In the early morning of March 20, 2003, US Navy bombers on aircraft carriers and Tomahawk missile-launching vessels in the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean, along with Air Force B-52s in Britain and B-2s in Diego Garcia, struck Baghdad and other parts of Iraq in a “Shock and Awe” blitzkrieg to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and occupy that oil-rich country.
Liberation (3/20/23), the newspaper of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, was one of the few outlets to cover the March 18 peace march in Washington, DC.
Twenty years on, the US news media, as is their habit with America’s wars, published stories looking back at that war and its history (FAIR.org, 3/22/23), most of them treading lightly around the rank illegality of the US attack, a war crime that was not approved by the UN Security Council, and was not a response to any imminent Iraqi threat to the US, as required by the UN Charter.
Oddly, none of those national media organizations’ editors saw as relevant or remotely newsworthy a groundbreaking protest rally and march outside the White House of at least 2,500–3,000 people on Saturday, March 18, 2023, called by a coalition of over 200 peace and anti-militarism organizations to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion.
The Washington Post, like the rest of the national news media, failed to mention or even run a photo of the rally in Lafayette Park. It didn’t even cover the peaceful and spirited march from the front of the White House along Pennsylvania and New York avenues to the K Street Washington Post building to deliver several black coffins as a local story—despite the paper’s having a reporter whose beat is actually described by Post as being to “to cover protests and general assignments for the metro desk.” An email request to this reporter, Ellie Silverman, asking why this local protest in DC went unreported did not get a response.
National press a no-show
Code Pink was among the organizers of the DC march.
The rally, organized by the ANSWER Coalition and sponsors such as Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, Black Alliance for Peace and Radical Elders, drew “several thousand” antiwar, anti-military protesters, according to ANSWER Coalition national director Brian Becker. He said the demonstration’s endorsers were calling for peace negotiations and an end to US arms for Ukraine, major cuts in the US military budget, an end to the US policy of endless wars, and freedom for Julian Assange and Indigenous prisoner Leonard Peltier.
Becker said that the coalition had a media team that spent two weeks on phones and computers, reaching out to national and local media organizations, including in the seven or eight other cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco, that held rallies on the same day. “Not a single member of the national press even showed up,” he said.
Two local Washington TV stations (CBS and ABC affiliates) did do brief stories on the rally and march, but Google and Nexis searches turned up not a single major mainstream national news report on the event, though it was the second, and significantly larger, antiwar demonstration in Washington in just four weeks, and the first by specifically left-wing peace and antiwar organizations. (The first rally, on February 19, called “Rage Against the War Machine,” organized primarily by libertarians and some left-wing opponents of the US proxy war with Russia, did get a mention in the conservative Washington Times (2/19/23) and promotion a day before the event by right-wing Fox News host Tucker Carlson (2/17/22).
“We talked to reporters and gave them details about our planning events during the two weeks before the march—the kinds of things that journalists years back used to like to attend to hear what the activists were saying and thinking, but nobody showed up from the media at those sessions,” says Becker. “I guess those who make the decisions about assignments and coverage didn’t want this event covered.”
Shift from the ’60s
Vietnam veterans in Washington, DC, march against the war, April 24, 1971 (CC photo: Leena A. Krohn).
FAIR founder Jeff Cohen noted a shift from the way peace demonstrations were covered in the 1960s. “Even a few hundred antiwar protesters at a local anti-Vietnam War march would get local news coverage,” he recalled:
We weren’t ignored, but every participant complained about the quality of the coverage that so often focused on the length of men’s hair, length of women’s skirts, usage of four-letter words, etc. and not substantive critique of war or US foreign policy. National protests in DC got significant national coverage, but not friendly coverage.
Cohen contrasted this with antiwar protests in recent decades, which have frequently been snubbed by media. “I think the ignoring of local and even national antiwar marches kicked in during the mid- and late 1980s around movements opposing US intervention in Central America,” he said.
Noam Chomsky (who knows from personal experience the sensation of being virtually blacklisted by corporate media) was a speaker at the March 18 event. Asked to explain this latest blackout of antiwar sentiment and opposition to military aid to Ukraine, he responded, “Par for the course.” He added, “Media rarely stray far from the basic framework imposed by systems of power, as FAIR has been effectively documenting for many years.”
Filling the hole
WSWS (3/21/23) was critical of the DC march for trying to change Democratic Party policy.
Fortunately, alternative media, which have proliferated online, are filling in the hole in protest coverage, though of course readers and viewers have to seek out those sources of information. There was a news report on the march in Fightback News (3/23/23), for example, and commentary on the World Socialist Web Site (3/21/23) and Black Agenda Report (2/22/23).
Foreign coverage of the March 18 antiwar event in the US was substantial, which should embarrass editors at US news organizations. Some foreign coverage, considering that it appeared in state-owned or partially state-owned media, were surprisingly professional. Read, for example, the report by Xinhua (3/19/23), China’s government-owned news service, or one in Al Myadeen (3/18/23), the Lebanese satellite news service, which reportedly favors Syria and Hezbollah.
It’s rather disturbing to find such foreign news outfits, not just covering news that is being hidden from Americans by their own vaunted and supposedly “free” press, but doing it more straightforwardly than US corporate media often do when they actually report on protests against US government policy.
Efforts to get either the Washington Post or New York Times to explain their airbrushing out the March 18 antiwar protest in Washington were unsuccessful. (Both publications have eliminated their news ombud offices, citing “budget issues.”)
Fortunately Patrick Pexton, the last ombud at the Washington Post, who now teaches journalism at Johns Hopkins University, and writes on media, foreign and defense policy, and politics and society, offered this emailed observation about the March 18 demonstration blackout:
I confess that I am surprised no major national news organization covered it. I know that some people look down their noses at Code Pink and ANSWER Coalition, and journalists generally are supportive of the Ukraine War, but the demonstrators have a legitimate point of view, and my general personal rule is that anytime you get 1,000 people to turn out to protest something, you should at the very least do a local story about it. I don’t know what the Post rules are today.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought the need to protect their forces with ground based air defence into sharp perspective The importance of ground-based air defence (GBAD) has been brought into sharp relief by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At time of writing (early January), Ukraine claimed to have shot down 281 Russian aircraft, 266 […]
Hypocrisy and humanity’s failure to “unite around consistently applied human rights and universal values” expose a system unfit to tackle global crises, according to a report published by Amnesty International on Monday, the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
“The West’s robust response to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine contrasts sharply with a deplorable lack of meaningful action on grave violations by some of their allies including Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt,” Amnesty said in an introduction to its annual global human rights report.
“As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights turns 75, Amnesty International insists that a rules-based international system must be founded on human rights and applied to everyone, everywhere,” the group asserted.
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Amnesty continued:
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 unleashed numerous war
crimes, generated a global energy and food crisis, and sought to further
disrupt a weak multilateral system. It also laid bare the hypocrisy of
Western states that reacted forcefully to the Kremlin’s aggression but
condoned or were complicit in grave violations committed elsewhere…
Double standards and inadequate responses to human rights abuses taking place around the world fuelled impunity and instability, including deafening silence on Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, inaction on Egypt, and the refusal to confront Israel’s system of apartheid against Palestinians.
The report also highlights China’s use of strong-arm tactics to suppress international action on crimes against humanity it has committed, as well as the failure of global and regional institutions—hamstrung by the self-interest of their members—to respond adequately to conflicts killing thousands of people including in Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Yemen.
“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a chilling example of what can happen when states think they can flout international law and violate human rights without consequences,” Amnesty International secretary general Agnès Callamard said in a statement.
“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was created 75 years ago, out of the ashes of the Second World War. At its core is the universal recognition that all people have rights and fundamental freedoms,” she added. “While global power dynamics are in chaos, human rights cannot be lost in the fray. They should guide the world as it navigates an increasingly volatile and dangerous environment. We must not wait for the world to burn again.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The announcement by President Vladimir Putin over the weekend that Russia will deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus marked a further escalation of potentially cataclysmic tensions over the war in neighboring Ukraine. As the Associated Press reported, “Putin said the move was triggered by Britain’s decision this past week to provide Ukraine with armor-piercing rounds containing depleted uranium.”
There’s always an excuse for nuclear madness, and the United States has certainly provided ample rationales for the Russian leader’s display of it. American nuclear warheads have been deployed in Europe since the mid-1950s, and current best estimates say 100 are there now—in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey.
Count on U.S. corporate media to (appropriately) condemn Putin’s announcement while dodging key realities of how the USA, for decades, has been pushing the nuclear envelope toward conflagration. The U.S. government’s breaking of its pledge not to expand NATO eastward after the fall of the Berlin Wall—instead expanding into 10 Eastern European countries—was only one aspect of official Washington’s reckless approach.
During this century, the runaway motor of nuclear irresponsibility has been mostly revved by the United States. In 2002, President George W. Bush withdrew the U.S. from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a vital agreement that had been in effect for 30 years. Negotiated by the Nixon administration and the Soviet Union, the treaty declared that its limits would be a “substantial factor in curbing the race in strategic offensive arms.”
His lofty rhetoric aside, President Barack Obama launched a $1.7 trillion program for further developing U.S. nuclear forces under the euphemism of “modernization.” To make matters worse, President Trump pulled the United States out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a crucial pact between Washington and Moscow that had eliminated an entire category of missiles from Europe since 1988.
The madness has remained resolutely bipartisan. President Joe Biden quickly dashed hopes that he would be a more enlightened leader about nuclear weapons. Far from pushing to reinstate the canceled treaties, from the outset of his presidency Biden boosted measures like placing ABM systems in Poland and Romania. Calling them “defensive” does not change the fact that those systems can be retrofitted with offensive cruise missiles. A quick look at a map would underscore why such moves were so ominous when viewed through Kremlin windows.
Contrary to his 2020 campaign platform, President Biden has insisted that the United States must retain the option of first use of nuclear weapons. His administration’s landmark Nuclear Posture Review, issued a year ago, reaffirmed rather than renounced that option. A leader of the organization Global Zero put it this way: “Instead of distancing himself from the nuclear coercion and brinkmanship of thugs like Putin and Trump, Biden is following their lead. There’s no plausible scenario in which a nuclear first strike by the U.S. makes any sense whatsoever. We need smarter strategies.”
Daniel Ellsberg—whose book The Doomsday Machine truly should be required reading in the White House and the Kremlin—summed up humanity’s extremely dire predicament and imperative when he told the New York Times days ago: “For 70 years, the U.S. has frequently made the kind of wrongful first-use threats of nuclear weapons that Putin is making now in Ukraine. We should never have done that, nor should Putin be doing it now. I’m worried that his monstrous threat of nuclear war to retain Russian control of Crimea is not a bluff. President Biden campaigned in 2020 on a promise to declare a policy of no first use of nuclear weapons. He should keep that promise, and the world should demand the same commitment from Putin.”
We can make a difference—maybe even the difference—to avert global nuclear annihilation. This week, TV viewers will be reminded of such possibilities by the new documentary The Movement and the “Madman” on PBS. The film “shows how two antiwar protests in the fall of 1969—the largest the country had ever seen—pressured President Nixon to cancel what he called his ‘madman’ plans for a massive escalation of the U.S. war in Vietnam, including a threat to use nuclear weapons. At the time, protestors had no idea how influential they could be and how many lives they may have saved.”
In 2023, we have no idea how influential we can be and how many lives we might save—if we’re really willing to try.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on state television Saturday plans to station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus — an escalation anti-war campaigners had been warning about and that alarmed disarmament advocates and experts. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) “condemns this extremely dangerous escalation which makes the use of nuclear weapons more likely…
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on state television Saturday plans to station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus—an escalation anti-war campaigners had been warning about and that alarmed disarmament advocates and experts.
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) “condemns this extremely dangerous escalation which makes the use of nuclear weapons more likely,” the group declared in a series of tweets.
“In the context of the war in Ukraine, the likelihood of miscalculation or misinterpretation is extremely high,” ICAN added. “Sharing nuclear weapons makes the situation much worse and risks catastrophic humanitarian consequences.”
“Sharing nuclear weapons makes the situation much worse and risks catastrophic humanitarian consequences.”
The deployment decision comes 13 months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and after the United Kingdom this week revealed plans to provide the invaded nation with armor-piercing rounds containing depleted uranium (DU).
Putin said the U.K.’s announcement “probably served as a reason” why Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko agreed to the plan and argued that it won’t violate Russia’s international nonproliferation treaty obligations, according to a BBC translation.
As Reutersexplained, “The Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, signed by the Soviet Union, says that no nuclear power can transfer nuclear weapons or technology to a nonnuclear power, but it does allow for the weapons to be deployed outside its borders but under its control—as with U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe.”
The United States, which has the world’s second-largest nuclear arsenal after Russia, “long ago deployed their nuclear weapons on the territory of their allies, NATO countries, in Europe,” the Russia leader noted. “We are doing the same thing that they have been doing for decades.”
Russia “will not hand over” nuclear arms to Belarus, Putin insisted, explaining that his country has already given its ally an Iskander missile complex that can be equipped with weapons, plans to start training crews in early April, and aims to complete construction of a special storage facility for the nukes by the beginning of July.
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The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and in the five years that followed, nuclear weapons based in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine were transferred to Russia—where they have remained since.
“It’s a very significant move,” Nikolai Sokol, a senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Nonproliferation, toldReuters of the deployment decision. “Russia had always been very proud that it had no nuclear weapons outside its territory. So, now, yes, they are changing that and it’s a big change.”
Hans Kristensen, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project, told Reuters that “this is part of Putin’s game to try to intimidate NATO… because there is no military utility from doing this in Belarus as Russia has so many of these weapons and forces inside Russia.”
Global Zero managing partner Derek Johnson said that “Putin’s nuclear provocations are dangerous and unacceptable. U.S. and NATO must resist calls to respond in kind and avoid injecting nuclear weapons deeper into this war.”
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In addition to his nuclear announcement, Putin pointed out during the Saturday interview that Russia also has depleted uranium shells. As he put it: “I must say that certainly, Russia has something to respond. Without exaggeration, we have hundreds of thousands, namely hundreds of thousands of such shells. We are not using them now.”
A U.K. Ministry of Defense official had confirmed earlier this week that “alongside our granting of a squadron of Challenger 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine, we will be providing ammunition including armor-piercing rounds which contain depleted uranium,” which swiftly generated concerns about not only Russian nuclear threats but also public health and environmental impacts.
“DU shells have already been implicated in thousands of unnecessary deaths from cancer and other serious illnesses,” stressed Kate Hudson, general secretary of the U.K.-based Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which has advocated for a moratorium on such arms. “Sending them into yet another war zone will not help the people of Ukraine.”
This post has been updated with new comments from Derek Johnson.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
On March 17, a little more than one year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), announced that the Pre-Trial Chamber (PTC) had issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for the commission of war crimes in Ukraine. The PTC also issued an arrest warrant for Maria Lvova-Belova, commissioner for children’s rights…
The objective of all this was ultimately to achieve a 1962 Cuban-Missile-Crisis in reverse, by which the U.S. will ultimately place at least one nuclear missile only about 300 miles away from Moscow and then demand Russia’s capitulation. If Russia says no, then within only five minutes from America’s firing its knockout missile, Moscow can be annihilated, Russia’s central command beheaded, and that is too fast for Russia to be able to recognize that it had been done and then to launch its retaliatory weapons against America. So, there might be a reasonable chance for America to eliminate Russia by a blitz-nuclear attack from Ukraine — or at least there are influential people in the U.S. Government and academe who think so (including virtually the entire Biden Administration, just like in Obama’s and Trump’s).
Ever since at least 2006, the idea had become mainstream in American geostrategic planning circles for America to abandon the prior nuclear meta-strategy — “Mutually Assured Destruction” or MAD — of using nuclear weapons in order to avert a nuclear war, to becoming instead “Nuclear Primacy,” to use nuclear weapons in order to win a nuclear war. Biden pushed it almost beyond the point of no return until Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022 so as to push back Ukraine’s nearest border from its present roughly 300 miles away from Moscow to perhaps a thousand miles away. However, even that would be nearer to Moscow than the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis standard, which was Cuba being 1,331 miles away from Washington DC. And now Finland, which aims to join NATO, might move that to only 507 miles; so, America’s goal of conquering Russia is still very much a national-security threat to the people in Russia. In fact, by 2017, America already had become frighteningly near to being able to perpetrate a ‘victorious’ blitz-nuclear attack against Russia.
By contrast, Russia has never tried to place its ground-based nuclear missiles that near to Washington DC. Cuba was the last opportunity to do that, and it was during the time of the Soviet Union, and it was instead 1,331 miles away from DC. Russia, today — now that NATO has grown to surround it (especially in Ukraine, which has the nearest border to Moscow) — is in enormous danger from this. On 17 December 2021, Russia formally presented separately to America, and to NATO, Russia’s fundamental national-security concerns, and on 7 January 2022 both America and its NATO said no to all of them — not even for negotiation. Russia’s only remaining option then was to invade and conquer Ukraine. America has no national-security interest in Russia’s nearest neighbor, Ukraine, but Russia certainly does and must win this war or else capitulate to the U.S. regime. Russia doesn’t have the option of allowing this Ukraine to serve as an American nuclear launching-pad against The Kremlin. Whether it will allow Finland (the second-nearest) to become that is not yet clear.
If Russia’s Government were like America’s Government, then Russia might now be considering to turn Mexico against America like America has turned Ukraine against Russia. On March 21st, Ben Norton headlined “‘Mexico is not a US colony!’: AMLO condemns invasion threats, celebrates nationalization of oil, lithium” and quoted from recent speeches by Mexico’s President, who has made clear the depths of the mutual hostility on both sides of that border. The current Mexican President has transformed his country’s international policies into a clear condemnation of the arrogance and psychopathic greed of America’s billionaires and their Government. What is remarkable is that Russia has given no sign of trying to turn Mexico into a Russian launching-pad against America as America is now straining to bring to culmination Obama’s plan for Ukraine to become America’s launching-pad against Russia.
Clearly, Russia’s Government is fundamentally different from America’s, vastly less aggressive. It’s obvious to any rational person. For Russia to lose the war in Ukraine would be disastrous, whereas for America to lose it would be just another defeat for America, like Vietnam was, and Afghanistan was, and Iraq was, and Syria was, and Libya was, and so many others have been — and none of those defeats after 1945 has even nicked the U.S. regime’s ability to dictate to the rest of the world like it demands to do. Maybe this one would, but that would be all to the good, for the entire world — if America doesn’t resort to nuclear war in order to try to assert its supremacy. What’s at stake for Russia in this matter is its very existence as an independent country. What’s at stake for America in it — this war on Russia’s border, not on ours — is whatever America’s billionaires will choose it to be. And if they choose to lose, then everyone (including especially in Europe) will be better off as a result. But if America’s billionaires choose to ‘win’ (if they’re that power-crazed), then the world won’t survive this. So, yes: since 1945, there’s a huge difference between Russia’s Government, and ours.
The objective of all this was ultimately to achieve a 1962 Cuban-Missile-Crisis in reverse, by which the U.S. will ultimately place at least one nuclear missile only about 300 miles away from Moscow and then demand Russia’s capitulation. If Russia says no, then within only five minutes from America’s firing its knockout missile, Moscow can be annihilated, Russia’s central command beheaded, and that is too fast for Russia to be able to recognize that it had been done and then to launch its retaliatory weapons against America. So, there might be a reasonable chance for America to eliminate Russia by a blitz-nuclear attack from Ukraine — or at least there are influential people in the U.S. Government and academe who think so (including virtually the entire Biden Administration, just like in Obama’s and Trump’s).
Ever since at least 2006, the idea had become mainstream in American geostrategic planning circles for America to abandon the prior nuclear meta-strategy — “Mutually Assured Destruction” or MAD — of using nuclear weapons in order to avert a nuclear war, to becoming instead “Nuclear Primacy,” to use nuclear weapons in order to win a nuclear war. Biden pushed it almost beyond the point of no return until Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022 so as to push back Ukraine’s nearest border from its present roughly 300 miles away from Moscow to perhaps a thousand miles away. However, even that would be nearer to Moscow than the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis standard, which was Cuba being 1,331 miles away from Washington DC. And now Finland, which aims to join NATO, might move that to only 507 miles; so, America’s goal of conquering Russia is still very much a national-security threat to the people in Russia. In fact, by 2017, America already had become frighteningly near to being able to perpetrate a ‘victorious’ blitz-nuclear attack against Russia.
By contrast, Russia has never tried to place its ground-based nuclear missiles that near to Washington DC. Cuba was the last opportunity to do that, and it was during the time of the Soviet Union, and it was instead 1,331 miles away from DC. Russia, today — now that NATO has grown to surround it (especially in Ukraine, which has the nearest border to Moscow) — is in enormous danger from this. On 17 December 2021, Russia formally presented separately to America, and to NATO, Russia’s fundamental national-security concerns, and on 7 January 2022 both America and its NATO said no to all of them — not even for negotiation. Russia’s only remaining option then was to invade and conquer Ukraine. America has no national-security interest in Russia’s nearest neighbor, Ukraine, but Russia certainly does and must win this war or else capitulate to the U.S. regime. Russia doesn’t have the option of allowing this Ukraine to serve as an American nuclear launching-pad against The Kremlin. Whether it will allow Finland (the second-nearest) to become that is not yet clear.
If Russia’s Government were like America’s Government, then Russia might now be considering to turn Mexico against America like America has turned Ukraine against Russia. On March 21st, Ben Norton headlined “‘Mexico is not a US colony!’: AMLO condemns invasion threats, celebrates nationalization of oil, lithium” and quoted from recent speeches by Mexico’s President, who has made clear the depths of the mutual hostility on both sides of that border. The current Mexican President has transformed his country’s international policies into a clear condemnation of the arrogance and psychopathic greed of America’s billionaires and their Government. What is remarkable is that Russia has given no sign of trying to turn Mexico into a Russian launching-pad against America as America is now straining to bring to culmination Obama’s plan for Ukraine to become America’s launching-pad against Russia.
Clearly, Russia’s Government is fundamentally different from America’s, vastly less aggressive. It’s obvious to any rational person. For Russia to lose the war in Ukraine would be disastrous, whereas for America to lose it would be just another defeat for America, like Vietnam was, and Afghanistan was, and Iraq was, and Syria was, and Libya was, and so many others have been — and none of those defeats after 1945 has even nicked the U.S. regime’s ability to dictate to the rest of the world like it demands to do. Maybe this one would, but that would be all to the good, for the entire world — if America doesn’t resort to nuclear war in order to try to assert its supremacy. What’s at stake for Russia in this matter is its very existence as an independent country. What’s at stake for America in it — this war on Russia’s border, not on ours — is whatever America’s billionaires will choose it to be. And if they choose to lose, then everyone (including especially in Europe) will be better off as a result. But if America’s billionaires choose to ‘win’ (if they’re that power-crazed), then the world won’t survive this. So, yes: since 1945, there’s a huge difference between Russia’s Government, and ours.
The western political/media class has suddenly resurrected the phrase “Axis of Evil” in recent days to refer to the increasing intimacy between Russia and China, just in time for the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
Famed Iraq War cheerleader Sean Hannity appears to have kicked things off last week, saying on his show that “a new Axis of evil is emerging” between China, Russia and Iran, a slogan that has since been echoed numerous times this week.
On Tuesday former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley told Fox News that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are “two dictators that have said they are unlimited partners,” asserting that “This is the new Axis of Evil, with Iran being their junior partner.”
Also on Tuesday Representative Mike Lawler tweeted, “Xi’s meeting with Putin in Moscow is deeply concerning and highlights the growing threats posed by this new axis of evil,” and on Thursday he tweeted, “We are dealing with a new axis of evil and failure to stop Putin in Ukraine will have far-reaching implications as Russia pushes further into Eastern Europe and China moves against Taiwan.”
"This is the new Axis of Evil" Nikki Haley says of China and Russia "with Iran being the junior partner."
That's absolutely right. If you look around the world, every authoritarian regime is supported by either or all of the three rogue tyrants in Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran. https://t.co/JP4GbnZpHs
On Wednesday The Telegraph published an article titled “Xi and Putin are building a new axis of evil,” which mixes in the phrases “China-Russia axis” and “Beijing-Moscow axis” for good measure.
Also on Wednesday Representative Brian Mast tweeted “This is the new axis of evil” with a picture of Xi and Putin shaking hands.
The “Axis of Evil” slogan was first made infamous by George W Bush in a jingoistic speech he gave a few months after 9/11, and at the time referred to the nations of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. The following year Iraq would be in ruins as the US empire ushered in a new era of worldwide military expansionism and shockingly aggressive interventionism throughout the Middle East.
Bush (and the speechwriter who helped him coin the phrase, neoconservative war propagandist David Frum) used the word “Axis” to evoke the memory of the Axis powers of World War II who fought against the Allied forces, of which the United States was a part. Western warmongers have an extensive history of comparing every war they want to fight to the second world war, framing whoever their Enemy of the Day happens to be as the new Adolf Hitler, whoever wants to fight him as the new Winston Churchill, and whoever opposes the war as the new Neville Chamberlain.
The idea is to get everyone thinking in terms of Good Guys versus Bad Guys like children watching a cartoon show, instead of like grown adults engaged in complex analysis of real life as it actually exists. Because the US empire has spent generations framing WWII as a pure Good Guys versus Bad Guys conflict, now propagandists can say that every Pentagon target is Hitler and the US and its allies are the brave heroes who are fighting Hitler.
The axis of authoritarianism linking Russia, China, and Iran also runs through Florida where Trump and DeSantis compete to see who can better toe the pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine line set by Tucker Carlson. The enemies of democratic freedom announce themselves. . . https://t.co/folIj3Ls8n
And that appears to be the intention behind this recent resurrection of the “Axis of Evil” label: not to recall George W Bush’s hawkish sloganeering on the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, but to recall World War II. This seems likely because we’re also seeing a huge increase in the use of the term “axis” to refer to Russia, China, Iran and sometimes other nations like North Korea, without the fun “of Evil” part.
Genocide walrus John Bolton has been trying to make “axis” happen for a while now; he used that term to refer to the relationship between Russia and China last month in an interview with The Washington Post, where he also claimed that we are already in “a global war” against those nations. In an interview with The Telegraph earlier this week Bolton referred to “the China-Russia axis,” which he described as having “outriders like Iran and North Korea.”
On Monday Representative Jamie Raskin tweeted about the “axis of authoritarianism linking Russia, China, and Iran.”
On Wednesday Representative Lisa McClain tweeted, “Xi and Putin seek a new world order that poses a worrying global threat. The West should be worried about this China-Russia axis and what it means for freedom.”
(Can I just pause a moment here to note that it’s a bit odd for the other guys to be labeled the “axis” when the US is now aligned with every one of the World War II Axis powers?)
At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Thursday, committee chairman Michael McCaul shed a bit more light on the worldview driving this perspective in his opening remarks.
“History shows when you project strength you get peace but when you project weakness it does invite aggression and war; you only need to look back to Neville Chamberlain and Hitler, and really the course of time has proven that axiom,” McCaul said, adding, “We’re starting to see this alliance very similar in my judgement to what we saw in World War Two: Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.”
The problem with McCaul’s thinking, of course, is that he is pretending the US is just some passive witness to the formation of this evil “axis” of hostile nations instead of the singular driving factor behind it. Russia, China, and other unabsorbed governments have all been driven closer and closer together by the hostility of the United States toward all of them, and now they are overcoming some significant differences to rapidly move into increasingly intimate strategic partnerships to protect their national sovereignty from a globe-spanning empire which demands total submission from every government on earth.
Empire managers have long forecasted the acquisition of post-Soviet Russia as an imperial lackey state which could be weaponized against the new Enemy Number One in China, but instead the exact opposite happened. Hillary Clinton told the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in 2021 that as an insider within the US power structure she’d “heard for years that Russia would become more willing to move toward the west, more willing to engage in a positive way with Europe, the UK, the US, because of problems on its border, because of the rise of China.” But that’s not what occurred.
“We haven’t seen that,” Clinton said. “Instead what we’ve seen is a concerted effort by Putin maybe to hug China more.”
Perhaps more effort would have been expended winning over Russia’s friendship had this incorrect forecast not been made. If US empire managers had not been so confident that Moscow would come groveling to their feet to kiss the imperial ring, perhaps they would not have felt so comfortable expanding NATO, knocking back Putin’s early gestures of goodwill while administration after administration assured him with its actions that it will accept nothing but total subordinance, and engaging in aggressive brinkmanship on its border.
But they made a different call, so now we have to listen to cringey cold warriors like Michael McFaul moan about Moscow deciding to go with Beijing instead of Washington.
After the collapse of the USSR, a democratic Russia had the chance to be a major, respected European power. Putin however has pushed Russia a different way, turning Russia (yet again) into a vassal of an Asian autocratic power. Such a wasted opportunity. Oh well.
“After the collapse of the USSR, a democratic Russia had the chance to be a major, respected European power,” McFaul recently complained on Twitter. “Putin however has pushed Russia a different way, turning Russia (yet again) into a vassal of an Asian autocratic power. Such a wasted opportunity. Oh well.”
Which is of course just McFaul’s way of saying, “Russia was supposed to be our vassal, not China’s!”
Really all this fuss is nothing other than the emergence of a multipolar world crashing headlong into the imperial doctrine that US unipolar hegemony must be maintained at all cost. If not for that last bit the US empire ceasing to singularly dominate the planet wouldn’t be much of a problem, but because there’s a zealous belief that all attempts to surpass the United States must be treated as enemy acts of aggression we’re now seeing world powers split into two increasingly hostile alliance groups with more and more talk of hot global conflict.
This is madness, and it needs to stop.
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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 for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. 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.
In response to questions he received during a press conference on Monday about Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin cementing a “new era” in strategic partnership between China and Russia, the White House National Security Council’s John Kirby made no fewer than seven assertions that the US is the “leader” of the world.
“The two countries have grown closer. But they are both countries that chafe and bristle at U.S. leadership around the world.”
“And in China’s case in particular, they certainly would like to challenge U.S. leadership around the world.“
“But these are not two countries that have, you know, decades-long experience working together and full trust and confidence. It’s a burgeoning of late based on America’s increasing leadership around the world and trying to check that.”
“Peter, these are two countries that have long chafed, as I said to Jeff — long chafed at U.S. leadership around the world and the network of alliances and partnerships that we have.”
“And we work on those relationships one at a time, because every country on the continent is different, has different needs and different expectations of American leadership.”
“That’s the power of American convening leadership. And you don’t see that power out of either Russia or China.”
“But one of the reasons why you’re seeing that tightening relationship is because they recognize that they don’t have that strong foundation of international support for what they’re trying to do, which is basically challenge American leadership around the world.”
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John Kirby really wants everyone to know that America is in charge of the world. This is from one single press conference. pic.twitter.com/HeE9uGEwrW
The illusory truth effect is a cognitive bias which causes people to mistake something they have heard many times for an established fact, because the way the human brain receives and interprets information tends to draw little or no distinction between repetition and truth. Propagandists and empire managers often take advantage of this glitch in our wetware, which is what’s happening when you see them repeating key phrases over and over again that they want people to believe.
We saw another repetition of this line recently at an online conference hosted by the US Chamber of Commerce, in which the US ambassador to China asserted that Beijing must accept the US as the “leader” of the region China happens to occupy.
US empire managers are of course getting very assertive about the narrative that they are the world’s “leader” because that self-appointed “leadership” is being challenged by China, and the nations which support it with increasing openness like Russia. Most of the major international news stories of our day are either directly or indirectly related to this dynamic, wherein the US is struggling to secure unipolar planetary domination by thwarting China’s rise and undermining its partners.
The message they’re putting out is, “This is our world. We’re in charge. Anyone who claims otherwise is freakish and abnormal, and must be opposed.”
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US Ambassador To China: "We're The Leader" Of The Indo-Pacific
The way US empire managers talk about "leading" ostensibly sovereign states with ostensibly independent governments shows you they really do think they own the world.https://t.co/obSehF6xZ1
Why do they say the US is the “leader” of the world instead of its “ruler”, anyway? I’m unclear on the difference as practically applied. Is it meant to give us the impression that the US rules the world by democratic vote? That this is something the rest of the world consented to? Because I sure as hell don’t remember voting for it, and we’ve all seen what happens to governments which don’t comply with US “leadership”.
I’m not one of those who believe a multipolar world will be a wonderful thing, I just recognize that it beats the hell out of the alternative, that being increasingly reckless nuclear brinkmanship to maintain global control. The US has been in charge long enough to make it clear that the world order it dominates can only be maintained by nonstop violence and aggression, with more and more of that violence and aggression being directed toward major nuclear-armed powers. The facts are in and the case is closed: US unipolar hegemony is unsustainable.
The problem is that the US empire itself does not know this. This horrifying trajectory we’re on toward an Atomic Age world war is the result of the empire’s doctrine that it must maintain unipolar control at all costs crashing into the rise of a multipolar world order.
It doesn’t need to be this way. There’s no valid reason why the US needs to remain in charge of the world and can’t just let different people in different regions sort out their own affairs like they always did before. There’s no valid reason why governments need to be brandishing armageddon weapons at each other instead of collaborating peacefully in the interest of all humankind. We’re being pushed toward disaster to preserve “American leadership around the world,” and I for one do not consent to this.
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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 for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. 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.
The idea of a political coalition that mixes self-identified communists with neo-Nazis may seem implausible at first. However, a February 19 rally in Washington, D.C., branded as an effort to “Rage Against the War Machine,” brought together dissident parts of the left and the right into common opposition to the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) role in Russia’s war on Ukraine.
On 10 March, Canada’s National Post headlined “Regime change in Moscow ‘definitely’ the goal, Joly says,” and reported that “Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly raises the possibility of regime change in Moscow. … ‘The goal is definitely to do that, is to weaken Russia’s ability to launch very difficult attacks against Ukraine. We want also to make sure that Putin and his enablers are held to account,’ she said. ‘I always make a difference between the regime and the people of a given country, which is fundamental.’”
On 26 March 2022, Bloomberg News bannered “Joe Biden Calls for Regime Change in Moscow as He Likens Invasion to Ww2 Horrors,” and reported that, “Joe Biden directly appealed to the Russian people with comparisons between the invasion of Ukraine and the horrors of the Second World War as he called for Vladimir Putin to go. ‘For God’s sake this man cannot remain in power,’ the US president said, calling for regime change in Moscow during a speech from Poland on Saturday. He told Russians they are not ‘our enemy’.”
Contrary to U.S.-and-allied propagandists, that war in Ukraine wasn’t started on 24 February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, but back in February 2014 when U.S. President Barack Obama’s Administration had started by no later than June of 2011 to plan, and by no later than 1 March 2013 inside the U.S.’s Ukrainian Embassy to execute the plan, and then on 20 February 2014 to culminate the U.S. coup that overthrew and replaced Ukraine’s democratically elected neutralist President, and replaced him and his Government with the U.S. selected leaders of the new, and rabidly Russia-hating, U.S.-controlled, Ukrainian regime.
And, now, on 17 March 2023, NBC News headlines “International Criminal Court issues arrest warrant for Putin over alleged Ukraine war crimes” and reports that the U.S.-and-allied regimes are starting a case in the International Criminal Court — which has no jurisdiction over Russia and over Ukraine and over the United States, all three of which nations refused to ratify and therefore are not subject to that Court’s jurisdiction (since it’s not a “Universal” court like the U.N.’s International Court of Justice is) — initiating this purely propaganda case against Russia. Why did they not do that against America and the UK, when those regimes invaded and destroyed Iraq on the basis only of lies (which Russia certainly did not do in the case of the now U.S.-controlled Ukraine)?
Wikipedia makes this elementary fact about that Court quite clear, by saying:
It lacks universal territorial jurisdiction and may only investigate and prosecute crimes committed within member states, crimes committed by nationals of member states, or crimes in situations referred to the Court by the United Nations Security Council.
The U.S. and its allies are bringing this case as a propaganda-vehicle, but the Court itself, by ‘investigating’ this case that falls outside its jurisdiction, is destroying whatever pitiful international credibility that it had. Any court that ever serves a purely-propaganda function cannot ever again be taken seriously by any serious person. It is groveling to someone. It is simply embarrassing itself. The U.S. and its allies are contemptuous not only of the public but of this Court, to do this.
Furthermore: the U.S.-and-allied allegations that regime-change is being sought only against a country’s leadership, and not against the country’s people, is ludicrous, because those aggressor-countries’ long histories of imposed regime-changes against Governments they wanted to topple — such as Chile, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and all the rest — have always been from bad to worse against the targeted countries’ publics. Moreover, the U.S. regime has repeatedly made explicitly clear that, though all of the devastation that its invasion and continued occupation and massive thefts from Syria have brought hell upon its people, the U.S. Government absolutely refuses to allow any reconstruction to occur in Syria unless the U.S. is controlling that country.
On day two of DSEI Japan the main conference agenda focussed on lessons that can be learned from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In a discussion chaired by Koichi Isobe, Former Commander of Eastern Army, Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, an analysis of the Russo-Ukrainian war and how future conflicts could be avoided featured prominently. The […]
Before the MH17 passenger plane was shot down over the civil-war zone in Ukraine on 17 July 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama needed to persuade 9 EU countries that were opposed to adding more sanctions against Russia — needed to force them to approve adding those sanctions. He needed to supply them with ‘evidence’ that Russia was doing heinous things in Ukraine’s civil war. On 15 July 2014, Russia’s RT headlined “9 EU countries ready to block economic sanctions against Russia,” and reported that:
France, Germany, and Italy are among EU members who don’t want to follow the US lead and impose trade sanctions on Russia. US sanctions are seen as a push to promote its own multibillion free-trade pact with Europe.
“France, Germany, Luxembourg, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, Slovenia, and EU President Italy see no reason in the current environment for the introduction of sectorial trade and economic sanctions against Russia and at the summit, will block the measure,” a diplomatic source told ITAR-TASS.
In order for a new wave of sanctions to pass, all 28 EU members must unanimously vote in favor. EU ministers plan to discuss new sanctions against Russia at their summit in Brussels on Wednesday, July 16. Even if only one country vetoed, sanctions would not be imposed. With heavyweights like France and Germany opposed to more sanctions the measure will likely again be stalled, the source said.
After the plane was shot down, America, UK, and Ukraine immediately said that Russia and Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine did it, and then, within just a few weeks, all 9 of the EU hold-outs switched to approve the added anti-Russian sanctions that Obama wanted.
On 5 March 2023, the independent investigative journalist Kit Klarenberg headlined “Meet the British intelligence-linked firm that warped MH17 news coverage,” and he reported how coordinated and pre-planned by British intelligence (which worked hand-in-glove with both Ukrainian and American Governments on this) the MH17 operation had been set up not just to shoot down the plane but to be backed up with faked ‘evidence’ that it had been done by Russia. (In his report, he uses undefined the acronym “JIT”: that refers to the official “Joint Investigative Team” on the downing of MH17.)
On 7 October 2019, I had already headlined “Update on the MH17 case” and documented that Netherland’s Government had signed an “8 August 2014 agreement [never made public] with Ukraine, to find Ukraine not to have perpetrated the downing. But the families [of the 196 Dutch who had been murdered by the shoot-down] don’t know this,” and the Dutch court that was hearing the MH17 case refused to consider any other evidence, especially not from Russia, and refused to consider those families’ urgings for that court to consider any evidence that was being offered on the case — including from Russia, which the Dutch Government pre-emptively was alleging had done the shoot-down. That secret agreement was among the four members of the “Joint Investigative Team,” all four of which were ‘allies’ (vassal-nations) of the U.S. Government: “Netherlands, Ukraine, Belgium, and Australia.” They all agreed that the case would be tried in the Netherlands, because 196 of the 298 corpses came from there. My article links down to the evidence that Russia was wanting to present but was barred from presenting, and it also links down to evidence from the Government of Malaysia and the black boxes it had, and the MH17 pilots’ corpses that Malaysia had, all of which was likewise clear that the MH17 was shot down not by any BUK missile from Russia, but instead by a Ukrainian air force warplane that fired straight at the pilot, whose corpse was riddled with bullets. The Ukrainian warplane pilot, from whose plane those bullets were being fired, was under the command of the Ukrainian government that Obama had installed. In other words: Obama was the Commander-in-Chief of the entire operation. And it obtained its objective: on 31 July 2014, the 9 recalcitrant EU members all switched to approve the new sanctions against Russia.
On Sept. 26, 2022, a series of explosions rocked the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Denmark. Danish and Swedish authorities quickly determined that the damage done to the pipelines was not caused by earthquakes or other seismic activity, but by “blasts.” The pipelines were a crucial part of Europe’s energy infrastructure, delivering billions of cubic meters of gas from Russia. Over 500,000 tons of methane, a greenhouse gas 80x more damaging for the climate than carbon dioxide, were released from the explosions in the largest ever recorded single methane leak in human history.
The question of how the Nord Stream leaks occurred—and who is responsible—went unanswered for months. The US and NATO have both described the events as acts of sabotage, and the Russian government has pointed the finger at the US. In Feb., veteran journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell report detailing how President Joe Biden ordered the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines. The White House swiftly denounced Hersh’s report as “utterly false,” and ridicule soon followed in the corporate media. Seymour Hersh joins The Chris Hedges Report to explain his report, and why corporate media and the US government are so intent on dismissing him.
Production: Adam Coley, David Hebden, Cameron Granadino Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
Chris Hedges: On Monday, Sept. 26, 2022, a series of underwater explosions blew huge holes into the Nord Stream I and II, two pairs of pipelines constructed to carry Russian natural gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea. These four pipelines, steel reinforced concrete cables built to withstand the direct impact of the anchor of an aircraft carrier, were destroyed in a clandestine act of sabotage, according to an investigation by Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh.
The pair of Nord Stream I pipelines carried Russian gas to Germany until Moscow cut off supplies at the end of August 2022. The pair of Nord Stream II pipelines, which would’ve doubled the amount of gas that would be available to Germany and Western Europe, were never operational, as Germany suspended its certification process shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. White House spokesperson Adrian Watson called Hersh’s report, “false and complete fiction.” CIA spokesperson, Tammy Thorpe, said, “This claim is completely and utterly false.”
Denials by US officials of covert operations, of course, are routine. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, for example, denied any US involvement in the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, assuring the American people that the invasion was not “staged from American soil.” When Seymour Hersh in 2004 published the first stories about the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, a Pentagon spokesperson called his reporting “a tapestry of nonsense”, adding that Hersh was a guy who “threw a lot of crap against the wall and expects someone to peel off what’s real.”
Despite the denials, the United States has long expressed hostility to the pipelines. It worked to prevent the completion of the pipelines and imposed illegal sanctions on enterprises engaged in its construction. President Biden on Feb. 7, 2022, prior to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia stated, “If Russia invades, there will be no longer a Nord Stream II. We will bring an end to it.”
During a Senate hearing, Victoria Nuland, undersecretary of state for political affairs, was asked by Senator Ted Cruz whether his legislation aimed at sanctioning the Nord Stream II gas pipeline, which was voted down in January of 2022, could have stopped the war. “Like you, I am, and I think the administration is very gratified to know that Nord Stream II is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea,” Nuland said.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken described the destruction of the pipelines as a “tremendous opportunity, which would enable EU countries to become less dependent on Russian energy.” The New York Times reported in December that Russia had begun expensive repairs on the pipelines, raising questions about Washington’s claim that Russia had bombed its own infrastructure. These explosions are not insignificant acts. They are acts of war. They expose not only the collapse of the rule of law, but the lack of oversight by Congress.
I covered the mining of Nicaragua’s Harbors in 1983 by the Reagan administration as a reporter in Central America. The mining was designed to cripple the economy in Nicaragua and boost the fortunes of the US-backed contra rebels seeking to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The mining backfired. It sparked outrage around the globe and saw Congress cut off funding for the contras a year later. The International Court of Justice in 1986 ruled against the United States over its mining of the harbors.
Hersh’s revelations should have led to a similar condemnation by Congress and an internal investigation into illegal activities by the CIA and the Pentagon. It should have prompted news organizations to dig deeper into a scandal, a flagrant violation of the UN Charter and international treaties. It should have prompted a national debate about the war in Ukraine and the steady escalation of our involvement, one that could lead to a direct confrontation with Russia and possibly nuclear war.
Joining me to discuss his latest investigative piece is Seymour Hersh, one of our most important and fearless investigative reporters who, among many groundbreaking stories, exposed the US Army’s 1969 Mỹ Lai Massacre and coverup, the Watergate scandal, the secret bombing of Cambodia, the torture by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib of Iraqi prisoners, and the false narrative told by the US government about the events surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden.
So Sy, let’s talk about why the US destroyed the pipelines, and in your story you write that they began preparing the destruction of the pipelines two months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And then if you can also explain why they saw the pipelines as a threat.
Seymour Hersh: Well, you’re getting to the core of it, and actually if you wonder why people on the inside might have talked to me about this, it’s because of their disillusionment with what the Obama administration did. The initial plan was the initial idea of a covert team, the set-up to look at the… The initial team was set up only to give options, and that was before Christmas of 2021. We were three months away, or two and a half months away from the invasion. But the Russian, Putin, et cetera, was already moving forces into Belarus. So something was on, and the idea was Jake Sullivan convened a group of the usual: CIA, NSA State Department, Treasury Department, joint chiefs of staff, a small group meeting at a very secret place they have in the executive office building. And I did mention specifics there because I wanted people to know that I knew specifics, because I knew there would be resistance to the story I was writing, which I didn’t learn about till after the bombing took place last September.
At that time, it was just a question of the word of art. The language was very specific. They were told to discuss kinetic or… The way it was actually put was we want reversible and irreversible options. That was the literal, the artful language used and the reversible options would be more sanctions, et cetera, et cetera. And ask Cuba about sanctions. They’ve been sanctioned since ’61. Yeah. And the sanctions as they didn’t work out in Russia too, the current one. And the irreversible would be something kinetic. So within a couple of weeks it was clear the people who advocated for us won the game and they were thinking of military options, and they had all sorts of crazy options. We had learned in the Vietnam War, we mined Haiphong Harbor by dropping mines from a bomb with timers on them from airplanes. It’s amazing, the state of art of mine warfare has grown up enormously.
And so the option was to blow up the pipeline. That’s the one option you can give. And they told the White House, I would guess, I don’t know specifics, but certainly by mid-January they were saying, okay, it’s possible, because people there knew of the capability. We had a very superior school down in the panhandle of Florida, somewhere near something called Panama City. There was a big Navy school for divers, and navy divers, not SEALS. They were navy trained divers. And they had been skilled in the art of blowing up an oil rig. We might not like the good and the bad, they could also clear harbors. But they were experts, and we knew we had the experts. A good bomb could mine anything, even a pipeline. But how to do it wasn’t clear.
But they told the White House in January they had made a connection with Norway. The Norwegian Navy goes back to the Vietnam War with us, really. I’ve written about that, as you probably know. They go back to the provocation that led to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that led to this whole horrible war. There’s an analogy. I’m writing about it because we’re in an analogous situation with Lydon Johnson having the right by lying and doing something deceitful, pretending that North Vietnam had attacked that American destroyer, which it had not, and put us into a war that, as we like to say, killed between two and three Vietnamese, as if between one million or two million isn’t such a big deal. Anyway, whatever racist intonation you want to give it, it’s there.
And in this case, they came up with an option. It was all a terribly secret program that they were doing, they were working with the Norwegians, that’s never been made public. And until actually, as I mentioned, I wrote about it in another [subsequent] piece and the extent to which Norway was in our pocket on this stuff. And so –
Chris Hedges: Let me ask why –
Seymour Hersh: Let me just finish the thought. The issue is, initially it was just going to be a threat, that Putin and the hostility from Putin had been growing with America. Americans respond to presidents yipping and yapping about a bad guy, and Putin was a dead letter man in America right now. Right now you can’t talk about him in any rational way. But the question was, once they told the White House that both the president and the undersecretary for political affairs… Whatever her name is.
Chris Hedges: Victoria Nuland.
Seymour Hersh: Victoria Nuland, whose husband is one of the original –
Chris Hedges: Robert Kagan.
Seymour Hersh: Yeah, Kagan, who’s one of the guys that thought the solution to Al-Qaeda bombing us in the 9/11 was radical hating Saddam. Anyway, whatever. The worst mistake probably made in modern history, even worse, probably, in the long-term, maybe worse than Vietnam because of the consequences that we still are looking at.
Anyway, the only point was that their idea was to construct a mechanism to put Putin back down. We’re going to destroy the second pipeline. The first pipeline, there are two. The first one which went into business in 9/11 [sic] supplying Europe with gas, cheap gas, a lot of it, was cut back, was stopped by Putin himself in 2021 or ’20 just because of the language we were using.
The second one was stopped by us. It was the new pipeline, Nord Stream II. It had been finished in 2020 or ’21 and had been sanctioned by Germany. So we had a pipeline that could have been opened by the Germans but had been sanctioned. And so Biden gives the order to bomb it, and it’s destroyed on September the 26th, months after the… And these guys had, I don’t know whether they had just backed off when he, I don’t know whether they had to go back and put everything online, but they thought it was a dead letter issue. So he does it, and on his command – That’s what people in the CI do, they respond to the crown and not to the Constitution, something I mentioned in the first story – And with a sense of doom, and he blew it up.
And so I’ve done a lot of thinking, a lot of reporting on what was going on in late September that would’ve changed the equation. By blowing up the German pipeline, he was saying there’s no natural gas or oil in West Europe. And there’s been a constant worry going back to the Kennedy days about Russia and their great reservoir of national gas and oil, weaponizing gas to maintain good relationships with Germany. We never liked that. We never liked the fact that Germany and Western Europe were so dependent on Russian fuel.
That always bothered us, particularly Cheney. Cheney worried about it. Condoleezza Rice spoke often about it in the Bush Cheney years, Biden, when he was vice president, chaired a committee that continued – This is not a new idea, trying to remove the… It’s not a new idea to remove this link that would give the Russians some power inside Europe. That was always a nagging issue for us in the Cold War, the world of containment and this whole facade of containment that we think has worked but has not. Anyway, that’s another story.
And so what happened is, and the best I can get, and the people I talk to, obviously I’m longer tooth here in Washington and so I know a lot of people, and in the whole intelligence picture I’m seeing, particularly by late September, is so different than what’s been written in The Times, The Washington Times and The Washington Post. It’s like it’s another world. They’re so dependent on the paper, on briefings from, I guess from the Biden people. I don’t know where they’re getting the stuff they publish.
But by late September, there had been a wonderful alleged victory when the Russians retreated and the Ukrainians ran across dozens of miles of territory. But I will tell you that by late September, at the best, it was going to be a very dark stalemate with no victory possible and Zelenskyy not willing to negotiate. He had backed off and he was in his own little world of total corruption, the corruption of Ukraine. I mean, it’s so bad that the worry we’ve had in the community is that he was in trouble with the generals because he was taking too much of the swag, his cut was too big. I’m serious. So I’m in that level of information that is really good, and I know it’s real, and meanwhile the papers are talking about whatever they’re talking about, but sometimes there’s a hint of darkness.
So in September, I think I will give you what I believe is the rationale for what he did, which is he wanted to prevent Germany, which has always, right now, there was, in case you care, there were two large marches in Berlin last weekend. One, the police said 15,000 or 13,000, And the newspaper people and the people running the protest said it was much closer than 50,000. Tremendous amount against the war, not about the pipeline, against giving more to this war because of the danger it posed. They did a march on Saturday, and Sunday they went to the largest American base near Berlin, Manheim, and surrounded it, and also protested. And apparently in some embassy, I don’t remember whether it was ours or not, they had a destroyed Russian tank on display, and they took down with the display and they put flowers and peace signs on it over that weekend. Not a word in the Western press, not a word in The New York Times. It was a big story in the media in Europe, and certainly even London had good stories on it. Not a word here. It’s like there’s some sort of nimbus, a dark cloud over us.
Anyway, so I think the best guess you have – And I would guess 90% this is good – Is that Biden [inaudible] frightened, that if he saw long war coming, Germany, which was the reluctant to re-arm after World War II, after all, they spent a decade murdering, raping, and killing in Western Europe, among other places, and they’re allies now, they’re all in NATO. So I think what he did is he told NATO and he told Western Europe and he told Germany, we no longer have your back. We’ve always had your back. We no longer have it. You can’t count on us anymore, because this president thinks his war in Ukraine is more important than giving you, the German government, the ability, not this winter, but next winter is going to be a tough one, the ability to keep the factories going and people warm.
Now, right now in Germany, the price of electricity is still rational, and the government is subsidizing up to 20%, in some places more, so people that, particularly in larger cities and the corporations, but the largest corporation and the chemical company in the world just cut back production. It’s been talking to China about moving some facilities there because they can’t predict. They don’t have a predictor. The gas that Russia was pumping in Nord Stream I was cheap and plentiful, and so much that the German corporations that handled the gas were selling it downstream and making a profit, which Russia did care not.
The pipeline Nord Stream I, which was such a boon to the European economy, was owned 51% by Gazprom, oligarchs who kicked back a great deal of money to Russia. To give you some idea how much money that was being produced for Russia and for gas being one, one year, $45 billion was funneled into the Russian economy by Gazprom. 49% of it, the company, was owned by – We’re talking about stockholders – Was owned by four European countries that sold the cheap gas downstream.
So it was a big operation, and they lost Nord Stream I, Nord Stream II was going to pick it back up. So that Biden did this, what some people call an act of war – At least the people involved think it was an act of war, who did the planning for it – Because he no longer trusted West Europe to support him and his venture in Ukraine, which I think the only thing he can think is that presidents in wars always are popular. A war is sustained presidents.
We’ve seen that historically that they go… Bill Clinton came into office with one, don’t tell, don’t… With the attitude allowing gays in the military, there was tremendous resistance and the first couple of months were just a disaster. He probably should have fired some of the members of the joint chief who were openly critical of him. But he didn’t do that. He waffled. But in May, I think it was, he authorized the bombing of Baghdad. The first time the Americans have ever bombed a major capital in the Middle East. And killed eight people, which I remember one official told me only eight. And I said to him, what if one of them was your… His son played on a ball team with mine. That’s how I knew Sandy Berger. Sandy was deputy national security [adviser].
I came in there to do a story about what they did, and he said, what are you worrying about? They’re only eight. And I said, one of them was your son that played third base with my kid, my kid’s baseball team. And he said, get out of this office. Literally. No Republican ever did that to me, even in the Bush, even with Clinton, in the days of Watergate, nobody. There’s always a manner of politeness. He said, get out of my office, somebody I’d known for 20 years.
And so Clinton does the bombing, and the next day was a Saturday, and on Sunday I’m watching, he goes to church, and he’s followed by cameras going to church. It was his best day in the White House. He’d actually bombed and killed people, and that was his best day. And I remember that stuck in my mind forever. So that’s where we’re at with this presidency we have right now, the best day, he thinks it’s going to come when he wins in whatever his fantasy is about Ukraine. It is terrifying.
Chris Hedges: But he’s losing the war. They’re losing the war, the Russians.
Seymour Hersh: Well, I don’t know if… I think if you watch The Times and Post like I do, I think they’re beginning to back off, but they still run nothing. I love the stories about Russians raping and brutality. Is there an army that doesn’t rape and brutalize? Are you kidding? What happens when a Russian soldier is captured by the Ukrainians? They’re given blankets and hot coffee?
Chris Hedges: Well, or those, the Ukrainians argue, are collaborators. What happens to them?
Seymour Hersh: Well, you’re talking about that famous story about that first village.
Chris Hedges: Yeah.
Seymour Hersh: Bucha. And where the reporters were taken by… They never mentioned that they were taken by representatives of the Ukrainian government to this village. Yes. My understanding – I haven’t written this because I follow the war, but I haven’t been writing about it – During the COVID days, I’ve been doing a big project on containment going back to China in ’54. It’s fascinating how dumb we are and have been all along with our anti-communist stuff. But anyway, I’m back in Vietnam too a lot. But their armbands, they were just hell. They put armbands around certain people. And there was a lot of reporting in the European press, not here, that many of the people who were executed so badly had been accused of being Russian supporters or collaborators by the Ukrainians.
So they were killed, and not necessarily by the retreating Russian troops. But I assure you there are abuses by troops everywhere. I mean, rapists, that’s one of the virtues of being a soldier in every war. Don’t think we’re any better than anybody else. We know we’re not. I mean, Mỹ Lai told me [sic] that I went light on the sex stuff at Mỹ Lai. When I wrote my stories, I didn’t want every South Vietnamese soldier to wake up after reading what really happened and getting his revolver and going hunting down that American soldier. I was worried about that. The war was still on. Soldiers do awful things.
Chris Hedges: Yeah, yeah, I know. And both sides lie like they breathe. I want to ask about the Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center, which you mentioned, because, as you said, it’s not part of America’s special operations command. But it was selected for a reason, not solely because of its expertise, but because, as you write in your story, it allowed the administration not to brief Congress.
Seymour Hersh: Well, when you’re working with the CIA and the NSA on secret operations, there is a law. The CIA in particular has to do a finding that has to be presented to Congress. Basically it’s to a clerk on a subcommittee of appropriations that only has four members on it. I mean, it’s still a very contained operation, but it has to be briefed. And you also have to brief the Gang of Eight, which is what they call the House and Senate leaders of both parties and the House and Senate members of the Intelligence Committee. And there hasn’t been any collaboration or any good feelings between the two of them since Trump got in. I mean, are you kidding? And would you think about if you’re Biden and you want to run a down and dirty program, do you want to brief Speaker McCarthy about it? I don’t think so.
But whatever the case is, once the reason they pick the divers who are skilled, it’s a school. You pick people that have been trained by them. By the way, the whole trick of an operation like this is very few. You only needed two divers, but you had to pick good ones who not necessarily were at the school, but they’ve been trained by the school and have been in the field doing good and bad, as I wrote. Anyway, once you don’t go to the Navy Seals because they’re in the special operations command, and that requires a finding. So look, this is all just word games, because I wrote a lot for The New Yorker after, when Bush and Cheney were in running ops, they never briefed anything to the Congress. They just said, screw this law, who cares?
But under Biden, it was very convenient to say, once Biden spoke out about the operation and once you only had people there who were from the Navy doing the diving, not SEALS. And once you actually had, even if somebody you actually had, you hadn’t told the joint chiefs much about this because they have to respect certain laws, you can decide it’s no longer a covert operation, it’s now a classified operation. And under rulings they have, the CIA can bring in an army unit, a military unit into an operation that’s classified without briefing Congress. That’s just all games and words. But that is so, that’s what they did. In a way, Biden’s shooting off his mouth, Biden in February, after they gave him a briefing, went public and was asked about if he was trying to stop Russia. We can stop Nord Stream II. We know we can, and we will when we can, that kind of language was used. By the way, not one reporter has asked the White House about that since those early expressions, not one reporter. They just don’t do it.
And it was interesting to me that four days – I didn’t know anything about this then, I was just following it – Four days after the Sept. 26 bombing, which I do think was aimed at keeping Europe away from being tied to Russia because of this long-standing worry about the Russian “weaponization” is the word we used. Four days later, Jake Sullivan, who had convened the initial meeting, had a news conference. He was asked, not right away, I was amazed, not till 11 minutes – I looked at the tape – Was he asked about the bombing under the sea, and he said, yes. He said… I don’t know what they’re feeding the press corps today, but the question was asked in such a way, do you think Russians did it? What?
As somebody said to me about the story I wrote, a friend of mine that’s much smarter than I am. Given that Nuland and Biden had both, in January and February, talked about the possibility of doing it, once they learned it was possible from the secret world, which was really upsetting to the guys in the secret world doing it. Once they said that, anyway, you’d think somebody would ask that question. But instead the first question asked was, do you think the Russians did it? And Sullivan, who had convened the meeting knowing exactly what happened, his answer was, I love this. He said, well, it’s like that, because they’re immediately accusing us and denying. So that seems to be the way the Russians operate. But I will tell you, the Danes and the Swedes are doing an investigation and I said, let’s wait and see until it happens.
So a month later, the Danes and Swedes, Oct. 16, I think, I didn’t even mention this in the article. It’s too stupid to be believed. They announced that they just studied the event for weeks and weeks, and they concluded there was indeed an underwater explosion [Chris laughs]. That was their study. And so here’s the question I’ve asked. Here’s the question that the next time there’s a news conference I asked, please, please, some reporter ask this question: Well, Mr. President, you’re the president and you have the right, absolute right to demand, it’s called, there’s a two, the word of Hartford that skips my mind. He can make a request, he can ask the head of intelligence, the Office of National Intelligence has an intelligence. They’re the top dogs. It’s called The Head of National Intelligence runs all the community, and he can ask them, he can compel him to do a study of what happened and who did the bombing.
And the CIA has an office called the Directorate of Intelligence along with Operations and Science & Technology, which produces a lot of good stuff. There are a lot of bright guys working there. You can ask them to do a study. And if the CIA, when it has people in the field like they did in Norway as a team, it used to be called the C team. It’s all very secret. I’m sure they change everything every week. But there is a team there that does the monitoring. If we have a team abroad, they monitor local phone calls, everything, to make sure nobody’s figured out there’s something ongoing on a very high intense operation, make a study. He’s never asked anybody to do anything. Why don’t you ask if he’s at… Just ask. And the answer will be, of course they haven’t, because they know the answer. This is such a dumb lie they’re into, and they’re going to just lie the rest of the way, because why not?
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about the reaction. Let’s talk about the reaction, and in particular the reaction of news organizations. As you, when you and I worked at The Times, if somebody, Washington Post, broke a major story, we had to dig to find out whether we could match it. If we couldn’t match it, we had to acknowledge that The Post ran it. The Times hated doing that. But this reaction is frightening. I’m sure you find… I find it frightening, but I’ll let you take it from there. I mean, I find it kind of staggering.
Seymour Hersh: Well, the problem with… You’re right. In the early days… I’ll tell you something else we did when I was at The Times, everybody screws up a story. I screwed up a story about a certain ambassador during the Chile crisis, and he was a friend of the paper and Abe Rosenthal. The editor had visited him. He was the ambassador. Ed Corey was the ambassador to Ethiopia at the time. And he had been in Chile, and he had been involved in, there were two aspects to the Chilean operation we did to get at Allende. I mean, the idea that Allende’s death was a suicide is not possible for me to believe. We were after Allende, but there were two levels. There was a propaganda level that the ambassador ran, ranting about him and calling him out. And then there was this secret level of actually paying people to kill people that he was not cut in because he wasn’t trusted by the station because he was a motor mouth, Ed Corey.
And so as a reporter, when I wrote the story, the first story about Chile and the CIA involvement, and Kissinger was angry and all that stuff. He was involved. And there was a Senate committee led by Frank Church who later read, investigated another story I did, the church committee, after domestic spying, and he started, his committee put out a report, and I, like 50 other reporters, I was following the story, wrote a piece for The New York Times about the Senate Committee said this and that about this Chile stuff. And Corey, I mentioned, they had mentioned Corey as being involved in the actual more aggressively than just propaganda. And he, of course, went nuts about it. And even though I had done the same thing others did, he focused on me, and he was right. I later learned that he was cut out.
I later learned that he was cut out of anything involved with the killing stuff because they didn’t trust the ambassador, which happens. And so I was then working on a book on Kissinger, and it was ’81. I’d been out of the paper for a couple years, and I told Abe, well, you know what? We screwed this guy over on page one, even though I wrote the report, six other, eight other people did, but still I wrote it, and New York Times was The New York Times, and so we did a front page correction. I wrote a 3,000 word [story], not only correcting that he wasn’t in it, but describing why he wasn’t in it as a way to write another story about what really happened. And we put it on page one and the response of the peers was pretty much ignoring this exceptional thing, that I wrote a 3,000 word story saying I screwed up stuff, but there was a reason for it, which was made better.
Time magazine, they did a ridiculing piece, the 3,000 word oops, right? They’d run the same story I did earlier, a couple years earlier on the Senate committee. And so Abe Rosenthal said to me, I’ll never forget it, he said, I’m never going to show.. He used a vulgar word for rear end. He said, I’m never going to show my ass to those guys again. Screw them all. I’m done. No more corrections, if this is the way they behave. I spent a month doing it. I’m sure I got paid minimal money. It wasn’t about money. I wasn’t on the staff.
I saw that. You’re right. Even still then The Times covered things that they didn’t report that was of note, but I would say that’s disappeared totally, long before I wrote stuff. I mean, when I was doing stuff for The New Yorker after 9/11, I was doing a lot of stories because I have access all with unnamed sources, but of course The New Yorker knows the sources and the people – By the way, I’m working with New Yorker checkers right now, and an editor who was my editor on The London Review of Books, and I wrote a bunch of stuff for them – And so they stopped chasing stories back then in, I thought, after 9/11. I had a wonderful friend of mine that was on the paper call me and said, well, we all were called in on Sunday about this story, and we called everybody, we can’t match it, so we’re going to forget it.
I said, what? He said, I know, it’s crazy, but they’re not going to do it. So it’s just an old… Values change, and it changed then. Right now what they’re doing is they’re putting America in jeopardy. I mean, that’s a serious charge to make. The Times has a special obligation, its stature, and it still has the staff. The print circulation is way down, as you probably know, down to 330,000, it was 1.7 million. But they’re doing great. They have an online reading. I still get the paper. I’m old-fashioned. My wife’s been reading it online since it started because it’s easier for her. I still get the print, and I like to feel it, and I like to read it that way. But it’s got an obligation to.
The one fight I had with Rosenthal when I worked there that was never resolved wasn’t about the paper’s instinctive anti-communism. It was about the fact that they weren’t an American newspaper. None of this American exceptionalism. They’re an international newspaper and they shouldn’t cover things from the American point of view as they do. That was a big fight I had. Just an intellectual fight, that you’re making a mistake. You’re bigger than that. You got to start covering the story from a world point of view. And they didn’t. He thought I was nuts.
Chris Hedges: Well, I’m just going to stop there for a minute, but I mean, Abe Rosenthal, a very problematic figure. I mean, those were the glory days. It’s so diminished in terms of its integrity, its ethics, and the quality of its journalism, whether Jeff Gerth, of course, is a great piece. We did an interview with Jeff on the Russia-Trump saga, two years, four years of slogging what was salacious gossip as news, the Caliphate podcast, all that kind of stuff.
I want to thank the Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com. That was Sy Hersh, who you can also find at Substack.
The International Criminal Court on Friday issued international arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova for allegedly abducting Ukrainian children and transporting them to Russia.
The Hague-based ICC said that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that Putin and Lvova-Belova bear “individual criminal responsibility” for “the war crime of unlawful deportation” of Ukrainian children “from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”
ICC President Judge Piotr Hofmański said in a video statement announcing the warrant that “it is forbidden by international law for occupying powers to transfer civilians from the territory they live in to other territories. Children enjoy special protection under the Geneva Convention.”
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Ukrainian officials accuse Russian forces of taking around 14,000 children from Ukraine to Russia since Putin launched the invasion in February 2022.
“They change their citizenship, give them up for adoption under guardianship, commit sexual violence and other crimes,” Daria Herasymchuk, the commissioner for children’s rights and rehabilitation for Ukraine, toldEuronews.
According to an Associated Pressinvestigation published last month:
Russian law prohibits the adoption of foreign children without consent of the home country, which Ukraine has not given. But in May, Putin signed a decree making it easier for Russia to adopt and give citizenship to Ukrainian children without parental care—and harder for Ukraine and surviving relatives to win them back.
Russia also has prepared a register of suitable Russian families for Ukrainian children, and pays them for each child who gets citizenship—up to $1,000 for those with disabilities. It holds summer camps for Ukrainian orphans, offers “patriotic education” classes, and even runs a hotline to pair Russian families with children from Donbas.
Lvova-Belova has defended the deportations as “saving” lost or orphaned children.
The ICC warrants came one day after the United Nations’ Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine published a report detailing Russian war crimes against Ukrainians including “willful killings, attacks on civilians, unlawful confinement, torture, rape, and forced transfers and deportations of children.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The UK government have proposed a n £11bn defence spending boost. However, Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR) have stated that the hike will not provide security. Meanwhile, the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) have said that the figure is outrageous in a cost-of-living crisis.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced that the hike would come into play over the next five years. His aim is to take the UK’s percentage of GDP spent on defence higher, in order to align with NATO requirements.
However, critics wasted no time attacking the new plans. Pacifist group PPU said ammunition and submarines did nothing for those in poverty:
Much of the increase is expected to be spent on military equipment, all while millions struggle with the cost of living.
Climate change
PPU said that the news made Tory commitments on climate change look hollow:
while successive government security reviews have all listed climate change as a security priority, ministers have continued to ignore this and increasingly equate security with preparations for war.
PPU spokesperson Jonathon Maunder called for a “real budget for security”:
The increasingly visible effects of climate change act as a reminder that weapons cannot keep us safe. The Covid-19 vaccine response showed up us what can happen when people around the world work together for common aims and the climate emergency should be no different.
Defence budget
Scientist campaigners from SGR listed reasons why the new budget would not deliver security particularly, in respect to Russia and Ukraine. They pointed out that NATO already had a bigger military budget than Russia. Additionally, only a small part of the budget would be going to help Ukraine’s war against Russian occupation.
They also warned that current defence spending was at odds with the UK’s real needs. They said public services are breaking down, and real global security was about addressing climate change and poverty.
SGR director Dr Stuart Parkinson said:
In summary, the justifications for an increase in the UK’s military budget are weak – given the recent huge rises in funding for British armed forces, the lack of convincing military arguments, and the urgent, life-saving potential of alternative spending options in healthcare, overseas aid, and environmental protection.
Clearly, rather than play to NATO or our allies in the US, the UK needs to take a serious approach to war and insecurity. This requires a clear-headed approach to defence spending whilst addressing people’s actual day-to-day needs. Most importantly, we need an approach that doesn’t just hand money to arms firms.
On 24 February 2023, the Chinese Foreign Ministry released a twelve-point plan entitled ‘China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis’. This ‘peace plan’, as it has been called, is anchored in the concept of sovereignty, building upon the well-established principles of the United Nations Charter (1945) and the Ten Principles from the Bandung Conference of African and Asian states held in 1955. The plan was released two days after China’s senior diplomat Wang Yi visited Moscow, where he met with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Russia’s interest in the plan was confirmed by Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov shortly after the visit: ‘Any attempt to produce a plan that would put the [Ukraine] conflict on a peace track deserves attention. We are considering the plan of our Chinese friends with great attention’.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky welcomed the plan hours after it was made public, saying that he would like to meet China’s President Xi Jinping as soon as possible to discuss a potential peace process. France’s President Emmanuel Macron echoed this sentiment, saying that he would visit Beijing in early April. There are many interesting aspects of this plan, notably a call to end all hostilities near nuclear power plants and a pledge by China to help fund the reconstruction of Ukraine. But perhaps the most interesting feature is that a peace plan did not come from any country in the West, but from Beijing.
When I read ‘China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis’, I was reminded of ‘On the Pulse of Morning’, a poem published by Maya Angelou in 1993, the rubble of the Soviet Union before us, the terrible bombardment of Iraq by the United States still producing aftershocks, the tremors felt in Afghanistan and Bosnia. The title of this newsletter, ‘Birth Again the Dream of Global Peace and Mutual Respect’, sits at the heart of the poem. Angelou wrote alongside the rocks and the trees, those who outlive humans and watch us destroy the world. Two sections of the poem bear repeating:
Each of you, a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,
Clad in peace, and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the rock were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
Knew nothing.
The River sang and sings on.
…
History, despite its wrenching pain
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.
History cannot be forgotten, but it need not be repeated. That is the message of Angelou’s poem and the message of the study we released last week, Eight Contradictions of the Imperialist ‘Rules-Based Order’.
In October 2022, Cuba’s Centre for International Policy Research (CIPI) held its 7th Conference on Strategic Studies, which studied the shifts taking place in international relations, with an emphasis on the declining power of the Western states and the emergence of a new confidence in the developing world. There is no doubt that the United States and its allies continue to exercise immense power over the world through military force and control over financial systems. But with the economic rise of several developing countries, with China at their head, a qualitative change can be felt on the world stage. An example of this trend is the ongoing dispute amongst the G20 countries, many of which have refused to line up against Moscow despite pressure by the United States and its European allies to firmly condemn Russia for the war in Ukraine. This change in the geopolitical atmosphere requires precise analysis based on the facts.
To that end, our latest dossier, Sovereignty, Dignity, and Regionalism in the New International Order (March 2023), produced in collaboration with CIPI, brings together some of the thinking about the emergence of a new global dispensation that will follow the period of US hegemony. The text opens with a foreword by CIPI’s director, José R. Cabañas Rodríguez, who makes the point that the world is already at war, namely a war imposed on much of the world (including Cuba) by the United States and its allies through blockades and economic policies such as sanctions that strangle the possibilities for development. As Greece’s former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said, coups these days ‘do not need tanks. They achieve the same result with banks’.
The US is attempting to maintain its position of ‘single master’ through an aggressive military and diplomatic push both in Ukraine and Taiwan, unconcerned about the great destabilisation this has inflicted upon the world. This approach was reflected in US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin’s admission that ‘We want to see Russia weakened’ and in US House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul’s statement that ‘Ukraine today – it’s going to be Taiwan tomorrow’. It is a concern about this destabilisation and the declining fortunes of the West that has led most of the countries in the world to refuse to join efforts to isolate Russia.
As some of the larger developing countries, such as China, Brazil, India, Mexico, Indonesia, and South Africa, pivot away from reliance upon the United States and its Western allies, they have begun to discuss a new architecture for a new world order. What is quite clear is that most of these countries – despite great differences in the political traditions of their respective governments – now recognise that the United States ‘rules-based international order’ is no longer able to exercise the authority it once had. The actual movement of history shows that the world order is moving from one anchored by US hegemony to one that is far more regional in character. US policymakers, as part of their fearmongering, suggest that China wants to take over the world, along the grain of the ‘Thucydides Trap’ argument that when a new aspirant to hegemony appears on the scene, it tends to result in war between the emerging power and existing great power. However, this argument is not based on facts.
Rather than seek to generate additional poles of power – in the mould of the United States – and build a ‘multipolar’ world, developing countries are calling for a world order rooted in the UN Charter as well as strong regional trade and development systems. ‘This new internationalism can only be created – and a period of global Balkanisation avoided’, we write in our latest dossier, ‘by building upon a foundation of mutual respect and strength of regional trade systems, security organisations, and political formations’. Indicators of this new attitude are present in the discussions taking place in the Global South about the war in Ukraine and are reflected in the Chinese plan for peace.
Our dossier analyses at some length this moment of fragility for US power and its ‘rules-based international order’. We trace the revival of multilateralism and regionalism, which are key concepts of the emerging world order. The growth of regionalism is reflected in the creation of a host of vital regional bodies, from the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), alongside increasing regional trade (with the BRICS bloc being a kind of ‘regionalism plus’ for our period). Meanwhile, the emphasis on returning to international institutions for global decision-making, as evidenced by the formation of the Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter, for example, illustrates the reinvigorated desire for multilateralism.
The United States remains a powerful country, but it has not come to terms with the immense changes taking place in the world order. It must temper its belief in its ‘manifest destiny’ and recognise that it is nothing more than another country amongst the 193 members states of the United Nations. The great powers – including the United States – will either find ways to accommodate and cooperate for the common good, or they will all collapse together.
At the start of the pandemic, the head of the World Health Organisation, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, urged the countries of the world to be more collaborative and less confrontational, saying that ‘this is the time for solidarity, not stigma’ and repeating, in the years since, that nations must ‘work together across ideological divides to find common solutions to common problems’. These wise words must be heeded.
Sukhoi Su-35 (NATO reporting name: Flanker-E+) Gen. 4++ multi-role twin-engine supermaneuverable fighter jet took to the skies for the first time 15 years ago. Today, Su-35S, along with Su-30SM, makes the backbone of the Russian Air Force, and is also one of the core products of the Russian aviation exports. Su-35 also incorporates some Gen.5 […]
Fears of an escalation between nuclear superpowers Russia and the United States mounted Tuesday after a U.S. Air Force Reaper drone went down in international waters in the Black Sea during an encounter with a Russian fighter jet, with both sides giving varying accounts of the incident.
Two Russian Su-27 aircraft conducted an unsafe and unprofessional intercept with a U.S. Air Force intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance unmanned MQ-9 aircraft that was operating within international airspace over the Black Sea today. At approximately 7:03 am (CET), one of the Russian Su-27 aircraft struck the propeller of the MQ-9, causing U.S. forces to have to bring the MQ-9 down in international waters. Several times before the collision, the Su-27s dumped fuel on and flew in front of the MQ-9 in a reckless, environmentally unsound, and unprofessional manner. This incident demonstrates a lack of competence in addition to being unsafe and unprofessional.
“This incident follows a pattern of dangerous actions by Russian pilots while interacting with U.S. and allied aircraft over international airspace, including over the Black Sea,” EUCOM added. “These aggressive actions by Russian aircrew are dangerous and could lead to miscalculation and unintended escalation. “
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U.S. Air Force Gen. James B. Hecker said in a statement that “U.S. and allied aircraft will continue to operate in international airspace and we call on the Russians to conduct themselves professionally and safely.”
The Russian Ministry of Defense issued a statement on the incident claiming that the U.S. drone had its transponders turned off and denying that Russian aircraft came into contact with the MQ-9. The ministry said the U.S. aircraft “violated the boundaries” of an area demarcated by Moscow “for the purpose of conducting a special military operation”—an invasion—in Ukraine, and that the drone “went into uncontrolled flight with a loss of altitude and collided with the water surface” as “a result of sharp maneuvering.”
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An unnamed U.S. Air Force official toldThe War Zone that American officials do not believe the Russians deliberately tried to bring down the drone, but that the alleged collision “seems to be simple incompetence.”
War Zone reporters Howard Altman and Joseph Trevithick wrote that “today’s incident does, of course, come amid long-standing concerns about the potential for the conflict in Ukraine to spill out more broadly in the region.”
“Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, routinely issue nebulous threats to retaliate against the United States, other members of NATO, and other countries over military aid and other support for Ukraine,” the pair added. “How either side will react to the loss of the MQ-9 remains to be seen.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The legendary Daniel Ellsberg has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In a March 1 email to friends, Dan wrote, “I’m sorry to report to you that my doctors have given me three to six months to live … it might be more, or less.” He will turn 92 on April 7. Dan displayed uncommon courage in 1971 when he publicized the 7,000-page top-secret Pentagon Papers while working at the Rand Corporation.
The extraordinary March 10, 2023 announcement that China’s top diplomat, Mr. Wang Yi, helped broker a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran suggests that major powers can benefit from believing that, as Albert Camus once put it, “words are more powerful than munitions.”
This concept was also acknowledged by General Mark Milley, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff who said on January 20, 2023, that he believes Russia’s war in Ukraine will conclude with negotiations rather than on the battlefield. In November of 2022, asked about prospects for diplomacy in Ukraine, Milley noted that the early refusal to negotiate in World War One compounded human suffering and led to millions more casualties.
“So when there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved … seize the moment,” Milley told the Economic Club of New York.
Twenty years ago, in Baghdad, I shared quarters with Iraqis and internationals in a small hotel, the Al-Fanar, which had been home base for numerous Voices in the Wilderness delegations acting in open defiance of the economic sanctions against Iraq. U.S. government officials charged us as criminals for delivering medicines to Iraqi hospitals. In response, we told them we understood the penalties they threatened us with (twelve years in prison and a $1 million fine), but we couldn’t be governed by unjust laws primarily punishing children. And we invited government officials to join us. Instead, we were steadily joined by other peace groups longing to prevent a looming war.
In late January 2003, I still hoped war could be averted. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s report was imminent. If it declared that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction (WMD), U.S. allies might drop out of the attack plans, in spite of the massive military buildup we were witnessing on nightly television. Then came Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003, United Nations briefing, when he insisted that Iraq did indeed possess WMD. His presentation was eventually proven to be fraudulent on every count, but it tragically gave the United States enough credibility to proceed at full throttle with its “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign.
Beginning in mid-March 2003, the ghastly aerial attacks pounded Iraq day and night. In our hotel, parents and grandparents prayed to survive ear-splitting blasts and sickening thuds. A lively, engaging nine-year-old girl completely lost control over her bladder. Toddlers devised games to mimic the sounds of bombs and pretended to use small flashlights as guns.
Our team visited hospital wards where maimed children moaned as they recovered from surgeries. I remember sitting on a bench outside of an emergency room. Next to me, a woman convulsed in sobs asking, “How will I tell him? What will I say?” She needed to tell her nephew, who was undergoing emergency surgery, that he had not only lost both his arms but also that she was now his only surviving relative. A U.S. bomb had hit Ali Abbas’s family as they shared a lunch outside their home. A surgeon later reported that he had already told Ali that they had amputated both of his arms. “But,” Ali had asked him, “will I always be this way?”
I returned to the Al-Fanar Hotel that evening feeling overwhelmed by anger and shame. Alone in my room, I pounded my pillow, tearfully murmuring, “Will we always be this way?”
Throughout the Forever Wars of the past two decades, U.S. elites in the military-industrial-Congressional-media complex have manifested an insatiable appetite for war. They seldom heed the wreckage they have left behind after “ending” a war of choice.
Following the 2003 “Shock and Awe” war in Iraq, Iraqi novelist Sinan Antoon created a main character, Jawad, in The Corpse Washer, who felt overwhelmed by the rising numbers of corpses for whom he must care.
“I felt as if we had been struck by an earthquake which had changed everything,” Jawad reflects. “For decades to come, we would be groping our way around in the rubble it left behind. In the past there were streams between Sunnis and Shi͑ites, or this group and that, which could be easily crossed or were invisible at times. Now, after the earthquake, the earth had all these fissures and the streams had become rivers. The rivers became torrents filled with blood, and whoever tried to cross drowned. The images of those on the other side of the river had been inflated and disfigured . . . concrete walls rose to seal the tragedy.”
“War is worse than an earthquake,” a surgeon, Saeed Abuhassan, told me during Israel’s 2008-2009 bombing of Gaza, called Operation Cast Lead. He pointed out that rescuers come from all over the world following an earthquake, but when wars are waged, governments send only more munitions, prolonging the agony.
He explained the effects of weapons that had maimed patients undergoing surgery in Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital as the bombs continued to fall. Dense inert metal explosives lop off people’s limbs in ways that surgeons can’t repair. White phosphorus bomb fragments, embedded subcutaneously in human flesh, continue to burn when exposed to oxygen, asphyxiating the surgeons trying to remove the sinister material.
“You know, the most important thing you can tell people in your country is that U.S. people paid for many of the weapons used to kill people in Gaza,” Abuhassan said. “And this also is why it’s worse than an earthquake.”
As the world enters the second year of war between Ukraine and Russia, some say it’s unconscionable for peace activists to clamor for a cease-fire and immediate negotiations. Is it more honorable to watch the pile-up of body bags, the funerals, the grave digging, the towns becoming uninhabitable, and the escalation that could lead to a world war or even a nuclear war?
U.S. mainstream media rarely engages with professor Noam Chomsky, whose wise and pragmatic analysis rests on indisputable facts. In June 2022, four months into the Russia-Ukraine war, Chomsky spoke of two options, one being a negotiated diplomatic settlement. “The other,” he said, “is just to drag it out and see how much everybody will suffer, how many Ukrainians will die, how much Russia will suffer, how many millions of people will starve to death in Asia and Africa, how much we’ll proceed toward heating the environment to the point where there will be no possibility for a livable human existence.”
UNICEF reports how months of escalating devastation and displacement affect Ukrainian children: “Children continue to be killed, wounded, and deeply traumatized by violence that has sparked displacement on a scale and speed not seen since World War II. Schools, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure on which they depend continue to be damaged or destroyed. Families have been separated and lives torn apart.”
Estimates of Russian and Ukrainian military casualties vary, but some have suggested that more than 200,000 soldiers on both sides have been killed or wounded.
Gearing up for a major offensive before the spring thaw, Russia’s government announced it would pay a bonus to troops that destroy weapons used by Ukrainian soldiers which were sent from abroad. The blood money bonus is chilling, but on an exponentially greater level, major weapons manufacturers have accrued a steady bonanza of “bonuses” since the war began.
In the last year alone, the United States sent $27.5 billion in military assistance to Ukraine, providing “armored vehicles, including Stryker armored personnel carriers, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, and High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled vehicles.” The package also included air defense support for Ukraine, night vision devices, and small arms ammunition.
Shortly after Western countries agreed to send sophisticated Abrams and Leopard tanks to Ukraine, an adviser to Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, Yuriy Sak, spoke confidently about getting F-16 fighter jets next. “They didn’t want to give us heavy artillery, then they did. They didn’t want to give us Himars systems, then they did. They didn’t want to give us tanks, now they’re giving us tanks. Apart from nuclear weapons, there is nothing left that we will not get,” he told Reuters.
Ukraine isn’t likely to get nuclear weapons, but the danger of nuclear war was clarified in a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists statement on January 24, which set the Doomsday Clock for 2023 to ninety seconds before the metaphorical “midnight.” The scientists warned that effects of the Russia-Ukraine war are not limited to an alarming increase in nuclear danger; they also undermine global efforts to combat climate change. “Countries dependent on Russian oil and gas have sought to diversify their supplies and suppliers,” the report notes, “leading to expanded investment in natural gas exactly when such investment should have been shrinking.”
Mary Robinson, the former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, says the Doomsday Clock sounds an alarm for all humanity. “We are on the brink of a precipice,” she said. “But our leaders are not acting at sufficient speed or scale to secure a peaceful and livable planet. From cutting carbon emissions to strengthening arms control treaties and investing in pandemic preparedness, we know what needs to be done. The science is clear, but the political will is lacking. This must change in 2023 if we are to avert catastrophe. We are facing multiple existential crises. Leaders need a crisis mindset.”
As do we all. The Doomsday Clock indicates we’re living on borrowed time. We needn’t “always be this way.”
Over the past decade, I was fortunate to be hosted in dozens of trips to Kabul, Afghanistan, by young Afghans who fervently believed that words could be stronger than weapons. They espoused a simple, pragmatic proverb: “Blood does not wash away blood.”
We owe to future generations every possible effort to renounce all war and protect the planet.
A Sweden-based research institute published a report Monday showing that the United States accounted for 40% of the world’s weapons exports in the years 2018-22, selling armaments to more than 100 countries while increasing its dominance of the global arms trade.
The report—entitled Trends in International Arms Transfers, 2022—was published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and listed the United States, Russia, France, China, and Germany as the world’s top five arms exporters from 2018-22. The five nations accounted for 76% of worldwide weapons exports during that period.
The five biggest arms importers over those five years were India, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Australia, and China.
“The United States has much room for improvement.”
The United States saw a 14% increase in arms exports over the previous five-year period analyzed by SIPRI. U.S. arms were delivered to 103 nations from 2018-22, with 41% going to the Middle East.
“Even as arms transfers have declined globally, those to Europe have risen sharply due to the tensions between Russia and most other European states,” Pieter Wezeman, senior researcher at the SIPRI Arms Transfers Program, said in a statement. “Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, European states want to import more arms, faster. Strategic competition also continues elsewhere: Arms imports to East Asia have increased and those to the Middle East remain at a high level.”
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According to the report, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine early last year “had only a limited impact on the total volume of arms transfers in 2018–22, but Ukraine did become a major importer of arms in 2022.”
Ukraine was the 14th-largest arms importer from 2018-22 and the third-biggest last year.
Wiliam Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote Monday that “the impacts of the global arms trade aren’t just about the volume of weapons delivered. The question is how those weapons are likely to be used, and the extent to which they promote stability versus fueling conflict or propping up repressive regimes with abysmal human rights records.”
“On this score the United States has much room for improvement,” he continued. “Transfers to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for use at the peak of their brutal war in Yemen, and sales to major human rights violators from the Philippines, Egypt, and Nigeria are a few examples of how U.S. arms deliveries can make the world a more dangerous place.”
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“There are a number of promising steps that Congress can take—as articulated by a new coalition, the Arms Sales Accountability Project—that would mandate closer scrutiny of U.S. sales,” Hartung asserted.
“There is also some useful language in the Biden administration’s new arms transfer policy directive, that, if implemented, would significantly rein in the most egregious sales,” he added. “Only time will tell if U.S. policy can be moved towards one based on arms sales restraint rather than arms sales promotion.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has had “devastating” consequences for children in residential institutions. Thousands have been transferred to occupied territories or to Russia, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Monday 13 March.
HRW’s Bill Van Esveld stated:
This brutal war has starkly shown the need to end the perils faced by children who were institutionalised.
Returning children who were illegally taken by Russian forces should be an international priority.
At least several thousand children have been transferred to Russia or occupied territories, the report said. HRW called for a “concerted international effort” to return forcibly deported children and urged Russia to publish information on their whereabouts.
Ukraine and human rights groups have spoke out against the forced transfer of thousands of children since the war began, with Russian families said to be fostering Ukrainian children.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week referred to the “kidnapping, forced adoption and re-education of Ukrainian children committed by Russia”, calling this “a war crime and a crime against humanity”.
In May 2022, Russia’s parliament changed its law, allowing authorities to change Ukrainian children’s nationality to Russian, and in turn the adoption of children by Russian families in Russia.
Ukraine’s institutionalised children
HRW said the war highlighted the urgent need for reform in Ukraine, which had over 105,000 children in institutions before the war: the largest number in Europe after Russia. Nearly half were children with disabilities.
Since 2005, the Ukrainian government has pledged to deinstitutionalise its children. It said that it would instead place them in family settings, but little was done. In fact, the number of children’s institutions actually grew. In 2015, there were 663 institutions, and this figure rose to 727 in 2022. 100 of those institutions – which housed over 32,000 children before 2022 – are now in territories under Russian occupation.
Many more children will be left orphaned or separated from their parents as a result of the war. HRW stated:
Children are being newly institutionalised, including children whose parents were killed and wounded, as well as whose parents experienced mental health crises due to the war.
HRW’s 55-page report also highlighted other problems. These include mental trauma to the displaced children, and neglect and inadequate care due to lack of caregivers. The report stated:
Many children in institutions had to shelter for weeks from bombardments in basements without electricity or running water, including children with disabilities.
A group of children from an institution in Mariupol did not speak for four days after they were evacuated to Lviv, in March 2022.
The UN should establish an inter-agency task force dedicated to identifying the whereabouts and ensuring the welfare and return of unaccompanied and separated children who were forcibly transferred within Ukraine or deported to Russia, including children who were illegally adopted and naturalised.
Ukraine’s children are just some of more than 400 million who live in countries where there is violent conflict. For as long as there is war, children will always be vulnerable to exploitation and trafficking. As nation states continue to use war to pursue power, children will always be the most strongly impacted victims.
As we pass the one-year anniversary of the Ukraine War, we are reminded of the pain and suffering of Ukrainian people whose country has been ravaged by war, Russian mothers whose sons will never return home, and all who have been affected deeply by the global food and energy crisis this war has engendered. While there is little room for optimism in the bleak picture, one possible silver lining is…
Writing festivals are often tired, stilted affairs, but the 38th Adelaide Writers’ Week did not promise to be that run-of-the-mill gathering of yawn-inducing, life draining sessions. For one thing, social media vultures and public relations experts, awaiting the next freely explosive remark or unguarded comment, were at hand to stir the pot and exhort cancel culture.
The fuss began with the festival organisers’ invitation of two Palestinian authors, Susan Abulhawa and Mohammed El-Kurd. Abulhawa was specifically targeted for critical comments on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, notably regarding NATO membership, and for being a mouthpiece of “Russian propaganda”, while El-Kurd has been singled out for social-media commentary on the Israeli state, calling it “sadistic”, “demonic” and “a death cult”.
Righteously, the South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas showed his less than worldly view on such festivals by insisting on boycotting their talks and presentations. Ever the vote-getting politician, there were those constituents at the Association of Ukrainians in South Australia who had been making noise, notably through their president, Frank Fursenko. “We are very concerned that [the festival organisers] are giving a platform to people who are known apologists for the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” insisted Fursenko.
Malinauskas even contemplated pulling government funding from the event, something he declared at his address opening Writers’ Week. (This was also the view of the South Australian opposition leader, David Speirs.) The premier, it should be noted, is less morally troubled when it comes to funding the LIV Golf tournament, backed by the obscurantist journalist-assassinating regime of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
At the very least, he made some concession to maturity: refusing “to listen to someone’s viewpoint” also involved surrendering “the opportunity to challenge it, much less change their mind.” But for all that Abulhawa’s presence at the Writers’ Week had to be “actively” questioned.
The Advertiser was less reserved, barking in childish condemnation and demanding, via a statement from editor Gemma Jones, that the Writers’ Week director Louise Adler resign. “The views of the two writers in question are repugnant.”
Law firm MinterEllison also took up a tenancy in the land of black and white in their decision to withdraw sponsorship, citing concerns about “the potential for racist or antisemitic commentary.” It had decided “to remove our presence and involvement with this year’s Writers’ Festival program”. That’s branding for you.
Consultancies hardly known for their principled stances on intellectual debate let alone the public good took to the podium of virtue even as they withdrew their support. PwC, which provides pro bono auditing for the Adelaide Festival Foundation, openly disassociated itself from the event by requesting that its logo be removed from the festival website. “We condemn in the strongest terms any antisemitic comments and any suggestion of support for Russia’s war against Ukraine,” the company stated in a memorandum. “We stand with the Jewish and Ukrainian communities who have been understandably hurt by this issue. In this respect, we have asked the chair of the Adelaide Foundation that any association with PwC with this aspect of the festival be removed.”
In all these shallow, stubbornly ahistorical assessments, context is missing. The background, and sense of where such supposedly horrendous opinions sprung from, are dismissed. The culture of cancellation and erasure, as it has been previously, is the prerogative of the powerful and their PR offices. It is also insidious, stressing the trendy, appealing brand of the moment, the acceptable opinion which makes the acceptable person.
El-Kurd, Palestinian poet and correspondent for The Nation, enraged since the day Jewish settlers made their way into his East Jerusalem home, has made no secret in adopting a more militant stance for Palestinians. It was, he stated, “not enough that I have lost my home to Israeli settlers, it’s not enough that I grew up and lived as a refugee under military occupation.” In his protest and suffering, he had been constantly told to be “polite” and “respectable”.
Those years were behind him, times which featured a “failed strategy” that placed a heavy emphasis on humanising unacceptable tragedy: the focus on women and children (again, the branding that matters); the focus on “our inability to commit violence, our inability to feel rage”. “And we over-emphasise the victims whose qualifiers make them human.”
In her response to the storm, Abulhawa expressed gratitude to Adler and the Board of the Adelaide Festival “for bravely ensuring that we do and will have space to speak and interact with readers on a cultural landscape.” She then moved to chart the fault lines that have made contrarian views – or at least views deemed undesirable by the anointed policing agents on the Ukrainian War – a matter of vengeful reaction. To be critical of the Ukrainian Saint was to somehow be a shill for Russia’s Vladimir Putin; to be a proponent for peace was somehow akin to encouraging genocide. “These assertions are false, absurd and libellous.”
Specifically regarding Zelenskyy, his sins lay in “taking actions and provocations that would lead to foreseeable, even predictable, war, which has not only wrecked Ukraine and her people, but led to global insecurity and fuel shortages, affecting the most vulnerable among us.”
Her views are not unusual, or astonishing. They are also echoed through the Global South, where the brands of the noble Ukrainian victim and the remorseless Russian monster have lesser currency. One can understand the dynamics, and sad perversions of power, without justifying their brutal manifestations. Abulhawa references John Mearsheimer’s warnings about US provocations against Russia, using Ukraine as a base and pretext. The Ukraine conflict, to that end, is not isolated or regional. It is a “global proxy war, the outcome of which may well determine the world order for generations to come.”
Abulhawa would have also been well within her rights to cite the very figure who gave birth to the doctrine of Soviet containment at the start of the Cold War. The late diplomat and historian George Frost Kennan, eyeing the expansionist drive of NATO and US power eastwards towards the Russian border, could only issue this warning in 1997: “Such a decision may be expected to inflame nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”
To her estimable credit, Adler remained adamant and defiant in permitting the writers to attend their events. “Our business,” she told the ABC, “is to operate an open space, not a safe space, in which ideas that may be confronting, disturbing, provocative, are debated with civility, that’s the agenda.” Writers, she also explained to The Age, were not sought out “via their Twitter feeds. I do not think the social media space for a nuanced or reasoned analysis and discussion.” It never was such a place, but to the cancel culture footsoldiers, that is exactly where they feel most comfortable.
Is it Russian imperialism or great-power politics that explains Putin’s invasion of Ukraine? And how likely is it that we could see regime change in Moscow? Moreover, do ideological labels matter in today’s political climate? C. J. Polychroniou tackles these questions in an interview with the French-Greek journalist Alexandra Boutri. He contends that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a major war crime but that the ongoing war is rooted in NATO’s eastward expansion and associated with the game of great-power politics. As for those who compare Putin to Hitler and call for regime change in Russia, Polychroniou argues that such claims and demands are both absurd and dangerous.
Alexandra Boutri: Let me start by asking you to share with me your views about an international relations topic that has dominated headlines for the past year, namely, the Russia-Ukraine war. Does it have its roots on Russian imperialistic aggression, which is the general view among most mainstream pundits, including many on the Left, or is it something more complicated than that?
C. J. Polychroniou: I think the best way to address your question is by putting this unnecessary tragedy, which, incidentally, could very well drag on for years to come, in historical context and thus realizing how easily it could have been avoided. Indeed, Putin’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, may have taken everyone by surprise but the seeds of this war had been sown long before. Now, Ukrainians tend to emphasize Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 as the origin of the conflict between the two countries. This is not an accurate description because the great-power rivalry between the United States and Russia is left out of the equation.
But let’s start with Crimea. For whatever reason, Crimea was gifted from Soviet Russia to Soviet Ukraine in 1954. Interestingly enough, the overwhelming majority of the population of Crimea in the 1950s was ethnic Russian and there was still an ethnic Russian majority of over 60 percent in 2014. It should also be pointed out that the Crimean Peninsula has always been a strategically vital location on the Black Sea. Indeed, Crimea’s position in the Black Sea holds such strategic importance that Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hawkish national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, made strong hints in a 1997 book titled The Grand Chessboard that the Crimean Peninsula could become a major source of instability in the territories of the former Soviet Union. Putting aside for now the legality of the Russian operation to annex Crimea, what is often ignored in the Ukrainian and western narrative is that it took place in the aftermath of NATO’s enlargement following the collapse of the Soviet Union. And it wasn’t just Putin who was wary of NATO’s eastward expansion. Gorbachev was also suspicious of the perpetuation of NATO following the end of the Cold War while Boris Yeltsin, in a letter sent to President Clinton in 1993, had strongly opposed NATO’s expansion to the east.
It seems appropriate here to recall that Putin did not mince words when it came to giving his opinion about the eastward expansion of NATO at the Security Conference in Munich on February 2007:
I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee.” Where are these guarantees?
Each round of NATO expansion since the fall of the Berlin Wall (NATO grew from 16 countries at the peak of the Cold War to 30 today, several of which were part of the Warsaw Pact) was followed by loud complaints from Russia that such moves posed a threat to Russia’s national security. Moreover, the prospect of Georgia and Ukraine becoming members of the trans-Atlantic military alliance constituted a red line for Moscow. Yet pledges were made by NATO leaders at the Budapest Summit in April 2008 that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually become NATO member states. In fact, relations between NATO and Ukraine go back to the early 1990s and, after 2014, the level of military cooperation between the two intensified in critical areas.
From the perspective of the Kremlin, what NATO (i.e., the US) was up to amounted to an “encirclement” of Russia. Indeed, it shouldn’t be difficult to understand why Russian leaders felt this way, and there is no doubt that US officials knew all along that they were crossing Russia’s red lines on NATO expansion.
In this context, Russia’s invasion of the territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia in 2008, Crimea’s annexation in 2014, and the disastrous invasion of Ukraine in 2022 are all part of the game of great-power politics and have little to do with Putin’s alleged push for a new Russian empire.
Alexandra Boutri: So, according to the analysis you just provided, the idea that Putin might want to invade countries in Europe is utter hogwash. But what about the suggestion that Putin is a tyrant, this generation’s Adolf Hitler, and therefore his regime must be overthrown?
C. J. Polychroniou: The idea that Putin has plans to invade countries in Europe is so absurd and ridiculous as to be laughable. Indeed, the only serious question here is why so many refuse to acknowledge that NATO and the US bear responsibility for Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and are now failing to pursue a diplomatic path in order to put an end to this great tragedy, which is going to get much worse in the months to come as Ukraine keeps receiving more and more weapons from the west and Russia is preparing for a bigger fight. The losses on both sides are already staggering and Ukraine’s economy and infrastructure are on the verge of collapse. This is a completely senseless war that could have easily been avoided if U.S. and NATO had paid proper attention to Russia’s red lines. In fact, many top-level diplomats and academic experts had predicted that NATO’s provocative actions would lead to war.
Having said that, it goes without saying of course that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wrong, violates the UN Charter and cannot be justified under international law. Moreover, Russia could easily be charged with war crimes for the Ukraine invasion. Yet isn’t it interesting that the Kremlin’s legal justification for the invasion is based on the “pre-emptive principle” first argued by the US when it invaded Iraq in 2003? Of equal interest is to see how the western community has reacted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in comparison to the way it reacted to the US invasion of Iraq. Most Americans still have no idea of the level of destruction that the invasion unleashed. The prestigious medical journal The Lancet estimated in a 2006 study that more than 600,000 Iraqis were killed during the first 40 months of war and occupation in Iraq. But the western community is king of the double standard.
To address your question about Putin, he is no doubt a ruthless autocrat. Manipulation and repression are integral components of his regime. They have been so from the day he was sworn in as president of Russia, more than 20 years ago. Now he is also a war criminal, but we must be careful with crazy comparisons with Hitler. If Putin is the new Hitler because of his decision to invade Ukraine, why shouldn’t the same be said about George W. Bush when he invaded Iraq? However, such analogies are not only ludicrous but extremely offensive because they cheapen the memory of millions of innocent people killed by the Nazis. Hitler’s monstrous regime carried out various major genocides and countless of mass murders. This may run counter to how major segments of the media are portraying Putin these days, but he is a rational and strategic actor, though he badly miscalculated his military strength when he decided to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine as well as Ukrainian resistance. Furthermore, he has always been very popular with the Russian people and is even more popular today. In September 2022, his popularity level stood at 77 percent. After the invasion of Ukraine, the approval rating increased. In February 2023, Putin’s approval rating at home jumped up to 82 percent.
So, when pundits and experts alike in the US and elsewhere speak of regime change in Russia, one really wonders what they may have in mind. Is regime change going to come from the inside, through a coup or revolution, or from the outside, through a foreign invasion? The security forces, which are the core and backbone of Putin’s regime, answer directly to Putin and they will surely protect him from any possible coup. On the other hand, his popularity is so great that simply precludes the possibility that he can be overthrown by his own people. A foreign invasion of Russia to overthrow Putin’s regime is sheer madness and totally out of the question, so all this talk about regime change in Moscow amounts to nothing more than dangerous political posturing. Why so? Because regime change seekers suspect, and they are probably right, that the most likely scenario for Putin to be removed from power is through the weakening of Russia. This means either Putin losing the war in Ukraine or witnessing the collapse of his own economy. In either case, achieving the goal of Putin’s removal from power mandates an indefinite continuation of the war regardless of what happens to Ukraine itself. But even so, what guarantee is there that Putin won’t be replaced by someone even more ruthless? A weakened and humiliated Russia will most likely lead to the emergence of an even more ruthless leader. After all, it was the economic collapse and humiliation of the 1990s that made Putin such a popular figure with the Russian people.
Alexandra Boutri: The far-right seems to have sided with Putin in Russia’s war against Ukraine, while many of the left are defending Ukraine and even going so far as to support a stronger NATO. Do political labels matter in today’s world? Indeed, is the left-right political spectrum still valid today?
C. J. Polychroniou: The situation with far-right groups and individuals supporting Putin in Russia’s war against Ukraine is a bit complicated. Some on the far-right in both the US and Europe seem to have sided with Putin simply because they see him as a white supremacist and the “savior” of western culture. But my own impression is that this is the case far more so with America’s far-right than it is with Europe’s far-right. Indeed, there has been a marked shift in the rhetoric of many extreme right-wingers in Europe since the war started. For instance, both Marine Le Pen in France and Matteo Salvini in Italy, both of them long-time admirers of Vladimir Putin, have condemned “Russian aggression.” They may have done so purely out of political opportunism, but there you have it. Anyway, ideological consistency is not the forte of the far-right. However, the same can be said nowadays about certain segments of the Left. Indeed, who would have thought 10 or even 5 years ago that the Left might one day be defending the enlargement of NATO? But we live in a time of interminable crises and perhaps political identity plight comes with the territory.
Today, more than any other time in recent history, the traditional political terms “left” and “right” have become a bit redundant, though I am not suggesting by any stretch of the imagination of doing away with the distinction. But consider this: Some of today’s conservative governments in Europe are pursuing policies, such as trying to tame the market and using the state to support vulnerable populations, that are hardly representative of neoliberalism or even traditional conservatism. Greece and Poland come to mind, both countries governed by right-wing political parties. By the same token, so-called “left” parties have moved ever so closer to the right, pursuing even neoliberal policies when they are in power, to the point that blue collar workers have switched allegiances. And the Green parties of today bear no resemblance whatsoever to the Green Movement of the seventies. The German Green party, for instance, is now advocating for stronger U.S. militarism.
In the United States, of course, the situation is in some ways quite different. The Republican Party has moved so far to the right that it has developed a serious extremism problem while the Democratic Party has drifted towards its progressive faction. However, both “left” and “right” in the US are involved in a growing “culture war” and both practice cancel culture. The mania over political correctness and identity politics, which are the last things that the Left should be embracing given its historical commitment to free speech and universality, is terrible business. It is in fact helping today to give shape and form to the reactionary politics and policies of Ron DeSantis, the rising star of America’s hard- right.
(@DanielDiMartino) 
