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Category: Russia

  • Ukraine civilian deaths may be thousands higher than official toll, warns UN

    Deaths yet to be accounted for in devastated port city of Mariupol likely to add significantly to total

    The head of the UN human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine has warned that the civilian death toll in Ukraine may be thousands higher than the official toll of 3,381, with deaths in the port city of Mariupol alone likely to add significantly to the total.

    “We have been working on estimates, but all I can say for now is that it is thousands higher than the numbers we have currently given to you,” Matilda Bogner, the head of the UN human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine, told a press briefing in Geneva, when asked about the total number of deaths and injuries.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Fake Political Parties In A Fake Democracy: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    I remember feeling such solidarity with Democrats who opposed Bush’s warmongering. I sincerely did not know it was just empty political posturing for them and they’d happily sign off on any war no matter how insane as long as the president doing it had a (D) next to their name.

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    All the Democratic Party’s actions make sense when you switch from thinking of it as a political party whose job is to enact the will of voters to thinking about it as a narrative control operation whose job is to prevent the local riff raff from tampering with the gears of a globe-spanning empire.

    The US doesn’t have political parties, it has narrative control ops disguised as political parties. One of them overtly promotes capitalism and imperialism by appealing to Americans’ worst impulses, the other covertly diverts healthy impulses back into capitalism and imperialism.

    An elephant and a donkey fight in a puppet show and the crowd cheers for one or the other while thieves pick their pockets. And when people start to notice their wallets are missing, they’re told they can stop the pickpocketing by cheering louder for their favorite puppet.

    People ask why the Democrats never codified Roe vs Wade into law, and the answer is, because that’s not their job. Their job is not to enact the policies you elected them to enact. Their job is not even to win elections. Their job is to keep you staring at the puppet show while the empire has its way with the world.

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    The Democratic Party is like one of those perpetual fuckups who does all the wrong things and makes all the wrong decisions and never stops blaming all their self-generated problems on everyone else.

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    Calls for civility and polite protesting always have a lot less to do with the actual protest at hand than with elites getting nervous about the commoners figuring out that their superior numbers mean they can do whatever they want to whoever they want and nobody can stop them.

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    Democracy is when you get to vote on which oligarchic muppet will ceremonially pardon a turkey on Thanksgiving but not on whether your government should greatly escalate the risk of nuclear war.

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    Still can’t believe US officials flat out admitted to the press that they’ve been circulating disinformation to the public about the Ukraine war and then like three weeks later it came out that the US government now has a Ministry of Truth for countering disinformation.

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    Yes the Department of Homeland Security’s Ministry of Truth is headed by a weird ridiculous person. Please don’t let that distract from the vastly more significant fact that the Department of Homeland Security has a Ministry of Truth.

    I already know that my plea here is in vain, because focusing on the ridiculous shitlib has a mainstream partisan slant while focusing on empire narrative management about wars and foreign enemies does not. The mainstream partisan angle wins out every time.

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    All Americans need to really deeply ingest the fact that their government is currently decoupling Covid relief funding from Ukraine proxy war funding because it wants to make sure that the proxy war funding actually passes. Really sit with what that says about everything.

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    Imagine if instead of deliberately provoking and funding a proxy war against Russia that could get everyone killed, the US had pledged to back Zelensky militarily against the Nazi factions who were threatening to kill him if he made peace with Russia like he campaigned on doing?

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    The US proxy war in Ukraine is more serious than Iraq. It’s more serious than Vietnam. The body count is lower for now, but this is a confrontation that Russia has increasingly valid reasons to see as a direct existential threat. This war truly endangers every life on earth.

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    Ah for the good old days before 2022 when “We should try to avoid nuclear war” was an uncontroversial position.

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    It’s evident now that there’s literally no cap on how much more US interventionism the western political/media class will support in Ukraine. There’s no escalation the Biden administration could propose that they wouldn’t support and call everyone a Kremlin agent who opposes it.

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    There doesn’t seem to be any conscious, thinking force driving the escalations against Russia and China. It’s more like watching a force of nature like a hurricane or a wildfire. Just microbes mindlessly responding to the stimulus of global capitalism, with no one ultimately in the driver’s seat.

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    U2 performing in Kyiv should reassure Gen Xers that as much as people bitch about Instagram influencers and TikTok stars our phony pop culture bullshit still has everyone else beat.

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    Zelensky: So what we need from you Americans is your continued military support, your continued financial support, your continued moral support, and your LIVE FROM NEW YORK IT’S SATURDAY NIGHT!

    [music starts playing, we all die a little inside]

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    Elon Musk became the Libertarian Messiah because he’s their strongest argument that capitalism can save the world. A billionaire Pentagon contractor is their strongest argument that capitalism can save the world.

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    The English language has many words for insanity. Probably for the same reason people who live way up north have many words for snow.

     

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • 2022 Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent

    On 3 May 2022 the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) announced the three recipients of the 2022 Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent.

    The 2022 laureates are: professional basketball player and human rights advocate Enes Kanter Freedom, Iranian artist project PaykanArtCar, and Ukrainian-born Russian journalist Marina Ovsyannikova. This year’s laureates will receive their awards on Wednesday, May 25, during the 2022 Oslo Freedom Forum.

    Enes Kanter Freedom is a professional basketball player and vocal advocate for human rights. Since the start of the 2021 NBA season, he has used his global platform to consistently raise awareness of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s human rights abuses. Using his basketball shoes as the canvas for his messages, he wore multiple artistic designs highlighting issues such as the Uyghur genocide, the occupation of Tibet, slave labor at the Nike shoe factories, and the intolerance of China’s dictator. As a result of his creative dissent, he is now banned from China and was dropped by both the Boston Celtics and the Houston Rockets, despite being only 29 years old and in the prime of his career. Freedom’s perseverance has captured the attention of international media and informed millions of sports fans about the global struggle for individual rights in places like Tibet and the Uyghur region. At a time when professional athletes display incessant hypocrisy, unlimited greed, and double standards, Freedom emerges as the moral conscience of professional basketball. Freedom first came to international attention as an outspoken critic of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, making him a target of Turkey’s government — he was deemed a “terrorist” by the regime, stripped of his passport, and was publicly disowned by his family. In late 2021, he changed his name and added “Freedom” as his official last name. See: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/525e5018-7f56-4009-85b8-3f3cce9a8810

    The PaykanArtCar unites the talents of contemporary Iranian artists in the diaspora with a beloved symbol of Iranian national pride — the Paykan automobile — to advocate for human rights in Iran. The car used was once gifted by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran to the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, and was purchased at an auction to serve as the canvas for artwork by Iranian artists in exile. Each year, PaykanArtCar commissions an exceptional Iranian artist-in-exile to use the car to capture the Iranian struggle for human dignity and basic freedoms. The inaugural PaykanArtCar was designed by Alireza Shojaian and features a historic Persian design with a provocative message about the brutality and ruthlessness faced by the marginalized and oppressed LGBTQ+ community inside Iran. The PaykanArtCar represents brave, creative dissent against the human rights abuses of Iran’s theocratic dictatorial regime. The PaykanArtCar will travel to Norway to be present at the Oslo Freedom Forum as part of Human Rights Foundation’s Art in Protest exhibit and will be parked at the event venue. The second edition of PaykanArtCar will be painted by a female Iranian artist and will advocate for women’s rights in Iran.

    Marina Ovsyannikova is a Ukrainian-born Russian journalist and activist, who staged a live protest against the war in Ukraine during a news broadcast of Russian state TV. Ovsyannikova was a longtime editor at Russia’s Channel One, where her job was to assist those engaged in disinformation to be distributed to the Russian people. After thinking through ways in which she could protest, she chose to interrupt a live broadcast, holding a sign calling for “no war.” Following her demonstration on live TV and a subsequent anti-war video, Ovsyannikova was held overnight in a police station, denied access to a lawyer, and ultimately fined 30,000 roubles — she disappeared without contact for more than 12 hours. The Kremlin denounced her protest as “hooliganism,” and Ovsyannikova faces up to 15 years in prison under Russia’s disinformation laws. In a recent article, she expressed profound regret for her years as a participant in “the Russian propaganda machine” where her job was to create “aggressive Kremlin propaganda – propaganda that constantly sought to deflect attention from the truth, and to blur all moral standards,” she says: “I cannot undo what I have done. I can only do everything I possibly can to help destroy this machine and end this war.”

    For more on the Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent and its laureates, see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/awards/438F3F5D-2CC8-914C-E104-CE20A25F0726

    HRF Announces the 2022 Havel Prize Laureates

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

  • The Most American Thing That Has Ever Happened

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    We are once again witnessing history being made, folks. Today, in the Year of our Lord two thousand and twenty-two, we get the great privilege of bearing witness to the single most American thing that has ever happened.

    The Biden administration has asked top Democrats to decouple the federal government’s Covid relief spending package from its much larger bill for funding of the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, because one of those two things is too controversial and contentious to pass quickly.

    Guess which one.

    Politico reports:

    Congressional Democratic leaders reached a bipartisan accord to send $39.8 billion to Ukraine to bolster its monthslong battle against a brutal Russian assault.

     

    And that deal is now expected to move swiftly to President Joe Biden’s desk after Democrats agreed to drop another one of their top priorities — billions of dollars in pandemic aid that has stalled on the Hill. The Ukraine aid could come to the House floor for a vote as soon as Tuesday, according to a person familiar with the discussions who spoke candidly on condition of anonymity.

    That nearly $40 billion worth of proxy war funding eclipses the paltry $10 billion in Covid relief funding that was being debated in congress, and is in fact well in excess of the already massive $33 billion sum requested by the White House.

    “President Joe Biden and top Democrats have agreed to a GOP demand to disentangle a stalled COVID-19 response package from a separate supplemental request for military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine so the latter can move more quickly,” Roll Call reports. “At the same time, House and Senate Democrats have upped the price tag on the Ukraine package by $6.8 billion above Biden’s initial $33 billion request. Democrats proposed including an additional $3.4 billion for food aid and $3.4 billion more to replace U.S. military equipment sent to Ukraine, according to a source familiar with the offer.”

    I defy you to find me anything more American than Washington decoupling relief for its own citizens from its proxy war funding because it wants to make sure the proxy war funding actually passes.

    It’s almost too perfect. You couldn’t come up with a better summation of the US empire in a nutshell if you tried. Taking money away from needful Americans because congressional opposition to helping them so was putting too much inertia on Washington’s games of nuclear brinkmanship is the single most American thing that has ever happened.

    There’s actually a real poetic beauty to it, if you look close enough. The government which runs a globe-spanning empire is dubious about the need to help its own citizenry recover from an economy-flattening pandemic, but throws its full bipartisan support behind a proxy war which threatens the life of every living organism.

    That’s it. That’s the whole entire point I wanted to make here. It’s so insane you’ll cry if you don’t laugh. And we’ll always have those little moments of laughter. Even if these psychos get us all killed.

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

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    Feature image via Wikimedia Commons.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Purpose of Sanctions

    Global economic sanctions have shocked the Russian economy. But can they halt Russian aggression?

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • The US Could’ve Prevented This War Just By Protecting Kyiv From Nazis

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    As we hydroplane toward the brink of nuclear armageddon while Bono and the Edge play U2 songs in Kyiv, it’s probably worth taking a moment to highlight the fact that this entire war could have been avoided if the US had simply pledged military protection for Zelensky against the far right extremists who were threatening to lynch him if he enacted the peacemaking policies he was elected to enact.

    To be clear, what we are indulging in here is entirely an act of fantasy. In imagining what would have happened if the US had pledged to protect the Ukrainian government from an undemocratic violent overthrow at the hands of fascists instead of waging a horrific proxy war, we are imagining a world in which the US government acts in the highest interest of all instead of working continuously to dominate the planet no matter how much madness and cruelty it needs to inflict upon humanity. A world in which the US hadn’t been taking steps toward the orchestration of this proxy war for many years.

    With that out of the way, it’s just a simple fact that for a fraction of the military firepower the US is pouring into Ukraine right now, it could have prevented the entire war by simply protecting Ukrainian democracy from the undemocratic impulses of the worst people in that country.

    When he was asked by The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel last month what he thinks is preventing Kyiv from signing a peace agreement with Russia, John Mearsheimer, whose analysis of this conflict has been prophetic for many years, replied as follows:

    I think that when Zelensky ran for president he made it very clear that he wanted to work out an arrangement with Russia that ended the crisis in Ukraine, and he won. And what he then tried to do was move toward implementing the Minsk II agreement. If you were going to shut down the conflict in Ukraine, you had to implement Minsk II. And Minsk II meant giving the Russian-speaking and the ethnic Russian population in the easternmost part of Ukraine, the Donbas region, a significant amount of autonomy, and you had to make the Russian language an official language of Ukraine.

     

    I think Zelensky found out very quickly that because of the Ukrainian right, it was impossible to implement Minsk II. Therefore even though the French and the Germans, and of course the Russians were very interested in making Minsk II work, because they wanted to shut down the crisis, they couldn’t do it. In other words, the Ukrainian right was able to stymie Zelensky on that front.

    When Mearsheimer says that the Ukrainian right was able to stymie Zelensky, he doesn’t mean by votes or by democratic processes, he means by threats and violence. In an article last month titled “Siding with Ukraine’s far-right, US sabotaged Zelensky’s mandate for peace,” journalist Aaron Maté wrote the following:

    In April 2019, Zelensky was elected with an overwhelming 73% of the vote on a promise to turn the tide. In his inaugural address the next month, Zelensky declared that he was “not afraid to lose my own popularity, my ratings,” and was “prepared to give up my own position – as long as peace arrives.”

     

    But Ukraine’s powerful far-right and neo-Nazi militias made clear to Zelensky that reaching peace in the Donbas would have a much higher cost.

     

    “No, he would lose his life,” Right Sector co-founder Dmytro Anatoliyovych Yarosh, then the commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, responded one week after Zelensky’s inaugural speech. “He will hang on some tree on Khreshchatyk – if he betrays Ukraine and those people who died in the Revolution and the War.”

    In a 2019 interview with Maté, the late great scholar Stephen Cohen made the following comments:

    But ultimately you have a situation now which seems not to be widely understood, that the new president of Ukraine, Zelensky, ran as a peace candidate. This is a bit of a stretch and maybe it doesn’t mean a whole lot to your generation, but he ran a kind of George McGovern campaign. The difference was McGovern got wiped out and Zelensky won by, I think, 71, 72 percent. He won an enormous mandate to make peace. So, that means he has to negotiate with Vladimir Putin. And there are various formats, right? There’s a so-called Minsk format which involves the German and the French; there’s a bilateral directly with Putin. But his willingness—and this is what’s important and not well reported here—his willingness to deal directly with Putin, which his predecessor, Poroshenko, was not or couldn’t or whatever reason—actually required considerable boldness on Zelensky[‘s part], because there are opponents of this in Ukraine and they are armed. Some people say they’re fascists but they’re certainly ultra-nationalist, and they have said that they will remove and kill Zelensky if he continues along this line of negotiating with Putin.

    …

    Zelensky cannot go forward as I’ve explained. I mean, his life is being threatened literally by a quasi-fascist movement in Ukraine, he can’t go forward with full peace negotiations with Russia, with Putin, unless America has his back. Maybe that won’t be enough, but unless the White House encourages this diplomacy, Zelensky has no chance of negotiating an end to the war, so the stakes are enormously high.

    In an article titled “Why Russia Went to War Now,” Antiwar’s Ted Snyder explains that Putin likely made the decision to invade because Kyiv wasn’t respecting Minsk II and because future NATO membership with Ukraine was being kept on the table while weapons poured into the country from the US.

    “Zelensky wouldn’t talk to the leaders of the Donbas, Minsk was dead and Russia feared an imminent operation against the ethnic Russian population of the Donbas,” Snyder writes. “At the same time, Washington had become a leaky faucet on promises of flooding Ukraine with weapons and open doors to NATO: two red lines Putin had clearly drawn.”

    But, again, Zelensky couldn’t enact Minsk because it had been made abundantly clear to him that he faced a horrific death by fascist lynch mob if he did. If the choice is between taking a chance on a US proxy war and getting Gaddafied in the public square, I think many leaders around the world would opt for the former.

    So Zelensky made peace with the Nazis, whose will for Ukraine aligned with Washington’s.

    But what this means is that every major factor which led to Russia’s decision to invade could have been nullified by the US government. A guarantee of no NATO membership for Ukraine could have been made. The weapons supplies could have been stopped. And Zelensky and his government could have received protection from the US military against the armed fascists who would repeat their violent acts of 2014 upon them.

    It would have been wins all around. We wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of nuclear armageddon. Ukraine would have been spared the horrors of an insane proxy war. Western powers wouldn’t be sending arms to literal Nazi factions. And the US would actually be protecting Ukrainian democracy, instead of just pretending to.

    But, again, we are only indulging in fantasy here. Fighting Nazis, protecting democracy and waging peace are not things the US empire actually does in real life. The US is the most tyrannical and murderous regime on earth, by a truly massive margin, and it will happily risk the life of everyone on earth if it means securing planetary rule.

    But sometimes it’s nice to imagine the kind of world we might be living in if we were not ruled by psychopaths.

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

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    Image via Wikimedia Commons.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • NYT Pundit Thinks U.S. Should Be “Calling the Shots” in Ukraine’s War

    This is a commentary upon N.Y. Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s statement on May 6 that Ukraine’s Government is and ought to be the U.S. Government’s agent in its war against Russia, not representing the interests of the Ukrainian people in it. He introduced the statement by noting that Ukraine is a bad country,

    a country marbled with corruption. That doesn’t mean we should not be helping it. I am glad we are. I insist we do. But my sense is that the Biden team is walking much more of a tightrope with Zelensky than it would appear to the eye — wanting to do everything possible to make sure he wins this war but doing so in a way that still keeps some distance between us and Ukraine’s leadership. That’s so Kyiv is not calling the shots [I boldfaced that — he didn’t] and so we’ll not be embarrassed by messy Ukrainian politics in the war’s aftermath.

    He starts there by putting down Ukraine as a “country,” and then asserts that, fortunately, “Kyiv is not calling the shots and so we’ll not be embarrassed by messy Ukrainian politics in the war’s aftermath.” Perhaps an underlying assumption of his in saying this is that America is NOT “a country riddled with corruption,” and, so, that it is right and good that Ukraine is America’s slave in this matter.

    He continues there:

    The view of Biden and his team, according to my reporting, is that America needs to help Ukraine restore its sovereignty and beat the Russians back — but not let Ukraine turn itself into an American protectorate on the border of Russia. We need to stay laser-focused on what is our national interest and not stray in ways that lead to exposures and risks we don’t want.

    I believe that Friedman truly does represent the U.S. Establishment that he is a part of, and that “Biden and his team” likewise do. I accept Friedman’s statement as reflecting accurately the way that “Biden and his team” (which, given the U.S. Congress’s virtually 100% voting for it in this matter of Ukraine, also includes virtually every U.S. Senator and Representative) feel about the matter: they feel that Ukraine must be their slave in it and must do whatever the U.S. Government demands that it do in its war with Ukraine’s next-door-neighbor, Russia.

    That view — the view that it’s not only true but good that “Kyiv is not calling the shots” in this matter — reflects the view that an imperialist government has toward one of its colonies or vassal-nations (which the imperialist nation nowadays calls instead its ‘allies’). And this is the reason why they treat not only their armies but all of the residents in their ‘allies’ as being appropriate cannon-fodder or ‘proxy soldiers’ in their foreign wars, wars to conquer other countries — such as, in this case, Russia.

    Here was how the former U.S. President, Barack Obama, phrased the matter to America’s graduating cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, on 28 May 2014:

    The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.

    It could as well have been said by England’s royals and other aristocrats during their imperialistic heyday.

    All other nations are “dispensable.” America’s military is an extension of international economic competition so that America’s billionaires will continue to rule the world in the future, as they do now. “Rising middle classes compete with us” and are consequently America’s enemies in the “dispensable” countries (everywhere in which vassalage to America’s billionaires — being “America’s allies” — is rejected), so that “it will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.” So he told America’s future generals, regarding those who live (as the 2017 U.S. Army report put it) “in the shadow of significant U.S. military capability and the implied promise of unacceptable consequences in the event that capability is unleashed.” America’s military are the global gendarmes not of Hitler’s nazi regime in WW II, but of America’s nazi regime in the lead-up to WW III.

    Thomas Friedman, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and all of the other U.S. major ‘news’-media, feel this way about it, and report and comment upon the ’news’ that way, but I think that it was a slip-up that Friedman and the Times expressed it, for once, so honestly, especially given that they are master-liars on most international-news reporting and commentary. The pièce de résistance in his commentary was its ludicrously hypocritical line that “America needs to help Ukraine restore its sovereignty.” (They must be America’s slaves but restore their sovereignty. How stupid do they think that the American public is?) That too is typical of aristocrats’ hypocrisies and general corruptness — including that of the U.S. Government itself, which represents ONLY America’s billionaires and other super-rich — it’s a regime and no democracy at all.

    Moreover, whereas America has no business at all to be involved in this war, Russia very much does, and the U.S. regime’s involvement there is ONLY in order to conquer Russia — which is a psychopathic and super-imperialistic objective to have, and not MERELY a real and soaring threat against the safety of all parts of the world — the real and now rapidly growing danger of there being a World War III.

    Incidentally, the title of Friedman’s commentary was “The War Is Getting More Dangerous for America, and Biden Knows It.” It’s an interesting title, because it concerns ONLY what Friedman and America’s other aristocrats care about, which is themselves, and not at all about what any of the ‘dispensable’ countries (including Ukraine) care about. Since the publics everywhere care about preventing a WW III (nuclear war between Russia and America — including all NATO countries), that is a stunningly narrow sphere of concern regarding a potentially world-ending catastrophe. Clearly, America’s aristocrats are rank psychopaths. They control the U.S. Government, and this is the result of that. It’s a Government in which the worst come first, the public last. Russia is up against that: it is up against America, and Ukraine is only the first battleground of WW III, now only at the proxy stage for the U.S. regime but not for the Russian Government, which, in this matter, truly does represent the most-vital national-security interests of its citizens. Everyone except U.S.-and-allied aristocracies (many of whom are buyers of billionaires’ bunkers) have an overriding interest in America’s defeat in this war, before it ever reaches the nuclear stage, of direct Russia vs. U.S. warfare.

    The shame of today’s U.N. is that it’s not enraged against the U.S. Government. This is shaping up to be the biggest scandal and failure in the U.N.’s entire history, virtually its own collapse.

    The post NYT Pundit Thinks U.S. Should Be “Calling the Shots” in Ukraine’s War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Ukraine Alone Makes Biden The Worst US President In A Long Time

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    Antiwar libertarian hero Scott Horton has a viral tweet going around which reads simply, “Biden’s refusal to attempt to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine is the greatest scandal in American political history.”

    Kind of smacks you in the face, doesn’t it? I’ve never seen anyone put it quite like that before, but if you think about it, how could it not be true?

    It’s just a simple fact that the Biden administration is actually hindering diplomatic efforts to negotiate an end to this war, and that it has refused to provide Ukraine with any kind of diplomatic negotiating power regarding the possible rollback of sanctions and other US measures to help secure peace. Washington’s top diplomats have consistently been conspicuously absent from any kind of dialogue with their counterparts in Moscow.

    Statements from the administration in fact indicate that they expect this war to drag on for a long time, making it abundantly clear that a swift end to minimize the death and destruction is not just uninteresting but undesirable for the US empire.

    And this isn’t just another war. This is a proxy war being waged by one of the world’s two top nuclear forces against the world’s other top nuclear force. This is more serious than Iraq. It is more serious than Vietnam. It is more serious than any US war that has happened in the lifetime of anyone likely to be reading these words, because Russia has increasingly valid reasons to believe its very existence as a nation is being threatened. This is therefore a war that could very easily result in the death of everyone on earth.

    The US Secretary of “Defense” has openly said that America’s goal is to “weaken” Russia in this war. Biden himself has made statements which can only be interpreted as calls for regime change in Moscow. US officials have been leaking to the press claims that US intelligence has directly facilitated the killing of Russian generals and the sinking of a Russian war ship.

    The imperial political/media class are not even denying that this is a US proxy war anymore. In an alarmingly rapid pivot from the mass media’s earlier position that calling this a proxy war is merely an “accusation” promoted solely by Russia, we’re now seeing the use of that term becoming more and more common in authorized news outlets. The New Yorker came right out and declared that the US is in “a full proxy war with Russia” the other day, and US congressman Seth Moulton recently told Fox News that the US is at war with Russia through a proxy.

    “At the end of the day, we’ve got to realize we’re at war, and we’re not just at war to support the Ukrainians,” Moulton said. “We’re fundamentally at war, although it’s somewhat through proxy, with Russia. And it’s important that we win.”

    How fast did that happen? How fast were we paced from “It’s Russian propaganda to call this a proxy war” to “Obviously this is a proxy war and we need to make sure we win”? Fast enough to make your head spin, that’s for sure.

    And it’s not just a proxy war, it’s a proxy war the US knowingly provoked. We know now that the US intelligence cartel had clear vision into Russia’s plans to launch this invasion, which means they also knew how to prevent it. A few low-cost maneuvers like promising not to add Ukraine to NATO as well as promising Zelensky that the US would protect him and his government from the violent fascist factions who were threatening to kill him if he honored the Minsk agreements and made peace with Russia as Ukrainians elected him to do. That’s all it would have taken.

    Many, many western experts warned for many years that the actions of the US and NATO would lead to the confrontation we’re now being menaced with. There was every opportunity to turn away from this war, and instead the US-centralized empire hit the accelerator and drove right into it. Knowingly.

    The whole thing was premeditated. All with the goal of weakening Russia and effecting regime change in Moscow in order to secure US unipolar hegemony.

    https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1498491107902062592

    The Biden administration was the last in a long line of decision makers to choose this world-threatening confrontation over peace. There was an opportunity to avert this horror, and that opportunity wasn’t taken.

    Allowing the world to come this close to nuclear war already makes Biden the worst US president since Bush. At least. History may well show his to be the single most depraved presidency of all time.

    Preventing nuclear war is a US president’s single most important job. It’s so important you shouldn’t even really have to talk about it, because it’s so self-evidently the number one priority. And this administration is just rolling the dice on nuclear conflict with increasing frequency every day.

    Even if humanity survives this standoff (and the one with China that’s next in line), Biden will still have been an unforgivably depraved president for allowing it to get this close. There’s no excuse whatsoever for just casually rolling the dice on all terrestrial life like this.

    Just seriously meditating on what nuclear war is and what it means should be enough to show anyone that any flirtation with the remotest possibility of inflicting it on our world is unforgivable. It’s the worst crime anyone could possibly commit short of actual nuclear war.

    Now all we can do is hope some small spark of sanity ignites deep within our species before we snuff ourselves out for good.

    _________________________

    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.

  • U.S. Pushes Fake Stories To Goad Russia Into Escalation

    The geniuses (not) at the National Security Council want to goad Russia into direct attacks on U.S. forces or interests. That would give the U.S. an excuse to further escalate the war in Ukraine into an open confrontation. It would also diverts the attention away from domestic problems.

    To achieve this the NSC has pushed a number of stories to the media which claim that alleged Ukrainian successes are based on U.S. intelligence.

    The post U.S. Pushes Fake Stories To Goad Russia Into Escalation appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Biden Vacillates As Venezuela’s Maduro Gains Ground

    Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s repeated calls for dialogue with the U.S. in order to normalize relations seem to be paying off.

    His openness to rapprochement contrasts with the Biden administration’s nebulousness regarding the degree to which Washington is willing to recognize Maduro as president (full diplomatic recognition is out of the question).

    Biden’s use of sanctions as a bargaining chip to wrest concessions from Caracas is a harder sell than former President Donald Trump’s regime-change narrative on the basis of the preposterous Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle, sometimes referred to as “humanitarian intervention.”

    Over the last two months, the flip flops and timidity of the Biden administration have been put on full display.

    The post Biden Vacillates As Venezuela’s Maduro Gains Ground appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Empire News Roundup: Latin American Sovereignty, Anatoliy Shariy And More

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Multipolarista’s Ben Norton reports that Former Brazilian president Lula da Silva, who is still favored to beat Bolsonaro in the nation’s election later this year, has announced plans to create a Latin American currency called the “Sur” (South) in order to “be freed of the dollar.” Lula is also making headlines today for his position that presidents Zelensky and Putin are both equally to blame for the war in Ukraine, and that the US and EU also share blame for the conflict.

    This comes at the same time the Mexican government begins promoting the idea of a Latin American lithium alliance. Bolivia’s Kawsachun News reports that Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has expressed his intention to form an alliance with major lithium nations Bolivia, Argentina and Chile for the mutual benefit of all nations involved. This could have major implications for the future due to the use of lithium batteries in smartphones, laptops and tablets, as well as electric cars.

    Latin America finally moving out of Washington’s Monroe Doctrine sphere of domination and into its own collective sovereignty for its own benefit would be an earth-shaking historical development. That there appears to be some movement toward that end is both exciting and scary, because the US empire isn’t known for peacefully allowing its vassals to simply move out from under its thumb. Either way, though, the fact that nations around the world are coming out against the empire with increasing boldness is hugely significant.

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

    Brazil’s left-wing leader Lula da Silva says if he wins the 2022 presidential elections, “we are going to create a currency in Latin America,” called the Sur ("South"), to combat “the dependency on the dollar” https://t.co/bYVifxRL74

    — Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) May 4, 2022

    The New York Times is reporting that US intelligence has helped Ukrainian forces “target and kill many of the Russian generals who have died in action in the Ukraine war,” citing anonymous senior US officials.

    This incendiary claim may or may not be true; remember US officials have already admitted that they’ve been pouring out a deluge of disinformation about this war with the loyal facilitation of the western press. If it is true, it would mean yet another dangerous escalation in the US proxy war against Russia.

    Oh and on that note it would appear that we are indeed allowed to refer to this as a proxy war now. The New Yorker has come right out and declared that the US is in “a full proxy war with Russia,” a claim that social media users have called me a Kremlin agent and Putin cock sucker many times for advancing in the weeks preceding this narrative pivot. It’s hilarious that it was ever controversial to say that pouring billions of dollars worth of weaponry into a foreign nation to be used by CIA-trained fighters with the direct ongoing assistance of US military intelligence is a proxy war, but it’s nice that we’re allowed to call a spade a spade now.

    Speaking of the US empire’s world-threatening proxy war with Russia, I would like to highlight an important new dialogue between The Socialist Program’s Brian Becker and a scientist named Greg Mello, who is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Los Alamos Study Group and an expert on nuclear war. The interview is just as valuable for Becker’s insightful commentary as Mello’s, and together they provide a lot of sorely needed insight into the nature of the horrifying games the empire is playing with our lives in this nuclear standoff.

    Lastly we should flag the fact that Spanish police just arrested a Ukrainian politician and media figure named Anatoliy Shariy on behalf of the Ukrainian government on charges of treason. This “treason” appears to amount to political speech that has been outlawed by the Ukrainian government, with earlier reports on Kyiv’s accusations against him only referencing “propaganda in favor of Russia” and “subversive activity against Ukraine.”

    Shariy fled Ukraine for EU asylum in 2012 for fear of political persecution by Kyiv, and has been living in Spain since 2019. The opposition party which Shariy founded in 2019 was banned by the Ukrainian government following the Russian invasion. Reuters reports that he has been released by a Spanish court on condition of surrendering his passport and performing regular court check-ins pending an extradition hearing.

    This is the Free World that we are risking nuclear annihilation in order to protect, folks. Are we sure we want to do this? Is this fight really worth risking the life of every terrestrial organism for? It’s a question we should all be contemplating very seriously.

    ______________

    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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  • Antiwar Groups Protest Defense Industry Profiteering in Ukraine

    The war of aggression that Russia has perpetrated in Ukraine has rightly generated widespread condemnation, both among Russia’s Western critics and the world at large. On the war’s obvious heinousness, almost all of the U.S. political spectrum is in agreement. However, opinions as to the appropriate Western response proceed from vastly different premises.

    The predominant left position is, on the whole, resolutely antiwar. U.S. activists of all stripes have been rolling out ambitious organizing efforts in the hopes of nudging the conflict towards diplomacy and an eventual ceasefire. Given the considerable death toll and the millions of refugees the war has produced — to say nothing of the threat of conventional or nuclear escalation — the matter is an urgent one.

    In the process of organizing opposition, there has, of course, been much in the way of internal debate among various left factions. More contentious dimensions include the question of arming Ukrainians, the comparative moral weighting of nonviolence and self-defense, and the degree of culpability that should be attributed to NATO for its demonstrable role in decades of ratcheting tensions.

    Whatever their perspective on the circumstances, organizers from left-liberals to communists are calling upon the means of protest at their disposal, from media initiatives to global rallies to demonstrations at the thresholds of the military-industrial complex. To mount an effective confrontation with the U.S. empire and defense industry and influence a far-flung conflict is a daunting prospect. Yet despite the historic scale of the challenge, coalitions of antiwar activists are striving to realize their vision of the end of imperial aggression — perpetrated by Russia and the U.S. alike.

    Defaulting to Militarism

    Antiwar organizers generally share a conviction that diplomacy should take precedence in resolving the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The vast majority are vehemently opposed to any form of active U.S. military intervention — a prudent stance for those who wish to avoid a hot war with a nuclear power. Unsurprisingly, the same cannot be said for the U.S. political establishment, which has seized upon the opportunity to vilify Russia, seemingly eager to court a clash between the two deteriorating superpowers. Right-wing war fervor, always simmering below the surface, has boiled over; Republican jingoists (and a number of foolhardy op-eds in major media) espoused everything from a no-fly zone to refusing to rule out the deployment of U.S. ground troops.

    These lawmakers’ martial fantasies are more than a little cavalier about the potential for Great Power conflict. Comparatively less reckless centrists, for their part, mostly favor a two-pronged approach: the imposition of devastating punitive sanctions on Russia and the delivery of vast amounts of weaponry to Ukrainian forces — stopping short of outright U.S. military intervention.

    Democrats have leaped to snipe at the right by demonstrating who can demand the larger flood of weaponry, while leveraging the conflict for all manner of political purposes. By any measure, it has been a field day for fawning, ham-fisted propagandists like noted stenographer Bret Stephens. (“The U.S. stands up to bullies!”) Both parties are unequivocal in their shared support for an overflowing bounty of war materiel and other assistance. As of this writing, the White House is requesting a stunning $33 billion for Ukraine. The number keeps climbing.

    The U.S. public largely endorses these policies, with a majority approving of or wishing to increase weaponry shipments. (Further, a remarkable 35 percent favor direct military action — “even if it risks nuclear conflict with Russia,” speaking poorly of their aptitude in risk assessment.) NATO has held out against calls to impose a no-fly zone; at least the military alliance sees the wisdom in avoiding a shooting war with Russian forces. The shooting will instead be done by Ukrainian hands with plentiful Western arms — very much to the benefit of the U.S. defense industry. It is no coincidence that we see such an eagerness to fortify Ukraine among the government and media. Not only is the state keen to see Russia battered and chastened, but conflict and arms deals, as ever, mean profit.

    A desire to aid Ukrainian resistance is perhaps understandable. (Though its ranks of far right nationalists might give pause.) Supporters claim that arming Ukraine will make possible a resounding Russian defeat and withdrawal, which, in theory, could shorten the conflict. “But if it doesn’t,” writes Jeremy Scahill in The Intercept, “and the flow of weapons delays a negotiated settlement between Russia, Ukraine, and NATO, then it is hard to see the massive scope of the weapons transfers as a clear positive.” Further Russian retaliation and the deployment of Western weaponry in a protracted insurgency could result in a great deal of harm and sharpen the already-pronounced refugee crisis.

    Antiwar activists perceive the inundation of Ukraine with armaments as yet another round of war profiteering — one that risks precluding diplomatic solutions. As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy petitions the world to arm Ukraine and intervene militarily, antiwar groups, in contrast, have spoken out in strident opposition to the staggering influx of Western arms, as well as the Cold-War style bellicosity that U.S. power has again taken up with gusto.

    Antiwar Coalitions in Action

    In the meantime, large-scale real-world protests against the war have erupted on numerous fronts — both within Russia and Ukraine and across the globe. Progressive, pacifist and anti-imperialist groups in the U.S. are no exception, having mobilized their considerable institutional resources to voice their own opposition. Given the unlikelihood of influencing the actions of the Russian government, they’ve targeted the realm in which they are mostly likely to have an impact — namely, U.S. policy. Because of its deep entanglements in the war, the U.S. response could easily be a critical determining factor on the outcome: either negotiation, drawdown and eventual peace, or escalation and sustained bloodshed.

    Though the U.S. antiwar movement has never reattained the scale of its Vietnam-era heyday, plenty of groups with antiwar missions are active in the modern day. Many date to the resistance against the U.S.’s imperial expeditions in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s — for example, CODEPINK, the sizeable progressive and feminist antiwar organization, was founded in 2002. The group has been one of the more visible in mounting a response to the Ukraine issue, voicing dissent with the provision of weapons and directing public attention to the geopolitical context of NATO’s aggressive posture in the preceding years.

    Truthout reached CODEPINK cofounder and activist Medea Benjamin, a Green Party member and former California Senate candidate, to learn more about the group’s agitational efforts and how antiwar elements in the U.S. might conceivably affect policy. As Benjamin sees it, the effort begins with education and informing the public: counteracting a media apparatus that insistently seeks to justify opening the floodgates of advanced weaponry — sometimes very directly.

    “[The idea that weapons and sanctions are necessary] is being pushed by people in the White House and most members of Congress. It’s certainly being pushed by the corporate media,” Benjamin said. (Take The New York Times, for instance, which conceded sanctions may be “harsh,” but deemed they were ultimately “appropriate.” We are left to wonder why the Times didn’t insist the U.S. be so “harshly” sanctioned in the wake of the invasion of Iraq.)

    Benjamin underscored the structural incentives: “The weapons companies [are] concerned about the drawing down of U.S. wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq. [The state] sees this as an opportunity to really debilitate Russia.… The ability to bleed the Russian economy and to curtail its reach also means that the U.S. is strengthening its position globally.”

    CODEPINK and its allies, galvanized by the war, have busied themselves in a flurry of activity. CODEPINK had in fact already rallied a number of times in protest of rising tensions, before the crisis’s late-February outbreak. Immediately after Russian troops made their first incursion into Ukraine, the organization, along with U.K.-based groups like the Stop the War Coalition, the No to NATO Network and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, held an emergency online panel and rally, bringing together figures like Jeremy Corbyn and historian and writer Vijay Prashad to denounce the war (Corbyn called it “abominable, appalling and unnecessary”), and to call for peace.

    CODEPINK’s series of webinars drew thousands — including, as Benjamin described, “representatives from members of parliaments from many governments, including the British, Irish, German, French and Spanish, [and] well-known academics and activists.” In April, Benjamin also hosted another “Stop the War in Ukraine” online rally featuring Noam Chomsky, another appearance from Vijay Prashad, Greek leftist politician Yanis Varoufakis, New Left Review editor Tariq Ali, and other notable voices.

    These online events occurred in tandem with real-world rallies — “days of action,” which, Benjamin said, brought together “about 125 different groups around the world.” CODEPINK has long worked beside organizations like the ANSWER Coalition (another large antiwar group in the United States, which has also hosted online conversations). Together with the Black Alliance for Peace, Peace Action, and others, the coalition put together a rally in Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Square as tensions rose. Further CODEPINK protests took place across various U.S. locales, where volunteers demonstrated, put up flyers and gathered signatures on petitions.

    As Benjamin framed it, the core message in conducting this public outreach amounted to posing the questions, “Do you want the war in Ukraine to end? Do you want to save the lives of Ukrainian people? Well, then let’s call for a ceasefire and for serious negotiations.” She feels that this approach is a convincing one: “Once we have a chance to talk to people about it, we do get them to our side.”

    Benjamin and CODEPINK plan to sustain their current rates of activity. In June, the group is joining the Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington, D.C. — an effort spearheaded by the Poor People’s Campaign to speak out against militarism and the bloated defense budget, among other systemic issues. Benjamin also highlighted future plans to send activists to protest an upcoming NATO strategic summit in Madrid, along with an international antiwar coalition of considerable size. Their hope is to apply pressure at a critical time: “With the upcoming election in November, I think that we can be part of talking about why this is happening, not allowing Biden to get away with blaming everything on Russia, but instead putting the blame on militarism and the inability to really seriously push for a negotiated solution,” Benjamin told Truthout.

    Resolute Nonviolence

    Joining CODEPINK at the Madrid NATO summit and elsewhere will be World Beyond War (WBW), a U.S.-based pacifist organization that maintains international chapters, including in Ukraine. David Swanson is WBW’s executive director. In a conversation with Truthout, he described the group’s assiduous organizing efforts. Like CODEPINK, WBW’s current strategy is to inform the public, presenting pacifist arguments for abolishing war, nuclear weaponry and arms dealing. WBW’s output has included innumerable articles, books, interviews, op-eds, videos, podcasts, and other media. In addition, said Swanson, “We’ve done tons of webinars, online and offline educational events. We have lots of speakers, we go and talk to classrooms, go and talk to peace groups that organize events and do tons of the same online.”

    To augment the media push, WBW has also directed substantial real-world actions. “The past week, we’ve been doing protests all over the world,” said Swanson. The immediate future will see WBW participate in widespread protests on a global day of action, planned for May 7.“We’ve done these days before, usually in coalition with other groups, sometimes globally, sometimes nationally, trying to do days of events where we have at least small and sometimes large demonstrations or rallies or protests everywhere.”

    WBW is also engaging in some more pointed confrontations. In one instance, a WBW advisory board member disrupted an event in Canada by confronting the deputy prime minister with an antiwar, anti-NATO diatribe. Another arm of WBW’s strategy, ongoing for years, is to protest at the physical offices of weapons manufacturers — major beneficiaries of wars that are incentivized to ensure they remain as drawn-out and destructive as possible. WBW will be demonstrating at the next annual meeting of aviation and defense corporation Northrop Grumman. Members aim to draw attention to the key role that the corporation and other arms manufacturers like Lockheed Martin play in “the war on Ukraine from which [they are] proudly profiting,” Swanson said. “There are Congress members proudly profiting from stock ownership in Lockheed Martin.”

    Swanson sees the attention that the war on Ukraine has received as an opportunity to buttress opposition to militarism in general — and to flag certain contradictory narratives from U.S. empire and its mouthpieces. “After decades of demanding that war victims be treated with some sympathy and respect,” he said, “to have that finally happen in one place is an opportunity to say ‘Yes! Right on! What about all the other war victims?’ To have the U.S. government want war treated as a crime and prosecuted in a court — wonderful! Now how about all the other wars?”

    That sort of hypocrisy around foreign policy is one of the state’s (and dominant media’s) most reliable features. Again, the tragedy of Ukraine has been especially amplified because it serves a convenient ideological function in contesting Russia’s geopolitical position. (And, as many have pointed, or blurted, out: Sympathy towards this conflict has also had particular purchase because Ukraine is considered a “civilized” European country with a large white population. A number of media figures have told on themselves on this front.)

    Key to WBW’s ideology is an unswerving commitment to pacifism. As Swanson described it, “We are opposed to all war, all militarism, all war thinking, all support for military funding, always, without exception.… We think that’s actually the moral thing to do.” Nonviolence, for WBW, is non-negotiable — as evidenced by a recent article of his, which criticized the Poor People’s Campaign for an email that seemed to condone arming Ukraine. As Swanson continued: “To drag this on, to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian as we have their backs with the money rolling in — I don’t think this is a moral position. This is the point we struggle to educate people on: that the United States and Ukraine, as well as Russia, should be trying to end the war. It’s almost considered treasonous. The ‘proper’ position is to want to continue the war to weaken Russia.”

    People Can Still Stop Wars

    Countless organizers are just as aghast as Swanson at the grotesqueries of this war as well at its ideological utility for other powerful warmongering interests, their rank hypocrisy on display. Despite its distance from the conflict and a lack of leverage over Russia’s actions, the U.S. antiwar movement does, conceivably, have the potential to impact its own government. A U.S. pivot to pursuing a diplomatic resolution might help avoid a prolonged and grueling war of attrition. Yet if present conditions continue to accelerate — continued Russian aggression (as well as their significant battlefield setbacks) as the West increasingly arms Ukraine — the war may develop into the latter.

    There are challenging moral questions to be weighed by the war’s opponents: questions of pacifism and self-defense, of how best to show solidarity with a beleaguered Ukraine, of how a war of aggression might be mitigated without worsening violence. Even understanding the conflict requires triangulating between the relentless propaganda of two powerful and deceptive nations. It would be easy for antiwar activists to give into the long odds and a sense of impotence or apathy, in a struggle that can seem quixotic. Yet the U.S. military and government, while an imposing edifice of power and profit, is not invulnerable, and mass protest and dissent have swayed the course of its history in the past. Despite their differences, antiwar organizers are collectively buoyed by a faith in what history has demonstrated: that people, when organized, can still stop wars.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A Statement On Ukraine From The Black Liberation Movement

    The ongoing crisis and war in Ukraine threatens to pull the world into a disastrous nuclear confrontation. Disinformation, lies, and propaganda from the US and other western media are aimed at confusing millions of people inside the US and around the world to view Russia as the aggressor, while hiding the US role in the evolution of this conflict. One major example of this manipulation is that western media has not been honest about the massive role that the US played in facilitating a 2014 coup in Ukraine that overthrew the country’s democratically elected president, and funneled support to neo-Nazi forces who were favorable to US/EU interests, helping them rise to power in Ukraine.

    The post A Statement On Ukraine From The Black Liberation Movement appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • There Are Many American Soldiers Already In Ukraine

    Willy Joseph Cancel, a native of Orange County, New York, became the first U.S. casualty of the Ukraine War last week.

    The U.S. Marine veteran was killed fighting alongside Ukrainian forces while working for a private U.S. military contractor. He was ambushed by Russian forces during a night-time patrol—though his body has not yet been recovered.

    Cancel served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2017 to 2021; he received a bad conduct discharge in November after serving time in the brig for an undisclosed criminal offense.

    His mother, Rebecca Cabrera, said that her son went over to fight in Ukraine because “he believed in what Ukraine was fighting for and he wanted to be a part of it to contain it there so it didn’t come here, and that maybe our American soldiers wouldn’t have to be involved in it.”

    The post There Are Many American Soldiers Already In Ukraine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Self-Determination and the War in Ukraine

    We cannot know how Ukraine will develop after the war. But we know there will be horrible consequences if Russia wins.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Chomsky: US Is Prioritizing Its Jockeying With Russia, Not Ukrainians’ Lives

    Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is an utter disaster for Ukraine, and the war is not going well for the Russian forces who are experiencing heavy losses and may be running low on both supplies and morale. Perhaps this is the reason why Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, also encouraged by the support that Ukraine has received from Western countries, claimed a few days ago on the Greek state-run broadcaster ERT that “the war will end when Ukraine wins.”

    In this exclusive interview, world-renowned scholar and leading dissident Noam Chomsky considers the implications of Ukraine’s heroic stance to fight the Russian invaders till the end, and why the U.S. is not eager to see an end to the conflict.

    Chomsky, who is internationally recognized as one of the most important intellectuals alive, is the author of some 150 books and the recipient of scores of highly prestigious awards, including the Sydney Peace Prize and the Kyoto Prize (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), and of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from the world’s most renowned universities. Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and currently Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona.

    C.J. Polychroniou: After months of fighting, it’s obvious that the invasion is not going according to the Kremlin’s plans, hopes and expectations. NATO figures have claimed that Russian forces have already suffered as many deaths as they did during the entire duration of the Afghan war, and the position of the Zelenskyy government now seems to be “peace with victory.” Obviously, the West’s support for Ukraine is key to what’s happening on the ground, both militarily and in terms of diplomatic solutions. Indeed, there is no clear path to peace, and the Kremlin has stated that it is not seeking to end the war by May 9 (known as Victory Day, which marks the Soviets’ role in defeating Nazi Germany). Don’t Ukrainians have the right to fight to death before surrendering any territory to Russia, if they choose to do so?

    Noam Chomsky: To my knowledge, no one has suggested that Ukrainians don’t have that right. Islamic Jihad also has the abstract right to fight to the death before surrendering any territory to Israel. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it’s their right.

    Do Ukrainians want that? Perhaps now in the midst of a devastating war, but not in the recent past.

    President Zelenskyy was elected in 2019 with an overwhelming mandate for peace. He immediately moved to carry it out, with great courage. He had to confront violent right-wing militias who threatened to kill him if he tried to reach a peaceful settlement along the lines of the Minsk II formula. Historian of Russia Stephen Cohen points out that if Zelenskyy had been backed by the U.S., he could have persisted, perhaps solving the problem with no horrendous invasion. The U.S. refused, preferring its policy of integrating Ukraine within NATO. Washington continued to dismiss Russia’s red lines and the warnings of a host of top-level U.S. diplomats and government advisers as it has been doing since Clinton’s abrogation of Bush’s firm and unambiguous promise to Gorbachev that in return for German reunification within NATO, NATO would not expand one inch beyond Germany.

    Zelenskyy also sensibly proposed putting the very different Crimea issue on a back burner, to be addressed later, after the war ends.

    Minsk II would have meant some kind of federal arrangement, with considerable autonomy for the Donbass region, optimally in a manner to be determined by an internationally supervised referendum. Prospects have of course diminished after the Russian invasion. How much we don’t know. There is only one way to find out: to agree to facilitate diplomacy instead of undermining it, as the U.S. continues to do.

    It’s true that “the West’s support for Ukraine is key into what’s happening on the ground, both militarily and in terms of diplomatic solutions,” though I would suggest a slight rephrasing: The West’s support for Ukraine is key into what’s happening on the ground, both militarily and in terms of undermining instead of facilitating diplomatic solutions that might end the horror.

    Congress, including congressional Democrats, are acting as if they prefer the exhortation by Democratic Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee of Intelligence Adam Schiff that we have to aid Ukraine “so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”

    Schiff’s warning is nothing new. It is reminiscent of Reagan’s calling a national emergency because the Nicaraguan army is only two days marching time from Harlingen, Texas, about to overwhelm us. Or LBJ’s plaintive plea that we have to stop them in Vietnam or they will “sweep over the United States and take what we have.”

    That’s been the permanent plight of the U.S., constantly threatened with annihilation. Best to stop them over there.

    The U.S. has been a leading provider of security assistance to Ukraine since 2014. And last week, President Biden asked Congress to approve $33 billion to Ukraine, which is more than double what Washington has already committed since the start of the war. Isn’t it therefore safe to conclude that Washington has a lot riding on the way the war ends in Ukraine?

    Since the relevant facts are virtually unspeakable here, it’s worth reviewing them.

    Since the Maidan uprising in 2014, NATO (meaning basically the U.S.) has “provided significant support with equipment, with training, 10s of 1000s of Ukrainian soldiers have been trained, and then when we saw the intelligence indicating a highly likely invasion Allies stepped up last autumn and this winter,” before the invasion, according to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg).

    I’ve already mentioned Washington’s refusal to back newly elected President Zelenskyy when his courageous effort to implement his mandate to pursue peace was blocked by right-wing militias, and the U.S. refused to back him, preferring to continue its policy of integrating Ukraine into NATO, dismissing Russia’s red lines.

    As we’ve discussed earlier, that commitment was stepped up with the official U.S. policy statement of September 2021 calling for sending more advanced military equipment to Ukraine while continuing “our robust training and exercise program in keeping with Ukraine’s status as a NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner.” The policy was given further formal status in the November 10 U.S.-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership signed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

    The State Department has acknowledged that “prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States made no effort to address one of Vladimir Putin’s most often stated top security concerns — the possibility of Ukraine’s membership into NATO.”

    So matters continued after Putin’s criminal aggression. Once again, what happened has been reviewed accurately by Anatol Lieven:

    A U.S. strategy of using the war in Ukraine to weaken Russia is also of course completely incompatible with the search for a ceasefire and even a provisional peace settlement. It would require Washington to oppose any such settlement and to keep the war going. And indeed, when in late March the Ukrainian government put forward a very reasonable set of peace proposals, the lack of public U.S. support for them was extremely striking.

    Apart from anything else, a Ukrainian treaty of neutrality (as proposed by President Zelensky) is an absolutely inescapable part of any settlement — but weakening Russia involves maintaining Ukraine as a de facto U.S. ally. U.S. strategy as indicated by [Defense Secretary] Lloyd Austin would risk Washington becoming involved in backing Ukrainian nationalist hardliners against President Zelensky himself.

    With this in mind, we can turn to the question. The answer seems plain: judging by U.S. actions and formal pronouncements, it is “safe to conclude that Washington has a lot riding on the way the war ends in Ukraine.” More specifically, it is fair to conclude that in order to “weaken Russia,” the U.S. is dedicated to the grotesque experiment that we have discussed earlier; avoid any way of ending the conflict through diplomacy and see whether Putin will slink away quietly in defeat or will use the capacity, which of course he has, to destroy Ukraine and set the stage for terminal war.

    We learn a lot about the reigning culture from the fact that the grotesque experiment is considered highly praiseworthy, and that any effort to question it is either relegated to the margins or bitterly castigated with an impressive flow of lies and deceit.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Russian and US Escalations Raise Risk of Direct Military Clash in Ukraine

    As President Biden seeks $33 billion more for Ukraine, we look at the dangers of U.S. military escalation with Medea Benjamin of CodePink and George Beebe of the Quincy Institute. He is the former head of Russia analysis at the CIA and a former adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. The massive spending in Ukraine that outweighs public funding to combat the coronavirus pandemic shows that “there are very few things that the Biden administration thinks are more important right now than defeating Russia, and I don’t think that accords, actually, with the priorities of the American people,” says Beebe. “To support the people of Ukraine and stop the fighting, we need not to pour billions of dollars of more weapons in, but to say, ‘Negotiations now,’” says Benjamin.

    TRANSCRIPT

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

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

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for the strongest possible military response against Russia. Pelosi made the comments in Poland Monday after she became the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Ukraine. During a meeting there with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Pelosi vowed the United States would keep backing Ukraine militarily “until the fight is done.”

    SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI: We believe that we are visiting you to say thank you for your fight for freedom, that we are on a frontier of freedom and that your fight is a fight for everyone. And so our commitment is to be there for you until the fight is done.

    AMY GOODMAN: Pelosi’s surprise trip to Ukraine came just days after President Biden asked Congress for an additional $33 billion for Ukraine. This comes as evidence grows that the war in Ukraine is increasingly becoming a proxy war between Russia and the United States and its NATO allies. Last week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the U.S. wants to see Russia, quote, “weakened.” Over the weekend, Russia Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the U.S. and NATO should stop arming Ukraine if they’re really interested in resolving the Ukraine crisis.

    Well, we’re joined now by two guests. Medea Benjamin is co-founder of the antiwar group CodePink. We usually speak to her in Washington, D.C. Now she’s in Havana, Cuba. George Beebe is also with us. He’s grand strategy director at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His recent piece is headlined “Tell us how this war in Ukraine ends.” He’s the former director of Russia analysis at the Central Intelligence Agency and was special adviser on Russia to Vice President Cheney from 2002 to 2004. He’s the author of the 2019 book The Russia Trap: How Our Shadow War with Russia Could Spiral into Nuclear Catastrophe.

    George Beebe, let’s begin with you. You wrote the piece, “Tell us how this war in Ukraine ends.” So, why don’t you tell us? The latest news is that it may well be that the Russian President Vladimir Putin will announce the war on Ukraine on May 9th, Victory Day in Russia, when they beat the Nazis in 1945.

    GEORGE BEEBE: Well, I think that’s quite possible. Russians have been speculating for quite some time that Putin might take the step of moving from what he has called a “special operation” in Ukraine into a full-fledged and declared war, which would mean a national mobilization, widespread conscription of Russian soldiers and their use in the battle in Ukraine. So, what that would mean would be that Russia would be gearing up for all-out war in Ukraine.

    And the context of this, of course, would be that Putin would argue that this is not actually a war between Russia and Ukraine, that this is a much larger war between Russia and the United States and NATO. That’s how Russian elites and Putin had been depicting this conflict, actually, for many years, well before Russia’s actual invasion of Ukraine on February 24th. They think that Ukraine is simply a pawn in this much bigger geopolitical game, and they think the stakes are astronomically high for Russia. They think that this is a fight for Russia’s survival, that the stakes are existential. So, if you’re looking at this war and asking how does this end and when does it end, that’s a very bad sign, because it suggests that the Russians are gearing up for a very long-term conflict here.

    And the same thing, I think, is going on on the American side, as well. What we’ve seen in the last few weeks is rhetoric which more and more openly discusses our goal being victory over Russia, Russia’s strategic defeat, the weakening of its military, the marginalization of Russia as a player in the world. And some U.S. officials, including President Biden, have even alluded to the possibility of Putin leaving power, regime change.

    So, what we’re seeing, I think, on both sides is escalation, escalation in the objectives, I think, that they’re seeking. And with that escalation of objectives, I think the likelihood that this turns into a direct military clash between the United States and Russia goes up. So this is a very dangerous moment, I think.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, George Beebe, I’d like to ask you — in terms of this new call for $33 billion in aid that President Biden has made to Congress for Ukraine, this is an astounding amount of money. And, you know, I looked at — for instance, U.S. foreign aid to the entire Latin America and Caribbean region has averaged, over the last 60 years, about $3 billion annually. And yet many Americans are so worried about the increasing flight of so many people from Latin America across the U.S. border, but yet we’re giving so little aid to the countries there, and yet somehow we come up with $33 billion. Is this a — what is the signal that the Biden administration is sending by such a huge request, a big portion of it being military aid, but also direct foreign aid to Ukraine?

    GEORGE BEEBE: Well, budgets, of course, are reflections of a government’s priorities. You can’t do everything. We don’t have infinite resources, so you have to make choices about what’s more important and what’s less important. And this is an enormous sum of money that the Biden administration is requesting. It comes on top of a lot of money that’s already been spent on this effort in Ukraine, not just in the United States but on the part of our NATO allies, as well. So this is a very big effort, but it also says something about where the Biden administration’s priorities really are on this. And I think it’s fair to say, if you look at the numbers, that there are very few things that the Biden administration thinks are more important right now than defeating Russia. And I don’t think that that accords actually with the priorities of the American people. But I think that’s up for them to decide.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’d like to bring Medea Benjamin into the discussion. Oh, I’m sorry — well, I wanted to ask you further — there had been a prior attempt, obviously, at reaching a peace accord in Ukraine, the Minsk Accords. Could you talk about what happened, why those Minsk accords failed?

    GEORGE BEEBE: Well, the Minsk accords go back to the outbreak of this war in Ukraine back in 2014. That had its origins in a tug-of-war between the European Union and, to some degree, NATO, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other hand. And it was really about Ukraine’s geopolitical fate.

    The European Union had been negotiating with the Ukrainian government for many months about an association accord. And that would, I think, allow greater trade and commerce and interaction between Ukraine and the EU, and that held the prospect of a very bright economic future for Ukrainians, and a lot of Ukrainians felt that that was a wonderful thing. There are few populations in the world that don’t look forward to greater economic prosperity. But the terms of that association agreement essentially said to Ukraine, “You’ve got to make a choice: Either you have a very close and deepening trade relationship with the EU or with Russia, but not both. You can’t have the same depth of trading with both Russia and the EU at the same time.”

    Now, the Russians objected to that, because, of course, they had long-standing relationships with Ukraine, very deep economic relationships but also cultural and personal. And looming behind this was the threat that Ukraine would essentially move into NATO and the West at the expense of cordial relations with Russia. And for all kinds of reasons, the Russians found that profoundly threatening, including to Russia’s vital security interests.

    Now, this tug-of-war over Ukraine tore the Ukrainian country apart, because there were people in the western regions of Ukraine that were very, very European culturally and in their political orientation; there were parts of the eastern parts of Ukraine that were largely Russian-speaking and culturally Russian and were more oriented toward relationships with Russia. And as the people in the western parts of Ukraine urged that Ukraine turn westward, the people in the east felt threatened, and they objected.

    This eventually broke out into an actual civil war. Violence erupted. And the great powers, of course, got involved — the United States, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other hand. And fighting broke out. The Russians intervened covertly. They announced they would be annexing Crimea, which had been part of Russia up until the 1950s, when then-Soviet Premier Khrushchev gifted Crimea from the Russian Federation to the Ukrainian Republic within the Soviet Union. And the Russians took it back. And this, of course, collapsed into this years-long war, and the West tried to find a way to end that fighting.

    And that ultimately resulted in the Minsk accords, which were an attempt to try to find a settlement inside Ukraine that allowed the regions in Ukraine’s east greater autonomy. It provided for the withdrawal of Russian forces, the holding of elections in the east, the guarantees of language rights in the eastern parts of Ukraine. The Russian speakers felt that Ukrainian nationalists were violating their linguistic rights.

    This was never implemented, largely because the Ukrainian nationalists were concerned that this was ultimately a formula to allow Russia to use the greater weight of the eastern regions within the Ukrainian state to veto any membership of Ukraine in NATO over time. And I think they were right. That was exactly why the Russians found the Minsk accords appealing, that this was a way of guaranteeing that Ukraine would not join NATO over Russian objections. And that, you know, essentially fell apart as a result. The Ukrainians never were willing to implement it. The Russians were never willing to compromise on their insistence on those terms. And, you know, that played a big role in producing where we are today.

    AMY GOODMAN: In addition to George Beebe, we do now have Medea Benjamin on the line with us. She’s actually in Havana, Cuba, right now, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CodePink. Medea, we’re speaking to you in the week when President Biden has asked for $33 billion more for mainly military aid, military weapons to Ukraine. Contrast that with the $22 billion asked for for all of the U.S. dealing with COVID, and that has been summarily rejected by the Republicans and some Democrats, far less than the $33 billion. But I wanted to ask you about that and the Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin talking about W and W — weakening Russia and winning, Ukraine winning — and, overall, what you think needs to happen right now.

    MEDEA BENJAMIN: I think it’s terrible that the U.S., on all levels, from the White House to Congress, are pushing this as either regime change or a winnable war, when we know there is no winning in this. I want to hear them talking about what compromises are they willing to make. I want to hear them saying they’re going to put their efforts into negotiations. I want to hear them say they’re going to separate humanitarian aid and military support for Ukraine and get that humanitarian aid approved.

    And I want to see that the people of the United States understand that to support the people of Ukraine and stop the fighting, we need not to pour billions of dollars of more weapons in, but to say, “Negotiations now.” And that’s why we’re calling people to come out this weekend, next weekend, the following weekend, have rallies, download our flyers, get people to sign petitions, saying we need to end this war and not allow it to keep spreading and turn into a nuclear holocaust. People can go to PeaceInUkraine.org to find more information.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Medea, how would you see the prospects for a settlement, for an agreement? And what might that entail?

    MEDEA BENJAMIN: Well, certainly, they’ve been outlined by Zelensky himself and by the Russians. I think the United States is one of the greatest obstacles to negotiations. We have to recognize a neutral Ukraine, non-expansion of NATO and demilitarization of the region.

    And I want to add one other thing, Juan, which is we’re coming to the 40-year anniversary of the 1 million people out in Central Park saying no to nuclear weapons in 1982. We in the United States have to work with the people inside Russia, not only to end this war in Ukraine but also to get serious about banning nuclear weapons, like the U.N. treaty calls on the world to do.

    AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask George Beebe — you have written that “the advent of the cyber age has made the chances of escalation into direct East-West conflict much greater than during the Cold War, while doing [very] little to reduce its potential destructiveness.” Can you explain this, and also just acknowledging that today President Biden is in Alabama at a Lockheed Martin plant, at a weapons plant?

    GEORGE BEEBE: Well, I think the advent of the digital era has changed things in a couple of important ways. One is the information sphere, the media sphere. It’s become increasingly segmented. And social media, Twitter and other platforms, I think, encourage outrage. That’s what gets attention online, not people who are saying, you know, “Look, we have to look at this in a balanced way. It’s complicated. We need to understand the dynamics of all of this.” It doesn’t tend to lend itself toward that kind of complexity and reasoned evidence. The people that get attention are the ones that scream the loudest and provoke the most outrage. That actually makes the political context in which you can try to aim toward diplomatic settlements of things like that more difficult, not less. So that’s one part of the problem.

    The other part of the problem is the blurring of things that used to be relatively clearly delineated — espionage and warfare, for example, sabotage and strategic attacks. It used to be, in the old days, that it was clear, when you’re gathering intelligence information, you know, you’re using human agents, or you’re taking photographs from satellites or airplanes, or you’re eavesdropping on phone calls of various kinds, the person who was on the other end of those intelligence collection efforts knew that that was intelligence collection.

    AMY GOODMAN: We have five seconds.

    GEORGE BEEBE: OK. Today, if you intrude on someone’s computer network, you can not only gather information, but you can destroy that network. You can sabotage it. And when you think about all the things that are connected to the internet, that becomes very dangerous in a crisis.

    AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there, George Beebe of the Quincy Institute and Medea Benjamin of CodePink. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Stay safe.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Non-Independence Of Western-Funded “Independent Media” In Ukraine

    Many Kyiv Independent Journalists Come From Suspect Backgrounds, Including Individuals Who Previously Worked For NATO Think Tank The Atlantic Council, The U.S. Embassy In Ukraine, Or For The Council On Foreign Relations.

    The post The Non-Independence Of Western-Funded “Independent Media” In Ukraine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • These countries are willing to risk US ire over Russia-Ukraine

    Americans are fervently cheering for Ukraine in a war that many believe is a decisive struggle for human freedom. The intensity of our infatuation makes it easy to assume that everyone in the world shares it. They don’t.

    The impassioned American reaction is matched only in Europe, Canada, and the handful of U.S. allies in East Asia. For many people in the rest of the world, the Russia-Ukraine conflict is just another pointless Western war in which they have no stake.

    The two biggest countries in Latin America, Mexico and Brazil, have refused to impose sanctions on Russia or to curtail trade. South Africa, the economic powerhouse of the African continent, has done the same. Asia, though, is where the resistance to joining the pro-Ukraine bloc appears most deliberate and widespread. This has alarmed Washington. To fight back, the United States is cracking its whip over several Asian nations.

    The post These countries are willing to risk US ire over Russia-Ukraine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • More Escalations In Online Censorship

    There’s no sensible argument that this new escalation in censorship is saving lives or that it’s being

    This post was originally published on Real Progressives.

  • Cost of the Ukraine War Felt in Africa, Global South

    While international news headlines remain largely focused on the war in Ukraine, little attention is given to the horrific consequences of the war which are felt in many regions around the world. Even when these repercussions are discussed, disproportionate coverage is allocated to European countries, like Germany and Austria, due to their heavy reliance on Russian energy sources.

    The horrific scenario, however, awaits countries in the Global South which, unlike Germany, will not be able to eventually substitute Russian raw material from elsewhere. Countries like Tunisia, Sri Lanka and Ghana and numerous others, are facing serious food shortages in the short, medium and long term.

    The World Bank is warning of a “human catastrophe” as a result of a burgeoning food crisis, itself resulting from the Russia-Ukraine war. The World Bank President, David Malpass, told the BBC that his institution estimates a “huge” jump in food prices, reaching as high as 37%, which would mean that the poorest of people would be forced to “eat less and have less money for anything else such as schooling.”

    This foreboding crisis is now compounding an existing global food crisis, resulting from major disruptions in the global supply chains, as a direct outcome of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as pre-existing problems, resulting from wars and civil unrest, corruption, economic mismanagement, social inequality and more.

    Even prior to the war in Ukraine, the world was already getting hungrier. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), an estimated 811 million people in the world “faced hunger in 2020”, with a massive jump of 118 million compared to the previous year. Considering the continued deterioration of global economies, especially in the developing world, and the subsequent and unprecedented inflation worldwide, the number must have made several large jumps since the publishing of FAO’s report in July 2021, reporting on the previous year.

    Indeed, inflation is now a global phenomenon. The consumer price index in the United States has increased by 8.5% from a year earlier, according to the financial media company, Bloomberg. In Europe, “inflation (reached) record 7.5%”, according to the latest data released by Eurostat. As troubling as these numbers are, western societies with relatively healthy economies and potential room for government subsidies, are more likely to weather the inflation storm, if compared to countries in Africa, South America, the Middle East and many parts of Asia.

    The war in Ukraine has immediately impacted food supplies to many parts of the world. Russia and Ukraine combined contribute 30% of global wheat exports. Millions of tons of these exports find their way to food-import-dependent countries in the Global South – mainly the regions of South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. Considering that some of these regions, comprising some of the poorest countries in the world, have already been struggling under the weight of pre-existing food crises, it is safe to say that tens of millions of people already are, or are likely to go, hungry in the coming months and years.

    Another factor resulting from the war is the severe US-led western sanctions on Russia. The harm of these sanctions is likely to be felt more in other countries than in Russia itself, due to the fact that the latter is largely food and energy independent.

    Although the overall size of the Russian economy is comparatively smaller than that of leading global economic powers like the US and China, its contributions to the world economy makes it absolutely critical. For example, Russia accounts for a quarter of the world’s natural gas exports, according to the World Bank, and 18% of coal and wheat exports, 14% of fertilizers and platinum shipments, and 11% of crude oil. Cutting off the world from such a massive wealth of natural resources while it is desperately trying to recover from the horrendous impact of the pandemic is equivalent to an act of economic self-mutilation.

    Of course, some are likely to suffer more than others. While economic growth is estimated to shrink by a large margin – up to 50% in some cases – in countries that fuel regional and international growth such as Turkey, South Africa and Indonesia, the crisis is expected to be much more severe in countries that aim for mere economic subsistence, including many African countries.

    An April report published by the humanitarian group, Oxfam, citing an alert issued by 11 international humanitarian organizations, warned that “West Africa is hit by its worst food crisis in a decade.” Currently, there are 27 million people going hungry in that region, a number that may rise to 38 million in June if nothing is done to stave off the crisis. According to the report, this number would represent “a new historic level”, as it would be an increase by more than a third compared to last year. Like other struggling regions, the massive food shortage is a result of the war in Ukraine, in addition to pre-existing problems, lead amongst them the pandemic and climate change.

    While the thousands of sanctions imposed on Russia are yet to achieve any of their intended purpose, it is poor countries that are already feeling the burden of the war, sanctions and geopolitical tussle between great powers. As the west is busy dealing with its own economic woes, little heed is being paid to those suffering most. And as the world is forced to transition to a new global economic order, it will take years for small economies to successfully make that adjustment.

    While it is important that we acknowledge the vast changes to the world’s geopolitical map, let us not forget that millions of people are going hungry, paying the price for a global conflict of which they are not part.

    The post Cost of the Ukraine War Felt in Africa, Global South first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Age Of Self-Delusion

    Blinded by what Barbara Tuchman calls “the bellicose frivolity of senile empires,” we are marching ominously towards war with Russia. How else might we explain Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s public declaration that the US goal is to “weaken Russia” and Joe Biden’s request for another $33 billion in “emergency” military and economic aid (half of what Russia spent on its military in 2021) for Ukraine?

    The same cabal of generals and politicians that drained the state of trillions of dollars in the debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Somalia and learned nothing from the nightmare of Vietnam, revel in the illusion of their omnipotence. They have no interest in a diplomatic solution. There are billions in profits to be made in arms sales. There is political posturing to be done. There are generals itching to pull the trigger. Why have all these high-priced and technologically advanced weapons systems if you can’t use them? Why not show the world this time around that the US still dominates the globe?

    The post The Age Of Self-Delusion appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Dangers And Conflict Resolution Efforts In Moldova

    Transnistria is de facto independent with many state-like attibutes and calls itself officially the Moldovian Republic of Dniestr.  However, no other state, including the Russian Federation has recognized it as an independent state.  There are, however, some 1500 Russian military permanently present in Transnistria.  Transnistria had some 706, 000 inhabitants in 1991 at the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union.  Today, there are some 450,000 – probably less.  Many, especially young people, have left to study or work abroad.  Many in Transnistria have Russian passports in order to travel.  The Transnistrian economy is in the hands of a small number of persons closely linked to the government.

    The post Dangers And Conflict Resolution Efforts In Moldova appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Western Civilization Is Being Organized Around Winning US Infowars

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    The US-centralized empire’s use of propaganda, censorship and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation is the single most urgent issue of our time, because it’s what prevents attention from being drawn to all other issues. And all signs indicate it’s set to get much, much worse.

    I feel the need to reiterate once again that the censorship we’re seeing about Ukraine is of a whole new kind than anything we’ve seen before. There’s no pretense that it’s done to save lives or protect democracy this time around, it’s just “We need to control the thoughts that people think about this war.”

    Once it was accepted that disinformation and misinformation must be curtailed from above, government and tech institutions took that as license to decide what’s true and false on our behalf. We know this because now they’re just openly propagandizing and censoring us about a war.

    You didn’t know that you were granting government and tech institutions authority to decide what’s true and false on your behalf when you agreed that it’s fine for them to work together to censor and sanctify Official Narratives about Covid, but it turns out that’s what was happening.

    It looks pretty obvious in retrospect now though, doesn’t it? You can’t regulate “disinformation” and “misinformation” without first determining what it is, and you can’t determine what it is without assigning someone the authority to make those distinctions. There are no benefecent, impartial and omniscient entities who can be trusted to become objective arbiters of absolute reality on our behalf. There are only flawed human beings who act in their own interest, which is why we’re now being censored and propagandized about a war.

    In literally the very next instant after being given the authority to decide what’s true and false on our behalf regarding Covid, those same government, media and tech institutions launched into World War II levels of propaganda and censorship over a war we’re not even officially in. It was like they all said “Oh good, we get to do that now, finally.” The consensus that it was fine to launch into a shocking information lockdown about Ukraine was already formed and prepped for roll-out the day Russia invaded. It was taken as a given that they had that authority.

    Over the last two years you’d get called an “anti-vaxxer” and worse if you said you didn’t think government-tied monopolistic megacorporations should be restricting speech about Covid measures that affect everyone, but it turns out those who issued these warnings were 100 percent correct.

    It is clear now, as we see what we are becoming, that granting these powerful institutions authority to sort out fact from fiction on our behalf is far more dangerous than misinformation about a virus ever was. Now here we are, with the empire setting up “disinformation” boards while it escalates aggressions with Russia by the day and prepares to do the same with China in the not-too distant future. Our whole civilization is being organized around winning US propaganda wars.

    Censorship is bad because free speech is how society orients itself toward truth, course-corrects when it’s going astray, and holds power to account. This is true whether censorship is by the government or by tech oligarchs. Only morons act like this is some weird right wing thing.

    People say, “Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom of reach!”

    And the answer to this is always, yes it does you idiot. If people who support status quo power have access to all the largest voice amplification platforms while critics of status quo power don’t, this kills the very purpose of free speech protections. Free speech protections are enshrined exactly because unrestricted speech puts a check on power. If critics of status quo power structures are being banned from the platforms where people get their voices heard, this function has been nullified.

    You can’t say your society has free speech if critics of status quo orthodoxies aren’t free to speak where they will be heard, for exactly the same reason you can’t say people have free speech in Saudi Arabia as long as nobody hears their criticisms of the government.

    Because free speech is designed to put a check on status quo power, it is exactly the voices who criticize the status quo that must be protected. Some of these voices will be unpalatable, but the alternative is permitting a Ministry of Truth to decide what dissent is permissible, an authority that’s certain to be abused.

    Speech isn’t free if it isn’t free in all the areas where people congregate to speak. If only mainstream supporters of the status quo have free access to all platforms, then free speech isn’t happening, and power has a lot more ability to do what it likes unchecked by the public. Saying it’s fine because people are still free to go to Gab or Truth Social to voice their criticisms of establishment Ukraine narratives or whatever is the same as saying it’s fine because people can still speak their criticisms of the government into a hole in the ground. Free speech is not happening.

    Consent for this was given when we allowed these powers to assume complete narrative authority over what constitutes “misinformation”. It’s never too late to revoke consent, though. It just means the fight to pry our voices out of the hands of our rulers is going to be a tough slog.

    ___________________

    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.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Little-Known International Charter At The Center of Ukraine War and China’s Future Defense

    In 1999, the United States and the 56 other participating states of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) signed a charter in Istanbul that is another intentionally ignored key to understanding the war in Ukraine.

    The OSCE is the world’s largest regional security organization . It claims to engage in political dialogue – that is, a forum for political dialogue on a wide range of security issues. There are 57 OSCE member states that cover three continents – North America, Europe and Asia. The policies the OSCE deliberates over include security issues such as arms control, terrorism, good governance, energy security, human trafficking, democratization, media freedom, and the rights of national minorities that affect more than a billion people. This is what they say they do, anyway.

    But the 1999 Istanbul Charter signed by all the member states says that countries should be free to choose their own security arrangements and alliances but specifies that, in doing so, countries “will not strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other states.”

    The post The Little-Known International Charter At The Center of Ukraine War and China’s Future Defense appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Ukrainian blacklist that includes ex-Pink Floyd musician has MI5 as one of its sources

    A Ukrainian blacklist claims to source some of its intelligence from Britain’s MI5. And it even includes a file on former Pink Floyd musician Roger Waters. The aims of the blacklist appear to be the suppression and elimination of voices critical of the Ukrainian government.

    Meanwhile, there are those on the radical left – anarchists – who are fighting as partisans or alongside government forces, determined to crush the Russian invaders.

    ‘Peacemaker’ blacklist

    The Orwellian-sounding Peacemaker/Myrotvorets database is a blacklist reportedly organised in 2014. This was after a meeting between a former member of Ukraine’s security service Sluzhba Bespeky Ukrayiny (SBU) and Ukrainian politician George Tuka.

    According to a 2019 Al Jazeera article, the database contained more than 130,000 persons, including Russian military and pro-Russia separatists. The Mirror believes the total number of names on the blacklist is now around 187,000.

    Al Jazeera reported in 2019 that the database also included “4,000 international journalists accredited by separatist authorities”. And it currently includes a link to a list of more than 600 Russian FSB (successor to KGB) officers “involved in the criminal activities of the aggressor country in Europe”.

    British musician on blacklist

    Peacemaker also includes a file on former Pink Floyd musician Roger Waters. An English translation of that file shows Waters is accused of:

    Anti-Ukrainian propaganda. An attempt on the territorial integrity of Ukraine. Participation in attempts to legalize the annexation of Crimea by Russia.

    It also includes a zip file with a list of websites that purport to back up these allegations. And the source of the Waters file is given as ‘SBU’.

    Former Swiss strategic intelligence member Jacques Baud claims the Peacemaker database is used as a means of harassing or eliminating those in favour of a deal with Russia:

    In the Ukraine, with the blessing of the Western countries, those who are in favor of a negotiation have been eliminated. This is the case of Denis Kireyev, one of the Ukrainian negotiators, assassinated on March 5 by the Ukrainian secret service (SBU) because he was too favorable to Russia and was considered a traitor. The same fate befell Dmitry Demyanenko, former deputy head of the SBU’s main directorate for Kiev and its region, who was assassinated on March 10 because he was too favorable to an agreement with Russia—he was shot by the Mirotvorets (“Peacemaker”) militia.

    Clampdown on the left

    Meanwhile, an article by Max Blumenthal and Esha Krishnaswamy in the Grayzone claims that Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has “outlawed his opposition, ordered his rivals’ arrest, and presided over the disappearance and assassination of dissidents across the country”.

    They add:

    In a March 19 executive order, Zelensky invoked martial law to ban 11 opposition parties. The outlawed parties consisted of the entire left-wing, socialist or anti-NATO spectrum in Ukraine. They included the For Life Party, the Left Opposition, the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, the Socialist Party of Ukraine, Union of Left Forces, Socialists, the Party of Shariy, Ours, State, Opposition Bloc and the Volodymyr Saldo Bloc.

    One blogger referred to in the article provides a list of those who “fell foul of the Ukrainian government and its policies”. The article also includes numerous accounts of alleged torture carried out by Ukrainian military against Russians and pro-Russians.

    From the frontline

    There’s also another side to this conflict.

    Le Monde Libertaire interviewed a member of the mainly Ukrainian anti-authoritarian Resistance Committee regarding what’s happening in Ukraine since the Russian invasion. The anonymous interviewee – we will call her ‘Yulia’ – explains that anarchists and anti-fascists have joined with units of the Territorial Defence Forces (TDF). And they are mostly active in the Kyiv region and Kharkiv.

    Yulia adds:

    While we had always opposed the Ukrainian state, we understand that Russian autocracy is much worse. If the Russian army occupied Ukraine, there would be absolutely no political freedom, activists would be imprisoned or killed.

    As for Putin, she adds:

    [He] himself had said many times before that his favourite philosopher was Ivan Ilyin – a far-right thinker exiled by the Bolsheviks, who later supported the Italian Fascists and German Nazis as they rose to power , who had also repeatedly spoken out against the Ukrainians as a threat to Russia. Not to mention Putin’s ties and financial support to various far-right parties and Western politicians – like Marine le Pen, Eric Zemmour in France, Victor Orban in Hungary,

    Yulia also  provides an excellent insight into how anarchists and left libertarians are organising with government forces. She adds how the TDF have “defended some cities against Russian regular troops and became partisans”. However, ” in other cases they fight alongside the army”.

    It’s all about survival:

    While some might argue that anarchists should have no cooperation with the state military, for all Ukrainian anarchists it is clear that this is a battle for our survival. The Russian army has already committed numerous war crimes against Ukrainian civilians, including the indiscriminate destruction of cities, the bombing of hospitals, the execution of men of conscription age, as well as mass arrests of pro activists- Ukrainians in various cities under occupation. If Russia won, such crimes would continue throughout Ukraine. This is why all Ukrainian anarchists decided to resist Russian aggression – like those anarchists who joined the Free French Army to fight against German Nazism.

    Daily reports on the fight by the libertarian left against the Russian aggressors are provided by Operation Solidarity and published by Le Monde Libertaire.

    What is it good for?

    War inevitably results in atrocities and war crimes. And in Ukraine, it’s important to question the ultimate aim and scope of the Peacemaker blacklist, particularly if Baud’s claim that Peacemaker’s militia carried out an assassination is correct.

    War also sees the often inevitable crackdown on those critical of the government line. We see that in Russia, with the banning of independent news media and blocking of social media. But, as pointed out in the article by Blumenthal and Krishnaswamy, it appears to be happening in Ukraine too, with the clampdown on opposition. The authors also point out that the Ukrainian government has combined all TV news channels into a single channel, which can be a form of censorship.

    In any war, independent journalism has an important role to play to report on all of these aspects. Even if, for some readers, that makes for uncomfortable reading.

    Featured image via screenshot

    By Tom Coburg

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • United Nations Secretary General Holds Talks On Ukraine War

    The topic of the discussions centered on the two-months long Russian military intervention in Ukraine which has been fueled by the imposition of unprecedented sanctions by the United States and the European Union (EU) alongside the massive transferal of weapons to the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky by key member-states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

    Two distinct positions were articulated during one-on-one talks between Putin and Guterres which were broadcast internationally. Later there was a press conference held featuring Foreign Minister Lavrov and Secretary General Guterres where differences over the Ukraine situation were aired publicly.

    After leaving Moscow, Guterres travelled to the capital of Ukraine where he reviewed damage from the war which has killed untold numbers of people and dislocated millions.

    The post United Nations Secretary General Holds Talks On Ukraine War appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Ukraine – Doubling Down

    According to the daily reports of Russia’s Ministry of Defense the Ukraine is losing several hundred soldiers and some 30 armored vehicles per day, most of them to artillery. A flood of gruel pictures posted on Telegram by both sides confirm this. Several Ukrainian attempts to counterattack Russian forces have failed.

    ‘Western’ propagandists are noting that their side is losing. The typical U.S. reaction to losing is to double down. As Michael Hudson explains (vid), the economic consequences of this war will be catastrophic for many countries and people. But the neocons who are running the war do not care about those. They have a plan to profit from it. They want to stay the unipolar power of the globe. To them it is a game and their main motives include an ingrained hatred towards Russia.

    The post Ukraine – Doubling Down appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Peace Movement Needs To Demand Dismantling Of NATO

    During World War II an “unnatural alliance” was created between the United States, Great Britain, and the former Soviet Union. What brought the three countries together—the emerging imperial giant (the United States), the declining capitalist power (Great Britain), and the first socialist state (the Soviet Union)—was the shared need to defeat fascism in Europe. Rhetorically, the high point of collaboration was reflected in the agreements made at the Yalta Conference, in February 1945, three months before the German armies were defeated.

    At Yalta, the great powers made decisions to facilitate democratization of former Nazi regimes in Eastern Europe, a “temporary” division of Germany for occupation purposes, and a schedule of future Soviet participation in the ongoing war against Japan.

    The post Peace Movement Needs To Demand Dismantling Of NATO appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Real Zelensky: From Celebrity Populist To Unpopular Neoliberal

    A comedic actor who rose to the country’s highest office in 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was virtually unknown to the average American, except perhaps as a bit player in the Trump impeachment theater. But when Russia attacked Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Zelensky was suddenly transformed to an A-list celebrity in US media. American news consumers were bombarded with images of a man who appeared overcome by the tragic events, possibly in over his head, but ultimately sympathetic.  It didn’t take long for that image to evolve into the khaki-clad, tireless hero governing over a scrappy little democracy and single-handedly staving off the barbarians of autocracy from the east.

    The post The Real Zelensky: From Celebrity Populist To Unpopular Neoliberal appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.