…We firmly condemn all crimes and other grave violations under international law committed by both Israel and Palestinian armed groups. Targeted and indiscriminate attacks against civilians can never be justified. We call on the ICC Office of the Prosecutor to accelerate its investigation into serious crimes committed by all parties in Palestine and Israel. We call on Israel to ratify the Rome Statute, and for the ICC to hold both State and non-State perpetrators of international crimes accountable. We call on the Commission of Inquiry to address the situation within the context of its root causes: settler colonialism, apartheid, and denial of the fundamental rights to self-determination and return of the Palestinian people, all amounting to grave violations of international law. We call on governments to immediately stop providing political and military support to Israel, while Ministers manifest a genocidal intent against Palestinians. On 9 October 2023, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s Minister of Defense, stated: “We are imposing a complete siege on [Gaza]. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel – everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly”. We deplore the dehumanization of all people, including not mentioning Palestinian civilians’ killings in statements in this Council. As we gear up to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the UDHR, we remind this Council that for 75 years, generations of people in Gaza and historic Palestine have not been born free and equal in dignity and rights. Until this is addressed, the cycles of violence will not end. As Israel continues to bomb the Rafah crossing, the international community has a duty to guarantee immediate humanitarian access to besieged Gaza. We call on States to establish an international protective presence in the OPT, as called for by UN Special Procedures. For 75 years, the international community has enabled impunity and failed to fulfill the right to self-determination of Palestinian people, including through their legitimate right to resist colonialism.
The Council has shown that it does have an important role to play in addressing violations amidst multiple human rights crises. We welcome the establishment of the mechanism on Sudan and the extension of the Special Rapporteur on Russia, inter alia, in this regard. But these stand in stark contrast to its failure to renew the critical mandate on Ethiopia, particularly in light of the expert finding of the acute risk of ongoing and further atrocity crimes, as well as other Council blind spots where mounting human rights violations remain ignored. We stress the need for the Council to take a principled approach and to address situations on their merits.
We remain deeply concerned about reprisals against civil society actors who engage or seek to engage with UN bodies and mechanisms. We call on all States and the Council to do more to address the situation, including raise concerns about specific cases of reprisals and demand that governments provide an update on any investigation or action taken toward accountability. We welcome the adoption of the resolution on cooperation with the UN, including the reference to adequately resourced dedicated civil society focal points, however we are disappointed that several proposals by States and civil society to strengthen the text were not taken on board. The Secretary General’s most recent report on reprisals notes increased physical and digital surveillance of those cooperating with the UN and application of laws aimed at punishing or deterring cooperation. While the resolution takes notes of these trends we regret that the resolution does not fully address how these should be addressed. We welcome the strong focus on prevention and emphasis given to accountability. Nonetheless, the preventative role the Council could play in regard to reprisals, as signs of deterioration in civic space conditions, is overlooked. In addition, States’ monitoring and reporting responsibilities in relation to allegations of acts of intimidation or reprisal could be addressed more fully. Also, we welcome the call to the SG for adequate resources to be allocated to OHCHR to prevent and address allegations.
We welcome the resolution on preventable maternal mortality and morbidity, which reiterates that PMMM is a human rights issue that requires a human rights-based approach response, centering inter alia the principles of accountability, meaningful participation of primarily affected people, non-discrimination and equality and transparency. The resolution aims at garnering political will to curb maternal mortality and morbidity rates that have been stagnating and failing to meet SDGs targets. The resolution rightly highlights the full realization of the right to sexual and reproductive health and the provision of comprehensive sexual and reproductive health information and services, including comprehensive sexuality education and safe abortion (with the caveat of not when against national law), as pre-conditions to lower PMMM. We welcome the call to update the technical guidance on a HRBA to PMMM. We however deplore the amendments put forward seeking to weaken the text and apply a protectionist lens to women’s rights to bodily autonomy, taking away their agency and their status of full rights holders under IHRL.
We express our support for a new resolution on the right to privacy in the digital age, which contains strong new standards under the theme of data protection. The resolution also contains stronger language on remote biometric surveillance systems, such as facial recognition, stressing that they raise serious concerns with regard to their proportionality. While we applaud that the resolution acknowledges that some applications of new and emerging technologies may not be compatible with international human rights law, we call for future iterations to take a step further in establishing “red lines” and to call for bans of such technologies. We also urge the core group to address other emerging issues for the right to privacy in the future, such as social media monitoring.
We welcome the adoption of the resolution on the question of the death penalty aimed at ensuring that criminal justice systems are consistent with international human rights obligations in relation to capital punishment, with a focus on the relation between Art 6 and Art 14 of the ICCPR, particularly on the right to seek pardon or commutation of the sentence, and the right to have one’s conviction reviewed by a higher tribunal according to law. In accordance with the safeguards guaranteeing the protection of the rights of those facing the death penalty, as set out in the annex to Economic and Social Council Resolution 1984/50. We welcome that any attempt by a number of States to undermine the aim of the resolution through a number of amendments, have been rejected.
We welcome the adoption of the resolution from rhetoric to reality: a global call for concrete action against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance’ and the mandate renewal of the Working Group of Experts of People of African Descent (WGEPAD). We welcome that the rhetoric to reality resolution, interalia, strongly condemns the discriminatory treatment, unlawful deportations, excessive use of force and deaths of African migrants and migrants of African descent, including refugees and asylum-seekers, at the hands of law enforcement officials engaged in migration and border governance. It calls on States to ensure accountability and reparations for human rights violations at borders and to adopt a racial justice approach, including by adopting policies to address structural racism in the management of international migration. However, we regret that it did not reiterate that the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and colonialism were grave violations of international law that require States to make reparations proportionate to the harms committed and to ensure that structures in the society that are perpetuating the injustices of the past are transformed, including law enforcement and the administration of justice. We urge all States to fully implement the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (DDPA). We also call on States to fully cooperate with the WGEPAD and EMLER including by accepting country visits, and implementing their recommendations as well as those from the Permanent Forum and the High Commissioner’s Agenda towards Transformative Change for Racial Justice and Equality.
We welcome the adoption of the resolution on the human rights situation in the Russian Federation, and the re-mandating of the Special Rapporteur. The human rights situation in Russia has drastically deteriorated in the past year, and the Special Rapporteur needs more time to report on the general situation in the country and the Council to equally be able to scrutinize the situation.
We welcome the adoption of the resolution on a Working Group on the rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas. The resolution recognizes the contributions of peasants and other people working in rural areas in ensuring the right to adequate food and nutrition, a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, as well as to conserving and improving biodiversity. It calls upon all States and all stakeholders to cooperate fully with the Working Group on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas. The establishment of an interdisciplinary WG with balanced geographical representation will promote the effective and comprehensive implementation of the UNDROP and provide opportunities to share and promote good practices and lessons learned on the implementation of the UNDROP.
We welcome the adoption of the resolution on Afghanistan, which extends and strengthens the mandate of the Special Rapporteur. However, we are dismayed that the HRC once again failed to establish an independent investigative mechanism, despite compelling evidence for its need. This risks the entrenchment of impunity for crimes against humanity. This body must center rights holders and survivors, and heed the call of Afghan civil society, who have consistently asked for such a mechanism. We urge States to recognise the situation of women and girls in the country as amounting to gender apartheid, and to support the codification of this crime in the draft Articles on Crimes against Humanity.
We regret that the item 10 resolution on Yemen, again fails to respond to the urgent need for accountability for past and on-going violations and abuses in Yemen.
We welcome the adoption of the resolution on the enhancement of technical cooperation and capacity-building in the field of human rights and its focus on the Universal Periodic Review. The resolution contains a number of key references to the positive role civil society plays in technical assistance, and the possible role multi-stakeholder partnerships between States, UN agencies and civil society can play in supporting the implementation of international human rights obligations by UN Member States. The establishment of an online repository of technical cooperation and capacity-building activities could help civil society identify advocacy opportunities in regards to country-specific situations, in collaboration with UN agencies, as well as opportunities to share best practices and capitalize on lessons learned in regard to technical assistance.
We welcome the renewal of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Cambodia. In a context defined by systematic targeting and silencing of human rights defenders, critics and political opponents, the Special Rapporteur’s independent and objective assessment of the situation is more important than ever. However, we regret that the resolution once again failed to adequately reflect the reality of the situation and attempted to justify continuing restrictions on civil and political space on the basis of the country’s political and historical particularities as well as national legislation that contradict its international obligations.
We welcome the resolution on the rights of older persons and its important focus on the right of older persons to live free from violence, abuse, and neglect. Now, more needs to be done to ensure that older persons’ rights are protected in reality, including by establishing an international treaty on the rights of older persons.
We welcome the allocation of additional resources to the OHCHR in the area of economic, social and cultural rights, with the adoption of the resolution on ESCR and inequalities.
One year after the release of the OHCHR report finding possible crimes against humanity committed by China against Uyghurs and Muslim minorities, we deplore the sustained failure of this Council to engage in dialogue on the matter, let alone prevent the continuation of abuses. We regret the absence of a joint statement on China at the Council in 2023. The CESCR, the CEDAW, the CERD, the OHCHR, the ILO, as well as Special Procedures through three joint statements, nearly 30 press releases and over 100 letters to the government since 2018, have provided overwhelming evidence pointing to systematic and widespread human rights violations across the country. So long as the Council is not able to take principled action on the basis of objective criteria, other powerful perpetrators will feel empowered to continue committing atrocity crimes, relying on the Council’s silence. We reiterate our pressing call for all Council Members to support the adoption of a resolution establishing a UN mandate to monitor and report on the human rights situation in China.
Finally, we note the outcomes of the Human Rights Council elections. We welcome that Russia’s candidacy was defeated but regret the election of other members responsible for atrocity crimes, widespread civil society repression, and patterns of reprisals.
Signatories: International Service for Human Rights (ISHR), International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), GIN SSOGIE NPC, Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, FIAN International, Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA).
A simultaneous war with China and Russia is a strategic nightmare that sober American strategists such as Henry Kissinger have been warning the US to avoid at all costs, and it is also a topic that some US media outlets have become more and more fond of talking about in recent years. At least from the publicly available information, Washington has never previously addressed it as a formal political agenda, supposedly aware of its seriousness and the terrible risks it carries. But the publication of a report by a congressionally appointed bipartisan panel titled America’s Strategic Posture crossed this “red line” on October 12.
The central point of the 145-page report is that the US must expand its military power, particularly its “nuclear weapons modernization program,” in order to prepare for possible simultaneous wars with China and Russia. Notably, the report diverges completely from the current US national security strategy of winning one conflict while deterring another, and from the Biden administration’s current nuclear policy. It is not a fantasy among the American public, but a serious strategic assessment and recommendation in the service of policymaking.
The 12-member panel that wrote the report was hand-picked by the US Congress from major think tanks and retired defense, security officials and former lawmakers. This report makes us feel that a “strategic nightmare” is sneaking into the US political agenda, but has not drawn due concern and vigilance in Washington, and to a large extent, the American elite group represented by the panel is actively working to make this nightmare come true.
A look at the specific recommendations of this report will send shivers down the spine of those who retain any basic rationality. The report recommends that the US deploy more warheads, and produce more bombers, cruise missiles, ballistic missile submarines, non-strategic nuclear weapons and so on. It also calls on the US to deploy warheads on land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and to consider adding road-mobile ICBMs to its arsenal, establishing a third shipyard that can build nuclear-powered ships, etc.
What depths of insanity is the US sinking to? The US’ military spending accounts for nearly 40 percent of the world’s total defense expenditures, and it has been growing dramatically for several years, with military spending in 2023 reaching $813.3 billion, more than the GDP of most countries, but even that is not enough for these politicians. Such a report full of geopolitical fanaticism and war imagery, whether or not it actually ends up as a “guide” for Washington’s decision-making, is dangerous and needs to be resisted and opposed by all peace-loving countries.
According to some American media, the report ignores the consequences of a nuclear arms race. In fact, the report doesn’t seem to consider this at all and doesn’t suggest any measures other than nuclear expansion to address this issue. In other words, it is a reckless approach. Both China and Russia are nuclear powers, and everyone knows that provoking a confrontation between nuclear powers is a crazy idea. Even promoting a nuclear arms race under the banner of “deterrence” is a disastrous step backward in history. Washington’s political elites, who lived through the Cold War, cannot be unaware of this. However, the fact that such an absurd and off-key report is being presented in all seriousness by the US Congress is both surreal and unsurprising. It is in line with the distorted political atmosphere in Washington today.
The motives behind this exaggeration of threats and creating a warlike atmosphere are highly suspicious. The recent outbreak of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict caused a sharp increase in US defense industry stocks, while American defense industry companies have also been the biggest beneficiaries of the long-standing Russia-Ukraine conflict. The military-industrial complex, like a geopolitical monstrosity, parasitically clings to American society, manipulating its every move, pushing Washington step by step to introduce and even prepare for ideas that were once considered “impossible.” The prosperity of the American military-industrial complex is built upon blood and corpses, and carries a primal guilt. Serving the interests of the American military-industrial complex is unethical.
The reality is that such rhetoric is becoming increasingly politically acceptable in today’s Washington. The idea of “preparing for possible simultaneous wars with Russia and China,” once a fringe fantasy, has gradually made its way into Washington’s agenda, which is deeply unsettling. If Washington were to adopt even a small portion of the recommendations in this report, the harm and threats it could pose to world peace would be immeasurable and would ultimately backfire on the US itself. There is an old Chinese saying: “Those who play with fire will perish by it.” This is something that is worth Washington’s careful consideration.
A year after being suspended from the body, Russia will not be returning to the UN Human Rights Council in January, despite its best efforts. Running for one of two seats allocated to countries from Central and Eastern Europe, Russia received only 83 votes, significantly less than competitors Albania (123) and Bulgaria (163).
‘With this vote, States have acted in line with General Assembly resolution 60/251 and stopped Russia’s brazen attempt to undermine the international human rights system,’ said Madeleine Sinclair, co-director of ISHR’s New York office. ‘Russia must answer for a long list of crimes in Ukraine and for its ruthless and longstanding crackdown on civil society and individual liberties at home. We’re relieved voting States agreed that it could not have legitimately held a seat at the UN’s top human rights body,’. [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/russia/]
In the only other competitive race, between States from Latin American and the Caribbean, the General Assembly re-elected Cuba, one of Russia’s most consistent allies. Cuba ran for one of three seats for Latin America and the Caribbean, facing three competitors and coming in first, with 146 votes, ahead of Brazil (144), the Dominican Republic (137) and Peru (108).
Results for Asia and Africa were as disappointing as they were predictable, with the election of China and Burundi. Both States ran in uncompetitive races, with only as many candidates as seats available, thus all but assured to win. They were elected with 154 (China) and 168 (Burundi), finishing bottom of each of their respective regional slates with noticeably fewer votes than their direct competitors.
Both countries are objectively and manifestly unsuitable for the Human Rights Council in view of their domestic records, their past actions as Council members, and the very criteria that nominally governs membership of the Council.
ISHR has been campaigning to call on States at the General assembly to vote in accordance with resolution 60/251 and to use their votes to ensure a strong and principled Human Rights Council. ISHR produced a series of individual and regional scorecards examining the records of all 17 candidates running this year.
On February 12, 2002 at a Pentagon news conference, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked by Jim Miklaszewski, the NBC Pentagon correspondent, if he had any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was supplying them to terrorists. Rumsfeld delivered a famous non-answer answer and said:
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
When he was pressed by Jamie McIntyre, CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, to answer the question about evidence, he continued to talk gobbledygook, saying, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice versa.”
He never said he had evidence, because he didn’t.
Rumsfeld, who enjoyed his verbal games, was the quintessential bullshitter and liar for the warfare state. This encounter took place when Rumsfeld and his coconspirators were promoting lie after lie about the attacks of September 11, 2001 and conflating false stories about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in order to build a case to wage another war against Iraq, in order to supplement the one in Afghanistan and the war on “terror” that they launched post September 11 and the subsequently linked anthrax attacks.
A year later on February 5, 2003, U. S. Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the U. N. Security Council and in a command performance assured the world that the U.S. had solid evidence that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” repeating that phrase seventeen times as he held up a stage prop vial of anthrax to make his point. He said, “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources — solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” He was lying, but to this very day his defenders falsely claim he was the victim of an “intelligence failure,” a typical deceitful excuse along with “it was a mistake.” Of course, Iraq did not have “weapons of mass destruction” and the savage war waged on Iraq was not a mistake.
Scott Ritter, the former Marine U.N. weapons inspector, made it very clear back then that there was no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but his expertise was dismissed, just as his current analysis of the war in Ukraine is. See his recent tweet about Senator Diane Feinstein in this regard:
Thirteen months after Rumsfeld’s exchange in the news conference, the United States invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, knowing it had no justification. It was a war of aggression. Millions died as a result. And none of the killers have been prosecuted for their massive war crimes. The war was not launched on mistaken evidence; it was premeditated and based on lies easy to see. Very, very easy to see.
On January 28, 2003, eleven days before Powell performance, I, an independent writer, wrote a newspaper Op Ed, “The War Hoax,” saying:
The Bush administration has a problem: How to start a war without having a justifiable reason for one. No doubt they are working hard to solve this urgent problem. If they can’t find a justification, they may have to create one. Or perhaps they will find what they have already created. . . . Yet once again, the American people are being played for fools, by the government and the media. The open secret, the insider’s fact, is that the United States plans to attack Iraq in the near future. The administration knows this, the media knows it, but the Bush scenario, written many months ago, is to act as if it weren’t so, to act as if a peaceful solution were being seriously considered. . . . Don’t buy it.
Only one very small regional Massachusetts newspaper, the North Adams Transcript, was willing to publish the piece.
I mention this because I think it has been very obvious for a very long time that the evidence for United States’ crimes of all sorts has been available to anyone who wished to face the truth. It does not take great expertise, just an eye for the obvious and the willingness to do a little homework. Despite this, I have noticed that journalists and writers on the left have continued to admit that they were beguiled by people such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joseph Biden, con men all. I do not mean writers for the mainstream press, but those considered oppositional. Many have, for reasons only they can answer, put hope in these obvious charlatans, and some prominent ones have refused to analyze such matters as the JFK assassination, September 11th, or Covid-19, to name a few issues. Was it because they considered these politicians and matters known unknowns, even when the writing was on the wall?
Those on the right have rolled with Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump in a similar manner, albeit for different reasons. It causes me to shake my head in amazement. When will people learn? How long does it take to realize that all these people are part of a vast criminal enterprise that has been continuously waging wars and lying while raking in vast spoils for the military-industrial complex. There is one party in the U.S. – the War Party.
If you have lived long enough, as have I, you reach a point when you have, through study and the accumulation of evidence, arrived at a long list of known knowns. So with a backhand slap to Donald Rumsfeld, that long serving servant of the U.S. war machine, I will list a very partial number of my known knowns in chronological order. Each could be greatly expanded. There is an abundance of easily available evidence for all of them – nothing secret – but one needs to have the will for truth and do one’s homework. All of these known knowns are the result of U.S. deep state conspiracies and lies, aided and abetted by the lies of mass corporate media.
My Known Knowns:
The U.S. national security state led by the CIA assassinated President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.This is The foundational event for everything that has followed. It set the tone and sent the message that deep state forces will do anything to wage their wars at home and abroad. They killed JFK because he was ending the war against Vietnam, the Cold War, and the nuclear arms race.
Those same forces assassinated Malcolm X fourteen months later on February 21, 1965 because he too had become a champion of peace, human rights, and racial justice with his budding alliance with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Such an alliance of these two black leaders posed too great a threat to the racist warfare state. This conspiracy was carried out by the Nation of Islam, the New York Police Department, and U.S. intelligence agencies.
The Indonesian government’s slaughter of more than one million mainly poor rice farmers in 1965-6 was the result of a scheme planned by ex-CIA Director Allen Dulles, whom JFK had fired. It was connected to Dulles’s role in the assassination of JFK, the CIA-engineered coup against Indonesian President Sukarno, his replacement by the dictator Suharto, and his mass slaughter ten years later, starting in December 1975. The American-installed Indonesian dictator Suharto, after meeting with Henry Kissinger and President Ford and receiving their approval, would slaughter hundreds of thousands East-Timorese with American-supplied weapons in a repeat of the slaughter of more than a million Indonesians in 1965.
In June of 1967, Israel, a purported ally of the U.S., attacked and destroyed the Egyptian and Syrian armies, claiming falsely that Egypt was about to attack Israel. This was a lie that was later admitted by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in a speech he gave in 1982 in Washington, D.C. Israel annexed the West Bank and Gaza and still occupies the Golan Heights as well. In June 1967, Israel also attacked and tried to sink the U.S. intelligence gathering ship the U.S. Liberty, killing 34 U.S. sailors and wounding 170 others. Washington covered up these intentional murders to protect Israel.
On April 4, 1968, these same intelligence forces led by the FBI, assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. He was not shot by James Earl Ray, the officially alleged assassin, but by a hit man who was part of another intricate government conspiracy. King was killed because of his work for racial and human rights and justice, his opposition to the Vietnam War, and his push for economic justice with the Poor People’s Campaign.
Two months later, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, on his way to the presidency, was also assassinated by deep state intelligence forces in another vastly intricate conspiracy. He was not killed by Sirhan Sirhan, who was a hypnotized patsy standing in front of RFK. He was assassinated by a CIA hit man who was standing behind him and shot him from close range. RFK, also, was assassinated because he was intent on ending the war against Vietnam, bringing racial and economic justice to the country, and pursuing the assassins of his brother John.
The escalation of the war against Vietnam by Pres. Lyndon Johnson was based on the Tonkin Gulf lies. Its savage waging by Richard Nixon for eight years was based on endless lies. These men were war criminals of the highest order. Nixon’s 1968 election was facilitated by the “October Surprise” when South Vietnam withdrew from peace negotiations to end the war. This was secretly arranged by Nixon and his intermediaries.
The well-known Watergate scandal story, as told by Woodward and Bernstein of The Washington Post, that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, is an entertaining fiction concealing intelligence operations.
Another October Surprise was arranged for the 1980 presidential election. It was linked to the subsequent Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, led by future CIA Director under Reagan, William Casey, and former CIA Director and Vice-President under Reagan, George H. W. Bush. As in 1968, a secret deal was made to secure the Republican’s election by making a deal with Iran to withhold releasing the American hostages they held until after the election. They were released minutes after Reagan was sworn in on January 20, 1981. American presidential elections have been fraught with scandals, as in 2000 when George W. Bush and team stole the election from Democrat Al Gore, and Russia-gate was conjured up by the Democrats in 2016 to try to prevent Trump’s election.
The Reagan administration, together with the CIA, armed the so-called “Contras” to wage war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua that had overthrown the vicious U.S. supported dictator Anastasio Somoza. The Contras were Somoza supporters and part of a long line of terrorists that the U.S. had used throughout Latin America where they supported dictators and death squads to squelch democratic movements. Such state terrorism was of a piece with the September 11, 1973 U.S. engineered coup against the democratic government of President Salvatore Allende in Chile and his replacement with the dictator Augusto Pinochet.
The Persian Gulf War waged by George H.W. Bush in 1991 – the first made for TV war – was based on lie upon lie promoted by the administration and their public relations firm. It was a war of aggression celebrated by CNN and other media as a joyous July 4th fireworks display.
Then the neoliberal phony William Clinton spent eight years bombing Iraq, dismantling the social safety net, deregulating the banks, attacking and dismantling Yugoslavia, savagely bombing Serbia, etc. In a span of four months in 1999 he bombed four countries: Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia. He maintained the U.S. sanctions placed on Iraq following the Gulf War that resulted in the death of 500,00 Iraqi children. When his Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked by Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes if the price was worth it, Albright said, “We think the price is worth it.”
The attacks of September 11, 2001, referred to as 9/11 in an act of linguistic mind control in order to create an ongoing sense of national emergency, and the anthrax attacks that followed, were a joint inside operation – a false flag – carried out by elements within the U.S. deep state. Together with the CIA assassination of JFK, these acts of state terrorism mark a second fundamental turning point in efforts to extinguish any sense of democratic control in the United States. Thus The Patriot Act, government spying, censorship, and ongoing attacks on individual rights.
The George W. Bush-led U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. and its “war on terror” were efforts to terrorize and control the Middle East, Southwest Asia, as well as the people of the U.S. The aforementioned Mr. Rumsfeld, along with his partner in crime Dick Cheney, carried out Bush’s known known war crimes justified by the crimes of Sept 11 as they simultaneously created a vast Homeland Security spying network while eliminating Americans basic freedoms.
Barack Obama was one of the most effective imperialist presidents in U.S. history. Although this is factually true, he was able to provide a smiling veneer to his work at institutionalizing the permanent warfare state. When first entering office, he finished George W. Bush’s unfinished task of bailing out the finance capitalist class of Wall St. Having hoodwinked liberals of his bona fides, he then spent eight years presiding over extrajudicial murders, drone attacks, the destruction of Libya, a coup in Ukraine bringing neo-Nazis to power, etc. In 2016 alone he bombed seven countries Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and Iraq. He expanded U.S. military bases throughout the world and sent special forces throughout Africa and Latin America. He supported the new Cold War with sanctions on Russia. He was a fitting successor to Bush junior.
Donald Trump, a New York City reality TV star and real estate tycoon, the surprise winner of the 2016 U.S. presidential election despite the Democratic Party’s false Russia-gate propaganda, attacked Syria from sea and air in the first two years of his presidency, claiming falsely that these strikes were for Syria’s use of chemical weapons at Douma and for producing chemical weapons. In doing so, he warned Russia not to be associated with Syrian President Assad, a “mass murderer of men, women, and children.” He did not criticize Israel that to the present day continues to bomb Syria, but he recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. He ordered the assassination by drone of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani near Baghdad International Airport while on a visit to meet with Iraq’s prime minister. As an insider contrary to all portrayals, he presided over Operation Warp Speed Covid vaccination development and deployment, which was a military-pharmaceutical-CIA program, whose key player was Robert Kadlec (former colleague of Donal Rumsfeld with deep ties to spy agencies), Trump’s Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response and an ally of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates. On December 8, 2020 Trump joyously declared: “Before Operation Warp Speed, the typical time-frame for development and approval [for vaccines], as you know, could be infinity. And we were very, very happy that we were able to get things done at a level that nobody has ever seen before. The gold standard vaccine has been done in less than nine months.” And he announced they he will quickly distribute such a “verifiably safe and effective vaccine” as soon as the FDA approved it because “We are the most exceptional nation in the history of the world. Today, we’re on the verge of another American medical miracle.” The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was approves three days later. Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine received FDA emergency use authorization a week later.
This Covid-19 medical miracle was a con-job from the start. The official Covid operation launched in March 11, 2020 with worldwide lockdowns that destroyed economies while enriching the super-rich and devastating regular people, was a propaganda achievement carried out by intelligence and military apparatuses in conjunction with Big Pharma, the WHO, the World Economic Forum, etc. and promulgated by a vast around-the-clock corporate media disinformation campaign. It was the third fundamental turning point – following the JFK assassination and the attacks of September 11, 2001 and anthrax – in destabilizing the economic, social and political life of all nations while undermining their sovereignty. It was based on false science in the interests of further establishing a biosecurity state. The intelligence agency planners who had conducted many germ war game simulations leading up to Covid -19 referred to a future arising out of such “attacks,” as the “New Normal.” A close study of these precedents, game-planning, and players makes this evident. The aim was to militarize medicine and produce a centralized authoritarian state. Its use of the PCR “test” to detect the virus was a lie from the start. The Nobel Award winning scientist who developed the test, Kary Mullis, made it clear that “the PCR is a process. It does not tell you that you are sick.” It is a process “to make a whole lot of something out of nothing,” but it can not detect a specific virus. That it was used to detect all these Covid “cases” is all one needs to know about the fraud.
Joseph Biden, who was Obama’s point man for Ukraine while vice-president and the U.S. engineered the 2014 coup d’état in Ukraine, came into office intent on promoting the New Cold War with Russia and refused all Russian efforts to peacefully settle the Ukrainian crisis. He pushed NATO to further provoke Russia by moving farther to the east, surrounding Russia’s borders. He supported the neo-Nazi Ukrainian elements and its government’s continuous attacks on the Russian speaking Donbass region in eastern Ukraine. In doing so, he clearly provoked Russian into sending troops into Ukraine on 24 February 2022. He has fueled this war relentlessly and has pushed the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. He supported the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. He currently presides over an aggressive provocation of China. And like his predecessor Trump, he promotes the Covid disinformation campaign and the use of “vaccines,” urging people to get their jabs.
Throughout all these decades and the matters touched upon here – some of my known knowns – there is another dominant theme that recurs again and again. It is the support for Israeland its evil apartheid regime’s repeated slaughters and persecution of the Palestinian people after having dispossessed them of their ancestral land. This has been a constant fact throughout all U.S. administrations since the JFK assassination and Israel’s subsequent acquisition of nuclear weapons that Kennedy opposed. It is been aided and abetted by the rise of the neocon elements within the U.S. government and the 1997 formation of The Project for the New American Century, founded by William Kristol and Donald Kagan, whose signees included Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, et al., and their claim for the need “for a new Pearl Harbor.” Many of these people, who held dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship, became members of the Bush administration. Once the attacks of September 11th occurred and a summer of moviegoers watching the new film Pearl Harbor had passed, George W. Bush and the corporate media immediately and repeatedly proclaimed the attacks a new Pearl Harbor. Once again, the Palestinian’s and Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel that is widely and falsely reported as unprovoked, as is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has been referred to as “a Pearl Harbor Moment.” By today, Monday 9 Oct. 2023, President Biden has already given full U.S. support to Israel as it savagely attacks Gaza and has said that additional assistance for the Israeli Defense Forces is now on its way to Israel with more to follow over the coming days. Rather than acting as an instrument for peace, the U.S. government continues its support for Israel’s crimes as if it were the same country. The Israel Lobby and the government of Israel has for decades exerted a powerful control over U.S. Middle East policies and much more as well. The Mossad has often worked closely under the aegis of the CIA together with Britain’s M16 to assassinate opponents and provoke war after war.
Donald Rumsfeld, as a key long time insider to U.S. deep state operations, was surely aware of my list of known knowns. He was just one of many such slick talkers involved in demonic U.S. operations that have always been justified, denied, or kept secret by him and his ilk.
One does not have to be a criminologist to realize these things. It is easy to imagine that Rumsfeld’s forlorn ghost is wandering since he went to his grave with his false “unknown unknowns” tucked away.
When he said, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice-versa,” he did say it, of course. Despite double-talkers like him, evidence of decades of U.S. propaganda is easy to see through if one is compelled by the will-to-truth.
“Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again. All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.” – Norman O. Brown
Note: If you think I too have no evidence, look at this for many of them.
There was a whiff of Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’ at the 20th Valdai annual meeting this week at a hotel over the gorgeous heights of the Krasnaya Polyana, north-west of the picturesque resort Sochi.
But instead of a deep dive into the lure and degeneracy of ideas in an introverted community in the Swiss Alps on the eve of the First World War, we immersed ourselves in powerful new ideas expressed by a community of Global Majority intellectuals on the possible eve of a psycho neocon-intended WWIII.
And then, of course, President Putin intervened, striking the plenary session like lightning.
This is an unofficial Top Ten of his address, before the Q&A which was characteristically engaging:
“I even suggested joining NATO for Russia. But no, NATO does not need such a country (…) Apparently, the problem is geopolitical interests and an arrogant attitude towards others.”
“We never started the so-called war in Ukraine. We are trying to end it.”
“In the international system, lawlessness reigns supreme.”
“This is not a territorial war. The issue is much broader and more fundamental: it is about the principles on which a new world order will be built.”
“The history of the West is a chronicle of endless expansion, and a huge financial pyramid.”
“A certain part of the West always needs an enemy. To preserve the internal control of their system.”
“Perhaps [the West] should check its hubris.”
“That era [of Western domination] is long gone. It’s never coming back.”
“Russia is a distinct civilization-state.”
“Our understanding of civilization is quite different. First, there are many civilizations. And none of them is better or worse than the other. They are equal, as expressions of the aspirations of their cultures, their traditions, their peoples. For each of us it is different.”
On The Road to “Asynchronous Multipolarity”
The theme of Valdai 2023 was, most appropriately, ‘Fair Multipolarity’. The key axes of discussion were presented in this provocative, detailed report. It’s as if the report had prepared the stage for Putin’s address and his carefully crafted answers to the questions from the plenary.
The concept of multipolarity in the Russian space was first articulated by the late, great Yevgeny Primakov in the mid-Nineties. Now, the road to multipolarity is based on Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s concept of “strategic patience.”
In a crisscrossed cornucopia of nation-states, larger blocs, security blocs and ideological historic blocs, we’re now deep into mega-alignments – even as the political West cultivates its universalist ambitions. The Eurasian “non-bloc” is in fact a mega-alignment, as much as the revitalized Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which finds its expression in the G77 (actually formed by 134 nations).
The ideal path to follow might be horizontalism – in a Deleuze-Guattari sense – where we would have 200 equal nation-states. Of course the collective West won’t allow it. Andrey Shushentov, Dean of the School of International Relations at MGIMO University, proposes the notion of “asynchronous multipolarity”. Radhika Desai of Manitoba University proposes “pluripolarity” – borrowing from Hugo Chavez.
The risk, as expressed by Turkish political scientist Ilter Turan, is that by trying to build a replica of the present system via, for instance, BRICS 11, we may be racing towards a parallel system that simply cannot organize itself as the leader of a new order. So, a clearly possible outcome is a bipolar system – considering the impossible convergence of common values.
At the same time, a South-east Asian perspective, expressed by the President of the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam, Pham Lan Dung, points to what is really relevant for middle and small countries: everything should proceed on the basis of South-South friendships.
The BRICS Bank: It’s Complicated
In one of the key panels on BRICS as a prototype of a new international architecture, the star of the show was Brazilian economist Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr, who drew on his vast former experience at the IMF and as Vice-President of the NDB – the BRICS bank – for a realist presentation.
The key problem of the NDB is how to maintain unity while navigating power politics and reaching the upcoming stages of de-dollarization.
Batista outlined how a new international financial architecture may imply a future common currency. He stressed the success of implementing two practical experiments: a BRICS monetary fund (called the Contingent Reserve Agreement, CRA) and a multilateral development bank, the NDB.
Progress though “has been slow”. The monetary fund “has been frozen by the five Central Banks”, and must be expanded. Links with the IMF “must be severed”, but that incurs “fierce resistance” by the five Central Banks of BRICS members (and soon there will be 11).
Turning the NDB around will be a Sisyphean task. Disbursement of loans as well as project implementation have been “slow”. The US dollar “is the unit of account for the bank” – which in itself is counter-productive. The NDB is far from being a global bank: only three countries so far have joined. Current NDB President Dilma Rousseff has only two years to turn it around.
Batista remarked how the common currency idea first came from Russia, and was instantly embraced by Lula when he was Brazil’s President in the 2000s. The R5 concept – the currencies of all current five BRICS members start with a “R” – may endure; but now that will have to expand to R11.
The first substantial step ahead, after revamping the NDB, should be a currency from an issuing bank backed by bonds guaranteed by member countries, freely convertible, with currency swaps denominated in R5.
A healthy prospect is that Russia will appoint the next bank President starting in 2025. So the way forward substantially depends on Russia and Brazil, Batista emphasized. At the BRICS 11 summit in Kazan in south-west Russia next year, “a key decision should be made”. And during the Brazilian BRICS presidency in 2025, “the first practical steps should be announced”.
Looking For a New Universality
Almost all panels at Valdai focused on how to develop an alternative system, but the two main themes were inevitably the lack of democracy in current international institutions and the weaponization of the US dollar. Batista correctly observed how the US itself is the main enemy of the US dollar when using it as a weapon.
At the Q&A, Putin addressed the key issue of economic corridors. He noted how BRI and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) might have different interests: “Not true. They are harmonious and complement each other”. This is reflected in how they are geared to “ensure new logistic routes and industrial chains”, and all that “complemented by the real productive sector”.
Going forward, there’s a pressing need to coin a new terminology for this emerging new “universality” – even as nations continue to behave most often by following national interests.
What’s clear is that the collective West’s “universality” is not valid anymore. A remarkable panel on ‘Russian Civilization Through the Centuries’ showed how the notion of “universality” actually entered Western civilization through St Paul – after his Damascus moment – whereas the Indian notion of equilibrium inbuilt in the Upanishads would be way more appropriate.
Still, we are now in hot debate over the notion of the “civilization-state”, as configured mostly by India and China, Russia and Iran.
Pierre de Gaulle, grandson of the iconic General, expanded on the French notion of universality, embodied in the much-quoted slogan “liberté, egalité, fraternité” – not exactly upheld by Macronism. He made a point to stress he was the “sole representative of France” at Valdai (only a handful of European academics came to Sochi, and no diplomats).
De Gaulle reminded everyone how Saint Simon was a Russophile and how Voltaire corresponded with Catherine the Great. He alluded to the deep Franco-Russian cultural ties; a “shared community of interests”; and “the bond of Christianity”.
In contrast, crucially, “the US never accepted that Russia could develop under a different model”. And now that is illustrated by “how little today’s intellectual elites in the West know about Eurasia.”
De Gaulle emphasized the “tragic mistake is to see Russia through Western eyes”. He invoked Dostoevsky as he lamented the current “destruction of family values” and “existential void” inbuilt in the process of manufacturing consent. He pledged to “fight for independence”, just like his grandfather, under the seal of “faith, family and honor”, and stressed “we must rethink Europe”, inviting “war profiteers to come to Russia”.
Top of The Hill: a Cathedral or a Fortress?
Beyond Valdai, and especially throughout the crucial year of 2024 – while Russia holds the presidency of BRICS – there will be much further discussion about “poles” of ancient civilizations. A broad coalition of states that support multipolarity actually do not support the “civilization” concept; instead, they support the notion of people sovereignty.
It was up to Dayan Jayatilleka, former Sri Lankan plenipotentiary ambassador to Russia, to come up with a brilliant formulation.
He showed how Vietnam faced a proxy war against the hegemon successfully – “using 5,000 years of Vietnamese civilization”. That was “an internationalist phenomenon”. Ho Chi Minh took his ideas from Lenin – while enjoying full support from students in the US and Europe.
Russia might therefore learn from the Vietnamese experience how to conquer young hearts and minds across the West for its quest towards multipolarity.
It was clear to the overwhelming majority of analysts at Valdai that the concept of Russian civilization is an “existential challenge” to the collective West. Especially because it includes, historically, the radical universality of the Soviet Union. Now is time for Russian thinkers to work hard on refining the internationalist aspect.
Alexander Prokhanov came up with another startling formulation. He compared the Russian dream with a cathedral on the top of a hill, whereas the Anglo-Saxon dream is a fortress on the top of the hill, engaged in constant surveillance. And if you misbehave, you “will receive some Tomahawks.”
The conclusion: “We will always be in conflict with the West.” So what? The future, as I discussed off the record with Grandmaster Sergey Karaganov, one of the founders of Valdai, is in the East.
And it was Karaganov who arguably posed the most challenging question to Putin. “He stressed how nuclear deterrence does not work anymore. So should we lower the nuclear threshold?”
Putin replied,
I am well aware of your position. Let me remind you the Russian military doctrine has two reasons for the possible use of nuclear weapons. The first is if nuclear weapons are used against us – as retaliation. The response is absolutely unacceptable for any potential aggressor. Because from the moment a missile launch is detected, no matter where it comes from – anywhere in the world’s oceans or from any territory – in a retaliatory strike, so many, so many hundreds of our missiles appear in the air that no enemy will have a chance of survival, and in several directions at once.
The second reason is “a threat to the existence of the Russian state even if only conventional weapons are used.”
And then came the clincher – actually a veiled message to the characters whose dream is “victory” via a first strike: “Do we need to change that? Why? I see no point. There’s no situation when something can threaten the existence of the Russian state. No sane person would consider the use of nuclear weapons against Russia.”
After the United States announced in early September that it would supply depleted uranium munitions to Ukraine, a claim began to circulate in Chinese-language posts that a ship carrying such munitions was destroyed by Russian fighter jets, citing a photo as a proof.
But the claim is false. The photo in fact shows an arms depot explosion which occurred in Ukraine in 2017. Keyword searches found no credible reports to back the claim.
The claim and the photo were shared in posts on popular Chinese social media platforms such as Douyin and NetEase as seen here and here.
“The United States shipped 20,000 depleted uranium bombs to Ukraine. They were attacked as soon as they entered the port… The well-prepared Russian army quickly locked onto the giant ship and blew it up and sank it in the port,” one post reads in part.
The claim was accompanied by several photos with the posts specifically citing one photo of the explosion as the evidence of the Russian attack.
The claim emerged after the U.S. Department of Defense formally announced on Sept. 6 that it would supply depleted uranium munitions to Ukraine as part of US$175 million in additional military aid to the country. Officials did not state a specific date for when the shipment would be sent to Ukraine.
This announcement was met with strong criticism from Russia, and shortly thereafter claims circulated on Chinese social media about Russian jets taking down a U.S. vessel.
But the claim is false. The photo in fact shows an arms depot explosion which occurred in Ukraine in 2017.
Chinese netizens claim that Russian fighter jets sank a US ship transporting depleted uranium shells. (Screenshot/Douyin & Netease)
Old photo
A reverse image search on Google found the matching photo published in media reports about a Ukrainian arms depot explosion in 2017 as seen here and here as well as on China’s official military website.
The caption of the photo, credited to Reuters, reads: “More than 180,000 tonnes of munitions were believed to have been stored at the depot.”
The explosion occurred after a depot in Kalynivka, a city about 175 kilometers (110 miles) from Kiev, caught fire, forcing local authorities to eventually evacuate more than 30,000 people from the area.
A closer look at the original photo shows that the fireball featured in the photo was enlarged and cropped before being used as alleged evidence of the destroyed ocean liner full of uranium munitions. However, the actual shape of the fireball in both pictures exactly match, as are peripheral details such as trees and electric poles in the surrounding countryside.
Below is a screenshot comparison.
Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Taejun Kang and Malcolm Foster.
Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) is a branch of RFA established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. Our journalists publish both daily and special reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of public issues.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Dong Zhe for Asia Fact Check Lab.
The United States has blacklisted 42 Chinese companies among a total of 49 worldwide for on-selling U.S.-made microchips to Russia in violation of sanctions, according to a document released Friday.
The blacklisting, under the Department of Commerce’s Entity List, means American companies will need to apply for a special license – which is rarely, if ever, granted – to continue selling to the firms.
The move comes amid a brewing U.S.-China trade war on microchip sales, with the Biden administration banning the export of technology to make high-end chips to China and Beijing hitting back by banning U.S. chipmaker Micron from selling in China’s market.
Besides the 42 Chinese companies, there are also three Indian and two Turkish firms blacklisted, as well as one each in Estonia, Finland, Germany, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.
All are accused of activities “contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States,” says the Federal Register filing.
“These entities are added to the Entity List for providing support to Russia’s military and/or defense industrial base. Specifically, these entities supplied Russian consignees connected to the Russian defense sector with U.S.-origin integrated circuits,” it says.
The chips “have been controlled for export and reexport and transfer within Russia since September 15, 2022,” and companies need to seek a specific license for any sales “destined to Russia or Belarus.”
The United States has called on China to not materially support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and has called the transfer of weapons a redline. But officials have also said they do not necessarily consider small shipments made by private Chinese firms to be a violation.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alex Willemyns for RFA.
When Cubans began telling stories of being lured into Russia with promises of jobs and instead being sent to the front lines in Ukraine, many US media outlets seemed eager to report the story. But what might on the surface seem like journalism to expose the plight of the powerless was really just another exercise in bolstering official US narratives and whitewashing US complicity.
Reports emerged that Cuban recruits were promised citizenship and a monthly salary far higher than what most Cubans could ever hope for in their native country, in exchange for what some described as support work for the Russian military—things like construction or driving. Once they arrived in Russia, however, they found themselves sent to the front lines.
The Cuban government blamed a “human trafficking network,” and soon announced that they had arrested 17 people in connection with the scheme. FAIR could find no news reports confirming whether those involved in luring the Cubans were working for Russian or Cuban authorities.
US corporate media were happy to comment on Russia’s military weakness, speculate about the role of the Cuban government and paint a picture of bleak economic conditions in Cuba. But they were almost entirely silent on one of the key causes of that bleakness, which made the victims so susceptible in the first place: the US embargo on Cuba, ongoing now for more than 60 years and ramped up under Trump.
‘To bring about hunger’
Reuters (5/8/18): “The United States has lost nearly all international support for the embargo since the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
The US imposed an embargo on Cuba in 1962 and has steadfastly maintained it since then, in a failed attempt to overthrow the Communist government. President Barack Obama began normalizing relations with Cuba in 2016, but Donald Trump sharply reversed course. He issued a series of new sanctions over the course of his presidency, including curtailing remittances from relatives in the US, barring US tourism and designating Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism—which, combined with the Covid-19 pandemic, helped send Cuba’s economy into a tailspin. Despite campaign promises to restore diplomatic relations, Joe Biden has largely maintained Trump’s sanctions on Cuba.
The purpose of the embargo is precisely to inflict economic hardship on civilians so that they rise up against the government. As the State Department argued in 1960, recognizing that the Castro government had the support of the Cuban people, “The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” Therefore, “every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba” and “to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”
While the embargo has been a miserable failure at its end goal of regime change, it has been much more effective at its intermediary goals of hunger and desperation. In 2018, the UN estimated that the sanctions had cost the country $130 billion (Reuters, 5/8/18); last year Cuba reported that number had risen to $154 billion (UN, 11/3/22). With the tightened Trump-era sanctions and the added impact of the pandemic, Cuba’s economy has nosedived in recent years, crucial context for a story of the exploitation of Cuban citizens.
Economy ‘devastated’—but why?
This New York Times piece (9/5/23) doesn’t mention the economic hardships that would make enticement by Russia effective, but does quote a Miami-based analyst who says that it is “not possible” that the Cuban government would not know about efforts to traffic its citizens.
The New York Times‘ first story (9/5/23) didn’t mention economic conditions in Cuba, let alone the US embargo. In a followup article, the Times (9/8/23) again elided any US role, but did note that “US officials have said that Russia has struggled to attract recruits for its war effort.”
The Washington Post (9/5/23) offered a more in-depth report that included the tale of two victims of the scheme who had been featured on Telemundo (9/3/23). The Post quoted one: “Given the situation in Cuba, we didn’t think twice.” The article then offered an explanation of Cuba’s “crippled” economy, pointing to a list of causes: “the coronavirus pandemic, lackluster tourism, US punitive action and inefficient policies.”
What “punitive action” might that be, and for what? The Post didn’t bother to clarify.
NPR‘s Morning Edition (9/6/23) chose to cover the story by interviewing Chris Simmons, described as “an expert in Cuban spycraft.” Simmons, who has not worked in counterintelligence in over ten years, and did not claim to have any inside information about the case at hand, nevertheless asserted confidently that “this is just the latest in a long series of criminal enterprises run by the Cuban government.” The Cuban government denies involvement, but aside from noting that perfunctorily, anchor Leila Fadel did not challenge Simmons’ speculation or offer any other perspectives.
Fadel asked if Cuba needs Russia, noting that Cuba “is a relatively isolated place. It’s one of the few remaining Communist countries. It’s facing its worst economic crisis in decades.” Simmons responded: “They absolutely do need Russia. The Cuban economy remains devastated, and the Russians have been their biggest and most generous supporter.” But neither Fadel nor Simmons made any effort to explain why Cuba is isolated, or why its economy is devastated.
A report on NPR‘s website (9/5/23) was more circumspect, offering a brief summary of the facts without “expert” commentary like that of Simmons, but provided only this explanation of the economic context:
Cuba is facing the worst economic crisis in decades. The government is struggling to keep the lights on and Cubans are struggling to keep food on their tables. If already bad relations with the United States deteriorate, things could get worse.
‘Aligned against its foreign policies’
A Newsweek headline (9/5/23) describes Cuba as “America’s backyard.”
Newsweek published an article (9/5/23) explaining that “Russian forces have been badly mauled in 18 months of combat in Ukraine.” Its only mention of US sanctions came in an explanation of Cuba/Russia relations: “Both have been under US sanctions for years and have generally aligned against its foreign policies in the Americas and beyond.”
A second Newsweek piece (9/8/23) cited Luis Fleischman of the Palm Beach Center for Democracy and Policy Research as its only expert source. Fleischman suggested that the Cuban government was involved, and argued that “Cuba’s economy is in dire straits, mainly because Venezuela’s oil bonanza is over.”
Fleischman did mention sanctions, but without reference to who imposed them or how they impact civilians, only the state: “Remember, both countries are under sanctions,” he said. “In other words, there is no reason for both countries to break such a convenient relationship.” Newsweek offered no further context.
In fact, FAIR only found two explicit references in US news coverage to the US embargo as a cause of economic crisis in Cuba. A CNN.com article (9/19/23), headlined “Why Cubans Are Fighting for Russia in Ukraine,” explained in its second paragraph:
Across much of Cuba, the economy has ground to a standstill as the Communist-run island reels from a sharp drop in tourism, spiking inflation and renewed US sanctions.
Time (9/18/23) reported that “Cuba has been crippled by a 60-year US embargo, island-wide blackouts and a hunger crisis.” It gave a sense of why these recruits were such easy targets:
The recruits’ social-media accounts underscore the hardship of their lives in Cuba, with posts begging for medicine and selling everything from cell phone parts to rationed meat on black market sites. “With the money you’ll pay me,” one Cuban man said in a video on WhatsApp addressed to Russian recruiters, “if I’m killed or not, at least I’ll be able to help my family.”
Time also spent most of its lengthy article attempting to establish the Cuban government’s complicity.
Uncovered denunciations
Meanwhile, when both Cuba and Brazil denounced the US embargo at the UN General Assembly in New York last week, none of those outlets saw fit to mention it.
Not a big enough story? How about when the General Assembly voted for the 30th year in a row to condemn the US embargo, 185–2, with only the US and Israel opposing. (Brazil and Ukraine abstained.) The only one of the above outlets we could find covering the vote was Newsweek (11/5/22).
The US sanctions on Cuba are an act of war, condemned globally and with immense impact on the lives of the Cuban people. US reporting on the plight of Cuban civilians that does not provide that context is little more than state propaganda.
Featured image: A Telemundo report (9/3/23) on Cubans who say they were recruited to Russia’s war effort under false pretenses.
When considering the recent performances at the General Assembly of the United Nations this year, the echoes of “peace” resound through the plenary hall. Why should anyone want peace in the Ukraine more than any other place the Empire is waging war? My suspicion is that many of these calls are really for Russia to withdraw to its pre-2014 borders. They believe that would make the US regime happy and be a great relief to the minor and little league oligarchs who long for return to business as usual. Calm and intelligent people could be forgiven for doubting the sincerity of many peace petitioners.
After all, don’t the continuing wars in Africa, the still pending “United Nations” war against the DPRK (where there is only a 70-year-old armistice since 1953), and the innumerable economic wars being waged in places and ways we do not even know, deserve to end too?
Like the war in the Ukraine, one will hear how complicated these wars are. They cannot be simply ended. Yet they are all simple in one material way: without the US and its NATO cut-outs—often the principal aggressor in violation of the Kellogg-Briand Treaty—many of these wars would never have started or would have long ago been resolved. So why not demand that the US stop waging wars and why not apply sanctions to the US for its belligerence and violations of the law of nations? How can the United Nations end wars when it cannot even end the one it started in 1951? Could it be that too many of the parties among those who convene to call for peace, really need and want just a piece of the action?
The two military veterans probably best known for criticising US policy in Ukraine, Colonel Douglas MacGregor USA and Major Scott Ritter USMC, have said loud and clear that at least from a military standpoint the Ukrainian armed forces have lost the war against Russia. There have been numerous voices calling for an end to the conflict, not least because the more than USD 46 billion and counting in military aid alone, has yet to produce any of the results announced as aims of what has finally been admitted is a war against Russia.i If Mr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine’s government in Kiev, is to be taken at face value, then the hostilities can only end when Crimea and the Donbas regions are fully under Kiev’s control and Vladimir Putin has been removed from office as president of the Russian Federation. To date no commentator has adequately explained how those war aims are to be attained. This applies especially after the conservatively estimated 400,000 deaths and uncounted casualties in the ranks of Kiev’s forces since the beginning of the Russian special military operation in February 2022.
Before considering the political and economic issues it is important to reiterate a few military facts, especially for those armchair soldiers who derive their military acumen from TV and Hollywood films. As MacGregor and Ritter, both of whom have intimate practical knowledge of warfare, have said: Armies on the ground need supplies, i.e. food, weapons, ammunition, medical care for wounded, etc. These supplies have to be delivered from somewhere. In ancient times, armies could live off the land. Essentially this was through looting and plunder—stealing their food from the local population as they marched. To prevent the local population from becoming the enemy in the rear and avoid early exhaustion of local supply, generals started paying for what was requisitioned. Defending forces would often withdraw the civilian population and destroy what could not be taken to avoid supplying their enemies. In fact, this kind of rough warfare against civilians still occurs although it has been forbidden under the Law of Land Warfare.ii Naturally the soldier in the field can no longer make weaponry. Even less can they be plundered from the local inhabitants—unless one comes across some tribe the US has armed with Stingers. All the weapons the Ukrainian armed forces deploy have to be imported from countries with manufacturing capacity. As the two retired officers, among others, have said, such capacity is unavailable to the Ukraine. Obviously it would also be unavailable to NATO forces were they to deploy in Ukraine in any numbers. It is illusory to believe that a NATO army can do what the Wehrmacht could not some eighty years ago with three million men under arms and the most modern army of its day. This was so obvious from the beginning that one has to wonder why this war ever started. Is it possible that wars are started without any intention of winning them? If winning the war is not the objective, then what is?
Forgery and force: Explicit and implicit or latent and expressed foreign policy
Historical documents are essential elements in any attempt to understand the past and the present. However, this is not because they are necessarily true or accurate. Forgeries and outright lies are also important parts of the historical record. Perhaps the most notorious forgery in Western history is the so-called Donation of Constantine. This document was used to legitimate papal supremacy and the primacy of the Latin over the Greek Church. Although it did not take long for the forgery to be discovered, the objective was accomplished. Even today most people in the West have learned that the part of the Christian Church called Orthodoxy is schismatic when the reverse is true, namely the Latin Church arose from a coup d’état against Constantinople.
There is now no shortage of evidence that the British Empire forced the German Empire into the Great War and with US help justified the slaughter of some four million men, ostensibly to expel German forces from Belgium. There is systematically suppressed testimony by commanders in the field and others in a position to know that the Japanese attack on the US colonial base at Pearl Harbor was not only no surprise but a carefully crafted event exploited to justify US designs on Japan and China. Yet to this day the myth of surprise attack against a neutral country prevails over the historical facts. Even though there is almost popular acceptance that the US invasion of Iraq was based on entirely fabricated evidence and innuendo, the destruction of the country was not stopped and continues as of this writing.
What does that tell us about historical record and official statements of policy? Former POTUS and CIA director, George H.W. Bush expressed the principle that government lies did not matter because the lie appears on page one and the retraction or correction on page 28. In short, it is the front page that matters. That is what catches and keeps the public’s attention. Truth and accuracy are immaterial.
Let us consider for a moment one of the most durable wonders of published state policy—the Balfour Declaration. This brief letter signed by one Arthur Balfour on 2 November 1917 was addressed to the Lord Rothschild, in his capacity as some kind of conduit for the Zionist Federation. Carroll Quigley in his The Anglo-American Establishment strongly suggests that Lord Rothschild, also in his capacity as a sponsor of the Milner Round Table group, presented the letter for Mr Balfour to sign. As Quigley also convincingly argues the academic and media network created by the Round Table has successfully dominated the writing of British imperial history making it as suspicious as the Vatican’s history of the Latin Church.
This “private” letter to the British representative of the West’s leading banking dynasty is then adopted as the working principle for the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine awarded to the British Empire. From this private letter an international law mandate was created, continued under the UN Charter, to convert a part of the conquered Ottoman Empire into a state entity for people organized in Europe who imagined that some thousand(s) of years ago some ancestors once inhabited the area.iii The incongruence of this act ought to have been obvious—and in fact it was. The explicit policy with which the British Empire had sought to undermine Germany and Austria-Hungary was that of ethnic/linguistic self-determination of peoples. So by right—even if the fiction of a population in diaspora were accepted—this could not pre-empt the right of ethnic/linguistic self-determination in Palestine where Arabic was the dominant language and even those who adhered to the Jewish religion were not Europeans.
As argued elsewhere there has been a century of propaganda and brute force applied to render the dubious origins and the legitimation for the settler conquest that was declared the State of Israel in 1948 acceptable no matter how implausible. Like the Donation of Constantine, the Balfour Declaration served its purpose. No amount of rebuttal can reverse the events that followed.
Motors and motives
However, the question remains what is then the policy driving such acts? What is the motive for such seemingly senseless aggression against ordinary people? Why does an institution supposedly based on national self-determination deny it so effectively to majorities everywhere whose only fault appears to be living on land others covet? By the time the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples was finally adopted in 1960, there was no question of reversing the de facto colonisation practiced by the mandatory powers under the League. Moreover the Declaration was only an act of the UN General Assembly, a body wholly dominated by the three permanent imperial members of the Security Council, each with their veto powers.
To understand that and perhaps to better illuminate the principal subject—Ukraine—it is helpful to recall that of the five permanent members of the Security Council, the two most powerful are not nation-states at all. The United Kingdom is a colonial confederation as is the United States.
Russia, France, and China are all states derived from historical ethnic-linguistic determination. Beyond doubt they were formed into such unitary states through wars and revolutions. As de Gaulle famously said, “France was made with the sword”. However, there is no question that these three countries are based explicitly on ethnic-linguistic and cultural congruity within continental boundaries, in the sense articulated by the explicit text of the Covenant and the Charter. On the contrary, Great Britain and the United States are commercial enterprises organised on the basis of piracy and colonial conquest. There is not a square centimetre of the United States that was not seized by the most brutal force of arms from its indigenous inhabitants. “Ethnic-linguistic” among the English-speaking peoples is a commodity characteristic. It is a way to define a market segment.
Great Britain gave the world “free trade” and liberalism and the US added to that the “open door”. Nothing could be more inimical to the self-determination of peoples than either policy.iv How can a people be independent and self-determined when they are denied the right to say “no”? The Great War and its sequel, the war against the Soviet Union and Communism, aka World War 2, were first and foremost wars to establish markets dominated by the Anglo-American free trade – open door doctrine. One will not find this explicitly stated in any of the history books or the celebratory speeches on Remembrance Day (Memorial Day in the US) or the anniversary of D-Day, to which properly the Soviet Union and Russia ought not to be invited. After all D-Day was the beginning of the official war by Anglo-America against the Soviet Union after Hitler failed. More of Italian, French and German industrial and domestic infrastructure was destroyed by aerial bombardment from the West than by anything the Wehrmacht did—since its job was to destroy Soviet industry. This will not be reported in schoolbooks and very few official papers will verify this open secret. That is because like the Donation much of what counts as history was simply “written to the file”. The facts, however, speak for themselves. When the German High Command signed the terms of unconditional surrender in Berlin-Karlshorst, the domestic industry of the West, except the US, had been virtually destroyed leaving it a practical monopoly not only in finance but manufacturing that would last well into the late 1960s.v Only the excess demand of the war against Korea accelerated German industrial recovery. No one can say for sure how much of German, French, Italian, Belgian, or Netherlands capital was absorbed by Anglo-American holding companies. Hence those that wonder today about the self-destruction of the German economy have to ask who owns Germany in fact. To do that one will have to hunt through the minefield of secrecy jurisdictions behind which beneficial ownership of much of the West is concealed.
It is necessary to return to the conditions at the beginning of the Great War to understand what is happening now in Ukraine. One has to scratch the paint off the house called “interests” and recall some geography. F. William Engdahl performed this task well in his ACentury of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (2011). It would do well to summarise a few of his points before going further.
Geography and aggrandizement
Continental nation-states need secure land routes. Pirate states need secure sea-lanes. Britain succeeded in seizing control ruling the waves after defeating the Spanish and Portuguese fleets. It reached a commercial entente with the Netherlands, which helped until the Royal Navy was paramount. The control of the seas meant that Britain could dominate shipping as well as maritime insurance needed to cover the risk of sea transport. So it was no accident that Lloyds of London came to control the financing of maritime traffic. Geography dictated that the alternative for continental nation-states was the railroad. Germany was building a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad which would not only have delivered oil to its industry but allowed it to bypass the Anglo-French Suez Canal and the British controlled Cape route. Centuries before the predecessors to the City of London financed crusades to control the trade routes through the Middle East, propagandistically labelled the Holy Land, whereby this was wholly for commercial reasons. The Anglo-American led NATO captured Kosovo not out of any special loyalty to Albanians but because of geography. Camp Bondsteel lies at the end of the easiest route to build pipelines between Central Asia and the Mediterranean. In short there is not a single war for “self-determination” waged by the Anglo-American special relationship that was not driven by piratical motives, for which ethnic-linguistic commodities are expendable.
In 1917, the “interests”, for whom Lord Rothschild spoke and no doubt provided financial support, coincided with the pre-emptive control over real estate that had been desired by the banking-commercial cult at least since the establishment of the Latin Church. It is no accident that serious investigations have established that the state created from the British Mandate in Palestine was a commercial venture like all other British undertakings. Moreover it has been able to use its most insidious cover story to veil itself in victimhood and thus immunity for those criminal enterprises, both private and state, that use it as a conduit: money laundering, drug and arms trafficking, training of repressive forces for other countries on contract, etc. all documented and protected by atomic weapons. Moreover this enterprise has been the greatest per capita recipient of US foreign aid for decades. Its citizens are able to use dual citizenship to hold high office in the sovereign state that funds it, too. Any attempt to criticize or oppose this relationship or its moral justification by a public official or personality with anything to lose can lead to the gravest of consequences. Its official lobby in the US, AIPAC, is only one instrument by which any act that could interfere with the smooth flow of cash or influence between Washington and Tel Aviv can be prevented or punished. It draws on an international organisation that does not even have to be organised. The status of ultimate victimhood combined with mass media at all levels committed to protecting “victims” can summon crowds just as Gene Sharp predicted in his works.vi
A business too innocent to fail
Now we come to the issues with which this essay began. What is the aim of the war in Ukraine? Will it end when the military operations have failed?
In April 2022, i.e. just over a month after the Russian intervention, Volodymyr Zelenskyy described “the future for his country”. He used the terms “a big Israel”. In Haaretz it was reported that Zelenskyy wanted Ukraine to become “a big Israel, with its own face”. Writing for the NATO lobby, the Atlantic Council, Daniel Shapiro elaborated what Zelenskyy might mean: the main points are security first, the whole population plays a role, self-defence is the only way, but maintain active defence partnerships, intelligence dominance, technology as key, build an innovation ecosystem, maintain democratic institutions.vii The stories depict this stance for better or worse as the creation of a state under permanent military control, always giving priority to existential threats—presumably from the East.
But is that really what Zelenskyy meant? Or perhaps that is what he was just supposed to say. What about those who have directed nearly all of NATO armament and so many billions through the hands of the Kiev regime—one notorious even before 2022 as the most corrupt in Europe, if not anywhere? Maybe another construction is to be applied. Perhaps Zelenskyy is talking, like some latter day Balfour, on behalf of his sponsors whose Holocaust piety never prevented them from subjecting nearly entire populations to forced medical experiments starting in 2020. Perhaps he is talking about the extensive participation in all sorts of international trafficking, either as agent or protection for the principals. Perhaps he is talking about the permanent and undebatable foreign aid contributions from the US and the extortion from other countries, e.g. as Norman Finkelstein documented.viii There is no doubt that Ukraine has become a major hub for human trafficking, arms smuggling, and biological-chemical testing. They have atomic reactors and have asked for warheads.ix
Add to this the potential of a large and potentially self-righteous diaspora spread throughout the West, heavily subsidised and already equipped with influence in high places. A “Ukraine Lobby” was already in preparation in 1947 when the British shipped some eight thousand POWs of the SS Galizia Division (a Ukrainian force) from Italy to Britain without a single war crimes investigation.x From there they were able to spread throughout the Empire as Canada amply indicates.
Much of the debate about the Ukraine war remains confused because of the successful obfuscation around the term “Nazi”. Essentially a Hollywood story has been substituted for analysis of the historic development of the ideology and government that prevailed in Germany between 1933 and 1945.xi Nazism is treated as sui generis based on criteria that are not unique at all. For example, great attention is given to uniforms and insignia. In fact, after the Great War all the major political factions and parties, e.g. the SPD and DKP, had uniformed paramilitary organisations formed mainly of front veterans. When the NSDAP was able to ban all opponents those uniforms also disappeared. Contemporary fascism also uses current fashion and language. Only the nostalgic retain antiquated uniform and language styles. However repulsive the ideology may be these so-called neo-Nazis are equivalent to the historical re-enactment units found throughout the US for example.
After WW2 much of Europe was a wasteland, especially the East. Refugees understandably fled as far west as they could because getting to North or South America meant living in territories unscathed by war. The British and US secret services deliberately exploited these refugee waves to cover the removal into safety of the residue of their fascist allies. There they were to prepare for the continuation of war against the Soviet Union by other means. These formations often hid behind ethnic front groups, as the fascists did in occupied West Germany. Hence when an embarrassing discovery was made—usually some low or middle grade Nazi veteran—then he could be disgraced, tried or deported while leaving the bulk of the clandestine organisation in tact. These Nazis were obviously the result of careless immigration oversight but by no means a reflection of state policy.
Together, historical re-enactment Nazism and “exposed” single Nazi veterans distracted from the large scale programs supporting and expanding anti-communist forces both domestically and for expeditionary deployment. Much more seriously, these two “shows” and the deliberate suppression of meaningful debate about fascist policies and practices—always reduced to anti-Jewish attitudes and actions alone—have successfully prevented any coherent analysis and debate about the relationship between Anglo-American monopoly capital and the cartels that backed the NSDAP regime or the relationship between US/ NATO policy and its consistent support of fascist regimes in Spain, Portugal and throughout the world. It has prevented coherent debate about the long forgotten but documented participation of reconstructed Nazis in the government of the Federal Republic of Germany and their active participation in the Ukrainian war against the Soviet Union after 1945.
Zelenskyy and his fellow travellers cannot be blamed for their self-confident fascism. It is not an anomaly but a historical product of decades of Anglo-American/ NATO business plans—including the distraction of “Nazi” from the substance of those plans. Given how successful Lord Rothschild’s model for Israel has been, one can scarcely blame a patriot like Volodymyr Zelenskyy for seizing the opportunity to apply it to his own country. The model has been so successful that no one in public dare oppose it. Why not establish another such parasitic machine? Russians just like Arabs provide the permanent enemies with which to sell the permanent victim status at the expense of millions of displaced Ukrainians.
In other words, there is a very successful business model to be implemented wholly consistent with free trade and the open door and all those other slogans, which have anointed plunder and pillage by the occasionally alpine commercial cult in their campaign to assure that all of us own nothing and they will be happy.
i Jonathan Masters and Will Merrow, “How Much as the US Sent to Ukraine Here are Six Charts”, Council on Foreign Relations (10 July 2023). Among those declaring this was Foreign Minister of the German Federal Republic, Annalena Baerbock. Angela Merkel, the former chancellor of the Federal Republic is on record having said that the so-called Minsk Accords were intended to stall the Russian reaction in Donbas until Ukraine could be sufficiently armed to fight against the Russian Federation.
ii Principally the Hague (1907) Conventions and subsequent Geneva Conventions
iii More likely the Eastern Europeans in question were descendent from the Khazar kingdom located far closer to what today is Ukraine. The ruling elite was to have converted to Rabbinic Judaism in the 8th century. The Khazar Khaganate was disbursed by the end of the first millennium CE. This would better explain the hostility toward Russia and myth of a national homeland, displaced in 1917 to Palestine based on contemporary political realities.
iv Historian Gerald Horne ascribes “free trade” to the so-called Glorious Revolution, which also abolished the Royal Africa Company, opening “free trade in slaves”; see The Counter-Revolution of 1776 (2014).
v Bombing of German factories conspicuously omitted Ford plant in Cologne and GM’s Opel factory in Russelsheim, although both Ford and GM claimed and received reparations for damage done by Allied bombers.
vi Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy (1994)
vii Daniel B. Shapiro, “Zelenskyy wants Ukraine to be ‘a big Israel’. Here’s a road map”, New Atlanticist (6 April 2022) “By adapting their country’s mind-set to mirror aspects of Israel’s approach to security challenges, Ukrainian officials can tackle national security challenges with confidence and build a similarly resilient state”.
viii Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (2000)
ix This notorious request by Zelenskyy at the Munich Security Conference in 2022 for atomic weapons was another reason President Vladimir Putin gave for a military response to Kiev’s attacks on the Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine that Russia had been forced to recognise as two independent republics and grant protection.
x A documentary produced by Julian Hendy (The SS in Britain) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjj__aya4BA contains interviews, e.g. with civil servants who were told by US authorities that no pre-immigration investigations were to be conducted. This film about the 14thWaffenSS Division Galizia division has been almost scrubbed from the Web. The film, originally to be broadcast by Yorkshire Television (UK) was never shown. Geoffrey Goodman described details after a private viewing in a Guardian article (12 June 2000).
xi A useful source for the historical context and actual description of the NSDAP regime can be found in Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944, a detailed study written originally in English by Franz Neumann. This book comprises two parts: the NS state and the economic system. Very little attention is paid to the section on the economic system although the regime cannot be understood without its legacy economic policies and the bureaucracy responsible for implementing them.
We will never know the world that could have been had President John F. Kennedy’s assassination never taken place, but an inkling of how things could have been different can be found in the final months of his life. In his new book, To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace, Jeffrey Sachs unearths JFK’s final political campaign—to establish a secure and lasting peace with the Soviet Union. How far did JFK’s efforts go? What sort of progress was made on ending the Cold War, not through the collapse of the Soviet Union, but rather through mutual cooperation and understanding? To answer these questions and more, Jeffrey Sachs joins The Chris Hedges Report.
Jeffrey D. Sachs serves as the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he holds the rank of University Professor, the university’s highest academic rank. Sachs was Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University from 2002 to 2016.
Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley Post-Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Speaker 1:
(Singing)
Chris Hedges:
John F. Kennedy’s last battle, cut short by his assassination, was the effort to build a sustainable piece with the Soviet Union. Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics at Columbia University in his new book, To Move the World, chronicles the campaign by Kennedy from October 1962 to September 1963 to curb the arms race and build ties with his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev. Sachs looks at the series of speeches Kennedy gave to end the Cold War and persuade the world to make peace with the Soviets.
Kennedy implemented the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963, but Kennedy’s vision was not shared by many cold warriors in the establishment, including some within his administration and especially within the military.
Joining me to discuss To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace is Professor Jeffrey Sachs. I want to begin with the Cuban Missile Crisis because this is a moment that you write about in your book where Kennedy is battling in particularly the military, figures like Curtis LeMay was the head of the Air Force, who want to engage in a hot war to essentially bomb Cuban missile bases and I believe even Soviet ships. And this I think kind of precipitated the change that came about within Kennedy.
Jeffrey Sachs:
Let me say first what a pleasure it is to be with you and how good it is to talk about these issues on their 60th anniversary, because they are completely alive today in the context of the war in Ukraine as well, where the US and Russia are in effect at war. And I’m afraid our leaders are not learning the lessons that Kennedy learned and espoused.
I think even before the Cuban Missile Crisis, it’s worth saying that Kennedy came into office in January 1961, intent on peace, but found himself at the brink of nuclear annihilation just a year and-a-half afterwards. And that was not only shocking, but rather a sign of how extraordinarily dangerous the world was and continues to be.
So Kennedy came in January 1961, not aiming for war, but aiming for negotiation and peace. And remember in his inaugural address, he had the famous line, “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.”
And he knew the dynamics of how things can get out of hand. He understood that the world was dangerous and he was going to avoid it. And yet the first year was a massive debacle because the CIA came to him and said, “Mr. President, now you have to implement the invasion of Cuba.” And he had serious doubts about it, but like most presidents and certainly most presidents in their first months, he kind of went along and said, okay, you can do it, but I’m not going to give air cover.
And some flaky set of decisions from the CIA and Kennedy had them go forward. And of course the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was itself a debacle, a disaster. It led to a horrible interchange with Khrushchev who wrote in a private channel to Kennedy, “Stop this piracy of people in your government.” And Kennedy wrote back brazenly, “No, it’s not my government. This is independent of the United States.” And Khrushchev wrote back in effect, don’t lie to me like that Mr. President.
Chris Hedges:
I want to stop you there because you write in the book about two times the Kennedy administration lied to the Soviets and how destructive that was to building relationships.
Jeffrey Sachs:
Actually the first lie came when the Soviet Union shot down a CIA spy plane, the U-2 spy plane with Gary Powers, just on the eve of what was supposed to be a summit between Eisenhower and Soviet party chairman Nikita Khrushchev. And the CIA lies for a living. We know this. But it lied to the president of the United States also saying, Mr. President, don’t worry, they can’t shoot down the spy plane. It’s too high. And if they do shoot down the spy plane, it’s designed to disintegrate. And if it doesn’t disintegrate anyway, the pilot is going to take his cyanide pill. There’s no way anything can happen to embarrass you.
And of course they shoot down the spy plane, they get the wreckage, they get the pilot alive, Gary Powers, they don’t announce that. They say, we have been spied upon, and downed the plane without revealing those details.
And Eisenhower comes out and says, no, no, no, no, this is a weather craft that went off course from Turkey. And then the Soviets reveal, we have the fuselage, we have the pilot who has told us about his spy mission. Direct, blatant lies. Then soon after this comes the direct blatant lies of the Bay of Pigs.
It’s dangerous. And this is the CIA, by the way, and it’s the CIA still today in my view. It is lying and unaccountable and really never called to task for these lives because the public doesn’t know them, doesn’t understand what’s going on. But from the Soviet US point of view, within months of the Kennedy administration, this air was poisoned.
And there was one other thing that was absolutely precipitating all of this, which was, and very fundamental and completely never discussed in America almost at all, but there had been no peace treaty at the end of World War II and the Cold War emerged in fact over a bitter dispute between the Soviet Union and the United States about the future of Germany. The Soviet Union had lost more than 20 million people in the war and did not want to see German remilitarized.
The United States, on the other hand, decided that the three occupied regions from the western side, the US, French and British regions would form a single new Federal Republic of Germany. The remaining fourth part, the Soviet-occupied part, would become the German Democratic Republic, the GDR. But the western side would become the bulwark of a new military alliance, NATO, and it would be remilitarized. And the Soviet Union said, no, we just lost more than 20 million people, now within a few years you’re remilitarizing.
Well, of course the United States never listened, never negotiated, and at the end of the 1950s, took another step. Eisenhower was flirting with the idea, maybe we should just give our allies control over nuclear weapons as well so we can reduce the US troops numbers in Europe. Eisenhower was very frugal. He was a fiscal conservative and he wanted to bring troops home and use the nuclear shield.
And so there was, at the end of the 1950s, lots of talk about nuclear sharing and this was freaking out the Soviet Union also. And the United States doesn’t know how to talk to anybody. There’s no diplomacy, there are mortal enemies, there’s no one to negotiate. And so the situation by the time Kennedy came in was completely fraught, then came the Bay of Pigs. Then Khrushchev said, okay, we need to teach Americans a bit of their own lessons. We’ll put missiles in Cuba.
And Khrushchev had a quite remarkable exchange with Andrei Gromyko, his foreign minister. Gromyko said, “No, what, war?” And Khrushchev said, no, not war. Just basically teach these Americans about their arrogance. They have missiles in Turkey. We’re going to put missiles in Cuba, nothing about war.
But of course everything immediately spiraled out of control when the missile placements were discovered and the subterfuge that the Soviets were using to place the missile systems in place. And it was like the subterfuge of the United States doing what it did on it’s side. Things get out of hand.
And as soon as Kennedy saw the U-2 spy plane over Cuba taking these pictures of missile sites, he convened an executive committee, ExComm, and it was almost unanimous. Well, we got to shoot down these sites, we have to take them out before they can be deployed. And it was unanimous essentially that there needed to be an immediate war and the joint chiefs were told to go off and plan the military campaign against Cuba. Would it be an air campaign? Would it just be to take out the sites? How many troops would be needed? And so forth.
Kennedy, interestingly, to make a very long story short, had lunch by coincidence with Adlai Stevenson, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, on the first day of the Cuban Missile Crisis when Kennedy had seen the pictures. And Adlai Stevenson said to Kennedy, well, of course you need diplomacy to end this and exchange the missiles with the Turkish missiles.
Kennedy was shocked because no other advisor had said anything about diplomacy. It was basically unanimous for a military approach, which by the way almost surely may be too strong, although I’m not sure it is, but most likely would’ve led to nuclear annihilation. Because our doctrine was that if we were attacked by a nuclear weapon, we would give a full response. By the way, full meaning not only the Soviet Union but Eastern and Central Europe, China, hundreds of millions of people killed. And now we learned afterwards from the nuclear winter, maybe all of humanity perishing from starvation afterwards.
But Stevenson laid the idea of maybe a negotiated settlement. Well, to make a long story short, as people know, Kennedy really almost alone though with this hint from Stevenson and then with his brother Robert pushing and Ted Sorensen pushing and a few others pushing, turned the tide over a few days that, don’t do something precipitous, let’s try to figure out what’s in Khrushchev’s mind.
And Kennedy came to realize, because he had people like the Air Force head, Curtis LeMay, who just wanted nuclear war it seems or first strike against the Soviet Union, that he was surrounded by a lot of hotheads who could end the world. And he realized Khrushchev probably was as well. And the two of them came to realize, we better tamp this down. And they did.
And they agreed on a deal of this removal of missiles both from Cuba and from Turkey. The big mistake Kennedy made, and I always think it’s unfair to call it a mistake because he saved the world, so you get a lot of credit for that. But the mistake he made was insisting that the deal be secret so that it looked to the American people like he had simply faced down the Soviet Union and they had backed away. Because it wasn’t known that the removal of the American missiles were part of an exchange, and that wasn’t known for decades actually. Well, just to come to the book…
Chris Hedges:
Let me just stop you there because right in the preface, and I didn’t know this, you talk about once that machinery begins to be put in place, a human error can trigger a nuclear catastrophe. You write one Alaska-based US Air Force pilot had not gotten the message. This was not to send flights over Cuba. And after taking off to collect air samples to check on Soviet nuclear testing, the pilot had become disoriented and inadvertently flown his plane into Soviet airspace. Soviet fighter jets scrambled to intercept the U-2 while, due to the high alert status prompted by the crisis, the US plane sent to escort it back to base were armed with nuclear warheads and had the authority to fire.
Jeffrey Sachs:
Yes, and actually that was one of the episodes that brought us to the brink of nuclear annihilation. But there was one even more dramatic, which was that after the agreement was reached between Kennedy and Khrushchev, there was a disabled submarine in the Caribbean that was part of a squadron and it was the one in that squadron that carried nuclear tipped torpedoes.
And when that disabled sub rose, normally the US might drop depth charges on the submarine to get it, to force it to rise. But a jackass, I think is the right technical term, dropped live hand grenades as he was flying over this rising submarine and the skipper thought, our sub is under attack, there must be war.
Chris Hedges:
This was a Russian submarine?
Jeffrey Sachs:
Sorry, Russian submarine, that was my point, disabled Russian submarine, excuse me. And they thought they were under attack and that there must be a war at the surface. It was disabled and out of communication. And so the captain of the vessel ordered that the nuclear tipped submarine be loaded into the torpedo bay and that it be fired.
And if it had been fired, under US nuclear doctrine, being attacked by a nuclear weapon, including a nuclear tipped torpedo, under US doctrine would have launched that full scale response that would have destroyed humanity. And the order to fire was countermanded at the last moment by virtue of the fact that there happened to be a Soviet party official who was senior to the captain of the vessel who said, I don’t think it’s a good idea. We should rise without firing.
And they did, and it turned out there wasn’t a war on the surface and there wasn’t a need to launch the torpedo. We came within a second of ending the world and that was after the agreement had been reached between the USSR and the United States. And Martin Sherwin, the late historian who now people know as the person who co-wrote the great book American Prometheus on J. Robert Oppenheimer, wrote this story in his wonderful last book before he passed away, Gambling with Armageddon, which is a history of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Absolutely phenomenal.
Chris Hedges:
As is American Prometheus. And they’re both great books. He wrote that with Kai Bird, of course. You can visit that submarine. I think it’s in San Francisco. I did. The Russian Submarine is a museum.
So Kennedy walks away from this horrified at how close the world came to nuclear Armageddon, but he also walked away with a deep distrust of the military. And I want to talk about the decision to give this speech, which I had not read in full until I read it in your book and then went and listened to it.
It has to be one of the most courageous acts by a politician, you could argue perhaps since anything FDR did. And it’s utterly remarkable. And what’s frightening or disturbing is that I can’t see any political figure giving a speech like that again. So let’s talk about how Kennedy changed and what he set out to do. And of course it was all cut short by his assassination in November of 1963.
Jeffrey Sachs:
I think first it’s fair to say that being president of the United States is a tough job and it’s impossible to do right in the early days and early years because you don’t get it. And our security state in the United States, which was created by the National Security Act of 1947, which created a secret security state and a private army of the United States called the CIA, which is one half its function, because it does intelligence and it does private warfare of the United States.
And the whole apparatus is secret and largely out of control. And it is absolutely out of control by any public understanding or scrutiny or accountability or congressional oversight today as it was in the early 1960s. Well, Kennedy came in with a lot of energy and idealism and brilliance and he stumbled terribly in the first year with the Bay of Pigs Cuban invasion and then in the second year, the near disaster of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And my view is he had the potential for greatness at the beginning and by his third year he had become a magnificent politician and statesman of the first order. One of our truly great presidents. Not so much in the first two years, although the potential was there, but the growth that came through this set of trials was extraordinary.
Already after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy was so disturbed by the CIA that he was beside himself about how they had led the US and his administration and himself personally into this awful debacle. He didn’t trust the CIA. After the Cuban Missile Crisis and after hearing people like Curtis LeMay even essentially calling Kennedy a traitor for not launching the war or a coward and feeling all of this pressure for war, he was profoundly disturbed and profoundly moved and profoundly scared at how fragile the world was. And he was determined to do something in 1963. And he-
Chris Hedges:
Let me just interject. He fired Dulles and he fired Bissell. So he actually took on the CIA establishment and triggered deep animus. And I want you, as you go on, to talk about this speech, but one of the things I found fascinating from your book is how few people he informed about what it was he was about to say. And we have about nine minutes left, so I want to make sure we talk about the content of what he said.
Jeffrey Sachs:
So Kennedy wanted to say to the American people, peace is possible, even with the Soviet Union, even with the other side. And the whole content of the speech is they are human beings like we are. They want to live, they want to protect their children, they want to have a future. And this speech is unbelievable because it’s the only foreign policy speech I know of anywhere where it is not telling the other side what to do, not making threats, not reveling in glory, not saying we are number one, not saying they are evil, but saying to the American people, we need to reconsider our own position. And remember today we’re told every day by the completely irresponsible, reckless and ignorant mass media like the New York Times, I’m going to say because it’s terrible, and like the Washington Post and others, there’s no one to talk to. There’s no one to negotiate with over Ukraine.
And in the Cold War in 1963, it was even more like that. The Cuban Missile Crisis had just occurred. Could you even imagine negotiating with the Soviet Union? And Kennedy’s whole message is we can negotiate. They want the same things. They too will abide by treaties as long as those treaties are also in their interest and they can be relied upon to abide by treaties that are in their interest and also in our interests. There is a benefit of cooperation. This is rational. In fact, the pursuit of peace is the rational end of rational men, says President Kennedy.
Chris Hedges:
I just want to read a couple sections because it is an absolutely remarkable, and as you point out through Sorensen, beautifully elegiac and just gorgeously written, but these are some of the things, just I want to read three short sections.
“I speak of peace,” this is Kennedy, “as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war. And frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears, but we have no more urgent task.”
And then he says, “So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s future, and we are all mortal.”
And just to conclude, he asks in the speech, “What kind of peace do we seek? Not a PAX Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war, not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I’m talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living. The kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children. Not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women. Not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time.” That was incredible.
Jeffrey Sachs:
It gives you goosebumps. Of course, I’ve listened, I don’t know how many dozens or hundreds of times to the speech. I’ve made my family listen on so many occasions. But the words are thrilling. The words are mesmerizing in their beauty. And Ted Sorensen has a big hand in that as well and in their ability to make change.
And I think one of the things that Kennedy also says in here, which is incredible, is his advice on leadership. And I don’t have exactly the words here, but to paraphrase, he says, by defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we help all people to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly toward it. So the goal of peace, if made to be manageable, practical, like a treaty, to stop atomic testing, stop atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, is a practical, manageable step and people draw hope from it.
So the speech was so riveting and powerful. By the way, kept completely outside of the bureaucracy, was essentially hidden from the security apparatus, from the State Department, the CAA, even the White House. Only Sorensen and Kennedy worked on it basically until the last moment. Then they said, I’m giving this. Kennedy said, I’m giving it, so it could not be vetoed by state or by the Defense Department or the National Security Council or anybody else. And he gave it.
And what is amazing, absolutely amazing is that Khrushchev heard it, was carried away, summoned the US envoy, Kennedy’s envoy to Moscow, Averell Harriman, and said, “This is the finest speech by an American president since FDR. I want to make peace with your president.” The words were so powerful, the motivation, the ideas were so powerful. Kennedy disseminated the speech through Pravda, Izvestiya, on- [inaudible 00:27:44]
Chris Hedges:
Isn’t that hilarious? Pravda reprinted it.
Jeffrey Sachs:
Exactly, and broadcast the speech. And within a few weeks they had signed the agreement. Within a few weeks. Absolutely an astounding achievement. Then Kennedy, just to say he was also the grassroots politician, he was a political guy to the core. He went out to campaign for it. And so he took his tour around the United States, the joint chiefs, oh, well, we don’t know this is… They come to testify in Congress and try to knock down this agreement.
And Kennedy carried the American public overwhelmingly and then won a decisive victory in the Senate 60 years ago just now for the ratification of this treaty. And this is, the time when we’re talking is the time of the UN General Assembly. Kennedy went to tell the leaders what this meant in another completely magnificent address. And he said, “This is not the end of conflict, but it is a ray of hope piercing through the clouds.”
And he ends his address to the world leaders assembled in front of him in the chamber of the UN General Assembly. Kennedy, having brought peace, brought hope, and all the world leaders assembled in front of him. And he says to them that Archimedes is said to have told his friends, “Give me a place to stand and I can move the world. Fellow leaders of the world, let us see if we can take our stand here in this place, in this time, to move the world towards peace.” And you just can’t get better than that. The idealism, the hope, the practicality, and Kennedy infused the whole world with it. And then they killed him.
Chris Hedges:
And we’ve lost it. We’ve lost it.
Jeffrey Sachs:
And they killed him because, I’m personally convinced after having studied this in depth for decades now, and now we have the report completely debunking the Warren Commission with the magic bullet being no magic bullet at all, but a bullet that the Secret Service pulled out of the back of Kennedy’s seat and put on the stretcher, debunking the entire forensic basis of the Warren Commission. I’m pretty convinced that it was rogue elements within the US government itself.
Chris Hedges:
Well, Alan Dulles-
Jeffrey Sachs:
Alan Dulles, the CIA.
Chris Hedges:
Can’t get more evil than that.
Jeffrey Sachs:
Exactly. We don’t know exactly who, but this was a conspiracy and it was a conspiracy against peace. And our security state is in full force. Our president, in my view, is not in control, and in any event has been a hardliner and a cold warrior, whatever you want to call it, well past the Cold War.
These neocons don’t understand peace, they don’t understand negotiation, they don’t understand diplomacy, they don’t understand the nuclear threat. And one other point, Chris, of the speech that I think is so pertinent and completely neglected. Kennedy says, “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy or of a collective death wish for the world.”
And the US has gone out to humiliate Putin and to defeat Putin, and Russia has 6,000 nuclear weapons. What are we doing? What are we thinking? Of course, I take it a little bit, even a step back. I think this is, I call it the war of NATO enlargement because I think the entire war in Ukraine came because the United States so recklessly and imprudently kept pushing, pushing, pushing NATO enlargement, Russia saying, stop, it’s a red line, stop. And then not to Ukraine, for heaven’s sake, not to Ukraine our 2,300 kilometer border, not to surround us in the Black Sea, and the US is deaf to this.
And then trying to humiliate Putin and doing exactly the opposite of what Kennedy said. And I take it seriously when Kennedy says in that remark about not pushing a nuclear power to a corner, he says, “above all,” as if that’s the synthesis of what he’s learned from the Cuban Missile Crisis. Above all, don’t humiliate a nuclear adversary. And our people don’t even know it. We don’t have diplomats and we don’t have a president in my view that understands the job of keeping the foot on the brake. So it’s a very dangerous time.
Chris Hedges:
In this last part, I want to ask you what happened. So you have this incredible moment in American history. Of course, Khrushchev doesn’t last much longer. After Kennedy’s assassination, the hardliners regain control in the Soviet Union. What happened? Just run through that historical period to where we are now.
Jeffrey Sachs:
Of course it’s complicated, but there was a period of detente and of arms agreements. The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which we’ve been discussing, led directly to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty a few years later. A really momentous achievement to not stop nuclear proliferation, but definitely to slow it down dramatically. Because Kennedy rightly worried about 30 or 40 nuclear-powered or nuclear weapons countries by the time we are now, and it is around 10. Absolutely not safe and in control, but not the mass proliferation.
And the Treaty of 1963 played a critical part in that. Detente came, we had our ups and downs. We had huge tensions in the early 1980s when Reagan proposed to put intermediate range nuclear weapons into Europe and the Cold War intensified, heated up again. Then came Gorbachev, and Gorbachev was a great statesman, the greatest of our age of that time, a man of peace.
And he and Reagan actually realized the potential for peace and negotiated an end to the Cold War. And quite remarkably, it was Gorbachev who unilaterally said, in 1990, I will disband the Warsaw Pact military alliance of the Soviet Union. And James Baker III, the Secretary of State of George Bush, Sr., who had followed Reagan as president, of course. Baker ran to assure him, we will never take advantage of your decision, President Gorbachev, we will not move NATO one inch eastward.
And this was repeated by the German government that was interested in German reunification. And Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the foreign minister of Germany, promised no NATO enlargement. Of course, as soon as the Soviet Union ended at the end of 1991, the US cheated and it cheated till this day. And despite vast documentary evidence, we have a lot of people, oh, we never promised anything. It’s true Gorbachev didn’t get it in writing in a treaty, because they weren’t making treaties. They were arranging the end of the Cold War. But Gorbachev was promised, and those promises were sheer lies.
Chris Hedges:
I just want to interject. I was there. I covered the unification of Germany. I covered the East German revolution, the revolution in Czechoslovakia and Romania, and they could not have unified Germany without Soviet acquiescence.
Jeffrey Sachs:
Of course. And Gorbachev said, this is important for us, you will not take advantage of us. It was very, very clear. And I was there as an economic advisor to Gorbachev’s team and then to President Yeltsin’s team and to President Kuchma’s team of Ukraine. I saw these events also very, very close up, and we had a chance for peace.
And the United States said, well, it’s not peace we want. We want unipolarity. We want world hegemony. We’re now the most powerful country in the world. We won. You lost. We’re going to even take out every ally you ever had, whether it’s Syria or Iraq or Libya or Serbia or others. We’re going to go in one by one and clean up the act because we can do it with impunity. Now, who are you? You’re a defeated power.
And so the United States treated Russia with contempt, engaged in regime change operations all over the region, usually with some mix of CIA background and National Endowment for Democracy and NGOs pouring in money and mucking up the local politics to get someone that would be compliant with the United States.
And Russia kept saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, you promised and you keep moving eastward towards us. Clinton started the process of NATO enlargement. His own secretary of defense, Bill Perry, was aghast and thought about resigning, said, this is going to mess up everything. Of course, the very architect of containment policy, George Kennon, who invented containment in 1947 in his long telegram and in his foreign affairs article said, you start NATO enlargement, you’re going to have absolutely a new Cold War.
But American politicians cannot hear anybody’s concerns, and the arrogance is breathtaking, and the ignorance is breathtaking in my view. And the power of the military industrial security state in the United States is awful and breathtaking as well. So under Clinton, three countries joined NATO, and then under Bush Jr., 2007, seven more countries, the three Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Slovenia.
And Russia’s now being cornered by the advancing NATO. And Putin says in 2007 at the Munich Security Conference, stop. Stop. You promised in 1990 no advance, and now all you’re doing is advancing your military. And in 2002, by the way, the United States unilaterally pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and started to put in ageist missiles on Russia’s borders, nearby Russia in Poland and Romania in particular.
So Putin says, stop this. And what does the United States do in response? Bush Jr. instructs his ambassador to NATO, interestingly, Victoria Nuland, who was Cheney’s foreign policy advisor, then US Ambassador to NATO, then suddenly is Hillary’s foreign policy advisor. Then suddenly the Assistant Secretary of State in 2014 when the US was part of the overthrow of the Ukraine government to get someone that was suppliant to the US desire for NATO enlargement.
And so the tensions kept rising until 2014, the United States participated in a regime change operation, very typical, overthrowing a Ukrainian president that wanted neutrality, Viktor Yanukovych.
And at that moment, Putin said, you’re not getting our naval base in Crimea, and took back Crimea because it was not going to fall into NATO hands. And the Russian part of Ukraine, ethnic Russian part of the Eastern Donbas, was aghast at the Russophobic regime that had come into power with the US connivance in February 2014, so it called to break away.
And it required a treaty, two treaties, in fact, Minsk I and Minsk II, to try to make peace within Ukraine itself. And the idea of the Minsk II agreement was that the eastern part of Ukraine, which is ethnically overwhelmingly Russian, would have autonomy within Ukraine, a federal Ukraine. And the United States opposed federalization, and the Ukrainians opposed it. They signed the treaty. The US Security Council endorsed the treaty, and they blew it off, the Ukrainians and the Americans. Forget it. We don’t have to implement it.
So by the time Biden came in 2021, Minsk had fallen apart. The US was arming Ukraine to the teeth. Biden came in full cold warrior, we’re going to expand NATO to Ukraine. Yes we are. And Putin said, no, you’re not. And in December 17th, 2021, Putin put on the table a draft US Russia security agreement based on NATO not enlarging to Ukraine, and these missiles not being pointed at Russia.
And I called the White House at that point to senior official and said, “Negotiate. You’ve got a basis to avoid war.” No, don’t worry. But anyway, NATO enlargement is none of Russia’s business. That’s the formal policy of the United States of America. It’s mind mindbogglingly stupid. NATO enlargement is not part of Russia’s business? Well, whose business is it part of?
Chris Hedges:
I want to insert there that Victoria Nuland, of course, is part of the Biden administration back at the State Department, number one, and I want to ask-
Jeffrey Sachs:
She keeps getting promoted as we get deeper and deeper into war. It’s unbelievable. But that’s the deep state. Is she Republican? Is she Democrat? Doesn’t matter. She’s for war. That’s it.
Chris Hedges:
Right. Well, the Democratic party has become more fervently the war party than even the Republican party.
Jeffrey Sachs:
If you look at the base, the Democrats are the war mongerers. The Republicans want peace. It’s amazing. It’s something that’s absolutely astounding. But basically the American public, as usual, has been lied to again and again and again, told that there’s no predicate to this war. There’s no basis of negotiation. They have no idea that Russia has tried to negotiate all the time throughout.
But the US attitude is we don’t have to talk to them. And if you don’t talk to them, you end up with war. Whereas Kennedy’s whole point was, we can negotiate with the other side. That was the whole point that brought Kennedy’s achievement of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban treaty.
Chris Hedges:
Well, it’s kind of chronicle of a war foretold because William Burns, we know from released cables, sent cables back from, he was the ambassador in Moscow saying, it doesn’t matter where you are on the political spectrum in Russia, you don’t essentially turn Ukraine into a hostile entity on Russia’s border. And he’s ignored. I just have one last question.
Jeffrey Sachs:
Just to say, by the way, because that memo, which is entitled, “Nyet Means Nyet.”
Chris Hedges:
Yes.
Jeffrey Sachs:
And saying it’s not just Putin, it’s all the Russian [inaudible 00:45:18] class.
Chris Hedges:
That’s right, that’s right.
Jeffrey Sachs:
The only reason we saw it is WikiLeaks. Because our government is so secretive, the American people are not told anything about what’s going on. And your former paper, it is the New York Times, right?
Chris Hedges:
Yes.
Jeffrey Sachs:
They’re not… I love the New York Times. It published the Pentagon Papers. Now it’s completely in the hands of government. It doesn’t question a word. Weird.
Chris Hedges:
I have one last question-
Jeffrey Sachs:
And alarming. Please.
Chris Hedges:
How, well, we’ll have to do a show on the deterioration of American journalism. As you know, I’m a very strong supporter of Julian. So how, especially having worked in Russia, how do you characterize the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
Jeffrey Sachs:
I characterize it as occurring in the eighth year of a war that started with the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych and escalated after that as totally avoidable. Because if Biden had negotiated with Putin in December 2021, the war would’ve been avoided.
I regard it as an attempt at the beginning to force Ukraine to the negotiating table. And within a few days of the launch of the so-called special military operation, which was not an invasion at the scale to take over Ukraine, it was a military operation to push Ukraine to the negotiating table. Within a few days, Zelenskyy said, we can negotiate. A few more days, he said, we can be neutral. We need security guarantees, but we can be neutral. I know because I’ve spoken to the people that were involved in the negotiations in March 2022 that these negotiations were making tremendous progress on the basis of Ukrainian neutrality and non-enlargement of NATO.
And we know that one day the negotiations stopped. The Ukrainians walked in to the Turkish mediators and said, we’re not negotiating now. We’re taking a break from negotiating. They stopped. Why? The United States told them, you don’t need to negotiate. You need to defeat Russia. You don’t need to accept neutrality. We’ve got your back.
And the United States pushed Ukraine into an escalating war thinking that the combination of economic sanctions and HIMARS and other wonder weapons would force Putin to back down. Putin didn’t back down. In fact, he mobilized in the summer of 2022. So America’s game of chicken didn’t exactly work. It led to another round of escalation.
And it’s especially led to a bloodbath, completely predictable, because Americans have refused, and by Americans, I mean Biden, our president who’s responsible and his team, have rejected negotiations at every turn. And they tell us, which is a lie, that there’s no one to negotiate with and that Russia’s not interested in negotiating, and that’s a lie.
The difference is Russia’s interested in negotiating an end to NATO enlargement, and the United States is interested in going wherever it pleases. No other country, even not even a nuclear superpower allowed to have a red line on their side in their neighborhood. Whereas we are in the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine. So we said 200 years ago, no one in the Western atmosphere should meddle, and Russia’s not allowed to say we don’t want your military on our border. No, that’s not Russia’s business. So this is a massive, colossal failure of US diplomacy.
Chris Hedges:
Great. I want to thank the Real News Network and its production team, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivera. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
Since the 19th century, the epithet “sick man of Europe” has been used to describe European nations undergoing economic hardship or social restlessness—first the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s, then Russia in 1917, France in the 1950s, Britain in the 1960s, Italy in the 1970s and Germany in the late 1990s/early 2000s.
Corporate media outlets have recently been applying the phrase to Germany again in response to the Central European nation’s negative GDP growth. “Is Germany the Sick Man of Europe?” a Bloomberg video (8/3/23) asked. A CNN article (8/24/23) explained “Why Some Are Calling Germany ‘the Sick Man of Europe’ Once Again.” CNBC (9/4/23) reported, “Germany Is the ‘Sick Man of Europe’—and It’s Causing a Shift to the Right, Top Economist Says.”
But their reporting has consistently ignored what is likely a primary source of Germany’s economic illness: the sabotage on the Nord Stream pipelines that carried natural gas from Russia to Europe.
There is substantial evidence that the “sick” German economy has been significantly impacted by the loss of the pipelines, and it can be verified that the dearth of inexpensive Russian gas is a major contributor to Germany’s succumbing to a recession. Natural gas accounts for around a quarter of Germany’s overall energy mix. In 2021, the year before fighting over Ukraine’s secessionist Donbas region deepened, Germany imported 142 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas, with 52% of it originating from Russia. In the three years leading up to the current conflict, Germany’s natural gas consumption averaged 89 bcm. (Germany was able to reexport much of its imports, reaping the economic benefits from selling the surplus gas to neighboring countries.)
Nord Stream 1 alone was vastly larger than any other Russian gas pipeline to Germany, annually delivering up to 59 bcm. Germany’s Federal Office for Economic Affairs and Export Control does not identify the infrastructural origin of imported gas, so the public remains unaware of the exact volume of gas imports coming from Nord Stream. But Germany lost, at least for the foreseeable future, as much as a staggering 66% of its gas consumption, and 42% of its supply.
“The German economy is the European Union’s greatest economic casualty of the war in Ukraine,” economist Jeffrey Sachs told FAIR:
The destruction of Nord Stream, the loss of trade with Russia and the boomerang effect of US/EU sanctions will weigh very heavily on the German economy, and hence on the EU-wide economy, for years to come.
Scrambling to find replacements for Russian gas, Germany has turned to liquified natural gas (LNG) from the United States—and it may even turn to Russia LNG, too. The European Union and the United Kingdom saw their imports of US LNG increase more than threefold in the first four months of 2022 from the previous year. At the same time, Europe is now importing greater quantities of LNG from Russia than ever before. According to a report in Spiegel (9/12/23), “There are many indications that this fuel will ultimately also be burned in Germany.”
Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is the largest component of natural gas; an estimated 56,000–155,000 metric tons were released into the atmosphere by the Nord Stream sabotage. If the destruction of the pipeline expedites the transition to green energy, its long-term net impact may be positive. However, there are short-term repercussions.
Russian pipeline gas is more cost-effective than LNG, and using the the latter as an energy source is more harmful to the environment: It requires energy-intensive, low-temperature storage, fuel for transatlantic shipping (in the case of LNG from the US), liquefaction and regasification, and often the construction of LNG terminals (as seen in Germany).
In September 2022, three of the four strands that make up the $19 billion Nord Stream 1 and Nord 2 pipelines were ruptured by underwater explosions. Russia held a 51% stake in the pipelines, with remaining ownership distributed among four Western European nations. Financing for the project came from a Russian energy firm and Western European companies. The pipelines made landfall in Germany, the nation that depended on them the most.
Nord Stream 1 began delivering gas in 2011. Nord Stream 2 never entered service, as its certification was suspended by Germany in February 2022 following Russia’s formal recognition of two breakaway regions in Ukraine. In August 2022, Russia halted gas flows through Nord Stream 1, citing maintenance work. After the sabotage, in October 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered to supply gas via the one remaining line of Nord Stream 2 that had not been damaged in the attack; his offer was rebuffed.
Corporate media’s knee-jerk reaction was to blame Russia for what stands as one of the most significant acts of industrial sabotage in history (FAIR.org, 3/3/23, 10/7/22). Yet with emerging evidence suggesting a Western nation—either the US, Ukraine or possibly a combination of the two—as the likely perpetrator, self-appointed media doctors who have dubbed Germany the “sick man of Europe” are declining to associate German economic woes with the $19 billion elephant in the room.
Hundreds of corporate media articles have recently focused on Germany, and many of them have characterized the country as the “sick man of Europe.” There is consensus in the reporting that skyrocketing energy costs, particularly the surging price of natural gas, are the primary drivers of inflation, recession and the plummeting industrial output of Europe’s largest economy. But omission of a key source, if not the main source, of the illness appears to be a significant oversight by the corporate press, akin to medical malpractice.
The case of Spiegel is a serious one, especially given the outlet’s recent history of breaking consequential stories about the Nord Stream sabotage. The attack is absent from a 7,000-word article—“Why Germany’s Economy Is Flailing—and What Could Help” (9/7/23)—bylined by no fewer than 11 reporters. The following week, the outlet continued to feign ignorance, posing the question “How Can That Be?” (9/12/23) in reference to Europe’s growing imports of Russian LNG.
NPR has covered the Nord Stream sabotage as well. However, an NPR article (9/27/22) on Germany’s energy crisis immediately following the attack excluded its impact. Published on the very day following the sabotage, NPR’s piece about Germany’s return to coal as a fuel amid the urgency to find alternatives to Russian gas notably neglected to mention the unprecedented attack on both the environment and industry.
“Nord Stream” and “sabotage” are missing words from these Spiegel and NPR reports, as well as from hundreds of articles assessing Germany’s energy crunch (e.g., PBS, 7/19/23). Here the omission is the bombshell news. The unreported constitutes the core of the story, serving as the viral headline that remains unwritten.
What connects the Spiegel pieces and much of NPR’s reporting is a suppression of the specifics of the breaking news. Euphemisms are employed to avoid providing an accurate diagnosis. In the case of Spiegel, the Nord Stream pipelines are rechristened “the Baltic Sea pipelines” and the deliberate act of sabotage is called “failed Russian pipeline gas.” For its part, NPR (12/26/22) found it suitable to bowdlerize the bombed pipelines as “now-defunct.”
Having sidelined the sabotage as a major cause of Germany’s economic troubles, many in the corporate press went on to recommend dubious remedies. Take CNN (8/24/23):
One problem—the cost of natural gas—has been particularly acute for its [Germany’s] energy-guzzling manufacturers. European gas prices soared to all-time highs last summer. Although they have fallen steeply in recent months, they are ticking up again as the possibility of strike action at liquefied natural gas (LNG) plants in Australia has raised fears of a global supply crunch.
The “possibility” of a labor strike is scapegoated for the high “cost of natural gas.” The subtext is that workers’ rights, already dangerously widespread and infecting the economy, must be curtailed.
CNN appears to be constraining the wider facts. The outlet defines recession “as two consecutive quarters of declining output.” The data confirming Germany’s fall into recession are based on its GDP performance in the first quarter of 2023. Output, in other words, contracted over the first three months of the year, following a contraction of 0.4% in the fourth quarter of 2022. Both time periods precede the pathogens of organized labor allegedly “ticking up” gas prices and Germany’s recent designation as the “sick man of Europe” (New Statesman, 6/7/23).
This is not the first time FAIR (e.g., 8/10/23, 6/1/23, 9/1/97) has documented the corporate press scapegoating workers’ rights for economic conditions.
Slashing corporate taxes rates are also among the medications recommended in various articles about the “sick man of Europe.” The expertise of the chief economist at Commerzbank was sought by a number of media organizations (e.g., Financial Times, 8/20/23; Deutsche Welle, 8/1/23; Yahoo! Finance5/25/23). The expert told CNBC (8/24/23) that
Germany needs lower corporate taxes, less red tape, faster approval procedures, more investment in roads, bridges and digital infrastructure, competitive electricity prices and better schools.
Some of those prescribed economic and structural restoratives may very well improve the patient’s economic health. But the articles touting corporate tax cuts as a cure overlook a critical fact: Corporate tax rates in Germany averaged 38.5% from 2001 to 2007, and have hovered at approximately 30% since 2008. How, despite these rates, the German economy managed to become, after 2008, a “powerhouse” and “economic superstar” doesn’t seem a question worth considering.
Politico (7/13/23), too, seems to have recommended treatment unrelated to the disease:
A big flash point will be social welfare. Germany operates one of the most generous welfare states, with social spending accounting for 27% of the economy last year (compared with 23% in the US). With Berlin under pressure to spend vastly more on defense, the belt-tightening—and the public backlash—has already begun.
A lot to unpack there. Large military contractors, such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, provide Politico with advertising revenue. Axel Springer, the multibillion-dollar German media company that owns Politico, has a documented history of hostility toward social democracy.
Like the CNBC article, the 3,400-word Politico piece does not contain even one sentence informing readers that “social spending” by the German government has seen a minuscule increase—from 25.5% to 26.7%—over the last quarter-century. Nor are readers told that although social spending in countries such as France and Austria accounts for around 30% of GDP, their economies are being given much cleaner bills of health than Germany’s.
The implication is that health would be regained if sickly Germany adopted an economic model more closely resembling that of the United States. But Germany’s economy minister seems to disagree that the German welfare state is a weakness that makes the economy sick.
“At the same time, the German economy retains a host of strengths,” Robert Habeck wrote in the Economist (9/14/23) in response to its August 17 cover story, “Is Germany Once Again the Sick Man of Europe?” “Our social-market economy maintains its traditions of employer-union co-operation and a powerful welfare state,” Habeck declared.
Is Habeck wrong to reject the US model as a cure for the “sick man of Europe”? Nein.
Following the pandemic, life expectancy in many other high-income countries rebounded. But life expectancy in the US, already lower than in peer nations, declined. The US spends more on the military than the next 10 countries combined, including China, Russia, India and Saudi Arabia. “Among industrial nations, the United States is by far the most top-heavy, with much greater shares of national wealth and income going to the richest 1% than any other country,” according to Inequality.org.
Perhaps most damning of all for the US, a country that prides itself on the “American Dream,” is its failure to even crack the top 25 on the list of nations with the highest socioeconomic mobility. Germany is ranked 11th, well ahead of the US.
But the health of the two countries may be more intertwined than initial diagnoses suggest. According to an MSNBC op-ed (7/13/23), “The US also has a lower inflation rate than any other G7 member—it’s not like Biden’s policies are driving up inflation in Germany.” But if the United States, either directly or through proxies, blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, it would bear a significant responsibility for the deteriorating condition of the “sick man of Europe”—and it’s going to need a really good medical malpractice defense lawyer, despite what establishment media have told readers.
The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) is a massive public diplomacy op launched at the recent G20 summit in New Delhi, complete with a memorandum of understanding signed on 9 September.
Players include the US, India, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and the EU, with a special role for the latter’s top three powers Germany, France, and Italy. It’s a multimodal railway project, coupled with trans-shipments and with ancillary digital and electricity roads extending to Jordan and Israel.
If this walks and talks like the collective west’s very late response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched 10 years ago and celebrating a Belt and Road Forum in Beijing next month, that’s because it is. And yes, it is, above all, yet another American project to bypass China, to be claimed for crude electoral purposes as a meager foreign policy “success.”
No one among the Global Majority remembers that the Americans came up with their own Silk Road plan way back in 2010. The concept came from the State Department’s Kurt Campbell and was sold by then-Secretary Hillary Clinton as her idea. History is implacable, it came down to nought.
And no one among the Global Majority remembers the New Silk Road plan peddled by Poland, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Georgia in the early 2010s, complete with four troublesome trans-shipments in the Black Sea and the Caspian. History is implacable, this too came down to nought.
In fact, very few among the Global Majority remember the $40 trillion US-sponsored Build Back Better World (BBBW, or B3W) global plan rolled out with great fanfare just two summers ago, focusing on “climate, health and health security, digital technology, and gender equity and equality.”
A year later, at a G7 meeting, B3W had already shrunk to a $600 billion infrastructure-and-investment project. Of course, nothing was built. History really is implacable, it came down to nought.
The same fate awaits IMEC, for a number of very specific reasons.
Map of The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC)
Pivoting to a black void
The whole IMEC rationale rests on what writer and former Ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar deliciously described as “conjuring up the Abraham Accords by the incantation of a Saudi-Israeli tango.”
This tango is Dead On Arrival; even the ghost of Piazzolla can’t revive it. For starters, one of the principals – Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman – has made it clear that Riyadh’s priorities are a new, energized Chinese-brokered relationship with Iran, with Turkiye, and with Syria after its return to the Arab League.
Moreover, both Riyadh and its Emirati IMEC partner share immense trade, commerce, and energy interests with China, so they’re not going to do anything to upset Beijing.
At face value, IMEC proposes a joint drive by G7 and BRICS 11 nations. That’s the western method of seducing eternally-hedging India under Modi and US-allied Saudi Arabia and the UAE to its agenda.
Its real intention, however, is not only to undermine BRI, but also the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INTSC), in which India is a major player alongside Russia and Iran.
The game is quite crude and really quite obvious: a transportation corridor conceived to bypass the top three vectors of real Eurasia integration – and BRICS members China, Russia, and Iran – by dangling an enticing Divide and Rule carrot that promises Things That Cannot Be Delivered.
The American neoliberal obsession at this stage of the New Great Game is, as always, all about Israel. Their goal is to make Haifa port viable and turn it into a key transportation hub between West Asia and Europe. Everything else is subordinated to this Israeli imperative.
IMEC, in principle, will transit across West Asia to link India to Eastern and Western Europe – selling the fiction that India is a Global Pivot state and a Convergence of Civilizations.
Nonsense. While India’s great dream is to become a pivot state, its best shot would be via the already up-and-running INTSC, which could open markets to New Delhi from Central Asia to the Caucasus. Otherwise, as a Global Pivot state, Russia is way ahead of India diplomatically, and China is way ahead in trade and connectivity.
Comparisons between IMEC and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) are futile. IMEC is a joke compared to this BRI flagship project: the $57.7 billion plan to build a railway over 3,000 km long linking Kashgar in Xinjiang to Gwadar in the Arabian Sea, which will connect to other overland BRI corridors heading toward Iran and Turkiye.
This is a matter of national security for China. So bets can be made that the leadership in Beijing will have some discreet and serious conversations with the current fifth-columnists in power in Islamabad, before or during the Belt and Road Forum, to remind them of the relevant geostrategic, geoeconomic, and investment Facts.
So, what’s left for Indian trade in all of this? Not much. They already use the Suez Canal, a direct, tested route. There’s no incentive to even start contemplating being stuck in black voids across the vast desert expanses surrounding the Persian Gulf.
One glaring problem, for example, is that almost 1,100 km of tracks are “missing” from the railway from Fujairah in the UAE to Haifa, 745 km “missing” from Jebel Ali in Dubai to Haifa, and 630 km “missing” from the railway from Abu Dhabi to Haifa.
When all the missing links are added up, there’s over 3,000 km of railway still to be built. The Chinese, of course, can do this for breakfast and on a dime, but they are not part of this game. And there’s no evidence the IMEC gang plans to invite them.
All eyes on Syunik
In the War of Transportation Corridors charted in detail for The Cradle in June 2022, it becomes clear that intentions rarely meet reality. These grand projects are all about logistics, logistics, logistics – of course, intertwined with the three other key pillars: energy and energy resources, labor and manufacturing, and market/trade rules.
Let’s examine a Central Asian example. Russia and three Central Asian “stans” – Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan – are launching a multimodal Southern Transportation Corridor which will bypass Kazakhstan.
Why? After all, Kazakhstan, alongside Russia, is a key member of both the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
The reason is because this new corridor solves two key problems for Russia that arose with the west’s sanctions hysteria. It bypasses the Kazakh border, where everything going to Russia is scrutinized in excruciating detail. And a significant part of the cargo may now be transferred to the Russian port of Astrakhan in the Caspian.
So Astana, which under western pressure has played a risky hedging game on Russia, may end up losing the status of a full-fledged transport hub in Central Asia and the Caspian Sea region. Kazakhstan is also part of BRI; the Chinese are already very much interested in the potential of this new corridor.
In the Caucasus, the story is even more complex, and once again, it’s all about Divide and Rule.
Two months ago, Russia, Iran, and Azerbaijan committed to building a single railway from Iran and its ports in the Persian Gulf through Azerbaijan, to be linked to the Russian-Eastern Europe railway system.
This is a railway project on the scale of the Trans-Siberian – to connect Eastern Europe with Eastern Africa and South Asia, bypassing the Suez Canal and European ports. The INSTC on steroids, in fact.
Guess what happened next? A provocation in Nagorno-Karabakh, with the deadly potential of involving not only Armenia and Azerbaijan but also Iran and Turkiye.
Tehran has been crystal clear on its red lines: it will never allow a defeat of Armenia, with direct participation from Turkiye, which fully supports Azerbaijan.
Add to the incendiary mix are joint military exercises with the US in Armenia – which happens to be a member of the Russian-led CSTO – cast, for public consumption, as one of those seemingly innocent “partnership” NATO programs.
This all spells out an IMEC subplot bound to undermine INTSC. Both Russia and Iran are fully aware of the former’s endemic weaknesses: political trouble between several participants, those “missing links” of track, and all important infrastructure still to be built.
Turkish Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for his part, will never give up the Zangezur corridor across Syunik, the south Armenian province, which was envisaged by the 2020 armistice, linking Azerbaijan to Turkiye via the Azeri enclave of Nakhitchevan – that will run through Armenian territory.
Baku did threaten to attack southern Armenia if the Zangezur corridor was not facilitated by Yerevan. So Syunik is the next big unresolved deal in this riddle. Tehran, it must be noted, will go no holds barred to prevent a Turkish-Israeli-NATO corridor cutting Iran off from Armenia, Georgia, the Black Sea, and Russia. That would be the reality if this NATO-tinted coalition grabs Syunik.
Today, Erdogan and Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev meet in the Nakhchivan enclave between Turkiye, Armenia, and Iran to start a gas pipeline and open a military production complex.
The Sultan knows that Zangezur may finally allow Turkiye to be linked to China via a corridor that will transit the Turkic world, in Azerbaijan and the Caspian. This would also allow the collective west to go even bolder on Divide and Rule against Russia and Iran.
Is the IMEC another far-fetched western fantasy? The place to watch is Syunik.
A screen grab from Danish Defense shows the gas leak from the exploded Nord Stream pipelines causing bubbles on the surface of the Baltic Sea on September 30, 2022. / Photo by Swedish Coast Guard Handout / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.
I do not know much about covert CIA operations—no outsider can—but I do understand that the essential component of all successful missions is total deniability. The American men and women who moved, under cover, in and out of Norway in the months it took to plan and carry out the destruction of three of the four Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea a year ago left no traces—not a hint of the team’s existence—other than the success of their mission.
Deniability, as an option for President Joe Biden and his foreign policy advisers, was paramount. No significant information about the mission was put on a computer, but instead typed on a Royal or perhaps a Smith Corona typewriter with a carbon copy or two, as if the Internet and the rest of the online world had yet to be invented. The White House was isolated from the goings-on near Oslo; various reports and updates from the field were directly provided to CIA Director Bill Burns, who was the only link between the planners and the president who authorized the mission to take place on September 26, 2022. Once the mission was completed, the typed papers and carbons were destroyed, thus leaving no physical trace—no evidence to be dug up later by a special prosecutor or a presidential historian. You could call it the perfect crime.
There was a flaw—a gap in understanding between those who carried out the mission and President Biden, as to why he ordered the destruction of the pipelines when he did. My initial 5,200-word report, published in early February, ended cryptically by quoting an official with knowledge of the mission telling me: “It was a beautiful cover story.” The official added: “The only flaw was the decision to do it.”
This is the first account of that flaw, on the one-year anniversary of the explosions, and it is one President Biden and his national security team will not like.
Inevitably, my initial story caused a sensation, but the major media emphasized the White House denials and relied on an old canard—my reliance on an unnamed source—to join the administration in debunking the notion that Joe Biden could have had anything to do with such an attack. I must note here that I’ve won literally scores of prizes in my career for stories in the New York Times and the New Yorker that relied on not a single named source. In the past year we’ve seen a series of contrary newspaper stories, with no named first-hand sources, claiming that a dissident Ukrainian group carried out the technical diving operation attack in the Baltic Sea via a 49-foot rented yacht called the Andromeda.
I am now able to write about the unexplained flaw cited by the unnamed official. It goes once again to the classic issue of what the Central Intelligence Agency is all about: an issue raised by Richard Helms, who headed the agency during the tumultuous years of the Vietnam War and the CIA’s secret spying on Americans, as ordered by President Lyndon Johnson and sustained by Richard Nixon. I published an exposé in the Times about that spying in December 1974 that led to unprecedented hearings by the Senate into the role of the agency in its unsuccessful attempts, authorized by President John F. Kennedy, to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Helms told the senators that the issue was whether he, as CIA director, worked for the Constitution or for the Crown, in the person of presidents Johnson and Nixon. The Church Committee left the issue unresolved, but Helms made it clear he and his agency worked for the top man in the White House.
Back to the Nord Stream pipelines: It is important to understand that no Russian gas was flowing to Germany through the Nord Stream pipelines when Joe Biden ordered them blown up last September 26. Nord Stream 1 had been supplying vast amounts of low-cost natural gas to Germany since 2011 and helped bolster Germany’s status as a manufacturing and industrial colossus. But it was shut down by Putin by the end of August 2022, as the Ukraine war was, at best, in a stalemate. Nord Stream 2 was completed in September 2021 but was blocked from delivering gas by the German government headed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz two days prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Given Russia’s vast stores of natural gas and oil, American presidents since John F. Kennedy have been alert to the potential weaponization of these natural resources for political purposes. That view remains dominant among Biden and his hawkish foreign policy advisers, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland, now the acting deputy to Blinken.
Sullivan convened a series of high-level national security meetings late in 2021, as Russia was building up its forces along the border of Ukraine, with an invasion seen as almost inevitable. The group, which included representatives from the CIA, was urged to come up with a proposal for action that could serve as a deterrent to Putin. The mission to destroy the pipelines was motivated by the White House’s determination to support Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. Sullivan’s goal seemed clear. “The White House’s policy was to deter Russia from an attack,” the official told me. “The challenge it gave to the intelligence community was to come up with a way that was powerful enough to do that, and to make a strong statement of American capability.”
The major gas pipelines from Russia to Europe. / Map by Samuel Bailey / Wikimedia Commons.
I now know what I did not know then: the real reason why the Biden administration “brought up taking out the Nord Stream pipeline.” The official recently explained to me that at the time Russia was supplying gas and oil throughout the world via more than a dozen pipelines, but Nord Stream 1 and 2 ran directly from Russia through the Baltic Sea to Germany. “The administration put Nord Stream on the table because it was the only one we could access and it would be totally deniable,” the official said. “We solved the problem within a few weeks—by early January—and told the White House. Our assumption was that the president would use the threat against Nord Stream as a deterrent to avoid the war.”
It was no surprise to the agency’s secret planning group when on January 27, 2022, the assured and confident Nuland, then undersecretary of state for political affairs, stridently warned Putin that if he invaded Ukraine, as he clearly was planning to, that “one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” The line attracted enormous attention, but the words preceding the threat did not. The official State Department transcript shows that she preceded her threat by saying that with regard to the pipeline: “We continue to have very strong and clear conversations with our German allies.”
Asked by a reporter how she could say with certainty that the Germans would go along “because what the Germans have said publicly doesn’t match what you’re saying,” Nuland responded with an astonishing bit of doubletalk: “I would say go back and read the document that we signed in July [of 2021] that made very clear about the consequences for the pipeline if there is further aggression on Ukraine by Russia.” But that agreement, which was briefed to journalists, did not specify threats or consequences, according to reports in the Times, the Washington Post, and Reuters. At the time of the agreement, on July 21, 2021, Biden told the press corps that since the pipeline was 99 percent finished, “the idea that anything was going to be said or done was going to stop it was not possible.” At the time, Republicans, led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, depicted Biden’s decision to permit the Russian gas to flow as a “generational geopolitical win” for Putin and “a catastrophe” for the United States and its allies.
But two weeks after Nuland’s statement, on February 7, 2022, at a joint White House press conference with the visiting Scholz, Biden signaled that he had changed his mind and was joining Nuland and other equally hawkish foreign policy aides in talking about stopping the pipeline. “If Russia invades—that means tanks and troops crossing . . . the border of Ukraine again,” he said, “there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” Asked how he could do so since the pipeline was under Germany’s control, he said: “We will, I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.”
Scholz, asked the same question, said: “We are acting together. We are absolutely united, and we will not be taking different steps. We will do the same steps, and they will be very very hard to Russia, and they should understand.” The German leader was considered then—and now—by some members of the CIA team to be fully aware of the secret planning underway to destroy the pipelines.
By this point, the CIA team had made the necessary contacts in Norway, whose navy and special forces commands have a long history of sharing covert-operation duties with the agency. Norwegian sailors and Nasty-class patrol boats helped smuggle American sabotage operatives into North Vietnam in the early 1960s when America, in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, was running an undeclared American war there. With Norway’s help, the CIA did its job and found a way to do what the Biden White House wanted done to the pipelines.
At the time, the challenge to the intelligence community was to come up with a plan that would be forceful enough to deter Putin from the attack on Ukraine. The official told me: “We did it. We found an extraordinary deterrent because of its economic impact on Russia. And Putin did it despite the threat.” It took months of research and practice in the churning waters of the Baltic Sea by the two expert US Navy deep sea divers recruited for the mission before it was deemed a go. Norway’s superb seamen found the right spot for planting the bombs that would blow up the pipelines. Senior officials in Sweden and Denmark, who still insist they had no idea what was going on in their shared territorial waters, turned a blind eye to the activities of the American and Norwegian operatives. The American team of divers and support staff on the mission’s mother ship—a Norwegian minesweeper—would be hard to hide while the divers were doing their work. The team would not learn until after the bombing that Nord Stream 2 had been shut down with 750 miles of natural gas in it.
What I did not know then, but was told recently, was that after Biden’s extraordinary public threat to blow up Nord Stream 2, with Scholz standing next to him, the CIA planning group was told by the White House that there would be no immediate attack on the two pipelines, but the group should arrange to plant the necessary bombs and be ready to trigger them “on demand”—after the war began. “It was then that we”—the small planning group that was working in Oslo with the Royal Norwegian Navy and special services on the project—“understood that the attack on the pipelines was not a deterrent because as the war went on we never got the command.”
After Biden’s order to trigger the explosives planted on the pipelines, it took only a short flight with a Norwegian fighter and the dropping of an altered off-the-shelf sonar device at the right spot in the Baltic Sea to get it done. By then the CIA group had long disbanded. By then, too, the official told me: “We realized that the destruction of the two Russian pipelines was not related to the Ukrainian war”—Putin was in the process of annexing the four Ukrainian oblasts he wanted—“but was part of a neocon political agenda to keep Scholz and Germany, with winter coming up and the pipelines shut down, from getting cold feet and opening up” the shuttered Nord Stream 2. “The White House fear was that Putin would get Germany under his thumb and then he was going to get Poland.”
The White House said nothing as the world wondered who committed the sabotage. “So the president struck a blow against the economy of Germany and Western Europe,” the official told me. “He could have done it in June and told Putin: We told you what we would do.” The White House’s silence and denials were, he said, “a betrayal of what we were doing. If you are going to do it, do it when it would have made a difference.”
The leadership of the CIA team viewed Biden’s misleading guidance for its order to destroy the pipelines, the official told me, “as taking a strategic step toward World War III. What if Russia had responded by saying: You blew up our pipelines and I’m going to blow up your pipelines and your communication cables. Nord Stream was not a strategic issue for Putin—it was an economic issue. He wanted to sell gas. He’d already lost his pipelines” when the Nord Stream I and 2 were shut down before the Ukraine war began.
Within days of the bombing, officials in Denmark and Sweden announced they would conduct an investigation. They reported two months later that there had indeed been an explosion and said there would be further inquiries. None has emerged. The German government conducted an inquiry but announced that major parts of its findings would be classified. Last winter German authorities allocated $286 billion in subsidies to major corporations and homeowners who faced higher energy bills to run their business and warm their homes. The impact is still being felt today, with a colder winter expected in Europe.
President Biden waited four days before calling the pipeline bombing “a deliberate act of sabotage.” He said: “now the Russians are pumping out disinformation about it.” Sullivan, who chaired the meetings that led to the proposal to covertly destroy the pipelines, was asked at a later press conference whether the Biden administration “now believes that Russia was likely responsible for the act of sabotage?”
Sullivan’s answer, undoubtedly practiced, was: “Well, first, Russia has done what it frequently does when it is responsible for something, which is make accusations that it was really someone else who did it. We’ve seen this repeatedly over time.
“But the president was also clear today that there is more work to do on the investigation before the United States government is prepared to make an attribution in this case.” He continued: “We will continue to work with our allies and partners to gather all of the facts, and then we will make a determination about where we go from there.”
I could find no instances when Sullivan was subsequently asked by someone in the American press about the results of his “determination.” Nor could I find any evidence that Sullivan, or the president, has been queried since then about the results of the “determination” about where to go.
There is also no evidence that President Biden has required the American intelligence community to conduct a major all-source inquiry into the pipeline bombing. Such requests are known as “Taskings” and are taken seriously inside the government.
All of this explains why a routine question I posed a month or so after the bombings to someone with many years in the American intelligence community led me to a truth that no one in America or Germany seems to want to pursue. My question was simple: “Who did it?”
The Biden administration blew up the pipelines but the action had little to do with winning or stopping the war in Ukraine. It resulted from fears in the White House that Germany would waver and turn on the flow of Russia gas—and that Germany and then NATO, for economic reasons, would fall under the sway of Russia and its extensive and inexpensive natural resources. And thus followed the ultimate fear: that America would lose its long-standing primacy in Western Europe.
Some days ago, Belgian Energy Minister Tinne Van der Straeten requested the European Union to reduce importing Russian gas and get rid altogether of fossil fuels by 2027. This after the Global Witness NGO released data showing that Belgium is currently the third-largest importer of Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG).
Belgium accounts globally for 17% of Russia’s exports, behind only China and Spain.
Later in an interview with the Financial Times, Van der Straeten said she was “not happy” about the fact that Russian gas kept flowing into Europe. She then understated Belgium’s share of Russian gas, indicating it was merely 2.8% of Europe’s imports that remained in Belgium, the rest was “in transit”. How wrong or misleading her statement was is revealed by the Global Witness NGO.
She admitted, though Belgium supports sanctions on Russian fuel, it was unlikely to happen. It would require the unanimous support of all EU members.
Earlier this week, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer admitted that Russian LNG was difficult to replace, pointing out that while it was “not cheaper than any other” gas, the way the pipeline system is arranged in Europe makes it difficult to substitute.
There is no end to excuses and pretexts in explaining why Europe must continue to import Russian hydrocarbons. Amazing. No word about the European economy which is at the brink of total collapse. Maybe Germany has already passed the point of no return.
And no word, of course, that this suicidal path to follow the Washington Masters and their overlords dictate is due to an utterly corrupt European leadership, combined with the equally corrupt strongest economy’s leadership, Germany – something that has hardly been seen in recent history.
How vassalic must you be to commit suicide on the orders of Washington and the corporate financial overlords who pulls the strings on Washington, pretending to run the world.
This is just the beginning. The EU Russian energy apologists start talking about energy imports from Russia – and how it is necessary for now – but also how to wean themselves off Russian energy dependence very, very soon.
The Guardian puts it this way: “EU countries bought 22m cubic meters of Russian LNG between January and July 2023, compared with 15m during the same period in 2021, Global Witness said. “Buying Russian gas has the same impact as buying Russian oil. Both fund the war in Ukraine, and every euro means more bloodshed.”
This is, of course, a mainstream media blow on Russia. Never a reason or history on how NATO provoked the war in Ukraine.
This is just part of the story. What the holy west and particularly the vassal-EU does not mention are the other more than 100 essential products they keep importing from Russia at ever larger quantities, and – yes – despite the sanctions.
And the list goes on – another 82 lines of imports.
2022 EU Imports from Russia are the 3 largest since 2013, despite sanctions.
People are fooled.
Europe cannot live without imports from Russia.
So, what are the sanctions for?
Propaganda?
Russia bashing?
Your mind control?
Another legitimate question one may ask: why does Russia sell to the sanctioning countries? Russia does not really need Europe and the US for trade and for economic survival.
President Putin’s Press Secretary, Dmitry Peskov, recently said that Russia is doing well and growing, despite western sanctions. See this.
Russia is well integrated into the Asian complex. It is a co-founder of the original BRICS and now the new BRICS-11. Russia is also a key player in the Global South which becomes ever more important on the global stage.
Uranium imports by the US and Europe from Russia is another unwritten sheet and rarely published news. Russia sold about $1.7 billion in nuclear products to firms in the U.S. and Europe, and this despite the western stiff sanctions, due to the western provoked war in Ukraine. The West calls it a Russian invasion. In reality, it was a NATO-triggered move for preserving Russian sovereignty – and against some 20 to 30 war-grade biolabs in the Ukraine, built and funded by the US. See this.
The United States’ uranium purchases from Russia have doubled since last year. The U.S. bought 416 tons of uranium from Russia in the first half of the year, more than double the amount for the same period in 2022 and the highest level since 2005.
One may question the seriousness of the US Russia bashing, especially since according to a report by RT, Russia is supplying the U.S. only with enriched uranium, a critical component for civil nuclear power generation, but also for nuclear weapons – according to a report by RT. How come Russia is selling Washington Weapon-grade enriched uranium?
Given the foregoing inconsistencies with “sanctions” – mind you, highly publicized sanctions – how serious can the West be taken?
The world must wake up. People of western countries, whose democracy has long been abolished, trampled by the tyrannical western powers “rules-based order”, must stand up against these rulers, invent alternatives to their corporate financial empires and build a world of peace and harmony outside the dictatorial matrix.
Before the US started sending cluster bombs to Ukraine, the use of such weapons was seen by the New York Times (3/5/22) as something you would “accuse” another country of doing.
For the New York Times news department, cluster munitions fall into two categories—clearly wrong or complexly controversial—depending on who uses them.
There was no ambiguity when Russia apparently started using cluster weapons during the invasion of Ukraine. Five days after the invasion began, the Times (3/1/22) front-paged a story that described them in the second paragraph as “internationally banned” and went on to report:
Neither Russia nor Ukraine is a member of the treaty that bans cluster munitions, which can be a variety of weapons—rockets, bombs, missiles and artillery projectiles—that disperse lethal bomblets in midair over a wide area, hitting military targets and civilians alike.
Given that the Times is a US-based outlet, the long article unduly detoured around some basic facts—notably, that the United States is also not “a member of the treaty that bans cluster munitions.” And the 1,570-word piece failed to mention anything about the US military’s firing of cluster munitions during its own invasions and other military interventions, including Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The Congressional Research Service has noted that “US and British forces used almost 13,000 cluster munitions containing an estimated 1.8 to 2 million submunitions during the first three weeks of combat in Iraq in 2003.”
When the Times (3/5/22) followed up a few days later with a piece headlined “NATO Accuses Russia of Using Cluster Bombs in Ukraine,” the ostensible paper of record still did not mention Washington’s refusal to sign the treaty banning cluster munitions. As for US use of those weapons, the piece buried a single sentence with a deficient summary at the end of the 24-paragraph article, telling readers:
NATO forces used cluster bombs during the Kosovo war in 1999, and the United States dropped more than 1,000 cluster bombs in Afghanistan from October 2001 to March 2002, according to a Human Rights Watch report.
The Pentagon’s massive use of cluster munitions during the invasion of Iraq went unmentioned. So did a Tomahawk missile attack with a cluster bomb, launched from a US Navy warship, that killed 14 women and 21 children in Yemen a week before Christmas in 2009.
A ‘most vexing question’
Based on its url, the original headline of this July 14 New York Times story was “Widely Banned Cluster Munitions From the US Arrive in Ukraine.”
Appropriately, the New York Times reporting on Russia’s use of cluster munitions was unequivocally negative in tone and content, devoid of justifications or rationales. But when President Joe Biden decided in early July of this year that the United States should supply cluster munitions to Ukraine, it was a different story. A frequent theme was the urgent need to replenish dwindling Ukrainian supplies of weaponry, while the United States possessed enormous quantities of cluster munitions.
In some coverage—“Here’s What Cluster Munitions Do and Why They Are So Controversial” (7/6/23), “Democrats Denounce Biden’s Decision to Send Ukraine Cluster Munitions” (7/7/23) and “Cluster Weapons US Is Sending Ukraine Often Fail to Detonate” (7/7/23)—Times reporting explained that those weapons are especially inhumane time bombs. Their shrapnel tears into the bodies of civilians who encounter duds that explode months or years later.
But such concerns were soon overshadowed by emphasis on a knotty American dilemma, which the Times (7/11/23) described as “vexing.” For months, the newspaper explained in a written introduction to its Daily podcast:
President Biden has been wrestling with one of the most vexing questions in the war in Ukraine: whether to risk letting Ukrainian forces run out of artillery rounds they desperately need to fight Russia, or agree to ship them cluster munitions — widely banned weapons known to cause grievous injury to civilians, especially children.
Shift to ‘impact on battlefield’
The New York Times (7/14/23) reports that the effect of arming Ukraine with cluster bombs will be “modest,” but will “make the Ukrainian artillery a little more lethal.”
As the reportorial focus shifted, military concerns became dominant. “US Cluster Munitions Arrive in Ukraine, but Impact on Battlefield Remains Unclear” (7/14/23) was the headline over a story that fretted about insufficient impact:
US officials and military analysts warn that American-made cluster munitions probably will not immediately help Ukraine in its flagging counteroffensive against Russian defenses as hundreds of thousands of the weapons arrived in the country from US military depots in Europe, according to Pentagon officials.
From there, the Times tracked the progress and potential effectiveness of the newly shipped US weaponry, with stories like “Cluster Munitions Reach Ukraine a Week After Biden’s Announcement” (7/14/23), “Ukraine Starts Using American-Made Cluster Munitions in Its Counteroffensive, US Officials Say” (7/20/23) and “Ukrainians Embrace Cluster Munitions, but Are They Helping?” (9/7/23).
Notably absent from the newspaper’s coverage of US cluster munitions were names or photos of anyone who’d been maimed or killed by them—except for a long piece about US servicemembers who were accidental victims of those US weapons in Iraq, “Three American Lives Forever Changed by a Weapon Now Being Sent to Ukraine” (9/3/23).
As for the Iraqi lives forever changed by those weapons, there was no space for their names or pictures. In fact, Iraqi victims weren’t mentioned at all.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
When former French President Nicolas Sarkozy suggested that a total Ukrainian military victory was unlikely, the New York Times‘ Roger Cohen (8/27/23) charged that “the obstinacy of the French right’s emotional bond with Russia owes much to a recurrent Gallic great-power itch.”
It doesn’t take much in our media system to be labeled a “Putin apologist” or “pro-Russia.” In this New Cold War, even suggesting that the official enemy is not Hitlerian or completely irrational could earn ridicule and attack.
After the largely stalled Ukrainian counteroffensive against the Russian occupation, conditions on the front have hardened into what many observers describe as a “stalemate.” Like virtually all wars, the Russo-Ukrainian War will end with a negotiated settlement, and the quicker it happens, the quicker the bodies will stop piling up.
Despite this, anyone who advocates actually pursuing negotiations is immediately attacked. The New York Times (8/27/23) did this in an article about former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in an article that argued he “gives a voice to obstinate Russian sympathies.” The Times wrote:
In interviews coinciding with the publication of a memoir, Mr. Sarkozy, who was president from 2007 to 2012, said that reversing Russia’s annexation of Crimea was “illusory,” ruled out Ukraine joining the European Union or NATO because it must remain “neutral,” and insisted that Russia and France “need each other.”
“People tell me Vladimir Putin isn’t the same man that I met. I don’t find that convincing. I’ve had tens of conversations with him. He is not irrational,” he told Le Figaro. “European interests aren’t aligned with American interests this time,” he added.
To Times writer Roger Cohen, Sarkozy’s remarks “underscored the strength of the lingering pockets of pro-Putin sympathy that persist in Europe,” which persist despite Europe’s “unified stand against Russia.” Cohen didn’t challenge or rebut anything the former president said—he merely quoted the words, labeled them “pro-Putin,” and moved on.
The New Cold War mentality has encouraged a new wave of McCarthyite attacks against anyone who dissents against the establishment status quo. Merely pointing out that Putin is “not irrational” flies in the face of the accepted conventional wisdom that Putin is a Hitler-like madman hell bent on conquering Eastern Europe. That conventional wisdom is what allows calls for negotiation to be dismissed without any serious discussion, and challenging that wisdom elicits harsh reactions from establishment voices.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
A key function of state-corporate media is to keep the public pacified, ignorant and ill-equipped to disrupt establishment power.
Knowledge that sheds light on how the world operates politically and economically is kept to a minimum by the ‘mainstream’ media. George Orwell’s famous ‘memory hole’ from ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ signifies the phenomenon brilliantly. Winston Smith’s work for the Ministry of Truth requires that he destroys documents that contradict state propaganda:
When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
— Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949, Penguin edition, 1982, p. 34
The interests of power, hinging on the domination of an ignorant population, are robustly maintained:
In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.
— Ibid., p. 36
As the Party slogan puts it:
Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
— Ibid., p. 31
In today’s fictional ‘democracies’, the workings of propaganda are more subtle. Notably, there is a yawning chasm between the rhetoric of leaders’ professed concern for human rights, peace and democracy, and the realpolitik of empire, exploitation and control.
As Declassified UKobserved earlier this year, the UK has planned or executed over 40 attempts to remove foreign governments in 27 countries since the end of the Second World War. These have involved the intelligence agencies, covert and overt military interventions and assassinations. The British-led coup in Iran 70 years ago is perhaps the best-known example; but it was no anomaly.
If we broaden the scope to British military interventions around the world since 1945, there are as many as 83 examples. These range from brutal colonial wars and covert operations to efforts to prop up favoured governments or to deter civil unrest, including British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1953, Egypt in the 1950s, Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011 (more on this below).
The criminal history of the US in terms of overthrowing foreign governments, or attempting to do so, was thoroughly documented by William Blum, author of Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II and Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower.
These multiple invasions, coups and wars are routinely sold to the public as ‘humanitarian interventions’ by Western leaders and their propaganda allies of the ‘mainstream’ media.
A Feted War Criminal
Tony Blair, the arch British war criminal, is largely treated by the UK political and media classes as a wise elder statesman on domestic and world affairs. It sums up the way this country is run by a corrupt and blood-soaked establishment. Proving the point, the Financial Times recently tweeted:
Sir Tony Blair is back. Once vilified as a “war criminal” by some in Labour, his influence within the party is growing again under Sir Keir Starmer. The FT speaks to the former UK premier: https://on.ft.com/3PDkIpE
You’ve got to love the FT’s insistence on using ‘Sir’, as though that bestows some measure of respectability on a man who waged devastating wars of first resort in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Costs of War project, based at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, estimates that the total death toll in post-9/11 wars – including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen – could be at least 4.5-4.7 million. Blair is one of the Western leaders who shares complicity for this appalling death toll. That fact has been essentially thrown down the memory hole by propaganda outlets who welcome him with open arms.
Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark once explained how, following the 9/11 attacks, the US planned to ‘take out’ seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. It is remarkable that this testimony, and compelling footage, has never been deemed credible evidence by ‘mainstream’ media.
The notion that Blair was ‘once vilified’ as a war criminal – and let’s drop those quotation marks around ‘war criminal’ – as though that is no longer the case is ludicrous. In any case, what does the carefully selected word ‘vilify’ actually mean? According to the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, it can mean two things:
1: to utter slanderous and abusive statements against: defame;
2: to lower in estimation or importance.
The FT would presumably like to implant in readers’ minds the idea that Blair has been unjustly accused of being a war criminal; that the suggestion is a slander. But Blair, along with Bush and the Cheney gang, was one of the chief accomplices behind the mass terrorist attack on Iraq in 2003. It was the ‘supreme international crime’, judged by the standards of the Nuremberg trials held after the Second World War.
The accompanying FT photograph of a supposedly statesman-like ‘Sir’ Tony Blair was overlaid with a telling quote:
[Britain’s] a country that is in a mess. We are not in good shape.
Unmentioned is that Blair had a large part to play in creating today’s mess in Britain. Other than his great crimes in foreign affairs, he is an ardent supporter of the destructive economic system blandly titled ‘neoliberalism’. He continued along the path laid down by Tory leader Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Indeed, when Thatcher was once asked what she regarded as her greatest achievement, she replied: ‘Tony Blair and New Labour’.
As for Blair, he has described Thatcher in glowing terms as ‘a towering political figure’ whose legacy will be felt worldwide. He added:
I always thought my job was to build on some of the things she had done rather than reverse them.
The current Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer – another ‘Sir’ and stalwart of the establishment – is unashamedly casting himself as a Blairite figure. They have even appeared in public together to ‘bask in each other’s reflected glory’, as one political sketch writer noted.
It says everything that Sir Keir Starmer, the UK’s former director of public prosecutions, is actively seeking to rehabilitate him.
That’s the same Starmer who helped smear his leftwing predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.
The ‘Unprovoked’ Invasion of Ukraine
The mass-media memory hole is proving invaluable in protecting the public from uncomfortable truths about Ukraine. Western leaders’ expression of concern for Ukraine is cover for their desire to see Russian leader Vladimir Putin removed from power and Russia ‘weakened’, as US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin admitted earlier this year. Austin was previously a board member of Raytheon Technologies, a military contractor, stepping down with a cool sum of $2.7 million to join the Biden administration: yet another example of the ‘revolving door’ between government and the ‘defence’ sector.
Australian political analyst Caitlin Johnstone noted recently that:
Arguably the single most egregious display of war propaganda in the 21st century occurred last year, when the entire western political/media class began uniformly bleating the word “unprovoked” in reference to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Pointing out that the West ‘provoked’ Russia is not the same as saying that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was justified. In fact, we were clear in our first media alert following the invasion:
Russia’s attack is a textbook example of “the supreme crime”, the waging of a war of aggression.
As Noam Chomsky pointed out, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was totally unprovoked, but:
nobody ever called it “the unprovoked invasion of Iraq.” In fact, I don’t know if the term was ever used; if it was, it was very marginal. Now you look it up on Google, and hundreds of thousands of hits. Every article that comes out has to talk about the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Why? Because they know perfectly well it was provoked. That doesn’t justify it, but it was massively provoked.’
Bryce Greene, a media analyst with US-based Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), observed that US policy makers regarded a war in Ukraine as a desirable objective:
One 2019 study from the RAND Corporation—a think tank with close ties to the Pentagon—suggested that an effective way to overextend and unbalance Russia would be to increase military support for Ukraine, arguing that this could lead to a Russian invasion.
The rationale was outlined in a Wall Street Journalopinion piece by John Deni of the Atlantic Council, a US think tank with close links to the White House and the arms industry, headlined “The Strategic Case for Risking War in Ukraine”. Greene summarised the logic:
Provoking a war would allow the US to impose sanctions and fight a proxy war that would grind Russia down. Additionally, the anti-Russian sentiment that resulted from a war would strengthen NATO’s resolve.
Greene added:
The consensus among policymakers in Washington is to push for endless conflict, no matter how many Ukrainians die in the process. As long as Russia loses men and material, the effect on Ukraine is irrelevant. Ukrainian victory was never the goal.
It’s just a well–documented fact that the US and its allies provoked this war in a whole host of ways, from NATO expansion to backing regime change in Kyiv to playing along with aggressions against Donbass separatists to pouring weapons into Ukraine. There’s also an abundance of evidence that the US and its allies sabotaged a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine in the early weeks of the war in order to keep this conflict going as long as possible to hurt Russian interests.
She continued:
We know that western actions provoked the war in Ukraine because many western foreign policy experts spent years warning that western actions would provoke a war in Ukraine.
But you will search in vain for substantive reporting of such salient facts and relevant history – see also this piece by FAIR – in ‘mainstream’ news media.
A recent interview with the influential US economist and public policy analyst Jeffrey Sachs, former director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, highlighted just how serious these media omissions are in trying to understand what is going on in Ukraine. In a superb 30-minute exposition, Sachs presented vital truths, not least that:
I think the defining feature of American foreign policy is arrogance. And they can’t listen. They cannot hear red lines of any other country. They don’t believe they exist. The only red lines are American red lines.
He was referring here to Russia’s red-line plea to the West not to continue expanding NATO right up to its borders; something, as mentioned above, Western foreign policy experts have been warning about for more than three decades. Would Washington ever allow a Russian sphere of influence to extend to US borders, with Mexico and Canada under the ‘evil spell’ of the Kremlin? Of course not.
It’s pretty clear in early 2014 that regime change [in Ukraine] – and a typical kind of US covert regime change operation – was underway. And I say typical because scholarly studies have shown that, just during the Cold War period alone, there were 64 US covert regime change operations. It’s astounding.
What is also astounding, but entirely predictable, is that any such discussion is impermissible in ‘respectable’ circles.
Sachs described how the US reassured Ukraine after the Minsk II agreement in 2015, which was intended to bring peace to the Donbass region of Ukraine:
Don’t worry about a thing. We’ve got your back. You’re going to join NATO.
The role of Biden, then US Vice-President and now President, was to insist that:
Ukraine will be part of NATO. We will increase armaments [to Ukraine].
On 17 December 2021, Putin drafted a security agreement between Russia and the United States. Sachs read it and concluded that it was ‘absolutely negotiable’, adding:
Not everything is going to be accepted, but the core of this is NATO should stop the enlargement so we don’t have a war.
Sachs, who has long had high-level contacts within successive US administrations, then described an exchange he had over the telephone with the White House. ‘This war is avoidable’, he said. ‘Avoid this war, you don’t want a war on your watch.’
But the White House was emphatic it would give no commitment to stop enlargement. Instead:
No, no! NATO has an open-door policy [i.e. any country can supposedly join NATO.]
Sachs responded:
That’s a path to war and you knowit. You’ve gotto negotiate.
These people do not understand anything about diplomacy. Anything about reality. Their own diplomats have been telling them for 30 years this is a path to war.
Sachs also related how Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky was so taken aback when the Russian invasion began on 24 February 2022, that he started saying publicly, within just a few days, that Ukraine could be neutral; in other words, not join NATO. This was the essence of what Russia was seeking. But the Americans shut down that discussion, as Sachs went on to explain.
By March 2022, Ukrainian and Russian officials were holding negotiations in Turkey. Meanwhile, Naftali Bennett, who was then Israel’s Prime Minister, was making progress in mediating between Zelensky and Putin, as he described during a long interview on his YouTube channel. But, ultimately, the US blocked the peace efforts. Sachs paraphrased Bennett’s explanation as to why:
They [the US] wanted to look tough to China. They were worried that this could look weak to China.
Incredible! The US’s primary concern is to look strong to China, its chief rival in world affairs. This recalls the motivation behind the US dropping atomic bombs on Japan at the end of the Second World War as a show of might to the Soviet Union.
Infamously, Boris Johnson, then the British PM, travelled to Ukraine in April 2022, presumably under US directive, telling Zelensky not to negotiate with Russia.
If we had truly democratic, impartial news media, all these facts would be widespread across national news outlets. BBC News correspondents would continually remind viewers and listeners how the West provoked Russia, then blocked peace efforts. Instead, the memory hole is doing its job – inconvenient facts are disappeared -and we are bombarded with wall-to-wall propaganda about Russia’s ‘unprovoked’ invasion of Ukraine.
Libya: A Propaganda Masterclass
The memory-hole phenomenon is a huge factor in media coverage of Libya which, as we wrote last week, has suffered terribly in recent flooding and the collapse of two dams. The city of Derna was washed into the sea after 40cm of rain fell in twenty-four hours, leaving 20,000 people dead.
But vital recent history has been almost wholly buried by state-corporate media. In 2011, NATO’s attack on Libya essentially destroyed the state and killed an estimated 40,000 people. The nation, once one of Africa’s most advanced countries for health care and education, became a failed state, with the collapse of essential services, the re-emergence of slave markets and raging civil war.
The massive bombing, heavily involving the UK and France, had been enthusiastically championed (see our 2011 media alerts here and here) by Western politicians and state-corporate media, including BBC News, as a ‘humanitarian intervention’ to get rid of an ‘autocratic dictator’, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
The tipping point was the alleged threat of a massacre by Gaddafi’s forces in Benghazi. A senior government official serving under then Prime Minister, David Cameron, stated:
There was a very strong feeling at the top of this government that Benghazi could very easily become the Srebrenica of our watch. The generation that has lived through Bosnia is not going to be the “pull up the drawbridge” generation.
The reference was to the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in July 1995 by Bosnian Serb forces. The threat of something similar happening in Benghazi was a relentless theme across the airwaves and newspaper front pages. The Guardian, in line with the rest of the supposed ‘spectrum’ of British newspapers, promoted Cameron as a world-straddling statesman. The Arab Spring had ‘transformed the prime minister from a reluctant to a passionate interventionist.’ The paper dutifully helped his cause with sycophantic pieces such as the bizarrely titled, ‘David Cameron’s Libyan war: why the PM felt Gaddafi had to be stopped.’
In August 2011, serial Guardian propagandist Andrew Rawnsley responded to NATO’s overthrow of the Libyan government:
Libyans now have a chance to take the path of freedom, peace and prosperity, a chance they would have been denied were we to have walked on by when Muammar Gaddafi was planning his rivers of blood. Britain and her allies broadly got it right in Libya.
The BBC’s John Humphrys opined that victory had delivered ‘a sort of moral glow.’ (BBC Radio 4 Today, 21 October 2011)
There are myriad other examples from the Guardian and the rest of the ‘MSM’. The pathology of this propaganda blitz was starkly exposed by a 2016 report into the Libya war by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. The report summarised:
The result was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL in North Africa.
As for the alleged threat of a massacre by Gaddafi’s forces in Benghazi, the repeated rationale for the intervention, the report commented:
the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence…Gaddafi’s 40-year record of appalling human rights abuses did not include large-scale attacks on Libyan civilians.’ (Our emphasis)
More on this, and the propaganda blitz that enabled NATO’s attack on Libya, can be found in our 2016 media alert, “The Great Libya War Fraud“.
Behind the rhetoric about removing a dictator was, of course, the underlying factor of oil; as it so often is in the West’s imperial wars. In 2011, Real News interviewed Kevin G. Hall, the national economics correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, who had studied WikiLeaked material on Libya. Hall said:
As a matter of fact, we went through 251,000 [leaked] documents… Of those, a full 10 percent of them, a full 10 percent of those documents, reference in some way, shape, or form oil.’ (‘WikiLeaks reveals US wanted to keep Russia out of Libyan oil,’ The Real News, 11 May 2011)
British oil giants BP and Shell are returning to the oil-rich north African country just over a decade after the UK plunged it into chaos in its 2011 military intervention, which the British government never admitted was a war for oil.
There were additional ‘benefits’ to the West. As WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange explained in an interview with John Pilger, Hillary Clinton intended to exploit the removal of Gaddafi as part of her corporate-funded bid to become US president. Clinton was then US Secretary of State under President Barack Obama:
Libya’s war was, more than anyone else’s, Hillary Clinton’s war…who was the person who was championing it? Hillary Clinton. That’s documented throughout her emails [leaked emails published by WikiLeaks]’.
Assange added:
She perceived the removal of Gaddafi, and the overthrow of the Libyan state, something that she would use to run in the election for President.
You may recall Clinton’s gleeful response to the brutal murder of Gaddafi:
We came, we saw, he died.
Also, as Assange pointed out, the destruction of the Libyan state generated a catastrophe of terrorism and a refugee crisis, with many drowning in their attempts to cross the Mediterranean to Europe:
Jihadists moved in. ISIS moved in. That led to the European refugee and migrant crisis. Because, not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people then fleeing Syria, destabilisation of other African countries as the result of arms flows, the Libyan state itself was no longer able to control movement of people through it…. [Libya] had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So, all problems, economic problems, civil war in Africa – people previously fleeing those problems didn’t end up in Europe.
Very little of the above vital history and context to the recent catastrophic flooding in Libya is included in current ‘mainstream’ news reporting. At best, there is token mention. At worst, there is deeply deceitful and cynical rewriting of history.
A report on the Sky News website went about as far as is permissible in detailing the reality:
Libyans are worn down by years and years of poor governance many of which date back to 2011 and the NATO-backed ousting of the country’s autocratic dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, during the period which became known as the Arab Spring.
Gaddafi was killed and the country dived into instability with rival armed militias vying for power and territory.
An article for the BBC News Africa section gave an even briefer hint of the awful truth:
Libya has been beset by chaos since forces backed by the West’s NATO military alliance overthrew long-serving ruler Col Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011.
This was the only mention in the article of Western responsibility for the disaster. The shameful propaganda censorship was highlighted when the article was posted by the BBC Africa Twitter/X account. So many readers pointed out the glaring omissions that a Twitter/X warning of sorts appeared under the BBC’s tweet:
Readers added context they thought people might want to know.
Then:
Due to NATO intervention in Libya, several problems such as the lack of a unified government, the re-emergence of slave markets and collapse of welfare services have made the country unable to cope with natural disasters.
If such ‘context’ – actually, vital missing information – were to regularly appear under BBC tweets because of reader intervention, it would be a considerable public service; and a major embarrassment for the self-declared ‘world’s leading public service broadcaster’.
A major reason for the appalling death toll in the Libyan city of Derna was that two dams had collapsed, sending 30 million cubic metres of water into the city in ‘tsunami-like waves’. These dams were built in the 1970s to protect the local population. A Turkish firm had been contracted in 2007 to maintain the dams. This work stopped after NATO’s 2011 bombing campaign. The Turkish firm left the country, their machinery was stolen and all work on the dams ended. This was mentioned briefly in a recent Guardianarticle, but NATO’s culpability was downplayed and it certainly did not generate the huge headlines across the ‘MSM’ that it warranted.
Further crucial context was also blatantly flushed down the media’s memory hole: NATO had deliberately destroyed Libya’s water infrastructure in 2011. Investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed reported in 2015:
The military targeting of civilian infrastructure, especially of water supplies, is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. Yet this is precisely what NATO did in Libya, while blaming the damage on Gaddafi himself.
Ros Atkins, who has acquired a huge profile as an expert ‘explainer’, with the moniker ‘BBC News Analysis Editor’, narrated a video for the BBC News website ‘on the floods in Libya – and the years of crisis there too.’ Once again, NATO’s appalling role in the 2011 destruction of the country was glossed over. The BBC’s ‘explanation’ explained virtually nothing.
Meanwhile, the Guardian ran a wretched editorial which is surely one of the worst Orwellian rewritings of history it has ever published:
Vast fossil fuel reserves and regional security objectives have encouraged foreign powers to meddle in Libya.
As noted above, that was emphatically not the story in 2011 when the Guardian propagandised tirelessly for ‘intervention’. The editorial continued:
Libyans have good reason to feel that they have been failed by the international community as well as their own leaders.
In fact, they were also failed by Guardian editors, senior staff, columnists and reporters who did so much to sell ‘Cameron’s war’ on Libya. Nowhere in the editorial is NATO even mentioned.
And beneath this appalling, power-serving screed was a risible claim of reasons for supporting the Guardian:
Our fearless, investigative journalism is a scrutinising force at a time when the rich and powerful are getting away with more and more, in Europe and beyond.
This assertion is an audacious reversal of truth from one of the worst perpetrators of memory-hole journalism in the Western world.
A Ukrainian presidential advisor asserted to CNN (5/30/23): “If there are timely deliveries of large quantities of the necessary consumable components…then of course the war can mathematically be over this year…. It will end undoubtedly on the borders of Ukraine as they were in 1991.”
It has been clear for some time that US corporate news media have explicitly taken a side on the Ukraine War. This role includes suppressing relevant history of the lead-up to the war (FAIR.org, 3/4/22), attacking people who bring up that history as “conspiracy theorists” (FAIR.org, 5/18/22), accepting official government pronouncements at face value (FAIR.org, 12/2/22) and promoting an overly rosy picture of the conflict in order to boost morale.
For most of the war, most of the US coverage has been as pro-Ukrainian as Ukraine’s own media, now consolidated under the Zelenskyy government (FAIR.org, 5/9/23). Dire predictions sporadically appeared, but were drowned out by drumbeat coverage portraying a Ukrainian army on the cusp of victory, and the Russian army as incompetent and on the verge of collapse.
Triumphalist rhetoric soared in early 2023, as optimistic talk of a game-changing “spring offensive” dominated Ukraine coverage. Apparently delayed, the Ukrainian counteroffensive launched in June. While even US officials did not believe that it would amount to much, US media papered over these doubts in the runup to the campaign.
Over the last three months, it has become clear that the Ukrainian military operation will not be the game-changer it was sold as; namely, it will not significantly roll back the Russian occupation and obviate the need for a negotiated settlement. Only after this became undeniable did media report on the true costsofwar to the Ukrainian people.
Overwhelming optimism
A former top US general assured NPR (5/12/23) that “Ukraine’s long-anticipated counteroffensive against Russia will ultimately succeed.”
In the runup to the counteroffensive, US media were full of excited conversation about how it would reshape the nature of the conflict. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told Radio Free Europe (4/21/23) he was “confident Ukraine will be successful.” Sen. Lindsey Graham assured Politico (5/30/23), “In the coming days, you’re going to see a pretty impressive display of power by the Ukrainians.” Asked for his predictions about Ukraine’s plans, retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges told NPR (5/12/23), “I actually expect…they will be quite successful.”
I personally think that this is going to be really quite successful…. And [the Russians] are going to have to withdraw under pressure of this Ukrainian offensive, the most difficult possible tactical maneuver, and I don’t think they’re going to do well at that.
The Washington Post’s David Ignatius (4/15/23) acknowledged that “hope is not a strategy,” but still insisted that “Ukraine’s will to win—its determination to expel Russian invaders from its territory at whatever cost—might be the X-factor in the decisive season of conflict ahead.”
The New York Times (6/2/23) ran a story praising recruits who signed up for the Ukrainian pushback, even though it “promises to be deadly.” Times columnist Paul Krugman (6/5/23) declared we were witnessing “the moral equivalent of D-Day.” CNN (5/30/23) reported that Ukrainians were “unfazed” as they “gear up for a counteroffensive.”
Cable news was replete with buzz about how the counteroffensive, couched with modifiers like “long-awaited” or “highly anticipated,” could turn the tide in the war. Nightly news shows (e.g., NBC, 6/15/23, 6/16/23) presented audiences with optimistic statements from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other figures talking about the imminent success.
Downplaying reality
The Washington Post (4/10/23) noted that pessimistic leaked assessments were “a marked departure from the Biden administration’s public statements about the vitality of Ukraine’s military.”
Despite the soaring rhetoric presented to audiences, Western officials understood that the counteroffensive was all but doomed to fail. This had been known long before the above comments were reported, but media failed to include that fact as prominently as the predictions for success.
On April 10, as part of the Discord leaks story, the Washington Post (4/10/23) reported that top secret documents showed that Ukraine’s drive would fall “well short” of its objectives, due to equipment, ammunition and conscription problems. The document predicted “sustainment shortfalls” and only “modest territorial gains.”
The Post additionally cited anonymous officials who claimed that the documents’ conclusions were corroborated by a classified National Intelligence Council assessment, shown only to a select few in Congress. The Post spoke to a Ukrainian official who “did not dispute the revelations,” and acknowledged that it was “partially true.”
While the Post has yet to publish the documents in full, the leaks and the other sources clearly painted a picture of a potentially disastrous counteroffensive. Fear was so palpable that the Biden administration privately worried about how he could keep up support for the war when the widely hyped offensive sputtered. In the midst of this, Blinken continued to dismiss the idea of a ceasefire, opting instead to pursue further escalating the conflict.
Despite the importance of these facts, they were hardly reported on by the rest of corporate media, and dropped from subsequent war coverage. When the Post (6/14/23) published a long article citing Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s cautious optimism about the campaign, it neglected to mention its earlier reporting about the government’s privately gloomier assessments. The documents only started appearing again in the press after thousands were dead, and the campaign’s failure undeniable.
In an honest press, excited comments from politicians and commentators would be published alongside reports about how even our highest-level officials did not believe that the counteroffensive would amount to much. Instead, anticipation was allowed to build while doubts were set to the side.
Too ‘casualty-averse’?
After noting estimates that 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died and as many as 120,000 wounded, the New York Times (8/18/23) reported that “American officials say they fear that Ukraine has become casualty averse.”
y July, Ukrainian casualties were mounting, and it became clearer and clearer that the counteroffensive would fail to recapture significant amounts of Ukrainian territory. Reporting grew more realistic, and we were given insights into conditions on the ground in Ukraine, as well as what was in the minds of US officials.
According to the Washington Post (8/17/23), US and Ukrainian militaries had conducted war games and had anticipated that an advance would be accompanied by heavy losses. But when the real-world fatalities mounted, the Post reported, “Ukraine chose to stem the losses on the battlefield.”
This caused a rift between the Ukrainians and their Western backers, who were frustrated at Ukrainians’ desire to keep their people alive. A mid-July New York Times article (7/14/23) reported that US officials were privately frustrated that Ukraine had become too afraid of dying to fight effectively. The officials worried that Ukrainian commanders “fear[ed] casualties among their ranks,” and had “reverted to old habits” rather than “pressing harder.” A later Times article (8/18/23) repeated Washington’s worries that Ukrainians were too “casualty-averse.”
Acknowledging failure
Wall Street Journal (7/23/23): “US Defense Department analysts knew early this year that Ukraine’s front-line troops would struggle against Russian air attacks.”
After it became undeniable that Ukraine’s military action was going nowhere, a Wall Street Journal report (7/23/23) raised some of the doubts that had been invisible in the press on the offensive’s eve. The report’s opening lines say it all:
When Ukraine launched its big counteroffensive this spring, Western military officials knew Kyiv didn’t have all the training or weapons—from shells to warplanes—that it needed to dislodge Russian forces.
The Journal acknowledged that Western officials simply “hoped Ukrainian courage and resourcefulness would carry the day.”
One Post column (7/26/23) asked, “Was Gen. Mark Milley Right Last Year About the War in Ukraine?” Columnist Jason Willick acknowledged that “Milley’s skepticism about Ukraine’s ability to achieve total victory appears to have been widespread within the Biden administration before the counteroffensive began.”
And when one official told Politico (8/18/23), “Milley had a point,” acknowledging the former military head’s November suggestion for negotiations. The quote was so telling that Politico made it the headline of the article.
Even Rep. Andy Harris (D-Md.), co-chair of the congressional Ukraine Caucus, publicly questioned whether or not the war was “winnable” (Politico, 8/17/23). Speaking on the counteroffensive’s status, he said, “I’ll be blunt, it’s failed.”
The Washington Post (8/17/23) blamed the failure of “a counteroffensive that saw tens of billions of dollars of Western weapons and military equipment” on Ukraine’s failure to accept “major casualties” as “the cost of piercing through Russia’s main defensive line.”
Newsweek (8/16/23) reported on a Ukrainian leadership divided over how to handle the “underwhelming” counteroffensive. The Washington Post (8/17/23) reported that the US intelligence community assessed that the offensive would fail to fulfill its key objective of severing the land bridge between Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine and Crimea.
As the triumphalism ebbed, outlets began reporting on scenes that were almost certainly common before the spring push but had gone unpublished. One piece from the Post (8/10/23) outlined a “darken[ed] mood in Ukraine,” in which the nation was “worn out.” The piece acknowledged that “Ukrainian officials and their Western partners hyped up a coming counteroffensive,” but there was “little visible progress.”
The Wall Street Journal (8/1/23) published a devastating piece about the massive number of amputees returning home from the mine-laden battlefield. They reported that between 20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians had lost one or more limbs as a result of the war—numbers that are comparable to those seen during World War I.
Rather than dwelling on the stalled campaign, the New York Times and other outlets focused on the drone war against Russia, even while acknowledging that the remote strikes were largely an exercise in public relations. The Times (8/25/23) declared that the strikes had “little significant damage to Russia’s overall military might” and were primarily “a message for [Ukraine’s] own people,” citing US officials who noted that they “intended to demonstrate to the Ukrainian public that Kyiv can still strike back.” Looking at the quantity of Times coverage (8/30/23, 8/30/23, 8/23/23, 8/22/23, 8/22/23, 8/21/23, 8/18/23), the drone strikes were apparently aimed at an increasingly war-weary US public as well.
War as desirable outcome
The Army War College’s John Deni (Wall Street Journal, 12/22/21) urged the US to take “a hard-line stance in diplomatic discussions,” because “if Mr. Putin’s forces invade, Russia is likely to suffer long-term, serious and even debilitating strategic costs.”
The fact that US officials pushed for a Ukrainian counteroffensive that all but expected would fail raises an important question: Why would they do this? Sending thousands of young people to be maimed and killed does nothing to advance Ukrainian territorial integrity, and actively hinders the war effort.
The answer has been clear since before the war. Despite the high-minded rhetoric about support for democracy, this has never been the goal of pushing for war in Ukraine. Though it often goes unacknowledged in the US press, policymakers saw a war in Ukraine as a desirable outcome. One 2019 study from the RAND Corporation—a think tank with close ties to the Pentagon—suggested that an effective way to overextend and unbalance Russia would be to increase military support for Ukraine, arguing that this could lead to a Russian invasion.
In December 2021, as Russian President Vladimir Putin began to mass troops at Ukraine’s border while demanding negotiations, John Deni of the Atlantic Council published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (12/22/21) headlined “The Strategic Case for Risking War in Ukraine,” which laid out the US logic explicitly: Provoking a war would allow the US to impose sanctions and fight a proxy war that would grind Russia down. Additionally, the anti-Russian sentiment that resulted from a war would strengthen NATO’s resolve.
All of this came to pass as Washington’s stance of non-negotiation successfully provoked a Russian invasion. Even as Ukraine and Russia sat at the negotiation table early in the war, the US made it clear that it wanted the war to continue and escalate. The US’s objective was, in the words of Raytheon boardmember–turned–Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, “to see Russia weakened.” Despite stated commitments to Ukrainian democracy, US policies have instead severely damaged it.
NATO’s ‘strategic windfall’
David Ignatius (Washington Post, 7/18/23) called the Ukraine War “a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians)…. This has been a triumphal summer for the alliance.”
In the wake of the stalled counteroffensive, the US interest in sacrificing Ukraine to bleed Russia was put on display again. In July, the Post‘s Ignatius declared that the West shouldn’t be so “gloomy” about Ukraine, since the war had been a “strategic windfall” for NATO and its allies. Echoing two of Deni’s objectives, Ignatius asserted that “the West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked,” and “NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland.”
In the starkest demonstration of the lack of concern for Ukraine or its people, he also wrote that these strategic successes came “at relatively low cost,” adding, in a parenthetical aside, “(other than for the Ukrainians).”
Ignatius is far from alone. Hawkish Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah) explained why US funding for the proxy war was “about the best national defense spending I think we’ve ever done”: “We’re losing no lives in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians, they’re fighting heroically against Russia.” The consensus among policymakers in Washington is to push for endless conflict, no matter how many Ukrainians die in the process. As long as Russia loses men and material, the effect on Ukraine is irrelevant. Ukrainian victory was never the goal.
‘Fears of peace talks’
The Hill (9/5/23) publishes warnings that “creeping negativity among the US public” will “increase pressure for Ukrainians to negotiate with Russia.”
Polls show that support for increased US involvement in Ukraine is rapidly declining. The recent Republican presidential debate demonstrated clear fractures within the right wing of the US power structure. Politico (8/18/23) reported that some US officials are regretting potential lost opportunities for negotiations. Unfortunately, this minority dissent has yet to affect the dominant consensus.
The failure of the counteroffensive has not caused Washington to rethink its strategy of attempting to bleed Russia. The flow of US military hardware to Ukraine is likely to continue so long as this remains the goal. The Hill (9/5/23) gave the game away about NATO’s commitment to escalation with a piece titled “Fears of Peace Talks With Putin Rise Amid US Squabbling.”
But even within the Biden administration, the Pentagon appears to be at odds with the State Department and National Security Council over the Ukraine conflict. Contrary to what may be expected, the civilian officials like Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland and Antony Blinken are taking a harder line on perpetuating this conflict than the professional soldiers in the Pentagon. The media’s sharp change of tone may both signify and fuel the doubts gaining traction within the US political class.
Senate Democrats on the Armed Forces Committee are calling for an inquiry into billionaire Elon Musk’s actions regarding his restrictions on the Ukraine military’s use of his Starlink internet satellite system. Excerpts from a soon-to-be-published book about Musk revealed that he disallowed access to the network during a drone mission near Crimea last year. Initial media reports about the book…
Following on from its decision to donate widely banned cluster munitions to Ukraine the US is sending armor-piercing depleted uranium (DU) munitions to fight Russia. Indifferent to the poisonous effect of these weapons, the Justin Trudeau government has remained mum on Washington’s escalatory move.
Depleted uranium (DU) is a by-product from the production of fuel used in atomic power stations. A heavy metal, DU is good for armor-piercing rounds.
But it’s also toxic. Studies have linked DU munitions to cancer and birth defects. The US DU munitions will add to the growing health and ecological damage of the war.
As the world’s second biggest producer of uranium, Canada is the source of a significant share of US uranium. Over the past two decades Canada has abstained on a series of UN resolutions concerning DU munitions. Backed by the vast majority of General Assembly members, the resolutions don’t even call for the abolition of DU, but only for transparency in their use to enable clean up.
Canadian forces have supported the use of DU munitions. In the first Gulf War 4,000 Canadians fought alongside US forces that fired shells with DU, which probably increased the incidence of cancer and congenital disease for those nearby. Similarly, the Canadian air force was a major participant in the 1999 bombing of Serbia in which NATO jets dropped bombs containing DU, causing long term ecological damage.
Alongside health and ecological concerns, the DU munitions donation escalates the conflict. Russian officials labelled the new US donations a “criminal act” and “indicator of inhumanity”. When the UK gave Ukraine DU-laced arms to use in Challenger 2 tanks, Russia cited the move to justify stationing tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.
Ottawa has been a staunch proponent of NATO’s proxy war. At the recent G20 meeting in India Prime Minister Trudeau complained there wasn’t a stronger condemnation of Russia. Over the past year and a half Canada has given $2 billion in arms, promoted former Canadian soldiers fighting, trained thousands of Ukrainian troops and dispatched special forces to Ukraine. Ottawa has also provided significant intelligence assistance with the Communications Security Establishment even extending its cyber defence umbrella to Ukraine.
While rarely raising peace negotiations, Trudeau has repeatedly said “Canada will continue to stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes”. Combined with NATO prodding Ukraine into a horrific counteroffensive, this effectively means prolonging the death and destruction, which could have been avoided if the US/NATO agreed not to expand to Ukraine. In a recent speech NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg all but said as much, noting “President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course, we didn’t sign that… So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.”
Notwithstanding Trudeau’s statements about “as long as it takes”, the government appears to be slowing down new arms announcements. The last one seems to have been five months ago on April 11. Maybe Canadian weapons stocks are running low or the government understands the public is souring on arms deliveries.
On the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion the National Post reported on a poll that found “only 33 per cent believe Canada should provide more personnel to train Ukrainian soldiers and just 32 per cent believe more military equipment should be provided.” The numbers are remarkable considering that no one in the dominant media or Parliament is articulating this position. With Ukraine’s counteroffensive failing, opposition to arms donations has likely grown. And Kyiv’s increasingly desperate response to the failure is troubling even if understandable amidst Russian violence [the violence is not one-sided — DV ed]. Sending drones to hit targets in Moscow will have limited military benefit but is sure to harden Russian resolve, making compromise more difficult.
Two columns in the Financial Times this month highlight the prevailing madness. “Ukraine cannot win against Russia now, but victory by 2025 is possible”, noted one headline while another stated “Negotiations between Russia and Ukraine would be a moral defeat.”
Nineteen months into this horrendous war the usually sober minded establishment paper seems to believe a “moral” victory is sending depleted uranium, ensuring ever more immediate and long-term death and destruction.
Egypt, Vietnam and Indonesia among countries sending delegations to four-day DSEI at ExCeL
Europe’s biggest ever arms fair got under way in London on Tuesday with record numbers expected to attend, boosted by interest from countries with controversial human rights records.
Authoritarian Egypt and Vietnam are among those sending delegations, defence sources said, as well as Indonesia and India – all countries whose arms-buying strategies have been affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 has been justified by Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “special military operation” with a few barbed purposes, among them cleaning the country’s stables of Nazis. As with so many instances of history, it was not entirely untrue, though particularly convenient for Moscow. At the core of many a nationalist movement beats a reactionary heart, and the trauma-strewn stretch that is Ukrainian history is no exception.
A central figure in this drama remains Stepan Bandera, whose influence during the Second World War have etched him into the annals of Ukrainian history. His appearance in the Russian rationale for invading Ukraine has given his spirit a historical exit clause, something akin to rehabilitation. This has been helped by the scant coverage, and knowledge of the man outside the feverish nationalist imaginings that continue to sustain him.
Since his 1959 assassination, the subject of Bandera as one of the foremost Ukrainian nationalists has lacked any lengthy treatment. Then came Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe’s door stop of a work in 2014, which charted the links between Bandera’s nationalist thought, various racially-minded sources such as Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi, who dreamed of a Ukraine cleansed of Russians, Poles, Magyars, Romanians and Jews, and the role of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which was founded in Vienna in 1929 by Yevhen Konovalets and Andriy Melnyk.
Notwithstanding the cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic composition of the territories that would become modern Ukraine, the OUN specialised in the babble of homogenous identity and purity. A hatred of Jews was more than casual: it was integral. They were, to quote the waspish words of Yuri Lylianych in Rozbudova Natsii (Rebuilding the Nation), the official OUN journal, “an alien and many of them even a hostile element of the Ukrainian national organism.”
For his part, Bandera, son of a nationalist Greek Catholic priest, was a zealot, self-tormentor and flagellator. As head of the Ukrainian Nationalists, Bandera got busy, blooding himself with such terrorist attacks as the 1934 assassination of the Polish Minister of the Interior Bronisław Pieracki. He was fortunate that his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, not that it stopped him from bellowing “Slava Ukrayiny!”
Followers of Bandera came to be known as the Banderowzi. During the second week after the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Benderowzi, flushed with confidence, declared a Ukrainian state in Lemberg. The occasion was celebrated a few days with a pogrom against Jews in the city. It remains unclear, however, where the orders came from. With the Germans finding Bandera’s followers a nuisance and ill-fitting to their program, they were reduced in importance to the level of police units and sent to Belarus. On being transferred to Volhynia in Ukraine, many melted into the forests to form the future UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army).
For its part, the OUN, aided by the good services of the Ukrainian citizenry, assisted the Third Reich slaughter 800,000 Jews in western Ukraine. The UPA, as historian Jaroslav Hryzak writes, proceeded to fight all and sundry, be they units of the German Army, red partisans, the Polish underground army, and other Ukrainian nationalists. Volhynia and Galicia were sites of frightful slaughter by the UPA, with the number of murdered Poles running upwards of 100,000. One target remained enduring – at least for five years. From 1944 to 1949, remnants of the UPA and OUN were fixated with the Soviets while continuing a campaign of terror against eastern Ukrainians transferred to Volhynia and Galicia as administrators or teachers, along with alleged informers and collaborators.
Oddly enough, Bandera as a historically active figure played less of a direct role in the war as is sometimes thought, leaving the Banderowzi to work their violence in the shadow of his myth and influence. From the Polish prison he was kept in, he escaped after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. In the summer of 1941, he anticipated a more direct role in the conflict as future Prowidnyk (leader) but was arrested by the Germans following the Lviv proclamation of a Ukrainian state On June 30, 1941.
Prior to his arrest, however, he had drafted, with the aid of such deputies as Stepan Shukhevych, Stepan Lenkavs’kyi and Iaroslva Stes’ko, an internal party document ominously entitled, “The Struggle and Activities of the OUN in Wartime.” In it, purification is cherished, one that will scrub Ukrainian territory of “Muscovites, Poles, and Jews” with a special focus on those protecting the Soviet regime.
Following his arrest, Bandera spent time in Berlin. From there, he had a stint as a political prisoner of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. His time in detention did little to quell the zeal of his followers, who went along their merry way butchering in the name of their cult leader. After the war, he settled in Munich with his family, but was eventually identified by a KGB agent and murdered in 1959.
Bandera offers a slice of historical loathing and reverence for a good number of parties: as a figure of the Holocaust, an opportunistic collaborator, a freedom fighter. Even within Ukraine, the split between the reverential West and the loathing East remained. In January 2010, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko declare Bandera a Hero of Ukraine.
In 2020, Poland and Israel jointly rebuked the city government of Kyiv via its ambassadors for sporting banners connected with the nationalist figure. Bandera’s portrait made an appearance on a municipal building at the conclusion of a January 1 march honouring the man’s 111th birthday, with hundreds of individuals in attendance.
In their letter to the city state administration, ambassadors Bartosz Cichocki and Joel Lion of Poland and Israel respectively expressed their “great concern and sorrow… that Ukraine’s authorities of different levels: Lviv Oblast Council and the Kyiv City State Administration continue to cherish people and historical events, which has to be once and forever condemned.”
The ambassadors also expressed concern to the Lviv Oblast for tolerating its celebration of a number of other figures: Andriy Melnyk, another Third Reich collaborator whose blood lust was less keen than that of Bandera’s followers; Ivan Lypa, “the Anti-Semite, Antipole and xenophobe writer,” along with his son, Yurii Lypa, “who wrote the racist theory of the Ukrainian Race.”
The stubborn Bandera itch can manifest at any given moment. In July 2022, the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, as it so happens another Andriy Melnyk, misjudged the mood by airing his views about Bandera. He insisted that the nationalist figure had been needlessly libelled; he “was not a mass murderer of Jews and Poles” and nor was there evidence to suggest otherwise. The same Melnyk had also accused the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz of being a “beleidigte Leberwurst” (offended liver sausage), a delightful term reserved for the thin-skinned.
As ambassadors are usually expected to be vessels of government opinion, such conduct should have been revealing enough, though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s decision to remove Melnyk from his Berlin post was put down to “a normal part of diplomatic practice.” A likelier explanation lies in the furore the pro-Bandera remarks caused in the Israeli Embassy (“a distortion of the historical facts,” raged the official channel, not to mention belittling “the Holocaust and is an insult to those who were murdered by Bandera and his people) and Poland (“such an opinion and such words are absolutely unacceptable,” snapped the country’s Deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Przydacz).
Despite his removal from the post, messages of regret and condolences flowed from a number of his German hosts, suggesting that the butcher-adoration-complex should be no barrier to respect in times of conflict. “The fact that he did not always strike the diplomatic tone here is more than understandable in view of the incomprehensible war crimes and the suffering of the Ukrainian people,” reasoned the foreign policy spokesman of the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) parliamentary group, Roderich Kiesewetter. Bandera would surely have approved the sentiment.
During the 54th session, Ghana, Fiji, Hungary, Ireland and Uruguay will present a draft resolution on cooperation with the UN. ISHR urges all States to support the adoption of a HRC resolution that strengthens the UN’s responses to reprisals.
On 28 September, the Assistant Secretary General for Human Rights, Ilze Brands Kehris, will present the Secretary General’s annual Reprisals Report to the Council in her capacity as UN senior official on reprisals. States raising cases is an important aspect of seeking accountability and ending impunity for acts of reprisal and intimidation against defenders engaging with the UN. It can also send a powerful message of solidarity to defenders, supporting and sustaining their work in repressive environments.
Anexa Alfred Cunningham (Nicaragua), a Miskitu Indigenous leader, woman human rights defender, lawyer and expert on Indigenous peoples rights from Nicaragua, who has been denied entry back into her country since July 2022, when she participated in a session of a group of United Nations experts on the rights of Indigenous Peoples. States should demand that Anexa be permitted to return to her country, community and family and enabled to continue her work safely and without restriction.
Vanessa Mendoza (Andorra), a psychologist and the president of Associació Stop Violències, which focuses on gender-based violence, sexual and reproductive rights, and advocates for safe and legal abortion in Andorra. After engaging with CEDAW in 2019, Vanessa was charged with ‘slander with publicity’, ‘slander against the co-princes’ and ‘crimes against the prestige of the institutions’. She has been indicted for the alleged “crimes against the prestige of the institutions” involving a potentially heavy fine (up to 30,000 euros) and a criminal record if convicted. States should demand that the authorities in Andorra unconditionally drop all charges against Vanessa and amend laws which violate the rights to freedom of expression and association.
Kadar Abdi Ibrahim (Djibouti) is a human rights defender and journalist from Djibouti. He is also the Secretary-General of the political party Movement for Democracy and Freedom (MoDEL). Days after returning from Geneva, where Kadar carried out advocacy activities ahead of Djibouti’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR), intelligence service agents raided his house and confiscated his passport. He has thus been banned from travel for five years. States should call on the authorities in Djibouti to lift the travel ban and return Kadar’s passport immediately and unconditionally.
Hong Kong civil society (Hong Kong): Until 2020, civil society in Hong Kong was vibrant and had engaged consistently and constructively with the UN. This engagement came to a screeching halt after the imposition by Beijing of the National Security Law for Hong Kong (NSL), which entered into force on 1 July 2020. States should urge the Hong Kong authorities to repeal the offensive National Security Law and desist from criminalizing cooperation with the UN and other work to defend human rights.
Maryam al-Balushi and Amina al-Abduli (United Arab Emirates), Amina Al-Abdouli used to work as a school teacher. She was advocating for the Arab Spring and the Syrian uprising. She is a mother of five. Maryam Al Balushi was a student at the College of Technology. They were arrested for their human rights work, and held in incommunicado detention, tortured and forced into self-incriminatory confessions. After the UN Special Procedures mandate holders sent a letter to the UAE authorities raising concerns about their torture and ill treatment in detention in 2019, the UAE charged Amina and Maryam with three additional crimes. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found their detention arbitrary and a clear case of reprisals for communicating with Special Procedures. In April 2021, a court sentenced them to three additional years of prison for “publishing false information that disturbs the public order”. States should demand that authorities in the UAE immediately and unconditionally release Maryam and Amina and provide them with reparations for their arbitrary detention and ill-treatment.
Other thematic debates
At this 54th session, the Council will discuss a range of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights and issues through dedicated debates with the:
Special Rapporteur on truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence
Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, including its causes and consequences
Working Group on Arbitrary Detention
Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances
Special Rapporteur on the implications for human rights of the environmentally sound management and disposal of hazardous substances and waste
ID on HC oral update on drivers, root causes and human rights impacts of religious hatred constituting incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence
In addition, the Council will hold dedicated debates on the rights of specific groups including with the:
Independent Expert on the enjoyment of all human rights by older persons
Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
Country-specific developments
Afghanistan
The Council will hold an Interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan on 11 September, and on the OHCHR report on Afghanistan on 12 September, and will consider a resolution on the human rights situation in Afghanistan at this session.
ISHR supports the call of Afghan human rights defenders to the Council to renew the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan. We also support the call to establish a parallel independent investigative mechanism in the upcoming September session and to ensure meaningful follow up to the joint report of the Special Rapporteur and the Working Group on discrimination against women and girls, as well as continuation of a dedicated discussion at the Council on the situation of women and girls in Afghanistan. Accountability for widespread human rights violations, including gender apartheid and other crimes against humanity, is imperative to securing sustainable peace and development in the country.
Algeria
We urge States to demand that Algeria, a Council member, end its crackdown on human rights defenders and civil society organisations, amend laws aimed at silencing peaceful dissent and stifling civil society, and immediately and unconditionally release arbitrarily detained human rights defenders and activists, including in the interactive dialogue with the Working Group on arbitrary detention. Since the beginning of the Hirak pro-democracy movement, the Working Group has issued at least 6 decisions of arbitrary detention, highlighting Algerian legislation that is inconsistent with international law, violations of due process and the right to a fair trial, as well as violations to the right to freedom of expression, discrimination based on language, ethnicity and religion. They have also condemned Algeria’s abuse of counter-terrorism legislation. States should call on Algeria to implement the recommendations of the working group.
We also urge States to address the case of reprisals against HRDs Kaddour Chouicha and Jamila Loukil, members of the Algerian League for the Defence of Human Rights (LADDH) before its dissolution by the Algerian authorities. They were prevented from traveling to attend the pre-session organized by UPR-info, a clear case of reprisals against human rights defenders attempting to cooperate with the UPR. Chouicha, Loukil and other HRDs are charged in a criminal case, which includes ‘enrollment in a terrorist or subversive organization active abroad or in Algeria’. They are still awaiting trial as the authorities postponed their court session on 15 June 2023. If convicted of these charges, they face up to twenty years imprisonment.
Bahrain
Civil society organisations, including ISHR, have requested States to urge Bahraini authorities to unconditionally release all those sentenced for their political opinions, including human rights defenders Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja and Abduljalil Al-Singace, and in the meantime, to ensure that they are provided with life-saving medical care to prevent an imminent tragedy. [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2023/08/20/500-bahraini-prisoners-on-hunger-strike-over-conditions/]
Burundi
The Council will hold an Interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on Burundi on 22 September. As serious human rights violations persist in Burundi and the Government has failed to hold perpetrators accountable or take the concerns raised by Burundian and international actors seriously, the Council should not relax its scrutiny. The Council should extend the Special Rapporteur’s mandate for a further year.
China
31 August marked one year since the release of the groundbreaking OHCHR report finding possible crimes against humanity committed by the Chinese government in Xinjiang. This Council session also marks one year since the failure of the Council, and most of its Council Members, to stand by principle against Beijing’s coercion and promote a dialogue on the human rights of Uyghurs. Since that time, the recommendations of the OHCHR’s report have been echoed by the CERD in its Urgent Action decision on Xinjiang, by the CESCR and CEDAW in their respective Concluding Observations, and by 15 Special Procedures mandates in their seven benchmarks on Xinjiang. Yet, in a surprise visit to the region in August, President Xi Jinping reiterated its hardline policy and called for further efforts to ensure ‘social stability’ and ‘control illegal religious activities’. States should take collective action to urge China to implement key recommendations from the OHCHR Xinjiang report, and from relevant UN Treaty Bodies and Special Procedures, with a focus on root causes of violations that commonly affect Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hong Kongers and mainland Chinese human rights defenders, including the abuse of national security laws and measures.
States should further ask for the prompt release of human rights defenders targeted by the Chinese government’s renewed crackdown on human rights lawyers, including lawyer Lu Siwei at risk of refoulement from Laos, activists Chang Weiping, Ding Jiaxi and Xu Zhiyong, recently convicted to lengthy prison sentences, as well as Yu Wensheng and Xu Yan, detained en route to meet with EU diplomats in Beijing. Ten years after the detention, and subsequent death in custody, of woman human rights defender Cao Shunli on her way to attend China’s UPR in Geneva, the Council must also pierce the veil of impunity for egregious cases of reprisals, and call on China to acknowledge its responsibility, bring perpetrators to justice and provide adequate remedy. [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2023/09/05/human-rights-lawyer-gao-zhisheng-and-the-practice-of-enforced-disappearances-joint-letter/]
Egypt
Recent arrests and arbitrary detention of several media figures, dissidents and their family members in Egypt are indicative of the ongoing crackdown on basic freedoms and liberties in the country, and reflect a lack of genuine political will to improve the human rights situation by the Egyptian government. In the last ten years, Egyptian human rights organisations have recorded the enforced disappearance of no less than 3,000 citizens for varying periods of time, death by mistreatment and medical negligence of at least 1,200 people in detention centers, the sexual assault of at least 655 people and their family members, and the extrajudicial killing of more than 750 people. The continued silence on Egypt by States at the Council will only encourage further violations. NGOs continue to urge States to ensure appropriate action on Egypt at the Council though the establishment of a monitoring and reporting mechanisms on the human rights crises in the country. As an immediate step, States should deliver a follow-up joint statement condemning the human rights situation in the country and calling on the Egyptian government to refrain from continuing to carry out wide-spread human rights violations.
Israel/OPT
While Israel rejected all the recommendations on the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and refugee return made by states during its UPR review, States should reiterate their commitment to putting an end to 75 years of denial of the Palestinian’s people inalienable rights to return and self-determination.
During HRC 53, civil society welcomed the resolution put forward by the OIC to ensure the full implementation of the United Nations database of businesses involved in Israeli’s settlement enterprise in the occupied Palestinian territory. States must ensure that the mandate is implemented in full as it represents a question of credibility to the Council, including by ensuring that the budget adopted in the fifth committee of the General Assembly later this year is in line with the programme budget implications (PBI).
Russia
The Council will hold an Interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on the Russian Federation on 21 September. The Council will also be called upon to renew the mandate of the Special Rapporteur (HRC Resolution 51/25). ISHR strongly supports the renewal of the mandate and urges States to oppose Russia’s candidacy to the Human Rights Council.
The human rights situation in Russia continues to deteriorate, while Russia also continues to perpetrate atrocity crimes in Ukraine In recent months, Russia has enacted laws providing immunity against war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the ‘State’s interests’, intensified its assault against LGBT persons, adopted further measures to repress civil society and silence independent journalists, and continued to arbitrarily imprison human rights defenders. Of further and direct relevance to the Council, Russia adopted a new law on 28 April 2023 which criminalises assistance, cooperation or confidential communications with international bodies, which may include the HRC and its mechanisms. These regressive developments, and the lack of any improvement in the human rights situation in the country, clearly warrant the extension of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur.
With respect to Russia’s candidacy for the Council, ISHR only campaigns against countries based on strict and objective criteria. Russia manifestly fulfils all of these criteria, being a country: (1) responsible for a pattern of reprisals against those who cooperate with the UN; (2) responsible for the repression of civil society (Russia is ranked as ‘closed’ (scoring 17/100 in the Civicus Monitor); and (3) directly responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine according to the HRC-mandated CoI. On ISHR’s HRC candidate scorecards, Russia scores just 1/20 on objective criteria.
Saudi Arabia
In light of the ongoing diplomatic rehabilitation of crown prince and de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi authorities’ brazen repression continues to intensify. Some notable recent trends as documented by ALQST include, but are not limited to: the further harsh sentencing against individuals for peaceful social media use, including a death sentence issued against a man for tweets, the prosecution of women such as Manahel al-Otaibi over her choice of clothing and support for women’s rights, the ongoing forcible disappearance of prisoners of conscience including Mohammed al-Qahtani [see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/78383825-0b3f-4bca-883a-b81e1baecd09]and Essa al-Nukheifi beyond the expiry of their sentences, and; regressive developments in relation to the death penalty, including a surge in executions (95 individuals were executed in 2023 so far), and several young men at imminent risk of execution for crimes they allegedly committed as minors. Human Rights Watch has documented the brutal massacre of migrants at the Yemen border, in what may amount to further crimes against humanity. ISHR continues to call for States at the Council to adopt a resolution mandating an independent international monitoring and investigative mechanism on massive human rights violations perpetrated in and by Saudi Arabia.
Sudan
On 12 September, the Council will hold Interactive Dialogue on the High Commissioner’s oral update on Sudan.
Sudanese Women Rights Action published a report “laying an overview of the conditions of women’s rights and gender equality in Sudan as an extended crisis started on October 25th, 2021, when the military took over the power in Sudan, ending the transitional period on a bloody note…the report presents verified information about the crises scope, context, and responses from a gender perspective based on the needs on the grounds, the challenges, and the recommended interventions according to local actors and women activists.” ISHR urges the implementation of the recommendations identified by women activists including to “Pressure both fighting parties to commit to sustainable Ceasefire; Pressure the fighting parties to open humanitarian corridors; Provide urgent funding to the humanitarian aid interventions; Ensure protection and evacuation of women and WHRDs from fighting areas”. Ahead of HRC54, ISHR joined over 110 NGOs in reiterating a call on the Council to establish an independent investigative mechanism on Sudan with a mandate to investigate human rights violations and abuses in Sudan, collect and preserve evidence, and identify those responsible.
Tunisia
We regret that the Council failed to exercise its prevention mandate and address the deteriorating human rights situation in Tunisia during HRC 53, during which the High Commissioner and UN Special Procedures raised alarm at the escalating pattern of human rights violations and the rapidly worsening situation in Tunisia following President Kais Saied’s power grab on 25 July 2021. In the last two years in Tunisia there has been a significant erosion of the rule of law, attacks on the independence of the judiciary, reprisals against independent judges and lawyers and judges associations, a crackdown on peaceful political opposition and abusive use of “counter-terrorism” law in politicised prosecutions, as well as attacks on freedom of expression and threats to freedom of association.
In an open letter against the “Memorandum of Understanding on a Strategic and Comprehensive Partnership between the European Union (EU) and Tunisia” and against the EU’s border externalisation policies, 379 researchers and members of civil society decried the use of vulnerable populations as scapegoats to mask the failures of public policy in Tunisia. While Tunisian authorities were persecuting Black African foreign nationals, including migrants, asylum seekers and refugees – deporting at least 1,200 sub-Saharan nationals to the borders with Libya and Algeria, in inaccessible and militarised desert zones, leaving them abandoned without water and food – the signing of the Memorandum effectively gave Tunisia “a blank check, following a strategy that is all the more irresponsible given its inefficacy”. Unless States tackle “the structural socio-economic causes of so-called irregular migration”, and radically rethink access to mobility, “this security approach to border management will only make crossings more deadly and strengthen smugglers”. Addressing these grave violations cannot be done without also urgently addressing the rule of law crisis in the country.
Venezuela
The UN’s fact-finding mission on Venezuela (FFM) will report to the Council on 25 and 26 September. The Mission will focus on the situation for human rights defenders in the country – an essential focus given the existing and proposed legislation adversely affecting civic space, and the threats and attacks HRDs face. The recent sentencing of 6 union leaders, denounced by UN Special Rapporteurs, is a clear example of the criminalisation of HRDs, as is the continued detention of the HRD Javier Tarazona, since July 2021, and that of many other real or perceived opposition figures. The continuing impunity in regard to the killing of defender Virgilio Trujillo Arana a year ago is an example of how little will exists to prevent attacks against HRDs.
In its first report in 2020, the FFM stated that it had reasonable grounds to believe that crimes against humanity had been carried out in Venezuela, with the principal targets of violations including social activists and political leaders at the forefront of protests. The recommendations made by the FFM at that time have not been implemented. We recall that Venezuela continues to refuse to engage with the FFM or allow it to enter the country.
States must participate in the interactive dialogue with the FFM to highlight the essential role of HRDs; express utmost concern at the ongoing, systematic threats, attacks and restrictions against civic space, and urge the Venezuelan authorities to take immediate steps to implement the recommendations issued by the UN human rights system. States must speak out forcefully in support of the FFM and its work, and encourage other states to do the same. This vital accountability mandate must be supported and its recommendations echoed, so that victims of violations in the country can believe that one day justice will be done.
Other country situations:
The High Commissioner will provide an oral update to the Council on 11 September 2023. The Council will consider updates, reports and is expected to consider resolutions addressing a range of country situations, in some instances involving the renewal of the relevant expert mandates. These include:
Interactive Dialogue on the report of the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar and Interactive Dialogue on the OHCHR report on Myanmar
Interactive Dialogue on the report of the High Commissioner on Nicaragua and oral update by the Group of Experts on Nicaragua
Interactive Dialogue on the report of the OHCHR on Sri Lanka
Interactive Dialogue with the Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia
Interactive Dialogue with the Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic
Interactive Dialogue on the interim oral update of the High Commissioner on the situation of human rights in Belarus
Interactive Dialogue with the Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine and Interactive Dialogue on the High Commissioner oral update on Ukraine
Enhanced Interactive Dialogue on the report of the High Commissioner and experts on the Democratic Republic of Congo
Interactive Dialogue on the oral update of OHCHR on technical assistance and capacity-building for South Sudan
Interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on Cambodia and presentation of the Secretary-General’s report
Interactive Dialogue with the Independent Expert on Somalia
Interactive Dialogue with the Independent Expert on the Central African Republic
Interactive Dialogue with the High Commissioner on the interim report on Haiti
Presentation of the High Commissioner’s report on cooperation with Georgia
Presentation of the High Commissioner’s report on cooperation with Yemen
Council programme, appointments and resolutions
Appointment of mandate holders
The President of the Human Rights Council has proposed candidates for the following mandates:
Special Rapporteur on minority issues
Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants
Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism
Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity
Working Group on discrimination against women and girls, several members
Resolutions to be presented to the Council’s 54th session
At the organisational meeting on 28 August resolutions were announced (States leading the resolution in brackets):
From rhetoric to reality: a global call for concrete action against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance (Africa Group)
Technical assistance and capacity-building in the field of human rights in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Africa Group)
Question of the death penalty (Benin, Belgium, Costa Rica, France, Mexico, Mongolia, Republic of Moldova, Switzerland)
Special Rapporteur on truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence – mandate renewal (Argentina, Morocco, Switzerland)
Human rights and Indigenous Peoples (Guatemala, Mexico)
Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan – mandate renewal (EU)
Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Burundi – mandate renewal (EU)
Working Group on enforced or involuntary disappearances – mandate renewal (Argentina, France, Japan, Morocco)
Implementation of the UN declaration on the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas (Bolivia)
Technical assistance and capacity-building for Yemen in the field of human rights (Lebanon on behalf of the Arab Group)
Special Rapporteur on Russia – mandate renewal (Luxembourg on behalf of 26 EU countries)
Right to privacy in the digital age (Austria, Brazil, Germany, Liechtenstein, Mexico)
A world of sports free from racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance (Brazil and Africa Group)
Cooperation with the United Nations, its representatives and mechanisms in the field of human rights (Fiji, Ghana, Hungary, Ireland, Uruguay)
The core group on Sudan (Germany, Norway, UK, US) announced that they are considering presenting a resolution on Sudan at this session. The core group on Syria (Germany, France, Italy, Jordan, Netherlands, Qatar, Turkiye, UK, USA) also announced that they are considering presenting a resolution on the human rights situation in Syria.
Read here the three year programme of work of the Council with supplementary information.
Read here ISHR’s recommendations on the key issues that are or should be on the agenda of the UN Human Rights Council in 2023.
It all tallies. War, investments and returns. The dividends, solid, though the effort expended – at least by others – awful and bloody. While a certain narrative in US politics continues in the vein of traditional cant and hustling ceremony regarding the Ukraine War – “noble freedom fighters, we salute you!” twinned with “Russian aggressors will be defeated” – there are the inadvertently honest ones let things slip. A subsidised war pays, especially when it is fought by others.
The latter narrative has been something of a retort, an attempt to deter a growing wobbling sentiment in the US about continuing support for Ukraine. In a Brookings study published in April, evidence of wearying was detected. “A plurality of Americans, 46%, said the United States should stay the course in supporting Ukraine for only one to two years, compared with 38% who said the United States should stay the course for as long as it takes.”
In early August, a CNN survey found that 51% of respondents believed that Washington had done enough to halt Russian military aggression in Ukraine, with 45% approving of additional funding to the war effort. A breakdown of the figures on ideological grounds revealed that additional funding is supported by 69% of liberals, 44% of moderates and 31% of conservatives. In Congress, opposition to greater, ongoing spending is growing among the Republicans, reflecting increasing concern among GOP voters that too much is being done to prop up Kyiv.
Such a mood has been anticipated by number crunching types keen to reduce human life to an adjustable unit on a spreadsheet. The Centre for European Policy Analysis, for example, suggested that a “cost-benefit analysis” would be useful regarding US support for Ukraine. “It’s producing wins at almost every level,” came the confident assessment. In spectacularly vulgar language, the centre notes that, “from numerous perspectives, when viewed from a bang-per-buck perspective, US and Western support for Ukraine is an incredibly cost-effective investment.”
War-intoxicated Democrats would do well to remind their Republican colleagues about such wins, notably to those great patriots known as the US Arms Industry. Aid packages to Ukraine, while dressed up as noble, democratic efforts to ameliorate a suffering country’s position vis-à-vis Russia, are much more than that.
In May 2022, for instance, President Joe Biden signed a bill providing Kyiv $40.1 billion in emergency funding, split between $24.6 for military programs, and $15.5 billion for non-military objects. Even then, it was clear that one group would prove the greatest beneficiary. Stephen Semler of the Security Policy Reform Institute was unequivocal: US military contractors.
Of the package, rich rewards amounting to $17.3 billion would flow to such contractors, comprising goods, be they in terms of weapons and equipment, or services in the form of training, logistics and intelligence. “It allows the Biden administration,” writes Semler, “to continue escalating the United States’ military involvement in the war as the administration appears increasingly disinterested in bringing it to an end through diplomacy.”
Broadly speaking, the US military-industrial complex continues to gorge and merely getting larger. Whatever the outcome of this war – talk of absolute victory or defeat being the stuff of dangerous fantasy – it remains the true beneficiary, the sole victor fed by new markets and opportunities. Former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, now vice president of the Toledo Center for Peace, had to concede that the US arms industry was the “one clear winner” in this bloody tangle.
The addition of new member states to NATO, in this case Finland and Sweden, will, Ben Ami suggests, “open up a big new market for US defence contractors, because the alliance’s interoperability rule would bind them to American-made defence systems.” The evidence is already there, with Finland’s order of 64 new F-35 strike fighters developed by Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems. The Ukraine War has been nothing short of lucrative in that regard.
Such expansion also comes with another benefit. The interoperability requirement in the NATO scheme acts as a bar to any alternatives. “The market for their goods is expanding,” writes Jon Markman for Forbes, “and they will face no competition for the foreseeable future.”
It should come as little surprise that the US defence contractors have been banging the drum for NATO enlargement from the late 1990s on. While a good number of those in the US diplomatic stable feared the consequences of an aggressive membership drive, those in the business of making and selling arms would have none of it. The end of the Cold War necessitated a search for new horizons in selling instruments of death. And with each new NATO member – Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic – the contracts came. Washington and the defence contractors, twinned with purpose, pursued the agenda with gusto.
In 1997, Democratic Senator Tom Harkin was awake to that fact in hearings of the Senate Appropriations Committee on the cost of NATO enlargement. He was particularly concerned by a fatuous remark by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright comparing NATO’s expansion with the economic Marshall plan implemented in the aftermath of the Second World War. “My fear is that NATO expansion will not be a Marshall plan to bring stability and democracy to the newly freed European nations but, rather, a Marshall plan for defense contractors who are chomping [sic] at the bit to sell weapons and make profits.”
The moral here from the US military-industrial complex is: stay the course. The returns are worth it. And in such a calculus, concepts such as freedom and democracy can be commodified and budgeted. As for Ukrainian suffering? Well, let it continue.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.
The West is writing a script about its relations with China as stuffed full of misdirection as an Agatha Christie novel.
In recent months, US and European officials have scurried to Beijing for so-called talks, as if the year were 1972 and Richard Nixon were in the White House.
But there will be no dramatic, era-defining US-China pact this time. If relations are to change, it will be decisively for the worse.
The West’s two-faced policy towards China was starkly illustrated last week by the visit to Beijing of Britain’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly – the first by a senior UK official for five years.
While Cleverly talked vaguely afterwards about the importance of not “disengaging” from China and avoiding “mistrust and errors”, the British parliament did its best to undermine his message.
The foreign affairs committee issued a report on UK policy in the Indo-Pacific that provocatively described the Chinese leadership as “a threat to the UK and its interests”.
In terminology that broke with past diplomacy, the committee referred to Taiwan – a breakaway island that Beijing insists must one day be “reunified” with China – as an “independent country”. Only 13 states recognise Taiwan’s independence.
The committee urged the British government to pressure its Nato allies into imposing sanctions on China.
Upping the stakes
The UK parliament is meddling recklessly in a far-off zone of confrontation with the potential for incendiary escalation against a nuclear power, a situation unrivalled outside of Ukraine.
But Britain is far from alone. Last year, for the first time, Nato moved well out of its supposed sphere of influence – the North Atlantic – to declare Beijing a challenge to its “interests, security and values”.
There can be little doubt that Washington is the moving force behind this escalation against China, a state posing no obvious military threat to the West.
It has upped the stakes significantly by making its military presence felt ever more firmly in and around the Straits of Taiwan – the 100-mile wide waterway separating China from Taiwan that Beijing views as its doorstep.
Senior US officials have been making noisy visits to Taiwan – not least, Nancy Pelosi last summer, when she was house speaker. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is showering Taiwan with weapons systems.
If this weren’t enough to inflame China, Washington is drawing Beijing’s neighbours deeper into military alliances – such as Aukus and the Quad – to isolate China and leave it feeling threatened. The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, describes this as a policy of “comprehensive containment, encirclement and suppression against us”.
Last month, President Biden hosted Japan and South Korea at Camp David, forging a trilateral security arrangement directed at what they called China’s “dangerous and aggressive behavior”.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s “Pacific Defence Initiative” budget – chiefly intended to contain and encircle China – just keeps rising.
In the latest move, revealed last week, the US is in talks with Manila to build a naval port in the northernmost Philippine islands, 125 miles from Taiwan, boosting “American access to strategically located islands facing Taiwan”.
That will become the ninth Philippine base used by the US military, part of a network of some 450 operating in the South Pacific.
Dirty double game
So what’s going on? Is Britain – along with its Nato allies – interested in building greater trust with Beijing, as Cleverly argues, or backing Washington’s escalatory manoeuvres against a nuclear-armed China over a small territory on the other side of the globe, as the British parliament indicates?
Inadvertently, the foreign affairs committee’s chair, Alicia Kearns, got to the heart of the matter. She accused the British government of having a “confidential, elusive China strategy”, one “buried deep in Whitehall, kept hidden even from senior ministers”.
And not by accident.
European leaders are torn. They fear losing access to Chinese goods and markets, plunging their economies deeper into recession after a cost-of-living crisis precipitated by the Ukraine war. But most are even more afraid of angering Washington, which is determined to isolate and contain China.
That divide was highlighted by French President Emmanuel Macron following a visit to China in April, when he urged “strategic autonomy” for Europe towards Beijing.
“Is it in our interest to accelerate [a crisis] on Taiwan? No. The worse thing would be to think that we Europeans must become followers on this topic and take our cue from the US agenda and a Chinese overreaction,” he said.
Macron soon found himself roundly rebuked in Washington and European capitals.
Instead, a dirty double game is being played. The West makes conciliatory noises towards Beijing, while its actions turn ever more belligerent.
Cleverly himself alluded to this deceit, observing of relations with China: “If there is ever a situation where our security concerns are at odds with our economic concerns, our security concerns win out.”
After Ukraine, we are told, Taiwan must be the locus of the West’s all-consuming security interest.
Cleverly’s meaning is barely veiled: Europe’s clear economic interests in maintaining good relations with Beijing must be suborned to Washington’s more malevolent agenda, masquerading as Nato security interests.
Forget Macron’s “autonomy”.
Notably, this game of misdirection draws on the same blueprint that shaped the long build-up to the Ukraine war.
Moscow cornered
Western politicians and media repeat the preposterous claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” only because they created a cover story beforehand, as they now do with China.
I have set out in detail before how these provocations unfolded. Bit by bit, US administrations eroded Ukrainian neutrality and incorporated Russia’s large neighbour into the Nato fold. The intention was to covertly turn it into a forward base, capable of positioning nuclear-tipped missiles minutes from Moscow.
Washington ignored warnings from its most senior officials and Russia experts that cornering Moscow would eventually provoke it into a pre-emptive strike against Ukraine. Why? Because, it seems, that was the goal all along.
The invasion provided the pretext for the US to impose sanctions and wage its current proxy war, using Ukrainians as foot soldiers, to neutralise Russia militarily and economically – or “weaken” it, as the US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin explicitly terms Washington’s key aim in the Ukraine war.
Moscow is seen as an obstacle, alongside China, to the US maintaining “full-spectrum global dominance” – a doctrine that came to the fore after the Soviet Union’s collapse three decades ago.
Using Nato as sidekick, Washington is determined to keep the world unipolar at all costs. It is desperate to preserve its global, imperial military and economic might, even as its star wanes. In such circumstances, Europe’s options for Macron-style autonomy are non-existent.
Peace talks charade
The public’s continuing ignorance of Nato’s countless provocations against Russia is hardly surprising. Reference to them is all but taboo in Western media.
Instead, the West’s belligerent manoeuvrings – as with those now against China – are overshadowed by a script that trumpets its faux-diplomacy, supposedly rebuffed by “madman” Russian President Vladimir Putin.
This disingenuous narrative was typified by western double-dealing over accords signed in 2014 and 2015 in the Belarussian capital Minsk – after negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv to stop a bloody civil war in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donbass.
There, Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and separatist Ukrainians of Russian origin began facing off in 2014, immediately after yet more covert meddling. Washington assisted in the overthrow of an elected Ukrainian government sympathetic to Moscow. In response, ethnic Russians demanded greater autonomy from Kyiv.
The official story is that, far from inflaming conflict, the West sought to foster peace, with Germany and France brokering the Minsk accords.
One can argue about why those agreements failed. But following Russia’s invasion, a disturbing new light was shed on their context by Angela Merkel, German chancellor at the time.
She told Die Ziet newspaper last December that the 2014 Minsk agreement was less about achieving peace than “an attempt to give Ukraine time. It also used this time to get stronger, as you can see today… In early 2015, Putin could easily have overrun them [areas in Donbas] at the time. And I very much doubt that the Nato countries could have done as much then as they do now to help Ukraine.”
If Russia could have overrun Ukraine at any time from 2014 onwards, why did it wait eight years, while its neighbour grew much stronger, assisted by the West?
Assuming Merkel is being honest, Germany, it seems, never really believed the peace process it oversaw stood a chance. That suggests one of two possibilities.
Either the initiative was a charade, brokered to buy more time for Ukraine to be integrated into Nato, a path that was bound to lead to Russia’s invasion – as Merkel herself acknowledges. Indeed, she accepts that Ukraine’s accession process into Nato launched in 2008 was “wrong”.
Or Merkel knew that the US would work with Kyiv’s new pro-Washington government to disrupt the process. Europe could do little more than delay an inevitable war for as long as possible.
Neither alternative fits the “unprovoked” narrative. Both suggest Merkel understood Moscow’s patience would eventually run out.
The theatre of the Minsk accords was directed at Moscow, which delayed invading on the assumption the talks were in good faith, but also at western publics. When Russia did finally invade, they could be easily persuaded Putin never planned to embrace western “peace” overtures.
Economic chokehold
As with Ukraine, the cover story concealing the West’s provocations towards China has been carefully directed from Washington.
Europeans like Cleverly are parading around Beijing to make it look like the West desires peaceful engagement. But the only real engagement is the crafting of a military noose around China’s neck, just as a noose was crafted earlier for Russia.
The security rationale this time – of protecting far-off Taiwan – obscures Washington’s less palatable aim: to enforce US global dominance by smashing any economic or technological threat from China and Russia.
Washington can’t remain military top dog if it doesn’t also maintain a chokehold on the global economy to fund its inflated Pentagon budget, equivalent to the combined spending of the next 10 nations.
The dangers to Washington are only underscored by the rapid expansion of Brics, a bloc of emerging economic powers headed by China and Russia. Six new members will join the current five in January, with many more waiting in the wings.
An expanded Brics offers new security and economic axes on which these emerging powers can organise, profoundly weakening US influence.
Brics+ will only strengthen their mutual interests.
That will be no comfort in Washington. The US has long favoured keeping the two at loggerheads, in a divide-and-rule policy that rationalised its continuous meddling to control the oil-rich Middle East and favoured Washington’s key regional military ally, Israel.
But Brics+ won’t just end the US role in dictating global security arrangements. It will gradually loosen Washington’s stranglehold on the global economy, ending the dollar’s dominance as the world reserve currency.
Brics+ now controls a majority of the world’s energy supplies, and some 37 percent of global GDP, more than the US-led G7. Opportunities to trade in currencies other than the dollar become much easier.
As Paul Craig Roberts, a former official in Ronald Reagan’s treasury, observed: “Declining use of the dollar means a declining supply of customers for US debt, which means pressure on the dollar’s exchange value and the prospect of rising inflation from rising prices of imports.”
In short, a weak dollar is going to make bullying the rest of the world a considerably more difficult prospect.
The US isn’t likely to go down without a fight. Which is why Ukrainians and Russians are currently dying on the battlefield. And why China and the rest of us have good reason to fear who may be next.
The Biden administration is expected to send armor-piercing munitions containing depleted uranium to Ukraine as part of the latest military aid package, even though the weapons are radioactive and their use causes contamination that is hazardous to human health. It’s the latest escalation in the war between Ukraine and Russia that nonproliferation activists warn could possibly lead to a nuclear…
The Biden administration will, for the first time, send controversial armor-piercing munitions containing depleted uranium to Ukraine, according to Reuters. The munition can be fired from U.S. Abrams tanks, which are expected to arrive in Ukraine in the coming weeks. The shells, which will come from U.S. excess inventory, would be funded by the Presidential Drawdown Authority…
Illustration: Liu Rui/GT
