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  • Covert Warfare: How NATO’s Defense Contractors Assisted Ukraine in War

    British special forces were training Ukrainian troops in Kyiv since early this month, Ukrainian commanders told The Times in mid-April. Captain Yuriy Myronenko, whose battalion is stationed in Obolon on the northern outskirts of Kyiv, told the news outlet that military trainers had come to instruct new and returning military recruits to use NLAWs, British-supplied anti-tank missiles that were delivered in February as the invasion was beginning.

    Former British soldiers, marines and special forces commandos are also in Ukraine working as training contractors and volunteers, but the Ukrainian officers were adamant that their training this month was carried out by serving British soldiers.

    “The elite SAS special forces units [a British army special forces unit] have been present in Ukraine since the start of the war, as have the American Deltas [a US special forces unit],” Georges Malbrunot, a reporter for French Le Figaro newspaper, citing a French intelligence source, tweeted on April 9. The reporter spilled the secret the same day when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made his surprise visit to Kyiv. The British leader was reportedly surrounded by guards from the elite SAS force.

    The veteran French journalist who returned from Ukraine after arriving with volunteer fighters told broadcaster CNews that Americans were directly “in charge” of the war on the ground. “I had the surprise, and so did they, to discover that to be able to enter the Ukrainian army, well it’s the Americans who are in charge,” said Malbrunot.

    Adding that he and the volunteers “almost got arrested” by the Americans, who asserted they were in charge, the journalist then revealed that they were forced to sign a contract until the end of the war. “And who is in charge? It’s the Americans, I saw it with my own eyes,” said the French reporter, adding, “I thought I was with the international brigades, and I found myself facing the Pentagon.”

    In addition to British SAS units and United States special forces and covert CIA operatives, approximately 6,824 “foreign mercenaries” from 63 countries came to Ukraine to fight for the Zelensky government, the Russian Defense Ministry revealed last week. Of these, 1,035 have been “eliminated,” while several thousand remain. Four hundred foreign fighters are holed up in Mariupol, where ultra-nationalist forces, including the neo-Nazi fighters, have refused to surrender.

    The most numerous group of foreign fighters, numbering 1,717, arrived from Poland, while around 1,500 came from the US, Canada and Romania. Up to 300 people each came from the UK and Georgia, while 193 arrived from the Turkish-controlled areas of Syria.

    These figures were announced on April 17 by Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov. According to the general, 1,035 “foreign mercenaries” had been killed by Russian forces and 912 fled Ukraine, leaving 4,877 active in the cities of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Nikolaev and Mariupol.

    The largest undercover force the world has ever known is the one created by the Pentagon over the past decade. Some 60,000 people now belong to this secret army, many working under masked identities and in low profile, all part of a broad program called “signature reduction,” and a substantial number of these defense contractors have been assisting Ukraine’s security forces and allied neo-Nazi militias for over eight years in the proxy war against Russia since the Maidan coup toppling Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.

    The force, more than ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA, carries out domestic and foreign assignments, both in military uniforms and under civilian cover, Newsweek reported last May.

    The unprecedented shift has placed an ever greater number of soldiers, civilians, and contractors working under false identities, partly as a natural result in the growth of secret special forces but also as an intentional response to the challenges of traveling and operating in an increasingly transparent world.

    The covert warfare operations mounted by the Pentagon’s “secret army” in conflict zones across the world is not just a little-known sector of the American military, but also a completely unregulated practice. No one knows the program’s total size, and the explosion of signature reduction has never been examined for its impact on military policies and culture. Congress has never held a hearing on the subject. And yet the military developing this gigantic clandestine force challenges US laws, the Geneva Conventions, the code of military conduct and basic accountability.

    The signature reduction effort engages some 130 private companies to administer the new clandestine world. Dozens of little known and secret government organizations support the program, doling out classified contracts and overseeing publicly unacknowledged operations. Altogether the companies pull in over $900 million annually to service the clandestine force.

    Special operations forces constitute over half the entire signature reduction force, the shadow warriors who pursue terrorists in war zones from Pakistan to West Africa but also increasingly work in unacknowledged hot spots, including behind enemy lines in places like North Korea, Ukraine and Iran. Military intelligence specialists—collectors, counter-intelligence agents, even linguists—make up the second largest element: thousands deployed at any one time with some degree of “cover” to protect their true identities.

    Since the harrowing Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad in 2007, the Blackwater private military contractor, renamed as Academi in 2011 and becoming a subsidiary of Constellis Group following a merger with Triple Canopy in 2014, has built quite a business empire for itself. In 2013, Academi subsidiary International Development Solutions received an approximately $92 million contract for State Department security guards.

    After selling Blackwater to a group of investors in 2010, Erik Prince, a former US Navy Seals officer and the swashbuckling founder of Blackwater, has founded another security company Frontier Services Group, registered at Hong Kong Stock Exchange, that advises and provides aviation and logistical solutions to Chinese oligarchs for the security of their lucrative business projects in Africa.

    Furthermore, besides advising and assisting the UAE’s petro-monarchy in strengthening the police state, Erik Prince also reportedly provided weapons and modified aircraft to eastern Libya’s warlord and former CIA asset Khalifa Haftar, backed by Egypt and UAE, in his thwarted military campaign against the Tripoli government lasting from April 2019 to June 2020.

    Using the good offices of his sister Betsy Devos, who worked as Trump’s secretary of education, Erik Prince even made an offer to Trump for outsourcing of the Afghanistan war to private military contractors advising and assisting Afghan security forces following the withdrawal of US troops. But Trump reached a peace agreement with the Taliban in Feb. 2020 and then lost the re-election bid before he could consider the bizarre proposal.

    Although the Pentagon’s military contractors have known to be training and advising several brigades of neo-Nazis backed by Ukraine’s security forces in the Donbas region since 2014, Erik Prince, alongside top executives of leading private security firms providing military contractors to the US Department of Defense, personally visited Kyiv in early February following the Russian troop build-up and met with security officials of the Zelensky government, according to informed sources.

    Before embarking on the clandestine Kyiv visit, Erik Prince consulted with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Director National Intelligence Avril Haines, with whom his relationship goes a long way back to early nineties after she purchased a bar in Fell’s Point, Baltimore, which had been seized in a drug raid. She turned the location into an exotic bookstore and café, offering “erotica readings,” among other licentious pastimes.

    In his meetings with the high-ups in the US national security agencies, Erik Prince reportedly obtained a “gentleman’s promise,” though without any documentary assurances due to secretive nature of the Faustian pact, that he and his associates would not be held legally liable for the dirty work they do in Ukraine’s proxy war.

    In fact, private military contractors in close co-ordination and consultation with covert operators from the CIA, special forces and Western intelligence agencies are not only training Ukraine’s largely conscript security forces and allied neo-Nazi militias in the use of over 60,000 anti-tank weapons and 25,000 anti-aircraft weapons collectively provided as military assistance to Ukraine by NATO countries but are also directing the whole defense strategy of Ukraine by taking active part in combat operations in some of the most hard fought battles against Russia’s security forces at Mariupol, Kharkiv and Donbas region in east Ukraine.

    In a bombshell scoop, The Times reported on March 4 that defense contractors were recruiting former military veterans for covert operations in Ukraine for a whopping $2,000 a day: “The job is not without risk but, at almost $60,000 a month, the pay is good. Applicants must have at least five years of military experience in Eastern Europe, be skilled in reconnaissance, be able to conduct rescue operations with little to no support and know their way around Soviet-era weaponry.”

    Russian media alleged last month that the United States security agencies had launched a large-scale recruitment program to send private military contractors to Ukraine, including professionally trained mercenaries of Academi, formerly Blackwater, Cubic and Dyn Corporation.

    Russia’s Defense Ministry’s spokesman Igor Konashenkov warned that foreign mercenaries in Ukraine would not be considered prisoners of war if detained in line with international humanitarian law, rather they could expect criminal prosecution at best.

    Speaking to CNN’s Dana Bash on April 3, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that “NATO allies have supported Ukraine for many, many years,” adding that military aid has been “stepped up over the last weeks since the invasion.” The official clarified that “NATO allies like the United States, but also the United Kingdom and Canada and some others, have trained Ukrainian troops for years.”

    According to Stoltenberg’s estimates, “tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops” had received such training, and were now “at the front fighting against invading Russian forces.” The secretary general went on to credit the Brussels-based alliance with the fact that the “Ukrainian armed forces are much bigger, much better equipped, much better trained and much better led now than ever before.”

    In addition to a longstanding CIA program aimed at cultivating an anti-Russian insurgency in Ukraine, Canada’s Department of National Defense revealed on January 26, two days following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that the Canadian Armed Forces trained “nearly 33,000 Ukrainian military and security personnel in a range of tactical and advanced military skills.” While The United Kingdom, via Operation Orbital, trained 22,000 Ukrainian fighters, as noted by NATO’s informed secretary general.

    In an explosive scoop, Zach Dorfman reported for the Yahoo News on March 16: “As part of the Ukraine-based training program, CIA paramilitaries taught their Ukrainian counterparts sniper techniques; how to operate U.S.-supplied Javelin anti-tank missiles and other equipment; how to evade digital tracking the Russians used to pinpoint the location of Ukrainian troops, which had left them vulnerable to attacks by artillery; how to use covert communications tools; and how to remain undetected in the war zone while also drawing out Russian and insurgent forces from their positions, among other skills, according to former officials.

    “When CIA paramilitaries first traveled to eastern Ukraine in the aftermath of Russia’s initial 2014 incursion, their brief was twofold. First, they were ordered to determine how the agency could best help train Ukrainian special operations personnel fight the Russian military forces, and their separatist allies, waging a grinding war against Ukrainian troops in the Donbas region. But the second part of the mission was to test the mettle of the Ukrainians themselves, according to former officials.”

    Besides the CIA’s clandestine program for training Ukraine’s largely conscript military and allied neo-Nazi militias in east Ukraine and the US Special Forces program for training Ukraine’s security forces at Yavoriv Combat Training Center in the western part of the country bordering Poland that was hit by a barrage of 30 cruise missiles killing at least 35 militants on March 13, Dorfman claims in a separate January report that the CIA also ran a covert program for training Ukraine’s special forces at an undisclosed facility in the southern United States.

    “The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel, according to five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the initiative. The program, which started in 2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in the Southern U.S., according to some of those officials.

    “While the covert program, run by paramilitaries working for the CIA’s Ground Branch — now officially known as Ground Department — was established by the Obama administration after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, and expanded under the Trump administration, the Biden administration has further augmented it.”

    By 2015, as part of this expanded anti-Russia effort, CIA Ground Branch paramilitaries also “started traveling to the front in eastern Ukraine” to advise and assist Ukraine’s security forces and allied neo-Nazi militias there. The multiweek, US-based CIA program included “training in firearms, camouflage techniques, land navigation, tactics like cover and move, intelligence and other areas.”

    One person familiar with the program put it more bluntly. “The United States is training an insurgency,” said a former CIA official, adding that the program has taught the Ukrainians how “to kill Russians.” Going back decades, the CIA had provided limited training to Ukrainian intelligence units to try and shore up a US-allied Kyiv and undermine Russian influence, but cooperation ramped up after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 following the Maidan coup toppling Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a former CIA executive confided to Dorfman.

    The post Covert Warfare: How NATO’s Defense Contractors Assisted Ukraine in War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • After Undermining International Criminal Court, Us Now Wants It To Charge Russians

    Although the United States has tried mightily to undermine the International Criminal Court (ICC) since it became operational in 2002, the U.S. government is now pushing for the ICC to prosecute Russian leaders for war crimes in Ukraine. Apparently, Washington thinks the ICC is reliable enough to try Russians but not to bring U.S. or Israeli officials to justice.

    On March 15, the Senate unanimously passed S. Res 546, which “encourages member states to petition the ICC or other appropriate international tribunal to take any appropriate steps to investigate war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Russian Armed Forces.”

    The post After Undermining International Criminal Court, Us Now Wants It To Charge Russians appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Global Capitalism Has Become Dependent on War-Making to Sustain Itself

    The Russian invasion of Ukraine has sparked fierce political debate on the geopolitical consequences of the conflict. But less noticed and equally as important, the war has paved the way for a more sweeping militarization of what was already a global war economy mired in deep political and economic crisis. Geopolitical tensions and international conflicts may be tragic for those caught up in conflagrations such as in Ukraine — but advantageous for those seeking to legitimize expanding military and security budgets and open up new opportunities for capitalist profit-making in the face of chronic stagnation and social discontent.

    In late March, the Biden administration, citing the Russian invasion, called for a $31 billion increase in the Pentagon budget over the previous year and on top of an emergency appropriation weeks earlier of $14 billion for Ukraine’s defense. Prior to the invasion, in late 2021, the U.S. government approved a nearly $800 billion military budget, even as, in the same year, it ended the war in Afghanistan. Almost overnight following the Russian invasion, the U.S., European Union, and other governments around the world allocated billions of dollars in additional military spending and sent streams of military hardware and private military contractors into Ukraine.

    Shares of military and security firms surged in the wake of the invasion. Two weeks into the conflict, shares of Raytheon were up 8 percent, General Dynamics up 12 percent, Lockheed Martin up 18 percent and Northrop Grumman up 22 percent, while war stocks in Europe, India, and elsewhere experienced similar surges in expectation of an exponential rise in global military spending. Russian President Vladimir Putin, in the words of the managing director of AeroDynamic Advisory, a Pentagon contractor, is “unquestionably the best F-35 salesman of all time,” in reference to a spike in U.S. government funding for the Lockheed Martin jet fighter. Said one consultant to Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Technologies: “For the defense industry, happy days are here again. When the defense budget rises it tends to lift all boats in the industry.”

    Militarized Accumulation

    The Russian invasion — brutal, reckless and condemnable by any standard — has sparked debate on NATO’s proposed expansion into Ukraine and the role that it played in motivating the Kremlin. U.S. officials were keenly aware, in fact, that the drive to expand NATO to Russian borders would eventually push Moscow into a military conflict. “We examine a wide range of nonviolent measures that could exploit Russia’s actual vulnerabilities and anxieties as a way of stressing Russia’s military and economy and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad,” notes a 2019 study by the RAND Corporation, a Pentagon-affiliated think tank. “The steps we examine would not have either defense or deterrence as their prime purpose,” it states, but rather, “these steps are conceived of as elements in a campaign designed to unbalance the adversary, leading Russia to compete in domains or regions where the United States has a competitive advantage, and causing Russia to overextend itself militarily or economically.”

    But the provocation could not be reduced to geopolitical competition, however important, as most observers were keen to do. Missing from the larger picture was the centrality of militarized accumulation — of endless low- and high-intensity warfare, simmering conflicts, civil strife and policing — to the global political economy. Militarized accumulation refers to a situation in which a global war economy relies on the state to organize war-making, social control and repression to sustain capital accumulation in the face of chronic stagnation and saturation of global markets. These state-organized practices are outsourced to transnational corporate capital, involving the fusion of private accumulation with state militarization in order to sustain the process of capital accumulation. Cycles of destruction and reconstruction provide ongoing outlets for over-accumulated capital; that is, these cycles open up new profit-making opportunities for transnational capitalists seeking ongoing opportunities to profitably reinvest the enormous amounts of cash they have accumulated. There is a convergence in this process of global capitalism’s political need for social control and repression in the face of mounting popular discontent worldwide and its economic need to perpetuate accumulation in the face of stagnation.

    Wars provide critical economic stimulus. They have historically pulled the capitalist system out of accumulation crises while they serve to deflect attention from political tensions and problems of legitimacy. It took World War II to finally lift world capitalism out of the Great Depression. The Cold War legitimated a half century of expanding military budgets and the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, the longest in history, helped keep the economy sputtering along in the face of chronic stagnation in the first two decades of the century. From the anti-Communist fervor of the Cold War, to the “war on terror,” then the so-called New Cold War, and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the transnational elite, led by Washington, have had to conjure up one enemy after another to legitimate militarized accumulation and deflect crises of state legitimacy and capitalist hegemony onto external enemies and contrived threats.

    The events of September 11, 2001, marked the start of an era of a permanent global war in which logistics, warfare, intelligence, repression, surveillance and even military personnel are more and more the privatized domain of transnational capital. The Pentagon budget increased 91 percent in real terms between 1998 and 2011, while worldwide, total state military budget outlays grew by 50 percent from 2006 to 2015, from $1.4 trillion to more than $2 trillion. (This figure does not take into account the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on intelligence; contingency operations; policing; bogus wars against immigrants, terrorism and drugs; and “homeland security.”) During this time, military-industrial complex profits quadrupled.

    However, focusing just on state military budgets only gives us a part of the picture of the global war economy. As I showed in my 2020 book, The Global Police State, the various wars, conflicts and campaigns of social control and repression around the world involve the fusion of private accumulation with state militarization. In this relationship, the state facilitates the expansion of opportunities for private capital to accumulate through militarization, such as by facilitating global weapons sales by military-industrial-security firms, the amounts of which have reached unprecedented levels. Global weapons sales by the top 100 weapons manufacturers and military service companies increased by 38 percent between 2002 and 2016 and can be expected to escalate further in the face of a prolonged war in Ukraine.

    By 2018, private for-profit military companies employed some 15 million people around the world, while another 20 million people worked in private security worldwide. The private security (policing) business is one of the fastest-growing economic sectors in many countries and has come to dwarf public security around the world. The amount spent on private security in 2003, the year of the invasion of Iraq, was 73 percent higher than that spent in the public sphere, and three times as many persons were employed in private forces as in official law enforcement agencies. In half of the world’s countries, private security agents outnumber police officers.

    These corporate soldiers and police were deployed to guard corporate property, provide personal security for executives and their families; collect data; conduct police, paramilitary, counterinsurgency and surveillance operations; carry out mass crowd control and repression of protesters; run private detention and interrogation facilities; manage prisons and participate in outright warfare. Now, these same private military and security firms are pouring into Ukraine, with some mercenary companies offering between $1,000 and $2,000 a day for those with combat experience.

    The Russian invasion has accelerated but did not originate the ongoing surge in military spending around the world. It is notable that state military spending worldwide skyrocketed in the wake of the 2008 global financial collapse even beyond the post-9/11 spending hike, rising from about $1.5 billion in 2008 to over $2 trillion in 2022. The fact that this explosion in spending coincides perfectly with continued worldwide stagnation following the Great Recession suggests that the heightened militarization of the global economy is as much or more a response to this chronic stagnation than to perceived security threats. If bursts of militarized accumulation (such as that unleashed by 9/11, then by the 2008 financial collapse, and now by the Russian invasion) help offset the overaccumulation crisis further into the future, they are also high-risk bets that heighten worldwide tensions and push the world dangerously towards all-out international conflagration.

    The Crisis of Global Capitalism

    This crisis of global capitalism is economic, or structural, one of chronic stagnation in the global economy. But it is also political: a crisis of state legitimacy and capitalist hegemony. The system is moving towards “a general crisis of capitalist rule” as billions of people around the world face uncertain struggles for survival and question a system they no longer see as legitimate. Historically, wars have pulled the capitalist system out of crisis while they serve to deflect attention from political tensions and problems of legitimacy.

    Economically, global capitalism faces what is known in technical language as “overaccumulation”: a situation in which the economy has produced — or has the capacity to produce — great quantities of wealth but the market cannot absorb this wealth because of escalating inequality. Capitalism by its very nature will produce abundant wealth yet polarize that wealth and generate ever greater levels of social inequality unless offset by redistributive policies. The level of global social polarization and inequality now experienced is without precedent. In 2018, the richest 1 percent of humanity controlled more than half of the world’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent had to make do with just 5 percent. The international development agency Oxfam reported in January that during the first two years of the coronavirus pandemic, the 10 richest men in the world more than doubled their fortunes, from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion, while 99 percent of humanity saw a fall in their income and 160 million more people fell into poverty.

    Such inequalities end up undermining the stability of the system as the gap grows between what is — or could be — produced and what the market can absorb. The extreme concentration of the planet’s wealth in the hands of the few and the accelerated impoverishment and dispossession of the majority means that the transnational capitalist class, or TCC, has increasing difficulty in finding productive outlets to unload enormous amounts of surplus it accumulated. In the years leading up to the pandemic, there was a steady rise in underutilized capacity and a slowdown in industrial production around the world. The surplus of accumulated capital with nowhere to go expanded rapidly. Transnational corporations recorded record profits during the 2010s at the same time that corporate investment declined. Along with militarized accumulation, the TCC has turned to unprecedented levels of financial speculation and to debt-driven growth to sustain profit-making in the face of the crisis. If left unchecked, overaccumulation results in crisis — in stagnation, recessions, depressions, social upheavals and war — just what we are experiencing right now.

    But there is a related dynamic at work in the global war economy: the need for dominant groups to suppress mass discontent and deflect the crisis of state legitimacy. International frictions escalate as states, in their efforts to retain legitimacy, seek to sublimate social and political tensions and to keep the social order from fracturing. All around the world, a “people’s Spring” has taken off. From Chile to Lebanon, Iraq to India, France to the United States, Haiti to Nigeria, South Africa to Colombia, Jordan to Sri Lanka, waves of strikes and mass protests have proliferated and, in some instances, appear to be acquiring an anti-capitalist character. Wars and external enemies allow the ruling groups to deflect attention away from domestic malaise in their effort to maintain a grip on power as the crisis deepens.

    In the U.S., this sublimation has involved efforts to channel social unrest towards scapegoated communities such as immigrants or other marginalized groups — this is one key function of racism and was a core component of the Trump government’s political strategy — or towards an external enemy such as China or Russia, which had clearly become a cornerstone of the Biden government’s strategy well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. U.S. presidents historically reach their highest approval ratings when they launch wars. George W. Bush reached an all-time-high of 90 percent in 2001 as his administration geared up to invade Afghanistan, and his father George H.W. Bush achieved an 89 percent approval rating in 1991, right as the U.S. declared the end of its (first) invasion of Iraq and the “liberation of Kuwait.”

    It is unlikely that an increasing militarization of the world economy can in the long run offset either the economic or the political dimensions of the crisis of global capitalism. Global capitalism is emerging from the coronavirus pandemic with more inequality, more authoritarianism, more militarization, and more civic and political strife. In the U.S., class struggle is heating up, with a wave of strikes and of unionization drives in Amazon, Starbucks, and elsewhere in the gig economy. The current inflationary spiral and the escalation of class struggle in the United States and around the world point to the inability of the ruling groups to contain the expanding crisis. The drive by the capitalist state to externalize the political fallout of the crisis increases the danger that international tensions and localized conflicts such as in Ukraine will snowball into broader international conflagrations of unforeseen consequences.

    As the Ukraine crisis continues to drag on and the global revolt escalates, there will be a radical reconfiguration of global geopolitical alignments to the drumbeat of escalating turbulence in the world economy that will feed new political upheavals and violent conflicts, making global capitalism all the more volatile. While it is hard to imagine a return to the status quo antebellum in Eastern Europe, in the larger picture, the Ukraine crisis is not the cause but a consequence of the general crisis of global capitalism. That crisis will only get worse. Fasten your seat belts; it will get much worse.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • How Obama-Biden Team Empowered Terrorists In Syria

    The Obama-Biden team’s record in Syria resonates today as many of its members handle the unfolding crisis in Ukraine. As in Syria, the U.S. is flooding a chaotic war zone with weapons in a dangerous proxy conflict against Russia, raising the threat of military confrontation between the world’s top nuclear powers. “I deeply worry that what’s going to happen next is that we will see Ukraine turn into Syria,” Democratic Senator Chris Coons told CBS News on April 17. Based on declassified documents, news reports, and scattered admissions of U.S. officials, this overlooked history of how the Obama-Biden team’s effort to oust the Assad regime – in concert with allies including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey – details the series of discrete decisions that ultimately led the U.S. to empower terror networks bent on its destruction.

    The post How Obama-Biden Team Empowered Terrorists In Syria appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Vets Push “No War, No Warming” Climate Campaign Amid Russian Invasion of Ukraine

    Antiwar and progressive veterans organizations across the country are marking the first Earth Day after the United States’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and Russia’s subsequent invasion of Ukraine by highlighting the ways in which militarism fuels the global climate emergency, and how the planetary crisis, in turn, impacts service members.

    The U.S.’s role as the world’s largest weapons dealer, they say, is bad for the planet. True climate action, in their view, means ending new weapons shipments to Ukraine and instead deepening diplomatic channels toward a negotiated settlement to end the conflict.

    Echoing Earth Day’s historically antiwar roots, they are pressuring Congress members to pass a new climate and social spending package and fund a just transition away from fossil fuels that includes good jobs for impoverished veterans and fossil fuel-sector workers. Such a plan, they say, would also ensure energy independence from petrostate dictators like Russian President Vladimir Putin. The veterans are also pressuring politicians to remediate land polluted by U.S. military bases around the globe and support a Department of Defense accounting and reduction of its greenhouse gas emissions.

    In West Virginia, a state with one of the highest densities of veterans and rates of veteran poverty in the nation, climate justice organizers with the progressive veterans group Common Defense have been meeting with Sen. Joe Manchin and his staff to encourage him to support legislation that would invest in green jobs for low-income West Virginian veterans.

    Manchin, who chairs the powerful Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has gained almost total control over the future of U.S. climate policy as a key swing vote in Democrats’ narrowly controlled 50-50 Senate. He used this power to sink President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better climate and social spending bill in December by announcing his opposition on Fox News.

    The West Virginia senator has since reopened talks on a smaller, party-line reconciliation package that would use the budget process to circumvent a Republican filibuster. His legislative framework would take an “all-of-the-above” approach to energy policy that would include using tax breaks to push up to $555 billion in clean energy subsidies while also rolling back Republicans’ 2017 tax cuts and reforming prescription drug pricing. Under Manchin’s plan, half of the revenue generated would go toward reducing the federal deficit and inflation.

    Common Defense Climate Justice Organizer Lakiesha Lloyd tells Truthout veterans want to see a portion of the $555 billion clean energy investments go toward workforce development programs and training for veterans and fossil fuel-sector workers in West Virginia — and has told Senator Manchin’s staff as much.

    Lloyd, who lives in Charleston, West Virginia, and served as a military police officer and Army specialist from 2001 to 2010, said she knows firsthand how difficult it is for veterans in West Virginia to transition out of the armed services and into the U.S. workforce: After she was discharged, she and her two children had to move in with her mother because she was unable to find work that would allow her to support her family while paying rent and utilities.

    “Historically here in the state, you only had two choices: It was either going to the mines, or go into the military if you wanted a decent living,” she tells Truthout. Sometimes it was both: When her own grandfather came home from World War II, he went to work in a West Virginia coal mine, she says.

    Now, with the latest United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warning that global greenhouse gas emissions need to peak by 2025 to keep planetary warming to the Paris Agreement limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius, both veterans and coal miners need a pathway to transition, Lloyd says, and the languishing climate provisions of the reconciliation bill could help set their course.

    Common Defense organizers have had at least three climate-focused meetings with Manchin’s staff since the creation of the organization’s climate justice program this year, and while the campaign is still a work in progress, Lloyd says their conversations thus far have been “productive.” Moreover, she says, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has helped energize the discussions, since Manchin has signaled an openness to renewable energy jobs being part of an “all-of-the-above” strategy for energy independence from Russian oil and gas.

    Lloyd, however, expressed concern about the Biden administration’s recent reversals on prior climate commitments, including its announcement of a joint U.S.-European Union energy security deal to increase so-called liquefied natural gas (LNG) extraction and infrastructure buildout to boost fracked gas shipments to Europe, as well as this week’s resumption of onshore oil and gas lease sales on public lands.

    Those moves come as the administration weighs which pro-extraction policies can win over Senator Manchin’s support after he asked the administration for concessions on oil and gas drilling, including the resumption of offshore leasing in the Gulf of Mexico and increased LNG exports.

    Manchin makes nearly $500,000 a year from his family business at a coal waste plant in Grant Town, West Virginia, that, as Truthout previously reported, nearly 400 West Virginia climate activists blockaded this month. He also remains the top congressional recipient of campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry, collecting nearly $743,000 this election cycle.

    Still, Lloyd says, veterans have unique leverage to pressure Manchin toward taking climate action. Common Defense organizers have been highlighting the ways the climate emergency impacts military personnel by fueling domestic climate disasters in the U.S. and by exacerbating wars around the globe — both to which service members are routinely deployed. Veterans are highlighting these realities as they push for workforce development and training for veterans who want to transition out of the military into green jobs.

    Meanwhile, antiwar vets with the organizations Veterans for Peace (VFP) and CODEPINK used Earth Week to highlight how U.S. tax dollars fund both war and environmental destruction. The groups joined Extinction Rebellion NYC, a climate group focused on using civil disobedience to provoke policy change, in organizing a nonviolent direct action in Manhattan’s Financial District on Tax Day, Monday. Putting the connection between militarism and the climate crisis on full display, marchers chanted, “No War, No Warming” while several protesters locked themselves to two 15-foot tripods. At least nine people were arrested.

    In addition to spotlighting how the U.S. funnels more than half of its federal budget to the Pentagon, veterans and environmental activists say the action was also in opposition to the U.S. military’s role as the world’s single-largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels. While the military has accounted for 77 to 80 percent of federal energy use since 2001, it continues to remain exempt from President Biden’s executive order to cut government emissions in order to reach 100 percent clean electricity by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050.

    To make matters worse, President Biden’s Fiscal Year 2023 Pentagon budget blueprint requests a record $813.3 billion in military spending, a $31 billion increase from the current level. The budget proposal, however, fails to include any definitive plans to lower carbon emissions related to national security, combat, intelligence or military training. In fact, the U.S. military fails to even account for or publicly report its overall fuel consumption or greenhouse gas emissions — despite requirements to do so laid out in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2021.

    Research shows the U.S. military produces at least 59 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually — more greenhouse gas emissions than industrialized countries including Sweden, Denmark and Portugal. The fact that the Defense Department doesn’t report its own emissions and has no decarbonization targets is something VFP National President Susan Schnall, who helped organize the Tax Day protest, says her organization wants to change.

    Schnall, who served as a Navy nurse from 1967 to 1969 and was court-martialed for her anti-Vietnam War activities during that time, told Truthout the organization’s relatively new Climate Crisis & Militarism Project is pressuring Congress members to support and co-sponsor House Resolution 767, which would force the Pentagon to monitor, track and report greenhouse gas emissions from all its operations.

    The bill, introduced in the House in November 2021 by Rep. Barbara Lee, also compels the Defense Department to set annual greenhouse gas emission reduction targets for both domestic and foreign operations consistent with the Paris Agreement limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius. It likewise commits the Defense Department to reduce the overall environmental impact of all military activities in accordance with the science-based emission targets set out in the NDAA for Fiscal Year 2022. Representatives Pramila Jayapal, Mondaire Jones, Ro Khanna and Rashida Tlaib are among the resolution’s co-sponsors.

    Schnall tells Truthout H.R. 767 has become even more important after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and President Biden’s announcement Thursday of an additional $800 million in military and weapons aid to the country. The new aid package builds on roughly $2.6 billion in military assistance that Biden has already approved. Even moderate reductions in U.S. military spending, Schnall says, could free up enough resources to meet sustainable development goals and fight the climate crisis.

    Beyond its arms dealing, Schnall and other VFP organizers say it’s imperative that the Defense Department account for the environmental impacts of its nearly 800 U.S. military bases around the world, as well as for the environmental devastation wrought by its use of chemicals like Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS), Agent Orange and depleted uranium, as well as its use of toxic burn pits that have harmed GIs who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another major focus of VFP’s Climate Crisis & Militarism Project is, of course, the environmental and planetary dangers posed by nuclear weapons armaments, she says.

    “Every year we hear that we’re on the edge of climate catastrophe from which there would be no return, and it feels like today we certainly are, both in terms of our war-causing extraction and our extraction-causing wars,” Schnall tells Truthout. “The greed of these major international industries and corporations — I feel like it’s trite to say it’s astounding, but it indicates absolutely no concern at all for the future or for humans, just greed for money and profits.”

    Weapons manufacturers like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics are already cashing in on the conflict in Ukraine, benefiting not only from direct arms transfers to the country but also from the Pentagon’s Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative and the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing program, both of which finance U.S. arms and military training. Arms contractors can expect additional profits as they work to restock depleted Defense Department inventories, which lawmakers dedicated $3.5 billion of its Ukraine spending package to — $1.75 billion above what the president requested.

    Antiwar and GI activists argue that pouring weapons into Ukraine not only closes off prospects for peace, it also continues to accelerate the climate emergency by inflating national military budgets and arms contractors’ bottom lines, reinforcing and expanding a military-industrial complex that is the single biggest institutional driver of the climate emergency.

    Yet U.S. military assistance to Ukraine continues to enjoy support among many progressives, antiwar veterans say — including some within the climate and environmental justice movement. That’s something Ramon Mejia, anti-militarism national organizer at Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, plans to warn against on Saturday as a keynote speaker at the Green New Deal Network’s Earth Week mobilization, Fight For Our Future. Mejia, who is also a member of About Face: Veterans Against the War, served as a corporal in the Marine Corps from 2001 to 2004 and deployed to Iraq in 2003.

    He tells Truthout he hopes to push conservation and environmental justice organizations to take firmer anti-militarist positions on U.S. foreign policy — including positions against additional arms shipments that will prolong the conflict in Ukraine and potentially imperil efforts at diplomacy.

    Environmentalist collaboration with anti-militarist efforts isn’t a given: Mejia points out that some environmentalists are taking approaches that are complicit with militarism. For example, the Sierra Club recently reinstated scheduled trips to Israel after pressure from pro-Israeli organizations. Pro-Palestinian advocates had previously successfully pressed the group to nix the trips, arguing they help to “greenwash Israel’s system of apartheid.”

    “We have to be straight across the board and engage in every which way,” Mejia tells Truthout, referring the environmental movement. “We can’t be hypocritical about it. We can’t be like, picking and choosing when we engage and when we don’t.”

    Instead of supporting weapons shipments, climate justice groups should focus on ways to deepen diplomatic channels and support Ukrainian refugees and those displaced within the country through humanitarian aid, Mejia argues.

    As part of its “No War, No Warming” campaign, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance is joining veterans groups in pressuring members of Congress support H.R. 767 and shrink the overall size of the military, including closing overseas bases and remediating and transitioning the land for community use. The campaign is also pressing lawmakers to reallocate Pentagon, policing and arms funding into life-affirming social spending and community resources, and create policy bans on weapons manufacturing and the production of nuclear weapons. Mejia says the campaign is specifically targeting congressional sponsors of the Green New Deal to drive home the importance of including the military in any plans for a national transition to clean energy.

    The history of the first Earth Day in 1970, in which organizers initially modeled a national, environmentally focused teach-in on similar teach-ins debating the Vietnam War on college campuses across the U.S., Mejia says, underscores the need for the antiwar and environmental movements to come together and lift up the linkages between their struggles.

    “Earth Day is a bridge between movements and a bridge between communities to say that we all inhabit this this world. If we want to leave a better world after we transition, then we have to build movements across struggles,” Mejia says. “The systems that seek to harm us are intersectional, and we have to be an intersectional movement that bridges across the struggles we are fighting, whether they present as imperialism, capitalism or extractivism…. So it’s important that we continue to carry on [Earth Day’s] legacy.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • May 7, 2022: Actions Everywhere To End War In Ukraine

    The war in Ukraine rages on, and the war mentality, promoted by propaganda on all sides, generates ever more devotion to keeping it going, even escalating it, even considering repeating it in Finland or elsewhere based on having “learned” precisely the wrong “lesson.” The bodies pile up. The threat of famine looms over many countries. The risk of nuclear apocalypse grows. The impediments to positive action for the climate are strengthened. Militarization expands.

    We desperately need a global call for a ceasefire and serious negotiations — meaning negotiations that will partially please and displease all sides but end the horror of war, halt the madness of sacrificing more lives in the name those already slaughtered. Basta! Enough is enough. Let’s all turn out on May 7th.

    The post May 7, 2022: Actions Everywhere To End War In Ukraine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Energy, food and and fertiliser: Ukraine war exposes fragility of capitalism

    Energy, food, and fertiliser supplies are all under threat from the war in Ukraine. A new Chatham House report details how the conflict has, and will continue to, impact the global economy. It warns that rising prices in some sectors as a result of the war would have severe implications. The report comes as the pressure to transition to fairer and greener economies mounts.

    The authors warn of supply disruption and soaring prices:

    The conflict in Ukraine has led to immediate and significant logistical disruptions in the energy, food and fertilizer sectors, and to swift and robust responses from Western countries in the form of economic sanctions against Russia. Together, these have prompted rapid worldwide price rises for energy, food and fertilizer products.

    Russian gas

    Sanctions on Russia also contribute to the crisis, with many European countries deeply reliant on Russian fossil fuels. The authors say that even though sanctions are in place, the nature of the global economy means that they have not been applied to their fullest extent:

    Governments have, however, held back on implementing the strongest possible measures – including a full embargo on energy imports – partly due to the challenge of diversifying away from Russian imports and partly in order to maintain leverage in the event of further escalation. In the meantime, Russian gas continues to flow.

    They add that even if “Russian production were restricted”:

    …the desire and the ability to ramp up production to relieve the tightness in the market would prevent further price rises.

    Breadbasket

    Recent investigations by fact checkers seem to confirm that Ukraine remains a key food producer. It has the most arable land in Europe, and rates 3rd for fertile black soil globally. As The Canary has previously reported, the war could impact food security globally. Many major aid agencies source large amounts of grain in the country.

    Various factors are at play. Key ports are blocked or hard to access, while train lines have been sabotaged to prevent the Russian advance.

    The report warns that many agricultural activities will not be able to resume for some time. And that even if farmers “can reach their fields, they are short of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fuel for farm machinery”:

    Many of Ukraine’s most important growing regions – particularly for barley, maize, sunflower seed and wheat – are located in the east and northeast of the country, where the conflict has been most intense.

    The authors estimate 20-30 percent of crops may not be planted or lay unharvested. The threat to food supplies has already hit some countries, with price hikes the result.

    As the report explains:

    Impacts of the conflict on transportation costs are already becoming evident in the US: as demand for wheat pivots from the Black Sea to the US, the costs of exporting grain from the Gulf of Mexico coast have risen to a near eight-year high.

    Fragility

    The war in Ukraine has revealed that global capitalist economies are extremely fragile. Dependence on oil and gas is one key factor, especially at a time when we need to be transitioning to sustainable forms of energy. Supply chains for food, too, are being hit.

    This has implications not just for wealthy nations like the US, but also for international aid to famine-hit regions of the global south. If we needed any more evidence that humanity needs to move towards a more sustainable and equitable world, we can find it in the economics of the Ukraine war.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Rodion Kutsaev, cropped to 770 x 403, licenced under CCO 1.0. 

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Shitlibs Are Foam-Brained Human Livestock: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    The hyperbolic language westerners use to describe fairly normal modern warfare in Ukraine suggests they’ve invested exactly zero thought in what their own governments have been doing in the middle east for the last two decades.

    It’s like, yes, killing, violence and destruction is what war looks like. You’re describing the thing that war is. It’s creepy that you’re only just discovering this now. What did you think your government has been using to conduct its wars this whole time? Dank memes?

    ❖

    Before the Ukraine war I would’ve told you it’s impossible for me to despise shitlibs any more than I already do and impossible for me to have less respect for their foam-brained worldview. But I would have been wrong. Very, very wrong.

    ❖

    If your understanding of world events doesn’t account for the easily quantifiable fact that the US is the most tyrannical regime on earth by a massive margin, nothing else in your understanding of world events will be fact-based.

    There’s only one government that is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases, continually working to destroy any nation who disobeys it, and has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions. It isn’t Russia. It isn’t China. One must account for this reality.

    That’s tyranny. That is the thing that tyranny is. If it isn’t tyranny to bully and brutalize the entire world into obedience by any degree of violence necessary, then tyranny is a meaningless concept. The US just happens to export the majority of its tyranny outside its borders.

    ❖

    ❖

    The fact that CNN+ couldn’t even get 10k people to pay for its content shows why Silicon Valley needs to tilt its algorithms to boost mainstream media content while hiding indie media: people only look at that bullshit when they’re forced to. If it wasn’t for Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation outlets like CNN would have died years ago.

    ❖

    Journalism would greatly benefit from its practitioners becoming far more disdainful of the approval of their peers, rather than seeking that approval like crack fiends. In journalism when you were respected by all the other journos it used to mean you were probably doing something right; now it’s a sure sign you are doing something wrong.

    ❖

    Can’t shake how weird it is that we’re hurtling toward nuclear annihilation and we’re still all babbling about Will Smith and face masks.

    ❖

    Future generations, if there are future generations, will look back in horror at the fact that we just let billionaire corporations not only profit from war but actively lobby for more war via think tanks, campaign funding and other influence ops.

    ❖

    The fact that Australians are being pummeled with war propaganda about China combined with the freakishly hawkish alarmism about the Chinese security pact with the Solomon Islands should make all conscious Australians a bit nervous. If you don’t think the US empire would happily sacrifice Australia in a proxy war against a major rival, I suggest you take a closer look at Ukraine. Will Australians be sending our kids off to die fighting China over the Solomon Islands, or will it be over Taiwan? Find out in the next thrilling episode of Empire Management!

    It doesn’t need to be this way. There’s no legitimate reason major powers need to compete with each other and wave armageddon weapons at each other and try to dominate each other. We can just all collaborate toward the greater good of everyone. This is all absolute madness.

    ❖

    I do hope those of you who hate China but started following my work because you like my Russia/Ukraine takes are not under the illusion that we are friends. We are enemies and I deeply despise you. When things heat up with Beijing I’m going to spend every waking hour trying to make you rage-cry.

    ❖

    When the ecosystem is dying because of economic systems which depend on infinite growth on a finite world, your choices are either (A) abandon those systems or (B) pray that sociopathic oligarchs somehow get us into space in the next few years. Guess which one we’re going with.

    ❖

    ❖

    Humanity’s major problems arise from the impulse to control. Ecocide arises from the impulse to control nature. Empire arises from the impulse to control civilizations. Oligarchy arises from the impulse to control political outcomes. Ego arises from the impulse to control life.

    A healthy humanity would be free of the impulse to manipulate and exert control: over life, over people, over nature. But it would be so different from the humanity we know now that falling into that way of functioning would be a kind of death. And it would feel like a death.

    Sometimes it seems like people want the world to end, want humanity to go extinct. I’d suggest that this may be a confused expression of an intuited truth: that there’s something good on the other side of ending all this. But it’s the end of our dysfunction, not of our species.

    _______________________

    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. 

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Indian Air Force keeps Brahmos-A on high readiness

    The Indian Air Force (IAF) continues to validate the capabilities of the Brahmos-A (air-launched) supersonic cruise missile, claiming a successful live-fire test of the missile from an IAF Sukhoi Su-30 MKI multirole combat aircraft off the eastern coast on 19 April. “The missile achieved a direct hit on the target, a decommissioned Indian Navy ship,” […]

    The post Indian Air Force keeps Brahmos-A on high readiness appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Russia, Ukraine, and the USA: Trapped in a Cultural Script

    Compassion for Ukrainians victimized by Russia’s violence demonstrates that human hearts care. However, beneath the visible current of compassion there’s an alarming, dangerous dynamic at play.

    What’s hair-raising about this crisis is not only the violence but the fact that US political leaders and media makers are not recognizing positive and negative motivations on both sides of conflict. Instead, they’re deliberately creating an inaccurate good vs. evil storyline, a storyline that ignites unwarranted, dangerous feelings of self-righteous hatred against Russia.

    The US perpetually perceives its role in conflict as that of a heroic rescuer or innocent victim upholding humanity and freedom against evil persecutors. However, 245 years of US history reveal that this perception is fiction, a psychological construct. Psychological analysts Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward called the persecutor, victim, and rescuer scenario a “cultural script.”

    Examination of 245 years of US history reveals that the perception of always being a good guy fighting evil is fiction, a psychological construct. In fact, good and bad, truths and lies invariably exist on both sides of conflict.

    Nonetheless, to deceive others and perhaps themselves, US policymakers’ pattern of relentlessly legitimating their violence, deadly sanctions, and foreign coups by denying the validity of enemy grievances, hiding their own greed and aggressive motives, refusing to cooperatively negotiate, concealing enemy negotiation offers, fabricating lies, omitting significant facts, using false pretexts, and overlooking the disastrous results of a pseudo-religious faith in the problem-solving magic of weapons is so predictable that it’s hard to decide whether it’s more enraging, pathetic, boring, or nauseating.

    Consider one persecutor-victim-hero drama that began in 1979. President Jimmy Carter, livid over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, claimed it was “the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War.” Actually, Afghanistan’s Marxist government, which had been trying to reform the extreme, unjust inequalities of wealth and land ownership in Afghanistan, had requested Soviet assistance against insurgents, but the USSR, the “evil persecutor,” didn’t want to send troops. When the Soviets finally complied, they explained it was because of secret US involvement in Afghanistan. The world called the Soviets liars.

    Two decades later US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted that Carter had begun aiding the insurgent mujahideen—the “heroes”—six months prior to the entry of the persecutors, the Soviets. A delighted Brzezinski knew this could provoke the Soviets to invade and get mired in their own “Vietnam.” Convinced of Soviet evil and mujahideen goodness, US policymakers ignored that the mujahideen skinned Soviet POWs alive.

    And now we’re to believe that weapon shipments and sanctions are needed for the US to help rescue Ukraine from “evil” Russia.

    The first step in convincing the world to believe the script’s good vs. evil dynamics is to depict Russia as the persecutor who’s motivated, not by fear, but by evil. No problem! Simply label Putin as paranoid and discount Russian fears as ludicrous: NATO’s expansion into Slavic lands, NATO—Ukraine military collaboration, US missile bases in eastern Europe, anti-Russian policies and prejudice in Ukraine, neo-Nazi violence in Ukraine, neo-Nazis and ultranationalists in Ukraine’s police, military, and government, the manipulation of Ukraine by Western profit-seekers, and Western economic and political conquest—likely of Russia itself.

    The next step is to paint the US as a heroic rescuer motivated purely by integrity and compassion. Simple! Muffle up all greed-related motives for antagonizing Russia: US weapon industry profits, NATO’s agenda for bases on the Black Sea, IMF goals, ExxonMobil’s coveting Black Sea fossil fuel deposits, and Biden’s connections with Ukraine’s largest natural gas corporation. Then, conceal US hopes to dominate the global energy trade, maintain the dollar as the international energy trade currency, displace Russia from Europe’s gas market, shut down Nord Stream 2, and export fracked liquefied natural gas to Europe via Ukraine.

    Also ignored are the biases and aims of those social and business circles who are forever dictating US foreign policy according to their pecuniary priorities and uncooperative, control-oriented habits of international relations. President Biden’s administration, for example, includes many members of the Alliance for Securing Democracy—with an advisory board that combines neoconservatives with liberal hawks, Albright Stonebridge Group—with its interest in Russian business acquisitions, and the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).

    CNAS, whose donors include multiple weapon corporations, the European Union, US Department of Defense, Finland’s Defense Ministry, Amazon, Google, and ExxonMobil, was formerly led by President Biden’s current Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, whose husband, Robert Kagan, co-founded the conquest-seeking neoconservative Project for the New American Century. Yet we’re to assume that donors’ priorities aren’t skewing foreign policy in dysfunctional ways.

    With Russia’s fears dismissed and US greed disguised, the good vs. evil script is further strengthened by permitting only shallow public analysis. For example, how do we know that Russia wasn’t deliberately provoked so that the ulterior goals of certain American social circles could be advanced under the guise of nobly responding to Russia’s aggression? The topic isn’t permitted into discussion.

    Another topic given quarter-inch deep analysis is Biden’s seemingly fair-minded declaration that each nation has the right to choose alliances. It’s an unusual statement coming from a “you’re with us or against us” nation that has punished or ousted national leaders who refused to sever alliances with the USSR or Cuba.

    Nuland’s leaked tapes from 2014 (which mention Biden and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan) and a US record of instigating coups indicate that Americans were likely involved in promoting the bloody 2014 coup of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Yanukovich to install anti-Russian leadership agreeable to European Union and NATO ties. So does Biden’s “right to choose alliances” proclamation apply to nations before a US-approved coup or only afterwards?

    Another enraging example of shallow analysis is the opinion falsely parroted by US “experts” that Putin’s 2021 essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russia and Ukraine,” lays bare Putin’s imperialist vision for Ukraine and his lack of recognition of Ukraine’s sovereignty and borders. Whether the experts are deliberately lying or lack reading comprehension skills, their claim is false and, given the self-righteous hatred their claim generates, utterly irresponsible.

    Nowhere in the essay does Putin speak of conquering Ukraine or refusing to recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty. Putin specifically describes the relationship between the US and Canada as the type of relationship Russia seeks with Ukraine. When he speaks of “unity,” he’s not speaking of dissolving Ukraine’s political sovereignty. He’s speaking of cultural and historical ties between the two nations.

    Putin’s description of the Bolsheviks’ creation of borders never suggests that he’s doing away with them. It’s possible he’s implying that Donetsk, Lugansk, and certainly Crimea have large Russian populations and do not necessarily belong in Ukraine, especially if Ukraine’s post-coup government is harboring neo-Nazism and installing language and indigenous people policies of a deliberate anti-Russian nature. Note that Ukraine and the US are the only two nations in the UN to vote against the recent resolution to condemn the glorification of Nazism.

    Of course, US policymakers are not uncomfortable with Nazism and, following WWII, employed one thousand Nazis to spy on Russia. And it was US banks and companies such as Ford, General Motors, and du Pont that opportunistically helped fund Hitler’s war arsenal. Even in 1973, the US worked with pro-Nazi collaborators and US corporate funds to plant protests, propaganda, economic sabotage, and violence that climaxed in the CIA’ s horrific 9/11/73 coup of Chile’s Salvador Allende. It’s not surprising that in 2014, Russian news sources claimed that US private military contractors were training right-wing Ukrainian extremists.

    In his essay, Putin clearly states his wish to negotiate with Ukraine, but not with Ukrainian leaders who are mere representatives of Western profiteers eager to use Ukraine’s land and resources for their own benefit. But, of course, US commentators either ignore the statement or, forgetting US history, discount Putin’s fears of Western profiteering as conspiracy theory.

    Double standards also fortify the script. Russia’s invasions are motivated by belligerence, never legitimate fears, while US invasions are motivated by legitimate fears, never belligerence. Same behavior, different judgment.

    Headlines scream of savage Russian war crimes. TV reporters interview sobbing Ukrainians. Yet US, NATO, and Ukrainian war crimes are barely publicized, their victims ignored. Same actions, different judgment. To learn about US war crimes and Afghan and Iraqi suffering, you’ve got to read investigative reporters’ books.

    American groupthink, inflated by its self-righteous role in the script, and seeming to borrow from middle-school social dynamics, jeers and smears President Putin’s every word as absurd and staged. But we’re to trust Biden as honest, unstaged, unconcealing. No proof is needed. Just faith in the script.

    Putin’s wish to protect Donetsk and Lugansk, self-declared republics since 2014, and end Kiev’s 8-year war that has killed 14,000 is automatically mocked as false pretext for conquest. Yet US wishes to protect Ukraine from Russia are trusted as caring, without ulterior design. The role of private military contractors, NATO, and the US in escalating civil war and provoking Russia by arming Ukraine with billions in weapons since 2014 rather than committing to non-violently resolve Ukraine’s internal conflict remains shamefully unassessed.

    The consequences of belief in this drama? The US habitually uses exaggerated fears of evil enemies as false justification for colossal military budgets, NATO expansion, more military bases, troops, weapons, and nukes—all of which pour gasoline on the world tinderbox of tension, drain desperately-needed funding, and fail to resolve conflict.

    If evil is equated with enemies, it becomes deceptively simple for “heroes” to champion goodness: bomb enemies into submission, impose deadly sanctions, strangulate funding, send weapons, engineer coups. But none of these methods nurture goodness. The truth is, those convinced they’re fighting evil are frequently blinded to the immorality and injustice of their own actions against people who aren’t so evil after all.

    The good vs. evil script is also unjust because it enables the “innocent” to get away with all they’ve done to exacerbate conflict. The script can even enable the “innocent,” including Biden administration neoconservatives and liberal hawks, to slickly seize power, resources, and markets from those deemed evil.

    US leaders’ promotion of this good vs. evil storyline appears compassionate, but it isn’t against killing. It isn’t about justice. It’s about pushing a script that provides pretext on the part of those proclaiming their own goodness to inflict injustice and violence against Russia and Putin, already verbally crucified by a mob of liars. It’s about solidifying our allegiance to US policymakers’ decisions about whom we should kill and whom we should cry for. Yet policymakers step beyond Constitutional grounds when they use their power to turn our hearts on and off, to bait us to hate some and love others to serve their greed for Mid-Eastern, Ukrainian, and Russian wealth.

    We’ve got to scrap the script and view conflict impartially. We deserve accurate, sophisticated information about conflict, not propaganda that teaches us to hate. We need full truth to help us ground irrational fears of bad guys, cure the sickness of greed, and offer caring and friendship, not just for those falsely deemed innocent and heroic, but for all of us, with 360◦ of empathy, all the way around the world.

    • View all six videos here:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuNEw9-1OIk-CwU-5vAElcg

    • Read the entire essay at Countercurrents

    • This article was first published at TRANSCEND Media Service

    The post Russia, Ukraine, and the USA: Trapped in a Cultural Script first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The AmericaNATOstani Sacrifice of Ukraine; or, Alternatively “Saving Private Ukraine”

    Don’t Poke the Bear!

    — ancient Chinese or Indian or Iranian or Tralfamadorean proverb

    To begin, a small observation:  Instead of bailing out cash-strapped Weapons Dealers with sudden arms sales to Ukraine, perhaps we should send a team of our best Comedy Writers to its embattled President, Volodymyr Zelensky, whose “No-Fly Zone” jokes are not only not landing, but quite literally bombing upon the runways they are taxiing, and totally in vain?  In other words, and contrary to Zelensky’s scripted joke early on, the Ukrainian comedian-president does need a “lift”– never mind the “ammunition.”

    For the sake of clarity, the “AmericaNATOstani” in the title of this piece is an adaptation of Pepe Escobar’s conceptually fun coinage “NATOstan,” which describes quite accurately that antiquated Cold War monster in the form it deserves.  However:  What of the sense of humor of Zelensky’s apparent nemesis, Russian president Vladimir Putin, in this “Tale of Two Vlads”?

    Well, Mr Putin made a wry reference to the U$A’s 2003 Iraq-Attack-Two campaign when he asserted that “De-Nazification” was a primary goal of his predictably unlikely — or unpredictably likely — invasion of neighboring Ukraine.  “De-Ba’athification” in Iraq, of course, was a major Tony-Bush 2 talking point during that particular illegal invasion of a sovereign nation.  In another slightly comical rhetorical move, Putin called his invasion of Ukraine a “Special Military Operation,” weirdly echoing the AmericaNATOstanis who euphemism’d their 2011 Regime Change operation in Libya as a “Humanitarian Intervention.”  So, if his current gig doesn’t work out, maybe Putin’s got a back-up career in Stand-Up?

    All jokes aside, the current “undeclared” War in Ukraine is bizarre and surreal as it is obviously brutal, no matter which Propaganda Media outlets you favor.  People are dying, and being grievously wounded, while “cutting-edge” Weapons Systems are being tested.  To the extent that Ukraine is a de facto NATO state, Russia is at war with NATO, which also means the United States.

    From a Western media propaganda perspective, one fact sticks out:  only Russian soldiers, including their Generals, and Ukrainian civilians are getting killed.  The Ukrainian military, often derided despite being NATO-trained, have suffered, apparently, next to “zero” actual casualties during this egregious Russian assault.  How can this be?  Are the Ukrainians even fighting?  Or, put another way:  Who is fighting for the Ukrainians?

    One answer to this conundrum can be gleaned from the March 13 attack upon a forward-operating NATO base outside of Lviv, in western Ukraine, quite close to the Polish border.  Western sources immediately reported that the base had been flattened by a barrage of Russian cruise missiles, with uncharacteristically instant casualty counts.  What to make of that?

    Much has been made of the neo-Nazi elements in the current Ukrainian regime, although the Corporate Western Press has been at great pains to downplay it, despite FaceBook now proudly promoting neo-Nazi merch over their Internet waves, like “Swastikas are cool if it’s pro-Ukraine, dude!”  So:  What is Ukraine?

    Once upon a time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (no qualifications for the job, by the way) declared that the United States does not recognize “spheres of influence,” which in practical-speak meant that the Entire World was the United States “sphere of influence,” so you local “deploreables” just gotta abide. Clinton, if I recall somewhat correctly, was referring specifically to the neighborhood of Russia, and letting Putin know that the Almighty United States of America would not recognize Russia as any kind of equivalent sovereign power.  As we know now, Hillary was only speaking for the Banks, not a country like the United States, which has become primarily a “Front Company” for certain stakeholders.

    The last paragraph here gets quite a bit ahead of the argument, of course, even though the “stakes” in this Game have clearly been plotted-out well before. Well, the “best laid plans” oft come to nought.  Putin’s thrown a bit of a wrench into the Monkey Works with his invasion of Ukraine, and the geo-political fact that the U$A’s most staunch Middle Eastern allies, or Saudi’Israeli’a, are so far quite indifferent, indicates that Mr Putin’s improbable punch is landing, so to speak.  President Joe Malarkey’s mumble-sense about “Democrashy” — not so much.

    From what I have gathered, the consensus is this:  Ivy League nitwits in charge of US Policy need to go, get real jobs somewhere that have zero influence on American policy, foreign or Other.  These privileged idiots have destroyed the “American Brand,” and the Brand Prayed On, Tra-la-la, to the demonstrable detriment of a better situation for the rest of us.  In other words, “Saving Private Ukraine” won’t save us from the collapse of the U$ Dollar, and that’s the real “Chernobyl!” in play behind Putin’s wantonly selective destruction of neighboring Ukraine.  Putin kind of knows it, I think.  Hopefully, Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time is not far from his bedstead; some Irony, meaning Levity, is needed to lead us all out of this potentially Thermo-Nuclear nonsense. Biden’s doddering, obviously, so a figure like Putin needs to stand up, whatever we all think he’s horribly doing in Ukraine (by the way, it’s the AmericaNATOstanis who set the trap in Ukraine, like a ritual sacrifice, as if the sacrifice of Ukrainian People would save or exculpate them from their own corruption, etc…).  In case you don’t know it by now, “Don’t Look Up!”, because it’s your old Dr Strangelove…

    The post The AmericaNATOstani Sacrifice of Ukraine; or, Alternatively “Saving Private Ukraine” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Ukraine Drives America’s Cynical Concern for Human Rights in India

    The real worry for the Biden administration is a potential Indian pivot away from Washington toward Moscow.

    This post was originally published on Real Progressives.

  • Western-Led Globalization Might End, But The New Globalization Might Have An Eastern Face

    An article written by authors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge for Bloomberg on March 24 sounded the alarm to announce the end of “the second great age of globalization.” The Western trade war and sanctions against China that predated the pandemic have now been joined by the stiff Western sanctions imposed against Russia after it invaded Ukraine. These sanctions are like an iron curtain being built by the United States and its allies around Eurasia. But according to Micklethwait and Wooldridge, this iron curtain will not only descend around China and Russia but will also have far-reaching consequences across the world.

    The post Western-Led Globalization Might End, But The New Globalization Might Have An Eastern Face appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • International Solidarity With Ukrainians Should Extend Beyond Aid and Refugees

    We go to Ukraine, where Russia continues its assault along a 300-mile frontline in the eastern region. This comes as the U.S. and Western allies promise more weapons for Ukrainian defenses, prompting worry of escalation as Russian President Vladimir Putin abandons negotiations for a ceasefire agreement. We speak with Ukrainian political scientist and historian Denis Pilash, who is a democratic socialist, part of Sotsialnyi Rukh, and is also involved in humanitarian aid efforts in western Ukraine that he calls “the backbone of Ukrainian resistance.” He says Putin’s imperialist military aggressions should be seen as analogous to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and other nations.

    TRANSCRIPT

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

    AMY GOODMAN: Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered a blockade of a massive steel complex in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, where thousands of Ukrainians are holed up, including civilians and fighters with two regiments, the 36th Marine Brigade and the far-right Azov Brigade. Russia had been considering storming the complex but for now has opted to blockade it. This comes as Putin claims Russia has, quote, “liberated” the rest of the city, which has been devastated by weeks of Russian attacks.

    In eastern Ukraine, fighting is continuing along a 300-mile frontline. The governor of Luhansk says Russia now controls 80% of the region. Luhansk is one of two regions that make up the Donbas in eastern Ukraine.

    The United States and its allies are continuing to funnel weapons to Ukraine. On Wednesday, President Biden met with U.S. military leaders at the White House.

    PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Weapons and ammunition are flowing in daily. And we’re seeing just how vital our alliances and partnerships are around the world.

    AMY GOODMAN: In other developments, the prime ministers of Spain and Denmark are in Kyiv today for talks with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch has released a report accusing Russia of committing war crimes in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv. The group said it found extensive evidence of summary executions, enforced disappearances and torture.

    We’re joined now by Denis Pilash, a Ukrainian political scientist and historian, member of the Ukrainian democratic socialist organization Sotsialnyi Rukh, or the Social Movement. He’s also an editor at Commons: Journal of Social Criticism.

    Welcome to Democracy Now!, Denis. It’s great to have you with us. If you can start off by talking about the resistance in Ukraine? We hear a lot about the military resistance, but if you can talk about, overall, the kind of resistance that doesn’t get coverage?

    DENIS PILASH: Really, Ukraine, it stands not due just to the military resistance, though hundreds of thousands of people have volunteered to either the Armed Forces or the territorial defense units, but also due to millions of people who are engaged in just these humanitarian efforts and keeping the things running. For instance, the essential workers, the railroad workers, the employees of the state railway company, they did a really heroic job by evacuating millions of people fleeing from the most dangerous regions to the safer ones. And actually dozens of them have been killed. And many were killed while performing their duties. The same applies to healthcare workers, nurses and doctors, who are risking their own lives to save others. And again, Russia is targeting hospitals, as well, and so, many of these people are killed, as well. And, in general, we have these spontaneous networks of nonhierarchical solidarity that emerged on the ground in different regions and cities throughout the country, who helped the people who had to relocate, and also who helped to distribute the humanitarian aid, medicine, food and so on. And altogether, this constitutes the backbone of the Ukrainian resistance.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Denis, I want to ask about the, just yesterday — we reported it in our introduction — the release of this Human Rights Watch report on war crimes in Bucha. You had said in March, a month ago, that Putin’s war crimes are following in the footsteps of the war crimes committed by governments like the United States. But since these massacres in Bucha, you’ve said the correct analogy now might be to what Indonesia did following the occupation of East Timor or what Pakistan did in — West Pakistan did to East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in the war in 1971. Could you elaborate on that? What do you see as the war changed, how the war has changed since March, and why you think these situations are now more accurate?

    DENIS PILASH: I think that it’s really the same crime of military aggressions that was done by numerous other governments and other imperialists, as well. And in this case, Putin’s war in Ukraine or his wars in Chechnya were — or Yeltsin’s war in Chechnya, were in the same line with, say, Bush and Blair and their cronies attacking Iraq. But the intensity of these atrocities that were revealed with these horrible pictures from Bucha, Irpin, Borodyanka and other Kyiv suburbs, they show us all scale of atrocities, starting from sexual violence, from torture and to mass executions. And here we see also some kind of ideological explanation by some of the — in the Russian propaganda machine that Ukraine, in a way, has to be cleansed.

    And this leads us to these analogies not just with, many have recalled, Srebrenica and what happened in the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the ’90s, but really to what happened, for instance, when pro-American dictator Suharto occupied East Timor and unleashed acts of genocide against the local population in the 1970s. So, we see that in some places the reality of this occupation is so brutal that it leads to a mass obliteration of human lives.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: And so, Denis, do you support the continued supply of weapons to Ukraine, which is exponentially increasing now, despite the fact that many say supplying these weapons will only prolong the war?

    DENIS PILASH: You see, if, like, making analogies, so maybe supplying Soviet and Chinese weapons to Vietnam, they also prolonged the resistance of the Vietnamese, and thus they prolonged the war, but it was still a unilateral aggression done by an imperialist power — in that case, the U.S.; in this case, Putin’s Russia. And just in order to preserve human lives that are lost in all these airstrikes and shellings, because civilians are dying massively throughout country, and, actually, no place in the country can be really safe, as objects, including civilian objects, including schools and hospitals, have been hit in many parts. So, for instance, having anti-aircraft weaponry, it really preserves these people who are hiding in their basements, in their apartments and so on.

    But in a way, these supplies — we also have to remember that Russia also used to be supplied with Western weapons, from Germany, France and from other countries, and that even now it’s still fueled by these payments for the Russian oil and gas. So, it can be said that there are more German parts in Russian tanks than American munition in Ukrainian arms.

    But, in general, we need to oversee that this military assistance that is needed by the Ukrainian resistance, that it will go to Ukrainians, and it’s not just used as a pretext for this, you know, increasing of military-industrial complexes in the other Western countries, because no one is gaining from more militarized Germany or U.S. It’s really up to the people on the ground, up to the people in the Ukrainian resistance, who need this, not the interests of these companies that have to be preserved.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, Denis Pilash, let me ask you about the Azov Battalion, because the U.S. has a rule that weapons to Ukraine can’t go to them, but right now with the massive influx of weapons, there’s no way that they can be traced to where. You have been a fierce critic of the far right in Ukraine. What are your thoughts on this? And also a fierce critic of the expansion of NATO, and now you have Sweden, you have Finland saying they want to join NATO, although it looks like one of the reasons for this invasion, Ukraine being a part of NATO, was actually not a possibility for years to come.

    DENIS PILASH: It was really just a pretext. It was brought along by the Russian propaganda. And actually, I think that the main promoter of NATO was Vladimir Putin himself, who actually pushed — and these were the words, for instance, of Ilya Ponomarev, the only MP in the Russian parliament who voted against annexation of Crimea, that this will lead to pushing Ukraine in the arms of NATO. And now he’s doing the same with Finland and Sweden.

    And regarding the Azov, that is now not a battalion for seven years but a regiment in the National Guard of Ukraine, well, it’s just one unit in the general resistance, that now I think it’s really up to half a million people who are engaged either in the army or in these territorial defense units. And most of it are now really blockaded in the Mariupol, a city that has — living through a really brutal siege. And maybe the atrocities there, when they are revealed, maybe they will compare to those in Kyiv Oblast. So, I think that, in reality, now this group, it constitutes a tiny fraction in the general Ukrainian military resistance. And I don’t think that it’s so important, both in terms of, like, percentage compared with the rest of the military and the National Guard and so on, neither in the context of its political influence, because, again, the far right in Ukraine never was really popular electorally, and it never had a mass social base for it.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Denis, I’d like you to elaborate on a point you made about this in another recent interview. On the Azov regiment, you said that, quote, “Just as our understanding of the corruption of Abbas administration and the far-right nature of Hamas … shouldn’t be an obstacle to hearing the plight of the [Palestinians],” so should the presence of the right wing in Ukraine not be a way of not listening to the plight of the Ukrainians. Could you elaborate on that, how you see the two situations as at all analogous?

    DENIS PILASH: I think that any analogy is — well, they can be still very far away, but the core of both situations is that you need to really address the people from below, the grassroots. You need to hear the plight of men and women who are suffering and who are struggling, in both cases. And actually, using all this, you know, invoking the problems that exist in every context, it’s just a pretext for remaining — you know, trying to remain neutral. But as the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, when you are neutral in a conflict between an oppressor and an oppressed, you are actually playing on the side of the oppressor.

    So, and here, I think that so much attention has been attributed to the far right in Ukraine. And actually we lost also the far right on the other side of the war, and actually we lost the moment when — like, I can address the Russian sociologist Greg Yudin, who shows how the Russian regime itself became more and more a fascist side, so it was becoming an open far-right dictatorship. And this war, it’s a massive step in not just stirring up all these nationalist feelings throughout Eastern Europe in other countries, but, first of all, it was boosting the ultranationalist sentiment in Russia, and it was boosting the repressive apparatus in Russia. And it was suppressing any kind of discontent and actually almost wiping out the antiwar protests.

    So, again, the big problem here is that we have an imperialist power that is now run by a far-right regime, not just in terms of its ideology, invoking Ivan Ilyin and other fascist thinkers, but in terms of its praxis, what it has already done not just in Ukraine but in many other places in the post-Soviet space, which it regards, as, for instance, U.S. does towards the Latin American region, that it’s its backyard, and it’s entitled to do whatever it wants. It does the same to the neighboring countries in the case of Russia.

    AMY GOODMAN: Denis Pilash, you have been fiercely critical of the role Russian oligarchs have played, I mean, back to 2014, Russia’s annexation of Crimea. But you’ve also talked about the involvement of the Ukrainian elite. If you can talk about who they are and their significance today, and if your views have changed?

    DENIS PILASH: Well, actually, the Russian and Ukrainian elites, the oligarchic capitalist class, they came from the same source, so they were result of this primitive accumulation of capital in the ’90s, the people who grabbed, in a mostly criminal manner, the riches of the countries and who actually devastated their own citizens to become part of the global capitalist class, of the global ruling class. I think the slight difference is, obviously, that in Russia the presence of more these siloviki, these security services people, and also more bureaucratic layers, it’s stronger, but it’s still preserving the interests of Russian big capital.

    And in case of Ukraine, you have a number of these competing oligarchs that tried not just to control the economy but also to influence and control the political decisions in the country, and who are still playing the same and who also have shown their contempt towards their own citizens, not just by many of them had fled — like, prior of the invasion, they just left Ukraine — but they continue this looting of the country, and they try to store, as the Russian colleagues, to store what was stolen from their people in tax havens. And this is why, when we speak about, for instance, seizing the assets of oligarchs, be it Russian or Ukrainians, we also need to address the issue of this offshore capitalism of the tax havens, where the majority of these oligarchic elites, they used to use them to prevent not just paying taxes but also to prevent being — to see the ways how they were exploiting the countries.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Denis, could you explain? Do you think this oligarchic class in either Ukraine or Russia is benefiting from this war? And who are the beneficiaries of this war, as you see it?

    DENIS PILASH: Well, actually, this war has gotten so irrational that it seems that the gains that can be won by some in the elite, they are really nothing compared to the destruction that is brought on. And actually, I think it really transcended beyond, like, real rationale, some real rational motivation. But, actually, in any case of war, or other harsh situation, it’s like the shock doctrine. Yes, the ruling class, it grabs this opportunity to curtail the rights and freedoms of the masses as much as they can, and also to make their power stronger. So, obviously, it was the case with Russia. Then Russia — Russian, this vertical of power, it become even more centralized and autocratic. And these people who are in power for — like Putin and his cronies being in power for 20 years and being unchecked and having no feedback and no democratic procedures from below.

    And in Ukraine, we also see that, for instance, our neoliberal MPs, just today, they tried to pass a law that will make easier to lay off workers, to curtail their labor rights. So, the same people who are now essential for the defense of Ukraine, their rights have been attacked and are being attacked by the elites, who use the situation of the war maybe for reducing the space of the rights of workers and of unions. So, it’s the case, I think, in almost any war that we see today. This one is no exception.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Denis, finally, what do you see as a possible conclusion of this war? What kinds of concessions would Ukraine have to make? Are those either likely or desirable? How will this end?

    DENIS PILASH: It’s hard to predict. And, actually, another point for having armaments to Ukraine is to make this analogy with the people who are involved in trade unions organizing. They know that to negotiate with the boss, who is stronger than you, you also need to have some power on your side. And it seems now that Russia is still pushing for some kind of — for having the opportunity to grab a bigger chunk of Ukraine, and probably to grab a bigger part of eastern Ukraine. And that’s why it isn’t at this point actually willing to have a, like, clear and equal negotiation with the Ukrainian side. And this is why we so desperately need to have Russia on the table, to sit and to really negotiate a real ceasefire, and not what was done, like, previously, when even opening humanitarian corridors usually meant that they are endangered by Russian shellings and Russian fire.

    But we have also seen that Russia has been — the Russian military has been quite inefficient in many ways, and their first expectations of that they will have a very smooth blitzkrieg, it failed. They failed. And now they are still going to present some kind of victory to their population and for the propaganda, as well.

    But it seems that, really, there are many possible outcomes. And some of them are really terrible. But with having enough international solidarity, that means also pushing through a broader region of what has to be done to help Ukraine. It’s not just humanitarian or military aid or helping the refugees. It’s also the issue of cancellation of Ukrainian external debt. It’s the issue of preserving a framework for the rebuilding, the recovery of the country in a more socially just and inclusive, conclusive way. It also means to envision a ecosocialist alternative to the existing neoliberal capitalism, that will exclude such fossil fuel autocratic empires as modern Russia or modern Saudi Arabia, as it is waging equally criminal war in Yemen, are, and also to really democratize the international order, not to resort to this playing of big, grand powers that views the world as just some playground for a redistributing of the spheres of influence, but to really give voice and to empower the smaller countries and their people to really stop this domination of big imperialist powers, like the U.S., Russia, China, and you can continue the list. So, it’s really to — we need a more complex vision for the future in order to — not just to stop this war, but to prevent further ones.

    AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you, Denis Pilash, for joining us, Ukrainian political scientist —

    DENIS PILASH: Thank you so much.

    AMY GOODMAN: — historian, member of the Ukrainian democratic socialist organization, translated into English, the Social Movement, a leftist party created by the working people of Ukraine, also an editor of Commons: Journal of Social Criticism, speaking to us from western Ukraine.

    Next up, we speak with Tony Wood, author of Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ukrainian Officials Call for Humanitarian Corridor in Last Mariupol Holdout

    Ukrainian officials made urgent appeals Thursday for a humanitarian corridor to allow around 1,000 trapped civilians, including children, to safely escape Mariupol as Russian forces surrounded a steel plant that is believed to be Ukraine’s final holdout in the strategic port city.

    Declaring that his forces have secured the “liberation” of Mariupol — where Ukrainian officials say at least 20,000 people have been killed — Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered troops not to storm the steel plant but to “block it off so that a fly can’t get in.”

    Around 2,000 Ukrainian fighters remain holed up in the Azovstal metallurgical plant along with civilians, and the fighters have rejected Russia’s calls for a complete surrender. Mariupol’s mayor, Vadym Boychenko, has accused Russia of committing “war crimes” and “genocide” in its efforts to seize control of the city.

    Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, called on Russian forces to allow the establishment of a humanitarian corridor to let civilians and wounded soldiers escape the plant.

    “There are now about 1,000 civilians and 500 wounded soldiers. They all need to be removed from Azovstal today,” said Vereshchuk. “I call on world leaders and the international community to focus their efforts on Azovstal now… This is a key point and a key moment for the humanitarian effort.”

    Late Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he would be willing to negotiate the exchange of Russian prisoners of war for Ukrainian civilians trapped in Mariupol, much of which has been reduced to rubble by near-constant Russian bombardment. Attempts to establish ceasefires in Mariupol have repeatedly collapsed, making it difficult to evacuate civilians and deliver humanitarian aid to the besieged city.

    Zelenskyy said the Russian side has not agreed to the proposed exchange.

    “The situation in Mariupol is deteriorating,” Zelenskyy warned. “As far as I know, there are about a thousand civilians behind our guys in Mariupol, including children and women.”

    “We are ready for the sake of our people — both military and civilian — for any format of exchange,” Zelenskyy added. “And whether I like it or not, in the course of the remaining three years that the people have given me, I am ready to hold a dialogue with the president of Russia on the end of the war.”

    As the Associated Press noted Thursday, the “scale of suffering” in Mariupol “has made it a worldwide focal point, and its definitive fall would deprive Ukraine of a vital port, complete a land bridge between Russia and the Crimean Peninsula, and free up Russian troops to move elsewhere in the Donbas.”

    Diplomatic talks to end Russia’s weeks-long war have been ongoing for weeks but have yet to produce a breakthrough as Moscow ramps up its assault on eastern Ukraine. Russia’s delegation has reportedly sent its Ukrainian counterpart a new “draft document” outlining Moscow’s demands, but it’s not clear how the document differs from previous proposals or whether Ukraine will find it acceptable.

    Earlier this week, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres sent separate letters to Zelenskyy and Putin requesting meetings with the two leaders in their respective capitals, an effort aimed at advancing peace talks. Zelenskyy has also offered to meet with Putin directly, but the Russian president has not accepted.

    More than 5 million people have fled Ukraine in the nearly two months since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, according to the U.N., and millions more have been internally displaced.

    Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesperson for Guterres, said Wednesday that “at this time of great peril and consequence,” the secretary-general “would like to discuss urgent steps to bring about peace in Ukraine and the future of multilateralism based on the charter of the United Nations and international law.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • AVIC A313A helicopter edges closer to first flight

    A new indigenous medium-lift helicopter being developed by the state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) has achieved a key developmental milestone with the successful static load test of the rotorcraft’s rear airframe and tail boom modules. AVIC’s China Helicopter Research and Development Institute (CHRDI) announced in mid-April that the test validated the design’s ability […]

    The post AVIC A313A helicopter edges closer to first flight appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • How strong is Russian and Belarusian resistance to Putin’s Ukraine war?

    An underground anti-war movement continues to organise in Russia and neigbouring Belarus, despite facing harsh repression, reports Dick Nichols.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Chomsky: Our Priority on Ukraine Should Be Saving Lives, Not Punishing Russia

    Nearly two months into the war in Ukraine, and peace is nowhere in sight. In fact, the level of destruction has intensified and both sides seem to have little hope for a peaceful settlement anytime soon. Furthermore, the international situation is also heating up as some European neutral countries are thinking of joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a development that prompted the Kremlin to respond with threats of deploying nuclear weapons in the Baltic region should such a move take place.

    In the interview that follows, world-renowned scholar and leading dissident Noam Chomsky addresses these developments in an exclusive interview for Truthout. He emphasizes that we must prioritize saving human lives — not punishing Russia — in determining next moves.

    Chomsky is internationally recognized as one of the most important intellectuals alive. He 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, 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: Noam, Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week at a joint press conference with ally Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko that peace talks have reached a “dead end” and that the invasion is proceeding as planned. In fact, he vowed that the war would continue until all goals that were set at the start of the invasion are completed. Does Putin not want peace in Ukraine? Is he really at war with NATO and the U.S.? If so, particularly given how dangerous the West’s policy toward Russia has been so far, what can be done now to prevent an entire country from being potentially wiped off the map?

    Noam Chomsky: Before proceeding with this discussion, I’d like to emphasize, once again, the most important point: Our prime concern should be to think through carefully what we can do to bring the criminal Russian invasion to a quick end and to save the Ukrainian victims from more horrors. There are, unfortunately, many who find heroic pronouncements to be more satisfying than this necessary task. Not a novelty in history, regrettably. As always, we should keep the prime issue clearly in mind, and act accordingly.

    Turning to your comment, the final question is by far the most important one; I’ll return to the earlier ones.

    There are, basically, two ways for this war to end: a negotiated diplomatic settlement or destruction of one or the other side, either quickly or in prolonged agony. It won’t be Russia that is destroyed. Uncontroversially, Russia has the capacity to obliterate Ukraine, and if Putin and his cohort are driven to the wall, in desperation they might use this capacity. That surely should be the expectation of those who portray Putin as a “madman” immersed in delusions of romantic nationalism and wild global aspirations.

    That’s clearly an experiment that no one wants to undertake — at least no one who has the slightest concern for Ukrainians.

    The qualification is unfortunately necessary. There are respected voices in the mainstream who simultaneously hold two views: (1) Putin is indeed a “deranged madman” who is capable of anything and might lash out wildly in revenge if backed to the wall; (2) “Ukraine must win. That is the only acceptable outcome.” We can help Ukraine defeat Russia, they say, by providing advanced military equipment and training, and backing Putin to the wall.

    Those two positions can only be simultaneously held by people who care so little about the fate of Ukrainians that they are willing to try an experiment to see whether the “deranged madman” will slink away in defeat or will use the overwhelming force at his command to obliterate Ukraine. Either way, the advocates of these two views win. If Putin quietly accepts defeat, they win. If he obliterates Ukraine, they win: It will justify far harsher measures to punish Russia.

    It is of no little interest that such willingness to play games with the lives and fate of Ukrainians receives high praise, and is even considered a noble and courageous stance. Perhaps other words might come to mind.

    Putting aside the qualification — unfortunately necessary in this strange culture — the answer to the question posed seems clear enough: engage in serious diplomatic efforts to end the conflict. Of course, that’s not the response for those whose prime goal is to punish Russia — to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian, as Ambassador Chas Freeman describes current U.S. policy, matters we have discussed.

    The basic framework for a diplomatic settlement has long been understood and has been reiterated by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. First, neutralization of Ukraine, providing it with a status rather like Mexico or Austria. Second, putting off the matter of Crimea. Third, arrangements for a high level of autonomy for Donbass, perhaps within a federal arrangement, preferably to be settled in terms of an internationally run referendum.

    Official U.S. policy continues to reject all of this. High administration officials don’t just concede 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.” They praise themselves for having taken this position, which may well have been a factor in impelling Putin to criminal aggression. And the U.S. continues to maintain this position now, thus standing in the way of a negotiated settlement along the lines Zelenskyy outlined, whatever the cost to Ukrainians.

    Can a settlement along those general lines still be achieved, as seemed likely before the Russian invasion? There is only one way to find out: to try. Ambassador Freeman is far from alone among informed Western analysts in chastising the U.S. government for having “been absent [from diplomatic efforts] and, at worst, implicitly opposed” to them with its actions and rhetoric. That, he continues, is “the opposite of statecraft and diplomacy” and a bitter blow to Ukrainians by prolonging the conflict. Other respected analysts, such as Anatol Lieven, generally agree, recognizing that at the very least, “The U.S. has done nothing to facilitate diplomacy.”

    Regrettably, rational voices, however respected, are at the margins of discussion, leaving the floor to those who want to punish Russia — to the last Ukrainian.

    At the press conference, Putin did appear to be joining the U.S. in preferring “the opposite of statecraft and diplomacy,” though his remarks do not close off these options. If peace talks are now at a “dead end,” that doesn’t mean that they cannot be resumed, at best with committed participation of the great powers, China and the U.S.

    China is rightly condemned for its unwillingness to facilitate “statecraft and diplomacy.” The U.S. as usual is exempt from criticism in U.S. mainstream media and journals (though not completely), except for not providing more weapons to prolong the conflict or using other measures to punish Russians, the dominant concern, it appears.

    One measure the U.S. could use is proposed from the halls of Harvard Law School, at the supposed liberal extreme of opinion. Professor emeritus Laurence Tribe and law student Jeremy Lewin propose that President Joe Biden should follow the precedent set by George W. Bush in 2003, when he seized “Iraqi funds sitting in American banks, allocating the proceeds to aid the Iraqi people and to compensate victims of terrorism.”

    Did President Bush do something else in 2003 “to aid the Iraqi people”? That annoying question would be raised only by those guilty of the sin of “whataboutism,” one of the recent devices designed to bar any attention to our own actions and their consequences for today.

    The authors recognize that there are some problems in freezing funds that have been kept for security in New York banks. They bring up the freezing of Afghanistan’s funds by the Biden administration, which was “controversial, owing mostly to unsettled questions regarding court attachment of assets and allocating claims among dueling plaintiffs … suits filed by the relatives of those killed or wounded on 9/11.”

    Unmentioned, perhaps not controversial, is the plight of Afghan mothers watching their children starve because they cannot access their bank accounts to buy food in the markets, and more generally the fate of millions of Afghans facing starvation.

    Further comment bearing on President Bush’s 2003 efforts “to aid the Iraqi people” is provided, inadvertently, by the leading foreign policy analyst of The New York Times, Thomas Friedman in his headline: “How Do We Deal With a Superpower Led by a War Criminal?”

    Who could imagine that a superpower could be led by a war criminal in this enlightened day and age? A difficult dilemma to face, even to contemplate, in a country of pristine innocence like ours.

    Is it any wonder that the more civilized part of the world, mostly the Global South, contemplates the spectacle unfolding here with astonishment and disbelief?

    Returning to the press conference, Putin did say that the invasion was proceeding as planned and would continue until the initial goals are achieved. If the consensus of Western military analysts and political elites is anywhere near accurate, that is Putin’s way of acknowledging that the initial goals of quickly conquering Kiev and installing a puppet government had to be abandoned because of fierce and courageous Ukrainian resistance, exposing the Russian military as a paper tiger incapable even of conquering cities a few miles from its border that are defended by a mostly citizens army.

    The consensus of experts then draws a further conclusion: The U.S. and Europe must devote even greater resources to protecting themselves from the next onslaught of this rapacious military monster who is poised to launch an attack to overwhelm NATO and the U.S.

    The logic is overwhelming.

    According to the consensus, Russia is now revising its abandoned plans and concentrating on a major assault in the Donbass region, where some 15,000 people are reported to have been killed since the Maidan uprising in 2014. By whom? It should not be hard to determine with many Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) observers on the ground.

    It seems to me to go too far to conclude that Putin is aiming for war with NATO and the U.S., that is, mutual annihilation. I think he wants peace — on his terms. (What monster doesn’t?) What these terms are we can only discover by trying to find out, through “statecraft and diplomacy.” We cannot find out by refusing to engage in this option, refusing even to contemplate or discuss it. We cannot find out by carrying forward the official policy announced last September and reinforced in November, matters that we have discussed repeatedly: the official U.S. policy on Ukraine that is withheld from Americans by the “free press” but surely studied very carefully by Russian intelligence, which has access to the White House website.

    Returning to the essential point, we should be doing what we can to bring the criminal aggression to an end and doing so in a way that will save Ukrainians from further suffering and even possible obliteration if Putin and his circle are driven to the wall with no way out. That calls for a popular movement that will press the U.S. to reverse its official policy and to join in diplomacy and statecraft. Punitive measures (sanctions, military support for Ukraine) might be justified if they contribute to this end, not if designed to punish Russians while prolonging the agony and threatening Ukraine with destruction, with unspeakable ramifications beyond.

    There are unconfirmed reports that Russia has used chemical weapons in the Ukrainian city that has been perhaps most brutally attacked — namely Mariupol. In turn, the U.K.’s government rushed to announce rather boldly that “all options are on table” if these reports are correct. Indeed, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has already stated that such development would “totally change the nature of the conflict.” What does “all options on table” mean, and could it possibly include that scenario that the Ukraine war might go nuclear?

    The phrase “all options are on the table” is normal in what passes for statecraft in the U.S. and U.K. — all in direct violation of the UN Charter (and if anyone were to care, the U.S. Constitution). We don’t know what might be in the minds of those who regularly issue these declarations. Perhaps they mean what the words say: that the U.S. is prepared to resort to nuclear weapons, thus very likely destroying itself along with much of life on Earth (though beetles and bacteria may proliferate). Maybe that is tolerable in their minds if it at least punishes Russians, who, we are told, are such an irremediable curse that the only solution may be “permanent Russian isolation” or even “Russia delenda est.”

    It is, to be sure, appropriate to be much concerned about use of chemical weapons, even when unconfirmed. At the risk of more whataboutism, we should also be concerned about the well-confirmed reports of deformed fetuses in Saigon hospitals right now, among the terrible results of the chemical warfare unleashed by the Kennedy administration to destroy crops and forests, a core part of the program to “protect” the rural population who were supporting the Viet Cong, as Washington knew well. We should be concerned enough to do something to alleviate the consequences of these terrible programs.

    If Russia might have used or be contemplating the use of chemical weapons, it is definitely a matter of deep concern.

    There are also claims that thousands of Ukrainians have been forcefully deported from Mariupol to remote parts of Russia, evoking dark memories of the Soviet mass deportations under Stalin. Kremlin officials have rejected such claims as “lies,” but have openly talked about relocating civilians trapped in Mariupol. If reports of forced civilian deportations from Mariupol to Russia are proven true, what would be the purpose of such reprehensible actions, and wouldn’t they add to the list of Putin’s war crimes?

    They surely would add to the list, already quite long. And, fortunately, we will know a lot about these crimes. There already are extensive investigations of Russian war crimes underway, and despite technical difficulties, they will proceed.

    That, too, is normal. When enemies carry out crimes, a major industry is mobilized to reveal every tiny detail. As should be done. War crimes should not be concealed and forgotten.

    Regrettably, that is the near-universal practice in the U.S. A few of the myriad examples have just been alluded to. But the fact that today’s global hegemon adopts the reprehensible practices of its predecessors still leaves us free to expose the crimes of today’s official enemies, a task that should be undertaken, and surely will be in this case. Others outside of the reach of the U.S. propaganda system will be appalled by the hypocrisy, but that’s no reason not to welcome the highly selective exposure of war crimes.

    Those with some perverse interest in looking at ourselves can learn some lessons from the way atrocities are handled when exposed. The most notable case is the My Lai massacre, finally recognized after freelance reporter Seymour Hersh exposed the crime to the West. In South Vietnam, it had long been known but did not arouse much attention. The Quaker medical center in Quang Ngai didn’t even bother reporting it because such crimes were so common. In fact, the official U.S. government investigation found another one like it at the nearby village of My Khe.

    The My Lai massacre could be absorbed within the propaganda system by restricting the blame to GIs in the field who didn’t know who was going to shoot at them next. Exempt were — and are — those who sent them on these mass murder expeditions. Furthermore, the focus on one of the many crimes on the ground served to conceal the fact that they were the merest footnote to a huge bombing campaign of slaughter and destruction directed from air-conditioned offices, mostly suppressed by the media, though Edward Herman and I were able to write about it in 1979, making use of detailed studies provided to us by Newsweek correspondent Kevin Buckley, who had investigated the crime along with his colleague Alex Shimkin but was unable to publish more than fragments.

    Short of such cases, which are rare, U.S. crimes are not examined and little is known about them. An old story among the very powerful.

    It’s not easy to understand what is in the back of the minds of war criminals like Putin — or those who don’t exist, according to the canon as preached by New York Times pundits who are aghast at the discovery that war criminals exist — among official enemies.

    Finland and Sweden seem to be warming up to the idea of joining NATO. In the event of such development, Russia has threatened to deploy nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles in the Baltic region. Does it make sense for neutral countries to join NATO? Do they really have reasons to be concerned about their own security?

    Let’s return to the overwhelming consensus of Western military analysts and political elites: The Russian military is so weak and incompetent that it couldn’t conquer cities near its border that are defended mostly by a citizen’s army. So, therefore, those with overwhelming military power must tremble in their boots about their security in the face of this awesome military power, on the march.

    One can understand why this conception should be a favorite in the offices of Lockheed Martin and other military contractors in the world’s leading arms exporter, relishing the new prospects for expanding their bulging coffers. The fact that it is accepted in much wider circles, and also guides policy, again perhaps merits some thought.

    Russia does have advanced weapons, which can destroy (though evidently not conquer), so the Ukraine experience is held to indicate. For Finland and Sweden, abandoning neutrality and joining NATO might enhance the likelihood of their use. Since the security argument is not easy to take seriously, that seems to be the most likely consequence of their joining NATO.

    It’s also worth recognizing that Finland and Sweden are already fairly well integrated into the NATO command system, just as was happening with Ukraine from 2014, solidified further with the official U.S. government policy statements of last September and November and the refusal of the Biden administration “to address one of Vladimir Putin’s most often stated top security concerns — the possibility of Ukraine’s membership into NATO” — on the eve of the invasion.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Impunity of War Lords, Financial Thieves, Israel, Mercenaries, Mindlessness

    These are not good people, those in charge of the military blast-them-all-away-but charge-citizens-hard-on-the-back-end complexes. Here, below, and I have seen a lot, but I shudder just looking at these, well, misanthropes: Biden, Blinken and Austin, a trio of despicable fellows. All the years Austin worked as a mercenary in uniform, and then the offensive weapons companies he protected in that racket. Biden? Over fifty years of destroying Democracy. Blinken? The 71st United States secretary of state since January 26, 2021. He was deputy national security advisor from 2013 to 2015 and deputy secretary of state from 2015 to 2017 under Obama.

    Senior US official may soon visit Kiev – media

    US apologizes to ruler of Gulf monarchy - media

    More space junk, leaks, and the moon shot of Artemis. Think about that — billions for that endeavor and it is not one step for man, but rather one giant leap for Lords of War 3.0, and the war merchants and the FIRE branding thugs of billions. And we have teacher shortages, teacher burnout, prescriptions (necessary) for anyone’s serious diseases out the roof. All of that crisis after crisis, and the inflation, and the housing market on steroids/lack of affordable housing rising, and the suicide rates, and the lost and lost generations, now, and those unborn. All that infrastructure collapsing, all those homes leaking, all those fields and crops dessicating, all the wind and rain and heat, all the lack of decent living conditions. All of the decay and the rising number of aging people who do/barely live without . . . WITHOUT  decent food, health care, denistry, safe and creative activities of daily living. We do without, man, while we arm Nazis and a billionaire boy Being There schmuk. This is the West, the USA under these felons’ leadership (sic) . . .  these thieves, these elites and these Ivy Leaguers. Mainstream Media doesn’t just fawn over them; the MSM pimps for them. But pimps in MSM are, well, a dual-use sort of profession — pimping and prostituting. We the people, we the youth, we the students, we the uninformed, are being screwed, blued and tattooed.**

    **(The phrase has always had a very definite negative connotation, and means to be supremely screwed, screwed beyond all comprehension. The original phrase was “screwed, blewed and tattooed”.

    1. “Screwed” essentially means “cheated” here, much as it does today.
    2. “Blewed” meant “lost or been robbed of”. The word’s origin is from the German “blauen” so it’s actually related to “blue”, not “blew”, and meant that something had vanished (into the blue). (According to “A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant” by Charles Godfrey Leland, published in 1889.)
    3. “Tattooed” refers here to a beating with very rapid blows, in the same sense as a military tattoo, which is a rapid pattern on a drum.

    So, the phrase literally meant “cheated, robbed and beaten.”)

    Being All Things by Being Nothing: The Enigma of 'Being There' | PopMatters

    Channel 4 to screen comedy that shot Volodymyr Zelensky to fame | News | The Times

    The dance with the devil is us, we the people, The Eighty Percent, dancing to our graves while paying for the sins of the rich, the millionaires and the billionaires.

    Gouging, and shortages, death in a corner of an unheated home: the new Cormac McCarthy script (The Road).

    See the source image

    Entire regions of the country where homes are unaffordable to most, but where the house flippers get to bid on anything to drive up the cost of a roof over the poorhouse’s head. Meth heads and booze drinkers. So many people guzzling drugs and insane ideas to stave off the pain, the suicidal ideation, the drip-drip-drip of death by a thousand neocon/neoliberal/celebrity culture cuts.

    Death By A Thousand Cuts - Death By A Thousand Cuts - Sticker | TeePublic

    Rural hospitals short-staffed/not staffed. Urban hospitals short staffed/not staffed. Massive quits for many professions. Then, the doom of Zoom, all those students in college demanding teachers turn their world in hybrid worlds of students sitting at home, sipping drinks, playing Nerf ball, while getting the classes delivered via internet connection. More of the same nothingness, dead-head dumb thinking, and no conversing.

    - Sputnik International, 1920, 15.04.2022

    [Artemis shut down for leaking — more misappropriated junk voted on by NOT you and I!]

    Truly, the blashpemy of the media is their collusion with the ZioLensky thief, the Thiefs of Israel, and their collusion with the orgasmic military murdering machine, all the hardware and equipment produced, hawked, sold, used. Imagine, EU throwing weapons at Ukraine, while that perversion of a human, ZioLensky hides in Poland. Imagine all the surrendering of Ukrainian Military to the Russians. Imagine his home in Florida, a cool $28 million worth, the Panama Papers reported.

    For Ukrainian Jews, having a Jewish president is a source of pride — and fear | The Times of Israel

    Imagine Blinken, Biden and Austin in Ukraine. Legitimate targets in my mind. Of course, Ukraine has so much to do with You and I, USA. You know, the ZioLensky amassing $billion$, as the Panama Papers revealed. Well, Pandora Papers, that is! (Panama Papers reveals other thieves and money laundering whores)  Imagine, all the things this society, USA, goes without, and all the sliding systems decaying, and the fraying of social safety nets, all of that, yet, we have Save a ZioLensky Day (daily) at the grocery store, and at the military hardware bargain basement. Easter rotten eggs for the Nazis of Ukraine.

    Volodymyr Zelenskiy

    • Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his partners in comedy production owned a network of offshore companies related to their business based in the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, and Belize.
    • Zelensky’s current chief aide, Serhiy Shefir, as well as the head of the country’s Security Service, were part of the offshore network.
    • Offshore companies were used by Shefir and another business partner to buy pricey London real estate.
    • Around the time of his 2019 election, Zelensky handed his shares in a key offshore company over to Shefir, but the two appear to have made an arrangement for Zelensky’s family to continue receiving money from the offshore. (Source)

    Billions while the heart medicines and diabetes drugs are unaffordable for many. Then, think of Blinken, Biden and Austin. Think of all the fools in the media who make millions a year. All those in the offensive weapons industries. All the governmental workers and all the politicos. Those tanks and “war things” from EU, Germany, hell, ZioLensky is making out like a true war bandit, but in skinny jeans and Gucci shoes).

    Germany explains limits to Ukraine weapons supply

    Look at this fool, this Brit, captured by Russia and then his family pleads for “fair” treatment of this guy. He’s a soldier for hire, a mercenary, and the British Family wants their son to be treated like what? A criminal, which he is. I can’t image this fellow making it on a 20 click hike with a 60 pound rucksack and thrity pounds of weaponry. But this is it for the Western mind and body!

    Then these headlines surround this illegality. “Israel has dropped repeated hints at a major strike on Iranian nuclear facilities in the near future”. This is kosher? Under world order? Hmm. So, dropping bombs on nuclear facilities is fair game? All over the world? This is why the Jewish Project is a Jaded Project, one geared toward murder and theft. Impunity. Killing Iranians. Blasting nuclear plants? So, how is it Russia doesn’t just ka-boom those bioweapons labs in Ukraine? (Do a Google Gulag search on, “Ukraine biolabs” and you get a thousand hits on why that story is fake!)  This is the new abnormal — quash any story that goes outside the neoliberal-rah-rah USA bold coloring lines!

    Israel has dropped repeated hints at a major strike on Iranian nuclear facilities in the near future

    War in Ukraine turns people’s lives and affairs upside down. Dirty laundry, previously hidden, is on display. A Russian communication on March 6 mentions “evidence of an emergency clean-up performed by the Kyiv regime was found—aimed at eradicating traces of the military-biological program in Ukraine, financed by @DeptofDefense.”

    A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson two days later spoke of “26 [U.S.] bio-labs and other related facilities in Ukraine.” (Source)

    Found 30 biological labs in Ukraine, possibly for bioweapons, claim Russian forces, World News | wionews.com

    “Germany involved in ‘military biological activities’ in Ukraine – Russia” (Source)

    Bernie’s F-35’s, man, the Bernie Bro Most Expensive Offensive Weapon

    NATO pins nuclear plans on F-35

    NATO planners are updating the US “nuclear sharing” program to account for most European allies planning to buy F-35 joint strike fighter jets, the alliance’s director of nuclear policy said this week. Lockheed Martin’s fifth-generation fighter has been embraced by multiple US allies, including most recently Germany, despite the Pentagon’s own misgivings about the program.

    “We’re moving fast and furiously towards F-35 modernization and incorporating those into our planning and into our exercising and things like that as those capabilities come online,” Jessica Cox, director of the NATO nuclear policy directorate in Brussels, said on Wednesday, adding that “By the end of the decade, most if not all of our allies will have transitioned” to the F-35. (Source)

    Bernie Sanders supports the basing of the F-35s in Vermont. He said, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, that it would be a “major blow” if the weapons program did not come to Vermont. Referring to the Vermont National Guard, Sen. Sanders stated, “If they don’t have planes to fly, there ain’t going to be too much for them to do.”

    Bernie Sanders Loves This $1 Trillion War Machine

    If they don’t have nukes to fire, then what are they going to do with themselves? If they don’t have frigates to sail, what will they do on the water? If they don’t have missiles to launch, then what will they do in the air?

    And this guy was what? An alternative? What? He’s as insane as Trump as Bush as Obama. As Elizabeth Warren reiterated, she is a capitalist . . . “capitalist to my bones…” Sanders is one too.

    But we have the beasts of this nation, Israel, all those in Europe, Australia, everywhere the US not only wags the tail but bites with rabid glee. Yet, we have pundits and great intellectuals covering up the tracks of history. All the hatefulness of the Anglo Saxons, the British Isle, all the Euro-Trash, so much, that speaks to that hatred of Slavs, Russians, the Chinese Peril, all those “Orientals,” and, alas, the Muslims, we have that elephant in the room of these traitors of humankind. And, yet, Russia, and Syria, and, well, USSR did support many movements, many revolutions, and those in countries considered black and brown. To be honest, the Russians were asked (USSR) to get involved with Afghanistan by the Afghans.

    As is the case with the Anglo-American-Canadian-New Zealand-Australia-UK world, there will be blood, in every imaginable way. From birth to death, from the village, to the great cities, the Anglo-American-Canadian-New Zealand-Australia-UK is like a termite of galactic proportions, drilling into all cultures, all tribes, all people of the land, people of seas and mountains and forests. The munching mandibles of that “race” of people. Imagine, calling Russians orcs, subhuman.

    The reality is the full force of these demonic masters of slavery — EU, Nato, USA-Israel-UK-ETC. will make Ukraine the killing fields.

    They are hoping for a nuclear strike.

    And, alas, this is the reality the leftists who support Russia’s goals in de-Nazification. The end goal has been shifted. With the full force of the military industrial complex.

    Day 50 of the SMO – are things becoming clear(er)? (UPDATED 2x)

    While the armies of Ukraine and Russia are preparing for the upcoming battle for Donbass, Kiev’s allies are increasing arms supply shipments to Ukraine. The United States, mainly by European forces, is implementing a large-scale rearmament project for Ukraine.

    Heavy offensive systems are being transferred to the disposal of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which will open a new stage of military confrontation.

    The delivery of about three hundred modernized Soviet-made tanks to Ukraine was confirmed. According to various reports, Poland transfers the upgraded T-72M1R as the Czech Republic removes its T-72s from storage. The AFU also has 170 Polish BMP-1s at its disposal. Echelons with M109 howitzers and M113 armored personnel carriers are already on the Ukrainian border.

    High-precision ammunition is also being transferred to Ukraine, including the M982 Excalibur with GPS guidance and anti-tank SMArt 155 munitions. Ukraine has also been provided with Switchblade mobile barrage ammunition.

    Ukrainian troops are being saturated with modern air defense systems including British Starstreak MANPADS and American Stingers.

    During a recent briefing, the Pentagon said that a batch of 1,000 ATGMs has already been delivered to Ukraine.

    It is reported that Norwegian Naval Strike Missiles are planned to be transferred to Ukraine. According to some reports, the MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System will be also transferred from Europe. The range of these complexes reaches 300 km, which makes it possible to strike deep into the territory of Russia.

    At the same time, mercenaries and military personnel of NATO countries are deployed along with the AFU in Ukraine under the guise of foreign volunteers. The foreign fighters in Ukraine are led by US officers. It has become obvious that the whole command of the AFU is concentrated mainly in the hands of the United States.

    On April 14, Russian missile forces eliminated another detachment of foreign mercenaries in Ukraine. As a result of the strike, up to 30 mercenaries of the Polish private military campaign were killed in the settlement of Izyumskoye in the Kharkiv region.

    According to unconfirmed reports from local sources, about 2,000 foreign mercenaries, including fighters from Turkey and Azerbaijan, arrived on the territory of the Zaporozhye region. Most likely, foreigners will be deployed on the Avdiivka front lines, since the Russian forces have already begun assault and offensive operations in the area.

    In the political arena, the United States openly issues an ultimatum to all countries that are not ready to sacrifice their own interests and stop cooperation with Russia.

    US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has issued threats to those countries that see an opportunity to benefit by maintaining their relations with Russia and filling the void left by others.

    “Let’s be clear, the united coalition will not be indifferent to actions that undermine the sanctions we have imposed.” – she claimed. (Source)

    Monsters.

    See the source image

    No highly trained and experienced special forces Russian brigade has anything on this whiz woman, Yellen. These are natural born killers, of the massive variety.

    https://pictures.reuters.com/archive/RUSSIA-SECURITY-DRILLS-RC21LD9YZWSD.html

    The chosen few, those Star Chamber Elite, the veritable unholiest criminals of FIRE — finance insurance real estate — with their weapons of mass destruction — algorithms, Wall Street, Deep State, Shallow State, Sanctions, and, well, we now know, DARPA Bat Virus, et al — they are unbeatable!

    Finally, the ZioLensky is looking for his own Ten Year War. Talk about the obscene oligarch:

    Ukraine is not prepared to give up its territories and is ready, if needed, to fight with Russia “for ten years,” the country’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has said.

    In an interview with CNN, Zelensky said that for Ukraine “the battle for Donbass is very important” for a number of reasons. He explained that this battle might influence “the course of the whole war.” However, the president stressed that the preferable solution of the conflict is the diplomatic one.

    “We cannot give up our territory, but we must find some kind of dialogue with Russia,” Zelensky said, underlining that no talks could be conducted “on the basis of the Russian ultimatum.”

    He stressed that a dialogue is needed to prevent more deaths but he hasn’t ruled out another option.

    “We can fight the Russian Federation for 10 years,” Zelensky said.

    Those mighty billionaires and multimillionaires will be laughing all the way to the bank, or gold markets.

    Shift!!!!

    A little poem for Russia, still, National Poetry Month:

    Tears of Rage Captured in a Poem and Harmonica Riff

    You think dark is just one color, but it ain’t. There’re five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don’t stay still. It moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green.

    — Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, Chapter 2, Page 40

    ‘A thoroughfare for freedom beat
    Across the wilderness.’

    we (they) came, we (USA) laughed
    they (Libyans) died, then Yemeni babies
    those children of Venezuela
    collateral damage, Libya
    immolated by Democrat with an H
    Clinton laughs when leaders are raped
    with blade, but we are the voice
    of hypocrisy, Iran, and Brown places
    or Black haunts, those Congo tykes pulling up
    coltan/iPhones/ Chrome books for all
    we dance in our cancel culture….

    ‘And crown thy good with brotherhood
    From sea to shining sea.’

    talking heads paid for stupidity
    millionaires chant to teens and grannies–
    ‘Russia is an enemy, we are at war’
    even those puttering PhD fools
    learn to forget Yankee damage
    to Cuban babies, the kindness
    of Norte Americanos holding
    death court on Afghanis,
    millions will suffer Goldman
    JP Morgan Sachs lords of financial war….

    ‘Thine alabaster cities gleam
    Undimmed by human tears.’

    yet Safeway plies me when I
    buy tofu and butter leaf lettuce
    ‘give money for Ukraine’
    that fascist Comic ZioLenskyy
    trickster of thespian rouse
    he dances with billionaires….

    ‘Who more than self their country loved,
    And mercy more than life.’

    I have friends who dig deep,
    journalists where truth is core
    principle, where all sides are facets
    of complicated stories, now, tomorrow
    history redefined is scooped up
    pulled apart, a place of discovery
    but Americanos can’t take nuance
    the white is against black
    pro versus con, enemy or foe….

    ‘For purple mountain majesties.’

    we’ve been Wobblies for
    one century, THEY/USA jailing speakers
    we, organizers against capital
    shot down by Pinkerton and Police….

    ‘O beautiful for pilgrim feet.’…

    today mainstream is extreme
    squashing out common sense
    old retirees chanting, ‘treason . . .
    never pro-Russia . . . block anyone shouting Donbas crimes
    Crimea crimes . . . ‘
    these old mothball ideas are tools
    of CIA, tools of VOA, tools of withering
    politicos, plagiarist-rapist VP now POTUS

    the digital demigods have it
    shutting down free speech zones
    closing minds, corralling those of us
    called fringe, in their minds
    fanatical, gleeful donating
    one dollar to a Nazi regime
    the optics of Jew with Azov
    oh the Congressional dimwits zoomed
    comic boy caught money
    hiding in Panama Papers…

    ‘Till all success be nobleness,
    And ev’ry gain divine.’

    how many Safeway campaigns
    ask money for Afghanistan
    billions stolen from treasury
    how many pleas by Walgreens
    beg for dollars to stave off
    Yemen famine . . . how many
    d’s with Democrat shouting
    ‘bomb apartheid Israel
    fabricated stolen land
    of a military industrial complex
    stamped with Star of David’?….

    ‘For amber waves of grain.’

    those star spangled sycophants
    they draw cartoons of their hero
    as Europeans shut down
    stars and stripes infirm
    old men, young Ivy League
    demons, telling world–
    tighten belts, shower less
    yet Safeway and Walgreens
    want my shekels for bombs
    bullets brigades of mercenaries
    yet we hear in all circles
    of Dante’s hell, screams of
    ‘hate 139 million Russians . . .
    death to Slavs . . . sanction
    heroes of world war two . . .
    eviscerate good people
    who plowed over Nazi’s . . .
    donate to Ukraine.’

    old and young
    tongues tied to propagandists
    chanting homilies from mainstream
    media, minds blended into mush
    the hubris and greed and power
    Yankee Doodle Dandy eyeing
    China, wanting every dead
    Taiwanese as the price of
    red white and blue
    sanctions –unilateral murder
    until Safeway and Walgreens
    plead for dollars for Taiwan-
    Ukraine as USA/RoboCop
    stuffs trillions
    into war machine
    oil machine
    retail machine….

    ‘O beautiful for spacious skies.’

    Brother, sister will you spare
    a billion for big bad bombs?

    Behold, you are beautiful, my love;
    behold, you are beautiful;
    your eyes are doves.

    –“Song of Solomon,”1:15

    The post The Impunity of War Lords, Financial Thieves, Israel, Mercenaries, Mindlessness first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Ukraine Is Still Losing So What Is Its Plan?

    Russian and Donbas forces have cleared the city of Mariupol except for the giant metallurgic complex of Azovstal which is held by some estimated 4,000 men, including many from the fascist Azov battalion.

    On Sunday Russia opened corridors across the front line and asked for those forces to surrender. However the Zelensky government ordered them to stay and to continue to bind Russian forces which otherwise could be used elsewhere.

    The post The Ukraine Is Still Losing So What Is Its Plan? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Script: Evil Persecutor, Innocent Victim, Rescuing Hero

    Read the entire essay at Countercurrents.

    The post The Script: Evil Persecutor, Innocent Victim, Rescuing Hero first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • UN Amplifies Calls for Ceasefire as Russia Intensifies Attack on Eastern Ukraine

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a televised address late Monday that his country will continue to fight back as Russia ramped up its assault on eastern Ukraine with the goal of fully capturing the Donbas region, a more limited military campaign that comes after Moscow’s forces failed to seize Kyiv and other major cities.

    “It can now be stated that Russian troops have begun the battle for Donbas, for which they have been preparing for a long time,” Zelenskyy warned Monday night. “A very large part of the entire Russian army is now focused on this offensive.”

    “No matter how many Russian soldiers are driven there, we will fight,” he added. “We will defend ourselves. We will do it daily. We will not give up anything Ukrainian, and we do not need what’s not ours.”

    While Moscow is focusing its offensive on eastern Ukraine — where Russia-backed separatists have been battling Ukrainian forces for years — its military is still attacking other parts of the country. Earlier Monday, Russian missile strikes killed at least seven people in the Western city of Lviv.

    Russia also continued its efforts to capture Mariupol, a strategic port city in southeastern Ukraine that has become the site of one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the weeks-long war. Ukrainian forces in the besieged city have rejected Russia’s demands that they surrender.

    “Securing Mariupol would free Russian troops up to move elsewhere in the Donbas, deprive Ukraine of a vital port, and complete a land bridge between Russia and the Crimean Peninsula, seized from Ukraine from 2014,” the Associated Press noted Tuesday.

    Russia’s Defense Ministry said that the country’s forces struck nearly 1,300 Ukrainian targets late Monday and early Tuesday. Russian forces also seized the eastern Ukrainian city of Kreminna, the regional governor said Tuesday. Ukrainian troops have withdrawn from the city, the first Russia has captured during its renewed offensive.

    The New York Times reported that “Ukrainian troops were fighting Russian forces across the sprawling eastern front on Tuesday, the Ukrainian military said, as the battle for control over the industrial heartland of the nation intensified.”

    Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, said that because of the increasingly intense fighting, there will be no humanitarian corridors established Tuesday to help evacuate trapped civilians. Thus far, Russia’s invasion has displaced more than 10 million Ukrainians.

    “Intense shelling continues in the Donbas,” said Vereshchuk. “According to Mariupol, the Russians refuse to provide a corridor for civilians in the direction of Berdyansk. We continue difficult negotiations on the opening of humanitarian corridors in Kherson and Kharkiv regions.”

    Meanwhile, broader diplomatic talks aimed at securing an end to the war appear to be at a standstill. Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin said peace negotiations were “at a dead end.”

    A day later, the Pentagon hosted top U.S. arms makers as the Biden administration authorized another $800 million in military assistance for Ukraine. In the coming days, the U.S. reportedly plans to begin training Ukrainian forces on how to operate howitzer artillery systems as they brace for Russia’s eastern assault.

    “The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought immense suffering to the people of that land, while sparking calls for increased military spending in both the United States and Europe,” William Hartung and Julia Gledhill wrote for TomDispatch over the weekend. “Though that war may prove to be a tragedy for the world, one group is already benefiting from it: U.S. arms contractors.”

    During a press briefing on Monday, a spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called on “all parties to enact an urgent and immediate humanitarian ceasefire, which will enable the safe and secure functioning of humanitarian corridors, help evacuate civilian residents, and also deliver lifesaving humanitarian and medical assistance.”

    “Genuine negotiations must be given a chance to succeed and to bring lasting peace,” said Stéphane Dujarric. “The secretary-general and the U.N. stand ready to support such efforts.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • We owe it to the victims of conflict to tell the unsanitised truth about war

    Warning: this article includes graphic descriptions and images of injury and death

    Almost every day we see reports of horrific atrocities committed in Ukraine, with images of dead or mutilated bodies often sanitised by blurring. But as a Labour MP argues, the public should not be protected from seeing the true horrors of such atrocities.

    This is not about sensationalising, but standing witness to what is happening because we owe it to the victims of those crimes.

    The tragedies we are witnessing in Ukraine are devastating for the people there. Sadly they are not exceptional. The Canary has a long history of reporting on such war crimes – from Afghanistan, to Iraq, to Yemen, to Turkey, and beyond.

    It’s essential the horror of all of these conflicts is told.

    Revealing the truth

    UK Labour MP Chris Bryant tweeted that media –  in this case BBC World – should not protect the public from seeing the truth about atrocities taking place in Ukraine:

    Byline Times executive editor Peter Jukes argues that we owe it to the victims of war and their families to reveal the full truth of such crimes:

    Unsanitised crime scenes

    Over many days tweets from independent sources provide unsanitised images of alleged war crimes, mostly discovered in Bucha. For example, one tweet claims to show more murdered civilians with their hands tied behind their backs. Another shows dead bodies of civilians left lying in the streets.

    This tweet shows the burnt bodies of dead civilians, apparently families:

    And this video shows the horrible scene that followed the bombing of the railway station at Kramatorsk, with at least 50 people dead:

    As for the total devastation of Mariupol, this level of destruction is reminiscent of what happened in Grozny (Chechnya) and Aleppo (Syria).

    Butchery in Bucha

    There are also other reports about alleged atrocities committed in Bucha.

    On 4 April it was claimed that the bodies of 410 civilians had been found in towns near Kyiv after the Russian military retreated. A mass grave was also discovered in Bucha. It was alleged that Russian soldiers had fired on men fleeing the town, and had killed civilians at will.

    Regarding atrocities in Bucha and the other towns of Hostomel and Irpin, Ukraine’s ambassador to Australia Vasyl Myroshnychenko commented:

    We see civilians’ dead bodies lying around the city, many of them have their hands tied up… Multiple rapes of women, children killed. This is a massacre.

    Many other atrocities were reported by a number of papers, including the Daily Mirror.

    Anatomy of murder captured by drone

    Then there was the now infamous murder, captured by drone, of what appears to be a civilian who simply stepped out of his car, with hands raised, after being ordered to by the military.

    Zdf commented:

    The pictures from March 7 show Russian soldiers dragging the body of the man away from his car and into a ditch. A woman and a child were also travelling with him. They are later led by soldiers into the nearby forest. What happens to them then, the pictures do not show.

    A BBC report takes up the story – and it is shocking:

    Some answers already exist for a couple who were killed by the Russians and left to decompose on 7 March. Their rusty, shrapnel riddled car lies in the road next to one of the petrol stations, reduced to a shell by fire. Next to it are the burnt and twisted remains of a body that is just about recognisable as the remains of a man. A wedding ring is still on the corpse’s finger. Stretched out inside the hulk of their car is what is left of the incinerated body of a woman, the mouth opened in what looks like a scream. …

    The bodies, the BBC discovered in an investigation this month, are of Maksim Iowenko and his wife Ksjena. They were part of a convoy of 10 civilian vehicles who were trying to escape the Russians and get to Kyiv.

    The report continued:

    Also in the car were their six-year-old son and the elderly mother of one of Maksim’s friends. Both of them survived and were eventually released by the Russian soldiers.

    They were found walking back down the road, and the woman told her family that Maksim was shouting that a child was in the car when he was killed.

    The elderly woman and the boy are now safe but traumatised.

    The report added: “Under the laws of war civilians are protected, and when they are killed in defiance of those laws, their deaths amount to war crimes”.

    But that was just one event, amongst hundreds of similar atrocities. It demonstrates all loss of morality.

    Dehumanising the enemy

    From the beginning of this war there have been reports of countless numbers of civilians murdered and tortured. These and similar acts are war crimes, says Amnesty International. They may even be considered acts of genocide.

    It’s now understood that as many as 20,000 civilians may have lost their lives in the city of Mariupol alone. And Iryna Venediktova, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, understands that more than 6,000 cases of war crimes have been opened for investigation.

    But why are civilians dealt with in this way? The answer is that, as with most wars, the protagonists are made to see the enemy – military or civilian –  as less than human.

    The following tweet includes an audio recording of what’s claimed to be Russian soldiers being ordered to kill in this way. The man giving the orders says “Here is a whole village of civilians. Shoot the civilian cars”:

    According to the Guardian, the recording was intercepted by Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence service, in relation to the attacks in Bucha. If it proves to be authentic, it demonstrates not just the dehumanising of civilians but also the brutalisation of the combatants.

    “Unspeakable, deliberate cruelty”

    Human Rights Watch’s European media director posted a thread, commenting on some of the recent examples of atrocities:

    Human Rights Watch has documented many alleged war crimes, in a number of locations in Ukraine.

    Hugh Williamson, Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia director, commented.

    The cases we documented amount to unspeakable, deliberate cruelty and violence against Ukrainian civilians. Rape, murder, and other violent acts against people in the Russian forces’ custody should be investigated as war crimes.

    The HRW report added:

    The laws of war prohibit willful killing, rape and other sexual violence, torture, and inhumane treatment of captured combatants and civilians in custody. Pillage and looting are also prohibited. Anyone who orders or deliberately commits such acts, or aids and abets them, is responsible for war crimes. Commanders of forces who knew or had reason to know about such crimes but did not attempt to stop them or punish those responsible are criminally liable for war crimes as a matter of command responsibility.

    The accounts listed in the report, detailing horrific atrocities, will no doubt add to other evidence to be examined by the international courts.

    Denials or in denial

    And then there’s another narrative: the denial by Russia of any involvement in war crimes and atrocities:

    This separate statement, issued by the Russian ministry of defence via its Telegram account, was in response to claims of war crimes committed in Bucha.

    It concludes:

    All this confirms conclusively that the photos and video footage from Bucha are another hoax, a staged production and provocation by the Kiev regime for the Western media, as was the case in Mariupol with the maternity hospital, as well as in other cities.

    Moscow also has its many supporters and apologists. For example, there’s this article in the Orinoco Tribune. It in turn refers to another article, published on the ‘War On Fakes’ site.

    And there’s this lengthy article by Jacques Baud, former member of Swiss strategic intelligence. He argues that Ukraine made serious errors in the years leading up to the war and it could have been averted.

    Justice?

    Putting aside the geopolitics, what is undeniable in this conflict, as with many others, is the way civilians and their homes have been criminally targeted from day one. And it is these civilians, not governments, who ultimately deserve our support.

    Moreover, journalists have an obligation to reveal, as far as they can, the truth about the horrors of war – for to do anything less would arguably equate to complicity. Indeed, over the years The Canary has not shirked from revealing the horrors of such crimes, sometimes publishing images and videos that bring home the full truth of what took place.

    And the more the truth of war is revealed, the more likely the perpetrators of war crimes will be exposed and hopefully brought to justice.

    Featured image via Flickr Creative Commons / manhhai cropped 770×403 pixels

    By Tom Coburg

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Despite Biden’s Promises, US Offers Few Supports for Ukrainian Refugees

    During the first four months of fiscal year 2022 (October 1, 2021, to January 31, 2022), more than 6,000 asylum seekers from Ukraine and Russia were apprehended at U.S. border crossings and deported. Then, in late February, Russia invaded Ukraine and, virtually overnight, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shifted gears to accommodate the influx of Ukrainians who began showing up at the U.S.-Mexico border. In fact, whether arriving on foot and in cars, most were allowed in and given “humanitarian parole.”

    But not all displaced people have entered through Mexico. Many have flown into the U.S. as “tourists” from Europe, landing in places where they have family or friends and hoping to file an asylum application once they regroup.

    Sue Fox is the executive director of the Shorefront YM-YWHA in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, an area populated by thousands of immigrants from countries that once comprised the USSR. Many families from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus are arriving in Brooklyn with their children, she told Truthout — and so far, there are scant resources to meet their needs.

    “The biggest issue is housing, putting a roof over their heads, but apartments are very expensive,” Fox said. “These are folks who had a middle or upper-middle-class life in Ukraine and they don’t know what to do now that they’re here. Many have families, but their families don’t always have resources to give them.”

    In response, Fox says that she and her staff have been scrambling to help newcomers access available health care, register kids in school, and connect them with food pantries, mental health resources and legal assistance.

    It’s been difficult, Fox admits, because so much remains unknown.

    “It’s difficult not to be able to provide answers,” Fox said. “But there are no answers yet. We don’t know what the procedures will be for people who want to apply for Temporary Protected Status (TPS)” or other immigration safeguards.

    This, despite the March announcement by the Biden administration that the U.S. will accept 100,000 refugees fleeing Ukraine, donate $1 billion to help European nations accommodate the influx of people displaced by the war, and add Ukraine to the roster of 13 countries whose residents are eligible for TPS. This status is given to individuals forced to emigrate because of ongoing armed conflicts, large-scale environmental disasters, or “extraordinary and temporary conditions” in their home countries. According to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, 75,100 Ukrainians who were in the U.S. on or before March 1, 2022, will be able to apply for TPS. This will permit them to stay in the country and work for up to 18 months. The actual process for applying, however, needs to be outlined in the Federal Register and as of mid-April, this has not yet been done.

    “It’s a confusing mess,” Jodi Ziesemer, director of the NY Legal Assistance Group, a provider of free legal services to low-income people, told Truthout. “There’s been a disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality. On one hand, the U.S. is telling Ukrainians that the country is extending TPS to them so they expect benefits. But these benefits are not actually available to them.”

    This is not the only glitch that troubles Ziesemer. Policies for those coming into the country from the southern border — as well as for those entering the U.S. from Canada — are inconsistent, she says, so different protocols are being applied depending on which government authorities, CBP or ICE agents a person sees. “There is great confusion,” she adds.

    The unofficial policy, she explains, is for Ukrainians to be given humanitarian parole at the border, which enables them to enter the country and work. But parole is not a direct path to a green card or citizenship, and those given this authorization will need to file an asylum application within one year of arriving. This creates barriers, particularly for refugees who don’t know English. While there is no fee to file a claim, the 12-page form — which must be filled out in English — is cumbersome and usually requires the assistance of a trained advocate to complete. Necessary paperwork to substantiate claims may also be required — and be difficult to access for those who fled with little more than the clothes on their backs.

    “It’s frustrating,” Ziesemer said. “People are returning to Europe because it’s easier for them to be in the EU, where they can live and work for up to three years. We’re trying to advise people as best we can, but there’s a lot of misinformation about what the U.S. is doing and offering.”

    Ginger Cline is a staff attorney at the Border Rights Project of Al Otro Lado, and has been working in Tijuana, Mexico, since 2020. People from the Ukrainian and Russian communities in nearby San Diego, California, have helped set up porta-potties, tents and food stations for recent arrivals coming into Tijuana, she told Truthout. “CBP is coordinating with the Mexican police to bring a certain number of Ukrainians to the port of entry every hour,” she said, adding that priority is given to families with young children and those with serious medical needs.

    This is in sharp contrast to the way asylum seekers from other countries are treated, she says. For one, until mid-April, Title 42, a policy enacted by the Trump administration in March 2020, barred all but a handful of asylum seekers from entering the U.S., purportedly as a way to control the spread of COVID. “Title 42 gave CBP discretion, but was used to deny entry to almost everyone wanting to apply for asylum,” Cline said. “This changed when Ukrainians began to arrive and the government announced that Title 42 was being waived for them.”

    Cline describes the special treatment afforded Ukrainians as having a devastating impact on people from other nations. “Of course, Ukrainians should be welcomed into the U.S. and given the opportunity to apply for asylum,” she said. “It’s horrifying to see this war of aggression, but there are non-white people from other countries — including Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras and Somalia — who have been waiting at the border to apply for asylum for more than two years. They need protection, too.”

    Cline notes other disparities as well. Among them, CBP is allowing entire Ukrainian families to enter the U.S. together, something that is often denied to people from other countries. She describes assisting a man from Haiti who was extremely ill with HIV and had been traveling with his niece and nephew. “When we got him to the port of entry, he was approved for admission but his family members were not,” Cline said. “I’ve seen this brutality repeatedly. We’ve seen kids ripped from a grandmother’s arms, allowed to enter with their mom while grandma and an aunt are denied. It’s heartbreaking. Every member of the household suffered the same trauma that brought them to the border. It’s simply cruel to let some people in and not others.”

    Jessica Bolter, policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, attributes the U.S.’s favoring of Ukrainians to a lingering Cold War residue. “U.S. decisions about who wins asylum cases have been deeply political for decades,” she said. “There are still echoes of Cold War thinking in the asylum system, so people fleeing countries that were once communist still have an increased chance of being admitted. Even before the Russian invasion, the asylum grant rate for Ukrainians was 66 percent. It was 77 percent for Russians. This is much higher than it is for people of other nationalities.”

    Not surprisingly, advocates have recommendations for changing this and improving the treatment of refugees from Ukraine and other countries.

    Naomi Steinberg, vice president of U.S. policy and advocacy at HIAS (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), argues that family reunification should form the cornerstone of the U.S. response to the refugee crisis. While many Ukrainians will opt to stay in Europe until the crisis ends, she says, “there is a subset for whom staying in Europe is not the best option. People who have family in the U.S. should be allowed to enter through an expanded refugee resettlement program, rather than given humanitarian parole.” This is preferable, she says, because those entering through refugee resettlement, “are automatically eligible for a green card in a year. They are also eligible for resettlement services. Humanitarian parole requires them to apply for asylum, a process that is complicated.”

    Similarly, Steinberg recognizes that while TPS gives people “some breathing room,” like humanitarian parole, it has to be renewed. To be successful, she continues, people usually need legal counsel, which can be expensive.

    Other roadblocks and bureaucratic snafus — a result of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies — are also becoming increasingly apparent. Advocates say that by the time Donald Trump left office, the country’s resettlement programs were in shambles and the Biden administration has still not done what’s needed to get things back up and running.

    Kelly Agnew-Barajas, director of refugee resettlement at Catholic Charities, Archdiocese of New York, describes overwhelmed advocates who are trying to reopen the 320 local refugee resettlement agencies that were shuttered in 2018 following Trump’s slashing of the annual refugee quota from 110,000 in 2017 to 15,000 in 2020.

    This lack of infrastructure, Agnew-Barajas points out, has exacerbated the current crisis. Nonetheless, she is pleased that at least some Ukrainians (and a smaller number of Russians and Belarusians) are being paroled in. Still, she stresses that even before Ukrainians began streaming into the U.S., the country faced a significant processing backlog.

    “The 76,000 Afghan refugees admitted to the country in 2021 have still not been fully resettled,” Agnew-Barajas told Truthout. “There is a lot of nervousness in the advocacy community because 5,000 additional Afghans will be arriving before September. This is on top of the regular flood of immigrants coming from other countries. The process for Afghan arrivals has been very, very difficult. We need to plan for Ukrainian arrivals. We need resources and emergency supplies.”

    Stacy Caplow, professor of law and associate dean of experiential education at Brooklyn Law School, agrees. The fact that people all over the world are languishing in refugee camps waiting to be resettled, she says, underscores the urgency of the situation.

    At the same time, she notes that those admitted into the U.S. on humanitarian parole have a marked advantage. “If you are already in the U.S., you can apply for asylum and go through the adjudication system. You go to court and see a judge who determines if you meet eligibility for admission under the law. It usually takes a long time, but if there is the will, the time can be shortened,” Caplow said. This was done for Afghan evacuees. Others, in refugee camps in places like Kenya, “have been waiting for 10 years to begin the process.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Pakistan’s Pivot To Russia And Ouster Of Imran Khan

    Days before Imran Khan’s ouster on April 10 as prime minister in a no-trust motion in the parliament orchestrated by foreign powers, two impersonators were arrested in Washington for posing as US federal security officials and cultivating access to the Secret Service, which protects President Joe Biden, one of whom claimed ties to Pakistani intelligence.

    Justice department assistant attorney Joshua Rothstein asked a judge not to release Arian Taherzadeh and Haider Ali, the men arrested on April 6 for posing as Department of Homeland Security investigators for two years before the arrest, the Guardian reported on April 8.

    The men also stand accused of providing lucrative favors to members of the Secret Service, including one agent on the security detail of the first lady, Jill Biden. Prosecutors said in court filings they seized a cache of weapons from multiple DC apartments tied to the defendants.

    The post Pakistan’s Pivot To Russia And Ouster Of Imran Khan appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Nazification Of Ukraine And How The War Is Changing The World

    In follow up to a two-hour webinar hosted by the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) with Scott Ritter, a former weapons inspector who blew the whistle on the lack of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq, Clearing the FOG continues the conversation on Ukraine. Ritter delves into how Nazis went from being a fringe group in Ukraine to being mainstreamed and treated as heroes. He explains the ways the conflict in Ukraine has ended the United States’ era of being a sole dominant global power and has exposed the weaknesses of both the US and NATO militaries. Ritter states that if the current conflict escalates to a nuclear war, it will mean the end of human civilization.

    The post The Nazification Of Ukraine And How The War Is Changing The World appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Zelensky Oversees Campaign Of Assassination, Kidnapping And Torture Of Political Opposition

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has framed his country’s war against Russia as a battle for democracy itself. In a carefully choreographed address to US Congress on March 16, Zelensky stated, “Right now, the destiny of our country is being decided. The destiny of our people, whether Ukrainians will be free, whether they will be able to preserve their democracy.” Western media has looked the other way, however, as Zelensky and top officials in his administration have sanctioned a campaign of kidnapping, torture, and assassination of local Ukrainian lawmakers accused of collaborating with Russia. Several mayors and other Ukrainian officials have been killed since the outbreak of war, many reportedly by Ukrainian state agents after engaging in de-escalation talks with Russia.

    The post Zelensky Oversees Campaign Of Assassination, Kidnapping And Torture Of Political Opposition appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Kamila Valieva and Eileen Gu:  Young Women Athletes as Enemies of Empire

    Kamila Valieva

    As one who has followed Olympic women’s figure skating, especially since Michelle Kwan (ironically a Chinese-American), I was—as an egalitarian feminist when it comes to sports—excited to learn that there was a 15-year-old Russian woman skater, Kamila Valieva, who could do effortless quad jumps.  Waiting in anticipation of her first Olympic performance, I listened to commentators and former US skaters Tara Lipinsky and Johnny Weir rave about her spectacular talent.  They told the audience that we were about to see “the best skating in the world”…that “a talent like this comes around once in a lifetime.”  They found her first performance in the short skate “incredible… flawless… perfect in every way.”  It was, they said, a rare privilege to watch her perform:  “she will have an amazing legacy.”  Days later they would say nothing watching her perform.

    Weir and Lipinski were disgusted.  They said she should not be there.  It was so unfair to the other skaters.  They were too sickened to even watch her.  What happened?  The Empire and its allies, based on a highly questionable positive drug test, declared her a “doper.”  She was booed, harassed.  And she finally (literally) fell.  The Russians should obviously not have the first female Olympic quad jumper.  The Russians were taking far too many gold medals.  This whole spectacle was an intersection of hegemonic American world politics and ruthless patriarchy.  Women athletes had become enemies, and thus victims, of Empire. USA!  USA!

    The US has always had a need to be first—to put it mildly.  Any coverage of Olympic or international games I’ve ever watched features US athletes and almost never anyone else.  President Jimmy Carter got the ball rolling with his 1980 boycott of the Olympics in the Soviet Union.  Under Carter the Cold War had worsened because of factors like American criticism of Soviet alleged abuses of human rights and the Afghan crisis—therefore the controversial move to ignore the Olympics’ so-called non-political philosophy.  American views of Russian athletics did not improve:  the alleged Russian Doping Scandals began around 2008 and are still going. In 2008, Russian track and field athletes were suspended from competition because of supposed doping, cheating, cover-ups, even “state-sponsored” doping.

    A 2015 New York Times article cited an ex-chief of a so-called Russian anti-doping laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov, who claimed that samples were doctored so that several Russian gold medal winners in the 2014 winter games in Sochi could be victors.  Members of the Russian Sports Ministry thought it an April Fools’ joke, done for “purely political reasons” and threatened to sue the Times. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) had asked the accuser, Mr. Rodchenkov, to resign years before, for taking bribes, and since 2012 he had lived in L A.  Because of such allegations, the World Athletics Federation suspended the Russian Athletic Federation in 2015, but let “clean athletes” participate under “neutral status”:  no Russian flags or anthems.  In 2019, 2020 and 2021, more accusations were brought against various Russian sports officials for “falsifying documents” and etc., and thus the suspensions continued.

    President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government have strongly denied the allegations, calling them a political weapon of the West.  Any appeals from Russian athletes have been denied.  Some argued all countries cheated, why single out Russia?  Others thought the Russians were being framed to keep their very strong athletes from competitions.  It does seem odd that once your athletes were so scrutinized you would be careful to stop “doping.”  In fact, the stated goal of the Russian Sports Ministry at the end of 2021 was –once again—to have the Russian Athletic Federation and Anti-Doping Agency reinstated.  The “West” has remained hostile toward Russian athletics.  And this most certainly included Russian ice skaters:  a sport where Russia has been at the very top for years.

    Kamila Valieva had to skate under the same restraints that all Russian athletes face.  But because she was so incredibly good, the skating world simply had to acknowledge her.  In looking at her biographical data—there’s not much!  She’s only 15; born in April of 2006 in Kazan, Russia.  And she has a Pomeranian named Lena, a gift from a fan.  Before she was five years old, her mother had her in gymnastics, ballet and skating, but after age five, it was only skating.   In her first season out of junior ranking she had risen far above her opposition.  She is the fourth woman to land a quadruple jump in competition and the first to do it in Olympic competition.  Valieva set world records on her path to Grand Prix titles in Vancouver and Sochi, and the European Championships in Tallinn in January of this year.  In Beijing the expectations for Kamila Valieva were very high.  As one Russian journalist put it, she was so good in her short skate routine in Beijing that “even some western media outlets often so begrudging with their praise of Russian athletes were forced—perhaps through gritted teeth—to lavish praise on Valieva.” And when she competed next, for the Russian team, she did become the first woman to land a quad in Olympic history. But very soon after that, it was rumored there were “doping allegations” against Kamila Valieva.  A test taken in December was only revealed just then—in the midst of the March Olympics.  It seemed the Russians may not fare so well after all.

    Of course, the US also insisted on besting the Chinese athletes in Beijing, but added a nasty political narrative about their host.  Sports analysts like Mike Tirico were pressed into service as experts on alleged Chinese abuses vs. Uyghurs (abuses debunked by reporters like Max Blumenthal), their “authoritarian” government, misguided Covid protocols, etc.  American politicians and media had already prepped the US audience to be anti-Asian generally, by these supposed abuses and the potential of China becoming an even greater economic power—and unapologetically socialist as well.  The COVID pandemic was their fault too; President Trump calling it “Kung Flu” or the “Chinese virus.”  It was embarrassing to listen to the vitriolic commentary by US “analysts” with their long recanting of Chinese faults and crimes.  Our ugly history with China started with the US involvement in the Opium War through the dangerous gradual encirclement of present-day China with US warships and bases placed on numerous unwilling Pacific islands, as John Pilger’s brilliant film The Coming War on China illustrates.   And the US had tried to help their bad faith anti-China Olympic campaign with a “diplomatic boycott” (which didn’t really catch on).

    Eileen Gu

    Another young woman athlete, Chinese-American Eileen Gu, also became a victim of the Empire’s anger.  Gu is 18; she has a Chinese mother and was raised in San Francisco.  A brilliant world class freestyle skier, she has medalled in X Games, the World Championship and the Youth Olympics.  Gu announced in 2019 that she would represent China in the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.  But she wasn’t called a traitor until the Olympics drew near.

    Gu has said that she welcomes the opportunity to draw people to winter sports.  The Chinese cheered her everywhere, but Americans not so much.  She was derided for taking advantage of “premier training” in the US and then abandoning the US for China.  Tucker Carlson said she had betrayed her country and “renounced” her citizenship.  The New York Times portrayed Gu as an “anti-hero of the feminist ideal” since she chose China which supposedly oppresses women.  At the other end of the political spectrum, right-wing social media echoed Carlson’s sentiments in calling for Gu to leave the country for her betrayal.  Gu won three Olympic medals in freestyle skiing, two gold and a silver.  Unfortunately for USA her three medals added to China’s total of 15 (with nine gold), best ever for China in a winter Olympics.

    Eileen Gu also faces anti-female prejudice since extreme sports has always been male-dominated, although women do compete alongside the men.  Gu thinks “as a young biracial woman, it is super important to be able to push boundaries. . . those of the sport and those of the record books because that’s what paves the paths for the next generation of girls.”  So why does the country where she lives give her an incredibly hard time?  As professor of sport Simon Chadwick said, “Her success is being weaponized and used for geopolitical purposes.  This is incredibly unfair because she’s an 18-year-old athlete with a dual heritage family who just wants to try her best and make her parents proud, and yet she’s being turned into a geopolitical weapon.”  Journalist Danny Haiphong has argued that Eileen Gu has chosen the “wrong” side by choosing to compete for a non-white, communist country.  She is assaulting “American exceptionalism” –being a traitor to the “empire’s civilizing mission.”  She should not be skiing for the “Chinese devils.”   But Gu insists (on her Instagram) she hopes “to unite people, promote common understanding, create communication, and forge friendship.”  And she has said:  “I am also a teenage girl.  I do my best to make the world a better place, and I’m having fun while doing it.”  Not what the Empire is about.

    Vietnamese-American Haiphong also has pointed out that some American athletes were not going for the Empire’s narrative that the Chinese were being bad hosts—inferior food, lodging, unreasonable COVID protocols, and so on.  Snowboarder Tessa Maud refuted American media’s narrative and talked of the warm welcome she’d received by Chinese volunteers and how she loved the local cuisine.   Skier Aaron Blunk went so far as to criticize American media coverage of the games on Twitter as often “completely false.”  He called Beijing one of the better Olympics he’s been in, including the COVID protocols, the hosting:  “It’s been phenomenal.”  So Twitter suspended his account.  As Haiphong put it:  “Humanizing China represents a direct threat to the new Cold War Agenda.”  The US must control the narrative, and that included not allowing China, or Russia, to shine.

    The Empire certainly succeeded in taking the shine from the great Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva.  Commentators Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir, who had just called Valieva the “best skater in the world” with a “talent that comes once in a lifetime,” were about to change their minds.  At Beijing, Valieva’s performance in the short skate was “a thing of great beauty.”  Weir and Lipinski thought it “incredible.”  Weir gushed about the interview he had been granted by the young Valieva.  Her second performance was a free skate for the Russian team.  She fell once but the skate was historic because as noted, she became the first woman in history to land a quad at the Olympics.  She finished 30 points ahead of second place Kaori Sakamoto.  Weir and Lipinski could not find enough superlatives.

    All awaited what would no doubt be another historic performance by Valieva in the ladies singles event.  But then rumors began that the medal ceremony, with Russia winning gold and the US silver—would be delayed.  And then that “a Russian skater” had a positive doping test.  Then it leaked it was Kamila Valieva, in spite of IOC rules that any accusation against a “minor” must remain secret.  A test taken on December 25, sent to a Swedish lab, showed minute traces of trimetazidine, an “illegal” heart drug which may have some positive effect on athletic performance, although many argue it would not help skaters.  Valieva’s family and coaching team believed she may have been exposed to it through her grandfather, who took the drug.  The Russian team also said she had repeatedly tested negative before and after the positive sample.  They said she was innocent.  The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) panel ruled she would not be suspended from the competition.  A further investigation would happen later, now scheduled to conclude by mid-August.

    Kamila Valieva rallied to lead the field in the ladies short program.  This was when stalwart patriots Lipinski and Weir were too disgusted to watch.  I remember these stalwarts as being very nasty in speaking of the Russian skaters both during the Sochi (Russia) Olympics in 2014, and the 2018 PyeongChang  (South Korea)  games (where “cleared” Russians could skate).   Some observers found them “a breath of fresh air,” but others as “mean, obnoxious, distracting.”  At any rate, they were outraged Valieva was allowed to perform.  She was “ruining everything.”  Their only comment after her performance was “she skated.”  Getting their wish for her downfall, the scandal finally impacted her free skate and she finished fourth after stumbles and falls.  Unfortunately for USA! Russian Alexandra Trusova won silver.  Former Russian ice dancer champion Alexander Zhulin has said that international sports authorities will have to live with “ruining” Kamila Valieva’s Olympic dreams.  He had never “seen Kamila so lost.”  The IOC and WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) “destroyed and removed the biggest star of figure skating.”  The December 25 test was revealed after team Russia’s brilliant performance, capped by Valieva’s skate, won gold.  It does seem like an American Empire kind of move.

    Valieva’s coact Eteri Tutberidze, who, along with Kamila’s team, was (incredibly) criticized by the IOC’s Thomas Bach, for being “too cold.”   Tutberidze said Kamila was “our star.”  “Those who smiled yesterday—today left the stands demonstrably ignoring and pouncing like jackals.”  There were reporters, especially the British, who followed her around at practice, yelling “Are you a doper?”  Valieva addressed her Beijing experience in two “emotional instagrams” in late February.  She thanked her coaches for “helping me to be strong.”  And she thanked all who “were with me during this tough period . . who did not let me lose heart. . and who believed in me.”  A few weeks later she was on the ice again.

    Kamila participated in the “Channel One Cup”  Russian skating (competitive) exhibition, since Russian skaters were banned from the Worlds.  Valieva skated a “simplified” program, but said the experience of being out on the ice was “exhilarating.”  Anna Shcherbakova won the women’s event.  Valieva has said that the Olympics should not be “idealized” and her “journey is just beginning.” In a recent interview with “People Talk” she said she can be “cocky, obnoxious, stubborn, insecure.”  But also “sociable, cheerful, active, and of course, romantic…”  In skating programs, her coaches see her in “lyrical images,” but she wants to be “different in programs:  a hooligan, daring, bold.”  She is a typical teenager, but also very intelligent, a brilliant athlete and a targeted enemy of Empire.

    Sportswriters can be very effective operatives for Empire.  My favorite is probably Christine Brennan.  I had admired Brennan as one of the team of reporters on HBO’s “Real Sports,” although unfortunately now they seem more apt to take a corporate line than do the critical reporting they used to do.  Brennan accused Valieva, and Russia, of turning the Winter Games “into a bizarre and troubling fiasco” because of their “state-sponsored doping.”  She said Valieva “would have been favored to win” the Worlds in Montpelier, but she “crumbled under the scrutiny of her positive drug test.”  When Americans won the pairs skating title at Worlds, their first since 1979, Brennan wrote:  “No Russia?  No China?  No problem.”  And “few will miss them.”  The Beijing medal count had USA with 25 medals, behind Norway, Russia, Germany and Canada, much like their finish at PyeongChang.  The Russians had 32 medals, with six gold; the Chinese had 15, with nine gold; USA! had a paltry 25, with eight gold, well behind Russia.  Totally unacceptable.

    Of course, by the World Championships, more than Valieva and her fellow skaters were ousted from competition.  It was all Russia, all the time—everyone Russian was out because the World Federations of all the sports, influenced and/or bludgeoned into it, had banned them all because of the Russian military action in Ukraine.  This was the Russian response to being encircled with troops and NATO forces, and a Nazi-led government provided by the US in Ukraine in 2014, which had been attacking the Russian-language population of eastern Ukraine since that 2014 coup.  An unprecedented campaign of Western propaganda and lies is in full swing, definitely McCarthyite in its depth and with parallel lasting and dangerous results to come.  In the 1950s Ethel Rosenberg was executed for being a communist wife—a wife who either evilly influenced her husband Julius to reveal atomic secrets to the Russians or did not, as was her duty, stop him from doing so.  Julius Rosenberg, executed with his wife, was reputedly worried that if the US gained too much power without a balance from the Soviets, it would lead to a dangerous situation.  And he was right.  The US government has become an Empire that will tolerate no state competitor, nor even states who will not line up and stay with the American Empire’s plans.  This is very clear in the world of sport—certainly in the supposedly apolitical Olympic world.

    To punish Russia, the US/Europe have gone totally insane with their bans and sanctions.  Many sanctions such as Russian energy, will only punish Europe; others involve outright piracy as in US allies helping themselves to Russian yachts.  The list goes on, but in the world of sport—athletes from Russia and its close ally Belarus are banned “until further notice” from international skiing, track and field events, tennis, basketball, aquatic sports, volleyball, curling, hockey, rugby, football (soccer), and of course, skating.  Many of these sports have Russian champions, and they, as Christine Brennan put it, “will not be missed.”  A few officials have objected, and paid for it.  Russian sports officials say they will “temporarily” develop their own competitions, with foreign athletes.  They say the western world is committing “sporting genocide” against its athletes.

    So Kamila Valieva and company will skate at home, and Eileen Gu will still be considered a traitor by many Americans.  The hate expressed by Tara Lipinski and Christine Brennan is too easily tapped by the American sports world.  Here is hegemonic politics, and ruthless patriarchy and racism, coming together.  And here are two remarkably strong and level-headed young women athletes who are braving the results of being who they are.  In its overwhelming power, the US Empire has made evil all things Chinese and Russian, and women athletes have not been spared the weaponizing of that hate.

    The post Kamila Valieva and Eileen Gu:  Young Women Athletes as Enemies of Empire first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Who Will Hold the US/EU/NATO Accountable For Its Many War Crimes?

    Should it be found that Russian troops have committed these heinous acts they were accused of in Bucha, they should absolutely be made accountable for them. But who will prosecute or sanction or even hold accountable the US/EU/NATO in any of their war crimes? Already the UN has voted to remove Russia from the Human Rights Council in an unprecedented move, doing so without a shred of evidence that Russian forces have committed the alleged atrocities in Bucha.

    The post Who Will Hold the US/EU/NATO Accountable For Its Many War Crimes? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Despite U.S. Bluff and Bluster, Pentagon’s Bioweapon Threat to Russia and China Is Serious

    When Russia launched its intervention in Ukraine on February 24, the Kiev regime promptly ordered a network of 30 laboratories funded and managed by the Pentagon to destroy samples of pathogens. That these laboratories were engaged in biological weapons development was later admitted on March 8 by U.S. State Department official Victoria Nuland during hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

    The post Despite U.S. Bluff and Bluster, Pentagon’s Bioweapon Threat to Russia and China Is Serious appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.