radiofree.asia

Category: Russia

  • US Interventionism Always Makes Things Worse: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Friendly reminder that it’s impossible to get a clear understanding of what’s going on in the world without accounting for the fact that very powerful people within your own society are actively working very hard to manipulate your understanding in their favor.

    ❖

    Obviously believing unproven US or Ukrainian claims about what’s happening on the ground in Ukraine is as dumb as believing unproven Russian claims about what’s happening there, and anyone advocating for direct NATO military intervention against Russia is an enemy of our species.

    Advocating skepticism of unproven claims made during a war and saying nuclear superpowers should not attack one anothers’ military forces on the basis of those claims should literally be the least controversial position that anyone could possibly voice about anything.

    ❖

    US military interventionism always makes things worse and never accomplishes what its proponents claim it will accomplish. It’s stupid to have to keep saying this year after year. There’s nothing wrong in Ukraine that direct US military intervention couldn’t make much, much worse.

    ❖

    It’s been universally understood since Stalin got the bomb that nuclear-armed powers must never go to war with each other, but everyone’s so insane now we’re seeing daily op-eds and news segments about how NATO could attack the Russian military in Ukraine without starting a nuclear war.

    Nuclear superpowers must never go to war with each other. This is the single most existentially important thing for the human species to understand. It’s been understood for generations, and it didn’t magically stop being true because you saw a bunch of Ukrainian flags and some unconfirmed pictures of alleged war crimes.

    People say things like, “Putin believes he can rely on the nuclear threat to keep us from confronting him!” Yeah that’s how military strategy works, dipshit. He has a military strength that his enemies need to respect. That means you shouldn’t attack Russia, not that you should.

    For years I’ve had idiot QAnon cultists telling me nuclear weapons are a hoax and they’re not real. Now all of a sudden my online notifications are full of shitlibs saying almost the same thing.

    ❖

    Still hilarious that the United States of America thinks it has the moral authority to tell other nations how they should respond to a military invasion.

    ❖

    Do you truly believe it’s a coincidence that mainstream Americans were made to despise Putin with a Trump-Russia collusion narrative that turned out to be pure bullshit in the years preceding an unrelated US proxy war against Putin? What would it mean if it wasn’t a coincidence?

    ❖

    Looks like Jen Psaki’s making a major career move from spreading US government lies to spreading US government lies on cable news.

    ❖

    If you look at the behavior of the US empire underneath all the narratives, two things become clear:

    1. It plans to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world by halting the rise of China.
    2. It can only accomplish this via actions that will massively disrupt the entire world.

    The strongest argument for a multipolar world is that maintaining a unipolar one necessarily requires endless violence and continually escalating nuclear brinkmanship. It is literally unsustainable.

    There’s no valid reason nations can’t just get along and collaborate toward the greater good of humanity without one of them trying to dominate all the others. The unipolarist impulse to rule the earth stops this peaceful and collaborative world from emerging. There is no “Pax Americana”. Unipolarism is the opposite of peace.

    People try to argue that if the US wasn’t the unipolar world dominator then it would be China or someone else, because it’s “human nature” to want to take over the world. But there was never a unipolar world hegemon ever in human history until three decades ago; you can’t claim something that has only happened one single time is “human nature”.

    Europeans set sail and conquered people around the world. China built a wall. Also the idea that China seeks to replace the US as global tyrant assumes that Beijing has been watching the US empire crush itself under its own weight and thinking “Ooh, yeah, that looks awesome. Let’s definitely do that.”

    ❖

    It says so much about how propagandized people are and how insulated their ideological echo chambers have become that their first thought when encountering someone with a foreign policy opinion they disagree with is “I bet this person is a secret agent from a hostile government.”

    I’m always like, really? That’s your go-to? That I’m saying what I’m saying because I’m an operative for a foreign intelligence agency? Can’t possibly just be that I just have different opinions about the world’s most powerful government than the ones you hear on TV? How distorted does the information landscape have to be that criticizing the most dangerous impulses of the most powerful and destructive power structure on earth is something people view as weird and suspicious?

    It really tells you how powerful the empire’s narrative domination is. Even leaving aside how normal criticizing the world’s largest power structure ought to be, how homogeneous has the information environment become where any divergence of opinion sticks out so much that it’s met with such intense shock that people think you’re a foreign agent?

    ❖

    Russian perspectives need to be banned and Germans need to be jailed for supporting Putin and the news media need to push US government narratives and Silicon Valley algorithms need to aggressively boost those government narratives, because that’s what it takes to protect the western world from tyranny.

    ❖

    Few people sincerely want the truth about the world. Most just want politicians and pundits to whisper reassuringly in their ear, “Don’t worry. We’ve got this. Your schoolteachers told you the truth about everything, and so did the news man. You are on the side of righteousness.”

    _________________________

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

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Tectonic Shifts in the World Economy: A World Systems Perspective

    Orientation 

    One of the main problems with Western media (other than their non-stop anti-Russian propaganda), is the narrow and parochial manner in which they conceive world events. Like realists and liberals of international relations theory, they analyze world events two countries at a time, for example, the U.S. vs Russia. They appear to have little conception of interdependence, like Russia, China, and Iran as a single block. Or the U.S., England, and Israel as another block. No state can make any moves without considering the causes and consequences of their actions for their interdependent states. Secondly, these talking heads fail miserably in understanding that conflicts between states are inseparable from the evolution of global capitalism which, in many respects, is stronger than any state. Thirdly, their “analysis” fails to consider that the world capitalist system has evolved over the last 500 years, as I will soon present. We will see that what is going on in Ukraine is part of a much larger tectonic struggle between Eastern China, Russia, and Iran to create a multipolar world while being desperately opposed by a declining West, headed by the United States and its minions.

    A Brief History of Modern Capitalism

    According to world systems theory, the global capitalist system has gone through four phases. In each phase, there was a dominant hegemon. First, there was the merchant capital of Italy that lasted from 1450-1640. This was followed by the great Dutch seafaring age from 1610-1740. Next, there was the British industrial system from 1776 to World War I. Lastly, the Yankee system which lasted from 1870 to 1970. Note that over these 500 years the pace of change quickened. In the Italian phase, the city states of Venice and Genoa rose and fell over 220 years. By the time we get to the United States, the time of rise and decline is 100 years. All this has been laid out by Giovanni Arrighi in The Long 20th century. In Adam Smith in Beijing, Arrighi also lays out the reasons he is convinced that China will be the leading hegemon in the next phase of capitalism.

    Five Types of Capitalism   

    Historically there have been five types of capitalism. The first is merchant capital in which profits are made by trade, selling cheap and buying dear. This is what Venice and Genoa did, as did Dutch seafarers on a grander scale. Next, is agricultural capitalism, including the slave system of the United States, Britain, and parts of the Caribbean, South America, and Africa. Then, the British invented the industrial capitalism system in which profit was made by investing the infrastructure of society: railroads, factories, and surplus labor from the wage labor system. Lastly, especially in the 20th century, we have two other forms of capitalism. In addition to being an industrial power after World War II, the United States used its industrial power to invest in the military arms industry and relied on finance capital (stocks and bonds).

    Destructive Forms of Capitalism

    In the later stage of all four systems, making money from commodities or technologies becomes problematic because it becomes unpredictable what people will buy. For example, after the Depression from 1929-1941, the United States got out of the depression by investing in the military. This was so successful that after World War II, capitalists began investing in the military even during peacetime (Melman, After Capitalism). It provided a much more predictable profit as long as countries continued to go to war. This encourages arming your own country or supplying the whole world, which is what the United States does today. There is also finance capital, where banks invest in stocks, bonds and financial instruments rather than infrastructure (as industrial capitalists did). For the past 50 years military and finance capital are primarily where the ruling class in Yankeedom has made its profits.

    In the early phases of capitalism, in all four cycles, commodities were produced which required money as mediation, but the purpose was to produce more commodities and technologies. In the decaying part of the cycle, capitalists would rather invest in finance capital than industrial capital because of the quick turn-around in profits. Investing in building bridges, repairing roads, or building schools will surely benefit capitalists in the long run. Smooth supply chains for capitalist profit and a sound education in high school and college would ensure that workers not only know how to do their jobs but that they would be creative-thinkers and innovators. Capitalists these days don’t want to invest in these things, and this is why the infrastructure in Yankeedom is falling apart and the Yankee population cannot compete with students from other countries with better educational systems.

    What is World Systems Theory?

    World systems theory is a macro-sociological theory of long-term social change which includes economic theory and world history. It is provocative in at least three ways. One, its basic unit of analysis is the entire world-system of capitalism rather than nation-states. Second, it argues that the so-called socialist societies were not really socialist, but rather state-capitalist. Third, global capitalism organizes itself into a transnational division of labor which ignores the boundaries of nation-states. World-systems theory has been used by historians, international relations theorists, and international political economists to explain the rise and fall of nation-states, the increase and decrease in stratification patterns, as well as rise and decline of imperialism. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Terry Boswell have specialized in understanding social movements and the timing and placing of revolutions from a world-systems perspective.

    Economic Zones Within the World-system

    Overview of the core, periphery                                                 

    World-systems are divided into three zones: the core, the semi-peripheral, and the peripheral countries. Economically and politically, core countries dominate other countries without being dominated. Semi-periphery countries are dominated by the core, and, in turn, dominate the periphery. The periphery are dominated by both. Part of the wealth of core countries comes from their exploitation of the peripheral countries’ land and labor through colonization.

    Core and periphery

    The core countries control most of the wealth in the world capitalist system. Workers are highly specialized, high technology is used. It has an industrial-electronic base. They extract raw materials from the peripheral countries and sell peripheral countries finished products. Core countries have the most highly specialized workers and a relatively small agricultural base, whereas peripheral countries have strong agricultural or horticultural bases and have a semi-skilled urban working class. The peripheral countries have relatively unspecialized labor whose work is labor-intensive with low wages. Much of the work done in peripheral countries is commercial agriculture—the production of coffee, sugar, and cotton.

    The core countries are the home of the transnational corporations who control the world. Additionally, the core countries control the major banking institutions that provide international loans, such as the IMF and the World Bank. Finally, the core countries have the most powerful militaries. Paradoxically, when core countries are at their peak, their militaries are not very active. They only become more active as a core country goes into decline, as in the United States. Core countries typically have the most highly trained workers. In their heyday, core countries have strong centralized states that provide for pensions, unemployment, and road construction. In their weak stage, states withdraw these benefits and invest in their military to protect their assets abroad as their own territory falls apart. Core countries have large tax bases and, at their best, support infrastructural development.

    The periphery nations own very little of the world’s means of production. In the case of African states or tribes, they have great amounts of natural resources, including diamonds and minerals, but these are extracted by the core countries. Furthermore, core states are usually able to purchase raw materials and cheap labor from non-core states at low prices and yet demand higher prices for their exports to non-core states. Core states have access to cheap skilled professional labor through migration (brain drain) from semi-peripheral states . Peripheral countries don’t have a solid tax base because their states have to contend with rival ethnic and tribal forces who are hardly convinced that taxes are good for them and their sub-national identities.

    Peripheral countries often do not have a diversified economic base and are forced by the world market to produce one product. A good example of this is Venezuela and its oil. Peripheral countries have relatively steeper stratification patterns because there are no middle classes for the wealth to spread across. A tiny landed elite at the top sells off most of the land to transnational corporations. The state tends to be both weak and strong. States in the periphery have difficulty forming and sustaining their own national economic policy because foreign corporations want to come and go as they please. On the other hand, if a nationalist or a socialist rise to power, the state will be very strong and dictatorial. This is because they are constantly at war with transnational corporations who seek to overthrow them. Since transnational corporations often do this through oppositional parties, those in power are extremely suspicious of oppositional parties. Hence their label as “authoritarian”. In contemporary world systems, peripheries are found in parts of Latin America and in the most extreme form in Sub-Saharan Africa.

    Semi-periphery                                                 

    The semi-periphery contains countries that as a result of national liberation movements and class struggles have risen out of the periphery and have some characteristics of the core. They can also be composed of formerly core countries that have declined. For example, Spain and Portugal were once core countries in Early Modern Europe. Semi-peripheral countries often take over industries the core no longer wants such as second-generation computers, appliances, or transportation systems. Semi-peripheral states enter the world systems with some degree of autonomy rather than simply a subordinate country. These industries are not strong enough to compete with core countries in “free trade”. Therefore, they tend to apply protectionist policies towards their industry. They tend to export more to peripheral states and import more from core states in trade. In the 21st century, states like Brazil, Argentina, Russia, India, Israel, China, South Korea and South Africa (BRICS) are usually considered semi peripheral.

    As I said above, the world capitalist system has changed four times in the last 500 years and each time not only have the configurations of the core countries changed but so have the semi peripheral countries in the world systems. For at least half of capitalist world systems, there were some countries that were outside the periphery, including the United States. Semi-peripheral countries are not fully industrialized countries, but they have scientists and engineers which can lead to some wealth.

    Which countries are in the core periphery and semi periphery countries today?

    The core countries in the world today are the United States, Germany, Japan, and the Scandinavian social democratic countries of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. Minor core countries are England, France, Italy, and Spain. Eastern European countries are in the semi-periphery. South of the border, there are four semi-periphery countries: Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. More powerful up and coming semi-peripheral states include Saudi Arabia, Israel, Russia, China, and India. Most of Africa is in the periphery of the world systems with the exception of South Africa (semi-periphery).

    Where did world systems theory come from?

    Immanuel Wallerstein was a sociologist who specialized in African studies, so he had first-hand knowledge of the reality of exploitation by colonists. He was influenced by the work of Ferdinand Braudel who wrote a great three-volume history of capitalism. Wallerstein was also influenced by Marx and Engels, but he thought their history of capitalism was too Eurocentric. He emphasized that the core countries did not just exploit their own workers, but they have made great profits through the systematic exploitation of the peripheral countries for hundreds of years.

    Modernization theory

    World systems theory was in part a reaction against the anti-communist, modernization theory of international politics that prevailed after World War II into the 1960’s. Please see the table below which compares world systems theory to modernization theory.

    Dependency theory of Andre Gunder Frank

    Around the same time as world systems theory developed, Andre Gunder Frank developed what came to be called “dependency theory”. This theory also challenged modernization theory’s assumption that countries that were called “traditional societies” were improved by contact with the core countries. He claimed that they were systematically exploited by the core countries, made worse than they were before they had any contact with them. As long ago as 1998, Gunder Frank predicted the rise of China. See his book ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age.

    Karl Polyani

    Other influences on the world-systems theory come from a scholar of comparative economic systems, Karl Polyani. His major contribution is to show that there was no capitalism in tribal or agricultural civilizations and that the “self-subsisting” economy of capitalism was a relatively recent development. Wallerstein reframed this in world systems terms, with the tribal as “mini-systems”, agricultural civilization as “empires” and the capitalist system as “world economies”. Nikolai Kondratiev introduced patterns he saw in the capitalist world economy that centered around cycles of crisis and wars within very specific time periods.

    Interstate System

    As I said earlier, in international relations theory, realist and neo-conservative theory and neoliberal theories of the state treat each state as if they were separate units. Applied to today, that would formulate world conflict as a battle between, say, the United States and Russia. Neo-conservative and neoliberal theory treat any alliance between states as secondary epiphenomenon that can be dissolved without too much trouble. Secondly, both these theories operate as if interstate politics are relatively autonomous from economics. To the extent to which these theories mention capitalism, it is the domestic economy of nation-states. Each tries to hide the international nature of capitalism and the extent to which transnational corporations can, and do, override national interests. The ideology of the interstate system is sovereign equality, but this is practically overridden as states are treated as neither sovereign nor equal, especially in Africa.

    World systems theory sees states differently. For one thing, nation-states are not like Hobbes atoms which crash against each other in a war of all against all. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, fresh after the Thirty Years’ War, was an attempt to move beyond dynastic empires to nation-states. In core capitalist countries there were never single nation states. The Treaty created a system of nation-states which had rules of engagement, treaties, do’s and don’ts.

    Today, between the core, periphery, and semi-periphery countries lies a system of interconnected state relationships. This interstate system arose either as a concomitant process or as a consequence of the development of the capitalist world-system over the course of the “long” 16th century as states began to recognize each other’s sovereignty.

    Between these economic zones there were no enforceable rules about how nation-states should act, outside of not impeding the flow of capital between zones. Political domestic elites, international elites, and corporations competed and cooperated with each other, the results of which no one intended. Unsuccessful attempts have been made by the League of Nations and later the United Nations to create an international state. However, nation-states have been unwilling to give up their weapons. Therefore, the international anarchy of capitalist production is still unchecked. The function of the state is to regulate the flow of capital, labor, and commodities across borders and to enforce the structure of market rates. Not only do strong states impose their will on weak states. Strong states also impose limitations on other strong states, as we are seeing with US sanctions against Russia.

    Who Will Be the Next World-Economy Hegemon?

    Situation in Ukraine

    Everything about Ukraine needs to be understood as the desperate clawing of a Yankee empire terrified of being left behind. The U.S. has so far convinced Europe to stay away from Russia and China, but it has nothing to offer. As Gary Olsen said, the Europeans may slowly make deals with Russia and China because they have some sense of where the future lies. So, Western hydra-headed totalitarian media all speak with the same voice: RUSSIA, RUSSIA, EVIL RUSSIA. EVIL PUTIN. Putin certainly had nerve wanting a national economy with its own economic policy. God forbid! But the time is up for Yankeedom and no terrorist police, no military drones, no Republicrats, and no stock exchange jingling with the trappings of divine honor can stop it.

    The weakness of Europe

     So, if Yankeedom is in decline (and even Brzezinski admitted this) who are the new contenders? Up until maybe five years ago, I thought Germany might be, with its industrial base and its strong working class. But in the last five years German standards of living have declined. It seems that the EU is in the midst of cracking up. There is no leadership with the departure of Angela Merkel. Macron is on the way out in France. All the other countries in Europe, including Italy, are under water with debt. England is the puppy dog of the United States and hasn’t been a global power in over 100 years. Germany, Spain, Italy, and Greece could be helped enormously by allaying themselves with Russia and China, but at this point most Europeans have been bullied and complicit in myopically siding with a collapsing United States. There is a good chance the US will drag most of Europe down with them.

    Collapse of the core zones?

    As we have seen, according to world systems theory, the history of capitalism has had three zones: core, periphery, and semi-periphery. The countries that have inhabited the three zones have changed along with the dominant hegemon over the last 500 years, and we are now in unprecedented territory. There is a good chance that the entire batch of formerly core states, the United States, Britain, France, and the west will collapse and that the core capitalist system will be without a hegemon (with the possible exception of the Scandinavian countries). China seems to be about ten years away from assuming that position.

    2022-2030 the reign of the semi-periphery?

    So, is it fair to say there is a huge tectonic shift where most of the core countries will collapse and the world system will have no core for maybe 20 years? It seems clear that the new hegemon is going to be China. Arrighi and Gunder Frank both thought this. But China is still a semi-periphery country and it might take 10-15 years to enter the core. Meanwhile its allies, Russia and Iran, are also semi-periphery countries. In South America, Argentina had the foresight to sign on the Chinese Belt Road Initiative. Brazil and Chile are still uncommitted to China and occupy a semi-peripheral status. The big country in Asia is India. It is very important to the Yankees not to lose control of India, and they have all the reason in the world to beat war drums in an attempt to demonize China. If a right winger such as Modi can refuse to side against Russia in the current events in Ukraine, will a more moderate or social democratic president of India have the vision to see the future lies in aligning with China? I wouldn’t count on it given the behavior of green-social democrat leadership in Germany.

    The only European countries who seem to have made their way through 40 years of Neoliberal austerity, the collapse of Yugoslavia, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of fascist parties in Europe are the Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. There is no reason why they could not maintain core status, though China would be the leading power.

    The new hegemon China and the world-system in 2030  

    I can imagine the world-system in 2030 could consist of China and the Scandinavian countries in the core, with Russia, Iran, and maybe Brazil, Argentina and Chile on the semi-periphery along with possibly India. I don’t know where to place the US and Europe. Since they are drunk with finance capital, it is unfair to put them in the semi-periphery, which is usually involved in productive scientific endeavors. Yet they are more productive than the peripheral countries. Africa could be the last battleground between the decadent Yankee and European imperialists who live on as neo-colonial crypto-imperialists attempting to either sell arms to Africans or directly set up regimes and enslave Africans to work the mines.

    If China is able to develop African productive forces with the Belt Road Initiative, it might be an incentive to calm down the ethnic warfare there. It would be a wonderful thing if the African states could finally control the enormous wealth of their country. We cannot expect too much from China. The best they could do would be to invest in cultivating scientists and engineers to build up Africa as a fully industrialized continent. To me, what matters about China is not arguing whether or not it is really socialist, but that it is doing what Marx liked best about capitalism: developing the productive forces.

    The prospects for a world state?

    We cannot expect the Yankee state to decline peacefully and not start World War III. Is it possible to have a global capitalist realignment without starting World War III? As Chris Chase-Dunn has advocated for decades, we need a world state that has the capability to enforce a ban on interstate warfare. That is not likely now. The only attempts at this: the League of Nations and the United Nations happened after the misery of two world wars. Both attempts at world state have failed because nation-states would not agree to give up their weapons.

    What about world ecology?                                                                              

    But as world systems theorist Chris Chase Dunn points out, a Chinese-centered world still inherits the increasing ecological destruction that has been an inherent part of the world system since the industrial revolution and now the global pandemic. This includes extreme weather (hot and cold), pollution of land and oceans with plastics and the products of industrialization like carbon, flooding from global warming, and desertification of lands due to droughts and monocropping.

    What about Marx’s dream of shrinking the ratio between freedom and necessity in the light of ecological disaster?

    For Marx and Engels, the dream of socialism was based on abundance. Unfortunately, because socialism first took place in what Wallerstein would call peripheral or semi-peripheral countries, socialism has come to be associated with poverty. An implication that could be drawn under socialism is that people should expect to be poor and share the poverty equally. That is the opposite of how Marx and Engels saw things. They hoped that socialism would first break out in the west in an industrialized country, with an organized working-class party taking the lead. They hoped that the revolution of overthrowing capitalism would preserve its material abundance, technology, and scientific achievements, not tear them to the ground. They wanted to develop the forces of production that capitalism unleashed while abolishing the political economy of private property over means of production. As socialism developed, the collective creativity of workers would shrink the ratio between necessary work and freedom. What does this mean?

    This meant that workers would either:

    1. a) work less and produce the same amount
    2. b) work the same amount but produce more
    3. c) work more and produce much more

    In other words, workers would have an increase in the number of choices of what to do with their free time because of an increase in the technology and collective creativity to produce more with less. My question is, given the irreversible ecological situation we are in, is it still realistic to expect socialism will continue to be based on abundance? I can imagine that the way China is going, in that part of the world it may still be possible. I also suspect that in the Scandinavian countries it might be possible. The problem is that global pandemics, extreme weather, flooding, desertification, and pollution cannot easily, if at all, be contained within countries that are capitalist or socialist.

    How Reliable is World-systems Theory?

    I will limit criticisms of world systems theory to those of a political and economic nature. One common criticism is the struggle to do empirical research with a unit of analysis being the entire world system. This is not to say world systems theorists do not do empirical work, because they do. It is more a matter of how to derive meaningful relationships between variables at such a complex level of abstraction. Statistics for individual nation states are easier to manage, although nation-states are not autonomous actors.

    Another criticism is that the successes of existing socialist states are in danger of being given the short shrift. Like many in the West, the first line of criticism by world systems theorists of socialist countries is that they are one-party dictatorships. While this may be true, there is good reason why communist parties in power are nervous about the prospect of oppositional parties being used by foreign capitalists to overthrow them. In addition, socialist countries have better records than capitalist countries on the periphery in the fields of literacy (reading and writing), low-cost housing, healthcare, and free education. Please see Michael Parenti, Black Shirts and Reds for more on this.

    The third major criticism comes from orthodox Marxist, Robert Brenner. Brenner claims that the emphasis by world systems theorists on the relationship between economic zones comes at a cost to understanding the class structure within and between nation-states. I think world systems theorists are well aware of class relationships, but they choose to focus on the capitalist relationships between states. Lastly, Theda Skocpol argues that world systems theory understates the power of the state in international affairs. The state is not just the creature of transnational capital. States engage in military competition which long s capitalism. State structures compete with each other.

    On a positive note, as I said earlier, Christopher Chase-Dunn has done some creative work with Terry Boswell in tracking the timing and location of rebellions and revolutions in the 500 years of the world systems in Spirals of Capitalism and Socialism. In addition, he wrote a very groundbreaking book with Tom Hall Rise and Demise, which challenges Wallerstein by suggesting that there were precapitalist world systems that go all the way back to hunter-gatherers. Also see my book with him, Social Change: Globalization from the Stone Age to the Present.

    • First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Socialism

    The post Tectonic Shifts in the World Economy: A World Systems Perspective first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ‘Often a Russian mother has a TV for a brain’: Ukraine YouTuber films PoWs calling home

    Volodymyr Zolkin says interviews cut though Putins lies and denies they violate Geneva conventions

    For some he is exposing Russians to the truth of Vladimir Putin’s war, while to others he is traipsing over the Geneva conventions by parading prisoners of war on the internet.

    Volodymyr Zolkin, 40, an amateur video blogger before the war, has become a YouTube hit in Ukraine and elsewhere for his 50-plus interviews with captured soldiers and pilots, which he says are an attempt to cut through the censorship to inform Russian families about the fate of relatives.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Ukraine war looms over conference on curbing use of heavy bombs in cities

    Geneva meeting aims to reach draft agreement on restricting explosives in wake of shelling in Ukraine

    Sixty countries will meet in Geneva from Wednesday to discuss curbs on the use of heavy bombs in urban areas in the wake of intense fighting in Ukraine believed to have killed and injured thousands in cities such as Mariupol.

    The three-day conference, supported by the UN secretary general, aims to produce a draft international agreement to restrict use of indiscriminate bombing in cities, which statistics show overwhelmingly leads to the death of civilians.

    Continue reading…

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

  • New Witness Testimony About Mariupol Maternity Hospital ‘Airstrike’

    On March 9th, shocking news of a deliberate Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol, eastern Ukraine, began spreading widely via social media and news outlets. Fiery condemnation from Western officials, pundits, and journalists was immediate. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for his part, claimed the act was proof of the “genocide” Russia was perpetrating against the civilian population, and urged European leaders to condemn the “war crime” and “strengthen sanctions” to stop the Kremlin’s “evil” deeds in the country. NPR suggested the attack was part of Russia’s “terrible wartime tradition” of purposefully targeting health facilities and medics during conflicts, dating back to Chechnya. But newly released testimony from one of the incident’s main witnesses punctures the official narrative about a targeted Russian airstrike on the hospital. The witness account indicates the hospital had been turned into a base of operations by Ukrainian military forces and was not targeted in an airstrike, as Western media claimed. Her testimony also raised serious questions about whether at least some elements of the event were staged for propaganda purposes – and with the cooperation of the Associated Press.

    The post New Witness Testimony About Mariupol Maternity Hospital ‘Airstrike’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • How the World’s Not-So-Great Powers Are Miscalculating on Ukraine

    In Western military circles, it’s common to refer to the “balance of forces” — the lineup of tanks, planes, ships, missiles, and battle formations on the opposing sides of any conflict. If one has twice as many combat assets as its opponent and the leadership abilities on each side are approximately equal, it should win. Based on this reasoning, most Western analysts assumed that the Russian army — with a seemingly overwhelming advantage in numbers and equipment — would quickly overpower Ukrainian forces. Of course, things haven’t exactly turned out that way. The Ukrainian military has, in fact, fought the Russians to a near-standstill. The reasons for that will undoubtedly be debated among military theorists for years to come. When they do so, they might begin with Moscow’s surprising failure to pay attention to a different military equation — the “correlation of forces” — originally developed in the former Soviet Union.

    That notion differs from the “balance of forces” by placing greater weight on intangible factors. It stipulates that the weaker of two belligerents, measured in conventional terms, can still prevail over the stronger if its military possesses higher morale, stronger support at home, and the backing of important allies. Such a calculation, if conducted in early February, would have concluded that Ukraine’s prospects were nowhere near as bad as either Russian or Western analysts generally assumed, while Russia’s were far worse. And that should remind us of just how crucial an understanding of the correlation of forces is in such situations, if gross miscalculations and tragedies are to be avoided.

    The Concept in Practice Before Ukraine

    The notion of the correlation of forces has a long history in military and strategic thinking. Something like it, for example, can be found in the epilogue to Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel, War and Peace. Writing about Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812, Tolstoy observed that wars are won not by the superior generalship of charismatic leaders but through the fighting spirit of common soldiers taking up arms against a loathsome enemy.

    Such a perspective would later be incorporated into the military doctrine of the Russian Bolsheviks, who sought to calculate not only troop and equipment strength, but also the degree of class consciousness and support from the masses on each side of any potential conflict. Following the 1917 revolution in the midst of World War I, Russian leader Vladimir Lenin argued, for example, against a continuing war with Germany because the correlation of forces wasn’t yet right for the waging of “revolutionary war” against the capitalist states (as urged by his compatriot Leon Trotsky). “Summing up the arguments in favor of an immediate revolutionary war,” Lenin said, “it must be concluded that such a policy would perhaps respond to the needs of mankind to strive for the beautiful, the spectacular, and the striking, but that it would be totally disregarding the objective correlation of class forces and material factors at the present stage of the socialist revolution already begun.”

    For Bolsheviks of his era, the correlation of forces was a “scientific” concept, based on an assessment of both material factors (numbers of troops and guns on each side) and qualitative factors (the degree of class consciousness involved). In 1918, for example, Lenin observed that “the poor peasantry in Russia… is not in a position immediately and at the present moment to begin a serious revolutionary war. To ignore this objective correlation of class forces on the present question would be a fatal blunder.” Hence, in March 1918, the Russians made a separate peace with the German-led Central Powers, ceding much territory to them and ending their country’s role in the world war.

    As the Bolshevik Party became an institutionalized dictatorship under Joseph Stalin, the correlation-of-forces concept grew into an article of faith based on a belief in the ultimate victory of socialism over capitalism. During the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras of the 1960s and 1970s, Soviet leaders regularly claimed that world capitalism was in irreversible decline and the socialist camp, augmented by revolutionary regimes in the “Third World,” was destined to achieve global supremacy.

    Such optimism prevailed until the late 1970s, when the socialist tide in the Third World began to recede. Most significant in this regard was a revolt against the communist government in Afghanistan. When the Soviet-backed People’s Democratic Party in Kabul came under attack by Islamic insurgents, or mujahideen, Soviet forces invaded and occupied the country. Despite sending ever larger troop contingents there and employing heavy firepower against the mujahideen and their local supporters, the Red Army was finally forced to limp home in defeat in 1989, only to see the Soviet Union itself implode not long after.

    For U.S. strategists, the Soviet decision to intervene and, despite endless losses, persevere was proof that the Russian leaders had ignored the correlation of forces, a vulnerability to be exploited by Washington. In the 1980s, under President Ronald Reagan, it became U.S. policy to arm and assist anticommunist insurgents globally with the aim of toppling pro-Soviet regimes — a strategy sometimes called the Reagan Doctrine. Huge quantities of munitions were given to the mujahideen and rebels like the Contras in Nicaragua, usually via secret channels set up by the Central Intelligence Agency. While not always successful, these efforts generally bedeviled the Soviet leadership. As Secretary of State George Shultz wrote gleefully in 1985, while the U.S. defeat in Vietnam had led the Soviets to believe “that what they called the global ‘correlation of forces’ was shifting in their favor,” now, thanks to U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and elsewhere, “we have reason to be confident that ‘the correlation of forces’ is shifting back in our favor.”

    And yes, the Soviet failure in Afghanistan did indeed reflect an inability to properly weigh the correlation of all the factors involved — the degree to which the mujahideen’s morale outmatched that of the Soviets, the relative support for war among the Soviet and Afghan populations, and the role of outside help provided by the CIA. But the lessons hardly ended there. Washington never considered the implications of arming Arab volunteers under the command of Osama bin Laden or allowing him to create an international jihadist enterprise, “the base” (al-Qaeda), which later turned on the U.S., leading to the 9/11 terror attacks and a disastrous 20-year “global war on terror” that consumed trillions of dollars and debilitated the U.S. military without eliminating the threat of terrorism. American leaders also failed to calculate the correlation of forces when undertaking their own war in Afghanistan, ignoring the factors that led to the Soviet defeat, and so suffering the very same fate 32 years later.

    Putin’s Ukraine Miscalculations

    Much has already been said about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s miscalculations regarding Ukraine. They all began, however, with his failure to properly assess the correlation of forces involved in the conflict to come and that, eerily enough, resulted from Putin’s misreading of the meaning of the U.S. exit from Afghanistan.

    Like many in Washington — especially in the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party — Putin and his close advisers viewed the sudden American withdrawal as a conspicuous sign of U.S. weakness and, in particular, of disarray within the Western alliance. American power was in full retreat, they believed, and the NATO powers irrevocably divided. “Today, we are witnessing the collapse of America’s foreign policy,” said Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Russian State Duma. Other senior officials echoed his view.

    This left Putin and his inner circle convinced that Russia could act with relative impunity in Ukraine, a radical misreading of the global situation. In fact, along with top U.S. military leaders, the Biden White House was eager to exit Afghanistan. They wanted to focus instead on what were seen as far more important priorities, especially the reinvigoration of U.S. alliances in Asia and Europe to better contain China and Russia. “The United States should not, and will not, engage in ‘forever wars’ that have cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars,” the administration affirmed in its Interim National Security Strategic Guidance of May 2021. Instead, the U.S. would position itself “to deter our adversaries and defend our interests… [and] our presence will be most robust in the Indo-Pacific and Europe.”

    As a result, Moscow has faced the exact opposite of what Putin’s advisers undoubtedly anticipated: not a weak, divided West, but a newly energized U.S.-NATO alliance determined to assist Ukrainian forces with vital (if limited) arms supplies, while isolating Russia in the world arena. More troops are now being deployed to Poland and other “front-line” states facing Russia, putting its long-term security at even greater risk. And perhaps most damaging to Moscow’s geopolitical calculations, Germany has discarded its pacifist stance, fully embracing NATO and approving an enormous increase in military spending.

    But Putin’s greatest miscalculations came with respect to the comparative fighting capabilities of his military forces and Ukraine’s. He and his advisers evidently believed that they were sending the monstrous Red Army of Soviet days into Ukraine, not the far weaker Russian military of 2022. Even more egregious, they seem to have believed that Ukrainian soldiers would either welcome the Russian invaders with open arms or put up only token resistance before surrendering. Credit this delusion, at least in part, to the Russian president’s unyielding belief that the Ukrainians were really Russians at heart and so would naturally welcome their own “liberation.”

    We know this, first of all, because many of the troops sent into Ukraine — given only enough food, fuel, and ammunition for a few days of combat — were not prepared to fight a protracted conflict. Unsurprisingly, they have suffered from strikingly low morale. The opposite has been true of the Ukrainian forces who, after all, are defending their homes and their country, and have been able to exploit enemy weaknesses such as long and sluggish supply trains to inflict heavy losses.

    We also know that Putin’s top intelligence officials fed him inaccurate information about the political and military situation in Ukraine, contributing to his belief that the defending forces would surrender after just a few days of combat. He subsequently arrested some of those officials, including Sergey Beseda, head of the foreign intelligence branch of the FSB (the successor to the KGB). Although they were charged with the embezzlement of state funds, the real reason for their arrest, claims Vladimir Osechkin, an exiled Russian human rights activist, was providing the Russian president with “unreliable, incomplete, and partially false information about the political situation in Ukraine.”

    As Russia’s leaders are rediscovering, just two decades after the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan, a failure to properly assess the correlation of forces when engaging in battle with supposedly weaker foes on their home turf can lead to disastrous outcomes.

    China’s Faulty Assessments

    Historically speaking, the Chinese Communist Party leadership has been careful indeed to gauge the correlation of forces when facing foreign adversaries. They provided considerable military assistance, for example, to the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, but not so much as to be viewed by Washington as an active belligerent requiring counterattack. Similarly, despite their claims to the island of Taiwan, they have so far avoided any direct move to seize it by force and risk a full-scale encounter with potentially superior U.S. forces.

    Based on this record, it’s surprising that, so far as we know, the Chinese leadership failed to generate an accurate assessment of either Putin’s plans for Ukraine or the likelihood of an intense struggle for control of that country. China’s leaders have, in fact, long enjoyed cordial relations with their Ukrainian counterparts and their intelligence services surely provided Beijing with reliable information on that country’s combat capabilities. So, it’s striking that they were caught so off-guard by the invasion and fierce Ukrainian resistance.

    Likewise, they should have been able to draw the same conclusions as their Western counterparts from satellite data showing the massive Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s borders. Yet when presented with intelligence by the Biden administration evidently indicating that Putin intended to launch a full-scale invasion, the top leaders simply regurgitated Moscow’s assertions that this was pure propaganda. As a result, China didn’t even evacuate thousands of its own nationals from Ukraine when the U.S. and other Western nations did so, leaving them in place as the war broke out. And even then, the Chinese claimed Russia was only conducting a minor police operation in that country’s Donbas region, making them appear out of touch with on-the-ground realities.

    China also seems to have seriously underestimated the ferocity of the U.S. and European reaction to the Russian assault. Although no one truly knows what occurred in high-level policy discussions among them, it’s likely that they, too, had misread the meaning of the American exit from Afghanistan and, like the Russians, assumed it indicated Washington’s retreat from global engagement. “If the U.S. cannot even secure a victory in a rivalry with small countries, how much better could it do in a major power game with China?” asked the state-owned Global Times in August 2021. “The Taliban’s stunningly swift takeover of Afghanistan has shown the world that U.S. competence in dominating major power games is crumbling.”

    This miscalculation — so evident in Washington’s muscular response to the Russian invasion and its military buildup in the Indo-Pacific region — has put China’s leaders in an awkward position, as the Biden administration steps up pressure on Beijing to deny material aid to Russia and not allow the use of Chinese banks as conduits for Russian firms seeking to evade Western sanctions. During a teleconference on March 18th, President Biden reportedly warned President Xi Jinping of “the implications and consequences” for China if it “provides material support to Russia.” Presumably, this could involve the imposition of “secondary sanctions” on Chinese firms accused of acting as agents for Russian companies or agencies. The fact that Biden felt able to issue such ultimatums to the Chinese leader reflects a potentially dangerous new-found sense of political clout in Washington based on Russia’s apparent defenselessness in the face of Western-imposed sanctions.

    Avoiding U.S. Overreach

    Today, the global correlation of forces looks positive indeed for the United States and that, in a strange sense, should worry us all. Its major allies have rallied to its side in response to Russian aggression or, on the other side of the planet, fears of China’s rise. And the outlook for Washington’s principal adversaries seems less than auspicious. Even if Vladimir Putin were to emerge from the present war with a larger slice of Ukrainian territory, he will certainly be presiding over a distinctly diminished Russia. Already a shaky petro-state before the invasion began, it is now largely cut off from the Western world and condemned to perpetual backwardness.

    With Russia already diminished, China may experience a similar fate, having placed such high expectations on a major partnership with a faltering country. Under such circumstances, it will be tempting for the Biden administration to further exploit this unique moment by seeking even greater advantage over its rivals by, for instance, supporting “regime change” in Moscow or the further encirclement of China. President Biden’s March 26th comment about Putin — “this man cannot remain in power” — certainly suggested a hankering for just such a future. (The White House did later attempt to walk his words back, claiming that he only meant Putin “cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors.”) As for China, recent all-too-ominous comments by senior Pentagon officials to the effect that Taiwan is “critical to the defense of vital U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific” suggest an inclination to abandon America’s “one China” policy and formally recognize Taiwan as an independent state, bringing it under U.S. military protection.

    In the coming months, we can expect far more discussion about the merits of such moves. Washington pundits and politicians, still dreaming of the U.S. as the unparalleled power on planet Earth, will undoubtedly be arguing that this moment is the very one when the U.S. could truly smite its adversaries. Such overreach — involving fresh adventures that would exceed American capacities and lead to new disasters — is a genuine danger.

    Seeking regime change in Russia (or anywhere else, for that matter) is certain to alienate many foreign governments now supportive of Washington’s leadership. Likewise, a precipitous move to pull Taiwan into America’s military orbit could trigger a U.S.-China war neither side wants, with catastrophic consequences. The correlation of forces may now seem to be in America’s favor, but if there’s one thing to be learned from the present moment, it’s just how fickle such calculations can prove to be and how easily the global situation can turn against us if we behave capriciously.

    Imagine, then, a world in which all three “great” powers have misconstrued the correlation of forces they may encounter. As top Russian officials continue to speak of the use of nuclear weapons, anyone should be anxious about a future of ultimate overreach that will correlate with nothing good whatsoever.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Pundits Who Advocate Hot War With Russia Are Enemies Of Humanity

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    In an appearance on the MSNBC show Velshi, The Modern War Institute’s John Spencer explicitly advocated direct US military conflict with Russia due to allegations of war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.

    “I’m ready to commit at this moment — unlike I was before this day — to put people in direct contact with Russia, to stop Russia,” Spencer said. “Call it peacekeeping. Call it what you will. We have to do more than provide weapons. And by ‘we,’ I mean the United States. Yes, we’ll do it as a coalition with lots of other people, but we are the example. So put boots on the ground, send weapons directly at Russia.”

    Notice the bizarre verbal gymnastics being used by Spencer to obfuscate the fact that he is advocating a hot war with a nuclear superpower: “put people in direct contact with Russia,” “send weapons directly at Russia”. Who talks like that? He’s calling for the US military to fire upon the Russian military, he’s just saying it really weird.

    To be clear this isn’t just some arms industry-funded think tanker saying this; The Modern War Institute is part of the Department of Military Instruction for the United States Military Academy, which is operated directly by the Pentagon.

    Asked by the show’s host Ali Velshi what he thought of warnings that direct military confrontation with Russia could lead to nuclear war, Spencer said, “It is a huge risk, I understand that. But today is different.”

    Velshi himself was much more to the point than his guest, both online and on social media.

    “We are past the point of sanctions and strongly-worded condemnations and the seizing of oligarchs’ megayachts,” Velshi told his MSNBC audience. “If this is not the kind of moment that the United Nations and NATO and the UN and the G-20 and the Council of Europe and the G-7 were made for, what was the point of these alliances if not to stop this? The world cannot sit by as Vladimir Putin continues this reign of terror.”

    “The turning point for the west and NATO will come when the sun rises over Kyiv on Sunday, and the war crimes against civilian non-combatants becomes visible to all,” Velshi said on Twitter over the weekend. “There is no more time for prevarication. If ‘never again’ means anything, then this is the time to act.”

    Asked what specifically he meant by this, Velshi clarified that he was advocating “Direct military involvement.”

    “Lines have been crossed and war crimes have been committed by Putin that make direct military intervention something NATO now must seriously consider,” Velshi added.

    When I called Velshi a fucking lunatic for expressing these views (to my mind the only sane response to such madness), he argued that going to war with Russia for Ukraine would not necessarily lead to nuclear war, claiming that “A no fly zone is not so different from the endless supply of weaponry the west is sending in to Ukraine.”

    These are not sane or acceptable things for mainstream pundits to be telling people. Directly attacking the Russian military would indeed risk unleashing a chain of rapid escalations that could easily lead to full-scale nuclear war; there would be far too many small, moving parts for this to be anywhere remotely close to predictable or controllable. A no-fly zone over Ukraine would immediately put NATO powers in direct hot war with Russia, which is in fact completely different from shipping weapons to Ukrainian forces.

    The fact that a nuclear superpower cannot be regarded in the same way as a nation without nukes has been basic, common sense orthodoxy for all major powers since Stalin got the bomb. This is not some kind of advanced esoteric understanding that you can only grasp if you’ve been studying this stuff for years; as far as I know children are still learning about the history of nuclear weapons and Mutually Assured Destruction in grade school. This isn’t something you should have to explain to grown adults, much less influential mainstream news media pundits.

    But it’s becoming more and more common. The line that we’re already in World War 3 and need to begin acting accordingly is showing up more and more often. The idea that NATO powers might be able to get away with attacking the Russian military in Ukraine without sparking a nuclear exchange is fast becoming its own genre of western foreign policy punditry, and that trend looks to accelerate with the latest (arguably pretty dubious) claims of Russian atrocities in this war.

    Already we’ve got Velshi’s cries for World War 3 joined by the likes of Human Rights Foundation Chairman Garry Kasparov, who apparently spent so long training to beat a machine that he turned into one:

     

    Image

    You’ve also got opinion makers in outlets like The New York Times telling people that “The United States and NATO should be less deferential to Mr. Putin’s attempt to wield the threat of nuclear weapons — not only for the sake of supporting Ukraine but also to ensure global geopolitical stability in the future.”

    There’s also the galling White House press conferences in which ambitious reporters aggressively demand to know why the Biden administration isn’t doing more to escalate against Russia, as clear an illustration as you could ask for of the fact that the mainstream press are only allowed to be pushy and confrontational with US government officials when they’re demanding more bloodshed.

    As we’ve discussed previously, even if these increasingly loud calls for hot war between nuclear superpowers don’t immediately succeed, what they do is push the Overton window of mainstream discourse all the way over toward the most warmongering extreme possible so that calls for more escalation seem moderate and calls for de-escalation look like extremist apologia for Vladimir Putin. In the very best-case scenario they leave people far more open to consenting to far more nuclear brinkmanship than any thinking person should ever consent to.

    This is not okay. It is not okay for them to do this to us. It is not okay for them to normalize the idea of escalations that could easily end humankind. That is the most insane position that any person could possibly take. More insane than Nazism, or any other extremist ideology you could think of. Supporting actions that may lead to human extinction makes these people enemies of our entire species.

    Ukraine is still accepting foreign volunteers. If these omnicidal war sluts are so horny for “direct military involvement” against Russia, I wish they would just get on a plane and go do it themselves without trying to drag all of humanity into it with them.

    You want direct military involvement? Fine. Go do it yourself. Be the direct military involvement you want to see in the world.

    __________________________

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

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Joe Biden’s Democracy Gaffe

    It does not pay to be too moralistic in politics.  Self-elevation can lead to tripping up.  Sermonising even as your stable needs cleaning can enfeeble the argument. But Bidenism, this gaffe-prone ideology currently doing the rounds in a barely breathing administration, has identified the simplest of binaries to work with.

    In his State of the Union address, US President Joe Biden took the slicer to the world of politics and placed them into two tidy camps in a tradition that would have impressed the Bolshevik ideologue, Andrei Zhdanov.  “In the battle between democracy and autocracy, democracies are rising to the moment, and the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security.”

    In this supposed morality tale and cartoon strip, the wicked Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin does battle with the heroic democracy that is Ukraine, all simplified into roles where virtue combats satanic vice.  There is no room for debate, for contrast, for history.  Awkward realities are never allowed to intrude.

    Putin, Biden insisted, “sought to shake the foundations of the free world, thinking he could make it bend to his menacing ways.”  The President, in contrast, had been busily building “a coalition of freedom-loving nations” across Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa to oppose that man in the Kremlin.  Like a student proffering a glowing report card, Biden spoke of spending “countless hours unifying our European allies.”

    This child-in-cradle view of the world was not going to go down well with other powers.  Leaving aside Putin as the feted gargoyle of tyranny, such talk about autocracy and democracy jars in a good number of countries.  A few see themselves as US allies.  It would have made the eyes of Egypt’s strongman President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, roll.  It would have caused members of the House of Saud more than a bit of irritation, even if Biden has failed to make good an election promise to reassess Washington’s relationship with the bone saw butchers in Riyadh.

    In Warsaw, on March 26, the US President was at it again, adding a few more streaky remarks about this “dictator bent on rebuilding an empire”.  This time, he went just that bit further.  “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”  When stated in a country increasingly gagging to get at Russia in whatever way it can short of total war, this was imprudent.  Biden may well have said one thing, but he was also telling Poland, a NATO ally, that it could not ship MiG-29 jets to the Ukrainians.

    A sweat might have also broken across the brows of those in the Pentagon.  The US military is confident that Putin, if placed in a situation of being directly threatened, might resort to the nuclear option.  It did not impress French President Emmanuel Macron, who stated in response that, “We want to stop the war that Russia launched in Ukraine, without waging war and without escalation.”  Biden’s coalition of freedom lovers suddenly seemed rocky.

    US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was left with the task of qualifying and unscrambling.  No, the United States did not, he claimed in a press conference on March 27, “have a strategy of regime change in Russia or anywhere else, for that matter.  In this case, as in any case, it’s up to the people of the country of question.  It’s up to the Russian people.”

    This astonishing analysis, so separated from the truth of US foreign policy over the years, glossed over the invasion of Afghanistan to oust the now returned Taliban (that regime change went so well); the open endorsement of Juan Guaidó’s leadership credentials in Venezuela against the established government; military assistance to rebel factions in Libya and, as a consequence, the public mauling and murder of long-time leader Muammar Gaddafi and his country’s de facto partition; and that real treat of an effort: the invasion of Iraq and the eventual capture and execution of Saddam Hussein.

    Blinken’s summation is particularly rich given Washington’s own meddling in Ukrainian-Russian affairs.  Such conduct seemed animated by a notion held by former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: democracy is only good for a country so long as it returns the right candidate.  Falling short, Washington should provide a correcting hand.

    One happy to offer that helping hand was Victoria Nuland, famed for her “Fuck the EU” call with US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, in February 2014.  It is telling that she is currently Biden’s Undersecretary for Political Affairs.  As Assistant Secretary of State, Nuland shamelessly contemplated Arseniy Yatsenyuk as Washington’s replacement for the elected Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych.  Three weeks later, the pro-Russian Yanukovych was ousted.

    Umbrage was also taken with the European Union’s partiality towards former heavyweight boxer Vitaly Klitschko as prime ministerial material.  “I don’t think Klitsch should go into the government,” a snootily dismissive Nuland told Pyatt. “I don’t think it’s necessary, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

    With such machinations exposed, US officials can be safely saddled with responsibility for overthrowing an elected government (democracy, but just the wrong sort) and aiding to precipitate a civil war that saw the deaths of 13,000 people, impoverished a country, and laid the seeds of sorrow that are now returning a terrible harvest.

    Troublingly, Biden’s amnesiac coverage of the issues has found an audience.  The reaction to his Warsaw gaffe in some quarters was far from negative.  It took only a few days for the New York Times to feature a letter from one Tomasz Kitlinski of Lublin in Poland, who was delighted at the suggestion of ridding the world of Putin.  The President “was absolutely correct and doesn’t need diplomatic sophistries to defend his discourse.”

    Another letter in the same column showed the danger of such rhetoric, the put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is school of thinking.  “President Biden states that Vladimir Putin ‘cannot remain in power’,” writes Richard Kooris of Austin, Texas, “and yet he refuses to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine or allow Poland to make MiG-29 fighter jets available to Ukraine, ostensibly out of fear of igniting a wider (or nuclear) conflict.”

    The general tone of the readership, at least those pruned from the email stash sent to the Gray Lady, suggested that Biden was merely uttering the truth, gaffe or otherwise.  Edward Luce, in the Financial Times, suggested that the Warsaw stumble was revealing, in so far as it was “hard to picture the circumstances in which the US would reincorporate Russia into the global economy while Putin is still there.”  The only question remains how far Washington will go to make matters worse, scuttling the prospects of a durable, realistic peace between Kyiv and Moscow.

    The post Joe Biden’s Democracy Gaffe first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Interview: Russia’s Feminist resistance to Putin’s war on Ukraine

    Viktorya Kokoreva speaks with Russian feminist activist and historian Ella Rossman from Feminist Anti-war Resistance about the challenges this new movement faces.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • NATO Sets Out Its Strategy For Even More Military Build-Up

    NATO sees Russia as a threat to US power—and has poured arms and soldiers into eastern Europe accordingly. That’s not the latest statement from the Stop the War Coalition—but the picture NATO paints itself in its annual report released on Thursday.

    The report gives an outline of what the US’s military alliance got up to in 2021 and spells out its aims for the years ahead. It all comes packaged in the ­language of “cooperation” and “security.” But once you strip out the guff, what the report really says is NATO’s biggest concern is containing Russia and China.

    The post NATO Sets Out Its Strategy For Even More Military Build-Up appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Red Scare

    “I had my first glimmer of ‘the other side of the story’ about communism in 1968, living in Massapequa, Long Island, a suburban housewife, watching Walter Cronkite reporting on the Vietnam War.  He ran old news film of a slender, boyish Ho Chi Minh meeting with Woodrow Wilson in 1919, at the end of World War I, seeking US help to end the brutal French colonial occupation of Vietnam.  Cronkite reported how Ho had even modeled the Vietnamese Constitution on ours.  Wilson turned him down and the Soviets were more than happy to help.  That’s how Vietnam went Communist. Years later, I saw the film Indochine, dramatizing the cruel French enslavement of Vietnamese workers on rubber plantations.”

    The post The Red Scare appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Ukrainian Officials Accuse Russia of Carrying Out “Deliberate Massacre” in Bucha

    Ukrainian officials on Sunday accused Russian forces of carrying out a “deliberate massacre” in Bucha as images of what appear to be dead civilians littering the city’s streets sparked global outrage.

    Evidence of the apparent atrocities came after Russian forces retreated from areas around Kyiv, including Bucha, which sits just northwest of the capital.

    Agence France-Presse reported Saturday that its journalists saw “at least 20 bodies on a single street” in Bucha. All of the corpses were in civilian clothes, the agency reported, and at least one had his hands tied behind his back with a piece of white cloth.

    According to Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy: “These people were not in the military. They had no weapons. They posed no threat.”

    “How many more such cases are happening right now in the occupied territories?” he asked.

    Bucha Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk claimed to Reuters Saturday that those left on the streets “were shot in the back of their heads. So you can imagine what kind of lawlessness they perpetrated here.”

    Zelenskyy spokesperson Sergey Nikiforov told BBC’s “Sunday Morning” that authorities found in Bucha and other areas where Russian troops have departed had “mass graves filled with civilians.”

    “We found people with hands and legs tied and bullet holes in the back of their heads,” he said, “and half-burned bodies as if somebody tried to hide their crimes.”

    “I have to be careful with my wording,” he said, but “it looks exactly like war crimes.”

    Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted Sunday, “Bucha massacre was deliberate,”

    In a statement, Kuleba called on the International Criminal Court to “thoroughly collect all evidence of Russian war crimes” in Bucha and other Kyiv-area towns retaken by Ukrainian forces.

    European officials also expressed condemnation Sunday over the alleged acts in Bucha.

    “Shocked by haunting images of atrocities committed by Russian army in Kyiv liberated region,” tweeted European Council President Charles Michel, adding the hashtag #BuchaMassacre.

    The E.U., said Michel, is also readying further sanctions targeting Russia.

    Russian authorities, for their part, denied the reports regarding Bucha as “fake” and suggested Ukrainians created the mass grave.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The West’s Tax Loopholes Render Sanctions on Russian Oligarchs Moot

    Where would Vladimir Putin be without the Russian oligarchy? Without Russia’s oligarchs, political leaders of the Western world have concluded, Putin would be tottering. Western leaders have made squeezing Russia’s richest a central piece of their strategy to end Putin’s Ukraine cross-border assault.

    These same Western leaders, unfortunately, have failed to take seriously what ought to be an equally pressing question: Where would Russia’s oligarchs be without the West, without the Wall Streeters, wealth managers, and assorted other high-finance riff-raff “paid millions,” as Institute for Policy Studies analyst Chuck Collins puts it, “to help billionaires sequester trillions”?

    Western leaders have essentially been ignoring this question almost ever since the old Soviet Union collapsed. And now we’re paying the price. Those Ukraine sanctions against Russia’s oligarchs? They come with a huge loophole. The Western world’s opaque web of tax havens and anonymous corporations is essentially rendering much of those sanctions ineffective.

    Sanctioned Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, for instance, has used the West’s “wealth defense industry” to shift formal ownership of major chunks of his $18.4-billion personal fortune beyond the reach of sanction orders. Tax havens like the British Virgin Islands, notes Transparency International UK’s Steve Goodrich, “have long been a destination of choice for Kremlin cronies and kleptocrats.”

    “Complex networks of secretive shell companies in these jurisdictions,” Goodrich adds, “means the UK government is attempting to enforce these sanctions with one arm tied behind its back.”

    Minimal U.S. disclosure requirements, Global Financial Integrity policy director Lakshmi Kumar points out, are also easing the way for sanction-skirting Russian oligarchs. Billionaire-friendly legal fine print, she told Bloomberg earlier this week, is letting tainted money “rebrand itself, essentially.”

    The United States, agrees Rep. Tom Malinowski, a Democrat from New Jersey, “has become one of the easiest places in the world for corrupt kleptocrats around the world to hide money.”

    “The difficulties of applying sanctions in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” sums up the Tax Justice Network’s Alex Cobham, “have highlighted the abject failure of current standards of financial transparency.”

    The U.S. wealth defense industry, we need to remember, hasn’t just been helping Russian oligarchs hide their fortunes. America’s money-handlers have for years been helping them pile up ever grander fortunes. They’ve steered the illicit funds of Russian oligarchs into U.S. real estate, investment funds, and “even factories,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jake Bernstein, a senior reporter on the 2016 bombshell “Panama Papers” tax avoidance exposé.

    The Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich has used “a network of banks, law firms and advisers in multiple countries,” the New York Times just reported, to invest “billions in American hedge funds.” Along the way, he tapped the expertise and contacts of U.S. high-finance giants ranging from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to BlackRock and the Carlyle Group.

    But the damage the wealth defense industry has wreaked upon the Western world — indeed the whole planet — goes beyond undermining the sanction squeeze on Russia’s oligarchs. These defenders of grand private fortune appear to have placed somewhere between $5 trillion and $8 trillion worldwide beyond the reach of tax collectors. Tax havens, as Annette Alstadsaeter of Norway’s Centre for Tax Research told the Washington Post last fall, have become “a contagion.”

    And no nation has done more to spread this contagion than the United States. Anonymous American companies, one World Bank survey has found, played key roles in 85 percent of the over 150 cases of grand corruption that World Bank analysts examined.

    New variants of this contagion typically originate in the United States as well. South Dakota has had a particularly consequential impact. At the end of the 20th century, the state’s political high command worked hand-in-glove with wealth defense industry lawyers and lobbyists to turned the “trust” from a tool for circumventing inheritance rules into a global “go-to vehicle for tax avoidance.” By 2010, deep pockets had amassed $57 billion in South Dakota trusts. By 2020, that total had hit $367 billion.

    The evolution of the trust instrument, notes Columbia Law School’s Katharina Pistor, illustrates how today’s national legal systems “have become items on an international menu of options.” The super rich choose from this menu “the laws by which they wish to be governed.”

    “The privileged few can decide how much to pay in taxes and which regulations to endure,” she continues. “And if legal obstacles cannot be overcome quite that easily, lawyers from leading global law firms will draft legislation to make a country compliant with the ‘best practices’ of global finance.”

    We can’t literally see our wealth defenders at work. But we can feel their impact. Average-income people in rich countries, note inequality researchers Joseph Stiglitz, Todd Tucker, and Gabriel Zucman, “now pay far higher taxes than major corporations.” These corporations and the rich who run them are basically enjoying a “free-ride on the rest of society,” and their tax avoidance “means less investment in infrastructure, education, and research.”

    What can we do? We can fight back, and, at the global level, some reformers — like the University of Virginia Law School’s Ruth Mason — are even feeling optimistic about the struggles ahead.

    For much of the last century, Mason notes, a small club of rich nations working through the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD, set international tax policy. The system they created rested on bilateral tax treaties designed to make sure that corporations doing business outside their home nation wouldn’t be taxed twice on the same income, once by their home country and once by their host.

    In the resulting global tax order, nations “set their tax rates independently from each other,” and Mason’s research details how major corporations like Apple became adept at gaming the system. They moved “valuable intellectual property to low-tax jurisdictions,” then charged their related corporate entities in high-tax jurisdictions “artificially high licensing fees,” a maneuver that gained their entities in high-tax jurisdictions large tax deductions and their fee-charging entities a bargain-basement tax rate on their fee income.

    In tax dork circles, tax-avoidance games like these go by the acronym of BEPS, short for “domestic tax base erosion and profit shifting.” The tricks of the BEPS trade, the OECD now estimates, cost governments worldwide as much as a quarter-trillion dollars annually in lost revenue.

    Policymakers in the 20th century, Mason notes, either saw corporate tax avoidance as “unproblematic” or “regarded the costs of curbing it as too high.” But that hands-off mindset, Mason argues, “ended abruptly with the 2008 financial crisis.” The resulting job losses and budget shortfalls led to a “new intolerance of corporate tax dodging” as one legislative hearing after another made widely public astounding examples of corporate tax arrogance. One hearing in the UK disclosed that Amazon, source of the one of the world’s largest personal fortunes, had paid a miniscule £1 million in tax the previous year on £4 billion in sales. A U.S. Senate hearing revealed that Apple had subsidiaries that “filed full tax returns nowhere on earth.”

    Amid the resulting furor, the major nations that make up the G20 realized they “needed to do something — or at least appear to do something — about corporate tax avoidance.” They delegated that task to the OECD, and that led to a “BEPS Project” that has had, Mason believes, a “profound effect” on international tax norms and institutions. The BEPS effort, she explains, has shifted the global tax discourse from preventing “double taxation” to ensuring “full taxation,” a phrasing that encompasses closing tax loopholes and preventing abusive tax planning.

    Other tax reformers have a distinctly less sanguine take on evolving international tax norms. Yes, note tax scholars Stiglitz, Tucker, and Zucman, the global tax deal that emerged from the BEPS negotiations does move a fair-tax agenda forward, by, for instance, making it harder for multinationals “to exploit tax havens by establishing a global minimum tax of at least 15 percent on corporate profits.” But this tax rate remains “much lower than what working-class and middle-class people typically pay in high-income countries” — and “far lower” than the 40 to 50 percent rate that U.S. corporations faced “for all but four years from 1942 to 1987.”

    Other critics see in the G20-backed effort an absence of the political will necessary to truly take on global oligarchic power. Many of these critics are pushing for a United Nations convention on tax issues, an idea the Tax Justice Network feels “is developing what may prove to be an unstoppable momentum.” Earlier this month, the Global Alliance for Tax Justice and Eurodad, a network of 60 civil society organizations from 29 European countries, released a draft of what a UN tax convention could be.

    “Repeated efforts to stop international tax dodging,” notes the draft author Tove Maria Ryding, “have resulted in only sticky plaster solutions, additional complexities, and rules that continue to be biased in favor of the rich.”

    The groups behind the new UN convention draft, she adds, hope the proposals in it “will help to kickstart a discussion about the fundamental reforms that we really need.”

    That discussion has also begun within the United States. Early last year, before the Biden inauguration, Congress overturned a Trump veto and enacted legislation that, the American Prospect applauds, “requires the owners of all financial assets to disclose their true identity to regulatory agencies and the IRS.” The Biden Justice Department, meanwhile, has launched a new kleptocracy task force, focused on Russian oligarchs, that could serve as a model for broader anti-oligarch offensives.

    But much more remans to be done. One example: The ENABLERS Act now pending before Congress targets a hole in the already existing Bank Secrecy Act that lets agents for oligarchs park their ill-gotten gains almost wherever in the United States they please.

    “If we make banks report dirty money but allow law, real estate, and accounting firms to look the other way,” says Rep. Tom Malinowski, the bill’s lead sponsor, “that creates a loophole that crooks and kleptocrats can sail a yacht through.”

    Advocates for a bold pushback against the wealth defense industry are calling for much more ambitious steps as well, from outlawing abusive trusts to investing big-time in tax enforcement — and substantially hiking overall tax rates on our most awesomely affluent.

    State and local governments are also getting involved. In Vermont, New Jersey, and other states — and in cities like Los Angeles and San Jose — activists are pushing beyond new disclosure rules and demanding extra taxes on mansions and penalties on the secretive deep pockets who spend mega-millions buying up condos as investments and then let them sit vacant, moves that distort the housing market at the expense of ordinary households.

    The Ukraine war could end up activating still more advocacy against oligarchy. But the conventional political wisdom is already fixating on the notion that the defense industry will prove to be the war’s biggest long-term winner. Mainstream pundits are predicting big increases in military spending throughout the Western world.

    If that outcome turns out to be the Ukraine war’s most lasting legacy, oligarchy — worldwide — will have triumphed.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • As Europe Turns Away From Russian Oil, Gas Exporters’ Global Clout Is Increasing

    Few events in recent years have proved to be as transformative of international relations as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting imposition of sanctions on the Russian economy. The war and sanctions have sundered or sharply curtailed most remaining trade and diplomatic relations between Russia and the West, forcing Western firms to suspend their operations in Russia and plan for a world divided into highly segmented trade blocs.

    Every major industry will be battered by these seismic shifts, but none more so than energy: Prior to the invasion, Russia was Europe’s principal supplier of imported oil and natural gas, so European efforts to replace those imports with supplies acquired elsewhere will have a powerful impact on the global trade in both commodities.

    This impact has already been evident in the petroleum realm, where increased European demand for non-Russian supplies has contributed to rising gasoline prices everywhere, including the United States. Its greatest long-term effect, however, is likely to be seen in the market for liquefied natural gas (LNG), once a relatively minor factor in the global energy equation that is gaining ever-increasing prominence. As Europe turns away from Russian gas, it will become increasingly reliant on LNG imports to satisfy its needs — and this, in turn, will result in new trading partnerships and an accompanying transformation of global energy geopolitics.

    All this has come about because European leaders, over the course of many decades, chose to rely on the mammoth oil and gas reserves of Russia (and before that, the Soviet Union) to supply their countries with affordable energy for industry, home heating and electricity generation. Russian gas imports have become especially important in recent years as the European Union (EU) has sought to reduce its reliance on coal (because of its high carbon content) and nuclear power (out of a fear of accidents). By 2020, Europe obtained about 30 percent of its imported oil from Russia and a whopping 57 percent of its imported natural gas.

    Prior to Russia’s invasion, plans were in place to further increase Europe’s reliance on Russian natural gas, largely through construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Nord Stream 1, opened in 2011, runs under the Baltic Sea from Vyborg in northwestern Russia to Lubmin in Germany; a parallel conduit, Nord Stream 2, was begun in 2018 and completed in late 2021. Many prominent figures in the U.S. and Europe had protested construction of Nord Stream 2 on the grounds that it would increase Europe’s dependence on Russian energy and thereby give Moscow greater sway over European decision making in a crisis. German officials were still debating whether to give it their final approval in early February when Vladimir Putin began amassing forces for the invasion, at which point the new German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, suspended the certification process.

    The cancellation of Nord Stream 2, and other measures being undertaken to wean Europe off Russian oil and gas, will severely disrupt the energy equation in Europe and force it to find alternative sources for both primary fuels. The Europeans are, of course, also trying to increase their reliance on renewable sources of energy, and some — like France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom — plan to renew their reliance on nuclear power. But their economies have long been structured around access to abundant inputs of oil and gas, and it will not be easy for them to eliminate their thirst for them any time soon. Searching elsewhere for additional supplies of these resources will, therefore, constitute a major policy priority in the months and years ahead.

    Securing additional imports of oil and natural gas will be no easy task. Finding more oil will be tough enough — the major suppliers are now producing at near-maximum capacity — but acquiring more gas will prove even more difficult. Petroleum has the advantage of being a liquid, and so can readily be transported by tanker ship from suppliers located anywhere on the planet. Europe possesses many ports and refineries for unloading and processing crude oil, so even if it will be forced to pay higher prices to compete with consumers in Asia and elsewhere, it should be able to obtain adequate supplies to meet its basic needs in the months ahead.

    Obtaining additional gas imports, however, will pose a greater challenge. Natural gas can be delivered by pipeline, but most of Europe’s piped gas comes from Russia, and the construction of alternative conduits, say from North Africa or the Caspian Sea area, will take many years. Gas can also be delivered by sea in the form of LNG, but that requires an elaborate infrastructure for liquefication on the supplier’s part and for regasification at the receiving end — infrastructure that is only available in certain parts of the world. Europe now possesses 28 large-scale LNG import facilities and is building more, but will need a much larger number if it is to increase its reliance on LNG. On the other side of the equation, it faces stiff competition for access to the relatively small number of gas producers with the liquefication facilities needed to export LNG.

    These challenges were brought into sharp relief on March 28 when President Joe Biden and the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyden, announced a joint plan to eliminate the EU’s reliance on Russian gas entirely by 2027. To achieve this ambitious goal, the U.S. pledged to double its LNG shipments to Europe, from about 25 to 50 billion cubic meters per year, while the EU agreed to acquire additional amounts from other sources and to build dozens of new regasification facilities. With Russia playing a diminished role in supplying Europe’s energy, the handful of major LNG suppliers are thus set to enjoy increased geopolitical clout.

    A comparison of the top five oil and natural gas producers is useful in highlighting this power shift. To begin with, the LNG trade is highly concentrated: While the top five exporters of oil (in rank order) — Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, the United States and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — account for approximately 50 percent of global exports, the top five suppliers of LNG — Qatar, Australia, the U.S., Russia and Malaysia — account for 70 percent of such exports. Expand these groups to the top 10, and the extent of concentration is even more pronounced: While the leading oil exporters command 70 percent of the global marketplace, the leading LNG suppliers control an astounding 89 percent.

    The comparison between oil and LNG exporters is revealing in another sense. While rosters of the top 10 in each category include several overlaps, including Nigeria, Russia and the United States, there are many discrepancies. Saudi Arabia, long considered the epicenter of global oil production and the dominant force in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), doesn’t appear on the LNG list, which is led by its arch-rival Qatar. Similarly, Australia, never before thought of as an energy superpower, occupies a prominent place on the LNG list.

    As Europe comes to rely on LNG for an ever-increasing share of its natural gas, those few major exporters of this resource are bound to acquire greater clout in world affairs, just as the major oil producers have long exercised disproportionate influence. With this in mind, it is worth looking more closely at some of the leading LNG exporters.

    Qatar

    Occupying a small peninsular attached to Saudi Arabia’s Persian Gulf coast, Qatar possesses the world’s third-largest reserves of natural gas (most of it found in offshore areas) and is the world’s leading exporter of LNG. It is a member, along with neighboring oil-producing states, of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a multilateral military arrangement backed by the United States. But Qatar’s rulers have sought to pursue a more independent stance than its fellow GCC members, supporting rebel groups in Libya and Syria that were opposed by Saudi Arabia, and retaining cordial relations with Iran. In 2017, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE cut off diplomatic relations with Qatar and denied its planes access to their airspace; relations were only restored in 2021, after Qatar contributed troops to the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen. Despite these squabbles with its neighbors, Qatar has come to play a singular role in the Gulf region, hosting the Al Jazeera media network and hosting delicate negotiations, such as the peace talks between the Taliban and the United States. With Qatar likely to remain the world’s leading supplier of exportable gas, it is poised to play an even more pivotal role in the years ahead.

    Australia

    Often thought of as an outlier in global politics — noted in particular for its loyalty to the U.K. and well-established military ties with the U.S. — Australia has begun to play a more autonomous and muscular role in world affairs. The country has, of course, long been a major exporter of vital resources, including iron ore, bauxite and coal. It was not known, however, as an oil supplier, and it is only recently, with the development of mammoth fields discovered off the country’s northwest coast, that it has emerged as the world’s second leading supplier of LNG. Most of this gas now goes to China, Japan and South Korea; in fact, Australia is China’s leading supplier of LNG. But as China has begun to play a more assertive role in the Asia-Pacific region — for example, by militarizing small islands in the South China Sea — Australia has become leery of overreliance on the Chinese market. To afford itself greater autonomy, Australian leaders have increased their military spending and drawn closer to the United States, a move given formal substance with the recent signing of the Australia-U.K.-U.S. (AUKUS) security pact and the acquisition of nuclear submarine technology from the United States. With its increased income from LNG exports, Australia will be able to further enhance its military capabilities and play a more prominent role on the world stage.

    The United States

    For decades, the U.S.’s energy politics have largely been governed by its dependence on fossil fuel imports, not exports. Up until the onset of the 21st century, the U.S. was highly reliant on imported petroleum, and this dependency played a significant role in shaping its foreign policy, particularly toward the Middle East. But the introduction of advanced drilling technologies — notably hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” — has allowed the U.S. to exploit its vast shale reserves and largely eliminate its reliance on imported oil. Moreover, fracking has resulted in an explosion in natural gas production, permitting both the replacement of domestic coal plants with gas facilities and, for the first time, the large-scale export of gas. Whereas the U.S. possessed no functioning LNG export terminals as recently as 2015, it now has seven in operation, with a dozen more awaiting government approval and financing. Under the joint U.S.-EU plan announced on March 28, the Biden administration will speed up the approval process for these added facilities and otherwise help Europe to wean itself from Russian gas. This move is being welcomed by those on both sides of the Atlantic who seek to terminate Russia’s dominance of the gas trade, but has raised concern among those who fear it will perpetuate Europe’s reliance on fossil fuels and so slow the transition to a green energy future.

    These few vignettes demonstrate how the world’s growing reliance on LNG — now being accelerated by Europe’s drive to reduce its reliance on Russian gas — is upending the global energy equation and enabling new actors to assume leading roles. How all this will play out in the years ahead remains to be seen, but it is already evident that political analysts’ tendency to equate “energy geopolitics” with a certain lineup of familiar players now needs to be reconsidered, allowing for the incorporation of major LNG exporters into our calculations.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Will Biden Shoot Himself In The Foot To Impose Sanctions On Russia?

    On Thursday, President Joe Biden ordered the largest release ever from the US emergency oil reserve in a futile attempt to bring down gasoline prices that have soared to record levels following the Russo-Ukraine War. Starting in May, the United States will release 1 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil for six months from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), amounting to 180 million barrels in total, which is equivalent to only two days of the global demand.

    Invoking the fabled trope of American patriotism, Biden urged the consumers not to hesitate from paying twice the amount while filling gas tanks in order for the military-industrial complex to reap billions of dollars windfalls by providing anti-aircraft and anti-armor munitions to NATO’s proxies in Ukraine.

    The post Will Biden Shoot Himself In The Foot To Impose Sanctions On Russia? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Will Biden Shoot Himself in the Foot to Impose Sanctions on Russia?

    On Thursday, President Joe Biden ordered the largest release ever from the US emergency oil reserve in a futile attempt to bring down gasoline prices that have soared to record levels following the Russo-Ukraine War. Starting in May, the United States will release 1 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil for six months from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), amounting to 180 million barrels in total, which is equivalent to only two days of the global demand.

    Invoking the fabled trope of American patriotism, Biden urged the consumers not to hesitate from paying twice the amount while filling gas tanks in order for the military-industrial complex to reap billions of dollars windfalls by providing anti-aircraft and anti-armor munitions to NATO’s proxies in Ukraine. “This is a moment of consequence and peril for the world, and pain at the pump for American families. It’s also a moment of patriotism,” Biden said at an event at the White House.

    The US announcement came a day before the International Energy Agency member countries were set to meet on Friday to discuss a further emergency oil release that would follow their March 1 agreement to release about 60 million barrels that would cover only two-third of a single day’s oil demand, as the global net oil consumption per day is over 90 million barrels. With over 10 million barrels daily oil production capacity, Russia, alongside Saudi Arabia, is the world’s largest oil producer accounting for providing over 10% of the world’s crude oil demand.

    As far as military power is concerned, Russia with its enormous arsenal of conventional as well as nuclear weapons more or less equals the military power of the United States. But it’s the much more subtle and insidious tactic of economic warfare for which Russia seems to have no answer following the break-up of the Soviet Union in the nineties and consequent dismantling of the once-thriving communist bloc, spanning Eastern Europe, Latin America and many socialist states in Asia and Africa in the sixties.

    The current global neocolonial order is being led by the United States and its West European clients since the signing of the Bretton Woods Accord in 1945 following the Second World War. Historically, any state, particularly those inclined to pursue socialist policies, that dared to challenge the Western monopoly over global trade and economic policies was internationally isolated and its national economy went bankrupt over a period of time. But for once, it appears Washington might shoot itself in the foot by going overboard in its relentless efforts to punish Russia for invading Ukraine.

    On March 17, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori, two British-Iranian nationals held in Iran since 2016 and 2017, respectively, were unexpectedly set free and were permitted to travel to the United Kingdom. In return, the British government, in what gave the impression of a ransom payment, triumphantly announced it had settled a £400m debt owed to Iran from the seventies.

    The thaw in the frosty relations between the Western powers and Iran signaled that a tentative understanding on reviving the Iran nuclear deal was also reached behind the scenes, particularly in the backdrop of the Ukraine crisis and the Western efforts to internationally isolate Russia. After sanctioning Russia’s 10 million barrels daily crude oil output, the industrialized world is desperately in need of Iran’s 5 million barrels oil production capacity to keep the already inflated oil price from causing further pain to consumers.

    Last month, Venezuela similarly released two incarcerated US citizens in an apparent goodwill gesture toward the Biden administration following a visit to Caracas by a high-level US delegation, despite the fact that Washington still officially recognizes Nicolas Maduro’s detractor Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s “legitimate president.” Nonetheless, Venezuela is one of Latin America’s largest oil producers and opening the international market to its heavy crude might provide a welcome relief in the time of global oil crunch.

    Niftily forestalling the likelihood of strengthening of mutually beneficial bonds between China and Russia when the latter is badly in need for economic relief, the United States pre-emptively accused China of pledging to sell military hardware to Russia, when the latter, itself one of the world’s leading arms exporters, didn’t even make any such request to China.

    US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan held an intense seven-hour meeting in Rome with his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi on March 15, and warned China of “grave consequences” of evading Western sanctions on Russia. Besides wielding the stick of economic sanctions, he must also have dangled the carrot of ending trade war against China initiated by the Trump administration and continued by the Biden administration until Russia invaded Ukraine in late February.

    Despite vowing to treat the Saudi kingdom as a “pariah” in the run-up to November 2020 presidential elections, the Wall Street Journal reported last month the White House unsuccessfully tried to arrange calls between President Biden and the de facto leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as the US was working to build international support for Ukraine and contain a surge in oil prices.

    “Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the U.A.E.’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan both declined U.S. requests to speak to Mr. Biden in recent weeks, the officials said, as Saudi and Emirati officials have become more vocal in recent weeks in their criticism of American policy in the Gulf.

    “‘There was some expectation of a phone call, but it didn’t happen,’ said a U.S. official of the planned discussion between the Saudi Prince Mohammed and Mr. Biden. ‘It was part of turning on the spigot [of Saudi oil].’

    “But the Saudis and Emiratis have declined to pump more oil, saying they are sticking to a production plan approved by OPEC. Both Prince Mohammed and Sheikh Mohammed took phone calls from Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, after declining to speak with Mr. Biden.”

    To add insult to the injury, Saudi Arabia has reportedly invited Chinese President Xi Jinping for an official visit to the kingdom that could happen as soon as May, and is also considering pegging its vast oil reserves in yuan, a move that could spell end to the petrodollar hegemony.

    The United States and Britain were ramping up pressure on Saudi Arabia to pump more oil and join efforts to isolate Russia, while Riyadh had shown little readiness to respond and had revived a threat to ditch dollars in its oil sales to China, Reuters reported last month.

    “If Saudi Arabia does that, it will change the dynamics of the forex market,” said a source with knowledge of the matter, adding that such a move—which the source said Beijing had long requested and which Riyadh threatened as far back as 2018—might prompt other buyers to follow.

    Trump aptly observed: “Now Biden is crawling around the globe on his knees begging and pleading for mercy from Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela.” It appears quite plausible that in its relentless efforts to internationally isolate Russia, the Biden administration is likely to unravel the whole neocolonial economic order imposed on the world after the signing of the Bretton Woods Accord following the Second World War in 1945.

    In order to bring home the significance of the Persian Gulf’s oil in the energy-starved industrialized world, here are a few stats from the OPEC data: Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves of 266 billion barrels and its daily oil production is 10 million barrels; Iran and Iraq each has 150 billion barrels reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million barrels per day each; while UAE and Kuwait each has 100 billion barrels reserves and produces 3 million barrels per day each; thus, all the littoral states of the Persian Gulf, together, hold 788 billion barrels, over half of world’s 1477 billion barrels proven oil reserves.

    In many ways, the current oil crunch caused by Washington’s unilateral decision to impose economic sanctions on Russia’s vital energy sector is similar to the oil crisis of 1973. The 1973 collective Arab oil embargo against the West following the Arab-Israel War lasted only for a short span of six months during which the price of oil quadrupled, but Washington became so paranoid after the embargo that it put in place a ban on the export of crude oil outside the US borders, and began keeping sixty-day stock of reserve fuel for strategic and military needs dubbed the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).

    Regarding the reciprocal relationship between Washington and the Gulf’s autocrats, it bears mentioning that in April 2016, the Saudi foreign minister threatened that the Saudi kingdom would sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets if the US Congress passed a bill that would allow Americans to sue the Saudi government in the United States courts for its role in the September 11, 2001 terror attack – though the bill was eventually passed, Saudi authorities have not been held accountable for nurturing terrorism.

    It’s noteworthy that $750 billion was only the Saudi investment in the United States, if we add its investment in the Western Europe and the investments of the oil-rich U.A.E, Kuwait and Qatar in the Western economies, the sum total would amount to trillions of dollars of Gulf’s investments in the economies of North America and Western Europe.

    Additionally, regarding the Western defense production industry’s sales of arms to the Gulf Arab States, a report authored by William Hartung of the US-based Center for International Policy found that the Obama administration had offered Saudi Arabia more than $115 billion in weapons, military equipment and training during its eight-year tenure.

    Similarly, the top items in Trump’s agenda for his maiden visit to Saudi Arabia in May 2017 were: firstly, he threw his weight behind the idea of the Saudi-led “Arab NATO” to counter Iran’s influence in the region; and secondly, he announced an unprecedented arms package for Saudi Arabia.

    The package included between $98 billion and $128 billion in arms sales and, over a period of 10 years, total sales could reach $400 billion, as Donald Trump himself alluded to in his conversations with American journalist Bob Woodward described in the book Rage.

    President Donald Trump boasted that he protected Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman from congressional scrutiny after the brutal assassination of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.

    “I saved his ass,” Trump said in 2018, according to the book. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.” When Woodward pressed Trump if he believed the Saudi crown prince ordered the assassination himself, Trump responded: “He says very strongly that he didn’t do it. Bob, they spent $400 billion over a fairly short period of time,” Trump said.

    “And you know, they’re in the Middle East. You know, they’re big. Because of their religious monuments, you know, they have the real power. They have the oil, but they also have the great monuments for religion. You know that, right? For that religion,” Trump noted. “They wouldn’t last a week if we’re not there, and they know it,” he added.

    In this reciprocal relationship, the US provides security to the ruling families of the Gulf Arab States by providing weapons and troops; and in return, the Gulf’s petro-sheikhs contribute substantial investments to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to the Western economies.

    All the recent wars and conflicts aside, the unholy alliance between the Western powers and the Gulf’s petro-monarchies is much older. The British Empire stirred uprising in Arabia by instigating the Sharifs of Mecca to rebel against the Ottoman rule during the First World War, as the Ottoman Empire had sided with Germany during the war.

    After the Ottoman Empire collapsed following the war, the British Empire backed King Abdul Aziz (Ibn-e-Saud) in his violent insurgency against Sharif of Mecca Hussein bin Ali, because the latter was demanding too much of a price for his loyalty, the unification of the whole of Arabian peninsula, including the Levant, Iraq and the Gulf Emirates, under his suzerainty as a bribe for stabbing the Ottoman Empire in the back during the First World War.

    Consequently, the Western powers abandoned the Sharifs of Mecca, though the scions of the family were rewarded with kingdoms in Iraq and Jordan, imposed the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 dividing Arabs into small states at loggerheads with each other, and lent their support to the nomadic Sauds of Najd.

    King Abdul Aziz defeated the Sharifs and united his dominions into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 with the financial and military support of the British Empire. However, by then the tide of the British Imperialism was subsiding and the Americans inherited the former territorial possessions of the British Empire.

    At the end of the Second World War on 14 February 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt held a historic meeting with King Abdul Aziz at Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal onboard USS Quincy, and laid the foundations of an enduring alliance which persists to this day. During the course of that momentous meeting, among other things, it was decided to set up the United States Military Training Mission (USMTM) to Saudi Arabia to “train, advise and assist” the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces.

    Aside from USMTM, the US-based Vinnell Corporation, which is a private military company based in the US and a subsidiary of the Northrop Grumman, used over a thousand Vietnam War veterans to train and equip 125,000 strong Saudi Arabian National Guards (SANG) which is not under the authority of the Saudi Ministry of Defense and acts as the Praetorian Guards of the House of Saud.

    In addition, the Critical Infrastructure Protection Force, whose strength is numbered in tens of thousands, is also being trained and equipped by the US to guard the critical Saudi oil infrastructure along its eastern Persian Gulf coast where 90% of 266 billion barrels Saudi oil reserves are located.

    Currently, the US has deployed tens of thousands of American troops in aircraft carriers and numerous military bases in the Persian Gulf that include sprawling al-Dhafra airbase in Abu Dhabi, al-Udeid airbase in Qatar and a naval base in Bahrain where the Fifth Fleet of the US Navy is based.

    The post Will Biden Shoot Himself in the Foot to Impose Sanctions on Russia? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ‘They said they’d mutilate and kill me,’ says kidnapped Ukrainian journalist

    Russian soldiers tortured Oleh Baturin and threatened to harm his family. Now released, he talks about his terrifying eight-day ordeal

    Around lunchtime on 12 March, Oleh Baturin, a Ukrainian journalist in the occupied region of Kherson, received a phone call from an unknown number. It was the activist Serhiy Tsygipa. “I really need to see you, I’m ready to get to Kakhovka,” he said calmly. They agreed to meet at 5pm at the city’s bus station.

    Having warned his family where he was going and who he was meeting, Baturin, 43, who works at the independent newspaper Novyi Den (New Day), left his ID and phone at home and went to the meeting place. But Tsygipa was not there. It was a trap. As he turned to go home, he heard a van door slam and the clatter of feet heading towards him.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Ukrainian children used as ‘human shields’ near Kyiv, say witness reports

    Horrifying accounts tell of Russian soldiers placing children on tanks to protect their vehicles when moving

    Russia has been accused by Ukraine of using children as “human shields” while regrouping its forces, as the first horrifying witness accounts from the newly liberated town of Bucha, near Kyiv, emerge.

    Ukraine’s attorney general is gathering a dossier of claims about the Russian use of local children to avoid fire when in retreat from around Ukraine’s capital and elsewhere.

    Continue reading…

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

  • The Ukraine – A Decisive Transfer Of The Balance Of Power From West To East

    Most of the debate and coverage of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war in Australia and the Western world is decidedly banal. It is characterized by the simplification of an extremely complex situation to generate a narrative that can be summarized as Putin and Russia are evil and Ukraine is good. This gross simplification is not helpful in either understanding the causes of the war, the nature of the war, its broader implications and most importantly of all, how it can be ended with the least number of additional deaths and injuries and damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure.

    The post The Ukraine – A Decisive Transfer Of The Balance Of Power From West To East appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • US-EU Sanctions Hit Latin America’s Banana Growers

    Russia is a large consumer of the Latin American banana—but western sanctions have dealt a devastating blow to farmers who can no longer get their products to market. For Ecuador, the world’s largest exporter of bananas, the setback has been disastrous. Around 25% of Ecuador’s banana exports go to Russia and 90% of all bananas consumed in Russia come from Ecuador. However, commercial ships carrying the bananas can no longer reach the port of St. Petersburg due to sanctions imposed by the US and EU. The sudden drop in demand has left producers with excess supply. Prices have collapsed as a result.

    The post US-EU Sanctions Hit Latin America’s Banana Growers appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Biden Means What He Says

    “I mean what I say when I say it!” Those words were spoken by president elect Joe Biden in December 2020 during a meeting with a group described as “civil rights leaders.” Video of the meeting was leaked and Biden’s insulting and dismissive attitude towards Black people was clear even to those who ignored this tendency he has shown throughout his 50 years of public life.

    Biden did us a favor by revealing himself and by telling us to pay attention when he speaks. That advice should be followed no matter how strange his words may seem. Even in his bad tempered confusion, Biden always reveals what he is doing.

    He recently made news for all the wrong reasons during his recent trip to Europe where he attended a combination G7 summit and NATO meeting in Brussels followed by a trip to Poland.

    The post Biden Means What He Says appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Depicting Putin As ‘Madman’ Eliminates Need For Diplomacy

    Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, Western media have depicted Russian President Vladimir Putin as an irrational—perhaps mentally ill—leader who cannot be reasoned or bargained with. Such portrayals have only intensified as the Ukraine crisis came to dominate the news agenda.

    The implications underlying these media debates and speculations about Putin’s psyche are immense. If one believes that Putin is a “madman,” the implication is that meaningful diplomatic negotiations with Russia are impossible, pushing military options to the forefront as the means of resolving the Ukraine situation.

    If Putin is not a rational actor, the implication is that no kind of diplomacy could have prevented the Russian invasion, and therefore no other country besides Russia shares blame for ongoing violence.

    The post Depicting Putin As ‘Madman’ Eliminates Need For Diplomacy appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • US Imperialism’s Proxy War With Russia In Ukraine

    Here is my analysis of what’s going on in Ukraine after one month. It may not prove acceptable to many. Certainly not liberals, the ruling elite in Washington, or even some left liberal and socialist left. But I’ve always spoken my mind and will continue to do so, with no allegiances to any political forces or organizations. So here goes:

    First, this is a proxy war engineered by US neocons and political elites, that has its origins going back as far as 1999, when the neocons began to gain greater control over US foreign policy. The dress rehearsal for the current conflict originates with the Clinton administration. Once Clinton could not keep his zipper shut and the radical right used the opportunity to exact whatever concessions they wanted from him in his final two years in office, the shift in US foreign policy began and has gained momentum ever since.

    The post US Imperialism’s Proxy War With Russia In Ukraine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • No, Russia isn’t ‘reviving the Soviet empire’


    This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • History Rounds off Skeletons to Zero

    On 16 March 2022, as Russia’s war on Ukraine entered its second month, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev warned his people that ‘uncertainty and turbulence in the world markets are growing, and production and trade chains are collapsing’. A week later, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) released a brief study on the immense shock that will be felt around the world due to this war. ‘Soaring food and fuel prices will have an immediate effect on the most vulnerable in developing countries, resulting in hunger and hardship for households who spend the highest share of their income on food’, the study noted. South of Kazakhstan, in the Kyrgyz Republic, the poorest households already spent 65% of their income on food before these current price hikes; as food inflation rises by 10%, the impact will be catastrophic for the Kyrgyz people.

    The post History Rounds off Skeletons to Zero appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Ukraine: The Afghanistan Model for the Consolidation of the Global White Supremacist Movement

    For African and other colonized people on the receiving end of the U.S. and Western self-centered and opportunist policies, illusions about the real intentions of the White West have usually proven to be deadly. This is even more true in the current crisis of legitimacy and generalized decline of the Western colonial/imperial project. The proclivity of Western imperialism to resort to naked, direct violence to advance its interests and to use anyone and everyone, the possibility that the U.S. would allow extremist right-wing white nationalists and neo-Nazis real-world training, combat experience and networking represents an existential threat.

    The post Ukraine: The Afghanistan Model for the Consolidation of the Global White Supremacist Movement appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Meet the New, Resource-Based Global Reserve Currency

    It was something to behold. Dmitri Medvedev, former Russian President, unrepentant Atlanticist, current deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, decided to go totally unplugged in an outburst matching the combat star turn of Mr. Khinzal that delivered palpable shock and awe all across NATOstan. Medvedev said “hellish” Western sanctions not only have failed to cripple Russia, but are instead “returning to the West like a boomerang.” Confidence in reserve currencies is “fading like the morning mist”, and ditching the US dollar and the euro is not unrealistic anymore: “The era of regional currencies is coming.”

    The post Meet the New, Resource-Based Global Reserve Currency appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Sanctions On Russia Boomerang – Biden Promises Food Shortages

    “Food shortages — it’s going to be real,” President Joe Biden said in Brussels March 25. “The price of the sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia. It’s imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well.” This  ominous warning, reported around the world, was delivered at a NATO press conference. As Biden spoke, workers’ actions in Spain, Greece, Italy, France and Germany confronted soaring prices for fuel and food. From truckers to farmers on tractors, roads were blocked. Fishing people organized on boats. The price of fuel has already become unbearable. This resistance is just a glimpse of what is to come, as the economic unraveling of Europe, due to U.S. and European Union sanctions, boomerangs back on those countries who acceded to U.S. demands.

    The post Sanctions On Russia Boomerang – Biden Promises Food Shortages appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Anti-Russian Bigotry Increases in the US and Beyond Amid Putin’s War on Ukraine

    On a warm Thursday in March, Firouza, an immigrant from Uzbekistan, is sitting in front of her shop in Brooklyn’s Little Odessa, a section of Brighton Beach. It’s home to more than 35,000 people, many of them born in the eastern European countries that once comprised the Soviet Union.

    Firouza is methodically cutting pieces of blue and yellow ribbon while sitting on a chair in the store’s entryway. After she amasses a small pile, she ties the strips into a bow and adds a safety pin. A dollar buys one and business is brisk as diverse customers stop by to purchase this small token of solidarity with their Ukrainian neighbors.

    Firouza also sells Ukrainian flags and the multicolored flowered shawls and scarves that are popular in Ukraine.

    She has been doing this, she says, since the third day of Vladimir Putin’s war.

    “I don’t know anyone in Ukraine and have never been there,” she tells Truthout. “But the war made me depressed. Everyone in this neighborhood is stressed out. We can’t sleep. Children and women are dying. Bombs are falling. I had to do something to raise money to help.”

    Firouza is not the only local business owner to express this sentiment. In fact, dozens of restaurants and stores along Brighton Beach Avenue, the community’s commercial strip, are flying the blue and yellow flag of Ukraine and many windows bear messages calling for peace that are written in the Cyrillic alphabet. A few shops are also collecting money and supplies for shipment abroad, including antibacterial wipes, aspirin, bandages, batteries, diapers, headlamps, Ibuprofen, ready-to-eat packaged food and meal bars, tape, tourniquets, underwear, socks, T-shirts and hats.

    Shopkeeper after shopkeeper reports that such expressions of solidarity are happening throughout the U.S., wherever large concentrations of Ukrainians live or have ties.

    Manhattan’s East Village, for example, once boasted a large Ukrainian population, and while gentrification has pushed out most of those who came here in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, several Ukrainian businesses, a credit union and two Ukrainian churches are still located in the area. Signs with the words “Slava Ukraini” — Glory to Ukraine — appear in many shop windows. Lampposts on every corner of busy Second Avenue are covered in anti-Putin posters, ads for an April 16th “Comics for Ukraine” fundraiser, and pictures of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Colorful posters on doors urge residents to donate goods and money to ongoing relief efforts.

    Veselka Restaurant, the oldest Ukrainian business in the borough, raised $250,000 during the first two weeks of the war and is donating 100 percent of its borscht sales to refugee aid.

    Jason Birchard, the third-generation owner of the eatery, told Truthout that the outpouring of support has been tremendous. “Most people recognize that Ukrainians are being mistreated, and when they see the atrocities on the news night after night, they want to do something to show their outrage and support the people who are being driven from their homes.” The restaurant has partnered with St. George Ukrainian Catholic Church, Birchard says, and materials and money are being sent to Poland. From there, he explains, resources are going to established social welfare organizations and pop-up sites that are providing immediate assistance to the people coming into the country.

    “We will do this indefinitely,” Birchard says, “as long as the need exists.”

    Veselka, a Ukrainian restaurant in New York City, displays shows of solidarity with the Ukrainian people in its windows.
    Veselka, Manhattan’s oldest Ukrainian business, has raised more than $250,000 for refugees fleeing Ukraine.
    Veselka's windows are painted with messages of solidarity with the people of Ukraine.
    Veselka’s windows are painted with messages of solidarity with the people of Ukraine.

    As we talk, Birchard points to the long line outside the restaurant door and tells Truthout that he is staggered by the increase in business, up 75 percent since the war began. He also expresses surprise at the enormous offers of solidarity, from efforts by individuals like Firouza, to the mountain of donated materials he and other businesspeople have collected.

    Nonetheless, he knows that many Russian-owned businesses — including the nearly century-old Russian Tea Room and the newer Tzarevna restaurant in Manhattan — have floundered as backlash against all things Russian has ramped up in response to the conflict. This is true, he says, even when these businesses are overtly opposed to Putin’s regime and supportive of Ukraine. In fact, a worldwide boycott of Russian products has been promoted with the #BoycottRussia hashtag, and many companies have responded by posting pro-Ukraine messages on their websites; others have completely removed all references to their country of origin.

    Stolichnaya Vodka, for one, will now be marketed as Stoli, exiled Russian-born businessman Yuri Shefler told the press in early March, in “direct response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” This, despite the fact that Stoli is produced in Latvia.

    “I see a trend toward hating all Russians,” Nastya, a Russian immigrant living in Colorado, told Truthout. “The media needs to do a better job of explaining why hatred should not be against all Russians but should be directed toward Putin’s political regime.” Since the war began, she says, “many of us in the Russian community have felt insecure, as if we are somehow responsible or to blame for what’s happening. We feel this even though we are appalled by Putin.” At the same time, she worries that because she speaks with an accent, she will be the target of random animosity or violence.

    Her fears are not unfounded. Nastya says that she is disheartened by reports of vandalism at Russian restaurants in Washington, D.C. and Denver, Colorado, and at Russian Orthodox churches in Canada and New Zealand.

    Many individuals have also reported online harassment and taunts, as well as disparaging comments from strangers after being heard speaking Russian when out in public. According to an article in the Christian Science Monitor, fear of backlash has prompted some restaurants to remove references to Russian foods on their menus, instead labeling them as “European.”

    Other examples abound. A restaurant in the German city of Bietigheim-Bissingen posted a sign alerting potential patrons that it would not serve people with Russian passports, a decision that it reversed after protests.

    In Milan, Italy, Bicocca University announced that it intended to cancel a class on Fyodor Dostoevsky, a decision that the institution quickly withdrew after outraged students demonstrated their opposition.

    The arts have also indicated their antipathy to Russia and the Russian people. As has been widely reported, Alexander Malofeev, a 20-year-old pianist scheduled to play with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal and the Vancouver Recital Society, had his performances canceled despite the fact that he openly condemns the war. Similarly, the U.K.’s Royal Opera House canceled appearances by the Royal Moscow Ballet, and the Edinburgh Playhouse canceled the Ballet of Siberia. Meanwhile, New York’s Carnegie Hall replaced Russian-born conductor Valery Gergiev with a Canadian, and piano soloist Denis Matsuev with a South Korean.

    In addition, the Hermitage Amsterdam, “the official outpost of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg,” shuttered an exhibit featuring Russian Avant Garde artists; Netflix halted all incoming Russian-language series; and the Glasgow Film Festival pulled two films from its roster. Not to be outdone, Reddit has blocked all websites ending in .RU.

    What’s more, academics at the Centre for Combating Corruption (a private organization funded by donations from people in the U.S., Ukraine, and throughout the European Union) are demanding that scholars drop their affiliations with groups including the Moscow-headquartered Gorchakov Fund; Berlin’s Dialogue of Civilizations Institute; and the Paris-based Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, entities the group charges promote “Kremlin propaganda.” They are also demanding that colleges and universities sever their financial ties to Russian oligarchs and remove these donors’ names from campus buildings.

    Jordan Gans-Morse, faculty director of the Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies program at Northwestern University, told Truthout that many scholars find Putin’s regime so repugnant that they also want to end all collaborative work with Russian researchers and educators.

    But should all Russian arts, artists and intellectuals be punished for the actions of their autocratic president?

    Ernece B. Kelly, a retired City College of New York professor and longtime peace activist, says no. “It’s one thing to contact our politicians to encourage them to weigh in on stopping indiscriminate bombings and incursions, and a different matter to encourage boycotts of consumer goods which degrade the lives of ordinary Russians,” she told Truthout. “Banning Russian books and other cultural or educational events does nothing to further Russia’s lethal aggression and, in fact, may eat away at the heart and soul of people who have the potential to remove Putin and his allies.”

    Firouza, the Brighton Beach ribbon seller, agrees, arguing against blanket condemnations of all Russians and stresses that she and her neighbors have been careful not to tar the entire Russian community for Putin’s war crimes. “Most Russians are good people,” she says. “This is true in New York City and it was true in Uzbekistan.”

    Twelve-year-old Denis, standing in line for a table at Veselka, is similarly circumspect. “I was born here, but my parents come from Ukraine. We don’t blame the Russian people for this. We blame the Russian government. We don’t hate Russians. We eat Russian food. We shop in Russian stores,” he says, noting the intertwined relationships between the two peoples.

    Nonetheless, Russophobia persists and is reminiscent of anti-Japanese bigotry during World War II, anti-Muslim bigotry following 9/11, and ongoing anti-Chinese bigotry that worsened after the COVID-19 pandemic.

    For some, this is a reminder of the hurtful Cold War-era antipathy between the U.S. and Russia that lasted from approximately 1946 until 1991. But as the Norwegian Center for Humanitarian Studies reminds us, “Russophobia is a form of injustice and creates the conditions for long-term animosity and hate that will complicate future social and political relations. Making all Russians a universal target of global blame is, simply put, short-sighted and immoral.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Multiplying Hatred and Division: Humanity at War With Itself

    Whatever our differences, beliefs and prejudices we can all agree that peace is a good thing, can’t we, don’t we? All rational decent human beings would, I’m sure, nod enthusiastically, and who among us would admit to not being rational or decent…..even the despots believe they are – rational, just misunderstood. So why are human beings in constant conflict, why are there wars and the like at all, whether it’s in Ukraine, Ethiopia, Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan etc., etc.?

    Fighting, violent conflict, heated arguments, all bad, harmony and peace good; it’s simple, obvious, right? Up to the point when someone somewhere attacks the rational decent men/women, in some way. Insults their family, belittles their religion or political ideology, criticizes or denigrates their country, burns their flag. At that moment, while peace is, theoretically at least, still cherished, it is forgotten, laid asunder, trampled underfoot. Heads locked, anger and rage unleashed, escalation is swift, intransigence immediate, forgiveness unthinkable. And, in a world of quick judgments and rabid tribalism, to not fight implies cowardice, moral weakness, leaving one open to abuse and exploitation.

    Humanity is at war, not just with rival groups or nations, but within relationships, with the planet and with ourselves. Conditioned: psychologically and sociological conditioned, into war, into nationalism, into isms of all kinds, into competition and selfishness. And from this conditioned center action proceeds, action that is fragmented, ridden with desire and self-serving motives. The inevitable result is the world around us, chaos, violence, destruction and division. A harmonious peaceful world rests upon humankind being in harmony with itself; violence abounds because violence sits within the content of human consciousness like a cancer, a cancer which is being constantly inflamed by systems and values that are designed to be divisive.

    Some will argue that human beings are  innately violent (in the same way they say that man is born to compete); we’d like to be peaceful and kind, but, they claim, we just can’t help ourselves. By this fatalistic and false logic the men of war – the politicians, generals, terrorists, criminals and lovers of violence everywhere (including Putin) – could propose that some uncontrollable instinct forces them to fight, torture and kill; an ancient instinct rooted in tribalism, self-protection and fear, a dark shadow of man’s ancient past when right and wrong were unknown and survival was all.

    Well, laying aside such spurious, albeit convenient nonsense, we can all agree that war is forever wrong, abhorrent and ugly on all levels, including the attack on Ukraine (ditto US attack on Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam etc); a brutal act of aggression taking place within a historical and geo-political context, which, whilst not in any way justifying the attack, is relevant. Repeatedly laid out by commentators and analysts in recent weeks, including John Mearsheimer in his interview with The New Yorker, this context includes NATO expansionism, in spite of US commitments to Russia that no such expansion would take place; the US/West arming Ukraine and supporting the overthrow of the government in 2014, and in the months leading up to Russia invading, agitating, virtually demanding a war. Constantly prodding The Russian Bear, egging him on, daring him to attack with various threats – ‘there will be serious consequences’ and so on. Mainstream/corporate media functioned as the megaphone of political agitation and aggression.

    Putin would probably have attacked anyway, but the constant screaming from the touchline certainly wasn’t designed to deter an invasion and foster peace, tolerance and understanding.

    Western leaders, particularly the bumbling fumbling Johnson (desperate to be seen to be relevant), and bewildered Biden, repeatedly praise Ukrainian heroism and armed resistance. President Zelenskiy echoed Churchill in his address to the UK parliament, declaring that the people of Ukraine would battle on relentlessly, “We will fight in the forests, in the fields, on the shores, in the streets.” For this fighting spirit and steadfast ‘leadership’, which the media lap up,  Zelenskiy is praised, hailed as a hero. It’s an approach that suits The West well, particularly the (US-dominated) arms industry; but by encouraging people to fight he is condemning more Ukrainians to death, because, having committed himself and his troops this far, Putin will not withdraw, on the contrary the bombardments will only intensify, causing more suffering and destruction until a deal is agreed.

    Stop fighting and reduce the carnage; never surrender, resist fiercely and consistently, but stop fighting and allow the Russians to do the same. The Stop Fighting Keep Resisting approach, is not pacifism or weakness and does not imply giving up, acquiescing; non-violent resistance is a powerful force against aggression and injustice of all kinds. It is also the method recommended by enlightened teachers throughout the ages. Christ, for example, in His inspired Sermon on the Mount, said: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you” (Luke 6:27-28), and  taught that if “someone strikes you on your right cheek, turn the other one to him as well” (Luke 6:29). He, Christ, is not suggesting a passive, weak-kneed response to a cruel bully, but a resolute one – defiantly standing one’s ground with pride, but not reverting to violence and hate.

    This compassionate non-violent response was also taught by the Buddha 600 years prior to Christ; in fact, Buddhism, like Jainism, rejects any type of violence to all forms of life. And within the Upanishad (the oldest philosophical text known, and basis of Hinduism) a similar approach is found: ‘Non-injury’ as the Hindu might term it.

    Not responding to violence with violence weakens the forces of hate and fear that impels and empowers the aggressor; as Dr. Martin Luther King said, “returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” In this materialistic cynical world such statements, and they are statements of truth, are totally disregarded, laughed at.

    Love, whilst superficially cherished, has been reduced to crass sentimentality, to a warm comforting ‘feeling’; replaced by desire, distorted and corrupted. To even suggest that the demonstration of love, which is a dynamic creative energy inspiring all that is good, might be a solution to conflict, a requirement and facilitator of peace, is to be dismissed as a deluded dreamer. As, then, is Christ, whilst still being worshipped (something He never wanted or asked for incidentally), ditto the Buddha, the Ancient Rishis of India and others. It matters not it seems what the source of such wise advice and guidance is: no matter how enlightened, humanity ignores and laughs at it; labels the speaker as naive, someone ‘not living in the real world’.

    But, in order to live peacefully together, love and the qualities of goodness that flow from it are essential. Not romantic love, weak idealism or religious rhetoric, but love as a living force animating our actions, influencing the design of socio-economic-political systems and institutions, inspiring social justice; love shaping values and behavior and purifying, quietening thought, unifying communities and peoples, allowing peace to naturally come about.

    Although there are (decent) people living ‘good’ wholesome lives in every corner of the globe, this common-sense image, which I’m guessing all would applaud and many long for, is a long way from the current world in which we live, a utopian fantasy almost. Competition, nationalism and selfishness dominate world affairs and many personal relationships, and form the structure of the socio-economic Ideology of Greed and Division; conformity, noise and intolerance abound; short-term pleasure sold in place of lasting happiness.

    These are the methodologies and values underpinning an approach to life that has poisoned the planet, created societies of unhealthy men and women and fed an atmosphere of conflict and violence. It is an ugly cynical way of living based on false conclusions and ignorance that has denied all wonder and mystery while strengthening reductive self-centred constructs (rooted in a belief in separation) about who and what we are. It is an approach to life that, if we are to save the planet and create peaceful societies made up of contented, healthy men and women, indeed if we are to survive at all, must be rejected totally.

    The post Multiplying Hatred and Division: Humanity at War With Itself first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.