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  • Talks to End War in Ukraine Are Collapsing as US Seeks Regime Change in Moscow

    As the United Nations warns about the devastating global impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, talks to negotiate a peace settlement appear to have collapsed. Russian President Vladimir Putin appears determined to push forward despite a more resilient Ukrainian defense than expected, as both sides seem to be fixated on gaining military and territorial victories. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to pour millions of dollars in weapons into Ukraine. “It does seem that the United States thinks that Ukraine should be supported in its war effort, not its negotiation effort, until the very end,” says Nina Khrushcheva, professor at The New School and the great-granddaughter of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. She also speaks about the current climate of civil society within Russia and the faulty intelligence that led Putin to decide to invade Ukraine.

    TRANSCRIPT

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

    AMY GOODMAN: The New York Times is reporting talks to end the war in Ukraine have collapsed, with Russian and Ukrainian negotiators further apart from an agreement than at any other point during the war. Russia claims Ukraine still has not responded to a draft peace agreement it submitted April 15th.

    The Times reports Ukraine has been bolstered by a flood of weapons from the United States and its allies. The U.S. Senate is expected to vote today to approve an additional $40 billion in military and economic aid to Ukraine.

    Meanwhile, leaders of France, Germany and Italy are publicly calling for negotiations to end the war. On Friday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wrote on Twitter, “There must be a ceasefire in Ukraine as quickly as possible.” He made the comment after a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron told the European Parliament Europe’s duty should be to achieve a ceasefire, not wage war with Russia. Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi also embraced the pushing for negotiations to reach a ceasefire.

    With the war in Ukraine now in its 85th day, we turn to Nina Khrushcheva, professor of international affairs at The New School, co-author In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones. She’s also the great-granddaughter of the former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Her recent piece in Foreign Affairs is headlined “The Coup in the Kremlin.”

    Professor Khrushcheva, if you could start off by commenting on some European Western allies, like Germany, France and Italy, saying that there should be a negotiated settlement now, yet we see at this point it looks like the talks between Ukraine and Russia have collapsed? Can you talk about what’s happened and what you think needs to happen to bring this to a close?

    NINA KHRUSHCHEVA: Thank you, Amy, very much.

    Well, Germany has a bit of a kind of difficult road in trying to balance between Russia and Ukraine to a degree, because Olaf Scholz just now, just recently, said that Putin is not ready for negotiations, and Ukraine is not going to agree to a forced settlement. So, Germany, on one hand, does want to or does advocate for negotiated settlement; on the other hand, it depends — it almost seems like it depends who Olaf Scholz talked to the last moment.

    I think Italy has come up with an interesting — I think it was five articles proposal of how you can negotiate. And it is possible, what I’m hearing at least today from Moscow, that Moscow is seriously looking into it. It’s not clear whether they are going to accept it.

    It’s not clear whether the negotiations will rise up again, because, for now, it seems to me that both sides appear to want to have more military victories, or small victories as they are, and they think that for now they — for example, Russians feel that they can take a little bit more of Ukrainian territory, and Ukrainians feel that they can — for example, the Ukrainians just expelled the Russian forces from — the remaining Russian forces from the city of Kharkiv. So the Ukrainians feel that it’s possible that they can in fact free out some of the Ukrainian territory already taken, already taken by the Russians.

    So, what we know from wars from time immemorial is that when there is a decision to keep on with taking territory, freeing territory, it’s very difficult — it’s very difficult to get to actual negotiations, because military wins, or military desire to win more territory wins.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: Nina, could you respond to those who say, “Let’s talk about the role of the U.S. in pushing for negotiations” — first of all, if the U.S. has been doing that? And second of all, respond to those who say that U.S. policy now has completely shifted: Whereas initially it was about defending Ukraine, it’s now about defeating Russia. Do you agree with that? And if so, what kind of defeat? What would defeat look like for Russia?

    NINA KHRUSHCHEVA: Well, thank you. I actually don’t think it’s shifted. I think it was pretty obvious from the beginning that the United States was — it didn’t expect Russia to be doing so badly, or the war going so slowly, in a sense, and Putin having less victories than initially expected. Remember the calculation on the American side that Kyiv would be — could be taken by the Russians in three days. I mean, you know, it hasn’t been taken at all so far and doesn’t seem to be in the Russian plans whatsoever.

    But I think that the regime change, in a sense, was American idea right from the beginning. And that’s what the sanctions were, the sort of the consorted and massive sanctions, that the Russians call it the economic weapons of mass destruction, have been all about, kind of this idea that the Russians would get so traumatized that they would just get to the streets and sweep Putin away, or the oligarchs would get very upset because their yachts are taken away and then — and just go and have a coup.

    So I don’t know if the United States’ position has changed. It became — probably became more vocal the more they talked to Ukrainians. And also, I mean, Ukrainians have shown — not that it was a surprise to me, I must say, but Ukrainians have shown incredible resilience. And so, when the negotiations were seemingly doing OK, the Russians withdrew from the areas of Kyiv. And that was — you know, for the Russians, they say it was the idea that they’re just going to help negotiations, but it was taken by the Ukrainian side and the American side as the Russian defeat, and then the more weapons went into Ukraine.

    So I think the United States, it doesn’t seem to be interested, or at least I haven’t seen any interest in, in fact, negotiated position, because they do think Ukraine can win or should win, but also, as one of the anchors, American anchors, TV anchors, told me, is that: “How do we get rid of Putin?” And my response was, “We may not, because it’s not a Hollywood movie.” I mean, you know, not everything ends with a Marvel character victory. But it does seem that the United States thinks that Ukraine should be supported in its war effort, not its negotiation effort, until the very end, because the victories of Ukraine or not defeats of Ukraine are much greater than originally was expected.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Nina, you mentioned now the sanctions, the sanctions that the U.S. has imposed on Russia, and what possibility they had to weaken Putin’s position. You are in regular touch with people in Russia. What are the effects of these sanctions on ordinary people? And what effect have they had on the regime?

    NINA KHRUSHCHEVA: Well, they couched — the regime has couched the sanctions well enough. I mean, clearly, there’s not enough — or there is no Western products whatsoever. I mean, I was told. I haven’t been in Moscow since then, but I was told there’s just gaping holes in all these luxury and nonluxury Western stores all over in Moscow and all over other Russian cities. So, that’s not a pretty picture. And it does seem to be very upsetting — not “does seem to be,” it’s very upsetting for the Russians. You know, McDonald’s, the symbol of kind of Russian global — Russia joining the global American formula, the McDonald’s shop, store — McDonald’s restaurant on Pushkin Square in the center of Moscow just got closed. But what Russians were able to do — and I don’t know how, you know, because it’s not really — it’s only three months. It hasn’t been enough time to really see the consequences. But that McDonald’s now is just going have a different name, and they say 90% of what McDonald’s was doing is going to be done there. So, the symbol of McDonald’s is gone, but the products may remain and still seem to be remaining.

    But I think what it also does for the Russians is that they get very angry at the West. They’re angry at Putin for what he put them into, but when the West closed, I mean, it’s a summary punishment of all Russians, whether they support the war, and a lot of them do not support the war. And that makes them very angry at the West and very upset at the West, because they feel like they’re completely squeezed between the rock and the hard place. They have no place to go. They have no visas. I mean, they are given no consideration when they try to flee abroad. And a lot of them who did flee abroad at the beginning of the war, in February and March, now have to come back, because they can’t open bank accounts and so on and so forth. So I think that should be, in fact, something that U.S. and other Western countries should look into, is that how to actually bolster civil society that is remaining in Russia rather than completely killing whatever is left.

    AMY GOODMAN: Professor Nina Khrushcheva, you wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs called “The Coup in the Kremlin: How Putin and the Security Services Captured the Russian State.” Why don’t you lay that out for us, and how you think it shapes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?

    NINA KHRUSHCHEVA: Well, thank you, Amy. It’s a really long piece. Well, I mean, Putin, as we know, was a KGB lieutenant colonel when he took over the position first of the prime minister in ’99 and then became president of Russia in 2000. So it was, in many ways, a KGB coup. And I start my piece with him joking, speaking to the security forces for their kind of unofficial, and then became official, holiday on December 20th, that the order — that the security forces’ order of infiltrating the highest echelons of political power in Russia is now achieved. So, that was a joke, but it was not a joke, because a lot of people who oversaw or have been overseeing, you know, oil and gas industry and the cosmos industry and so on and so forth, the bank industry, they were Putin’s friends and colleagues, former friends and colleagues from KGB.

    But my argument is that what happened on February 24th is that it was, as I call it, an FSB-on-FSB coup, because before, even if the KGB people — and I call KGB summarily security forces people — were in charge, it was also kind of a handpick operation. You can push more, you can push back, but they were also understanding that Russia needs security, and it should be a very strong security apparatus, but it also should be part of the world. And therefore, it wasn’t really summarily being suppressed in any and all forms.

    But on February 24th, some security officials, or many security officials, may not be ready. They were not — we know that they were not ready for that. It was Putin’s decision. And yet the collective security apparatus took it as a sign that now oppression in Russia is their primary consideration, because Russia is the state that needs to withstand the demands of the West or withstand the attacks of the West, the way it is being presented. And so, the functional autocracy that was there until February 24th now has been replaced through this absolutely blind, faceless security bureaucracies.

    And that’s what this war in Ukraine, in addition to everything else, is all about. And so, one of the things that is interesting that, you know, there’s expectations that, well, if Putin is gone, it’s going to get better. Well, it may get less toxic; I don’t think it’s going to get better, because once security is in charge of Russia — we’ve seen it over centuries of history — in charge of Russia, it’s not giving its power that easily. So, Russia may be less toxic to the world, but it certainly be infinitely more oppressive within Russia.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: Nina, could you say — you just said that the decision to invade Ukraine was Putin’s decision. On what grounds did he make this decision? Because many have pointed out that this was — of course, it’s catastrophic for Ukraine, but also catastrophic for Russia. What kind of intelligence were these security officials giving him that allowed him to make this decision, which appears to have gone — the invasion seems to have gone quite differently from how they might have imagined?

    NINA KHRUSHCHEVA: Absolutely. And that’s — I mean, I wrote about it in the piece, but I also wrote about it in previous pieces that I do — do a column for Project Syndicate — sort of explaining this, because Putin, as I said, a KGB man, so that was run like a clandestine operation, essentially. So only a few people knew what was going on. In fact, the army itself didn’t know when it’s going to go, whether it’s going to go full way into Ukraine or just the eastern parts of it.

    But also, I mean, it is absolute power corrupts absolutely. Putin has been on top of the state for 22 years. They’ve been security forces that were feeding him information about Ukraine and its Nazi president or Western control, Western-controlled government, and how ordinary Ukrainians are suffering from that kind of Nazi-type oppression, because nobody really in their right mind believed that Putin would go and do this, because that really is, as you said, I mean, not only destroyed Ukraine, it also completely — and Ukraine will rebuild, and Ukraine will be better than ever, but Russia is just destroyed for decades, if not for centuries to come, because nobody is going to believe us that we are in fact going to become a normal country one day.

    And so, that intelligence that was fed to him is the intelligence he wanted to hear. That is, Ukraine is just ready to fold and embrace Russia as their leader of the pan-Slavic state that somehow Putin imagined he would put together. And that is, I mean, I think — it’s not enough time has passed, but I think from when there is more time passed, it would be one of the most incredible research in history, how on Earth this complete disinformation, misinformation resulted in this catastrophic decision for — not just for Ukraine, not just for Russia, but also for the world at large.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Nina, could you talk a little bit about the response within Russia, to the extent that you’re aware of it, not among the people so much as among officials? Earlier this week, there was a video that was widely circulated of a former Russian colonel who appeared to be critical of perceptions of the war in Russia and among the security establishment. This is a clip.

    MIKHAIL KHODARYONOK: [translated] First, I should say, you should not take informational sedatives. Sometimes you hear reports of a moral psychological breakdown in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, that their mood is allegedly close to a crisis. To put it mildly, this is not true. … The situation for us will clearly get worse. … The biggest problem with our military and political situation is that we are in total geopolitical isolation and the whole world is against us, even if we don’t want to admit it.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Nina, could you respond to that, especially given the fact that he was speaking on state television? And then he appeared again a couple of days later, just on Wednesday, and seemed to express a very, very different opinion, and so there’s been speculation that he was warned not to speak out in this fashion.

    NINA KHRUSHCHEVA: Absolutely. I mean, he was — good for him. He absolutely was warned not to speak out in this fashion and talk about the Russian isolation, because what we hear from the officials who — originally, on February 21st, when Putin announced that Russia would recognize the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk republics, his security council seemed to be — I think we spoke about it on this program — seemed to be in a complete shock about it. But, you know, then they immediately — not immediately, but soon enough, kind of settled down, figured it out. Some were warned. Some were threatened. Some just didn’t have any other place to go, in a sense. And suddenly, whatever he is saying is now considered treason. And those officials who originally were in shock now are the ones saying that if you talk negatively about the Russian, as they call it, special military operation, or you talk about the Russian forces, the military forces, that are not advancing as fast as they should, that amounts to treason. Those who left the country and critical, that amounts to treason, and so on and so forth.

    So, with the officials, there is some — I mean, clearly, there is inside dissent, but very rarely you can hear it publicly. And, in fact, more and more so, we hear from those officials, with absolute terror in their eyes, how they just now stand behind Russia, and motherland is something that is against the West and the United States.

    Just now, the iconic, iconic character, Yuri Shevchuk, who was the icon of Russian hard rock, just had a concert in which — and before that, he spoke what motherland in fact means to him and spoke against the war. What happened after the concert, he was immediately detained. He was immediately interrogated. And now there is a lawsuit against him. And he is the icon of the Russian rock.

    So, basically, it is a martial law that is not being announced as a martial law, but it affects everybody. It affects people who try to protest and can’t, because they’re immediately detained, the celebrities and, of course, the officials and the oligarchs. That’s why from the oligarchs, I think only three — and I write about it in my Foreign Affairs article — only three have actually spoken mildly or forcefully against the war, and the rest are silent and accepting. That’s the KGB force.

    AMY GOODMAN: Professor Khrushcheva,, you’ve studied Putin. Your book is In Putin’s Footsteps. What about the exposure of his family? It’s so rare to learn about, for example, the sanctioning of his two daughters, of his longtime girlfriend. What does this do to him?

    NINA KHRUSHCHEVA: Nothing. Nothing.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, let me ask you another question then. At the end of your book, since we have so little time, you talk about Kremlin officials saying that this will end the way the Soviet Union pulled out of Afghanistan in the late ’80s. What does that look like?

    NINA KHRUSHCHEVA: Well, that looks like they withdrew from Afghanistan after 10 years of a horrible war in ’89 with, you know, tail between their legs, completely humiliated. And as we remember, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. And so, that’s what those officials, who don’t speak publicly but sometimes speak to people like me, say they envision this regime will fall. What they don’t know is when that happens.

    AMY GOODMAN: And finally, before we end, I wanted to play for you a comment made by former President George W. Bush. It was Wednesday. He spoke at his Presidential Center in Dallas about the invasion of Ukraine, but the speech took an unexpected turn.

    GEORGE W. BUSH: The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq — I mean of Ukraine. Iraq. Anyway. I’m 75.

    AMY GOODMAN: That’s video of Bush’s comments. They’ve gone viral. The former Ohio state Senator Nina Turner responded, tweeting, “George W. Bush just admitted to being a war criminal of the likes of Vladimir Putin, then laughed. Sickening.” Professor Khrushcheva, your response?

    NINA KHRUSHCHEVA: Well, I agree. And actually, the Russians have been playing that clip and, you know, with the comments, “Look who’s talking.” So, that’s what their response is, is that, you know, “You’re lecturing us on our unjust war, and look what you have done all around the world.” And I think, you know, I go back, as I always do, to my former mentor, George Kennan, who wrote an article in Foreign Affairs, too, in — I mean, “too” — wrote an article in Foreign Affairs in 1995, calling it un-American principles. And so, you know, when America does things like it did in Iraq, then people like Kim Jong-un, people like Putin would go in and say, “Well, America can do it. Why can’t we?”

    AMY GOODMAN: Nina Khrushcheva, professor of international affairs, New School, co-author of In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones, great-granddaughter of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. We’ll link to your piece in Foreign Affairs headlined “The Coup in the Kremlin.”

    Next up, we speak to the head of Brady, one of the oldest gun violence prevention groups in the U.S., about the status of gun control after the racist massacre in Buffalo Saturday. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The TV Man Is Not Your Friend: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    It’s very cute how empire apologists talk about driving Putin from Ukraine so there can be peace, like that’s a real thing. Like if it happened the war would just stop, and the US alliance wouldn’t with absolute certainty continue the attack and work to topple Moscow by any means necessary.

    There’s zero reason to take on faith the MSM narrative that Ukraine is kicking Putin’s ass and victory is imminent, but even if that did happen there’d be less than zero reason to believe the fighting would stop there. If anything it would get much more dangerous from that point.

    This doesn’t end with Russia leaving Ukraine, it ends with Putin being replaced with a Yeltsin-like US vassal and the eventual balkanization of the Russian Federation. Really it doesn’t end until Beijing has been subverted and the US empire secures total global hegemony. Or when the empire collapses. Or when we all get nuked and die.

    Empire apologists don’t even really deny this:

    ❖

    Marjorie Taylor Greene being better than progressive Democrats on Ukraine is noteworthy not because it makes Greene look good but because it makes those progressive Democrats look really, really, really bad.

    ❖

    People who think Tucker Carlson is fighting the establishment are exactly the same as people who think “the Squad” is fighting the establishment. Exactly the same. Same people, slightly different bumper stickers.

    It’s obvious that every member of the “populist right” who’s now getting praise for being correct about Ukraine will function as virulent empire propagandists once the imperial crosshairs inevitably move from Moscow to Beijing. We know this because of their rhetoric about China today.

    Do you know what happens to mainstream media figures who provide real resistance to empire agendas? They get fired. Ask Phil Donahue or Chris Hedges. The fact that Tucker Carlson is a top pundit on imperial media (Murdoch media no less) means he’s an agent of the empire.

    This belief that there are factions of the mainstream media working against the empire is as naive as the belief that there are factions of mainstream US politicians working against the empire. The empire doesn’t platform people who pose a threat to it. This isn’t complicated. The TV man is not your friend.

    I run into far too many people who oppose war and can’t understand why I’m saying things about issues like China which disagree with what they’re being told by their “populist antiwar” heroes on the right. The propaganda campaign against China isn’t going to get better; it’s going to get much, much worse, and it’s important to start fighting it early. Because it’s going to be bad.

    ❖

    ❖

    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 wrong things about Covid or Ukraine, they are worried you’ll start learning true things about your rulers.

    The imperial power structure which runs Silicon Valley, and which is imprisoning Julian Assange, and which literally just admitted it’s circulating disinformation about Russia, is not worried about disinformation. And it’s hilarious that anyone is pretending otherwise.

    ❖

    “No no you don’t understand, if the US and its allies didn’t give weapons to Al Qaeda and Nazi militias, the bad guys might win.”

    ❖

    The one single time the US had a monopoly on nuclear weapons at the same time it was at war, it used them. Not because it needed to, but as a show of force. That was the dawn of the modern US empire. That’s how it was born. And it never got any saner from there.

    ❖

    There is a kind of poetic beauty, I guess in the way the US empire was birthed onto the world stage by a nuclear blast and will probably die in the same way.

    ❖

    Psychological abuse is still abuse. Psychological tyranny is still tyranny. The fact that a large amount of the tyranny in so-called free democracies expresses as mass-scale psychological manipulation does not make it less tyrannical, it just makes it more photogenic.

    ❖

    All of religion and almost all spirituality is glorified escapism at best and tyrannical psychological domination at worst, and humanity would be better off without it. But what remains just might save the world.

    ____________________

    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.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • ‘Disinformation’ Label Serves to Marginalize Crucial Ukraine Facts

     

    NBC: In a break with the past, U.S. is using intel to fight an info war with Russia, even when the intel isn't rock solid

    NBC (4/6/22) referred to making charges against Russia for which there is “no evidence” as having “blunted and defused the disinformation weaponry of the Kremlin.”

    Disinformation has become a central tool in the United States and Russia’s expanding information war. US officials have openly admitted to “using information as a weapon even when the confidence and accuracy of the information wasn’t high,” with corporate media eager to assist Washington in its strategy to “pre-empt and disrupt the Kremlin’s tactics, complicate its military campaign” (NBC, 4/6/22).

    In defense of the US narrative, corporate media have increasingly taken to branding realities inconvenient to US information goals as “disinformation” spread by Russia or its proxies.

    The New York Times (1/25/22) reported that Russian disinformation doesn’t only take the form of patently false assertions, but also those which are “true but tangential to current events”—a convenient definition, in that it allows accurate facts to be dismissed as “disinformation.” But who determines what is “tangential” and what is relevant, and what are the guiding principles to make such a determination? In this assessment, Western audiences are too fickle to be trusted with making up their own mind.

    There’s no denying that Russia’s disinformation campaign is key to justifying its war on Ukraine. But instead of uncritically outsourcing these decisions to Western intelligence officials and weapons manufacturers, and as a result erasing realities key to a political settlement, the media’s ultimate guiding principle for what information is “tangential” should be whether it is relevant to preventing the further suffering of Ukrainian civilians—and reducing tensions between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.

    For Western audiences, and US citizens in particular, labeling or otherwise marginalizing inconvenient realities as “disinformation” prevents a clear understanding of how their government helped escalate tensions in the region, continues to obstruct the possibility of peace talks, and is prepared to, as retired senior US diplomat Chas Freeman describes it, “fight to the last Ukrainian” in a bid to weaken Russia.

    Coup ‘conspiracy theory’

    Ben Norton advancing "conspiracy theory"

    The New York Times (4/11/22) drew a red line through Benjamin Norton for advancing the “conspiracy theory” that  “US officials had installed the leaders of the current Ukrainian government.” Eight years ago, the Times (2/6/14) reported as straight news the fact that US “diplomats candidly discussed the composition of a possible new government to replace the pro-Russian cabinet of Ukraine’s president.”

    For example, the New York Times (4/11/22) claimed that US support for the 2014 “Maidan Revolution” that ousted Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych was a “conspiracy theory” being peddled by the Chinese government in support of Russia. The article featured an image with a red line crossing out the face of journalist Benjamin Norton, who was appearing on a Chinese news channel to discuss how the US helped orchestrate the coup. (Norton wrote for FAIR.org frequently from 2015–18.) The evidence he presented—a leaked call initially reported by the BBC in which then–State Department official Victoria Nuland appears to select opposition leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be Ukraine’s new prime minister—is something, he noted, that the Times itself has reported on multiple times (2/6/14, 2/7/14).

    Not having been asked for comment by the Times, Norton responded in a piece of his own (Multipolarista, 4/14/22), claiming that the newspaper was “acting as a tool of US government information warfare.”

    Beyond Nuland’s apparent coup-plotting, the US campaign to destabilize Ukraine stretched back over a decade. Seeking to isolate Russia and open up Ukraine to Western capital, the US had long been “fueling anti-government sentiment through mechanisms like USAID and National Endowment for Democracy (NED)” (FAIR.org, 1/28/22). High-profile US officials like Sen. John McCain even went so far as to rally protesters in the midst of the Maidan uprising.

    In the wake of the far right–led and constitutionally dubious overthrow, Russia illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula and supported a secession movement in the eastern Donbass region, prompting a repressive response from Ukraine’s new US-backed government. Eight years later, the civil war has killed more than 14,000. Of those deaths, 3,400 were civilian casualties, which were disproportionately in separatist-controlled territories, UN data shows. Opinions on remaining in Ukraine vary within the Donbass.

    When the Times covered the Russian annexation of Crimea, it acknowledged that the predominantly ethnic Russian population there viewed “the Ukrainian government installed after the ouster last weekend of Mr. Yanukovych as the illegitimate result of a fascist coup.” But now the newspaper of record is using allegations of disinformation to change the record.

    To discredit evidence of US involvement in Ukraine’s 2014 regime change hides crucial facts that could potentially support a political solution to this crisis. When the crisis is reduced merely to the context of Russian aggression, a peace deal that includes, for example, a referendum on increased autonomy for the Donbass seems like an outrageous thing for Ukraine to have to agree to. But in the context of a civil war brought on by a US-backed coup—a context the Times is eager to erase—it may appear a more palatable solution.

    More broadly, Western audiences that are aware of their own government’s role in sparking tensions may have more skepticism of Washington’s aims and an increased appetite for peace negotiations.

    Normalizing neo-Nazis

    Atlantic Council: Ukraine's Got a Real Problem With Far Right Violence

    In 2018, the Atlantic Council (6/20/18) wrote that the Ukraine government “tacitly accepting or even encouraging the increasing lawlessness of far-right groups” “sounds like the stuff of Kremlin propaganda, but it’s not.”

    The outsized influence of neo-Nazi groups in Ukrainian society (Human Rights Watch, 6/14/18)—including the the Azov Regiment, the explicitly neo-Nazi branch of Ukraine’s National Guard—is another fact that has been dismissed as disinformation.

    Western outlets once understood far-right extremism as a festering issue (Haaretz, 12/27/18) that Ukraine’s government “underplayed” (BBC, 12/13/14). In a piece called “Ukraine’s Got a Real Problem with Far-Right Violence (and No, RT Didn’t Write This Headline),” the Atlantic Council (UkraineAlert, 6/20/18) wrote:

    Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House and Front Line Defenders warned in a letter that radical groups acting under “a veneer of patriotism” and “traditional values” were allowed to operate under an “atmosphere of near total impunity that cannot but embolden these groups to commit more attacks.”

    To be clear, far-right parties like Svoboda perform poorly in Ukraine’s polls and elections, and Ukrainians evince no desire to be ruled by them. But this argument is a bit of “red herring.” It’s not extremists’ electoral prospects that should concern Ukraine’s friends, but rather the state’s unwillingness or inability to confront violent groups and end their impunity.

    Atlantic Council: The Dangers of Echoing Russian Disinformation on Ukraine

    Three years later, the Atlantic Council (6/19/21) was dismissing “the idea of Ukraine as a hotbed of right-wing extremism” as “rooted in Soviet-era propaganda.”

    But now Western media attempt to diminish those groups’ significance, arguing that singling out a vocal but insignificant far right only benefits Russia’s disinformation campaign (New Statesman, 4/12/22). Almost exactly three years after warning about Ukraine’s “real problem” with the far right, the Atlantic Council (UkraineAlert, 6/19/21) ran a piece entitled “The Dangers of Echoing Russian Disinformation on Ukraine,” in which it seemingly forgot that arguments about the electoral marginalization of Ukraine’s right wing are a “red herring”:

    In reality, Ukraine’s nationalist parties enjoy less support than similar political parties in a host of EU member states. Notably, in the two Ukrainian parliamentary elections held since the outbreak of hostilities with Russia in 2014, nationalist parties have failed miserably and fallen short of the 5% threshold to enter Ukrainian parliament.

    ‘Lead[ing] the white races’

    Financial Times: 'Don't Confuse Patriotism and Nazism'

    Contrary to the Financial Times’ headline (3/29/22), the accompanying article seems to encourage readers to mistake Nazism for patriotism.

    Russian propaganda does overstate the power of Nazi elements in Ukraine’s government—which it refers to as “fascist”—to justify its illegal aggression, but seizing on this propaganda to in turn downplay the influence and radicalism of these elements (e.g., USA Today, 3/30/22; Welt, 4/22/22) only prevents an important debate on how prolonged US and NATO military aid may empower these groups.

    The Financial Times (3/29/22) and London Times (3/30/22) attempted to rehabilitate the Azov regiment’s reputation, using the disinformation label to downplay the influence of extremism in the national guard unit. Quoting Azov’s founder Andriy Biletsky as well as an unnamed Azov commander, the Financial Times cast Azov’s members as “patriots” who “shrug off the neo-Nazi label as ‘Russian propaganda.’” Alex Kovzhun, a “consultant” who helped draft the political program of the National Corps, Azov’s political wing, added a lighthearted human interest perspective, saying Azov was “made up of historians, football hooligans and men with military experience.”

    That the Financial Times would take Biletsky at his word on the issue of Azov’s Nazi-free character, a man who once declared that the National Corps would “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans]” (Guardian, 3/13/18), is a prime example of how Western media have engaged in information war at the expense of their most basic journalistic duties and ethics.

    Azov has opened its ranks to a flood of volunteers, the Financial Times continued, diluting its connection to Ukraine’s far-right movement, a movement that has “never proved popular at the ballot box” anyways. BBC (3/26/22) also cited electoral marginalization in its dismissal of claims about Ukraine’s far right as “a mix of falsehoods and distortions.” Putin’s distortions require debunking, but neither outlet acknowledged that these groups’ outsized influence comes more from their capacity for political violence than from their electoral participation (Hromadske, 10/13/16; Responsible Statecraft, 3/25/22).

    London Times: Azov Battalion: ‘We are patriots – we’re fighting the real Nazis of the 21st century’

    London Times (3/30/22): You’d have to live in a “warped, strange world” to think that these gentlemen wearing SS-derived shoulder patches were Nazis.

    In the London Times piece, Azov commander Yevgenii Vradnik dismissed the neo-Nazi characterization as Russian disinformation: “Perhaps [Putin] really believes it,” as he “lives in a strange, warped world. We are patriots but we are not Nazis.” Sure, the article reports, “Azov has its fair share of football hooligans and ultranationalists,” but it also includes “scholars like Zaikovsky, who worked as a translator and book editor.”

    To support such “patriots,” the West should fulfill their “urgent plea” for more weapons. “To retake our regions, we need vehicle-mounted anti-aircraft weapons from NATO,” Vradnik said. Thus Western media use the “Russian disinformation” label to not only downplay the threat of Ukraine’s far right, but even to encourage the West to arm them.

    Responsible Statecraft (3/25/22) pushed back on the media’s dismissiveness, warning that “Russian propaganda has colossally exaggerated the contemporary strength of Ukrainian extreme nationalist groups,” but

    because these groups have been integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard yet retain their autonomous identities and command structures, over the course of an extended war they could amass a formidable fifth column that would radicalize Ukraine’s postwar political dynamic.

    To ignore the fact that prolonged military aid could reshape Ukraine’s politics in favor of neo-Nazi groups prevents an understanding of the threats posed to Ukrainian democracy and civil society.

    Shielding NATO from blame

    NYT: The Five Conspiracy Theories That Putin Has Weaponized

    Ilya Yaboklov (New York Times, 4/25/22): “NATO is the subject of some of the regime’s most persistent conspiracy theories, which see the organization’s hand behind popular uprisings around the world.”

    Much like with the Maidan coup, the corporate media’s insistence on viewing Russian aggression as unconnected to US imperial expansion has led it to cast any blame placed on NATO policy as Russian disinformation.

    In “The Five Conspiracy Theories That Putin Has Weaponized,” New York Times (4/25/22), historian and author Ilya Yaboklov listed the Kremlin’s most prominent “disinformation” narratives. High on his list was the idea that “NATO has turned Ukraine into a military camp.”

    Without mentioning that NATO, a remnant of the Cold War, is explicitly hostile to Russia, the Times piece portrayed Putin’s disdain for NATO as a paranoia that is convenient for Russian propaganda:

    NATO is Mr. Putin’s worst nightmare: Its military operations in Serbia, Iraq and Libya have planted the fear that Russia will be the military alliance’s next target. It’s also a convenient boogeyman that animates the anti-Western element of Mr. Putin’s electorate. In his rhetoric, NATO is synonymous with the United States, the military hand of “the collective West” that will suffocate Russia whenever it becomes weak.

    The New York Times is not the only outlet to dismiss claims that NATO’s militarization of Ukraine has contributed to regional tensions. Jessica Brandt of the Brookings Institute claimed on CNN Newsroom (4/8/22): “There’s two places where I have seen China carry Russia’s water. The first is, starting long before the invasion, casting blame at the foot of the United States and NATO.” The Washington Post editorial board (4/11/22) argued much to the same effect that Chinese “disinformation” included arguing “NATO is to blame for the fighting.” Newsweek (4/13/22) stated that Chinese disinformation “blames the US military/industrial complex for the chaos in Ukraine and other parts of the world,” and falsely claims that “Washington ‘squeezed Russia’s security space.’”

    Characterizing claims that NATO’s militarization of Russia’s neighbors was a hostile act as “paranoia” or “disinformation” ignores the decades of warnings from top US diplomats and anti-war dissidents alike that NATO expansionism into former Warsaw Pact countries would lead to conflict with Russia.

    Jack F. Matlock Jr, the former ambassador to the USSR warned the US Senate as early as 1997 that NATO expansion would threaten a renewal of Cold War hostilities (Responsible Statecraft, 2/15/22):

    I consider the administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.

    Weakening Russia

    Foreign Policy (5/4/22)

    The US War College’s John Deni (Foreign Policy, 5/4/22) argues that NATO expansion is not to blame for Russian insecurity, because “over the centuries…Russia has experienced military invasions across every frontier,” and so it was going to “demonize the West” regardless.

    These “disinformation” claims also ignore the more contemporary evidence that Western officials have an explicit agenda of weakening Russia and even ending the Putin regime. According to Ukrainska Pravda (5/5/22; Intercept, 5/10/22), in his recent trip to Kyiv, UK prime minister Boris Johnson told Volodymyr Zelensky that regardless of a peace agreement being reached between Ukraine and Russia, the United States would remain intent on confronting Russia.

    The evidence doesn’t stop there. In the past months, Joe Biden let slip his desire that Putin “cannot remain in power,” and US officials’ have become more open about their objectives to weaken Russia (Democracy Now!, 5/9/22; Wall Street Journal, 4/25/22). Corporate media have cheered on these developments, running op-eds in support of policies that go beyond a defense of Ukraine to an attack on Russia (Foreign Policy, 5/4/22; Washington Post, 4/28/22), even expressing hope for a “palace coup” there (The Lead, 4/19/22; CNN Newsroom, 3/4/22).

    As famed dissident Noam Chomsky said in a discussion with the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill (4/14/22):

    We can see that our explicit policy—explicit—is rejection of any form of negotiations. The explicit policy goes way back, but it was given a definitive form in September 2021 in the September 1 joint policy statement that was then reiterated and expanded in the November 10 charter of agreement….

    What it says is it calls for Ukraine to move towards what they called an enhanced program for entering NATO, which kills negotiations.

    When the media denies NATO’s culpability in stoking the flames of war in Ukraine, Americans are left unaware of their most effective tool in preventing further catastrophe: pressuring their own government to stop undermining negotiations and to join the negotiating table. Dismissing these realities threatens to prolong the war in Ukraine indefinitely.

    Squelching dissent

    MintPress: An Intellectual No-Fly Zone: Online Censorship of Ukraine Dissent Is Becoming the New Norm

    Alan MacLeod (Mint Press, 4/25/22): “These new rules will not be applied to corporate media downplaying or justifying US aggression abroad, denying American war crimes, or blaming oppressed peoples…for their own condition, but instead will be used as excuses to derank, demote, delist or even delete voices critical of war and imperialism.”

    As the Biden administration launches a new Disinformation Governance Board aimed at policing online discourse, it is clear that the trend of silencing those who speak out against official US narratives is going to get worse.

    Outlets like Russia Today, MintPress News and Consortium News have been banned or demonetized by platforms like Google and its subsidiary YouTube, or services like PayPal. MintPress News (4/25/22) reported YouTube had “permanently banned more than a thousand channels and 15,000 videos,” on the grounds that they were “denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events.” At the same time, platforms are loosening the restrictions on praising Ukraine’s far right or calling for the death of Russians (Reuters, 3/11/22). These policies of asymmetric censorship aid US propaganda and squelch dissent.

    After receiving a barrage of complaints from the outlet’s supporters, PayPal seemingly reversed its ban of Consortium News’ account, only to state later on that this reversal was “mistaken,” and that Consortium was in fact permanently banned. The outlet’s editor-in-chief Joe Lauria (5/4/22) responded to PayPal’s ban:

    Given the political climate it is reasonable to conclude that PayPal was reacting to Consortium News’ coverage of the war in Ukraine, which is not in line with the dominant narrative that is being increasingly enforced.

    As Western outlets embrace the framing of a new Cold War, so too have they embraced the Cold War’s McCarthyite tactics that rooted out dissent in the United States. With great-power conflict on the rise, it is all the more important that US audiences understand the media’s increasing repression of debate in defense of the “dominant narrative.” In the words of Chomsky:

    There’s a long record in the United States of censorship, not official censorship, just devices, to make sure that, what intellectuals call the “bewildered herd,” the “rabble,” the population, don’t get misled. You have to control them. And that’s happening right now.

    The post ‘Disinformation’ Label Serves to Marginalize Crucial Ukraine Facts appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Nordic NATO Expansion or NATO Implosion?

    On May 16 2022, Finland and Sweden decided to become members of NATO.

    Not only is this totally against the 1991 US / NATO promise to then Russian President Gorbachev, that “NATO will not move an inch eastward from Berlin”. Then total NATO members were 14, two in the Americas – US and Canada – and 12 in Europe. By late 1990’s, expansion started rapidly and today NATO counts 30 members, 28 in Europe and the same two in the Americas. Most of the new ones are East of Berlin.

    Finland shares a 1,340 km border with Russia. Thus, as a NATO country, it would become another real threat for Moscow. Also, during WWII, Finland allied with Nazi-Germany fighting the Soviet Union, when the USSR lost some 27 million people, soldiers and civilians. Finland does not have a clean record vis-à-vis Russia.

    On the other hand, Sweden shares no border with Russia and has not been at war with Russia in 300 years. Sweden, like Finland, has not been threatened at all by Russia. So, Sweden teaming up with Finland against Russia – there is something quite weird going on.  A country does not overnight seek or make an enemy when there was absolutely not a minimum threat from the “assumed” enemy. What’s going on?

    Given the circumstances of these two “neutral” countries suddenly changing from “neutral” to “aggressive” against Russia, there must have other reasons than Russia attacking Ukraine. Both of these countries know exactly the background for the Russian war on Ukraine.

    While war should, under all circumstances, be avoided and replaced by negotiations, one cannot ignore Russia’s worries -– preoccupations enhanced by the fact that many proposals for negotiations advanced by Russia before the war were rejected by Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy. Likewise, after the beginning of the armed conflict, proposal for Peace Talks, notably by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov were, though first accepted, then rejected, which made Mr. Lavrov assume that Mr. Zelenskyy is not his sovereign own man, but follows instructions. See his interview with Al Arabia media.

    Could it be, or is it highly probable, that both Finland and Sweden were coerced by Washington, and likely by Europe / NATO to decide and ask for immediate NATO membership? Sweden, because of the North Sea, where Russia has a dominant presence?

    The NATO Czar, Stoltenberg, has repeatedly said that NATO would apply special measures (or create special rules?) to accelerate NATO membership for these two countries. He reiterated on several occasions that by June 2022 Finland and Sweden could already be active members. Normally, it takes at least a year for a new NATO member to enter the Alliance. So, what’s the hurry, if there is no threat?

    Before the Ukraine-Russia war, and before the billion-dollars-worth of western anti-Russia campaign, only about a third, max. 40% of the people of both countries, were somewhat favorable towards NATO – a clear minority.

    After the beginning of the war, and the utterly distorted anti-Russia lie-propaganda campaign, the popular support for NATO-entry allegedly jumped to about 70%. Yet, this figure advanced by the two NATO-candidate countries, would have to be scientifically verified as both nations have a highly educated population. They know the risks they are taking by becoming de facto enemies of Russia by NATO membership.

    Ukraine was a candidate for NATO long before the 2014 Maidan Coup. In fact, the Maidan Coup was an instrument to accelerate Ukraine’s NATO membership. Russia – President Putin – from the very beginning said Nyet to Ukraine NATO membership. Not only was he referring to the 1991 promise, but also to the Minsk Agreement of 2014.

    After the US planned and directed the Maidan Coup in Kiev, the Minsk Protocol was negotiated by France and Germany. Under the Minsk Accord, Ukraine was to remain neutral, de-militarized, no NATO ever. The Protocol also demanded a De-Nazification of Ukraine, as well as a special status for the two Donbass Republics — Donetsk and Lugansk.

    De-Nazification refers primarily to the Nazi Azov Battalion(s) that were, for the last 8 years, lambasting and attacking mostly civilians in the two “independent” Donbass Republics, causing some 14,000 deaths, about one third of which are children.

    Russia – President Putin and most of the Kremlin – are particularly sensitive to the Ukraine Nazis, as they collaborated with Hitler’s Nazi-Germany in WWII in the war against Russia, when some 27 million Russians were killed. NATO knows about it. Therefore NATO, under the guidance of Washington and followed by Brussels, kept — and keeps — provoking Russia with first sending military “advisors” and clandestinely weapons to Ukraine. For NATO countries a key objective is to conquer Russia – primarily for her riches in natural resources, as well as the enormous landmass, the globe’s largest country – and for the power the dominance of large and rich Russia would bestow in this sick western personal and corporate oligarchy.

    In the preparation of the war, weapons were relatively clandestinely delivered from the west to Ukraine. Now, weapon deliveries from the US and from European NATO countries in the tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars-worth equivalent, are fully open. No secret. Not even hidden anymore. NATO countries feel they have the right to indirectly use Ukraine to fight Russia.

    But what is RIGHT?

    The last two decades at least, were exacerbated by the fake WEF (World Economic Forum)-imposed covid scare — lockdown, killing of the world economy, killing of common people’s livelihood, killing of children’s future – reflected in the skyrocketing teenager suicide rate and more untold misery, all of which eradicated the human notion of RIGHTS and WRONGS.

    The last two decades at least, were exacerbated by the fake WEF (World Economic Forum)-imposed covid scare, lockdown, killing of the world economy, killing of common people’s livelihood, killing of children’s future – reflected in the skyrocketing teenager suicide rate and more untold misery; all of which eradicated the human notion of RIGHTS and WRONGS.

    During this period, International Rule of Law has completely disappeared. Nobody respects it anymore. The judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC) of The Hague, so far have not accepted any claim that goes against the interests of the Cabal, mostly Anglo Saxon-led westerners – plus the insanely wealthy financial corporations — BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and Fidelity.  See also Ukraine-Russia and the World Economic Forum (WEF): A Planned Milestone Towards “The Great Reset”?

    But now comes the hick. Just a little detail. According to Article 10 of the NATO Constitution, all 30 members of the Alliance have to agree to a new member.

    Turkey, a key NATO member, in a particularly strategic geographic and geopolitical position – opposes entry of Finland and Turkey into NATO. And this under the pretext, according to Turkish President Erdogan, that “the two Nordic countries are “guesthouses for terrorist organizations.” He [Erdogan] was referring to the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Front (DHKP/C), which have been outlawed by Ankara”.

    “These countries do not have a clear unequivocal stance against terrorist organizations. Sweden is the incubation center of terrorist organizations. They bring terrorists to talk in their parliaments… We wouldn’t say ‘yes’ to them joining NATO, a security organization… They were going to come on Monday to convince us.  Sorry, they don’t have to bother,” Erdogan said.

    The Swedish Foreign Ministry said on Monday [16 May 2022] that senior official from Helsinki and Stockholm would travel to Turkey to discuss the matter. Erdogan, however, indicated at the press briefing that such talks would be senseless. See this from Le Monde International.

    Turkey may be a NATO country, one of the most important ones for the Alliance, due to its geographically strategic location and position. However, Turkey is also an ally of Russia. And in recent months, years, Erdogan has been tilting more to Russia, to the east in general, than to the west, towards her western NATO allies. Has Erdogan noticed how unreliable and deceptive, and trickery the West / NATO is and behaves around the world? It’s very likely.

    Anticipating such a move, Jens Stoltenberg had already said days ago, that if Turkey, or any other NATO member, would oppose entry of Finland and Sweden into the Alliance, NATO would apply special measures to overrule NATO’s Article 10. He did not elaborate what measures he would apply.

    But in a world without rules, everything is possible.

    When in 2017, Turkish President Recep Erdogan brokered a deal reportedly worth $2.5 billion with Russian President Vladimir Putin for the purchase of the highly sophisticated Russian S-400 air defense system, there was talk of Turkey possibly exiting the Alliance. Indeed, Turkey has been “sanctioned” for doing so, and many, if not all, of the nuclear war-heads stationed in Turkey were removed and placed in Europe, most of them in Italy.

    Might this be again a moment for Turkey to say and, indeed, decide to exit NATO and seek closer alliance with Russia and China – and the east in general? The Eurasian Economic Commission might welcome a strategic Turkey in its fold. For Turkey quite a positive alternative option to the constant threats and sanctions by the west.

    Would NATO fall apart, if Turkey decided to leave? Good riddance! It would be a blessing for the world.

    The post Nordic NATO Expansion or NATO Implosion? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • What Is Offensive, What Is Defensive, In The Ukraine Conflict

    An important aspect of debate on conflicts relates to identifying offensive and defensive forces as this has important implications for ethical aspects and the moral strength commanded by contending sides.

     In the Ukraine conflict there are many complexities, but perhaps such identification can become becomes easier if we follow Prof. Richard Falk in seeing the Ukraine war in terms of not one but three wars—Russia vs. Ukraine, USA vs. Russia and Western Ukraine vs. Eastern Ukraine.

    If Russia vs. Ukraine war is seen to be starting from February 24 2022, then clearly Russia is in the offensive position in this war. However in the larger and for world peace the riskier war– the  USA versus Russia conflict—the USA is clearly in the offensive for the much longer period of nearly three decades.

    The post What Is Offensive, What Is Defensive, In The Ukraine Conflict appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Keir Starmer has returned western imperialism to the core of Labour policy

    The local authority election results earlier this month in the UK were as bleak as expected for Boris Johnson’s government, with the electorate ready to punish the ruling party both for its glaring corruption and rocketing high-street prices.

    A few weeks earlier, the police fined Johnson – the first of several such penalties he is expected to receive – for attending a series of parties that broke the very lockdown rules his own government set. And the election took place as news broke that the UK would soon face recession and the highest inflation rate for decades.

    In the circumstances, one might have assumed the opposition Labour Party under Keir Starmer would romp home, riding a wave of popular anger. But in reality, Starmer’s party fared little better than Johnson’s. Outside London, Labour was described as “treading water” across much of England.

    Starmer is now two years into his leadership and has yet to make a significant mark politically. Labour staff are cheered that in opinion polls the party is finally ahead – if marginally – of Johnson’s Tories. Nonetheless, the public remains adamant that Starmer does not look like a prime minister in waiting.

    That may be in large part because he rarely tries to land a blow against a government publicly floundering in its own corruption.

    When Johnson came close to being brought down at the start of the year, as the so-called “partygate scandal” erupted with full force, it was not through Labour’s efforts. It was because of relentless leaks presumed to be from Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former adviser turned nemesis.

    Starmer has been equally incapable of cashing in on the current mutinous rumblings against Johnson from within his own Tory ranks.

    Self-inflicted wounds

    Starmer’s ineffectualness seems entirely self-inflicted.

    In part, that is because his ambitions are so low. He has been crafting policies to look more like a Tory-lite party that focuses on “the flag, veterans [and] dressing smartly”, as an internal Labour review recommended last year.

    But equally significantly, he has made it obvious he sees his first duty not to battle for control of the national political terrain against Johnson’s government, but to expend his energies on waging what is becoming a permanent internal war on sections of his own party.

    That has required gutting Labour of large parts of the membership that were attracted by his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, a democratic socialist who spent his career emphasising the politics of anti-racism and anti-imperialism.

    To distance himself from Corbyn, Starmer has insisted on the polar opposites. He has been allying ever more closely with Israel, just as a new consensus has emerged in the human rights community that Israel is a racist, apartheid state.

    And he has demanded unquestioning loyalty to Nato, just as the western military alliance pours weapons into Ukraine, in what looks to be rapidly becoming a cynical proxy war, dissuading both sides from seeking a peace agreement and contributing to a surge in the stock price of the West’s military industries.

    Broken promises

    Starmer’s direction of travel flies in the face of promises he made during the 2020 leadership election that he would heal the internal divisions that beset his predecessor’s tenure.

    Corbyn, who was the choice of the party’s largely left-wing members in 2015, immediately found himself in a head-on collision with the dominant faction of right-wing MPs in the Labour parliamentary caucus as well as the permanent staff at head office.

    Once leader, Starmer lost no time in stripping Corbyn of his position as a Labour MP. He cited as justification Corbyn’s refusal to accept evidence-free allegations of antisemitism against the party under his leadership that had been loudly amplified by an openly hostile media.

    Corbyn had suffered from a years-long campaign, led by pro-Israel lobby groups and the media, suggesting his criticisms of Israel for oppressing the Palestinian people were tantamount to hatred of Jews. A new definition of antisemitism focusing on Israel was imposed on the party to breathe life into such allegations.

    But the damage was caused not just by Labour’s enemies. Corbyn was actively undermined from within. A leaked internal report highlighted emails demonstrating that party staff had constantly plotted against him and even worked to throw the 2017 election, when Corbyn was just a few thousand votes short of winning.

    With Brexit thrown into the mix at the 2019 election – stoking a strong nativist mood in the UK – Corbyn suffered a decisive defeat at Johnson’s hands.

    But as leader, Starmer did not use the leaked report as an opportunity to reinforce party democracy, as many members expected. In fact, he reinstated some of the central protagonists exposed in the report, even apparently contemplating one of them for the position of Labour general secretary.

    He also brought in advisers closely associated with former leader Tony Blair, who turned Labour decisively rightwards through the late 1990s and launched with the US an illegal war on Iraq in 2003.

    Instead, Starmer went after the left-wing membership, finding any pretext – and any means, however draconian – to finish the job begun by the saboteurs.

    He has rarely taken a break from hounding the left-wing membership, even if a permanent turf war has detracted from the more pressing need to concentrate on the Tory government’s obvious failings.

    Flooded with arms

    Starmer’s flame-war against the left has become so extreme that, as some critics have pointed out, both Pope Francis and Amnesty International would face expulsion from Starmer’s Labour Party were they members.

    The pope is among a growing number of observers expressing doubts about the ever-more explicit intervention by the US and its Nato allies in Ukraine that seems designed to drag out the war, and raise the death toll, rather than advance peace talks.

    In fact, recent views expressed by officials in Washington risk giving credence to the original claims made by Russian President Vladimir Putin justifying his illegal invasion of Ukraine in late February.

    Before that invasion, Moscow officials had characterised Nato’s aggressive expansion across Eastern Europe following the fall of the Soviet Union, and its cosying up to Ukraine, as an “existential threat”. Russia even warned that it might use nuclear weapons if they were seen as necessary for its defence.

    The Kremlin’s reasons for concern cannot be entirely discounted. Two Minsk peace accords intended to defuse a bloody eight-year civil war between Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and ethnic Russian communities in eastern Ukraine, on Russia’s border, have gone nowhere.

    Instead, Ukraine’s government pushed for closer integration into Nato to the point where Putin warned of retaliation if Nato stationed missiles, potentially armed with nuclear warheads, on Russia’s doorstep. They would be able to strike Moscow in minutes, undermining the premise of mutually assured destruction that long served as the basis of a Cold War detente.

    In response to Russia’s invasion, Nato has flooded Ukraine with weapons while the US has been moving to transfer a whopping $40bn in military aid to Kyiv – all while deprioritising pressure on Moscow and Kyiv to revisit the Minsk accords.

    Nato weapons were initially supplied on the basis that they would help Ukraine defend itself from Russia. But that principle appears to have been quickly jettisoned by Washington.

    Last month, US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin declared that the aim was instead to “see Russia weakened” – a position echoed by Nato former Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The New York Times has reported that Washington is involved in a “classified” intelligence operation to help Ukraine kill senior Russian generals.

    US officials now barely conceal the fact that they view Ukraine as a proxy war – one that sounds increasingly like the scenario Putin laid out when justifying his invasion as pre-emptive: that Washington intends to sap Russia of its military strength, push Nato’s weapons and potentially its troops right up against Russia’s borders, and batter Moscow economically through sanctions and an insistence that Europe forgo Russian gas.

    The existential threat Putin feared has become explicit US policy, it seems.

    Fealty to Nato

    These are the reasons the pope speculated last week that, while Russia’s actions could not be justified, the “barking of Nato at the door of Russia” might, in practice, have “facilitated” the invasion. He also questioned the supply of weapons to Ukraine in the context of profiteering from the war: “Wars are fought for this: to test the arms we have made.”

    Pope Francis, bound by formal Vatican rules of political neutrality, has to be cautious in what he says. And yet Starmer has deemed similar observations made by activists in the Labour party as grounds for expulsion.

    The Labour leader has clashed head-on with the Stop the War Coalition, which Corbyn helped found in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The group played a central role in mobilising opposition to Britain’s participation, under Blair, in the 2003 illegal invasion of Iraq.

    Stop the War, which is seen as close to the Labour left, has long been sceptical of Nato, a creature of the Cold War that proved impervious to the collapse of the Soviet Union and has gradually taken on the appearance of a permanent lobby for the West’s military industries.

    Stop the War has spoken out against both Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and the decades-long expansion by Nato across Eastern Europe that Moscow cites as justification for its war of aggression. Starmer, however, has scorned that position as what he calls “false equivalence”.

    In a commentary published in the Guardian newspaper, he denied that Stop the War were “benign voices for peace” or “progressive”. He termed Nato “a defensive alliance that has never provoked conflict”, foreclosing the very debate anti-war activists – and Pope Francis – seek to begin.

    Starmer also threatened 11 Labour MPs with losing the whip – like Corbyn – if they did not immediately remove their names from a Stop the War statement that called for stepping up moves towards a diplomatic solution. More recently, he has warned MPs that they will face unspecified action from the party if they do not voice “unshakeable support for Nato”.

    Starmer has demanded “a post 9/11” style surge in arms expenditure in response to the war in Ukraine, insisting that Nato must be “strengthened”.

    He has shut down the Twitter account of Labour’s youth wing for its criticisms of Nato.

    In late March he proscribed three small leftist groups – Labour Left Alliance, Socialist Labour Network, and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty – adding them to four other left-wing groups that he banned last year. Stop the War could soon be next.

    Starmer’s relentless attacks on anti-war activism in Labour fly in the face of his 10 pledges, the platform that helped him to get elected. They included a commitment – reminiscent of Pope Francis – to “put human rights at the heart of foreign policy. Review all UK arms sales and make us a force for international peace and justice”.

    But once elected, Starmer has effectively erased any space for an anti-war movement in mainstream British politics, one that wishes to question whether Nato is still a genuinely defensive alliance or closer to a lobby serving western arms industries that prosper from permanent war.

    In effect, Starmer has demanded that the left out-compete the Tory government for fealty to Nato’s militarism. The war in Ukraine has become the pretext to force underground not only anti-imperialist politics but even Vatican-style calls for diplomacy.

    Apartheid forever

    But Starmer is imposing on Labour members an even more specific loyalty test rooted in Britain’s imperial role: support for Israel as a state that oppresses Palestinians.

    Starmer’s decision to distance himself and Labour as far as possible from Corbyn’s support for Palestinian rights initially seemed to be tactical, premised on a desire to avoid the antisemitism smears that plagued his predecessor.

    But that view has become progressively harder to sustain.

    Starmer has turned a deaf ear to a motion passed last year by Labour delegates calling for UK sanctions against Israel as an apartheid state. References to it have even been erased from the party’s YouTube channel. Similarly, he refused last month to countenance Israel’s recent designation as an apartheid state by Amnesty and a raft of other human rights groups.

    Last November, Starmer delivered a fawningly pro-Israel speech alongside Israel’s ultra-nationalist ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, in which he repeatedly conflated criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

    He has singled out anti-Zionist Jewish members of Labour – more so than non-Jewish members – apparently because they are the most confident and voluble critics of Israel in the party.

    And now, in the run-up to this month’s local elections, he has flaunted his party’s renewal of ties with the Israeli Labor party, which severed relations during Corbyn’s tenure.

    Senior officials from the Israeli party joined him and his deputy, Angela Rayner, in what was described as a “charm offensive”, as they pounded London streets campaigning for the local elections. It was hard not to interpret this as a slap in the face to swaths of the Labour membership.

    The Israeli Labor party founded Israel by engineering a mass ethnic cleansing campaign, as documents unearthed by Israeli historians have confirmed, that saw hundreds of thousands of Palestinians expelled from their homeland.

    Israel’s Labor party has continued to play a key role both in entrenching illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied territories to displace Palestinians, and in formulating legal distinctions between Jewish and Palestinian citizenship that have cemented the new consensus among groups such as Amnesty International that Israel qualifies as an apartheid state.

    The Israeli Labor party is part of the current settler-led government that secured court approval last week to evict many hundreds of Palestinians from eight historic Palestinian villages near Hebron – while allowing settlers to remain close by – on the pretext that the land is needed for a firing zone.

    Israel’s Haaretz newspaper concluded of the ruling: “Occupation is temporary by definition; apartheid is liable to persist forever. The High Court approved it.”

    Labour’s ugly face

    The ugly new face of Labour politics under Starmer is becoming ever harder to conceal. Under cover of rooting out the remnants of Corbynism, Starmer is not only proving himself an outright authoritarian, intent on crushing the last vestiges of democratic socialism in Labour.

    He is also reviving the worst legacies of a Labour tradition that cheerleads western imperialism and cosies up to racist states – as long as they are allies of Washington and ready to buy British arms.

    Starmer’s war on the Labour left is not – as widely assumed – a pragmatic response to the Corbyn years, designed to distance the party from policies that exposed it to the relentless campaign of antisemitism smears that undermined Corbyn.

    Rather, Starmer is continuing and widening that very campaign of smears. He has picked up the baton on behalf of those Labour officials who, the leaked internal report showed, preferred to sabotage the Labour Party if it meant stopping the left from gaining power.

    His task is not just to ensnare those who wish to show solidarity with the Palestinians after decades of oppression supported by the West. It is to crush all activism against western imperialism and the state of permanent war it has helped to engineer.

    Britain now has no visible political home for the kind of anti-war movements that once brought millions out onto Britain’s streets in an effort to halt the war on Iraq. And for that, the British establishment and their war industries have Sir Keir Starmer to thank.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

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  • The Subtleties of Anti-Russia Leftist Rhetoric

    While the so-called liberal and conservative corporate mainstream media – all stenographers for the intelligence agencies – pour forth the most blatant propaganda about Russia and Ukraine that is so conspicuous that it is comedic if it weren’t so dangerous, the self-depicted cognoscenti also ingest subtler messages, often from the alternative media.

    A woman I know, and who knows my sociological analyses of propaganda, contacted me to tell me there was an excellent article about the war in Ukraine at The Intercept, an on-line publication funded by billionaire Pierre Omidyar I have long considered a leading example of much deceptive reporting wherein truth is mixed with falsehoods to convey a “liberal” narrative that fundamentally supports the ruling elites while seeming to oppose them.  This, of course, is nothing new since it’s been the modus operandi of all corporate media in their own ideological and disingenuous ways, such as The New York Times, CBS, the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, Fox News, CNN, NBC, etc. for a very long time.

    Nevertheless, out of respect for her judgment and knowing how deeply she feels for all suffering people, I read the article.  Written by Alice Speri, its title sounded ambiguous – “The Left in Europe Confronts NATO’s Resurgence After Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine” – until I saw the subtitle that begins with these words: “Russia’s brutal invasion complicates…”  But I read on.  By the fourth paragraph, it became clear where this article was going.  Speri writes that “In Ukraine, by contrast [with Iraq], it was Russia that had staged an illegal, unprovoked invasion, and U.S.-led support to Ukraine was understood by many as crucial to stave off even worse atrocities than those the Russian military had already committed.” [my emphasis]

    While ostensibly about European anti-war and anti-NATO activists caught on the horns of a dilemma, the piece goes on to assert that although US/NATO was guilty of wrongful expansion over many years, Russia has been an aggressor in Ukraine and Georgia and is guilty of terrible war crimes, etc.

    There is not a word about the U.S. engineered coup in 2014, the CIA and Pentagon backed mercenaries in Ukraine, or its support for the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and Ukraine’s years of attacks on the Donbass where many thousands have been killed.  It is assumed these actions are not criminal or provocative.  And there is this:

    The uncertain response of Europe’s peace activists is both a reflection of a brutal, unprovoked invasion that stunned the world and of an anti-war movement that has grown smaller and more marginalized over the years. The left in both Europe and the U.S. have struggled to respond to a wave of support for Ukraine that is at cross purposes with a decades long effort to untangle Europe from a U.S.-led military alliance. [my emphasis]

    In other words, the article, couched in anti-war rhetoric, was anti-Russia propaganda.  When I told my friend my analysis, she refused to discuss it and got angry with me, as if I therefore were a proponent of war  I have found this is a common response.

    This got me thinking again about why people so often miss the untruths lying within articles that are in many parts truthful and accurate.  I notice this constantly.  They are like little seeds slipped in as if no one will notice; they work their magic nearly unconsciously.  Few do notice them, for they are often imperceptible.  But they have their effects and are cumulative and are far more powerful over time than blatant statements that will turn people off, especially those who think propaganda doesn’t work on them.  This is the power of successful propaganda, whether purposeful  or not.  It particularly works well on “intellectual” and highly schooled people.

    For example, in a recent printed  interview, Noam Chomsky, after being introduced as a modern day Galileo, Newton, and Descartes rolled into one, talks about propaganda, its history, Edward Bernays, Walter Lippman, etc.  What he says is historically accurate and informative for anyone not knowing this history.  He speaks wisely of U.S. media propaganda concerning its unprovoked war against Iraq and he accurately calls the war in Ukraine “provoked.”  And then, concerning the war in Ukraine, he drops this startling statement:

    I don’t think there are ‘significant lies’ in war reporting. The U.S. media are generally doing a highly creditable job in reporting Russian crimes in Ukraine. That’s valuable, just as it’s valuable that international investigations are underway in preparation for possible war crimes trials.

    In the blink of an eye, Chomsky says something so incredibly untrue that unless one thinks of him as a modern day Galileo, which many do, it may pass as true and you will smoothly move on to the next paragraph.  Yet it is a statement so false as to be laughable.  The media propaganda concerning events in Ukraine has been so blatantly false and ridiculous that a careful reader will stop suddenly and think: Did he just say that?

    So now Chomsky views the media, such as The New York Times and its ilk, that he has correctly castigated for propagandizing for the U.S. in Iraq and East Timor, to use two examples, is doing “a highly creditable job in reporting Russian crimes in Ukraine,” as if suddenly they were no longer spokespeople for the CIA and U.S. disinformation.  And he says this when we are in the midst of the greatest propaganda blitz since WW I, with its censorship, Disinformation Governance Board, de-platforming of dissidents, etc., that border on a parody of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

    Even slicker is his casual assertion that the media are doing a good job reporting Russia’s war crimes after he earlier has said this about propaganda:

    So it continues. Particularly in the more free societies, where means of state violence have been constrained by popular activism, it is of great importance to devise methods of manufacturing consent, and to ensure that they are internalized, becoming as invisible as the air we breathe, particularly in articulate educated circles. Imposing war-myths is a regular feature of these enterprises.

    This is simply masterful.  Explain what propaganda is at its best and how you oppose it and then drop a soupçon of it into your analysis.  And while he is at it, Chomsky makes sure to praise Chris Hedges, one of his followers, who has himself recently wrote an article – The Age of Self-Delusion – that also contains valid points appealing to those sick of wars, but which also contains the following words:

    Putin’s revanchism is matched by our own.

    The disorganization, ineptitude, and low morale of the Russian army conscripts, along with the repeated intelligence failures by the Russian high command, apparently convinced Russia would roll over Ukraine in a few days, exposes the lie that Russia is a global menace.

    ‘The Russian bear has effectively defanged itself,’ historian Andrew Bacevich writes.

    But this is not a truth the war makers impart to the public. Russia must be inflated to become a global menace, despite nine weeks of humiliating military failures. [my emphasis]

    Russia’s revanchism?  Where?  Revanchism?  What lost territory has the U.S. ever waged war to recover?  Iraq, Syria, Cuba, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, etc.?  The U.S.’s history is a history not of revanchism but of imperial conquest, of seizing or controlling territory, while Russia’s war in Ukraine is clearly an act of self-defense after years of U.S./NATO/Ukraine provocations and threats, which Hedges recognizes.  “Nine weeks of humiliating military failures”? – when they control a large section of eastern and southern Ukraine, including the Donbass.  But his false message is subtly woven, like Chomsky’s, into sentences that are true.

    “But this is not a truth the war makers impart to the public.”  No, it is exactly what the media spokespeople for the war makers – i.e. The New York Times (Hedges former employer, which he never fails to mention and for whom he covered the Clinton administration’s savage destruction of Yugoslavia), CNN, Fox News, The Washington Post, the New York Post, etc. impart to the public every day for their masters.  Headlines that read how Russia, while allegedly committing daily war crimes, is failing in its war aims and that the mythic hero Zelensky is leading Ukrainians to victory.  Words to the effect that “The Russian bear has effectively defanged itself” presented as fact.

    Yes, they do inflate the Russian monster myth, only to then puncture it with the myth of David defeating Goliath.

    But being in the business of mind games (too much consistency leads to clarity and gives the game away), one can expect them to scramble their messages on an ongoing basis to serve the U.S. agenda in Ukraine and further NATO expansion in the undeclared war with Russia, for which the Ukrainian people will be sacrificed.

    Orwell called it “doublethink”:

    Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty.To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality one denies – all this is indispensably necessary….with the lie always one step ahead of the truth.

    Revealing while concealing and interjecting inoculating shots of untruths that will only get cursory attention from their readers, the writers mentioned here and others have great appeal for the left intelligentsia.  For people who basically worship those they have imbued with infallibility and genius, it is very hard to read all sentences carefully and smell a skunk.  The subterfuge is often very adroit and appeals to readers’ sense of outrage at what happened in the past – e.g. the George W. Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

    Chomsky, of course, is the leader of the pack, and his followers are legion, including Hedges.  For decades they have been either avoiding or supporting the official versions of the assassinations of JFK and RFK, the attacks of September 11, 2001 that led directly to the war on terror and so many wars of aggression,and the recent Covid-19 propaganda with its devastating lockdowns and crackdowns on civil liberties.  They are far from historical amnesiacs, of course, but obviously consider these foundational events of no importance, for otherwise they would have addressed them.  If you expect them to explain, you will be waiting a long time.

    In a recent article – How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind: an autopsy – Christian Parenti writes this about Chomsky:

    Almost the entire left intelligentsia has remained psychically stuck in March 2020. Its members have applauded the new biosecurity repression and calumniated as liars, grifters, and fascists any and all who dissented. Typically, they did so without even engaging evidence and while shirking public debate. Among the most visible in this has been Noam Chomsky, the self-described anarcho-syndicalist who called for the unvaccinated to “remove themselves from society,” and suggested that they should be allowed to go hungry if they refuse to submit.

    Parenti’s critique of the left’s response (not just Chomsky’s and Hedges’) to Covid also applies to those foundational events mentioned above, which raises deeper questions about the CIA’s and NSA’s penetration  of the media in general, a subject beyond the scope of this analysis.

    For those, like the liberal woman who referred me to The Intercept article, who would no doubt say of what I have written here: Why are you picking on leftists? my reply is quite simple.

    The right-wing and the neocons are obvious in their pernicious agendas; nothing is really hidden; therefore they can and should be opposed. But many leftists serve two masters and are far subtler. Ostensibly on the side of regular people and opposed to imperialism and the predations of the elites at home and abroad, they are often tricksters of beguiling rhetoric that their followers miss. Rhetoric that indirectly fuels the wars they say they oppose.

    Smelling skunks is not as obvious as it might seem.  Being nocturnal, they come forth when most are sleeping.

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  • NDP onboard with Cons, Liberals in warmongering over Ukraine

    Canada’s “left wing” party is openly opposed to negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine.

    In “Feds must do more to support Ukraine, say experts, Ukrainians, opposition MPs” NDP foreign affairs critic Heather McPherson repeats the party’s call to send more weapons to fight Russia and suggests the NDP formally opposes negotiations. The Monday Hill Times article reported, “McPherson said while the NDP will always look at non-violent means of conflict resolution by diplomatic and humanitarian means, Russia’s war against Ukraine is not a case when it can be done.”

    MP Charlie Angus is more forthright in his opposition to negotiations. Asked on Twitter last week “Do you agree that what is needed concerning Russia/Ukraine war is negotiations not more weapons?” Angus responded, “We will negotiate when Putin pulls his war machine out of Ukraine and the international war crimes unit is allowed to fully investigate his crimes.” (While they trend in different directions, one can support sending weapons and seeking to negotiate.)

    Angus’ statement is a call to prolong and escalate the war. When I tweeted as much, Angus blocked me. Apparently, Angus talks tough about Ukrainians fighting until the end but is sensitive to being challenged on Twitter.

    As part of their three-year pact with the Liberals the NDP agreed to a budget that allocated half a billion dollars for arms to fight Russia (on top of more than $100 million in arms delivered to Ukraine in previous weeks). McPherson and Angus’ statements on negotiations suggests the party also agrees with the Liberals’ hostility to seeking diplomatic pathways to end the violence in Ukraine.

    On Monday foreign affairs minister Mélanie Joly told CBC Radio, “at this point, like I said, the goal is not to be negotiating.” Two weeks into Russia’s illegal invasion Joly said “right now, it’s not about a diplomatic solution.” Prior to February 24 Canadian officials weren’t keen on negotiating either.

    In word and deed Canada has sought to escalate tensions and extend the fighting. It is echoing evermore open calls by British and US officials to prolong the fighting and turn Ukraine into a proxy conflict. During an April 9 visit to Kyiv Boris Johnson reportedly pressured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to ditch peace talks and after the British PM met French President Emmanuel Macron last week his office released a statement saying “he urged against any negotiations with Russia on terms that gave credence to the Kremlin’s false narrative for the invasion.”

    Hinting at what’s long been US policy in Ukraine, Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin declared recently, “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.” In explaining his support for a $40 billion US arms and aid package to Ukraine, Congressman Dan Crenshaw tweeted, “Yeah, because investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea.” Previously, Congressman Adam Schiff told the House of Representatives that the “United States aids Ukraine and her people so we can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”

    While less crass with their declarations, the NDP is aligned with this thinking. As I detailed here, the NDP has been pressing conflict with Russia for years and has consistently supported measures that escalate tensions in Ukraine.

    This reflects the party’s tradition of belligerence that I detail in Left, Right: Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada. The NDP/CCF supported Canada fighting in Korea, Yugoslavia and Libya. To give but one example after Moammar Gaddafi was savagely killed in 2011 NDP interim leader Nycole Turmel released a statement noting, “the future of Libya now belongs to all Libyans. Our troops have done a wonderful job in Libya over the past few months.”

    The NDP’s public opposition to negotiations that might end the horrors in Ukraine exposes the depth of the party’s warmongering.

    The post NDP onboard with Cons, Liberals in warmongering over Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Kremlin Spokesman Says Russia Now Considers US, European Allies “Hostile States”

    Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that Moscow now considers the United States and its European allies “hostile states” as Western governments continue to pour heavy weaponry into Ukraine, which is attempting to beat back Russia’s deadly invasion.

    The West has also put in place an unprecedented regime of sanctions with the goal of hampering Russia’s economy and undermining the country’s war machine.

    During an event in Moscow on Tuesday, Peskov characterized the ongoing conflict as “a diplomatic war and a political war” between Russia and the Western nations backing Ukraine with economic and military support as well as intelligence.

    “There are attempts to isolate us in the world. It’s an economic war,” said Peskov. “It is true that we keep referring to them mildly as unfriendly states, but I should say that they are hostile states, because what they are doing is war.”

    Peskov went on to say that “our national money…has been arrested” and assets “have been stolen.”

    “But we are going to fight for them, of course,” he added.

    The Kremlin spokesman’s remarks came amid mounting fears that the West’s response to Russia’s illegal and devastating invasion has become a proxy war that could spiral into a direct military conflict between nuclear-armed powers.

    Last month, U.S. Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin vindicated such fears by declaring that one of the Biden administration’s primary objectives in Ukraine is to weaken Russia, further dampening hopes of a diplomatic resolution to the war.

    While the Biden administration has insisted it does not want a full-blown war with Russia and has publicly distanced itself from a hawkish Democratic lawmaker who recently said the U.S. is “fundamentally at war” with Russia by proxy, foreign policy analysts and anti-war campaigners argue that the White House is inflaming the conflict by prioritizing arms shipments to Ukraine over peace negotiations.

    In a floor speech last week, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) — the chamber’s second-ranking Democrat — slammed Republican lawmakers for criticizing the Biden administration’s energy policies and declared that Congress should “get off this and really focus on the enemy,” referring to Russia.

    “I know there’s a lot of politics here, but we’re at war,” Hoyer said.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Live-Action Role Play In Ukraine

    It was — literally — a made-for-television moment. A former U.S. Navy chief petty officer turned cable news pundit, dressed in a fresh out-of-the-box camouflage uniform replete with body armor and magazine pouches, wearing matching camouflage helmet and gloves, and cradling an automatic rifle, stared into the camera and announced “I am here to help this country [Ukraine] fight what is essentially a war of extermination.”

    With a Ukrainian flag on his left shoulder, and a U.S. flag emblazoned on his body armor, the man, Malcolm Nance, declared that “This is an existential war, and Russia has brought it to these people and is mass murdering civilians.”

    A day before, Nance had tweeted a black-and-white photograph of himself, similarly clad, announcing “I’m DONE talking.”

    The post Live-Action Role Play In Ukraine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • It Is Foolish For Finland And Sweden To Join NATO And Ignore Both The Real Causes And Consequences

    Here’s what the West is intellectually unable – in the midst of its boundlessly self-righteous, militarist mood to see:

    NATO’s expansion policy created – and is responsible for – the conflict. Russia created – and is responsible for – the war. There exists no violence which is not rooted in underlying conflicts. Conflict and peace literate people, therefore, talk about both.

    And if they want peace, they do not increase the symptoms – the war – they address the real cause, the conflict and ask the conflicting parties to tell what they fear and what they want and then move, step-by-step towards a sustainable solution.

    But neither the mainstream media nor politicians have the civil courage to address the conflict. It’s only about the war and only about Russia/Putin who must be punished, no matter the price to be paid by future generations. If we survive.

    The post It Is Foolish For Finland And Sweden To Join NATO And Ignore Both The Real Causes And Consequences appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Ending “West’s Neocolonial Oppression”: On the New Language and Superstructures

    The Russia-Ukraine war has quickly turned into a global conflict. One of the likely outcomes of this war is the very redefinition of the current world order, which has been in effect, at least since the collapse of the Soviet Union over three decades ago.

    Indeed, there is a growing sense that a new global agenda is forthcoming, one that could unite Russia and China and, to a degree, India and others, under the same banner. This is evident, not only by the succession of the earth-shattering events underway, but, equally important, the language employed to describe these events.

    The Russian position on Ukraine has morphed throughout the war from merely wanting to “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine to a much bigger regional and global agenda, to eventually, per the words of Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, “put an end to the unabashed expansion” of NATO, and the “unabashed drive towards full domination by the US and its Western subjects on the world stage.”

    On April 30, Lavrov went further, stating in an interview with the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, that Russia’s war “contributes to the process of freeing the world from the West’s neocolonial oppression,” predicated on “racism and an exceptionality.”

    But Russia is not the only country that feels this way. China, too, even India, and many others. The meeting between Lavrov and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on March 30, served as a foundation of this truly new global language. Statements made by the two countries’ top diplomats were more concerned about challenging US hegemony than the specifics of the Ukraine war.

    Those following the evolution of the Russia-China political discourse, even before the start of the Russia-Ukraine war on February 24, will notice that the language employed supersedes that of a regional conflict, into the desire to bring about the reordering of world affairs altogether. 

    But is this new world order possible? If yes, what would it look like? These questions, and others, remain unanswered, at least for now. What we know, however, is that the Russian quest for global transformation exceeds Ukraine by far, and that China, too, is on board.

    While Russia and China remain the foundation of this new world order, many other countries, especially in the Global South, are eager to join. This should not come as a surprise as frustration with the unilateral US-led world order has been brewing for many years, and has come at a great cost. Even the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, though timid at times, has warned against this unilaterality, calling instead on the international community to commit itself to  “the values of multilateralism and diplomacy for peace.”

    However, the pro-Russian stances in the South – as indicated by the refusal of many governments to join western sanctions on Moscow, and the many displays of popular support through protests, rallies and statements – continue to lack a cohesive narrative. Unlike the Soviet Union of yesteryears, Russia of today does not champion a global ideology, like socialism, and its current attempt at articulating a relatable global discourse remains, for now, limited.

    It is obviously too early to examine any kind of superstructure – language, political institutions, religion, philosophy, etc – resulting from the Russia-NATO global conflict, Russia-Ukraine war and the growing Russia-China affinity.

    Though much discussion has been dedicated to the establishing of an alternative monetary system, in the case of Lavrov’s and Yi’s new world order, a fully-fledged substructure is yet to be developed.

    New substructures will only start forming once the national currency of countries like Russia and China replace the US dollar, alternative money transfer systems, like CIPS, are put into effect, new trade routes are open, and eventually new modes of production replace the old ones. Only then, superstructures will follow, including new political discourses, historical narratives, everyday language, culture, art and even symbols.

    The thousands of US-western sanctions slapped on Russia were largely meant to weaken the country’s ability to navigate outside the current US-dominated global economic system. Without this maneuverability, the West believes, Moscow would not be able to create and sustain an alternative economic model that is centered around Russia.

    True, US sanctions on Cuba, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela and others have failed to produce the coveted ‘regime change’, but they have succeeded in weakening the substructures of these societies, denying them the chance to be relevant economic actors at a regional and international stage. They were merely allowed to subsist, and barely so.

    Russia, on the other hand, is a global power, with a relatively large economy, international networks of allies, trade partners and supporters. That in mind, surely a regime change will not take place in Moscow any time soon. The latter’s challenge, however, is whether it will be able to orchestrate a sustainable paradigm shift under current western pressures and sanctions.

    Time will tell. For now, it is certain that some kind of a global transformation is taking place, along with the potential of a ‘new world order’, a term, ironically employed by the US government more than any other.

    The post Ending “West’s Neocolonial Oppression”: On the New Language and Superstructures first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The Chris Hedges Report: Ukraine And The Resurgence Of American Militarism

    The war in Ukraine, stoked in part by NATO expansion and the violation of promises made to Moscow at the end of the Cold War, now looks set to become a lengthy war of attrition—one funded and backed by the United States. What will be the consequences of the United States’s commitment to long-term conflict, and where will we be when the war finally ends?

    Andrew Bacevich explains in this interview how the end of the Cold War triggered a new bout of American military interventionism that has now spanned decades. Moreover, as Bacevich argues, if the fighting in Ukraine ceases without a geopolitical plan for peaceably bringing Russia back into the community of nations, we risk setting the world stage for even greater conflict.

    The post The Chris Hedges Report: Ukraine And The Resurgence Of American Militarism appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Bizarre, Unanimous Democratic Support For The $40b War Package

    After Joe Biden announced his extraordinary request for $33 billion more for the war in Ukraine — on top of the $14 billion the U.S. has already spent just ten weeks into this war — congressional leaders of both parties immediately decided the amount was insufficient. They arbitrarily increased the amount by $7 billion to a total of $40 billion, then fast-tracked the bill for immediate approval. As we reported on Tuesday night, the House overwhelmingly voted to approve the bill by a vote of 388-57. All fifty-seven NO votes came from Republican House members. Except for two missing members, all House Democrats — every last one, including all six members of the revolutionary, subversive Squad — voted for this gigantic war package, one of the largest the U.S. has spent at once in decades.

    The post The Bizarre, Unanimous Democratic Support For The $40b War Package appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Advancing Interconnected Solutions To The Food, Energy And Finance Crises

    The governing body of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) met in Rome on April 8, 2022 in an Extraordinary Session to examine the “impact of the Ukraine-Russia conflict on global food security and related matters under its mandate” and advise on how it should proceed. Meanwhile, just two days earlier, the Civil Society and Indigenous People Mechanism (CSIPM) at U.N. Committee on World Food Security (CFS) called for an Extraordinary Plenary Session of the CFS.

    We must consider these developments along with a new initiative from the U.N. and against the background of the FAO’s global food prices index reaching its highest level ever.

    The post Advancing Interconnected Solutions To The Food, Energy And Finance Crises appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • NY Times Shifts Prowar Narrative, Documents Failure Of US In Ukraine

    The New York Times has a job to do – and it has done that job spectacularly well over the past few months.  The Times is a leader, in the opinion of this writer, the leader in spelling out the US narrative on the war in Ukraine, a tale designed to keep up morale, give the war a high moral purpose and justify the untold billions pouring from the taxpayers’ pockets into Joe Biden’s proxy war on Russia. Day in and day out in page after page of word and picture it has been instructing one and all, including politicians and lower level opinion shapers, exactly what to think about the war in Ukraine.

    So, when the Times says that things are not going well for the US and its man in Kiev, Volodymyr Zelensky, it is a man bites dog kind of story.  It tells us that some truths have gone from uncomfortable to undeniable. 

    The post NY Times Shifts Prowar Narrative, Documents Failure Of US In Ukraine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • New York Times Shifts Prowar Narrative, Documents Failure of U.S. in Ukraine

    The New York Times has a job to do – and it has done that job spectacularly well over the past few months.  The Times is a leader, in the opinion of this writer, the leader in spelling out the US narrative on the war in Ukraine, a tale designed to keep up morale, give the war a high moral purpose and justify the untold billions pouring from the taxpayers’ pockets into Joe Biden’s proxy war on Russia. Day in and day out, in page after page of word and picture, it has been instructing one and all, including politicians and lower level opinion shapers, exactly what to think about the war in Ukraine.

    So, when the Times says that things are not going well for the US and its man in Kiev, Volodymyr Zelensky, it is a man bites dog kind of story.  It tells us that some truths have gone from uncomfortable to undeniable.  Such was nature of the page one story on May 11, headlined “Russians Hold Much of the East, Setbacks Aside.”

    Even that anti-narrative headline softens the bitter truth.  The first paragraph of the story fesses up more completely, stating, “Obscured in the daily fighting is the geographic reality that Russia has made gains on the ground.” Not “holding” ground but “gaining” ground.  Not exactly a morale booster.

    The Times goes on, “The Russian Defense Ministry said Tuesday that its forces in eastern Ukraine had advanced to the border between Donetsk and Luhansk, the two Russian-speaking provinces where Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Ukraine’s army for eight years.” Here it reminds us that the first shots in this war were not fired on February 24, as the narrative goes, but eight long years ago in the Donbas.  It is a jolting reminder for those who base their support for the war on “who fired the first shot,” that their “moral” view has a considerable blind spot.

    The Times continues: “…. the Donbas seizure, combined with the Russian invasion’s early success in seizing parts of southern Ukraine adjoining the Crimean peninsula ….gives the Kremlin enormous leverage in any future negotiation to halt the conflict.”

    It goes on: “And the Russians enjoy the added advantage of naval dominance in the Black Sea, the only maritime route for Ukrainian trade, which they have paralyzed with an embargo that could eventually starve Ukraine economically and is already contributing to a global grain shortage.”  More bad news.

    More: “Russia has all but achieved one of its primary objectives: seizing a land bridge connecting Russian territory to the Crimean peninsula.”  And: “The last stronghold of Ukrainian resistance in this area, at the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, has been whittled to a few hundred hungry troops now confined mostly to bunkers.”  Ouch!

    Finally, turning its attention to the economy, the Times states: “The war has ‘put Ukraine’s economy under enormous stress, with the heavy devastation of infrastructure and production capacities,’ the bank said in an economic update. It estimated that 30 percent to 50 percent of Ukrainian businesses have shut down, 10 percent of the population has fled the country and a further 15 percent is displaced internally.”  That is a grand total of 25% of the population displaced from their homes.

    This sad tale of failure, misery and death is broken up by considerable verbiage, some anecdotes from the front and the testimony of Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence, whose testimony is guarded but bleak.  But read with thought, there is a big failure looming over the enterprise.

    So, in a panic the US continues to throw mountains of cash at the problem, about $63 billion if one includes the recent infusion of about $40 million about to whistle through the Senate and already passed by the House with only 57 Nays, all Republican.

    But why this abrupt shift in tone by the Times.  Lax editorial oversight?  This does not appear to be the case, because right on cue on the same day we are treated to an Opinion piece entitled: “America and Its Allies Want to Bleed Russia. They Really Shouldn’t.”  It suggests that it is time for the U.S. to wave the white flag.

    The piece concludes thus:

    But the longer the war, the worse the damage to Ukraine and the greater the risk of escalation. A decisive military result in eastern Ukraine may prove elusive. Yet the less dramatic outcome of a festering stalemate is hardly better. Indefinite protraction of the war, as in Syria, is too dangerous with nuclear-armed participants.

    Diplomatic efforts ought to be the centerpiece of a new Ukraine strategy. Instead, the war’s boundaries are being expanded and the war itself recast as a struggle between democracy and autocracy, in which the Donbas is the frontier of freedom. This is not just declamatory extravagance. It is reckless. The risks hardly need to be stated.

    It appears some in the Foreign Policy Elite and other precincts of the Deep State have seen the looming disaster for the proxy war on Russia being waged by Biden, Nuland, Blinken and the rest of the neocon cabal.  The prospect of nuclear holocaust lying at the end of this road may be enough to rouse them from their Exceptionalist torpor. They seem to want to stop the train that they have set in motion before it runs off the cliff.  It is not clear whether they will prevail.  But it is clear that we need to drive those responsible for this dangerous debacle out of power -before it is too late.

    The post New York Times Shifts Prowar Narrative, Documents Failure of U.S. in Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Letters from Moscow: Education, Health Care, Unions, and Political Parties Across the Class Divide

    What follows is a series of emails from a comrade, HCE. He is a Russian citizen and has lived and worked in Moscow for many years. He is a Marxist-Leninist. The questions we asked him are in bold.

    Dear Bruce:

    Before I start answering more of your questions, I would like to make a comment on the very complicated situation concerning access to data which affects both my three previous letters and as well as any future letters.

    Rocky times in the political economy and computerized and digital world

    After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russia embarked on an extremely complicated process of switching from one political economy to another. This coincided with another drastic change, the computerization, digitization, and data organization of the whole state apparatus. This includes administration, health, education, defense, and industry. This process was difficult. We went through what I would call a “hybrid” stage in the late 1990s and up to the early 2000s.

    A large number of the technical, medical, and administrative state employees were new to computers then and there was an urgent need to digitize a huge amount of data. At the same time, state facilities still had to function. The state cadres by the 1990s – 2000 were no spring chickens. They were around 45 years of age and were slower to learn about the computerized, digital world. I remember the problems of the customs. It was a real headache.  Older doctors had to learn to use computers and databases, and all this did not come easily. Computers had become a necessity that accompanied a person everywhere. Nevertheless, Russia made a leap forward and covered a lot of ground rapidly in the digital world. This was true especially in programming due to the solid mathematical background offered in schools and universities established during Soviet times.

    How much does each social class pay to go to grammar school, high school and college in the public and private sector?

    The constitution of the Russian Federation clearly states that preschool, primary, high school or vocational schools are free of charge and compulsory. Higher education is also free of charge, and acceptance is on a competitive basis. Parallel to state sponsored education, there is private education that is available from kindergarten until university. The classes that have the luxury to pay for their children’s education are the upper middle-class and the upper-class. Many of the children of the upper-class study abroad in the US and European countries.

    In spite of all the advantages and benefits of n facilities and equipment in private schools, their performance is not better than state budget schools. This is because there are still traditions and quality remaining from Soviet times in state budget schools. There is a feature in Russian cultural history that defies elite education. Occasionally from the far regions come working-class nuggets that with their talent and persistence are able to reach the heights of the academic and artistic world.

    What about the cost of healthcare for each social class?

    The Soviet Union had an immense health care system that included general hospitals, specialized hospitals, hospitals for children and babies, and clinics tied to factories and universities. All this was inherited by Russia. Every Moscow resident is tied to a hospital in his administrative district. There are children’s hospitals, too. According to the constitution, everyone has a right to health protection so medical care in state and municipal health care institutions is free of charge. The cost of healthcare if the patient goes to a state-owned hospital will be one and the same for all classes.

    The private health care system is much smaller and cannot be compared to the state system. In my opinion, the private system has carved themselves a niche for upper-middle class and upper-class people. This is because there are no queues, accommodations are better, and for your money the doctor is willing to listen to your complaints not for 10 minutes but for 30 minutes. Otherwise, the doctors are the same.

    The problems of the state health care system are more organizational than anything else (as mentioned at the beginning of my letter). There were some attempts to make changes according to western management practices. These were failures and much disliked by the majority of the people trying to innovate, digitize the data base, and streamline the administrative apparatus. Instead of having innovation that would serve the healthcare system you have innovation for its own sake. Gradually the system already in place is adjusting.

    Let me give a human face to these dry facts:

    “Two months ago, my wife fell ill and was feeling very bad and since we are both elderly (80+ years of age), I called for an ambulance.  It arrived in 10 minutes. Two young men arrived who checked my wife’s blood pressure. They had a portable device for checking her heart after placing sensors on her. They received the result on graph paper. The doctor checked her and called the hospital telling me that tomorrow a specialist would arrive to check her again, but for now she was ok. The next day we got a call from the doctor and asked if that time was ok to come over. When the doctor arrived she carefully checked my wife over and wrote a lengthy prescription.  We declined hospitalization, and I promised the doctor that I would take care of my wife. She agreed but warned me that if my wife did not feel better in two days, they would want to hospitalize her.”  

    All of this was free of charge.

    What is the status of unions? How militant or not are they? What percentage of working-class people join them?

    A couple of words regarding the history of the unions in Russia are necessary in order to understand their present status. Very briefly, unions began to appear with the rise of capitalism in Russia. They were dynamic and revolutionary, and played a big role in the February and Great October revolutions of 1917. After the formation of the USSR, the employers and the employees were both working-class and the unions became part of the state serving the working-class in health, education, recreation, and many other functions. It was called the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (AUCCTU) – the central body of trade unions, it functioned from 1918 until 1990.

    After the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the switch from socialism back to capitalism, this entity remained in the same role although politically much weakened, but still had significant assets, organizational ties, and funds. The working-class did not have a militant organization. They were not created for organizing and fighting the capitalist employers. The name of this organization is The Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR).

    To date, the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia is still the largest public association in Russia. As of January 1, 2020, the FNPR had 122 member organizations, including 40 all-Russian (interregional) trade unions. This included 5 trade unions cooperating with the FNPR on the basis of agreements. It also included 82 territorial associations of trade union organizations. The FNPR unites 19.9 million trade union members.  It has its relations with the government and its party, United Russia, capitalist employers, as well as having its members in the State Duma (Russian Parliament).

    The second trade union of importance is The Confederation of Labor of Russia (KTR)  (English version available). It was formed in 1995 and has about 2 million members. It is militant. It has to be said that it faces immense difficulties, and its victories are few and far between. Still, they are developing and learning. The Confederation of Labor of Russia is an independent trade union and does not follow the official government line. Its struggle is not only for purely economic benefits. It has an agreement with the Communist Party since 2008.

    Besides the above-mentioned trade unions there are many others, but these two are the most prominent

    How many political parties are there? How strong are they? What about the Communist Party there?  

    There are fifteen parties in Russia. The results of the last State Duma (Russian Parliament) elections in 2021 resulted in the following top five parties.

    United Russia (the government party) – 49.2%

    The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) – 18.93%

    Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) – 7.55%

    A Just Russia – Patriots – For Truth – 7.46%

    New People – 5.32%

    The Communists (CPRF) in Russia came in a very strong second in spite of the harassment, arm twisting, slander, and cheating. The Communists (CPRF) in Russia are not like the communist parties in most parts of Europe and the US.  They are not on the fringes of society. Of all the parties mentioned above, they are the oldest and have deep roots in the people. This was clearly demonstrated in the conflict in the Ukraine, where many soldiers and people raised the red banner besides the official government flag. The parties at the lower end are mainly those that have a strong pro-western ideology and are closer to social democrats and liberals.

    I often remember the American saying “When the going gets tough the tough get going”. As soon as the conflict in the Ukraine started the Russian government quickly found out that the baggage they had picked up from the West was useless. It could not consolidate the people, and a big number of the so-called celebrities left Russia. They found out that the Soviet culture, films, and song was what brought the people together and lay in their collective memory. The official media was forced to somewhat change its tune in its negative portrayal of nearly everything related to the Soviet period.

    The Communists have a strong presence, and the people see that they have a clear and comprehensive program for the economic development of the country. The Communist ideology has a solution for the problems related to nationalism. In any TV talk show, were they invited (this is not often), they dominate simply by their logic. I find especially encouraging the fact that young people (not older than 45) are occupying important positions in the party’s hierarchy and being given the responsibility to become Duma members and governors. The CPRF has three governors out of the 85. Please note that I am using an approximation here, since the administrative configuration is not one but of several types.

    The Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) is a nationalist, right-wing party. Their charismatic leader, Zhirinovsky, on whom the party depended, passed away recently. In my opinion there could be a decline in their influence depending on how the party deals with their loss. A Just Russia – Patriots – For Truth is a coalition of three parties, the biggest is A Just Russia, with socialist-democratic views.

    The New People party was formed and is still headed by a businessman, Alexei Nechayev, owner of the cosmetics company Faberlic. This is a party oriented towards the young managerial type. It has a right leaning capitalist ideology that reminds one of Ayn Rand ideas.

    In reply to your inquiry of whether there are parties backed by the US, my opinion is that parties that are influenced or backed by the US are not on the right. The right in Russia is most probably nationalistic. The parties that are more likely to be on the “democratic liberal” side, are those that began their career with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and actively participated in the economic upheavals that created the oligarchy. Since those times of the 1990s, they have been steadily declining until in our times they cannot meet the quota for getting in the Duma. They still are present on the political stage due to the support from the West and the way the West exaggerates their presence and influence and the noise they make. By carefully observing the representatives of this phenomenon we notice that they were rubber-stamped by the same hand, from Venezuela, throughout Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Georgia, and Russia. What gathers the right and the ‘liberal democrats” together is their hatred of socialism, communists and anything related to the Soviet Union. The US and the West directly and aggressively have backed parties or their representatives through NGOs. However, a law has been passed recently declaring any NGO receiving financial or other kind of support from a foreign country to be a foreign agent and will be treated accordingly.

    How do each of the social classes line up in terms of religious affiliation?

    Dear Bruce,

    Allow me to begin this part of my letter with a quotation from no less an authority than historian Edward Gibbon:

    “…but so intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people.”

    Orthodox Christianity is the prevailing branch of Christianity and does not depend on class. It is the religion for all classes from the upper-class to the working-class.

    There are other religions as well. According to the Levada Centre (not official source):

    Christian Orthodox believers — 63%

    Atheists — 26%

    Muslims — 7%

    Protestants — less than 1%

    Jews — less than 1%

    Catholics — less than 1%

    The overwhelming number of Christians are orthodox. Religion had an intensely strong comeback after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. This is manifested not only by the number of believers, but by the wealth, opulence, and the close ties between the state and the church. The official point of view is trying to bring back some of the ideology of tsarist Russia, of tying nationalism and religion to the state. The church now is ubiquitous, imposing its presence in education, the army and general public. Churches are built everywhere. However, if immediately after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, religion had a certain appeal to the Russian population, it is now rapidly declining. All of what I have said about Christianity is true for the Muslim regions and republics where Islam schools and mosques are present in large numbers. Laws have been passed to guard the church and religion.

    With affection and respect

    HCE

    The post Letters from Moscow: Education, Health Care, Unions, and Political Parties Across the Class Divide first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel’s PR Problem, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Israel’s mounting PR crisis boils down to the fact that its violence and oppression isn’t happening in some far off land as in the case with US wars, it’s happening right at home surrounded by video cameras and enforced by police and soldiers who are not adept PR spinmeisters.

    Israeli apartheid is imposed not by trained propagandists but by armed thugs who’ve been told their whole lives that the people they’re responsible for keeping in check are inferior. They don’t think how it’s going to look when they, for example, assault mourners at the funeral of a Palestinian American journalist who was slain by IDF sniper fire. If the whole thing was being upheld by spinmeisters like Jen Psaki, Michael McFaul and Jake Tapper it would unfold in a much more media-friendly way, but it’s being largely upheld by people who’ve been indoctrinated with an apartheid mindframe their entire lives instead.

    Combine that element with the dramatic uptick in recent years of video cameras and internet access, and you’ve got a surefire recipe for the defeat of a generations-long perception management campaign that had until that point been very successful.

    I mean, whatever your opinion on Israel/Palestine in general and this latest episode in particular, you really can’t dispute that the caption in this tweet is just objectively true:

    Public approval of the Israeli apartheid regime, like approval of the US police, has plummeted in direct proportion to the ubiquitousness of video cameras. In much the same way DNA testing vindicated prisoners who’d insisted on their innocence for years, a new technological development proved true what a marginalized population had been saying all along.

    So in that sense the increasingly mainstream opposition to the Israeli status quo has been a rare victory for alternative media and citizen journalism: ordinary people recording and spreading the truth without the permission of establishment narrative managers.

    I think it’s basically accurate to say that the human adventure is mostly about becoming more and more conscious, of both our inner and outer worlds. And it doesn’t get much more conscious than raw video footage circulating on a global mind network.

    That’s why the Israeli regime kills journalists, and that’s why the US-centralized empire is working to legalize and normalize extraditing and imprisoning them. In a weird way it really is kind of a fight between the forces within humanity who want to switch the lights on versus the forces who wish to keep the lights off.

    ❖

    ❖

     

    There is no “The Squad”. There’s the US congress which is responsible for facilitating the continued domination of a globe-spanning empire, and running alongside that there are a few social media accounts who periodically make progressive-sounding noises on the internet.

    “The Squad” isn’t a political faction, it’s a soundtrack to an empire. It’s soothing noises people can listen to while the US hegemon destroys the world.

    ❖

    They used to call you crazy if you warned that we’re being propagandized to support a war with Russia. Now they call you crazy if you don’t support the war with Russia.

    ❖

    Obviously the only logical response to a war that was caused by NATO expansionism is to dramatically expand NATO.

    ❖

    NATO is a “defensive alliance” like Hiroshima and Nagasaki were defensive nuclear strikes.

    I guess you can call anything a “defensive alliance” if you categorize everything it does as “defense”, up to and including wars of aggression to topple foreign governments. I mean I suppose if you assume it’s your God-given right to control everything that happens in the world then anyone who disobeys your will can be construed as an aggressor against your imperial divine right, and therefore anything you do in response to them is defensive in nature.

    ❖

    It’s just amazing how quickly and effectively the spectrum of debate was limited to “We should engage in tons of nuclear brinkmanship” versus “We should only engage in a fair bit of nuclear brinkmanship”. No space is allowed in the Overton window for “No nuclear brinkmanship, please”; that was transformed into a “Russian talking point” and therefore taboo.

    The US propaganda machine is the most powerful force on earth.

    ❖

    “We’re turning into China,” complained the citizen living under an empire that is vastly more tyrannical than China.

    ❖

    You’re only as free as you allow your world to be. The impulse to control and manipulate life is what gives rise to egoic consciousness, which is what chains us to the wheels of suffering. What presents as a path to security is really the path to insecurity.

    In setting the world free, we set ourselves free. In setting ourselves free, the world becomes that much freer.

    _______________

    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.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • A Manufactured Crisis In Ukraine Is Victimizing The World’s Peoples

    With the conflict in Ukraine entering its third month, the likelihood of a successfully negotiated peace — an immediate necessity — is becoming ever more remote. This proxy war by the United States is designed to use the Ukrainian people to mortally disable . Those who profit from war benefit, while those most vulnerable suffer: ian civilians, but more broadly working people internationally and especially in the Global South.

    The post A Manufactured Crisis In Ukraine Is Victimizing The World’s Peoples appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Rand Paul Blocks Senate Vote On $40 Billion Ukraine Aid

    On Thursday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) blocked an effort in the Senate to hold a quick vote on the nearly $40 billion aid package for Ukraine that passed in the House on Tuesday.

    “My oath of office is to the US constitution not to any foreign nation and no matter how sympathetic the cause, my oath of office is to the national security of the United States of America,” Paul said on the Senate floor before blocking the vote. “We cannot save Ukraine by dooming the US economy.”

    Paul blocked the vote because he wanted to include text in the bill that would create a special inspector general for oversight of the billions being sent to Ukraine. He initially offered to include the oversight as an amendment, which would have been voted on separately, but he ultimately wanted to change the legislation.

    The post Rand Paul Blocks Senate Vote On $40 Billion Ukraine Aid appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Zelenskyy Calls for Direct Talks With Putin as Russia Pulls Back From Kharkiv

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday that he is prepared to hold direct talks with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin amid mounting fears that Moscow’s invasion and the West’s response have spiraled into a dangerous proxy war between nuclear-armed powers.

    “We must find an agreement,” Zelenskyy said in an interview with an Italian media outlet as deadly ground fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces continues to intensify.

    Ukrainian and Western officials claimed Friday that Russian troops have begun pulling back from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, as Moscow focuses its assault on the eastern part of the country.

    Zelenskyy stressed Thursday that while he is ready for talks with Putin — who has thus far declined calls for face-to-face negotiations — he would not accept “ultimatums” from the Russian side.

    “As president, I am ready to speak with Putin, but only with him, without his intermediaries and on the terms of dialogue, and not ultimatums,” Zelenskyy said.

    “We want the Russian army to leave our land. We aren’t on Russian soil,” he added. “We won’t save Putin’s face by paying with our territory. That would be unjust.”

    The Ukrainian president’s comments came as peace negotiations remained at a standstill and as Western governments, including the United States, continued pumping billions of dollars worth of heavy weaponry into the war zone. In the coming days, the U.S. Senate is expected to send to President Joe Biden’s desk a package containing another $40 billion in military and economic aid package for Ukraine.

    Last week, the Ukrainian newspaper Ukrayinska Pravda reported that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson used a visit to Kyiv last month to pressure Zelenskyy to abandon the prospects of peace talks with Russia.

    Based on unnamed sources from Zelenskyy’s inner circle, the Ukrainian media outlet’s report appeared to vindicate concerns that the West is more interested in inflicting damage on Russia than securing a diplomatic resolution to the war, which is now in its third month.

    “Every day the war continues, the risk of its spreading grows,” Andrew Murray of the U.K.-based Stop the War Coalition wrote in a recent analysis. “Other states could be drawn in by accident or design, and clearly Washington and London are seeing how far they can push their involvement without triggering wider war. Miscalculation is all too easy to envisage.”

    “The alternative — and urgent — perspective is of a ceasefire and peace talks,” Murray added. “The outline of an agreement on Ukrainian neutrality, without membership of NATO but with some form of international guarantees, seems to exist.”

    In an op-ed for Common Dreams on Friday, Peace Action president Kevin Martin wrote that “the tragic, illegal war of aggression by Russia against Ukraine should end now, with a ceasefire and then a comprehensive peace agreement.”

    “It could be based on the previously negotiated 2015 Minsk II agreement, which is quite detailed and balanced in seeking to resolve territorial, political, cultural, and linguistic disputes,” Martin argued. “What makes this war so ghastly is the eventual outcome was widely known and achievable before Russia invaded, namely Ukrainian neutrality, no NATO membership, and territorial, legal and political accommodations over Crimea and the Donbas region.”

    “Not one more Ukrainian civilian, or Ukrainian or Russian soldier, needs to die or be maimed for life in this senseless slaughter,” he added.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Historic vote: Russia also out of ECOSOC NGO Committee

    On Wednesday, 13 April, members of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) elected 19 members to the UN Committee on NGOs, a body frequently criticised for restricting civil society participation at the UN. See my earlier posts on this topic: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/ngo-committee/

    Members of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) voted to elect 19 members for the next 4 year term (2022-2025) of the ECOSOC Committee on NGOs. The 19 members of the Committee, elected from five regional groups, are the gatekeepers for civil society at the UN as they decide which NGOs receive UN accreditation participation rights.

    In the election, the Eastern European States was the only regional group which presented a competitive slate, as three candidates, Armenia, Georgia and Russia, contested for the two available seats. Armenia, Georgia and Russia received 47, 44 and 15 votes respectively. As a result, Russia,  a member of the Committee since its establishment in 1947, has been voted out. This result comes one week after a historic resolution of the UN General Assembly to suspend Russia’s Human Rights Council membership. https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2022/04/08/suspension-of-membership-un-human-rights-council-finally-operationalised/

    Despite Russia’s departure, the incoming NGO Committee still includes members with deeply problematic records on safeguarding human rights and civil society participation. According to the CIVICUS Monitor, 60% of the incoming members are currently characterised as being ‘closed’ or ‘repressed’ civic spaces. This includes all members for the Asia-Pacific region. Civic space is ‘obstructed’ or ‘narrowed’ within the remaining 40%.

    “Members of the NGO Committee are the primary decision makers on which NGOs can access UN bodies and processes,” said Maithili Pai, Programme Officer and ISHR focal point for civil society access and participation. “States must fulfil their fundamental mandate under ECOSOC Resolution 1996/31 by acknowledging the breadth of NGO expertise and their capacity to support the work of the UN, and ensuring just, balanced, effective and genuine involvement of NGOs around the world.” she added.

    ISHR is aware of 352 currently deferred organisations seeking UN accreditation, at least 40 which have faced over four years of deferrals, and one that has been deferred for 14 years. In response, ISHR sought to campaign for states to engage in competitive and meaningful elections that could produce positive outcomes for civil society. We urge incoming members of the Committee to open the doors of the UN to civil society groups from around the world.

    https://ishr.ch/latest-updates/ecosoc-committee-on-ngos-elections-russia-voted-out-for-first-time-in-75-years/

  • Finland will join NATO, but some question where it will lead

    Finland will apply to join NATO, the country’s leadership has announced. Sweden is expected to follow suit. Both nations have historically been neutral, but the Russian war in Ukraine has shifted attitudes. In Finland, according to some figures, support for NATO membership shot up to 76% after the Russian invasion.

    On Thursday morning, Finnish president Sauli Niinistö said he had spoken with Ukraine’s Volodyymr Zelenskyy about the application:

    Boris Johnson has been a central figure in the decision. On Wednesday, he pledged the UK would respond with force if Finland was attacked. This effectively makes Finland a NATO member already:

    NATO’s Article 5 ties allies into responding militarily if partners are attacked:

    The principle of collective defence is at the very heart of NATO’s founding treaty. It remains a unique and enduring principle that binds its members together, committing them to protect each other and setting a spirit of solidarity within the Alliance.

    Militarisation

    Others have questioned whether the move would increase the likelihood of war:

    While some suggested that the trade-off wasn’t worth it, especially given that Russia is unlikely to invade Finland:

    Another social media user suggested that if Donald Trump were to be re-elected in the US, he might leave NATO, leaving the countries unprotected anyway:

    Sweden?

    Swedish president Carl Bildt also announced that his country would seek membership:

    This is significant because Sweden has been a neutral country since the 1800s. As such, joining a military alliance would be a serious change in the balance of European politics.

    However, as one Twitter user pointed out, Russia’s Vladimir Putin is likely to cite the new applications as evidence of NATO expansion:

    Militarism

    Sweden and Finland have the right to apply for NATO membership. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is understandable that such a move would have public support. However, it is also true that Europe is becoming increasingly militarised as what looks like a new Iron Curtain hardens across the continent.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/David Smith, cropped to 770 x 403, licenced under CC BY 2.0.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Ukraine – Putin On Why The War Started, Failed Attempts On Snake Island, Other Issues

    The most important part of Vladimir Putin’s speech to the Victory Parade on the Red Square is the narrative that explains how the current war in Ukraine began. Putin is correct in seeing this as a NATO proxy war against Russia. The use of ‘pre-emptive strike’ is somewhat misleading. In fact the Ukraine started the war on Wednesday, February 16 2022, when its forces near the Donbas republics began preparatory artillery strikes for an all out ground attack on the Donbas republics. The February 15 report of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine recorded some 41 explosions in the ceasefire areas. This increased to 76 explosions on Feb 16, 316 on Feb 17, 654 on Feb 18, 1413 on Feb 19, a total of 2026 of Feb 20 and 21 and 1484 on Feb 22. The OSCE mission reports showed that the great majority of impact explosions of the artillery were on the separatist side of the ceasefire line.

    The post Ukraine – Putin On Why The War Started, Failed Attempts On Snake Island, Other Issues appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Info-Warrior Malcolm Nance

    Malcolm Nance, the MSNBC talking head who bills himself as an “intelligence professional,” recently quit his media gig, signed on to the so-called International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine and left to battle the Russians.  At least that’s what he wants all of us to think.  There are so many things wrong with this story that I don’t know where to begin.  So, I guess the best place to begin is at the beginning.

    I met Malcolm Nance in the spring of 2001.  I had returned from an overseas assignment as a C.I.A. counterterrorism officer to take a course called “advanced counterterrorism operations.”  As part of the class, the participants were given about a dozen books related to the latest thinking on terrorism and how to combat it.

    The post Info-Warrior Malcolm Nance appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Biden Signs Bill Reviving World War Ii-Era Lend-Lease Program To Ukraine

    President Biden on Monday signed a bill into law reviving the World War II-era lend-lease program for Ukraine, paving the way for an escalation in US military aid to Kyiv.

    The Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022 allows Biden to send weapons to Ukraine free of charge while technically requiring payment at a later date. Under the lend-lease act during World War II, the US sent billions of dollars in weapons to the Soviet Union, China, Britain, and other allies.

    The legislation received massive bipartisan support in Congress, passing by voice vote in the Senate and by a vote of 417-10 in the House, with only Republicans voting against the bill.

    The post Biden Signs Bill Reviving World War Ii-Era Lend-Lease Program To Ukraine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • World Peace And Relief For Ukrainians Must Guide Early Resolution Of Crisis

    For most people worldwide, the most obvious aspect of the new crisis that has gripped our already deeply troubled planet is that the war should end immediately.

    Such a strong feeling is based on concerns of world peace as well on reducing the distress of people of Ukraine.

    At the same time the wider and longer-term aspects of the crisis cannot be ignored. Eminent academic Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University has suggested very rightly that the Ukraine crisis should be seen to be consisting of not one but three wars at three levels— Russia-Ukraine war,  USA-Russia war and Western Ukraine—Donbass region war. Lasting peace will come if all three wars end.

    The post World Peace And Relief For Ukrainians Must Guide Early Resolution Of Crisis appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Poor People’s Campaign and the Moral Dilemma of Liberalism

    Rev. William Barber (Photo: Getty Images)

    The demands for justice at home and abroad must not be sacrificed on the altar of what is called pragmatism. The false choices presented by liberalism can undermine the movement altogether.

    Rev. William Barber, an indisputable champion of the poor and a consistent voice demanding an end to poverty, may have made a serious moral and ethical error that effectively placed him outside of the “Kingian” framework that informed Dr. King’s work especially during the last year of his life.

    In an attempt to make a point about the flawed priorities of the duopoly, Dr. Barber wrote in an email to the “movement family” on Saturday, April 30, 2022 that, “despite the political gridlock on Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats have acted swiftly to approve historic military aid to Ukraine. In the face of such a moral imperative, it would be anathema for either party to ask, “How are we going to pay for it?”

    He then went on to suggest that the “moral clarity” that informed the decision to provide military support to Ukraine was contradicted by the lack of moral clarity or support for addressing the pressing needs of the poor. He identified those two contradictory policy orientations – money for war but no money to pass “Build Back Better” legislation, for example, as representing the moral and ethical contradiction at the heart of U.S. politics.

    I will give our dear brother the benefit of the doubt. He was making the point that the duopoly will support in a bipartisan manner those items that it deems a priority. For Rev. Barber and the Campaign, the issue of poverty and its devastating social consequences should be a priority for the U.S. state. However, in trying to make that point Rev Barber seemed to support the Biden’s administration’s war policies which as a follower of Dr. King would seem like a major contradiction. It would seem that to equate a moral imperative for providing military aid to Ukraine to wage war, no matter if it is claimed to be defensive, would be a dramatic departure from the non-violence ethos at the center of Dr. King’s worldview.

    Dr. King said himself that it was his silence on the war that presented a moral contradiction that could only be ultimately resolved by him speaking out in opposition to the Vietnam war. It is unimaginable that Dr. King would give his blessings to a military aid package that Rev. Barber’s language appears to do while simultaneously not demanding an end to the conflict as Rev Barber clearly failed to do in his communication to the movement family. We must now ask Rev Barber if his characterization of the military aid package as a moral imperative was just a clumsy use of words or does he actually support the ultimate expression of violence – war?

    We all know the history. After the student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and all the radical Black liberation and socialist organizations had condemned the war in Vietnam, Dr. King finally broke his silence, as he framed it, and began to speak out against the war in early 1967 with the most extensive and important speech on April 4, 1967, at the Riverside Church in New York. The capitalist rulers understand symbols and so on April 4, 1968, Dr. King was murdered in Memphis where he was supporting a strike of Black sanitation workers against the Memphis city government.

    Rev. Barber claims that “King was gunned down for his efforts to build a Poor People’s Campaign.” There is no doubt that the poor people’s campaign was a significant factor. The rulers understood the danger of Dr. King venturing into class politics, especially with his social democratic positions becoming more evident. But what Barber glosses over is that while the poor people’s campaign was seen as a threat, it was King’s break with the democratic party establishment, and at that time the majority position of the U.S. public who supported the war effort, that made Dr. King the most hated man in the country.

    It is always dangerous to be in a nation that is undergoing an irrational war frenzy, but the danger is exponentially increased if you are a dissident. Rev. Barber is a student of history and understands the potential threats when you break with power. Perhaps in order to try and salvage some semblance of the Build Back Better legislation Rev. Barber believes it prudent to concede the war effort in Ukraine in order to avoid alienating elements of the democratic party that he feels he has to continue to work with, even if it is clear that the party continues to move to the right, even rehabilitating ultranationalist white supremacists and literal neo-Nazis in the Azov regiments.

    But as that old saying goes, when you lay down with dogs you might very well get up with fleas. And if you concede moral positions because of pragmatic considerations, you undermine your moral standing with your base and on top of that your opposition usually loses respect for you.

    Rev. Barber and the Poor Peoples’ Campaign have already created a moral and political contradiction for themselves with their sloppy and dubious moral reasoning on Ukraine. That is, if the bipartisan decision to provide more weapons of war to Ukraine represents a morally uncontested position, how will the Campaign counter the argument that it is equally moral to continue to vote for the ever-increasing military budgets of the Pentagon in light of the supposed security threats from Russia and China?

    It is the lack of political and ideological clarity that distorts moral clarity to the extent that you can believe you are behaving morally when instead you have only surrendered to power and are working on its behalf.

    Dr. King made a choice. He put principles over politics and broke with power. The Poor People’s Campaign will find it difficult to bring people together to denounce poverty while now having to mute their criticism of military spending. It is this kind of politics that is at the heart of the contradiction between the people and the neoliberal capitalist democrat party and its sycophants.

    • First published in Black Agenda Report

    The post The Poor People’s Campaign and the Moral Dilemma of Liberalism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Biden Administration Is Fueling Ukraine War Profiteering

    There was a moment back at the beginning of the Ukraine war when I transformed into a werewolf of war, all claws and fangs and bloodlust. Most humans share this detestable gene to one degree or another, and on this day, it was shouting out of my eyes.

    That long armored column, remember? The miles-long column of soldiers, materiel and artillery slogging its way toward Kyiv to perform slaughter and destruction. We watched it day after day as it creeped closer and closer to the city… until it just stopped.

    Nobody could quite figure out why, and as Ukraine’s forces began picking it apart, it dawned on those observing that maybe the vaunted Russian military wasn’t quite up to the drill. Hitler and Napoleon were thwarted by Russian snow; in this, Russia was thwarted by Ukrainian road mud and the misplaced optimism of the top command. Meanwhile, many lives were lost brutally every day, on both sides.

    There the long column sat, and I could not help but think of the so-called “Highway of Death” in Iraq, when U.S. air power massacred Iraqi forces that were retreating from Kuwait down Highway 80. This was arguably a war crime, as those Iraqi forces were running away, and was a gruesome slaughter by any measure… but there, outside Kyiv, was an attacking army bent on destruction that was stuck in place. If they got unstuck, they’d likely rain hell down on a massive city.

    One wing of A-10 Warthogs, I whispered to myself around a mouthful of newly sharp teeth… I am no combat pilot by any stretch of the imagination, but I am certain every fighter jock who saw that column was thinking precisely the same thing. Warthogs were made to eat armor, and a Google search for “A10 Warthog Russian Column” proved I wasn’t the only one with the same idea (though it’s apparently not as easy as my lurid imagination would have it).

    In the end, nothing came of that traffic jam. The column melted into the larger maw of the war, and I was left to contend with the chilly fact that the caveman with the rock axe lurks behind my eyes, too.

    It can be argued that the failure to confront and damage that convoy represented an immediate tactical failure, but for one thing: The only entity in the theater capable of such an attack is NATO, and had NATO done so, we would all be up to our eyelashes in a full-fledged war with a nuclear-armed nation under the sway of an unbalanced autocrat.

    The term is “escalation,” also known as “mission creep,” and in the present circumstances, both are to be avoided to the greatest possible degree. Vladimir Putin enjoys personal control over a nuclear arsenal that can destroy a city block or an entire city, depending on his mood. He has rattled the launch keys at the West more than once since his invasion of Ukraine, and these weapons have been deployed around the Baltic Sea since before the invasion.

    Disturbingly, a different sort of escalation has been taking place over the last few weeks. Official U.S. voices have been increasingly gleeful in their public bragging about how our direct assistance to Ukraine has led to the deaths of a slew of Russian generals and the sinking of the Russian Naval flagship, the Moskva.

    “After reports in The New York Times and NBC News about the intelligence, Mr. Biden called Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III; Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence; and William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, to chastise them, according to a senior administration official,” reports The New York Times. “That seemed to be where Mr. Biden was drawing a line — providing Ukraine with guns to shoot Russian soldiers was OK, providing Ukraine with specific information to help them shoot Russians was best left secret and undisclosed to the public.”

    On Monday, President Biden signed into law an updated version of the Lend-Lease Act, which allowed the U.S. to more easily provide support for beleaguered Europe in the days before our involvement in World War II. He has also demanded that Congress pass $33 billion in further military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, “a package that congressional Democrats plan to increase by another $7 billion,” according to the Times.

    A sign of how important this aid is to the Biden administration came when the president separated the Ukraine funds from COVID aid funds. Initially, the two were to be combined in a single package for easier passage, but Republicans chose once again to be Republicans and tossed up roadblocks over the COVID money. Rather than endure another protracted mud fight along these lines, Biden has put up the Ukraine funding on its own.

    For some in our government, this slow bleed toward open war is exacerbated by the best of intentions; only a heart of stone can witness the horrors in Ukraine and not long to do something to stop it (even though, for many, that urge is being erroneously directed toward military escalation).

    For others, however, mission creep is the way to increased profits for the war-making sector of the economy, and that beast is always hungry.

    We are perilously close to a conflict that could spiral out of control and into nuclear confrontation. While Ukraine cannot be abandoned, maybe it’s time for those who should know better to stop bragging to the public prints. Remember: The Lend-Lease Act was the last step before we entered WWII. That was a different time, and now is not the time to repeat that history.

    The werewolf is in all of us. That does not mean we have to let it out.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.