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Category: Russia

  • Afghanistan War Outcome: Hope for Sovereign Nations Fighting the Scourge of Neocolonial Imperialism

    Photo credit from the archives of Newsonline

    Exits of Netanyahu and Trump: chance to dial down Mideast tensions

    The Iraqi geopolitical analyst, Ali Fahim, recently said in an interview with The Tehran Times: “The arrival of [newly elected Iranian President] Ebrahim Raisi at the helm of power gives a great moral impetus to the resistance axis.” Further, with new administrations in the United States, Israel, and Iran, another opportunity presents itself to reinstate fully the 2015 multilateral nuclear agreement, as well as completely lift the US economic sanctions from Iran.

    Let us wait and see after Raisi is in power in August 2021. It is a fact that, since the Trump administration pulled out of the 2015 multilateral nuclear deal, tensions have been on the rise. One can legitimately suspect that the Trump pull-out had as its real intentions: first, to provoke Tehran; second to undo one of the only foreign policy achievements of the Obama administration, which was negotiated by John Kerry for the US. The Trump administration also used unfair economic sanctions on Iran as a squeeze for regime-change purposes. This was a complete fiasco: the Islamic Republic of Iran suffered but held together.

    As far as military tensions in the region, there are many countries besides Syria where conflicts between Iran-supported groups and US-supported proxies are simmering, or full blown. The US does its work, not only via Israel in the entire region, but also Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in Yemen, and presently Turkey in Syria. Right now conflicts are active in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Palestine, but something could ignite in Lebanon at any time.

    Photo credit from the archives of Newsonline

    Iran views itself as the lead supporter of the resistance movement, not only through its support for regional allies like Hezbollah and Bashar al-Assad, but also beyond the Middle-East, for Maduro in Venezuela. The upcoming Iranian administration does not hide its international ambition. For better or worse, Iran sees itself as a global leader of smaller nonaligned countries that are resisting US imperialism, be it Syria, Yemen, Palestine, Lebanon, or Venezuela. Even though Iran is completely different ideologically, it has replaced the leadership of Yugoslavia’s Tito or Cuba’s Castro. Both were not only Marxists but also leaders of the nonaligned movement during the Cold War, when the US and the USSR were competing to split the world in two. Now the dynamics have shifted because of China’s rising global influence, and the Iran Islamic Republic thinks it has a card to play in this complex geopolitical imbroglio.

    Photo credit from the archives of Newsonline

    In the US, Europe and Gulf States, Raisi has been categorized as a hardliner cleric and judge, but this gives Raisi more power than he will have as president. In Iran, major foreign policy issues are not merely up to the president to decide but a consensus process involving many. In the end such critical decisions are always signed off by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Khamenei has already indicated that he supports going back to the 2015 nuclear deal. During his electoral campaign, Raisi, who is close to Khamenei despite previous opposition, said that if elected he would uphold the 2015 landmark nuclear agreement.

    Photo Credit:  Gilbert Mercier

    Ottoman empire revival under Erdogan

    Turkey’s President, Recep Erdogan, often behaves as a modern day Sultan. He is shrewd and extremely ambitious. He fancies himself to be the global leader, politically and militarily, of Sunny Islam. Under Erdogan, Turkey has flexed its military muscles, either directly or through Syrian proxies, not only in Syria, but also in Libya, as well as in Turkey’s support for Qatar in the small Gulf State’s recent skirmish with Saudi Arabia. Erdogan thinks he now has a card to play in Afghanistan. More immediately and strategically, the serious issue on Erdogan’s plate is called Idlib.

    Photo credit from the archives of Newsonline

    The problem of the pocket of Idlib has to be resolved, and unfortunately, for all the civilian population that has been and will be in the crossfire, it can only be solved by a full-on military operation, with troops from Bashar al-Assad and Russia. Turkey is, of course, adamant about keeping a military presence and influence within Syria to prevent a complete Assad victory. Time will tell, but the war of attrition has to end. For this to happen, Russia has to commit to face Turkey from a military standpoint. If Russia is ready for a direct confrontation with Turkey, then Bashar al-Assad’s troops, and Russian forces bringing mainly logistic and air support, should prevail.

    What should make this easier is the fact Erdogan has overplayed his hand for quite some time. This includes his tense relationships with his supposed NATO allies, many of whom, including France, Greece and even Germany, would not mind having him out of NATO altogether.

    There are important factors that explain, not only why Erdogan is quite popular with Turks, but also why his position could become precarious. Erdogan is playing on the Turkish nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire.

    From one Empire to two others: the Sykes-Picot agreement

    To understand better this imperial dynamic, we must go back to the middle of World War I, when the Ottoman Empire was allied with Germany. In 1916, the Sykes-Picot secret agreement effectively sealed the fate of post World War I Middle-East. This British-French agreement, in expectation of a final victory, was a de-facto split of the Ottoman Empire. In the resulting colonial or imperial zones of influence, a euphemism for an Anglo-French control of the region, the British would get Palestine, Jordan, Iraq and the Gulf area, while France would take control of Syria and Lebanon. More than 100 years later, the misery created by this imperialist deal lingers in the entire region, from Palestine, with the 1948 English-blessed creation of the Zionist state of Israel, to Iraq. France put in place two protectorates in Syria and Lebanon, in which the respective populations did not fare much better. Even today, French governments still act as if they have a say in Lebanese affairs.

    Photo Credit from the archive Magharebia

    The weight of history and the nostalgia of 600 years of rule in the Middle-East are why some Turks — especially Erdogan — feel entitled to an intrusive role in the region. The unfortunate story of the Middle-East has been to go from one imperialism to another. With the American empire taking over in the mid-1950s, the only competition during the Cold War became the USSR. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US had carte blanche. It became more blunt about the exploitation of resources, regime-change policies and its role as the eternal champion of the sacred state of Israel. Quickly, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar became the US’ best friends in the Arab world. I have called this alliance between the West, Israel and the oil-rich Gulf states an unholy alliance. It is still at play, mainly against Iran.

    Photo Credit: David Stanley

    Since the collapse of the USSR, the US empire has tried to assert a worldwide hegemony by mainly two different approaches: support of autocratic regimes like those in the Gulf States, or pursuit of regime change policies to get rid of sovereign nations. This is what I have identified as engineering failed states: a doctrine at play in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Often, Islam soldiers of fortune — called at first freedom fighters as in Afghanistan, or the so-called Free Syrian Army — have mutated down the line into ISIS terrorists. Once the mercenaries developed independent ambitions, they served a dual purpose: firstly, as tools of proxy wars; secondly as a justification for direct military interventions by the empire and its vassals. Since the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq the bottom line results have been the same: death and destruction. Tabula rasa of Iraq, Libya and Syria, with countries left in ruins, millions killed, and millions of others turned into refugees and scattered to the winds. The numbers are mind boggling in the sheer horrors they reflect. According to the remarkable non-partisan Brown University Costs of War project, since the start of the US-led so-called war on terror, post September 11, 2001, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere the direct cost in people killed has been over 801,000. So far, the financial burden for US taxpayers has been $6.4 trillion.

    Photo credit from the archives of Newsonline

    Does Erdogan think he can do better than Alexander the Great with Afghans?

    Apparently Erdogan’s imperial ambitions reach as far as the land of the Pashtuns. The Taliban already control about 85 percent of Afghanistan. While most NATO troops have either left or are in the process of doing so, Erdogan has volunteered Turkish troops to secure Kabul’s airport. Some in the Middle-East speculate, rightly or wrongly, that Erdogan plans to send to Afghanistan some of his available Syrian mercenaries, like those he has used in Libya. Even if this is rubber stamped by regional powers like Pakistan or Iran, which it won’t be, such a direct or proxy occupation will fail. If Turkish or Syrian mercenaries, or any other foreign proxies for that matter, try to get in the way of the Taliban, they will be shredded to bits.

    Does Erdogan think he is a modern day version of Alexander the Great? This is plainly laughable! The Taliban are resuming control of Afghanistan, and that is the reality. Something Afghans agree upon is that they want all occupying foreigners out. This will include Turkish and Syrian mercenaries.

    Photo Credit:  Gilbert Mercier

    Post Netanyahu Israel: more of the same for Palestinians?

    For the Palestinians living either in Gaza or in the occupied territories, one element that has changed in Israel is that Netanyahu is no longer in power. It would be naive to think that the new Israeli administration will be less Zionist in its support for Jewish settlers expanding their occupation of Palestinian land, but we might see a small shift, more like a pause in Israel’s bellicose behavior.

    Lebanon on the brink: opportunity for Israel to attack Hezbollah?

    Despite Lebanon’s dreadful political and economic situation, Israel would be ill advised to consider any military action. Hezbollah is a formidable fighting force of 70,000 men, who have been battle hardened for almost a decade in Syria. Vis a vis Iran, a direct aggression of Israel is even less likely. With Trump gone, it seems that Israel’s hawks have missed out on that opportunity. Furthermore, it would be borderline suicidal for the Jewish state to open up many potential fronts at once against Hezbollah, Hamas, and Bashar al-Assad’s army. All of them would have the backing and logistic support of Iran.

    Once the 2015 nuclear agreement is in force again, with the Biden administration, the tensions in the region should significantly decrease. It is probable that in the new negotiations, Iran will request that all the US economic sanctions, which were put in place by the Trump administration, be lifted.

    Photo credit from Resolute Support Media archive

    Neocolonial imperialism: a scourge that can be defeated

    One thing about US administrations that has remained constant pretty much since the end of World War II is an almost absolute continuity in foreign policy. From Bush to Obama, Obama to Trump, and now Trump to Biden, it hardly matters if the US president is a Democrat or Republican. The cornerstone of foreign policy is to maintain, and preferably increase, US hegemony by any means necessary. This assertion of US imperial domination, with help from its NATO vassals, can be blunt like it was with Trump, or more hypocritical with a pseudo humanitarian narrative as during the Obama era.

    The imperatives of military and economic dominance have been at the core of US policies, and it is doubtful that this could easily change. Mohammed bin-Salman‘s war in Yemen is part of this scenario. Some naively thought MBS would be pushed aside by the Biden administration. The clout of the Saudis remained intact, however, despite the CIA report on the gruesome assassination of a Washington Post journalist in Turkey. All evidence pointed to bin-Salman, but he was not pushed aside by his father. Under Biden, MBS is still Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, and de-facto autocratic ruler. The Saudis’ oil and money still have considerable influence in Washington.

    The Saudis understand very well that, since the 1970s, their real geopolitical power has resided in the way they can impact global oil prices. They can still make the barrel price go up or down to serve specific geopolitical interests. For example, recently the Saudis tried to help the US regime change policy in Venezuela by flooding the global market to make oil prices crash. Saudi Arabia and its United Arab Emirates ally have used the black gold as an economic weapon countless times, and very effectively.

    The great appetite of the Saudis for expensive weapons systems is another reason why they have a lot of weight in Washington and elsewhere. How can one oppose the will of a major client of the corporate merchants of death of the military-industrial complex?

    Photo Credit from archive of DVIDSHUB

    History will eventually record the 20-year Afghanistan war as a defeat and perhaps the beginning of the end for the US empire that established its global dominance aspiration in 1945. People from countries like Yemen, Palestine, as well as Mali, Kashmir, and even Haiti, who are fighting against an occupation of their lands, respectively, by the imperial little helpers Saudi Arabia, Israel, France, India and the United Nations, should find hope in what is going on in Afghanistan. My News Junkie Post partner Dady Chery has explained the mechanics of it brilliantly in her book, We Have Dared to Be Free. Yes, occupiers of all stripes can be defeated! No, small sovereign nations or tribes should not despair! The 20-year US-NATO folly in Afghanistan is about to end. The real outcome is a victory of the Pashtuns-Taliban that is entirely against all odds. It is a victory against the most powerful military alliance ever assembled in history. Yemenites, Palestinians, Tuaregs, Kashmiris, Haitians and other proud people, fighting from different form of neocolonial occupations, should find inspiration from it. It can be done!

    Photo Credit from the archive of Antonio Marin Segovia

    The post Afghanistan War Outcome: Hope for Sovereign Nations Fighting the Scourge of Neocolonial Imperialism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Russian Startup Bags $1.5M To Launch Vegan Meat Across Eastern Europe

    4 Mins Read Welldone, a Russian plant-based meat startup, has just raised $1.5 million in fresh funding. Amid surging vegan demand in the region, the capital will go towards growing production and distribution. Welldone, which already has a strong foothold in the Russian market, says it plans to take its products across Eastern Europe and beyond.  Welldone has […]

    The post Russian Startup Bags $1.5M To Launch Vegan Meat Across Eastern Europe appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Needed Urgently! New US National Myth

    Lenin dismantled in Berdiansk, Ukraine. Confederacy President Jefferson Davis in Richmond. Lieutenant-general Cornwallis in Halifax, Nova Scotia.


    Empires rise and fall. And usually burn themselves out rather quickly. What else is new? ‘American decline’ is a Wikipedia page. You can feel it in the air. One greets it with dread or hope, or better dread-hope. America’s sins are adding up, yet the US is a behemoth for well over two centuries and will not go in peace.

    It’s biblical in dimensions: elites brazenly steal from the poor, then use the money to lobby, privatization, to make ever more money, with God’s wrath hovering like a sword overhead, as such vile behaviour undermines the whole system.

    It’s so painful to watch, yet again, how perverse capitalism makes people act. How it rewards scoundrels unimaginable fortunes. It’s the same with atom-splitting, computers, drones, what happens to good leaders everywhere who don’t follow the script, in short: everything capitalism touches (which is by now just about everything, including sex, now retouched as gender) turns to sh*t.

    And what about the US? It presides over this bacchanalia, consuming/ destroying all it touches (consumption is derived from the Latin ‘destroy’, so I could just leave it at ‘destroy’). And what does America produce? Not an awful lot in real terms, and less and less all the time. Actual industrial output in the US has been falling for decades. What the US is producing is more and more debt. The world ‘buys’ US debt and sells it consumer goods, chained as it is to US dollars. I.e., chained to US debt. But Americans themselves are slaves to personal debt. Now, as the US totters on, ruling the waves and waving the rules, the world has reached an apotheosis.

    A quick history of the American story/ epic/ saga is:

    *20,000 years of tribal hunter gatherers, in harmony with nature,

    *settler colonialism, i.e., war, theft, genocide,

    *declaration of bourgeois revolution promising life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (scaled back to life, liberty and private property in the constitution),

    *2 centuries of wild, uncontrolled, ‘creative destruction’, using and discarding resources at an insane pace, blanketing the continent in square grids of endless roads, cookie-cutter suburbs, cities turning into ghost towns, arriving at

    *a car-choked dead end, where the threat of nuclear war and environmental Armageddon loom ever closer.

    There is already a cottage industry of Chicken Littles on US collapse, collapsarianism, Dmitry Orlov the oldest and most celebrated. Orlov is a Russian American engineer, born in 1962 in Leningrad. He emigrated with his parents in 1970s. Like the Soviet Union, the US collapse will be the result of huge military budgets, government deficits, an unresponsive political system, plus, for the US, declining oil production. Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects (2008, 2011) and  The Five Stages of Collapse (2013) are entertaining as well as informative, as is his legendary 2006 article ‘Closing the ‘Collapse Gap: the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US’ which brought the collapsarianism into the mainstream.

    Martyanov, like Orlov, was born in the 1960s, though Martyanov hails from Baku, and studied at the Caspian (Kirov) Naval Academy. Their writings are both polemics by engineers. Sort-of Marxist:

    Orlov: *When faced with a collapsing economy, one should stop thinking of wealth in terms of money.

    Martyanov: *The Republican embrace of China in the 2000s shows how the capitalist will sell the very rope on which he will be hanged.

    *America’s cultural and political decline are direct consequences of its precipitously diminishing ability to make—produce, that is—things which matter and that Americans need.

    Ex-Soviets are tough nuts. And they pull no punches. Engineers, more so. Having had to bite their lips too many times pre-fall, they are unqualified in their openness and critical faculties, and generally love/hate America in equal portions. A popular saying of the day in the USSR was: “They tell us that capitalism stinks, but what a delightful smell.” Orlov enjoys the stink. (His blog ClubOrlov’s latest: Why are empires, especially dying ones, drawn to Afghanistan like moths to a flame?)

    Martyanov is unrelentless and unapologetically contrarian. He has a lot of bones to pick, with lots of detours into modern Russia.

    *He argues Germany’s economy is in free fall, overburdened by a green energy chimera, refusing to air condition airports. (Greta Thunberg is dismissed as an ‘illiterate girl from Sweden’).

    *He (and, news to me, Putin) insist climate warming is not due to human activity (not a shred of viable evidence, except for ever unreliable models, that humanity’s activity drives climate change), (p71)

    *Covid is a fraud,

    *American environmentalists are pushing an agenda which undermines the very foundation of modern human civilization.

    US mass culture a straitjacket

    He is right, though, to argue that consumerism as an ideology is a straitjacket. The rise of postmodernism since WWII has accelerated the decline of American culture. Harold Bloom observes that “instead of the pursuit of truth, there is an adolescent certainty that all is uncertain.” He criticizes such cultural icons as Mick Jagger, who portrays himself as  a nihilistic rebel, both hetero and homosexual, embracing drugs and “the rock ideal of universal classless society founded on love.” Because youth bond with such decadent anti-heroes, they miss embracing the positive heroes of the past, never achieving a deep love for culture.

    Weimar Germany is the classic example of decadent culture before the deluge. Rome in its later years was famous for its decadence, sexual promiscuity and homosexuality. It’s happening again before our very eyes. The current obsession with transsexualism, and the reforming of our sexuality according to a radical critique of ‘hetero-patriarchy’ and its replacement with an array of designer sexualities, is perhaps the strongest indicator of imminent collapse.

    Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December (1982) chronicles the state of urban culture and race relations in Chicago in the 1960s as compared to socialist eastern Europe, where traditional culture ruled. Already by the 1980s, within sight of the collapse behind the Iron Curtain, their culture was beginning to look good to outsider Bellow. The farther we ‘progress’ from those days, the better things there look.

    Just as the Soviet Union denounced western decadence, Russia too is the empire’s spoilsport. Again, today’s news: the European Court of Human Rights determined that Russian law, which defines marriage as only between a man and a woman, breached the right to private and family life enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights.The decision obliges the country to legislate for recognition of LGBT+ marriages. The Court also awarded €2,200 in costs to the claimants.

    The backlash against the new sexuality being promoted by the West has begun, with protest politics in Hungary, Poland, and half the US pitted against the other half, with sexual politics at the centre of the divide. It seems Putin’s rush to change the constitution to limit marriage to male-female last year was just in the knick of time.

    On the consumer side of ideology, Veblen identified the importance that status takes on in a consumer-oriented society, where spending more on goods is a status symbol, the Veblen effect. This effect cancels the upper limit on personal consumption. The sky is literally the limit, as the billionaires Bezos and Branson  with their trips into outerspace a mere drop in their financial buckets. Where one’s worth is measured solely in money, society becomes a stage for moneyed giants to act out for the rest of society, who worship these successful, glamorous idols. And feel worthless.  With the ascendancy of Black Lives Matters, with the gay liberation forces martialed behind it, US culture lies in shreds. Consumption as the be all and end all is literally destroying the planet. Help!

    Magic numbers

    Having dispensed with lots of damned MAGA lies, we are left with statistics. When Simon Kuznets invented GDP in the 1930s (I’m not joking), he deliberately left two industries out of this then novel, revolutionary idea of a national income: finance and advertising. Kuznets’ logic was simple, not mere opinion, but analytical fact: finance and advertising do not create new value, they only allocate, or distribute existing value (Marx’s unproductive labour), in the same way that a loan to buy a television isn’t the television, or an ad for healthcare isn’t healthcare. They are only means to goods, not goods themselves.

    Congress ignored Kuznets, and included advertising and finance in the statistic. As a result, actual American GDP is formed primarily by non-productive sectors such as finance, insurance, and real estate, known as the FIRE economy. (I’m not joking, though I can’t resist fantasizing about lighting a match to all that paper ‘wealth’.)

    Martyanov’s Soviet education allows him to step back from the appearance (illusion) of wealth in US stats, and recognize that real wealth is not in financial ‘services’ — mutual shining of each other’s boots by two close friends and then paying each other $10 for doing this does not produce $20 of value, something that seems to escape most American economists.

    All the above does is yet further monetize our lives. Real value resides in food on the table, a roof over your head, a secure job and good education. There are lots of modern day shoe shiners, busily shining every day, inflating statistics, but producing no value. Viewed in real teams, the US looks more and more like a 3rd world country.

    Subtract finance and advertising from GDP, and what’s left? Well, since more than 50% every year of GDP comes from finance and advertising,  we would immediately see that the economic ‘growth’ that the US chases never actually existed at all, that the actual size of the American economy is grossly inflated. Growth itself has only been an illusion, a trick of numbers. I.e., the economy is a hollow shell. When the dollar goes, it will take the US ‘economy’ with it. That explains the consistent pattern of the ever-increasing overall trade deficit for the United States since 1970, when Nixon took the US off the gold standard.

    Food insecurity

    Martyanov and Orlov are weak on ways out of our dead end. That’s not their purpose. (Orlov: hope that the rest of the world manages to come together and build at least the scaffolding of a functional imperial replacement) but we need to prepare.

    Orlov urges us to look to Soviet experience for lessons. There is already a germ of Soviet thinking at play in food banks. Any national crisis (WWII, today) pushes us towards a communal (i.e., socialist) answer. Covid-era news has highlighted the growing  importance of food banks throughout the US, where lines of cars circled the block and shelves were constantly depleted.

    It’s as if Basic Income was being invented out of dire necessity. 30+% of Americans have food insecurity. This phenomenal growth of food banks is a clear symptom of decline, dread-hope. My foodbank is called the ‘Essentials Market’, and is always stocked with bread, some vegetables (in season or as spillover from imports from Mexico and the US), plus bizarre things like chicken flavoured peanuts. This week, sweat peas, delicious but with black spots. Also goods with package flaws, or funny shaped potatoes and carrots. It was bi-weekly before covid but is now weekly and looks like this will continue. Portions are equal, and quantity depending on supply.

    It is much more enjoyable shopping than at a ‘super’market. i donate monthly, so i’m probably not saving much on what I take home. I only go to Loblaws for frozen orange juice and canned pineapple.

    I lived in Soviet Union in its twilight years, when ”defitsiti’ were the norm, but even then, shopping was an adventure, a hunt, and your spoils brought a feeling of accomplishment. Gift parcels at work were a cause for celebration. We are programmed to think that mind-numbing, ice-cold supermarkets are the pinnacle of personal happiness, but there are other ways of structuring consumption: solidarity, social justice, modesty, gifting.

    You share or trade with others what you don’t really want. The fact that money doesn’t enter into the equation (or in Soviet times, was not important), makes it more like a social gathering. But then my foodbank is small, well-run and adequately funded. Large foodbanks are less welcoming but still provide an essential service for free. There isn’t a lot of waste — if a big load of toothpaste comes in, you might get two tubes. If you are lucky, you might get the last cake or brick of cheese, but there’s always tofu, frozen meat, potatoes and carrots.

    As for food production, while the US is roughly balanced on food imports/ exports now, there are serious problems of water access and increasing wild fires which will lead to troubles, even if government starts right now to address them.

    National myth? Israel?

    Martyanov makes an unwieldy comparison of US and Russia on the culture front. He approves of the new Russian constitution where the State language on all the territory of the Russian Federation is the Russian (Russkii) language, the language of the State-founding people. That it helps bind the nation. He then argues that nowadays in America anything even remotely comparable to acknowledging that Euro-Americans represent the core nationality of the United States would be an anathema for the primarily globalist establishment. 

    His logic should mean recognizing the natives as the founding people. No one invited the white settlers, who Martyanov seems to be arguing are the ‘founding nation’. Russian nation building was radically different, where Russians lived more or less peacefully alongside natives across Siberia, so fit well with the first ‘founding fathers’. And his attempt to square the Trumpian circle is to include black slaves and hispanics and forget the Philippinos, Vietnamese and other flotsam, doesn’t work either. Captives and other settlers are no more ‘founding peoples’ than these other settlers.

    But he’s right that America’s lack of a myth-that-fits-all is at the heart of its disintegration, and that Russia indeed has big advantage as it limps along, trying to recover. It has many moments that all Russian citizens can relate to, though the two images that stand out as icons in all Russians’ minds are surely these.

    Russians are powerful myth makers, and even look back fondly on their Soviet experience and increasingly honour it. Their Soviet national myth crashed on the hidden rocks of commodity fetishism. The ‘soviet man’ was supposed to be ascetic, a consumer minimalist, devoting himself to study, self-improvement, social activities, preserving nature, things we all wish we had time for but don’t, until retirement, when you are too old and lame to be much good to anyone. That’s good for priests and revolutionaries, maybe 10%, but not as a founding myth.

    Though flawed, Martyanov is worth reading for his details, the Russia asides. It’s fascinating to see a sharp Soviet-Russian mind at work, deconstructing the US. Martyanov would probably be writing the same book if he were still Soviet, living in still extant socialism. I’m sure Putin’s advisers think along similar lines.

    What really is missing in both Orlov and Martyanov is a chapter on how Israel contributes to US disintegration. Or rather a framing of the whole topic as referring to US-Israel, as they function as siamese twins, joined at the hip, with two heads, one much more clever than the other. Israel has pushed the US for the past 7 decades to do much self-harm, to discredit the US on the world stage, to push the entire Middle East into ceaseless, tragic turmoil. Without Israel, the US would be in much better shape, perhaps not even disintegrating.

    Hopeful signs

    If politicians heeded Hudson on debt forgiveness, maybe we could reboot the US. But it would still mean revolution.The Bezoses and Bransons stick out like sore thumbs. In the meantime, decline is relentless. There are good signs in the slow-motion US disintegration:

    *Biden’s backing off Nord Stream 2 allowing Europe to manage its own energy,

    *Biden’s bid to nab corporations in tax havens. Even Canada and Europe are on board. Can this plug the hole in the dyke propping up the rise sea of toxic dollars? As with the climate, storms are more frequent and more lethal. It’s hard to see a happy ending in all this but it won’t hurt.

    *Pride Month’s black eye, when Supreme Court allowed the Catholic church to exclude same sex couples in adoption in Philadelphia,

    *a groundswell of support, with young people at the forefront on global warming and against Israeli apartheid. As with South Africa in the 1980s, the world is slowly mobilizing to bring the Israeli part of US-Israel to justice.

    These groundswells, which Martyanov got wrong, ignores or belittles, are the seeds of a new, better post-US-imperialism. Martyanov and Orlov are engineers, not writers. Just as Martyanov dismisses nonengineers from climate policy, we can’t take engineer think as the last word to resolve the complex problems engineers have created that brought us to this fix. Orlov, dubbed a survivalist, currently is producing affordable house boats for apres le deluge.

    As for a credible founding myth, it’s not going to happen, unless you go back to the distant past. 1619+ meant slavery and genocide, 1776 meant a bourgeois revolution glorifying profit, wealth, and reaffirming slavery and genocide, 1899 seizing Philippines meant empire, though now minus slavery. Canada doesn’t have the slavery baggage, [Myth? See “Canada’s slavery secret: The whitewashing of 200 years of enslavement” — DV Ed] but the native genocide was pretty much the same. This year’s Canada Day on July 1 was without major fireworks, more a day of reflection, contrition. We’re already wrestling with a new national myth. It’s not easy. But it’s gonna be a lot hard south of the border.

    Inspired by Trump’s angry circus performance at Mount Rushmore, [the renaming of what the Lakota people called Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe, Six Grandfathers — DV Ed] last year, a landback movement has begun. We land’owners’ can give back our lands to natives whose land it really is, and let them be custodians, our high priests. We must embrace the native cultures where we live. That should be our founding myth. Such a post-consumer-settler-colonial society has a chance. We can do our accounting according to a happiness index, ridding ourselves of the financial intermediaries sucking up the real wealth and leaving only debt.

    The post Needed Urgently! New US National Myth first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Walberg.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Luke Harding’s Continued Employment Discredits All Western Media

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    Collusion author Luke Harding continues to receive mainstream traction authoring stories which generate headlines in influential media outlets around the world promoting his theory that Trump conspired with the Kremlin, despite the fact that both he and his theory have been completely and utterly discredited many times over.

    The Guardian has published an article co-authored by Harding on “what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents” which “suggest” that Russian officials had a conversation which delivers “apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses kompromat, or potentially compromising material, on the future president.”

    “The paper refers to ‘certain events’ that happened during Trump’s trips to Moscow,” says Harding with his two co-authors. “Security council members are invited to find details in appendix five, at paragraph five, the document states. It is unclear what the appendix contains.”

    “Russia’s three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, in a decree appearing to bear Putin’s signature,” the article reads, adding, “Western intelligence agencies are understood to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin.”

    Note the highly qualified language, an ever-present phenomenon in the thinly sourced Russiagate stories we were inundated with throughout the entirety of Trump’s presidency: “suggest”, “assessed to be”, “apparent”, “appearing to”, “seem to”.

    Also note how Harding and company do not know what’s in the appendix referenced which supposedly elaborates on their most incendiary claim.

    Also note how “Western intelligence agencies” are the authoritative sources behind these claims.

    Beyond this, the actual document provided by The Guardian has come under scrutiny for containing numerous linguistic errors unlikely to have been made by native Russian speakers.

    Then there’s the little itty bitty problem that the president who the authors claim was beholden to the Kremlin via kompromat was indisputably far more hawkish toward Moscow than both the president who preceded him and the president who replaced him. If Kremlin intelligence did indeed compromise Trump with blackmail, a claim for which the Mueller investigation found no evidence, then it was a very poor investment indeed as it clearly had no impact on US foreign policy.

    But the most damning evidence of all against this claim is the fact that serial fabulist Luke Harding had anything to do with it.

    This is after all the same reporter who authored The Guardian’s notorious 2018 claim that Trump crony Paul Manafort had meetings with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy, an evidence-free claim that was clearly false from the moment it was published and discredited even further by the fact that the Mueller investigation found no evidence for it. The same author who was involved in publishing a WikiLeaks password which led to unredacted documents becoming public. The same author who was humiliatingly incapable of substantiating his allegations of Trump-Russia collusion when he finally encountered an interviewer who challenged him to defend the titular claim in his book, Collusion.

    Luke Harding should not be able to find employment anywhere more influential than the far side of a cashier’s counter, yet here he is still getting his ridiculous stories published by one of the most influential news media outlets in the English-speaking world.

    Given legitimacy by The Guardian‘s publication, other western media are picking up this transparently bogus story and hyping it through the roof, from the Daily Beast headline “Reported Kremlin Leak Appears to Confirm Existence of Trump ‘Kompromat’” to the Forbes headline “Trump Kompromat Claimed: Kremlin Documents Reportedly Show Putin Conspiring For Billionaire” to the Raw Story headline “‘The pee tape is real’: Critics claim Kremlin leak confirms ‘every awful thing said about Trump ends up being absolutely true’“.

    These articles will generate plenty of clicks, and they will make sure mainstream liberals maintain their virulent hatred of Russia. What they will not do is help anyone form a truth-based worldview.

    If you needed any more proof that western media does not exist to tell you the truth about the world, there you go. The news in our society exists not to create an informed populace but to preserve partisan worldviews which protect the interests of the imperialist oligarchic class.

    ____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . 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  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  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, . 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • How public ‘apologies’ are used against domestic abuse victims in Chechnya

    Activists say Ramzan Kadyrov’s regime uses televised confessions ‘under duress’ to hold back women’s rights, despite changes in society

    Khalimat Taramova, the 22-year-old daughter of a prominent Chechen businessman, sits demurely on a velvet sofa ornately embellished in gold. She is wearing a modest dress and a headscarf. With her on the sofa are three men dressed in suits. They are appearing on Grozny TV, the state television channel of Russia’s Chechen Republic.

    Only a couple of weeks before the programme was shown on 14 June, Taramova fled her home, where she said she was subjected to violence after going against her family’s wishes. She sought help from a group of women’s rights activists, the Marem project , who let her stay in a flat owned by one of its members in the neighbouring republic of Dagestan. In a video released on social media on 6 June, she pleaded for the Chechen authorities not to come looking for her.

    If a member of a family is publicly humiliated this downgrades them and their whole family

    [Women] are more doubtful that they can ever escape the situation. They know the reach of the regime is so wide

    Related: ‘They find you and shoot you’: Chechens in fear after third Kadyrov critic killed

    Continue reading…

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

  • Human rights lawyer Semyon Simonov convicted under Russia’s foreign agents law

    Nadia Murray-Ragg of Victoria U. Wellington Faculty of Law, in New Zealand reports on 12 July 2021 that human rights defender and lawyer Semyon Simonov was convicted under Russia’s foreign agents law in a controversial criminal trial on Sunday.

    In December 2016, Russia designated the Southern Human Rights Center (SHRC) as a foreign agent, considering it to be engaging in political activity. The SHRC is an organization providing pro bono legal services on human rights issues in Russia. Given this status, Russian law required the SHRC to register as a foreign agent. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), “foreign agent” connotes being a traitor or spy. [see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2019/11/19/russias-foreign-agents-bill-goes-in-overdrive/]

    In February of 2017, Russia fined the SHRC for its failure to register. A Russian court determined Simonov, the President of the SHRC, would be held liable to pay the fine in July of 2019 following the SHRC’s non-payment. Sunday’s ruling imposed a sentence of 250 hours of community service onto Simonov for failure to pay the fine.

    Simonov has a long history of championing for human rights. He has documented the human rights violations endured by migrant workers preparing for the 2018 FIFA World Cup and the 2014 Winter Olympics.

    Simonov’s criminal case has been heavily criticized by the human rights community. HRW’s Russia Researcher, Damelya Aitkhozhina, said “The criminal case against Semyon Simonov has been a sham from start to finish. It’s shocking and abhorrent that the authorities wasted so much time and resources on a case in which the accused did nothing but help people protect their rights.”

    Similarly, the country’s foreign agents law itself has faced calls for repeal. It has been criticized for quashing dissent and undermining the United Nations’ Declaration on Human Rights Defenders which provides in article one that everyone has the right “to promote and to strive for the protection and realization of human rights”.

    “The ‘foreign agents’ law is nothing more than a tool of repression,” said HRW. “[I]t should be immediately repealed.” See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/01/11/five-individuals-now-listed-as-foreign-agents-in-russia/

    Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty filed a lawsuit challenging the country’s foreign agents law, citing concerns about the controversial law’s “profound chilling effect”.

    https://www.jurist.org/news/2021/07/russia-court-convicts-human-rights-lawyer-under-foreign-agents-law/

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

  • Russian Guantánamo Prisoner Released to UAE at Risk of Torture Upon Repatriation

    Former Guantánamo detainee Ravil Mingazov

    United Nations human rights special rapporteurs expressed serious concerns on July 2 about the “the imminent forced repatriation of former Guantánamo detainee Ravil Mingazov from the United Arab Emirates [UAE] to Russia, saying he faced substantial risk of torture and ill-treatment upon his return.”

    One of the last prisoners to be released the day before Obama’s presidency ended in 2017, and one of 23 prisoners transferred to the UAE, Mingazov is one of 19 former prisoners who remain there, along with 18 Yemenis. In a July 2020 letter to the UAE government, which has received no response, the experts expressed concerns about the safety of the former prisoners and their conditions, as they remain in detention and largely without access to family, lawyers and independent medical care — in some cases, over six years after their transfer — and the secret terms of the assurances given to the U.S. in the resettlement agreement.

    These concerns were followed in October 2020 by calls to halt the potential forced and unlawful repatriation of the 18 Yemenis. As concerns these men, the experts stated, “While we welcome the Government’s decision not to repatriate these Yemeni nationals we continue to be gravely concerned at their indefinite detention at an undisclosed location, without charge or trial, with extremely restricted family contact, no legal representation and recurrent periods of prolonged solitary confinement.”

    On the other hand, the experts are now concerned that “Mr. Mingazov has been subjected to continuous arbitrary detention at an undisclosed location in the UAE, which amounts to enforced disappearance [… and] risks being forcibly repatriated to Russia despite the reported risk of torture and arbitrary detention based on his religious beliefs.”

    In recent weeks, the Russian authorities have visited his family home in preparation for his repatriation. The experts have said, “Any repatriation process happening without full respect for procedural guarantees, including an individualized risk assessment, would violate the absolute prohibition of refoulement.” His family have not received any official information about his planned repatriation.

    One of eight Russian nationals held at Guantánamo, Mingazov was the only one not to be returned to the Russian Federation in 2004. Like the others, he had fled religious persecution in his homeland and insisted he should not be returned there. The seven men who were made to return in 2004 have faced ongoing persecution, arbitrary detention, torture, spurious charges and one was shot dead by security officers in the street in 2007.

    Although in June, Russian President Vladimir Putin attacked the U.S. for the continuing human rights abuses and lawlessness at Guantánamo, the risk of torture, persecution and forced repatriation to Russia remains quite real. In February, the European Court of Human Rights found the Russian authorities guilty of torture, forced confessions and unfair convictions in the cases of a number of Muslim men from the North Caucasus. In April, a number of human rights organizations condemned France following the forced deportation of a Chechen asylum seeker, a victim of torture and a witness in a torture investigation against the Chechen authorities, in contravention of a court order and international law, to Russia, where he was abducted two days after his deportation, and where he remains “at high risk of torture.”

    Mingazov’s situation means he is essentially in the same position in which he found himself in 2016 when the periodic review board at Guantánamo Bay cleared him for release to the UAE: between a rock and a hard place. He has simply moved from indefinite arbitrary detention at the hands of the U.S. to detention for the past four years at the hands of the UAE sanctioned by the U.S. The threat of repatriation to the Russian Federation has long been there too.

    In 2016, however, Mingazov had one other potential option. His ex-wife and teenage son are refugees in the United Kingdom. His lawyers applied for him to join them but this was turned down by the close U.S. ally. In a question in parliament by MP Tom Brake days before Mingazov was sent to the UAE, the British government, while refusing to comment on any asylum claim, admitted that, “The Government received a request from the U.S. Government to allow the transfer of Ravil Mingazov from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to the UK. After careful consideration, the Government declined this request.” Since the U.S. could not rely on allies who claim to uphold human rights, men like Ravil Mingazov, who were never charged or tried at Guantánamo, found themselves “resettled” in further uncertainty and sometimes persecution in third states.

    Along with the death in March 2021 of former Tunisian prisoner, Lotfi Ben Ali, who was released in 2014 to Kazakhstan, which later expelled him, and who died in Mauritania suffering from multiple medical problems, Mingazov’s case raises important questions for the Biden administration’s stance on Guantánamo.

    Typically, the U.S. has chosen to wash its hands of prisoners once they are transferred, even though it continues to enforce close surveillance of them, regardless of the conditions — arbitrary detention, harassment by the authorities, poverty, homelessness — that they may find themselves in. Nonetheless, as survivors of torture, the men have a right to rehabilitation.

    In Mingazov’s case, the Biden administration must take immediate action to remedy what has been almost two decades of torture and indefinite arbitrary detention by intervening and ensuring that he is not subject to forced repatriation to the Russian Federation, and if he cannot live in freedom and humane conditions in the UAE, to ensure his transfer to a country where he can.

    There has been much optimism over the Biden administration and its reported stance on Guantánamo. Yet, amid calls to reinstate the measures once used by the man to whom he served as vice president, there must be consideration of the consequences of Obama’s tactics, of which both these men, who were transferred by his administration, are victims. Many of the 197 prisoners Obama resettled in third states were often also transferred under dubious trade and diplomatic arrangements and with questionable assurances given by states in return.

    Almost 20 years on, although 40 prisoners remain at Guantánamo, after a peak of almost 800, the impact of Guantánamo detention on the individuals and communities affected is seldom taken into consideration unless it can be used as an excuse for further belligerence, extralegal detention elsewhere or to justify further human rights abuses by the U.S. and its allies.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Did Russia’s Foreign Minister Get His Bisexual Jesus Riff From TikTok?

    Russia’s top diplomat, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, baffled Russian journalists this week when he claimed, without evidence, that schools in several Western countries routinely teach children “that Jesus Christ was bisexual.”

    The bizarre false claim, in a lengthy opinion essay published on Monday, was presented by Lavrov as an example of the sort of “aggressive LGBT propaganda” that Russia has barred by law since 2013. In recent weeks, European Union leaders have strongly criticized Hungary for passing a similar law, which bans the portrayal of LGBTQ characters in textbooks, advertising and even television shows likely to be seen by children.

    In both Russia and Hungary, the often violent repression of LGBTQ citizens appears to be an effort by reactionary, conservative ruling parties to portray themselves as defenders of traditional, Christian societies that are under siege from progressive ideas imported from the supposedly decadent West.

    Lavrov is a veteran diplomat but he was just handpicked by President Vladimir Putin to enter electoral politics, leading a slate of candidates in upcoming parliamentary elections. In his essay, Lavrov seemed miffed by the recent wave of protests against Hungary’s anti-LGBT law during the current Euro 2020 soccer tournament, particularly at matches in Budapest or involving the Hungarian team. The tournament resumes on Friday with a game between Switzerland and Spain in the Russian city of St. Petersburg.

    MUNICH, GERMANY - JUNE 23: (BILD ZEITUNG OUT) . Speedster with Pride flag on the field prior to the UEFA Euro 2020 Championship Group F match between Germany and Hungary at Football Arena Munich on June 23, 2021 in Munich, Germany. (Photo by Harry Langer/DeFodi Images via Getty Images)

    A protester ran onto the pitch waving a rainbow flag before kick-off in a soccer match between Hungary and Germany in Munich last week during Euro 2020.

    Photo: Harry Langer/DeFodi Images via Getty Images

    Because Lavrov did not offer any examples of countries where the supposed bisexuality of Jesus is a standard part of the curriculum, and no one has yet found any, Russian journalists guessed that he might have been riffing off a viral TikTok video, in which an Australian mother who takes pride in educating her young children to be accepting of anyone who is “different, trans or gay,” filmed her 4-year-old son saying that Jesus is “bi and non-binary.”

    When his mother asks, “Did they teach you that at school?” the boy answers, “Yes.” The incredulous mother replies, “That is not true, they did not teach you that at school.” The boy, with what sounds like a stifled laugh, insists, “We learned it at school.” “That’s a lie,” his mother replies.

    As his mother, a TikTok influencer who studied acting at art school, films herself reacting theatrically, the boy reasons that Jesus must be bisexual, “because he loves everyone in the world,” and non-binary, “because he wears a dress and he’s a man.”

    Clearly offended by the suggestion from Russian journalists that her boss had based his claim about Western education on information gathered from the musings of a child, Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry’s chief spokesperson, denied that TikTok was his source in an indignant Facebook post.

    Zakharova insisted that Lavorv had been referring to information published in the Western media. But the sole example she cited was an obscure report from a small Christian news site based in London, which makes no reference to any teaching of children. Instead, the report describes an online Pride event earlier this month for teachers in Scotland, which was organized by their union and included scenes from the play “The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven,” performed by the trans playwright Jo Clifford.


    A spokesperson for the Educational Institute of Scotland, the teachers’ union, confirmed in an email to The Intercept that, “Students in Scotland are not taught that Jesus was bisexual. The Minister is misinformed if he thinks otherwise.”

    The union “held a member-only, opt-in online Pride event, which featured a range of performances by LGBT artists, one of which was by Jo Clifford.”

    Clifford wrote in an email of her own that the Russian foreign ministry’s account of her performance “is inaccurate in every respect.”

    “The event was open to teachers who were members of the union only,” Clifford wrote. “My play is not taught in British schools; and it does not say Jesus was bisexual. It has nothing to say about the historical Jesus. It imagines Jesus coming back to earth in the present day (in accordance with traditional Christian beliefs) and imagines him to belong to an oppressed group (again according to traditional Christian beliefs).”

    Clifford added that her play invites the audience “to imagine Jesus returning as a trans woman. She preaches a sermon; she tells parables based on those in the Gospel; she offers the audience bread and wine; she blesses them.”

    Because the play challenges “traditional Christian beliefs both in the West and the Russian Orthodox church, which are fiercely trans- and homo-phobic,” Clifford wrote, conservative Christian groups have objected since it was first performed in 2009, and “a tiny minority protested against my performance” for the Scottish teachers.

    So, if the Christian Today article Zakharova cited was Lavrov’s source, he failed to read it very closely. The report is about a performance at a Zoom event for adult teachers, which was not attended by any students, of a play that does not argue that Jesus was bisexual.

    As the exile Russian news site Meduza notes, the details of Lavrov’s claim are much closer to what the 4-year-old Australian boy told his mother he’d learned in school than anything in the article cited by his spokesperson. But even if the boy’s apparently fanciful account of what he was taught at school could be shown to be true, that’s far from evidence that, as Lavrov claimed in print, schools in a number of Western countries teach children as part of the curriculum that Jesus was bisexual.

    According to Meduza, the Russian journalist Dmitry Kolezev argues that the most likely explanation is that the TikTok video was the original source of Lavrov’s delusional claim about Western schools, but the ministry was embarrassed to be caught relying on the musings of a child and scrambled to find an alternative. The report on the Scottish play was all they could come up with, in a retrospective search to find evidence of something that’s not true, even though it transparently fails to support Lavrov’s claim in multiple ways.

    Such a comically shoddy effort at spin would normally be funny, Kolezev observed, but for the fact that the Russian government’s cynical lie about the supposed depravity of childhood education in the West is being used to justify the repression of LGBTQ Russians and gin up hatred against them.

    The post Did Russia’s Foreign Minister Get His Bisexual Jesus Riff From TikTok? appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Classified documents found at Kent bus stop hint at reality of UK military strategy

    Secret military documents found at a Kent bus stop show us how British foreign policy works. The papers were reportedly found by a member of the public and then ended up with the BBC.

    The documents contained important details of a naval confrontation between Russian forces and a UK warship. And an investigation is being conducted into their loss. The documents provide a brief snapshot of the UK’s international conduct and also ask serious questions about it.

    Crimea clash

    On 23 June, the destroyer HMS Defender passed close to waters claimed by Russia. The ship had left Odessa, where UK defence firms had signed a deal with Ukraine to build military bases and supply patrol ships.

    Aboard were BBC journalists. Defender found itself ‘buzzed’ by Russian aircraft and ships. The journalists filmed the events. And the entire incident was framed as one of Russian aggression.

    However, the surprise discovery of the papers turns the UK narrative on its head.

    Theatre

    Among the details revealed by the BBC after receiving the documents were plans for the Crimean mission, dubbed Op [Operation] DitroIte. And the BBC‘s reporting appears to show officials discussing possible outcomes of the ship’s passage. Their comments suggest that the UK sought an aggressive reaction from Russia.

    A Powerpoint slide in the files shows two possible routes. One was close to Crimea and likely to attract what officials term a “welcoming party”. But the other did not pass through contested waters.

    The BBC reported:

    Alongside the military planning, officials anticipated competing versions of events.

    We have a strong, legitimate narrative”, they said, noting that the presence of the embedded journalists (from the BBC and Daily Mail) on board the destroyer “provides an option for independent verification of HMS Defender’s action.

    Arms exports

    The documents contained details of arms exports.

    The BBC was cagey about what it disclosed. On the arms exports its says:

    The bundle includes updates on arms exports campaigns, including sensitive observations about areas where Britain might find itself competing with European allies.

    The shadow war

    The files also suggested that high-level discussions were underway about Afghanistan troop deployments after withdrawal this year.

    Because the US appears to have requested UK special forces troops stay in the country after withdrawal in 2021. The BBC reported few details, saying they could endanger lives.

    The files acknowledged great danger to any troops who remain, for instance:

    “Any UK footprint in Afghanistan that persists… is assessed to be vulnerable to targeting by a complex network of actors,” it says, noting that “the option to withdraw completely remains.”

    Behind-the-scenes

    Naturally, the BBC released very little about the files.

    And it appears the Crimea incident was stage-managed at the British end to shape public perceptions. So it seems quite likely the BBC were onboard to report the UK narrative.

    These files may only represent a snapshot. But subjected to stage-managed events like Crimea, it’s no wonder the public can’t easily understand Britain’s role in the world. Moreover, serious questions need to be asked about how the UK media works with the UK military.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Royal Navy

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • F-35A wins the Swiss Air Force Competition

    On 16 June US President Joe Biden had lobbied on behalf of American defence companies when meeting his Swiss counterpart while in Geneva for his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.  On 30 June the Swiss executive branch announced plans to purchase the advanced Lightning II  fighter aircraft from US manufacturer Lockheed Martin, which beat […]

    The post F-35A wins the Swiss Air Force Competition appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Rosoboronexport to be official sponsor of MAKS-2021 Air Show

    Rosoboronexport JSC (part of the Rostec State Corporation) will be the official sponsor of the MAKS-2021 International Air Show, which will be held from July 20 to 25 at the Gromov Flight Research Institute’s airfield in Zhukovsky, near Moscow. “For Rosoboronexport, MAKS was and remains the premier venue to show its partners the best export […]

    The post Rosoboronexport to be official sponsor of MAKS-2021 Air Show appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • China and Russia Quiet about US Past Genocides and Ongoing Genocide in the Middle East and Africa

    The world facing desperate situations of climate change, planetary degradation and nuclear war preparation desperately needs protection from inhumane deceiving war promoting Western media, and from where shall it come if not from the bountiful and powerful two great designated adversaries of the Western powers, China, the world’s most populous nation and largest economy, and the Russian Federation encompassing 11% of the planet’s landmass.

    Seems That the World Has Let Americans Get Away With Murderous Genocide in So Many Countries

    Let’s begin with acknowledging that officials of the United States of America, its military, its clandestine operating CIA, and personnel within its criminal media cartel have been committing crimes against humanity free of any worry or concern of prosecution.

    Let us also acknowledge that though there is relatively free speech throughout most of the world, no one seems to ever be talking about the multitude of legally prosecutable monstrous crimes against humanity committed by Americans with impunity, many of which involve the death of millions of innocent men, women and children. There is a strange absence of much talk about them even as the horrific acts of genocide that they were.

    The World Court of Public Opinion Is Not Yet in Session Regarding US Crimes Against Humanity

    Sure, there are quite a few anti-imperialist books in print that are critical of US genocides, but the great court of world pubic opinion has not been in session since 1945 when there was consensus among people throughout the world for demanding the ultimate legal punishment of the leaders of the nations for the murderous horrors perpetrated during their invasions and bombings in the course of the Second World War.

    American Officials are Vulnerable for Having Confessed or Bragged about Their Illegal, Unconstitutional and Genocidal Crimes

    How is it that even government officials of nations presently under attack by the United States of America, and those of nations invaded and bombed by the US in the past, passively continue to allow Americans to get away with murder, the present murdering of thousands and the past mass murder of many millions, when massively murderous crimes against humanity have even been openly admitted to by high officials of the government of the United States of America by their openly characterizing them either as having been mistakes or by bragging about their having been successful.

    –  American officials claiming that their mega genocidal invasions, bombings and occupation wars in Vietnam and Iraq were honest mistakes are the two most devastating examples. “We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.” –former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.1 “It was a mistake, and I acknowledge that.” — Presidential candidate Joe Biden referring to his vote in favor of the Iraq invasion war when he was chairman of the powerful US Senate Foreign Relations Committee.2 But no talk of Americans paying for their years of ‘mistakes,’ murder and maiming of millions and the destruction of their countries.

    –  The CIA official in charge of the the US/UK covertly engineered bloody overthrow of Iranian democracy in 1953 has even written a book bragging about his crime,3 which the CIA has publicly admitted to.4

    –  American murderous invasions of Cuba, Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada and covertly arranging and financing devastating civil wars in Guatemala and El Salvador that are openly acknowledged (without any sense of responsibility for the suffering).

    –  The undercover arrangements for the brutal assassination of democratically elected popular first Congo President Patrice Lumumba were entertainingly reviewed in a televised segment of the US government’s Smithsonian Institute Channel in US mainstream media,5 no contrition indicated.

    No Uproar in Reaction to Americans Massive Murdering of Millions of Innocent Men, Women and Children in Their Own Beloved Countries far away from the Invading United States of America

    Martin Luther King’s & Nelson Mandela’s Exceptional Outcries

    Oh, from time to time there have been accusing outcries from individuals: “The greatest  purveyor of violence in the world is my own government,” Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967 made headlines in newspapers throughout the world,6 and South African President Nelson Mandela in 2003, “If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities it is the United States of America,”7 Of course, CIA controlled criminal mainstream media vilified King, didn’t report Mandela’s outcry, and has made sure that few people ever heard of King’s condemnation of his government again. However, neither King nor Mandela called for prosecution of the perpetrators and compensation for victims of the atrocities they decried. (King did say that Americans ‘must make what reparations they can for the damage they did and provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in the US if necessary, but said nothing about prosecution of Americans.)

    In Western alternate media, the finest independent journalists, top intellectuals and historians stick to reporting and chronicling events of human horror as if they were imperial RealPolitik, as unchallengeable as the weather, rarely including the whole truth that they are obviously prosecutable as crimes against humanity, crimes against peace and genocide. Inversely, in the case of domestic homicide on a city street anywhere in the world, the public clamors to know whether or not what happened was a crime or not. Amazingly, in world coverage independent journalism this writer finds the word ‘crime’ is never or hardly ever employed. Journalists report mass murderous world events as terrible or mistaken foreign policy, rarely, if ever, citing a need for reparations, indemnity, or compensation for surviving victims.

    Sadly, when an Iraq mom, managed to get her lawsuit against President Bush and members of his administration as far as a US Federal Court of Appeals, it received only a very modest amount of coverage even in anti-imperialist independent alternate media.

    There’s Freedom of Speech but No One is Speaking Out

    Why is there is no outcry around the world against the dozens of US invasions, bombings, occupation wars and deadly sanctions in and on smaller nations? The US bloodletting is probably rarely even much of a topic of pubic conversation anywhere except within the populations of the countries under US attack. Independent peoples historians assume that it is because of the enormous influence of monopolized CIA overseen giant worldwide media conglomerates.

    For decades, powerful CIA controlled Western news and entertainment media, with it’s television’s worldwide satellite reach has mesmerized and totally bamboozled its planetary audience into ineptitude with its programing of indulgence, of very restricted and twisted selective news, deceitfully blacked out critical information, misinformation, and often outright lies ultimately portraying the many US regime change invasions, bombings, sanctions and occupation wars as benevolent and necessary to protecting American freedom and democracy.8

    Way back in 1950, Albert Einstein explained “Under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.”9

    Albert Einstein wrote that in 1950, even before the CIA operation Mongoose10 had completed its control over everyone of any appreciable importance in American media and sources of information and in much of Western Europe and on the other continents, see the lengthy article: Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A. 12/26/1977, The New Times.11,12

    Powerful Western Media Has Anesthetized Majority Humanity but Why Are Even those Nations under US Attack Relatively Silent Re US Crimes Against Humanity?

    Unfortunately, some nations currently under American military attack have pro US war lord governments installed by American occupying forces as in the case of Afghanistan and Somalia, and the populations of many nations formerly invaded, bombed and sanctioned by Americans, like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia want to put their enormous suffering behind them. Their governments seek to avoid confrontation with the USA, long become trading partners.

    A majority of small countries in the world once attacked by Americans, British or French have governments either economically, politically and militarily controlled by the USA or by a Western colonial power, or if enjoying a degree of independence, fear criticizing the US would bring economic punishment and/or covertly arranged disturbances.

    Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Syria, Yemen and North Korea For Years Under Mortal Attack From USA! China & Russia  Targeted with Nuclear Missiles — All Have Independent Governments

    This is all to say that humanity can only hope for calls for international law to come down on the past and present murderous lawlessness of the  American empire from nations presently under attack which have independent governments free from US control, like China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Syria, Yemen and North Korea. However, up to now, the these nations have not taken advantage of the US wars confessed to as mistakes, which it seems could easily be profiled into world public awareness of USA guilt of genocide, at least in Vietnam and more recently in Iraq.

    Likewise would the repeated quoting publicly of Martin Luther King’s blistering condemnations of his government damage the credibility of Western media, which has for more than a half-century blacked-out Kings damnation of his government. These glaringly obvious ways to fight back against the insanely criminal USA that is attacking their nations and constantly threatening world war are not being taken advantage of though many nations suffer US sanctions and worse.

    Solidarity and Truthful Counter-Propaganda from Independent Nations Under US Attack Woefully Insufficient

    The US was sued by Nicaragua in the World Court in 1984 for mining Nicaragua’s harbors and other hostile acts (Nicaragua v. United States). The Court ruled in Nicaragua’s favor and found the US in violation of customary international law. The court put the United States of America under obligation to make reparation to the Republic of Nicaragua for all injury caused to Nicaragua. The US ignored the ruling but apparently stopped the mining. The suit brought international attention to US being guilty of crimes against a tiny country and it considering itself above the law.

    This conviction by the International Court of Justice should not have been allowed to be forgotten as well as the US mega genocides committed in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Iraq, and all the other regime change murderous invasions, bombings and deadly sanctions of Latin American, Middle East and African nations.

    An Absence of Law

    No leader anywhere ever seems to call for prosecution of US invasions under the Nuremberg Principles of International Law. Even the very leaders of nations under illegal US NATO attack fail to even speak of laws broken during yearly UN General Assembly Debates

    There has long been an atmosphere of appeasement in the UN General Assembly’s yearly General Debate. Delegate after delegate from Africa, Asia and Oceania seem to adhere to some ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ not to embarrass the great and powerful United States of America when describing the appalling conditions prevailing throughout the 3rd World.

    How strange, mysterious, unexplainable, illogical, baffling and painful for millions grieving over past genocidal military action and the millions facing death or worse today, that since the inception of the United Nations, no delegate to the UN General Assembly, with one exception (to the best of this historian’s knowledge), has called for justice under the law, for any of the the tens of millions of survivors of past mega profitable crimes against peace, crimes against humanity and forms of genocide. The single exception this author could find was Muammar Gaddafi’s comprehensive UN General Assembly address calling for investigation of all wars and restitution for victims of US NATO UN crimes against humanity.

    That one exception occurred during the UN General Debate in 2009, when Gaddafi, leader of the Revolution of the Socialist Peoples Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, spoke in the name of the African Union: “We are about to put the United Nations on trial; the old organization will be finished and a new one will emerge.”  Gaddafi called for investigations into past wars of permanent members of the Security Council, the US, UK and France, to be followed by trials of those guilty of causing these wars and millions of deaths and suffering “that has surpassed that brought by the Nazis.”

    Speaking before the UN General Assembly in 2009, Gaddafi, had called the Security Council a “Terror Council” for the sixty-five wars it has failed to prevent, even approving or participating in most of them. How prophetic for what would come Gaddafi’s way so soon. (See “Time to Expose Media Manufactured Uprising CIA Terrorists US-NATO Air Strikes on Wealthy Libya“)13

    By not using their veto power, two giant independent nations, Russia and revolutionary China, gave the colonial powers the 2011 No-Fly Zone resolution which US and NATO military used to destroy all Libya’s army and militias which had been successfully fighting a CIA created terrorist rebel army that was executing black Libyans.14

    China and Russia also voted for a resolution precipitously accusing Libya’s government leaders and armed groups of violently suppressing peaceful demonstrations.

    However, the Prosecutor of International Criminal Court Fatou Bensouda, stated that Mr. Gaddafi is just one of several individuals in Libya whose alleged criminal acts could fall within the jurisdiction of the ICC which continues to monitor criminal actions of armed groups in the country. These armed groups represent a major threat to long-term peace and stability in Libya.” There never was a single documenting video or photo of a peaceful anti-government demonstration, let alone, one being fired upon. To the contrary, there was a near million wildly demonstrating in favor of Gaddafi and Libya’s Green Book socialism while NATO planes bombed never reported in the New York Times or elsewhere in the US or Europe.15

    The colonial powers had sufficient influence in both the Arab League and the African Union to have both organizations vote against Gaddafi, which in turn influenced China’s UN posture.

    China, after indicating it was against military intervention, abstained instead of voting no on the UN Security Council resolution calling for war on the Libyan government with the fig lief of enforcing a no-fly zone to protect civilians — a war by white neocolonialist powers on their former African colony that had raised its Arab socialist living standard to be higher than nine European nations including Russia.

    China lovers were instantly stumped into incomprehension, bewilderment, dismayed, the rug pulled out from underneath their feet. Their confidence lost that the fifth of Mankind with wisdom gained during five thousand years of practical living would protect the rest of us from the insanely barbaric, homicidal imperialism wrought by predatory capitalism that had once colonized the whole nonwhite world, including China. This confidence or hope was now destroyed with our witnessing China going along with a classic example of false flag violence fostering a civil war in the age old imperialist principle of divide and conquer.

    Vladimir Putin was not president of Russia during the Libyan debacle, and this author later published “Russians Calling Medvedev a ‘Traitor’ for Not Vetoing UN NATO War on Libya in Larger Context” — the article’s larger theme is the willingness of humanity to accept White world profitable investments in genocide until world economic power shifts from Europeans and their descendant nations overseas to the six sevenths of humanity they plunder. Article portrays the immediate before and after of the preposterous destruction of Libya.

    The White folks nations led by the US have been throwing up a solid anti-Russian and anti-Chinese barrage of accusations, but the two great designated adversaries of the West remain polite and defensive.

    China is accused of cultural genocide in Xinjiang, US President Biden labels Russian President Putin “a killer,” while even the West’s obvious backing of horrific ISIS goes unmentioned by the Russians and Chinese. (See “An American Senator Writes of ISIS ‘Hellish Filth We’ve Recruited, Armed and Trained for 8 Years!’” “The Syrian War had ” much to do with clandestine actions of CIA, MI-6, Mossad, Turkish MIT, French DGSE, Saudi GID and others. It would never have occurred without American planning and execution (and criminal media complicity).16

    In ISIS IS US, a panel of cutting-edge researchers tell what ISIS really is, and what has been going on behind the scenes in Iraq, Syria and Libya. The conclusion: Like Iran-Contra, the ISIS death squads were set up by the US to crush a nation.))

    Chinese & Russian Diplomacy Quiet Re America’s Massive Genocide17 in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan

    About 2.4 million people have been killed as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, while about 1.2 million have been killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a result of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. About 250,000 Libyans have been killed in the war, violence and chaos that the U.S. and its allies unleashed in Libya in February 2011. It is estimated that about 1.5 million people have been killed in Syria since the Islamic terrorists, ISIS and others were introduced into Syria. Estimates of people killed in Somalia since 2006 must be somewhere between 500,000 and 850,000. Estimates for Yemen are about 175,000 people killed, a minimum of 120,000 and a maximum of 240,000.

    After 16 years of war, about 6 million violent deaths, and the killing continues as we read this.

    After 21 years of war, 6 countries utterly destroyed and many other destabilized, and this reality carefully omitted from what qualifies as the evening news on telecasts in America, Europe and most of the TV watching world audience.18 Would that a compassionate supreme being looking down at planet Earth, would somehow see to this information being presented to Earthlings, that they might be motivated to put a end to such a inhuman catastrophe.

    The world facing desperate situations of climate change, planetary degradation and nuclear war preparation desperately needs protection from inhumane deceiving war promoting Western media, and where shall it come if not from the bountiful and powerful two great designated adversaries of the Western powers, China, the world’s most populous nation and largest economy, and the Russian Federation encompassing 11% of the planet’s landmass.

    Until now, seems that both Russia and China have confined themselves to presenting convincing domestic media and have spent only modest resources in reaching out internationally beyond cultural and scientific news coverage.

    It bears mention that if China and Russia sought to seriously expand their international news coverage to include some occasional  overview of the mega massive loss of life in the millions brought about by the genocidal foreign policies of the United States of America and its allies since 1945, both could expect some somewhat similar charge of at least one genocidal policy each. China’s invasion of Vietnam in 1976, as the New York Times alleged that leader Deng Xiaoping stated as “to teach Vietnam a lesson” — a lesson that took the lives of 30,000 human beings. Over the span of years from 1991 through 2017, Russia first lost the Chechian war for independence, then reconquered Chechnya amid a terrific loss of life and deadly Islamic terror, and in 2008 fought a heavy handed war with Georgia over the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia.

    However, it is China and the Russian Federation that represent humanity’s hope and profound desire for a peaceful world of cooperation and non-belligerence. At present a wild insistence is being broadcast for war preparation with its seemingly unlimited financing constantly demanded in the media of the US-led Western neo-colonial capitalist democracies. The list of genocidal regime change wars, invasions, bombings and sanctions perpetrated by the US led Western powers since 1945 is inclusive of nearly a majority of the formerly militarily colonized peoples of the world and the deadly violence continues in more than a half dozen nations. This is what needs media attention for protection of those who will otherwise continue to suffer death, maiming and immeasurable suffering.

    Though for the Chinese, confrontation, both in the martial arts, as in Kung-fu, and in social behavior and personal demeanor is a face and balance losing stance, Chinese cities are targeted with US nuclear warheads, and since either by accident, mistake or intention, a million-fold catastrophe could occur, it would seem some outspoken attention, some awareness, some warning for all humanity is in order. NATO has threateningly declared China a global security challenge.19

    Military and nuclear confrontation seems to be no problem for President Putin, however given the awesome challenge of climate change and planetary degradation being derailed by the mega enormous financial and human resources wasted on military spending, a facing off in a tough cold war posture does not seem a sufficient response to the continuing menace from the United States of America and her allies.

    In this no win situation, may some Chinese philosophical wisdom be introduced in some fresh world media in time to prevent the third world war being so assiduously invested in, planned, prepared for and promoted, while the effects of climate change and Earth degradation slowly inundates humanity in a lethal future.

    1. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, writing in his 1995 memoir, In Retrospect, on the management of the Vietnam War.
    2. Presidential candidate Joe Biden referring to Iraq invasion war. During a 2020 presidential debate, Biden delivered an apology for Iraq War vote] As Chairman of Foreign Affairs Committee, Senator Joe Biden’s enthusiastic support for war on Iraq was crucial.
    3. Countercoup: The Struggle for the control of Iran is the memoir of CIA man Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of former US President Theodore Roosevelt.the book recounts his role in overthrowing democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh with triumphant zeal.
    4. The CIA has publicly admitted for the first time that it was behind the notorious 1953 coup against Iran’s democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, in documents that also show how the British government tried to block the release of information about its own involvement in his overthrow. The US national security archive at George Washington University published a series of declassified CIA documents. 8/19/2013, The Guardian.
    5. Devil Eisenhower ordered the assassination of President Patrice Lumumba, YouTube 1/13/2017, BBCFOUR Smithsonian Channel telecasted https://www.bing.com/videos/search.
    6. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City.
    7. AP in Johannesburg and agencies, 30 Jan 2003.
    8. “Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent revisited,” The Listening Post 12/22/2018, You Tube.
    9. Albert Einstein, Essays in Humanism.
    10. Mockingbird was a secret operation by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to influence media. Begun in the 1950s, organization recruited leading American journalists into a network to help present the CIA’s views, and funded some student and cultural organizations, and magazines as fronts and also worked to influence foreign media and political campaigns.

      After 1953, Operation Mockingbird had major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. The usual methodology was placing reports developed from intelligence provided by the CIA to witting or unwitting reporters. Those reports would then be repeated or cited by the preceding reporters which in turn would then be cited throughout the media wire services. These networks were run by people with well-known pro-American big business and anti-communist views.

      The CIA currently maintains a network of individuals around the world who attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda, and provide direct access to a large amount of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.”

      After leaving the Washington Post in 1977, Carl Bernstein spent six months looking at the relationship of the CIA and the press during the Cold War years.

      — Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media.”

      For those unfamiliar, Operation Mockingbird was a CIA operation began as the Cold War ramped up in the 1950’s. In an attempt to gather …

      “Newly Declassified Govt Docs Reveal Operation Mockingbird is Alive and Well,” Oct 2, 2015.

    11. Church Committee (the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) was a U.S. Senate select committee in 1975-6 that investigated abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church amazingly criminal findings must have the publishers of the New York Times some obligation to report on covert criminal activity the Church Committee had brought to public attention.

      Philip Agee and Louis Wolf, Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe, 1988.

      The agency appears to be a serial violator of human rights around the world including inside America itself. The books shows everyone how to identify CIA …

      “Operation Mockingbird, CIA Media Control Program,” YouTube

      1976, Senator Church live with his investigating committee re Operation Mockingbird

    12. Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent 1988, Pantheon Books.
    13. A month before French and British planes would eventually destroy Libyan Armed Forces and militias, and hunt Gadaffi down there was a massive pro-Gadaffi Green Libya demonstration of a near million Libyans and Gadaffi address the multitude from hiding even while NATO planes bombed. It went unreported in Western media and videos of the event have recently been removed, blocked. For years they could be viewed at HUGE PRO GADDAFI RALLY IN TRIPOLI – RAW FOOTAGE, 7/2/2011, http://www.blacklistednews.com/?news_id=14505 among other alternate media sites. All now blocked or no longer available.
    14. There were armed attacks on police stations (even traffic police) and vicious attacks on Chinese and Korea construction workers already two days before, and during the anniversary of the Danish Cartoons or “day of rage,’ executions of 50 captured Libyan soldiers, one beheaded, some hung along with police officers. And who knows how many ordinary Libyan civilians harmed by tough guys brought in to Benghazi and other Cyrenaican towns. This was reported by Reuters and BBC, but not CNN. There are (now were) some horrifically gruesome cell phone videos on the Internet of grisly hangings, beheadings, bloody beatings of blacks and others loyal to their government. (Libya has a black population, mostly in South Libya, of half a million. Libya under Gaddafi has eliminated a good deal of race discrimination, so black Libyans are especially loyal to the government.) Jay Janson, “There Was No Libyan Peaceful Protest, Just Murderous Gangs and Nic Robertson,” 16 June, 2011, Countercurrents.org.
    15. [14]
    16. Ask Hillary Who Buys ISIS et al Terrorists Helping US Oust Assad NewToyota Trucks/ Heavy Weapons.” Sec. Hillary oversaw regime change wars in Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, S. Sudan, Syria, Yemen; should be asked to explain new Toyota trucks/heavy weapons coming to ISIS/other terrorists, who have been mass murdering US designated enemies in Assad’s Syria and Shiite wherever they are; why superpower US ‘fighting’ for 5 years can’t defeat ragtag force of 25,000; involved false flags attacks on US to prove innocence?

      John-Paul Leonard, ISIS IS US: The Shocking Truth: Behind the Army of Terror

    17. Article 2 of the The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the United Nations General Assembly effective 1/12/1951, defines genocide as

      … any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:

      (a) Killing members of the group;

      (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

      (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

    18. Nicolas J.S. Davies, “How Many Millions Have Been Killed in America’s Post-9/11 Wars? Part 3: Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen,” Consortium News, April 25, 2018.
    19. M.K. Bhadrakumar, “NATO declares China as global security challenge in World, 18/06/2021.
    The post China and Russia Quiet about US Past Genocides and Ongoing Genocide in the Middle East and Africa first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ‘Leaked’ Documents: British HMS Defender Stunt Near Crimea Was An Intentional Provocation

    The British government ordered the ship to take the aggressive route through territorial waters of Crimea which the Russian government had announced to be off limits. Those three designated off-limits zones are marked on the British map! Taking that route was patently illegal under international law. The map thus proves that the move of the HMS Defender was an intended provocation, not an ‘innocent passage’ as the British government had originally claimed.

    The post ‘Leaked’ Documents: British HMS Defender Stunt Near Crimea Was An Intentional Provocation appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • UFO Report Provides No New Information But Plenty Of Fodder For Cold Warrior Policymakers

    The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released its hotly anticipated UFO report, which at nine pages in length with no new information is about as spectacular a letdown for UFO enthusiasts as you could possibly get. It does however contain multiple lines which will likely be useful for cold warrior policymakers going forward, just as we forecast earlier.

    In summary:

    • The ODNI says there do appear to be unidentified objects in US airspace behaving in ways the government can’t yet explain.
    • No direct mention is made of the possibility that these objects could be extraterrestrial in origin.
    • Direct mention is made of the possibility that UFOs could be highly advanced Russian or Chinese technology.
    • UFOs “pose a hazard to safety of flight” and could be a national security threat.

    Those last two points are the only ones which US policymakers of any significance are going to pay attention to.

    “UAP [Unidentified Aerial Phenomena] clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security,” the report says. “Safety concerns primarily center on aviators contending with an increasingly cluttered air domain. UAP would also represent a national security challenge if they are foreign adversary collection platforms or provide evidence a potential adversary has developed either a breakthrough or disruptive technology.”

    “UAP pose a hazard to safety of flight and could pose a broader danger if some instances represent sophisticated collection against U.S. military activities by a foreign government or demonstrate a breakthrough aerospace technology by a potential adversary,” the report adds.

    “Some UAP may be technologies deployed by China, Russia, another nation, or a non-governmental entity,” it also says.

    While the authors of the report also say they “currently lack data to indicate any UAP are part of a foreign collection program or indicative of a major technological advancement by a potential adversary,” the fact that Russia or China magically leapfrogging US technology by centuries seventy years ago has been validated as a possibility by the report is a gift to cold warriors eager to ramp up aggressions and inflame a high-budget arms race against those nations.

    Among those cold warriors is Senator Marco Rubio, one of the handful of individuals behind this strange new UFO narrative’s entry into mainstream attention. Rubio released the following statement shortly before the report was published:

    “For years, the men and women we trust to defend our country reported encounters with unidentified aircraft that had superior capabilities, and for years their concerns were often ignored and ridiculed. This report is an important first step in cataloging these incidents, but it is just a first step. The Defense Department and Intelligence Community have a lot of work to do before we can actually understand whether these aerial threats present a serious national security concern.”

    As I’ve been saying repeatedly, the odds of this new UFO narrative entering mainstream consciousness courtesy of the Pentagon, military/intelligence operatives, and corrupt warmongering politicians at the same moment the US begins implementing a new cold war against Russia and China is far too convenient for mere coincidence to be a likely explanation. We can expect to see the hawkish agendas of warmongers like Marco Rubio further advanced by this new UFO narrative going forward.

    _________________________

    Sorry for no audio on this one; we’re out of town today.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Crimea incident raises questions about military deals and client journalism

    A confrontation between a Royal Navy ship and Russian forces off the coast of Crimea is raising big questions – about journalism, about international relations, and about Britain’s role in the world.

    The incident took place on Wednesday 23 June. The British destroyer HMS Defender passed close to the Crimean coast having left Odessa that day. But Russia and the UK tell different stories of what happened next.

    Russia

    Russia has been in control of the Crimean peninsular since 2014, but the western powers say the region was annexed. The route HMS Defender took was through waters Russia considers its own. The response involved a warship shadowing Defender and a coast guard ship closely following the vessel. Multiple aircraft also ‘buzzed’ (flew close to) the UK destroyer.

    Russia summoned the UK defence attache in Moscow. And it also claims to have fired warning shots and dropped four bombs near the UK warship. In a BBC video, a Russian voice is heard over a radio threatening to fire.

    A Russian minister said:

    We may appeal to reason and demand to respect international law. If it doesn’t help, we may drop bombs and not just in the path but right on target if colleagues don’t get it otherwise.

    UK

    Russians fired no weapons or bombs at or near the ship, according to defence secretary Ben Wallace. He also said Defender had used a legitimate route. Russian claims are propaganda, he told reporters.

    These are the things that come an[d] go with Russia. Disinformation, misinformation is something that we have seen regularly. We are not surprised by it.

    In a parliamentary statement, he said:

    a Russian coastguard vessel warned that Russian units would shortly commence a live-fire gunnery exercise.

    They said artillery was seen on shore but it was out of range and “posed no danger”. Wallace insisted there had been no territorial breach. But there is a lot going on behind the scenes.

    Ukraine deal

    Declassified UK reporter Phil Miller tweeted that the Ukrainian government signed a new military deal with UK firms very recently. The firm Babcock International will build naval bases, and Babcock’s board includes a former head of UK intelligence. The close military relationship between the UK and Ukraine is likely to displease the Russian government.

    According to the MOD website, the deal was actually signed aboard HMS Destroyer.

    Reporters on board?

    The BBC and Daily Mail seem to have had reporters onboard HMS Defender. A number of independent journalist’s questioned their presence.

    One pointed out that it was quite a “stroke of luck” media were aboard.

    Journalist Jonathan Cook seemed to feel there was something deliberate about the reporters’ presence:

    International law?

    Speaking on 24 June, PM Boris Johnson said the UK had the right to be in what he described as Ukrainian sovereign territory:

    This is part of a sovereign Ukrainian territory, it was entirely right that we should vindicate the law and pursue freedom of navigation in the way that we did, take the shortest route between two points, and that’s what we did.

    But others questioned the UK’s commitment to order, citing examples where the UK has not respected international law. Declassified UK editor Mark Curtis came up with two striking examples: the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza and the plight of the Chagos Islanders.

    The UK government would like to frame Russia as an international bogeyman. But a deeper investigation shows a far more complex story – one of client journalism and defence firm deals. It’s a story that displays nothing of the even-handed role British governments like to pretend they play in the world.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/UK Ministry of Defence

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • ‘Sovereign’ EU should be able to talk to Putin says Merkel

    Brussels,

    German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday insisted that the EU should be able to talk to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, after other leaders from the bloc thwarted her push for a summit.

    “The president of the US met for a serious talk with Vladimir Putin, which I did not have the impression was a reward for the Russian president,” Merkel told a press conference after EU talks in Brussels.

    “A sovereign EU, in my opinion, should also be able to represent the interests of the EU in such a similar conversation.”

    Germany and France rattled wary EU counterparts especially those neighboring Russia with a proposal to restart talks between Putin and the bloc, frozen since Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014.

    Leaders rejected the push during hours of late-night wrangling in Brussels, with opponents arguing it risked sending the wrong message to Putin in the face of ongoing aggression from Moscow.

    “We believe that it is far too premature and that now it would be a kind of reward for Russia’s President, for his politics, but unfortunately aggressive policy, provoking neighbors, attacks of various kinds,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said.

    Italy’s Mario Draghi, who backed a meeting between all EU leaders and Putin, said that the proposal had come “a bit as a surprise” and upset the countries most worried about Moscow.

    He said that the bloc had “substantially shelved this idea, at least for the moment”.

    The Kremlin said it “regretted” the decision by the EU to reject talks and insisted that Putin “remains interested in establishing working relations between Moscow and Brussels”.

    This post was originally published on VOSA.

  • Biden, Putin and the Press

    Corporate media in the United States work hand in hand with the state and promote its neoliberal and imperialist agenda. There is great continuity from administration to administration and nowhere is that more obvious than in the realm of foreign policy. The duopoly war party consensus doesn’t just dominate in the White House and Congress, but also in television news and newspapers. The recent summit meeting between Joe Biden  and Russian president Vladimir Putin  demonstrated that the media see themselves as governmental servants. They have little interest in being adversarial or keeping the public informed of anything meaningful.

    The post Biden, Putin and the Press appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The United States Continues to Play its Geopolitical Games but the Rest of the World Moves On

    One has to seriously wonder what game Joe Biden thinks he is playing. Fresh from what appears to have been an amiable meeting with Vladimir Putin in Geneva, the United States promptly announced a new range of sanctions upon Russia. The ostensible reason for the latest sanctions was the imprisonment of minor Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. This man has been the subject of more media attention in the western mainstream media than any other Russian figure apart from President Putin himself.

    The latest episode of publicity springs from Navalny being sentenced to 2 years imprisonment. What is missing from the vast majority of western accounts of this imprisonment is that it was the activation of a previously suspended sentence on counts of dishonesty. Navalny blatantly breached the terms of his conditional release on these charges. He knew he would be sent to prison for this yet voluntarily returned to Russia after a spell in a German hospital.

    The reason Navalny was in hospital was that he became ill on an internal Russian flight. The aircraft was diverted to enable Navalny to be admitted to hospital. There he was treated by Russian doctors who diagnosed various illnesses that Navalny had a history of. At his request he was released to a German hospital when it was announced that he was suffering from exposure to Novichok.

    No evidence of this substance has ever been released by the German authorities. We are expected to believe that this was undetected in the Russian hospital where Navalny was first treated. This simply defies common sense. It is even more unlikely that if Navalny did have evidence of an alleged poisoning he would be freely released to a western hospital. Unfortunately, truth and logic are two components conspicuously missing in all western media reports of his illness.

    Navalny chose to voluntarily return to Russia where he knew he would be sent to prison for parole violations. Again, if Russia had indeed tried to kill him, it defies logic that he would return to the site of his alleged assassination attempt. To give them a second chance to finish him off?

    The logic behind western support for this minor politician has always been a conspicuously absent component of the saga. Navalny was at best a minor player in the Russian political stakes. The last time he stood for public office he barely received 2% popular support, hardly the sort of figures to cause Vladimir Putin any serious headaches.

    Now the Americans are using Navalny’s imprisonment as the ostensible reason for further sanctions. It simply does not make any sense at all to use this minor political irritant as a reason to impose further sanctions upon Russia. It is especially puzzling given the obvious attempts by the Americans to de-freeze their Russian antipathy. It needs to be remembered that the summit between Biden and Putin was at the strong request of the Americans.

    They were clearly playing a different game in requesting the meeting and what appears to have been an effort to de-freeze US –Russia relations. It is not rocket science to anticipate the real American motives for wanting to de-freeze the relationship between the United States and Russia.

    The United States knows it cannot take on both Russia and China at the same time, and it clearly sees China as the greater threat to its long-standing hegemony upon the world stage. Hence, to clear its decks for a full-scale assault upon the Chinese, it needed to subvert the Russian-Chinese relationship. That relationship has never been stronger. The two countries recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of an agreement between the two States to cooperate more fully with each other.

    The relationship has grown notary stronger in the past two or three years, helped in no small part by the obvious antipathy to the two nations shown by Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump. It is one of life’s little ironies that Trump was heavily and continuously attacked by his political rivals as being “Putin’s puppet,” although in truth there was never any kind of relationship between the two men, let alone one that could be used as a political weapon against Trump.

    Yet we now see Biden, anxious to sit down with Putin only a few months into his presidency. He was able to do so without chorus of antipathy that was a constant feature of the Trump presidency toward any gesture that Trump may have made — or wanted to make — toward Russia.

    Apart from seeking some clear air for the American concentration on China, the United States has another motive for the meeting. There is now a serious gap between Russian and American military technology, and Biden was anxious to negotiate some type of freeze in Russian military technology advances. Repeated independent commentators such as Andrei Martyanov (Disintegration, Charity Press 2021) estimate the United States is now at least 10 years behind Russia in military technology, and has the capacity to wipe out its American competition.

    The Americans, who have already ceded economic supremacy to the Chinese, are keen to ensure that the military status does not follow the same fate. To this end they are mounting a relentless campaign against China, accusing them of multiple human rights abuses in Hong Kong, and especially against the Uighur population of the autonomous region of Xinjiang.

    There have been lurid allegations against China over the alleged ill-treatment of the Uighur population ranging from mass imprisonment to enforced abortion and genocide. That these allegations are completely devoid of a factual basis has not stopped the relentless western propaganda.

    The crucial involvement of Xinjiang in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and abundance of natural resources, including a recent discovery of huge oil deposits, is not unrelated to the motives behind the western attacks. The latest population data from the region, showing a higher growth rate than for China as a whole, is but one factual element that destroys the lurid allegations of “genocide”. These and related stories of systematic abuse by the Chinese authorities were recently demolished by Max Blumenthal (thegrayzone.com 30 April 2021).

    Facts have a troubling way of destroying the propaganda. Unfortunately, it is unlikely to see a cessation of the constant attacks on China by its geopolitical enemies who clearly are moving to a different agenda.

    The Russian-Chinese alliance will, however, continue to make enormous strides in reshaping the geopolitical and trading agenda. The United States will just have to adapt to these new realities.

    The post The United States Continues to Play its Geopolitical Games but the Rest of the World Moves On first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • What happened to Glenn Greenwald? Trump happened and put the left’s priorities to the test

    There’s been a new public fracturing of the intellectual left, typified by an essay last week from Nathan J Robinson, editor of the small, independent, socialist magazine Current Affairs, accusing Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi of bolstering the right’s arguments. He is the more reasonable face of what seems to be a new industry arguing that Greenwald is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, setting the right’s agenda for it.

    Under the title “How to end up serving the right”, Robinson claims that Greenwald and Taibbi, once his intellectual heroes, are – inadvertently or otherwise – shoring up the right’s positions and weakening the left. He accuses them of reckless indifference to the consequences of criticising a “liberal” establishment and making common cause with the right’s similar agenda. Both writers, argues Robinson, have ignored the fact that the right wields the greatest power in our societies.

    This appears to be a continuation of a fight Robinson picked last year with Krystal Ball, the leftwing, former co-host of a popular online politics show called The Rising. Robinson attacked her for sharing her platform with the conservative pundit Saagar Enjeti. Ball and Enjeti have since struck out on their own, recently launching a show called Breaking Points.

    Notably, Greenwald invited Robinson on to his own YouTube channel to discuss these criticisms of Ball when Robinson first made them. In my opinion, Robinson emerged from that exchange looking more than a little bruised.

    As with his clash with Ball, there are problems with Robinson’s fuzzy political definitions.

    Somewhat ludicrously in his earlier tussle, he lumped together Enjeti, a thoughtful right wing populist, with figures like Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, both of them narcissists and authoritarians (of varying degrees of competence) that have donned the garb of populism, as authoritarians tend to do.

    Similarly, Robinson’s current disagreements with Greenwald and Taibbi stem in part from a vague formulation – one he seems partially to concede – of what constitutes the “left”. Greenwald has always struck me more as a progressive libertarian than a clearcut socialist like Robinson. Differences of political emphasis and priorities are inevitable. They are also healthy.

    And much of Robinson’s essay is dedicated to cherrypicking a handful of tweets from Greenwald and Taibbi to make his case. Greenwald, in particular, is a prolific tweeter. And given the combative and polarising arena of Twitter, it would be quite astonishing had he not occasionally advanced his arguments without the nuance demanded by Robinson.

    Overall, Robinson’s case against both Greenwald and Taibbi is far less persuasive than he appears to imagine.

    Stifling coverage

    But the reason I think it worth examining his essay is because it demonstrates a more fundamental split on what – for the sake of convenience – I shall treat as a broader intellectual left that includes Robinson, Greenwald and Taibbi.

    Robinson tries to prop up his argument that Greenwald, in particular, is betraying the left and legitimising the right with an argument from authority, citing some of the left’s biggest icons.

    Two, Naomi Klein and Jeremy Scahill, are former journalist colleagues of Greenwald’s at the Intercept, the billionaire-financed online news publication that he co-founded and eventually split from after it broke an editorial promise not to censor his articles.

    Greenwald fell out with the editors in spectacularly public fashion late last year after they stifled his attempts to write about the way Silicon Valley and liberal corporate media outlets – not unlike the Intercept – were colluding to stifle negative coverage of Joe Biden in the run-up to the presidential election, in a desperate bid to ensure he beat Trump.

    Greenwald’s public statements about his reasons for leaving the Intercept exposed what were effectively institutional failings there – and implicated those like Scahill and Klein who had actively or passively colluded in the editorial censorship of its co-founder. Klein and Scahill are hardly dispassionate commentators on Greenwald when they accuse him of “losing the plot” and “promoting smears”. They have skin in the game.

    But Robinson may think his trump (sic) card is an even bigger left icon, Noam Chomsky, who is quoted saying of Greenwald: “He’s a friend, has done wonderful things, I don’t understand what is happening now… I hope it will pass.”

    The problem with this way of presenting Greenwald is that the tables can be easily turned. Over the past few years, my feeds – and I am sure others’ – have been filled with followers asking versions of “What happened to Chomsky?” or “What happened to Amy Goodman and Democracy Now?”

    The answer to these very reductive questions – what happened to Greenwald and what happened to Chomsky – is the same. Trump happened. And their different responses are illustrative of the way the left polarised during the Trump presidency and how it continues to divide in the post-Trump era.

    Authoritarian thinking

    Robinson treats the Trump factor – what we might term Post-Traumatic Trump Disorder – as though it is irrelevant to his analysis of Greenwald and Taibbi. And yet it lies at the heart of the current tensions on the left. In its simplest terms, the split boils down to the question of how dangerous Trump really was and is, and what that means for the left in terms of its political responses.

    Unlike Robinson, I don’t think it is helpful to personalise this. Instead, we should try to understand what has happened to left politics more generally in the Trump and post-Trump era.

    Parts of the left joined liberals in becoming fixated on Trump as a uniquely evil and dangerous presence in US politics. Robinson notes that Trump posed an especial and immediate threat to our species’ survival through his denial of climate change, and on these grounds alone every effort had to be made to remove him.

    Others on the left recoil from this approach. They warn that, by fixating on Trump, elements of the left have drifted into worryingly authoritarian ways of thinking – sometimes openly, more often implicitly – as a bulwark against the return of Trump or anyone like him.

    The apotheosis of such tendencies was the obsession, shared alike by liberals and some on the left, with Russiagate. This supposed scandal highlighted in stark fashion the extreme dangers of focusing on a single figure, in Trump, rather than addressing the wider, corrupt political structures that produced him.

    It was not just the massive waste of time and energy that went into trying to prove the unprovable claims of Trump’s collusion with the Kremlin – resources that would have been far better invested in addressing Trump’s real crimes, which were being committed out in the open.

    It was that the politically tribal Trump-Russia narrative engulfed and subverted a meaningful politics of resistance. It snared those like Wikileaks founder Julian Assange who had been trying to break open the black box of western politics. It fortified the US security services after they had been exposed by Edward Snowden’s revelations as secretly and illegally conducting mass spying on the public’s communications. It breathed a dangerous credibility into the corrupt Democratic party machine after its embarrassment over engineering Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy. And it revived the fortunes of an increasingly discredited liberal media that quickly won large ratings by promoting fabulists like Rachel Maddow.

    Those on the left who tried to challenge Russiagate in order to focus on real political issues were stigmatised as Putin’s puppets, their arguments were labelled “fake news”, and they were gradually algorithmed into social media purdah.

    Under the Russiagate banner, parts of the left were soon rallying, however reluctantly, behind corporate champions of the planet-destroying status quo.

    But it was even worse than that. The fixation on the obviously hollow Russiagate narrative by the Democratic Party, the corporate media, Silicon Valley, and the US intelligence agencies served to prove to wide swaths of conservative America that Trump was right when he berated a “liberal” establishment for being invested only in its own self-preservation and not caring about ordinary Americans.

    Russiagate did not just divide the left, it dramatically strengthened the right.

    Free speech dangers

    Robinson knows all this, at least intellectually, but perhaps because Trump looms so large in his thinking he does not weigh the significance in the same terms as Greenwald and Taibbi.

    The problem with characterising Trump as a supremely evil figure is that all sorts of authoritarian political conclusions flow from that characterisation – precisely the political conclusions we have seen parts of the left adopting. Robinson may not expressly share these conclusions but, unlike Greenwald and Taibbi, he has largely ignored or downplayed the threat they present.

    If Trump poses a unique danger to democracy, then to avoid any recurrence:

    • We are obligated to rally uncritically, or at least very much less critically, behind whoever was selected to be his opponent. Following Trump’s defeat, we are dutybound to restrain our criticisms of the winner, Joe Biden, however poor his performance, in case it opens the door to Trump, or someone like Trump, standing for the presidency in four years’ time.
    • We must curb free speech and limit the free-for-all of social media in case it contributed to the original surge of support for Trump, or created the more febrile political environment in which Trump flourished.
    • We must eradicate all signs of populism, whether on the right or the left, because we cannot be sure that in a battle of populisms the left will defeat the right, or that left wing populism cannot be easily flipped into right wing populism.
    • And most importantly, we must learn to distrust “the masses” – those who elected Trump – because they have demonstrated that they are too easily swayed by emotion, prejudice and charisma. Instead, we must think in more traditional liberal terms, of rule by technocrats and “experts” who can be trusted to run our societies largely in secret but provide a stability that should keep any Trumps out of power.

    Greenwald and Taibbi have been focusing precisely on this kind of political fallout from the Trump presidency. And it looks suspiciously like this, as much as anything else, is what is antagonising Robinson and others.

    Greenwald’s own experiences at the Intercept underline his concerns. It was not just that Greenwald was forced out over his efforts late last year to talk about the documents found on Hunter Biden’s laptop and the questions they raised about his father, the man who was about to become US president. It was that the Intercept stopped Greenwald from talking about how the entire liberal corporate media and all of Silicon Valley were actively conspiring to crush any attempt to talk about those documents and their significance – and not on the basis of whether they were genuine or not.

    Greenwald walked away from what amounted to a very well-paid sinecure at the Intercept to highlight this all-out assault on democratic discourse and the election process – an assault whose purpose was not the search for truth but to prevent any danger of Trump being re-elected. By contrast, in a tweet thread that has not aged well, Robinson along with many others quibbled about the specifics of Greenwald’s case and whether it amounted to censorship, very much ignoring the wood for the trees.

    Greenwald and Taibbi talk so much about the role of the traditional media and Silicon Valley because they understand that the media’s professed liberalism – claims to be protecting the rights of women, ethnic minorities and the trans community – is a very effective way of prettifying corporate authoritarianism, an authoritarianism the left claims to be fighting but has readily endorsed once it has been given a liberal makeover.

    It is not that the “liberal” establishment – the corporate media, Silicon Valley, the intelligence services – is actually liberal. It is that liberals have come increasingly to identify with that establishment as sharing their values.

    For this reason, Robinson obscures the real nature of the divide on the left when he discusses the power of the Supreme Court. He criticises Greenwald and Taibbi for ignoring the fact that the right exercises absolute power through its packing of the court with rightwing judges. He accuses them of instead unfairly emphasising the power exercised by this “liberal” establishment.

    But despite Robinson’s claims, the Supreme Court very obviously doesn’t wield “all the power”, even with its veto over legislation and actions of the administration. Because an even greater power is invested in those institutions that can control the public’s ability to access and interpret information; to find out what is being done in the shadows; and to make choices based on that information, including about who should represent them.

    Information control and narrative management are the deepest forms of power because they shape our ability to think critically, to resist propaganda, to engage in dialogue and to forge alliances that might turn the tide against a profoundly corrupt establishment that includes both the Supreme Court and Silicon Valley. Robinson ignores this point in his essay, even though it is fundamental to assessing “What happened to Greenwald and Taibbi?”. A commitment to keeping channels of information open and ensuring dialogue continues, even in the post-Trump era, is what happened to them.

    Hard drives smashed

    The crux of Robinson’s argument is that Greenwald and Taibbi have made a pact with the devil, gradually chaining their more progressive credentials to a Trumpian rightwing populism to defeat the “liberal” establishment. That, Robinson suggests, will only strengthen and embolden the right, and ensure the return of a Trump.

    The evidence Robinson and others adduce for Greenwald’s betrayal, in particular, are his now regular appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, where Greenwald and Carlson often find common ground against the authoritarian excesses of that same “liberal” establishment.

    That should not surprise us. Carlson and the right have an interest in the break-up of Silicon Valley’s tech monopolies that favour a Democratic Party authoritarianism over their own Republican Party authoritarianism. Greenwald has an interest in the break-up of Silicon Valley’s tech monopolies too but for a very different reason: because he is against monopolies designed to keep the public propagandised and manipulated.

    Opposing them both is an authoritarian “liberal” establishment – the Democratic Party, traditional corporate media, Silicon Valley, the intelligence services – that have every interest in perpetuating their control over the tech monopolies.

    Robinson contrasts Greenwald’s behaviour to his own clean hands as the editor of the small socialist magazine, Current Affairs.

    But we should note that Robinson has compromised himself far more than he cares to admit. For several years he used the liberal corporate outlet of the Guardian as a platform from which to present a watered-down version of his own socialist politics. To do so, he had to ignore the paper’s appalling record of warmongering abroad and of subverting socialists like Jeremy Corbyn at home.

    Robinson finally came unstuck when a Guardian editor effectively fired him for writing a satirical tweet about the huge sums of aid given by the US to Israel each year to kill and maim Palestinians under occupation and destroy their infrastructure.

    One can debate whether it is wise for the left to use essentially hostile corporate platforms – liberal or conservative – to advance its arguments. But that is not the debate Robinson is trying to provoke. And for obvious reasons: because in piggybacking on the Guardian, Robinson did what Greenwald has done in piggybacking on Tucker Carlson. Both have used the reach of a larger corporate outlet to build their audience and expand the number of people exposed to their more progressive ideas.

    There is an apparent difference, though. In Robinson’s case, he has admitted with impressive frankness that he would have been willing to self-censor on Israel had he been told by the Guardian beforehand that speaking out was likely to cost him his job. That sets his own position apart from Greenwald, who decided to walk from the Intercept rather than allow his work to be censored.

    Nonetheless, it is far from clear, as Robinson assumes, that liberal corporate outlets are a safer bet for the left to ally with than rightwing corporate outlets.

    Greenwald, remember, was eased out of the “liberal” Guardian many years before Robinson’s sacking after he brought the paper the glory associated with the Snowden revelations while also incurring the intelligence services’ wrath. Those revelations exposed the dark underbelly of the US national security state under the “liberal” presidency of Barack Obama, not Trump. And years later, Greenwald was again pushed out, this time from the supposedly even more “liberal” Intercept as part of its efforts to protect Biden, Obama’s Democratic party successor.

    Greenwald wasn’t dispatched from these publications for being too righ-twing. Tensions escalated at the Guardian over the security service backlash to Greenwald’s unwavering commitment to free speech and transparency – just as the Guardian earlier fell out with Assange faced with the security services’ retaliation for Wikileaks’ exposure of western war crimes.

    The Guardian’s own commitment to transparency was surrendered with its agreement to carry out the UK security services’ demand that it smash hard drives packed with Snowden’s secrets. The destruction of those files may have been largely symbolic (there were copies in the possession of the New York Times) but the message it sent to the left and to the UK intelligence agencies was clear enough: from now on, the Guardian was resolutely going to be a team player.

    What these experiences with the Guardian and the Intercept doubtless demonstrated to Greenwald was that his most fundamental political principles were essentially incompatible with those of the “liberal” media – and all the more so in the Trump era. The priority for liberal publications was not truth-telling or hosting all sides of the debate but frantically shoring up the authority of a “moderate” technocratic elite, one that would ensure a stable neoliberal environment in which it could continue its wealth extraction and accumulation.

    Robinson implies that Greenwald has been embittered by these experiences, and is petulantly hitting back against the “liberal” establishment without regard to the consequences. But a fairer reading would be that Greenwald is fighting against kneejerk, authoritarian instincts wherever they are found in our societies – on the right, the centre and the left.

    The irony is that he appears to be getting a better hearing on Tucker Carlson than he does at the Guardian or the Intercept. Contrary to Robinson’s claim, that says more about the Guardian and the so-called liberal media than it does about Greenwald.

    Captured by wokeness

    Robinson also misrepresents what Greenwald and Taibbi are trying to do when they appear on rightwing media.

    First, he gives every impression of arguing that, by appearing on the Tucker Carlson show, Greenwald naively hopes to persuade Carlson to switch allegiance from a right wing to left wing populism. But Greenwald doesn’t go on the Tucker Carlson show to turn its host into a leftist. He appears on the show to reach and influence Carlson’s millions of viewers, who do not have the same investment in neoliberalism’s continuing success as the multi-millionaire Carlson does.

    Is Greenwald’s calculation any more unreasonable than Robinson’s belief while writing for the Guardian that he might succeed in turning the Guardian’s liberal readers into socialists? Is Robinson right to assume that liberals are any less committed to their selfish political worldview than the right? Or that – when their side is losing – liberal readers of the Guardian are any less susceptible to authoritarianism than rightwing viewers of Fox News?

    Robinson also wrongly accuses Greenwald and Taibbi of suggesting that the CIA and major corporations have, in Robinson’s words, “become captured by culturally left ‘woke’ ideology”. But neither writer appears to believe that Black Lives Matter or #MeToo is dictating policy to the establishment. The pair are arguing instead that the CIA and the corporations are exploiting and manipulating “woke” ideology to advance their own authoritarian agendas.

    Their point is not that the establishment is liberal but rather that it can more credibly market itself as liberal or progressive when a Trump is in power or when it is feared that a Trump might return to power. And that perception weakens truly progressive politics. By donning the garb of liberalism, elites are able to twist the values and objectives of social movements in ways designed to damage them and foster greater social divisions.

    A feminism that celebrates women taking all the top jobs at the big arms manufacturers – the corporations whose business is the murder of men, women and children – is not really feminism. It is a perversion of feminism. Similarly, establishment claims to “wokeness” provide cover as western elites internally divide their own societies and dominate or destroy foreign ones.

    “Woke authoritarianism”, as Robinson mockingly terms it, is not an attribute of wokeness. It is a description of one specific incarnation of authoritarianism that is currently favoured by an establishment that, in the post-Trump era, has managed more successfully to cast itself as liberal.

    Mask turn-off

    The central issue here – the one Robinson raises but avoids discussing – is what political conditions are most likely to foster authoritarianism in the US and other western states, and what can be done to reverse those conditions.

    For Robinson, the answer is reassuringly straightforward. Trump and his rightwing populism pose the biggest threat, and the Democratic party – however dismal its leaders – is the only available vehicle for countering that menace. Therefore, left journalists have a duty to steer clear of arguments or associations that might confer legitimacy on the right.

    For Greenwald and Taibbi, the picture looks far more complicated, treacherous and potentially bleak.

    Trump fundamentally divided the US. For a significant section of the public, he answered their deep-seated and intensifying disenchantment with a political system that appears to be rigged against their interests after its wholesale takeover by corporate elites decades ago. He offered hope, however false.

    For others, Trump threatened to topple the liberal facade the corporate elites had erected to sanctify their rule. He dispensed with the liberal pieties that had so effectively served to conceal US imperialism abroad and to maintain the fiction of democracy at home. His election tore the mask off everything that was already deeply ugly about the US political system.

    Did that glimpse into the abyss fuel the sense of urgency among liberals and parts of the left to be rid of Trump at all costs – and the current desperation to prevent him or someone like him from returning to the Oval Office, even if it means further trashing free speech and transparency?

    In essence, the dilemma the left now faces is this:

    To work with the Democrats, with liberals, who are desperate to put the mask back on the system, to shore up its deceptions, so that political stability can be restored – a stability that is waging war around the globe, that is escalating the threat of super-power tensions and nuclear annihilation, and that is destroying the planet.

    Or to keep the mask off, and work with those elements of the populist left and right that share a commitment to free speech and transparency, in the hope that through open debate we can expose the current rule by an unaccountable, authoritarian technocratic class and its corporate patrons masquerading as “liberals”.

    The truth is we may be caught between a rock and hard place. Even as the warning signs mount, liberals may stick with the comfort blanket of rule by self-professed experts to the bitter end, to the point of economic and ecological collapse. And conservatives may, at the end of the day, prove that their commitment to free speech and disdain for corporate elites is far weaker than their susceptibility to narcissist strongmen.

    Robinson no more has a crystal ball to see the future than Greenwald. Both are making decisions in the dark. For that reason, Robinson and his allies on the left would be better advised to stop claiming they hold the moral high ground.

    The post What happened to Glenn Greenwald? Trump happened and put the left’s priorities to the test first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • UN warns of worst ‘cascade of human rights setbacks in our lifetimes’

    Rights chief calls for concerted global action, citing recent violations in China, Russia and Ethiopia

    The UN rights chief has called for concerted action to recover from the worst global deterioration of rights she had seen, highlighting the situation in China, Russia and Ethiopia among others.

    “To recover from the most wide-reaching and severe cascade of human rights setbacks in our lifetimes, we need a life-changing vision, and concerted action,” Michelle Bachelet told the opening of the UN Human Rights Council’s 47th session.

    Related: ‘Bodies are being eaten by hyenas; girls of eight raped’: inside the Tigray conflict

    Related: China’s Uyghurs living in a ‘dystopian hellscape’, says Amnesty report

    Continue reading…

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

  • United States: The Biden-Putin meeting and the nuclear threat

    United States President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin have agreed to discuss the control of nuclear weapons, reports Barry Sheppard, but the expansion of NATO and US imperialist interests may block any meaningful outcome.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Trust Lacking at Blah Summit

    Aside from establishing face-to-face contact between the the two presidents, the Biden-Putin summit today met only the most modest expectations of those hoping for improved ties between the U.S. and Russia. By the same token, weapons makers and others profiteering on tension with Russia, and living in fear of a thaw in bilateral relations, can now breathe a sigh of relief.

    The post Trust Lacking at Blah Summit appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Putin-Biden Summit ‘Seems Thin’

    The results of the Putin-Biden summit today in Geneva seem to be thin. The meetings were expected to last for 4 to 5 hours but ended after little more than 2 hours.

    During his press conference President Vladimir Putin said that the talks were constructive. He lauded Biden as very experienced politician and said that they had two hours of face time.

    There were a few results:

    The ambassadors of both sides, who had been recalled from Washington and Moscow, will return to their posts.
    There will be new expert rounds about cybersecurity.
    There may be talks about an exchange of prisoners.
    There will be new rounds about security, which means strategic nuclear weapons.

    The post Putin-Biden Summit ‘Seems Thin’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Why Democracies in G7 and NATO Should Reject U.S. Leadership

    Photo credit: BPM Media – Protest at G7 summit in Cornwall UK

    The world has been treated to successive spectacles of national leaders gathering at a G7 Summit in Cornwall and a NATO Summit in Brussels.

    The U.S. corporate media have portrayed these summits as chances for President Biden to rally the leaders of the world’s democratic nations in a coordinated response to the most serious problems facing the world, from the COVID pandemic, climate change and global inequality to ill-defined “threats to democracy” from Russia and China.

    But there’s something seriously wrong with this picture. Democracy means “rule by the people.” While that can take different forms in different countries and cultures, there is a growing consensus in the United States that the exceptional power of wealthy Americans and corporations to influence election results and government policies has led to a de facto system of government that fails to reflect the will of the American people on many critical issues.

    So when President Biden meets with the leaders of democratic countries, he represents a country that is, in many ways, an undemocratic outlier rather than a leader among democratic nations. This is evident in:

    – the “legalized bribery” of 2020’s $14.4 billion federal election, compared with recent elections in Canada and the U.K. that cost less than 1% of that, under strict rules that ensure more democratic results;

    – a defeated President proclaiming baseless accusations of fraud and inciting a mob to invade the U.S. Congress on January 6 2021;

    – news media that have been commercialized, consolidated, gutted and dumbed down by their corporate owners, making Americans easy prey for misinformation by unscrupulous interest groups, and leaving the U.S. in 44th place on Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index;

    – the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, with over two million people behind bars, and systemic police violence on a scale never seen in other wealthy nations;

    – the injustice of extreme inequality, poverty and cradle-to-grave debt for millions in an otherwise wealthy nation;

    – an exceptional lack of economic and social mobility compared to other wealthy countries that is the antithesis of the mythical “American Dream”;

    – privatized, undemocratic and failing education and healthcare systems;

    – a recent history of illegal invasions, massacres of civilians, torture, drone assassinations, extraordinary renditions and indefinite detention at Guantanamo—with no accountabllity;

    – and, last but not least, a gargantuan war machine capable of destroying the world, in the hands of this dysfunctional political system.

    Fortunately, though, Americans are not the only ones asking what is wrong with American democracy. The Alliance of Democracies Foundation (ADF), founded by former Danish Prime Minister and NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, conducted a poll of 50,000 people in 53 countries between February and April 2021, and found that people around the world share our concerns about America’s dystopian political system and imperial outrages.

    Probably the most startling result of the poll to Americans would be its finding that more people around the world (44%) see the United States as a threat to democracy in their countries than China (38%) or Russia (28%), which makes nonsense of U.S. efforts to justify its revived Cold War on Russia and China in the name of democracy.

    In a larger poll of 124,000 people that ADF conducted in 2020, countries where large majorities saw the United States as a danger to democracy included China, but also Germany, Austria, Denmark, Ireland, France, Greece, Belgium, Sweden and Canada.

    After tea with the Queen at Windsor Castle, Biden swooped into Brussels on Air Force One for a NATO summit to advance its new “Strategic Concept,” which is nothing more than a war plan for World War III against both Russia and China.

    But we take solace from evidence that the people of Europe, whom the NATO war plan counts on as front-line troops and mass casualty victims, are not ready to follow President Biden to war. A January 2021 survey by the European Council on Foreign Affairs found that large majorities of Europeans want to remain neutral in any U.S. war on Russia or China. Only 22% would want their country to take the U.S. side in a war on China, and 23% in a war on Russia.

    Few Americans realize that Biden already came close to war with Russia in March and April, when the United States and NATO supported a new Ukrainian offensive in its civil war against Russian-allied separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Russia moved tens of thousands of heavily-armed troops to its borders with Ukraine, to make it clear that it was ready to defend its Ukrainian allies and was quite capable of doing so. On April 13th, Biden blinked, turned round two U.S. destroyers that were steaming into the Black Sea and called Putin to request the summit that is now taking place.

    The antipathy of ordinary people everywhere toward the U.S. determination to provoke military confrontation with Russia and China begs serious questions about the complicity of their leaders in these incredibly dangerous, possibly suicidal, U.S. policies. When ordinary people all over the world can see the dangers and pitfalls of following the United States as a model and a leader, why do their neoliberal leaders keep showing up to lend credibility to the posturing of U.S. leaders at summits like the G7 and NATO?

    Maybe it is precisely because the United States has succeeded in what the corporate ruling classes of other nations also aspire to, namely, greater concentrations of wealth and power and less public interference in their “freedom” to accumulate and control them.

    Maybe the leaders of other wealthy countries and military powers are genuinely awed by the dystopian American Dream as the example par excellence of how to sell inequality, injustice and war to the public in the name of freedom and democracy.

    In that case, the fact that people in other wealthy countries are not so easily led to war or lured into political passivity and impotence would only increase the awe of their leaders for their American counterparts, who literally laugh all the way to the bank as they pay lip service to the sanctity of the American Dream and the American People.

    Ordinary people in other countries are right to be wary of the Pied Piper of American “leadership,” but their rulers should be too. The fracturing and disintegration of American society should stand as a warning to neoliberal governments and ruling classes everywhere to be more careful what they wish for.

    Instead of a world in which other countries emulate or fall victim to America’s failed experiment in extreme neoliberalism, the key to a peaceful, sustainable and prosperous future for all the world’s people, including Americans, lies in working together, learning from each other and adopting policies that serve the public good and improve the lives of all, especially those most in need. There’s a name for that. It’s called democracy.

    The post Why Democracies in G7 and NATO Should Reject U.S. Leadership first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Olga Sadovskaya is the 2021 OAK Human Rights Fellow

    The Oak Institute for Human Rights has named Olga Sadovskaya, a Russian human rights lawyer, as its 2021 Human Rights Fellow. Sadovskaya, vice chair of the Committee Against Torture, the largest and most notable anti-torture organization in Russia, has worked on issues surrounding torture for more than 18 years. In 2017 she was shortlisted for the Nobel Peace Prize.

    Sadovskaya, who hails from the city of Nizhny Novgorod in western Russia, will join the Colby community in August and will engage with students, faculty, staff, and the greater community throughout the fall semester.

    Olga Sadovskaya, the 2021 Oak Human Rights Fellow, will join the Colby community for the Fall 2021 semester and raise awareness on issues of torture and incarceration in Russia and around the world.

    “The consistent violation of human rights in the carceral system is not only a major global problem but it is an urgent issue in the United States. There is a pressing need to confront and find better solutions to our current prison system,” said Valérie Dionne, director of the Oak Institute for Human Rights and associate professor of French. “We are lucky to have Olga Sadovskaya coming to campus to share her experience combating torture and to explore potential solutions with us that could replace the current carceral system.”

    The Committee Against Torture (CAT), established in 2000 by Sadovskaya and three other activists, created accountability for torture previously missing in Russia. Torture was scarcely discussed, and victims were often scared, ashamed to speak out, or believed justice was unattainable. Even with CAT’s work, however, the practice of torture prevails, and investigations into torture are still inadequate. This problem is amplified in the Chechen Republic, where CAT is the sole organization working on cases of torture and abductions. 

    Sadovskaya and her dedicated team have won many international awards: the PACE Prize of the Council of Europe, the Martin Ennals Award, the Frontline Defenders Human Rights Award, and the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize. Sadovskaya herself has received the Andrei Sakharov Freedom Award. See: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/D1B800F8-72AE-F593-868A-57F650E2D576 and https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/5E2006EC-8C84-6024-F77C-52D17819BB10

    During her early years at the organization, Sadovskaya’s role as an investigator included collecting evidence of torture in prisons, penal colonies, police stations, and psychiatric institutions. Over time, she transitioned to analysis and international defense work with the European Court of Human Rights and various UN bodies. Sadovskaya also trains lawyers on how to work with the European Court of Human Rights. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2015/12/02/russian-olga-sadovskaya-keeps-fighting-torture/

    Drawing upon years of experience with torture cases, Sadovskaya and her team wrote and published a methodology for public investigations, widely used by human rights organizations in Russia. Sadovskaya has personally represented more than 300 victims of torture before the European Court of Justice. Two of the cases were included in the list of the 20 most important cases that changed Russia (Case-Law of the European Court of Human Rights, Special issue, 5, 2018).  

    While working against state-sanctioned torture, Sadovskaya has faced personal threats, including threats of murder, particularly for her work in Chechnya. The committee’s office has been burned down several times, and members’ cars have been destroyed. Sadovskaya is also periodically monitored and constantly at risk of being accused of baseless crimes. 

    The Oak Human Rights Fellowship will give Sadovskaya a much-needed respite to return to Russia with renewed energy. As the 2021 Oak Fellow, she will connect with Colby students and raise awareness on issues of torture and incarceration in Russia and around the world. 

    http://www.colby.edu/news/2021/06/11/olga-sadovskaya-named-2021-oak-human-rights-fellow/

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

  • NATO Summit: Building Unity against Russia, China, Cyberattacks

    NATO members at its first in-person gathering since 2018 have adopted a new 2030 strategic concept proposed by Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. The joint communiqué of the bloc’s 30 nations said that they agreed further to strengthen NATO in the face of any threats.

    “[We will] strengthen NATO as the organizing framework for the collective defense of the Euro-Atlantic area, against all threats, from all directions,” the statement said.

    The alliance members have stated that they are facing “systemic competition from assertive and authoritarian powers” as well as growing security challenges. They specifically focused on Russia and China, among the leading causes of their concerns, with a nod to the nuclear deal with Iran.

    The post NATO Summit: Building Unity against Russia, China, Cyberattacks appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • History writing in Russia suppressed

    A new FIDH report published on 10 June 20212 finds that human rights abuses targeting historians, activists, journalists, and NGOs working on historical memory of the Soviet past have become systematic since at least 2014. Legal impediments and implementation of laws designed to stifle free speech and freedom of association, arbitrary arrests and prosecutions, censorship, public smear campaigns, and failure to provide effective remedies for past abuses are just some of the violations detailed.

    In recent years, control over the historical narrative of the Soviet past has become an essential tool for consolidating authoritarian rule. Building Russia’s collective identity around Soviet victory in the Second World War, the current regime attacks historians, journalists, civil society activists, and non-governmental organisations that work to keep alive a historical memory of the Soviet past that focuses on identification of the perpetrators and victims of the likes of the Great Terror, Joseph Stalin’s 1937-38 campaign of deadly political repression.

    The new FIDH report, Russia: Crimes Against History, catalogues these violations, analyses them from the viewpoint of international human rights law, and makes recommendations to national authorities and international organisations on how to improve the situation of so-called “history producers.”

    “Our report is the first comprehensive analysis of the issue of manipulation of historical memory in Russia from the vantage point of human rights law,” said Ilya Nuzov, head of FIDH’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk who conceived and co-authored the report. “Our findings show that the authorities have created a climate of fear and repression for all independent voices working on historical past in Russia, reminiscent of the worst practices of the Soviet period.”

    Specifically, the report details how, in recent years, the government has methodically attempted to discourage independent work in the historical field while actively promoting its own “historical truth” that centers on Soviet victory in the Second World War.

    In 2020, the official historical narrative was set in stone in the Constitution, which was amended contrary to domestic and international law. In the Constitution, Russia is presented as the “successor” regime of the Soviet Union, which must “honour the memory of the defenders of the fatherland” and “protect the historical truth.” This narrative is actively promoted by government institutions. On the other hand, the authorities have stigmatised and penalised internationally supported civil society organisations, such as International Memorial, with the likes of foreign agent laws; it has criminalised interpretations that diverge from the state’s interpretation of history through the adoption of “Exoneration of Nazism” and other memory laws; and it has organised show trials against independent historians like Yuri Dmitriev, who received a draconian 13-year sentence for his tireless work to identify and commemorate victims of the Great Terror. Seae also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2020/10/01/dunja-mijatovic-calls-on-russia-to-end-judicial-harassment-of-human-rights-defenders/

    “The report is important not only for Russia,” remarked Valiantsin Stefanovic, FIDH vice president. “Its findings and recommendations could be applied to other countries in the region and around the world that manipulate historical memory. In Belarus for instance, we see a similar use of memory laws to crack down on the pro-democracy movement.”

    The report formulates a number of recommendations, such as the establishment of legal guarantees and protections to safeguard the independence of historians’ work. It also proposes the official recognition of historians as human rights defenders by United Nations special procedures, in addition to the creation of a “historians’ day” by UNESCO.

    Click to access russie-_pad-uk-web.pdf

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

  • Russian court outlaws Alexei Navalny’s organisation

    Court has in effect liquidated the opposition politician’s movement by classifying it as ‘extremist’

    A Russian court has outlawed opposition politician Alexei Navalny’s nationwide political organisation on the grounds it is “extremist”, in a landmark step for Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on political dissent.

    The court decision, which had been anticipated, in effect liquidates Navalny’s non-violent opposition movement and bars his allies from running for office for years, as the Kremlin seeks to erase the jailed opposition leader from Russian political life.

    Related: The Guardian view on Russia’s opposition: given hell, but not giving up | Editorial

    Continue reading…

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

  • Ka-52 attack helicopter completes test launches of Vikhr missiles

    The Kalashnikov Group has announced the completion of the flight tests of the Vikhr AT-16 Scallion anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs)[1]. During the trials, a Kamov Ka-52 Hokum-B combat-reconnaissance helicopter conducted 22 missile launches[2]. “The modernization has resulted in an increase of the probability of hitting targets at short ranges, and the flight stability was improved. […]

    The post Ka-52 attack helicopter completes test launches of Vikhr missiles appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Media Converges On The Narrative That UFOs May Be Russian/Chinese Threat

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    So in case you haven’t been keeping up it’s been pretty thoroughly confirmed that the US government’s highly anticipated UFO report due this month won’t contain any significant revelations and certainly won’t verify anyone’s ideas about these phenomena being extraterrestrial in origin, but it absolutely will contain fearmongering that UFOs could be evidence that the US has fallen dangerously behind Russian and Chinese technological development in the cold war arms race.

    Unknown US officials have done a print media tour speaking to the press on condition of anonymity (of course), with first The New York Times reporting their statements about the contents of the UFO report and then CNN and The Washington Post. Each of these outlets reported the same thing: the US government doesn’t know what these things are but is very concerned they constitute evidence that Russia and/or China have somehow managed to technologically leapfrog US military development by light years. All three mention these two nations explicitly.

    This narrative was then picked up by cable news, with MSNBC inviting former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta on to explain to their audience that the US government should assume UFOs are Russian or Chinese in origin until that possibility has been exhausted.

    “Is it your assumption that it is Russia or China testing some crazy technology that we somehow don’t have, or are we sort of over-assuming the abilities of China and Russia and that the only other explanation is that if it is not us ourselves then it is something otherworldly?” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd asked Panetta.

    “I believe a lot of this stuff probably could be countries like Russia, like China, like others, who are using now drones, using the kind of sophisticated weaponry that could very well be involved in a lot of these sightings,” Panetta replied. “I think that’s the area to go to very frankly in order to identify what’s happening.”

    “It sounds like you think we should exhaust that out, exhaust that hypothesis first before you start dealing with other hypotheses,” Todd said.

    “Yeah, absolutely,” said Panetta, who for the record is every bit as much of a tyrannical, thuggish imperialist cold warrior as any other CIA director.

    This UFOs-as-Chinese/Russian-threat narrative has quickly been picked up and thrust into mainstream orthodoxy by all the major branches of the mass media, from Fox News to Reuters to The Guardian to Today to the BBC to USA Today. Whenever you see the imperial media converge to this extent upon a single narrative, that’s the Official Narrative of the empire. We can expect to see a lot more of this going forward.

    Interestingly, the only mass media segment I’ve seen on this topic since the New York Times story broke which doesn’t promote the UFOs-as-Chinese/Russian-threat narrative is a guest appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight by Lue Elizondo, the military intelligence veteran who got the ball rolling on the new UFO narrative which emerged in 2017. Elizondo goes out of his way to tell Carlson (who himself has been promoting the idea that UFOs may be a foreign adversarial threat with cartoonish melodrama) that there’s no way these could be Russian or Chinese aircraft.

    Elizondo, who seems to favor the UFOs-as-extraterrestrials narrative, argues that there are extensive records of military encounters with these phenomena stretching back seventy years, which rules out China since it could barely keep its head above water back then and rules out Russia because it shared its UFO knowledge with the US after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

    I don’t know what’s going on with that last bit; I see no reason to trust that an American spook is acting in good faith on such an easily manipulated topic, but it is entirely possible that Elizondo set out on this road out of a sincere desire for government disclosure on UFOs and is now trying to regain control of the narrative now that he sees the cold war arms race direction it has taken.

    Chris Melon, another major player in the new UFO narrative, recently complained on Twitter that “some important information was not shared” with the public in the UFO report. So who knows, maybe the initiators of this new UFO narrative were acting in good faith and their efforts were just swiftly hijacked by forces beyond their control to advance preexisting cold war agendas.

    Regardless of whether or not that’s true, it was always inevitable that this strange new rabbit hole of UFOs going mainstream was going to lead to more cold war propaganda. I’ve been interacting a bit with the online UFO community for the first time ever, and it seems like they’re mostly decent people with good intentions and a lot of hope for this new governmental investigation. But it also seems like they’re largely a community which mostly just talks to itself and is only just beginning to meet the cold harsh light of day that is the impenetrable depravity of the US war machine.

    The US government is pure swamp; you can’t use the swamp to fix the swamp. Democrats were never going to use a Special Counsel to remove Trump, Trump was never going to take down the Deep State, and the US government isn’t going to investigate itself and tell everyone that aliens are real.

    If there are indeed extraterrestrials and they are indeed flying around our world in strange aircraft, we are more likely to get the truth about this from the extraterrestrials themselves than from the US military. The war machine only does killing and destruction; it’s not going to suddenly develop an interest in truth and transparency. The sooner UFO enthusiasts realize this the better.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.