The most powerful empire that has ever existed, which is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and continuously works to destroy any nation who challenges its global dominion, claims that it is in a global power struggle against “authoritarianism”.
❖
Russia will lose the propaganda war on every front, at least in the west. It will lose every narrative dispute about alleged war crimes in the court of public opinion, whether those allegations are true or not. The US military is beatable, the US dollar is beatable, but the US propaganda machine is an unstoppable juggernaut.
❖
Can’t believe we’ve been watching people lose their social media accounts for posting “misinformation” this whole time only for US officials to come right out and admit that they’ve been running an active disinformation campaign where they knowingly circulate lies about Russia.
A random guy says something on social media that differs from mainstream consensus? That’s misinformation; he needs to be de-platformed. The most powerful government in the world uses the most powerful media institutions in the world to circulate disinfo? That’s just fine normal stuff.
It’s actually really disturbing that US empire managers now feel comfortable just leaking the fact that they are blatantly lying to the public to win a psywar against Putin. It means they’re confident they can get the public to consciously consent to their rulers lying to them for their own good.
Three U.S. officials tell NBC News that U.S. claims based on “intelligence” on Russia were made up simply to “preempt the Russians”
One U.S. official: “It doesn’t have to be solid intelligence when we talk about it..” pic.twitter.com/Yv9udq05ex
Don’t take life advice from unhappy people, don’t take creative advice from people who don’t create, don’t take career advice from people whose careers aren’t where you want yours to be, don’t take advice on the Ukraine war from people who supported the Iraq invasion.
❖
People tell me, “Talk to Ukrainians!”
No matter how many Ukrainians I talk to, it will still be an objective fact that the US government and western media have a well-documented history of lying about every war, and that wanting direct hot warfare between nuclear superpowers is fucking insane.
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It’s amazing how many arguments I run into that essentially boil down to “Your opinion is Russian.” It’s like the word “Russian” stopped referring to a nation and its population and now refers to some sort of metaphysical quality of one’s soul, similar to the word “Satanic”.
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The other day a longtime lefty follower called me a bootlicker for saying the US military should not directly attack the Russian military in Ukraine. Opposing US military interventionism and World War 3 is bootlicking now. War propaganda is turning people’s brains into soup.
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The agenda to create a one world government is not some hidden conspiracy involving secret societies and shadowy figures with Jewish surnames. The US empire is openly working to unite the planet under a single power structure which effectively functions as one government.
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Washington DC is the hub of the imperial political machine, Virginia is the hub of the imperial war machine, California is the hub of the imperial propaganda machine.
❖
In the end we’re just a confused species who entered into an awkward developmental transition phase because our brains evolved too fast.
We wound up with the ability to think abstract thoughts but without the wisdom to refrain from identifying with them. With the ability to invent nuclear weapons but without the wisdom to refrain from building them. The ability to conquer our ecosystem without the wisdom to refrain from doing so. To write vast tomes of philosophy that contain not one line telling us how to feel content in our own bodies, on our own home planet. To construct entire belief systems that are utterly useless for living in harmony with what is.
I’m sure birds and whales went through awkward evolutionary transition phases as well before they turned into the graceful flyers and swimmers they are today. Their early ancestors probably looked downright ridiculous for a while. It’s just that their transitions didn’t involve giant prefrontal cortices in their skulls that make childbirth painful and could easily give rise to the end of all life on earth.
The birth of a human baby is difficult due to the size of our enormous, rapidly evolved brains relative to the more slowly evolved pelvic bone. The birth of a sane humanity will be difficult for similar reasons.
I do believe we have the ability to make the jump from this awkward transition phase to become a truly conscious species. But it looks like if we make it, it’s going to be by the skin of our omnivore teeth.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Ukrainian and Western media outlets have accused Russian troops of killing civilians in Bucha and other towns around Ukraine’s capital, Kiev in the past month. Excerpts of phone calls obtained by RT, however, appear to contradict some of the allegations and seem to paint a different picture of the situation on the ground.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed, on Thursday, that the situation in settlement of Borodyanka is “much more disastrous” than that reported in Bucha, about 25 kilometers (15.5 miles), to the southeast. Moscow has strongly denied the allegations and accused Ukraine, and its Western backers of trying to “frame” its personnel.
RT was unable to independently verify the authenticity of the recordings. In what appears to be an excerpt from a satellite phone call, an alleged reporter identified only as ‘Simon’ tells his colleagues he visited Borodyanka and found that “there’s no bodies in the streets at all,” contrary to what he was led to expect.
The town has been “shelled to pieces,” he outlines, “but there’s no evidence of any rights abuses here at all.” Simon claims that he and his crew interviewed multiple residents who said the Russian troops had been very friendly and gave them food and water and other supplies. “And we got quotes on camera for that,” he adds.
“I don’t know what the prosecutor was talking about, but we have seen nothing like that at all. It’s a completely different picture,” he continues, adding that a French journalist may have seen the body of someone killed by shelling, but “no executions.”
The alleged reporter ends the call by saying he was going back to Bucha, to “try and find some more evidence of extrajudicial killings there, but there’s no sign of any of that here.”
Ukraine accused Russia of murdering over 400 civilians in Bucha before retreating from the town near Kiev last week. The US and its allies have backed Kiev’s claims, citing them as reasons to impose more sanctions against Russia.
Moscow has categorically denied the accusations, saying that Russian troops pulled out of the town on March 30, and that claims of killings appeared only four days later – after Ukrainian security forces and TV cameras arrived in the town.
Another recording obtained by RT seems to depict a conversation between two Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) officials. The SBU is the local successor agency to the Soviet KGB.
They discuss the situation in Kukhari, a town about 60 kilometers (37 miles) northwest of Bucha, and seem to contradict the prevailing media narrative coming from Kiev and the NATO capitals.
“From March 24 to April 3, after we pushed the ‘orcs’ away from here,” says a person only identified as Sergey Anatolyevich, speaking to someone named Lesogor and using a derogatory Ukrainian term for Russians. “After the unit that pushed them out moved on, the territorial defense came from Malin … and marauded during that time. Looted everything they could. Broke down doors, everything. Safes were opened, cars were stolen. They stuffed the cars with everything worth anything and took it away,” he adds.
“It turns out the ‘Moskals’ took nothing, but ours went in and looted everything,” Sergey Anatolyevich adds, using another derogatory term for Russians. Malin is a nearby town southwest of Kukhari, held by the Ukrainian military.
When Lesogor asks which unit was looting, Sergey Anatolyevich replies that no one really knows. “Some say Volhynian, others say someone else,” he says, referring to a region in western Ukraine.
Moscow attacked the neighboring state in late February, following Ukraine’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements signed in 2014, and Russia’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German and French brokered Minsk Protocol was designed to regularize the status of the regions within the Ukrainian state.
Russia has now demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two regions by force.
It was big news that Russia was stripped of its seat in the Un human Rights Council.
In March 2014 in one of my first blog posts I argued for making better use of the possibility to suspend member states (be it in the context of reprisals): “The resolution establishing the new Human Rights Council – replacing the previous Commission – states that “members elected to the Council shall uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights.” And one of the novelties touted was that the General Assembly, via a two-thirds majority, can suspend the rights and privileges of any Council member that it decides has persistently committed gross and systematic violations of human rights during its term of membership.
The chilling effect that reprisals can have – especially when met with impunity – is potentially extremely damaging for the whole UN system of human rights procedures and will undo the slow but steady process of the last decades. Taken together with the above-mentioned seriousness of the aggravating character of reprisals, a powerful coalition of international and regional NGOs could well start public hearings with the purpose of demanding that States that commit reprisal be suspended.
UN members voted on Thursday 7 April to strip Russia from its seat at the Human Rights Council, over alleged civilian killings in the region around Kyiv, Ukraine. The proposal, presented at a UN General Assembly emergency session in New York, was backed by 93 countries. Russia, China, Belarus, Syria and Iran were among the 24 countries to vote against, while 58 countries, including India, Brazil and South Africa abstained.
Introducing the US-led resolution, Ukrainian ambassador to the UN, Sergiy Kyslytsya, told fellow members that suspending Russia’s right to sit on the Council, was “not an option, but a duty”.
This is the first time a permanent member of the UN Security Council has been removed from any UN body.
Countries react
Taking the floor, China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba, echoed Russia’s comments and said the move was politically driven. Belarus dubbed it an attempt to “demonise” Russia. Warning that they would abstain, several countries including India, Egypt, Senegal, Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, argued it was too soon to vote on such a proposal and that investigations into the allegations should be conducted beforehand.
In a statement published on its website, Russia’s permanent mission in Geneva called the decision “an unlawful and politically motivated step, the sole purpose of which – to exert pressure on a sovereign state that pursues an independent domestic and foreign policy”.
Russia’s deputy ambassador, Gennady Kuzmin, said after the vote that Russia had already withdrawn from the council before the assembly took action, apparently in expectation of the result. By withdrawing, council spokesman Rolando Gomez said Russia avoided being deprived of observer status at the rights body.
A Russian missile attack on Friday reportedly killed more than 30 people at a train station in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, where civilians gathered to flee escalating violence in the region.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, the regional governor of Donetsk, said in a statement that “thousands of people were at the station during the missile strike, as residents of Donetsk region are being evacuated to safer regions of Ukraine.”
Horrific photos and video footage from the scene show bodies and luggage strewn on the pavement and emergency officials working to transport those wounded by the strike, which came as Russia faced growing accusations of war crimes. One photo appeared to show the missile that landed near the train station.
The Financial Timesreported that the Russian Defense Ministry “initially said it had used high-precision rockets to attack three Ukrainian railway stations in the Donbas that it claimed were hosting ‘Ukrainian reserves’ armaments and military equipment.’”
“But after the scale of the civilian casualties became clear, Russia denied any involvement in the attack, which it said was a ‘provocation’ that ‘has nothing to do with reality,’” FT added. “The defense ministry said: ‘Russia’s forces had no plans to fire on targets in Kramatorsk on April 8.’ It claimed that the missiles used in the attack were used solely by Ukrainian forces.”
In the wake of the attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russian forces of “cynically destroying the civilian population” because they are “lacking the strength and courage to stand up to us on the battlefield.”
“This is an evil that has no limits,” he added. “And if it is not punished, it will never stop.”
The latest reported atrocity comes as Western officials say that Russia, having failed to seize Kyiv and other major cities, is shifting its focus to eastern Ukraine, where Moscow-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces have been fighting for years.
In recent days, Ukrainian officials have implored residents in the eastern region to evacuate ahead of potential Russian offensive. According to the Washington Post, local officials on Wednesday “reported renewed Russian shelling in the eastern Donetsk region, killing at least five people, and as many as 10 high-rise apartment buildings on fire in Severodonetsk, in the neighboring Luhansk district.”
Since Russia launched its invasion in late February, more than 11 million Ukrainians — around a quarter of the pre-war population — have been forced to flee their homes to escape airstrikes and ground fighting.
On Thursday, NATO member countries agreed to provide Ukraine with more advanced weaponry despite mounting concerns that Western arms shipments are hampering the ongoing peace talks and potentially prolonging the war. Weeks of tense negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian delegations have yet to produce a lasting ceasefire or a broader breakthrough, despite some reports of progress from both sides.
Vadym Prystaiko, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, toldSky News ahead of the train station attack that “we’re trying to build up a very, very uneasy [and] very, very difficult, compromise.”
“Many Ukrainians are not happy with the attempts of the government to find some ground with Russia,” said Prystaiko. “People, in most of the cases, don’t even understand how can we sit at the table with those who are just killing each and every day our people. But that’s the nature of any war. They will have to come to an end and we will.”
This story has been updated to include new comments from the Russian Defense Ministry.
Margaret Flowers and Joe Lombardo of the United National Antiwar Coalition host a conversation with Scott Ritter regarding the situation in Ukraine and its broader implications for the realignment of global power, security and economic structures. Ritter discusses the provocations that led Russia to launch a military operation, the humanitarian situation, including what happened in Bucha, how Russia is winning, and the propaganda being used to build popular support for war.
Scott Ritter was the UN weapons inspector who, during the Iraq War told the truth that we found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He became outspoken about this, which undercut the main reason the US used to invade and occupy Iraq. As with the Iraq War, Scott Ritter is outspoken about the present war in Ukraine, in which we are again hearing US lies about the reasons for, and the events happening in the Ukraine War.
It is hard to fathom the depths of our time, the terrible wars, and the confounding information that whizzes by without much wisdom. Certainties that flood the airwaves and the internet are easy to come by, but are they derived from an honest assessment of the war in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russian banks (part of a broader United States sanctions policy that now afflicts approximately thirty countries)? Do they acknowledge the horrific reality of hunger that has increased due to this war and the sanctions? It appears that much of the ‘certainties’ are caught up in the ‘Cold War mentality’, which views humanity as irreversibly divided on two opposing sides. However, this is not the case; most countries are struggling to craft a non-aligned approach to the US-imposed ‘new Cold War’. Russia’s conflict with Ukraine is a symptom of broader geopolitical battles that have been waged over decades.
On 26 March, US President Joe Biden defined some certainties from his perspective at the Royal Castle in Warsaw (Poland), calling the war in Ukraine ‘a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force’. These binaries are wholly a fantasy of the White House, whose attitude towards ‘rules-based order’ is not rooted in the UN Charter but in ‘rules’ that the US pronounces. Biden’s antinomies culminated in one policy objective: ‘For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power’, he said, meaning Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. The narrowness of Biden’s approach to the conflict in Ukraine has led to a public call for regime change in Russia, a country of 146 million people whose government possesses 6,255 nuclear warheads. With the US’s violent history of controlling leadership in several countries, reckless statements about regime change cannot go unanswered. They must be universally contested.
The principal axis of Russia’s war is not actually Ukraine, though it bears the brunt of it today. It is whether Europe can be permitted to forge projects independently of the US and its North Atlantic agenda. Between the fall of the USSR (1991) and the world financial crisis (2007–08), Russia, the new post-Soviet republics (including Ukraine), and other Eastern European states sought to integrate into the European system, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Russia joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace process in 1994, and seven Eastern European countries (including Estonia and Latvia that border Russia) joined NATO in 2004. During the global financial crisis, it became evident that integration into the European project would not be fully possible because of vulnerabilities in Europe.
At the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, President Vladimir Putin challenged the US’s attempt to create a unipolar world. ‘What is a unipolar world?’, Putin asked. ‘No matter how we beautify this term, it means one single centre of power, one single centre of force, and one single master’. Referring to US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 (which he had criticised at that time) and the US’s illegal Iraq War in 2003, Putin said, ‘Nobody feels secure anymore because nobody can hide behind international law’. Later, at the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest (Romania), Putin warned about the dangers of NATO’s eastward expansion, lobbying against the entry of Georgia and Ukraine into the military alliance. The next year, Russia partnered with Brazil, China, India, and South Africa to form the BRICS bloc as an alternative to Western-driven globalisation.
Yang Fudong (China), Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, Part IV, 2006.
For generations, Europe has relied on imports of natural gas and crude oil first from the USSR and then from Russia. This dependence on Russia has increased as European countries have sought to end their use of coal and nuclear energy. At the same time, Poland (2015) and Italy (2019) signed onto the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Between 2012 and 2019, the Chinese government also formed the 17+1 Initiative, linking seventeen central and Eastern European countries in the BRI project. The integration of Europe into Eurasia opened the door for its foreign policy independence. But this was not permitted. The entire ‘global NATO’ feint – articulated in 2008 by NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer – was part of preventing this development.
Fearful of the great changes occurring in Eurasia, the US acted on commercial and diplomatic/military fronts. Commercially, the US tried to substitute European reliance on Russian natural gas by promising to supply Europe with Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) from both US suppliers and Gulf Arab states. Since LNG is far more expensive than piped gas, this was not an enticing commercial deal. Challenges to Chinese advancements in high-tech solutions – particularly in telecommunications, robotics, and green energy – could not be sustained by Silicon Valley firms, so the US escalated two other instruments of force: first, the use of War on Terror rhetoric to ban Chinese firms (claiming security and privacy considerations) and second, diplomatic and military manoeuvres to challenge Russia’s sense of stability.
Sadamasa Motonaga (Japan), Red and Yellow, 1963.
The US’s strategy was not entirely successful. European countries could see that there was no effective substitute for both Russian energy and Chinese investment. Banning Huawei’s telecommunications tools and preventing NordStream 2 from certification would only hurt the European people. This was clear. But what was not so clear was that the US concurrently began to dismantle the architecture that held in place confidence that no country would begin a nuclear war. In 2002, the US unilaterally abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and, in 2018–19, they left the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. European countries played a key role in establishing the INF Treaty in 1987 through the ‘nuclear freeze’ movement, but the abandonment of the treaty in 2018–19 was met with relative silence from Europeans. In 2018, US National Security Strategy shifted from its focus on the Global War on Terror to the prevention of the ‘re-emergence of long-term, strategic competition’ from ‘near-peer rivals’ such as China and Russia. At the same time, European countries began to carry out ‘freedom of navigation’ exercises through NATO in the Baltic Sea, the Arctic Sea, and South China Sea, sending threatening messages to China and Russia. These moves effectively brought China and Russia very close together.
Russia indicated on several occasions that it was aware of these tactics and would defend its borders and its region with force. When the US intervened in Syria in 2012 and Ukraine in 2014, these moves threatened Russia with the loss of its two main warm water ports (in Latakia, Syria and Sebastopol, Crimea), which is why Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and intervened militarily in Syria in 2015. These actions suggested that Russia would continue to use its military to protect what it sees as its national interests. Ukraine then shut down the North Crimean canal that brought the peninsula 85% of its water, forcing Russia to supply the region with water over the Kerch Strait Bridge, built at enormous cost between 2016 and 2019. Russia did not need ‘security guarantees’ from Ukraine, or even from NATO, but it sought them from the United States. There was fear in Moscow that the US would place intermediate range nuclear missiles around Russia.
Evgeny Trotsky (Russia), Rest, 2016.
In light of this recent history, contradictions rattle the responses of Germany, Japan, and India, amongst others. Each of these countries needs Russian natural gas and crude oil. Both Germany and Japan have sanctioned Russian banks, but neither German Chancellor Olaf Scholz nor Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida can cut energy imports. India, despite being part of the US-backed Quad along with Japan, has refused to join the condemnation of Russia and the sanctions on its banking sector. These countries have to manage the contradictions of our time and weigh up the uncertainties. No state should accept the so-called ‘certainties’ that reinforce Cold War dynamics, nor should they neglect the dangerous outcomes of externally influenced regime change and chaos.
It is always a good idea to reflect on the quiet charm of the poems of Tōge Sankichi, who watched the atomic bomb fall on his native Hiroshima in 1945, and then later joined the Japanese Communist Party to fight for peace. In his ‘Call to Action’, Sankichi wrote:
stretch out those grotesque arms
to the many similar arms
and, if it seems like that flash might fall again,
hold up the accursed sun:
even now it is not too late.
British politician and broadcaster George Galloway has made headlines in the UK with his threat to press legal action against Twitter for designating his account “Russia state-affiliated media”, a label which will now show up under his name every time he posts anything on the platform.
“Dear @TwitterSupport I am not ‘Russian State Affiliated media’,” reads a viral tweet by Galloway. “I work for NO Russian media. I have 400,000 followers. I’m the leader of a British political party and spent nearly 30 years in the British parliament. If you do not remove this designation I will take legal action.”
Galloway argues that while his broadcasts have previously been aired by Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik, because those outlets have been shut down in the UK by Ofcom and by European Union sanctions he can no longer be platformed by them even if he wants to. If you accept this argument, then it looks like Twitter is essentially using the “state-affiliated media” designation as a marker of who Galloway is as a person, rather than as a marker of what he actually does.
Dear @TwitterSupport I am not “Russian State Affiliated media”. I work for NO #Russian media. I have 400,000 followers. I’m the leader of a British political party and spent nearly 30 years in the British parliament. If you do not remove this designation I will take legal action.
Regardless of whether you agree with Galloway’s argument or not, this all overlooks the innate absurdity of a government-tied social media corporation like Twitter labeling other people “state-affiliated media”. Twitter is state-affiliated media. It has been working in steadily increasing intimacy with the United States government since the US empire began pressuring Silicon Valley platforms to regulate content in support of establishment power structures following the 2016 election.
In 2020 Twitter was one of the many Silicon Valley corporations who coordinated directly with US government agencies to determine what content should be censored in order to “secure” the presidential election. In 2021 Twitter announced that it was orchestrating mass purges of foreign accounts on the advice of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which receives funding from many government institutions including the US State Department.
“ASPI is the propaganda arm of the CIA and the U.S. government,” veteran Australian diplomat Bruce Haigh told Mintpress News earlier this year. “It is a mouthpiece for the Americans. It is funded by the American government and American arms manufacturers. Why it is allowed to sit at the center of the Australian government when it has so much foreign funding, I don’t know. If it were funded by anybody else, it would not be where it is at.”
Twitter has also coordinated its mass purges of accounts with a cybersecurity firm called FireEye, which this 2019 Sputnik article by journalist Morgan Artyukhina explains was “founded in 2004 with money from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel.”
[Thread] Twitter is partnering with a crazy, hawkish, US-govt & arms industry funded think tank to regulate false info online.
This should be alarming to anyone who cares about truth, free speech or peace, as my new @MintPressNews investigation explains:https://t.co/8Wi11qfpf3
It has been an established pattern for years that whenever Twitter reports that it has purged thousands of accounts which it suspects of inauthentic behavior on behalf of foreign governments, you know it’s never going to be accounts from US-aligned countries like the UK, Israel or Australia, but consistently from US-targeted nations like Russia, China, Venezuela or Iran. You can choose to believe that’s because the US only aligns with saintly governments who would never dream of engaging in unethical online behavior, but that would be an infantile position which defies all knownevidence.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Twitter has been aggressively boosting US narratives about the war by frequently showing users a Twitter Topic without their having subscribed to it which is full of imperial spinmeisters, including The Kyiv Independent with all its shady CIA-affiliated origins.
Twitter also promotes US narratives about the war by keeping a “War in Ukraine” section perpetually on the right-hand side of the screen for desktop users, which runs stories that are wildly biased toward the US/NATO/Ukraine alliance. There was a full day last month where any time I checked Twitter on my laptop I was informed that “Russia continues to strike civilian targets in Kyiv and across Ukraine.” The claim that Russia had been “targeting” civilians during that time was dismissed as nonsense shortly thereafter by US military experts speaking to Newsweek.
This is the message desktop Twitter users are receiving at the top right of their screen. We talk a lot about Silicon Valley's role in facilitating US government censorship, but we should probably talk a lot more about its role in facilitating US government propaganda as well. pic.twitter.com/PL9ms8gVU7
When the invasion began Twitter also started actively minimizing the number of people who see Russian media content, saying that it is “reducing the content’s visibility” and “taking steps to significantly reduce the circulation of this content on Twitter”. It also began placing warning labels on all Russia-backed media and delivering a pop-up message informing you that you are committing wrongthink if you try to share or even ‘like’ a post linking to such outlets on the platform.
Twitter also began placing the label “Russia state-affiliated media” on every tweet made by the personal accounts of employees of Russian media platforms, baselessly giving the impression that the dissident opinions tweeted by those accounts are paid Kremlin content and not simply their own legitimate perspectives. This labeling has led to complaints of online harassment as propaganda-addled dupes seek out targets to act out their media-instilled hatred of all things Russian.
As more and more people find themselves branded with the “Russia state-affiliated media” label, Twitter has concurrently announced that it will be hiding the visibility of any account that wears it, announcing on Tuesday that the platform “will not amplify or recommend government accounts belonging to states that limit access to free information and are engaged in armed interstate conflict.” Which is a bit rich, considering the fact that the US does both of those things.
“This means these accounts won’t be amplified or recommended to people on Twitter, including across the Home Timeline, Explore, Search, and other places on the service. We will first apply this policy to government accounts belonging to Russia,” Twitter said.
This diminished visibility has been verified by people who’ve been slapped with the “Russia state-affiliated media” label. So you can understand why imperial narrative managers whose job is to quash dissent want that designation applied to as many critics of the US empire as possible.
Incredible. It appears every account hit w/ the “Russian state-affiliated media” label is not only shadow banned from Twitter but banned from appearing in searches by new users—all in the name of protecting free speech and democracy.@HelenaVillarRT@rachblevins@afshinrattansipic.twitter.com/U9xb78U1FZ
If you are curious why the “state-affiliated media” label has not been applied to Twitter accounts associated with government-funded outlets of the US and its allies like NPR and the BBC, it’s because Twitter has explicitly created a loophole to exclude those outlets from such a designation.
“State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy,” Twitter’s rules say.
Which is of course an absurd and arbitrary distinction. Whether you like George Galloway or not, I think anyone who’s familiar with his personality would agree that if anyone ever tried to take away his editorial independence and tell him what he is or isn’t permitted to say, it would take an entire team of surgeons to remove Galloway’s footwear from their personal anatomy. Many people who’ve worked with Russian media have said they’ve never been told what to say, and Galloway is surely one of them.
The audacity of a social media company which works hand-in-glove with the most powerful government on earth to go around branding people “state-affiliated media” is appalling. Twitter is state-affiliated media. It is an instrument of imperial narrative control, just like all the other billionaire Silicon Valley megacorporations of immense influence. Putin could only dream of having state media that effective.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
It is hard to fathom the depths of our time, the terrible wars, and the confounding information that whizzes by without much wisdom. Certainties that flood the airwaves and the internet are easy to come by, but are they derived from an honest assessment of the war in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russian banks (part of a broader United States sanctions policy that now afflicts approximately thirty countries)? Do they acknowledge the horrific reality of hunger that has increased due to this war and the sanctions? It appears that much of the ‘certainties’ are caught up in the ‘Cold War mentality’, which views humanity as irreversibly divided on two opposing sides. However, this is not the case; most countries are struggling to craft a non-aligned approach to the US-imposed ‘new Cold War’. Russia’s conflict with Ukraine is a symptom of broader geopolitical battles that have been waged over decades.
The United Nations General Assembly voted 93-24 with 58 abstentions to drop the Russian Federation from membership on the UN Human Rights Council, based on allegations and grisly videos and photos appearing to show execution-style slayings of civilians in Ukraine by Russian troops.
While there are calls for independent investigations into those allegations, the US and NATO member state governments have been pushing the claim that Russia is committing war crimes in Ukraine including the major war crime of invading another country, the unasked question in the US media is: Why hasn’t the US been kicked out of the Human Rights Council for similar war crimes that aren’t at all allegations, but are well documented fact? Why indeed, for all the accusations that Russian President Vladimir Putin is himself a war criminal responsible for all these crimes, haven’t a number of US presidents still living been accused of war crimes?
In a bombshell NBC scoop published Wednesday, the authors of the report alleged that US spy agencies used deliberate and selective intelligence leaks to monopoly news outlets to mount an information warfare campaign against Russia during the latter’s month-long military offensive in Ukraine, despite being aware the intelligence wasn’t credible.
The US intelligence assessment that Russia was preparing to use chemical weapons in the Ukraine War, that was widely reported in the corporate media and confirmed by President Biden himself, was an unsubstantiated claim leaked to the press as a tit-for-tat response to the damning Russian allegation that Ukraine was pursuing an active biological weapons program, in collaboration with Washington, in scores of bio-labs discovered by Russian forces in Ukraine in early days of the military campaign.
The crux of the NBC report, however, isn’t what’s being disclosed but rather what’s still being withheld by the US intelligence community that the monopoly news outlets are not at liberty to report on.
Despite being aware of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s major unilateral concession to Kyiv, halting Russian offensive north of the capital and focusing on liberating Russian-majority Donbas in east Ukraine, practically spelling an end to Russia’s month-long offensive in Ukraine, US security officials are still deceptively asserting that Russia’s pullout from areas around Kyiv “wasn’t a retreat but a strategic redeployment” that signals a “significant assault on eastern and southern Ukraine,” one that US officials believe could be a “protracted and bloody fight.”
Regarding the malicious disinformation campaign mounted by Western media on behalf of NATO powers, the report notes: “The idea is to pre-empt and disrupt the Kremlin’s tactics, complicate its military campaign, undermine Moscow’s propaganda and prevent Russia from defining how the war is perceived in the world, said a Western government official familiar with the strategy.”
It has become clear now the “40-mile-long Trojan Horse” of battle tanks, armored vehicles and heavy artillery that descended from Belarus in the north and reached the outskirts of Kyiv in the early days of the war without encountering much resistance en route the capital was simply a power projection gambit astutely designed as a diversionary tactic by Russia’s military strategists in order to deter Ukraine from sending reinforcements to Donbas in east Ukraine where real battles for territory were actually fought and scramble to defend the embattled country’s capital instead.
But US security agencies insidiously kept feeding false information of impending fall of the Ukrainian capital to the monopoly media throughout Russia’s month-long military campaign in Ukraine. Only two conclusions could be drawn from this scaremongering tactic: either it was a massive intelligence failure and Western security agencies weren’t aware the “40-mile-long Trojan Horse” approaching the capital was a ruse; or the NATO’s spy agencies had credible intelligence since the beginning of Russia’s military campaign that real battles for territory would be fought in Donbas in east Ukraine and the feigned assault on the capital was simply a diversionary tactic but they exaggerated the threat in order to vilify Russia’s calculated military offensive in Ukraine, and win the war of narratives that “how the war is perceived across the world.”
Except in the early days of the military campaign when Russian airstrikes and long-range artillery shelling targeted military infrastructure in the outskirts of Kyiv to degrade the combat potential of Ukraine’s armed forces, the capital did not witness much action during the month-long offensive. Otherwise, with the tremendous firepower at its disposal, the world’s second most powerful military force had the demonstrable capability to reduce the whole city down to the ashes.
By mid-March, after the “40-mile-long” column of armored vehicles that created panic in the rank and file of Ukraine’s security forces and their international backers and that didn’t move an inch further after reaching the outskirts of Kyiv in the early days of the war, it became obvious even to the lay observers of the Ukraine War that it was evidently a diversionary tactic.
But Western security agencies and the corporate media kept propagating the myth that the purported assault on the Ukrainian capital was stalled by alleged “fierce Ukrainian resistance,” and if it were up to Russian forces, they would “ransack the capital Kyiv” and “overrun the whole territory” of the embattled country.
Even a week after the unilateral Russian peace initiative on March 25, scaling back its blitz north of the capital and focusing instead on liberating Russian-majority Donbas region in east Ukraine, a task that has already been accomplished in large measure, Western intelligence community and the monopoly media kept warning the gullible audience Russia’s pullout from areas around Kyiv “wasn’t a retreat but a strategic redeployment” and that Russian forces had withdrawn back into Belarus and Russia simply to “regroup, refit and resupply.”
Last week, US officials told reporters they had intelligence suggesting “Putin was being misled” by his own advisers, who were “afraid to tell him the truth.” “The degree to which Putin is isolated or relying on flawed information can’t be verified,” Paul Pillar, a retired career US intelligence officer, confided to NBC. “There’s no way you can prove or disprove that stuff,” he said.
Two US officials said the intelligence about whether “Putin’s inner circle was lying to him wasn’t conclusive” — based more on “analysis than hard evidence.” Multiple US officials acknowledged that the US had used “information as a weapon” even when “confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high.” Sometimes it had used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect, as with chemical agents, and other times, as an official put it, the US was just “trying to get inside Putin’s head.”
While attempting to play mind games with Putin, the US intelligence community must’ve overlooked “an inconsequential detail” that before venturing into politics, Putin himself led the Cold War’s premier Russian intelligence agency, the KGB, for many years, and the puerile psyops orchestrated by the CIA and NSA were nothing more than child’s play for the seasoned Russian strongman.
Based on declassified intelligence, the New York Times reported last week: “The Russian military’s stumbles have eroded trust between Mr. Putin and his Ministry of Defense. While Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu had been considered one of the few advisers Mr. Putin confided in, the prosecution of the war in Ukraine has damaged the relationship. Mr. Putin has put two top intelligence officials under house arrest for providing poor intelligence ahead of the invasion, something that may have further contributed to the climate of fear.”
Other American officials, as reported in the mainstream media, had said that “Putin’s rigid isolation during the pandemic” and willingness to publicly “rebuke advisers who did not share his views” had created a degree of wariness, or even fear, in senior ranks of the Russian military. Officials believe that Putin had been getting “incomplete or overly optimistic reports” about the progress of Russian forces, “creating mistrust with his military advisers.”
The corporate media’s psychological warfare campaign, in collaboration with Western intelligence community, after the successful culmination of Russia’s month-long military offensive in Ukraine must have upset the Russian leader to the extent that instead of summarily sacking and court-martialing the military’s top brass, he has decided to celebrate May 9 as the Victory Day by announcing to organize a Russian Armed Forces parade in Moscow, and is reportedly considering rewarding battlefield commanders who valiantly fought in the Russo-Ukraine War with promotion in ranks and pecuniary benefits.
All the media hype in order to misguide gullible audiences following the stellar Russian victory in the Ukraine War aside, the fact remains it’s old wine in new bottles. The intelligence wasn’t declassified last week, it was declassified a month ago, but nobody paid much attention to the asinine assertion of an alleged rift between Putin and the Russian military leadership.
The Politico reported as early as March 8, in an article titled “Putin is angry,” that the US intelligence heads warned before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence during the panel’s annual hearing on worldwide threats that Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine was not going as planned and it could “double down” in Ukraine.
“Although it still remains unclear whether Russia will pursue a maximalist plan to capture all or most of Ukraine, Director National Intelligence Avril Haines said, such an effort would run up against what the U.S. intelligence community assesses is likely to be a persistent and significant insurgency by Ukrainian forces.”
Clearly, DNI Avril Haines spilled the secret before the House Select Committee on Intelligence that the US intelligence was in dark whether the Russian forces would overrun the whole of Ukraine, or the Russian blitz north of the capital was only a diversionary tactic meant for tying up Ukrainian forces in the north, while Russia concentrated its efforts in liberating Donbas in the east.
Echoing the “recently declassified intelligence” disclosed by NYT the preposterous claim that Putin’s rigid self-isolation during the COVID pandemic allegedly created a rift between him and Russia’s military leadership, the Politico report from a month ago presciently endorsed the inane intelligence assessment:
“William Burns, the CIA director, portrayed for lawmakers an isolated and indignant Russian president who is determined to dominate and control Ukraine to shape its orientation. Putin has been ‘stewing in a combustible combination of grievance and ambition for many years. That personal conviction matters more than ever,’ Burns said.
“Burns also described how Putin had created a system within the Kremlin in which his own circle of advisers is narrower and narrower — and sparser still because of the Covid-19 pandemic. In that hierarchy, Burns said, ‘it’s proven not career-enhancing for people to question or challenge his judgment.’”
The most notable success of the US information warfare campaign based on misleading declassified intelligence to media outlets, as claimed by the NBC report, may have been delaying the invasion itself by weeks or months, which officials believe they did with accurate predictions that Russia intended to attack, based on definitive intelligence. By the time Russia moved its troops in, “the West presented a unified front.”
“A former U.S. official said administration officials believe the strategy delayed Putin’s invasion from the first week of January to after the Olympics and that the delay bought the U.S. valuable time to get allies on the same page in terms of the level of the Russian threat and how to respond.”
Contradicting the NBC claim, however, The Intercept reported on March 11, citing “credible intelligence sources,” that despite staging a massive military buildup along Russia’s border with Ukraine for nearly a year, “Russian President Vladimir Putin did not make a final decision to invade until just before he launched the attack on February 24,” senior current and former US intelligence officials told the Intercept. “It wasn’t until February that the agency and the rest of the US intelligence community became convinced that Putin would invade,” the senior official added.
Last April, US intelligence first detected that “the Russian military was beginning to move large numbers of troops and equipment to the Ukrainian border.” Most of the Russian soldiers deployed to the border at that time were later “moved back to their bases,” but US intelligence determined that “some of the troops and materiel remained near the border.”
In June 2021, against the backdrop of rising tensions over Ukraine, Biden and Putin met at a summit in Geneva. The summer troop withdrawal brought a brief period of calm, but “the crisis began to build again in October and November,” when US intelligence watched as Russia once again “moved large numbers of troops back to its border with Ukraine.”
Extending the hand of friendship, Russia significantly drawdown its forces along the western border before the summit last June. Instead of returning the favor, however, the conceited leadership of supposedly world’s sole surviving super power turned down the hand of friendship and haughtily refused to concede reasonable security guarantees demanded by Russia at the summit that would certainly have averted the likelihood of the war.
After perusing such contradictory reports, citing “credible intelligence estimates,” it appears the US intelligence community has developed a novel espionage technique of playing both ends against the middle. The world’s leading US spy agencies seem to have this uncanny ability of predicting with absolute certainty that an event is as likely to happen as it is likely that it may not happen. And since the media watchdog has been tamed to the point where it dares not question the authority, therefore security agencies would get the credit whether or not they performed their duties diligently.
It is perfectly obvious by now, to anyone who cares to look, that mainstream media in America and the other Western powers are not reporting the Ukraine crisis accurately. Let me try that another way: The government-supervised New York Times and the rest of the corporate-owned media on both sides of the Atlantic lie routinely to their readers and viewers as to why Russia intervened in Ukraine, the progress of its military operation, the conduct of Ukrainian forces, and America’s role in purposely provoking and prolonging this crisis.
Amidst increasing Western outrage against Russia over allegations of genocide in Ukraine’s north-eastern Bucha region, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky emphasized on Tuesday, April 5, that the ongoing talks between both the countries will continue. Russia had denied its involvement in the killings and claimed that it was a false provocation meant to destroy the prospects of peace in the region.
Zelensky claimed that ending the talks now would prevent both countries from finding a solution to the present conflict and further prolong it. Talks are only hope to “find a way out of the situation and not to lose our territory,” he was reported as saying in the Ukrainian media.
When a gruesome six-minute video of Ukrainian soldiers shooting and torturing handcuffed and tied up Russian soldiers circulated online, outraged people on social media and elsewhere compared this barbaric behavior to that of Daesh. In a rare admission of moral responsibility, Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the Ukrainian President, quickly reminded Ukrainian fighters of their responsibility under international law. “I would like to remind all our military, civilian and defense forces, once again, that the abuse of prisoners is a war crime that has no amnesty under military law and has no statute of limitations,” he said, asserting that “We are a European army” as if the latter is synonymous with civilized behavior. Even that supposed claim of responsibility conveyed subtle racism, as if to suggest that non-westerners, non-Europeans, may carry out such grisly and cowardly violence, but certainly not the more rational, humane, and intellectually superior Europeans.
Russia’s war in Ukraine is producing an earthquake in international affairs. The war has raised new questions about national security across Europe and is shaking up energy geopolitics. In addition, the war seems to be creating new divisions between the Global North and the Global South while Russia and China strengthen their strategic relationship.
In the interview that follows, world-renowned scholar and leading dissident Noam Chomsky addresses some of the new developments taking place in the world system on account of Russia’s assault on Ukraine. Chomsky also ponders the question of whether Vladimir Putin can be prosecuted for war crimes in light of the mounting evidence that brings to mind the atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II. Recent evidence also indicates that Ukrainian forces have also engaged in war crimes by killing captured Russian soldiers.
Chomsky, who is internationally recognized as one of the most important intellectuals alive, is the author of some 150 books and the recipient of scores of highly prestigious awards, including the Sydney Peace Prize and the Kyoto Prize (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), and of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from the world’s most renowned universities. Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and currently Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona.
C. J. Polychroniou: The war in Ukraine has turned Russia into a pariah state throughout Europe and North America, but Moscow continues to receive support from many countries in the Global South. The strategic relationship between Russia and China seems to be getting stronger, although both countries had identified each other as major factors for maintaining order and stability in an “emerging polycentric world” long before Putin and Xi Jinping. In fact, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said following a recent meeting with his Chinese counterpart that the two countries are working together to advance a vision of a new world order, a new “democratic world order.” Is the new world order one that pits Global North and Global South countries against each other? And what do you make of the statement of Russia and China working together to promote a new “democratic world order?” To me, the idea of two autocratic states working together to promote democracy across the world sounds like a crude joke.
Noam Chomsky: The idea that Russia and China will be working together to promote a “democratic world order” is, of course, ludicrous. They will be doing so in much the way that the U.S. was laboring to “promote democracy” in Iraq, the goal of the invasion as President Bush announced when it became clear that the “single question” — will Saddam abandon his nuclear weapons program? — had been answered the wrong way. With rare exceptions, the intellectual class and even most scholarship leaped to attention and vigorously proclaimed the new doctrine, as I suppose is also the case today in Russia and China.
As U.S.-run polls showed, Americans enthralled by the “noble” goals belatedly proclaimed were even joined by some Iraqis: 1 percent of those polled. Four percent thought the U.S. invaded in order to help Iraqis. The rest concluded that if Iraq’s exports had been asparagus and pickles, and the center of global petroleum production was in the South Pacific, the U.S. wouldn’t have invaded.
I don’t pretend to have any expert knowledge, but from my own experience in past weeks with the Global South — press, many interviews and meetings, much personal discussion — it doesn’t seem to me quite accurate to say that it is supporting Moscow, except in the sense that Moscow is getting support from the Western powers that keep paying it for petroleum products and food (probably by now the source of Russia’s main export earnings).
My impression is that the Global South has sharply condemned the Russian invasion, but has asked: “What’s new?” The general reaction to President Biden’s harsh condemnation of Putin as a war criminal seems to be something like this: It takes one to know one. We agree that he is a war criminal, and as creatures of the Enlightenment, we adopt the Kantian principle of universality that is dismissed with contempt by the West, sometimes with angry charges of whataboutism.
It is, after all, not easy for people in the Global North — and, increasingly, the Global South — to be impressed by the “moral outrage” of Western intellectuals who just a few years ago, when all the horrific facts were in, were enthusiastically applauding the success of the invasion of Iraq, spouting pieties about noble intentions that would have embarrassed the most abject apparatchik.And we can just imagine the reaction when they read the pious invocation of the Nuremberg judgment by the editors of TheNew York Times, who are just now coming to recognize that, “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime: it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” The accumulated evil includes the instigation of ethnic conflict that has torn apart not only Iraq but the whole region, the horrors of ISIS, and much more.
Not, of course, what the editors have in mind. The supreme international crimes that they have supported for 60 years somehow escaped the Nuremberg judgment.
While there is appreciation in the Global South for the fact that at long last Western intellectuals and the political class are coming to perceive that aggressors can commit hideous crimes, they seem to feel that it is perhaps a little late, and curiously skewed, as they know from ample experience. They are also able to perceive that Westerners consumed with moral outrage over the crimes of enemies are still able to maintain their usual silence while their own leaders carry out terrible crimes right now — in Afghanistan, Yemen, Palestine, Western Sahara, and all too many other places where they could act at once, and expeditiously, to mitigate or end these crimes.
Let’s turn to the “strategic relationship between Russia and China.” It does indeed seem to be strengthening, though it is not much of a partnership. The corrupt Russian kleptocracy can provide raw materials and advanced weapons to the economic system that Beijing is systematically establishing through mainland Asia, reaching also to Africa and the Middle East, and by now even to U.S. domains in Latin America. But not much more. Russia’s role in this highly unequal relationship is, I think, likely to diminish further, much as Europe’s international role is likely to diminish after Putin has handed Europe on a golden platter to the U.S.-run “Atlanticist” system, a gift of substantial significance, as we’ve discussed before.
Can China help end the war in Ukraine? If yes, what’s stopping Beijing from using its influence over Moscow for a peace agreement to be reached in Ukraine?
China could act to advance the prospects for a peaceful negotiated settlement in Ukraine. It seems that the Chinese leadership sees no advantage in doing so.
China’s “information system” appears to be pretty much conforming to the Russian propaganda line. But more generally, it doesn’t seem to diverge much from a fairly common stance in the Global South, illustrated graphically by the sanctions map. The states joining in sanctions against Russia are in the Anglosphere and Europe, as well as Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. The rest of the world condemns the invasion, but is mostly standing aloof.
This should not surprise us. It is nothing new. We recall well that the Iraq invasion had virtually no global support. Less familiar is the fact that the same was true of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11. A few weeks after the invasion, an international Gallup poll asked the question: “Once the identity of the [9/11] terrorists is known, should the American government launch a military attack on the country or countries where the terrorists are based or should the American government seek to extradite the terrorists to stand trial?”
The wording reflects the fact that their identity was not known. Even eight months later, in his first major press conference, FBI Director Robert Mueller could only affirm that al-Qaeda was suspected of the crime. If the poll had asked about actual U.S. policy, the very limited support would doubtless have been even lower.
World opinion overwhelmingly favored diplomatic-judicial measures over military action. Opposition to invasion was particularly strong in Latin America, which has a little experience with U.S. intervention.
The free press spared Americans knowledge of international opinion. It was therefore able to proclaim that “the opposition [to the U.S. invasion] was mostly limited to the people who are reflexively against the American use of power.”
Quite a few suffer from this malady, apparently. Global opinion today should come as no great surprise.
China’s unwillingness to devote its efforts to a negotiated settlement of the Ukraine conflict deserves criticism, but it is hard to see how such criticism can properly come from Americans. After all, China is adhering to official U.S. policy. Simply put, the policy is to “fight to the last Ukrainian for Ukrainian independence” while offering no way to save Ukraine from further tragedy. Even worse, current policy undermines such hopes by informing Putin that he has no way out: it’s The Hague or proceed to destroy Ukraine.
The quote and the opinions just paraphrased are those of one of the most astute and widely respected U.S. diplomats, Ambassador Chas Freeman, who goes on to spell out the options, and to remind us of the history.
Like anyone who cares in the least about the fate of Ukrainians, Ambassador Freeman recognizes that the only alternative to Russian destruction of Ukraine — which, with their backs to the wall, Putin and his narrow circle of siloviki can implement — is a negotiated settlement that will be ugly, offering the aggressors an escape. He also carries the history back further than we have done in our earlier discussions, back to the Congress of Vienna of 1814, which followed the Napoleonic Wars. Metternich and other European leaders, he observes, “had the good sense to reincorporate [defeated] France into the governing councils of Europe,” overlooking its virtual conquest of Europe. That led to a century of substantial peace in Europe, which had long been the most violent part of the world. There were some wars, but nothing like what preceded. The century of peace ended with World War I.
Freeman goes on to remind us that the victors in the war did not have the good sense of their predecessors: “the victors — the United States and Britain and France — insisted on excluding Germany from a role in the affairs of Europe, as well as this newly formed Soviet Union, the result was World War II and the Cold War.”
As we’ve discussed earlier, a leading theme throughout the Cold War was the status of Europe: should it subordinate itself to the U.S. within the Atlanticist-NATO framework, the U.S. preference? Or should it become an independent “third force” along Gaullist lines, accommodating Russia within a Europe without military alliances from the Atlantic to the Urals?
The question arose starkly when the USSR collapsed, and Mikhail Gorbachev outlined the vision of a “common European home” with no military alliances from Lisbon to Vladivostok. In a limited form, the concept was revived by French President Emmanuel Macron in his recent abortive interchanges with Putin.
If there had been anyone in the Kremlin who resembled a statesman, they would have leaped at the opportunity to explore something like the Gorbachev vision. Europe has strong reasons to establish close relations with Russia, ranging from commerce to security. Whether such efforts might have succeeded, avoiding the Ukraine tragedy, we can only guess. The answer could only have been found out by trying. Instead, the hard men in Moscow turned to violence, compounding their criminal aggression with self-defeating foolishness.
The Gorbachev conception had some partial U.S. support within the framework of the Partnership for Peace, a U.S. initiative intended to provide a cooperative security system with a limited relation to NATO. Ambassador Freeman, who had a significant role in establishing it, describes its fate in words that are worth heeding:
What happened in 1994, which was a midterm election year, and 1996, which was a presidential election year, was interesting. In 1994, Mr. Clinton was talking out of both sides of his mouth. He was telling the Russians that we were in no rush to add members to NATO, and that our preferred path was the Partnership for Peace. The same time he was hinting to the ethnic diasporas of Russophobic countries in Eastern Europe — and, by the way, it’s easy to understand their Russophobia given their history — that, no, no, we were going to get these countries into NATO as fast as possible. And in 1996 he made that pledge explicit. [In] 1994 he got an outburst from [Boris] Yeltsin, who was then the president of the Russian Federation. [In] 1996 he got another one, and as time went on, when Mr. Putin came in, he regularly protested the enlargement of NATO in ways that disregarded Russia’s self-defense interests. So, there should have been no surprise about this. For 28 years Russia has been warning that at some point it would snap, and it has, and it has done it in a very destructive way, both in terms of its own interests and in terms of the broader prospects for peace in Europe.
None of this provides any excuse for Putin’s invasion, Freeman emphasizes. But it is important to understand that, “There were those people in the United States who were triumphalist about the end of the Cold War…. This allowed the United States to incorporate all the countries right up to Russia’s borders and beyond them, beyond those borders in the Baltics, into an American sphere of influence. And, essentially, they posited a global sphere of influence for the United States modeled on the Monroe Doctrine. And that’s pretty much what we have.”
Russian leadership tolerated Clinton’s violation of the firm U.S. commitment to Gorbachev not to extend NATO beyond East Germany. They even tolerated George W. Bush’s further provocations, and U.S. military actions that struck directly at Russian interests, undertaken in such a way as to humiliate Russia. But Ukraine and Georgia were red lines. That was clearly understood in Washington. As Freeman continues, no Russian leader was likely to tolerate the NATO expansion into Ukraine that began after the 2014 “coup, [carried out] to prevent neutrality or a pro-Russian government in Kiev, and to replace it with a pro-American government that would bring Ukraine into our sphere… So, since about 2015 the United States has been arming, training Ukrainians against Russia,” effectively treating Ukraine “as an extension of NATO.”
As we’ve discussed, that stance became explicit policy in Biden’s September 2021 official statement, possibly a factor in Russia’s decision to escalate to direct aggression a few months later.
Crucially, to repeat, current U.S. policy is to “fight to the last Ukrainian” while offering no way to save Ukraine from further tragedy and in fact undermining such hopes by informing Putin that he has no way out: it’s The Hague or proceed to destroy Ukraine.
China is probably relatively satisfied with the course of events. Very likely the same is true in Washington. Both have gained from the tragedy. And the euphoria among weapons and fossil fuel producers is unconcealed as they lead the way toward indescribable catastrophe, underscored in vivid terms by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report of April 4.
Turkey’s position over the war in Ukraine is to maintain neutrality while acting as a mediator in the Russian-Ukrainian crisis. Can Turkey continue to maintain such a balancing act since we know that it has been supplying military assistance to Ukraine since 2019 and that it is aligned with the geostrategic vision of Washington over Ukraine?
Turkey has had an ambiguous position in global affairs for many years. It is a member of NATO, but the EU has rejected its appeals for membership on human rights grounds. In the 1990s, Turkey was indeed responsible for hideous crimes: its massive state terror against its Kurdish population, leaving tens of thousands dead, 3,500 towns and villages destroyed, a flood of hundreds of thousands of people from the devastated Kurdish regions to miserable slums in Istanbul. The crimes were mostly concealed by the “Free Press,” perhaps because Clinton was pouring arms into Turkey, the flow escalating as atrocities mounted. Turkey became the leading recipient of U.S. military aid (apart from Israel-Egypt, a separate category), extending a very close correlation between human rights abuses and U.S. aid that goes far back, but somehow does not detract from its much-lauded nobility.
By 2000, Turkish state crimes were abating, and in the following years the situation greatly improved — something I was able to witness personally, with much appreciation. By 2005, under President Recep Erdoğan’s increasingly harsh rule, the progress ended, and reversed. That might have been in part a reaction to the continued refusal of the European Union to accept Turkish membership, ignoring the great steps forward in recent years and fortifying the sense that Europeans simply won’t accept Turks into their club.
Since then, Erdoğan’s rule has become far more brutal, again targeting Kurds but also attacking civil and human rights on a broad front. And he has been trying to turn Turkey into a major actor in regional affairs, with hints of a renewed Ottoman caliphate. He accepts Russian weapons over strong U.S. objections but remains a central part of the NATO system of regional — by now global — dominance. The “balancing act” with regard to Ukraine is a case in point.
If Turkey can facilitate negotiations that will bring the Ukraine horrors to an end, that will be a most welcome development, to be applauded. We can only speculate about what the chances are while the U.S. insists on perpetuating the conflict “to the last Ukrainian” while blocking an ugly negotiated settlement that is the alternative to destruction of Ukraine and perhaps even nuclear war.
Russian gas continues to flow to Europe although Putin had demanded that European governments pay for it in rubles. What would be the impact in the geostrategic relations between Europe and Russia if the former became independent from Russian gas?
It doesn’t look likely in the near future. Europe could manage to end the use of Russian coal and oil, but gas is a different matter. That requires pipelines, which it would take years to build, or transport facilities for liquified natural gas that barely exist. But the question we should be asking I think is different. Can we ascend to the wisdom of the reactionary tyrants who provided Europe with a century of peace in Vienna in 1814? Can we move towards the Gorbachev vision of a European common home with no military alliances, a conception not too far from the U.S.-initiated Partnership for Peace that was undermined by President Clinton? Can some resemblance to statesmanship appear in today’s Russia? Such questions as these should, I think, be in the forefront of our thinking, and our active engagement in trying to influence discussion and debate, and policy choices.
Evidence of Russian war crimes is mounting. Can Putin be prosecuted for war crimes in Ukraine?
Prosecution for war crimes, in the real world, is “victor’s justice.” That was clear from the Nuremberg Tribunal and was not even concealed in the accompanying Tokyo Tribunal. At Nuremberg, saturation bombing of densely settled urban areas was excluded because it was a specialty of the Allies. German war criminals were exculpated if they could show that the Allies carried out the same crimes. In subsequent years, the Nuremberg principles were thrown out the window. They have only recently been discovered as a cudgel to beat official enemies.
There can be no thought of trying the U.S. for its many horrendous crimes. An effort was once made to bring the U.S. to justice for its war against Nicaragua. The U.S. responded to the International Court of Justice orders to end the crimes by sharply escalating them while the press dismissed the court as a “hostile forum” as shown by its daring to convict the U.S. (per The New York Times’ editors), following ample precedent.
Putin might be tried for crimes if he is overthrown within Russia and Russia can be treated as a defeated country. That is what the record indicates.
Imaginably, the world might rise to a level of civilization in which international law can be honored instead of righteously wielded against selected targets. We should never cease efforts to bring that about. In doing so, we should not succumb to the illusions fostered by the global doctrinal systems.
Russia has been suspended from the United Nations’ leading human rights body as its invasion of Ukraine continues to provoke revulsion and outrage around the world.
At a meeting of the UN general assembly on Thursday, 93 members voted in favour of the diplomatic rebuke while 24 were against and 58 abstained.
Excuse me if I wander a little today — and if it bothers you, don’t blame me, blame Vladimir Putin. After all, I didn’t decide to invade Ukraine, the place my grandfather fled almost 140 years ago. I suspect, in fact, that I was an adult before I even knew such a place existed. If I could be accused of anything, maybe you could say that, for most of my life, I evaded Ukraine.
All of us are, in some fashion, now living inside the shockwaves from the Russian president’s grotesque invasion and from a war taking place close to the heart of Europe. I was not quite one year old in May 1945 when World War II in Europe ended, along with years of carnage unparalleled on this planet. Millions of Russians, six million Jews, god knows how many French, British, Germans, Ukrainians, and… well, the list just goes on and on… died and how many more were wounded or displaced from their homes and lives. Given Adolf Hitler’s Germany, we’re talking about nothing short of a hell on Earth. That was Europe from the late 1930s until 1945.
In the more-than-three-quarters of a century since then, with the exception of the brief Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, a civil war (with outside intervention) in the early 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, as well as warring in marginal places like Chechnya, Europe has been the definition of peaceful. Hence, the shock of it all. Believe me, it wouldn’t have been faintly the same if Vladimir Putin had invaded Kazakhstan or Afghanistan or… well, you get the idea. In fact, in 1979, when the leaders of the Soviet Union did indeed send the Red Army into Afghanistan and again, just over two decades later, when George W. Bush and crew ordered the U.S. military to invade the same country, there were far too few cries of alarm, assumedly because it hadn’t happened in the heart of Europe and who the hell cared (other, of course, than the Afghans in the path of those two armies).
Now, the Vlad has once again turned part of Europe into a war-torn nightmare, a genuine hell on earth of fire and destruction. He’s blasted out significant parts of major cities, sent more than four million Ukrainians fleeing the country as refugees, and uprooted at least 6.5 million more in that land. Consider it a signal measure of the horror of the moment that more than half of all Ukrainian children have, in some fashion, been displaced. Since that country became the focus of staggering media attention here (in coverage terms, it’s as if every day were the day after the 9/11 attacks), since it became more or less the only story on Earth, little surprise that it also came to seem like a horror, a crime, of an essentially unparalleled sort, an intrusion beyond all measure. The shock has been staggering. You just don’t do that, right?
The Heartland of War, Historically Speaking
Strangely enough, though, the Russian president’s gross act fits all too horribly into a far larger and longer history of Europe and this planet. After all, until 1945, rather than being a citadel of global peace, order, and European-Union-style cooperation, that continent was regularly a hell of war, conflict, and slaughter.
You could, of course, go back to at least 460 BC, when the 15-year Peloponnesian War between the Greek city states of Athens and Sparta began in an era that has long been considered the “dawn of civilization.” From then on through Roman imperial times, war, or rather wars galore, lay at the heart of that developing civilization.
Once you get to the later history of Europe, whether you’re talking about Vikings raiding England or English kings like Henry V fighting it out in France (read your Shakespeare!) in what came to be known as the Hundred Years’ War; whether you’re thinking about the Thirty Years’ War in medieval Europe in which millions are believed to have perished; the bloody Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century, including that self-proclaimed French emperor’s invasion of Russia; or, of course, World War I, an early-twentieth-century slaughterhouse, stretching from France again deep into Russia, not to speak of civil conflicts like the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, you’re talking about a genuine heartland of global conflict. (And keep in mind that Ukraine was all too often involved.)
In the years since World War II, especially here in the United States, we’ve grown far too used to a world in which wars (often ours) take place in distant lands, thousands of miles from the heart of true power and civilization (as we like to think of it) on this planet. In the 1950s with the Korean War, as well as in the 1960s and 1970s in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, war, fought by the U.S. and its allies was a significantly Asian phenomenon. In the 1980s and 1990s, the crucial locations were South Asia and the Middle East. In this century, once again, they were in South Asia, the Greater Middle East, and also Africa.
And of course, in the history of this planet, so many of the wars fought “elsewhere” ever since the Middle Ages were sparked by European imperial powers, as well as that inheritor of the European mantle of empire, the United States. Looked at in the largest historical framework possible, you might even say that, in some fashion, modern war as we’ve known it was pioneered in Europe.
Worse yet, as soon as the Europeans were able to travel anywhere else, what’s come to be known all too inoffensively as “the age of discovery” began. With their wooden sailing ships loaded with cannons and troops, they essentially pursued wars around the world in the grimmest fashion possible, while attempting to dominate much of the planet via what came to be known as colonialism. From the genocidal destruction of native peoples in North America (a legacy the United States inherited in the “New World” from its colonial mentors in the “Old World”) to the Opium Wars in China, from the Sepoy Mutiny in India to the repression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, the Europeans functionally exported extreme violence of many kinds globally in a way that would undoubtedly have impressed the ancient Greeks and Romans.
From the Portuguese and Spanish empires of the 16th century to the English and French empires of the 19th and early 20th centuries to the more recent American empire (though never referred to that way here) and the Russian one as well, the world was, in those years, flooded with a kind of violence with which Vladimir Putin would undoubtedly have been comfortable indeed. In fact, from the Peloponnesian War on, it’s been quite a Ukrainian-style story, a veritable European (and American) feast of death and destruction on an almost unimaginable scale.
The Afterlife of War
In 2022, however, simply claiming that war in Ukraine or anywhere else is just the same old thing would be deceptive indeed. After all, we’re on a planet that neither the Greeks, the Romans, Henry V, Napoleon, or Hitler could ever have imagined. And for that, you can thank, at least in part, that runaway child of Europe, the United States, while recalling one specific day in history: August 6th, 1945. That, of course, was the day a single bomb from a B-29 Superfortress bomber transformed the Japanese city of Hiroshima into rubble, while obliterating 70,000 or more of its inhabitants.
In the decades since, the very idea of war has, sadly enough, been transformed into something potentially all-too-new, whether in Europe or anywhere else, as long as it involves any of the planet’s nine nuclear powers. Since 1945, as nuclear weapons spread across the planet, we’ve threatened to export everyday war of the sort humanity has known for so long to heaven, hell, and beyond. In some sense, we may already be living in the afterlife of war, though most of the time we don’t know it. Don’t think it’s something odd or a strange accident that, when things began to go unexpectedly poorly for them, the Vlad’s crew promptly started threatening to use nuclear weapons if the Russians, instead of conquering Ukraine, were pushed into some desperately uncomfortable corner. As the deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, Dmitry Medvedev, put it recently,
“We have a special document on nuclear deterrence. This document clearly indicates the grounds on which the Russian Federation is entitled to use nuclear weapons… [including] when an act of aggression is committed against Russia and its allies, which jeopardized the existence of the country itself, even without the use of nuclear weapons, that is, with the use of conventional weapons.”
And keep in mind that Russia today has an estimated 4,477 nuclear warheads, more than 1,500 of them deployed, including new “tactical” nukes, each of which might have “only” perhaps one-third the power of the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima and so might be considered battlefield weaponry, though of an unimaginably devastating and dangerous sort. And mind you, Vladimir Putin publicly oversaw the testing of four nuclear-capable ballistic missiles just before he launched his present war. Point made, so to speak. Such threats mean nothing less than that, whether we care to realize it or not, we’re now in a strange and threatening new world of war, given that even a nuclear exchange between regional powers like India and Pakistan could create a nuclear winter on this planet, potentially starving a billion or more of us to death.
Honestly, if you think about it, could you even imagine a stranger or more dangerous world? Consider it an irony of the first order, for instance, that the U.S. has spent years focused on trying to keep the Iranians from making a single nuclear weapon (and so becoming the 10th country to do so), but not — not for a day, not for an hour, not for a minute — on keeping this country from producing ever more of them.
Take, for instance, the new intercontinental ballistic missile, the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, or GBSD, that the Pentagon is planning to build to replace our current crop of land-based nukes at an estimated price tag of $264 billion (and that’s before the cost overruns even begin). And that, in turn, is just a modest part of its full-scale, three-decade-long “modernization” program for its nuclear “triad” of land, sea, and air-based weapons that could, in the end, cost $2 trillion in taxpayer funds to ensure that this country would be capable of destroying not only this planet but more like it.
And just to put that in context: in a country that can’t find a red cent to invest in so many things Americans truly need, the one thing that both parties in Congress and the president (whoever he may be) can agree on is that ever more staggering sums should be spent on a military that’s fought a series of undeclared wars around the planet in this century in a remarkably unsuccessful fashion, bringing hell and high water to places like Afghanistan and Iraq, just as Vladimir Putin so recently did to Ukraine.
So, don’t just think of the Russian president as some aberrant oddball or autocratic madman who appeared magically at the disastrous edge of history, forcing his way into our peaceful lives. Unfortunately, he’s a figure who should be familiar indeed to us, given our European past. Shakespeare would have had a ball with the Vlad. And while he’s brought hell on Earth to Europe, given the way his top officials have raised the issue of nuclear weaponry, we should imagine ourselves in both an all-too-familiar and an all-too-new world.
Historically speaking, Europe should be thought of as the heartland of the history of war, but today, sadly enough, it should also potentially be considered a springboard into eternity for all of us.
Massachusetts Peace Action, a venerable part of the US Peace Movement, has been around since the 1980s and its predecessors date back to the 1950s. Its voice is heeded and it represents most of the shared opinions of the liberal and progressive US peace movement.
A recent piece by its Assistant Director, Brian Garvey, provides an astute analysis of the ideological differences in the progressive part of the US peace movement and properly criticizes its inability to unite around a common program. He asks the two crucial questions:
“What do we do now? and
“How do we make a difference?”
“Making a difference” to end the war is crucial. We in the US peace effort want to be effective.
Mobilizing a population to vilify and hate a targeted enemy is a tactic that leaders have used since before the dawn of human history, and it is being used to demonize Russia and Vladimir Putin in the current conflict. If we want to join the march to war, we can join the hate fest. But if we want a more objective and honest assessment of events, we must rely upon facts that our government and its cheer-leading mainstream media are not anxious for us to view.
In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, all things Russian are being punished. Russian athletes, including paraplegics, are barred from international sports competition. Century old Russian writers and musicians such as Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky are being removed from book shelves and concerts. Even Russian bred cats are not exempt.
The officials say the Biden administration has been rapidly pushing out “intelligence” about Russia’s plans in Ukraine that is “low-confidence” or “based more on analysis than hard evidence”, or even just plain false, in order to fight an information war against Putin.
The report says that toward this end the US government has deliberately circulated false or poorly evidenced claims about impending chemical weapons attacks, about Russian plans to orchestrate a false flag attack in the Donbass to justify an invasion, about Putin’s advisors misinforming him, and about Russia seeking arms supplies from China.
Psyops in the U.S. targeting the public used to be illegal, even though the way they got around it was to plant stories in the foreign press. But over the last five years beginning with Russiagate & now Ukraine, it is clear that U.S. public is fair game: https://t.co/gcEWoCZbkB
It was an attention-grabbing assertion that made headlines around the world: U.S. officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine.
President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions.
It’s one of a string of examples of the Biden administration’s breaking with recent precedent by deploying declassified intelligence as part of an information war against Russia. The administration has done so even when the intelligence wasn’t rock solid, officials said, to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin off balance.
So they lied. They may hold that they lied for a noble reason, but they lied. They knowingly circulated information they had no reason to believe was true, and that lie was amplified by all the most influential media outlets in the western world.
Another example of the Biden administration releasing a false narrative as part of its “information war”:
Likewise, a charge that Russia had turned to China for potential military help lacked hard evidence, a European official and two U.S. officials said.
The U.S. officials said there are no indications China is considering providing weapons to Russia. The Biden administration put that out as a warning to China not to do so, they said.
On the empire’s claim last week that Putin is being misled by his advisors because they are afraid of telling him the truth, NBC reports that this assessment “wasn’t conclusive — based more on analysis than hard evidence.”
I’d actually made fun of this ridiculous CIA press release when it was uncritically published disguised as a breaking news report by The New York Times:
Breaking News: The most influential newspaper in the English-speaking world routinely passes off CIA press releases as "Breaking News". https://t.co/aBzhidbozv
We’d also had fun with State Department Spokesman Ned Price’s bizarre February impersonation of Alex Jones, where he wrongly claimed that Russia was about to release a “false flag” video using crisis actors to justify its invasion:
US Again Tries To Pass Off Government Assertions As Evidence
"This is the kind of evidence you can't see. The evidence is invisible."https://t.co/mEqIsS0cUS
Other US government lies discussed in the NBC report were less cute:
In another disclosure, U.S. officials said one reason not to provide Ukraine with MiG fighter jets is that intelligence showed Russia would view the move as escalatory.
That was true, but it was also true of Stinger missiles, which the Biden administration did provide, two U.S. officials said, adding that the administration declassified the MiG information to bolster the argument not to provide them to Ukraine.
So the Biden administration knew it was sending weapons to Ukraine that would be perceived by a nuclear superpower as a provocative escalation, sent them anyway, and then lied about it. Cool, cool, cool.
This NBC report confirms rumors we’ve been hearing for months. Professional war slut Max Boot said via The Council on Foreign Relations think tank in February that the Biden administration had ushered in “a new era of info ops” with intelligence releases designed not to tell the truth but to influence Putin’s decisions. Former MI6 chief John Sawers told The Atlantic Council think tank in February that the Biden administration’s “intelligence” releases were based more on a general vibe than actual intelligence, and were designed to manipulate rather than to inform.
Amazing interview with of the former MI6 chief with the Atlantic Council's @B_judah (the whole gang present) where the intel goon *admits* that many western "intel leaks" media outlets are dutifully conveying aren't real leaks but propaganda messages designed to undercut Putin. pic.twitter.com/UOzBxG5F5H
And in case you were wondering, no, NBC did not just publish a major leak by whistleblowers within the US government who are bravely exposing the lies of the powerful with the help of the free press. One of the article’s authors is Ken Dilanian, who in 2014 was revealed to have worked as a literal CIA asset while writing for The LA Times. If you see Dilanian’s name in a byline, you may be certain that you are reading exactly what the managers of the US empire want you to read.
So why are they telling us all this now? Is the US government not worried that it will lose the trust of the public by admitting that it is continuously lying about its most high-profile international conflict? And if this is an “information war” designed to “get inside Putin’s head” as NBC’s sources claim, wouldn’t openly reporting it through the mainstream press completely defeat the purpose?
Well, the answer to those questions is where it gets really creepy. I welcome everyone’s feedback and theories on the matter, but as near as I can figure the only reason the US government would release this story to the public is because they want the general public to know about it. And the only plausible reason I can think of that they would want the public to know about it is that they are confident the public will consent to being lied to.
To get a better sense of what I’m getting at, it helps to watch the televised version of this report in which Dilanian and NBC anchor Alison Morris enthuse about how brilliant and wonderful it is that the Biden administration is employing these psychological warfare tactics to mess with Putin’s mind:
The message an indoctrinated NBC viewer will get when watching this segment is, “Isn’t this awesome? Our president is pulling off all these cool 3D chess moves to beat Putin, and we’re kind of a part of it!”
Just as the smear campaign against Julian Assange trained mainstream liberals to defend the right of their government to keep dark secrets from them, we may now be looking at the stage of narrative control advancement where mainstream liberals are trained to defend the right of their government to lie to them.
The US is ramping up cold war aggressions against Russia and China in a desperate attempt to secure unipolar hegemony, and psychological warfare traditionally plays a major role in cold war maneuverings due to the inability to aggress in more overt ways against nuclear-armed foes. So now would definitely be the time to get the “thinkers” of America’s two mainstream political factions fanatically cheerleading their government’s psywar manipulations.
A casual glance around the internet at what mainstream liberals are saying about this NBC report shows that this is indeed what is happening. In liberal circles there does appear to be widespread acceptance of the world’s most powerful government using the world’s most powerful media institutions to lie to the public for strategic gains. If this continues to be accepted, it will make things a whole lot easier for the empire managers going forward.
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Mobilizing a population to vilify and hate a targeted enemy is a tactic that leaders have used since before the dawn of human history, and it is being used to demonize Russia and Vladimir Putin in the current conflict. If we want to join the march to war, we can join the hate fest. But if we want a more objective and honest assessment of events, we must rely upon facts that our government and its cheer-leading mainstream media are not anxious for us to view.
In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, all things Russian are being punished. Russian athletes, including paraplegics, are barred from international sports competition. Century old Russian writers and musicians such as Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky are being removed from book shelves and concerts. Even Russian bred cats are not exempt.
If such actions are justified, why was there no such banning of US athletes, musicians or writers after the US invasion of Iraq? Moreover, why are so few people outraged by the bombing and killing of 370,000 Yemeni people? Why are so few people outraged as thousands of Afghans starve because the United States is seizing Afghanistan’s national assets which were in western banks?
Why Ukraine?
There has been massive and widespread publicity about Ukraine. It is a simple Hollywood script: Ukraine is the angel, Russia is the devil, Zelensky is the hero and all good people will wear blue and yellow ribbons.
Maintaining this image requires propaganda to promote it, and censorship to prevent challengers debunking it.
This has required trashing some long held western traditions. By banning all Russian athletes from international competition, the International Olympic Committee and different athletic federations have violated the Olympic Charter which prohibits discrimination on the basis of nationality.
Censorship
The West prides itself on free speech yet censorship of alternative viewpoints is now widespread in Europe and North America. Russia Today and other Russian media outlets are being blocked on the internet as well as cable TV. Ironically, numerous programs on RT were hosted by Americans, for example journalist Chris Hedges and comedian Lee Camp. The US is silencing its own citizens.
Censorship or shadow banning is widespread on social media. On April 6, one of the best informed military analysts, Scott Ritter @realScottRitter, was suspended from Twitter. Why? Because he suggested that the victims of Bucha may have been murdered not by Russians, but rather by Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and the US and UK may also be culpable.
The 2015 Netflix documentary titled “Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom” deals with the Maidan (Kiev central square) uprising of 2013-2014. It ignores the most essential elements of the events: the management provided by the US and the muscle provided by ultra-nationalists of the Right Sector and Azov Battalion. The attacks and killing of Ukrainian police are whitewashed away.
By contrast, the 2016 documentary “Ukraine on Fire“ provides the background and essential elements of the conflict. It is not available on Netflix and was banned from distribution on YouTube for some time.
Backed by US and UK intelligence agencies, Ukraine knows the importance of the information war. They make sensational accusations that receive uncritical media coverage. When the truth eventually comes out, it is ignored or buried on the back pages. Here are a few examples:
– In 2014, eleven civilians were killed in eastern Ukraine when an apartment was hit in rebel held territory. Ukraine tried to blame Russia even though no bombs were coming from Russia and the population is ethnically Russian.
– At the beginning of the current conflict, Ukrainian President Zelensky claimed that soldiers on Snake Island died heroically rather than surrender. Actually, all the soldiers surrendered.
– Ukraine and western media claim a maternity hospital in Mariupol was bombed by Russia. Evidence shows the hospital was taken over by Ukrainian military forces on March 7, two days before the bombing on March 9.
– The latest sensational accusations are regarding dead civilians in Bucha, north of Kiev. Again, there is much contrary evidence. The Russian soldiers left Bucha on March 31, the mayor of Bucha announced the town liberated with no mention of atrocities on March 31, the Azov battalion entered Bucha on April 1, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry published video of “Russian” atrocities on April 3.
In most cases, western media does not probe the accusations or use simple logic to ask if they make sense. However, in the case of Bucha story, the NY Times had to acknowledge they were “unable to independently verify the assertions by Ukraine’s Defense Ministry.”
Self Censorship
In addition to actual censorship, there is widespread self-censorship. Instead of reading what the Russians are saying, western political “analysts” engage in outlandish amateur psychology and speculation. With no factual basis, they speculate about what Putin wants and his mental state.
This is convenient if one does not want to deal with the real issues and arguments.
Most western analysts and journalists are afraid or unwilling to read or listen to what the Russian leaders say. That is unfortunate because those speeches are more clear and direct than those from western politicians who rely on public relations, spin and platitudes.
Fabricating quotes
Ignorance of Russian foreign policy is such that Truthout online magazine recently published an article which contains a sensational but completely invented quote from Putin. It says,
Putin here is clear enough: “Ukraine has no national rights that Russians are bound to respect. Prepare for reunification, reabsorption, or some other euphemism for subaltern status with Mother Russia.”
Putin said no such thing and any moderately knowledgeable person would recognize this to be fake.
When I emailed the co-author, Carl Davidson, asking where the quotation came from, he admitted inventing it. This is significant because the statement goes to the core of what the conflict is about. Is Russia trying to absorb all of Ukraine? Do they intend to occupy Ukraine? Anyone who reads the speeches of Putin and Lavrov, such as here, here and here, knows they do not. Davidson’s fabricated quote suggests he has not read the speeches himself.
Ukraine in the Global Context
The article with the made-up quote contends that “Putin is part of a global right-wing authoritarian movements that seeks to ‘overthrow’ the 20th Century.” This analysis is close to that of the US Democratic Party, which sees the major global division being between “authoritarianism” vs “democracy”.
It is highly US-centered and partisan, with Putin somehow lumped with Trump. It is also self-serving, with US Democrats as the embodiment of “democracy”. It is completely contrary to a class analysis.
This faulty analysis has major contradictions. It is well known that Biden is unpopular. Biden’s latest approval rating is under 42%. It is less well known in the West that Putin is popular in Russia. Since the intervention in Ukraine his approval rating has increased to over 80%.
Also largely unknown in the West, most of the world does NOT support the Western analysis of the Ukraine conflict. Countries representing 59% of the global population abstained or voted against the condemnation of Russia at the UN General Assembly. These countries tend to see US exceptionalism and economic-military domination as a key problem. They do not think it helpful to demonize Russia and they urge negotiations and quick resolution to the Ukraine war.
History will hold the United States accountable for the consequences of an increasingly offensive military doctrine beyond NATO’s borders which threatens international peace, security and stability…. Russia has the right to defend itself.
South African President Ramaphosa blamed NATO saying:
The war could have been avoided if NATO had heeded warnings from amongst its own leaders and officials over the years that its eastward expansion would lead to greater, not less, instability in the region.
The final settlement of the Ukraine crisis requires abandoning the Cold War mentality, abandoning the logic of ensuring one’s own security at the expense of others’ security, and abandoning the approach of seeking regional security by expanding military bloc.
Many western anti-war movements are critical of Russia’s invasion. Others, such as the US Peace Council, see the US and NATO as largely responsible. However, they all see the necessity of pressing to stop the war before it gets worse.
In contrast, the western military-industrial-media complex is fueling the war with propaganda, censorship, banning, demonization and more weapons. It appears they do not want a resolution to the conflict. Just as they supported NATO pushing up against Russia, knowing that it risked provoking Russia to the point of retaliation, they seem to be pushing for a protracted bloody conflict in Ukraine, knowing that it risks global conflagration. Yet they persist, while crying crocodile tears.
Massachusetts Peace Action, a venerable part of the US Peace Movement, has been around since the 1980s and its predecessors date back to the 1950s. Its voice is heeded and it represents most of the shared opinions of the liberal and progressive US peace movement.
A recent piece by its Assistant Director, Brian Garvey, provides an astute analysis of the ideological differences in the progressive part of the US peace movement and properly criticizes its inability to unite around a common program. He asks the two crucial questions:
“What do we do now? and
“How do we make a difference?”
“Making a difference” to end the war is crucial. We in the US peace effort want to be effective. If what we do makes no difference, then we might as well watch TV, go for a walk in the woods or just stay in bed for the day. In asking what is to be done, we must ask what is effective. And below I consider the matter in terms of effectiveness.
To get to an answer to his two questions, Garvey divides the movement into three ideological groups. His categorization is revealing:
“First, is the group that places all blame on Russia for the war in Ukraine..”
“Second, is a group that refuses to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
“The third group is a blend of the first two. It condemns Russia’s invasion… but it admits that NATO expansion set the stage.”
To Be Effective the US Peace Movement Must Focus on the US
Tellingly, it is all about Russia! Does it make sense for the US peace movement to be so concerned about what Russia does or fails to do? Remember, as Garvey points out quite correctly – that the goal of the peace movement is to “make a difference.” Do we imagine that what we say or do will “make a difference” in the inner circles of the Russian administration or Duma (parliament)? Or have an effect on Russian elections?
On the other hand, the politicians in the US are very, very concerned about what we may think – our words do have an effect, albeit limited one. That is the reason the US has no draft. So to “make a difference,” we ought to focus on what the United States can do now to end the war. It seems evident that we should call on Biden to stop sending arms, materiel and “advisors” to Ukraine. Today, now – first and foremost. That should be at the top of our list of goals.
Some would say that the Ukraine is a proxy in a fight between the US and Russia, with the US calling on Ukrainians to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian. In my view (full disclosure) that is absolutely correct, the goal being to set Europe against Russia to the benefit of the US. But it does not matter whether one agrees with that view or not. If above all else we want to stop the death and destruction of Ukrainians and Russians, if we want to be effective at ending the bloodshed ASAP, then we should work to stop the US from fueling the fire and prolonging the war with arms and advisors.
In short, stop sending US arms, materiel and advisors to Ukraine and its neighbors – NOW.
The same can be said of the US sanctions which fall most heavily on the Global South, threatening not only its energy supply but also food with expected widespread starvation to follow. Since these sanctions have the greatest impact on the people of color in the world, it is not a stretch to say they are racist.
In short, stop the racist US sanctions -NOW.
Stop the Russia Bashing
Moreover, keeping the focus on Russia takes the focus off the US and allows it to escape whatever responsibility it has for the war – and it is a rare bird in the peace community that feels the US bears no responsibility. The focus on Russia, including the McCarthyite insistence that everyone denounce Russia, beefs up the narrative that makes the war possible. This focus is in and of itself a great victory for the propagandists of war!
That leads us to the question of “condemning” Russia for the war. Wherever one might fall in the debate, what effect does this Russia bashing have? In terms of “making a difference” and mindful again of the fact that it is only the US not the Russians that hears us, what sort of a difference does the condemnation of Russia have? Clearly it feeds the pro-war narrative and builds more support for the war. We do not have to take the Russian side to call for an end to the Russia bashing, and such a call should be acceptable to all those who favor peace.
In short, stop the Russia Bashing – NOW.
Forget about Russia and a basis for unity emerges – anti-interventionism
The calls above are not only calls for effective action. They are calls everyone who wishes for peace can agree on -including those who fall outside the liberal/progressive camp like the Ron Paul Republicans or the Pat Buchanan traditional conservatives or paleo-conservatives.
Among these calls there is no call for diplomacy, negotiations or cease fires although I agree with those suggestions. Everyone agrees on that– with the possible exception of the Biden administration and the hawks in Congress. The Zelensky government and the Russian government are, in fact, negotiating.
And what those two governments come up with is their business not ours. For us to make suggestions to those two governments betrays a bit of hubris, even exceptionalism, that those of us living in the heart of the US Empire must watch out for. It permeates everything here. We are not gods pulling levers to run the world.
Once upon a time anti-interventionism, especially important for peace advocates living in the heart of the hegemonic US Empire, was a point of principle for all those who consider themselves progressives in the US. Sadly, that is no longer the case. Let’s hope that the war in Ukraine will arouse a passion for it once again.
The Bucha ‘Russian’ atrocities propaganda onslaught may have worked well in the ‘west’ but it lacks evidence that Russia had anything to do with it.
The former Indian ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar calls it an outright fake:
An indignant Moscow has angrily demanded a United Nations Security Council meeting on Monday over the allegations of atrocities by Russian troops in areas around Kiev through the past month. Prima facie, this allegation is fake news but it can mould misperceptions by the time it gets exposed as disinformation.
A Tass report says: “The Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday that the Russian Armed Forces had left Bucha, located in the Kiev region, on March 30, while “the evidence of crimes” emerged only four days later, after Ukrainian Security Service officers had arrived in the town. The ministry stressed that on March 31, the town’s Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk had confirmed in a video address that there were no Russian troops in Bucha. However, he did not say a word about civilians shot dead on the street with their hands tied behind their backs.”
When a gruesome six-minute video of Ukrainian soldiers shooting and torturing handcuffed and tied up Russian soldiers circulated online, outraged people on social media and elsewhere compared this barbaric behavior to that of Daesh.
In a rare admission of moral responsibility, Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the Ukrainian President, quickly reminded Ukrainian fighters of their responsibility under international law. “I would like to remind all our military, civilian and defense forces, once again, that the abuse of prisoners is a war crime that has no amnesty under military law and has no statute of limitations,” he said, asserting that “We are a European army”, as if the latter is synonymous with civilized behavior.
Even that supposed claim of responsibility conveyed subtle racism, as if to suggest that non-westerners, non-Europeans, may carry out such grisly and cowardly violence, but certainly not the more rational, humane and intellectually superior Europeans.
The comment, though less obvious, reminds one of the racist remarks by CBS’ foreign correspondent, Charlie D’Agata, on February 26, when he shamelessly compared Middle Eastern cities with the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, stating that “Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, (…) this is a relatively civilized, relatively European city”.
The Russia-Ukraine war has been a stage of racist comments and behavior, some explicit and obvious, others implicit and indirect. Far from being implicit, however, Bulgarian Prime Minister, Kiril Petkov, did not mince words when, last February, he addressed the issue of Ukrainian refugees. Europe can benefit from Ukrainian refugees, he said, because “these people are Europeans. (…) These people are intelligent, they are educated people. This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists.”
One of many other telling episodes that highlight western racism, but also continued denial of its grim reality, was an interview conducted by the Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, with the Ukrainian Azov Battalion Commander, Dmytro Kuharchuck. The latter’s militia is known for its far-right politics, outright racism and horrific acts of violence. Yet, the newspaper described Kuharchuck as “the kind of fighter you don’t expect. He reads Kant and he doesn’t only use his bazooka.” If this is not the very definition of denial, what is?
That said, our proud European friends must be careful before supplanting the word ‘European’ with ‘civilization’ and respect for human rights. They ought not to forget their past or rewrite their history because, after all, racially-based slavery is a European and western brand. The slave trade, as a result of which millions of slaves were shipped from Africa during the course of four centuries, was very much European. According to Encyclopedia Virginia, 1.8 million people “died on the Middle Passage of the transatlantic slave trade”. Other estimations put the number much higher.
Colonialism is another European quality. Starting in the 15th century, and lasting for centuries afterward, colonialism ravaged the entire Global South. Unlike the slave trade, colonialism enslaved entire peoples and divided whole continents, like Africa, among European spheres of influence.
The nation of Congo was literally owned by one person, Belgian King Leopold II. India was effectively controlled and colonized by the British East India Company and, later, by the British government. The fate of South America was largely determined by the US-imposed Monroe Doctrines of 1823. For nearly 200 years, this continent has paid – and continues to pay – an extremely heavy price of US colonialism and neocolonialism. No numbers or figures can possibly express the destruction and death toll inflicted by Western-European colonialism on the rest of the world, simply because the victims are still being counted. But for the sake of illustration, according to American historian, Adam Hochschild, ten million people have died in Congo alone from 1885 to 1908.
And how can we forget that World War I and II are also entirely European, leaving behind around 40 million and 75 million dead, respectively. (Other estimations are significantly higher). The gruesomeness of these European wars can only be compared to the atrocities committed, also by Europeans, throughout the South, for hundreds of years prior.
Mere months after The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed in 1949, the eager western partners were quick to flex their muscles in Korea in 1950, instigating a war that lasted for three years, resulting in the death of nearly 5 million people. The Korean war, like many other NATO-instigated conflicts, remains an unhealed wound to this day.
The list goes on and on, from the disgraceful Opium Wars on China, starting in 1839, to the nuclear bombings of Japan in 1945, to the destruction of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, in 1954, 1959 and 1970 respectively, to the political meddling, military interventions and regime change in numerous countries around the world. They are all the work of the West, of the US and its ever-willing ‘European partners’, all done in the name of spreading democracy, freedom and human rights.
If it were not for the Europeans, Palestine would have gained its independence decades ago, and its people, this writer included, would have not been made refugees, suffering under the yoke of Zionist Israel. If it were not for the US and the Europeans, Iraq would have remained a sovereign country and millions of lives would have been spared in one of the world’s oldest civilizations; and Afghanistan would have not endured this untold hardship. Even when the US and its European friends finally relented and left Afghanistan last year, they continue to hold the country hostage, by blocking the release of its funds, leading to actual starvation among the people of that war-torn country.
So before bragging about the virtues of Europe, and the demeaning of everyone else, the likes of Arestovych, D’Agata, and Petkov should take a look at themselves in the mirror and reconsider their unsubstantiated ethnocentric view of the world and of history. In fact, if anyone deserves bragging rights it is those colonized nations that resisted colonialism, the slaves that fought for their freedom, and the oppressed nations that resisted their European oppressors, despite the pain and suffering that such struggles entailed.
Sadly, for Europe, however, instead of using the Russia-Ukraine war as an opportunity to reflect on the future of the European project, whatever that is, it is being used as an opportunity to score cheap points against the very victims of Europe everywhere. Once more, valuable lessons remain unlearned.
The images coming out of Bucha, Ukraine, are harrowing, almost surreal.
A quiet residential street filled with smashed and burned war machines, one appearing to have almost melted into the pavement beside a street sign pointing the way to the supermarket.
Civilians searching desperately for missing loved ones with no idea where or how to begin. In the chaos of this charnel house, anyone could be anywhere, everywhere or nowhere.
A Russian tank turret lies in an open field strewn with smaller debris, the tank it belonged to nowhere in sight, a testament to the unspeakable violence that had been visited upon this town.
A brightly colored schoolyard playground smashed and shredded by artillery shrapnel.
And the bodies, many face down in the street with hands bound, others evidenced only by feet sticking out of hastily prepared mass graves.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy places the civilian death toll in Bucha at more than 300 people. Many of the dead were tortured first. Some of the carnage came as Russian forces retreated from the region around Kyiv in an attempt to reset and restart their shambolic invasion. Spokesmen for Russia’s Ministry of Defense denied the accusations, calling them a “hoax” and claiming the killings took place after Russian forces left town, but an analysis of satellite imagery shows that many of the dead had been lying in the streets for weeks.
The worst, apparently, may be yet to come. Iryna Venediktova, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, spoke on Ukraine’s national television network on Monday. “Venediktova said the number of victims in Borodyanka, around 23km west of Bucha, would be higher than anywhere else,” reports the Guardian, “but did not provide further details.”
“We can speak of Kyiv region because yesterday we got access to these territories and are currently working in Irpin, Bucha, Vorzel,” said Venediktova. “In fact, the worst situation with civilian victims is in Borodyanka. I think we will speak of Borodyanka separately.”
The bulk of photographs revealed to date were taken by press photographers who braved the war to capture those truths. They needed you and I to know what had happened there, and like any good journalist laboring under duress, they got the job done.
Joseph Galloway, widely considered the “dean” of war correspondents by his peers until his death in 2021, first confronted combat in the Ia Drang Valley of Vietnam in 1965. He described the experience to NPR’s Terry Gross:
Men next to me fell over with a bullet in the head. I was lying down as close to the ground as I could get, seemed like the right thing to do.
When I felt the toe of a combat boot in my ribs, and I sort of turned my head and tilted up and looked, and it was the battalion sergeant major, a man 6’3″ tall, a big bear of a guy. And he bent over at the waist and sort of yelled down at me so I could just hear him. And what he said shocked me. He said, sonny, you can’t take no pictures laying down there on the ground.
And I thought about that for a minute. And I realized he’s right. I can’t do my job down here. And the other thing that crossed my mind is I think we’re probably all going to be killed. And if that’s the case, I’d just as soon take mine standing up anyway. So I got up and went about my business.
Bucha has joined a long list of places where horrors have been visited upon the innocent, only to be exposed by the journalist’s pen or the photographer’s eye. My Lai, Srebrenica, the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, Rwanda, the Disappeared of Argentina. The difference between those tragedies and Bucha is the accelerated speed of the story of its plight going global.
“Bill Clinton regretted he did not respond to the murders of Tutsis in 1994,” reports Patrick Wintour for the Guardian, “saying he did not ‘fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which [Rwandans] were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror’. Srebrenica was arguably only the culmination of ethnic cleansing that had been going on for three years. My Lai, revealed two years after the event, only provided further momentum to a pre-existing US anti-war movement. The scale of the British repression of the Mau Mau rebellion was only truly documented decades afterwards by a Harvard historian Caroline Elkins in her book Britain’s Gulag.”
This time, it was different. The work of those journalists in the war zone of Ukraine rattled the world this week. Hopefully they will remind us all of the brutal human impact of war, beyond its politics.
To be sure, war photography can be used for ill — to whip up nationalism, xenophobia and militarism. But, given the right context, it can bring humanity back into the picture, and illuminate the deep and harrowing human toll of mass violence.
What a state this world has been driven into by the political, commercial and military interests of governments and corporations. Once it was possible for citizens to rail against injustice human rights violations and tyranny on social media platforms, but all that has changed. Following in the wake of censorship, character assassination and exclusion; to those who dissented and questioned on the Covid narrative, and efficacy and safety of experimental medicines injected into the public. A worrying new orthodoxy is taking root. In this dark new chapter there exists only one source of truth, fact can be assured solely through government agency or it’s approved corporate media partners. Any genuinely independent or critical voice is censored, dismissed, questioned or publicly smeared as unreliable, biased and misleading. All very Orwellian, including the operation of double-think.
Because the same authorities imposing such totalitarianism and censorship are doing so to ‘protect freedom, democracy and individuals’. Free-speech is under a vicious assault, particularly across the internet and social media, which Governments are striving to dominate. They have been helped in that objective by a number of compliant and ethically corrupt platforms, including Twitter, whose previous position on open debate and opposition to censorship has been replaced by an unquestioning obedience to the dictate of Governments and corporate interests. We saw this during the past two years, blocking people who dissented or questioned the drugs corporations and safety of their Covid products. Affirming only the narrative of health authorities and the political elite, to the banishment of any opposing view.
Sad to see such a venal decline, but here we are, having been psychologically groomed into an unthinking and servile condition by our own authorities. Hypocrisy now rules. While a media, which would have us believe they uphold the values of freedom-of-speech, objective reportage and balanced, independent journalism are little more than corporate and governmental whores. Too extreme? Not really. Take the current psychological warfare being conducted to sway and control public opinion on the situation in Ukraine, with only one version of events being allowed. Western media regurgitating word-for-word, without critical examination, every assertion and claim from the Ukrainian authorities. As governments and media corporations are banning Russian broadcasters, denigrating their output as lies and biased.
Now Twitter has announced it would no longer recommend tweets from Russian state-controlled media outlets for amplification. This means they would not be featured in the home timeline, notifications, or anywhere else on the platform. The reason offered to justify such censorship is interesting:
“When a government that’s engaged in armed conflictis blocking or limiting access to online services within their country, while they themselves continue to use those same services to advance their positions and viewpoints – that creates a harmful information imbalance,”Twitter’s Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth said.
Convinced? Reasonable? But hang on a minute what about imposing similar restrictions on China? After all it’s engaged in a war of cultural genocide against Tibetans and Uyghurs, operates forced labor-camps. Torture, forced sterilizations and executions are widespread. The Chinese regime has blocked Twitter from operating in China. While at the same time the platform’s timeline and various feeds are full of Chinese government orchestrated propaganda concealing such atrocities and misleading public opinion.Surely if Twitter held as a core principle its opposition to regimes exploiting their platform for purposes of disinformation while engaged in human rights crimes and imposing a violent tyranny it would have no objection in launching restrictions against Chinese government Twitter accounts and effectively block their output and visibility in the same way it is doing so against the Russian authority?
Of course it hasn’t done so and is unlikely to do so, demonstrating the nauseating hypocrisy at work and exposing the hollowness of such posturing. Like other social-media platforms Twitter is conforming to the double-standards and geo-political agenda of western states, who while condemning Russia’s actions are suffering a specific and acute amnesia on their blood-drenched invasions and roles in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Yemen!
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has announced that he expects NATO will be deepening its relationship with its “partners” in the Asia-Pacific because China has not condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“We see that China has been unwilling to condemn Russia’s aggression, and has joined Moscow in questioning the right of nations to choose their own path,” Stoltenberg said at a press conference on Tuesday. “At a time when authoritarian powers are pushing back on the rules-based international order, it is even more important for democracies to stand together, and protect our values. So I expect we will agree to deepen NATO’s cooperation with our Asia-Pacific partners, including in areas such as arms control, cyber, hybrid, and technology.”
Some “Asia-Pacific partners” named by Stoltenberg in his speech include “Australia, Japan, New Zealand and the Republic of Korea.” He also named “Georgia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina” as additional non-NATO “partners” of the military alliance.
As the late scholar on US-Russia relations Stephen Cohen explained years before the Ukraine crisis erupted in 2014, Moscow sees NATO as an “American sphere of influence,” and the expansion of NATO and NATO influence as expansion of that sphere. As the “North Atlantic” Treaty Organization continues to expand its influence and intimacy with “partners” surrounding China, we can probably expect Beijing to take a similar view.
Also on Tuesday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley told the House Armed Services Committee that the US needs to prepare for significant conflict with both Russia and China, echoing Stoltenberg’s comments about the “rules-based international order”.
“We are now facing two global powers: China and Russia, each with significant military capabilities both who intend to fundamentally change the rules based current global order,” Milley said. “We are entering a world that is becoming more unstable and the potential for significant international conflict is increasing, not decreasing.”
As we’ve discussed previously, these newspeak terms “rules-based international order” and “rules-based global order” really mean nothing other than “Washington-based global order”. It is wordplay designed to sidestep less convenient terms like “international law”, which is very clearly defined and not nearly as subject to US control as these other terms which mean nothing other than whatever the US empire wants them to mean.
People lost their minds when President Biden uttered the phrase “new world order” last month and were quickly informed by mainstream “fact checkers” that this does not validate longstanding conspiracy theories about an elite agenda to create a one-world government. In reality, though, the real agenda to create a one-world government is not some hidden conspiracy involving secret societies and shadowy figures with Jewish surnames. The US empire is openly working to unite the planet under a single power structure which effectively functions as one government in many ways.
BIDEN: "There's going to be a new world order out there and we have to lead it." pic.twitter.com/jNfUmUO80p
Back when the United Nations was being formed in 1945, Albert Einstein wrote hopefully about the possibility of a future one-world government and believed the primary obstacle to its emergence was the fact that the Soviet Union would resist joining it. Einstein therefore concluded that the best thing would be for other nations to band together under a “partial world Government… comprising at least two-thirds of the major industrial and economic areas of the world.”
And what’s interesting is that this is pretty much what ended up happening. The United States, along with the oligarchs and government agencies who run it, has become the hub of a vast undeclared empire unified not under an official imperial flag but under a network of alliances, treaties, “partnerships”, predatory loans and secret deals which other governments are encouraged to sign on to by varying degrees of coercion, with the understanding that if they don’t join up they will find themselves facing the wrath of the empire. Nations like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Bolivia, Syria and Venezuela have wholly resisted being brought underneath this power umbrella, while the remainder of the world has fallen into varying degrees of membership within the undeclared empire.
The empire’s member states have their own official governments with their own official laws and their own official elections (where applicable), but on international matters they move more or less as a cohesive unit against the nations who have resisted absorption into the imperial blob. This is what unipolar hegemony looks like, and the US has had a standing policy to preserve that unipolar hegemony since the fall of the Soviet Union.
This is the real one-world government conspiracy. The one with the most tangible reality behind it which most directly affects our lives. You don’t need to plunge down a bunch of paranoid rabbit holes to see it, you just have to watch the news with an understanding of which governments are part of this giant power structure and which ones have refused to be absorbed into it. It explains pretty much everything you see on the world stage.
Virtually every major international news story, underneath all the imperial narrative spin, is nothing other than the story of a giant US-centralized power structure working to incorporate more and more nations under its umbrella and smash any nation which refuses by any means necessary. Once you really see this you can never unsee it, because it tracks so consistently all across the spectrum. And once it’s seen, the major international conflicts being focused on by the imperial media will never again be confusing to you.
This is why they are ramping up aggressions against China as they prepare a campaign to stop its rise before its power makes a US-dominated world order a permanent impossibility. This is why they persisted in provocations that experts had long warned would lead to a Russian attack on Ukraine and are now leveraging the invasion to push for regime change in Moscow. This is why nations like Pakistan who get too close to defying the empire are threatened with regime change. This is why the imperial news cycle churns out narratives telling us Saddam needs to go, Gaddafi needs to go, Assad needs to go, Maduro needs to go, Kim Jong-Un needs to go, etc.
The US-centralized empire is continually working to unify the world under one power structure, and if it someday succeeds the result will not functionally be different from a one-world government. The problem, of course, is that some nations are resisting this agenda, and the ones who have been most successful in that resistance are armed with nuclear weapons. The agenda to secure total global domination at all cost is literally risking the life of every organism on this planet, and tensions along this front are only continuing to escalate.
The entire argument for a “rules-based international order” led by the United States is that it makes the world a more peaceful and harmonious place, but this argument is nullified by the omnicidal nature of the very measures which must be taken to secure that world order. US unipolar hegemony doesn’t make the world more peaceful, it makes it more dangerous. It cannot be maintained without nonstop violence and steadily escalating nuclear brinkmanship. “Pax Americana” is a lie.
The competition-based models that have been normalized for humanity are going to wipe us all out if we don’t change them very soon. Nations cannot keep waving armageddon weapons at each other because a few manipulators in the US Beltway convinced decision makers that they should rule the world. We cannot keep feeding our ecosystem into the gears of an insatiable capitalism machine that will collapse if it doesn’t continually expand.
We are going to have to find a way to move into collaboration-based systems with each other, with other nations, and with our environment. This way of living on this planet is utterly unsustainable.
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Much has been said and written about media bias and double standards in the West’s response to the Russia-Ukraine war, when compared with other wars and military conflicts across the world, especially in the Middle East and the Global South. Less obvious is how such hypocrisy is a reflection of a much larger phenomenon which governs the West’s relationship to war and conflict zones.
On March 19, Iraq commemorated the 19th anniversary of the US invasion which killed, according to modest estimates, over a million Iraqis. The consequences of that war were equally devastating as it destabilized the entire Middle East region, leading to various civil and proxy wars. The Arab world is reeling under that horrific experience to this day.
Also, on March 19, the eleventh anniversary of the NATO war on Libya was commemorated and followed, five days later, by the 23rd anniversary of the NATO war on Yugoslavia. Like every NATO-led war since the inception of the alliance in 1949, these wars resulted in widespread devastation and tragic death tolls.
None of these wars, starting with the NATO intervention in the Korean Peninsula in 1950, have stabilized any of the warring regions. Iraq is still as vulnerable to terrorism and outside military interventions and, in many ways, remains an occupied country. Libya is divided among various warring camps, and a return to civil war remains a real possibility.
Yet, enthusiasm for war remains high, as if over seventy years of failed military interventions have not taught us any meaningful lessons. Daily, news headlines tell us that the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, Spain or some other western power have decided to ship a new kind of ‘lethal weapons’ to Ukraine. Billions of dollars have already been allocated by Western countries to contribute to the war in Ukraine.
In contrast, very little has been done to offer platforms for diplomatic, non-violent solutions. A handful of countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia have offered mediation or insisted on a diplomatic solution to the war, arguing, as China’s foreign ministry reiterated on March 18, that “all sides need to jointly support Russia and Ukraine in having dialogue and negotiation that will produce results and lead to peace”.
Though the violation of the sovereignty of any country is illegal under international law, and is a stark violation of the United Nations Charter, this does not mean that the only solution to violence is counter-violence. This cannot be truer in the case of Russia and Ukraine, as a state of civil war has existed in Eastern Ukraine for eight years, harvesting thousands of lives and depriving whole communities from any sense of peace or security. NATO’s weapons cannot possibly address the root causes of this communal struggle. On the contrary, they can only fuel it further.
If more weapons were the answer, the conflict would have been resolved years ago. According to the BBC, the US has already allocated $2.7bn to Ukraine over the last eight years, long before the current war. This massive arsenal included “anti-tank and anti-armor weapons … US-made sniper (rifles), ammunition and accessories”.
The speed with which additional military aid has poured into Ukraine following the Russian military operations on February 24 is unprecedented in modern history. This raises not only political or legal questions, but moral questions as well – the eagerness to fund war and the lack of enthusiasm to help countries rebuild.
After 21 years of US war and invasion of Afghanistan, resulting in a humanitarian and refugee crisis, Kabul is now largely left on its own. Last September, the UN refugee agency warned that “a major humanitarian crisis is looming in Afghanistan”, yet nothing has been done to address this ‘looming’ crisis, which has greatly worsened since then.
Afghani refugees are rarely welcomed in Europe. The same is true for refugees coming from Iraq, Syria, Libya, Mali and other conflicts that directly or indirectly involved NATO. This hypocrisy is accentuated when we consider international initiatives that aim to support war refugees, or rebuild the economies of war-torn nations.
Compare the lack of enthusiasm in supporting war-torn nations with the West’s unparalleled euphoria in providing weapons to Ukraine. Sadly, it will not be long before the millions of Ukrainian refugees who have left their country in recent weeks become a burden on Europe, thus subjected to the same kind of mainstream criticism and far-right attacks.
While it is true that the West’s attitude towards Ukraine is different from its attitude towards victims of western interventions, one has to be careful before supposing that the ‘privileged’ Ukrainains will ultimately be better off than the victims of war throughout the Middle East. As the war drags on, Ukraine will continue to suffer, either the direct impact of the war or the collective trauma that will surely follow. The amassing of NATO weapons in Ukraine, as was the case of Libya, will likely backfire. In Libya, NATO’s weapons fueled the country’s decade long civil war.
Ukraine needs peace and security, not perpetual war that is designed to serve the strategic interests of certain countries or military alliances. Though military invasions must be wholly rejected, whether in Iraq or Ukraine, turning Ukraine into another convenient zone of perpetual geopolitical struggle between NATO and Russia is not the answer.
Within hours of news Sunday that there had been a massacre at Bucha, a town 63 kms north of the Ukrainian capital, the verdict was in: Russian troops had senselessly slaughtered hundreds of innocent civilians as they withdrew from the town, leaving their bodies littering the streets. Unlike their judicial systems, when it comes to war, Western nations dispense with the need for investigations and evidence and pronounce guilt based on political motives: Russia is guilty. Case closed. Except the case hasn’t even been opened yet and the sentence is already being proposed.