The Biden administration will, for the first time, send controversial armor-piercing munitions containing depleted uranium to Ukraine, according to Reuters. The munition can be fired from U.S. Abrams tanks, which are expected to arrive in Ukraine in the coming weeks. The shells, which will come from U.S. excess inventory, would be funded by the Presidential Drawdown Authority…
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Abdel Hadi el-Gazzar (Egypt), The Popular Chorus or Food or Comrades on the Theatre of Life, 1948 (post-dated 1951).On the last day of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, the five founding states (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) welcomed six new members: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The BRICS partnership now encompasses 47.3 percent of the world’s population, with a combined global Gross Domestic Product (by purchasing power parity, or PPP,) of 36.4 percent. In comparison, though the G7 states (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) account for merely 10 percent of the world’s population, their share of the global GDP (by PPP) is 30.4 percent. In 2021, the nations that today form the expanded BRICS group were responsible for 38.3 percent of global industrial output while their G7 counterparts accounted for 30.5 percent. All available indicators, including harvest production and the total volume of metal production, show the immense power of this new grouping. Celso Amorim, advisor to the Brazilian government and one of the architects of BRICS during his former tenure as foreign minister, said of the new development that ‘[t]he world can no longer be dictated by the G7’.
Certainly, the BRICS nations, for all their internal hierarchies and challenges, now represent a larger share of the global GDP than the G7, which continues to behave as the world’s executive body. Over forty countries expressed an interest in joining BRICS, although only twenty-three applied for membership before the South Africa meeting (including seven of the thirteen countries in the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC). Indonesia, the world’s seventh largest country in terms of GDP (by PPP), withdrew its application to BRICS at the last moment but said it would consider joining later. Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo’s comments reflect the mood of the summit: ‘We must reject trade discrimination. Industrial downstreaming must not be hindered. We must all continue to voice equal and inclusive cooperation’.
Tadesse Mesfin (Ethiopia), Pillars of Life: Waiting, 2018BRICS does not operate independently of new regional formations that aim to build platforms outside the grip of the West, such as the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Instead, BRICS membership has the potential to enhance regionalism for those already within these regional fora. Both sets of interregional bodies are leaning into a historical tide supported by important data, analysed by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research using a range of widely available and reliable global databases. The facts are clear: the Global North’s percentage of world GDP fell from 57.3 percent in 1993 to 40.6 percent in 2022, with the US’s percentage shrinking from 19.7 percent to only 15.6 percent of global GDP (by PPP) in the same period – despite its monopoly privilege. In 2022, the Global South, without China, had a GDP (by PPP) greater than that of the Global North.
The West, perhaps because of its rapid relative economic decline, is struggling to maintain its hegemony by driving a New Cold War against emergent states such as China. Perhaps the single best evidence of the racial, political, military, and economic plans of the Western powers can be summed up by a recent declaration of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the European Union (EU): ‘NATO and the EU play complementary, coherent and mutually reinforcing roles in supporting international peace and security. We will further mobilise the combined set of instruments at our disposal, be they political, economic, or military, to pursue our common objectives to the benefit of our one billion citizens’.
Alia Ahmad (Saudi Arabia), Hameel – Morning Rain, 2022Why did BRICS welcome such a disparate group of countries, including two monarchies, into its fold? When asked to reflect on the character of the new full member states, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said, ‘What matters is not the person who governs but the importance of the country. We can’t deny the geopolitical importance of Iran and other countries that will join BRICS’. This is the measure of how the founding countries made the decision to expand their alliance. At the heart of BRICS’s growth are at least three issues: control over energy supplies and pathways, control over global financial and development systems, and control over institutions for peace and security.
Houshang Pezeshknia (Iran), Khark, 1958A larger BRICS has now created a formidable energy group. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are also members of OPEC, which, with Russia, a key member of OPEC+, now accounts for 26.3 million barrels of oil per day, just below thirty percent of global daily oil production. Egypt, which is not an OPEC member, is nonetheless one of the largest African oil producers, with an output of 567,650 barrels per day. China’s role in brokering a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia in April enabled the entry of both of these oil-producing countries into BRICS. The issue here is not just the production of oil, but the establishment of new global energy pathways.
The Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative has already created a web of oil and natural gas platforms around the Global South, integrated into the expansion of Khalifa Port and natural gas facilities at Fujairah and Ruwais in the UAE, alongside the development of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030. There is every expectation that the expanded BRICS will begin to coordinate its energy infrastructure outside of OPEC+, including the volumes of oil and natural gas that are drawn out of the earth. Tensions between Russia and Saudi Arabia over oil volumes have simmered this year as Russia exceeded its quota to compensate for Western sanctions placed on it due to the war in Ukraine. Now these two countries will have another forum, outside of OPEC+ and with China at the table, to build a common agenda on energy. Saudi Arabia plans to sell oil to China in renminbi (RMB), undermining the structure of the petrodollar system (China’s two other main oil providers, Iraq and Russia, already receive payment in RMB).
Juan Del Prete (Argentina), The Embrace, 1937–1944Both the discussions at the BRICS summit and its final communiqué focused on the need to strengthen a financial and development architecture for the world that is not governed by the triumvirate of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Wall Street, and the US dollar. However, BRICS does not seek to circumvent established global trade and development institutions such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Bank, and the IMF. For instance, BRICS reaffirmed the importance of the ‘rules-based multilateral trading system with the World Trade Organisation at its core’ and called for ‘a robust Global Financial Safety Net with a quota-based and adequately resourced [IMF] at its centre’. Its proposals do not fundamentally break with the IMF or WTO; rather, they offer a dual pathway forward: first, for BRICS to exert more control and direction over these organisations, of which they are members but have been suborned to a Western agenda, and second, for BRICS states to realise their aspirations to build their own parallel institutions (such as the New Development Bank, or NDB). Saudi Arabia’s massive investment fund is worth close to $1 trillion, which could partially resource the NDB.
BRICS’s agenda to improve ‘the stability, reliability, and fairness of the global financial architecture’ is mostly being carried forward by the ‘use of local currencies, alternative financial arrangements, and alternative payment systems’. The concept of ‘local currencies’ refers to the growing practice of states using their own currencies for cross-border trade rather than relying upon the dollar. Though approximately 150 currencies in the world are considered to be legal tender, cross-border payments almost always rely on the dollar (which, as of 2021, accounts for 40 percent of flows over the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or SWIFT, network).
Other currencies play a limited role, with the Chinese RMB comprising 2.5 percent of cross-border payments. However, the emergence of new global messaging platforms – such as China’s Cross-Border Payment Interbank System, India’s Unified Payments Interface, and Russia’s Financial Messaging System (SPFS) – as well as regional digital currency systems promise to increase the use of alternative currencies. For instance, cryptocurrency assets briefly provided a potential avenue for new trading systems before their asset valuations declined, and the expanded BRICS recently approved the establishment of a working group to study a BRICS reference currency.
Following the expansion of BRICS, the NDB said that it will also expand its members and that, as its General Strategy, 2022–2026 notes, thirty percent of all of its financing will be in local currencies. As part of its framework for a new development system, its president, Dilma Rousseff, said that the NDB will not follow the IMF policy of imposing conditions on borrowing countries. ‘We repudiate any kind of conditionality’, Rousseff said. ‘Often a loan is given upon the condition that certain policies are carried out. We don’t do that. We respect the policies of each country’.
Amir H. Fallah (Iran), I Want To Live, To Cry, To Survive, To Love, To Die, 2023In their communiqué, the BRICS nations write about the importance of ‘comprehensive reform of the UN, including its Security Council’. Currently, the UN Security Council has fifteen members, five of which are permanent (China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US). There are no permanent members from Africa, Latin America, or the most populous country in the world, India. To repair these inequities, BRICS offers its support to ‘the legitimate aspirations of emerging and developing countries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, including Brazil, India, and South Africa to play a greater role in international affairs’. The West’s refusal to allow these countries a permanent seat at the UN Security Council has only strengthened their commitment to the BRICS process and to enhance their role in the G20.
The entry of Ethiopia and Iran into BRICS shows how these large Global South states are reacting to the West’s sanctions policy against dozens of countries, including two founding BRICS members (China and Russia). The Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter – Venezuela’s initiative from 2019 – brings together twenty UN member states that are facing the brunt of illegal US sanctions, from Algeria to Zimbabwe. Many of these states attended the BRICS summit as invitees and are eager to join the expanded BRICS as full members.
We are not living in a period of revolutions. Socialists always seek to advance democratic and progressive trends. As is often the case in history, the actions of a dying empire create common ground for its victims to look for new alternatives, no matter how embryonic and contradictory they are. The diversity of support for the expansion of BRICS is an indication of the growing loss of political hegemony of imperialism.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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The Russian invasion of Ukraine has had a devastating impact on the environment and global food market, particularly in Third World nations (also referred to as the Global South). Several instances of explosions in nuclear facilities, oil refineries and distribution pipelines have greatly contributed to the indiscriminate destruction of crops, agricultural land, and vital infrastructure in the region. Inevitably, such destruction has had an immediate impact on the people’s access to food supply in the North African and Middle Eastern countries that are dependent on the region for the same, leading to an impending food security crisis.
The implications of such destruction is noteworthy due to the information presented by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (‘FAO’), which indicates that 26 countries rely on wheat imports from Russia and Ukraine to fulfil 50% of their wheat requirements. According to data published by the United Nations World Food Programme (‘WFP’), an estimated 6 million children in the Sahel region of Africa remain malnourished, while 16 million individuals residing in urban areas are on the verge of experiencing food insecurity. Moreover, the aforementioned development has elevated the probability of food insecurity within the borders of Russia, and has the potential to trigger a global surge in malnourishment and famine, thereby intensifying concerns for developing nations. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that African nations exhibit a significant dependence on Russia and Ukraine for the procurement of essential agricultural commodities, including wheat, maize, and sunflower seed oil. It is worth mentioning that the Middle East and North African regions alone account for 80% of the wheat export from these countries. India’s annual demand for crude sunflower oil is largely met by Ukraine and Russia, accounting for up to 90% of the supply. The adverse effects of war and drought in certain regions have led to a heightened dependence on imports, exacerbating the potential consequences. Furthermore, the pre-existing risk of food insecurity in these areas compounds the issue. It has caused the agricultural commodity markets to remain highly elevated, even after retreating from their record high in 2022.
In this piece, we discuss that there is a need to establish a legal framework to account for Russia’s extraterritorial responsibility towards the Third World, to assess its violation of its obligation to protect the environment and its violation of the right to food. This framework must be compatible with a Third World Approach to International Law (‘TWAIL’)-centric analysis, as any such analysis would remain incomplete by simply focussing on the rights-rhetoric developed by the First World.
Establishing Russia’s Extraterritorial Responsibility towards the Third World
Russia has an Extraterritorial Obligation towards the Third World, which extends to countries that are not directly involved in the conflict. According to Article(s) 1 and 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (‘ICESCR’), the Right to Food has a transnational impact due to the Covenant’s emphasis on transnational cooperation, with no specific provisions on extraterritorial implementation. Further, Principles II-IV of the Maastricht Principles on Extraterritorial Duties of States in the Field of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (‘ETO Principles’) emphasizes the territory is extended to places outside the State’s own territory if the ICESCR-rights can be influenced outside the state’s borders. According to the UN Committee on World Food Security’s Framework for Action for Food Security and Nutrition in Protracted Crises (‘FFA’), protracted crises may have international, regional, and trans-boundary aspects and impacts, including the presence of refugees. The UN General Assembly Resolution on the Right to Food emphasizes the extraterritorial commitment to respect and protect and urges States to ensure their political and economic actions do not impede the enjoyment of ICESCR rights in other States. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and the UN Committee on World Food Security have been actively publishing reports on the plight of Third World countries due to the lack of food supplies and resources.
Russia has not fulfilled its extraterritorial commitment to provide help to foreign citizens, but indirect assistance is still needed. This has arisen due to its violation of its obligation to respect the right to food. In order to maintain its obligation to respect the right to food, Russia should have considered the effects of its actions on the global population (particularly in the Third World). This evaluation should have concluded that their actions would have calamitous consequences for global food security. Yet, the assaults were carried out, in violation of the universal extraterritorial obligation to respect (particularly in the Third World).
Identifying a TWAIL-centric legal framework to analyse Russia’s Extraterritorial Responsibility towards the Third World
Arguments for extraterritorial responsibility can be placed on Russia, but there is a less likelihood that Russia can be held accountable for its actions. To assess the damage to environment and food security caused by the conflict, it is necessary to identify a relevant standard to assess the damage. The Additional Protocol I (‘AP I’) to the Geneva Convention of 1977 mandates three conditions that must be satisfied during an armed conflict to trigger protection from environmental damage. This includes long-term, severe, and widespread damage to the natural environment by the chosen means of warfare. However, these conditions impose a very high threshold to establish environmental damage, as it only envisages damage towards a population for ten (10) years. In light of this, the Draft Principles on the Protection in Armed Conflict (‘DPPAC’) adopted by the International Law Commission is a more suitable framework to trigger environmental protection under the TWAIL analytical framework. It extends the obligation to protect the environment to all three stages of the armed conflict – before, during, and after. This brings the environmental law standard a step closer to the Third World, as the brunt of the impact, in this case, was borne by them.
The UN Special Rapporteur Report on ‘Conflict and the Right to Food’ highlights the effects of armed conflict on discrimination, inequality, bodily harm, ecological violence, and erasure. This could lead to the gradual ‘invisibilisation’ of such people through a violation of their food sovereignty, leading to their gradual ‘erasure’. The Russian invasion has caused environmental damage that directly impacts the food chain of the Third World and its population. In furtherance to this, access to food would become exclusive to First World citizens in the Third World, creating two classes of people based on their ability to meet basic needs. A legal analysis using a TWAIL analytical framework is necessary to bring international law closer to the ‘people’. Narratives by the global media, actions by States, and enforcement of statutes and obligations by States and International Organizations need to be developed further to provide for an equal space to TWAIL and its related approaches.
This post was originally published on LSE Human Rights.
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New research has revealed that the European Union (EU) has raised its imports of Russian liquified natural gas (LNG) by 40% since it began its brutal invasion in Ukraine. Moreover, in the first seven months of 2023, EU countries ploughed €5.3bn into buying up over half the Russia’s total supply.
Research and campaign nonprofit Global Witness produced the analysis. The organisation highlighted the hypocrisy of the soaring imports, which it said is “lining Putin’s pockets”.
LNG from Russia
Global Witness found that between January and July 2023, the EU has purchased 22 million cubic meters of LNG from Russia. LNG is a form of fossil gas that companies cool into liquid form for easier transportation.
Notably, this was a 40% climb on EU imports of Russian LNG for the same period in 2021. By comparison, the campaign group stated that the global average jump in Russian LNG imports stood at 6%.
On top of this, it pointed out that the EU is now buying up the bulk of Russia’s LNG. During the first seven months of 2023, the EU took 52% of Russia’s LNG exports. In the same period of 2022, this was 49%, and just 39% in 2021.
Moreover, two European countries are top buyers of Russian LNG. Specifically, Spain and Belgium are now the second and third largest purchasers of Russian LNG, behind only China. In 2023, Spain bought 18% of Russia’s total LNG. Meanwhile, Belgium was hot on its heels with 17% of Russia’s LNG sales. China accounted for marginally more, at 20%.
Gas from bloodshed in Ukraine
Global Witness suggested that the imports make the EU complicit in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Senior fossil fuel campaigner Jonathan Noronha-Gant said that:
every euro means more bloodshed. While European countries decry the war, they‘re putting money into Putin’s pockets.
The organisation has estimated that Russia’s LNG exports were worth $21bn in 2022. Given that oil and gas made up 45% of Russia’s federal budget pre-invasion in 2021, its likely the industry is financing its violent assault on Ukraine.
Global Witness also argued that the EU’s increase in Russian LNG exports showed that countries:
are simply not moving fast enough to replace gas with renewables.
In July, Climate Home News reported that the EU’s ambition for renewable energy deployment is woefully below what’s needed to meet global climate targets.
Of course, Western nations have meanwhile continued to facilitate fossil fuel expansion. G7 nations, including European economic majors, have doubled down on public finance for LNG elsewhere.
Fossil fuel profiteers of war
Of course, European fossil fuel majors have been making a killing from Russian LNG while the country wages its deadly invasion. Global Witness highlighted that Anglo-Dutch Shell and French TotalEnergies have maintained trade in Russian LNG. In particular, the campaign group showed that Total is the largest non-Russian buyer of LNG, at nearly 4.2 million cubic meters in 2023 so far.
Previous research from Global Witness in July revealed that Shell also likely raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in 2022 from Russian LNG. Its analysis identified that Shell had traded over 7.5 million cubic meters – 12% of Russia’s total LNG exports – between March and December 2022.
Global Witness said that this:
made Shell critical to a trade that brought Putin $21 billion in 2022.
Moreover, the nonprofit articulated how the oil and gas giant had justified its continued trade in Russian LNG:
under a pretext of ensuring Europe’s energy security.
However, as the Canary has previously detailed, this is a key “shock doctrine” tactic. Fossil fuel companies have employed this to capitalise on disasters. Significantly, a report from Greenpeace in April documented the industry’s barefaced weaponisation of the invasion to lock Europe into greater LNG dependancy.
Fossil fuels are war-mongering by design
Of course, European government and corporations’ support for brutal military regimes is nothing new. The Canary has previously highlighted EU financing and supply of arms to Saudi Arabia. The repressive regime has been waging a violent invasion on Yemen. Naturally, fossil fuels sit at the heart of Western backing of the war.
What’s more, not only has the EU increased its Russian LNG imports, it has also raised its share of fossil fuel imports from the violent Saudi regime. Since implementing sanctions, the EU’s share of diesel imports from Russia has plummeted. Whereas Russian diesel made up 53% of the Northwest Europe’s seaborne imports from October 2021 through September 2022, by February 2023, it was just 2%.
Conversely, in February 2023, Northwest Europe increased its imports of diesel from Saudi Arabia to 202,000 barrels per day. This was up from an average of 68,000 per day between October 2021 and September 2022.
Meanwhile, the Guardian and a group of nonprofits also exposed Western oil and gas companies’ coup money in February. They found that UK, US, and Irish gas firms had profited from Myanmar’s gas after its violent military coup.
The trade in fossil fuels has long been war-mongering by design. As Declassified UK detailed, fossil fuel interests have been at the center of multiple Western-backed coups and invasions.
If the devastating costs of the climate crisis weren’t already reason enough, fossil fuels’ major role in propping up murderous regimes should make the case for a just transition blatantly vital.
Feature image via Chursaev13/Wikimedia, cropped and resized to 1910 by 1000, licensed under CC BY 4.0
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After the closing of Memorial [see https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/12/29/russias-supreme-court-orders-closure-emblematic-memorial/], Deutsche Welle reported on 18 August 2023 that it was now the turn of the Sakharov Centre, the organization, dedicated to Nobel Peace Prize winning rights activist Andrei Sakharov [https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/B3C93212-FADC-4C30-B82A-3E5F2716F1D6] which was accused of illegally hosting conferences and exhibitions. It was created in Moscow almost three decades ago.
The closure of the human rights group is seen as part of the Kremlin’s campaign to crack down on liberal-leaning organizations that challenge official narratives, including those about Moscow’s military campaign in Ukraine.
Moscow City Court said in a statement that it had decided to liquidate the Sakharov Center at the request of the Justice Ministry for illegally hosting conferences and exhibitions.
Since its creation in 1996, the group has hosted hundreds of debates, exhibitions and other events. In 2015, thousands of people gathered there to pay their last respects to opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered near the Kremlin walls.
Authorities declared the group a “foreign agent” in 2014 and this year ordered the eviction of the center from its premises.=
On Thursday, authorities charged Grigory Melkonyants, the leader of Golos, a prominent independent election monitoring group, with being involved with an “undesirable” organization. He faces up to six years in prison.
In January, a court also ordered the closure of Russia’s oldest human rights organisation, the Moscow Helsinki Group.
Another rights group, Memorial, which established itself as a key pillar in civil society, was disbanded by Russian authorities in late 2021, just months before Putin sent troops to Ukraine.
https://www.dw.com/en/russia-closes-human-rights-group-sakharov-center/a-66572098
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
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The Italian theorist continues to offer important insights for organizers in the socialist lineage.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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Cosmopolitan — ‘world politics’, ‘world citizen’ — people of many races under a world empire. The word became a meme in the 1890s as British empire blossomed, supposedly the world now united around principles of the free market. Sounds cool. The market is the proven way to run economies. It is neutral, no favorites, harsh but just, making us work hard, the state ensuring people don’t cheat and undermine the sacred system. For if belief in all this wavers, the loss of faith in the market would spell doom for all, equally. We are equal before the law, and we can vote. That’s what democracy and freedom are all about, right?
But is the apparent real?
Statistics suggest there’s much more to all this. Income distribution has never been more skewed, clearly the result of four decades of neoliberalism. We’ve never been closer to world war (except in 1914 and 1939). Weren’t countries merrily trading in ‘free markets’ supposed to be peaceful? Reason and logic fail us.
Peter Myers’ Cosmopolis is a collection of essays, available free at his website, which can be read independently, packed with quotes, reflecting on past conspiracies, critiquing the neoliberal plot for world hegemony today, its origins and its relation to Jewish, Freemason, Nazi, Bolshevik, capitalist ones. The main actors — Trotsky vs Stalin, HG Wells and Orwell, the pandemic, and the return of fascism/ Nazism as the conspirators push for their TINA moment in the Great Reset, culminating in the war in Ukraine.
The star is HG Wells, who proposed a World State which he also called ‘Cosmopolis’. His ‘Open Conspiracy’, the world movement for the supercession or enlargement or fusion of existing political, economic, and social institutions … a movement aiming at the establishment of a world directorate” (Wells, Open Conspiracy, 1933, p. 32-3.)
There are two main themes. The first centres around the role of Jews in the Russian revolution, how Stalin ‘stole’ ‘their’ evolution (Myers calls it ‘one of the great Denials of our time’1), and how that resulted in Israel and feminism-gay liberation as the new, post-Marx ‘revolution’. He shows that the new Cold War is between the atheistic, LGBT, ‘Trotskyoid’, ‘Cosmopolitan’ West, on the one hand, and a coalition of Christian Russia and Confucian China, both a hybrid socialist-capitalist authoritarian on the other.
Myers’ other main theme is linking all suspicious recent events — assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK, 9/11 + the anthrax letters, MH370, the World Economic Forum and the Great Reset — to deep state elite plans. The WEF ‘penetrates the cabinets’, ‘but for an unelected body to do so is undemocratic and subversive. It implies Oligarchic rule—for the greater good, of course, because most people are Deplorables. The Globalists are attempting to implement the World State advocated by HG Wells.’
Myers draws from dozens of sources, many of which he unearthed himself and with the help of his strategically located readers, from the New York Public Library to the grave site of Stalin’s mother in Georgia. Part of the fun in reading this very readable work is following his sleuthing.
His appendices including the smoking gun revelations of Morrow and Hunt on JFK are welcome reminders of how truly bizarre US politics is. They make the case of assassination as the CIA modus operandi for JFK, MLK, and RFK. Truman’s 1963 Oped to the New York Times calling for the CIA to be brought under control disappeared the moment it appeared. (Eisenhower made sure his message got out and stayed out by springing it on a nationally broadcast farewell speech in 1960.) RFK was killed for calling for an independent investigation of his brother’s death. Which brings us to the ultimate cloak and dagger, the blowing up of North stream. The CIA is alive and well and still out of control.
Promised lands
Myers, like Solzhenitsyn, is not afraid to analyze the role of Russian Jews in the Russian revolution from start to finish, with a short bumpy patch under Stalin. The details are fascinating. It’s finally time to access Soviet history through different lenses, and Myers is a good source for this. One tidbit: ‘Both Trotsky (Kronstadt, collectivization) and Stalin (gulags) lived by the sword and died by the sword.’ i.e. they were both assassinated.2
It struck me that Israel is actually a slicker version of the Russian revolution from Lenin to Putin: a cosmopolitan ideological state, originally socialistic but quickly devolved into authoritarian capitalism, governed by a European elite as a police state oppressing non-Jews. BUT with a ‘heppi end’ for the Jews both in Russia and Israel. All but one of the Russian oligarchs are Jewish.
Just stating this truth is heresy. The centrality of the Jewish tribe must be rigorously denied, a feat which we watch as laws are pushed even in the United Nations (and unwritten laws for media stamped in journalists’ minds), asserting that any criticism of the Jewish state is racism, despite clear practice that shows Israel is the font of racism. Orwell’s 1984 doublethink and newsspeak have a new playing field, where INGSOC (Orwell’s Britain) has devolved into the most loyal supporter of the new Oceania (US), and no one notices that the Grand Inquisitor is a Goldstein.
In the days of the British empire, before the state of Israel, it was easier for the goy empire of the day (Britain) to manoeuvre, as the elite Jews at the centre of that conspiracy had to behave. The Shaftsbury/ MacKinder idea of a Jewish colony in the Middle East was there by the mid-19th century, but when it materialized in 1948, it had a new mother country and quickly started to play its own political games. Jews are nobody’s puppets. So the US-Israel empire is unwieldy and is wearing thin as Israel celebrates 75 years, its diamond jubilee. And moves to unite Sunni and Shia in a newly invigorated united front against Israel, with the US out of the picture, suggest that all the plandemics and wars might not be enough to put Humpty Dumpty together again.
Illuminati/ Freemason
Myers deals with the origins of today’s conspiracy, giving a central role to the Illuminati and Freemasons. I’m not convinced that there is more than an just an element of nostalgia in those who identify with these secretive groups. The Tempest, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Winter’s Tale are based on Masonic legends. Mozart’s Magic Flute has clear Illuminist influence. Goethe was a member of the Illuminati. Myers traces Freemason imagery, poses and beliefs as continuous through the post-enlightenment period. The hand-hiding pose traces back to classical times – Aeschines, founder of a rhetoric school, suggested that speaking with an arm outside one’s chiton was bad manners. The pose was used in 18th-century British portraiture as a sign that the sitter was from the upper class.
But there are definitely two versions of today’s conspiracy. Myers sees the Illuminati as more globalist (rule by the United Nations, UN Committees and International courts) as opposed to a more hegemonic nationalist rule by the UK/US/Israel. Jews, the most internationalist/cosmopolitan and yet ‘the most nationalist (chauvinist, self-absorbed) of peoples, are riven by the oscillation between Akhenaten’s Universal God and Jehovah the Tribal God.’
Elite Jews are behind the conspiracies today, though a small minority of ‘good’ Jews reject this secular Judaism-Zionism and work with non-Jews to unite as opponents to this corporate globalization, either nice Wellsian or chauvinist. Such as Jeffrey Sachs, who condemns US imperial policy today, having participated in the post-collapse Russian reforms which almost cemented post-Soviet Russia into the US-led conspiracy. Sachs and Putin ended up on much the same page three decades later, both essentially fighting the post-pandemic push by the globalists.
Marx was not a Freemason nor were Lenin, Trotsky, etc. Stalin, Hitler, Franco banned it as do all dictators. The most authoritative text, Manly Hall, Lost Keys of Freemasonry, 1923, is anodyne, admirable, no hint of anything nefarious, just another ‘path to enlightenment’. Freemasony operate(d) as a secret society but never very secret (unless outlawed) as it became fashionable in the 18th century. It was openly behind both the American and French revolutions (though not the Russian). Now it is more or less completely open. It has evolved over time as capitalism developed and made use of the Freemasons as a governing force of educated bourgeois.
Freemasonry serves imperialism though it is either unaware of this or accepts imperialism as the way to a universal society, the ancient dream, the Tower of Babel in reverse, as sincere striving rather than hubris. Hall’s thought stops with bourgeois society, though he explains the pomp of mystic self-striving which ‘true’ Masons pursue as part of their 33-level initiation.
Myers chides RFK Jr for not pointing to Masonic handshakes by Fauci and others, but are they just colourful flourishes, hiding the real deep state? Most Masons are just nice science-oriented, educated middle class men and women. Though Freemasonry might have sparked the French revolution, it didn’t come to power as a disciplined elite, and it was not a factor in the conspiratorial organization that brought the Bolsheviks to power. Freemasonry did not re-emerge in the former Soviet Union until after the breakup of Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe.
Vladimir Antyufeyev, deputy prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic blamed the ongoing conflict on US and European Masons. If in fact all European leaders are Freemasons and the US has Freemasonry built into its revolution, then Antyufeyev is right. Putin also attacked ‘Masonic’ competitors (at 15 minute spot) and warned that Russia has always ‘caught up with them in strategic weapons’.
An appeal online by Andrey Bogdanov, Great Master Of The Grand Lodge Of Russia, addressing the war in Ukraine, suggests the role of Freemasonry is not a serious lethal conspiracy: ‘For a real Freemason, no matter how complex the outside world is, a sense of inner harmony, fraternal communication and continuity of the chain of communication of Masonic knowledge are the prevailing aspects of its existence. Everything passes and only brotherhood seems eternal to us.’
New morality: anything goes
It is interesting that both ‘Marx and Engels saw the bourgeois family as a farce, oppressing women and predicted communal child-rearing but traditional forms of living, as did HG Wells. ‘ Yet all had traditional families. Rousseau, author of Emile, on free child-rearing, place all five of his children in an orphanage at birth.’ My takeaway: Intellectuals make poor rulers, always theorizing, conflicting and/or totalitarian.
Myers shows how important the Stalin-Trotsky war-within-the-revolution is to understanding our current cultural wars. ‘Trotskyists did not learn from the Soviet Union’s experience, because they deemed Stalinism a ‘betrayal’ of True Communism. Instead, they are bringing the Culture War — begun by Old Bolshevism — to the West; but, as David Horowitz noted, in the West it is called ‘Feminism’ rather than ‘Marxism’. … Whereas Hitler’s supporters are in jail for Holocaust Denial, and most of Stalin’s supporters in the West disappeared after 1991, Trotsky’s heirs and supporters are entrenched in Academia, university campuses, Foundations, the Media, the Public Service, and the Judiciary. They have dominated university campuses for decades. They regularly march in city centres—marches organised by Socialist Alliance, Socialist Alternative, or other Trotskyist sects. Green Left Weekly is a mainly Trotskyist newspaper.’
You must read the details yourself. The ‘revolution’ snuck in the back door.
And now we arrive at the Globalists, the ‘collective West’ elites, the new Oceania, having rewritten 20th c history as a benevolent empire that crushed fascism and communism (i.e., Stalinism), with no mention of the role of Judaism, though it was behind both, as Svengali for the Nazis and as shapers of communism in the latter.
‘The anti-Stalin ‘Trotskyoid’ Left, which Stalin defeated in Russia, has consolidated in the West and largely overthrown the Christian order via the so-called Culture War,’ which is already creating a centre of opposition that brings left and right together. ‘Putin, meanwhile, has re-established Christianity in Russia. The new Cold War is between the atheistic, LGBT, ‘Trotskyoid’, ‘Cosmopolitan’ West, on the one hand, and a coalition of Christian-socialist Russia and Confucian-Stalinist China on the other.’ Which is now attracting the evangelical right in the US, creating fissures in any conspiratorial attempt at a ‘Great Reset’.
Where is the East in all this? Myers points out that ‘Knowledge and ideas spread both ways across the Silk Road, from around 2000BC. Heraclitus’ philosophy is similar to Taoism, and he too took to the hills.’ Eastern thinking culminated in Plato. Marx dismissed ‘oriental despotism’ but Schopenhauer built his philosophy around Buddhism and despised socialist notions of elevating the working class as a historical actor. He quips in The World as Will and Representation that he would prefer to be ruled by a lion than one of his fellow rats. So were the nonentities that followed Stalin rats? They certainly weren’t lions. And the workers’ state collapsed in an awful hurry, with rats fleeing the sinking ship in droves when the hatch opened.
As for totalitarianism, Plato was the first to promote it, though he insisted his republic would only work for a community of 5,000. We shouldn’t blame Plato. ‘When Russian emigrants went to Palestine and established the state of Israel there, they brought with them both socialism (the kibbutzes being a benign kind) and the totalitarianism disclosed by Israel Shahak.3 Their treatment of the Palestinians and of their neighbours bears comparison with Soviet precedents. As for the ‘Open Society’, could there be anything more ‘Closed’ than the Jewish Bible’s mindset in its depiction of Goyim/the Nations?’
It is important to have reliable sources when dealing with Jewish issues. This work by Myers and his online library are essential tools to recognize the Jewish origins of today’s world.
Prescriptions
‘There IS a need for Environmental Limits, but the One Worlders are using this as an excuse to push World Government. The Trotskyist/HG Wells version of Communism is alive and well. ‘Open-border immigration, casual relationships treated as equivalent to marriage, We did not recognise it as Communist simply because we identified Stalin’s modifications as Communism. The Marxist Cultural Revolution, begun in the West in the late 1960s, has taken the West down the path pioneered by the early USSR. … To treat “relationships” as the equivalent of marriage is, in effect, to abolish marriage.’
‘As social breakdown proceeds, desperation will force us back to the essentials of life. We’ll be looking for ways to re-establish family ties, and the bonds between men and women.’ Myers takes many blinkers off leftists’ eyes (including mine). Even John Lennon’s Imagine: ‘no borders and no religion too.’ Many of us were smitten by the promise of 1917, which somehow morphed into a backdoor revolution of sex and drugs.
Myers has his finger in the dyke to stem the flood of book burning and newspeak today: History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one’s knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. … A great deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed. (1984 p. 250) As Myers points out it is the Trotskyoids of today that are the Thought Police for this brainwashing.
Is there any hope for ‘a less-severe Managerial State one day, not burdened by this Jewish bitterness or, equally, by a ‘white separatist’ prejudice’? China’s long tradition of state bureaucracy without full-blown slavery suggests itself as a tradition worth building on today, though contemporary China’s 996 policy4, and the plight of Tibetans, Uighurs and no doubt others, suggest capitalism erases even the most honoured traditions. Egypt and Babylon were successful state bureaucratic formations which were admired by Herodotus. It’s only biblical lore that paints a (self-serving) narrative dissing those civilizations.
Myers’ chapter on the covid plandemic documents how the Trotskyists in Australia sided with the conspiracy, denouncing anti-vaxxers as fascists. He could add the remnant of the communist parties too, which have all gone down the trans/gay road and meekly promoted the pro-vax plan. Even Cuba. The future opposition to the Wellsian world government is taking shape now, centred on Russia and China and their growing trade bloc with the third world (85% of the world population).
Wells is still the inspiration behind the one-worlders today, complete with his recommendation of an end to war and instead to deindustrialize in the interests of preserving the planet. ‘Wells presents a strong case for World Government, and it is a matter we should be discussing openly and (I believe) agonizing over, because we are in a Catch-22 situation. The threats are real, but the outcome could be Tyranny and the End of Civilization.’
‘Was George Orwell wrong when he depicted the coming tyranny as a Left-wing one?’ Left and right have lost their meaning. Genuine conservatives and genuine Marxist socialists have much common ground in opposing the liberal, now neoliberal Great Reset behind the plandemic and the cementing of a Wellsian globalism but under US-Israel.
*****
Afterthought:
The world had its moment of a global civilization. It started in 1917 and embraced the world by 1945 but collapsed when the US launched the Cold War. It was a proto-socialism, which the ‘collective West’ tolerated long enough to let the Communists beat Hitler. In the 1930s, it was implanted in the minds of anyone who took the time to consider it. Even the western media seemed to be on board as the fascist rivals prepared to destroy (the idea of) Communism.
Communism was the 19th century answer to industrial society, but Stalin made it a nonstarter for the ‘collective West’. Reading all this and the complicity of western media in giving Stalin’s regime lots of slack during the 1930s (Ukraine famine, mass arrests, slave labour), I’m reminded of my own ‘sov-symp’ Soviet sympathies, even today, with all the filth and horror exposed. It was never just a ‘managerial’ bureaucratic society. It was and will remain a stirring symbol of defiance of capitalism, banker-capitalist control, war as a plaything for weapons producers and cynical imperialist governments.
And it is Stalinism that retains the stamp of authenticity. The 1920s NEP mixed market was only a way station, and Khrushchev’s Thaw was really just living off the fruits of Stalinism; but without the ideological backbone, it slowly, then quickly collapsed. That spark/ flame in history is now the stuff of legend, still inspiring Africa and Asia for help in liberating themselves in the 1960s. When Russia needed them, they held out their hands.
Yes, Cuba and a few others survive, fiercely attacked by imperialism, but none of them would have existed without the Soviet Union, and none have found a magic key to leave its legacy – good and bad — behind. It still looms as the conscience of the world cosmopolis. It included villains but many more heroes and many happy, if exasperated campers. And inspired the best music of the century (Shostakovich, Prokofiev), the best athletes (hockey, figure skating legends). They proved socialism could work, even under excruciating conditions. Russians are right to mourn its demise. I will die a sovsymp.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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President Biden speaks to General Mark Milley after his 2023 State of the Union speech.
(Photo credit: Francis Chung/Politico)President Biden wrote in the New York Times in June 2022 that the United States was arming Ukraine to “fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.”
Ukraine’s fall 2022 counteroffensive left it in a stronger position, yet Biden and his NATO allies still chose the battlefield over the negotiating table. Now the failure of Ukraine’s long-delayed “Spring Counteroffensive” has left Ukraine in a weaker position, both on the battlefield and at the still empty negotiating table.
So, based on Biden’s own definition of U.S. war aims, his policy is failing, and it is hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers, not Americans, who are paying the price, with their limbs and their lives.
But this result was not unexpected. It was predicted in leaked Pentagon documents that were widely published in April, and in President Zelenskyy’s postponement of the offensive in May to avoid what he called “unacceptable” losses.
The delay allowed more Ukrainian troops to complete NATO training on Western tanks and armored vehicles, but it also gave Russia more time to reinforce its anti-tank defenses and prepare lethal kill-zones along the 700-mile front line.
Now, after two months, Ukraine’s new armored divisions have advanced only 12 miles or less in two small areas, at the cost of tens of thousands of casualties. Twenty percent of newly deployed Western armored vehicles and equipment were reportedly destroyed in the first few weeks of the new offensive, as British-trained armored divisions tried to advance through Russian minefields and kill-zones without demining operations or air cover.
Meanwhile, Russia has made similar small advances toward Kupyansk in eastern Kharkiv province, where land around the town of Dvorichna has changed hands for the third time since the invasion. These tit-for-tat exchanges of small pieces of territory, with massive use of heavy artillery and appalling losses, typify a brutal war of attrition not unlike the First World War.
Ukraine’s more successful counteroffensives last fall provoked serious debate within NATO over whether that was the moment for Ukraine to return to the negotiating table it had abandoned at British and U.S. urging in April 2022. As Ukrainian forces advanced on Kherson in early November, La Republicca in Italy reported that NATO leaders had agreed that the fall of Kherson would put Ukraine in the position of strength they had been waiting for to relaunch peace talks.
On November 9, 2022, the very day that Russia ordered its withdrawal from Kherson, General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke at the Economic Club of New York, where the interviewer asked him whether the time was now ripe for negotiations.
General Milley compared the situation to the First World War, explaining that leaders on all sides understood by Christmas 1914 that that war was not winnable, yet they fought on for another four years, multiplying the million lives lost in 1914 into 20 million by 1918, destroying five empires and setting the stage for the rise of fascism and the Second World War.
Milley concluded his cautionary tale by noting that, as in 1914, “… there has to be a mutual recognition that military victory is probably in the true sense of the word, is maybe not achievable through military means. And therefore, you need to turn to other means… So things can get worse. So when there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it, seize the moment.”
But Milley and other voices of experience were ignored. At Biden’s February State of the Union speech in Congress, General Milley’s face was a study in gravity, a rock in a sea of misplaced self-congratulation and ignorance of the real world beyond the circus tent, where the West’s incoherent war strategy was not only sacrificing Ukrainian lives every day but flirting with nuclear war. Milley didn’t crack a smile all night, even when Biden came over to glad-hand after his speech.
No U.S., NATO or Ukrainian leaders have been held accountable for failing to seize that moment last winter, nor the previous missed chance for peace in April 2022, when the U.S. and UK blocked theTurkish and Israeli mediation that came so close to bringing peace, based on the simple principle of a Russian withdrawal in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality. Nobody has demanded a serious account of why Western leaders let these chances for peace slip through their fingers.
Whatever their reasoning, the result is that Ukraine is caught in a war with no exit. When Ukraine seemed to have the upper hand in the war, NATO leaders were determined to press their advantage and launch another offensive, regardless of the shocking human cost. But now that the new offensive and weapons shipments have only succeeded in laying bare the weakness of Western strategy and returning the initiative to Russia, the architects of failure reject negotiating from a position of weakness.
So the conflict has fallen into an intractable pattern common to many wars, in which all parties to the fighting—Russia, Ukraine and the leading members of the NATO military alliance—have been encouraged, or we might say deluded, by limited successes at different times, into prolonging the war and rejecting diplomacy, despite appalling human costs, the rising danger of a wider war and the existential danger of a nuclear confrontation.
But the reality of war is laying bare the contradictions of Western policy. If Ukraine is not allowed to negotiate with Russia from a position of strength, nor from a position of weakness, what stands in the way of its total destruction?
And how can Ukraine and its allies defeat Russia, a country whose nuclear weapons policy explicitly states that it will use nuclear weapons before it will accept an existential defeat?
If, as Biden has warned, any war between the United States and Russia, or any use of “tactical” nuclear weapons, would most likely escalate into full-scale nuclear war, where else is the current policy of incremental escalation and ever-increasing U.S. and NATO involvement intended to lead?
Are they simply praying that Russia will implode, or give up? Or are they determined to call Russia’s bluff and push it into an inescapable choice between total defeat and nuclear war? Hoping, or pretending, that Ukraine and its allies can defeat Russia without triggering a nuclear war is not a strategy.
In place of a strategy to resolve the conflict, the United States and its allies harnessed the natural impulse to resist Russian aggression onto a U.S. and British plan to prolong the war indefinitely. The results of that decision are hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian casualties and the gradual destruction of Ukraine by millions of artillery shells fired by both sides.
Since the end of the First Cold War, successive U.S. governments, Democratic and Republican, have made catastrophic miscalculations regarding the United States’ ability to impose its will on other countries and peoples. Their wrong assumptions about American power and military superiority have led us to this fateful, historic crisis in U.S. foreign policy.
Now Congress is being asked for another $24 billion to keep fueling this war. They should instead listen to the majority of Americans, who, according to the latest CNN poll, oppose more funding for an unwinnable war. They should heed the words of the declaration by civil society groups in 32 countries calling for an immediate ceasefire and peace negotiations to end the war before it destroys Ukraine and endangers all of humanity.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Mao Xuhui (China), ’92 Paternalism, 1992In 2003, high officials from Brazil, India, and South Africa met in Mexico to discuss their mutual interests in the trade of pharmaceutical drugs. India was and is one of the world’s largest producers of various drugs, including those used to treat HIV-AIDS; Brazil and South Africa were both in need of affordable drugs for patients infected with HIV as well as a host of other treatable ailments. But these three countries were barred from easily trading with each other because of strict intellectual property laws established by the World Trade Organisation. Just a few months prior to their meeting, the three countries formed a grouping, known as IBSA, to discuss and clarify intellectual property and trade issues, but also to confront countries of the Global North for their asymmetrical demand that the poorer nations end their agricultural subsidies. The notion of South-South cooperation framed these discussions.
Interest in South-South cooperation dates back to the 1940s, when the United Nations Economic and Social Council established its first technical aid programme to assist trade between the new post-colonial states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Six decades later, just as IBSA was formed, this spirit was commemorated by the United Nations Day for South-South Cooperation on 19 December 2004. At this time, the UN also created the Special Unit for South-South Cooperation (ten years later, in 2013, this institution was renamed as the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation), which built upon the 1988 agreement on the Global System of Trade Preferences Among Developing Countries. As of 2023, this pact includes 42 member states from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, that are collectively home to four billion people and have a combined market of $16 trillion (roughly 20% of global merchandise imports). It is important to register that this longstanding agenda to increase trade between Southern countries forms the pre-history of the BRICS, set up in 2009 and presently made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
Madhvi Parekh and Karishma Swali (India), Kali I, 2021–22The entire BRICS project is centred around the question of whether countries at the nether end of the neo-colonial system can break out of that system through mutual trade and cooperation, or whether the larger countries (including those in the BRICS) will inevitably enjoy asymmetries of power and scale against smaller countries and therefore reproduce inequalities rather than transcend them. Our latest dossier, on Marxist dependency theory, calls into question any capitalist project in the South that believes it can somehow break free from the neo-colonial system by importing debt and exporting cheap commodities. Despite the limitations of the BRICS project, it is clear that the increase in South-South trade and the development of Southern institutions (for development financing, for instance) challenges the neo-colonial system even if it does not immediately transcend it. At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we have been closely following the developments and contradictions of the BRICS project from its inception and continue to do so.
Later this month, the fifteenth BRICS summit will take place in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 22–24 August. This meeting comes as two of the group’s members, Russia and China, are facing a New Cold War with the United States and its allies, while the other members face immense pressure to be drawn into this conflict. Below, you will find briefing no. 9, published in collaboration with No Cold War, which offers a brief but necessary primer of the upcoming BRICS summit. You can read the briefing below.
The upcoming fifteenth BRICS Summit (22–24 August) in Johannesburg, South Africa, has the potential to make history. The heads of state of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa will gather for their first face-to-face meeting since the 2019 summit in Brasilia, Brazil. The meeting will take place eighteen months since the beginning of military conflict in Ukraine, which has not only raised tensions between the US-led Western powers and Russia to a level unseen since the Cold War but also sharpened differences between the Global North and South.
There are growing cracks in the unipolar international order imposed by Washington and Brussels on the rest of the world through the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the international financial system, the control of information flows (in both traditional and social media networks), and the indiscriminate use of unilateral sanctions against an increasing number of countries. As United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres recently put it, ‘the post-Cold War period is over. A transition is under way to a new global order’.
In this global context, three of the most important debates to monitor at the Johannesburg summit are: (1) the possible expansion of BRICS membership, (2) the expansion of the membership of its New Development Bank (NDB), and (3) the NDB’s role in creating alternatives to the use of the US dollar. According to Anil Sooklal, South Africa’s ambassador to BRICS, twenty-two countries have formally applied to join the group (including Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Algeria, Mexico, and Indonesia) and a further two dozen have expressed interest. Even with numerous challenges to overcome, the BRICS are now seen as a major driving force of the world economy and of economic developments across the Global South in particular.
Lygia Clark (Brazil), O Violoncelista (‘The Violoncellist’), 1951The BRICS Today
In the middle of the last decade, the BRICS experienced a number of problems. With the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India (2014) and the coup against President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil (2016), two of the group’s member countries became headed by right-wing governments more favourable to Washington. Both India and Brazil retreated in their participation in the group. The de facto absence of Brazil, which from the outset had been one of the key driving forces behind the BRICS, represented a significant loss for the consolidation of the group. These developments undermined and hampered the progress of the NDB and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), established in 2015 – which represented the greatest institutional achievement of the BRICS to date. Although the NDB has made some progress it has fallen short of its original objectives. To date, the bank has approved some $32.8 billion in financing (in fact, less than that has been issued), while the CRA – which has $100 billion in funds to assist countries that have a shortage of US dollars in their international reserves and are facing short-term balance of payments or liquidity pressures – has never been activated.
However, developments in recent years have reinvigorated the BRICS project. The decisions of Moscow and Beijing to respond to escalations of aggression in the New Cold War by Washington and Brussels; the return of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to the presidency of Brazil in 2022 and the consequent appointment of Dilma Rousseff to the presidency of the NDB; and the relative estrangement, to varying degrees, of India and South Africa from the Western powers have resulted in a ‘perfect storm’ that seems to have rebuilt a sense of political unity in the BRICS (despite unresolved tensions between India and China). Added to this is the growing weight of the BRICS in the global economy and strengthened economic interaction between its members. In 2020, the global share of the BRICS’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in purchasing power parity terms – 31.5 percent – overtook that of the Group of Seven (G7) – 30.7 percent – and this gap is expected to grow. Bilateral trade among BRICS countries has also grown robustly: Brazil and China are breaking records every year, reaching $150 billion in 2022; Russian exports to India tripled from April to December 2022, year-on-year, expanding to $32.8 billion; while trade between China and Russia jumped from $147 billion in 2021 to $190 billion in 2022, an increase of nearly 30 percent.
Ayanda Mabulu (South Africa), Power, 2020What’s at Stake in Johannesburg?
Faced with this dynamic international situation and growing requests for expansion, the BRICS face a number of important questions:
In addition to providing concrete responses to interested applicants, expansion has the potential to increase the political and economic weight of the BRICS and, eventually, strengthen other regional platforms that its members belong to. But expansion also requires having to decide on the specific form that membership should take and may increase the complexity of consensus building, with a risk of slowing the progress of decision making and initiatives. How should these matters be dealt with?
How can the NDB’s financing capacity be increased, as well as its coordination with other development banks of the Global South and other multilateral banks? And, above all, how can the NDB, in partnership with the BRICS’ network of think tanks, promote the formulation of a new development policy for the Global South?
Since the BRICS member countries have solid international reserves (with South Africa having a little less), it’s unlikely that they will need to use the CRA. Instead, this fund could provide countries in need with an alternative to the political blackmail of the International Monetary Fund, which requires developing countries to enact devastating austerity measures in exchange for loans.
BRICS is reported to be discussing the creation of a reserve currency that would enable trade and investment without the use of the US dollar. If this were established, it could be one more step in efforts to create alternatives to the dollar, but questions remain. How could the stability of such a reserve currency be ensured? How could it be articulated with newly created trade mechanisms which do not use the dollar, such as bilateral China-Russia, China-Brazil, Russia-India, and other arrangements?
How can cooperation and technology transfer support the re-industrialisation of countries like Brazil and South Africa, especially in strategic sectors such as biotech, information technology, artificial intelligence, and renewable energies, while also fighting poverty and inequality, and achieving other basic demands of the peoples of the South?
Leaders representing 71 countries of the Global South have been invited to attend the meeting in Johannesburg. Xi, Putin, Lula, Modi, Ramaphosa, and Dilma have a lot of work to do, to answer these questions and make progress on the urgent matters in global development.
Peter Gorban (USSR), Field Camp. The Izvestiya., 1960Our institute continues to track these developments, neither with the belief that the BRICS project offers global salvation, nor with the cynicism that dismisses it as nothing new. History is moved, not by purity, but by the world’s contradictions.
As these major countries of the South meet in Johannesburg, they will confront the vast inequities in South Africa. These fissures are the grist for the poems of Vonani Bila, whose voice rises out of Shirley Village (Limpopo) and reminds us of the long walk ahead, through the BRICS project and beyond:
When the sun recedes
into the Soutpansberg,
Giyani Block puts on a
black adder coat;
a mirror of death and despair.Doctors and nurses stand on their feet.
They shall not rest when the workers’ strike
ignites its furious flame.
They’re on tiptoe, looking up,
wrestling the faceless, tailless monster. -
China’s paramount leader, like his Russian counterpart, is making a fine mess of his country’s economy and world standing
It must be tough, being a dictator, when your diktats are ignored, thwarted and scorned. Vladimir Putin is a sad case in point. He ordered the glorious reintegration of Ukraine into his imaginary Russian empire. What he got was an existential crisis that he couldn’t control.
China’s president, Xi Jinping, is another paramount leader with dictatorship issues. Xi presumes to exercise supreme control, channelling Mao Zedong like a card-carrying Communist party Zeus – yet repeatedly messes up. Xi’s signature tune could be the chorus to Moby’s Extreme Ways: “Then it fell apart … Like it always does.”
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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(Photo Credit: Lapaz Telesur)On June 27, 1986, the World Court condemned the United States for illegal war and aggression against Nicaragua and ordered the US to compensate Nicaragua for damages estimated to run to US$17 billion dollars, what today would be more than US$55 billion. On June 27 of this year, President Daniel Ortega demanded that the US fulfill its obligation. He stated:
On June 27, 1986, the International Court of Justice condemned the US and directed it to compensate Nicaragua for all damages caused as a consequence of military activities against Nicaragua. In a situation of armed aggression such as that carried out by the US, no amount of reparations – neither economic nor moral – could compensate for the devastation of the country, the loss of human lives and the physical and psychological wounds of the Nicaraguan people. The Court decided that the United States had a legal obligation to make economic reparations to Nicaragua for all the damages caused.
The President continued:
The compensation due to Nicaragua remains unpaid… Instead of receiving compensation as is morally and legally due, Nicaragua continues to be the object of a new form of aggression, which consists of sanctions and an attempted coup d’état.
In finishing, Ortega said that:
Nicaragua takes this opportunity to recall that the judgments of the ICJ are final and of obligatory compliance, and therefore the United States has the obligation to comply with the reparations ordered by the ruling of June 27, 1986.
In June the Sao Paulo Forum approved a resolution in support of Nicaragua’s demand for compliance with the 1986 ruling of the World Court. The Sao Paulo Forum is the premier forum of revolutionary organizations, movements and parties of Latin America and the Caribbean. The Sao Paulo Forum declared itself in support of Nicaragua’s demand that the US comply with the ICJ sentence, and compensate Nicaragua to the full extent of that historic ruling.
The Ministerial Meeting of the Coordinating Bureau of the Non-Aligned Movement meeting in Azerbaijan in June issued a joint declaration in which the member countries expressed their support for Nicaragua’s request for US compliance and compensation for damages in accordance with the ruling. The statement highlights that “the persistent refusal of the United States to comply with the Judgment of the International Court of Justice issued 37 years ago, is a flagrant violation of international law and of the ruling of the highest court of justice in the world.”
Nicaragua showed it will not bend to US coup attempts and destabilization when it tried and convicted Nicaraguan agents who participated in violent actions in an attempt to overthrow the government in 2018. Then on February 9, 2023, Nicaragua decided to deport 222 prisoners convicted of treason and other crimes to the US. “In accordance with the Law for the Defense of the Rights of the People, Independence, Sovereignty and Self-Determination … the immediate and effective deportation of 222 persons is ordered…The deportees were declared traitors and punished for different serious crimes (that would be serious crimes in any nation) and their citizenship rights are perpetually suspended.” [Note: The new law under which Nicaraguans can lose their citizenship because of treasonous acts is very similar to US Code 1481 under which a person can lose US citizenship by “committing any act of treason against, or attempting by force to overthrow, or bearing arms against, the United States, … by engaging in a conspiracy to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, if and when he is convicted thereof by a court martial or by a court of competent jurisdiction.]
In another example of demanding respect for sovereignty, Nicaragua suspended the placet it had granted to Fernando Ponz as European Union ambassador. Ministry of Foreign Affairs Denis Moncada Colindres said in a statement:
In view of the interfering and insolent communiqué of this day, which confirms the imperialist and colonialist positions of the European Union, this April 18, on the eve of the National Day of Peace, the sovereign and dignified government of the Republic of Nicaragua … has decided to suspend the placet that had been granted to Mr. Fernando Ponz as ambassador of that subjugating power. We reiterate to the neocolonialist gentlemen and women of the European Union our condemnation of all their historic genocide and we demand justice and reparation for these crimes against humanity and for their virulent, greedy and rapacious plundering of our wealth and cultures. In these circumstances and in the face of the permanent siege on the rights of our people to national sovereignty, we will not receive their representative.
On January 24, at the VII Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean Countries (CELAC) held in Argentina, Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Denis Moncada rejected foreign intervention in any form, including aggressions, invasions, interferences, blockades, economic wars, offenses, threats, humiliations, occupations as well as sanctions, which are nothing more than “aggressions, all illegal, arbitrary and unilateral.” His message also called on the CELAC countries to resist and reject everything that endangers the future, “the luminous horizon of our peoples, where we do not allow any more plundering of our natural and cultural resources, and where the genocide imposed on us for centuries by the colonialist powers is not only denounced, but [our resistance] becomes … songs that demand peace.” He went on to say, “The world urgently needs justice and peace…respectful cooperation and solidarity. The world needs understanding, comprehension and affection. The better world that we all want to create urgently needs … the ability to live together”….
Strategies for Development Despite Sanctions
In 2018, the same year of the coup attempt, the US passed a first round of sanctions called the Nica Act. Then, under President Joe Biden, more sanctions were passed called “RENACER.” Currently, Senators Marco Rubio and Tim Kaine have introduced a new bill to reauthorize and amend the previous sanctions making them even harsher.
All of these sanctions are illegal coercive measures and the US applies them not because Nicaragua has done something wrong, but exactly because Nicaragua is using the riches it produces for the social welfare of its people and not acting as a US colony. Sanctions tend to primarily affect economic growth and studies show they have the biggest effect on the poor and vulnerable.
Nicaragua has developed three essential areas that make it resilient even in the face of this form of war: Nicaragua produces about 90% of the food that people eat; Nicaragua has increased renewable energy from 20% to 70% so every year it is less dependent on petroleum imports; and it has developed excellent infrastructure in health, education, roads and bridges, energy, water and sewage. And because of more benefits like free universal health and education, more affordable housing possibilities as well as more opportunities for youth and women, a very high percentage of the population approves of the government – currently nearly 83%.
And Nicaragua is developing new relationships of respect with many other countries: In the first six months of 2023 Nicaragua received high level visits from China, Russia and Iran.
The Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation, Sergei Lavrov, visited Nicaragua on April 19 and said that together with Nicaragua they will continue to work hand in hand against interference and intervention. “Thanks to the efforts of Daniel Ortega, the country remains stable,” he said. “I would like to wish all Nicaraguans peace, prosperity and stability; I am convinced that the bilateral relations between Russia and Nicaragua will facilitate this process.” Multipolarity is a process that cannot be stopped, but Westerners under the auspices of the US try to spread their hegemony in conflicts such as the one in Ukraine and will try to increase their influence in the region looking towards the Pacific, among others,” he said. Russia has helped Nicaragua develop vaccine production such as the influenza vaccine now produced locally.
Cooperation with China began in December 2021 when Nicaragua recognized that there is only one China. Recently, on July 11 of this year, Nicaragua and China signed three agreements: China will donate 1,481 metric tons of wheat, 2,595 metric tons of urea, and 500 buses to Nicaragua. President Ortega thanked the President of China, Xi Jinping, for this cooperation that is provided in solidarity and unconditionally through the China International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA) for the benefit of Nicaraguan families. Lou Zhaohui, the President of CIDCA, said China will continue to support the efforts of Nicaragua to meet its goals of poverty reduction and human development. And as of May, Nicaragua can export seafood, beef, and textiles to China free of tariffs.
On February 1, 2023, Nicaragua hosted Iranian Foreign Minister Dr. Hossein Amir-Abdollahián. Then, on June 13 and 14, Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi visited Nicaragua to deepen relations and begin cooperation in the areas of science and technology. Raisi said that the United States wanted to paralyze its people through threats and sanctions; however, Iran was not paralyzed in its path and has turned threats and sanctions into opportunities and through those opportunities it has achieved great progress in many areas. “Although the enemy wants to discourage the revolutionary peoples, the peoples have to know that the new world order is being formed in favor of the resistance of the people and against imperialist interests,” Raisi stated.
President Daniel Ortega Emphasizes the Importance of Peace
This year, April 19 was declared the National Day of Peace. On this day in 2018, at the beginning of the attempted coup, the first three people were killed by US-backed agents, including a policeman, a young Sandinista and a passer-by.
In his speech on April 19 President Ortega said:
I want to remind all Nicaraguans to think for a moment what Nicaragua was like five years ago. Could you walk on these streets; could you live in peace in your homes? Everyone was terrified. And the deaths every day; those who were killed were blamed on the government, on the police, and the police were in their barracks, which was the decision we had taken.
President Ortega frequently emphasizes the importance of peace and how essential peace is to end poverty and for the development of all sectors of the country. On the 40th anniversary of the revolution in 2019, the president asked “What is the way to be able to work, study, receive health care, build schools, roads, show solidarity to get our Nicaraguan brothers and sisters who are still in these conditions out of poverty and extreme poverty? What is the fundamental condition?” Everyone answered with one voice that it is peace. He affirmed that a community needs peace to work and to live.
Residents of Leon march for peace carrying the blue and white flags of Nicaragua and the red and black flags of the FSLN. (Photo Credit: Nicaraguan photographer, Jairo Cajina) On January 9 of this year, at the swearing in the of National Assembly, President Ortega pointed out that:
No matter how well-intentioned a government may be, if there is no peace, social programs cannot go forward. Without peace, schools, roads, hospitals simply cannot be built. We already know how terrible war is, the war that Nicaragua has lived through, the attempted coups that Nicaragua has lived through, how much blood, how much pain caused by terrorists, how much damage to the economy. But in the midst of the coup d’état, we were still inaugurating infrastructure and, after security and peace were restored for all Nicaraguans, then came this new push, because the country had been acting with enormous strength from 2007 until the coup attempt.
Nicaragua does all it can to have peace, independence and sovereignty in order to advance well-being for its population. Nicaragua is a revolution that works!
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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We speak with Ukrainian peace activist Yurii Sheliazhenko, whom Ukrainian authorities have charged with justifying Russian aggression, days after his Kyiv apartment was raided and searched. Sheliazhenko is executive secretary of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement and has vocally opposed any escalation of the conflict, calling for a ceasefire and peace talks to end the war. “It is total nonsense that…
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President Kennedy’s World Peace speech on June 10, 1963,where he championed nuclear disarmament and lasting peace with the Soviet Union, is given renewed attention with a Kennedy now running for president and by the present war with Russia. JFK supposedly underwent a transformation after the near mutual nuclear annihilation with the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. It is claimed JFK had decided to withdraw from Vietnam, break up the CIA and the power of the Pentagon chiefs, and end the Cold War.
In his World Peace speech President Kennedy states,
I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.
Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world disarmament–and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude–as individuals and as a Nation–for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward–by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the cold war and toward freedom and peace here at home.
World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor–it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.
We [the US and Soviet Union] are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons.
So far so good. But then he adds:
To secure these ends, America’s weapons are nonprovocative, carefully controlled, designed to deter, and capable of selective use. Our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self-restraint.
And again:
The Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today.
In other words, the US that stands for peace, the Communist bloc instigates conflict. Not exactly putting into action his words, “every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward.” This has similarity to President Eisenhower’s farewell address warning us of the military-industrial complex after he spent eight years building it up.
Coming to his final words, Kennedy says, just six months after almost precipitating a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war.”
This World Peace speech is heralded by many progressive and libertarian people.
However, if “America’s weapons are nonprovocative… designed to deter”; if “Our military forces are committed to peace”; if “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war,” then Kennedy is saying US has been for peace and he is continuing that policy. His speech did not proclaim major policy change, but signaled a preservation of the present one.
We are told this speech, like the claim he planned to pull the troops out of Vietnam, posed a threat to the Pentagon chiefs. And we are told after the defeat at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba (April 1961), JFK vowed, “I will splinter the CIA up into a thousand pieces and scatter them into the wind.” This statement, said in private (contradicted by later Kennedy statements), is said to have made the CIA, like the Pentagon, seek revenge. This supposedly led, less than six months after his June 10 speech, to his murder on November 22.
Kennedy’s November 22, 1963 Speeches
His speeches he was to give that evening show the actual “peace” policy he was carrying out was really one of military escalation. From the first speech he was to give in Dallas:
In the past 3 years we have increased our defense budget by over 20 percent; increased the program for acquisition of Polaris submarines from 24 to 41; increased our Minuteman missile purchase program by more than 75 percent; doubled the number of strategic bombers and missiles on alert; doubled the number of nuclear weapons available in the strategic alert forces; increased the tactical nuclear forces deployed in Western Europe by 60 percent; added 5 combat ready divisions and 5 tactical fighter wings to our Armed Forces; increased our strategic airlift capabilities by 75 percent; and increased our special counter-insurgency forces by 600 percent.
From his second speech on November 22:
We have radically improved the readiness of our conventional forces – increased by 45 percent the number of combat ready Army divisions, increased by 100 percent the procurement of modern Army weapons and equipment, increased by 100 percent our ship construction, conversion, and modernization program, increased by 100 percent our procurement of tactical aircraft, increased by 30 percent the number of tactical air squadrons, and increased the strength of the Marines. As last month’s “Operation Big Lift” – which originated here in Texas – showed so clearly, this Nation is prepared as never before to move substantial numbers of men in surprisingly little time to advanced positions anywhere in the world. We have increased by 175 percent the procurement of airlift aircraft, and we have already achieved a 75 percent increase in our existing strategic airlift capability. Finally, moving beyond the traditional roles of our military forces, we have achieved an increase of nearly 600 percent in our special forces – those forces that are prepared to work with our allies and friends against the guerrillas, saboteurs, insurgents and assassins who threaten freedom in a less direct but equally dangerous manner.
Do these actions by JFK show the Soviet leaders his desire for “not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time”?
With good reason few believe the government’s story that Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. Since thousands of documents the government still conceals from us, we are left with unanswered questions. Maybe it was the CIA and FBI and Mafia and anti-Castro Cubans, or a sub-grouping in them.
The National Security State Campaign to Remove Trump
But we do have evidence the CIA, FBI, NSA, and DIA and other secret national police agencies have targeted a president – in the unsubstantiated stories of Russian election interference and Trump collusion with Russian President Putin. This national security police state hoax is reminiscent of the Weapons of Mass Destruction lie they fed us to start a war on Iraq. They conjured up this Russia collusion story to sway a US presidential election and continued it during Trump’s presidency. And in 2020, they suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop case to sway a second election. They now attempt to imprison him for treason.
Regardless your opinion of Trump, this is a documented case of the US national security state seeking to neutralize a president. Those who assert a US police state operation against Kennedy do not attempt to bolster this with the proven operation against Trump. It would make sense for them to argue that while evidence of the CIA plot to kill Kennedy remains a state secret, in Trump’s case their plots are now out in the open.
Moreover, Trump, though a racist and sexist bully, did advocate for the issues that are said to make JFK a target: to bring US troops home, have peaceful relations with Russia, and reign in national security state agencies.
For instance, Trump said at a press conference (October 21, 2019):
I got elected on bringing our soldiers back home. Now, it’s not very popular within the Beltway, because, you know, Lockheed doesn’t like it, and these great military companies don’t like it. It’s not very popular.
As we defend American lives, we are working to end American wars in the Middle East …. It is also not our function to serve other nations as law enforcement agencies. (February 28, 2019).
I want to bring our troops back from the endless war. They’ve been going on for 19 years in the area. But I’m going to bring them home from Syria. (Watch How Progressives Respond When Trump Isn’t Wrong) There is more here.
Concerning the security state police agencies, Trump condemned the collusion of the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton, and FBI when asked if he would publicly criticize President Putin for Russia’s interference when they met. In response former CIA head John Brennan declared, “Donald Trump’s press conference performance [with President Putin] in Helsinki rises to and exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors. It was nothing short of treasonous.” This sounds the same as the CIA’s alleged attitude towards JFK.
President Trump wrote (Mar 15, 2019):
New evidence that the Obama era team of the FBI, DOJ & CIA were working together to spy on (and take out) President Trump, all the way back in 2015.
Unelected deep state operatives who defy the voters to push their own secret agendas are truly a threat to democracy itself. (September 6, 2018).
This does not mean Trump was any more serious about “draining the swamp” than JFK in carrying out his World Peace speech – and in the end, the president is not in control of the national security state, but the reverse.
While President Trump did advocate US ruling class interests around the world and prioritized business interests above our welfare, the national security state did not forgive him for repudiating its endless war agenda. He wanted to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.
He befriended DPRK leader Kim Jong Un, an anathema to Washington, later explaining, “We have a good relationship with North Korea, we’re not in a war. Having a good relationship with leaders of other countries is a good thing.” (October 22, 2020).
Even worse, he said, “Some people hate the fact that I got along well with President Putin of Russia. They would rather go to war than see this” (July 18, 2018). He was gotten out of office, and then they instigated a war.
Of course, liberals would never uphold Trump, like they did Kennedy, Obama (in 2007-2008), Bernie, Jesse Jackson (1984), among others, as a leader who could move the US towards the dream of being a model for the world and make the US government actually represent the people.
Kennedy embodied progressives’ hope that a genuinely progressive democrat could become president and redeem the country, fulfill the promise of its ennobling principles and supposed exceptional nature. To MAGA people, Trump personifies the conservative realization of this same chauvinist dream.
Trump brought about a redirection in the US no more than Kennedy. But the popularity of both presidents in different sectors of the population does signify the common yearning of US people across the board for curtailing the immense power of the national security state. Now this national security state is using lawfare to intervene in the 2024 election process to disqualify and imprison Biden’s main challenger. That issue should be determined by the voters.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Leading medical journals published a joint editorial late Tuesday calling on world leaders to take urgent steps to reduce the risk of nuclear war — and eliminate atomic weapons altogether — as the threat of a potentially civilization-ending conflict continues to grow. The call was first issued in The Lancet, The BMJ, JAMA, International Nursing Review, and other top journals.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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-Russian tensions continued to rise this week as two U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drones were damaged by flares released from Russian jets over Syria. The first incident on Sunday damaged the drone’s propeller but did not cause it to crash, but it echoed a similar episode over the Black Sea in March when the drone crashed after a collision with a Russian jet. Another incident occurred Wednesday over…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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This story originally appeared in Jacobin on July 28, 2023. It is shared here with permission.
In Russia, a fabricated legal process has been launched against the prominent left-wing sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky. He is being accused of “justifying terrorism” based on his discussion about the motivations of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Crimean Bridge explosion. The true reason behind this is the elimination of remaining opposition figures amid a political crisis resulting from military failures.
Kagarlitsky is a renowned left-wing theoretician in Russia, internationally known for his works, including the popular books Between Class and Discourse and From Empires to Imperialism, which help to understand the structure of modern capitalism and the challenges faced by the left-wing movement.
Kagarlitsky did not emigrate or halt his political work, even when Russian authorities labeled him a “foreign agent” for his consistent antiwar stance during the 2022 Russian-Ukrainian conflict. He recently published his latest book. Over the years, the online journal Rabkor, directed by Kagarlitsky, has become an informational platform that unites people with various left-wing and prodemocratic perspectives. Kagarlitsky has never shied away from parliamentary methods of struggle and adeptly engaged in discussions with political opponents, even garnering sympathy from adversaries.
On July 25, 2023, it was revealed that the federal security services (FSB) instigated criminal charges against Kagarlitsky under one of the new repressive articles — “justification of terrorism.” The reason for this was an old post on social media in which he indicated that the Crimea Bridge explosion could be understood “from a military perspective.” Taking advantage of this absurd pretext, Kagarlitsky was swiftly taken one thousand kilometers away from Moscow and put on trial in a small regional town, in a closed session without media or legal representation. The Syktyvkar City Court ordered the detention of Kagarlitsky until September 24. The hearing was held in a closed session. He will be held in custody at the Verkhniy Chov detention center. Now, the elderly left-wing thinker faces up to seven years in prison, and searches are being conducted at the premises of his associates.
Such calculated precautions taken by those orchestrating the political persecution of Kagarlitsky demonstrate their serious concern about organized support for the left-wing sociologist — perhaps more so than any other remaining public figure in Russia. And not without reason, as news of Kagarlitsky’s arrest has sparked anger and empathy among a wide range of activists: all those who learned from him, debated with him, and worked alongside him.
Furthermore, this is not the first case of persecution against left-wing activists: criminal and administrative charges on false grounds are being brought against trade unionists and activists, such as Anton Orlov and Kirill Ukraintsev, and the “foreign agent” status is being imposed on new individuals every week, including mathematician and left-wing activist Mikhail Lobanov. Despite the near obliteration of legal avenues for resisting government oppression in Russia, we will not leave Kagarlitsky alone to face his accusers.
Kagarlitsky must be freed; and may this slogan be echoed by all who have ever shaken his hand or read his books. We call upon you to support him: through publications, actions, and attention to his books. People may perish, but ideas do not, and Kagarlitsky has done everything to ensure that prison walls will not hinder his fight for human freedom.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
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A Russian mercenary outfit rose to prominence on the UK government’s watch, a new committee report claims. They aren’t wrong. But regardless of the Wagner Group‘s crimes and influence, the UK itself remains a global hub for mercenary activity.
The Foreign Affairs Select Committee published the hard-hitting report on Wednesday 26 July. Titled ‘Guns for gold: The Wagner Network exposed’, the report examines the mercenary group’s global operations.
The authors warned that while the Putin-linked group is primarily understood through its role in Ukraine, it operates far outside Europe.
They said:
Wagner’s activities in Ukraine are not representative of the network’s operations globally.
Global guns for hire
Wagner’s operations are varied. And its roles can include military and non-military operations. The report also points out it is a complex entity with a range of affiliates and attributes:
The network’s military operations can be mapped in at least seven countries (Ukraine; Syria; the Central African Republic; Sudan; Libya; Mozambique; and Mali), with medium or high confidence that the network has been involved in a non-military capacity in 10 further countries since 2014.
While not every operation is at the direction of the Russian state, the network’s aims usually align to some degree with Russian interests:
Even when the Wagner Network has not acted as a direct proxy of the Russian Government, the Kremlin is likely to have benefited from its presence.
And while Wagner has a mixed track record, the costs are usually the same:
…atrocities, corruption and the plunder of natural resources.
Late to the party
The report claimed that the UK has tried to counter Wagner by supporting Ukraine. But this is not enough, given the group’s geographical spread:
It is deeply regrettable that it was not until early 2022 that the Government began to invest greater resource in understanding the Wagner Network, despite Wagner fighters having already conducted military operations in at least seven countries for almost a decade.
But there is another side to the mercenary debate. Certainly Wagner is a brutal operation, linked with atrocities around the world. So brutal and powerful, in fact, that it recently attempted to challenge the Russian state itself through a coup.
But the UK’s own vast, multi-billion pound mercenary industry has been thriving unchecked not for ten years, but since the Iraq War.
The UK Wagner?
While opaque and unaccountable, there have been attempts to expose the UK private military industry. Perhaps the most important report was published by the charity War on Want in 2016.
It found:
Private military and security companies (PMSCs) burst onto the scene 15 years ago, following the declaration of a ‘war on terror’ and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
And the firms quickly turned a tidy profit:
This vast private industry, now worth hundreds of billions of dollars, is dominated by UK companies reaping enormous profits from exploiting war, instability and conflict around the world.
War on Want called for a ban on mercenary firms – one which so far has not been enacted.
Whoever can pay
A later 2018 report into the industry showed it was still raking in cash for violence with minimal oversight.
As that Open Democracy investigation had it:
Many of these companies will serve whoever can pay – from wealthy private individuals to faceless corporations. It is easy for them to do so.
They added:
Despite the size of this mercenary industry, the entire sector is marked by secrecy. Men trained in the arts of subterfuge and counter-intelligence dominate this sphere, and the result is an industry that operates from the shadows.
Secretive elite gunmen
The UK mercenary industry involves a great number of shadowy people. But it has long centred on former soldiers from British special forces units. And the home of the SAS, the sleepy town of Hereford, is also a hub for for-profit military activity.
As journalist Matt Kennard reported in 2017:
The business model involves providing “soldiers for hire” to companies and governments around the world, to protect assets and important people from criminals and terrorists (and sometimes dissidents).
He added:
It is a multibillion dollar industry operating in virtually every country in the world
While warfare was, for many years, the sole preserve of states, the neoliberal model of privatisation has been extended to the provision of deadly violence. With obvious results.
Double standards?
Certainly, there is an argument the Wagner Group should be proscribed. But not for the first time, the UK finds itself in a position where it cannot finger-point and moralise. Given the UK is home to its own private military industry, which is also unregulated, it is very hard for the UK government to criticise other states for theirs.
That the same military industry is built on the expertise of its own elite troops, and within shouting distance of its own major special forces base, makes the government’s position even more untenable.
A ban on global mercenary firms would be sensible and prescient. But that must include our own killers-for-hire, as well as those of foreign powers.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/2s3m akatsiya, cropped to 1910 x 1000, licenced under CC BY-SA 4.0.
By Joe Glenton
This post was originally published on Canary.
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I just returned from my third trip to Russia, and my second trip to Donbass (now referring to the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk collectively) in about 8 months. This time, I flew into lovely Tallinn, Estonia and took what should be about a 6-hour bus ride to St. Petersburg. In the end, the bus trip took me about 12 hours due to a long wait in Customs on the Russian side of the border.
Having a US passport and trying to pass the frontier from a hostile, NATO country into Russia during wartime got me immediately flagged for questioning. And then, it turned out I didn’t have all my papers in order as I was still without my journalist credential from the Russian Foreign Ministry which was necessary given that I told the border patrol that I was traveling to do reporting. I was treated very nicely, though the long layover forced me to lose my bus which understandably went on without me.
However, sometimes we find opportunity in seemingly inconvenient detours, and that was true in this case. Thus, I became a witness to a number of Ukrainians, some of them entire families, trying to cross the border and to immigrate to Russia. Indeed, the only other type of passport (besides my US passport) I saw amongst those held over for questioning and processing was the blue Ukranian passport. This is evidence of an inconvenient fact to the Western narrative of the war which portrays Russia as an invader of Ukraine. In fact, many Ukrainians have an affinity for Russia and have voluntarily chosen to live there over the years.
Between 2014 – the real start of the war when the Ukrainian government began attacking its own people in the Donbass – and the beginning of Russia’s intervention in February of 2022, around 1 million Ukrainians had already immigrated to Russia. This was reported in the mainstream press back then, with the BBC writing about these 1 million refugees, and also explaining, “[s]eparatists in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk declared independence after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. Since the violence erupted, some 2,600 people have been killed and thousands more wounded. The city of Luhansk has been under siege by government forces for the past month and is without proper supplies of food and water.” The number of dead in this war would grow to 14,000 by February of 2022, again before Russia’s Special Military Operations (SMO) had even begun.
Around 1.3 million additional Ukrainians have immigrated to Russia since February of 2022, making Russia the largest recipient of Ukrainian refugees in the world since the beginning of the SMO.
When I commented to one of the Russian border officials, Kirill is his name, about the stack of Ukrainian passports sitting on his desk, he made a point to tell me that they treat the Ukrainians coming in “as human beings.” When my contact in St Petersburg, Boris, was able to send a photo of my newly-acquired press credential to Kirill, I was sent on my way with a handshake and was able to catch the next bus coming through to St. Petersburg almost immediately.
Once in St. Petersburg, I went to Boris’s house for a short rest and then was off by car to Rostov-on-Don, the last Russian city before Donetsk. I was driven in a black Lexus by a kind Russian businessman named Vladimir and along with German, the founder of the humanitarian aid group known as “Leningrad Volunteers.” The car was indeed loaded with humanitarian aid to take to Donbas. After some short introductions, and my dad joke about the “Lexus from Texas,” we were off on our 20-hour journey at a brisk pace of about 110 miles an hour.
We arrived in Rostov in the evening and checked into the Sholokhov Lofts hotel, named after Mikhail Sholokhov, Rostov’s favorite son who wrote the great novel, And Quite Flows the Don. We were told that, up until recently, a portrait of the titular head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, had adorned the lobby wall. They took this down after members of the Wagner Group invaded Rostov, putting fear in many of the residents. Now, the hotel only has Hollywood movie posters decorating the walls.
In the early afternoon the next day, my translator Sasha arrived from her hometown of Krasnodar, Russia – a 7-hour train ride from Rostov. Sasha, who is just 22 years old, is a tiny red-headed woman who quickly turned out to be one of the most interesting people I met on my journey. As she explained to me, Sasha has been supporting humanitarian work in Donbass since the age of 12. She told me that she derived her interest in this work from her grandmother who raised her in the “patriotic spirit” of the USSR. As Sasha explained, her parents were too busy working to do much raising of her at all. Sasha, who is from the mainland of Russia, attends the University of Donetsk to live in solidarity with the people who have been under attack there since 2014.
At age 22, Sasha, who wore open-toed sandals even when we traveled to the frontlines, is one of the bravest people I have ever met, and she certainly disabused me of any notion that I was doing anything especially brave by going to the Donbass. But, of course, as Graham Greene once wrote, “with a return ticket, courage becomes an intellectual exercise” anyway.
We quickly set out on our approximately 3-to-4-hour drive to Donetsk City, with a brief stop at a passport control office now run by the Russian Federation subsequent to the September, 2022 referendum in which the people of Donetsk and three other Ukrainian republics voted to join Russia. I was again questioned by officials at this stop, but for only 15 minutes or so. I just resigned myself to the fact that, as an American traveling through Russia at this time, I was not going to go through any border area without some level of questioning. However, the tone of the questioning was always friendly.
We arrived in Donetsk City, a small but lovely town along the Kalmius River, without incident. Our first stop was at the Leningrad Volunteers warehouse to unload some of the aid we had brought and to meet some of the local volunteers. Almost all of these volunteers are life-long residents of Donetsk, and nearly all of them wore military fatigues and have been fighting the Ukrainian forces as part of the Donetsk militia for years, many since the beginning of the conflict in 2014. This is something I cannot impress upon the reader enough. While we are often told that these fighters in the Donbass are Russians or “Russian proxies,” this is simply not true. The lion’s share of these fighters are locals of varying ages, some quite old, who have been fighting for their homes, families and survival since 2014. While there have been Russian and international volunteers who have supported these forces – just as there were international volunteers who went to support the Republicans in Spain in the 1930’s — they are mostly local. Of course, this changed in February of 2022 when Russia began the SMO. But even still, the locals of Donetsk continue to fight on, now alongside the Russian forces.
The lie of “Russian proxies” fighting in the Donbass after 2014 is actually one of the smaller ones of the Western mainstream press, for the claim at least acknowledges that there has been such fighting. Of course, the mainstream media has tried to convince us that there was never such fighting at all and that the Russian SMO beginning in February of 2022 was completely “unprovoked.” This is the big lie that has been peddled in order to gain the consent of the Western populations to militarily support Ukraine. What is also ignored is the fact that this war was escalating greatly before the beginning of the SMO and this escalation indeed provoked it. Thus, according to the Organization for European Security and Cooperation (OESC) — a 57-member organization including many Western countries, including the United States – there were around 2000 cease-fire violations in the Donbass in the weekend just before the SMO began on February 24, 2022. In a rare moment of candor, Reuters reported on February 19, 2022, “Almost 2,000 ceasefire violations were registered in eastern Ukraine by monitors for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on Saturday, a diplomatic source told Reuters on Sunday. Ukrainian government and separatist forces have been fighting in eastern Ukraine since 2014.”
Jacques Baud, a Swiss intelligence and security consultant and former NATO military analyst, further explains the precipitating events of the SMO:
as early as February 16, Joe Biden knew that the Ukrainians had begun shelling the civilian population of Donbass, putting Vladimir Putin in front of a difficult choice: to help Donbass militarily and create an international problem, or to stand by and watch the Russian-speaking people of Donbass being crushed.
. . . This is what he explained in his speech on February 21.
On that day, he agreed to the request of the Duma and recognized the independence of the two Donbass Republics and, at the same time, he signed friendship and assistance treaties with them.
The Ukrainian artillery bombardment of the Donbass population continued, and, on 23 February, the two Republics asked for military assistance from Russia. On 24 February, Vladimir Putin invoked Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which provides for mutual military assistance in the framework of a defensive alliance.
In order to make the Russian intervention totally illegal in the eyes of the public we deliberately hid the fact that the war actually started on February 16. The Ukrainian army was preparing to attack the Donbass as early as 2021, as some Russian and European intelligence services were well aware. Jurists will judge.
Of course, none of this was news to the people I met in Donetsk, for they had been living this reality for years. For example, Dimitri, a young resident of Donetsk who has been fighting since 2014 along with his mother and father, told me quite exasperated as he pointed to some of the weapons and ammunition behind him, “what is all this stuff doing here? Why have we been getting this since 2014? Because the war has been going on since then.” Dimitri, who was studying at the university when the conflict began, can no longer fight due to injuries received in the war, including damage to his hearing which is evidenced by the earplugs he wears. He hopes he can go back to his studies.
Just a few days before my arrival in Donetsk, Dimitri’s apartment building was shelled by Ukrainian forces, just as it had been before in 2016. Like many in Donetsk, he is used to quickly repairing the damage and going on with his life.
Dimitri took me to the Donetsk airport and nearby Orthodox church and monastery which were destroyed in fighting between the Ukrainian military and Donetsk militia forces back in 2014-2015. Dimitri participated in the fighting in this area back then, explaining that during that time, this was the area of the most intense fighting in the world. But you would not know this from the mainstream press coverage which has largely ignored this war before February of 2022.
One of the first individuals I interviewed in Donetsk was 36-year-old Vitaly, a big guy with a chubby, boyish face who wore a baseball hat with the red Soviet flag with the hammer and sickle. Vitaly, the father of three children, is from Donetsk and has been fighting there for four years, including in the very tough battle for the steel plant in Mariupol in the summer of 2022. He decided to take up arms after friends of his were killed by Ukrainian forces, including some who were killed by being burned alive by fascist forces –- the same forces, we are told, don’t exist. Vitaly, referring to the mainstream Western media, laughed when saying, “they’ve been saying we’ve been shelling ourselves for 9 years.”
Vitaly has personally fought against soldiers wearing Nazi insignia, and he is very clear that he is fighting fascism. Indeed, when I asked him what the Soviet flag on his hat meant to him, he said that it signified the defeat over Nazism, and he hopes he will contribute to this again. When I asked him about claims that Russia had intervened with soldiers in the war prior to February of 2022 as some allege, he adamantly denied this, as did everyone else I interviewed in Donetsk. However, he has witnessed the fact that Polish and UK soldiers have been fighting with the Ukrainian military since the beginning. Vitaly opined that, given what has transpired over the past 9 years, he does not believe that the Donbass will ever return to Ukraine, and he certainly hopes it will not. Vitaly told me quite stoically that he believes he will not see peace in his lifetime.
During my stay in Donetsk, I twice had dinner with Anastasia, my interpreter during my first trip to the Donbass in November. Anastasia teaches at the University of Donetsk. She has been traveling around Russia, including to the far east, telling of what has been happening in the Donbass since 2014 because many in Russia themselves do not fully understand what has been going on. She told me that when she was recounting her story, she found herself reliving her trauma from 9 years of war and feeling overwhelmed. Anastasia’s parents and 13-year-old brother live near the frontlines in the Donetsk Republic, and she worries greatly about them. Olga is glad that Russia has intervened in the conflict, and she indeed corrected me when I once referred to the Russian SMO as an “invasion,” telling me that Russia did not invade. Rather, they were invited and welcomed in. That does seem to be the prevailing view in Donetsk as far as I can tell.
During my 5-day trip to Donetsk, I was taken to two cities within the conflict zone – Yasinovataya and Gorlovka. I was required to wear body armor and a helmet during this journey, though wearing a seat belt was optional, if not frowned upon. While Donetsk City, which certainly sees its share of shelling, is largely intact and with teeming traffic and a brisk restaurant and café scene, once we got out of the city, this changed pretty quickly. Yasinovataya showed signs of great destruction, and I was told that a lot of this dated back to 2014. The destruction going back that far included a machine factory which is now being used as a base of operations for Donetsk forces and the adjacent administrative building which looks like it could have been an opera house before its being shelled. For its part, the city center of Gorlovka looked largely unmolested with signs of street life and even had an old trolley, clearly from the Soviet era, running through the center of town. But the outskirts of Gorlovka certainly showed signs of war. In both cities, one could hear the sound of shelling in the distance quite frequently.
In Gorlovka, we met with Nikoli, nicknamed “Heavy.” Nikoli looks like a Greek god, standing at probably 6 feet, 5 inches and all muscle. I joked with him while I was standing next to him that I felt like I was appearing next to Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. He got the joke and laughed. While a giant of a man, he seemed very nice and with a strong moral compass. He led us over to a makeshift Orthodox chapel in the cafeteria of what was a school, but which is now the base of operations for his Donetsk militia forces. He told us that, even now after the SMO began, about 90 percent of the forces in Gorlovka are still local Donetsk soldiers, and the other 10 percent are Russian. Again, this is something we rarely get a sense of from the mainstream press.
Nikoli, while sitting in front of the makeshift chapel, explained that while he still considers himself Ukrainian, for after all he was born in Ukraine, he said that Donetsk would never go back to Ukraine because Ukraine had “acted against God” when it began to attack its own people in the Donbass. He made it clear that he was prepared to fight to the end to ensure the survival of the people of Donetsk, and I had no doubt that he was telling the truth about that.
At my request, I met with the First Secretary of the Donetsk section of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), Boris Litvinov. Boris, who has also served in the Donetsk parliament, explained that the Communist Party under his leadership had been one of the leaders and initiators of the 2014 Referendum in which the people of Donetsk voted to become an autonomous republic and leave Ukraine. According to Boris, about 100 members of the Donetsk section of the CPRF are serving on the frontlines of the conflict. Indeed, as Boris explained, the CPRF supports the Russian SMO, only wishing that it had commenced in 2014. Boris is clear that the war in Ukraine is one over the very survival of Russia (regardless of whether it is capitalist or socialist) and that Russia is fighting the collective West which wants to destroy Russia.
Boris compares the fight in the Donbass to the fight of the Republicans against the fascists in Spain in the 1930’s, and he says that there are international fighters from all over the world (Americans, Israelis, Spanish and Colombians, for example) who are fighting alongside the people of Donbass against the fascists just as international fighters helped in Spain.
The last person I interviewed, again at my own request, was Olga Tseselskaya, assistant to the head of the Union of Women of the Republic of Donetsk and First Secretary of the Mothers’ United organization. The Mothers’ United organization, which has 6000 members throughout the Donetsk Republic, advocates for, and provides social services to, the mothers of children killed in the conflict since 2014. I was excited that Olga opened our discussion by saying that she was glad to be talking to someone from Pittsburgh because Pittsburgh and Donetsk City had once been sister cities.
I asked Olga about how she viewed the Russian forces now in Donetsk, and she made it clear that she supported their presence in Donetsk and believed that they were treating the population well. She adamantly denied the claims of mass rape made against the Russians earlier in the conflict. Of course, it should be noted, the Ukrainian parliament’s commissioner for human rights, Lyudmila Denisova, who was the source of these claims was ultimately fired because her claims were found to be unverified and without substantiation, but again the Western media has barely reported on that fact.
When I asked Olga whether she agreed with some Western peace groups, such as the Stop the War Coalition in the UK, that Russia should pull its troops out of the Donbass, she disagreed, saying that she hates to think what would happen to the people of the Donbass if they did. I think that this is something the people of the West need to come to grips with – that the government of Ukraine has done great violence against its own people in the Donbass, and that the people of the Donbass had every right to choose to leave Ukraine and join Russia. If Westerners understood this reality, they would think twice about “standing with” and continuing to arm Ukraine.
A cathedral near the Donetsk City airport was destroyed in 2014. The airport was also destroyed.
A bridge near the Donetsk airport which was destroyed in 2015 by Donetsk militia forces to prevent Ukrainian troops and tanks from crossing. • Both photos were taken by Daniel Kovalik.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Tactical Missiles Corporation (TMC) has presented at the International Maritime Defense Show (IMDS-2023) in the city of Kronstadt the latest naval weapons, including – for the first time – a new universal small-sized UMT torpedo. The UMT torpedo can be launched from helicopters, aircraft and drones. It deserves special attention because it is said to […]
The post Tactical Missiles Corporation Develops Anti-Drone Torpedo appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
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This morning Russian media sources reported that a Ukrainian followup attack to the one on the Crimea bridge by 28 drones was defeated by Russian air defenses. In response, Russia destroyed the manufacturing sites of the drones and fuel storage facilities that provide fuel for Ukraine’s military. The two words, “in response” tells us what is wrong with Putin’s conduct of the war. Why did it take a Ukrainian attack on Crimea for Russia to do what any other country at war would have done a long time ago—destroy its enemy’s armaments factories and fuel depots? It is as if Russia is not at war. The offensive initiatives are with Ukraine. All Russia does is to retaliate to Ukrainian attacks.
This is a mindless way for the Kremlin to conduct a war. It encourages the US neoconservatives to continue and to widen the conflict. Russia should have shut down Odessa long ago. It was mindless to leave Ukraine with bases on the Black Sea from which to launch attacks on the Crimea bridge. If Putin was conducting war as war should be conducted, the young girl’s parents would still be alive.
The Russian Foreign Ministry, like the Kremlin and the Defense Ministry, does not seen to comprehend that a war is in process. Russia termed the attack on the bridge a “terror attack.” The bridge is a legitimate military target. It was Putin’s limited operation that allowed Ukraine the resources and naval base with which to attack the bridge. Calling it a terror attack is a pretense that a war is not underway.
Perhaps one day the Russian government will come to its senses and comprehend that a war has too long been underway and make the decision to get it over with. As Prigozhin said, the Russian Ministry of Defense is asking his Wagner troops to die without offering them a prospect of victory.
Putin’s refusal to fight a war is going to cause the Russian people to tire of it. Why is Putin playing so totally into Washington’s hands?
Putin’s refusal to fight has even convinced his Chinese ally that Russia cannot win the conflict with Ukraine. Yesterday China’s UN representative, Geng Shuang, speaking to the UN Security Council wrote off any prospect of a Russian victory: “The evolution of the battlefield situation shows that military means cannot resolve the Ukrainian crisis, and the continuation of the conflict will only bring more suffering to civilians, and may even lead to unpredictable and irreparable situations.” Shuang agrees with me that the never-ending conflict is in danger of “getting out of control.”
It must be extremely embarrassing to Putin, to the Russian military, and to the Russian people to be seen as too weak and irresolute to defeat a third world military force. The encouragement Putin has given to Washington’s neoconservatives to push ever harder against Russia is leading, as I fear, to a wider conflict that could destroy organized life on earth.
Update:
Another Consequence for Putin for Failing to Bring the Conflict to a Close
Putin cannot attend in person a meeting of BRICS without the risk of his arrest.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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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 killed by 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.
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
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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.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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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…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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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 Festival and 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.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Lucy Westcott.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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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…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
