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Category: Russia

  • Pushing for Regime Change in Russia Implies an Embrace of Endless War in Ukraine

    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.

  • Total Worldwide Disarmament: Security Must Be for All Countries

    Read Parts 1, 2, and 3.

    A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.

    — Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1980

    All people opposed to war must be anti-imperialist. To not be anti-imperialist would render a declared antiwar position as a contradiction.

    Scott Ritter, steeped in military knowledge, has compellingly put forth the legal argument that Russia’s special military operation against the Ukrainian forces is legal. Ritter contends that the Russians are fighting the war with kid gloves, bending over backwards to limit civilian casualties. Ritter has gravitas since he was a US Marines intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector. Said Ritter,

    … the military imperative, the military necessity of shutting this [conflict] down is real, but Russia didn’t do it. Why? Because Russia isn’t viewing this as we viewed the war against the Iraqis. Russia is viewing this as a special military operation — people make fun of that word — but it’s not war because if it was war, Ukraine would be gone today, eliminated… [view from 49:16]

    To Rid the World of Warmaking, Target the Apex of Warmaking

    If one truly wants to rid the world of war, one needs to target the warmaker, the aggressor, the initiator of violence: the United States. The violence of the US even gave pause to the pacifist sentiments of Martin Luther King, Jr who said:

    … I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.

    Noted linguist Noam Chomsky ridiculed the Orwellian notion of a defense department in the US:

    … the Pentagon is in no sense a defense department. It has never defended the United States from anyone: it has only served to conduct aggression, and I think the American people would be better off without a Pentagon.

    The world would be better off without a Pentagon. To rid the world of war, as the preeminent superpower and rogue nation, the US has the moral obligation to seek a worldwide demilitarization. This will require full transparency verified through monitoring and compliance enforced by an independent and empowered body. After that, those entities and individuals responsible for US aggression and other war crimes should stand trial and be prosecuted, as should all responsible individuals in all nations that perpetrate war crimes.

    Of Course, War Should be Abolished

    Most people will distinguish between offensive warmaking and warring in self-defense. To draw an equivalency in criticism between an aggressor and and a war of resistance to attack is, palpably, wrongheaded. Worse, it provides succor to the aggressor since it fares no worse than its targeted enemy. Thus, a principled antiwar position would abjure scapegoating and falsely assessing equivalency in blame to a country that only seeks mutual security yet finds itself cornered by a hegemon. As T.P. Wilkinson compellingly argued:

    … the claim that Russia should not have violated Ukrainian sovereignty is based on the erroneous belief that Ukraine was invaded. This assertion is based on ignorance. Quite aside from the international-law issues posed by the sovereign claims of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR), and hence whether they could exert sovereign rights to conclude treaties and hence invite military aid, there is the long-standing original threat and active aggression of NATO in and through Ukraine’s governments. The recognition of sovereignty does not outweigh the right of self-defense.

    Prominent antiwar activist David Swanson wrote, “But unless we get back to disarmament, the long-term prospects for humanity are grim.

    I agree with Swanson’s assessment. As for disarmament, that is what Russia is carrying out right now in Ukraine. Weapons companies won’t be happy about that. However, it is high time that the Kellogg-Briand Pact be adhered to.

    Swanson continues, “Of course, NATO and everyone else have always wanted a neutral Ukraine, so this shouldn’t be such a huge hurdle.”

    This is puzzling. If NATO had wanted a neutral Ukraine all along, then why did NATO say yes to future Ukraine membership, albeit without specifying a date for joining? NATO even recognized Ukraine as an “enhanced opportunity partner.” Moreover, if the US-financed military biological program in Ukraine becomes verified, then it puts an emphatic kibosh to any talk of NATO having wanted a neutral Ukraine.

    Regarding the Russian demands, Swanson writes, “Of course, it is a horrible precedent to meet the demands of a warmaker.”

    But Ukraine is also a “warmaker” according to Swanson’s definition because it also wages war with Russia. Question: Did Swanson ever call Ukraine a “warmaker” back in 2014 for shelling Donbass? And just who made the war in Ukraine? Why did Russia “invade” Ukraine? Was it not Ukraine’s shelling of Donbass that precipitated an exodus of ethnic Russians into Russia and Ukraine’s refusal to abide by the Minsk Agreements that caused Russia, exasperated at the infidelity of its negotiating partners, to recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics? Was it not Ukraine that made war — specifically, that was the initiator of making war? Was Ukraine not undermining Russian state security by seeking NATO membership and being loaded up with NATO weaponry? Ukraine became a proxy of the US. In actuality, the initiator of warmaking is not Ukraine but the US. Swanson has failed to point this out.

    And why does a wide swath of antiwar types focus inordinately on Russia in Ukraine? Israel (an occupier of historical Palestine) has been aggressing Palestine, Syria, Iran, Lebanon for several years. The US is occupying a large chunk of Syria and stealing its oil and wheat. The US military refuses to remove its military from Iraq although ordered to do so by the Iraqi parliament — in essence, a de facto military occupation. Meanwhile the continental US sits in occupation of Indigenous nations territory, in occupation of Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, Guantánamo Bay, Guam, Saipan, the ethnically cleansed Chagos archipelago. How do Israel and the US escape sanctions and continual censure for their warmaking?

    Yet, by “invading” Ukraine, Russia is poised to very quickly become a war-ender. The timetable for the war from the Russian side is undisclosed, but it appears Russia has been proceeding slowly to ensure minimal civilian casualties. This is not a prediction, however, with Ukraine becoming militarily depleted, it is not out of the question that by summer Russia will have ended a war that has raged since 2014 between Ukraine and Donbass.

    Swanson’s final paragraph reads: “One way to negotiate peace would be for Ukraine to offer to meet all of Russia’s demands and, ideally, more, while making demands of its own for reparations and disarmament. If the war goes on and ends someday with a Ukrainian government and a human species still around, such negotiations will have to happen. Why not now?”

    Fine, peace now would be great. But what is the reasoning behind Swanson’s demand that Russia should pay for reparations and disarmament to Ukraine? Will Swanson also demand that Ukraine pay reparations to Donbass? Will Ukraine pay reparations to Russia for dragging it into the mess it created at the behest of the US?

    If Ukraine should be demanding reparations, then it should be demanding them from US-NATO that in an abjectly cowardly manner abandoned (and thank goodness it did) its prospective NATO member to face Russia alone. And Swanson would do well to argue that the US-NATO pay reparations to Ukraine, Donbass, and Russia. And then the US should be demanded to pay reparations to a historical list of countries that it has criminally devastated.

    Nonetheless, I find it strange that the US warmaker extraordinaire and a neo-Nazi-infiltrated Ukraine are glanced over while blame is laid on Russia.

    Although I may dissent on the facts and logic proffered on the warring, I am unequivocally in solidarity with worldwide disarmament and ending war forever. That day, unfortunately, has not arrived yet.

    A Principled Antiwar Coalition

    The United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) appears to have reached a principled antiwar position. I posed some questions based on their statement of Principles:

    Kim Petersen: “UNAC holds that the U.S. government…” From this I understand that the US military-industrial-governmental-etc nexus is the primary obstacle to a world without war. Is this correct?

    UNAC: Yes, the US government is the main imperialist power in the world and the main cause of war. It has about 20 times the number of foreign military bases as all other countries in the world and has a military budget that represents about 45% of the total military budget of all other countries. It has militarily intervened in other countries over 65 times in the past several decades. It is the only country that has used nuclear weapons on people.

    KP: “We support the right of all oppressed peoples, including colonized and formerly colonized countries, to determine their own road to liberation.” Does this grant the oppressed peoples the right to violently resist (at least equivalent to) the violence of oppression to liberate themselves?

    UNAC: Yes, the countries that the US has attacked and provoked have the right to defend themselves against US/NATO military aggression. The problem is that the US military has been much stronger than the countries it attracted until now.  This time, however, Russia is winning the proxy war against the combined might of the US-NATO and countries around the world are seeing that the “West” can be defeated. Even with its strong military, the people of Vietnam and Afghanistan were about to defeat the US military. Today to avoid the people of the US turning against their wars, they conduct proxy wars where others fight the battles. This was true in Libya, Syria and now they are showing their willingness to fight the war in Ukraine to the last Ukrainian.

    KP: Since UNAC supports “Mutual self-defense” how does UNAC view the denial of mutual security sought by Russia as justification to gain security through a special military operation?

    UNAC: The denial of Russian security was a deliberate strategy on the part of the US to provoke the war we are seeing today. The US thought that the war and the sanctions would cause regime change and the break-up of Russia. It is proving to be a mistake. The US provoked them by moving NATO up to their border, despite pledges not to do so. They have conducted “war games” on the Russian border and put nuclear capable missiles close to their borders. They created a coup in Ukraine to get rid of a government that wanted good relations with its neighbor and built the Ukraine military to the strongest in Europe. They trained them, armed them, gave them logistic support and paid for their military, all to try and defeat the Russian military. The US has never been interested in stability in the region or in Russian security. This has led to the war in Ukraine.

    *****
    If there is a warmaker or warmakers, then there must be a war-ender or war-enders. If by resisting a warmaker that one ends a war, then that should be, if not applauded, then, at least, tolerated by antiwar types. This holds especially true in the case of serial warmakers like the US. They say the bigger they are, the harder they fall. It appears that the US warmaking colossus is tottering toward an ungraceful fall in Ukraine. If so, then the peacemakers worldwide can breathe easier.

    The Antiwar Costa Rican Example

    In 1946, the pacifist physicist Albert Einstein wrote in a letter: “You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war. The very prevention of war requires more faith, courage and resolution than are needed to prepare for war. We must all do our share, that we may be equal to the task of peace.”

    In 1949, the Central American country of Costa Rica courageously embraced the logic expressed by Einstein. Costa Rica set the example for other genuinely antiwar countries to follow when it abolished its army.

    Worldwide disarmament is required. This will, undoubtedly, be a most difficult fight — dismantling the military-industrial complex in the US and disassembling other militaries abroad. Yet peace would be the glorious reward for people everywhere. Imagine what could be achieved with military spending redirected to job creation, healthcare, education, infrastructure construction and maintenance, social security, environmental protection and enhancement, space exploration, a living wage, etc. Is a perpetual state of spending on killing really what people should accept from their governments?

    The post Total Worldwide Disarmament: Security Must Be for All Countries first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Anonymous Sources Are Newsworthy—When They Talk to NYT, Not Seymour Hersh

     

    NYT: Intelligence Suggests Pro-Ukrainian Group Sabotaged Pipelines, U.S. Officials Say

    When the New York Times (3/7/23) makes a claim based on anonymous US officials, other media take note—because everyone knows anonymous US officials wouldn’t lie to the New York Times.

    The New York Times (3/7/23) on Tuesday ended its month-long boycott of veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’s February 8 story claiming the US destroyed the Nord Stream gas pipeline.

    The Times didn’t challenge Hersh’s story. It barely mentioned it. Instead, the Times reported “new intelligence” that “suggests” a pro-Ukrainian group was responsible.

    No firm details are provided, simply speculation, and the only sources cited are anonymous US officials.

    Hersh’s source also is unnamed, but is described as having “direct knowledge of the operational planning” of the operation. In contrast to the Times story’s lack of specifics, Hersh’s 5,000-word narrative provides extensive details of how US officials—at the direction of President Joe Biden—planned and executed the operation, using US Navy divers who used the cover of a NATO naval exercise in June to plant explosives, which were remotely detonated September 26.

    Strikingly different treatment

    The response of the nation’s major news organizations to the two stories also couldn’t have been more different.

    While big news internationally, Hersh’s story was not reported by any of the major US corporate broadcast networks—NBC, ABC and CBS—or the public broadcasters, PBS and NPR. Nor did the nation’s major cable outlets, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, cover the story (FAIR.org, 3/3/23).

    WaPo: Intelligence officials suspect Ukraine partisans behind Nord Stream bombings, rattling Kyiv’s allies

    The Washington Post (3/7/23) proves that it too is able to find government officials willing to promote the official line with no accountability.

    The Washington Post ignored Hersh’s story for two weeks, and then mentioned it (2/22/23) only after Russia cited Hersh’s story in calling for a UN investigation of the bombing. But the Post didn’t hesitate to follow the Times later Tuesday with its own story (3/7/23), headlined “Intelligence Officials Suspect Ukraine Partisans Behind Nord Stream Bombings, Rattling Kyiv’s Allies.” Like the Times, the Post relied solely on anonymous sources to attribute responsibility for the sabotage, who provided little in the way of details about how the bombing was accomplished.

    In a striking example of how differently the large corporate news outlets treat Hersh, the Post credited its rival newspaper for breaking the story, but did not mention Hersh at all.

    The Post story did add one significant development—that shortly after the Times story was published, German news media had reported that investigators in Europe “had identified a small team of saboteurs using a yacht rented from a company in Poland that was ‘apparently owned by two Ukrainians.’”

    ‘First significant lead’

    Fox News (3/7/23) also jumped on the Times story later Tuesday, but added nothing new. Hersh’s story was mentioned in two sentences at the end of the story and described as a “blog post” that “the White House last month dismissed….”

    CNN (3/8/23) also reported the Times story within 24 hours, but with a new element: “The German prosecutors’ office told CNN Wednesday they searched a boat in January that was suspected of carrying explosives.” The CNN story did not mention Hersh.

    MSNBC: Intelligence suggests pro-Ukrainian group sabotaged pipelines, US Officials Say

    If the New York Times says so, it’s news (MSNBC, 3/8/23).

    That same day, MSNBC ran a segment featuring NBC News reporter Molly Hunter (3/8/23), who repeated the Times’ claim that its story was “the first significant lead” in the investigation of the bombing. It also failed to mention Hersh.

    A statement from German officials confirming that investigators in January had searched a vessel suspected of carrying explosives used in the bombing was reported by NBC News (3/8/23) and the Associated Press. The AP dispatch was picked up by ABC News (3/8/23) and PBS (3/8/23). All credited the Times story; none mentioned Hersh.

    NPR did its own report Wednesday (3/8/23), which referenced a high Ukrainian government official “questioning recent reports that a pro-Ukraine group was behind the undersea bombings.” The official was quoted saying the reports by the Times and Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper (3/7/23), which first reported the suspected involvement of a yacht, “had ‘lots of assumptions and anonymous conjecture but not real facts.’”

    While giving voice to skepticism about the Times story, NPR did not discuss Hersh’s alternative take.

    Summarizing the scorecard, all three major cable news outlets—CNN, MSNBC and Fox News—publicized the Times story within a day of publication. Of the five major corporate and public broadcasters, NBC, ABC, PBS and NPR carried the story; only CBS remained silent.

    As for Hersh, the blackout remains, with the sole exception of the two sentences totaling 49 words shirt-tailed to the Fox News report.

    AP embarrasses itself

    AP: A global mystery: What’s known about Nord Stream explosions

    What’s not known about Nord Stream explosions (AP, 3/8/23): how to spell Seymour Hersch [sic].

    The Associated Press (3/8/23) finally mentioned Hersh’s reporting late Wednesday, in a round-up piece headlined “A Global Mystery: What’s Known About Nord Stream Explosions.” But the 176-year-old nonprofit cooperative news agency, which prides itself on unbiased reporting adhering to old-school journalistic standards of objectivity, managed to both disrespect Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the most famous investigative reporters in the nation, and embarrass itself by misspelling his name:

    After months of few developments in the probes, American investigative journalist Seymour Hersch, known for past exposes of US government malfeasance, self-published a lengthy report in February alleging that President Joe Biden had ordered the sabotage, which Hersch said was carried out by the CIA with Norwegian assistance.

    That report, based on a single, unidentified source, has been flatly denied by the White House, the CIA and the State Department, and no other news organization has been able to corroborate it. Russia, followed by China, however, leaped on Hersch’s reporting, saying it was grounds for a new and impartial investigation conducted by the United Nations.

    The misspelling was not corrected until the next day.

    Zero times any number is zero

    Snopes: Claim That US Blew up Nord Stream Pipelines Relies on Anonymous Source

    Snopes (2/10/23) has not yet run a piece criticizing the New York Times article (3/7/23) for relying on anonymous sourcing.

    AP wasn’t alone in casting doubt about Hersh’s story by stressing it is “based on a single, unidentified source,” while failing to note the Times piece also rested entirely on anonymous “US officials.”

    A Business Insider piece (2/9/23) published the day after Hersh posted his story, derided his account of the bombing as an “evidence-free theory,” noting his claims “appear to rely on a single unnamed source.”

    Republished by Yahoo! (2/9/23) and MSN (2/9/23), the Business Insider article was the primary source of an article by the factchecking site Snopes (2/10/23), with the headline “Claim That US Blew up Nord Stream Pipelines Relies on Anonymous Source.”

    It can be argued that the New York Times was exempted from such criticism because it didn’t rely on just one source; the plural “US officials” appears 16 times in the story.

    But if Hersh’s unnamed source has zero credibility, then so does each source included under the umbrella of “US officials” at the Times. The laws of mathematics should apply: Zero times any number is still zero.

     

    The post Anonymous Sources <i>Are</i> Newsworthy—When They Talk to NYT, Not Seymour Hersh appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • “One Day Our Luck Will Run Out”: Ukraine Nuclear Plant Loses Power Again

    The largest nuclear energy plant in Europe, located in southern Ukraine, lost all off-site power for the sixth time in a year as Russian forces carried out a massive missile attack on Thursday, once again raising fears of a nuclear catastrophe with continent-wide implications. Rafael Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, expressed dismay over the repeated near-misses…

    Source

  • Energy Anxiety

    After more than half a century of dependence on Russian oil and gas, the war in Ukraine has forced German officials to reconsider their reliance on fossil fuels entirely.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Attack Of The “Pro-Ukrainian Group”: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The latest New York Times report on the Nord Stream pipeline bombing is something else. According to NYT’s anonymous US government sources, the pipelines were blown up by a “pro-Ukrainian group” who had no known connections to any military or intelligence agency, but somehow had all the information, skills, diving equipment and military explosives necessary to carry out such an attack.

    It’s actually insulting how stupid it is. It reads like a small child lying about who broke the lamp in the living room; “Uhh, some bad guy came in and broke it, then he left. He was wearing a black cape and had a twirly mustache.” At least respect us enough to make up a better lie than “Yeah it turns out it was just some random people with a boat, man! It’s crazy I know!”

    They literally wrote an entire article without ever addressing how bizarre it is to just keep referring to the alleged perpetrators as just a “group”. Like that’s a thing. “Yeah you know, one of those Groups we’ve all been hearing about in the news. You know Groups, they sail around the world destroying international undersea energy infrastructure.”

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    Remember kids, Sy Hersh's Nord Stream report is untrustworthy because it is unproven and relies on anonymous sources. pic.twitter.com/vu3RjlxgFf

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 7, 2023

    Imagine having to tell this Scooby Doo-esque tale about a yacht of Ukraine-loving mischief-makers who pranked Europe’s energy supply like it’s a real thing. Like, “Oh come on, who among us has not taken a boatload of military explosives to go blow up international pipelines for fun with their friends?”

    ❖

    I’m finding myself growing more and more enraged at the way war with China is being aggressively pushed in Australia. There’s nothing more evil than starting a completely needless war for power and profit. The people who are pushing this monstrous depravity should be afraid to go out in public.

    War is the worst thing in the world, and a war between China and the US alliance would be the worst of all wars. The people who are trying to inflict this incomprehensible horror upon humanity (all in the name of securing US unipolar hegemony, mind you) are enemies to our species.

    People who beat the drums of world war should be treated with the same revulsion and rejection as child rapists and serial killers. They should be afraid to show their faces outside, and in a remotely sane society, they would be. In a remotely sane society, people who even attempted to shove hot garbage like this down people’s throats would be driven out of every town they tried to enter. They’d die miserable, cold and alone in a cave somewhere, nibbling on bats and fungus.

    ❖

    Notice how there’s bipartisan support for escalations against Russia with the occasional voice of sanity permitted on the Republican side, and there’s bipartisan support for escalations against China with the occasional voice of sanity permitted on the Democrat side:

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    Has Washington's hawkish consensus on China created a more secure world for Americans and others?

    Or are we moving down a path that takes us toward decades of arms races, crises, perhaps even war?

    My take: pic.twitter.com/EVulU182Aw

    — Fareed Zakaria (@FareedZakaria) March 5, 2023

    The Democrats furiously promote escalations against Russia with Republicans playing a more passive accepting role, and Republicans furiously promote escalations against China with Democrats playing a more passive accepting role. Each carries forward different parts of the agenda.

    In this way the empire prevents partisans from arguing about if cold war escalations should occur, and gets them arguing instead about how and where they should occur. The debate isn’t “Should we militarize against a powerful country?” it’s “Should we militarize against Russia or against China?”

    ❖

    American exceptionalism means the rules apply to everyone except America.

    ❖

    The US is like one of those annoying dogs that’s always barking at the neighbors and at passersby on the street because it thinks they are trespassing on its property.

    ❖

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    Can someone please explain to me why @washingtonpost needs to give regular opinion columns to John Bolton, Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin AND Josh Rogin, when all four of them have the exact same warmongering neoconservative ideology and all the exact same opinions? pic.twitter.com/7IrGdZcgj3

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 6, 2023

    ❖

    When lots of Russians are dying I get empire simps saying “Haha I bet you’re sad you evil bitch,” when lots of Ukrainians are dying I get empire simps saying “Ooh I bet you’re happy you evil bitch,” but really I’m just angry knowing the US empire could have prevented all this with a little diplomacy and a few low-cost concessions.

    ❖

    Don’t call it a “proxy war”. By calling it a proxy war you are denying Ukraine’s sovereignty as a sovereign US military asset and its agency to do whatever the US wants it to do.

    ❖

    Wikipedia is one of the most brilliant tools of imperial narrative management ever devised. The ways it’s stacked in favor of the empire are hidden behind the illusory alibi of being a people-driven information source, so its readers have no idea they’re consuming propaganda.

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    My Wikipedia page claims I “promote conspiracy theories” about Syria's Douma incident.

    In reality, I report on leaks from the OPCW investigation of Douma. Does reporting on leaked documents that happen to undermine pro-war NATO claims mean promoting "conspiracy theories" now? pic.twitter.com/r32ffvgGjr

    — Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) March 4, 2023

    Ben Norton had a great write-up with the Grayzone a few years ago on the way Wikipedia’s fraudulent narrative about itself as a free encyclopedia maintained by a community of volunteers through open collaboration masks a top-down control system slanted to favor the empire. Like all the best tools of imperial control, Wikipedia disguises itself as a populist instrument of the people while being owned and operated by individuals with deep ties to status quo power. But how many people who visit Wikipedia are familiar with articles like the above and the facts laid out therein? Almost none of them. It’s one of the most-visited websites in the world, and people don’t know this.

    Sometimes all you can do is stop and stare in slack-jawed marvel at how ingenious the empire is at manipulating the ways people think about their world. It’s depraved, it’s abusive, and it’s profoundly destructive, but by God is it brilliant.

    Just imagine what humanity could accomplish if our species was pouring all its innovation and ingenuity into coming up with ways to make the world a better place for everyone instead of figuring out the best ways to control people’s thoughts, reap massive profits, and wage wars.

    _________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. 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.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

     

  • Reject the Left-Right Alliance Against Ukraine

    If American leftists take seriously their commitment to self-rule and loathing of foreign aggression, they should shed their ambivalence about supporting Ukraine.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Zelenskiy vows to ‘find the murderers’ of PoW allegedly shot dead by Russians

    Ukrainian president’s comments come after video appears to show killing of unarmed combatant

    Volodymyr Zelenskiy has vowed to “find the murderers” of an unarmed Ukrainian prisoner of war apparently shot dead by Russian troops as the Ukrainian military named the man it said was in the footage that spread rapidly across social media on Monday.

    In the graphic 12-second clip that first circulated on Telegram and was widely shared on Twitter, a detained combatant, named by the Ukrainian military as Tymofiy Mykolayovych Shadura, is seen standing in a shallow trench smoking a cigarette. The soldier, in uniform with a Ukrainian flag insignia on his arm, says “Glory to Ukraine” and is then apparently shot with automatic weapons.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Ukraine urges ICC to investigate video appearing to show Russians killing PoW

    Graphic clip shows detained combatant standing in a shallow trench before being apparently shot

    Ukraine has urged the international criminal court to investigate footage circulating on social media that appeared to show Russian fighters killing a Ukrainian prisoner of war.

    In the graphic clip that first circulated on Telegram, a detained combatant is seen standing in a shallow trench and smoking a cigarette. The soldier says “Glory to Ukraine” and is then apparently shot with automatic weapons.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • EU Fails to Comply with Grain-Export Deal

    On Saturday, March 4, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, at the G20 meeting in Delhi, announced that because the EU has refused to comply with its side of the U.N.-brokered 27 July 2022 “Grain [and fertilizer] Deal” that the U.N. brokered in Istanbul on 27 July 2022, Russia will likewise not comply with it, starting on March 18.

    On February 8, Reuters had headlined “Russia: EU not fulfilling promises on grain deal,” and reported that the deal was in jeopardy because of the EU’s continued violations of it that were supplying super-inexpensive food to the EU while continuing to block food going to Africa — for which latter purpose the deal had been mainly designed.

    Then, on Saturday March 4, Russia’s Tsargrad news site headlined “The Rejection of the Grain Deal Will Force Russia to Resolve the Issue of Odessa. And This is a Significant Event.” By implication, it was interpreting Lavrov’s statement to reflect that Ukraine’s main Black Sea port of Odessa (which has historically been overwhelmingly pro-Russian), which is the port through which Ukraine’s agricultural exports are shipped, might soon be taken over by Russia because the EU is using it to provide economic benefits to the EU and to Ukraine while starving and/or soaring food-cost inflation in Africa, will no longer continue to be tolerated by Russia. In other words: Africa and Russia were being cheated by the EU and Ukraine, and Russia will cease that starting March 18.

    On March 3, Tsargrad had bannered “Ammonia Instead of Wheat. What Will Russia Gain by Breaking the ‘Grain Deal’,” and it explained that:

    The grain deal, about the need for which “our Western partners” spoke so much, can be terminated without any possibility of renewal in the near future. If this happens, then Ukraine will lose the opportunity to earn money on dumped wheat exports, Turkey will lose a fair amount of profits from participating in the transit of this grain and a fair amount of political influence as an intermediary between Russia and its opponents. The European Union will lose a significant part of the grain in its market – the very one that it had promised the poorest African countries would be the deal’s primary beneficiaries, but which turned out to be much more necessary for EU bakers and confectioners, instead of gto Africans who need bread and fertilizers.

    In general, it will be bad for everyone. Except Russia. Russia will not lose anything, because it didn’t gain anything from the deal.

    If Russia takes over Odessa, then Ukraine could very well become an entirely land-locked country, without its only sea-access, which now is via Odessa. The EU and Ukraine would have — by their refusals to comply with the grain deal — considerably increased that likelihood (which would harm the longer-term interests both of Ukraine and the EU).

    In any case, the status of Odessa is now going to be a far more important issue in this war that it had been until now. It will no longer be an issue for Africa, because the July 27 deal didn’t benefit Africa at all (which it had been promised to do). Odessa will instead be purely an issue between Ukraine and Russia.

    The post EU Fails to Comply with Grain-Export Deal first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • All US Presidents are War Criminals

    This is a US war on Russia. Period.

    We have to be very clear, even to the point of being blunt. By ‘we’ I mean those of us involved who are conscious of being part of an Information War–the propaganda war that we are recipients of—on the receiving end of this tsunami of crap. We have to say things flat without fear and without compromise. This is a US war on Russia. Period. Now why do we have to say this? Why should we say it so bluntly?

    The propaganda matrix is so powerful that people, especially within the bubble–that is, within what people call NATOstan. This is the ‘civilized’ world, 15% of the human population. The West. People are so confused and so propagandized that it’s almost as if they have no sense of pattern recognition, or have never read a chapter book. This is a war, a US war against Russia. Why? Because the US is NATO. What is NATO? NATO is a Horribles Parade costume, it’s a Halloween mask. It’s just the US–the extension of the US military around the world by another name. Pure and simple.

    Now when you find all of these things that they’re finding, all the material, all of the connections and the proof that NATO is much more involved than they claim. This is to say that the US is involved. This is the extension of the US. Again: why? Because the US is at war with everybody. The US is involved in its forever war against every*body* and every*thing.* Sometimes the mask slips and people see it. But they hide behind proxies, they hide behind local conflicts, they make it seems like they are doing something else. But they are involved.

    Anglo-US Empire struggling to keep things as they are

    The United States Empire, the inheritors of the UK Empire–so the Anglo-US Empire is involved in a struggle to keep things as they are. They are in the very last throes the death throes I think–of a 500-year history of slaughter and plunder that has kept all of the wealth in the world funneling upwards to them. And the question is not it can they do it, but rather why can’t they see that it’s a completely impossible thing.

    US to send $100 million in additional military aid to Ukraine

    The US announced on 5 April that it would send up to $100 million in additional military aid to Ukraine.

    This is a war against time, against history. Think of the unimaginable arrogance it takes to think that you can freeze time. Why are they going to fail? Because no Empire has succeeded in freezing time. You’re done! It’s over–leave the stage politely, with a gracious bow and support what’s coming next. But no. The unspeakable hubris it takes not only to try to shape the development of life, but to stop it. and this is how you know that they are at work. They’re at work in Ukraine; but that’s not enough: while they’re doing that, they have to try to overthrow Imran Khan in Pakistan. They have to go and threaten Modi in India not to pay too much in Rubles with Russia. Not to have too much Rupee-Ruble shenanigans because we don’t like that, right?

    They try to threaten Orban in Hungary by having the EU accuse them of erosion of democracy. Orban’s great crime is to say he’s going to be closer to Russia. Same with Vuccic in Serbia. You know, these are people who are our increasingly not going to be cowed.

    I don’t know exactly why–within the bubble–why people are so malleable. I mean it’s really incredible how susceptible people are in the Western so-called democracies, where the news is so censored and so filtered that it’s a wonder that they know anything at all. They have this farce–they are pumping up support for this chapter of the Forever War (which they call the Ukraine War) by advertising it in an award show. They have Zelensky prost…ing himself by appearing at the Grammy’s! The National Gallery changes the title of Degas’ work to say Ukrainian Dancers instead of Russian Dancers. Then all the stuff I’ve talked about before, the boycott on Russian vodka, what have you. Whatever. And they are so deep in this–this is inside the bubble–that you cannot talk about any of the real things that are happening.

    Yes, there are Nazis! How do we know? Because the US has been working with them since the 1940s. And with their parents and their grandparents. There’s no secret about this. Even these liberal intellectuals and so-called politically conscious and aware types would have admitted this. This was not controversial even a year or two ago. There were articles everywhere about the Nazi problem in Ukraine, about using the Nazis. Again we come back the notion of pattern recognition. Why are they so surprised? Why is it such a shock?

    Somoza was a Nazi. In Chile Pinochet was a Nazi. They always use these people as their proxies. Why would Ukraine be any different? Maybe it’s because de-Nazification was never really finished in Germany to begin with. They didn’t really like it too much the first time around because defeating communism became more important. Meh. Nazi, schmazi. We took Werner Von Braun, which Tom Lehrer even wrote a song about. De-Nazification, say in Bavaria: 75% of the Nazis identified were rehabilitated. Then they formed the CSU which was part of the basis for Adenauer’s first government.

    Why the US attempted to topple Pakistan’s government

    The US attempted to topple the government of Pakistani PM Imran Khan because “he would not allow US military bases there and because he will not toe the line on Russia.”

    It was never taken seriously and there were always greater threats. Communism was a greater threat. Why is there a Red Scare in the US but the German Bund was allowed to have its Nazis twenty-five thousand strong at Madison Square Garden? We’ve always known which side they were on. They were never serious about it and they’re not serious now. So what is interesting is how the rest of the world thinks. Because they have never been stupid about any of this.

    The American Empire is in a war against humanity

    Europeans love to talk about the Cold War. Well, it wasn’t that cold—ask the people in Vietnam whether it was cold or hot. Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar. Or Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador? Argentina–the Dirty War. Chile—the disappeared. Algeria, Uganda, Rwanda with the divisions that were sown by the Empire. Angola, Mozambique, South Africa itself. The Congo with King Leopold’s murderous reign and NATO’s role in the killing of Lumumba. Palestine? I mean seriously? Are these people serious? The US president gets to call the Russian president a thug and a war criminal? All US presidents are war criminals! This is why when people asked why are we so confident not only when we say it’s a US war against Russia, US war against the world. Why then are we all so sanguine that they will lose, these forces that are trying to stop time?

    It comes back to all the same philosophers is that Dr. King quoted: William Cullen Bryant, the truth crushed to earth will rise again or Thomas Carlyle no lie can live forever. All these things are still true. Ukraine is NATO is the US. The Africans know it, the Indians know it, the Chinese know it, the South Americans and Central Americans know it. This is 85% of humanity. The American Empire is in a war against humanity.

    So how are we so sure, when I hear about the particulars–you have to zoom in every once in awhile. The Maternity Hospital in Mariupol being bombed? Well I don’t know how; I’ll wait and see. Then the model appears in an interview and says it was Ukrainians. The ghost of Kiev? Hmmm, I’m not sure…turns out to be a video game. The Snake Island Heroes who died so heroically yet wound up being videotaped later on having surrendered. The Russian bombing of the Zaporozhie power plant story which Russians were guarding turned out to be too risible to be true. Now this current massacre where bodies are sitting up and waving at the camera. You know, you have to wait because they’ve always use these tricks. It’s not new–pattern recognition! The next chapter–look ahead and sneak a peek at the cliff notes, if you want to stay sane and stay alive.

    And then you have the people involved who want us to feel guilty: the pressure! The pressure to be anti-Russia on the people inside the West… Now, outside people are a little bit freer, so it’s a push back against that that hubris, having been NATO’s victims. Having been subjects of the hot side of the Cold War, they will just tell NATO and the US, as my father said, to take a long walk off a short pier. It is absolutely clear, and we have to present it as such. Or, to quote an Afro-Russian poet, Alexander Pushkin: Для меня/ Так это ясно, как простая гамма. this is as clear to me as a simple sum. And we have to stay strong, and keep our eyes on the fight of our lives, the lives of humanity and the life of the whole world. History is on our side.

    The post All US Presidents are War Criminals first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Voices Against War

    Read Parts 1 and 2.

    The sooner the war in Ukraine is over, the sooner the U.S. and Russia can get down to the business of preserving arms control as a viable part of the relationship between the two nations.

    By seeking to extend the Ukraine conflict, however, the U.S. is in effect engaging in an act of self-immolation that threatens to engulf the world in a nuclear holocaust.

    — former United States Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter

    It is an imperative, and it must be a universal principle of all morally conscious people that war is anathema and militaries should be abolished everywhere, at least on the national level. (I leave open space for the establishment and maintenance of a genuinely international military force under a nonaligned international command to uphold the disarmament and abolishment of national and extranational militaries.)

    In the article, “On the Left and Violence in Syria: The imperialist Violence in Syria, Part 7,” B.J. Sabri and I discussed violence in the context of mortal struggle between or inside nation states and the need to consider the factors that generated it. It is a given that every decent person in the world should decry the killing of kids, women, elderly, and civilians of all ages anywhere, and this includes men; there is no debate on this point. However, our rage, analysis, and criticism should be directed primarily and even exclusively on all those governments whose involvement in imperialism, warring, and killing that create death, destruction, and tragedies.

    However, the root causes of warring must be addressed, and not all warring must be considered as equivalent. Morality and principles must guide us in how we address warring.

    Earlier, I argued: “As a principle, resistance to oppression must be an inalienable right no matter what the type of resistance it may be. Blame for any violent resistance must never be laid on the oppressed but rather on the oppressor because oppression in itself is violent and when one suffers violence then violent resistance becomes justified as self-defense.”

    Numerous anti-imperialist writers from around the world are antiwar. Yet, not all clearly distinguish between the initiator of the violence, resistance to the initial violence, and machinations that corner a rival country which then fights it way out from the corner.

    Ted Glick, antiwar activist and author of Burglar for Peace, wrote on 24 February,

    The Ukraine/Russia war continues to be, at root, a battle for national self-determination by Ukraine against an imperialist power, Russia. Disturbingly, there continue to be leftist groups and individuals in the US who deny this fact.

    I demurred with his contention that it was “a battle for national self-determination by Ukraine against an imperialist power, Russia,” so I asked Ted Glick,

    How do you define NATO’s massive eastward encroachment to Russia’s border? Yet, you define Russia as an imperialist for defending its security after its proposal of a mutual security agreement was rejected by US-NATO-Ukraine. It sure seems to me that Russia asked for a win-win from all parties, and that the blame lies on those who rejected security for all.

    Glick replied,

    An invasion by 125,000 troops into a neighboring country isn’t ‘defending its security,’ it is imperialist aggression.

    Peace advocate Jan Oberg, co-founder of the The Transnational Foundation (a think tank dedicated to bringing about “peace by peaceful means”), wrote in an email missive on 8 April 2022:

    It’s time to say it clear and loud: Russia is responsible for its illegal and immoral invasion of Ukraine. The West is responsible for its military, economic and political reaction to it and for NATO’s expansion before it. And Ukraine’s leaders are responsible for how they operated 2014-2022.

    And it is every social science intellectual’s duty to do comparative studies – to compare also this war with other wars over the last 30 years, the far majority of which conducted illegally and immorally by the US and NATO allies – and with many times worse consequences than the war on Ukraine has so far had.

    I asked Jan Oberg,

    My reading from the above is that Russia acted without provocation. So provocation (unless you reject that) based on a rejection of mutual security and knowing full well what US imperialism has wreaked over the years up to today only makes the West responsible for their reaction to Russia’s invasion? This strikes me as the onus being placed on Russia. Others argue that the SMO was legal (e.g., Scott Ritter). Immoral. Yes, killing in isolation is immoral, but killing in self-defense is not immoral. Allowing a serious threat to the lives and livelihoods of the Russian people to continue to encroach closer with an agenda to carve up Russia and siphon off its resources would be a dereliction of a government’s duty, no?

    Oberg replied,

    No, the invasion was by no means unprovoked – I would never use that stupid NATO phrase/lie.

    In terms of a bit of philosophy, each of us are responsible for how we choose to react to a provocation – and other acts.  There is no automaticity that legitimates violent actions – I am too much of a Gandhian to believe in that. And that what I said here, today a year ago:

    https://transnational.live/2022/02/25/there-were-alternatives-why-russia-should-not-have-bombed-ukraine/

    Secondly, all my arguments are written up here – but I admit it is a long one:

    https://transnational.live/2022/08/18/the-tff-abolish-nato-catalogue/

    It’s one long argument that NATO has made the mother of all blunders – in trying to getting Ukraine into NATO and NATO into Ukraine. A series of scholars – including I myself – warned that war would be the outcome. Nobody listened to us – not even to (now CIA’s) William Burns (see my latest article) and also not to any Russian leader for 30 years.

    Even so, I would argue, the invasion was not acceptable – although understandable/explainable.

    David Swanson of War Is A Crime.org, has been an unrelenting opponent of war — a principled sentiment. What sane and morally guided person doesn’t share this sentiment? Although opposition to warmaking is a unifying factor of antiwar types, there is room for dissent as to what constitutes warmaking and the legitimacy of different forms of warring. For instance, Swanson lumps together warmaking and the warring of a resistance, such that he criticizes all violence, even that in self-defense, as reprehensible. Not only is such lumping flawed but it is arguably a barrier to attaining a world in which there is no more war. If one fails to unequivocally differentiate between offensive violence (what I would define as “warmaking,” although an equally apt term may be “aggression.”) and the violence of self-defense or joint defense of an ally under attack (which is not “warmaking” – except in an Orwellian sense – but is more aptly defined as “resistance.”) George Orwell was scathing in his rejection of pacifism: “Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other.”1

    In response to a 3 September 2019 article, “Nonviolence Denial Is As Dangerous As Climate Denial” by Swanson, I interviewed him to discern how he could seemingly equate all actors in a war notwithstanding why the warring started and why the warring actors where engaged. I find some of his statements factually inaccurate, logically and ethically flawed, and evasive.

    For example, Swanson cited, by way of Stephen Zunes, “Mariupol became the largest city to be liberated from control by Russian-backed rebels in Ukraine…” This is propaganda for NATO. Another writer would have noted that the US engineered a coup in Ukraine to overthrow the elected government using neo-Nazis, to which a resistance arose in the east of Ukraine.

    In a similar vein to Oberg, Swanson presents as a successful passive resistance the Gandhian example in India. Of this, George Orwell wrote, “As an ex-Indian civil servant, it always makes me shout with laughter to hear, for instance, Gandhi named as an example of the success of non-violence. As long as twenty years ago it was cynically admitted in Anglo-Indian circles that Gandhi was very useful to the British government.”1 Those people who were subservient to British empire in the Indian subcontinent could be considered accomplices in a genocide that has been calculated to number 100 million.

    *****

    As for the problem with pacifism, to get at the core of the matter, I present a scenario from which readers can draw their own conclusions.

    Imagine that a person unfamiliar to you suddenly punches you in the face. You recoil from the blow and massage your sore jaw. Somehow you stifle any physical retaliation. Instead you try to understand why this stranger would assault you. He replies, “Just because I don’t like your face.”

    He comes at you again with his fist, and it lands in your solar plexus. You are bent over and winded by the blow. Then he kicks you in the side. At this point you fully understand that the attacker is going to continue to inflict physical violence against you.

    Two questions for readers to ponder:

    1) Seeing no other options, if you defend yourself physically, are you blameworthy for any part of the violence?

    2) Are you then a “violence-maker” along with the attacker who threw the first punches without any legitimate justification?

    *****

    While non-violent resistance sounds righteous. I submit that a violent attacker prefers nothing better than to target a passive “resistor”? What good is being self-righteous when you are hospitalized or dead, leaving behind your family and friends to fend for themselves and their potentially becoming the next targets for violence? I side with the logic proffered by the anti-racist revolutionary Malcolm X:

    I myself would go for nonviolence if it was consistent, if everybody was going to be nonviolent all the time. I’d say, okay, let’s get with it, we’ll all be nonviolent. But I don’t go along with any kind of nonviolence unless everybody’s going to be nonviolent…. But as long as you’ve got somebody else not being nonviolent, I don’t want anybody coming to me talking any nonviolent talk.2

    Readers ought to reach their own conclusions and consider the above scenario while reading the following interview with Swanson.

    *****

    Kim Petersen: I am thoroughly antiwar, and I’d like to see every nation disarm. However, I grant the victims of attack the right to defend against and resist attacks. This does not come through to me in your latest piece. So I pose the following questions.

    David Swanson: Because I disagree with it. 🙂

    KP: You wrote: “I severely criticized my fellow peace activists when some of them cheered for Russian bombings in Syria. I even went after Russia for its warmaking in Syria repeatedly on Russian television.”

    I agree that warmaking is a heinous crime. And as I understand it, you condemn all warring. Nonetheless, for warring to occur there has to be a starting point and, I submit that a war does not usually start simultaneously between/among combatants. Therefore, I ask if a party makes war against your country, how should you respond? Would you not defend your country?

    DS: Usually this is asked as “Do the Iraqis get to fight back?” since it’s the U.S. doing most of the aggression. The short answer to that question is that if the aggressor would have refrained, no defense would have been needed. Turning resistance to U.S. wars around into justification for further U.S. military spending is common on this topic, yet too twisted even for a K Street lobbyist.

    The slightly longer answer is that it’s generally not the proper role for someone born and living in the United States to advise people living under U.S. bombs that they should experiment with nonviolent resistance.

    But the right answer is a bit more difficult than either of those. It’s an answer that becomes clearer if we look at both foreign invasions and revolutions/civil wars. There are more of the latter to look at, and there are more strong examples to point to. But the purpose of theory, including Anti-Just-War theory, should be to help generate more real-world examples of superior outcomes, such as in the use of nonviolence against foreign invasions.

    Studies like Erica Chenoweth’s have established that nonviolent resistance to tyranny is far more likely to succeed, and the success far more likely to be lasting, than with violent resistance.3 So if we look at something like the nonviolent revolution in Tunisia in 2011, we might find that it meets as many criteria as any other situation for a Just War, except that it wasn’t a war at all. One wouldn’t go back in time and argue for a strategy less likely to succeed but likely to cause a lot more pain and death. Perhaps doing so might constitute a Just War argument. Perhaps a Just War argument could even be made, anachronistically, for a 2011 U.S. “intervention” to bring democracy to Tunisia (apart from the United States’ obvious inability to do such a thing, and the guaranteed catastrophe that would have resulted). But once you’ve done a revolution without all the killing and dying, it can no longer makes sense to propose all the killing and dying — not if a thousand new Geneva Conventions were created, and no matter the imperfections of the nonviolent success.

    Despite the relative scarcity of examples thus far of nonviolent resistance to foreign occupation, there are those already beginning to claim a pattern of success. Here’s Stephen Zunes:

    “Nonviolent resistance has also successfully challenged foreign military occupation. During the first Palestinian intifada in the 1980s, much of the subjugated population effectively became self-governing entities through massive noncooperation and the creation of alternative institutions, forcing Israel to allow for the creation of the Palestine Authority and self-governance for most of the urban areas of the West Bank. Nonviolent resistance in the occupied Western Sahara has forced Morocco to offer an autonomy proposal which — while still falling well short of Morocco’s obligation to grant the Sahrawis their right of self-determination — at least acknowledges that the territory is not simply another part of Morocco.

    “In the final years of German occupation of Denmark and Norway during WWII, the Nazis effectively no longer controlled the population. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia freed themselves from Soviet occupation through nonviolent resistance prior to the USSR’s collapse. In Lebanon, a nation ravaged by war for decades, thirty years of Syrian domination was ended through a large-scale, nonviolent uprising in 2005. And last year, Mariupol became the largest city to be liberated from control by Russian-backed rebels in Ukraine, not by bombings and artillery strikes by the Ukrainian military, but when thousands of unarmed steelworkers marched peacefully into occupied sections of its downtown area and drove out the armed separatists.”4

    One might look for potential in numerous examples of resistance to the Nazis, and in German resistance to the French invasion of the Ruhr in 1923, or perhaps in the one-time success of the Philippines and the ongoing success of Ecuador in evicting U.S. military bases, plus of course the Gandhian example from India. But the far more numerous examples of nonviolent success over domestic tyranny also provide a guide toward future action.

    To be morally right, nonviolent resistance to an actual attack need not appear more likely to succeed than violent. It only need appear somewhat close to as likely. Because if it succeeds it will do so with less harm, and its success will be more likely to last.

    KP: And if you and your allies engage in defense, does that mean that you are a “warmaker”?

    DS: That would depend on whether your defense uses war.

    KP: Sorry, I should have elaborated. If you use the physical violence characteristic of warring to defend against a war launched against you, does that make you a “warmaker”?

    DS: Yes, if you wage war you wage war.

    which does not mean Hitler = Roosevelt = Castro

    it just means if you wage war you wage war

    KP: In the case of Syria, the legitimate government (meaning that it governs the country and is recognized as the government by other countries) found itself under physical attack, (and for the sake of argument whether we agree or not on this point) is that government not allowed to defend itself from physical threat?

    DS: The simple answer of yes or no in a particular circumstance as well as the answer to “How much mass slaughter is acceptably characterized as defense”? is not empirically answerable by a scientist or a lawyer and, as you know, is answered by the U.S. and allied nations as they see fit. What I would consider a moral answer is of course a completely different one.

    KP: You wrote: “If the United States and Russia escalate a joint bombing campaign in Syria, things will go from very bad to even worse for those not killed in the process.”

    With all due respect, this comes across as an assertion; one could equally assert the opposite: if fanatical “insurgents,” “rebels,” “mercenaries,” etc. (whatever monikers one wishes to attach to the forces seeking to depose the government) are allowed to attack without resistance and depose the government then the situation will surely become a hell, and the evidence for this is the smoldering carcass of the formerly leading African nation of Libya.

    DS: It’s not an assertion. It’s a guarantee. But it’s not exclusive of your worry, as the U.S. is not setting aside overthrowing the government and throwing the region into chaos and likely putting ISIS in power. Clinton says Obama was wrong not to bomb and overthrow the government three years ago, and she intends to do so.

    KP: You wrote: “Of course the U.S. went ahead with arming and training and bombing on a much smaller scale. Of course Russia joined in, killing even more Syrians with its bombs than the United States was doing, and it was indeed deeply disturbing to see U.S. peace activists cheer for that. Of course the Syrian government went on with its bombings and other crimes, and of course it’s disturbing that some refuse to criticize those horrors, just as it’s disturbing that others refuse to criticize the U.S. or Russian horrors or both, or refuse to criticize Saudi Arabia or Turkey or Iran or Israel.”

    By trying to come across as evenhanded in your criticism, I submit a bias arises. Do you agree or disagree that if Saudi-, Qatari-, western-backed “rebels” had not launched/supported an attempted coup that there would have been no need for the Syrian government to defend the country (and, of course, the government) and there would have been no need to ask Russia to intervene or Iran or Hezbollah?

    DS: The Syrian government cracked down on a mostly Syrian opposition before it became such a proxy war — which excuses the ongoing mass murder by absolutely nobody. [This narrative by Swanson has been compellingly refuted by independent journalist Eva Bartlett who has often been on the ground in Syria during the fighting.5 ]

    KP: If my contention is factual, then why focus equal blame on the resistance to the “rebels”? The rebels made war, and this gave rise to resist the “rebels.”

    DS: Blaming everyone engaged in making a situation worse does not mean blaming them all equally, and I have certainly never tried to imply such a thing which would of course be ridiculous.

    Part 4: Ending war for once and all.

    1. George Orwell, “Pacifism and the War.”
    2. Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks (New York: Grove Press, 1965): 138.
    3. Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2012).
    4. Stephen Zunes, “Alternatives to War from the Bottom Up.”
    5. From Eva Bartlett, “Deconstructing the NATO Narrative on Syria,” Dissident Voice, 10 October 2015:

      Yet, it is known that from the beginning, in Dara’a and throughout Syria, armed protesters were firing upon, and butchering, security forces and civilians. Tim Anderson’s “Syria: how the violence began, in Daraa” pointed out that police were killed by snipers in the March 17/18 protests; the Syrian army was only brought to Dara’a following the murder of the policemen. Additionally, a storage of protesters’ weapons was found in Dara’a’s al-Omari mosque.

      Prem Shankar Jha’s, “Who Fired The First Shot?” described the slaughter of 20 Syrian soldiers outside Dara’a a month later, “by cutting their throats, and cutting off the head of one of the soldiers.” A very “moderate”-rebel practice.

      In “Syria: The Hidden Massacre” Sharmine Narwani investigated the early massacres of Syrian soldiers, noting that many of the murders occurred even after the Syrian government had abolished the state security courts, lifted the state of emergency, granted general amnesties, and recognized the right to peaceful protest.

      The April 10, 2011 murder of Banyas farmer Nidal Janoud was one of the first horrific murders of Syrian civilians by so-called “unarmed protesters.” Face gashed open, mutilated and bleeding, Janoud was paraded by an armed mob, who then hacked him to death.

      Father Frans Van der Ludt—the Dutch priest living in Syria for nearly 5 decades prior to his April 7, 2014 assassination by militants occupying the old city of Homs—wrote (repeatedly) of the “armed demonstrators” he saw in early protests, “who began to shoot at the police first.”

    The post Voices Against War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Hawks Have Had China In Their Crosshairs For Years: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Western media have erased from history all the western provocations which led to the war in Ukraine, they only report pro-western narratives, they hide Ukrainian casualties and ignore the Nord Stream pipeline bombing, then they tell you to worry about foreign propaganda.

    ❖

    Every now and then I like to highlight the fact that all this China stuff was forcast way back in 2004 by Michael Parenti, who said that the unipolarist neoconservative ideology that had hijacked US foreign policy envisioned a massive strategic confrontation with Beijing.

    “The PNAC plan envisions a strategic confrontation with China, and a still greater permanent military presence in every corner of the world,” Parenti wrote in his book Superpatriot. “The objective is not just power for its own sake but power to control the world’s natural resources and markets, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, and power to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere — including North America — the blessings of an untrammeled global ‘free market.’ The end goal is to ensure not merely the supremacy of global capitalism as such, but the supremacy of American global capitalism by preventing the emergence of any other potentially competing superpower.”

    “PNAC” refers to Project for the New American Century, the wildly influential neoconservative think tank whose members played a critical role in pushing the Iraq invasion. Since that time PNAC’s vision for the future has quietly become the mainstream US foreign policy consensus.

    After the fall of the Soviet Union the US government espoused a doctrine of securing US unipolar planetary domination by ensuring no rival superpowers develop, nicknamed the Wolfowitz Doctrine after the Pentagon official who supervised its drafting. Paul Wolfowitz would later become a PNAC member.

    What we’re witnessing now is this doctrine of maintaining unipolar hegemony at all cost colliding with the emergence of a multipolar world order, carried largely by the rise of China toward superpower status. Parenti saw this coming because like PNAC he saw that these two factors must necessarily collide.

    ❖

    The western left is absolute dogshit on war and empire. Pure fucking dogshit. Those who don’t outright cheer for imperial militarism ignore it altogether, or don’t place nearly enough emphasis on it. Those placing an appropriate amount of emphasis on it are a small minority.

    And of course that’s not ultimately all their fault; they’re swimming in the same ocean of empire propaganda and psyops as everyone else. But as we’re accelerating toward a global conflict of unfathomable horror this dereliction of duty is getting less and less acceptable. This needs to change.

    Sure there are other problems we’ve got to worry about, but none of those other problems are going to matter when we’re all dying in a nuclear holocaust. There’s no excuse for anyone who thinks of themselves as anti-imperialist to fail to stand against the empire’s brinkmanship. The US empire is rapidly ramping up aggressions against Russia and China simultaneously and in many sectors of the American left this is getting less attention than the fucking presidential election that’s almost two years away. This isn’t healthy, and it isn’t acceptable.

    People on the left — including some pretty influential ones — used to mock me for warning that mounting Russia hysteria was being used to pave the way for reckless escalations against Moscow. Now we’re closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

    This isn’t something you can just ignore. This isn’t something you can put on the back burner for when you have time. The fate of our entire species is being threatened by the empire’s campaign to secure unipolar planetary hegemony; not later on in the future, but right now.

    People are watching this, and people are noticing. If the western left doesn’t step up its game on opposing brinkmanship between nuclear-armed major powers, other political factions are going to step in and fill the void. If/when that happens, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.

    At what point are we going to wake up and start saying no to this? It has to be soon, because if you wait until a world war between nuclear powers has actually started, you’ve already waited too long. I highly recommend people get moving on this.

    ❖

    There’s a tendency to look at the prospect of nuclear war as an almost philosophical or spiritual subject, probably because you have to have such a big-picture perspective to consider it properly. But it’s a very concrete matter concerning actual, physical warheads and actual, physical people.

    We know that these weapons can end the world, and we know that they will do so under an increasingly likely set of circumstances. This is not religious end-times prophesying, this is an objective, scientific fact about a material situation that our leaders knowingly put us in.

    The fact that we are closer to nuclear annihilation than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis is not some act of God or fate or something that’s passively happening like the weather, it’s the result of concrete decisions made by concrete people with names and addresses. The fact that we could all die in a nuclear holocaust and the after effects thereof is right now a solid, material reality, and it should be treated like one. We should be doing everything we can to demand our leaders change their policies to make that outcome far less likely.

    ❖

    The difference between western liberals and the Proud Boys is that the Proud Boys are self-described “western chauvinists” who promote the belief that “west is best”, whereas western liberals espouse these positions without voicing them out loud.

    ❖

    The most dangerous supremacist belief system in the world is American supremacism, because the belief that the US should rule the world has humanity on a direct trajectory toward hot military confrontation between multiple nuclear-armed nations.

    ❖

    Spiritual enlightenment, inner work, personal psychology, journalism, political activism and geopolitical analysis are all different aspects of the same one thing. In their authentic forms they’re all just different manifestations of the human quest for truth: the quest to learn the truth and to let it inform the way reality expresses, whether that expression is in the way our own minds operate or in the way human civilization as a whole is shaped.

    _________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. 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.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Major US Outlets Found Hersh’s Nord Strom Scoop Too Hot to Handle

     

    Scores of hits from publications across the globe pop up from an internet search for veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’s claim that the US destroyed Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipeline.

    Reuters: Seymour Hersh: who is the journalist who claims the US blew up the Nord Stream pipelines?

    The British news agency Reuters (2/9/23) ran at least ten stories on Seymour Hersh’s Nord Stream report; the US AP didn’t run one.

    But what is most striking about the page after page of results from Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo in the weeks following the February 8 posting of Hersh’s story isn’t what is there, but what is not to be found:

    •  The Times of London (2/8/23) reported Hersh’s story hours after he posted it on his Substack account, but nothing in the New York Times.
    • Britain’s Reuters News Agency moved at least ten stories (2/8/23, 2/9/23, 2/12/2, 2/15/23, among others), the Associated Press not one.
    • Not a word broadcast by the major US broadcast networks—NBC, ABC, CBS—or the publicly funded broadcasters PBS and NPR.
    • No news stories on the nation’s major cable outlets, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News.

    Is there justification for such self-censorship? True, Hersh’s story is based on a single anonymous source. But anonymous sources are a staple of mainstream reporting on the US government, used by all major outlets. Further, countless stories of lesser national and international import have been published with the caveat that the facts reported have not been independently verified.

    Doubts about Hersh’s story aside, by every journalistic standard, the extensive international coverage given the story, as well as the adamant White House and Pentagon denials, should have made it big news in the United States.

    More important, if Hersh got it wrong, his story needs to be knocked down. Silence is not acceptable journalism.

    News blackout

    Newsweek: Did Biden Order an Attack on Russia's Nord Stream Pipelines? What We Know

    The online magazine Newsweek (2/8/23) was one of the few notable US outlets to cover Hersh’s report as a news story.

    What’s not in doubt is the remarkable breadth of the news blackout surrounding Hersh’s story. The only major US newspaper to cover it as breaking news was the New York Post (2/8/23).

    It did appear on the opinion pages—but not the news columns—of two major dailies. The Los Angeles Times (2/11/23) mentioned Hersh’s story in the 11th paragraph of a weekly round-up by the letters editor. On the New York Times  opinion page (2/15/23), Ross Douthat included Hersh in a column headlined “UFOs and Other Unsolved Mysteries of Our Time.”

    Fox News firebrands Tucker Carlson (2/8/23) and Laura Ingraham (2/14/23) collectively gave Hersh’s story a few minutes on their cable TV shows, but their network didn’t post a news story. On Fox News Sunday (2/19/23), National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby was asked about Hersh’s claims. But, again, Fox News didn’t do a separate news report.

    Newsweek (2/8/23) has covered the story , but focusing mainly on White House denials and Russia’s reaction. Bloomberg News (2/9/23) ran a four-paragraph follow-up that also stressed the Russian response, but provided no details of Hersh’s account of the bombing.

    The Washington Post’s first mention of the story (2/22/23) came two weeks after it was posted. Again, Russian reaction was the hook, as seen in the headline: “Russia, Blaming US Sabotage, Calls for UN Probe of Nord Stream.”

    ‘Discredited journalist’

    Business Insider: The claim by a discredited journalist that the US secretly blew up the Nord Stream pipeline is proving a gift to Putin

    Focusing on a story’s acceptance by an official enemy (Business Insider, 2/9/23) is a good tactic for promoting unquestioning rejection of information that challenges official narratives.

    Arguably the most influential coverage of Hersh’s story came from Business Insider (2/9/23), which posted what can justly be called a hit piece, given its blatantly loaded headline: “The Claim by a Discredited Journalist That the US Secretly Blew Up the Nord Stream Pipeline Is Proving a Gift to Putin.”

    The Business Insider article was picked up by Yahoo! (2/9/23) and MSN (2/9/23). It also was the primary source of an article in Snopes (2/10/23), the only major factchecking site to weigh in on Hersh’s claims. But Snopes, which bills itself as “the definitive Internet reference source for researching urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors and misinformation,” didn’t check any disputed facts. Instead, it starts with an ad hominem attack, asking “Who is Seymour Hersh?”

    Snopes answers that rhetorical question by summarizing his body of work—uncovering the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1970, revealing the secret bombing in Cambodia and the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq—but emphasizing that “his later work, however, has been controversial and widely panned by journalists for promoting conspiratorial claims that hinge on dubious anonymous sources or speculation.”

    Snopes’ presentation is hardly even-handed. No defenders of Hersh are cited in the four-paragraph overview of his work, which includes seven hyperlinks to sources. That looks impressive. But clicking on the links reveals four are to the same source: the Business Insider hit piece.

    Snopes’ failure to acknowledge multiple links to the same source isn’t just sloppy, it’s misleading, because most readers don’t check to see if the same source is cited repeatedly.

    It’s likely Snopes used the Business Insider piece a fifth time—the last without attribution. The Snopes article’s final sentence states: “Hersch [sic] was asked by the Russian news agency TASS about the identity of his source. He told them that, ‘It’s a person, who, it seems, knows a lot about what’s going on.’ ”

    The Business Insider piece ends with a paragraph with the same misspelling of Hersh’s name, the same TASS link and identical—word for word — translation of his response. (It doesn’t help Snopes’ credibility as a factchecker that Hersh’s name was originally misspelled two other times in the article.)

    Much of the remainder of Snopes’ article consists of quotes from Hersh’s story, followed by commentary disparaging Hersh’s reliance on a single, unnamed source. Since that’s something Hersh readily acknowledges, it’s hard to see the informational value of the Snopes article.

    Competition, not just critics

    While several bloggers have challenged details in Hersh’s account, no news outlet has answered the only question that matters: Who blew up the pipeline?

    Waiting for official explanations appears to be a dead end. Sweden, Denmark and Germany have launched investigations, but have not indicated when—or if—results would be released.

    The giants of US journalism—the New York Times, Washington Post and the major broadcast networks—have the resources to try and solve the mystery. And it’s certainly possible that one or more of them are working to do just that. But the pipelines were destroyed five months ago. Since then, Seymour Hersh is the only journalist to offer an explanation of who was responsible.

    There should be others. Hersh needs competition, not just critics.

     

    The post Major US Outlets Found Hersh’s Nord Strom Scoop Too Hot to Handle appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Why Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 Was Legal

    Under international law, “aggression” (or “aggressive war”) has never yet been defined so as to separate it clearly from “defensive war” (or “defense”), and this murkiness is the U.N.’s most fundamental failure to-date, because the U.N. was supposed to have been formed in order to prevent a World War Three (WW III), which is impossible to do unless the meaning of “defense” is clear and defense is clearly legal, and the meaning of “aggression” is clear and aggression is clearly illegal; but, a definition is here employed in which “aggression” is anything that endangers a country’s existence or sovereignty over its legal territory, and “defense” is anything that is provoked by (i.e., in response to) “aggression” and that consequently has been forced upon a country as the only reasonable alternative to allowing itself to be taken over by an “aggressor” country. In this definition (a reasonable and practical definition — as opposed to the U.N.’s absence of any definition), “aggression” can be perpetrated by any means, not ONLY military, but also by such means as a coup, or international subversion, or illegal international sanctions — any means whatsoever that can be used in order to seize control over another country (i.e., over a different sovereign nation’s Government). The U.S. Government has always opposed any definition of “aggression” and has always refused even to consider any proposed definition of it that would include anything else than military aggression because America routinely uses non-military forms of aggression (such as coups, and sanctions) and demands to be always able to continue to do so without being called an “aggressor.” This is simply a fact and is the reason why the U.N. is nothing more than a talking-forum and a sump for refugees and any other problems that powerful countries intend to give only lip-service to addressing — it has no significant international power at all. (NOTE: Anyone who doubts that the U.N. has utterly failed to define “aggression” will see in the final paragraph here — which will be entirely in parentheses — a discussion of the U.N.’s absurd, even outright circular, latest formal proposal to deal with that matter.)

    The war in Ukraine is further complicated in international law because clearly Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 constitutes a danger to Ukraine’s sovereignty; but the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis established a fundamental case-law precedent thereafter, by means of which any major international power — in that instance the United States — has a right in international law to prevent any nearby nation from being able to be used by another major international power — in that instance the Soviet Union — to position military forces there that endanger the national security or sovereignty of a major power (in that instance of the United States); and, consequently, the U.S. Government was behaving defensively (against the Soviet Union), instead of aggressively (against Cuba), when it restricted Cuba’s Government from enabling the Soviet Government to position its forces (specifically its nuclear forces) on that island.

    What will be argued here is that that international legal precedent applies universally in international law and that the war in Ukraine was started by the U.S. Government by means of its coup in Ukraine, which replaced an authentically neutral Government there by a rabidly anti-Russian government there (that possessed and possesses no legitimacy even under Ukraine’s Constitution at that time), and that Russia’s Government consequently has an international-law right to take control over Ukraine’s Government in order for Russia to be able to protect itself against America’s Government — which is the aggressor here. Russia is the defender of its own sovereign territory; and Ukraine is merely the battlefield upon which this war between the aggressor America and the defender Russia is being waged.

    Since the topic here is international law, not any national law, only national Governments are involved; and this means that a civil war, or war within a country, is NOT even possibly a matter that the U.N. can reasonably become involved in or have any authority to make pronouncements about. (Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who invented the U.N., did it with that aim — clear separation of international law from national law — in mind, but his immediate successor, who designed the U.N., nullified that and some other aspects of FDR’s plan for the U.N. This is the reason why the U.N. fails. Truman was determined that the U.S. Government itself will ultimately take control over the entire world.)

    The documentation of each step in this case is immediately accessible to the reader simply by clicking onto the links in it at any point where the reader wants to see what the evidence for the given allegation there is:

    On 8 February 2010, Britain’s Guardian headlined “Yanukovych set to become president as observers say Ukraine election was fair.”

    On 12 April 2010 was reported in Ukraine that,

    The president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych met in Washington with the American counterpart Barack Obama.

    On the Ukrainian side, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Konstantin Grishchenko, Minister for fuel and Energy Yurii Boyko, head of the presidential administration Serhiy Lovochkin, deputies head of the administration Hanna Herman and Yuri Lacnyy were also taking part in the meeting.

    The American side represents Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, national security advisor to the U.S. President James Jones, senior director of the U.S. National Security Council on non-proliferation Laura Holgate.

    On 2 July 2010, Clinton again met privately with Yanukovych, this time in Kiev; and, on this occasion, spoke publicly about the meeting, and said that while the United States supported Ukraine’s independence, “the United States welcomes Ukrainian parliament’s decision to approve foreign military exercises on Ukrainian territory in 2010 and we thank Ukraine and the Ukrainian people for your important contributions to NATO and other international security operations.” This means that the U.S. Government actually did not support Ukraine’s independence but instead wanted Ukraine to join its NATO military alliance that had repeatedly rejected Russia’s requests to apply to join it. The U.S. wanted Russia’s bordering nations in NATO, but not Russia itself. Apparently, Yanukovych again said no. That doomed him.

    By no later than June 2011, the United States Government commenced its planning for the coup that occurred in Ukraine in February 2014.

    By no later than 1 March 2013, the U.S. Government in its Embassy in Ukraine, started training members of the far-right Svoboda and Right Sector political organizations in Ukraine how to use the internet in order to raise a crowd to demonstrate against Ukraine’s President, Viktor Yanukovych, to demand his removal from office.

    On 14 April 2014, an article was published in the Polish NIE investigative-journalism magazine saying that in the months prior to Yanukovych’s overthrow, especially during the spring of 2013, paramilitaries of Ukraine’s Right Sector organization were training secretly in Poland, under the direction of America’s CIA, and Poland’s Government.

    By no later than June 2013, the U.S. Government began soliciting for Pentagon-authorized U.S. contractors to convert a school in Sevastopol Crimea, in Ukraine, near Russia’s largest naval base, which is there. This was while Yanukovych was still in office, when the U.S. had no business in Crimea.

    On 19 November 2013, Yanukovych was informed the results by Ukraine’s Academy of Sciences, of its analysis which he had requested, of the EU’s offer to Ukraine to join the EU, which found that it required an up-front expenditure by Ukraine of $160 billion, which Ukraine did not have and the EU refused to supply. So, whomever designed the EU’s proposal knew, in advance, that Yanukovych would turn it down. That was to become the pretext for overthrowing him. It had been set up in advance.

    On 20 November 2013, the Maidan square anti-Yanukovych public demonstrations began. They were led by Andrei Parubiy (“the Commandant of Maidan”), one of the two co-founders of the Social-Nationalist Party of Ukraine, which the CIA had advised to change its name from that Nazi-inspired one, to the “Freedom” or Svoboda Party — which they did. Parubiy’s 2nd-in-command was the founder of the Right Sector Party, Dmitriy Yarosh, who organized the U.S.-backed paramilitaries there that had been trained in Ukraine and in Poland.

    The coup itself occurred during 20-27 February 2014; and here (and its transcript is here) is its smoking-gun evidence that it was a U.S. coup; and there is proof that even the EU’s Foreign Affairs Minister at the time, Catherine Ashton, did not know that it had been any coup at all until her investigator in Kiev reported back to her on 26 February 2014 that it had been. (Here is that phone-conversation, and here is its transcript.) So: Obama had kept the operation secret even from her. (In fact, Obama’s designer of the coup, Victoria Nuland, in that smoking-gun phone-call, said “Fuck the EU”: the EU were vassal-nations of the U.S. empire, and so didn’t need to understand what was happening.)

    At that time, and throughout the post-Soviet history of polling of Ukrainians regarding their attitudes toward the EU and especially toward NATO, that attitude was around two-to-one that NATO was an enemy of Ukrainians, and economic relations east of Ukraine were more important to Ukraine than economic relations west of Ukraine (the EU) were; but this situation reversed itself virtually overnight after America’s 20-27 February 2014 coup. Still, in Crimea and Ukraine’s southeast, NATO and the U.S. were viewed overwhelmingly as enemies, not friends — and the U.S. Government itself knew this because it had commissioned some of those polls. Nonetheless: the U.S. Government insisted that Ukraine must treat as “terrorists” and ethnically cleanse away any residents in those increasingly breakaway regions who refused to accept the U.S.-imposed rulers as being their rulers. And this was done, starting on 15 April 2014. The war against the breakaway-supporters was officially labeled, by the new coup-government, an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” or “ATO” for short. The voters for Yanukovich had to be cleared out, killed and/or escaped into adjoining Russia, so that anti-Russian politicians would win future Ukrainian elections, and the U.S. Government will continue to control Ukraine.

    The United States and its ‘allies’ (colonies, vassal-nations) insist upon having the right to place any weapons onto Russia’s borders especially in Ukraine, because ONLY Ukraine borders less than 800 miles from The Kremlin; it borders only 300 miles from it, and is therefore by far the best place for the U.S. Government ultimately to place its missiles, because that would be only five minutes of missile-flying-time away and would therefore constitute its checkmate of Russia’s Government — far too little time in which for The Kremlin to be certain that America had launched them and for the Kremlin thence to launch its retaliatory weapons. This is the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse and on steroids.

    On 17 December 2021, Russia submitted separately to the U.S. and to NATO extremely reasonable, even necessary, national-security proposals to discuss and negotiate with them, but instead got from both on 7 January 2022 resounding and contemptuous rejections of all of Russia’s national-security concerns. Since what were now clearly Russia’s mortal enemies were not approachable any other way than by means of Russia invading and taking control of Ukraine itself, that is what they did, on 24 February 2023. It was a self-protective act that America and its vassal nations had forced upon Russia, and which was done. This was, and is, essential self-defense, by Russia, against a long and consistent history of U.S.-and-allied aggression.

    The reason why the U.N., as presently constituted, is unable to define “aggression” (not only the military forms of it but also and especially the non-military forms, which precede the military forms) is that U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who invented and originally planned a U.N. that would have succeeded, died on 12 April 1945, and the U.N. that we have was instead designed by his immediate successor, Harry Truman, who despised him and wanted the U.S. Government itself to become the ultimate imperial Government — a global dictator — over the entire world, which was a direct contradiction of what FDR had so carefully planned and intended: the U.N. as a federal global democracy of nations, a democratic federal republic of nations, replacing all empires, and in possession of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial powers to do that.

    So: whereas we now have (as a direct result of what Truman did) no existing definition of “aggression” and of “defense,” and instead have a chaos in international laws of war, Russia is at least as much in the right, as America would have been in the Cuban Missile Crisis to launch an all-out invasion against Cuba and/or the Soviet Union if the Soviet Union had refused to remove its missiles from Cuba. Russia didn’t launch nuclear war against the U.S., but did launch a conventional war against Ukraine, which was forced upon Russia by the U.S. and NATO decisions to reject on 7 January 2022 Russia’s essential national security demands.

    (CLOSING NOTE: The U.N.’s latest formal proposal to address its lack of a definition of “aggression” was on 11 June 2010, and can be seen here. It pertains to the Rome Statute that controls the International Criminal Court (ICC) — a body to which the U.S. Government never joined, so it is immune to. It says: “Crime of aggression: 1. For the purpose of this Statute, “crime of aggression” means the planning, preparation, initiation or execution, by a person in a position effectively to exercise control over or to direct the political or military action of a State, of an act of aggression which, by its character, gravity and scale, constitutes a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations. 2. For the purpose of paragraph 1, “act of aggression” means the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations. Any of the following acts, regardless of a declaration of war, shall, in accordance with United Nations General Assembly resolution 3314 (XXIX) of 14 December 1974, qualify as an act of aggression.” Number 1 there entails the phrase “an act of aggression,” and therefore this ‘defintion is circular: it defines “aggression” by relying upon a presumably already defined usage of the word “aggression,” and is therefore blatantly stupid. Number 2 there uses the phrase “inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations,” but the purpose here was supposed to be to give meaning to that term in the Charter. The U.N.’s Charter employs the word “aggression” 3 times: Articles Numbered 1, 39, and 53, but never defines it. That’s the problem here — not a solution to it. However, this definition of “aggression” does pertain to the U.N.-authorized ICC. And this definition does include as examples of “aggression”: Article 8, #2, paragraphs e and f: “(e) The use of armed forces of one State which are within the territory of another State with the agreement of the receiving State, in contravention of the conditions provided for in the agreement or any extension of their presence in such territory beyond the termination of the agreement; (f) The action of a State in allowing its territory, which it has placed at the disposal of another State, to be used by that other State for perpetrating an act of aggression against a third State.” Notice that (f) uses the word “aggression” in ‘defining’ “aggression” — yet again that shocking stupidity. However, ignoring that for a moment: (f) clearly describes “aggression” by Ukraine against Russia; (e) describes “aggression” that’s “The use of the armed forces of America which are within the territory of Ukraine with the agreement of Ukraine, in contravention of the conditions provided for in the agreement or any extension of their presence in Ukraine beyond the termination of the agreement” — except that no such “agreement” exists or is known to exist — and if it does exist, then who, precisely, are the “aggressor(s)” supposed to be? It doesn’t say. So: (e) is also stupid. But (f) describes Ukraine’s aggression against Russia (but entails circularity in doing so). Whether (f) also would be categorizing America as being an “aggressor” against Russia is unknown. However, beyond those problems: Nothing in that ICC ‘definition’ of “aggression” would have bearing upon America’s coup against Ukraine in 2014, which was the actual and precipitating initial act of aggression directly against Ukraine and indirectly (but also very powerfully) against Russia (and to which Russia then ultimately responded on 24 February 2022 by its invasion). Furthermore: None of the three nations — America, Russia, and Ukraine — have ratified the Rome Statute that authorizes the ICC; so, none of the three can be prosecuted by the ICC; so, there can be, under the sole entity that the U.N. has authorized to try cases in international criminal law, no prosecution of any of these three.

    In conclusion: It is clear that anyone who alleges that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an international war crime or in any other way a violation of international law is a mere anti-Russia propagandist; and, moreover, even if all three of these nations had ratified the Rome Statute, the only one that could be prosecuted for having committed an international war-crime, the crime of “aggression,” would be Ukraine, though the ambiguity of (e) might possibly then allow prosecution of America too; but no prosecution could be allowed against Russia, because even then there would be no rational way to interpret anything that Russia has done in this matter as constituting “aggression.” In the U.S.-and-allied countries, it’s all propaganda; and, unfortunately, publics are stupid enough to believe it, so it’s effective.)

    The post Why Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 Was Legal first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • On Biden Turning Down China’s Push for Peace Deal in Ukraine

    There’s something irrational about President Biden’s knee-jerk dismissal of China’s 12-point peace proposal titled “China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis.”

    “Not rational” is how Biden described the plan that calls for de-escalation toward a ceasefire, respect for national sovereignty, establishment of humanitarian corridors and resumption of peace talks.

    “Dialogue and negotiation are the only viable solution to the Ukraine crisis,” reads the plan. “All efforts conducive to the peaceful settlement of the crisis mU.S.t be encouraged and supported.”

    Biden turned thumbs down

    “I’ve seen nothing in the plan that would indicate that there is something that would be beneficial to anyone other than Russia if the Chinese plan were followed,” Biden told the press.

    In a brutal conflict that has left thoU.S.ands of dead Ukrainian civilians, hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers, eight million Ukrainians displaced from their homes, contamination of land, air and water, increased greenhouse gasses and disruption of the global food supply, China’s call for de-escalation would surely benefit someone in Ukraine.

    Other points in China’s plan, which is really more a set of principles rather than a detailed proposal, call for protection for prisoners of war, cessation of attacks on civilians, safeguards for nuclear power plants, and facilitation of grain exports.

    “The idea that China is going to be negotiating the outcome of a war that’s a totally unjust war for Ukraine is just not rational,” said Biden.

    Instead of engaging China—a country of 1.5 billion people, the world’s largest exporter, the owner of a trillion dollars in U.S. debt and an industrial giant—in negotiating an end to the crisis in Ukraine, the Biden administration prefers to wag its finger and bark at China, warning it not to arm Russia in the conflict.

    Psychologists might call this finger-wagging projection—the old pot calling the kettle black routine. It is the U.S., not China, that is fueling the conflict with at least $45 billion dollars in ammunition, drones, tanks, and rockets in a proxy war that risks—with one miscalculation—turning the world to ash in a nuclear holocaust.

    It is the U.S., not China, that has provoked this crisis by encouraging Ukraine to join NATO, a hostile military alliance that targets Russia in mock nuclear strikes, and by backing a 2014 coup of Ukraine’s democratically elected Russia-friendly president Viktor Yanukovych, thus triggering a civil war between Ukrainian nationalists and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, regions Russia has more recently annexed.

    Biden’s sour attitude toward the Chinese peace framework hardly comes as a surprise. After all, even former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett candidly acknowledged in a five-hour interview on YouTube that it was the West that last March blocked a near-peace deal he had mediated between Ukraine and Russia.

    Why did the U.S. block a peace deal? Why won’t President Biden provide a serious response to the Chinese peace plan, let alone engage the Chinese at a negotiating table?

    President Biden and his coterie of neo-conservatives, among them Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, have no interest in peace if it means the U.S. concedes hegemonic power to a multi-polar world untethered from the all-mighty dollar.

    What may have gotten Biden unnerved—besides the possibility that China might emerge the hero in this bloody saga—is China’s call for the lifting of unilateral sanctions. The U.S. imposes unilateral sanctions on officials and companies from Russia, China and Iran. It imposes sanctions on whole countries, too, like Cuba, where a cruel 60-year embargo, plU.S. assignment to the State Sponsor of Terrorism list, made it difficult for Cuba to obtain syringes to administer its own vaccines during the COVID pandemic. Oh, and let’s not forget Syria, where after an earthquake killed tens of thoU.S.ands and left hundreds of thoU.S.ands homeless, the country struggles to receive medicine and blankets due to U.S. sanctions that discourage humanitarian aid workers from

    operating inside Syria.

    Despite China’s insistence it is not considering weapons shipments to RU.S.sia, Reuters reports the Biden administration is taking the pulse of G-7 countries to see if they would approve new sanctions against China if that country provides RU.S.sia with military support.

    The idea that China could play a positive role was also dismissed by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who said, “China doesn’t have much credibility because they have not been able to condemn the illegal invasion of Ukraine.”

    Ditto from U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who told ABC‘s Good Morning America, “China has been trying to have it both ways: It’s on the one hand trying to present itself publicly as neutral and seeking peace, while at the same time it is talking up Russia’s false narrative about the war.”

    False narrative or different perspective?

    In AugU.S.t of 2022, China’s ambassador to Moscow charged that the United States was the “main instigator” of the Ukraine war, provoking Russia with NATO expansion to RU.S.sia’s borders.

    This is not an uncommon perspective and is one shared by economist Jeffrey Sachs who, in a February 25, 2023 video directed at thousands of anti-war protesters in Berlin, said the war in Ukraine did not start a year ago, but nine years ago when the U.S. backed the coup that overthrew Yanukovych after he preferred Russia’s loan terms to the European Union’s offer.

    Shortly after China released its peace framework, the Kremlin responded cautiously, lauding the Chinese effort to help but adding that the details “need to be painstakingly analyzed taking into account the interests of all the different sides.” As for Ukraine, President Zelinsky hopes to meet soon with Chinese President Xi Jinping to explore China’s peace proposal and dissuade China from supplying weapons to Russia.

    The peace proposal garnered more positive responses from countries neighboring the warring states. Putin’s ally in Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko, said his country “fully supports” the Beijing plan. Kazakhstan approved of China’s peace framework in a statement describing it as “worthy of support.” Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán—who wants his country to stay out of the war—also showed support for the proposal.

    China’s call for a peaceful solution stands in stark contrast to U.S. warmongering this past year, when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Aus.tin, a former Raytheon board member, said the U.S. aims to weaken Russia, presumably for regime change—a strategy that failed miserably in Afghanistan where a near 20-year U.S. occupation left the country broke and starving.

    China’s support for de-escalation is consistent with its long-standing opposition to U.S./NATO expansion, now extending into the Pacific with hundreds of U.S. bases encircling China, including a new base in Guam to house 5,000 marines. From China’s perspective, U.S. militarism jeopardizes the peaceful reunification of the People’s Republic of China with its break-away province of Taiwan. For China, Taiwan is unfinished business, left over from the civil war 70 years ago.

    In provocations reminiscent of U.S. meddling in Ukraine, a hawkish Congress last year approved $10 billion in weapons and military training for Taiwan, while House leader Nancy Pelosi flew to Taipei—over protests from her constituents—to whip up tension in a move that brought U.S.-China climate cooperation to a halt.

    A U.S. willingness to work with China on a peace plan for Ukraine might not only help stop the daily loss of lives in Ukraine and prevent a nuclear confrontation, but also pave the way for cooperation with China on all kinds of other issues—from medicine to education to climate—that would benefit the entire globe.

  • Why Biden Snubbed China’s Ukraine Peace Plan


    Photo credit: GlobelyNews

    There’s something irrational about President Biden’s knee-jerk dismissal of China’s 12-point peace proposal titled “China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis.”

    “Not rational” is how Biden described the plan that calls for de-escalation toward a ceasefire, respect for national sovereignty, establishment of humanitarian corridors and resumption of peace talks.

    “Dialogue and negotiation are the only viable solution to the Ukraine crisis,” reads the plan. “All efforts conducive to the peaceful settlement of the crisis must be encouraged and supported.”

    Biden turned thumbs down.

    “I’ve seen nothing in the plan that would indicate that there is something that would be beneficial to anyone other than Russia if the Chinese plan were followed,” Biden told the press.

    In a brutal conflict that has left thousands of dead Ukrainian civilians, hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers, eight million Ukrainians displaced from their homes, contamination of land, air and water, increased greenhouse gasses and disruption of the global food supply, China’s call for de-escalation would surely benefit someone in Ukraine.

    Other points in China’s plan, which is really more a set of principles rather than a detailed proposal, call for protection for prisoners of war, cessation of attacks on civilians, safeguards for nuclear power plants and facilitation of grain exports.

    “The idea that China is going to be negotiating the outcome of a war that’s a totally unjust war for Ukraine is just not rational,” said Biden.

    Instead of engaging China–a country of 1.45 billion people, the world’s largest exporter, the owner of a trillion dollars in US debt and an industrial giant–in negotiating an end to the crisis in Ukraine, the Biden administration prefers to wag its finger and bark at China, warning it not to arm Russia in the conflict.

    Psychologists might call this finger-wagging projection–the old pot calling the kettle black routine. It is the US, not China, that is fueling the conflict with at least $45 billion dollars in ammunition, drones, tanks and rockets in a proxy war that risks–with one miscalculation–turning the world to ash in a nuclear holocaust.

    It is the US, not China, that has provoked this crisis by encouraging Ukraine to join NATO, a hostile military alliance that targets Russia in mock nuclear strikes, and by backing a 2014 coup of Ukraine’s democratically elected Russia-friendly president Viktor Yanukovych, thus triggering a civil war between Ukrainian nationalists and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, regions Russia has more recently annexed.

    Biden’s sour attitude toward the Chinese peace framework hardly comes as a surprise. After all, even former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett candidly acknowledged in a five-hour interview on YouTube that it was the West that last March blocked a near-peace deal he had mediated between Ukraine and Russia.

    Why did the US block a peace deal? Why won’t President Biden provide a serious response to the Chinese peace plan, let alone engage the Chinese at a negotiating table?

    President Biden and his coterie of neo-conservatives, among them Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, have no interest in peace if it means the US concedes hegemonic power to a multi-polar world untethered from the all-mighty dollar.

    What may have gotten Biden unnerved—besides the possibility that China might emerge the hero in this bloody saga—is China’s call for the lifting of unilateral sanctions. The US imposes unilateral sanctions on officials and companies from Russia, China and Iran. It imposes sanctions on whole countries, too, like Cuba, where a cruel 60-year embargo, plus assignment to the State Sponsor of Terrorism list, made it difficult for Cuba to obtain syringes to administer its own vaccines during the COVID pandemic. Oh, and let’s not forget Syria, where after an earthquake killed tens of thousands and left hundreds of thousands homeless, the country struggles to receive medicine and blankets due to US sanctions that discourage humanitarian aid workers from operating inside Syria.

    Despite China’s insistence it is not considering weapons shipments to Russia, Reuters reports the Biden administration is taking the pulse of G-7 countries to see if they would approve new sanctions against China if that country provides Russia with military support.

    The idea that China could play a positive role was also dismissed by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who said, “China doesn’t have much credibility because they have not been able to condemn the illegal invasion of Ukraine.”

    Ditto from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who told ABC’s Good Morning America, “China has been trying to have it both ways: It’s on the one hand trying to present itself publicly as neutral and seeking peace, while at the same time it is talking up Russia’s false narrative about the war.”

    False narrative or different perspective?

    In August of 2022, China’s ambassador to Moscow charged that the United States was the “main instigator”of the Ukraine war, provoking Russia with NATO expansion to Russia’s borders.

    This is not an uncommon perspective and is one shared by economist Jeffrey Sachs who, in a February 25, 2023  video directed at thousands of anti-war protesters in Berlin, said the war in Ukraine did not start a year ago, but nine years ago when the US backed the coup that overthrew Yanukovych after he preferred Russia’s loan terms to the European Union’s offer.

    Shortly after China released its peace framework, the Kremlin responded cautiously, lauding the Chinese effort to help but adding that the details “need to be painstakingly analyzed taking into account the interests of all the different sides.” As for Ukraine, President Zelinsky hopes to meet soon with Chinese President Xi Jinping to explore China’s peace proposal and dissuade China from supplying weapons to Russia.

    The peace proposal garnered more positive response from countries neighboring the warring states. Putin’s ally in Belarus, leader Alexander Lukashenko, said his country “fully supports” the Beijing plan. Kazakhstan approved of China’s peace framework in a statement describing it as “worthy of support.” Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán–who wants his country to stay out of the war– also showed support for the proposal.

    China’s call for a peaceful solution stands in stark contrast to US warmongering this past year, when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, a former Raytheon board member, said the US aims to weaken Russia, presumably for regime change–a strategy that failed miserably in Afghanistan where a near 20-year US occupation left the country broke and starving.

    China’s support for de-escalation is consistent with its long-standing opposition to US/NATO expansion, now extending into the Pacific with hundreds of US bases encircling China, including a new base in Guam to house 5,000 marines. From China’s perspective, US militarism jeopardizes the peaceful reunification of the People’s Republic of China with its break-away province of Taiwan. For China, Taiwan is unfinished business, left over from the civil war 70 years ago.

    In provocations reminiscent of US meddling in Ukraine, a hawkish Congress last year approved $10 billion in weapons and military training for Taiwan, while House leader Nancy Pelosi flew to Taipei – over protests from her constituents–to whip up tension in a move that brought US-China climate cooperation to a halt.

    A US willingness to work with China on a peace plan for Ukraine might not only help stop the daily loss of lives in Ukraine and prevent a nuclear confrontation, but also pave the way for cooperation with China on all kinds of other issues–from medicine to education to climate–that would benefit the entire globe.

    The post Why Biden Snubbed China’s Ukraine Peace Plan first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • US Exceptionalism and the Wars in Syria and Ukraine

    Syria has been at war since 2011. The conflict is in a stalemate. US troops control nearly a third of the country. The US finances the operation and a secessionist army with oil and wheat they take from the area. It funds them and deprives the Syrian government from their own resources. In the northern province of Idlib, the Syrian version of Al Qaeda is in control, receiving the majority of aid from Europe while the 90% of Syrians who live in government controlled areas go hungry and have electricity only three hours per day.

    Meanwhile in Ukraine, the bloodshed continues as Russian troops battle Ukrainian soldiers while the US and NATO pour in weapons. Russian troops have taken control of much of the eastern region, the Donbass.

    How did we get here and what is driving the process?

    The Rise of the US Exceptionalism

    After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, influential neoconservatives said it was time for US interests and priorities to be dominant. There was only one superpower. This was to be a New American Century with no challengers. This perspective went from being a fringe element to increasingly influential. Over the course of the 1990s, it took hold and became US foreign policy. They said it explicitly: The US should not permit any country to challenge US supremacy and dominance.

    With the Soviet Union gone and Russia in disarray, there was no counter-force in international organizations or the United Nations. The US manipulated existing agencies and created new institutions to its advantage. History and international agreements were rewritten. For example, with US and Israeli pressure, the UN resolution affirming that Zionism is a form of racism was overturned.

    US foreign policy became increasingly aggressive. Sanctions on Iraq, aimed to drive the country into total submission, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Children were especially vulnerable to sickness from contaminated water. Chlorine for purification was prohibited while the US hailed itself a leader in gender equality with the first female Secretary of State, Madeline Albright.

    Recalcitrant countries were subject to attack. The multi-ethnic country of Yugoslavia was a prime target. Divisions were promoted while the CIA funded an extremist separatist army. NATO went on the attack, bombing Serbia without authorization from the UN Security Council. The plan was clear: divide and conquer.

    Simultaneously, the creation of the European Union in 1993 made it harder for individual countries to act in their own best interests and easier for the US to dominate the whole.

    The military alliance binding them together is NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Although this is a military alliance, there is no doubt which country is paramount. The US spends more than all others combined.

    The September 11 attacks in 2001 were a watershed moment. The attacks provided a “Pearl Harbor” moment and justification for increased US aggression abroad. The official explanation of who carried out the attacks and why has been seriously challenged. Whoever perpetrated the attacks, neoconservatives used 9-11 to push their agenda. The US commenced their attack and occupation of Afghanistan.

    The next major violation of international law was the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Iraq was devastated, extremism and sectarianism exploded. Today, US troops remain there despite the Iraqi parliament and government requesting they leave.

    Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction as claimed by US “intelligence”. Instead, a form of chemical weapons was created in Iraq by the US military. Dust from depleted uranium bullets and missiles vaporized and mixed with the environment. Iraq has experienced a huge increase in birth defects and cancer.

    Russia Restabilizes

    While this was happening, Russia was starting to restabilize under the Putin administration. After a decade of chaos, corruption and the collapse of the communist safety net, Russia was getting back on its feet in the early 2000s. The standard of living and life expectancy started to increase. Western advisors were no longer in charge. Oligarchs were no longer able to rob at will.

    Even though the Warsaw Pact has ceased to exist, NATO refused to disband. On the contrary, despite promises to Russian leaders, NATO expanded in 1999, 2004 and 2009.

    When NATO invited Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO in 2008, Russia loudly said NO. They said that would cross a red line for them. NATO was clearly an OFFENSIVE alliance and to permit it on the Ukraine border less than 500 miles from Moscow would jeopardize Russian security. Russia kept asking that security for ALL be considered.

    War in Libya and Syria

    Unrest in Libya erupted in early 2011. Western media started propagating stories of pending massacres and the UN Security Council, with China and Russia abstaining, authorized a “no fly zone” and “necessary measures to protect civilians”. This became the pretext for the US plus NATO and other allies to attack Libyan government forces. They overthrew the Libyan government and unleashed a civil war that continues to today. Later evidence revealed the sensational claims of rape and pending massacre were falsehoods, just like in the past.

    At the same time, the West and allies Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey were funding, training and supporting extremists and foreigners travelling to Syria. After the overthrow of the Libyan government, the CIA took control of Libyan military arsenals and started sending weapons to jihadists in Syria.

    Extremists were trained in camps in Turkey on the Syrian border. Weapons were flown into Incirlik US Air Base in southern Turkey. Thus started the US war on Syria which continues to today.

    In the Fall of 2013, a sarin gas attack killed hundreds of civilians in outer Damascus. Neocons were itching to attack Syria as they had attacked Libya and Iraq. President Obama claimed, “We know the Assad regime was responsible.” He also said “I believe we should act. That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional.”

    The US attack was deterred after Russia persuaded Syria to give up all their chemical weapons – which had been developed as a deterrent against Israel’s nuclear weapons. Russian Putin praised the agreement but cautioned, “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.”

    Later, Seymour Hersh revealed that the chemical attacks were not carried out by the Syrian government as claimed by Obama. Rather, they had been perpetrated by Syrian extremists with Turkish support. The purpose was to provide a pretext for US and NATO direct attacks on Syria.

    War in Ukraine

    Meanwhile, 1200 miles north of Damascus, protests in the Maidan main square of Kyiv Ukraine were growing in intensity. There was a combination of peaceful protesters and a small but violent faction of ultra nationalist extremists. Western billionaires and US agencies were instrumental in promoting pro-western organizations and the Ukraine protests. US politicians and officials such as Victoria Nuland and John McCain showed up to offer symbolic and tangible support.

    On February 7, 2014, Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador planned who would take leadership after the pending Ukraine coup. Nuland summed it up: “Yats is the guy” (Arseny Yatsenyuk). Referring to a compromise agreement preferred by European leaders, Nuland said, “Fuck the EU.” From the conversation, we also know that Jake Sullivan (current National Security Advisor) and then Vice President Biden were involved. US neoconservatives were not satisfied with a mixed Ukraine. They wanted an anti-Russia Ukraine.

    With the Winter Olympics in Sochi Russia drawing toward a close, someone decided to expedite the coup. Timing is important. On February 20, snipers killed over 50 protesters and police to ignite the events. Ukrainian-Canadian Professor Ivan Katchanovoski of the University of Ottawa has rigorously researched the events and shows that the shootings were by snipers located in opposition controlled buildings.

    On the first day of the coup government, on 27 February, they removed Russian as an official language despite 30% of the population having it as a first language. It would be comparable to a coup in Ottawa Canada with the coup government removing French as an official language of Canada. The new leader was the same Arseny Yatsenyuk as planned by Nuland weeks earlier.

    Opponents of the coup government were attacked with 42 killed in Odessa. In Crimea, they quickly organized a referendum on whether to secede from Ukraine. With 83% turnout, 97% of the population said they wanted to join the Russian Federation. In eastern Ukraine north of Crimea, called the Donbas, there was also a majority of the population deeply opposed to the coup and coup government. They confronted the authorities and many military units defected to join the secessionists. The regions were cut off by the Kiev government, with pensioners no longer receiving retirement checks and government services stopped. The Ukrainian Army attacked and thousands died. The regions were excluded from national elections. Eventually they organized themselves as the Donetsk and Lugansk Peoples Republics. Thus the war in Ukraine did not begin one year ago; it began nine years ago, in February 2014.

    In late 2014 and again in 2015, peace agreements to resolve the civil war in Ukraine were signed in Minsk. France and Germany were to help insure the implementation. Russia supported this as a way to resolve the conflict. The UN Security Council passed a resolution endorsing the agreement.

    Instead of implementing this, Kiev ignored their promises while the US and NATO began arming and training the Ukraine Army. In effect, Ukraine became an unofficial member. The arming and NATO-ization continued and escalated. First it was only “defensive” weapons. Then, under Trump, they began supplying “offensive” weapons.

    NATO plans to destabilize and weaken Russia were explicit. The Pentagon thinktank, the RAND Corporation, published reports discussing strategic options to weaken and destabilize Russia. The longer term goal: to break it up as plotted by Brzezinkski in his US foreign policy bible The Grand Chessboard.

    It has recently been revealed by the former Ukrainian, French and German leaders that the 2015 Minsk peace agreement was a ruse. By their own statements and admissions, it was never a genuine effort to peacefully resolve the civil war in eastern Ukraine. The goal was to stall for time while NATO trained and equipped the Ukrainian Army, to solidify the anti Russian attitude and crush those not in agreement.

    NeoCons do not want peace in Ukraine

    The neocons driving Washington’s foreign policy do not want to end the Ukraine war; they want to prolong it. They dream of repeating what happened in the 1980’s when Russian intervention in Afghanistan led to the weakening and ultimate breakup of the Soviet Union. The former boss of Jake Sullivan, Hillary Clinton, said explicitly in March “That [Afghanistan] is the model that people are now looking toward.”

    The immorality of US policy is breathtaking. Afghanistan went through hell beginning in 1979 as the US and Saudi Arabia supported and armed religious fanatics to destabilize Afghanistan and create trouble for the Soviet Union. Afghanistan has endured over four decades of conflict and extremism and is still suffering.

    Today, US neocons running foreign policy are sacrificing Ukraine with the same goal of undermining Russia. They could not live with a neutral Ukraine and have promoted and allied with ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi Ukrainian elements. Previously Washington did not want anything to do with the neo-Nazis but this has changed.

    NeoCons and Syria

    The US has also allied with extremists in Syria. In late 2014 and early 2015, ISIS and Nusra (the Syrian Al Qaeda) made major assaults. Syrian and foreign extremists poured across the Turkish border. There were dozens of Canadians, hundreds of Brits, thousands of Europeans and North Africans. The Canadian and British secret services were well aware of the plans of their citizens who were being recruited by Al Qaeda and ISIS. They did nothing because, as Jake Sullivan said, “AQ [Al Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.”

    With weapons and training from western military and intelligence forces, the extremists were able to capture a large area of northern Syria and the outskirts of Damascus.

    In September 2015 Russia came to the assistance of the Damascus government. They provided airplanes and pilots to attack the advancing extremists. Uninvited, the US began also overflying Syria and then establishing US bases in the east and south. They rarely attacked ISIS but attacked Syrian troops at critical times. Then they began cultivating Kurdish secessionist elements. They rebranded them as the “Syrian Democratic Forces”. They are still there today – stealing the Syrian nation’s wealth in oil and wheat. The US has imposed draconian sanctions on the majority of the country. The dirty war on Syria continues.

    Neoconservative belief in US supremacy and impunity are exemplified by former Deputy Director of the CIA, Michael Morell. In an 2016 interview, he was outraged that Russia supported the Syrian government resisting extremist attacks. In a 2016 interview, Morell publicly suggested “covertly” killing Russians who are on the ground in Syria. “They got to pay a price for what they’re doing. Just like we made the Russians pay a price in Afghanistan …. We have to make them want to go home.”

    Russian Intervention in Ukraine

    One year ago, Russia troops went into Ukraine with the stated goal of de-nazifying and de-militarizing the country. Many Ukrainian civilians have fled the fighting with more that 3 million going to Russia, by far the most of any country.

    Did Russia have a choice? They could have continued waiting, hoping for a change in attitude by the US and NATO. They tried. In December 2021 Russia proposed peace treaties with the US and NATO. Instead of negotiating, the US and NATO dismissed the proposals out of hand.

    The US-Ukraine Stategic Partnership, signed in November 2021, made it clear there was no intention to respect the will of the overwhelming majority of people in Crimea or to implement the Minsk Agreement to resolve the eastern Ukraine conflict peacefully. On the contrary, Ukraine with US support was building its forces to attack the Donbass and perhaps Crimea.

    After 30 years of NATO provocations and escalating threats, Russia acted. While this has been condemned in the West, there is widespread understanding and support for their position in the Global South. A recent poll indicates that a big majority continue to feel positively about Russia.

    What happens in Ukraine will have a profound impact on the globe. The “New American Century” dreamed by US hawks has been challenged.

    It is high time to end US delusions of superiority and exceptionalism. The USA should become a normal nation.

    We need a multipolar world with respect for the UN Charter and international law.

    Let the people in Crimea and the Donbass choose their destinies. Let the war end and Ukrainians recover and prosper in an independent country which is neither a tool of the US or Russia. Let Syria rebuild and recover without the cruel US sanctions.

    Let the US turn from fomenting conflicts, undermining and attacking other countries to reforming and improving itself.

    The post US Exceptionalism and the Wars in Syria and Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • It Is The Mass Media’s Job To Help Suppress Anti-War Movements

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    In a new article titled “European antiwar protests gain strength as NATO’s Ukraine proxy war escalates,” The Grayzone’s Stavroula Pabst and Max Blumenthal document the many large demonstrations that have been occurring in France, the UK, Germany, Greece, Spain, the Czech Republic, Austria, Belgium and elsewhere opposing the western empire’s brinkmanship with Russia and proxy warfare in Ukraine.

    Pabst and Blumenthal conclude their report with a denouncement of the way the western media have either been ignoring or sneering at these protests while actively cheerleading smaller demonstrations in support of arming Ukraine.

    “When Western media has not ignored Europe’s antiwar protest wave altogether, its coverage has alternated between dismissive and contemptuous,” they write. “German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle sneeringly characterized the February 25 demonstration in Berlin as ‘naive’ while providing glowing coverage to smaller shows of support for the war by the Ukrainian diaspora. The New York Times, for its part, mentioned the European protests in just a single generic line buried in an article on minuscule anti-Putin protests held by Russian emigres.”

    This bias is of course blatantly propagandistic, which won’t surprise anyone who understands that the mainstream western media exist first and foremost to administer propaganda on behalf of the US-centralized empire. And chief among their propaganda duties is to suppress the emergence of a genuine peace movement.

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    European antiwar protests gain strength as NATO’s Ukraine proxy war escalates@stavroulapabst and @MaxBlumenthal cover the surge of antiwar activity across the continent over the past year, from Athens to Prague to London to Berlin to Paris and beyondhttps://t.co/At63ggS8M4

    — The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews) February 27, 2023

    As we’ve discussed previously, it has never in human history been more urgent to have a massive, forceful protest movement in opposition to the empire’s rapidly accelerating trajectory toward a global conflict against Russia and China. Other peace movements have arisen in the past in response to horrific wars which would go on to claim millions of lives, but a world war in the Atomic Age could easily wind up killing billions, and must never be allowed to happen.

    And yet the public is not treating this unparalleled threat with the urgency it deserves. A few protests here and there is great, but it’s not nearly enough. And the reason the people have not answered the call is because the mass media have been successfully propagandizing them into accepting the continuous escalations toward world war that we’ve been seeing.

    People aren’t going to protest what their government is doing if they believe that what their government is doing is appropriate, and the only reason so many people believe what their government is doing with regard to Russia and China is appropriate is because they have been propagandized into thinking so.

    The mass media are not telling the public about the many well-documented western provocations which led to the war in Ukraine and sabotaged peace at every turn; they’re just telling everyone that Putin invaded because he’s an evil Hitler sequel who loves killing and hates freedom. The mass media are not telling the public about the way the US empire has been encircling China with war machinery in ways it would never permit itself to be encircled while deliberately staging incendiary provocations in Taiwan; they’re just telling everyone that China is run by evil warmongering tyrants. The mass media are not reminding the public that after the fall of the Soviet Union the US empire espoused a doctrine asserting that the rise of any foreign superpower must be prevented at all cost; they’re letting that agenda fade into the memory hole.

    Because people believe Russia and China are the sole aggressors and the US and its allies are only responding defensively to those unprovoked aggressions, they don’t see the need for a mass protest movement against their own governments. If you tell the average coastal American liberal that you’re holding a protest about the war in Ukraine, they’re going to assume you mean you’re protesting against Putin, and they’ll look at you strangely if you tell them you’re actually protesting your own government’s aggressions.

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    There Has Never In History Been A Greater Need For A Large Anti-War Movement

    "The wars in Vietnam and Iraq killed millions; we're talking about a conflict that can kill billions."https://t.co/eMXpSNBuLH

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) February 27, 2023

    The narrative that Russia and China are acting with unprovoked aggression actually prevents peace, because if your government isn’t doing anything to make things worse, then there’s nothing it can change about its own behavior to make things better. But of course there is a massive, massive amount that the western power alliance can change about its own behavior with regard to Russia and China that would greatly improve matters. Instead of working to subordinate the entire planet to the will of Washington and its drivers, they can work toward de-escalation, diplomacy and detente.

    We’re not going to get de-escalation, diplomacy and detente unless the people use the power of their numbers to demand those things, and the people are not going to use the power of their numbers to demand those things as long as they are successfully propagandized not to. This means propaganda is the ultimate problem that needs to be addressed. Ordinary people can only address it by waking the public up to the fact that the political/media class are lying to them about what’s happening with Russia and China, using whatever means we have access to.

    So that’s what we need to do. We need to fight the imperial disinformation campaign using information. Tell people the truth using every medium available to us to sow distrust in the imperial propaganda machine, because propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you.

    Our rulers are always babbling about how they’re fighting an “information war” against enemy nations, but in reality they’re fighting an information war against normal westerners like us. So we must fight back. We need to cripple public trust in the propaganda machine and begin awakening one another from our propaganda-induced sleep, so that we can begin organizing against the horrific end they are driving us toward.

    ______________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. 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.

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  • The Nuclear “War” in Ukraine May Not Be the One We Expect

    In 1946, Albert Einstein shot off a telegram to several hundred American leaders and politicians warning that the “unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Einstein’s forecast remains prescient. Nuclear calamity still knocks. Even prior to Vladimir Putin’s bloody invasion of Ukraine, the threat of a nuclear…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Antiwar, Apathy, and War Hawks

    Read Part 1.

    Back in February of 2003, an estimated 10 million to 15 million people hit the streets around the world in opposition to a war on Iraq. US president George W Bush dismissed the protesting masses as a “focus group.” Bush and his partner in crime, UK prime minister Tony Blair, invaded Iraq and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died, as well as thousands of the invading troops.

    Unfortunately, 20 years later, the Rage Against War Machine rally in Washington DC didn’t draw near enough numbers to make an impression. One estimate put the numbers between 1,000 and 3,000 people, which has to be majorly disappointing for the antiwar movement. The rally has been for the most part ignored by the monopoly media, much as the W Bush and Blair governments paid scant heed to the antiwar protestors in 2003.

    Why the low turnout? Did W Bush crush the soul of the antiwar movement?

    While the number of protestors in the US and Britain seemed impressive in 2003, when one considers the numbers as a percentage of the population, then one might conclude that either many more people were insouciant or worse that many more people supported the war machine.

    TP Wilkinson interviewed Joan Roelofs, author of The Trillion Dollar Silencer: Why There Is So Little Anti-War Protest in the United States. As to the paucity of antiwar protest, Roelofs postulated:

    There is a heritage of violence and its glorification in the US, perpetrated by propaganda, the educational system, and the adoration of family members who have been in the military. In addition, there are other reasons for supporting the military, including fear (of being considered unpatriotic, etc.), distractions, and interests. My book is mainly about the interests and the military connections pervading our social, educational, cultural, and economic institutions.

    Or does a segment of the antiwar movement pursue a wrongheaded strategy?

    *****
    On 11 April 2022, important antiwar activist David Swanson wrote:

    Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons and was attacked. Therefore every country should have nuclear weapons.

    NATO didn’t add Ukraine, which was attacked. Therefore every country or at least lots of them should be added to NATO.

    Russia has a bad government. Therefore it should be overthrown.

    These lessons are popular, logical — even unquestionable truth in many minds — and catastrophically and demonstrably wrong.

    Swanson tries to dismantle the argument that “every country that gives up nukes gets attacked.” He states Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons. Those nukes were Soviet nukes, and Ukraine never had control of these nukes. All of the nukes were removed to Russia under a 1994 agreement. Swanson acknowledges, “Now, it is true that Libya gave up its nuclear weapons program and was attacked.” Libya gave up its program, but it never had nukes, and Swanson eludes the question of whether Libya would have been attacked if it had succeeded in the development and retention of its nukes.

    Swanson: “And it is true that numerous countries lacking nuclear weapons have been attacked: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, etc. But nuclear weapons don’t completely stop India and Pakistan attacking each other…”

    Comment: The key words here are “don’t completely stop” attacks. What has not transpired is an all-out attack. Dangerous as a pin-prick attack might be, there is a undeniably large difference between such attacks and launching a major military offensive. Granted, a pin-prick attack is risky and might indeed provoke a heightened response leading to great devastation, but both sides certainly must be aware that if a certain red line is crossed and a nuclear exchange is precipitated that it is goners for all sides. Such is the ineluctable outcome of nuclear war.

    Swanson: “… don’t stop terrorism in the U.S. or Europe…”

    Comment: Terrorism is a damnable scourge. What Swanson points to is retail terrorism, and it is tiny in destructive magnitude compared to the wholesale terrorism of nation states such as the US. One must not condemn one form of terrorism, retail, and neglect to condemn the far greater wholesale terrorism. Indeed, all terrorism that targets civilians must be condemned. Thankfully, terrorists do not have nukes … yet. There are still, however, unrecovered broken arrows out there.

    Swanson: “… don’t prevent a major proxy war with the U.S. and Europe arming Ukraine against Russia…”

    Comment: Proxy wars speak more to madness and false bravado. In the case of the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, it speaks to cowardice — the abject refusal to own up to the crime one committed, even though every politically aware person knows the US did it with the considerable aid of Norway and also the investigation’s cover-up carried out by Sweden and Denmark. The reality is a nation that presents itself as an exceptional and indispensable beacon on the hill, but it doesn’t have the gumption to own up to what it did.

    Swanson: “… don’t stop a major push for war with China…”

    Comment: Pushing for and carrying out war are different animals. As it stands, US-NATO-Ukraine are headed for a major defeat, and that precludes an attack on China in the near and longer term.

    Swanson: “… don’t prevent Afghans and Iraqis and Syrians fighting against the U.S. military…”

    Comment: What is the choice?: either capitulate and live on one’s knees or resist with honor. Besides, the US is hamstrung from using nukes, particularly against less militarily potent countries that do not possess nuclear weapons because overtly using WMD would thoroughly undermine (if that isn’t the case yet) the attack on an Iraq that was fundamentally disarmed. And it would/should result in a massive condemnation of the US and the fracturing of its alliances.

    Swanson: “… and have as much to do with starting the war in Ukraine as their absence does with failing to prevent it.”

    Comment: Looks like Swanson is destroying his own argument here. The Ukrainians don’t have nukes, so Russia need not employ nukes. If Ukraine had had nukes, would Russia have invaded? Just imagine a nightmare scenario of neo-Nazis having control over nukes.

    Swanson: “Among Russia’s excuses for invading Ukraine was the positioning of weaponry nearer its border than ever before. Excuses, needless to say, are not justifications…”

    Comment: Who decides what is a justification or an excuse? Swanson? He needs to define what the difference between an excuse and a justification is and why a particular case is neither one or the other; merely stating so is thoroughly uncompelling. Is not removing a credible threat being stationed ever closer to Russian territory justifiable? Apparently not to Swanson.

    Swanson: “… and the lesson learned in Russia that the U.S. and NATO will listen to nothing other than war is as false a lesson as those being learned in the U.S. and Europe.”

    Comment: Sounds like a strawman argument. So who is saying that “the U.S. and NATO will listen to nothing other than war” and that this is the lesson Russia has learned? Swanson is, arguably, absolving the US and its NATO minions because provoking a war is more-or-less warmaking by intention. If setting up the situation knowing that it will lead to war is not sufficient to qualify as a “lesson learned,” then the flow of weapons from the US-NATO into Ukraine is undeniably a “lesson learned.”

    Did the US intentionally provoke the war? There are numerous pronouncements by politicians and media calling it a proxy war, for example, by German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said: “We are fighting a war against Russia…,” by Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton, who serves on the House Armed Forces Committee, by the Washington Post, by Fox News: “Tucker: We are at war with Russia, whether or not Congress has declared it,” by the Cato Institute, by Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd, etc. It is indeed a proxy war, a war the US, Canada, and Europe finance with Ukrainian blood to try and weaken Russia.

    The goal is to break up Russia and exploit its resources.

    Swanson: “Russia could have supported the rule of law and won over much of the world to its side.”

    Comment: Which law says that Ukraine cannot join NATO? Which law says that the US cannot station weapons in Ukraine and point them at Moscow? Which law? The laws of the rules-based order? Swanson assumes the rule of law works in this world. But Swanson knows well, for instance, the purposeful miscarriage of justice against Julian Assange. Why should Russia fare any better under the law than Assange? The US regards international law with impunity. The US has not enacted Article 6 as required by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; it is not a member of the ICC; it even ignores rulings by the World Court against it. Russia is well aware of this. Israel is a serial violator of international law, yet it is backed by the US and many of the NATO countries, so Swanson appears to be talking from the ether here. Julian Assange has been awaiting justice for over a dozen years, yet Swanson laments that Russia “chose not to” have pursued the legal route. Before proposing solutions such as turning to the courts, first it has to be demonstrated that law works. The law throughout history, up to the present day, has been clearly and demonstrably hit-and-miss. Why would Russia submit its security to such a flawed process?

    Swanson: “In fact, the United States and Russia are not parties to the International Criminal Court.”

    Comment: Why would Russia bind itself to the ICC when its main adversary refuses to join? What sense would that make? Why would Russia sign the Ottawa Treaty on the prohibition of landmines when the US refuses? Why would Russia denuclearize if the US doesn’t? Moreover, why does Swanson grant that the ICC is an impartial administrator of justice?

    Swanson: “The U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, the U.S. and Russian efforts to win over Ukraine for years, the mutual arming of conflict in Donbas, and the Russian invasion of 2021 highlight a problem in world leadership.” [italics added]

    Comment: A contradiction? Why did Swanson earlier make the argument that Russia could appeal to the rest of the world through law when there is a problem in world leadership? Again, no mention was made of NATO encroachment toward Russia. Is not the eastward spread of NATO (facilitated by a US-backed coup in Ukraine) the greater precipitating invasion? And did not the US-fueled coup in Ukraine beget the Russian invasion?

    Furthermore, what needs to be stated is that there is no Russian encroachment toward Europe or the US. Europe and the US do not find themselves ringed by Russian military bases. Knowing this, it is undeniably clear who the intrusive, provocative party is.

    Swanson: “Of 18 major human rights treaties, Russia is party to only 11, and the United States to only 5, as few as any nation on Earth. Both nations violate treaties at will, including the United Nations Charter, Kellogg Briand Pact, and other laws against war. Both nations refuse to support and openly defy major disarmament and anti-weapons treaties upheld by most of the world.”

    Comment: Again, if a major belligerent such as the US rejects treaties, then countries targeted by the US, such as Russia, might feel compelled to abstain from such treaties that would tie their hands vis-à-vis an antagonist. This may well hamper the ability of a country to defend itself. Consider also treaties signed by Russia and not signed by the US, such as “Protection from Torture, Ill-Treatment and Disappearance,” “Employment and Forced Labour,” and “Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity.” Therefore, to criticize both parties and without pointing out key differences points to a bias. To the point, there is no equivalence between the US and Russia.

    Swanson: “… the United States actually keeps nuclear weapons in five other nations and considers putting them into more, while Russia has talked of putting nukes in Belarus.”

    Comment: As they say: talk is cheap or, more aptly, actions speak louder than words. Hence, there is no equivalence between militaristic actions actually carried out by the US and rumors about what Russia might do. Besides, if Russia did move nukes into Belarus, criticism must take into consideration why Russia did so because every nation has a right to ensure its security, and that is why the special military operation was launched against Ukraine: because Russian security concerns were ignored.

    Swanson: “Russia and the United States stand as rogue regimes outside the Landmines Treaty, the Convention on Cluster Munitions, the Arms Trade Treaty, and many others.”

    Comment: What if the USA signed? Is the reason that Russia has not signed because it objects to handcuffs on its military operability, or is the reason for Russia not signing because the US will not? Why did Russia get the bomb? Because the US had it. Swanson completely misses this point. Russia signed the Outer Space Treaty; the US is the only country to reject it.

    Swanson: “The United States and Russia are the top two dealers of weaponry to the rest of the world, together accounting for a large majority of weapons sold and shipped.”

    Comment: Has Swanson considered that Russia might very well stop selling weaponry if the US and all other countries agreed to this? Should Russia stand aside and allow the US to reap monster profits from weapons sales to further finance its own arsenal? Would that be a prudent move by a nation exposed to incessant US warmongering against it?

    Swanson: “Meanwhile most places experiencing wars manufacture no weapons at all. Weapons are imported to most of the world from a very few places. The United States and Russia are the top two users of the veto power at the UN Security Council, each frequently shutting down democracy with a single vote.”

    Comment: It is poor argumentation to argue against the use of a veto right by a UN Security Council member nation without analyzing what the veto was used for and whether the veto use was valid or not. Consider, for example, what happened when China and Russia abstained from the UNSC Resolution 1973 calling for a ceasefire and setting up no-fly zones in Libya. NATO members reinterpreted the resolution, invoked the Farcical Responsibility to Protect principle, (Obviously farcical because what about the responsibility to protect Palestinians from Israeli killing sprees? Protect the Yemenis from (instead of bolstering) Saudi attacks. Etc.) and attacked Libya which wound up being destroyed by the attackers. Arguably, if either Russia or China had used its veto, the carnage and devastation in Libya could have been averted. Besides, if one country flagrantly wields the veto to the detriment of the other what choice is left to the other? Reporting an equivalence in criticism to both parties when one party is the preponderant warmaker suggests a superficial analysis.

    Swanson: “Russia could have prevented the invasion of Ukraine by not invading Ukraine.”

    Comment: How should one respond when someone states the obvious? But sure, allow Ukraine and NATO to deny Russia their desired security. If Russia permitted that would it be a smart move on Russia’s part — inviting NATO to set missiles up near its border?

    Swanson: “Europe could have prevented the invasion of Ukraine by telling the U.S. and Russia to mind their own business.”

    Comment: That would be nice, but it would also be absurd. Since when does Europe tell the US what to do rather than bending over when ordered to do so by the hegemon?

    Swanson: “The United States could almost certainly have prevented the invasion of Ukraine by any of the following steps, which U.S. experts warned were needed to avoid war with Russia:

    • Abolishing NATO when the Warsaw Pact was abolished.
    • Refraining from expanding NATO.
    • Refraining from supporting color revolutions and coups.
    • Supporting nonviolent action, training in unarmed resistance, and neutrality.
    • Transitioning from fossil fuels.
    • Refraining from arming Ukraine, weaponizing Eastern Europe, and conducting war rehearsals in Eastern Europe.
    • Accepting Russia’s perfectly reasonable demands in December 2021.”

    Comment: If Russia’s demands were “perfectly reasonable,” why is Swanson inordinately finding fault with Russia? Is Russia militarily encircling the US? And why does Swanson think that the US wanted to prevent the invasion? Why does Swanson not put the whole onus on the US-NATO where it belongs and demand that they should have accepted the “perfectly reasonable” security demands sought by Russia?

    Swanson: “In 2014, Russia proposed that Ukraine align with neither the West nor the East but work with both. The U.S. rejected that idea and supported a military coup that installed a pro-West government.”

    Comment: Again, why is he criticizing Russia so much? If Russia had supported a military coup to overthrow the government in Mexico and installed an unfriendly regime that placed missiles pointed at the US, what would have been the American response? Informed people are well aware of what happened when Soviet missiles were stationed in Cuba.

    Swanson: “But refraining from expanding NATO would not have prevented Russia attacking Ukraine because the Russian government is a noble philanthropic operation.”

    Comment: Snarky criticism from Swanson exposes either Russophobia or a US-centric bias. What removing an offer of NATO membership to Ukraine would have done is remove a Russian objection and address Russian security concerns. Plus, Russia would have been cast as a bad faith actor had it subsequently invaded Ukraine. What Swanson fails to acknowledge is the widespread reputation of Putin for not bluffing; succinctly, he means what he says.

    Also consider why Russia was not admitted into the purported defensive alliance of Nato? What better way to remove an adversary than to join with them.

    Swanson: “It would have prevented Russia attacking Ukraine because the Russian government would have had no good excuse to sell to the Russian elites, the Russian public, or the world.”

    Comment: Does Swanson mean an excuse, or does he mean justification? Whatever, it presupposes that Putin wanted to attack Ukraine, and that the security proposals that his government proffered were just a ruse. Swanson offers no substance to his speculation. It appears rather that Swanson is providing an excuse for the US. Although he is critical of US warmaking, he lessens criticism against the US by providing a justification/excuse in the form of a reified Russian bogeyman for the US — all without irrefutable substantiation.

    In Part 3: Voices from the antiwar movement.

    The post Antiwar, Apathy, and War Hawks first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Tragic Anniversary: One Year Into the Russo-Ukrainian War



    The first anniversary of a nightmare has passed, and it probably won’t be the last. The body bags are multiplying day by day.

    Russian military losses are staggering, well over 100,000 killed or wounded. Ukraine has suffered over 20,000 casualties, many more have died from malnutrition and sickness, and more than 20% of the population, eight-million refugees, have fled the country. As Russia despairs over lost hopes, and its declining international prestige, Ukraine is mired in rubble. Its infrastructure has been smashed, its environment incalculably devasted, and its citizenry is living in fear. Centralization of power is taking place in both Russia and Ukraine. Dissenters are driven underground, minorities are fearful, human rights are compromised, corruption is widespread, and public life is decaying. Increasingly, the gap is widening between the interests of two sovereigns, which they equate with those of their nations, and their subjects who must bear the burden of their choices.

    Terminating assistance for Ukraine remains unthinkable, but tying aid to conditions attendant upon its pursuit of peace is not. The United States has already sent $113 billion, twice the amount it wasted in Afghanistan, and 2023 has been greeted with the promise of another $6.5 billion. Left-wing critics are grumbling about funding a proxy war, and the profits being accrued by the military-industrial complex, while influential extremists in the Republican Party are embracing isolationism and intent on cutting off aid entirely. Moreover, polls indicate that Ukraine is a very low priority in the minds of American voters. Is Europe willing to shoulder more of the burden? Maybe is not an answer.

    A new Russian offensive is underway and a second front may open through Belarus. Will the United States and NATO send troops if current forms of military and financial prove inadequate? Of course, Russian forces might be thrown back, and regime change could occur. Will regional implosion follow? The resulting repercussions are impossible to predict, and Western leaders should be careful what they wish for. Russia has withdrawn from its treaty with the United States, calling for a reduction of nuclear weapons, and President Vladimir Putin’s disclaimers concerning tactical nuclear strikes should not be taken at face value. That is especially the case if he feels himself backed into a corner without an exit option.

    Two global blocs are forming that feature the United States, NATO, Great Britain, and Ukraine on one side and China, North Korea, Iran, South Africa, possibly India, and the “stans” of Central Asia on the other. China is the wild card. A major trading partner with the West, China views Russia as a crucial ally in challenging American hegemony. China is engaged in a computer “chip war” with the United States and there is fierce competition between them over semiconductors. President Joseph Biden has been outspoken in defense of Taiwan against Chinese threats and, most likely, aid packages for Indonesia and the Philippines are already being prepared. President Xi Peng’s call for a “cease-fire” does not turn him into a saint, only a very canny politician. Cease-fire or stalemate, which can easily devolve into trench warfare, will make Russia even more dependent on Chinese support and, simultaneously, drain Western resources. “Neither peace nor war,” using Trotsky’s phrase, is not the same as disarmament or a peace treaty.

    President Putin has re-stated his readiness to participate in an international peace conference. His conditions for beginning discussions remain unchanged: Ukraine must first demilitarize, recognize Russian annexations, especially Crimea and territories around Kherson, and guarantee Russian security. Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, is no less disingenuous when it comes to negotiations: Russia must first meet ten conditions including withdrawal of its forces from all Ukrainian territories including Crimea. Treaties between friends are easy to conclude. Between enemies it is another matter, however, especially when they both insist on having their respective goals met before any talks take place.

    When Russia launched its invasion one year ago, Western fears of “appeasement” were understandable. New imperialist undertakings are unlikely, however, given its losses and miscalculations. Nevertheless, sanctions have not brought Russia to its knees: its trade has “bounced back” to pre-war levels, according to the New York Times (2/2/2023), and its GDP has unexpectedly risen 3% over the past year. Given Putin’s institutional “unification” (Gleichschaltung) of Russia, which marks all totalitarian regimes, domestic dissent is also likely under control. Shifting gears, Ukraine asserted its right of national self-determination in resisting Russia’s invasion, which is in accord with international law. However, whether by design or not, it is now completely reliant on foreign assistance and the nation’s sovereignty will remain compromised so long as the war continues.

    Western “liberal” mass media have mostly turned into irresponsible cheerleaders for Ukraine just as was initially the case when the United States became involved in Vietnam and Iraq. Responsible critics are dismissed, alternative policies are ignored, while complexities and risks remain unexamined. The parameters for peace are clear and, given that geo-political realities will not magically disappear, they are unlikely to change. In this morally just war is it really moral to keep demanding useless sacrifices? That seems a legitimate question as the second year of the nightmare begins.

    This article is based on a speech given for a conference marking the first anniversary of the invasion, social democratic perspectives on war and reconstruction, hosted by the European Foundation for Progressive Studies (FEPS) on February 23,2023.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Russian War Crimes Have Hardened Ukrainians Against Peace Talks, Activist Says

    The world held its breath when Russia invaded Ukraine one year ago. Would Kyiv fall to Russian forces, as President Vladimir Putin and a small inner circle had planned? Would the Kremlin install a puppet dictatorship and brutally crush dissent, just as Putin does at home? We soon learned Putin seriously underestimated his neighbor and its allies to the West, but today there is no end to the war in…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Behind the Self-Defeating Approach toward the National Protest against the US War on Russia in Ukraine

    The Rage Against the War Machine, which stood up against the US war on Russia in Ukraine, was the first national anti-war demonstration in the capital in years. This was a groundbreaking event, showing that the anti-war movement has revived on a national scale after years of relative quiescence. Yet this success was not welcomed by some leftist anti-war activists. People may be acquainted with the issue of Libertarians as a key sponsor of the rally, and some of the views or alleged views of some of the speakers — views unrelated to the demands of the demonstration. 

    Underlying this are deeper causes for the conflict.

    A lefty anti-war coalition?

    Some consciously, some not, seek to build a “left” anti-war coalition, an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist one. This confuses an anti-war movement with a left organization. It isolates you from possible allies. It is a myth that anti-war movements are led by leftists, a myth that anti-war movements consist mostly of leftists. Most people protest war because they are sick of war, are against new wars – not because they are leftist, but because they have human feeling. This should not be some new revelation. 

    Movement building means we need to win over the people. And we need committed activists and experienced organizers. Whether they hold an anti-imperialist worldview is secondary. People become anti-imperialist — if they do at all — after becoming politically active, combined with some period of study. Often they become so only temporarily, as we see today with so many on the left supporting US regime change in Ukraine, Nicaragua, Syria, Iran, Hong Kong, or Russia. 

    The root of these leftists’ mixed-up thinking goes back to the purge of the working class left-wing from the trade union movement after World War II. US government operations drove this class struggle force out of its home base in the working class. The left has not rebuilt its natural home there, nor does it focus on reestablishing the working class as its base. Instead, they orient to the multi-class socially progressive milieu with its nebulous relation to the means of production. 

    A left that exists separate from a working class left-wing is homeless, cast adrift. In the socially progressive milieu, it rotates around Democratic Party voters, its liberal identity politics, and its disdain for the “deplorables.” Ironically, those who articulated that the Democratic Party is the more effective evil are living proof of the accuracy of this statement.

    A left-wing grounded working class would not make such foolish mistakes as not supporting the February 19 demonstration against imperialist war. Nor would a working class left-wing, in contrast to today’s left, have any greater hostility to Trump voters than to Obama, Clinton or Biden voters. 

    Left-right alliance?

    The February 19 anti-war demonstration was dubbed a “left-right” alliance, a term first used by left supporters of US regime change in Syria. These left apologists for the “Syrian Revolution” smeared opponents of that military operation as allied with “fascists” in a “red-brown” alliance. Now this has been picked up by some left opponents of the US war on Russia to attack a demonstration against the present imperial war. 

    A reality check is in order. People who attack demonstrations against US imperial wars are the ones who are reactionary, not the people who organize the demonstrations. That has always been the case.

    Fortunately, many of these have called another anti-war rally on March 18, even if not for the best of reasons.

    The demands of the Rage Against the War Machine rally were: Not One More Penny for War in Ukraine; Negotiate Peace; Stop the War Inflation; Disband NATO; Global Nuclear De-Escalation; Slash the Pentagon Budget; Abolish the CIA and Military Industrial Deep State; Abolish War and Empire; Restore Civil Liberties; and Free Julian Assange.

    While it is not clear what is meant by “left” and “right,” the demands of the rally are directed against the national security state, the actual government of this country. If you confront it, then you are not supporting it, and we are on the same side.

    Why did some lefty people set up a litmus test on other issues unrelated to the Rage Against the War Machine demands to determine who should be allowed to participate? If you want to weaken a movement, that is what you would do. Shun people who hold dissimilar beliefs on issues unrelated to the demands of the demonstration? That is a definition of sectarian.

    A demonstration gives us the opportunity to explain our anti-imperialist message to other participants. If we don’t use that opportunity, then we don’t do our job.

    School of Americas Watch protests at Fort Benning

    SOA Watch organized annual rallies outside Fort Benning against US military intervention and murder in Latin America. The protests were staged and funded by different orders and groups of the Catholic Church. Most participants came from Catholic orders and schools. These are organizations opposed to women’s right to choose, opposed to LGBT rights. Were the SOA Watch rallies a “left-right” alliance we should attack instead of joining? Attack the protests for being a platform legitimizing anti-woman and anti-gay groups? 

    The “Left-Right” Alliance Fred Hampton Built

    Fred Hampton and Bobby Lee of the Chicago Black Panthers showed how class-conscious activists work with seemingly hostile groups. In the late 1960s these Panthers helped create a Rainbow Coalition of poor blacks, Puerto Ricans, and southern whites to fight for fair housing, economic equality, and against police brutality. The whites, Young Patriot Organization (YPO) was based in Hillbilly Harlem, in uptown Chicago. They wore the Confederate flag as their emblem, and many were racist. But like blacks and latinos, the Young Patriots and their families experienced discrimination — being poor and from the South. Fred Hampton tolerated YPO members wearing their Confederate flag patches at meetings and rallies. It came to take on a new meaning within the Rainbow Coalition. The YPO began wearing the Confederate flag with black power symbols and slogans. Despite the racial divisions, the BPP and YPO found common cause in the fight against their oppression. Through their joint work, the Young Patriots cast off their white supremacy views, including the Confederate flag. They saw they had in much common with the Black Panthers and latino Young Lords. This is but one example of people, focused on taking on the imperialist power structure, overcame their “left-right” divisions and worked together to fight their common oppressor. 

    Medea Benjamin

    Medea Benjamin, a sensible and highly respected anti-war activist, no sectarian, had this to say about Rage Against the War Machine:

    Many people have asked me why I am not speaking at the Rage Against the War Machine rally in DC on Feb. 19. Here’s why: I supported the Rage Against the War Machine Rally from the time of its conception and I support it today, even though I will not be one of the speakers because the organization I have been associated with for 20 years, CODEPINK, urged me not to speak…

    So why do I support the rally?

    Because I am heartbroken by a war that is causing such death and destruction in Ukraine.

    Because I have real fears that this war could lead us into World War III or a nuclear confrontation.

    Because both political parties are complicit in giving over $100 billion to Ukraine to keep this war going.

    Because the Biden administration is pushing this war to weaken Russia instead of promoting solutions.

    Because we urgently need as many voices as possible, from a broad variety of perspectives, to speak out so we can be much more effective at pressuring Congress and the White House to move this conflict from the bloody battlefield to the negotiating table. The future of our world stands in the balance.

    Those are the key issues. To emphasize: on the anniversary of Ukraine war, the two superpowers are in combat. The US government states it remains committed to driving Russia out of the Ukraine; Russia says defeat threatens its very existence. Recall Biden said a year ago that US and European sanctions would make Russia leave Ukraine. The war has only escalated since then. Where will it lead?

    Tulsi Gabbard began her speech with the day in January 2018 when Hawaiians were warned on their cell phones “Ballistic missile inbound. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.” To think the leaders of the US and Russia will not blunder into a nuclear war, given all the previous incidents over the years, reveals a naïve faith in our leaders. To refuse to work with “the right” to avoid Ukraine becoming a nuclear war is mind-boggling in its stupidity. The Libertarians show their approach is not so sectarian. Those who brought us Rage Against the War Machine recognized if we are to defeat the non-stop imperial war machine that rules over our lives, we must work with all people possible under its boot. Until we all do, we defeat ourselves.

    The post Behind the Self-Defeating Approach toward the National Protest against the US War on Russia in Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • There Has Never In History Been A Greater Need For A Large Anti-War Movement

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Things are escalating more and more rapidly between the US-centralized power structure and the few remaining nations with the will and the means to stand against its demands for total obedience, namely China, Russia, and Iran. The world is becoming increasingly split between two groups of governments who are becoming increasingly hostile toward each other, and you don’t have to be a historian to know it’s probably a bad sign when that happens. Especially in the age of nuclear weapons.

    The US State Department’s Victoria Nuland is now saying that the US is supporting Ukrainian strikes on Crimea, drawing sharp rebukes from Moscow with a stern reminder that the peninsula is a “red line” for the Kremlin which will result in escalations in the conflict if crossed. On Friday, Ukraine’s President Zelensky told the press that Kyiv is preparing a large offensive for the “de-occupation” of Crimea, which Moscow has considered a part of the Russian Federation since its annexation in 2014.

    As Anatol Lieven explained for Jacobin earlier this month, this exact scenario is currently the one most likely to lead to a sequence of escalations ending in nuclear war. In light of the aforementioned recent revelations, the opening paragraph of Lieven’s article is even more chilling to read now than it was when it came out a couple of weeks ago:

    The greatest threat of nuclear catastrophe that humanity has ever faced is now centered on the Crimean peninsula. In recent months, the Ukrainian government and army have repeatedly vowed to reconquer this territory, which Russia seized and annexed in 2014. The Russian establishment, and most ordinary Russians, for their part believe that holding Crimea is vital to Russian identity and Russia’s position as a great power. As a Russian liberal acquaintance (and no admirer of Putin) told me, “In the last resort, America would use nuclear weapons to save Hawaii and Pearl Harbor, and if we have to, we should use them to save Crimea.”

    And that’s just Russia. The war in Ukraine is being used to escalate against all powers not aligned with the US-centralized alliance, with recent developments including drone attacks on an Iranian weapons factory which reportedly arms Russian soldiers in Ukraine, and Chinese companies being sanctioned for “backfill activities in support of Russia’s defence sector” following US accusations that the Chinese government is preparing to arm Russia in the war.

    Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly been holding multiple meetings with top military officials regarding potential future attacks on Iran to neutralize the alleged threat of Iran developing a nuclear arsenal, a “threat” that Netanyahu has personally been lying about for years.

    If you’ve been reading Antiwar.com (and if you care about this stuff you probably should be), you’ve been seeing new articles about the latest imperial escalations against China on a near-daily basis now. Sometimes they come out multiple times per day; this past Thursday Dave DeCamp put out two completely separate news stories titled “US Plans to Expand Military Presence in Taiwan, a Move That Risks Provoking China” and “Philippines in Talks With US, Australia on Joint South China Sea Patrols“. Taiwan and the South China Sea are two powderkeg flashpoints where war could quickly erupt at any time in a number of different ways.

    If you know where to look for good updates on the behavior of the US-centralized empire and you follow them from day to day, it’s clear that things are accelerating toward a global conflict of unimaginable horror. As bad as things look right now, the future our current trajectory has us pointed toward is much, much, much worse.

    Empire apologists will frame this trajectory toward global disaster as an entirely one-sided affair, with bloody-fanged tyrants trying to take over the world because they are evil and hate freedom, and the US-centralized alliance either cast in the role of poor widdle victim or heroic defender of the weak and helpless depending on which generates more sympathy on that day.

    These people are lying. Any intellectually honest research into the west’s aggressions and provocations against both Russia and China will show you that Russia and China are reacting defensively to the empire’s campaign to secure US unipolar planetary hegemony; you might not agree with those reactions, but you cannot deny that they are reactions to a clear and deliberate aggressor.

    This is important to understand, because whenever you say that something must be done to try and avert an Atomic Age world war, you’ll get empire apologists saying “Well go protest in Moscow and Beijing then,” as though the US power alliance is some kind of passive witness to all this. Which is of course complete bullshit; if World War III does indeed befall us, it will be because of choices that were made by the drivers of the western empire while ignoring off-ramp after off-ramp.

    This tendency to flip reality and frame the western imperial power structure as the reactive force for peace against malevolent warmongers serves to help quash the emergence of a robust anti-war movement in the west, because if your own government is virtuous and innocent in a conflict then there’s no good reason to go protesting it. But that’s exactly what urgently needs to happen, because these people are driving us to our doom.

    In fact, it is fair to say that there has never in history been a time when the need to forcefully oppose the warmongering of our own western governments was more urgent. The attacks on Vietnam and Iraq were horrific atrocities which unleashed unfathomable suffering upon our world, but they did not pose any major existential threat to the world as a whole. The wars in Vietnam and Iraq killed millions; we’re talking about a conflict that can kill billions.

    Each of the World Wars was in turn the worst single thing that happened to our species as a whole up until that point in history. World War I was the worst thing that ever happened until World War II happened, and if World War III happens it will almost certainly make World War II look like a schoolyard tussle. This is because all of the major players in that conflict would be armed with nuclear weapons, and at some point some of them are going to be faced with strong incentives to use them. Once that happens, Mutually Assured Destruction ceases to protect us from armageddon, and the “Mutual” and “Destruction” components come in to play.

    None of this needs to happen. There is nothing written in adamantine which says the US must rule the world with an iron fist no matter the cost and no matter the risk. There is nothing inscribed upon the fabric of reality which says nations can’t simply coexist peacefully and collaborate toward the common good of all beings, can’t turn away from our primitive impulses of domination and control, can’t do anything but drift passively toward nuclear annihilation all because a few imperialists in Washington convinced everyone to buy into the doctrine of unipolarism.

    But we’re not going to turn away from this trajectory unless the masses start using the power of our numbers to force a change from warmongering, militarism and continual escalation toward diplomacy, de-escalation and detente. We need to start organizing against those who would steer our species into extinction, and working to pry their hands away from the steering wheel if they refuse to turn away. We need to resist all efforts to cast inertia on this most sacred of all priorities, and we need to start moving now. We’re all on a southbound bus to oblivion, and it’s showing no signs of stopping.

    ____________________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Ukraine and The Tunnel at the End of the Light

    “Light at the end of the tunnel” was an iconic phrase used by the warmongers who kept the U.S. in Vietnam long after the War had been lost. The implication was that insiders could see through the fog of war and know that things were getting better. It was a lie.

    In January 1966, long before the military height of the War, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told President Johnson that the U.S. had a one-out-of-three chance of winning on the battlefield. But Johnson, like Eisenhower and Kennedy before him, and Nixon after him, didn’t want to be the first American president to lose a war. So, he ginned up a simplistic lie and “soldiered on.”

    The lie was blown by the Tet Offensive in January 1968. More than 100 U.S. military installations were attacked in a simultaneous nationwide assault that stunned the U.S. The broadcaster, Walter Cronkite, then “the most trusted man in America,” bellowed on national television, “I thought we were supposed to be winning this damned thing.” It was the beginning of the end of the U.S.’ murderous and failed occupation.

    We’re now facing another light-and-tunnel event, this time in Ukraine. Only now, it’s not the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s the tunnel at the end of the light. What do we mean by that?

    Until now, it’s been all light. Remember when the scrappy Ukrainian forces were kicking the barbarian Russian hordes’ asses? When every development betrayed the Russians’ clod-footed strategy, its soldiers’ bad morale, its army’s poor provisioning and worse leadership, and the perilous political situation for Putin back home? The testosterone was flowing. The bravado was intoxicating. The exceptionalism was sublimely seductive. It was only a matter of time and pluck and determination before Ukraine would bloody the bully’s nose and show it what the West was made of.

    Remember?

    No more.

    You can prosecute a war for only so long on the strength of smoke and mirrors, delusions and illusions, lies and press releases. Eventually, however, reality catches up with you. The thuggishly propagandized American citizenry couldn’t know it, but that catching up began in the first weeks of the War and has only accelerated since.

    Within the first week of the War, Russia had destroyed Ukraine’s air force and air defenses. By the second week, it had taken out most of Ukraine’s armories and weapons depots. Over following weeks and months, it systematically demolished artillery shipped in from former Warsaw Pact, now NATO, countries in Eastern Europe. It dismantled the country’s transportation and fuel supply systems. It has recently taken out most of the country’s electrical infrastructure.

    The Ukrainian army has lost an estimated 150,000 troops, a pace more than 140 times the rate of U.S. losses in Vietnam. This, at a time when 10 million of its formerly 36 million people have fled the country. The military is down to dragooning 16-year-old boys and 60-year-old men to man the barricades. It cannot get replacement ammunition. Russia has knocked out some 90% of Ukraine’s drones, leaving it largely sightless. Delivery times for the tanks that are the hoped-for “game changer” are running into months and years. Not that that will matter.

    Remember all the other failed “game changers”? The M777 howitzers and the Stryker armored fighting vehicles? The HIMARS multiple rocket launchers and the PATRIOT air defense systems? All were going to turn the tide at one time. All have proven impotent to stop Russia from seizing 20% of Ukraine’s territory and annexing it and its people to Russia.

    The U.S. lost the economic war, as well. Remember Joe Biden’s delusional prediction that the U.S. would see that “the ruble will be reduced to rubble”? And that “the most stringent sanctions regime in history” was going to “weaken” Russia, perhaps even leading to Putin’s overthrow? Most of it backfired, badly. Last year, the ruble reached its highest exchange rate in history. Russia’s 2022 trade surplus of $227 billion was up 86% from 2021. The U.S.’ trade deficit over the same period rose 12.2%, and is approaching $1 trillion.

    As a result of all of the above and more, the tide of insider opinion has turned against the War. Senior officials in Europe are talking openly about how the losses are unsustainable and they need to get back to security architectures that prevailed before the poisoned CIA-supported coup in Maidan in 2014. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently let slip that “It will be very, very difficult to eject the Russians from all of occupied Ukraine in the next year. The Washington Post warned recently that Ukraine faced a “critical moment” in the war, belaboring the fact that U.S. support was not limitless and would soon be reached. Hint. Hint.

    The Rand Corporation, one of the U.S.’ best-connected strategic whisperers, just published a report stating that “The consequences of a long war far outweigh the benefits.” It explicitly states that the U.S. needs to husband its resources for its more important upcoming conflict with China. Newsweek headlined that “Joe Biden Offered Vladimir Putin 20 Percent of Ukraine to End War.” It also revealed that “Nearly 90 percent of the world isn’t following us on Ukraine.” Vast swaths of Latin American, Africa, and Asia refuse to support the U.S. in its demand for sanctions against Russia.

    These are not “Light at the end of the tunnel” divinations. Quite the contrary. If there’s a common thread running through it all it is the sickening recognition that the war is lost, militarily, economically, and diplomatically, that there is no plausible scenario in which those losses will be turned around by soldiering on, and that what is needed now is a hide-the-loss, get-out-any-way-you-can, face-saving exit strategy.

    That will not be available, either. That’s where the tunnel at the end of the light comes into play.

    Even before the U.S. and its NATO puppets undertook the War, the rest of the world—and that means most of the world—was congealing itself into an anti-Western economic and security bloc. Led by China and its strategic ally, Russia, that bloc includes more than a dozen trade and security organizations. Those include the BRICS confederation of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, working explicitly to devise multi-polar institutions to stand up to the U.S.’ unipolar hegemonic model.

    It includes the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security compact made up of leading nations from east, central, and south Asia, including China, Russia, India, and soon, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. It is explicitly working to devise measures to prevent the kind of predatory military assaults the U.S. carried out against Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Afghanistan.

    The organizing economic engine behind these efforts it is China’s Belt and Road Initiative. BRI is a dizzyingly ambitious plan to connect Asia and more than 100 nations with 21st Century economic infrastructure, everything from highways and high-speed rail lines, to power generation, energy pipelines, communication systems, cities, ports, and more. It is critical to understand why BRI poses such daunting challenges to U.S. supremacy in the world.

    Infrastructure is so powerful because it spins off a vast, unimaginable array of secondary, and tertiary economic benefits. It was the railroads in the nineteenth century that bound the U.S. together as the world’s first continental-scale market. Manufacturers could produce for a larger market, and, therefore, at larger scale, and, therefore, at lower cost, than could producers anywhere else on earth.

    The railroads made the U.S. the largest market in the world for iron, steel, machine tools, grading equipment, farm equipment, and scores of other commercial and industrial products essential to a modern industrial economy. The U.S. began the 1800s with 1.5% of the world’s GDP. It ended the century with 19% of a four-times larger number, making it the largest economy in the world.

    Similarly, automobiles. People think it was Henry Ford and mass production that made the Twentieth Century “The American Century.” In fact, it was the build-out of millions of miles of roads and, later, interstates, without which automobiles would have remained expensive playthings of the wealthy. Those roads stitched the country together into an asphalt network that allowed individual mobility, by virtually anybody, anywhere, down to every street address in the country. The world had never seen anything like it.

    The secondary and tertiary economic effects were astounding, everything from the world’s largest markets for steel, glass, plastics, and rubber, to gasoline, diesel, highway construction on a continental scale, repair shops and drive-ins, to the entire panoply of culture we know of as suburbia. The Twentieth Century was the Century of the Automobile. The infrastructure the U.S. built to make it possible was the major reason—at least economically—that the U.S. led the world for most of that century.

    China is now proposing to do the same for Asia in the Twenty-First Century, but on a much larger scale. It is leading an infrastructure build-out that will dwarf Eisenhower’s Interstate highway system. It will serve most of the five billion people in Eurasia, thirty TIMES more than the 150 million people Eisenhower’s project helped.

    Wisely, China has ensured that all of the 100+ nations joining BRI are enriched by their participation, whether building themselves up domestically, or extending their reach internationally. It is the largest, most compelling, geographically extensive, nationally inclusive, mutually enriching economic enterprise in the history of the world. The U.S. is not part of it.

    Finally, there is the matter of the dollar. Since the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944, the global economy has used the dollar as the primary currency of international trade. This has given the U.S. an “exorbitant privilege” in that it can essentially write an unlimited stream of hot checks to the world, because countries need dollars to be able to conduct international commerce. The U.S. “sells” them dollars by issuing Treasury debt, which is a universally fungible international medium of exchange.

    One of the consequences of this arrangement is that it has allowed the U.S. to spend far beyond its means, running up $32 trillion of debt since 1980, when its national debt stood at a mere $1 trillion. The U.S. uses this debt to, among other things, fund its gargantuan military with its 800 military bases around the world, which it uses to do things like destroy Serbia, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and a host of lesser predations on other countries. All the world sees this and is repulsed by it.

    The world sees how dollar hegemony underwrites the U.S.’ ability to carry out or attempt coups in Honduras, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Myanmar, Belarus, Egypt, Syria, and, of course, Ukraine, among others. And these are just those in the past two decades.

    The same dollar hegemony underwrote U.S. predations in the latter part of the Twentieth Century against Iran, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile, Congo, Brazil, Indonesia, and dozens of other countries. Again, the rest of the world sees this. U.S. citizens, rapturously oblivious in their hermetically sealed media bubble, do not.

    The world saw how the U.S. stole $300 billion of Russian funds that were held in Western banks, part of its sanctions regime against Russia for its role in the Ukraine war. They’ve seen how the U.S. has carried out similar thefts against dollar-denominated funds of Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Iran. It sees how the Federal Reserve’s raising of interest rates to take care of U.S. needs makes capital flow out of other countries, and how it makes their currencies fall, forcing inflation on them. Not a single country in the world is left untouched.

    The cumulative impact of these facts is that many countries would rather not be held hostage to the implicit and explicit negative consequences of dollar hegemony. They also want to remove the “exorbitant privilege” that they believe the U.S. has abused to their individual and collective detriment.

    They have begun—again, led by Russia and China—to build an international finance and trading system that doesn’t rely on dollars, that uses countries’ local currencies, gold, oil, or other assets to trade. This received special impetus last year when Saudi Arabia announced it would begin accepting Chinese yuan in exchange for its oil. Oil is the world’s most valued internationally-traded commodity, so the perception is that a dam is beginning to break.

    It will take years before an equally functional substitute for the dollar is devised but what began a few years ago as a trickle has gained momentum and urgency as a consequence of U.S. actions in Ukraine. When the dollar is no longer the world’s international reserve currency and nations don’t need dollars to trade with each other, the U.S. will no longer be able to fund its massive budget and trade deficits by writing hot checks. The withdrawal will be agonizing and will greatly circumscribe the U.S.’ role as global hegemon.

    U.S. actions in Ukraine have driven together its two greatest adversaries, Russia and China. They, joined by India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran and dozens of other countries, are carrying out a Mackinder-feared Eurasian integration that will leave the U.S. outside of the world’s largest and most dynamic trading bloc.

    The U.S.’ military failure has advertised, once again (after Iraq and Afghanistan), the relative impotence of U.S. military solutions. Yes, it can still destroy small, defenseless countries like Serbia, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. But against a peer competitor that has chosen to stand up to it, the U.S. has, frankly, been handed its ass. All the world can see it.

    Events have shown the hollowness of U.S.-led economic and financial systems, as well, especially compared to China. China’s economic performance has far surpassed that of the U.S. It has lifted more people out of poverty more quickly than any country in the history of the world. Its growth has made it the largest economy in the world in purchasing power parity terms. While average inflation-adjusted incomes in the U.S. are little higher than they were 50 years ago, incomes in China are up more than 10 TIMES over the same period. And it has done this without brutalizing and pillaging other nations that refuse to bend to its hegemonic will.

    And, the War has betrayed, as nothing else possibly could, the diplomatic isolation of the U.S., with the vast majority of the world’s people refusing to implement U.S.-demanded sanctions against Russia. Its destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline is recognized as the greatest act of state-sponsored terrorism in history, easily surpassing 911 in terms of the hundreds of millions of people it will hurt. And this, to one of its putative allies, Europe. Imagine what happens to its enemies.

    This is the tunnel at the end of the light, a multi-polar as opposed to a unipolar world. It means increasing isolation of the U.S. from the rest of the world, the closing in of options, the narrowing of opportunities, the loss of strategic primacy that once graced the greatest power in the history of the world. It will mean dramatically reduced power and influence vis-à-vis the U.S.’ strategic adversaries, and markedly constrained ability to operate militarily, economically and financially in the world, what with the hot checkbook soon to be taken away.

    In twenty or thirty years, the U.S. will still be a substantial regional power, perhaps like Brazil in South America, Iran in West Asia, or Nigeria in Africa. But it will not be the global hegemon it once was, able to project and inflict power in the world as it has done for the last century. The U.S. abused its providential anointment as the exceptional nation. That abuse has been recognized, called out, and is now being acted against by most of the other nations of the world. The future will be very different for the U.S. than it has been for the past 80 years, since the end of World War II when it towered over the rest of the world like a giant among pygmies. Ukraine will prove to have been the turning point in this transformation, the tunnel at the end of the light.

  • Wang Yi Met with Putin

    This week’s News on China in 2 minutes.

    • Wang Yi met with Putin
    • Provinces to employ more people
    • Guangzhou to set up high-tech support fund
    • 40 years of Chinese medical team in Uganda

    The post Wang Yi Met with Putin first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ‘CELEBRATING’ THE FIRST BIRTHDAY OF THE RUSSIAN INVASION OF UKRAINE.

    There are only three things that can be celebrated at the conclusion of one year of a war that began when Russia invaded Ukraine. *Russia has failed to achieve its aims. *The people of Ukraine are valiant and resourceful. *Zelensky is a leader of huge stature and strength. There are three things that can be …

    Continue reading ‘CELEBRATING’ THE FIRST BIRTHDAY OF THE RUSSIAN INVASION OF UKRAINE.

    The post ‘CELEBRATING’ THE FIRST BIRTHDAY OF THE RUSSIAN INVASION OF UKRAINE. appeared first on Everald Compton.

    This post was originally published on My Articles – Everald Compton.

  • Ellen Schrecker on the New McCarthyism

     

          CounterSpin230224.mp3

     

    Tucker Carlson on Fox News: The Lunatics Are Running the Asylum

    Tucker Carlson on Fox News (7/6/21)

    This week on CounterSpin: If you care about free expression, and freedom generally, there is much to talk about right now. It is good to anchor ourselves in that conversation when we talk about books being banned and efforts to erase entire concepts, and then folks trying to inoculate themselves by saying they weren’t even talking about those concepts, until they learn that actually running away from those ideas doesn’t make you safe. These are not entirely new conversations or struggles. But our past has not been fully grappled with or understood, and that has everything to do with what’s happening now and how we can address it. History is alive and active, and you are a part of it.

    So this week we’re going to re-air a conversation that we had in January of 2017 with historian Ellen Shrecker, an expert on McCarthyism and its impacts. We don’t doubt that you will understand the relevance and the meaning in 2023.

          CounterSpin230224Schrecker.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the price of eggs.

          CounterSpin230224Banter.mp3

     

    The post Ellen Schrecker on the New McCarthyism appeared first on FAIR.

  • Ukraine: One Year of War on Top of 30 Years of Conflict Escalation

    Ukraine: 1 year of war on top of 30 years of conflict escalation: The only re-armament needed is intellectual and moral – on all sides

    Introduction: 1 year of violence on top of 30 years of conflict: Too much wrong thinking

    The world’s focus is on the war. On February 24, it is one year since Russia launched its so-called special military operation. Much more important is to focus on the underlying conflicts – because there exists no war or other violence without root causes.

    The focus on war, by definition, won’t lead to a solution or wider, sustainable peace – like feeling the pain in a patient without diagnosing where it comes from can never lead to healing.

    Unless you ask: What is the problem, the conflict, that stands between the conflicting parties – NATO and Russia – it will end with escalation until one of the sides feel that the nuclear button is the only way out.

    International politics is still so immature that the simple distinction between the violence and the conflict seem too intellectually demanding for the decision-makers, the media and most researchers.

    However, understanding it would help save humanity’s future.

    But the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC, of course, thrives on the focus on war, weapons and ever more – blind – militarist thinking.

    The conflict is about 30 years old, and the war is one year.

    Whatever the reader may think about Putin, Russia, the invasion, Ukraine etc., the infantile blaming, demonisation and the projection of all guilt on one side in such a complex, multi-party and history-based conflict should stop. It’s emotionalist and stands in the way of rational and prudent policy-making.

    Moreover, it is dangerous in its consequences. Therefore, it’s time for the West – US/NATO and the EU – to do some soul-searching and stop living in denial about its complicity in the conflict and this terrible war.

    The overarching fallacy is to think and believe that because Russia did something wrong, everything NATO/EU did and do is right.

    Contrary to good academic practice and my other writings, this article merely states points and conclusions, while my arguments can be found in the 200-300 pages of analyses I have written since 2014. Much of it can be found here and here.

    I focus here on NATO/EU policies and why they are wrong and won’t succeed; that does not mean that I find Russia’s policies right and successful. But before you accuse others, take a look at yourself. The day after the invasion, I distanced myself from it and also made six – correct, as it turned out – predictions.

    The basic psycho-political elements of the West’s policy vis-a-vis Russia

    The building blocks of the West’s – NATO/EU – policies vis-a-vis Russia can be characterised by the following psycho-political concepts:

    Immaturity and banalisation – in blaming everything on Russia in general and Putin in particular (it can be said that Putin also blames everything on the West, but that won’t help the EU and NATO – just make ‘us’ as stupid as ‘we’ think he is).

    Psycho-political projections – what Russia does, NATO/EU countries have done themselves and in some respects much worse; and Putin is hysteric when he feels threatened by us, whereas we are justified – always were – that Russia is a huge threat and that Ukraine is only the first of a series of future aggressions. In other words, comparative studies and media mention of NATO countries’ aggression and violations of international law are prohibited.

    Just one example: President Joe Biden, the leader of today’s only global empire with over 600 bases in more than 130 countries and the most war-fighting and mass-killing country since 1945, stated on February 24, 2022, that “This was … always about naked aggression, about Putin’s desire for empire by any means necessary.”

    Untruthful innocence – NATO, by constitution, never did and doesn’t do anything wrong; it is innocent. NATO’s S-G Stoltenberg has repeatedly stated that ‘NATO is not a party to the conflict’ (but also, inconsequently, that Putin must not win because, then, ‘we’ shall have lost). The homepages of NATO and the EU state untruthfully that the extremely well-documented promises made to Gorbachev about not expanding NATO ‘one inch’ were never given.

    The same untruthful innocence produces the lie that it all began with Russia’s annexation of Crimea or the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and that it was ‘unprovoked.’ The word reveals with abundant clarity that NATO knows it behaved in a provocative way. The only relevant history is the history of the conflict – which began at the end of the First Cold War in 1989-90. The rest is make-believe, opportunistic ignorance and pure propaganda.

    An example of symbol politics and “sending messages”

    European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen delivers a speech during a debate on ‘The State of the European Union’ at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, 14 September 2022. EPA/CHRISTOPHE PETIT TESSON

    Groupthink – which implies that a group of elite decision-makers constantly and over time confirm each other in being fundamentally right and cannot be on the wrong track; they meet (latest in Munich) and confirm each other; their ministries, presumed analytical institutions and think tanks as well as the mainstream media hardly ever raise questions or criticise; every interpretation and information not identical with this groupthink is repelled, the world is interpreted selectively to fit the group’s worldview – and eventually, it is totally convinced that it cannot be wrong and that it’s decisions are smart and productive and will lead to the goal.

    In this case, the US/NATO stated goal is to weaken Russia militarily and damage its economy to such an extent that it can never do such a thing again – a punishment for what it has done. Groupthink is dangerous because it defies reality checks, leads to hubris, to fatally wrong decisions, and invariably ends up as lemmings running to doom.

    Hubris – or arrogance: In reality, ‘we’ are omnipotent. As former NATO S-G, Anders Fogh-Rasmussen has stated: Putin knows that “NATO spends ten times more on the military than he does and that we can beat the crap out of him.” Yet, paradoxically, no Western leader seems to be even thinking of aligning the idea that NATO shall win this war with NATO’s consistent propaganda to its citizens that Russia was a formidable threat which NATO had to defend itself against.

    That was done by NATO having actually 12 times higher military expenditures before the war happened, and its ‘deterrence’ failed. And NATO has moved into the largest-ever re-armament to ‘defend’ with goals like 2-4% of the GNP spent/wasted on ‘warfare planning, ‘security’ and ‘defence.’ (As if that was a serious way to determine thow to meet perceived threats).

    Militarism – every’ solution’ mentioned is about military actions. We shall win on the battlefield. Nobody in NATO/EU circles knows how to pronounce words such as peace, conflict-resolution, mediation, peacemaking, peace-keeping, reconciliation, dialogue, talks…

    Of course, it is implicitly understood that President Putin is at such a low intellectual and moral level that the only thing he understands is that we – the bigger boys in the schoolyard – beat that crap out of him.

    Sadly, the only thing that today keeps the Western world together is militarism, winning over Russia together. No other or more positive cause has had the same solidifying function. Militarism has become a religion, NATO its church – and only infidels question that faith and God’s existence. And they know that God is always on’ our’ side.

    With warfare, people come together and, in enigmatic ways, their lives may acquire a new meaning that replaces a sense of meaninglessness, and fills an existential void.

    Omnipotence – the EU/NATO world has no sense of limitations. It can fight economic crises, recover after the Corona years, handle refugees, solve climate change, alleviate poverty – you name it – and it can re-arm for billions upon billions of dollars. It – the US in particular – can wage a Cold War on everything China – an industry of non-documented accusations – and it can print any amount of greenbacks and repay debts, fix all the infrastructure and other problems of the US society, compete and win in the fields of advanced technology.

    The EU – which hasn’t gotten its acts together and built a modern transport infrastructure based on an all-Europe high-speed train network – believes it can always do that later.

    All these countries can install sanctions ad libitum – the disease I call ‘sanctionitis’ – believing that they will not be hurt themselves by them. And we shall, of course, re-build Ukraine after we have contributed to destroying it, now it has fought so nobly for ‘our’ values.

    We are second to none, and we can do everything simultaneously. No need to prioritise. Significantly, all decisions are made knee-jerk: Sanctions, cancelling of Russia in all other fields, Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO member decisions without analyses of the short, mid-and long-term consequences.

    All major decision-makers will be retired or dead, leaving it our children and grandchildren to pay the price by living in a Cold War-impoverished, de-developed and unhappy Europe and US – the more so, the longer the war lasts.

    Lacking world awareness – 80-85% of humanity lives in countries whose governments do not side with the NATO/EU world. If the NATO/EU world thought about global attitudes before they made their decisions in response to Russia’s invasion, they made a Himalayan miscalculation – or thought they could later bully everybody into lining up behind them.

    This is interesting also because NATO does not only have 30 members, it has 42 partners – some on all continents – and it tries very clearly to move towards becoming a global rather than transatlantic organisation.

    This dimension is brilliantly summarised by the High Rep of the EU Foreign and Security Policy (and Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party member), Josef Borell’s racist statement from late 2022: “Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that the humankind has been able to build – the three things together. The rest of the world,” he went on, “is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.” (Stated when opening the European Diplomatic (!) Academy in Bruges).

    Interesting too?  At the 50th nuke-ban turning point

    This leads to:

    Intellectual poverty – EU/NATO policies now operate on simplifying Twitter-like statements, assertions, non-documented accusations, self-legitimising marketing language, slogans, empty promises and symbolic blue-yellow emblems, ties, dresses – instead of on analyses, arguments and complex understanding.

    Following these things every day is utterly boring, predictable and – filled with repetition. Mr Stoltenberg could easily Guiness World Records in Banality Repetition. The awareness or focus of politics, media and research is on weapons, war reporting, media war, more weapons fast into Ukraine – and ‘we shall win’ and ‘Russia must not win.’

    The obvious questions never asked are: And then what? At what cost to whom? And what will Europe and the world look like afterwards – if it exists? These groupthinkers don’t seem to bother. The idea of asking: If war, what are the underlying conflicts? What are the real, tangible problems – a conflict is an unsolved problem – that stand between NATO and Russia and seriously contributed to the latter blowing up – is prohibited.

    The intellectual poverty also comes through in believing, as it seems, that the word ‘Putin’ explains everything. So, this enormously complex conflict accumulating and deepening since the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact dissolved, is reduced to Mr Putin – The (D)Evil – his personality, childhood, or his being physically or mentally ill, a man you shall not listen to who runs a country whose people we punish collectively (against international law, but who cares?).

    Furthermore, it comes through in cancelling all critical voices and calling people who ar capable of seeing two sides in a conflict ‘Putinists’ or ‘Putin Versteher’ – the poor trick of framing, of attacking the messenger instead of saying something intellectually qualified.

    So, nine psycho-political building blocks in synergy.

    Reality checks are very unlikely – at least until the crisis is on the verge of complete breakdown. These building blocks alone guarantee, in my view, that this is not going to go well, and that the NATO/EU leaders are likely to make ever larger miscalculations and live on delusions. Wars tend to narrow down people’s minds. There is no space or time for reflection, for stopping to think.

    Ukraine in NATO? Rather NATO in Ukraine the last 30 years. And peace?

    2. What does it mean to win?

    The usual, again intellectually deficient, argument is that’ we’ must and will, therefore, win, ‘they’ shall lose. And, implicitly, we win because they lose, we win over them. That could turn out to be wrong because ‘they’ might win and ‘we’ might lose.

    But it is actually a fourfold table; apart from these two outcomes, both could somehow win, and both could lose.

    But even this is a fallacy – because there are not two but many parties: Russia (government and people), Ukraine (government and people), NATO with 30 member states (governments and people) and the US as the leader (government and people). And there is the rest of the world and how the conflict and war impact the global system as time passes.

    But let’s stick to the winning idea. What does it mean? Winning militarily, of course – but also winning politically, morally, economically and culturally? Who will be stronger in which respects when the war ends?

    The most likely scenario I see on this first anniversary of the war, is a long struggle rather than a quick end to it. The longer it lasts, the more difficult it will be to solve the underlying conflicts – because of the immense accumulated hatred, traumas, devastations, death and wounded, the destroyed economies, etc.

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    Although the human and material destruction in Ukraine is, so far, rather limited in comparison with, say, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen etc. – it is already as huge as it is heartbreaking. Therefore, the slogan “This war must stop now!” – is the most powerful and truthful – but it is unlikely that the parties will listen anytime soon. They are all in a blind chicken game.

    Apart from arms-producing companies and major energy corporations, I see none among the many conflict parties mentioned above who will be better off after this war than before 2014 (the US-instigated and financed regime change in Kyiv and the Russian annexation afterwards of Crimea) or before February 24, 2022.

    Instead, everyone – you and me, too – will pay various types of prices. This applies to the immediate after, but also to decades ahead. Healing this conflict and the wounds of this war, building trust as well as a new security system, will take several decades.

    In summary, this war cannot be won in any reasonable sense of the word. The ad nauseam repeated NATO/EU slogan “We shall win, stand with Ukraine as long as it takes,” is ill-considered, intellectually poor and delusional.

    And it is dangerously irresponsible also because it means killing even more Ukrainian citizens who – in any thinkable scenario – will be the main losers.

    Regrettably, this does not prevent those who say it from believing their own words. It’s just that they have never thought through what they mean – because of the 9 psycho-political points above.

    3. All basic NATO/EU assumptions are either plain wrong, unrealistic or unsustainable.

    1 • Putin wanted to split NATO, but we stand united.

    The first is plain wrong. If NATO is not a party to the conflict, why is Russia’s invasion of a non-NATO country an attempt to split the alliance? Ten former Warsaw Pact countries have become members of NATO despite the well-documented promises all important Western leaders gave Gorbachev over 30 years ago that, if they got united Germany into NATO, the alliance would not expand “one inch” to the East? Why did Russia not split that expanded NATO earlier – and why did it intervene in the case of Ukraine?

    It is true, however, that the only thing the West stands united around is hatred, demonisation and re-armament – winning the war on Ukraine’s territory. Western cohesion has much to thank Putin for – for as long as it lasts.

    2 • Putin is out to conquer one country after the other.

    Well, so far, it’s not gone that well in Ukraine, and why did he not do that over the last 20 years during which he has been president? Does Russia – with 8% of NATO’s military expenditures and falling – really have the capacity to invade one country after the other, occupy and administer a series of NATO members? Some people say, look at the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008. Well again, that was not what it really was – but the repeated propaganda works.

    3 • Russia/Putin threatens Finland and Sweden and may even make an isolated attack on the Swedish island of Gotland – therefore, Sweden must join NATO.

    Well, what about a shred of evidence of such an intention? Any assessment of the ‘correlation of forces’? Goodhearted people seem to believe that Sweden would have to fight it alone but – no – the US would come to its rescue even if Sweden wasn’t a member of NATO. That was already agreed upon and planned.

    Sweden will instead now be drawn early into warfare and have to accept US and perhaps other bases/weapons prepositioning on its territory and thereby ensure that Russian missiles will target Sweden. It has said goodbye to 200 years of beneficial non-alignment, an independent foreign policy, options of being a mediator and an advocate of common security and the UN goal of general and complete disarmament.

    The Swedish PM Kristersson has – without any mandate – promised full loyalty even with NATO’s nuclear doctrine. The Swedes will now live much more dangerously – with sharp, confrontational borderlines instead of neutral buffers. And with much less diversity and freely stated opinions in a more militarist security debate.

    4 • Russia will fall apart economically.

    Yes, of course, there are economic problems and they may likely increase year by year – but Russia is far from falling apart – for at least four reasons. Furthermore, the Russians know how to suffer – 27 million dead in WW2 – whereas Westerners don’t know much about suffering for their principles and stated ideals.

    Ukraine is an existential issue for Russia and many Russians, but absolutely not for the US/NATO – except for the fact that NATO’s only raison d’etre is expansion for the sake of expansion and to keep the conflict with Russia as a-symmetrical as possible and weaken Russia.

    Moreover, Russia has the world’s by far largest territory and deposits of natural resources – it is certainly able to slowly but surely turn its back on the EU and NATO countries and cooperate, instead, much more closely with China, India, Iran, the Middle East and the rest of the world, also in the China-driven Belt And Road Initiative, BRI.

    Out there, they may not love Russia, but they unite with it because they are sick and tired of the West in general and the US Empire’s operations in particular. And because the Global South has been hard hit by both global economic crisis, the fallout from the Corona and now the West’s response to the invasion.

    Supporting Ukraine militarily for as long as it takes

    We shall win this war. At what cost? What peace after?

    No ceasefire, no talks, no mediation, no UN or OSCE, no China, no peacekeepers, no demilitarisation, no brainstorming on possible solutions – in short, no-brainer and therefore no peace

    5 • We can win this war by letting the Ukrainians fight it for us.

    We’ve all heard it repeatedly: Ukraine’s cause is our cause. Ukraine is fighting for our liberal values, for us, for Europe. Ukraine struggles impressively for freedom, democracy, human rights – and therefore, we have a duty to support it with weapons and humanitarian aid.

    This idealised, or glossy, Western media image of ‘our’ Ukraine has a political purpose and should be discussed. Understandably, a country fighting for its survival may have to compromise on some of those fine values; the relevant question is what Ukraine might look like – given parts of its history and the de-moralising effects of multi-year warfighting.

    Additionally, do the Ukrainians have the military, political, economic and psychological strength to do carry the West’s burden on its shoulders, fight for years against NATO’s allegedly formidable nuclear enemy? For a time, yes, but hardly for much longer.

    We should not be surprised if more and more Ukrainians begin to wonder: How much of our country and our future must be destroyed to – perhaps – become a NATO member? Is our president doing what is best for Ukraine or is he actually more loyal to the US/NATO than to his citizens? What about internal conflicts, power struggles, coup d’etat attempts and war fatique if this war drags on and, for years, doesn’t lead to anything that can be called victory?

    And will Europe take more millions of Ukrainian refugees who have to run away or see no future there?

    What we see is the tyranny of the small steps – incremental NATO de facto involvement “for as long as it takes.” It means both fighter aircraft, long-range missiles, and substantial depletion of NATO’s military arsenals. It won’t be for Ukraine’s sake – the country could well be pulverised – but because ‘we’ need to win this war.

    6 • The ethics is abominable.

    Is Ukraine really important enough for the US and NATO to risk major war, perhaps nuclear war? Do NATO countries have real ideals, and do they want to show that deeds are more important than words? Does NATO really want to win and pay victory’s price?

    Today’s leaders would say ‘Yes.’ Then the moral dilemma can be formulated in this way: Why not put in 300,000 to 400,000 NATO troops and conduct the war you have developed plans for since decades back – make it your war, not a proxy war in which the Ukrainian people shall pay the price for the – predictable – consequences of NATO’s expansion (Remember that before the invasion, there was only a minority of all Ukrainians who were in favour of NATO membership and 2/3 of the people who wanted the question decided by a referendum – they never got. NATO and President Poroshenko made the decision).

    So, how much are the Ukrainians willing to sacrifice for ‘our’ goals? And for how long?

    7 • Peace will emerge from the victory on the battlefields of Ukraine.

    It won’t. It never has. Militarism and being drunk on weapons exclude every thought of peacemaking – the words mentioned above under militarism. When you allocate all your resources to the arsenals of war, you deplete the arsenals of peace.

    The NATO/EU countries have, in contrast to Putin in 2014, never proposed that the UN come in as a mediator, disarmer and dialogue facilitator. The Minsk process was nothing but a way to buy time for Ukraine to be armed as much as possible before the great battle for ‘our values’ and the killing of 14,000 Russian-leaning Ukrainian citizens. Ukraine is not a country without internal conflicts that may blow up when the present war ends.

    The incredible conflict and peace illiterate assumption seems to be that the NATO/EU countries can be both a fighting party and, later, a mediator. Or that there will be no need for any mediation and reconciliation with Russia: A new Iron Curtain, just tighter, in the making.

    8 • The people of Europe will put up with all this because we tell them it is an existential fight.

    I do not think they will. There are already doubts and demonstrations against the US/NATO/EU media narrative. It will dawn among the EU’s 420 million citizens that the skyrocketing prices are not “Putin’s prices” but of their own politicians’ making.

    It may dawn upon them that Nord Stream’s destruction was an act of economic terrorism against friends and allies, a deep humiliation of Germany and Chancellor Scholz personally – a hitherto unseen US arrogance that will not be forgotten even with the media avoiding it as much as they can – a 9/26 as a European 9/11?

    According to this survey published by Euronews, people’s attention is shifting from Ukraine’s battlefield to the wider-felt impacts, including supply-chain disruption, energy price spikes and rising inflation. Time will exert its influence on what can be done by whom and for how long.

    9 • We can make Ukraine a NATO member and ignore Russia’s concerns, protests and anger.

    Well, not exactly prudent but, rather, a result of the above 9 psycho-political mechanisms. That’s is why NATO’s expansion cannot be discussed and the narrative has it that Putin acted out of the blue.

    Generally, people who feel ignored will, as time passes and their frustration builds, force others to listen to them.

    In my online book, The TFF Abolish NATO Catalogue, I have analysed this expansion process and dealt with essentially important and trustworthy analyses. And Ted Snider writes in his article “We all knew the dangers of NATO expansion” that:

    “In 2008, William Burns, who is now Biden’s director of the CIA but was then ambassador to Russia, warned that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).” He warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that “I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” Short even of expansion into Ukraine, Burns called NATO expansion into Eastern Europe “premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.” If it came to Ukraine, Burns warned, “There could be no doubt that Putin would fight back hard.”

    This is one of numerous facts that you are prevented systematically by our politicians and media to know and discuss.

    The list of intellectuals – Realpolitik as well as peace experts – who have warned that Ukraine was a No Go place for full NATO membership is long and most mentioned in my book. NATO, the hubristic alliance, did not believe it had to listen or take serious what they – and every Russian president – have stated the last 30 years and CIA’s Burns expressed so well in the same year as NATO decided that Ukraine should become a NATO member (without ever asking the Ukrainian people).

    10 • The West will come out stronger and keep its role as a world leader.

    It won’t, it will be weakened. If it wants to outcompete China, the Belt and Road Initiative as well as other big powers, it would be wiser to sleep out the militarist hangover and get up early in the morning. If anything, this extremely resource-consuming war for a non-important, non-NATO country will weaken the West more than it will weaken Russia, which will join the emerging new multi-polar world order.

    It will instead accelerate the decline of the US global empire and cause it to fall sooner rather than later. Which is what I predict, for instance, in the article “The Occident is now militarising itself to death for a second time.”

    Instead of conclusions

    • We are where we are now for a series of reasons. We did not have to be here. This could all have been avoided.

    • The – superior – NATO/EU world is in denial, and its policies have no chance of succeeding because they are intellectually and morally deficient.

    • This is true irrespective of what you feel about Putin and Russia. If you or the West think he is stupid or evil, don’t believe that anything you do is wise and good. It hasn’t been. And don’t ever reciprocate in kind – tit-for-tat – because that makes you a mirror image of Putin. (Read your Gandhi).

    • Each and every person who says that ‘we’ shall win this war and ‘they’ shall lose should get out of the sandbox and recognise that s/he becomes co-responsible for the limitless suffering of the innocent Ukrainian citizens, perhaps in the millions.

    • This war must stop and stop now. We must begin to think and get out of the emotionalist, self-glorifying autopilot straitjacket.

    • Or we shall all lose.

    • Knowledge-based and intelligent civil conflict resolution is the only road to peace, cooperation and coexistence in the future.

    • Peace is still possible.

    • And peacemaking is the only chance for the US and Europe to play a positive role in tomorrow’s new and very different world.

    The post Ukraine: One Year of War on Top of 30 Years of Conflict Escalation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.