Category: Russia

  • Ukrainian Pacifist’s Message to the World: U.S., NATO & Russia Share Responsibility to Avoid War

    NATO officials have joined the U.S. and other Western nations in saying they have yet to see evidence that Russia is pulling back some troops near the shared border with Ukraine, as Russia claimed earlier this week. We speak with Yurii Sheliazhenko, executive secretary of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, who says, “Both great powers of the West and the East share equal responsibility to avoid escalation of war in Ukraine and beyond Ukraine.”

    Please check back later for full transcript.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

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    Months of frenzied speculation about an imminent Russian invasion of Kiev by Western journalists, think tanks, and politicians culminated on February 15 with Moscow reducing its military footprint near Ukraine’s border.

    The withdrawal came one day beforePresident Joe Biden’s administration inexactly forecast a phantom incursion.

    Panic was stoked to a perplexing degree. Atlantic Council representative Melinda Haring declared on February 11 that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “big weekend plans” forthcoming in Ukraine, including cutting off the nation’s power and heat, knocking out its entire navy and air force, killing a number of general staff in order to install a pro-Russian president, and resorting to “full-scale military invasion if Ukraine doesn’t give in.”

    When none of this came to pass over the weekend, Haring meekly claimed emotions were “running high,” and she’d “let them get the better” of her. She said she would be “more judicious” in future.Still, Haring complained of “Russian trolls,” and as Russia withdrew forces, she conveniently reframed the narrative. “We’ve been so focused on Russian troops and tanks that we missed Moscow’s strategy: strangle Ukraine’s economy and sap the resolve of its people.”

    Almost as baffling and bizarre was British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss boldly asserting on January 22 that London possessed “information” indicating Moscow planned to forcibly install a puppet government in Kiev. Forces would invade Ukraine and mount a coup through the help of a quintet of Ukrainian politicians with alleged links to Russian intelligence.

    “The information being released today shines a light on the extent of Russian activity designed to subvert Ukraine, and is an insight into Kremlin thinking,” Truss stated.

    An Illogical Coup Leader

    When asked to substantiate the claims, British officials were at a loss, and also refused to clarify how the information was obtained and verified.  

    These claims rapidly circulated. The New York Times praised Britain’s reckless inflaming of a highly volatile situation as “muscular.” But the media also acknowledged Truss “provided no evidence” to support the bombshell allegations.

    In an ironic twist, Yevhen Murayev, a former Ukrainian MP named by London as the Kremlin’s pick for President, expressed amusement and dismay.“You’ve made my evening. The British Foreign Office seems confused,” he told the Observer while laughing. “It isn’t very logical. I’m banned from Russia. Not only that, but money from my father’s firm there has been confiscated.”

    Two days later, London followed the US lead in withdrawing its embassy staff from Kiev. Yet hours later, a senior European diplomat made clear European Union member states would not withdraw, adding snidely there was no need to “dramatize” the situation while talks with Moscow continued.

    The Washington Post added to the confusion on January 29 when they quietly revealed that intelligence underlying Truss’ shock announcement was “collected and declassified” by the US, and the Biden administration had specifically asked British authorities to publicly expose the purported plot. Oddly, details weren’t shared with allies, such as Germany, where officials consistently expressed skepticism toward the notion that Russia would invade Ukraine.

    Nowhere in the Post’s coverage did the newspaper ask a very obvious question—why was the disclosure of the incendiary material outsourced in this manner?

    An Obliging Client State

    Britain’s laundering of US intelligence created the illusion that an ally had independently reinforced dodgy claims from US officials of an imminent Russian invasion. It allowed Washington to recast the December transfer of 90 tons of “lethal aid” to Ukraine as reactive. What’s more, the ruse provided plausible deniability in the event that the false narrative unraveled, as it inevitably did.

    The Biden administration knew very well that London could be relied upon. At the conclusion of World War II, a Foreign Office official ruefully concluded that a bankrupt Britain’s future lay in serving as “junior partner in an orbit of power predominantly under American aegis.” Ever since, the UK government has consistently gone further than most countries in serving Washington interests.In September 2021, Yahoo! News exposed how the CIA had  “secret war plans” to kidnap or even assassinate WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange if he attempted to leave the Ecuador embassy in London for Moscow. The report contained a shocking example of Britain’s willingness to do the bidding of US intelligence. (Note: Assange’s legal team says Assange was opposed to Ecuador’s proposal to assign him to a diplomatic post in Moscow.)

    Scenarios to thwart Assange’s escape included “gun battles with Kremlin operatives on the streets of London” and “shooting out the tires of a Russian plane carrying Assange before it could take off for Moscow.” US officials reportedly “asked their British counterparts to do the shooting if gunfire was required, and the British agreed.”

    The British also took the leading role in producing propaganda ahead of the US invasion of Iraq.  As far back as 1998, MI6 “black propaganda specialists” were involved in “psychological warfare” known as Operation Mass Appeal, according to former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter. The foreign spying agency circulated “intelligence” to media outlets “to help shape public opinion about Iraq and the threat posed by WMD [weapons of mass destruction].”

    “We have some outlets in foreign newspapers – some editors and writers who work with us from time to time – where we can spread some material,” MI6 representatives told Ritter. “We just need to be kept informed on what you are doing and when, so we can time the press releases accordingly.”

    A particularly controversial British intelligence assessment claimed Iraq President Saddam Hussein was capable of attacking Europe with WMD in just 45 minutes. It turned out the source was a lone Iraqi taxi driver. The claim was repeated in a televised speech by President George W. Bush in September 2002 and proved fundamental to the war in Baghdad two months later.

    British intelligence led the way in fomenting the US-led conflict against Syria in August 2013, after opposition-controlled Ghouta was allegedly struck by rockets fired by government forces containing the chemical agent sarin. The incident had the hallmarks of a false flag operation. US officials were forced to concede evidence implicating the Syrian government was hardly a “slam dunk,” and communications intercepted by German spies indicated that whatever happened, Syrian President Bashar Assad’s  government had not sanctioned or been aware of the attack.

    However, the British Joint Intelligence Committee possessed no such doubts and declared it was “highly likely that the Syrian regime was responsible,” and “there [were] no plausible alternative scenarios.” This resulted in a parliamentary vote on launching military intervention in Syria (alongside Washington and Paris mere days later). But that failed, taking the question of Western military action against Damascus off the table.

    British Influence Operations In Ukraine

    Ukraine is a country where Britain consistently seeks to influence events in order to derive economic, political, and military benefits. For example, leaked documents indicate London funded consultants to effectively market neoliberal labor “reforms” to the Ukrainian public, which would destroy employment rights and protections.

    The Foreign Office also financed Ukraine’s StopFake, a purported “fact-checking” website with deep links to fascist elements in the country. StopFake defended Ukrainian military training camps for children that are run by the Neo-Nazi militia Azov Battalion. They also defended Andrey Parubiy,a Ukrainian parliamentary speaker from 2016 – 2019 Parubiy is an avowed Adolf Hitler fan. When Parubiy visited Britain in 2018, local reporters sprang to his defence. He was implicated in a reported false flag massacre of Maidan protesters in February 2014.

    Even more significantly, the Foreign Office is secretly co-opting journalists and media organizations in Kiev via funding, training, and the surreptitious production of anti-Russian, pro-Western, and pro-NATO content. “Girls on HBO…but in Ukraine” was one suggested example of programming to support in leaked internal files.

    These efforts are a component of a £100 million clandestine drive by London to “weaken the Russian state’s influence” over its neighbors.

    All of which is another facet of Britain’s bond with the US that has been absolutely fundamental: relations between Moscow and Washington must remain tense. By presenting itself as a dependable bastion of European security, Britain can remain relevant globally, able to perpetually piggyback off its partner’s might. For this reason, London was willing to circulate bunk US intelligence about an impending Russian invasion of Ukraine.

    The West Keeps ‘Guessing’

    Fittingly, in the wake of Moscow’s announcement that it would withdraw troop deployments from some annual military exercises, Britain’s notorious Sun tabloid published an “exclusive” stating Russia was still planning to invade at 1 am London time on February 16.No “massive missile blitz” happened so the Sun updated the “exclusive” to say “Putin continued to keep the West guessing.” The article quoted Truss at some length, who said officials were “preparing for the worst,” believed an invasion “highly likely,” and “over the next few days there could be an attempt to claim the Ukrainians are attacking them so the Russians have a justification for invading.”

    “Certainly, our latest intelligence suggests that an invasion is imminent, that it’s highly likely, and that we’ve seen 100,000 troops stationed around the border,” Truss fulminated. “We would expect multiple sequenced attacks and not a single strike.””We could be on the brink of a war in Europe. That would have severe consequences not just for the people of Russia and Ukraine but also for the broader security of Europe,” Truss added.

    Such fearmongering has been de rigeur since 1946, when British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered an iconic speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. Churchill warned that communism posed “a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization.” Without “a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the US,” there may be another World War.

    At the time, opinion polls indicated American citizens not only valued and trusted their Soviet ally far more than Britain, but they foresaw a much-reduced role for the latter in world affairs following the war. Churchill’s comments were poorly received, but their impact was quickly apparent. Six months later, US-Soviet cooperation collapsed due to disagreements over the future of occupied Germany.

    Washington became wedded to a hardline anti-Soviet policy, and the Cold War was launched.

    The post British Officials Spread Moscow Coup Plot Disinformation For United States appeared first on Shadowproof.

    This post was originally published on Shadowproof.

  • U.S. soldiers disembark from a C-17 Globemaster cargo plane on the tarmac of Rzeszow-Jasionka Airport, south eastern Poland, on February 16, 2022. The soldiers are part of a deployment of several thousand sent to bolster NATO's eastern flank in response to tensions with Russia.

    The Ukraine-Russia conflict has escalated to a very dangerous point The possibility that it can turn into an armed conflict, or even a war, has increased significantly and is real. But the Russian invasion, which was basically announced by the U.S. and British governments and media for February 16, has not happened, and Russia declared the partial withdrawal of its forces. Such war is hardly inevitable and can be avoided. However, the peaceful resolution of the Ukraine-Russia conflict and the war in Donbas in Eastern Ukraine is greatly complicated by the dominant narratives of the Ukraine conflict.

    The narratives that are propagated by the Western governments and the mainstream media concerning the origin and the nature of the Ukraine conflict are truly Orwellian. They state that the pro-Russian government in Ukraine was ousted as result of peaceful mass Euromaidan protests in February 2014 and that President Viktor Yanukovych fled Ukraine because he ordered the massacre of the peaceful Maidan protesters by government forces. These protests took place on the main square in Kyiv, which is called Maidan, and they were directed against the Yanukovych government and his decision to suspend signing the EU association and free trade agreement. According to these narratives, Russia then annexed Crimea by using pure military force and launched a war with Ukraine in Donbas. These narratives assert that Ukraine is a sovereign democratic state which has a right to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the future and that Russia plans to invade Ukraine within days or weeks.

    Various evidence presented in studies by Western scholars who have researched the Ukraine conflict shows that these narratives are false. This mass killing of the Maidan movement’s own supporters — perpetrated by the oligarchic and far right elements of the Maidan alliance — made it possible for Maidan leaders to falsely blame the pro-Russian Yanukovych government and its police and security forces for the killing and then seize power in Ukraine. Western governments backed this undemocratic overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian government.

    The absolute majority of wounded Maidan protesters testified at the Maidan massacre trial and investigation in Ukraine that they and other protesters were massacred by snipers from the Hotel Ukraina and other buildings, which were seized by the Maidan opposition alliance, or that they witnessed such snipers there. Synchronized videos show that specific times and directions of the shooting of the majority of specific protesters did not coincide with specific times and directions of shooting by Berkut anti-riot police officers who were charged in Ukraine with their massacre. The investigation and the media revealed no evidence of any order by Yanukovych or his ministers and commanders to massacre the Maidan protesters. In contrast, 14 self-admitted members of the Maidan sniper units confessed that they themselves or other Maidan snipers massacred the police or protesters, and that this mass killing was done under the orders of Maidan leaders and former leaders of the pro-Western government of Mikheil Saakashvili in Georgia. Several Maidan leaders and activists testified about specific involvement of Maidan leaders in this mass killing.

    Moreover, two leaders of Ukraine’s far right Svoboda party stated that a representative of an unnamed Western government told them and other Maidan leaders a few weeks before the massacre that Western governments would turn on the Yanukovych government after casualties among protesters reached 100. The killed Maidan protesters were immediately called the “Heavenly Hundred” and Western governments blamed Yanukovych and his forces, and recognized the new Maidan government.

    In return, Russia escalated the conflict by annexing Crimea, where the majority of the population is ethnically Russian. Russia used a covert military intervention in this region. But public opinion polls showed that the absolute majority of Crimeans before and after the annexation supported joining Russia.

    A poll conducted shortly before the start of the war in Donbas showed that most of its residents supported separatism, ranging from autonomy within Ukraine to independence or joining Russia. The majority of scholars who researched this conflict classify the war in Donbas as a civil war with direct Russian military interventions in support of pro-Russian separatists in August 2014 and January-February 2015. It is revealing that satellite photos and videos of deployment of Russian troops, and Western intelligence reports about such deployment currently near Ukraine, in Belarus and Transnistria now confirm that there are no Russian military units in Donbas, whereas there are currently many Russian military units stationed in Crimea.

    An actual Russian-Ukrainian war would be devastating for Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin might use the current large military buildup near Ukraine either to try to force a peace deal on his preferred terms or to resort to some kind of military option. Such options might sooner or later include recognition of independence of separatist republics in Donbas and deployment of Russian military forces there, a limited armed conflict or even a full-scale war.

    But there is still a possibility for a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine conflict. Recent visits by French and German leaders to Russia and Ukraine represent such efforts. A peaceful conflict resolution can be done via an international agreement that offers Ukraine European Union membership prospects provided that it fulfills accession criteria (such as democracy) in exchange for neutral status and resolving the conflict in Donbas based on the Minsk agreements. The Minsk agreements, which were signed in the Belarus capital, specify a ceasefire and granting a special status within Ukraine and self-government to the separatist-controlled part of Donbas after the elections there. But such peaceful resolution of the Ukraine conflict requires recognizing that its dominant narratives and its origins are false.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • U.S. soliders deloyed to Poland en route to assist NATO

    Irrational political panic is as American a phenomenon as apple pie. It often arises as a result of a potential inability on the part of the powers-that-be to control the outcome of developments that may pose challenges to the interests of the existing socioeconomic order or to the status quo of the geostrategic environment. The era of the Cold War speaks volumes about this phenomenon, but it’s also evident in earlier periods — for example, the first Red Scare in the wake of World War I — and we can see clear parallels in the present-day situation with reactions to Ukraine and the rise of China as a global power.

    In the interview that follows, world-renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky delves into the phenomenon of irrational political panics in the U.S., with an emphasis on current developments on the foreign policy front — and the dangers of seeking to maintain global hegemony in a multipolar world.

    C.J. Polychroniou: The political culture in the United States seems to have a propensity toward alarmism when it comes to political developments that are not in tune with the economic interests, ideological mindset and strategic interests of the powers-that-be. Indeed, from the anti-Spanish panic of the late 1890s to today’s rage about Russia’s security concerns over Ukraine, and China’s growing role in world affairs and everything in between, the political establishment and the media of this country tend to respond with full-blown alarm to developments that are not in alignment with U.S. interests, values and goals. Can you comment about this peculiar state of affairs, with particular emphasis on what’s happening today in connection with Ukraine and China?

    Noam Chomsky: Quite true. Sometimes it’s hard to believe. One of the most significant and revealing examples is the rhetorical framework of the major internal planning document of the early Cold War years, NSC-68 of 1950, shortly after “the loss of China,” which set off a frenzy in the U.S. The document set the stage for huge expansion of the military budget. It’s worth recalling today when strains of this madness are reverberating — not for the first time; it’s perennial.

    The policy recommendations of NSC-68 have been widely discussed in scholarship, though avoiding the hysterical rhetoric. It reads like a fairytale: ultimate evil confronted by absolute purity and noble idealism. On one side is the “slave state” with its “fundamental design” and inherent “compulsion” to gain “absolute authority over the rest of the world,” destroying all governments and the “structure of society” everywhere. Its ultimate evil contrasts with our sheer perfection. The “fundamental purpose” of the United States is to assure “the dignity and worth of the individual” everywhere. Its leaders are animated by “generous and constructive impulses, and the absence of covetousness in our international relations,” which is particularly evident in the traditional domains of U.S. influence, the Western hemisphere, long the beneficiary of Washington’s tender solicitude as its inhabitants can testify.

    Anyone familiar with history and the actual balance of global power at the time would have reacted to this performance with utter bewilderment. Its State Department authors couldn’t have believed what they were writing. Some later gave an indication of what they were up to. Secretary of State Dean Acheson explained in his memoirs that in order to ram through the huge planned military expansion, it was necessary to “bludgeon the mass mind of ‘top government’” in ways that were “clearer than truth.” The highly influential Sen. Arthur Vandenberg surely understood this as well when advising [in 1947] that the government must “scare the hell out of the American people” to rouse them from their pacifist backwardness.

    There are many precedents, and the drums are beating right now with warnings about American complacency and naivete about the intentions of the “mad dog” Putin to destroy democracy everywhere and subdue the world to his will, now in alliance with the other “Great Satan,” Xi Jinping.

    The February 4 Putin-Xi summit, timed with the opening of the Olympic games, was recognized to be a major event in world affairs. Its review in a major article in The New York Times is headlined “A New Axis,” the allusion unconcealed. The review reported the intentions of the reincarnation of the Axis powers: “The message that China and Russia have sent to other countries is clear,” David Leonhardt writes. “They will not pressure other governments to respect human rights or hold elections.” And to Washington’s dismay, the Axis is attracting two countries from “the American camp,” Egypt and Saudi Arabia, stellar examples of how the U.S. respects human rights and elections in its camp — by providing a massive flow of weapons to these brutal dictatorships and directly participating in their crimes. The New Axis also maintains that “a powerful country should be able to impose its will within its declared sphere of influence. The country should even be able to topple a weaker nearby government without the world interfering” — an idea that the U.S. has always abhorred, as the historical record reveals.

    Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Delphi Oracle issued a maxim: “Know Thyself.” Worth remembering, perhaps.

    As in the case of NSC-68, there is method in the madness. China and Russia do pose real threats. The global hegemon does not take them lightly. There are some striking common features in how U.S. opinion and policy are reacting to the threats. They merit some thought.

    The Atlantic Council describes the formation of the New Axis as a “tectonic shift in global relations” with plans that are truly “head spinning”: “The sides agreed to more closely link their economies through cooperation between China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Putin’s Eurasian Economic Union. They will work together to develop the Arctic. They’ll deepen coordination in multilateral institutions and to battle climate change.”

    We should not underestimate the grand significance of the Ukraine crisis, adds Damon Wilson, president of the National Endowment for Democracy. “The stakes of today’s crisis are not about Ukraine alone, but about the future of freedom,” no less.

    Strong measures have to be taken right away, says Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: “President Biden should use every tool in his tool box and impose tough sanctions ahead of any invasion and not after it happens.” There is no time to dilly-dally with Macron-style appeals to the raging bear to temper his violence.

    Received doctrine is that we must confront the formidable threat of China and stand firm on Ukraine, while Europe wavers and Ukraine asks us to tone down the rhetoric and pursue diplomatic measures. Luckily for the world, Washington is unflinching in its dedication to what is right and just, even if it is almost alone, as when it righteously invades Iraq and strangles Cuba in defiance of virtually uniform international protest, to take just two from a plethora of examples.

    To be fair, adherence to the doctrine is not uniform. There’s deviation, most forcefully on the far right: Tucker Carlson, probably the most influential TV voice. He’s said we shouldn’t be involved in defending Ukraine against Russia — because we should be devoting all our resources to confronting the far more awesome China threat. Have to get our priorities straight in combating the Axis.

    Warnings about Russia’s mobilization to invade Ukraine have been an annual media event since the crises of 2014, with regular reports of tens or hundreds of thousands of Russian troops preparing to attack. Today, however, the warnings are far more shrill, with a mixture of fear and ridicule for so-called Mad Vlad, whom the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman describes as a “one-man psychodrama, with a giant inferiority complex toward America that leaves him always stalking the world with a chip on his shoulder so big it’s amazing he can fit through any door,” or from another perspective, the Russian leader seeking in vain for some response to his repeated requests for some attention to Russia’s expressed concerns. An analysis by MintPress found that 90 percent of the opinion pieces in the three major national newspapers have adopted a hawkish militant stance, with a bare scattering of questioning — a familiar phenomenon, as in the days before the Iraq invasion and, in fact, routinely when the state has delivered the word.

    As in the case of the Sino-Soviet conspiracy to gain “absolute authority over the rest of the world” in 1950, the word now is that the U.S. must act decisively to counter the threat of the New Axis to the “rule-based global order” that is hailed by U.S. commentators, an interesting concept to which I’ll return briefly.

    The “tectonic shift” is not a myth, and it does pose a threat to the U.S. It threatens U.S. primacy in shaping world order. That’s true of both of the crisis areas, on the borders of Russia and of China. In both cases, negotiated settlements are within reach: regional settlements. If they are achieved, the U.S. will only have an ancillary role, which it may not be willing to accept even at the cost of inflaming extremely hazardous confrontations.

    In Ukraine, the basic outlines of a settlement are well-known on all sides; we’ve discussed them before. To repeat, the optimal outcome for security of Ukraine (and the world) is the kind of Austrian/Nordic neutrality that prevailed through the Cold War years, offering the opportunity to be part of Western Europe to whatever extent they chose, in every respect apart from providing the U.S. with military bases, which would have been a threat to them as well as to Russia. For internal Ukrainian conflicts, Minsk II provides a general framework.

    As many analysts observe, Ukraine is not going to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the foreseeable future. George W. Bush rashly issued an invitation to join, but it was immediately vetoed by France and Germany. Though it remains on the table under U.S. pressure, it is not an option. All sides recognize this. The astute and knowledgeable Central Asia scholar Anatol Lieven comments that “the whole issue of Ukraine’s NATO membership is in fact purely theoretical, so that, in some respects, this whole argument is an argument about nothing — on both sides, it must be said, Russian as well as the West.”

    His comment brings to mind [Argentinian writer Jorge Luis] Borges’s description of the Falkland/Malvinas war: two bald men fighting over a comb.

    Russia pleads security concerns. For the U.S., it is a matter of high principle: We cannot infringe on the sacred right of sovereignty of nations, hence the right to join NATO, which Washington knows is not going to happen.

    On the Russian side, a formal pledge of non-alignment hardly increases Russian security, any more than Russian security was enhanced when Washington guaranteed to Gorbachev that “not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction,” soon abrogated by Clinton, then more radically by W. Bush. Nothing would have changed if the promise had risen from a gentlemen’s agreement to a signed document.

    The U.S. plea hardly rises to the level of comedy. The U.S. has utter disdain for the principle it proudly proclaims, as recent history once again dramatically confirms.

    For Washington, there is a deeper issue: A regional settlement would be a serious threat to the U.S. global role. That concern has been simmering right through the Cold War years. Will Europe assume an independent role in world affairs, as it surely can, perhaps along Gaullist lines: Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, revived in Gorbachev’s 1989 advocacy of a “common European home,” a “vast economic space from the Atlantic to the Urals”? Even more unthinkable would be Gorbachev’s broader vision of a Eurasian security system from Lisbon to Vladivostok with no military blocs, shot down without discussion in the negotiations 30 years ago over a post-Cold War settlement.

    The commitment to maintain the Atlanticist order in Europe, in which the U.S. reigns supreme, has had policy implications that reach beyond Europe itself. One crucial example was Chile in 1973, when the U.S. was working hard to overthrow the parliamentary government, finally succeeding with the installation of the murderous Pinochet dictatorship. A prime reason for destroying democracy in Chile was explained by its prime architect, Henry Kissinger. He warned that parliamentary social reforms in Chile might provide a model for similar efforts in Italy and Spain that might lead Europe on an independent path, away from subordination to U.S. control and the U.S. model of harsher capitalism. The domino theory, often derided, never abandoned, because it is an important instrument of statecraft. The issue arises again with regard to a regional settlement of the Ukraine conflict.

    Much the same is true in the confrontation with China. As we’ve discussed earlier, there are serious issues concerning China’s violation of international law in the neighboring seas — though as the one maritime country that refuses even to ratify the UN Law of the Sea, the U.S. is hardly in a strong position to object. Nor does the U.S. alleviate these problems by sending a naval armada through these waters or providing Australia with a fleet of nuclear submarines to enhance the already overwhelming military superiority of the U.S. off the coasts of China. The issues can and should be addressed by the regional powers.

    As in the case of Ukraine, however, there is a downside: The U.S. will not be in charge.

    Also as in the case of Ukraine, the U.S. professes its commitment to high principle in taking the lead to confront the threat of China: its horror at China’s human rights abuses, which are doubtless severe. Again, it is easy enough to assess the sincerity of this stand. One revealing index is U.S. military aid. At the top, in a category by themselves, are Israel and Egypt. On the Israeli record on human rights, we can now refer to the detailed reports of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, reviewing the crimes of what they describe as the world’s second apartheid state. Egypt is suffering under the harshest dictatorship of its tortured history. More generally, for many years, there has been a striking correlation between U.S. military aid and torture, massacre, and other severe human rights abuses.

    There is no more need to tarry on Washington’s concern for human rights than on its dedication to the sacred principle of sovereignty. The fact that these absurdities can even be discussed illustrates how deeply the rhetorical flights of NSC-68 permeate the intellectual culture.

    Hebrew University lecturer Guy Laron usefully reminds us of another facet of the Ukraine crisis: the long struggle between the U.S. and Russia over control of Europe’s energy, again in the headlines today. Even before Russia was a player, the U.S. sought to shift Europe (and Japan) to an oil-based economy, where the U.S. would have the hand on the spigot. Much of Marshall Plan aid was directed to this end. From George Kennan to Zbigniew Brzezinski commenting on the invasion of Iraq (which he opposed, but felt might confer advantages to the U.S. with the anticipated control over major oil resources), planners have recognized that control over energy resources could provide “critical leverage” over allies. Later years saw many struggles in the Cold War framework Laron describes, now very prominent. Ukraine has had a large part in these confrontations.

    Throughout, the shape of world order has of course been a driving concern of policy makers. For post-World War II Washington, there is only one acceptable form: under its leadership. And it must be a particular form of world order: the “rule-based international order,” which has displaced an earlier commitment to the “UN-based international order” established under U.S. lead after World War II. It’s not hard to discern the reasons for the transition in policy and accompanying commentary. In the rule-based order, the U.S. sets the rules.

    The same was true in the UN-based order in the early years after World War II. U.S. global dominance was so overwhelming that the UN served virtually as a tool of U.S. foreign policy and a weapon against its enemies. Not surprisingly, the UN was highly regarded in U.S. popular and intellectual culture, along with the UN-based international order, guided by Washington.

    That turned out to be a passing phase. The UN began to fall out of favor in U.S. elite opinion as it lurched out of control with the recovery of other industrial societies but particularly with decolonization, which brought discordant voices into the UN and also in independent structures such as the Non-Aligned Movement and many others — all very vocal and active, though effectively barred from the international information order dominated by the traditional imperial societies.

    Within the UN there were calls for a “New International Economic Order” that would offer the Global South something better than a continuation of the large-scale robbery, violent intervention and subversion that the colonized world had enjoyed during the long reign of Western imperialism. There were other threats, such as a call for a New International Information Order that would provide some opportunity for voices of the former colonies to enter the international information system, a near monopoly of the imperial powers.

    The masters of the world undertook vigorous campaigns to beat back these efforts, a major though largely ignored chapter of modern history — though not completely; there is some fine work of exposure and analysis.

    One effect of the Global South’s disruptive efforts was to turn U.S. practice and elite opinion against the UN, no longer a reliable agency of U.S. power as it had been in the early Cold War years. Furthermore, the foundations of modern international law in the few UN treaties that the U.S. ratified became completely unacceptable as the years passed, particularly the banning of “the threat or use of force” in international affairs, a practice in which the U.S. is far in the lead. It is conventional to say that the U.S. and Russia engaged in proxy wars during the Cold War years — omitting the fact that with rare exceptions, these were conflicts in which Russia provided some support to victims of U.S. attack. All topics that should have far more prominence.

    In this context, the “rule-based international order” became the favored pillar of world order, and there is much annoyance when China calls instead for the UN-based international order as it did at the rancorous March 2021 China-U.S. summit in Alaska (putting aside the sincerity of these pronouncements).

    It’s intriguing to see how the conflict with China plays out in U.S. policy and discourse in other domains. A front-page story in The New York Times is headlined: “House Passes Bill Adding Billions to Research to Compete With China; The vote sets up a fight with the Senate, which has different recommendations for how the United States should bolster its technology industry to take on China.” The official name of the bill is “The America Competes Act of 2022” — meaning “compete” with China.

    The passage of the bill was hailed in the left-liberal press: “The House gave President Joe Biden another reason to celebrate on Friday with the passage of a bill aimed at boosting competitiveness with China.”

    Could Congress support research and development because it would help American society, as this bill surely would? Apparently not; only because it would “take on China.” Republicans reflexively opposed the bill as usual, in this case because it “concedes too much to China.” Republicans also opposed what they called “far left” initiatives such as addressing climate change. The bill was derided by House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy as the “coral reefs bill.” How does saving humanity from self-destruction help to compete with China?

    A side comment: An amendment to the bill was introduced by Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Progressive Caucus, a call to release the near-$10 billion of the Afghan government held in New York banks, so as to help relieve the horrendous humanitarian crisis facing the population. It was voted down. Forty-four Democrats joined Republican brutality. It appears that the China-based Shanghai Cooperation Organization might be planning aid, more of the China threat.

    There is no denying that China is a rising superpower confronting the U.S. Reporting a study of Harvard’s Belfer Center of International Affairs, Graham Allison argued further that the so-called Thucydides Trap is likely to lead to a U.S.-China war.

    That cannot happen. U.S.-China war means simply: game over. There are critical global issues on which the U.S. and China must cooperate. They will either work together, or collapse together, bringing the world down with them.

    One of the most striking developments in the international arena today is that while the U.S. is pulling back from the Mideast, and elsewhere, China is moving in but with a different strategic approach and overall agenda. Instead of bombs, missiles and coercive diplomacy, China is expanding its influence with the use of “soft power.” Indeed, U.S. overseas expansion was always overwhelmingly dependent on the use of hard power, and, as result, it would only leave black holes behind after its withdrawal. To what extent, as some might argue, is this the result of a young nation ignorant of history and with lack of experience in global affairs (although it would be hard to find any examples of benign imperialism)?

    I don’t think the U.S. has forged new paths in Western imperial brutality. Simply consider its immediate predecessors in world control. British wealth and global power derived from piracy (such heroic figures as Sir Francis Drake), despoiling India by guile and violence, hideous slavery, the world’s greatest narcotrafficking enterprise, and other such gracious acts. France was no different. Belgium broke records in hideous crimes. Today’s China is hardly benign within its much more limited reach. Exceptions would be hard to find.

    The two cases you mention have highly instructive features, brought out clearly, if unintentionally, by how they are depicted. Take an article in The New York Times about the growing China threat. The headline reads: “As the U.S. Pulls Back from the Mideast, China Leans in; expanding its ties to Middle Eastern states with vast infrastructure investments and cooperation on technology and security.”

    That’s accurate; it’s one example of what’s happening all over the world. The U.S. is withdrawing military forces that have battered the Mideast region for decades in traditional imperial style. The evil Chinese are exploiting the retreat by expanding China’s influence with investment, loans, technology, development programs. What’s called “soft power.”

    Not just in the Mideast. The most extensive Chinese project is the huge Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that is taking shape within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which incorporates the Central Asia states, India, Pakistan, Russia, now Iran, reaching to Turkey and with its eye on Central Europe. It may well include Afghanistan if it can survive its current catastrophe. Chinese aid and development might manage to shift the Afghan economy from heroin production for Europe, the core of the economy during the U.S. occupation, to exploitation of its rich mineral resources.

    The BRI has offshoots in the Middle East, including Israel. There are accompanying programs in Africa, and now even Latin America, over strenuous U.S. objections. Recently, China announced that it’s taking over the manufacturing facilities in São Paulo that Ford abandoned, and will initiate large-scale electric vehicles production, an area in which China is far ahead.

    The U.S. has no way to counter these efforts. Bombs, missiles, special forces raids in rural communities just don’t work.

    It’s an old dilemma. Sixty years ago in Vietnam, U.S. counterinsurgency efforts were stymied by a problem that was despairingly recognized by U.S. intelligence and by Province Advisers: the Vietnamese resistance — the Viet Cong (VC), in U.S. discourse — were fighting a political war, a domain in which the U.S. was weak. The U.S. was responding with a military war, the arena in which it is strong. But that couldn’t overcome the appeal of VC programs to the peasant population.

    The only way the Kennedy administration could react to the VC political war was by U.S. Air Force bombing of rural areas, authorizing napalm, large-scale crop and livestock destruction and other programs to drive the peasants to virtual concentration camps where they could be “protected” from the guerillas who the U.S. knew they were supporting. The consequences we know.

    Earlier, the dilemma had been explained by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, addressing the National Security Council about U.S. problems with Brazil, where elites, he said, are “like children, with no capacity for self-government.” Worse still, in his words, the U.S. is “hopelessly far behind the Soviets in developing controls over the minds and emotions of unsophisticated peoples” of the Global South, even educated elites. Dulles lamented to the president about the Communist “ability to get control of mass movements, … something we have no capacity to duplicate. The poor people are the ones they appeal to and they have always wanted to plunder the rich.”

    Dulles left unsaid the obvious: The poor people somehow don’t respond well to our appeal of the rich to plunder the poor, so with great reluctance we have to turn to the arena of violence, where we dominate.

    That’s not unlike the dilemma posed when China “leans in” to the Global South by “expanding its ties with vast infrastructure investments and cooperation on technology and security.” That is one central element of the China threat that is eliciting such fears and anguish.

    The U.S. is reacting to this growing China threat in the arena where it is strong. The U.S. of course has overwhelming military dominance worldwide, even right off the coast of China. But it’s being enhanced. Last December, military analyst Michael Klare reports, President Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act. It 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.

    Klare adds that, “Ominously enough Taiwan too is included in the chain of armed sentinel states.” The word “ominously” is well chosen. China of course regards Taiwan as part of China. So does the U.S., formally. The official U.S. one-China policy recognizes Taiwan as part of China, with a tacit agreement that no steps will be taken to forcefully change its status. Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo chipped away at this formula. It’s now being driven to the brink. China has the choice of either succumbing or resisting. It is not going to succumb.

    This is only one component of the program to defend the U.S. from the China threat. A complementary element is to undermine China’s economy by means too well-known to review. In particular [in the U.S.’s eyes], China must be prevented from advancing in the technology of the future — actually extending its lead in some areas, such as electrification and renewable energy, the technologies that might save us from our race to destroy the environment that sustains life.

    One aspect of these efforts to undermine China’s progress is to pressure other countries to reject superior Chinese technology. China has found a way to get around these efforts. They are planning to establish technical schools in countries of the Global South to teach advanced technology — Chinese technology, which graduates will then use. Again, the kind of aggression that is hard to confront.

    U.S. influence is clearly declining across the international system, but one would not easily reach this conclusion by looking at the current U.S. National Security Strategy, which is still designed around the principle of the “two-war” doctrine even without expressly saying so. In this context, could it be argued that the U.S. empire is weakening in the 21st century, and that the end of the U.S. empire might not be a peaceful event?

    It has been widely predicted in foreign policy circles for many years that China is poised to surpass the U.S. and to dominate world affairs, a dubious prospect, in my opinion, unless the U.S. continues on its current course of self-destruction, probably to be accelerated with the predicted congressional victory of the denialist party in November.

    As we have discussed before, for some years the former Republican Party has been more accurately described as a “radical insurgency” that has abandoned normal parliamentary politics, to borrow the terms of political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute a decade ago — when Trump’s takeover of the insurgency was not yet a nightmare.

    The Trump administration established a two-war doctrine in all but name. A war between two nuclear powers can quickly get out of control, meaning the end.

    A step towards utter irrationality was taken last December 27, perhaps in celebration of Christmas, when President Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act, discussed earlier, enhancing the policy of “encirclement” of China, “containment” being out of date. That includes formation of the Quad: U.S.-India-Japan-Australia, supplementing the AUKUS alliance (Australia, U.K., U.S.) and the Anglosphere’s Five Eyes, all of them strategic-military alliances confronting China. China has only a troubled hinterland. As discussed earlier, the radical military imbalance in favor of the U.S. is being enhanced by other provocative acts, carrying great risk. Apparently we cannot let down our guard with the Axis powers on the march once again.

    It’s all too easy to sketch a likely trajectory that is far from a pleasant prospect. But we should never forget the usual proviso. We do not have to be passive spectators, thereby contributing to potential disaster.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Listen to a reading of this article:

    The Associated Press has published yet another article based on unevidenced assertions by anonymous government officials about the scary horrifying frightening Russian menace, this time to accuse another media outlet of promoting propaganda. Without a trace of irony.

    “U.S. intelligence officials on Tuesday accused a conservative financial news website with a significant American readership of amplifying Kremlin propaganda and alleged five media outlets targeting Ukrainians have taken direction from Russian spies,” AP reports. “The officials said Zero Hedge, which has 1.2 million Twitter followers, published articles created by Moscow-controlled media that were then shared by outlets and people unaware of their nexus to Russian intelligence. The officials did not say whether they thought Zero Hedge knew of any links to spy agencies and did not allege direct links between the website and Russia.”

    “The officials briefed The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence sources,” AP adds, repeating the refrain we’re all familiar with now which is always used to justify a complete absence of evidence or accountability for incendiary claims about governments the United States doesn’t like.

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    So @joebiden’s spooks are smearing random websites as Russian agents if they challenge White House warmongering and lies. A direct government attack on free speech. https://t.co/AK79MPdldp

    — Ali Abunimah (@AliAbunimah) February 15, 2022

    You have to scroll down to the eleventh paragraph for some examples of the “Kremlin propaganda” that Zero Hedge is accused of “amplifying”. These turn out to be entirely innocuous objections to western imperial narratives that were “written by people affiliated with the Strategic Culture Foundation,” an outlet the Biden administration sanctioned last year “for allegedly taking part in Russia’s interference in the 2020 U.S. election.”

    “Recent articles listed as authored by the foundation and published by Zero Hedge include those with the headlines: ‘NATO Sliding Towards War Against Russia In Ukraine,’ ‘Americans Need A Conspiracy Theory They Can All Agree On’ and ‘Theater Of Absurd… Pentagon Demands Russia Explain Troops On Russian Soil,’” writes AP’s Nomaan Merchant.

    You can read those three articles AP lists by clicking here, here and here respectively. Decide for yourself if these are sinister foreign psyops which require the urgent attention of the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world acting in concert with one of the most influential news agencies on earth, or if they are not in fact relatively reasonable opinions which only stand out because they fall outside the Overton window of what’s considered acceptable debate in the tightly controlled spectrum of mainstream political discourse.

    For its own part, Zero Hedge says that “this website has never worked, collaborated or cooperated with Russia, nor are there any links to spy (or any other) agencies.” The Associated Press offers no evidence or arguments to the contrary.

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    Now We've Done It: We Pissed Off The CIA https://t.co/I87aaJrmO3 pic.twitter.com/FsgnSENsQE

    — zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 15, 2022

    Zero Hedge happens to be one of the numerous outlets who periodically avail themselves of my open offer for anyone to republish my work free of charge if they want to, and what’s funny is I was just the other day noticing the number of views they get when they do so and marvelling that the US narrative control machine hasn’t done a better job of reducing their audience. Now a few days later here’s the US intelligence cartel using its media mouthpieces to brand it a Kremlin propaganda operation in what Electronic Intifada director Ali Abunimah calls a “direct government attack on free speech.”

    I’ve disagreed with plenty of things I’ve seen published in Zero Hedge. I’ve also seen a lot of very useful information which is highly inconvenient for the US-centralized empire. It’s that exact kind of information that the empire has been working very hard to marginalize and minimize amid widespread public access to the internet.

    The US government is not actually worried about Russian propaganda. The US government is worried about people disrupting US propaganda. Every day we’re offered new reasons why it’s important to regulate what online materials are seen by people, from fake news clickbait to Russian propaganda to Covid misinformation to foreign trolls to domestic extremism to election security, and the only thing they all have in common is that the solution is a more tightly regulated internet. At a certain point you can only conclude it is internet regulation itself that they are after, in the same way you’d conclude after a stranger kept offering you different reasons why you should let him hold your wallet that he’s really just after your wallet.

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    The Official Story https://t.co/07GCCfYoJB

    — zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 15, 2022

    Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. The ability to control the thoughts people think about what’s going on in their world is the only thing standing between the oppressive, exploitative status quo and revolutionary change. The powerful understand this while the general public do not. There is nothing, literally nothing, they wouldn’t be willing to do in order to ensure their control over dominant narratives.

    When they warn about Russian propaganda causing people to think wrong thoughts in their heads, they are so close to admitting the truth that they’re all acutely aware of: that human minds are very hackable, and that this can be used to advance the interests of power.

    Protecting this narrative control mechanism is the first and foremost priority of our ruling power structures, because it’s what all their other control mechanisms are built upon. That’s a major part of why the media have been acting so strange these last few years, and it’s a major part of why everything seems so weird and why so many people feel like they’re going a bit crazy when they try to understand the world.

    Right now we’re looking at a race. Between humanity trying to awaken from the psychological cages that have been constructed for us, and the builders of those cages trying to finish tightening those bolts so they can lock down our minds forever.

    ___________________________

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

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  • Amid escalating tensions between the United States, NATO and Russia, all eyes are on Ukraine. Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland describes it as “a struggle between democracy and authoritarianism.” But Nord Stream 2, a pipeline built to bring Russian gas under the Baltic Sea directly to Germany, is an integral part of the story.

    On January 27, US Under Secretary for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, asserted, “If Russia invades Ukraine one way or another … we will work with Germany to ensure it [the pipeline] does not move forward.” Delayed by US threats and sanctions, Nord Stream 2 highlights why countries are challenging the leadership of the Biden administration.

    Since the 1960s when Europe first began importing Russian gas, Washington perceived Russian energy as a threat to US leadership and Europe’s energy security.

    The post Pipeline Politics And The Ukraine crisis appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • For almost three months, the Western mainstream media, in a move not dissimilar to its previous assertions that Saddam Hussein had the capability to launch WMDs within 45 minutes, or that Iran was building a nuclear bomb, has repeatedly claimed that Russia is planning an ‘imminent’ invasion of its Western neighbour Ukraine – under the rule of the successive US-EU friendly governments of Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky since the 2014 Euromaidan, a CIA and MI6-orchestrated regime change operation launched in response to then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s November 2013 decision to suspend an EU trade deal in favour of pursuing closer ties with the Russian Federation.

    The post ‘Operation Cyclone – Ukraine Edition’ The Real plan? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Amid the hype around a potential Russian invasion, Moscow announced Tuesday that it is withdrawing troops from areas near Ukraine as military drills in the region conclude.

    Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for Russia’s Defense Ministry, said troops in Russia’s southern and western military districts have concluded drills and “have already begun loading onto rail and road transport and will begin moving to their military garrisons today.”

    The post Russia Announces Withdrawal Of Troops Near Ukraine As Drills Conclude appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Russia Says It Pulled Back Some Troops From Ukraine as Talks Continue

    Russia has announced plans to pull back some troops from the Ukrainian border in a possible effort to deescalate the standoff over Ukraine but still intends to continue with military exercises in Belarus and the Black Sea. This comes as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky indicated on Monday the country may drop its bid to join NATO and the U.S. continues to urge U.S. citizens to leave Ukraine, warning a Russian invasion could come as soon as Wednesday. We speak with Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK, who says the U.S. is continuing to escalate the crisis by directing U.S. funds to weapons and loans for Ukraine. “It seems the United States is more anxious for Russia to invade than Russia is to invade,” says Benjamin.

    TRANSCRIPT

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

    AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show looking at the crisis along the Russia-Ukraine border. Russia has announced it’s pulling back some troops from the border, in a possible effort to deescalate the standoff, but Russia is moving ahead with military exercises in Belarus and the Black Sea. On Monday, Russian television aired footage of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov urging Russian President Vladimir Putin to continue and intensify diplomatic negotiations. Also on Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine may drop its bid to join NATO, saying membership may have only been a dream.

    The United States has reportedly been warning allies Russia could invade Ukraine as soon as Wednesday — that’s tomorrow, February 16th. Ukraine’s president responded by announcing February 16th would become a “day of unity” for Ukrainians. The United States has also urged all U.S. citizens to leave Ukraine, as well as Belarus and parts of Moldova. The State Department has also moved its remaining staff from Kyiv to a temporary site in western Ukraine in the city of Lviv due to the Russian military buildup.

    To talk more about the crisis, we’re joined by Medea Benjamin, the co-founder of CodePink.

    Welcome to Democracy Now!, Medea. Can you talk about the latest developments around Ukraine and Russia, and the role of the United States?

    MEDEA BENJAMIN: Well, unfortunately, in the midst of this crisis, the United States is sending more weapons to Ukraine, and, as the secretary-general of the United Nations said without mentioning the United States, the incendiary rhetoric, saying that “Russia is ready to invade. Russia is ready to invade.” It seems the United States is more anxious for Russia to invade than Russia is to invade, and this is not helpful at all.

    I think it’s a very positive development that Zelensky has basically recognized that Ukraine will not enter NATO, and that is a positive thing. And all of the diplomatic efforts that are going on are extremely helpful and necessary, and we hope there will be an off-ramp, because the possibility of war is just unacceptable. Our members, our friends in Congress are trying to say to the administration that they cannot go into any military conflict without first going to Congress, which is something that would back up the administration. And so, we’re hoping that diplomacy will prevail, but we have to recognize that things continue to be extremely, extremely tense.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Medea, you mentioned that Zelensky appears to recognize that the membership in NATO will have to be postponed or, as he says, may be a dream. But it was actually — it’s in the Constitution. Back in 2019, the Ukrainian government actually amended its Constitution to say membership in NATO is a goal of the country. Is it your sense that Zelensky also has to deal with more right-wing elements within the Ukraine that continue to push him for the NATO membership?

    MEDEA BENJAMIN: Yes, but NATO has not been ready to invite Ukraine in. There are a number of different issues, including the lack of territorial integrity, as well as issues of Ukraine’s corruption, issues of the lack of a economic system that is compatible, issues about even the military. So, there was never an idea that Ukraine would quickly join in, but, as you said, it is in the Constitution, and it had been promised to Ukraine. But this is a — seems to be one of the ways out of this impasse is for Ukraine not to ask for membership. That means that NATO does not have to close the door; it just means that Ukraine itself would stop the process.

    AMY GOODMAN: Medea Benjamin, what do you think of the mobilization of peace movements in different countries in the areas? Have you been communicating with them? And what are their demands?

    MEDEA BENJAMIN: There have been peace mobilizations in Russia, in Ukraine, in the Western European countries. There is a group called No to NATO that has been going on for years and communicating, and we in the United States are part of that. And this is all efforts by the people to call on our governments to step back.

    And we need to continue to build up this international movement, recognizing that a war would be disastrous for all of the countries, and particularly, of course, for Ukraine, but to recognize what it would mean economically in terms of the rise of prices because of the cutoff of energy sources. The Europeans recognize this well. What we have to do is get more people in the United States involved in the peace movement, because I think people are much more concerned about domestic issues than they are about foreign policy, but, as we know, international conflicts will affect us here at home, certainly in terms of things like inflation. And that’s why we have to care about these issues and try to stop this war from happening.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in terms of now this latest announcement of a billion dollars in loan guarantees to Ukraine, seems Congress is ready and willing to shell out money despite the claims of some Republicans that there’s too much debt in the country.

    MEDEA BENJAMIN: Well, we see that, Juan, time and time again when it comes to issues that relate to a military buildup, whether it’s the Pentagon budget or giving money or loans to countries: When we’re in the midst of a crisis, there is not a question of not enough money. So, I think it’s both the giving of weapons, as well as these loans, that is part of making this situation more and more tense. And it is unfortunate that both Democrats and Republicans usually come together at times like this to escalate the crisis, give away our tax dollars, instead of stopping the flow of weapons, the flow of money, and putting the majority of our emphasis on negotiations.

    AMY GOODMAN: Well, Medea Benjamin, we’re going to ask you to stay with us, co-founder of CodePink. As we face the possibility of a new war, we look at a country that’s been ravaged by war for decades. President Biden is facing mounting criticism for seizing $7 billion of Afghanistan’s federal reserves frozen in the United States. Biden is giving half the money, he says, to September 11th victims. We’re going to speak with a mother of a young man who died in the 9/11 attacks. She says the money should stay in Afghanistan. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists emerged after World War II as a voice for peace by some of the scientists who developed the then ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Now, its mission has drifted into being an echo chamber for the US imperial project urging President Biden to take even more destabilizing actions against Russia.

    Dropping the A-bombs

    By the time that the scientists at the top-secret Manhattan Project had developed the atomic bomb and the US military had worked out the logistics for deploying it, World War II was for all intents and purposes over. By early May 1945, Germany had unconditionally surrendered; in large part due to the efforts of the Red Army defeating the Nazi Wehrmacht, but at the horrific cost of 27,000,000 Soviet lives. The Japanese too had been defeated militarily and had agreed to “unconditional surrender” with the one caveat that Emperor Hirohito be spared.

    So, the world’s emerging hegemon had a problem. It had the ultimate weapon to impose its policy of world domination (i.e., today’s official US national security doctrine of global “full spectrum dominance”). But what good is this ultimate weapon if it is a secret? And, even if known, would the world believe that the US has the will to unleash such a destructive force?

    President Truman had the solution – nuke Japan. All the military targets in Japan had been destroyed, but an even stronger message of the US’s determination to enforce imperial hegemony was made by annihilating the civilian cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

    The Japanese promptly surrendered, offering up the life of their emperor. The US accepted, but did not execute the emperor, who was more useful alive than dead. Besides, the leniency gesture reinforced the message that the US would capriciously bomb at will. Even when President Obama visited Hiroshima in 2016, he pointedly offered “no apology” for the destruction his country had wrought.

    Dawn of the Cold War

    The quick Japanese surrender in August 1945 had another cause, which many modern historians consider more overriding than the US bombs. The Soviets, engaged with their western front, had remained neutral in the war with Japan, but had promised the Allies to join the war effort against Japan once the Germans were defeated. At the same time the US dropped the bombs, the USSR declared war with Japan causing Tokyo to capitulate.

    The dropping of the atomic bombs was the first salvo of the Cold War, signifying the end of the US wartime alliance of convenience with the Soviet Union. Truman’s rush to nuke Japan had the dual advantage of making known his “hammer” over the Kremlin as well as denying the USSR time to advance east and have a seat in the surrender agreement with Japan. The Soviets had not developed atomic weapons on the assumption – which proved to be essentially correct – that World War II would be over before they could be deployed to defeat the Axis powers.

    In the immediate post-war period, the Soviets and their allies were existentially threatened by the unambiguous intention of the US and its allies to destroy them. As a defensive measure, the Soviet Union had no choice but to develop a deterrent nuclear force, testing its first atomic bomb in 1949.

    Although the Soviets pledged to use their nuclear arsenal only in defense and renounced “first strike,” the US didn’t. Soon the Cold War arms race threatened the planet with destruction. The emergent construct of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) was a fragile arrangement for the future of humanity.

    Emergence of the Bulletin by scientists for peace

    Voices of peace arose from the very inventers of the atomic bomb. Immediately after the destructive power of the atom was rained on Japan and even before the Soviet Union developed their deterrent force, former Manhattan Project scientists Eugene Rabinowitch and Hyman Goldsmith founded the Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, subsequently renamed the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

    Other notables associated with the Bulletin were nuclear physicist Hans Bethe, Soviet space scientist Anatoli Blagonravov, Jewish-German émigré and developer of quantum mechanics Max Born, physicist “father of the atomic bomb” turned anti-nuclear proliferation activist J. Robert Oppenheimer, British polymath peace activist Bertrand Russell, Soviet physicist Nikolay Semyonov, and Albert Einstein.

    The Bulletin’s Doomsday Clock, unveiled in 1947, was set at seven minutes to midnight. The clock was intended as an educational tool to serve “as a vivid symbol of these multiplying perils, its hands showing how close to extinction we are.”

    The Pugwash Conferences, an effort at peace in the early part of the Cold War, were an outgrowth of the Bulletin in its formative years in the 1950s.

    Mission drift at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

    Today, the risk of nuclear annihilation, not to mention global warming and other threats, has never been greater, according to the Bulletin’s Doomsday Clock. But the Bulletin has morphed from an advocate for peace and against other threats to humanity to something else.

    From an organization run by scientists, the current governing board of the Bulletin has hardly a scientist in sight. Its president and CEO is Rachel Bronson, a political scientist who came out of the US security establishment NGO world, including the Council on Foreign Relations (Wall Street’s think tank) and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (ranked the top military think tank in the world). Its chair, David Kuhlman, is a corporate consultant specializing in helping “clients identify pathways to profitable growth.” Its secretary, Steve Ramsey, formerly worked for defense contractor General Electric. Former Secretary of State and accused war criminal Madeleine Albright does promotionals for the Bulletin.

    The Bulletin maintains a liberal façade and still publishes articles that contribute to peace and environmentalism. In that way, its role in collusion with the US imperial project is insidious, because the patina of peace is used to legitimize its mission drift.

    Fanning the flames of anti-Chinese sentiment, the Bulletin promotes the conspiracy theory that the Chinese artificially developed COVID-19, featuring journalist Nicholas Wade’s “How COVID-19’s origins were obscured, by the East and the West.” However, scientific evidence points to natural origins of the virus. Anti-Russian sentiment is promoted with journalist Matt Field’s “Russian media spreading disinformation about US bioweapons as troops mass near Ukraine.” Where are the scientists advocating for peace?

    The Bulletin covers the Ukraine crisis

    Another case in point of its devolution is the article “How to mix sanctions and diplomacy to avert disaster in Ukraine,” published in the Bulletin on February 1. The article advocates for sanctions that would “severely and quickly devastate Russia’s powerful energy export sector.” Echoing Washington’s talking points, the article couches its recommendations as responding to Russian aggression but actually proposes nothing to de-escalate the conflict.

    It is beyond ironic that an organization that purports to be warning against the dangers of nuclear holocaust is making a full-throated defense of an even more aggressive posture by one of the world’s leading nuclear powers.

    Yes, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist’s Doomsday Clock is now 100 seconds to midnight, and they are trying to push it closer to Armageddon.

    The view of the Bulletin’s Ukraine article is that the current crisis is Putin’s “own making.” In contrast, the article explains that the US has diplomatically “initiated” talks with Russia. There is no mention of the forward deployment of US troops or sending lethal aid to Ukraine. There is no recognition of aggressive actions by NATO such as stationing assault ABM missile systems in Romania and possibly Poland. Off limits is allusion to the US shredding the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

    Hidden from sight in the aforementioned article and another published the same day on “How the demise of an arms control treaty foreshadowed Russia’s aggression against Ukraine” is the US-orchestrated Ukraine coup in 2014 that installed an anti-Russian regime there. The latter article’s meticulously detailed history of the region notes “Moscow invaded and annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea,” but not the coup that precipitated it.

    Reasonable peace proposals

    There is not a word in these articles of how some of the Russian initiatives might prevent hostilities and make the region more secure with a reduced likelihood of war. And certainly, there is none of the following reasonable peace proposals:

    +Russia and the US shall not use the territory of other countries to prepare or conduct attacks against the other.

    +Neither party shall deploy short- or intermediate-range missiles abroad or in areas where these weapons could reach targets inside the other’s territory.

    +Neither party shall deploy nuclear weapons abroad, and any such weapons already deployed must be returned.

    +Both parties shall eliminate any infrastructure for deploying nuclear weapons outside their own territories.

    +Neither party shall conduct military exercises with scenarios involving the use of nuclear weapons.

    +Neither party shall train military or civilian personnel from non-nuclear countries to use nuclear weapons.

    The above peace measures are what in fact Russia proposed, but are considered “non-starters” by the US and presumably by the Bulletin.

    Citing the Atlantic Council, the US-based think tank for NATO, the Bulletin explains that the sanctions that they are advocating would cause the Russian economy to “experience significant chaos.” These sanctions that the Bulletin calls for are a form of warfare just as deadly as dropping bombs. Sanctions kill! Instead of supporting peaceful measures to reduce tensions in the Ukraine, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has become a cheerleader for Washington.

    The post The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Calls for Escalating US Aggression against Russia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Members of Ukaraine's State Border Guard Service stand at the border crossing between Ukraine and Belarus on February 13, 2022, in Vilcha, Ukraine.

    The U.S. and U.K. officials and media have long been warning against the “imminent” Russian invasion of Ukraine. Whatever the prospects of such an invasion are, it also raises an important question about the character of the Russian political regime and how the invasion may change it.

    Let us hypothetically assume, as many have, that Russia can defeat the Ukrainian army and occupy a large part of Ukraine (especially the southeastern and central regions). The question is what to do with this part of Ukraine. The problem is not the unlikely massive Ukrainian guerrilla war against the Russian army. The problem is that the Russian state, such as it is now, has little to offer Ukrainians as well as to the world.

    Whatever one thinks is lying behind the current escalation — resurgent Russian imperialism exploiting a window of opportunity, Ukraine’s alleged attempts to solve the Donbass question by force, the expansion of NATO, attempts to undermine the Nord Stream 2 (a gas pipeline connecting Germany and Russia), domestic politics in the U.S. and U.K., or any combination of the above — Russia is currently doing very little to convince us that the media campaign about the “imminent invasion” has no real grounds, aside from simply saying so.

    Installing a pro-Russian government in Ukraine would certainly solve some of these issues for Russia. However, we should not assume that Russia is ready to bear the costs of a military invasion (some of them discussed below), or that the ongoing escalation is a part of such an attempt. Yet we can recognize that Russia seems interested in promoting the belief that it is capable of launching an invasion, regardless of what it actually plans to do within the strategy of its coercive diplomacy.

    Why Guerrilla War in Ukraine Seems Unlikely

    According to a recent poll, 33 percent of Ukrainians are ready for armed resistance in the event of Russian intervention in their city, while another 22 percent are in favor of nonviolent resistance. Yet both figures should be viewed with skepticism.

    First, other polls show that there are not so many Ukrainians who are ready to sacrifice their quality of life to prevent the Russian invasion. For example, at the end of November, only 33 percent of citizens supported the imposition of martial law in response to a possible Russian military build-up along Ukraine’s borders, while 58 percent opposed it.

    Second, the results of such polls only show citizens’ professed intentions, but do not predict their actual behavior. Many people tend to give answers that are socially expected from patriots and “real men” (“of course, I’ll fight, I’m not a sissy!”). For example, according to a poll conducted in April 2014, 21 percent of residents of the southeastern regions (more pro-Russian than the western regions) answered that they are ready for armed resistance in the event of an invasion by Russian troops in southeastern Ukraine. Yet only a very small part of these several million people went into battle when the war in Donbass began shortly afterward.

    The Anglosphere media publications currently depicting Ukrainians (including women and children) as prepared to fight the Russian army poorly represent the reality of most Ukrainians. Only a small number of people would really fight. These would be the remnants of the army and police, some of the veterans and volunteers who have already fought in Donbass, and right-wing radicals (such as the notorious Azov movement). Their resistance to the Russian troops would, of course, not be as strong as in Afghanistan, but not as weak as in separatist Donbass since 2014. However, the resistance would be enough to make the established political regime in pro-Russian Ukraine one of the most repressive in the entire former USSR.

    What Would Happen in Pro-Russian Ukraine?

    Add to this the low legitimacy of a hypothetical pro-Russian government among the Ukrainian population. Since the government will immediately fall under Western sanctions, it will have to be formed from people who do not have much property in the West. There is not much choice in the Ukrainian political elite. Therefore, the new government would consist of some old officials dismissed during the Euromaidan revolution (some left for Russia but many remained in Ukraine) and representatives of marginal political parties. The list of a possible pro-Russian government published recently by the U.K. Foreign Office hardly represents any serious plan but it shows which problems Russia would meet in forming a loyal government in Ukraine.

    The initially passive population would likely meet with ever more repression, and additional difficulties due to the Western sanctions. Add here the new government with little legitimacy. The main resistance to the pro-Russian government would most likely not be armed, but unarmed. Its base would be the middle class in the big cities, whose situation would likely deteriorate most steeply.

    At the same time, Ukraine would fall now into the same political space as Russia and Belarus and would actually strengthen internal opposition to the governments of those countries (instead of alienating, as happened during the earlier violent and nationalist Euromaidan protests). By occupying Ukraine, Russia would increase the risk of destabilization from within and weaken itself. The polls suggest that a large-scale war with Ukraine would not be popular among Russians.

    It is not clear which social group would benefit from the occupation and on whom the pro-Russian government could rely. Russia’s ability to offset the impact of sanctions and repression by improving the living standards of the tens of millions of Ukrainians is very limited. Although wages and pensions are being increased in annexed Crimea and Russia is investing heavily in the peninsula, its general economic situation is still comparable to the poorest regions of Russia. The mobilization and radical redistribution of resources that would be necessary to ensure any semblance of social legitimacy in hypothetical pro-Russian Ukraine would be incompatible with the patronage capitalism of post-Soviet Russia.

    Some U.S. government officials are concerned that Putin is trying to restore the Soviet Union. They generally ignore that such a restoration would require far more than military expansion — it would require a radical transformation of contemporary Russia.

    Passive Revolution?

    Some left-wing authors have tried to explain the post-Soviet transformation as a case of passive revolution. This term was made famous by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci used it for various processes, but foremost for the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy in the 19th century from a patchwork of small states and territories under the foreign dynasties’ control. As we know, it did not take place as a popular revolution under the hegemony of the progressive bourgeoisie, but through the military and diplomatic actions of the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont. Could it be that Putin is now performing a “function of Piedmont” in the post-Soviet space, using military power to compensate for the political weakness of the patronage bourgeoisie and the left movement whose members dreamed of reuniting the Soviet Union?

    There are fundamental differences. In Italy, passive revolution produced a stronger, modern and independent state. A transition to bourgeois order and a nation-state took place. The revolutionary transformations were carried out “from above” to prevent the Jacobin revolutionary threat to the feudal aristocracy “from below” (as during the French Revolution).

    The problem is that there is no post-Soviet passive revolution, in the sense of forced modernization under threat of a new “Jacobin” social revolution. The post-Soviet transformations are an ongoing crisis that actually began long before the collapse of the Soviet Union. These transformations actually signal stagnation and de-modernization instead of modernization. No post-Soviet maidan revolutions threatened the post-Soviet ruling class of patronage capitalists; they merely helped one faction of that class to replace another faction.

    “Civilizational” Identity Politics

    The problem with Russia today is not that it is supposedly restoring the “Soviet Empire.” The problem is that Russia is trying to conduct a Great Power foreign policy but is no longer the Soviet Union.

    Today’s Russia does not offer anything like the universal progressive project that once attracted Third World countries and mass movements to its side, even when fewer and fewer people believed in the Soviet Union itself, and whose modernization successes still evoke massive nostalgia even in countries where it was imposed by force (as in Eastern Europe). Now Russia compensates for a lack of “soft power” appeal with the “hard power” of coercive diplomacy.

    This is related to the notorious Russian “whataboutism.” When one has difficulty articulating advantages one has over their opponent, one tends to rely on the normalization of negative characteristics and actions to which one supposedly has the same “right” as everyone else in the club. For example, justifying Crimea annexation because, earlier, NATO bombed Yugoslavia and recognized Kosovo independence. This is a symptom and consequence of the still unresolved post-Soviet crisis of hegemony — incapacity of the ruling class for leadership in pursuing common interests with subaltern classes and other nations. For a truly hegemonic rule, it is not enough to say that “they are no better than us”. It is crucially important to convince that “we are indeed better than they are.”

    After the Putin-Biden summit in Geneva, which followed the Russian-Ukrainian escalation in the spring of 2021, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov published an article criticizing the selective application of “international rules” by Western powers. According to Lavrov, the “rules” are arbitrary and established by a small circle of nations. They are not based on international law and are not deliberated in established platforms such as the United Nations. Lavrov formulates this criticism in the language of “democracy.” He argued that the West is sensitive to violations of “internal” democracy but does not want an “external,” international democracy that would recognize the right of Russia and other non-Western powers to their own sovereignty and national ideology. The West does not recognize the reality of the multipolar world, he wrote. The recent joint statement signed by Putin and Xi Jinping begins with essentially the same argument.

    What Lavrov claims here, however, is not democracy but a kind of “civilizational” identity politics. The demand for recognition of the multipolar world — in contrast to the world under Western hegemony — isn’t grounded in any positive project for the good of humankind, which Russia would represent better. Instead, Lavrov simply calls for the right of the self-assigned representatives appealing to civilizational identities to be accepted and treated as equals on the international level based exclusively on their distinct identity claims.

    What Can Russia Offer to Ukraine and the World?

    Last summer, Putin published the famous article on Ukrainian-Russian history and relations where he claimed that Ukrainians and Russians are “one and the same people.” In Russian and Ukrainian languages, the word “people” means both a culturally distinct ethnic group as well as a political nation. This article has been often interpreted as Putin’s refusal to accept Ukraine’s sovereignty and justifying the invasion threat. However, this is a misleading and simplistic interpretation. Putin suggests that the desirable relations between Russia and Ukraine could be as between Germany and Austria. In Putin’s vision, Ukraine and Russia could be two states for “the same people,” allowing different versions of regional cultural identities to be expressed and to peacefully coexist, albeit separately due to complicated historical developments.

    However, this is not the only possible model of two states for “one and the same people” and perhaps not even the most obvious one for Putin himself, considering how long he worked in East Germany. Remarkably, he does not articulate the relationship between Russia and Ukraine as something like that between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which also offered two states for the divided German people but with fundamentally different models (and where an analog of the lost GDR would not necessarily be Russia). In Putin’s narrative, Ukrainians and Russians are “one and the same people” artificially divided by foreign powers. He says “A,” but he does not say “B”: “Our state is better than yours for the same people. We offer a better model and let the strongest survive.” Putin does not say this, not because he recognizes Ukraine’s sovereignty, but because he cannot offer a fundamentally better model for Ukraine than Ukraine’s predatory oligarchic elite and nationalist civil society.

    Many accuse Russia of revising the international order. In reality, Russian revanchism is not revisionist, but a conservative defense of the status quo: an attempt to hold on to Great Power status. Here lie the limits of the international appeal of current Russian rhetoric. The world needs change and solutions to major global problems rather than the conservation of the status quo.

    In a much-discussed speech at the Valdai Club last year, Putin articulated his vision as “healthy conservatism,” with his primary concern being to prevent “us from regressing and sinking into chaos.” However, when asked about universal values, not only for Russian “civilization” but for all humanity, he remained very brief and unspecific.

    An attempt to take over Ukraine would present the Russian ruling class with the choice of either taking the high risk of destabilizing its rule or radically revising its foundations. So far, there are no signs that they are now ready for the second scenario. Yet, however this crisis ends — short of escalating toward nuclear world war — it will increase the tensions between Russia’s Great Power claims and its backward political and social order.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing is here but the U.S. isn’t sending its officials, calling it a “diplomatic boycott.” Meanwhile, host outlet NBC is using every opportunity to bash China and Russia throughout their coverage. Tings Chak explains what the perception of the Olympics has been in China, analyzes the treatment of Eileen Gu, and reacts to the Western coverage. 22-year-old Amir Locke was shot to death by police in the early morning in his apartment in Minneapolis earlier this month, and protests have erupted nationwide. Ottawa truckers have been blocking roads, airports, and border crossings from the U.S. to Canada to protest coronavirus restrictions and vaccine requirements. The United States continues to escalate rhetoric and pressure against Russia, now making plans for the evacuation of Americans in Ukraine if Russia invades. Maryland residents represented their enslaved ancestors in court recently. Tyson Foods has more than doubled their profit this quarter – to $1.12 billion – by raising prices far higher than the wage increases workers have demanded and won.

    The post Winter Olympics: Western Reporters Compete For Gold In Fear-Mongering appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

  • COMMENTARY: By John Minto in Christchurch

    On December 30, New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade published a tweet condemning the forced closure of two Russian human rights groups, International Memorial and the Memorial Human Rights Centre.

    The groups were shut down by the Russian Supreme Court which was enforcing strict laws relating to dealings with “foreign agents”.

    In releasing the tweet, the government urged Russia to “live up to its civil and political rights commitments”.

    Our government has also been speaking out against human rights abuses in China against the Uighur people, to the extent of facilitating a parliamentary motion condemning the cruel policies of the Chinese government.

    Compare the criticism of Russia and China with MFAT’s reaction to Israel’s outrageous attacks on Palestinian human rights groups last October when it declared six of them to be “terrorist” organisations.

    The targeted groups (Bisan, Al-Haq, Addameer, Defence for Children International-Palestine, the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees, and the Union of Agricultural Work Committees) typically challenge human rights violations by the Palestinian Authority as well as Israel, both of which routinely detain Palestinian activists.

    Israel’s “terrorist” claim against these groups was a blatant attempt to undermine some of the most effective Palestinian civil society organisations, stifle their collective voices, and cut their sources of funding.

    Not a peep from MFAT
    But not a peep from MFAT. No tweets, no public statements, nothing.

    When our Foreign Minister is asked about these things her officials say the government is “very concerned” about developments in the Middle East and “keeping a close watch” on the situation. They say they regularly raise human rights concerns with the Israeli ambassador in meetings with officials.

    Heaven only knows what goes on in those meetings but if all human rights abuses by Israel against the Palestinian people were discussed, the Israeli ambassador would be in permanent residence at MFAT.

    MFAT gives similar responses when massive human rights abuses are perpetrated against the people of West Papua by the Indonesian Army, which has occupied the territory since 1962. These are discussed behind closed doors, if they are raised at all, with Indonesian officials.

    So what’s the difference that results in the Russian and Chinese governments being castigated for human rights abuses but for countries like Indonesia and Israel, there is minimal, if any, public comment?

    The awful truth is that our current government has moved New Zealand closer to the US than at any time since the 1980s and MFAT calls out human rights abuses to a US agenda.

    If the abuses are perpetrated by enemies of the US, such as in Russia or China, they get a full public blast but if US allies are killing unarmed people protesting the occupation of their country then it’s all hushed up.

    Kept ‘in the family’
    It’s kept “in the family”, behind closed doors. Martin Luther King’s comment about “the injustice of silence” applies.

    Human rights abuses against Palestinians and the people of West Papua continue because countries like New Zealand have self-important ministry officials who think it’s clever to operate a public/private hierarchy of human rights abuses according to US criteria.

    Aotearoa New Zealand is complicit in many ongoing human rights abuses through our silence.

    Cowardice is another word that comes to mind. It’s not acceptable.

    The hypocrisy of the US, and Aotearoa New Zealand’s, position on human rights was laid bare last week when Amnesty International released a 280-page report which concluded that Israel was an apartheid state. US Government officials attacked the report outright without reading it and without challenging any of the report’s substance.

    MFAT hasn’t uttered a word
    At a Washington press conference, a State Department official was left to try to explain why US Human Rights Reports have quoted extensively from Amnesty International regarding Ethiopia, China, Iran, Burma, Syria and Cuba but reject outright Amnesty’s report on Israel.

    Needless to say, MFAT hasn’t uttered a word on the Amnesty report but is busy helping support a webinar intending to “build strategic partnerships in agriculture” with Israel through AgriTech New Zealand. This is deeply embarrassing to this country and MFAT should cancel Aotearoa New Zealand’s involvement in this webinar.

    It goes without saying this country should stand against all abuses of human rights in a principled and forthright manner. This won’t happen until the current leadership of MFAT is stood down.

    John Minto is a political activist and commentator, and spokesperson for Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa. This article was first published by the New Zealand Herald and is republished with the author’s permission.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A video shows a five-year-old playing with a gun watched over by a uniformed man from a neo-Nazi organisation. You could be forgiven for thinking this BBC footage was from Louis Theroux’s new documentarForbidden America. But you’d be wrong.

    In fact, this footage was broadcast immediately after Theroux’s documentary about the far-right in the US, on the BBC Weekend News. But unlike Theroux’s expose, this news item failed to mention that the group it platformed is a neo-Nazi organisation known for ultranationalism, anti-semitism, and Nazi iconography.

    The Azov Regiment

    As part of the BBC‘s coverage of the situation in Ukraine, journalist Orla Guerin reported on people preparing for invasion. The segment covered a training afternoon for civilians organised by the National Guard. But it neglected to tell viewers that it was the Azov Regiment – formerly the Azov Battalion – that ran the training event.

    Azov was formed in 2014. Its first commander Andriy Biletsky is now the leader of the far-right ultranationalist National Corps party. In 2010, Biletsky stated that Ukraine’s mission was to:

    lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans].

    Azov’s links to neo-Nazi ideology are well documented. Even the Sun ran an article in January describing it as “neo-Nazi militia”. The paper further stated that:

    On the Azov Battalion-affiliated Thule Signal Telegram channel, openly racist jokes and memes are posted.

    The US State Department described the group as a “nationalist hate group”, and it’s banned on Facebook.

    Enter the BBC

    Despite these well-known links, the BBC uncritically visited the Azov training afternoon. It depicted young and old people learning how to fire guns, including “a granny with a gun”. And, perhaps most worryingly, it interviewed an Azov major. Over the footage of the earlier-mentioned five-year-old, Guerin narrates that there’s “a sense of peril for Ukraine and its people, like 5-year-old…”. She continues her dramatic voiceover, stating there’s a “sense that danger is closing in”.

    Yet not once does Guerin mention the dangers of the organisation they’re training with. She simply describes Azov as the “national guard”. The soldier who she interviews is captioned as a “Major” with the “National Guard”.

    Euro News also covered the same training event. But the difference is that it headlined its article:

    Ukraine far-right group offers training to civilians

    You can watch the BBC segment here:

    No excuses

    Even if Azov’s links to the far-right weren’t so widely documented, there is no excuse for the BBC not giving its viewers any background information on the organisation it platformed. Moreover, the BBC itself has reported on those links in the past. A 2014 BBC article contains this description of Azov:

    Run by the extremist Patriot of Ukraine organisation, which considers Jews and other minorities “sub-human” and calls for a white, Christian crusade against them, it sports three Nazi symbols on its insignia: a modified Wolf’s Hook, a black sun (or “Hakensonne”) and the title Black Corps, which was used by the Waffen SS.

    The same article also states:

    As a result, the question of the presence of the far-right in Ukraine remains a highly sensitive issue, one which top officials and the media shy away from. No-one wants to provide fuel to the Russian propaganda machine.

    You couldn’t make it up.

    The Canary contacted the BBC for a response, but it declined to comment.

    Gross negligence or gross manipulation?

    At best, the BBC‘s coverage could be gross negligence. It reported on an event and didn’t bother to question who was running it. At worst, it was gross manipulation, deliberately ignoring Azov’s far-right connections in favour of dramatic footage of people ready to arms themselves to fight against the evil Russian invaders.

    Either way, the BBC has a responsibility to its viewers that it didn’t uphold in this piece. According to Ofcom in 2020, the BBC  “remains the most-used news source”. 56% of adults get their news from BBC One. And according to its charter, the BBC should:

    act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output..

    With its segment on Ukraine, the BBC failed to do this. Instead, it platformed dangerous racists without comment. Whatever its reasons, this is simply not good enough.

    Featured image via screengrab/YouTube/BBC News 

    By Emily Apple

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • It must be a sure handicap to be saddled with such a name when piloting a large government department, but US Secretary of State Antony Blinken shows no sign of that bothering him.  It has, however, become a hallmark of a policy that is markedly devoid of foresight and heavily marked by stammering confusion.

    On his trip to Australia, Blinken showed us, again, how morality and forced ethics in the international scene can be the stuff of particularly bad pantomime.  He sounded, all too often, as an individual sighing about the threats to US power while inflating those of its adversaries.  Russia and China were, as they tend to be these days, at the front of the queue of paranoid agitation.

    In an interview with The Australian, Blinken was adamant that “there’s little doubt that China’s ambition over time is to be the leading military, economic, diplomatic and political power not just in the region, but in the world.”  He admitted that the US had its own version of an “international order” – but that vision was “liberal”.  Beijing’s was profoundly inappropriate.  “China wants an (international) order, but the difference is its world order would be profoundly illiberal.”

    Blinken was also pleased at what he saw on his visit to the University of Melbourne.  “My stepfather is an alumnus, so that was wonderful to reconnect, also just to talk to some remarkable young Australians who are really the future of the relationship, the partnership between us – incredibly engaged, incredibly smart, incredibly thoughtful about the present and the future.”  And, no doubt, handpicked for the occasion.

    Russia’s behaviour was also the subject of the Blinken treatment.  Australians, warned the secretary, faced a solemn choice before Moscow’s stratagems.  “Russia, right now,” he told an Australian news program on the ABC, “poses an immediate challenge, not just to Ukraine … but to some very basic principles that are relevant to the security not just to people in Europe, but throughout the world, including Australia.”  That’s considerable reach for a power with an economy that is only marginally larger than Australia’s.

    Blinken’s babble about international liberal orders and territorial integrity echoes the Truman Doctrine in the early stages of the Cold War, one that ended up bloodied and sodden in the rice fields and jungles of Indochina.  In time, variations of this same, pathetic overreading of imminent crises and threats would propel US forces into Iraq and Afghanistan, and what a supreme mess those engagements turned out to be.  All that mattered were the substitutes: in the case of Afghanistan, Islamic fundamentalism twinned with terrorism; in the case of Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction never found and forced links with al-Qaeda never proved.

    Blinken’s visit had also inspired the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison to wax lyrical about the sanctity of borders, something that proved somewhat irrelevant when Australia’s defence personnel found themselves serving as auxiliaries of US military efforts.  He wanted “to send a very clear message on behalf of Australia, a liberal democracy who believes in freedom and the sovereignty of states, not just in Europe, but in our region as well – that the autocratic, unilateral actions of Russia [are considered] to be threatening, and bullying Ukraine is something that is completely and utterly unacceptable.”

    Despite such statements, little is being done to stop the trains heading towards the precipice of conflict.  Everything is being said about getting citizens of other countries out of Ukraine before the bloody resolution.  In late January, of the 129 diplomatic missions based in Ukraine, four had announced the departure of family members of personnel: the US, UK, Australia and Germany.

    US President Joe Biden has been the leading voice on this move, adding kindling in urging that, “American citizens should leave, and should leave now.”  In an interview with NBC News, he did nothing to quell concerns.  “We’re dealing with one of the largest armies in the world.  This is a very different situation and things could go crazy quickly.”

    The Australians, unimaginatively obedient, have also issued similar calls of evacuation, suggesting imminent conflict.  Canberra has become rather adept at evacuating embassy staff and shutting down operations in the face of a crisis.  “Given the deteriorating security situation caused by the build up of Russian troops on Ukraine’s border,” Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne stated, “the Government has directed the departure of staff at the Australian embassy at Kyiv.”

    Ukrainian officials have not been too impressed by these very public sentiments of jumping ship.  Volodymyr Shalkivskyi, based at the Ukrainian embassy in Canberra, wished to “avoid panic and different kind of rumours that the invasion is inevitable.”  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also told reporters in southern Ukraine that, “The best friend of enemies is panic in our country.”

    The Ukrainian premier even went so far as to invite Biden to visit Kyiv to ease tensions, something he is unlikely to do, given the calls to evacuate US citizens.  “I am convinced that your arrival in Kyiv in the coming days, which are crucial for stabilising the situation, will be a powerful signal,” Zelensky is supposed to have said in a call to the US president.  He hoped that this would “help prevent the spread of panic.”

    While Zelensky’s role seems increasingly marginal, one blowed sideways by the winds of events increasingly beyond his control, Blinken’s focus, and that of the Biden administration, remains affixed to the Indo-Pacific.  Last year’s AUKUS agreement, negotiated in secret and in defiance of other alliances, including that with France, suggests that whatever Moscow’s intentions, China remains the primary, nerve racking concern.

    The post Blinken Foreign Policy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The United States and its backing of far-right forces in Ukraine, is the biggest impediment to peace, reports Barry Sheppard.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • The imperial center of the capitalist attack on nature in pursuit of private profits that threaten ultimate public loss continues into the new year, but we’re hopefully closer to a solution of our racial (human) problem at this most crucial time. With countless systemic breakdowns and divisions among people that seem, especially in America, to invite calamity, it may be the rest of the world that offers the most hope. The present maniacal threats to Russia, or rather Putin, since individual villains always count for more than systems, could bring about a nuclear war. But Russia and Putin, while capitalist, are not nearly dumb or murderous enough to invite that, yet the brainless assault on that nation in the psycho-economic need to maintain an imperial war business continues. The growing inequalities among those who finance this idiocy are forcing the subjects of empire, including most Americans, to begin a serious effort to clean up the moral and physical sewer created by the empire of waste and war.

    While imperial efforts to deal with the fact that China has become a major global marketplace force as great as America gets worse by the minute, equal efforts provoking potential warfare are presently directed at Russia with daily psychodramas being played out on alleged news reports more akin to mad doctor comic book science fantasy. A recent episode in surreal idiocy passing for reality has it that Russia is working on a film production of “false flag” action that will depict a Ukraine attack on Russia so as to allow Russia to retaliate. American state of inanity plots and conspiracies make left wing kooks and right wing pinheads look like superior fiction creators, but this is the expression of a dying world order that could take humanity with it if we don’t stop just watching the show and close it down before the theater roof collapses on all our heads.

    The United States of capital has a debt of 30 trillion dollars in order to maintain its crippled infrastructure and demonic consciousness control while its confused people grow in awareness of the injustice and near total disaster they are compelled to finance. We all borrowed that money from rich people and must pay them interest so that we may continue paying rent, mortgages, credit card bills and drug, alcohol, religious and other therapy bills to enable us to continue the irrationality. More of us are not only asking why but demanding that priorities change radically so that debt is only incurred to make life better for us rather than simply afford a minority of billionaires incredibly lavish wealth while a vast majority of workers who might as well be peasants for the way they are treated sink lower in political economic stature while consciousness controllers assure that we are all equal participants in something called our democracy. This is despite zero evidence of anything but minority control over a vast population reduced to hating one another and striving for national progress in separatist ghettos that make real democracy impossible.

    Today, what passes for liberal politics makes conservative politics stronger than ever in America’s lesser evil form of alleged democracy. Trump still serves as a whipping boy for the print stenographers and TV performers of corporate media but that distraction only furthers the alienation of former liberals who trend toward intellectual Nazism while labeling everyone else fascist white supremacists and far less economically privileged others fall more deeply into a pit of malevolent ignorance that has creatures like democratic party leaders treated as socialist enslavers preventing freedom by forcing people who pick up dog shit as civic duty into wearing masks to prevent a modern plague that has already killed hundreds of thousands in America. This supposedly expresses the heavy hand of murderous socialist-commies in this combat between the brain washed and the brain dead.

    An alleged menace to humanity is supposedly proved by Russia massing troops on its Ukrainian border while the USA and its NATO lapdogs – even if a few are starting to nip at their master – mass weapons and troops at the Ukrainian side of that border. Lost to the befogged and uninformed is that the Ukraine borders Russia — not Indiana, Florida or California. Ukraine was once part of the USSR and was given up on the promise that it would never be part of NATO and menace Russia, and that Russia would treat that possibility the way the USA would treat the possibility of Russian troops and weapons massed on the Canadian and Mexican borders

    The Un-Intelligence community that knew nothing about 911 but everything about Russian-Chinese dangerous intervention in our great market is still warning about Putin stealing elections, threatening invasions and China committing genocide while Americans willing to buy an insurance policy to protect them against being attacked by sharks while being struck by lightning need better wake up calls accompanied by respect rather than condescending contempt practiced by alleged liberals who gain supposed intellectual stature by how many times they can include” fascist white supremacist” in any sentence directed at even more powerless people.

    Here is how Putin put it in a recent press conference, injecting sanity and reality into a faster growing madness conducted by American government and media screeching about a Russian menace to the Ukraine, Europe, the world, outer space, shopping, elections and collective imbecility:

    We have made it clear that any further movement of NATO to the East is unacceptable. Is there anything unclear about this? Are we deploying missiles near the U.S. border? No, we are not. It is the United States that has come to our home with its missiles and is already standing at our doorstep. Is it going too far to demand that no strike systems be placed near our home? What is so unusual about this?

    This was not widely shared, or understood, by America’s alleged “free” market media, but that isn’t odd given practice of information control that has been going on since the birth of “our” nation. Here’s a quote from a supposedly bright guy rarely, if ever, seen or considered by millions who’ve been taught how bright he was but without this wisdom:

    Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society.

    This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the less privileged sections of the population.

    Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for citizens to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of their political rights.

    We are supposedly aware of his equation about energy and matter even though most of us haven’t the vaguest idea of its meaning but these insightful words about capitalism written by Albert Einstein back in 1949 have only been read by a few more folks than seeing them here for the first time. Karl Marx spoke of this reality back in the 19th century but most of us are barely aware of the great humorist Groucho and only know of Marx through teachings that come from people selling the insurance to protect us from being struck by lightning while being attacked by sharks.

    We need to stop buying the alleged insurance against the impossible and demand protection against the all to real menace of warfare. We’ll need public banks, higher taxes on wealth and a higher minimum wage and lower limits on individual wealth while millions live in poverty and the nuclear menace grows. If we cant do it our selves and have to rely on China and Russia growing closer to bring an end to an American minority attempting continued rule of the world that promises total disaster, we’ll deserve the outcome, rather than help create it, as we should.

    The post Old World Odor Needs Cleansing by a New World Order before the Stench Kills Everyone first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • What worries American diplomats is that Germany, other NATO nations and countries along the Belt and Road route understand the gains that can be made by opening up peaceful trade and investment. If there is no Russian or Chinese plan to invade or bomb them, what is the need for NATO? What is the need for such heavy purchases of U.S. military hardware by America’s affluent allies? And if there is no inherently adversarial relationship, why do foreign countries need to sacrifice their own trade and financial interests by relying exclusively on U.S. exporters and investors?

    The post America’s Real Adversaries Are Its European And Other Allies appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Following Russia’s troop build-up along Ukraine’s borders portending imminent invasion, Houthi rebels in Yemen backed by Iran, which is Russia’s most dependable regional ally in the decade-long Syrian conflict, have significantly escalated missile strikes on the oil-rich Gulf States with a nod of approval from the Kremlin in order to take pressure off Russia in the Ukraine stand-off by opening a second front in the veritable Achilles’ heel of the energy-dependent industrialized world.

    To buttress the defenses in the Gulf, US F-22 fighter jets arrived in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Saturday, Feb. 12, as part of an American defense response to recent missile attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels targeting the country. The Raptors landed at Al-Dhafra Air Base in Abu Dhabi, which hosts 2,000 US troops. American soldiers there launched Patriot interceptor missiles and briefly had to take shelter after the missiles exploded in the airspace above the military base last month.

    The deployment came after the Houthi rebels launched three attacks targeting Abu Dhabi last month, including one targeting a fuel depot that killed three people and wounded six. The attacks coincided with visits by presidents from South Korea and Israel to the UAE. Though overshadowed by the Ukraine crisis, the missile strikes targeting the Emirates has sparked a major US response. The American military has sent the USS Cole on a mission to Abu Dhabi.

    To return the favor of opening a second front in the Gulf and acknowledging Russia’s steadfast strategic alliance with Iran in the region, the Kremlin issued rare condemnation of recent Israeli airstrikes in Syria as “crude violation” of Syria’s sovereignty on Thursday, Feb. 10, that up until now were tacitly tolerated by the Russian forces based in Syria’s Tartus naval base and Khmeimim airbase southeast of Latakia, and also pledged last month that the Russian Air Force would conduct joint air patrols alongside the Syrian Air Force that would pre-empt the likelihood of further Israeli airstrikes in the future.

    “Israel’s continuing strikes against targets inside Syria cause deep concern,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said. “They are a crude violation of Syria’s sovereignty and may trigger a sharp escalation of tensions. Also, such actions pose serious risks to international passenger flights.”

    Although Israel claims its air campaign in Syria is meant to target Iran-backed militias, the airstrikes often kill Syrian soldiers. Syrian state media said one soldier was killed and five more were wounded in the latest Israeli attack at Damascus, which occurred Wednesday, Feb. 9.

    Russia has held talks with Israel on Syria, and said last month it would begin joint air patrols with Syria. The patrols will include areas near the Golan Heights in southern Syria bordering Israel, a frequent site of the Israeli airstrikes, and Israel is said to be considering discontinuing the strikes altogether or slowing them down significantly.

    The Times of Israel noted that this marked a momentous change in policy for Russia: “Following the patrol, Ynet reported that Israeli military officials were holding talks with Russian army officers to calm tensions.”

    The report added, “Israeli officials were struggling to understand why Russia, which announced that such joint patrols were expected to be a regular occurrence moving forward, had apparently changed its policy toward Israel.” The report claimed that Israel might limit its air campaign in Syria as a result of Russia’s “mystifying” change in the Syria policy.

    Over the years, Israel has not only provided material support to militant groups battling Damascus – particularly to various factions of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate al-Nusra Front in Daraa and Quneitra bordering the Israel-occupied Golan Heights – but Israel’s air force has virtually played the role of the air force of the terrorists and mounted hundreds of airstrikes in Syria during the decade-long conflict.

    In an interview to New York Times in January 2019, Israel’s former Chief of Staff Lt. General Gadi Eisenkot confessed that the Netanyahu government approved his recommendations in January 2017 to step up airstrikes in Syria. Consequently, more than 200 Israeli airstrikes were launched on the Syrian targets in 2017 and 2018, as revealed by the Israeli Intelligence Minister Israel Katz in September 2018.

    In 2018 alone, Israel’s air force dropped 2,000 bombs in Syria. The purported rationale of the Israeli airstrikes in Syria has been to degrade Iran’s guided missile technology provided to Damascus and its Lebanon-based proxy, Hezbollah, which poses an existential threat to Israel’s regional security.

    Nevertheless, Israeli military strategists’ “concerns” aside, it’s worth recalling that a joint American-Israeli program, involving a series of short-of-war clandestine strikes, aimed at taking out the most prominent generals of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and targeting Iran’s power stations, industrial infrastructure, and missile and nuclear facilities has been going on since early 2020 after the commander of IRGC’s Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani was assassinated in an American airstrike at the Baghdad airport on January 3, 2020.

    As the US presidential race heated up in the election year, the pace and sophistication of the subversive attacks in Iran picked up simultaneously. In the summer of 2020, “mysterious explosions” were reported at a missile and explosives storage facility at Parchin military base on June 26, at power stations in the cities of Shiraz and Ahvaz, a “mysterious fire” at Bushehr port on July 15 destroying seven ships, and a massive explosion at the Natanz nuclear site on July 2, 2020 that reportedly set back Iran’s nuclear program by at least two years.

    Besides wooing the Zionist lobbies in the run-up to the US presidential election, another purpose of the subversive attacks appeared to be to avenge a string of audacious attacks mounted by the Iran-backed forces against the US strategic interests in the Persian Gulf that brought the US and Iran to the brink of a full-scale war in September 2019.

    In addition to planting limpet mines on oil tankers off the coast of UAE in May 2019 and the subsequent downing of the American Global Hawk surveillance drone in the Persian Gulf by Iran, the brazen attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia on September 14, 2019, was the third major attack in the Persian Gulf against the assets of Washington and its regional allies.

    That the UAE had the forewarning of the imminent attacks was proved by the fact that weeks before the attacks, it recalled forces from Yemen battling the Houthi rebels and redeployed them to defend the UAE’s territorial borders.

    The September 14, 2019, attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility in eastern Saudi Arabia was an apocalypse for the global oil industry because it processed five million barrels crude oil per day, almost half of Saudi Arabia’s total oil production.

    The subversive attack sent jitters across the global markets and the oil price surged 15%, the largest spike witnessed in three decades since the First Gulf War after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, though the oil price was eased within weeks after industrialized nations released their strategic oil reserves.

    It bears mentioning that alongside deploying several thousand American troops, additional aircraft squadrons and Patriot missile batteries in Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the Abqaiq attack, several interventionist hawks in Washington invoked the Carter Doctrine of 1980 as a ground for mounting retaliatory strikes against Iran, which states:

    “Let our position be absolutely clear: an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

    Although the Houthi rebels based in Yemen claimed the responsibility for the September 2019 complex attack involving drones and cruise missiles on the Abqaiq petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, Washington dismissed the possibility. Instead, it accused Tehran of mounting the complex attack from Iran’s territory.

    Nevertheless, puerile pranks like planting limpet mines on oil tankers and downing a $200-million surveillance aircraft can be overlooked but the major provocation of mounting a drone and missile attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility that crippled its oil-processing functions for weeks was nothing short of showing red rag to the bull.

    Unless Iran got the green light to go ahead with the attacks from a major military power that equals Washington’s firepower, such confrontation would have amounted to a suicidal approach.

    Considering such a co-ordinated escalation in the Gulf by Iran and Russia, it seems a forgone conclusion that if the Kremlin decided to invade Ukraine, Iran, too, would mobilize its forces in the critically important volatile region to disrupt the global oil supply and put pressure on the energy-dependent industrialized powers to carefully consider their retaliatory measures against the Russia-Iran military alliance.

    In fact, this was the precise message conveyed to Washington’s military strategists by the last month’s audacious Houthi attacks on targets in UAE, specifically the one targeting al-Dhafra airbase hosting US forces.

    Regardless, the acts of subversion in the Persian Gulf in 2019 culminating in the “sacrilegious assault” on the veritable mecca of the oil production industry in Sept. 2019 should be viewed in the broader backdrop of the New Cold War that has begun following the Ukraine crisis in 2014 after Russia occupied the Crimean peninsula and Washington imposed sanctions on the Kremlin.

    In addition, Russia’s membership in the G8 forum was suspended by the Western powers in March 2014 and Russian President Vladimir Putin was snubbed at international summits by the Western leaders, by then-President Obama in particular, an insult that the Russian strongman took rather personally.

    The Kremlin’s immediate response to the escalation by Washington was that it jumped into the fray in Syria in September 2015, after a clandestine visit to Moscow by General Qassem Soleimani, the slain commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force.

    When Russia deployed its forces and military hardware to Syria in September 2015, the militant proxies of Washington and its regional clients were on the verge of drawing a wedge between Damascus and the Alawite heartland of coastal Latakia, which could have led to the imminent downfall of the Bashar al-Assad government.

    With the help of the Russian air power, the Syrian government has since reclaimed most of Syria’s territory from the insurgents, excluding Idlib in the northwest occupied by the Turkish-backed militants and Deir al-Zor and the Kurdish-held areas in the east, thus inflicting a humiliating defeat on Washington and its regional allies.

    Finally, a word about the venerated commander of IRGC’s Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani who was assassinated in an American airstrike on a tip-off from the Israeli intelligence at the Baghdad airport on January 3, 2020. Soleimani was the most trusted aide of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and his main liaison for holding consultations with Russia.

    Not only did he convince Kremlin with his diplomatic skills to strike at Washington’s vulnerability in the Syrian conflict but he was also the chief architect of the audacious September 2019 attacks at the Abqaiq petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the oil-rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.

    Reportedly, Trump initially rejected the Pentagon’s option to assassinate General Soleimani on December 28, 2019, due to apprehensions over full-scale confrontation with Iran, and authorized airstrikes on Iran-backed militia groups in Iraq instead.

    But after one of frequent rocket attacks at the US embassy in Baghdad claimed by Iran-backed forces, Trump succumbed to pressure from the American deep state, led by the powerful top brass of the Pentagon, which had a score to settle with General Soleimani for giving the global power a bloody nose in Syria’s war.

    The post Will Iran Strike at Global Oil Supply if Russia Invades Ukraine? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Listen to a reading of this article:

    If you “vote out fascism” and then the president you voted for turns out to have the same effective policies as the previous administration, it’s time to start asking who the fascists actually are.

    Hoo you’ve done it now, CIA. You are in trouble. It was all good fun when you were doing fine normal stuff like toppling governments and running torture programs and assassinating people, but collecting bulk data on Americans?? You better prepare for some accountability, mister!

    And the next time you suggest the CIA might be up to something nefarious, you’ll still get called a crazy conspiracy theorist.

    “Abolish the CIA” is almost too weak a position for an agency that should never have been made in the first place and should have been dismantled in the fucking nineteen sixties.

    The US war machine is just a rich man’s mafia.

    It’s not about Joe Rogan. It’s not about Covid misinformation. It’s not about QAnon, Russian trolls, domestic extremists or election security. It’s about ruling power structures needing to normalize and expand the regulation of online speech to protect consent for the status quo.

    A liberal is someone who yells all day about far right truckers and far right Joe Rogan and then applauds when their president gives weapons to literal Nazis.

    Very excited to find out whether “The US intelligence community says Putin has decided to invade Ukraine any minute now” is the kind of psyop that’s just designed to ramp up cold war hysteria or the kind of psyop that’s designed to prime us for US proxy war aggressions.

    The PR black eye the US empire sustained from the Iraq invasion ensured that it will greatly preference using proxy forces over US troops wherever possible. Middle Eastern jihadists, Latin American reactionaries, and Ukrainian Nazis all make very good proxy forces for the empire.

    A lot of confusion about Russia and Ukraine could be easily avoided if English language news media would end the appallingly unethical practice of printing unsubstantiated assertions by opaque intelligence agencies and presenting it as a “scoop”.

    The burden of proof is always on the party making the claim. It’s so weird how everyone will apply this standard to things like internet forum arguments and high school debates but not to immensely consequential claims by the most powerful institutions on the planet who have a well-documented history of lying.

    Make a claim that could result in winning a Twitter argument and you’ll immediately be asked for proof. Make a claim that could result in thousands of deaths and it will be reported as fact by The New York Times.

    So to recap:

    Nation stationing troops inside its own borders = hostile aggressor.

    Nation circling the planet with hundreds of military bases, waging nonstop wars, working to destroy any nation which disobeys it, pushing nuclear brinkmanship = just normal democracy freedom stuff.

    Those who called you crazy for warning that cold war escalations could lead to hot war will be the first to tell you when hot war approaches that it is unavoidable and must be supported.

    Is there any doubt that the same propaganda machine which convinced half the US political spectrum that the highest levels of their government had been infiltrated by the Kremlin could convince the public that a proxy war started by US/NATO/Ukraine was actually started by Russia?

    News media reporters and editors are just as culpable for the mass murders committed by the US military and its proxies as the troops who fire the weapons and the generals who give the orders. And military personnel who kill people in unjust wars are exactly as culpable for those crimes as any other murderer.

    People who say China is as evil as the US simply haven’t learned enough or thought honestly enough about the evils of the US.

    China is better than the US. That’s not because China is flawless, it’s because the US spending the 21st century slaughtering people by the millions and working to destroy any nation who disobeys it makes it quantifiably worse than literally anyone else.

    China is a surveillance state. The US empire is a surveillance state that also kills millions of people in wars of aggression.

    Rightists need to invent fairy tales about evil elites ushering in a Marxist dystopia because they are ideologically prohibited from considering the possibility that the evil elites are already getting their every wish fulfilled by our mundane, boring capitalist dystopia.

    Dissolution of the state in today’s world just means instant absorption into the US-centralized power structure. As long as the US empire is what it is and does what it does, states are necessary and criticisms of their existence are childish nonsense based on immature analysis.

    If China, North Korea, Venezuela or any other empire-targeted nation became an ideal stateless, classless, moneyless civilization it would instantaneously be absorbed by the empire. This self-evident fact invalidates all purist arguments against those governments. If your worldview does not account for the fact that there is a globe-spanning power structure working to absorb and subjugate all populations, you do not have a reality-based worldview. The empire is the very first obstacle to any leftward movement toward health in this world.

    The status quo is held in place by psychological compartmentalization. It’s held in place by propaganda and brute force, naturally, but it’s also equally propped up by the basic human tendency to avoid sincerely engaging with information that threatens to destroy our worldview.

    _______________________

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

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  • The current crisis in Ukraine had its beginnings in 2014, when the U.S. allied itself with right wing, white supremacist forces to overthrow an elected government. Supposed leftists in this country were largely silent about the danger and were themselves supportive of white supremacist politics carried out by the U.S. and its NATO partners.

    The post Left-Right White Solidarity Basis of Support for U.S./EU/NATO Wars on Global Humanity appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Russia’s goal is not to destroy Ukraine—this could be accomplished at any time. Rather, the goal of Russia is to destroy NATO by exposing its impotence.

    The post The Ultimate End Of NATO appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Listen to a reading of this article:

    I think it would be a lot more efficient and straightforward if all English-language news media were just run directly out of CIA headquarters by agency officials in Langley, Virginia. This way news reporters could eliminate the middleman and drop the undignified charade of presenting unproven assertions by western intelligence agencies as “scoops” that they picked up from “sources”.

    I mean, right now the mass media are churning out stories about “intelligence” which says Vladimir Putin has decided to invade Ukraine very soon, citing government officials and anonymous sources. We are never shown the “intelligence”, and we are never shown any evidence of its veracity; we’re simply told what opaque and unaccountable government agencies want us to believe about a foreign government. We’re not even reminded by the publishers of these CIA press releases that western intelligence agencies have a very extensive history of lying about exactly this sort of thing, and we’re certainly not informed that Kyiv appears to be ramping up aggressions in eastern Ukraine.

    Seriously, look at this absurd tweet by CNN’s Natasha Bertrand:

    That’s not a “scoop”. That’s just a news media employee repeating something she was told either directly or indirectly by the western intelligence cartel. She’s literally just telling us what an immensely powerful spy intelligence agency told her to say. And that’s become the norm for mass media reporting on all nations the western power alliance doesn’t like, especially Russia.

    So why mess around? Why not just move CNN’s office into the George Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley and have the CIA just publish its reports directly from there? I hear CNN needs a new president anyway. That way nobody needs to pretend they’re doing news reporting instead of intelligence agency stenography, the general public is clear that they’re being fed whatever story about reality the CIA wants them to believe, nobody feels like they’re being treated like a fool, plus it saves a commute for all the intelligence agency insiders who already work in the mass media.

    Because it must get pretty tedious, right? Where instead of just having your CIA employer tell you to run a story you have to go through this whole song and dance where an agency officer contacts you and says “Ooh buddy, have I got a scoop for you!” and then you type up what they say in newsy-sounding language citing “sources familiar with the matter” and present it as a news story.

    Clearly that’s not news reporting. Clearly it’s nothing other than garden variety state propaganda. So why not just be forthright about it? I know the CIA has a lot going on right now, but surely it can make some space in all its domestic surveillancelying, torturingdrug traffickingcoup-stagingwarmongering and assassinations for a little more state media news punditry?

    And of course we already know the answer. Propaganda doesn’t work if its targets know they are being propagandized. It needs to be administered by institutions who the public trusts to tell them the objective truth about what’s going on in the world. If the US and its Five Eyes allies simply controlled all media through the government like overtly totalitarian regimes, their propaganda would actually be far less effective than the systems of domestic perception management they have in place currently.

    The CIA is officially forbidden from operating in the United States (though as we’ve seen many times since its creation and up to the present day this is treated more as a guideline than a restriction), but what it is not officially forbidden to do is contact the media directly or through a proxy under the pretense of feeding them a news story which just so happens to advance the interests of the agency. The plutocratic media who benefit from the same status quo that the CIA protects then uncritically funnel that information into the minds of the unsuspecting public, and before you know it they’re rending their garments over a foreign government they’d previously not thought much about.

    In an actual free society with an actual free press, the very idea of this would be outrageous and if such a thing ever occurred it would be immediately condemned as journalistic malpractice with severe consequences for everyone involved. In an inverted totalitarian dystopia with the most effectively propagandized population on earth, it’s just treated as normal.

    _________________________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • As soon as Moscow received an American response to its security demands in Ukraine, it answered indirectly by announcing greater military integration between it and three South American countries, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba.

    Washington’s response, on January 26, to Russia’s demands of withdrawing NATO forces from Eastern Europe and ending talks about a possible Kyiv membership in the US-led alliance, was noncommittal.

    For its part, the US spoke of ‘a diplomatic path’, which will address Russian demands through ‘confidence-building measures’. For Russia, such elusive language is clearly a non-starter.

    On that same day, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced, in front of the Duma, Russia’s parliament, that his country “has agreed with the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua to develop partnerships in a range of areas, including stepping up military collaboration,” Russia Today reported.

    The timing of this agreement was hardly coincidental, of course. The country’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov did not hesitate to link the move to the brewing Russia- NATO conflict. Russia’s strategy in South America could potentially be “involving the Russian Navy,” if the US continues to ‘provoke’ Russia. According to Ryabkov, this is Russia’s version of the “American style (of having) several options for its foreign and military policy”.

    Now that the Russians are not hiding the motives behind their military engagement in South America, going as far as considering the option of sending troops to the region, Washington is being forced to seriously consider the new variable.

    Though US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan denied that Russian military presence in South America was considered in recent security talks between both countries, he described the agreement between Russia and the three South American countries as unacceptable, vowing that the US would react “decisively” to such a scenario.

    The truth is, that scenario has already played out in the past. When, in January 2019, the US increased its pressure on Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro to concede power to the US-backed Juan Guaido, a coup seemed imminent. Chaos in the streets of Caracas, and other Venezuelan cities, mass electric outages, lack of basic food and supplies, all seemed part of an orchestrated attempt at subduing Venezuela, which has for years championed a political discourse that is based on independent and well-integrated South American countries.

    For weeks, Washington continued to tighten the pressure valves imposing hundreds of sanction orders against Venezuelan entities, state-run companies and individuals. This led to Caracas’ decision to sever diplomatic ties with Washington. Ultimately, Moscow stepped in, sending in March 2019 two military planes full of troops and equipment to prevent any possible attempt at overthrowing Maduro. In the following months, Russian companies poured in to help Venezuela out of its devastating crisis, instigating another US-Russia conflict, where Washington resorted to its favorite weapon, sanctions, this time against Russian oil companies.

    The reason that Russia is keen on maintaining a geostrategic presence in South America is due to the fact that a stronger Russian role in that region is coveted by several countries who are desperate to loosen Washington’s grip on their economies and political institutions.

    Countries like Cuba, for example, have very little trust in the US. After having some of the decades-long sanctions lifted on Havana during the Obama administration in 2016, new sanctions were imposed during the Trump administration in 2021. That lack of trust in Washington’s political mood swings makes Cuba the perfect ally for Russia. The same logic applies to other South American countries.

    It is still too early to speak with certainty about the future of Russia’s military presence in South America. What is clear, though, is the fact that Russia will continue to build on its geostrategic presence in South America, which is also strengthened by the greater economic integration between China and most South American countries. Thanks to the dual US political and economic war on Moscow and Beijing, both countries have fortified their alliance like never before.

    What options does this new reality leave Washington with? Not many, especially as Washington has, for years, failed to defeat Maduro in Venezuela or to sway Cuba and others to join the pro-American camp.

    Much of the outcome, however, is also dependent on whether Moscow sees itself as part of a protracted geostrategic game in South America. So far, there is little evidence to suggest that Moscow is using South America as a temporary card to be exchanged, when the time comes, for US and NATO concessions in Eastern Europe. Russia is clearly digging its heels, readying itself for the long haul.

    For now, Moscow’s message to Washington is that Russia has plenty of options and that it is capable of responding to US pressure with equal or greater pressure. Indeed, if Ukraine is Russia’s red line, then South America – which has fallen under US influence since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 – is the US’s own hemispheric red line.

    As the plot thickens in Eastern Europe, Russia’s move in South America promises to add a new component that would make a win-lose scenario in favor of the US and NATO nearly impossible. An alternative outcome is for the US-led alliance to recognize the momentous changes on the world’s geopolitical map, and to simply learn to live with it.

    The post Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua: The US-Russia Conflict Enters a New Phase first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • China and Argentina move closer together as Argentina joins the BRI and they reach agreements on investments. Russia and China signed a joint declaration opposing Taiwan independence and NATO expansion. Green China runs a low-Carbon Olympics. Gu Ailing wins a gold medal for China.

    The post News on China | No. 86 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • © Andrew Harnik

    US President Joe Biden accused Russian leader Vladimir Putin of “wanting things he cannot get”. He was referring to Moscow’s security demands in Europe with regard to the US-led NATO military alliance.

    Looks like the man in the White House is inadvertently doing a bit of self-projection. It’s Biden who seems to want things that he can’t get.

    Top of that wish-list is for Russia to invade Ukraine. If that sounds a bit illogical, then why is Biden so obsessed about predicting an imminent military move by Russia against its western neighbor?

    The American president and his administration have been warning that Moscow could order an assault on Ukraine “any day”. Well, days and indeed weeks go by and there is no outcome as touted.

    Biden has also predicted that Putin doesn’t want to pursue diplomacy and that the Russian leader is driven to make war. Then a few days later, Putin hosted French President Emmanuel Macron in Moscow for marathon talks about resolving tensions.

    Russia has repeatedly rubbished the invasion claims – that have largely emanated from the United States – as baseless hysteria. President Putin said this week he has no intention of escalating the tensions over Ukraine.

    Moscow says that troops marshaled within Russia’s borders are not a threat to any neighboring state. The premise of American accusations about internal Russia’s military maneuvers is absurd. The precedent for interference it would establish is an affront to any nation’s sovereignty.

    Even the Ukrainian government and security officials have pushed back against the American claims of an imminent Russian invasion.

    Nevertheless, in spite of the lack of evidence and rationale, and in spite of a United Nations’ rebuke to desist from such inflammatory rhetoric, Washington keeps insisting on making its bogus predictions of Russian aggression.

    So, when is this gargantuan hoax going to be held to account? This contemporary version of “crying wolf” should have political and legal consequences for the hoaxers.

    Arguably, the Biden administration’s media campaign regarding Ukraine is a cynical exercise in manipulating public perception and manufacturing a crisis. Washington wants Russia to invade Ukraine in order to justify a US policy of division and conflict. American imperial ambitions for hegemony must rely on inciting tensions and ultimately conflict within Europe and towards Russia.

    A specific objective for American global ambitions is to sabotage the strategic energy trade between the European Union and Russia.  The problem for the US is that its charade of Russian aggression is simply not working. That’s because Moscow has no intention of starting a war with Ukraine or anyone else for that matter.

    Sure enough, Russia has put down red lines regarding its national security. They include no further eastward expansion of the NATO bloc and the exclusion of offensive American strike weapons from near Russia’s borders. To most reasonable observers, those demands are hardly signs of “aggression”. In fact, they sound like a plausible basis for discussing a new security framework for Europe.

    It seems that because the Biden administration can’t get what it wants – that is, a Russian invasion of Ukraine – it is hellbent on forcing or fabricating one.

    While European leaders this week anxiously appeal for more diplomacy to avert confrontation, it is salient and damnable that Washington is desperately militarizing the tensions. Biden has ordered more troops to deploy in Eastern Europe provocatively under the pretext of “defending allies from Russian aggression”. His administration is airlifting plane-loads of lethal weaponry to Ukraine which has the seeming intended effect of undermining any chance of finding a peaceful settlement to the Ukrainian civil war that has been simmering since the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in 2014.

    It is significant that Washington and London are the most hawkish advocates for trying to impose harsher economic sanctions against Russia. This is while the United States and Britain are taking the lead in militarizing Eastern Europe and talking up belligerence towards Moscow. The combined Anglo-American stance appears to be one of goading Russia into an armed conflict which can then be used as a pretext for sabotaging Europe’s energy relations with Russia.

    The danger is that the longer this American charade continues and the fantasy over Russia’s alleged invasion becomes more and more apparent, the risk increases of the US forcing a provocation for war. Perhaps not intended as a direct war, more likely as a proxy war using Ukraine.

    President Biden and his administration, as well as the entire US corporate media, are at risk of being exposed in the eyes of the world as war hoaxers. Included in that list of criminal warmongers is Britain.

    This portends Biden’s biggest foreign policy failure which, hard to believe, exceeds even the historic US defeat in Afghanistan.

    First published in Sputnik International

    The post Biden’s Big Fail… the Russian Invasion Fantasy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Commentators on the current Ukraine crisis have sometimes compared it to the Cuban missile crisis. This is a good comparison―and not only because they both involve a dangerous U.S.-Russian confrontation capable of leading to a nuclear war.

    During the 1962 Cuban crisis, the situation was remarkably similar to that in today’s Eastern Europe, although the great power roles were reversed.

    The post What The Cuban Missile Crisis Can Teach Us About Today’s Ukraine Crisis appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The original roles in the drama seem to be reversed. Back in December, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Oleksii Reznikov was warning that “not provoking Russia—that strategy does not and will not work,” claiming that Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 because NATO hadn’t let it join. In fact, Georgia began that war by attacking South Ossetia, driving tens of thousands of Russian-speaking residents there to flee across the border into Russia, creating an unprecedented refugee crisis for that country. These details, however, rarely trouble Western politicians or journalists.

    In December, the US seemed much more reluctant to escalate matters. President Joe Biden said he would not deploy troops to Ukraine, and ruled out a military response to any Russian incursion.

    The post Neo-Nazis Active In Ukraine As White House Adds 3,000 Troops appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Russian military T-72B3 tanks take part in a military exercise at the Kadamovsky Range in Russia's Rostov Region on January 27, 2022.

    Warning of the potentially catastrophic consequences of what could be the deadliest European conflict since World War II, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday stressed the imperative for a diplomatic solution to the Russia-Ukraine crisis that’s brought the world’s two nuclear superpowers perilously close to war.

    Writing for The Guardian, Sanders (I-Vt.) notes that “wars rarely turn out the way the experts tell us they will. Just ask the officials who provided rosy scenarios for the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, only to be proven horribly wrong. Just ask the mothers of the soldiers who were killed or wounded in action during those wars. Just ask the millions of civilians who became ‘collateral damage.’”

    Citing estimates that “there could be over 50,000 civilian casualties in Ukraine, and millions of refugees flooding neighboring countries,” the democratic socialist considers “the possibility that this ‘regional’ war could escalate to other parts of Europe.”

    “What might happen then is even more horrifying,” he says.

    Echoing anti-war activists who argue that U.S.-imposed economic sanctions are a dangerous provocation, Sanders asserts:

    The sanctions against Russia and Russia’s threatened response to those sanctions could result in massive economic upheaval — with impacts on energy, banking, food, and the day-to-day needs of ordinary people throughout the entire world. It is likely that Russians will not be the only people suffering from sanctions. And, by the way, any hope of international cooperation to address the existential threat of global climate crisis and future pandemics would suffer a major setback.

    While calling Russian President Vladimir Putin “most responsible for this looming crisis,” Sanders says that “I am extremely concerned when I hear the familiar drumbeats in Washington, the bellicose rhetoric that gets amplified before every war, demanding that we must show ‘strength,’ ‘get tough,’ and not engage in ‘appeasement.’”

    “A simplistic refusal to recognize the complex roots of the tensions in the region undermines the ability of negotiators to reach a peaceful resolution,” Sanders stresses before highlighting some of Moscow’s concerns — including the expansion of NATO into former Soviet republics and satellites and, specifically, the refusal of the U.S. to rule out Ukraine’s membership in what is seen as an anti-Russia alliance.

    “Does anyone really believe that the United States would not have something to say if, for example, Mexico was to form a military alliance with a U.S. adversary?” he asks.

    “Countries should be free to make their own foreign policy choices, but making those choices wisely requires a serious consideration of the costs and benefits,” Sanders contends. “The fact is that the U.S. and Ukraine entering into a deeper security relationship is likely to have some very serious costs — for both countries.”

    The senator concludes that “we must vigorously support diplomatic efforts to deescalate this crisis and reaffirm Ukrainian independence and sovereignty. And we must make clear that Putin and his gang of oligarchs will face major consequences should he continue down the current path.”

    “At the same time, we must never forget the horrors that a war in the region would cause and must work hard to achieve a realistic and mutually agreeable resolution — one that is acceptable to Ukraine, Russia, the United States, and our European allies,” he added, “and that prevents what could be the worst European war in over 75 years.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Devon Kearney in NPQ of 8 February 2022, reports on a worrying legislative development in El Salvador….

    It has been nearly a decade since the Russian government passed its “foreign agent law,” a measure that requires nonprofit groups that engage in political activity to register with the government if they receive money from overseas. Russia justified the bill by saying it was based on a U.S. law—a statute from the lead-up to World War II that many of us came to know only after Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was accused of being an unregistered foreign agent. Putin’s message was that this was just an ordinary, even boring regulatory measure.

    But it is more than that. Initial concerns focused on the stigma of being branded a foreign agent, but the law has sharper teeth, allowing the government to fine or even ban organizations that do not accept being branded as foreign agents. For example, on December 28, 2021, the government presented its case for disbanding the storied human rights organization Memorial for failing to include the disclaimer “produced by a foreign agent” on a few of its web pages. At the end of the hearing, the court ordered the Memorial to shut down. See: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/12/29/russias-supreme-court-orders-closure-emblematic-memorial/

    The sinister brilliance of the foreign agent law is twofold. First, it targets human rights NGOs’ supply lines, as it were, making it difficult to accept the funds they need to survive. In much of the world, human rights defenders rely on support from global philanthropies like the Open Society Foundations for the funding they need to operate. By the standards of Russia’s law, most would be required to register as foreign agents. Groups that take foreign money would be subject to government meddling and harassment; those that opted to do without would struggle to keep their doors open.

    Second, the law accomplishes this by co-opting legitimate regulatory functions of the state to crush dissent. Setting the rules for nonprofits—along with corporations, lobbyists, and a wide range of activities that impact the public good—is something governments are supposed to do. The great innovation of Putin and the autocrats that followed him was to turn regulatory schemes into instruments of their own political dominance. By obviating the need for violence against opponents, these methods may avoid the consequences of harsher exercises of state power. They are key to creating, in the words of Hungarian semi-dictator Viktor Orbán, an “illiberal democracy,” a state where elections continue but the rights and liberties of the people are curtailed.

    The world took notice when the Russian foreign agent law passed and, today, more than fifty countries have adopted laws based on the Russian example. One of the latest, introduced in November 2021 and still under debate, has an ominous twist. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2020/10/17/nicaragua-things-getting-worse-and-worse-for-human-rights-defenders-covid-19-and-foreign-agents/ as well as https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2016/06/17/un-rapporteurs-urge-india-to-repeal-law-restricting-human-rights-defenders-access-to-foreign-funding/

    Under 38-year-old President Nayib Bukele, a charismatic young politician, El Salvador has taken a sharp turn toward authoritarianism. Bukele made headlines in February 2020 when he brought armed soldiers into Congress to stand behind him as he demanded funding for the military. He has since fired prosecutors and judges in order to pack the legal system with loyalists. Bukele is the latest in a growing number of modernized dictators who adopt the tactics but not the swagger of their forebears. But his style is distinctive. In the Journal of Democracy, Salvadoran political scholar Manuel Meléndez-Sánchez writes: “Bukele relies on millennial authoritarianism, a distinctive political strategy that combines traditional populist appeals, classic authoritarian behavior, and a youthful and modern personal brand built primarily via social media.”

    Bukele’s authoritarian moves have raised alarms among Salvadoran civil society and around the world. The US has expressed its concern by hitting the government in the pocketbook: in May 2021, the United States Agency for International Development announced that it would pull funding from the Salvadoran police and other national agencies, instead directing the funds to civil society groups carrying out local development projects. More recently, USAID Administrator Samantha Power said the agency would commit $300 million for direct civil society funding in Central America, and promised to increase the amount of funding bypassing national governments to 50 percent within 10 years.

    All of this is in keeping with Power’s stated intention to provide aid to developing nations with a local, “bottom up” approach that prioritizes small businesses over big international contractors, and local civil society groups over national governments—“[t]o engage authentically with local partners and to move toward a more locally led development approach,” as she told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in July 2021.

    But in a region where US interference has long rankled rulers and their people, the move may be seen as ham-fisted—taking aid money to support opponents of a duly-elected government brings to mind the ways in which our country funded proxy wars that killed hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans and left a bloody trail in Nicaragua and Guatemala, as well. More recently, in 2019 the Trump Administration slashed hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the region in the hopes that by increasing financial pain it could pressure countries to take harsher measures to prevent their people from fleeing to the U.S.

    With this history as a pretext, and perhaps stinging at this new reduction in aid funding, Bukele’s government struck back. On November 9, 2021, the government introduced a bill to require domestic nonprofits or social enterprises (solely commercial enterprises are exempted) to register as foreign agents if they “respond to the interests of, or are directly or indirectly funded by, a foreigner.”

    That the Legislative Assembly is even considering such a restrictive bill sends a chilling message to human rights groups and organizations fighting against impunity and corruption,” says Ricardo González Bernal, the Fund for Global Human Rights’ Program Director for Latin America. The Fund supports grassroots human rights defenders and independent journalism in El Salvador, across Central America, and throughout the world.

    https://nonprofitquarterly.org/salvadoran-foreign-agent-law-threatens-human-rights-movements/

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