Thousands of people have left the country but a small group are determined to keep challenging Vladimir Putin despite the risks
Despite reaching one of the darkest moments in more than 40 years as a dissident and human rights activist, Oleg Orlov says that he has no plans to flee Russia. “I made a decision a long time ago that I want to live and die in Russia, it’s my country,” Orlov told the Observer. “Even though it’s never been so bad.”
That’s saying something for Orlov, who can recall printing homemade anti-war posters in the late 1970s to protest against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan or in support of Poland’s Solidarnost movement, and was an observer and negotiator during the bloody war in Chechnya in the 1990s.
I’m finishing up a “children’s book.” It’s longish. Kati the Coatimundi Finds Lorena. It’s about a precocious (actually, super smart) 12 year old, Lorena, who is in a wheelchair (paraplegic) who ends up finding out the family trip to Playa del Carmen back to San Antonio, Texas, brought with them a stowaway animal — a coati. Yep, the world of the 12 yeare old is full of reading, drawing, smarts. Yep, the girl and the animal can communicate with each other. Yep, lots of struggle with being “the other,” and, well, it’s a story that I hope even keeps grandma on the edge of her seat, or at least wanting to read more and more. She is a mestizo, too. We’ll see how that goes with the woke folk. I think I have a former veterinarian who is retired and now is working on illustrations, art. We shall see where this project heads.
Under this veil of creativity, of course, it’s difficult to just meld into pure art when the world around me is very very pregnant with stupidity, injustice, despotism, and Collective Stockholm Syndrome. Being in Oregon, being in a small rural area, being in the Pacific Northwest, being in USA, now that also bogs down spirits.
It’s really about how stupid and how inane and how blatantly violent this so-called Western Civilization has become. The duh factor never plays in the game, because (a) the digital warriors writing stuff like this very blog are not engaged with centers of power, influence or coalescing. Then (b) so many people are in their minds powerful because with the touch of a keyboard, they can mount an offensive on or against facts . . . or deeply regarded and thought out opinions. So, then (c) everyone has a right to their opinion . . . . that is how the American mind moves through the commercial dungeons their marketing and financial overlords end up putting them.
No pitchforks? How in anybody’s room temperature IQ does this make any sense? Demands for daily procurement of weapons for imbalanced, losing, and Nazified Ukraine?
It is about the food, stupid, okay, Carville?
So, before we move on, this is a communique from the G7 summit of the world’s biggest economies. And, no, EU and USA and Canada, not prepared for the Russian offensive’s affect on global food security. Alas, March 24, the G7 leaders agreed to use “all instruments and funding mechanisms” and involve the “relevant international institutions” to address food security, including support for the “continued Ukrainian production efforts.”
Ukraine has told the US that it urgently needs to be supplied with 500 Javelin anti-tank missiles and 500 Stinger air defense missiles per day, CNN reported on Thursday, citing a document presented to US lawmakers.
Western countries have been sending weapons and military gear to Kiev but President Volodymyr Zelensky says it is not enough to fend off the Russian attack that was launched a month ago.
CNN quoted sources as saying that Ukraine is now asking for “hundreds more” missiles than in previous requests sent to lawmakers. Addressing the leaders of NATO member states via video link on Thursday, Zelensky said he had not received a “clear answer” to the request of “one percent of all your tanks.” (source)
And, again, this is not blasphemy? Imagine, this “leader” and those “leaders,” smiling away during what is the 30 seconds to midnight doomsday clock. Smiling while Ukraine kills humanitarian refugees, while the biolabs sputtering on in deep freeze (we hope), and while the food prices are rising. Gas cards in California, and food coupons in France?
In a normal world, a million pundits would be all over this March 24 group/grope photo. Smiles, while we the people have to watch billions go to ZioLensky and trillions more shunted to these world leaders’ overlords?
As I alluded to in the title — the mighty warring UK, with the highrises in London, with those jet-setters and those Rothschild-loving royal rummies, it has food banks set up for the struggling, working class, and, alas, the gas is so pricey that people can’t boil spuds! Bring back the coal stoves!
These are leaders? The elites? The best of the best?
In an interview with the BBC Radio 4 Today program on Wednesday, Richard Walker said the “cost of living crisis is the single most important domestic issue we are facing as a country.” He cited reports from some food banks that users are “declining products such as potatoes and other root veg because they can’t afford to boil them.” Walker suggested that the UK government could implement measures to take the heat off retailers. He urged that the energy price cap on households could be extended to businesses, which he said would translate into some £100m in savings on consumers. He also called on authorities to postpone the introduction of the planned increase in national insurance, as well as some new environmental taxes. (source)
The operative words are “crumbling,” and, then, “malfescence,” and then, “hubris,” and then, “bilking.”
I just heard some inside stuff from someone working for a high tech company. I can’t get into too much about that, but here, these “engineers” in electronics or in data storage systems, they are, again, the height of Eicchmanns, but with the added twist of me-myself-and-I. Their expectations are $180,000 a year, with six weeks paid vacation, stocks, and, well, the eight-hour day.
I don’t think the average blog reader gets this — we are not talking about celebrities, or the executive team for Amazon or Dell or Raytheon. Yep, those bastards pull in millions a year, like those celebrities, the pro athletes and the thespians of note, or musicians. These are people who are demanding those entry pay rates who have no empathy for the world around them. Sure, they believe they have kids to feed, and they might rah-rah the Ukraine madness (that, of course, means, more diodes, batteries, computer chips, communication systems, et al for the monsters of war), but they laugh at the idea of real people with real poverty issues getting a cheque from Uncle Sam.
These are the everyday folk. I harken to the Scheer Report, tied to this fellow: It’s almost surreal and schizophrenic to valorize this fellow. Here, his bio brief, Ted Postol, a physicist and nuclear weapons specialist as well as MIT professor emeritus, joins Robert Scheer on this week’s edition of “Scheer Intelligence” to explain just how deadly the current brinkmanship between the U.S. and Russia really is. Having taught at Stanford University and Princeton prior to his time at MIT, Postol was also a science and policy adviser to the chief of naval operations and an analyst at the Office of Technology Assessment. His nuclear weapons expertise led him to critique the U.S. government’s claims about missile defenses, for which he won the Garwin Prize from the Federation of American Scientists in 2016. (source)
I’ll go with Mr. Fish, as his illustration, even though it has words, speaks volumes —
It all begs the question, so, now this weapons of war fellow, this US Navy advisor, physcist, he is now having his coming to Allah-Jesus-Moses moment? He gets it so wrong, and, one slice of the Ray-gun play, well, he also misses the point that people brought up in the warring world, and those with elite college backgrounds, or military and elite college backgrounds, and those in think tanks, or on the government deep or shallow state payroll, those in the diplomatic corps, those in the Fortune 5000 companies, the lot of them, and, of course, the genuflect to the multimillionaires and billionaires, they are, quite frankly, in most cases, sociopaths.
But, here, a quote from his interview with Robert Scheer:
And unfortunately, most of what people believe—even people who are quite well educated—is just unchecked. You know, only if you’re a real expert—and these people were not, in spite of the fact they viewed themselves that way—do you understand something about the reality of what these weapons are about. And so basically, to use a term that gets overused a lot, I think the deep state in both Russia and the United States—more the United States than Russia, at least as far as I can see—the deep state in the United States mostly, basically undermined the ideas and objectives of Ronald Reagan. And of course Gorbachev was facing a similar problem in Russia.
So there’s these giant institutions inside both countries. They’re filled with people who, at one level, honestly believe these bad ideas, or think they are right; and because they think they are right, and they convince themselves that it’s in the best interest of the country, what’s really going on, it’s in their best interest as professionals but they mix up their best interest with the interest of the country. They, these people take steps to blunt the directives of the president, and basically the system just moves on without any real modification, independent of this remarkable and actually extraordinarily insightful judgment of these two men. (source)
We know Reagan’s pedigree, and we know the millions who have suffered and died under his watch. And his best and brightest in his crew, oh, they are still around. Imagine, that, Trump 2024. Will another war criminal and his cadre of criminals rise again to national prominence. He will be seeking counsel:
Then, alas, the flags at the post office, half mast, yet again and again and again — Today, that other war criminal:
Go to minute 59:00 here at the Grayzone, and watch this woman (Albright) call Serbs disgusting. Oh well, flags are flapping once again for another war criminal!
Sure, watch the entire two hours and forty-five minutes, and then try and wrap your heads around 1,000 missiles a day on the road to Ukraine, and no-boiling spuds in the UK. And it goes without saying, that any narrative, any deep study of, any recalled history of this entire bullshit affair in the minds of most Yankees and Rebels, they — Pepe Escobar, Scott Ritter, Abby Martin, et al — are the fringe. Get to this one from Escobar, today:
A quick neo-Nazi recap
By now only the brain dead across NATOstan – and there are hordes – are not aware of Maidan in 2014. Yet few know that it was then Ukrainian Minister of Interior Arsen Avakov, a former governor of Kharkov, who gave the green light for a 12,000 paramilitary outfit to materialize out of Sect 82 soccer hooligans who supported Dynamo Kiev. That was the birth of the Azov batallion, in May 2014, led by Andriy Biletsky, a.k.a. the White Fuhrer, and former leader of the neo-nazi gang Patriots of Ukraine.
Together with NATO stay-behind agent Dmitro Yarosh, Biletsky founded Pravy Sektor, financed by Ukrainian mafia godfather and Jewish billionaire Ihor Kolomoysky (later the benefactor of the meta-conversion of Zelensky from mediocre comedian to mediocre President.)
Pravy Sektor happened to be rabidly anti-EU – tell that to Ursula von der Lugen – and politically obsessed with linking Central Europe and the Baltics in a new, tawdry Intermarium. Crucially, Pravy Sektor and other nazi gangs were duly trained by NATO instructors.
Biletsky and Yarosh are of course disciples of notorious WWII-era Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, for whom pure Ukrainians are proto-Germanic or Scandinavian, and Slavs are untermenschen.
Azov ended up absorbing nearly all neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine and were dispatched to fight against Donbass – with their acolytes making more money than regular soldiers. Biletsky and another neo-Nazi leader, Oleh Petrenko, were elected to the Rada. The White Führer stood on his own. Petrenko decided to support then President Poroshenko. Soon the Azov battalion was incorporated as the Azov Regiment to the Ukrainian National Guard.
They went on a foreign mercenary recruiting drive – with people coming from Western Europe, Scandinavia and even South America.
That was strictly forbidden by the Minsk Agreements guaranteed by France and Germany (and now de facto defunct). Azov set up training camps for teenagers and soon reached 10,000 members. Erik “Blackwater” Prince, in 2020, struck a deal with the Ukrainian military that would enable his renamed outfit, Academi, to supervise Azov.
It was none other than sinister Maidan cookie distributor Vicky “F**k the EU” Nuland who suggested to Zelensky – both of them, by the way, Ukrainian Jews – to appoint avowed Nazi Yarosh as an adviser to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi. The target: organize a blitzkrieg on Donbass and Crimea – the same blitzkrieg that SVR, Russian foreign intel, concluded would be launched on February 22, thus propelling the launch of Operation Z. (Source: “Make Nazism Great Again — The supreme target is regime change in Russia, Ukraine is just a pawn in the game – or worse, mere cannon fodder.”)
In the minds of wimpy Trump and wimpy Biden, or in those minds of all those in the camp of Harris-Jill Biden disharmony, these white UkiNazi hombres above are “our tough hombres.” Send the ZioLensky bombs, bioweapons, bucks, big boys. Because America the Ungreat will be shaking up the world, big time.
So, I slither back to the writing, finishing up my story about a girl, a coati, Mexico, what it means to be disabled, and what it means to be an illegal animal stuck in America, Texas, of all places, where shoot to kill vermin orders are a daily morning conversation with the oatmeal and white toast and jam.
If only the world could be run by storytellers, dancers, art makers, dramatists, musicians everywhere. Here, a great little thing from Lila Downs — All about culture, art, dance, language, food, color. Forget the physicists, man. And the electrical and dam engineers.
If you do not understand Spanish, then, maybe hit the YouTube “settings” and get the English subtitles.. In either case, magnificent, purely magnificent!
Before serving as a fixer and reporter for the BBC in Ukraine, Orysia Khimiak handled PR for a start-up called Reface which created what the Washington Post called a “reality distorting app” now serving as “a kind of Ukrainian war-messaging tool.”
According to her Linkedin profile, Khimiak was the director of PR for Reface until October 2021. While working that job, Khimiak says she built “long-term relationships with editors and media representatives.” She has also overseen a PR course for the Kiev-based Projector Institute, whose website currently greets visitors with the slogan, “Glory to Ukraine. We Will Win.”
The U.S. has tried to use yesterday’s NATO and G-7 meeting to push the Europeans towards sanctioning Russian hydrocarbon exports. It also tried to attach China to Russia and to get the Europeans to sanction its biggest trading partner. Both attempts failed. There will be no additional sanctions on Russia. And while the NATO communique mentions China it only urges it to leave its neutral position. Everyone knows that that is not going to happen. The only thing NATO agreed on is the release of a new load of fresh propaganda.
As the war in Ukraine enters its fourth week, EU authorities are increasingly revealing their double standards in how they treat refugees. European countries have welcomed white Ukrainian refugees, quickly integrating them into the labor market and schools. Meanwhile, Black and Brown refugees from the Global South continue to experience Europe’s racist border regime.
The Dalai Lama is among 16 Nobel Peace Prize laureates who jointly issued an open letter Saturday calling for the immediate end of the attack on Ukraine and an explicit vow from both Russia and NATO forces that nuclear weapons of any kind will not be used as part of this conflict or any other.
“We reject war and nuclear weapons,” the letter declares. “We call on all our fellow citizens of the world to join us in protecting our planet, home for all of us, from those who threaten to destroy it.”
Backed by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), which won the Nobel in 1985, and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), awarded the prize for similar advocacy in 2017, the letter was also signed by ten other individual winners — including Jody Williams, Kailash Satyarthi, and Óscar Arias Sánchez — as well as the International Peace Bureau, which won the award in 1910, the American Friends Service Committee (1947), and the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs (1995).
“The invasion of Ukraine has created a humanitarian disaster for its people,” the letter continues. “The entire world is facing the greatest threat in history: a large-scale nuclear war, capable of destroying our civilization and causing vast ecological damage across the Earth.”
The open letter calls for an immediate ceasefire agreement and the withdrawal of all Russian troops from Ukraine. After over a month of fighting, thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been killed, according to official figures, and millions of refugees have fled across the Ukraine border to neighboring countries while millions more have been displaced internally within the country.
I just added my name to the global call against war and nuclear weapons by the Dalai Lama, IPPNW and other Peace Prize Laureates. Sign now & RT, and they'll deliver our voices to key leaders from the Russian Federation and NATO. #NoWarhttps://t.co/8nqPcn15PH
Concern over the possible use of nuclear weapons has been heightened throughout the conflict after Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 27 ordered his military to put its nuclear forces on “special alert” — a move that was immediately condemned as “unacceptable and reckless” by the anti-nuclear group Global Zero.
Since then there has been growing worry that Putin could resort to the use of so-called “tactical” nukes, lower-yield weapons that some have tried to justify as less dangerous or destructive than their larger counterparts. Such arguments, as Common Dreamsreported earlier this week, have been roundly rejected.
Anyone suggesting use of even a “small” nuclear weapon, wrote Ploughshares Fund president Joe Circionne this week has “lost touch with the reality of nuclear war. Even the smallest conceivable nuclear blast would be many times more powerful than the largest conventional bomb.”
In addition to an end of the war and a vocal promise that nuclear weapons would not be used during the conflict in Ukraine, the open letter issued Saturday by the Nobel laureates calls for all countries of the world “to support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons to ensure that we never again face a similar moment of nuclear danger.”
The letter concludes, “It is either the end of nuclear weapons, or the end of us.”
The full text of the letter and the list of lead signatories — which can be endorsed by anyone on the Avaaz page — follows:
We reject war and nuclear weapons. We call on all our fellow citizens of the world to join us in protecting our planet, home for all of us, from those who threaten to destroy it.
The invasion of Ukraine has created a humanitarian disaster for its people. The entire world is facing the greatest threat in history: a large-scale nuclear war, capable of destroying our civilization and causing vast ecological damage across the Earth.
We call for an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of all Russian military forces from Ukraine, and for all possible efforts at dialogue to prevent this ultimate disaster.
We call on Russia and NATO to explicitly renounce any use of nuclear weapons in this conflict, and we call on all countries to support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons to ensure that we never again face a similar moment of nuclear danger.
The time to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons is now. It is the only way to guarantee that the inhabitants of the planet will be safe from this existential threat.
It is either the end of nuclear weapons, or the end of us.
We reject governance through imposition and threats, and we advocate for dialogue, coexistence and justice.
A world without nuclear weapons is necessary and possible, and together we will build it. It is urgent that we give peace a chance.
———————————-
Signatories list of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates:
His Holiness The Dalai Lama (1989) International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (1985) International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (2017) Juan Manuel Santos (2016) Kailash Satyarthi (2014) Leymah Gbowee (2011) Tawakkul Karman (2011) Muhammad Yunus (2006) David Trimble (1998) Jody Williams (1997) Jose Ramos-Horta (1996) Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs (1995) Óscar Arias Sánchez (1987) Lech Walesa (1983) American Friends Service Committee (1947) International Peace Bureau (1910)
To be clear, evidence is mounting that this is a proxy war deliberately instigated and perpetuated by the US empire with the goal of ousting Putin. Which means that, despite all the narrative window dressing and spin, this war is just more US regime change interventionism.
Saddam Hussein was not a nice person, and he did bad things. This doesn’t change the fact that Bush’s regime change war was a tremendous evil which unleashed unforgivable horrors, and that it was done because Saddam became inconvenient for the US empire. The same is happening here.
As a result of deliberately provoking this war, the US empire has:
Manufactured international consent for unprecedented economic warfare geared toward ousting Putin
Drawn Moscow into another Afghanistan-like military quagmire
Guaranteed immense profits for the war industry
Cut in on Russia’s fossil fuel business
Made Europe further subservient to US interests
EU agrees to buy gas from the US, reducing its dependence on Russian gas by one-third.
In case you wanted to know why Washington provoked war in Ukraine.
People say “This is not a proxy war! How dare you call this a proxy war?”
Pouring billions of dollars worth of weaponry into a foreign nation to be used by CIA-trained fighters with the direct ongoing assistance of US military intelligence is in fact the exact thing that a proxy war is. That is what those words mean.
If the Ukraine war is not a proxy war, then there has never been a proxy war.
❖
“So you think Ukraine should just GIVE Putin the Donbas and Crimea and neutrality, to end a war that Putin started??”
No I think Ukraine should sacrifice rivers of blood serving as US proxy cannon fodder for years to drain Moscow while you sit at home eating Pop Tarts and tweeting.
I definitely think every single Ukrainian man, woman and child should be sacrificed to this US proxy war for geostrategic dominance rather than yield some Russian-speaking parts of eastern Ukraine who want to be part of Russia anyway. Only a Putin-loving monster would disagree.
The only humanitarian position is to continue the US plan to flood the nation with just enough weapons to bleed Russia without actually winning for years to subvert Moscow in the grand chessboard maneuverings of a few sociopaths in Washington.
The Kremlin has announced its demands for ending the war in Ukraine: -Ukraine must change its constitution to guarantee it won't join any "blocs", i.e. NATO + EU. -Must recognise Crimea as part of Russia. -Must recognise the eastern separatist regions as independent.
Any Ukrainian mother who wouldn’t sacrifice her son for the remote chance of future NATO membership and control over Crimea just loves Putin and thinks Putin is awesome and is a Putler apologist.
I don’t care how many Ukrainian lives must be thrown into the gears of the imperial war machine to accomplish this. Sacrifice every one of them down to the last screaming baby, because I #StandWithUkraine until the next stylish hashtag and profile pic filter come along.
❖
There’d be a lot more credibility for the argument that Russia has no right to any “sphere of influence”—even over the presence of hostile military alliances directly on its border—if the US didn’t command a “sphere of influence” that looks like this:
NATO is a “sphere of influence”. It’s an extension of US imperial power. One of many.
You don’t get to unilaterally create a global dynamic and then cry when other countries respond accordingly. It’s like the US making international law meaningless by continually flouting it with zero consequences and then claiming another country violated international law.
People who say “What so Russia should just get to dictate whether its neighbors can join NATO and the EU??” without addressing US hegemony are either truly ignorant of US hegemony, willfully ignorant of US hegemony, or supportive of US hegemony. There are no other options. And there really is no way to address it in a way that makes Russia’s position look unreasonable. It’s simply not legitimate to claim Moscow has no right to even the slightest degree of any sphere of influence while the US empire exerts a sphere of influence the size of Earth.
❖
Very supportive of Biden’s not-deliberately-obliterating-all-terrestrial-life-in-a-thermonuclear-holocaust policy but strongly opposed to his continually-escalating-cold-war-and-proxy-war-tensions-in-ways-that-could-easily-inadvertently-spark-a-thermonuclear-holocaust policy.
❖
The caption is accurate. These recent press conferences make it clear that the problem isn't that the American press never challenges US officials. The reality is so much worse than that: they challenge US officials, but only when it's to push them into starting horrific wars. https://t.co/0x7gJC8ZON
I still have less than zero respect for the claim that I need to spend more time criticizing Putin, as though the nonstop criticisms of every single one of the most powerful government and media institutions in the western world is not enough. I have no influence over Putin. What I do have some small degree of influence over is the western society that is cheerleading a proxy war which all evidence says is actively being prolonged by the western empire to bleed Russia at the expense of Ukrainian lives.
Saying “Well Putin could just end his war!” is about as useful a contribution to the conversation as saying “Well Ukrainians could just sprout wings and fly to another country!” We have the same amount of control over both those things. I focus my efforts where they can do most good.
Demanding that we criticize Putin and the western powers who provoked and sustain this war equally, or anywhere near equally, is an absurd position. As badly as my empire loyalist detractors want it to be true, I don’t actually have an audience with Vladimir Putin. I have a western audience.
❖
People are going to get poorer and see their quality of life diminishing as a result of the US empire’s economic war with Russia. Our civilization has an illness. We’re like a patient wasting away as cancer spreads throughout our body. And the US empire is the malignant tumor.
_____________________________
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Note to our readers: These are letters from a comrade of ours who currently lives in Russia. English is not the first language of HCE so please be understanding. In other to preserve the integrity of these letters, we kept the original phrasing as best we could.
March 11th Hello Barbara,
Thank you for your message and concern. My wife and I are passing through a difficult phase in our lives. After our second vaccination in December, we, for some reason or other went through a period of being sick, myself in a light form while my wife gave me a scare. Anyway, that is behind us. Barbara, I thought that in my late years, being 80 years old now, we would settle down and I would take good care of my wife, go for long walks in the forest-parks of Moscow. Fate however, had other plans for us, and here we are in the midst of another war and sanctions surrounded by nations led by clowns, comedians, lunatics, and obsessed madmen. Allow me to give you my opinion on a number of issues.
The dependence of Europe on Russian natural gas
The US tried all the possible tricks to stop the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project. Generally, they want this energy market for US companies, in spite if the fact that gas will be in liquid form and transported by ships. The port that has to receive the liquid gas must have a very expensive plant. Besides the market factor there is the geopolitical factor of having Europe depending on the US for their energy. Russia has always delivered through thick and thin and always will. I wonder whether the US and their companies will be just as trustworthy.
Zelensky’s dirty bomb threat
Chernobyl is the place where the terrible catastrophe happened is located in the Ukraine. Zelensky declared that he would consider making an atom bomb if not given the security guarantees that he was asking for from Europe and the US on the second day of the war. He had in mind using materials from the damaged reactor and make a “dirty bomb”. I think that was the last straw. Russian special troops immediately moved to occupy Chernobyl. Thank goodness not a single shot was fired as the Ukrainian troops laid down their arms. The 8 years that the people of Donbas served as a shooting gallery for the Ukrainian nationalists and fascists has finally come to an end. Chernobyl at the present is being patrolled by joint Russian – Ukrainian units. There is a huge Sarcophagi covering the damaged reactor (if you see a clip or pictures, it is so ominous and awe striking. It makes you shiver).
The Mood of the Russian people
Now let me discuss the mood of the Russian people who I see on the street, the people who I talk to, and what I read and watch on local tv. Russians differ in their assessment of the war. By far the broadest section supports their president, and especially their armed forces. They are mainly working class, solid people, nationalists, and the majority of the left including CPRF.
Since the nomination of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats’ obsession with Russia’s and Trump’s supposed ties with them, these Democrats have played a terrible role in pushing the Russian people more to the right. Anything that is seen as part of the Democrats, like BLM, MeToo, or LGBT is derided here. White supremacy is on the rise. I have tried on many occasions to explain, for example BLM. The conversation usually begins with “I don’t take a knee before a N.” So, I have to explain the rules of US football, who Colin Kaepernick is and the conditions of his kneeling during the national anthem. Presenting the subtleties of this is not easy when Russians are already riled up. The Communist Party in Ukraine was prohibited many years ago and in this void came nationalism and religion. Both cards were used to divide the Russians and the Ukrainians. Russia has officially declared that the aim of their operation in the Ukraine is demilitarization and denazification.
Then there is a loud minority of very young people guided by NGOs financed by the West, part of the humanitarian intellectuals, artists, and actors. They are against their army and its operations in the Ukraine. The Russian Government has started taking measures against openly anti-Russian channels like Echo Moscow and Dozhd/Rain.
The situation in Russia is characterized by a retreat of the liberals and pro-western opposition. The polls show that the support for the president is 75% as of today, March 11. The street is calm, my apartment is near a university and campus and I see hundreds of young people going about their studies. I see people shopping, and I go shopping too. No panic, no rush. If the West thinks by imposing draconian sanctions it will change the mood of the people, then it is right but exactly in the opposite direction, instead of the critical and quite often satiric attitude towards the authorities. In fact, they are consolidating and supporting it. A new world is being born and Russia with all her faults and problems is the midwife and godmother. I will stop here but I have lot more to say. Please let us continue with the dialogue
With affection and respect
HCE
Dear Bruce,
Before writing on my observations on religious hostilities, allow me to make some notes on what the Ukraine fascist and ultra-national ideology is based on and where it comes from. I will not go too far back in history but pick it up after WW2.
Nazi collaborators and their role:
The Ukrainian government after the disintegration of the Soviet Union till today, with V. Zelensky have tried their best to whitewash and portray these collaborators as heroes and founders of the Ukraine State. I have chosen to describe Stepan Bandera, who probably is the most popular among the fascists who march with his portrait. Kindly find below my translation from Russian about Bandera. I have taken extracts from an article and what seemed to me important that would provide an idea of the basis for fascism.
The History of S. Bandera and the rehabilitation of fascism in Ukraine including by V. Zelensky
Bandera Stepan Andreevich was a leader and organizer of the Ukrainian national movement in Western Ukraine and considered a terrorist. He was a member of the Ukrainian military organization (from 1928) and the Organization of the Ukraine nationalists (OUN) from1929, and organizer of a series of terrorist acts. Bandera was condemned by the Polish authorities to life in prison and his memory has not been rehabilitated till now. He was considered a criminal.
Stepan Bandera and his supporters sought “independence” through violence, revolution, and genocide. The theoretical activity of the Bandera supporters started in Poland, their most notorious terror cases was the killing of government personalities Soviet Cousul Andre Mailov in 1933. In 1934 he participated in the organization in the killing of the Polish minister of interior Bronislav Peratski and the director of the Ukraine academic gymnasium Ivan Babi. He organized an explosion in the offices of the “Pratsia” newspaper.
In the summer of 1934, polish authorities arrested Bandera. On January 13, 1936, Stepan Bandera and his accomplices were sentenced to death for the murder of Peratski. Then the death penalty was changed to life in prison, which he spent till 1939 in Polish prisons. After the Nazis occupied Poland in 1939 he was freed.
During the German occupation, Bandera and his supporters cooperated with Hitler’s Germany and they terrorized the population. Poles and Jews were killed most of all. Immediately after the capture of Lvov the Bander, supporters jointly carried out mass pogroms.
In our days in Ukraine one of the dates that is commemorated as the “liberation movement for the independence of Ukraine” is 30 June 1941, when the Bandera supporters in Lvov declared the restoration of the Ukrainian state. In the “Act of the declaration of the Ukraine state”, there was the following point:
“The newly created Ukraine state will closely cooperate with the great National –Socialist Germany under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler, who is creating a new order in Europe the world and helps Ukraine to free itself from the Moscow occupation”
After the war, Stepan Bandera lived in Munich and worked for the British security services. A Soviet agent executed him in 1959.
The Ukraine authorities and V. Zelensky personally make a hero out of Bandera. Monuments are erected and marches take place in his honor in which the participants call for the killing of Russians. The original text of the link above contains pictures of the fascists in Ukraine during their marches, as well as a document in Ukrainian and its Russian translation, where Bandera and his supporters glorify Hitler and fawn over the Nazis, I recommend taking a look at it.
This is the ideology of a minority that has managed, with the financing and support of the West, to create an atmosphere of hate and terror, Russophobia, and xenophobia. The forces that could have stood up to them were either banned (the communists), or brainwashed and tempted by the dream of EU and NATO.
Fascist and nationalistic ideology in Ukraine is not a phenomenon that is purely local. it is part of the populist ultra-right ideas that have swept Europe and the US. These include the appearance of fascist movements that rode on the wave of capitalist austerity instability, lack of steady employment, to scapegoating refugees for the lack of capitalist prosperity.
Place of Religion: Ukraine Greek Orthodox vs Ukraine Greek Catholic Church There is another card that has been played by the west, the card of religion. Little has been said in the western media about this, but the fact that religion started to play a big role in the life of the people of the countries who were living in what was the Soviet Union is undeniable. People of various classes and occupations became religious, some even fanatics.
Very briefly, historically in Ukraine there were two main religious tendencies. Ukraine Greek Orthodox in the East and Ukraine Greek Catholic in the West. Relations are not the best. The Ukraine Greek Catholic Church actively cooperated with Nazi Germany during its occupation of Ukraine. Moreover, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Greek Orthodox Church in Ukraine from being part of the Moscow Patriarchy split into different parts mainly along nationalistic lines. This hatred was built not only on theological differences, but on property, including churches and land.
Economic self-sufficiency
I do not know whether you have heard Sergei Lavrov’s interview, there were the following words that made an impression on me:
“As for our economic problems, we will deal with them. We have coped with difficulties at all stages of our history when these difficulties arose. But this time, I assure you, we will get out of this crisis with a completely healthy psychology and a healthy consciousness. We will have no illusions about the reliability of the west as a partner. We will not have any illusions that the West, when it talks about its values, does not really believe in its promises and spells, and we will have no illusions that the West is capable of betrayal at any moment. It will betray anyone and betray its own values.” TASS reports Lavrov’s words. (My translation)
“Within the first 24 hours of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, all Ukrainian Ground Radar Intercept capabilities were wiped out. Without those radars, the Ukrainian Air Force lost its ability to do air to air intercept. In the intervening three weeks, Russia has established a de facto No Fly Zone over Ukraine. While still vulnerable to shoulder fired Surface to Air Missiles supplied by the U.S. and NATO to the Ukrainians, there is no evidence that Russia has had to curtail Combat Air Operations.”
With NATO countries recommitting themselves to the alliance and passing sweeping sanctions against Russia as punishment for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, is this the dawn of a new Cold War? We speak with foreign policy expert William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute, who warns that hawks in Washington are pushing for a massive increase in the U.S. military budget, which is already a record-high $800 billion a year. “There’s a danger that not only will this be a war in Ukraine, but the U.S. will use it as an excuse for a more aggressive policy around the world, arguing that it’s to counter Russia or China or Iran, or whoever the enemy of the moment is.” Hartung also speaks about the Saudi-led war in Yemen, where U.S. support has allowed the conflict to rage for years, killing about 400,000 people. Unlike in Ukraine, where the U.S. has more limited leverage, the Biden administration could “end that killing tomorrow,” Hartung says.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. As we continue to look at the global fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we’re joined by William Hartung of the Quincy Institute, who closely follows the global arms industry and the U.S. military budget. He has just co-written an article for TomDispatch headlined “Washington Should Think Twice Before Launching a New Cold War.”
Bill, welcome back to Democracy Now! Why don’t you take it from there? What is your assessment of what’s happening right now, and who most is profiting?
WILLIAMHARTUNG: Well, the hawks in Washington want to jack up the military budget and use Ukraine as an excuse. But if you look at the budget — and Biden is going to propose, according to press accounts, a military budget of over $800 billion on Monday. That’s more than was spent at the height of the Korean or Vietnam Wars. It’s $100 billion more than what was spent at the height of the Cold War under Ronald Reagan. So, this notion that to provide some weapons to Ukraine, to send a few thousand additional troops to Europe requires increasing this enormous budget is only going to benefit weapons contractors and members of Congress who receive campaign contributions from them, who use the arguments to get themselves elected.
So, you know, and then, overarching all this is this discussion of a new Cold War. And I think people don’t think about this — a lot of people think it’s like the United States spent the Soviet Union into the grave and brought democracy to Eastern Europe and so forth, but they don’t look at what happened all over the world in the name of fighting communism. They don’t look at the Vietnam War. They don’t look at the coups in Guatemala, Iran, Chile. They don’t look at arming of the so-called freedom fighters by Ronald Reagan, including the Afghan mujahideen, some of whom went on to help form al-Qaeda; including the Contras in Nicaragua, who committed unspeakable crimes; including the overthrow of the Allende elected government in Chile, when Henry Kissinger said, “You can’t let a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people,” acknowledging that they were overthrowing a democratic government. So I think there’s a danger that not only will this be a war in Ukraine, but the U.S. will use it as an excuse for a more aggressive policy around the world, arguing that it’s to counter Russia or China or Iran, or whoever the enemy of the moment is.
AMYGOODMAN: Bill Hartung, about the recent op-ed that you wrote for Stripes, “US should use its leverage to end the war in Yemen,” I mean, what we’re seeing, perhaps in an unprecedented way right now, is the mainstream U.S. corporate media on the ground, there with the targets of war. And it is horrifying, and the whole world is mesmerized by this, what it means to be at the target end of war. We don’t see that similarly in Yemen — hosts of global shows standing with the Yemeni people, looking up and seeing planes flying overhead. Can you talk about what it would mean, what you mean by saying the U.S. should use this leverage to end the war in Yemen?
WILLIAMHARTUNG: Yes. Well, I think, as you said, you know, the media has underscored the horrors of war by the way they’re covering Ukraine. And I think people should take that in. But they have not covered the horrors of war in Yemen. And if they did, people would understand that in the Saudi-UAE intervention there, of which today is the seventh anniversary, nearly 400,000 people have died, both through bombing, through a Saudi blockade that has kept important, necessary materials getting into the country, from bombing of hospitals, from bombing of a school bus, bombing of funerals, bombing of civilian neighborhoods.
So, the United States is key to this, because through Obama and Trump and Biden, the U.S. has supplied tens of billions of dollars of weaponry to the Saudi and UAE regimes that have been used to fuel that war. And if the United States cut off weapons and also the spare parts and maintenance that keeps the Saudi war machine running, we could end that killing tomorrow, and we could force the Saudis to negotiate in good faith for a peace agreement to end that war.
So, the contrast is stark. And, you know, in Ukraine, the United States’ leverage is more limited. It’s a complex problem. In Yemen, the people of the United States could force our government to end the killing in short order. So there’s more agency there. There’s more of an opportunity for people to make a difference. And there’s groups that have been doing so, including the Yemeni diaspora in the United States. And Representatives Peter DeFazio and Pramila Jayapal are going to bring a war powers resolution to end U.S. support for the Saudi-UAE war. So, I think this is an area where people can make a difference and where the international community for far too long has looked the other way.
AMYGOODMAN: Well, Bill Hartung, I want to thank you so much for being with us, national security and foreign policy expert at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. We’re going to link to all of your pieces at democracynow.org.
Next up, we’ll speak to the Colombian environment activist Francia Márquez Mina, the new running mate of presidential front-runner Gustavo Petro, who could become Colombia’s first Black female vice president. Stay with us for this exclusive interview.
Global climate advocates on Friday panned as “misguided and dangerous” the Biden administration’s newly announced effort to ramp up U.S. gas shipments to European Union countries as they look to reduce their dependence on Russian fossil fuels.
Under the new initiative, according to a White House fact sheet, the U.S. will help the E.U. secure an additional 15 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in 2022 “with expected increases going forward” — a set-up likely to benefit U.S. gas exporters.
The Wall Street Journalreported Friday that “the U.S. aims to ship 50 billion cubic meters of LNG to Europe annually through at least 2030… making up for about a third of the gas the E.U. receives from Russia.”
“The E.U. imported a record 22 billion cubic meters of LNG from the U.S. last year,” the Journal noted. New gas projects are set to come online in 2025.
While the Biden administration vowed to “undertake efforts to reduce the greenhouse gas intensity of all new LNG infrastructure and associated pipelines,” climate campaigners warned that the planned construction of new import facilities in Europe flies in the face of both U.S. and E.U. vows to slash planet-warming carbon emissions.
“Europe already has enough capacity to import the amount of gas the U.S. intends to supply, and building new import terminals would mean locking in fossil gas imports for years to come, long after the E.U. needs to quit this climate-wrecking fuel for good,” Murray Worthy, the gas campaign leader at Global Witness, said in a statement.
“Doubling down on gas is not the solution, whether it comes from Russia or the U.S.,” Worthy continued. “This announcement does not and must not be used to justify more fossil fuel projects in the U.S. New gas export terminals would take too long to build to help Europe now, would lead to huge climate-wrecking emissions and only help the fossil fuel industry.”
“Instead of lining the pockets of American fracking companies,” he added, “Europe should focus its energy investments on lasting solutions such as improving building insulation, heat pumps, and renewable energy sources. More investment and reliance on fossil fuels is music to the ears of despots and warmongers all over the world who recognize this is an energy system that benefits them. If Europe truly wants to get off Russian gas, the only real option it has is phasing out gas altogether.”
In response to Russia’s deadly assault on Ukraine — now in its second month with no end in sight — the E.U. is looking to slash Russian gas imports by two-thirds this year and completely end its reliance on Russian fossil fuels by 2027.
Before the Ukraine invasion, Europe got roughly 40% of its gas supply and 27% of its oil imports from Russia, an arrangement that led E.U. members — Germany in particular — to resist sanctions targeting the Russian fossil fuel industry.
“We aim to reduce this dependence on Russian fossil fuels and get rid of it,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said Friday.
But Kassie Siegel, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, warned in a statement Friday that simply switching gas suppliers “won’t solve Europe’s current crisis” — and will surely make the climate emergency worse.
“Pushing new toxic export facilities and decades more methane gas is a death sentence for those on the frontlines of the climate emergency,” Siegel said of the U.S. role in the new initiative. “President Biden must lead the world with a rapid buildout of renewable energy — not feed the fossil fuel beast that’s responsible for both petro-dictators and the climate crisis.”
“Approving more export terminals, pipelines, and fossil fuel production,” Siegel added, “only throws fuel on the fire of our burning world.”
The Washington Post has a new article out bemoaning the fact that Russian military commanders are declining calls from the Pentagon to discuss their operations in Ukraine (I dunno guys, might have something to do with the fact that the US is sharing extensive military intelligence on exactly those operations directly with the Ukrainian government). Tucked all the way down in the eighteenth paragraph of the article, we find a much more interesting revelation: that Washington’s top diplomat has made no attempt to contact his counterpart in Moscow since the war began on the 24th of February.
“Secretary of State Antony Blinken has not attempted any conversations with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, since the start of the conflict, according to U.S. officials,” The Washington Post reports.
So the US government is continuing its policy of refusing to attempt any high-level diplomatic resolutions to this war despite its public hand-wringing about the horrific violence that’s being inflicted upon the people of Ukraine. This revelation fits nicely with a recent report by Bloomberg’s Niall Ferguson that sources in the US and UK governments have told him the real goal of western powers in this conflict is not to negotiate peace or end the war quickly, but to prolong it in order “bleed Putin” and achieve regime change in Moscow.
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The amazing part of this column is that U.S. officials are saying out loud that they want the war to last in order to "bleed Putin". They don't care a fig about Ukraine. It stands completely alone (and Zelenskiy knows it, btw). https://t.co/NBOKvmT63K
Building on an earlier report from The New York Times that the Biden administration “seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire,” Ferguson writes that he has reached the conclusion that “the U.S. intends to keep this war going,” and says he has other sources to corroborate this:
“The only end game now,” a senior administration official was heard to say at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime. Until then, all the time Putin stays, [Russia] will be a pariah state that will never be welcomed back into the community of nations. China has made a huge error in thinking Putin will get away with it. Seeing Russia get cut off will not look like a good vector and they’ll have to re-evaluate the Sino-Russia axis. All this is to say that democracy and the West may well look back on this as a pivotal strengthening moment.”
I gather that senior British figures are talking in similar terms. There is a belief that “the U.K.’s No. 1 option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin.” Again and again, I hear such language. It helps explain, among other things, the lack of any diplomatic effort by the U.S. to secure a cease-fire. It also explains the readiness of President Joe Biden to call Putin a war criminal.
Earlier this month when The Intercept’s Ryan Grim was able to get a word in edgewise at a White House press briefing amid the throngs of mass media reporters demanding to know why Biden still hasn’t started World War 3, Press Secretary Jen Psaki gave a very revealing answer.
“So, aside from the request for weapons, President Zelensky has also requested that the US be more involved in negotiations toward a peaceful resolution to the war. What is the U.S. doing to push those negotiations forward?” asked Grim.
“Well, one of the steps we’ve taken — a significant one — is to be the largest provider of military and humanitarian and economic assistance in the world, to put them in a greater position of strength as they go into these negotiations,” Psaki answered, completely dodging the question of whether the US was actually doing anything to help negotiate peace.
As we’ve discussed previously, the US government has a well-documented history of working to draw Moscow into costly military quagmires with the goal of preoccupying its military forces and draining its coffers. Former US officials are on record publicly boasting about having done so in both Afghanistan and Syria. This is an agenda geared toward sapping the Russian government, manufacturing international consent for unprecedented acts of economic warfare designed (though perhaps ineptly) to crush the Russian economy, to foment discord and rebellion, and ultimately to effect regime change in Moscow.
The US empire doesn’t care about Ukrainian lives, and it’s insulting that its operatives continually pretend to. The empire will happily feed every man, woman and child in the entire nation into the mouth of this war if it means unseating a disobedient leader from a nuclear-armed seat of power which has become unacceptably cozy with Beijing and intolerably comfortable with intervening against US imperial agendas. And all the Ukrainian-flag-waving propagandized westerners with their #StandWithUkraine Instagram activism and blue and yellow profile pics will cheer for it every step of the way.
I hope this brutal proxy war ends and peace comes to Ukraine very quickly. But from what we’re seeing today there appears to be an immense globe-spanning power structure holding its foot against the door of the only exit from this horror.
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A group of veteran Russian human rights activists plan to publish an open letter calling on Russia to end its war in Ukraine, declaring it “our common duty” to “stop the war [and] protect the lives, rights and freedoms of all people, both Ukrainians and Russians”.
The “manifesto”, signed by 11 prominent activists including Lev Ponomaryov, Oleg Orlov and Svetlana Gannushkina, announces the creation of a new anti-war council of Russian human rights defenders and is the broadest collective statement against the war by the Russian human rights community to date.
Poland’s populist government has been under pressure over rights and democracy. Now it feels it has the moral high ground
Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine was a pivotal moment for Poland: proof positive it had been right about Russia all along, and the start of an immense national humanitarian effort. For its government, it is also an opportunity to score some points in Brussels.
Poland has “never had such an excellent brand, all over the world”, its prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, declared last week. It is “in the right position in international politics”, he said, no longer behind a “wall of unfair isolation”. The US president, Joe Biden, is due to visit the country on Friday.
The Pentagon is engaged in a consequential battle with the U.S. State Department and the Congress to prevent a direct military confrontation with Russia, which could unleash the most unimaginable horror of war. President Joe Biden is caught in the middle of the fray. So far he is siding with the Defense Department, saying there cannot be a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine fighting Russian aircraft because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.” But pressure on the White House from Congress and the press corps is unrelenting to recklessly bring NATO directly into the war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, hailed as a virtual superhero in Western media, has vacillated between openness to negotiating a peace settlement with Russia and calling for NATO to “close the skies” above Ukraine. To save his country he appears willing to risk endangering the entire world.
Since the Russian offensive inside Ukraine commenced on February 24, the Ukrainian military has cultivated the image of a plucky little army standing up to the Russian Goliath. To bolster the perception of Ukrainian military mettle, Kiev has churned out a steady stream of sophisticated propaganda aimed at stirring public and official support from Western countries. The campaign includes language guides, key messages, and hundreds of propaganda posters, some of which contain fascist imagery and even praise Neo-Nazi leaders.
U.S. pundits and strategic experts seem blissfully unaware of how close we all are to being fried in a nuclear strike by Russia. (Fair Labeling: if you are simply looking for yet another reason to demonize Putin, rather than to understand where he is coming from, save time and read no further.)
Here’s the thing: the Russians have good reason to be on hair-trigger alert. Their early-warning radar system is so inadequate that there are situations (including those involving innocent rocket launches) under which Russian President Putin would have only a few minutes – if that – to decide whether or not to launch nuclear missiles to destroy the rest of the world – on the suspicion that Russia was under nuclear attack.
Leaked documents give new information about the Pentagon program in biolaboratories in Ukraine. According to internal documents, Pentagon contractors were given full access to all Ukrainian biolaboratories which handled dangerous pathogens, while independent experts were denied even a visit. The new revelations challenge the U.S. government statement that the Pentagon just funded biolaboratories in Ukraine but had nothing to do with them.
In all likelihood, Russian President Vladimir Putin believed that his military would overrun Ukraine within a matter of a few days on February 24, when he ordered an invasion into the neighboring country after a long and massive military buildup on Ukraine’s border.
A month later, however, the war is still raging, and several Ukrainian cities have been devastated by Russian air attacks. Peace talks have stalled, and it is unclear whether Putin still wants to overthrow the government or is instead aiming now for a “neutral” Ukraine.
In the interview that follows, world-renowned scholar and leading dissident voice Noam Chomsky shares his thoughts and insights about the available options for an end to the war in Ukraine, and ponders the idea of “just” war and whether the war in Ukraine could potentially lead to the collapse of Putin’s regime.
Chomsky is internationally recognized as one of the most important intellectuals alive. His intellectual stature has been compared to that of Galileo, Newton and Descartes, as his work has had tremendous influence on a variety of areas of scholarly and scientific inquiry, including linguistics, logic and mathematics, computer science, psychology, media studies, philosophy, politics and international affairs. He is the author of some 150 books and the recipient of scores of highly prestigious awards, including the Sydney Peace Prize and the Kyoto Prize (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), and of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from the world’s most renowned universities. Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and currently Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona.
C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, we are already a month into the war in Ukraine and peace talks have stalled. In fact, Putin is turning up the volume on violence as the West increases military aid to Ukraine. In a previous interview, you compared Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the Nazi invasion of Poland. Is Putin’s strategy then straight out of Hitler’s playbook? Does he want to occupy all of Ukraine? Is he trying to rebuild the Russian empire? Is this why peace negotiations have stalled?
Noam Chomsky: There is very little credible information about the negotiations. Some of the information leaking out sounds mildly optimistic. There is good reason to suppose that if the U.S. were to agree to participate seriously, with a constructive program, the possibilities for an end to the horror would be enhanced.
What a constructive program would be, at least in general outline, is no secret. The primary element is commitment to neutrality for Ukraine: no membership in a hostile military alliance, no hosting of weapons aimed at Russia (even those misleadingly called “defensive”), no military maneuvers with hostile military forces.
That would hardly be something new in world affairs, even where nothing formal exists. Everyone understands that Mexico cannot join a Chinese-run military alliance, emplace Chinese weapons aimed at the U.S., and carry out military maneuvers with the People’s Liberation Army.
In brief, a constructive program would be about the opposite of the Joint Statement on the U.S.-Ukraine Strategic Partnership signed by the White House on September 1, 2021. This document, which received little notice, forcefully declared that the door for Ukraine to join NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) is wide open. It also “finalized a Strategic Defense Framework that creates a foundation for the enhancement of U.S.-Ukraine strategic defense and security cooperation” by providing Ukraine with advanced anti-tank and other weapons along with a “robust training and exercise program in keeping with Ukraine’s status as a NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner.”
The statement was another purposeful exercise in poking the bear in the eye. It is another contribution to a process that NATO (meaning Washington) has been perfecting since Bill Clinton’s 1998 violation of George H.W. Bush’s firm pledge not to expand NATO to the East, a decision that elicited strong warnings from high-level diplomats from George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, Jack Matlock, (current CIA Director) William Burns and many others, and led Defense Secretary William Perry to come close to resigning in protest, joined by a long list of others with eyes open. That’s of course in addition to the aggressive actions that struck directly at Russia’s concerns (Serbia, Iraq, Libya, and lesser crimes), conducted in such a way as to maximize the humiliation.
It doesn’t strain credulity to suspect that that the Joint Statement was a factor in inducing Putin and the narrowing circle of “hard men” around him to decide to step up their annual mobilization of forces on the Ukrainian border in an effort to gain some attention to their security concerns, in this case on to direct criminal aggression — which, indeed, we can compare with the Nazi invasion of Poland (in combination with Stalin).
Neutralization of Ukraine is the main element of a constructive program, but there is more. There should be moves towards some kind of federal arrangement for Ukraine involving a degree of autonomy for the Donbass region, along the general lines of what remains of Minsk II. Again, that would be nothing new in world affairs. No two cases are identical, and no real example is anywhere near perfect, but federal structures exist in Switzerland and Belgium, among other cases — even the U.S. to an extent. Serious diplomatic efforts might find a solution to this problem, or at least contain the flames.
And the flames are real. Estimates are that some 15,000 people have been killed in conflict in this region since 2014.
That leaves Crimea. On Crimea, the West has two choices. One is to recognize that the Russian annexation is simply a fact of life for now, irreversible without actions that would destroy Ukraine and possibly far more. The other is to disregard the highly likely consequences and to strike heroic gestures about how the U.S. “will never recognize Russia’s purported annexation of Crimea,” as the Joint Statement proclaims, accompanied by many eloquent pronouncements by others who are willing to consign Ukraine to utter catastrophe while advertising their bravery.
Like it or not, those are the choices.
Does Putin want to “occupy all of Ukraine and rebuild the Russian empire?” His announced goals (mainly neutralization) are quite different, including his statement that it would be madness to try to reconstruct the old Soviet Union, but he might have had something like this in mind. If so, it’s hard to imagine that he and his circle still do. For Russia to occupy Ukraine would make its experience in Afghanistan look like a picnic in the park. By now that’s abundantly clear.
Putin does have the military capacity — and judging by Chechnya and other escapades, the moral capacity — to leave Ukraine in smoldering ruins. That would mean no occupation, no Russian empire, and no more Putin.
Our eyes are rightly focused on the mounting horrors of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. It would be a mistake, however, to forget that the Joint Statement is only one of the pleasures that the imperial mind is quietly conjuring up.
A few weeks ago, we discussed President Biden’s National Defense Authorization Act, as little known as the Joint Statement. This brilliant document — again quoting Michael Klare — calls for “an unbroken chain of U.S.-armed sentinel states — stretching from Japan and South Korea in the northern Pacific to Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore in the south and India on China’s eastern flank” — meant to encircle China, including Taiwan, “ominously enough.”
We might ask how China feels about the fact that the U.S. Indo-Pacific command is now reported to be planning to enhance the encirclement, doubling its spending in fiscal year 2022, in part to develop “a network of precision-strike missiles along the so-called first island chain.”
For defense, of course, so the Chinese [government has] no reason for concern.
There is little doubt that Putin’s aggression against Ukraine fails just war theory, and that NATO is also morally responsible for the crisis. But what about Ukraine arming civilians to fight against the invaders? Isn’t this morally justified on the same grounds that resistance against the Nazis was morally justified?
Just war theory, regrettably, has about as much relevance to the real world as “humanitarian intervention,” “responsibility to protect” or “defending democracy.”
On the surface, it seems a virtual truism that a people in arms have the right to defend themselves against a brutal aggressor. But as always in this sad world, questions arise when we think about it a little.
Take the resistance against the Nazis. There could hardly have been a more noble cause.
One can certainly understand and sympathize with the motives of Herschel Grynszpan when he assassinated a German diplomat in 1938; or the British-trained partisans who assassinated the Nazi murderer Reinhard Heydrich in May 1942. And one can admire their courage and passion for justice, without qualification.
That’s not the end, however. The first provided the Nazis with the pretext for the atrocities of Kristallnacht and impelled the Nazi program further toward its hideous outcomes. The second led to the shocking Lidice massacres.
Events have consequences. The innocent suffer, perhaps terribly. Such questions cannot be avoided by people with a moral bone in their bodies. The questions cannot fail to arise when we consider whether and how to arm those courageously resisting murderous aggression.
That’s the least of it. In the present case, we also have to ask what risks we are willing to take of a nuclear war, which will not only spell the end of Ukraine but far beyond, to the truly unthinkable.
It is not encouraging that over a third of Americans favor “taking military action [in Ukraine] even if it risks a nuclear conflict with Russia,” perhaps inspired by commentators and political leaders who should think twice before doing their Winston Churchill impersonations.
Perhaps ways can be found to provide needed arms to the defenders of Ukraine to repel the aggressors while avoiding dire consequences. But we should not delude ourselves into believing that it is a simple matter, to be settled by bold pronouncements.
Do you anticipate dramatic political developments inside Russia if the war lasts much longer or if Ukrainians resist even after formal battles have ended? After all, Russia’s economy is already under siege and could end up with an economic collapse unparalleled in recent history.
I don’t know enough about Russia even to hazard a guess. One person who does know enough at least to “speculate” — and only that, as he reminds us — is Anatol Lieven, whose insights have been a very useful guide all along. He regards “dramatic political developments” as highly unlikely because of the nature of the harsh kleptocracy that Putin has carefully constructed. Among the more optimistic guesses, “the most likely scenario,” Lieven writes, “is a sort of semi-coup, most of which will never become apparent in public, by which Putin and his immediate associates will step down ‘voluntarily’ in return for guarantees of their personal immunity from arrest and their family’s wealth. Who would succeed as president in these circumstances is a totally open question.”
And not necessarily a pleasant question to consider.
Truth is often the first casualty of war, so it’s imperative that all those in power are still held to account during these times. Curtis Daly gives his opinion on troubling authoritarian moves by Volodymyr Zelensky.
Images of burnt flesh from napalm bombs, wounded and dead soldiers, scenes of U.S. soldiers burning the simple huts of Vietnamese villages, eventually turned the public against the war in Vietnam and produced the dreaded affliction, from the ruling class point of view, known as the “Vietnam syndrome.” This collective Post Traumatic Stress Disorder made it impossible for the public to support any foreign military involvement for years.
It took the rulers almost three decades to finally cure the public of this affliction. But the rulers were careful.
The brutal reality of what the U.S. was doing in Afghanistan and Iraq was whitewashed. That is why the images now being brought to the public by the corporate media are so shocking. It has been more than two generations since the U.S. public was exposed to the horrific images of war.
In the 1960s the rulers inadvertently allowed themselves to be undermined by the new television technology that brought the awful reality of imperialist war into the homes of the public. Now, the ruling class operating through its corporate media propaganda arms has been effectively using Ukraine war propaganda, not to increase Anti-war sentiment but to stimulate support for more war!
Incredibly also, the propagandists are pushing a line that essentially says that in the name of “freedom” and supporting Ukraine, the U.S. public should shoulder the sacrifice of higher fuel and food prices. This is on top of the inflation that workers and consumers were already being subjected to coming out of the capitalist covid scandal that devastated millions of workers and the lower stratums of the petit bourgeoisie.
But the war, and now the unfair shouldering of all of the costs of the capitalist crisis of 2008 – 2009, and the impact of covid by the working classes in the U.S., amounts to a capitalist tax. It is levied by the oligarchy on workers to subsidize the defense of the interests of big capital and the conditions that have produced obscene profits, even in the midst of the covid crisis and now, the Ukraine war.
These policies are criminal. While the U.S. continues to pretend that it champions human rights around the world, the failure of the state to protect the fundamental human rights of the citizens and residents in the U.S. is obvious to all, but spoken about by the few, except the Chinese government.
For those who might think that the Chinese criticism of the U.S. is only being driven by politics, and it might be, just a cursory, objective examination of the U.S. state policies over just the last few years reveals a shocking record of systematic human rights abuses that promise to become even more acute as a consequence of the manufactured U.S./NATO war in Ukraine.
The Ongoing Human Rights Crisis
The U.S. working class, and Black working class in particular, never recovered from the economic crisis of 2008 before it was once again ravaged in 2020 with the global capitalist crisis exacerbated by covid. On the heels of those two shocks, today millions of workers are experiencing a permanent state of precarity with evictions, the continued loss of medical coverage, unaffordable housing and food costs, and a capitalist-initiated inflation. The rulers are operating under the belief that with the daily bombardment of war images, U.S. workers and the poor will embrace rising costs of gas and even more increases in the cost of food.
Doesn’t the state have any responsibility to ensure that the economic human rights of the people are fulfilled? No, because liberal human rights practice separates fundamental human rights – such as the right to health, food, housing, education, a means to subsist at an acceptable level of material culture, leisure, and life-long social security – from democratic discourse on what constitutes the human rights responsibility of the state and the interests it must uphold in order to be legitimate.
The non-recognition of the indivisibility of human rights that values economic human rights to an equal level as civil and political rights, exposed the moral and political contradictions of the liberal human rights framework. The massive economic displacements with hunger, unemployment, and unnecessary deaths among the population in the United States, with a disproportionate rate of sickness and hospitalization among non-white workers and the poor in the U.S., were never condemned as violations of human rights.
War and Economic Deprivation the Systemic Contradictions of the Western colonial/capitalist Project
The war being waged against global humanity by the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination is a hybrid war that utilizes all the tools it has at its disposal – sanctions, mass incarceration, coups, drugs, disinformation, culture, subversion, murder, and direct military engagement to further white power. The Eurocentrism and “White Lives Matters More Movement” represented by the coverage of the war in Ukraine stripped away any pretense to the supposed liberal commitment to global humanity. The white-washing of the danger of the ultra-right and neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian military and state and the white ethno-nationalism that the conflict generated across the Western world demonstrated, once again, how “racialism” and the commitment to the fiction of white supremacy continues to trump class and class struggle and the ability to build a multi-national, class based anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist opposition in the North.
It is primarily workers from Russia, the Donbas and Ukraine who are dying. But as in the run-up to the first imperialist war in Europe, known as World War One, workers with the encouragement of their national bourgeoisie, are lining up behind their rulers to support the capitalist redivision taking place, a redivision that can only be completed by war as long as capitalism and capitalist competition continues. Yet, instead of “progressives and radicals” joining forces to resist the mobilization to war, they are finding creative ways to align themselves with the interests of their ruling classes in support of the colonial/capitalist project.
In the meantime, the people of Afghanistan are starving, with thousands of babies now dying of malnutrition because the U.S. stole their nation’s assets. Estimates suggest that unless reversed, more people there will die from U.S./EU imposed sanctions than died during the twenty year long war. And the impact of the war in Ukraine with the loss of wheat exports from Ukraine and Russia resulting not only in rising food prices globally but in some places like East Africa, resulting in death from famine.
In the U.S. where we witness the most abysmal record of covid failure on the planet, the virus will continue to ravage the population, with a disproportionate number who get sick and die being the poorest and those furthest from whiteness.
The lackeys of capital playing the role of democratic representatives claim that there is no money to bring a modicum of relief to workers represented in the mildly reformist package known as Build Back Better. Yet, the Brown University Costs of War Project estimates that the wars waged by the United States in this century have cost $8 trillion and counting, with another $8 trillion that will be spent over the next ten years on the military budget if costs remain constant from the $778 billion just allocated.
No rational human being desires war and conflict. The horrors of war that the public are finally being exposed to because it was brought to Europe again, the most violent continent on the planet, should call into question all of the brutal and unjustified wars that the U.S. and its flunky allies waged throughout the global South over the last seventy years. Unfortunately, because of the hierarchy of the value of human beings, the images of war in Ukraine are not translating into a rejection of war, but instead a rejection of war in Europe and on white Europeans.
This means that the wars will continue and we must fight, often alone, because as Bob Marley said in his song “War”:
Until the philosophy which hold one race superior
And another
Inferior
Is finally
And permanently
Discredited
And abandoned
Everywhere is war
Me say war
Few would forget the antics of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison who, as Treasurer, entered Parliament with a lump of coal and proceeded to praise it with the enthusiasm of a fetish worshipper. “Don’t be afraid,” he told fellow parliamentarians. “Don’t be scared.”
He has, with deep reluctance, conceded that climate change is taking place and, with even deeper reluctance, that human agency might be involved. But under his leadership, the fossil fuel lobby of Australia has no reason to fear. Denialism has simply become more covert.
This month, Industry Minister Angus Taylor, the government’s premier ignoramus on climate change, promised AU$50.3 million to fossil fuel entities to guarantee Australia against “the devastating impacts of a gas supply shortfall, as seen recently in Europe.” His government was “accelerating priority gas infrastructure projects that will protect Australia from potential energy shortages, keep pressure on prices and create jobs in regional Australia as part of our plan for a stronger future.”
Indeed, the lobby has every reason to be delighted with that other recent announcement by Morrison to enlist Australian coal in Ukraine’s war effort. With a shamelessness only he can muster, the Prime Minister has managed to make digging and exporting coal, even in small amounts at great cost, virtuous. In an official statement, Morrison claimed that, “in response to a direct request from Ukraine, Australia will donate 70,000 tonnes of thermal coal. This will help Ukraine’s power generators operating and supplying electricity to the power grid at this critical time.”
Little by way of logistical or pricing detail was given. We know who benefits the most from this. A triumphalist Whitehaven Coal will supply it, and the cost to the Australian taxpayer will be in the order of AU$31 million. Given that Whitehaven Coal has been a Liberal Party donor – AU$98,000 has been given over the last five years – the whiff of something rotten in the land of coal is strong.
The company’s board would have been delighted by the recent spike in its share prices. It also remains unclear whether the company offered a discount on the coal to the government. One thing is beyond doubt: Canberra is offering to foot the transport bill.
The coal, according to the Prime Minister, was needed “before the end of May and we have arranged the shipping for that to take place and are working with other countries to ensure it can get to Ukraine.” With beaming delight, Morrison could say that “it’s our coal. We dug it up. We’ve arranged the ship. We’ve put it on the ship and we’re sending it there to Ukraine to help power up their resistance and to give that encouragement.”
Richard Denniss, an economist based at the Australia Institute, is doubtful about the whole operation. “Sending a ship load of coal to Ukraine via Poland is just conservative virtue signalling.” If anything, the measure was insensible, given that Poland itself had “lots of coal. If we really thought Ukraine needed coal (I doubt it) we could just give them some money to buy Polish coal.”
The request is also slightly odd given that it was conveyed to Canberra from Poland itself. “It was made to me,” claimed Morrison, “through the Polish Prime Minister and we’re very pleased to be able to meet that need.”
The amount of thermal coal is also raising eyebrows amongst those not inclined towards astrological numbers and fantasy projections. Australia is sending a mere 10th of Ukraine thermal coal reserves, described by Resources Minister Keith Pitt as making “a real difference for the people of Ukraine by providing continued energy security, ensuring continued electricity supply to homes and industry”. With little justification, Morrison is also making the claim that a million Ukrainian homes will be powered, though left the duration of that effort in doubt.
The answer to such a crisis is not coal nor, in fact, fossil fuel exports masquerading as humanitarian rescue. Bernard Keane of Crikeymakes a relevant observation: “the clear lesson of Putin’s aggression in energy terms is the need to get out of fossil fuels as quickly as possible, removing the volatility and strategic weakness that reliance on global commodities brings.”
Whether the coal will ever reach its intended recipients is a question worth asking. If the coal transits through Poland, it will have to be transported via rail to Ukraine, which raises issues of viable infrastructure. Sea access is also bound to be unlikely, and even if that is taken, one analyst pithily notes that a vessel “should be quite a sitting target if the Russians knew what it was and where it was coming from.”
The Morrison government has made a habit of celebrating the announcement rather than the execution of detail. Mendacity and incompetence are twinned in this government’s insignia, and Ukrainian officials best ready themselves for disappointment.
You know you are being aggressively propagandized about Ukraine by the mass media and by Silicon Valley. You can feel it in your guts. Everyone can feel it, on some level. It feels gross.
The split on this issue is between those who trust this gut feeling and those who choose to psychologically compartmentalize away from it. Because if you don’t compartmentalize away from it, the implications of this are very frightening. It means pretty much everything you’ve been told your whole life about the government, about your nation, about the news media, and about the way the world works, has been a lie.
But that is the basic reality. If you’ve already seen this, you won’t experience cognitive dissonance when you observe it in the unprecedented imperial narrative management campaign we’re seeing with Ukraine. If you haven’t seen it, you’ll likely experience a lot of cognitive dissonance if you try to square your gut feeling that you’re being propagandized about Ukraine with your belief that your favorite politicians and news sources always tell you the objective truth. And you will compartmentalize accordingly.
That’s just how we’re wired. Our minds are wired to select for cognitive ease and forcefully reject information which challenges our present worldview. Pushing past the cognitive discomfort and facing reality is the only way to come to real understanding.
If this picture was printed out and framed, and then used as a bludgeon to bash you in the face whenever you looked at an electronic screen, it would feel how all this Ukraine war propaganda feels when you haven’t swallowed the official narrative.
People get outraged when I say we are being aggressively propagandized about Ukraine, but this fact is not seriously in dispute. The mass media have been relatively straightforward about it, though of course they fail to mention their own role in the propaganda campaign.
It seems like those who are new to the concept think that “propaganda” means making up fictional stories whole cloth, so they mistakenly assume that this is a claim that Russia never invaded and Ukrainians aren’t dying and suffering. But all it really means is that the narrative framing is manipulated. They’re not lying that there’s a war, they’re just manipulating the way people think about the war. How it’s happening, who’s to blame for it, whose agendas are served by getting it started and keeping it going, etc.
No good liar lies all the time. The best liars very seldom tell full-blown lies, always preferring to lie by omission, by distortion, by half-truth, by disproportionate focus, and by uncritically reporting other people’s lies in a way that suggests they’re true.
It’s all moving so fast now. Censorship and propaganda, the two arms of imperial narrative control, are escalating like nothing we’ve ever seen before. The doors on information control are being slammed and bolted shut all around the world as fast as the empire managers can get away with it.
And of course Australia is on the front line of this war against mental sovereignty:
And it’s because of all this intrusive perception management that we’re somehow simultaneously the closest we’ve been to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis, yet still collectively focused more on talking about sports and celebrity gossip as though everything is fine and normal.
This is something we could actually oppose, if enough of us had enough unpolluted information about what’s happening. This threat is not some inevitable force of nature that is happening to us, it’s something that is being done to us. By people. People with names and government offices.
If the nukes do start flying and we find ourselves in our final moments, will we really feel okay about having done nothing about it? About failing to mobilize in favor of de-escalation and detente? About being the first species in history to go extinct due to psychological compartmentalization and a reluctance to annoy government officials?
The only thing sadder than watching the world die would be watching it die without having done anything to try to save it.
The saying that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism is directly related to people’s inability to imagine anything other than increasingly aggressive escalations between nuclear powers in the competition-based systems we live under. People literally cannot imagine any deviation from this power struggle between nations, even if continuing along this trajectory means our complete annihilation.
And it really doesn’t need to be this way. There’s no good reason nations can’t cooperate with each other for the good of everyone without trying to dominate each other. There’s no good reason we can’t move from competition-based models of domination to collaboration-based models of human thriving.
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If the US empire truly believed its own role in this war was just, it wouldn't be unleashing unprecedented levels of censorship, blacking out Russian media, and propagandizing like it's already World War 3. https://t.co/BAbsGOFFyS
Michael Parenti said years ago that the ultimate neocon plan (which today has become simply the mainstream orthodoxy on US foreign policy) is a confrontation with disobedient governments, the ultimate target being China, to ensure the supremacy of American global capitalism. There’s no good reason this needs to happen. There’s no good reason the defensive Russia-China tandem described years ago by Gilbert Doctorow needs to be targeted in the way it’s currently being targeted by this war that was deliberately provoked by western powers.
They are lying to you. They are lying when they say they tried to prevent this war. They are lying when they say de-escalation is impossible. They are lying when they say World War 3 is inevitable, or is upon us already. Peace and detente are very possible. All that would need to happen is the dropping away of this notion that this planet of ours needs to be dominated by a single power structure. That’s all we’d need for the threat of nuclear armageddon to go away. That’s all we’d need to ensure humanity’s progress into the future.
We can simply move from endless escalation to diplomacy, from diplomacy to de-escalation, from de-escalation to detente, from detente to true peace, and from true peace to collaboration and human thriving. The only thing stopping that from happening is this insane drive to dominate.
Don’t believe the liars.
________________________
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Chisinau, Moldova – Nestled above the Black Sea, between the war zone in Ukraine and the eastern limits of NATO territory in Romania, sits the tiny, oft-forgotten landlocked nation of Moldova. Among the poorest countries in Europe by just about any relevant metric, it has been overwhelmed by Ukrainian refugees in the three weeks since the outset of what Russia calls its “special military operation” (спецоперация) in Ukraine.
More than 359,000 people of the 3.38 million who have fled Ukraine since February 24 have passed in and out of the country, according to the United Nations Commissioner for Refugees. Roman Macovenco of the Moldovan Consular Directorate confirmed at least 300,000 Ukrainians had crossed through Moldova.
While in no way excusing Russia’s criminal invasion, NATO expansion eastward increased its likelihood. Although we’ll never know if the war would not have happened under different circumstances, after a month of Russian violence against Ukraine the two countries’ negotiators have reportedly agreed that it will reject joining NATO as part of a peace pact.
Russia has long objected to NATO’s eastward expansion, particularly Ukraine’s de facto incorporation into the alliance. It repeatedly raised objections to NATO encircling its territory in the months leading up to its illegal invasion.
Last week the head of the European Union’s foreign policy, Josep Borrell, even admitted the push to expand NATO into Ukraine was an error.
Every day that passes in Russia’s war on Ukraine, another mall or theater or maternity hospital is vaporized. Cities are under siege. Each day inches closer to a breaking strain, a point that — once crossed — risks a plunge into global nuclear confrontation.
Meanwhile, the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are deploying economic sanctions, hoping they will convince Russian President Vladimir Putin and his supporters that it is time to go home. By any metric, the sanctions that have been levied against Russia, Putin and the ruling oligarchs are massive. Nations, banks, businesses, whole currencies have been denied them across the board, and more are still in the offing if this thing grinds on.
Before an emergency NATO summit in Brussels today, President Joe Biden is widely expected to announce a new round of sanctions, along with a tightening of the current ones. Meanwhile, a bipartisan clutch of senators is working with the Treasury Department to lock down more than $130 billion in Russian gold reserves.
There are three main perils to levying such ruinous sanctions, two that are well known and a third hardly discussed. The first is the danger of Putin deciding the economic damage being done to his country amounts to an existential threat, which then motivates him to menace the world with his nuclear arsenal to make them stop. A NATO move to further stymie Russia’s petroleum industry could elicit such a response, which is why the issue is being handled like a grenade with the pin half-pulled.
The second is the bitter harm done to the Russian people, who are largely innocent of Putin’s crime beyond some being duped into supporting it by his state media. Putin does not seem to care if Russians starve in the darkness he has brought down upon them; his yacht-hiding pals on speed-dial with 12 numbers to the left of the decimal on their bank accounts are his primary, secondary and tertiary concern.
The wrenching effect of those sanctions must therefore be our concern, for they are deeply concerning. Are they having the desired effect? Are they putting pressure on Putin’s allies, or are they merely damaging broad swaths of the Russian population? “The experience of U.S. sanctions’ impacts around the world is important,” writes Khury Petersen-Smith for Truthout, “especially because Washington and other Western capitals hold up sanctions as an alternative to war. We should understand them instead, however, as a weapon of war. Their devastating impact results in widespread suffering that may be quieter or less visible to most in the U.S. than an invasion or airstrikes are, but that is no less deadly.”
On paper, at least, Putin’s pals are taking it in the chops. The truth, however, brings us to the third peril: the fiction of economic hardship, which is playing out among Russia’s wealthy elite even now.
“Let us first recall that the freezing of assets held by Putin and his relatives is already part of the arsenal of sanctions that have been tried for several years,” explains economist and author Thomas Piketty. “The problem is that the freezes applied so far remain largely symbolic. They only concern a few dozen people, and can be circumvented by using nominees, especially as nothing has been done to systematically measure and cross-reference the real estate and financial portfolios held by each of them.”
It always seems to come back to real estate, to land. Once upon a time, land ownership granted one the right to vote. Later, real estate became the preferred playground for money laundering. Now, in the age of the kleptocratic oligarch, land serves to hide assets while allowing the asset-holder to dodge international sanctions levied against their home country.
These sanctions are supposed to be cramping the style of Putin’s oligarchs to such a degree that they gather the will to drag him back from the abyss … but this tactic will only succeed if the oligarchs — and Putin, himself a billionaire many times over — are the ones who are truly impacted.
This is not happening; ordinary people are suffering in their place, and that suffering only promises to grow. The solution, according to Piketty, is to deploy sanctions that are far more specifically targeted than those currently in use. It would be the difference between using a scalpel and using a broadsword.
“To bring the Russian state to heel, we must focus sanctions on the thin social layer of multimillionaires upon which the regime relies: a group much larger than a few dozen people, but much narrower than the Russian population in general,” argues Piketty. “To give you an idea, one could target the people who hold over €10m ($11m) in real estate and financial assets, or about 20,000 people, according to the latest available data. This represents 0.02% of the Russian adult population (currently 110 million)…. To implement this type of measure, it would be sufficient for western countries to finally set up an international financial registry (also known as a ‘global financial registry’ or GFR) that would keep track of who owns what in the various countries.”
Unfortunately, such measures will be exceedingly difficult to impose, and for one reason: Russia’s billionaires are sustained and protected by the same financial system that sustains and protects Western and Chinese billionaires. The latter group will not willingly abandon these self-serving rules of capitalism, even if it means allowing Putin and his allies to remain largely untouched amid the suffering of the people.
Do these Western wealthy elites support Putin and his war? Perhaps, but not nearly as much as they support the mechanisms of capitalism that build their fortunes. If those mechanisms are dismantled in order to punish the Russians, they will no longer serve the billionaire class as a whole, and that is not to be tolerated, no matter how high the bodies pile up. “So why has no progress still not been made in this direction?” asks Piketty. “For one simple reason: western wealthy people fear that such transparency will ultimately harm them.”
Wealth must be extracted, wealth must be protected: These are the only two laws that really matter to that sub-segment of the global populace. As Jacob Broom was once noted to say, “Control the coinage and the courts; let the rabble have the rest.”
That all this plays out beneath the shroud of war is the cruelest of ironies, for what is war but capitalism at its most robust, the most lucrative of all human endeavors? Every war lines the pockets of those who peddle the weapons, and among the peddlers in this war are more than a few of Putin’s friends. Try to imagine convincing the Carlyle Group to make George W. Bush back down from his Iraq invasion. Never in hell would that happen; the money was too good.
At the barest minimum, we need to do better than the current sanctions, and we need to do so now. Piketty offers a blueprint for that endeavor, but there are surely others to consider as well. We need to knock down the financial barricades that separate the billionaires from even the notion of justice. More than that, we need to disenthrall ourselves from the shameful use of mass sanctions and collective punishment. Every day that passes inches us closer to Armageddon, and not even an oligarch can survive a nuke. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
The Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine has provoked strong reactions across the world, from empathetic solidarity with the Ukrainian people to crass anti-Russian bigotry. Looking to ride the wave of both sentiments is a domestic foreign policy establishment that is eager to restore the U.S.’s global standing and sense of historic purpose — and perhaps their own soiled reputations after two decades of a disastrous “global war on terror.”
“The post-9/11 war on terror period of American hubris, and decline, is now behind us,” declared the Obama administration’s former deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes. “We’ve been trying to get to a new era for a long time. And now I think Putin’s invasion has necessitated an American return to the moral high ground.”
For the veteran foreign affairs reporter George Packer, Vladimir Putin’s war should jolt Americans out of the melancholy “realism” of a declining superpower and remind us of “a truth we didn’t want to see: that our core interests lie in the defense of [democratic and liberal] values.”
Then there is former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who revealed more than he intended when he declared that “Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has ended Americans’ 30-year holiday from history.”
Only a Pentagon bureaucrat could so easily dismiss the epochal events of recent years: a pandemic, an economic meltdown, an uprising for Black lives, and the acceleration of rising temperatures that threaten to destroy this era of human civilization. Sure, you can picture Gates saying, that stuff is kind of important, but a land war in Eurasia? Now that’s real history.
But there’s a common and depressing framework shared by Gates, Packer and even Rhodes, who once memorably described the Beltway foreign relations officialdom as “the Blob” which the rest of the Obama administration was trying to disrupt.
The U.S. has had ample opportunities in recent years, under Democratic and Republican administrations, to lead the way in defending liberal values and taking the moral high ground on such pivotal issues around the world as vaccine access, migrant rights and renewable energy conversion. Yet these centrist Democrats only seem to envision U.S. global leadership in the 21st century being restored through a revived 20th-century Cold War with Russia — and probably China.
Foreign policy elites might be especially eager to restore the U.S. to its former position of global strength because they are the ones who did so much to destroy it. Gates, Packer, and almost every other Washington insider initially supported the 2003 Iraq War, another shockingly brazen invasion that rested on legal fictions and false delusions of instant success.
The failures of that war, along with the Afghanistan war and “counterterror activities” in 83 other countries, have drained the U.S. treasury of an astounding $8 trillion, mortally wounded Washington’s global credibility, and contributed to the rising authoritarianism at home that helped Donald Trump win the presidency in 2016. Now “the Blob” is saying we can undo America’s decline … through another endless war.
Far from marking a break with the mistakes of its imperial adventures 20 years ago, this sudden consensus that we are in a new Cold War echoes the post-9/11 talk from the Bush administration about a “generational conflict” that would last decades and extend the fight against “terrorism” into countries across the globe.
Instead, the primary form of U.S. assistance has been an “unprecedented” flow of weaponry into the country. That’s because the Blob is looking to make Ukraine a costly and bloody battlefield for its Russian invaders.
Hillary Clinton was typically clumsy when she cited U.S. aid to Afghan militants fighting Russia in the 1980s as a potential model for what to do now in Ukraine. But while most American officials have the savvy to avoid proposing a repeat of the course of actions that ultimately led to the formation of al-Qaeda and the September 11 attacks, Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic points out that many U.S. officials share Clinton’s interest in turning Ukraine into a Russian quagmire.
Fortunately, the Biden administration (for now) has clearly ruled out imposing a no-fly zone that could lead to a catastrophic and possibly nuclear U.S.-Russia war (despite the protestations of an alarmingly hawkish White House press corps). But we should be clear that Washington regards Ukrainians as a propaganda tool for restoring the U.S.’s reputation, rather than 40 million people whose lives will be further devastated if their country becomes the site of a protracted war.
To be clear, the surge of enthusiasm for confronting Russia is being driven by the Putin government’s belligerent actions, which have already caused thousands of deaths, created 3 million refugees, and unraveled what were already frayed relations among the U.S., Russia, China and Western Europe.
People around the world should oppose the invasion and build solidarity with Ukraine, not through a new Cold War but by echoing the demands coming from Ukrainian and global activists to welcome refugees, abolish Ukraine’s debt, revive global disarmament talks and negotiate an immediate end to the war.
For anyone concerned that these measures don’t do enough to punish Vladimir Putin, there is an obvious and globally beneficial strategy for countering an autocratic government whose economy rests on oil exports. If wealthy governments had spent the last decade converting their economies to renewable energy sources, writes Naomi Klein, “Putin would not be able to flout international law and opinion as he has been doing so flagrantly, secure in the belief that he will still have customers for his increasingly profitable hydrocarbons.”
Instead, the Biden administration is looking to counter the loss of Russian fossil fuels by increasing global and domestic oil production. Like Russia, U.S. politics is a declining empire that has been captured by oil companies and other oligarchs; our democracy is so broken that a single West Virginia coal baron has held his entire party’s program hostage for the past year.
More generally, the U.S. has been on a slow-motion path (OK, maybe a little faster during the Trump years) toward the same trends of autocracy, oligarchy and hyper-nationalism that more greatly afflict Russia. Liberal foreign policy hawks like George Packer and Ben Rhodes see these trends and think they can be reversed through a new generational conflict that revives the country’s national spirit.
That sounds a bit like an American version of Putin’s logic, which only shows how much both countries were commonly shaped (and misshaped) by 50 years of the original Cold War. As the deadline for decisive climate action gets closer, the world can’t afford to waste another half-century on a new one.
Investigation reveals former rebel-held areas are being levelled under the guise of mine clearance to make way for high-end developments – leaving refugees nothing to return to
The Syrian regime is bulldozing former rebel-held neighbourhoods in Damascus under the guise of mine clearance to make space for a “new Syria” of upmarket new building developments and pristine gardens.
An investigation by the Guardian, Lighthouse Reports, Syrian Investigative Reporting for Accountability Journalism (Siraj) and Rozana Radio has analysed the almost wholesale demolition of Qaboun, a Damascus suburb, one of many neighbourhoods in the capital that is being cleared and redeveloped beyond recognition after former residents have either been displaced by fighting or become refugees abroad.
The cultural vandals and iconoclasts have been busy of late, removing Russians from the stables at short notice and demanding what might be called a necessary affirmation of disloyalty. It’s all good to talk about world peace and the resolution of disputes, but that will hardly do for the flag bearing choirs who have discovered their object of evil. Do you hate Vladimir Putin? If so, good. Do you love freedom? Well, of course, as everyone does with squeaking enthusiasm, even if they cannot define it.
The main interest is never in the second answer, but the first. Putin must be condemned and banished from your conscience, your mind and history. Ignore the fact that he is the elected leader of a country – he remains a tyrant to be condemned to liberal democratic execration. Best go about punishing people innocent of this fact.
Such a cringeworthy approach has seduced and trapped some able minds over the years. During the Cold War, the division of camps and ideologies demanded unthinking loyalty, not so much to truth but a version of it long lost in political drag and the hypocrisy of appearances. On September 22, 1947, delegates from Communist parties across the European spectrum heard the infantile ravings of the main Soviet delegate Andrei Zhdanov, who suggested with nether clenching tediousness that the world was divided between the “imperialist and democratic camp”. The US, allied with Great Britain and France, made up the former. “The anti-fascist forces comprise the second camp”, rooted in the USSR and its various, anomalously named “new democracies.”
In the United States, divisions were also being marked by the mind ravaging nature of ideological conformism. Executive Order 9835, issued by President Harry Truman, focused on whether “reasonable grounds exist for belief that the person involved is disloyal” with any organisation designated by the Attorney General to be “totalitarian, Fascist, Communist, or subversive”, or advocating or approving the forceful denial of constitutional rights to other persons or seeking “to alter the form of Government of the United States by unconstitutional means.”
The President’s Temporary Commission on Employee Loyalty (TCEL), packed with representatives from six government departments overseen by Special Assistant to the Attorney General A. Devitt Vanech, dealt with assessing federal loyalty standards and developing procedures to expunge or disqualify “any disloyal of subversive person” from federal service.
In this atmosphere, the vulgar and coarse Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy operated, at least for a time, with pugnacious impunity, claiming in his infamous Wheeling, West Virginia speech that 57 communists had found their way into the US State Department. The House Un-American Activities Committee also worked aggressively to advance the spirit of demonisation, ruining careers and blackening reputations. The stupid tend to linger in political accusation.
The Ukraine War is now making Russian citizens, at the behest of various quarters, undertake acts of purification in various foreign theatres. They are being told to engage in crude demonstrations of loyalty (or, in some cases, disloyalty). Admit you hate Putin, and you can attend a tournament to earn your crust.
UK Sports Minister Nigel Huddleston has taken a keen interest in this daft effort, hoping to encourage the organisers of Wimbledon, the All England Law Tennis Club (AELTC) to take a more severe approach to players from “pariah states” as long as they do not include such angelic wonders as Saudi Arabia. Before a select parliamentary committee, Huddleston noted that, “Many countries have agreed that they will not allow representatives from Russia to compete. There are also visa issues as well. When it comes to individuals, that is more complex.”
Complexity and Huddleston do not get along. “We need some potential assurance that they are not supporters of Putin and we are considering what requirements we may need to try to get some assurances along those lines.”
Tennis player Daniil Medvedev and his colleagues are facing the prospect that not engaging in public denouncement of the Kremlin will be insufficient to enable them to compete. They are already not permitted to compete under the Russian flag, and they are being told that a Russian winning Wimbledon would be unpardonable for the glorious British tournament. Their country has already been banned from competing in team events such as the Davis Cup and Billie Jean King tournaments.
Across the sporting world, players from Russia now see their country barred by the International Ski Federation, Formula One, hosting the European Champions League Final, the indefensibly boring European curling championships and the International Biathlon Union.
Such expectations are so extreme as to remind one of Cold War parallels. An occasional voice of reason can be found, even if they come from an individual who has no reason to fear repercussions himself. Australian tennis commentator and former player Todd Woodbridge told Nine’s Sports Sunday that this line of reasoning placed one on “slippery and dangerous ground.” Everyone knew “they have families back in whatever part of Russia they are from, and you do not want to be on the wrong side of that, because your family will pay the price.”
Woodbridge is a reliably unworldly sort, but these are sensible, humane words lost in the feverish hysteria that will cake and cloak discussion in this field for months. From culture to sporting fixtures, the smug, Putin hating establishment, under direction from their various advisors, are being told that denigrating and cancelling the representatives of Barbarian Rus is the way to go. Individuals will be crucified.
The incredible market for human slaughter called war existed thousands of years ago but it was a corner grocery store compared to the multi-trillion dollar moral sewer that represents modern mass murder. Part of what enables imperial and even lesser powers to slaughter at will is a rule book drawn up long ago when there might have been a possibility to just have military personnel chopping one another to bits while leaving the general populace out of the bloodletting. That certainly ended before the 20th century but what has transpired since then and up to the present is, to cite a couple of over-used therefore recognizable labels, a genocidal holocaust that has burned, bombed, shot, stabbed, smothered and shattered bodies, reducing humans to unrecognizable bloody pulp by the hundreds of millions.
The hideous reality of war and its public relations and adverting departments that allegedly inform us about it has people accepting its horror as some sort of natural occurrence like sunset, tides, weather, rather than seeing it as caused by ruling powers battling over their wealth struggles which reduce humanity to commit mass murder under the pretense of it being the natural order of things. Further, rules have been drawn by upper class educated folks with doctoral degrees legalizing mass murder who teach us just what is the proper way to bash in skulls, burn people to death and rape and murder in a supposedly civilized way.
The alleged morality of humans accepting one form of insanely hysterical murder as long as it adheres to a guidebook on the proper form of slaughter should make us all grateful there is no judgmental, vindictive old testament deity or we’d all have been destroyed after the second world war let alone after our profitable feasts of death since then when we’ve murdered even more.
This closely guarded secret that humanity suffers in wars but only when rationalizations of bloody filth called “war crimes” are committed is currently being used and abused in a form of language, thought and moral degeneracy that may finally end when human consciousness, especially American, rejects the degenerate advertising and public relations blitz posing as reporting to blame Russians for what is called by language perverts their “war crime” against the Ukrainian government. Said government is a product of a U.S. financed insurrection that dumped an elected president who favored Russia for a western political pimp favoring market forces, which include some modern Nazis.
While he has become a celebrity among morals free political employees of ruling power by informing everyone to send him weapons so that there can be more bloodshed of the loving, violence free western kind, the western world has increased military spending to record breaking figures. Our rulers, media employee shepherds, see to it that our population is reduced to sheep as much of the world is angrier than ever at the machinations of the warfare business though you’d never know it if all you had was the western media called a free press. They create mentally brutalized souls into paying hundreds of dollars for taco-pizza-burgers and calling it free food.
While Ukrainians have been dying by the thousands for the past eight years, subject to a US/NATO financed and controlled assault, Americans and the west have known absolutely nothing of what was going on and not until Russian retaliation have we heard repeated use of words like brutal, savage, slaughter and worse, to condemn what under normal American circumstances would be called a form of legal police action to purify the world and see to it that peace, love and tranquility would prevail as we slaughtered. Maybe after everyone was dead?
A nation that leads all others in conducting wars against weaker countries and murdering hundreds of thousands, at the least, and millions, at the worst, is not only bellowing murderous nonsense but manipulating good, well meaning people into swallowing editorial garbage that has some decent folks almost ready to pawn their pets to send money to suffering Ukrainians. Even worse, some perverted by venomous outpourings of what would be called vicious hate speech if conducted by anyone else, are ready to accept the potential of nuclear war in order to stop the horrible slaughter which mostly exists between the ears and comes out of the mouths of our thought police working overtime for our ruling powers.
A recent story headlined a murderous, bloody, brutal assault by Russians, which had killed two people at the time the story was filed. Sadly but horrendously over-stated in a nation which kills 4-5 Americans every hour in our private transport system of undeclared road wars to get us to work, shop, school, and conduct other freedom loving democratic economic action. This while the sanctions against Russia are causing serious economic pain the world over, including to Americans, while military spending and the mass murder business that is the backbone of our incredibly gross national product is growing faster and more dangerously and fossil fuel interests profit more than ever as environmental destruction proceeds at a more menacing pace.
This assault on reason, combined with the rape of language and the reduction of public consciousness to the level of a nation of insects, is really only an update of what has been going on for more than 100 years concerning Russia. The assault on that nation began in 1917 when the Russian revolution threatened capitalism, its global center then as now in the United States. America immediately invaded along with a group of its future lapdogs which eventually became NATO after the Second World War. The idea of a return to humanity’s roots by building a society based on communal cooperation rather than competitive actions which created wonderful benefits for some but only by reducing others to dreadful lives was too much for fanatics of the fundamentalist church of capital.
Our primitive communistic survival in the days before we destroyed hunter-gatherer people meant that when the hunt was successful, everyone ate meat and when it wasn’t, everyone ate what was gathered. This was thousands of years before vegan diets and anti-meat worship among good people who comfortably house 136 million pets in a nation where more than 500,000 humans are without shelter. The pet business was good for more than 104 billion in 2020, a mass of economic clout but still chump change compared to the 778 billion for war, which involves 750 American bases in 80 foreign countries for something calling itself “defense”. This protected folks like George Floyd from the brutal, savage, bloodthirsty fiend Putin, but was totally helpless to defend him from a few Americans with badges.
A communist ideal which held that a thousand people and a thousand loaves of bread should mean a loaf of bread for everyone sickened rich capitalists who insisted that some should get ten loaves each and the rest be damned, which is the gross foundation dressed in economic jargon that would make a house of prostitution a citadel of love. Capital said that just as sex workers made a decent living by using their private parts to make private profits for their pimps, workers of all kinds could live comfortably if they just did their jobs and didn’t ask any questions. Their media saw to it that unquestioners became everyday people.
The social seeds planted by people like Marx and Engels in the 19th century came to fruition early in the 20th in Russia, and the vicious assault on that nation began, then as now, from its headquarters in America. After 70 years of continuous physical and mental assault finally helped cause a breakdown of the Soviet Union and a return to capitalism, that was still not enough and the U.S. and its imperial lackeys kept up the war and its present experience which threatens the worst outcome for humanity. This will hopefully not only bring China and Russia closer but the people of the USA and global humanity together to transcend the danger by helping to end the degeneracy of warfare and create peace via the end of an imperial crusade to further enrich billionaires and their upper class servants while increasing mass poverty and the environmental threat to us all.
With daily by the minute assaults on consciousness reducing other wise good people to hateful idiocy demanding death for the savage Putin and evil Russians, there is glee among the perverted political economic leadership of the war business. They number a tiny group with power supposedly democratic while they brainwash people into believing autocracy – a term most hardly understand – is in charge everywhere but where it exists; in what we have been taught to believe is the free world. Benign (?) America billionaires become malevolently evil (ominous background music) Russian oligarchs, according to our mind shapers who neglect to point out they keep their wealth in the same banks – mostly American or at least using American dollars – to perform as charming space travelers or deranged killers, depending on national origin.
This perverse market freedom continues to mean imperial abuse by one nation, ours, while taxpayers absorb a debt of 30 trillion dollars paying for the empire which is bringing us all closer to a point at which we will have little time left as a human race. We need to begin acting like one very soon. That means far more than waving a Ukrainian flag and sending paychecks to the pimps of war, but no longer accepting their crimes against nature and beginning to act like what we are: a human race badly in need of global democracy to stop all wars, not just those we are told are the wrong way to butcher humans, and begin life. That calls for the end of the post World War II domination of the American empire and this present horror is hopefully a sign that it will be so. We need to turn off the anti-social media that insure further private profit and ultimate public loss and turn on humanity’s original instinct for cooperation. And hurry.
