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Category: Russia

  • Red Cross frustrated by lack of access to PoWs in Russian-occupied Donetsk

    ICRC responds to Volodymyr Zelenskiy criticism, saying it being refused entry to notorious Olenivka prison

    The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has gone public with its frustration at being refused entry to a notorious Russian prisoner of war camp after scathing criticism from Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

    In his daily evening address, Ukraine’s president accused the ICRC of a lack of leadership, suggesting that officials were picking up their salaries without doing their jobs.

    Continue reading…

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

  • We’re Being Pushed Toward Nuclear War On A Fiction: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    We’re being driven toward nuclear war on the completely fictional claim that Putin is a Hitler-like megalomaniac who’s just invading countries completely unprovoked, solely because he is evil and hates freedom, and won’t stop invading and conquering until he’s stopped by force.

    The news media aren’t telling people about the western aggressions which led to this war. They’re not telling people the US is keeping this war going with the stated goal of weakening Russia and is rejecting peace talks and refusing to push for peace. All people are being told is that Putin is another Hitler who won’t listen to reason and only understands violence. The world’s two nuclear superpowers are being pushed closer and closer to direct military confrontation based on a complete fiction which omits mountains of facts.

    To participate in this madness is indefensible. It is indefensibly immoral to foist a fictional version of events upon a trusting populace in order to manufacture consent for more and more aggressive acts of brinkmanship with a nuclear superpower. These people are depraved.

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    “No no you don’t understand, if we weren’t being told constantly by the media that this proxy war needs our full support and censoring the voices who dispute this and using giant troll armies to swarm and silence anyone who questions this, we might fall victim to propaganda.”

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    “You’re not anti-war, you’re just anti-AMERICAN wars,” said the person who is loudly cheerleading America’s proxy war in Ukraine.

    Warmongers don’t like being called warmongers when they support a US proxy war that was deliberately provoked by the US and is being sustained by the funding and facilitation of the US with the explicit goal of weakening a longtime geopolitical rival of the US. They get very upset when you point out the fact that they are doing this, and when people’s opposition to their warmongering is described as “anti-war”:

    They very much prefer to pretend that this time the US is on the good and righteous side of a war, because in that imaginary world they’re the cool anti-fascists standing up to an evil tyrant and those who oppose their warmongering are the real warmongers.

    “This time the US is on the GOOD side of a war! Also, goo goo ga ga I am a little baby with a little baby brain.”

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    The closer we get to nuclear war the less patience I have for sectarian spats between people who are supposed to be opposing war and militarism. Grow the fuck up and get over yourselves. This is more important than you and your ego.

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    Don’t let anyone tell you your criticisms of US warmongering make no difference; if they didn’t, the empire wouldn’t work so hard to dissuade you from making them. They work so hard to manufacture public consent for their agendas because they absolutely require that consent.

    An entire globe-spanning empire rests on our closed eyelids. Depends on keeping us in a propaganda-induced coma. Circulating ideas and information which discredit and dispute that propaganda poses a direct threat to that empire. That’s what all the censorship of dissent is about.

    Is your one tweet, video or public demonstration going to bring the empire crashing down? Of course not. But it will spread awareness by that much. And all positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an expansion of awareness. You’re nudging us all toward awakening to whatever extent you help expand awareness of truth and reality.

    We can’t be the Hollywood hero who single-handedly decapitates the machine, but we can all collectively throw sand in its gears, making it harder and harder for it to function. That’s what disrupting the imperial propaganda machine accomplishes, because that machine depends on propaganda. The weakest part of an empire that’s held together by lies and manipulation is its lies and manipulations; that’s why it’s such an aggressively protected aspect of its power. And it happens to be the one part that anyone with a voice can attack, and attack effectively.

    The nightmare scenario for our rulers is the same as the nightmare scenario for every ruler throughout history: that the masses will get sick of their rule and use the power of their numbers to get rid of them. That’s exactly what the propaganda matrix is designed to prevent.

    One aspect of this struggle that is a bit like a Hollywood movie is that it kind of is a struggle between light and darkness, because the empire depends on keeping its activities obfuscated and unseen while we’re all working to make its machinery visible and transparent. That’s why Assange is in prison. It’s also why internet censorship keeps ramping up, why propaganda is getting more and more blatant, and why online discussion is swarmed by astroturf trolling ops. Those in power are working against the people to keep things dark and unseen.

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    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    Feature image was posted to Flickr by Amaury Laporte at https://flickr.com/photos/8283439@N04/51909291570 (CC BY 2.0)

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Biden’s Broken Promise to Avoid War with Russia May Kill Us All

    Attack on Kerch Strait Bridge linking Crimea and Russia Credit: Getty Images

    On March 11, 2022, President Biden reassured the American public and the world that the United States and its NATO allies were not at war with Russia. “We will not fight a war with Russia in Ukraine,” said Biden. “Direct conflict between NATO and Russia is World War III, something we must strive to prevent.”

    It is widely acknowledged that U.S. and NATO officers are now fully involved in Ukraine’s operational war planning, aided by a broad range of U.S. intelligence gathering and analysis to exploit Russia’s military vulnerabilities, while Ukrainian forces are armed with U.S. and NATO weapons and trained up to the standards of other NATO countries.

    On October 5, Nikolay Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council, recognized that Russia is now fighting NATO in Ukraine. Meanwhile, President Putin has reminded the world that Russia has nuclear weapons and is prepared to use them “when the very existence of the state is put under threat,” as Russia’s official nuclear weapons doctrine declared in June 2020.

    It seems likely that, under that doctrine, Russia’s leaders would interpret losing a war to the United States and NATO on their own borders as meeting the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.

    President Biden acknowledged on October 6 that Putin is “not joking” and that it would be difficult for Russia to use a “tactical” nuclear weapon “and not end up with Armageddon.” Biden assessed the danger of a full-scale nuclear war as higher than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

    Yet despite voicing the possibility of an existential threat to our survival, Biden was not issuing a public warning to the American people and the world, nor announcing any change in U.S. policy. Bizarrely, the president was instead discussing the prospect of nuclear war with his political party’s financial backers during an election fundraiser at the home of media mogul James Murdoch, with surprised corporate media reporters listening in.

    In an NPR report about the danger of nuclear war over Ukraine, Matthew Bunn, a nuclear weapons expert at Harvard University, estimated the chance of Russia using a nuclear weapon at 10 to 20 percent.

    How have we gone from ruling out direct U.S. and NATO involvement in the war to U.S. involvement in all aspects of the war except for the bleeding and dying, with an estimated 10 to 20 percent chance of nuclear war? Bunn made that estimate shortly before the sabotage of the Kerch Strait Bridge to Crimea. What odds will he project a few months from now if both sides keep matching each other’s escalations with further escalation?

    The irresolvable dilemma facing Western leaders is that this is a no-win situation. How can they militarily defeat Russia, when it possesses 6,000 nuclear warheads and its military doctrine explicitly states that it will use them before it will accept an existential military defeat?

    And yet that is what the intensifying Western role in Ukraine now explicitly aims to achieve. This leaves U.S. and NATO policy, and thus our very existence, hanging by a thin thread: the hope that Putin is bluffing, despite explicit warnings that he is not. CIA Director William Burns, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and the director of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, have all warned that we should not take this danger lightly.

    The danger of relentless escalation toward Armageddon is what both sides faced throughout the Cold War, which is why, after the wake-up call of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, dangerous brinkmanship gave way to a framework of nuclear arms control agreements and safeguard mechanisms to prevent proxy wars and military alliances spiraling into a world-ending nuclear war. Even with those safeguards in place, there were still many close calls – but without them, we would probably not be here to write about it.

    Today, the situation is made more dangerous by the dismantling of those nuclear arms treaties and safeguards. It is also exacerbated, whether either side intends it or not, by the twelve-to-one imbalance between U.S. and Russian military spending, which leaves Russia with more limited conventional military options and a greater reliance on nuclear ones.

    But there have always been alternatives to the relentless escalation of this war by both sides that has brought us to this pass. In April, Western officials took a fateful step when they persuaded President Zelenskyy to abandon Turkish- and Israeli-brokered negotiations with Russia that had produced a promising 15-point framework for a ceasefire, a Russian withdrawal and a neutral future for Ukraine.

    That agreement would have required Western countries to provide security guarantees to Ukraine, but they refused to be party to it and instead promised Ukraine military support for a long war to try to decisively defeat Russia and recover all the territory Ukraine had lost since 2014.

    U.S. Defense Secretary Austin declared that the West’s goal in the war was now to “weaken” Russia to the point that it would no longer have the military power to invade Ukraine again. But if the United States and its allies ever came close to achieving that goal, Russia would surely see such a total military defeat as putting “the very existence of the state under threat,” triggering the use of nuclear weapons under its publicly stated nuclear doctrine.

    On May 23rd, the very day that Congress passed a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine, including $24 billion in new military spending, the contradictions and dangers of the new U.S.-NATO war policy in Ukraine finally spurred a critical response from The New York Times Editorial Board. A Times editorial, titled “The Ukraine War is Getting Complicated, and America Is Not Ready,” asked serious, probing questions about the new U.S. policy:

    “Is the United States, for example, trying to help bring an end to this conflict, through a settlement that would allow for a sovereign Ukraine and some kind of relationship between the United States and Russia? Or is the United States now trying to weaken Russia permanently? Has the administration’s goal shifted to destabilizing Putin or having him removed? Does the United States intend to hold Putin accountable as a war criminal? Or is the goal to try to avoid a wider war…? Without clarity on these questions, the White House…jeopardizes long-term peace and security on the European continent.”

    The NYT editors went on to voice what many have thought but few have dared to say in such a politicized media environment, that the goal of recovering all the territory Ukraine has lost since 2014 is not realistic, and that a war to do so will “inflict untold destruction on Ukraine.” They called on Biden to talk honestly with Zelenskyy about “how much more destruction Ukraine can sustain” and the “limit to how far the United States and NATO will confront Russia.”

    A week later, Biden replied to the Times in an Op-Ed titled “What America Will and Will Not Do in Ukraine.” He quoted Zelenskyy saying that the war “will only definitively end through diplomacy,” and wrote that the United States was sending weapons and ammunition so that Ukraine “can fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.”

    Biden wrote, “We do not seek a war between NATO and Russia.…the United States will not try to bring about [Putin’s] ouster in Moscow.” But he went on to pledge virtually unlimited U.S. support for Ukraine, and he did not answer the more difficult questions the Times asked about the U.S. endgame in Ukraine, the limits to U.S. involvement in the war or how much more devastation Ukraine could sustain.

    As the war escalates and the danger of nuclear war increases, these questions remain unanswered. Calls for a speedy end to the war echoed around the UN General Assembly in New York in September, where 66 countries, representing most of the world’s population, urgently called on all sides to restart peace talks.

    The greatest danger we face is that their calls will be ignored, and that the U.S. military-industrial complex’s overpaid minions will keep finding ways to incrementally turn up the pressure on Russia, calling its bluff and ignoring its “red lines” as they have since 1991, until they cross the most critical “red line” of all.

    If the world’s calls for peace are heard before it is too late and we survive this crisis, the United States and Russia must renew their commitments to arms control and nuclear disarmament, and negotiate how they and other nuclear armed states will destroy their weapons of mass destruction and accede to the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, so that we can finally lift this unthinkable and unacceptable danger hanging over our heads.

    The post Biden’s Broken Promise to Avoid War with Russia May Kill Us All first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Rejection Of Moscow’s Offer For Peace Talks Is Utterly Inexcusable

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday that Moscow was open to talks with the the US or with Turkey on ending the war in Ukraine, claiming that US officials are lying when they say Russia has been refusing peace talks.

    Reuters reports:

    Lavrov said officials, including White House national security spokesman John Kirby, had said the United States was open to talks but that Russia had refused.

     

    “This is a lie,” Lavrov said. “We have not received any serious offers to make contact.”

    Lavrov’s claim was given more weight when US State Department spokesman Ned Price dismissed the offer for peace talks shortly after it was extended, citing Russia’s recent missile strikes on Kyiv.

    “We see this as posturing,” Price said at a Tuesday press briefing. “We do not see this as a constructive, legitimate offer to engage in the dialogue and diplomacy that is absolutely necessary to see an end to this brutal war of aggression against the people and the state, the Government of Ukraine.”

    This is inexcusable. At a time when our world is at its most perilous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis according to many experts as well as the president of the United States, the US government has no business making the decision not to sit down with Russian officials and work toward de-escalation and peace. They have no business making that call on behalf of every terrestrial organism on this planet whose life is being risked in these games of nuclear brinkmanship. The fact that this war has escalated with missile strikes on the Ukrainian capital makes peace talks more necessary, not less.

    This rejection is made all the more outrageous by new information from The Washington Post that the US government does not believe Ukraine can win this war and refuses to encourage it to negotiate with Moscow.

    “Privately, U.S. officials say neither Russia nor Ukraine is capable of winning the war outright, but they have ruled out the idea of pushing or even nudging Ukraine to the negotiating table,” WaPo reports. “They say they do not know what the end of the war looks like, or how it might end or when, insisting that is up to Kyiv.”

    These two points taken together lend even more credibility an argument I’ve been making from the very beginning of this war: that the US does not want peace in Ukraine, but rather seeks to create a costly military quagmire for Moscow just as US officials have confessed to trying to do in Afghanistan and in Syria. Which would explain why US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the US goal in Ukraine is actually to “weaken” Russia, and also why the empire appears to have actively torpedoed a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia in the early days of the conflict.

    This proxy war has no exit strategy. And that is entirely by design.

    Many have been calling for the US to abandon its policy of actively sustaining this war while avoiding peace talks.

    “President Biden’s language, we’re about at the top of the language scale, if you will,” former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mike Mullen told ABC’s This Week on Sunday regarding the president’s recent remark that this conflict could lead to “Armageddon”.

    “I think we need to back off that a little bit and do everything we possibly can to try to get to the table to resolve this thing,” Mullen said, adding, “As is typical in any war, it has got to end and usually there are negotiations associated with that. The sooner the better as far as I’m concerned.”

    “One thing the United States can do is… drop the position, the official position, that the war must go on to weaken Russia severely, meaning no negotiations,” Noam Chomsky argued in a recent appearance on Democracy Now. “Would that open the way to negotiations, diplomacy? Can’t be sure. There’s only one way to find out. That’s to try. If you don’t try, of course it won’t happen.”

    “It is time for the United States to supplement its military support for Ukraine with a diplomatic track to manage this crisis before it spirals out of control,” said the Quincy Institute’s George Beebe following the Monday missile strikes on Kyiv, calling it “a major escalation in the war” that was bound to “bring the world closer to a direct military collision between Russia and the United States.”

    “The Americans have to come to an agreement with the Russians. And then the war will be over,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said at an event on Tuesday, adding that “anyone who thinks that this war will be concluded through Russian-Ukrainian negotiations is not living in this world.”

    It’s absolutely insane that the world’s two nuclear superpowers are accelerating toward direct military confrontation and they aren’t even talking to each other, and it’s even crazier that anyone who says they should be gets called a Kremlin agent and a Chamberlain-like appeaser. Responsible Statecraft’s Harry Kazianis discusses this freakish dynamic in a recent article titled “Talking is not appeasement — it’s avoiding a nuclear armageddon“:

    I have fought more than thirty combat simulations in wargames under my own direction for a private defense contract over the last several months, looking at various aspects of the Russia-Ukraine war, and one thing is clear: the chances of a nuclear war increase significantly every day that passes.

     

    In every scenario I tested, the Biden Administration slowly gives Ukraine ever more advanced weapons like ATACMS, F-16s, and other platforms that Russia has consistently warned pose a direct military threat. While each scenario has postulated a different point at which Moscow decides to use a tactical nuclear weapon in order to counter conventional platforms it can’t easily defeat, the chances that Russia uses nukes grow as new and more powerful military capabilities are introduced into the battlefield by the West.

     

    In fact, in 28 of the thirty scenarios I have run since the war began, some sort of nuclear exchange occurs.

     

    The good news is there is a way out of this crisis — however imperfect it may be. In the two scenarios where nuclear war was averted, direct negotiations led to a ceasefire.

    I repeat again that it is absolutely pants-on-head gibbering insanity that these direct negotiations are not already presently underway. Let us petition any and all higher powers we have faith in that this changes very soon. Let us also petition the leaders of our individual nations around the world to exert whatever kind of pressure they can muster upon Washington for these talks to commence. This brinkmanship threatens us all, and the managers of the US empire have no business playing these games with our lives.

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    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Whenever it Truly Matters, from Assange to Corbyn, George Monbiot cripples the Left

    Guardian columnist George Monbiot is, by his own admission, a very busy man. Dedicated as he is to issues such as soil loss, he has yet to find the time to throw his weight behind the campaign to free Julian Assange.

    When thousands of supporters poured into London from all over the world at the weekend to besiege the British Parliament, creating a human chain around it, Monbiot, like his newspaper the Guardian, ignored the event.

    Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, has been rotting in a UK high-security prison for years, as the United States works through a series of lawfare strategies to extradite him and lock him up indefinitely in a maximum-security jail on the other side of the Atlantic.

    Assange’s crime is doing real journalism: he published incontrovertible evidence of US and British war crimes in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. That kind of journalism has now been reclassified by Washington as espionage and treason, even though Assange is not a US citizen and did none of the work in the US. Plots by the CIA to murder and kidnap Assange have also come to light.

    Should his oppressors succeed, a very clear message will be sent to other journalists around the globe that the US is ready to come after them too if they disclose its crimes. The chilling effect on investigative journalism is already palpable.

    So, you might imagine, even a journalist like Monbiot – one primarily concerned about soil loss and other environmental concerns – should be worried by Assange’s fate. In the circumstances he might consider it worth publicising this threat to the most fundamental of our freedoms: the ability to know what our governments are up to and hold them to account.

    After all, Monbiot’s columns exposing the threats to our soil will be all the poorer if investigative journalism of the kind Assange excelled in before his silencing continues to be snuffed out by the US and UK’s joint terror campaign on whistleblowers and those who offer them a secure platform. How will we ever know what is being done behind our backs by governments and major corporations, or how they are keeping us in the dark about their political and environmental crimes and misdeeds, if fighters for transparency like Assange can simply be disappeared?

    But Monbiot is apparently not persuaded. He is yet to find the space or time for a column on this, the biggest threat to media freedom in our lifetime.

    When the Guardian columnist did take a week off from writing about soil loss and related topics, Assange’s plight, sadly, was still considered of insufficient import. As I have noted before, Monbiot decided it was more important to fill his empty slot in the paper’s commentary pages with denunciations of journalists like John Pilger for failing to be vocal enough in condemning Russia for invading Ukraine.

    Monbiot, it seems, felt he had to prioritise defending journalism from the menace posed by independent journalists on the left over any threat posed by the combined force of the US and British national-security states.

    But maybe the issue for Monbiot really is, as he has openly worried before, that he does not have anything sufficiently interesting to add to the topic because Assange’s persecution is already being detailed so fully by … a handful of independent journalists – those like John Pilger he wishes to bully into silence.

    Monbiot apparently does not need to dedicate a column to Assange, one that might alert millions of Guardian readers to the continuing persecution of a western journalist and the related assault on journalism, because independent left-wing writers – ones being algorithmed into oblivion by social media platforms – are covering the issue already.

    Breaking the rule book

    Those unsure whether Monbiot is arguing in good faith – and whether, aside from matters that touch directly on his environmental brief, he actually represents anything that can be seriously called “the left” – might consider his latest astounding tweet. He issued this one at the weekend, presumably adding so much to the burden of work that he could not find time to express his support for the human chain trying desperately to draw attention to the endless procedural and legal abuses at the heart the Assange case.

    Nonetheless, we should celebrate the fact that Monbiot took time from his busy environmental schedule to watch the first of The Labour Files, Al Jazeera’s explosive four-part documentary. The programmes draw on a huge cache of leaked internal Labour party files that show how the party’s right-wing bureaucracy broke Labour’s own rule book – as well as the law – to surveil, smear, bully and expel members that were seen as left-wing or supporters of Corbyn. Current leader Sir Keir Starmer appears to be colluding with, if not directing, this horror show.

    These Labour officials – who have been regularly termed “whistleblowers” by Monbiot’s employer, the Guardian – worked secretly to sabotage the 2017 election, including by helping to weaponise antisemitism to ensure Corbyn was unelectable, while at the same time demonstrating what looks suspiciously like a deep-seated racism in the treatment of black and Muslim party members, often because the BAME community were seen as stalwart allies of Corbyn, given his long-time activism against racism.

    So how did Monbiot respond to his belated exposure to The Labour Files? He tweeted:

    I’ve just watched Al Jazeera’s The Labour Files: The Crisis, about the handling of anti-semitism allegations. I found it deeply shocking. But I’m very unsure of myself on this issue. Have there been any rebuttals? Is there substantive evidence countering its claims? Thank you.

    Very unsure of himself? What surprising modesty and reticence from a journalist more usually ready with an opinion on a diverse range of topics – many concerning issues where he appears not to have read further than the headlines of his paper, the Guardian. Maybe it is too churlish to remember this 2011 Monbiot tweet on Assange, one that has fared badly with the passing of time:

    Why does Assange still have so much uncritical support? Seems to me he’s acting like a tinpot dictator

    Or how about his sudden and unexpected expertise in tripartite extradition law, between the US, Britain and Sweden? In 2012, he confidently observed:

    Harder to extrad[ite] him [Assange] from Sweden than UK, as US wld then have to go through 2 jurisdictions, not one.

    In fact, as people who know a lot more than Monbiot about such matters pointed out at the time, this was nonsense. Nils Melzer, an international law professor and the former United Nations expert on torture, recently wrote a book that set out good reasons why his lawyers would have assessed he was likely to be in far greater jeopardy in Sweden, where the extradition process was even more politicised than in the UK.

    Similarly, Monbiot has regularly chosen to offer his uninformed opinions on events taking place in far-off lands, from Syria to Ukraine. Why then the sudden loss of confidence when it comes to a matter happening on his doorstep, one that played out over seven years on the front pages of the establishment media, including his own newspaper, and whose evidentiary basis had been aired well before The Labour Files, in a leaked Labour internal report and the Forde inquiry’s report into that leak.

    Al Jazeera’s The Labour Files doesn’t cover much new ground. It deepens and enriches the evidence for abuses that were already in the public domain, including the collusion of newspapers like the Guardian with the Labour party bureaucracy in smearing as antisemites Corbyn and his supporters in the party, including many Jewish members.

    There has long been masses of information for Monbiot to get his teeth into, had he chosen to break with the enforced Guardian and media consensus and look into the matter. But like his colleagues, from the Daily Mail to the Guardian, he remained silent or amplified the lies rather than risk the career damage of challenging them as those independent journalists he so excoriates dared to do.

    Following the herd

    In fact, Monbiot’s seeming good-faith request for more evidence to assess the Al Jazeera documentary is treachery of the worst kind. Had he really wished to be better informed, he could have spoken long ago to Jewish Labour party members like Naomi Wimborne Idrissi who have been vilified and purged from Labour because they disputed the confected political and media narrative that Corbyn was an antisemite.

    Rather than show solidarity with them, or question what was happening, Monbiot once again followed the corporate herd; once again he ensured there was no one defending, let alone representing the views of, the British left as it was being defamed in the establishment media; and once again he helped to provide the veneer a supposed bipartisan consensus that Corbyn and his supporters were beyond the pale.

    In 2018, at the height of the antisemitism witch-hunt, Monbiot tweeted:

    It dismays me to say it, as someone who has invested so much hope in the current Labour Party, but I think @shattenstone is right: Jeremy Corbyn’s 2013 comments about “Zionists” were antisemitic and unacceptable.

    There is a reason that Monbiot suddenly professes to be interested in questioning whether the rampant, evidence-free antisemitism claims against Corbyn and large swaths of the Labour party were valid. Because, with the broadcasting of the Al-Jazeera documentary, he finds himself increasingly cornered. He looks ever more the charlatan, a journalist who withdrew from the struggle, standing silently by while the only chance to stop Britain’s endless political drift rightwards was eviscerated with lies promoted by the corporate media that pays his salary.

    And he did so, of course, in tandem with the campaign cheer-led by his own newspaper, the Guardian, to demonise the Labour left, as Al Jazeera documents.

    Rather than take a stand against the McCarthyism occurring right under his nose, witch-hunts that destroyed the British left’s chances of making the Labour party a meaningful alternative to the Conservatives’ “free market” zealotry, he focused his guns on left-wing journalists. He misrepresented as apologism for Putin their critiques of western hypocrisy and of Nato’s pursuit of a proxy war in Ukraine.

    Monbiot is a bad-faith actor for a further reason. Here is a reminder of his faux-naïve questions about The Labour Files:

    Have there been any rebuttals? Is there substantive evidence countering its claims?

    These hollow concerns should stick in his craw. Monbiot is a journalist. He knows as well as I do that Al Jazeera lawyered its programmes over and over again until it was certain that every part of them could be stood up, knowing that otherwise they would attract law suits like flies to a carcass. The feeding frenzy would have crippled the station.

    Monbiot knows, as I do, that if Al Jazeera had made a single solitary slip-up, the BBC, the Guardian and everyone else would be using it to discredit all the other claims in the four programmes. The noise would drown out every other issue raised in the programme.

    Monbiot knows, as I do, that the blanket silence from a corporate media deeply implicated in the fabrication of the Labour antisemitism narrative is proof alone that Al Jazeera’s claims are true – as are the deceitful responses from senior Labour politicians who, when challenged, profess not to have watched, or in some cases even heard of, the documentary. One doesn’t need to be a veteran poker player to spot the tell in that conspiracy of silence.

    Monbiot knows all of this. He is playing dumb, in the hope that his followers will fall for his act. In asking his questions, he is not trying to shed light on the Al Jazeera revelations. He is trying to keep those revelations obscured, in deep shadow, for a little longer.

    CIA talking points

    There is a pattern with Monbiot, one that he has been repeating for years. His position on every major issue, aside from his genuine passion for the environment, chimes precisely with that of his employer, the Guardian. He goes only as far as he is given licence to. He is not on the left, he is not a dissident, he is not even his own man. He is owned. He is a salary man. He is a corporate stooge.

    Even his environmentalism, invaluable as it invariably is, has been cynically weaponised by the Guardian. It provides a hook to draw in leftists who might stray elsewhere – and thereby help fund genuinely independent outlets – were they not offered a sop to keep them loyal to the Guardian corporate brand. Monbiot is the media equivalent of a promotional line to keep a supermarket’s shoppers satisfied.

    On foreign affairs, he promotes CIA talking points, advancing Washington’s ever expanding, ever more lucrative war on terror – wars that ravage the environment he supposedly cares about and constantly deflect our energies and attention from doing anything to tackle the ever more urgent climate crisis.

    He readily castigates anyone who tries to point this out as a Putin apologist, choking off the ability of the left – the one group equipped to challenge establishment propaganda – to air meaningful foreign policy debates.

    At home, he has equivocated on the biggest, most vital issues of our times.

    He indulged the Corbyn smears, even when it meant ushering in a fanatical right-wing government that is driving the destruction of the environment at break-neck speed. Even now, he professes doubts about the latest weighty evidence from Al Jazeera that confirms the earlier, equally weighty evidence that those smears were never rooted in any kind of reality.

    He has whispered his support for Assange, while doing nothing to galvanise the left into fighting not only for Assange’s personal freedom but for the freedoms of other journalists and the whistleblowers they depend on. In doing so, he has stifled efforts to shine a light into the very darkest corners of the machinery of the security state so that the public can know what is being done in its name. And further, in abandoning Assange he has abandoned the only journalist who had built a counter-weight, in Wikileaks, to take on that machinery.

    Far more is at stake here than simply griping about Monbiot’s failings. Just as Monbiot follows the company line set by the Guardian, never daring to stray far from the path laid down for him, so much of the left all too readily follows Monbiot, taking their cues from his take on events even though all too often he is simply regurgitating the consensus of the liberal wing of the establishment in which the Guardian is embedded.

    Monbiot is treated by much of the left as a figurehead, one whose environmentalism earns him credibility and credit with the left on foreign policy issues, from Syria to Ukraine, in which he echoes the same talking points one hears from Keir Starmer to Liz Truss. While on matters at home, like Assange and Corbyn, he sucks the wind out of the left’s sails.

    As the saying goes, if Monbiot did not exist, the establishment would have had to invent him. Their dirty work looks so much cleaner with him onboard.

    The post Whenever it Truly Matters, from Assange to Corbyn, George Monbiot cripples the Left first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Top Senate Democrat Vows to Block All Future Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia

    The Democratic chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee pledged late Monday to block all future U.S. weapons sales to Saudi Arabia as backlash over OPEC’s decision to cut oil production and push up gas prices continues to grow on Capitol Hill.

    Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), who has veto power over foreign arms sales, said in a statement that OPEC’s plan to slash production by two million barrels a day in a bid to prop up oil prices amounts to a “decision to help underwrite Putin’s war.” Russia, an OPEC ally, stands to benefit from higher oil prices without having to reduce its own production.

    “The United States must immediately freeze all aspects of our cooperation with Saudi Arabia, including any arms sales and security cooperation beyond what is absolutely necessary to defend U.S. personnel and interests,” Menendez said Monday. “As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I will not green-light any cooperation with Riyadh until the kingdom reassesses its position with respect to the war in Ukraine. Enough is enough.”

    With his statement, Menendez — a war hawk — joined progressive lawmakers such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) in demanding an end to U.S. military aid to the Saudis, the largest buyer of American weaponry.

    On Sunday, Khanna and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) announced legislation that would “immediately halt all U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia.” Last week, three House Democrats introduced a bill that would require the removal of U.S. troops and missile defense systems from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, a leading member of the OPEC cartel.

    Over the past several years, the U.S. has approved tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons sales to the Saudis as they’ve waged a catastrophic war on Yemen, sparking a massive humanitarian crisis. The U.S. has also cooperated with the Saudis militarily in other ways, including by refueling the oil kingdom’s warplanes, supplying fighter jet parts, and teaming up with the country’s murderous leadership to build high-tech bomb parts.

    Recent congressional efforts to block arms sales to the Saudis — including major deals approved by the Biden administration — have fallen short, but the OPEC decision could mark a key turning point as top Democratic lawmakers demand a complete reevaluation of U.S.-Saudi relations.

    Just over a year ago, Menendez notably opposed a Senate resolution that aimed to block a $650 million sale of missiles to the Saudis. The bipartisan resolution ultimately failed to clear the upper chamber.

    In a statement last week, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) — the chamber’s second-ranking Democrat and a supporter of previous attempts to block arms sales to the Saudis — declared that “it’s time for our foreign policy to imagine a world without this alliance with these royal backstabbers.”

    “From unanswered questions about 9/11, the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and the exporting of extremism, to dubious jailing of peaceful dissidents and conspiring with Vladimir Putin to punish the U.S. with higher oil prices, the Saudi royal family has never been a trustworthy ally of our nation,” Durbin said.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Evolving Big Brains Only To Go Extinct From Stupidity: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    It’s really too bad that anyone who thinks it might be a good idea to stop exponentially escalating this proxy war is an evil Nazi Putin propagandist, because things are getting very very dangerous.

    Normal person: I think it would be good if everyone didn’t die in a nuclear holocaust.

    Crazy person: That means you love Vladimir Putin.

    Normal person: No I just think it would be a good idea to try to prevent the horrific death of literally everyone.

    Crazy person: How much is the Kremlin paying you to say that?

    Fucking lunatics.

    Resisting nuclear armageddon is the least partisan position that anyone could possibly have. The least one-sided. The least “campist”. It’s just being a normal human organism with the most normal human impulse you could possibly come up with. It’s absolutely insane that anyone tries to spin it otherwise.

    A society where opposing nuclear armageddon is treated as freakish and evil is the most backwards and insane society imaginable. Seriously, try to imagine anything crazier and more backwards than that. A society where everyone walks and drives backwards? That’s less crazy and backwards. A society where the dogs own the people? That’s less crazy and backwards.

    This is it. This is peak crazy. A thinking species which regards as outrageous heresy any opposition to brinkmanship that can cause its extinction cannot get any more crazy. It’s turned as far away from sanity as any thinking creature could possibly be.

    ❖

    Maybe it would be wise to stop playing the “Let’s cross Putin’s red lines, I bet he’s bluffing this time” game.

    ❖

    People who aren’t gravely concerned about the rapidly escalating brinkmanship between the US and Russia simply have not spent enough time researching the facts and contemplating the reality of what nuclear war would mean. Their composure comes solely from psychological avoidance.

    ❖

    It is a bit hilarious that humans rapidly evolved these massive brains only to become the first species to go extinct due to stupidity.

    ❖

    FYI you should always be less trusting of your government in times of war, not more.

    ❖

    Analysis of the war in Ukraine which does not account for the western provocations which gave rise to it is not analysis at all. It’s propagandistic children’s literature.

    ❖

    If your proxy war demands nonstop PR spin and mass media propaganda at maximum aggression to manufacture public consent for it, maybe your proxy war is immoral and bad.

    ❖

    ❖

    The only way you can believe Russia is threatening with nuclear weapons in a way the US is not would be to think the US has a No First Use nuclear policy. Which would of course be false and silly.

    ❖

    When one side of the new cold war wants multipolarity where world power is much less centralized and the other side wants unipolar planetary domination where the entire world obeys Washington DC and its puppet masters, it’s not hard to figure out which side is the aggressor.

    ❖

    Be completely dismissive of those who object to your criticisms of western imperial aggression. The one and only reason they expect their dopey opinions to be taken seriously is because their position has been artificially normalized by copious amounts of propaganda. That’s it.

    The one and only thing making your worldview look strange and suspicious and the worldview of empire apologists look normal is the fact that we’ve all been swimming in empire propaganda our entire lives. It’s got nothing to do with the factuality or validity of anyone’s position. In reality, focusing one’s criticisms on the most dangerous impulses of the most powerful and destructive power structure on earth is the normal thing to do. It’s not strange and suspicious when you do it, it’s strange and suspicious that everyone else does not.

    ______________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Russian Army Fires Old Sparky: US Loses the Electric War in Ukraine

    Introductory annotation by Patrice Greanville, editor of the Greanville Post:

    As we could reliably predict, the Western media are self-righteously denouncing Moscow and rending their garments in an orgy of hypocrisy over what they frame as an act of “depraved terror”.  Unfortunately, the hundreds of millions in the captive audience have nowhere to turn (or know how) to find out the truth and the proper historical context for the Ukraine war, the first thing the Western media suppressed even before the war formally began last February.

    It must be noted that this sudden “rain of missiles” is virtually inexplicable if we follow Western media reports. The explanation for this contradiction is given by Moon of Alabama, who, with great irony but with 100% accuracy, headlines its 10 October dispatch, “Russia, Having ‘Run Out Of Missiles’, Launches Barrage On Ukraine,” adding,

    Back in March I had warned that Lies Do Not Win Wars. Here is another practical example.
    After allegedly having ‘run out of missiles’ and, more importantly, patience, the leadership of the Russian Federation decided to de-electrify Ukrainian cities with a ‘barrage of missile strikes’.

    MoA then lists no less than 25 examples of Western media proclaiming with great seriousness that Putin was about to run out of missiles. This pathetic campaign (see a sample from MoA below), one of many strands pushed by the West’s Big Lie ministry, which has been simply totalitarian when “covering” the Ukraine conflict,  went on from March to the present. We expect it to now finally halt, if for sheer decency, which they apparently lack, for no other reason than the impossibility of denying the obvious:

    BUT, since objectivity is for Journalism School chumps and not serious matters like imperial propaganda, the press is wasting no time to milk the latest news for maximum Russophobic effect. Unsurprising then to find CBS, a major US engine of shameless disinformation in the global news machinery, covering the story thusly (we have bolded some of the more revoltingly tendentious passages and terms):

    Russia rains missiles down on Ukraine’s capital and other cities in retaliation for Crimea bridge blast
    / CBS/AFP

    President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Monday people were killed and injured in multiple missile strikes on cities across Ukraine, including the first bombardment of the capital in months. CBS News senior foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata1 said the strikes, which could signal a major escalation in the eight-month-old war, appeared to be entirely punitive — retaliation meant to terrorize Ukrainian civilians2 in densely-populated urban neighborhoods, close to government buildings, with one even hitting a children’s playground.
     
    Ukraine’s national police later said at least 10 people were killed and about 60 others injured by the missile strikes early Monday morning.

     Russia’s strongman leader Vladimir Putin acknowledged the barrage of missiles, which Russia claimed targeted only energy infrastructure, was retaliation for an apparent Ukrainian attack on a key bridge over the weekend. Putin warned Monday that if Ukraine continued to mount “terrorist attacks” on Russia, his regime’s response would be “tough and proportionate to the level of threats.”
     
    “Unfortunately there are dead and wounded. Please do not leave the shelters,” Zelenskyy told Ukraine’s citizens on social media earlier Monday, accusing Russia of wanting to “wipe us from the face of the Earth.”

    APTOPIX Russia Ukraine War

    Rescue workers survey the scene of a Russian attack on Kyiv, Ukraine on Oct. 10, 2022. Several explosions rocked the city early in the morning following months of relative calm in the Ukrainian capital.ADAM SCHRECK / AP

    The explosions in Kyiv and other cities came just a day after Putin blamed Kyiv for a massive explosion on a 12-mile bridge connecting Crimea with Russia. Crimea is a large Ukrainian peninsula that Russia occupied and then unilaterally annexed eight years ago during a previous invasion. The annexation of that territory, like Putin’s recent land grab3 of four Ukrainian regions that he declared Russian soil last week, have been condemned as illegitimate and illegal by Ukraine, the United Nations, the U.S. and other Ukrainian partners.

    The CBS report could not avoid calling the attack a “war crime”, standard appellation for anything done by Russia and Putin in this conflict. They conveniently forget that it is US military doctrine (seen repeatedly in recent Gulf wars, etc.) to attack electricity power grids on the very first day of the onslaught, immediately condemning the country to severe stress due to lack of running water, heat, and the multitude of vital activities that electricity permits in modern society. (See more on this in our attached John Helmer report).The CBS report however grudgingly admitted that Moscow had apparently accomplished its purpose:

    As the European Union condemned Russia’s attack and said the targeting of civilians amounted to “a war crime,” Russia’s Defense Ministry confirmed the “massive strike with long-range precision weapons.” It claimed the missiles had targeted “objects of the military command and control, communications and energy systems of Ukraine” and that “all assigned objects were hit.”

    (CBS/AFP News, Oct 10, 2022)

    Meantime, Kiev, who, like the West, places great stock on the wiles of hybrid war, virtually acknowledged its hand in the terrorist strike on the Crimea bridge by circulating a stamp that gloated over the incident. The stamp appeared almost immediately after the bridge was blown up.

    By John Helmer, Moscow
    @bears_with

    In the propaganda war the Ukrainian-supplied western media, led by Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, have just announced the discovery of a box of gold teeth “in a suspected [sic] Russian torture chamber, prompting claims [sic] they were wrenched from victims [sic] of President Putin’s occupying forces in Kharkov [sic].”

    They are concealing that the Ukrainians of Kharkov whose teeth are fully intact inside their mouths can no longer operate their electric toothbrushes. There’s no electricity. Not for torture. Just enough for the allegations to be fabricated, published, and transmitted on the internet.

    According to Ukrainian sources, about 1,700 cities, towns and villages, with about 1 million consumers, were without power in mid-March; the most seriously affected were the regions of  Sumy, Chernigov, Nikolaev and Donetsk. On May 3, Ukrainian and western media reported a missile strike against power plants in the western Galicia region capital of Lvov; sub-stations supplying electricity to the railway system in the region were also hit.  The biggest of the Russian attacks on Ukrainian electricity plants was reported in the western press, again quoting Kiev sources, on September 11-12.  Power plants in Kharkov, Sumy, Poltava and Dnipropetrovsk regions were stopped.

    A report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), issued on October 6, confirms there was a sharp fall in consumer demand for electricity following these attacks; this appears as a gap in the data chart between September 11 and 13. Kiev officials claimthat the generating plants were  repaired and power restored.   The IEA report,  which relies upon and repeats data provided by the state utility Ukrenergo,  claims that just before the Russian strikes,  demand was running at 9.07 GW on Saturday, September 10, and that by the following Tuesday it was 13.56 GW.

    According to the IEA, “Ukraine’s electricity demand has fallen by about 40% since Russia’s invasion with no sign of recovery. Demand keeps decreasing slowly every week. The resulting decline in power generation has mainly taken place in nuclear. But coal-fired generation has also decreased.”  An IEA chart of power generation figures shows that from a peak of 21.87 GW on January 25, the production of electricity reported on October 5 had fallen to 11.41 GW – a cut of 48%.
     
    However, the same IEA report claims that since a low point was reached on June 26 of 9.13 GW, Ukrenergo has also been managing to restore output by 25%.
     
    A North American military specialist in infrastructure demolition and salvage, now retired, says these data are being faked by Ukrenergo. “The Russian strikes also interrupt data recording and reporting. The Ukrainians are not too keen to show weakness as they are anxious to be seen as a reliable supplier of electricity.”
     
    Slowly but surely, but also secretly, the war is destroying the electric generation on which the Ukraine depends for everything –  trains, water pumps, sewage treatment, light, heat, mobile telephones, refrigerators, radio and television, not to mention production lines in factories, in abattoirs,  sausage making and other farm and food processing.
     
    However, there remains electricity for the Ukrainian military operations to continue on the eastern front, and for cross-border trains to run into Lvov from Poland with fresh arms,  ammunition, and rotating allied military staff advisers, together with NATO politicians and journalists keen to advertise their support.
     
    In the wake of the attack on the Crimean Bridge, the electric war can now be expected to escalate.

    In this Ukrainian report of March 2022,   the “base installed generating capacity” of the country was reported at 56 GW at 2020 —  64% from thermal power plants, 25% nuclear and 10% hydro. The remaining 1%, offset by some hydro storage, was accounted for by solar, wind and other small generators.

    Source:  Olga Sushyk, Deputy Director of the Centre for European Studies at the Educational and Scientific Institute of Law, and Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv: “Ukraine’s Power System: Power and War”, published on March 17, 2022.

    Source for enlarged view: file:///D:/Backups/Downloads/

    Source: Lyudmila Vlasenko, Head of Electricity Sector Development Unit, Ukrainian Ministry of Energy and Coal Sector – report titled “Power System of Ukraine: Today and Tomorrow”, July 2013. Since  July of this year DTEK, the generation company owned by Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, has reported that “about 90% of Ukraine’s wind capacity and 30% of solar parks are offline because they are in occupied territories.”

    The Sushyk-Shevchenko report says that “due to damage to the electricity infrastructure, as of March 16, 2022, more than 1,679 Ukrainian localities remained without electricity – that’s about 928,000 consumers. The worst situation with electricity supply is in Sumy, Chernigov, Nikolaev, Kiev, and Donetsk regions.”

     

    An earlier background briefing paper from the International Energy Agency (IEA), dated 2021, confirms the pre-war details.  Here’s IEA’s backgrounder on Ukrainian electricity generation, apparently as of 2018.

     

    The IEA also publishes daily updated charts of the collapse of Ukrainian electricity production; these are based on data supplied by Ukrenergo. These charts show the losses up to October 9.

    The same source also shows this chart of Ukrainian electricity demand; demand responds to the cutoff of coal, gas and nuclear-fired generating plants by increasing use of domestic electrical heaters and back-up electrical generators.

    Since 2014 Ukraine has lost a third of its energy generation which had been located in the breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk regions. Another 10 power plants were lost in 2014-2015, and seventeen more in 2022, according to a new assessment published last Friday in Vzglyad of Moscow by Nikolai Storozhenko.

     

    “Zaporozhye NPP [Nuclear Power Plant] stands out among them, of course. But this does not mean that the others are not worth attention. For example, the Zaporozhye thermal power plant (Energodar) has an installed capacity of more than 3,500 MW and can potentially produce 23-25 billion kWh (the annual plan for the NPP for 2022 was 37 billion kWh). In other words, the loss of this energy supply is a hole which, practically, the Ukraine can do nothing to close, and which will largely determine the problems of the Ukrainian winter of 2022/23.”

     

    “Ukraine lost another 4% of electricity generation as a result of the fighting from February to September, according to the assessment of the National Council for the Restoration of Ukraine. However, it is obvious that these data do not take into account the blows to the energy infrastructure  which were inflicted on September 11-12 (Kharkov CHPP-5, Zmievskaya CHPP, Pavlodar CHPP-3, Kremenchug CHPP). In general, the damage and reduction in the capacity of the energy system looks enormous for Ukraine and it is not entirely clear how Zelensky manages to sell electricity to Europe against this background.”
     

    “But, firstly, sales [to Europe] will soon stop, which Zelensky has already warned Europe about, declaring recently: ‘We will not have enough volume to heat our homes, and this time is approaching.’ Secondly, Ukraine’s energy system is losing power simultaneously with a decrease in consumption…Yury Korolchuk, an expert at the Institute of Energy Strategies [Kiev],  is urging consumers to be ready for five to six-hour rolling blackouts. Rolling blackouts are not news for Ukraine, but the realities of the last few years. Moreover, this year in the reports on the procurement of fuel for the winter, firewood began to appear…and the mayor of Lvov said in August that the city is buying and stocking wood for fuel.”
     

    “What about gas supply? In the summer, Naftogaz asked for several billion dollars to purchase 5-7 billion cubic meters of gas – to bring reserves to 19 billion cubic meters. But there was no money for this – and to date, only 14 billion cubic meters have been accumulated. On the one hand, the situation for gas is about the same as with electricity: consumption is falling. Kherson, Zaporozhye, Donetsk, Lugansk and Kharkov regions are either completely written off…, or their supplies will be cut to a minimum. In most cities of Kharkov, Donetsk, Nikolaev,  Sumy, Chernigov regions and Zaporozhye there will be no heating. There will be no gas in winter, there will be light periodically —  such a frightening forecast was published in the Telegram channel…half of this source’s forecasts come true – and they shout loudly about them. The second half does not come true – and no one remembers about them.”
     

    “But in this case, the forecast is not groundless….[Ukrainian state] Naftogaz is delaying the conclusion of gas supply contracts with the gas distribution companies in the Kharkov and Dniepropetrovsk regions. At this point, it is worth remembering how, back in early summer, Zelensky’s office directly told the residents of the Donetsk region: go wherever you want, there will be no heating in winter.”
     

    “In other words, the Ukrainian strategy is something like this. There are the combat areas and those adjacent to them. There the population has already dispersed or has greatly decreased; there is a risk of attacks on the facilities themselves and fuel depots. So, it is in these areas that it will be hardest to winter. It will be more comfortable for Kiev which has its own thermal power plants and there is an opportunity to add power from western Ukrainian nuclear power plants, and for the Galician region of western Ukraine [Lvov]. Also, there are about three to four million internally displaced people  in Ukraine who have resettled mainly in these regions. Who should be kept without electricity and gas: the half-empty areas of the Zaporozhye region or Kiev? The choice is obvious.”
     

    This is how the Ukrainian energy experts view their choice from Kiev. The strategic options for the Russian General Staff and Kremlin remain secret, if not undecided.
     
    In the aftermath of the Crimean Bridge attack, Moscow television figures like Vladimir Soloviev have broadcast calls to extend the military campaign westward to Lvov and the Polish border. “It is obvious,” Soloviev said on Saturday, “that the NATO command took part in the development of this [Crimean Bridge] sabotage… What is our plan? Not to follow the enemy’s scenario, but to disrupt their plans, striking unexpected blows in directions where the enemy is not anticipating them. Ukraine should be plunged into dark times. Bridges, dams, railways, thermal power plants,  and other infrastructure facilities should be destroyed throughout the territory of Ukraine. There should be no administrative office building operating in both Kiev and Lvov. And not only that.”
     

    Left: a screen shot of a Kharkov substation after the September 11-12 attacks. Centre: Vladimir Soloviev, Moscow broadcaster and advocate for escalation. Russian and Crimean government officials are quieting the tone by announcing that train traffic on the Crimean Bridge has already resumed; that one road span is undamaged and will resume operation shortly; and replacement of the damaged road span will follow.
     
    A combined US and European Union (EU) plan to link the Ukrainian electricity grid to the EU system, and thus provide supply back-up in case the Ukrainian grid was attacked by the Russian Army, has already failed. A US publication headlined the attempt “The Race to Rescue Ukraine’s Power Grid From Russia”; click to read.
     
    “The test was years in the making, one of the final rituals in a drawn-out courtship between the Ukrainian and European power grids known as “synchronization.” But before it could join with Europe, Ukrenergo first had to prove it could keep the lights on without its connections to Belarus and Russia—in ‘island mode.’ The plan was to reconnect with its neighbours after a few days. Then in 2023 it would switch on the links with Europe.”
     
    “That’s not what happened. Instead, on February 24, the same day as the test, Russia invaded. Since noon that day, Ukraine—in coordination with its southern neighbour Moldova—has been powering itself solo. It’s a balancing act. Changing where the power comes from and where it goes means some lines suddenly get clogged with electrons while others dry up. It can be difficult to maintain balance for any length of time. So far, the Ukrainian grid is humming along at a frequency of 50 Hertz—stable, in other words—a Ukrenergo spokesperson told WIRED by email. But it’s risky to continue that way indefinitely, especially during a war. When stuff breaks in the power grid, the whole system has to absorb the shock and rebalance. And right now, a lot is breaking across Ukraine…Last week, Kadri Simson, the European commissioner for energy, said  the group representing the region’s transmission operators, will come to the rescue, potentially within weeks.”
     
    This was wishful thinking on the part of the Latvian official in Brussels. For Simson’s record of faking on the EU’s gas substitution schemes, and the Russian response, read this report from October 2021.
     
    The assessment of the North American expert on military operations against energy infrastructure focuses on the Russian side’s strategy until now, before considering the military options for the future. In addition to covering up the evidence of power generation losses by the Ukrainians which the source reports from Urkrenergo and IEA, he says the Russians have limited their attacks until now to “a form of reconnaissance by force. Their purpose”, he believes, ” has been to determine what generating capacity remains, what can be repaired, how to interdict the human repair logistics, what is irreparably lost, and then to attrite the remaining Ukrainian materiel and human resources as the winter season approaches.”
     
    “It appears to me that the Ukrainians are extremely hard-pressed to maintain and restore their electrical grid, most especially in the eastern regions. They are just as concerned to the point of adding and testing back-up generators at key nodes of the grid, especially in Kiev. By the way, the precedent for the Russian General Staff and Kremlin for destroying a country’s electrical grid was set during the NATO bombing of Serbia and then by the US air bombing of Iraq.”
     
    For a history of US Air Force (USAF) strategy in attacking electric generation and distribution grids, read this USAF University thesis, entitled “Strategic Attack of National Electrical Systems”, dated 1994:   “The USAF has long favoured attacking electrical power systems. Electric power has been considered a critical target in every war since World War II, and will likely be nominated in the future… The evidence shows that the only sound reason for attacking electrical power is to affect the production of war materiel in a war of attrition against a self-supporting nation-state without outside assistance.”

    Left: Major Thomas Griffith’s USAF study of 1994. Centre:  Iraqi electric relay unit bombed by the US Air Force in Operation Desert Storm in 1990-91.   Right:  Serbian generating plant damage after the USAF and European bombing campaign of May 1999.

    The western military source again: “War is war, whether you want to use terms like hybrid war or proxy war. It means destroying the enemy’s capacity to make war.  Shutting off the power in the rump Ukrainian state will do just that to the Ukrainians. If they then start to flee for refuge to Poland and Germany, this will be a disaster unparalleled in recent European history. Just the attendant collapse in telecommunications will make the place a madhouse. You can well imagine the rest. Already there are queues for water in Nikolaev, and who knows where else. How does  queueing for water, if there is any, in temperatures of minus-20C to minus-40C sound?  This won’t be like the blackouts from US sanctions and attacks in Cuba or Venezuela – there they didn’t  have to worry about freezing to death, the pipes bursting, or irreparable damage being done to billions of dollars’ worth of pumping, electrical,  and other equipment due to freezing.”
     
    “How many people realize that a sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) circuit breaker,  commonly used in electrical substations, requires an electric heating blanket to be functional in sub-zero weather? Most westerners don’t. They are common in high-voltage substations which ultimately feed the grid lines with power. In the Ukrainian case, I suspect  there is a mixture of those and older style oil circuit breakers (OCB), along with oil-filled large power transformers (LPT),  which are essential to electrical distribution. And guess where most of the oil comes from to fill these devices?”
     
    “I suspect that most of Zelensky’s officials and officials in the supporting EU governments have persuaded themselves with their own propaganda. They aren’t daring to think through these questions, any more than they care to understand that the housing of the pumps delivering their water and treating their sewage will freeze and split apart if they are not heated via electrical means. Even if the gas is on — and it won’t be — electricity is needed to ignite, then control, furnaces. How many of these officials understand the long lead times, compounded by manufacturing shutdowns due to high energy costs, which you must have to replace and restore everything?”
     
    “Who then will ‘stand with Ukraine’ when the gas and electricity rationing and unpayable consumer bills  roll over the Ukrainian border and into Poland, Germany, France, and the UK, as they are already doing?”
     
    “The Russians have been hitting the Ukrainian electrical distribution system for months now. As we know, they started with the rail traction power yards which are largely branches of the wider electric grid. Now they have moved to the substations and so-called ‘thermal power’  plants, hitting them in what seems to be pellmell fashion. I expect that the Russians are gathering intelligence now on repair times, re-equipment availability, deliveries, repair crew composition and coordination.”

    Source: https://transformers-magazine.com

    “So let’s imagine this. Winter arrives. The power is cut in Kharkov, Dniepropetrovsk, Pavlovsk, Nikolaev etc. and due to the unavailability of spares, repair crews, respite from attack, or all three, the outlook for the power outage is indefinite. What do people do? They migrate to where there is power, running water, heat etc… For millions this means west. So off they go. And when enough of them get there, bam! the power goes off there too.”

    Source for enlarged view: https://eneken.ieej.or.jp — page 6.

    Reading the grid maps of the Ukraine,  the source says “it is obvious that the real vulnerability, in my estimation, lies in the approximately 88 substations for 330 kV distribution and 33 substations for 220 kV distribution. Note the nodes or junctions. Those are substations connecting the distribution lines which crisscross the Ukraine. These substations contain large power transformers, switchgear, DCS equipment [Distributed Control System] and other power quality and control equipment, spares etc. Widespread coordinated strikes on these substations will quickly overwhelm the Ukrainian ability to effect repairs and re-balance the loads on the generation stations. This will create a cascade effect whereby overloaded power plants and distribution gear will ‘trip out’ over wide swathes of the country – if the protection between the Ukrainian and EU grids does not operate in time, or there is wild voltage/frequency oscillations there could be large interruptions in the EU countries being fed from Ukrainian sources.”
     
    “Any repair efforts will also be severely hampered, if not crippled, if utility yards where spare cables and other gear, as well as vehicles (bucket and line trucks, cranes, etc.), are stored and parked are struck. Personnel losses among the finite number of utility crew members due to follow-up attacks and the inevitable mishaps that come with interacting with damaged or compromised high voltage electrical equipment, will quickly mount. If the attacks are launched during the hard winter months, the impact will be exponential, increasingly unmanageable and catastrophic as the hours go by.”
     
    The above by Editor — John Helmer on Sunday, October 9, 2022.

    1. A professional disinformer, identical to thousands of colleagues who work on Western media to produce and spread lies according to the given script from the State Dept. or other power centers in the Western ruling class.
    2. The pot calling the kettle black. This from a media platform that like the rest of the US-controlled media around the world, ignored and covered up the deliberate shelling of Donbas cities for eight long years by a Nazi-infested Ukrainian army built, trained and directed by NATO. The dead by now amount to more than 14,000. They are almost all civilians,  including many women and children. Throughout this period, Kiev’s military was also engaged in the deliberate shelling of schools, medical facilities and vital infrastructure: water plants, power stations and so on. Tell us, again, who started this nice clambake? Russia or Washington through its color revolutions and many vassal/accomplices?
    3. Yes, tell us about land grabs, please. More glaring examples of double-standard based on US exceptionalism. Since the turn of the 20th century, the US has invaded and occupied many nations, after subjecting them to brutal military attacks and repression. The annexed regions in Donbas were all heavily Russian, historically and culturally, something we can hardly say about the US grabbing the Philippines in the 1900s, or setting itself up for generations in Korea, or illegally occupying one-third of Syria, a nation Washington has been trying to regime-change now for a generation via dirty war using terrorist proxies. We don’t have to mention here in detail the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq, two nations that the US and its NATO vassals invaded, occupied and destroyed for at least 30 years, with untold victims, before liberation came to the former thanks to their unrelenting struggle against the “crusader army”, with Iraq still attempting to get rid of the Washington infection. Of course, no mention is made here that these regions rejoined Russia not as a result of some perverse Putin whim, but after a formal referendum, whose validity is certainly no worse and probably a damn sight better than US elections.
    The post Russian Army Fires Old Sparky: US Loses the Electric War in Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The U.S. Is Leading the World Into the Abyss

    A few years after WW I, the poet T.S. Eliot opened his famous poem “The Wasteland” with these words: “April is the cruelest month … “  I think he may be wrong, for this October may be the cruelest month of all, followed by November.  Unprecedented.  You can hear the clicking and grating of spades if your antennae are attuned.

    We are on the brink of ominous events created by the U.S. war against Russia.  Yet so many people prefer to turn away and swallow the lies that the U.S. wants peace and not war and is the aggrieved party in the crisis.

    A friend of mine, who is constantly charging me with having turned right-wing because of my writing that accuses many traditional liberal/leftists of buying the national security state’s propaganda on the JFK assassination, “9/11,” Syria, Ukraine, Covid-19, censorship, the “New” Cold War, etc., and whose go-to news sources are The Guardian, CNN, The New York Times, NPR, ABC, seems oblivious to the fact that right and left have become useless terms and that these media are all mouthpieces for the CIA and their intelligence allies in the new Cold War; that the so-called right and left are joined at the hip with their obsession with Pax Americana.

    There are no right and left anymore; there are only free and independent voices or those of the caged parrots repeating what they have been taught to say:

    “Polly wants a war!”  “Polly wants a war.”

    I am afraid that I will never convince this dear friend otherwise and I find that depressing.  Yet I know such views are shared by millions of others and that even if nuclear war breaks out their minds will not change.  Propaganda runs very, very deep into their psyches, and they desperately want to believe.  Hitler said it clearly in Mein Kampf:

    The masses … are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

    Hitler learned so much about “manufacturing consent” from his American teachers Edward Bernays, Walter Lippmann, et al., who accomplished so much brainwashing of the American people.  They were all masters of the lie and millions continue to believe their followers.

    If nuclear weapons are again used (and everyone knows the only country to have used them), these believers will blame their use on Russia, even though Russia has made it very clear that it would only resort to such weapons if the country’s existence were threatened, while the U.S. continues affirming its right to preemptively use nuclear weapons when it so chooses.

    And even if nuclear weapons are not used, the recent sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines and the bombing of the Crimean Bridge, both clearly the work of U.S./NATO/Ukrainian forces, have raised the ante considerably.  The door to hell has just been opened wider, and I suspect not by accident, as the U.S. elections approach.

    In his recent television talk, Vladimir Putin made Russia’s nuclear position very clear, mentioning nuclear weapons only in the context of Western threats of using them, as Moon of Alabama reported.  Putin said:

    They [the U.S./NATO/Ukraine] have even resorted to the nuclear blackmail. I am referring not only to the Western-encouraged shelling of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, which poses a threat of a nuclear disaster, but also to the statements made by some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO countries on the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction – nuclear weapons – against Russia.

    I would like to remind those who make such statements regarding Russia that our country has different types of weapons as well, and some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have. In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.

    The citizens of Russia can rest assured that the territorial integrity of our Motherland, our independence and freedom will be defended – I repeat – by all the systems available to us. Those who are using nuclear blackmail against us should know that the wind rose can turn around.

    When the long-planned U.S. war against Russia, so obvious to anyone who sees past the propagandist headlines and studies the matter, soon explodes into full-scale open war for all to see in horror, as it will, these true believers will dig in their heels even more.  They will find new reasons to justify their faith, and it is akin to religious faith.  The infamous Rand Corporation’s 2019 report cited above, “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia,” cites the following as part of the war process, as summarized in the Strategic Culture article, but it will have no impact on the faithful believers:

    • Providing lethal military aid to Ukraine
    • Mobilizing European NATO members
    • Imposing deeper trade and economic sanctions
    • Increasing U.S. energy production for export to Europe
    • Expanding Europe’s import infrastructure to receive U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies

    I keep thinking of the U.S. false flag Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964 and how effective that was in convincing the gullible population and the complicit U.S. Congress – by a vote of 88 to 2 in the Senate and 414 to 0 in the House of Representatives (try to imagine such criminals) – that U.S. destroyers were innocently attacked by the North Vietnamese and that Lyndon Johnson should be given the authority to respond to repel “communist aggression,” which, of course, he did by bombing North Vietnam and sending 500,000 troops to savagely destroy Vietnam and Vietnamese nearly 9,000 miles from the United States.  Johnson simply lied to wage war and Biden is doing the same today.  But far too many people love their leaders’ lies because it allows them to secretly feel justified in the lies they themselves tell in personal matters.  And what may be true of the distant past, can’t be true today.

    In 1965, the folk singer Tom Paxton put Johnson’s lies to music with “Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation“.  In those days, art was used as a weapon against U.S. propaganda.

    Today we can ask: Where have all the artists gone?

    We know that the U.S. has, for the time being, abandoned sending hundreds of thousands of troops into another country; now it is drones, air warfare, special forces, the CIA, mercenaries, terrorists, and intermediaries such as the Ukrainian conscripts, Azov Nazis, and NATO surrogates.  Such was the lesson of Vietnam when the draft led to massive protests and resistance.  Now war is waged less obviously and the propaganda is more extensive and constant as a result of digital media.

    There are many such examples of U.S. treachery, most notably the attacks of September 11, 2001, but such history is only open to those who take it upon themselves to investigate.

    Now there is the corrupt Ukrainian U.S. puppet government, which is nearly 6,000 miles from the United States, and must be defended from Russian “aggression,” just like the corrupt South Vietnamese U.S. puppet government was.

    To those who buy the mass media propaganda, I ask: Why is the U.S.A. always fighting to kill people so far from its shores?  Doesn’t it sound a bit odd that our wonderful leaders destroyed Libya, Vietnam, Serbia, the Philippines, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc., countries so far away, and now that Russia defends itself from U.S./NATO encroachment a few miles from its borders, it is accused of being the evil aggressors and Vladimir Putin called another Hitler like all the leaders of the countries we attacked?  Have you completely lost your ability to think?  Or do you, like little children, actually believe the disembodied newsreaders who deliver your prepackaged television propaganda?

    If I ask such an obvious question, does that make me a “right-winger”?

    If I state two facts: that Donald Trump – whom I consider despicable and part of the divide and conquer game as Biden’s flip side, and have said so – did not start a war against Russia and that Russia-gate was a Democratic propaganda stunt and is false, does that make me a right-winger?  My friend would say so. Do telling facts define your political allegiances, whether they be facts about Republicans or Democrats?

    No.  I will tell you what it makes me: A disgusted human being sickened by all the lies and people’s gullibility after decades of evidence that should have awakened them to the truth about all these politicians and the war against Russia underway.  I have lost patience with it.  For decades I have been writing about such propaganda to no avail.  Yes, those who tended to agree with me might have moved a little closer to my arguments, but the vast majority have not budged an iota.

    I wish it were different. It is my desire. Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan sage of the Americas, who knew what was up and what was down when he wrote Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World in 1998, said this about Desire:

    A man found Aladdin’s lamp lying around. Since he was a big reader, the man recognized it and rubbed it right away. The genie appeared, bowed deeply, and said, ‘At your service master. Your wish is my command. But there will be only one wish.

    Since he was a good boy, the man said, ‘I wish for my dead mother to be brought back.’

    The genie made a face. ‘I’m sorry, master, but that wish is impossible. Make another.’

    Since he was a nice guy, the man said, ‘I wish the world would stop spending money to kill people.’

    The genie swallowed. ‘Uhh … What did you say your mother’s name was?’

    The desire for peace and security is a universal dream.  Sometimes it is hidden in people’s hearts because they have swallowed the lies of the evil ones who wish to wage war against those who insist on security for their country, as Russians are demanding today.

    It is very frustrating to try to wake people out of their manufactured consent and the insouciance that follows as we are being led into the abyss.

    But I will not stop trying.  Galeano did not.  He left us these words of universal resistance:

    We shall be compatriots and contemporaries of all who have a yearning for justice and beauty, no matter where they were born or when they lived, because the borders of geography and time shall cease to exist.

    We must save the world before it is too late.

    The post The U.S. Is Leading the World Into the Abyss first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Can Europe Afford to Turn a Blind Eye to Evidence of a US Role in Pipeline Blasts?

    The sabotage of the two Nord Stream pipelines leaves Europeans certain to be much poorer and colder this winter, and was an act of international vandalism on an almost unimaginable scale. The attacks severed Russian gas supplies to Europe and caused the release of enormous quantities of methane gas, the prime offender in global warming.

    This is why no one is going to take responsibility for the crime – and most likely no one will ever be found definitively culpable.

    Nonetheless, the level of difficulty and sophistication in setting off blasts at three separate locations on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines overwhelmingly suggests a state actor, or actors, was behind it.

    Western coverage of the attacks has been decidedly muted, given that this hostile assault on the globe’s energy infrastructure is unprecedented – overshadowing even the 9/11 attacks.

    The reason why there appears to be so little enthusiasm to explore this catastrophic event in detail – beyond pointing a finger in Russia’s direction – is not difficult to deduce.

    It is hard to think of a single reason why Moscow would wish to destroy its own energy pipelines, valued at $20 billion, or allow in seawater, possibly corroding them irreversibly.

    The attacks deprive Russia of its main gas supply lines to Europe – and with it, vital future revenues – while leaving the field open to competitors.

    Moscow loses its only significant leverage over Germany, its main buyer in Europe and at the heart of the European project, when it needs such leverage most, as it faces down concerted efforts by the United States and Europe to drive Russian soldiers out of Ukraine.

    Even any possible temporary advantage Moscow might have gained by demonstrating its ruthlessness and might to Europe could have been achieved just as effectively by simply turning off the spigot to stop supplies.

    Media taboo

    This week, distinguished economist Jeffrey Sachs was invited on Bloomberg TV to talk about the pipeline attacks. He broke a taboo among Western elites by citing evidence suggesting that the US, rather than Russia, was the prime suspect.

    Western media like the Associated Press have tried to foreclose such a line of thinking by calling it a “baseless conspiracy theory” and Russian “disinformation”. But, as Sachs pointed out, there are good reasons to suspect the US above Russia.

    There is, for example, the threat to Russia made by US president Joe Biden back in early February, that “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2” were Ukraine to be invaded. Questioned by a reporter about how that would be possible, Biden asserted: “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”

    Biden was not speaking out of turn or off the cuff. At the same time, Victoria Nuland, a senior diplomat in the Biden administration, issued Russia much the same warning, telling reporters: “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

    That is the same Nuland who was intimately involved back in 2014 in behind-the-scenes maneuvers by the US to help overthrow an elected Ukrainian government that led to the installation of one hostile to Moscow. It was that coup that triggered a combustible mix of outcomes – Kyiv’s increasing flirtation with NATO, as well as a civil war in the east between Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and ethnic Russian communities – that provided the chief rationale for President Vladimir Putin’s later invasion.

    And for those still puzzled by what motive the US might have for perpetrating such an outrage, Nuland’s boss helpfully offered an answer last Friday. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken described the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, and the consequent environmental catastrophe, as offering “tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come”.

    Blinken set out a little too clearly the “cui bono” – “who profits?” – argument, suggesting that Biden and Nuland’s earlier remarks were not just empty, pre-invasion posturing by the White House.

    Blinken celebrated the fact that Europe would be deprived of Russian gas for the foreseeable future and, with it, Putin’s leverage over Germany and other European states. Before the blasts, the danger for Washington had been that Moscow might be able to advance favorable negotiations over Ukraine rather than perpetuate a war Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, has already stated is designed to “weaken” Russia at least as much as liberate Ukraine.

    Or, as Blinken phrased it, the attacks were “a tremendous opportunity once and for all to remove the dependence on Russian energy, and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs.”

    Though Blinken did not mention it, it was also a “tremendous opportunity” to make Europe far more dependent on the US for its gas supplies, shipped by sea at much greater cost to Europe than through Russia’s pipelines. American energy firms may well be the biggest beneficiaries from the explosions.

    Meddling in Ukraine

    US hostility towards Russian economic ties with Europe is not new. Long before Russia’s invasion, Washington had been quite openly seeking ways to block the Nord Stream pipelines.

    One of Blinken’s recent predecessors, Condoleezza Rice, expressed the Washington consensus way back in 2014 – at the same time as Nuland was recorded secretly meddling in Ukraine, discussing who should be installed as president in place of the elected Ukrainian government that was about to be ousted in a coup.

    Speaking to German TV, Rice said the Russian economy was vulnerable to sanctions because 80% of its exports were energy-related. Proving how wrong-headed American foreign policy predictions often are, she asserted confidently: “People say the Europeans will run out of energy. Well, the Russians will run out of cash before the Europeans run out of energy.”

    Breaking Europe’s reliance on Russian energy was, in Rice’s words, “one of the few instruments we have… Over the long term, you simply want to change the structure of energy dependence.”

    She added: “You [Germany] want to depend more on the North American energy platform, the tremendous bounty of oil and gas that we’re finding in North America. You want to have pipelines that don’t go through Ukraine and Russia.”

    Now, the sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2 has achieved a major US foreign-policy goal overnight.

    It has also preempted the pressure building in Germany, through mass protests and mounting business opposition, that might have seen Berlin reverse course on European sanctions on Russia and revive gas supplies – a shift that would have undermined Washington’s goal of “weakening” Putin. Now, the protests are redundant. German politicians cannot cave in to popular demands when there is no pipeline through which they can supply their population with Russian gas.

    ‘Thank you, USA’

    One can hardly be surprised that European leaders are publicly blaming Russia for the pipeline attacks. After all, Europe falls under the US security umbrella and Russia has been designated by Washington as Official Enemy No 1.

    But almost certainly, major European capitals are drawing different conclusions in private. Like Sachs, their officials are examining the circumstantial evidence, considering the statements of self-incrimination from Biden and other officials, and weighing the “cui bono” arguments.

    And like Sachs, they are most likely inferring that the prime suspect in this case is the US – or, at the very least, that Washington authorized an ally to act on its behalf. Just as no European leader would dare to publicly accuse the US of carrying out the attacks, none would dare stage such an attack without first getting the nod from Washington.

    That was evidently the view of Radek Sikorski, the former foreign and defence minister of Poland, who tweeted a “Thank you, USA” with an image of the bubbling seas where one pipeline was ruptured.

    Sikorski, it should be noted, is as well-connected in Washington as he is in Poland, a European state bitterly hostile to Moscow as well as its pipelines. His wife, Anne Applebaum, is a staff writer at The Atlantic magazine and an influential figure in US policy circles who has long advocated for NATO and EU expansion into Eastern Europe and Ukraine.

    Sikorski hurriedly took down the tweet after it went viral.

    But if Washington is the chief suspect in blowing up the pipelines, how should Europe read its relations with the US in the light of that deduction? And what does such sabotage indicate to Europe’s leaders about how Washington might perceive the stakes in Europe? The answers are not pretty.

    Demand for fealty

    If the US was behind the attacks, it suggests not only that Washington is taking the Ukraine war into new, more dangerous territory, ready to risk drawing Moscow into a round of tit-for-tats that could quickly escalate into a nuclear confrontation. It also suggests that ties between the US and Europe have entered a decisive new stage, too.

    Or put another way, Washington would have done more than move out of the shadows, turning its proxy war in Ukraine into a more direct, hot war with Russia. It would indicate that the US is willing to turn the whole of Europe into a battlefield, and bully, betray and potentially sacrifice the continent’s population as cruelly as it has traditionally treated weak allies in the Global South.

    In that regard, the pipeline ruptures are most likely interpreted by European leaders as a signal: that they should not dare to consider formulating their own independent foreign policy, or contemplate defying Washington. The attacks indicate that the US requires absolute fealty, that Europe must prostrate itself before Washington and accept whatever dictates it imposes.

    That would amount to a dramatic reversal of the Marshall Plan, Washington’s ambitious funding of the rebuilding of Western Europe after the Second World War, chiefly as a way to restore the market for rapidly expanding US industries.

    By contrast, this act of sabotage strangles Europe economically, driving it into recession, deepening its debt and making it a slave to US energy supplies. Effectively, the Biden administration would have moved from offering European elites juicy carrots to now wielding a very large stick at them.

    Pitiless aggression

    For those reasons, European leaders may be unwilling to contemplate that their ally across the Atlantic could behave in such a cruel manner against them. The implications are more than unsettling.

    The conclusion European leaders would be left to draw is that the only justification for such pitiless aggression is that the US is maneuvering to avoid the collapse of its post-war global dominance, the end of its military and economic empire.

    The destruction of the pipelines would have to be understood as an act of desperation: a last-ditch preemption by Washington of the loss of its hegemony as Russia, China and others find common cause to challenge the American behemoth, and a ferocious blow against Europe to hammer home the message that it must not stray from the fold.

    At the same time, it would shine a different, clearer light on the events that have been unfolding in and around Ukraine in recent years:

    • NATO’s relentless expansion across Eastern Europe despite expert warnings that it would eventually provoke Russia.
    • Biden and Nuland’s meddling to help oust an elected Ukrainian government sympathetic to Moscow.
    • The cultivation of a militarized Ukrainian ultra-nationalism pitted against Russia that led to bloody civil war against Ukraine’s own ethnic Russian communities.
    • And NATO’s exclusive focus on escalating the war through arms supplies to Ukraine rather than pursuing and incentivizing diplomacy.

    None of these developments can be stripped out of a realistic assessment of why Russia responded by invading Ukraine.

    Europeans have been persuaded that they must give unflinching moral and military support to Ukraine because it is the last rampart defending their homeland from a merciless Russian imperialism.

    But the attack on the pipelines hints at a more complex story, one in which European publics need to stop fixing their gaze exclusively at Russia, and turn round to understand what has been happening behind their backs.

    The post Can Europe Afford to Turn a Blind Eye to Evidence of a US Role in Pipeline Blasts? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Leftists supporting Putin are ‘idiots’, say anarchists from Ukraine

    Within the Russian population, there’s resistance against Putin’s war. The Canary has tried to highlight this resistance by amplifying grassroots movements. Critically, it’s important that our ‘left’ alliances don’t result in us talking over voices on the ground in Russia.

    Activists in the resistance describe themselves as anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, anarchist-communists, or libertarian socialists/communists. Recent interviews with Russian – and Ukrainian – activists help provide an insight into the resistance, as well as into Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

    Russia or NATO?

    Given Ukraine is backed by NATO, it’s not surprising if many on the left may adopt an ambivalent stance regarding the Russian invasion. But as the Canary’s own Joe Glenton said in an article published just 48 hours after that invasion:

    It’s long past time for some of us to update our software on Russia/NATO antagonism.

    Two Ukrainian anarchists – Anatoliy Dubovikhave and Sergiy Shevchenko – commented on that and other matters concerning the invasion. They were interviewed by Yavor Tarinski of the Greek libertarian journal Aftoleksi, republished in English by the London-based Freedom.

    Dubovikhave and Shevchenko explained that they were members of Revolutionary Confederation of Anarchist-Syndicalists (in Russian, RKAS), which for many years was:

    involved in the labour movement, the student movement, we had a significant influence on the independent trade union movement, especially among the Donbas miners, where RKAS representatives participated in local and regional strike committees. We participated in a pan-Ukrainian movement to protect workers’ rights and oppose the deterioration of labour legislation.

    After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, RKAS had to change tack, adopting armed resistance against the aggressors. Dubovikhave and Shevchenko also train volunteers in “unofficial military organizations, from which territorial defense units later emerged”. Moreover, within the Ukrainian armed forces, soldiers have set up anarchist committees.

    They’re “idiots”

    With regard to those on the left who support Putin, Dubovikhave and Shevchenko explain:

    The left sees Putin’s Russia as an alternative to NATO, as a rival to NATO. In a sense, they are right: Russia is indeed opposed to NATO. But they do not see, and do not want to see, that the Russian alternative means only a desire to pursue its own, independent but equally (if not worse) imperialist policy.

    They say such ‘leftists’ are “idiots”.

    They add:

    It suffices to say that throughout the existence of the independent Ukrainian state, there has not been a single political anarchist prisoner here. At the same time, many dozens of our comrades in Russia ended up in Russian prisons – guilty solely for their anarchist convictions.

    But they remain optimistic, referring to a number of non-state self-organized initiatives in Ukraine:

    They deal with a variety of issues, from helping refugees and guarding small communities to supplying the military with everything they need. In this sense, Ukraine today follows anarchist practices more than many other societies in the world.

    Issues

    Aftoleksi also published a video by film-maker and independent journalist Alexis Daloumis, who interviewed Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Polish anarchists and anti-authoritarians. The main issues addressed include Russia’s claim that the invasion is about ‘denazification’, what’s really happening in Donbas, and the politics surrounding the involvement of NATO:

    Revolutionary Action

    Resistance by its nature comes in various forms. Back in March, the Canary reported that Ukrainian anarchists had set up an “international detachment to resist the Russian invasion”.

    Freedom also published an interview the Polish 161 Crew did with a member of the Ukrainian Operation Solidarity (OS). OS was set up by anarchists and libertarian socialists to support anti-fascists, anti-authoritarian activists, and leftists in their armed struggle against the Russian occupation.

    Like Dubovikhave and Shevchenko, OS made it clear why the left should not support Putin:

    Putin calls his actions “denazification” and “anti-fascism” – that’s absolute bullshit. Anti-fascists don’t bomb children and old people, they don’t throw thermobaric bombs at civilians or use phosphorus, they don’t leave or burn the bodies of soldiers on purpose so as not to have to pay their families any money, they don’t use own people as cannon fodder. We don’t destroy cities and leave scorched ground.

    The Canary has previously published details of mass anti-war protests, cyber attacks on Russian sites, and acts of sabotage.

    History of struggle

    Ukraine is no stranger to armed struggle and has a proud history of resisting totalitarianism. For example, anarchist insurrectionist Nestor Makhno led the 100,000 strong Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (RIAU). The RIAU fought a campaign against the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the Communist revolution.

    In an article in CrimethInc, published before Putin’s invasion, Ukrainian anarchists provided a brief history of resistance in Ukraine. They pointed out how during the occupation of Crimea, Russian authorities detained and tortured several anarchists.

    One anarchist group mentioned – Autonomnyi Opir (Autonomous Resistance) – was inspired by the Zapatistas (Mexican revolutionary anarchists) and the Kurds.

    Prisoner support

    Resistance invariably also means providing prisoner support. Autonomy is the website of Autonomy Action, an organisation of anarchists and libertarian communists that’s now in its 20th year. Since 2007, it has also hosted news and updates from the Moscow section of the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC). The latter provides support to prisoners, such as finding and paying for lawyers, supplying books and food packages, etc.

    In September, Autonomy published an interview with Moscow ABC (who translated it into English). In that interview, Moscow ABC explained how some people are jailed for spreading ‘fakes’, i.e.:

    the dissemination of any information about the actions of the Russian Armed Forces that differs from the official version.

    Moscow ABC also assists Solidarity Zone, an initiative that provides a similar service to that of the ABC. In May, Autonomy published a list of anti-war prisoners supported by Moscow ABC.

    Autonomy also provides updates on anti-war and anti-state prisoners. These include Belarusian anarchists charged on a number of offences, who were sentenced to 5 to 17 years, and the arrest and torture of anti-fascists in the Urals, variously accused of possession of weapons and explosives.

    Another site, Rupression, offers prisoner support specifically on a case involving eight people who were arrested in 2017-18. They were accused of being part of a terrorist organisation and were viciously tortured.

    The International Workers Association in Russia

    In 1989, my partner and I – both members of the London ABC and the UK section of the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers Association (IWA) – took the risk of travelling to the Soviet Union to meet a group of people who wanted to set up a Russian section of the IWA.

    As it was, it turned out to be a fruitful meeting. Some 23 years later, at the commencement of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the IWA in Russia issued a statement urging the Russian military to mutiny and Russian people to take strike action. Mutinies and acts of sabotage were subsequently reported, although there are no reports of strikes. Meanwhile, on-the-ground resistance against Putin’s imperialist aggression continues.

    Featured image via YouTube

    By Tom Coburg

    This post was originally published on Canary Workers’ Co-op.

  • Who Deserves a Nobel Peace Prize in Ukraine? 

    In what was described as a harsh rebuke of Russia, the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties, along with Belarusian human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski and the Russian human rights organization Memorial. While at first glance, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties might sound like a group that is well deserving of this honor, Ukrainian peace leader Yurii Sheliazhenko wrote a stinging critique.

    Sheliazhenko, who heads up the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement and is a board member of the European Bureau for Conscientious Objection, accused the Center for Civil Liberties of embracing the agendas of such problematic international donors as the U.S. Department of State and the National Endowment for Democracy. The National Endowment for Democracy supports NATO membership for Ukraine; insists that no negotiations with Russia are possible and shames those who seek compromise; wants the West to impose a dangerous no-fly zone; says that only Putin violates human rights in Ukraine; never criticizes the Ukrainian government for suppressing pro-Russian media, parties, and public figures; never criticizes the Ukrainian army for war crimes and human rights violations, and refuses to stand up for the human right, recognized under international law, to conscientious objection to military service.

    Supporting conscientious objectors is the role of Sheliazhenko and his organization, the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement (UPM). While we hear a lot about Russian war resisters, as Sheliazhenko points out even inside Ukraine, which is portrayed in Western media as a country entirely united in its war with Russia, there are men who don’t want to fight.

    The Ukrainian Pacifist Movement was founded in 2019 when fighting in the separatist-ruled Donbas region was at a peak and Ukraine was forcing its citizens to participate in the civil war. According to Sheliazhenko, Ukrainian men were “being given military summonses off of the streets, out of night clubs and dormitories, or snatched for military service for minor infractions such as traffic violations, public drunkenness, or casual rudeness to police officers.”

    To make matters worse, when Russia invaded in February 2022, Ukraine suspended its citizens’ right to conscientious objection and forbade men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country; nevertheless, since February, over 100,000 Ukrainian draft-eligible men managed to flee instead of fight. It’s estimated that several thousand more have been detained while trying to escape.

    International human rights law affirms peoples’ right, due to principled conviction, to refuse to participate in military conflict and conscientious objection has a long and rich history. In 1914, a group of Christians in Europe, hoping to avert the impending war, formed the International Fellowship of Reconciliation to support conscientious objectors. When the U.S. joined WWI, social reformer and women’s rights activist Jane Addams protested. She was harshly criticized at the time but, in 1931, she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

    In Russia, hundreds of thousands of young men are refusing to fight. According to a source inside Russia’s Federal Security Service, within three days of Russia’s announcement that it was drafting 300,000 more recruits, 261,000 men fled the country. Those who could booked flights; others drove, bicycled, and walked across the border.

    Belarusians have also joined the exodus. According to estimates by Connection e.V., a European organization that supports conscientious objectors and deserters, an estimated 22,000 draft-eligible Belarusians have fled their country since the war began.

    The Russian organization Kovcheg, or The Ark, helps Russians fleeing because of anti-war positions, condemnation of Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine, and/or persecution they are experiencing in Russia. In Belarus, the organization Nash Dom runs a “NO means NO” campaign to encourage draft-eligible Belarusians not to fight. Despite refusing to fight being a noble and courageous act for peace – the penalty in Russia for refusing the draft is up to ten years in prison and in Ukraine, it is at least up to three years, and likely much higher, with hearings and verdicts closed to the public – neither Kovcheg, Nash Dom nor the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, were announced as Nobel Peace Prize winners yesterday.

    The U.S. government nominally supports Russia’s war resisters. On September 27, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declared that Russians fleeing the draft were “welcome” in the U.S. and encouraged them to apply for asylum. But as far back as last October, before Russia invaded Ukraine, amid tit-for-tat U.S.-Russia tensions, Washington announced it would henceforth only issue visas to Russians through the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw, 750 miles away from Moscow.

    To put a further damper on Russian hopes of refuge in the U.S., on the same day as the White House held its press conference where it encouraged draft-eligible Russians to seek U.S. asylum, the Biden administration announced that it would be continuing into fiscal year 2023 its FY2022 global refugee cap of 125,000.

    You would think that those resisting this war would be able to find refuge in European countries, as Americans fleeing the Vietnam war did in Canada. Indeed, when the Ukraine war was in its early stages, European Council President Charles Michel called on Russian soldiers to desert, promising them protection under EU refugee law. But in August, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked his Western allies to reject all Russian emigres. Currently, all non-visa travel from Russia to EU countries is suspended.

    As Russian men fled after Putin’s draft announcement, Latvia closed its border with Russia and Finland said it was likely going to be tightening its visa policy for Russians.

    Had the Nobel Peace Prize awardees been the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian organizations that are supporting war resisters and peacemakers, it would have drawn global attention to the courageous young men taking this stand and perhaps opened more avenues for them to get asylum abroad. It could have also initiated a much-needed conversation about how the U.S. is supplying Ukraine with an endless flow of weapons but not pushing for negotiations to end a war so dangerous that President Biden is warning of “nuclear Armageddon.” It certainly would have been more in line with Alfred Nobel’s desire to bring global recognition to those who have “done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies.”

    The post Who Deserves a Nobel Peace Prize in Ukraine?  first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Criticizing Kremlin leads to treason charges

    Opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza in Moscow.
    Opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza in Moscow. © 2021 AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko

    On 7 October 2022 Human Rights Watch criticised sharply the Russian charge of high treason against an opposition politician, Vladimir Kara-Murza. It is “a blatant attempt to quash any criticism of the Kremlin and deter contact with the international community“, Human Rights Watch said. 

    This is the third baseless criminal charge against Kara-Murza since he was detained in April 2022. He has already been indicted for spreading “fake news” about the Russian Armed Forces because he publicly criticized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and for alleged involvement with an “undesirable” foreign organization. He now risks an additional sentence of up 20 years if convicted on high treason charges. [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2022/04/14/human-rights-defender-vladimir-kara-murza-arrested-in-russia/]

    “Vladimir Kara-Murza is a longstanding proponent of democratic values and has been a vocal opponent of Vladimir  Putin and Russia’s war on Ukraine,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “It is painfully obvious that the Kremlin sees Kara-Murza as a direct and imminent threat.  These charges against him and his prolonged detention are a travesty of justice. Russian authorities should immediately and unconditionally free Kara-Murza and drop all charges against him.” See also: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/34e43b60-3236-11ea-b4d5-37ffeeddd006

    Vadim Prokhorov, Kara-Murza’s lawyer, said the high treason charges relate to Kara-Murza’s  public criticism of the Russian authorities in international forums.

    Kara-Murza has called for sanctions against the Kremlin and has spoken in person before national political bodies throughout Europe and in the United States, and at many international and intergovernmental forums, including at the United Nations. He was a key figure advocating for the US Magnitsky Act that gave rise to the Global Magnitsky sanctions regime for serious human rights violations.

    Kara-Murza was also a close friend of the murdered Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov. He survived two near-fatal poisonings, in 2015 and 2017, which Bellingcat investigative journalists reported was most likely orchestrated by the Russian Federal Security Service and which the Russian authorities have failed to investigate. 

    Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine started in February, the Russian authorities have expanded their repressive toolbox. In March, Russian authorities criminalized calls for sanctions against Russia, and in July also criminalized “confidential cooperation” with foreign states, international or foreign organizations as well as public calls for action that are “against national interests.”

    These new provisions cannot be applied retroactively to the years of advocacy by Kara-Murza, Human Rights Watch said, and so he is being charged with high treason under Russia’s criminal code, which was expanded in November 2012. The definition was expanded to include consultations or any other assistance to a foreign state or international or foreign organizations…

    Russia’s rules on prosecution and trial of treason cases also breach human rights safeguards, in particular fair trial guarantees. For example, the criminal case materials in such proceedings are classified so that the defense team may not have access to key pieces of evidence, and the trial takes place behind closed doors, preventing public scrutiny.

    Ivan Safronov, a journalist, was recently convicted of high treason and sentenced to 22 years in maximum security prison and given a substantial fine for his journalistic investigations of defense contracts, spotlighting how treason cases are handled.  He was tried behind closed doors, key evidence obtained by fellow journalists was not accepted by the court, and his defense team came under immense pressure. Two of his lawyers had to flee the country, and a third was detained on accusations of spreading false information and remains in detention.

    “Sadly, it is unrealistic to expect that fair trial standards will be observed in Kara-Murza’s case,” Williamson said. “By jailing leaders like him, Russian authorities are attempting to instill fear in the Russian people and eradicate any opportunity for civil society to mobilize and oppose the Kremlin and its war.” 

    https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/10/07/russia-first-treason-charges-criticizing-kremlin

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • US Media’s Intellectual No-Fly-Zone on US Culpability in Nord Stream Attack

     

    Multiple explosions last week off the coast of Poland damaged both the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines, shutting down one and preventing the other from going online. The pipelines, intended to carry natural gas from Russia to Germany, are critical infrastructure for Europe’s energy markets.

    The explosions triggered a lopsided “whodunnit” in US media, with commentators almost universally fingering Russia as the culprit, despite the lack of a plausible motive. Official US opposition to the pipeline has been well-established over the years, giving Washington ample motive to destroy the pipelines, but most newsrooms uniformly suppressed this history, and attacked those who raised it.

    WaPo: European leaders blame Russian ‘sabotage’ after Nord Stream explosions

    “Only Russia had the motivation,” the Washington Post (9/27/22) claimed—even as it reported that the pipelines “deepened Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas,” which “many [presumably Western] officials now say was a grave strategic mistake.”

    After the explosions, much of the press dutifully parroted the Western official line. The Washington Post (9/27/22) quickly produced an account: “European Leaders Blame Russian ‘Sabotage’ After Nord Stream Explosions,” citing nothing but EU officials who claimed that while they had no evidence of Russian involvement, “only Russia had the motivation, the submersible equipment and the capability.”

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

    The idea that only Russia had the means and motivation is clearly false on both counts. Washington has made it clear for years that it doesn’t want the pipeline, and has taken active measures to stop it from coming online. As for the means, it’s patently absurd to suggest that the US doesn’t have the capability to lay explosives in 200 feet of water.

    Even Max Boot, who agreed in his Washington Post column (9/29/22) that only Russia had the means and motive, contradictorily acknowledged that “the means are easy.”

    A long history of opposition

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

    RAND: Extending Russia

    The RAND report (2019) that recommended “Reduc[ing] [Russian] Natural Gas Exports and Hinder[ing] Pipeline Expansions” now comes with a warning saying it’s been “mischaracterized” by “Russian entities and individuals sympathetic to Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.”

    A 2019 Pentagon-funded study from the RAND Corporation on how best to exploit “Russia’s economic, political and military vulnerabilities and anxieties” included a recommendation to “Reduce [Russian] Natural Gas Exports and Hinder Pipeline Expansions.” The study noted that a “first step would involve stopping Nord Stream 2,” and that natural gas “from the United States and Australia could provide a substitute.”

    This RAND study also prophetically recommended “providing more US military equipment and advice” to Ukraine in order to “lead Russia to increase its direct involvement in the conflict and the price it pays for it,” even though it acknowledged that “Russia might respond by mounting a new offensive and seizing more Ukrainian territory.”

    The Obama administration opposed the pipeline. As part of the major sanctions package against Russia in 2017, the Trump administration began sanctioning any company doing work on the pipeline. The move generated outrage in Germany, where many saw it as an attempt to meddle with European markets. In 2019, the US implemented more sanctions on the project.

    Upon coming into office, President Joe Biden made opposition to the pipeline one of his administration’s top priorities. During his confirmation hearings in 2021, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told Congress he was “determined to do whatever I can to prevent” Nord Stream 2 from being completed. Months later, the State Department reiterated that “any entity involved in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline risks US sanctions and should immediately abandon work on the pipeline.”

    In July 2021, the sanctions were relaxed only after contentious negotiations with the German government. The New York Times (7/21/21) reported that the administration and Germany still had “profound disagreements” about the project.

    As Russia was gathering troops at Ukraine’s border at the beginning of this year, US administration officials issued threats against the pipeline’s operation in the event of a Russian invasion. In January, Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland — one of the main players during the 2014 Maidan Coup in Ukraine and wife of Robert Kagan, the founder of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century — issued a stern warning against the pipeline. “If Russia invades, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 Will. Not. Move. Forward.”

    In February, Joe Biden himself told reporters, “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” After a reporter asked how the US planned to end a project that was under German control, Biden responded, “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”

    On February 22, after Russian troops were given orders to enter the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, Germany suspended the pipeline, in a move that was called “remarkable” at the time (New York Times, 2/22/22).

    In sharp contrast to the US’s antagonism, Russia has taken the opposite approach to the pipeline it spent billions of dollars to complete. As recently as three weeks ago, Putin expressed willingness to supply more gas if the EU would lift the sanctions against the newer pipeline. He said: “If things are so bad, just go ahead and lift sanctions against Nord Stream 2, with its 55 billion cubic meters per year — all they have to do is press the button and they will get going.” Diplomatic sources told the Cradle (9/29/22) that Russia and Germany were in talks about both NS1 and NS2 on the day of the explosion.

    The day after the attack, German government sources leaked to the German daily Der Spiegel (9/28/22) that weeks earlier, the CIA warned Germany of a potential attack on the pipeline. However, sources told CNN (9/29/22) that the warnings were “vague” and that “it was not clear from the warnings who might be responsible for any attacks on the pipelines, or when they might occur.” A high-level source in German intelligence told the Cradle (9/29/22) that they were “furious” because “they were not in the loop.”

    After the attack, Blinken called the bombing a “tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy,” and said that this “offers tremendous strategic opportunity for years to come.” On the other hand, Russia has already announced plans to begin repairing the pipeline.

    So contrary to what nearly the US entire media establishment has presented, the US has had ample motive to destroy the pipeline, and is actively celebrating its demise.

    ‘Thank you, USA’

    One event that fueled speculation of US involvement was a tweet from a Polish member of the European Parliament, Radek Sikorski—a one-time Polish Defense minister as well as a former American Enterprise Institute fellow, who was named one of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” in 2012 by Foreign Policy (11/26/12).

    Radosław Sikorski on Twitter: Thank You, USA

    The Washington Post (9/28/22) suggested that by thanking the United States over a picture of the pipeline explosion, Radek Sikorksi may have been “crediting the United States with rendering the pipelines moot by pressuring Europe not to take Russian natural gas.”

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

    He later tweeted against the pipeline, noting that “Nord Stream’s only logic was for Putin to be able to blackmail or wage war on Eastern Europe with impunity.” An hour later he elaborated:

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

    The last line was a joke about how Russia classifies its invasion of Ukraine as a “special military operation.”

    After these tweets received attention from those who suspected US responsibility, Sikorski deleted them. Business Insider (9/30/22) dishonestly wrote that these latter tweets were actually an “attempt to clarify that the original tweet was a criticism of US support for the pipeline being built in the first place.” Any honest reading of the tweets demonstrates that the opposite is true; presumably this is why Insider didn’t link to any specific text.

    The Washington Post (9/28/22) also offered a twisted interpretation of Sikorski’s tweets:

    His meaning wasn’t entirely clear; it seems possible he was crediting the United States with rendering the pipelines moot by pressuring Europe not to take Russian natural gas. In later tweets, he seemed actually to point to Russian sabotage.

    For the latter claim, the Post cited Sikorski’s joke about the “special maintenance operation,” but the full tweet shows that this is a preposterous interpretation.

    While certainly not a smoking gun, such a high-profile accusation (or expression of gratitude, such as it was) raises eyebrows, especially given Poland’s strenuous opposition to the pipeline, and the recent completion of a Norway/Poland pipeline designed to “cut dependency on Russia.” The circumstances are even more suspicious, given that Sikorski is the husband of the fervently anti-Russian staff writer at The Atlantic Anne Applebaum, who has been a key media figure advancing the pro-NATO narrative in the West.

    Applebaum even sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (a position she once shared with Victoria Nuland before Nuland moved into the Biden administration), a government-funded conduit for US regime change and destabilization projects that was an important driving force behind the 2014 coup that replaced Ukraine’s pro-Russian government with a Pro-Western one. Since then, the NED has funded English-language Ukrainian media like the Kyiv Independent, which, along with commentators like Applebaum herself, are now shaping coverage of the current war for Western audiences.

    The fact that someone as connected as Sikorski would find it appropriate to publicly thank the US for the attack certainly deserves scrutiny. Some US media brought up the tweet, but dismissed it as unimportant (The Hill, 9/30/22).

    ‘A reminder from Moscow’

    Business Insider: The sabotage of gas pipelines were a 'warning shot' from Putin to the West, and should brace for more subterfuge, Russia experts warn

    Business Insider (10/4/22): If Putin is willing to blow up his own pipelines, just think what he might do to yours!

    US media have all but ignored the critical context above. If a case like that existed for the Russia-did-it theory, you can be sure that it would have been spelled out in detail by everyone. But instead, US media direct attention away from the obvious and are left to grasp at straws to find a potential Russian motive. In fact, many outlets readily acknowledged that there was no obvious motive for Russia to bomb its own pipeline. For example, the New York Times (9/28/22) wrote:

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

    Vox (9/28/22) reported that “experts emphasized…it may be hard to fully know Moscow’s motivation.” NPR (9/28/22) also couldn’t readily answer “the question as to why Russia would attack its own pipelines.”

    Having admitted that Russia has no readily apparent motive, establishment media are left to stretch. They presented a couple of theories for Putin’s potential motivation, but neither holds up to scrutiny. One, per the Times (9/28/22), is that the leaks “may help Russia by pushing energy prices higher,” since “the natural gas market is spooked.” But this logic makes little sense, as Russia has been pushing for Europe to open the Nord Stream 2 pipeline since it was completed. Higher natural gas prices do Russia little good if it’s unable to deliver its gas to market.

    The Times (9/28/22) put forth another theory: that Putin is just teaching the West some kind of lesson:

    The ruptures could also be a reminder from Moscow that if European countries keep up their support for Ukraine, they risk sabotage to vital energy infrastructure.

    The Washington Post (9/27/22), speaking to “security officials,” cited similar theories:

    One official said it might have been a message to NATO: “We are close.” Another said that it could be a threat to other, non-Russian energy infrastructure.

    Business Insider (10/4/22) published a piece hysterically titled: “The Sabotage of Gas Pipelines Were a ‘Warning Shot’ From Putin to the West, and Should Brace for More Subterfuge, Russia Experts Warn.”

    CNN (9/29/22) also found a US official to tell them that “Moscow would likely view [attacking the pipeline] as worth the price if it helped raise the costs of supporting Ukraine for Europe,” and that “sabotaging the pipelines could ‘show what Russia is capable of.’” Vox (9/28/22) found some “experts” to tell them the same story.

    But the reality is that Russia has done its utmost to discourage NATO from further involvement in the war. A Russian attack on the pipeline would all but guarantee greater NATO involvement in Ukraine. Antagonizing Germany to teach the rest of Europe a lesson—which would only work if Russia was understood to be behind the sabotage—would be the opposite of Russia’s interests. This argument amounts to little more than “Putin is evil and hates Europe.”

    As FAIR (3/30/22) has previously written, this cartoon narrative of Putin as Hitler allows for all logic and reasoning to fall by the wayside. The US behavior with regards to the pipeline is objectively more compelling than the case against Russia, yet the media have dismissed it out of hand.

    A crack in the facade

    One of the cracks in the uniform coverage was a segment on Bloomberg TV (10/3/22). Host Tom Keene brought on Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, who was recently the head of the Lancet’s investigation (9/14/22) into the origin of Covid-19. During the interview, Sachs stated that he “would bet [the attack] was a US action, perhaps US and Poland.”

    Bloomberg host Tom Keene interviewing Jeffrey Sachs

    Bloomberg TV host Tom Keene (10/3/22) takes Jeffrey Sachs to task for questioning the official Nord Stream narrative.

    Keene immediately stopped him and demanded that he lay out evidence for the claim. Sachs cited radar evidence that US helicopters, normally based in Gdansk, had been hovering within the area of the explosion shortly before the attack. This is certainly not a smoking gun, given Western intelligence claims that Russian ships were observed in the area during this same timeframe, though it does add to the case for US responsibility. He also cited the threatening statements from Biden and Blinken as reasons for his suspicion.

    Sachs acknowledged the propaganda system in which he was operating:

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

    This was the only time FAIR saw an anchor push back and ask for evidence for guests’ speculation of responsibility—speculation that was usually pointed toward Russia.

    The broken clock

    As illustration of the weirdness that is the US elite’s opportunistic relationship with Russia, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson (9/27/22), the white nationalist who hosts the most popular evening talk show in America, was one of the only media figures to go against the dominant narrative. Carlson certainly overstated the case for US involvement in the pipeline attack, but he asked questions no one else in corporate media would touch.

    WaPo: Russian TV is very excited about Такер Карлсон’s Nord Stream theory

    The Washington Post (9/29/22) printed Tucker Carlson’s name in Cyrillic—implying that only a Russian agent would express doubts about the US’s innocence.

    But rather than dissect Carlson’s case factually, most other media relied purely on redbaiting. The Washington Post (9/29/22) wrote Carlson’s name in Cyrillic —”Russian TV Is Very Excited About Такер Карлсон’s Nord Stream Theory”—to play into the McCarthyite fearmongering of the New Cold War.

    The Post brought up the threatening statements from Nuland and Biden, and even the tweet from Sikorski, but only to dismiss them, because they weren’t a “smoking gun.” Of course, the Post refused to acknowledge that the quotes from administration officials demonstrated a clear opposition to the pipeline, and thus an obvious motive for the attack.

    Despite the fact that Carlson repeatedly claimed that “we don’t know what happened,” the Post declared that “he delivered his speculation as if it were fact and invited his viewers to do the same.” While this is a fair assessment of the tone if not the text of the segment, the Post had nothing to say about the certainty with which others in the media accused Russia.

    The Post’s reporting was picked up by MSNBC Katie Phang (10/1/22), who, also eschewing actual investigation, asked her guest, “How dangerous is it for an American media personality with the kind of reach that Tucker Calrson has to be out there spouting a talking point that ends up on Russian state TV?”

    ‘Baseless conspiracy theory’

    ABC: Russians push baseless theory blaming US for burst pipeline

    AP (via ABC, 9/30/22) accused “Kremlin and Russian state media” of “aggressively pushing a baseless conspiracy theory” in “another effort to split the U.S. and its European allies.”

    The Associated Press (9/30/22) wrote a widely republished story, headlined “Russians Push Baseless Theory Blaming US for Burst Pipeline,” that called the idea the US was responsible for the attacks a “baseless conspiracy theory.”

    Like the other coverage, the AP didn’t evaluate any of the evidence, but called the theory “disinformation” designed to “undermine Ukraine’s allies” and, importantly, painted such speculation as beyond legitimate discussion:

    The suggestion that the US caused the damage was circulating on online forums popular with American conservatives and followers of QAnon, a conspiracy theory movement which asserts that Trump is fighting a battle against a Satanic child-trafficking sect that controls world events.

    Bloomberg (reprinted in the Washington Post, 9/27/22) acknowledged Biden’s threats against the pipeline, but writer Javier Blas dismissed them without actually explaining why:

    Conspiracy theorists always see the hand of the CIA in everything. But that’s nonsense. The clear beneficiary of shutting down the Nord Stream pipelines for good is Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    Yes, the “clear beneficiary” of the destruction of the main method Russia could sell billions of dollars worth of natural gas to Europe was…the Russian president. It doesn’t make more sense if you read the whole article.

    The US press produced an overwhelming chorus of articles (e.g., Business Insider, 9/30/22; Vox, 2/28/22; Newsweek, 10/3/22) that deployed the term “conspiracy theory” to discredit the idea of US culpability. Not one of these pieces adequately explored the credible reasons for the suspicion, simply ignoring the body of evidence presented above.

    The Brookings Institution (where Robert Kagan works) published a long article (10/3/22), complete with graphs and charts, that warned of the dangers of podcasters spreading the idea that the US was culpable in the attacks. It dismissed this possibility on the strength of a link to the New York Times (9/28/22), used to substantiate a claim that “experts broadly agree that Russia is the key suspect.” It did not do any investigation of its own.

    When is a theory a ‘conspiracy theory’?

    Caitlin Johnstone: It’s Only A ‘Conspiracy Theory’ When It Accuses The US Government

    Caitlin Johnstone (10/4/22): “If you think the United States could have any responsibility for this attack at all, you’re a crazy conspiracy theorist and no different from QAnoners who think pedophile Satan worshipers rule the world.”

    This use of the term “conspiracy theory” or “conspiracy theorist,” along with the mention of QAnon, has the effect of associating speculation of US involvement in the attack with a class of people that have largely been discredited (with good reason) in the public mind. Once this link has been made, evaluating the evidence is no longer required. It’s a lazy rhetorical trick to marginalize dissent.

    In his book Conspiracy Theory in America, scholar Lance Dehaven Smith examined the way the term is deployed in establishment media:

    What they actually have in mind are suspicions that simply deviate from conventional opinion about the norms and integrity of US officials. In practice, it is not the form or the object of conspiracy theories, or even the absence of official confirmation, that differentiates them from other (acceptable) beliefs; it is their nonconformity with prevailing opinion.

    Writer Caitlin Johnstone (10/4/22) put it succinctly in a piece on the hysteria surrounding the pipeline attacks: “It’s Only a ‘Conspiracy Theory’ When It Accuses the US Government.” She wrote:

    Over and over again we see the pejorative “conspiracy theory” applied to accusations against one nation but not the other, despite the fact that it’s the exact same accusation. They are both conspiracy theories per definition: They’re theories about an alleged conspiracy to sabotage Russian pipelines. But the Western political/media class consistently applies that label to one and never the other.

    At a meeting of the UN Security Council—hastily called by Russia in the wake of the attacks—US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield called the Russian accusations “conspiracy theories,” then went on to accuse Russia of attacking its own pipeline. Reporting on the Security Council meeting, CNN (11/29/22) showed its own conspiratorial thinking, citing US officials who called the meeting itself “suspicious,” because “typically, the official said, Russia isn’t organized enough to move so quickly, suggesting that the maneuver was pre-planned.”

    Of course there are irresponsible, popular conspiracy theories that fail to hold up to scrutiny, and are in fact quite dangerous. The QAnon theory that the world’s elite are harvesting a substance called adrenochrome from trafficked children to gain special abilities and extend their life is absurd. The 2020 election spawned many disproven theories about a stolen Trump victory that ended up leading to the deadly riot at the Capitol on January 6. But just as the existence of websites that fabricate pseudo-news reports for profit gave Donald Trump a label to dismiss any journalism he didn’t like as “fake news,” so to are such fanciful theories based on leaps of logic used to disparage well-documented efforts to peer behind the scenes of US official policy.

    To be sure, we still don’t know for certain who was behind the pipeline bombing, but there is a solid prima facie case for US culpability. The explosion is a watershed moment in the escalation toward a direct confrontation between nuclear powers. Media malfeasance on this topic doesn’t just threaten the credibility of the press, but literally imperils the whole of human civilization.

     

    The post US Media’s Intellectual No-Fly-Zone on US Culpability in Nord Stream Attack appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Human Rights Campaigners in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia

    The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to two human rights groups, the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine and Memorial in Russia, as well as imprisoned Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski. The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised their work criticizing power and protecting fundamental human rights in neighboring countries torn apart by war. We speak to Anna Dobrovolskaya, who served as executive director of Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow, part of the Nobel-winning group Memorial, before it was shut down by the Russian government. “People can see this as a common victory for civil society, not just in Russia,” says Dobrovolskaya. We also speak with Ole von Uexküll, executive director of the Stockholm-based Right Livelihood Award Foundation; all of Friday’s Nobel winners are also previous Right Livelihood laureates, known informally as the “alternative Nobel Peace Prize.” The hope of these international awards is that Belarus will “immediately release Ales Bialiatski” and that Russia will stop their legal persecution of human rights organizations, says von Uexküll.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

    The Norwegian Nobel Committee has announced the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded to the imprisoned human rights activist Ales Bialiatski from Belarus, as well as the Russian human rights group Memorial and the Ukrainian organization Center for Civil Liberties. The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced this year’s Peace Prize winners at a ceremony this morning in Oslo.

    BERIT REISS–ANDERSEN: By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2022 to Ales Bialiatski, Memorial and the Center for Civil Liberties, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to honor three outstanding champions of human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence in the neighbor countries Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. Through their consistent efforts in favor of human values, anti-militarism and principles of law, this year’s laureates have revitalized and honored Alfred Nobel’s vision of peace and fraternity between nations — a vision most needed in the world today.

    AMY GOODMAN: After the Nobel Committee’s announcement, Anna Trushova of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine spoke to reporters.

    ANNA TRUSHOVA: [translated] I am happy. I am delighted to be part of the team that is so motivated, that does such wonderful things for our country. We understand that defenders of law are catalysts of changes, and this recognition motivates us even more to introduce these changes into our society. … When the full-scale aggression started, we obviously did not sit idle. We organized a team of defenders of law which actively documented war crimes. We have logged over 20,000 war crimes so far. And this is done in order to punish all perpetrators.

    AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by two guests. Joining us from Stockholm, Sweden, is Ole von Uexküll. He’s executive director of the Stockholm-based Right Livelihood Award Foundation. All three winners of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize are Right Livelihood laureates. And with us in Moscow is Anna Dobrovolskaya. She is the former executive director of the Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow, which was part of the group Memorial, which has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Her organization was shut down by the Russian government.

    Anna, let’s begin with you. The significance of this announcement? Did you know before the announcement that your group was going to win the Nobel Peace Prize? And what does this mean for what’s happening right now in Russia?

    ANNA DOBROVOLSKAYA: Hello, Amy.

    No, I had no idea that we can be winners this year. Memorial have been nominated several few times before, and some of our staff members have been nominated to the Nobel Peace Prize before. And, of course, it’s a great honor. Though I’m no longer with Memorial, I still keep receiving congratulations from all over the world.

    And people consider this as a common victory for civil society, not just in Russia, because it has some importance in Russia, but it’s extremely important now when there is a war between Russia and Ukraine. It is extremely important now to support organizations in all of those countries, and especially it is important for Ales, who is behind the bars. In Russia, I’m sure it will also have some significant importance, because Memorial keeps facing huge difficulties in continuation of its work, although the legal entities have been shut down. So I’m hoping that Russian authorities will step back. But, unfortunately, as we know, it didn’t help, for example, Novaya Gazeta, whose editor-in-chief was awarded the Peace Prize before, so, unfortunately, no bright forecast here.

    AMY GOODMAN: And talk about what Memorial worked on, when it was allowed to function, and what needs to be done right now in Russia.

    ANNA DOBROVOLSKAYA: When Memorial was able to function, we did lots of things. We had two major flows of work, so to say. We had a pillar related to historical remembrance, Soviet past, the political repressions during Soviet time and memorialization of those events, and we had this human rights wing, which I was the chair of. We worked with documenting the war crimes in Chechnya. We documented human rights violations all over the country. We helped the victims of political repressions and also provided various legal aid to the victims of human rights violations everywhere.

    Right now this all better be continued, because modern Russia is the place where lots of violations is happening. And actually, the current events is the continuation of the thought that has been promoted by Memorial for a long period of time, that if you have human rights violations within the country which are ignored and where you have impunity instead of putting people responsible for those human rights violations, it means that sooner or later it will go beyond the borders, beyond the national borders of the country. And that’s what we see exactly now with Russia, Ukraine, before with Georgia and with some other countries, as well.

    AMY GOODMAN: In March, Democracy Now! spoke to Oleksandra Matviichuk the head of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine, which won the Nobel Peace Prize today. This is what she said then.

    OLEKSANDRA MATVIICHUK: When the war started, I asked myself, “Do I feel a fear?” And I was emotional, but I don’t have fear. I have two main emotions. The first emotion is anger. I really anger, as the millions of Ukrainians, that Russia invades to our country, that Russia try to stop our democratic choice, that Russia try impose the logic of Soviet Union and push us away to the past, which we don’t want to return to. But most big emotion is love. This is a love to my country. This is a love to our people. It’s love to our values. And we will stand for it.

    AMY GOODMAN: And this is Oleksandra Matviichuk speaking in a video produced by the Right Livelihood Foundation. She’s one of this year’s Right Livelihood laureates.

    OLEKSANDRA MATVIICHUK: Now in Ukraine we are going through the difficult times. We are fighting for our freedom in all senses: for a freedom to be independent country; for a freedom to be Ukrainians, with our own language and culture; and for a freedom to have a democratic choice. … We are documenting war crimes in this war with Russia in order to hold war criminals accountable, to provide justice for each victims of these crimes.

    AMY GOODMAN: Ole von Uexküll is the executive director of the Right Livelihood Award Foundation, which is based in Stockholm, Sweden. They produced that video, because the Center for — CCL, the Ukraine human rights group, the Center for Civil Liberties, not only won the Nobel Peace Prize today, but it was just announced they won the Right Livelihood Awards. Can you talk about the significance of the two organizations converging, the Nobel Committee and the Right Livelihood Awards, and just who Oleksandra, CCL, Memorial and the Belarusian group — the Belarusian human rights activist, in prison right now, what this means, Ole?

    OLE VON UEXKÜLL: Thank you, Amy. And congratulations, Anna.

    I am overjoyed. It was amazing for us to hear this morning when we followed the announcement from Oslo and then, as you heard, a first Right Livelihood Award laureate was announced as a Nobel Peace laureate, and then a second one, and then even a third one. And awarding them together, I think, is very significant. It’s a very, very good sign.

    And it’s particularly significant that they received a peace award — they, as defenders of democracy and as defenders of the rule of law, received a peace award — because, as Anna already pointed out, democracy is really a precondition for peace. And we see in their work how they are laying the foundations for post-Soviet societies to be peaceful. And, I mean, that’s something we’ve been hearing from Memorial and from Ales Bialiatski, who have been our laureates for a bit longer, for many years, that the crackdown they experience in their own countries also has to be read and understood as a preparation for war.

    And I think it’s particularly fantastic — I mean, they both, Ales Bialiatski and Memorial, are from — have their roots in the democracy movement of the ’80s. Olexsandra Matviichuk, who we just heard, is a younger generation of democracy activist. I think she’s 38 years now, started her activism already 15 years ago. And this work that she does really shows the alternative to that kind of brutal aggression, the alternative which you can find in international law and accountability.

    AMY GOODMAN: And, Anna, if you can talk about the significance of a Russian group, a Belarusian human rights activist now in prison and CCL in Ukraine winning this award together? In the West, it’s always presented as Russia versus Ukraine, but your perspective as a human rights activist and lawyer?

    ANNA DOBROVOLSKAYA: Yeah, that’s a very good question, actually. A lot of people are now concerned about the words which were said in the Nobel Peace Committee, saying that they were hoping for the peaceful coexistence. And actually, a lot of — for many people of Ukraine, those words about peaceful coexistence were very, very controversial. And some people will also see that building these together, like bringing Ukraine, Belarus and Russia together, is some kind of attempt to stress how that these countries still have the common past, and maybe they still have common future, as that’s what Vladimir Putin and his government is hoping for. So, here, I see some potential contradiction. But at the same time, I know that, and we all know that, there always will be people who are not satisfied or completely happy with these or any other decision.

    Some people in my team in Memorial, they said — I spoke to them this morning, and they said that “We think that we don’t deserve it, because we couldn’t stop the war. We couldn’t be receiving the Peace Prize in this horrible moment, because, yeah, the war is still going. We couldn’t stop the war in Chechnya. There was a war in Georgia. There was a war in Syria and in many other places.” But again, the question is: Would it be different without us? And we most truly know that the world will be probably a worse place without human rights activists in Belarus, in Ukraine and, of course, in Russia.

    And I’m definitely hoping that for Ales Bialiatski, my longtime, esteemed colleague, that this will help to put not just him but many other people, activists and journalists from Belarus out of the bars, because they keep receiving horrible sentences. Just yesterday, a very prominent journalist, Andrei Alexandrov, was sentenced to 14 years in prison, which is absolutely horrible. And I’m just hoping that the demonstration that there is a Peace Prize and that the international community is paying attention to the work of civil society in all the three countries will definitely change the fate not just of the laureates but of everyone.

    AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to the imprisoned Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski, who just won the Nobel Peace Prize. This is a couple-minute video produced by the Right Livelihood Foundation when he won in 2020.

    NARRATOR: Ales Bialiatski is a human rights activist in Belarus, leading an almost 30-year campaign for democracy and freedom. In 1996, he founded the human rights center Viasna, which today is the country’s leading organization documenting human rights abuses and monitoring elections.

    Belarus, under the authoritarian rule of President Alexander Lukashenko, is often referred to as “Europe’s last dictatorship.” Elections are rigged, opposition voices are silenced, and civil society is severely restricted.

    Bialiatski has been arrested more than 25 times and spent several years in prison on trumped-up charges as Belarusian authorities have tried to impede him. The government has also frequently targeted Viasna and its members.

    However, Bialiatski and Viasna’s persistent and long-standing efforts to empower the people of Belarus and ensure their democratic rights have rendered them an unstoppable force for freedom. During the recent large-scale pro-democracy demonstrations, Viasna has been playing a leading role in advocating for the freedom of assembly, defending the rights of people arrested for protesting, and documenting human rights abuses.

    Bialiatski and Viasna continue to stand for the multitude of courageous people protesting Lukashenko’s dictatorial reign at high personal risk. Through their commitment to democracy and freedom, Bialiatski and Viasna have laid the foundations of a peaceful and democratic society in Belarus.

    AMY GOODMAN: And let’s hear the imprisoned Belarusian human rights activist Ales Bialiatski in his own words. Again, today, it was announced he has won the Nobel Peace Prize. He spoke in Stockholm when he won the 2020 Right Livelihood Award.

    ALES BIALIATSKI: [translated] Dear friends, this year’s Right Livelihood Award to the human rights center Viasna and myself is a very important and exciting moment in our lives. We are receiving the award, popularly called the alternative Nobel Prize, at a time when a peaceful revolution is underway in Belarus. For six months now, the Belarusian society has been engaged in a breathtaking struggle — a fight for human rights, democracy and justice; a fight for the right to “be called people,” as the Belarusian writer Yanka Kupala has said; a fight against Europe’s last dictator and the regime he has built over 26 years.

    AMY GOODMAN: Ales Bialiatski ended his Right Livelihood Award acceptance speech speaking in English. He congratulated his fellow winners, including the leading human rights activist in the United States, Bryan Stevenson, and the Right Livelihood Award winner, the Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, who was in prison at the time.

    ALES BIALIATSKI: There, Nasrin is in a terrible situation now. I can imagine how it is for her to be in prison, and even harder to go back. Sometimes I have dreams that I am in prison again, and those are my darkness dreams. My heart and soul are with Nasrin now. Thank you.

    AMY GOODMAN: Nasrin Sotoudeh, the Iranian human rights lawyer, was in prison in 2020. She is home now on medical leave from prison. Ole von Uexküll, I want to go back to you to talk about that moment. I was just texting with Bryan Stevenson, who also won that year. He is calling for Ales’s freedom, for his release from prison, congratulated him winning the Nobel Peace Prize today. He was not able to meet him in person because it was in the midst of the pandemic. I believe Ales was the only one — right? — who came to Sweden for the awards.

    OLE VON UEXKÜLL: Yes.

    AMY GOODMAN: And so you spent time with him.

    OLE VON UEXKÜLL: Yeah, that was really incredible also now to hear his words there again, and very typical for him to always think of others first and think of the international and universal nature of this fight for democracy and for human rights. And he called the prospect of having to go to prison his darkest dream, in what we just heard, and, unfortunately, that is what happened. Last summer, he was arrested again, together with other Viasna colleagues. He just spent his 60th birthday, now a couple of days ago, in prison in very bad conditions that we have also been protesting at the U.N. Human Rights Council.

    So, with this Nobel Peace Prize now, Belarus has to understand that they have to immediately release Ales Bialiatski and all the Viasna staff and other pro-democracy fighters who are in prison. And they also — and Russia has to understand that they have to end their legal prosecution of Memorial. And I hope that will be the effect of this award.

    AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this year, Democracy Now! spoke to Natallia Satsunkevich. She works with the imprisoned Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski in their organization, which in English translates into “Spring.” She was speaking to us from Vilnius — this was in March — from Vilnius in Lithuania, talking about her country.

    NATALLIA SATSUNKEVICH: There are more than 1,000 of political prisoners in Belarus. And the conditions where they stay, they are awful. It influences extremely on their health. And there is at least one case when a person died in Belarusian prison, a political prisoner. So, I really call you to keep in focus this topic also, political prisoners in Belarus, and to spread this information, to show your solidarity and to support them by sending letters and postcards of solidarity from all countries, from the world.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, Anna Dobrovolskaya, again, you’re in Moscow, executive director of what was the Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow. If you can talk about the role of Belarus right now in Russia’s war on Ukraine?

    ANNA DOBROVOLSKAYA: It is very hard to describe what is going on, because we have the official position, which is like Belarus has nothing to do with the war, but, unofficially, we of course see that a lot of troops, a lot of weaponry and a lot of, like, logistical flows are made through Belarus. And it was recently reported that there was first a missile issued on Ukrainian territory from Belarus. And Lukashenko is a very close person to Putin. He is like the closest companion maybe of all post-Soviet countries.

    And in terms of civil society, we see that Belarus is like a few steps ahead of us, ahead of Russia. And unfortunately, what is happening in Belarus — what was happening in Belarus before starts happening in Russia like maybe in couple of years. And right now the situation there with the civil society and everything is absolutely horrible. But unfortunately, in the international agenda, people of Belarus, as well as people of Russia, are presented often as those who support the war, which is absolutely not true, and especially for Belarus. It’s a country where almost no protest is possible and where people are being severely beaten up and detained even if they try to do something very, very innocent like, I don’t know, giving money to some opposition groups or something like that. And unfortunately, looking at Belarus, we always see that this is the future of Russia, if nothing changes.

    AMY GOODMAN: Today’s Nobel announcement comes on Vladimir Putin’s 70th birthday and also on the 16th anniversary of the assassination of a fierce journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, critic of Putin, a critic of Russia’s war in Chechnya, crusading human rights and anti-corruption reporter. What do we know about her death at this time, Anna?

    ANNA DOBROVOLSKAYA: I’m not sure about the recent developments, but I think that it was not properly investigated at this moment, as it happened with the death of all other journalists and human rights activists in Russia. There probably are some people who have been imprisoned due to the fact that they have been, like, those who implemented the murder itself. But there was no proper investigation of her death or of the death of Natalya Estemirova, who was a human rights activist from Chechnya and my colleague from Memorial. So, unfortunately, all these crimes are not being — yeah, they’re not being taken care of by the government. Previously, we had the possibility of going to European court if stuff like this happened, but right now it’s not the option again for the Russian human rights defenders.

    So, yeah, her death was a tragedy. It was the first one, followed by, unfortunately, many others. And to this day, she is very well remembered. She has books. People come bringing flowers to the place in Moscow where she lived. And everyone understands that this death, her killing, her murder, was like the point of no return, where it was already clear that Russia is going into some strange direction.

    AMY GOODMAN: Anna, how do you see this war ending?

    ANNA DOBROVOLSKAYA: Oh my god. I would really, really hope — well, it’s really difficult, because a lot of people are hoping that Ukraine will win. I’m hoping that there could be some possible settlement. I definitely think that Russia will pay a lot of money to everything that happened in Ukraine, and that I’m really hoping that there will be some international treaty now against the war criminals, against military criminals, and people who were accountable will be held accountable for the deaths. That’s my hope. Will there be some peace negotiation now or later? That’s just very, very hard to predict. And a lot of people are saying that no peace is possible, and no peace agreement is possible, which is, of course, understandable. I’m just hoping that nobody will die, but, unfortunately, the conflict is still going on.

    AMY GOODMAN: And, Ole von Uexküll, you know, the Right Livelihood Awards are often referred to as the “alternative Nobel Prize.” Now the alternative has merged with the actual Nobel Prize. And if you can talk about what that means, and in the world today, to see human rights activists and groups in Belarus, in Ukraine and Russia all receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, what this could lead to?

    OLE VON UEXKÜLL: Thank you, Amy. Yeah, we’ve been presenting the Right Livelihood Awards since 1980, and there has been an understanding of the importance of civil society activism from the very beginning. And with the Nobel Prizes, sometimes they honor that, but then also they honor people like Abiy of Ethiopia or Barack Obama, with — where there seems to be a totally different kind of understanding of how change should come about in the world. We believe strongly that power lies in people who get organized to fight for important causes like democracy, like peace, like human rights, and that that actually has a huge effect.

    And in this regard, I would say that the three Right Livelihood — now Right Livelihood-Nobel laureates, who won the Nobel Peace Prize today, that’s an incredible message of hope. It’s really a symbol of the weakness of Vladimir Putin and the old-style military aggression, with all its dangers to world peace, right? I’m not doubting that. But it shows the enormous power of the civilized way to handle conflict in international conflicts, to build societies for peace, which is, you know, by rule of law, through mechanisms of democracy. It’s incredible that the CCL, the Center for Civil Liberties — Oleksandra Matviichuk, we heard — they have collected more than 20,000 pieces of evidence for war crimes. So I have no doubt that there is going to be accountability. Putin is going to emerge as the loser, and not through the traditional military means alone, but really be defeated by accountability, by rule of law, by democracy. And that, for me, is the message of hope, which Nobel picked up this year, very much in line with our thinking for more than four decades. And yeah, it’s very significant.

    AMY GOODMAN: Since you seem to be a predictor of those who will win the Nobel Peace Prize, can you talk about who won this year? You just made the announcement for the Right Livelihood Award Foundation, the four winners.

    OLE VON UEXKÜLL: Right. We also gave an award to Somalia this year, to Ilwad Elman and Fartuun Adan, a mother and daughter who’ve built the Elman Peace Center, which does local peace work with communities, for instance, disarmament of former combatants, working a lot with child soldiers, working against gender-based violence. And for us, it was also very important and a really good message to have this conflict in Somalia, which, unfortunately, for too many around the world, is perceived as more of a forgotten conflict, you know, to have that honored in the same year with Ukraine, which, very rightly so, gets a lot of attention right now — because there are so many parallels in how you work for peace.

    And then, we always have four laureates, so our award also goes to Cecosesola, which is a cooperative — a network of cooperatives in Venezuela that are providing more than 100,000 families for their needs, much more successfully so than the failing economic system, and really shows the power of solidarity economics in times of crisis.

    And we gave an award to the Africa Institute for Energy Governance from Uganda for its work for localized, decentralized renewable energy and their important voice in the campaign against the disastrous East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline and bringing the voices of local people into these international campaigns.

    AMY GOODMAN: And finally, we have been tracking the rise of neofascism in Europe, whether we’re talking about Meloni in Italy, the Brothers of Italy party, to be the new, well, most far-right prime minister since Mussolini, is very proud to embrace Mussolini; Poland’s ruling party; and, of course, what’s happening in Sweden with the Sweden Democrats — might surprise people to hear who the Swedish Democrats are. Is this a concern of yours, Ole, as you speak to us from Stockholm?

    OLE VON UEXKÜLL: Oh, it’s a huge concern. It is terrible. The Sweden Democrats are a party with its roots in fascism. And the conservative and even the Liberal Party now chose to align themselves with the Sweden Democrats just for tactical gain, in order to be able to get the next prime minister elected. And when traditional established parties do something like that, we’ve seen so many times in history, then, obviously, they normalize this kind of hateful discourse, which borders to fascism. And in the process, people then, in the end, vote for the original. So, the conservatives were defeated, but now together with their new ally, the Sweden Democrats, they will probably form the next government.

    And that’s just — it’s a terrible blow to Sweden. It’s not a coincidence that an organization like ours was founded in this country, but it was founded in this country because also of our history, long-standing history here, supporting democracy and rule of law and human rights around the world. And now Sweden will not be able to do that in a credible way any longer. And people don’t seem to realize that that’s going to weaken Sweden a lot. Like what I just said, you know, the power of the universal values of democracy and rule of law, yes, they are under attack, but I think they will prevail, and it’s very sad to see Sweden starting to turn away from this camp.

    AMY GOODMAN: Ole von Uexküll, we thank you so much for being with us, executive director of the Stockholm-based Right Livelihood Award Foundation. The Right Livelihood Awards have gone to all three Nobel Peace Prize winners announced today. And I also want to thank Anna Dobrovolskaya, executive director of, now closed down, Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow. Memorial was just honored by the Norwegian Nobel Committee. She was speaking to us from Moscow.

    Coming up, the president, Biden — President Biden pardons thousands of people convicted of marijuana possession. We’ll speak to the Drug Policy Alliance. Stay with us.

  • Truss and Qatar: PM set to deepen relations with authoritarian Gulf state

    Prime minister Liz Truss has indicated she will court Qatar as an energy partner to counter the UK’s energy crisis. The authoritarian regime, known for its long list of human rights violations, is already closely aligned to the UK and will host the World Cup in December. Doha News reported that the Qatari and British energy ministers had spoken on Tuesday 5th October. But at the centre of these new plans, there is a gaping contradiction.

    Because Truss herself told Tories in her conference speech the following day that the UK had been reliant on gas from authoritarian regimes – meaning Russia – as Declassified UK were quick to point out:

    Presumably Qatar isn’t an authoritarian regime to Truss’s mind. Though quite a few people would disagree…

    Qatari regime

    Qatar is an authoritarian monarchy, like many of its Gulf neighbours. And like them, Qatar is the recipient of massive amounts of British military equipment.

    As the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) explains:

    Qatar is an authoritarian state with strict judicial constraints on freedom of expression. Detainees are subject to beatings and cruel treatment while a great many immigrant workers are trapped in conditions of forced labour.

    Also according to CAAT, Qatar was the 10th largest importer of arms globally between between 2015 and 2019. With UK arms exports licenses accounting for £384mn of the national total. In 2018 BAE Systems and Qatar signed a deal for Eurofighter underwritten by the government to the tune of £4.5bn. Meaning if Qatar defaults, BAE gets paid by the taxpayers.

    The World Cup

    These deals, and now any energy agreement which is reached, are conducted under the shadow of Qatar’s various human rights abuses. Of acute importance in 2022 is the treatment of migrant workers who have prepared Qatar to host the World Cup.

    Amnesty’s detailed 2020/21 report lists Qatar’s terrifying record on LGBT rights, women’s rights and trade unions. It also details the ‘kafala’ system to which many workers have been subjected. Kafala is, in effect, a system of indentured servitude which stops workers, for example, leaving the country or switching jobs.

    Human Rights Watch has said:

    the kafala system remains in place and continues to facilitate the abuse and exploitation of the country’s migrant workforce.

    Many migrant workers come from places like India and Bangladesh and have been forced to live and work in squalid conditions. Some estimates put the death toll for south Asian migrant labourers since Qatar won its bid for the World Cup at 6750.

    Human rights disaster

    Truss is well known for her clangers. And her latest plan to wean Britain off gas from a hardline regime, by getting it from a different hardline regime is another in a long of line of transparently stupid decisions. The energy crisis is very real, but it’s also the right time to start transitioning away from fossil fuels and towards more sustainable energy.

    Given she is literally the prime minster of the country, she clearly has the power. It’s time to stop being a moral vacuum on the matter of workers rights for the sake of resources.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/US Ambassador to the UK, cropped to 770 x 403

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on Canary Workers’ Co-op.

  • Peace Groups Urge Biden to Pursue Diplomatic “Off-Ramp” to Avert Nuclear War

    U.S. President Joe Biden said Thursday that nuclear threats from Russia’s leadership have raised the risk of “Armageddon” to its highest level since the Cuban Missile Crisis, prompting urgent calls for the White House to help bring the world back from the brink by actively pursuing a diplomatic end to the war in Ukraine.

    During a speech at a fundraiser for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Biden said that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “not joking when he talks about the use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons.”

    “I don’t think there is any such a thing as the ability to easily use a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon,” Biden continued, echoing the assessment of nuclear experts and nonproliferation campaigners.

    The U.S. president’s stark warning came weeks after Putin said in a televised address that it is “not a bluff” when he vows to “use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia.”

    Noting the nuclear capabilities of Western powers, Putin declared that Russia “also has various means of destruction, and for some components more modern than those of the NATO countries.”

    The U.S. responded with a warning of “catastrophic consequences” for Russia if it uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine, though the White House said earlier this week that it has not yet seen any “indication that Russia is preparing to imminently use nuclear weapons.”

    Putin’s remarks were viewed by anti-nuclear campaigners as his most aggressive to date as Russia’s assault on Ukraine drags on and continues to face major setbacks, heightening fears of a sharp escalation in military tactics.

    Peace campaigners have warned since the start of Russia’s invasion that the longer the war persists, the greater the chance of nuclear catastrophe as the U.S. and other NATO countries pour weaponry into Ukraine, increasing the risk of a direct confrontation between nuclear powers. The U.S. and Russia each have more than a thousand nuclear warheads deployed and ready to fire.

    Biden said Thursday that he is still attempting to determine Putin’s “off-ramp” in Ukraine, to which the advocacy group Just Foreign Policy responded: “Please tell Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to immediately ‘figure out’ that ‘off-ramp’ to this war before we ‘end up with Armageddon.’”

    Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy formally submitted an application for NATO membership after Putin signed decrees to annex four Ukrainian territories, developments that threatened to put a diplomatic solution further out of reach.

    Days later, the Pentagon confirmed it will send up to $625 million worth of additional weaponry to Ukraine as the U.S. faced criticism for failing to mount a serious push for peace talks. In an interview late last month, Blinken confirmed that “there are no talks” ongoing, blaming Russia.

    Earlier this week, Zelenskyy signed a decree ruling out negotiations with Russia as long as Putin is president.

    Anatol Lieven, director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, criticized the Biden administration’s stated position that “negotiations for peace or ceasefire are purely a matter for the Ukrainians.”

    “That can’t be right,” Lieven told Jacobin in an interview on Monday. “The United States is massively arming Ukraine, funding Ukraine, and running great risks for the sake of Ukraine — nuclear war, but also if you look at global conditions, the threat of recession, inflation in the US, the threat of really deep recession in Europe, food shortages in parts of the world.”

    “Of course that gives us a say in trying to bring about a peace settlement,” Lieven said.

    While calls for a diplomatic solution have been relatively muted in the U.S. Congress, some lawmakers have spoken out in recent days amid growing fears of a nuclear attack.

    “Putin launched an unprovoked and unjust war. Standing for Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty is just. We must do that,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) tweeted Monday. “We must also pursue every avenue of diplomacy to seek an end to the war. That is not a sign of appeasement, but effective diplomacy and statesmanship to save lives.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Nobel Peace Prize 2022 goes to well-recognised human rights defenders

    On 7 September 2022 The Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2022 to one individual and two organisations, who represent civil society in their home countries. They have for many years promoted the right to criticise power and protect the fundamental rights of citizens. They have made an outstanding effort to document war crimes, human right abuses and the abuse of power. Together they demonstrate the significance of civil society for peace and democracy.

    This year’s Peace Prize is awarded to human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski from Belarus, the Russian human rights organisation Memorial and the Ukrainian human rights organisation Center for Civil Liberties. The first two are well-known and received many important human rights awards.

    Ales Bialiatski was the winner of 11 other awards, see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/72682FFF-628F-4A5D-B6B3-52A776FF0E47, while Memorial got 7 awards earlier [see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/BD12D9CE-37AA-7A35-9A32-F37A0EA8C407], Oleksandra Matviichuk, the chair of the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties received a few days ago the Right livelihood award [see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/75690f04-7a51-4591-8e18-0826b93959b3]

    Ales Bialiatski founded the organisation Viasna (Spring) in 1996 in response to the controversial constitutional amendments that gave the president dictatorial powers and that triggered widespread demonstrations. In the years that followed, Viasna evolved into a broad-based human rights organisation that documented and protested against the authorities’ use of torture against political prisoners. Government authorities have repeatedly sought to silence Ales Bialiatski. He was imprisoned from 2011 to 2014. Following large-scale demonstrations against the regime in 2020, he was again arrested. He is still detained without trial. Despite tremendous personal hardship, Mr Bialiatski has not yielded an inch in his fight for human rights and democracy in Belarus. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/viasna-human-rights-centre/

    The human rights organisation Memorial was established in 1987 by human rights activists in the former Soviet Union who wanted to ensure that the victims of the communist regime’s oppression would never be forgotten. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov and human rights advocate Svetlana Gannushkina were among the founders. Memorial is based on the notion that confronting past crimes is essential in preventing new ones. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Memorial grew to become the largest human rights organisation in Russia. In addition to establishing a centre of documentation on victims of the Stalinist era, Memorial compiled and systematised information on political oppression and human rights violations in Russia. Memorial became the most authoritative source of information on political prisoners in Russian detention facilities. The organisation has also been standing at the forefront of efforts to combat militarism and promote human rights and government based on rule of law. During the Chechen wars, Memorial gathered and verified information on abuses and war crimes perpetrated on the civilian population by Russian and pro-Russian forces. In 2009, the head of Memorial’s branch in Chechnya, Natalia Estemirova, was killed because of this work. [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2019/07/15/ngos-remember-10th-anniversary-of-natalia-estemirovas-murder/]

    Civil society actors in Russia have been subjected to threats, imprisonment, disappearance and murder for many years. As part of the government’s harassment of Memorial, the organisation was stamped early on as a “foreign agent”. In December 2021, the authorities decided that Memorial was to be forcibly liquidated and the documentation centre was to be closed permanently. The closures became effective in the following months, but the people behind Memorial refuse to be shut down. In a comment on the forced dissolution, chairman Yan Rachinsky stated, “Nobody plans to give up.” [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/12/29/russias-supreme-court-orders-closure-emblematic-memorial/]

    The Center for Civil Liberties was founded in Kyiv in 2007 for the purpose of advancing human rights and democracy in Ukraine. The center has taken a stand to strengthen Ukrainian civil society and pressure the authorities to make Ukraine a full-fledged democracy. To develop Ukraine into a state governed by rule of law, Center for Civil Liberties has actively advocated that Ukraine become affiliated with the International Criminal Court. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Center for Civil Liberties has engaged in efforts to identify and document Russian war crimes against the Ukrainian civilian population. In collaboration with international partners, the center is playing a pioneering role with a view to holding the guilty parties accountable for their crimes.

    By awarding this Nobel Peace Prize for 2022 the Norwegian Nobel Committee is honouring outstanding champions of human rights and consistent efforts in favour of humanist values, anti-militarism and principles of law.

    https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2022/press-release/

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Nobel committee calls for release of peace prize winner Ales Bialiatski – video

    The jailed Belarusian human rights activist Ales Bialiatski has won the 2022 Nobel peace prize along with the Russian and Ukrainian human rights organisations Memorial and the Center for Civil Liberties. The chair of the Norwegian Nobel committee, Berit Reiss-Andersen, called for the release of Bialiatski, who was detained last year. While the prize will be seen by many as condemnation of Vladimir Putin, who is celebrating his 70th birthday on Friday, Reiss-Andersen denied it was an anti-Putin award 

    Continue reading…

  • We Survived The Last Nuclear Standoff Through Compromise And De-Escalation

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Vladimir Putin has signed documents finalizing the Russian annexation of four regions in eastern Ukraine, meaning there’s now a western-backed Ukrainian counteroffensive underway to recapture what Russia officially considers parts of its homeland.

    Moscow has made it clear that it will use all weapons systems at its disposal to defend against attacks on territories it claims as its own, which could include nuclear weapons. Depending on if and how that happens and what kind of day all the relevant decision makers are having when it does, there is a distinct possibility that a chain of events could follow which leads to the end of the world.

    This happens as Ukraine’s President Zelensky signs a decree officially ruling out the possibility of any peace talks with Putin, who recently publicly requested such talks. The US empire, which has been driving this proxy war from the beginning, is also not currently engaged in peace talks with Moscow. Things are accelerating faster and faster toward the absolute worst thing that could possibly happen, and as far as we know nobody’s got a foot anywhere near the brake pedal.

    Meanwhile, everyone has gone insane. The propaganda blanket has been laid on so thick since this war started that it has become the mainstream position that only continual escalation is acceptable. Public calls for de-escalation and detente are met with accusations of Kremlin loyalty, as we just saw with the vitriolic responses to Elon Musk’s online proposal of possible terms to end the war.

    There’s a popular post going around Twitter right now by a pro-Kyiv pundit named Thomas Theiner which sums up the delusional sentiments we’ve been seeing on this front.

    “I grew up during the Cold War. I studied the Cold War,” Theiner writes. “When the russians/Soviets say: ‘We will use nuclear weapons!’, the only answer must be: ‘Try and die.’ All else is seen as weakness by the kremlin and will lead to the russians using nukes.”

    Theiner is wrong, and has made no serious study of the cold war (or to be more precise the last cold war, since we’re in another one now). The only reason we survived the most dangerous part of that era was because of compromise and a sincere commitment to de-escalation, not because anyone was yelling “Try and die” at Moscow.

    Back in 2013 The Atlantic published a solid article titled “The Real Cuban Missile Crisis,” subtitled “Everything you think you know about those 13 days is wrong.” Its author Benjamin Schwartz details how the crisis was peacefully resolved not because JFK was on the phone yelling “Try and die” at Nikita Khrushchev, but because he secretly cut a deal to remove the Jupiter missiles the US had stationed in Italy and Turkey which provoked the 1962 incident in the first place.

    Moscow perceived that the only reason why that type of midrange weapon would be placed in such a way would be if the US was planning a nuclear first strike to disarm Russia, and Schwartz writes that that suspicion was entirely well-founded: the Kennedy administration had indeed strongly contemplated such a strike during the Berlin crisis of 1961. In response to this threat, as well as the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, Khrushchev moved ballistic missiles to Cuba, whose discovery led to the tense standoff which brought us far closer to nuclear annihilation than most of us care to contemplate. A secret deal was struck whose nature wouldn’t become public knowledge until decades later, resulting in both sides removing their offending missile placements.

    You and I are alive today because Kennedy backed down from the brink and struck a compromise (as well as our sheer dumb luck at having one cool-headed Soviet officer on a nuclear-armed submarine refuse to deploy the weapon while being bombarded by the US navy during the standoff between JFK and Khrushchev). Kennedy conditioned his acquiescence to Moscow’s demands on assurances that his doing so would be kept secret, because then, as now, there were tremendous political pressures not to be seen as “backing down” and “looking weak” before the enemy.

    But as history tells us, it’s not caveman chest-thumping that has allowed us to remain alive on a planet full of stockpiled armageddon weapons. It’s the sensibility to know when to compromise and relent rather than pushing continuously toward the edge.

    Detente used to be a household term. It was a routine subject of mainstream political discourse; mainstream politicians were expected to have a clear and articulate position on the diplomatic easing of tensions with the USSR. Now people don’t even know detente is a thing. I say that word to people and it’s clearly the first time they’ve ever encountered it, and the concept itself is completely alien to them. People I talk to tend to believe the only options on the table are either (A) continuing to escalate this insane game of nuclear chicken with Russia, or (B) giving Putin everything he wants. They’re completely unaware that a third option of negotiation, compromise and de-escalation exists, much less that it has historically been viable and successful.

    This is entirely by design. People don’t know that detente is an option because the political/media class virtually never mentions it anymore. The news media are supposedly responsible for helping to create an informed populace, but because their real job is propaganda they generally end up doing the exact opposite. If the public were permitted to become widely aware that these games of nuclear brinkmanship are not a necessity but a choice that is being made on their behalf, and that their leaders are rolling the dice on their lives and the lives of everyone they know and love for no other reason than to work toward securing unipolar planetary hegemony, they would no longer consent to this madness.

    If people really understood how much is being risked here, and how little it benefits them, Washington DC would be on fire right now. That’s why their understanding is continually manipulated and obscured by the managers of empire.

    _________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Feature image via the JFK Library and Museum.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • It’s Only A ‘Conspiracy Theory’ When It Accuses The US Government

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The western political/media class has been dismissing as “conspiracy theories” all claims that the US is likely responsible for last month’s sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, even while leveling the exact same accusations against Russia without ever using that term. Which probably says a lot about the way that label has been used over the years, if you think about it.

    At a UN Security Council meeting on Friday, US envoy Richard Mills repeatedly accused Russia of promoting “conspiracy theories” in its Nord Stream accusations against the United States, saying that “our Russian colleagues have decided to instrumentalize the Security Council meeting to spread conspiracy theories and disinformation.”

    “It’s important that we use this meeting not to foster conspiracy theories, but to focus our attention on Russia’s blatant violation of the Charter and its crimes in Ukraine,” Mills argues, after saying that “the United States categorically denies any involvement in this incident” and that there is no justification for “the Russian delegation raising conspiracy theories and mass disinformation in this Council.”

    Mills then hilariously spends the remainder of his remarks insinuating that it is actually Russia who perpetrated the attacks, mentioning the word “infrastructure” no less than nine times in his arguments to establish that in Ukraine, Russia has a history of attacking critical civilian infrastructure similar to the pipelines.

    “Sabotage of critical infrastructure should be of concern to us all,” Mills says. “In the context of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, we have seen numerous Russian attacks damaging civilian infrastructure. We witnessed Russia recklessly seize control of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, risking a nuclear disaster in Europe. We saw countless attacks destroying civilian electricity infrastructure.”

    “Despite efforts that we heard today to distract us from the truth, to distribute more disinformation and slightly wacky theories, the facts on the ground in Ukraine speak for themselves,” Mills concludes.

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    The sabotage of gas pipelines were a 'warning shot' from Putin to the West, and should brace for more subterfuge, Russia experts warn https://t.co/IvH6YmFh4b

    — Military and Defense Insider (@MilDefInsider) October 3, 2022

    Business Insider has a new article out titled “The sabotage of gas pipelines were a ‘warning shot’ from Putin to the West, and should brace for more subterfuge, Russia experts warn.” The “experts” in question are as follows:

    That’s it; that’s all the experts. Two lying warmongers and a history professor.

    Nowhere in the Business Insider article do the words “conspiracy” or “theory” appear. Contrast this with the recent Associated Press article titled “Russians push baseless theory blaming US for burst pipeline,” which was so frantic to spin accusations of US Nord Stream sabotage as a crazy conspiracy theory that it framed it as something only QAnon cultists believe.

    “The suggestion that the U.S. caused the damage was circulating on online forums popular with American conservatives and followers of QAnon, a conspiracy theory movement which asserts that Trump is fighting a battle against a Satanic child-trafficking sect that controls world events,” AP wrote.

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

    Still laughing at how frantically over the top AP went with its "blaming the US for sabotaging Russian pipelines is a baseless conspiracy theory" article. pic.twitter.com/avXgXYM5yP

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 1, 2022

    Over and over again we see the pejorative “conspiracy theory” applied to accusations against one nation but not the other, despite the fact that it’s the exact same accusation. They are both conspiracy theories per definition: they’re theories about an alleged conspiracy to sabotage Russian pipelines. But the western political/media class consistently applies that label to one and never the other.

    Here’s a link to another Business Insider article applying the “conspiracy theory” label to accusations of US Nord Stream sabotage. Here’s one from The Independent doing the same. Here’s one from The Washington Post. Here’s one from Newsweek. Here’s one from Vox. Here’s one from The Atlantic Council think tank. Here’s one from the Brookings Institution think tank. Here’s one from Media Matters for America, founded by the Center for American Progress think tank.

    Do you get the message? Are you receiving the messaging loud and clear? Accuse the US of sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines and it’s called a conspiracy theory. Accuse Russia of doing the exact same thing and it’s called news.

    And of course by pointing out this cartoonish double standard I do not mean to suggest that both theories are equally well-evidenced. One wouldn’t expect them to be in a contest in which one party had their own energy infrastructure sabotaged.

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    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

    For example, there’s the fact that Secretary of State Antony Blinken explicitly said that the sabotage of pipelines delivering Russian gas to Germany offers a “tremendous opportunity” to end Europe’s dependency on Russian energy. There’s also the fact that a 2019 Pentagon-commissioned study by the RAND Corporation on how to overextend and weaken Russia explicitly stated that the US would benefit from stopping Nord Stream 2. There’s also the fact that both President Biden and his Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland explicitly said that Nord Stream 2 would be brought to an end if Russia invades Ukraine, the fact that the US sanctioned those who built Nord Stream 2, the fact that former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice is on record saying the US wants Europeans to be more dependent on North American energy than on pipelines from Russia, the fact that Germans had just been angrily demanding an end to US-led sanctions on Russia and a reopening of Nord Stream gas, the fact that US naval forces were recently conducting unmanned underwater vehicle drills right where the pipelines were attacked, the fact that unmanned underwater vehicles have been found carrying explosive charges near Russian pipelines in the past, the fact that Poland literally just inaugurated a gas pipeline that will transport gas from Norway through Denmark and the Baltic Sea, the fact that US military helicopters were reportedly recorded traveling between the blast points and along the Nord Stream 2 pipeline shortly before the explosions, and the fact that the CIA has a known history of blowing up Russian gas pipelines.

    But sure, if you think the United States could have any responsibility for this attack at all, you’re a crazy conspiracy theorist and no different from QAnoners who think pedophile Satan worshippers rule the world.

    Okay, empire. Message received. Does make me wonder about some of those other “conspiracy theories” you’ve told us to ignore, though.

    _______________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Feature image via Danish Defense.

  • Only Adult Children Still Believe U.S. Propaganda

    It should now be quite clear to any reasonable person that the Biden administration is hell-bent on destroying Russia and will risk nuclear war in doing so.  It has already started World War III with its use of Ukraine to light the final match.  The problem is that reasonable people are in very short supply, and, as Ray McGovern recently wrote in “Brainwashed for War with Russia,” the Biden administration and their media lackeys

    … will have no trouble rallying Americans for the widest war in 77 years, starting in Ukraine, and maybe spreading to China …. Most Americans are just as taken in by the media as they were 20 years ago, when they were told there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They simply took it on faith. Nor did the guilty media express remorse – or a modicum of embarrassment.

    Many good writers – all of whom are banned from mainstream media – have  made clear why the corporate media propaganda about the US/NATO war against Russia via Ukraine is false and egregiously dangerous.  The government of the U.S.A. is led by morons in the demonic grip of the “The U.S. Should Rule the World” ideology.  It is nothing new.

    I don’t wish to debate the facts, for that is a fool’s game created to suggest there is something to debate.  For the evidence is clear, except to the public in the grip of propaganda-induced ignorance or those elites who never learned from the ancient Greek goddess Nemesis that dark Furies will destroy those who in their hubris push the limits.  The Biden administration has already done that, while President Biden mutters inanities as if he were a mafia boss wandering the streets in his pajamas and slippers.  The recent sabotaging of Nord Stream 2 is another example of the treacherous road we are traveling, as Diana Johnstone makes clear in her recent article, “Omerta in the Gangster War.”

    For years, the U.S.- run NATO has moved military forces and bases into countries encircling Russia. This includes weapons that can very quickly be converted to nuclear use. This, as I’ve pointed out before, is tantamount to Russia doing the same in Mexico and Canada, and let’s add Cuba as well.  We know what the U.S. response would be, but when President Putin and his government objected and said this is a betrayal of previous agreements, he was dismissed as if he were a child making things up.

    In 2014, when the U.S. engineered a coup in Ukraine, bringing into power neo-Nazi elements, and Russia protested this coup on its western border, Washington mocked such concerns. Every time Russia has complained about such provocative moves, the U.S. has dismissed them as inconsequential.

    For years the U.S. has supported the Ukrainian killing of the Russian speaking peoples of eastern Ukraine, and finally, when Ukraine had amassed forces to invade the Donbass region, the Russian government had had enough and sent troops into the region to defend this area.  Thus the hypocritical West played at outrage that what they had created was finally backfiring.  Russia was cast as the guilty party for invading Ukraine.  And now a full-fledged U.S. war against Russia is out in the open and it will become more dangerous as it continues.  Nuclear annihilation becomes a very real possibility as the Biden administration continues to push the envelope.

    There will be no end to the war in Ukraine because the U.S. is intent on doing everything in its power to try to bring Russia to its knees.  It is madness on its face, but then insane people are in charge. In this process, everyone is expendable, friends, foes, and anyone who stands in its way, including the U.S.’s supposed European allies whose leaders seem intent on destroying their own countries.

    Perhaps ironically – but I think not, as a knowledge of history confirms – the volte-face of the American liberal class with its promotion of the new Cold War, censorship, the CIA, and FBI and the so-called progressive Democratic politicians in the U.S congress, including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, embracing and voting for war with Russia via Ukraine, should be no great surprise. These people, and their Republican counterparts, with rare exceptions here and there, live on desolation row and flip when so ordered.  But “nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row,” in Dylan’s words, because it’s the social disease we inhabit, and like fish in water, many know nothing else.

    On a similar note, Ray McGovern has also recently reminded those who pay attention to him that The New York Times, as is its tradition, is promoting the U.S. war against Russia just as it did with the Vietnam War in the 1960s.  Little changes is his theme, no apologies are ever offered, and the readers of the most famous American newspaper and CIA conduit are asked to swallow daily doses of propaganda that are so egregiously obvious that only children would be fooled.  Sadly, the United States has become a country of children, Babes in Toyland who never realize that at the end of the plot the gun is reversed and is aimed at them.  And it’s not funny.

    A century ago in the years before World War I, American progressive intellectuals, as Stuart Ewen writes in PR: A Social History of Spin:

    … had espoused the Enlightenment dictum that people – at least middle-class people – were essentially rational, capable of evaluating information and then making intelligent decisions.  In the context of the CPI [the U.S, Committee on Public Information, a large propaganda apparatus set up in April 1917 by President Woodrow Wilson to sell the American entry into the war against Germany as necessary to ‘Make the World Safe for Democracy,’ whose members included Edward Bernays, the propagandist and so-called father of public relations] ‘public opinion’ became something to be mobilized and managed; the ‘public mind’ was now seen as an entity to be manufactured, not reasoned with.

    Faith in reason was abandoned in favor of psychological manipulation of emotion and the use of unreason – the “night mind” – which became the template for future propaganda and the application of psychological techniques, a forerunner of the CIA’s MKUltra and Operation Mockingbird.  As the crackdown on dissent increased with passage of the 1917 Espionage Act (under which Julian Assange is falsely charged today) and then the Sedition Act in 1918, many so-called progressives embraced the authoritarian imposition of state controls on dissent, just as they do today.  An important exception was Randolph Bourne, who in 1917 castigated these turncoats in his blistering essay, “War and the Intellectuals.”  “Socialists, college professors, publicists, new-republicans, [and] practitioners of literature,” he wrote, “had assumed the iniquitous task of ‘riveting the war mind on a hundred million of the world’s people.’”  Today such people debate whether they should be called liberal or progressive.  I say, call them warmongers of the lowest order.

    I remember when I was an impressionable child and television had only a few channels.  This was in the years between the Korean War and the one against Vietnam. There was a movie that was repeated on television regularly: Yankee Doodle Dandy, starring the amazing performer Jimmy Cagney as George M. Cohan, the Irish-American composer/lyricist/playwright, who, in the years before WW I was known as the man who owned Broadway and whose statue stands in Times Square in New York City.

    Child that I was, I saw the film many times and was mesmerized.  My emotions rose with every viewing.  My heart strings vibrated to the tunes of “Over There” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”  I marched proudly to WW I with Cagney/Cohan.  This was a movie that appeared in 1942 to promote the WW II war effort by using the lies about WW I to do it.  But, oh, what fun!  And the stirring songs – fodder for a child.  And this was before the CIA completely owned Hollywood.

    Yet I grew up.  I am no longer a child.  I have studied and seen through the propaganda of The New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, Fox News, The Guardian, Hollywood, etc.

    Many of those I know have not.  They believe in the unbelievable. They still live in what Jim Garrison called the “Doll’s House” and accept what Harold Pinter termed “a vast tapestry of lies.”  Pinter said in his 2005 Nobel address what has not changed an iota since about the U.S.’s murderous foreign policy:

    It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

    When I was a child, I was hypnotized by Yankee Doodle Dandy.

    I’ve grown a bit.  McGovern and Pinter are right; little has changed – Vietnam, WW I, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Iran, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Libya, China, etc.  And, of course, Russia, always Russia, at whose heart the weapons are always aimed, fiendish Russia that must be destroyed to make the world safe for the predators that pose as lovers of democracy and international law.

    When President Kennedy, deeply chastened by the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, spoke about real peace and democracy at American University on June 10, 1963, he was the last American leader to recognize that international relations had to undergo a radical change, especially in the nuclear age.  Demonizing other countries had to give way to dialogue and mutual respect.  He said:

    What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

    Five months later the CIA made sure his voice was stilled.  Such sentiments have been verboten ever since.

    Only children still believe the America propaganda and its war machine.

    The post Only Adult Children Still Believe U.S. Propaganda first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Nothing’s More Important Than Avoiding Nuclear War: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Avoiding nuclear war is the single most important agenda in the world. The single most important agenda in history. It is more important than your political faction. It is more important than how Vladimir Putin makes your feelings feel. It is more important than anything else.

    Whenever I say this I always get some liberal saying “Some things are worth dying for” or some shit. Actually, no. Nothing, literally nothing, is worth the obliteration of all life on earth. It’s not worth gambling all terrestrial life to please your dopey egocentric fixations.

    People who think nuclear brinkmanship is worth the risk either haven’t thought hard enough about what nuclear war is and what it would mean, or they just hate life and have some sick desire to see the end of everything. Either way they should be dismissed with extreme aggression.

    If there’s one thing everyone should be able to come together on, it’s that every measure should be taken to avoid the end of everything. It is only because our civilization is awash with war propaganda that this isn’t glaringly obvious to everybody.

    That necessarily means de-escalation and detente. It means compromise. It means change. It means acknowledging what your side did wrong to bring us this close to the edge and taking drastic measures to change that and make sure it never happens again. It’s not egoically pleasing, but it’s necessary. More so than anything has ever been. Risking the annihilation of all terrestrial life is not worth the egoic gratification we get from our narratives about “winning” and “losing” and “good guys” and “bad guys”. This is infinitely more important than that.

    ❖

    Our civilization is so backwards and insane that people will act like you’re the worst person in the world for saying we should try to avoid nuclear armageddon. I and many others have been screaming for years that US policy toward Russia is bringing us closer and closer to nuclear war; now we’re on the brink and the people we were screaming at are acting like we’re the assholes.

    ❖

    ❖

    Two administrations ago the US had a president who mocked the idea that Russia was a primary rival and said Ukraine was a core interest to Russia but not the US, and liberals thought he was awesome. After four years of intelligence agency-driven narratives marrying Russia to Trump, liberals are now braying for World War III.

    Before 2016 Democrats saw those who spent energy freaking out about Russia as weird, archaic cold warriors. Now they see anyone who doesn’t want war with Russia as a secret agent of the Kremlin. All because they were trained that Russia = Trump and therefore fighting Russia = fighting Trump.

    Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts.

    ❖

    Real monsters don’t look the way we’re trained to expect. Those who’ll rape and hurt us are usually people we know and trust. The most murderous tyrants don’t look like Hollywood villains; they make jokes and praise freedom and democracy and shake your hand on the campaign trail.

    Those who are causing the most death, oppression and misery in our world don’t resemble the Hitler-like monsters we’ve been trained to anticipate. They look friendly. They say things you agree with. Depending on their party, they might even ask you your pronouns. Meanwhile, Marvel supervillains have more depth and complexity than the one-dimensional characters the imperial spin machine concocts to represent its official enemies. Thanos was a more believable character with more understandable and nuanced motivations than the propaganda machine’s fictional representation of Putin.

    Predators know that if they stand out and look overtly predatory they’re not likely to land any prey; that’s why polar bears are white. The same is true of human predators. The unskillful ones are overtly predatory. The ones who catch the seal are the ones who hide in the snow.

    Real monsters don’t look how we’re trained to expect. Because the real monsters are the ones who’ve been training our expectations.

    ❖

    ❖

    The US empire has not gotten any less murderous and tyrannical than it was during the Bush administration, it’s just gotten better at hiding its murderousness and tyranny through narrative management, alternate forms of warfare like starvation sanctions, and outsourcing its military violence to other nations and military forces.

    ❖

    I sometimes get people objecting to my description of the US as the head of an empire, but that’s silly; it’s an empire in all but name. It’s an unofficial, unacknowledged empire that lets most of its member states keep their own flags and set most of their own domestic policies, but they act as a unified whole on foreign policy. If they don’t, their government gets replaced.

    You get a good vantage point on this dynamic from Australia, where every time we’ve tried to set foreign policy more in alignment with our own interests there’s been a coup driven by the US. That’s why we’re functionally just a US military and intelligence asset now; just a continent-sized military base with a good location in relation to China as far as the empire is concerned.

    Virtually all major international conflicts can be understood through the lens of the US-centralized power structure working to convert more and more nations into imperial member states, and nations resisting this agenda with varying degrees of success. It’s not just an empire, it’s the most powerful empire that has ever existed. Not even the British were able to project this much power and influence around the world. No other power has come nearly as close to unipolar planetary hegemony, which is the US empire’s ultimate goal.

    ❖

    The really transformative insights and epiphanies aren’t the ones about how you should be or what you should change, but the ones which bring consciousness to something inside you that you weren’t aware of before. Those are the revelations that leave you changed for life.

    People don’t keep their New Year’s resolutions. This is because we have a lot less free will than we think we do. The closest thing we have to real free will is the ability to bring awareness to the forces within us that drive our behavior, which can then be healed and released.

    Your way of living doesn’t change because you made some mental noises in your head saying you will change, but because you gained awareness of where your way of living comes from.

    Addictive behavior doesn’t change when you decide to change it, but when you bring consciousness to the dynamics within yourself which were compelling it.

    True selflessness comes not from choosing to be selfless, but from seeing that the self is an illusion.

    True presence comes not from choosing to be more present, but from deeply recognizing the newness of each instant that is always already the case.

    Inner peace comes not from choosing to be more peaceful, but from realizing that our entire field of consciousness is painted upon an abyss of pure peace.

    Happiness comes not from choosing to be happier, but from recognizing the exhaultant joy which already exists in everything.

    That which can be obtained can be lost. That which you choose to change will tend to change right back. But a recognition of the gifts we are already swimming in every instant of our lives brings in a health and harmoniousness which stays with us, because they’ve never not been with us.

    This is as true for humanity as a collective as it is for an individual. Changes in collective human behavior always arise from the spread of awareness, whether it’s to social injustices or scientific realities. So spreading awareness is what brings real change in the world.

    That’s ultimately the answer to every problem born of human behavior of any scale: expand consciousness. Bring seeing and recognition to that which is unseen and unrecognized. You can’t always choose for things to change, but you can always choose to expand consciousness.

    Expanding consciousness is what happens when we closely and honestly observe our inner processes: our belief systems, our habits of thinking and perceiving, how this experience is actually happening and what it’s being perceived by, etc. It’s also what happens when we engage in activism to spread awareness of important issues, when we engage in journalistic activity to spread information, or when we speak out against abusive power structures.

    And there are forces which will resist this, both within and without. There are identity constructs within us whose existence depends on not being consciously seen, and they do everything they can to distract us from looking at them. There are forces in the world who do that too. Just as egoic structures try to avoid being seen because their existence depends on it, so too do power structures work to avoid being seen for the same reason. That’s the reason for government secrecy, propaganda, censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and the war on journalism. That’s also the reason psychedelics were made illegal. Obstructing vision is the goal of these forces whose existence depends upon remaining unseen, whether it’s inner or outer vision.

    From my point of view that’s what all of life is about: bringing seeing to what’s unseen. The appearance of life on this planet made it possible for the universe to behold itself, and it’s beholding itself with greater and greater depth and complexity as life grows more advanced.

    The path toward harmony in ourselves is the same as the path toward harmony in society is the same as the path toward harmony in the universe: bringing clear seeing to what is, in whatever way we can. That’s how we bring harmoniousness to what is, on every level.

    ________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Imperial Demon Watch: Vladimir Putin

    Russia wants a peaceful Ukraine, Americans prefer one at war.

    — Israel Shamir, “Putin Prefers a Bad Peace”

    Even before the current round of nuclear brinksmanship in Ukraine, U.S.-Russian relations had descended to a lower point than U.S.-Soviet relations reached during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We’ve been courting nuclear annihilation for some time.

    Those who would like to exempt Washington from blame now will have to account for U.S. hostility towards Russia and the USSR, both of which long pre-date anything that could remotely be construed as provocation by Putin. After all, the United States invaded and occupied parts of the former USSR from 1918-1920, maintained a harshly belligerent stance all during the Cold War, and unleashed a plague of financial locusts to loot state enterprises throughout the former USSR as soon as the Berlin Wall came down, while enrolling the newly “independent” states into an anti-Moscow military alliance that extended to the very borders of Russia. Standards of living plunged, death rates soared, diplomacy suffocated, and Boris Yeltsin’s proposed U.S.-Russian partnership was immediately forgotten.

    If a China-Russia alliance had installed hostile governments in Canada and Mexico at the end of WWII, after which all of Latin America went full Communist while narco-terrorists began killing Anglo Texans and banning English, it’s unlikely any blame would fall on Washington if it attempted to resolve the situation by force, as it surely would. So we can dismiss pious moral grandstanding about the “evil” Putin as the boundless hypocrisy it transparently is.

    Furthermore, we should note that the rhetoric employed in this mad rush to terminal war is curious and irrational. For example, labeling Putin a “war criminal” actually legitimizes war, since it implies there is some ethical or at least inoffensive way to conduct mass slaughter, which is all that modern warfare is. Transparent attempts to miss this point by labeling massacre “collateral damage” should be dismissed with ridicule.

    And it can hardly be repeated too often that the USA is far and away the guiltiest “criminal” where war is concerned, having by far the greatest war industry ever seen in human history headquartered on its soil and forming the heart of its economy (the Defense Industrial Base), which it has used to fight an endless series of wars directly or by proxy throughout the world for the past eighty years. No other contemporary or historical power has achieved anything close to this commitment to mass killing.

    So it is absurd to define the situation in Ukraine as a uniquely evil instance of military aggression by Vladimir Putin. In a world of asymmetrical power with no effective world government, technically sophisticated powers always have the upper hand in violent conflicts with their neighbors, which are inevitable. And, of course, they insist on having friendly neighbors, preferably cooperative, though submissive will do.

    Hostile neighbors no one accepts. How much of the Americas does the United States permit be part of a hostile military alliance? According to the Monroe Doctrine, not one square inch. How did Washington react to Cuba installing Soviet nuclear missiles 90 miles from Florida in 1962? (Spoiler alert: it nearly blew up the planet.) What did the media do when Rafael Correa jokingly proposed an Ecuadorian military base in Miami to balance Washington’s Mena Air Base in Ecuador? It laughed, though the punchline is far from a joke.

    A majority of the world is fed-up with the hypocrisies of unilateral world order under U.S. control, and is not averse to accommodating an emerging China-Russia-India based new world order. Yes, the current war in Ukraine is causing further expansion of NATO (supposedly a good thing), but this, in turn, is devouring resources needed to stave off European economic collapse, while an emerging Russia-China-India alliance accelerates the collapse of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

    Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, a U.S. client state, Biden’s phone calls in the early stages of the current war went unanswered while Putin’s were cordially received. Got respect?

    Our mind managers warn us of the horrors of forced neutrality via Finlandization, and urge instead that we strive for regime change in Moscow. Strange. Finland is a success story, having achieved balance and stability via social democratic prosperity. On the other hand, U.S.-fostered regime change converts countries into corpse-strewn wastelands on a regular basis. Think Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Trying out this strategy on Russia obviously carries a high risk of nuclear annihilation. What stupendous prize awaits us if we successfully navigate this potentially species-terminating risk? The preservation of “our interests and our values,” as Hillary Clinton so loves to say.

    In other words, converting whole cities to radioactive ash is a small price to pay for preserving our favorite abstractions. Got it.

    We hear Putin is a strongman, an authoritarian, a totalitarian dictator, though we also hear people are fleeing Russia in droves. Why are they at liberty to do that in a “dictatorship”?

    By the way, was Abraham Lincoln also a dictator, he who suspended habeas corpus, jailed journalists, shut down hundreds of newspapers, and locked up thousands of political enemies? And what about Woodrow Wilson, who destroyed unions, imprisoned editors, closed newspapers, and assumed dictatorial control of finance, the press, farms, and commerce and transportation?

    Or maybe FDR was a dictator, who imprisoned over 100,000 U.S. citizens without charge and burned more civilians alive in a single night than either atomic bomb killed six months later?

    What do we actually mean when we call Putin a dictator? That the media isn’t free? But a major part of Russian, state-owned media has long transmitted pro-Western, anti-Russian content, paid for by Russian taxpayers. Try and find taxpayer-funded, Putin-sympathetic content that reaches mass audiences in the U.S. Good luck.

    What about free speech? Well, the Russian people have never had it, and therefore don’t care much about it. Americans have it in theory, but find its political potency nullified in practice by tsunamis of state and corporate propaganda. The most popular use of speech in the contemporary U.S. is not to reveal errors of argument and evidence, but to denounce others for being “idiots.” How free are we then?

    Is Putin a nationalist? In recent years state-enterprise CEOs in Russia were seen earning millions of rubles a year while everyone else had to tighten their belts. The Russian central bank bought U.S. Treasury Bonds and supported the U.S. dollar at the expense of the ruble. Where is the nationalism in such policy?

    Is Putin anti-democratic? The annexation of Crimea was overwhelmingly supported by Crimeans (97% vote).

    Didn’t Putin back Assad? Yes, because he was the legitimate head of state in Syria, while the alternative was rule by Islamic terrorists supported by the United States and Israel, but no sane person in Syria. Israel wants the dismemberment of Syria in order to keep the occupied Golan Heights forever.

    Much demonology is spouted from the simple fact that Putin is the former head of the K.G.B. But Putin is critical of the Bolsheviks and is not himself a Communist. Nevertheless, he considers the demise of the USSR a “world tragedy,” since overnight twenty-five million Russians found themselves foreigners living in fourteen new countries.

    Is Putin anti-Israel? Well, Daesh oil flowed to Israel, and Putin said nothing, valuing his relations with then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel, of course, supported Al-Nusra, and they were declared terrorists by the United Nations. But Israel is admirable by definition, because … the Holocaust. Strange, though, that Putin gets no credit for aiding the Holy State.

    We are told that no threat to the Russian state exists, so therefore no cause for war in Ukraine exists. But the Russian state and everything else can be blown off the map in a matter of minutes. The fact that the world is wired up to explode in a nuclear holocaust has been an American initiative from the beginning, and its dominant enemy has been (1) the USSR, and (2) Russia. NATO is by definition hostile to Russia, and lost even an ostensible reason for existing in 1991 with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. Why is it still around? Because Russia is still around, and Washington doesn’t like that fact. Its efforts to achieve regime change in Moscow can and may end human civilization, which isn’t likely to improve matters for Ukrainians.

    Is Putin an extremist? No. There is nothing radical in him. He has no plans for social re-arrangement. He merely seeks to have Russia respected as an independent, wealthy, and “great” nation, and yes, he wants Russia to be treated as an equal. But he also wants to fit into the world, not rebel against it. These modest ambitions are a threat to US/NATO hegemony and world dominance, which represent the triumph of Western extremism.

    Keeping things in perspective, Putin is a Russian patriot. He wants to see Russia be a strong, healthy country where people lead good lives, are happy, and Russia occupies a prominent position internationally. He’s not a chauvinist or reactionary nationalist.

    The Orange Revolution was totally unexpected in Russia, which can’t really be said to have a political opposition because there is no one who embodies and represents the views of a Russian majority. Having said that, Putin has been something of the “golden boy” in Russian politics for the past generation. He is good at addressing issues and speaking in clear terms that average people understand. The initial “democracy” of the Yeltsin period has been curtailed, but the middle class has developed rapidly on Putin’s watch.

    Yeltsin spoke to the U.S. Congress in 1992, and offered Washington a partnership in which each nation would treat the other as an equal. For thirty years now the U.S. has rejected this. In the year of the U.S./NATO attack on Serbia (1999), Yeltsin protested, “Russia is not Haiti. You can’t treat us like Haiti.” Washington considers Haiti a “shithole” country, as one of America’s more honest presidents memorably put it.

    Washington is incapable of giving Russia its due diplomatic respect. According to the reigning “Wolfowitz Doctrine,” the U.S. should dominate the world and not allow any rivals for power to emerge. Russia therefore is and should be treated as a second rate power. This is a non-negotiable position.

    Naturally, Putin does not accept this, and never accepted the U.S. view that Russia lost the Cold War. Russia saw the end of the Cold War as an opportunity for them to become part of the international community. At the core of Russian beliefs is that Russia must be a Great Power. The Russian people have never doubted that Russia is a great country. Having their noses rubbed in the Wolfowitz Doctrine year after year is insulting, degrading, and an open invitation to mutual suicide.

    The USSR’s forcing its rule onto Eastern Europe was a big mistake, though understandable given two Western invasions in a generation that left much of the country a smoldering ruin. The U.S. ignoring the possibility of Russia “coming back” to international prominence was a big American mistake. Washington continues to think of Russia as at most a regional power whose wants and needs can be ignored. But no nuclear-armed country can be ignored.

    At the end of the Cold War the U.S. promised not to expand NATO — not one inch — to the East, a promise it quickly violated.

    Now we wait to learn if our three-decade refusal to concede Russia minimal diplomatic respect and cooperation will eventuate in nuclear war.

    The post Imperial Demon Watch: Vladimir Putin first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • The Narrative That This War Was “Unprovoked” Prevents Peace

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Vladimir Putin has approved the annexation of four territories in eastern Ukraine, whose addition to the Russian Federation now await authorization from Russia’s other branches of government.

    The Zelensky government responded to the move by applying to join NATO, only to be immediately shut down by US and NATO officials. Can’t have sacrificial pawns trying to rise above their station on the grand chessboard, after all.

    But the empire’s proxy war against Russia continues, and the Ukrainian government has announced its intentions to drive out Russia from all of the Ukrainian territories it has claimed as its own.

    “For our plans, [Russia’s annexation] doesn’t matter,” Zelensky advisor Mykhailo Podolyak told Politico, adding that Ukraine will “protect our land using all our forces” and “should liberate all its territories.”

    The plan to reclaim territories annexed by Russia will according to Zelensky also include Crimea, which was annexed in 2014.

    All this talk about preparing a massive western-backed counter-offensive to recapture annexed territories from Russia — whose ranks are being reinforced with an additional 300,000 reservists — comes as Putin suggests that nuclear weapons may be used to protect what Moscow considers parts of Russia. Russia, like the United States, is one of the nuclear-armed nations without a No First Use policy.

    So we appear to be on a collision course toward a massive escalation between two nuclear-armed powers. The more things escalate the more likely it is that a nuclear weapon may be used, either deliberately or as a result of miscommunication or malfunction as nearly happened many times during the last cold war. Once one nuke is used the odds go up astronomically that a great many more will immediately follow, with variables on this outcome including the location where it detonates and how cool all the relevant heads happen to be at that particular historic moment.

    It is therefore no exaggeration to say that the human species has a vested interest in de-escalation and detente right away. Avoiding nuclear war is the single most important agenda in the entire world, without exception. It is the single most important agenda that has ever existed in all of history.

    But whenever you advocate for this supremely important agenda in any kind of public forum, you get a bunch of brainwashed empire automatons bleating about “appeasement” and accusing you of supporting a monstrous madman. And they do this because that’s what they were trained to do.

    As Noam Chomsky has been pointing out repeatedly, the political/media class have been continually indoctrinating the public with the completely false narrative that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked”. Every time the war comes up the imperial spinmeisters utter that slogan, in much the same way Michael Jackson had a quota for how often MTV hosts were obligated to refer to him as “The King of Pop Michael Jackson” when his name was mentioned.

    But what does it mean if the war is “unprovoked”? It means Putin didn’t invade Ukraine because of anything the western empire was doing, so it couldn’t have been prevented by the western empire behaving less aggressively on Russia’s borders. It means Putin necessarily invaded because he is some kind of evil lunatic who loves to commit war crimes, or a megalomaniacal tyrant who wants to conquer the world because he hates freedom and democracy. Which means he will keep attacking and invading other countries unless he can be stopped. Which means the only answer to the Putin problem is more war.

    This is why empire apologists get angry at those who advocate the only sane and rational position toward nuclear brinkmanship by calling for de-escalation and detente. It’s because they’ve been aggressively indoctrinated into the belief that war is the only answer.

    The moronic narrative that the invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” poses a massive obstacle to peace, because if Putin is just attacking and invading countries solely because he’s crazy and evil it means detente is impossible and he won’t stop until he’s decisively crushed. If it’s accepted that the US empire has played no role in provoking Putin’s actions, that means there’s nothing the empire could do to make continued Russian aggression less likely apart from regime change, or at least severely crippling and punishing Russia militarily.

    As long as the fact that this war was provoked remains unacknowledged by the side that provoked it, the sane path of de-escalation and detente will look like reckless appeasement of an irrational madman, and aggressive escalations of nuclear brinkmanship will look like sanity. The absurd position that Putin is an irrational actor with some kind of weird sexual fetish for war crimes is a one-way ticket to endlessly escalating war and eventual nuclear annihilation, because it leaves you with no options but continually intensifying military confrontation.

    The claim that peace is impossible and Putin must be crushed imperils the whole world. Even to deliver total victory in Ukraine (pushing Russia back to pre-2014 borders) could easily end up costing millions of lives and trillions of dollars and exponentially increase the risk of nuclear war, with no guarantee of success at all. But even if you did push Putin all the way out of Ukraine, what then? He’ll still be a crazy madman who wants to invade countries because he’s evil and hates freedom. The internal logic of your narrative says the attacks on Russia must continue until you get regime change. There’s no stopping point on your line of thinking until there’s a direct hot confrontation between nuclear superpowers.

    Be an adult and engage your critical thinking. Does a madman who goes around invading countries solely because he’s evil and hates freedom sound like a real-life human being to you? Or does it sound made up? Like something you’d see in a Hollywood movie? Like something that was concocted by people responsible for controlling the dominant narratives of our society and funneled into your mind using media?

    Marvel supervillains have more depth and complexity than the one-dimensional characters the imperial spin machine concocts to represent its official enemies. Thanos was a more believable character with more understandable and nuanced motivations than the propaganda machine’s fictional representation of Putin. That representation has been overlaid on top of the actual government official who you might not necessarily agree with, but can definitely understand and engage in diplomacy and negotiation.

    People who believe the empire’s narratives about its official enemies have fewer critical thinking skills than your average Marvel movie viewer. Think. Be a grown up and think. Someone’s benefitting from the aggressively promulgated narrative that peace is impossible and war is the only solution. And that someone isn’t you.

    _________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Over The Rainbow: Disneyfied News and the “Unprovoked” Invasion of Ukraine

    Last February, Emily Maitlis left her role as presenter of the BBC’s Newsnight programme to join rival media group Global. In a recent speech, Maitlis made a surprising reference to Theresa May’s former communications director Sir Robbie Gibb:

    ‘Put this in the context of the BBC board, where another active agent of the Conservative Party – former Downing Street spin doctor and former adviser to BBC rival GB News – now sits, acting as the arbiter of BBC impartiality.’

    Outraged by this whistleblowing, someone at the BBC activated the corporation’s ageing Complaint Response Autobot:

    ‘The BBC places the highest value on due impartiality and accuracy and we apply these principles to our reporting on all issues.’

    The standard, ‘Just the facts, Ma’am’, claim for ‘impartial’ journalism, in other words, as Matt Taibbi described it in Rolling Stone magazine.

    Maitlis’s criticism of bias at the BBC was ironic indeed given her own record. In August 2008, Maitlis opened BBC’s Newsnight programme with an almost Chomskyan comment on the conflict between Russia and Georgia:

    ‘Hello, good evening. The Russians are calling it “peace enforcement operation”. It’s the kind of Newspeak that would make George Orwell proud.’ (BBC2, August 11, 2008, 10:30pm)

    It was unclear why Orwell would have been made ‘proud’ by examples of ‘Newspeak’. But anyway, imagine Maitlis, or any BBC presenter, referring to comparable Western propaganda on Afghanistan (‘Operation Enduring Freedom’), Iraq (‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’), Syria, or Ukraine, as ‘the kind of Newspeak that would make George Orwell proud’.

    On 1 April 2020, Maitlis retweeted a thread on Twitter from someone called Dave Rich smearing Jeremy Corbyn. This was the first tweet in the thread:

    ‘Goodbye Jeremy Corbyn. They said you don’t have an antisemitic bone in your body. That may be true, but your brain is full of it. Can we remember all the examples? Probably not but I’ll have a go /1’

    Maitlis, who is from a Jewish family, retweeted this and similar comments to her quarter of a million followers.

    ‘Remarkable’ Rainbows

    The truth of the BBC’s reflexive claim that it ‘places the highest value on due impartiality and accuracy’ was, of course, tested to destruction by its coverage of the death and funeral of the Queen. A BBC news journalist observed:

    ‘As crowds wait to see the Queen’s lying-in-state for the final evening, many were touched to see the evening sky light up with a rainbow.

    ‘Remarkably, a rainbow was also spotted at Windsor Castle on the same day the Queen died on 8 September.

    ‘The BBC’s Sophie Raworth caught the reaction of people who spotted the rainbow as she noted on Sunday: “As the sun set over Westminster tonight… the crowd gasped.”’

    This was the BBC, in the 21st century, clearly suggesting that supernatural forces may have been honouring the Queen. Otherwise, it was not ‘remarkable’ for rainbows to appear as part of the UK’s mixed September weather; nor would a high-profile reporter feel the need to note that a number of overwrought mourners ‘gasped’ at the sight of a rainbow.

    Elsewhere on the BBC, the former Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, spoke of how the Queen had performed an act of spontaneous spiritual healing. Sentamu recalled:

    ‘I went with a huge burden of matters that maybe one day will be revealed.

    ‘I knelt down, and I said “Your Majesty, please pray for me.” So I put my hands together and she put hers outside mine, and we were silent for three minutes. At the end she said “Amen”.

    ‘When I got up, the burden had lifted.’

    Also on the BBC, we learned that ‘Emma, the Queen’s fell pony, greeted the procession’. Separately, the BBC devoted an entire news piece to the pony and the Queen’s two remaining corgis, Muick and Sandy, who were pictured looking sad and wistful. Apparently drawing inspiration from the Richard Gere film, ‘Hachi: A Dog’s Tale’, about a heartbroken dog waiting for his deceased master’s return, the BBC reported:

    ‘The Queen’s last two corgis have appeared during her coffin’s procession to Windsor Castle, as if out waiting for their mistress’s return.’

    Any Guardian readers hoping to escape this Disneyfied version of analysis were disappointed. In probably the first and last opinion piece of its kind, Anna Whitelock, professor of the history of monarchy at City, University of London, opined of the Queen:

    ‘Certainly, a monarch reigning for more than 70 years, but also a monarch who in a modern media age of populism and celebrity retained an echo of the mystical, age-old, divine right of kings.’

    Whitelock clarified the assertion, noting that Elizabeth had been ‘cast by accident of birth into a role unearned and then anointed as God’s chosen one’.

    To her credit, Whitelock was candid about the personal crisis that lay behind this analysis:

    ‘For me, the moment when the imperial crown, representing the sovereignty of the nation, and the orb and sceptre, representing spiritual and temporal power, were removed from the coffin, and so from Elizabeth for the last time, was the moment when my expertise abandoned me. In that instance, I became not a professor of the history of modern monarchy, but a disoriented forty something who, at least in that moment, witnessed the breaking of the spell: the shattering of the magic of monarchy that I have often described but had always assumed I was quite immune to.’

    The day after the funeral, high-profile Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff breathed a sigh of relief:

    ‘GOOD MORNING to the day the news is allowed back in the room’

    We asked:

    ‘Well, who stopped the news? Who has that right? And why did you allow it to happen?’

    Other journalists also expressed limited dissent. Long-time Guardian and Observer contributor, Dan Hancox, commented:

    ‘I think if I worked for BBC News in any capacity I would absolutely mortified after the last fortnight. “Public service”, “BBC balance” and purported pluralism revealed for what it truly is – an inflexible arm of the state and the elites that control it. Truly an embarrassment’

    Michael Crick, former political editor of the BBC’s Newsnight programme, went further:

    ‘The past days, with a few honourable exceptions, have been a shameful period for British journalism, in which scrutiny, challenge, perspective, balance and common sense have been ditched in favour of fawning  banalities.’

    We asked Hancox about the newspapers that publish his work:

    ‘And how did the Guardian and Observer fare, Dan?’

    Donnachadh McCarthy, aggrieved climate columnist at the Independent, responded first:

    ‘Seemed like they replaced the newspaper with 30 page royal souvenir promotion brochures, for 11 days solid!!   Arghhh

    ‘I was a captured subscriber.’

    McCarthy added:

    ‘Utterly failed on balanced reporting, just like they did with 1200 articles trashing Corbyn, to ensure Johnson got elected.’

    Clearly peeved, Hancox responded to our tweet:

    ‘This would maybe be a scathing gotcha if 1) I was editor of these newspapers, rather than a freelance writer, and 2) our monolithic licence-fee-funded PS broadcaster was the same thing as a privately-owned newspaper. For media critics, you could use a bit of media literacy’

    McCarthy responded to Hancox again:

    ‘Seems like you did not read the 11 royal souvenir brochures, which replaced Guardian Observer for 11 days!!

    ‘Now that is what was really shameful…’

    We replied to Hancox’s tweet referring to our attempted ‘gotcha’:

    ‘I’m genuinely asking: as a Guardian and Observer contributor, how mortified have you been by their performance?’

    Hancox responded:

    ‘You sad little men, shouting at a freelancer via QTs [quote tweets]. As usual showing your nuanced understanding of where power is located in the media’

    As other tweeters pointed out, Hancox had himself been ‘shouting’ at people who worked at the BBC ‘in any capacity’ – presumably including ‘sad little’ freelancers. We replied:

    ‘For 21 years now, journos have responded with rage and insults when we’ve asked them to comment on media publishing their work. It’s a way of avoiding the question. In essence: “You’re so nasty and vicious, and I’m so angry, that I won’t respond.” We haven’t been shouting at all.’

    Being described as ‘sad little men’ reminded us of the time filmmaker and BBC producer Adam Curtis commented to us two decades ago:

    ‘I don’t know whether it occurred to you that I might have been away – instead of stamping your little feet and trying to whip up an attack of the clones.’ 1

    To the painfully swollen egos of the Guardian and BBC, we are annoying ‘little men’ with ‘little feet’ barely worthy of consideration. After all, who are we? How dare we challenge them? As Peter Beaumont, the Observer’s foreign affairs editor, noted in a rare ‘mainstream’ mention (unthinkable now), we are ‘self-appointed media watchdogs’.2

    It was a telling comment. We are not appointed by authority of any kind and are therefore ‘little men’ to commentators afflicted by what Erich Fromm called ‘the authoritarian character structure’ – people who look to hierarchy, status and power for guidance, rather than to their own capacity for critical thought.

    The ‘Unprovoked’ Invasion

    We received a further telling response from high-profile reporter Wyre Davies of BBC News & Current Affairs. For reasons unknown, Davies likes to occasionally vent his spleen in our direction. This time, he responded to our retweet of a deeply disturbing prediction about the war in Ukraine by political commentator and former chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter:

    ‘The mobilization of 300,000 men, as well as the announced goal of bringing all other units up to the standards of the Russian army, will not happen overnight. Russia will be forming new units, and this takes time.’

    Ritter’s grim conclusion:

    ‘I believe we will see a strategic pause… But once Russia consolidates the new territory politically, and accrues the necessary military capacity, I believe we are looking at the physical destruction of the Ukrainian nation as the endgame for this conflict.’

    Ritter has been banned by Twitter, so Davies responded to us:

    ‘Indeed; one precipitated by Russia’s illegal, unprovoked and brutal invasion of Ukraine.’

    Like anyone who has looked at the facts, we agree that the invasion is illegal and brutal, but reject the claim that it was unprovoked. As John Pilger commented recently:

    ‘The news from the war in Ukraine is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission.  I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.

    ‘In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.

    ‘In 2014, the United States had sponsored a coup in Kiev that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man.’

    Pilger continued:

    ‘Last December, Russia proposed a far-reaching security plan for Europe. This was dismissed, derided or suppressed in the Western media. Who read its step-by-step proposals? On Feb. 24, President Volodymyr Zelensky threatened to develop nuclear weapons unless America armed and protected Ukraine.

    ‘On the same day, Russia invaded – an unprovoked act of congenital infamy, according to the Western media. The history, the lies, the peace proposals, the solemn agreements on Donbass at Minsk counted for nothing.’

    Pilger added:

    ‘Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts” – except one.

    ‘When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it? According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14,000 people have been killed in the Kiev regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.’

    As former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook wrote:

    ‘The encirclement of Russia by Nato was not a one-off error. Western meddling in the coup and support for a nationalist Ukrainian army increasingly hostile to Russia were not one-offs either. Nato’s decision to flood Ukraine with weapons rather than concentrate on diplomacy is no aberration. Nor is the decision to impose economic sanctions on ordinary Russians.

    ‘These are all of a piece, a pattern of pathological behaviour by the West towards Russia – and any other resource-rich state that does not utterly submit to western control.’

    Noam Chomsky commented recently:

    ‘In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, the major establishment journal, Fiona Hill and Angela Stent – highly regarded policy analysts with close government connections – report that:

    ‘“According to multiple former senior US officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement. The terms of that settlement would have been for Russia to withdraw to the positions it held before launching the invasion on February 24. In exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.’”

    Aaron Maté of The Grayzone website added:

    ‘In confirming that US officials were aware of this tentative agreement, Hill bolsters previous news that Washington’s junior partner in London was enlisted to thwart it. As Ukrainian media reported, citing sources close to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveled to Kiev in April and relayed the message that Russia “should be pressured, not negotiated with.” Johnson also informed Zelensky that “even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on [security] guarantees with Putin,” his Western patrons “are not.” The talks promptly collapsed.’

    Chomsky notes that it is not known if similar peace initiatives continue to be made:

    ‘If they do, they would not lack popular support, not only in the Global South but even in Europe, where “77 percent of Germans believe that the West should initiate negotiations to end the Ukraine war”.’

    Craig Murray, who was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004, offered this shocking observation:

    ‘There really are – and remember I worked over twenty years in British Foreign Office, six of them in the senior management structure – people in NATO, and in all western governments, who have no problem with the notion of hundreds of thousands of dead people, particularly as they are nearly all Eastern Europeans or Central Asians. They are not even particularly perturbed by the risk the conflict could turn nuclear. They are delighted that the Russian armed forces are being degraded and vast sums pumped into western military budgets. That is worth any number of dead Ukrainians to them.’

    Typically for ‘mainstream’ journalism, Wyre Davies was forthright in his condemnation of Russia’s invasion – nobody ever harmed their career by criticising Official Enemies. As with Hancox, we thought it would be interesting to test his honesty closer to home:

    ‘Wyre, in your opinion, was the 2003, US-UK invasion of Iraq illegal, unprovoked and brutal?’

    Davies responded:

    ‘Jeez … “look over there!” I thought for a minute this was all about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?’

    Which is how ‘mainstream’ journalists like it – it should be ‘all’ about Russia’s crimes. After working on Media Lens for two decades, it is still unclear to us whether journalists like Davies understand the consequences of damning the crimes of Official Enemies while refusing even to comment on the crimes of our own government. Do they understand that this one-eyed moral condemnation forever portrays the West as compassionate crusaders responding to the despicable illegality and violence of the ‘Bad Guys’? And do they understand that the results are catastrophic? The public simply doesn’t know that the West destroyed Iraq, Libya and Syria on packs of lies at vast human cost, fighting completely avoidable wars, while Western oil companies, like BP and Exxon in Iraq and Libya, reap the spoils.

    It is because all crimes are equal for journalists like Davies, but some crimes are more equal than others, that the public can’t conceive the utterly ruthless nature of Nato’s actions in Ukraine. To the public, it really does seem like the West is spending tens of billions of dollars to defend Ukrainian freedom. Even after the human catastrophes of Western ‘intervention’ in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, the public can still be made to believe that the chief Western concern in Iran is women’s rights, rather than the oil for which ‘we’, unprovoked, illegally and brutally overthrew the democratically elected Iranian government in 1953.

    It is only the awesome, brainwashing power of our state-corporate media that makes it possible for anyone to imagine that this is how Great Powers behave in the real world. If foreign policy really worked that way, planet Earth would long since have been transformed into a paradise of peace, equality and justice. We need only look around us to see how close we are to achieving that aim.

    1. Email to Media Lens, 18 June 2002.
    2. Beaumont, ‘Microscope on Medialens [sic]’, the Observer, 18 June 2006.
    The post Over The Rainbow: Disneyfied News and the “Unprovoked” Invasion of Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How To Defeat Putin

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    I know how to stop Vladimir Putin once and for all. I here offer my strategic wizardry to the western empire free of charge.

    Before I reveal my unstoppable plan, we must first understand that the Associated Press has just informed us that it is a “baseless conspiracy theory” that the US is responsible for sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines which were set up to carry Russian gas to Germany, and that this baseless conspiracy theory is being promoted solely by Russia and far-right groups.

    “The Kremlin and Russian state media are aggressively pushing a baseless conspiracy theory blaming the United States for damage to natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea in what analysts said Friday is another effort to split the U.S. and its European allies,” AP tells us. “The Russian position is also reverberating on social media forums popular with American conservatives and far-right groups.”

    “The suggestion that the U.S. caused the damage was circulating on online forums popular with American conservatives and followers of QAnon, a conspiracy theory movement which asserts that Trump is fighting a battle against a Satanic child-trafficking sect that controls world events,” AP reports.

    This information may come as a surprise to the many people who are unaware that promoting this claim means they are necessarily either Russian or far-right QAnon Satanic pedophile conspiracy theorists, like for example Poland’s former foreign minister and current sitting member of European Parliament Radek Sikorski, who openly thanked the United States for exploding the pipelines.

    The news that this conspiracy theory is “baseless” may also come as a surprise to those who’ve noted that both President Biden and his Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland explicitly said that Nord Stream 2 would be brought to an end if Russia invades Ukraine, that the US sanctioned those who built Nord Stream 2, that DC insiders are on record saying they want Europeans to be more dependent on North American energy than on pipelines from Russia, that Germans had just been angrily demanding an end to US-led sanctions on Russia and a reopening of Nord Stream gas, that US naval forces were recently conducting unmanned underwater vehicle drills right where the pipelines were attacked, that unmanned underwater vehicles have been found carrying explosive charges near Russian pipelines in the past, that Poland literally just inaugurated a gas pipeline that will transport gas from Norway through Denmark and the Baltic Sea, that US military helicopters were recorded traveling between the two blast points and along the Nord Stream 2 pipeline shortly before the explosions, that the US empire has an explicitly stated policy of ensuring that no powers develop that could challenge its global hegemony including in Europe, and that the CIA has a known history of blowing up Russian gas pipelines.

    But it’s in the news, so it’s definitely true. They’re not allowed to lie. The US is not guilty.

    So if it’s a crazy Russian-Satan-pedophile-QAnon crackpot conspiracy theory to believe the US government or its imperial proxies may have had something to do with the sabotage of Russian pipelines, who did it?

    Well, this is going to blow your mind because of how wildly counter-intuitive it is, but here’s the answer: Russia.

    This is according to such ever-impartial and totally trustworthy experts as former CIA director John Brennan, who says that “Russia certainly is the most likely suspect,” and NATO think tanker Alexander Vershbow, who says Putin blew up his own pipelines instead of simply closing a valve because he wanted to show the world that he is a “madman”.

    “The sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines further reinforces the image of Putin as madman, which might persuade some allies to push for a ceasefire and negotiations that would inevitably mean Ukraine giving up significant amounts of territory,” Vershbow told The Atlantic’s Susan B Glaser.

    So there you have it. Russia, not the US empire, is responsible for destroying billions of dollars of its own economic and energy infrastructure and releasing hundreds of millions of dollars of its own gas and ending its crucial point of leverage over Europe in direct facilitation of US geostrategic interests and in direct subversion of its own, because Putin is a crazy lunatic. If it wasn’t true, they couldn’t report it in the news.

    So are you ready for my brilliant strategy on how to defeat Putin? Here it is: simply stand back and wait for him to explode the rest of Russia.

    This is after all the same madman who the New York Times informs us has been ordering his troops to shell a nuclear power plant they already control. If Putin is a gibbering, irrational lunatic who enjoys blowing up his own stuff for no reason other than to act crazy, surely if we just stand back and leave him to his own devices he will soon turn the Russian Federation into a steaming pile of rubble.

    Honestly I can’t believe it’s taken me, a humble blogger, to figure this out on behalf of the US empire. You’d think with all the brilliant minds in the US government and the mainstream news media they’d have figured this one out by themselves, but apparently they need a little help sometimes. Any DC think tanks are welcome to call me for any lucrative employment offers they care to extend.

    You are welcome in advance. Here’s looking forward to Putin’s self-inflicted downfall.

    __________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Biden and Nuland Promised to Destroy Nordstream before the Russian Invasion

    Jan Oberg: Biden and Nuland promised to destroy Nordstream before the Russian invasion

    People from the Danish Defence Academy, other military experts – e.g. those of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation – most major Danish media and – of course – the Ukrainian President’s advisor uniformly point – to Russia as the saboteur of the Nordstream gas pipelines near Bornholm, the Danish island south of Sweden.

    The Danish Prime Minister Frederiksen and Defence Minister Bødskov, however, are a little lower than usual on Russia, pointing out how important – and difficult – it is to get clarity on this kind of thing so far down on the ocean bed.

    Read Denmark Radio’s always politically correct public service “take”: “Ukraine on the gas leak in Baltic Sea: Russian terrorist attack. Russia wants to create panic before winter, says advisor to Ukraine’s president” and here on the prime time news, TV-Avisen, Defence Minister Bødskov explains that we may never get clarity on who carried out the blast, that it is all very difficult and will take time and that Denmark has full backing from NATO…

    Here’s UPI’s take on the EU: “Sept. 28 (UPI) – The European Union on Wednesday said breaches in the Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines happened because of a “deliberate act” but stopped short of blaming Russia for the leaks.”

    How interesting they stopped short. For once.

    This is, of course, a political water-cycle ride into the blue deep sea.

    Surely, Russia has a tap – the kind you know you have on your kitchen sink – with which to stop the gas? Why take the big risk with such a difficult and profound espionage attack? And if it was a signal to Denmark, why do it in international waters?

    As usual, the Danish media seem unfamiliar with web search engines. And if they do, it must be that they are not reporting everything they have seen and are thus engaging in a rather narrow public education – leaving out what they believe that the citizens, for political reasons, do not need to know.

    You can search for yourself – don’t use Google because that’s part of US foreign policy – but e.g. DuckDuckGo – with the words “Biden on no Nordstream 2” and there are tons of references to Biden and his famous promise at a press conference with German chancellor Schilz that “we’ll bring an end to it” – Nordstream 2 – if Russia invades Ukraine.

    That was February 7 of this year – 3 weeks before Putin’s international law-breaking invasion in response to the provocation Russia perceives NATO’s 30-year systematic build-up of Ukraine as a future NATO country to be.

    Here’s a Reuters video of the already then sensational plan, which Biden clearly doesn’t want to explain and Chancellor Scholz looks a bit befuddled about:

    It’s also clear that Madam “Fuck-the-EU” Victoria Nuland – Biden’s Under-Secretary of State – has said the same thing just as unequivocally – see this video on Twitter. And on YouTube:

    I wish Frederiksen and Bødskov, the Danish underwater military experts and divers as well as the Danish media all the best with the difficult, lengthy investigation into the suspected Russian terrorist attack.

    The truth has long since become implausible…

    The post Biden and Nuland Promised to Destroy Nordstream before the Russian Invasion first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Nuclear war or a new front line: what the Ukraine annexations could mean

    Russian president Vladimir Putin is set to annex large areas of Ukraine. But, US president Joe Biden says the US will never recognise such territories as Russian. The eventual outcomes are unclear but an India-Pakistan style nuclear stand-off is a possibility.

    The Guardian surmised that the areas Putin plans to annex make up 15% of Ukraine. The paper claims that the Russian constitution means they could never be returned once claimed:

    The BBC reported the Kremlin’s claims that Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson had “backed annexation in five-day referendums”. But that the “so-called votes” have been “widely condemned outside Russia as a sham”.

    The BBC said:

    None of the four occupied regions that Russia aims to incorporate are under its full control. It can only lay claim to 60% of Donetsk while Zaporizhzhia’s regional capital remains in Ukrainian hands.

    Russian ambitions

    Speaking on Friday, Joe Biden told reporters that the annexation would never be recognised by the US:

    The United States, I want to be very clear about this, United States will never, never, never recognize Russia’s claims on Ukraine sovereign territory.

    He announced new sanctions and blasted what he called Russia’s “imperial ambitions”:

    Russia’s assault on Ukraine in pursuit of imperial ambitions is a flagrant, flagrant violation of the UN Charter, and the basic principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity.

    Strong words, though it is worth remembering US intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan to mention just two. A third could be the US’s longstanding bankrolling of Israel.

    Standoff

    It is hard to predict how the annexation matter will play out. Both Russia and Ukraine’s biggest ally, the US, is a nuclear power. Yet, excepting a disastrous error, it seems unlikely either will pull the trigger. More likely, the continuation of a high-intensity war, or even ongoing proxy war in the annexed regions.

    Whichever way the war plays out, those of us with a genuine interest in peace are not served by backing either the US or Russia in the form of bizarre modern-day campism (uncritical backing of either the US or Russia) which has played out since March.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, cropped to 770 x 403, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • This Would Be A Wise Stopping Point For This War: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    At the risk of upsetting the entire internet, the annexation of those four Ukrainian territories seems like a great time to end this war to me. Does anyone honestly believe a significant percentage of the people who live there want a massive counteroffensive on their doorstep? I don’t.

    The west knowingly provoked this war, the thing experts warned for years would happen did happen, and now Ukraine lost some territory. Rather than risking millions or billions of lives escalating this conflict, it seems sensible to draw a line under it. You can yell “Putin bad!” and “International law!” all you want, but it’s just a cold hard fact that after the annexation the US/NATO/Ukraine tandem is going to be presented with the choice of either ending the bloodshed or massively, massively escalating it. Pretty easy choice, in my opinion.

    There are two kinds of people who want peace in Ukraine: those who want it to come now via diplomacy, negotiation and compromise, and those who want it to come years from now after pouring millions of lives into driving Russia out of every last inch of Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders. You either support a negotiated settlement right now or you support an extremely long, protracted proxy war that risks nuclear annihilation, ends up costing millions of lives and trillions of dollars, and has no guarantee of success. And the latter position is what’s being planned for:

    Of course I don’t actually believe the fighting will end in this way at this time; there’s too much riding on keeping the bloodshed going. I’m just highlighting the fairly obvious fact that it could end now, and should end now.

    ❖

    So far the strongest arguments I’ve seen that Russia destroyed its own pipelines essentially boil down to “Putin is CRAAAZY! Who knows why that wacky guy does what he does? He’s bonkers!”

    “Of COURSE Russia would destroy its own energy infrastructure and hundreds of millions of dollars in natural gas against its own interests and in direct facilitation of longstanding US unipolarist agendas! He’s nuts! He’s CWAAAZY!” Science should really start taking a closer look at this unspecified mental illness which only affects geopolitical foes of the US empire.

    If we really believe Putin is so crazy and irrational that he’s begun exploding Russian pipelines and shelling Russia-controlled power plants, the strategy should logically be to simply stand back and let him bomb Russia back to the Stone Age.

    ❖

    A think tank is an institution wherein academics are paid by the worst people in the world to convince everyone that good things are bad and bad things are good.

    ❖

    To want a healthy world is to want what the ego sees as a boring world: peace, collaboration and harmony instead of conflict, competition and drama. The fact that egos can’t be content without conflict and drama means humanity must transcend egoic consciousness to become healthy.

    Our movies, shows and stories all revolve around conflict and drama because most of humanity is enslaved by egoic consciousness, and conflict and drama are what egos find appealing. We’re going to have to change that about ourselves to be able to live in a healthy world.

    If we remain in the same egoic patterning it wouldn’t matter if someone used a genie wish to make the world harmonious and egalitarian today, because we’d just ruin it immediately and return to our old modes of dysfunction. A healthy world can’t exist without a conscious humanity.

    We’re going to have to change, and we’re going to have to change in all the ways that are least appealing to the ego. It’s a hard sell. But it’s also an existential necessity, because we’re going to wipe ourselves out if we don’t.

    Image

    And of course a healthy world would not be boring. Peel away the egoic filters on human perception and all of life is clearly seen as thunderously beautiful and endlessly fascinating. The inability to be content with life as it is is just dysfunction born of egoic consciousness.

    ❖

    The universe is becoming more and more perceptive. More and more sentient. More and more capable of knowing itself, to greater and greater degrees of depth, breadth, and complexity. It’s like a baby slowly developing self-awareness.

    Did you know evening primrose flowers can “hear” bees approaching, and quickly make their nectar sweeter in order to attract them? Perception is happening all around us in the most unexpected ways, in places we’d never even think to look. Life is amazing. The universe is amazing.

    The dawn of life allowed the stardust to behold itself for the first time. And as life becomes more and more advanced, the stardust gets better and better at beholding.

    _________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.