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.
Russian lawmakers have passed an even more restrictive version of an anti-LGBTQ bill that would outlaw gender-affirming care and changing one’s gender in legal documents and public records, adding clauses that would annul marriages that include a person who has “changed gender” and bar transgender people from fostering or adopting children. Yulia Alyoshina, Russia’s first transgender politician…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The hypocrisy gets starker by the day. The same western media that strains to warn of the dangers of disinformation – at least when it comes to rivals on social media – barely bothers to conceal its own role in purveying disinformation in the Ukraine war.
In fact, the propaganda peddled by the media grows more audacious by the day – as two stories last week from the frontlines illustrate only too clearly.
Dominating headlines has been the environmental catastrophe created by the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam under Russian control. Flood waters from the Dnipro river have ruined vast swathes of land downriver from the dam and forced many tens of thousands to flee their homes.
Rightly, the wrecking of the dam is being called an act of “ecological terrorism” – the second major one associated with the war, following last September’s blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines supplying Russian gas to Europe.
The costs associated with keeping this war going and avoiding peace talks so that Russia can be “weakened”, as Biden administration officials insist is the priority, have grown much steeper than most people could have imagined.
This is why a clear understanding of what is going on – and what interests are being served by fuelling the fighting rather than resolving the war – is so vitally important.
There have always been at least two narratives in Ukraine, even if western audiences are rarely exposed to the Russian one – outside of mocking commentary from western reporters.
In the immediate aftermath of the breaching of the Kakhovka dam, the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, Steve Rosenberg, visibly sneered as he reported that Russian media were insisting Ukrainian “terrorists” were behind the destruction. Russians, he suggested, were being brainwashed by their government and media.
He obviously failed to spot the irony that his own reporting, like that of colleagues, has served to reinforce the impression that the only plausible culprit in the dam’s ruin – despite a lack of evidence so far – is Moscow. Like the Russian media, Rosenberg has been hawking precisely the line his own government, and its Nato allies, want from him.
The BBC recently launched its Verify service, ostensibly to root out disinformation. In similar vein, western media have started appending to any report of Russian assertions the warning: “This claim could not be verified.”
Like a nervous tic, the media added just such an alert to Russian statements that large numbers of Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in what looked like the first stages of Kyiv’s so-called “counter-offensive”.
But no such warnings have been attached to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s claims that Russia blew up the dam.
Instead, reporters have been quick to regurgitate, unverified, his self-serving assertions that Moscow caused the destruction, supposedly to ward off the imminent counter-offensive, and that only western help evicting Russia from the areas it has occupied can prevent further “terrorist” acts.
As has so often been the case in this war, a thick pall of fog is likely to shroud what happened at the Kakhovka dam for the foreseeable future.
Which means that, if the media is determined to recycle speculation, what it should be doing at this stage – apart from keeping an open mind and investigating for itself – is applying the principle of “cui bono?” or “who profits?”
And if it bothered to do that properly, it might be far more reluctant to pin responsibility on Russia.
As Scott Ritter, a former US marine and United Nations weapons inspector, has noted, the chief beneficiary of the attack has been Ukraine, both militarily and politically.
After all, the western media has been documenting a series of fortifications – from trenches and mines to concrete spikes – that the Russian army has constructed along its front lines during the long wait for the Ukrainian counter-offensive. As has often been pointed out, they are so extensive, they can easily be seen from space.
And yet if it did blow up the dam, Moscow just washed away all its carefully built defences in a key area that Ukraine has set its eyes on recapturing – and just at the time Kyiv is said to be preparing for a dramatic military offensive.
Further, the swollen river behind the dam was a significant obstacle to Ukrainian forces crossing the Dnipro river for many tens of miles. It will be much less of a barrier now its waters have receded as the river gushes into the Black Sea. The dam explosion punches a surprise hole in a key, natural part of Russia’s defensive line.
Another critical concern for the Kremlin will be that the explosion poses a direct threat to water supplies to the arid Crimean peninsula – the first piece of Ukrainian territory Russia annexed. After a US-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s government in 2014, Russia made a priority of securing Crimea, long the site of a strategic, warm-water naval base.
And to top it all, Russia’s control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, upstream of the dam, has already come under renewed international scrutiny as questions are raised about Moscow’s ability to cope with a possible meltdown there as water supplies, needed for cooling, dramatically diminish.
There are political advantages in the dam’s destruction for Kyiv too. As Ritter observes: “There is a lot of ‘Ukraine fatigue’ right now. The world is just tired of Ukraine, of funding Ukraine… What Ukraine needs is a catastrophic event that rallies international support around Ukraine by blaming Russia for something big.”
The dam blast does just that. It thrusts the war back into the spotlight, it casts Moscow as a “terrorist” threat not just to Ukraine but to wider humanity, and it will prove a very effective tool to justify yet more weapons and aid to “weaken” Russia, even if Ukraine’s counter-offensive proves a damp squib.
The western media has not only largely ignored these factors, it has also drawn a veil over its own recent reporting that might implicate Ukraine as chief culprit in blowing up the dam.
As the Washington Post reported back in December, the Ukrainian military had previously considered plans to destroy the Kakhovka – in other words, to carry out what is universally understood now as a major act of ecological terrorism. At the time, the plan barely raised an eyebrow in the West.
The preparations included what now looks like a reckless “test strike” with a HIMARS missile – supplied courtesy of the US – “making three holes in the metal [of the floodgates] to see if the Dnieper’s water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages”.
“The test was a success,” the Post reported Maj Gen Andriy Kovalchuk, a Ukrainian commander, saying back in December. “But the step [of destroying the dam] remained a last resort.”
Might that “test” or a similar one – possibly in preparation for a Ukrainian offensive – have accidentally undermined the dam’s integrity, making it gradually crumble from the pressure of the water?
Or could the dam’s destruction have been intentional – part of Ukraine’s offensive – spreading chaos to areas under Russian control, either to force Moscow to redirect its energies away from countering a Ukrainian attack, or deflect western public attention away from any difficulties Kyiv may have launching a credible military operation?
And why, anyway, would Moscow decide to destroy the dam, forfeiting control over water flow, when it could have simply opened the gates to flood areas downstream at any time of its choosing, such as when faced with an attempt to cross the river by the Ukrainian military?
These questions aren’t even being posed, let alone answered.
There has been an established pattern with the media during the Ukraine war, one that may serve as a guide in understanding how the story of the breaching of the dam will unfold.
The reticence of western outlets to ask basic questions, contextualise with relevant background, or pursue obvious lines of inquiry has been equally glaring in another act of ecological terrorism: the explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines back in September. They released enormous quantities of the prime global-warming gas methane.
Again, the media spoke as one. First, they echoed western officials in ascribing the explosions to Moscow, without a shred of evidence and even though the blasts were a huge blow to Russia.
The Kremlin lost the bountiful income stream that came from supplying Europe with natural gas. Meanwhile, diplomatically, it was stripped of its chief leverage over its biggest energy customer, Germany – leverage it might have used to induce Berlin to break with the West’s sanctions policy.
All of this was hard to obscure. Soon the western media simply dropped the Nord Stream story entirely.
Interest surfaced again only much later, in March, when the New York Times and a German publication, Die Zeit, published separate and quite preposterous accounts, based on unnamed intelligence sources.
According to these accounts, a group of six rogue Ukrainians chartered a yacht and blew up the pipelines off the coast of Denmark in a James Bond-style mission. The story was widely amplified by the western media, even though independent analysts ridiculed it as wildly implausible and technically unfeasible.
The problem the media has faced is that a very much more plausible account of the Nord Stream blasts had already been produced by the legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in February. His unnamed intelligence source offered a far more credible and detailed account, and one that blamed the US itself.
The circumstantial evidence for US responsibility – or at least involvement – was already substantial, even if the media again ignored it.
From Joe Biden downwards, US officials either expressed a determination beforehand to stop more Russian gas from reaching Europe through Nord Stream or celebrated the pipelines’ destruction after the fact.
The Biden administration also had a prime motive for blowing up Nord Stream: a desire to end Europe’s energy dependence on Russia, especially when Washington wanted to line up Moscow and Beijing as the new targets in its permanent “war on terror”.
Hersh’s source argued that the explosives were placed by special US Navy divers, with Norwegian assistance, during an annual naval exercise, Baltops, and remotely detonated three months later.
The media studiously ignored this version. When it was referenced on the odd occasion, the story was dismissed because it was attributed to a single unnamed source. None of the media, however, appeared to have similar reservations about the fantastical yacht version, also supplied by an unidentified intelligence source.
Hersh’s account has refused to go away, gaining ever more traction on social media so long as no credible alternative emerged.
And so – bingo! The fantastical claim that a group of amateurs was able to locate and blow up the pipelines deep on the ocean floor has been dropped.
Last week the Washington Post reported that an unnamed European intelligence service had warned the Biden administration of an impending attack on the Nord Stream pipelines three months before it took place. According to this account, a small crack team sent by the Ukrainian military carried out the “covert” operation – again acting, it was stressed, without Zelensky’s knowledge.
The Post reported that “officials in multiple countries” confirmed that the US had received advance warning.
The story raises all kinds of deeply troubling questions – none of which the media seem interested in addressing.
Not least, if true, it means that the Biden administration has blatantly lied for months in promoting a fiction: that Russia carried out the attack. The White House and European capitals knowingly misled the western media and publics.
If Biden officials have indeed conspired in maintaining a grand lie about such a momentous act of industrial terror – one that caused untold environmental damage and is contributing to a mounting recession in Europe – what other lies have they been telling? How can anything they claim about the Ukraine war, such as who is responsible for the Kakhovka dam’s destruction, be trusted?
And yet the western media – which, according to this new account, was deceived for months – seems completely unconcerned.
Further, if Washington knew of the impending act of terror – which was directed at European energy sources as much as at a nuclear-armed Russia – why did it not intervene?
The media’s coverage of this new version largely frames the US as impotent, incapable of stopping the Ukrainians from blowing up the pipelines.
But Washington is the world’s sole superpower. Ukraine is entirely dependent on its support – financially and militarily. If the US withdrew its backing, Ukraine would be forced to engage in peace talks with Russia. The idea that Washington could not have stopped the attack is no more credible than the claim a group of sailing enthusiasts blew up the pipelines.
If this latest account is true, Washington had the leverage to stop the attack on Europe’s energy infrastructure but failed to act. By any reasonable assessment, it should be considered to have willed the pipelines’ destruction, despite the devastating toll on Europe and the environment.
And thirdly, based on this account, Ukraine – or at least its military – has proven itself quite capable of committing the most heinous act of terrorism, even against its allies in Europe. Why should anyone, least of all the media, now be so dismissive of Russian claims of Ukrainian war crimes, including destroying the Kakhovka dam?
The truth, however, is that the western media are not concerned by the implications of this latest account, any more than they are by Hersh’s earlier one – not if it means turning the US and its allies into the bad guys. The story was reported cursorily, and will be filed away as another piece of a puzzle no one has any interest in solving.
The western media’s role in foreign affairs is to prop up a narrative that turns our leaders into good people doing their best in a bad world, one that forces on them difficult, sometimes morally compromised, choices.
But what if Biden and Zelensky aren’t really heroes, or even good people? What if they are just as ignoble, just as callous and inhumane, as the foreign leaders we so readily dismiss as the “new Hitler”? It’s just that they receive far better public relations from our complicit media.
Coverage of the destruction of the Kakhovka dam and Nord Stream pipelines alludes to a double problem: that western leaders and their allies may be implicated in the most terrible crimes, but we can rarely be sure because our media are so determined not to find out.
This week, the New York Times finally admitted on its pages something that it and the rest of the western media once openly acknowledged but have cast as a taboo since Russia’s invasion: that the Ukrainian military is awash with neo-Nazi symbols.
However, even as the paper of record admitted what it had previously condemned as “disinformation” whenever it appeared on social media, the New York Times insisted on an absurd distinction.
Yes, the paper agreed that Ukrainian soldiers are proud to decorate themselves in Nazi insignia. And yes, much of wider Ukrainian society commemorates notorious Nazi figures from the Second World War such as Stepan Bandera. But no, Ukraine’s prolific use of Nazi symbols does not translate into any attachment to Nazi ideology.
This is the argument being made by western publications that at the same time have taken seriously claims that a rock star, Roger Waters, is antisemitic for performing a track from his four-decade-old album The Wall satirising a fascist dictator… dressed as a fascist dictator.
Waters’ real crime is that now Jeremy Corbyn has been ousted from the Labour Party, he is the most visible supporter of Palestinian rights in the western world.
If the New York Times and the rest of the western media are willing to give Ukrainian Nazis a makeover, making them look good, what are they doing for Biden, Zelensky and European leaders?
One thing we know for sure: we cannot look to the western media for an answer.
• First published in Middle East Eye
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Canadian government’s plan to double its semipermanent military force on Russia’s border ratchets up tensions that should be reduced. It highlights the West’s betrayal of promises made to Soviet officials and Canada’s addiction to stationing troops in Europe.
On Monday Justin Trudeau announced that Canada will ramp up its military presence in Latvia. The government will add about 1,200 military personnel to the nearly 1,000 Canadians already deployed on Russia’s border. As part of the announcement Trudeau committed $2.6 billion over three years to expand Latvia-focused Operation REASSURANCE. “Canada will also procure and pre-position critical weapon systems, enablers, supplies and support intelligence, cyber, and space activities”, the prime minister said in a statement. Last month Ottawa announced the deployment of 15 Leopard 2 battle tanks to Latvia.
In 2017 Canada took charge of one of four Eastern European NATO battle groups. In June 2021 Canada opened a $19 million headquarters in Latvia and by the end of the current commitment Canadian Forces will have been stationed there for a decade.
The semi-permanent stationing of Canadian forces on Russia’s border represents a flagrant violation of the promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev at the end of the Cold War. In 1990 the Soviet/Russian leader agreed not to obstruct German reunification, to withdraw tens of thousands of troops from the east and for the new Germany to be part of NATO in return for assurances that the alliance wouldn’t expand “one inch eastward”. A 1990 Ottawa Citizen wire article quoted West Germany’s foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, saying, “the West is agreed that with a unification of Germany, there will not be any eastward extension of NATO”, which was ostensibly a defence arrangement against the Soviet Union.
As I’ve detailed, Ottawa led the charge for NATO expansion despite the promises made to Gorbachev. Soon after taking office in 1993 Prime Minister Jean Chretien began promoting Poland’s adhesion to NATO and Ottawa has led the push to double the size of the alliance by expanding into eastern and northern Europe. Ottawa has also promoted Ukraine’s adhesion to the alliance and has trained its military to be interoperable with NATO.
Alongside ending the stated objective for NATO, the dissolution of the Soviet Union undercut Canada’s rationale for stationing troops in Europe. From the early 1950s to 1990s over one hundred thousand Canadian troops rotated through bases in France and Germany. In the late 1960s the Royal Canadian Air Force had over 250 US atomic bombs at its disposal in Europe.
Incredibly, the US-led war in Korea was the initial justification for stationing Canadian troops in Europe (and rearming the colonial powers as they suppressed independence movements with Canadian NATO mutual assistance program weaponry). According to defence minister Brooke Claxton, “NATO owes the fact that it was built-up to the Communist aggression in Korea … To meet the challenge of Korea required a buildup of our forces comparable to what was needed to meet our commitments to Europe.” As per the Washington/Ottawa storyline, the North Korean leadership’s effort to unite the country under its direction in mid 1950 was part of a worldwide communist conspiracy. Who controlled the distant, impoverished, country was of limited import to most North Americans so US/Canadian decision makers claimed Moscow stoked the conflict in Korea to divert attention from its plan to invade Western Europe. In response, thousands of Canadian troops were dispatched to France and Germany in 1951. They would remain in Europe until 1993.
Of course, Canada previously sent large numbers of troops to Europe during World War I and II. Between 1917 and 1920 six thousand Canadian troops invaded Russia. About 600 Canadians fought in Murmansk and Archangel where the British used chemical agent diphenylchloroarsine, which causes uncontrollable coughing and individuals to vomit blood.
Decades earlier Canadians fought the Russians. Much of the British garrison in Canada left for Crimea during the 1853-56 war and many Canadians also volunteered for British units fighting Russia. In “How the Crimean War of 1853 helped shape the Canada of today” historian C.P. Champion describes how the naval base on Vancouver Island was greatly expanded in response to the war. He also quotes historian John Castell Hopkins explaining that the Militia Act of 1855, which formed the basis for today’s army, was “a result of the feeling aroused by the Crimean War.”
Canada has a history of belligerence towards Russia. Given that, this country stationing its troops near Russia’s border is perceived as threatening by Moscow. Remember that Russia shipping some missiles to Cuba resulted in an American naval blockade and almost caused a nuclear holocaust in the early 1960s.
A nation committed to peace must try to understand the viewpoint of potential adversaries. A nation planning war increases tension and prolongs every military standoff. Exactly the way Canada has acted towards Russia for many decades.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Rightly, there’s been an outpouring of tributes to Daniel Ellsberg following the announcement of his death last Friday, aged 92. His leaking of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 revealed that Washington officials had systematically lied for decades about US military conduct in Vietnam.
The disclosure of 7,000 pages of documents, and subsequent legal battles to stop further publication by the New York Times and Washington Post, helped to bring the war to a close a few years later.
As an adviser to US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara in the 1960s, Ellsberg had seen first-hand the Pentagon’s brutal military operations that caused mass civilian casualties. Entire villages had been burned, while captured Vietnamese were tortured or executed. Deceptively, the US referred to these as “pacification programmes”.
But most of those today loudly hailing Ellsberg as an “American hero” have been far more reluctant to champion the Ellsberg of our times: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
For years, Assange has been rotting in a London high-security prison while the Biden administration seeks his extradition on charges that ludicrously equate his publication of the Afghan and Iraq war logs – a modern Pentagon Papers – with “espionage”.
Like Ellsberg, Assange exposed the way western states had been systematically lying while they perpetrated war crimes. Like Ellsberg, he was fraudulently labelled a threat to national security and charged with espionage. Like Ellsberg, if found guilty, he faces more than 100 years in jail. Like Ellsberg, Assange has learned that the US Congress is unwilling to exercise its powers to curb governmental abuses.
But unlike Ellsberg’s case, the courts have consistently sided with Assange’s persecutors, not with him for shining a light on state criminality. And, in a further contrast, the western media have stayed largely silent as the noose has tightened around Assange’s neck.
The similarities in Assange’s and Ellsberg’s deeds – and the stark differences in outcomes – are hard to ignore. The very journalists and publications now extolling Ellsberg for his historic act of bravery have been enabling, if only through years of muteness, western capitals’ moves to demonise Assange for his contemporary act of heroism.
Docile lapdogs
The hypocrisy did not go unnoticed by Ellsberg. He was one of the noisiest defenders of Assange. So noisy, in fact, that most media outlets felt obliged in their obituaries to make reference to the fact, even if in passing.
Ellsberg testified on Assange’s behalf at a London extradition hearing in 2020, observing that the pair’s actions were identical. That was not entirely right, however.
Assange published classified documents passed to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning, just as the New York Times published the secrets handed to them by Ellsberg. Given that media freedoms are protected by the US First Amendment, whereas whistleblowing by an official is not, Assange’s treatment is even more perverse and abusive than Ellsberg’s.
In contrast to his case, Ellsberg added, the WikiLeaks founder could never receive a fair hearing in the US. His trial has already been assigned to a court in the eastern district of Virginia, home to the US intelligence agencies.
Late last year, as Assange’s prospects of extradition to the US increased, Ellsberg admitted that he had been secretly given a backup copy of the leaked Afghan and Iraq war logs, in case WikiLeaks was prevented from making public the details of US and UK criminality.
Ellsberg pointed out that his possession of the documents made him equally culpable with Assange under the justice department’s draconian “espionage” charges. During a BBC interview, he demanded that he be indicted too.
If the praise being lavished on Ellsberg in death demonstrates anything, it is the degree to which the self-professed watchdogs of western state power have been tamed over subsequent decades into being the most docile of lapdogs.
In the Assange case, the courts and establishment media have clearly acted as adjuncts of power, not checks on it. And for that reason, if no other, western states are gaining greater and greater control over their citizenry in an age when mass digital surveillance is easier than ever.
Spied on day and night
For those reluctant to confer on Assange the praise being heaped on Ellsberg, it is worth remembering how similarly each was viewed by US officials in their respective eras.
Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and then secretary of state, called Ellsberg the “most dangerous man in America”.
Mike Pompeo, President Donald Trump’s director of the Central Intelligence Agency, declared Assange and WikiLeaks a “non-state, hostile intelligence service”. Pompeo’s CIA also secretly plotted ways to kidnap or assassinate Assange in London.
Both Ellsberg and Assange were illegally surveilled by government agencies.
In Ellsberg’s case, Nixon’s officials wiretapped his conversations and tried to dig up dirt by stealing files from his psychiatrist’s office. The same team carried out the Watergate break-in, famously exposed by the US media, that ultimately brought Nixon down.
In Assange’s case, the CIA spied on him day and night after he was given political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, even violating his privileged conversations with his lawyers. Astonishingly, this law-breaking has barely been remarked on by the media, even though it should have been grounds alone for throwing out the extradition case against him.
Nixon officials tried to rig Ellsberg’s trial by offering the judge in his hearings the directorship of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In Assange’s case, a series of judicial irregularities and apparent conflicts of interest have plagued the proceedings, again ignored by the establishment media.
This month, High Court judge Jonathan Swift rejected what may amount to a last-ditch attempt by Assange’s legal team to halt his extradition. Swift’s previous career was as a government lawyer. Looking back on his time there, he noted that his “favourite clients were the security and intelligence agencies”.
Above the law
But if the modern White House is as hostile to transparency as its predecessors – and armed with more secret tools to surveil critics than ever before – the media and the courts are offering far less remedy than they did in Ellsberg’s time.
Even the Obama administration understood the dangers of targeting Assange. His relationship to Manning was no different from the New York Times’ to Ellsberg. Each publicised state wrongdoing after classified documents were divulged to them by a disenchanted official.
Prosecuting Assange was seen as setting a precedent that could ensnare any publisher or media outlet that made public state secrets, however egregious the crimes being exposed.
For that reason, Obama went full guns blazing against whistleblowers, locking up more of them than all his predecessors combined. Whistleblowers were denied any right to claim a public-interest defence. State secrecy was sacrosanct, even when it was being abused to shield evidence of criminality from public view.
Asked whether Obama would have pursued him through the courts, as Nixon did, Ellsberg answered: “I’m sure that President Obama would have sought a life sentence in my case.”
It took a reckless Trump administration to go further, casting aside the long-standing legal distinction between an official who leaks classified documents in violation of their employment contract, and a publisher-journalist who exposes those documents in accordance with their duty to hold the powerful to account.
Now Biden has chosen to follow Trump’s lead by continuing Assange’s show trial. The new presumption is that it is illegal for anyone – state official, media outlet, ordinary citizen – to disclose criminal activity by an all-powerful state.
In Assange’s case, the White House is openly manoeuvring to win recognition for itself as officially above the law.
Disappeared from view
In the circumstances, one might have assumed that the courts and media would be rallying to uphold basic democratic rights, such as a free press, and impose accountability on state officials shown to have broken the law.
In the 1970s, however imperfectly, the US media gradually unravelled the threads of the Watergate scandal till they exposed the unconstitutional behaviour of the Nixon administration. At the same time, the liberal press rallied behind Ellsberg, making common cause with him in a fight to hold the executive branch to account.
Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, charged Ellsberg with espionage and accused the New York Times of the same. Claiming the paper had undermined national security, he threatened it with ruinous legal action. The Times ignored the threats and carried on publishing, forcing the justice department to obtain an injunction.
The courts, meanwhile, took the side of both Ellsberg and the media in their legal battles. In 1973, the federal court in Los Angeles threw out the case against Ellsberg before it could be put to a jury, accusing the government of gross misconduct and illegal evidence gathering against him.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court prioritised freedom of the press, denying the government prior restraint. Ultimately, these cases and others forced Nixon from office in disgrace.
The contrast with Assange’s treatment by the media and the courts could not be starker.
The media, even “liberal” outlets he worked with on the Afghan and Iraq logs, including the New York Times and the Guardian, have struggled to show even the most rudimentary kind of solidarity, preferring instead to distance themselves from him. They have largely conspired in US and UK efforts to suggest Assange is not a “proper journalist” and therefore does not deserve First Amendment protections.
These media outlets have effectively partnered with Washington in suggesting that their collaboration with Assange in no way implicates them in his supposed “crimes”.
As a result, the media has barely bothered to cover his hearings or explain how the courts have twisted themselves into knots by ignoring the most glaring legal obstacles to his extradition: such as the specific exclusion in the UK’s 2007 Extradition Treaty with the US of extraditions for political cases.
Unlike Ellsberg, who became a cause celebre, Assange has been disappeared from public view by the states he exposed and largely forgotten by the media that should be championing his cause.
Ellsberg emerged from his court victory over the Pentagon Papers to argue: “The demystification and de-sanctification of the president has begun. It’s like the defrocking of the Wizard of Oz.”
In this assessment, time has proved him sadly wrong, as he came to recognise.
In recent months, Ellsberg had become an increasingly voluble critic of US conduct in the Ukraine war. He drew parallels with the lies told by four administrations – those of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson – to hide the extent of Washington’s involvement in Vietnam before the US went public with its ground war.
Ellsberg warned that the US was waging a similarly undeclared war in Ukraine – a proxy one, using Ukrainians as cannon fodder – to “weaken the Russians“. As in Vietnam, the White House was gradually and secretly escalating US involvement.
As also in Vietnam, western leaders were concealing the fact that the war had reached a stalemate, with the inevitable result that large numbers of Ukrainians and Russians were losing their lives in fruitless combat.
He called former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s hidden, early role in stymying peace talks between Russia and Ukraine “a crime against humanity.”
Referring to history repeating itself, he observed: “It’s an awakening that’s in many ways painful.”
Most of all, Ellsberg feared that the West’s war machine – addicted to Cold War belligerence, obscured under the supposedly “defensive” umbrella of Nato – wanted once again to confront China.
In 2021, as the Biden administration intensified its hostile posturing towards Beijing, Ellsberg revealed that back in 1958 Eisenhower’s officials had drawn up secret plans to attack China with nuclear weapons. That was during an earlier crisis over the Taiwan Strait.
“At this point, I’m much more aware of… how little has changed in these critical aspects of the danger of nuclear war, and how limited the effectiveness has been to curtail what we’ve done,” he told an interviewer shortly before he died.
What Ellsberg understood most keenly was the desperate need – if humanity was to survive – both for more whistleblowers to come forward to expose their states’ crimes, and for a tenacious, watchdog media to give their full backing.
Watching the media abandon Assange to his persecutors, Ellsberg could draw only one possible conclusion: that humanity’s odds were shortening by the day.
• First published in Middle East Eye
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
World Wars I and II were contests between empires, and so America’s President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was determined that after WW II, all empires would be outlawed and all international relations (between nations) would be controlled only by a global all-inclusive federation of nations, which in 1941 he referred to would be called “the United Nations” and which would exclusively possess the Executive, Legislative, and Juridical, powers and authorities — to make and enforce the international laws that would be created by that international Legislature of all nations, subject to that Supreme Court which would interpret that Legislature’s constitution or “Charter” for this global government between nations, and which would be enforced by that international Executive. All strategic weaponry would be owned and under the control of that Executive and none other. This was FDR’s plan to replace empires and world wars, by creating the world’s first democratic federation of all nations, which would supersede and replace any and all empires.
On 25 July 1945, FDR’s immediate successor Harry Truman, became convinced by two imperialists whom he deeply respected, Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower, to reject that plan by FDR, which plan Truman didn’t even know about but only inferred might have existed and been FDR’s plan. In any case, Truman secretly despised FDR, and replaced his entire Cabinet within two years, so that he (instead of FDR) would shape the post-WW-II world.
The first-ever military alliance was created by Truman (under the guidance of Eisenhower, Churchill, James Byrnes and others) in order to carry out his plan for ultimate global conquest. A “military alliance” is a military contract between nations that is legally binding between them by a provision in it that says an invasion against any one of them will be an invasion against all of them and will automatically place each one of them into a state of war against that invader. It is unlike all prior empires because it is by contract instead of by exigency. Unlike in World Wars One and Two, in neither of which, the empires or coalition of empires that were waging war against each other were subject to any overriding pre-signed contract amongst them, the U.S. Government in 1949 created the world’s very first military alliance by contract, NATO, and many of the signatories to or members of that contract didn’t know when they signed it that they were thereby committing their nation to relying upon the U.S. Government to determine their foreign policies, which would be enforced by the U.S. military — they didn’t know that they were thereby becoming vassal-nations or colonies of an entirely new TYPE of empire: a military alliance by contract, instead of merely by exigency (such as had been the case in WW I & WW II).
This was an entirely new phenomenon in world affairs, and it is increasingly forcing the world’s nations to either comply with whatever the demands by the U.S. Government are, or else to potentially become victimized by the U.S. and its ‘allies’, such as Germany did when the U.S. Government arranged for the Russo-German-owned Nord Stream fuel pipelines from Russia to Germany and the rest of the EU, to become blown-up and destroyed (which was an act of war by the U.S. Government against both Russia and Germany, Germany being itself a member-nation in NATO and therefore having no recourse against it).
When the Nord Stream pipelines were blown-up, Germany could not rely upon the NATO Treaty to protect itself against that invader because the invader in that instance was the U.S. Government, the virtual owner of NATO; and, furthermore, the U.S. Government has 231 military bases in Germany; so, Germany’s Government was powerless to resist in any way — verbally or otherwise.
The world’s second military alliance was the Warsaw Pact, which was created on 14 May 1955 by the Soviet Union in direct response to the U.S. Government’s contemptuous rejection of the Soviet Union’s secret request on 22 April 1954 to Eisenhower, to be considered for possible admission into NATO. That rejection was the moment when Khrushchev recognized to a certainty that the U.S. Government was determined to conquer the Soviet Union, no matter what concessions the Soviet Union might make. Whereas in the NATO treaty, its Article 5 is the core, the core in the Warsaw Pact treaty is its Article 4, which is equivalent to it. Whereas the Warsaw Pact agreement became terminated in 1991 on the basis of verbal promises not to expand the alliance, which the U.S. Government and its allies had made in 1990 to the Soviet Government, all of which turned out all to have been lies that were controlled by U.S. President GHW Bush, the NATO agreement remained in force and even doubled its membership after the Warsaw Pact ended.
The world’s third military alliance is the AUKUS Treaty, this being a secret treaty (thus even worse than the NATO Treaty, which was not a secret agreement) by which the U.S. and its UK partner created a new military alliance, between Australia, UK, and U.S., but this time against China, instead of against Russia. There have been efforts by the U.S. Government to get its NATO military alliance to include the leading nations in the areas of the Pacific and Indian Oceans to join NATO, but NATO’s France has thus-far blocked that. Apparently, if the U.S. Government is determined to force WW III to start in Asia-Pacific, then the military alliance will have to be based on the secret AUKUS agreement, not on the public NATO agreement.
In order for AUKUS to avoid being criticized on account of the non-publication of the treaty, a Web-search for such phrases as “AUKUS text” produces subsidiary documents such as this, instead of the actual document, and this is done in order to deceive researchers to think that it’s not even a military alliance at all (and in that linked-to example, it’s only an agreement about technological cooperation, which doesn’t even mention “China” nor have any mutual-‘defense’ clause in it). They’re treating researchers as fools.
Consequently, there now are two military alliances, NATO against Russia, and AUKUS against China, and both of them are intended ultimately to conquer the entire world with the participation of America’s ‘allies’ or colonies.
To the extent that either of these military alliances succeeds, there will be a Third World War; and, so, now, all nations of the world are implicitly being challenged, either to join the U.S. to conquer Russia and China; or, else, to say no to the U.S. Government, and to demand that it reverse what it did and for it to participate with other nations to institute the changes that must be made to the U.N.’s Charter in order to transform that into what FDR had been intending; or, else, for all decent nations to create together a replacement of Truman’s U.N., so that the U.S. Government will become isolated in its aim to win a WW III, and there will instead become the type of world that FDR had been hoping would follow after WW II — a world that would NOT produce another World War..
Conceptually, the issue here is between the Truman-installed win-lose plan for the future (which is no basic change from the past), versus a win-win plan for the future, which is what FDR and the Governments in both Russia and China have been advocating for but no one is doing anything to help actually bring about. Ironically, the Truman plan would actually be lose-lose, because any WW III would destroy this entire planet. But it’s the direction we are heading toward.
It’s important to understand that though FDR invented and came up with the fundamental principles for his planned “United Nations,” it was Truman right after FDR’s 12 April 1945 death who basically controlled the San Francisco Conference, during 25 April to 26 June 1945 and the text that it wrote for the U.N.’s Charter. We got Truman’s U.N. — not FDR’s.
Also ironically, the Truman pathway we are on, toward that result, is the opposite of “democracy” though is claimed to epitomize democracy. For example: just consider the ridiculousness of the AUKUS contract being a SECRET treaty among self-proclaimed ‘democracies’. Then add to this the fact that the secret treaty is a preparation for a WW III that would start in Asia against China instead of in Europe (which had been the main battleground in both of the first two World Wars) and against Russia. So: its presumption is that the world’s publics will quietly be shepherded into WW II on the basis of — among other lies — a secret treaty, the one that created the world’s second military alliance and that isn’t even criticized for its being a secret (and extremely dangerous) treaty among ‘democracies’. Lies can kill the world.
These are the reasons why both NATO and AUKUS must be disbanded, just like the Warsaw Pact was. Either that, or else we’ll have WW III.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
After the closing of a major NATO summit in Lithuania, President Biden vowed to support Ukraine and warned the war may continue for a long time, before flying to Finland, the newest member of NATO, which shares an 830-mile border with Russia. The goal of this summit may have been to make Ukraine seem more aligned with NATO, but “they actually revealed that the alliance was split” when they did not…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On 11 July, the UN Security Council failed to reach consensus on extending a key Syria aid route. This threw into doubt a vital mechanism that provides life-saving support to millions of people.
Russia vetoed a nine-month extension of the agreement authorising the operation of the conduit during a vote at the UN headquarters in New York. It then failed to muster enough votes to adopt just a six-month extension.
The UN-brokered deal that allows for the delivery of aid from Turkey into rebel-held areas of Syria expired on 10 July.
Many council members – including the US, the UK, and France – have called for a full-year extension. However, they backed a nine-month compromise put forward by Switzerland and Brazil.
The proposal was vetoed by Russia, whose six-month offer only secured China’s support.
US ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield called Russia’s veto “an act of utter cruelty”.
Russian representative Vassili Nebenzia said that Western countries had a “complete disregard” for the interests of the Syrian people. On top of this, he accused them of “artificially” provoking Moscow into vetoing.
He also threatened to “close down” the aid route if support for his country’s draft was not forthcoming.
The 15 members of the Security Council had been trying for days to find a compromise to extend the deal. Since 2014, it has allowed for food, water, and medicine to be trucked to northwestern Syria without the authorisation of Damascus.
Humanitarian convoys wrapped up their operations the night of 10 July. Now, the future of the aid corridor is unclear. It cannot resume operations until the UN reauthorises it.
UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres said he was “disappointed” by the failure to reach agreement. He called on all council members to “redouble their efforts to support the continued delivery” of the assistance.
The Swiss ambassador to the UN said diplomats would “get back to work immediately to find a solution”.
Floriane Borel of Human Rights Watch said “aid delivery should be based on needs, not politics”. She added that:
Russia’s cynical veto of a cross-border aid lifeline for millions of Syrians is a painful reminder that the Security Council should not be entrusted with decisions about humanitarian assistance.
The crossing provides for more than 80% of the needs of people living in rebel-controlled areas. This included everything from diapers and blankets to chickpeas. The government in Damascus regularly denounces the aid deliveries as a violation of its sovereignty.
Russia has been chipping away at the deal for years. The accord originally allowed for four entry points into rebel-held Syria. More recently, this was reduced to one: the Bab al-Hawa crossing.
The aid mechanism comes up for renewal every six months due to pressure from Damascus ally Moscow.
UN humanitarian affairs chief Martin Griffiths called again last week for the opening of more crossing points, for at least 12 months.
He added that the situation:
is intolerable for the people of the northwest, and those brave souls who help them to go through these ups and downs every six months.
He also pointed out that humanitarian agencies have to bring pre-positioned stock into the country every time access is threatened, in case the crossing is closed.
According to the UN, four million people in Syria depend on humanitarian assistance to survive. Years of conflict, economic strife, and devastating earthquakes have only exacerbated the situation.
An earthquake in February killed tens of thousands of people in the country. Following it, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad agreed to the opening of two more crossings.
These remain open despite the Security Council’s failure to reauthorize the use of Bab al-Hawa. The authorization for these two other corridors is set to expire in mid-August.
Guterres’s spokesman Stephane Dujarric said those two crossings “cannot match” Bab al-Hawa, which handles 85% of aid.
Since the earthquake, more than 3,700 UN trucks carrying aid have passed through the three checkpoints. Most have passed through Bab al-Hawa, including 79 on Monday.
However, Dujarric warned that:
That door is shut right now.
Additional reporting via Agence France-Presse
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Patrickneil, resized to 1910*1000, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
Rosoboronexport JSC (part of Rostec State Corporation) will showcase highly effective Counter Precision Guided Munition (Counter-PGM) systems developed and produced by Russian defense industry to guests and visitors of the ARMY 2023 Forum. “The experience of military conflicts shows a rapidly growing trend towards the use of land-, air- and sea-based precision guided munitions. With […]
The post Rosoboronexport to present Russian Counter-PGM systems at ARMY 2023 Forum appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
Rights defenders are sure of Chechen law enforcers’ involvement in attack on Milashina says Roman Kuzhev, СK correspondent
The attack on the journalist Elena Milashina and the advocate Alexander Nemov has to do with Milashina’s publications in which she wrote about human rights violations in Chechnya, human rights defenders have noted.
The “Caucasian Knot” reported that on July 4, Elena Milashina, a journalist of the “Novaya Gazeta” outlet, and Alexander Nemov, an advocate for Zarema Musaeva, were attacked in Chechnya. They were beaten up by masked gunmen when they were on the way from the airport to Grozny, where the verdict in the case of Zarema Musaeva was to be announced. The head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, has promised to “sort things out”; and Akhmed Dudaev, the head of the Chechen Press Ministry, have pointed out that “the style of Western intelligence services” is seen in the attack.
Svetlana Gannushkina, the head of the “Civic Assistance” Committee, is sure that the attack had to do with Milashina’s human rights activities. “They were waiting for her there to beat her for her so much writing on human rights issues, conducts inquiries and shows the real Chechnya,” Ms Gannushkina has stated.
According to her version, the attackers are definitely law enforcers. Gannushkina* has also added that the attackers would not be identified and punished. Oyub Titiev, a human rights defender, is also sure that Milashina was the attackers’ target. “Only law enforcers can beat a woman so openly and with such cruelty,” he has stated.
Ruslan Kutaev, the president of the Assembly of Caucasian Nations, is sure that Milashina would have been attacked at any moment while in Grozny.
A criminal case on the attack on Milashina and Nemov can be initiated under several articles, said Galina Tarasova, a lawyer. According to her story, the case should have been transferred to the central office of the Investigating Committee of the Russian Federation (ICRF).
This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on July 5, 2023 at 08:07 pm MSK. https://eng.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/62817
Many other human rights groups reported on this:
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/7/6/elena_milashina_attack
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/07/04/journalist-and-human-rights-lawyer-viciously-attacked-chechnya
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
Since the end of the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has distinctly strayed from its original purpose. It has become, almost shamelessly, the vessel and handmaiden of US power, while its burgeoning expansion eastwards has done wonders to upend the applecart of stability.
From that upending, the alliance started bungling. It engaged, without the authorisation of the UN Security Council, in a 78-day bombing campaign of Yugoslavia – at least what was left of it – ostensibly to protect the lives of Kosovar Albanians. Far from dampening the tinderbox, the Kosovo affair continues to be an explosion in the making.
Members of the alliance also expended material, money and personnel in Afghanistan over the course of two decades, propping up a deeply unpopular, corrupt regime in Kabul while failing to stifle the Taliban. As with previous imperial projects, the venture proved to be a catastrophic failure.
In 2011, NATO again was found wanting in its attack on the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. While it was intended to be an exemplar of the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine, the intervention served to eventually topple the doomed Colonel Gaddafi, precipitating the de-facto partitioning of Libya and endangering the very civilians the mission was meant to protect. A continent was thereby destabilised. The true beneficiaries proved to be the tapestry of warring rebel groups characterised by sectarian impulses and a voracious appetite for human rights abuses and war crimes.
The Ukraine War has been another crude lesson in the failings of the NATO project. The constant teasing and wooing of Kyiv as a potential future member never sat well with Moscow and while much can be made of the Russian invasion, no realistic assessment of the war’s origins can excise NATO from playing a deep, compromised role.
The alliance is also proving dissonant among its members. Not all are exactly jumping at the chance of admitting Ukraine. German diplomats have revealed that they will block any current moves to join the alliance. Even that old provoking power, the United States, is not entirely sure whether doors should be open to Kyiv. On CNN, President Joe Biden expressed the view that he did not “think it’s ready for membership of NATO.” To qualify, Ukraine would have to meet a number of “qualifications” from “democratisation to a whole range of other issues.” While hardly proving very alert during the interview (at one point, he confused Ukraine with Russia) he did draw the logical conclusion that bringing Kyiv into an alliance of obligatory collective defence during current hostilities would automatically put NATO at war with Moscow.
With such a spotty, blood speckled record marked by stumbles and bungles, any suggestions of further engagement by the alliance in other areas of the globe should be treated with abundant wariness. The latest talk of further Asian engagement should also be greeted with a sense of dread. According to a July 7 statement, “The Indo-Pacific is important for the Alliance, given that developments in that region can directly affect Euro-Atlantic security. Moreover, NATO and its partners in the region share a common goal of working together to strengthen the rules-based international order.” With these views, conflict lurks.
The form of that engagement is being suggested by such ideas as opening a liaison office in Japan, intended as the first outpost in Asia. It also promises to feature in the NATO summit to take place in Vilnius on July 11 and 12, which will again repeat the attendance format of the Madrid summit held in 2022. That new format – featuring the presence of Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, or the AP4, should have induced much head scratching. But the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Washington’s beady eyes in Canberra, celebrated this “shift to taking a truly global approach to strategic competition”.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg is also much in favour of such competition, warning member states of Beijing’s ambitions. “We should not make the same mistake with China and other authoritarian regimes,” he suggested, alluding to a dangerous and flawed comparison between Ukraine and Taiwan. “What is happening in Europe today could happen in Asia tomorrow.”
One of the prominent headscratchers at this erroneous reasoning is French President Emmanuel Macron. Taking issue with setting up the Japan liaison office, Macron has expressed opposition to such expansion by an alliance which, at least in terms of treaty obligations, has a strict geographical limit. In the words of an Elysée Palace official, “As far as the office is concerned, the Japanese authorities themselves have told us that they are not extremely attached to it.” With a headmaster’s tone, the official went on to give journalists an elementary lesson. “NATO means North Atlantic Treaty Organization.” The centrality of Articles 5 and 6 of the alliance were “geographic” in nature.
In 2021, Macron made it clear that NATO’s increasingly obsessed approach with China as a dangerous belligerent entailed a confusion of goals. “NATO is a military organisation, the issue of our relationship with China isn’t just a military issue. NATO is an organisation that concerns the North Atlantic, China has little to do with the North Atlantic.”
Such views have also pleased former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, whose waspish ire has also been trained on the NATO Secretary-General. In his latest statement, Stoltenberg was condemned as “the supreme fool” of “the international stage”. “Stoltenberg by instinct and policy, is simply an accident on its way to happen”. In thinking that “China should be superintended by the West and strategically circumscribed”, the NATO official had overlooked the obvious point that the country “represents twenty percent of humanity and now possesses the largest economy in the world … and has no record for attacking other states, unlike the United States, whose bidding Stoltenberg is happy to do”.
The record of this ceramic breaking bloc speaks for itself. In its post-Cold War visage, the alliance has undermined its own mission to foster stability, becoming Washington’s axe, spear and spade. Where NATO goes, war is most likely. Countries of the Indo-Pacific, take note.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
There is a certain desperation in the logic of those who argue that a depraved solution has merit because it’s only slightly less depraved than that of the opponent. Torture is bad but should still be used because your adversary feels free to resort to it. Only do so, however, via judicial warrant. Bombing hospitals is terrible, but when done, select those with military personnel. Before long, one’s moral compass does not so much adjust as vanish into a horizon of relativist horror.
Much of this is evident in the Ukraine War, notably regarding weapons supply and deployment. Ukraine, the Biden administration has announced, will receive cluster munitions, despite their appalling record as, in the words of a coalition of civil society organisations, “indiscriminate weapons that disproportionately harm civilians, both at the time of use and for years after a conflict has ended.” Some detail of this was provided in a July 7 White House press briefing by the National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan.
According to Sullivan, Washington based its “security assistance decision on Ukraine’s needs on the ground, and Ukraine needs artillery to sustain its offensive and defensive operations.” It all came down to the sustained use of artillery in the conflict. “Ukraine is firing thousands of rounds a day to defend against Russian efforts to advance and also to support its own efforts to retake its sovereign territory.”
Preference shown by Sullivan for the “they do it, so we can” argument, a vagabond’s reasoning. In an effort to minimise culpability, he reasons that the US has better cluster munitions than those of the Russian military. (Such a marvellous difference and bound to excite those keen on flimsy moral calculi.) First, Sullivan makes the claim that Russia had “been using cluster munitions since the start of this war to attack Ukraine.” No mention is made of claims by Human Rights Watch that Ukraine has already deployed cluster bombs, notably on Russian-controlled areas in and around Izium in 2022.
A point is also made that Russian forces had been using munitions with a failure rate of between 30 and 40 percent. “In this environment, Ukraine has been requesting cluster munitions in order to defend its own sovereign territory. The cluster munitions that we would provide have dud rates far below what Russia is doing – is providing – not higher than 2.5 percent.” The admission is telling, if only because US law and regulations prohibit the transfer of cluster munitions with “dud rates” higher than 1 percent.
Kyiv has also wooed Washington with an undertaking that it will de-mine the residual remains of the munitions in question. Again, reasons Sullivan, such de-mining would have to take place in any case, given Russia’s own resort to their use.
Only briefly in such casuistry does Sullivan mention the contentious, hideous nature of the munitions. “We recognize,” he told the press briefing, “that cluster munitions create a risk of civilian harm from unexploded ordnance. This is why we’ve deferred – deferred the decision for as long as we could.” President Joe Biden reiterated the sentiment to CNN, claiming that it was “a very difficult decision on my part” to make. “I discussed this with our allies. I discussed this with our friends on the [Capitol] Hill.” But White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby was probably closer to the mark in deeming these weapons “innovative” in curbing Russia’s military efforts.
The Biden administration has done much to avoid the stern disapproval of the use of such munitions in international law, hiding behind notions of grave duty. The 2008 United Nations Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) outlines state party obligations to “never under any circumstances” use such munitions; develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer to anyone, directly or indirectly, those same munitions; and assist encourage or induce anyone to engage in any activity prohibited to a State Party under the convention.
Article 3 also notes a State Party’s obligations to “destroy or ensure destruction of all cluster munitions […] as soon as possible but not later than eight years after the entry into force” of the CCM. Inability to do so can lead to the convening of state parties, a review conference for an extension of the deadline, or, in some exceptional cases, an extension of four years.
The number of parties to the convention, including a number of European states aiding Ukraine, has reached an impressive 123. That said, three relevant absentees from the list stand out: Washington, Moscow and Kyiv. While Biden claims to have had discussions with lawmakers on his decision, 19 members of the House of Representatives have demurred in a statement rebuking the transfer, reiterating the call for the US to “join global allies and sign on to that UN Convention”.
The signatories also note that “there is no such thing as a safe cluster bomb – and using or transferring them for use hurts the global effort to eradicate these dangerous munitions, taking us down the wrong path.” Past blemishes are also cited as a haunting reminder about what such weapons do. “The US history of using cluster munitions – particularly the legacy of long-term harm to civilians in Southeast Asia – should prevent us from repeating the mistakes of our past.” The difference now is that Ukraine has become the designated proxy for using such crude weaponry and is being given encouragement into the bargain.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
❖
Professional psychopath John Bolton has an article out with The Hill titled “America can’t permit Chinese military expansion in Cuba” which inadvertently spells out exactly what’s wrong with the way the US empire keeps amassing heavily armed proxy forces on the borders of its large Asiatic enemies.
Citing a Wall Street Journal report from last month in which anonymous US officials claim that Havana has entered negotiations with Beijing for a possible future joint military training facility in Cuba, Bolton argues that the US must use any amount of aggression necessary to prevent this facility’s construction, up to and including regime change interventionism.
“The potential of significant Chinese facilities in Cuba is a red-flag threat to America,” Bolton writes, arguing that such activities “could well camouflage offensive weapons, delivery systems or other threatening capabilities.”
“For example, hypersonic cruise missiles, already harder to detect, track, and destroy than ballistic missiles, are natural candidates for installation in Cuba, a prospect we cannot tolerate, along with many other risks, like a Chinese submarine base,” he adds.
All of which are arguments that could be made pretty much note-for-note by Russia and China about the ways the US has been threatening their security interests with war machinery in their immediate surroundings.
Arguing that the US is “bound by no commitment limiting our use of force,” Bolton advocates “Revoking diplomatic relations with Cuba; increased economic sanctions against both China and Cuba; and far stricter implementation of existing sanctions” as an immediate response to this reported development, advocating regime change interventionism as an ultimate solution to Cuba’s disobedient behavior.
“Had Presidents Eisenhower or Kennedy acted more forcefully and effectively against Castro, we might have avoided many perilous Cold War crises, sparing us decades of strategic concern, not to mention the repression of Cuba’s people,” Bolton writes, adding, “With Beijing’s threat rising, we should not miss today’s moment without seriously reconsidering how to return this geographically critical island to its own people’s friendlier hands.”
Bolton notes that Guantanamo Bay “remains fully available to us today” for any operations the US should choose to avail itself of to topple Havana.
This would be the same John Bolton who in 2002 falsely accused Cuba of having a biological weapons program in a bid to sweep the island up in the same post-9/11 war push he was helping the US construct against Iraq with extreme aggression.
Any time there’s the faintest whisper of a foreign power setting up a military presence in Washington’s neck of the woods, hawks immediately begin pounding the drums of war and exposing the hypocrisy of the US empire’s insistence on its right to form military alliances and amass proxy forces on the doorstep of its geopolitical rivals. Empire apologists always dismiss Russia and China’s claims that US military encroachments on their surroundings are an unacceptable security risk and say that no nation has a right to a “sphere of influence” which its enemies are forbidden to enter, yet we can plainly see that the US reserves a right to its own sphere of influence from its own doctrines and behaviors.
Earlier this year Senator Josh Hawley ominously asked an audience, “Imagine a world where Chinese warships patrol Hawaiian waters, and Chinese submarines stalk the California coastline. A world where the People’s Liberation Army has military bases in Central and South America. A world where Chinese forces operate freely in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.” Which is exactly what the US military has been doing to China.
The single dumbest thing the US-centralized empire asks us to believe is that the military encirclement of its top two geopolitical rivals is a defensive action, rather than an act of extreme aggression. The idea that the US militarily encircling Russia and China is an act of defense rather than aggression is so in-your-face transparently idiotic that anyone who thinks critically enough about it will immediately dismiss it for the foam-brained nonsense that it is, yet because of propaganda that is the mainstream narrative in the western world, and millions of people accept it as true.
The point of highlighting hypocrisy is not that being a hypocrite is some special crime in and of itself, it’s to show that the hypocrite is lying about their motives and behavior, and to dismantle their arguments defending their positions. If the US would interpret a Chinese military presence in Cuba as an incendiary provocation, then logically the far greater military presence the US has amassed on the borders of Russia and China is a vastly greater provocation by that same reasoning, and the US knows it. There exists no argument to the contrary that doesn’t rely on baseless “well it’s different when we do it” assertions.
Demanding that Russia and China tolerate behavior from the US that the US would never tolerate from Russia or China is just demanding that the world subjugate itself to the US empire. Those who argue that Russia should have tolerated Ukraine being made into a NATO asset or that China should just accept US military encirclement because something something freedom and democracy are really just saying the US should be allowed to rule every inch of this planet completely uncontested.
If what you really want is for the US to dominate every inch of this planet completely uncontested, don’t try and tell me that your actual concern is for the people of Ukraine or Taiwan or anywhere else. Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. Just be honest about what you are and where you stand.
_________________
All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Victoria Amelina, who was wounded in a Russian missile attack in Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine on 27 June and died, aged 37, of her injuries four days later, knew that being a writer made her a target for Russia. She was aware that the invading forces had lists of activists and intellectuals to eliminate, but she also understood her country’s history: in March 2022, summoning one of the darkest pages in Ukrainian literary history – the murder of a generation of Ukrainian writers during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, known as the “executed renaissance” – she wrote that “there is a real threat that Russians will successfully execute another generation of Ukrainian culture – this time by missiles and bombs”.
Victoria sought to protect and promote Ukrainian culture as the country came under attack: in 2021 she founded a literature festival in her husband Oleksandr’s home town, New York, in the Donetsk region. The town (whose unlikely name is thought to have been originally Neu Jork and to have come from 19th-century German settlers) was occupied by the Russian army in 2014 and has been on the frontline ever since.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Social psychosis is widespread. In the words of the British psychiatrist, R. D. Laing, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.”
He was not referring to raving, drooling, hitting-your-head-against-the-wall lunacy but a taken-for-granted acceptance of a world long teetering on the edge of nuclear extinction, to take the most extreme example, but surely only one of many. The insouciant acceptance and support of psychotic rulers who promote first-strike nuclear war is very common. First strike nuclear policy is United States policy.
I recently wrote an article about the dangers of the fourteen U.S. Trident submarines. These subs constantly cruise under the oceans carrying 3,360 nuclear warheads equivalent to 134,400 Hiroshima bombs. All are on first strike triggers. And, of course, these are supplemented by all the land and air based nukes. My point was not very complicated: now that the United States government has abrogated all nuclear weapons treaties and continues to escalate its war against Russia in Ukraine, we are closer to nuclear annihilation than ever before.
This conclusion is shared by many esteemed thinkers such as the late Daniel Ellsberg who died on June 16, 2023 and whose 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, makes clear that nuclear war, waged intentionally or by mistake or accident, is very possible. In the months before he died, he warned that this is now especially true with the situation in Ukraine and the U.S. provocations against China.
The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal recently addressed the UN Security Council on the danger of U.S. actions in Ukraine and asked:
Will we see another Douma deception, but this time in Zaporizhzhia?
Why are we doing this? Why are we tempting nuclear annihilation by flooding Ukraine with advanced weapons and sabotaging negotiations at every turn?
Finian Cunningham has just raised the specter of a thermonuclear catastrophe initiated by a U.S./Ukrainian false flag attack on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant.
So my article was in no way unusual, except for my concentration on the Trident submarines.
When, against my better judgment, I read some commentators’ responses to my piece at a few websites where my article was posted, I was taken aback when I read the following [all emphases are mine]:
I vote for the bang!
To hear that there are no nuclear weapons and never were; to learn that some in their embrace of nihilism hope for a nuclear holocaust; to read that nuclear weapons are never going to be used because they only exist for show – well, this at least confirmed my suspicion that many who comment on articles are either bonkers or trolls or both. Some probably have nothing better to do than inform writers how wrong they are. It frightened me. It made me wonder how many of the millions of silent ones think similarly or have come to embrace hopelessness as a way of life – the feeling that they have no power because that has been drilled into them from birth. I have long thought that cultural normality can be understood as the use of one’s freedom to create a prison, a cell in which one can convince oneself that one is safe because the authorities have established a sacred umbrella to protect one from an apocalyptic hard rain that they never think is going to fall.
The Pew Research Center recently surveyed the American public on their sixteen greatest fears. Nuclear war was not one them. It was as if nuclear weapons did not exist, as if they have been buried in the cellar of public awareness. As if Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Newman’s motto was the national motto: “What? Me worry?” No doubt more Americans are aware of the gross public spectacle of Joey Chestnut stuffing his mouth with sixty-five hot dogs in ten minutes than they are of the Biden administration’s insane escalation toward nuclear war in Ukraine. We live in Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle.”
Although he was writing years ago, Ronald Laing’s words sound ironically prescient today after so many years of endless propaganda, the destruction of human experience resulting in destructive behavior, and the relentless diminishment of human beings to the status of machines:
At this moment in history, we are all caught in the hell of frenetic passivity. We find ourselves threatened by extermination that will be reciprocal, that no one wishes, that everyone fears, that may just happen to us ‘because’ no one knows how to stop it. There is one possibility of doing so if we can understand the structure of this alienation of ourselves from our experience, our experience from our deeds, our deeds from human authorship. Everyone will be carrying out orders. Where do they come from? Always from elsewhere. Is it still possible to reconstitute our destiny out of the hellish and inhuman fatality?
That is the key question now that more than fifty years have elapsed since Laing penned those words in his now classic book, The Politics of Experience (isbn.nu). He said then, which is exponentially truer today, that “machines are already becoming better at communicating with each other than human beings with each other.” Talking about deep things has become passé for so many.
If we don’t start worrying and unlove the machines, we are doomed sooner or later. Sooner is probable. Nuclear weapons are very real. They are poised and ready to fly. If we continue to live in denial of the madness of those who provoke their use while calmly promoting first-strike policies as the U.S. government does, we are worse than fools. We are suicidal.
As Daniel Ellsberg told us, “Don’t wait ‘till the bombs are actually falling.” That will be too late. There is no doubt that before a nuclear war can happen, we must go insane, normally so.
Let’s make the few protest voices in the wilderness the cries of hundreds of millions:
End nuclear weapons now before they end us.
Stop escalating the war in Ukraine now.
Make peace with Russia and China now.
“There is such a thing as being too late,” Martin Luther King, Jr. told us on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was assassinated in a U.S. government plot.
“We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.”
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
An independent weapons watchdog on Thursday implored the Biden administration to abandon any plans it has to provide the Ukrainian government with cluster bombs. While the White House has yet to finalize its decision, the State Department is expected to invoke a waiver under U.S. arms export laws that would allow stockpiled cluster munitions to be transferred to Ukraine, which is currently waging…
Russia has begun transferring tactical, or short-range, nuclear weapons to Belarus, prompting President Joe Biden to call the move “absolutely irresponsible” earlier this month. He’s not wrong. It is irresponsible to disburse nuclear weapons to other countries, increasing the risk that those weapons could be used by accident, miscalculation, or deliberately, especially with an active war nearby.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Elena Milashina and Alexander Nemov were on their way to the sentencing of a human rights activist in Grozny when they were assaulted
Assailants have carried out a brutal attack on a human rights lawyer and a prominent Russian journalist in Chechnya, leaving them with stab wounds, broken fingers and head wounds.
The brazen assault on journalist Elena Milashina and lawyer Alexander Nemov in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, was the most vicious in recent memory, leading even to a rare rebuke from the Kremlin which called it a “very serious attack that requires rather energetic measures”. Similar attacks in Chechnya, however, have gone unpunished for years.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Daniel Ellsberg marches in the San Francisco Pride Parade to free whistleblower Chelsea Manning, June 29, 2014 (Photo by R.D. Harris)
Daniel Ellsberg died on June 16, fighting to the end to warn of the existential threat of nuclear war. The 92-year-old whistleblower left a legacy of peace activism dating to his courageous release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Given the advancing security state and the atrophying peace movement, could his accomplishments be repeated today in this time of war in Ukraine?
From “defense intellectual” to peace activist
Daniel Ellsberg started his career as a brilliant “defense intellectual” working for the military and quasi-state think tanks. He helped plan, among other things, nuclear first strikes against the Soviet Union with China as a secondary target. However, with access to top secret information, he came to understand that the Vietnam War was unwinnable and the government – surprise, surprise – was lying to the US public that it could and would prevail.
Ellsberg’s geopolitical posture underwent a sea change from being a master of war to a warrior for peace. This was in the 1960s, and the transformation did not happen in isolation.
Ellsberg reportedly attended his first peace demomonstration in 1965, while still working for the RAND Corporation. He was especially inspired by the example of Randy Kehler, a draft resister willing to go to prison for his beliefs. By May 1971, the to-be whistleblower participated in a mass demonstration against the Vietnam War in an “affinity group” with known radicals Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky.
Could an analyst with access to top secret information also associate with nationally prominent dissidents, attend rallies against the military, yet go undetected and undeterred by today’s surveillance state apparatus? Not likely.
Also not likely, regrettably, is the revival of a political milieux like that of the sixties. This year, the Rage Against the War Machine demonstration, organized principally by the Libertarian and People’s parties, managed to attract only a few thousand to Washington on February 19. A few weeks later, another coalition led by ANSWER, UNAC, and others staged an anti-war rally on March 18 with similarly low turnout. Since then, there has not even been an attempt to mount a national demonstration against the ever escalating war in Ukraine.
Pentagon Papers purloined and published
Back in 1969, besides attending anti-war demos on his time off, Ellsberg was busy at work photocopying what were to become known as the Pentagon Papers, revealing the truth of the US imperial effort. To be sure, such a 7,000-page duplication feat could not be accomplished undetected under present security arrangements.
By 1970, Ellsberg was contacting sympathetic Democratic Party senators such as J. William Fulbright, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and George McGovern. They could release the papers on the floor of the Senate and still enjoy immunity from prosecution. They refused, but kept the liaison confidential.
After entrusting the Pentagon Papers with New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, the Times began publishing excerpts on June 31, 1971, without Ellsberg’s prior consent. Ellsberg also provided the Washington Post and other outlets with the papers, which published excerpts.
While the Times and the Post have long practiced follow-the-flag journalism, the fourth estate was still not yet quite the stenographers for the State Department and mouthpieces for the security agencies that they are now.
And today, unlike Fulbright and especially McGovern who were questioning the Vietnam War effort, not a single Democrat in either house opposes a war in Ukraine that is heading toward a nuclear exchange. Oddly, the contemporary politicians that could most nearly pass for peaceniks on Capitol Hill are far-right Republicans.
Fugitive Ellsberg
Once the Pentagon Papers went public, Ellsberg went on the lamb, precipitating the largest FBI “manhunt” since the Lindbergh kidnapping of 1932. But the feds never caught him. After thirteen days, Ellsberg simply turned himself in.
Such a hide-and-seek scenario would be impossible these days with our every move recorded on ubiquitous surveillance cameras. Eluding the 21st century police state is no longer an option.
Case dismissed due to government misconduct
Ellsberg went to trial on January 3, 1973, charged with theft and conspiracy under the 1917 Espionage Act. He faced 115 years in prison.
His defense was that the documents were illegally classified to keep them from the American public, not from a foreign enemy. That defense was disallowed.
The government was meanwhile busy collecting evidence against him. Operatives from the Nixon White House illegally broke into his psychiatrist’s house. The perpetrators included G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, who weren’t caught then. But a year later the “plumbers,” which were initiated to get Ellsberg, got their comeuppance when they were implicated in the Watergate scandal. The FBI also illegally wiretapped Ellsberg’s phone and then claimed the recordings had been lost.
In light of such government misconduct, the Nixon-appointed judge on the case, William Byrne, was compelled to dismiss the case on May 13, 1973. The back story is that while the trial was in progress, the judge was offered the directorship of the FBI, which he wanted but had to wait until the trial was concluded before accepting.
Ellsberg went free and went on to be a leading voice for peace. Byrne never got the FBI appointment.
Shifting partisan views on the security state and war
Today, with modern surveillance techniques and the NSA collecting every citizen’s electronic communications, the FBI would have no need to wiretap as they did with Ellsberg. And federal court judges no longer impartially dismiss cases of whistleblowers who dare to defy the state, as with Obama prosecuting more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous presidents combined.
According to polls over the last decade, partisan views on the growing surveillance state have flipflopped. The majority of Republicans now oppose the security state while most Democrats embrace it. Likewise, the Democrats are the new party of war.
The Armageddon-loving crazies in the Pentagon now serve as a calming counterpoint to the White House and the neo-con warriors in the State Department. Compared to Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland, the baddie generals of the past look like pacifists.
Nixon and Kissinger conspired to split the socialist bloc, pitting People’s China against the Soviets. In contrast, the current somnambulist in the Oval Office is working overtime to forge a union of these two supposed enemy states, while preparing for nuclear war against them both.
And no one in official circles seems the least bit concerned that the juggernaut to planetary annihilation has a fatal design flaw; no brakes to stop it.
We are living in times when the likes of far-right Republican Tucker Carlson are the ones making reasonable critiques of the unfettered security state and of the continual provocations against Russia.
Barbara Lee and the whole lot of once peace-promoting Democrats have learned to love war, voting nearly unanimously for every military appropriation to the proxy conflict on Russia’s border. Unfortunately, the fear of fascism by putative liberals does not extend to actual Nazis in Ukraine.
Progressive Democrats
How about the strategy of progressives working within the Democratic Party to move it to the left? In practice, Bernie Sanders and the Squad have worked tirelessly from one celebrity ball to next to prove that the term “progressive Democrat” is an oxymoron. Yes, the senator from the Green Mountain State is still a cut above Mitch McConnell. But that is not a very high bar.
That same Vermont career politician is now a significant cut below the maverick crusader who had in more auspicious times run for the presidency in 2016 and 2020 on the platform that the whole system was rigged including the Democratic Party. In so doing, he proved the DNC was indeed rigged. And then he proceeded to unreservedly join the Democrats, sheep-dogging Our Revolution into the party.
When the Democrats held a trifecta of the executive, House, and Senate, Mr. Sanders’ $200 billion healthcare package was off the table. Yet when the House went Republican, Bernie revived the initiative knowing that it would be defeated.
To be fair, blame for the demise of liberalism must be shared with its constituents who have become so deranged by the specter of Donald Trump that they will swallow anything the Democrats feed them. Even formerly liberal publications like The Nation run hit pieces against RFK Jr., terrified that the pro forma presidential primaries might include someone questioning party orthodoxy.
Meanwhile, they remain clueless that working class Americans are not wildly enthusiastic about another four years of Kamala Harris and her running mate. The Democrat’s frontrunner currently has a dismal 40% approval rating.
The Vietnam and Ukraine wars
The release of the Pentagon Papers revealed that the state was cognizant of the futility of the Vietnam venture and was maliciously willing to continue at a horrific cost to US troops and a still greater toll of Vietnamese lives. The paper’s publication was credited with contributing to a growing domestic disenchantment with imperial war.
Saigon “fell” two years after Ellsberg’s case was dismissed. On April 30, 1975, the Vietnamese successfully repelled the aggressor on the battlefield. With the anti-war movement mounting and the troops resisting, Washington was forced to accept defeat.
Now the US is embroiled in yet another horrific war, but a war of a different kind. The Ukraine War is a proxy war without a major commitment of US troops. However, similar to the exposés of the Pentagon Papers, it is now known that:
– The war in Ukraine was deliberately provoked by the US.
– The Minsk accords were a cynical ploy to buy time to arm Ukraine.
– US boots are being deployed on the ground.
– The US intends to eschew any negotiated peace.
– The war is unwinnable.
– The carnage is about maintaining empire, not preserving democracy.
Why haven’t those revelations mobilized the peace movement? One contributing factor is its connections to the Democrats who have wholesale converted into a party of war.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Biden administration is considering providing Ukraine with cluster bombs and may announce this decision in early July, NBC News reports. “We have been thinking about DPICM for a long time,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Friday at the National Press Club. “Yes, of course, there’s a decision-making process ongoing.” Dual-purpose improved conventional munitions…
After months of denouncing the nation’s military brass, Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin led Wagner Group mercenaries in an attempted coup d’état against President Vladimir Putin’s regime. After a day when Putin’s rule seemed in jeopardy, the Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko brokered a deal to resolve the crisis — at least for now. While the U.S. made it clear that they had nothing to…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Each time it happens, the world insists: ‘never again’. But the political and moral blindspots that allow these atrocities will persist until the lessons of history are learned
It’s happening again. In Darfur, scene of a genocide that killed 300,000 people and displaced millions 20 years ago, armed militias are on the rampage once more. Now, as then, they are targeting ethnic African tribes, murdering, raping and stealing with impunity. “They” are nomadic, ethnic Arab raiders, the much-feared “devils on horseback” – except now they ride in trucks. They’re called the Janjaweed. And they’re back.
How is it possible such horrors can be repeated? The world condemned the 2003 slaughter. The UN and the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigated. Sudan’s former president, Omar al-Bashir, was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity along with his principal allies. The trial of one suspect, known as Ali Kushayb, opened last year. Yet Bashir and the guilty men have evaded justice so far.
In this episode, we look at the release of findings by the NSW ICAC regarding former Premier Gladys Berejiklian and former NSW MP, Daryl Maguire. The ICAC found both individuals engaged in serious corruption, with Berejiklian breaching public trust by supporting a grant to the Australian Clay Target Association and the construction of a hall for the Riverina Conservatorium of Music. While it was recommended that charges be laid against Maguire, no charges were recommended against Berejiklian. The findings come after criticism from former Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the former NSW Coalition government. The media’s portrayal of Berejiklian as a “victim of a bad relationship” has been challenged, and the delayed release of the findings has also sparked an outrage.
The war in Ukraine and recent events in Russia: Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner paramilitary force, instigated an insurrection in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, before surrendering his weapons and seeking exile in Belarus through a deal with President Alexander Lukashenko. The potential implications of this event, including the ongoing war in Ukraine and its potential to spread to Russia, pose serious risks for Europe and the rest of the world. However, Australian media coverage of these events has been lacking, leading people to seek information through alternative channels such as Twitter, Reddit, CNN, or Al Jazeera.
The former Labor leader Simon Crean died during the week, and is remembered as one of the more decent figures in federal politics, received tributes from all sides of the political spectrum. Although his tenure as Labor leader from 2001 to 2003 was not marked by strong public support or success in opinion polls, Crean made significant reforms within the Labor Party to make it more democratic and less dominated by union bureaucrats. His memorable speech opposing the Iraq war showcased his courage and foresight, ultimately vindicating his position.
We also look at recent opinion polling – the two-party preferred voting figures, which remain relatively stable with Labor at 54% and the Coalition at 46%. However, of particular concern for the federal government is the decline in the percentage of people who believe Australia is heading in the right direction. Over the course of a year, the figure dropped from 48% to 33%, while the number of people expressing that the country is going in the wrong direction increased from 27% to 47%. This shift in public opinion could have implications for the government’s popularity and electoral prospects.
We don’t plead, beseech, beg, guilt-trip, or gaslight you and claim the end of the world of journalism is coming soon. We keep it simple: If you like our work and would like to support it, send a donation, from as little as $5. Or purchase one of our books! It helps to keep our commitment to independent journalism ticking over! Go to our supporter page to see the many ways you can support New Politics.
The post Podcast: Serious corruption in NSW, Russia and the Australia media, vale Simon Crean and is Labor heading in the wrong direction? appeared first on New Politics.
This post was originally published on New Politics.
Amidst this week’s strange attempt to instigate a military coup from the head of Russia’s Wagner Group, President Putin took a loud stand calling out the operation as a foreign directed insurgency with parallels drawn from the chaotic revolution of 1917.
Just as in 1917, the nation was at war with an enemy on the verge of defeat, and just as 1917, foreign manipulations using fifth columnists resulted in sucking the nation into Civil War. Putin stated:
Exactly this strike was dealt in 1917 when the country was in WW1, but its victory was stolen. Intrigues and arguments behind the army’s back turned out to be the greatest catastrophe, destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war… Russians were killing Russians, brothers killing brothers. But the beneficiaries were various political chevaliers of fortune and foreign powers who divided the country and tore it into parts. We will not let this happen.
Now I don’t know if the events catalyzed by Prigozhin’s attempted coup are part of a ‘game within a game’ designed to flush out fifth columnists while providing a headfake to western strategists… OR if this was an authentic coup. But what I do know is that there are historical processes at play which too few recognize and which President Putin understands very well.
Some might think Putin’s comparison to the 1917 revolution to be hyperbole, or a disrespect for the glorious Soviet revolution. They would be mistaken.
Aborting a System of Win-Win Cooperation
The sad fact is that neither the Bolsheviks nor Mensheviks which emerged onto the stage of history at the turn of the 20th century were organically arising “peoples’ movements”.
Upon deeper analysis conducted by historians like Anthony Sutton, Kerry Bolton, and Robert Cowley, both organizations which eventually merged into a singular force, enjoyed vast financial patronage of western imperial powerhouses such as Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff (head of Kuhn, Loeb & co.) and even Lord Alfred Milner — head of the newly formed Round Table Movement.
These characters bankrolled much of the Bolshevik movement as early as 1905 in order to destroy a truly revolutionary process that was spreading across much of the world in the wake of the Civil War.
One of the leading champions of this revolutionary process was Lincoln’s former bodyguard and the first Governor of Colorado, William Gilpin. Governor Gilpin envisioned a world of sovereign nation states united by rail lines stretching through the Bering Strait and bringing all the continents and cultures into harmonious co-existence. In his famous 1890 ‘Cosmopolitan Railway’ Gilpin stated:
The cosmopolitan railway will make the whole world one community. It will reduce the separate nations to families of our great nation… From extended intercommunication will arise a wider intercourse of human ideas and as the result, logical and philosophical reciprocities, which will become the germs for innumerable new developments; for in the track of intercommunication, enterprise and invention invariably follow and whatever facilitates one stimulates every other agency of progress.
Describing the obvious brotherhood of Russia and the USA in spearheading this project, Gilpin wrote:
It is a simple and plain proposition, that Russia and the United States, each having broad, uninhabited areas and limitless undeveloped resources, would by the expenditure of two or three hundred millions apiece for a highway of the nations through their now waste places, add a hundred fold to their wealth and power and influence. Nations which can spend in war their thousands of lives – the lives of the best and bravest of their sons and citizens – can surely afford a little of their surplus wealth and energy for such a work as this [p. 35].
The American System Goes Global
Gilpin was not alone in this vision. In fact, he represented a network of statesmen spread all across the globe who recognized that the only way to break out of the endless cycle of wars, usury, and corruption, which the Hobbesian structures of the British Empire maintained globally, was through the adoption of an anti-Free Trade system known as “The American System of Political Economy”. This was a very different concept of “America” than the Pax Americana which has run roughshod over the world since WWII.
In Russia, this process found its champion in the figure of Sergei Witte (Finance Minister and Minister of Transportation from 1892-1903) who led a faction of the Russian intelligentsia in a struggle for progress and cooperation both internally and with allied nations against powerful forces committed to feudalism both within the Russian oligarchy and externally. The regressive forces which Witte had to contend with included powerful reactionary traditionalist forces who yearned for the good old days before Czar Alexander II freed the serfs and on the other extreme, the emergence of vast clusters of anarchist movements threatening to burn down the state in a replication of the Jacobin frenzy of the French revolution.
As Martin Sieff has demonstrated through his many writings on Prince Kropotkin, many of these anarchist networks enjoyed the patronage of powerful forces that cared little for the plight of the working class.
The international spread of the American System between 1876-1905 took the form of large-scale industrialization and railroads. The funding mechanism was located in a practice that has fallen out of favor in the West (although has made a powerful comeback in China in recent years) called ‘dirigisme’ — the emission of productive credit from state banks.
It was Witte who had spearheaded the Trans Siberian Railway’s construction between 1890-1905 with plans to extend rail lines to China and beyond utilizing state directed capital and a blend of private enterprise. A fuller exposition of Witte’s fight will be unveiled in the next installment.
The British Empire, which always relied on keeping nations divided, underdeveloped and dependent on the use of maritime shipping, was not amused.
By controlling the international maritime choke points, the tiny island was able to exert its influence across the globe. Through the vigorous enforcement of laissez-faire doctrines of free trade, nations were blocked from protecting themselves from the financial warfare launched by the city of London against victim states (speculative volatility, usury, cheap dumping, cash cropping, and drug running). Anyone wishing to engage in long term planning in the building up of the land-based transport corridors via rail, roads, and industry would be easily sabotaged if the British System were shaping their world.
The international movement to break this system of evil was the only real revolutionary process animating the world during this time.
The Bolshevik Counter-Revolution: An Anglo-American Fraud
In 1905, Wall Street financier Jacob Schiff had given $200 million to the Japanese to assist their victory against the Russians during the 1904-05 Russo Japanese war. This generosity ultimately earned the banker the Medal of the Rising Sun in the Meiji Palace in 1907.
After crippling the Russian state and military (its navy was wiped out during the war), Schiff turned his attention to financing revolutionary activities within Russia itself. How money was spent by Schiff was difficult to say until 1949, when Schiff’s grandson John Schiff bragged to the New York Journal that his grandfather had given $20 million “for the triumph of communism in Russia.”
American journalist, and Schiff asset George Kennan, played an instrumental role as perception manager of the revolution and bragged that he had converted 52,000 Russian soldiers imprisoned in Japan into Bolshevik revolutionaries. A March 24, 1917 interview recorded in The New York Times celebrating the revolution read:
Mr. Kennan told of the work of the Friends of Russian Freedom in the revolution. He said that during the Russian-Japanese war he was in Tokyo, and that he was permitted to make visits among the 12,000 Russian prisoners in Japanese hands at the end of the first year of the war. He had conceived the idea of putting revolutionary propaganda into the hands of the Russian army.
The Japanese authorities favoured it and gave him permission. After which he sent to America for all the Russian revolutionary literature to be had…
“The movement was financed by a New York banker you all know and love,’ he said, referring to Mr Schiff, ‘and soon we received a ton and a half of Russian revolutionary propaganda. At the end of the war 50,000 Russian officers and men went back to their country ardent revolutionists. The Friends of Russian Freedom had sowed 50,000 seeds of liberty in 100 Russian regiments. I do not know how many of these officers and men were in the Petrograd fortress last week, but we do know what part the army took in the revolution.”
Schiff himself jubilantly stated to the New York Times, March 18, 1917:
May I through your columns give expression to my joy that the Russian nation, a great and good people, have at last effected their deliverance from centuries of autocratic oppression and through an almost bloodless revolution have now come into their own. Praised be God on high!
Historian Kerry Bolton wrote of New York Federal Reserve director William Boyce Thompson who had been installed as head of the American Red Cross during the 1917 revolution and was largely recognized as the true U.S. ambassador to the government, saying:
Thompson set himself up in royal manner in Petrograd reporting directly to Pres. Wilson and bypassing U.S. Ambassador Francis. Thompson provided funds from his own money, first to the Social Revolutionaries, to whom he gave one million rubles, and shortly after $1,000,000 to the Bolsheviks to spread their propaganda to Germany and Austria.
Writing in 1962, historian Arsene de Goulevitch, who experienced the events of 1917, firsthand wrote:
In private interviews, I have been told that over 21 million rubles were spent by Lord Alfred Milner in financing the Russian Revolution… The financier just mentioned was by no means alone among the British to support the Russian revolution with large financial donations. [1]
According to his own accounts, during the four months Leon Trotsky spent in New York in 1917, much of it was spent hobnobbing with the upper crust of Wall Street and being driven around in limousines. [2]
It is also noteworthy that after Trotsky was arrested by Canadian authorities while en route back to Russia with tens of thousands of dollars of Wall Street money, it was none other than Claude Dansey (Cecil Rhodes disciple, deputy chief of the new MI6 and founder of US military intelligence in 1917!!) that directly intervened to liberate Trotsky and company.
Leon Trotsky’s Immortal Treachery
Leon Trotsky, who Lord Milner, Schiff, Paul Warburg etc., always intended to be the leader of the movement that would take control over the dead bodies of the Romanovs, was fortunately ousted by the saner forces around Joseph Stalin in 1927.
As historian Grover Furr masterfully documents using recently declassified material, testimonies, and other evidence from archives in the USA and Russia, Leon Trotsky made several attempts to return to power in Russia after his expulsion. He didn’t do this alone, however, but largely with the help of fascist forces in Britain, Japan, Ukraine, and Germany all the way until the moment he met his untimely end in 1940. This will be the subject of a future review of Grover Furr’s work. [3] One of the best and more recent among Furr’s pioneering writing on this topic can be found in his New Evidence of Trotsky’s Conspiracy, Erythos Press, 2020. Furr’s website is also an invaluable resource.
For all of Lenin’s many problems, he differed from Trotsky on two interconnected points of 1) a general belief in voluntarism and 2) a rejection of the theory of permanent revolution.
Where Lenin believed that productive labor could be channeled towards the improvement of productive forces of society, Trotsky believed that any such effort at peaceful productive improvement would lead only to decadence. Permanent revolution was thus needed to keep workers from falling into sloth amidst the eternal striving for global class struggle. In 1914, a frustrated Lenin spoke of Trotsky’s fetish, saying:
he [Trotsky] deserted the Mensheviks and occupied a vacillating position, now co-operating with Martynov (the economist), now proclaiming his absurdly Left ‘permanent revolution’ theory.
Another point of conflict between Lenin on the one side and Trotsky on the other centered on whether or not Russia should continue to participate in WWI.
:quality(80)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/semana/YAKF6BBSOBF3RHXBYN6NOTSIR4.jpg)
Where Lenin wanted to bring Russia out of the insane conflict in the first moments of their coup in 1917, Trotsky and his close ally Bukharin demanded that Russia stay in the war with the aim of converting it into a total pan European (and ultimately global) revolution. Trotsky’s commitment to global socialist revolution vs Stalin’s commitment to “socialism in one country” was at the heart of an unbridgeable divide between the two revolutionaries throughout the years.Upon taking charge of the Russian economy, Trotsky and Lenin unleashed a destructive wave of economic reforms titled ‘The New Economic Policy’ (NEP) that saw vast liberalization of the entire state with western corporate powers sweeping in to buy up former national utilities for pennies on the dollar. The most powerful figure of the western magnates to be granted full access to buy up Russia under this new policy was Occidental Petroleum’s Armand Hammer (1898-1990) who was only forced to leave Russia the moment Trotsky was kicked out (and returning to dominance in the weeks after Stalin’s 1953 death).
Later on in life, Hammer described how Lenin told him: ”We do not need doctors, we need businessmen… communism is not working and we must change to a New Economic Policy.”
Working closely with Lenin and especially Trotsky, Hammer became the principal moderator of nearly every business deal made between the Soviet government and western corporations during the 1920s which saw Russia sink into brutal economic enslavement to foreign powers at a pace which would not be seen again for over 60 years.
The vast liberalization of the Russian economy during the dark 1920s paralleled closely the Perestroika program of free trade/privatization of the 1990s and it is no coincidence that George Bush Sr dubbed this program of Balkanized looting of Russia ‘Operation Hammer’.
If one saw a proto-George Soros in the figure of Armand Hammer, they would not be far off.
Parvus and the Pan-European Union
Trotsky’s close association with Alexander Israel Helphand (aka: Parvus) throughout the revolution of 1905 and beyond is also suspicious and should be considered in the context of a much broader imperial geopolitical strategy.
Parvus’ association with the Pan-European Union founded by Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi in 1923 is another relevant anomaly that takes us into the deeper power structures lurking below the surface waves of history. [4] Parvus’s association with the Pan European Union and broader fascist operations across Turkey and the Middle East is laid out in Jeffrey Steinberg’s 2005 report “Cheney Revives Parvus’ Permanent War .madness”
Other members of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s institution included likes of Benito Mussolini, Walter Lippman, Nazi finance minister Hjalmar Schacht and Nazi geopolitician Karl Haushofer, while financiers Max Warburg and Louis de Rothschild openly bankrolled the organization.
In 1932, Kalergi delivered a speech celebrating the great restoration of order that would emerge in the unified pan-European effort to put down Bolshevik anarchism saying:
This eternal war can end only with the constitution of a world republic…. The only way left to save the peace seems to be a politic of peaceful strength, on the model of the Roman Empire, that succeeded in having the longest period of peace in the west thanks to the supremacy of his legions.
This group played a much greater role in history than many realize and set the stage for the European Union. Parvus’ (and Trotsky’s) close association with Vladimir Jabotinsky set the stage for the most fascist elements of Zionism to emerge in the wake of WWII, and Parvus’ work as propagandist and arms dealer for the leadership of the Young Turk movement (deployed to set a weakened Ottoman Empire on fire and provoke what became the Balkan Wars of 1912-13) can still be felt across the Turkish world to this day.
It is also noteworthy that none other than Otto von Hapsburg himself had run this organization for over 30 years and also created a sister organization called Dignitae Humanae Institute to “united the right of the world” under a gnostic Catholic veneer with a Clash of Civilizations rebranding for the alt right. As the ultra-liberalized dissolution of society proceeds expectedly apace under the moral mush of LBGTXYZ gobbledygook, pagan Gaia worship, and critical race theory, it is obvious that a knee jerk leap into radical conservativism will accelerate. Hence, a net has been cast to catch conservative fish.
Located in an 800-year-old monastery in Trisulti, Otto Hapsburg’s organization has found a useful frontman in the form of a Jesuitical fascist right-wing priest of the American alt-right by the name of… Steve Bannon. [5] This fact gives new meaning to Bannon’s self-characterization as a Leninist. In an August 22, 2016 Daily Beast article, journalist Ronald Radosh described a conversation he had with Bannon two years earlier saying “we had a long talk about his approach to politics. He never called himself a “populist” or an “American nationalist,” as so many think of him today. “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed. Shocked, I asked him what he meant.
“Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
Trotskyites Mutate into Neocons
I say this here and now just to draw a parallel in the reader’s mind to the strange transmogrification which leading Trotskyists took in the USA once their leader’s life was snuffed out in 1940. Trotsky’s body wasn’t even cold before such devotees as James Burnham, Sidney Hook, Max Schachtman, Albert Wohlsetter, and Irving Kristol abandoned Trotskyite socialism and adopted a new rabidly right-wing paradigm, which came to be known as ‘neo-conservativism’.
This poisonous movement grew quickly throughout the Cold War and took over the USA over the dead bodies of JFK and his brother while unleashing a new global dis-order ‘clash of civilizations’ each-against-all logic onto the globe under the watch of the Trilateral Commission of Kissinger, Brzezinski, and David Rockefeller.
I think we can intimate what Trotsky ultimately saw as the final destination for his aims of a global revolution of the masses, and willingness to collaborate with Nazis to achieve his ends by considering the writings of former Trotskyite James Burnham.
As Cynthia Chung pointed out in her recent article on the topic, Burnham, (Trotsky’s former personal assistant and a man known to many as the father of the neocons), saw the resolution to the Manichean problem of class struggle and Cold War in a one world fascist government. Right before Trotsky’s 1940 death, Burnham wrote an essay renouncing Dialectic Materialism in favor of the superior philosophy of Bertrand Russell as outlined in the 1913 Principia Scientifica, and hence his rebirth as a neocon was ensured. [6] In his Feb 1940 ‘Science and Style’, Burnham wrote: “Do you wish me to prepare a reading list, Comrade Trotsky? It would be long, ranging from the work of the brilliant mathematicians and logicians of the middle of the last century to one climax in the monumental Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead (the historic turning point in modern logic), and then spreading out in many directions – one of the most fruitful represented by the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science.”
Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead’s three volume Principia Mathematica published between 1910-1913 set the stage for the latter development of cybernetics and information theory by Russell’s pupil Norbert Wiener
The question now sits before us: Was Burnham’s conversion to Russell’s worldview inconsistent with the actual goals and mission of Leon Trotsky?
It is too often forgotten that Leon Trotsky, acting as chairman of the technical and scientific board of industry, quite literally controlled all science policy of Russia from 1924-25. During this time, he wrote a 1924 pamphlet outlining his pro-eugenics vision of the future global order that would be brought into existence through the forces of Darwinian natural selection saying:
The human species will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and mass psycho-physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution… man will make his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to a higher consciousness… to create a higher social biological type, or if you please, a superman.
Whether we consider Trotsky’s relentless efforts to integrate Darwinism with Marxist Dialectic Materialism or the Neoconservative commitment to a Darwinian survival of the fittest ethic merged with a gnostic Christian end times doctrine, the effects are largely identical: Global chaos with a supposed point of rapture/synthesis to resolve the chaos of the material world. Getting to this destination, whereby a new order and new Nietzschean human being were to emerge, simply required a cleansing experience.
In this sense, Trotsky could be compared to a Russian version of his contemporary Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Where Chardin was tasked with merging Darwin’s theory of natural selection into Christianity, Trotsky was tasked with merging Darwin’s theory into the state religion of Marxist dialectic materialism in Russia. The end result in either case was identical.
Wohlstetter and RAND Corporation
Albert Wohlstetter is another devout Trotskyist who became a leading neo-conservative and controlling hand behind RAND Corporation. It was under Wohlstetter’s influence that RAND Corp became the principal conduit for the intellectual takeover of all branches of US policy on military, economic, and cultural levels.
How did this occur? Through a process known as Cybernetics.
Created by Norbert Wiener as the “practical application” of Lord Bertrand Russell’s “theoretical” Principia Mathematica of 1910-1913, Cybernetics was essentially a ‘science of control’ which became the conduit used to re-brand eugenics into new clothes after World War II.
As I outlined in my recent essay ‘The Revenge of the Malthusians and the Science of Limits’ the language of Cybernetics was called ‘systems analysis’ and presumed that all systems could be described as closed units susceptible to pure mathematical description and most importantly… manipulation from a scientific elite.
Author Alex Abella described RAND’s systems analysis repackaging of Dialectic Materialism in the following terms in his Soldiers of Reason:
RAND’s systems analysis…refused to be constrained by existing reality…Systems analysis was the freedom to dream and to dream big, to turn away from the idea that reality is a limited set of choices, to strive to bend the world to one’s will…the crux of systems analysis lies in a careful examination of the assumptions that gird the so-called right question, for the moment of greatest danger in a project is when unexamined criteria define the answers we want to extract. Sadly, most RAND analysts failed to perceive this inherent flaw in their wondrous construct. Not only that, the methodology of systems analysis required that all the aspects of a particular problem be broken down into quantities…Those things that could not be eased into a mathematical formula…were left out of the analysis… By extension, if a subject could not be measured, ranged, and classified, it was of little consequence in systems analysis, for it was not rational. Numbers were all – the human factor was a mere adjunct to the empirical.
The key that gives both Dialectic Materialism the same power of evil as the upgraded tool of Bertrand Russell’s Principia Scientifica extolled by Burnham or Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics/systems analysis is found in the following axiom: “Quantity must always govern quality”.
Under the influence of Wohlsetter’s RAND Corporation, the USA was driven into full scale insanity with a military outlook driven by computer models that presumed nuclear war was a winnable endeavor bringing the world closer to full scale nuclear holocaust. The merging of Darwinism with social science created “eugenics” which presumed that quantitative properties like genetic codes and DNA gave rise to qualitative attributes like “morality”, “wisdom” or “fitness to rule or live”.
In order for society to be brought into acceptance of this new soul-less paradigm of existence, with an invisible master class governing depopulated slaves from above, a vast shock therapy would be called for.
The Frankfurt School Global Revolution
That cleansing experience would take the form of ritualistic climax of purgative violence which would usher in a state of total despair and thus a new scientific priesthood managing the slaves of the other under a renewed form of technocratic feudalism. But how would society be brought to such a state of despair such that the masses would clamor for a new age to be imposed upon them in the form of a one world technocratic government?
When Christianity, nationalism, and respect for family values still governed society, such a state of nihilistic despair requisite to achieve this breaking point was more than a little difficult to achieve.
Here the role of Trotsky’s associates Georg Lukacs, and Willi Munzenberg play an important role.
Both men were not only radical Bolsheviks but also founders of a new organization founded in 1923 known as the Institute for Social Research founded in Frankfurt Germany, otherwise known as “The Frankfurt School”.
The Frankfurt School would lay out a comprehensive intellectual framework for a new global aesthetical and scientific revolution premised on the worship of decay, ugliness, and death within a Weberian-Freudian-Marxist synthesis. The system developed by these misanthropic leading priests of the new cult of death would justify the CIA’s funding of abstract art, post-modernist literature, a-tonal music, and other most modernist garbage throughout the Cold War. The launching of this project in full force took the form of a CIA-MI6 funded operation in 1949 dubbed ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom’. Leading organizers of this congress included Lord Bertrand Russell and two former Trotskyists: Sidney Hook and James Burnham.
This group and their role in steering mass education and culture over the ensuing century will be the topic of a future report.
Post-Script: A Final Word from Putin
To this author’s knowledge, the first time Vladimir Putin laid out a full attack on the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution as a foreign directed color revolution was during his 2021 Valdai Club meeting. At his keynote address, the Russian leader called out the social engineers masquerading as revolutionaries and social reformers today driving a parallel to the destructive ideology of the Bolsheviks of 1917:
The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.
1. Czarism and Revolution, published by Omni Publications in Hawthorne, 1962 French edition, pp. 224, 230.
2. Leon Trotsky: My Life, New York publisher: Scribner’s, 1930, p. 277.
3. One of the best and more recent among Furr’s pioneering writing on this topic can be found in his New Evidence of Trotsky’s Conspiracy, Erythos Press, 2020. Furr’s website is also an invaluable resource.
4. Parvus’s association with the Pan European Union and broader fascist operations across Turkey and the Middle East is laid out in Jeffrey Steinberg’s 2005 report “Cheney Revives Parvus’ Permanent War Madness”
5. This fact gives new meaning to Bannon’s self-characterization as a Leninist. In an August 22, 2016 Daily Beast article, journalist Ronald Radosh described a conversation he had with Bannon two years earlier saying “we had a long talk about his approach to politics. He never called himself a “populist” or an “American nationalist,” as so many think of him today. “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed. Shocked, I asked him what he meant. “Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
6. In his February 1940 ‘Science and Style’, Burnham wrote: “Do you wish me to prepare a reading list, Comrade Trotsky? It would be long, ranging from the work of the brilliant mathematicians and logicians of the middle of the last century to one climax in the monumental Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead (the historic turning point in modern logic), and then spreading out in many directions – one of the most fruitful represented by the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science.”
• Originally published in the The Last American Vagabond
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
US neoconservatives like Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken are using Ukraine as the linchpin of their strategy to undermine and destabilise Russia.
Since the start of the conflict in February 2022, billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware has been sent to Ukraine by the EU. By late February 2023, it had forwarded €3.6 billion worth of military assistance to the Zelensky regime via the European Peace Fund. However, even at that time, the total cost for EU countries could have been closer to €6.9 billion.
In late June 2023, the EU pledged a further €3.5 billion in military aid. Josep Borrell is the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EU Commission.
Following this latest pledge, he stated on Twitter:
“We will continue to double down on our military support on both equipment [and] training. For as long as it takes.”
Great news for European and UK armaments companies like BAE Systems, Saab and Rheinmetall, which are raking in huge profits from the destruction of Ukraine (see the CNN Business report “Europe’s arms spending on Ukraine boosts defense companies“).
US arms manufacturers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are also acquiring multi-billion-dollar contracts (as outlined in the online articles “Raytheon wins $1.2 billion surface-to-air missile order for Ukraine” and “Pentagon readies new $2 billion Ukraine air defense package including missiles“).
And as for BlackRock, JP Morgan and private investors, they aim to profit from the country’s reconstruction along with 400 global companies, including Citi, Sanofi and Philips.
As reported on the CNN Business website (“War-torn economy needs private investors to rebuild“), JP Morgan’s Stefan Weiler sees a “tremendous opportunity” for private investors.
At the same time, in “War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land“, the Oakland Institute describes how financial institutions are insidiously supporting the consolidation of farmland by oligarchs and Western financial interests.
With Ukrainian forces struggling on the battlefield, it poses the worrying question: with so much money at stake for Western capital, just how far will the US escalate in order to prevent Russia from securing control over areas of the country?
Meanwhile, away from the boardrooms, business conferences and high-level strategizing, hundreds of thousands of ordinary young Ukrainians have died.
Irish MEPs Mick Wallace and Claire Daley have been staunch critics of the EU stance on Ukraine (see Claire Daley talking in the EU parliament about Ukraine burning through a generation of men on YouTube).
Wallace recently addressed the EU Parliament, describing the heist currently taking place in that country by Western corporations.
Wallace said:
The damage to Ukraine is devastating. Towns and cities that endured for hundreds of years don’t exist anymore. We must recognise that these towns, cities and surrounding lands were long being stolen by local oligarchs colluding with global financial capital. This theft quickened with the onset of the war in 2014.
The pro-Western government opened the doors wide for massive structural adjustment and privatisation programmes spearheaded by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the IMF and the World Bank. Zelensky used the current war to concentrate power and accelerate the corporate fire sale. He banned opposition parties that were resisting deeply unpopular reforms to the laws restricting the sale of land to foreign investors.
Over three million hectares of agricultural land are now owned by companies based in Western tax havens. Ukraine’s mineral deposits alone are worth over $12 trillion. Western companies are licking their lips.
What are the working-class people of Ukraine dying for?
Photograph Source: Alexander Davronov – CC BY-SA 4.0
When news broke of Wagner Commander Yevgeny Prigozhin’s race toward Moscow this past weekend I noted in a social media post this required a serious logistical effort to supply. I have since scaled back my assessment of its logistical complexities. Rather than 24,000 Wagner forces on the march toward Moscow, it quickly became known it was only 4-6,000, and estimated vehicles at 55 on the bottom end, to 200 on the top side. Not insignificant, but not huge either. And we don’t know yet if it was Prigozhin’s intention of going all the way to Moscow, or if it was a bluff. In short, logistics may not have been that consequential for this rash dash to Moscow, or perhaps they were all along intending to halt before arriving there. There may, or may not, have been significant planning involved, but the logistical complexity of Prigozhin’s race to Moscow may not have required the advanced planning many pundits assert.
No sooner, however, had the tires on Prigozhin’s trucks stopped rolling, than pundits from what Vladimir Putin calls the “collective West” (as he terms what is chiefly the UK and its former historical settler colonies) were spinning yarns about how the run on Moscow reprised events of 1917. In fact, so was Putin for that matter. Having seemingly read an article or book on the subject, the foreign policy commentariat began churning out articles suggesting a veritable Kornilov Affair that was a prelude to the collapse of Russia’s Kerensky government still at war with Germany. Of course, it remains too early to tell if there are any “rhymes” let alone repetitions, to paraphrase the late Samuel Clemens to 1917, in this matter.
Regarding WWI, we all know it was catastrophic for Czarist and Kerensky’s Russia. Then 1.8 million Russian soldiers died and some half-million direct civilian deaths and another 700,000 from war related disease. Its economy shrank by over half. So, it was utter economic collapse then and some 2-3 million dead for Russia in 1917. This has little relation to Russia now, but that is hardly to say all is well there presently. But what are the differences between then and now?
Today, instead of over half of Russia’s GDP gone, Russia’s economy shrank 2.1% in 2022 and is set to grow by 0.7% this year. We might quibble at the margins of these numbers, but for most this is an unnoticeable change, vs the catastrophic collapse of Russia’s economy in WWI. Moreover, Russia presently is not even on a full war-economy footing (although their critics from Russian chauvinists say they should be). Russia is spending a paltry 3% of their GDP on the war. In short, Putin has undertaken his war in Ukraine on the cheap in hopes of “keeping the calm” at home. But it appears Putin went too far on this score of war without domestic inconvenience and the military and nationalists are unhappy with the results.
On deaths, the numbers are serious. Some tens of thousands (others argue more, but without conclusive evidence) Russian soldiers are dead. These are poor working-class sops from the provinces few care about. Disregard for their plight, if not fate, showed Putin at his worst when he told the mother of one of these fallen young men that she should be happy her son died for a reason. “Some people, are they even living or not living? It’s unclear. And how they die, from vodka or something else, it’s also unclear…But your son lived, you understand?” It’s rotten, but also increasingly normal in war today and Ukraine now also shows a similar profile for who is fighting and dying in this war.
This is all by way of saying we should not overstate comparisons with WWI, which while the present war is terrible, its impact still pales to that of the first World War. That said, the war clearly has gone on too long for the taste of Russia’s nationalists and they are restive with the lack of its progress. Thus, Putin will have to exit or escalate, both of which pose their dangers for the Kremlin, and possibly the world if Putin takes the likely path of escalation.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey Sommers.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Putin is weak and getting weaker. In this special live taping of Gaslit Nation, Russian mafia expert Olga Lautman, who has a long history of investigating and exposing the Russian mafia state’s active measures in the U.S. and Europe, joins Andrea to discuss where things are headed in Russia’s escalating power struggle, what it means for Ukraine, and how the world needs to start preparing for a post-Putin Russia.
“Putin is finished,” Olga warns in this urgent discussion. Putin may be forced into retirement in a dacha on the outskirts of Russia or “die in his sleep,” with Shoigu or another tool of the Russian security forces becoming the new strongman. Prighozin’s attempted military coup was the inevitable escalation of growing tensions between warring factions, but as Olga points out, the siloviki–the ruthless, imperialistic, genocidal security forces–are in charge, and always have been, even during the collapse of the Soviet Union. They are the kingmakers, and it’s clear that they want Putin gone. Prigozhin served a purpose of striking Putin with a fatal blow, and the months ahead will continue to weaken him as Russia continues to lose an unwinnable war in Ukraine.
Our bonus episode this week includes our extended audience Q&A at our live taping, with a focus on Russia’s influence campaigns in U.S. elections. As mentioned in this week’s show, there’s going to be a special live taping of Gaslit Nation held in New York City at the Lower East Side venue Caveat, hosted by Kevin Allison of the popular and provocative storytelling podcast RISK! on Saturday August 5th at 4pm EST. The discussion will include the making of the brand new Gaslit Nation graphic novel Dictatorship: It’s Easier Than You Think!, and include an opportunity to order signed copies. For tickets to join the event in person or wherever you are by watching the livestream, get your tickets here!
This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation with Andrea Chalupa and Sarah Kendzior and was authored by Andrea Chalupa & Sarah Kendzior.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is one of the key people driving US foreign policy. He was mentored by Hillary Clinton with regime changes in Honduras, Libya and Syria. He was the link between Nuland and Biden during the 2014 coup in Ukraine. As reported by Seymour Hersh, Sullivan led the planning of the Nord Stream pipelines destruction in September 2022. Sullivan guides or makes many large and small foreign policy decisions. This article will describe Jake Sullivan’s background, what he says, what he has been doing, where the US is headed and why this should be debated.
Background
Jake Sullivan was born in November 1976. He describes his formative years like this:
I was raised in Minnesota in the 1980s, a child of the later Cold War – of Rocky IV, the Miracle on Ice, and ‘Tear down this wall’. The 90s were my high school and college years. The Soviet Union collapsed. The Iron Curtain disappeared. Germany was reunified. An American-led alliance ended a genocide in Bosnia and prevented one in Kosovo. I went to graduate school in England and gave fiery speeches on the floor of the Oxford Union about how the United States was a force for good in the world.
Sullivan’s education includes Yale (BA), Oxford (MA) and Yale again (JD). He went quickly from academic studies and legal work to political campaigning and government.
Sullivan made important contacts during his college years at elite institutions. For example, he worked with former Deputy Secretary of State and future Brookings Institution president, Strobe Talbott. After a few years clerking for judges, Sullivan transitioned to a law firm in his hometown of Minneapolis. He soon became chief counsel to Senator Amy Klobuchar who connected him to the rising Senator Hillary Clinton.
Mentored by Hillary
Sullivan became a key adviser to Hillary Clinton in her campaign to be Democratic party nominee in 2008. At age 32, Jake Sullivan became deputy chief of staff and director of policy planning when she became secretary of state. He was her constant companion, travelling with her to 112 countries.
The Clinton/Sullivan foreign policy was soon evident. In Honduras, Clinton clashed with progressive Honduras President Manuel Zelaya over whether to re-admit Cuba to the OAS. Seven weeks later, on June 28, Honduran soldiers invaded the president’s home and kidnapped him out of the country, stopping en route at the US Air Base. The coup was so outrageous that even the US ambassador to Honduras denounced it. This was quickly over-ruled as the Clinton/Sullivan team played semantics games to say it was a coup but not a “military coup.” Thus the Honduran coup regime continued to receive US support. They quickly held a dubious election to make the restoration of President Zelaya “moot”. Clinton is proud of this success in her book “Hard Choices.”
Two years later the target was Libya. With Victoria Nuland as State Department spokesperson, the Clinton/Sullivan team promoted sensational claims of a pending massacre and urged intervention in Libya under the “responsibility to protect.” When the UN Security Council passed a resolution authorizing a no-fly zone to protect civilians, the US, Qatar and other NATO members distorted that and started air attacks on Libyan government forces. Today, 12 years later, Libya is still in chaos and war. The sensational claims of 2011 were later found to be false.
When the Libyan government was overthrown in Fall 2011, the Clinton/Sullivan State Department and CIA plotted to seize the Libyan weapons arsenal. Weapons were transferred to the Syrian opposition. US Ambassador Stevens and other Americans were killed in an internecine conflict over control of the weapons cache.
Undeterred, Clinton and Sullivan stepped up their attempts to overthrow the Syrian government. They formed a club of western nations and allies called the “Friends of Syria.” The “Friends” divided tasks who would do what in the campaign to topple the sovereign state. Former policy planner at the Clinton/Sullivan State Department, Ann Marie Slaughter, called for “foreign military intervention.” Sullivan knew they were arming violent sectarian fanatics to overthrow the Syrian government. In an email to Hillary released by Wikileaks, Sullivan noted “AQ is on our side in Syria.”
Biden’s adviser during the 2014 Ukraine Coup
After being Clinton’s policy planner, Sullivan became President Obama’s director of policy planning (Feb 2011 to Feb 2013) then national security adviser to Vice President Biden (Feb 2013 to August 2014).
In his position with Biden, Sullivan had a close-up view of the February 2014 Ukraine coup. He was a key contact between Victoria Nuland, overseeing the coup, and Biden. In the secretly recorded conversation where Nuland and the US Ambassador to Ukraine discuss how to manage the coup, Nuland remarks that Jake Sullivan told her “you need Biden.” Biden gave the “attaboy” and the coup was “midwifed” following a massacre of police AND protesters on the Maidan plaza.
Sullivan must have observed Biden’s use of the vice president’s position for personal family gain. He would have been aware of Hunter Biden’s appointment to the board of the Burisima Ukrainian energy company, and the reason Joe Biden demanded that the Ukrainian special prosecutor who was investigating Burisima to be fired. Biden later bragged and joked about this.
In December 2013, at a conference hosted by Chevron Corporation, Victoria Nuland said the US has spent five BILLION dollars to bring “democracy” to Ukraine.
Sullivan helped create Russiagate
Jake Sullivan was a leading member of the 2016 Hillary Clinton team which promoted Russiagate. The false claim that Trump was secretly contacting Russia was promoted initially to distract from negative news about Hillary Clinton and to smear Trump as a puppet of Putin. Both the Mueller and Durham investigations officially discredited the main claims of Russiagate. There was no collusion. The accusations were untrue, and the FBI gave them unjustified credence for political reasons.
Sullivan played a major role in the deception as shown by his “Statement from Jake Sullivan on New Report Exposing Trump’s Secret Line of Communication to Russia.”
Sullivan’s misinformation
Jake Sullivan is a good speaker, persuasive and with a dry sense of humor. At the same time, he can be disingenuous. Some of his statements are false. For example, in June 2017 Jake Sullivan was interviewed by Frontline television program about US foreign policy and especially US-Russia relations. Regarding NATO’s overthrow of the Libyan government, Sullivan says, “Putin came to believe that the United States had taken Russia for a ride in the UN Security Council that authorized the use of force in Libya…. He thought he was authorizing a purely defensive mission…. Now on the actual language of the resolution, it’s plain as day that Putin was wrong about that.” Contrary to what Sullivan claims, the UN Security Council resolution clearly authorizes a no-fly zone for the protection of civilians, no more. It’s plain as day there was NOT authorization for NATO’s offensive attacks and “regime change.”
Planning the Nord Stream Pipeline destruction
The bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines, filled with 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas, was a monstrous environmental disaster. The destruction also caused huge economic damage to Germany and other European countries. It has been a boon for US liquefied natural gas exports which have surged to fill the gap, but at a high price. Many European factories dependent on cheap gas have closed down. Tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs.
Seymour Hersh reported details of How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline. He says, “Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.” A sabotage plan was prepared and officials in Norway and Denmark included in the plot. The day after the sabotage, Jake Sullivan tweeted
I spoke to my counterpart Jean-Charles Ellermann-Kingombe of Denmark about the apparent sabotage of Nord Stream pipelines. The U.S. is supporting efforts to investigate and we will continue our work to safeguard Europe’s energy security.
Ellerman-Kingombe may have been one of the Danes informed in advance of the bombing. He is close to the US military and NATO command.
Since then, the Swedish investigation of Nord Stream bombing has made little progress. Contrary to Sullivan’s promise in the tweet, the US has not supported other efforts to investigate. When Russia proposed an independent international investigation of the Nord Stream sabotage at the UN Security Council, the resolution failed due to lack of support from the US and US allies. Hungary’s foreign minister recently asked,
How on earth is it possible that someone blows up critical infrastructure on the territory of Europe and no one has a say, no one condemns, no one carries out an investigation?
Economic Plans devoid of reality
Ten weeks ago Jake Sullivan delivered a major speech on “Renewing American Economic Leadership” at the Brookings Institution. He explains how the Biden administration is pursuing a “modern industrial and innovation strategy.” They are trying to implement a “foreign policy for the middle class” which better integrates domestic and foreign policies. The substance of their plan is to increase investments in semiconductors, clean energy minerals and manufacturing. However the new strategy is very unlikely to achieve the stated goal to “lift up all of America’s people, communities, and industries.” Sullivan’s speech completely ignores the elephant in the room: the costly US Empire including wars and 800 foreign military bases which consume about 60% of the total discretionary budget. Under Biden and Sullivan’s foreign policy, there is no intention to rein in the extremely costly military industrial complex. It is not even mentioned.
US exceptionalism 2.0
In December 2018 Jake Sullivan wrote an essay titled “American Exceptionalism, Reclaimed.” It shows his foundational beliefs and philosophy. He separates himself from the “arrogant brand of exceptionalism” demonstrated by Dick Cheney. He also criticizes the “American first” policies of Donald Trump. Sullivan advocates for “a new American exceptionalism” and “American leadership in the 21st Century.”
Sullivan has a shallow Hollywood understanding of history: “The United States stopped Hitler’s Germany, saved Western Europe from economic ruin, stood firm against the Soviet Union, and supported the spread of democracy worldwide.” He believes “The fact that the major powers have not returned to war with one another since 1945 is a remarkable achievement of American statecraft.”
Jake Sullivan is young in age but his ideas are old. The United States is no longer dominant economically or politically. It is certainly not “indispensable.” More and more countries are objecting to US bullying and defying Washington’s demands. Even key allies such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates are ignoring US requests. The trend toward a multipolar world is escalating. Jake Sullivan is trying to reverse the trend but reality and history are working against him. Over the past four or five decades, the US has gone from being an investment, engineering and manufacturing powerhouse to a deficit spending consumer economy waging perpetual war with a bloated military industrial complex.
Instead of reforming and rebuilding the US, the national security state expends much of its energy and resources trying to destabilize countries deemed to be “adversaries”.
Conclusion
Previous national security advisers Henry Kissinger and Zbignew Brzezinski were very influential.
Kissinger is famous for wooing China and dividing the communist bloc. Jake Sullivan is now wooing India in hopes of dividing that country from China and the BRICS alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa).
Brzezinski is famous for plotting the Afghanistan trap. By destabilizing Afghanistan with foreign terrorists beginning 1978, the US induced the Soviet Union to send troops to Afghanistan at the Afghan government’s request. The result was the collapse of the progressive Afghan government, the rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and 40 years of war and chaos.
On 28 February 2022, just four days after Russian troops entered Ukraine, Jake Sullivan’s mentor, Hillary Clinton, was explicit: “Afghanistan is the model.” It appears the US intentionally escalated the provocations in Ukraine to induce Russia to intervene. The goal is to “weaken Russia.” This explains why the US has spent over $100 billion sending weapons and other support to Ukraine. This explains why the US and UK undermined negotiations which could have ended the conflict early on.
The Americans who oversaw the 2014 coup in Kiev, are the same ones running US foreign policy today: Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan. Prospects for ending the Ukraine war are very poor as long as they are in power.
The Democratic Party constantly emphasizes “democracy” yet there is no debate or discussion over US foreign policy. What kind of “democracy” is this where crucial matters of life and death are not discussed?
Robert F Kennedy Jr is now running in the Democratic Party primary. He has a well informed and critical perspective on US foreign policy including the never ending wars, the intelligence agencies and the conflict in Ukraine.
Jake Sullivan is a skilled debater. Why doesn’t he debate Democratic Party candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr over US foreign policy and national security?
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Report details widespread and systematic torture with summary executions of more than 70 people
Russian forces have carried out widespread and systematic torture of civilians detained in connection with their attack on Ukraine, summarily executing more than 70 of them, the UN human rights office said on Tuesday.
It interviewed hundreds of victims and witnesses for a report detailing more than 900 cases of civilians, including children and elderly people, being arbitrarily detained in the conflict, most of them by Russia. The vast majority of those interviewed said they were tortured and in some cases subjected to sexual violence during detention by Russian forces, the head of the UN human rights office in Ukraine said.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
A lot of nonsense is being spouted by a bevy of spontaneous “Russian experts” in light of the Prigozhin spray, a mutiny (no one quite knows what to call it), stillborn in the Russian Federation. It all fell to the theatrical sponsor, promoter and rabble rouser Yevgeny Prigozhin, a convict who rose through the ranks of the deceased Soviet state to find fortune and security via catering, arms and Vladimir Putin’s support.
In the service of the Kremlin, Prigozhin proved his mettle. He did his level best to neutralise protest movements. He created the Internet Research Agency, an outfit employing hundreds dedicated to trolling for the regime. Such efforts have been apoplectically lionised (and vilified) as being vital to winning Donald Trump the US presidency in 2016.
His Wagner mercenary outfit, created in the summer of 2014 in response to the Ukraine conflict, has certainly been busy, having impressed bloody footprints in the Levant, a number of African states, and Ukraine itself. Along the way, benefits flowed for the provision of such services, including natural resource concessions.
But something happened last week. Suddenly, the strong man of the mercenary outfit that had been performing military duties alongside the Russian Army in Ukraine seemed to lose his cool. There were allegations that his men had been fired upon by Russian forces, a point drawn out by his capture of the 72nd Motorised Rifle Brigade commander, Lieutenant Colonel Roman Venevitin. Probably more to the point, he had found out some days earlier that the Russian Defence Ministry was keen to rein in his troops, placing them under contractual obligations. His autonomous wings were going to be clipped.
The fuse duly went. Prigozhin fumed on Telegram, expressing his desire to get a number of officials, most notably the Defence Minister, Sergei Shoigu, and Chief of the General staff Valery Gerasimov, sent packing. A “march for justice” was organised, one that threatened to go all the way to Moscow.
President Vladimir Putin fumed in agitation in his televised address on June 24, claiming that “excessive ambition and personal interests [had] led to treason, to the betrayal of the motherland and the people and the cause”. Within hours, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, whose diplomatic skills are threadbare, had intervened as mediator, after which it was decided that the Wagner forces would withdraw to avoid “shedding Russian blood”.
This all provided some delicious speculative manna for the press corps and commentariat outside Russia. Nature, and media, abhor the vacuum; the filling that follows is often not palatable. There was much breathless, excited pontification about the end of Putin, despite the obvious fact that this insurrection had failed in its tracks. John Lyons of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation was aflame with wonder. Where, he wondered, was the Russian President? Why did the Wagner soldiers “get from Ukraine to Rostov, take control of Ukraine’s war HQ then move to Voronezh without a hint of resistance”?
John Lough of Chatham House in London claimed that Putin had “been shown to have lost his previous ability to be the arbiter between powerful rival groups.” His “public image in Russia as the all-powerful Tsar” had been called into question. Ditto the views of Peter Rutland of Wesleyan University, who was adamant in emphasising Putin’s impotence in being “unable to do anything to stop Prigozhin’s rogue military unit as it seized Rostov-on-Don”, only to then write, without explaining why, about uncharacteristic behaviour from both men in stepping “back from the brink of civil war”.
Then came the hyperventilating chatter about nuclear weapons (too much of the Crimson Tide jitters there), the pathetic wail that accompanies those desperate to fill both column space. The same degree of concern regarding such unsteady nuclear powers as Pakistan is nowhere to be seen, despite ongoing crises and the prospect of political implosion.
Commentors swooned with excitement: the Kremlin had lost the plot; the attempted coup, if it could even be called that, had done wonders to rattle the strongman. Those same commentators could not quite explain that Prigozhin had seemingly been rusticated and banished to Belarus within the shortest of timeframes, where he is likely to keep company with a man of comparatively diminished intellect: Premier Lukashenko himself. Prigozhin, for all his aspirations, has a gangster’s nose for a bargain, poor or otherwise.
As Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov put it, the original criminal case opened against Prigozhin for military mutiny by the Kremlin would be dropped, while any Wagner fighters who had taken part in the “march for justice” would not face any punitive consequences. Those who had not participated would be duly assimilated into the Russian defence architecture in signing contracts with the Defence Ministry.
The image now appearing – much of this subject to redrawing, resketching, and requalifying – is that things were not quite as they seemed. Assuming himself to be a big-brained Wallerstein of regime stirring clout, Prigozhin had seemingly put forth a plan of action that had all the seeds of failure. Britain’s The Telegraph reported that “the mercenary force had only 8,000 fighters rather than the 25,000 claimed and faced likely defeat in any attempt to take the Russian capital.”
Another reading is also possible here, though it will have to be verified in due course. Putin had anticipated that this contingently loyal band of mercenaries was always liable to turn, given the chance. Russia is overrun with such volatile privateers and soldiers of fortune. Where that fortune turns, demands will be made.
Ultimately, in Putin’s Russia, the political is never divorceable from the personal. Chechnya’s resilient thug, Ramzan Kadyrov, very much the prototypical Putin vassal only nominally subservient, suggests that this whole matter could be put down to family business disputes. “A chain of failed business deals created a lingering resentment in the businessman, which reached its peak when St. Petersburg’s authorities did not grant [Prigozhin’s] daughter a coveted land plot.” The big picture, viewed from afar, can be very small indeed.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
