President Joe Biden broke the record for the longest presidential press conference ever – going nearly two hours fielding question after question. He stood that long to prove his stamina and dispel bigoted charges of ageism.
How did he do by his own standards? First, his opening remarks naturally touted the bright spots in the economy and the administration’s efforts to control Covid-19 during his first year in office. However, he missed an important opportunity to connect with the public and focus the tunnel-vision media on the serious legislation he wants to advance.
For example, early on Biden proposed reversing some of the tax cuts for giant corporations and the super-wealthy that Trump rammed through Congress in 2017. Biden did not say why it is urgent for Congress to act on this matter or explain that these taxes are necessary not just for fairness, but to pay for the major proposals he has on Capitol Hill. Therefore, the media will not pay attention and assume he has given up.
Calling himself a “union guy” for decades, Biden inexplicably did not give a shout-out for a higher federal minimum wage, now frozen at $7.25 an hour. The House Democrats passed a bill increasing the minimum wage in stages to $15 but the bill is stuck in the Senate and threatened by an anti-worker GOP filibuster. He also could have brought national attention to the House-passed “Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act” that makes it less difficult to form unions. This legislation is also mired in the Senate. The President’s failure to mention these proposals signals to the press that these bills are off the table for this election year. Consequently, reporters don’t write about these important measures.
Biden portrayed his Republican enemies in the Senate with weak language, asking thrice whether there was anything the GOP was for. That criticism could have been far more penetrating had he enumerated ten proposals, passed in the House, that the corporate-indentured Republicans in both the House and Senate were against big time. Imagine the impact, for example, of noting the GOP blocking the renewal of $300 or $250 monthly checks to over 65 million children (both liberal and conservative families in need) in a mid-winter pandemic. Why not mention expanding Medicare for the elderly, or rebuilding America in every community—the latter desired by just about every local chamber of commerce, union, and small business? Such concise contrasts by Biden would have sent the cruel duo, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy reeling.
Biden spoke of infrastructure, to be sure, but didn’t highlight the appeal to specific local interests and the overwhelming public support. He should have also warned big business to stop grabbing and corrupting the safety net assistance for deprived small business, under the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). He could have referred to the Inspector General’s exposés at the Small Business Administration (SBA), which have gone almost unnoticed.
Biden marveled at the fact that not one Republican senator has dissented from draconian do-nothing Republican leaders. Unfortunately, the Democrats assured the Republican lock-step by not trying months ago to intensely spin-off some GOP Senators starting with the five not running for re-election and Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT). Romney says he hasn’t received one call from the White House.
Presidential remarks at press conferences needn’t devote more than two or three sentences to alert the country and the media to an administration’s priorities. Biden’s omissions were puzzling indeed by comparison to his own previous policy stands.
As a long-time corporate Democrat, it was not surprising that Biden did not mention law and order for the corporate crooks that have hugely ripped off government programs, as well as exploiting consumers and workers. But then he doesn’t exactly have the strong support from the Democratic Party or the Democratic National Committee (DNC) down to the state committees whose hands are out 24/7 for corporate campaign contributions.
Equally disappointing were the reporters’ questions narrowly ranging over a small number of issues – voting rights, the votes in Congress, his declining poll numbers, and Ukraine. The White House Press Corps, as the legendary pioneer Helen Thomas would politely point out, censors itself when it isn’t fearful of its bosses or being sycophantic. There were no questions on what Biden wants, but omitted. There were no questions on the corporate domination of just about every sector of our government and its political economy. And there were no questions about the bloated, unauditable, draining military budget to which was added $24 billion more than Biden and the Pentagon requested.
Consumers are hurt by gouging prices, deceptive practices, and blocked remedies. Many workers have widespread occupational hazards, low pay, and few benefits, yet they are taking more opportunities in a period of temporary labor shortages to form unions among some big-box chains and retailers (Starbucks, Amazon). The White House Press Corps repeatedly fails to ask questions that ordinary people would want answered about their conditions.
When Biden signals his acceptance of only pieces of his proposals being passed, he pre-signals defeat and weakens his negotiating leverage in advance. Presidents who appear weak diminish per se their influence with Congress.
Perhaps the media’s worst performance last Wednesday was their war-inciting, history-forgetting questions about Ukraine – goading a properly cautious Biden. After all, President Putin knows how deep Russian memories are of losing about 50 million people from western frontier invasions in World War I and World War II. They know that any Russian leader would oppose NATO, a military alliance against the Soviet Union – bringing weapons and membership to adjacent Ukraine. Nonetheless, the reporters chose war inciting, not peace inciting (diplomacy), questions, other than asking about what happened to his campaign promise to end the war in Yemen.
Biden, his advisers, and the Press Corps need to review their performances to avoid future ditto heading. We need to make them care enough to engage in such introspections.
President Biden said Wednesday that Russian President Vladimir Putin will pay a “serious and dear price” if he orders his reported 100,000 troops stationed along the Russian-Ukraine border to invade Ukraine, a scenario Biden says is increasingly likely. This comes as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Ukraine’s president on Wednesday, similarly warning Russia could attack Ukraine on “very short notice.” We speak with The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel, who says the hawkish U.S. approach to the Russia-Ukraine conflict is a waste of national resources, and says the U.S. should pursue diplomacy instead of throwing around threats of expanding NATO into Eastern Europe. “More attention should be paid to how we can exit these conflicts, how we can find a way for an independent Ukraine,” says vanden Heuvel, who calls the Ukraine conflict a civil war turned into a proxy war. “If there is creative diplomacy, I think you could see a resolution of this crisis.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: President Biden said Wednesday he expects Russia will invade Ukraine, but predicted Russian President Vladimir Putin does not want a full-blown war. Russia has reportedly stationed about 100,000 troops on its Ukraine border and sent troops into Belarus, which also shares a border with Ukraine. Biden said Washington’s response to a Russian invasion will depend on its severity.
PRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: Russia will be held accountable if it invades. And it depends on what it does. It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion, and then we end up having to fight about what to do and not do, etc. But if they actually do what they’re capable of doing with the force amassed on the border, it is going to be a disaster for Russia.
AMYGOODMAN: Biden’s remarks about a “minor incursion” alarmed officials in Ukraine. Shortly after the news conference ended, Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, released a statement clarifying Biden’s comments about a “minor incursion” by saying, quote, “If any Russian military forces move across the Ukrainian border, that’s a renewed invasion, and it will be met with a swift, severe, and united response from the United States and our Allies.”
During the news conference, President Biden also predicted Russian President Vladimir Putin will move troops into Ukraine. This is Biden responding to a question from David Sanger of The New York Times about Putin.
PRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: I think he still does not want any full-blown war, number one. Number two, do I think he’ll test the West, test the United States and NATO as significantly as he can? Yes, I think he will. But I think he’ll pay a serious and dear price for it that he doesn’t think now will cost him what it’s going to cost him. And I think he will regret having done it. …
I’m not so sure he has — is certain what he’s going to do. My guess is he will move in. He has to do something. And, by the way, I’ve indicated to him — the two things he said to me that he wants guarantees on: One is Ukraine will never be part of NATO, and, two, that NATO — or, there will not be strategic weapons stationed in Ukraine. Well, we can work out something on the second piece, [inaudible] what he does along the Russian line, as well, or the Russian border, in the European area of Russia. …
DAVIDSANGER: Mr. President, it sounds like you’re offering some way out here, some off-ramp. And it sounds like what it is, is at least an informal assurance that NATO is not going to take in Ukraine anytime in the next few decades. And it sounds like you’re saying we would never put nuclear weapons there. He also wants us to move all of our nuclear weapons out of Europe and not have troops rotating through the old Soviet Bloc. Do you think there’s space there, as well?
PRESIDENTJOEBIDEN: No. No, there’s not space for that. We won’t permanently station, but the idea we’re not going to — we’re going to actually increase troop presence in Poland, in Romania, etc., if in fact he moves, because we have a sacred obligation in Article 5 to defend those countries. They are part of NATO. We don’t have that obligation relative to Ukraine, although we have great concern about what happens in Ukraine.
AMYGOODMAN: That’s President Biden speaking at his two-hour news conference Wednesday.
Secretary of State Tony Blinken is planning to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov Friday. Blinken is meeting with some of his NATO counterparts in Berlin today and was in Kyiv Wednesday.
To talk about U.S.-Russian relations, we’re joined by Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher of The Nation magazine. She has been reporting from Russia and on Russia for the last 30 years. She’s also a columnist for The Washington Post. Her latest piece is headlined “Stop the stumble toward war with Russia.”
In your piece, you write, “In the technical argot of diplomacy, what’s going on in the Ukraine crisis is nuts.” Katrina, can you first respond to what President Biden said, what the White House took back after, and actually what is going on?
KATRINAVANDENHEUVEL: Well, I mean, Amy, first of all, what you just listened to, David Sanger of The New York Times, who’s been on the beat to promote a conflict or war with Russia for — with Russia-Ukraine for several years. What’s going on is that the most immediate task is to defuse the immediate crisis. And you can hear in Biden’s — the interstitial pieces of Biden, if you decipher what he said, that there is room, if there was creative diplomacy, if there was as much time spent pondering what Putin is going to do or worrying about the — you know, not even worrying, but ginning up war.
What’s clear is that three presidents — Obama, Trump and even Biden — have said that Ukraine is not a national security, vital security interest of the United States. No president at this moment is going to send men and women to Ukraine to fight. It has become a proxy war, however. It’s been geopoliticized, when in fact it’s a civil war. And there is this relationship between Russia and Ukraine, and it also goes back to the bigger issue, Amy, of NATO expansion. In 1997, there was a vigorous debate in this country about NATO expansion, and key people who knew Russia well warned it would lead to a new Cold War.
So, here we are. And I think it — you know, we’re living at a time, Amy, of pandemic, of racial division, of staggering economic inequality, of climate crisis. And to go to war, or even to contemplate these two new Cold Wars, Russia and China, seems to me nuts. And more attention should be paid to how we can exit these conflicts, how we can find a way for an independent Ukraine, free and whole, between East and West, as opposed to all this talk about more military massing on the border, or even — and I’ll end here — The New York Times the other day planting anonymous intelligence sources warning of a false flag operation which would create a pretext for Russian invasion. There is that danger. Why I use the word “stumble” is that it, you know, looks a little like World War I, where some accident could happen. You’ve got two nuclear-armed countries. And I think instead of focusing on troops and this, let’s find a diplomatic — tough diplomatic solution, and let’s begin the arms control work that needs to be done. The INF could be brought back; it was abolished by John Bolton and Trump, 2019. Today’s the Doomsday Clock announcement. Will it be closer to midnight, which is perilous? Lots of work to be done, instead of all this talk about war, war, war, troops, troops, troops.
NERMEENSHAIKH: Well, Katrina, we’ll go back in a second to, as you said, a possible diplomatic resolution to the conflict, you know, Blinken’s meetings in the last couple of days, and tomorrow meeting with Lavrov. But you mentioned — and this is a critical issue — the question of NATO expansion since 1997. I mean, it’s staggering. There have been a very large number of countries that have joined since 1997, Eastern European countries: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and, most recently, North Macedonia. So, two questions: First of all, could you explain why Russia is especially concerned about Ukraine joining NATO? And also, what the significance, the importance of, what the function is of NATO, now that the — I mean, it’s been decades now that the Warsaw Pact was dissolved?
KATRINAVANDENHEUVEL: That is the central question, Nermeen. I mean, when the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, naturally one would think NATO would be dissolved, and we would find a new security architecture that wasn’t a militarized one. By the way, in 1997, people like Paul Nitze — I mean, Paul Nitze, Richard Pipes, McNamara, these people opposed the expansion. But put that aside. The expansion of NATO was the expansion of a military institution, which is dominated by the United States. This is no coffee klatsch. This is a group which brings weapons to the fore. You have to buy certain weapons, you know, get in sync with the whole operation. There are other institutions that could have created, as Mikhail Gorbachev had spoken of a “common European home” from Vladivostok to Lisbon, which wouldn’t have been militarized.
You know, Russia, the Soviet Union lost 27 million people in World War II. There is a real continuing fear, even in younger generations, about being encircled. And, you know, we had our Monroe Doctrine. We had our spheres of influence. What if Mexico — what if Soviet troops had — Russian troops suddenly decided to alight in Mexico? Borders matter, especially in the Russian historical consciousness. But that is playing a role right now. Ukraine, unlike the other countries you mentioned, has had a very special relationship with Russia, and Russia with Ukraine. Ukraine is a divided country. It is a country that has a right to be fully independent. But it is very much in — a lot of Russians are intermarried with Ukraine. Ukraine is not like Montenegro. And so, I think one has to understand that there is an expression in foreign affairs called strategic empathy. I mean, you try — and if there was standing in the other’s shoes, not condoning, but understanding, I think we would be in a better place.
Finally, Article 5 of NATO demands that NATO members go to the military assistance of countries which are invaded. I come back to the fact that, first of all, no American president, in my understanding, will send American men and women to fight. There is talk of funding an insurgency in Ukraine. How did that turn out in Afghanistan when we funded the mujahideen?
So, there are a lot of issues. But, you know, Gorbachev was promised after German reunification that NATO would not move one inch eastward. That is to be found in archives — National Security Archive, for example. And there is kind of a thought that Putin is asking for written material because he thinks that might protect him from Gorbachev’s fate. I don’t think so. But again I come back to, if there is creative diplomacy, I think you could see a resolution of this crisis. And to have war at this time is to add to the other wars we confront, climate, pandemics.
NERMEENSHAIKH: And as far as the negotiations are concerned, Katrina, can you talk about what we know so far about what happened in the meetings between Zelensky and Blinken, and today his meetings with his counterparts in the EU, and what to expect from what might happen tomorrow with Blinken’s meeting with Lavrov? Yesterday also, on Wednesday, French President Macron, going against what the U.S. has called for, has urged EU states to speak directly to Russia. Could you comment on that, as well?
KATRINAVANDENHEUVEL: That, I think, is very important, and it speaks to a diplomatic resolution that may be able to be revived, either called Minsk, the Minsk agreement, or the Normandy agreement, which was originally Germany, France, Russia, Ukraine, not the United States. But I think it’s a good sign that European countries may have more independence — France, Germany — in working out something with Russia.
And I think, you know, what is happening in Ukraine, I don’t know, except that Zelensky’s rival arrived in Ukraine, Kyiv, the other day, the “Chocolate King,” who was the previous president, and was arrested and is sitting in a courthouse. Why that’s happening now maybe exposes some of the real problems in Ukraine. By the way, Ukraine couldn’t legally enter NATO right now, because its territorial integrity is not whole.
I think Lavrov — and I’ll get in trouble for this — is one of the most steady and experienced diplomats working today. So I think if Blinken and Lavrov could get beyond some of the kind of rhetoric, you could see some real dealings that would be a resolution, perhaps moving back to Minsk and/or finding EU as a vehicle or finding the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. So, I think this is hopeful that there are ongoing meetings, because I do think the crisis immediately, the importance of that being defused then gives some space.
NERMEENSHAIKH: And, Katrina, before we turn to other aspects of Biden’s comments yesterday and assessment of his first year in office, one last point on what’s happening now in Ukraine. I mean, the U.S. and EU have discussed the possibility of wide-ranging sanctions against Russia as a first step. I mean, there are already sanctions in place. Could you say something about the kinds of sanctions that are being contemplated and the significance of the U.S. possibly cutting Russia off from the dollar-denominated international financial system? What would that mean, and how likely is it?
KATRINAVANDENHEUVEL: Well, I think you’re certainly hearing a lot of talk about punitive sanctions, you know, onerous sanctions. First of all, one needs to understand there are already layers and layers of sanctions on Russia. In fact, the Democrats put forward their sanction bill the other day, and I believe it was Cruz put forward one.
I do think the SWIFT removing Russia from the global trading system could have real implications, but, you know, that could push Russia closer to China and an alternative currency, which would not be helpful to the Europeans or to the United States.
And I think the — again, in Germany, you have the big issue of Nord Stream, the pipeline. It’s an interesting moment, because that is not yet fully approved. There are still regulatory issues. You now have a new government in Germany. The foreign minister is a Green, and the Greens are opposed to the pipeline for environmental and other reasons. So that may be played out apart from sanctions imposed by the United States.
In general, sanctions have not worked. They have made countries more resistant to U.S. pressure. And I think the whole matter of sanction as a foreign policy, in some cases it’s the equivalent of war. The humanitarian cost has to be thought through.
AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there for now and, of course, continue to cover this issue, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher of The Nation magazine, columnist for The Washington Post. We’ll link to your pieces there, the latest one, “Stop the stumble toward war with Russia.” Katrina is going to stay with us as we look at President Biden’s first year in office and the Senate’s failure to pass voting rights legislation after Manchin and Sinema sided with the Republicans to block changing the filibuster. And we will be joined, as well, by Ralph Nader. Stay with us.
Continuing the hysteria surrounding Ukraine, the White House warned on Tuesday that Russia could invade the country “at any point.”
“Our view is this is an extremely dangerous situation. We’re now at a stage where Russia could at any point launch an attack in Ukraine,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters.
Also on Tuesday, the State Department claimed that Russia could use military drills in Belarus as cover to attack Ukraine from the north. Russia said Tuesday that it has begun deploying troops to Belarus for joint exercises that will be held in February.
“The reports of Russian troop movements towards Belarus, which these movements are supposedly under the auspices of regularly scheduled joint military exercises, are concerning,” a State Department official told reporters.
Most Americans now understand that it was wrong to spend centuries enslaving millions of people. Not many Americans yet understand how equally wrong it is that their government has spent the 21st century killing millions and displacing tens of millions in its post-9/11 wars.
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The US is more dangerous now as it loses global primacy than it has been at any other point in its history. There really are just two options currently on the table: either the US empire relinquishes unipolar domination voluntarily and leads a peaceful transition into a multipolar world, or it takes increasingly drastic and dangerous action to maintain planetary control. The latter choice is both horrifying and likely.
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People in western imperialist nations pretending to care about Muslims in China will never stop being hilarious.
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Remember kids: false flags are crazy conspiracy theories that only ridiculous crackpots believe in, except when they’re reported as fact by news outlets who’ve lied to you about every war.
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Putin has been reading The Art of War in preparation for his unprovoked Ukraine invasion. pic.twitter.com/vukLvJBAL2
Sure is an interesting coincidence how all the (still completely unproven) narratives about Russian 2016 election interference and Trump collusion served perfectly to manufacture consent for all the bat shit insane US/NATO escalations we’re seeing in Ukraine today.
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Everyone who’d support going to war with Russia or China over Ukraine or Taiwan should be regarded with the same revulsion and social rejection as child molesters.
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Capitalism is so innately absurd that its proponents always respond to questions about systemic problems by babbling about what people can do as individuals. People are homeless? Get a job. Jobs don’t pay enough? Get a better job. It’s like addressing the problem of a skyscraper being on fire by saying “Don’t go to the floors that are on fire.”
It’s like if there was a locked room full of ten prisoners and you only gave them enough food to keep seven alive, and you responded to their complaints by saying “Better make sure you grab the food first when I throw it in your cell, then.”
It’s a belief system you can only hold in place with psychological compartmentalization. Tell that one suffering guy to get a better job and save his money, and then simply do not think about the millions of people who are working low-paying jobs and unable to save any money.
Any competition-based system will necessarily have losers as well as winners in those competitions. Saying “Compete better than those you’re competing against” does nothing for the part of the population who must necessarily lose. A collaboration-based system is what’s needed.
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You don’t even need compassion for the poor and disadvantaged to oppose capitalism. You just need some basic self-preservation and an understanding that in a system where human behavior is driven by profit, war and ecocide must necessarily continue as long as they are profitable.
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It's so easy to get lost in the narrative matrix without a good moral compass. You start off opposing right wingers to be a good person, then you fall down a few rabbit holes and before you know it you're telling a Rasmussen pollster you support taking kids from unvaxxed parents. https://t.co/2vrpo5lUJ5
Seems like every day the media have an urgent new report explaining why the free flow of ideas on the internet is dangerous and needs to be curtailed. Today it’s one thing, tomorrow it’ll be something else. It’s not about this or that person or issue, it’s about controlling information on the internet.
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It was pretty clever how they redefined fascism as “being kind of racist” while actual fascism was rebranded as “just normal party politics”.
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Saying propaganda doesn’t work is the same as saying advertising doesn’t work, and advertising is nearly a trillion-dollar industry. Also, advertising would be much more effective than it already is if corporate ads were allowed to disguise themselves as news reports in The New York Times.
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Having strong political opinions on social media is no substitute for doing the work to heal your early childhood trauma.
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If you’re the same person you were a decade ago, you just wasted ten years of your life.
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On 14 January, a breaking news story from the New York Times informed its readers: “U.S. Says Russia Sent Saboteurs Into Ukraine to Create Pretext for Invasion.”
Unsurprisingly, Washington “did not release details of the evidence it had collected.” Why did the NYT not question the withholding of evidence? Why even deign to report what so easily could be dismissed, by definition, as hearsay? Is that because the White House is a paragon of truth-telling? Did its erroneous reporting by disgraced writer Judith Miller that Iraq possessed weapons-of-mass-destruction precipitating a US-led invasion not teach NYT a lesson?
Nevertheless, the NYT chooses to lend credence to the anti-Russia accusation. It sources Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, who “said the Russian military planned to begin these activities several weeks before a military invasion, which could begin between mid-January and mid-February. She said Moscow was using the same playbook as it did in 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, a part of Ukraine.”
What does it say about the NYT when it unquestioningly quotes a person or entity? One might well surmise that the NYT has accorded its imprimatur that what has been said is an unquestionable fact. What about relevant background information that is omitted by the NYT?
Since when does a referendum in which 97% of the population chose to join Russia rather than remain a part of Ukraine? Why does this expression of the democratic will constitute an annexation? The US tried to have the referendum ruled illegal in the United Nations Security Council but this was, predictably, quashed by a Russian veto. China abstained noting that Crimea is not a superficial consideration and that there is a “complex intertwinement of historical and contemporary factors.” And how could the UN go against self-determination for Crimea when that principle is enshrined in Article I of the UN Charter? UN secretary-general António Guterres said the principle of self-determination “remains both a source of pride for the Organization and a crucial pillar of its work going forward.
Why does the NYT not mention how Crimea became a part of Ukraine in the first place? Is it not pertinent that Crimea became a part of the Ukraine as result of a transfer from Russia by the USSR in 1954? When Ukraine departed the USSR did it still merit keeping Crimea and the Sevastopol Naval Base important for Russian security?
Is it not crucial to mention that the Crimean referendum only took place after a US-instigated coup that toppled the elected government in Ukraine and saw Neonazis assume governmental office in Kyiv?
Is it journalism to quote a Pentagon official as saying the intelligence about the operation is “very credible”?
The NYT relates that the refusal to reveal evidence is “for fear of alerting the Russian operatives whose movements are being tracked”? What kind of excuse is that? If indeed any of this “intelligence” is true, then the operatives must now know that they were tracked?
Despite all the aforementioned, the NYT seems cocksure about their reporting: “The American allegations were clearly part of a strategy to try to prevent an attack by exposing it in advance.” Those clever Americans thwarting a Russian attack and saving Ukraine without having to fire a shot. Cough, cough.
Among the Russian demands from the nugatory Brussels talks, the NYT notes, without further comment: “Russia has also demanded that the United States remove all of its nuclear weapons from Europe, and that Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia, three surrounding states that once were part of the Soviet empire, never join NATO.”
The current editors at the NYT should know well the history of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet the NYT did not connect the dots to Soviet nukes in Cuba and American nukes in Europe. Why were American concerns about nukes across the pond in Cuba a grave security threat while nukes in Europe on Russia’s front porch are not a security threat to Russia?
As a matter of principle, the US-NATO side ought best to consider the security concerns of all actors. And while all the actors are considering, a suggestion: consider declaring continental Europe a nuclear weapon-free zone. It should help anxious Europeans should sleep a bit easier.
With the United States and Russia in a standoff over NATO expansion and Russian troop deployments along the Ukrainian border, US corporate media outlets are demanding that Washington escalate the risk of a broader war while misleading their audiences about important aspects of the conflict. Many in the commentariat called on the US to take steps that would increase the likelihood of war. In the New York Times , retired US Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman wrote that “the United States must support Ukraine by providing more extensive military assistance.”
In a drastic pivot from typical denunciations of false flag operations as conspiratorial nonsense that don’t exist outside the demented imagination of Alex Jones, the US political/media class is proclaiming with one voice that Russia is currently orchestrating just such an operation to justify an invasion of Ukraine.
“As part of its plans, Russia is laying the groundwork to have the option of fabricating a pretext for invasion,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Friday. “We have information that indicates Russia has already pre-positioned a group of operatives to conduct a false flag operation in eastern Ukraine.”
“Without getting into too much detail, we do have information that indicates that Russia is already working actively to create a pretext for a potential invasion, for a move on Ukraine,” Pentagon Spokesperson John Kirby told the press on Friday. “In fact, we have information that they’ve pre-positioned a group of operatives, to conduct what we call a false flag operation, an operation designed to look like an attack on them or their people, or Russian speaking people in Ukraine, as an excuse to go in.”
The US government has substantiated these incendiary claims with the usual amount of evidence, by which I of course mean jack dick nothingballs. The mass media have not been dissuaded from reporting on this issue by the complete absence of any evidence that this Kremlin false flag plot is in fact a real thing that actually happened, their journalistic standards completely satisfied by the fact that their government instructed them to report it. Countless articles and news segments containing the phrase “false flag” have been blaring throughout all the most influential news outlets in the western world without the slightest hint of skepticism.
This sudden embrace of the idea that governments can stage attacks on their own people to justify their own pre-existing agendas is a sharp pivot from the scoff which such a notion in mainstream liberal circles has typically received. This 2018 article from The New York Times simply dismisses the idea that the 2014 Maidan massacre was a false flag carried out by western-backed opposition fighters in Ukraine to frame the riot police of the government who was ousted in that coup, for example, despite the existence of plenty of evidence that this is indeed what happened. This BBC article dismisses without argument the idea that the alleged 2018 chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria could have been a false flag carried out by the Al Qaeda-aligned insurgents on the ground to provoke a western attack on the Syrian government, yet there are mountains of evidence that this was the case.
Articles denouncing the very idea of “false flag conspiracy theories” surface routinely in the mass media. Snopes has a whole article explaining that false flags are kooky nonsense without any mention of the fact that this is a known tactic we’ve seen intelligence operatives discussing in declassified documents, like when the CIA considered planting bombs in Miami to blame Castro. I myself was once temporarily suspended by Facebook just for posting an article about false flag operations that are publicly acknowledged to have occurred. People who dare to question the many gaping plot holes in the official 9/11 narrative have often been treated with the same disdain and revulsion as neo-Nazis and pedophilia advocates.
"A US official told CNN" is not a "Scoop" but demonstrates the willingness of 'journalists' to stenograph unverifiable government disinformation. https://t.co/wr2u3xKtiI
None of this is to say that every theory about any false flag operation is true; many are not. But the way the mass media will instantly embrace an idea to which they’ve heretofore been consistently hostile just because their government told them to to do it says so much about the state of the so-called free press today, and the fact that the rank-and-file public simply accepts this and marches along with it as though talking about false flags has always been normal says so much about the level of Orwellian doublethink that people have been trained to perform in today’s information ecosystem. The way false flag operations were widely considered conspiratorial hogwash until the instant they were reported as real by the media institutions who’ve lied to us about every war is downright creepy.
The problem with preemptive false flag accusations is of course that the side making the claim can simply launch an unprovoked attack and then say “See? They’re staging a false flag to frame our side, just like we said they would!” And then they can present their subsequent actions as defensive in nature, when in reality they were the aggressors and instigators. We are seeing nothing from the obedient western news media to suggest they’d do anything other than uncritically regurgitate such claims into the minds of their trusting audiences.
As the Beltway doctrine that US unipolar hegemony must be preserved at all cost crashes headlong into the reality of an emerging multipolar world, the US government is now more dangerous than it has ever been at any point in its history. We need the press to be holding the drivers of empire to account with the light of truth, and we need the public to be opposing and scrutinizing these reckless escalations. Instead, we are getting the exact opposite. God help us all.
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The most pressing threat to global security right now isn’t so-called “provocations” by either Russia or China. It is the United States’ misplaced obsession with its own “credibility”.
This rallying cry by Washington officials – echoed by the media and allies in London and elsewhere – is code for allowing the US to act like a global gangster while claiming to be the world’s policeman. US “credibility” was apparently thrown into question last summer – and only when President Joe Biden held firm to a pledge to pull US troops out of Afghanistan.
Prominent critics, including in the Pentagon, objected that any troop withdrawal would both suggest the US was backing off from a commitment to maintain the so-called “international order” and further embolden the West’s “enemies” – from the Taliban and Islamic State (IS) group to Russia and China.
In a postmortem in September, General Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, echoed a view common in Washington: “I think that our credibility with allies and partners around the world, and with adversaries, is being intensely reviewed by them to see which way this is going to go – and I think that damage is one word that could be used.”
At the same time, a former defence official in the George W Bush administration judged US credibility after the Afghanistan withdrawal at “rock bottom“.
The only way this understanding of US “credibility” makes sense is if one disregards the disastrous previous two decades of Washington’s role in Afghanistan. Those were the years in which the US army propped up a bunch of wildly unpopular kleptocrats in Kabul who ransacked the public coffers as the US launched an arms’ length drone war that ended up killing large numbers of Afghan civilians.
To bolster its apparently diminished “credibility” after the troop withdrawal, the US has imposed crushing sanctions on Afghanistan, deepening its current famine. There have also been reports of CIA efforts to run covert operations against the Taliban by aiding its opponents.
Cold War relic
Washington’s “credibility” was also seemingly in peril when US and Russian officials met in Geneva this week for negotiations in the midst of a diplomatic, and potential military, standoff over Ukraine.
The background are demands from Moscow that Washington stops encircling Russia with military bases and that Nato end its relentless advancement towards Russia’s borders. Nato should be a relic of a Cold War-era that officially ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991. Moscow dissolved its own version of Nato, the Warsaw Pact, more than three decades ago.
Russia had been given verbal assurances in 1990 by George HW Bush’s administration that Nato would not expand militarily beyond the borders of what was then West Germany. Seven years later, President Bill Clinton signed the Nato-Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations, which committed Russia and Nato not to treat each other “as adversaries”, while Nato reiterated that there would be no “additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces” in former Eastern bloc states.
Every subsequent US administration has flagrantly broken both of these pledges, with Nato troops now stationed across eastern Europe. Perhaps not surprisingly, Moscow feels as menaced by Nato’s aggressive posturing, which serves to revive its Cold War fears, as Washington would if Russia placed military bases in Cuba and Mexico.
No one should forget that the US was prepared to bring the world to the brink of armageddon in a nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union in 1962 to prevent Moscow from stationing nuclear missiles in Cuba.
Historic alliance
Despite the current clamour about the need for the US to maintain its “credibility”, Washington was in fact only being asked at the Geneva talks to start honouring, 30 years late, commitments it made long ago and has repeatedly violated.
The latest flashpoint is Ukraine, Russia’s neighbour, which has been roiling since a coup in 2014 overthrew the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, an ally of Moscow. The deeply divided country is split between those who want to prioritise their historic ties with Russia and those who want to be embraced by the European Union.
Moscow – and a proportion of Ukrainians – believe Washington and Europe are exploiting the push for an economic pact to engineer Ukraine’s subordination to Nato security policies, directed against Russia. Such fears are not misplaced. Each of what were formerly Soviet states that became an EU member has also been recruited to Nato. In fact, since 2009 it has been an official requirement, through the Treaty of Lisbon, that EU member states align their security policies with Nato.
Now US “credibility” apparently depends on its determination to bring Nato to Russia’s front door, via Ukraine.
US perfidy
Reporting on a working dinner with Russian diplomats last Sunday, before the Geneva meeting, Wendy Sherman, the US deputy secretary of state, recast that perfidy as the US stressing its commitment to “the freedom of sovereign nations to choose their own alliances”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, is being widely made out to be the aggressor after he posted tens of thousands of troops at the border with Ukraine.
One can argue whether those soldiers are massed for an invasion of Ukraine, as is being widely assumed in the western media, or as a show of force against a US-led Nato that believes it can do whatever it pleases in Russia’s backyard. Either way, a miscalculation by either side could prove disastrous.
According to the New York Times, General Milley has warned the Russians that an invasion force would face a prolonged insurgency backed by US weaponry. There are reports that Stinger anti-aircraft missiles have already been delivered to Ukraine.
Similarly, Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, has threatened“confrontation and massive consequences for Russia if it renews its aggression on Ukraine”.
Drumbeat of war
This reckless way of projecting “credibility” – and thereby making confrontations and war more, not less, likely – is currently on show in relation to another nuclear-armed power, China. For many months, the Biden administration has been playing what looks like a game of chicken with Beijing over China’s continuing assertion of a right to use force against Taiwan, a self-governing island off the coast of China that Beijing claims as its territory.
Few countries formally recognise Taiwan as a state, and nothing in relations between Taipei and China is settled. That includes heated disagreements over the division of airspace, with Taiwan – backed by the US – claiming that a whole chunk of southeast mainland China falls within its “defence zone”. That means the scaremongering headlines about record numbers of Chinese warplanes flying over Taiwan need to be taken with a large pinch of salt.
The same disputes apply to China and Taiwan’s respective claims to territorial waters, with a similar potential for provocation. The pair’s conflicting views of what constitutes their security and sovereignty are a ready hair-trigger for war – and in circumstances where one party possesses a large nuclear arsenal.
Nonetheless, the Biden administration has stomped into this long-simmering feud by feeding the media with alarmist headlines and security analysts with talking points about a possible US war with China over Taiwan. Top Pentagon officials have also stoked concerns of an imminent invasion of Taiwan by China.
Diplomatically, President Biden snubbed his nose at Beijing by inviting Taiwan to attend his so-called “democracy summit” last month. The event further inflamed Chinese indignation by showing Taiwan and China in separate colours on a regional map.
The CIA has announced the establishment of a new espionage centre with an exclusive focus on China. According to CIA director William Burns, it is necessary because the US is faced with “an increasingly adversarial Chinese government”. That “adversary”, however, poses no direct threat to US security – unless Washington chooses provocatively to bring Taiwan under its security umbrella.
Washington’s drumbeat has been so constant that a recent poll showed more than half of Americans supported sending US troops to defend Taiwan.
Nuclear hard line
The picture is the same with Iran. US “credibility” is being cited as the reason why Washington needs to take a hard line against Tehran – goaded, as ever, by Israel – on its presumed ambitions to build a nuclear bomb.
Israel, of course, has had its own large arsenal of nuclear weapons for decades – entirely unmonitored and in violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Both the US and Israel fear Iran wants to level the nuclear playing field in the Middle East. Israel is determined to make sure that only it has the power to make nuclear-backed threats, either against others in the region or as leverage in Washington to get its way.
President Barack Obama’s administration signed an agreement with Iran in 2015 placing strict limits on Tehran’s development of nuclear technology. In return, Washington lifted some of the most punishing sanctions on the country. Three years later, however, President Donald Trump reneged on the deal.
Now Iran suffers the worst of both worlds. The US has again intensified the sanctions regime while demanding that Tehran renew the deal on worse terms – and with no promise, according to US Secretary of State Blinken, that the next US administration won’t tear up the agreement anyway.
US “credibility” does not depend, it seems, on Washington being required to keep its word.
In the background, as ever, is the threat of joint military reprisals from Israel and the US. In October, Biden reportedly asked his national security adviser to review Pentagon plans for a military strike if this one-sided “diplomatic process” failed. A month later, Israel approved $1.5bn for precisely such an eventuality.
Drunk on power
Washington’s emphasis on its “credibility” is actually a story the US elite tells itself and western publics to obscure the truth. What is really prized is America’s ability to enforce its economic interests and military superiority unchallenged across the globe.
After the Korean and Vietnam wars, and the US overthrow of the elected government of Iran to reinstall its dictator-monarch, there is barely a corner of the planet where the US has not meddled. In Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and its so-called “backyard”, Latin America, US “credibility” has required interventions and war as an alternative to diplomacy.
In October 2019, as Trump suggested that US troops would be pulled out of Syria – where they had no authorisation from the United Nations to be in the first place – Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and former head of the CIA, observed that the decision had “weakened the US” and “undercut our credibility in the world”.
He added: “There isn’t an ally that we’ve around the world that doesn’t now distrust us and worry about whether or not we will stand by our word.”
But this kind of credibility is built not on principle, on respecting others’ national sovereignty, or on peace-building, but on the gangsterism of a superpower drunk on its own power and its ability to intimidate and crush rivals.
Washington’s “word” is only selectively kept, as its treatment of Russia and Iran highlight. And enforcement of its “credibility” – from breaking commitments to threatening war – has had a predictable effect: they have driven Washington’s “enemies” into an opposition camp out of necessity.
The US has created a more menacing adversary, as Russia and China, two nuclear powers, have found a common purpose in asserting a countervailing pressure on Washington. Since the late summer, the two have held a series of war games and joint military exercises, each of them a first.
The world is entering what looks like a new, even more complex cold war, in which any misunderstanding, mishap or false move could rapidly escalate into nuclear confrontation. If it happens, the pursuit of US “credibility” will have played a central part in the catastrophe.
When I was a union organizer with the United Farm Workers I twice served on a contract negotiating committee – as the note-taker. I learned that the very first clause negotiated in any union contract is the ‘Recognition’ by the company of the union’s right to bargain on behalf of the workers.
This recent meeting between Russia and U.S. in Geneva proved to me that Washington does not recognize Russia as an equal bargaining entity. Instead the US arrogantly believes it can pre-determine its policy – in this case steroidal NATO expansion and regime change in Russia. This is clearly the US agenda.
Washington and Brussels (and London of course) can’t afford to recognize Russia as an equal.
Alexander Vindman (New York Times, 12/10/21): “A prosperous Ukraine buttressed by American support” could persuade Russians “to eventually demand their own framework for democratic transition”—i.e., regime change.
With the United States and Russia in a standoff over NATO expansion and Russian troop deployments along the Ukrainian border, US corporate media outlets are demanding that Washington escalate the risk of a broader war while misleading their audiences about important aspects of the conflict.
Many in the commentariat called on the US to take steps that would increase the likelihood of war. In the New York Times (12/10/21), retired US Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman wrote that “the United States must support Ukraine by providing more extensive military assistance.” He argued that “the United States should consider an out-of-cycle, division-level military deployment to Eastern Europe to reassure allies and bolster the defenses of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,” even while calling for a strategy that “avoids crossing into military adventurism.” He went on to say that “the United States has to be more assertive in the region.”
Yet the US has been plenty “assertive in the region,” where, incidentally, America is not located. In 2014, the US supported anti-government protests in Ukraine that led to the ouster of democratically elected, Russia-aligned Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych (Foreign Policy, 3/4/14). Russia sent its armed forces into the Crimea, annexed the territory, and backed armed groups in eastern Ukraine.
Since then, the US has given Ukraine $2.5 billion in military aid, including Javelin anti-tank missiles (Politico, 6/18/21). The US government has applied sanctions to Russia that, according to an International Monetary Fund estimate, cost Russia about 0.2 percentage points of GDP every year between 2014 and 2018 (Reuters, 4/16/21).
Furthermore, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—a US-led military alliance hostile to Russia—has grown by 14 countries since the end of the Cold War. NATO expanded right up to Russia’s border in 2004, in violation of the promises made by the elder George Bush and Bill Clinton to Russian leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin (Jacobin, 7/16/18).
“Russia has shown its intent to violate its international commitments by demanding NATO cease expanding,” Rob Portman and Jeanne Shaheen argue in the Washington Post (12/24/21)—ignoring the US’s violated commitment to not expand NATO eastward.
In the Washington Post (12/24/21), Republican Sen. Rob Portman and Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen jointly contended in Orwellian fashion that the Biden administration should take “military measures that would strengthen a diplomatic approach and give it greater credibility.” They wrote that “the United States must speed up the pace of assistance and provide antiaircraft, antitank and anti-ship systems, along with electronic warfare capabilities.” The authors claimed that these actions “will help ensure a free and stable Europe,” though it’s easy to imagine how such steps could instead lead to a war-ravaged Europe, or at least a tension-plagued one.
Indeed, US “military measures” have tended to increase, rather than decrease, the temperature. Last summer, the US and Ukraine led multinational naval maneuvers held in the Black Sea, an annual undertaking called Sea Breeze. The US-financed exercises were the largest in decades, involving 32 ships, 40 aircraft and helicopters, and 5,000 soldiers from 24 countries (Deutsche Welle, 6/29/21). These steps didn’t create a “stable Europe”: Russia conducted a series of parallel drills in the Black Sea and southwestern Russia (AP, 7/10/21), and would go on to amass troops along the Ukrainian border.
Afghan precedent
Max Boot (Washington Post, 12/15/21) suggests the US should point out to Russia “that Ukraine shares a lengthy border—nearly 900 miles in total—with NATO members Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland.” Pretty sure they’re aware of that, Max.
Preventing Russia from attacking will require a more credible military deterrent. President Biden has ruled out unilaterally sending US combat troops to Ukraine, which would be the strongest deterrent. But he can still do more to help the Ukrainians defend themselves.
The United States has already delivered more than $2.5 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since 2014, with $450 million of that coming this year. There are also roughly 150 US troops in Ukraine training its armed forces.
But Ukraine is asking for more military aid, and we should deliver it. NBC News reports that “Ukraine has asked for air defense systems, anti-ship missiles, more Javelin antitank missiles, electronic jamming gear, radar systems, ammunition, upgraded artillery munitions and medical supplies.” The Defense Department could begin airlifting these defensive systems and supplies to Kyiv tomorrow.
Later in the article, Boot contended that the US should help prepare Ukraine to carry out an armed insurgency in case Russia intensifies its involvement in Ukraine. He said that “outside support” is “usually the key determinant of the success or failure of an insurgency”: Because of aid from the US and its allies, he noted, the mujahedeen in Afghanistan “were able to drive out the Red Army with heavy casualties.” Amazingly, Boot said nothing about the many alumni of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan who joined the Taliban and al-Qaeda (Jacobin, 9/11/21).
That it might be possible to reach an agreement in which Ukraine remains neutral between NATO and Russia (Responsible Statecraft, 1/3/22) is not the sort of possibility that Boot thinks is worth exploring. He apparently would prefer to dramatically increase the danger of armed conflict between two nuclear powers.
Whitewashing Nazis
The Nation (5/6/21): “Glorification of Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators isn’t a glitch but a feature of today’s Ukraine.”
US media should present Americans with a complete picture of Ukraine/Russia so that Americans can assess how much and what kind of support, if any, they want their government to continue providing to Ukraine’s. Such a comprehensive view would undoubtedly include an account of the Ukrainian state’s political orientation. Lev Golinkin in The Nation (5/6/21) outlined one of the Ukrainian government’s noteworthy tendencies:
Shortly after the Maidan uprising of 2013 to 2014 brought in a new government, Ukraine began whitewashing Nazi collaborators on a statewide level. In 2015, Kyiv passed legislation declaring two WWII-era paramilitaries—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—heroes and freedom fighters, and threatening legal action against anyone denying their status. The OUN was allied with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust; the UPA murdered thousands of Jews and 70,000–100,000 Poles on their own accord.
Every January 1, Kyiv hosts a torchlight march in which thousands honor Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, who headed an OUN faction; in 2017, chants of “Jews Out!” rang out during the march. Such processions (often redolent withantisemitism) are a staple in Ukraine….
Ukraine’s total number of monuments to Third Reich collaborators who served in auxiliary police battalions and other units responsible for the Holocaust number in the several hundred. The whitewashing also extends to official book bans and citywide veneration of collaborators.
The typical reaction to this in the West is that Ukraine can’t be celebrating Nazi collaborators because it elected [Volodymyr] Zelensky, a Jewish president. Zelensky, however, has alternated between appeasing and ignoring the whitewashing: In 2018, he stated, “To some Ukrainians, [Nazi collaborator] Bandera is a hero, and that’s cool!”
Furthermore, according to a George Washington University study, members of the far-right group Centuria are in the Ukrainian military, and Centuria’s social media accounts show these soldiers giving Nazi salutes, encouraging white nationalism and praising members of Nazi SS units (Ottawa Citizen, 10/19/21). Centuria leaders have ties to the Azov movement, which “has attacked anti-fascist demonstrations, city council meetings, media outlets, art exhibitions, foreign students, the LGBTQ2S+ community and Roma people”: the Azov movement’s militia has been incorporated in the Ukrainian National Guard (CTV News, 10/20/21). Azov, the UN has documented, has carried out torture and rape.
Absent information
The fact that that Ukraine’s government and armed forces include a Nazi-sympathizing current surely would have an impact on US public opinion—if the public knew about it. However, this information has been entirely absent in recent editions of the New York Times and Washington Post.
From December 6, 2021, to January 6, 2022, the Times published 228 articles that refer to Ukraine, nine of which contain some variation on the word “Nazi.” Zero percent of these note Ukrainian government apologia for Nazis or the presence of pro-Nazi elements in Ukraine’s armed forces. One report (12/21/21) said:
On Russian state television, the narrative of a Ukraine controlled by neo-Nazis and used as a staging ground for Western aggression has been a common trope since the pro-Western revolution in Kyiv in 2014.
Nothing in the article indicates that while “controlled” may be a stretch, the Ukrainian government officially honors Nazi collaborators. That doesn’t mean Russia has the right attack Ukraine, but US media should inform Americans about whom their tax dollars are arming.
In the same period, the Post ran 201 pieces that mention the word “Ukraine.” Of these, six mention the word “Nazi,” none of them to point out that the Ukrainian state has venerated Holocaust participants, or that there are Nazis in the Ukrainian military. Max Boot (1/5/22) and Robyn Dixon (12/11/21), in fact, dismissed this fact as mere Russian propaganda. In Boot’s earlier Ukraine piece (12/15/21), he acknowledged that the UPA collaborated with the Nazis and killed thousands of Polish people, but his article nevertheless suggested that the UPA offer a useful model for how Ukrainians could resist a Russian invasion, asserting that “all is not lost” in case of a Russian invasion, because “Ukrainian patriots could fight as guerrillas against Russian occupiers”:
They have done it before. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was formed in 1942 to fight for that country’s independence. Initially, it cooperated with Nazi invaders but later fought against them. When the Red Army marched back into Ukraine in 1943, the UPA resisted. The guerrillas carried out thousands of attacks and inflicted thousands of casualties on Soviet forces while also massacring and ethnically cleansing the Polish population in western Ukraine. The UPA continued fighting until the 1950s, forcing Moscow to mobilize tens of thousands of troops and secret policemen to restore control.
“All is not lost,” for Boot, though the lives of thousands of Poles and Jews were, the latter of whom he didn’t bother to mention. Calling the perpetrators of such atrocities “Ukrainian patriots” is a grotesque euphemism that, first and foremost, spits on the victims, and also insults non-racist Ukrainians. After a two-paragraph interval, Boot wrote that
the Ukrainian government needs to start distributing weapons now and, with the help of US and other Western military advisers, training personnel to carry out guerrilla warfare. Volodymyr Zelensky’s government should even prepare supply depots, tunnels and bunkers in wooded areas, and in particular in the Carpathian Mountains, a UPA stronghold in the 1940s.
Evidently neither the UPA’s precedent of fascist massacres, nor the presence of similarly oriented groups in contemporary Ukraine’s armed forces and society, give Boot pause. He’d rather the US continue flooding the country with weapons; the consequences aren’t a concern of Boot’s.
Readers seeking riotous calls to violence in Eastern Europe should turn to the Times and the Post, but those who are interested in a thoroughgoing portrait will be disappointed.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO’s chief Jens Stoltenberg
To deceive, telling half-truths, or a complete lie is nothing new in politics, particularly security politics. But until some 20-30 years ago, I would – perhaps naively – see it as an exception. Tragically – and perhaps to many readers’ surprise – it is now the rule. At least in U.S. and NATO circles, and that is particularly regrettably since The West professes to be a democratic system with specific values and even a moral leader to The Rest.
Lying systematically about facts – historical facts – and other countries and cultures should be incompatible with The West’s perception of itself. But, today, it isn’t.
Lies are widespread in so-called security politics when some militarist project doesn’t make any (common) sense to intelligent people when the real motives have to be covered up and war is being prepared or when the sociological cancer called the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC, and the elites it consists of, try to obtain even larger military expenditures from their taxpayers.
You lie to manufacture an enemy that can justify what you will do and enrich yourself. With 40+ years of experience in security politics in general and NATO/US policies in particular, I know too much – sorry for the arrogance – and have become too cynical to believe that what goes on goes on for the sake of self-defence, security or peace.
Some quick examples of gross empirically revealed lying to the word – all the liars still at large:
• In the 1990s, Yugoslav President Milosevic was Europe’s new Hitler (Bill Clinton) and planned a genocide on the Albanians in Kosovo.
• Saddam Hussein’s soldiers threw babies out of their incubators in Kuwait City.
• Afghanistan had to be destroyed because of 9/11.
• Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
• The US-led Global War On Terror – GWOT – has been about reducing terrorism.
• The US/NATO orchestrated regime-change attempt in Syria from 2011 to 2016 was exclusively about Dictator al-Assad’s sudden sadist “killing of his own.”
• Gaddafi was just about to murder all who lived in Benghazi.
• The conflict around Ukraine was started by Putin’s “aggression” on Crimea, nothing preceded it.
• Iran has always plotted and lied to acquire nuclear weapons.
• There are only bad things to say about Russia and China and…
You may continue on your own.
A recent lie is particularly nasty because it is not about some limited event or pretext. It is a cynical attempt to rewrite contemporary history to justify (even further) NATO expansion and intimidate Russia.
The lie is this:
• The West’s leaders never promised Mikhail Gorbachev and his foreign minister Edvard Shevardnadze not to expand NATO eastward. They also did not state that they would take serious Soviet/Russian security interests around its borders. And that, therefore, each of the former Warsaw Pact countries has a right to join NATO if they decide to freely.
It is this lie I am going to deal with below, and you can hear these lies presented by Antony Blinken and Jens Stoltenberg – in slightly different versions – with crystal clarity in the following two videos.
Before I start, let me say that it has never been my style to focus on or attack individuals. I’ve always been more interested in structures and processes and in how they shape people. But there comes a time when leaders must be held accountable because they choose to lie repeatedly, although they do have the choice not to.
And because lies have often been war crimes in the making.
Antony Blinken
First, US Secretary-of-State, Antony Blinken on January 7, 2022 – scroll the video below to 38:30 where he begins to speak and distorts the Ukraine conflict history and then, at 43:00-45:00, continues to say that Russia is driving the false narrative that the West had given assurances to Russia/Gorbachev about not expanding NATO back in 1989-90. It wouldn’t and couldn’t, he says. And all the claims Russia makes are false and shall not permit “us” to be diverted from the main thing: Russia’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine.
Right after (45:40) comes another lie – Russia also invaded Georgia. Anyone who has studied the U.S. Congressional Research Service’s analysis of 2009, “Russia-Georgia Conflict in 2008: Context and Implications for U.S. Interests,” knows that this issue was vastly more complex and that it was Georgia – led by hotheaded U.S. friend Mikheil Saakashvili whose political life ever since has resembled a tragicomic farce – that had occupied the larger part of South Ossetia before Russia intervened massively. The responsibility for the war and violence can not seriously be placed on the Russian side alone.
And he continues his self-righteous accusations. Blinken’s list is long, and he reads his accusation list with a submachinegun speed, sometimes so stumbling and unclear that one must wonder whether he is uncomfortable because he is subconsciously aware that he lies, deceives and omits to make his psycho-political projections of the U.S.’s own dark sides sound intelligent, logical and truthful.
This U.S. Secretary of State can’t be bothered by facts or nuances. Neither could his predecessor, Mike Pompeo, who was proud to say that at the CIA, he directed “We Lied, We Cheated, We Stole. We had entire training courses….” Mr Blinken continues reading his obsessive, hateful listing of all the sins of Russia. As if the US/NATO did not exist and, therefore, there was no conflict which normally takes a least two parties. In his comprehensive conflict illiteracy, this conflict has only one party: Russia.
The intellectual level is deplorable. NATO allies and mainstream media have no public opinion or critical views on any of it. One must assume that they agree and can make no better analyses themselves.
Now, take a look – at least at the sequences, I’ve mentioned above. Then, I show you how Mr Blinken is lying deliberately under the video.
Now, how can Mr Blinken flatly deny that assurances were given to Gorbachev?
Steven Pifer quotes from it but stops right before the well-known statement in the interview article by then U.S. Secretary of State, James Baker, that “NATO will not move one inch further east.” He also omits these words by Gorbachev himself:
The decision for the U.S. and its allies to expand NATO into the east was decisively made in 1993. I called this a big mistake from the very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990. With regards to Germany, they were legally enshrined and are being observed.
Interesting too? The addiction to militarism spells the end of the US as we know it.
Can this really be interpreted to mean that Gorbachev says that no assurances were ever given?
We get a key to why Blinken uses a fake analysis: Because it fits his posturing as a paragon of truth and because Mr Pifer is a senior fellow at Brookings but also a former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine and adviser to one of the most hawkish think-tanks, Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington.
A slight twist, omission or interpretative casuistry isn’t that important, is it? Well, if you are not yet convinced that Mr Blinken lies deliberately, I ask you to now go to the authoritative National Security Archive at George Washington University. It’s an incredible source of facts, and we should thank it for making the truth available through comprehensive documentation on so many security-related issues.
TFF has reproduced two essential pieces from that archive of irrefutable documentation that Gorbachev indeed was given such assurances – “cascades” of them! as is stated in the article – by all the most influential Western leaders at the end of 1989 and into 1990:
Woerner had given a well-regarded speech in Brussels in May 1990 in which he argued: “The principal task of the next decade will be to build a new European security structure, to include the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations. The Soviet Union will have an important role to play in the construction of such a system. If you consider the current predicament of the Soviet Union, which has practically no allies left, then you can understand its justified wish not to be forced out of Europe.”
Now in mid-1991, Woerner responds to the Russians by stating that he personally and the NATO Council are both against expansion – “13 out of 16 NATO members share this point of view” – and that he will speak against Poland’s and Romania’s membership in NATO to those countries’ leaders as he has already done with leaders of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Woerner emphasizes that “We should not allow […] the isolation of the USSR from the European community.”
This is just one of the “cascades” of statements and assurances given to the Russians at the time. Over 30 years ago, 13 out of 16 members were against NATO expansion because they respected Russia’s crisis and legitimate security interests! Today – 2022 – NATO has 30 members.
Is the U.S. Secretary of State, his advisors and speechwriters unaware of the next-door National Security Archives and what is in them concerning one of contemporary history’s most important events: the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact? Are we really to believe that they have no clue about the conditions and dialogues at the end of the first Cold War? If so, they ought to resign or be fired for their unbelievable incompetence.
If not so – if they know the content of these historical documents – Mr Blinken, his advisors and speechwriters know that they lie.
Their words, therefore, should never be trusted. Neither should the media that avoid highlighting these lies and thereby become complicit. The task of a supposedly free press is to reveal the power abuse of democratically elected people who deliberately fill their constituencies with lies.
Simple as that.
Jens Stoltenberg
In this press conference video from January 7, 2022, NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg states some of the same rhetoric, distortions, simplifications and lies. Not to mention platitudes accompanied by an almost funny body language of bombastic gestures to compensate for his weak content, mantras and repetitions.
Listen at around 19:00 minutes how he maintains that NATO enlargement has been “extremely important for stability and peace and freedom and democracy in Europe” where it can indeed be argued that that enlargement is the main reason that Europe is now in a situation which can reasonably be called the 2nd Cold War.
Why else has NATO not created the desired and stipulated peace and stability since it was created in 1949? So, no, Mr Stoltenberg, you cannot continue – like your masters in Washington – to argue that the present war risks are caused by Russia and Russia alone? If that’s what they order you to say, you have the option to choose decency and resign.
The NATO Secretary-General repeats that each state has a sovereign right to decide its own course and choose its own security arrangements. And that NATO has not dragged in anybody, and they have all just decided democratically to become a member.
That is simply not true.
NATO as an alliance has enormous resources to influence opinions in potential member states. Contrary to his open door talk, NATO’s Charter speaks only about inviting new members, not about holding a door open for anyone who might want to join.
It should be well-known by now – but isn’t – that in the late 1990s, Vladimir Putin asked to join NATO – but it didn’t happen, did it, Mr Stoltenberg? And why not? Because Putin – Russia – wanted to be invited as an equal partner and not sit and wait till Montenegro had become a member, to put it bluntly. NATO decided to close the door at Putin’s request.
And what an exciting thought: Russia in NATO! Who would Mr Stoltenberg and Mr Blinken – and all the rest of the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC, then have to put all the blame on? How then legitimate NATO’s permanent armament and 12% higher military expenditures than Russia’s?
Mr Stoltenberg must know that he lies when saying NATO has an open door. It doesn’t for Russia. It doesn’t even have open ears for Russia’s security concerns (which each and every NATO member, the U.S. in particular, would consider reasonable if a Russian military alliance incrementally crept close to their borders).
And he must know that he lies when he acts as though he does not know that Russia has been against that very NATO enlargement that he fakes has been so positive for all of Europe during no less than 30 years.
Funnily, Stoltenberg first emphasises (around 19:30) that all new NATO members have freely decided to join. Then he boasts about all NATO does to train, help, support candidates and how important Ukraine is as a NATO partner while not a member. As he says, candidates need to carry through reforms to meet NATO standards. And NATO gives them “practical and political support” so they can – later – meet NATO standards and become members.
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What an extraordinary altruism NATO radiates! Are we really to believe that NATO certainly drags in no one, as he maintains?
NATO set up an office in Kyiv, Ukraine, already in 1994, and here you can see how – incrementally – Ukraine has been dragged in, seduced, and promised a great Euro-Atlantic future in one document after the other.
And here you’ll see how Olga Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, standing at NATO’s HQ with Stoltenberg, consistently talks about NATO as Ukraine’s “allies,” expect all kinds of guarantees and – in Foreign Policy of course – argues that Ukraine Needs a Clear Path to NATO Membership in the face of Russian aggression.
And now, the integration process has probably gone so far that neither NATO nor Ukraine would be able to see any other alternative but full membership at some point. Being fiancées, why not marry through a formal membership – as has been said about Sweden?
In its Russia-humiliating policies, NATO has not even seen it coming: That with all the promises, structures and processes accumulating and creating expectations, the alliance would, at some point, run into serious conflict with Russia. If so, the entire alliance suffers from conflict illiteracy and a tremendous lack of foresight.
An that is why you have to construct Russia as a huge militarily aggressive state with an unsympathetic leader – one “we” can freely demonise and don’t even have to listen to.
Now, listen then to this Stoltenberg statement about the – real – importance of NATO’s help (20:45): “…It also makes the societies of Ukraine and Georgia stronger. So resilient, well-functioning societies are also less vulnerable from interference from Russia.”
Just a welcoming open NATO door to countries that decide freely and democratically that they want to knock on it?
It’s time for a reality check in NATO Realpolitik’s – outdated – world. If you do not manifestly want to provoke and increase war risks, you would do it completely differently every day since 1989.
The NATO expansion basis is obvious: Get as many as possible into NATO, demonise Russia and Putin and make it impossible for Russia to have any influence in Europe and on its future.
How strange, indeed, that Russia perceives the Alliance’s expansion right up to its borders as a deliberate military threat and a politically motivated undermining of its status and power!
How surprising that it thinks its security interests in its near-abroad should be respected, just because it has been invaded historically from the West and contained all along its borders since the Second World War in which, by the way, it lost some 24 million people!
It is tragic beyond words that the West has not a single politician today like Willy Brandt, Egon Bahr, Olof Palme or any of the real statesmen who gave Gorbachev cascades of assurance because they possessed two essentially important qualities: intellectual competence and empathy, a wish and ability to try to live themselves into the situation of “the other” and thereby think in terms of common security at lower military levels.
They were mature personalities basing their policies on analysis and consultations. They knew that you can only achieve security with and not against “the other”.
Instead, NATO has only anti-intellectual, self-centred and -aggrandising militarists running the self-defeating “know-everything-listen-to-nobody” show foolproven by history to lead to war.
And it is tragic beyond words that the peoples of Europe do not debate these issues and that all alternatives to militarism have been deprived of all their resources while NATO militarism costs trillions of dollars what are desperately needed in all other sectors of Western society.
In summary, the US/NATO world threw away the most significant and precious opportunity to create peace in Europe after 1945, when it decided to take advantage of Russia’s weakness. As suggested by Gorbachev and many security and peace intellectuals at the time, the members of the old blocs could have joined forces and created an entirely new all-European security and peace architecture.
We are now facing the tragic consequences of the arrogant winner-takes-it-all policy manifested by the US Clinton administration’s decision to ignore all the assurances and begin expanding NATO eastward in 1994, helped by submissive European allies that had neither the intellectual capacity nor political will to manifest their own interests.
Watchdog’s latest report argues autocrats around the world are getting desperate as opponents form coalitions to challenge them
Increasingly repressive and violent acts against civilian protests by autocratic leaders and military regimes around the world are signs of their desperation and weakening grip on power, Human Rights Watch says in its annual assessment of human rights across the globe.
In its world report 2022, the human rights organisation said autocratic leaders faced a significant backlash in 2021, with millions of people risking their lives to take to the streets to challenge regimes’ authority and demand democracy.
Kazakhstan reminds of Armenia (September 2015), also energy price increases, Georgia (April 2009), opposition attempting to force pro-Russian President Mikheil Saakashvili, from power; and even to some extent of Ukraine (2014) – Maiden riots supposedly because then President Viktor Yanukovych, lured into negotiations with Europe for an association agreement with the European Union, behind which was – who else – NATO. The majority of Ukrainians had no idea about these ongoing negotiations and their background. So, the riots were planned by long hand and had nothing to do with the short-cut EU negotiations. Talks were eventually interrupted when Yanukovych received assurances from Russia for a “better deal”.
That’s when hell broke out on 21 February 2014 and the Maidan massacre took place. Its violent destruction was disproportionate to the cause. Western hired mercenaries were behind the merciless killing. The Maidan massacre murdered some 130 people, including some 18 policemen. That’s when it became clear – another Color Revolution was being instigated by the west – and always, but always with NATO in the back. NATO’s goal was setting up one or several bases in Ukraine, the closer to Moscow, the better.
Just for the record, the 1991 agreement between Europe and the new Russia, stipulated that there would be no new NATO bases further to the east (of Berlin), was never respected by the west. That’s why President Putin is drawing red lines, and rightly so.
Perhaps, one of the first such Color Revolutions in recent history was Serbia, when in early 2000 Serbian youth chanted “Slobo, Save Serbia! Slobo Save Serbia!”. Later that year, a “reform-minded” foreign-funded and trained group of young people infiltrated the Serbian pro-Milosevic youth and brought Milosevic, the president loved by most Serbs, to fall in October 2000. He was arrested immediately shipped to the ICC prison in The Hague, where he awaited trial for highest treason and crimes against humanity, which he did not commit.
His lawyers accumulated enough proof for Milosevic to demonstrate that the west was behind this Color Revolution and, indeed, the total dismantling of former Yugoslavia. If these documents would become known to the Court, the ICC, one of the most important interferences and destruction of a country in recent history would shed an irrevocable light on the crimes of the west, at that time led by President Clinton et al. So, Milosevic had to be “neutralized’. On March 11, 2006, he was found dead in his prison cell, a so-called suicide. This, despite the fact that since June 2001, he was on constant suicide watch.
Well, these are the stories of Armenia, Georgia and Serbia, but back to Kazakhstan, which resembles in many details these preceding so-called Color Revolutions. NATO having been unsuccessful under Russia’s strict red line – to advance further toward Moscow in Ukraine, or before in Belarus — is trying now on the southern front, with Kazakhstan.
This is clearly an attempted coup, no longer just protests about a gas price hike. It was engineered by the west – see this interview on the Kazakhstan crisis of Dr. Marcus Papadopoulos with Kevork Almassian (video 46 min. 6 January 2022):
No chance of success with this new coup attempt – just more propaganda for the west. President Putin will never allow these former Soviet republics to slide into the power base of the west, of NATO, especially now, since it is well known that over 90% of the population of all these former Soviet Republics want to stay firmly in Russia’s orbit.
The repeated protest patterns in Serbia, Armenia, Georgia, Belarus, and now in Kazakhstan are clearly indicative of western / NATO pressure to destabilize Russia and, ideally, so they keep dreaming since WWII – bring Russia into the “western influence base” – call it slavehood. In several of these cases the base reason for riots were massive energy price hikes, were just a pretext to heavy violent interference by western mercenaries under the guidance of NATO.
Never to forget NATO is always the power base behind these moves, because the end game is one or several NATO bases in the countries they are trying to putsch. Yet, it doesn’t seem to be very smart, as the west ought to know that none of these former Soviet Republics will betray Russia – almost all the people, including all the higher-level politicians, want to remain firmly in Russia’s zone of influence. Kiev was an exception. Kiev since WWII has been a Nazi stronghold, something that doesn’t apply to the rest of Ukraine.
In Kazakhstan, after what appears as local rather peaceful riots, violent elements were introduced from “outside”, in the form of well-trained almost para-military protesters, out to kill. It is what has become known as an attempted “Color Revolution”.
In Kazakhstan the death toll far exceeds 30, including 18 policemen, at least two of whom were decapitated. Hundreds have been injured. While according to Kazakh President Tokayev, constitutional order was largely restored last Friday, 7 January, unrest continues and nearly 4000 people were arrested. The extreme violence took over government buildings and burnt them down; the airport was occupied. The level of violence was way disproportionate for a gas price hike. Clearly other motives are at stake.
The vast majority of the 19 million Kazakhs have not taken to the streets, because of the gas price increase, which was not as dramatic as the western main stream media has you believe. The majority lives in rural areas and avoids violence.
These latest Kazakh upheavals could also be called a below-the-belt NATO approach to destabilize Russia, since NATO seems to have failed in Ukraine. In other words, undermining Russia’s position on Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin held talks with member states of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) on Friday. Peacekeepers from Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan were deployed to Kazakhstan earlier last week. President Tokayev was saying they would stay “for a limited period of time” to support the local security forces. Indeed, this morning, January 11, President Tokayev has declared the CSTO mission completed and is discussing with the troops their repatriation.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense later clarified that the CSTO forces have also been tasked with the protection of important facilities and key infrastructure and were not supposed to participate in “operational and combat” activities.
The EU, a typical undecided hypocritical agent, also offered the bloc’s assistance to help resolve the crisis with several countries calling on both the protesters and government forces to refrain from violence.
Yeah, right: calling on both parties to refrain from violence, when, in fact, the violent element was introduced clearly by NATO members, most of whom are Europeans. Once again, the trustworthiness of Europe is down in the pits. All it will do is appease some ignorant western, mostly European citizen with a massive flood of pro-western propaganda.
The question in the room is why Russian and Kazakh governments’ special services did not foresee this type of “Color Revolution” coming, especially after Russia’s drawing a red line on Ukraine? And after the west had lost her coup attempt in Belarus? Is it possible that the Ukraine distraction – hyped up by the western media with constant threats of a nuclear WWIII scenario – diverted President Putin’s attention from other vulnerable attack areas, such as Kazakhstan? And possibly Belarus? The latter is currently quiet. But to an outside eye, it looks like a temporary calm. And Ukraine is far from over.
As long as Russia is running after the problem, rather than taking an offensive surprise lead, Putin may remain in a defensive bind. Reacting, rather than being pro-active. That’s always a disadvantage and may deserve strategic rethinking.
Just imagine what a pro-active surprise move might be. For example, Russia setting up a military base in Mexico. And why not? Russia would certainly have the stature and standing in terms of friendly relations with Mexico to do so. It would be a game changer. It would put a different spin on world geopolitics. Why not give it a try by starting talks with AMLO, Mr. Lopez Obrador, Mexico’s President.
The west’s / NATO’s intent has been since the 1990s to separate Kazakhstan from the orbit of the former Soviet Union and today’s Russia. So far unsuccessfully, for the reasons pointed out before. Kazakhstan exports 30% to and imports 60% from Russia and China. Today more than ever Kazakhstan is part of the Eurasian alliance. It is a de facto integrated nation and one in close partnership.
The Russians and Kazakhs have learned from Ukraine. It didn’t take President Kassym-Jomart Kemelevich Tokayev long to request assistance from Russia; and it didn’t take long for President Putin to respond, through the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO – Eurasian security organization; members: Russia (de facto leader), Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan).
In addition to the CSTO troops, Russia also sent air force troops to counter the militants. Chances are that this will not become a new Kiev, where Assistant Foreign Minister Victoria Nuland, so eloquently said “f*ck Europe!” since the US had already spent 10 million dollars over the past years to prepare this coup.….
What we see in Kazakhstan are very well trained and armed militants – not peaceful protesters, as would have been the case when protests started over gas price increases – it is clear that peaceful protesters do not take over government buildings and airports, they do not shoot police officers to kill – this is clearly foreign intervention.
It is amazing – and sad – to watch how Europe plays along, letting NATO troops eventually ravaging the European territory – when Russia interferes. Only brainless European leaders (sic) will allow NATO playing war games that could turn anytime “hot” – hot again on the territories of Europe.
That’s what the European Union has become. She is led by an unelected lady, Madame Ursula von der Leyden, formerly Germany’s Defense Minister, but more importantly and much less visibly, she is a Member of the Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum. We know who calls the shots over the European Union – and most of the viciously dictatorial leaders (sic) of the EU member countries, stripped of their sovereignty – are scholars from Klaus Schwab’s special courses for “Young Global Leaders”. This also applied for the most covid-tyrannical heads of states around the world.
They shall not prevail.
Back to Kazakhstan. The same people who scare (mostly) the western people to death for a virus that has never been isolated and identified, are also behind destroying Russia and China.
If they were to succeed in Kazakhstan, they would have managed to weaken Russia considerably, and the next step would most likely be NATO’s ignoring Moscow’s red line on Ukraine with the aim of arming Ukraine and making it eventually a NATO country.
This is, however, still unlikely because Putin then would not hesitate invading Ukraine through the Dunbass area, defending Russia’s interests. NATO and the US know that they have no chance against Russia’s newest defense systems. Would they let it happen, letting Europe be obliterated for the third time in a bit more than 100 years?
The fight for Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus is a pivotal strategic chess game. Undoubtedly Russia will win it, but at what cost for Europe, for Eurasia? The more severe the covid restrictions the west will impose – and the east will obey – the higher the price for maintaining or regaining sovereign European and Eurasian countries.
The real threat from ground based surface-to-air missiles means that there is still a need to keep the Vietnam ‘Wild Weasel’ capability current. The US Navy’s (USN) announcement that the Northrop Grumman AGM-88E Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile – Extended Range (AARGM-ER) had received Milestone C programme approval on 23 August 2021 focused attention on the […]
Although 2021 is now behind us, there are many issues that will linger for a while, or much longer, and will certainly dominate much of the news in 2022, as well. These are but a few of the issues.
NATO-Russian Brinkmanship
Exasperated with NATO expansion and growing ambitions in the Black Sea region, Moscow has decided to challenge the US-led Western alliance in an area of crucial geopolitical importance to Russia.
Ukraine’s quest for NATO membership, especially following the Crimea conflict in 2014, proved to be a red line for Russia. Starting in late 2021, the US and its European allies began accusing Russia of amassing its forces at the Ukrainian border, suggesting that outright military invasion would soon follow. Russia denied such accusations, insisting that a military solution can be avoided if Russia’s geopolitical interests are respected.
Some analysts argue that Russia is seeking to “coerce the west to start the new Yalta talks,” a reference to a US, UK and Russia summit at the conclusion of World War II. If Russia achieves its objectives, NATO will no longer be able to exploit Russia’s fault lines throughout its Western borders.
While NATO members, especially the US, want to send a strong message to Russia – and China – that the defeat in Afghanistan will not affect their global prestige or tarnish their power, Russia is confident that it has enough political, economic, military and strategic cards that would allow it to eventually prevail.
China’s Unhindered Rise
Another global tussle is also underway. For years, the US unleashed an open global war to curb China’s rise as a global economic power. While the 2019 ‘Trade War’, instigated by the Donald Trump administration against China delivered lukewarm results, China’s ability to withstand pressure, control with mathematical precision the spread, within China, of the Covid-19 pandemic, and continue to fuel the global economy has proved that Beijing is not easy prey.
An example of the above assertion is the anticipated revival of the Chinese tech giant, Huawei. The war on Huawei served as a microcosm of the larger war on China. British writer, Tom Fowdy, described this war as “blocking exports to (Huawei), isolating it from global chipmakers, forcing allies to ban its participation in their 5G networks, imposing criminal charges against it and kidnapping one of its senior executives”.
However, this is failing, according to Fowdy. 2022 is the year in which Huawei is expected to wage massive global investments that will allow it to overcome many of these obstacles and become self-sustaining in terms of the technologies required to fuel its operations worldwide.
Aside from Huawei, China plans to escalate its response to American pressures by expanding its manufacturing platforms, creating new markets and fortifying its alliances, especially with Moscow. A Chinese-Russian alliance is particularly important for Beijing as both countries are experiencing strong US-Western pushback.
2022 is likely to be the year in which Russia and China, in the words of Beijing’s Ambassador to Moscow, Zhang Hanhui, stage a “response to such overt (US) hegemony and power politics”, where both “continue to deepen back-to-back strategic cooperation.”
The World ‘Hanging by a Thread’
However, other conflicts exist beyond politics and economy. There is also the war unleashed on our planet by those who favor profits over the welfare of future generations. While the Glasgow Climate Pact COP26 began with lofty promises in Scotland in November, it concluded with political compromises that hardly live up to the fact that, per the words of UN Secretary-General António Guterres, “we are still knocking on the door of climate catastrophe”.
True, in 2022 many tragedies will be attributed to climate change. However, it will also be a year in which millions of people around the world will continue to push for a collective, non-political response to the ‘climate catastrophe’. While Planet Earth is “hanging by a thread” – according to Guterres – political compromises that favor the rich become the obstacle, not the solution. Only a global movement of well-integrated civil societies worldwide can compel politicians to heed the wishes of the people.
Refugees, Democracy and Human Rights
The adverse effects of climate change can be felt in myriad ways that go beyond the immediate damage inflicted by erratic weather conditions. War, revolutions, endemic socio-economic inequalities, mass migration and refugee crises are a few examples of how climate change has destabilized many parts of the world and wrought pain and suffering to numerous communities worldwide.
The issue of migration and refugees will continue to pose a threat to global stability in 2022, since none of the root causes that forced millions of people to leave their homes in search of safer and better lives have been addressed. Instead of contending with the roots of the problem – climate change, military interventions, inequality, etc. – quite often the hapless refugees find themselves accused and demonized as agents of instability in Western societies.
This, in turn, has served as a political and, at times, moral justification for the rise of far-right political movements in Europe and elsewhere, which are spreading falsehoods, championing racism and undermining whatever semblance of democracy that exists in their countries.
2022 must not be allowed to be another year of pessimism. It can also be a year of hope and promise. But that is only possible if we play our role as active citizens to bring about the coveted change that we would like to see in the world.
On January 10, American and Russian officials will meet to discuss Putin’s proposal on mutual security guarantees. Western media and political analysts have cast Putin’s demands that NATO not expand further east to Ukraine and that NATO not establish military bases in former Soviet states nor use them to carry out military activity as bold and impossible. Here are six crucial pieces of background that the western media will not tell you.
The worldview of liberals usually ends at the borders of the U.S. settler-state until they are mobilized by the oligarchy to provide ideological cover for the latest imperialist intrigue. This is as true for the liberal Black “misleadership” class as it is for Euro-American liberals.
But U.S.-centrism and class collaboration are not just maladies of the liberal class. Self-identified radicals or leftists from all backgrounds also suffer from this affliction, resulting in a very thin social base for anti-imperialism in the U.S., and even throughout Western Europe.
So, Ukraine, Russia, and NATO feel like a world away and in no way relevant to the everyday grind that the millions of working people are forced to engage in as part of this vicious, backward social, economic system called capitalism.
In the wake of the December 31 phone call between Presidents Biden and Putin, two very different perceptions of reality were brought into conflict which we can only pray will be resolved in the coming days and weeks of meetings between both sides.
Where one side sees itself committed to supporting Ukraine’s independent right to join NATO in order to help empower the trans Atlantic rules based order, the other side sees an encroaching military encirclement of its vast territory under a military doctrine dubbed “full spectrum dominance”. This latter doctrine, born in the bowels of Brzezinski’s “Flexible Response” doctrine of 1980, assumes that it is possible to deliver a nuclear first strike on Russia (and China) with only minor “acceptable” rates of collateral damage suffered as a consequence.
Former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul correctly identified President Putin’s fears of NATO’s ongoing encroachment in a December 21 tweet, but was McFaul correct to dismiss these concerns as the crazy ravings of a paranoid Russian dictator with no bearing in reality? Or is there something to Putin’s fears?
Considering the rapid growth of NATO from 16 to 29 nations in 24 years, and the obsessive drive which post-Maidan Kiev governments have made to enter into the military pact, Putin’s fears shouldn’t be dismissed too quickly.
When you also consider 1) the vast array of military games that have taken place on the Black Sea in recent years, 2) the expansion of the anti-ballistic missile shield which weapons experts have proven can be turned into offensive systems with relative ease, 3) America’s abrogation of several trust building treaties since 2002, 4) the vast increase of arms sales to Ukraine over the past year, and 5) the promotion of first-use nuclear bombs by leading western officials in the last few weeks of 2021, it is clear that Russia’s fears are not unfounded as McFaul or other hawks encircling Biden would have it seem.
Considering McFaul is a renowned “color revolution expert” who was caught trying to arrange a failed “white revolution” in Russia in 2011, it must be assumed that his perspective is more than a little polluted.
Even China has felt the burn of full spectrum dominance and western regime change operations in recent years, with a massive armada of military bases, troop buildup, war games and anti-ballistic missiles like THAAD deployed in South Korea where 20 thousand American troops are stationed and ready for battle. These troops are joined by 50 thousand soldiers in Japan, while talks of creating a Pacific NATO (aka: QUAD) has occupied the conversations of military officials in Washington, Japan, India and Australia since 2020.
Ukraine and Taiwan: Spark Plugs for WW3?
As much as Biden, McFaul, Carter, or Nuland might scream and shout that “Crimea will always belong to Ukraine,” the fact is that a democratic plebiscite did occur in 2014 which resulted in a majority vote to return the peninsula to Russia. Whether you like it or not, that happened.
As much as war hawks might also scream that the island of Taiwan is an independent nation deserving of US military support, according to the United Nations, and Taiwan’s own constitution, the island is still legally a part of China. That’s just a basic fact of life that no amount of media spin can change.
Should we treat the words of leading NATOcrats like Jens Stoltenberg seriously when he threatens to move US nukes in Germany closer to Russia’s border? Should we dismiss the claims made by former Defense Secretary Ash Carter that the USA should support a color revolution in Russia? Should we ignore the words of Senator Roger Wicker when he called for a nuclear first strike on Russia on December 8?
Whether or not American citizens take such words seriously, the fact is that Vladimir Putin and his military advisors certainly do.
USA Should Agree to Putin’s Demands
Taking the above facts into consideration, Putin’s demands for written agreements on freezing the growth of NATO’s eastward expansion should strike any American patriot as eminently reasonable.
After all, who does NATO’s growth actually benefit? Does it benefit the Ukrainian people if US missiles are installed in Kiev, which would only see the nation suffer the risk of a Russian retaliatory attack? And who on earth will gain if the world is pushed to nuclear war?
If Putin requests that war games halt on Russia’s border (which he will reciprocate in turn) and requests that no short or medium range missiles be placed on Ukrainian soil (which he will reciprocate in turn) while re-empowering the Russia-NATO council, then what harm does this do to the USA’s interests? Moscow is, after all, only 300 miles away from Ukraine’s border, so this sort of security guarantee is perfectly rational.
Just to put it into perspective, I doubt a single American would feel secure if either Russia or China carried out military war games in the Gulf of Mexico while placing Russian-controlled missiles in Ottawa. And how secure would Americans feel if Moscow’s intelligence agencies were openly supporting rabidly anti-American Mexicans who wished to become a part of a Shanghai Cooperation Organization of the Americas?
So rather than risk lighting the world on nuclear fire in a bid for global hegemony, why not simply agree to Putin’s red lines, while also toning down the sabre-rattling in the Pacific while we’re at it?
Doing these simple things will involve returning to the tried-and-true methods of diplomatic engagement and acting like the UN Charter actually matters in international affairs. It will also involve treating other nations like partners with common interests, instead of assuming that everyone not under our hegemony are enemies vying for dominance in a world of diminishing returns.
It may be a lot to ask the NATOcrats running rampant in Washington, but I guarantee you that the majority of Americans from all sides of the political aisle will be overjoyed to avoid a nuclear holocaust.
RAND lists economical, geopolitical, ideological and informational as well as military measures the U.S. should take to weaken Russia. Since the report came out the first four of the six ‘geopolitical measures’ listed in chapter 4 of the report have been implemented. The U.S. delivered lethal weapons to Ukraine, it increased its support for ‘rebels’ in Syria. It attempted a regime change in Belarus and instigated a war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The U.S. is now implementing measure 5 which aims to ‘reduce Russia’s influence in Central Asia’.
China and Russia are right to try to undermine US unipolar hegemony. The planet is not America’s property and efforts to stop it being treated as such are good.
It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and still believe the US is a force for peace and justice in this world.
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The belief that China is trying to become the next unipolar global hegemon is premised on the idea that Beijing has been watching the floundering US empire burn itself out and get crushed under its own weight after just a few decades and thinking “Oh that looks awesome! Let’s definitely do that!”
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“No no you don’t understand, the US needs to keep bombing and starving civilians and engaging in nuclear brinkmanship and arming extremist militias and supporting dictators and destroying any nation who disobeys it. Otherwise the world might be taken over by a tyrannical regime!”
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You could very easily fill a list with one thousand things Americans should care about more than the one year anniversary of a few wingnuts wandering around the Capitol Building for a bit and then leaving.
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Americans have always had a special love for fake fighting. Civil War reenactments. Pro wrestling. Jerry Springer. Democrats vs Republicans.
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Biden is a better Trump than Trump was; he’s advancing all Trump’s policies more effectively than Trump and actually doing things that Trump only talked about. If Trumpers had any actual ideological consistency instead of vapid partisan hackery they’d all be Biden supporters.
US deportations of children increased by 30% in 2021, first year of the Biden-Harris admin
19,793 minors were deported to Mexico, 15,488 (78%) not accompanied by adults
2021 had the most deportation of children in 5 years (including all of Trump's admin)https://t.co/yzkv6Pvm8x
Please consider the possibility that it’s not a coincidence that Democrats have done literally exactly what those who oppose “vote blue no matter who” said they would do when they took power.
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Nobody gets censored for “covid misinformation”; that’s just today’s excuse. Before that it was the so-called Facebook whistleblower, before that it was domestic extremism, before that it was election security, before that it was Russian disinfo and fake news. The reality is much simpler: people are being censored on the internet to normalize censorship on the internet.
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Don’t underestimate how badly our rulers need to regulate speech on the internet. Their very survival depends on preventing awareness of the exploitative and oppressive nature of the status quo from spreading into the mainstream. They’d do literally anything to stop it.
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Leaving mainstream social media platforms for fringe social media is just marginalizing yourselves. It’s doing the narrative managers’ job for them. By all means join alternative platforms also, but don’t quarantine yourself from the mainstream crowd as long as that’s where the people are. That’s just giving the bastards what they want.
The whole objective of internet censorship via de-platforming and algorithm manipulation is to quarantine the mainstream herd away from wrongthink. Leaving is just doing exactly what they want you to do. You need to stay and disrupt establishment narratives where you can be seen.
Sure you maybe have free speech on those small fringe platforms. You have free speech on a desert island, too. It doesn’t matter what you say if people don’t hear your words. If you oppose the status quo, you need to oppose it wherever your voice can influence people.
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There is no “human nature” apart from our immutable physiological features. What we’re dealing with in matters of societal organization is the human condition; conditioning by propaganda, by early childhood trauma, by generational trauma. And we can heal all of that conditioning.
People who cite “human nature” to argue that society must necessarily be organized a certain way are only ever talking about their own conditioning. If they think it’s human nature to be selfish and competitive, they’re just telling you how they’ve been conditioned to be.
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The narratives about what’s going on in our world had already become unsustainably shrill and muddled before Covid; now it’s gotten so bad it affects the decisions people make in their everyday lives. Humanity is approaching a white noise saturation point with narrative itself.
Which could end up being a good thing, in the long run. All of humanity’s problems ultimately boil down to an unwholesome relationship with mental narrative. If that relationship becomes so strained that it snaps, maybe we can replace it with something healthier and more truthful.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Yevhen Lavrenchuk is being held in Italy on an international warrant with Russia seeking his extradition
A Ukrainian opera director arrested in Italy at Russia’s request has pledged to continue his fight against the “oppression” of Vladimir Putin’s government as calls for his release mount from around the world.
Yevhen (Eugene) Lavrenchuk, 39, was detained in Naples on an international arrest warrant issued by Russia during a stopover in the city on 17 December.
The Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) announced Wednesday that it is sending peacekeeping forces to Kazakhstan after the country’s president requested help to deal with massive protests.
The CSTO is a six-member military alliance made up of six former Soviet states. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, the CSTO’s current chair, announced the deployment and said the peacekeepers would be sent to Kazakhstan “for a limited period with the aim of stabilization and normalization of the situation in this country.” Pashinyan didn’t specify how many peacekeepers were being deployed.
Speaking at a New Hampshire campaign event in 2019, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden told the crowd, “We don’t need more nuclear weapons, period.” After the bluster and apocalyptic theatrics of Donald Trump, many voters hoped Biden’s decades of nuclear arms control experience would bring restraint and stability to the United States’ nuclear policies.
In Biden’s own words, “If you want a world without nuclear weapons, the United States must take the initiative to lead the world,” and yet, one year into his presidency, Biden has continued many of the nuclear weapons programs that began or advanced under Trump.
Currently, the U.S. is pursuing a nuclear weapons modernization program that was launched by the Obama-Biden administration that is expected to cost at least $1.7 trillion by 2046. This includes large spending increases on a controversial low-yield smaller nuclear warhead, the total replacement of the intercontinental ballistic missile force, new B-21 strategic bombers, B-52 upgrades, more destructive nuclear warheads, as well as other programs.
Additionally, on December 27, Biden signed into law the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, a nearly $770 billion military bill that includes almost $28 billion for nuclear weapons. As of September 2020, the U.S. had a total inventory of 5,600 stockpiled nuclear warheads which, together with Russia, represent approximately 91 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.
Below, eight analysts, activists and nuclear specialists offer Truthout their assessment of Biden’s first year of nuclear policies.
Increased Transparency
Compared to his predecessor, Biden has been more transparent in disclosing nuclear budget, stockpile and dismantlement figures, says Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. For his increased transparency, the extension of a major arms treaty, and for initiating strategic talks with Russia and China, Kristensen gives Biden a grade of “B.”
With respect to the incomplete disclosure and slowing rate of dismantling retired nuclear warheads, however, he gives Biden a “C.” Furthermore, he’s concerned Biden’s forthcoming Nuclear Posture Review might not adopt a no-first-use nuclear weapons policy.
“[Biden’s] general military strategy and foreign policy are beefing up offensive capabilities and posturing in response to Russia and China,” Kristensen told Truthout. “Many see that as necessary to deter those countries, but it may also work to stimulate their activities further.”
Saving New START
On the plus side, Biden earned widespread praise for extending the New START Treaty, which limits U.S.- and Russian-deployed long-range nuclear weapons, before it was set to expire two weeks into his presidency. Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, called the extension an “important and common-sense step.” John Tierney, a former congressman and executive director of the nonprofit Council for a Livable World, described the treaty’s extension as “one bright spot” in Biden’s first year, which he said was a “serious disappointment” otherwise.
“On the whole, the Biden administration has rubber-stamped every major big-budget nuclear weapons system produced under the Trump administration,” Tierney told Truthout. He further criticized Biden for failing to miss “low-hanging fruit,” including opportunities to cancel a new “unnecessary and wasteful” submarine-launched ballistic missile nuclear warhead, a life-extension program for the outdated B-83 megaton gravity bomb, and “more useable” nuclear weapons.
“At the moment,” Tierney said, “We must give [Biden] a ‘C-minus’ — a passing grade, but only barely.”
Grassroots movement Beyond the Bomb’s executive director, Cecili Thompson Williams, told Truthout that even though Biden has stated support for a no-first-use policy, a more rational nuclear posture has not been a Biden administration priority.
“Without that leadership, nuclear hawks at the Department of Defense are once again succeeding in their resistance to common-sense changes to make our nuclear policy safer,” Thompson Williams said. Also giving Biden a “C-minus,” she called his first year “disappointing but with potential to improve.”
In September, 29 members of Congress wrote to Biden to implore him to reduce excessive spending and over-reliance on nuclear weapons. This was followed by a letter to the president sent in December and signed by almost 700 scientists and engineers calling for a reduction in the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. national security.
In Search of Strategic Stability
When Biden became president one year ago, he inherited four major international nuclear challenges: Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. Vowing to rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known as the Iran nuclear deal, from which Trump unilaterally withdrew in 2018, Biden said the U.S. was “prepared to return to full compliance if Iran does the same.”
Assal Rad, a senior research fellow with the National Iranian American Council, tells Truthout that despite high hopes that Biden would reverse Trump’s actions which helped drive the U.S. and Iran dangerously close to all-out war in 2019-20, in many ways, the Biden administration has continued the Trump administration’s “maximum-pressure” policy.
The continuation of sanctions that are devastating Iran’s citizens and its economy, Rad says, has only hindered efforts to revive the deal. She criticizes Biden for failing to act swiftly during the window of opportunity he had in his first five months as president to seek progress with Iran’s previous, more engagement-friendly Hassan Rouhani administration before staunch conservative Ebrahim Raisi was elected in June.
“The Biden administration now finds itself in a much more challenging position to restore the deal,” Rad said. “Now, more than ever, we need diplomatic resolutions to global issues and an even-handed approach on nuclear proliferation.” On Biden’s Iran nuclear policy, Rad gives the president a “C” for not “succeeding to accomplish anything but not yet entirely failing by escalating tensions further.”
A Dangerous Status Quo
After whiplash diplomacy in which Trump threatened to “totally destroy North Korea,” only to later fawn over “beautiful letters” he received from Kim Jong Un, Northeast Asia analysts were hopeful the Biden administration would lead to a less erratic, more substantive phase of nuclear diplomacy.
Although Biden said he shares South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s stated goal of “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” Christine Ahn, executive director of Women Cross DMZ, tells Truthout, “much of this is rhetoric,” and the Biden administration has not changed what she called the “failed policies of sanctions, military exercises and the travel ban.”
“The U.S. will continue these militaristic policies until North Korea makes progress on denuclearization, which won’t happen as long as the U.S. continues its hostile policies,” Ahn said. She gives Biden a grade of “D” because “he hasn’t done anything to improve relations with North Korea [including declaring an end to the Korean War], which will be pivotal to advance denuclearization.”
Strategic Stability
After Russia and the U.S., China is the third-largest nuclear weapons state. While China is expanding its nuclear capabilities, its arsenal remains a fraction of the other two countries. Tong Zhao, a senior fellow at the Nuclear Policy Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, tells Truthout that Biden understands the importance of direct engagement on nuclear matters with China’s President Xi Jinping.
Writing from Beijing, Zhao noted that Biden achieved “some success” by prompting Xi to acknowledge the importance of discussing strategic stability at their first virtual meeting in November, something Xi previously did not acknowledge.
In its broadest sense, Zhao said, “strategic stability” refers to the maintenance of generally stable bilateral [U.S.-China] relations. More narrowly, it refers to a stable nuclear relationship by mitigating a nuclear arms race or the use of nuclear weapons.
Zhao called the Biden administration’s nuclear policymaking “pragmatic” for his willingness to start with less-difficult issues such as crisis prevention and confidence-building measures. Zhao gives Biden an “A-minus.”
The Good, the Bad and the Incomplete
Arms Control Association Executive Director Daryl G. Kimball, told Truthout that Biden’s first year of nuclear policy has been a mix of good (New START); bad (an enormous nuclear budget); and incomplete or mixed (Iran, North Korea). “It’s not a simple answer that can be boiled down to a letter grade,” Kimball said.
In July, the association published an issue brief which details why Biden’s 2022 nuclear budget is “very unhelpful,” what Kimball described as an “excessive and extremely costly plan to upgrade all major aspects of the nuclear weapons arsenal.” Exactly what the role and purpose of nuclear weapons is in Biden’s national security strategy will be detailed in the forthcoming Nuclear Posture Review, expected in early 2022.
“The jury is still out on whether the president will follow through on his pledge during the campaign, and in his interim national security strategy, to reduce the role of nuclear weapons and to restore U.S. leadership on nuclear arms control and disarmament,” Kimball said. “I have my deep concerns about whether this Nuclear Posture Review will do that.”
The one area where Kimball gives Biden an “F” is for his failure to speak about the importance of reducing growing nuclear competition and the need to pursue a world without nuclear weapons. “I think it’s a failure of leadership in his first 12 months not to have delivered a major or even a minor policy speech on the subject,” Kimball said.
One of the most notable nuclear developments of Biden’s first year in office occurred just two days after he was sworn in as president. On January 22, the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) entered into force, making nuclear weapons illegal under international law. Adopted and ratified by at least 58 countries, the U.S. and the other eight nuclear-weapons-possessing nations oppose the ban.
As Arms Control Association’s Kimball points out, the TPNW contributes to a common goal shared by nuclear-armed states and non-nuclear-armed states, which is the pursuit of a world without nuclear weapons. The TPNW also reinforces the taboo against the possession and use of nuclear weapons.
Beatrice Fihn, executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, notes that when Biden took office, he inherited a disarmament situation that was “in tatters,” but says the TPNW created a bright spot. “Instead of embracing this, the Biden administration has aggressively attacked the TPNW and relentlessly pressured allies to abandon the treaty.”
Biden’s disarmament policy, Fihn told Truthout, is a “D-minus” — “not the leadership that can save us from nuclear disaster.”
Since Iran finalized its Comprehensive 25 Year Cooperation Plan with China on 27 March, a completely new geometry has arisen in Southwest Asia, which is evolving at breakneck speed.
An ancient civilization serving as the third foundational pillar supporting the Greater Eurasian Partnership, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) on 17 September, Iran has finally emerged as a leading driver for stabilization and progress.
Vladimir Putin was “defiant” during his end-of-year press conference last Thursday. The Russian president, who has held these impressive question-and-answer events for the past 20 years, was “bellicose.” He was “threatening.” So we read in the all-the-same-always American press.
As feared in November (see blog post below) Russia’s Supreme Court on Tuesday 28 December 2021 ordered the closure of Memorial International, one of the country’s most respected human rights organizations, wiping out three decades of work to expose the abuses and atrocities of the Stalinist era. Memorial is the winner of at least 7 international human rights awards: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/BD12D9CE-37AA-7A35-9A32-F37A0EA8C407
The court ruled that Memorial International had fallen afoul of Russia’s “foreign agent” law. But the group said the real reason for the shutdown was that authorities did not approve of its work.
The ruling is the latest blow to Russia’s hollowed-out civil society organizations, which have gradually fallen victim to Putin’s authoritarian regime.
Videos posted on social media showed Memorial supporters shouting, “Shame, shame!” in the court’s hallways and at the entrance to the building shortly after the ruling. Seven people were detained outside the courthouse following the proceedings, according to independent monitoring group OVD-Info. The organization said three of them are believed to be instigators whose sole aim was to cause havoc, not support Memorial.
Memorial International’s lawyer, Tatiana Glushkova, confirmed the ruling to CNN and said the group would appeal the decision. “The real reason for Memorial’s closure is that the prosecutor’s office doesn’t like Memorial’s work rehabilitating the victims of Soviet terror,” Glushkova told CNN.
The Prosecutor General’s Office of Russia requested Memorial International be liquidated in November. The group was accused of repeatedly breaking the law for failing to mark all its publications with a compulsory “foreign agent” warning. The Justice Ministry had designated the group a foreign agent in 2016, using a law targeting organizations receiving international funding.
Memorial’s representatives argued there were no legal grounds for the group’s closure, and critics say the Russian government targeted Memorial for political reasons.
Oleg Orlov, a member of Memorial International’s board, said the court’s decision was “purely ideological” and “a demonstrative, blatant, illegal decision.”
“Allegedly, we do not assess the Soviet Union and Soviet history the right way. But this is our assessment, we have the right to do it,” Orlov told CNN.
Memorial was founded in the late 1980s to document political repressions carried out under the Soviet Union, building a database of victims of the Great Terror and gulag camps. The Memorial Human Rights Centre, a sister organisation that campaigns for the rights of political prisoners and other causes, is also facing liquidation for “justifying terrorism and extremism”. One of the group’s co-founders was Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, who went on to be the first honorary chairman of the Memorial Society.
The US and its allies are pushing the world toward nuclear armageddon. The US and its allies armed Al Qaeda in Syria. The US and its allies are carrying out a literal genocide in Yemen. The US and its allies are deliberately starving children by the thousands. Shut up about Russia and China.
Desmond Tutu said “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” This is especially true of the unjust situation in which the largest power structure on earth oppresses and tyrannizes populations around the world to force their obedience. Refusing to take a clear stance against that power structure is siding with it.
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William Van Wagenen has a new article out with The Libertarian Institute documenting the mountains of evidence that the US and its allies were supporting Al Qaeda-tied militias in Syria from the beginning of the war, in direct contradiction of the mainstream narrative that that started later.
This is what happened in Syria, it’s what happened in Libya, and it’s what was on track to happen in Xinjiang before Beijing said “nah” and launched its crackdown. The west isn’t mad at Beijing for committing a “genocide”, it’s mad at Beijing for preventing one.
Like so many other western propaganda operations these days, this one is predominantly about China’s Belt and Road Initiative which it plans to use to help rise above US hegemony and create a multipolar world. The actual interest in Xinjiang has been about the fact that it is a key geostrategic region that the western empire would greatly benefit from balkanizing away from China so it can’t fulfill the crucial role planned for it in the BRI.
This map says more than any article you'll ever see in corporate media about why Western imperialist countries (that have spent decades killing Muslims) suddenly pretend to care about Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China.
Criticize Beijing’s crackdown in Xinjiang all you want, but it is indisputably orders of magnitude less draconian than the US “war on terror” approach which has killed millions and displaced tens of millions since 9/11.
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Yes, China’s government is more authoritarian than yours in some ways. Also, you’re being deceived by a massive, sweeping propaganda campaign about the things China’s government does and the threat it poses to you. Both of these things are true. They do not contradict each other.
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If somebody somehow managed to leak 100 percent of all classified information on all US government malfeasance, it probably wouldn’t have the effect you’d imagine. The mass media would either ignore it or spin it into obscurity, and it would be quickly shuffled out of the spotlight. We may be sure this is true because there’s already more than enough publicly available information on US government depravity to completely discredit all of its leading institutions. The reason that information hasn’t caused uproar and unrest is because of narrative management. Propaganda is the ultimate enemy.
The real problem isn’t access to information so much as the way that information is presented to the average citizen. That’s why it’s so important to attack and discredit the means of information presentation at mass scale wherever there’s an opportunity. Imperial narrative control is our real prison.
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You can understand why the US political system refuses to bring Americans out of debt and impoverishment by imagining what would happen if it didn’t. Ordinary people would use their new financial influence to create a system that serves them rather than serving a globe-spanning empire. In a system where money equals power, people would begin using their new economic power to change political and economic realities for their benefit. They’d begin working to divert wasteful war machine spending to themselves. The oligarchs who control both US political parties can’t have that.
Money is power and power is relative, so those with lots of money are incentivised to keep as much money as possible for themselves to maximize their power. If everyone is a king then nobody is a king. There is a tremendous amount of power riding on keeping Americans poor and busy.
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Echo chamber dynamics and cognitive biases are the uncrowned rulers of the human worldview. They shape our perceptions of what’s happening in the world and tend to do so without ever even being noticed. That’s why introspection and self-awareness are fundamental to understanding.
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The world is burning and psychopaths are brandishing armageddon weapons in the name of global domination. If you are going to spend any of your remaining time on this planet fighting, it would probably be wise to spend it fighting for something that truly matters.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Analysis: brief window when Russia would tolerate independent reckoning of its past appears to have closed
In a terrible year for human rights in Russia, beginning with the imprisonment of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the closure of International Memorial stands out for its ruthlessness.
Founded in the late 1980s by Andrei Sakharov and other Soviet-era dissidents, the group took the new freedoms offered under Mikhail Gorbachev and used them to reveal raw truths about the fate of millions of victims of Stalin’s repressions.
After weeks of media scare about a purported Russian military invasion of Ukraine, the conflict may get a chance to be solved in a negotiated way. The public conversation on the current escalation of the Russian-Western conflict over Ukraine is, however, quite ironic. At least on the surface, it focuses on guarantees that Ukraine would not join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military alliance, which is not only far from inviting Ukraine to join but which most Ukrainians themselves do not want to enter.
Ukraine is not merely playing a secondary role in the exchange of threats and negotiations about its destiny. But in a typical colonial way, commentators are homogenizing Ukrainians and misrecognizing the political diversity in a nation of 40 million people. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently tweeted about the principle “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” contrary to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inclination to determine Ukraine’s membership in NATO in a narrow circle of Great Powers. However, the problem is not only deciding “without Ukraine” but also deciding “for” very diverse Ukrainians as if they held identical opinions on the critical issues in question.
A popular interpretation of the Euromaidan revolution contributes to this strategic disguise. As the story goes on, in 2014, Ukrainians from different regions, which merged into one modern state only during WWII, finally truly united in the civic inclusive nation born in the revolution. Ukrainians made their “civilizational choice” in favor of the Western geopolitical orientation and are defending it against Russian aggression, which is attempting to return Ukraine to its sphere of influence. The war in Donbas that followed in 2014 is presented as primarily an inter-state war and not a direct continuation of the violent civil conflict that started in the last days of Euromaidan even before any military moves by Russia.
In reality, Euromaidan was a deficient revolution. It did not form any national unity, but the elite groups which benefited from it (together with ideological cheerleaders) need to sustain this illusion for internal and external legitimacy via combination of silencing and repression. It is, therefore, in their interest to present the alternative positions on Ukrainian past, present and future as “non-Ukrainian” or even “anti-Ukrainian,” even though these positions are shared by many (if not most) Ukrainian citizens. As a result, these Ukrainians are more and more deprived of a voice in the domestic and international public spheres.
Ukraine has not simply turned into an object of the Great Powers’ play. In an especially humiliating way, Ukraine is exploited to cover imperialist interests and misrepresent them as a noble endeavor. The pathos-laden references to Ukraine’s sovereignty parallel the reality of the state, which is more dependent on foreign powers politically, economically and militarily than ever before since the Soviet collapse. Recognizing Ukraine’s diversity and shifting the discussion to the interests of Ukrainians is particularly imperative not only for immediate de-escalation of the conflict, but for any sustainable solution for Ukraine and the peace in Europe.
Do Ukrainians Want to Join NATO?
Russia is demanding ironclad guarantees that Ukraine (and other ex-USSR states) will not join NATO, and that NATO would not use the territory of these states for military expansion. The typical answer from Western officials and observers so far has been that it is for NATO and Ukraine to decide, not for Russia. Many Western commentators are obsessed with reading Putin’s mind: How he would react if not satisfied with a response to his ultimatums? They are mirrored by the viral symmetrical speculations on the opposite side whether Biden would be ready to strike a deal with Russia. Not so many are interested in what Ukrainians think about all this. Do Ukrainians actually want to join NATO?
Ukraine’s neutral status, which excludes it from entering any military blocs, was inscribed into the foundational documents of the modern Ukrainian state: the Declaration of Sovereignty (adopted July 16, 1990) and the Constitution of Ukraine (June 28, 1996). In December 2007, on the eve of the infamous Bucharest summit that settled that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO,” less than 20 percent of Ukrainian citizens supported joining NATO. The majority of Ukrainians were split between support for a military alliance with Russia or retaining the non-bloc neutral status.
NATO membership remained a cause of only a small minority within Ukrainian society until the tumultuous events of 2014. As a result of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbas, support for NATO membership jumped up to about 40 percent. However, it was still not embraced by a majority of Ukrainians.
Two things contributed to this shift in public opinion. Some previously skeptical Ukrainians started to see NATO membership as a protection against further hostile actions from Russia. But no less important reason for the hike in support was that the surveys no longer included the most pro-Russian Ukrainian citizens from the territories not under Ukrainian government control — Crimea and Donbas. Millions of Ukrainian citizens have been effectively excluded from the Ukrainian public sphere.
In the rest of Ukraine, support for a military alliance with Russia sharply dropped since 2014. However, most of the former Russia supporters did not turn into supporters of NATO but switched to support for a neutral status, “plague on both of your houses” position. If you think about the seven years of military conflict, which is predominantly (mis)represented as the war with Russia, the reluctance to embrace NATO by a very large part of Ukrainians is amazing.
Before the elections of 2019, the previous Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, pushed for changes to Ukraine’s constitution to put it on a path to join the European Union (EU) and NATO. It did not help to prevent his devastating defeat by Zelensky.
Support for NATO in Ukraine varies by region. A stable, solid pro-NATO majority exists only in the western regions. There is, perhaps, pro-NATO plurality in Central Ukraine. But in the eastern and southern regions, neutrality is more popular than NATO membership, despite the fact that this part of Ukraine would most probably be occupied in case of any real Russian invasion.
A correlation between support for NATO and different visions of Ukrainian national identity makes the issue especially divisive. Many Ukrainians see NATO as a defense from Russia. Many other Ukrainians feel that NATO membership would forfeit more of Ukraine’s sovereignty to the West, which they feel has been happening since 2014, and, at the same time, would increase tensions with Russia, escalate internal tensions among Ukrainians, and drag the nation in one of the U.S.’s “forever” wars, one of which just recently ended in a humiliating defeat.
There is some evidence that the Russian military build-up in spring 2021 could increase support for NATO. It is quite probable that NATO supporters would win a potential referendum. However, such projections for the referendum are less valid to assess the preferences for Ukraine’s security strategy among Ukraine’s general population because they squeeze the choice to “yes” or “no” and do not cover millions of Ukrainian citizens in Donbas and Crimea who would not be able to vote at the referendum but have a strong opinion on the issue. Besides, it remains uncertain how Ukraine’s public opinion would react to very clear messages that the U.S. excludes sending troops to fight Russia in case it attacks Ukraine and to any potential compromises in the course of negotiations with Russia.
While criticizing Putin’s demands to decide Ukraine’s membership between the Great Powers, it is important not to fall into a similar fallacy and dubiously impose the desire to join NATO on Ukrainians. Ukrainians are far from unified in support of NATO membership. It is a contentious issue that can only be properly resolved in a political process in which a large part of dissenting Ukrainians are not discarded and stigmatized by default as “traitors” or “stooges” of Russian propaganda for being skeptical about NATO for good reasons.
Way Out and Way Forward
The opposition segment may represent a large minority or sometimes even the majority of Ukrainian citizens, but it has been poorly mobilized and organized in comparison to the nationalist and neoliberal sections of civil society. The latter only expanded its pressure for their unpopular agendas on the weakened Ukrainian state. The radicalizing nationalist policies during Poroshenko’s rule were followed, in 2021, by the sanctions and threats by Zelensky targeting a leader of the popular opposition party, powerful oligarchs and most of the major opposition media. Despite human rights criticism, this did not provoke any significant public reaction from the West, unlike repression of the Russian and Belarusian opposition. Many observers accepted a lazy securitizing explanation that repression of allegedly “pro-Russian” forces is inevitable or even legitimate in the country under the foreign threat. However, further limitations on the political and public representation of a large segment of Ukrainian society does not make Ukraine stronger — only weaker and even more divided.
The Minsk peace accords, which require institutionalizing a special status for the breakaway territories in Donbas, could be an important part of the possible solution for Ukraine. They were signed after a series of defeats of the Ukrainian military in 2014-2015; however, little has been implemented since then. Noteworthy, even some supporters present it as an “unsavory compromise” with “Russia’s terms, imposed using armed aggression.”
However, it is important to understand the Minsk accords as not something that Putin wants, but as a possible way towards a more democratic and pluralistic Ukraine that recognizes and accepts its own political diversity. Simultaneously, the accords are both the ends and the means in this process. The Minsk accords presuppose that the people in Donbas return back as a legitimate part of the Ukrainian nation. Mostly they have very different opinions about the history and recent events, language policies, and international alliances than the nationalist political and civil society who speak on behalf of the Ukrainian society but only poorly represent its diversity. This would require a radical change of the dominant post-Euromaidan discourse in Ukraine’s public sphere and work towards a more inclusive definition of the national identity.
On the other hand, by returning the millions of Ukrainian citizens in Donbas back to Ukraine, the Minsk accords restore some of the lost balance (now institutionally protected) into Ukrainian politics that diverged from the attitudes and expectations of the general population. The Minsk accords simultaneously require and enable a substantive dialogue on Ukraine’s future.
There are risks, of course. There is a strong demand for peace in Ukrainian society, but specific clauses of the special status for Donbas (such as amnesty for combatants or institutionalizing separatist armed units as “people’s militia”) are not popular. However, lack of majority support has never been the main reason for the Ukrainian government to evade implementing the Minsk accords, as it has never been an obstacle to the campaign for NATO membership and even less popular nationalist and neoliberal policies. Importantly, despite that the Minsk accords were an outcome of the military defeats, most Ukrainians supported them right after their signing in 2015. If many Ukrainians are disappointed now, it is primarily because of the little progress and ineffectiveness in bringing peace to Ukraine, not because the accords are fundamentally unacceptable.
More important was the explicit threat of violence articulated by the nationalist civil society leading the so-called “anti-capitulation” protests. They were rather small and only 26 percent of Ukrainians expressed support for the protests, while 41 percent were clearly against them. Nevertheless, they stalled further progress in implementing the Minsk accords after initial successes that followed Zelensky’s landslide victory in the 2019 election.
At stake, however, is not the “capitulation” of Ukraine, but of a very specific nation-building project for Ukraine, where Russia plays the role of the main “Other,” against which the adepts of the project articulate their national identity. The problem with this project is that the attempted assimilation of Ukraine’s internal cultural and political diversity (to repeat the problematic path of how the modern Western nations were constructed since the 19th century) is incompatible with how many people see democracy today. Arguably, it is as incompatible as replay of the Great Power politics from the “golden age” of imperialism. However, this nation-building project is also hardly even feasible under the present conditions because it will not be supported by the parallel modernization processes. One cannot repeat the “turning peasants into Frenchmen” process nowadays because the Communist Party completed this task for Ukraine decades ago. It is no surprise that the fundamentally anti-Communist project of Ukrainian civil society has continuously failed to unify the nation, despite three revolutions in the life of one generation and supposedly mobilizing threat from abroad. So far, the attempts to push forward this nation-building project did not solve but rather intensified the deep post-Soviet crisis of political representation.
A different, pluralistic Ukraine developing in a more synthetic and dialogical way as a sovereign bridge between Europe and Russia is certainly possible. To get there, recognizing Ukraine’s political diversity and establishing conditions for institutionally protected national dialogue among Ukrainians with opposing views are vital. Whether it is really needed by anyone except Ukrainians is a different question.
