On 1 July 2023, woman human rights defender and author Viktoria Amelina died in hospital in Dnipro, Ukraine after sustaining fatal injuries during the Russian missile attack on Kramatorsk, Ukraine on 27 June 2023. PEN Ukraine reported the death of the woman human rights defender on 3 July 2023 with the consent of her relatives. Viktoria is survived by her husband and 10-year old son.
Viktoria Amelina was a woman human rights defender and writer. In June 2022, after the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, she joined the Ukrainian human rights organisation Truth Hounds to document war crimes. She had been documenting apparent Russian war crimes in the liberated territories of eastern, southern and northern Ukraine, and particularly the village of Kapytolivka in Kharkiv region. During one of her missions, Viktoria Amelina discovered a diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a Ukrainian writer who was abducted and killedby the Russian military. She was also working on a non-fiction project “War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War”, a research project about the Ukrainian women human rights defenders documenting and investigating war crimes committed by the Russian military. Before joining Truth Hounds, Viktoria Amelina actively campaigned for the liberation of Oleh Sentsov, a Ukrainian film director from Crimea who was a political prisoner of the Russian authorities from 2014 to 2019.
Viktoria Amelina won the Joseph Conrad Literature Prize for her prose works, including the novels Dom’s Dream Kingdom and Fall Syndrome, and was a finalist for the European Union Prize for Literature. In 2021, she founded the New York book festival in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, where New York refers to a village in Donetsk that is very close to the military frontline.
On 27 June 2023, the woman human rights defender Viktoria Amelina was in Kramatorsk, in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, accompanying a delegation of Colombian writers and journalists who represented #AguantaUcrania, a group that raises awareness about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in Latin America. Before coming to Kramatorsk, the group took part in a prominent Ukraninan literary fair “Book Arsenal.” They all arrived to Kramatorsk to document the situation in Ukrainian cities in the Donetsk region to support the visibility work of #AguantaUcrania.
On the evening of 27 June 2023, the group was having dinner in the Ria Lounge restaurant in Kramatorsk, when a Russian missile hit the building in which the restaurant was located. This missile killed 13 civilians and injured a further 60. As a result of the missile strike, Viktoria Amelina suffered a severe head injury and was hospitalised in Kramatorsk, before being transferred to the hospital in Dnipro. The woman human rights defender died in the hospital in Dnipro three days later, on 1 June 2023.
Truth Hounds and PEN Ukraine reported that, in the aftermath of the attack, Russian state propaganda media falsely claimed that the target of the missile was the temporary headquarters of one of the Ukrainian Armed Forces brigades. In reality, the Ria Lounge restaurant in Kramatorsk was one of the most popular restaurants in the city and was frequented by Ukrainian and international human rights and civil society actors, humanitarian volunteers, and media and film crews. Truth Hounds and PEN Ukraine’s report stated that there were no military objectives that the Russian military could have have been targetting with a missile attack that day. Together, the human rights organisations made a public statement concerning the strike, stating that the precision of the Iskander missiles leads them to believe that the missile strike was an attack against the civilian population.
In light of the death of the woman human rights defender Viktoria Amelina, Front Line Defenders once again reiterates its grave concern about the killings of Ukrainian human rights defenders, civil society activists, humanitarian volunteers and other community leaders as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion in Ukraine. According to Front Line Defenders’ HRD Memorial, at least 50 human rights defenders were killed in Ukraine in 2022, including humanitarian actors and human rights journalists, as a result of the activities of the Russian military forces.
Front Line Defenders strongly condemns the killing of the woman human rights defender Viktoria Amelina and urges the authorities of the Russian Federation to cease targeting civilian objects in accordance with Russia’s international humanitarian and human rights law obligations, recalling that the deliberate targeting of civilians is prohibited under the Fourth Geneva Convention. The attack on the Ria Lounge restaurant may qualify as a war crime pursuant to Article 8(2)(b)(ii) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) – “intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects.” Alternatively, such an attack may be qualified under Article 8(2)(b)(i) – “intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population”; or Article 8(2)(b)(iii) – “intentionally directing attacks against personnel, installations, material, units or vehicles involved in a humanitarian assistance […] mission.” Front Line Defenders calls for an impartial and independent investigation into the killing of human rights defender Viktoria Amelina while she was on mission conducting her human rights work. All those involved in the commission of this crime must be brought to justice.
Russian authorities grounded a Moscow-bound flight to arrest a North Korean diplomat’s wife and son who went missing from the far eastern city of Vladivostok last month, residents in Russia familiar with the case told Radio Free Asia.
RFA reported on June 6 that Russian authorities announced that they were searching for Kim Kum Sun, 43, and Park Kwon Ju, 15, who had last been seen on June 4 leaving the North Korean consulate in Vladivostok.
Kim had been working as the acting manager of two North Korean restaurants in the city in place of her husband, considered a diplomat, who traveled to North Korea in 2019 but was unable to return to Russia due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
On July 7, the day after the announcement, Kim and Park were arrested after boarding a Moscow-bound flight departing from the central Russian city of Krasnoyarsk, a resident of Vladivostok, who requested anonymity for personal safety, told RFA’s Korean Service.
“Their flight to Moscow departed from Yemelyanovo International Airport located on the outskirts of Krasnoyarsk as normal, but to arrest the mother and the son, the Russian public security authorities forced the plane to return to the airport,” he said. “When the plane landed …, the authorities arrested them.”
They would have gotten all the way to Moscow if not for the consulate getting Russian authorities involved, the Vladivostok resident said.
As of Tuesday, Russian media has made no mention of Kim and Park’s arrest. RFA was not able to confirm with Russian authorities that they grounded the flight to arrest the pair.
Higher priority?
It was also not clear if Kim and Park had been accused of any crimes.
But it is standard procedure for the North Korean consulate to fraudulently accuse missing personnel of crimes so that Russian authorities place a higher priority on the case, a Russian citizen of Korean descent from Krasnoyarsk, who requested anonymity for security reasons, told RFA.
“North Korea reports missing people by framing them for crimes,” he said. “So the escapees are in danger of being executed without the protection of the local state and the international community.”
But if they were accused criminals, the runaways would not be eligible for international protection, he said.
The Krasnoyarsk resident confirmed that the authorities ordered the plane to return to the airport to arrest Kim and Park.
“There has been an increasing number of escape attempts among North Korean trade officials and workers in Russia recently,” he said.
They may have been inspired by other North Koreans who successfully fled, including a computer engineer, a work unit manager, a work site manager, a doctor and a soldier from the General Staff Department of the North Korean military.
“The United Nations and the international community must take an active role in helping those who risk their lives to escape from the dictatorship,” the Krasnoyarsk resident said.
“Instead of [arresting them] as demanded by the North Korean authorities and sending them to a place where death awaits them, [Russian authorities] should open the way for them to receive refugee status according to the regulations set by the United Nations.”
Translated by Leejin J. Chung. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Kim Jieun for RFA Korean.
A new investigation reveals the extent of the CIA’s involvement in the war in Ukraine, where the agency operates clandestinely in what, under a formal declaration of war, would be the domain of the military. We’re joined on the show by the author of the investigation, William Arkin, a national security reporter and senior editor at Newsweek, who says that the CIA has “got its hand in a little bit…
On the road to Rustavi Prison #12, where the only journalist jailed in Georgia is still serving out his 3.5-year sentence, Sofia Liluashvili is speaking to me about poetry.
Liluashvili is the wife of Georgian journalist Nika Gvaramia, who spent more than a year behind bars before a pardon by President Salome Zurabishvili led to his release on June 22. Less than two weeks earlier, I and CPJ Deputy Emergencies Director Kerry Paterson were in Georgia, the country that became independent after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, driving with Liluashvili to the prison holding her husband.
Liluashvili is in the back of a black SUV talking about growing up in Georgia under Soviet rule as we stop for water at a gas station known for its American-style hot dogs. We are in this car on our way to stand outside Rustavi prison and call on President Zurabishvili to release him.
Tamta Muradashvili, lawyer for Mtavari Arkhi TV station; Kerry Paterson, CPJ’s deputy emergencies director; Lucy Westcott, CPJ’s emergencies director; and Sofia Liluashvili, wife of Nika Gvaramia stand outside of Rustavi Prison, where Gvaramia was held for more than a year until June 22, 2023. (Credit: CPJ)
Thirteen days later, Zurabishvili would do just that.
I was part of a CPJ team in Georgia attending the ZEG Storytelling Festivaland to bring attention to Gvaramia’s case, as well as broader global press freedom concerns. Our trip also gave us the opportunity to tell Liluashvili and Tamta Muradashvili, lawyer for Mtavari Arkhi (Main Channel), the opposition broadcaster run by Gvaramia before his arrest, that Gvaramia would be named as one of CPJ’s 2023 International Press Freedom Award winners – the first Georgian journalist to receive this recognition.
Miraculously, he’ll now be able to accept the award in person.
But back to poetry. We head out of the city toward the prison, known for holding political prisoners. It’s lunchtime, so cars crawl around the slender blue figures of the Merheb Fam Monuments decorating the traffic circle. Liluashvili recalls how thoughts were not your own when you grew up in Soviet-era Georgia. Presented with a poem in school, you were immediately told its meaning. There was no opportunity to let the words marinate, to attach feelings to rhythm and couplets, to create your own definitions. Being denied a chance to think for yourself was a restrictive way to live, she says.
Now, she says, there is fear among many Georgians that those days could return.
Georgia’s political climate has deteriorated since the optimistic days of the 2003 uprising, the Rose Revolution. Stark polarization over whether Georgia should tilt toward Russia or Europe has contributed to a worsening media environment in recent years; tensions over the regional impact of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have only deepened the country’s divisions.
Nick Lewis, CPJ’s correspondent for Central Asia and the Caucasus, says journalists have been attacked and legislation has been weaponized against independent media. In July 2021, protesters attacked dozens of journalists covering a planned LGBT-Pride march in Tbilisi – an event Lewis describes as a turning point for the media, with Georgian cameraman Aleksandre Lashkarava dying after being beaten by anti-LGBT protesters. There is also increasing concern about abusive SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) suits brought by government officials against opposition news outlets.
This year alone, CPJ’s documentation of numerous press freedom violations in Georgia includes attacks on journalists at protests against a proposed Russia-style “foreign agent” bill that was introduced by authorities—but quickly squashed following the protests—and the suspension of accreditation for opposition broadcasters covering parliament.
Liluashvili believes the importance of freedom of expression, that ability to decide what and how to think for yourself, is directly tied to her husband’s three-and-a-half-year jail sentence. In Georgia, she says, it’s important to be able speak freely.
Sofia Liluashvili, wife of journalist Nika Gvaramia, speaks to Georgian media outside of Rustavi Prison, June 9, 2023. (Credit: CPJ)
Gvaramia, the only journalist in Georgia sentenced to prison in retaliation for his work since CPJ started compiling records in 1992, was jailed on abuse of power charges related to his use of a company car at his previous employer, broadcaster Rustavi 2. The charges – denied by Gvaramia – were widely considered to be retaliatory, with the European Parliament describing them as “dubious” and noting that his sentence was perceived in Georgia “as an attempt to silence a voice critical of the current government.”
That government is led by the populist-conservative Georgian Dream party that Gvaramia and others decry as increasingly influenced by Russia.
Georgia’s Western aspirations are well-documented, with recent polls showing public support for joining the EU and NATO at 89 percent and 73 percent respectively. Tbilisi’s graffiti echo these numbers, as many walls are decorated with the country’s borders filled in with the colors and symbols of each institution’s flag. The European Union, which closely monitored Gvaramia’s imprisonment, called his jailing an impediment to EU membership. For Gvaramia and other opposition journalists and figures, this is a fight against a Russian-influenced government for a European future characterized by democracy and press freedom.
Challenges to Georgia’s press freedom are not new. Lincoln Mitchell, a lecturer at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and author of “Uncertain Democracy: U.S. Foreign Policy and Georgia’s Rose Revolution” and “The Color Revolutions”, told CPJ that media conditions under the previous government of currently imprisoned Mikheil Saakashvili were dire. Opposition stations were barred from broadcasting or shut down, while broadcasting offices were raided and computers pulled out of the wall with the help of sledgehammers in order to keep them off air, he said.
“It’s impossible to look at Georgia and say it’s becoming more democratic and freer,” noted Mitchell. “However, it is also dangerous to embrace too deeply the narrative [that] this is a government that is pro-Russia.”
In Tbilisi, our prison drive takes us past layers of buildings that give way to flatlands intermittently broken up by clusters of Soviet-era apartment buildings. I inhale ginger sweets and channel my pre-press conference nerves into asking Liluashvili questions. Muradashvili, as his lawyer, is allowed to visit Gvaramia daily, but Liluashvili sees him only once a month. She always brings him books and food and says he does not complain about conditions in the prison. She is used to this drive more than a year into her husband’s imprisonment, but as she won’t be going inside today she sees this visit as a business, rather than personal, trip.
Closer now to Rustavi, an industrial city of around 100,000 people, Liluashvili recounts details of her previous prison visits. One image stands out: the handprints left on the glass pane separating visitors from prisoners. Some big, some small, the prints haven’t, for some reason, been wiped away. The smudged ghosts of the yearning to touch a loved one haunt her. We are struck by how she speaks about Gvaramia not only as her husband and father of their three children, or even as a well-regarded journalist, but as someone she truly admires.
Local TV crews are waiting as we step into the blistering early June heat. Liluashvili, dressed in the red and white colors of the Georgian flag, dons a pair of spherical Dr. Strangelove-style glasses and continues sharing stories about Gvaramia, who, she says, knows we are outside today. She recalls a post-World Cup 2022 prison visit when his voice was hoarse from celebrating Argentina winning the tournament.
An exterior view of Rustavi Prison, with a children’s play area alongside the parking lot. (Credit: CPJ)
I notice a tiny, seemingly new children’s playground composed of a seesaw and a rabbit on a spring, little handles poking out of its cheeks, sitting next to the glass-and-wood façade of the prison’s similarly fresh-looking reception building. It looks displaced, a mistake in the scenery, in front of the barbed wire-topped high white walls and the guard tower that looms nearby. The only shade is in the shallow shadows of cars or trees. Staff recognize Liluashvili and wave to her on their way into the prison.
Gvaramia’s colleagues from Mtavari Arkhi are among those who interview me, Liluashvili, and Muradashvili, before I read my comments. They are eager to report on his imprisonment, which has had a chilling effect on journalists throughout the country.
Standing in front of assembled journalists and cameras, my statement, which emphasizes that the jailing of a journalist marks a turning point for a country, is one of many calls by media freedom groups – including CPJ – for Gvaramia’s release. An April 2023 letter from CPJ to President Zurabishvili and signed by nearly a dozen media freedom organizations calling for his release received widespread attention in the country.
CPJ Emergencies Director Lucy Westcott is shown speaking outside of Rustavi Prison on Mtavari Arkhi’s 3pm news bulletin, while driving back to Tbilisi. June 9, 2023. (Credit: CPJ)
Our visit makes headlines less than an hour later on Mtavari Arkhi’s 3pm bulletin. We watch it on a phone mounted to the car’s dashboard, hurtling down the road back to Tbilisi. Next to us, Liluashvili is running Gvaramia’s Twitter and Facebook accounts, ensuring the visit is fed back out into the world in as many ways as possible. CPJ colleagues in New York and Sweden are working to push out the news coverage at the same time. I hope I’ve done justice to his family, colleagues, and everyone who has worked so hard to secure his freedom.
In this discussion, Yuliya Yurchenko, Eric Toussaint, and Sushovan Dhar contextualize Ukraine’s struggle as part of the global movement against neoliberalism and debt. This public forum was organized by the Ukraine Solidarity Network (U.S.) on May 12, 2023 and was co-hosted by Haymarket Books. Each speaker made opening comments, with a discussion. Special thanks to Nate Moore for assistance with…
Russian lawmakers have passed an even more restrictive version of an anti-LGBTQ bill that would outlaw gender-affirming care and changing one’s gender in legal documents and public records, adding clauses that would annul marriages that include a person who has “changed gender” and bar transgender people from fostering or adopting children. Yulia Alyoshina, Russia’s first transgender politician…
The hypocrisy gets starker by the day. The same western media that strains to warn of the dangers of disinformation – at least when it comes to rivals on social media – barely bothers to conceal its own role in purveying disinformation in the Ukraine war.
In fact, the propaganda peddled by the media grows more audacious by the day – as two stories last week from the frontlines illustrate only too clearly.
Dominating headlines has been the environmental catastrophe created by the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam under Russian control. Flood waters from the Dnipro river have ruined vast swathes of land downriver fromthe dam and forced many tens of thousands to flee their homes.
Rightly, the wrecking of the dam is being called an act of “ecological terrorism” – the second major one associated with the war, following last September’s blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines supplying Russian gas to Europe.
The costs associated with keeping this war going and avoiding peace talks so that Russia can be “weakened”, as Biden administration officials insist is the priority, have grown much steeper than most people could have imagined.
This is why a clear understanding of what is going on – and what interests are being served by fuelling the fighting rather than resolving the war – is so vitally important.
There have always been at least two narratives in Ukraine, even if western audiences are rarely exposed to the Russian one – outside of mocking commentary from western reporters.
In the immediate aftermath of the breaching of the Kakhovka dam, the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, Steve Rosenberg, visibly sneered as he reported that Russian media were insisting Ukrainian “terrorists” were behind the destruction. Russians, he suggested, were being brainwashed by their government and media.
He obviously failed to spot the irony that his own reporting, like that of colleagues, has served to reinforce the impression that the only plausible culprit in the dam’s ruin – despite a lack of evidence so far – is Moscow. Like the Russian media, Rosenberg has been hawking precisely the line his own government, and its Nato allies, want from him.
Pall of fog
The BBC recently launched its Verify service, ostensibly to root out disinformation. In similar vein, western media have started appending to any report of Russian assertions the warning: “This claim could not be verified.”
Like a nervous tic, the media added just such an alert to Russian statements that large numbers of Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in what looked like the first stages of Kyiv’s so-called “counter-offensive”.
But no such warnings have been attached to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s claims that Russia blew up the dam.
Instead, reporters havebeen quick to regurgitate, unverified, his self-serving assertions that Moscow caused the destruction, supposedly to ward off the imminent counter-offensive, and that only western help evicting Russia from the areas it has occupied can prevent further “terrorist” acts.
As has so often been the case in this war, a thick pall of fog is likely to shroud what happened at the Kakhovka dam for the foreseeable future.
Which means that, if the media is determined to recycle speculation, what it should be doing at this stage – apart from keeping an open mind and investigating for itself – is applying the principle of “cui bono?” or “who profits?”
And if it bothered to do that properly, it might be far more reluctant to pin responsibility on Russia.
Rallying support
As Scott Ritter, a former US marine and United Nations weapons inspector, has noted, the chief beneficiary of the attack has been Ukraine, both militarily and politically.
After all, the western media has been documenting a series of fortifications – from trenches and mines to concrete spikes – that the Russian army has constructed along its front lines during the long wait for the Ukrainian counter-offensive. As has often been pointed out, they are so extensive, they can easily be seen from space.
And yet if it did blow up the dam, Moscow just washed away all its carefully built defences in a key area that Ukraine has set its eyes on recapturing – and just at the time Kyiv is said to be preparing for a dramatic military offensive.
Further, the swollen river behind the dam was a significant obstacle to Ukrainian forces crossing the Dnipro river for many tens of miles. It will be much less of a barrier now its waters have receded as the river gushes into the Black Sea. The dam explosion punches a surprise hole in a key, natural part of Russia’s defensive line.
Another critical concern for the Kremlin will be that the explosion poses a direct threat to water supplies to the arid Crimean peninsula – the first piece of Ukrainian territory Russia annexed. After a US-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s government in 2014, Russia made a priority of securing Crimea, long the site of a strategic, warm-water naval base.
And to top it all, Russia’s control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, upstream of the dam, has already come under renewed international scrutiny as questions are raised about Moscow’s ability to cope with a possible meltdown there as water supplies, needed for cooling, dramatically diminish.
There are political advantages in the dam’s destruction for Kyiv too. As Ritter observes: “There is a lot of ‘Ukraine fatigue’ right now. The world is just tired of Ukraine, of funding Ukraine… What Ukraine needs is a catastrophic event that rallies international support around Ukraine by blaming Russia for something big.”
The dam blast does just that. It thrusts the war back into the spotlight, it casts Moscow as a “terrorist” threat not just to Ukraine but to wider humanity, and it will prove a very effective tool to justify yet more weapons and aid to “weaken” Russia, even if Ukraine’s counter-offensive proves a damp squib.
Reckless ‘test’ strike
The western media has not only largely ignored these factors, it has also drawn a veil over its own recent reporting that might implicate Ukraine as chief culprit in blowing up the dam.
As the Washington Postreported back in December, the Ukrainian military had previously considered plans to destroy the Kakhovka – in other words, to carry out what is universally understood now as a major act of ecological terrorism. At the time, the plan barely raised an eyebrow in the West.
The preparations included what now looks like a reckless “test strike” with a HIMARS missile – supplied courtesy of the US – “making three holes in the metal [of the floodgates] to see if the Dnieper’s water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages”.
“The test was a success,” the Post reported Maj Gen Andriy Kovalchuk, a Ukrainian commander, saying back in December. “But the step [of destroying the dam] remained a last resort.”
Might that “test” or a similar one – possibly in preparation for a Ukrainian offensive – have accidentally undermined the dam’s integrity, making it gradually crumble from the pressure of the water?
Or could the dam’s destruction have been intentional – part of Ukraine’s offensive – spreading chaos to areas under Russian control, either to force Moscow to redirect its energies away from countering a Ukrainian attack, or deflect western public attention away from any difficulties Kyiv may have launching a credible military operation?
And why, anyway, would Moscow decide to destroy the dam, forfeiting control over water flow, when it could have simply opened the gates to flood areas downstream at any time of its choosing, such as when faced with an attempt to cross the river by the Ukrainian military?
These questions aren’t even being posed, let alone answered.
James Bond mission
There has been an established pattern with the media during the Ukraine war, one that may serve as a guide in understanding how the story of the breaching of the dam will unfold.
The reticence of western outlets to ask basic questions, contextualise with relevant background, or pursue obvious lines of inquiry has been equally glaring in another act of ecological terrorism: the explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines back in September. They released enormous quantities of the prime global-warming gas methane.
Again, the media spoke as one. First, they echoed western officials in ascribing the explosions to Moscow, without a shred of evidence and even though the blasts were a huge blow to Russia.
The Kremlin lost the bountiful income stream that came from supplying Europe with natural gas. Meanwhile, diplomatically, it was stripped of its chief leverage over its biggest energy customer, Germany – leverage it might have used to induce Berlin to break with the West’s sanctions policy.
All of this was hard to obscure. Soon the western media simply dropped the Nord Stream story entirely.
Interest surfaced again only much later, in March, when the New York Times and a German publication, Die Zeit, published separate and quite preposterous accounts, based on unnamed intelligence sources.
According to these accounts, a group of six rogue Ukrainians chartered a yacht and blew up the pipelines off the coast of Denmark in a James Bond-style mission. The story was widely amplified by the western media, even though independent analysts ridiculed it as wildly implausible and technically unfeasible.
‘Ukraine did it’
The problem the media has faced is that a very much more plausible account of the Nord Stream blasts had already been produced by the legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in February. His unnamed intelligence source offered a far more credible and detailed account, and one that blamed the US itself.
The circumstantial evidence for US responsibility – or at least involvement – was already substantial, even if the media again ignored it.
From Joe Biden downwards, US officials either expressed a determination beforehand to stop more Russian gas from reaching Europe through Nord Stream or celebrated the pipelines’ destruction after the fact.
The Biden administration also had a prime motive for blowing up Nord Stream: a desire to end Europe’s energy dependence on Russia, especially when Washington wanted to line up Moscow and Beijing as the new targets in its permanent “war on terror”.
Hersh’s source argued that the explosives were placed by special US Navy divers, with Norwegian assistance, during an annual naval exercise, Baltops, and remotely detonated three months later.
The media studiously ignored this version. When it was referenced on the odd occasion, the story was dismissed because it was attributed to a single unnamed source. None of the media, however, appeared to have similar reservations about the fantastical yacht version, also supplied by an unidentified intelligence source.
Hersh’s account has refused to go away, gaining ever more traction on social media so long as no credible alternative emerged.
And so – bingo! The fantastical claim that a group of amateurs was able to locate and blow up the pipelines deep on the ocean floor has been dropped.
Last week the Washington Post reported that an unnamed European intelligence service had warned the Biden administration of an impending attack on the Nord Stream pipelines three months before it took place. According to this account, a small crack team sent by the Ukrainian military carried out the “covert” operation – again acting, it was stressed, without Zelensky’s knowledge.
The Post reported that “officials in multiple countries” confirmed that the US had received advance warning.
White House lied?
The story raises all kinds of deeply troubling questions – none of which the media seem interested in addressing.
Not least, if true, it means that the Biden administration has blatantly lied for months in promoting a fiction: that Russia carried out the attack. The White House and European capitals knowingly misled the western media and publics.
If Biden officials have indeed conspired in maintaining a grand lie about such a momentous act of industrial terror – one that caused untold environmental damage and is contributing to a mounting recession in Europe – what other lies have they been telling? How can anything they claim about the Ukraine war, such as who is responsible for the Kakhovka dam’s destruction, be trusted?
And yet the western media – which, according to this new account, was deceived for months – seems completely unconcerned.
Further, if Washington knew of the impending act of terror – which was directed at European energy sources as much as at a nuclear-armed Russia – why did it not intervene?
The media’s coverage of this new version largely frames the US as impotent, incapable of stopping the Ukrainians from blowing up the pipelines.
But Washington is the world’s sole superpower. Ukraine is entirely dependent on its support – financially and militarily. If the US withdrew its backing, Ukraine would be forced to engage in peace talks with Russia. The idea that Washington could not have stopped the attack is no more credible than the claim a group of sailing enthusiasts blew up the pipelines.
If this latest account is true, Washington had the leverage to stop the attack on Europe’s energy infrastructure but failed to act. By any reasonable assessment, it should be considered to have willed the pipelines’ destruction, despite the devastating toll on Europe and the environment.
And thirdly, based on this account, Ukraine – or at least its military – has proven itself quite capable of committing the most heinous act of terrorism, even against its allies in Europe. Why should anyone, least of all the media, now be so dismissive of Russian claims of Ukrainian war crimes, including destroying the Kakhovka dam?
‘Good Nazis’
The truth, however, is that the western media are not concerned by the implications of this latest account, any more than they are by Hersh’s earlier one – not if it means turning the US and its allies into the bad guys. The story was reported cursorily, and will be filed away as another piece of a puzzle no one has any interest in solving.
The western media’s role in foreign affairs is to prop up a narrative that turns our leaders into good people doing their best in a bad world, one that forces on them difficult, sometimes morally compromised, choices.
But what if Biden and Zelensky aren’t really heroes, or even good people? What if they are just as ignoble, just as callous and inhumane, as the foreign leaders we so readily dismiss as the “new Hitler”? It’s just that they receive far better public relations from our complicit media.
Coverage of the destruction of the Kakhovka dam and Nord Stream pipelines alludes to a double problem: that western leaders and their allies may be implicated in the most terrible crimes, but we can rarely be sure because our media are so determined not to find out.
This week, the New York Times finally admitted on its pages something that it and the rest of the western media once openly acknowledged but have cast as a taboo since Russia’s invasion: that the Ukrainian military is awash with neo-Nazi symbols.
However, even as the paper of record admitted what it had previously condemned as “disinformation” whenever it appeared on social media, the New York Times insisted on an absurd distinction.
Yes, the paper agreed that Ukrainian soldiers are proud to decorate themselves in Nazi insignia. And yes, much of wider Ukrainian society commemorates notorious Nazi figures from the Second World War such as Stepan Bandera. But no, Ukraine’s prolific use of Nazi symbols does not translate into any attachment to Nazi ideology.
This is the argument being made by western publications that at the same time have taken seriously claims that a rock star, Roger Waters, is antisemitic for performing a track from his four-decade-old album The Wall satirising a fascist dictator… dressed as a fascist dictator.
Waters’ real crime is that now Jeremy Corbyn has been ousted from the Labour Party, he is the most visible supporter of Palestinian rights in the western world.
If the New York Times and the rest of the western media are willing to give Ukrainian Nazis a makeover, making them look good, what are they doing for Biden, Zelensky and European leaders?
One thing we know for sure: we cannot look to the western media for an answer.
The Canadian government’s plan to double its semipermanent military force on Russia’s border ratchets up tensions that should be reduced. It highlights the West’s betrayal of promises made to Soviet officials and Canada’s addiction to stationing troops in Europe.
On Monday Justin Trudeau announced that Canada will ramp up its military presence in Latvia. The government will add about 1,200 military personnel to the nearly 1,000 Canadians already deployed on Russia’s border. As part of the announcement Trudeau committed $2.6 billion over three years to expand Latvia-focused Operation REASSURANCE. “Canada will also procure and pre-position critical weapon systems, enablers, supplies and support intelligence, cyber, and space activities”, the prime minister said in a statement. Last month Ottawa announced the deployment of 15 Leopard 2 battle tanks to Latvia.
In 2017 Canada took charge of one of four Eastern European NATO battle groups. In June 2021 Canada opened a $19 million headquarters in Latvia and by the end of the current commitment Canadian Forces will have been stationed there for a decade.
The semi-permanent stationing of Canadian forces on Russia’s border represents a flagrant violation of the promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev at the end of the Cold War. In 1990 the Soviet/Russian leader agreed not to obstruct German reunification, to withdraw tens of thousands of troops from the east and for the new Germany to be part of NATO in return for assurances that the alliance wouldn’t expand “one inch eastward”. A 1990 Ottawa Citizen wire article quoted West Germany’s foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, saying, “the West is agreed that with a unification of Germany, there will not be any eastward extension of NATO”, which was ostensibly a defence arrangement against the Soviet Union.
As I’ve detailed, Ottawa led the charge for NATO expansion despite the promises made to Gorbachev. Soon after taking office in 1993 Prime Minister Jean Chretien began promoting Poland’s adhesion to NATO and Ottawa has led the push to double the size of the alliance by expanding into eastern and northern Europe. Ottawa has also promoted Ukraine’s adhesion to the alliance and has trained its military to be interoperable with NATO.
Alongside ending the stated objective for NATO, the dissolution of the Soviet Union undercut Canada’s rationale for stationing troops in Europe. From the early 1950s to 1990s over one hundred thousand Canadian troops rotated through bases in France and Germany. In the late 1960s the Royal Canadian Air Force had over 250 US atomic bombs at its disposal in Europe.
Incredibly, the US-led war in Korea was the initial justification for stationing Canadian troops in Europe (and rearming the colonial powers as they suppressed independence movements with Canadian NATO mutual assistance program weaponry). According to defence minister Brooke Claxton, “NATO owes the fact that it was built-up to the Communist aggression in Korea … To meet the challenge of Korea required a buildup of our forces comparable to what was needed to meet our commitments to Europe.” As per the Washington/Ottawa storyline, the North Korean leadership’s effort to unite the country under its direction in mid 1950 was part of a worldwide communist conspiracy. Who controlled the distant, impoverished, country was of limited import to most North Americans so US/Canadian decision makers claimed Moscow stoked the conflict in Korea to divert attention from its plan to invade Western Europe. In response, thousands of Canadian troops were dispatched to France and Germany in 1951. They would remain in Europe until 1993.
Of course, Canada previously sent large numbers of troops to Europe during World War I and II. Between 1917 and 1920 six thousand Canadian troops invaded Russia. About 600 Canadians fought in Murmansk and Archangel where the British used chemical agent diphenylchloroarsine, which causes uncontrollable coughing and individuals to vomit blood.
Decades earlier Canadians fought the Russians. Much of the British garrison in Canada left for Crimea during the 1853-56 war and many Canadians also volunteered for British units fighting Russia. In “How the Crimean War of 1853 helped shape the Canada of today” historian C.P. Champion describes how the naval base on Vancouver Island was greatly expanded in response to the war. He also quotes historian John Castell Hopkins explaining that the Militia Act of 1855, which formed the basis for today’s army, was “a result of the feeling aroused by the Crimean War.”
Canada has a history of belligerence towards Russia. Given that, this country stationing its troops near Russia’s border is perceived as threatening by Moscow. Remember that Russia shipping some missiles to Cuba resulted in an American naval blockade and almost caused a nuclear holocaust in the early 1960s.
A nation committed to peace must try to understand the viewpoint of potential adversaries. A nation planning war increases tension and prolongs every military standoff. Exactly the way Canada has acted towards Russia for many decades.
Rightly, there’s been an outpouring of tributes to Daniel Ellsberg following the announcement of his death last Friday, aged 92. His leaking of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 revealed that Washington officials had systematically lied for decades about US military conduct in Vietnam.
The disclosure of 7,000 pages of documents, and subsequent legal battles to stop further publication by the New York Times and Washington Post, helped to bring the war to a close a few years later.
As an adviser to US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara in the 1960s, Ellsberg had seen first-hand the Pentagon’s brutal military operations that caused mass civilian casualties. Entire villages had been burned, while captured Vietnamese were tortured or executed. Deceptively, the US referred to these as “pacification programmes”.
But most of those today loudly hailing Ellsberg as an “American hero” have been far more reluctant to champion the Ellsberg of our times: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
For years, Assange has been rotting in a London high-security prison while the Biden administration seeks his extradition on charges that ludicrously equate his publication of the Afghan and Iraq war logs – a modern Pentagon Papers – with “espionage”.
Like Ellsberg, Assange exposed the way western states had been systematically lying while they perpetrated war crimes. Like Ellsberg, he was fraudulently labelled a threat to national security and charged with espionage. Like Ellsberg, if found guilty, he faces more than 100 years in jail. Like Ellsberg, Assange has learned that the US Congress is unwilling to exercise its powers to curb governmental abuses.
But unlike Ellsberg’s case, the courts have consistently sided with Assange’s persecutors, not with him for shining a light on state criminality. And, in a further contrast, the western media have stayed largely silent as the noose has tightened around Assange’s neck.
The similarities in Assange’s and Ellsberg’s deeds – and the stark differences in outcomes – are hard to ignore. The very journalists and publications now extolling Ellsberg for his historic act of bravery have been enabling, if only through years of muteness, western capitals’ moves to demonise Assange for his contemporary act of heroism.
Docile lapdogs
The hypocrisy did not go unnoticed by Ellsberg. He was one of the noisiest defenders of Assange. So noisy, in fact, that most media outlets felt obliged in their obituaries to make reference to the fact, even if in passing.
Ellsberg testified on Assange’s behalf at a London extradition hearing in 2020, observing that the pair’s actions were identical. That was not entirely right, however.
Assange published classified documents passed to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning, just as the New York Times published the secrets handed to them by Ellsberg. Given that media freedoms are protected by the US First Amendment, whereas whistleblowing by an official is not, Assange’s treatment is even more perverse and abusive than Ellsberg’s.
In contrast to his case, Ellsberg added, the WikiLeaks founder could never receive a fair hearing in the US. His trial has already been assigned to a court in the eastern district of Virginia, home to the US intelligence agencies.
Late last year, as Assange’s prospects of extradition to the US increased, Ellsberg admitted that he had been secretly given a backup copy of the leaked Afghan and Iraq war logs, in case WikiLeaks was prevented from making public the details of US and UK criminality.
Ellsberg pointed out that his possession of the documents made him equally culpable with Assange under the justice department’s draconian “espionage” charges. During a BBC interview, he demanded that he be indicted too.
If the praise being lavished on Ellsberg in death demonstrates anything, it is the degree to which the self-professed watchdogs of western state power have been tamed over subsequent decades into being the most docile of lapdogs.
In the Assange case, the courts and establishment media have clearly acted as adjuncts of power, not checks on it. And for that reason, if no other, western states are gaining greater and greater control over their citizenry in an age when mass digital surveillance is easier than ever.
Spied on day and night
For those reluctant to confer on Assange the praise being heaped on Ellsberg, it is worth remembering how similarly each was viewed by US officials in their respective eras.
Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and then secretary of state, called Ellsberg the “most dangerous man in America”.
Mike Pompeo, President Donald Trump’s director of the Central Intelligence Agency, declared Assange and WikiLeaks a “non-state, hostile intelligence service”. Pompeo’s CIA also secretly plotted ways to kidnap or assassinate Assange in London.
Both Ellsberg and Assange were illegally surveilled by government agencies.
In Ellsberg’s case, Nixon’s officials wiretapped his conversations and tried to dig up dirt by stealing files from his psychiatrist’s office. The same team carried out the Watergate break-in, famously exposed by the US media, that ultimately brought Nixon down.
In Assange’s case, the CIA spied on him day and night after he was given political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, even violating his privileged conversations with his lawyers. Astonishingly, this law-breaking has barely been remarked on by the media, even though it should have been grounds alone for throwing out the extradition case against him.
Nixon officials tried to rig Ellsberg’s trial by offering the judge in his hearings the directorship of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
This month, High Court judge Jonathan Swift rejected what may amount to a last-ditch attempt by Assange’s legal team to halt his extradition. Swift’s previous career was as a government lawyer. Looking back on his time there, he noted that his “favourite clients were the security and intelligence agencies”.
Above the law
But if the modern White House is as hostile to transparency as its predecessors – and armed with more secret tools to surveil critics than ever before – the media and the courts are offering far less remedy than they did in Ellsberg’s time.
Even the Obama administration understood the dangers of targeting Assange. His relationship to Manning was no different from the New York Times’ to Ellsberg. Each publicised state wrongdoing after classified documents were divulged to them by a disenchanted official.
Prosecuting Assange was seen as setting a precedent that could ensnare any publisher or media outlet that made public state secrets, however egregious the crimes being exposed.
For that reason, Obama went full guns blazing against whistleblowers, locking up more of them than all his predecessors combined. Whistleblowers were denied any right to claim a public-interest defence. State secrecy was sacrosanct, even when it was being abused to shield evidence of criminality from public view.
Asked whether Obama would have pursued him through the courts, as Nixon did, Ellsberg answered: “I’m sure that President Obama would have sought a life sentence in my case.”
It took a reckless Trump administration to go further, casting aside the long-standing legal distinction between an official who leaks classified documents in violation of their employment contract, and a publisher-journalist who exposes those documents in accordance with their duty to hold the powerful to account.
Now Biden has chosen to follow Trump’s lead by continuing Assange’s show trial. The new presumption is that it is illegal for anyone – state official, media outlet, ordinary citizen – to disclose criminal activity by an all-powerful state.
In Assange’s case, the White House is openly manoeuvring to win recognition for itself as officially above the law.
Disappeared from view
In the circumstances, one might have assumed that the courts and media would be rallying to uphold basic democratic rights, such as a free press, and impose accountability on state officials shown to have broken the law.
In the 1970s, however imperfectly, the US media gradually unravelled the threads of the Watergate scandal till they exposed the unconstitutional behaviour of the Nixon administration. At the same time, the liberal press rallied behind Ellsberg, making common cause with him in a fight to hold the executive branch to account.
Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, charged Ellsberg with espionage and accused the New York Times of the same. Claiming the paper had undermined national security, he threatened it with ruinous legal action. The Times ignored the threats and carried on publishing, forcing the justice department to obtain an injunction.
The courts, meanwhile, took the side of both Ellsberg and the media in their legal battles. In 1973, the federal court in Los Angeles threw out the case against Ellsberg before it could be put to a jury, accusing the government of gross misconduct and illegal evidence gathering against him.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court prioritised freedom of the press, denying the government prior restraint. Ultimately, these cases and others forced Nixon from office in disgrace.
The contrast with Assange’s treatment by the media and the courts could not be starker.
The media, even “liberal” outlets he worked with on the Afghan and Iraq logs, including the New York Times and the Guardian, have struggled to show even the most rudimentary kind of solidarity, preferring instead to distance themselves from him. They have largely conspired in US and UK efforts to suggest Assange is not a “proper journalist” and therefore does not deserve First Amendment protections.
These media outlets have effectively partnered with Washington in suggesting that their collaboration with Assange in no way implicates them in his supposed “crimes”.
As a result, the media has barely bothered to cover his hearings or explain how the courts have twisted themselves into knots by ignoring the most glaring legal obstacles to his extradition: such as the specific exclusion in the UK’s 2007 Extradition Treaty with the US of extraditions for political cases.
Unlike Ellsberg, who became a cause celebre, Assange has been disappeared from public view by the states he exposed and largely forgotten by the media that should be championing his cause.
Shortening Odds
Ellsberg emerged from his court victory over the Pentagon Papers to argue: “The demystification and de-sanctification of the president has begun. It’s like the defrocking of the Wizard of Oz.”
In this assessment, time has proved him sadly wrong, as he came to recognise.
In recent months, Ellsberg had become an increasingly voluble critic of US conduct in the Ukraine war. He drew parallels with the lies told by four administrations – those of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson – to hide the extent of Washington’s involvement in Vietnam before the US went public with its ground war.
Ellsberg warned that the US was waging a similarly undeclared war in Ukraine – a proxy one, using Ukrainians as cannon fodder – to “weaken the Russians“. As in Vietnam, the White House was gradually and secretly escalating US involvement.
As also in Vietnam, western leaders were concealing the fact that the war had reached a stalemate, with the inevitable result that large numbers of Ukrainians and Russians were losing their lives in fruitless combat.
He called former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s hidden, early role in stymying peace talks between Russia and Ukraine “a crime against humanity.”
Referring to history repeating itself, he observed: “It’s an awakening that’s in many ways painful.”
Most of all, Ellsberg feared that the West’s war machine – addicted to Cold War belligerence, obscured under the supposedly “defensive” umbrella of Nato – wanted once again to confront China.
In 2021, as the Biden administration intensified its hostile posturing towards Beijing, Ellsberg revealed that back in 1958 Eisenhower’s officials had drawn up secret plans to attack China with nuclear weapons. That was during an earlier crisis over the Taiwan Strait.
“At this point, I’m much more aware of… how little has changed in these critical aspects of the danger of nuclear war, and how limited the effectiveness has been to curtail what we’ve done,” he told an interviewer shortly before he died.
What Ellsberg understood most keenly was the desperate need – if humanity was to survive – both for more whistleblowers to come forward to expose their states’ crimes, and for a tenacious, watchdog media to give their full backing.
Watching the media abandon Assange to his persecutors, Ellsberg could draw only one possible conclusion: that humanity’s odds were shortening by the day.
World Wars I and II were contests between empires, and so America’s President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was determined that after WW II, all empires would be outlawed and all international relations (between nations) would be controlled only by a global all-inclusive federation of nations, which in 1941 he referred to would be called “the United Nations” and which would exclusively possess the Executive, Legislative, and Juridical, powers and authorities — to make and enforce the international laws that would be created by that international Legislature of all nations, subject to that Supreme Court which would interpret that Legislature’s constitution or “Charter” for this global government between nations, and which would be enforced by that international Executive. All strategic weaponry would be owned and under the control of that Executive and none other. This was FDR’s plan to replace empires and world wars, by creating the world’s first democratic federation of all nations, which would supersede and replace any and all empires.
On 25 July 1945, FDR’s immediate successor Harry Truman, became convinced by two imperialists whom he deeply respected, Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower, to reject that plan by FDR, which plan Truman didn’t even know about but only inferred might have existed and been FDR’s plan. In any case, Truman secretly despised FDR, and replaced his entire Cabinet within two years, so that he (instead of FDR) would shape the post-WW-II world.
The first-ever military alliance was created by Truman (under the guidance of Eisenhower, Churchill, James Byrnes and others) in order to carry out his plan for ultimate global conquest. A “military alliance” is a military contract between nations that is legally binding between them by a provision in it that says an invasion against any one of them will be an invasion against all of them and will automatically place each one of them into a state of war against that invader. It is unlike all prior empires because it is by contract instead of by exigency. Unlike in World Wars One and Two, in neither of which, the empires or coalition of empires that were waging war against each other were subject to any overriding pre-signed contract amongst them, the U.S. Government in 1949 created the world’s very first military alliance by contract, NATO, and many of the signatories to or members of that contract didn’t know when they signed it that they were thereby committing their nation to relying upon the U.S. Government to determine their foreign policies, which would be enforced by the U.S. military — they didn’t know that they were thereby becoming vassal-nations or colonies of an entirely new TYPE of empire: a military alliance by contract, instead of merely by exigency (such as had been the case in WW I & WW II).
This was an entirely new phenomenon in world affairs, and it is increasingly forcing the world’s nations to either comply with whatever the demands by the U.S. Government are, or else to potentially become victimized by the U.S. and its ‘allies’, such as Germany did when the U.S. Government arranged for the Russo-German-owned Nord Stream fuel pipelines from Russia to Germany and the rest of the EU, to become blown-up and destroyed (which was an act of war by the U.S. Government against both Russia and Germany, Germany being itself a member-nation in NATO and therefore having no recourse against it).
When the Nord Stream pipelines were blown-up, Germany could not rely upon the NATO Treaty to protect itself against that invader because the invader in that instance was the U.S. Government, the virtual owner of NATO; and, furthermore, the U.S. Government has 231 military bases in Germany; so, Germany’s Government was powerless to resist in any way — verbally or otherwise.
The world’s third military alliance is the AUKUS Treaty, this being a secret treaty (thus even worse than the NATO Treaty, which was not a secret agreement) by which the U.S. and its UK partner created a new military alliance, between Australia, UK, and U.S., but this time against China, instead of against Russia. There have been efforts by the U.S. Government to get its NATO military alliance to include the leading nations in the areas of the Pacific and Indian Oceans to join NATO, but NATO’s France has thus-far blocked that. Apparently, if the U.S. Government is determined to force WW III to start in Asia-Pacific, then the military alliance will have to be based on the secret AUKUS agreement, not on the public NATO agreement.
In order for AUKUS to avoid being criticized on account of the non-publication of the treaty, a Web-search for such phrases as “AUKUS text” produces subsidiary documents such as this, instead of the actual document, and this is done in order to deceive researchers to think that it’s not even a military alliance at all (and in that linked-to example, it’s only an agreement about technological cooperation, which doesn’t even mention “China” nor have any mutual-‘defense’ clause in it). They’re treating researchers as fools.
Consequently, there now are two military alliances, NATO against Russia, and AUKUS against China, and both of them are intended ultimately to conquer the entire world with the participation of America’s ‘allies’ or colonies.
To the extent that either of these military alliances succeeds, there will be a Third World War; and, so, now, all nations of the world are implicitly being challenged, either to join the U.S. to conquer Russia and China; or, else, to say no to the U.S. Government, and to demand that it reverse what it did and for it to participate with other nations to institute the changes that must be made to the U.N.’s Charter in order to transform that into what FDR had been intending; or, else, for all decent nations to create together a replacement of Truman’s U.N., so that the U.S. Government will become isolated in its aim to win a WW III, and there will instead become the type of world that FDR had been hoping would follow after WW II — a world that would NOT produce another World War..
Conceptually, the issue here is between the Truman-installed win-lose plan for the future (which is no basic change from the past), versus a win-win plan for the future, which is what FDR and the Governments in both Russia and China have been advocating for but no one is doing anything to help actually bring about. Ironically, the Truman plan would actually be lose-lose, because any WW III would destroy this entire planet. But it’s the direction we are heading toward.
Also ironically, the Truman pathway we are on, toward that result, is the opposite of “democracy” though is claimed to epitomize democracy. For example: just consider the ridiculousness of the AUKUS contract being a SECRET treaty among self-proclaimed ‘democracies’. Then add to this the fact that the secret treaty is a preparation for a WW III that would start in Asia against China instead of in Europe (which had been the main battleground in both of the first two World Wars) and against Russia. So: its presumption is that the world’s publics will quietly be shepherded into WW II on the basis of — among other lies — a secret treaty, the one that created the world’s second military alliance and that isn’t even criticized for its being a secret (and extremely dangerous) treaty among ‘democracies’. Lies can kill the world.
These are the reasons why both NATO and AUKUS must be disbanded, just like the Warsaw Pact was. Either that, or else we’ll have WW III.
After the closing of a major NATO summit in Lithuania, President Biden vowed to support Ukraine and warned the war may continue for a long time, before flying to Finland, the newest member of NATO, which shares an 830-mile border with Russia. The goal of this summit may have been to make Ukraine seem more aligned with NATO, but “they actually revealed that the alliance was split” when they did not…
On 11 July, the UN Security Council failed to reach consensus on extending a key Syria aid route. This threw into doubt a vital mechanism that provides life-saving support to millions of people.
Russia vetoed a nine-month extension of the agreement authorising the operation of the conduit during a vote at the UN headquarters in New York. It then failed to muster enough votes to adopt just a six-month extension.
Russian veto
The UN-brokered deal that allows for the delivery of aid from Turkey into rebel-held areas of Syria expired on 10 July.
Many council members – including the US, the UK, and France – have called for a full-year extension. However, they backed a nine-month compromise put forward by Switzerland and Brazil.
The proposal was vetoed by Russia, whose six-month offer only secured China’s support.
US ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield called Russia’s veto “an act of utter cruelty”.
Russian representative Vassili Nebenzia said that Western countries had a “complete disregard” for the interests of the Syrian people. On top of this, he accused them of “artificially” provoking Moscow into vetoing.
He also threatened to “close down” the aid route if support for his country’s draft was not forthcoming.
Syria aid corridor halted
The 15 members of the Security Council had been trying for days to find a compromise to extend the deal. Since 2014, it has allowed for food, water, and medicine to be trucked to northwestern Syria without the authorisation of Damascus.
Humanitarian convoys wrapped up their operations the night of 10 July. Now, the future of the aid corridor is unclear. It cannot resume operations until the UN reauthorises it.
UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres said he was “disappointed” by the failure to reach agreement. He called on all council members to “redouble their efforts to support the continued delivery” of the assistance.
The Swiss ambassador to the UN said diplomats would “get back to work immediately to find a solution”.
‘Needs, not politics’
Floriane Borel of Human Rights Watch said “aid delivery should be based on needs, not politics”. She added that:
Russia’s cynical veto of a cross-border aid lifeline for millions of Syrians is a painful reminder that the Security Council should not be entrusted with decisions about humanitarian assistance.
The crossing provides for more than 80% of the needs of people living in rebel-controlled areas. This included everything from diapers and blankets to chickpeas. The government in Damascus regularly denounces the aid deliveries as a violation of its sovereignty.
Russia has been chipping away at the deal for years. The accord originally allowed for four entry points into rebel-held Syria. More recently, this was reduced to one: the Bab al-Hawa crossing.
The aid mechanism comes up for renewal every six months due to pressure from Damascus ally Moscow.
An ‘intolerable’ situation
UN humanitarian affairs chief Martin Griffiths called again last week for the opening of more crossing points, for at least 12 months.
He added that the situation:
is intolerable for the people of the northwest, and those brave souls who help them to go through these ups and downs every six months.
He also pointed out that humanitarian agencies have to bring pre-positioned stock into the country every time access is threatened, in case the crossing is closed.
According to the UN, four million people in Syria depend on humanitarian assistance to survive. Years of conflict, economic strife, and devastating earthquakes have only exacerbated the situation.
An earthquake in February killed tens of thousands of people in the country. Following it, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad agreed to the opening of two more crossings.
These remain open despite the Security Council’s failure to reauthorize the use of Bab al-Hawa. The authorization for these two other corridors is set to expire in mid-August.
‘That door is shut’
Guterres’s spokesman Stephane Dujarric said those two crossings “cannot match” Bab al-Hawa, which handles 85% of aid.
Since the earthquake, more than 3,700 UN trucks carrying aid have passed through the three checkpoints. Most have passed through Bab al-Hawa, including 79 on Monday.
Rosoboronexport JSC (part of Rostec State Corporation) will showcase highly effective Counter Precision Guided Munition (Counter-PGM) systems developed and produced by Russian defense industry to guests and visitors of the ARMY 2023 Forum. “The experience of military conflicts shows a rapidly growing trend towards the use of land-, air- and sea-based precision guided munitions. With […]
Rights defenders are sure of Chechen law enforcers’ involvement in attack on Milashina says Roman Kuzhev, СK correspondent
The attack on the journalist Elena Milashina and the advocate Alexander Nemov has to do with Milashina’s publications in which she wrote about human rights violations in Chechnya, human rights defenders have noted.
The “Caucasian Knot” reported that on July 4, Elena Milashina, a journalist of the “Novaya Gazeta” outlet, and Alexander Nemov, an advocate for Zarema Musaeva, were attacked in Chechnya. They were beaten up by masked gunmen when they were on the way from the airport to Grozny, where the verdict in the case of Zarema Musaeva was to be announced. The head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, has promised to “sort things out”; and Akhmed Dudaev, the head of the Chechen Press Ministry, have pointed out that “the style of Western intelligence services” is seen in the attack.
Svetlana Gannushkina, the head of the “Civic Assistance” Committee, is sure that the attack had to do with Milashina’s human rights activities. “They were waiting for her there to beat her for her so much writing on human rights issues, conducts inquiries and shows the real Chechnya,” Ms Gannushkina has stated.
According to her version, the attackers are definitely law enforcers. Gannushkina* has also added that the attackers would not be identified and punished. Oyub Titiev, a human rights defender, is also sure that Milashina was the attackers’ target. “Only law enforcers can beat a woman so openly and with such cruelty,” he has stated.
Ruslan Kutaev, the president of the Assembly of Caucasian Nations, is sure that Milashina would have been attacked at any moment while in Grozny.
A criminal case on the attack on Milashina and Nemov can be initiated under several articles, said Galina Tarasova, a lawyer. According to her story, the case should have been transferred to the central office of the Investigating Committee of the Russian Federation (ICRF).
This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on July 5, 2023 at 08:07 pm MSK. https://eng.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/62817
Since the end of the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has distinctly strayed from its original purpose. It has become, almost shamelessly, the vessel and handmaiden of US power, while its burgeoning expansion eastwards has done wonders to upend the applecart of stability.
From that upending, the alliance started bungling. It engaged, without the authorisation of the UN Security Council, in a 78-day bombing campaign of Yugoslavia – at least what was left of it – ostensibly to protect the lives of Kosovar Albanians. Far from dampening the tinderbox, the Kosovo affair continues to be an explosion in the making.
Members of the alliance also expended material, money and personnel in Afghanistan over the course of two decades, propping up a deeply unpopular, corrupt regime in Kabul while failing to stifle the Taliban. As with previous imperial projects, the venture proved to be a catastrophic failure.
In 2011, NATO again was found wanting in its attack on the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. While it was intended to be an exemplar of the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine, the intervention served to eventually topple the doomed Colonel Gaddafi, precipitating the de-facto partitioning of Libya and endangering the very civilians the mission was meant to protect. A continent was thereby destabilised. The true beneficiaries proved to be the tapestry of warring rebel groups characterised by sectarian impulses and a voracious appetite for human rights abuses and war crimes.
The Ukraine War has been another crude lesson in the failings of the NATO project. The constant teasing and wooing of Kyiv as a potential future member never sat well with Moscow and while much can be made of the Russian invasion, no realistic assessment of the war’s origins can excise NATO from playing a deep, compromised role.
The alliance is also proving dissonant among its members. Not all are exactly jumping at the chance of admitting Ukraine. German diplomats have revealed that they will block any current moves to join the alliance. Even that old provoking power, the United States, is not entirely sure whether doors should be open to Kyiv. On CNN, President Joe Biden expressed the view that he did not “think it’s ready for membership of NATO.” To qualify, Ukraine would have to meet a number of “qualifications” from “democratisation to a whole range of other issues.” While hardly proving very alert during the interview (at one point, he confused Ukraine with Russia) he did draw the logical conclusion that bringing Kyiv into an alliance of obligatory collective defence during current hostilities would automatically put NATO at war with Moscow.
With such a spotty, blood speckled record marked by stumbles and bungles, any suggestions of further engagement by the alliance in other areas of the globe should be treated with abundant wariness. The latest talk of further Asian engagement should also be greeted with a sense of dread. According to a July 7 statement, “The Indo-Pacific is important for the Alliance, given that developments in that region can directly affect Euro-Atlantic security. Moreover, NATO and its partners in the region share a common goal of working together to strengthen the rules-based international order.” With these views, conflict lurks.
The form of that engagement is being suggested by such ideas as opening a liaison office in Japan, intended as the first outpost in Asia. It also promises to feature in the NATO summit to take place in Vilnius on July 11 and 12, which will again repeat the attendance format of the Madrid summit held in 2022. That new format – featuring the presence of Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, or the AP4, should have induced much head scratching. But the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Washington’s beady eyes in Canberra, celebrated this “shift to taking a truly global approach to strategic competition”.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg is also much in favour of such competition, warning member states of Beijing’s ambitions. “We should not make the same mistake with China and other authoritarian regimes,” he suggested, alluding to a dangerous and flawed comparison between Ukraine and Taiwan. “What is happening in Europe today could happen in Asia tomorrow.”
One of the prominent headscratchers at this erroneous reasoning is French President Emmanuel Macron. Taking issue with setting up the Japan liaison office, Macron has expressed opposition to such expansion by an alliance which, at least in terms of treaty obligations, has a strict geographical limit. In the words of an Elysée Palace official, “As far as the office is concerned, the Japanese authorities themselves have told us that they are not extremely attached to it.” With a headmaster’s tone, the official went on to give journalists an elementary lesson. “NATO means North Atlantic Treaty Organization.” The centrality of Articles 5 and 6 of the alliance were “geographic” in nature.
In 2021, Macron made it clear that NATO’s increasingly obsessed approach with China as a dangerous belligerent entailed a confusion of goals. “NATO is a military organisation, the issue of our relationship with China isn’t just a military issue. NATO is an organisation that concerns the North Atlantic, China has little to do with the North Atlantic.”
Such views have also pleased former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, whose waspish ire has also been trained on the NATO Secretary-General. In his latest statement, Stoltenberg was condemned as “the supreme fool” of “the international stage”. “Stoltenberg by instinct and policy, is simply an accident on its way to happen”. In thinking that “China should be superintended by the West and strategically circumscribed”, the NATO official had overlooked the obvious point that the country “represents twenty percent of humanity and now possesses the largest economy in the world … and has no record for attacking other states, unlike the United States, whose bidding Stoltenberg is happy to do”.
The record of this ceramic breaking bloc speaks for itself. In its post-Cold War visage, the alliance has undermined its own mission to foster stability, becoming Washington’s axe, spear and spade. Where NATO goes, war is most likely. Countries of the Indo-Pacific, take note.
There is a certain desperation in the logic of those who argue that a depraved solution has merit because it’s only slightly less depraved than that of the opponent. Torture is bad but should still be used because your adversary feels free to resort to it. Only do so, however, via judicial warrant. Bombing hospitals is terrible, but when done, select those with military personnel. Before long, one’s moral compass does not so much adjust as vanish into a horizon of relativist horror.
Much of this is evident in the Ukraine War, notably regarding weapons supply and deployment. Ukraine, the Biden administration has announced, will receive cluster munitions, despite their appalling record as, in the words of a coalition of civil society organisations, “indiscriminate weapons that disproportionately harm civilians, both at the time of use and for years after a conflict has ended.” Some detail of this was provided in a July 7 White House press briefing by the National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan.
According to Sullivan, Washington based its “security assistance decision on Ukraine’s needs on the ground, and Ukraine needs artillery to sustain its offensive and defensive operations.” It all came down to the sustained use of artillery in the conflict. “Ukraine is firing thousands of rounds a day to defend against Russian efforts to advance and also to support its own efforts to retake its sovereign territory.”
Preference shown by Sullivan for the “they do it, so we can” argument, a vagabond’s reasoning. In an effort to minimise culpability, he reasons that the US has better cluster munitions than those of the Russian military. (Such a marvellous difference and bound to excite those keen on flimsy moral calculi.) First, Sullivan makes the claim that Russia had “been using cluster munitions since the start of this war to attack Ukraine.” No mention is made of claims by Human Rights Watch that Ukraine has already deployed cluster bombs, notably on Russian-controlled areas in and around Izium in 2022.
A point is also made that Russian forces had been using munitions with a failure rate of between 30 and 40 percent. “In this environment, Ukraine has been requesting cluster munitions in order to defend its own sovereign territory. The cluster munitions that we would provide have dud rates far below what Russia is doing – is providing – not higher than 2.5 percent.” The admission is telling, if only because US law and regulations prohibit the transfer of cluster munitions with “dud rates” higher than 1 percent.
Kyiv has also wooed Washington with an undertaking that it will de-mine the residual remains of the munitions in question. Again, reasons Sullivan, such de-mining would have to take place in any case, given Russia’s own resort to their use.
Only briefly in such casuistry does Sullivan mention the contentious, hideous nature of the munitions. “We recognize,” he told the press briefing, “that cluster munitions create a risk of civilian harm from unexploded ordnance. This is why we’ve deferred – deferred the decision for as long as we could.” President Joe Biden reiterated the sentiment to CNN, claiming that it was “a very difficult decision on my part” to make. “I discussed this with our allies. I discussed this with our friends on the [Capitol] Hill.” But White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby was probably closer to the mark in deeming these weapons “innovative” in curbing Russia’s military efforts.
The Biden administration has done much to avoid the stern disapproval of the use of such munitions in international law, hiding behind notions of grave duty. The 2008 United Nations Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) outlines state party obligations to “never under any circumstances” use such munitions; develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer to anyone, directly or indirectly, those same munitions; and assist encourage or induce anyone to engage in any activity prohibited to a State Party under the convention.
Article 3 also notes a State Party’s obligations to “destroy or ensure destruction of all cluster munitions […] as soon as possible but not later than eight years after the entry into force” of the CCM. Inability to do so can lead to the convening of state parties, a review conference for an extension of the deadline, or, in some exceptional cases, an extension of four years.
The number of parties to the convention, including a number of European states aiding Ukraine, has reached an impressive 123. That said, three relevant absentees from the list stand out: Washington, Moscow and Kyiv. While Biden claims to have had discussions with lawmakers on his decision, 19 members of the House of Representatives have demurred in a statement rebuking the transfer, reiterating the call for the US to “join global allies and sign on to that UN Convention”.
The signatories also note that “there is no such thing as a safe cluster bomb – and using or transferring them for use hurts the global effort to eradicate these dangerous munitions, taking us down the wrong path.” Past blemishes are also cited as a haunting reminder about what such weapons do. “The US history of using cluster munitions – particularly the legacy of long-term harm to civilians in Southeast Asia – should prevent us from repeating the mistakes of our past.” The difference now is that Ukraine has become the designated proxy for using such crude weaponry and is being given encouragement into the bargain.
Professional psychopath John Bolton has an article out with The Hill titled “America can’t permit Chinese military expansion in Cuba” which inadvertently spells out exactly what’s wrong with the way the US empire keeps amassing heavily armed proxy forces on the borders of its large Asiatic enemies.
Citing a Wall Street Journal report from last month in which anonymous US officials claim that Havana has entered negotiations with Beijing for a possible future joint military training facility in Cuba, Bolton argues that the US must use any amount of aggression necessary to prevent this facility’s construction, up to and including regime change interventionism.
“The potential of significant Chinese facilities in Cuba is a red-flag threat to America,” Bolton writes, arguing that such activities “could well camouflage offensive weapons, delivery systems or other threatening capabilities.”
“For example, hypersonic cruise missiles, already harder to detect, track, and destroy than ballistic missiles, are natural candidates for installation in Cuba, a prospect we cannot tolerate, along with many other risks, like a Chinese submarine base,” he adds.
All of which are arguments that could be made pretty much note-for-note by Russia and China about the ways the US has been threatening their security interests with war machinery in their immediate surroundings.
Arguing that the US is “bound by no commitment limiting our use of force,” Bolton advocates “Revoking diplomatic relations with Cuba; increased economic sanctions against both China and Cuba; and far stricter implementation of existing sanctions” as an immediate response to this reported development, advocating regime change interventionism as an ultimate solution to Cuba’s disobedient behavior.
“Had Presidents Eisenhower or Kennedy acted more forcefully and effectively against Castro, we might have avoided many perilous Cold War crises, sparing us decades of strategic concern, not to mention the repression of Cuba’s people,” Bolton writes, adding, “With Beijing’s threat rising, we should not miss today’s moment without seriously reconsidering how to return this geographically critical island to its own people’s friendlier hands.”
Bolton notes that Guantanamo Bay “remains fully available to us today” for any operations the US should choose to avail itself of to topple Havana.
Any time there’s the faintest whisper of a foreign power setting up a military presence in Washington’s neck of the woods, hawks immediately begin pounding the drums of war and exposing the hypocrisy of the US empire’s insistence on its right to form military alliances and amass proxy forces on the doorstep of its geopolitical rivals. Empire apologists always dismiss Russia and China’s claims that US military encroachments on their surroundings are an unacceptable security risk and say that no nation has a right to a “sphere of influence” which its enemies are forbidden to enter, yet we can plainly see that the US reserves a right to its own sphere of influence from its own doctrines and behaviors.
Earlier this year Senator Josh Hawley ominously asked an audience, “Imagine a world where Chinese warships patrol Hawaiian waters, and Chinese submarines stalk the California coastline. A world where the People’s Liberation Army has military bases in Central and South America. A world where Chinese forces operate freely in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.” Which is exactly what the US military has been doing to China.
The single dumbest thing the US-centralized empire asks us to believe is that the military encirclement of its top two geopolitical rivals is a defensive action, rather than an act of extreme aggression. The idea that the US militarily encircling Russia and China is an act of defense rather than aggression is so in-your-face transparently idiotic that anyone who thinks critically enough about it will immediately dismiss it for the foam-brained nonsense that it is, yet because of propaganda that is the mainstream narrative in the western world, and millions of people accept it as true.
The point of highlighting hypocrisy is not that being a hypocrite is some special crime in and of itself, it’s to show that the hypocrite is lying about their motives and behavior, and to dismantle their arguments defending their positions. If the US would interpret a Chinese military presence in Cuba as an incendiary provocation, then logically the far greater military presence the US has amassed on the borders of Russia and China is a vastly greater provocation by that same reasoning, and the US knows it. There exists no argument to the contrary that doesn’t rely on baseless “well it’s different when we do it” assertions.
Demanding that Russia and China tolerate behavior from the US that the US would never tolerate from Russia or China is just demanding that the world subjugate itself to the US empire. Those who argue that Russia should have tolerated Ukraine being made into a NATO asset or that China should just accept US military encirclement because something something freedom and democracy are really just saying the US should be allowed to rule every inch of this planet completely uncontested.
If what you really want is for the US to dominate every inch of this planet completely uncontested, don’t try and tell me that your actual concern is for the people of Ukraine or Taiwan or anywhere else. Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. Just be honest about what you are and where you stand.
_________________
All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Ukrainian novelist who became a war crimes investigator following the Russian invasion, and fought to uncover the true stories of her compatriots’ experiences under occupation
Victoria Amelina, who was wounded in a Russian missile attack in Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine on 27 June and died, aged 37, of her injuries four days later, knew that being a writer made her a target for Russia. She was aware that the invading forces had lists of activists and intellectuals to eliminate, but she also understood her country’s history: in March 2022, summoning one of the darkest pages in Ukrainian literary history – the murder of a generation of Ukrainian writers during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, known as the “executed renaissance” – she wrote that “there is a real threat that Russians will successfully execute another generation of Ukrainian culture – this time by missiles and bombs”.
Victoria sought to protect and promote Ukrainian culture as the country came under attack: in 2021 she founded a literature festival in her husband Oleksandr’s home town, New York, in the Donetsk region. The town (whose unlikely name is thought to have been originally Neu Jork and to have come from 19th-century German settlers) was occupied by the Russian army in 2014 and has been on the frontline ever since.
Social psychosis is widespread. In the words of the British psychiatrist, R. D. Laing, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.”
He was not referring to raving, drooling, hitting-your-head-against-the-wall lunacy but a taken-for-granted acceptance of a world long teetering on the edge of nuclear extinction, to take the most extreme example, but surely only one of many. The insouciant acceptance and support of psychotic rulers who promote first-strike nuclear war is very common. First strike nuclear policy is United States policy.
I recently wrote an article about the dangers of the fourteen U.S. Trident submarines. These subs constantly cruise under the oceans carrying 3,360 nuclear warheads equivalent to 134,400 Hiroshima bombs. All are on first strike triggers. And, of course, these are supplemented by all the land and air based nukes. My point was not very complicated: now that the United States government has abrogated all nuclear weapons treaties and continues to escalate its war against Russia in Ukraine, we are closer to nuclear annihilation than ever before.
This conclusion is shared by many esteemed thinkers such as the late Daniel Ellsberg who died on June 16, 2023 and whose 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, makes clear that nuclear war, waged intentionally or by mistake or accident, is very possible. In the months before he died, he warned that this is now especially true with the situation in Ukraine and the U.S. provocations against China.
The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal recently addressed the UN Security Council on the danger of U.S. actions in Ukraine and asked:
Will we see another Douma deception, but this time in Zaporizhzhia?
Why are we doing this? Why are we tempting nuclear annihilation by flooding Ukraine with advanced weapons and sabotaging negotiations at every turn?
Finian Cunningham has just raised the specter of a thermonuclear catastrophe initiated by a U.S./Ukrainian false flag attack on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant.
So my article was in no way unusual, except for my concentration on the Trident submarines.
When, against my better judgment, I read some commentators’ responses to my piece at a few websites where my article was posted, I was taken aback when I read the following [all emphases are mine]:
Like many other boomers, Edward J Curtin Jr is caught up in ‘nuclear terror’ … whereas on 4chan you see that a large portion of the young generation has come to accept the massive evidence that Hiroshima & Nagasaki were chemically firebombed like Tokyo, and ‘nuclear weapons’ most likely do not exist at all. The 10 alleged ‘nuclear powers’ have had reasons to hoax together, just like the global collusion on ‘covid’ & ‘vaccines’.
So, the point is? Subs with nukes have been cruising around the world’s oceans for over 60 years, back to the time when they tried to scare us with the Cuban missile crisis. I was on a fast attack sub during the Vietnam war, friend of mine got boomer duty, which is what they call the ones that carry the missiles. They’re there for show, they aren’t going to use them. Yes, they should be banned internationally, just in case. But as with the Nuremberg trials and principles, that’s not nearly enough. We’re going to need to create our own New World Order
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper
I vote for the bang!
The nuke is exaggerated. Reality is that too many will survive a nuclear WWIII. There will still be too many useless eaters and psychos left in the underground bunkers no matter how many nukes we drop. Like Chernobyl it will only develop to paradises for animals, natives and homeless on food stamps, while we the exceptionals will suffer from an underground life for 50 years without seeing natural light . A global virus and for double insurance a coupled vaxx, will be a much more effective tool to clean the filth and double shareholders profit..,
Dear Ed the sea monsters about as real as nukes.
Another one of the “elites” hoaxes.
To hear that there are no nuclear weapons and never were; to learn that some in their embrace of nihilism hope for a nuclear holocaust; to read that nuclear weapons are never going to be used because they only exist for show – well, this at least confirmed my suspicion that many who comment on articles are either bonkers or trolls or both. Some probably have nothing better to do than inform writers how wrong they are. It frightened me. It made me wonder how many of the millions of silent ones think similarly or have come to embrace hopelessness as a way of life – the feeling that they have no power because that has been drilled into them from birth. I have long thought that cultural normality can be understood as the use of one’s freedom to create a prison, a cell in which one can convince oneself that one is safe because the authorities have established a sacred umbrella to protect one from an apocalyptic hard rain that they never think is going to fall.
The Pew Research Center recently surveyed the American public on their sixteen greatest fears. Nuclear war was not one them. It was as if nuclear weapons did not exist, as if they have been buried in the cellar of public awareness. As if Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Newman’s motto was the national motto: “What? Me worry?” No doubt more Americans are aware of the gross public spectacle of Joey Chestnut stuffing his mouth with sixty-five hot dogs in ten minutes than they are of the Biden administration’s insane escalation toward nuclear war in Ukraine. We live in Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle.”
Although he was writing years ago, Ronald Laing’s words sound ironically prescient today after so many years of endless propaganda, the destruction of human experience resulting in destructive behavior, and the relentless diminishment of human beings to the status of machines:
At this moment in history, we are all caught in the hell of frenetic passivity. We find ourselves threatened by extermination that will be reciprocal, that no one wishes, that everyone fears, that may just happen to us ‘because’ no one knows how to stop it. There is one possibility of doing so if we can understand the structure of this alienation of ourselves from our experience, our experience from our deeds, our deeds from human authorship. Everyone will be carrying out orders. Where do they come from? Always from elsewhere. Is it still possible to reconstitute our destiny out of the hellish and inhuman fatality?
That is the key question now that more than fifty years have elapsed since Laing penned those words in his now classic book, The Politics of Experience (isbn.nu). He said then, which is exponentially truer today, that “machines are already becoming better at communicating with each other than human beings with each other.” Talking about deep things has become passé for so many.
If we don’t start worrying and unlove the machines, we are doomed sooner or later. Sooner is probable. Nuclear weapons are very real. They are poised and ready to fly. If we continue to live in denial of the madness of those who provoke their use while calmly promoting first-strike policies as the U.S. government does, we are worse than fools. We are suicidal.
As Daniel Ellsberg told us, “Don’t wait ‘till the bombs are actually falling.” That will be too late. There is no doubt that before a nuclear war can happen, we must go insane, normally so.
Let’s make the few protest voices in the wilderness the cries of hundreds of millions:
An independent weapons watchdog on Thursday implored the Biden administration to abandon any plans it has to provide the Ukrainian government with cluster bombs. While the White House has yet to finalize its decision, the State Department is expected to invoke a waiver under U.S. arms export laws that would allow stockpiled cluster munitions to be transferred to Ukraine, which is currently waging…
Russia has begun transferring tactical, or short-range, nuclear weapons to Belarus, prompting President Joe Biden to call the move “absolutely irresponsible” earlier this month. He’s not wrong. It is irresponsible to disburse nuclear weapons to other countries, increasing the risk that those weapons could be used by accident, miscalculation, or deliberately, especially with an active war nearby.
Elena Milashina and Alexander Nemov were on their way to the sentencing of a human rights activist in Grozny when they were assaulted
Assailants have carried out a brutal attack on a human rights lawyer and a prominent Russian journalist in Chechnya, leaving them with stab wounds, broken fingers and head wounds.
The brazen assault on journalist Elena Milashina and lawyer Alexander Nemov in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, was the most vicious in recent memory, leading even to a rare rebuke from the Kremlin which called it a “very serious attack that requires rather energetic measures”. Similar attacks in Chechnya, however, have gone unpunished for years.
Daniel Ellsberg marches in the San Francisco Pride Parade to free whistleblower Chelsea Manning, June 29, 2014 (Photo by R.D. Harris)
Daniel Ellsberg died on June 16, fighting to the end to warn of the existential threat of nuclear war. The 92-year-old whistleblower left a legacy of peace activism dating to his courageous release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Given the advancing security state and the atrophying peace movement, could his accomplishments be repeated today in this time of war in Ukraine?
From “defense intellectual” to peace activist
Daniel Ellsberg started his career as a brilliant “defense intellectual” working for the military and quasi-state think tanks. He helped plan, among other things, nuclear first strikes against the Soviet Union with China as a secondary target. However, with access to top secret information, he came to understand that the Vietnam War was unwinnable and the government – surprise, surprise – was lying to the US public that it could and would prevail.
Ellsberg’s geopolitical posture underwent a sea change from being a master of war to a warrior for peace. This was in the 1960s, and the transformation did not happen in isolation.
Ellsberg reportedly attended his first peace demomonstration in 1965, while still working for the RAND Corporation. He was especially inspired by the example of Randy Kehler, a draft resister willing to go to prison for his beliefs. By May 1971, the to-be whistleblower participated in a mass demonstration against the Vietnam War in an “affinity group” with known radicals Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky.
Could an analyst with access to top secret information also associate with nationally prominent dissidents, attend rallies against the military, yet go undetected and undeterred by today’s surveillance state apparatus? Not likely.
Also not likely, regrettably, is the revival of a political milieux like that of the sixties. This year, the Rage Against the War Machine demonstration, organized principally by the Libertarian and People’s parties, managed to attract only a few thousand to Washington on February 19. A few weeks later, another coalition led by ANSWER, UNAC, and others staged an anti-war rally on March 18 with similarly low turnout. Since then, there has not even been an attempt to mount a national demonstration against the ever escalating war in Ukraine.
Pentagon Papers purloined and published
Back in 1969, besides attending anti-war demos on his time off, Ellsberg was busy at work photocopying what were to become known as the Pentagon Papers, revealing the truth of the US imperial effort. To be sure, such a 7,000-page duplication feat could not be accomplished undetected under present security arrangements.
By 1970, Ellsberg was contacting sympathetic Democratic Party senators such as J. William Fulbright, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and George McGovern. They could release the papers on the floor of the Senate and still enjoy immunity from prosecution. They refused, but kept the liaison confidential.
After entrusting the Pentagon Papers with New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, the Times began publishing excerpts on June 31, 1971, without Ellsberg’s prior consent. Ellsberg also provided the Washington Post and other outlets with the papers, which published excerpts.
While the Times and the Post have long practiced follow-the-flag journalism, the fourth estate was still not yet quite the stenographers for the State Department and mouthpieces for the security agencies that they are now.
And today, unlike Fulbright and especially McGovern who were questioning the Vietnam War effort, not a single Democrat in either house opposes a war in Ukraine that is heading toward a nuclear exchange. Oddly, the contemporary politicians that could most nearly pass for peaceniks on Capitol Hill are far-right Republicans.
Fugitive Ellsberg
Once the Pentagon Papers went public, Ellsberg went on the lamb, precipitating the largest FBI “manhunt” since the Lindbergh kidnapping of 1932. But the feds never caught him. After thirteen days, Ellsberg simply turned himself in.
Such a hide-and-seek scenario would be impossible these days with our every move recorded on ubiquitous surveillance cameras. Eluding the 21st century police state is no longer an option.
Case dismissed due to government misconduct
Ellsberg went to trial on January 3, 1973, charged with theft and conspiracy under the 1917 Espionage Act. He faced 115 years in prison.
His defense was that the documents were illegally classified to keep them from the American public, not from a foreign enemy. That defense was disallowed.
The government was meanwhile busy collecting evidence against him. Operatives from the Nixon White House illegally broke into his psychiatrist’s house. The perpetrators included G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, who weren’t caught then. But a year later the “plumbers,” which were initiated to get Ellsberg, got their comeuppance when they were implicated in the Watergate scandal. The FBI also illegally wiretapped Ellsberg’s phone and then claimed the recordings had been lost.
In light of such government misconduct, the Nixon-appointed judge on the case, William Byrne, was compelled to dismiss the case on May 13, 1973. The back story is that while the trial was in progress, the judge was offered the directorship of the FBI, which he wanted but had to wait until the trial was concluded before accepting.
Ellsberg went free and went on to be a leading voice for peace. Byrne never got the FBI appointment.
Shifting partisan views on the security state and war
Today, with modern surveillance techniques and the NSA collecting every citizen’s electronic communications, the FBI would have no need to wiretap as they did with Ellsberg. And federal court judges no longer impartially dismiss cases of whistleblowers who dare to defy the state, as with Obama prosecuting more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous presidents combined.
According to polls over the last decade, partisan views on the growing surveillance state have flipflopped. The majority of Republicans now oppose the security state while most Democrats embrace it. Likewise, the Democrats are the new party of war.
The Armageddon-loving crazies in the Pentagon now serve as a calming counterpoint to the White House and the neo-con warriors in the State Department. Compared to Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland, the baddie generals of the past look like pacifists.
Nixon and Kissinger conspired to split the socialist bloc, pitting People’s China against the Soviets. In contrast, the current somnambulist in the Oval Office is working overtime to forge a union of these two supposed enemy states, while preparing for nuclear war against them both.
And no one in official circles seems the least bit concerned that the juggernaut to planetary annihilation has a fatal design flaw; no brakes to stop it.
We are living in times when the likes of far-right Republican Tucker Carlson are the ones making reasonable critiques of the unfettered security state and of the continual provocations against Russia.
Barbara Lee and the whole lot of once peace-promoting Democrats have learned to love war, voting nearly unanimously for every military appropriation to the proxy conflict on Russia’s border. Unfortunately, the fear of fascism by putative liberals does not extend to actual Nazis in Ukraine.
Progressive Democrats
How about the strategy of progressives working within the Democratic Party to move it to the left? In practice, Bernie Sanders and the Squad have worked tirelessly from one celebrity ball to next to prove that the term “progressive Democrat” is an oxymoron. Yes, the senator from the Green Mountain State is still a cut above Mitch McConnell. But that is not a very high bar.
That same Vermont career politician is now a significant cut below the maverick crusader who had in more auspicious times run for the presidency in 2016 and 2020 on the platform that the whole system was rigged including the Democratic Party. In so doing, he proved the DNC was indeed rigged. And then he proceeded to unreservedly join the Democrats, sheep-dogging Our Revolution into the party.
When the Democrats held a trifecta of the executive, House, and Senate, Mr. Sanders’ $200 billion healthcare package was off the table. Yet when the House went Republican, Bernie revived the initiative knowing that it would be defeated.
To be fair, blame for the demise of liberalism must be shared with its constituents who have become so deranged by the specter of Donald Trump that they will swallow anything the Democrats feed them. Even formerly liberal publications like TheNation run hit pieces against RFK Jr., terrified that the pro forma presidential primaries might include someone questioning party orthodoxy.
Meanwhile, they remain clueless that working class Americans are not wildly enthusiastic about another four years of Kamala Harris and her running mate. The Democrat’s frontrunner currently has a dismal 40% approval rating.
The Vietnam and Ukraine wars
The release of the Pentagon Papers revealed that the state was cognizant of the futility of the Vietnam venture and was maliciously willing to continue at a horrific cost to US troops and a still greater toll of Vietnamese lives. The paper’s publication was credited with contributing to a growing domestic disenchantment with imperial war.
Saigon “fell” two years after Ellsberg’s case was dismissed. On April 30, 1975, the Vietnamese successfully repelled the aggressor on the battlefield. With the anti-war movement mounting and the troops resisting, Washington was forced to accept defeat.
Now the US is embroiled in yet another horrific war, but a war of a different kind. The Ukraine War is a proxy war without a major commitment of US troops. However, similar to the exposés of the Pentagon Papers, it is now known that:
– The war in Ukraine was deliberately provoked by the US.
– The Minsk accords were a cynical ploy to buy time to arm Ukraine.
Why haven’t those revelations mobilized the peace movement? One contributing factor is its connections to the Democrats who have wholesaleconverted into a party of war.
The Biden administration is considering providing Ukraine with cluster bombs and may announce this decision in early July, NBC News reports. “We have been thinking about DPICM for a long time,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Friday at the National Press Club. “Yes, of course, there’s a decision-making process ongoing.” Dual-purpose improved conventional munitions…
After months of denouncing the nation’s military brass, Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin led Wagner Group mercenaries in an attempted coup d’état against President Vladimir Putin’s regime. After a day when Putin’s rule seemed in jeopardy, the Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko brokered a deal to resolve the crisis — at least for now. While the U.S. made it clear that they had nothing to…
Each time it happens, the world insists: ‘never again’. But the political and moral blindspots that allow these atrocities will persist until the lessons of history are learned
It’s happening again. In Darfur, scene of a genocide that killed 300,000 people and displaced millions 20 years ago, armed militias are on the rampage once more. Now, as then, they are targeting ethnic African tribes, murdering, raping and stealing with impunity. “They” are nomadic, ethnic Arab raiders, the much-feared “devils on horseback” – except now they ride in trucks. They’re called the Janjaweed. And they’re back.
How is it possible such horrors can be repeated? The world condemned the 2003 slaughter. The UN and the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigated. Sudan’s former president, Omar al-Bashir, was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity along with his principal allies. The trial of one suspect, known as Ali Kushayb, opened last year. Yet Bashir and the guilty men have evaded justice so far.
In this episode, we look at the release of findings by the NSW ICAC regarding former Premier Gladys Berejiklian and former NSW MP, Daryl Maguire. The ICAC found both individuals engaged in serious corruption, with Berejiklian breaching public trust by supporting a grant to the Australian Clay Target Association and the construction of a hall for the Riverina Conservatorium of Music. While it was recommended that charges be laid against Maguire, no charges were recommended against Berejiklian. The findings come after criticism from former Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the former NSW Coalition government. The media’s portrayal of Berejiklian as a “victim of a bad relationship” has been challenged, and the delayed release of the findings has also sparked an outrage.
The war in Ukraine and recent events in Russia: Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner paramilitary force, instigated an insurrection in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, before surrendering his weapons and seeking exile in Belarus through a deal with President Alexander Lukashenko. The potential implications of this event, including the ongoing war in Ukraine and its potential to spread to Russia, pose serious risks for Europe and the rest of the world. However, Australian media coverage of these events has been lacking, leading people to seek information through alternative channels such as Twitter, Reddit, CNN, or Al Jazeera.
The former Labor leader Simon Crean died during the week, and is remembered as one of the more decent figures in federal politics, received tributes from all sides of the political spectrum. Although his tenure as Labor leader from 2001 to 2003 was not marked by strong public support or success in opinion polls, Crean made significant reforms within the Labor Party to make it more democratic and less dominated by union bureaucrats. His memorable speech opposing the Iraq war showcased his courage and foresight, ultimately vindicating his position.
We also look at recent opinion polling – the two-party preferred voting figures, which remain relatively stable with Labor at 54% and the Coalition at 46%. However, of particular concern for the federal government is the decline in the percentage of people who believe Australia is heading in the right direction. Over the course of a year, the figure dropped from 48% to 33%, while the number of people expressing that the country is going in the wrong direction increased from 27% to 47%. This shift in public opinion could have implications for the government’s popularity and electoral prospects.
Music interludes:
Support independent journalism
We don’t plead, beseech, beg, guilt-trip, or gaslight you and claim the end of the world of journalism is coming soon. We keep it simple: If you like our work and would like to support it, send a donation, from as little as $5. Or purchase one of our books! It helps to keep our commitment to independent journalism ticking over! Go to our supporter page to see the many ways you can support New Politics.
Amidst this week’s strange attempt to instigate a military coup from the head of Russia’s Wagner Group, President Putin took a loud stand calling out the operation as a foreign directed insurgency with parallels drawn from the chaotic revolution of 1917.
Just as in 1917, the nation was at war with an enemy on the verge of defeat, and just as 1917, foreign manipulations using fifth columnists resulted in sucking the nation into Civil War. Putin stated:
Exactly this strike was dealt in 1917 when the country was in WW1, but its victory was stolen. Intrigues and arguments behind the army’s back turned out to be the greatest catastrophe, destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war… Russians were killing Russians, brothers killing brothers. But the beneficiaries were various political chevaliers of fortune and foreign powers who divided the country and tore it into parts. We will not let this happen.
Now I don’t know if the events catalyzed by Prigozhin’s attempted coup are part of a ‘game within a game’ designed to flush out fifth columnists while providing a headfake to western strategists… OR if this was an authentic coup. But what I do know is that there are historical processes at play which too few recognize and which President Putin understands very well.
Some might think Putin’s comparison to the 1917 revolution to be hyperbole, or a disrespect for the glorious Soviet revolution. They would be mistaken.
Aborting a System of Win-Win Cooperation
The sad fact is that neither the Bolsheviks nor Mensheviks which emerged onto the stage of history at the turn of the 20th century were organically arising “peoples’ movements”.
Upon deeper analysis conducted by historians like Anthony Sutton, Kerry Bolton, and Robert Cowley, both organizations which eventually merged into a singular force, enjoyed vast financial patronage of western imperial powerhouses such as Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff (head of Kuhn, Loeb & co.) and even Lord Alfred Milner — head of the newly formed Round Table Movement.
These characters bankrolled much of the Bolshevik movement as early as 1905 in order to destroy a truly revolutionary process that was spreading across much of the world in the wake of the Civil War.
One of the leading champions of this revolutionary process was Lincoln’s former bodyguard and the first Governor of Colorado, William Gilpin. Governor Gilpin envisioned a world of sovereign nation states united by rail lines stretching through the Bering Strait and bringing all the continents and cultures into harmonious co-existence. In his famous 1890 ‘Cosmopolitan Railway’ Gilpin stated:
The cosmopolitan railway will make the whole world one community. It will reduce the separate nations to families of our great nation… From extended intercommunication will arise a wider intercourse of human ideas and as the result, logical and philosophical reciprocities, which will become the germs for innumerable new developments; for in the track of intercommunication, enterprise and invention invariably follow and whatever facilitates one stimulates every other agency of progress.
Describing the obvious brotherhood of Russia and the USA in spearheading this project, Gilpin wrote:
It is a simple and plain proposition, that Russia and the United States, each having broad, uninhabited areas and limitless undeveloped resources, would by the expenditure of two or three hundred millions apiece for a highway of the nations through their now waste places, add a hundred fold to their wealth and power and influence. Nations which can spend in war their thousands of lives – the lives of the best and bravest of their sons and citizens – can surely afford a little of their surplus wealth and energy for such a work as this [p. 35].
The American System Goes Global
Gilpin was not alone in this vision. In fact, he represented a network of statesmen spread all across the globe who recognized that the only way to break out of the endless cycle of wars, usury, and corruption, which the Hobbesian structures of the British Empire maintained globally, was through the adoption of an anti-Free Trade system known as “The American System of Political Economy”. This was a very different concept of “America” than the Pax Americana which has run roughshod over the world since WWII.
In Russia, this process found its champion in the figure of Sergei Witte (Finance Minister and Minister of Transportation from 1892-1903) who led a faction of the Russian intelligentsia in a struggle for progress and cooperation both internally and with allied nations against powerful forces committed to feudalism both within the Russian oligarchy and externally. The regressive forces which Witte had to contend with included powerful reactionary traditionalist forces who yearned for the good old days before Czar Alexander II freed the serfs and on the other extreme, the emergence of vast clusters of anarchist movements threatening to burn down the state in a replication of the Jacobin frenzy of the French revolution.
As Martin Sieff has demonstrated through his many writings on Prince Kropotkin, many of these anarchist networks enjoyed the patronage of powerful forces that cared little for the plight of the working class.
The international spread of the American System between 1876-1905 took the form of large-scale industrialization and railroads. The funding mechanism was located in a practice that has fallen out of favor in the West (although has made a powerful comeback in China in recent years) called ‘dirigisme’ — the emission of productive credit from state banks.
It was Witte who had spearheaded the Trans Siberian Railway’s construction between 1890-1905 with plans to extend rail lines to China and beyond utilizing state directed capital and a blend of private enterprise. A fuller exposition of Witte’s fight will be unveiled in the next installment.
The British Empire, which always relied on keeping nations divided, underdeveloped and dependent on the use of maritime shipping, was not amused.
By controlling the international maritime choke points, the tiny island was able to exert its influence across the globe. Through the vigorous enforcement of laissez-faire doctrines of free trade, nations were blocked from protecting themselves from the financial warfare launched by the city of London against victim states (speculative volatility, usury, cheap dumping, cash cropping, and drug running). Anyone wishing to engage in long term planning in the building up of the land-based transport corridors via rail, roads, and industry would be easily sabotaged if the British System were shaping their world.
The international movement to break this system of evil was the only real revolutionary process animating the world during this time.
The Bolshevik Counter-Revolution: An Anglo-American Fraud
In 1905, Wall Street financier Jacob Schiff had given $200 million to the Japanese to assist their victory against the Russians during the 1904-05 Russo Japanese war. This generosity ultimately earned the banker the Medal of the Rising Sun in the Meiji Palace in 1907.
After crippling the Russian state and military (its navy was wiped out during the war), Schiff turned his attention to financing revolutionary activities within Russia itself. How money was spent by Schiff was difficult to say until 1949, when Schiff’s grandson John Schiff bragged to the New York Journal that his grandfather had given $20 million “for the triumph of communism in Russia.”
American journalist, and Schiff asset George Kennan, played an instrumental role as perception manager of the revolution and bragged that he had converted 52,000 Russian soldiers imprisoned in Japan into Bolshevik revolutionaries. A March 24, 1917 interview recorded in The New York Times celebrating the revolution read:
Mr. Kennan told of the work of the Friends of Russian Freedom in the revolution. He said that during the Russian-Japanese war he was in Tokyo, and that he was permitted to make visits among the 12,000 Russian prisoners in Japanese hands at the end of the first year of the war. He had conceived the idea of putting revolutionary propaganda into the hands of the Russian army.
The Japanese authorities favoured it and gave him permission. After which he sent to America for all the Russian revolutionary literature to be had…
“The movement was financed by a New York banker you all know and love,’ he said, referring to Mr Schiff, ‘and soon we received a ton and a half of Russian revolutionary propaganda. At the end of the war 50,000 Russian officers and men went back to their country ardent revolutionists. The Friends of Russian Freedom had sowed 50,000 seeds of liberty in 100 Russian regiments. I do not know how many of these officers and men were in the Petrograd fortress last week, but we do know what part the army took in the revolution.”
Schiff himself jubilantly stated to the New York Times, March 18, 1917:
May I through your columns give expression to my joy that the Russian nation, a great and good people, have at last effected their deliverance from centuries of autocratic oppression and through an almost bloodless revolution have now come into their own. Praised be God on high!
Historian Kerry Bolton wrote of New York Federal Reserve director William Boyce Thompson who had been installed as head of the American Red Cross during the 1917 revolution and was largely recognized as the true U.S. ambassador to the government, saying:
Thompson set himself up in royal manner in Petrograd reporting directly to Pres. Wilson and bypassing U.S. Ambassador Francis. Thompson provided funds from his own money, first to the Social Revolutionaries, to whom he gave one million rubles, and shortly after $1,000,000 to the Bolsheviks to spread their propaganda to Germany and Austria.
Writing in 1962, historian Arsene de Goulevitch, who experienced the events of 1917, firsthand wrote:
In private interviews, I have been told that over 21 million rubles were spent by Lord Alfred Milner in financing the Russian Revolution… The financier just mentioned was by no means alone among the British to support the Russian revolution with large financial donations. [1]
According to his own accounts, during the four months Leon Trotsky spent in New York in 1917, much of it was spent hobnobbing with the upper crust of Wall Street and being driven around in limousines. [2]
It is also noteworthy that after Trotsky was arrested by Canadian authorities while en route back to Russia with tens of thousands of dollars of Wall Street money, it was none other than Claude Dansey (Cecil Rhodes disciple, deputy chief of the new MI6 and founder of US military intelligence in 1917!!) that directly intervened to liberate Trotsky and company.
Leon Trotsky’s Immortal Treachery
Leon Trotsky, who Lord Milner, Schiff, Paul Warburg etc., always intended to be the leader of the movement that would take control over the dead bodies of the Romanovs, was fortunately ousted by the saner forces around Joseph Stalin in 1927.
As historian Grover Furr masterfully documents using recently declassified material, testimonies, and other evidence from archives in the USA and Russia, Leon Trotsky made several attempts to return to power in Russia after his expulsion. He didn’t do this alone, however, but largely with the help of fascist forces in Britain, Japan, Ukraine, and Germany all the way until the moment he met his untimely end in 1940. This will be the subject of a future review of Grover Furr’s work. [3] One of the best and more recent among Furr’s pioneering writing on this topic can be found in his New Evidence of Trotsky’s Conspiracy, Erythos Press, 2020. Furr’s website is also an invaluable resource.
For all of Lenin’s many problems, he differed from Trotsky on two interconnected points of 1) a general belief in voluntarism and 2) a rejection of the theory of permanent revolution.
Where Lenin believed that productive labor could be channeled towards the improvement of productive forces of society, Trotsky believed that any such effort at peaceful productive improvement would lead only to decadence. Permanent revolution was thus needed to keep workers from falling into sloth amidst the eternal striving for global class struggle. In 1914, a frustrated Lenin spoke of Trotsky’s fetish, saying:
he [Trotsky] deserted the Mensheviks and occupied a vacillating position, now co-operating with Martynov (the economist), now proclaiming his absurdly Left ‘permanent revolution’ theory.
Another point of conflict between Lenin on the one side and Trotsky on the other centered on whether or not Russia should continue to participate in WWI.
A mind-numbing over-simplification of Russian history has destroyed the ability for countless historians to recognize the reason for the life and death battles that took place between Trotsky and Stalin during the first 20 post revolutionary years [in photo: Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky
Where Lenin wanted to bring Russia out of the insane conflict in the first moments of their coup in 1917, Trotsky and his close ally Bukharin demanded that Russia stay in the war with the aim of converting it into a total pan European (and ultimately global) revolution. Trotsky’s commitment to global socialist revolution vs Stalin’s commitment to “socialism in one country” was at the heart of an unbridgeable divide between the two revolutionaries throughout the years.Upon taking charge of the Russian economy, Trotsky and Lenin unleashed a destructive wave of economic reforms titled ‘The New Economic Policy’ (NEP) that saw vast liberalization of the entire state with western corporate powers sweeping in to buy up former national utilities for pennies on the dollar. The most powerful figure of the western magnates to be granted full access to buy up Russia under this new policy was Occidental Petroleum’s Armand Hammer (1898-1990) who was only forced to leave Russia the moment Trotsky was kicked out (and returning to dominance in the weeks after Stalin’s 1953 death).
Later on in life, Hammer described how Lenin told him: ”We do not need doctors, we need businessmen… communism is not working and we must change to a New Economic Policy.”
Working closely with Lenin and especially Trotsky, Hammer became the principal moderator of nearly every business deal made between the Soviet government and western corporations during the 1920s which saw Russia sink into brutal economic enslavement to foreign powers at a pace which would not be seen again for over 60 years.
The vast liberalization of the Russian economy during the dark 1920s paralleled closely the Perestroika program of free trade/privatization of the 1990s and it is no coincidence that George Bush Sr dubbed this program of Balkanized looting of Russia ‘Operation Hammer’.
If one saw a proto-George Soros in the figure of Armand Hammer, they would not be far off.
Parvus and the Pan-European Union
Trotsky’s close association with Alexander Israel Helphand (aka: Parvus) throughout the revolution of 1905 and beyond is also suspicious and should be considered in the context of a much broader imperial geopolitical strategy.
Parvus’ association with the Pan-European Union founded by Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi in 1923 is another relevant anomaly that takes us into the deeper power structures lurking below the surface waves of history. [4] Parvus’s association with the Pan European Union and broader fascist operations across Turkey and the Middle East is laid out in Jeffrey Steinberg’s 2005 report “Cheney Revives Parvus’ Permanent War .madness”
Other members of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s institution included likes of Benito Mussolini, Walter Lippman, Nazi finance minister Hjalmar Schacht and Nazi geopolitician Karl Haushofer, while financiers Max Warburg and Louis de Rothschild openly bankrolled the organization.
In 1932, Kalergi delivered a speech celebrating the great restoration of order that would emerge in the unified pan-European effort to put down Bolshevik anarchism saying:
This eternal war can end only with the constitution of a world republic…. The only way left to save the peace seems to be a politic of peaceful strength, on the model of the Roman Empire, that succeeded in having the longest period of peace in the west thanks to the supremacy of his legions.
This group played a much greater role in history than many realize and set the stage for the European Union. Parvus’ (and Trotsky’s) close association with Vladimir Jabotinsky set the stage for the most fascist elements of Zionism to emerge in the wake of WWII, and Parvus’ work as propagandist and arms dealer for the leadership of the Young Turk movement (deployed to set a weakened Ottoman Empire on fire and provoke what became the Balkan Wars of 1912-13) can still be felt across the Turkish world to this day.
It is also noteworthy that none other than Otto von Hapsburg himself had run this organization for over 30 years and also created a sister organization called Dignitae Humanae Institute to “united the right of the world” under a gnostic Catholic veneer with a Clash of Civilizations rebranding for the alt right. As the ultra-liberalized dissolution of society proceeds expectedly apace under the moral mush of LBGTXYZ gobbledygook, pagan Gaia worship, and critical race theory, it is obvious that a knee jerk leap into radical conservativism will accelerate. Hence, a net has been cast to catch conservative fish.
Located in an 800-year-old monastery in Trisulti, Otto Hapsburg’s organization has found a useful frontman in the form of a Jesuitical fascist right-wing priest of the American alt-right by the name of… Steve Bannon. [5] This fact gives new meaning to Bannon’s self-characterization as a Leninist. In an August 22, 2016 Daily Beast article, journalist Ronald Radosh described a conversation he had with Bannon two years earlier saying “we had a long talk about his approach to politics. He never called himself a “populist” or an “American nationalist,” as so many think of him today. “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed. Shocked, I asked him what he meant.
“Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
Trotskyites Mutate into Neocons
I say this here and now just to draw a parallel in the reader’s mind to the strange transmogrification which leading Trotskyists took in the USA once their leader’s life was snuffed out in 1940. Trotsky’s body wasn’t even cold before such devotees as James Burnham, Sidney Hook, Max Schachtman, Albert Wohlsetter, and Irving Kristol abandoned Trotskyite socialism and adopted a new rabidly right-wing paradigm, which came to be known as ‘neo-conservativism’.
This poisonous movement grew quickly throughout the Cold War and took over the USA over the dead bodies of JFK and his brother while unleashing a new global dis-order ‘clash of civilizations’ each-against-all logic onto the globe under the watch of the Trilateral Commission of Kissinger, Brzezinski, and David Rockefeller.
I think we can intimate what Trotsky ultimately saw as the final destination for his aims of a global revolution of the masses, and willingness to collaborate with Nazis to achieve his ends by considering the writings of former Trotskyite James Burnham.
As Cynthia Chung pointed out in her recent article on the topic, Burnham, (Trotsky’s former personal assistant and a man known to many as the father of the neocons), saw the resolution to the Manichean problem of class struggle and Cold War in a one world fascist government. Right before Trotsky’s 1940 death, Burnham wrote an essay renouncing Dialectic Materialism in favor of the superior philosophy of Bertrand Russell as outlined in the 1913 Principia Scientifica, and hence his rebirth as a neocon was ensured. [6] In his Feb 1940 ‘Science and Style’, Burnham wrote: “Do you wish me to prepare a reading list, Comrade Trotsky? It would be long, ranging from the work of the brilliant mathematicians and logicians of the middle of the last century to one climax in the monumental Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead (the historic turning point in modern logic), and then spreading out in many directions – one of the most fruitful represented by the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science.”
Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead’s three volume Principia Mathematica published between 1910-1913 set the stage for the latter development of cybernetics and information theory by Russell’s pupil Norbert Wiener
The question now sits before us: Was Burnham’s conversion to Russell’s worldview inconsistent with the actual goals and mission of Leon Trotsky?
It is too often forgotten that Leon Trotsky, acting as chairman of the technical and scientific board of industry, quite literally controlled all science policy of Russia from 1924-25. During this time, he wrote a 1924 pamphlet outlining his pro-eugenics vision of the future global order that would be brought into existence through the forces of Darwinian natural selection saying:
The human species will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and mass psycho-physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution… man will make his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to a higher consciousness… to create a higher social biological type, or if you please, a superman.
Whether we consider Trotsky’s relentless efforts to integrate Darwinism with Marxist Dialectic Materialism or the Neoconservative commitment to a Darwinian survival of the fittest ethic merged with a gnostic Christian end times doctrine, the effects are largely identical: Global chaos with a supposed point of rapture/synthesis to resolve the chaos of the material world. Getting to this destination, whereby a new order and new Nietzschean human being were to emerge, simply required a cleansing experience.
Where Chardin was tasked with merging Darwin’s theory of natural selection into Christianity, Trotsky was tasked with merging Darwin’s theory into the state religion of Marxist dialectic materialism in Russia. The end result in either case was identical.
Wohlstetter and RAND Corporation
Albert Wohlstetter is another devout Trotskyist who became a leading neo-conservative and controlling hand behind RAND Corporation. It was under Wohlstetter’s influence that RAND Corp became the principal conduit for the intellectual takeover of all branches of US policy on military, economic, and cultural levels.
How did this occur? Through a process known as Cybernetics.
Created by Norbert Wiener as the “practical application” of Lord Bertrand Russell’s “theoretical” Principia Mathematica of 1910-1913, Cybernetics was essentially a ‘science of control’ which became the conduit used to re-brand eugenics into new clothes after World War II.
As I outlined in my recent essay ‘The Revenge of the Malthusians and the Science of Limits’ the language of Cybernetics was called ‘systems analysis’ and presumed that all systems could be described as closed units susceptible to pure mathematical description and most importantly… manipulation from a scientific elite.
Author Alex Abella described RAND’s systems analysis repackaging of Dialectic Materialism in the following terms in his Soldiers of Reason:
RAND’s systems analysis…refused to be constrained by existing reality…Systems analysis was the freedom to dream and to dream big, to turn away from the idea that reality is a limited set of choices, to strive to bend the world to one’s will…the crux of systems analysis lies in a careful examination of the assumptions that gird the so-called right question, for the moment of greatest danger in a project is when unexamined criteria define the answers we want to extract. Sadly, most RAND analysts failed to perceive this inherent flaw in their wondrous construct. Not only that, the methodology of systems analysis required that all the aspects of a particular problem be broken down into quantities…Those things that could not be eased into a mathematical formula…were left out of the analysis… By extension, if a subject could not be measured, ranged, and classified, it was of little consequence in systems analysis, for it was not rational. Numbers were all – the human factor was a mere adjunct to the empirical.
The key that gives both Dialectic Materialism the same power of evil as the upgraded tool of Bertrand Russell’s Principia Scientifica extolled by Burnham or Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics/systems analysis is found in the following axiom: “Quantity must always govern quality”.
Under the influence of Wohlsetter’s RAND Corporation, the USA was driven into full scale insanity with a military outlook driven by computer models that presumed nuclear war was a winnable endeavor bringing the world closer to full scale nuclear holocaust. The merging of Darwinism with social science created “eugenics” which presumed that quantitative properties like genetic codes and DNA gave rise to qualitative attributes like “morality”, “wisdom” or “fitness to rule or live”.
In order for society to be brought into acceptance of this new soul-less paradigm of existence, with an invisible master class governing depopulated slaves from above, a vast shock therapy would be called for.
The Frankfurt School Global Revolution
That cleansing experience would take the form of ritualistic climax of purgative violence which would usher in a state of total despair and thus a new scientific priesthood managing the slaves of the other under a renewed form of technocratic feudalism. But how would society be brought to such a state of despair such that the masses would clamor for a new age to be imposed upon them in the form of a one world technocratic government?
When Christianity, nationalism, and respect for family values still governed society, such a state of nihilistic despair requisite to achieve this breaking point was more than a little difficult to achieve.
Here the role of Trotsky’s associates Georg Lukacs, and Willi Munzenberg play an important role.
Both men were not only radical Bolsheviks but also founders of a new organization founded in 1923 known as the Institute for Social Research founded in Frankfurt Germany, otherwise known as “The Frankfurt School”.
The Frankfurt School would lay out a comprehensive intellectual framework for a new global aesthetical and scientific revolution premised on the worship of decay, ugliness, and death within a Weberian-Freudian-Marxist synthesis. The system developed by these misanthropic leading priests of the new cult of death would justify the CIA’s funding of abstract art, post-modernist literature, a-tonal music, and other most modernist garbage throughout the Cold War. The launching of this project in full force took the form of a CIA-MI6 funded operation in 1949 dubbed ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom’. Leading organizers of this congress included Lord Bertrand Russell and two former Trotskyists: Sidney Hook and James Burnham.
This group and their role in steering mass education and culture over the ensuing century will be the topic of a future report.
Post-Script: A Final Word from Putin
To this author’s knowledge, the first time Vladimir Putin laid out a full attack on the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution as a foreign directed color revolution was during his 2021 Valdai Club meeting. At his keynote address, the Russian leader called out the social engineers masquerading as revolutionaries and social reformers today driving a parallel to the destructive ideology of the Bolsheviks of 1917:
The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.
Notes
1. Czarism and Revolution, published by Omni Publications in Hawthorne, 1962 French edition, pp. 224, 230.
2. Leon Trotsky: My Life, New York publisher: Scribner’s, 1930, p. 277.
4. Parvus’s association with the Pan European Union and broader fascist operations across Turkey and the Middle East is laid out in Jeffrey Steinberg’s 2005 report “Cheney Revives Parvus’ Permanent War Madness”
5. This fact gives new meaning to Bannon’s self-characterization as a Leninist. In an August 22, 2016 Daily Beast article, journalist Ronald Radosh described a conversation he had with Bannon two years earlier saying “we had a long talk about his approach to politics. He never called himself a “populist” or an “American nationalist,” as so many think of him today. “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed. Shocked, I asked him what he meant. “Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
6. In his February 1940 ‘Science and Style’, Burnham wrote: “Do you wish me to prepare a reading list, Comrade Trotsky? It would be long, ranging from the work of the brilliant mathematicians and logicians of the middle of the last century to one climax in the monumental Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead (the historic turning point in modern logic), and then spreading out in many directions – one of the most fruitful represented by the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science.”
:quality(80)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/semana/YAKF6BBSOBF3RHXBYN6NOTSIR4.jpg)
