Ministers from 35 countries recently met to discuss a proposed ban on Russian athletes in the 2024 Olympic games. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky joined the meeting and dramatically stated, “If there’s an Olympic sport with killings and missile strikes, you know which team would take first place.” The Russian military has indeed inflicted tragedy on Ukraine. However, Zelensky’s remarks also…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
U.S. President Joe Biden made a brief surprise trip to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv on Monday to pledge his “unwavering and unflagging commitment” ahead of the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion, which has left tens of thousands dead, sparked a massive humanitarian crisis, and raised fears of a broader war between nuclear powers.
During Biden’s visit to Kyiv, his first since Russia’s invasion on February 24 of last year, he announced a fresh $500 million in military assistance to Ukraine, adding to the more than $100 billion in total aid the U.S. has delivered to Ukraine since the start of the devastating war.
After a meeting with Biden, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he and the U.S. president “discussed the future provision of longer-range missiles that Ukraine had not yet received,” the Financial Times reported.
The aid package announced Monday includes funding for air surveillance radars, anti-tank missiles, and artillery ammunition.
“Later this week, we will announce additional sanctions against elites and companies that are trying to evade or backfill Russia’s war machine,” Biden said in a statement. “Over the last year, the United States has built a coalition of nations from the Atlantic to the Pacific to help defend Ukraine with unprecedented military, economic, and humanitarian support—and that support will endure.”
Biden’s trip came a day before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s expected state of the nation address on Tuesday, his first such speech since April 2021. Estimates of Russia’s death toll from the war vary widely, ranging from fewer than 10,000 troops killed to upwards of 200,000.
The one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion will come as the prospects of a diplomatic resolution appear as remote as ever. As the Associated Press reported Monday, “Biden is trying to keep allies unified in their support for Ukraine as the war is expected to intensify with spring offensives.”
“Zelenskyy is pressing allies to speed up delivery of promised weapon systems and calling on the West to provide fighter jets—something that Biden has declined to do,” the outlet noted. “The U.S. president got a taste of the terror that Ukrainians have lived with for close to a year when air raids sirens howled just as he and Zelenskyy wrapped up a visit to the gold-domed St. Michael’s Cathedral.”
On Thursday, a day before the anniversary, the 193-member United Nations General Assembly is expected to vote on a nonbinding resolution calling for “a cessation of hostilities” in Ukraine and “a comprehensive, just, and lasting peace” deal “as soon as possible.”
A final draft of the resolution, circulated by the European Union, also urges U.N. member states “redouble support for diplomatic efforts” to end the war.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Peace advocates from across the United States plan to convene in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday for a lobby day during which they’ll call on lawmakers to push for a ceasefire and diplomatic talks in Ukraine, as the Biden administration responds to pressure to provide the Ukrainians with fighter jets.
“We need to stop rubber-stamping tens of billions of dollars for weapons for an unwinnable proxy war between the United States and Russia,” said co-organizer Ann Wright, a retired Army colonel and State Department diplomat. “It’s time for Congress to reassert its constitutional authority over matters of war and peace, and call for negotiations, not escalation.”
Days before the one-year mark of the Russian invasion, the campaigners will begin by delivering a letter to the offices of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and will then visit the offices of lawmakers who sit on the House Armed Services Committee.
Organizers say they will ask representatives to publicly call on President Joe Biden to “pursue urgent diplomatic efforts” to end the war as quickly as possible, as progressives in Congress did last October with a letter they were then forced to retract under pressure, and as Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Mark Milley also urged shortly thereafter.
They will also call on lawmakers to support legislation to end military support for the war, oppose the sending of fighter jets to Ukraine, and request a briefing by the White House on efforts to promote peace talks.
“We need to stop rubber-stamping tens of billions of dollars for weapons for an unwinnable proxy war between the United States and Russia.”
The lobby day is being organized as leaders meet at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, where Western leaders in recent days said they were prepared to support Ukraine “as long as necessary,” as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said.
Scholz told CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour Friday that discussions of “when, in which month, the war will end” are “not really a very good idea.”
French President Emmanuel Macron also said that France and its allies are “ready for a prolonged conflict.”
The U.S. has so far declined to send fighter jets to Ukraine, but it did agree to send more than two dozen Abrams tanks to the country last month, marking “a serious escalation,” according to U.K.-based group Stop the War Coalition.
Britain and France have signaled that they’re open to sending fighter planes, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has requested, and a bipartisan group of American lawmakers on Friday wrote to President Joe Biden asking him to send F-16 jets.
Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the top U.S. general in Europe, told a group of U.S. legislators last week that American F-16s would help Ukraine win the war.
Doing so would necessitate either training Ukrainians to fly the planes, which could take months, or sending “volunteer [U.S.] veterans,” Konstantinos Zikidis, an aerospace engineer at the Hellenic Air Force in Greece, told Al Jazeera last month.
The latter option would likely be seen by Russian President Vladimir Putin as a major escalation, wing commander Thanasis Papanikolaou told the outlet.
“The Russians will try to present that NATO is directly involved in the Ukraine war, and will threaten nuclear war,” he said.
In Munich on Saturday, Vice President Kamala Harris said support for supplying the Ukrainians with weapons remains high among the U.S. public, although the issue now polls at 48%, according to an Associated Press/NORC poll released last week, compared to 66% last May.
“We cannot continue to fuel a war that creates such daily suffering and risks becoming a nuclear confrontation,” said Medea Benjamin, peace activist and co-founder of CodePink, ahead of the lobby day. “We need Congress to take a stand and push for urgent diplomatic efforts to end the war.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
As we approach the one-year anniversary of the Ukraine War, Russia appears to be undertaking a major offensive while Ukraine is planning a counter-offensive. Each side appears to think it can clinch a clear military victory, and force the other side to accept that it can’t win.
But the reality is that a stalemate has been reached that is causing immense suffering on each side, with particularly brutal destruction by Russia of civilian targets in Ukraine, including energy facilities, apartment complexes, hospitals, and even schools. The momentum Ukraine saw up through the fall seems to have dissipated.
Of grave concern to the whole planet is that Russia has a policy that if they perceive an existential threat, they are willing to use so-called tactical nuclear weapons–which are short range for battlefield use, and are less powerful than long range nuclear weapons–to intimidate an opponent to back off and make concessions.
In response to this increased danger of nuclear war, experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently moved its Doomsday Clock forward to 90 seconds to midnight—the closest it has ever been!
Given escalatory steps each side has recently taken, there is an acute threat that the Ukraine War will turn into yet another endless war. As mentioned above, Russia is using long range missiles to destroy civilian infrastructure in blatant violation of international law. The U.S. and Germany have agreed to send advanced tanks to Ukraine, to enable their planned counteroffensive.
This means an increased risk of turning into a NATO-Russia war that would threaten unthinkable destruction throughout Europe, as well as the first use of nuclear weapons in war since 1945. The entire world has a stake in preventing this nightmare scenario.
The previous endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ended up causing irreparable harm to large parts of the Middle East, and have been followed by major instability in both those countries. But neither involved the danger of the use of nuclear weapons, despite the false assertion that Iraq supposedly had nuclear weapons.
As long as the Ukraine War is allowed to continue, the danger of the use of nuclear weapons remains acute. The only “off ramp” that will certainly prevent the use of nuclear weapons, which could potentially escalate all the way to global nuclear annihilation, is to engage in a diplomatic surge to rapidly end the war.
The current Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Milley, and his predecessor, Admiral Mullen have both proposed such diplomacy.
Some realistic diplomatic approaches are being suggested. For example, the promise of long-term American support for Ukraine’s security could be linked to its willingness to open negotiations. The prospect of some sanctions against Putin’s regime being lifted could be linked to Russia’s willingness to offer concessions Ukraine might accept. Another possibility is for a neutral country to host talks on a Long Term Truce and Steps Toward Peace, with the UN as the facilitator.
We must support urgent and effective diplomacy to bring the year old Ukraine War to a rapid end, save untold lives being lost in another endless war, and protect humanity from the danger of nuclear holocaust.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Country came near median of 163 countries on Index of Impunity, higher than Hungary and Singapore
The US scores surprisingly badly in a new ranking system charting abuses of power by nation states, launched by a group co-chaired by former UK foreign secretary David Miliband.
The US comes close to the median of 163 countries ranked in the Index of Impunity, reflecting a poor record on discrimination, inequality and access to democracy. The country’s arms exports and record of violence are an even bigger negative factor.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
The United Nations’ 193 member countries are expected to vote on a resolution declaring “the need to reach, as soon as possible, a comprehensive, just and lasting peace” in Ukraine next Thursday, on the eve of the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of its neighbor.
Two days of speeches are planned leading up to the vote, which could be just the latest U.N. General Assembly (GA) resolution related to the war. While such measures would typically come out of the Security Council, it has been hamstrung because Russia is one of five countries with veto power in that United Nations body.
A European Union diplomat told The Associated Press that Ukraine asked the E.U. to draft the resolution along with other member states to mark the anniversary of the invasion with a strong statement advocating peace, in line with the U.N. Charter.
The U.N. Charter uses the term peace dozens of times and specifically states that “all members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.”
As the AP detailed:
Ukraine initially thought of having the General Assembly enshrine the 10-point peace plan that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced at the November summit of the Group of 20 major economies, U.N. diplomats said. But this idea was shelved in favor of the broader and less detailed resolution circulated Wednesday.
As one example, while the resolution to be voted on emphasizes the need to ensure accountability for the most serious crimes committed in Ukraine through “fair and independent investigations and prosecutions at the national or international level,” it does not include Zelenskyy’s call for a special tribunal to prosecute Russian war crimes.
The pending resolution reportedly calls for “a cessation of hostilities” and reiterates the GA’s earlier demand that Russia “immediately, completely, and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces” from internationally recognized Ukrainian territory.
The draft resolution—which would not be legally binding, if passed—also urges United Nations members and global groups to “redouble support for diplomatic efforts,” including those of U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, according to the AP.
E.U. Ambassador Olof Skoog, who helped draft the resolution, told Reuters that “we count on very broad support from the membership. What is at stake is not just the fate of Ukraine, it is the respect of the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of every state.”
\u201cHere are today’s control-of-terrain maps of #Russia’s invasion of #Ukraine from @TheStudyofWar and @criticalthreats.\n\nClick here to see our interactive map: https://t.co/8RN8PxU2LC\u201d— ISW (@ISW) 1676585443
Previous GA resolutions calling for the withdrawal of all Russian troops, demanding the protection of civilians and critical infrastructure, and denouncing Russia’s “attempted illegal annexation” of Ukrainian regions received at least 140 votes in favor.
Two other resolutions in the assembly last year—one suspending Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council and another advocating Russian reparations to Ukraine over the war—garnered less support, with just 93 and 94 supportive votes, respectively.
The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights on Monday confirmed the war has killed at least 7,199 Ukrainian civilians and injured another 11,756, while also noting that actual figures are likely “considerably higher, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
We urgently need to spark a mass mobilization antiwar movement in North America. There have been good antiwar demonstrations in recent months, but they have been very limited. We need to rapidly expand tenfold.
The Rage Against the War Machine initiative, which is organized by a diverse group of anti-war forces, could do just that. The demands and overall speaker list are very good.
For example, Demand 1 is “Not one more penny for War in Ukraine”. They explain, “The Democrats and Republicans have armed Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars in weapons and military aid. The war has killed tens of thousands, displaced millions, and is pushing us toward nuclear WW3. Stop funding the war.”
Demand 2 is “Negotiate Peace.” They explain, “The US instigated the war in Ukraine with a coup on its democratically-elected government in 2014, and then sabotaged a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine in March. Pursue an immediate ceasefire and diplomacy to end the war.”
The speakers list contains many eloquent voices for peace and against a militarist foreign policy. There are former members of Congress including Cynthia McKinney, Tulsi Gabbard, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. There are peace activists such as Anne Wright and David Swanson. There are journalists such as Chris Hedges, Garland Nixon, Scott Horton, Max Blumenthal, and Kim Iversen. Former Green Party candidate Dr Jill Stein will be there. So will Dan McKnight from the veterans group “Bring our troops home.” And there are many more speakers.
Most of those who support the Rally believe it is crucial to broaden the movement and that means allying with others who may have different views on other issues.
The Rage rally focus is on ending the Ukraine war, disbanding NATO and stopping the slide toward nuclear Armageddon. Should they have included other issues such as abortion, trans rights, gay rights, immigrant rights? I have helped organize rallies where those issues were included, but believe it is a mistake to insist on this. The antiwar movement needs to quickly reach way beyond the Left. That means vastly broadening our reach and uniting with some people who think differently about other issues.
The capitalist system is flexible. Having women, people of color and nonconforming gender individuals in key positions does not threaten the system. The war machine continues, as does the grotesque income inequality, severe poverty and institutional racism.
To challenge the war machine, we need a mass movement that is broad and inclusive. Agreeing on all issues should not be required. To make this a demand, and to de-platform anyone who does not agree, is counterproductive. It weakens the antiwar movement and keeps us isolated.
We need to advance our common cause by working together with people who think differently on some issues. We can probably learn from them as they learn from us.
The ruling elite is content when the mass of working people are divided and fighting over racial, cultural and social issues. What threatens the ruling elite is the possibility of a mass movement demanding a change in US foreign policy of aggression, sanctions and wars. What threatens the ruling class are demands for improvement in the lives of all working people.
The Occupy Movement demand to support the 99% against the 1% was clear, accurate and uniting. Similarly, the demand to change US foreign policy and dramatically reduce the military budget has the potential to appeal to a broad majority of Americans.
The current slide toward a catastrophic war between the US and Russia makes it urgent to build a broad movement to oppose militarism and the war machine.
There needs to be a resurgence of energy and activism across the country. Let’s make this weekend’s Rage Against the War Machine as big and successful as possible and do more in the coming months.
The post We Need a Huge Rage against the War Machine first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Fresh graves at a cemetery near Bakhmut, December 2022. – Photo credit: Reuters
In a recent column, military analyst William Astore wrote, “[Congressman] George Santos is a symptom of a much larger disease: a lack of honor, a lack of shame, in America. Honor, truth, integrity, simply don’t seem to matter, or matter much, in America today… But how do you have a democracy where there is no truth?”
Astore went on to compare America’s political and military leaders to the disgraced Congressman Santos. “U.S. military leaders appeared before Congress to testify the Iraq War was being won,” Astore wrote. “They appeared before Congress to testify the Afghan War was being won. They talked of “progress,” of corners being turned, of Iraqi and Afghan forces being successfully trained and ready to assume their duties as U.S. forces withdrew. As events showed, it was all spin. All lies.”
Now America is at war again, in Ukraine, and the spin continues. This war involves Russia, Ukraine, the United States and its NATO allies. No party to this conflict has leveled with its own people to honestly explain what it is fighting for, what it really hopes to achieve and how it plans to achieve it. All sides claim to be fighting for noble causes and insist that it is the other side that refuses to negotiate a peaceful resolution. They are all manipulating and lying, and compliant media (on all sides) trumpet their lies.
It is a truism that the first casualty of war is the truth. But spinning and lying has real-world impacts in a war in which hundreds of thousands of real people are fighting and dying, while their homes, on both sides of the front lines, are reduced to rubble by hundreds of thousands of howitzer shells.
Yves Smith, the editor of Naked Capitalism, explored this insidious linkage between the information war and the real one in an article titled, “What if Russia won the Ukraine War, but the Western press didn’t notice?” He observed that Ukraine’s total dependence on the supply of weapons and money from its Western allies has given a life of its own to a triumphalist narrative that Ukraine is defeating Russia, and will keep scoring victories as long as the West keeps sending it more money and increasingly powerful and deadly weapons.
But the need to keep recreating the illusion that Ukraine is winning by hyping limited gains on the battlefield has forced Ukraine to keep sacrificing its forces in extremely bloody battles, like its counter-offensive around Kherson and the Russian sieges of Bakhmut and Soledar. Lt. Col. Alexander Vershinin, a retired U.S. tank commander, wrote on Harvard’s Russia Matters website, “In some ways, Ukraine has no choice but to launch attacks no matter the human and material cost.”
Objective analyses of the war in Ukraine are hard to come by through the thick fog of war propaganda. But we should pay attention when a series of senior Western military leaders, active and retired, make urgent calls for diplomacy to reopen peace negotiations, and warn that prolonging and escalating the war is risking a full-scale war between Russia and the United States that could escalate into nuclear war.
General Erich Vad, who was German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s senior military adviser for seven years, recently spoke to Emma, a German news website. He called the war in Ukraine a “war of attrition,” and compared it to the First World War, and to the Battle of Verdun in particular, in which hundreds of thousands of French and German soldiers were killed with no major gain for either side.
Vad asked the same persistent unanswered question that the New York Times editorial board asked of President Biden last May. What are the U.S. and NATO’s real war aims?
“Do you want to achieve a willingness to negotiate with the deliveries of the tanks? Do you want to reconquer Donbas or Crimea? Or do you want to defeat Russia completely?” asked General Vad.
He concluded, “There is no realistic end state definition. And without an overall political and strategic concept, arms deliveries are pure militarism. We have a militarily operational stalemate, which we cannot solve militarily. Incidentally, this is also the opinion of the American Chief of Staff Mark Milley. He said that Ukraine’s military victory is not to be expected and that negotiations are the only possible way. Anything else is a senseless waste of human life.”
Whenever Western officials are put on the spot by these unanswered questions, they are forced to reply, as Biden did to the Times eight months ago, that they are sending weapons to help Ukraine defend itself and to put it in a stronger position at the negotiating table. But what would this “stronger position” look like?
When Ukrainian forces were advancing toward Kherson in November, NATO officials agreed that the fall of Kherson would give Ukraine an opportunity to reopen negotiations from a position of strength. But when Russia withdrew from Kherson, no negotiations ensued, and both sides are now planning new offensives.
The U.S. media keep repeating the narrative that Russia will never negotiate in good faith, and it has hidden from the public the fruitful negotiations that began soon after the Russian invasion but were quashed by the United States and United Kingdom. Few outlets reported the recent revelations by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett about the ceasefire negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Turkey that he helped to mediate in March 2022. Bennett said explicitly that the West “blocked” or “stopped” (depending on the translation) the negotiations.
Bennett confirmed what has been reported by other sources since April 21, 2022, when Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, one of the other mediators, told CNN Turk after a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting, “There are countries within NATO who want the war to continue… They want Russia to become weaker.”
Advisers to Prime Minister Zelenskyy provided the details of Boris Johnson’s April 9 visit to Kyiv that were published in Ukrayinska Pravda on May 5. They said Johnson delivered two messages. The first was that Putin and Russia “should be pressured, not negotiated with.” The second was that, even if Ukraine completed an agreement with Russia, the “collective West,” who Johnson claimed to represent, would take no part in it.
The Western corporate media has generally only weighed in on these early negotiations to cast doubt on this story or smear any who repeat it as Putin apologists, despite multiple-source confirmation by Ukrainian officials, Turkish diplomats and now the former Israeli prime minister.
The propaganda frame that Western establishment politicians and media use to explain the war in Ukraine to their own publics is a classic “white hats vs black hats” narrative, in which Russia’s guilt for the invasion doubles as proof of the West’s innocence and righteousness. The growing mountain of evidence that the U.S. and its allies share responsibility for many aspects of this crisis is swept under the proverbial carpet, which looks more and more like The Little Prince’s drawing of a boa constrictor that swallowed an elephant.
Western media and officials were even more ridiculous when they tried to blame Russia for blowing up its own pipelines, the Nord Stream underwater natural gas pipelines that channeled Russian gas to Germany. According to NATO, the explosions that released half a million tons of methane into the atmosphere were “deliberate, reckless, and irresponsible acts of sabotage.” The Washington Post, in what could be considered journalistic malpractice, quoted an anonymous “senior European environmental official” saying, “No one on the European side of the ocean is thinking this is anything other than Russian sabotage.”
It took former New York Times investigative reporter Seymour Hersh to break the silence. He published, in a blog post on his own Substack, a spectacular whistleblower’s account of how U.S. Navy divers teamed up with the Norwegian navy to plant the explosives under cover of a NATO naval exercise, and how they were detonated by a sophisticated signal from a buoy dropped by a Norwegian surveillance plane. According to Hersh, President Biden took an active role in the plan, and amended it to include the use of the signaling buoy so that he could personally dictate the precise timing of the operation, three months after the explosives were planted.
The White House predictably dismissed Hersh’s report as “utterly false and complete fiction”, but has never offered any reasonable explanation for this historic act of environmental terrorism.
President Eisenhower famously said that only an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” can “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
So what should an alert and knowledgeable American citizenry know about the role our government has played in fomenting the crisis in Ukraine, a role that the corporate media has swept under the rug? That is one of the main questions we have tried to answer in our book War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict. The answers include:
– The U.S. broke its promises not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe. In 1997, before Americans had ever heard of Vladimir Putin, 50 former senators, retired military officers, diplomats and academics wrote to President Clinton to oppose NATO expansion, calling it a policy error of “historic proportions.” Elder statesman George Kennan condemned it as “the beginning of a new cold war.”
– NATO provoked Russia by its open-ended promise to Ukraine in 2008 that it would become a member of NATO. William Burns, who was then the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow and is now the CIA Director, warned in a State Department memo, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red-lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).”
– The U.S.backed a coup in Ukraine in 2014 that installed a government that only half its people recognized as legitimate, causing the disintegration of Ukraine and a civil war that killed 14,000 people.
– The 2015 Minsk II peace accord achieved a stable ceasefire line and steady reductions in casualties, but Ukraine failed to grant autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk as agreed. Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande now admit that Western leaders only supported Minsk II to buy time for NATO to arm and train Ukraine’s military to recover Donbas by force.
– During the week before the invasion, OSCE monitors in Donbas documented a huge escalation in explosions around the ceasefire line. Most of the 4,093 explosions in four days were in rebel-held territory, indicating incoming shell-fire by Ukrainian government forces. U.S. and U.K. officials claimed these were “false flag” attacks, as if Donetsk and Luhansk’s forces were shelling themselves, just as they later suggested that Russia blew up its own pipelines.
– After the invasion, instead of supporting Ukraine’s efforts to make peace, the United States and the United Kingdom blocked or stopped them in their tracks. The U.K.’s Boris Johnson said they saw a chance to “press” Russia and wanted to make the most of it, and U.S. Defense Secretary Austin said their goal was to “weaken” Russia.
What would an alert and knowledgeable citizenry make of all this? We would clearly condemn Russia for invading Ukraine. But then what? Surely we would also demand that U.S. political and military leaders tell us the truth about this horrific war and our country’s role in it, and demand that the media transmit the truth to the public. An “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” would surely then demand that our government stop fueling this war and instead support immediate peace negotiations.
The post How Spin and Lies Fuel a Bloody War of Attrition in Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
In a recent column, military analyst William Astore wrote, “[Congressman] George Santos is a symptom of a much larger disease: a lack of honor, a lack of shame, in America. Honor, truth, integrity, simply don’t seem to matter, or matter much, in America today… But how do you have a democracy where there is no truth?”
Astore went on to compare America’s political and military leaders to the disgraced Congressman Santos. “U.S. military leaders appeared before Congress to testify the Iraq War was being won,” Astore wrote. “They appeared before Congress to testify the Afghan War was being won. They talked of “progress,” of corners being turned, of Iraqi and Afghan forces being successfully trained and ready to assume their duties as U.S. forces withdrew. As events showed, it was all spin. All lies.”
Now America is at war again, in Ukraine, and the spin continues. This war involves Russia, Ukraine, the United States and its NATO allies. No party to this conflict has leveled with its own people to honestly explain what it is fighting for, what it really hopes to achieve and how it plans to achieve it. All sides claim to be fighting for noble causes and insist that it is the other side that refuses to negotiate a peacefual resolution. They are all manipulating and lying, and compliant media (on all sides) trumpet their lies.
It is a truism that the first casualty of war is the truth. But spinning and lying has real-world impacts in a war in which hundreds of thousands of real people are fighting and dying, while their homes, on both sides of the front lines, are reduced to rubble by hundreds of thousands of howitzer shells.
Yves Smith, the editor of Naked Capitalism, explored this insidious linkage between the information war and the real one in an article titled, “What if Russia won the Ukraine War, but the Western press didn’t notice?” He observed that Ukraine’s total dependence on the supply of weapons and money from its Western allies has given a life of its own to a triumphalist narrative that Ukraine is defeating Russia, and will keep scoring victories as long as the West keeps sending it more money and increasingly powerful and deadly weapons.
But the need to keep recreating the illusion that Ukraine is winning by hyping limited gains on the battlefield has forced Ukraine to keep sacrificing its forces in extremely bloody battles, like its counter-offensive around Kherson and the Russian sieges of Bakhmut and Soledar. Lt. Col. Alexander Vershinin, a retired U.S. tank commander, wrote on Harvard’s Russia Matters website, “In some ways, Ukraine has no choice but to launch attacks no matter the human and material cost.”
No party to this conflict has leveled with its own people to honestly explain what it is fighting for, what it really hopes to achieve and how it plans to achieve it.
Objective analyses of the war in Ukraine are hard to come by through the thick fog of war propaganda. But we should pay attention when a series of senior Western military leaders, active and retired, make urgent calls for diplomacy to reopen peace negotiations, and warn that prolonging and escalating the war is risking a full-scale war between Russia and the United States that could escalate into nuclear war.
General Erich Vad, who was German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s senior military adviser for seven years, recently spoke to Emma, a German news website. He called the war in Ukraine a “war of attrition,” and compared it to the First World War, and to the Battle of Verdun in particular, in which hundreds of thousands of French and German soldiers were killed with no major gain for either side.
Vad asked the same persistent unanswered question that the New York Times editorial board asked of President Biden last May. What are the U.S. and NATO’s real war aims?
“Do you want to achieve a willingness to negotiate with the deliveries of the tanks? Do you want to reconquer Donbas or Crimea? Or do you want to defeat Russia completely?” asked General Vad. He concluded, “There is no realistic end state definition. And without an overall political and strategic concept, arms deliveries are pure militarism. We have a militarily operational stalemate, which we cannot solve militarily. Incidentally, this is also the opinion of the American Chief of Staff Mark Milley. He said that Ukraine’s military victory is not to be expected and that negotiations are the only possible way. Anything else is a senseless waste of human life.”
Whenever Western officials are put on the spot by these unanswered questions, they are forced to reply, as Biden did to the Times eight months ago, that they are sending weapons to help Ukraine defend itself and to put it in a stronger position at the negotiating table. But what would this “stronger position” look like? When Ukrainian forces were advancing toward Kherson in November, NATO officials agreed that the fall of Kherson would give Ukraine an opportunity to reopen negotiations from a position of strength. But when Russia withdrew from Kherson, no negotiations ensued, and both sides are now planning new offensives.
The U.S. media keep repeating the narrative that Russia will never negotiate in good faith, and it has hidden from the public the fruitful negotiations that began soon after the Russian invasion but were quashed by the United States and United Kingdom. Few outlets reported the recent revelations by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett about the ceasefire negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Turkey that he helped to mediate in March 2022. Bennett said explicitly that the West “blocked” or “stopped” (depending on the translation) the negotiations.
Bennett confirmed what has been reported by other sources since April 21, 2022, when Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, one of the other mediators, told CNN Turk after a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting, “There are countries within NATO who want the war to continue… They want Russia to become weaker.”
Objective analyses of the war in Ukraine are hard to come by through the thick fog of war propaganda.
Advisers to Prime Minister Zelenskyy provided the details of Boris Johnson’s April 9 visit to Kyiv that were published in Ukrayinska Pravda on May 5th. They said Johnson delivered two messages. The first was that Putin and Russia “should be pressured, not negotiated with.” The second was that, even if Ukraine completed an agreement with Russia, the “collective West,” who Johnson claimed to represent, would take no part in it.
The Western corporate media has generally only weighed in on these early negotiations to cast doubt on this story or smear any who repeat it as Putin apologists, despite multiple-source confirmation by Ukrainian officials, Turkish diplomats and now the former Israeli prime minister.
The propaganda frame that Western establishment politicians and media use to explain the war in Ukraine to their own publics is a classic “white hats vs black hats” narrative, in which Russia’s guilt for the invasion doubles as proof of the West’s innocence and righteousness. The growing mountain of evidence that the U.S. and its allies share responsibility for many aspects of this crisis is swept under the proverbial carpet, which looks more and more like The Little Prince‘s drawing of a boa constrictor that swallowed an elephant.
Western media and officials were even more ridiculous when they tried to blame Russia for blowing up its own pipelines, the Nord Stream underwater natural gas pipelines that channeled Russian gas to Germany. According to NATO, the explosions that released half a million tons of methane into the atmosphere were “deliberate, reckless, and irresponsible acts of sabotage.” The Washington Post, in what could be considered journalistic malpractice, quoted an anonymous “senior European environmental official” saying, “No one on the European side of the ocean is thinking this is anything other than Russian sabotage.”
It took former New York Times investigative reporter Seymour Hersh to break the silence. He published, in a blog post on his own Substack, a spectacular whistleblower’s account of how U.S. Navy divers teamed up with the Norwegian navy to plant the explosives under cover of a NATO naval exercise, and how they were detonated by a sophisticated signal from a buoy dropped by a Norwegian surveillance plane. According to Hersh, President Biden took an active role in the plan, and amended it to include the use of the signaling buoy so that he could personally dictate the precise timing of the operation, three months after the explosives were planted.
The White House predictably dismissed Hersh’s report as “utterly false and complete fiction”, but has never offered any reasonable explanation for this historic act of environmental terrorism.
President Eisenhower famously said that only an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” can “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
So what should an alert and knowledgeable American citizenry know about the role our government has played in fomenting the crisis in Ukraine, a role that the corporate media has swept under the rug? That is one of the main questions we have tried to answer in our book War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict. The answers include:
What would an alert and knowledgeable citizenry make of all this? We would clearly condemn Russia for invading Ukraine. But then what? Surely we would also demand that U.S. political and military leaders tell us the truth about this horrific war and our country’s role in it, and demand that the media transmit the truth to the public. An “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” would surely then demand that our government stop fueling this war and instead support immediate peace negotiations.
Listen to a reading of this article:
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An article by The Washington Post titled “Pentagon looks to restart top-secret programs in Ukraine” contains some interesting information about what US special ops forces were doing in Ukraine in the lead-up to the Russian invasion last year, and what they are slated to be doing there in the future.
“The Pentagon is urging Congress to resume funding a pair of top-secret programs in Ukraine suspended ahead of Russia’s invasion last year, according to current and former U.S. officials,” writes the Post’s Wesley Morgan. “If approved, the move would allow American Special Operations troops to employ Ukrainian operatives to observe Russian military movements and counter disinformation.”
Much further down in the article we learn the specifics of what those two top-secret programs were. One of them entailed US commandos sending Ukrainian operatives “on surreptitious reconnaissance missions in Ukraine’s east” to collect intelligence on Russia. The other entailed secretly administering online propaganda, though of course The Washington Post does not describe it as such.
“We had people taking apart Russian propaganda and telling the true story on blogs,” WaPo was told by a source described as “a person in the Special Operations community.”
Social media warfare. US Special Operations: "Before the invasion, US Special Operations troops were running two irregular warfare surrogate programs in Ukraine. In one, “We had people taking apart Russian propaganda and telling the true story on blogs." https://t.co/IXFI7Q48Mb
— Ivan Katchanovski (@I_Katchanovski) February 11, 2023
US special ops forces “employing Ukrainian operatives” to “take apart Russian propaganda” and “tell the true story on blogs” is just US special ops forces administering US propaganda online. Whether or not they actually see themselves as “telling the true story” or “taking apart Russian propaganda” does not change the fact that they are administering US government propaganda. A government circulating media which advances its information interests is precisely the thing that state propaganda is.
The US government is theoretically prohibited from directly administering propaganda to its own population (though even that line has been deliberately eroded in recent years with measures like the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act and US government infiltration of the mass media and Silicon Valley), but there’s nothing stopping the funding and directing of foreign bodies to circulate propaganda on the internet, which has no national borders. Back when US propaganda was limited to old media like the CIA’s Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia it was possible to claim that the propaganda was solely being targeted at the populations where that media was broadcast, but propaganda circulated online will necessarily trickle over everywhere, including to US audiences.
The Washington Post explains that these secret programs were discontinued ahead of the Russian invasion last year because a stipulation in the 2018 NDAA law which permitted their funding forbids their use during a “traditional armed conflict,” so the Pentagon is working to persuade congress to repeal that condition. Part of its sales pitch to congress to get these secret operations restarted is that they will be “what the U.S. military calls ‘non-kinetic’ — or nonviolent — missions,” which the administering of propaganda would certainly qualify as.
They're Not Worried About "Russian Influence", They're Worried About Dissent
One of the craziest things happening in the world today is the way westerners are being brainwashed by western propaganda into panicking about Russian propaganda.https://t.co/qf10kuPteV
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) February 5, 2023
As we discussed recently, it’s very silly that there’s a major push in the US power alliance to begin administering more government propaganda in order to “counter Russian propaganda” when Russian propaganda has no meaningful influence in the western world. Before RT was shut down it was drawing just 0.04 percent of the UK’s total TV audience. The much-touted Russian election interference campaign on Facebook was mostly unrelated to the election and affected “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content” according o Facebook, while research by New York University into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 election found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” A study by the University of Adelaide found that despite all the warnings of Russian bots and trolls following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of inauthentic behavior on Twitter during that time was anti-Russian in nature.
In reality, this push we’ve been seeing to pour more and more energy into propaganda, censorship, and other forms of narrative control has nothing to do with “taking apart Russian propaganda” and everything to do with suppressing dissent. The US empire has been frantically ramping up propaganda and censorship because the “great power competition” it has been preparing against Russia and China is going to require economic warfare, massive military spending, and nuclear brinkmanship that no one would consent to without lots of manipulation. Nobody’s going to consent to being made poorer, colder, and less safe over some global power struggle that doesn’t benefit them unless that consent is actively manufactured.
That’s why the media have been acting so weird lately, that’s why dissident voices are getting harder and harder to find online, that’s the purpose of the new “fact-checking” industry and other forms of narrative control, and that’s why the Pentagon wants congressional funding for its propaganda operations in Ukraine. The fact that the empire’s “great power competition” happens to be occurring at the same time as widespread access to the internet means that drastic measures must be made to ensure its information dominance so it can march the public into playing along with this agenda. The more desperate our rulers grow to secure unipolar planetary domination, the more important controlling the narrative becomes.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
Shortly after the election of Donald Trump, revelations that a Russian disinformation campaign had helped sweep the 45th president to power shook the media and the wider culture. The unfolding drama of the Mueller Report and a Senate investigative panel gripped the nation for the next four years. But now, journalist Matt Taibbi has revealed that the source of many of the claims of ongoing Russian disinformation during the Trump presidency, Hamilton 68, was itself a disinformation operation concocted by former US intelligence officials. Matt Taibbi joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his findings and dissect how legacy media, the public, and even Congress were taken along for the ride in the ‘Russiagate’ saga.
Matt Taibbi is a journalist, author, and co-host of the Useful Idiots podcast.
Studio: Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden
Video Post-Production: Adam Coley
Audio Post-Production: Tommy Harron
Chris Hedges: Matt Taibbi has published an investigation – Which you can read on his Substack – About a vast propaganda campaign called Hamilton 68, launched a year after Donald Trump won the presidency. It smeared critics of the Democratic Party from the left and the right as Russian assets. Hamilton 68 claimed it used a complex data analysis and relied on so-called disinformation experts to ferret out fake news on social media that emanated from the Kremlin.
Hamilton 68, a computerized dashboard designed to be used by reporters and academics to “measure Russian disinformation” was run by Democratic operatives including John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, and figures from the intelligence agencies such as the CIA, the FBI, and Homeland Security, as well as neoconservatives and establishment Republicans, such as Bill Crystal, who do not support Trump and have been warmly embraced by the Democratic Party.
Mainstream news outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, PBS, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, as well as Mother Jones, which ran 14 stories based on the group’s alleged research, cited Hamilton 68 as an authoritative source, even as the site refused to disclose the data or methods it used to make its assessments. Hundreds, if not thousands, of media headlines were flagged as Russian bought infiltrations in online discussions about Brett Kavanaugh, Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign, the Parkland shooting, US missile strikes in Syria, and Bernie Sanders’s campaign, many other stories. Fact checking sites such as Politi Fact and Snopes also relied on Hamilton 68.
Taibbi, given access to Twitter’s internal memos and emails by Elon Musk, who bought Twitter, was able to expose not only fraudulent claims of Hamilton 68, but the massive failure of the press, which was a full partner in one of the worst forms of censorship since the red baiting of Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, one that targeted people with dissident or unconventional opinions and accused them, in essence, of un-American activities.
So let’s go back, just set the stage. This is, I think his name was… Was it Watts? This FBI guy, Clint Watts. But set the stage right after the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s response, just to remind viewers of the loss, and how that response led to the rise of so-called disinformation experts and groups like Hamilton 68.
Matt Taibbi: Well, it’s a complicated story. I think the backdrop to the Hamilton 68 story is, if you really want to look at the full timeline, the Columbia Journalism Review has a whole 26,000 word piece this week. But the shortcut version of this story is that after Trump won the election, Chris, there was immediately a series of stories coming from different directions saying that the election was illegitimate, that Trump had been assisted by Russians, that there was some kind of collusion going on, and that there was disinformation in the news media that had been amplified by Russian accounts that Trump’s own accounts and hashtags and tweets had been amplified by Russian forces. And then formally in, I believe it was August of 2017, this group Hamilton 68 came out. It’s an outgrowth of both the German Marshall Fund and a think tank called the Alliance for Securing Democracy. And it was basically a tool designed to be used by reporters and academics that “track Russian disinformation” by monitoring accounts that were called linked, “linked to Russian influence activities online.”
Now, they never disclosed what was on this list or what they were actually tracking, and it was only by accident looking through some Twitter files, emails that we find this big conversation where internally Twitter is saying, we’ve got the list. We’ve reversed engineered it, and they’re not Russians. These are mostly ordinary people. Out of 644 accounts, only 36 of them began in Russia, and most of the rest of them, from what I’ve found, were ordinary people, a lot of them right leaning, but some of them on the left, too. So it was a fraud. It was a big gigantic media fraud, basically, where I think the story here is equal parts disinformation on the part of this think tank, but also, as you alluded to, the enormous media failure, which would be… I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on that.
Chris Hedges: Of those 36, weren’t a lot of them from your story RT? It was Russia Today. It was the Russian television station.
Matt Taibbi: There were several RT related accounts. There were some Sputnik accounts. There were some Russian embassy accounts. There was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, if I’m not mistaken. So a lot of these were sort of official Russian accounts. Now, Hamilton eventually transitioned to a more open system that was only tracking Russian official accounts, which is interesting in itself that that’s actually more of a real service. But what they did is they piled all these real accounts that had real opinions that maybe a channel like RT or the Russian Foreign Ministry, they might have an interest that coincided, but these were real people in America and Canada and Great Britain who had these opinions. They either favored Trump or were retweeting hashtags like #WalkAway or #FireMcMaster. And this group just described that as part of a Russian influence campaign when, in fact, it was not that.
Chris Hedges: Just give us, before we go in, you actually reached out to these people, some of these people. I’ll let you explain that. But just give us a sense of the scale, because it was massive. It just dominated the press. I mean, we were talking before we went on the air. I think one of the reasons the media organizations are going to ignore it is because what are they going to say? We’re sorry for the last four years. It’s such an egregious failure that it’s… To admit what they did, it ends up looking like an article from The Onion.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, this would be a difficult thing to retract, in a way. I wanted to hear what the innocent explanation was not only from this group, but from all the media companies that ran these stories. So I not only sent queries up, but I kind of threw a fit about it publicly on Twitter and online, basically daring them or taunting them in an effort to try to get comment out. Because if there was some reason that I wasn’t privy to, I really wanted to hear it. And they no commented to me until the story made a big splash on the internet, at which point some of them started to come in.
Now, the media people haven’t commented yet, but there’s no excuse for what happened with them. Because you and I have both been reporters, Chris, if someone comes to me with a story and says, we’re tracking Russian… We have a magic box that tracks Russian influence, and they are connected to all these organic political activities, you think about things like #WalkAway, that’s Democrats who are leaving the party, hashtag #FireMcMaster, that’s Republicans who are against HR McMaster, right? #ReleaseTheMemo. That’s Republicans who want Devin Nunez’s memo out. All these things were “linked” to Russian influence on all the biggest channels and newspapers in America. And the source was wrong. I mean, again, what would you do as a reporter, Chris? I’d say, what’s in the box? Right? Tell me how it works. And they never asked that question.
Chris Hedges: Well, I love this. This is from your article, it’s Laura Rosenberg, the two founders of Hamilton 68, the blue and red team of former counselor to Marco Rubio, Jamie Fly, and Hillary for America, foreign policy advisor, Laura Rosenberger told Politico they couldn’t reveal the names of the accounts because the Russians will simply shut them down. It’s kind of like Joe McCarthy’s empty briefcase.
Matt Taibbi: Oh yeah, there are exactly 57 [inaudible].
Chris Hedges: Right.
Matt Taibbi: I guess I’m mixing [inaudible]. That was [inaudible] candidate. But yeah, that’s what they were doing. They were saying inside this thing, there are subversives who are linked to Russia, but they weren’t that. I looked at the list. The chronology here is a little complicated. Twitter was upset about all this stuff, and so they figured out what was in the list, being in a unique position to do it because they have the data. And so they recreate the list, and it’s full of all these people. It’s like Consortium editor, Joe Loreo. There are all these small, low influenced Trump accounts with names like Classy Girl for DJT, Trump Dyke is another one. There’s lots and lots of these people. And I reached out to probably a couple of dozen of them, talked to a bunch of them on the phone. They’re all over the world, but they’re real people. They’re not Russian agents. They just had these opinions. And so they were used as fodder to create these fake news stories.
Chris Hedges: So why did the most prestigious and powerful media organizations, and why did universities such as Harvard, Princeton, MIT, why do you think they so enthusiastically signed on for the witch hunt?
Matt Taibbi: Well, I think this is connected to a bigger picture that I don’t fully have yet. I mean, I think there are things that are going to come into view, maybe not necessarily for me, but there are people working on it. And the idea is, I think, that this whole concept of Russian disinformation was used as a battering ram to get inside of companies like Twitter and to influence them to open their doors to government efforts to moderate the platforms.
We don’t like the fact that you’re not letting us censor this or that. We want to have more direct control over things. And you are housing Russian disinformation activities online. They all got dragged to the Senate floor and the House floor in late 2017, if you remember that. It started with Senator Warner, Mark Warner of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. It spread to all the House committees, House Intelligence Committee. Then there was energy and commerce. It never ended. The companies finally said uncle and let these people in. I think this is all related. These stories were used, basically, to make the argument that you have to let us start censoring people.
Chris Hedges: So as you know, I was overseas for 20 years, and it just smells like these CIA front groups. CIA, in some countries I was in, actually owned newspapers. But do we know the genesis of it? Do we know how deep these roots go?
Matt Taibbi: That’s a tough question to answer yet. I think we got to look at some of those things. If you look at the advisory board of who’s on the think tank that birthed this thing, it’s chock full of former intelligence officials. Michael Morrell, the acting CIA director. He was going to be Hillary’s CIA chief, Mike Chertoff, who was the Homeland Security Chief during the Iraq Wars, Iraq period. There’s a deputy, former deputy head of the NSA on there. And then Hamilton’s also connected to a company called New Knowledge that was an advisor to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. A number of their people were involved in testifying before the Senate and the House.
Some of those folks, if you look at their backgrounds, they have definitely government ties, Department of Defense specifically. We don’t know yet exactly, but I think it’s a very interesting question that we need to know more about the genesis of how this got created. And look, Hamilton 68 is just one of these shops. It was the progenitor version of this kind of activity. There are a lot of these things now proliferating in universities and then in the think tank space.
Chris Hedges: Twitter was complicit, because as you point out, Roth, I think, was his name. They did, through this reverse engineering, realize that this was a scam, but they did not make it public, and continued to engage in the censorship that was demanded of them. Talk about that. And also, can you talk about Twitter’s secret blacklist?
Matt Taibbi: The first question, yes. Yoel Roth, who is the Trust and Safety Chief at Twitter, who became kind of an infamous figure after the first batch of Twitter files was released, because he was influential in suppressing the Hunter Biden story, but he actually pushed back against this. There’s a number of quotes from him. He’s saying, “I think we have to just call this out on the BS it is.” That’s one of the more explosive quotes from him. He’s saying that people are… This dashboard will take ordinary Russians and accuse, I’m sorry, ordinary conservatives and accuse them of being Russian.
But he was met with opposition within the company, senior former White House officials who worked in the comms department were saying we have to be careful on how we push back. And there’s a gentleman named Carlos Manier who went on to work for Pete Buttigieg who says, I want to push back too, but we have to play the longer game. And so as you say, Twitter’s role is difficult to assess, because on the one hand, they didn’t play ball with Hamilton 68, but they also didn’t make it public either. So I don’t know how you call that one. I mean, they are complicit in a way, for sure.
Chris Hedges: So there were three major classes of accounts on the Hamilton list, and they included media figures, David Horowitz, Joe Loreo, you mentioned, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News. Explain those three accounts, how they worked.
Matt Taibbi: As I said before, there was a thin layer of real Russian accounts at the top. Then there’s a big middle layer of basically real ordinary people with very low followings. There’s a few small media accounts in there. Not small, I would say medium sized. So Joe Loreo went on to be editor of Consortium. At the time, he was just a writer for Consortium living in Iraq. He’s on the list. There was a conservative broadcast figure named Dennis Michael Lynch who was on Newsmax and Fox. He’s on there, and there’s an internet site called the Sirius Report that’s on there. There’s a few media sites, but then mainly it’s just these regular people with less than 5,000 followers. And then at the very bottom, there is a thin layer, I would say somewhere beneath 20% – And Twitter did a forensic analysis of this – That was half dead, zombified accounts that followers were decreasing. Now, that could happen for any number of reasons at Twitter. That could be because you got banned for something, or it could be because you’re a bot.
So the way to understand this I think is best: Real Russians at the top, then a whole bunch of ordinary people, and then there’s some suspicious accounts at the bottom and they might just be commercial. Who knows what they are. Hard to say.
Chris Hedges: So let’s talk about the press formula. I love it when you do these. You have a habit of boiling it right down to the essence. You said, here’s the formula for how it worked. Defamation became hardwired into the media landscape. “Research Institute makes invented pot claims, reporters toss said claims at hated targets like Tulsi Gabbard, headlines flow.” You said, “The scam needs just three elements: Credentials of someone like former FBI agent Watts, the absence of any semblance of fact checking, and the silence of companies like Twitter.” But it was. It did. It worked exactly as you pointed out. And with just no incredulity. I mean they just swallowed it whole.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, and that’s the part that is hard for me to grasp, because I can understand a couple of reporters getting beat by this, but all of them? I mean, that’s difficult to understand. And then there were obviously a few of us… I know you would never follow. You and I talked about this at the time, how ridiculous all these stories were. People like Glenn Greenwald specifically called out this site. I did as well, a few times. There was actually, believe it or not, a Tucker Carlson segment about it. But I would say 99% of the working reporters fell for this. And nobody within these institutions to whom this was pitched backed up on it as far as I know. I haven’t found that yet. But there aren’t reporters coming out of the woodwork who said, oh, I got pitched by these folks, then I didn’t do that story. Or I exposed them.
Because there’s only two ways this can go. If somebody pitches you and you find out they’re fake, you have an obligation at that point to out it, don’t you? I would think. It’s remarkable not only that it happened, but also now that we know what they did that nobody’s backing up.
Chris Hedges: I think your fundamental job as a reporter is to determine whether it’s fake or not. That’s what being a reporter means. But there was zero effort.
Matt Taibbi: Right. And that’s what’s so amazing. Again, you know, you think about what you did for a living, what I’ve done for so long. You think about what somebody like Jeff Gerth did for years before this Columbia Journalism Review piece that came out this week, phone call after phone call to ascertain what happened. And during this period, you had these incredible pieces where somebody at a magazine like Mother Jones would say, here’s what Russian bots are pushing today. And they would just look at the dashboard and then just start writing. There’s no middle part to this where you make a phone call.
So they basically automated the sourcing process for these folks, and it was phony. So I think it’s a dangerous thing. And the problem with this is that while this was a pretty simple, cartoonish, almost scam, there are lots of more sophisticated ones out there that will be harder to unravel.
Chris Hedges: I mean, David Corn at Mother Jones has dined out on this for five years, and I think you mentioned before he’s written some kind of a response to Jeff Gerth. What did he say? That –
Matt Taibbi: The Columbia Journalism Review’s 24,000 word piece is a big fail. And again, at first I sympathized. I knew David a little bit, and in this business, it happens. Sometimes sources lie to you, and you screw up. You fall for something. It does happen. It shouldn’t. It is not like being a doctor where if you screw up, somebody dies, necessarily. But sometimes mistakes happen, and you get a source like Christopher Steele who comes to you and he’s got all these credentialed people vouching for him. You could see how that could happen, but you gotta own it when that happens. You can’t turn around and attack people for describing how that was wrong. I was very upset by Mother Jones‘s response to this whole thing.
These organizations need to reestablish their credibility. And Gerth, who worked on your paper, Bob Woodward now is saying that these companies need to look themselves in the mirror, and they won’t do it. Curious to hear your thoughts about why.
Chris Hedges: I think it goes back to your book Hate Inc. First, tell us what the response has been. I mean, it’s been this deafening silence.
Matt Taibbi: Nothing, nothing. Again, it’s a 20, I guess it started out as a 26,000 word piece. If a story, a book length investigation in the Columbia Journalism Review doesn’t get you 30 seconds on CNN, then I don’t know what would prompt a response at this point.
Chris Hedges: Well, but what about the data? I mean, you have printed the data and there’s no response.
Matt Taibbi: Well, it’s worse than that, they’ve actively said the opposite. I mean, not that I mind, I’m used to it at this point, but there have been lots of stories about what an awful person I am and what an awful person Elon Musk is.
Chris Hedges: All of that’s true. But it doesn’t take away from the work of your journalism. I mean, it’s irrelevant what kind of person you are.
Matt Taibbi: Well, yeah, of course. Yeah.
Chris Hedges: I mean, nobody’s ever accused Sye Hersh of being warm and fuzzy. I mean, it’s ridiculous. It’s just silly. I’m joking of course, because I like you very much, but it just has nothing to do with the topic.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, it’s a total… To use a journalism cliche, it’s a non-denial denial. You’re not addressing the issue. There was an amazing line in the Mother Jones piece about the CGR thing where they’re saying Gerth is arguing that the collusion didn’t happen. But, in a sense, it did happen. I don’t know, that’s exactly what we’re trained to assess. Did it happen really or in a sense, right? If it’s just in a sense, we can’t print it. That’s the entire purpose of a newspaper.
Chris Hedges: What you’re watching is the complete moral bankruptcy in real time of the press, and I’ll go to your book Hate Inc., because I think you made an important point, where media organizations, unlike the old model, have now siloed themselves to cater to a particular demographic. And when you’re catering to that demographic, what you’re in essence doing is feeding that demographic what it wants to hear.
And we had mentioned the other day when we spoke about the Caliphate podcast at The New York Times, which was based on one source that was completely fraudulent. And I had been in the Middle East for seven years. I remember listening to just the first 10 minutes, and it had this kind of snuff porn quality to it, people being crucified on crosses and stuff. And it just stank of fiction, having come out of the Middle East, and there’s no accountability. I mean, the reporter wasn’t fired because they fed their demographic what they wanted to hear. And I think that that has eroded accountability because it all becomes about stroking the demographic as a commercial model. I’m just summing up the points you made in your book.
Matt Taibbi: Oh no, but you’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right. Yeah. Once upon a time. And not to be all back in the day about it, but if you printed something like Caliphate, if you did a story like that and put your whole weight into it, and it was completely fake, and you did no work to see whether it happened, it was a career ending thing. It could be a career ending thing. And that hung over every reporter’s head. That was the defense mechanism of the business. That’s gone. There is no sword of Damocles over your head now when you work. If you make a mistake, it’s accepted. It’s understood, because this is an entertainment product now. It’s not a service, and you’re not trying to determine the truth, it’s not like an evidentiary process. It’s different. I mean, I don’t know how to think about it, honestly.
Chris Hedges: Well, and if you report, as you have done, in such a way that discredits or critiques or undermines that narrative, then – I think you and Glen have become examples of this – You are very viciously attacked. I don’t follow it closely, but I think they’re now calling you some kind of closet right-winger. I don’t know what they’re calling you. But that becomes a response.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, that’s the go-to response. Now, The Washington Post, amusingly, actually described me as conservative journalist in one of their pieces. And before I even heard about it, there was such an uproar online that they silently edited it out of the piece.
Chris Hedges: Isn’t it The Washington Post that won the Pulitzer for the Russiagate material that they then took down off their website? Is that the same?
Matt Taibbi: That’s the same Washington Post that ran a house editorial this week talking about how objectivity is dead. And I was no fan of objectivity, necessarily, as a model, but as an aspiration, absolutely. That was what the business was all about. We’re trying to ascertain what’s true or not. That’s the basic function of what we do. And they’re moving into something, some other world now, and it’s very sad to watch.
Chris Hedges: Well, that’s why they’re crucifying Julian Assange. I mean, the Democrats loved him with the Iraq, Afghan war logs, and then he had the honesty to print the Podesta emails. And if you have them and don’t make them public, you can do that as a choice, but you can’t then call yourself a journalist. So I find the state, and I’ve been in the business a long time, it’s extremely depressing.
I want to, before we close, bring up, so we saw the Biden administration attempt to appoint this woman, Nina Yanakovich, as the Russian disinformation czar. She’s been at the forefront of Russian disinformation. She calls Julian Assange scum. So they tried to set this up in Homeland Security. It was too much, too unpalatable to establish at this moment a Ministry of Truth in the United States. Is that where we’re headed?
Matt Taibbi: I think that was the idea. Whether we’re going to get there or not is an open question. I think some of the companies don’t want to go along. That’s the subtext, actually, of the whole Trump years, is that the government wanted increasing amounts of control over these platforms. Some of the platforms, sometimes for reasons because they were greedy and they wanted to keep some certain foreign markets open, push back. And now there’s been this increasingly intense cry for access by agencies like the DHS, which was what Nina Jaquez was going to be, was going to be under Homeland Security.
While they did still go through with something like that, they just didn’t create the open board. Lee Fong did a report in The Intercept outing how that works. We’ve seen sort of echoes of it in the Twitter files. We do see how requests for content moderation are routed through the FBI and DHS specifically. There’s a bureaucracy that’s been set up. So that’s what they want. Whether they’re going to get it absolutely or how much they’ve gotten it is an open question. As you see, some of the companies are breaking ranks openly, and that’s what this argument’s about.
Chris Hedges: Well, aren’t they getting it through subterfuge, in essence?
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, no, they’re creating a panic around something. And look, yes, these things all do exist. There are foreign information operations that do exist. Russia has one. They based it on ours, but they do have one. They do these things. They do create social media accounts. They do try to introduce themes into our conversations. And there are domestic extremists in America. As you know, there are lunatics on all sides. But there are, of course, racists and crazies and people who make threats. It’s a difficult question, though, how to deal with that. But they amplified these problems in order to get access. They said, these problems are emergencies. We must get in. You must let us have control. And they lied about the scale of it.
Chris Hedges: Well, the difference is this isn’t against extremism. It is about protecting a neoliberal order, which has visited tremendous suffering on the American people that they have no intention of changing. In fact, they will accelerate it. And so it becomes, in essence, finding a scapegoat. I mean, the reason Trump wins the election is not because the white working class has been impoverished and dethroned, but because of Russia.
That was Matt Taibbi. You can read his article, which you should read, on Substack on Hamilton 68. I want to thank the Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
The exposure has been denied by the Empire. But does anyone believe the denial? Not today, none. People across the world have come across such denials many times, and each time all the denials turned out to be lies.
The latest denial is related to the incident of explosion in the Nord Stream pipelines.
The famous journalist Seymour Hersh’s investigation found that the US destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea in a covert operation.
Citing a source with direct knowledge of the planning of the operation, the legendary investigative reporter, said in an article:
Explosives were planted at the pipelines in June 2022. It was planted by US Navy divers. The job of planting explosives was carried on under the guise of a NATO exercise named BALTOPS22.
Hersh presented the findings in an article posted on February 8, 2023 in his Substack.
The reporter’s findings said that the explosives were detonated on September 26, 2022 with a signal from a sonar buoy. The buoy was dropped near the pipelines by a surveillance plane of the Norwegian Navy.
The planning for the job was initiated in December 2021. A task force was set up, in which US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan participated.
The Pulitzer prize-winning reporter said he had reached out to the White House and the CIA, seeking comments on his finding. Both firmly rejected Hersh’s findings. The finding was termed “completely and utterly false” and “false and complete fiction”.
Hersh, famous for his exposure of the 1968 My Lai Massacre committed by US soldiers in Vietnam that brought him the Pulitzer in 1970, said in the article:
As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia.
He wrote:
US President Joe Biden’s Administration was focused on jeopardizing the Nord Stream. First, it was through sanctions; and then, sabotage. The Nord Stream appeared as a key to swaying Europe to its cause amid then-looming conflict in Ukraine.
Hersh — well reputed for his exposure of other political scandals including the US covert bombing of Cambodia, the CIA’s illegal domestic spying, and the US military’s torture and abuse of prisoners in Iraq — detailed the sabotage operation, the planning and logistical considerations carried out among the White House, the US military, and the CIA. A major part of the planning was wiping out signs of the US’ involvement.
The sabotage operation’s stakes were high was clear to all involved with the operation.
According to the journalist’s source, the operation was actually an act of war, and some officials were in favor of dropping the idea of sabotage.
The Nord Stream’s possible role in Europe was clear to all including the Empire. It was opposed by the Empire from the very beginning of the project. Nonetheless, Russia completed construction of the significant pipelines. US Empire refused to permit the pipelines to function. Russia pointed out this part of the explosion incident: Who benefits from failure of the pipelines?
A few developments after the Nord Stream explosion are well reported. These include SMS from Ms. Liz Truss, then PM of the UK: “It’s done”. Another was one official’s saying: The US was doing everything possible to stop Nord Stream. After completion of setting up of the pipeline, it was also told: We’re going to get rid of it.
What was done? What step was taken to stop the pipeline? The questions lead to actors intolerant with the pipeline.
After the exposure by Hersh, Snowden, the famous whistleblower, in a tweet briefly mentioned the Bay of Pigs incident.
Snowden referred to a 1961-news report, in which Dean Rusk, then US secretary of state, denied that the Bay of Pigs incident was staged from the US soil. But later, it was exposed that the Bay of Pigs operation was a CIA organized operation to overthrow Fidel’s revolutionary government in Cuba.
File photo taken on 5 February 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a vial that he said was the size that could be used to hold anthrax as he addresses the UN Security Council in New York. (Photo by Timothy A. Clary / AFP)
There are other famous lies by the empire. These include the poison-vial story that asserted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had lethal chemical weapons. This was told on the UN podium with then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell waving a vial as proof of the chemical weapon. There are plenty of lies related to the Empire’s Vietnam War.
After these practices, the Empire calls upon all to follow rules-based world order, and have trust on its words. But who shall believe the Empire?
Even, the Empire’s proxies do not trust their master. They know the Empire would dump them at any opportune moment – when the Empire’s necessity so demands. This was experienced in many countries, including South Vietnam.
The Nord Stream sabotage exposure again exposes the “mainstream” media. The report exposing the sabotage has been ignored by the MSM, although, immediately after the explosion, the MSM placed blame on Russia.
Will it be possible to hush facts if further exposures of the sabotage follow? Will not continued silence or denials erode trust further? Powerful propaganda with participation of the MSM will not be able to stop this erosion of trust.
Following the sabotage exposure, Russia has demanded an international investigation of the incident. But, it is assumed that this demand will go unheeded. Immediately after the explosion, Russia had pointed to involvement of the US-UK in the sabotage. That went unheeded.
With this world order, the imperialist practice of marketing lies undoubtedly will continue. People, especially peoples in lands destroyed by imperialism, will not believe these lies, as their experiences always question statements from imperialist sources.
The Nord Stream sabotage shows a dangerous aspect: A powerful actor can sabotage any other initiative by any country if the initiative is considered harmful to the powerful actor’s interest. All countries will reflect upon this aspect, concerned for their safety should they try to leave the Empire’s orbit. It’s a characteristic of this world order.
However, it will be questioned: Is this the rules-based world order? It is no doubt a rules-based order, but the rule is the Empire’s rule, and the order is the empire order.
The post Does Anyone Believe the US’s Denial of Carrying out the Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Listen to a reading of this article:
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My sources corroborate Seymour Hersh’s report that the US was behind the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage. (My sources are logic, common sense, and public statements by US government officials.)
If Putin and senior Russian officials had said what Biden and senior US officials have been saying about how much they hate the Nord Stream pipelines and how great it is that they were bombed, every member of the western political/media class would blame Russia for the bombing, and we would never hear the end of it.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>FLASHBACK: BIDEN:“If Russia invades — that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine — then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it”
REPORTER: “How will you do that?”
BIDEN: “I promise you, we'll be able to do it.”pic.twitter.com/XGmFV4c9Qm
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 9, 2023
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>According to @SecBlinken, the Nord Stream pipeline bombing "offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come." Too bad that this tremendous opportunity for DC bureaucrats will come at the expense of everyone else, especially this coming winter. pic.twitter.com/T2eacQUuBF
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) October 1, 2022
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>At a Senate hearing, top US diplomat Victoria Nuland celebrated the Nord Stream 2 pipeline bombing:
"Senator Cruz, like you, I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea." pic.twitter.com/KS5OM4N165
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) January 27, 2023
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>Pompeo says US will 'do everything' to stop Nord Stream 2 project https://t.co/gnARiIAUhi pic.twitter.com/VZg6HIWrFM
— American Military News (@AmerMilNews) August 1, 2020
Russia would stand nothing to gain by bombing its own pipeline whose gas flow it could control on its own end, while US officials are openly acknowledging that the US benefits from it directly. It’s just so silly how imperial spinmeisters are falling all over themselves to dismiss a claim they all privately know is true because it’s so glaringly obvious.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>In this video I discuss Seymour Hersh's bombshell report that the US blew up Nord Stream
I also look at other evidence he didn't mention
Norway & Poland opened their own Baltic pipeline hours after the sabotage
US is now the world's largest LNG exporterhttps://t.co/8RCoWWwXni
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 9, 2023
The Nord Stream sabotage is like what 9/11 would look like if before 9/11 you had top US officials saying “Yeah we’re definitely going to bring an end to the World Trade Center” and then after 9/11 they were saying “It’s good that the World Trade Center was destroyed because it advances our interests.” The compilations of evidence we’ve been seeing that the US was behind this attack look a lot like the evidence compiled by 9/11 conspiracy analysts, except the evidence is way stronger and US officials are pretty much saying they did it in plain English.
It’s just a basic fact that conspiracies happen. Powerful people do conspire with each other, and they are often able to keep their conspiring secret for a very long time. It really is a cruel joke how our rulers hide their actions behind thick veils of government secrecy, punish anyone who tries to look behind those veils with harsh prison sentences, and then have the gall to smear those who try to form theories about what they’re doing behind those veils as “conspiracy theorists”.
Just something to keep in mind as the mad narrative management scramble to brand Sy Hersh a “conspiracy theorist” continues.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>Love how Reuters calls it a "blog post" to imply that Sy fucking Hersh is just some rando with a Tumblr account. pic.twitter.com/1BIu0Y1ysw
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) February 8, 2023
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The empire has been frantically ramping up propaganda and censorship because its “great power competition” against Russia and China is going to require economic warfare, massive military spending, and nuclear brinkmanship that no one would consent to without lots of manipulation.
Economic warfare, exploded military spending and nuclear brinkmanship all harm/threaten the interests of the rank-and-file public. Nobody’s going to consent to being made poorer and less safe over some global power struggle that doesn’t benefit them without being manipulated to.
That’s why the media have been acting so weird lately, that’s why dissident voices are getting harder and harder to find online, and that’s the purpose of the new “fact-checking” industry and other forms of narrative control. Controlling the narrative is growing more crucial.
It would never occur to a normal person that China needs to be made to submit to US interests and that economic sacrifices must be made to attain this goal which make their wallet lighter, for example. That’s the kind of change you can only get consent for if you manufacture that consent. The fact that the empire’s “great power competition” happens to be occurring at the same time as widespread access to the internet means that drastic measures must be made to ensure the empire’s information dominance so it can march the public into playing along with this agenda.
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So many Americans in my social media notifications bought fully into the shrieking hysteria about a fucking balloon the other day. Doesn’t bode well for how critically they’ll be thinking once the anti-China propaganda campaign really gets going.
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Still blows my mind how the empire can rob Americans blind, keep them poor, deprive them of all normal social safety nets, oppress them, exploit them, throw them into the largest prison system on earth, work them into the ground, and then convince them to be angry at China.
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All major US foreign policy maneuvers in today’s world are ultimately about preventing China from becoming an obstacle to US planetary rule. That’s all its shenanigans with Russia, Iran etc are ultimately about, and it’s what Ukraine is about too. If you don’t see this, you’re not seeing anything.
If you say you oppose US foreign policy toward Russia but not toward China, then you don’t really oppose US foreign policy toward Russia, because it’s the same foreign policy. They’re just two aspects of the same one agenda.
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Rank-and-file Australians are so pathetically aligned with US interests in their opinions because we have the most concentrated media ownership in the western world — a huge amount of it by Murdoch, who has been intimately intertwined with US government agencies for many decades.
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A sizeable percentage of the people who shriek at me for criticizing US foreign policy are Bernie Sanders progressives and self-described “anarchists”. Very few of the people who think of themselves as fighting the power and opposing tyranny actually do.
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The best measure of character for a journalist, analyst or commentator is whether they spend their time punching up or punching down. Are they always throwing shots at the world’s top power structure, or are they punching at weaker governments, other commentators, “tankies”, marginalized groups, etc?
This is the best measure of character because consistently throwing punches at the very top is the least effective way to rise in influence and build a brand, because those who facilitate the interests of the powerful will be uplifted and amplified by the establishment power structure while those who work against those interests will not be. Someone who’s only ever punching up as high as possible — never down or laterally — is more likely to be in it for nobler reasons than fame and fortune.
This is also a good way to evaluate your own character. Are you always punching up as high as your arms can reach? Or are you getting lost in sectarianism, social media drama, or power-serving attacks on parts of the rank-and-file public? How high are your fists going? It’s a good habit to check in on this from time to time.
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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, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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Feature image via Danish Defense.
The United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) arming of the Ukrainian defense against Russia’s invasion has turned the legacy of the Cold War into a hot proxy war, intensifying the danger of an even more catastrophic nuclear war. The prior threats to launch nuclear weapons by North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and former U.S. President Donald Trump had already raised this specter.
Listen to a reading of this article:
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Days after the war in Ukraine began it was reported by The New York Times that “President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has asked the Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, to mediate negotiations in Jerusalem between Ukraine and Russia.” In a recent interview, Bennett made some very interesting comments about what happened during those negotiations in the early days of the war.
In a new article titled “Former Israeli PM Bennett Says US ‘Blocked’ His Attempts at a Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal,” Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes the following:
Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in an interview posted to his YouTube channel on Saturday that the US and its Western allies “blocked” his efforts of mediating between Russia and Ukraine to bring an end to the war in its early days.
On March 4, 2022, Bennett traveled to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin. In the interview, he detailed his mediation at the time between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which he said he coordinated with the US, France, Germany, and the UK.
Bennett said that both sides agreed to major concessions during his mediation effort.
…
But ultimately, the Western leaders opposed Bennet’s efforts. “I’ll say this in the broad sense. I think there was a legitimate decision by the West to keep striking Putin and not [negotiate],” Bennett said.
When asked if the Western powers “blocked” the mediation efforts, Bennet said, “Basically, yes. They blocked it, and I thought they were wrong.”
Former Israeli PM Bennett Says US ‘Blocked’ His Attempts at a Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal
Bennett says the US and its Western allies decided to 'keep striking Putin' and not negotiate
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Russia #Ukraine #diplomacy #Israel #Bennett https://t.co/GBBkzbvwxG pic.twitter.com/CQK0BYGxcj— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) February 5, 2023
Bennett says the concessions each side was prepared to make included the renunciation of future NATO membership for Ukraine, and on Russia’s end dropping the goals of “denazification” and Ukrainian disarmament. As DeCamp notes, this matches up with an Axios report from early March that “According to Israeli officials, Putin’s proposal is difficult for Zelensky to accept but not as extreme as they anticipated. They said the proposal doesn’t include regime change in Kyiv and allows Ukraine to keep its sovereignty.”
Bennett is about as unsavory a character as exists in the world today, but Israel’s complicated relationship with this war lends itself to the occasional release of information not fully in alignment with the official imperial line. And his comments here only add to a pile of information that’s been coming out for months which says the same thing, not just regarding the sabotage of peace talks in March but in April as well.
In May of last year Ukrainian media reported that then-British prime minister Boris Johnson had flown to Kyiv the previous month to pass on the message on behalf of the western empire that “Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with,” and that “even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.”
In April of last year, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that “there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue, let the war continue and Russia gets weaker.” Shortly thereafter, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said that the goal in Ukraine is “to see Russia weakened.”
מאז שסיימתי את תפקידי כראש ממשלה לא התראיינתי.
עכשיו זה קורה.
אבל בתקופה סוערת ובעידן של סרטונים קצרצרים ופאנלים צעקניים, נעניתי לבקשה של חנוך דאום לקיים שיחה קצת אחרת.
שיחה מקיפה וכנה של כמעט חמש שעות, על הכל.
מוזמנים לצפות >> https://t.co/JTkpi3EBjh— Naftali Bennett בנט (@naftalibennett) February 4, 2023
A September Foreign Affairs report by Fiona Hill asserts that in April of last year a peace deal had been in the works between Moscow and Kyiv, which would presumably have been the agreement that Johnson et al were able to sabotage:
According to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.
In March of last year Bloomberg’s Niall Ferguson reported that sources in the US and UK governments had told him the real goal of western powers in this conflict is not to negotiate peace or end the war quickly, but to prolong it in order “bleed Putin” and achieve regime change in Moscow. Ferguson wrote that he has reached the conclusion that “the U.S. intends to keep this war going,” and says he has other sources to corroborate this:
“The only end game now,” a senior administration official was heard to say at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime. Until then, all the time Putin stays, [Russia] will be a pariah state that will never be welcomed back into the community of nations. China has made a huge error in thinking Putin will get away with it. Seeing Russia get cut off will not look like a good vector and they’ll have to re-evaluate the Sino-Russia axis. All this is to say that democracy and the West may well look back on this as a pivotal strengthening moment.”
I gather that senior British figures are talking in similar terms. There is a belief that “the U.K.’s No. 1 option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin.” Again and again, I hear such language. It helps explain, among other things, the lack of any diplomatic effort by the U.S. to secure a cease-fire. It also explains the readiness of President Joe Biden to call Putin a war criminal.
All this taken together heavily substantiates the claim made by Vladimir Putin this past September that Russia and Ukraine had been on the cusp of peace shortly after the start of the war, but western powers ordered Kyiv to “wreck” the negotitations.
“After the start of the special military operation, in particular after the Istanbul talks, Kyiv representatives voiced quite a positive response to our proposals,” Putin said. “These proposals concerned above all ensuring Russia’s security and interests. But a peaceful settlement obviously did not suit the West, which is why, after certain compromises were coordinated, Kyiv was actually ordered to wreck all these agreements.”
In his Sept. 21 speech, Putin said that Ukraine and Russia were close to a “peace settlement,” but that Kiev’s NATO backers intervened to “undermine” it.
Amid bellicose nuclear threats, this widely overlooked claim could offer a new off-ramp to peace. https://t.co/kEjUX6Ihh4 pic.twitter.com/qEttgevUk1
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) September 25, 2022
Month after month it’s been reported that US diplomats have been steadfastly refusing to engage in diplomacy with Russia to help bring an end to this war, an inexcusable rejection that would only make sense if the US wants this war to continue. And comments from US officials continually make it clear that this is the case.
In March of last year President Biden himself acknowledged what the real game is here with an open call for regime change, saying of Putin, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Statements from the Biden administration in fact indicate that they expect this war to drag on for a long time, making it abundantly clear that a swift end to minimize the death and destruction is not just uninteresting but undesirable for the US empire.
US officials are becoming more and more open about the fact that they see this war as something that serves their strategic objectives, which would of course contradict the official narrative that the western empire did not want this war and the infantile fiction that Russia’s invasion was “unprovoked”. Recent examples of this would include Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s speech ahead of Zelensky’s visit to Washington in December.
“President Zelensky is an inspiring leader,” McConnell said in his speech ahead of the Ukrainian president’s visit to Washington. “But the most basic reasons for continuing to help Ukraine degrade and defeat the Russian invaders are cold, hard, practical American interests. Helping equip our friends in Eastern Europe to win this war is also a direct investment in reducing Vladimir Putin’s future capabilities to menace America, threaten our allies, and contest our core interests.”
In May of last year Congressman Dan Crenshaw said on Twitter that “investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea.”
Indeed, a report by the empire-funded Center for European Policy Analysis titled “It’s Costing Peanuts for the US to Defeat Russia” asserts that the “US spending of 5.6% of its defense budget to destroy nearly half of Russia’s conventional military capability seems like an absolutely incredible investment.”
Continuing our support for Ukraine is morally right, but it is not only that. It is also a direct investment in cold, hard, American interests. pic.twitter.com/zlWoAVz3Kk
— Leader McConnell (@LeaderMcConnell) December 24, 2022
In May of last year US Senator Joe Manchin said at the World Economic Forum that he opposes any kind of peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia, preferring instead to use the conflict to hurt Russian interests and hopefully remove Putin.
“I am totally committed, as one person, to seeing Ukraine to the end with a win, not basically with some kind of a treaty; I don’t think that is where we are and where we should be,” Manchin said.
“I mean basically moving Putin back to Russia and hopefully getting rid of Putin,” Manchin added when asked what he meant by a win for Ukraine.
“I believe strongly that I have never seen, and the people I talk strategically have never seen, an opportunity more than this, to do what needs to be done,” Manchin later added.
Then you’ve got US officials telling the press that they plan to use this war to hurt Russia’s fossil fuel interests, “with the long-term goal of destroying the country’s central role in the global energy economy” according to The New York Times. You’ve also got the fact that the US State Department can’t stop talking about how great it is that Russia’s Nord Stream Pipelines were sabotaged in September of last year, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying the Nord Stream bombing “offers tremendous strategic opportunity” and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland saying the Biden administration is “very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”
The US empire is getting everything it wants out of this proxy war. That’s why it knowingly provoked this war, that’s why it repeatedly sabotaged the outbreak of peace after the war broke out, and that’s why this proxy war has no exit strategy. The empire is getting everything it wants from this war, so why wouldn’t it do everything in its power to obstruct peace?
I mean, besides the obvious unforgivable depravity of it all, of course. The empire has always been fine with cracking a few hundred thousand human eggs in order to cook the imperial omelette. It is unfathomably, unforgivably evil, though, and it should outrage everyone.
_________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
In order to understand why, the nature of imperialism, and thus of all empires, needs first to be explained (especially because almost no one knows about this):
Whereas a merely domestic dictatorship is no danger to other nations, an international dictatorship — or “empire” — is a danger to other nations, because every empire (i.e., each of the individuals who actually control it) craves to increase or expand its (their) control, and because this imperialistic craving is or ought to be part of the very definition of “empire” because every empire is built in that way (insatiable desire for growth), and also because any empire is heading for extinction to the extent that it quits this aspiration and abandons any area that it formerly did control. The difference between the regime of Franco in Spain, and the regime of Hitler in Germany, that necessitated a World War (specifically WWII) in order for other nations to protect themselves from Hitler’s fascism but not from Franco’s fascism, was precisely that Hitler’s was imperialistic and Franco’s was not. If Hitler and Hirohito and Mussolini had not been imperialistic, then there would have been no WWII. (The public in every nation were opposed to entering war against the imperialistic fascists but ultimately only the most rigid fools could any longer deny that the only alternative to war against the imperialistic fascists would be surrender to them — and so there was WWII. Isolationism and preaching ‘peace’ in the face of imperialists is short-sighted foolishness. That foolishness ends by being invaded: by means of subversion, sanctions, coup, and/or military action.) There can be no peace with an empire, unless it’s an expired one. Empires are the very engines of war, and of nearly constant war.
Starting from 25 July 1945, America became imperialistic — adopted, in fact, the goal of taking control over the entire world — when its new President, Harry S. Truman, decided to accept the advice from his hero, General Dwight Eisenhower (supported by the British imperialist Winston Churchill) for the United States to become not only an empire but the ONLY empire (which Churchill’s nation U.K., would, Churchill hoped, secretly control behind-the-scenes) and take over the entire world, but especially win the Soviet Union — and so the “Cold War” that was to be (so the fool Truman was led to believe) ‘between communism=dictatorship versus capitalism=democracy’ started and then became permanently installed by Truman’s immediate successor, President Eisenhower. Those two Presidents actually created the military-industrial complex (MIC) or the U.S. Government that would become controlled by the largest corporations (such as Lockheed) whose main or entire market would be the U.S. Government and its vassal-nations or ‘allies’ (such as Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the entirety of the former British Empire), which would be the customer-Governments for those U.S.-and-allied, or imperial, weapons-manufacturers. And, when the biggest weapons-manufacturers control the Government, rather than the Government controlling the biggest weapons-manufacturers, that isn’t merely capitalism, but it is dictatorial capitalism: it is “fascism.” In fact: it is imperialistic fascism — the most dangerous type of Government that exists in the modern era.
What Churchill in 1946 dubbed “the Special Relationship” (the umbilical cord connecting the U.S. to the U.K.) had actually been invented by the British magnate Cecil Rhodes, privately, in 1877, before it was institutionalized by Rhodes in his will upon his death in 1902. One of his friends and followers was the then-young Winston Churchill. The 1911 book Cecil Rhodes: His Private Life, says of Rhodes (p. 256), “He was very much entertained by Mr. Churchill’s ready wit and clever conversation, and he listened intently to his views on the political questions of the day. He admired his intellectual powers, which, in conjunction with his dash and ‘go,’ he said must inevitably bring him to front.” Whatever else might be said of Rhodes, he was both extraordinarily prophetic and extraordinarily effective. (Likewise so, is Rhodes’s follower in the present day, George Soros, who cites the philosopher Karl Popper but acts like, and channels, instead, Cecil Rhodes.) However, now, after Rhodes’s operation’s enormous success, starting on 25 July 1945, it is taking desperate gambles to continue in control, which gambles are effective only in a short-term sense because the sheer corruption within it is rotting it out so much as to be bringing it down. And that is what is happening.
The U.K.-U.S. operation is now in its decline-phase and is responding the more desperately and destructively as that decline becomes evermore clear. Its arrogance is placing such pressure upon their vassal-nations as to be increasingly forcing a breaking-up of “The Western Alliance” — the (U.K.)-U.S.-and-allied countries. Yet, at the same time, the U.K.-U.S. alliance is doing all it can to bring some of its vassal-nations, such as Japan, South Korea, Finland, and Sweden, even more tightly into the fold. However, any success in that regard will come at a higher cost to the U.K.-U.S. empire than has been the case in the past. To most observers, the decline and fall of “The West” is now at least as apparent as what had been the case during the Roman embodiment; and if the U.K.-U.S. will persist now, the result will be even more catastrophic than what happened to the empires of Germany, Italy, and Japan from WWII. It will be even uglier than WWII.
On February 3, I headlined “RT: NATO Nations Start to Go Public About U.S. Government’s International Dictatorship” and remarked upon how amazing it was that on that date, both Türkiye and Hungary were publicly insulting the U.S. Government. Such boldness and independence from two of the current era’s lone remaining empire’s vassal-nations (or at least they had been, up till that point in time) is historically unprecedented. How the U.S. dictatorship will be able to continue to call itself a “democracy” after having been declared simultaneously by two of its vassal-nations to be instead an arrogantly bullying dictatorship, seems hard to fathom. Maybe it will even cause some other of the dictatorship’s vassal-nations, such as Japan, South Korea, Finland, and Sweden, to have second thoughts about drawing themselves even closer than they already are.
America’s Government is on the war-path and has been since 1945, in the name of ‘freedom, democracy, and human rights’ but lying all the way and now getting too close to the precipice of WW III. How many of its ‘allies’ will stay with it to that end?
There is sound reason why global polls show that America is the #1 country that is cited as posing the world’s biggest threat to peace. Global polls didn’t exist during World War II, but if they had, then America certainly wouldn’t have been viewed that way then; probably Nazi Germany would have been. And America has risen to take its place.
The U.S. Congressional Research Service’s list of U.S. invasions (including increases in existing invasions) lists and briefly describes 297 such invasions after WW II (i.e., during 1945-2022, a 77-year period), and is titled “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2022.” That 297 U.S. invasions in the past 77 years is more than all of the instances put together during 1798-1945 — a 147-year period. And none of those 297 invasions was defensive. All were unConstitutional. Most of them were purely aggressions (some in order to help a foreign tyrant suppress his own population). America’s Founders had insisted there be no “standing army” in this nation. Until Truman established the ‘Defense’ Department and CIA in 1947, there wasn’t any. That created America’s military-industrial complex.
Anyway, Ukraine’s and Russia’s Defense Ministers agree (but NATO disagrees) that the war in Ukraine is between NATO and Russia, not between Ukraine and Russia; this is already WWIII, and the only significant question about it now is whether it’s going to reach a final nuclear stage. This will depend upon how far Washington is willing to go in order to persist in the objective that Hitler had, to control ultimately the entire world. And the likelihood of its going all the way to global annihilation will considerably reduce if the U.S. empire soon starts to break up. Which could happen, starting soon.
The post The US Empire is Starting to Fall Apart first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
From Russia to Sweden and the United States, there’s a growing network of White nationalist groups that stretches around the world. The reporting team at Verified: The Next Threat investigates how these militant groups are helping each other create propaganda, recruit new members and share paramilitary skills.
We are updating this episode, which first aired in July, to reflect recent activities by the Russian Imperial Movement and other white supremacist groups around the world.
We start with a group called the Russian Imperial Movement, or RIM. Its members are taking up arms in Russia’s war against Ukraine, which they say is a battle in a much larger “holy war” for White power. Scripps News senior investigative reporter Mark Greenblatt interviews a leader of the group who says RIM’s goal is to unite White nationalists around the world. The group even runs training camps where White supremacists can learn paramilitary tactics.
Russia’s White nationalists are making connections with extremists in the United States. Greenblatt talks with a neo-Nazi named Matt Heimbach, who was a major promoter of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Soon after Charlottesville, Heimbach invited members of RIM to the U.S. and connected them to his network of American White power extremists.
We end with a visit by Greenblatt to the State Department in Washington, where he interviews two top counterterrorism officials. They say they’re aware of the growing international network of White supremacists, but explain that White power groups are now forming political parties, which makes it more difficult for the agency to use its most powerful counterterrorism tools.
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Think about this …
The neocons lied to us about Bosnia, Serbia, and Kosovo.
They lied to us about Afghanistan.
They lied to us about Iraq.
They lied to us about Libya.
They lied to us about Syria.
They’re currently lying to us about Yemen, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, Colombia, and China.
So …
Why would we for a microsecond think that they’re telling us the truth about Russia and Ukraine?
I looked around at major Western media news recently. There’s not really that much on Ukraine now. At least, nothing compared to the deluge we were seeing back at the onset of the “crisis”. You know, back in February almost a year ago when Putin apparently snorted PCP and went on a completely unprovoked destructive rampage.
Why so little about the greatest threat to world peace since the Third Reich?
There are two reasons: 1) This latest iteration of the RUSSIA BAD campaign, which really got ramped up in 2014, has now brainwashed a sufficient number of citizens so they keep on waving their blue-and-yellow flags, certain their RUSSIA BAD/UKRAINE GOOD battlecry embraces all they believe to be noble and true, guaranteeing 2) that now there will be no public outrage over the oceans of money which will continue to flow into the coffers of the defense industry — because, you know, it’s ABSOLUTELY THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD THAT WE DEFEAT RUSSIA on the battlefield in Ukraine. More weapons, more bombs! More wasted tax dollars! More skyrocketing profits for the merchants of death. More fattened stock portfolios for the ultra-wealthy.
Yes, while everyday people are personally struggling with accelerating inflation, stagnant wages, job insecurity and shrinking opportunity, business closures, out-of-control housing costs, food shortages, energy shortages, baby formula shortages, on and on, and because of the exploding deficit — now pushing our national debt beyond the legal debt ceiling — there’s no relief in sight from Uncle Sam for us regular folks. Yet by some stroke of magic or divine intervention, there are limitless piles of money to send to Ukraine; plenty of funding to ship increasingly lethal weaponry to the psychopathic, neo-Nazi regime in Kiev, in order to keep the war going; plenty in the vault to vastly increase US/NATO military readiness in Europe; mountains of resources available to rebuild Ukraine, relocate its refugees, prop up its comedian/puppet/war-to-the-
I won’t get into the ongoing and demonstrably vacuous debate over Russia’s “real” motives, because what Russia’s priorities and concerns been clear for decades. Here is what President Putin said to the Russian Duma (the equivalent of our Congress) this past July 7, another critical speech which will get no mention in the Western mainstream media:
Our proposals to create a system of equal security in Europe were rejected, initiatives on joint work on the problem of missile defense were rejected, warnings about the unacceptability of NATO expansion, particularly as concerns the former republics of the Soviet Union, were ignored.
This should sound very familiar. Putin and other spokespersons for Russian national interests have been saying these same things for years. Putin’s historical speech at the Munich Conference in 2007 laid it out with jarring clarity. If the West wanted to understand, appreciate and respect Putin as the leader of the world’s largest country, acknowledge that as a sovereign nation, Russia, like every other nation has legitimate rights and interests to safeguard, that speech alone offered all of the needed insights and perspective, and moreover issued ample warning of what would be coming if things didn’t change. That was almost 16 YEARS AGO! As we all know — if a person’s not totally brainwashed and extends just a cursory glance at the current situation — not only did the trajectory of U.S. policy not alter course, America and its vassals in Europe doubled down in vilifying Putin and Russia, even manufacturing blatantly false news and slanderous innuendos, initiating crude and transparently illegal provocations, and instituting economic sanctions and seizure of economic assets with reckless abandon. England and the now deposed Boris Johnson, have been especially savage in this hybrid war effort and propaganda juggernaut.
Now we have a culmination of this treachery unfolding in Ukraine.
Keep first and foremost in mind that Russia was bound to react. The West knew Russia would react. There was no way it couldn’t react. If Russia were militarizing Mexico, training Mexican soldiers to fight the U.S., flooding northern Mexico with lethal weaponry, threatening to include Mexico in a hostile military alliance, flying nuclear-capable bomber sorties over Mexico, and had mounted an unprecedented propaganda campaign that stretched out over ten years to demonize the U.S. and its leaders (and throughout this entire onslaught of intimidation and hostility, those same U.S. leaders were warning over and over that Russia was crossing red lines and if the provocations in Mexico didn’t stop, there would be big problems), without time to blink, the U.S. would have reacted. The U.S. would have reacted big time! In fact, considering its record over the decades post-WWII, U.S. attempts to resolve the crisis using diplomacy would be minimal and superficial. It would have been bombs away with 300,000 troops swarming across the border. Tactical nukes would have been positioned, armed, and aimed in case our troops encountered any unexpected resistance.
Even more to the point of understanding the cauldron in Ukraine — and here’s what is commonly completely missed or ignored — the West wanted Russia to react. It was the plan from the beginning and that beginning got its start almost twenty years ago.
This was back in the early 2000s. Once the U.S. realized that Vladimir Putin was not a malleable drunk like Yeltsin, who would do the bidding of the neoliberal predators unleashed on Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1992, once the U.S. and its partners in predation in the EU realized that Putin was going to rebuild Russia as a world-class power, protect Russia’s economy and vast resources from further plunder by the West, and without resorting to extreme communist-style socialism, restore the government’s vital role in raising the standard of living for the Russian people, Russia was viewed in a hostile light, and increasingly portrayed as an adversary in the Western press. Russia as a military power — and yes, it still had a huge nuclear arsenal comparable to that of the U.S. — represented a real and menacing threat. Reminders of the Cold War, the extremely tense standoff with the Soviet Union which lasted four decades, became more frequent. Coexistence and cooperation were increasingly declared out of the question by the usual suspects, the bellicose and belligerent Project for a New American Century crowd and their puppets in the media. These world conquest, anti-Russian fanatics, which coalesced into the vitriolic neoconservative cabal now running U.S. foreign policy, mobilized and unleashed their longstanding hatred for Russia. Topping the list were influential insiders like Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Destroying Russia has been priority #1 for these psychopaths. Take it apart, fragment it, eliminate any possibility of its functioning as a nation, then go in, loot its vast resources, raid its economy with predatory neoliberalism, chalk it up as another conquest. Next move on to China.
All part of the plan, to push Russia to the point where it had to engage its military resources.
More to the point of this article, it’s all part of a huge con. The biggest fraud and ripoff in human history.
I wish I could use words other than ‘fraud’ and ‘con’ and ‘ripoff’. I sound like I’m talking about the Mafia. Street gangs. Thugs and scammers.
But it is what it is. I am talking about thugs and scammers. That’s exactly how the treacherous scum deciding our foreign policy operate. They threaten and bully. They use fear and intimidation.They lie with every breath they take. They manipulate and yes … they con and defraud us. We are subjected to deception and theft polished to a high sheen. And we innocently and naively keep falling for the propaganda. We let the warmongers continue with their wars, looting our national wealth along the way. The Mafia could learn a lot from the current crop of criminals in power.
The psychopaths behind this heist — of the truth and our future — are the neocons, who now swarm like a weaponized pathogen all over Washington DC. Their “gain of function” and increased lethality is the direct result of a ruthless power grab stretching over three decades, leveraging every means and mechanism available to promote their foul, destructive policies to the forefront. The neocons are now fully in control of our foreign policy. This equates to nothing less than endless war, the destruction of our political system, and ultimately the collapse of the U.S. as a world power and potentially its demise as a functioning nation.
We have no choice as citizens. These insane scumbags must be removed from power. PERIOD!
That begins with replacing our current legislature — both House and Senate — every last one of them. Why? Because for a host of reasons, everyone we have elected supports, enables, and is fully complicit with our corrupt, neocon-infested foreign policy establishment, with U.S. military aggression, our disdain for diplomacy, our arrogant chest-beating exceptionalism. The only means available to we the people of getting rid of the neocon cabal is electing a Congress that reflects OUR VALUES — we the people — not the priorities of the war industries, investment banks, the ruling elite. If we can gain control of Congress — total control, at least 300 in the House and 67 in the Senate — we can start to flush out our governing institutions and begin to reverse our disastrous, catastrophic direction as a nation, both at home and across the planet.
We achieve this takeover by creating real choice at the polls. No more having to choose between a war-promoting/military expanding Democrat and a war-promoting/military expanding Republican. WE MUST be able with our votes to choose between war and peace. This means running candidates in every election at every level who are 100% committed to ending the wars, significantly reducing the DOD budgets (by 50% or more), and creating a military engineered and equipped to defend our borders and national interests, not conquer the world for Wall Street and our predatory corporate interests.
Here’s my plan for creating just such real choice at the polls …
WHAT IS THE PEACE DIVIDEND STRATEGY?
If you have something better — a serious plan that’s not just more whining or dreamy-eyed fantasy but could actually work — let me know.
The post Ukraine: The Latest Neocon Con first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Sixty years ago, a crowd of us young people anxiously massed around a black-and-white TV in my college student union building. The US and the USSR were in an existential standoff. The US had deployed ballistic nuclear missiles in Turkey. When the Soviets responded by placing missiles in Cuba, the US demanded their removal or face dire consequences.
We all breathed an enormous collective sigh of relief when Nikita Khruschev publicly agreed to withdraw the Soviet missiles from Cuba. John F. Kennedy secretly reciprocated by removing US missiles from Turkey aimed at the Soviet Union. The whole world rejoiced. A close encounter with a war, which could have threatened civilization, had been avoided.
In the aftermath, a robust international peace movement demanded and achieved some successes including the Anti-Ballistic Missile and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaties. Those halcyon days are now over. The US is largely responsible for scrapping those disarmament treaties. The last remaining Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) expires in February 2026 and has faint prospects of being renewed.
Back in 1962, in the midst of the Cold War, it would have been unfathomable to think that we were living in hopeful times of relative security. But such was the case, compared to the current situation. The US and the USSR were both willing to step back from the brink of nuclear conflict in 1962. Both sides sought accommodation; neither sought victory. Now the US and its allies seek a mortal defeat of Russia.
No Exit Strategy
History has shown wars either end in a negotiated peace or in victory for one side.
The world was fortunate that the Cuban Missile Crisis ended with both sides willing to seek accommodation rather than victory. In contrast, the currently raging and indeed escalating Ukraine War could be the prelude to World War III because neither side appears to have an exit strategy; one by choice, the other because its back is to the wall.
The US’s intent is victory by “overextending and unbalancing” Russia in the words of the 2019 position paper by the semi-governmental Rand Corporation. As analyst Rick Sterling pointed out, this was the playbook for the US to provoke Russia into the current conflict. Bombers have been repositioned within striking range of key Russian strategic targets, additional tactical nuclear weapons deployed, and US/NATO war exercises have been held on Russia’s borders.
German ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel recently revealed that the western powers never intended to make peace with Russia. That admission explicitly articulated what had been long enshrined in US foreign policy. Sooner or later the mounting provocations by the US and its allies deliberately threatening its existence would have had to be addressed by Russia.
Expansion of NATO
NATO was founded in 1949 at the onset of the Cold War against the then Soviet Union and later against Russia. NATO was from the beginning not so much an “alliance” as it was a military extension of the US empire where all members had to be integrated with and under US military command.
From its initial 12 members, NATO had expanded east toward the USSR with the addition of Greece, Turkey, and West Germany, by the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. After that crisis and despite assurances to the Soviets and then the Russian Federation, NATO has expanded to the very borders of what is today Russia with a full membership of 28 hostile states.
Nuclear proliferation
The horrendous bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 marked the dawn of the nuclear era with the US holding a monopoly of this ultimate weapon of mass destruction. The Soviet Union defensively developed its own capacity by 1949, followed by the UK in 1953. Since 1962, the nuclear club expanded to France, China, Israel, rivals India and Pakistan, and finally North Korea.
Currently, the US has 1644 deployed strategic nuclear warheads compared to 1588 by Russia. The only other powers with strategic warheads deployed on intercontinental missiles or bombers are France and the UK.
All of today’s nuclear powers, according to the Federation of American Scientists, “continue to modernize their remaining nuclear forces at a significant pace, several are adding new types and/or increasing the role they serve in national strategy and public statements, and all appear committed to retaining nuclear weapons for the indefinite future.” The danger of nuclear war is ever greater, exacerbated by potential unintentional or accidental triggers.
US hegemony threatened
Especially with the rise of China as a world economic power, US hegemony is being challenged. Washington has not adjusted to an emerging multilateral world graciously.
The one third of humanity that has failed to be sufficiently subservient to what President Biden calls his “rules-based order” have been placed under asphyxiating unilateral economic sanctions. Western Europe, a would-be natural trade partner with their neighbor to the east, has been pressured to sever their economic ties with Moscow. And if there is a hint of hesitancy, the US simply uses force as it did to end the export of Russian gas to Germany via the Nord Stream pipelines.
However, the US has found that it cannot always prevail. Pentagon Plan B, accordingly, is a plague of chaos as has been the fate for Afghanistan, Libya, Haiti, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, etc. For the hegemon, a failed state is better than an independent one. Given the alternative of chaos, one that would make the fire-sale Yeltsin period look like a picnic (and one in which Putin was complicit), Russia sees no alternative but to try to prevail at whatever cost.
Normalization of nuclear war
Adding to the present danger is the normalization of war. When I was in elementary school, the US government’s policy was to bring home the fear of nuclear war in order to justify the post-WWII expansion of the empire’s military. So, us children were terrorized with “duck-and-cover” drills. Families were to sequester in their own private bomb shelters.
Now the prevailing propaganda from Washington is that nuclear war can be “won.” Dr. Strangelove is no longer satire. This planning to fight a nuclear war as if it were not an existential threat is institutionalized insanity. Symptomatic is the Smithsonian Magazine’s reassurance: “Today we live in a vastly different world…the threat of global thermonuclear war has mostly faded.”
However, Robert Kagan, spouse of the US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, asks: “Can America learn to use its power?” The neo-con then argues in favor of a vigorous nuclear confrontation with Russia on the grounds that Putin will most likely back down.
As if in response, the inimitable Caitlin Johnstone retorts: “It’s as rational as believing Russian roulette is safe because the man handing you the pistol didn’t blow his head off when he pulled the trigger.”
A pathway to a negotiated peace settlement is lacking
The Rand Corporation recently floated the perspective that: “The costs and risks of a long war in Ukraine are significant and outweigh the possible benefits of such a trajectory for the US.” Rand not only reflects, but also leads ruling class opinion. So, this analysis is significant because it backs off from advocating complete victory in Ukraine against Russia.
Unfortunately, not only does the Biden administration have no exist strategy to its wars without end, but it also faces little domestic opposition to this policy compared to former times.
While a handful of Republicans – mainly for narrow partisan reasons – have questioned the ever-expanding US war efforts, there is absolute war unanimity among Democrats. The Democrats have become the full-throated party of war. United with the neoconservatives, the “pimps of war” are charting the course of our future. Even some putative leftists in the US are beating the war drums to “support Ukraine’s victory against the Russian invasion.”
How I long for those days gone by when the choice of “better red than dead” was an option.
The post Nuclear War Is No Exit for the Ukraine Crisis first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Geoffrey Robertson says wealthy Russians using legal system to intimidate British journalists and publishers
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has helped “open eyes” to the idea of reforming England’s increasingly draconian libel and privacy laws, according to one of the country’s leading media advocates.
Geoffrey Robertson KC, author of a new book on efforts by the rich and powerful to suppress free speech, Lawfare, said the war revealed the cynical way wealthy Russians – and others – have exploited the English legal system.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Croatian President Zoran Milanovic became the latest critic to condemn the decision of Western countries, including the United States, to send dozens of tanks to Ukraine to help fight the war against Russia, warning that continued military escalation will not help bring the conflict to an end.
“I am against sending any lethal arms there,” Milanovic said at a press conference. “It prolongs the war.”
The Biden administration last week announced that it will send more than 30 Abrams battle tanks to Ukraine, while German officials confirmed they will supply Ukrainian soldiers with 14 Leopard 2 tanks. Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, and the United Kingdom have already dispatched tanks to the country, which was invaded nearly a year ago by Russian forces.
Conservative British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said last week that the continued military support for Ukraine will “ensure Ukraine wins this war and secures a lasting peace,” but peace advocates have long said that countries including the U.S. must prioritize promoting diplomacy between Ukraine and Russia.
“What is the goal of this war? A war against a nuclear power that is at war in another country? Is there a conventional way to defeat such a country?”
The Stop the War Coalition in the U.K. announced an upcoming demonstration last week following the announcement by the U.S. and Germany, saying, “Arming Ukraine and sending tanks is a step further away from negotiation.”
In October, progressives in the U.S. House said in a letter to Biden that “the alternative to diplomacy is protracted war” before distancing themselves from the statement under pressure. The White House has resisted calls to aggressively push for peaceful negotiations even from Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark Milley.
Milanovic’s most recent comments follow his accusation earlier this month that the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO) are fighting a “proxy war against Russia through Ukraine.”
“What is the goal of this war?” Milanovic asked on Monday. “A war against a nuclear power that is at war in another country? Is there a conventional way to defeat such a country?”
He also predicted that European countries will “pay the price” for becoming militarily involved in the way and that Europe will ultimately pour more resources into the effort to end the war through military might.
“America pays the least,” he said. “Not a single American tank will go to Ukraine in a year. Only German tanks will be sent there.”
Last week, he expressed hope in a television interview that negotiations between Ukraine and Russia are ongoing.
“Supplies of Western tanks to Ukraine will extend the war. If America and Russia don’t agree, and that’s not in sight so far, the war won’t be over,” he told N1. “I hope that some talks are going on, otherwise we are inching toward the Third World War.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Are America’s national interests best served by our stance on the Ukraine-Russia war? It is striking that within the Democratic Party, with its long tradition of anti-war activism, there are no prominent voices raising this question.
President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the influence of the military industrial complex on war policy. But he would likely fear speaking out today, even though the doomsday clock now says America’s stance on the Ukraine-Russian war has helped put all of us in the greatest peril ever. All the NATO countries disagree. As do the major newspaper editorial boards. Polls say about 90 percent of Democrats back continuing to give aid to Ukraine in its war against Russia.
As a consequence, no potential Democratic presidential contender dares to oppose the policy. Such public opposition would be labeled disloyal, even pro-Russian.
Yet history says the American people are being ill served by this chloroform of conformity. This is true based on an unimpeachable source: the American people.
In 1952, Eisenhower won the presidency by promising to change Democratic President Harry Truman’s Korean War policy. Even after Truman’s disastrous showing in the New Hampshire primary, Democrats stuck with the status quo. Ike won in a landslide.
In 1968, when little known Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.) announced his intention to challenge Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War policy, he met universal derision from the party establishment. They declared him a certain loser, indeed a flake.
A few weeks after a disastrous showing in the New Hampshire primary, LBJ quit the race. Democrats nominated Johnson war apologist Vice President Hubert Humphrey to the loud opposition of antiwar activists. Humphrey seemed a certain loser until Johnson suddenly agreed with his critics. LBJ said his emissaries would attend formal peace negotiations. Polls soon had the race statistically tied. But Humphrey lost a close election to Richard Nixon.
In 1992, polls suggested support from usually loyal Democratic voters for Republican President George H.W. Bush’s Gulf war policy made him unbeatable for reelection. All the big-name Democratic hopefuls declined to run. But little-known Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton rejected the poll results. He won the 1992 contest by the biggest electoral margin of any Democratic challenger since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932.
As has been famously observed, you make peace with your enemies, not your friends.
In 2004, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) originally backed Republican President George W. Bush’s Iraq War stance. But little-known former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.) launched the longest long shot antiwar presidential candidacy in four decades. He seemed poised to win until Kerry cleverly morphed from hawk to dove. Kerry won the nomination but lost to Bush in the closest reelection bid since 1916.
In 2008 Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) seemed on a fool’s mission challenging Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) for the Democratic nomination. But the underdog Illinoisian had opposed the Iraq War while Clinton supported Bush’s war resolution. Had she been willing to admit a mistake, she almost certainly would have stopped Obama’s campaign in its tracks. But she refused. He won.
Obama’s general election opponent had won the GOP nomination in part due to his support for Bush’s Iraq war policy. Obama won with the biggest Democratic margin of any challenger since FDR.
In 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces had been assumed an easy winner. The West therefore gave Ukraine the obligatory lip service. Russia had nuclear weapons, and the U.S. had no interest in poking the Russian bear. But the Russian army proved grossly overrated. Ukraine forces, led by formerly derided ex-comedian President Volodymyr Zelensky, demonstrated unexpected prowess.
However, without the West’s money and arms, Ukraine would have eventually lost. For nearly a year, America and its allies have funded the war against Russia. This put Putin in an increasingly difficult position both on the battlefield and at home.
Russia uses increasingly more powerful weapons in turn requiring the West to send ever more powerful weaponry to the Ukrainians. The end game is unclear. Peace must eventually come. But it will likely require the United States to make a commitment of hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild Ukraine.
The 2024 election cycle has only just begun. But the prospects are not good that we will have a serious presidential candidate who dares to disagree with current war policy. Never before has the chloroform of conformity been inhaled so deeply.
As has been famously observed, you make peace with your enemies, not your friends.
We can assume that any treaty will include America agreeing to foot the biggest part of the reconstruction costs. This amount may far exceed the funds needed to rebuild the schools for all the poor children in America. It may exceed the funds required to provide training for all the workers who will be put out of jobs by artificial intelligence.
We have a $31.5 trillion national debt, in good measure due to our military spending and forgiving trillions in debt as an incentive for other countries to forgo military solutions to problems.
It is not disloyal to either party or to the country to question a dangerous situation no one in America would have wanted a year ago. Asking the necessary questions is the opposite of disloyalty; it is the height of patriotism.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Listen to a reading of this article:
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If you say you oppose Russia because you’re an anti-imperialist but you don’t oppose the US empire for its role in starting and perpetuating this war, then you’re a liar. You don’t oppose Russia because you’re an anti-imperialist, you oppose Russia because you’re an imperialist.
The only people who say “Putin can end this war at any time by withdrawing” are those who deny the US empire’s aggressions which led to this conflict, which is just a nonsense garbage position based on lies. They don’t actually want peace, they just want victory for the empire. The real unbiased position which supports peace is wanting both Russia and the western empire to begin engaging in diplomacy, de-escalation and detente to end this war. But empire simps will call you treasonously biased if you support anything other than total Russian defeat.
This dopey propaganda-addled notion that the west did nothing wrong and Putin attacked Ukraine solely because he is evil and hates freedom actually prevents peace from happening. If one side only acknowledges the reality of the aggressions of the other side, peace is impossible. If you don’t understand how a war was started and perpetuated, then you can’t understand how peace can be started and perpetuated. The empire deliberately works to prevent the public from obtaining this understanding, because the empire wants war.
It’s not okay for grown adults to act like Putin is just running around invading countries willy nilly because he’s a crazed madman. You’ve got a whole internet of information at your fingertips. Use it.
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It’s impossible to overstate how much our society is shaped by the fact that those who are given the most influence and the largest platforms will experience our status quo systems as working very nicely and have a vested interest in preserving those systems which benefit them. The media-owning, culture-manufacturing class of the super-wealthy elevates people to wealth and celebrity who look like they will be good protectors of their class interests. Those people will necessarily speak fondly of the status quo political systems which let them be rich.
Two-time Academy Award winner #SeanPenn gifted his Oscar to Ukrainian president @ZelenskyyUa as a symbol of strength #Zelenskyy #Ukraine #UkraineRussiaWar️ pic.twitter.com/8UITVC9y7T
— CNBC-TV18 (@CNBCTV18News) November 9, 2022
These are the people who put on all the shows, movies and music almost everyone consumes, thereby engineering mainstream culture to the benefit of the super wealthy. It shapes the way the people think, speak, act and vote. What they feel entitled to. What they think is possible.
A rich celebrity who makes millions of dollars a year in a fun, easy and egoically gratifying job is not going to be spotlighting all the lives who are being destroyed by the status quo systems which elevated them. They’re not going to favor the revolutionary changes that are needed. They’re not going to be calling for a massive, sweeping overhaul of the systems which are crushing ordinary people to death and creating widespread misery; at most they’re going to be telling you to vote Democrat or Republican and quibbling about minor disagreements on tax rates. But these are the people with the loudest voices in our society — not just the loudest, but many orders of magnitude more amplified and influential than the voices of the ordinary people who are suffering under existing systems. These loudly-amplified rich celebrities shape and direct mainstream culture.
This dynamic plays such a massive role in hiding from mainstream attention the ways our status quo systems are exploiting, oppressing and abusing people while killing our biosphere and pushing us toward nuclear annihilation, that it’s hard to wrap your mind around how far it goes. The way everyone’s thinking about the world is so pervasively informed by perspectives that are favorable to the status quo prevents them from even noticing how bad things are for everyone else. It’s widely assumed that if you’re struggling in this mess, it’s because of your own failures. If any media you turn on depicts people who are doing basically fine and are content with the way things are while you’re barely able to keep your head above water, the take-home message is that the problem is with you, not with our systems. That you are what needs to change.
The failings of the status quo are hidden in mainstream culture, and people aren’t permitted to consider the possibility that there might be a better way for things to be. People don’t know, and they don’t know that they don’t know. They’re kept in the dark about what’s possible.
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People are like, “Oh yeah right Caitlin, it’s ALWAYS America’s fault. You’re always blaming the US for every conflict, just because it runs a globe-spanning empire which dominates the planet with violence and coercion and works continuously to keep all the other countries subjugated to it.”
They’re like, “Right, right, blame EVERYTHING on the violent unipolar planetary hegemon.”
It’s a lot like saying, “Okay sure we’re trapped in a room with a tiger, and sure we keep getting eaten, and yes your leg is missing and you’ve got a large bite out of your torso, but you can’t blame ALL of that on the tiger. It’s not fair. Some of it might be Steve’s fault. Steve’s kind of a jerk.”
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People whose opinions are grounded in facts and logic don’t need to resort to accusing those who disagree with them of being secret agents working for foreign governments.
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Blinken says the Nord Stream bombing "offers tremendous strategic opportunity" and Nuland says it's good and awesome that Nord Stream 2 was destroyed, so obviously the only possible culprit in the Nord Stream bombing is Vladimir Putin. https://t.co/dzCTWZKrfa
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) January 27, 2023
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Most people on this planet couldn’t give a shit who governs Crimea, but one small group insists we risk every life in existence on earth — every bee, every frog, every tree, every child — for their current t-shirt-of-the-week issue. It’s so arrogant.
It’s one thing to draw a line and say “The world must never let anyone cross this point, even if it means risking nuclear armageddon.” It’s quite another to make that line something as trivial as the question of who governs Crimea. It’s not legitimate to risk all life over that. This is especially true because the US empire provoked this war and because even the Crimeans themselves prefer to be Russian. But even if none of that was the case, it still wouldn’t be legitimate for the US empire to risk the lives of people in Africa or South America by backing an offensive on Crimea.
The correct response to anyone who supports this is “Who the fuck do you think you are? Who the fuck are you to risk the life of every human and non-human life on this planet over an issue only a tiny fraction of the world cares one whit about?”
All these armchair warriors saying “We need to be brave and take a stand!” are willing to gamble billions of lives who do not consent to being gambled over a war they’re not even fighting in. All while refusing to deeply contemplate what nuclear war would entail. They’re the worst kind of cowards.
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I just want the rapidly rising threat of nuclear war to be treated, reported on, and discussed like the supremely important issue that it is. It’s the single most important matter in the world and it just gets casually mentioned here and there like it’s just another issue.
It’s actually a huge problem that nobody wants to talk about the single most important issue in the world and everyone acts like you’re a crazy hysterical idiot for pointing out the very real ways we’re moving closer to that very real possibility. I’ve been writing about the growing risk of nuclear war for years and people have been calling me a delusional lunatic and a Putin puppet the entire time, meanwhile we’ve demonstrably and indisputably been seeing massive steps toward that outcome and it’s still being dismissed.
Even if you believe that all this nuclear brinkmanship is justified and good, you still need to fully acknowledge the reality of the risk and the unfathomable horrors that it would unleash upon our world. And you need to do it with all the respect and solemnity the subject deserves.
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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, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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Feature image via https://www.president.gov.ua/ (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
The U.S. war against Vietnam provides a rather close analogy to the Russian war against Ukraine. An analogy, of course, is not an equivalence. There are many differences between the two cases. But there are enough similarities that some useful conclusions can be drawn. Both Vietnam and Ukraine had been colonies, and both the United States and Russia are superpowers. In each case…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Listen to a reading of this article:
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“Why don’t you ever criticize RUSSIA’S warmongering?” is a question I am often asked with great indignation. People cannot comprehend why I would spend all my time criticizing the warmongering of the power structure I live under without spending any time criticizing the government they’re used to hearing criticisms of.
It’s a question born of delusion and propaganda brainwashing, and it has several good answers. Here are some of my favorites.
“Why don’t you ever criticize RUSSIA’S warmongering?”
First of all, I actually do sometimes criticize Russia’s warmongering, to the limited extent that I believe it’s necessary in a civilization that’s being deliberately saturated in maximum-amplification criticisms of Russia’s warmongering. That criticism generally goes something like this: Putin is responsible for Putin’s decisions, and the US empire is responsible for the US empire’s decisions. Putin is responsible for deciding to invade Ukraine, and the US empire is responsible for provoking that invasion.
It’s not actually complicated. If I provoke someone into doing a bad thing, then we each have a degree of moral responsibility for the bad thing that was done. So much modern empire apologia revolves around pretending that provocation is simply not a thing; that this very simple and fundamental concept we all learned about as children was just invented last year by the Russian government. It’s bizarre and undignified and people should feel embarrassed for doing it. You know what provocation is. Stop acting like an idiot.
“Why don’t you ever criticize RUSSIA’S warmongering?”
Why don’t I instead spend all my time criticizing the most powerful and destructive government on earth, whose crimes are always either ignored or supported by the political and media institutions of the English-speaking world?
Focusing one’s criticisms on the world’s most powerful and destructive government is actually the only normal and sane thing to do. It’s not strange and suspicious that I do it, it’s strange and suspicious that more people don’t.
The United States is the most tyrannical government on earth. It is currently circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and waging wars which have killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century. Its sanctions and blockades continuously target civilians with deadly force in nations like Venezuela, Yemen and Syria. It works to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates by toppling their governments via CIA coups, proxy armies, partial and full-scale invasions, and the most egregious number of election interferences in the entire world.
None of these things are true of Russia. Focusing on the world’s worst offender is normal, especially in a western media environment where that offender receives almost no meaningful criticism from major institutions. None of this means I think Russia’s government is wonderful and perfect, only that the government most sorely in need of criticism in our society is not Russia’s.
“Why don’t you ever criticize RUSSIA’S warmongering?”
Why don’t you show me a major western institution that gives an appropriate level of criticism to the warmongering empire I spend my time criticizing, instead of spending 100 percent of its time criticizing foreign governments?
What? You can’t? Because the entire western political/media class reliably facilitates the information interests of that empire?
Well okay then. That’s the imbalance I’m trying to fix. You don’t help restore balance in a wildly imbalanced information environment by spending half your time criticizing the governments that are always criticized in that environment and half your time criticizing the far worse offender who never gets criticized, you help restore balance by focusing your criticisms on the far worse offender who doesn’t receive anywhere near an appropriate level of criticism. Time you spend on one is time you’re not able to spend on the other.
“Why don’t you ever criticize RUSSIA’S warmongering?”
This is going to blow your mind, but I don’t actually have a Russian audience. I have an English-speaking audience which lives predominantly under the thumb of the western empire. That’s where my voice gets heard, and that’s where my voice can make a difference.
“Why don’t you ever criticize RUSSIA’S warmongering?”
The only reason it even occurs to you to ask that question is because you are surrounded all day by voices who spend all their time criticizing Russia’s warmongering and no time criticizing US warmongering. It’s what you’re accustomed to and what you’ve been conditioned to expect. Someone focusing their criticisms on the world’s most powerful and destructive government only looks weird to you because you’ve been conditioned by propaganda to see criticism of Russia as normal and criticism of the US empire as a freakish aberration, and because the imperial narrative managers have created a neo-McCarthyite atmosphere which frames all critics of US foreign policy as treasonous Kremlin loyalists.
Only in the most propaganda-addled of minds does focusing one’s criticisms on the world’s most powerful and destructive government look strange and suspicious. Only in the most brainwashed of brains does does focusing one’s criticisms on the most powerful empire to ever exist look like a sign of immorality, dysfunction, treason, or support for the Kremlin.
“Why don’t you ever criticize RUSSIA’S warmongering?”
Why don’t you go watch TV? If you’ve got some desperate, aching need to hear one more westerner offer one more criticism of Russia’s warmongering, simply switch on the nearest television to any channel and wait a few minutes.
“Why don’t you ever criticize RUSSIA’S warmongering?”
Nobody has ever once been able to provide me with a logically coherent answer for why I should spend any time whatsoever criticizing a government all western institutions criticize 24/7/365 while those institutions totally ignore US imperial criminality. I often get quasi-leftists much closer to the mainstream worldview than myself arguing that I should criticize both Russia and the US empire, but not a single one of them has ever been able to provide me with a lucid argument for that position which holds up to scrutiny. It’s always just some unexamined assumption they hold as a belief because they haven’t thought terribly hard about it.
Nobody can ever intelligibly explain to me what actual, concrete good is done for the world by one more westerner lending their voice to a message that is already being amplified as much as any message could possibly be amplified in the English-speaking world. They always wind up resorting to saying things like “Well it makes you look bad if you don’t criticize both” — like they transform into my pro bono PR agents who suddenly pretend to care very deeply about protecting my public image. Really they just want me to shut up and stop criticizing the empire.
“Why don’t you ever criticize RUSSIA’S warmongering?”
Because I don’t want to be a goddamn Pentagon propagandist. In a media environment that is being flooded with propaganda messaging designed to manufacture consent for more proxy warfare, militarism and nuclear brinkmanship, we all have to be very careful about what we put our energy behind. Throwing your weight behind “Russia bad!” messaging in such an environment is an irresponsible use of your voice, especially when you could be using your voice to call for de-escalation, diplomacy and detente and help people understand that they are being deceived.
Before they drop bombs, they drop narratives. Before they launch missiles, they launch propaganda campaigns. If you choose to lend your energy to the narrative control operations designed to pave the way to death and destruction, then you’re just as responsible for that death and destruction when it occurs as the person who hits the launch button.
You are responsible for what you put out into the world, and you are responsible for its consequences. Stop functioning as an unpaid empire propagandist just because it’s sometimes awkward not to.
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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, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Feature image via Pixabay. Formatted for size.
This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
One official enemy’s arms sales to another official enemy are frequently highlighted in headlines (New York Times, 9/25/22).
Russia’s use of Iranian-made drones in the Ukraine war has garnered substantial attention in flagship US news outlets like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. These papers’ first references to the matter came on July 11. Between then and the time of writing (January 24), the publications have run 215 pieces that mention Ukraine and the words “Iranian drones,” “Iranian-made drones,” “drones made in Iran” or minor variations on these phrases. That’s more than one mention per day over six-and-a-half months.
The fact that some of Russia’s drones are made in Iran is not only frequently mentioned, but is often featured in headlines like “Iran to Send Hundreds of Drones to Russia for Use in Ukraine, US Says” (Washington Post, 7/11/22), “Ukraine Warns of Growing Attacks by Drones Iran Has Supplied to Russia” (New York Times, 9/25/22) and “Russia’s Iranian Drones Pose Growing Threat to Ukraine” (Wall Street Journal, 10/18/22).
Drones are, of course, just one type of weapons export among many, and US-made armaments have not received similar coverage when they are implicated in the slaughter of innocents.
Middle East Eye (5/18/21): “The US has agreed…to give Israel $3.8bn annually in foreign military financing, most of which it has to spend on US-made weapons.”
One example is Israel’s May 10–21, 2021, bombing of Gaza. According to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Israeli military killed approximately 245 Palestinians, including 63 children, and “totally destroyed or severely damaged” more than 2,000 housing units:
An estimated 15,000 housing units sustained some degree of damage, as did multiple water and sanitation facilities and infrastructure, 58 education facilities, nine hospitals and 19 primary healthcare centers. The damage to infrastructure has exacerbated Gaza’s chronic infrastructure and power deficits, resulting in a decrease of clean water and sewage treatment, and daily power cuts of 18–20 hours, affecting hundreds of thousands.
Israel’s attack was carried out with an arsenal replete with US weaponry. From 2009–20, more than 70% of Israel’s major conventional arms purchases came from the US; according to Andrew Smith of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, Israel’s “major combat aircraft come from the US,” notably including the F-16 fighter jets that were bombarding Gaza at the time (Middle East Eye, 5/18/21). As the Congressional Research Service (11/16/20) noted six months before the attack on Gaza, Israel has received more cumulative US foreign assistance than any other country since World War II:
To date, the United States has provided Israel $146 billion (current, or non-inflation-adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding. At present, almost all US bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance.
I searched the databases of the Times, Journal and Post for the equivalent terms I used for the Iranian drones used in Ukraine, and added analogous terms. In the one-month period beginning May 10, just 15 articles in these papers mentioned Israel’s use of US weapons, approximately half as many stories as have been published on the Russian use of Iranian-made drones each month.
Rather than making a top journalistic priority of the question of whether their readers’ own government contributed to the slaughter being reported on, the New York Times (1/21/22) waits until the 23rd paragraph to bring it up.
A grisly case from the ongoing Yemen war is another worthwhile comparison for how Iranian weapons exports and their US counterparts are covered. On January 21, 2022, the US/Saudi/Emirati/British/Canadian coalition in Yemen bombed a prison in Sa’adah, killing at least 80 people and injuring more than 200. The US weapons-maker Raytheon manufactured the bomb used in the atrocity.
In coverage from the month following the attack, I find evidence of only two articles in the three papers that link the slaughter and US weapons. A New York Times story (1/21/22) raised the possibility that US-made bombs killed people in Sa’adah:
It was unclear whether the weapons used in the airstrikes had been provided by the United States, which in recent years has been by far the largest arms seller to Saudi Arabia and the [United Arab] Emirates, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which monitors weapons transfers.
The one piece that explicitly pointed to US culpability in the Sa’adah massacre was an op-ed in the Washington Post (1/26/22) that referred to “ample evidence showing US weapons used in the attack.” Thus the Wall Street Journal didn’t consider US participation in a mass murder that killed 80 people to be newsworthy, and the Times and Post evidently concluded that US involvement merited minimal attention. The Post (1/21/22) even ran an article that misleadingly suggested the US had ceased to be a major factor in the war:
The United States once strongly backed the Saudi-led coalition. But President Biden announced early last year that Washington would withdraw support for the coalition’s offensive operations, which have been blamed for the deaths of thousands of civilians. The Trump administration had previously halted US refueling of Saudi jets operating against the Houthis. Some members of Congress had long expressed outrage over US involvement in the war, including weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.
Yet mere weeks before Sa’adah killings, Congress signed off on a Biden-approved $650 million weapons sale to Saudi Arabia (Al Jazeera, 12/8/21). That means Washington is still “strongly back[ing]” the coalition, notwithstanding the hollow claims that such weapons are defensive (In These Times, 11/22/21).
David Ignatius (Washington Post, 8/24/22) refers to drones that explode when they hit a target as “suicide drones.” Are missiles that explode when they hit a target committing suicide?
The coverage of Iran’s weapons exports and the US’s also diverges in terms of the analyses that the outlets offer.
David Ignatius told his Washington Post (8/24/22) readers to “beware the emerging Tehran/Moscow alliance.” In the periods I examined, there is a marked shortage of articles urging readers to “beware” the Washington/Tel Aviv or Washington/Riyadh alliances, despise the bloodshed they facilitate.
The Wall Street Journal (10/28/22) contended that
Russia’s expanding use of Iranian drones in Ukraine poses an increasing threat for the US and its European allies as Tehran attempts to project military power beyond the Middle East.
The article went on to say that “the Western-made components that guide, power and steer the [Iranian] drones touch on a vexing problem world leaders face in trying to contain the expanding threat.” The piece cited Norman Roule, formerly of the CIA,
warn[ing] that the combination of drones and missiles one day might be used against Western powers. “This Ukraine conflict provides Iran with a unique and low-risk opportunity to test its weapons systems against modern Western defenses,” Mr. Roule said.
The US weapons that helped lay waste to Gaza and snuff out dozens of prisoners in Sa’adah are barely presented as having harmed their victims, and not at all as an “increasing” or “expanding” threat to rival powers such as Russia or China, or to anyone else.
A co-author from the “United States Institute for Peace” (Washington Post, 12/6/22) suggests sending “US military escorts” into an active war zone. What could go wrong?
In the New York Times (11/1/22), Bret Stephens contended that the Biden
administration should warn Iran’s leaders that their UAV factories will be targeted and destroyed if they continue to provide kamikaze drones to Russia, in flat violation of UN Security Council Resolution 2231. If Tehran can get away with being an accessory to mass murder in Ukraine, it will never have any reason to fear the United States for any of its malign behavior. Every country should be put on notice that the price for helping Moscow in its slaughter will be steep.
Of course, the UN charter does not give individual countries the right to attack other nations they perceive as violating UN Security Council resolutions. And needless to say, the Times, Journal and Post do not say that US responsibility for mass murder in Palestine and Yemen means that weapons factories in the US should be “targeted and destroyed” by a hostile power. Nor do they suggest that the US should be “put on notice” that there will be a “steep” “price for helping” Tel Aviv or Riyadh in their “slaughter.”
William B. Taylor and David J. Kramer argue in the Post (12/6/22) that Iranian drones are among the few “Russian weapons that work,” and that the US needs to “provid[e] Ukraine with missile defense, anti-drone and antiaircraft systems.” None of the articles I examined said that anyone should give military hardware to the Palestinians or Yemenis for protection against US-made weapons.
If these outlets’ concern about Iranian arms exports to Russia were about the sanctity of human life, there wouldn’t be such a gap between the volume and character of this coverage compared to that of US weapons piling up corpses in Palestine and Yemen. Instead, corporate media have focused on how official enemies enact violence, and downplayed that which their own country inflicts.
The post To US Papers, Iranian Weapons Far More Newsworthy Than Those Made in USA appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
The world is a frightening place at the moment. War in Ukraine, US hostility towards China, environmental and economic crises. But don’t worry too much. One Tory MP has written a four point plan to save the world. And at the centre of it sits Britain – and his own undeniable strategic genius.
Bournemouth East MP, ex-soldier, and hawk Tobias Ellwood sketched his plans for world domination in Conservative Home. His master plan involves beating Russia and containing China. And he says Britain is the ideal vehicle for this mission.
As an example of his smarts, Ellwood was an avid supporter of the plan to send more tanks to Ukraine, despite warnings it could escalate the war there:
Sending tanks to Ukraine is the right call but exposes the sorry state of our own diminished land warfare combat effectiveness.
Ukraine needs 300 tanks.
We cannot exhibit conventional deterrence ourselves with a fleet of just 148.
My joint article in @Telegraph @hamishdbg pic.twitter.com/Gl9yZjcaXX
— Tobias Ellwood MP (@Tobias_Ellwood) January 25, 2023
Ellwood warns us of “a new Cold War”, and attempts to present an answer:
…one grand strategy – the New Containment – comprising three interrelated operational actions: for Russia, for China, and for the West.
His proposals include, amongst other things:
He also tells us we must support Taiwan as a bulwark against China. He urges the government to convince the British people that China is a danger to us all. Nothing is said of the inevitable rise of anti-Chinese racism which would result. Ellwood also recommends finding allies in the Chinese diaspora and developing a parallel NATO-type organisation for Asia.
What this amounts to is moving imaginary chess pieces around a board. This is itself very much in keeping with the brand of analysis favoured by Westminster hawks. And it also somewhat denies the complexity of the situation at hand.
As for the West’s role in his plan, Ellwood opens highly originally – with a reference to Churchill:
In 1941 Churchill braved the Atlantic to meet with President Roosevelt and dared to speculate what a post-war world might look like.
He adds:
The resulting Atlantic Charter paved the way for the international economic and security model that served the globe well for decades.
The assumption appears to be that the post-war economic and security model (capitalism and imperialism) was in some sense effective or equitable enough to deserve a reprise. Though looking at the state of the world today – including Ukraine – one might feel the need to reflect a little deeper.
Could it be possible, for example, that many of the issues we face today flow from the post-war settlement of Western military and capitalist hegemony? This doesn’t seem to figure at all for Ellwood.
Our security architecture, Ellwood says, must not decline any further. By which he appears to mean the West’s capacity to make imperial war. Britain, however, is positioned to lead a renewed policy of containing our enemies:
Britain is well-placed to help lead this balancing act with our reputation as a nation that defends and promotes hard-fought standards and values. But we have become risk-averse and distracted.
Climate change, the most pressing global security threat of all, is relegated to a mention in the closing sections of Ellwood’s piece. And there is a weird sense from Ellwood that it is a battle that we are currently winning:
We have led in the most serious global battle of our times – climate change – but now we must widen our horizons further.
Ellwood’s article belongs to a distinct genre. There is a generation of hawkish scholars, MPs, and former military officers who spend their time trying to re-draw the map of the world in their heads – and then write terrible articles about it.
The themes are usually similar: nostalgia, power, decline, and more than a hint of bloodthirstiness. The assumptions are always nationalist, capitalist, and imperialist. These offerings usually try to reduce to the complexity of international affairs to worryingly simple to-do lists.
And that would be fine, if some of these people were not near the levers of power. That’s why this kind of dross must be challenged wherever we find it.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Cpl Lee Goddard, cropped to 770 x 403, licensed under the Open Government Licence.
By Joe Glenton
This post was originally published on Canary.
The 26 January JTA Daily Briefing arrived in my mailbox with the subject: “Major Israeli Raid in Jenin Kills 9 Palestinians.” I was sadly dumbfounded by the imparted insensitivity and inhumanity. Would any humanity-loving organization blare such news about the killing of the Other? Supposedly, the Oslo accords were a movement toward peace, but Zionist Israel has continued to wreak violence unabated, and Palestinians of every age and gender are the victims whether they be civilians or not. Yes, the violence is not only from one side, but the violence is overwhelmingly carried out by the Israeli side. And, when it comes to violence by Palestinians, one must realize that they have the right to resist oppression, occupation, siege, and violence.
Imagine what would have been the reaction in the West if a headline had appeared — “Major Palestinian Raid in Tel Aviv Kills 9 Palestinians”?
Such is the hypocrisy of the “West” that Israel can unleash lethal violence against Palestinians with scarcely a peep from the “West.” A Palestinian reprisal would undoubtedly be denounced in the strongest language as terrorism, and Palestinian officials would be called onto the carpet to unequivocally condemn the violence. Even the United Nations hardly comes across as a neutral party.
The US can steal oil in open daylight from Syria, and there is not a peep from US-allied countries. Palestinians know this all too well, as Israel has been expropriating Palestinian oil and gas for years. The US occupies Cuban territory, and there is hardly a peep from the US-alliance. Britain can steal the gold reserves of the Venezuelan people, and there is little complaint from governments in the West.
Western thievery has extended to Russia, as its bank assets were frozen by the US and by the European Union with the stated intention of using Russian assets to reconstruct Ukraine.
The peoples of Palestine, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela people, among other nationalities, suffer from US thievery and violence. As an accomplice or silent actor, this also points to the inhumanity of US-allied governments. These are the same governments that criticize Russia for its “unprovoked invasion” of Ukraine.
A Telling Comparison
What happened when one out-of-uniform US marine officer, first lieutenant Robert Paz, was killed by Panamanian soldiers in December 1989? US president George HW Bush launched Operation Just Cause [sic]. A US invasion of Panama happened. About 600 Panamanians were killed (half civilians) and 23 US soldiers. Panamanian president Manuel Noriega, the drug-running CIA asset (and a person who should have been untouchable by having diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Article 29 reads, “The person of a diplomatic agent shall be inviolable.”) was abducted and brought back to the US to face American justice.
Since 2014, following the US-orchestrated coup in Ukraine, a war has been carried out by the Ukrainian state, including its neo-Nazi fighters, against the predominantly ethnic Russian peoples of Donbass. Over 13,000 people had been killed, according to data from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.1
Consider that the US invaded Panama after one US marine was killed, but the killing of thousands of ethnic Russians (who had been clamoring for secession to Russia) was muted by the US, the self-same country which created the circumstances that filliped Russia’s Special Military Operation to protect its security from further NATO encroachment.
That the US invaded a country (many countries in its history) does not mitigate a Russian invasion of a country. But the invasions are not the same. There was no credible threat to US security from Syria, Palestine, Iran, Libya, Viet Nam, Venezuela, etc, but the US invaded or abetted the attack on these countries nonetheless. Russia has made irrefutably clear the security concerns posed by NATO missiles appearing on the Ukraine-Russia border just minutes away from Moscow. Russia was faced with an existential threat, a threat that the US would never allow (witness the US reaction to the stationing of Soviet missiles in Cuba).
This essential background information will not appear in monopoly media.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Immediately after the United States and Germany announced that they are sending main battle tanks to Ukraine — immediately, without any pretense of a decent interval — the Ukrainian government, backed by some East European members of NATO, has raised a demand for the latest U.S. fighter jets; and discussions of this within NATO are reportedly already under way.
So far, the Biden administration has described this as a “red line,” and West European diplomats have expressed private “concern.” But given that one NATO weapon after another that was previously seen as absolutely tabooed has been supplied since the Russian invasion began, Ukrainian officials have good reason for expressing confidence that the Biden administration and NATO will sooner or later agree to this.
If it is correct that several recent Russian missile strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure have been launched from long-range Tupolev bombers flying over Russian territory, then if the Ukrainian armed forces receive fighters capable of shooting them down, there is little reason to think they will not do so. They would indeed be perfectly within their rights. Whether it carries an acceptable level of risk, however, is another matter.
There are a couple of curious features about this progressive escalation of Western military aid to Ukraine; ironic in one case, extremely dangerous in the other. The first is that when Russia invaded almost a year ago, and most NATO military analysts predicted a sweeping Russian victory, there was no official talk of heavy weapons for Ukraine — and indeed, the Ukrainian forces stopped and turned back the Russian advance with a combination of their own courage and grit with light Western infantry weapons: Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.
The further the Russians have been pushed back, and the more deeply they have become bogged down in the east and south, the more Western weapons supplies have grown — in the name of defending Ukraine and preventing any future Russian threat to NATO. A more cynical view would be that when Russia really did seem threatening, the West was too scared to risk war with Russia by sending such weapons; and that the escalation has grown not with the Russian threat, but precisely with growing Russian weakness, a belief that Russia can be not only halted but crushingly defeated, and a growing confidence that Russian talk of red lines and escalation are empty bluff.
This is the second irony, and it is a potentially catastrophic one. By repeatedly escalating their own weapons supplies in order to defeat Russia’s conventional forces, while suggesting that Russian threats of escalating in turn by unconventional means are empty, the West is openly challenging Russia to make good on its threats.
This does not mean that the Kremlin would suddenly resort to nuclear weapons. If it did,God forbid, this would come only after several radical turns in the cycle of escalation. Other Russian responses are however not only possible but becoming increasingly likely: for example, attacks on U.S. satellites whose intelligence has done so much to help the Ukrainian armed forces; or on Western communications infrastructure; or on NATO embassies in Kyiv.
The advantage of such a strategy from Moscow’s point of view would be that it would not be a direct attack on NATO territory, and so would not automatically trigger a NATO military response. It would nonetheless bring NATO and Russia much closer to the direct conflict that President Biden has always said that he is determined to avoid.
Top Russian officials and commentators have said recently that Russia is now in effect at war not with Ukraine but with NATO; and a great many ordinary Russians appear to believe this — not surprisingly, since German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has just said the same. Leading commentators (including at the U.S. Helsinki Commission) and East European governments, have declared openly that complete Russian defeat in Ukraine should be sought in order to bring down the Putin regime. Some have called for this in turn to lead to the “decolonization” of Russia, code for the break-up of the Russian Federation and the destruction of the Russian state.
Given that these advocates of Western assistance for complete Russian defeat also portray Putin as a dictator determined to maintain his own hold on power irrespective of the costs to Russia and the world; and portray Russian nationalism as intrinsically and irredeemably tied to imperialism and military aggression, it is very hard to see why they also believe that faced with the threat of complete defeat, the Russian government would not in fact escalate by some form of attack on NATO.
Setting aside for a moment the undoubted illegality, immorality, and brutality of the Russian invasion, and analyzing on the basis of reality and reciprocity, a simple thought exercise is in order: Supposing the United States were fighting a war close to its own borders, with stakes that many members of the U.S. government and political elites believed – right or wrong – were existential for America’s survival as a great power or even as a united country; and supposing a hostile great power were massively and increasingly arming America’s enemy, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of American troops and the risk of complete defeat. Would Washington refrain permanently from some form of harsh retaliation? Perhaps it would — but I really would not like to bet on it, least of all if the stakes risked being raised and raised until in the end human civilization itself were on the table.
This article was originally published by Responsible Statecraft and appears here with permission.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Listen to a reading of this article:
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The other day I stumbled across a 2014 opinion piece in The Guardian titled “It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war” by Seumas Milne, who the following year would go on to become the Labour Party’s Executive Director of Strategy and Communications under Jeremy Corbyn.
I bring this up because the perspectives you’ll find in that article are jarring in how severely they deviate from anything you’ll see published in the mainstream press about Ukraine in 2023. It places the brunt of the blame for the violence and tensions in that nation at that time squarely at Washington’s feet, opening with a warning that the “threat of war in Ukraine is growing” and saying there’s an “unelected government in Kiev,” and it only gets naughtier from there.
I strongly recommend reading the article in full if you want some perspective in just how dramatically the mass media has clamped down on dissenting ideas about Ukraine and Russia, beginning with the frenzied stoking of Russia hysteria in 2016 and exploding exponentially with the Russian invasion last year. I doubt there’s a single paragraph which could get published in any mainstream outlet in the media environment of today.
Milne writes about how “the Ukrainian president was replaced by a US-selected administration, in an entirely unconstitutional takeover,” and about “the role of the fascistic right on the streets and in the new Ukrainian regime.” He says that “Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia,” and that “you don’t hear much about the Ukrainian government’s veneration of wartime Nazi collaborators and pogromists, or the arson attacks on the homes and offices of elected communist leaders, or the integration of the extreme Right Sector into the national guard, while the anti-semitism and white supremacism of the government’s ultra-nationalists is assiduously played down.” He says that “after two decades of eastward Nato expansion, this crisis was triggered by the west’s attempt to pull Ukraine decisively into its orbit and defence structure.”
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>In 2014 The Guardian published an op-ed about Ukraine by @SeumasMilne that would be shriekingly condemned as Russian propaganda today. I doubt there's a single paragraph in this article that could be published in today's mainstream media environment.https://t.co/Z7zRRbFrVo
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) January 23, 2023
Milne says “Putin’s absorption of Crimea and support for the rebellion in eastern Ukraine is clearly defensive,” and says the US and its allies have been “encouraging the military crackdown on protesters after visits from Joe Biden and the CIA director, John Brennan.” He correctly predicts that “one outcome of the crisis is likely to be a closer alliance between China and Russia, as the US continues its anti-Chinese ‘pivot’ to Asia,” and presciently warns of “the threat of a return of big-power conflict” as Ukraine moves toward war.
To be clear, Milne was not some fringe voice who happened to get picked up for one Guardian op-ed by a strange editorial fluke; he published hundreds of articles with The Guardian over the course of many years, and kept on publishing for a year and a half after this Ukraine piece came out, right up until he went to work for Corbyn. He was on the left end of the mainstream media, but he was very much part of the mainstream media.
This article would of course have drawn controversy and criticism at the time; there were many people who were on the opposite side of the debate in 2014, though they would’ve had a fraction of the numbers of the shrieking conformity enforcers we see on all matters related to Ukraine today. Milne himself says that “the bulk of the western media abandoned any hint of even-handed coverage” after the Crimea annexation, so his article would have been an outlier to be sure. But the fact remains that it was published in The Guardian, and that it would never be published there today.
Seriously, try to imagine an article like that about what happened in Ukraine in 2014 appearing in a mainstream publication like The Guardian in 2023. Can you imagine the hysterics? The histrionic garment-rending from the establishment narrative managers? The social media swarming of Zelenskyite trolls? This is after all the same media environment that pressured CBS to retract its story about how arms shipments to Ukraine weren’t getting where they were supposed to, and pressured Amnesty International to apologize for saying anything about Ukrainian war crimes.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>.@guardian column by John Pilger is worth reading: In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia | http://t.co/DVvcAjDB0Z
— Katrina vandenHeuvel (@KatrinaNation) May 14, 2014
Or how about this Guardian article by John Pilger titled “In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia,” subtitled “Washington’s role in Ukraine, and its backing for the regime’s neo-Nazis, has huge implications for the rest of the world,” published two weeks after Milne’s?
Pilger’s article is somehow even more heretical than Milne’s, saying Washington “masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government in Kiev” and that “Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park – run personally by CIA director John Brennan in Kiev, with dozens of ‘special units’ from the CIA and FBI setting up a ‘security structure’ that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup.”
As with Milne, Pilger criticizes the media environment at the time, saying “propaganda” about what’s happening in Ukraine is happening in an “Orwellian style”. But again, his article was published in The Guardian, whereas today it never would be.
Pilger has actually provided some background for this shift in mass media reporting, saying that there was a “purge” of dissident voices from The Guardian’s ranks around 2014-2015.
“My written journalism is no longer welcome in The Guardian which, three years ago, got rid of people like me in pretty much a purge of those who really were saying what The Guardian no longer says any more,” Pilger reported in a January 2018 radio interview.
Interestingly, a 2019 Declassified UK report found that British intelligence services began aggressively targeting The Guardian after its 2013 publication of the Edward Snowden documents, and found their in when the outlet’s editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger was replaced by Katharine Viner in March 2015. After that point The Guardian began moving away from critical investigative reporting and began publishing softball “interviews” with MI5 and MI6 chiefs and willingly participating in the west’s information war against Russia.
Once the western world plunged in unison into blinkered Russia hysteria after Hillary Clinton lost the US presidential election in 2016, we began seeing things like that time a BBC reporter admonished a guest for voicing unauthorized opinions about Syria because “we’re in an information war with Russia.”
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>BBC Reporter Discourages Syria Questions Due To “Information War” With Russia
"You know you’re in trouble when the military man tries to do the journalist’s job by asking questions and holding power to account… and the journalist tries to stop him."https://t.co/DVxR3JQ6S2
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) April 18, 2018
Whether or not you agree with the perspectives authored by Milne and Pilger is irrelevant to the very important fact that they could say things in the mainstream media in 2014 that they could never say in the mainstream media in 2023. The dramatic shift from a media environment where criticism of establishment Russia narratives is permitted to one where it is not permitted is worth noting, because it means there was a conscious shift toward converting the mass media into full-fledged cold war propaganda outlets.
A lot of things have happened since 2014, but nothing about what happened in 2014 has changed since 2014. It’s still the same year it always was, because that’s how time works; nothing has changed about 2014 other than the thoughts you’re permitted to voice about it in mainstream outlets like The Guardian.
This bizarre historical revisionism has been occurring not just in The Guardian but throughout the mainstream media. Last year Moon of Alabama published a piece titled “Media Are Now Whitewashing Nazis They Had Previously Condemned” which compiles many, many instances in which the mass media have reported on Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem over the years, and contrasts this with the way the mass media now whitewashes those paramilitaries and pretends they’re just fine upstanding patriots. In the years prior to the Russian invasion there were neo-Nazis in Ukraine; now there are no neo-Nazis in Ukraine and there never have been and you’re a treasonous Putin puppet if you say otherwise. Nothing actually changed about Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem; all that changed is the narrative.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>MoA – Apr 30, 2022:
Media Are Now Whitewashing Nazis They Had Previously Condemnedhttps://t.co/7suYcVyzdu https://t.co/jLsMc6kQpH
— Moon of Alabama (@MoonofA) December 4, 2022
Everyone should be aware that the mass media have drastically changed the perspectives they’re willing to publish on Ukraine, because it proves that these outlets are not working to help create a well-informed populace and facilitate important conversations, but are in fact knowingly operating as war propaganda firms. They’re not trying to inform people about what’s going on in the world, they’re trying to manipulate the way people think about the world. These two goals could not possibly be more different.
Power is controlling what happens; true power is controlling what people think about what happens. They’re re-writing history to influence control over what people think about the present. As old Orwell put it, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
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