Watching a buffoon commit suicide is never a pleasant thing.
— Scott Ritter on a Richard Medhurst podcast, May 19, 2022
“Putin is mad and losing his marbles all over Ukraine” goes a certain conventional AmericaNATOstani talking point bombastically broadcast over all mainstream media outlets in the Collective West these days. The idea that the Collective West’s own madness has been projected upon the figure of Vladimir Putin is considered anathema, a heresy promoted by none other than “Mad Vlad” himself, whose propaganda services, we are led to believe, have unusually penetrated our own sacrosanct Disinformation Systems.
How can this be? Put it another way: How is it that fervor for Ukraine, or “Ukraine War Fever!”, can so instantly inundate our psyches and senses, especially after our 2-year long struggle with Covid Disorder, or whatever the “Experts” are calling that Thing now?
Several reasons “Arab Spring” to mind, so to speak, but we need to be more specific in this space. Putin’s “crazy” move into Ukraine was not unanticipated; after all, Western Intel agencies were screaming it from every Major Media platform rooftop, giving us all pause — including myself — not to believe it. How now — “Mad Cow!”–could Putin actually invade sacred Ukraine?
The answer is startlingly easy and obvious to any geopolitical observer worth a grain. Simply stated, the thesis is this: the Collective West has lost its Collective Damned Mind. Mr Putin in Russia knows this, frets over this, yet decided to authorize finally an “operation” that could result in the ultimate calamity, a thermo-nuclear war, if the TransAtlanticans do not come to their “common senses” in time. Putin’s quite coy here, and Lavrov, too, because: Who knows? Russia is both small and large on the world stage, meaning population and resources, and a little “regime change” in Russia could change the equation for certain stakeholders whose stakes have been a bit shaky of late.
The transition from Covid hysteria to Russia invades Ukraine hysteria is perhaps nowhere better described than Fabio Vighi’s March 14 article @Philosphical Salon: “From Covid-19 to Putin-22,” where Mr Vighi elucidates the terms and arrangements of the baton pass, as it were, from one World Crisis to the next. In Vighi’s own words he states: “Putin’s war is the ideal continuation of the ‘war on Covid.’ The overarching aim is to obfuscate the real issue at stake, which consists of pulling mountains ofcheap money into the debt-addicted economy.” Catch-22?
The economic boomerang of “sanctions” against Russia is already being felt — Everywhere! This was a completely stupid idea, and severely questions the sanity of any Western leader so-called. U$A president Joe “Bidenopolous” is the first such leader, manifestly, to lead the roll call of Western “leaders” to be called to account, especially considering his weird dealings in Ukrainian corruption schemes. We’ll leave his compromised son Hunter out of this report, as others with more knowledge of Hunter’s Burisma position are certainly pointing out. Joe Biden’s racist old ass is without question hanging out to dry over Ukraine — and is there a Victoria Nuland or Geoffrey Pyatt in the house? Maybe some Neo-Nazis?
Which brings us all to Azovstal, the Azovstal Steel Works, where so many Ukrainian fighters have suddenly surrendered. Mariupol was the home to the “Azov Battalion,” which prides itself on Nazi iconography, and assumed that the Collective West would have their “back,” in any case. Mr Putin almost made a funny joke a few weeks back, when the defenders of Azov’s home base, reduced to hiding out in the vast steel factory there, said that his forces would seal that area so tightly that not even a fly could go in or out. Harking back to the beginning of the “Special Military Operation,” many Western folks were clamoring for a “No Fly Zone” over Ukraine, presumably to deny Russian aerial operations there Ironically, Mr Putin issued an actual “No Fly Zone” over Azovstal, declaring that not even a fly would be allowed entry or exit. Some still claim that Zelensky’s Ukraine is at least winning the “Media War!,” as if that is a Thing. The reality is that the Ukrainian General Staff wants nothing to do with this war, which is really NATO’s war, but they are stuck with their oaths of duty, and duty they must.
I am not a militarist. However, honestly, anyone reading this note, please understand how horrible it truly is for Ukrainian commanders in the Donbass right now, because they have no choice. The reality is that the Russians killing them really don’t want to be killing them, but they are “under orders,” too. In other words, if you put it up to the Ukrainian General Staff, they would send Zelensky to Miami forever, and work it out with the Russians, who are actually quite close to them, strangely enough. This is not exactly the piece I expected to write, but this is where it stands.
Personally, I hope that the Ukrainians lay down their arms before their arms are literally blown off by Russian munitions. Seriously, DC politicos have been referring to this conflict as a “proxy war,” meaning a proxy war against Russia, with absolutely no explanation why we, the United States of America, should be waging a proxy war against Russia. Just to be perfectly clear: Almighty Russia is in no way waging a “proxy war” against U$.
So, in provisional conclusion, just to be clear, let’s say that it is the Collective West, the TransAtlanticans, the AmericaNATOstanis — not to mention the Nazis! — and not Mr Putin, who’s lost its damned mind!
The war in Ukraine is now in its fourth month, but there is no sign of a ceasefire or resolution anywhere in sight. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has ruled out a ceasefire or concessions, yet he maintains that only diplomacy can end the war. In the meantime, Russian forces are trying to capture eastern Ukraine, while the policy of the United States is to provide military support to Zelenskyy’s government for as long as it might take to weaken Russia in hope that regime change will come to Moscow.
These developments do not bode well either for Ukraine or for the world at large, argues Noam Chomsky, a public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure. In this new and exclusive interview for Truthout, Chomsky urges the forces capable of ending the war to devote their energy to finding constructive ways to put a halt to the unfolding tragedies. In addition, he analyzes the new and highly dangerous global order that is taking shape. Perhaps to the surprise of many, especially considering the ongoing war in Ukraine, he does not describe the U.S.-Russia confrontation as the central element of the new global order in the making. Chomsky is institute professor and professor of linguistics at MIT and currently laureate professor at the University of Arizona, and has published some 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy and international affairs.
C.J. Polychroniou: After months of fighting, there is still very little hope of peace in Ukraine. Russia is now refocusing its efforts on taking control of the east and south of the country with the likely intent of incorporating them into the Russian Federation, while the West has signaled that it will step up military support for Ukraine. In the light of these developments, Ukrainian officials have ruled out a ceasefire or concessions to Moscow, although President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also went on record saying that only diplomacy can end the war. Don’t these two positions cancel each other out? Doesn’t a mutually acceptable agreement for a war to end always contain concessions? Indeed, back in March, the Ukrainian government had signaled its intention that it was willing to make big concessions for the war to end. So, what’s going on? Could it be that neither side is fully invested in peace?
Noam Chomsky: I’ll come back to the questions, but we should carefully consider the stakes. They are very high. They go far beyond Ukraine, desperate and tragic as the situation is there. Anyone with a moral bone in their body will want to think through the issues carefully, without heroic posturing.
Let’s consider what is at stake.
First, of course, is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a crime (to repeat once again) that can be compared to the U.S. invasion of Iraq or the Hitler-Stalin invasion of Poland, the kind of crimes against peace for which Nazi war criminals were hanged — though only the defeated are subject to punishment in what we call “civilization.” In Ukraine itself, there will be a terrible toll as long as the war persists.
There are broader consequences, which are truly colossal. That’s no exaggeration.
One is that tens of millions of people in Asia, Africa and the Middle East are literally facing starvation as the war proceeds, cutting off desperately needed agricultural supplies from the Black Sea region, the primary supplier for many countries, including some already facing utter disaster, like Yemen. Will return to how that is being handled.
A second is the growing threat of terminal nuclear war. It is all too easy to construct plausible scenarios that lead to a rapid climb up the escalation ladder. To take one, right now the U.S. is sending advanced anti-ship missiles to Ukraine. The flagship of the Russian fleet has already been sunk. Suppose more of the fleet is attacked. How does Russia then react? And what follows?
To mention another scenario, so far Russia has refrained from attacking the supply lines used to ship heavy armaments to Ukraine. Suppose it does so, placing it in direct confrontation with NATO — meaning the U.S. We can leave the rest to the imagination.
Other proposals are circulating that would very likely lead to nuclear war — which means the end, for all of us, facts that do not seem to be properly understood. One is the widely voiced call for a no-fly zone, which means attacking anti-aircraft installations inside Russia. The extreme danger of such proposals is understood by some, notably the Pentagon, which so far has been able to veto the most dangerous proposals. For how long in the prevailing mood?
These are horrendous prospects. Prospects: what might happen. When we look at what actually is happening, it gets worse. The Ukraine invasion has reversed the much-too-limited efforts to address global warming — which will soon become global frying. Prior to the invasion, some steps were being taken to avert catastrophe. Now that has all been thrown into reverse. If that continues, we’re done.
One day the IPCC issues another severe warning that if we are to survive, we must start right now to reduce use of fossil fuels. Right now, no delay. The next day President Biden announces vast new expansion of fossil fuel production.
Biden’s call to increase fossil fuel production is sheer political theater. It has nothing to do with today’s fuel prices and inflation, as claimed. It will be years before the poisons reach the market — years that could be spent on moving the world rapidly to renewable energy. That’s perfectly feasible, but barely discussed in the mainstream. There’s no need to comment here. The topic has recently been expertly analyzed by economist Robert Pollin in another of his essential contributions to understanding this critical issue of survival and acting on that understanding.
It is crystal clear that settling the Ukraine crisis is of extraordinary significance, not just for Ukraine itself but because of the calamitous consequences beyond if the war persists.
What then can we do to facilitate ending the tragedy? Let’s begin with virtual truism. The war can end in one of two ways: Either there will be a diplomatic settlement, or one side will capitulate. The horror will go on unless it ends with a diplomatic settlement or capitulation.
That at least should be beyond discussion.
A diplomatic settlement differs from capitulation in one crucial respect: Each side accepts it as tolerable. That’s true by definition, so it is beyond discussion.
Proceeding, a diplomatic settlement must offer Putin some kind of escape hatch — what is now disdainfully called an “off-ramp” or “appeasement” by those who prefer to prolong the war.
That much is understood even by the most dedicated Russia-haters, at least those who can entertain some thought in their minds beyond punishing the reviled enemy. One prominent example is the distinguished foreign policy scholar Graham Allison of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, who also has long direct experience in military affairs. Five years ago, he instructed us that it was then clear that Russia as a whole is a “demonic” society and “deserves to be strangled.” Today he adds that few can doubt that Putin is a “demon,” radically unlike any U.S. leader, who at worst only make mistakes, in his view.
Yet even Allison argues that we must contain our righteous anger and bring the war to a quick end by diplomatic means. The reason is that if the mad demon “is forced to choose between losing and escalating the level of violence and destruction, then, if he’s a rational actor, he’s going to choose the latter” — and we may all be dead, not just Ukrainians.
Putin is a rational actor, Allison argues. And if he is not, all discussion is useless because he can destroy Ukraine and maybe even blow up the world at any moment — an eventuality we cannot prevent by any means that won’t destroy us all.
Proceeding with truism, to oppose or even act to delay a diplomatic settlement is to call for prolonging the war with its grim consequences for Ukraine and beyond. This stand constitutes a ghastly experiment: Let’s see whether Putin will slink away quietly in total defeat, or whether he will prolong the war with all its horrors, or even use the weapons that he indisputably has to devastate Ukraine and to set the stage for terminal war.
All of this seems obvious enough. Or it should, but not in the current climate of hysteria, where such near truisms elicit a great flood of utterly irrational reactions: The monster Putin won’t agree, it’s appeasement, what about Munich, we have to establish our own red lines and keep to them whatever the monster says, etc.
There is no need to dignify such outpourings with a response. They all amount to saying: Let’s not try, and instead undertake the ghastly experiment.
The ghastly experiment is operative U.S. policy, and is supported by a wide range of opinion, always with noble rhetoric about how we must stand up for principle and not permit crime to go unpunished. When we hear this from strong supporters of U.S. crimes, as we commonly do, we can dismiss it as sheer cynicism, the Western counterpart to the most vulgar apparatchiks of the Soviet years, eager to eloquently denounce Western crimes, fully supportive of their own. We also hear it from opponents of U.S. crimes, from people who surely do not want to carry out the ghastly experiment that they are advocating. Here other issues arise: the rising tide of irrationality that is undermining any hope for serious discourse — a necessity if Ukraine is to be spared indescribable tragedy, and even if the human experiment is to persist much longer.
If we can escape cynicism and irrationality, the humane choice for the U.S. and the West is straightforward: seek to facilitate a diplomatic settlement, or at least don’t undermine the option.
On this matter, official Western opinion is split. France, Germany and Italy have been calling for negotiations to establish a ceasefire and move toward a diplomatic settlement. The U.S. and Britain, the West’s two warrior states, object. Their position is that the war must proceed: the ghastly experiment.
The longstanding U.S. policy of undermining diplomacy, which we have reviewed in detail in earlier discussions, was presented in sharper form a few weeks ago at a meeting of NATO powers and others organized by Washington at the U.S. airbase in Ramstein, Germany. The U.S. issued the marching orders: The war must be continued so as to harm Russia. That is the widely advocated “Afghan model” that we have discussed: In the words of the definitive scholarly study of the topic, it is the policy of “fighting Russia to the last Afghan” while seeking to delay Russian withdrawal and to undermine the UN diplomatic efforts that finally brought the tragedy to an end.
Explaining U.S.-NATO goals at Ramstein, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”
Let’s think about it. How do we ensure that Russia can never again invade another country? We put aside here the unthinkable question of whether reshaping U.S. policy might contribute to this end, for example, examining Washington’s openly declared refusal to consider any Russian security concerns and many other actions that we have discussed.
To achieve the announced goal, it seems that we must at least reenact something like the Versailles Treaty, which sought to ensure that Germany would not be able to go to war again.
But Versailles did not go far enough, as was soon made clear. It follows that the new version being planned must “strangle the demon” in ways that go beyond the Versailles effort to control the Huns. Perhaps something like the Morgenthau Plan.
That is the logic of the pronouncements. Even if we don’t take the words seriously and give them a limited interpretation, the policy entails prolonging the war, whatever the consequences are for Ukrainians and the “collateral damage” beyond: mass starvation, possible terminal war, continued destruction of the environment that sustains life.
Narrower questions of a similar sort arise with regard to the blockade, with its lethal effects in the Global South. Right now, Ukrainian ports are blockaded by the Russian Navy, preventing desperately needed exports. What can be done about it?
As always, there are two directions to explore: military or diplomatic. “War/War or Jaw/Jaw” in the phrase attributed to Churchill, who assigned priority to the latter.
War/War is official U.S. policy: Send advanced anti-ship missiles to force Russia to stop blockade of ports. Beyond the Russian flagship, more can be sunk. Will the Russians observe quietly? Maybe. How would the U.S. react in similar circumstances? We can put that aside.
Another possibility, proposed by the Wall Street Journal editors, is “to use warships to escort merchant ships out of the Black Sea.” The editors assure us that it would conform to international law, and that Russians will stop at nothing. So, if they react, we can proclaim proudly that we upheld international law as all goes up in flames.
The editors observe that there are precedents: “The U.S. has marshalled allies for such a mission twice in recent decades. In the late 1980s the U.S. reflagged and protected Kuwaiti oil tankers as they sailed out of the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq tanker war.”
That is correct, though there is a small oversight. The U.S. did indeed intervene directly to provide crucial support for Reagan’s good friend Saddam Hussein in his invasion of Iran. That was after supporting Saddam’s chemical warfare that killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians, and even charging Iran for Saddam’s massacre of Kurds with chemical warfare. Iran was the demon of the day. A fine precedent.
Those are options for ending the blockade, keeping to convention by restricting attention to force rather than possible peaceful steps.
Are there any? One cannot know without thinking about them, looking at what is transpiring, and trying. It may be of relevance that Russia did propose something of the sort, though in our increasingly totalitarian culture, it can be reported only at the extreme margins. Quoting from a libertarian website:
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko … [argued] his country is not solely responsible for the burgeoning food emergency while pointing to Western sanctions blocking the export of grain and fertilizers.
“You have to not only appeal to the Russian Federation but also look deeply at the whole complex of reasons that caused the current food crisis. [Sanctions] interfere with normal free trade, encompassing food products including wheat, fertilizers and others,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko said.
Is it worth considering? Not in our culture, which automatically reaches for the revolver.
The reflexive preference for violence, and its grim consequences, have not been overlooked abroad. That’s common in the Global South, which has ample experience with Western practice, but even among allies. The editor of the Australian international affairs journal Arenadeplores the rigid censorship and intolerance of even mild dissent in U.S. media, concluding that “This means it is almost impossible within mainstream opinion to simultaneously acknowledge Putin’s insupportable actions and forge a path out of the war that does not involve escalation, and the further destruction of Ukraine.”
Quite correct. And unless we can escape this self-imposed trap, we are likely to march on to annihilation. It is all reminiscent of the early days of World War I when the Great Powers enthusiastically undertook a self-destructive war, but this time with incomparably more severe consequences lurking not far in the distance.
I’ve said nothing about what Ukrainians should do, for the simple and sufficient reason that it’s not our business. If they opt for the ghastly experiment, that’s their right. It’s also their right to request weapons to defend themselves from murderous aggression.
Here we return to what is our business: ourselves. How should we respond to these requests? I’ll repeat in a moment my personal belief, but here too a little honesty wouldn’t hurt. There are many ringing declarations upholding the sacred principle that victims of criminal assault must be supported in their just demand for weapons to defend themselves. It is easy to show that those who issue them don’t believe a word of what they are saying, and in fact, almost always, strongly support providing weapons and crucial diplomatic support to the aggressor. To take just the most obvious case, where are the calls to provide Palestinians with weapons to defend themselves from half a century of brutal criminal occupation in violation of Security Council orders and international law — or even to withdraw the decisive U.S. support for these crimes?
One can, of course, read the reports of U.S.-backed settler-IDF atrocities in the Israeli press, in the daily columns of the great journalist Gideon Levy. And we can read the withering reports by another honorable Israeli journalist, Amira Hass, reviewing the bitter condemnations of the ecological damage caused by the “demonic” Russians in Ukraine, which somehow miss the Israeli attack on Gaza last May, when “Israeli shells ignited hundreds of tons of pesticides, seeds, fertilizers, other chemicals, nylon and plastic sheeting, and plastic piping in a warehouse in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahia.” The shelling ignited 50 tons of hazardous substances, with lethal effects on the shattered population, which is living in conditions of bare survival, international agencies report, after decades of U.S.-backed Israeli sadism. It is “chemical warfare by indirect means,” the highly reputable Palestinian legal research and activism agency al-Haq reports, after extensive investigation.
None of this, and vastly more, inspires any word in the mainstream about ending huge U.S. support for the murderous occupier, or of course for any means of defense.
But enough of such outrageous “whataboutism,” otherwise known as elementary honesty, and a common theme outside of our tightly controlled doctrinal system. How should the principle apply in the unique case of Ukraine, where the U.S. for once opposes aggression? My own view, to repeat, is that the Ukrainian request for weapons should be honored, with caution to bar shipments that will escalate the criminal assault, punishing Ukrainians even more, with potential cataclysmic effects beyond.
If the war in Ukraine can be ended through diplomacy, a peace deal could take many forms. The diplomatic solution advanced by many experts is the one based on a Ukrainian treaty of neutrality while Russia drops its objections to Ukraine’s membership in the EU, although the road to membership will inevitably be very long. However, there is one scenario which is rarely discussed, yet this is where things could be headed. This is Graham Allison’s “Korean scenario,” where Ukraine is divided into two parts without a formal treaty. Do you regard this as a likely or possible scenario?
It is one of a number of possible very ugly outcomes. Speculation seems to me rather idle. Better, I think, to devote our energy to thinking of constructive ways to overcome the developing tragedies — which, again, go far beyond Ukraine.
We might even envision a broader framework, something like the “common European home” with no military alliances proposed by Mikhail Gorbachev as an appropriate framework of world order after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Or we might pick up some of the early wording of the Partnership for Peace, initiated by Washington in the same years, as when President Clinton in 1994 assured Boris Yeltsin that “the broader, higher goal [is] European security, unity and integration – a goal I know you share.”
These promising prospects for peaceful integration were soon undercut, however, by Clinton’s plans for NATO expansion, over strong Russian objections, long preceding Putin.
Such hopes can be revived, to the great benefit of Europe, Russia and world peace generally. They might have been revived by Putin had he pursued Macron’s tentative initiatives towards accommodation instead of foolishly choosing criminal aggression. But they are not necessarily dead.
It’s useful to recall some history. For centuries, Europe was the most vicious place on earth. For French and Germans, the highest goal in life was to slaughter one another. As recently as my childhood, it seemed unimaginable that it could ever end. A few years later, it did end, and they have since been close allies, pursuing common goals in a radical reversal of a long history of brutal conflict. Diplomatic successes need not be impossible to achieve.
It is now a commonplace that the world has entered a new Cold War. In fact, even the once-unthinkable scenario of using nuclear weapons in warfare is no longer taboo talk. Have we entered an era of confrontation between Russia and the West, a geostrategic and political rivalry reminiscent of the Cold War?
Nuclear warfare had better become taboo talk, and unthinkable policy. We should be working hard to restore the arms control regime that was virtually dismantled by Bush II and Trump, who didn’t have quite enough time to complete the job but came close. Biden was able to rescue the last major relic, New Start, just days before its expiration.
The arms control regime should then be extended, looking forward to the day when the nuclear powers will join the UN Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, now in force.
Other measures can be taken to alleviate the threat, among them implementing Nuclear Weapons-Free Zones (NWFZ). They exist in much the world, but are blocked by U.S. insistence on maintaining nuclear weapons facilities within them. The most important would be a NWFZ in the Middle East. That would end the alleged Iranian nuclear threat and eliminate any thin pretext for the criminal U.S.-Israeli bombings, assassinations and sabotage in Iran. That crucial advance in world peace is, however, blocked by the U.S. alone.
The reason is not obscure: It would interfere with Washington’s protection of Israel’s huge nuclear arsenal. That has to be kept in the dark. If exposed, U.S. law would come into play, threatening Washington’s extraordinary support for Israel’s illegal occupation and constant crimes — another topic that is unmentionable in polite society.
All steps should be taken to remove the scourge of nuclear weapons from the earth, before they destroy all of us.
In the world system that is taking shape, the confrontation with Russia is something of a sideshow. Putin has handed Washington a marvelous gift by turning Europe into a virtual U.S. vassal, cutting off the prospects that Europe might become an independent “third force” in international affairs. A consequence is that the fading Russian kleptocracy, with its huge stock of natural resources, is being incorporated into the Chinese-dominated zone. This growing system of development and loans stretches over Central Asia and reaches to the Middle East through the UAE and Maritime Silk Road, with tentacles stretching to Africa and even to Washington’s “little region over here,” as FDR’s Secretary of War Henry Stimson described Latin America while calling for dismantling of all regional associations except for our own.
It is the “China threat” that is the centerpiece of U.S. strategy. The threat is enhanced if resource-rich Russia is incorporated as a junior partner.
The U.S. is now vigorously reacting to what it calls “Chinese aggression,” such as devoting state resources to developing advanced technology and internal repression. The reaction, initiated by Trump, has been carried forward by Biden’s policy of “encirclement” based on a ring of “sentinel states” off the coast of China. These are armed with advanced weapons, recently upgraded to high-precision weapons, aimed at China. The “defense” is backed by a fleet of invulnerable nuclear submarines that can destroy not just China but the world many times over. Since that is not good enough, they are now being replaced as part of the enormous Trump-Biden military expansion.
The stern U.S. reaction is understandable. “China, unlike Russia, is the only country powerful enough to challenge U.S. dominance on the world stage,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced in describing this intolerable threat to world order (aka U.S. dominance).
While we talk of “isolating Russia,” if not “strangling” this “demonic” society, most of the world is keeping its ties open to Russia and to the China-dominated global system. It is also watching, bemused, as the U.S. destroys itself from within.
Meanwhile the U.S. is developing new alliances, which will presumably strengthen in November if the GOP takes over Congress and manages to gain long-term control of the political system through its quite open efforts to undermine political democracy.
One such alliance is being firmed up right now with the racist self-declared “illiberal democracy” of Hungary, which has crushed free speech and independent cultural and political institutions and is worshipped by leading figures of the GOP from Trump to media star Tucker Carlson. Steps toward that goal were taken a few days ago at the conference of far right elements in Europe that met in Budapest, where the star attraction was the Conservative Political Action Conference, a core element of the Republican Party.
The alliance between the U.S. and the European extreme right has a natural ally in the Abraham alliance forged by Trump and Jared Kushner. This widely hailed alliance formalized the tacit relations between Israel and the most reactionary states of the MENA (Middle East-North Africa) region. Israel and Hungary already have close relations, based on shared racist values and a sense of grievance for being shunned by more liberal elements in Europe. Another natural partner is today’s India, where Prime Minister Modi is shattering Indian secular democracy and establishing a Hindu ethnocracy, bitterly repressing the Muslim population, and extending India’s domains with his brutal occupation of Kashmir.
The U.S. is already virtually alone in recognizing the two existing illegal MENA occupations in violation of Security Council orders: Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights and of vastly expanded Greater Jerusalem, and Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara to extend its near monopoly of irreplaceable phosphate reserves. With the GOP in power, the U.S. might complete the picture by recognizing Hindu India’s violent takeover of Kashmir.
A new global order is taking shape, but the U.S.-Russia confrontation is not its central element.
Speaking of a new Cold War, I must say I am in utter disbelief by the delirious reaction on the part of so many in the U.S. to analyses seeking to provide background to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the same is true in connection with voices calling for diplomacy to end the war. They conflate explanation and justification and willfully ignore historical facts, such as the decision of the U.S. to expand NATO eastward without consideration to Russia’s security concerns. And it isn’t as if this decision was greeted at the time with approval by leading diplomats and foreign affairs experts. Former U.S. envoy to the Soviet Union Jack F. Matlock Jr. and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned against NATO expansion and Ukraine’s inclusion. George Kennan’s reaction to the Senate’s 1998 ratification of NATO eastward expansion up to the borders of Russia was even more blunt: “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war…. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely…. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever…. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the Nato expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are – but this is just wrong.”
Were these top U.S. diplomats Russian pawns, as is often said today of anyone offering background information why Russia has invaded Ukraine? I like to have your thoughts on this matter.
You can add others who delivered stern warnings to Washington that it was reckless and needlessly provocative to ignore Russia’s announced security concerns, including current CIA Director William Burns and his predecessor Stansfield Turner, even hawks like Paul Nitze, in fact almost the whole of the diplomatic corps who had any deep knowledge of Russia. Those warnings were particularly strong with regard to Russia’s concerns, well before Putin and including every Russian leader, over incorporation into NATO of Georgia and Ukraine. These are Russia’s geostrategic heartland as is evident by a look at a topographic map and recent history, Operation Barbarossa.
Are they all Russian pawns? I suppose that can be claimed in today’s climate of frenzied irrationality, a danger to ourselves and the world.
It’s useful to have a look at chapters of history that are far enough back so that we can consider them with some degree of detachment. An obvious choice, as mentioned earlier, is the First World War. It is now recognized that it was a terrible war of futility and stupidity in which none of the agents had a tenable stand.
That’s now. Not at the time. As the great powers of the day stumbled into war, the educated classes in each proclaimed the nobility of the cause of their own state. A famous manifesto of prominent German intellectuals appealed to the West to support the land of Kant, Goethe, Beethoven, and other leading figures of civilization. Their counterparts in France and Britain did the same, as did the most distinguished American intellectuals when Woodrow Wilson joined the war shortly after having won the 1916 election on a platform of Peace without Victory.
Not everyone took part in the celebration of the grandeur of their own state. In England, Bertrand Russell dared to question the party line; in Germany, he was joined by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht; in the U.S., by Eugene Debs. All were imprisoned. Some, like Randolph Bourne in the U.S., escaped that fate. Bourne was only barred from all liberal journals.
This pattern is not a departure from the historical norm. It pretty much is the norm, regrettably.
The World War I experience did provide important lessons. That was recognized very quickly. Two highly influential examples are Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays. Lippmann went on to become a most prominent U.S. 20th century public intellectual. Bernays became one of the founders and intellectual leaders of the huge public relations industry, the world’s major propaganda agency, devoted to undermining markets by creating uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices and to fostering the unbridled consumerism that ranks alongside the fossil fuel industries as a threat to survival.
Lippmann and Bernays were Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy liberals. They were also members of the propaganda agency established by President Wilson to convert a pacifist population to raging anti-German fanatics, the Creel Committee on Public Information, a properly Orwellian title. Both were highly impressed by its success in “manufacture of consent” (Lippmann), “engineering of consent” (Bernays). They recognized this to be a “new art in the practice of democracy,” a means to ensure that the “bewildered herd” — the general population — can be “put in their place” as mere “spectators,” and will not intrude into domains where they do not belong: policy decisions. These must be reserved for the “intelligent minority,” “the technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals” in the Camelot version.
That is pretty much reigning liberal democratic theory, which Lippmann and Bernays helped forge. The conceptions are by no means new. They trace back to the early democratic revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries in England and then its U.S. colony. They were invigorated by the World War I experience.
But while the masses may be controlled with “necessary illusions” and “emotionally potent oversimplifications” (in the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, venerated as the “theologian of the liberal establishment”), there is another problem: the “value-oriented intellectuals” who dare to raise questions about U.S. policy that go beyond tactical decisions. They can no longer be jailed, as during World War I, so those in power now seek to expel them from the public domain in other ways.
Barry Healy reviews a new “fly-on-the-wall” documentary about the life of Alexei Navalny, following his sensational poisoning by Russian government agents in 2020.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated that Western nations will continue “moving Heaven and Earth” to send weapons to Ukraine in its war against Russia. 1 While they may be moving Earth, it’s doubtful they’re moving Heaven, which could very well be enraged at US policymakers’ habit of seizing for itself divine powers to inflict massive amounts of death whenever conflict looms on the horizon. For good reason, so much power was never intended to be in the hands of mere mortals.
US policymakers are responding to the current crisis in Ukraine with weapon shipments. They responded to the outbreak of Ukraine’s civil war in 2014 with weapon shipments. In fact, the very factors that provoked Russia to invade Ukraine in the first place pertain precisely to Western weapons: the West’s obsessive clinging to militarism in the form of NATO expansion, missile launchers at bases in Eastern Europe, NATO joint military training with nations along Russia’s borders, and shipments of billions in dollars of weapons to help Ukraine attack Donetsk and Lugansk. There have also been reports of US private military contractors training far right-wing extremists in Ukraine during the civil war.2 In addition, Russia accuses the US of developing biological weapons in Ukraine.3 and Russia accuses forces loyal to Kiev of preparing to launch a chemical attack in Ukraine. 4
If Western weapons provoked Russia, why, then, would more Western weapons be the solution?
For those who can’t think outside the box of 245 years of US foreign policy grounded in weaponry, war, and greed, weapons are the answer. It’s like a home on a hot summer day that has only one thing in the fridge: weapons.
For 245 years, the US government has been like an ostrich with its head in the sand, refusing to see the immense damage inflicted upon society and the planet by its unwarranted, magical faith in weapons. Refusing to see, it’s unable to learn and therefore persists in its habit of responding to foreign threats, not with efforts to reduce tension and increase harmony between opposing sides, but with weapons, threats, and the escalation of tension.
When foreign nations are immersed in civil wars, US policymakers never impartially seek reconciliation between all sides. Instead, they perpetually take sides to further their own ulterior motives, hence the need to send weapons to help one side kill off and dominate the other, as if one side is so good and the other side so evil that one deserves to kill and the other deserves to be killed. US policymakers then cut off communication with the enemy, thus further preventing the ability to understand the enemy’s point of view—and making all the more possible a blackout of truth within the US that in turn bolsters the perception of the enemy as malicious and deserving of death.
Yet every one of these steps is a backward step away from peace and away from truth and understanding. Why should we apply on the international level forms of human relations that we would never condone at the level of personal, local, or national relations? Why should we allow violence to determine who will acquire which resources and markets, when violence would never be accepted as a tool to allow one US corporation to take over the market of another?
Our goal should be reconciliation between both sides, not conquest of one side over the other. And the power we need isn’t technological power but a power that has been Missing in Action amongst US foreign policymakers for 245 years: the power of hearts, minds, and spirits to foster across lines of conflict qualities of love, truth, peace, understanding, and joy. The power and will needed to adhere to such qualities and pursue non-violent solutions of conflict resolution and reconciliation can be compared to that of a hero clinging to the side of a cliff, struggling to reach a branch just overhead, and determined not to fall but to keep trying, no matter what. But instead of that hero, we have President Joe Biden, who recently decided that Americans have to fork over an additional $33 billion in military aid to help Ukraine wage war for US policymakers against Russia.5
Rather than applying backward, dysfunctional forms of human relations to international conflict, let’s place our consciousness in our hearts, turn on our brain power, and impartially, logically, cooperatively, and peacefully address the roots of violence on all sides of conflict.
While there are many approaches to non-violent conflict resolution, I’ll provide a condensed analysis here using my own model in the hope that it may help with the current crisis, if anyone is listening at all. This essay was hard to keep down to size because more and more issues, examples, and perspectives can always be found. However, I trust that this abbreviated analysis, as imperfect as it may be, can enable us to take several leaps forward in a helpful direction across the stepping stones of the river, and I hope that Readers can add to this their own knowledge and insights to further this analysis and develop the national and international resolve to seek cooperative, non-violent conflict resolution.
The autumn of 9/11, I created a model called Paradigm for Peace which has four parts: the Defensive and Aggressive Roots of Violence; the Mental, Legal, and Physical Escalators of Violence, Three Facets of Solutions, and a Cooperative “Quest” Attitude of Thought and Dialogue. I spent the next twenty years writing a multi-volume work on foreign policy and peace in which I applied the model primarily to the Mid-East/US conflicts, but also to other conflicts, including the Cold War, Nazi Germany, and the US Civil War.
This fourth element, the cooperative quest attitude, is the model’s underlying and ever-present dynamic. Participants in dialogue and conflict resolution strive to uphold attitudes of bold amiability, curiosity for the truth, and a determination to figure out how to make the pieces of the puzzle of peace fit together. Participants express themselves clearly and solidly, yet, with just as much strength, they endeavor to genuinely understand opposing perspectives and get in their shoes. They can even practice temporarily switching roles and arguing sincerely on behalf of those on the other side of conflict. Unlike a debate in which each side views victory in terms of beating the other and making knock-out verbal jabs, in cooperative quest dialogue, winning is cooperative and victory is the growth of truth, understanding, and harmony for all.
Using this open-minded, cooperative attitude of thought and dialogue, the key to promote impartiality is to cast aside the belief that conflict is always a case of one’s own good guys fighting defensively against aggressive bad guys. Instead, we look at both the defensive and aggressive motivations experienced by all the different sides both in the larger external conflict, which involves Russia, the US, and NATO, as well as by those in the internal conflict within Ukraine, including those Ukrainians who support Russia, those who support the US and NATO, those who support violence in this conflict, and those who don’t.
It’s important to non-violently address both fronts of conflict, the external international and internal national conflicts, because they feed off each other. Throughout the Cold War, US conflicts perpetually fed off the internal conflicts of other nations. US policymakers, perhaps deceiving themselves that they were fighting evil, would take advantage of other nations’ internal tensions, fuel them with weapon shipments and military aid, and use the conflict to try to indirectly fight the USSR, even if the USSR’s involvement was just a figment of US policymakers’ imaginations, as in Greece following WWII.6 Sometimes US policymakers would bait the USSR into conflict, as they did in Afghanistan in 1979.7
We should also address the multiple fronts of conflict and friction that likely exist within each side, and we should be sure to break down the analysis to separate the views of policymakers from civilians. After all, policymakers cannot speak for civilians, even though they try to all the time. Biden and Ukraine’s President Zelenskiy are stating or implying that Ukrainian civilians want weapons. But do they really? Or do they favor non-violent conflict resolution? There are more fronts of conflict amongst policymakers themselves—within Ukraine, Russia, and the US. Hopefully, cooperative dialogue can be developed into a habit used by policymakers to learn to treat their differences of opinion in a functional and caring manner rather than in a threatened manner that leads to the silencing, intimidation, or firing of those who disagree.
It’s crucial to never deliberately exclude any group from this thoughtful, caring analysis—no matter what—but to take the time to impartially consider and understand how all of these actors feel threatened. Although it’s important to analyze the roots of conflict comprehensively, a rough comprehensive understanding can be acquired quite quickly, even within a single hour of discussion. Non-violent conflict resolution actually saves time because the process doesn’t psychologically, socially, physically, and financially retard the road to peace the way war and sanctions do. The obstacle to non-violent conflict resolution isn’t time. The obstacle is US policymakers’ lack of commitment to choose cooperative non-violence.
When you analyze various conflicts and make the effort to lay out the Roots and Escalators of Violence, you come to a stunning conclusion: there’s barely a single Root or Escalator of Violence that can be remedied or even alleviated by weapons, violence, war, threats, and sanctions. Perhaps this is why US foreign policymakers refuse to examine the roots of conflict. They know the truth will put war and weapon corporations out of business, and they know they’ll no longer be able to use war and “fighting for freedom” and “rescuing humanity” as a pretext to gobble up foreign resources and markets.
On the other hand, perhaps some really do believe they’re fighting for freedom. Judging by the bizarre and illogical reactions of US “experts” who felt offended and threatened by President Putin’s 2007 speech in Munich and his July 2021 essay, a speech and an essay that actually delivered admirable and honorable ideas, it could be that US foreign policymakers honestly see the world as much more threatening than it really is because they lack skills in relating to, cooperating with, and even understanding the words and intentions of other people and nations.
In the following parts of this essay, we’ll run the current Ukraine crisis through the Paradigm for Peace model in order to gain insight into the roots and escalators of violence and a cooperative, intelligent approach towards peace and justice.
Peter Baker and Michael Levenson, “Biden Digs in on Ukraine Strategy, Sending $33 Billion in Aid,” New York Times, April 28, 2022.
Thomas G. Paterson, J. Garry Clifford, and Kenneth J. Hagan, American Foreign Policy: A History Since 1900 (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1991), 450-51; Ed Vulliamy and Helena Smith, “Athens 1944: Britain’s dirty secret,” Guardian, November 30, 2014.
Scott and I focused initially on President Biden’s just-completed Excellent Adventure in the Far East and the U.S. effort to woo countries away from China or, at least, pre-empt closer bilateral ties. Why must China’s “win-win” approach be dismissed out of hand — especially when it was so mutually beneficial 50 years ago in reducing tension and keeping the peace? Recent developments, including talks with Chinese officials, have fortified Scott’s view that China remains extremely reluctant to go to war over Taiwan. Nevertheless, China will do so “in a heartbeat” if Taiwan declares independence and develops a more substantial military relationship with the U.S.
As the United States undergoes a national mourning process over a spate of mass shootings, American white nationalists with documented histories of violence are attaining combat experience with advanced US-made weapons in a foreign proxy war.
That’s according to the Department of Homeland Security, which has been gathering intelligence on Americans who have joined the ranks of the more than 20,000 foreign volunteers in Ukraine.
The FBI has indicted several American white nationalists associated with the Rise Above Movement after they trained with the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and its civilian wing, the National Corps, in Kiev. But that was almost four years ago. Today, federal law enforcement has no idea how many US neo-Nazis are participating in the war in Ukraine, or what they are doing there.
There is a first and still very low noise signal that the Zelenski regime in Kiev is coming apart.
Six weeks ago there were suddenly many claims that Russian soldiers in Ukraine had raped people.
Time headlined: Ukrainians Who Have Been Raped by Russian Troops Are Refusing to Stay Silent
Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Lyudmyla Denisova said that 25 teenage girls were kept in a basement in Bucha and gang-raped; nine of them are now pregnant. Elderly women spoke on camera about being raped by Russian soldiers. The bodies of children were found naked with their hands tied behind their backs, their genitals mutilated. Those victims included both girls and boys, and Ukrainian men and boys have been sexually assaulted in other incidents. A group of Ukrainian women POWs had their heads shaved in Russian captivity, where they were also stripped naked and forced to squat.
Ten months before Russian troops poured into Ukraine, that country’s President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a bill into law authorizing the private sale of farmland, reversing a moratorium that had been in place since 2001.
An earlier administration in Ukraine had instituted the moratorium in order to halt further privatization of The Commons and small farms, which were being bought up by oligarchs and concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. As documented in a series of critical reports over ten years by the Oakland Institute based in California*,* the moratorium on land sales in Ukraine aimed to prevent the acquisition and consolidation of farmland in the hands of the domestic oligarch class and foreign corporations.
The marketization of farmland is part of a series of policy “reforms” that the International Monetary Fund stipulated as a precondition enabling Ukraine to receive $8 billion in loans from the IMF.
A Ukrainian government official frequently cited as a source by western news media for her allegations of atrocities committed by Russian troops has been fired by the Ukrainian parliament, in part because of the unevidenced nature of those claims.
A Ukrainian official has been relieved of her duties over her handling of reports detailing sexual assault allegations made against Russians in Ukraine.
On Tuesday, the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, removed Lyudmila Denisova, the parliament’s commissioner for human rights, from her post, according to Ukrainska Pravda. No new appointment has been made to fill the role.
The move to dismiss Denisova came after outrage about the wording used in public reports about alleged sexual assaults committed by Russians, as well as the alleged dissemination in those reports of unverified information. Despite accusations from Ukraine, the Kremlin has repeatedly denied that Russian soldiers have committed war crimes or sexual assaults during the invasion.
As it happens, Newsweek is one of the many western outlets who have uncritically cited Denisova’s unevidenced claims in their reporting of events in Ukraine. She was the “Ukraine official” in Newsweek’s incendiary April headline “Russians Raped 11-Year-Old Boy, Forced Mom to Watch: Ukraine Official,” an article whose entire first half featured unevidenced claims by Denisova.
"The racist occupiers must bear the strictest responsibility!" said Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, Lyudmila Denisova, of Russian soldiers. https://t.co/ObN7cDbEJv
A Ukrainian official has been relieved of her duties over her handling of reports detailing sexual assault allegations made against Russians in Ukraine.
Denisova’s name featured just the other day in my own critique of the western media’s blind-faith regurgitation of Ukrainian government assertions when multiple western media outlets parroted her unevidenced claims about two Russians raping a one year-old baby to death.
Business Insider, The Daily Beast, The Daily Mail, The Sun, Metro, The Daily Mirror and Yahoo News all published reports on the same story, and the one and only source for all of them was a post made by Denisova on a Ukrainian government website which contained no evidence and concluded with a call for more weapons and sanctions against Russia from the western world.
Western Media Run Blatant Atrocity Propaganda For The Ukrainian Government
"The latest story making the rounds is a completely unevidenced claim made by a Ukrainian government official that Russians are going around raping Ukrainian babies to death."https://t.co/tuYauL2Hol
This is not just brazen journalistic malpractice, this is actual atrocity propaganda. This latest development shows that even the Ukrainian government is more skeptical of Ukrainian government claims than the western mainstream press.
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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, 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.
Russia’s “Special Military Operation”, which began on Feb. 24, is entering its fourth month. Despite stiffer than expected Ukrainian resistance (bolstered by billions of dollars of western military assistance and accurate, real-time battlefield intelligence by the U.S. and other NATO members) Russia is winning the war on the ground, and in a big way.
After more than ninety days of incessant Ukrainian propaganda, echoed mindlessly by a complicit western mainstream media that extolls the battlefield successes of the Ukrainian armed forces and the alleged incompetence of the Russian military, the Russians are on the cusp of achieving the stated goal of its operation, namely the liberation of the newly independent Donbass Republics of Lugansk and Donetsk, which Russia recognized two days before its invasion.
The Russian victory in Donbass comes after weeks of intensive combat that saw the Russian military shift gears away from what has become known as Phase One. That was the month-long opening act which, according to Russian President Vladimir Putin in his Feb. 24 address, was tasked with taking “actions throughout the territory of Ukraine with the implementation of measures for its demilitarization and denazification.”
British empire smut rag The Times has a new article out titled “Azov Battalion drops neo-Nazi symbol exploited by Russian propagandists,” which has got to be the most hilarious headline of 2022 so far (and I’m including The Onion and other intentionally funny headlines in the running).
“The Azov Battalion has removed a neo-Nazi symbol from its insignia that has helped perpetuate Russian propaganda about Ukraine being in the grip of far-right nationalism,” The Times informs us. “At the unveiling of a new special forces unit in Kharkiv, patches handed to soldiers did not feature the wolfsangel, a medieval German symbol that was adopted by the Nazis and which has been used by the battalion since 2014. Instead, they featured a golden trident, the Ukrainian national symbol worn by other regiments.”
Yeah that’s how you solve Ukraine’s Nazi problem. A logo change.
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BREAKING: Ukrainian Nazis are getting rid of their SS symbols to stop evil propagandists in one of the smartest marketing moves ever. The Times headline tells how much Western oligarchs support fascists. ✋ pic.twitter.com/ITV7TFWA6F
Claiming it’s “Russian propaganda” to say the Azov Battalion uses neo-Nazi insignia, and is ideologically neo-Nazi, is itself propaganda. A month ago Moon of Alabama published an incomplete list of the many mainstream western outlets who have described various Ukrainian paramilitaries as such, so if it’s only “Russian propagandists” who’ve been saying the Azov Battalion is neo-Nazi then Silicon Valley social media platforms should immediately ban outlets like NBC News, the BBC, The Guardian, and Reuters.
Before this war started this past February it wasn’t seriously controversial to say that Ukraine has a Nazi problem except in the very most virulent of empire spinmeister echo chambers. Even in the early days of the conflict it was still happening with mainstream publications who hadn’t yet gotten the memo that history had been rewritten, like this NBC News article from March titled “Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real, even if Putin’s ‘denazification’ claim isn’t.”
An excerpt:
Just as disturbing, neo-Nazis are part of some of Ukraine’s growing ranks of volunteer battalions. They are battle-hardened after waging some of the toughest street fighting against Moscow-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine following Putin’s Crimean invasion in 2014. One is the Azov Battalion, founded by an avowed white supremacist who claimed Ukraine’s national purpose was to rid the country of Jews and other inferior races. In 2018, the U.S. Congress stipulated that its aid to Ukraine couldn’t be used “to provide arms, training or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.” Even so, Azov is now an official member of the Ukraine National Guard.
So plainly it is not “Russian propaganda” to highlight the established fact that there are neo-Nazi paramilitaries in Ukraine who are receiving weapons from the US and its allies. The change in insignia isn’t being made to correct a misperception, it’s being made to obscure a correct perception.
The change in insignia is a rebranding to a more mainstream-friendly logo, very much like Aunt Jemima rebranding to Pearl Milling Company due to the Jim Crow racism the previous branding evoked. The primary difference is that the corporate executives of Pearl Milling probably aren’t still interested in turning America back into an apartheid state.
As journalist Alex Rubenstein noted on Twitter, al Qaeda in Syria went through a similar rebranding not long ago for the exact same reasons:
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Azov is the new al-Qaeda in Syria: "We aren't al-Qaeda! We split from them. Sure, all of us are former members but our new group, Jaysh al-Zawahiri, isn't down with that sort of thing! We still fly the black flag but changed the words on it. Now please us send more weapons." https://t.co/coh8mZPNLQ
Indeed it is very normal for the US and its allies to provide backing to fascistic extremists in order to advance imperial agendas, because those tend to be the armed factions in a given area who are willing to inflict the brutal acts of violence upon their countrymen necessary to facilitate those agendas.
From far right militias in Latin America to tyrannical jihadists in the Middle East, this pattern of backing murderous fascists and then having to manage public perception of their depravity has been going on a long time. After the US alliance began working with al Qaeda-aligned factions to push regime change Syria, it eventually became necessary for them to rebrand to appease public concerns about their image. When the US-backed Contras were committing human rights atrocities in Nicaragua to stomp out the leftist Sandinistas, the Reagan administration was launching a massive perception management campaign to manipulate the way people see the situation.
In Ukraine, neo-Nazi paramilitaries just happen to have been the armed thugs who were depraved enough to do what the empire needed done on the ground. As Ukrainian-American peace activist Yuliy Dubovyk explained for Multipolarista, they were the ones who were willing to fire upon their own countrymen in eastern part of the nation.
The people in Donetsk and Luhansk were less lucky. The coup government dispatched the military to suppress their insurrections.
At first many Ukrainian soldiers refused to shoot at their own countrymen, in this civil war that their US-backed government started.
Seeing the hesitation of the Ukrainian military, far-right groups (and the oligarchs that were backing them) formed so-called “territorial defense battalions,” with names like Azov, Aidar, Dnipro, Tornado, etc.
Much like in Latin America, where US-backed death-squads kill left-wing politicians, socialists, and labor organizers, these Ukrainian fascist battalions were deployed to lead the offensive against the militias of Donetsk and Luhansk, killing Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
The fact that factions like the Azov Battalion have been the ones willing to get their hands dirty in Ukraine has been a major factor in their ability to shore up influence over the nation’s affairs far in excess of their numbers, a dynamic described in detail by The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Alex Rubenstein. As noted by journalist Aaron Maté, when Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine these extremists openly threatened to lynch him if he worked to make peace with Russia as he had pledged to do.
And on that note it’s work issuing another reminder at this time that the US could easily have prevented this entire war by simply giving Zelensky protection from those factions so that he could enact the peace mandate he’d been elected to enact. But of course the US would never do such a thing, because the US always wanted this war, and because the US does not actually believe in democratic mandates, and because the US does not actually oppose Nazism.
Which is why when concerns were raised about arming neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine, the only offer on the table was a logo change.
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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, 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.
U.S. government strategists are using sanctions as a wrecking ball to demolish the globalized economy. It is a desperate struggle to preserve their global hegemony and a unipolar world. The policy of consciously demolishing supply chains of essential products amounts to a reckless war on defenseless civilian populations. Sanctions disrupt trade worldwide and send shockwaves far beyond the countries directly targeted. This is well understood by financial planners.
“Food shortages — it’s going to be real,” President Joe Biden said in Brussels March 25 at a NATO press conference, an ominous warning reported around the world. “The price of the sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia. It’s imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well.”
Is reality setting in? Is that why a Washington Post reporter, who has been on the frontline in Ukraine, was allowed to write this?
“Ukrainian volunteer fighters in the east feel abandoned.
After three months of war, this company of 120 men is down to 54 because of deaths, injuries and desertions.
The volunteers were civilians before Russia invaded on Feb. 24, and they never expected to be dispatched to one of the most dangerous front lines in eastern Ukraine. They quickly found themselves in the crosshairs of war, feeling abandoned by their military superiors and struggling to survive.”
It’s so important that the public have no real say in US politics that the empire not only set up two oligarchic puppet parties which pretend to oppose each other, but also set up fake populist movements within each of those factions which pretend to be fighting the establishment within those parties.
It’s a very clever illusion that sucks up almost all real opposition. If you don’t fall for the first kayfabe conflict and realize the game is rigged for the powerful, you can still end up buying into the fake populist movements set up to oppose them. I fell for them both early on in this commentary gig. But after a while of watching what they do (as opposed to just listening to what they say) and seeing where they actually stand and fight or refuse to fight, you see it’s all an Inception-level fakery. The opposition is controlled, and so is the opposition to the opposition.
It’s like when you dream you’re waking up from a dream but you’re actually in another dream; you awaken from the liberals-vs-conservatives puppet show and then turn to the fake progressive Democrats or the bullshit MAGA camp as a solution, but you’re still asleep.
This all sounds like an awful lot of work to go through until you remember that an entire globe-spanning empire depends on the ability to prevent the American public from either (A) voting in a disruptive government or (B) fighting a revolution. So much power rides on their ability to do this.
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Ever since the school shooting in Texas we’ve been watching an entire country learn that it’s not actually cops’ job to save anyone or risk any danger and the only reason they assumed otherwise was because of movies and TV shows.
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Idea for an action movie: The Rock needs to rescue his kid from an elementary school where there’s an active shooter, but first he needs to fight his way through an army of cops trying to stop him.
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You end mass shootings in America by ceasing to have America serve as the hub of a globe-spanning empire that’s held together by violence and nonstop mass media psyops. It’s not impossible. It’s not even difficult. It’s just not an option anyone in charge would ever consider.
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I’m finding myself having less and less patience with people who think the US is an innocent little flower regarding the Ukraine war. It’s like, come on. Grow the fuck up.
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Friendly reminder that for a fraction of the cost of funding a world-threatening proxy war against Russia the US could simply have protected Zelensky from the neo-Nazi militias who were threatening to lynch him if he tried to make peace with Russia and prevented this entire war.
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The airhead mainstream narrative that Ukrainian forces have been destroying Russian troops and humiliating Putin in epic win after epic win has become unsustainable:
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Russian troops are making steady progress in Ukraine’s east. That's sparking fears they could be poised for a bigger breakthrough, and leading to increasingly panicked calls from Kyiv for more powerful weapons https://t.co/TbneLP3ABF
Ukrainian leaders project an image of military invulnerability against #Russia. But commanders offer a more realistic portrait of the war, where outgunned volunteers describe being abandoned by their military brass and facing certain death at the front. https://t.co/YLu9M28Cx8
Another shout out to all you big brave sofa warriors who’ve been screaming that a negotiated peace settlement is unacceptable and helping the US empire throw Ukrainian lives into the gears of a stupid proxy war for US unipolar hegemony while you sit safe at home eating Doritos.
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If you’re more hawkish than Henry Kissinger, you’re too fucking hawkish.
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Whenever I try to talk about the risk of the Ukraine war escalating into a nuclear holocaust I get people telling me if that happens it will be Putin’s fault. Like that would make it okay somehow. Like that would somehow validate all the steps our leaders took to get us to that point.
Of all the intensely stupid ways team loyalty and partisanship can express itself, I really don’t think you could come up with one dumber than “Our nuclear brinkmanship isn’t a problem because it’ll be the other side who launches the first nuke” if you tried.
Even pretending it’s certain that Russia would be the one to initiate a nuclear exchange, would that thought actually comfort you when you feel the earth shake? Would you feel any better about the decisions which gave rise to that moment by telling yourself Putin started it? I mean if there’s any time when it doesn’t matter who “started it”, it’s surely when the “Mutual” and “Destruction” part of Mutually Assured Destruction goes into action? I think at that point all our dopey team sports cheering and booing pretty much goes out the window, no?
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Nowadays whenever there's an agenda that's of high value to the US empire there is a 100% chance you'll soon see shitlibs using woke-sounding jargon to promote it. pic.twitter.com/KD56cBI4wo
Hollywood lies about what American journalists really do in the same way it lies about what American soldiers and police really do, and it has just as disruptive an effect on people’s perception of reality.
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People who accuse you of having Kremlin loyalties when you question or criticize the US empire are admitting that they don’t care whether statements are true or false, only whether they demonstrate loyalty to our rulers. That’s the lens through which they examine the world, and it’s pure brain poison. How can people think lucid thoughts and engage in lucid discourse about ideas and events when they are continuously measured not by how truthful they are but by what loyalties they appear to demonstrate? They cannot.
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Empire loyalists have exactly two arguments:
1. “That foreign leader my government dislikes is comparable to Adolf Hitler.”
2. “If you object to what my virtuous government has planned for that leader it means you love and support that leader.”
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I honestly don’t understand how anyone can stay abreast of the day-to-day depravity of the oligarchic empire without a daily practice geared toward inner peace. Things are so insane and confusing and only getting more so; you’ve got to have a regular discipline to form stability.
Meditation, self-enquiry, healing and energy practices, whatever gets you there, but surely you’ve got to have something before you can stare into the face of the beast continuously without going mad. I can’t imagine looking at this thing every day without any kind of a practice.
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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, 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.
Posted on streetlamps all over Germany are stickers showing fleeing silhouettes with the caption, “Refugees welcome – bring your families”. Some have been blacked out with felt markers or ripped partially away. The Germans have mixed feelings about refugees, as demonstrated in the earlier waves from the Mideast and the current one from the Ukraine.
Germany took in over two million refugees from the Mideast wars, far more than any other country. The equivalent for the US population would be eight million.
This has created an enormous financial and cultural strain in a country that historically has had little immigration. It comes at a time when poverty is increasing and social services are being reduced. The once-generous welfare state is gradually being dismantled. This financial squeeze is worsening now because of expenses for the refugees. The two million newcomers receive enough money to live on plus free healthcare, education, and access to special programs. Some cheat on this, registering in several places under different names and getting multiple benefits. Many Germans resent paying for all this with high taxes while their own standard of living is declining.
The trauma of war and displacement has caused a few refugees to lose their moral compass. They do things here they wouldn’t do at home.
Two-thirds of the refugees are young men, some of them convinced Allah has ordained males to dominate females. In their view, women who aren’t submissive need to be punished. Since being male is the only power many of them have, they feel threatened by women in positions of power, and they sometimes react with hostility. Over a thousand women have been physically attacked — some murdered and raped and many aggressively grabbed on the breasts as a way of showing dominance. Many more have been abused — insulted, harassed, spat upon.
Many refugees are aware that Germany, as a member of NATO, supports these wars that have forced them to flee their homes. They’re not fooled by the rhetoric of “humanitarian intervention.” They know NATO’s motives are imperialistic: to install governments agreeable to Western control of their resources and markets. Although they are now safe, their relatives and friends are still being killed with weapons made in Germany and oppressed by soldiers and police trained and financed by Germany. Rather than a grateful attitude, some have come with a resentful one.
Crime has increased, especially violent crimes such as knife attacks. Police and others have been killed and wounded by refugees. Organized criminal clans have become established in Germany’s lenient legal atmosphere. A few ISIS and al-Qaeda members slipped in with the refugees. They have bombed a Christmas market, attacked synagogues, murdered Jews on the street, recruited new members in mosques.
In the past 75 years Germany has become a peaceful country. The current violence is profoundly disturbing to them. It brings back terrible memories.
The violent refugees, though, are only a small minority. Most of the newcomers have a positive attitude. They are getting a fresh start in life, recovering from trauma, getting an education, learning new skills. They’ve been introduced to other cultural possibilities.
Women in particular are responding favorably to this new environment. Seeing how women here live, some of them are beginning to free themselves from patriarchal bondage. With help from German feminists they are developing the energy and determination to challenge male rule and change the conditions of their lives. And they’ll inspire their sisters back home.
The situation with the Ukrainian refugees is much different. The cultures are similar, so there’s less clash. The war hasn’t been going on for long, so there are few of them and problems have not yet developed. They are being celebrated as brave heroes standing up to an aggressive Russia intent on dominating Europe. Anti-Russian feelings have been strong in Germany for two centuries, so this propaganda finds ready acceptance. During the Cold War the German government beamed out the constant danger of Russian attack in order to justify the presence of US troops and nuclear weapons on their soil. Now they condemn Putin as the new Hitler. Atrocity stories of Russian troops get enormous coverage, those of Ukrainian troops against separatists in Donbass are ignored. Every small Ukrainian victory is cheered with blood-thirsty enthusiasm. Welcoming these refugees is part of the strategy for maintaining NATO dominance.
But, of course, it is important to take them in, to shelter them from this latest capitalist butchery. Like the Arabs, most of them are fine people, and many will stay and contribute to the society in their new home.
Germany still has anti-foreign, anti-Semitic, right-wing extremists, but since World War Two the West German government has systematically pushed them out of public life. Unfortunately that wasn’t true in East Germany. There the Stalinist regime ignored the problem, as did Stalinist governments in the eastern European countries. They didn’t want to risk provoking uprisings against their dictatorships. In the former East Germany, which is much smaller than the West, right-wing extremists are a small minority, but a hateful, well-organized, and sometimes violent one. In eastern Europe they are much stronger, sometimes the most powerful political force.
The establishment press in the USA, Britain, and France jump at every opportunity to exaggerate right-wing incidents in Germany in order to divert attention from problems in their own country. The right wing in the USA is much more powerful and dangerous than that in Germany. That’s why our resistance to it is so important.
While everyone’s focused on the latest mass shooting in the US, The Washington Post published what may be the first major acknowledgement from the mainstream western media that Ukraine’s war against Russia has not been nearly the cakewalk they’ve been leading the public to believe.
In a new article titled “Ukrainian volunteer fighters in the east feel abandoned,” WaPo reports that contrary to the triumphant narratives the western world is being spoon fed, many troops in eastern Ukraine have been surviving on one potato per day and deserting their posts because they feel their leaders have turned their backs on them and they’re being sent to certain death.
“Stuck in their trenches, the Ukrainian volunteers lived off a potato per day as Russian forces pounded them with artillery and Grad rockets on a key eastern front line. Outnumbered, untrained and clutching only light weapons, the men prayed for the barrage to end,” The Washington Post reports, citing multiple named sources.
“Ukrainian leaders have projected and nurtured a public image of military invulnerability — of their volunteer and professional forces triumphantly standing up to the Russian onslaught,” the article reads. “But the experience of Lapko and his group of volunteers offers a rare and more realistic portrait of the conflict and Ukraine’s struggle to halt the Russian advance in parts of Donbas. Ukraine, like Russia, has provided scant information about deaths, injuries or losses of military equipment. But after three months of war, this company of 120 men is down to 54 because of deaths, injuries and desertions.”
Ukrainian leaders project an image of military invulnerability against #Russia. But commanders offer a more realistic portrait of the war, where outgunned volunteers describe being abandoned by their military brass and facing certain death at the front. https://t.co/YLu9M28Cx8
WaPo reports that volunteer troops in that part of the country “quickly found themselves in the crosshairs of war, feeling abandoned by their military superiors and struggling to survive.”
“We are being sent to certain death,” said one volunteer. “We are not alone like this, we are many.”
“Hours after The Post interviewed Lapko and Khrus, members of Ukraine’s military security service arrived at their hotel and detained some of their men, accusing them of desertion,” WaPo reports. “The men contend that they were the ones who were deserted.”
Some commentators have remarked on the fact that at long last we’re seeing some realistic coverage of this war in the mainstream press.
“First major US media I’ve seen to report catastrophic condition of Ukrainian forces, collapsing Ukrainian morale on the front. Seems obvious we should know the truth about a war our government is so deeply invested in,” tweeted journalist Mark Ames, a frequent critic of the mass media blackout on conditions in the Ukrainian military.
“This might be the first article in a mainstream publication that punctures the PR spin and secrecy of the foreign military that the US is subsidizing. Two commanders were arrested after they spoke to the Washington Post, painting an extremely grim picture,” tweeted journalist Michael Tracey.
This is indeed a major break from standard mainstream reporting on this conflict, which is normally more in line with this recent Newsweek article titled “Putin’s Elite Soldiers Getting Wiped Out as Russia Makes Mistakes—U.K.,” sourced entirely in unevidenced claims by the British government and the military industrial complex-funded neocon think tank Institute for the Study of War.
First major US media I've seen to report catastrophic condition of Ukrainian forces, collapsing Ukrainian morale on the front. Seems obvious we should know the truth about a war our government is so deeply invested in.https://t.co/sYYwdm1p62
So anyway, there it is. That’s the reality on the front lines of this conflict that westerners have been cheering on from their comfortable homes while calling anyone who advocates a negotiated peace settlement a Putin apologist and a Kremlin troll.
These big brave sofa warriors have been on social media demanding that Ukrainians keep fighting in this way until they’ve secured total victory over Russia and reclaimed Crimea and the Donbas, tweeting “Slava Ukraini” with their little blue-and-yellow flag emojis during the commercial breaks of their favorite TV show in between mouthfuls of Funyuns.
Westerners would be a lot less cavalier about demanding a foreign population keep fighting until total victory if they truly understood the horrors of war. Unfortunately there’s a propaganda machine of unprecedented sophistication that has spent generations preventing them from obtaining that very understanding.
That’s why they’re so happy to throw endless Ukrainian lives into the gears of the imperial war machine, and that’s why the WaPo article we are discussing here is receiving very little mainstream attention online as of this writing. It will be dismissed and ignored by empire managers and their brainwashed flock with a “Hmm, you just can’t hire good cannon fodder these days.”
"So you think Ukraine should just GIVE Putin the Donbas and Crimea and neutrality, to end a war Putin started??"
No I think Ukraine should sacrifice rivers of blood serving as US proxy cannon fodder for years to drain Moscow while you sit at home eating Pop Tarts and tweeting.
There’s no real reckoning with exactly what’s happening and exactly what these people are being called on to put themselves through. In the children’s crayon drawing version of this war that lives in the heads of western so-called centrists, this is a team of heroic Good Guys righteously beating the tar out of hordes of Bad Guys because that’s what happens in the movies and on TV.
But this is not the movies, and this is not TV. People are dying in a US proxy war that was deliberately provoked by the US-centralized empire, and behind all the narratives and spin they are ultimately doing so for nothing more noble than the agenda to secure US unipolar hegemony.
Many of the blue-and-yellow flag wavers are well-intentioned, and really do think they are advocating for Ukrainian freedom and sovereignty. But in reality all they’ve been cheering for is Ukrainian subservience and enslavement to the empire, Ukrainian death, Ukrainian suffering, and the continuation of a dangerous proxy war between nuclear superpowers that threatens the life of everyone on earth.
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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, 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.
The Japanese Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced on 24 May that six Chinese and Russian strategic bombers were observed flying near the Japan on the same day that Tokyo was hosting the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) summit, prompting the Japan Air-Self Defense Force (JASDF) to scramble its jets in response. According to the MoD, two […]
The Pentagon reports about the continuing efforts to sell new U.S. weapons to those nations which discard their old ones in Ukraine. To express the seriousness of the situation in Ukraine the Pentagon decided to hoist Ukraine’s blue-above-yellow flag upside down. Hanging a flag upside down is a sign of either dire distress or cultural ignorance. Given that this was a Pentagon event the later is the more likely to be the case. The Baltic nutters have a another great and of course completely impractical idea.
It was apparently a “gaffe” of the kind we had forgotten since George W Bush stepped down from the US presidency in early 2009. During a speech in Dallas last week, he momentarily confused Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current war of aggression against Ukraine and his own war of aggression against Iraq in 2003.
Bush observed that a lack of checks and balances in Russia had allowed “one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq… I mean, Ukraine. Iraq too. Anyway… I’m 75.”
It sounded like another “Bushism” – a verbal slip-up – for which the 43rd president was famous. Just like the time he boasted that people “misunderestimated” him, or when he warned that America’s enemies “never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people – and neither do we”.
Maybe that explains why his audience laughed. Or maybe not, given how uncomfortable the laughter sounded.
Bush certainly wanted his mistake to be seen as yet another slip-up, which is why he hurriedly blamed it on his age. The senility defence doubtless sounds a lot more plausible at a time when the incumbent president, Joe Biden, regularly loses track of what he is saying and even where he is.
The western media, in so far as it has bothered to report Bush’s speech, has laughed along nervously too. It has milked the incident largely for comic effect: “Look, we can laugh at ourselves – unlike that narcissist Russian monster, Putin.”
The BBC accorded Bush’s comment status as a down-page brief news item. Those that gave it more attention preferred to term it a “gaffe” or an amusing “Freudian slip”.
‘Putin apologists’
But the focus on the humour of the moment is actually part of the media’s continuing war on our understanding of recent history. It is intended to deflect us, the audience, from thinking about the real significance of Bush’s “gaffe”.
The only reason the media is now so belatedly connecting – if very indirectly – “a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion” of Ukraine and what happened in Iraq is because of Bush’s mistake.
Had it not happened, the establishment media would have continued to ignore any such comparison. And those trying to raise it would continue to be dismissed as conspiracy theorists or as apologists for Putin.
The implication of what Bush said – even for those mockingly characterising it in Freudian terms – is that he and his co-conspirator, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, are war criminals and that they should be on trial at the Hague for invading and occupying Iraq.
Everything the current US administration is saying against Putin, and every punishment meted out on Russia and ordinary Russians, can be turned around and directed at the United States and Britain.
And yet, the western establishment media are proposing none of the above. They are not calling for Blair and Bush to be tried for war crimes. Meanwhile, they echo western leaders in labelling what Russia is doing in Ukraine as genocide and labelling Putin as an evil madman.
The western media are as uncomfortable taking Bush’s speech at face value as his audience was. And for good reason.
That is because the media are equally implicated in US and UK crimes in Iraq. They never seriously questioned the ludicrous “weapons of mass destruction” justification for the invasion. They never debated whether the “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign of Baghdad was genocidal.
And, of course, they never described either Bush or Blair as madmen and megalomaniacs and never accused them of waging a war of imperialism – or one for oil – in invading Iraq. In fact, both continue to be treated by the media as respected elder statesmen.
During Trump’s presidency, leading journalists waxed nostalgic for the days of Bush, apparently unconcerned that he had used his own presidency to launch a war of aggression – the “supreme international crime”.
And Blair continues to be sought out by the British and US media for his opinions on domestic and world affairs. He is even listened to deferentially when he opines on Ukraine.
Pre-emption excuse
But this is not simply about a failure to acknowledge the recent historical record. Bush’s invasion of Iraq is deeply tied to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. And for that reason, if no other, the western media ought to have been driving home from the outset the parallels between the two – as Bush has now done in error.
That would have provided the geopolitical context for understanding – without necessarily justifying – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the West’s role in provoking it. Which is precisely why the media have worked so hard to ignore those parallels.
In invading Iraq, Bush and Blair created a precedent that powerful states could redefine their attack on another state as “pre-emptive” – as defensive rather than aggressive – and thereby justify the military invasion in violation of the laws of war.
Bush and Blair falsely claimed both that Iraq threatened the West with weapons of mass destruction and that its secular leader, Saddam Hussein, had cultivated ties with the extreme Islamists of al-Qaeda that carried out the 9/11 attacks on the US. These pretexts ranged from the entirely unsubstantiated to the downright preposterous.
Putin has argued – more plausibly – that Russia had to take pre-emptive action against covert efforts by a US-led Nato to expand its military sphere of influence right up to Russia’s borders. Russia feared that, left unchecked, the US and Nato were preparing to absorb Ukraine by stealth.
But how does that qualify Russia’s invasion as defensive? The Kremlin’s fears were chiefly twofold.
First, it could have paved the way for Nato stationing missiles minutes away from Moscow, eroding any principle of mutual deterrence.
And second, Nato’s incorporation of Ukraine would have drawn the western military alliance directly into Ukraine’s civil war in the eastern Donbass region. That is where Ukrainian forces, including neo-Nazi elements like the Azov Brigade, have been pitted in a bloody fight against ethnic Russian communities.
In this view, absent a Russian invasion, Nato could have become an active participant in propping up Ukrainian ultra-nationalists killing ethnic Russians – as the West is now effectively doing through its arming of Ukraine to the tune of more than $40bn.
Even if one discounts Russia’s concerns, Moscow clearly has a greater strategic interest invested in what its neighbour Ukraine is doing on their shared border than Washington ever had in Iraq, many thousands of miles away.
Proxy wars
Even more relevant, given the West’s failure to acknowledge, let alone address, Bush and Blair’s crimes committed in Iraq, is Russia’s suspicion that US foreign policy is unchanged two decades on. On what basis would Moscow believe that Washington is any less aggressive or power-hungry than it was when it launched its invasion of Iraq?
The western media continue to refer to the US attack on Iraq, and the subsequent bloody years of occupation, as variously a “mistake”, a “misadventure” and a “blunder”. But surely it does not look that way to Moscow, all the more so given that Washington followed its invasion of Iraq with a series of proxy wars against other Middle Eastern and North African states such as Libya, Syria and Yemen.
To Russia, the attack on Iraq looks more like a stepping stone in a continuum of wars the US has waged over decades for “full-spectrum dominance” and to eradicate competitors for control of the planet’s resources.
With that as the context, Moscow might have reasonably imagined that the US and its Nato allies were eager for yet another proxy war, this time using Ukraine as the battlefield. Recent comments from Biden administration officials, such as Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, noting that Washington’s tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Kyiv is intended to “weaken Russia”, can only accentuate such fears.
Back in March, Leon Panetta, a former US secretary of defence and the CIA director under Barack Obama, who is in a position to speak more freely than serving officials, observed that Washington was waging “a proxy war with Russia, whether we say so or not”.
He predicted where US policy would head next, noting that the aim would be “to provide as much military aid as necessary”. Diplomacy has been a glaringly low priority for Washington.
Barely concealed from public view is a desire in the US and its allies for another regime change operation – this time in Russia – rather than end the war and the suffering of Ukrainians.
Butcher versus blunderer
Last week, the New York Times very belatedly turned down the war rhetoric a notch and called on the Biden administration to advance negotiations. Even so, its assessment of where the blame lay for Ukraine’s destruction was unambiguous: “Mr Putin will go down in history as a butcher.”
But have Bush or Blair gone down in history as butchers? They most certainly haven’t. And the reason is that the western media have been complicit in rehabilitating their images, presenting them as statesmen who “blundered” – with the implication that good people blunder when they fail to take account of how entrenched the evil of everyone else in the world is.
A butcher versus a pair of blunderers.
This false distinction means western leaders and western publics continue to evade responsibility for western crimes in Iraq and elsewhere.
That was why in late February – in reference to Ukraine – a TV journalist could suggest to Condoleezza Rice, who was one of the architects of the illegal war of aggression on Iraq as Bush’s national security adviser: “When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.” The journalist apparently did not consider for a moment that it was not just Putin who was a war criminal but the very woman she was sitting opposite.
It was also why Rice could nod solemnly and agree with a straight face that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was “against every principle of international law and international order – and that’s why throwing the book at them [Russia] now in terms of economic sanctions and punishments is a part of it”.
But a West that has refused to come to terms with its role in committing the “supreme international crime” of invading Iraq, and has been supporting systematic crimes against the sovereignty of other states such as Yemen, Libya and Syria, cannot sit in judgment on Russia. And further, it should not be trying to take the high ground by meddling in the war in Ukraine.
If we took the implications of Bush’s comment seriously, rather than treating it as a “gaffe” and viewing the Iraq invasion as a “blunder”, we might be in a position to speak with moral authority instead of flaunting – once again – our hypocrisy.
In a recent television interview, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said “victory will be bloody,” but Ukraine will not allow Russia to control Ukrainian cities and territories seized in its brutal invasion of his country. Zelenskyy told the U.S.-based outlet Axios on Monday that Ukraine must “hold the line” or NATO countries, such as Latvia and Estonia, will be Russia’s next targets, which could force the United States to deploy troops in Eastern Europe under NATO’s collective defense rules.
Zelenskyy is using the threat of U.S. soldiers dying overseas to keep Americans’ attention and shore up U.S. support for the long haul. After stunning success on the battlefield against a much larger enemy, Ukraine is now committed to pushing Russia off every inch of disputed territory, including the destroyed city of Mariupol now under Russian control, and the eastern Donbas region where Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists have fought since 2014. Critics on the left and right warned the Biden administration that U.S. involvement risks conflict with Russia, but according to Zelenskyy, a wider war is more likely if the steady stream of U.S. weapons and military aid to Ukraine dries up.
“We have no way out of this situation,” Zelenskyy added.
Meanwhile, some on the Ukrainian left, including the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, say the arms transfers from the U.S. simply escalate the conflict and draw both sides further away from negotiating a ceasefire.
The horrifying war of attrition threatens to drag on for months or years as fighting in Ukraine’s south and east rages and Russia bombards towns and cities to make way for more attacks. The United States is pumping weapons and military aid into Ukraine at unprecedented levels, raising a sharp debate about whether the U.S. is defending a war-torn ally or pushing Ukrainians to become cannon fodder for a complex and dangerous proxy war with Russia.
Biden administration officials have said the U.S. wants Ukraine to “win” the war and weaken the Russian military, a longstanding goal of the U.S.-led NATO alliance. Meanwhile, the conflict has divided left-leaning circles across Europe and the U.S. as leftists within the Ukrainian resistance join Zelenskyy in clamoring for shipments of arms to fight an authoritarian invader.
“The lack of weapons will not stop the war, but will only lead to more civilian casualties, kidnappings and torture in the occupied territories, a humanitarian catastrophe, and more waves of refugees,” reads a statement posted on Telegram by Operation Solidarity, a group of leftist and anti-authoritarian civil volunteers who bring aid to battered Ukrainian cities.
In contrast, Ukrainian pacifists are protesting Ukraine’s mandatory military mobilization under martial law while calling on both sides to declare a ceasefire and restart negotiations before more lives are lost. United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, Pope Francis, international antiwar coalitions, and leaders of countries across the world have also urged Ukraine and Russia to call a ceasefire and resume peace talks that stalled weeks ago.
“In my view, U.S. taxpayers should know about weapons supplies to Ukraine, that indeed it escalates the Russia-Ukraine armed conflict, it increases risk of direct confrontation between two nuclear superpowers, U.S. and Russia, and it has bad impact on economy and ecology of United States as well as global negative impact,” said Yurii Sheliazhenko, executive secretary of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, in an email.
Zelenskyy also says that the war will “certainly” end in diplomacy. However, it’s been increasingly difficult to arrange a meeting with Putin, especially after Russian forces committed atrocities against civilians in Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol, and other cities. Now that the Ukrainian resistance has embarrassed a much stronger Russian military, recent statements indicate that Zelenskyy seems to be aiming for a bloody “victory” followed by diplomacy, rather than a quick ceasefire and negotiated settlement.
Such an agreement would end the violence but likely concede slices of Ukrainian territory near the eastern border. Russia already annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 without much of a fight. Desperate for a concession to justify the war, Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to control the Donbas region and a land bridge to Crimea that would create a security buffer zone between an increasingly isolated Moscow and NATO-allied countries in Europe.
Billions of Dollars’ Worth of U.S. Weapons Since 2014
U.S. military spending on Ukraine is already well over the aid amounts sent to Israel, Afghanistan and Egypt. The U.S. dispatched more than $3.9 billion worth of U.S. weapons to Ukraine before Congress approved a $40 billion aid package signed by President Biden this week, which includes at least $6 billion in military assistance and $9 billion to replenish U.S. weapons stockpiles after transfers to Ukraine.
The U.S. is the world’s top arms dealer, and weapons sales and transfers are central to U.S. foreign policy across the world.
U.S. weapons transfers to Ukraine are not a brand-new phenomenon. Zelenskyy was pleading for more U.S. weapons long before Putin invaded his country in February. Ukraine has fought a simmering civil war with Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas region since 2014, when the U.S. began funneling what would amount to $6.5 billion in security assistance to the country over the course of the last eight years, according to the State Department. The war followed a political uprising that ousted a pro-Russian president and pitted the U.S. and Russia against each other in a diplomatic proxy fight.
In an infamous call with former President Donald Trump in 2019, Zelenskyy asked for more Javelin missile systems — the same anti-tank weapons that have successfully thwarted Russian invaders. Trump agreed, but the former president said Zelenskyy must “do us a favor” first. That favor, of course, was digging up dirt on Joe Biden, the Democrat Trump expected to run against for reelection. A whistleblower complaint led to the second unsuccessful effort to impeach Trump from office.
Now, U.S.-made Howitzers and artillery rounds, laser-guided rocket systems, battle drones, Stinger and Javelin missile systems and an assortment of smaller arms have all made it to the front lines in Ukraine. The illicit arms trade in Ukraine has ballooned since the civil war began in 2014, raising fears about loose weapons powerful enough to destroy buildings and down commercial airplanes, according to the Washington Post. The war is a boon for U.S. arms manufacturers, who collectively spend billions of dollars lobbying Congress.
Sheliazhenko said the war is taking a toll on the Ukrainian people that is rarely discussed in the Western media. Men ages 18-60 are not allowed the leave the country, forcing fleeing families to split up at the border. There are no legal exceptions that would allow pacifists who refuse military service on principle to flee abroad, according to a letter Sheliazhenko received from state officials. Recently, a transgender woman reported being strip searched and denied entry to Poland after Ukrainian border guards decided she was a man.
Sheliazhenko points to an official petition with more 27,000 signatures demanding Zelenskyy end the mandatory military mobilization. Wealthy men are able to bribe their way out of the country, and even as volunteers wait in long lines at military enlistment offices, recruiters “hunt down men … near shopping malls” and summon them to war.
“For what purpose? Only bribes — logic does not suggest anything else,” reads the petition, which urges Zelenskyy to open the border for all Ukrainians, prioritize volunteer conscripts and crack down on corruption.
Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces, which train civilians to defend against Russia, are blurring the line between civilian and combatant. Russian forces have hunted down, tortured and executed men suspected of arming themselves against the invasion. Yet, many Ukrainians are still eager to resist Putin’s invasion. A member of a Territorial Defense unit near Kyiv, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said fighters returning from the front lines reported a morale boost after receiving U.S. weapons and were eager to show others how to use them.
“Weapons Are Only About Death”
Operation Solidarity volunteers recently delivered food to beleaguered residents of Chernihiv, the northeastern Ukrainian city besieged by Russian forces in the early days of the war. The Russian army destroyed over 1,000 homes as well as critical civilian infrastructure in Chernihiv, according to the group’s posts on Telegram. In a previous post, Operation Solidarity appealed to leftists across Europe to support their government’s efforts to arm Ukraine with weapons and protective equipment. The group said many people in Europe, especially in antiwar movements, will condemn Putin’s aggression, but are not prepared to supply the Ukrainian resistance due to concerns over “militarism.” The group posted this statement:
Without a doubt, war leads to an increase in military budgets, arms supplies are not always controlled, and, in general, weapons are always about death. It’s hard to disagree with this. But it is important to clarify that it wasn’t the Ukrainian people who chose this path. Weapons and military equipment are needed only to protect ourselves from the authoritarian regime which today razes cities to the ground and kills their inhabitants.
Operation Solidarity said the war demonstrates that the world needs a new antiwar movement pushing all countries to give up offensive and nuclear weapons, not just smaller countries such as Ukraine, which agreed to remove Soviet-era nukes from its territory in 1992. In the group’s view, a Russian victory would signal to other belligerent countries that nuclear weapons and a larger military are enough to invade a weaker neighbor with impunity, which could spark a global arms race.
“The presence of an aggressor state, one that has achieved its goals through military means, will lead to an even more significant expansion of military budgets, an increased concentration of weapons at the borders of Russia and Europe, and a constant threat of world destruction in a nuclear war,” the group said. “This cannot be acceptable for any anti-war movement.”
However, the U.S. and Russia have arguably been engaged in an arms race in Ukraine since at least 2014. Putin’s invasion finally tipped the scales, and the U.S. responded with massive shipments of weapons and other supplies. As Zelenskyy tours the world via videoconference asking for support, Ukraine’s armed forces are using these weapons to push back against Russian troops, whose failure to overrun the capital city of Kyiv inspired the West to bet on a Ukrainian victory.
Meanwhile, the battle for the Donbas region is raging, and the scars left in its wake will take generations to heal.
A week ago, we made note of a May 11 New York Times news article, documenting that all was not going well for the U.S. in Ukraine, and a companion opinion piece hinting that a shift in direction might be in order.
Now on May 19, “THE EDITORIAL BOARD,” the full Magisterium of the Times, has moved from hints to a clarion call for a change in direction in an editorial uninformatively titled, “The War Is Getting Complicated, and America Isn’t Ready.” From atop the Opinion page the Editorial Board has declared that “total victory” over Russia is not possible and that Ukraine will have to negotiate a peace in a way that reflects a “realistic assessment” and the “limits” of U.S. commitment. The Times serves as one the main shapers of public opinion for the Elite and so its pronouncements are not to be taken lightly.
US Senator Joe Manchin said at the World Economic Forum on Monday that he opposes any kind of peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia.
Manchin, who at the moment is one of the most powerful elected officials in Washington, added that only the complete forcible ejection of Russia from all of Ukraine is acceptable, that the war should ideally be used to remove Putin from power, and that he and the strategists he talks to see this war as an “opportunity”.
“I am totally committed, as one person, to seeing Ukraine to the end with a win, not basically with some kind of a treaty; I don’t think that is where we are and where we should be,” Manchin said.
“I mean basically moving Putin back to Russia and hopefully getting rid of Putin,” Manchin added when asked what he meant by a win for Ukraine.
Joe Manchin, speaking today at the World Economic Forum, rejects the idea that the Ukraine war should ever be resolved with "some type of a treaty." Instead demands fighting "to the end," until total victory — which includes "getting rid of Putin" pic.twitter.com/wPj8qfsF1P
Manchin clarified that he did not mean pushing Putin back to “pre-February”, ostensibly meaning with Russia still controlling the largely Moscow–loyal Crimea and supporting separatist territories in the Donbass, but with Kyiv fully reclaiming all parts of the nation.
“Oh no, I think Ukraine is determined to take their country back,” Manchin said when asked to clarify, further clarifying that he wants his call for regime change in Russia to be carried out by “the Russian people.”
“I believe strongly that I have never seen, and the people I talk strategically have never seen, an opportunity more than this, to do what needs to be done,” Manchin later added. “And Ukraine has the determination to do it. We should have the commitment to support it.”
In this next clip Manchin says he and the strategists he talks to have never seen an "opportunity" like this war to "do what needs to be done" against Putin. 2/2 pic.twitter.com/wzDhL22piH
Manchin’s comments fit in perfectly with what we know about the US-centralized empire’s real agendas in Ukraine.
Earlier this month Ukrainian media reported that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the nation’s president Volodymyr Zelensky on behalf of NATO powers that “even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.”
Last month US Secretary of “Defense” Lloyd Austin acknowledged that the goal in this war is not peace in Ukraine or the mere military defeat of Russia but to actually weaken Russia as a nation, saying “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”
Last week The New York Times reported that the Biden administration is developing plans to “further choke Russia’s oil revenues with the long-term goal of destroying the country’s central role in the global energy economy.”
Just the other day Ukraine’s military intelligence chief announced that the mission has already creeped forward from the goal of defeating the Russian invaders to reclaiming the Crimean territory which was annexed by the Russian Federation in 2014.
Two months ago Biden himself acknowledged what the real game is here with an open call for regime change, saying of Putin, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
Statements from the Biden administration in fact indicate that they expect this war to drag on for a long time, making it abundantly clear that a swift end to minimize the death and destruction is not just uninteresting but undesirable for the US empire.
This is not a proxy war with peace as an option anywhere within sight. It’s not about saving Ukrainian lives. It’s not even about beating Russia in Ukraine. It’s about achieving regime change in Moscow, no matter how many lives need to be destroyed in the process.
Peace is not on the menu.
Yes, The Ukraine War Could Have Been Prevented
An agreement in which Ukraine promised to remain a neutral country and the fulfilment of the Minsk accords could have stopped Putin’s invasion, @I_Katchanovski explains.https://t.co/iZjTYxNaA8
This war could easily have been prevented with a little diplomacy and reasonable compromise. As the University of Ottawa’s Ivan Katchanovski recently explained to The Maple, “an agreement in which Ukraine promised to remain a neutral country and the fulfilment of the Minsk accords could have stopped Putin’s invasion.”
We know now that the US intelligence cartel had good visibility into what the Kremlin had planned for Ukraine, so they would have known exactly what could have been done to prevent the invasion. They knowingly chose to do none of those things, because the goal was to provoke this war the entire time and then weaponize it against Moscow.
That’s why the Biden administration has been hindering diplomatic efforts to negotiate an end to this war, why it has refused to provide Ukraine with any kind of diplomatic negotiating power regarding the possible rollback of sanctions and other US measures to help secure peace, and why Washington’s top diplomats have consistently been conspicuously absent from any kind of dialogue with their counterparts in Moscow.
Empire spinmeisters and their propagandized victims like to claim that Ukrainian forces are fighting for “peace” in Ukraine. The other day Kyiv Independent’s Illia Ponomarenko, who has called the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion his “brothers in arms,” tweeted this:
Good god, I want peace in Ukraine by Christmas time. Fireworks and joy in the snowy streets of Kyiv. Patriotic music, strangers hugging each other at the Maidan, “merry Christmas, war is over.” That would be just awesome, don’t you guys think so?
But anyone who understands this war knows this is ridiculous. Peace is not the goal in Ukraine. Most of the Ukrainians doing the fighting surely believe they are fighting for peace in their homeland, and peace is surely their intention, but that’s not something the empire will allow if the empire gets any say in the matter.
Even if Ukraine does somehow avoid being used as cannon fodder to draw Moscow into a long and costly slog as US officials have admitted was done in both Afghanistan and in Syria, and even if they do somehow manage to deliver a crushing and conclusive defeat to Moscow in the near term (which is far less probable than the western media would have you believe), that wouldn’t be the end of the war. The war would just change shape as the empire and its proxies go on the offensive against Moscow.
This war does not end with Russia being driven from Ukraine, it ends with regime change and the balkanization of the Russian Federation. Really it doesn’t end until the rise of China has been stopped and US unipolar hegemony secured. Or when the empire collapses. Or when we all die in a nuclear holocaust.
All forward motion in this war has nothing but violence as far as the eye can see on its trajectory into the future. No matter how much wealth and war machinery you pour into this conflict, that trajectory of death and destruction will just keep stretching out to the horizon. As Chris Hedges recently explained, war is the only path the empire has left open to itself.
I’ve seen some cute kids in my time, but nobody’s as adorable as people who think the US pours weapons into foreign nations in order to achieve peace.
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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, 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.
A week ago, we made note of a May 11 New York Times news article, documenting that all was not going well for the U.S. in Ukraine, and a companion opinion piece hinting that a shift in direction might be in order.
Now on May 19, “THE EDITORIAL BOARD,” the full Magisterium of the Times, has moved from hints to a clarion call for a change in direction in an editorial uninformatively titled, “The War Is Getting Complicated, and America Isn’t Ready.” From atop the Opinion page the Editorial Board has declared that “total victory” over Russia is not possible and that Ukraine will have to negotiate a peace in a way that reflects a “realistic assessment” and the “limits” of U.S. commitment. The Times serves as one of the main shapers of public opinion for the Elite and so its pronouncements are not to be taken lightly.
Ukrainians will have to adjust to US “limits” and make sacrifices for newfound U.S. realism
The Times May editorial dictum contains the following key passages:
“ In March, this board argued that the message from the United States and its allies to Ukrainians and Russians alike must be: No matter how long it takes, Ukraine will be free. …”
“That goal cannot shift, but in the end, it is still not in America’s best interest to plunge into an all-out war with Russia, even if a negotiated peace may require Ukraine to make some hard decisions (emphasis, jw).”
To ensure that there is no ambiguity, the editorial declares that:
“A decisive military victory for Ukraine over Russia, in which Ukraine regains all the territory Russia has seized since 2014, is not a realistic goal. … Russia remains too strong…”
To make certain that President Biden and the Ukrainians understand what they should do, the EDITORIAL BOARD goes on to say:
“… Mr. Biden should also make clear to President Volodymyr Zelensky and his people that there is a limit to how far the United States and NATO will go to confront Russia, and limits to the arms, money and political support they can muster. It is imperative that the Ukrainian government’s decisions be based on a realistic assessment of its means and how much more destruction Ukraine can sustain (emphasis, jw).”
As Volodymyr Zelensky reads those words, he must surely begin to sweat. The voice of his masters is telling him that he and Ukraine will have to make some sacrifices for the US to save face. As he contemplates his options, his thoughts must surely run back to February, 2014, and the U.S. backed Maidan coup that culminated in the hasty exit of President Yanukovych from his office, his country and almost from this earth.
Ukraine is a proxy war that is all too dangerous
In the eyes of the Times editorial writers, the war has become a U.S. proxy war against Russia using Ukrainians as cannon fodder – and it is careening out of control:
“The current moment is a messy one in this conflict, which may explain President Biden and his cabinet’s reluctance to put down clear goal posts.”
“The United States and NATO are already deeply involved, militarily and economically. Unrealistic expectations could draw them ever deeper into a costly, drawn-out war..”
“Recent bellicose statements from Washington — President Biden’s assertion that Mr. Putin ‘cannot remain in power,’ Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s comment that Russia must be ‘weakened’ and the pledge by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, that the United States would support Ukraine ‘until victory is won’ — may be rousing proclamations of support, but they do not bring negotiations any closer.”
While the Times dismisses these statements as “rousing proclamations,” it is all too clear that for the neocons in charge of U.S. foreign policy, the goal has always been a proxy war to bring down Russia. This has not become a proxy war; it has always been a proxy war. The neocons operate by the Wolfowitz Doctrine, enunciated in 1992, soon after the end of Cold War 1.0, by the necoconservative Paul Wolfowitz, then Under Secretary of Defense:
“We endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”
“We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global power.”
Clearly if Russia is “too strong” to be defeated in Ukraine, it is too strong to be brought down as a superpower.
The Times has shifted its opinion from March to May. What Has Changed?
After 7 years of slaughter in the Donbass and 3 months of warfare in Southern Ukraine, has the Times editorial board suddenly had a rush of compassion for all the victims of the war and the destruction of Ukraine and changed its opinion? Given the record of the Times over the decades, it would seem that other factors are at work.
First of all, Russia has handled the situation unexpectedly well compared to dire predictions from the West.
President Putin’s support exceeds 80%.
165 of 195 nations, including India and China with 35% of the world’s population, have refused to join sanctions against Russia, leaving the U.S., not Russia, relatively isolated in the world.
The ruble, which Biden said would be “rubble” has not only returned to its pre-February levels but is valued at a 2 year high, today at 59 rubles to the dollar compared to 150 in March.
Russia is expecting a bumper harvest and the world is eager for its wheat and fertilizer, oil and gas all of which provide substantial revenue.
The EU has largely succumbed to Russia’s demand to be paid for gas in rubles. Treasury Secretary Yellin is warning the suicidal Europeans that an embargo of Russian oil will further damage the economies of the West.
Russian forces are making slow but steady progress across southern and eastern Ukraine after winning in Mariupol, the biggest battle of the war so far, and a demoralizing defeat for Ukraine.
In the US inflation, which was already high before the Ukraine crisis, has been driven even higher and reached over 8% with the Fed now scrambling to control it by raising interest rates. Partly as a result of this, the stock market has come close to bear territory. As the war progresses, many have joined Ben Bernanke, former Fed Chair, in predicting a period of high unemployment, high inflation and low growth – the dread stagflation.
Domestically, there are signs of deterioration in support of the war. Most strikingly, 57 House Republicans and 11 Senate Republicans voted against the latest package of weaponry to Ukraine, bundled with considerable pork and hidden bonanzas for the war profiteers. (Strikingly no Democrat, not a single one, not even the most “progressive” voted against pouring fuel on the fire of war raging in Ukraine. But that is another story.)
And while U.S. public opinion remains in favor of U.S. involvement in Ukraine there are signs of slippage. For example, Pew reports that those feeling the U.S. is not doing enough declined from March to May. As more stagflation takes hold with gas and food prices growing and voices like those of Tucker Carlson and Rand Paul pointing out the connection between the inflation and the war, discontent is certain to grow.
Finally, as the war becomes less popular and it takes its toll, an electoral disaster looms ahead in 2022 and 2024 for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, for which the Times serves as a mouthpiece.
The NYT editorial signals alarm over the insane goal of the neoconservatives
There is a note of panic in this appeal to find a negotiated solution now. The U.S. and Russia are the world’s major nuclear powers with thousands of nuclear missiles on Launch On Warning, aka Hair Trigger Alert. At moments of high tension, the possibilities of Accidental Nuclear Armageddon are all too real.
President Biden’s ability to stay in command of events is in question. Many people of his age can handle a situation like this, but many cannot and he seems to be in the latter category.
Alarm is warranted and panic is understandable.
The neocons are now in control of the foreign policy of the Biden administration, the Democratic Party and most of the Republican Party. But will the neocons in charge give up and move in a reasonable and peaceful direction as the Times editorial demands? This is a fantasy of the first order. As one commenter observed, the hawks like Nuland, Blinken and Sullivan have no reverse gear; they always double down. They do not serve the interests of humanity nor do they serve the interests of the American people. They are in reality traitors to the U.S. They must be exposed, discredited and pushed aside. Our survival depends on it.
The contempt shown by Hungary’s prime minister for EU norms requires a response
In recent years, as Viktor Orbán has consolidated his hold over Hungary’s body politic, he has acquired a cult following on America’s Republican right. That status was confirmed last week when US conservatives staged a special conference in Budapest, the centrepiece of which was an address by the newly re-elected prime minister. Speaking to the conference theme of “God, homeland, family”, the self-styled standard bearer for “illiberal democracy” did not hold back. Delegates were told that “ideologically trained bureaucrats” in Washington and Brussels – in cahoots with progressive liberals and “neo-Marxists” – were seeking to undermine traditional western values. Mr Orbán then outlined the strategy taken in Hungary to eradicate this threat. “The first point in the Hungarian formula,” he said, “is to play by our own rules.”
In that spirit, Mr Orbán’s Hungary has flouted the democratic norms of European Union membership for years. On issues relating to corruption, the independence of the media, asylum and LGBTQ+ rights, Budapest has flatly ignored EU objections to its actions. Mr Orbán has made domestic political capital from waging a culture war against Brussels, even as Hungary accessed billions of pounds worth of EU regional aid. As he trolls the EU ever more brazenly from within and gives masterclasses to America’s “alt-right”, what can Brussels do about it?
Above photo: The Mariupol Commercial Sea Port in the city of Mariupol. Vladimir Gerdo/TASS. Russia is falsely accused of blocking Ukraine’s sea ports and thereby increasing a global food shortage: The United Nations has warned that the war in Ukraine has helped to stoke a global food crisis that could last years if it goes unchecked, as […]
“Scoundrel Time,” Lillian Hellman’s book about her experiences during the Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt, is one of the books “Scheer Intelligence” host Robert Scheer thinks best describes the current political climate in the U.S. Scheer has spotlighted various dissenting Western voices on the Ukraine war, none of which support Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the European nation but merely question the West’s role in the conflict. CIA veterans Ray McGovern and John Kiriakou, who join Scheer on this week’s episode, are two such voices who have been maligned for their opinions on the subject.
On the most recent installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” the three spar about how the Ukrainian conflict is being covered in the U.S., where this war is heading, and what the conflict means for U.S.-China relations, as well as the potential for nuclear war. Listen to the full discussion between McGovern, Kiriakou and Scheer as they expertly pick apart many myths that are being dangerously propagated about Ukraine, Russia, and the West.
The Ukrainian government is quickly learning that it can say anything, literally anything at all, about what’s happening on the ground there and get it uncritically reported as an actual news story by the mainstream western press.
The latest story making the rounds is a completely unevidenced claim made by a Ukrainian government official that Russians are going around raping Ukrainian babies to death. Business Insider, The Daily Beast, The Daily Mail and Yahoo News have all run this story despite no actual evidence existing for it beyond the empty assertions of a government who would have every incentive to lie.
“A one-year-old boy died after being raped by two Russian soldiers, the Ukrainian Parliament’s Commissioner for Human Rights said on Thursday,” reads a report by Business Insider which was subsequently picked up by Yahoo News. “The accusation is one of the most horrific from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but is not unique.”
At the end of the fourth paragraph we get to the disclaimer that every critical thinker should look for when reading such stories in the mainstream press:
“Insider could find no independent evidence for the claim.”
A growing number of accusations that Russian soldiers are raping the youngest and most vulnerable war victims is the latest disturbing twist in a modern war defined by archaic brutalityhttps://t.co/fFFkGLmg7M
In its trademark style, The Daily Beast ran the same story in a much more flamboyant and click-friendly fashion.
“The dead boy is among dozens of alleged child rape victims which include two 10-year-old boys, triplets aged 9, a 2-year-old girl raped by two Russian soldiers, and a 9-month-old baby who was penetrated with a candlestick in front of its mother, according to Ukraine’s Commissioner for Human Rights,” The Daily Beast writes.
The one and only source for this latest spate of “the Russians are raping babies to death” stories is a statement on a Ukrainian government website by Ukraine’s Human Rights Commissioner Lyudmyla Denisova. The brief statement contains no evidence of any kind, and its English translation concludes as follows:
I appeal to the UN Commission for Investigation Human Rights Violations during the Russian military invasion of Ukraine to take into account these facts of genocide of the Ukrainian people.
I call on our partners around the world to increase sanctions pressure on russia, to provide Ukraine with offensive weapons, to join the investigation of rashist crimes in our country!
The enemy must be stopped and all those involved in the atrocities in Ukraine must be brought to justice!
This is what passes for journalism in the western world today. Reporting completely unfounded allegations against US enemies based solely on assertions by a government official demanding more weapons and sanctions against those enemies and making claims that sound like they came from an It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia bit.
The Ukrainian government is quickly learning that it can say anything, literally anything about Russia, without any evidence at all, and the western mainstream press will report it as an actual news story. pic.twitter.com/BYESIPwe1x
We cannot say definitively that these rapes never happened. We also cannot say definitively that the Australian government isn’t warehousing extraterrestrial aircraft in an underground bunker in Canberra, but we don’t treat that like it’s an established fact and publish mainstream news reports about it just because we can’t prove it’s false. That’s not how the burden of proof works.
Obviously the rape of children is a very real and very serious matter, and obviously rape is one of the many horrors which can be inflicted upon people in the lawless environment of war. But to turn strategically convenient government assertions about such matters into a news story based on no evidence whatsoever is not just journalistic malpractice but actual atrocity propaganda.
Atrocity propaganda has been in use for a very long time due to how effective it can be at getting populations mobilized against targeted enemies, from the Middle Ages when Jews were accused of kidnapping Christian children to kill them and drink their blood, to 17th century claims that the Irish were killing English children and throwing them into the sea, to World War I claims that Germans were mutilating and eating Belgian babies.
Atrocity propaganda frequently involves children, because children cannot be construed as combatants or non-innocents, and generally involves the most horrific allegations the propagandists can possibly get away with at that point in history. It creates a useful appeal to emotion which bypasses people’s logical faculties and gets them accepting the propaganda based not on facts and evidence but on how it makes them feel.
Before writing this, the members of the @nytimes Editorial Board should have asked themselves who among them wanted to have their children, including babies and infants, raped by Russian soldiers, because that is what's happening in Ukraine: https://t.co/upsYpUmuyIhttps://t.co/UeCbCDTLfr
And the atrocity propaganda is functioning exactly as it’s meant to. Do a search on social media for this bogus story that’s been forcibly injected into public discourse and you’ll find countless individuals expressing their outrage at the evil baby-raping Russians. Democratic Party operative Andrea Chalupa, known for her controversial collusion with the Ukrainian government to undermine the 2016 Trump campaign, can be seen citing the aforementioned Daily Beast article on Twitter to angrily admonish the New York Times editorial board for expressing a rare word of caution about US involvement in the war.
“Before writing this, the members of the New York Times Editorial Board should have asked themselves who among them wanted to have their children, including babies and infants, raped by Russian soldiers, because that is what’s happening in Ukraine,” Chalupa tweeted.
See that? How a completely unevidenced government assertion was turned into an official-looking news story, and how that official-looking news story was then cited as though it’s an objective fact that Russian soldiers are running around raping babies to death in Ukraine? And how it’s done to help manufacture consent for a geostrategically crucial proxy war, and to bludgeon those who express any amount of caution about these world-threatening escalations?
That’s atrocity propaganda doing exactly what it is meant to do.
Now on top of all the other reasons we’re being given why the US and its allies need to send Ukraine more and more war machinery of higher and higher destructive capability, they also need to do so because the Russians are just raping babies to death willy nilly over there. Which just so happens to work out nicely for the US-centralized empire’s goals of unipolar domination, for the Ukrainian regime, and for the military-industrial complex.
And that wasn’t even the extent of obscene mass media atrocity propaganda conducted on behalf of Ukrainian officials for the day. Newsweek has a new article out titled “Russians Targeting Kids’ Beds, Rooms With Explosives: Ukrainian Bomb Team,” which informs us that “The leader of a Ukrainian bomb squad has said that Russian forces are targeting children by placing explosive devices inside their rooms and under their beds.”
Then at the end of the second paragraph we again find that magical phrase:
“Newsweek has not independently verified the claim.”
The Newsweek report is based on part of an embarrassing ABC News Australia puff piece about a Ukrainian team which is allegedly responsible for removing landmines in areas that were previously occupied by Russian forces. The puff piece refers to the team as a “unit of brave de-miners” while calling Russian forces “barbaric”.
ABC uncritically reports all the nefarious ways the evil Russians have been planting explosives with the goal of killing Ukrainian civilians, including setting mines in children’s beds and teddy bears and placing them under fallen Ukrainian soldiers. Way down toward the bottom of the article we see the magical phrase again:
“The ABC has not been able to independently verify these reports, but they back up allegations made by Ukraine’s President.”
Ahh, so what you’re being told by Ukrainian forces “backs up” what you’ve been told by the president of Ukraine. Doesn’t get any more rock solid than that, does it? Great journalism there, fellas.
The Ukrainian government stands everything to gain and nothing to lose by just saying whatever it needs to say in order to obtain more weapons, more funding and increasingly direct assistance from western powers, so if it knows the western media will uncritically report every claim it makes, why not lie? Why not tell whatever lie you need to tell in order to advance your own interests and agendas? It would be pretty silly of them not to take advantage of the opening they’re being given.
This is something the western press know is happening. They know full well that Ukraine is waging a very sophisticated propaganda campaign against Russia and seeding disinformation to facilitate that infowar. It’s not a secret. They are participating in that campaign knowingly.
The mass media have been cranking out atrocity propaganda about what’s happening in Ukraine since before the invasion even started, like when they reported in February that Russia has a list of dissidents, journalists and “vulnerable populations such as religious and ethnic minorities and LGBTQI+ persons” who it plans on rounding up and torturing when it invades. Funny how we just completely stopped hearing about that one.
And this is all happening at the same time the western political/media class continues to shriek about the dangers of “disinformation” and the urgent need to strictly regulate its circulation on the internet, even after US officials came right out and admitted that they’ve been circulating disinformation about Russia and Ukraine. I guarantee you none of these completely evidence-free claims will be subject to censorship by the “fact checkers” of social media platforms.
The fact that both Silicon Valley and the mainstream news media have accepted it as a given that it is their job to manipulate public thought about this war tells you everything you need to know about how free and truth-based the so-called liberal democracies of the western world really are. We are being deceived and confused into consenting to agendas that could very easily lead to nuclear armageddon, and if we ever raise our voices in objection to this we are branded Putin propagandists and disinformation agents.
It’s getting very, very bad. Turn around, people. Wrong way.
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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, 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.
Twitter has published what it calls a “crisis misinformation policy” announcing that it will be actively reducing the visibility of content found to be false which pertains to “situations of armed conflict, public health emergencies, and large-scale natural disasters.”
If you’ve been paying attention to the dramatic escalations in online censorship we’ve been seeing in 2022, it will not surprise you to learn that the Ukraine war is the first crisis to which this new censorship policy will be applied.
Twitter says that it “won’t amplify or recommend content” found to violate its new policy, and will also attach warning labels to individual tweets and even hide offending content behind a warning label and disable the retweet function on particularly naughty posts.
The problem here is of course the question of how to impartially establish whether something is objectively false without it turning into at best a flawed system guided by fallible human biases and perceptual filters and at worst a powerful institution shutting down unauthorized speech. Twitter says it formed its new policy with input from unnamed “global experts and human rights organizations,” and will be enforcing it with the help of “conflict monitoring groups, humanitarian organizations, open-source investigators, journalists, and more.” This will come as no comfort to anyone who’s familiar with the history of propaganda peddling that can be found in everysingleone of those respective categories.
Twitter lists the following examples of the kind of content that will be found in violation of its crisis misinformation policy:
False coverage or event reporting, or information that mischaracterizes conditions on the ground as a conflict evolves;
False allegations regarding use of force, incursions on territorial sovereignty, or around the use of weapons;
Demonstrably false or misleading allegations of war crimes or mass atrocities against specific populations;
False information regarding international community response, sanctions, defensive actions, or humanitarian operations.
Dorsey's Twitter Resignation Sparks Fears Of More Internet Censorship
Twitter's new CEO has given some indications that he has a lot less interest in free speech than his predecessor and is much more favorable to censorship via algorithm manipulation.https://t.co/zVAPOC0pxp
When Jack Dorsey resigned as Twitter CEO last November, I noted the warning signs we were seeing that his replacement, Parag Agrawal, supported the use of measures which make unauthorized content much less visible than authorized content without eliminating the unauthorized content altogether.
“There’s a lot of content out there,” Agrawal said in a 2020 interview. “A lot of tweets out there, not all of it gets attention, some subset of it gets attention. And so increasingly our role is moving towards how we recommend content and that sort of, is, is, a struggle that we’re working through in terms of how we make sure these recommendation systems that we’re building, how we direct people’s attention is leading to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory.”
This agenda to “direct people’s attention” toward “healthy public conversation” by controlling how content is “recommended” to viewers echoes the censorship-by-algorithm tactics we’ve seen employed by Facebook, Google, and by Google-owned YouTube. Google has been hiding dissident media in its search results for years, and in 2020 the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet admitted to algorithmically throttling World Socialist Website. Last year the CEO of YouTube acknowledged that the platform uses algorithms to elevate “authoritative sources” while suppressing “borderline content” not considered authoritative. Facebook spokeswoman Lauren Svensson said in 2018 that if the platform’s fact-checkers (including the state-funded establishment narrative management firm Atlantic Council) rule that a Facebook user has been posting false news, moderators will “dramatically reduce the distribution of all of their Page-level or domain-level content on Facebook.”
Twitter has generally been the most reluctant of the major platforms to exercise censorship on behalf of the empire, which is what has made it a better source of ideas and information than any other major platform. But now we’re seeing the most pernicious form of online censorship, censorship by manipulation of content visibility, take hold there as well.
Censorship by visibility manipulation is the most destructive form of online censorship that exists, because its consequences are both so much more far-reaching and so much less attention-grabbing than the controversial act of banning users from platforms or removing their posts. It’s a kind of censorship that people don’t even know is happening, and it’s happening all over the place.
It is deeply disturbing how Silicon Valley megacorporations have simply accepted that it is their job to help the US win a propaganda war against Russia, and how everyone’s just going along with that like it’s fine and normal. Our ability to share ideas and information on the platforms where most people congregate is being increasingly restricted, not on the basis of whether our speech is harmful, or even whether it is true, but on whether it helps or hinders the US propaganda campaign against Russia.
Silicon Valley censorship with the Ukraine war is an unprecedented escalation because they’re not pretending to be doing it to protect people from a virus or to safeguard elections or defend the public good in any way. It’s literally just “Well we can’t have people thinking wrong thoughts about a war,” without even really explaining why that’s important in any coherent and sensical fashion.
There’s no longer any pretense that the internet is being censored to protect the public interest. It’s just open censorship of information about a war, solely because they take it as a given that it’s their job to control the things people think and say about that war. They’re coming right out and saying yes, we are the platforms you come to in order to share ideas and information with your fellow humans, and yes, we are agents of the US empire. This is a dramatic escalation.
All this public hand wringing about misinformation and disinformation is itself disinformation. They’re not worried about the spread of disinformation, they’re worried about the spread of information. Your rulers are not concerned that you’ll start learning false things about Covid or the war in Ukraine, they are worried you’ll start learning true things about your rulers. That’s what all this fuss is really about.
They are locking down our minds and sanitizing our information ecosystem for the protection of the empire. I will keep saying this and saying this for as long as I am able: we’ve got to wake up and stop these bastards before it is too late.
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As Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, wrote in early February, before Russia’s intervention in Ukraine:
America no longer has the monetary power and seemingly chronic trade and balance-of-payments surplus that enabled it to draw up the world’s trade and investment rules in 1944-45.
The threat to U.S. dominance is that China, Russia and Mackinder’s Eurasian World Island heartland are offering better trade and investment opportunities than are available from the United States
The most glaring example is the U.S. drive to block Germany from authorizing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to obtain Russian gas for the coming cold weather. Angela Merkel agreed with Donald Trump to spend $1 billion building a new LNG port to become more dependent on highly priced U.S. LNG. (The plan was cancelled after the U.S. and German elections changed both leaders.)
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