This post was originally published on Real Progressives.
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“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” Karl Marx.
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Soon after arriving in Oslo, my taxi zigzagged through the city’s well-organized streets and state-of-the-art infrastructure. Large billboards advertised the world’s leading brands in fashion, cars, and perfumes. Amid all the expressions of wealth and plenty, an electronic sign by a bus stop flashed the images of poor looking African children needing help.
Over the years, Norway has served as a relatively good model of meaningful humanitarian and medical aid. This is especially true if compared to other self-serving western countries, where aid is often linked to direct political and military interests. Still, the public humiliation of poor, hungry and diseased Africa is still disquieting.
The same images and TV ads are omnipresent everywhere in the West. The actual tangible value of such charity aside, campaigns to help poor Africa do more than perpetuate a stereotype, they also mask the actual responsibility of why natural resource-rich Africa remains poor, and why the supposed generosity of the West over the decades has done little to achieve a paradigm shift in terms of the Continent’s economic health and prosperity.
News from Africa is almost always grim. A recent ‘Save the Children’ report sums up Africa’s woes in alarming numbers: 150 million children in East and Southern Africa are facing the double threat of grinding poverty and the disastrous impact of climate change. The greatest harm affects the children population in South Sudan, with 87 percent, followed by Mozambique (80 percent), then Madagascar (73 percent).
The bad news from Africa, illustrated in the Save the Children report, was released soon after another report, this time by the World Bank, indicating that the international community’s hope to end extreme poverty by 2030 will not be met.
Consequently, by 2030, around 574 million people, estimated at 7 percent of the world’s total population, will continue to live in extreme poverty, relying on about two dollars a day.
Sub-Saharan Africa currently serves as the epicenter of global extreme poverty. The rate of extreme poverty in that region is about 35 percent, representing 60 percent of all extreme poverty anywhere in the world.
The World Bank suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Russia-Ukraine war are the main catalysts behind the grim estimates.
Growing global inflation and the slow growth of large economies in Asia are also culprits.
But what these reports don’t tell us, and what images of starving African children don’t convey is that much of Africa’s poverty is linked to the ongoing exploitation of the continent by its former – or current – colonial masters.
This is not to suggest that African nations have no agency of their own, in contributing to their worsening situation or in challenging intervention and exploitation. Without a united front and major change in geopolitical global balances, pushing back against neocolonialism is not an easy feat.
The Russia-Ukraine war and the global rivalry between Russia and China, on the one hand, and western countries on the other have encouraged some African leaders to speak out against the exploitation of Africa, and the use of Africa as a political fodder for global conflicts. The food crisis has been at the center of this fight.
In the late October Dakar International Forum on Peace and Security, some African leaders resisted pressure from western diplomats to toe the West’s line on the war in Ukraine.
Ironically, French minister of state Chrysoula Zacharopoulou sought “solidarity from Africa”, alleging that Russia poses an “existential threat” to Europe.
Though France continues to effectively control the currencies, thus economies of 14 different African countries – mostly in West Africa – Zacharopoulou declared that “Russia is solely responsible for this economic, energy and food crisis.”
President of Senegal, Macky Sall was one of several African leaders and top diplomats who challenged the duplicitous and polarizing language.
“This is 2022, this is no longer the colonial period… so countries, even if they are poor, have equal dignity. Their problems have to be handled with respect,” he said.
It is this coveted ‘respect’ by the West that Africa lacks. The US and Europe simply expect African nations to abandon their neutral approach to global conflicts and join the West’s continued campaign for global dominance.
But why should Africa, one of the richest and most exploited continents, obey the West’s diktats?
The West’s insincerity is glaring. Its double standard didn’t escape African leaders, including Nigeria’s former president Mahamadou Issoufou. “It’s shocking for Africans to see the billions that have rained down on Ukraine while attention has been diverted from the situation in the Sahel (region),” he said in Dakar.
Following the elevated political discourse emanating from African leaders and intellectuals gives one hope that the supposedly ‘poor’ Continent is plotting an escape from the grip of western domination, though many variables would have to work in their favor to make this happen.
Africa’s existent wealth alone can fuel global growth for many years to come. But the beneficiaries of this wealth should be Africa’s sons and daughters, not the deep pockets of the West’s wealthy classes. Indeed, the time has come that Africa’s children are not paraded as charity cases in Europe, a notion that only feeds into the long-distorted power relations between Africa and the West.
The post Liberating Africa from Poverty Requires Changing Power Relations with the West first appeared on Dissident Voice.
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The author with Pyatnashka commanders at outpost near Avdeevka, Donetsk People’s Republic. [ Source: Photo courtesy of Eva Bartlett]America is widely understood to be a key instigator behind conflict in Ukraine that has pitted brother against brother
Smeared, stigmatized, and lied about in Western media propaganda, the mostly Russian-speaking people of the Donbass region were being slaughtered by the thousands in a brutal war of “ethnic cleansing” launched against them by the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv, which the U.S. installed after the CIA overthrew Ukraine’s legally elected president in a 2014 coup.
Although the Donbass people had been pleading for Russian military aid to defend them against the increasingly murderous military assaults by the Ukraine government forces, which killed more than 14,000 of their people, Russian President Vladimir Putin declined to intervene. Instead, he tried to broker a peace agreement between the warring parties.
But the U.S. and Britain secretly colluded to sabotage peace negotiations, persuading president Zelenksy to ignore the Minsk II peace agreement that the Ukraine government had previously signed, and which had been countersigned by Russia, France and Germany.
Realizing that the U.S. and its NATO allies would never permit peace negotiations to succeed, Putin finally invaded Ukraine on February 24. Russian troops went in to support and reinforce the outnumbered and outgunned Donbass Special Forces who had been defending their land against attacks by the Kyiv government for nearly eight years.
Voices From the Frontlines of Eastern Ukraine
In the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) in October, I went to a frontline outpost 70 meters from Ukrainian forces in Avdeevka (north and west of Donetsk), according to the Donbass commanders I spoke with there.
To reach that position, I went with two other journalists to a meeting point with two commanders of Pyatnashka—volunteer fighters, including Abkhazi, Slovak, Russian, Ossetian and other nationalities, including locals from Donbass.
From there, they drove us to a point as far as they could drive before walking the rest of the way, several minutes through brush and trenches, eventually coming to their sandbagged wood and cement fortified outpost.
It has changed hands over the years, Ukrainian forces sometimes occupying it, Donbass forces now controlling it.
One soldier, a unit commander who goes by the call sign “Vydra” (Otter), was formerly a miner from the DPR who had been living in Russia with his family. In 2014, he returned to the Donbass to defend his mother and relatives still there. He spoke of the outpost.
We dug and built this with our hands. Several times over the years, the Ukrainians have taken these positions. We pushed them back, they stormed us…Well, we have been fighting each other for eight years.
There, artillery fire is the biggest danger they face. “You can hide from a sniper, but not from artillery, and they’re using large caliber.”
“Vydra,” a unit commander of the Pyatnashka fighters. [Source: Photo courtesy of Eva Bartlett]His living quarters is a dank, cramped, room with a tiny improvised bed, with another small room and bed for others at the outpost.
A sign reads: “If shelling occurs, go to the shelter.” The kind of sign you see all over Donetsk and cities of the Donbass, due to Ukraine’s incessant shelling of civilian, residential areas. In a frontline outpost where incoming artillery is the norm, the sign is slightly absurd, clearly a joke.
An Orthodox icon sits atop the sign. Ukrainian nationalists hang and spray Nazi graffiti and slogans of death; these fighters revere their faith.
A poster, with the DPR flag, reads: “We have never known defeat, and it’s clear that this has been decided from above. Donbas has never been forced to its knees, and no one will ever be allowed to.”
The only things decorating the space are tins of tuna and canned meat, instant noodles, and washing powder. Their existence is bare minimum, nothing glamorous about it; they volunteer because, as they told me, this is their land and they will protect it.
Perhaps surprising to some, when Vydra was asked whether he hates Ukrainians, he replied emphatically no, he has friends and relatives in Ukraine.
“We have no hatred for Ukraine. We hate those nationalists who came to power. But ordinary Ukrainians? Why? Many of us speak Ukrainian. We understand them, they understand us. Many of them speak Russian.
I’ve been involved in sports a lot of time, wrestling. So, I’ve got a lot of friends in Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Kirovograd, Odessa, Lvov, Ivano-Frankivsk, Transcarpathia.
I have relatives in western Ukraine, and we still communicate. Yes, they say one thing on the street, but when we talk to each other, they say, ‘Well, you have to, because the SBU is listening.’
Ukraine shouts about democracy, then puts people in handcuffs for no reason. My aunt got in trouble because they found my photo on her Skype.
And I’m on the Myrotvorets [kill list] website.” [As is the author, see this article.]
He spoke of Ukraine’s shelling from 2014, when the people of the Donbass were unarmed and not expecting to be bombed by their own country.
When the artillery hit the city of Yenakievo, east of Gorlovka, we were defenseless. We went with hunting rifles and torches to fight them. Most of the weapons we had later were captured from them. We had to go to the battlefield without weapons in order to get the weapons.
When asked if he was concerned that Ukrainian forces might take Donetsk he replied no, of course not, they didn’t succeed in 2014, they won’t now.
When asked whether he had a message for soldiers of the Ukrainian army, Vydra replied without hesitating,
Go home! We’ve been saying that since 2014: Go home. Unequivocally, we don’t want them here, but we don’t want to kill them. I’m not speaking about nationalists, I’m speaking about Ukrainian soldiers, who are drafted or forcefully employed in the Ukrainian army. Guys, go home, either surrender or go. This is our land. We’re not leaving, we’re not going anywhere.
I asked how he felt to be treated and described as sub-human, to be called dehumanizing names, a part of the Ukrainian nationalists’ brainwashing propaganda. As I wrote previously:
“Ukrainian nationalists openly declare they view Russians as sub-human. School books teach this warped ideology. Videos show the extent of this mentality: Teaching children not only to also hate Russians and see them as not humans, but also brainwashing them to believe killing Donbas residents is acceptable. The Ukrainian government itself funds neo-Nazi-run indoctrination camps for youths.”
“It’s offensive,” Vydra said, “We are saddened: There are sick people. We need to heal them, slowly.”
I asked whether he thought friendship between Ukrainians and Russians would be possible.
“It will take years for any friendship. Take Chechnya, one region of Russia, it was at war. But slowly, slowly…We must all live together. We are one people.” Indeed, now Chechen fighters are one of the most effective forces fighting alongside Donbass and Russian soldiers to liberate Donbass areas from Ukrainian forces.
He opened a zippered trousers pocket and proudly brandished a small plastic sleeve containing children’s drawings, also containing icons of saints and Christ, and prayers…
“This is very personal, it’s like my guardian angel. I put it in plastic, I don’t even keep my ID in plastic. I’ve been carrying this one in my pocket since February. I’ve been in all sorts of hot spots. A child drew this, we receive letters from children. It’s very nice to look at them when it’s hard and we are under fire.”
He read one letter:
“We are waiting for you. Thank you for risking your lives to defend Donbas. Yulia and Ira.”
“I don’t even know who are Yulia and Ira,” he said smiling.
Showing the icons, he said, “This is Saint Ushakov, our great commander. This is Jesus Christ, our Heavenly Protector. This Abkhazi icon was given to me by the guys. This is a prayer book. And here is a prayer,” he said of one page prayer.
These words are to support when times are very hard. When there is heavy shelling, it can go on for hours. So, while you’re sitting there, you can read this.
Especially for the younger guys, 22, 23 years old, just finished college. This is new to them.
Commanders Speak of Geopolitical Reasons for Ukraine’s War
Outside, sitting in front of an Orthodox banner and a collection of collected munitions—including Western ones—two platoon commanders, “Kabar” and “Kamaz,” spoke of the bigger geopolitical picture. [See video]
“America is running the show here,” Kabar said. “It builds foreign policy on the basis of how its domestic policy is built, which is through conflicts with external countries. They are accustomed to proving their power to their people through terrorism around the world, inciting fires in Syria, in the east. They played the card of radical Islam there.
And now they are playing the card of fascism. They do not see themselves on the other side of good. They need wars, blood, cruelty, and they signed Europe up for this.
However, they’ve missed one point: Russia, since the days of the Soviet Union, has never retreated in large scale wars. They took Europe and pushed it to slaughter Russia, and they put Russia in such a position that it must secure its national interests. Europe needs to understand this, to pay attention to history, to stop being led by the United States.”
“Kabar,” a commander of the Pyatnashka fighters. [Source: Photo courtesy of Eva Bartlett]When asked about his feeling regarding Ukrainians, “Kabar” replied similarly to Vydra.
We don’t blame the whole Ukrainian people. Ukrainians are our friends, they are our relatives. They’ve been struck by evil, and it’s not their fault, ordinary people are not to blame for this. We will liberate them from fascism, we’ll show them brotherhood, and we’ll make friends.
This is a good opportunity for us to defeat evil. God has honored us with this right to fight evil.
Kamaz, when asked why he is fighting, replied that this is his homeland, he was born here, and that he has a son who he doesn’t want to inherit Ukraine’s war on the Donbass.
I myself am Greek by nationality. Ukrainians are Slavs, they are our brothers, their grandfathers fought together shoulder to shoulder with our grandfathers against Nazism and fascism. We are here to finish it, so that our children live a normal happy life. We are fighting for the future.
He spoke of America’s continuous need for war.
We’ve seen it in Syria and Yugoslavia, where they destroyed everything and then set everything up their own way, so the people must submit, almost like slaves.
I asked whether he thought peace between Ukraine and Russia is possible.
Yes, possibly, why not? But at the moment, the President of Ukraine said there will be no negotiations.
Negotiations are possible, but I think not with this president. When he comes to his senses, he will not be able to negotiate, because he took a lot of money.
Before leaving the outpost, we chatted a bit with the commanders. A puppy sought the attention of a young soldier. Another puppy ran around our feet. The outpost commanders and soldiers take care of the dogs. Their presence added a somewhat surreal touch to the scene: an outpost which is routinely shelled, where life can cease to exist at any moment, and these happy, well-cared for puppies running around like dogs anywhere.
Western Media Inverted Reality, Lauding Nazis and Demonizing Defenders
While many in the West think that this conflict started in February 2022, those following events since 2014 are aware that, following the Maidan coup and Odessa massacre, and the rise of fascism in Ukraine against the Ukrainian people, the Donbass republics wanted to distance themselves from Ukraine’s Nazis and fascism.
The sacrifices which the people of the Donbass republics have endured, particularly those fighting to protect their families and loved ones, have been and continue to be immense.
Just as the heroes of the Syrian Arab Army were maligned, so too have Donbass forces have been maligned by Western media, though both are defending their homelands from terrorist forces trained and funded by the West. Terrorists given the freedom to commit endless atrocities against Donbass civilians.
These defenders, many living in dank trench conditions didn’t choose war, they responded to it, to protect their loved ones and their future. In spite of more than eight years of being warred upon by Ukraine, they retain their humanity.
• First published at CovertAction Magazine
The post Maligned in Western Media, Donbass Forces are Defending their Future from Ukrainian Shelling and Fascism first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Listen to a reading of this article:
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We’re at the most dangerous point in humanity’s abusive relationship with US unipolar domination, for the same reason the most dangerous point in a battered wife’s life is right when she’s trying to escape. The empire is willing to do terrible and risky things to retain control.
“If I can’t have you no one can” is a line that can be said to a wife or to the world.
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Nobody likes feeling like they’re part of the problem. The reality that the US is the most tyrannical, murderous and belligerent government on earth causes people discomfort for the same reason they don’t like thinking about factory farming or their own socioeconomic privilege.
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Canada: We’re euthanizing people now.
Conservatives: EVIL! SATAN!
Canada: *Poor people.
Conservatives: We’re listening…
Canada: A St. Catharines man says he will choose medically assisted death over homelessness. CityNews explores the ethics of MAiD amid concerns some feel they have no other choice.
Source: CityNews (Youtube) pic.twitter.com/GhQuOTRQA2— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2023) November 12, 2022
Euthanizing the poor is just capitalism finally being honest about itself. After all these years of falsely pretending to have real solutions to the problems it creates, it finally presents a solution entirely in alignment with its values that actually works.
Capitalism’s answer to “What about the poor?” has always been “They should work harder,” and its answer to “What about those who can’t work?” has always been “They should die quickly.” But until now it’s always been spoken wordlessly in the policies enacted and the societal structures put in place. Now it’s just right there, completely undisguised. It’s refreshingly honest.
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Landlords don’t “provide housing”, they restrict housing. The housing already exists; landlords just make it much harder for the people who need it to access it.
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Why is AP continuing to protect the anonymity of the US official who fed them a fake story about Russia attacking Poland? This is a very important question that demands serious answers. If government officials know they can get brazen lies anonymously published in the press and still have their anonymity protected after those lies are exposed, they will with 100% certainty continue to do so. Why wouldn’t they? There are no consequences.
It’s obnoxious and unacceptable that the mass media currently hold random social media users to higher levels of accountability than powerful government officials who circulate lies that can start wars.
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Western politicians, pundits and celebrities circulating the false claim that Iran sentenced 15,000 protesters to death is a good example of the way fact checking and journalistic responsibility go out the window when it’s a claim about a government the US empire wants to remove. It’s also a good illustration of the point Glenn Greenwald is always repeating that the largest and most egregious purveyors of misinformation in the western world are not Russian trolls or conspiracy theorists but the mainstream western political/media class.
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Again, the most important thing for a westerner to understand about Iran is that it’s none of your fucking business. The less western “help” Iranians are getting, the better it is for Iranians. Demands that you “support the Iranian people” are only ever made in bad faith. No material benefits come from you tweeting “yay Iranian protesters” with the relevant hashtags. All that happens is you draw more western attention to Iran, along with the support for interventionism that inevitably comes with it.
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Advocating peace and criticizing Nazis to trigger the libs.
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It is good that the idea of peace talks with Russia is gaining more mainstream support. It should have had full support from the beginning. It’s only due to propaganda that opposing endless escalations between nuclear superpowers isn’t the most mainstream normie position ever.
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Probably goes without saying but anyone who believes Trump would be meaningfully better than Biden on any issue that matters didn’t pay attention when he was president.
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I’m not a multipolarist, I’m an omnipolarist — I think everyone on earth should have an equal amount of power. I want 8 billion equal poles. Multipolarity is just the practical lesser evil to unipolarity, because it turns out unipolarity requires constant war and nuclear brinkmanship to maintain.
People say multipolarity necessarily requires wars as well, but that’s not true. There’s no reason powers like China and the US can’t get along and collaborate in everyone’s interest. The only thing stopping that is the US empire’s desire to keep chasing total unipolar planetary domination.
I’m always reluctant to commit to other people’s -ists and -isms, but I’m definitely big on omnipolarism and information anarchism.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
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We continue our coverage from the U.N. climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, with prominent Russian environmentalist Vladimir Slivyak, co-chair of the Russian environmental organization Ecodefense and winner of the 2021 Right Livelihood Award for defending the environment and mobilizing grassroots opposition to the coal and nuclear industries in Russia. Slivyak says the Russian war in Ukraine, especially the Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, should serve as a warning to immediately transition to renewable energy sources, not nuclear energy, and to stop relying on fossil fuels. “As long as the United States and European Union continue to pay Vladimir Putin for uranium or fossil fuel, that means that this money will be used for the war in Ukraine. That means more people will die in Ukraine,” he adds.
Please check back later for full transcript.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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As I report on the aftermath of Russian occupation, there is a new sense that what once seemed impossible can be achieved
- Nataliya Gumenyuk is a Ukrainian journalist and author
At Liberty Square in Kherson, residents gather, trying to find wifi near the temporary wireless internet towers and charging points. There is limited phone connection and no internet to read the news and find out what is going on outside this recently liberated region. During their withdrawal after nine months of occupation, Russian forces blew up the TV tower and the power grid, so there is no electricity to charge devices either.
Yet the mood is celebratory in the square today, as locals wave Ukrainian flags and banners marking the liberation. It has been seven days since Ukrainian troops re-entered the city, but Ukrainian soldiers, police, social services, foreign reporters and anyone who has arrived from outside the city are still greeted warmly.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Wars tend to bury facts. What comes out of them is often a furiously untidy mix of accounts that, when considered later, constitute wisps of fantasy and presumption. Rarely accepted in the heat of battle is the concept of mistake: that a weapon was wrongly discharged or errantly hit an unintended target; a deployment that went awry; or that the general was drunk when an order was given. Wars invite ludicrous tall tales and lies with sprinting legs.
In the Ukraine War, where accurate information has almost ceased to be relevant (unless you believe the sludge from any one side), the latest shock and shudder came in the form of a missile that fell on Polish territory. As a result, two farmers lost their lives in the village of Przewodów.
The farmers, as the pencilled in victims of a broader power play, almost ceased to be relevant. Discussions moved on to a potential violation of Polish territory and the prospect of NATO engagement. The missile had been “Russian-made”, which tickled those keen to push a widening of the conflict. Never mind that Ukraine has its own share of Russian and Soviet-era weapons systems.
The Ukrainian side, ever keen to bring in more military assistance against Moscow, was clear from the outset: it could not have been from their side. “Russia now promotes a conspiracy theory that it was allegedly a missile of Ukrainian air defense that fell on the Polish theory [sic],” raged the country’s Foreign Affairs Minister Dmytro Kuleba. “Which is not true. No one should buy Russian propaganda or amplify its messages. This lesson should have been long learnt since the downing of #MH17.”
The Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, was also keen to capitalise. There was little doubt, in his mind, who was responsible. It could never be a Ukrainian missile battery; never be a deflection arising from the aerial tussle of projectiles. “I have no doubt that this was not our missile,” he mentioned in televised remarks. “I believe that this was a Russian missile based on our military reports.”
Then came a slight qualification, if only one phrased in a typically non-qualified manner. “Let’s say openly, if, God forbid, some remnant (of Ukraine’s air-defences) killed a person, these people, then we need to apologise. But first there needs to be a probe, access – we want to get the data you have.”
But even Ukraine’s allies and sponsors found this a bit salty and impulsive. Yes, there was much theatre in rushed emergency meetings as the G20 summit broke into a G7 conclave, but a brake seemed to have been brought to bear. The NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg was left having to explain that the missile was unlikely to have been fired from Russian territory. The Russian denial of direct responsibility might well be disliked, but it was probably true. Mistake or not, however, the guilty party for all and sundry was clear: the Polish missile strike was “likely caused by Ukraine but not Ukraine’s fault”.
Poland’s own leaders also began to release statements suggesting that this was not, in fact, a missile released from Russian territory. Poland’s President Andrzej Duda made an unreserved observation. “From the information that we and our allies have, it was a S-300 rocket made in the Soviet Union, an old rocket and there is no evidence that it was launched by the Russian side.”
He also conceded that the missile may have fallen on Polish territory in the course of Ukraine “launching their missiles in various directions”. There was “nothing, absolutely nothing, to suggest that it was an intentional attack on Poland.”
Knowing the political sensitivity of it all, especially if it might cast a poor light on Ukraine’s heroism, he preferred to rationalise the mistake. Had Russia not attacked Ukraine and initiated the war, there would have been no reason to fire the deviant missile in the first place. The law of causality dictated its dark tune, and things followed. Moscow bore “the ultimate responsibility, because this would not have happened hadn’t Russia waged a brutal war of aggression against Ukraine.”
The US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, went even further, happy to not bother about what she dismissively called the “facts”. Such circumstances would “never have happened but for Russia’s needless invasion of Ukraine and its recent missile assaults against Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure. The UN Charter is clear. Ukraine has every right to defend itself against this barrage.”
The US National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson also added to the argument that, even if the lethal result had been from a Ukrainian launch, it was all in the course of self-defence. “[W]hatever the final conclusions may be, it is clear that the party ultimately responsible for this tragic incident is Russia, which launched a barrage of missiles on Ukraine specifically intended to target civilian infrastructure. Ukraine had – and has – every right to defend itself.”
The only question now remains how the next misfiring goes. On this occasion, the reins were pulled just before the precipice. Facts or no fact, NATO did not want to be engaged – at least for now. Poland, despite its past bravura to get a hack at the Russian bear, kept a sense of troubled composure. Ukrainian officials, however, wished to push the matter further, egging on a NATO trigger for deeper, military commitment. The grounds for a further expansion of the war are evident; the powder keg is ready.
The post The Polish Missile Narrative first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Germany latest to end peacekeeping mission as operations prove unable to stop Islamic extremist insurgency
Thousands of international troops are withdrawing from Mali amid surging violence, growing Russian influence and an acute humanitarian crisis.
On Wednesday Germany became the latest country to end its participation in the UN peacekeeping mission in the unstable west African country. Earlier this week, British officials said that 300 British soldiers sent in 2020 to join the United Nations force would be returning earlier than planned.
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Arms firms could be in for a windfall in the wake of an underwater attack on a Russian pipeline. The defence media has reported that the Ministry of Defence (MOD) is preparing to pursue new underwater surveillance technology. The move follows mysterious leaks in the Baltic sea’s Nord Stream gas pipeline in September 2022, which some have claimed were a result of an attack.
The Nord Stream incident has seen a Royal Navy ship guarding critical underwater infrastructure in the North Sea amid fears of further sabotage.
Windfall
Defense News, a military media outlet, has now reported that the tenders for new security equipment are being prepared. They reported on 16 November:
Britain plans to boost its undersea capabilities in the face of growing threats from Russia, with the Ministry of Defence preparing to release tender documents in the next few weeks aimed at purchasing a deep-water remotely operated vehicle.
And the estimated costs run into the millions:
The Defence Equipment and Support arm of the MoD is currently in the process acquiring the remotely operating vehicle in a program likely to cost the British £20 million, or $24 million.
The main effort seems to be the purchase of an underwater drone – a spokesperson for the MOD confirmed to Defense News that the search is underway.
Underwater warfare
Drones have come to prominence as airborne weapons. Some, such as the iconic Predator drone, have become synonymous with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. War crimes and clandestine military practices have also been a major feature of the rise of drone warfare.
Underwater drones are an emerging field. In 2020, the US and the arms firm Boeing developed an unmanned submersible with astonishing capabilities:
The 15.5-meter long Echo Voyager has a range of nearly 7,500 miles. It has also deployed at sea up to three months in a test, and theoretically could last as long as six months.
Supposedly, Voyager also can dive as deep as 3,350 meters—while few military submarines are (officially) certified for dives below 500 meters.
The British have also been developing underwater drones. The Royal Navy and Royal Marines carried out tests in July 2021.
A new battlefield
Drones have long been connected with air warfare. However, the sea is also becoming a battlefield for unmanned systems – and arms makers are poised to cash in on this growing field.
As new regions of the earth become terrain in a global battlefield, more resources will be poured into initiatives which do nothing to solve the real security issues faced by humanity: capitalist crisis, authoritarianism, and climate change.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Petty Officer 3rd Class Michael Scichilone, cropped to 770 x 403.
By Joe Glenton
This post was originally published on Canary.
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Listen to a reading of this article:
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A surprisingly frank article by The New York Times titled “Western Allies Look to Ukraine as a Testing Ground for Weapons” describes how the imperial war machine is capitalising on the US proxy war to test its weapons for future use.
“Ukraine has become a testing ground for state-of-the-art weapons and information systems, and new ways to use them, that Western political officials and military commanders predict could shape warfare for generations to come,” write’s NYT’s Lara Jakes.
Jakes writes that “new advances in technology and training in Ukraine are being closely monitored for the ways they are changing the face of the fight.” These new technological advancements include an information system known as Delta, as well as “remote-controlled boats, anti-drone weapons known as SkyWipers and an updated version of an air-defense system built in Germany that the German military itself has yet to use.”
A former Lithuanian president is quoted as saying, “We’re learning in Ukraine how to fight, and we’re learning how to use our NATO equipment,” adding, “It is shameful for me because Ukrainians are paying with their lives for these exercises for us.”
Yeah, no shit.
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US government mouthpiece the New York Times admits that NATO imperialists are using Ukraine as a laboratory to test new weapons and technology.
The military-industrial complex makes more and more money while Ukrainians and Russians die https://t.co/m87gyvyl6g
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 16, 2022
At some point The New York Times article was re-titled from “Western Allies Look to Ukraine as a Testing Ground for Weapons” to the slightly less obvious “For Western Weapons, the Ukraine War Is a Beta Test.”
News that the west is using Ukraine to test weapons systems for future wars aligns with recent comments by the commander of the US nuclear arsenal that the proxy war is a test run for a much bigger conflict that’s on its way.
“This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup,” said US STRATCOM head Charles Richard at a naval conference earlier this month. “The big one is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested [in] a long time.”
So in addition to being used to advance longstanding US geostrategic objectives, apparently this war is also being used to sharpen the imperial war machine’s claws for a looming hot war with China and/or Russia. The US would certainly have an advantage in military test runs over the years in such a conflict.
As an aside, it’s probably worth noting that all the testing of new western weapons technology would likely explain reports from Ukrainian astronomers that the skies over Kyiv have been “swarming with unidentified flying objects (UFOs).” The aforementioned New York Times article quotes Ukrainian vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov as saying that the weapons testing he’s seen has convinced him that “the wars of the future will be about maximum drones and minimal humans.”
It's reasonable to suspect that some UAP described in the new report may be linked to foreign surveillance or military technologies. 🛸 https://t.co/3OtGBx7nJu
— Live Science (@LiveScience) September 18, 2022
One of the many reasons the US and its complex network of allies, partners and assets are always fighting so many wars is because new weapons technology needs to be tested in battle before it can be deemed effective. What this means in practice is using human bodies as test subjects, the way a scientist uses laboratory rats or guinea pigs.
The US-centralized empire pretends to care about Ukrainian lives, but in reality it only cares about them to the extent that a researcher cares about his lab rats. And for exactly the same reason.
What could be more sinister than that? Well, the agendas that they are running those tests in preparation for, I suppose.
________________
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 via Curious Expeditions (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0), alterations made
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Listen to a reading of this article:
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Two false news reports have gone viral in recent hours due to sloppy sourcing and journalistic malpractice. As usual they both featured bogus claims about US-targeted nations, in this case Russia and Iran.
An article in Responsible Statecraft titled “How a lightly-sourced AP story almost set off World War III” details how the propaganda multiplier news agency published a one-source, one-sentence report claiming that Russia had launched a deadly missile strike at NATO member Poland, despite evidence having already come to light by that point that the missile had probably come from Ukraine. This set off calls for the implementation of a NATO Article 5 response, meaning hot warfare between NATO and Russia in retaliation for a Russian attack on one of the alliance members.
Mainstream news reports circulated the narrative that Poland had been struck by a “Russian-made” missile, which is at best a highly misleading framing of the fact that the inadvertent strike came from a Soviet-era surface-to-air missile system still used by Ukraine, a former Soviet state. Headlines from the largest and most influential US news outlets like The New York Times, CNN and NBC all repeated the misleading “Russian-made” framing, as did AP’s own correction to its false report that Poland was struck by Russia.
A lot of people spent yesterday calling for war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. I dug into how one poorly sourced story made that happen in my latest for @RStatecraft https://t.co/yH5nRwuVnS
— Connor Echols (@connor_echols) November 16, 2022
All current evidence indicates that Poland was accidentally hit by one of those missiles while Ukraine was defending itself from Russian missile strikes. President Biden has said it’s “unlikely” that the missile which killed two Poles came from Russia, while Polish president Andrzej Duda and NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg both said it looks like it was an accidental strike from Ukrainian air defenses. Russia says its own missile strikes have been no closer than 35 km from the Polish border.
The only party still adamantly insisting that the strike did come from Russia is Ukraine, leading an exasperated diplomat from a NATO country to anonymously tell Financial Times: “This is getting ridiculous. The Ukrainians are destroying [our] confidence in them. Nobody is blaming Ukraine and they are openly lying. This is more destructive than the missile.”
It is very sleazy for AP to continue to protect the anonymity of the US official who fed them a lie of such immense significance and potential consequence. They should tell the world who it was who initiated that lie so we can demand explanations and accountability.
Another false story that went extremely viral was one that Newsweek has been forced to extensively revise and correct that was initially titled “Iran Votes to Execute Protesters, Says Rebels Need ‘Hard Lesson’,” but is now titled “Iran Parliament Chants ‘Death to Seditionists’ in Protest Punishment Call.” The latest correction notice now reads, “This article and headline were updated to remove the reference to the Iranian Parliament voting for death sentences. A majority of the parliament supported a letter to the judiciary calling for harsh punishments of protesters, which could include the death penalty.”
Moon of Alabama explains how the Newsweek piece was the springboard that launched the viral false claim that the Iranian government had just sentenced 15,000 protesters to death, which was circulated by countless politicians, pundits and celebrities throughout social media. This claim has been debunked by mainstream outlets like NBC News, who explains that “There has been no evidence that 15,000 protesters have been sentenced to death. Two protesters had been sentenced to death as of Tuesday, although they can appeal, according to state news agencies.”
This claim was mindlessly shared by more mainstream commentators, political leaders (including @JustinTrudeau and @tedlieu), "journalists" and activists than one could count. It went mega-viral.
Just basic skepticism would've revealed it had no credible sourcing from the start: https://t.co/Es1ODHQhWh
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 15, 2022
An article by The Cradle titled “Fact check – Iran has not sentenced ‘15,000’ protesters to death” explains that the Iranian parliament actually just signed a letter urging the Iranian judiciary to issue harsher sentences upon protesters who’ve been demonstrating against Tehran. Those sentences can include the death penalty as noted above, but up to this point have more often entailed prison sentences of five to ten years.
The Cradle also notes that even the “15,000” figure is suspect, as its sole source is an American organization funded by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy:
Further muddying the waters, the figure of 15,000 protesters detained by Iranian authorities originates from the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA).
US-based HRANA is the media arm of the Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRAI), a group that receives funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) – a CIA soft power front that has for decades funded regime-change efforts across the globe.
Indeed, it’s public knowledge that NED is funded directly by the US government, and that according to its own cofounder was set up to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly. It’s possible that the 15,000 figure could be more or less accurate, and it’s possible that a great many more Iranian protesters will be sentenced to death for their actions, but reporting such possibilities as a currently established fact is plainly journalistic malpractice.
How it started How it's going pic.twitter.com/mT3FSd2I7O
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) June 1, 2022
In April of this year Newsweek published an article titled “Russians Raped 11-Year-Old Boy, Forced Mom to Watch: Ukraine Official.” In May of this year Newsweek published an article titled “Ukraine Official Fired Over Handling of Russian Sexual Assault Claims.” It was the same official. Newsweek made no mention of the fact that its source for its sexual assault story had just been fired for disseminating unevidenced claims about sexual assault. To this day its April report contains no updates or corrections.
Contrast this complete dereliction of journalistic responsibility with Newsweek’s extreme caution when one of its reporters tried to report on the OPCW scandal which disrupted the US government narrative about an alleged chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government. Reporter Tareq Haddad was forbidden by his superiors to write about the many leaks coming out exposing malfeasance in the Douma investigation by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, on the basis that NED-funded Bellingcat had disputed the leaks and that other respectable outlets had not reported on them.
I wrote about the North Korea Law of Journalism, which states that media editorial standards about a country are directly proportional to how well the US govt thinks of them. https://t.co/xcPD3OqOzt pic.twitter.com/aYcW2B0f4u
— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) June 11, 2019
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has published numerous articles documenting what Adam Johnson calls the North Korea Law of Journalism, which holds that “editorial standards are inversely proportional to a country’s enemy status.” In other words, the more disfavorably a foreign government is viewed by the US empire, the lower the editorial standards for reporting claims about them. Because Russia and Iran are both viewed as enemies of Washington, western news media often feel comfortable just publishing any old claim about them as fact regardless of sourcing or evidence.
We saw this highlighted during the insanity of Russiagate, where mainstream news outlet after mainstream news outlet was caught publishing unevidenced conspiratorial hogwash that it was often (though not even always) forced to retract. This was possible because when it comes to implicating Russia the evidentiary standards for reporting on something are much lower than they would be for implicating a government that is held in favor by the US.
And this is the case because the western mainstream media are the propaganda services of the US-centralized empire. They do not exist to tell people the truth, they exist to manipulate the public into hating the official enemies of the empire and into consenting to foreign policy agendas that they would not otherwise consent to.
Imperial propagandists lower their editorial standards when reporting on official enemies not because they are bad at their job, but because they are very good at their job. It’s just that their job isn’t what we’ve been told.
________________
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.
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After frantic speculation that Russia fired a missile into Poland, it now seems that the missile actually came from Ukraine. Reports on Wednesday 16 November seemed to confirm this. But, that didn’t stop Western warmongers sabre-rattling, anyway.
Not a Russian missile
As Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported, Poland’s President Andrzej Duda said on Wednesday 16 November that it was “very likely” that the deadly missile that struck Przewodow, a Polish border village, was from Ukraine’s air defence. Duda said of the strike, which killed two civilians:
Absolutely nothing indicates that this was an intentional attack on Poland… It’s very likely that it was a rocket used in anti-missile defence, meaning that it was used by Ukraine’s defence forces.
Russia accused Ukraine of the deadly blast, with Belgium saying it was probably caused by Kyiv’s air defences firing at Moscow’s incoming missiles. The strike immediately sparked concerns that NATO might be drawn directly into Russia’s war against Western-backed Ukraine. However, the situation calmed as officials urged against quick judgement – with a Kremlin spokesperson even praising US president Joe Biden’s response.
Prior to all this, Western hawks were pushing for war:
.@general_ben .@glennkirschner2 .@MalcolmNance .@CheriJacobus .@BadBradRSR .@JudyPete Breaking: it is being reported that Russian missiles have landed in Poland, a NATO country, and killed two people. In theory that should trigger an Article 5 response. Putin must be stopped. pic.twitter.com/vwAC3MHFNL
— ChattJazz
(@ChattJazz) November 15, 2022NEW: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calls apparent Russian missile strike into Poland an "attack on collective security."
"This is a very significant escalation," the Ukrainian leader said. "We must act."
— Jack Detsch (@JackDetsch) November 15, 2022
By 16 November, barely a day later, these people were looking reactionary at best. As the Communist Party of Great Britain tweeted:
WARMONGERS EXPOSED – yesterday there were widespread calls to invoke article 5 of the NATO treaty on the grounds that missiles had landed in Poland. Well from the horse's mouth, we now know they were fired – not from Russia but from Ukraine.
— Communist Party ☭ (@CPBritain) November 16, 2022
However, for people on the ground in Przewodow, the reality was a world away from geopolitical game playing.
“Terrified”
Village resident Joanna Magus is a teacher. She told AFP:
I’m scared. I didn’t sleep all night… I hope it was a stray missile because otherwise we’re helpless…
I heard a huge explosion, a terrible explosion, so I went up to the window and saw a huge cloud of dark smoke… I saw people running… I thought maybe something had happened at the grain dryer, that one of the devices broke and exploded.
She said her husband was outside at the time, near the scene of the blast. So, she called him and found out he “pretty much saw what happened”:
He was terrified, said something exploded and that two people were feared dead. It was total panic from there.
Meanwhile, war still rages in Ukraine – while leaders who are “all as bad as each other” play war games, with others cheering from the side lines.
Featured image via Sky News – YouTube
Additional reporting via Agence France-Presse
By Steve Topple
This post was originally published on Canary.
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U.S. President Joe Biden apparently sought to lower tensions with China this week when he promised Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping that Washington was “not seeking a new Cold War” with Beijing.
The two leaders met on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Indonesia. It was their first face-to-face meeting since Biden took office in January 2021. While Biden was all smiles for a handshake photo-op, Xi looked noticeably reserved, like a guy who was bracing himself as one about to hear loads of bullshit.
After more than three hours of private discussions, the Americans and Western media subsequently tried to spin that both sides had agreed on condemning Russia’s alleged threat to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. This was the Americans taking license. Xi did not specify Russia, according to the White House readout of the meeting. Both leaders condemned nuclear war and said it should never be fought, a rebuke which applies as much to the United States as anyone else. The Western media, however, tried to spin it as joint condemnation of Russia.
The Chinese side had quite a different take on what was conveyed in the meeting. No wonder that Xi had looked reserved when he greeted Biden earlier.
President Xi was quoted as telling Biden: “A statesman should think about and know where to lead his country. He should also think about and know how to get along with other countries and the wider world… Instead of talking in one way and acting in another, the United States needs to honor its commitments with concrete action.”
This was pretty close to the Chinese president calling out his American counterpart as a bare-faced liar who can’t be trusted in what he says.
After all, Biden has continued the policy of massively arming China’s island province of Taiwan. That is a direct assault on Beijing’s sovereignty and China’s territorial integrity as well as posing a threat to its national security across the 150-km Taiwan Strait.
This American president has said publicly on four occasions that the U.S. would defend Taiwan militarily if the Chinese mainland were to exercise its legal right to use force for bringing the island under full administrative control from Beijing. Those declarations by Biden violate the legally binding One China principle recognized by international law as well as under domestic U.S. laws. At the G20 summit this week, Biden said there was no change in American policy on Taiwan, despite his previous flagrant statements to the contrary.
The Biden administration is planning to station nuclear-capable B-52 bombers in Australia aimed at provoking China as well as supplying Canberra with nuclear submarines as part of a new military coalition in the Asia-Pacific involving the United Kingdom, known as AUKUS.
Washington has also stepped up economic warfare against China with bans on the export of hi-tech semiconductors vital for Chinese industry.
The resumption of U.S. war drills off the Korean Peninsula in recent weeks after a three-year hiatus has sharply escalated tensions with between North and South Korea which poses a destabilizing national security risk for neighboring China.
So, Biden’s talk of “not seeking a new Cold War” with China is contemptible in the face of empirical events and U.S. conduct.
Which brings us to the question: what was Biden trying to achieve in soft-talking to Xi?
It seems the U.S. president was really seeking to split China from Russia.
Biden talked about no Cold War with China. But what about Russia? Seems the United States is full-on about aggravating Moscow. Can a presumed superpower be credibly in a Cold War with one adversary but not with another? That dichotomy doesn’t sound believable. So, what’s going on?
It is significant that Putin did not attend the G20 summit this week. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was deputized to act as Russia’s dignitary for the event. Why Putin did not go to the summit was not clear.
Also significant was a top-level meeting held in Turkey at the same time between the U.S. and Russia’s spy chiefs.
William Burns, the CIA director, met with the head of Russia’s foreign intelligence Sergei Naryshkin in Ankara. The meeting was widely reported in the Western media which is unusual for such back-channel encounters. The impression is that the Biden administration wanted this meeting to be widely reported for the optics and headlines. Western headlines dutifully reported that Burns purportedly “warned Russia against using nuclear weapons in Ukraine”.
The White House’s national security council emphasized that Burns was not engaged in talks to end the conflict in Ukraine.
The heavily reported narrative of “warning Russia against nukes” reinforces the contrived notion that Russia is a pariah state that is threatening to use nuclear weapons, whereas it is Moscow that has repeatedly warned that the war being fueled in Ukraine by the United States and its NATO partners could spiral uncontrollably into a catastrophic confrontation.
Russia has not threatened to use nuclear weapons, has not even mentioned the word, and it has warned of the reckless dangers that the U.S. and NATO are stoking. If anything, it is the United States and its partners who are implicitly threatening the risk of nuclear war. President Vladimir Putin’s warned in September that if Russia’s existential security is threatened by NATO then Moscow reserves “the right to use all means of defense”. That reasonable warning has been cynically distorted to appear like a menacing threat to use nukes by Russia.
It seems that the Burns trip was aimed at further demonizing Russia as a nuclear threat to world security. Meanwhile, Biden was trying to ingratiate himself with Xi as a way to undermine the strong friendship that has developed between Beijing and Moscow, especially under Xi and Putin’s leadership.
Biden’s bid to appease Xi by saying that there is no Cold War intended is a blatant lie that China no doubt can see through as plain as a glass of urine. Biden and Burns’ clunky double act is likely to not impress anyone in Beijing and Moscow.
• First published in Strategic Culture Foundation
The post Biden and Burns in Double Act to Split Putin and Xi first appeared on Dissident Voice.
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GEOFOR: How do you see the outcome of the elections: is this a victory for the Republicans or a failure for the Democrats?
Peter Koenig: So far, to the surprise of most people, there are no clear results yet of the US Midterm Elections. The Republicans have won the House of representatives, where they already had a majority before, but the Senate is not decided yet. In three States, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, the ballots are still being counted, or they will head for a run-off on 6 December 2022.
The results are too close to call a winner. There will be run-off elections on 6 December 2022. It is still possible that the Republicans may win a razor-thin majority in the Senate. That would mean, taking over both Chambers and putting Joe Biden in a “lame duck” position.
For the past two years the Senate was evenly divided 50:50, with a “majority” for the Dems, because the Vice-President (Democrat) may cast the deciding vote.
What can clearly be said, there was no “Wave of Red” – Red standing for Republicans, as was expected and was unfailingly indicated by all the predictive polls.
In that sense – just looking at the surface – the elections were a victory for the Dems.
But there is more to it. This “victory” is more than surprising. Many serious analysts and particularly Republican politicians, as well as independent media and journalists are talking about voter fraud.
Former President Trump was the first to express his doubts about fair elections. Frankly, judging by the election preceding polls, they may have a point. Problems with voting equipment have been reported from Arizona and Michigan. Voter intimidation was also reported from several States, including Georgia and Michigan.
More may surface as time goes by. It is highly unusual that predictive polls are so far from the actual vote.
Voter fraud was also an issue in the 2020 Presidential Elections. It is said that President Trump and his lawyers have proof that Trump won by at least 2 million votes. Some put the figures much higher.
Interestingly, none of the State Courts where Trump’s lawyers attempted to present his case – nor the US Supreme Court — accepted even to look at his documentation. This is more than strange, suspicious.
Also, the very unusual refusal by a State or even Supreme Court not even looking at a former President’s case, has never been heard of before.
GEOFOR: What role was played by the administration and personally by President Joe Biden in the defeat of the Democrats?
PK: That will be an interesting question to answer, when the final results will be in, three weeks from now.
What can already be said – Biden is a “non-President”. Unfortunately, he is not apt for this position. He is often confused, doesn’t know what he is talking about – and even at this point, with two years into his Presidency, he is hinting at running again in 2024.
Mind you, this had all been planned. The Globalists, those who believe, or dream, they will eventually run the world under a One World Order (OWO), those even behind and above the Washington Government, needed a hapless Joe Biden, who will do the bidding of those who call the shots.
Therefore, it would be a miracle, if the run-off elections would favor the Republicans, hence giving both Senate and House of Representatives to the Republicans.
And that even with a majority of Democrats, of the American public – and European, for that matter – because the vast majority of the people do not agree with an OWO, they do not approve of the tyrannical dictatorship behind Globalism.
This applies to the entire world.
Allow me to talk from my experience as a World Bank economist, having worked in many countries around the globe, mostly the Global South, Globalization has done a lot of harm to them, to the majority of people, has indebted them, made them vulnerable for ever-more and ever unfairer deals of exploitation. Globalisation has impoverished people – everywhere – and is hellbent to continue doing so.
Therefore, the Democrats in the US and the socialists or left-leaning parties around the globe, have all been sold to globalism. As Klaus Schwab, eternal CEO of the WEF proudly says, “with our Young Global Leaders (YGL) Program we were able to infiltrate every Government of the world”.
Unfortunately, he is right. Take Justin Trudeau, one of Schwab’s darlings, a YGL graduate, was elected under a social-democrat ticket. Look at him today. He is the worst neoliberal tyrant Canada has ever known.
The same all over Europe. Literally every “leader” of EU member countries, is a YGL graduate. And they, the WEF scholars, will do whatever it takes to avoid a nationalist – usually right-wing, or center-right, in any case not a Globalist, to take over.
Most of the Social-Democrats in Europe, or the Democrats in the US, have no clue that their party has been hijacked by the Globalists. In essence, there is no longer a “left” or “right”– there are only Globalists and non-Globalists.
GEOFOR: The new congressional configuration is unlikely to allow the President to be impeached, which some influential Republicans are talking about. But can the situation of the “lame duck” lead to the voluntary resignation of the incumbent President in order not to create problems for the party in future elections?
PK: Never. President Biden will never be impeached. Even if a majority in Congress would vote for it. Biden is a needed puppet for those who call the shots, who have designed the Great Reset, and the UN Agenda 2030 – and all the dictatorial calamities that go with it.
Without naming names, it is fair to say that Big, HUGE Capital is behind this absolute and total control of the population, of capital – as well as the entire production apparatus, meaning food, climate, or as the going narrative says, “man-made climate change”, by excessive CO2 emissions.
Never mind that these are all lies, thick lies, surprisingly that by now a majority of the world populace has not caught up to it, or if they did, they look on and let it happen. COP after COP after COP (COP = Conference of the Parties), the same dialogues, the same promises, the same indecisions, the same non-adherence to their promises.
It takes another puppet, UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres – who sometimes doesn’t know what meeting he is addressing – to spell out the same sloganizing narratives about stopping the world from getting warmer than 1.5 degrees C.
Isn’t it extremely arrogant of humans, believing they can influence the temperatures of Mother Earth?
We are now at COP27 at Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, ongoing, where delegates will talk and celebrate and live in luxury and glamour for two weeks, with execs arriving in private jets – similar to those who talk the same lingo arriving in Davos every January for Klaus Schwab’s despicable “world commanding” event, the World Economic Forum.
To answer the “lame duck” question – that’s precisely what they want. A leader who doesn’t lead, who doesn’t think much, who is happy with people who think for him, while he bathes in the presidential glory.
Since the Globalists are determined to never give up and to prevail over the world order, they are not worried about creating problems for the party in future elections.
GEOFOR: In an interview with the National Interest magazine Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, made it clear that if the Republicans win, they will reconsider the issue of supporting Kiev. In our opinion, the intention is good.
However, will the majority of Congress be able to really influence the process of pumping the Ukraine with weapons? After all, the growing workload of the American military-industrial complex is an increase in the number of jobs…
PK: Of course, Republicans would reconsider supporting Kiev. Most would stop the “blank checks” giveaways-for-naught immediately.
They recognized the corrupt scam from day one. They might consider initiating job-creation programs in the US, where poverty is rampant and on the rise.
So far, between the US and Europe, close to US$ 100 billion have been flowing into Kiev, in weaponry and “budget support” operation (a euphemism for corruption); much of it disappeared into thin air, while Washington and Brussels are just onlooking, or – rather – are closing their eyes.
In Europe like in the US the majority of people want sovereign countries, with their sovereign governments, culture, education systems, their sovereign autonomous values, their countries – a country that does not have to bend to the orders of some self-imposed supremacy.
This war was made by Washington and NATO and bought and corrupted European leaders – again – made by the WEF’s academy for YGLs. It was provocation after provocation since 1991, since the collapse by the Soviet Union (to be frank, also bought and corrupted by the west), including the US funded some 20-30 deadly bio-labs in Ukraine.
President Putin warned them many times, and when they didn’t stop at the Red Line, Putin had to intervene. Avoiding a war would have been easy – by sheer adherence to the German and French sponsored Minsk I and II, especially Minsk II of spring 2015.
But Kiev knew from the get-go that they would never have to adhere to the Minsk Accords, that Brussels would turn a blind eye and eventually both Brussels and Washington would support them fighting Russia.
US Republicans and the majority of the western people – and you may say, the majority of the Global South — are non-Globalists. They do not want a war anywhere. Not in Ukraine, not in Syria, not in Yemen, not in Somalia – no war. Period.
So, yes, for the Washington-NATO war machine and their European vassals, the war in Ukraine is a lucrative win-win situation. Highly profitable weapon-manufacturing, job creation – and even more important, bashing President Putin and weakening Russia.
Russia is by far the largest and richest country in the world. Controlling Russia, would help the unipolar OWO controlling the world.
The west needs wars, especially the US, not only because the US GDP depends close to 60% on the conflict cum war machine and associated industries and services, but also because being war-master inflicts fear and obedience.
Isn’t it telling, under President Trump, the US didn’t start any new war. By contrast, Obama inherited two, and added four more on his own during his two 4-year terms.
Let’s hope for a miracle – that the Republicans win both Houses of the US Congress on 6 December 2022.
If they don’t, and voter fraud becomes apparent, the US might risk a civil war.
See this, just one reference to potential voter fraud.
• This interview was first published by GEOFOR (Geopolitical Forecast, Russia), in Russian here; in English here, 14 November 2022.
The post GEOFOR Interview with Peter Koenig first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Washington’s vaunted “rules-based international order” has undergone a stress test following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and here’s the news so far: it hasn’t held up well. In fact, the disparate reactions to Vladimir Putin’s war have only highlighted stark global divisions, which reflect the unequal distribution of wealth and power. Such divisions have made it even harder for a multitude of sovereign states to find the minimal common ground needed to tackle the biggest global problems, especially climate change.
In fact, it’s now reasonable to ask whether an international community connected by a consensus of norms and rules, and capable of acting in concert against the direst threats to humankind, exists. Sadly, if the responses to the war in Ukraine are the standard by which we’re judging, things don’t look good.
The Myth of Universality
After Russia invaded, the United States and its allies rushed to punish it with a barrage of economic sanctions. They also sought to mobilize a global outcry by charging Putin with trashing what President Biden’s top foreign policy officials like to call the rules-based international order. Their effort has, at best, had minimal success.
Yes, there was that lopsided vote against Russia in the United Nations General Assembly, the March 2nd resolution on the invasion sponsored by 90 countries. One hundred and forty-one nations voted for it and only five against, while 35 abstained. Beyond that, in the “global south” at least, the response to Moscow’s assault has been tepid at best. None of the key countries there — Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa, to mention four — even issued official statements castigating Russia. Some, including India and South Africa, along with 16 other African countries (and don’t forget China though it may not count as part of the global south), simply abstained from that U.N. resolution. And while Brazil, like Indonesia, voted yes, it also condemned “indiscriminate sanctions” against Russia.
None of those countries joined the United States and most of the rest of NATO in imposing sanctions on Russia, not even Turkey, a member of that alliance. In fact, Turkey, which last year imported 60 billion cubic meters of natural gas from Russia, has only further increased energy cooperation with Moscow, including raising its purchases of Russian oil to 200,000 barrels per day — more than twice what it bought in 2021. India, too, ramped up oil purchases from Russia, taking advantage of discounted prices from a Moscow squeezed by U.S. and NATO sanctions. Keep in mind that, before the war, Russia had accounted for just 1% of Indian oil imports. By early October, that number had reached 21%. Worse yet, India’s purchases of Russian coal — which emits far more carbon dioxide into the air than oil and natural gas — may increase to 40 million tons by 2035, five times the current amount.
Despite the risk of facing potential U.S. sanctions thanks to the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), India also stuck by its earlier decision to buy Russia’s most advanced air-defense system, the S-400. The Biden administration eventually threaded that needle by arranging a waiver for India, in part because it’s seen as a major future partner against China with which Washington has become increasingly preoccupied (as witnessed by the new National Security Strategy). The prime concern of the Indian leadership, however, has been to preserve its close ties with Russia, war or no war, given its fear of a growing alignment between that country and China, which India sees as its main adversary.
What’s more, since the invasion, China’s average monthly trade with Russia has surged by nearly two-thirds, Turkey’s has nearly doubled, and India’s has risen more than threefold, while Russian exports to Brazil have nearly doubled as well. This failure of much of the world to heed Washington’s clarion call to stand up for universal norms stems partly from pique at what’s seen as the West’s presumptuousness. On March 1st, when 20 countries, a number from the European Union, wrote Pakistan’s then-prime minister Imran Khan (who visited Putin soon after the war began), imploring him to support an upcoming General Assembly resolution censuring Russia, he all too typically replied: “What do you think of us? Are we your slaves… [Do you take for granted] that whatever you say we will do?” Had such a letter, he asked, been sent to India?
Similarly, Celso Amorim, who served as Brazil’s foreign minister for seven years during the presidency of Luis Inacio “Lula” de Silva (who will soon reclaim his former job), declared that condemning Russia would amount to obeying Washington’s diktat. For his part, Lula claimed Joe Biden and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky were partly to blame for the war. They hadn’t worked hard enough to avert it, he opined, by negotiating with Putin. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa blamed Putin’s actions on the way NATO had, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, provocatively expanded toward Russia’s border.
Many other countries simply preferred not to get sucked into a confrontation between Russia and the West. As they saw it, their chances of changing Putin’s mind were nil, given their lack of leverage, so why incur his displeasure? (After all, what was the West offering that might make choosing sides more palatable?) Besides, given their immediate daily struggles with energy prices, debt, food security, poverty, and climate change, a war in Europe seemed a distant affair, a distinctly secondary concern. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro typically suggested that he wasn’t about to join the sanctions regime because his country’s agriculture depended on imported Russian fertilizer.
Leaders in the global south were also struck by the contrast between the West’s urgency over Ukraine and its lack of similar fervor when it came to problems in their part of the world. There was, for instance, much commentary about the generosity and speed with which countries like Poland and Hungary (as well as the United States) embraced Ukrainian refugees, having largely shut the door on refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. In June, while not mentioning that particular example, India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, highlighted such sentiments when, in response to a question about the European Union’s efforts to push his country to get tougher on Russia, he remarked that Europe “has to grow out of the mindset that [its] problems are the world’s problem, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problem.” Given how “singularly silent” European countries had been “on many things which were happening, for example in Asia,” he added, “you could ask why anybody in Asia would trust Europe on anything at all?”
The West’s less-than-urgent response to two other problems aggravated by the Ukraine crisis that hit the world’s poor countries especially hard bore out Jaishankar’s point of view. The first was soaring food prices sure to worsen malnutrition, if not famine, in the global south. Already in May, the World Food Program warned that 47 million additional people (more than Ukraine’s total population) were going to face “acute food insecurity” thanks to a potential reduction in food exports from both Russia and Ukraine — and that was on top of the 193 million people in 53 countries who had already been in that predicament (or worse) in 2021.
A July deal brokered between Ukraine and Russia by the U.N. and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did, in fact, ensure the resumption of food exports from both countries (though Russia briefly withdrew from it as October ended). Still, only a fifth of the added supply went to low-income and poor countries. While global food prices have fallen for six months straight now, another crisis cannot be ruled out as long as the war in Ukraine drags on.
The second problem was an increase in the cost of both borrowing money and of debt repayments following interest rate hikes by Western central banks seeking to tamp down inflation stoked by a war-induced spike in fuel prices. On average, interest rates in the poorest countries jumped by 5.7% — about twice as much as in the U.S. — increasing the cost of their further borrowing by 10% to 46%.
A more fundamental reason much of the global south wasn’t in a hurry to pillory Russia is that the West has repeatedly defenestrated the very values it declares to be universal. In 1999, for instance, NATO intervened in Kosovo, following Serbia’s repression of the Kosovars, even though it was not authorized to do so, as required, by a U.N. Security Council resolution (which China and Russia would have vetoed). The Security Council did approve the U.S. and European intervention in Libya in 2011 to protect civilians from the security forces of that country’s autocrat, Muammar Gadhafi. That campaign, however, quickly turned into one aimed at toppling his government by assisting the armed opposition and so would be widely criticized in the global south for creating ongoing chaos in that country. After 9/11, the United States offered classically contorted legal explanations for the way the Central Intelligence Agency violated the Convention Against Torture and the four 1949 Geneva Conventions in the name of wiping out terrorism.
Universal human rights, of course, occupy a prominent place in Washington’s narratives about that rules-based world order it so regularly promotes but in practice frequently ignores, notably in this century in the Middle East. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was aimed at regime change against a country that posed no direct threat to Russia and therefore was indeed a violation of the U.N. Charter; but so, too, was the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, something few in the global south have forgotten.
The War and Climate Change
Worse yet, the divisions Vladimir Putin’s invasion has highlighted have only made it more difficult to take the necessary bold steps to combat the greatest danger all of us face on this planet: climate change. Even before the war, there was no consensus on who bore the most responsibility for the problem, who should make the biggest cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, or who should provide funds to countries that simply can’t afford the costs involved in shifting to green energy. Perhaps the only thing on which everyone agrees in this moment of global stress is that not enough has been done to meet the 2015 Paris climate accord target of ideally limiting the increase in global warming to 1.5 degrees Centigrade. That’s a valid conclusion. According to a U.N. report published this month, the planet’s warming will reach 2.4 degrees Centigrade by 2100. This is where things stood as the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference kicked off this month in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
As a start, the $100 billion per year that richer countries pledged to poor ones in 2009 to help move them away from hydrocarbon-based energy hasn’t been met in any year so far and recent disbursements, minimal as they have been, were largely in the form of loans, not grants. The resources the West will now have to spend just to cover Ukraine’s non-military needs for 2023 — $55 billion in budgetary assistance and infrastructure repairs alone, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky — plus soaring inflation and slower growth in Western economies thanks to the war make it doubtful that green commitments to poor countries will be fulfilled in the years to come. (Never mind the pledge, in advance of the November 2021 COP26 United Nations Climate Change Conference, that the $100 billion goal would be met in 2023.)
In the end, the surge in energy costs created by the war, in part because Russia’s natural gas supplies to Europe have been slashed, could prove the shot in the arm needed for some of the biggest emitters of carbon dioxide and methane to move more quickly toward wind and solar power. That seems especially possible because the price of clean energy technologies has declined so sharply in recent years. The cost of photovoltaic cells for solar power has, for instance, fallen by nearly 90% in the past decade; the cost for lithium-ion batteries, needed for rechargeable electric vehicles, by the same amount during the last 20 years. Optimism about a quicker greening of the planet, now a common refrain, could prove valid in the long run. However, when it comes to progress on climate change, the immediate implications of the war aren’t encouraging.
According to the International Energy Agency, if the Paris Agreement’s target for limiting global warming and its goal of “net zero” in global emissions by 2050 are to prove feasible, the building of additional fossil-fuel infrastructure must cease immediately. And that’s hardly what’s been happening since the war in Ukraine began. Instead, there has been what one expert calls “a gold rush to new fossil fuel infrastructure.” Following the drastic cuts in Russian gas exports to Europe, new liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities — more than 20 of them, worth billions of dollars — have either been planned or put on a fast track in Canada, Germany, Greece, Italy, and the Netherlands. The Group of Seven may even reverse its decision last May to stop public investment in overseas fossil-fuel projects by the end of this year, while its plan to “decarbonize” the energy sectors of member countries by 2035 may also fall by the wayside.
In June, Germany, desperate to replace that Russian natural gas, announced that mothballed coal-fired power plants, the dirtiest of greenhouse-gas producers, would be brought back online. The Federation of German Industry, which opposed shutting them down well before the war started, has indicated that it’s already switching to coal so that natural gas storage tanks can be filled before the winter cold sets in. India, too, has responded to higher energy prices with plans to boost coal production by almost 56 gigawatts through 2032, a 25% increase. Britain has scrapped its decision to prohibit, on environmental grounds, the development of the Jackdaw natural gas field in the North Sea and has already signed new contracts with Shell and other fossil-fuel companies. European countries have concluded several deals for LNG purchases, including with Azerbaijan, Egypt, Israel, the United States, and Qatar (which has demanded 20-year contracts). Then there’s Russia’s response to high energy prices, including a huge Arctic drilling project aimed at adding 100 million tons of oil a year to the global supply by 2035.
U.N. Secretary-General António Gutteres characterized this dash toward yet more hydrocarbon energy use as “madness.” Using a phrase long reserved for nuclear war, he suggested that such an unceasing addiction to fossil fuels could end in “mutually assured destruction.” He has a point: the U.N. Environment Program’s 2022 “Emissions Gap Report” released last month concluded that, in light of the emissions targets of so many states, Earth’s warming in the post-Industrial Revolution era could be in the range of 2.1 to 2.9 degrees Celsius by 2100. That’s nowhere near the Paris Agreement’s more ambitious benchmark of 1.5 degrees on a planet where the average temperature has already risen by 1.2 degrees.
As the Germany-based Perspectives on Climate Group details in a recent study, the Ukraine war has also had direct effects on climate change that will continue even after the fighting ends. As a start, the Paris Agreement doesn’t require countries to report emissions produced by their armed forces, but the war in Ukraine, likely to be a long-drawn-out affair, has already contributed to military carbon emissions in a big way, thanks to fossil-fuel-powered tanks, aircraft, and so much else. Even the rubble created by the bombardment of cities has released more carbon dioxide. So will Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction, which its prime minister estimated last month will cost close to $750 billion. And that may be an underestimate considering that the Russian army has taken its wrecking ball (or perhaps wrecking drones, missiles, and artillery) to everything from power plants and waterworks to schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings.
What International Community?
Leaders regularly implore “the international community” to act in various ways. If such appeals are to be more than verbiage, however, compelling evidence is needed that 195 countries share basic principles of some sort on climate change — that the world is more than the sum of its parts. Evidence is also needed that the most powerful countries on this planet can set aside their short-term interests long enough to act in a concerted fashion and decisively when faced with planet-threatening problems like climate change. The war in Ukraine offers no such evidence. For all the talk of a new dawn that followed the end of the Cold War, we seem stuck in our old ways — just when they need to change more than ever.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Russia’s war in Ukraine is intensifying. In response to victories on the battlefield won by Ukrainians this fall, Russia has responded by launching a wave of missile and drone attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure throughout the country. As a result, over 15,000 Ukrainian civilians had been killed or injured by early October, and another 1,043 by early November. Despite this state terrorism, Ukraine has continued to put up a valiant resistance to invasion and occupation.
Faced with a failing war, Vladimir Putin’s regime has conscripted hundreds of thousands of men into his armed forces and deployed them to his frontlines. That, in turn, has triggered a rise in antiwar resistance in Russia. In an exclusive for Truthout, Ashley Smith interviews Lolja Nordic from the Russian activist organization Feminist Antiwar Resistance about the movement against Putin’s regime and its imperialist invasion of Ukraine.
Lolja Nordic is anarcho ecofeminist, antiwar activist and artist from Saint Petersburg, where until recently she organized for gender equality, human rights and climate justice. She is a co-coordinator of Feminist Anti-War Resistance, a group created in February 2022 to protest the war in Ukraine. Since January 2021 Lolja has been facing political repression, arrest and threats for her activism. In March 2022 she had to flee Russia and continue her work in exile after becoming a suspect in a “phone terrorism” criminal case, which was fabricated by the Russian secret police to put pressure on several antiwar activists.
Ashley Smith: What is the nature and roots of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine? Why did he launch it and what are his war aims?
Lolja Nordic: Putin actually started the war back in 2014 when he annexed Crimea. He just escalated it in February. His reasons are clear, and he has repeated them over and over. He has a very colonial mindset; he opposes any country in the post-Soviet space gaining its independence. He has ambitions to rebuild the old empire.
He considers Ukraine to be a part of Russia and will not allow it to exist as an independent country. He denies it is a nation, rejects its right to self-determination, and refuses to acknowledge Ukrainians’ agency and subjectivity.
After Ukraine’s Maidan uprising in 2013-2014 that drove Russia’s corrupt ally, Viktor Yanukovych, from power, Putin feared that the country was slipping out of his control. So, over the last eight years he has deployed troops to Ukraine, backed up the so-called People’s Republics in Donetsk and Luhansk, and plotted to carry out the colonial seizure of the whole country.
Putin’s imperialism flows from his abusive, toxic and patriarchal worldview. You can hear this in how he speaks about Ukraine. His language is identical to how rapists and abusers talk about their victims.
The Ukrainian resistance has scored a wave of victories and forced Putin to conscript hundreds of thousands of people. What impact has Russia’s military defeats and the mobilization had on Russian society?
The defeats and mobilization have forced the war into the middle of Russian society. Men are being called up and deployed in large numbers and against their will. Almost every family in Russia has a loved one that could be forced to fight in Ukraine.
This has triggered broader questioning of the war. Before the mobilization, conservative Russians could believe Putin’s claim that it would not affect your life. They had supported Putin for years based on his promise of stability and his claim that without his rule there would be chaos.
That is no longer credible. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled the country to avoid conscription and repression, others have gone into hiding; some conscripted men even committed suicide or died in suspicious circumstances at the training camps; large numbers have been deployed in battle, and many are already dying at the front. People are beginning to realize that Putin’s regime is the source of instability and chaos.
That does not mean everyone who is against the war or mobilization has become an antiwar activist. Putin retains a base, especially in the elite but also among broader sections of the population. But now there is much more questioning and that has given space for more resistance to Putin and his war.
In February and March there were daily antiwar protests in cities all over Russia. The regime crushed them with harsh repression, arresting more than 16,000 people by June. By October this number had risen to 19,000. Many activists were tortured and some even raped.
Putin immediately criminalized all expressions of antiwar opposition. You can get arrested for posting the word “war” or even for wearing clothing with the colors of the Ukrainian flag. This repression drove protests for the most part off the streets.
Most Russian people are not wealthy, many are struggling on low wages and find it difficult to meet their basic needs. So, they are reluctant to risk the safety of their families or lose their jobs by openly opposing the war when faced with possible, arrest, fines and torture.
But the mobilization triggered another wave of protests. The most significant ones were in Republics like Dagestan and Sakha (Yakutia) where women led marches against conscription. This took incredible bravery, because in regions like Dagestan protesters face even more severe repression than people do in cities like Moscow or St. Petersburg. For over a decade, Russia has carried out mass repression and counter-insurgency to impose its rule in Dagestan.
But protests are not the only form of antiwar resistance. Thousands of Russians are involved in the grassroots networks to provide humanitarian aid to Ukrainians who have been abducted and forcefully relocated from Ukraine to Russia. Those networks also help them flee from Russia across the border back to Ukraine or into Europe.
There is also a large partisan movement made up mostly of anarchists. They have been disabling railway lines to disrupt the transport of military vehicles and weaponry to the front. They have thrown Molotov cocktails to set fire to military offices all over the country on weekends when no one was inside with the aim of slowing conscription.
What has your organization Feminist Antiwar Resistance been doing to build opposition to the war? What specifically feminist arguments do you stress in your organizing?
For feminists worldwide, war is one of our central issues. We see how all kinds of violence are interconnected, including militaristic violence. War has its roots in patriarchal culture, its oppressive structures, and systemic violence. So, when Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, we decided to unite different feminist groups from all over Russia and from other countries to form Feminist Antiwar Resistance.
It is a horizontal network with groups and activists both inside and outside Russia. We have a lot of different campaigns to confront the regime and weaken Russia’s war machine. We have organized many street protests and actions since February 24. When the mobilization was announced, we worked with a youth-led democracy group, Vesna (Spring), to call demonstrations throughout the country.
Together with Anti-job and Antivoenny Bolnichny (Antiwar Sick Leave) — two organizations which fight for labor rights in Russia — we built a project called Anti–War Fund that provides help to workers whose labor rights were violated because of their antiwar activism. This is important because many people are threatened with getting fired illegally for being spotted at protests or just posting antiwar content online. To build a sustainable antiwar movement we need to support these kinds of workers with free legal help and protection, so it would be more difficult for the bosses and companies to pressure and silence them.
We built our own network of volunteers providing humanitarian aid to Ukrainian refugees in Russia. We started a hotline where antiwar activists can get urgent, free psychological help. We provide counseling and advice to people who face all sorts of risks. We organize help to political prisoners and help activists find temporary hiding to escape repression.
One of our goals is to break through the regime’s propaganda both online and offline. We have established Feminist Antiwar Resistance social media on Telegram, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter as a form of digital resistance and launched a printed newspaper that exposes the reality of this horrific imperialist war.
We produce a newspaper called Zhenskaya Pravda (Women’s Truth). It looks like an ordinary local free newspaper, but it’s filled with antiwar articles. We disguise it like that so it could be spread widely in different public spaces in Russia. Anybody can print it at home and spread it secretly at campuses, malls, community buildings, etc.
Often, we design our posts as memes or jokes to go viral, reach a broader, conservative, or apolitical audience. But once you dig into them you can find the information and arguments against the regime and the invasion.
One of our most important new initiatives is collaborating with different decolonial antiwar movements organized by Russia’s ethnic minorities and Indigenous people. They have been fighting to protect their culture and fight for their independence. We are working with them to give them a platform to give voice to their struggle.
Russian forces in the occupation have suffered enormous casualties. Is there any resistance to the war developing in the Russian troops?
There are signs of this beginning. A lot of people who were conscripted are really angry. They were not adequately trained, did not have adequate equipment, and were just sent to the front lines. Many of them posted videos expressing anger over these conditions. Some groups of conscripted soldiers have staged protests and sabotage at the training camps.
At this point, we don’t know if this is leading to large-scale resistance within the Russian troops. There is no transparency of what is happening at the front inside the Russian army and soldiers who try to sabotage or desert face the risk of being executed at the front by their own commanders.
But we do know that people are sabotaging Russia’s war just by refusing conscription either by fleeing the country or going into hiding. Some people don’t look at it that way, but I do.
Anything that weakens the Russian army is helping Ukraine win. People refusing conscription deprives Russian imperialism of foot soldiers. However, conscious or not, that is part of the antiwar resistance.
Given the setbacks Russia has suffered, Putin has turned to state terrorist attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure to break Ukraine’s will to fight. What is Putin’s strategy now?
It’s really hard to get inside Putin’s head. To be honest, his assessment of the war and therefore his strategy is a bit delusional. He does not get accurate reports from his underlings.
So, he can’t really come up with an effective strategy. Everything about this war demonstrates his strategic incompetence from the initial failed siege of Kyiv to the defeats Russian forces are experiencing now.
Faced with these setbacks, Putin is now using tactics he used in Chechnya and Syria — massacring civilians, blowing up apartment buildings, and destroying civilian infrastructure like water and electric plants. He doesn’t care about human lives in Ukraine or in Russia. He’s sacrificing us all for his imperialist ambitions.
We endured this in Russia through his 22-year reign. He’s launched war after war from Chechnya to Georgia to Syria and now Ukraine. None of this has benefitted anyone but his regime and its cronies. Ordinary Russians and Putin’s international victims have paid the price with their lives and livelihoods. His regime is a terrorist state.
But the governments in Europe that now denounce Putin are hypocrites. Many of them up until February met with him at summits, shook his hand, and some, especially among the far right elite, spoke about him as a strong leader and somehow part of the opposition to the U.S. They did this while they knew that he was murdering independent journalists, killing his political opponents, and jailing and torturing Russian activists.
European activists and leftists, as well as those in the U.S., have to criticize their own governments for enabling this regime to rule. European states, even now in the midst of this war, are still financing Putin’s military machine with every payment for Russia’s fossil fuel exports.
In the West, many pacificists have argued for an immediate ceasefire and a negotiated settlement. What are the problems with such calls?
It is absurd to demand that an occupied country stop fighting for its liberation and essentially give up its land for peace. It’s the same as telling a victim of violence to not resist a person who tries to abuse, rape or murder them. Why would we tell that to Ukrainians?
Our task is to stop the aggressor. That means first and foremost building solidarity with Ukraine and its people. They have been screaming for help for months. They don’t have enough weapons to fight against Russian aggression. They don’t have defensive weapons to protect their citizens from missile attacks. They deserve all the military and financial help to liberate their country.
Instead of putting demands on Ukraine to stop fighting, we should be focused on doing all we can to weaken Russia’s war machine. If we are disturbed by global militarization, we should be first of all focused not on the question of whether it’s good to provide weapons to Ukraine, but on how to demilitarize and weaken the Russian army, how to put pressure on those countries that have been providing weapons to Russian soldiers or equipment to Russian police to beat and arrest protesters. To begin with, countries should stop financing Putin’s war and reinforcing the Russian military by buying Russian fossil fuels.
Where do you think the war and the resistance to it are headed? What should we expect in the short, medium and long term?
It is very difficult to predict. There are just too many variables. What I do know is that we have to keep building the resistance to the regime in Russia and it is a lot of work. We need to build and enlarge grassroots horizontal networks of resistance to cover the whole country, provide mutual aid and sustain it.
We need to expand the number of people who are aware, ready to act, and trained to co-organize so we are prepared to act fast in critical moments. We need international solidarity with Ukraine against this war. We need international solidarity with people who are fighting Putin’s regime in Russia.
In Russia, we are fighting for a future free of Putin and his oligarchs and their militarism. That future will be one where women, queer people, ethnic minorities, Indigenous people and working people can all live together in peace and with equal rights.
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Listen to a reading of this article:
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The Atlantic, which is owned by billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs and run by neoconservative war propagandist Jeffrey Goldberg, has published a pair of articles that are appalling even by its own standards.
Virulent Russiagater Anne Applebaum argues in “Fear of Nuclear War Has Warped the West’s Ukraine Strategy” that the US and its allies should escalate against Russia with full confidence that Putin won’t respond with nuclear weapons.
“Here is the only thing we know: As long as Putin believes that the use of nuclear weapons won’t win the war—as long as he believes that to do so would call down an unprecedented international and Western response, perhaps including the destruction of his navy, of his communications system, of his economic model—then he won’t use them,” Applebaum writes.
Anne Applebaum's disdain for "restraint," her insouciance regarding the nuclear threat, and her reckless call for "belief"at the end of this article, is truly chilling. This is the new McCarthyism. @PatPorter76 @samuelmoyn @QuincyInst https://t.co/tG7z6KED6O
— Jeanne Morefield (@JeanneMorefiel1) November 10, 2022
But throughout her own essay Applebaum also acknowledges that she does not actually know the things she is claiming to know.
“We don’t know whether our refusal to transfer sophisticated tanks to Ukraine is preventing nuclear war,” she writes. “We don’t know whether loaning an F-16 would lead to Armageddon. We don’t know whether holding back the longest-range ammunition is stopping Putin from dropping a tactical nuclear weapon or any other kind of weapon.”
“I can’t prove this to be true, of course, because no one can,” says Applebaum after confidently asserting that more western aggression would actually have deterred Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
These are the kinds of things it’s important to have the highest degree of certainty in before taking drastic actions which can, you know, literally end the world. It’s absolutely nuts how western pundits face more scrutiny and accountability when publicly recommending financial investments than when recommending moves that could end all terrestrial life.
On that note it’s probably worth mentioning here that Applebaum’s husband, European Parliament member Radoslaw Sikorski, recently made headlines by publicly thanking the United States for sabotaging the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
The Atlantic has also published an article titled “The Age of Social Media Is Ending,” subtitled “It never should have begun.” Its author, Ian Bogost, argues that the recent management failures in Twitter and Facebook mean the days of just any old schmuck having access to their own personal broadcasting network are over, and that this is a good thing.
Bogost’s piece contains what has got to be the single most elitist sentence that I have ever read:
“A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset.”
Nothing enrages the official authorized commentariat like the common riff raff having access to platforms and audiences. That’s why the official authorized commentariat have been the most vocal voices calling for internet censorship and complaining about the rise of a more democratized information environment. These elitist wankers have been fuming for years about the way the uninitiated rabble have been granted the ability to not just talk, but to talk back.
Social networking had its problems, but the real horror was its evolution into social media (which it did without anyone really noticing).
Making connections for modest use was okay. Turning everyone into constant content creators/sinks was not. https://t.co/Ishu3HDYzG
— Ian Bogost (@ibogost) November 11, 2022
Hamilton Nolan of In These Times posted a recent observation on Twitter which makes the perfect counter to The Atlantic’s snooty pontifications.
“The best thing Twitter did for journalism was to show everyone there are thousands of regular people who are better writers than most professionals which is why the most mediocre famous pundits have always been quickest to dismiss it as a cesspool,” Nolan writes, adding, “Best thing Twitter did for the world in general was to allow anyone to yell directly at rich and powerful people, which drove many of them insane, including the richest guy on earth.”
Of course the imperial narrative managers at The Atlantic would be opposed to normal people getting a voice in public discourse. When your job is to control the narrative, the bigger a monopoly you hold over it the better.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
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For years the world saw Putin as almost a figure of fun – while in Russia he was already meting out brutality to dissidents and LGBTQ+ activists
Last night I saw Pussy Riot, on the Hackney leg of their Riot Days European tour to raise money for a children’s hospital in Ukraine. Their sound guy, Alexander Cheparkhun, came on stage to introduce them. I guess he was about my age, I couldn’t be precise because I didn’t have my glasses. He vibed the sort of age, where you can’t see things without glasses. He described how he met Maria Alyokhina (who also goes by Masha Alekhina), one of the founding members of the band who was first imprisoned in 2012 and then under constant surveillance, harassment, house arrest, arrest-arrest and persecution, until she escaped from Russia to Iceland earlier this year. When her sentence was handed down 10 years ago, he said, it was the first time in his life he had witnessed the political imprisonment of artists.
This was a useful bit of context, or rather, a glass of cold water to the face, after years of somnambulance: no one is laughing at Vladimir Putin now, of course, but for years, he was almost a figure of fun, with his bare-chested, horse-riding photoshoots and florid turn of phrase. On the world stage, he was the uncle who might say dodgy things, but got invited anyway: what was the worst that could happen? This indulgent, pretty feckless view of Putin was overlaid by the sense that Russia merely did things differently; perhaps the state was a bit thin-skinned and hotheaded, maybe it didn’t prioritise human rights as much as one would like, but this was a cultural thing, probably related to the weather. If we had maybe expressed that view out loud more often, Russian citizens could have said: “No, actually, punk bands sentenced to hard labour for protest actions is very much a now thing, rather than an always thing.”
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Listen to a reading of this article:
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I feel like we haven’t been talking enough about the fact that US government agencies were just caught intimately collaborating with massive online platforms to censor content in the name of regulating the “cognitive infrastructure” of society. The only way you could be okay with the US government appointing itself this authority would be if you believed the US government is an honest and beneficent entity that works toward the benefit of the common man. Which would of course be an unacceptable thing for a grown adult to believe.
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It’s still astonishing that we live in a world where our rulers will openly imprison a journalist for telling the truth and then self-righteously bloviate about the need to stop authoritarian regimes from persecuting journalists.
Look at this scumbag:
No member of the press should be threatened, harassed, attacked, arrested, or killed for doing their job. On the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists, we vow to continue protecting and promoting the rights of a free press and the safety of journalists. https://t.co/qXYyVoVlbM
— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) November 2, 2022
Look at him. Can you believe this piece of shit? The gall. The absolute gall.
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There is no such thing as unbiased journalism. If someone tells you they are unbiased they are either knowingly lying, or they are so lacking in self-awareness that you should not listen to them anyway.
The divide is not between biased journalists and unbiased journalists, it’s between journalists who are honest and transparent about their biases and journalists who are not. There are no unbiased journalists. There are no unbiased people. You’re either honest about this or you’re not.
Of course journalists should try to be as fair and honest as they can. It’s just the epitome of childlike naivety to believe that western mainstream journalists do this.
Reporters who support the mainstream worldview are just as biased as reporters from Russian or Chinese state media; they espouse a peculiar perspective and concrete interests and agendas. The problem is the mainstream worldview is so normalized it looks like impartial reality, so you’ll get mainstream western journalists speaking disdainfully of Julian Assange or The Grayzone or whoever because those people have biases and agendas, as though they themselves have no biases or agendas and are nothing other than impartial arbiters of absolute reality.
Which is plainly ridiculous. The worldview which facilitates the abuses of oligarchy and empire and the status quo politics which serves as their vehicle is anything but impartial. It’s not even sane. But because it’s been normalized by propaganda it looks like baseline reality.
The only reason the mainstream worldview is mainstream is because the world’s most powerful people have poured a tremendous amount of money into making it mainstream. That’s the one and only reason. It’s not the moderate perspective, it’s just the most funded and marketed perspective.
All journalists have biases, and all journalists have agendas. It’s just that most of them have the mundane agenda of becoming esteemed and well-known, and the easiest way to do that is to espouse the mainstream worldview where the tide of propaganda can carry you to shore.
The easiest way to become rich and famous in news media is to promote the interests of the rich and powerful people who own and influence the news media. The easiest way to become reviled and marginalized is to attack those interests. Your values determine which path you choose.
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There’s no such thing as a Hollywood ending.
There’s no such thing as an objective journalist.
There’s no such thing as a moral billionaire.
There’s no such thing as a humanitarian intervention.
There’s no such thing as an honest war.
People should learn all this in grade school.
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You know you're living in an infantilized bootlicking paternalistic society when the prospect of not having a team of authority figures curating your information feed for you is seen as "dangerous". pic.twitter.com/5pZCXrn112
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) November 5, 2022
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Who understands that narrative control is power? Empire managers. Plutocrats. Propagandists. Smearmeisters. Manipulators. Abusers. Cult leaders. Bullies.
Who does not understand that narrative control is power? Pretty much everyone else.
This is the source of most problems.
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Platforms censoring hate speech is not the same as platforms censoring political speech and speech which criticizes the agendas of the powerful. Censoring hate speech is done to benefit the platform’s profit margins; censoring political speech is done to benefit powerful government agencies. You can make slippery slope arguments, but they’re not equal, and they’re not similar.
You can argue with the reality that for-profit platforms will always censor the most repellent forms of speech in order to prevent their audiences from being driven from the platform, but that is reality. And it is very different from censoring on behalf of US alphabet agencies. If what you want is a platform where all legal forms of expression are allowed, then for-profit platforms are not a good vehicle for that. Perhaps you want a nationalized social media platform funded by taxpayers with robust speech protections built into its terms of use.
There’s a massive difference between a platform banning speech which makes that platform a gross place that nobody wants to hang out at and a platform banning the way people talk about a war or a virus because government agencies told them to. It’s unhelpful to conflate the two.
And the conflation goes both ways. People who just want to spew hate will pretend to care about fighting the power, and the powerful who want to censor the internet to suppress inconvenient speech will pretend to care about stopping hate. It’s important to be aware of these obfuscations.
There’s a night and day difference between people who oppose censorship because they don’t want the powerful controlling human speech and people who oppose censorship because they want to say ethnic slurs. They’re not the same. A good tool for making these distinctions is to examine whether the agenda punches down or punches up. If it seeks to suppress speech on behalf of the powerful or harm disempowered communities, it’s punching down.
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Nobody’s ever been able to answer this question: if Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine had nothing to do with western provocations, how come so many western experts spent years warning that the west’s actions would provoke Russia to invade Ukraine?
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Ukraine is a far more celebrated and aggressively defended centerpiece of hawkish American fanaticism than Israel ever was.
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Anyone who believes US policy on Ukraine will change under Republicans is a fucking moron. https://t.co/00O5F0w522
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) November 4, 2022
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If you find yourself rushing to defend the foreign policy of the most militarily, economically and culturally dominant nation on earth, ask yourself why that is. Ask whom that impulse benefits. Ask how that impulse came upon you. Ask if it could have been put there by propaganda.
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It is false to claim that capitalism, competition and greed are “human nature”. I cite as my source for this claim the fact that I am human. The truth is that those who claim capitalism, competition and greed are “human nature” are not actually telling you anything about human nature. They are telling you about their own nature.
And it isn’t even really accurate to call it their “nature”; it’s just their conditioning. And we can all change our conditioning. The only people who deny this are those who haven’t sincerely tried to yet.
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One reason I publish poetry and share insights about philosophy and spirituality on top of my political and foreign policy commentary is because as the information ecosystem gets more polluted it’s not enough to tell people what you think, you’ve got to show them who you are. As more and more energy goes into distorting and manipulating public understanding of the world, it becomes more necessary to bare your soul to the furthest extent possible so people can decide on their own whether you’re the kind of person they want to pay attention to.
People are very distrusting in today’s environment, and rightly so; we swim in an ocean of lies. You can get around that distrust by manipulating people into thinking you’re trustworthy, or you can do it by taking transparency to the furthest extent possible and letting yourself be fully seen so that people can make up their own minds about you for themselves.
I can’t promise that I’ll always get everything right or that I’ll always be seeing things the most clearly, but I can promise to always be honest and to always be running on maximum transparency about who I am, where I’m coming from, and what my biases and agendas are.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
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ANALYSIS: By Alexander Gillespie, University of Waikato
Since Jacinda Ardern described the state of world affairs as “bloody messy” earlier this year there have been few, if any, signs of improvement. Ukraine, China, nuclear proliferation and the lasting impacts of a global pandemic all present urgent, unresolved challenges.
For a small country in an increasingly lawless world this is both dangerous and confronting.
Without the military or economic scale to influence events directly, New Zealand relies on its voice and ability to persuade.
- READ MORE: Putin plays the annexation card, pushing the war in Ukraine into a dangerous new phase
- How will China interact with the world over the next 5 years? Xi’s new speech holds clues
- Nukes, allies, weapons and cost: 4 big questions NZ’s defence review must address
But by placing its faith in a rules-based order and United Nations processes, New Zealand also has to work with — and sometimes around — highly imperfect systems. In some areas of international law and policy the machinery is failing. It’s unclear what the next best step might be.
Given these uncertainties, then, where has New Zealand done well on the international stage, and where might it need to find a louder voice or more constructive proposals?
Confronting Russia
Strength and clarity have been most evident in New Zealand’s response to the Russian attack on Ukraine. There has been no hint of joining the abstainers or waverers at crucial UN votes condemning Russia’s actions.While it can be argued New Zealand could do more in terms of sanctions and support for the Ukrainian military, the government has made good use of the available international forums.
Joining the International Court of Justice case against “Russia’s spurious attempt to justify its invasion under international law” and supporting the International Criminal Court investigation into possible war crimes in Ukraine are both excellent initiatives.
Unfortunately, similar avenues have been blocked when it comes to other critical issues New Zealand has a vested interest in seeing resolved properly.
UN vote to ignore human rights abuses in China leaves west in dead end https://t.co/mTWo4ETubU
— The Guardian (@guardian) October 7, 2022
China and human rights
This has been especially apparent in the debate about human rights abuses in China, and allegations of genocide made by some countries over the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.New Zealand and some other countries correctly avoided using the word “genocide”, which has a precise legal meaning best applied by UN experts, not domestic politicians. Instead, the government called on China to provide meaningful and unfettered access to UN and other independent observers.
While not perfect, the visit went ahead. The eventual report by outgoing UN Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet concluded that China had committed serious human rights violations, which could amount to crimes against humanity.
This should have forced the international community to act. Instead, 19 countries voted with China to block a debate at the UN Human Rights Council (17 wanted the debate, 11 abstained). The upshot was that China succeeded in driving the issue into a diplomatic dead-end.
Allowing an organisation designed to protect victims to be controlled by alleged perpetrators isn’t something New Zealand should accept. The government should make it a diplomatic priority to become a member of the council, and it should use every opportunity to speak out and keep the issue in the global spotlight.
Ardern’s Russia warning: New nuclear age dawns – countries want to start and win new nuclear war https://t.co/ft03c2FAI5 pic.twitter.com/DRoA4IDRFN
— nzherald (@nzherald) September 23, 2022
Arms control
Elsewhere, New Zealand’s foreign policy can arguably be found wanting — most evidently, perhaps, in the area of nuclear arms regulation.Advocating for the complete prohibition of all nuclear weapons, as the prime minister did at the UN in September, might be inspiring and also good domestic politics, but it doesn’t make the world safer.
With the risk of nuclear conflagration at its highest since the Cuban missile crisis, a better immediate goal would be improving the regulation, rather than prohibition, of nuclear weapons. This would entail convincing nuclear states to take their weapons off “hair-trigger alert”.
The other goals should be the adoption of a no-first-use policy by all nuclear powers (only China has made such a commitment so far), and a push for regional arms control in the Indo-Pacific to rein in India, Pakistan and China.
Pandemic preparedness
Finally, there is the danger of vital law and policy not just failing, but not even being born. This is the case with the World Health Organisation’s so-called “pandemic treaty”, designed to better prevent, prepare for and respond to the next global pandemic.New Zealand set out some admirable goals in its submission in April, but these have been watered down or are missing from the first working draft of the proposed agreement.
This shouldn’t be accepted lightly given the lessons of the past two-and-a-half years. Transparency by governments, a precautionary approach and the meaningful involvement of non-state actors will be essential.
Similarly, improved oversight of the 59 laboratories spread across 23 countries that work with the most dangerous pathogens is critical. Currently, only a quarter of these labs score highly on safety. The proposed treaty does little to demand the kind of biosecurity protocols and robust regulatory systems required to better protect present and future generations.
As with the other urgent and difficult issues mentioned here, New Zealand’s future is directly connected to what happens elsewhere in the world. The challenge now is to keep adapting to this changing global order while being an effective voice for reason and the rule of law.
Dr Alexander Gillespie is professor of law, University of Waikato. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
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Listen to a reading of this article:
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A new article for The Irish Times by Virginia Tech professor Gerard Toal, titled “Ukraine risks being locked into endless war in bid for perfect peace,” contains a very interesting paragraph:
Ordinary Ukrainians on the front lines are divided on a ceasefire and negotiations. My Ukrainian colleague Karina Korostelina and I surveyed the attitudes of both residents and displaced persons in three Ukrainian cities close to the southeast battlefields this summer. Almost half agreed it was imperative to seek a ceasefire to stop Russians killing Ukraine’s young men. Slightly more supported negotiations with Russia on a complete ceasefire, with a quarter totally against and a fifth declaring themselves neutral. Respondents were torn when considering whether saving lives or territorial unity were more important to them. Those most touched by the war, namely the internally displaced, were more likely to prioritise saving lives. Other research reveals that those farthest from the battlefields have the most hawkish attitudes.
It’s the third from the last paragraph in the article, whose overall content cannot be remotely construed as sympathetic toward Moscow, but it’s very important information.
“Those most touched by the war, namely the internally displaced, were more likely to prioritise saving lives. Other research reveals that those farthest from the battlefields have the most hawkish attitudes.”
Those two simple sentences sum up so much of the attitude we are seeing toward this war, and it applies as much to those cheerleading continual escalation and bloodshed from the comfort of their homes on the other side of the world.
Unlike sofa warriors in the West and elsewhere treating people like plastic figurines on a board, Ukrainians most affected by the fighting tend to be more in favour of talks for a ceasefire and prioritise actual human lives over borders & land:https://t.co/Yh0dto1xPA pic.twitter.com/VcHJwLs6ci
— Branko Marcetic (@BMarchetich) November 3, 2022
“Other research reveals that those farthest from the battlefields have the most hawkish attitudes.”
Remember this as you watch pundits and politicians calling for escalations in Ukraine from Washington DC, Los Angeles and London.
Remember this as you watch armchair warriors and NAFO neckbeards dogpiling anyone who advocates peace talks.
Remember this as you watch progressives on Capitol Hill pressured into walking back even the mildest support for potential ceasefire negotiations at some point.
Remember this as more and more information comes out about the way bot swarms and astroturf trolling operations have been used to shout down and silence anyone who advocates peace online.
War is the single most horrific thing in the world. It is the most insane thing that humans do, by far. The most destructive. The least sustainable. The most conducive to human suffering. If people could spend even one hour in the cortisol-soaked mind of a mother trying to bring up her kids in the middle of the conflict, grieving people you’ve lost, worried about losing more, working out how to stretch the food and the fuel, trying to keep things as normal as possible for your stressed out children, jumping at every noise, trying to forget the things you have seen, peace would be achieved within that hour. Everyone and everything would be mobilized to stop this hell on earth as soon as humanly possible. It would be clear to all that the tragedy that is unfolding right now is not just causing enormous suffering in this moment, but every minute it goes on trauma is burning itself deeper into the subconscious of every single person going through it which will torment them and their descendents for generations to come.
But because we are primates who evolved in small social groups, humans often have trouble feeling empathy for that suffering until it enters into our own immediate circle. Our own city. Our own house. Our own sons, brothers and fathers going out to fight and never coming home.
So this war has become like a game for people. A vehicle from which to promote their political ideologies and masturbate their propaganda-induced Good Guys vs Bad Guys fantasies. A team sport where they can cheer on the total recapture of all annexed territories in eastern Ukraine from anonymous Shiba avatar accounts online to pass time in their meaningless lives.
The view that diplomacy is bad and the war should go on is held by former colonial powers in the Global North representing, generously, 13% of humanity. It's Global South states representing ~65% of the world's people calling for negotiations. Colonial reflex indeed. pic.twitter.com/GNHMO9qsWK
— Branko Marcetic (@BMarchetich) November 3, 2022
The passive team sports cheerleading spirit that this war has brought on is made all the more obnoxious by the fact that Ukraine is still accepting volunteers to fight on the front lines. If you think this war is good and should continue, the morally coherent thing to do would be to go fight in it, rather than sitting at home eating cheese puffs with one hand and tweeting with the other acting as a pro bono Pentagon propagandist between visits to Pornhub while other people die for your cause.
But that isn’t happening. People are happy to sit in the comfort of their own home and watch their remote war movie unfold on CNN.
This isn’t a game. This is a war the US empire provoked to advance its own strategic agendas and therefore has a responsibility to help end, but instead we’re being hammered by that empire with propaganda, censorship, bot armies and troll farms dedicated to convincing everyone that nuclear brinkmanship is safety and peace talks are danger.
Don’t help them do this. Don’t help manufacture consent for a proxy war whose continuation has less and less support the closer and closer you get to the actual killing. Find some other way to pass your time and scratch your itch for conflict and egoic gratification, one which doesn’t involve spending real people’s lives like video game money. Get a healthier hobby for God’s sake.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
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Listen to a reading of this article:
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2022 is an insane year to be a critic of the empire. People are being censored for disputing official narratives about a war. Those who aren’t censored are being mobbed by astroturf trolling operations. A frenetic propaganda push is turning our friends, family, coworkers and acquaintances into brainwashed empire automatons who despise our heretical rejection of official imperial doctrine about Russia and Ukraine.
And this is just a quick note to say thank you for holding the line anyway, and to note that your opposition to nuclear brinkmanship, US warmongering and propaganda makes a difference.
If our rulers did not require the consent of the public, they would not work so hard to manufacture that consent. While the empire managers work hard to keep us from noticing that there a whole lot more of us than there are of them, this is a reality that our rulers are at all times acutely aware of. It gives them nightmares to contemplate the possibility of people growing tired of being impoverished and endangered by the economic warfare and nuclear brinkmanship our rulers are inflicting upon us in order to advance their unipolarist agendas of global domination. They are never not afraid of the possibility that we might begin to collectively push back in large numbers.
That is why we are being continually inundated by ever-rising levels of propaganda, censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulations and empire trolls. And that’s why there are increasing artificially created pressures to shun, silence and shut down anyone who speaks out against the madness we are witnessing.
As the US-centralized empire ramps up cold war aggressions against not one but two powerful nations in China and Russia, manipulating public thought at mass scale to go along with those reckless and costly aggressions becomes more and more essential. What that means is that anyone who is voicing opposition to those agendas is a significant thorn in the side of the power structure that’s advancing them.
As I keep repeating, all positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. Whether you’re talking about positive changes in individual behavior or collective behavior, it always arises from an increase in awareness of something where there previously was less awareness. Self-destructive behavior patterns change when the individual becomes more conscious of the internal forces which drive them. Social injustices change when the collective becomes more conscious of how unwholesome they are. Abuses of power change when investigative journalism and whistleblowers bring awareness to those abuses.
By vocally opposing the madness our world is descending into, you are helping to expand consciousness. To whatever extent you draw more attention and awareness to the lies, manipulations and malfeasance that is being inflicted upon our world in facilitation of the agendas of oligarchy and empire, you are expanding consciousness by that much. You are bringing collective human behavior that much closer to real change, whether you’re talking to people in person, making videos, holding demonstrations, distributing pamphlets, tweeting, blogging, spray painting the truth on an overpass or yelling it at a street corner.
Which is why you meet up with so much opposition when you do. Just as there are forces within us which resist being seen in order to remain unconscious, there are forces in the world which work to shut down attempts to shine the light of truth on them. That’s all you’re ever meeting up with when people try to stop you from speaking out, and it deserves no more respect than that.
So keep speaking. Keep pushing for a sane and peaceful world. You’re doing great, and your voice makes a difference, and don’t you dare let anyone tell you otherwise. If our voices made no difference, the most powerful people in the world wouldn’t be trying to shut us down.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
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No one took responsibility for the explosion over the weekend that ripped through a section of the Kerch Bridge that links Russia to Crimea and was built by Moscow after it annexed the peninsula back in 2014.
But it was not just Kyiv’s gleeful celebrations that indicated the main suspect. Within hours, the Ukrainian authorities had released a set of commemorative stamps depicting the destruction.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was under no illusions either. On Monday, he struck out with a torrent of missiles that hit major Ukrainian cities such as Kyiv and Lviv. It was a pale, Slavic echo of Israel’s intermittent bombardments of Gaza, which are expressly intended to send the Palestinian enclave “back to the Stone Age“.
If the scenes looked familiar – an attack by one party, followed by a massive retaliatory strike from the other – the mood and language that greeted the Ukrainian attack and the Russian counter-attack felt noticeably different from what passes for normal western commentary about Israel and Palestine.
The blast on the Kerch Bridge was welcomed with barely concealed excitement from western journalists, politicians and analysts, while Moscow’s strikes on Kyiv were uniformly denounced as Russian brutality and state terrorism. That is not the way things work when Israel and Palestinian factions engage in their own rounds of fighting.
Had the Palestinians openly celebrated blowing up a bridge in East Jerusalem, a territory illegally annexed by Israel in the 1960s, and killed Israeli civilians as collateral damage in the process, who can really imagine western media reports being similarly supportive?
Nor would western academics have lined up, as they did for Ukraine, to explain in detail why destroying a bridge was a proportionate act and fully in accordance with the rights in international law of a people under belligerent occupation to resist.
Instead, there would have been thunderous denunciations of Palestinian savagery and “terrorism”.
In reality, Palestinian resistance nowadays is far more modest – and yet still receives western censure. Palestinians need only to fire a home-made rocket, or launch an “incendiary balloon”, usually ineffectually out of their cage in Gaza – where they have been besieged for years by their Israeli persecutors – to incur the wrath of Israel and the western powers that claim to constitute the “international community”.
Even more perversely, when Palestinians solely target Israeli soldiers, as they are unambiguously entitled to do under international law, they are similarly reviled as criminals.
Regular rampages
But the double standards do not end there. Western media and politicians were unreservedly appalled by Moscow’s retaliatory strikes on the Ukrainian capital. Despite the media’s emphasis on Russia’s targeting of civilian infrastructure, the number of civilians killed across Ukraine by the wave of missile hits on Monday was reported to be low.
Western media are far less horrified when it comes to Israel’s regular rampages across Gaza – even when Israel “retaliates” after much less provocation and when its strikes inflict far greater suffering and damage.
And, of course, it is not just Israel that is benefiting from this hypocrisy. The United States’ “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign that initiated the war on Iraq in 2003 – and so impressed western commentators – killed many thousands of Iraqi civilians. Russia’s strikes on Kyiv pale in comparison.
There are other glaring inconsistencies. After Russia’s missile strikes, Ukraine is gaining an even more receptive ear in western capitals to its demands for additional weaponry to help regain the eastern territories Moscow has annexed.
By contrast, no one in the West is suggesting that the Palestinians should be armed to help them fight off decades of Israeli occupation and siege. Quite the reverse. It is invariably western weapons that rain down on Gaza, supplied to the belligerent Israeli occupier by the very parties now condemning Russia.
And in stark contrast to Britain’s whole-hearted support as Ukraine battles to stop Russia’s annexation of its eastern territories, the UK’s prime minister Liz Truss stated only last month that she may reward Israel for its illegal annexation of Jerusalem by moving the British embassy there.
Whereas Palestinians are constantly inveigled to postpone their liberation struggle and wait for their occupier to agree to peace talks, even when Israel openly scorns engagement, Ukrainians are pushed by the West to do the exact opposite. They are expected to delay any negotiations with Russia and focus on the battlefield.
Similarly, those who promote talks between Israel and Palestine that are never going to take place are praised as peacemakers. Those who advocate for talks between Ukraine and Russia – when Moscow has expressed a repeated willingness to negotiate, even if its overtures are disparaged by the West – are rounded on as appeasers.
Russia, meanwhile, faces sustained and comprehensive sanctions imposed by western states to bring it to heel.
By contrast, those proposing a far weaker tool – grassroots boycotts – to pressure Israel to loosen its choke-hold on Gaza are smeared as antisemites and face legislation to outlaw their activities by the same western states sanctioning Moscow.
It is almost as if the “freedom-loving” West has an entirely inconsistent agenda when it comes to the plights of Ukraine and Palestine. Israel’s hold on Palestine is unfortunate but justified; Russia’s over Ukraine is emphatically not.
Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s “unprovoked aggression” is heroic. Palestinian resistance to Israel’s violence – invariably presented as self-defence – is terrorism.
Double standards
Western news at the moment is a litany of these double standards and legal and ethical contradictions – and yet barely anyone seems to notice.
Westerners, for example, are currently cheering the protests in Iran, where women and girls have taken to the streets and created mass disturbances in schools. Their protests were sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini after she was taken into custody for wearing her hijab head covering too loosely.
Western media celebrate these young women casting aside the hijab in defiance of the unaccountable clerics who rule over them. The West bewails the beatings and attacks they receive from a tyrannous, patriarchal Iranian theocracy.
And yet there is no comparable solidarity with Palestinians when they collectively defy an unaccountable Israeli occupation army that rules over them. When they turn out to protest at the fence Israel has built all around Gaza to imprison them, preventing them from leaving for work or to see family overseas, or to reach hospitals much better equipped than their own that have been under Israeli blockade for years, they are shot down by Israeli snipers.
Where is the applause for those brave Palestinian protesters standing up to their oppressors? Where are the denunciations of Israel for compelling Palestinians to endure a tyrannous, apartheid-enforcing Israeli military?
Why is it entirely unremarkable that Palestinians – young and old, men and women – are regularly beaten or killed by Israel, while the death of a single Iranian woman is enough to reduce the western media to paroxysms of outrage?
And why, just as pertinently, does the West care so much about the lives of young Iranian women and their hijab protests when it appears not to give a damn about these women’s lives, or those of their brothers, when it comes to enforcing decades of western sanctions? Those restrictions have plunged parts of Iranian society into deep and sustained poverty that puts Iranian lives at risk.
Such is the reflexive hypocrisy that Israeli women who have shown no solidarity with Palestinian women abused and killed by the Israeli army turned out last week to cut their hair in a public act of sisterhood with Iranian women.
Western dictates
There is nothing new about these double standards. They are entrenched in western thinking, based on a profoundly racist, colonial worldview – one that sees “the West” as the good guys and everyone else as morally compromised, or irredeemably evil, if they refuse to bow to western dictates.
That is highlighted by the current battle of an 88-year-old Palestinian businessman, Munib al-Masri, to win an apology from Britain.
At his instruction, two eminent lawyers – Luis Moreno Ocampo, a former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, and Ben Emmerson, a former United Nations expert on human rights – have been reviewing evidence of crimes committed by British forces in the years before 1948, when the UK ruled Palestine under a mandate.
When Britain withdrew, it effectively allowed Zionist institutions to take its place and create a self-declared Jewish state of Israel on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland.
The evidence documented by Ocampo and Emmerson – which they describe as “shocking” – includes crimes such as arbitrary killings and detentions, torture, use of human shields, and home demolitions weaponised as collective punishment.
If that all sounds familiar, it should. Israel has been terrorising Palestinians with these same exact policies over the past 74 years. That is because Israel incorporated the British mandate’s “emergency regulations” permitting such crimes into its legal and administrative codes. It simply continued what Britain had started.
Masri hopes to present the 300-page dossier to the UK government later this year. According to the media, it will be “reviewed thoroughly” by the Ministry of Defence. But do not hold your breath waiting for an apology.
The reality is that Ocampo and Emmerson did not need to conduct their research. Nothing they tell the UK government will be a revelation. British officials already know about these crimes. And there is no remorse – as demonstrated by, if nothing else, the fact that Britain continues to back Israel to the hilt even while the Israeli military continues the same reign of state terror.
Israel’s task was to rebrand as a “western-style democracy” the British mandate’s brutal colonial rule over the Palestinian population. It is the reason Israel receives billions of dollars in aid from the US every year, and why it never faces consequences for any of the crimes it commits.
The ugly truth is that westerners dwell permanently inside their own bubble of disinformation, one puffed up by their leaders and the media, that allows them to imagine themselves as the good guys – whatever the evidence actually proves.
The double standards in the West’s treatment of Ukraine compared to Palestine should be a moment when that harsh realisation finally dawns. Sadly, western publics just seem to sink ever deeper into the comforting illusion of self-righteousness.
The post Westerners live in denial, convinced they’re the good guys first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!— T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”, 1925
When many people share thoughts, speech, or conduct that is frequently repeated and becomes automatic, it is fair to call it a social habit. Such habits tend to become invisible and unspeakable. They become part of our taken-for-granted-world.
When I recently wrote an essay about hoarding – “The Last Temptation of Things,” many people got angry with me. A friend wrote to me to say: “I congratulate and curse you for writing this.” He meant it as a complement. I took it as meaning I had touched a raw nerve and it touched off a series of further thoughts about social habits and people’s angry reactions when they are challenged.
Some people who criticized me absurdly complained that I was supporting Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum’s “You Will Own Nothing” campaign, something I have opposed from the start. Others said that I was attacking people who kept mementos and photographs, etc. and that I was advocating living in a shack. This was clearly false. Some got it, of course, and knew that I was using an extreme example to make a point about excessive saving of all sorts of things and how debilitating it is to surround ourselves with far more than we could ever use, need, or even know we have. My case study was a friend’s house that my wife and I had just cleaned out in an exhaustive case of what felt like an exorcism.
Now I see that there is a clear connection between hoarding – or whatever word you choose to give it when the saving of things is excessive – and propaganda. Both are forms of habitual clutter, one mental and the other physical, the former imposed from without and accepted passively and the latter self-created to try to protect from loss. In both cases, the suggestion that your social habits need to be examined is often greeted as a threat to one’s “existence” and elicits anger or dismissal.
Sociologists, of which I am one, have various terms for what I am calling social habits. They don’t speak the language of ordinary people, and so their lingo rarely enters into common discourse to be heard by most people. Such verbiage often just mystifies.
But habit is a plain and clear word, and social habit simply extends the meaning I am referring to. José Ortega Y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, and Max Weber referred to it as “usage” before settling on habit. While usage is accurate, it lacks the stickiness of habit, which is the simplest word and one everyone understands as behavior that has become automatic through frequent repetition.
For example, in the inconsequential realm of clothing fashions, men are now wearing tight leg-fitting pants, and it seems normal to most, just as loose pants did in the past. It will change, of course, and a new or ”old” social fashion habit will replace it and most will go with it. Either way you choose you lose – or win – depending on whether or not you follow the fashions of dress, which mean little or much depending on whether you interpret them symbolically as signifying more than their appearances present.
It is true that all ideas, language usage, and behavior become second nature until they are not. For example, “my bad” may no longer be good, as far as I know, a phrase I have avoided along with “a ton of fun,” “you guys,” and “overseas contingency operations.”
Some social habits persist for a very long time because they are continually reinforced with propaganda that created them in the first place. As Jacques Ellul has emphasized, such propaganda is not the touch of a magic wand. “It is based on slow, constant impregnation. It creates convictions and compliance that are effective only by continuous repetition.” Like a slowly dripping faucet, it drips and drips and drips to reinforce its point.
Take the hatred of Russia promulgated by the U.S. government. It is more than a century old. Few Americans know that the U.S. invaded Russia in 1918 to try to stop the Russian Revolution. Today’s U.S. war against Russia is nothing new, yet many people buy the daily lies about the war in Ukraine because it is a habit of mind, part of their taken-for-granted-world.
Take the CIA assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother, Robert. For decades the U.S. media has worked hand-in-glove with the CIA to reinforce the official lies by calling those who have exposed those lies “conspiracy theorists,” a term that the CIA itself promoted and the media continues to use daily to ridicule dissent. The phrase “conspiracy theorist” is a handy social usage regularly used now to dismiss critics of any official claim, not just the Kennedys’ murders. Additionally, it is used to lump together the most absurd claims available – e.g. a Martian woman gives birth to a cat in Las Vegas – with the exposure of real government conspiracies in order to dismiss both as ridiculous.
Take the U.S. government assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that has been covered up by giving MLK, Jr. his own holiday and reducing his message to pablum. Now you can have a day of service to forget King’s passionate denunciation of the U.S. government as the most violent nation on the earth and the government’s murder of him for his powerful anti-war stance and his campaign for economic justice for all.
Take the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent anthrax attacks. They too were wrapped in propaganda from day one that has been reinforced since, resulting in the social habit shared by the majority that Osama bin Laden and nineteen Arab hijackers planned and carried out the attacks. This propaganda supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the so-called war on terror that has never ended, the destruction of Libya, Afghanistan, the ongoing war against Syria, the aggression toward China, and the U.S. war against Russia, to name the most obvious. And it ushered in twenty-one years and counting of the squelching of civil liberties, government censorship, and surveillance. All this with no mass resistance from a population lost in the taken-for-granted world of mind control. Their minds cluttered with lies.
Take the Covid pandemic propaganda that introduced the New Normal in March 2020 and continues today. Destroying small businesses, crippling the economies, fattening up the elites and the wealthiest classes and corporations, injecting millions with untested mRNA so-called vaccines, this diabolical Big Lie has accustomed people to accepting further restrictions on their natural rights under the guise of protecting their health while severely damaging their health. Despite the fact that all the official claims have been proven false, the fear of death and disease, promoted for many years, has dramatically entered into the social bloodstream and additional censorship of dissenting voices has been embraced.
In all these examples and so many more, people’s minds have been slowly and insidiously filled with ideas and distorted facts that are false and controlling, similar to a hoarder’s accretion of objects that can overwhelm them. The propagandists have stuffed them with “things” that can assuage their fear of emptiness and the consequent possibility of being able to think clearly for themselves. Excessive information is the last thing people need, for as C. Wright Mills said sixty years ago, “… in this age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it.”
Ellul describes the modern person thus:
Above all he is a victim of emptiness – he is a man devoid of meaning. He is very busy, but he is emotionally empty, open to all entreaties and in search of only one thing – something to fill his inner void …. He is available and ready to listen to propaganda. He is the lonely man …. For it, propaganda, encompassing Human Relations, is an incomparable remedy. It corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of a community, to lose oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology that will end loneliness. Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness.
And whenever one questions any of the social habits that sustain people’s illusions, their reactions can be sharp and shrill. To suggest that people collect too many things out of a fear of emptiness, as I did with the hoarding piece, becomes a direct attack on some deep sense they have of themselves. As if the “stuff” were an extension of their identities without which they would drown. Even more threatening to so many is to question their opinions about Covid 19, JFK, RFK, the U.S war against Russia, 9/11, etc., and to suggest they have swallowed massive doses of deep-state propaganda. This often infuriates them.
It is “unspeakable,” as the Trappist monk Thomas Merton said, as quoted by James W. Douglass in his extraordinary book, JFK and The Unspeakable:
One of the awful facts of our age is the evidence that the [world] is stricken indeed, stricken to the very core of its being by the presence of the Unspeakable …. It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience …
Social habits are very hard to break, especially when they are reinforced by official propaganda. They tend to be addictive. Ownership and use of the cell phone is a prime example. Such phones are a key element in the digital revolution that has allowed for increased social control and propaganda. Few can give them up. And when your mind is filled with years of propaganda that has become second-nature, your ability to think independently is extremely limited. There is no place for the creative emptiness that leads to genuine thought. Dissent becomes “conspiracy theory.”
Hollow heads filled with straw indeed.
But Eliot may have been wrong in the way he ended his poem:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.It may end with a bang while many just whimper.
The post Self-Destructive Social Habits, Loneliness, and Propaganda first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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The country’s judiciary says those marching against the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini will be tried
Iran’s judiciary has announced that it will hold public trials for as many as 1,000 people detained during recent protests in Tehran alone – and more than a thousand others outside the capital – as international concern grew over Iran’s response to the protests that began with the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after her arrest.
The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said he was shocked by the number of innocent protesters who were being illegally and violently arrested. Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, has already announced that she is to ask the European Union to sanction the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation.
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Listen to a reading of this article:
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The US is preparing to station multiple nuclear-capable B-52 bombers in northern Australia in what the mass media are calling a “signal to China,” yet another example of Australia’s forced subservience as a US military/intelligence asset.
“Having bombers that could range and potentially attack mainland China could be very important in sending a signal to China that any of its actions over Taiwan could also expand further,” Becca Wasser from the Centre for New American Security think tank told the ABC.
“This is a dangerous escalation. It makes Australia an even bigger part of the global nuclear weapons threat to humanity’s very existence – and by rising military tensions it further destabilises our region,” tweeted Greens Senator David Shoebridge of the incendiary provocation.
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This is a dangerous escalation. It makes Australia an even bigger part of the global nuclear weapons threat to humanity’s very existence – and by rising military tensions it further destabilises our region https://t.co/OTSSfV25fJ
— David Shoebridge (@DavidShoebridge) October 30, 2022
A new Australian Financial Review article titled “Australia’s alliances in Asia are a tale of two regions” candidly discusses the Biden administration’s recent sanctions geared toward kneecapping the Chinese tech industry in what the author James Curran correctly says “is unambiguously a new cold war.” Curran describes the impossible task Australia has of straddling the ever-widening divide between its number one trading partner China and its number one “security” partner the US, while Washington continually pressures Canberra and ASEAN states toward greater and greater enmity with Beijing.
“ASEAN countries, as much as Australia, have much at stake in resisting the onset of a bifurcated world,” Curran writes.
But that bifurcation is being shoved through at breakneck pace, using both hard and soft power measures. Australians have been hammered with increasingly aggressive anti-China propaganda, and as a result nearly half of them now say they would be willing to go to war to defend Taiwan from an attack by the mainland, with a third saying they’d support a war against China over the Solomon Islands.
A recent Cambridge study found that this hostility toward China has been on the rise in recent years not just in Australia but throughout the “liberal democracies” of the US-centralized power alliance. But what’s interesting is that public opinion is exactly reversed in the much larger remainder of the Earth’s population, with people outside the US power cluster just as fond of China as those within that power cluster are hostile toward it. This relationship is largely mirrored with Russia as well.
“Among the 1.2bn people who inhabit the world’s liberal democracies, three-quarters (75%) now hold a negative view of China, and 87% a negative view of Russia,” the report reads. “However, for the 6.3bn people who live in the rest of the world, the picture is reversed. In these societies, 70% feel positively towards China, and 66% positively towards Russia.”
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Fascinating research by the University of Cambridge!
Whilst in Western liberal democracies (1.2bn people) 75% hold a negative view of China, in the rest of the world (6.3bn people) 70% feel positively towards China. In those countries, China has even overtaken the US!
Small 🧵 pic.twitter.com/CGF8KtEdis
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) October 30, 2022
The report finds that in the “developing” world, approval of China is higher than approval of the US:
“For the first time ever, slightly more people in developing countries (62%) are favourable towards China than towards the United States (61%). This is especially so among the 4.6bn people living in countries supported by the Belt and Road Initiative, among whom almost two-thirds hold a positive view of China, compared to just a quarter (27%) in non-participating countries.”
The report finds that while Russia’s approval has plummeted in the west, it maintains broad support in the east despite the invasion of Ukraine:
“However, the real terrain of Russia’s international influence lies outside of the West. 75% of respondents in South Asia, 68% in Francophone Africa, 62% in Southeast Asia continue to view the country positively in spite of the events of this year.”
I first became aware of the Cambridge study via a Twitter thread by Arnaud Bertrand (who is a great follow if you happen to use that demonic app). Bertrand highlights data in the study showing that US-aligned nations’ opinion of China began plummeting not after the Covid outbreak in late 2019, but after 2017 when the US began ramping up its propaganda campaign against Beijing.
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A puzzling observation in today's world is that almost no Western leader has laid out a positive vision for the future.
Take Biden for instance. His big vision is "democracies vs autocracies". Meaning his vision for the future of the world is conflict. How positive is that?
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) October 24, 2022
Apart from the fact that the USA’s immensely sophisticated propaganda machine naturally focuses primarily on where the world’s wealth and military firepower rests while pushing its global agendas, and apart from the fact that those in Belt and Road Initiative countries apparently believe they benefit from their economic relationships with China, the disparity between the “developed” and “developing” worlds in their perceptions of the US and its enemies may also be partly explained by another thought-provoking Arnaud Bertrand thread, which I will quote in its entirety here:
A puzzling observation in today’s world is that almost no Western leader has laid out a positive vision for the future.
Take Biden for instance. His big vision is “democracies vs autocracies”. Meaning his vision for the future of the world is conflict. How positive is that?
Contrast this with China: between “national rejuvenation” and “common prosperity” at home and the “global security initiative” as their vision for improved international relations; everyone is very clear on the journey they’re embarked on.
This is a key, if not the key reason why the “West” has no chance in hell to convince the “rest” to join them.
There’s simply nothing to join! Except conflict, I guess, but you join a conflict to fight for a vision – for a better world – the conflict itself cannot be the vision!
This reminds me of what George Kennan, the architect of the cold war, wrote: to win he said that America had to “create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problems of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a World Power, and which has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own among the major ideological currents of the time”
Does America give this impression today?
Even in my own country, France. Ask any French person what Macron’s vision for the future of France and the world is, what the grand plan is, and you’ll get very puzzled looks. “Reform the pension system so we have to work longer?”
The truth is there’s nothing, nada, rien!
What we have essentially in the West are political operators. They think their jobs are to get reelected and to attempt to move whatever metrics the electorate cares about: GDP, unemployment, debt levels, CO2 emissions, etc. Actual leaders have gone extinct (or gone East).
It’s actually quite sad, really speaks to the levels of intellectual decrepitude in the West today. The time of the Enlightenment, the big revolutions is well and truly gone. We’re stuck with our mediocre operators.
It’s also why this is such a dangerous time. A positive vision brings confidence, it brings hope, it motivates, it makes people look forward to what’s to come. The West has none of that today.
The future is scary, the dominant feelings are fear and anger.
And when there’s a lot of fear and anger, these feelings need to be directed somewhere. And our operators certainly don’t want it to be them! So it’s China, Iran, all those “foreigners” who “hate our freedom”.
Perfect recipe for a very bad conflict…
Please, don’t get fooled!
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MUST WATCH: The brilliant Professor Sachs speaks the truth and offers his wisdom and advice for humanity. "The real struggle of the world is to live together and overcome our common crises of environment and inequality."
Original video: https://t.co/WFZAbS1cPG pic.twitter.com/zhW3IIOXQ6
— Kimmee Lee (@KimmeeLee2) October 22, 2022
Bertrand’s musings echo a recent quote by Professor Jeffrey Sachs at the Athens Democracy Forum: “The single biggest mistake of president Biden was to say ‘the greatest struggle of the world is between democracies and autocracies’. The real struggle of the world is to live together and overcome our common crises of environment and inequality.”
Indeed, we could be striving toward a positive vision for the future, one which seeks “common prosperity” and “improved international relations,” one which works to remedy inequality and address the looming environmental crisis. Instead the world is being bifurcated, split in two, which history tells us is probably an indication that something extremely terrible is on the horizon for our species unless we drastically change course.
It’s worth keeping all this in mind, as nuclear-capable bombers are deployed to Australia; as NATO weighs moving nuclear weapons to Russia’s border in Finland; as the Biden administration goes all in on economic warfare with China regardless of the consequences; as Russia accuses the US of “lowering the nuclear threshold” by modernizing the arsenal in Europe into “battlefield weapons”; as the Council on Foreign Relations president openly admits that the US is now working to halt China’s rise on the world stage; as China declares its willingness to deepen ties with Russia on all levels.
We could have such a wonderful, healthy, collaborative world, and it’s being flushed down the toilet because an empire is using its leverage over the wealthiest populations on our planet to work toward dominating all the other populations. This stupid, insane quest to shore up unipolar planetary domination is costing us everything while gaining us nothing, and it’s going to be the poorest and weakest among us who suffer the most as a result.
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SOCHI, RUSSIA – OCTOBER 21, 2021: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin addresses the 18th Annual Meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club titled “Global Shake-Up in the 21st Century: The Individual, Values, and the State.” Dmitry Feoktistov/TASS
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, speaking at the Valdai International Discussion Club meeting on October 27, gave a speech that described his ideology, and he took questions from the audience and answered further regarding a number of highly important issues. Everything that he said there is consistent with what he has previously stated, but this event was perhaps the fullest-ever exposition of his views, which I, as an American historian, have always found to be remarkably similar to the views that U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) stated, especially in private, and which guided his actions both domestically and especially in international affairs. FDR was passionately anti-imperialistic, and believed that both of the two World Wars resulted from clashes between imperialistic powers, and that the top goal for the post-WW-II world must be to outlaw all empires and replace them all by a United Nations (he even named it) that would be a global federation of all nations and in whose General Assembly each nation will have one vote, but which will also have a Security Council in which each one of the major world powers will negotiate differences between themselves so that no major world power will be able to violate the national sovereignty of any other major world power — and this would include allowing the ability (such as JFK negotiated with Khrushchev during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis) to prevent any other major world power from using any nation that borders any other major world power (such as Cuba does near America), to ally itself (especially militarily) with another major world power. (This principle would likewise limit complete sovereignty both for Ukraine and Taiwan — and for any other nation that borders a major world power.) FDR also believed that the U.N. must have the global monopoly control over all geostrategic weaponry, as a further means of outlawing imperialism and the wars that imperialism produces. (Harry S. Truman castrated FDR’s U.N. plan, which he despised.)
Too little attention has been paid by historians to FDR’s ideology, which really drew very heavily from Abraham Lincoln’s, which, in turn, drew very heavily from the authors of the Declaration of Independence and of the U.S. Constitution — especially from Thomas Jefferson and James Wilson. Consequently, readers here who are acquainted with the writings by those authors (the people who wrote those two documents) will find here a 21st Century version of that ideology, coming from a Russian historical and cultural perspective. These are highlights only, both from Putin’s speech and from his answers to questions which were posed to him after it:
Valdai International Discussion Club meeting
27 October 2022
Ladies and gentlemen, friends. …
We have used the Valdai Club platform to discuss, more than once, the major and serious shifts that have already taken place and are taking place around the world, the risks posed by the degradation of global institutions, the erosion of collective security principles and the substitution of “rules” for international law. I was tempted to say “we are clear about who came up with these rules,” but, perhaps, that would not be an accurate statement. We have no idea whatsoever who made these rules up, what these rules are based on, or what is contained inside these rules. …
The so-called West which is, of course, a theoretical construct since it is not united and clearly is a highly complex conglomerate, but I will still say that the West has taken a number of steps in recent years and especially in recent months that are designed to escalate the situation. As a matter of fact, they always seek to aggravate matters, which is nothing new, either. This includes the stoking of war in Ukraine, the provocations around Taiwan, and the destabilisation of the global food and energy markets. To be sure, the latter was, of course, not done on purpose, there is no doubt about it. The destabilisation of the energy market resulted from a number of systemic missteps made by the Western authorities that I mentioned above. As we can see now, the situation was further aggravated by the destruction of the pan-European gas pipelines. This is something otherworldly altogether, but we are nevertheless witnessing these sad developments.
Global power is exactly what the so-called West has at stake in its game. But this game is certainly dangerous, bloody and, I would say, dirty. It denies the sovereignty of countries and peoples, their identity and uniqueness, and tramples upon other states’ interests. In any case, even if denial is the not the word used, they are doing it in real life. No one, except those who create these rules I have mentioned is entitled to retain their identity: everyone else must comply with these rules. …
Belief in one’s infallibility is very dangerous; it is only one step away from the desire of the infallible to destroy those they do not like, or as they say, to cancel them. Just think about the meaning of this word.
Even at the very peak of the Cold War, the peak of the confrontation of the two systems, ideologies and military rivalry, it did not occur to anyone to deny the very existence of the culture, art, and science of other peoples, their opponents. …
At one time, the Nazis reached the point of burning books, and now the Western “guardians of liberalism and progress” have reached the point of banning Dostoyevsky and Tchaikovsky. The so-called “cancel culture” and in reality – as we said many times – the real cancellation of culture is eradicating everything that is alive and creative and stifles free thought in all areas, be it economics, politics or culture.
Today, liberal ideology itself has changed beyond recognition. If initially, classic liberalism was understood to mean the freedom of every person to do and say as they pleased, in the 20th century the liberals started saying that the so-called open society had enemies and that the freedom of these enemies could and should be restricted if not cancelled. …
But Dostoevsky will live on, as will Tchaikovsky, Pushkin, no matter how much they would have liked the opposite.
Standardisation, financial and technological monopoly, the erasure of all differences is what underlies the Western model of globalisation, which is neocolonial in nature. Their goal was clear – to establish the unconditional dominance of the West in the global economy and politics. To do that, the West put at its service the entire planet’s natural and financial resources, as well as all intellectual, human and economic capabilities, while alleging it was a natural feature of the so-called new global interdependence.
As soon as non-western countries began to derive some benefits from globalisation, above all, the large nations in Asia, the West immediately changed or fully abolished many of those rules. And the so-called sacred principles of free trade, economic openness, equal competition, even property rights were suddenly forgotten, completely. They change the rules on the go, on the spot wherever they see an opportunity for themselves. …
So currently, an overwhelming majority of the international community is demanding democracy in international affairs and rejecting all forms of authoritarian dictate by individual countries or groups of countries. What is this if not the direct application of democratic principles to international relations?
What stance has the “civilised” West adopted? If you are democrats, you are supposed to welcome the natural desire for freedom expressed by billions of people, but no. The West is calling it undermining the liberal rules-based order. It is resorting to economic and trade wars, sanctions, boycotts and colour revolutions, and preparing and carrying out all sorts of coups.
One of them led to tragic consequences in Ukraine in 2014. They supported it and even specified the amount of money they had spent on this coup. They have the cheek to act as they please and have no scruples about anything they do. They killed [Qasem] Soleimani, an Iranian general. You can think whatever you want about Soleimani, but he was a foreign state official. They killed him in a third country and assumed responsibility. What is that supposed to mean, for crying out loud? What kind of world are we living in? …
Over a thousand years, Russia has developed a unique culture of interaction between all world religions. There is no need to cancel anything, be it Christian values, Islamic values or Jewish values. We have other world religions as well. All you need to do is respect each other. In a number of our regions – I just know this firsthand – people celebrate Christian, Islamic, Buddhist and Jewish holidays together, and they enjoy doing so, as they congratulate each other and are happy for each other. …
I am convinced that real democracy in a multipolar world is primarily about the ability of any nation – I emphasise – any society or any civilisation to follow its own path and organise its own socio-political system. …
The world is diverse by nature and Western attempts to squeeze everyone into the same pattern are clearly doomed. Nothing will come out of them.
The conceited aspiration to achieve global supremacy and, essentially, to dictate or preserve leadership by dictate is really reducing the international prestige of the leaders of the Western world, including the United States, and increasing mistrust in their ability to negotiate in general. They say one thing today and another tomorrow; they sign documents and renounce them, they do what they want. There is no stability in anything. How documents are signed, what was discussed, what can we hope for – all this is completely unclear.
Previously, only a few countries dared argue with America and it looked almost sensational, whereas now it has become routine for all manner of states to reject Washington’s unfounded demands despite its continued attempts to exert pressure on everyone. …
As an independent and distinctive civilization, Russia has never considered and does not consider itself an enemy of the West. Americophobia, Anglophobia, Francophobia, and Germanophobia are the same forms of racism as Russophobia or anti-Semitism, and, incidentally, xenophobia in all its guises. …
In 2000, after I was elected President, I will always remember what I faced: I will remember the price we paid for destroying the den of terrorism in the North Caucasus, which the West almost openly supported at the time. …
What is more, not only did the West actively support terrorists on Russian territory, but in many ways it nurtured this threat. We know this. Nevertheless, after the situation had stabilised, when the main terrorist gangs had been defeated, including thanks to the bravery of the Chechen people, we decided not to turn back, not to play the offended, but to move forward, to build relations even with those who actually acted against us, to establish and develop relations with all who wanted them, based on mutual benefit and respect for one another. …
Russia is not challenging the Western elites. Russia is simply upholding its right to exist and to develop freely. Importantly, we will not become a new hegemon ourselves. Russia is not suggesting replacing a unipolar world with a bipolar, tripolar or other dominating order, or replacing Western domination with domination from the East, North or South. This would inevitably lead to another impasse. …
I am convinced that dictatorship can only be countered through free development of countries and peoples; the degradation of the individual can be set off by the love of a person as a creator; primitive simplification and prohibition can be replaced with the flourishing complexity of culture and tradition.
The significance of today’s historical moment lies in the opportunities for everyone’s democratic and distinct development path, which is opening up before all civilisations, states and integration associations. We believe above all that the new world order must be based on law and right, and must be free, distinctive and fair.
The world economy and trade also need to become fairer and more open. Russia considers the creation of new international financial platforms inevitable; this includes international transactions. These platforms should be above national jurisdictions. They should be secure, depoliticized and automated and should not depend on any single control centre. Is it possible to do this or not? Of course it is possible. This will require a lot of effort. Many countries will have to pool their efforts, but it is possible. …
Clearly, we have a common and very pragmatic interest in free and open scientific and technological exchange. United, we stand to win more than if we act separately. The majority should benefit from these exchanges, not individual super-rich corporations.
How are things going today? If the West is selling medicines or crop seeds to other countries, it tells them to kill their national pharmaceutical industries and selection. In fact, it all comes down to this: its machine tool and equipment supplies destroy the local engineering industry. I realised this back when I served as Prime Minister. Once you open your market to a certain product group, the local manufacturer instantly goes belly up and it is almost impossible for him to raise his head. That’s how they build relationships. That’s how they take over markets and resources, and countries lose their technological and scientific potential. This is not progress; it is enslavement and reducing economies to primitive levels.
Technological development should not increase global inequality, but rather reduce it. …
Let me emphasise again that sovereignty and a unique path of development in no way mean isolation or autarky. On the contrary, they are about energetic and mutually beneficial cooperation based on the principles of fairness and equality. …
Unity among humankind cannot be created by issuing commands such as “do as I do” or “be like us.” It is created with consideration for everyone’s opinion and with a careful approach to the identity of every society and every nation. This is the principle that can underlie long-term cooperation in a multipolar world. …
Thank you very much.
Fyodor Lukyanov: Thank you very much, Mr President, for such an all-encompassing speech.
I cannot but spontaneously grasp at the conclusion, as long as you mentioned the revolutionary situation, those at the top and those at the bottom. Those of us who are a bit older studied all this at school. Who do you associate yourself with, those at the top or the bottom?
Vladimir Putin: With the bottom, of course, I am from the bottom.
My mother was… As you know, I said it many times that I come from a working family. My father was a foreman, he graduated from a vocational school. My mother did not receive education, even secondary, she was a mere worker, and had many jobs; she worked as a nurse in a hospital, and as a janitor and a night watchman. She did not want to leave me in kindergarten or in nursery.
So therefore, I naturally am very sensitive – thank God this has been the case until now and, I hope, will continue – to the pulse of what an ordinary person lives though.
Fyodor Lukyanov: So, on the global level, you are among those who “don’t want to [live in the old way]?”
Vladimir Putin: At the global level, naturally, it is one of my responsibilities to monitor what is going on the global level. I stand for what I just said, for democratic relations with regard to the interests of all participants in international communication, not just the interests of the so-called golden billion. …
Fyodor Lukyanov: Excellent.
Mr President, your decision to start a special military operation in February came as a big surprise for everyone, including the majority of Russian citizens. We know that you have described the logic and reasons for that decision many times. However, decisions of this importance are hardly made without a special motive. What happened before you made the decision?
Vladimir Putin: I have said this many times, and you will hardly hear anything new today. What happened? I will not speak about NATO’s expansion to Ukraine, which was absolutely unacceptable to us, and everyone knew that but simply disregarded our security interests. … I said at the outset, on the day the operation started, that the most important thing for us is to help Donbass. I have already mentioned this, and if we had acted differently, we would not have been able to deploy our Armed Forces on both sides of Donbass. …
Ivan Safranchuk: Ivan Safranchuk, MGIMO University.
… Is it true that the world is on the verge of the possible use of nuclear weapons? How will Russia act in these circumstances? …
Vladimir Putin: Nuclear provocation and the inflaming of the possibility that Russia might theoretically use nuclear weapons are being used to reach these goals: to influence our friends, our allies, and neutral states by telling them, look at whom you support; Russia is such a scary country, do not support it, do not cooperate with it, do not trade with it. This is, in fact, a primitive goal.
What is happening in reality? After all, we have never said anything proactively about Russia potentially using nuclear weapons. All we did was hint in response to statements made by Western leaders. …
Finally, about using or not using [nuclear weapons]. The only country in the world which has used nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state was the United States of America; they used it twice against Japan. What was the goal? There was no military need for it at all. What was the military practicability to use nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, against civilians? Had there been a threat to the US territorial integrity? Of course not. It was not practical from the military point of view either, because Japan’s war machine had already been destroyed, it was not able to resist, so what was the point in dealing the final blow with nuclear weapons?
By the way, Japanese textbooks usually say that it was the Allies that struck a nuclear blow at Japan. They have such a firm grip over Japan that the Japanese cannot even write the truth in their school textbooks. … As for Russia…We have the Military Doctrine, and they should read it. One of its articles explains the cases when, why, in relation to what and how Russia considers it possible to use weapons of mass destruction in the form of nuclear weapons to protect its sovereignty, territorial integrity and to ensure the safety of the Russian people. …
Fyodor Lukyanov: All right. And what about the role of a leader who has to make a decision on this issue?
Vladimir Putin: We are ready to settle any issues. We are not refusing. Last December we offered the United States to continue the dialogue on strategic stability but received no response. It was in December of last year. Silence. …
Fyodor Lukyanov: Two years ago, you spoke highly about President Erdogan at the Valdai Club meeting, saying that he did not go back on his words but did what he said he would do. Many things have happened over the past two years. Has your opinion of him changed?
Vladimir Putin: No. He is a competent and strong leader who is guided above all, and possibly exclusively, by the interests of Turkiye, its people and its economy. This largely explains his position on energy issues and, for example, on the construction of TurkStream.
We have proposed building a gas hub in Turkiye for European consumers. Turkiye has supported this idea, of course, first of all, based on its own interests. We have many common interests in tourism, the construction sector and agriculture. There are many areas where we have common interests.
President Erdogan never lets anyone get a free ride or acts in the interests of third countries. He upholds above all the interests of Turkiye, including in dialogue with us. In this sense, Turkiye as a whole and personally President Erdogan are not easy partners; many of our decisions are born amid long and difficult debates and negotiations.
But there is a desire on both sides to reach agreements, and we usually do it. In this sense, President Erdogan is a consistent and reliable partner. This is probably his most important trait, that he is a reliable partner. …
Kubat Rakhimov: I am Kubat Rakhimov from the Kyrgyz Republic.
… What do you think of the possibility of relocating the capital of the Russian Federation to the centre of the country, that is, to the centre of the Eurasian continent, so it can be closer to countries in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation?
Thank you.
Vladimir Putin: … Yes, we have talked about this. The Russian capital has been moved several times in the history of the Russian state. Historically and mentally, the centre of Russia is always associated with Moscow and, in my opinion, there is no need.
There are problems in the capital’s development as a metropolitan area, but I must say that, with Mayor Sobyanin’s team, these problems are addressed and resolved much better than in many other countries and metropolitan areas. …
Alexander Prokhanov: Mr President, very often foreigners ask us, “What can you, Russians, offer to the modern world? Where are your Nobel Prize winners? Where are your great discoveries, industrial and scientific achievements?” My colleagues often answer, “Well, what about the great Russian culture? Pushkin? Rublev? Russian icons? The marvellous Russian architecture?” They say, “But this was all in the past. What about today?”
When I listened to you today, it dawned on me what Russia can offer to the world: Russia can offer a religion of justice, because this religion, this feeling is at the heart of all Russian culture and Russian self-sacrifice. And today, Russia is making this sacrifice, essentially, it is standing up alone to the rest of the world, the cruel Western world, waging this fight for justice. … Maybe we should make the current Russian ideology a religion of justice?
Vladimir Putin: You know, you just said that we are making sacrifices for the sake of other peoples. I’ll argue with you here. We are not sacrificing anything. We are working to strengthen our sovereignty, and it is in our own interests. First of all, strengthening our financial and economic sovereignty, it will lay the foundation for our future growth – technological, educational and scientific growth.
Whether we have Nobel Prize laureates or not. When did Alferov make his invention? He was awarded the Nobel Prize for it after 30 years – or how many? Is that all that matters? The former President of the United States was awarded a Nobel prize. Is this an indicator of real achievement? With all due respect to both the Nobel Committee and the winner of this remarkable Nobel Prize, is that the only indicator?
The post Putin at Valdai first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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The official narrative promoted by the entire western political/media class is that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February of this year solely because he is evil and hates freedom. He wants to conquer as much of Europe as possible because he cannot stand free democracies, because he is another Adolf Hitler.
The official narrative is that while Russia is in Ukraine solely because its leader is an evil monster like Hitler, the US is in Ukraine solely because its leaders are righteous. The United States is providing arms, military intelligence, and assistance on the ground from special ops forces and CIA officers to Ukraine, as well as implementing an unprecedented regime of economic warfare against Russia, solely because the US loves its good friends the Ukrainians and wants to protect their freedom and democracy.
If you dispute any part of the official Ukraine narrative, you are an evil monster, and a disinformation agent. Because Vladimir Putin is the same as Adolf Hitler, you are also the same as Neville Chamberlain, and are guilty of the cardinal sin of supporting appeasement.
Because you are an evil disinformation agent Neville Chamberlain appeasement monster, it is legitimate to censor you. It is legitimate to accuse you of being secretly paid by the Russian government. It is legitimate to swarm you with coordinated astroturf trolls working to shout you down and overwhelm you. It is legitimate to publish propagandistic smear pieces about you. All normal expectations of public discourse go out the window, because you are a monster, not a person.
If you are tempted to ask questions which put a wobble on the official narrative, you must resist this urge at all cost. Don’t ask why western officials, scholars and strategists have spent years warning that the actions of western governments would lead to this war. Don’t ask what people are talking about when they say the US provoked this war, or when they say the US is using this war to advance strategic agendas it has had in place for years, or when they suggest that these things might have something to do with why the US is obstructing diplomatic solutions at every turn. If you ask questions like these, you are the worst person in the world.
Per the official narrative, if you confront powerful lawmakers on their support for US interventionism in Ukraine, you are “parroting pro-Putin talking points” and spreading “Russian disinformation“. Questioning officials of the most powerful government in the world about the most consequential decisions being made in the world is violence, and is not allowed.
I am sorry, you all aren’t “anti war protesters”, you are dangerous propagandists who are literally making a mockery of the anti war movement.
I have never had the pleasure of responding to
ridiculous internet disinformation in person before. Thank you for the opportunity ✌
https://t.co/xzTLQCymgO— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) October 28, 2022
If you claim you are objecting to the US using proxy warfare in Ukraine on anti-war grounds, you are lying; you are not anti-war. You are only anti-war if you support the same positions on Ukraine as noted anti-war activists John Bolton, Bill Kristol, Tom Cotton, and Mike Pompeo. If you want to learn about the true anti-war position, consult reliable anti-war publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post.
The official narrative on Ukraine is that the US empire and its media never lie or circulate propaganda about wars that the US is involved in. If you dispute this, you are lying and circulating propaganda. That’s why it’s necessary to have so much censorship and organized trolling and mass media reports reminding you how good and righteous this war is: it’s to protect you from lies and propaganda.
If any part of the official narrative on Ukraine sounds suspicious to you, this means you have been infected by Russian disinformation. Do not breathe a word of the thoughts you’ve been thinking to anyone, or else you will be guilty of spreading Russian disinformation and will become the enemy of the free world.
Remember, good citizen: we must oppose Russian propaganda at all costs to protect our western values of free expression, free thought, free press, and free democracy. So do not question any part of the official Ukraine narrative. Or else.
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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.
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Mainstream punditry in the latter half of 2022 is rife with op-eds arguing that the US needs to vastly increase military spending because a world war is about to erupt, and they always frame it as though this would be something that happens to the US, as though its own actions would have nothing to do with it. As though it would not be the direct result of the US-centralized empire continually accelerating towards that horrific event while refusing every possible diplomatic off-ramp due to its inability to relinquish its goal of total unipolar planetary domination.
The latest example of this trend is an article titled “Could America Win a New World War? — What It Would Take to Defeat Both China and Russia” published by Foreign Affairs, a magazine that is owned and operated by the supremely influential think tank Council on Foreign Relations.
“The United States and its allies must plan for how to simultaneously win wars in Asia and Europe, as unpalatable as the prospect may seem,” writes the article’s author Thomas G Mahnken, adding that in some ways “the United States and its allies will have an advantage in any simultaneous war” in those two continents.
Western arms systems are among the best in the world—but to win a potential conflict against both China and Russia, the United States will also need to develop new fighting techniques, writes Thomas Mahnken.https://t.co/1xLExCQx5D
— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) October 27, 2022
But Mahnken doesn’t claim a world war against Russia and China would be a walk in the park; he also argues that in order to win such a war the US will need to — you guessed it — drastically increase its military spending.
“The United States clearly needs to increase its defense manufacturing capacity and speed,” Mahnken writes. “In the short term, that involves adding shifts to existing factories. With more time, it involves expanding factories and opening new production lines. To do both, Congress will have to act now to allocate more money to increase manufacturing.”
But exploding US weapons spending is still inadequate, Mahnken argues, saying that “the United States should work with its allies to increase their military production and the size of their weapons and munitions stockpiles” as well.
Mahnken says this world war could be sparked “if China initiated a military operation to take Taiwan, forcing the United States and its allies to respond,” as though there would be no other options on the table besides launching into nuclear age World War Three to defend an island next to the Chinese mainland that calls itself the Republic of China. He writes that “Moscow, meanwhile, could decide that with the United States bogged down in the western Pacific, it could get away with invading more of Europe,” demonstrating the bizarre Schrödinger’s cat western propaganda paradox that Putin is always simultaneously (A) getting destroyed and humiliated in Ukraine and (B) on the cusp of waging hot war with NATO.
It's crazy how many people are making entire careers out of advocating the worst thing that could possibly happen. pic.twitter.com/GfmBrNDEDg
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 27, 2022
Again, this is just the latest in an increasingly common genre of mainstream western punditry.
In “The skeptics are wrong: The U.S. can confront both China and Russia,” The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin wags his finger at Democrats who think aggressions against Russia should be prioritized and Republicans who think that military and financial attention should be devoted to China, arguing porque no los dos?
In “Could The U.S. Military Fight Russia And China At The Same Time?“, 19FortyFive’s Robert Farley answers in the affirmative, writing that “the immense fighting power of the US armed forces would not be inordinately strained by the need to wage war in both theaters” and concluding that “the United States can fight both Russia and China at once… for a while, and with the help of some friends.”
In “Can the US Take on China, Iran and Russia All at Once?” Bloomberg’s Hal Brands answers that it would be very difficult and recommends escalating in Ukraine and Taiwan and selling Israel more advanced weaponry to get a step ahead of Russia, China and Iran respectively.
In “International Relations Theory Suggests Great-Power War Is Coming,” the Atlantic Council’s Matthew Kroenig writes for Foreign Policy that a global democracies-versus-autocracies showdown is coming “with the United States and its status quo-oriented democratic allies in NATO, Japan, South Korea, and Australia on one side and the revisionist autocracies of China, Russia, and Iran on the other,” and that aspiring foreign policy experts should adjust their expectations accordingly.
When they’re not arguing that World War Three is coming and we must all prepare to fight it and win, they’re arguing that a global conflict is already upon us and we must begin acting like it, as in last month’s New Yorker piece “What if We’re Already Fighting the Third World War with Russia?”
New: The skeptics are wrong: The U.S. can confront both China and Russia https://t.co/raxePmSa0T by me @PostOpinions
— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) August 4, 2022
These Beltway swamp monster pontifications are directed not just at the general public but at government policymakers and strategists as well, and it should disturb us all that their audiences are being encouraged to view a global conflict of unspeakable horror like it’s some kind of natural disaster that people don’t have any control over.
Every measure should be taken to avoid a world war in the nuclear age. If it looks like that’s where we’re headed, the answer is not to ramp up weapons production and create entire industries dedicated to making it happen, the answer is diplomacy, de-escalation and detente. These pundits frame the rise of a multipolar world as something that must inevitably be accompanied by an explosion of violence and human suffering, when in reality we’d only wind up there as a result of decisions that were made by thinking human beings on both sides.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s no omnipotent deity decreeing from on high that we must live in a world where governments brandish armageddon weapons at each other and humanity must either submit to Washington or resign itself to cataclysmic violence of planetary consequence. We could just have a world where the peoples of all nations get along with each other and work together toward the common good rather than working to dominate and subjugate each other.
As Jeffrey Sachs recently put it, “The single biggest mistake of president Biden was to say ‘the greatest struggle of the world is between democracies and autocracies’. The real struggle of the world is to live together and overcome our common crises of environment and inequality.”
MUST WATCH: The brilliant Professor Sachs speaks the truth and offers his wisdom and advice for humanity. "The real struggle of the world is to live together and overcome our common crises of environment and inequality."
Original video: https://t.co/WFZAbS1cPG pic.twitter.com/zhW3IIOXQ6
— Kimmee Lee (@KimmeeLee2) October 22, 2022
We could have a world where our energy and resources go toward increasing human thriving and learning to collaborate with this fragile biosphere we evolved in. Where all our scientific innovation is directed toward making this planet a better place to live instead of channeling it into getting rich and finding new ways to explode human bodies. Where our old models of competition and exploitation give way to systems of collaboration and care. Where poverty, toil and misery gradually move from accepted norms of human existence to dimly remembered historical record.
Instead we’re getting a world where we’re being hammered harder and harder with propaganda encouraging us to accept global conflict as an unavoidable reality, where politicians who voice even the mildest support for diplomacy are shouted down and demonized until they bow to the gods of war, where nuclear brinkmanship is framed as safety and de-escalation is branded as reckless endangerment.
We don’t have to submit to this. We don’t have to keep sleepwalking into dystopia and armageddon to the beat of manipulative sociopaths. There are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and we’ve got a whole lot more at stake here than they do.
We can have a healthy world. We’ve just got to want it badly enough. They work so hard to manufacture our consent because, ultimately, they absolutely do require it.
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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.
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Criticizing your government is propaganda.
Disagreeing with neocons is supporting fascism.
Opposing an empire is defending tyranny.
Seeking de-escalation causes escalation.
Nuclear brinkmanship is safety.
Diplomacy is appeasement.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
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Criticism of US foreign policy looks like Russian propaganda to people who’ve spent their entire lives marinating in US propaganda.
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They need so much propaganda, censorship and organized trolling because without those things the public would realize that pouring billions of dollars into an unwinnable conflict that risks nuclear war and makes everyone poorer actually sucks and doesn’t benefit normal people.
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Comparisons of Putin to Hitler only sound profound and relevant if you only just began paying attention to US foreign policy and are therefore unaware that literally every single US enemy is always copiously compared to Hitler. It’s like The Boy Who Cried Wolf, except there is no wolf, and the boy just keeps crying “Wolf!” over and over again, and the villagers never learn their lesson and never stop believing him.
Because mainstream westerners ignored all wars until Ukraine, they don’t know we’ve seen all these tricks before. They don’t know the war propaganda is airing reruns. They think it’s new to compare today’s Official Enemy to Hitler. They never question the atrocity narratives. They don’t know the US always lies about every war. They think it’s a crazy conspiracy theory to suggest that the actions and motives of their government isn’t what they’ve been told. They say “Uh, hello? PUTIN is the one who invaded!” like that obvious fact somehow makes it impossible to be lied to about the other aspects of the war.
Because they weren’t paying attention to all the empire’s tricks leading up to this, they don’t see the same old patterns rolling themselves out yet again, often by the same old voices as before. They don’t know what patterns to watch for, so they don’t see or recognize them. That’s the only reason their eyes don’t reflexively roll when they’re told today’s Official Enemy invaded completely unprovoked, solely because he is evil and hates freedom, or that the US is defending its friends the Ukrainians because it wants to protect freedom and democracy.
If you only just started paying attention and don’t know the US power alliance literally always lies about every war it’s involved in, the war propaganda slides down their throats with zero gag reflex, because they don’t recognize it as propaganda. It’s unfamiliar to them.
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Criticizing the extensively documented western aggressions that led to this war is not the same as saying the invasion is good or that Vladimir Putin is a wonderful person. If this isn’t obvious to you, it’s because US propaganda has turned your brain into soup.
It’s absolutely insane how literally any criticism of the indisputable well-documented western provocations in Ukraine gets shouted down and raged at. You’re only allowed to say this war is completely unprovoked and began solely because Vladimir Putin is evil and hates freedom.
If discussing facts and criticizing the foreign aggressions of the most powerful government in the world is taboo, you might be ruled by tyrants and surrounded by their brainwashed human livestock. If you spend your time raging and yelling at those who advocate peace, you might just be pro-war.
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I gotta hand it to the war propagandists on Ukraine, it’s truly impressive how they’ve managed to convince everyone that the real “anti-war” position on this issue is the one being promoted by John Bolton, Bill Kristol, Tom Cotton and Mike Pompeo.
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Putin is responsible for Putin’s decisions, the US empire is responsible for the US empire’s decisions. Putin is responsible for deciding to invade, the US empire is responsible for the mountains of well-documented aggressions which provoked that decision. This isn’t complicated.
I can respect arguments which assign blame to both the US and Russia. I can respect arguments which place more blame on Russia than on the US empire’s provocations. But the mainstream narrative does neither: it completely exonerates the US from even the tiniest bit of responsibility. Which is just a joke; there is no valid basis on which to claim this war was unprovoked. None. The only people who claim this are the propagandists and those they have propagandized.
But that’s pretty much everyone I wind up arguing with about Ukraine: those who adamantly insist that the most powerful empire that has ever existed bears exactly zero percent of the responsibility for this war. That sycophantic, bootlicking mind virus is what I am always pushing back on.
If you believe the US empire bears zero responsibility for starting this war, even in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary, it’s because empire propaganda has melted your brain. But this is most people. It’s the mainstream perspective on this war.
That demands pushback. Herculean pushback. The fact that the most powerful and belligerent power structure on the face of this earth is predominantly viewed as having no responsibility for the extremely dangerous war it deliberately provoked demands aggressive opposition.
The US deliberately provoked this war. The US is keeping this war going. The US is using this war to advance its geostrategic interests in Europe and Asia. These are facts. When facts are taboo, you are living in a world of lies.
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The Assange case is resonating with so many people because it’s personal. It’s asking each of us what kind of world we want to live in: one where journalists are allowed to tell the truth about the powerful, or one where they are not? It’s a question that demands an answer.
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I speak in a forceful and unmitigated way because that’s how you get people to listen to you, and because it is the right thing to do. If empire critics don’t speak in a forceful and unmitigated way, the only ones speaking in a forceful and unmitigated way will be the imperial pundits and politicians.
It often enrages empire apologists that I speak this way, because they’re not used to criticism of the US empire being voiced like this, but it also sometimes confuses people who agree with me for the same reason. Socialists and anti-imperialists usually mitigate their voices. I don’t, because that’s just a bad habit. If you’re right, you should speak like you’re right. If we don’t, the only ones speaking like they’re right will be those who are wrong. And then those who are wrong are the only ones who will be listened to.
And that’s exactly what’s happening: those with the most influential voices are those who defend the most depraved impulses of the most powerful people in the world. Those are the people who are being listened to right now. So speak like you know you’re right and they’re wrong, because that is indeed the case.
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Fredric Jameson says it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Adyashanti says spiritual people are often more afraid of life than they are of death. These two points seem related. Armageddon feels less scary than sorting our shit out as a species.
The idea of finally turning towards each other and coming into enough intimacy to move from competition-based systems to collaboration-based ones feels more intimidating than the end of the world, so people start hoping for the end because at least that way it’ll be over with. For the same reason people who can’t imagine going on living get suicidal ideations, people who can’t imagine humanity transcending its self-destructive pattering get omnicidal ideations.
This is a major obstacle. Humans need to overcome their fear of life.
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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.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Feature image via Amaury Laporte (CC BY 2.0), formatted for size.
This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
