.

    Stalin’s short-sighted decree abolishing religion

    Stalin showed very little understanding of why people are religious. If religion is the opium of the masses, the need for religion doesn’t disappear if you take away its forms. A real materialist policy would be to improve the standard of living and then expect that as heaven is gradually created on earth the need for religion would become less. On one hand an expansion of the number of atheists would be predictable. At the same time, those who continued to be religious would find their gods and goddesses immanent rather than transcendental. Just as primitive communism had earth spirits of rocks, rivers and trees, so under advanced communism the spirits would come back to earth because communists were in the process of creating heaven on earth

    The dogmatic nature of dialectical materialism
    Unfortunately Marx and Engels’ work cast a long shadow over future generations of Marxists and too many of them have never come out of the shadows. This is not unique to Leninism. For example, after Engels wrote The Family, Private property and the State it took 80 years for Marxists to stop repeating what Engels said about these subjects and accept that anthropologists were scientists that have discovered new processes about social evolution.

    Even now, some Marxists who are otherwise very creative in their fields, repeat the tired old story of social evolution going from primitive communism to the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ to slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism and back to socialism.

    Secondly, Marxist philosophers have mindlessly insisted that all philosophy can be divided into materialism and idealism. Please see my article Out on A Limb With Dialectical Materialism for six ways to categorize philosophy. In addition, these Leninist philosophers have crudely tried to directly link philosophy to political positions like fascism, imperialism and capitalism. So, for example, Maurice Cornforth, whom I’ve learned quite a bit from, tries to connect the pragmaticism of William James and Charles Sanders Peirce to imperialism because of what the United States was doing during World War II at the time they were writing.

    Lastly, in the Lysenko affair, Soviet agricultural policy took a very bad turn because Soviet scientists were not allowed to favor in Mendelian genetics into their policy. This was because dialectical materialism had no place for how biological and social processers might interact in the raising of crops. The randomness of Mendelian genetics was attacked as “bourgeois” and dismissed in favor of Lamarckian causal laws. Random mutations were attacked as liberal a world view projected onto science and over 3,000 natural scientists were dismissed. This policy undermined the prospect of scientists solving agricultural problems using the best science in the world.

    The post Dancing with the Devil: Is It Possible to Evaluate Stalin Dialectically? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Eighty years after the U.S. Bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki Are We on the Verge of Another Nuclear War?

    Eighty years ago, the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are now nine nuclear-armed nations, many in military confrontation with one another. It is quite remarkable that there has not been another nuclear war. How can this be explained?

    Some say the absence of another nuclear war proves that nuclear “deterrence” is working, and to some extent, that is true. These nations are rightfully afraid of a nuclear conflagration that could obliterate their societies and even destroy all life on planet Earth.  With escalating military confrontations today – even the possibility of a World War – how long can “deterrence” work?

    “So Far, So Good…”

    “So far, so good” is probably the faintly hopeful refrain heard from many who feel helpless to undo the nuclear danger. This is reminiscent of the cartoon of the man falling from the top of a building. As he passes each descending floor, he proclaims, “So far, so good….”

    In reality, a fair amount of luck has helped humanity avert nuclear catastrophe until now. We came very close during the “Cuban Missile Crisis.” A political officer on a Russian submarine that was out of communication and uncertain if a nuclear war had already begun, called off a missile launch at the last minute. Another Russian military technician, suspicious of an errant radar reading that appeared to show incoming US missiles, called off another imminent nuclear strike. It could just as easily have gone the other way.

    Many experts worry that it will be an accidental nuclear launch that ends us. This is all the more concerning as Artificial Intelligence is applied to nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, decreasing the decision-making time to split seconds, and removing human oversight. What could go wrong?

    Never Again?

    2025 also marks eighty years from the end of World War II and the defeat of the German fascists by Russia, the United States, and the European Allies. Eighty years since Russian and US troops liberated thousands of skeletal prisoners from German concentration camps, much to the horror of the world, which reacted with calls of “Never Again!”

    But wait, don’t we have concentration camps now in the U.S.? Isn’t that why ICE now has a larger budget than any branch of the military, and larger than the entire current Federal prison system? They are building concentration camps for undocumented workers, whom they demonize as “murderers,” “rapists,” “gang members,” and “terrorists.” The vast majority of immigrants who have already been violently taken from their jobs and families, imprisoned and deported, have no criminal records whatsoever, and are productive, respected members of their communities.

    Authoritarianism with distinct overtones of white supremacy is on the rise once again, while craven European politicians clamor for war with Russia and more military spending. What could go wrong?

    Israel, purportedly a safe haven for the persecuted Jewish people – a “land without a people for a people without a land” – is escalating its blatant genocide in Gaza. The images of intentionally starved Palestinian men, women, and children conjure images of emaciated prisoners – mostly Jews – in World War II concentration camps.

    Israel Wages Genocide While Threatening Its Neighbors with Nuclear Weapons

    Israel is also a nuclear power, although it has long been considered impolite to say so. The United States helped Israel gain nuclear technology and has helped to shield Israel from any nuclear accountability. Israel has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Its nuclear arsenal is not inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which the U.S. weaponized to support its rationale for war against Iraq, Syria, and Iran. The IAEA announced a resolution critical of Iran’s nuclear program on Thursday, June 12, the day before Israel’s attack on Iran. Coincidence? Probably not. Like so many other international bodies, the IAEA has been subverted to serve U.S. and Israeli war aims.

    Unlike Iran, Israel actually has nuclear weapons. Will they use them against Iran? The Israeli government of rightwing extremists has already shown us the depths of depravity they are willing to go. Furthermore, all their Arab neighbors know Israel is the only nuclear-armed nation in the Middle East.

    Daniel Ellsberg, author of The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, reminded us that “Nuclear weapons are used every day. They are like a gun you point at somebody’s head.”

    Aside from “luck,” it has been nuclear arms treaties that have held nuclear war in check. In recent years, however, the U.S. has shredded most of these treaties and missed many opportunities for peace:

    • Reagan rejected President Gorbachev’s offer for both countries to eliminate all their nuclear weapons if the U.S. would stop deployment of a “Star Wars” missile defense system in space.
    • President Clinton refused President Putin’s offer to cut our massive nuclear arsenals to 1,500 bombs and to call on all of the other nuclear-armed states to negotiate the elimination of all nuclear weapons, in exchange for the US not placing missile sites in Romania.
    • President George W. Bush walked out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and put a missile base in Romania. President Trump placed another missile base in Poland.
    • President Bush in 2008 and President Obama in 2014 blocked any discussion of Russian and Chinese proposals for a space weapons ban in the consensus-bound UN Committee for Disarmament in Geneva.
    • President Obama rejected President Putin’s offer to negotiate a treaty to ban cyber war.
    • President Trump pulled the US out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
    • President Trump withdrew from the Iran Nuclear Deal and placed sanctions on Iran.
    • From President Clinton through President Trump, the US has never ratified the 1992 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which Russia ratified.
      [Reference: Veterans For Peace Nuclear Posture Review.]

    Taken in their totality, these U.S. moves constitute an attempt to gain nuclear superiority, including the possibility of launching a first-strike nuclear attack. Pulling out of the ABM and INF treaties, in particular, indicates U.S. intentions to threaten Russia with nuclear war.

    Is it any wonder that Russia, faced with the prospect of the U.S./NATO troops and nuclear weapons systems stationed on its border with Ukraine, felt compelled to take military action? Now Russia is stuck in a bloody war that has been constantly escalated by the U.S., which has rejected multiple opportunities for peace talks since the war began. Russia asked for neutrality for Ukraine and respect for the rights of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking populations. Over one million casualties later (both sides), the bloody trench-and-drone war drags on, not because of Russian intransigence, but because of the aggressive U.S. policy of “full-spectrum dominance” in every corner of the globe.

    Drone Attack on Russia’s Strategic Bombers Tempted Nuclear War

    On June 1 of this year, a U.S.-supported Ukrainian drone attack on nuclear bombers in Russia almost triggered a nuclear war. According to a Russian general who spoke with former CIA geopolitical analyst Larry Johnson, the world was even closer to nuclear war than during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Russian bombers were openly visible on the tarmac, in accordance with the New START Treaty, which is designed to prevent a nuclear-first strike by either Russia or the U.S. This last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia is due to expire this coming February. But it has already been drone-bombed.

    News Flash! President Trump just posted on his Truth Social account that he is sending two nuclear-armed submarines closer to Russia. Why? Because he didn’t like something that Russia’s Dmitri Medvedev said on social media. What? Trump is scoring pissing points by playing with nuclear weapons? A narcissistic psychopath has his hand on the nuclear button. This is all the more reason to push for an end to the president’s sole authority to launch a nuclear war.

    To round out this bleak report, we must at least mention that the U.S. is planning for war against China. The United States is openly planning to wage a war against China – some say as soon as 2027. Why? Because China’s remarkable revolution from extreme poverty to becoming a prosperous global powerhouse is something that the U.S. ruling class (or “deep state”) will not accept. So China will not be attacked because of its military aggression. Even as the U.S. wages perpetual war on multiple countries, China has not been at war with anybody in this century. U.S. complaints about Taiwan are nothing more than an excuse, a trigger for the war that U.S. leaders are determined to wage, at all costs.

    The Pentagon Is Planning a Nuclear First-Strike Against China

    The Pentagon has figured out that it cannot win a conventional war against China, however. It is planning to use nuclear weapons – an overwhelming first strike or possibly only “tactical nuclear weapons,” those cute little guys that are several times more powerful than what was dropped on Hiroshima.

    U.S. war planners recently asked Australia and Japan to declare what military resources they will bring to bear in a war against China. And get this… The U.S. held talks with Japan, of all nations, to discuss how they will coordinate their efforts after a nuclear strike on China. Among the issues they discussed were how to manage public opinion after a nuclear war.

    So if you think I am pointing the finger at the U.S. as the “bad guy” who is mostly responsible for the prospect of a civilization-ending nuclear war, then you are reading correctly. To put it bluntly, the problem is U.S. imperialism. The waning U.S. empire, desperate to maintain and expand its hegemony, is the elephant in the room. It is buttressed by a very large and powerful Military Industrial Complex (MIC), the one that President Eisenhower warned us about – now on steroids. Ray McGovern of Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), a former CIA analyst himself, has expanded the MIC acronym to MICIMATT (Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Media Academia Think-Tanks). Yes, they are all complicit, not just with genocide in Palestine, but with militarizing and destroying the world. We peace-loving people have our work cut out for us. We are up against a lot.

    There is a lot of money to be made from war and militarism. And Politicians learn the advantages of justifying war and funding the war machine. The ever-growing Pentagon budget has ballooned to over One Trillion Dollars under Trump, money that will be redirected from the social security net that is being systematically shredded. Spending on nuclear weapons “modernization” alone will cost $100 billion in just the next year (from the budgets of the Pentagon and the Department of Energy).

    “The End Is Near”

    For decades, peace activists, scientists, and others have been warning us about the “growing danger of nuclear war.” Those sounding the nuclear alarm have been treated like the proverbial fanatic with the sign, “The End Is Near,” or like Chicken Little – “the sky is falling.” It is mostly by dumb luck, however, that we have not all perished in a nuclear Armageddon already. The guard rails have been removed, with the U.S. abrogation of nuclear arms deals. There are very few “adults in the room,” certainly not in the U.S., where Neocons who love Israel but hate Iran and Russia have seized the helm. It will take a miracle and a lot of activism to avoid utter disaster in the relatively near future.

    Many people are already experiencing disaster, what with wars, genocide, extreme poverty, starvation, and the climate crisis – the fruits of corporate greed and militarism. Many people also suffer from the poison of the entire nuclear cycle. There are 15,000 abandoned uranium mines in the western U.S., many of them on First Nations lands. Radiation contaminates the water, the air, the land, and the people, who suffer from many cancers and radiation-related diseases.

    The U.S. Exploded 67 Nuclear Bombs in the Marshall Islands

    Then there are the “downwinders” who suffer from the radiation of nuclear bomb testing. Or worse. The Marshall Islands were devastated by nuclear bomb testing. From 1946 to 1958, the U.S. detonated 67 nuclear bombs on this island nation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  To add insult to injury, their islands are now “sinking” from global warming and rising seas. Many Marshallese, unable to grow food on radiated land and unable to eat the fish from radiated waters, have been allowed to live in the U.S., without citizenship or security, and denied healthcare by many states. There is no cancer treatment facility in the Marshall Islands, and no VA facility for its many veterans of the U.S. military.

    We will end this disturbing nuclear tour on a positive note. It has to do with the Marshall Islands. In 1958, four Quaker peace activists bought a sailboat and announced to the world their intention to sail from Los Angeles 4,000 miles into the nuclear test zone in the Marshall Islands to stop U.S. nuclear testing. They were led by Albert Bigelow, a World War II Navy Commander who resigned his commission in protest of the U.S. nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    The Golden Rule Crew Tried to Stop U.S. Nuclear Testing

    Halfway through the voyage, when Bigelow and his intrepid crew pulled into Honolulu, they were arrested and thrown in jail, and the Coast Guard seized their boat, named Golden Rule. They never made it to the Marshall Islands. Still, they succeeded in bringing worldwide attention to the danger of radiation that was floating all over the globe, even getting into mothers’ milk. Opposition to nuclear testing led to the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1962, signed by President Kennedy and the leaders of Russia and the UK. The treaty banned nuclear testing in the atmosphere, in the water, and in space. Only underground tests were permitted.  These days, most nuclear testing is done using computer simulations.

    The remarkable saga of the Golden Rule continued. The 34-foot ketch was sold and sailed as a pleasure boat by several families to the South Pacific and the Caribbean. Somehow, in 2010, it was found in Humboldt Bay in northern California – a derelict boat that had sunk in a gale and had a big hole in its side.  Some locals dragged the beat-up boat onto the beach and planned to make a bonfire of it. When someone discovered the boat’s legacy, however, local members of Veterans For Peace rescued it and decided to restore it to its original glory.

    In June of 2015, after five years of dedicated volunteer labor by veterans, Quakers, and boat lovers, the Golden Rule splashed back into the waters of Humboldt Bay and began sailing up and down the west coast from British Columbia to Mexico (Ensenada), then to Hawai’i and all around the Hawaiian islands. Back to California, trucked to Minneapolis, sailed down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, to Cuba, and up the East Coast to Toronto and back to Chicago, a 12-month voyage with a total of 102 port stops.  At every stop, the Golden Rule and its crew were welcomed excitedly by local peace and environmental activists as well as by state and local officials. Nobody wants a nuclear war!

    The Golden Rule Is Sailing Around San Francisco Bay

    The historic Golden Rule ­peace boat sailed last week from its homeport in Humboldt Bay to San Francisco Bay, where it will spend the month of August educating the public about the “growing danger of nuclear war,” and the importance of supporting the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The Treaty, supported by an overwhelming majority of countries, went into force in January 2021. It prohibits nations from developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, transferring, possessing, stockpiling, using, or threatening to use nuclear weapons, or allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on their territory. It also prohibits them from assisting, encouraging, or inducing anyone to engage in any of these activities.

    Peace at Home, Peace Abroad!

    The Golden Rule is a national project of Veterans For Peace, a 40-year-old organization dedicated to exposing the true costs of war, restraining our government from intervening, overtly and covertly, in the internal affairs of other nations, and ridding the world of nuclear weapons. At its recent national convention, veterans from U.S. wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and recent deployments made a united call for opposition to the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and for resistance to racist ICE attacks in our communities. While calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons, the Golden Rule will be echoing these urgent cries for “Peace at Home, Peace Abroad.”

    The post Eighty years after the U.S. Bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki Are We on the Verge of Another Nuclear War? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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