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Category: Russia

  • Russian court orders closure of country’s oldest human rights group

    Supreme court ruling on Memorial is watershed moment in Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on independent thought

    Russia’s supreme court has ordered the closure of Memorial International, the country’s oldest human rights group, in a watershed moment in Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on independent thought.

    The court ruled Memorial must be closed under Russia’s controversial “foreign agent” legislation, which has targeted dozens of NGOs and media outlets seen as critical of the government.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Those Nasty Russians

    The New York Times reported this week that Russia is preparing its public for potential war with the United States.

    Moscow is “promoting patriotism” by training high school students in history and military history, according to the Times, and that Russian media outlets are saying that the country considers itself to be “surrounded by enemies” and may be forced to defend itself “as it did against the Nazis.”

    The post Those Nasty Russians appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The West Might Deliberately Start A War In Ukraine: Lavrov Says

    On Monday, Russia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov denounced that the West might provoke a war in Ukraine to blame Russia and impose economic sanctions on it.

    “I do not rule out that there is such a desire to fuel militaristic sentiments [in Ukraine] to stage a ‘small war’ and then accuse us and impose new sanctions to suppress our competitive advantages,” Lavrov said.

    The post The West Might Deliberately Start A War In Ukraine: Lavrov Says appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • 2022 — Year Of Major Power Conflict Over Ukraine

    Russia says Europe must think about the real prospect of turning their continent into a field of military confrontation like that which existed at the height of the Cold War, writes Scott Ritter. The United States, wrapped in its self-made cloak of so-called “American exceptionalism”, is loath to undertake any action that can be construed as weakening its geopolitical posture or strengthening that of an adversary, actual or potential.

    The post 2022 — Year Of Major Power Conflict Over Ukraine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Failure of US media on Ukraine

    We need to constantly remind ourselves about the US media. During the Cold War, there was the saying that the difference between the New York Times and the Soviet Pravda was that Pravda readers knew they were being lied to. Unfortunately, current coverage by the US media about the movement of Russian troops demonstrates the applicability of that saying today.

    Lies by Omission

    For example, the US public is continually being told that the movement of a large number of Russian troops is a major crisis-inducing provocation of the US and NATO over Ukraine. There is much speculation about whether or not Russia will attack Ukraine and how the US and NATO should react to an attack. This coverage portrays Russia as the initiator of this situation and that the US and NATO  are being forced to react. Unsurprisingly, the US media fails to remind the public about recent history that provides vital context for current events.

    Promise and Betrayal

    After the fall of the Berlin Wall there were negotiations about the reunification of Germany. During these negotiations, the US Secretary of State James Baker and West German officials promised that NATO would not expand eastward if the Soviets allowed Germany to be reunited. This promise was crucial for the Soviets given previous devastating invasions by Western European nations. For example, during WWII, estimates are that the Soviet Union lost over 26 million people, about 13% of its 1939 population. The Soviet Union was thus understandably concerned about a possibly hostile military group coming closer to its border.

    In 1996, George Kennan, architect of the U.S. containment policy towards the Soviet Union, warned that NATO’s expansion into former Soviet territories would be a “strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.” In 1998, Thomas Friedman solicited Kennan’s reaction to the Senate’s ratification of NATO’s eastward expansion. Kennan said: ”I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.”

    Despite Kennan’s warning, the Clinton administration broke the US promise and expanded NATO towards the Russian border. The following Bush and Obama administrations both continued the expansion and betrayal. Kennan was clearly correct and the NATO expansion has provoked an unnecessary crisis.

    Cuba and Ukraine

    Russia has strongly opposed further expansion of NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, nations that share borders with it. NATO missiles could quickly reach Moscow allowing little time for Russia to react. However, the US and NATO, blinded by arrogance and lacking any real statesmen, continue to dismiss Russia’s existential concerns.

    Just as the US went to the brink of nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba, Russian President Putin has drawn a red line over the entry of Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. Just as the US said that Cuba couldn’t have Soviet missiles positioned there, Russia is saying that Ukraine and Georgia can’t join NATO nor have US missiles positioned there.

    US-supported coup and illegitimate government

    The Western media has also downplayed the 2014 US-supported coup of the democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. The US wanted a leader of Ukraine to be someone who would want to join NATO. A mostly nonviolent protest of Ukrainians who wanted to join the EU began after Yanukovych rejected a bad EU economic aid offer in favor of a much better deal from Russia.

    Eventually, after a violent government response to months of protests, a compromise between the government and the political opposition was negotiated by foreign ministers from Poland, France and Germany. Despite this agreement, violence and intimidation by the far-right immediately resumed and quickly led to Yanukovych’s departure. George Friedman, CEO of Stratfor, a U.S. firm known as the ‘Shadow CIA’, said: “It really was the most blatant coup in history.”

    Kosovo and Crimea

    After the coup and the installation of an illegitimate government, Russia annexed Crimea and supported people in eastern Ukraine who rejected the Ukrainian government. The US-led West reacted quite strongly, particularly against the annexation of Crimea. However, Russia pointed out how the West supported the secession of Kosovo from Serbia.

    According to Matthew Parish, a noted international lawyer based in Geneva, if nations cannot reach agreement on the right of minorities to secede and the emergence of new states, “then the difference between Kosovo and Crimea is precisely nothing, save one of political expediency; and the colour of that lens depends upon which direction one may be looking through it. Viewed from the west, Kosovo is most expedient whereas Crimea is not. When one gazes through the eastern corner of the same lens, reflections may be reversed.”

    Russian troop deployment and US-led NATO war games

    US and Western stenographers posing as an independent media portrayed the positioning of a large number of Russian forces on its border with Ukraine as a huge provocation. It is unsurprising that these stenographers didn’t hype the numerous and large US/NATO war games in the Baltic and Black Sea areas as a provocation to Russia. Can you imagine the US reaction if a hostile military force were to hold war games near US borders?

    Minsk II Protocol

    An agreement was reached in February 2015 by the leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine that could resolve the crisis. The Minsk II Protocol was approved unanimously by the UN Security Council. Samantha Power, then US ambassador to the UN, said: “The consensus here, and in the international community, remains that Minsk’s implementation is the only way out of this deadly conflict.”

    Instead of conducting war games and sending weapons to Ukraine, why not apply pressure on Ukraine to implement this agreement. Given what Samantha Power said, this seems to be the best way to avoid a war where there are no winners.

    The post Failure of US media on Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • What Russia Says About Its Not-An-Ultimatum Demands To The U.S. And NATO

    Russia has detailed its security demands to the U.S. and NATO in form of two draft treaties. Andrei Martyanov also explains the timing. Russia is technologically and militarily in a strong position and currently can survive a break with the ‘western’ world without too much trouble. The U.S. is in disarray and NATO not ready to fight. It is simply the right moment.

    The post What Russia Says About Its Not-An-Ultimatum Demands To The U.S. And NATO appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Chomsky: Outdated US Cold War Policy Worsens Ongoing Russia-Ukraine Conflict

    Ukrainian soldiers walk along the front lines with Russia-backed separatists, not far from town of Avdiivka in the Donetsk region of Ukraine on December 11, 2021.

    The tension on the Russia-Ukraine border represents an ongoing conflict between two nations with many cultural affinities, but is also part of a much larger rivalry between the U.S. and Europe on one side, and Russia on the other. As Noam Chomsky reminds us in the exclusive interview for Truthout that follows, in 2014, a Russia-supported government in Ukraine was forcefully removed from power by a coup supported by the U.S. and replaced by a U.S. and European-backed government. It was a development that brought closer to war the two main antagonists of the Cold War era, as Moscow regards both U.S. and European involvement in Ukraine and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) continued eastward expansion as part of a well-orchestrated strategy to encircle Russia. The strategy of encirclement is indeed as old as NATO itself, and this is the reason why Russian President Vladimir Putin issued recently a list of demands to the U.S. and NATO with regard to their actions in Ukraine and even parts of the former Soviet space. In the meantime, senior-level Russian officials have gone even further by warning of military response if NATO continues to ignore Moscow’s security concerns.

    As Chomsky notes below, the Russia-Ukraine conflict is a solvable problem, but one wonders if the U.S. will remain dedicated to a “zombie policy” that could produce potentially awful consequences in the event of a diplomatic failure.

    Noam Chomsky is internationally recognized as one of the most important intellectuals alive. His intellectual stature has been compared to that of Galileo, Newton and Descartes as his work has had tremendous influence on a variety of areas of scholarly and scientific inquiry, including linguistics, logic and mathematics, computer science, psychology, media studies, philosophy, politics and international affairs. He is the author of some 150 books and recipient of scores of highly prestigious awards, including the Sydney Peace Prize and the Kyoto Prize (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), and of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from the world’s most renowned universities. Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and currently Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona.

    C.J. Polychroniou: Following the undoing of the USSR between 1980-1991, people in Ukraine voted overwhelmingly in 1991 to declare independence from the crumbling communist empire. Since then, Ukraine has sought to align closely with the European Union (EU) and NATO, but Moscow has objected to such plans, as it has always considered Ukraine to be part of Russia, and, accordingly, continued to meddle in the country’s internal affairs. In fact, Ukraine became a battleground in 2014 when Putin decided to annex Crimea, which he called the “spiritual source” of the Russian state, and, since then, tensions between the two countries have been very hard to diffuse. In your own view, what’s really behind the conflict between Russia and Ukraine?

    Noam Chomsky: There’s more to add, of course. What happened in 2014, whatever one thinks of it, amounted to a coup with U.S. support that replaced the Russia-oriented government by a Western-oriented one. That led Russia to annex Crimea, mainly to protect its sole warm water port and naval base, and apparently with the agreement of a considerable majority of the Crimean population. There’s extensive scholarship on the complexities, particularly Richard Sakwa’s Frontline Ukraine and more recent work.

    There’s an excellent discussion of the current situation in a recent article in The Nation by Anatol Lieven. Lieven argues realistically that Ukraine is “the most dangerous [immediate] problem in the world,” and “also in principle the most easily solved.” The solution has already been proposed and accepted — in principle: the Minsk II agreement, adopted by France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine in 2015, and endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council. The agreement tacitly presupposes withdrawal of George W. Bush’s invitation to Ukraine to join NATO, reaffirmed by Barack Obama, vetoed by France and Germany, an outcome that no Russian leader is likely to accept. It calls for disarmament of the separatist Russia-oriented region (Donbas) and withdrawal of Russian forces (“volunteers”), and spells out the key elements of settlement, with “three essential and mutually dependent parts: demilitarization; a restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty, including control of the border with Russia; and full autonomy for the Donbas in the context of the decentralization of power in Ukraine as a whole.” Such an outcome, Lieven observes, would not be unlike other federations, including the U.S.

    Minsk II has not been implemented because of disagreements about timing of its various measures. The issue has been “buried” in U.S. political circles and media, Lieven writes, “because of the refusal of Ukrainian governments to implement the solution and the refusal of the United States to put pressure on them to do so.” The U.S., he concludes, has been keeping to “a zombie policy — a dead strategy that is wandering around pretending to be alive and getting in everyone’s way, because U.S. policy-makers have not been able to bring themselves to bury it.”

    The imminent dangers make it imperative to bury the policy and adopt a sound one.

    To overcome the impasse will not be easy, but as Lieven observes, the only alternatives are too horrendous to consider. The essentials are understood: Austrian-style neutrality for Ukraine, which means no military alliances or foreign military bases, and an internal resolution in the general terms of Minsk II.

    “The most dangerous problem in the world” can therefore be solved with a modicum of rationality.

    The broader context reaches back to the collapse of the Soviet Union 30 years ago. There were three contrasting visions of the global order that should be established in the wake of its collapse. All accepted that Germany would be unified and would join NATO — a remarkable concession by Russia, considering that Germany alone, not part of a hostile military alliance, had virtually destroyed Russia twice in the past century, a third time joining with the West (including the U.S.), in the “intervention” immediately after the Bolsheviks took power.

    One proposal was Mikhail Gorbachev’s: a Eurasian security system from the Atlantic to Vladivostok, with no military blocs. The U.S. never considered that as an option. A second proposal was offered by George H.W. Bush and his Secretary of State James Baker, endorsed by West Germany: NATO would not move “one inch to the East,” meaning East Berlin; nothing beyond was contemplated, at least publicly. The third was Bill Clinton’s: NATO would move all the way to the Russian border, carry out military maneuvers in the states adjoining Russia, and place weapons on the Russian border that the U.S. would certainly regard as offensive weapons in the (inconceivable) event that it would even tolerate anything remotely comparable anywhere in its vicinity. It was the Clinton Doctrine that was implemented.

    The asymmetry is far more deeply rooted. It is a core component of the “rule-based international order” that the U.S. advocates (while by coincidence, setting the rules), replacing the supposedly archaic UN-based international order that bans “the threat or use of force” in international affairs. The latter condition is unacceptable to rogue states that demand the right to employ the threat of force constantly, and to resort to force at will. An important topic that we have discussed before.

    One crucial illustration of the rule-based asymmetry that should be familiar is President Kennedy’s response to Nikita Khrushchev’s sending of nuclear missiles to Cuba — in reaction to the threat of invasion as the culmination of JFK’s terrorist war against Cuba, and to his huge arms buildup in response to Khrushchev’s offer for mutual reduction of offensive weapons even though the U.S. was far in the lead. The critical issue that almost led to devastating war was the status of U.S. nuclear-armed missiles aimed at Russia in Turkey. As the crisis moved ominously close to war, the key issue was whether the missiles should be publicly withdrawn (as Khrushchev requested) or only secretly (as Kennedy demanded). In fact, the U.S. had already ordered them withdrawn to be replaced by far more menacing Polaris submarines, so there was no withdrawal at all, only escalation.

    The crucial asymmetry is presupposed, an inviolable principle of world order, established more extensively as the Clinton’s NATO Doctrine was imposed.

    It should be recalled that this was only one component of a more expansive Clinton Doctrine, which accords the U.S. the right to use military force “unilaterally when necessary” to defend vital interests such as “ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources.” No one else can claim such a right.

    There is extensive scholarly debate about the status of the Bush-Baker proposal. The agreement was only verbal, as argued in justification when Washington instantly violated it, moving troops to East Berlin. But the basic facts are not seriously in doubt.

    NATO was founded in response to the alleged threat posed to Western democracies by the Soviet Union. Yet, NATO not only did not disappear after the end of the Cold War, but continued its expansion eastwards and, as a matter of fact, regards Ukraine today as a potential member. What is the relevance of NATO today, and to what extent is it responsible for escalating tensions on Russia’s borders and for potentially ushering in a new Cold War?

    The expansion to the East, including regular military maneuvers and threatening weapons systems, is clearly a factor in escalating tensions, the offer to Ukraine to join NATO even more so, as just discussed.

    In thinking about the acutely dangerous current situation, it’s useful to bear in mind the founding of NATO and the “alleged threat.” There’s a good deal to say about that topic, specifically about how the Russian threat was actually perceived by planners. Inquiry shows that it was quite different from the fevered rhetoric employed “to scare the hell out of the country” in a manner “clearer than truth” (Sen. Arthur Vandenberg and Dean Acheson, respectively).

    It is well-known that the influential planner George Kennan considered the Russian threat to be political and ideological, not military. He was, in fact, sent out to pasture early on for failure to join in the largely manufactured panic. Still, it’s always instructive to see how the world is perceived at the dovish extreme.

    As head of the State Department planning staff, Kennan was so concerned about the threat from postwar Russia in 1946 that he felt that partition of Germany might be necessary in violation of wartime agreements. The reason was the need to “rescue Western zones of Germany by walling them off against Eastern penetration,” not, of course, by military force, but by “political penetration,” where the Russians had the advantage. In 1948, Kennan advised that, “The problem of Indonesia [is] the most crucial issue of the moment in our struggle with the Kremlin,” even though the Kremlin was nowhere in sight. The reason was that if Indonesia falls under “Communism” it could be an “infection [that] would sweep westward” through all of South Asia, even endangering U.S. control of the Middle East.

    The internal record is littered with similar illustrations of oblique, sometimes quite explicit, recognition of reality. In general, “The Kremlin” became a metaphor for anything that might fall out of U.S. control — until 1949, when the “Sino-Soviet conspiracy” could sometimes fill the bill.

    Russia was indeed a threat, within its Eastern European domains, just as many around the world can attest to threats of the U.S. and its Western allies. There should be no need to sample that awful history. NATO had little role in it.

    With the collapse of the USSR, the official justification for NATO was gone, and something new had to be devised. More generally, some new pretext had to be devised for violence and subversion. One device, quickly seized upon, was “humanitarian intervention.” This was soon framed within the doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P). Two versions were formulated. The official version was adopted by the UN in 2005. It keeps to the strictures of the UN Charter banning the threat or use of force in international affairs apart from conditions irrelevant to R2P, proceeding beyond only in calling on states to observe humanitarian law.

    That’s the official version of R2P. A second version was formulated by the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty on Responsibility to Protect (2001), produced under the initiative of former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans. It departs from the official version in one crucial respect: a situation in which “the Security Council rejects a proposal or fails to deal with it in a reasonable time.” In that case, the Report authorizes “action within area of jurisdiction by regional or sub-regional organizations under Chapter VIII of the Charter, subject to their seeking subsequent authorization from the Security Council.”

    In practice, the right to intervene is reserved to the powerful — in today’s world, to the NATO powers, which are also unilaterally able to determine their own “area of jurisdiction.” They did in fact do so. NATO unilaterally determined that its “area of jurisdiction” includes the Balkans, then Afghanistan, and well beyond. NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer instructed a NATO meeting in June 2007 that, “NATO troops have to guard pipelines that transport oil and gas that is directed for the West,” and more generally have to protect sea routes used by tankers and other “crucial infrastructure” of the energy system. NATO’s area of jurisdiction is therefore worldwide.

    To be sure, some do not agree; in particular, the traditional victims of the kind tutelage of Europe and its offshoots. Their opinion, as always dismissed, was made explicit in the first meeting of the South Summit of 133 states (April 2000). Its declaration, surely with the recent bombing of Serbia in mind, rejected “the so-called ‘right’ of humanitarian intervention, which has no legal basis in the United Nations Charter or in the general principles of international law.” The wording of the declaration reaffirms earlier UN declarations to the same effect, and is mirrored in the official version of R2P.

    Standard practice since has been to refer to the official UN version as justification for whatever is done but to keep to the Evans Commission version for determination of choice of action.

    There are indications that Russia is building capacity to attack Ukraine, with some military analysts claiming that this could happen in the first couple months of the new year. While it is not likely that NATO would intervene militarily in a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, a Russian invasion of Ukraine would surely bring about a dramatic transformation of the international landscape. What would be the most realistic solution to the Ukraine conflict?

    The indications are real, and ominous. Most serious analysts doubt that Putin would launch an invasion. He would have a great deal to lose — maybe everything if the U.S. reacted with force, as we all might. At best from his perspective, Russia would be engaged in a bitter “endless war” and subjected to very severe sanctions and other harsh measures. I presume that Putin’s intention is to warn the West not to disregard what he takes to be Russian interests, with some justice.

    There is a realistic solution: the one that Anatol Lieven outlined. As he discusses, it is not easy to imagine another one. And none has been proposed.

    Fortunately, this solution is within reach. It is of great importance to keep popular opinion from being inflamed by all-too familiar devices that have led to catastrophe in the past.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Big Threats Are The Ones We Can’t Come Back From: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    NATO expansionism and provocations in Ukraine have caused Russia to issue warnings that it will begin creating counter-threats to those escalations if they are not scaled back, which can easily lead to another Cuban Missile Crisis-like standoff (which we barely survived by sheer dumb luck last time). Nothing about our insane cold war environment suggests western leaders will navigate this situation safely.

    ❖

    Anti-China propaganda is not any more complicated than other western propaganda narratives, but many who’ve seen through other narratives still buy into the anti-China ones. This is likely due to the fact that anti-China propaganda has been going for generations, plus the added factors of racism, anti-communism, and anxiety about what’s going to happen after the inevitable collapse of the US empire.

    ❖

    It’s amazing how many arguments I encounter that boil down to “China is bad. Therefore everything bad I hear about China is probably true.”

    It’s an extremely widespread species of brain worm. “China is bad. Everything bad I hear about China is therefore probably true. Everyone who disputes any of those bad things is therefore wildly biased toward China. Because China is bad, nobody could possibly be biased toward it is unless they’re a paid shill. I’m good at thinking.”

    ❖

    It is true that western media are greatly exaggerating the threat of an unprovoked attack on Taiwan or Ukraine by China or Russia, respectively. But even if they weren’t, going to war with Russia or China over who governs Taiwan or Ukraine would only be supported by crazy morons.

    People often object to this position saying, “So you’re saying we should just let China/Russia invade Taiwan/Ukraine??”

    And the answer is “Yes. Of course we should. What are you a fucking idiot?”

    ❖

    The US is the absolute last government on earth we should want making decisions which threaten the very existence of our species. Its interventions are consistently disastrous, consistently based on lies, consistently fail to accomplish what their proponents claim, and are never based on what’s in the highest interest for everyone.

    ❖

    Hey remember when everyone pretended to believe Jeremy Corbyn was a closet Nazi just to keep the left from gaining a foothold in the UK? And how saying he isn’t a Nazi made you a Nazi? Saying they were cynically pretending to believe he’s a Nazi also made you a Nazi. Everyone was a Nazi except those who pretended to believe Corbyn was a Nazi. That was some wild shit.

    And now they’re all gone. There was a giant Nazi epidemic, couldn’t throw a stone without hitting a Corbyn-loving Nazi, and now they’re all gone.

    Where have all the Nazis gone?

    Image

    ❖

    You simply cannot understand international controversies without understanding the propaganda spin that goes into them and having an acute awareness that your own society participates in those propaganda operations. You just can’t. If you don’t get this, you don’t get anything.

    People get annoyed at me for pointing this out; they try to act like you can discuss this or that story about an empire-targeted nation without addressing the fact that it’s happening in the context of an aggressive western propaganda campaign. And you can’t. Doing so is absurd.

    ❖

    “That western narrative is false.”

    ‘Oh yeah? Prove it!’

    “Here’s a link.”

    ‘Ha! THAT outlet? You can’t cite THAT outlet!’

    “Why not?”

    ‘That outlet always disputes western narratives!’

    “Yeah that’s why I cited it.”

    ‘No. You can only cite outlets that never dispute western narratives.’

    ❖

    It’s such a trip how CIA veterans and Israeli operatives are trying to push the Biden administration into a military confrontation with Iran and the public response has not been for everyone to grab these people and throw them into the ocean.

    ❖

    For many months people have been yelling at me for focusing on world-threatening nuclear brinkmanship instead of Covid authoritarianism. Now the brinkmanship has gotten far more dangerous, and those same people often tell me these cold war escalations are a hoax.

    There’s so much sloppy thinking on this front. People have literally told me that world powers are repositioning their military arsenals as a “distraction” from the Covid issue; not just once but many times. And they’ll cite the US, China and Russia having some degree of overlap in their Covid policies as proof that they’re all acting under a one-world government and therefore on the same side.

    To my mind the rising risk of nuclear war in the next few years is the single most urgent threat in the world, and each escalation makes it more likely. I am glad that I have not been successfully cajoled into dismissing this primary threat by sloppy thinkers with bad media consumption habits.

    ❖

    The only ultimate threats to humanity are those we can’t fix later on. Nuclear annihilation. Environmental collapse. Dystopia where total information control and automated weaponry make revolution impossible. On anything else we can always course correct after realizing our mistake. We’re only really locked in if we make a mistake that we can’t come back from.

    ________________________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Human Rights Watch advises new German Government

    A man wearing a suit raises his right hand
    Germany’s new Chancellor Olaf Scholz (left) and Baerbel Bas, President of the Bundestag, during the swearing-in of the new Federal Government in Berlin, December 8, 2021.  © 2021 Florian Gaertner/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

    On 10 December 2021, David Fischer, HRW’s Media Coordinator, Germany published “A Human Rights Roadmap for Germany’s New Government“

    …The climate crisis threatens catastrophic impacts on human rights, and ambitious climate action by the government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is critical if Germany – the European Union’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter – is to help prevent the worst of those impacts.  The new government’s coalition agreement, a non-binding roadmap for legislative action, calls for elimination of coal energy “ideally” by 2030, promises a roll-back of subsidies for fossil fuels and legislation to deal with climate change adaptation planning. These are positive steps but insufficient to reach Germany’s contribution toward the global goal in the Paris Agreement of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

    In addition to the climate crisis, the new coalition between the Social Democrat Party (SPD), the Free Democrats (FDP) and the Greens (Die Grünen) will have to tackle challenges to the rule of law within the EU, stand up for human rights against autocrats in China and Russia, and address the many challenges arising from the pandemic.

    The coalition agreement makes promising commitments to advance the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, including to change the law on legal gender recognition for transgender people so that it is based on self-determination. The coalition also commits to protecting human rights in supply chains in line with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights that include the right to a remedy for victims. It proposes to increase the capacity of German courts to prosecute universal jurisdiction cases such as the trial on state-sponsored torture in Syria.

    Within Europe, the new government intends to push for judgements of the European Court of Human Rights to have greater impact and “be implemented in all member states”. It supports the use of mechanisms and sanctions to enforce the rule of law in European Union member states. It also calls for shared responsibility for migrants and refugees among member states, an end to pushbacks at EU borders and for the border agency Frontex to respect human rights.

    Scholz’s new government will now need to live up to expectations on human rights and prove that what the coalition dubbed “Germany’s responsibility for Europe and the World” is expressed in actions and not just words.

    https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/12/08/human-rights-roadmap-germanys-new-government

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

  • The Self-determination Struggle in Russian Crimea and the Pro-autonomy Struggle in Donbas (formerly eastern Ukraine)

    Potential hotspots between Russia and Ukraine, 2021. Panther Media GmbH / Alamy Stock Vector

    Dissident Voice has published an article by U.S. writer William Boardman on December 14 titled ‘Ukraine is a problem only as long as the West makes it one’. The article is reprinted from Reader Supported News and warns of the dangerous consequences emanating from the military threats by the Western powers against Russia. The U.S. and Russia are the world’s two leading nuclear powers, Boardman reminds. He asks rhetorically in his article, “What could possibly go wrong?”

    The danger is even more acute, Boardman warns, because of “the U.S.-led nuclear arms race”. Recall that the imperialist nuclear powers have refused to heed the call to abolish their nuclear weapons or even to swear off a ‘first strike’ policy.

    Western governments and media are currently spouting a tidal wave of lies and misinformation about the situation in eastern Ukraine, warning of an imminent ‘Russian invasion’ of the country. They are doing more than talking; they are also boosting their supplying of arms and provision of military training to the Ukrainian armed forces and its associated, extreme-right paramilitary battalions.

    As a result, it is more important than ever for antiwar activists and alternative media to provide reliable and factual information that can counter the government and media barrage emanating from Western capitals. This article aims to further explain the important points made by the article in Dissident Voice and add some clarifications of the recent history of Ukraine.

    The Minsk-2 peace agreement remains foundational

    Boardman’s article states an essential truth for understanding the anti-Russia propaganda barrage: “The essence of a solution for Ukraine issues has already been outlined in the so-called ‘Minsk II’ agreement of 2015, reached by leaders of France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine.”

    The nine-point, Minsk II agreement reached in February 2015, and unanimously endorsed several days later by the UN Security Council, contains the essential provisions for ending the NATO-encouraged, low-intensity war by the Ukrainian government and its armed forces against the autonomous republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. It proposes measures of political autonomy for the two autonomous republics as well as other measures to normalize the situation along a Ukraine-Russia border. But as Boardman writes, “Despite their formal assent to Minsk II, three U.S. administrations [since 2015] have supported Ukraine in refusing to implement the agreement. Nor have they proposed any better idea. This is an example of foreign policy guided by denial of reality.”

    The measures in Minsk-2 are essential for a settlement of the conflict in Donbas, the historic, heavily industrialized region lying between Ukraine and Russia. The region comprises the former Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. The population is majority Russian speaking but includes a significant minority of residents who consider themselves Ukrainian.

    The importance of keeping Minsk II in the picture is underlined by three recent commentaries on NATO’s anti-Russia aggression, which are all very informative but which neglect to mention Minsk II. They are: Russell Bentley in Covert Action Magazine on Nov 12; Katrina vanden Heuvel in The Nation on December 8 and Nicolai Petro (U. of Rhode Island) in The Nation on December 10.

    Restating some facts about Donbas and Russian Crimea

    Boardman writes near the outset of his essay, “Eastern Ukraine, the Donbas, has been a war zone since March 2014 when separatist Ukrainian forces in Donetsk and Luhansk started fighting for independence from the central government in Kiev. This is a civil war between the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk against the Ukraine government.” There are inaccuracies here that merit clarification.

    The people of Donbas and their self-defense forces are not ‘separatists’. They never were. Their struggle began as a resistance struggle against the new, right-wing government in Kyiv that emerged from the violent, extreme-right coup there in February 2014. Their struggle quickly transformed into military resistance against extreme-right and neo-Nazi paramilitaries from Ukraine who commenced violent incursions into Donbas in late April 2014. The Donbas resistance and struggle quickly became a fight for political autonomy, and this was codified in the Minsk II agreement (text here).

    Only a properly conducted referendum in Donbas could determine whether a majority there today would support outright secession from Ukraine and joining the Russia Federation, as occurred in Crimea in March 2014. With all the violence and killings that Donbas has suffered at the hands of Ukrainian forces, it would hardly be surprising if secession were to win a majority in a referendum vote. But that remains speculation. Disappointingly for many in Donbas, Russia is in a poor position to defy the NATO countries and support the holding of a referendum in Donbas. For NATO, a referendum is the last thing it would wish to see.

    The armed resistance to Kyiv and its extreme-right paramilitary battalions began in late April 2014, not in March as Boardman writes. This was two months after the coup in Ukraine and more than a month after the March 16 referendum in Crimea. A majority of Crimea’s population voted to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. The reasons for the nearly two-month delay between mass, anti-coup resistance in Crimea and that which erupted in Donbas tell us a great deal about the modern history of Ukraine.

    The self-determination struggle in Crimea

    Crimea was an autonomous republic of Ukraine, the only part of Ukraine with such a status. Its constitutional powers resembled something similar to those of U.S. states or Canadian provinces. Otherwise, Ukraine is a highly centralized state with all power sitting in Kyiv. Indeed, Ukrainian was the only official language in Ukraine. One of the first acts of the new Crimean government following the 2014 referendum was to legislate three official languages—Russian, Ukrainian and Tatar.

    The struggle for Crimean autonomy dates back, through various iterations, to the self-determination policies of the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was founded in 1921. It became a constituent of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union) upon the founding of the USSR in 1922. Crimea’s political status was obliterated by the catastrophic invasion by Nazi Germany in 1941. It was the scene of some of the bloodiest battles of World War Two; the Nazi occupation was finally defeated in 1944.

    In 1954, Crimea was attached to Soviet Ukraine by a decision of the central government of the Soviet Union. This was done without the slightest consultation with the population and it never sat well with the population and its elected leaders. Some autonomous status was retained, but very limited. Many Crimeans consider that they didn’t ‘join’ but ‘rejoin’ Russia in 2014 since they had no say in the original decision by the Soviet Union in 1954 to remove the peninsula from the Soviet Russian republic and attach it to Soviet Ukraine.

    The survival of Crimean autonomy was such that the people there had an elected and constitutional governing authority to turn to when their world turned upside down with the February 2014 coup in Kyiv. When the new leaders in Kyiv, including from neo-Nazi paramilitaries, began to threaten Crimea with military intervention if it did not acquiesce to the coup, the leaders of the republic did not shrink from their duty to protect the population. They called on Russia to protect them from a looming bloodbath, and they proceeded with a referendum vote in less than a month following the coup. The vote passed by a sizable majority.

    No such autonomous political power, bequeathed by history, existed in Donbas in 2014. The people there had to build representative political institutions more or less from scratch. Thanks to heroic efforts by self-defense fighters, the Ukrainian assaults in 2014/early 2015 were slowed and eventually pushed back. But the assault never ended, despite Minsk II. Ukrainian forces have maintained their occupation of the western areas of Donetsk and Lugansk and have waged deadly and continual sniper shootings and artillery shelling of autonomous areas.

    Why were the people of Donbas so vulnerable at the outset? The answer to that question is beyond the scope of this article, but should be of great interest to anyone interested in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union. Due largely to the intense military intervention and economic blockade by the Western powers against the early Soviet Union, the new country evolved over time into a form of authoritarian socialism. Its early, exemplary policies of self-determination and autonomy for national minorities were eroded and reversed during the rule of Joseph Stalin. The Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) was abolished in 1945.

    The people of Crimea chastened under Soviet Ukrainian rule, which began in 1954. It was one of the poorest regions of Ukraine but the population had few political means to change their status. That all changed with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s. Crimeans resisted the dismantlement of the Soviet Union, which set in motion a regression back to capitalism. The dismantlement prompted a resurgence of self-determination struggle. Crimeans voted in a January 1991 referendum to restore the ASSR. Several months later, they voted strongly in favour of a Soviet Union-wide referendum to retain the Soviet Union (albeit with important reforms to its political structure). Included in that mix during the 1990s were strong demands in Crimea for affiliation to Russia or outright independence.

    Russia and Crimea

    Russia did not “take advantage” of the chaotic, post-coup situation in 2014 and “walk into Crimea unopposed and annex it,” as Boardman writes. The referendum vote of March 16, 2014 was organized by an elected and constitutional authority, the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. A strong majority of Crimeans voted in favour of joining the Russian Federation. The legitimacy of it all—legally and morally–is confirmed not only by events at the time but also by subsequent opinion polling of the population. In the months and years following, polling has consistently shown strong support, higher, even, than the original vote, for the 2014 decision, including among the minority populations of Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians. (One of those polls, by a German firm in 2015, was partly financed by the Canadian government.)

    It is true that Russia dispatched police and soldiers to aid the Crimean government with its referendum and to provide safety and protection from the rightist paramilitaries in Ukraine threatening to invade. But they did not ‘walk into’ the peninsula. Russia had approximately 20,000 soldiers already stationed in and around its naval base at the Crimean port city of Sevastopol, under the terms of a treaty between Ukraine and Russia negotiated amidst the breakup of the Soviet Union.

    As I wrote in in 2017:

    With violent intervention against Crimea imminently threatened, yes, Russia moved quickly and decisively to facilitate the Crimea referendum. This was not an ‘annexation’. It was an emergency situation in which the people and elected representatives of Crimea were demanding protection from the threats by the neo-Nazis in Ukraine and also demanding a referendum on their future political/economic status. They would not take ‘no’ for an answer from the Russian government on a referendum. As well, there was strong pressure on the Russian government from its own population to defend the Crimean people and facilitate a referendum. The agreement between the European Union and Russia on February 19 (2014) to advance the date for the next presidential election in Ukraine, scheduled for 2015, was quickly sabotaged. Given who was now in power in Kyiv as a result of the coup, Russia had no reason whatsoever to believe that a compromise was possible allowing for a safe and meaningful future for Crimea in Ukraine. (United Nations ‘human rights’ ideologues issue report condemning Crimea, Sep 25, 2017.)

    Never mentioned in corporate and state media reports in the West are the outrageous measures by Ukraine immediately following the referendum. Most of Crimea’s water and electricity supply came from Ukraine along the narrow isthmus connecting the two territories. This was severed by Ukraine. Likewise for all road, rail and aircraft connections. These were serious human rights violations but the Western ‘democracies’ looked aside and censoring Western media has gone along for the ride.

    (For an overview of Crimean history, see the excellent The Crimea Question Identity, Transition, and Conflict, by Gwendolyn Sasse, Harvard U. Press, 2005, paperback edition in 2014, 384 p.)

    Impoverishment in Ukraine under the EU economic association agreement

    Boardman writes, “In 2013, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych put NATO and European Union membership in play, then reversed course under Russian pressure.” Yes, but the Russian ‘pressure’ was coming in the form of a better economic agreement, compared to what was on offer from the European Union. The proof of the poverty of the EU association agreement is in the results nearly eight years later. During that time, Ukraine has suffered a serious degrading of its political sovereignty at the hands of the EU and NATO as well as a further, desperate impoverishment of the Ukrainian people.

    The most recent measure of Ukraine’s impoverishment is the blow delivered by the coronavirus pandemic. The country has a high rate of Covid-19 infections and the lowest rate of vaccination in Europe. This is but one of many measures of poverty.

    A report by UNICEF in April 2021 details the poverty of families with children in Ukraine. It reports that the rates of ‘absolute poverty’ of families with children in Ukraine in 2019 was 47.3 per cent. For families without children, the rate was 34.3 per cent. The threshold of ‘absolute poverty’ is defined in the report as the minimum requirements necessary to provide for minimum standards of food, cloths, healthcare, and shelter. (See the two charts enclosed immediately below.)

    Absolute poverty rate in Ukraine, by type of households with children (UNICEF, 2021)

    Child absolute poverty rate in Ukraine (UNICEF, 2021)

    Another measure of impoverishment is the high number of Ukrainians seeking to emigrate to central and western Europe for work. Indeed, a compelling reason why many Ukrainians supported the 2013 economic association agreement with the European Union (and supported the coup the EU helped to incite) was that it offered a path to leave the country and work in higher income countries in Europe.

    Exact figures on economic migrants from Ukraine vary. According to Ukraine’s Ministry of Social Policy, 3.2 million Ukrainians work permanently outside the country. (All figures here do not include the populations of Donbas and Crimea.) Between 2014 and 2019, 3,446,793 Ukrainians received first-time residence permits in the EU. Poland remains the top destination for Ukrainian labour migrants to the EU. During the period 2014-2019, Ukraine received US$67.914 billion in remittances, with this source of income accounting, on average, for 9.5% of annual GDP, exceeding ten per cent for the three years 2016-2018. (source: Report by Prague Process, Mar 15, 2021)

    Politico put the number of economic migrants at four million in a report on May 31, 2020. That report also said, “According to the World Bank, 2019 remittances were the highest in Europe at nearly $16 billion–ten percent of Ukrainian GDP.” Open Democracy said in a June 2020 article there are five million Ukrainians working abroad.

    Then there are the privatizations of state-owned enterprises that are continuing. In a brief report published by the pro-NATO think-tank Atlantic Council in April 2021, Dmytro Sennychenko, head of the State Property Fund of Ukraine, explained that his government forecasts 2021 budget revenues from privatizations amounting to more than USD 430 million. Of that, USD 320 million will come from large-scale privatizations, meaning the industrial giants inherited from Soviet Ukraine. An additional USD 110 million will come from the sale of smaller, private enterprises. Sennychenko writes that the forecast is “entirely realistic” because the Ukrainian government oversaw similar amounts of privatizations in 2020.

    Why the U.S. and NATO act as they do

    Boardman opens his article with, “Since the fall of the Soviet Union thirty years ago, US policy on Ukraine has been an ugly mix of inconsistency, quiet aggression, fear-mongering and stupidity.” He writes in his conclusion, “Ukraine is a wholly American-made pseudo crisis in which the US national interest is close to zero.” He adds, “President Biden has the opportunity to re-direct US policy on Ukraine in a peaceful direction… But it will take serious, steadfast courage… And we don’t know if he has the strength to wage peace.” Many readers of these words will no doubt be unconvinced by the image of a bumbling U.S. and NATO.

    The U.S. and its allies are waging a multi-front economic war with military threats against Russia and also against China, Venezuela, Cuba and others. The exact pretexts vary from one targeted country to the next. But the overall reasons are evident. The capitalist and imperialist system and the countries that police it worldwide are in decline. Their criminal negligence has brought the world to the brink of disaster due to global warming and now a coronavirus pandemic. Their economic order is highly unstable and will not tolerate rivals or even friendly competitors outside the tight club of imperialist countries (North America, Europe, Japan and Australasia) whose membership is largely unchanged since 1945. They have shown time and again that their ultimate option in dealing with rivals is violence—be it starvation by sanctions or bombing from the air.

    The big capitalists are driven to act violently by the all-powerful economic laws of growth and expansion of their system. These same laws are driving the global warming emergency.

    This is the scourge which the world must join together to challenge and overcome. Those who foment militarism and environmental destruction must be unseated and replaced by governments dedicated to building a new world based on social justice and environmental stewardship. The building of broad, anti-imperialist alliances to oppose militarism and economic blockades is a key step towards humanity’s survival and progress.

    *****

    Recommended, related readings:1

    1. “Russia’s ‘plan to invade Ukraine’ exists only in the U.S. and NATO imagination,” commentary by Scott Ritter, RT, Dec 5, 2021.

      “Who is fighting who in Ukraine?,” commentary by Glenn Diesen, published in RT, Dec 5, 2021 (Glenn Diesen is a professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and an editor at the journal Russia in Global Affairs.)

      “Is Russia going to invade Ukraine?,” essay and commentary by Paul Robinson (U. of Ottawa), published in RT, Nov 24, 2021.

    The post The Self-determination Struggle in Russian Crimea and the Pro-autonomy Struggle in Donbas (formerly eastern Ukraine) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • True Colors: Red, White, Black And Blue

    With a bold and completely self-sabotaging diplomatic blunder, one which fails on every level including the least rigorous sanity test, this past Wednesday the U.S. was one of two nations to vote against a UN resolution designed to discourage the glorification and promotion of Nazi ideology. The other nation was Ukraine, which currently is overrun and effectively ruled by Jew-hating, Russia-hating, LGBT-hating neo-Nazis, who openly flaunt their allegiance to Stepan Bandera, a collaborator with the Third Reich during WWII.

    The reason the U.S. supports such Jew-hating, Russia-hating thugs is obvious. It’s an effective way to intimidate Russia and initiate a proxy war.

    The post True Colors: Red, White, Black And Blue appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • US Unveils Legal Trigger For War With Russia

    A bill tabled this week in the Senate looks likely to pass into law because of the bilateral consensus of belligerence towards Russia. It is generally accepted as if fact that Russia is threatening to invade Ukraine despite Moscow’s repeated denials and lack of evidence to support such sensationalized speculation.

    Among other provocations, the lawmakers want to more than double the supply of lethal weaponry that the US is about to send Ukraine and to kill off the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Europe.

    The post US Unveils Legal Trigger For War With Russia appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The navy splurged at least £73 MILLION on flagship’s dictator-visiting, arms-selling 2021 trip

    HMS Queen Elizabeth’s 2021 world tour saw the flagship aircraft carrier visit some of the world’s most grotesque dictatorships while showing off British military equipment. It came at a cost of £73m to the taxpayer   – not including one lost fighter jet. The figures emerged from a parliamentary question put to Tory defence minister James Heappey by Labour’s John Healey.

    On 16 December, Healey asked:

    what countries the carrier strike group has had (a) engagements and (b) military exercises to date; and what those engagements and military exercises were.

    Heappey replied:

    The table below sets out the countries and/or overseas territories that the UK Carrier Strike Group has interacted with during the 2021 deployment. This also includes activity undertaken by our Integrated Partners, the Netherlands and United States.

    Bucket list

    The list is a virtual Who’s Who of Western-backed dictatorships, authoritarian regimes, and human rights abusing states. These included countries on the UK’s own human rights priority list. Among them were Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Bangladesh. In the latter case, UK marines trained special forces as part of the carrier group’s trip. Brunei, which recently passed new anti-LGBTQI+ laws, and Turkey all featured.

    The carrier group also stopped off in Haifa to work with the Israeli Navy, despite Israel also featuring on the human rights priority list. Some UK interactions with Gulf autocracies and Iraq were as part of the so-called Dragon Group, a regional and international military alliance.

    Arms deals, strategic alliances

    The itinerary also included Diego Garcia – an Indian Ocean island leased to the US as a strategic base. The native Chagossian Islanders were forcibly expelled by the British from the late 1960s to make way for American forces.

    A visit to Ukraine to sign contracts for new military ships resulted in a controversial incident. Russian planes ‘buzzed’ a British warship as it sailed through contested waters. Handily, UK media teams were on board to record the incident. A leak later revealed the journalist’s presence had largely been orchestrated by the military for propaganda purposes.

    Conservative estimate

    The £73m figure may be conservative. General running costs for the carrier group which would accrue whether or not it was deployed were not tallied. Additionally, the loss of an (estimated $115m) F-35 fighter jet which crashed into the sea in November isn’t included.

    Some in the MOD-adjacent press suggested that £73m seemed like “good value for money when considering the number of countries visited”. However, it’s more difficult to gauge the views of people in places like Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Brunei, or Palestine.

    Featured image – Wikimedia Commons/David Jenkins

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Neocons Bent On Starting Another Disaster In Ukraine

    If anything, Washington’s neoconservatives have an unerring instinct for survival. Having brought about multiple disasters in the two decades since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, from the Iraq war to the twin debacles in Libya and Syria, the neocons seem to have perfected the art of failing up.

    Harvard University’s Stephen Walt once quipped that “Being a Neocon Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry.” And in this regard, the story of the Kagan family is instructive.

    Robert Kagan, a contributing columnist for The Washington Post, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and author of pseudo-histories such as The Jungle Grows Back, has for years been a leading advocate of American militarism.

    The post Neocons Bent On Starting Another Disaster In Ukraine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Russia And Israel – A Double Standard In International Condemnation

    Over the past month, in a break from its usual focus on COVID-19, the Western mainstream media has dedicated a sizeable amount of coverage to unverified claims by unnamed US intelligence officials that the Russian Federation is planning an imminent military invasion of its western neighbour Ukraine – under the rule of the successive US-EU friendly governments of Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky since 2014, when the CIA-orchestrated Euromaidan colour revolution toppled the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych, following his November 2013 decision to suspend an EU trade deal in favour of pursuing closer ties with Moscow.

    The coverage, which comes at a time of increased tensions in Eastern Europe amidst a build-up of refugees on the Belarus-Poland border being labelled as an attempt by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko to destabilise the European Union, has resulted in widespread condemnation of Moscow by the Western media and political establishment…

    The post Russia And Israel – A Double Standard In International Condemnation appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Russian anti-tank shells make debut in Egypt

    Rostec’s Technodinamika holding, which unites Russia’s major ammunition developers and manufacturers, has unveiled for the first time at the EDEX`21 expo in Cairo its cutting-edge high-performance 125 mm tank gun rounds, namely 3VBM23 Svinets-2 and 3VBM17 Mango-M. Both rounds have the armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot (APFSDS) projectiles and are intended to defeat modern upgraded tanks fitted […]

    The post Russian anti-tank shells make debut in Egypt appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Ukraine Is a Problem Only as Long as the West Makes It One

    Ukrainian servicemen take part in a drill of the airborne troops taking place in Zhytomyr region on November 21, 2018. (photo: AFP)

    Since the fall of the Soviet Union thirty years ago, US policy on Ukraine has been an ugly mix of inconsistency, quiet aggression, fear-mongering and stupidity. Now President Biden is recklessly intensifying the same failed tactics while expecting a different outcome and risking a confrontation of the world’s two major nuclear-armed states.

    What could possibly go wrong?

    What passes for conventional wisdom nowadays is expressed by the cover headline of the November 29 issue of The Nation magazine, of all places:

    Ukraine: The Most Dangerous Problem in the World

    That is such hogwash. The Nation knows better. But the fear-mongering leads, even though the magazine’s sub-head is: “But there’s already a solution.” Author Anatol Lieven argues persuasively that the essence of a solution for Ukraine issues have already been outlined in the so-called “Minsk II” agreement of 2015, reached by leaders of France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine. The agreement was endorsed unanimously by the United Nations Security Council. Despite their formal assent to Minsk II, three US administrations have supported Ukraine in refusing to implement the agreement. Nor have they proposed any better idea. This is an example of foreign policy guided by denial of reality.

    Ukraine remains a “dangerous problem” only as long as the US and Ukraine insist on making it one. (It’s hardly “the most dangerous,” given climate change, or US provocation of China, or the US-led nuclear arms race, or the self-gutting of US democracy.)

    With the Soviet Union gone in 1991, US President Bush assured Russian leaders that NATO would not expand to include former Soviet states. Whether this was a lie or a broken promise hardly matters. NATO expanded. Russia was confronted with the prospect of an avowedly hostile military alliance approaching its borders along the same invasion route followed by Napoleon and Hitler. As long as Ukraine remained unaligned, Russian historical memory could rest quietly. Ukraine puts almost 1,000 miles between Russia and NATO member Poland. Ukraine’s population of about 45 million ranges from very pro-western to virtually Russian. The country has long been deeply corrupt with a quasi-functional democracy (an opportunistic playground for the likes of Paul Manafort and Hunter Biden). All in all, from a geopolitical perspective, Ukraine was (and still is) a combustible potential best left undisturbed.

    In 2013, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych put NATO and European Union membership in play, then reversed course under Russian pressure. In November 2013, he cancelled an EU association agreement just days before it was to take effect. With US connivance, pro-western Ukrainian forces launched the Maidan Revolution that lasted into the spring of 2014. Elected president Yanukovich was forced out of office (shades of Iran 1953) and the country entered a period of chaos. Russia took advantage of this to walk into Crimea unopposed and to annex it, as voted by the Crimean parliament, despite objections from the West. These objections have continued to the present, together with economic sanctions and military provocations from the Black Sea.

    The US and NATO have justified their hostile actions by claiming Russia was also about to invade eastern Ukraine, which still hasn’t happened. Eastern Ukraine, the Donbas, has been a war zone since March 2014 when separatist Ukrainian forces in Donetsk and Luhansk started fighting for independence from the central government in Kiev. This is a civil war between the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk against the Ukraine government. The People’s Republics comprise about 6,200 square miles (bigger than Connecticut) with almost 4 million people, mostly Russian-speaking, whose currency is the ruble. Russia has supported the People’s Republics, but short of introducing its own troops. Likewise, the US and NATO have supported Kiev, but short of introducing their own troops into the Donbas. The fighting has been intense in the past, with some 10,000 killed on both sides, but the conflict in recent years has been limited to trench warfare along a 400-mile front, with most casualties coming from sniper fire. Neither side has made significant advances in years.

    In 2014, Russia and Ukraine met under the auspices of the European Union and signed the first Minsk Protocol in an ultimately ineffective effort to reach a ceasefire. The following year, five parties signed a second Minsk Protocol – Ukraine, Ukraine Separatists, Russia, France, and Germany – which led to reduced fighting but no lasting solution. Through all of this, the US under President Obama, played no useful role in resolving the issues or assuring anything like a stable peace.

    The US remains gripped, apparently, by a reflexive Cold War rigidity which requires that Russia be to blame for anything we don’t like, such as the results of the US-sponsored coup in Ukraine in 2014. The new Cold War is manifested by the expansion of NATO, needlessly threatening Russia on the basis of a paranoid Western sense of threat.

    Another manifestation of Cold War thinking is Biden’s choice of Victoria Nuland as his current special ambassador to Russia to discuss Ukraine. Nuland was notoriously involved in efforts to manipulate the 2013 Madan uprising and supporting the coup against Yanukovich. When apprised of European desires to proceed cautiously, Nuland was recorded on cell phone saying, “Fuck the EU.” Such assertions of American exceptionalism continue to make the world a more dangerous place.

    What could Biden do now to make the world a safer place?

    Biden could ease sanctions over Crimea, acknowledging that its return to Russia is a done deal with strong historic and geo-political justifications. Biden could also stop US nuclear-capable bombers from probing Russia in the Black Sea region. It’s hard to see how continuing such provocative flights can have a calming effect.

    Most importantly, Biden could assure Russia (as the US did once before in 1992) that NATO would not expand to include Ukraine. In his recent conversation with Putin, Biden did the opposite, making it all but non-negotiable. That has the obvious effect of continuing the conflict, asserting the right to hold a knife to another’s throat.

    This particular knife was forced into NATO’s hands in April 2008 by the illegitimate President Bush against the will of the majority of NATO members. The issue came up at NATO’s North Atlantic Council meeting in Bucharest. NATO members easily accepted the future membership of Albania and Croatia, but balked at approving Ukraine or Georgia. Instead, in the Bucharest Summit Declaration, members approved a compromise article drafted by the British with intentional imprecision, paragraph 23 of 50, that began:

    NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for

    membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become

    members of NATO….

    The paragraph continues with generalizations about the countries’ contributions to the war in Afghanistan, their promised democratic reforms, and so on. But there is no date for membership, no process for achieving membership (as distinct from Albania and Croatia), and actual approval is only anticipated at some unknown future date. This paragraph in the Bucharest Declaration is essentially a throwaway line, putting off to an indeterminate future the clearly divisive and dangerous issue of relating to Russian border states.

    Elsewhere, the Bucharest Declaration discusses a variety of practical matters with consistent self-confidence and expressions of peaceful cooperation:

    … we stand ready to continue working with Russia as equal partners in areas of common concern…. [paragraph 28]

    We remain committed to substantive political discussions and effective cooperation…. [paragraph 32]

    The Alliance will continue to support, as appropriate, these efforts as guided by regional priorities and based on transparency, complementarity and inclusiveness, in order to develop dialogue and cooperation among the Black Sea states and with the Alliance. [paragraph 36]

    The Bucharest Declaration does not express an alliance seeking confrontation with Russia, for all that George W. Bush wanted it.

    The Bucharest Declaration treats NATO’s war in Afghanistan as a success and expresses the need for possible future military actions against Iran and North Korea (but no mention of China). There is no hint of anyone wondering why something called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization thinks it has any legitimate business operating in landlocked Afghanistan.

    More than a decade later, four American presidents have turned Afghanistan into a world class disaster. America has turned its back on mass starvation there. And still there is no sense of national responsibility or shame as Biden and the US governing elite stumble provocatively toward new looming catastrophes with Iran, China, climate change, public health, and functioning democracy itself.

    Ukraine is a wholly American-made pseudo crisis in which the US national interest is close to zero. The US forced NATO to put Ukraine in play in 2008 by breaking the earlier US pledge not to put Ukraine in play. Now our obtuse leadership poses as acting on principle by refusing to break the pledge that broke the first pledge, even though that is the most obvious, effective de-escalation available: guarantee Russia a border with no more NATO threats and negotiate (as others have done) in good faith to defuse the rest of the Ukrainian mishmash.

    When Secretary of State Anthony Blinken says that “one country trying to tell another what its choices should be, including with whom it associates, that’s not an acceptable proposition,…” what we’re hearing is a US official ignoring reality and denying what the US does every day. And when former US ambassador Michael McFaul tweets: “Putin invented this ‘crisis’ single-handedly. Nothing changed in Ukraine. Nothing changed regarding NATO policy” – he’s just lying.

    Worse, the blind rigidity of the likes of Blinken and McFaul serves to enable the truly mindless warmongers like US Senator Roger Wicker, R-MS, who doesn’t have the sense not to invite nuclear war when he tells Fox News:

    Military action could mean that we stand off with our ships in the Black Sea, and we rain destruction on Russian military capability. It could mean that. It could mean that we participate, and I would not rule that out, I would not rule out American troops on the ground. We don’t rule out first use nuclear action.

    President Biden has the opportunity to re-direct US policy on Ukraine in a peaceful direction,

    But it will take serious, steadfast courage. We don’t know how compromised he is by his previous dealing in Ukraine, or his son’s. We don’t know if he has the clarity of mind to see the obvious. And we don’t know if he has the strength to wage peace.

    The post Ukraine Is a Problem Only as Long as the West Makes It One first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The United States Is Using Nazis In Ukraine To Provoke War With Russia

    If you listen to the corporate media in the United States, you may believe the lies that say Russia is preparing to invade Ukraine. In reality, it is the United States, led by then vice president Joe Biden, that conducted a coup to replace the elected president of Ukraine in 2014 and has been training and arming Nazis to attack the ethnically Russian Donbass Region in eastern Ukraine ever since. There is daily violence against civilians and basic infrastructure. The Biden administration is escalating this aggression and trying to blame Russia with the support of the same corporate media that defended US attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria. To clear the fog on this misinformation campaign, Bruce Gagnon of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space speaks about what is actually happening in Ukraine, the role of the US and the growing risk of war with Russia.

    The post The United States Is Using Nazis In Ukraine To Provoke War With Russia appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Assange Case Is The US Defending Its Right To Lie: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The Assange case is the most powerful government in the world defending its right to lie to you.

    ❖

    Q: What’s the difference between how the US deals with journalists it hates and how Saudi Arabia deals with journalists it hates?

    A: Speed.

    ❖

    The US is currently building a network of long-range missile systems on a chain of islands near China’s coast for the explicit purpose of threatening China. You can tell who is the aggressor in US-China tensions by asking yourself what would happen if this situation was reversed.

    Per Washington’s own logic it would be perfectly reasonable, and indeed responsible, for China to set up military arsenals along both US coastlines to “contain” it and “deter” attacks on Latin American nations, as the US has an extensive history of launching such attacks and will surely try to again. But we all know what the US response to such behavior would be.

    ❖

    It’s a bit annoying living in a world that’s ruled by a dying empire whose increasing desperation to retain control could lead it to initiate a dangerous military confrontation with a major power at any time.

    The rise of China crashing into the Washington doctrine that US unipolar hegemony must be preserved at all cost is an unstoppable-force-meets-immovable-object situation that could very easily end in nuclear armageddon.

    If the preservation of US unipolar hegemony requires continually escalating military brinkmanship against nuclear-armed Russia and China as well as powerful forces like Iran, then the claim that US unipolar hegemony makes the world a more peaceful place is plainly false.

    ❖

    You currently have a much higher chance of dying as a result of a nuclear war instigated by your government or its allies than as a result of someone else refusing to take a Covid vaccine. You hear about the latter threat but not the former because the mass media exist to protect imperialist agendas from scrutiny.

    ❖

    You know you’re getting scammed when your government ends a long and expensive war and then the military budget goes up.

    ❖

    There is no sector of US government policy more significant and consequential than the command of the most powerful military force ever assembled. There is also no sector of US government policy with less oversight, accountability, or press scrutiny.

    ❖

    Besides a brief window after 9/11 the US has never really been able to sell the narrative that governments it wants to ramp up aggressions against are about to attack its easily-defended shores. So instead it does ridiculous things like claiming those governments are about to invade Ukraine and Taiwan.

    The US empire never attacks, it only “defends”. All its aggressions are always about “defending” freedom and democracy, “defending” human rights, “defending” nations that can’t defend themselves, etc. Often it even “defends” preemptively, before the attacker has done anything. Sometimes the attacker is the last to find out that they were planning an attack.

    ❖

    Ever since getting our eviction notice I’ve struggled to be creative because my mind is so focused on the daunting task of finding a nice yet affordable place for my family to live, and it really makes me feel for everyone for whom housing security is a chronic creativity drain. All to pay for the privilege of living on the fucking planet we were fucking born on.

    I mean, think about how much creativity and innovation our species is missing out on because our dopey, primitive societal models force people to spend so much brainpower just figuring out how to stay fed and housed. That brainpower could have gone toward improving our world.

    ❖

    Really I’m just a mother. I’m just a mum who wants a healthy planet and a healthy society for her kids, and I advocate the things I believe will facilitate that. You can add whatever -ists and -isms you want on top of that, but my true ideology is motherhood.

    ❖

    Right now being smart and informed is a detriment to happiness because things are shitty and the more you understand the harder it is to be happy. Once we create a healthy world this will reverse; the more you understand about the world the more uplifted and optimistic you’ll be.

    _________________________

    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. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Biden’s Empty Warning Over Putin’s Straw Man “Invasion”

    © Sputnik / Sergey Guneev

    As we enter the Christmas season that’s just pantomime on Pennsylvania Avenue.

    The private video call which lasted two hours on Tuesday was eagerly anticipated around the world amid mounting tensions and fears of a military confrontation over Ukraine.

    The next day headlines in Western media outlets were laden with dramatic “warnings” reportedly given by Biden to Putin, telling the Russian leader to abandon nefarious plans for a military invasion of Ukraine.

    America’s NPR reported: “In a two-hour-long call with Putin, President Biden warned that the U.S. was prepared to make Moscow pay if an invasion should occur.”

    ABC headlined: “Biden confronts Putin over Ukraine in high stakes meeting”.

    The New York Times billed the big moment thus: “Biden delivers a warning to Putin over Ukraine”. While the US establishment’s favourite think-tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, briefed its readers: “Biden warns Putin of consequences if Russia invades Ukraine”.

    So, just in case you didn’t get the message yet: Biden read the riot act to Putin about invading Ukraine, or so we are led to believe.

    The thing is though it is only an assertion by the Biden administration that Russia is planning to launch an offensive against Ukraine. That assertion has been predictably and dubiously amplified by the Western media as well as by the NATO-backed Kiev regime. The 2014 CIA-installed Neo-fascist regime has been claiming for nearly seven years that Russia is threatening an invasion and that it is standing alone to defend the rest of Europe from being overrun by Russian tanks.

    Over the past month, Moscow has repeatedly dismissed a deluge of Western media claims that Russian troops are building up near Ukraine’s border for an incursion. The U.S. and Ukrainian military intelligence can’t seem to agree on a figure for the alleged buildup. Some reports say 90,000, others say 175,000. In any case, whatever the number, the troops are on Russian soil. Where does the West want them to go? To Russia’s Far East and Vladivostok? Oh no, then Russia will be accused of plotting to invade Alaska?

    Senior U.S. officials like Secretary of State Antony Blinken even admit to their own absurd vacuity, saying, “We don’t know what Putin’s intentions really are.”

    The optics of the Biden-Putin video call say a lot too. Biden was seated in the Situation Room at the White House for the meeting. That conjures an atmosphere of crisis and showdown reminiscent of the 1962 Cuban missile confrontation between Kennedy and Khrushchev.

    For his part, Putin took the call while at his residence in Sochi on the Black Sea where he goes for relaxation.

    It was notable too that Putin was photographed seated at a table on his own to engage with the U.S. president while Biden was accompanied in the Situation Room with four aides, including Antony Blinken, who were obviously present to support or prompt the titular commander-in-chief. The TV monitors appeared to show the two presidents in a face-to-face encounter, but out of the screen view were the four aides to Biden.

    The main conversation was behind closed doors, but from the initial publicly broadcasted greetings, the atmosphere was civil, cordial and relaxed. Biden was not in the slightest reproaching his Russian counterpart, as media reports claimed.

    Following the discussions, U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan told media there was a lot of give and take between the two leaders but there was “no finger-wagging”.

    Sullivan said Biden informed Putin that there would be serious economic consequences if Russia invaded Ukraine – again an invasion that Moscow has repeatedly dismissed as baseless hysteria. Sullivan indicated that the leverage could be exerted through the U.S. and European Union cancelling the Nord Stream 2 gas export pipeline from Russia.

    Sullivan also suggested that Washington would cut off Russia from the U.S.-controlled international banking system known as SWIFT which would impact Russia’s export earnings. Sullivan said another leverage point would be for the U.S. to increase military aid to Ukraine, the Baltic states and other eastern European countries. But it is unlikely that the United States would become directly involved in a confrontation with Russia.

    This all has a certain logical traction but it is divorced from reality. Russia is supposedly warned not to invade Ukraine. Putin is supposedly warned about severe economic consequences if he orders an invasion. Then there is no invasion, and it all looks as if Biden, the noble leader of the free world, bravely faced down the Russian “autocrat”.

    But hold on a moment. That only holds if we believe in the dubious claims that Russia is planning an imminent invasion of Ukraine.

    If there is no invasion that’s because there wasn’t a plan in the first place. It has nothing to do with purported warnings from Biden. It is due simply to the fact that, as Russia has maintained all along, it is not threatening anyone.

    Biden’s threats of “consequences” are therefore empty and directed at a straw man of Western propaganda invention.

    So what did take place? The White House readout of the conversation was brief and bereft of any detail. The Kremlin version of the conversation said that both sides agreed to discuss further Russia’s concerns about national security posed by the U.S.-led NATO military alliance building up on Russia’s borders.

    Sullivan claimed that Biden laid out an “alternative path” for Putin involving diplomacy and peaceful negotiation. “I will say that formal agreements or formal treaties were not on the table in the conversation today,” the national security advisor said. He added: “But the straightforward notion that the United States flanked by our European allies and partners would be prepared to talk to Russia, about the strategic issues in the European theatre — that was on the table.”

    In other words, after the American pretensions are discarded, this is the “alternative path” of diplomacy and negotiation that Russia has been consistently calling for but which the United States, NATO and their sponsored Russophobic Kiev regime have all been avoiding up to now. It wasn’t Putin that took an off-ramp. It was Biden.

    Biden’s “warning” is just theatrics to conceal a crisis that Washington has created in the first place. Moscow wasn’t “told” anything. It is Washington that needs to stop playing geopolitical mind-games and get down to earnest dialogue – if, that is, it genuinely wants to avoid confrontation.

    • First published in Sputnik International

    The post Biden’s Empty Warning Over Putin’s Straw Man “Invasion” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Hegemony Doesn’t Make The World More Peaceful, It Makes It More Dangerous

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    A Republican senator who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee stated on a Tuesday Fox News appearance that he strongly supports keeping US military action on the table if Russia invades Ukraine, up to and including a first-use nuclear attack.

    “I would not rule out military action,” Senator Roger Wicker told Fox News host Neil Cavuto. “I think we start making a mistake when we take options off the table. So I would hope the president keeps that option on the table.”

    “What does military action mean, senator?” Cavuto asked.

    “Well, military action could mean that we standoff with our ships in the Black Sea and we rain destruction on Russian military capability,” the senator replied. “It could mean that. It could mean that we participate – and I would not rule that out – I would not rule out American troops on the ground. You know we don’t rule out first-use nuclear action. We don’t think it will happen. But there’s certain things in negotiations – if you’re going to be tough – that you don’t take off the table.”

    Wicker emphasized that his position was entirely bipartisan.

    “To the extent that you’ve had Democrats on the show right before me saying that we should be tougher, I support that and I appreciate that,” Wicker said. “I think they represent the fear that we have, the realization that we have in the Congress, that losing a free democratic Ukraine to Russian invasion would be a game-changer for a free Europe.”

    Top Biden administration diplomat and neoconservative Ukraine coup plotter Victoria Nuland didn’t go quite as far, but did assert that a perceived attack on Ukraine would see Russia financially cut off from the entire world.

    “What we are talking about would amount to essentially isolating Russia completely from the global financial system, with all the fallout that would entail for Russian businesses, for the Russian people, for their ability to work and travel and trade,” Nuland told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday.

    It remains to be seen whether tensions between NATO powers and Moscow over Ukraine will improve or get worse after a two-hour talk between President Biden and President Putin on Tuesday, but it is already abundantly clear that we are as usual being aggressively deceived about the situation. As the Moon of Alabama blog explained the other day, the narrative that Russia is poised for an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is flimsy at best, and could easily be designed to frame Russia as the aggressor should a future attack on rebel-held territories in eastern Ukraine by US, NATO and Ukrainian forces cross one of Putin’s red lines and provoke a military response from Moscow.

    Whatever’s happening, hawks in the US political/media class keep trying to amp the public up for a direct military confrontation between nuclear superpowers.

    “If Russia invades a non-NATO partner vital to US-led operations in Iraq/Afghanistan, whose integrity we guaranteed in 1994 and defense we materially support, so soon after the abandonment of our allies in Kabul, the damage done to US credibility and hegemony will be immeasurable,” tweeted MSNBC’s Noah Rothman in contribution to the Ukraine controversy.

    There’s a lot going on in that post, like the ridiculous claim that Ukraine played a “vital” role in US-led operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the bizarre suggestion that Washington guaranteed it would militarily defend Ukraine’s integrity in 1994. But what’s most interesting is Rothman’s refreshingly honest admission that if the hawks get their way in the event of a Ukraine conflict, people’s sons and daughters would be sent to kill and die in a war over something as stupid as “US credibility and hegemony.”

    Indeed, all US wars in recent memory have been over US hegemony. When they occur they are always portrayed as heroic acts of defense against evil hostile aggressors; self-defense, defense of human rights, defending freedom and democracy, defending populations which can’t defend themselves, etc. In the imperial doctrine of the US political/media class, the empire never attacks, it only “defends”.

    But if you break down the underlying causes of those military interventions they always boil down to preserving US unipolar hegemony, i.e. undisputed planetary domination. It’s not an accident that US military interventionism is consistently most concentrated in areas of high geostrategic value, focused on maintaining the ability to control the world’s crucial resources and shipping lanes, militarily surrounding disobedient governments, and continually expanding the ability to quickly launch devastating attacks on any population which acts against the will of the empire.

    That’s the real reason you’re hearing so much hysterical shrieking about China lately, as well as governments which cooperate with it like Russia. It’s got nothing to do with Ukraine or Taiwan or election meddling or human rights concerns in Xinjiang, it’s because China is the head of a rising bloc of non-empire-aligned governments which threatens US hegemony. It’s because Russia and China have been getting closer and closer after western empire managers predicted the exact opposite would occur.

    Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Bloomberg New Economy Forum last month that she’d “heard for years that Russia would become more willing to move toward the west, more willing to engage in a positive way with Europe, the UK, the US, because of problems on its border, because of the rise of China.” But that’s not what occurred.

    “We haven’t seen that,” Clinton said. “Instead what we’ve seen is a concerted effort by Putin maybe to hug China more.”

    Had the predictions of US empire architects proved correct, the Russia-China tandem described in 2017 by Gilbert Doctorow would never have come to be, and China would have been far weaker and far more vulnerable to US subversion as a result. All the panicked consent-manufacturing you’ve been seeing from empire managers these last few years is due to the frantic need to course-correct after those forecasts fell flat.

    As Noam Chomsky recently observed, the real “threat” China poses is that it cannot be bullied into complying with the will of the US empire.

    “The U.S. will not tolerate the existence of a state that cannot be intimidated the way Europe can be, that does not follow U.S. orders the way Europe does but pursues its own course. That is the threat,” Chomsky told Democracy Now last month.

    Whatever your opinions on Chomsky at this point in his life, you cannot deny that he is correct here. Beltway empire managers determined after the fall of the Soviet Union that the US must prevent the rise of another rival superpower at all cost, and all the attempts you are seeing to undermine China and its geostrategic support system are simply the effects of that resolution playing out exactly as intended.

    But what are the consequences of that resolution? What does it mean when history’s first ever unipolar planetary hegemon must maintain that unipolar hegemony even if it means risking a third world war against an alliance of nuclear-armed nations? What does it mean when the decline of an empire meets with the imperial doctrine that planetary domination must be held in place by any means necessary, and when we now have US senators talking on national television about launching a nuclear first strike on Russia if it invades a nation hardly any Americans could even find on a map?

    It means the world has gotten a lot less safe.

    The main argument you’ll hear from those who support the continued existence of a US-led world order is that if it wasn’t Washington ruling the world it would be Beijing or Moscow, which is just silly “If I don’t steal it someone else will steal it” nonsense that isn’t substantiated by facts. The planet never had a unipolar hegemon until three decades ago; there’s nothing inscribed upon the fabric of reality which says there needs to be one, and all the evidence coming from Beijing and Moscow is that those governments want a multipolar world, not to dominate a unipolar one. Besides, it’s not like the US has been making global domination look sexy during that time by rapidly burning itself out and teetering on the brink of collapse.

    The other main argument you’ll hear in favor of US unipolar hegemony is the claim of “Pax Americana“; that it makes the world a more peaceful place. But, again, how true is that if US unipolar hegemony must be held in place by endless violence and is now forcing humanity toward a world war between powerful nuclear-armed nations?

    After all, “Pax Americana” has already killed millions of people and displaced tens of millions in US wars of geostrategic domination just since the turn of this century. The US-backed assault on Yemen alone will have killed 377,000 people by the end of this year, and the horrors show no sign of stopping. Unilateral starvation sanctions on disobedient populations are deliberately murdering civilians around the world. And now, no longer able to make due with simply smashing weaker nations, we are being fed the usual “defense” propaganda about Ukraine and Taiwan to gin up support for world war in the nuclear age.

    The western media have been screaming that Russia is about to invade Ukraine any minute now for years on end. The narratives we’re being fed about Taiwan are blatantly propagandistic. All they’re doing is brainwashing the public into consenting to aggressions which are so dangerous that, all by themselves, they completely invalidate the argument that US unipolar hegemony makes the world safer or more peaceful.

    ________________________________

    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. 

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  • War in Ukraine? NATO expansion drives conflict with Russia

    Russia is seeking a legally binding pledge that NATO will stop expanding east, including to Ukraine. If the US refuses, is war next? Richard Sakwa joins Pushback.

    The post War in Ukraine? NATO expansion drives conflict with Russia appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Our Rulers Are Not Rational Creatures: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    We survived the nuclear horror of the cold war only to see our rulers turn around and start another one for no legitimate reason, this time against two nations simultaneously. And almost no one objected.

    The first cold war was colored by a healthy fear of nuclear annihilation, by support for detente in mainstream political factions, and by an understanding that this was a situation we should ideally get ourselves out of as soon as possible. This new cold war features none of these, and is against two nuclear powers, Russia and China, instead of just one. Twice as many unpredictable moving parts. Twice as many things that can go cataclysmically wrong. And this one’s got a whole new dimension of danger in the race to put weapons in space. Our odds here are not good.

    I probably won’t feel such an urgent need to keep talking about this as much once I start seeing some real sustained acknowledgement in mainstream circles that there is a very very dangerous game being played here and heroic efforts need to be made to de-escalate it. But right now there just isn’t. Everyone is asleep at the wheel. Nobody’s noticing how dangerous this nuclear tightrope walk is getting.

    ❖

    China is the same kind of country it was during the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. All that’s changed is the level of power it has on the world stage, and therefore the threat level it poses to US planetary domination.

    ❖

    China is building up its military might in correct anticipation of an eventual confrontation with the US empire. The empire’s choices are now (A) abandon the goal of indefinite unipolar hegemony and pursue detente, or (B) orchestrate some kind of massive attack soon before China becomes too powerful to defeat.

    ❖

    I will admit to being more rude to hysterical anti-China types than I am to most people. This is partly because the agendas they’re facilitating are so dangerous, and partly because they’re often a very abrasive combination of stupid and uninformed yet arrogant and condescending. They’ve seriously got the worst low-info/high confidence ratio of any faction I’ve ever encountered.

    ❖

    ❖

    Many Bible verses have done lots of damage over the years, but among the most destructive has been “The poor you will always have with you” from Matthew 26:11. It’s been used often to argue that poverty cannot be eliminated, which at this point in our development is simply false.

    As Buckminster Fuller once said, “It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete. It is a matter of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry.”

    Allowing poverty to continue is now a choice. It’s not a choice being made by you or me or any ordinary person, but it is still a choice, being made by the drivers of global capitalism. We could eliminate it, but we don’t, and we accept this as normal because we’re brainwashed.

    We could be living in a world where people collaborate with each other toward everyone’s benefit but instead we’re waiting around to find out if we’ll all die in a nuclear holocaust because some neocons convinced everyone in Washington that the US must maintain unipolar hegemony.

    ❖

    “How come you still write about the world like nothing’s changed since Covid?”

    Because as far as my line of commentary is concerned nothing has. We’re still hurtling toward armageddon and dystopia just as I was describing before 2020, there are just new justifications and details behind some aspects of that trajectory. We’re still headed for disaster unless the people rise up and use the power of their numbers to turn us away from the trajectory toward doom, and that’s still not going to happen as long as people are being propagandized. This is all still the case just as it was in 2019.

    The emotions of the Hot News Story of the Day often make it hard for people to clearly see the horrific nature of the status quo that has already been in place for a long time, the abuses of which have been far, far greater than the Covid-related ones. In terms of abusive systems held in place by propaganda and authoritarian force, the ones we had in place in 2019 dwarf the measures we’ve seen put in place since by orders of magnitude. Many just didn’t notice them because they’ve been conditioned to accept them as normal.

    A big part of what I do here is try to help people see the mundane horrors of the status quo with fresh eyes. If someone was teleported here from an alternate Earth with a healthy society, they’d never stop screaming.

    ❖

    Leftists who spend a lot of energy conformity-policing the online left are admitting that they’re only in this for the egoic currency of social media reactions. There’s no other reason to look at our world’s problems and decide that’s the most useful expenditure of your energy. If you look at the dire straits humanity is in and then decide you’re going to spend your time and energy calling Jimmy Dore a fascist or Max Blumenthal an anti-vaxxer or whatever, you’re admitting you’re not in this to make the world better. You’re not interested in fixing this thing.

    ❖

    ❖

    The most powerful people in our world pursue power for its own sake and do so with amoeba-like levels of wisdom and insight. Don’t attribute any higher order of decision-making capability to them than you would to any random acquaintance in your life. If anything, attribute less.

    Most people are deeply unconscious and patterned. Ruling elites are no exception, and in fact they are more unconscious. It’s a common error to think of these people as rational actors; really their minds are running on autopilot in response to conditioning put in place long ago.

    That’s why you’ll see them continuing policies which destroy the biosphere they depend on for survival or escalating military aggressions between nuclear powers. They’re not making cool, rational decisions, they’re acting out impulses within themselves that they don’t understand.

    You’ll hear people say “They wouldn’t nuke themselves, it’s irrational” or “If the climate situation was really that bad they’d have taken drastic action long ago,” but this assumes you’re dealing with rational minds and not what are essentially neurological computer programs. Really you’re just looking at highly traumatized organisms mindlessly acting out patterns set in place much earlier in their lives to cope with distress and gain a feeling of safety and security. And virtually none of those patterns are useful for running the world in a sane way.

    Any analysis which holds that elites wouldn’t do something simply because it’s not rational is an analysis which omits the important fact that, as Robert Heinlein put it, “Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.”

    These people are not gods. They’re barely even humans.

    ❖

    You’re far from the truth if you believe the official government runs things. You’re closer to the truth if you believe unelected plutocrats and secretive agencies run things. You’re standing in the truth if you see that the self is an illusion and no one ultimately runs things.

    ❖

    It’s not true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; the absence of beauty is. Beauty is everywhere; it’s the natural, default state of perception. The inability to see beauty in something is the result of mental projections added onto that natural state by the beholder.

    _______________________

    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. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • In That Final Moment

    Listen to a reading of “In That Final Moment”:

    ❖

    When the nukes start flying,
    when we see the mushroom cloud growing on the horizon,
    when reality comes crashing down in the most overt way possible,
    when the realization slowly dawns that this really is the end,
    none of our old stuff will matter anymore.

    It will not matter if you are American, Russian or Chinese.
    It will not matter if your skin is darker or lighter.
    It will not matter if you feel like a man or a woman or both or neither.
    It will not matter if your politics are left, right or center.
    It will not matter who you voted for.
    All that will matter, in that final moment,
    is that it is ending.

    We will behold that final moment
    standing alongside progressives and conservatives,
    racists and radlibs,
    socialists and soldiers,
    communists and cops,
    and all our irreconcilable differences
    will suddenly dissolve into nothing.

    Against the suddenly visible backdrop of total annihilation,
    the existence of any human anywhere is a miracle,
    and the existence of life on this planet is a priceless gift.
    We won’t even care whose fault it was,
    whether it was deliberate or accidental,
    or whether it was the result of some malfunction, miscommunication, or misunderstanding.
    All we will care about is that it is ending.

    And in that final moment we will hug our loved ones tight,
    whether we are Christian or atheist,
    Jew or Arab,
    Indian or Pakistani,
    anti-vaxxer or Antifa.

    And in that final moment we will say,
    in our heart of hearts,
    with our innermost voices,
    “Oh, I see it now!
    I see how easy it is to stand together!
    I see how small our differences are compared to this great commonality!
    I see where we went wrong,
    and how very easy it would be to fix it!”

    And in that final moment we will say,
    “We see it now!
    We see the mistakes we made,
    and made and made and kept on making!
    We understand our fundamental error!
    Just give us one do-over and we can correct it immediately!
    Could we have a do-over please?
    Could we have a do-over please?”

    In that final moment,
    we will ask,
    “Could we have a do-over please?”

    _________________________

    _________________________

    _________________________

    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. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Nobel winner: ‘We journalists are the defence line between dictatorship and war’

    Next week, Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov receive their Nobel peace prizes. In a rare interview, Muratov says he fears the world is sliding towards fascism

    The last time a journalist won a Nobel prize was 1935. The journalist who won it – Carl von Ossietzky – had revealed how Hitler was secretly rearming Germany. “And he couldn’t pick it up because he was languishing in a Nazi concentration camp,” says Maria Ressa over a video call from Manila.

    Nearly a century on, Ressa is one of two journalists who will step onto the Nobel stage in Oslo next Friday. She is currently facing jail for “cyberlibel” in the Philippines while the other recipient Dmitry Muratov, the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, is standing guard over one of the last independent newspapers in an increasingly dictatorial Russia.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Claims of Russian Interference in Ukraine Reek of Hypocrisy

    The Russians are up to no good and we must prepare to protect Ukraine. Moscow interferes in US and Canadian elections. That’s what Washington, Ottawa and their media sycophants claim. But is this just another case of accusing others of doing the things you do? An age-old propaganda technique designed to deflect attention away from your misdeeds?

    For example, amidst claims the Russians may invade the Ukraine or overthrow its government, Ottawa says it is considering a military response. According to the Globe and Mail, Canada may deploy fighter jets currently in Romania to the Ukraine or send (again) a warship into the Black Sea, which borders the Ukraine and Russia. But 200 Canadian troops, as well as two dozen police, are already based in the Ukraine. Through a memorandum of understanding Ottawa signed with Kiev, a Canadian company is also helping build up Ukrainian ammunition production.

    As for interfering in the politics of another country, since the mid-2000s Ottawa has provided significant support to right wing, nationalist opponents of Russia in the Ukraine. According to the Canadian Press, opposition protesters were camped in the Canadian embassy for a week during the successful February 2014 rebellion against Viktor Yanukovych, who hailed from the Russian speaking east of the Ukraine. In a paper titled “The far right, the Euromaidan, and the Maidan massacre in Ukraine” University of Ottawa professor Ivan Katchanovski reported, “The leader of the [Far right] Svoboda-affiliated C14 admitted that his C14-based Maidan Self-Defense company took refuge in the Canadian embassy in Kyiv on February 18 and stayed there during the Maidan massacre.”

    Alongside Canada’s support for the Ukrainian military, over 500 Canadian troops are leading a NATO mission on Russia’s doorstep in Latvia. Thirty countries are currently conducting drills in Latvia as part of NATO Baltic Winter Shield 2021. In a position sure to anger the Kremlin, Latvia’s defence minister recently requested US missiles capable of hitting Moscow and called for a permanent US military presence there. US and British troops are stationed throughout the region.

    Canada has sanctions on Russia and the Liberals have repeatedly labeled that country a threat to the “international rules-based order” Canada claims to uphold. In a major June 2017 foreign policy speech minister Chrystia Freeland called, “Russian military adventurism and expansionism … clear strategic threats to the liberal democratic world, including Canada.”

    But it is absurd to suggest that growing tension over the Ukraine simply reflects Russian belligerence.

    This is not the first time the media and politicians have grossly distorted reality to bash Russia.

    Aping Hillary Clinton, cold warriors and other segments of the US establishment, Canadian media and politicians pushed the idea of Russian electoral interference. In December 2018 the front page of The Walrus boldly proclaimed: “The Russian Threat to Canadian Democracy.” The lead article was titled “Could the Russians Decide Canada’s Next Prime Minister? Why the upcoming federal election isn’t safe from manipulation by Moscow.”

    Canadian politicians repeatedly beat the “Russiagate” drum. In April 2019 Freeland said she was “very concerned that Russia is meddling” in Canada’s election and claimed there had “already been efforts by malign actors to disrupt our democracy.” For his part, Trudeau opined that “countries like Russia are behind a lot of the divisive campaigns … that have turned our politics even more divisive and more anger-filled than they have been in the past.”

    Ten months before the 2019 federal election the government established a special task force to monitor potential threats to Canada’s democracy that included representatives of CSIS, RCMP, Communications Security Establishment and Global Affairs’ intelligence branch. It was all for naught. Two days after the 2019 election the Privy Council Office quietly announced no foreign actor attempted to interfere. (Recently the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency reported that CSIS “skirted” the law in its effort to protect the 2019 election from possible foreign interference.)

    From the get-go the claim that Russia got Donald Trump elected was silly. But, the “Russiagate” narrative collapsed definitively last month when the Steele dossier was conclusively discredited.

    Alongside outlandish claims of electoral interference, Ottawa adopted a sanctions regime based on a highly dubious individual’s criticism of Russia. In 2017 the government adopted sanctions legislation, modeled after the 2012 US Magnitsky Act, designed to demonize Russia. Ottawa immediately targeted Russian officials under legislation that allowed the government to freeze individuals’ assets/visas and prohibit Canadian companies from dealing with sanctioned individuals.

    The legislation was named after Sergey Magnitsky who proponents claim was tortured to death for exposing Russian state corruption. The source of the claim was William Browder, an American who got rich amidst the fire sale of Russian state assets in the 1990s. With billionaire banker Edmond J. Safra, Browder co-founded Hermitage Capital Management, which became the largest hedge fund in Russia. Hermitage Capital earned a staggering 2,697% return between 1996 and 2007.

    Those who question the western-backed story line say Magnitsky was an accountant who helped Browder claim illicit tax breaks. According to this version of the story, Browder exploited Magnitsky’s death — caused by inhumane jail conditions — to avoid being extradited to Russia on tax fraud charges.

    While it’s hard to be completely confident about the truth, it’s difficult to believe that a US capitalist who got rich in Russia in the 1990s would simply turn into a human rights activist. On the other hand, the idea that a wealthy and powerful individual meshed self-preservation with growing Russophobia seems plausible.

    Both Browder and partner Safra have dubious backgrounds. Browder worked for Robert Maxwell, a crooked British press baron and Mossad spy, whose daughter Ghislaine Maxwell was Jeffrey Epstein’s decades-long sex ring coordinator/partner. Safra’s name is cited in Epstein’s little black book.

    A November 2019 Der Spiegel exposé titled “The Case of Sergei Magnitsky: Questions Cloud Story Behind U.S. Sanctions” poked important holes in Browder’s story. Further undermining Browder’s claims, last year Switzerland’s Attorney General dropped a decade-long investigation into Russian money laundering Browder brought to the Swiss authorities’.

    There are many good reasons to distrust the media and politicians’ drum beating about Russian belligerence in the Ukraine. Evidence suggests these sorts of accusations are often hypocritical, self-justifications for more military/intelligence spending.

    The post Claims of Russian Interference in Ukraine Reek of Hypocrisy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The US Manufactures Weapons And Consent: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The only manufacturing jobs left in the US are military weapons and consent.

    ❖

    Gotta keep dropping bombs because they gotta keep making bombs. Gotta keep making bombs because they made the entire economy dependent on bomb-making. This is the only type of system that could possibly work.

    ❖

    The goal of internet censorship is to suppress and marginalize unauthorized ideas so much that the internet actually becomes a net negative for ordinary people, because the only ones who will be able to rapidly share ideas of consequence will be the propagandists and their acolytes.

    ❖

    Because people who object to US-led imperialist aggressions against their governments are routinely purged from social media, those of us who do not live in nations that are being targeted by those aggressions have a special duty to forcefully speak out against US imperialism.

    ❖

    “Come to our Summit for Democracy,” said the nation whose elections are completely fake and whose intelligence agencies have interfered in scores of foreign elections and which openly works to topple democratically elected governments around the world all the time.

    I mean, come on:

    ❖

    Capitalism is such a garbage system that news media will shriek all day about “crime” like it’s this mysterious alien phenomenon being inflicted upon society from the outside instead of a very obvious symptom of economic injustices with very obvious and widely known solutions.

     

    ❖

    I was fully expecting Biden to be absolute shit but I will still admit to being disappointed that he just flat-out lied about ending the war in Yemen. Yes I know it serves me right for getting my hopes up. But it is still horrific that this atrocity continues.

     

    ❖

    “You’re Australian, don’t write about America.”

    You’re a literal empire. Everyone gets to talk about you. Shut the fuck up.

    When people would tell me to shut up about the US because I’m not American I used to point out that my co-writer/husband Tim is American, but I quickly realized that’s giving way to much credence to the idea that non-Americans can’t criticize a planet-dominating unipolar empire.

    ❖

    Covid is interesting in that it has a propaganda campaign that everyone’s aware of and encouraged to participate in. So you’ll see things like when Jimmy Dore got slammed earlier this year for talking about his adverse vaccine reaction, not because it was false, but because it hurt the propaganda effort.

    There’s no basis whatsoever for the belief that Dore lied about having adverse reactions, but he got raked over the coals anyway. You see things like that all the time: people forcefully discouraged from talking about raw facts because it might hurt the vaccine effort or whatever.

    You are free to believe this propaganda campaign is a good thing, or that it’s a necessary evil, but what you can’t do is deny that it’s a propaganda campaign. There’s a concerted effort to manage perception, and the rank-and-file public is actively participating in that effort.

    None of this is to deny that there’s misinformation about Covid and vaccines etc; there’s an incredible amount of stupid bullshit and sloppy thinking out there. But there’s also a fair bit of real information that people simply cannot discuss outside certain echo chambers without being stomped down.

    This is a fairly new development, where the public is encouraged not just to share a certain message but to aggressively shut down anything which doesn’t perfectly align with it regardless of whether or not it is based in fact. Narrative managers are watching this one closely.

     

    ❖

    The increasing likelihood of nuclear war between the US power alliance and Russia and/or China is the most important issue in the world. It’s self-evidently priority number one, because there will be no politics, protests, Covid vaccines, racial issues, healthcare etc if we are all dead.

    There is no other issue that could instantly turn all the other issues into a non-issue tomorrow. Opposing the way the US and its allies are rapidly ramping up hostilities against Russia and China simultaneously and shutting down any possibility of detente must be our foremost priority.

    I just keep seeing a day not far in the future were a nuke gets discharged amid the chaos and confusion of escalating cold war tensions between nuclear-armed nations and all we’ll be thinking about as the world ends is all the stupid nonsense we’d been arguing about previously.

    ❖

    The advent of nuclear weapons didn’t prevent a third world war, it just postponed it. It is not a coincidence that the two most powerful nations the US has been unable to absorb into its field of control are nuclear-armed ones. But now a final confrontation is on the horizon.

    After the second world war the US became the top imperialist aggressor, and since it couldn’t take out Russia and China it set about absorbing weaker nations into its imperial folds. Now only a few nations remain unabsorbed, and the drums of war against Russia and China are beating ever louder. There was a tiny four-year window after Hiroshima before Stalin got the bomb, and China followed five years later. By doing so they were able to postpone a direct confrontation with the US empire for the rest of the century, but they’ve been marked for absorption ever since.

    And now the campaign to shore up total global control is approaching its final stage.

    ❖

    Things are fucked, the people who are making them fucked will keep doing so until stopped by the public, and the public is being psychologically manipulated away from stopping them by propaganda. That’s our whole struggle right now, and it’s happening on many different fronts.

    __________________________

    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. 

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    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Even after 40 years the response to Aids in many countries is still held back by stigma | Hakima Himmich and Mike Podmore

    It is hard to protect yourself from HIV when having sterile syringes or condoms can lead to arrest: discrimination is restricting progress in eliminating HIV

    Forty years after the first cases of Aids were discovered, goals for its global elimination have yet to be achieved. In 2020, nearly 700,000 people died of Aids-related illnesses and 1.5 million people were newly infected with HIV.

    This is despite scientific and medical advances in the testing, treatment and care of people living with HIV.

    Continue reading…

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

  • What’s Left: In Defense of Glenn Greenwald

    The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press. It will make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.

    If you aren’t careful, because I’ve seen some of you caught in that bag, you run away hating yourself and loving the man — while you’re catching hell from the man. You let the man maneuver you into thinking that it’s wrong to fight him when he’s fighting you. He’s fighting you in the morning, fighting you in the noon, fighting you at night and fighting you all in between, and you still think it’s wrong to fight him back. Why? The press. The newspapers make you look wrong.

    — Malcolm X, Speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem (13 December 1964), later published in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (1965), edited by George Breitman, p. 93.

    Caitlin Johnstone asserts that “The most significant political moment in the US since 9/11 and its aftermath was when liberal institutions decided that Trump’s 2016 election wasn’t a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control.”  Since Trump’s election, information control contributes to why people critical of the democrats are called Trump sympathizers.  Journalist Paul Street, if not the tip of the iceberg of this tendency, speaks for many.  In these dark times, we must pull our forces together to overcome the challenges we face, and not obstruct political dialogue and struggle.

    Street’s CounterPunch article,”Glenn Greenwald is Not Your Misunderstood Left Comrade“, obstructs political dialogue and struggle. He gave no substantive rebuttal to a Greenwald article, which declared “grotesque” the sight of masked servants and unmasked elite at the  New York Met Gala.  In a classic ad hominem attack, since Street couldn’t summon up an intelligent response, he just hurled insults. Sadly, this is what currently passes for political debate.

    Where is our political compass?  Street says: “Glenn Greenwald is not a man of ‘the Left’ (or whatever’s left of ‘the Left’).”  What does “Left” mean, post-Trump?  Street asserts that “Greenwald broke on through to the wrong side during the Trump years, so clouded by his understandable contempt for liberal and Democratic hypocrisy, corporatism, and imperialism as to become a willing accomplice of the white nationalist right.”  Greenwald’s tireless and meticulous debunking of Russiagate cast him as a Trump sympathizer to people like Street.  Remarkably, many on “the Left,” still believe Russia did it, though the recent indictment of Hilary Clinton’s lawyer  and arrest of the principal source of the bogus Steele dossier, should put any such notion to rest.

    Street quickly discounts Greenwald’s reason for leaving The Intercept, saying “he was too good to be edited – …a piece that tried to advance Trump campaign propaganda against Joe Biden on the eve of the 2020 presidential election.”  Street is critical that Greenwald is “all over the Hunter Biden-New York Post-deep state laptop story,”  but after  New Proof Emerges of the Biden Family Emails: a Definitive Account of the CIA/Media/BigTech Fraud, even CNN recognized the bombshell.

    The World Socialist Website, in sync with Street’s “analysis,” calls Greenwald a “sly fascism-denier” who Street says “has creepily thrown in with the white nationalist right.” Why? In his always impeccably documented piece,  FBI Using the Same Fear Tactic From the First War on Terror: Orchestrating its Own Terrorism Plots, Greenwald discussed the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Whitmer.  He concludes that “there was no way to avoid suspicions about the FBI’s crucial role in a plot like this absent extreme ignorance about the bureau’s behavior over the last two decades or an intentional desire to sow fear about right-wing extremists attacking Democratic Party officials one month before the 2020 presidential election.”

    Greenwald was one of the few who smelled a rat in the Michigan kidnapping story.  After serious investigative journalism, he found the rat.  “In sum, the FBI devised this plot, was the primary organizer of it, funded it, purposely directed their targets to pose for incriminating pictures that they then released to the press, and then heaped praise on themselves for stopping what they themselves had created. The Wall Street Journal’s headline declares, In Michigan Plot to Kidnap Governor, Informants Were Key, yet January 6 is declared an attempted coup.”

    In spite of such headlines from the WSJ, Street says Greenwald “downplays the seriousness of the fascist-putschist Capitol Riot of January 6, 2021.” This doesn’t sound like downplaying to me: “Of course the FBI was infiltrating the groups they claim were behind these attacks…Yet the suggestion that FBI informants may have played some role in the planning of the January 6 riot was instantly depicted as something akin to, say, 9/11 truth theories or questions about the CIA’s role in JFK’s assassination.”

    Street claims Greenwald has a “curious alignment with the white-nationalist neofascist Donald Trump and the January 6th marauders in their purported struggle with ‘the deep state.’”  Marauders or the FBI?  Does he not believe in a Deep State?

    Greenwald’s article “Questions About the FBI’s Role in 1/6 Are Mocked Because the FBI Shapes Liberal Corporate Media” is subtitled “The FBI has been manufacturing and directing terror plots and criminal rings for decades. But now, reverence for security state agencies reigns.”  In a widely praised TED Talk, Trevor Aaronson states, “There’s an organization responsible for more terrorism plots in the United States than al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab and ISIS combined: The FBI.”  Then why are Street, World Socialist Website, Counterpunch and many others well-versed in COINTELPRO tactics, now swallowing FBI words whole and calling people Trump fascists for raising the issue of FBI involvement in January 6?

    Street says Greenwald “defends Trump and other Amerikaner neofascists against the ‘censorship’ of their supposed free speech right to spew sexist, nativist, and white power hatred on Twitter and Facebook.”  An article I wrote about the new reality police revealed that Media Alliance, a San Francisco organization founded in 1976 to be mainstream media watchdogs, circulated a petition after January 6 which says:  “Facebook should create a circuit breaker to help prevent dangerous disinformation and incitements to violence from ever reaching a mass audience…”

    That good minds sincerely believe Silicon Valley executives should be the Gods of truth in today’s world makes Orwell look cheerily optimistic.  Yet shockingly, many people agree with the unprecedented censorship of a former president.  Nixon, even after his impeachment and resignation, was never gagged as Trump is.  As a former constitutional lawyer, Greenwald addressed concerns of Silicon Valley censorship in “Congress Escalates Pressure on Tech Giants to Censor More, Threatening the First Amendment.”  He believes House Democrats are getting closer to the constitutional line, if they have not already crossed it.

    Greenwald recently wrote several pieces on COVID, one announcing that he was eagerly vaccinated.  However, his questions about the cost-benefit analysis that is missing from the covid debate and his support of the position taken by NBA star Jonathan Isaac have Street condemn him for “failing to mention the horrific, anti-science, covid-fueling and pandemo-fascist anti-masking and anti-vax practices, policies, and politics of the Amerikaner Party of Trump (the Republicans)….”  Very articulate and factual.

    As opposed to a report from the National Vaccine Information Center, Forced Vaccination Was Always the End Game, which cites that breakthrough COVID infections, hospitalizations and deaths in fully vaccinated people are on the rise, individuals who have recovered from the infection have stronger natural immunity than those who have been vaccinated, and officials at the World Health Organization now say that the SARS-COV-2 virus is mutating like influenza and is likely to become prevalent in every county – no matter how high the vaccination rate.

    Unfortunately, in spite of such growing data, Greenwald’s piece supporting NBA’s Isaac is subtitled:  It is virtually a religious belief in the dominant liberal culture that people who do not want the COVID vaccine are stupid, ignorant, immoral and dangerous.

    Greenwald’s “The ACLU, Prior to COVID, Denounced Mandates and Coercive Measures to Fight Pandemics” excerpts from a 2008 report of “the actual ACLU prior to its Trump-era transformation” which had one primary purpose: to denounce as dangerous and unnecessary attempts by the state to mandate, coerce, and control in the name of protecting the public from pandemics.

    The report cites lessons from history: American history contains vivid reminders that grafting the values of law enforcement and national security onto public health is both ineffective and dangerous. Too often, fears aroused by disease and epidemics have justified abuses of state power. Highly discriminatory and forcible vaccination and quarantine measures adopted in response to outbreaks of the plague and smallpox over the past century have consistently accelerated rather than slowed the spread of disease, while fomenting public distrust and, in some cases, riots.

    Greenwald legitimately questioned the ACLU’s about-face from the report to its current position: “Far from compromising them, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties,” its Twitter account announced.  Street supports the ACLU’s current position.

    Many people ask Why Does Glenn Greenwald Keep Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s Show?  The question I keep asking, but get no answer, is why Greenwald, Tulsi Gabbard, Aaron Maté, Matt Taibbi, Max Blumenthal and Jimmy Dore can only appear on Fox?  Why are they not on “liberal” MSNBC or CNN, let alone Democracy Now?  The dominant, ubiquitous paradigm that cannot be challenged is – don’t go after the democrats.

    Greenwald, as Julian Assange, is condemned by liberals only post-Trump.  The liberal visceral hatred of Trump has trumped rational discourse. If there was true rational discourse, Assange would not be suffering in Belmarsh Prison as a consequence of his cardinal sin – publishing emails harmful to democrats.

    Following the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, Greenwald again went out on a limb, which a revolutionary comrade called a “rant,” but his message is only what Caitlin Johnstone asserted:  “If your opinion about a legal case would be different if the political ideologies of those involved were reversed and all other facts and evidence remained the same, then it’s probably best not to pretend your position on the case has anything to do with facts or evidence.”  But Greenwald is again in the crosshairs of “progressives.”

    I agree with Street that he and Greenwald are not “on the same side.”  If Street, and countless others like him, engaged in true political debate and struggle rather than calling people “facetious,” “stupid” and “snotty,” we might be closer to the revolution Street says he hungers for.

    The post What’s Left: In Defense of Glenn Greenwald first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • We’re Sleepwalking Into Nuclear War

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Every day there’s more propaganda banging the drums of war between nuclear-armed nations a little louder. Western media are churning out reports about Russia preparing to invade Ukraine any minute now and China preparing to invade Taiwan any minute now, saying the response to each is obviously to move a lot of high-powered weaponry to both of those locations, and none of them are questioning whether these allegations are true or whether those responses are wise.

    This is so dangerous. This whole two-front nuclear brinkmanship game is so very, very dangerous, and they keep finding ways to make it more dangerous. And hardly anyone notices it, because the news media outlets that people look to to understand the world aren’t telling them it’s dangerous.

    The only danger you’re allowed to discuss in mainstream western reporting about Russia and China is their scary aggressive expansionism, like this new Newsweek propaganda piece here. Nowhere are you allowed to question if it’s true, or to even breathe a word about the possibility of detente.

    It’s official empire doctrine that the borders of Russia and China will necessarily keep expanding unless militantly held in place by The Good Guys. It’s taken as a given that those nations are essentially mindless cancers that can only metastasize to other parts of the body unless aggressively treated. At no point is it permissible to ask if perhaps we are heading in a direction that could literally end the world and if that could not be easily avoided by simply working to scale down tensions. At no point is it permissible to question if these nations might be reacting defensively to western aggressions and discuss the possibility of working toward detente.

    Australian journalist John Pilger was already sounding alarms about this years ago. This article about the shocking escalations against Russia and China by western powers was written all the way back in 2016, and it’s gotten so much worse than that since then. Yet it’s still taken as a given by Serious News Reporters in the west that Russia and China are these reckless aggressors and the US is responding defensively to their aggressions.

    You can tell people who freak out about Russia and China are either acting in bad faith or regurgitating propaganda because they all act like detente is not a thing. They don’t even acknowledge the existence of that concept. Many literally don’t even know the meaning of the word.

    At no time does it ever even enter their minds that hey, maybe these nations might be acting defensively to blatantly imbalanced military realities like the one illustrated below, and that the sane thing to do would be to move toward de-escalation.

    People think this way because they are programmed to, and they are programmed to think that way because easing off of aggressions rather than escalating them would permit the end of US planetary hegemony and a move into a multipolar world. The empire cannot tolerate such a thing.

    It was established after the fall of the Soviet Union that another multipolar world must be avoided at all cost; even if it means imperiling the whole world to maintain supremacy. Easing tensions would mean ceasing to do everything you can to prevent the rise of China as a global superpower. That’s what all the hysterical shrieking about Russia and China has really been about these last few years: manufacturing consent for this aggressive campaign.

    If things were permitted to take their natural course, China would rise and the US would officially move into post-primacy and we’d have a proper multipolar world. This has been deemed so undesirable that they’re willing to risk the life of every terrestrial organism to stop it.

    There are no checks or balances on this insane agenda. It’s supported by all mainstream parties and all mainstream media outlets. We’re sleepwalking into nuclear war. Nobody’s awake to the danger. Not the public, not the media, and most frighteningly not the empire managers actually driving these agendas.

    _____________________________

    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. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.