radiofree.asia

Category: Russia

  • The Atlantic Is A Shitty Propaganda Rag Run By Elitist Wankers

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    The Atlantic, which is owned by billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs and run by neoconservative war propagandist Jeffrey Goldberg, has published a pair of articles that are appalling even by its own standards.

    Virulent Russiagater Anne Applebaum argues in “Fear of Nuclear War Has Warped the West’s Ukraine Strategy” that the US and its allies should escalate against Russia with full confidence that Putin won’t respond with nuclear weapons.

    “Here is the only thing we know: As long as Putin believes that the use of nuclear weapons won’t win the war—as long as he believes that to do so would call down an unprecedented international and Western response, perhaps including the destruction of his navy, of his communications system, of his economic model—then he won’t use them,” Applebaum writes.

    But throughout her own essay Applebaum also acknowledges that she does not actually know the things she is claiming to know.

    “We don’t know whether our refusal to transfer sophisticated tanks to Ukraine is preventing nuclear war,” she writes. “We don’t know whether loaning an F-16 would lead to Armageddon. We don’t know whether holding back the longest-range ammunition is stopping Putin from dropping a tactical nuclear weapon or any other kind of weapon.”

    “I can’t prove this to be true, of course, because no one can,” says Applebaum after confidently asserting that more western aggression would actually have deterred Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

    These are the kinds of things it’s important to have the highest degree of certainty in before taking drastic actions which can, you know, literally end the world. It’s absolutely nuts how western pundits face more scrutiny and accountability when publicly recommending financial investments than when recommending moves that could end all terrestrial life.

    On that note it’s probably worth mentioning here that Applebaum’s husband, European Parliament member Radoslaw Sikorski, recently made headlines by publicly thanking the United States for sabotaging the Nord Stream gas pipelines.

    The Atlantic has also published an article titled “The Age of Social Media Is Ending,” subtitled “It never should have begun.” Its author, Ian Bogost, argues that the recent management failures in Twitter and Facebook mean the days of just any old schmuck having access to their own personal broadcasting network are over, and that this is a good thing.

    Bogost’s piece contains what has got to be the single most elitist sentence that I have ever read:

    “A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset.”

    Nothing enrages the official authorized commentariat like the common riff raff having access to platforms and audiences. That’s why the official authorized commentariat have been the most vocal voices calling for internet censorship and complaining about the rise of a more democratized information environment. These elitist wankers have been fuming for years about the way the uninitiated rabble have been granted the ability to not just talk, but to talk back.

    Hamilton Nolan of In These Times posted a recent observation on Twitter which makes the perfect counter to The Atlantic’s snooty pontifications.

    “The best thing Twitter did for journalism was to show everyone there are thousands of regular people who are better writers than most professionals which is why the most mediocre famous pundits have always been quickest to dismiss it as a cesspool,” Nolan writes, adding, “Best thing Twitter did for the world in general was to allow anyone to yell directly at rich and powerful people, which drove many of them insane, including the richest guy on earth.”

    Of course the imperial narrative managers at The Atlantic would be opposed to normal people getting a voice in public discourse. When your job is to control the narrative, the bigger a monopoly you hold over it the better.

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    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, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. 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 American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • I saw the magnificent Pussy Riot last night. If only the world had listened to what they were saying a decade ago | Zoe Williams

    For years the world saw Putin as almost a figure of fun – while in Russia he was already meting out brutality to dissidents and LGBTQ+ activists

    Last night I saw Pussy Riot, on the Hackney leg of their Riot Days European tour to raise money for a children’s hospital in Ukraine. Their sound guy, Alexander Cheparkhun, came on stage to introduce them. I guess he was about my age, I couldn’t be precise because I didn’t have my glasses. He vibed the sort of age, where you can’t see things without glasses. He described how he met Maria Alyokhina (who also goes by Masha Alekhina), one of the founding members of the band who was first imprisoned in 2012 and then under constant surveillance, harassment, house arrest, arrest-arrest and persecution, until she escaped from Russia to Iceland earlier this year. When her sentence was handed down 10 years ago, he said, it was the first time in his life he had witnessed the political imprisonment of artists.

    This was a useful bit of context, or rather, a glass of cold water to the face, after years of somnambulance: no one is laughing at Vladimir Putin now, of course, but for years, he was almost a figure of fun, with his bare-chested, horse-riding photoshoots and florid turn of phrase. On the world stage, he was the uncle who might say dodgy things, but got invited anyway: what was the worst that could happen? This indulgent, pretty feckless view of Putin was overlaid by the sense that Russia merely did things differently; perhaps the state was a bit thin-skinned and hotheaded, maybe it didn’t prioritise human rights as much as one would like, but this was a cultural thing, probably related to the weather. If we had maybe expressed that view out loud more often, Russian citizens could have said: “No, actually, punk bands sentenced to hard labour for protest actions is very much a now thing, rather than an always thing.”

    Continue reading…

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

  • No Such Thing As An Objective Journalist: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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    I feel like we haven’t been talking enough about the fact that US government agencies were just caught intimately collaborating with massive online platforms to censor content in the name of regulating the “cognitive infrastructure” of society. The only way you could be okay with the US government appointing itself this authority would be if you believed the US government is an honest and beneficent entity that works toward the benefit of the common man. Which would of course be an unacceptable thing for a grown adult to believe.

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    It’s still astonishing that we live in a world where our rulers will openly imprison a journalist for telling the truth and then self-righteously bloviate about the need to stop authoritarian regimes from persecuting journalists.

    Look at this scumbag:

    Look at him. Can you believe this piece of shit? The gall. The absolute gall.

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    There is no such thing as unbiased journalism. If someone tells you they are unbiased they are either knowingly lying, or they are so lacking in self-awareness that you should not listen to them anyway.

    The divide is not between biased journalists and unbiased journalists, it’s between journalists who are honest and transparent about their biases and journalists who are not. There are no unbiased journalists. There are no unbiased people. You’re either honest about this or you’re not.

    Of course journalists should try to be as fair and honest as they can. It’s just the epitome of childlike naivety to believe that western mainstream journalists do this.

    Reporters who support the mainstream worldview are just as biased as reporters from Russian or Chinese state media; they espouse a peculiar perspective and concrete interests and agendas. The problem is the mainstream worldview is so normalized it looks like impartial reality, so you’ll get mainstream western journalists speaking disdainfully of Julian Assange or The Grayzone or whoever because those people have biases and agendas, as though they themselves have no biases or agendas and are nothing other than impartial arbiters of absolute reality.

    Which is plainly ridiculous. The worldview which facilitates the abuses of oligarchy and empire and the status quo politics which serves as their vehicle is anything but impartial. It’s not even sane. But because it’s been normalized by propaganda it looks like baseline reality.

    The only reason the mainstream worldview is mainstream is because the world’s most powerful people have poured a tremendous amount of money into making it mainstream. That’s the one and only reason. It’s not the moderate perspective, it’s just the most funded and marketed perspective.

    All journalists have biases, and all journalists have agendas. It’s just that most of them have the mundane agenda of becoming esteemed and well-known, and the easiest way to do that is to espouse the mainstream worldview where the tide of propaganda can carry you to shore.

    The easiest way to become rich and famous in news media is to promote the interests of the rich and powerful people who own and influence the news media. The easiest way to become reviled and marginalized is to attack those interests. Your values determine which path you choose.

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    There’s no such thing as a Hollywood ending.

    There’s no such thing as an objective journalist.

    There’s no such thing as a moral billionaire.

    There’s no such thing as a humanitarian intervention.

    There’s no such thing as an honest war.

    People should learn all this in grade school.

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    Who understands that narrative control is power? Empire managers. Plutocrats. Propagandists. Smearmeisters. Manipulators. Abusers. Cult leaders. Bullies.

    Who does not understand that narrative control is power? Pretty much everyone else.

    This is the source of most problems.

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    Platforms censoring hate speech is not the same as platforms censoring political speech and speech which criticizes the agendas of the powerful. Censoring hate speech is done to benefit the platform’s profit margins; censoring political speech is done to benefit powerful government agencies. You can make slippery slope arguments, but they’re not equal, and they’re not similar.

    You can argue with the reality that for-profit platforms will always censor the most repellent forms of speech in order to prevent their audiences from being driven from the platform, but that is reality. And it is very different from censoring on behalf of US alphabet agencies. If what you want is a platform where all legal forms of expression are allowed, then for-profit platforms are not a good vehicle for that. Perhaps you want a nationalized social media platform funded by taxpayers with robust speech protections built into its terms of use.

    There’s a massive difference between a platform banning speech which makes that platform a gross place that nobody wants to hang out at and a platform banning the way people talk about a war or a virus because government agencies told them to. It’s unhelpful to conflate the two.

    And the conflation goes both ways. People who just want to spew hate will pretend to care about fighting the power, and the powerful who want to censor the internet to suppress inconvenient speech will pretend to care about stopping hate. It’s important to be aware of these obfuscations.

    There’s a night and day difference between people who oppose censorship because they don’t want the powerful controlling human speech and people who oppose censorship because they want to say ethnic slurs. They’re not the same. A good tool for making these distinctions is to examine whether the agenda punches down or punches up. If it seeks to suppress speech on behalf of the powerful or harm disempowered communities, it’s punching down.

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    Nobody’s ever been able to answer this question: if Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine had nothing to do with western provocations, how come so many western experts spent years warning that the west’s actions would provoke Russia to invade Ukraine?

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    Ukraine is a far more celebrated and aggressively defended centerpiece of hawkish American fanaticism than Israel ever was.

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    If you find yourself rushing to defend the foreign policy of the most militarily, economically and culturally dominant nation on earth, ask yourself why that is. Ask whom that impulse benefits. Ask how that impulse came upon you. Ask if it could have been put there by propaganda.

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    It is false to claim that capitalism, competition and greed are “human nature”. I cite as my source for this claim the fact that I am human. The truth is that those who claim capitalism, competition and greed are “human nature” are not actually telling you anything about human nature. They are telling you about their own nature.

    And it isn’t even really accurate to call it their “nature”; it’s just their conditioning. And we can all change our conditioning. The only people who deny this are those who haven’t sincerely tried to yet.

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    One reason I publish poetry and share insights about philosophy and spirituality on top of my political and foreign policy commentary is because as the information ecosystem gets more polluted it’s not enough to tell people what you think, you’ve got to show them who you are. As more and more energy goes into distorting and manipulating public understanding of the world, it becomes more necessary to bare your soul to the furthest extent possible so people can decide on their own whether you’re the kind of person they want to pay attention to.

    People are very distrusting in today’s environment, and rightly so; we swim in an ocean of lies. You can get around that distrust by manipulating people into thinking you’re trustworthy, or you can do it by taking transparency to the furthest extent possible and letting yourself be fully seen so that people can make up their own minds about you for themselves.

    I can’t promise that I’ll always get everything right or that I’ll always be seeing things the most clearly, but I can promise to always be honest and to always be running on maximum transparency about who I am, where I’m coming from, and what my biases and agendas are.

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    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, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. 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 American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Dealing with a ‘bloody messy’ world – the urgent foreign policy challenges facing NZ

    ANALYSIS: By Alexander Gillespie, University of Waikato

    Since Jacinda Ardern described the state of world affairs as “bloody messy” earlier this year there have been few, if any, signs of improvement. Ukraine, China, nuclear proliferation and the lasting impacts of a global pandemic all present urgent, unresolved challenges.

    For a small country in an increasingly lawless world this is both dangerous and confronting.

    Without the military or economic scale to influence events directly, New Zealand relies on its voice and ability to persuade.

    But by placing its faith in a rules-based order and United Nations processes, New Zealand also has to work with — and sometimes around — highly imperfect systems. In some areas of international law and policy the machinery is failing. It’s unclear what the next best step might be.

    Given these uncertainties, then, where has New Zealand done well on the international stage, and where might it need to find a louder voice or more constructive proposals?

    Confronting Russia
    Strength and clarity have been most evident in New Zealand’s response to the Russian attack on Ukraine. There has been no hint of joining the abstainers or waverers at crucial UN votes condemning Russia’s actions.

    While it can be argued New Zealand could do more in terms of sanctions and support for the Ukrainian military, the government has made good use of the available international forums.

    Joining the International Court of Justice case against “Russia’s spurious attempt to justify its invasion under international law” and supporting the International Criminal Court investigation into possible war crimes in Ukraine are both excellent initiatives.

    Unfortunately, similar avenues have been blocked when it comes to other critical issues New Zealand has a vested interest in seeing resolved properly.

    China and human rights
    This has been especially apparent in the debate about human rights abuses in China, and allegations of genocide made by some countries over the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

    New Zealand and some other countries correctly avoided using the word “genocide”, which has a precise legal meaning best applied by UN experts, not domestic politicians. Instead, the government called on China to provide meaningful and unfettered access to UN and other independent observers.

    While not perfect, the visit went ahead. The eventual report by outgoing UN Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet concluded that China had committed serious human rights violations, which could amount to crimes against humanity.

    This should have forced the international community to act. Instead, 19 countries voted with China to block a debate at the UN Human Rights Council (17 wanted the debate, 11 abstained). The upshot was that China succeeded in driving the issue into a diplomatic dead-end.

    Allowing an organisation designed to protect victims to be controlled by alleged perpetrators isn’t something New Zealand should accept. The government should make it a diplomatic priority to become a member of the council, and it should use every opportunity to speak out and keep the issue in the global spotlight.

    Arms control
    Elsewhere, New Zealand’s foreign policy can arguably be found wanting — most evidently, perhaps, in the area of nuclear arms regulation.

    Advocating for the complete prohibition of all nuclear weapons, as the prime minister did at the UN in September, might be inspiring and also good domestic politics, but it doesn’t make the world safer.

    With the risk of nuclear conflagration at its highest since the Cuban missile crisis, a better immediate goal would be improving the regulation, rather than prohibition, of nuclear weapons. This would entail convincing nuclear states to take their weapons off “hair-trigger alert”.

    The other goals should be the adoption of a no-first-use policy by all nuclear powers (only China has made such a commitment so far), and a push for regional arms control in the Indo-Pacific to rein in India, Pakistan and China.

    Pandemic preparedness
    Finally, there is the danger of vital law and policy not just failing, but not even being born. This is the case with the World Health Organisation’s so-called “pandemic treaty”, designed to better prevent, prepare for and respond to the next global pandemic.

    New Zealand set out some admirable goals in its submission in April, but these have been watered down or are missing from the first working draft of the proposed agreement.

    This shouldn’t be accepted lightly given the lessons of the past two-and-a-half years. Transparency by governments, a precautionary approach and the meaningful involvement of non-state actors will be essential.

    Similarly, improved oversight of the 59 laboratories spread across 23 countries that work with the most dangerous pathogens is critical. Currently, only a quarter of these labs score highly on safety. The proposed treaty does little to demand the kind of biosecurity protocols and robust regulatory systems required to better protect present and future generations.

    As with the other urgent and difficult issues mentioned here, New Zealand’s future is directly connected to what happens elsewhere in the world. The challenge now is to keep adapting to this changing global order while being an effective voice for reason and the rule of law.The Conversation

    Dr Alexander Gillespie is professor of law, University of Waikato. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

  • The Farther People Are From The Fighting In Ukraine, The More They Oppose Peace Talks

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    A new article for The Irish Times by Virginia Tech professor Gerard Toal, titled “Ukraine risks being locked into endless war in bid for perfect peace,” contains a very interesting paragraph:

    Ordinary Ukrainians on the front lines are divided on a ceasefire and negotiations. My Ukrainian colleague Karina Korostelina and I surveyed the attitudes of both residents and displaced persons in three Ukrainian cities close to the southeast battlefields this summer. Almost half agreed it was imperative to seek a ceasefire to stop Russians killing Ukraine’s young men. Slightly more supported negotiations with Russia on a complete ceasefire, with a quarter totally against and a fifth declaring themselves neutral. Respondents were torn when considering whether saving lives or territorial unity were more important to them. Those most touched by the war, namely the internally displaced, were more likely to prioritise saving lives. Other research reveals that those farthest from the battlefields have the most hawkish attitudes.

    It’s the third from the last paragraph in the article, whose overall content cannot be remotely construed as sympathetic toward Moscow, but it’s very important information.

    “Those most touched by the war, namely the internally displaced, were more likely to prioritise saving lives. Other research reveals that those farthest from the battlefields have the most hawkish attitudes.”

    Those two simple sentences sum up so much of the attitude we are seeing toward this war, and it applies as much to those cheerleading continual escalation and bloodshed from the comfort of their homes on the other side of the world.

    “Other research reveals that those farthest from the battlefields have the most hawkish attitudes.”

    Remember this as you watch pundits and politicians calling for escalations in Ukraine from Washington DC, Los Angeles and London.

    Remember this as you watch armchair warriors and NAFO neckbeards dogpiling anyone who advocates peace talks.

    Remember this as you watch progressives on Capitol Hill pressured into walking back even the mildest support for potential ceasefire negotiations at some point.

    Remember this as more and more information comes out about the way bot swarms and astroturf trolling operations have been used to shout down and silence anyone who advocates peace online.

    War is the single most horrific thing in the world. It is the most insane thing that humans do, by far. The most destructive. The least sustainable. The most conducive to human suffering. If people could spend even one hour in the cortisol-soaked mind of a mother trying to bring up her kids in the middle of the conflict, grieving people you’ve lost, worried about losing more, working out how to stretch the food and the fuel, trying to keep things as normal as possible for your stressed out children, jumping at every noise, trying to forget the things you have seen, peace would be achieved within that hour. Everyone and everything would be mobilized to stop this hell on earth as soon as humanly possible. It would be clear to all that the tragedy that is unfolding right now is not just causing enormous suffering in this moment, but every minute it goes on trauma is burning itself deeper into the subconscious of every single person going through it which will torment them and their descendents for generations to come.

    But because we are primates who evolved in small social groups, humans often have trouble feeling empathy for that suffering until it enters into our own immediate circle. Our own city. Our own house. Our own sons, brothers and fathers going out to fight and never coming home.

    So this war has become like a game for people. A vehicle from which to promote their political ideologies and masturbate their propaganda-induced Good Guys vs Bad Guys fantasies. A team sport where they can cheer on the total recapture of all annexed territories in eastern Ukraine from anonymous Shiba avatar accounts online to pass time in their meaningless lives.

    The passive team sports cheerleading spirit that this war has brought on is made all the more obnoxious by the fact that Ukraine is still accepting volunteers to fight on the front lines. If you think this war is good and should continue, the morally coherent thing to do would be to go fight in it, rather than sitting at home eating cheese puffs with one hand and tweeting with the other acting as a pro bono Pentagon propagandist between visits to Pornhub while other people die for your cause.

    But that isn’t happening. People are happy to sit in the comfort of their own home and watch their remote war movie unfold on CNN.

    This isn’t a game. This is a war the US empire provoked to advance its own strategic agendas and therefore has a responsibility to help end, but instead we’re being hammered by that empire with propaganda, censorship, bot armies and troll farms dedicated to convincing everyone that nuclear brinkmanship is safety and peace talks are danger.

    Don’t help them do this. Don’t help manufacture consent for a proxy war whose continuation has less and less support the closer and closer you get to the actual killing. Find some other way to pass your time and scratch your itch for conflict and egoic gratification, one which doesn’t involve spending real people’s lives like video game money. Get a healthier hobby for God’s sake.

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    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, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. 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 American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • You’re Doing Great And Your Voice Makes A Difference

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    2022 is an insane year to be a critic of the empire. People are being censored for disputing official narratives about a war. Those who aren’t censored are being mobbed by astroturf trolling operations. A frenetic propaganda push is turning our friends, family, coworkers and acquaintances into brainwashed empire automatons who despise our heretical rejection of official imperial doctrine about Russia and Ukraine.

    And this is just a quick note to say thank you for holding the line anyway, and to note that your opposition to nuclear brinkmanship, US warmongering and propaganda makes a difference.

    If our rulers did not require the consent of the public, they would not work so hard to manufacture that consent. While the empire managers work hard to keep us from noticing that there a whole lot more of us than there are of them, this is a reality that our rulers are at all times acutely aware of. It gives them nightmares to contemplate the possibility of people growing tired of being impoverished and endangered by the economic warfare and nuclear brinkmanship our rulers are inflicting upon us in order to advance their unipolarist agendas of global domination. They are never not afraid of the possibility that we might begin to collectively push back in large numbers.

    That is why we are being continually inundated by ever-rising levels of propaganda, censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulations and empire trolls. And that’s why there are increasing artificially created pressures to shun, silence and shut down anyone who speaks out against the madness we are witnessing.

    As the US-centralized empire ramps up cold war aggressions against not one but two powerful nations in China and Russia, manipulating public thought at mass scale to go along with those reckless and costly aggressions becomes more and more essential. What that means is that anyone who is voicing opposition to those agendas is a significant thorn in the side of the power structure that’s advancing them.

    As I keep repeating, all positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. Whether you’re talking about positive changes in individual behavior or collective behavior, it always arises from an increase in awareness of something where there previously was less awareness. Self-destructive behavior patterns change when the individual becomes more conscious of the internal forces which drive them. Social injustices change when the collective becomes more conscious of how unwholesome they are. Abuses of power change when investigative journalism and whistleblowers bring awareness to those abuses.

    By vocally opposing the madness our world is descending into, you are helping to expand consciousness. To whatever extent you draw more attention and awareness to the lies, manipulations and malfeasance that is being inflicted upon our world in facilitation of the agendas of oligarchy and empire, you are expanding consciousness by that much. You are bringing collective human behavior that much closer to real change, whether you’re talking to people in person, making videos, holding demonstrations, distributing pamphlets, tweeting, blogging, spray painting the truth on an overpass or yelling it at a street corner.

    Which is why you meet up with so much opposition when you do. Just as there are forces within us which resist being seen in order to remain unconscious, there are forces in the world which work to shut down attempts to shine the light of truth on them. That’s all you’re ever meeting up with when people try to stop you from speaking out, and it deserves no more respect than that.

    So keep speaking. Keep pushing for a sane and peaceful world. You’re doing great, and your voice makes a difference, and don’t you dare let anyone tell you otherwise. If our voices made no difference, the most powerful people in the world wouldn’t be trying to shut us down.

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    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, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. 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 American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Westerners live in denial, convinced they’re the good guys

    No one took responsibility for the explosion over the weekend that ripped through a section of the Kerch Bridge that links Russia to Crimea and was built by Moscow after it annexed the peninsula back in 2014.

    But it was not just Kyiv’s gleeful celebrations that indicated the main suspect. Within hours, the Ukrainian authorities had released a set of commemorative stamps depicting the destruction.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin was under no illusions either. On Monday, he struck out with a torrent of missiles that hit major Ukrainian cities such as Kyiv and Lviv. It was a pale, Slavic echo of Israel’s intermittent bombardments of Gaza, which are expressly intended to send the Palestinian enclave “back to the Stone Age“.

    If the scenes looked familiar – an attack by one party, followed by a massive retaliatory strike from the other – the mood and language that greeted the Ukrainian attack and the Russian counter-attack felt noticeably different from what passes for normal western commentary about Israel and Palestine.

    The blast on the Kerch Bridge was welcomed with barely concealed excitement from western journalists, politicians and analysts, while Moscow’s strikes on Kyiv were uniformly denounced as Russian brutality and state terrorism. That is not the way things work when Israel and Palestinian factions engage in their own rounds of fighting.

    Had the Palestinians openly celebrated blowing up a bridge in East Jerusalem, a territory illegally annexed by Israel in the 1960s, and killed Israeli civilians as collateral damage in the process, who can really imagine western media reports being similarly supportive?

    Nor would western academics have lined up, as they did for Ukraine, to explain in detail why destroying a bridge was a proportionate act and fully in accordance with the rights in international law of a people under belligerent occupation to resist.

    Instead, there would have been thunderous denunciations of Palestinian savagery and “terrorism”.

    In reality, Palestinian resistance nowadays is far more modest – and yet still receives western censure. Palestinians need only to fire a home-made rocket, or launch an “incendiary balloon”, usually ineffectually out of their cage in Gaza – where they have been besieged for years by their Israeli persecutors – to incur the wrath of Israel and the western powers that claim to constitute the “international community”.

    Even more perversely, when Palestinians solely target Israeli soldiers, as they are unambiguously entitled to do under international law, they are similarly reviled as criminals.

    Regular rampages

    But the double standards do not end there. Western media and politicians were unreservedly appalled by Moscow’s retaliatory strikes on the Ukrainian capital. Despite the media’s emphasis on Russia’s targeting of civilian infrastructure, the number of civilians killed across Ukraine by the wave of missile hits on Monday was reported to be low.

    Western media are far less horrified when it comes to Israel’s regular rampages across Gaza – even when Israel “retaliates” after much less provocation and when its strikes inflict far greater suffering and damage.

    And, of course, it is not just Israel that is benefiting from this hypocrisy. The United States’ “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign that initiated the war on Iraq in 2003 – and so impressed western commentators – killed many thousands of Iraqi civilians. Russia’s strikes on Kyiv pale in comparison.

    There are other glaring inconsistencies. After Russia’s missile strikes, Ukraine is gaining an even more receptive ear in western capitals to its demands for additional weaponry to help regain the eastern territories Moscow has annexed.

    By contrast, no one in the West is suggesting that the Palestinians should be armed to help them fight off decades of Israeli occupation and siege. Quite the reverse. It is invariably western weapons that rain down on Gaza, supplied to the belligerent Israeli occupier by the very parties now condemning Russia.

    And in stark contrast to Britain’s whole-hearted support as Ukraine battles to stop Russia’s annexation of its eastern territories, the UK’s prime minister Liz Truss stated only last month that she may reward Israel for its illegal annexation of Jerusalem by moving the British embassy there.

    Whereas Palestinians are constantly inveigled to postpone their liberation struggle and wait for their occupier to agree to peace talks, even when Israel openly scorns engagement, Ukrainians are pushed by the West to do the exact opposite. They are expected to delay any negotiations with Russia and focus on the battlefield.

    Similarly, those who promote talks between Israel and Palestine that are never going to take place are praised as peacemakers. Those who advocate for talks between Ukraine and Russia – when Moscow has expressed a repeated willingness to negotiate, even if its overtures are disparaged by the West – are rounded on as appeasers.

    Russia, meanwhile, faces sustained and comprehensive sanctions imposed by western states to bring it to heel.

    By contrast, those proposing a far weaker tool – grassroots boycotts – to pressure Israel to loosen its choke-hold on Gaza are smeared as antisemites and face legislation to outlaw their activities by the same western states sanctioning Moscow.

    It is almost as if the “freedom-loving” West has an entirely inconsistent agenda when it comes to the plights of Ukraine and Palestine. Israel’s hold on Palestine is unfortunate but justified; Russia’s over Ukraine is emphatically not.

    Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s “unprovoked aggression” is heroic. Palestinian resistance to Israel’s violence – invariably presented as self-defence – is terrorism.

    Double standards

    Western news at the moment is a litany of these double standards and legal and ethical contradictions – and yet barely anyone seems to notice.

    Westerners, for example, are currently cheering the protests in Iran, where women and girls have taken to the streets and created mass disturbances in schools. Their protests were sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini after she was taken into custody for wearing her hijab head covering too loosely.

    Western media celebrate these young women casting aside the hijab in defiance of the unaccountable clerics who rule over them. The West bewails the beatings and attacks they receive from a tyrannous, patriarchal Iranian theocracy.

    And yet there is no comparable solidarity with Palestinians when they collectively defy an unaccountable Israeli occupation army that rules over them. When they turn out to protest at the fence Israel has built all around Gaza to imprison them, preventing them from leaving for work or to see family overseas, or to reach hospitals much better equipped than their own that have been under Israeli blockade for years, they are shot down by Israeli snipers.

    Where is the applause for those brave Palestinian protesters standing up to their oppressors? Where are the denunciations of Israel for compelling Palestinians to endure a tyrannous, apartheid-enforcing Israeli military?

    Why is it entirely unremarkable that Palestinians – young and old, men and women – are regularly beaten or killed by Israel, while the death of a single Iranian woman is enough to reduce the western media to paroxysms of outrage?

    And why, just as pertinently, does the West care so much about the lives of young Iranian women and their hijab protests when it appears not to give a damn about these women’s lives, or those of their brothers, when it comes to enforcing decades of western sanctions? Those restrictions have plunged parts of Iranian society into deep and sustained poverty that puts Iranian lives at risk.

    Such is the reflexive hypocrisy that Israeli women who have shown no solidarity with Palestinian women abused and killed by the Israeli army turned out last week to cut their hair in a public act of sisterhood with Iranian women.

    Western dictates

    There is nothing new about these double standards. They are entrenched in western thinking, based on a profoundly racist, colonial worldview – one that sees “the West” as the good guys and everyone else as morally compromised, or irredeemably evil, if they refuse to bow to western dictates.

    That is highlighted by the current battle of an 88-year-old Palestinian businessman, Munib al-Masri, to win an apology from Britain.

    At his instruction, two eminent lawyers – Luis Moreno Ocampo, a former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, and Ben Emmerson, a former United Nations expert on human rights – have been reviewing evidence of crimes committed by British forces in the years before 1948, when the UK ruled Palestine under a mandate.

    When Britain withdrew, it effectively allowed Zionist institutions to take its place and create a self-declared Jewish state of Israel on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland.

    The evidence documented by Ocampo and Emmerson – which they describe as “shocking” – includes crimes such as arbitrary killings and detentions, torture, use of human shields, and home demolitions weaponised as collective punishment.

    If that all sounds familiar, it should. Israel has been terrorising Palestinians with these same exact policies over the past 74 years. That is because Israel incorporated the British mandate’s “emergency regulations” permitting such crimes into its legal and administrative codes. It simply continued what Britain had started.

    Masri hopes to present the 300-page dossier to the UK government later this year. According to the media, it will be “reviewed thoroughly” by the Ministry of Defence. But do not hold your breath waiting for an apology.

    The reality is that Ocampo and Emmerson did not need to conduct their research. Nothing they tell the UK government will be a revelation. British officials already know about these crimes. And there is no remorse – as demonstrated by, if nothing else, the fact that Britain continues to back Israel to the hilt even while the Israeli military continues the same reign of state terror.

    Israel’s task was to rebrand as a “western-style democracy” the British mandate’s brutal colonial rule over the Palestinian population. It is the reason Israel receives billions of dollars in aid from the US every year, and why it never faces consequences for any of the crimes it commits.

    The ugly truth is that westerners dwell permanently inside their own bubble of disinformation, one puffed up by their leaders and the media, that allows them to imagine themselves as the good guys – whatever the evidence actually proves.

    The double standards in the West’s treatment of Ukraine compared to Palestine should be a moment when that harsh realisation finally dawns. Sadly, western publics just seem to sink ever deeper into the comforting illusion of self-righteousness.

    The post Westerners live in denial, convinced they’re the good guys first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Self-Destructive Social Habits, Loneliness, and Propaganda

    We are the hollow men
    We are the stuffed men
    Leaning together
    Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

    — T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”, 1925

    When many people share thoughts, speech, or conduct that is frequently repeated and becomes automatic, it is fair to call it a social habit.  Such habits tend to become invisible and unspeakable. They become part of our taken-for-granted-world.

    When I recently wrote an essay about hoarding – “The Last Temptation of Things,” many people got angry with me.  A friend wrote to me to say: “I congratulate and curse you for writing this.”  He meant it as a complement.  I took it as meaning I had touched a raw nerve and it touched off a series of further thoughts about social habits and people’s angry reactions when they are challenged.

    Some people who criticized me absurdly complained that I was supporting Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum’s “You Will Own Nothing” campaign, something I have opposed from the start.  Others said that I was attacking people who kept mementos and photographs, etc. and that I was advocating living in a shack.  This was clearly false.  Some got it, of course, and knew that I was using an extreme example to make a point about excessive saving of all sorts of things and how debilitating it is to surround ourselves with far more than we could ever use, need, or even know we have.  My case study was a friend’s house that my wife and I had just cleaned out in an exhaustive case of what felt like an exorcism.

    Now I see that there is a clear connection between hoarding – or whatever word you choose to give it when the saving of things is excessive – and propaganda. Both are forms of habitual clutter, one mental and the other physical, the former imposed from without and accepted passively and the latter self-created to try to protect from loss.  In both cases, the suggestion that your social habits need to be examined is often greeted as a threat to one’s “existence”  and elicits anger or dismissal.

    Sociologists, of which I am one, have various terms for what I am calling social habits.  They don’t speak the language of ordinary people, and so their lingo rarely enters into common discourse to be heard by most people. Such verbiage often just mystifies.

    But habit is a plain and clear word, and social habit simply extends the meaning I am referring to.  José Ortega Y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, and Max Weber referred to it as “usage” before settling on habit.  While usage is accurate, it lacks the stickiness of habit, which is the simplest word and one everyone understands as behavior that has become automatic through frequent repetition.

    For example, in the inconsequential realm of clothing fashions, men are now wearing tight leg-fitting pants, and it seems normal to most, just as loose pants did in the past.  It will change, of course, and a new or ”old” social fashion habit will replace it and most will go with it.  Either way you choose you lose – or win – depending on whether or not you follow the fashions of dress, which mean little or much depending on whether you interpret them symbolically as signifying  more than their appearances present.

    It is true that all ideas, language usage, and behavior become second nature until they are not.  For example, “my bad” may no longer be good, as far as I know, a phrase I have avoided along with “a ton of fun,” “you guys,” and “overseas contingency operations.”

    Some social habits persist for a very long time because they are continually reinforced with propaganda that created them in the first place.  As Jacques Ellul has emphasized, such propaganda is not the touch of a magic wand.  “It is based on slow, constant impregnation.  It creates convictions and compliance that are effective only by continuous repetition.”  Like a slowly dripping faucet, it drips and drips and drips to reinforce its point.

    Take the hatred of Russia promulgated by the U.S. government.  It is more than a century old.  Few Americans know that the U.S. invaded Russia in 1918 to try to stop the Russian Revolution.  Today’s U.S. war against Russia is nothing new, yet many people buy the daily lies about the war in Ukraine because it is a habit of mind, part of their taken-for-granted-world.

    Take the CIA assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother, Robert.  For decades the U.S. media has worked hand-in-glove with the CIA to reinforce the official lies by calling those who have exposed those lies “conspiracy theorists,” a term that the CIA itself promoted and the media continues to use daily to ridicule dissent.  The phrase “conspiracy theorist” is a handy social usage regularly used now to dismiss critics of any official claim, not just the Kennedys’ murders.  Additionally, it is used to lump together the most absurd claims available – e.g. a Martian woman gives birth to a cat in Las Vegas – with the exposure of real government conspiracies in order to dismiss both as ridiculous.

    Take the U.S. government assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that has been covered up by giving MLK, Jr. his own holiday and reducing his message to pablum.  Now you can have a day of service to forget King’s passionate denunciation of the U.S. government as the most violent nation on the earth and the government’s murder of him for his powerful anti-war stance and his campaign for economic justice for all.

    Take the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent anthrax attacks.  They too were wrapped in propaganda from day one that has been reinforced since, resulting in the social habit shared by the majority that Osama bin Laden and nineteen Arab hijackers planned and carried out the attacks.  This propaganda supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the so-called war on terror that has never ended, the destruction of Libya, Afghanistan, the ongoing war against Syria, the aggression toward China, and the U.S. war against Russia, to name the most obvious. And it ushered in twenty-one years and counting of the squelching of civil liberties, government censorship, and surveillance.  All this with no mass resistance from a population lost in the taken-for-granted world of mind control.  Their minds cluttered with lies.

    Take the Covid pandemic propaganda that introduced  the New Normal in March 2020 and continues today.  Destroying small businesses, crippling the economies, fattening up the elites and the wealthiest classes and corporations, injecting millions with untested mRNA so-called vaccines, this diabolical Big Lie has accustomed people to accepting further restrictions on their natural rights under the guise of protecting their health while severely damaging their health.  Despite the fact that all the official claims have been proven false, the fear of death and disease, promoted for many years, has dramatically entered into the social bloodstream and additional censorship of dissenting voices has been embraced.

    In all these examples and so many more, people’s minds have been slowly and insidiously filled with ideas and distorted facts that are false and controlling, similar to a hoarder’s accretion of objects that can overwhelm them. The propagandists have stuffed them with “things” that can assuage their fear of emptiness and the consequent possibility of being able to think clearly for themselves. Excessive information is the last thing people need, for as C. Wright Mills said sixty years ago, “… in this age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it.”

    Ellul describes the modern person thus:

    Above all he is a victim of emptiness – he is a man devoid of meaning. He is very busy, but he is emotionally empty, open to all entreaties and in search of only one thing – something to fill his inner void …. He is available and ready to listen to propaganda. He is the lonely man …. For it, propaganda, encompassing Human Relations, is an incomparable remedy.  It corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of a community, to lose oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology that will end loneliness. Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness.

    And whenever one questions any of the social habits that sustain people’s illusions, their reactions can be sharp and shrill.  To suggest that people collect too many things out of a fear of emptiness, as I did with the hoarding piece, becomes a direct attack on some deep sense they have of themselves.  As if the “stuff” were an extension of their identities without which they would drown.  Even more threatening to so many is to question their opinions about Covid 19, JFK, RFK, the U.S war against Russia, 9/11, etc., and to suggest they have swallowed massive doses of deep-state propaganda. This often infuriates them.

    It is “unspeakable,” as the Trappist monk Thomas Merton said, as quoted by James W. Douglass in his extraordinary book, JFK and The Unspeakable:

    One of the awful facts of our age is the evidence that the [world] is stricken indeed, stricken to the very core of its being by the presence of the Unspeakable …. It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience …

    Social habits are very hard to break, especially when they are reinforced by official propaganda.  They tend to be addictive.  Ownership and use of the cell phone is a prime example.  Such phones are a key element in the digital revolution that has allowed for increased social control and propaganda.  Few can give them up.  And when your mind is filled with years of propaganda that has become second-nature, your ability to think independently is extremely limited.  There is no place for the creative emptiness that leads to genuine thought.  Dissent becomes “conspiracy theory.”

    Hollow heads filled with straw indeed.

    But Eliot may have been wrong in the way he ended his poem:

    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but a whimper.

    It may end with a bang while many just whimper.

     

    The post Self-Destructive Social Habits, Loneliness, and Propaganda first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Iran to hold public trials for up to 2,000 detained in protests

    The country’s judiciary says those marching against the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini will be tried

    Iran’s judiciary has announced that it will hold public trials for as many as 1,000 people detained during recent protests in Tehran alone – and more than a thousand others outside the capital – as international concern grew over Iran’s response to the protests that began with the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after her arrest.

    The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said he was shocked by the number of innocent protesters who were being illegally and violently arrested. Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, has already announced that she is to ask the European Union to sanction the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation.

    Continue reading…

  • New Study Finds The Rest Of The World Supports China And Russia

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The US is preparing to station multiple nuclear-capable B-52 bombers in northern Australia in what the mass media are calling a “signal to China,” yet another example of Australia’s forced subservience as a US military/intelligence asset.

    “Having bombers that could range and potentially attack mainland China could be very important in sending a signal to China that any of its actions over Taiwan could also expand further,” Becca Wasser from the Centre for New American Security think tank told the ABC.

    “This is a dangerous escalation. It makes Australia an even bigger part of the global nuclear weapons threat to humanity’s very existence – and by rising military tensions it further destabilises our region,” tweeted Greens Senator David Shoebridge of the incendiary provocation.

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    This is a dangerous escalation. It makes Australia an even bigger part of the global nuclear weapons threat to humanity’s very existence – and by rising military tensions it further destabilises our region https://t.co/OTSSfV25fJ

    — David Shoebridge (@DavidShoebridge) October 30, 2022

    A new Australian Financial Review article titled “Australia’s alliances in Asia are a tale of two regions” candidly discusses the Biden administration’s recent sanctions geared toward kneecapping the Chinese tech industry in what the author James Curran correctly says “is unambiguously a new cold war.” Curran describes the impossible task Australia has of straddling the ever-widening divide between its number one trading partner China and its number one “security” partner the US, while Washington continually pressures Canberra and ASEAN states toward greater and greater enmity with Beijing.

    “ASEAN countries, as much as Australia, have much at stake in resisting the onset of a bifurcated world,” Curran writes.

    But that bifurcation is being shoved through at breakneck pace, using both hard and soft power measures. Australians have been hammered with increasingly aggressive anti-China propaganda, and as a result nearly half of them now say they would be willing to go to war to defend Taiwan from an attack by the mainland, with a third saying they’d support a war against China over the Solomon Islands.

    A recent Cambridge study found that this hostility toward China has been on the rise in recent years not just in Australia but throughout the “liberal democracies” of the US-centralized power alliance. But what’s interesting is that public opinion is exactly reversed in the much larger remainder of the Earth’s population, with people outside the US power cluster just as fond of China as those within that power cluster are hostile toward it. This relationship is largely mirrored with Russia as well.

    “Among the 1.2bn people who inhabit the world’s liberal democracies, three-quarters (75%) now hold a negative view of China, and 87% a negative view of Russia,” the report reads. “However, for the 6.3bn people who live in the rest of the world, the picture is reversed. In these societies, 70% feel positively towards China, and 66% positively towards Russia.”

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    Fascinating research by the University of Cambridge!

    Whilst in Western liberal democracies (1.2bn people) 75% hold a negative view of China, in the rest of the world (6.3bn people) 70% feel positively towards China. In those countries, China has even overtaken the US!

    Small 🧵 pic.twitter.com/CGF8KtEdis

    — Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) October 30, 2022

    The report finds that in the “developing” world, approval of China is higher than approval of the US:

    “For the first time ever, slightly more people in developing countries (62%) are favourable towards China than towards the United States (61%). This is especially so among the 4.6bn people living in countries supported by the Belt and Road Initiative, among whom almost two-thirds hold a positive view of China, compared to just a quarter (27%) in non-participating countries.”

    The report finds that while Russia’s approval has plummeted in the west, it maintains broad support in the east despite the invasion of Ukraine:

    “However, the real terrain of Russia’s international influence lies outside of the West. 75% of respondents in South Asia, 68% in Francophone Africa, 62% in Southeast Asia continue to view the country positively in spite of the events of this year.”

    I first became aware of the Cambridge study via a Twitter thread by Arnaud Bertrand (who is a great follow if you happen to use that demonic app). Bertrand highlights data in the study showing that US-aligned nations’ opinion of China began plummeting not after the Covid outbreak in late 2019, but after 2017 when the US began ramping up its propaganda campaign against Beijing.

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    A puzzling observation in today's world is that almost no Western leader has laid out a positive vision for the future.

    Take Biden for instance. His big vision is "democracies vs autocracies". Meaning his vision for the future of the world is conflict. How positive is that?

    — Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) October 24, 2022

    Apart from the fact that the USA’s immensely sophisticated propaganda machine naturally focuses primarily on where the world’s wealth and military firepower rests while pushing its global agendas, and apart from the fact that those in Belt and Road Initiative countries apparently believe they benefit from their economic relationships with China, the disparity between the “developed” and “developing” worlds in their perceptions of the US and its enemies may also be partly explained by another thought-provoking Arnaud Bertrand thread, which I will quote in its entirety here:

    A puzzling observation in today’s world is that almost no Western leader has laid out a positive vision for the future.

    Take Biden for instance. His big vision is “democracies vs autocracies”. Meaning his vision for the future of the world is conflict. How positive is that?

    Contrast this with China: between “national rejuvenation” and “common prosperity” at home and the “global security initiative” as their vision for improved international relations; everyone is very clear on the journey they’re embarked on.

    This is a key, if not the key reason why the “West” has no chance in hell to convince the “rest” to join them.

    There’s simply nothing to join! Except conflict, I guess, but you join a conflict to fight for a vision – for a better world – the conflict itself cannot be the vision!

    This reminds me of what George Kennan, the architect of the cold war, wrote: to win he said that America had to “create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problems of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a World Power, and which has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own among the major ideological currents of the time”

    Does America give this impression today?

    Even in my own country, France. Ask any French person what Macron’s vision for the future of France and the world is, what the grand plan is, and you’ll get very puzzled looks. “Reform the pension system so we have to work longer?”

    The truth is there’s nothing, nada, rien! 

    What we have essentially in the West are political operators. They think their jobs are to get reelected and to attempt to move whatever metrics the electorate cares about: GDP, unemployment, debt levels, CO2 emissions, etc. Actual leaders have gone extinct (or gone East).

    It’s actually quite sad, really speaks to the levels of intellectual decrepitude in the West today. The time of the Enlightenment, the big revolutions is well and truly gone. We’re stuck with our mediocre operators.

    It’s also why this is such a dangerous time. A positive vision brings confidence, it brings hope, it motivates, it makes people look forward to what’s to come. The West has none of that today.

    The future is scary, the dominant feelings are fear and anger.

    And when there’s a lot of fear and anger, these feelings need to be directed somewhere. And our operators certainly don’t want it to be them! So it’s China, Iran, all those “foreigners” who “hate our freedom”.

    Perfect recipe for a very bad conflict…

    Please, don’t get fooled!

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    MUST WATCH: The brilliant Professor Sachs speaks the truth and offers his wisdom and advice for humanity. "The real struggle of the world is to live together and overcome our common crises of environment and inequality."

    Original video: https://t.co/WFZAbS1cPG pic.twitter.com/zhW3IIOXQ6

    — Kimmee Lee (@KimmeeLee2) October 22, 2022

    Bertrand’s musings echo a recent quote by Professor Jeffrey Sachs at the Athens Democracy Forum: “The single biggest mistake of president Biden was to say ‘the greatest struggle of the world is between democracies and autocracies’. The real struggle of the world is to live together and overcome our common crises of environment and inequality.”

    Indeed, we could be striving toward a positive vision for the future, one which seeks “common prosperity” and “improved international relations,” one which works to remedy inequality and address the looming environmental crisis. Instead the world is being bifurcated, split in two, which history tells us is probably an indication that something extremely terrible is on the horizon for our species unless we drastically change course.

    It’s worth keeping all this in mind, as nuclear-capable bombers are deployed to Australia; as NATO weighs moving nuclear weapons to Russia’s border in Finland; as the Biden administration goes all in on economic warfare with China regardless of the consequences; as Russia accuses the US of “lowering the nuclear threshold” by modernizing the arsenal in Europe into “battlefield weapons”; as the Council on Foreign Relations president openly admits that the US is now working to halt China’s rise on the world stage; as China declares its willingness to deepen ties with Russia on all levels.

    We could have such a wonderful, healthy, collaborative world, and it’s being flushed down the toilet because an empire is using its leverage over the wealthiest populations on our planet to work toward dominating all the other populations. This stupid, insane quest to shore up unipolar planetary domination is costing us everything while gaining us nothing, and it’s going to be the poorest and weakest among us who suffer the most as a result.

    ________________

    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, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. 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 American husband Tim Foley.

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  • Putin at Valdai

    SOCHI, RUSSIA – OCTOBER 21, 2021: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin addresses the 18th Annual Meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club titled “Global Shake-Up in the 21st Century: The Individual, Values, and the State.” Dmitry Feoktistov/TASS

    Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, speaking at the Valdai International Discussion Club meeting on October 27, gave a speech that described his ideology, and he took questions from the audience and answered further regarding a number of highly important issues. Everything that he said there is consistent with what he has previously stated, but this event was perhaps the fullest-ever exposition of his views, which I, as an American historian, have always found to be remarkably similar to the views that U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) stated, especially in private, and which guided his actions both domestically and especially in international affairs. FDR was passionately anti-imperialistic, and believed that both of the two World Wars resulted from clashes between imperialistic powers, and that the top goal for the post-WW-II world must be to outlaw all empires and replace them all by a United Nations (he even named it) that would be a global federation of all nations and in whose General Assembly each nation will have one vote, but which will also have a Security Council in which each one of the major world powers will negotiate differences between themselves so that no major world power will be able to violate the national sovereignty of any other major world power — and this would include allowing the ability (such as JFK negotiated with Khrushchev during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis) to prevent any other major world power from using any nation that borders any other major world power (such as Cuba does near America), to ally itself (especially militarily) with another major world power. (This principle would likewise limit complete sovereignty both for Ukraine and Taiwan — and for any other nation that borders a major world power.) FDR also believed that the U.N. must have the global monopoly control over all geostrategic weaponry, as a further means of outlawing imperialism and the wars that imperialism produces. (Harry S. Truman castrated FDR’s U.N. plan, which he despised.)

    Too little attention has been paid by historians to FDR’s ideology, which really drew very heavily from Abraham Lincoln’s, which, in turn, drew very heavily from the authors of the Declaration of Independence and of the U.S. Constitution — especially from Thomas Jefferson and James Wilson. Consequently, readers here who are acquainted with the writings by those authors (the people who wrote those two documents) will find here a 21st Century version of that ideology, coming from a Russian historical and cultural perspective. These are highlights only, both from Putin’s speech and from his answers to questions which were posed to him after it:

    Valdai International Discussion Club meeting

    27 October 2022

    Ladies and gentlemen, friends. …

    We have used the Valdai Club platform to discuss, more than once, the major and serious shifts that have already taken place and are taking place around the world, the risks posed by the degradation of global institutions, the erosion of collective security principles and the substitution of “rules” for international law. I was tempted to say “we are clear about who came up with these rules,” but, perhaps, that would not be an accurate statement. We have no idea whatsoever who made these rules up, what these rules are based on, or what is contained inside these rules. …

    The so-called West which is, of course, a theoretical construct since it is not united and clearly is a highly complex conglomerate, but I will still say that the West has taken a number of steps in recent years and especially in recent months that are designed to escalate the situation. As a matter of fact, they always seek to aggravate matters, which is nothing new, either. This includes the stoking of war in Ukraine, the provocations around Taiwan, and the destabilisation of the global food and energy markets. To be sure, the latter was, of course, not done on purpose, there is no doubt about it. The destabilisation of the energy market resulted from a number of systemic missteps made by the Western authorities that I mentioned above. As we can see now, the situation was further aggravated by the destruction of the pan-European gas pipelines. This is something otherworldly altogether, but we are nevertheless witnessing these sad developments.

    Global power is exactly what the so-called West has at stake in its game. But this game is certainly dangerous, bloody and, I would say, dirty. It denies the sovereignty of countries and peoples, their identity and uniqueness, and tramples upon other states’ interests. In any case, even if denial is the not the word used, they are doing it in real life. No one, except those who create these rules I have mentioned is entitled to retain their identity: everyone else must comply with these rules. …

    Belief in one’s infallibility is very dangerous; it is only one step away from the desire of the infallible to destroy those they do not like, or as they say, to cancel them. Just think about the meaning of this word.

    Even at the very peak of the Cold War, the peak of the confrontation of the two systems, ideologies and military rivalry, it did not occur to anyone to deny the very existence of the culture, art, and science of other peoples, their opponents. …

    At one time, the Nazis reached the point of burning books, and now the Western “guardians of liberalism and progress” have reached the point of banning Dostoyevsky and Tchaikovsky. The so-called “cancel culture” and in reality – as we said many times – the real cancellation of culture is eradicating everything that is alive and creative and stifles free thought in all areas, be it economics, politics or culture.

    Today, liberal ideology itself has changed beyond recognition. If initially, classic liberalism was understood to mean the freedom of every person to do and say as they pleased, in the 20th century the liberals started saying that the so-called open society had enemies and that the freedom of these enemies could and should be restricted if not cancelled. …

    But Dostoevsky will live on, as will Tchaikovsky, Pushkin, no matter how much they would have liked the opposite.

    Standardisation, financial and technological monopoly, the erasure of all differences is what underlies the Western model of globalisation, which is neocolonial in nature. Their goal was clear – to establish the unconditional dominance of the West in the global economy and politics. To do that, the West put at its service the entire planet’s natural and financial resources, as well as all intellectual, human and economic capabilities, while alleging it was a natural feature of the so-called new global interdependence.

    As soon as non-western countries began to derive some benefits from globalisation, above all, the large nations in Asia, the West immediately changed or fully abolished many of those rules. And the so-called sacred principles of free trade, economic openness, equal competition, even property rights were suddenly forgotten, completely. They change the rules on the go, on the spot wherever they see an opportunity for themselves. …

    So currently, an overwhelming majority of the international community is demanding democracy in international affairs and rejecting all forms of authoritarian dictate by individual countries or groups of countries. What is this if not the direct application of democratic principles to international relations?

    What stance has the “civilised” West adopted? If you are democrats, you are supposed to welcome the natural desire for freedom expressed by billions of people, but no. The West is calling it undermining the liberal rules-based order. It is resorting to economic and trade wars, sanctions, boycotts and colour revolutions, and preparing and carrying out all sorts of coups.

    One of them led to tragic consequences in Ukraine in 2014. They supported it and even specified the amount of money they had spent on this coup. They have the cheek to act as they please and have no scruples about anything they do. They killed [Qasem] Soleimani, an Iranian general. You can think whatever you want about Soleimani, but he was a foreign state official. They killed him in a third country and assumed responsibility. What is that supposed to mean, for crying out loud? What kind of world are we living in? …

    Over a thousand years, Russia has developed a unique culture of interaction between all world religions. There is no need to cancel anything, be it Christian values, Islamic values or Jewish values. We have other world religions as well. All you need to do is respect each other. In a number of our regions – I just know this firsthand – people celebrate Christian, Islamic, Buddhist and Jewish holidays together, and they enjoy doing so, as they congratulate each other and are happy for each other. …

    I am convinced that real democracy in a multipolar world is primarily about the ability of any nation – I emphasise – any society or any civilisation to follow its own path and organise its own socio-political system. …

    The world is diverse by nature and Western attempts to squeeze everyone into the same pattern are clearly doomed. Nothing will come out of them.

    The conceited aspiration to achieve global supremacy and, essentially, to dictate or preserve leadership by dictate is really reducing the international prestige of the leaders of the Western world, including the United States, and increasing mistrust in their ability to negotiate in general. They say one thing today and another tomorrow; they sign documents and renounce them, they do what they want. There is no stability in anything. How documents are signed, what was discussed, what can we hope for – all this is completely unclear.

    Previously, only a few countries dared argue with America and it looked almost sensational, whereas now it has become routine for all manner of states to reject Washington’s unfounded demands despite its continued attempts to exert pressure on everyone. …

    As an independent and distinctive civilization, Russia has never considered and does not consider itself an enemy of the West. Americophobia, Anglophobia, Francophobia, and Germanophobia are the same forms of racism as Russophobia or anti-Semitism, and, incidentally, xenophobia in all its guises. …

    In 2000, after I was elected President, I will always remember what I faced: I will remember the price we paid for destroying the den of terrorism in the North Caucasus, which the West almost openly supported at the time. …

    What is more, not only did the West actively support terrorists on Russian territory, but in many ways it nurtured this threat. We know this. Nevertheless, after the situation had stabilised, when the main terrorist gangs had been defeated, including thanks to the bravery of the Chechen people, we decided not to turn back, not to play the offended, but to move forward, to build relations even with those who actually acted against us, to establish and develop relations with all who wanted them, based on mutual benefit and respect for one another. …

    Russia is not challenging the Western elites. Russia is simply upholding its right to exist and to develop freely. Importantly, we will not become a new hegemon ourselves. Russia is not suggesting replacing a unipolar world with a bipolar, tripolar or other dominating order, or replacing Western domination with domination from the East, North or South. This would inevitably lead to another impasse. …

    I am convinced that dictatorship can only be countered through free development of countries and peoples; the degradation of the individual can be set off by the love of a person as a creator; primitive simplification and prohibition can be replaced with the flourishing complexity of culture and tradition.

    The significance of today’s historical moment lies in the opportunities for everyone’s democratic and distinct development path, which is opening up before all civilisations, states and integration associations. We believe above all that the new world order must be based on law and right, and must be free, distinctive and fair.

    The world economy and trade also need to become fairer and more open. Russia considers the creation of new international financial platforms inevitable; this includes international transactions. These platforms should be above national jurisdictions. They should be secure, depoliticized and automated and should not depend on any single control centre. Is it possible to do this or not? Of course it is possible. This will require a lot of effort. Many countries will have to pool their efforts, but it is possible. …

    Clearly, we have a common and very pragmatic interest in free and open scientific and technological exchange. United, we stand to win more than if we act separately. The majority should benefit from these exchanges, not individual super-rich corporations.

    How are things going today? If the West is selling medicines or crop seeds to other countries, it tells them to kill their national pharmaceutical industries and selection. In fact, it all comes down to this: its machine tool and equipment supplies destroy the local engineering industry. I realised this back when I served as Prime Minister. Once you open your market to a certain product group, the local manufacturer instantly goes belly up and it is almost impossible for him to raise his head. That’s how they build relationships. That’s how they take over markets and resources, and countries lose their technological and scientific potential. This is not progress; it is enslavement and reducing economies to primitive levels.

    Technological development should not increase global inequality, but rather reduce it. …

    Let me emphasise again that sovereignty and a unique path of development in no way mean isolation or autarky. On the contrary, they are about energetic and mutually beneficial cooperation based on the principles of fairness and equality. …

    Unity among humankind cannot be created by issuing commands such as “do as I do” or “be like us.” It is created with consideration for everyone’s opinion and with a careful approach to the identity of every society and every nation. This is the principle that can underlie long-term cooperation in a multipolar world. …

    Thank you very much.

    Fyodor Lukyanov: Thank you very much, Mr President, for such an all-encompassing speech.

    I cannot but spontaneously grasp at the conclusion, as long as you mentioned the revolutionary situation, those at the top and those at the bottom. Those of us who are a bit older studied all this at school. Who do you associate yourself with, those at the top or the bottom?

    Vladimir Putin: With the bottom, of course, I am from the bottom.

    My mother was… As you know, I said it many times that I come from a working family. My father was a foreman, he graduated from a vocational school. My mother did not receive education, even secondary, she was a mere worker, and had many jobs; she worked as a nurse in a hospital, and as a janitor and a night watchman. She did not want to leave me in kindergarten or in nursery.

    So therefore, I naturally am very sensitive – thank God this has been the case until now and, I hope, will continue – to the pulse of what an ordinary person lives though.

    Fyodor Lukyanov: So, on the global level, you are among those who “don’t want to [live in the old way]?”

    Vladimir Putin: At the global level, naturally, it is one of my responsibilities to monitor what is going on the global level. I stand for what I just said, for democratic relations with regard to the interests of all participants in international communication, not just the interests of the so-called golden billion. …

    Fyodor Lukyanov: Excellent.

    Mr President, your decision to start a special military operation in February came as a big surprise for everyone, including the majority of Russian citizens. We know that you have described the logic and reasons for that decision many times. However, decisions of this importance are hardly made without a special motive. What happened before you made the decision?

    Vladimir Putin: I have said this many times, and you will hardly hear anything new today. What happened? I will not speak about NATO’s expansion to Ukraine, which was absolutely unacceptable to us, and everyone knew that but simply disregarded our security interests. … I said at the outset, on the day the operation started, that the most important thing for us is to help Donbass. I have already mentioned this, and if we had acted differently, we would not have been able to deploy our Armed Forces on both sides of Donbass. …

    Ivan Safranchuk: Ivan Safranchuk, MGIMO University.

    … Is it true that the world is on the verge of the possible use of nuclear weapons? How will Russia act in these circumstances? …

    Vladimir Putin: Nuclear provocation and the inflaming of the possibility that Russia might theoretically use nuclear weapons are being used to reach these goals: to influence our friends, our allies, and neutral states by telling them, look at whom you support; Russia is such a scary country, do not support it, do not cooperate with it, do not trade with it. This is, in fact, a primitive goal.

    What is happening in reality? After all, we have never said anything proactively about Russia potentially using nuclear weapons. All we did was hint in response to statements made by Western leaders. …

    Finally, about using or not using [nuclear weapons]. The only country in the world which has used nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state was the United States of America; they used it twice against Japan. What was the goal? There was no military need for it at all. What was the military practicability to use nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, against civilians? Had there been a threat to the US territorial integrity? Of course not. It was not practical from the military point of view either, because Japan’s war machine had already been destroyed, it was not able to resist, so what was the point in dealing the final blow with nuclear weapons?

    By the way, Japanese textbooks usually say that it was the Allies that struck a nuclear blow at Japan. They have such a firm grip over Japan that the Japanese cannot even write the truth in their school textbooks. … As for Russia…We have the Military Doctrine, and they should read it. One of its articles explains the cases when, why, in relation to what and how Russia considers it possible to use weapons of mass destruction in the form of nuclear weapons to protect its sovereignty, territorial integrity and to ensure the safety of the Russian people. …

    Fyodor Lukyanov: All right. And what about the role of a leader who has to make a decision on this issue?

    Vladimir Putin: We are ready to settle any issues. We are not refusing. Last December we offered the United States to continue the dialogue on strategic stability but received no response. It was in December of last year. Silence. …

    Fyodor Lukyanov: Two years ago, you spoke highly about President Erdogan at the Valdai Club meeting, saying that he did not go back on his words but did what he said he would do. Many things have happened over the past two years. Has your opinion of him changed?

    Vladimir Putin: No. He is a competent and strong leader who is guided above all, and possibly exclusively, by the interests of Turkiye, its people and its economy. This largely explains his position on energy issues and, for example, on the construction of TurkStream.

    We have proposed building a gas hub in Turkiye for European consumers. Turkiye has supported this idea, of course, first of all, based on its own interests. We have many common interests in tourism, the construction sector and agriculture. There are many areas where we have common interests.

    President Erdogan never lets anyone get a free ride or acts in the interests of third countries. He upholds above all the interests of Turkiye, including in dialogue with us. In this sense, Turkiye as a whole and personally President Erdogan are not easy partners; many of our decisions are born amid long and difficult debates and negotiations.

    But there is a desire on both sides to reach agreements, and we usually do it. In this sense, President Erdogan is a consistent and reliable partner. This is probably his most important trait, that he is a reliable partner. …

    Kubat Rakhimov: I am Kubat Rakhimov from the Kyrgyz Republic.

    … What do you think of the possibility of relocating the capital of the Russian Federation to the centre of the country, that is, to the centre of the Eurasian continent, so it can be closer to countries in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation?

    Thank you.

    Vladimir Putin: … Yes, we have talked about this. The Russian capital has been moved several times in the history of the Russian state. Historically and mentally, the centre of Russia is always associated with Moscow and, in my opinion, there is no need.

    There are problems in the capital’s development as a metropolitan area, but I must say that, with Mayor Sobyanin’s team, these problems are addressed and resolved much better than in many other countries and metropolitan areas. …

    Alexander Prokhanov: Mr President, very often foreigners ask us, “What can you, Russians, offer to the modern world? Where are your Nobel Prize winners? Where are your great discoveries, industrial and scientific achievements?” My colleagues often answer, “Well, what about the great Russian culture? Pushkin? Rublev? Russian icons? The marvellous Russian architecture?” They say, “But this was all in the past. What about today?”

    When I listened to you today, it dawned on me what Russia can offer to the world: Russia can offer a religion of justice, because this religion, this feeling is at the heart of all Russian culture and Russian self-sacrifice. And today, Russia is making this sacrifice, essentially, it is standing up alone to the rest of the world, the cruel Western world, waging this fight for justice. … Maybe we should make the current Russian ideology a religion of justice?

    Vladimir Putin: You know, you just said that we are making sacrifices for the sake of other peoples. I’ll argue with you here. We are not sacrificing anything. We are working to strengthen our sovereignty, and it is in our own interests. First of all, strengthening our financial and economic sovereignty, it will lay the foundation for our future growth – technological, educational and scientific growth.

    Whether we have Nobel Prize laureates or not. When did Alferov make his invention? He was awarded the Nobel Prize for it after 30 years – or how many? Is that all that matters? The former President of the United States was awarded a Nobel prize. Is this an indicator of real achievement? With all due respect to both the Nobel Committee and the winner of this remarkable Nobel Prize, is that the only indicator?

    The post Putin at Valdai first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Official Narrative On Ukraine

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    The official narrative promoted by the entire western political/media class is that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February of this year solely because he is evil and hates freedom. He wants to conquer as much of Europe as possible because he cannot stand free democracies, because he is another Adolf Hitler.

    The official narrative is that while Russia is in Ukraine solely because its leader is an evil monster like Hitler, the US is in Ukraine solely because its leaders are righteous. The United States is providing arms, military intelligence, and assistance on the ground from special ops forces and CIA officers to Ukraine, as well as implementing an unprecedented regime of economic warfare against Russia, solely because the US loves its good friends the Ukrainians and wants to protect their freedom and democracy.

    If you dispute any part of the official Ukraine narrative, you are an evil monster, and a disinformation agent. Because Vladimir Putin is the same as Adolf Hitler, you are also the same as Neville Chamberlain, and are guilty of the cardinal sin of supporting appeasement.

    Because you are an evil disinformation agent Neville Chamberlain appeasement monster, it is legitimate to censor you. It is legitimate to accuse you of being secretly paid by the Russian government. It is legitimate to swarm you with coordinated astroturf trolls working to shout you down and overwhelm you. It is legitimate to publish propagandistic smear pieces about you. All normal expectations of public discourse go out the window, because you are a monster, not a person.

    If you are tempted to ask questions which put a wobble on the official narrative, you must resist this urge at all cost. Don’t ask why western officials, scholars and strategists have spent years warning that the actions of western governments would lead to this war. Don’t ask what people are talking about when they say the US provoked this war, or when they say the US is using this war to advance strategic agendas it has had in place for years, or when they suggest that these things might have something to do with why the US is obstructing diplomatic solutions at every turn. If you ask questions like these, you are the worst person in the world.

    Per the official narrative, if you confront powerful lawmakers on their support for US interventionism in Ukraine, you are “parroting pro-Putin talking points” and spreading “Russian disinformation“. Questioning officials of the most powerful government in the world about the most consequential decisions being made in the world is violence, and is not allowed.

    If you claim you are objecting to the US using proxy warfare in Ukraine on anti-war grounds, you are lying; you are not anti-war. You are only anti-war if you support the same positions on Ukraine as noted anti-war activists John Bolton, Bill Kristol, Tom Cotton, and Mike Pompeo. If you want to learn about the true anti-war position, consult reliable anti-war publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

    The official narrative on Ukraine is that the US empire and its media never lie or circulate propaganda about wars that the US is involved in. If you dispute this, you are lying and circulating propaganda. That’s why it’s necessary to have so much censorship and organized trolling and mass media reports reminding you how good and righteous this war is: it’s to protect you from lies and propaganda.

    If any part of the official narrative on Ukraine sounds suspicious to you, this means you have been infected by Russian disinformation. Do not breathe a word of the thoughts you’ve been thinking to anyone, or else you will be guilty of spreading Russian disinformation and will become the enemy of the free world.

    Remember, good citizen: we must oppose Russian propaganda at all costs to protect our western values of free expression, free thought, free press, and free democracy. So do not question any part of the official Ukraine narrative. Or else.

    ________________

    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, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. 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 American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Advocating World War Three Is Just Mainstream Punditry Now

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    Mainstream punditry in the latter half of 2022 is rife with op-eds arguing that the US needs to vastly increase military spending because a world war is about to erupt, and they always frame it as though this would be something that happens to the US, as though its own actions would have nothing to do with it. As though it would not be the direct result of the US-centralized empire continually accelerating towards that horrific event while refusing every possible diplomatic off-ramp due to its inability to relinquish its goal of total unipolar planetary domination.

    The latest example of this trend is an article titled “Could America Win a New World War? — What It Would Take to Defeat Both China and Russia” published by Foreign Affairs, a magazine that is owned and operated by the supremely influential think tank Council on Foreign Relations.

    “The United States and its allies must plan for how to simultaneously win wars in Asia and Europe, as unpalatable as the prospect may seem,” writes the article’s author Thomas G Mahnken, adding that in some ways “the United States and its allies will have an advantage in any simultaneous war” in those two continents.

    But Mahnken doesn’t claim a world war against Russia and China would be a walk in the park; he also argues that in order to win such a war the US will need to — you guessed it — drastically increase its military spending.

    “The United States clearly needs to increase its defense manufacturing capacity and speed,” Mahnken writes. “In the short term, that involves adding shifts to existing factories. With more time, it involves expanding factories and opening new production lines. To do both, Congress will have to act now to allocate more money to increase manufacturing.”

    But exploding US weapons spending is still inadequate, Mahnken argues, saying that “the United States should work with its allies to increase their military production and the size of their weapons and munitions stockpiles” as well.

    Mahnken says this world war could be sparked “if China initiated a military operation to take Taiwan, forcing the United States and its allies to respond,” as though there would be no other options on the table besides launching into nuclear age World War Three to defend an island next to the Chinese mainland that calls itself the Republic of China. He writes that “Moscow, meanwhile, could decide that with the United States bogged down in the western Pacific, it could get away with invading more of Europe,” demonstrating the bizarre Schrödinger’s cat western propaganda paradox that Putin is always simultaneously (A) getting destroyed and humiliated in Ukraine and (B) on the cusp of waging hot war with NATO.

    Again, this is just the latest in an increasingly common genre of mainstream western punditry.

    In “The skeptics are wrong: The U.S. can confront both China and Russia,” The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin wags his finger at Democrats who think aggressions against Russia should be prioritized and Republicans who think that military and financial attention should be devoted to China, arguing porque no los dos?

    In “Could The U.S. Military Fight Russia And China At The Same Time?“, 19FortyFive’s Robert Farley answers in the affirmative, writing that “the immense fighting power of the US armed forces would not be inordinately strained by the need to wage war in both theaters” and concluding that “the United States can fight both Russia and China at once… for a while, and with the help of some friends.”

    In “Can the US Take on China, Iran and Russia All at Once?” Bloomberg’s Hal Brands answers that it would be very difficult and recommends escalating in Ukraine and Taiwan and selling Israel more advanced weaponry to get a step ahead of Russia, China and Iran respectively.

    In “International Relations Theory Suggests Great-Power War Is Coming,” the Atlantic Council’s Matthew Kroenig writes for Foreign Policy that a global democracies-versus-autocracies showdown is coming “with the United States and its status quo-oriented democratic allies in NATO, Japan, South Korea, and Australia on one side and the revisionist autocracies of China, Russia, and Iran on the other,” and that aspiring foreign policy experts should adjust their expectations accordingly.

    When they’re not arguing that World War Three is coming and we must all prepare to fight it and win, they’re arguing that a global conflict is already upon us and we must begin acting like it, as in last month’s New Yorker piece “What if We’re Already Fighting the Third World War with Russia?”

    These Beltway swamp monster pontifications are directed not just at the general public but at government policymakers and strategists as well, and it should disturb us all that their audiences are being encouraged to view a global conflict of unspeakable horror like it’s some kind of natural disaster that people don’t have any control over.

    Every measure should be taken to avoid a world war in the nuclear age. If it looks like that’s where we’re headed, the answer is not to ramp up weapons production and create entire industries dedicated to making it happen, the answer is diplomacy, de-escalation and detente. These pundits frame the rise of a multipolar world as something that must inevitably be accompanied by an explosion of violence and human suffering, when in reality we’d only wind up there as a result of decisions that were made by thinking human beings on both sides.

    It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s no omnipotent deity decreeing from on high that we must live in a world where governments brandish armageddon weapons at each other and humanity must either submit to Washington or resign itself to cataclysmic violence of planetary consequence. We could just have a world where the peoples of all nations get along with each other and work together toward the common good rather than working to dominate and subjugate each other.

    As Jeffrey Sachs recently put it, “The single biggest mistake of president Biden was to say ‘the greatest struggle of the world is between democracies and autocracies’. The real struggle of the world is to live together and overcome our common crises of environment and inequality.”

    We could have a world where our energy and resources go toward increasing human thriving and learning to collaborate with this fragile biosphere we evolved in. Where all our scientific innovation is directed toward making this planet a better place to live instead of channeling it into getting rich and finding new ways to explode human bodies. Where our old models of competition and exploitation give way to systems of collaboration and care. Where poverty, toil and misery gradually move from accepted norms of human existence to dimly remembered historical record.

    Instead we’re getting a world where we’re being hammered harder and harder with propaganda encouraging us to accept global conflict as an unavoidable reality, where politicians who voice even the mildest support for diplomacy are shouted down and demonized until they bow to the gods of war, where nuclear brinkmanship is framed as safety and de-escalation is branded as reckless endangerment.

    We don’t have to submit to this. We don’t have to keep sleepwalking into dystopia and armageddon to the beat of manipulative sociopaths. There are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and we’ve got a whole lot more at stake here than they do.

    We can have a healthy world. We’ve just got to want it badly enough. They work so hard to manufacture our consent because, ultimately, they absolutely do require it.

    ______________

    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, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. 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 American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Boy Who Cried Hitler: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    Criticizing your government is propaganda.

    Disagreeing with neocons is supporting fascism.

    Opposing an empire is defending tyranny.

    Seeking de-escalation causes escalation.

    Nuclear brinkmanship is safety.

    Diplomacy is appeasement.

    War is peace.

    Freedom is slavery.

    Ignorance is strength.

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    Criticism of US foreign policy looks like Russian propaganda to people who’ve spent their entire lives marinating in US propaganda.

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    They need so much propaganda, censorship and organized trolling because without those things the public would realize that pouring billions of dollars into an unwinnable conflict that risks nuclear war and makes everyone poorer actually sucks and doesn’t benefit normal people.

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    Comparisons of Putin to Hitler only sound profound and relevant if you only just began paying attention to US foreign policy and are therefore unaware that literally every single US enemy is always copiously compared to Hitler. It’s like The Boy Who Cried Wolf, except there is no wolf, and the boy just keeps crying “Wolf!” over and over again, and the villagers never learn their lesson and never stop believing him.

    Because mainstream westerners ignored all wars until Ukraine, they don’t know we’ve seen all these tricks before. They don’t know the war propaganda is airing reruns. They think it’s new to compare today’s Official Enemy to Hitler. They never question the atrocity narratives. They don’t know the US always lies about every war. They think it’s a crazy conspiracy theory to suggest that the actions and motives of their government isn’t what they’ve been told. They say “Uh, hello? PUTIN is the one who invaded!” like that obvious fact somehow makes it impossible to be lied to about the other aspects of the war.

    Because they weren’t paying attention to all the empire’s tricks leading up to this, they don’t see the same old patterns rolling themselves out yet again, often by the same old voices as before. They don’t know what patterns to watch for, so they don’t see or recognize them. That’s the only reason their eyes don’t reflexively roll when they’re told today’s Official Enemy invaded completely unprovoked, solely because he is evil and hates freedom, or that the US is defending its friends the Ukrainians because it wants to protect freedom and democracy.

    If you only just started paying attention and don’t know the US power alliance literally always lies about every war it’s involved in, the war propaganda slides down their throats with zero gag reflex, because they don’t recognize it as propaganda. It’s unfamiliar to them.

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    Criticizing the extensively documented western aggressions that led to this war is not the same as saying the invasion is good or that Vladimir Putin is a wonderful person. If this isn’t obvious to you, it’s because US propaganda has turned your brain into soup.

    It’s absolutely insane how literally any criticism of the indisputable well-documented western provocations in Ukraine gets shouted down and raged at. You’re only allowed to say this war is completely unprovoked and began solely because Vladimir Putin is evil and hates freedom.

    If discussing facts and criticizing the foreign aggressions of the most powerful government in the world is taboo, you might be ruled by tyrants and surrounded by their brainwashed human livestock. If you spend your time raging and yelling at those who advocate peace, you might just be pro-war.

    ❖

    I gotta hand it to the war propagandists on Ukraine, it’s truly impressive how they’ve managed to convince everyone that the real “anti-war” position on this issue is the one being promoted by John Bolton, Bill Kristol, Tom Cotton and Mike Pompeo.

    ❖

    Putin is responsible for Putin’s decisions, the US empire is responsible for the US empire’s decisions. Putin is responsible for deciding to invade, the US empire is responsible for the mountains of well-documented aggressions which provoked that decision. This isn’t complicated.

    I can respect arguments which assign blame to both the US and Russia. I can respect arguments which place more blame on Russia than on the US empire’s provocations. But the mainstream narrative does neither: it completely exonerates the US from even the tiniest bit of responsibility. Which is just a joke; there is no valid basis on which to claim this war was unprovoked. None. The only people who claim this are the propagandists and those they have propagandized.

    But that’s pretty much everyone I wind up arguing with about Ukraine: those who adamantly insist that the most powerful empire that has ever existed bears exactly zero percent of the responsibility for this war. That sycophantic, bootlicking mind virus is what I am always pushing back on.

    If you believe the US empire bears zero responsibility for starting this war, even in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary, it’s because empire propaganda has melted your brain. But this is most people. It’s the mainstream perspective on this war.

    That demands pushback. Herculean pushback. The fact that the most powerful and belligerent power structure on the face of this earth is predominantly viewed as having no responsibility for the extremely dangerous war it deliberately provoked demands aggressive opposition.

    The US deliberately provoked this war. The US is keeping this war going. The US is using this war to advance its geostrategic interests in Europe and Asia. These are facts. When facts are taboo, you are living in a world of lies.

    ❖

    The Assange case is resonating with so many people because it’s personal. It’s asking each of us what kind of world we want to live in: one where journalists are allowed to tell the truth about the powerful, or one where they are not? It’s a question that demands an answer.

    ❖

    I speak in a forceful and unmitigated way because that’s how you get people to listen to you, and because it is the right thing to do. If empire critics don’t speak in a forceful and unmitigated way, the only ones speaking in a forceful and unmitigated way will be the imperial pundits and politicians.

    It often enrages empire apologists that I speak this way, because they’re not used to criticism of the US empire being voiced like this, but it also sometimes confuses people who agree with me for the same reason. Socialists and anti-imperialists usually mitigate their voices. I don’t, because that’s just a bad habit. If you’re right, you should speak like you’re right. If we don’t, the only ones speaking like they’re right will be those who are wrong. And then those who are wrong are the only ones who will be listened to.

    And that’s exactly what’s happening: those with the most influential voices are those who defend the most depraved impulses of the most powerful people in the world. Those are the people who are being listened to right now. So speak like you know you’re right and they’re wrong, because that is indeed the case.

    ❖

    Fredric Jameson says it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Adyashanti says spiritual people are often more afraid of life than they are of death. These two points seem related. Armageddon feels less scary than sorting our shit out as a species.

    The idea of finally turning towards each other and coming into enough intimacy to move from competition-based systems to collaboration-based ones feels more intimidating than the end of the world, so people start hoping for the end because at least that way it’ll be over with. For the same reason people who can’t imagine going on living get suicidal ideations, people who can’t imagine humanity transcending its self-destructive pattering get omnicidal ideations.

    This is a major obstacle. Humans need to overcome their fear of life.

    _______________

    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, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. 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 American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Wicked Leaks, Part 1: How The Media Quarantined Evidence On Nord Stream Sabotage

    Last week, Alex Nunns, author of The Candidate – Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path To Power and former Corbyn speechwriter, described the current assault on democracy within the Labour Party:

    ‘What’s happening in the Labour Party is new. The Labour right, having had the shock of their lives in 2015, are now intent on eradicating the left entirely. This isn’t how their predecessors thought. It’s a new departure in Labour history that’ll have long term consequences.’

    So why the change?

    ‘Previous generations of Labour right bureaucrats accommodated the left not because they were nicer than the current lot but because 1) the left was part of a power bloc which they needed to advance their own ends & 2) they were confident in containing the left within that bloc.

    ‘This generation of Labour right bureaucrats acts differently because 2) has changed, but 1) hasn’t. Their predecessors weren’t all stupid, so there will be a long-term cost.’

    In other words, the Labour right is ‘eradicating the left entirely’ because, as the Corbyn near-miss in 2017 showed, the level of public support for left policies is now so high that it threatens to surge uncontrollably through any window of opportunity.

    This rings true, and not just for the Labour Party. What we have often called the ‘corporate media’, but which in truth is a state-corporate media system, has followed essentially the same path for the same reasons.

    Where once the likes of John Pilger, Robert Fisk and Peter Oborne were granted regular columns in national newspaper and magazines, and even space for prime-time documentaries, their brand of rational, compassionate dissent has been all but banished. Pilger commented recently:

    ‘In recent years, some of the best journalists have been eased out of the mainstream. “Defenestrated” is the word used. The spaces once open to mavericks, to journalists who went against the grain, truth-tellers, have closed.’

    In October 2019, Peter Oborne published an article on ‘the way Boris Johnson was debauching Downing Street by using the power of his office to spread propaganda and fake news’.1. The media response:

    ‘This article marked the end of my thirty-year-long career as a writer and broadcaster in the mainstream British press and media. I had been a regular presenter on Radio 4’s The Week in Westminster for more than two decades. It ceased to use me, without explanation. I parted company on reasonably friendly terms with the Daily Mail after our disagreement…

    ‘The mainstream British press and media is to all intents and purposes barred to me.’ (p. 132 and p. 133)

    As with the Labour Party, the reason is that the game – and it always was a game – has changed. In the age of internet-based citizen journalism – heavily filtered by algorithms and ‘shadow-banning’ though it is – elite interests can no longer be sure that the truth can be contained by the ‘free press’ and its obedient ranks of ‘client journalists’.

    In our media alert of 26 July 2002, we wrote:

    ‘This does not mean that there is no dissent in the mainstream; on the contrary the system strongly requires the appearance of openness. In an ostensibly democratic society, a propaganda system must incorporate occasional instances of dissent. Like vaccines, these small doses of truth inoculate the public against awareness of the rigid limits of media freedom.’

    That was true two decades ago when we started Media Lens. But, now, the state-corporate media system relies less on inoculation and more on quarantine: inconvenient facts, indeed whole issues, are simply kept from public awareness. We have moved far closer to a totalitarian system depending on outright censorship.

    An example was provided by a remarkable leading article in the Observer, titled, ‘The Observer view on the global escalation of Russia’s war on Ukraine’. The title notwithstanding, this October 9 article made no mention at all of the terrorist attacks on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines just two weeks earlier, on September 26. But why?

    The pipelines are multi-national projects operated by Swiss-based Nord Stream AG, with each intended to supply around 55 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually from Russia to Europe through pipelines laid beneath the Baltic Sea connecting to a German hub. Completed a decade ago, Russian gas giant, Gazprom, has a 51 percent stake in the project that cost around $15 billion to build. US media watch site, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), made the key point:

    ‘Any serious coverage of the Nord Stream attack should acknowledge that opposition to the pipeline has been a centerpiece of the US grand strategy in Europe. The long-term goal has been to keep Russia isolated and disjointed from Europe, and to keep the countries of Europe tied to US markets. Ever since German and Russian energy companies signed a deal to begin development on Nord Stream 2, the entire machinery of Washington has been working overtime to scuttle it.’

    The evidence for this is simply overwhelming. For example, FAIR noted that during his confirmation hearings in 2021, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told Congress he was ‘determined to do whatever I can to prevent’ Nord Stream 2 from being completed. Months later, the US State Department reiterated that ‘any entity involved in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline risks US sanctions and should immediately abandon work on the pipeline’.

    If that doesn’t make US hostility to the pipelines clear enough, President Joe Biden told reporters in February:

    ‘If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.’

    Asked by a reporter how the US intended to end a project that was, after all, under German control, Biden responded:

    ‘I promise you, we will be able to do that.’

    No surprise, then, that, following the attack, Blinken described the destruction of the pipelines as a ‘tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy,’ adding that this ‘offers tremendous strategic opportunity for years to come’.

    Former UN weapons inspector and political analyst Scott Ritter commented:

    ‘Intent, motive and means: People serving life sentences in U.S. prisons have been convicted on weaker grounds than the circumstantial evidence against Washington for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines.’

    In a rare moment of ‘mainstream’ dissent echoing Ritter’s conclusion, Columbia University economist, Jeffrey Sachs, surprised his interviewer by saying:

    ‘I know it runs counter to our narrative, you’re not allowed to say these things in the West, but the fact of the matter is, all over the world when I talk to people, they think the US did it. Even reporters on our papers that are involved tell me, “Of course [the US is responsible],” but it doesn’t show up in our media.’

    Sachs added: ‘there’s direct radar evidence that US helicopters, military helicopters that are normally based in Gdansk were circling over this area’.

    Despite all of this, FAIR reported of US corporate media coverage:

    ‘Much of the media cast their suspicions towards Russia, including Bloomberg (9/27/22), Vox (9/29/22), Associated Press (9/30/22) and much of cable news. With few exceptions, speculation on US involvement has seemingly been deemed an intellectual no-fly-zone.’

    Thus, the possibility of US involvement has been intellectually quarantined. Instead, US media have been tying themselves in knots trying to find alternative explanations. The New York Times wrote:

    ‘It is unclear why Moscow would seek to damage installations that cost Gazprom billions of dollars to build and maintain. The leaks are expected to delay any possibility of receiving revenue from fuel going through the pipes.’

    In Britain, the Guardian affected similar confusion:

    ‘Nord Stream has been at the heart of a standoff between Russia and Europe over energy supplies since the start of the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine, but it is not immediately clear who stands to benefit from the destruction of the gas infrastructure.’

    If not ‘immediately clear’, it surely becomes clear after a moment’s honest reflection. Another Guardian report commented:

    ‘Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic states and the US – including its former president Donald Trump – have been fierce critics of the Nord Stream pipeline, and Germany has announced its intention to wean itself off Russian gas completely and Gazprom has wound down deliveries to almost zero.

    ‘For a Nato ally to have carried out an act of sabotage on a piece of infrastructure part-owned by European companies would have meant much political risk for little gain, but for Russia to destroy its own material and political asset would also seem to defy logic.’

    The risk is not, in fact, that great in a world where politicians and media like the Guardian refuse to point the finger of blame at the world’s sole superpower. As we have seen, the assertion that an attack by a Nato ally would be ‘for little gain’ was publicly contradicted by Blinken’s own comment that the destruction of the pipelines ‘offers tremendous strategic opportunity for years to come.’

    The Guardian added:

    ‘Some European politicians suggested Russia could have carried out the blasts with the aim of causing further havoc with gas prices or demonstrating its ability to damage Europe’s energy infrastructure.’

    But as the Guardian acknowledged, this ‘logic’ seemed ‘to defy logic’ and suggested journalists were burying their heads in the sand at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. A further Guardian report noted:

    ‘A senior Ukrainian official also called it a Russian attack to destabilise Europe, without giving proof.’

    Or any reasoning. The report continued:

    ‘British sources said they believed it may not be possible to determine what occurred with certainty.’

    How convenient. The Telegraph reported:

    ‘Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, said that if it was confirmed it was an act of sabotage by Russia it would be “in nobody’s interest”.’

    Again, a statement directly contradicted by Blinken himself. His ‘in nobody’s interest’ comment was the main focus of most media coverage.

    FAIR discussed a tweet from a Polish member of the European Parliament, Radek Sikorski – a one-time Polish defence minister as well as a former American Enterprise Institute fellow, who was named one of the ‘Top 100 Global Thinkers’ in 2012 by Foreign Policy. FAIR reported:

    ‘Sikorski tweeted a picture of the methane leak in the ocean, along with the caption, “As we say in Polish, a small thing, but so much joy.” He later tweeted, “Thank you, USA,” with the same picture.’

    These comments were occasionally reported in the UK press, but Sikorski later tweeted against the pipeline, noting:

    ‘Nord Stream’s only logic was for Putin to be able to blackmail or wage war on Eastern Europe with impunity.’

    He added:

    ‘Now $20 billion of scrap metal lies at the bottom of the sea, another cost to Russia of its criminal decision to invade Ukraine. Someone…did a special maintenance operation.’

    This was clearly an ironic reference to the term ‘special military operation’ used by Russia to describe its illegal invasion of Ukraine.

    Significantly, the Telegraph reported some but not all of this:

    ‘Sikorski posted a photo of the Nord Stream methane bubbling to the Baltic’s surface, with the brief message: “Thank you, USA.”

    ‘Sikorski has since deleted his tweet, and has not since elaborated on it… [but] it was widely seized upon by pro-Russian media seeking to make the case for American sabotage.’

    But as we have seen, Sikorski certainly had elaborated on it; and media didn’t need to be ‘pro-Russian’ to believe the comments pointed towards Western sabotage.

    The Daily Mail also struggled to understand:

    ‘On Twitter Radoslaw Sikorski posted a picture of a massive methane gas spill on the surface of the Baltic Sea with the comment: “Thank You USA”. The hawkish MEP later tweeted that if Russia wants to continue supplying gas to Europe it must “talk to the countries controlling the gas pipelines”.

    ‘Whatever did he mean?’

    In fact, Sikorski had been very clear about what he meant.

    In a single, casual comment in the Mail on Sunday, Peter Hitchens may be the only ‘mainstream’ journalist to actually affirm the likely significance of Sikorski’s comments:

    ‘Radek Sikorski may have given the game away. First, he tweeted “Thank you, USA” with a picture of the gas bubbling up into the Baltic. Then, when lots of people noticed, he deleted it. That made me think he was on to something.’ 2

    Curiously, non-corporate journalists like Jonathan Cook, Caitlin Johnstone, Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Maté, Bryce Green, even hippy Russell Brand, were able to find all the evidence and arguments omitted by ‘mainstream’ journalists supported by far greater resources.

    And this makes the point with which we began this alert: there is now so much high-quality journalism exposing the establishment outside the state-corporate ‘mainstream’, that the task of the ‘mainstream’ now is to protect the establishment by acting as a buffer blocking citizen journalism from public awareness.

    The Observer editorial which failed to even mention this major terror attack on civilian infrastructure talked of a ‘Putin plague’, describing the Russian leader as ‘a pestilence whose spread threatens the entire world. Ukraine is not its only victim’. That’s the Bad Guy. So who are the Good Guys in this fairy-tale? The editors added:

    ‘In this developing confrontation, much more is at stake than Ukraine’s sovereignty. On life support, it seems, is the entire postwar consensus underpinning global security, nuclear non-proliferation, free trade and international law.’

    It is easy to understand why the Observer would prefer to quarantine the possibility of US involvement in a terror attack that would make a nonsense of the editors’ lofty rhetoric about a ‘postwar consensus’ based on ‘international law’.

    Also no surprise, the Observer once again found answers in the favoured, fix-all solution beloved of the Western press – regime change:

    ‘If the Putin plague is ever to be eradicated, if the war is ever to end, such developments inside Russia, presaging a change of leadership, full military withdrawal from Ukraine and a fresh start, represent the best hope of a cure.’

    • Part 2 to follow shortly.

    1. Peter Oborne, The Assault on Truth, Simon & Schuster, 2021, p. 130
    2. Hitchens, ‘How could I know…’ Mail on Sunday, 2 October 2022.
    The post Wicked Leaks, Part 1: How The Media Quarantined Evidence On Nord Stream Sabotage first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Thirty Progressive Democrats Break Rank, Calling for a Ceasefire in Ukraine

    Reps. Pramila Jayapal and other members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus at a recent news conference outside the U.S. Capitol. (Credit: The Washington Post)

    In a dramatic break with the Biden administration on the eve of the midterm elections, 30 House Democrats sent a letter to President Biden urging him to engage in direct talks with Russian President Vladmir Putin to end the war in Ukraine. In addition to bilateral talks, signatories to the letter, initiated by Progressive Caucus Chair Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, urge the White House to support a mutual ceasefire and diplomatic efforts to avoid a protracted war that threatens more human suffering and spiraling global inflation, as well as nuclear war through intention or miscalculation.

    Despite President Biden’s recent acknowledgement that we have never been closer to nuclear Armageddon since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Biden has not met with Putin since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, and he recently told the press he will refuse to meet with Putin next month when the two attend the G-20 Summit in Bali.

    In addition to Congresswoman Jayapal (D-WA), the Democratic signers of the letter are Representatives Adams (NC), Blumenauer (OR), Bowman (NY, Bush (MO), Carson (IN), Clarke (D-NY), De Fazio (D-OR), DeSaulnier (CA), Garcia (IL), Grijalva (AZ), Jackson Lee (TX), Jacobs (CA), Johnson (GA), Jones (NY), Khanna (CA), Lee (CA), Moore (WI), Newman (IL), Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Omar (MN), Paine (NJ), Pingree (ME), Pocan (WI), Pressley(MA), Raskin (MD), Takano (CA), Tlaib (MI), Velazquez (NY) and Watson Coleman (NJ).

    Expressing praise for Biden’s “commitment to Ukraine’s legitimate struggle against Russia’s war of aggression,” the letter dodges the question of whether the United States should continue to arm Ukraine with medium-range rockets, ammunition, drones, tanks and other weapons.

    The letter reads “…. we urge you to pair the military and economic support the United States has provided to Ukraine with a proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire.” The key words here are “has provided” as opposed to “will provide,” leaving open the possibility that some Democrats will oppose future weapons transfers.

    Back in May, not a single Democrat voted against the eye-popping $40 billion Ukraine package, much of it earmarked for weapons, intelligence, and combat training. On September 30, Congress passed the “Ukraine Supplemental Appropriations Act,” giving another $12.35 billion of our tax dollars for training, equipment, weapons, and direct financial aid for Ukraine–without so much as a whisper of dissent from Democrats.

    So far, the only congressional opposition to arming Ukraine has come from far right Republicans. Despite Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s enthusiastic support for the $40 billion package, 57 House Republicans and 11 GOP Senators voted against it. Some objected because they thought the U.S. military should focus on China or on the U.S.-Mexico border, but others cited concerns over the lack of oversight, unmet domestic needs and runaway spending.

    One of the most prominent critics of Biden’s handling of the war is former President Donald Trump. Never mind that Trump reversed his predecessor President Barack Obama’s decision to refrain from sending offensive weapons to Ukraine and failed to negotiate the continuation of two vital arms control treaties with Russia—the Open Skies Treaty and the Intermediate Nuclear-Range Forces Treaty (INF). Trump is now using his public appearances and the media, including his social media platform Truth Social, to call for peace talks.

    “Be strategic, be smart (brilliant!), get a negotiated deal done NOW,” he wrote online. At an Arizona rally, Trump boomed, “With potentially hundreds of thousands of people dying, we must demand the immediate negotiation of the peaceful end to the war in Ukraine, or we will end up in World War III and there will be nothing left of our planet.”

    Trump has also insisted that if he were president, the war in Ukraine would not have happened because unlike Biden, he would have met with Putin: “I’d talk to him; I’d meet with him. There is no communication between him and Biden.” Trump volunteered himself as a possible negotiator. “I will head up group???” he wrote on TruthSocial.

    Also calling for negotiations is far right Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson. Carlson says that the nuclear threat “is enough for any responsible person to say, ‘now we stop,’ especially if that person is the leader of the United States, the country which is funding this war and that could end this war tonight by calling Ukraine to the table.”

    Tesla’s Elon Musk, now backing Republicans, told his 107 million Twitter followers that “the probability of nuclear war is rising rapidly” and suggested a very rational peace deal in which Russia keeps Crimea, Ukraine affirms neutrality from NATO and the UN oversees referendums in the Donbass.

    Another newly minted Republican now condemning U.S. support for the war is former 2020 Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, once a supporter of Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders and a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. Gabbard announced that she is quitting the party in power, saying: “I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers.”

    Political observers might surmise that Gabbard is positioning herself for another presidential run, but whether or not that’s the case, her sharp criticism of Democrats is finding an audience among millions of Fox viewers.

    If Republicans take over the House in November, House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy warns they may turn off the money spigot for Ukraine. “I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine.”

    McCarthy’s comment caused such panic on Capitol Hill that according to NBC News, leaders in both parties are considering passing legislation in the lame duck session to send Ukraine $50 billion more in weapons, military training and economic aid, bringing the total U.S. tab since the Russian invasion to over $100 billion, which exceeds the budget of the entire U.S. State Department.

    It will be telling to see if any Democrats, including those who signed the Jayapal letter, will vote against more weapons. As inflation worsens and voters seek leaders to address their economic needs instead of endless war in Ukraine, Democrats, especially those who call themselves progressives, should not cede the peace position to Donald Trump and Tea Party Republicans bent on repealing voting rights, deregulating environmental protections and banning abortion.

    The future of their Democratic Party is at stake – and the human race, too.

    The post Thirty Progressive Democrats Break Rank, Calling for a Ceasefire in Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • House Progressives Call on Biden to Pursue Diplomatic Talks to End Ukraine War

    Noting the pain and suffering of the Ukraine people and the risk of nuclear war that threatens the entire world, progressive U.S. lawmakers on Monday called on President Joe Biden to make a decisive shift in his approach to the conflict by initiating a “proactive democratic push” with the goal of seeking “a realistic framework for a ceasefire” through direct negotiations with Russia.

    Led by Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the lawmakers said the U.S. must lead efforts to end the war as peacefully as possible in addition to providing the Ukrainians with economic and military aid, which now totals $60 billion.

    “If there is a way to end the war while preserving a free and independent Ukraine, it is America’s responsibility to pursue every diplomatic avenue to support such a solution that is acceptable to the people of Ukraine,” wrote the lawmakers. “The alternative to diplomacy is protracted war, with both its attendant certainties and catastrophic and unknowable risks.”

    The letter was sent to the White House exactly eight months after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has counted at least 6,374 civilian deaths, including more than 400 children, and nearly 10,000 civilian injuries. The war has also displaced an estimated 13 million people.

    Putin escalated the war by illegally annexing four occupied regions last month, as well as issuing his latest nuclear threat, saying his military “will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia.”

    In their letter Monday, progressives including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) noted that Biden himself has said Putin “doesn’t have a way out” and that “there’s going to have to be a negotiated settlement” to end the war.

    Beyond casualties in Ukraine, they noted, “the conflict threatens an additional tens of millions more worldwide, as skyrocketing prices in wheat, fertilizer, and fuel spark acute crises in global hunger and poverty,” in addition to elevating the risk for a nuclear strike.

    “The longer the war in Ukraine goes on, the greater the risk of escalation — to widespread, devastating effect,” Jayapal told The Washington Post.

    Marcus Stanley, advocacy director for the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said the progressives’ leadership “is crucial and welcome.”

    “This letter marks the first time prominent Democratic elected officials have publicly called on the administration to pair support for Ukraine’s self-defense with a strong diplomatic effort to seek an end to the fighting,” said Stanley. “Without diplomacy the war risks turning into an extended, bloody stalemate with ongoing and increasing damage to the world economy and to Ukraine itself. Even worse, it could easily escalate into a broader or even a nuclear conflict.”

    While stating their agreement with the White House’s consistent statements that Ukraine must be included in any diplomatic discussions about the conflict and the country’s fate, the progressives urged the administration to reconsider its position that the U.S. will fund Ukraine’s military resistance for “as long as it takes” to defeat Russia.

    “We agree with the administration’s perspective that it is not America’s place to pressure Ukraine’s government regarding sovereign decisions,” the lawmakers wrote, adding: “We believe such involvement in this war also creates a responsibility for the United States to seriously explore all possible avenues, including direct engagement with Russia, to reduce harm and support Ukraine in achieving a peaceful settlement.”

    Despite Zelenskyy stating that Putin’s recent annexation makes peace talks impossible in the moment, the letter from the U.S. lawmakers notes that the Ukrainian president has previously acknowledged that the war “will only definitively end through diplomacy.”

    In an op-ed for Common Dreams on Monday, Medea Benjamin and Marcy Winograd of CodePink called the letter “a start” on the path to a negotiated settlement for a ceasefire.

    Until now, the pair noted, most lawmakers speaking out against the White House’s approach to the conflict in Ukraine have been right-wing Republicans, including Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who said earlier this month that if Republicans win control of Congress in November they will not approve more aid for Ukraine.

    “Democrats, especially those who call themselves progressives,” wrote Benjamin and Winograd, “should not cede the peace position to Donald Trump and Tea Party Republicans bent on repealing voting rights, deregulating environmental protections, and banning abortion.”

    The letter was sent a day after U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s most recent discussion with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and comes a month after a poll commissioned by the Quincy Institute showed that nearly half of U.S. voters believe the administration should do more to push for diplomatic talks to end the war.

    “We urge you to make vigorous diplomatic efforts in support of a negotiated settlement and ceasefire, engage in direct talks with Russia, explore prospects for a new European security arrangement acceptable to all parties that will allow for a sovereign and independent Ukraine, and, in coordination with our Ukrainian partners, seek a rapid end to the conflict and reiterate this goal as America’s chief priority,” wrote the lawmakers.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Terror to elation: Ukrainian woman’s journey from Azovstal to PoW to freedom

    Exclusive: Guardian hears of ordeal in first major interview given by any of the women freed in last week’s prisoner swap

    It was like something from the cold war. After five months in the most notorious jail in occupied Ukraine, Alina Panina, 25, had found herself, without explanation, at the foot of a bridge over a river in no man’s land with 107 fellow female Ukrainian prisoners of war.

    Behind Panina lay Russian-occupied territory and her experiences of the siege of Mariupol’s Azovstal steelworks, the subsequent surrender and then captivity in Olenivka prison in Donetsk. There she was witness to the aftermath of an explosion that killed 53 male prisoners, a blast said by Kyiv to have been engineered by Moscow to silence the victims of torture.

    Continue reading…

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

  • BBC at 100: the future for global news and challenges facing the World Service

    ANALYSIS: By Simon Potter, University of Bristol

    The BBC celebrated its 100th birthday last Tuesday. It came as the institution faces increasing competition for audiences from global entertainment providers, anxieties about the sustainability of its funding and a highly competitive global news market.

    Its international broadcasting operation, the BBC World Service, is only a little younger, established 90 years ago.

    Delivering news and programmes in 40 languages across the continents, it faces similar, significant questions about financing, purpose and its ability to deliver in a world of increased social media and online news consumption.

    Currently the BBC’s international services are mostly funded by British people who pay a television licence fee, with a third of the total cost covered by the UK government.

    The BBC claimed that, as of November 2021, the World Service reached a global audience of 364 million people each week.

    The role of radio
    Radio is still clearly a key means to extend the reach of the World Service and a core part of the BBC’s global news package. It is highly adaptable and reasonably affordable.

    It also gives people in parts of the world where access to media can be difficult relatively easy access to news. Short-wave radio, the traditional means of broadcasting over very long distances, is also difficult for hostile regimes to block.

    Recently, fears that Russia would target Ukraine’s internet infrastructure and erect firewalls to prevent its own citizens’ accessing western media sources, led the BBC to reactivate shortwave radio news services for listeners in both countries. UK government funding of £4.1 million supported this.

    Current thinking about the World Service has been shaped by a 2010 decision of UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s government to withdraw Foreign and Commonwealth Office funding for BBC international operations from 2014. This seemed to end a 60 years-long era when the BBC was the key subcontractor for British global “soft power” (using cultural resources and information to promote British interests overseas).

    The plan was that British TV licence-fee payers would fund the World Service, seemingly as an act of international benevolence, free of government ties. However, this seemed unlikely to be sustainable at a time when BBC income was being progressively squeezed.

    A person in Western Sahara with a radio set.
    Access to radio news is much easier than other forms of media in some parts of the world. Image: Saharaland/Shutterstock/The Conversation

    In 2015, World Service revenues were boosted by a major grant from the UK’s Official Development Assistance fund, covering around a third of the World Service’s running costs.

    One anonymous BBC insider was quoted by The Guardian saying that this would sustain the corporation’s “strong commitment to uphold global democracy through accurate, impartial and independent news”.

    Even before the Second World War, the BBC claimed it only broadcast truthful and objective news. Policy makers recognised this as a crucial asset for promoting British interests overseas, and seldom sought to challenge (openly at least) the “editorial independence” of the BBC.

    The BBC’s 2016 royal charter further entrenched this thinking, stating that news for overseas audiences should be “firmly based on British values of accuracy, impartiality and fairness”. The idea that a truthful approach to news was a core “British value” that could help promote democracy around the world became part of the BBC’s basic mission statement.

    In 2017, the BBC established 17 new foreign-language radio and online services. To maximise possibilities for listening it purchased FM transmitter time in major cities around the world, and deployed internet radio, increasingly accessible to many users via mobile devices.

    The focus was on Africa and Asia. However, the World Service also strengthened its Arabic and Russian provision to serve those who “sorely need reliable information”.

    Fake news factor
    The World Service’s rationale has been strengthened by growing concerns about “fake news”: distorted and untrue reports designed to serve the commercial or geopolitical interests of those who manufacture it.

    The BBC has, in response, further emphasised its historic role as a truthful broadcaster. In its trusted news initiative it has worked with other global media outlets to tackle disinformation, hosting debate and discussion, and sharing intelligence about the most misleading campaigns.

    Claims for continued relevance also rest on a drive to bring news to an ever larger audience. The BBC’s stated aim is to reach 500 million people this year, and a billion within another decade.

    In 2021 the BBC claimed to be on course to realise this goal, reaching a global audience of 489 million. The audience for the World Service accounted for the single largest component of this global figure.

    What then should we make of the BBC’s announcement in September 2022 that 400 jobs would have to go at the World Service due to the freezing of the licence fee and rapidly rising costs?

    Radio services in languages including Arabic, Persian, Hindi and Chinese will disappear, and programme production for the English-language radio service will be pared down. Certainly, these cuts will reduce the BBC’s impact overseas.

    But they should also be understood as part of a longstanding and ongoing transition from shortwave radio to web radio.

    Similarly, cutting back on World Service non-news programming might not be a major cause for concern. In an age of global streaming services and social media, audiences can receive programmes from providers from across the globe.

    The World Service would find it hard to compete with many of these services. However, the BBC remains in a pre-eminent position to offer trusted news.

    By focusing on providing news online, the World Service is putting its resources where it can best promote British soft power and international influence, thereby improving prospects for its own continued existence.

    However, abandoning radio entirely would be a mistake. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated, radio remains a crucial way to reach audiences who might find their access to trusted news via the internet suddenly cut off.The Conversation

    Dr Simon Potter, Professor of Modern History, University of Bristol. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

  • A Crimean “Bridge too Far”?

    This is a war between Russia and the United States.
    — Jeffrey Sachs, talking with The Grayzone, October 9, 2022

    We’re now 8 months (or 8 years and 8 months) into the Ukrainian conflict, and the “dogs of war” are still barking it up, and their bark has become increasingly “nuclear” in tone.  Take Joe Biden’s recent “Armageddon” reference at a fundraiser, where he compared the current situation to the nuclear-tipped danger of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.  Well, what a bizarre comparison, since Russia would be in the position of the “United States” in the analogy, but maybe Biden’s really that “strategically confused.”  Nevertheless, Biden’s “gaffe” did serve to raise anxiety levels, and Lord Fauci knows we all need some more of that, ever since the Covid kind of receded into the background noise we always knew it was.  Of course, “Apocalypse” Joe may have really been suggesting that we should be sending more Bibles than Bombs to Ukraine, but no available evidence, unfortunately, supports this theory.

    By weird coincidence, perhaps, a few days after Biden’s Biblical end-of-times invocation, Russia made Sergei Surovikin commander of their Ukraine operation.  Surovikin’s nickname:  “General Armageddon.”  At the very least, then, we can say that “Armageddon’s” trending this October and — Just in time for Halloween!

    Of course, the threat of nuclear war has been baked into the blue-and-yellow cake of this entirely avoidable conflict from the beginning, and, even immediately prior to Russia launching its “Special Military Operation” on February 24; indeed, Ukrainian comedian president Zelensky had made some smelly nuclear noises at the Munich Security conference some days before that may have triggered the invasion.  Chernobyl quickly became a symbol of the conflict in its opening phase, with western corporate media insisting that Putin was trying to cause “Chernobyl 2: the Sequel.”

    Somehow, the “Chernobyl story” has gone quiet since Russian forces decided that Kiev (or Kyiv) would not fall in 3 days.  Nevertheless, the Zaporozhia nuclear power plant has risen in the South of “We-don’t-know-what-country!” to take Chernobyl’s place, and to keep the idea of a radiological catastrophe in — or at least hovering around — the news cycle.  Russian forces have had control of the plant, apparently Europe’s largest, for months.  By many accounts, the Zaporozhia nuclear plant has been subjected to frequent shelling, often attributed in the western press to the very same Russians who are in possession of it. Well, one supposes that, by the same illogic, the Russians also scuttled their Nord Stream pipelines in NATO-side Baltic Sea waters just to spite — themselves.  One does not have to be a Scuba Team Sabotage Specialist to see the absurdity of this accusation.

    Which brings us to the Kerch Bridge sabotage event of October 8, which was instantly celebrated in Kiev (or Kyiv), with a blown-up (pun not necessarily unintended) postage stamp of the blown-up section of the burning bridge as a downtown sidewalk billboard with folks taking smiling selfies in front of it.  One suspects that these selfie-takers were not taking selfies in front of the blown-up SBU building in downtown Kiev (or Kyiv) two days later.  SBU is the Ukrainian equivalent of the CIA or MI6, both of which Intel agencies no doubt had offices inside.  No word, predictably, upon the extent of the destruction of this Ukrainian intel HQ building. Instead, western media pretended that Russia’s missile barrage was primarily aimed at children’s playgrounds all over Ukraine.  Even Democracy Now! pushed this Russophobic narrative by showcasing a 5-year old Ukrainian boy to explain the initial wave of Russian missile strikes, as if that “progressive” news outfit couldn’t find an adult correspondent:  Talk about child exploitation!

    Of course, central to the AmericaNATOstani’s Ukraine script is the talking point that “Villaindimir” Putin is threatening the use of nuclear weapons, and his provocative speech of September 30 is cited, quite hysterically, as “Exhibit A!”  In that speech, “Mad Vlad” was recognizing the validity of the referenda in the 4 breakaway regions of southern and eastern Ukraine, which all voted to join Russia.  In fact, Putin never mentioned nuclear weapons, but he did refer to the collective West as being “anti-democratic, totalitarian, and satanic.”  He also declared, in no uncertain terms, that 4 centuries of Western global hegemony are over (paraphrase).  Pretty bold statement there, Mr Putin!  The non-TransAtlantican World may not approve of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, but certainly are not too upset by it.  Clearly, there is a new world system emerging, and the traditional arbiters of Power, the Imperial West, will have to get used to watching the Show, which they used to direct, from the “cheap seats.”

    Ironically, perhaps, Putin is a “westerner,” even though western media, at the behest of western intel agencies, of which they are merely speaking tube apparatuses, wants everyone to believe that he’s the latest incarnation of the “brutal dictator” we’ve been taking down all of these Made-for-TV episodes, or decades:  the “Villain with the Thousand Faces.”  But, truth be told, all slips of slithery tongues aside:  It’s the crazy Bidenite Regime pushing the “Armageddon” button, the Apocalypse envelope — not Putin.

    To that end (The End?), it was widely reported this morning, the 10th “22” of 2022, that the U.$. Army’s 101st Airborne Division has been conducting “live fire exercises” in Romania, next door to Ukraine.  The 101st, or “Screaming Eagles” as they are colloquially known, have not been deployed to Europe since World War 2.  One wonders:  What’s up with that?  Operation “Save the Day”?  Another “Charge of the Light Brigade”?  Yet the Sun is inexorably setting on Western power, hegemony, call it what you will.  The West is like a long spoiled child that the rest of the World is sending back to its room; unfortunately, this spoiled child has many nuclear “toys” at its disposal as it tries to tantrum its way out of the inevitable.

    Interestingly enough, Armageddon is mentioned only once in the Bible’s last “official” book, the Book of Revelation, 16:16.  Perhaps “Smoke-Signaler-in-Chief” Biden was merely blowing some slippery smoke by invoking “Armageddon,” like:  “It’ll be Armageddon, folks, if you don’t donate, and donate like you mean it!  Hey Fat, you know…the Thing!”  There’s a midterm election coming up.  Some say it’ll be a “game changer,” if only because people like to repeat the talking point phrase “game changer.”  With any luck, it will be an Armageddon Stopper…”Strategic confusion, folks, nothing but strategic confusion!”

    The post A Crimean “Bridge too Far”? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Always Opposing The Last War But Not The Current One: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Those who hate Russia the most are the ones who embody everything they claim to hate about it: they’re all pro-war, pro-censorship, pro-propaganda, pro-trolling operations, and support Ukraine in banning political parties and opposition media. They are what they claim to hate.

    Meanwhile those of us who oppose those things are told to “move to Russia”, even though we’re the ones advocating the supposed “western values” they claim to support while they’re doing everything they can to undermine them. They should move to Russia.

    ❖

    ❖

    Western propaganda means people always oppose the last war but not the current war. The US provoking and sustaining its Ukraine proxy war is no more ethical than its invading of Iraq; it just looks that way due to propaganda. Ukraine isn’t the good war, it’s just the current war.

    It is only by the copious amounts of propaganda our civilization is being hammered with that this is not immediately obvious to everyone. In the future (assuming we don’t annihilate ourselves first), the propaganda will have cleared from the air enough for people to see clearly and realize that they were lied to. Again.

    The US indisputably deliberately provoked this war. The US is indisputably keeping this war going. The US indisputably benefits from this war while Ukrainians, Russians and Europeans get nothing but suffering from it. Empire apologists will admit to the latter in rare moments of honesty, as Matthew Yglesias recently did when he wrote the following:

    The United States is using up a lot of military equipment in the war, but it’s being used for the purpose of destroying Russian military equipment. Since we were already fully committed to an anti-Russian military alliance, this is actually a really good deal for us. Basically, NATO equipment + Ukrainian lives are being traded for Russian equipment + Russian lives, which leaves NATO coming out ahead. That’s doubly true because NATO is much richer than Russia, so we win a long-term game of “everyone explode their weapons as fast as they can make them.”

     

    Again, though, what makes that really true is that NATO material is killing Russian soldiers, while Russian material is killing Ukrainian soldiers. That’s a deal in our favor.

    It’s easy to oppose the last war. It’s hard to oppose current wars as the propaganda machine is shoving them down our throats. Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts.

    ❖

    ❖

    The fact that the White House is weighing a national security review of Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase because he’s perceived as having an “increasingly Russia-friendly stance” is an admission that the US government views large social media platforms as its own propaganda services.

    ❖

    There is no one who can be trusted with the authority to determine what constitutes “disinformation” or “misinformation” on behalf of large numbers of people. This is because we are not impartial omniscient deities but highly fallible, biased humans with our own vested interests.

    This fatal logical flaw in the burgeoning business of “fact checking” and “counter-disinformation” is self-evident at a glance, and it becomes even more glaring once you notice that all the major players involved in instituting and normalizing these practices have ties to status quo power.

    The idea that someone needs to be in charge of deciding what’s true and false on behalf of the rank-and-file citizenry is becoming more and more widely accepted, and it’s plainly irrational. In practice it’s nothing other than a call to propagandize the public more aggressively. You might agree with their propaganda. The propagandists might believe they are being totally impartial and objective. But as long as they have any oligarchic or state backing, directly or indirectly, they are necessarily administering propaganda on behalf of the powerful.

    Question the assumption that people saying wrong things to each other on the internet is a problem that needs to be fixed. People have always said wrong things to each other. Untruth has always existed. We’ve managed. It’s not a problem we should want the powerful to fix for us.

    ❖

     

    ❖

    Science should be the most collaborative endeavor in the world. Every scientist on earth should be collaborating and communicating. Instead, because of our competition-based models, it’s the exact opposite: scientific exploration is divided up into innovators competing against other innovators, corporations competing against other corporations, nations competing against other nations.

    If we could see how much we are losing to these competition-based models, how much innovation is going unrealized, how much human thriving is being sacrificed, how we’re losing almost all of our brainpower potential to these models, we’d fall to our knees and scream with rage. If science had been a fully collaborative worldwide hive mind endeavor instead of divided and turned against itself for profit and military power, our civilization would be unimaginably more advanced than it is. This is doubtless. We gave up paradise to make a few bastards rich.

    It’s not too late to have this, of course. We could still abandon our competition-based models for collaboration-based ones and create paradise on earth together; we’ve just got to want it badly enough as a species.

    A collaboration-based society where everyone gets what they need wouldn’t just eliminate the inefficiencies and obstacles created by competition: it would free up the brainpower of our entire species to devote itself to innovation and discovery. As Stephen J Gould said, “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

    Poverty, inequality, the patent system, the need to earn money to survive, corporate competition, corporate secrecy, competition between states, state secrecy, war, militarism; all these drainages leave us with a tiny fraction of our available scientific potential. Overcoming the existential roadblocks we’ve set up for ourselves in our near future is going to require a tremendous amount of brilliance, and we won’t have access to that brilliance until we become a conscious species and move from competition-based models to collaborative ones.

    _______________________

    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, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. 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 American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • 55% of Humanity Does Not Reject the Accession to Russia of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia

    On October 12, 2022, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) passed a resolution rejecting the accession to Russia of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions in Ukraine.

    The resolution is titled, “Territorial Integrity of Ukraine: Defending the Principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” It reads, in part:

    [The UNGA] Declares that the unlawful actions of the Russian Federation with regard to the illegal so-called referendums held from 23 to 27 September 2022 in parts of the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine that, in part, are or have been under the temporary military control of the Russian Federation, and the subsequent attempted illegal annexation of these regions, have no validity under international law and do not form the basis for any alteration of the status of these regions of Ukraine…

    A majority of the 193 countries of the UNGA voted IN FAVOR of the resolution. Here was the final tally:

    143 In Favor

    5 Against

    35 Abstentions

    10 Not Voting

    Let’s call the votes in the last three categories: NO, ABSTENTION and NOT VOTING, or NAN for short. The tally then looks like this:

    143 In Favor

    50 Nan

    From this result it appears the resolution won overwhelming support, just as Western media reports. But voting in the UNGA is undemocratic in the extreme. For example, Tuvalu (population 12,000), Principality of Liechtenstein (population 38,128) and China (population 1,439,323,776) each get one vote in the UNGA. 1 That is why the vote tally looks very different when measured by world population:

    54.56% of world population: Nan

    45.44% of world population: In Favor

    If the vote were measured by population, then this resolution failed decisively. The Western press casually and routinely buries this obvious fact. But that’s the least of the deceptive reporting of the vote. When it comes to the October 12 resolution, and this year’s other UNGA resolutions condemning Russia, the press has also avoided reporting that these votes are consistently marked by the global divide of race, wealth, and position in the world economic order: the whitest, richest, most powerful and imperial countries support these resolutions, and the poorer, weaker countries of color, in general, tend not to.

    As you might expect, just as with the UNGA resolutions condemning Russia on March 2 and April 7 of this year, the NAN vote includes the world’s most socialist-leaning and redistributive governments, as well as the leading anti-imperialist countries in the US crosshairs, such as China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Eritrea, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela and Viet Nam. 2

    Statistics on the race/wealth divide in the March 2 and April 7 UNGA votes can be found in two articles, here and here. 3 But take just the racial split in the March 2 vote, since that result was very like the result for the October 12 vote. On March 2 the UNGA voted to condemn the Russian intervention of February 24. That condemnation won the support of only 41% of the world’s population. The racial split in the vote was plain. Although “white” countries account for roughly 14% of the world’s population they made up one-third of the vote IN FAVOR of the March 2 resolution, and only 3% of the recorded NAN vote.

    Before comparing the March 2 and October 12 votes, note that whiteness is closely associated with the richest countries, as well as a central, or “core,” position in the world order, according to world-systems analysis.4  In that analysis, the “core” states of the world-system are the countries of North America and Western Europe, plus Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan and Singapore, while all other countries belong to the “periphery” or “semi-periphery” of the world-system.5

    With that in mind, compare the March 2 vote to the October 12 vote. The October 12 anti-Russia resolution won slightly more support than the March 2 resolution (45% on October 12 vs. 41% on March 2). 6  Yet the breakdown of the two votes by wealth, color and core/periphery status of the countries was virtually identical.7  Which means that by population, the majority of countries of color, poorer countries, and countries of the global periphery have for eight months maintained their refusal to condemn Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

    This is remarkable given the world-historic events in Ukraine. Eight months of the war have now passed, tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed, with many more severely injured and millions displaced. The Western press has been relentless in its uncritical support of the US/NATO effort in Ukraine, including near daily accounts of Russian atrocities while ignoring all reports that refute them, and ignoring as well many reports of Ukrainian atrocities and war crimes. The US and the EU have placed severe sanctions on Russia, which, curiously, seem to be harming Western Europeans and the people of the Global South more than the ostensible target.8

    Most important, perhaps, for the nations of the UNGA, is that the October 12 resolution concerns the most significant events in Ukraine since February 24: the accession to Russia of Ukrainian territory. This is presumably a much more serious violation of the UN Charter than the assumed violation Russia committed with its February 24 intervention. And yet a majority of the world’s population still refuses to condemn the territorial acquisitions.

    Just as notable is the opposite phenomenon: the unbroken unity of the wealthy, almost entirely white, nations of the imperial core. Every single one of these countries voted IN FAVOR of the October 12 resolution. In the face of world-shaking events stemming from the war, this privileged voting block has proved unbreakable in its animosity toward Russia.

    But UNGA resolutions are not the only measure of this global divide on Russia/Ukraine. If support for the West’s sanctions regime against Russia is any indication, the split is perhaps more dramatic. As Gfoeller and Rundell wrote in Newsweek (9/15/22), “While the United States and its closest allies in Europe and Asia have imposed tough economic sanctions on Moscow, 87% of the world’s population has declined to follow us.” And note that countries agreeing to the sanctions on Russia are nearly all countries of the imperial core.

    Racialized imperial relations are different than personal racism. Russia is a white country, though it is not among the rich nations and belongs to the periphery of the world-system. Japan and Singapore are rich, core countries, even though they are countries of color. Yet Russia, like the Soviet Union before it, has aligned politically with the Global South. This is especially true now, with regard to Syria, Iran, China and the Left governments of Latin America, such as Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. This earns Russia a special racialized status in the Western press and the global order. 9  On the other hand, Japan and Singapore have long been given a national status comparable to one that existed for some individuals in apartheid South Africa, that of “honorary whites.” Neither fact belies the racism of the global system. On the contrary, it becomes more obvious. People of the Global South seem to recognize this when they watch Russia confront the global hegemon in Europe.

    And so, just as with previous UNGA votes condemning Russia’s actions in Ukraine, the Western press, with maximum duplicity, continues to treat the October 12th vote as a resounding world condemnation of Russia, when, in fact, it is proof of the world majority’s refusal to condemn Russian actions in Ukraine.

    Ukraine is now the tragic battlefield of the Global North, but the vote on this UNGA resolution and world rejection of sanctions against Russia reveal a deeper, global conflict drenched in the blood of centuries of imperialism and white supremacy.

    1. For world population figures in this article, see world population; population by country; population of India.
    2. Abstention on such resolutions should not be read as silence. For example, the NAN vote includes the abstention of China, which recently expressed support for Russia’s actions in Ukraine: “On Russia’s core interests and major issues of concern, China expresses its understanding and full support for Russia. On the Ukraine issue, for example, the United States and NATO are expanding directly on Russia’s doorstep, threatening Russia’s national security and the lives of Russian citizens. Given the circumstances, Russia has taken necessary measures. China understands, and we are coordinating on various aspects. I believe Russia was cornered. In this case, to protect the core interests of the country, Russia gave a resolute response.” (Li Zhanshu, chairman of China’s National People’s Congress Standing Committee, September 8, 2022).
    3. “The UN Condemnation of Russia is Endorsed by Countries Run by the Richest, Oldest, Whitest People on Earth But Only 41% of the World’s Population” (March 28, 2022), here, here, or here; “Global Divide: 76% of Humanity (& Nearly All Poorer Nations of Color) Did Not Vote To Kick Russia Off the UN Human Rights Council” (April 25, 2022), here, here, or here.
    4. World-systems theory puts the global wealth split into relief, dividing the nations of the world into the “core” and “periphery” of the global system. In world-systems theory the surplus value of labor flows disproportionately from the periphery to the core: “The countries of the world can be divided into two major world regions: the ‘core’ and the ‘periphery.’ The core includes major world powers and the countries that contain much of the wealth of the planet. The periphery has those countries that are not reaping the benefits of global wealth and globalization.” (Colin Stief, ThoughtCo.com, 1/21/20).
    5. According to Salvatore Babones (2005), the core countries are: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States.
    6. The slight difference between the March 2 and October 12 votes is accounted for by a reshuffling of the votes of five countries which voted IN FAVOR in March and NAN in October, and seven countries that voted NAN in March and IN FAVOR in October. The first group includes Djibouti, Honduras, Lesotho, Sao Tome and Principe, and Thailand. The second group includes Angola, Bangladesh, Guinea-Bissau, Iraq, Madagascar, Morocco, and Senegal.
    7. See fn. 3.
    8. The United Nations reported on statements at October 12 session considering the resolution: “India joined several other speakers in expressing deep worry that the people of the global South were feeling pain from a food, fuel and fertilizer shortage, and sky-high price increases, as a result of the war.”
    9. Occasionally the animus is stated boldly. Here is Former US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on NBC’s Meet the Press in 2017: “…the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, almost genetically, [are] driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever…”
    The post 55% of Humanity Does Not Reject the Accession to Russia of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 55% of Humanity Does Not Reject the Accession to Russia of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia

    On October 12, 2022, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) passed a resolution rejecting the accession to Russia of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions in Ukraine.

    The resolution is titled, “Territorial Integrity of Ukraine: Defending the Principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” It reads, in part:

    [The UNGA] Declares that the unlawful actions of the Russian Federation with regard to the illegal so-called referendums held from 23 to 27 September 2022 in parts of the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine that, in part, are or have been under the temporary military control of the Russian Federation, and the subsequent attempted illegal annexation of these regions, have no validity under international law and do not form the basis for any alteration of the status of these regions of Ukraine…

    A majority of the 193 countries of the UNGA voted IN FAVOR of the resolution. Here was the final tally:

    143 IN FAVOR

    5 AGAINST

    35 ABSTENTIONS

    10 NOT VOTING

    Let’s call the votes in the last three categories: NO, ABSTENTION and NOT VOTING, or NAN for short. The tally then looks like this:

    143 IN FAVOR

    50 NAN

    From this result it appears the resolution won overwhelming support, just as Western media reports. But voting in the UNGA is undemocratic in the extreme. For example, Tuvalu (population 12,000), Principality of Liechtenstein (population 38,128) and China (population 1,439,323,776) each get one vote in the UNGA.1 That is why the vote tally looks very different when measured by world population:

    54.56% of world population: NAN

    45.44% of world population: IN FAVOR

    If the vote were measured by population, then this resolution failed decisively. The Western press casually and routinely buries this obvious fact. But that’s the least of the deceptive reporting of the vote. When it comes to the October 12 resolution, and this year’s other UNGA resolutions condemning Russia, the press has also avoided reporting that these votes are consistently marked by the global divide of race, wealth, and position in the world economic order: the whitest, richest, most powerful and imperial countries support these resolutions, and the poorer, weaker countries of color, in general, tend not to.

    As you might expect, just as with the UNGA resolutions condemning Russia on March 2 and April 7 of this year, the NAN vote includes the world’s most socialist-leaning and redistributive governments, as well as the leading anti-imperialist countries in the US crosshairs, such as China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Eritrea, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela and Viet Nam.2

    Statistics on the race/wealth divide in the March 2 and April 7 UNGA votes can be found in two articles, here and here.3 But take just the racial split in the March 2 vote, since that result was very like the result for the October 12 vote. On March 2 the UNGA voted to condemn the Russian intervention of February 24. That condemnation won the support of only 41% of the world’s population. The racial split in the vote was plain. Although “white” countries account for roughly 14% of the world’s population they made up one-third of the vote IN FAVOR of the March 2 resolution, and only 3% of the recorded NAN vote.

    Before comparing the March 2 and October 12 votes, note that whiteness is closely associated with the richest countries, as well as a central, or “core,” position in the world order, according to world-systems analysis.4 In that analysis, the “core” states of the world-system are the countries of North America and Western Europe, plus Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan and Singapore, while all other countries belong to the “periphery” or “semi-periphery” of the world-system.5 


    With that in mind, compare the March 2 vote to the October 12 vote. The October 12 anti-Russia resolution won slightly more support than the March 2 resolution (45% on October 12 vs. 41% on March 2).6 Yet the breakdown of the two votes by wealth, color and core/periphery status of the countries was virtually identical.3 Which means that by population, the majority of countries of color, poorer countries, and countries of the global periphery have for eight months maintained their refusal to condemn Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

    This is remarkable given the world-historic events in Ukraine. Eight months of the war have now passed, tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed, with many more severely injured and millions displaced. The Western press has been relentless in its uncritical support of the US/NATO effort in Ukraine, including near daily accounts of Russian atrocities while ignoring all reports that refute them, and ignoring as well many reports of Ukrainian atrocities and war crimes. The US and the EU have placed severe sanctions on Russia, which, curiously, seem to be harming Western Europeans and the people of the Global South more than the ostensible target.7

    Most important, perhaps, for the nations of the UNGA, is that the October 12 resolution concerns the most significant events in Ukraine since February 24: the accession to Russia of Ukrainian territory. This is presumably a much more serious violation of the UN Charter than the assumed violation Russia committed with its February 24 intervention. And yet a majority of the world’s population still refuses to condemn the territorial acquisitions.

    Just as notable is the opposite phenomenon: the unbroken unity of the wealthy, almost entirely white, nations of the imperial core. Every single one of these countries voted IN FAVOR of the October 12 resolution. In the face of world-shaking events stemming from the war, this privileged voting block has proved unbreakable in its animosity toward Russia.

    But UNGA resolutions are not the only measure of this global divide on Russia/Ukraine. If support for the West’s sanctions regime against Russia is any indication, the split is perhaps more dramatic. As Gfoeller and Rundell wrote in Newsweek (9/15/22), “While the United States and its closest allies in Europe and Asia have imposed tough economic sanctions on Moscow, 87% of the world’s population has declined to follow us.” And note that countries agreeing to the sanctions on Russia are nearly all countries of the imperial core.

    Racialized imperial relations are different than personal racism. Russia is a white country, though it is not among the rich nations and belongs to the periphery of the world-system. Japan and Singapore are rich, core countries, even though they are countries of color. Yet Russia, like the Soviet Union before it, has aligned politically with the Global South. This is especially true now, with regard to Syria, Iran, China and the Left governments of Latin America, such as Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. This earns Russia a special racialized status in the Western press and the global order.8 On the other hand, Japan and Singapore have long been given a national status comparable to one that existed for some individuals in apartheid South Africa, that of “honorary whites.” Neither fact belies the racism of the global system. On the contrary, it becomes more obvious. People of the Global South seem to recognize this when they watch Russia confront the global hegemon in Europe.

    And so, just as with previous UNGA votes condemning Russia’s actions in Ukraine, the Western press, with maximum duplicity, continues to treat the October 12th vote as an resounding world condemnation of Russia, when in fact it is proof of the world majority’s refusal to condemn Russian actions in Ukraine.

    1. Ukraine is now the tragic battlefield of the Global North, but the vote on this UNGA resolution and world rejection of sanctions against Russia reveal a deeper, global conflict drenched in the blood of centuries of imperialism and white supremacy.
      For world population figures in this article, see world population; population by country; population of India.)
    2. Abstention on such resolutions should not be read as silence. For example, the NAN vote includes the abstention of China, which recently expressed support for Russia’s actions in Ukraine: “On Russia’s core interests and major issues of concern, China expresses its understanding and full support for Russia. On the Ukraine issue, for example, the United States and NATO are expanding directly on Russia’s doorstep, threatening Russia’s national security and the lives of Russian citizens. Given the circumstances, Russia has taken necessary measures. China understands, and we are coordinating on various aspects. I believe Russia was cornered. In this case, to protect the core interests of the country, Russia gave a resolute response.” (Li Zhanshu, chairman of China’s National People’s Congress Standing Committee, September 8, 2022)
    3. “The UN Condemnation of Russia is Endorsed by Countries Run by the Richest, Oldest, Whitest People on Earth But Only 41% of the World’s Population” (March 28, 2022), here, here, or here; “Global Divide: 76% of Humanity (& Nearly All Poorer Nations of Color) Did Not Vote To Kick Russia Off the UN Human Rights Council” (April 25, 2022), here, here, or here.
    4. World-systems theory puts the global wealth split into relief, dividing the nations of the world into the “core” and “periphery” of the global system. In world-systems theory the surplus value of labor flows disproportionately from the periphery to the core: “The countries of the world can be divided into two major world regions: the ‘core’ and the ‘periphery.’ The core includes major world powers and the countries that contain much of the wealth of the planet. The periphery has those countries that are not reaping the benefits of global wealth and globalization.” (Colin Stief, ThoughtCo.com, 1/21/20)
    5. According to Salvatore Babones (2005), the core countries are: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States.
    6. The slight difference between the March 2 and October 12 votes is accounted for by a reshuffling of the votes of five countries which voted IN FAVOR in March and NAN in October, and seven countries that voted NAN in March and IN FAVOR in October. The first group includes Djibouti, Honduras, Lesotho, Sao Tome and Principe, and Thailand. The second group includes Angola, Bangladesh, Guinea-Bissau, Iraq, Madagascar, Morocco, and Senegal.
    7. The United Nations reported on statements at October 12 session considering the resolution: “India joined several other speakers in expressing deep worry that the people of the global South were feeling pain from a food, fuel and fertilizer shortage, and sky-high price increases, as a result of the war.”
    8. Occasionally the animus is stated boldly. Here is Former US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on NBC’s Meet the Press in 2017: “…the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, almost genetically, [are] driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever…”
    The post 55% of Humanity Does Not Reject the Accession to Russia of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • British PM Liz Truss Exits

    After just six weeks in Office, the UK Prime Minister, Liz Truss – a Tory – quits. The shortest ever PM in British history. Rumors have it that Boris Johnson, her immediate predecessor – may also be the favored candidate as her successor.

    Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Composite: PA/Getty images

    Could well be.

    It would be a little-veiled game.

    And as usual, no coincidence; not that Boris resigned, not that Liz Truss entered, nor that she resigned after only a short period. And it will not be coincidence if Boris is reelected and stays as British PM up to, or close to, 5 years.

    The opposition – Labor – would like to call for new General Elections, but they will be overruled by the Tories’ almost two-thirds majority in Parliament.

    Boris Johnson was ideal for the tandem Washington-London on a rampage intent on demolishing Europe via the Russian war with Ukraine. Johnson was the brain, Biden and his hintermen the executioners. And as they were working on dismembering Europe, they also were, with NATO aid, simultaneously attempting to crush Russia.

    The illusion of arrogance has no limits.

    Britain’s exit from the EU was no coincidence either. It was part of the plan – the plan to act relatively undisturbed outside the EU on the very EU’s destruction. They have Germans, who do the same from inside – Ms. Ursula von der Leyen, (unelected, but appointed) President of the European Commission, former German Defense Minister; and Olaf Scholz, Chancellor of Germany. Among his many high-ranking former political positions, he was Vice Chancellor under Angela Merkel, Minister of Finance and Mayor of Hamburg.

    They are both involved from within, destroying Europe economically and socially.

    Boris Johnson first lost popularity with the long-drawn-out EU-exit; then with his floppy handling of the “covid crisis” – and a number of intended or not, other crises: An enormous budget deficit, a national debt of about 95% of GDP in 2022, the highest since 1960. An infamously decaying infrastructure throughout the country – as well as other plunders, including a sex-scandal of a senior lawmaker in Johnson’s Government.

    When some 50 parliamentarians resigned within 48 hours in protest of the sex-scandal, Johnson resigned in July 2022, in what was considered a non-confidence manifestation.

    British General Elections would have been due in January 2025, in a bit over two years. With Boris’ popularity in free fall, even within his own party, the Tories would have had next to no chance to win the elections. The Conservatives have currently about a 3 to 2 majority over Labor.

    The British exit from the EU looks increasingly like the precursor to the plan currently being executed. Destroy Europe and “contain” Russia for the benefit of the big One World Order (OWO).

    Remember – nothing is coincidence. It fits all into the Great Reset and – interalia – into the UN Agenda 2030. The European Union, a block of 27 countries and half a billion population, would be too unwieldy to control, and does not fit into the OWO’s Command Center.

    So, in response to the British crises earlier this year, better get Boris out and replace him temporarily with a “caretaker”. Ms. Liz Truss was a perfect fit for the scheme. She knew exactly what her role was, and she played it as good as she could.

    Ms. Truss knew what to do as an immediate measure to earn immediate countrywide criticism, namely reducing taxes for the rich.

    The British economy is in a sharp down-turn, losing in August 2022 unexpectedly 0.3% in output, driven by a sharp decline in manufacturing and a small contraction in services, according to the Office for National Statistics recent assessment.

    Ms. Truss also knew that under such somber circumstances, certain measures like tax cuts for the rich, are a no-go. She did it anyway – to draw the ire of the public and of her own Parliament, even her Tory colleagues.

    Her then newly appointed finance minister, Jeremy Hunt, reversed the decision on the tax cuts for the rich and said that the government will prioritize help for the most vulnerable, referring also to the high inflation of 10.1% in September and projected to rise further until the end of the year. A British recession is in the making.

    With all that self-made circus, the time had come for Liz Truss to go. Most media and political analysts predicting on Wednesday 19 October, that her ouster or resignation was not even a “question of days, but of hours”.

    Yesterday, 20 October, Liz Truss resigned, “as planned”, leaving the field open for the new – old PM, Boris Johnson. After the Liz Truss disaster, he has gained new popularity. A socio-psychological trick. A majority of Tories want him back. And since the Tories will be Kingmakers – again – Johnson’s re-election is almost assured.

    See this.

    That means the Washington-London-NATO Trio will be intact again, and able to continue their war game – with economic catastrophes for Europe, and by and large the global north. The key players US, EU and Germany are well aware and play the self-destructive game, as long as they can – or as long as they are allowed to do so by their still slumbering populace.

    The visible people on top are following orders, coming silently down through the WEF – instrument of the gigantic Financial-IT Complex (FITC), running the world. Up to end 2019, they did it more or less clandestinely. Since 2020, the beginning of the dictatorial worldwide implementation of the insane covid fear – paralleled by the deadly vaxx-tyranny – this Cult of the Riches has become increasingly visible, hiding behind just a thin “veil of shame”.

    If re-elected as PM, Boris and his party’s two-third’s majority would have a good chance to last through another 5 years. Enough time to drive the Elite’s Agenda forward. The proxy-war with Russia could be dragged on for several years – always with an “immediate threat” of turning nuclear. Initiated by Russia, of course.

    The UN Agenda 2030 is in full implementation. All behind the curtain of war. Bothing is coincidence. The dots connect. One just has to see them.

    The media love to play right along with the propaganda song, keeping people around the (western) globe on their toes, diverted with fear from whatever else is going on behind the scene – in an attempt of completing the Great Cult Reset, including with the WEF’s planned 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR), and the consequential transhumanization.

    To 4IR and transhumanization is intimately linked to the rapidly expanding construction of 5G-antennas throughout the western world. Both 4IR and transhumanization depend on a 5G seamless and flawless coverage. The antenna proliferation is hardly visible and even less talked about. Construction often happens at night.

    The duo, Biden/Johnson, representing the old but faltering British Empire, supported by an ever-expanding NATO, are hoping to prevail and revive the Empire’s Dream back to reality.

    It won’t happen. The Boris tactic of resigning to be re-elected is a clever ploy. But far from enough to face the dawning new world in the East – an era of collaboration and Peace – an era of cooperation and development. Development, as in seeking social balance and equity.

    The future is in the East, where the sun rises. The East encompasses already about half the world’s population and a number of existing and emerging associations, like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the BRICS-plus, ASEAN, Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and many more.

    The British-American Empire is on its last leg. Never mind the last-ditch Biden/Johnson efforts with NATO backing. Their economy is fake and broke. The economy of the emerging East is solid and real.

    The post British PM Liz Truss Exits first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Scientists Warn Nuclear War Would Make the World Colder, Darker and Hungrier

    Even as Russian President Vladimir Putin repeatedly warns he could use nuclear weapons if he believed Russian (or Russian-seized) territory was threatened, tensions also remain high in other potential nuclear flashpoints from North Korea and Taiwan to border regions of China, India and Pakistan.

    This comes as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has just embarked on its annual nuclear training exercises in Belgium. The U.S. has an estimated 100 non-strategic nuclear weapons deployed at six military bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. Russia is expected to hold its own nuclear exercises soon, though U.S. officials say no notification has yet been provided as required under the New START treaty.

    On October 6, President Joe Biden warned that the threat of Armageddon was at its highest point since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. While the world remains focused on the threat of nuclear war, scientists, academics, and other experts are warning how a nuclear conflict would change life on Earth.

    Recent reports coauthored by Alan Robock, a distinguished professor in the department of environmental sciences at Rutgers University, paint a portrait of a post-nuclear war world that is colder, darker and hungrier than is usually described in nuclear reporting.

    In these reports, scientists explain how nuclear weapons, if used in a range of circumstances, could cause firestorms that would release smoke, soot and pollutants into the upper atmosphere, blocking sunlight and causing a sudden cooling effect long known as “nuclear winter.” Such a disturbance would impact the world’s oceans and dramatically undermine food security, potentially causing a large-scale collapse of agriculture that could lead to global famine.

    In the journal AGU Advances, scientists report that global cooling caused by a nuclear war could disturb ocean and sea ice ecology for decades or even centuries, killing off marine life and disrupting natural systems.

    A second report published in Nature Food illustrates how nuclear weapons, like enormous wildfires, would unleash soot into the stratosphere that could persist for years. Similar to historic massive volcanic eruptions, destruction resulting from the use of nuclear weapons could lead to sudden cooling on a global scale, resulting in widespread crop failure, famine and extreme political instability.

    Under a range of nuclear war scenarios, multiple nuclear detonations between 15 to 100 kilotons could kill tens or hundreds of millions of people in a matter of hours or days. U.S. non-strategic nuclear warheads range from 0.3 kilotons to 170 kilotons. The bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were approximately 15 and 21 kilotons respectively.

    In the event of a major nuclear war between Russia and the United States, a resulting nuclear winter could cause as many as 5.3 billion people to die of starvation within two years of such a war.

    With sunlight blocked, staple crops like wheat, maize, rice and soybeans would rapidly fail, leaving the world suddenly short of enough food. Countries in northern latitudes (including nuclear-armed Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China and North Korea) would see the greatest decline in calorie production.

    Following a regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan, calorie reductions may be less severe, but depending on the scenario, other problems like the destruction of infrastructure, radiation poisoning, large-scale death and political upheaval would offer the coldest of comfort.

    The disruption to agriculture and resulting food shortages would not be evenly distributed, suggesting some countries in southern latitudes like Australia and New Zealand could experience relatively less severe climate impacts but would face unprecedented waves of refugees fleeing nuclear and climate-impacted countries.

    The Nature Food study’s authors conclude: “…the reduced light, global cooling and likely trade restrictions after nuclear wars would be a global catastrophe for food security.”

    Speaking with Truthout Robock, who has been studying nuclear winter since 1984, said that while current computer models are more comprehensive, the basic idea that if sunlight is blocked, the Earth’s surface will be colder and darker hasn’t changed since he began studying the threat.

    In the 1980s, after Robock, his colleagues and their Russian counterparts presented similar findings to Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the U.S. and Russian leaders issued a joint statement declaring that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” The same declaration was repeated by the UN Security Council’s five permanent members (P5) with nuclear weapons (Russia, U.S., China, France, U.K.) last January, but their subsequent rhetoric and actions call their commitment to not using nuclear weapons into question.

    Unlike in the 1980s, when massive demonstrations against nuclear weapons pressured leaders to sharply reduce their arsenals, today’s threat of nuclear war has not yet translated into worldwide protests.

    “We’ve calculated [that] even though the number of weapons has gone down, there’s still enough to produce a nuclear winter if Russia and the U.S. have a nuclear war,” Robock says, noting that unlike the other nuclear-armed nations whose arsenals are limited to no more than a few hundred, both the U.S. and Russia still maintain thousands of nuclear warheads.

    “If you wanted to threaten the use of [nuclear weapons] to deter an attack, how many do you have to put on the capital of your enemy? The answer is one,” he says. “Maybe you need two, but a couple hundred is more than enough, so why don’t the U.S. and Russia get down to a couple hundred right now?” Such a reduction in stockpiles, Robock says, would greatly reduce the danger of nuclear winter.

    The climatological effects of a nuclear war, Robock says, are not the same as trying to counter the effects of climate change through methods like stratospheric geoengineering or climate intervention. “This would be instant climate change, not gradual climate change. A nuclear winter would cool down a lot and kill all of our crops.”

    A Medical Disaster

    In February, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) published a report entitled “No Place to Hide: Nuclear Weapons and the Collapse of Health Care Systems” which examined how the detonation of one nuclear bomb could affect 10 major cities. Casualty projections ranged from over 260,000 to more than 1.2 million injured from a single 100-kiloton bomb.

    Hospitals and medical systems in cities like London, Beijing or Washington, D.C. no matter how well-equipped, would be unable to adequately respond to a nuclear bomb. Tens or hundreds of thousands of patients in need of care for severe burns, cuts, broken bones, concussions, radiation poisoning, and other grave injuries would overwhelm doctors and nurses. Hospitals would almost certainly be damaged and destroyed, with health care professionals among the dead and injured. Those needing emergency treatment would likely be far greater than the number of patients seen at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    The likely damage to vital communications and transportation infrastructure and other critical technology would make it difficult or impossible to provide even basic care as computers, vehicles, and medical and lab equipment were severely disrupted or rendered inoperable. Essential water, electricity and sewage systems could be cut off and in the near term there would be an immediate shortage of medication and medical supplies. In the long term, supply chains that deliver medicine and equipment would be severely impacted.

    For years, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has also warned that no medical system would be able to respond to the use of nuclear weapons of any size or number. In the words of former ICRC President Peter Maurer, “if a nuclear weapon were to detonate in or near a populated area, no state or international body could adequately address the immediate humanitarian emergency nor the long-term consequences, nor provide sufficient assistance to victims.”

    A Civilization-Ending Event

    Ira Helfand, a longtime emergency room physician and co-chair of Physicians for Social Responsibility’s Nuclear Weapons Abolition Committee, spoke with Truthout by video call from Massachusetts.

    Helfand likens the current nuclear crisis to a global near-death experience, but says that unless humanity recognizes how close we are to death, we risk failing to take the action needed to reduce the threat and avert a future catastrophe. Without profound change, he worries we will not address the underlying conditions that led to the current crisis.

    Helfand cites the importance of recent scientific reports in helping make the connection between the climate and nuclear crises. He says that not only would a nuclear war cause a climate disaster, at the same time, the climate crisis increases the chance of a nuclear war. As large regions of the planet are rendered unfit for human habitation, global tension will increase, with climate catastrophes creating more refugees.

    “People are talking about the need to relocate perhaps more than a billion people,” says Helfand. “That doesn’t happen smoothly and easily. That generates enormous amounts of conflict.” Ten or 15 years from now when the climate crisis has worsened, the movement of tens or hundreds of millions of people will cause tremendous political instability. If nuclear weapons are “still on the table,” Helfand says, there’s a greater chance they may be used.

    He points to burgeoning climate crises in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia where he fears two nuclear-armed countries — India and Pakistan — are on a collision course, not because of ideology, religion or political doctrine, but because of water. Melting Himalayan glaciers, catastrophic flooding, changing rainfall patterns and control over essential water flow could set the stage for a future conflict between Pakistan, India and China.

    “We’re in a situation where there has to be a totally different way for great powers to interact with each other,” shifting from a model based on competition to one based on cooperation, Helfand says. “If such a crisis reaches its full fruition and becomes a military conflict between two nuclear-armed states, we’re going to have a civilization-ending event.”

    The aftermath of a nuclear war would be chaotic as survivors fought for whatever was left. Any nation that might “come out on top” of a nuclear conflict would have the “ash heap of human civilization” to claim as its own, he says.

    Before such a nightmare scenario occurs, Helfand sees an opportunity to come together if our leaders are honest, courageous, truthful and tell people what needs to be done. A paradigm shift in which nations recognize the need to cooperate is necessary if survival is to remain possible. “This just can’t go on indefinitely,” he warns. “Either we’re going to do something very fundamentally different, or we’re going to have a nuclear war and that needs to be clearly understood by everyone.”

    This May Be the Last Time

    Susi Snyder, financial section coordinator for ICAN, says that even a relatively small nuclear detonation would have a global ripple effect. She points to the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of how a large-scale disruption’s impact can continue for years.

    When thinking of a nuclear weapon’s aftermath, Snyder says that beyond the death and destruction, there would be associated disruption of transportation, trade, commerce, travel and global markets. The current war in Ukraine has already fueled food and energy crises in multiple countries, and a nuclear war would be far worse. Any use of a nuclear weapon would jar commodity and resource markets, disrupting trade, creating instability and uncertainty, and suddenly driving the need for alternate sources of food, energy and raw materials. Such abrupt shifts could also threaten human rights and the environment in places that were suddenly in demand.

    Depending on how limited or widespread the use of nuclear weapons was, much of what is considered “normal” for most people in developed countries — reliable communications, transportation, the availability of household utilities, food, consumer goods, and even travel and entertainment — could be disrupted or cut off.

    The damage from even a relatively “small” or limited nuclear detonation would likely draw humanitarian aid away from other areas. Even in such a scenario, Snyder says, “every place will be affected in some way.” Because a nuclear threat has the potential to harm every part of the planet, Snyder says countries that are usually left out of the nuclear discussion are becoming more vocal, emphasizing the humanitarian and environmental risks to countries geographically far removed from nuclear-armed nations.

    Post-Cold War notions that the threat of nuclear weapons is a thing of the past have quickly faded and frustration is growing as the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) has failed to end nuclear arms races or deliver complete nuclear disarmament.

    Recognizing the urgent need to do away with nuclear weapons, 68 countries have adopted and ratified the much more recent Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) which entered into force in 2021. Unlike the NPT, the TPNW prohibits the development, testing, production, acquisition, possession, transfer, stockpiling or threat to use nuclear weapons.

    None of the P5 nuclear weapon states or the four other nuclear-armed nations (India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea) recognizes the TPNW. Instead, they embrace the theory of deterrence. Nuclear deterrence — the threat to use one’s nuclear weapons against another state — Snyder says, allows for naked conventional weapon aggression without fear of reprisal, as is being demonstrated by Russia in Ukraine today.

    She also notes that there are dozens of multinational corporations which profit from nuclear weapons and have a vested interest in perpetuating their production. She says this raises the question, “Is it ok to incinerate a city in 30 minutes or less? If it’s legitimate, then the pathway is nuclear weapons for everybody. And if it’s not legitimate, then there really is one choice — to end nuclear weapons for everybody.”

    In an age when it only takes 45 minutes to go from the decision to launch a nuclear weapon to a detonation that could abruptly bring about the end of life as we know it, we must deliberately and soberly consider the consequences of using nuclear weapons. The luxury of looking away is gone. People around the world — especially in nuclear armed nations — have a responsibility to pressure politicians to abolish these horrific weapons. Without a sharp increase in vocal and mobilized opposition to the unstable and unsustainable nuclear threat, the danger will continue and eventually, many fear, humanity’s luck will run out. Now is the time for each of us to take whatever action we can — because no one knows if or when nuclear weapons will be used again, very possibly for the final time.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Pretending To Seek Peace In An Unwinnable Proxy War: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    We should probably talk more about the fact that the US empire is loudly promoting the goal of achieving peace in Ukraine by defeating Russia while quietly acknowledging that this goal is impossible. This is like accelerating toward a brick wall and pretending it’s an open road.

    The narrative that Russia can be defeated by escalating against it makes sense if you believe Russia can be defeated, but the US empire does not believe that Russia can be defeated. It knows these escalations are only going to exponentially ramp up death and devastation.

    “Beat Putin’s ass and make him withdraw” sounds cool and is egoically gratifying, and it’s become the mainstream answer to the problem of the war in Ukraine. But nobody promoting that answer can address the fact that the ones driving this proxy war believe it’s impossible. In fact, all evidence we’re seeing suggests that the US is not trying to deliver Putin a crushing defeat in Ukraine and force him to withdraw, but is rather trying to create another long and costly military quagmire for Moscow, as cold warriors have done repeatedly in instances like Afghanistan and Syria.

    Wanting to weaken Russia and wanting to save lives and establish peace in Ukraine are two completely different goals, so different that in practice they wind up being largely contradictory. Drawing Moscow into a bloody quagmire means many more people dying in a war that lasts years.

    The US does not want peace in Ukraine, it wants to overextend Russia, shore up military and energy dominance over Europe, expand its war machine and enrich the military-industrial complex. It’s posing as Ukraine’s savior while being clearly invested in Ukraine’s destruction.

    It is not legitimate to support this proxy war without squarely addressing this massive contradiction using hard facts and robust argumentation. Nobody ever has.

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    The idea that the US and NATO have no special obligation to help negotiate a peace settlement in Ukraine only makes sense if you pretend the US and NATO played no role in causing the war in Ukraine. Which is to say it only makes sense if you believe a silly, infantile fiction. There are plenty of arguments to be made that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is immoral and illegal, but to claim it was unprovoked and exculpate the US-centralized power structure from any responsibility for provoking it is inexcusable fact-free bullshit.

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    Saying “Putin can end this war by withdrawing!” in response to discussions about what the west can do to bring peace to Ukraine is just interrupting serious adult conversations with childish prattle that only serves to cover up your desire for this war to last forever.

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    Westerners demand more nuanced and believable motives from their Marvel movie villains than from the propaganda narratives their media peddle about enemies of the US empire.

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    Imagine living on a dying world where people are brainwashed from birth into mindless consumerism and saturated in propaganda promoting war and status quo kleptocracy and exploitation, and deciding that the real sign of societal deterioration is teenagers using different pronouns. Like okay sure we’re being marched into armageddon and dystopia by mass-scale psychological manipulation that’s so ubiquitous and pervasive that hardly anyone ever notices it or talks about it, but the real sign our civilization is crumbling is my friend’s kid using “they/them”.

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    It is always right and good to criticize the most dangerous actions of the most powerful government in the world. It is always right and good to demand the west uphold the values it claims to uphold and play by the rules it claims to play by. This is self-evident and requires no defense.

    I’ve long felt like a big part of my job here is just being the voice that says “You’re not crazy. I see it too.” Assuring people they’re not going mad when it looks like everything they were told about the world is a lie and everyone they were trained to trust is deceiving them.

    Because that is the message you will receive when you start asking the important questions and getting the important answers about ruling power structures in our world: people will act like you’re a raving lunatic for talking about US empire malfeasance and western propaganda. Only by mass-scale propaganda brainwashing would it ever appear insane to criticize the most dangerous impulses of the most powerful and destructive government on earth. It’s the most normal, sane and rational thing in the world, but it’s made to look freakish by narrative spin.

    To paraphrase Jiddu Krishnamurti, it is no measure of health to be deemed sane in a profoundly insane society.

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    Boss makes a dollar,
    I make a dime,
    boss’s overseas wage slave makes a penny,
    the war victim gets death,
    the factory farmed animal gets torture,
    the biosphere gets mass extinction,
    that’s why I endorse global communism
    and the metamorphosis of human consciousness
    on company time.

    Okay it doesn’t rhyme like the original but I like it anyway.

    __________________

    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, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. 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 American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Putinism’s Defeated Opposition

    In a new collection, Ilya Budraitskis provides a trenchant analysis of the ideological underpinnings of Putin’s Russia and the domestic political groups that have opposed his government.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • The Most Powerful Weapon The West Gave Ukraine: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    It’s pretty wild how the US is sending armored vehicles to Haiti to help quash the exact sort of uprising it’s been actively trying to create in places like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and Hong Kong.

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    The Pentagon is seeking sweeping new powers in preparation for a war with China, the Senate NDAA bill increases proposed military aid to Taiwan from 4.5 to 10 billion dollars, and Tony Blinken is claiming without evidence that Beijing has greatly accelerated its plans to annex Taiwan. This is all as aggressions continue to ramp up against Russia. They really are doing this thing.

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    So it looks like this is what we’ll be doing for the foreseeable future: calling to escalate the war in Ukraine, facilitating the escalation of the war in Ukraine, and then screaming with shock and outrage when the war in Ukraine escalates. That seems to be what we’ve got planned.

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    That's because the threat perception doesn't come from geography but from propaganda. Americans are the single most propagandized population on earth. https://t.co/ATBWPt4OXF

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 18, 2022

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    “Maybe my government is actually in the wrong here and is just lying and manipulating to advance its own interests?” should be a much more common thought. It’s a line of inquiry that should be taught to schoolchildren. It is by design that it doesn’t occur to people more often.

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    The most powerful weapon the west has given Ukraine is not the HIMARS, it’s the US propaganda machine.

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    The only people who support western proxy warfare in Ukraine are those who deny the extensively documented ways the western empire has provoked, sustained, manipulated and exploited this war. You can only support what’s being done by lying and/or being lied to.

    ❖

    “Calling for de-escalation actually causes escalation” is the single dumbest empire bro talking point yet to emerge from this war.

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    Still laughing about how liberals just spent months amplifying and celebrating a trolling operation founded by a literal Nazi.

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    NAFO founder Kamil Dyszewski (@Kama_Kamilia) is an antisemitic gamer from Poland pic.twitter.com/q5YPmDOFYZ

    — Moss Robeson (@mossrobeson__) October 14, 2022

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    If nuclear war erupts it won’t matter whose fault it was. It won’t matter who started it. It won’t matter whether Moscow had legitimate claim to Zaporizhzhia. All that will matter is that it happened. There will be no adjudicating responsibility after the fact. We won’t be here.

    The time to turn away from the trajectory toward nuclear war is now, not later. It’s bizarre how many people I get telling me “Well if nuclear war happens it’ll be Putin’s fault,” like that will be any comfort to them as they hug their family close and wait for a horrific death.

    There’s just so much sloppy thinking about the actual end of the world. People aren’t looking directly at this thing and thinking rigorously about what it would mean. What it would entail. This is understandable; it’s a terrible thing to contemplate. But we do urgently need to.

    People don’t seem to get that nuclear annihilation is the one mistake we could make that we can’t ever fix. There’s this unquestioned assumption that if it happened there’d be some kind of course correction afterward, but there won’t be. No one will be here to do it. No takesies backsies.

    People can’t imagine their own absence. That’s why we make up stories about life after death. It’s also why we’re having a hard time squarely facing the prospect of an Earth with no humans on it. People still assume human inventions like “fault” and “blame” will remain after us.

    People kill themselves by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge a lot. The few survivors all say that the first thought they had upon free fall was instant regret. They realize in an instant that every problem they have can be solved except for the one they have just given themselves. Imagine having that thought, but it’s all life on Earth that we’ve killed. That’s what nuclear holocaust is. A moment of instant terrible regret followed by the blackness of the void.

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    During the Cuban Missile Crisis the top news story every day was how that whole Cuban Missile Crisis situation is going. During the nuclear brinkmanship crisis of 2022 the top news stories are about Kanye, Trump and Alex Jones. We are sleepwalking toward a cliff’s edge.

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    A sane society would chase off anyone who advocated nuclear brinkmanship and drive them out of human civilization. In our society we give them punditry gigs on mainstream media platforms and lucrative jobs at influential think tanks.

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    There are people among us who dress up their personal suicidal ideations as a world-weary, humble knowing that humans are shit and we need to die. I call these omnicidal ideations, and they are not noble or humble, they are monstrous and at odds with all of life on earth. If you can’t want to live for yourself, then live for your dog. Live for the ladybugs. Live for all the innocents that don’t deserve any of this.

    ❖

    This is all completely unnecessary. There’s nothing inscribed upon the fabric of reality saying states need to be waving armageddon weapons at each other. There’s no valid reason not to lay aside these games of global conquest and collaborate together toward a healthy coexistence on this planet.

    We could have such a beautiful world. All the energy we pour into competition and conquest could go toward innovation that benefits us all, making sure everyone has enough, eliminating human suffering and the need for human toil. We’re trading heaven on earth for elite ego games.

    There’s no valid reason we can’t move from models of competition and domination to models of collaboration and care. Collaboration with each other; care for each other. Collaboration with our ecosystem; care for our ecosystem. We’re throwing it away in exchange for senseless misery and peril.

    ___________________

    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, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. 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 American husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

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  • The Other Russia-West War: Why Some African Countries are Abandoning Paris, Joining Moscow

    The moment that Lieutenant-Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba was ousted by his own former military colleague, Captain Ibrahim Traore, pro-coup crowds filled the streets. Some burned French flags, others carried Russian flags. This scene alone represents the current tussle underway throughout the African continent.

    A few years ago, the discussion regarding the geopolitical shifts in Africa was not exactly concerned with France and Russia per se. It focused mostly on China’s growing economic role and political partnerships on the African continent. For example, Beijing’s decision to establish its first overseas military base in Djibouti in 2017 signaled China’s major geopolitical move, by translating its economic influence in the region to political influence, backed by military presence.

    China remains committed to its Africa strategy. Beijing has been Africa’s largest trading partner for 12 years, consecutively, with total bilateral trade between China and Africa, in 2021, reaching $254.3 billion, according to recent data released by the General Administration of Customs of China.

    The United States, along with its western allies, have been aware of, and warning against China’s growing clout in Africa. The establishment of US AFRICOM in 2007 was rightly understood to be a countering measure to China’s influence. Since then, and arguably before, talks of a new ‘Scramble for Africa’ abounded, with new players, including China, Russia, even Turkiye, entering the fray.

    The Russia-Ukraine war, however, has altered geopolitical dynamics in Africa, as it highlighted the Russian-French rivalry on the continent, as opposed to the Chinese-American competition there.

    Though Russia has been present in African politics for years, the war – thus the need for stable allies at the United Nations and elsewhere – accelerated Moscow’s charm offensive. In July, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited Egypt, Ethiopia, Uganda, and the Republic of Congo, fortifying Russia’s diplomatic relations with African leaders.

    “We know that the African colleagues do not approve of the undisguised attempts of the US and their European satellites .. to impose a unipolar world order to the international community,” Lavrov said. His words were met with agreement.

    Russian efforts have been paying dividends, as early as the first votes to condemn Moscow at the United Nations General Assembly, in March and April. Many African nations remained either neutral or voted against measures targeting Russia at the UN.

    South Africa’s position, in particular, was problematic from Washington’s perspective, not only because of the size of the country’s economy, but also because of Pretoria’s political influence and moral authority throughout Africa. Moreover, South Africa is the only African member of the G20.

    In his visit to the US in September, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa defended his country’s neutrality and raised objections to a draft US bill – the Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act – that is set to monitor and punish African governments who do not conform to the American line in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

    The West fails to understand, however, that Africa’s slow, but determined shift toward Moscow is not haphazard or accidental.

    The history of the continent’s past and current struggle against western colonialism and neocolonialism is well-known. While the West continues to define its relationship with Africa based on exploitation, Russia is constantly reminding African countries of the Soviet’s legacy on the continent. This is not only apparent in official political discourses by Russian leaders and diplomats, but also in Russian media coverage, which is prioritizing Africa and reminding African nations of their historic solidarity with Moscow.

    Burning French flags and raising Russian ones, however, cannot simply be blamed on Russian supposed economic bribes, clever diplomacy or growing military influence. The readiness of African nations – Mali, Central African Republic and, now, possibly, Burkina Faso – has much more to do with mistrust and resentment of France’s self-serving legacy in Africa, West Africa in particular.

    France has military bases in many parts of Africa and remains an active participant in various military conflicts, which has earned it the reputation of being the continent’s main destabilizing force. Equally important is Paris’s stronghold over the economies of 14 African countries, which are forced to use French currency, the CFA franc and, according to Frederic Ange Toure, writing in Le Journal de l’Afrique, to “centralize 50% of their reserves in the French public treasury”.

    Though many African countries remain neutral in the case of the Russia-Ukraine war, a massive geopolitical shift is underway, especially in militarily fragile, impoverished and politically unstable countries that are eager to seek alternatives to French and other western powers. For a country like Mali, shifting allegiances from Paris to Moscow was not exactly a great gamble. Bamako had very little to lose, but much to gain. The same logic applies to other African countries that are fighting extreme poverty, political instability and the threat of militancy, all of which are intrinsically linked.

    Though China remains a powerful newcomer to Africa – a reality that continues to frustrate US policymakers – the more urgent battle, for now, is between Russia and France – the latter experiencing a palpable retreat.

    In a speech last July, French President Emmanuel Macron declared that he wanted a “rethink of all our (military) postures on the African continent.” France’s military and foreign policy shift in Africa, however, was not compelled by strategy or vision, but by changing realities over which France has little control. 

    The post The Other Russia-West War: Why Some African Countries are Abandoning Paris, Joining Moscow first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • They’re Recycling The Viagra Rape Atrocity Propaganda They Used On Libya

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The west is advancing the claim that Putin is distributing Viagra to his soldiers so that they can more effectively rape Ukrainians, which was a ridiculous propaganda narrative the first time the west used it to manufacture consent for regime change in Libya.

    In a Thursday interview with the French government-owned news agency AFP, a Mauritian-British official from the United Nations named Pramila Patten claimed that Russia has a “military strategy” of mass rape in Ukraine and that Russian soldiers are being “equipped” with the erectile dysfunction medication Viagra in order to facilitate that military strategy.

    “When you hear women testify about Russian soldiers equipped with Viagra, it’s clearly a military strategy,” Patten said.

    Because AFP is one of the major propaganda multipliers whose material is republished by news media outlets around the world, Patten’s completely unevidenced claim of weaponized Viagra has been uncritically reported as a real news story by outlets like CNN, The New York Post, Forbes, The Independent, The Hill, and Yahoo News. This claim will now be folded into many rank-and-file mainstream news consumers’ understanding of what is happening in Ukraine, despite its brazenly propagandistic nature.

    The only other time the west has been hammered with a story about marauding Viagra-armed rape brigades like this was in 2011, when the western empire was circulating atrocity propaganda to manufacture consent for regime change interventionism in Libya. In March of that year an email later published by WikiLeaks was sent to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by her private advisor Sidney Blumenthal, informing her of an unconfirmed “rumor” that Libya’s longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi “has adopted a rape policy and has even distributed Viagra to troops.” Blumenthal notes that this claim originated from “the rebel side” of the conflict, which we now know included Al Qaeda, whom Gaddafi had been fighting.

    The following month that “rumor” was repeated before the UN national security council by Susan Rice, another Obama administration official, this time presented not as a rumor but as a reality. Although anonymous US military intelligence officials informed the press the very next day that they had no evidence of Rice’s claim, by June an International Criminal Court investigation was underway with western news media continuing to uncritically report claims of weaponized Viagra in Libya.

    Meanwhile, another UN human rights investigator named Cherif Bassiouni said he’d found those allegations to have arisen from “massive hysteria” and that both sides of the conflict had been making them about the other. Amnesty International failed to turn up any evidence of mass rapes and weaponized Viagra in Libya, and a 2016 report by the British Parliament found that the false “humanitarian intervention” by NATO forces which resulted in Gaddafi’s death had in fact been based on lies.

    This information came far too little, far too late. The case was made for intervention and Libya was plunged into chaos and humanitarian catastrophe by the western empire and its jihadist proxies on the ground, putting a final nail in the coffin of the claim that NATO is a “defensive alliance”.

    Of course we cannot conclusively prove that Putin isn’t giving his soldiers sex drugs to help them rape Ukrainians more efficiently. We cannot conclusively prove that Ukrainian spies aren’t sneaking across the border and injecting Russian babies with HIV either, but we don’t treat bizarre, nonsensical and completely unevidenced claims as true just because they cannot be definitively proven false. Especially when those exact claims have been used to advance depraved power agendas in the past in instances that remain completely unevidenced.

    Earlier this year the western media were uncritically publishing claims made by a single official in the Ukrainian government that Russian soldiers were running around raping Ukrainian babies and children, despite the fact that those claims had no evidence and were accompanied by demands for more western military assistance. Weeks later, that very same official was fired by the Ukrainian parliament for, among other things, circulating unevidenced claims about rapes by Russian soldiers.

    As we’ve discussed previously, the U.S. and its proxies have an extensive history of using atrocity propaganda, for example in the infamous “taking babies from incubators” narrative that was circulated in the 1990 false Nayirah testimony which helped manufacture consent for the Gulf War. Atrocity propaganda has been in use for a very long time due to how effective it can be at getting populations mobilized against targeted enemies, from the Middle Ages when Jews were accused of kidnapping Christian children to kill them and drink their blood, to 17th century claims that the Irish were killing English children and throwing them into the sea, to World War I claims that Germans were mutilating and eating Belgian babies.

    Western mass media are proving time and time again that there is no accusation against Russia that they will not promote as factual news reporting, no matter how evidence-free and ridiculous. The fact that they’re going to the well and recycling old atrocity propaganda illustrates this even more lucidly.

    If we were being told the truth about this war, we wouldn’t be hammered with blatant atrocity propaganda by so-called “news” outlets. We wouldn’t be subjected to ever escalating censorship of voices who criticize the western empire’s role in this war. We wouldn’t be swarmed by pro-NATO online trolling operations founded by actual neo-Nazis.

    How are people not yet tired of having their intelligence insulted?

    ________________

    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, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. 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 American husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

     

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.