President Joe Biden and some Democrats in Congress are trying to make one hell of a bad deal. A recent vote for emergency military funding that would have traded extremist demands from the Republican Party on immigration for billions of dollars in military aid to Israel, Taiwan and Ukraine failed in the Senate. But now, some Democrats have signaled that they’re willing to trade human rights for…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
NATO’s having won Finland as a member is the worst blow to Russia’s national security in decades, and it wouldn’t have happened if Putin had played his cards right. This fact will be explained here:
No one is perfect; and, as I’ve explained elsewhere (such as here) I believe that Putin’s track-record during his now nearly 23 years of being the leader of Russia is vastly superior to that of any leader of any U.S.-and-allied country during any portion of that 23-year period. However, I shall explain here why I believe that Putin’s public-relations errors regarding his handling of Ukraine constitute a major flaw in his leadership-record and produced Finland’s becoming a NATO member — and potentially the most dangerous one to Russia in all of Europe.
The most crucial thing to understand is why did Russia actually need to invade Ukraine? The answer is very simple (far simpler than Putin’s many and confusing statements about that). Putin’s many explanations never made clear the core reason: The U.S. Government has been planning to win a WW III by blitz-nuking The Kremlin so fast that Russia’s central command wouldn’t have enough time to press the button to launch its retaliatory missiles and bombers; and therefore immediately after that blitz-nuclear first-strike decapitation of Russia, the U.S. regime would be able entirely on its own schedule to then knock out virtually all of Russia’s retaliatory weaponry and so to win WW III with perhaps only a few million dead on its side and thus, finally, at long last, possessing (at a small enough cost in American lives so as to be attractive to the few individuals who actually control the U.S. Government) full control over Russia, which is the world’s most-natural-resources-rich country — which is why the U.S. regime was so set, for so long a time, on winning Ukraine as a NATO member. And this is also the reason why Obama finally grabbed Ukraine in 2014.
The ideal place from which to launch that blitz attack against Russia would be Ukraine, because it has the nearest border to Russia’s central command in The Kremlin, which is only 317 miles (511 km) away from Ukraine — a mere five minutes of missile-flying time away — from Shostka in Ukraine, to Moscow in Russia. A mere five minutes away from decapitating Russia’s central command. That is the real answer to the crucial question of why did Russia actually need to invade Ukraine? Putin never clearly stated it, and never focused on it; and, so, in both Finland and Sweden (and throughout Europe), Russia’s essential defensive invasion of Ukraine was instead widely viewed as being aggressive not defensive: aggression against Ukraine, instead of defensive against America (which has controlled Ukraine ever since America’s February 2014 coup there). Thus, both Finland and Sweden (on the basis of that false impression) joined NATO, and American troops and weapons will be pouring into Finland even closer to The Kremlin than had previously been the case — almost as close as-if Ukraine DID join NATO. Maybe Ukraine will be kept out of NATO, but Finland, which is around 500 miles from The Kremlin, joined NATO largely because of Putin’s PR failure regarding his invasion of Ukraine.
Just like in chess, the way to win the game is to capture the king, in war-strategy the way to win is to decapitate the opposite side’s leadership by capturing or disabling its Commander-in-Chief. The U.S. regime had started by no later than 2006 to plan for winning a WW III instead of to use its nuclear weapons only in order to work alongside Russia to PREVENT there being any WW III. During the George W. Bush Administration, neoconservatism became — and has remained since — bipartisan in both of America’s two political Parties. The only way that this “Nuclear Primacy” strategy can even conceivably be achieved would be via a blitz-nuclear attack beheading ’the enemy’.
Russia has in place a “dead-hand” system to release, automatically-and-
America’s capturing Ukraine, which it did in 2014 by Obama’s brilliantly successful coup that he hid behind anti-corruption demonstrations on Kiev’s Maidan Square, was intended to make it possible for America to checkmate Russia by positioning a missile in or near Shostka. This was why Putin had established as being a red line that America must not cross, Ukraine’s possibly becoming a NATO member.
On 17 December 2021, Putin buried in two proposed treaties — one delivered to Biden and the other to NATO — his demand for America and its colonies never to allow Ukraine into NATO, and he did this as quietly as possible and failed to explain to the public why Russia could never tolerate a possibility that Ukraine would join NATO. His proposed two treaties buried the entire matter of Ukraine, and mentioned “Ukraine” only once, in the propsal to NATO, by saying, “All member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization commit themselves to refrain from any further enlargement of NATO, including the accession of Ukraine as well as other States.” He gave no hint of why Ukraine was the only nation that was singled-out to be named. Both of the proposed treaties were intended to be understood only by the recipients, not by any nation’s public. They weren’t written so as to make clear to the public what the motivation behind them was — though both of them could have been. Neither Biden nor NATO were willing to negotiate about anything in those two documents. There was just silence for three weeks, and neither of the two documents was published or discussed in the ‘news’-media. The Kremlin did nothing to facilitate access to the documents even to the press. Putin himself wanted it that way; he handled this as strictly a matter of private diplomacy, not at all of public relations, much less of helping the public to understand the Russian Government’s motivation behind the documents.
Then, suddenly, and little reported or commented upon, on 7 January 2022, the AP headlined “US, NATO rule out halt to expansion, reject Russian demands” — every one of his demands. Putin now had no other option than to invade Ukraine to take it militarily so as to prevent any U.S. nuclear missile possibly becoming placed there — to do it BEFORE Ukraine would be already seriously on the road to NATO membership, because if he were to wait any longer, then it might already be too late — and there would then be zero chance once Ukraine would already be a NATO member.
He invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
He had done no public relations in order to help the publics in The West to understand WHY he invaded. His explanations seemed to have been intended to resonate ONLY to his fellow-Russians, NOT to any international audience.
This was tragic because not only was Ukraine the MOST dangerous nation to be admitted into NATO, but the second-most dangerous nation to become a NATO member is Finland, which at Kotka is only 507 miles or 815 km. away from blitz-nuking Moscow (and that would be a 7-minute missile-flight-time away); and whereas Putin had done nothing in order to explain to their public that Ukraine was a unique and special case and that Russia at that time actually had no national-security worries about Finland, Finland’s public couldn’t see why he wouldn’t want to take their country too, now that Russia had invaded ‘democratic Ukraine’.
As is normal for the U.S. regime and its agents, they had long been working upon the Finnish public in order to stir them to fear Russia; and polling is always one of the tools that it uses in order to manipulate public opinion in such a target-country. On 28 January 2022, Helsinki’s MTV News headlined (as autotranslated) “MTV Uutisten survey: Support for NATO membership has risen to 30 percent, opposition has clearly decreased – ‘It would be safer with the West’,” and reported:
Opposition to NATO membership has decreased, while the position of more and more people is uncertain, according to a recent survey by MTV Uutisten. If Finland’s top management supported joining NATO, half of the Finns would already be on the side of NATO membership.
Based on a survey conducted by MTV Uutisten, 30 percent of Finns support Finland’s application for NATO membership. 43 percent of those who responded to the survey oppose applying for membership, and 27 percent are unsure of their position. …
The National Defense Information Planning Board (MTS) analyzed the support for NATO membership at the end of 2021. At that time, 24 percent of respondents supported applying for membership. More than half, or 51 percent, opposed applying for NATO membership.
Since then, Russia has presented a list of demands to the West, which included, among other things, NATO’s commitment not to expand to the east. The concern for Europe’s security has been increased by the heavy military equipment that Russia has moved near the Ukrainian border.
According to everyone, Russia’s actions are not yet so burdensome that they should apply to NATO. …
In recent years, in NATO polls, support has typically been close to 20 percent and opposition over 50 percent.
Based on the survey conducted now, the opposition is no longer as strong as before. In addition to the supporters of NATO membership, the number of undecideds has also increased. The difficulty of forming an accurate opinion is also evident in the comments. …
In addition to the current NATO position, the respondents were asked whether Finland should apply for NATO membership if the top government was in favor of it.
In this case, support for NATO membership rose from 30 percent to as much as [NO — TO EXACTLY] 50 percent [saying that on this question they’d trust that the Government’s leaders would make the best decision on this matter]. 33 percent of the respondents chose not to answer, and 18 percent could not form their opinion.
The majority of respondents would follow the government if it decided to join NATO.
That was before Russia invaded Ukraine — a country that Finnish ‘news’-media had already long presented favorably against Russia and as being a victim of Russia’s opposing Ukraine’s ‘democratic revolution’ at the Maidan Square in February 2014. No Finnish news-medium existed that indicated this ‘democratic revolution’ to have been actually a U.S. coup. Finnish ‘news’-media had censored-out all of that actual history. When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Finns were therefore terrified, and the Finnish Government — right along with Sweden’s, which had similarly been worked on for decades by U.S. and its NATO agents — promptly requested NATO membership. On 16 September 2022, Gallup’s polling reported that 81% of Finns and 74% of Swedes approved of their country’s joining the NATO anti-Russian military alliance. Prior to the invasion of Ukraine, the figures had been almost the exact reverse.
Presidential elections are expected to be held in Finland on Sunday, 28 January 2024, with a possible second round on Sunday, 11 February 2024. The leading candidate now is Alexander Stubb, who is one of Finland’s top CIA assets. In a 28 October 2023 campaign speech he said, “If I am elected president of the republic, I promise that Finland will support Ukraine as long as necessary. Ukraine is fighting for the whole civilized and free world – against oppression and tyranny. And that war it will win, has already won. Slava Ukraine! … Fortunately, Finland has now chosen its place. We are part of the alliance of Western democracies. The next president of the republic will literally be the international NATO president. … Our NATO path began to open with the Russian war of aggression. … I consider Russia’s attack on Ukraine to be the time of a new turning point in world politics.” (Actually, Obama’s 2014 coup in Ukraine was that.)
But already, on 18 December 2023, Finland and the U.S. signed a Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA) enabling Washington to send troops there and store weapons and ammunition, up to and including nuclear weapons, at 15 locations in Finland. Drago Bosnik at South Front headlined “FINLAND’S NEW ‘DEFENSE’ DEAL WITH US EERILY REMINDS OF SIMILAR ONE WITH NAZI GERMANY”, and he wrote: “For Russia, this is particularly concerning, as Finland and Estonia, now both NATO members, are in close proximity to St. Petersburg, its second most important city.” However, St. Petersburgh isn’t actually a concern here any more than Miami was a concern when America in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis wouldn’t allow Soviet missiles to be posted in Cuba — Washington DC was the concern, and it was nearly a thousand miles farther away from Cuba than Moscow is from Ukraine. Similarly to JFK then, Russia’s worry now is how close Finland is to Moscow — not to St. Petersberg. And whereas Cuba was 1,131 miles away from DC, Finland is only 507 miles from Moscow. Putin never made clear that his concern regarding American nukes in Ukraine was the same as JFK’s was regarding Soviet nukes in Cuba — but twice as much so. If Putin had made that point clearly and often, then demagogues such as Stubb wouldn’t have been able to get the impact they did from phrases such as “Our NATO path began to open with the Russian war of aggression. … I consider Russia’s attack on Ukraine to be the time of a new turning point in world politics.” America has been the aggressor here — against Russia; Russia was by then forced, by America and by its NATO, to respond militarily, since all diplomatic efforts by Russia had been ignored by the aggressors. Just like JFK was not the aggressor in 1962, Putin was not the aggressor in 2022. Putin could easily have made that point, but he never did — he buried it in with a mess that in Western countries seemed like merely a blur. He handed the Russia-the-aggressor argument to America’s agents in Finland, and they ran with it and thereby easily succeeded to present Russia as the bogeyman, against which NATO represented safety. This was a major blunder by Putin — not just in Finland, but throughout The West.
One might blame the Finnish (and Swedish) people for having fallen for what was actually the U.S. empire’s narrative on the Ukraine situation; but to do so would confuse the liars with their victims — the deceived public. For example: I personally submitted to all of Finland’s major ‘news’-media right after Finland’s Government expressed the intention to seek admission into NATO, arguing that to enter NATO would increase — NOT decrease — the danger to Finland’s national security, by causing Finland to thereby become targeted by Russia’s missiles (which had previously NOT been aimed at them); and all of those media refused even to reply — no questions or editorial suggestions, but simply refused to respond to or contemplate presenting a counter-argument. The Finnish public were never presented such an argument. Is that a ‘democracy’?
Moreover: the same situation, of a widely deceived public falling into the grip of the U.S. empire and believing its lies, is widespread, not only within this or that nation. For example, on December 19th, the Danish peace-researcher and professor at Sweden’s Lund University, Jan Oberg, headlined at Dissident Voice, “How Much Longer Can Danes Snore While Their Security and Democracy are Being Stripped away and Danish Politics Increase the Risk of World War III?,” and he reported the very same trap being fallen-into by the Danes that Finns are falling into. Blaming this phenomenon on the victims, the public, instead of on the billionaires who have engineered and provided the trap (and who enormously profit from it), is simply more of the standard blame-the-victim morality.
By this time, Putin ought to be well aware that it was a huge blunder. As I noted with concern on 28 October 2022, “NATO Wants To Place Nuclear Missiles On Finland’s Russian Border — Finland Says Yes”. His blunder was blatantly clear by that time. And I already had outlined, on 13 May 2022, “Russia’s Weak Response to Finland’s Joining NATO” and presented there a strategy to replace that weak response with a much stronger and entirely diplomatic strategy for Russia to terminate the NATO alliance. I am surprised that Putin still, even to the present day, has failed to initiate some such policy. His passivity in that regard is stunning.
However, on 5 April 2023, since that proposed strategy wasn’t being even mentioned in the press by anyone but myself, I concluded that the time had come to lay out an alternative strategy, “Russia’s only safe response to Finland in NATO is to move Russia’s capital to Novosibirsk.” Whereas Finland (Kotka) is only 507 miles or 816 kilometers from Moscow, it is 2,032 miles or 3,271 kilometers from Novosibirsk.
Furthermore: Novosibirsk is 2,716 miles or 4,372 kilometers from Japan (Hokkaido). And it is 2,371 miles or 3,815 kilometers from South Korea (Seoul). Placing Russia’s central command in Novosibirsk would eliminate the danger from the U.S. regime and its colonies.
Obviously, if Russia’s capital city becomes relocated to Novosibirsk, then the Cold War (the danger that the U.S. empire poses to Russia) will effectively be ended. But Putin has initiated no new approach to addressing the problem that his own continuing blunder has largely assisted to cause to Russia’s national security.
The post How Putin’s Explanation of Why Russia Invaded Ukraine Facilitated or Even Caused NATO to Win 2 New Members: Finland and Sweden first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
President Biden appears to be caving to hard-line Republican demands for a new crackdown on asylum seekers and immigrants nationwide in exchange for more Ukraine funding. As negotiations on the emergency funding request continue, we speak with Democratic Congressmember Greg Casar of Texas about how he and other lawmakers oppose “some of the worst changes to our immigration system in decades.”…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Human rights campaigners say ‘responsibility to protect’ principle and ambition to prevent genocides have diminished
Human rights activists say that the international community has given up on intervention efforts to stop mass atrocities, leading to fears that such occurrences may become the norm around the world.
The warnings come on the 75th anniversaries this weekend of the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, both signed in the aftermath of the Holocaust in the hope that the world would act in concert to prevent a repeat of such mass slaughter.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
This live blog is now closed, you can read more of our UK political coverage here
The UK has suffered a sharp decline in its performance in the latest round of influential international academic tests, wiping out recent progress, as the widespread disruption caused by Covid continued to take its toll on education, the Guardian reports.
Yesterday, when he was being interviewed at the Resolution Foundation conference, Keir Starmer was asked by Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor of the Economist, if he could say in what way his policies were different from the Conservatives’. Starmer was able to provide a half-decent answer, but he did not entirely dispel her suggestion that in many areas the policy overlap is getting more and more pronounced.
Today’s announcement is an admission of years of Tory failure on both the immigration system and the economy, as net migration has trebled to a record high under the Tories since they promised to reduce it at the last election.
Labour has said repeatedly that net migration should come down and called for action to scrap the unfair 20% wage discount, raise salary thresholds based on economic evidence, bring in new training requirements linked to the immigration system, as well as a proper workforce plan for social care. Immigration is important but the system needs to be controlled and managed. But whilst the Conservatives have finally been forced to abandon the unfair wage discount that they introduced, they are still completely failing to introduce more substantial reforms that link immigration to training and fair pay requirements in the UK, meaning many sectors will continue to see rising numbers of work visas because of skills shortages.
What that means is, if you’ve got a shortage occupation, not just health and social care workers – that might be also engineers, might also include now bricklayers – employers will still be able to recruit at less than the threshold. And yet the government is still doing nothing to tackle those skills.
We think the Migration Advisory Committee should look at this very swiftly before it is introduced, particularly at the impact this is going to have on British citizens who fall in love across borders.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Canadian House Speaker Anthony Rota (Politico, 9/24/23) said of the SS veteran, “He’s a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service.”
Media coverage of the Canadian Parliament’s standing ovation in September for Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old Ukrainian Canadian who fought for the Nazis in World War II, has included egregious Holocaust revisionism.
On September 22, following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s address to the Canadian parliament, Canada’s then–Speaker of the House Anthony Rota introduced Hunka:
We have here in the chamber today a Ukrainian-Canadian veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today.
Rota went on to call Hunka “a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service” (Politico, 9/24/23). Parliamentarians of all political parties gave Hunka two standing ovations, and Zelenskyy raised his fist to salute the man (Sky News, 9/26/23).
Then the New York–based Forward (9/24/23) pointed out that Hunka had fought for the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division, also known as the Galicia Division, of the SS. (The SS, short for Schutzstaffel, “Protection Squadron,” was the military wing of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party.)
“You have to tread softly on these issues,” said the main expert used by the CBC (9/28/23) to discuss the topic of Ukraine and Nazism.
Covering the subsequent controversy, the CBC (9/28/23) ran the headline, “Speaker’s Honoring of Former Nazi Soldier Reveals a Complicated Past, Say Historians.” In the context of the Holocaust, “complicated” functions as a hand-waving euphemism that gets in the way of holding perpetrators accountable: If a decision is “complicated,” it’s understandable, even if it’s wrong.
Digital reporter/editor Jonathan Migneault, who wrote the piece, soft-pedaled the Galicia Division in other ways too. He said that some of the Ukrainians who joined it did so “for ideological reasons, in opposition to the Soviet Union, in hopes of creating an independent Ukrainian state.”
That’s quite a whitewashing of the ideological package that goes with signing up for the SS, leaving out that this vision for an “independent Ukrainian state” included the extermination of Jewish, LGBTQ, Roma and Polish minorities. As far as the “hopes of creating an independent Ukrainian state” alibi, the Per Anders Rudling (Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 2012) documents that “there is no overt indication that the unit [of Ukrainian Waffen-SS recruits] in any way was dedicated to Ukrainian statehood, let alone independence.”
Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick (9/26/23) mocked Poland for wanting to extradite Hunka, whose unit massacred Poles during World War II, because “Poland has a notorious history of antisemitism.”
Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick (9/26/23) also used the word “complicated” to diminish Nazi atrocities, and mock the Polish government’s interest in having Hunka extradited for war crimes:
Funny, they’ve had 73 years to ask Canada for him. It’s almost as if Poland has a notorious history of antisemitism but that’s crazy talk….
Rota should have understood how complicated history is, how, post-Holodomor, a Ukrainian caught between Hitler and Stalin made a fatal choice.
We can hate Hunka for that now. I do.
But would every Canadian MP have made immaculate choices inside Stalin’s “Bloodlands” in 1943? Of course you and I would have been heroic, joined the White Rose movement, been executed for our troubles. But everyone?
Mallick refers to Ukraine as “Stalin’s ‘Bloodlands,’” citing the Holodomor, the 1930s famine in the Soviet Union that killed an estimated 3.5 million Ukrainians, as well as millions in other parts of the USSR. Yet her link takes readers to a review of the book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which—its own flaws notwithstanding (Jacobin, 9/9/14)—discusses the killings in Ukraine and elsewhere by Stalin and, on a significantly more egregious scale, Hitler. Acknowledging that the phrase she’s borrowing refers to both Soviet crimes and the Nazis’ genocides would have made the choice of joining the Nazis seem rather less sympathetic.
Meanwhile, Mallick’s baffling comments about Poland erase the Nazis’ systematic killing of Polish people. Polish history has indeed been marred by horrific antisemitism, with many Polish people complicit in the Holocaust, as she glibly references; this does not erase the fact that the Nazis also murdered 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles, or negate Poland’s desire to see their killers brought to justice. As Lev Golinkin (Forward, 9/24/23) pointed out, the Galicia Division that Hunka belonged to
was visited by SS head Heinrich Himmler, who spoke of the soldiers’ “willingness to slaughter Poles.” Three months earlier, SS Galichina subunits perpetrated what is known as the Huta Pieniacka massacre, burning 500 to 1,000 Polish villagers alive.
Keir Giles (Politico, 10/2/23) advances the argument that joining the SS and swearing “absolute obedience to the commander in chief of the German Armed Forces Adolf Hitler” doesn’t make you a Nazi.
An old cliché uses the analogy of gradually boiling a frog to explain how fascism takes hold in societies, but readers of Keir Giles’ intervention (Politico, 10/2/23) will feel like they are eyes-deep in a bubbling cauldron.
Giles, who said the relevant history is “complicated” four times and “complex” twice, wrote an article entitled “Fighting Against the USSR Didn’t Necessarily Make You a Nazi.” That’s a dubious claim in a piece focused on World War II, when the Soviet Union was the main force fighting Nazi Germany, and thus fighting the Soviets made you at least an ally of Nazis.
More to the point, the unit Hunka belonged to was a formal division of the SS, trained and armed by Nazi Germany (Forward, 9/27/23), which “fought exclusively to serve Nazi aims” (National Post, 9/25/23).
Giles, however, opened by writing:
Everybody knows that a lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth has even got its boots on.
And the ongoing turmoil over Canada’s parliament recognizing former SS trooper Yaroslav Hunka highlights one of the most important reasons why.
Something that’s untrue but simple is far more persuasive than a complicated, nuanced truth….
In the case of Hunka, the mass outrage stems from his enlistment with one of the foreign legions of the Waffen-SS, fighting Soviet forces on Germany’s eastern front.
Setting aside that Giles omits “and butchering innocent people” when he describes Waffen-SS activities as “fighting Soviet forces,” his suggestion that calling Hunka a Nazi is a “lie” does not withstand even minimal scrutiny. For instance, Rudling (Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 2012) documents that, from August 29, 1943, onward, Ukrainian Waffen-SS recruits were sworn in with the following oath:
I swear before God this holy oath, that in the battle against Bolshevism, I will give absolute obedience to the commander in chief of the German Armed Forces Adolf Hitler, and as a brave soldier I will always be prepared to lay down my life for this oath.
Vowing “absolute obedience” to Hitler, and swearing that you’re willing to die for him, makes you as root and branch a Nazi as Rudolf Hess or Hermann Göring.
SS commander Heinrich Himmler inspecting troops from the Galicia Division.
After drawing these bogus distinctions between the Nazis and their units, Giles moved on to genocide denial:
The idea that foreign volunteers and conscripts were being allocated to the Waffen-SS rather than the Wehrmacht on administrative rather than ideological grounds is a hard sell for audiences conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide….
Repeated exhaustive investigations—including by not only the Nuremberg trials but also the British, Canadian and even Soviet authorities—led to the conclusion that no war crimes or atrocities had been committed by this particular unit.
Giles doesn’t name any investigations by British or Soviet officials, so it’s unclear what he’s talking about on those points, but he’s lying about Nuremberg. The Nuremberg Tribunals did not specifically address the Galicia Division (Guardian, 9/25/23), but found that the combat branch of which they were a part, the Waffen-SS, “was a criminal organization”:
In dealing with the SS, the Tribunal includes all persons who had been officially accepted as members of the SS, including the members of the Allgemeine SS, members of the Waffen-SS, members of the SS Totenkopfverbaende, and the members of any of the different police forces who were members of the SS.
Giles asserted that “simple narratives like ‘everybody in the SS was guilty of war crimes’ are more pervasive because they’re much simpler to grasp”—but everybody in the SS was, quite literally, guilty of war crimes.
The Ottawa Citizen (9/27/23), citing B’nai Brith, reported that “the Canadian government’s approach to Nazi war criminals had been marked with ‘intentional harboring of known Nazi war criminals.’”
The Canadian investigation Giles refers to is a 1986 Canadian government report that claims that membership in the Galicia Division did not in and of itself constitute a war crime. This conclusion is highly suspect when read against the Nuremberg tribunal’s judgment, and the report also has to be understood in the broader context of Canadian state investigations into Nazis in the country. As the Ottawa Citizen’s David Pugliese (9/27/23) explained:
The federal government has withheld a second part of a 1986 government commission report about Nazis who settled in Canada. In addition, it has heavily censored another 1986 report examining how Nazis were able to get into Canada. More than 600 pages of that document, obtained by this newspaper and other organizations through the Access to Information law, have been censored.
Neither Giles nor any other member of the public knows what the Canadian government is hiding about its investigation, or why it’s concealing this information, so it’s disingenuous for him to present the fraction of the government’s conclusions to which he has access as if it is the final word on the Galicia Division or anything else.
As to Giles’ jaw-dropping complaint that people are “conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide,” the Nuremberg Trial concluded that the SS carried out
persecution and extermination of the Jews, brutalities and killings in concentration camps, excesses in the administration of occupied territories, the administration of the slave labor program, and the mistreatment and murder of prisoners.
Perhaps the public is “conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide” because the SS carried out genocide.
As disconcerting as it is that authors like Giles are writing fascist propaganda—and that Mallick veers perilously close to the same—it’s even more alarming that editors at outlets like the Star, CBC and Politico deem such intellectually and morally bankrupt material worthy of publication.
The post Media Holocaust Revisionism After Canada’s Standing Ovation for an SS Vet appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
Our world is being torn asunder by two horrific wars. Israel is carrying out a genocidal war against Palestine, massacring and wounding tens of thousands of people in Gaza. At the very same time, Russia continues its imperialist war to annex Ukraine, killing and maiming untold numbers in the process. Instead of building solidarity between Palestine and Ukraine’s struggle for self-determination…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Want to understand why the media we consume is either owned by billionaires or under the thumb of government? The latest developments in the story about who was behind the explosions that destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines that brought Russian gas to Europe provide the answer.
Although largely forgotten now, the blasts in the Baltic Sea in September 2022 had huge and lasting repercussions. The explosion was an act both of unprecedented industrial sabotage and of unparalleled environmental terrorism, releasing untold quantities of the most potent of the greenhouse gases, methane, into the atmosphere.
The blowing up of the pipelines plunged Europe into a prolonged energy crisis, tipping its economies deeper into a recession from which they are yet to recover. Europe was forced to turn to the United States and buy much more expensive liquified gas. And one of the long-term effects will be to accelerate the de-industrialisation of Europe, especially Germany.
There can be almost no one in Europe who did not suffer personal financial harm, in most cases significant harm, from the explosions.
The question that needed urgently answering at the time of the blasts was one no media organisation was in a hurry to investigate: Who did it?
In unison, the media simply recited the White House’s extraordinary claim that Russia had sabotaged its own pipelines.
That required an unprecedented suspension of disbelief. It meant that Moscow had chosen to strip itself both of the lucrative income stream the gas pipelines generated, and of the political and diplomatic leverage it enjoyed over European states from its control of their energy supplies. This was at a time, remember, when the Kremlin, embattled in its war in Ukraine, needed all the diplomatic influence it could muster.
The need to breathe credibility into the laughably improbable “Russia did it” story was so urgent at the time because there was was only one other serious culprit in the frame. No media outlet, of course, mentioned it.
My latest: If, as seems likely, the US was behind the pipeline blasts, it shows it's ready to turn the whole of Europe into a battlefield – and bully, betray and potentially sacrifice the continent’s population as cruelly as it has treated the Global South https://t.co/cIN1INfiOQ
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) October 6, 2022
US officials from Biden down had repeatedly threatened that Washington would intervene to make sure the Nord Stream pipelines could not operate. The administration was expressly against European energy dependency on Russia. Another gain from the pipelines’ destruction was that a more economically vulnerable Europe would be forced to lean even more heavily on the US as a guarantor of its security, a useful chokehold on Europe when Washington was preparing for prolonged confrontations with both Russia and China.
As for the means, only a handful of states had the divers and technical resources enabling them to pull off the extremely difficult feat of successfully planting and detonating explosives on the sea floor undetected.
Had we known then what is gradually becoming clear now, even from establishment media reporting – that the US was, at the very least, intimately involved – there would have been uproar.
It would have been clear that the US was a rogue, terrorist state, that it was willing to burn its allies for geostrategic gain, and that there was no limit to the crimes it was prepared to commit.
Every time Europeans had to pay substantially more for their heating bills, or filling up their car, or paying for the weekly shop, they would have known that the cause was gangster-like criminality by the Biden administration.
Which is precisely why the establishment media were so very careful after the explosions not to implicate the Biden administration in any way, even if it meant ignoring the mass of evidence staring them in the face.
It is why they ignored the incendiary report by legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh – who has broken some of the most important stories of the last half century – detailing exactly how the US carried out the operation. When his account was occasionally referenced by the media, it was solely to ridicule it.
The story no one wanted told. Seymour Hersh reveals how the US blew up the Nordstream gas pipelines, one of the great environmental disasters of our time. I'm guessing Hersh published on Substack because no establishment media outlet dared touch his expose https://t.co/B2IxQj5kuh
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 9, 2023
It is why, when it became obvious that the “Russia did it” claim was unsupportable, the media literally jumped ship: credulously reporting that a small group of “maverick” Ukrainians – unknown to President Volodymyr Zelensky, of course – had rented a yacht and carried off one of the most daring and difficult deep-sea stunts ever recorded.
It is why, later, the media treated it as entirely unremarkable – and certainly not worthy of comment – that new evidence suggested the Biden administration was warned of this maverick Ukrainian operation against the whole of Europe. It apparently knew what was about to happen but did precisely nothing to stop it.
My latest: First, journalists lapped up Russian culpability for the Nord Stream blasts. Now they peddle a preposterous James Bond-style story.
Anything to ignore the US role in an act of unrivalled industrial and environmental terrorism https://t.co/LIwuiIdW21
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) April 11, 2023
And it is why the latest reporting from the Washington Post changes the impossible-to-believe “maverick” Ukrainian operation into one that implicates the very top of the Ukrainian military. Still, once again, the paper and the rest of the media steadfastly refuse to join the dots and follow the implications contained in their own reporting.
The central character in the new drama, Roman Chervinsky, belongs to Ukraine’s special operations forces. He supposedly oversaw the small, six-man team that rented a yacht and then carried out the James Bond-style attack.
The ingenuous Post claims that his training and operational experience meant he was “well suited to help carry out a covert mission meant to obscure Ukraine’s responsibility”. It lists his resistance activities against Russia. None indicate that he had the slightest experience allowing him to mastermind a highly challenging, extremely dangerous, technically complex attack deep in the waters of the Baltic Sea.
If the Ukrainian military really was behind the explosions – rather than the US – all the indications are that the Biden administration and Pentagon must have been intimately involved in the planning and execution.
Not least, it is extremely unlikely that the Ukrainian military had the technical capability to carry out by itself such an operation successfully and undiscovered.
And given that, even before the war, the Ukrainian military had fallen almost completely under US military operational control, the idea that Ukraine’s senior command would have been able to, or dared, execute this complex and risky venture without involving the US beggars belief.
Politically, it would have been quite extraordinary for Ukrainian leaders to imagine they could unilaterally decide to shut down energy supplies to Europe without consulting first with the US, especially when Ukraine’s entire war effort was being paid for and overseen by Washington and Europe.
And, of course, Ukrainian leaders would have been only too aware that the US was bound to quickly work out who was behind the attack.
It would be telling indeed that, in such circumstances, the Biden administration would apparently choose to reward Ukraine with more money and arms for its act of industrial sabotage against Europe rather than punish it in any way.
It would be equally astonishing that the three states supposedly investigating the attack – Germany, Sweden and Denmark – would not also soon figure out for themselves that Ukraine was culpable. Why would they decide to cover up Ukraine’s attack on Europe’s economy rather than expose it – unless they were worried about upsetting the US?
And, of course, there is the elephant in the room: the Washington Post’s earlier reporting indicated the US had prior knowledge that Ukraine was planning the attack. That is even more likely if the pipeline blast was signed off by Ukrainian military commanders rather than a group of Ukrainian “mavericks”.
The Washington Post’s new story repeats the line that the Biden administration was forewarned of the attack. Now, however, the Post casually reports that, after expressing opposition, “US officials believed the attack had been called off. But it turned out only to have been postponed to three months later, using a different point of departure than originally planned”.
The Post simply accepts the word of US officials that the most powerful country on the planet fell asleep at the wheel. The CIA and the Biden administration apparently knew the Ukrainian military was keen to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines and plunge Europe into an energy crisis and economic recession. But US officials were blindsided when the same small Ukrainian operational team changed locations and timings.
On this account, US intelligence fell for the simplest of bait and switches when the stakes were about as high as could be imagined. And the Washington Post and other media outlets report all of this with a faux-seriousness.
Either way, the US is deeply implicated in the attack on Europe’s energy infrastructure and the undermining of its economy.
Even if the establishment media reporting is right and Ukraine blew up Nord Stream, the Biden administration must have given the green light, overseen the operational planning and assisted in the implementation and subsequent cover-up.
Then again, if as seems far more likely, Hersh is right, then there was no middle man – the US carried out the attack on its own. It needed a fall guy. When Russia no longer fitted the bill, Ukraine became the sacrificial offering.
A year on, these muffled implications from the media’s own reporting barely raise an eyebrow.
The establishment media has played precisely the role expected of it: neutering public outrage. Its regimented acceptance of the initial, preposterous claim of Russian responsibility. Its drip-feed, uncritical reporting of other, equally improbable possibilities. Its studious refusal to join the all-too-visible dots. Its continuing incuriousness about its own story and what Ukraine’s involvement would entail.
The media has failed by every yardstick of what journalism is supposed to be there for, what it is supposed to do. And that is because the establishment media is not there to dig out the truth, it is not there to hold power to account. Ultimately, when the stakes are high – and they get no higher than the Nord Stream attack – it is there to spin narratives convenient to those in power, because the media itself is embedded in those same networks of power.
Why do billionaires rush to own media corporations, even when the outlets are loss-making? Why are governments so keen to let billionaires take charge of the chief means by which we gain information and communicate between ourselves. Because the power to tell stories, the power over our minds is the greatest power there is.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The New York Times headline said it all: “Middle East War Adds to Surge in International Arms Sales.” The conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, and beyond may be causing immense and unconscionable human suffering, but they are also boosting the bottom lines of the world’s arms manufacturers. There was a time when such weapons sales at least sparked talk of “the merchants of death” or of “war profiteers.”…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
For years, John J. Mearsheimer, that seemingly ageless, if somewhat chilly presence at the University of Chicago, has been a thorn of irritation to certain establishment ideas. With his pugnacious sense of realist politics, he has little time for the sentimentality that accompanies what he calls the “liberal delusions” of power. It’s all good to feel anguish and worry at the predations of power, but why encourage them when there is no need to?
This somewhat crude summation only does some justice to JJM’s thought process. But it does provide an interesting backdrop to the recent revelations regarding the Ukraine conflict, one that is falling into a horrendous, bleeding stalemate.
In his Foreign Affairs assessment of 2014 on the Ukraine-Russian conflict, Mearsheimer throws in the usual grenades. “US and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border.” He noted the pernicious, meddling roles played by such characters as US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs, Victoria Nuland, who revealed in 2013 how the US had invested more than $5 billion since 1991 to aid Ukraine achieve “the future it deserves.” This involved the spearheading efforts of the National Endowment for Democracy.
As Russian tanks moved into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Mearsheimer proved unrelenting: Russia had been needlessly provoked into “a preventive war”. While not permissible in just war theory, “Russian leaders certainly saw the invasion as ‘just’, because they were convinced that Ukraine joining NATO was an existential threat that had to be eliminated.” The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was so enthusiastic at the views of the realistic scholar, it endorsed his 2014 Foreign Affairs contribution.
For taking such a stance, dreamy liberal humanitarians and neoconservative provocateurs came to detest Mearsheimer. The New Statesman would suggest that he became, as a consequence “the world’s most hated thinker.” Anne Applebaum, in her usual neoconservative biliousness, wondered “if the Russians didn’t actually get their narrative from Mearshimer [sic] et al. Moscow needed to say West was responsible for Russian invasions (Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, Ukraine), and not their own greed and imperialism.”
Mearsheimer was already representative of a field filled with foreboding assessments about what an eastern strategic expansion against Russia would do, warmed by the almost throwaway assurances from US Secretary of State James Baker to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. At that point, the still extant Soviet Union had 380,000 troops stationed in East Germany. Baker’s suggestion: Why not remove those troops if NATO did “not shift one inch eastwards from its position”?
The following day, Baker repeated the formula to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl via letter: “Would you prefer to see a unified Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no US forces, or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastwards from its present position?” Kohl had preferred to directly inform Gorbachev of his own assurance that no NATO bases would be established in the former East Germany.
In October 1990, the US State Department concluded in an analysis that “it is not in the best interest of NATO or the US that these states be granted full NATO membership” warning against “an anti-Soviet coalition whose frontier is the Soviet border.”
George F. Kennan’s observations seven years later are also prickly with concern. As the father of Cold War Soviet containment, he could only see trouble brewing on the horizon were a now diminished Russia provoked. The decision to expand NATO “may be expected to inflame nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”
That same year, the current US President noted that, irrespective of the merits of the countries keen to participate in the alliance, an enlarged NATO would constitute the “tipping point” for Russia. His reference point then was the various Baltic States.
A number of former US ambassadors to Moscow have also warned, at stages, about the dangers. In 1997, it was Jack Matlock, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. At the time, the Clinton administration’s recommendation to enlarge NATO membership was considered “misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War.”
Eight years later, William J. Burns, then still ambassador to Russia and currently director of the CIA, shot a number of flares on the issue: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).”
In a February 2008 memorandum published by WikiLeaks, the assessment by Burns is stark: “NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains ‘an emotional and neuralgic’ issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia.” Such strategic policy considerations included, among other things, a fear that the country could be “split in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene.” Concerns also abounded regarding the “impact on Russia’s defense industry, Russian-Ukrainian family connections, and bilateral relations generally.”
What then made September 2023 special in this overview was an unusually frank admission from the NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in remarks made to the joint meeting of the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs (AFET) and the Subcommittee on Security and Defence (SEDE).
That admission concerned Putin’s unequivocal intentions to invade Ukraine were NATO to be further enlarged: “The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition to not invade Ukraine. Of course, we didn’t sign that.”
Stoltenberg went on to pour scorn on this revealing point. Putin demanded the “removal of our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.” The conclusion is then indefatigably clear: “So [Putin] went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.”
In such statements, the lines between explanation, justification and wilful blindness are not always demarcated. But here we have a stunning confession that should be minted in every historical overview of a calamitous conflict that may eventually result, in some form or rather, in the very same de facto arrangements Putin demanded in 2021. Russia will have to contend with its own problems and nightmares regarding the Ukraine War, but as such, Stoltenberg, NATO and the US imperium deserve a withering stare from history’s muse.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Australia will provide Ukraine with $20 million worth of home-grown technology, including counter-drone systems and deployable 3D printers, as part of its latest military assistance package. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed the Australian innovation package during his trip to the United States, where he is meeting with legislators on a way forward with the trilateral…
The post $20m in home-grown tech bound for Ukraine appeared first on InnovationAus.com.
This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.
Australia will provide Ukraine with $20 million worth of home-grown technology, including counter-drone systems and deployable 3D printers, as part of its latest military assistance package. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed the Australian innovation package during his trip to the United States, where he is meeting with legislators on a way forward with the trilateral…
The post $20m in home-grown tech bound for Ukraine appeared first on InnovationAus.com.
This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.
Clio, Muse of History, Charles Meynier (1768–1832)
Peter Turchin, author of End Times: Elites, Counter-elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, (2023), is one of the founders of the new ‘science’ of cliodynamics, a discipline which coalesced in the 1990s, statistical juggling ‘facts’ from the past, stitched together from bare bones (literally) of archeology, climate, geopolitics, crimes, arrests/ executions, wine imports, lots and lots of numbers. There’s probably even a case for kitchen sinks. Think: weather forecasting. My favourite historian, Arnold Toynbee, when asked by a critic what the secret of history was, answered: Just one damned thing after another. Well, it seems Turchin has finally trumped the great master.
We can use computers to plumb the depths of human civilization for social darwinian ‘laws’ for how societies form, how individuals develop within family and state structures. We have even revolutionized astrology, churning out detailed astrological charts that connect each of us to the planets (especially the gas giants). Just as stunning is how we can now look back at the rise and fall of civilizations and detect ‘laws’ for how and why they collapse. I put quotation marks around laws, as we all know there is no Absolute Truth, only relative truths, truths for each individual universe/ bubble that each of us lives in, only generalizations in human knowledge, even so-called science.
Turchin was born Soviet, emigrated as a teen to the West, and as a math whiz and biologist, found the perfect niche: exploring the collapse of civilizations, in the first place his own, which he surely mourns, though his deadpan style and mordant sense of humor tempers any hint of nostalgia. Another Soviet emigre whiz kid, Dmitry Orlov has made a career out of predicting US collapse along the lines of the Soviet one.1 But Turchin’s work is more serious, dare I say scientific?
Axioms: 1) Our main engine for civilizations is power. Power comes from force, wealth, bureaucracy, ‘soft’ ideology.
2) Turchin doesn’t come out and say it in so many words, but the natural state of civilization is plutocracy, rule by the elite. It’s possible to keep this in check (Mamluks in Egypt) but there are always external factors that undermine the best of intentions (Ottomans with gunpowder). Democracy is no magic bullet as it is easily subverted by elites.
Laws: 1) Revolution arises only from immiseration and elite overproduction.
2) The iron law of oligarchy: where an interest group acquires a lot of power, it inevitably uses this power in self-interested ways.
If whoever ‘wins’ just replaces the old elite with a new elite, this creates a wealth pump, which syphons the society’s wealth from the poor to the new elite, over time creating more immiseration and more useless elites, leading to collapse and the cycle repeats.
3) There are only so many places for elites. When the wealth pump is active, it creates more elites and more immiseration, leading to collapse.
4) The rise-collapse is generally in long cycles of 200+ years. (100 years for polygamy.)
Revolutions should be a last resort. They are never pretty, and usually end up at a place no one expected or wanted. Except for the handful of conspirators that end up on top and can create a new elite before the masses figure out what has happened. Occasionally, the revolution works beautifully, at least in the short term. Russia 1917, Cuba 1959, Egypt 1952, Libya 1969, Iran 1979, Venezuela 1999. Those were the ‘easy’ ones. Then there’s China 1948, which took 20 years of hell. Vietnam, ditto. Ditto hegemon. Let’s not even mention poor Afghanistan. Or Cambodia.
Our above select revolutions all took very different but equally nasty turns, sometimes internal (not controlling the wealth pump), all face(d) fierce efforts to undermine them by the ruling world hegemon, that have left revolutionaries bitter and disillusioned.
Case studies
Turchin focuses on France, where the state was flourishing in the 13th C but collapsed in the 1350s as elite factions fought among themselves and with the English, massacring each other until Henry V’s iconic battle of Agincourt in 1415 and a second collapse till 1453, as the English soldiers stayed behind for the pickings. That saw the population fall by half to 10m. The ‘good’ news was the quantity of nobles fell by 3/4, leaving room for the next cycle to begin.
The rise-collapse is generally in long cycles. France went through cycles of 250, 210, 210 years. England had its own glitches, so its cycles are less uniform. Civil war anarchy under King Stephen 1150s, then 1315+ famine, Black Death and the (civil) War of Roses 1455+. it was able to export its surplus elites to 14th c France but they returned and then there was the peasant revolt of 1381. For history nuts, all this turbulence is heady stuff which makes great swashbuckling. Game of Thrones. Richard II deposed by Lancaster (Lannister). Turchin identified the fall of elite status by English wine imports. By the end of the War of Roses 1490, there were few wine-drinkers.
Dynamics of rise-collapse
Clidynamics was in fact invented in the 14th c by Ibn Khaldun who proposed cycles of 4 generations which then replace their elites, stabilized for a new cycle. But he was writing for the polygamous Muslim world, which shortens the cycle, as new elites grow rapidly and need replacing more often. And without the masses of statistics and computers, Ibn Khaldun was limited in what could be done with his insight
Another curiosity is dynamic entrainment, as observed when metronomes, randomly started, eventually come into sync. Instabilities sometimes coincide. The 17th C English civil war, the Russian time of troubes, the collapse of the Ming dynasty. Then followed the 18th c time peace and imperial expansion, excess elite population, the wealth pump shifting wealth to the elites leading to immiseration and the rollicking 19th C.
Of course the elephant in the room is the hegemon. Where one size is made to fit all, the Roman/British/US steamroller flattens most bubbles, making our cycles fit its cycles. Whether there is positive feedback, increasing the violent swings of rise and collapse, I’m not sure. Probably. Turchin doesn’t go that far. But it seems likely, especially when an angry hegemon and global warming are put into the same equation.
Where are we today?
In Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018), Steven Pinker is optimistic about the world, seeing a bright future of tech blessings lifting the poor out of poverty. Turchin sees our present world as one of turmoil, with far too many elite wannabees, the masses revolting. Most of Pinker’s decline in poverty since 1970 is from China. Median wages have hardly increased, the lowest wages even fell since 1970s. Numbers are easily cooked so Turchin looks at the most important ‘basket of goods’: education, home, health. Tuition has increased 10x or more; it is impossible to buy a house; life expectancy is falling most for white males 30–50 (dropped by 1.6 yrs from 2014–2020.).
The last quasi-collapse for the US was, like in Europe, in the mid-19th C, culminating in the civil war, when US average height fell by 4+ cm 1830-1900. In the US, after the civil war, the elites managed to pull together to stave off revolution, reducing the immiseration during what’s called the Progressive era and then New Deal reforms. The elites paid for all this. The number of millionaires plummeted. Corporations paid 90% of profits to the public good till 1960. The post-WWII prosperity was based on an unwrtten contract among workers, business, and the state.
But the next generation of elites didn’t remember. The turning point into chaos was 1980, Reagan’s ‘greed is good’ neoliberalism. The 1970s sharpened the struggle with new eager elites sharpening their knives, creating an age of discord, as the pillars of postwar prosperity were dismantled. Wages stagnated, institutions eroded. The happiness quotient has dropped from 2000 on. The wealth pump was shifting wealth to the overproduced elite.
As in the 19th C, US height stopped increasing in 1960 (now the tallest humans are in the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany). Real wages stopped growing in the late 1970s. There is even a new term for the sharp increase in suicides among the nonelite (i.e. no college education) in America: deaths of despair. Now for women too. And the mad rush to join the elite is at fever pitch (note: cheating on entrance to elite universities).
So it’s pretty clear that the 2020s are crisis time in the US, and all of the collective West, like dutiful metronomes, coming together in one big rave. (Nothing like war to line the dominoes up.) Immiseration and elite overproduction. Roll out the ‘red’ carpet. But remember revolution is deadly business. Look for off ramps.
What about the tragedy of Ukraine?
The US, Ukraine and Russia are classic plutocracies, Belarus far less so, having avoided the privatizing/looting that both Russia and Ukraine suffered in the 1990s. So no oligarchs. A benign, stable dictatorship. No collapse imminent despite lots of external shenanigans.
Russia managed to bring the oligarchs sort-of into line. Not Ukraine, where the state is powerless over the oligarchs and fell prey to external forces (the US State Department) to govern among the feuding oligarchs in the 2000s.
Belarus, surprise, has been the big winner. Lukashenko was elected with 80% of the vote in 1994 with the promise to keep Soviet system as much in tact as possible. No mass privatizations. No billionaires. Strong links with the military.
The Ukraine oligarchs were never overthrown. Ukraine had a higher GDP per capita in 1990 than either Belarus or Russia, but by 2013 was less than half ($7,400 vs Russia $18,100, Belarus $16,100). All elected Ukrainian politicians just filled their pockets, divided oligarch spoils. All were western-oriented as ther stashes were in western banks, their kids at Oxford, Stanford.
By 2014, it was run by proconsul Victoria Nuland, who came with $5b to tame the oligarchs. Ukraine had/has three ‘classes’: the masses, oligarchs and the State Department. Elections were/are a joke, so immiserated masses change leaders each time, producing only new scandals. Only the first leader Kuchma served two terms. It’s as if Turchin’s laws are working at warp speed, with elites slogging it out and masses more and more immiserated with each election, until the current collapse in war.
Some sobering outcomes of past crises:
1830-70 was spectacularly turbulent. All major states have had revolutions or civil wars, including the US and China. France managed to get three revolutions—in 1830, 1848, 1871. Japan’s regime felll in 1867.
Some conclusions:
1) Success stories: US Progressive era and New Deal, Chartist Britain, Russian reforms of Alexander II. The US and Britain avoided revolution. Russia didn’t. We can be optimistic if it is possible to shut down the wealth pump and rebalance the masses-elite division without resorting to revolution or catastrophic war. We can use cliodynamics to predict coming collapse and the policies necessary to remedy and bring the society back into balance.
2) There is no permanent solution. Beware the iron law of oligarchy. We must constantly fine-tune the system to shut down the wealth pump and avoid unstable disequilibrium.
3) Money allows the plutocrats to plan and then implement their plans for the long term. Only immiseration and intra-elite squabbles can undermine them. The share of income to the top 1% since 1945 was 10%, but rapidly increased after 2000. In Germany to 13%. In nice Denmark it went from 7% to 14%. In the US it started shifting in 1980 and is now a whopping 19%. In contrast, in France it is still a modest 10%.2
We are living through a real-life experiment to see how the different strategies pan out. We all are now in the disintegrative phase of the clio-cycle, our own age of discord, entrained by multiple crises. It’s hard to just wipe out the excess elite these days, although the war in Ukraine is helping. Complex human societies need rulers, administrators, thought leaders to function well. The trick is to constrain them to act for the benefit of all.
4) Democracy is usually a plus, but the fate of Ukraine is a stark reminder of its inherent weakness. If the elites are too greedy and too powerful, they subvert democracy through soft power, their control of the bureaucracy, and their wealth. When that fails, war.
19th C Britain gets the Nobel prize for social change, avoiding the dreaded, inevitably violent revolution that came to France in 1871 and more fatefully, Russia in 1917. The Chartist period 1819-1867 saw a breakdown of elite solidarity, hurried liberal reforms to mitigate the immiseration of the masses, the export of surplus elites and workers by opening the floodgates to emigration, even subsidizing travel to the new colonies. There was just enough unrest, demos, riots, deaths to persuade just enough of the political elite to undertake critical reforms, repealing the Corn Laws, allowing trade unions, the vote, etc. Workers regained their physical height, lost since the rise of industrial capitalism. Britain moved from ‘a fiscal-military state to an administrative state capable of meeting the needs of complex commercial and industrial society.’3
Sadly, Turchin doesn’t mention basic income. It is increasingly promoted by worried elites. This is surely a kind of magic bullet to deflate the wealth pump, if used in conjunction with a new resolve as in WWII, when corporations were harnessed to produce for society, and were taxed at 90+%, turning off the wealth pump. Cliodynamics provides a powerful tool to support it.
Turchin doesn’t dwell on the Soviet experience, but there the wealth pump was directly in the hands of the state. It was stable but finally it too overproduced elites and, at the same time stagnated without democracy to keep renewing the elite in balance with the interests of society (i.e., Belarus today). His prescription is the cruder version of ‘basic income’: bringing the relative wage up too the equilibrium livel, shutting down elite overproduction.
We now face a massive overproduction of elite wannabees at the same time as we are confronted by the need to cut back on consumption to meet external threats (climate). It certainly looks like socialism is the only way out. The most elegant and transparent mechanism to get there is the basic income and higher corporate taxes. As for excess elites, we must educate ourselves away from snobbism, find other ways to keep humans busy, engaged, developing, sans money/status.
ENDNOTES
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
ANALYSIS: By M. Muhannad Ayyash, Mount Royal University
American President Joe Biden is among the latest Western politicians to land in Tel Aviv in a show of support to Israel.
As Israel’s primary backer, the United States has sent two aircraft carriers to the region and indicated it could deploy 2000 American troops to Israel.
Biden was also set to meet Palestinian and Arab leaders in the Jordanian capital Amman. But Jordan cancelled the meeting after a reported airstrike on October 17 killed about 500 people at a Gaza hospital.
In the days after Hamas launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood against Israel, European and North American governments (with few exceptions) were quick to provide a unified and consistent message of support for Israel.
That message contains at least four interconnected elements:
Palestinians erased
There are a few important features of this message, but I want to focus on two that highlight the West’s double standards.
First, is the advancement of anti-Palestinian racism in the West. It is critical to underscore a salient feature of anti-Palestinian racism: the silencing of the Palestinian critiques of Zionism and Israel.
This is a dynamic which has its roots in the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) and erases Palestinian voices, history, presence, aspirations and identity from public discourse.
Political, media and educational institutions in the West regularly sideline and silence Palestinians and their supporters. This is not just an issue among the right-wing or even centrists, but occurs across the political spectrum.
Left-wing politics, including progressive spaces, that purport to be anti-racist often remain hostile to Palestinian voices
Here in Canada, a statement by progressive Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow painted a rally in support of Palestinians as allegedly supporting violence and as a threat to the safety and security of Canadian Jews. That statement is still up on her X account.
This is precisely the anti-Palestinian narrative that has permeated in the West for years: that all support for Palestine is inherently violent and driven by antisemitic hatred of all Jews. Thus, in the name of anti-racism, Palestinians and their supporters are denounced and even criminalised.
Gaza| The City Of War And Love. #GazaGenocide pic.twitter.com/naiFWgYS1G
— PALESTINE ONLINE
(@OnlinePalEng) October 20, 2023
Differing reactions to civilian death
Second, the double standard is on display in the reactions we have seen to the killing of Israeli civilians and the reactions — or lack thereof — to the killing of Palestinian civilians. Many are rightly highlighting Western hypocrisy by drawing comparisons to how the West responded to Russia’s war on Ukraine.
We need to look at how Western governments have responded to the killing of Israeli civilians versus the killing of Palestinian civilians. For the Israeli state and Israeli victims, political, military, economic, cultural and social institutions have fully mobilised to provide support.
The same is entirely absent for the Palestinians. For the Palestinians, there are no evacuations. Aircraft carriers are not sent to provide military support. Mainstream political and cultural discourse does not humanise Palestinian life and mourn Palestinian death.
Aid relief is withheld and used as a bargaining counter. Economic support is not forthcoming. Institutions do not send Palestinians messages of support.
In some ways, this silence is not surprising. No one expressing support for Israel risks losing their livelihood. Many who have voiced solidarity with Palestinians have lost their jobs, been rebuked, suspended and faced doxing.
More than 400 congressional staffers signed a letter urging Congress to back a cease-fire in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/WT99B79n4f
— PALESTINE ONLINE
Western self-interest
States are not moral entities, but act purely in self-interest. Palestinian freedom and liberation does not align with the interests of the US-led West.
Therefore, Western institutions repeat the increasingly weak talking point that “terrorism” is the cause of all the violence. This talking point is used to provide Israel with the green light to unleash uninhibited violence against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and Jerusalem.
The idea that Western governments and institutions are horrified by violence against civilians rings hollow because of their silence when it comes to violence against Palestinian civilians and other groups around the world.
For decades, Palestinians have been expelled from their land, killed and maimed in great numbers, including in mass atrocities and many well-documented cases of sexual violence and torture in Israeli prisons.
This only scratches the surface of the violence that Palestinians continuously experience, and have experienced, since well before Hamas was formed.
I’m confused. When Ukrainians attacked back after Russia’s invasion, the US celebrated them. When Palestinians do the same against Israeli occupation, they’re condemned.
Filter the propaganda through this lens: the US empire will always choose sides based on its own interests.
— Bianca Graulau (@bgraulau) October 8, 2023
Palestinians continue to suffer what Palestinian scholars Nahla Abdo and Nur Masalha have called an ongoing Nakba and genocide of the Palestinian people. Yet, when Palestinians suffer, as they are now in Gaza, what Israeli historian and expert on genocide Raz Segal has called “a textbook case of genocide,” Western governments remain silent.
There was no Western outrage when Israel ordered more than a million Palestinians to leave their homes in 24 hours. In February, Israeli settlers went on an hours-long rampage in the Palestinian town of Huwara after two settlers were shot by a Palestinian.
Western condemnations of the rampage were muted or non-existent.
Hundreds of scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies and genocide studies are now sounding the alarm about the possibility of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The stories of Palestinian lives that end with the sudden drop of a bomb are not told. Palestinian voices that explain the settler colonialism they suffer remain sidelined. And Palestinian aspirations for decolonised liberation are denied.
The West’s institutional reaction is not just hypocritical, it is an expression of where Western governments stand on the question of Palestine. The West is an active participant in the erasure of Palestine, and when moments of intensified violence like this happen, the West’s true position becomes clear for all to see.
However, people power across the world, including in the US, provide reason for hope. Increasingly, many in the West are disgusted and ashamed by the erasure of Palestine and the killing of Palestinian civilians.
More people are joining the protests and calling for the siege on Gaza to be lifted once and for all. More people power is needed to demand that governments do everything they can to resolve this issue, which can only begin to move towards peace and justice when the Palestinian people are free.
M. Muhannad Ayyash is professor of sociology, Mount Royal University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Photo Credit: The Cradle
Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was meticulously planned. The launch date was conditioned by two triggering factors.
First was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flaunting his ‘New Middle East’ map at the UN General Assembly in September, in which he completely erased Palestine and made a mockery of every single UN resolution on the subject.
Second are the serial provocations at the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, including the straw that broke the camel’s back: two days before Al-Aqsa Flood, on 5 October, at least 800 Israeli settlers launched an assault around the mosque, beating pilgrims, destroying Palestinian shops, all under the observation of Israeli security forces.
Everyone with a functioning brain knows Al-Aqsa is a definitive red line, not just for Palestinians, but for the entire Arab and Muslim worlds.
It gets worse. The Israelis have now invoked the rhetoric of a “Pearl Harbor.” This is as threatening as it gets. The original Pearl Harbor was the American excuse to enter a world war and nuke Japan, and this “Pearl Harbor” may be Tel Aviv’s justification to launch a Gaza genocide.
Sections of the west applauding the upcoming ethnic cleansing – including Zionists posing as “analysts” saying out loud that the “population transfers” that began in 1948 “must be completed” – believe that with massive weaponry and massive media coverage, they can turn things around in short shrift, annihilate the Palestinian resistance, and leave Hamas allies like Hezbollah and Iran weakened.
Their Ukraine Project has sputtered, leaving not just egg on powerful faces, but entire European economies in ruin. Yet as one door closes, another one opens: Jump from ally Ukraine to ally Israel, and hone your sights on adversary Iran instead of adversary Russia.
There are other good reasons to go all guns blazing. A peaceful West Asia means Syria reconstruction – in which China is now officially involved; active redevelopment for Iraq and Lebanon; Iran and Saudi Arabia as part of BRICS 11; the Russia-China strategic partnership fully respected and interacting with all regional players, including key US allies in the Persian Gulf.
Incompetence. Willful strategy. Or both.
That brings us to the cost of launching this new “war on terror.” The propaganda is in full swing. For Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Hamas is ISIS. For Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev, Hamas is Russia. Over one October weekend, the war in Ukraine was completely forgotten by western mainstream media. Brandenburg Gate, the Eiffel tower, the Brazilian Senate are all Israeli now.
Egyptian intel claims it warned Tel Aviv about an imminent attack from Hamas. The Israelis chose to ignore it, as they did the Hamas training drills they observed in the weeks prior, smug in their superior knowledge that Palestinians would never have the audacity to launch a liberation operation.
Whatever happens next, Al-Aqsa Flood has already, irretrievably, shattered the hefty pop mythology around the invincibility of Tsahal, Mossad, Shin Bet, Merkava tank, Iron Dome, and the Israel Defense Forces.
Even as it ditched electronic communications, Hamas profited from the glaring collapse of Israel’s multi-billion-dollar electronic systems monitoring the most surveilled border on the planet.
Cheap Palestinian drones hit multiple sensor towers, facilitated the advance of a paragliding infantry, and cleared the way for T-shirted, AK-47-wielding assault teams to inflict breaks in the wall and cross a border that even stray cats dared not.
Israel, inevitably, turned to battering the Gaza Strip, an encircled cage of 365 square kilometers packed with 2.3 million people. The indiscriminate bombing of refugee camps, schools, civilian apartment blocks, mosques, and slums has begun. Palestinians have no navy, no air force, no artillery units, no armored fighting vehicles, and no professional army. They have little to no high-tech surveillance access, while Israel can call up NATO data if they want it.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant proclaimed “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.”
The Israelis can merrily engage in collective punishment because, with three guaranteed UNSC vetoes in their back pocket, they know they can get away with it.
It doesn’t matter that Haaretz, Israel’s most respected newspaper, straight out concedes that “actually the Israeli government is solely responsible for what happened (Al-Aqsa Flood) for denying the rights of Palestinians.”
The Israelis are nothing if not consistent. Back in 2007, then-Israeli Defense Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin said, “Israel would be happy if Hamas took over Gaza because IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state.”
Ukraine funnels weapons to Palestinians
Only one year ago, the sweaty sweatshirt comedian in Kiev was talking about turning Ukraine into a “big Israel,” and was duly applauded by a bunch of Atlantic Council bots.
Well, it turned out quite differently. As an old-school Deep State source just informed me:
“Ukraine-earmarked weapons are ending up in the hands of the Palestinians. The question is which country is paying for it. Iran just made a deal with the US for six billion dollars and it is unlikely Iran would jeopardize that. I have a source who gave me the name of the country but I cannot reveal it. The fact is that Ukrainian weapons are going to the Gaza Strip and they are being paid for but not by Iran.”
After its stunning raid last weekend, a savvy Hamas has already secured more negotiating leverage than Palestinians have wielded in decades. Significantly, while peace talks are supported by China, Russia, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt – Tel Aviv refuses. Netanyahu is obsessed with razing Gaza to the ground, but if that happens, a wider regional war is nearly inevitable.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah – a staunch Resistance Axis ally of the Palestinian resistance – would rather not be dragged into a war that can be devastating on its side of the border, but that could change if Israel perpetrates a de facto Gaza genocide.
Hezbollah holds at least 100,000 ballistic missiles and rockets, from Katyusha (range: 40 km) to Fajr-5 (75 km), Khaibar-1 (100 km), Zelzal 2 (210 km), Fateh-110 (300 km), and Scud B-C (500 km). Tel Aviv knows what that means, and shudders at the frequent warnings by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah that its next war with Israel will be conducted inside that country.
Which brings us to Iran.
Geopolitical plausible deniability
The key immediate consequence of Al-Aqsa Flood is that the Washington neocon wet dream of “normalization” between Israel and the Arab world will simply vanish if this turns into a Long War.
Large swathes of the Arab world in fact are already normalizing their ties with Tehran – and not only inside the newly expanded BRICS 11.
In the drive towards a multipolar world, represented by BRICS 11, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), among other groundbreaking Eurasian and Global South institutions, there’s simply no place for an ethnocentric Apartheid state fond of collective punishment.
Just this year, Israel found itself disinvited from the African Union summit. An Israeli delegation showed up anyway, and was unceremoniously ejected from the big hall, a visual that went viral. At the UN plenary sessions last month, a lone Israeli diplomat sought to disrupt Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi’s speech. No western ally stood by his side, and he too, was ejected from the premises.
As Chinese President Xi Jinping diplomatically put it in December 2022, Beijing “firmly supports the establishment of an independent state of Palestine that enjoys full sovereignty based on 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital. China supports Palestine in becoming a full member of the United Nations.”
Tehran’s strategy is way more ambitious – offering strategic advice to West Asian resistance movements from the Levant to the Persian Gulf: Hezbollah, Ansarallah, Hashd al-Shaabi, Kataib Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and countless others. It’s as if they are all part of a new Grand Chessboard de facto supervised by Grandmaster Iran.
The pieces in the chessboard were carefully positioned by none other than the late Quds Force Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qassem Soleimani, a once-in-a-lifetime military genius. He was instrumental in creating the foundations for the cumulative successes of Iranian allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine, as well as creating the conditions for a complex operation such as Al-Aqsa Flood.
Elsewhere in the region, the Atlanticist drive of opening strategic corridors across the Five Seas – the Caspian, the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Eastern Mediterranean – is floundering badly.
Russia and Iran are already smashing US designs in the Caspian – via the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) – and the Black Sea, which is on the way to becoming a Russian lake. Tehran is paying very close attention to Moscow’s strategy in Ukraine, even as it refines its own strategy on how to debilitate the Hegemon without direct involvement: call it geopolitical plausible deniability.
Bye bye EU-Israel-Saudi-India corridor
The Russia-China-Iran alliance has been demonized as the new “axis of evil” by western neocons. That infantile rage betrays cosmic impotence. These are Real Sovereigns that can’t be messed with, and if they are, the price to pay is unthinkable.
A key example: if Iran under attack by a US-Israeli axis decided to block the Strait of Hormuz, the global energy crisis would skyrocket, and the collapse of the western economy under the weight of quadrillions of derivatives would be inevitable.
What this means, in the immediate future, is that he American Dream of interfering across the Five Seas does not even qualify as a mirage. Al-Aqsa Flood has also just buried the recently-announced and much-ballyhooed EU-Israel-Saudi Arabia-India transportation corridor.
China is keenly aware of all this incandescence taking place only a week before its 3rd Belt and Road Forum in Beijing. At stake are the BRI connectivity corridors that matter – across the Heartland, across Russia, plus the Maritime Silk Road and the Arctic Silk Road.
Then there’s the INSTC linking Russia, Iran and India – and by ancillary extension, the Gulf monarchies.
The geopolitical repercussions of Al-Aqsa Flood will speed up Russia, China and Iran’s interconnected geoeconomic and logistical connections, bypassing the Hegemon and its Empire of Bases. Increased trade and non-stop cargo movement are all about (good) business. On equal terms, with mutual respect – not exactly the War Party’s scenario for a destabilized West Asia.
Oh, the things that a slow-moving paragliding infantry overflying a wall can accelerate.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Under the less than inspiring implicit slogan of “You’re Stuck with Biden,” the Democratic Party has foregone presidential primary debates this election season. Not even bothering with the pretense of democratic people’s choice, naked bourgeois rule is offered to their captured constituencies.
Joe Biden’s approval rating has sunk to a dismal 40.5%. USA Today asks: “How can Donald Trump – a twice-impeached, four-times indicted former president… – be tied, or even leading, Joe Biden in the 2024 election?”
Progressive Democrats – an oxymoron – are alarmed. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, unconditionally endorsed a Biden rerun even before Joe announced; a raw demonstration that there is not even a glimmer of a progressive agenda in the Democratic Party.
Fellow putative progressive Jim McGovern explained that offering the voters a progressive alternative was verboten because “the stakes are too high this year.”
Call out the attack dogs
If you can’t practice internal democracy or offer an appealing candidate who speaks to the issues concerning the electorate, the course of action for the party faithful is a no-brainer – call out the attack dogs! Target anyone with the temerity to even raise the possibility of an alternative to the two-parties’ shared agenda of austerity for working people, ever more aggressive imperialism, and planetary global warming.
Washington bureau chief for the once progressive Mother Jones, David Corn, got the memo. He smeared independent candidate Dr. Cornel West for not being a Democratic Party sycophant.
Corn reports that West “hobnobs” with people who are not vitriolically opposed to China and instead espouse international peace. Otherwise, the article in MoJo (as the cool people at the publication call themselves) has nothing but bad things to say about West.
Actually, failing to be a Sinophobe is itself a major demerit for Corn. As an equal opportunity xenophobe against official enemies of the US state, Corn has made a professional career peddling the Russiagate conspiracy. Much to his embarrassment, Corn was a major promoter of the discredited Steele dossier, for which even the Washington Post ridiculed Corn’s journalistic malpractice.
Guilt by association
Corn’s hatchet job criticizes West, but he can’t find much to disparage about the esteemed academic and activist. So the ace reporter resorts to guilt by association. West, he argues, must be “judged by those who share the platform” with him.
West appeared on an October 3 forum with the likes of Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink. The feminist grassroots organization works to end US wars and militarism. Corn hastens to add that her organization was “the subject of a recent New York Times investigation,” which uncovered the unamazing scoop that some on the left have benefactors.
Worse yet, the forum also featured comedian and “far-left” podcaster Lee Camp who harbors resentment for the US “war machine.”
But that was not the end of it. West dared to share the stage with Eugene Puryear, a member of the Party of Socialism and Liberation which favors the “revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.” The accusation is repeated a second time in the short piece just in case you weren’t horrified the first time.
Premature Peacenik
Besides the indiscretion of hobnobbing with undesirables, the transgression that most rankled Corn was Dr. West’s recognition that the war in Ukraine was provoked by the US and its allies before the head of NATO made a similar observation.
The “hail Ukraine” crowd, led by Mr. Biden, are now telling us the Ukraine War was a brilliant strategy to weaken Russia on the cheap, and that it is a bargain to shovel billions more of tax payer dollars to prolong the carnage. But somehow Corn takes umbrage when West suggests the US had some hand in precipitating the debacle.
We are living in times when Rep. Margorie Taylor Greene, a person considered far right by liberals, poses for selfies with peaceniks who Corn now scorns. MTG tweeted: “Today, I met brave @codepink activists who protested for peace…We don’t agree on most things, but we do agree Congress should STOP fueling the war in Ukraine!”
When liberal Democrats find themselves to the right of the likes of Henry Kissinger on matters of war and peace, one needs a score card to know which half of the two-party duopoly is the lesser evil. Liberals who opposed the border wall, deportations of immigrants, aggressive militarism, continuing student debt, promoting oil drilling, and escalating defense budgets when these were Trump policies are happily sucking up when Biden continued and even upped the same measures. West is trying to provide a counterpoint.
West goes independent
Corn sloppily claimed that West is the “Green Party presidential candidate.” West had announced he would run for the Green Party nomination along with a number of other contenders. But the Green Party selection will not be made until 2024.
In any case, West has since announced that he will be running as an independent. As such, West will not enjoy the Green’s advantage of ballot status in around 18 states. West hopes to get on the ballot on 35 to 40 states, rejecting the argument that leaving the Greens would make him less challenging to the Democrats.
West’s departure is unfortunate for the Greens. Had he captured the nomination and run as a Green, his celebrity could have bolstered the party by attracting more registrations. Increasing voter dissatisfaction with the two major capitalist parties has not translated into resurgent third parties at a time when alternatives are ever more needed.
As an independent, West will no longer have the stabilizing bookends of an established party to provide feedback and policy guidance. Vanity and individualism are harder to correct when a candidate is accountable to himself only.
Finally, an independent West will not have to contend with the bureaucracy and internal politics of the Greens. More difficult, however, will be fighting for ballot status against major party-controlled electoral authorities. As Ralph Nader discovered, Democrats were willing to go to unprincipled lengths to keep him off the ballot, cheating and even going to jail.
Cornel West’s platform
The Democrats are marching lock-step on a “Biden’s not Trump” platform, so shut up.
West’s platform is arguably one that is closer to the sentiments of the voters. Some 65% Democrats, 40% independents, and even 10% Republicans support socialism in some form. Agreeing with West, 55% of the electorate oppose additional funding for Ukraine. In contrast, an unprecedented unanimity of House and Senate Democrats support war funding.
Most US voters identify as independents. If ours were truly a democracy, the West platform would qualify as mainstream and West would look like a centrist. But the US political center has shifted decisively to the right.
The two-party neocons have highjacked the US ship of state. Endless war and nuclear confrontation are not middle political postures. Cities of homeless and billionaires joyriding in outer space do not reflect a popular economy.
West’s rebuttal of the spoiler critique
The liberal mantra is to support the Dems despite their politics – not because of their politics – to avoid an even greater evil. Their solution, however, is to reward bad behavior by pledging to swallow whatever the Democrats cough up.
West advises the Democrats to stop obsessing about independents and concentrate on mobilizing their base because they have more registered voters than the Republicans. In the long run, replace the Electoral College with a direct popular vote.
Further, the best way for the Democrats to avoid losing votes to a progressive is to preempt their issues for combatting global warming, reducing income inequality, dismantling the national security state, and ending militarism.
A left alternative in the electoral arena, such as the one West poses, challenges the Democrats to be progressive. Otherwise they have little incentive to raise crucial issues. Removing a progressive challenge from the left is tantamount to encouraging the Democrats to shift further to the right with the assurance that their progressive-leaning captured constituencies, such as ethnic minorities and labor, have nowhere else to go.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
ANALYSIS: By Alexander Gillespie, University of Waikato
It was perhaps inevitable that the shock Hamas attack on Israel would become a minor election sideshow in New Zealand. Less than a week from the Aotearoa New Zealand polls, a crisis in the Middle East offered opposition parties a brief chance to criticise the foreign minister’s initial reaction.
But if it was a fleeting and fairly trivial moment in the heat of a campaign, the crisis itself is far from it — and it will test the foreign policy positions of whichever parties manage to form a government after Saturday.
It can be tempting to see the latest eruption of violence in Gaza and Israel as somehow “normal”, given the history of the region. But this is far from normal.
What appear to be intentional war crimes and crimes against humanity, involving the use of terror against citizens and guests of Israel, will provoke what will probably be an unprecedented response.
Israel’s declaration of war and formation of an emergency war cabinet — backed by threats to “wipe this thing called Hamas off the face of the Earth” — were the start.
The bombardment and “complete siege” of Gaza, and preparation for a possible ground invasion, have catastrophic potential.
Hundreds of thousands may be forced towards Egypt or into the Mediterranean, with the fate of the hostages held by Hamas looking dire. Israel has now said there will be no humanitarian aid until the hostages are free.
There is a risk the war will spread over Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, with Hezbollah (backed by Iran) now involved.
US President Joe Biden’s warning to Iran to “be careful”, and the deployment of a US carrier fleet to the Eastern Mediterranean, only ups the ante.
“The number of bombs that Israel has dropped on the Gaza Strip in the last six days is equal to the number of bombs that America has dropped in Afghanistan in a year.”
– The Washington Post pic.twitter.com/0CiXPZKL1u
— PALESTINE ONLINE
Rules of war
Given the suspension of some commercial flights to and from Israel, New Zealand’s most meaningful first response has been practical: arranging a special flight from Tel Aviv for citizens and Pacific Islanders, and their families, currently in Israel or the Palestinian territories who wish to leave.
Beyond these immediate concerns, however, the world is divided. Outrage in the West is matched by support in Arab countries for Palestinian “resistance”. Despite US efforts to get a global consensus condemning the attack, the United Nations Security Council could not agree on a unified statement.
With no global consensus, New Zealand can do little more than assert and defend the established rules-based international order. This includes stating clearly that international humanitarian law and the rules of war are universal and must be applied impartially.
That’s akin to New Zealand’s position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine: the rules of war apply to all, both state and non-state forces (irrespective of whether those parties agree to them). War crimes are to be investigated, with accountability and consequences applied through the relevant international bodies.
This applies to crimes of terror, murder, hostage-taking and indiscriminate rocket attacks carried out by Hamas. But the government needs also to emphasise that war crimes do not justify further retaliatory war crimes.
Specifically, unless civilians take a direct part in the conflict, the distinction between them and combatants must be observed. Military action should be proportionate, with all feasible precautions taken to minimise incidental loss of civilian life.
International law prohibits collective punishments, and access for humanitarian relief should be permitted. To hold an entire population captive – as a siege of Gaza involves – for the crimes of a military organisation is not acceptable.
UNICEF: 447 Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza, there are reports that this number has already risen. #GazaUnderAttack pic.twitter.com/a2SNVqgOJg
— PALESTINE ONLINE
The two-state solution
It is also important that New Zealand carefully considers definitions of terrorism and legitimate force. Terrorists do not enjoy the political and legal legitimacy afforded by international law.
Unlike other members of the Five Eyes security network, New Zealand designates only the military wing of Hamas, not its political wing, as a prohibited “terrorist entity” under the Terrorism Suppression Act.
Whether this distinction is anything more than a fiction needs to be reviewed. If this were to change, it would mean the financing, participation in or recruitment to any branch of Hamas would be illegal. This might have implications for any future peace process, should Hamas be involved.
At some point, most people surely hope, the cycle of violence will end. The likeliest route to that will be the so-called “two-state solution”, requiring security guarantees for Israel, negotiated land swaps and careful management of Jerusalem’s holy sites.
New Zealand has long supported this initiative, despite its apparent diplomatic near-death status. An emergency meeting of the Arab League in Cairo this week urged Israel to resume talks to establish a viable Palestinian state, and China has also reiterated support such a solution.
New Zealand cannot stay silent when extreme, indiscriminate violence is committed by any group or nation. But joining any movement of like-minded nations to continue pushing for the two-state solution is still its best long-term strategy.
Dr Alexander Gillespie is professor of law, University of Waikato. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
I grew up in a small Midwestern town that was part of an industrial oasis located in the midst of corn and soybean fields. The oasis existed because bituminous coal had been discovered under the flat lands well over a hundred years ago.
The mines attracted thousands of workers from Eastern and Southern Europe, including my two grandfathers. The large immigrant working class, in turn, attracted industry as well. General Motors, General Electric, Hyster, and several other corporations soon made a home in this rural area.
At the time of my birth, the mines were exhausted for profitable exploitation (My grandfather had the dubious distinction of being one of the last miners killed). But industry continued on until the deindustrialization that wracked the entire Midwest in the 1990s.
I probably first heard the expression “DP” in the late McCarthy era when family and friends spoke of some people who were new to the area. My inquiring mind soon learned that these DPs were “displaced people” — Eastern European refugees from camps in Western Europe relocating to the US through humanitarian agencies. In keeping with the tenor of the time, I was told that they were fleeing Communism.
Since Chicago was the choice of many of the first wave of Lithuanians arriving in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, it was no surprise, then, that many Lithuanian DPs found their way to Chicago, then sometimes merged into the large Lithuanian immigrant community where I lived.
Given the time and the reigning sympathy for the “victims” of Communism, they were unsurprisingly welcome. Their children went to school with me and socialized with my circle of friends.
Later, when in graduate school and taking more than a superficial interest in European history, I had a Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment about the DPs: What — I asked myself — were Lithuanians doing in Nazi Germany at the close of World War II?
If they were anti-fascists, surely, they would have remained East. If they were forced laborers or prisoners-of-war, they would have been repatriated. Since the Nazis were not kind to the ordinary untermenschen of the East unless they were sympathizers or collaborators, it would be a reasonable assumption that many, if not most, traveled ahead of the Red Army across Poland and Eastern Germany with the help or acquiescence of the Nazis — they were collaborators and would have been treated accordingly. Of course, there may have been myriad explanations for some displaced Lithuanians who found their way to these camps, but not thousands.
This squared with my US experience. Unlike the impoverished peasant wave of immigrants who came to the US at the turn of the century, the post-World War II immigrants brought a heavy dose of cultural nationalism and tradition. The first wave had their cultural ties to the old country severed at Ellis Island when our names were butchered by the immigration officers. Assimilation was made easy in the mines, mills, and factories; and cultural identity grew thin.
Where the first wave was shaped by oppressive, exploitative working conditions and welcomed, even led progressive unionism and a solidarity culture, this second wave was decidedly conservative and battled to move many of the existing ethnic organizations away from their secular, progressive direction.
Of course, it was not only Lithuanians, but other Eastern and Central European peoples who were welcomed to the US and Canada because their anti-Communism was unwelcome in the country-of-origin, but welcome here. That ticket was valid for collaborators as well, especially if they had skills useful to the anti-Communist crusade.
Much of this history is rarely spoken. We all know about the Nazi, Werner von Braun, the father of the US missile and space program, but little else besides an occasional death-camp guard who flies too close to the flame and is exposed.
Therefore, the recent Canadian parliament fiasco comes as no surprise to those of us familiar with the embarrassing welcome mat extended to the fascists, ultra-nationalists, and collaborators with Nazism after World War II. Indeed, that collaboration with collaborators evolved into an open door for the exiled reactionaries from every anti-Communist, client regime that the US has sponsored since 1945. From the Cuban gusanos to Venezuelan golpistas, the US government has found a happy haven for the world’s most violent anti-democrats, thereby polluting our own politics.
So, watching the standing ovation for a 98-year-old Ukrainian veteran of the Waffen-SS by every Canadian parliamentarian and most of the Canadian government only underscores the hypocrisy of Western governments that presume to lecture the world on democracy and human rights.
Imagine that people who want and expect to be taken seriously on world affairs wildly applauding a rare surviving participant in history’s greatest mass slaughter. It should be even more embarrassing that a mainstream corporate media had to be reluctantly goaded into indignation over this outrage, a media that wallows in sanctimonious self-righteousness and smugness.
Major media commentators have a short, selective memory.
Upon the July 5, 1986 death of Yaroslav Stetsko, the former Ukrainian Premier during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, President Ronald Reagan sent condolences to his widow celebrating his “courageous struggle” and closing with “Your cause is our cause. God bless you.” Stetsko had no doubt cherished the pictures taken with Reagan, Bush, and UN ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick.
Stetsko, a notorious anti-Semite, was instrumental in forming the infamous Nachtigall and Roland battalions made up of Ukrainian fascists who worked alongside the Nazis in killing Jews, Communists, prisoners, gypsies, and members of the resistance. In July after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Stetsko sent a warm, fawning letter to Adolf Hitler expressing gratitude and admiration for the Nazi action and hoping for a victory against the Soviet Union.
He is the ideological father of Svoboda, the ultra-nationalist, anti-Communist, anti-Semitic, racist, Nazi-nostalgic party that, continuing Stetsko’s ideology, exercises far-too-much influence in modern Ukraine’s political life.
Outrages like the Canadian parliamentary fiasco and Reagan’s celebration of the life of a war criminal occur because no one in official circles or the capitalist media expects the public to know about the vast amount of collaboration with Nazism that occurred as the Wehrmacht and the SS marched East in their Lebensraum im Osten campaign. Nor are most people in North America aware that Nazis and their Eastern European collaborators were welcomed to our shores by the thousands.
Also, most people in North America have not learned of the incredible crimes committed against Jews and other ethnic groups, as well as Communists and anti-fascists in the Baltics, Ukraine, and Poland by the ultra-nationalists, fascists, anti-Semites, and anti-Communists of those countries (one mustn’t forget that fascist volunteers from Finland, Romania, Norway, Hungary, and Italy also fought with the Nazis on the Eastern front).
Countless studies, memoirs, and documents exist recounting the role of Eastern European collaborators in ethnic and political murder, though they garner no interest from the pundits, the commentators, and the popularizers. Instead, a book like Alliance for Murder: The Nazi-Ukrainian Nationalist Partnership in Genocide, ed. B.F. Sabrin (1991) goes unheralded, unreviewed, and relegated to a few library shelves.
Gruesome first-person accounts and documents portray the terror, cruelty, and murder conducted by the Ukrainian nationalists. Told mainly by surviving Jewish victims, Alliance for Murder focuses on the nationalist murders in the Tarnopol region of Ukraine but shows the systematic collaboration of the Ukrainian nationalists. The book quotes a former Nazi general, Otto Korfes:
[The trenches] were filled with men, women, and children, mostly Jews. Every trench contained some 60-80 persons. We could hear their moans and shrieks as grenades exploded among them. On both sides of the trenches stood some 12 men dressed in civilian clothes. They were hurling grenades down the trenches… Later, officers of the Gestapo told us that those men were Banderists (July 3, 1941) [Banderists were followers of Stefan Bandera, a founder of the OUN nationalist organization].
Another book, Fraud, Famine, and Fascism, by Douglas Tottle (1987), dared to challenge the mythology of a calculated, purposeful famine in the Ukraine organized by the Soviets. The so-called Holodomor has become the standard Western narrative that fuels and justifies Ukrainian hatred and contempt for Communism and Russia — much like today’s Western angst over the Uyghurs in the Peoples’ Republic of China — while distracting Westerners from the brutal actions of Ukrainian nationalism from its beginnings until today.
Tottle’s book was of special interest because it came after Robert Conquest — a serial contriver of Communist perfidy — published his widely influential book on the 1930s famine — The Harvest of Sorrow. Tottle, a Canadian union activist, former editor of the USW The Challenger, and a movement organizer, rocked the smug, well-connected Conquest’s carefully constructed anti-Soviet tome so effectively that the nationalist Ukrainian diaspora was rattled and motivated to hurriedly convene an “international commission” to determine the “truth” about Ukraine. Organized and hand-picked by the nationalist World Congress of Free Ukrainians, the inquiry set out to place its stamp of approval upon Conquest’s accusations and dismiss Tottle’s rejoinder.
The biographies of former top leaders of the World Congress of Free Ukrainians (later the Ukrainian World Congress) exhibits the political flavor of the organization: Anton Melnyk, member of Stepan Bandera’s fascistic OUN; Mykola Plaviuk, member of the Nazi-collaborationist Ukrainian National Army, 2nd Division; and Peter Savaryn, member of the notorious 14th Waffen-SS volunteer Division “Galicia.” With this illustrious group of former leaders of the World Congress of Free Ukrainians, it is not difficult to imagine how objective their inquiry into the so-called Holodomor would be.
The ultimate tribute to the impact of Tottle’s research comes from the arch anti-Soviet pundit, Anne Applebaum, who proclaimed that Tottle — a mere Canadian leftist with no elite credentials — could not have written his book without Soviet help.
Citing Reuben Ainsztein, Tottle says: “In the first three months of Nazi occupation of Western Ukraine, 15 per cent of Gallician Jews — 100,000 people — were slaughtered by the joint action of the Germans and Ukrainian nationalists.”
He concludes:
…collaboration between the Nazis and Ukrainian Nationalists began long before the war and continued throughout the war, even after the Germans were completely driven out of Ukrainian territory. The Nationalists were firmly locked into the Nazi occupation machine. Their police and punitive units mass-murdered Jews and Ukrainians alike. Vast numbers of Ukrainians were also rounded up, with the help of Ukrainian collaborators for shipment to Germany as slave laborers. Thousands of actions were carried out by Nationalist militias, SB, UPA and Ukrainian police units, often under German supervision. Nationalist-recruited troops served Hitler in Ukraine, Poland, Byelorussia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. Ukrainian collaborators assisted in the murder of hundreds of thousands in death camps like Trblinka, Sobibor, Yanowska and Trawniki.
As Max Blumenthal notes, after the war the Canadian government in “Ottawa placed thousands of Ukrainian veterans of Hitler’s army on the fast-track to citizenship” while classifying thousands of Jewish refugees as “enemy aliens.” Undoubtedly, the US government welcomed even a greater number of Nazi collaborators who were “proven” anti-Communists.
If the brief glimpse into the sordid history of Ukrainian (and other Eastern European) collaborators afforded by the Canadian parliamentary fiasco serves any purpose, it is to remind us of the lingering disease of twentieth-century European nationalism and its ugly inhumanity. Those who turn their eyes away from this legacy and its continuing influence over today’s Ukrainian politics will never begin to understand the dynamics of the conflict within that country and with its neighbor. The symbols of Ukrainian nationalism, so readily embraced by Western armchair warriors raging at Putin, are dripping with the blood of Jews, Poles, Russians, Communists, partisans, and anti-fascists who encountered Ukrainian nationalism and its virulent practitioners.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
On February 12, 2002 at a Pentagon news conference, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked by Jim Miklaszewski, the NBC Pentagon correspondent, if he had any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was supplying them to terrorists. Rumsfeld delivered a famous non-answer answer and said:
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
When he was pressed by Jamie McIntyre, CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, to answer the question about evidence, he continued to talk gobbledygook, saying, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice versa.”
He never said he had evidence, because he didn’t.
Rumsfeld, who enjoyed his verbal games, was the quintessential bullshitter and liar for the warfare state. This encounter took place when Rumsfeld and his coconspirators were promoting lie after lie about the attacks of September 11, 2001 and conflating false stories about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in order to build a case to wage another war against Iraq, in order to supplement the one in Afghanistan and the war on “terror” that they launched post September 11 and the subsequently linked anthrax attacks.
A year later on February 5, 2003, U. S. Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the U. N. Security Council and in a command performance assured the world that the U.S. had solid evidence that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” repeating that phrase seventeen times as he held up a stage prop vial of anthrax to make his point. He said, “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources — solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” He was lying, but to this very day his defenders falsely claim he was the victim of an “intelligence failure,” a typical deceitful excuse along with “it was a mistake.” Of course, Iraq did not have “weapons of mass destruction” and the savage war waged on Iraq was not a mistake.
Scott Ritter, the former Marine U.N. weapons inspector, made it very clear back then that there was no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but his expertise was dismissed, just as his current analysis of the war in Ukraine is. See his recent tweet about Senator Diane Feinstein in this regard:
Thirteen months after Rumsfeld’s exchange in the news conference, the United States invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, knowing it had no justification. It was a war of aggression. Millions died as a result. And none of the killers have been prosecuted for their massive war crimes. The war was not launched on mistaken evidence; it was premeditated and based on lies easy to see. Very, very easy to see.
On January 28, 2003, eleven days before Powell performance, I, an independent writer, wrote a newspaper Op Ed, “The War Hoax,” saying:
The Bush administration has a problem: How to start a war without having a justifiable reason for one. No doubt they are working hard to solve this urgent problem. If they can’t find a justification, they may have to create one. Or perhaps they will find what they have already created. . . . Yet once again, the American people are being played for fools, by the government and the media. The open secret, the insider’s fact, is that the United States plans to attack Iraq in the near future. The administration knows this, the media knows it, but the Bush scenario, written many months ago, is to act as if it weren’t so, to act as if a peaceful solution were being seriously considered. . . . Don’t buy it.
Only one very small regional Massachusetts newspaper, the North Adams Transcript, was willing to publish the piece.
I mention this because I think it has been very obvious for a very long time that the evidence for United States’ crimes of all sorts has been available to anyone who wished to face the truth. It does not take great expertise, just an eye for the obvious and the willingness to do a little homework. Despite this, I have noticed that journalists and writers on the left have continued to admit that they were beguiled by people such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joseph Biden, con men all. I do not mean writers for the mainstream press, but those considered oppositional. Many have, for reasons only they can answer, put hope in these obvious charlatans, and some prominent ones have refused to analyze such matters as the JFK assassination, September 11th, or Covid-19, to name a few issues. Was it because they considered these politicians and matters known unknowns, even when the writing was on the wall?
Those on the right have rolled with Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump in a similar manner, albeit for different reasons. It causes me to shake my head in amazement. When will people learn? How long does it take to realize that all these people are part of a vast criminal enterprise that has been continuously waging wars and lying while raking in vast spoils for the military-industrial complex. There is one party in the U.S. – the War Party.
If you have lived long enough, as have I, you reach a point when you have, through study and the accumulation of evidence, arrived at a long list of known knowns. So with a backhand slap to Donald Rumsfeld, that long serving servant of the U.S. war machine, I will list a very partial number of my known knowns in chronological order. Each could be greatly expanded. There is an abundance of easily available evidence for all of them – nothing secret – but one needs to have the will for truth and do one’s homework. All of these known knowns are the result of U.S. deep state conspiracies and lies, aided and abetted by the lies of mass corporate media.
My Known Knowns:
Donald Rumsfeld, as a key long time insider to U.S. deep state operations, was surely aware of my list of known knowns. He was just one of many such slick talkers involved in demonic U.S. operations that have always been justified, denied, or kept secret by him and his ilk.
One does not have to be a criminologist to realize these things. It is easy to imagine that Rumsfeld’s forlorn ghost is wandering since he went to his grave with his false “unknown unknowns” tucked away.
When he said, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice-versa,” he did say it, of course. Despite double-talkers like him, evidence of decades of U.S. propaganda is easy to see through if one is compelled by the will-to-truth.
“Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again. All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.” – Norman O. Brown
Note: If you think I too have no evidence, look at this for many of them.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
After the United States announced in early September that it would supply depleted uranium munitions to Ukraine, a claim began to circulate in Chinese-language posts that a ship carrying such munitions was destroyed by Russian fighter jets, citing a photo as a proof.
But the claim is false. The photo in fact shows an arms depot explosion which occurred in Ukraine in 2017. Keyword searches found no credible reports to back the claim.
The claim and the photo were shared in posts on popular Chinese social media platforms such as Douyin and NetEase as seen here and here.
“The United States shipped 20,000 depleted uranium bombs to Ukraine. They were attacked as soon as they entered the port… The well-prepared Russian army quickly locked onto the giant ship and blew it up and sank it in the port,” one post reads in part.
The claim was accompanied by several photos with the posts specifically citing one photo of the explosion as the evidence of the Russian attack.
The claim emerged after the U.S. Department of Defense formally announced on Sept. 6 that it would supply depleted uranium munitions to Ukraine as part of US$175 million in additional military aid to the country. Officials did not state a specific date for when the shipment would be sent to Ukraine.
This announcement was met with strong criticism from Russia, and shortly thereafter claims circulated on Chinese social media about Russian jets taking down a U.S. vessel.
But the claim is false. The photo in fact shows an arms depot explosion which occurred in Ukraine in 2017.
Old photo
A reverse image search on Google found the matching photo published in media reports about a Ukrainian arms depot explosion in 2017 as seen here and here as well as on China’s official military website.
The caption of the photo, credited to Reuters, reads: “More than 180,000 tonnes of munitions were believed to have been stored at the depot.”
The explosion occurred after a depot in Kalynivka, a city about 175 kilometers (110 miles) from Kiev, caught fire, forcing local authorities to eventually evacuate more than 30,000 people from the area.
A closer look at the original photo shows that the fireball featured in the photo was enlarged and cropped before being used as alleged evidence of the destroyed ocean liner full of uranium munitions. However, the actual shape of the fireball in both pictures exactly match, as are peripheral details such as trees and electric poles in the surrounding countryside.
Below is a screenshot comparison.
Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Taejun Kang and Malcolm Foster.
Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) is a branch of RFA established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. Our journalists publish both daily and special reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of public issues.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Dong Zhe for Asia Fact Check Lab.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Riga, October 5, 2023—The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by the disappearance of Ukrainian journalist Viktoria Roshchina and called on Russian authorities and anyone with information about her to disclose her location immediately.
“We are deeply worried by the disappearance of Viktoria Roshchina, who has been missing for over two months after planning to go on a reporting trip in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory,” said Carlos Martinez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director, in New York. “CPJ stands in solidarity with other organizations calling on Russian authorities and anyone with information on her whereabouts to come forward at once. Journalists must be able to freely report on the invasion without retaliation.”
Roshchina, who planned to travel to the occupied territories of eastern Ukraine via Russia to report on the situation there, left Ukraine for Poland on July 25 and was expected to reach the occupied territories three days later.
She has been missing since August 3, and her current location is unknown, according to a statement by global non-profit organization International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) and Sevgil Musaieva, the chief editor of Ukrainska Pravda, an independent Ukrainian news website that Roshchina works with.
On August 3, Roshchina told her sister that she made it through days of border checks but did not share her location, Musaieva told CPJ, adding that Ukraine’s SBU security service has since told Roshchina’s family that Russian forces captured her.
“Unfortunately, we didn’t know where she went, how she crossed the border with Russia, or where she last got in touch,” Musaieva said. “If we had known at least something, it would have greatly simplified this search.”
Roshchina’s family reported her missing to the Ukrainian authorities on August 12 and filed an official missing case on September 21. CPJ’s emails to the SBU and the Russian Ministry of Defense received no response.
Musaieva told CPJ that Roshchina was not on editorial assignment for Ukrainska Pravda, “but she asked what topics we could theoretically be interested in.” Roshchina is a freelance reporter who has been covering the war in Ukraine for several Ukrainian media outlets, including Ukrainska Pravda, regional news website Novosti Donbassa, and privately owned news website Censor.net.
In March 2022, Roshchina was detained by Russian forces for 10 days while reporting in southeastern Ukraine. That same month, Russian forces in Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporozhye region fired on her vehicle.
Russian forces have detained multiple Ukrainian journalists since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The whereabouts of former journalist Iryna Levchenko, missing since early May 2023, and of journalist Dmytro Khilyuk, detained in early March 2022, are still unknown.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Washington, D.C. – A group of 50 activists and Vermont constituents staged a sit-in inside Senator Bernie Sanders’ office on Wednesday, demanding the senator to call for peace and diplomacy in Ukraine instead of more weapons and war. The sit-in resulted in the arrest of 11 activists, including an 89-year-old CODEPINK peace activist.
The group was joined by Green Party Presidential Candidate Dr. Cornel West in the Senate lobby for a prayer vigil before the sit-in. The prayer vigil and sit-in were part of a week of action that included an antiwar rally on Tuesday night featuring Dr. West, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary; Claudia de la Cruz, Co-Executive Director of The People’s Forum; Lee Camp, American comedian, writer, podcaster, news journalist; Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK and Global Exchange; and Eugene Puryear, American journalist, activist, and host on Breakthrough News.
“We need Bernie to provide leadership to put a stop to the US funding of the Ukraine war now. Use the money for healthcare, not warfare,” said Burlington resident James Marc Leas.
Crystal Zevon, an artist and CODEPINK peace activist from Barnet, VT, expressed her disappointment in Senator Sanders, who has voted for more weapons to Ukraine and even criticized Democrats who called for peace talks. “Yes, Bernie should condemn the Russian invasion, but he should also be calling for a negotiated end to this brutal war,” said Zevon.
The group carried signs in support of peace talks and negotiations, including one quote from the Senator himself in which he previously called for a diplomatic solution.
Jodie Evans, Co-Founder of CODEPINK, reminded Senator Sanders of his antiwar roots, “We are showing up to remind Bernie of the values he espoused that made his name what it is. And call on him to stand for peace, to call for diplomacy and to again lead for peace,” said Evans.
Medea Benjamin, Co-Founder of CODEPINK and author of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, expressed her disappointment in the lack of Democrats calling for peace talks. “I am appalled that NO Democrats are saying what the majority of American people are saying: We need peace talks, not more war. This is NOT a MAGA issue or a Republican issue but an issue of human survival to stop WWIII and possibly a nuclear war. We need Bernie to be with us on the side of peace,” said Benjamin.
The activists are urging Senator Sanders to call for the flow of weapons to stop and the leadership of Ukraine, Russia, and the US to sit at the negotiating table and end the horrific war.
Click here to see all the photos and video clips from all the actions.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
This report consists of three parts:
1. Canada’s House of Commons gives standing ovation to a man introduced as a Ukrainian “war hero”, later to discover that he served in the Nazi 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS. (Hindustan Times)
2. Trudeau Urged to Resign (Sky News)
3. Is Trudeau Supportive of Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Party Svoboda? (Global Research)
Part I
Zelensky Addresses Canada’s House of Commons
“Oversight. Major Embarrassment”
“In a major embarrassment for Ottawa, the Canadian lawmakers gave a standing ovation to a man who was introduced as a war hero after Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s address in the House of Commons only to later realise that he had served in a Nazi unit during World War II.” (Hindustan Times)
 |
The Speaker of Canada’s House of Commons apologized Sunday for recognizing 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka as a “Ukrainian hero” before the Canadian Parliament.
Hunka served in World War II as a member of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, according to a Jewish human rights group that demanded an apology.
“In my remarks following the address of the President of Ukraine, I recognized an individual in the gallery. I have subsequently become aware of more information which causes me to regret my decision to do so,” Anthony Rota said in a statement.
Rota took responsibility for what was characterized as an oversight, calling the initiative “entirely my own.”
“The initiative was entirely my own, the individual in question being from my riding and having been brought to my attention,” he added, adding his “deepest apologies” to Jewish communities.
 |
Following Zelenskiy’s address in the House of Commons, Rota acknowledged Hunka, who was seated in the gallery, praising him for fighting for Ukrainian independence against the Russians. Hunka received two standing ovations from those gathered.
“At a time of rising antisemitism and Holocaust distortion, it is incredibly disturbing to see Canada’s Parliament rise to applaud an individual who was a member of a unit in the Waffen-SS, a Nazi military branch responsible for the murder of Jews and others,” the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center said in a statement while demanding an apology earlier Sunday.
“An explanation must be provided as to how this individual entered the hallowed halls of Canadian Parliament and received recognition from the Speaker of the House and a standing ovation,” the group added.
Hindustan Times, September 25, 2023
Part II
Sky News: “Trudeau Urged to Resign”
What this Sky News (com.au) report conveys is that PM Trudeau was fully aware of the fact that Yaroslav Hunka was a member of the Waffen SS in the course of World War II.
This was not an oversight. Trudeau met Hunka personally prior the event.
Visibly Anthony Rota did not know who Yaroslav Hunka was. And as Speaker of the House he was requested by the Liberal government to call for a standing ovation.
This was carefully planned in advance.
Who should have apologized to the Jewish community: Anthony Rota or Prime Minister Trudeau?
But there is more than meets the eye:
“Mr Hunka was applauded for fighting against the Soviet Red Army with the “first Ukrainian division” — as the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (“Galicia”), a largely Ukrainian Nazi collaborator unit, was renamed in March 1945 as Germany was on the point of losing the war.
Following the incorporation of openly Neo-nazi units like the Azov and Aidar battalions into the Ukrainian military, the incident underlines the way the war is being used to rewrite history and rehabilitate fascist collaborators while depicting the Soviet Union as the aggressor in World War II.” (Morningstar Online)
Neither Canada’s Liberal government, nor the Opposition have addressed this issue. Why? (Above comments by Michel Chossudovsky)
Sky News Report
Part III
Is Trudeau Supportive of Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Party Svoboda?
The issue of “the Ukrainian hero of the 14th Division Waffen SS Yaroslav Hunka” has opened up a Can of Worms, a Pandora’s box.
In a bitter irony, President Zelensky who is of Jewish Russian descent has embraced Neo-Nazism. He fully endorsed (together with Trudeau and Freeland) the standing ovation in support of Yaroslav Hunka. (See image in Part I above)
According to the Leader of the Opposition:
“Trudeau personally met and honoured the veteran of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (A Nazi Division).
Liberals then arranged for this Nazi veteran to be recognized on the Floor of the House of Commons” (Pierre Poilievre, Leader the Opposition)
 |
The leader of the Opposition Pierre Poilievre begs the question. Has P.M. Trudeau succumbed to Nazi ideology?
From the outset in early 2016, Trudeau’s Liberal government has been supportive of Neo-Nazi elements within the Kiev regime, including the Azov Battalion and the Svoboda Neo-Nazi Party.
Amply documented, Svoboda together with the “Right Sector” (Pravy Sektor) were actively involved in the 2014 EuroMaidan massacre.
The founders of Ukraine’s Svoboda Party are Oleh Tyahnybok and Andrij Parubiy. Both individuals have played a key role in shaping the Kiev regime on behalf of their US-NATO sponsors.
Deputy Speaker and Speaker Andriy Parubiy of the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian Parliament, 2016-2019) was first received by Trudeau at the House of Commons in February 2016.
Parubiy also met up with members of Trudeau’s Cabinet including Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who describes Ukraine as a “vibrant democracy”.
 |
 |
Is Parubiy a “Good Guy”? Ask PM Trudeau
Parubiy describes Adolf Hitler as a true proponent of democracy:
“The speaker [Parubiy] told chat show Freedom of Speech on Ukraine’s ICTV channel (video, click to view, Ukrainian) that he had “scientifically studied” democracy and cautioned his audience “not to forget the contributions of the Fuehrer [Hitler] to the development of democracy.
“The greatest man who practised direct democracy was Adolf Hitler in the 1930s,” he said.
The founder of the Social National Party, now known as Svoboda, added that it was “necessary to introduce direct democracy to Ukraine, with Hitler as its torchbearer.” (ICTV Channel quoted in Britain’s Morningstar September 5, 2018 report, emphasis added)
 |
With some exceptions, this controversial statement was not picked up by the Western press. Lies by omission.
Why? Because the Kiev regime (including its Armed Forces and National Guard) is integrated by Nazi elements which have been supported in bilateral agreements with both Canada and the US.
Parubiy has been given red carpet treatment by Western governments. He is casually portrayed as a right wing politician rather than an avowed neo-Nazi.
Embarrassment or Denial? The US Congress, Canada’s Parliament, the British Parliament, European Parliament, have invited and praised Andriy Parubiy.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
MOSCOW — North Bay, Ontario, is a small Canadian city of immigrants from Europe, their upwardly mobile children, and their children’s children.
It’s the town where Yaroslav Hunka lives after he left the British prisoner of war camp where he and other Ukrainian soldiers of the SS Waffen Grenadier Galician Division were held after the end of fighting in Europe in 1945. North Bay is where his son Martin Hunka was chief financial officer of Redpath Mining, a mine engineering company. By North Bay standards, the Hunka family is better educated and wealthier than most, donating substantial sums of money to the local hospital, universities, and Ukrainian national organisations, and through the Redpath mining company to local politicians.
North Bay is also where the children of these men demonstrate Hitler salutes and Nazi Party slogans on the local high school football field.
This is the model of small-town church-going people of modest but respectable means who share the prevailing ideology of their homeland grandparents who were on the side of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Stepan Bandera in the last world war. The smiles remain the same, the stand-up stiff-arm salutes have changed. The minds remain fixed where they were in their grandparents’ ideology – that was the collective fascism of a century ago.* These people continue to believe that for their liberation, the Russian race should be destroyed – “suffocated” is the state policy term used by Canada’s Foreign Minister, Melanie Joly.
The churches they attend organised a rally for this goal at the North Bay City Hall featuring statements by the two Hunkas; they were St. Andrew’s United, Trinity United, Emmanuel United Church, and Omond Memorial United Church. “Nothing has changed,” Yaroslav Hunka said at what the churches called a “peace vigil”. “The same enemy. First Stalin was there and now this idiot. But Ukraine is not by itself like it was before. The whole world knows about Ukraine and the whole world supports Ukraine and that is very important.”
Martin Hunka added: “I think the support in Canada, the support around the world has been fantastic. At least now we have friends, whether that is going to translate into anything concrete on the ground, I think it already is.”
This is the town where the first Italian to become Speaker of the House of Commons in Ottawa ran a business and collected election campaign donations. That’s Anthony Rota, the man who invited the two Hunka men to be guests in the Speaker’s Gallery during the speech of Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky on September 22. Rota and the government’s leader of the House of Commons, Karina Gould, arranged for the two Hunka men to be seated in the front row of the gallery next to the leaders of Canada’s military and internal security forces, General Wayne Eyre, the chief of the Defence Staff, and Deputy Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Bryan Larkin, protected by two armed bodyguards.
When Rota spoke to introduce Hunka, he had just read from his script that in December 1941, after World War II had begun, the then-British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill appealed to the House in Ottawa “to rally for continued support of his country at war. It was a defining moment of history, and one that must never be forgotten.” Hunka and the SS Galicians came next on the same page of Rota’s script. “We have here in the Chamber today Ukrainian-Canadians, Ukrainian-Canadian veteran from the Second World War who fought [for] Ukrainian independence against the Russians, and continues to support the troops today, even at his age of ninety-eight [cheering; applause]…. We thank him for all his service, thank you [cheering; applause].”
Rota was making an explicit equivalence in Canadian policy for war against Russia between Zelensky, Churchill, and Hunka. Ideologically, this was also the equivalence between Hunka’s service to the Reich, “and what is at stake — Ukraine’s freedom, but also preservation of the rules-based order which is a fundamental part of the future of the democratic world,” Rota wound up.
Rota didn’t write this 7-minute, multi-page 2,500 word speech by himself. In draft, Rota sent it for review and editing by Joly, the foreign minister; by Gould, in charge of the government’s business in the House; and by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. An Access to Information Act (ATIA) request for the circulation list of the draft speech and for the other preparations for the Zelensky appearance, including the invitation list for the Speaker’s Gallery, would provide the evidence. No Canadian reporter or publication has attempted to do this, yet.
Watch the hour-long House ceremony here.
For Canada’s black voters, underrepresented in the House of Commons, Rota also tried to link Zelensky’s and Hunka’s war against Russia to Nelson Mandela’s speech to the Canadian parliament.
Every member of the House of Commons, General Eyre and Commissioner Larkin, stood and applauded Hunka’s wartime killing of Russians. Twice.
Top: the front row of Canadian officials in the Speaker’s Gallery of the House of Commons: from left to right, unidentified Canadian official; General Wayne Eyre (red ring), chief of Canada’s Defence Staff; Bryan Larkin, Deputy Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in charge of “specialized policing services”; unidentified Canadian official; Martin Hunka, retired chief financial officer of Redpath Mining, a mine engineering company of North Bay, Ontario; and his father Yaroslav Hunka of North Bay (red arrow). The two unidentified men not wearing decorations have been identified by a local source as bodyguards for the two ranking officers between them; the vetting by them of those seated next to them, the Hunkas, and those seated behind them, would have gone into considerable detail of their security files – details now denied by every senior official of the government who were on the House floor applauding. Bottom: https://www.cbc.ca/
Source: https://pdba.georgetown.edu/
This is the House of Commons floor plan of 2005. There have been renovations, seating changes, and rule variations since then. Number 21 in this diagram is the Speaker’s Gallery where Eyre, Larkin, Martin and Yaroslav Hunka and the bodyguards were seated during Zelensky’s speech on September 22. In an attempt to explain how the Speaker’s Gallery was filled, the government organ CBC reported through a former chief of protocol, Roy Norton, that in the standard procedure Joly’s ministry would have been consulted on filling the Speaker’s Gallery guest list. Notwithstanding, Norton claimed the government would have had “zero role in inviting Mr Hunka, or for that matter most of the people who sat in the gallery”. Norton had been a Canadian foreign ministry diplomat for many years, ending up as chief of protocol until 2019. He was out of government before wartime security measures surrounding the Ukrainian president and Canadian general officers took effect.
The standing, smiling, cheering, hand-clapping display of September 22 in Ottawa was, sociologically and psychologically speaking,1 the same as German communities of the North Bay-kind and German officials of the House of Commons-type displayed throughout the 1930s and 1940s until they were stopped by the Red Army and silenced by Germany’s capitulation in May 1945. Not that their descendants in North Bay and across Canada have surrendered that German ideology in the seventy-eight years which have elapsed since then. The enthusiasm of the MPs to jump to their feet, shouting and saluting Hunka for killing Russians is evidence plain.
So are the subsequent attempts by the MPs, government ministers, and General Eyre to pin responsibility on Rota and claim ignorance for themselves. Eyre’s spokesman has announced “[the decision to recognize Hunka] was made independently within the Speaker’s office, without the involvement or awareness of people in attendance, including DND/CAF [National Defence/Canadian Armed Forces] members present.” The implication is that the chief of the Defence Staff twice stood to applaud without knowing who or why, and without understanding what Rota had said.
Deputy Prime Minister Freeland’s acute nervousness at concealing her role in celebrating Hunka and the Galician division was visible when she was questioned by a reporter six days after the event, on September 28. Asked whether she supports the reopening of the Deschênes Commission, the Canadian government investigation of war criminals in 1985-86, so that “Canadians can know how many veterans who fought with the Nazis are here in our country,” Freeland fidgeted with her hands for several seconds before evading a direct answer.
“As a government,” she said, “we are going to be very thoughtful about any further steps that need to be taken.”
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland at her press conference on September 28. Source: https://twitter.com/
A new investigation, if it were held and if the Deschênes Commission files on immigrant Ukrainian participants in German war crimes were reopened, would identify the German Army, SS and Nazi career of Freeland’s maternal grandfather, Mikhail Chomiak, who was still wanted for his war crimes in Poland in the 1980s. The first report of Chomiak’s active involvement in the liquidation of the Jewish communities of the Galician region around Lvov, appeared here in January 2017. At the time, Freeland dismissed the evidence as Russian propaganda.
Hunka has identified the British Army and its intelligence units as likely to be holding files on him and other members of the Galician division during their time in British prisoner-of-war camps between 1945 and 1951. According to Hunka, “on the last day of the war, the Galicia Division broke contact with the CHA in Styria, Austria, and surrendered to the British Army. In the prisoner-of-war camp in Italy, I met many guys from different villages of the Berezhany region. I remember that Yaroslav Babuniak, Stepan Kukuruza, Yaroslav Lototskyi, Lev Bahlay, Volodymyr Bilyk, Ostap Sokolskyi, Lev Babiy, Yaroslav Ivakhiv were there from the Berezhany gymnasium. I think it was God’s will that we should go around the world like the tribe of Israel, tell the world about Ukraine, and forty-five years later come to it with help.”
A Canadian government press release claims the British government asked Canada to take Ukrainian POWs like Hunka as immigrants. Hunka himself has not revealed where he met Margaret Edgerton, the English woman he married in 1951, before the two moved to Canada in 1954.
Edgerton’s obituary reveals she was born in Warwickshire, but this does not reveal how she met Hunka “after the Second World War.” Altogether, nine years of British Army, MI6, and MI5 records on Hunka are so far unmentioned in the Canadian and international reporting of his case.
Published in 2011 in Combatant News, a US-based platform for Ukrainian soldiers who had served the Ukrainian National Army (UNA), Hunka titled this statement “My Generation Memoirs.”
During two years of interrogations of Hunka and the other Galician veterans in Italy, the British government prepared some for covert operations against the Soviets in the Ukraine, and resettled others in the UK. “When the 8,500 Ukrainian former soldiers of the Galicia Division were transferred to the UK from Italy in May-June 1947 they were accommodated in prisoner-of-war (POW) camps in various parts of the UK, mainly in the agricultural areas of eastern England and southern Scotland. Occasionally the men were moved between camps. In July 1948 the numbers of men in camps at or near various locations were as follows: Hempton (Norfolk) – 1,682 men, Mildenhall (Suffolk) – 1,401, Allington (Lincolnshire) – 1,319, Moorby (Lincolnshire) – 1,264, Botesdale (Suffolk) – 1,010, Dalkeith (Scotland) – 958, Lockerbie (Scotland) – 463, other locations (including hospitals, where invalids were held) – 300. After the men were released from POW status (August-October 1948) and admitted into the European Voluntary Workers (EVW) scheme, the POW camps in which they were being held were taken over by civilian authorities and redesignated as hostels.”
Another Ukrainian account of British efforts to prevent Hunka and the other Galician veterans from being repatriated to Soviet Ukraine to face war crimes trials is described here. Because Hunka came from Berezhany, in the Ternopil region, the British classified him as a Polish national rather than a Soviet, and this protected him from deportation to his homeland.
That he and his associates may have participated in the killing of between 4,000 and 8,000 Jews in the area between 1941 and 1943 is suggested in this brief timeline. Hunka claims that in 1940 when he was a 15-year old high school student in Berezhany, he was one of six Ukrainians in a class of forty; two were Poles; and “the rest [32] were Jewish children of refugees from Poland. We wondered why they ran away in front of such a civilised Western people as the Germans.”
In 1941, when the killing of the Jews of Berezhany was under way, Hunka has written that “I was just 16 years old, and the next two years [1942-43] were the happiest years of my life. I did not imagine that what I experienced in those two years would give me love for my hometown so much that it would be enough for me for the rest of my life. Little did I know then that dreams of those two years, of the company of charming girls, of cheerfully cheerful friends, of fragrant evenings in the luxurious castle park and passages through the city would help me overcome the troubled times of the following years.”
In 1943, Hunka, then 18 years old, reports that “in two weeks, eighty thousand volunteers volunteered for the division, including many students of the Berezhany gymnasium. None of us asked what our reward would be, what our provision would be, or even what our tomorrow would be. We felt our duty to our native land – and left!” The massacres of several thousand Polish villagers started in the Ternopil region after this mobilisation in 1943, and after the Jews had been wiped out, including all of Hunka’s schoolmates. The most notorious of the Galician division’s attacks was the destruction of the Polish village and inhabitants of Huta Pieniacka in February 1944.
Hunka’s whereabouts as the Galician units moved through his home region killing Poles was almost certainly recorded by British military interrogators when Hunka was in their POW camp in Italy from 1945 to 1947. The British evidence on Hunka would have been passed to the Canadian immigration authorities if they had requested it at the time Hunka applied to leave the UK for Toronto.
The same evidence, and more, was gathered by the Polish authorities in Warsaw, where the Galician division and individual name files are being opened now at the Institute for National Remembrance (IPN). Soviet military and security files on Hunka are also available in Moscow.
In January 2017 Galicians vandalized the memorials to the villagers of Huta Pieniacka with Ukrainian national and SS graffiti.
British government propaganda is reporting the Hunka affair as a debate between elderly Jews and nonagenarian Ukrainians arguing over past and disputed history which Rota, government ministers, General Eyre, and every member of the Canadian parliament knew nothing of until now. This is also the line taken by Gould whose first tweet to protect Hunka and herself claimed: “Like all MPs, I had no further information than the Speaker provided. Exiting the Chamber I walked by the individual and took a photo. As a descendent of Jewish Holocaust survivors I would ask all parliamentarians to stop politicizing an issue troubling to many, myself included.” What Gould meant was that she and the Jewish community do not want Hunka’s past record to upset the current alliance between the Jews and Ukrainians of Canada to prosecute the war against Russia.
The German Foreign Ministry, headed by Annalena Baerbock, the leading promoter in Berlin of race war against Russia, defended the standing salute for Hunka given by Sabine Sparwasser, German ambassador to Canada, who was in the Speaker’s Gallery near Hunka. According to the ministry spokesman, Sebastian Fischer (right), reading from a prepared statement, Sparwasser had no idea what she was standing to applaud. “The true identity of Mr. Hunka, namely that he was a volunteer member of the Waffen-SS, was not known to those present, since his participation had not been announced.”
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) version of what happened in the past claims “the Galicia Division has been accused of committing war crimes, but its members have never been found guilty in a court of law.” This BBC report makes no reference to Poland or to the Polish massacres at all. It depicts public criticism of Hunka as a Jewish community protest, boosted by Moscow. “While far-right extremism still exists in Ukraine, it is much smaller than what Russian propaganda tries to make people believe…”
Source: https://www.bbc.com/
The Polish government investigation of Hunka has begun since the Hunka affair was publicised.
The mainstream Canadian media are also trying to restrict the public controversy to a debate between Jews and Ukrainians, and direct the ensuing public apologies to the Jewish community. Here, for example, Irwin Сotler, former Canadian justice minister and Liberal Party attorney-general, speaking from Jerusalem, makes the point that in 1948 “it was easier to get into Canada if you were a Nazi than if you were a Jew.” Сotler explained the reason for this was “indifference and inaction by successive Canadian governments. As a result we became a sanctuary for Nazi war criminals and no accountability.”
Сotler was misrepresenting the record. He knows that before the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Anglo-American alliance took the same view as the German Reich that the “Judaeo-Bolshevik conspiracy” put Jews and Russians into the same category for targeting as enemies. After 1945 it took time before the same alliance, including Canada, removed Jews from the war targeting. Russians have remained, however. Сotler is as committed to waging the present war against them as Hunka and everyone else in the Canadian parliament.
Endnote
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
When considering the recent performances at the General Assembly of the United Nations this year, the echoes of “peace” resound through the plenary hall. Why should anyone want peace in the Ukraine more than any other place the Empire is waging war? My suspicion is that many of these calls are really for Russia to withdraw to its pre-2014 borders. They believe that would make the US regime happy and be a great relief to the minor and little league oligarchs who long for return to business as usual. Calm and intelligent people could be forgiven for doubting the sincerity of many peace petitioners.
After all, don’t the continuing wars in Africa, the still pending “United Nations” war against the DPRK (where there is only a 70-year-old armistice since 1953), and the innumerable economic wars being waged in places and ways we do not even know, deserve to end too?
Like the war in the Ukraine, one will hear how complicated these wars are. They cannot be simply ended. Yet they are all simple in one material way: without the US and its NATO cut-outs—often the principal aggressor in violation of the Kellogg-Briand Treaty—many of these wars would never have started or would have long ago been resolved. So why not demand that the US stop waging wars and why not apply sanctions to the US for its belligerence and violations of the law of nations? How can the United Nations end wars when it cannot even end the one it started in 1951? Could it be that too many of the parties among those who convene to call for peace, really need and want just a piece of the action?
The two military veterans probably best known for criticising US policy in Ukraine, Colonel Douglas MacGregor USA and Major Scott Ritter USMC, have said loud and clear that at least from a military standpoint the Ukrainian armed forces have lost the war against Russia. There have been numerous voices calling for an end to the conflict, not least because the more than USD 46 billion and counting in military aid alone, has yet to produce any of the results announced as aims of what has finally been admitted is a war against Russia.i If Mr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine’s government in Kiev, is to be taken at face value, then the hostilities can only end when Crimea and the Donbas regions are fully under Kiev’s control and Vladimir Putin has been removed from office as president of the Russian Federation. To date no commentator has adequately explained how those war aims are to be attained. This applies especially after the conservatively estimated 400,000 deaths and uncounted casualties in the ranks of Kiev’s forces since the beginning of the Russian special military operation in February 2022.
Before considering the political and economic issues it is important to reiterate a few military facts, especially for those armchair soldiers who derive their military acumen from TV and Hollywood films. As MacGregor and Ritter, both of whom have intimate practical knowledge of warfare, have said: Armies on the ground need supplies, i.e. food, weapons, ammunition, medical care for wounded, etc. These supplies have to be delivered from somewhere. In ancient times, armies could live off the land. Essentially this was through looting and plunder—stealing their food from the local population as they marched. To prevent the local population from becoming the enemy in the rear and avoid early exhaustion of local supply, generals started paying for what was requisitioned. Defending forces would often withdraw the civilian population and destroy what could not be taken to avoid supplying their enemies. In fact, this kind of rough warfare against civilians still occurs although it has been forbidden under the Law of Land Warfare.ii Naturally the soldier in the field can no longer make weaponry. Even less can they be plundered from the local inhabitants—unless one comes across some tribe the US has armed with Stingers. All the weapons the Ukrainian armed forces deploy have to be imported from countries with manufacturing capacity. As the two retired officers, among others, have said, such capacity is unavailable to the Ukraine. Obviously it would also be unavailable to NATO forces were they to deploy in Ukraine in any numbers. It is illusory to believe that a NATO army can do what the Wehrmacht could not some eighty years ago with three million men under arms and the most modern army of its day. This was so obvious from the beginning that one has to wonder why this war ever started. Is it possible that wars are started without any intention of winning them? If winning the war is not the objective, then what is?
Forgery and force: Explicit and implicit or latent and expressed foreign policy
Historical documents are essential elements in any attempt to understand the past and the present. However, this is not because they are necessarily true or accurate. Forgeries and outright lies are also important parts of the historical record. Perhaps the most notorious forgery in Western history is the so-called Donation of Constantine. This document was used to legitimate papal supremacy and the primacy of the Latin over the Greek Church. Although it did not take long for the forgery to be discovered, the objective was accomplished. Even today most people in the West have learned that the part of the Christian Church called Orthodoxy is schismatic when the reverse is true, namely the Latin Church arose from a coup d’état against Constantinople.
There is now no shortage of evidence that the British Empire forced the German Empire into the Great War and with US help justified the slaughter of some four million men, ostensibly to expel German forces from Belgium. There is systematically suppressed testimony by commanders in the field and others in a position to know that the Japanese attack on the US colonial base at Pearl Harbor was not only no surprise but a carefully crafted event exploited to justify US designs on Japan and China. Yet to this day the myth of surprise attack against a neutral country prevails over the historical facts. Even though there is almost popular acceptance that the US invasion of Iraq was based on entirely fabricated evidence and innuendo, the destruction of the country was not stopped and continues as of this writing.
What does that tell us about historical record and official statements of policy? Former POTUS and CIA director, George H.W. Bush expressed the principle that government lies did not matter because the lie appears on page one and the retraction or correction on page 28. In short, it is the front page that matters. That is what catches and keeps the public’s attention. Truth and accuracy are immaterial.
Let us consider for a moment one of the most durable wonders of published state policy—the Balfour Declaration. This brief letter signed by one Arthur Balfour on 2 November 1917 was addressed to the Lord Rothschild, in his capacity as some kind of conduit for the Zionist Federation. Carroll Quigley in his The Anglo-American Establishment strongly suggests that Lord Rothschild, also in his capacity as a sponsor of the Milner Round Table group, presented the letter for Mr Balfour to sign. As Quigley also convincingly argues the academic and media network created by the Round Table has successfully dominated the writing of British imperial history making it as suspicious as the Vatican’s history of the Latin Church.
This “private” letter to the British representative of the West’s leading banking dynasty is then adopted as the working principle for the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine awarded to the British Empire. From this private letter an international law mandate was created, continued under the UN Charter, to convert a part of the conquered Ottoman Empire into a state entity for people organized in Europe who imagined that some thousand(s) of years ago some ancestors once inhabited the area.iii The incongruence of this act ought to have been obvious—and in fact it was. The explicit policy with which the British Empire had sought to undermine Germany and Austria-Hungary was that of ethnic/linguistic self-determination of peoples. So by right—even if the fiction of a population in diaspora were accepted—this could not pre-empt the right of ethnic/linguistic self-determination in Palestine where Arabic was the dominant language and even those who adhered to the Jewish religion were not Europeans.
As argued elsewhere there has been a century of propaganda and brute force applied to render the dubious origins and the legitimation for the settler conquest that was declared the State of Israel in 1948 acceptable no matter how implausible. Like the Donation of Constantine, the Balfour Declaration served its purpose. No amount of rebuttal can reverse the events that followed.
Motors and motives
However, the question remains what is then the policy driving such acts? What is the motive for such seemingly senseless aggression against ordinary people? Why does an institution supposedly based on national self-determination deny it so effectively to majorities everywhere whose only fault appears to be living on land others covet? By the time the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples was finally adopted in 1960, there was no question of reversing the de facto colonisation practiced by the mandatory powers under the League. Moreover the Declaration was only an act of the UN General Assembly, a body wholly dominated by the three permanent imperial members of the Security Council, each with their veto powers.
To understand that and perhaps to better illuminate the principal subject—Ukraine—it is helpful to recall that of the five permanent members of the Security Council, the two most powerful are not nation-states at all. The United Kingdom is a colonial confederation as is the United States.
Russia, France, and China are all states derived from historical ethnic-linguistic determination. Beyond doubt they were formed into such unitary states through wars and revolutions. As de Gaulle famously said, “France was made with the sword”. However, there is no question that these three countries are based explicitly on ethnic-linguistic and cultural congruity within continental boundaries, in the sense articulated by the explicit text of the Covenant and the Charter. On the contrary, Great Britain and the United States are commercial enterprises organised on the basis of piracy and colonial conquest. There is not a square centimetre of the United States that was not seized by the most brutal force of arms from its indigenous inhabitants. “Ethnic-linguistic” among the English-speaking peoples is a commodity characteristic. It is a way to define a market segment.
Great Britain gave the world “free trade” and liberalism and the US added to that the “open door”. Nothing could be more inimical to the self-determination of peoples than either policy.iv How can a people be independent and self-determined when they are denied the right to say “no”? The Great War and its sequel, the war against the Soviet Union and Communism, aka World War 2, were first and foremost wars to establish markets dominated by the Anglo-American free trade – open door doctrine. One will not find this explicitly stated in any of the history books or the celebratory speeches on Remembrance Day (Memorial Day in the US) or the anniversary of D-Day, to which properly the Soviet Union and Russia ought not to be invited. After all D-Day was the beginning of the official war by Anglo-America against the Soviet Union after Hitler failed. More of Italian, French and German industrial and domestic infrastructure was destroyed by aerial bombardment from the West than by anything the Wehrmacht did—since its job was to destroy Soviet industry. This will not be reported in schoolbooks and very few official papers will verify this open secret. That is because like the Donation much of what counts as history was simply “written to the file”. The facts, however, speak for themselves. When the German High Command signed the terms of unconditional surrender in Berlin-Karlshorst, the domestic industry of the West, except the US, had been virtually destroyed leaving it a practical monopoly not only in finance but manufacturing that would last well into the late 1960s.v Only the excess demand of the war against Korea accelerated German industrial recovery. No one can say for sure how much of German, French, Italian, Belgian, or Netherlands capital was absorbed by Anglo-American holding companies. Hence those that wonder today about the self-destruction of the German economy have to ask who owns Germany in fact. To do that one will have to hunt through the minefield of secrecy jurisdictions behind which beneficial ownership of much of the West is concealed.
It is necessary to return to the conditions at the beginning of the Great War to understand what is happening now in Ukraine. One has to scratch the paint off the house called “interests” and recall some geography. F. William Engdahl performed this task well in his A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (2011). It would do well to summarise a few of his points before going further.
Geography and aggrandizement
Continental nation-states need secure land routes. Pirate states need secure sea-lanes. Britain succeeded in seizing control ruling the waves after defeating the Spanish and Portuguese fleets. It reached a commercial entente with the Netherlands, which helped until the Royal Navy was paramount. The control of the seas meant that Britain could dominate shipping as well as maritime insurance needed to cover the risk of sea transport. So it was no accident that Lloyds of London came to control the financing of maritime traffic. Geography dictated that the alternative for continental nation-states was the railroad. Germany was building a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad which would not only have delivered oil to its industry but allowed it to bypass the Anglo-French Suez Canal and the British controlled Cape route. Centuries before the predecessors to the City of London financed crusades to control the trade routes through the Middle East, propagandistically labelled the Holy Land, whereby this was wholly for commercial reasons. The Anglo-American led NATO captured Kosovo not out of any special loyalty to Albanians but because of geography. Camp Bondsteel lies at the end of the easiest route to build pipelines between Central Asia and the Mediterranean. In short there is not a single war for “self-determination” waged by the Anglo-American special relationship that was not driven by piratical motives, for which ethnic-linguistic commodities are expendable.
In 1917, the “interests”, for whom Lord Rothschild spoke and no doubt provided financial support, coincided with the pre-emptive control over real estate that had been desired by the banking-commercial cult at least since the establishment of the Latin Church. It is no accident that serious investigations have established that the state created from the British Mandate in Palestine was a commercial venture like all other British undertakings. Moreover it has been able to use its most insidious cover story to veil itself in victimhood and thus immunity for those criminal enterprises, both private and state, that use it as a conduit: money laundering, drug and arms trafficking, training of repressive forces for other countries on contract, etc. all documented and protected by atomic weapons. Moreover this enterprise has been the greatest per capita recipient of US foreign aid for decades. Its citizens are able to use dual citizenship to hold high office in the sovereign state that funds it, too. Any attempt to criticize or oppose this relationship or its moral justification by a public official or personality with anything to lose can lead to the gravest of consequences. Its official lobby in the US, AIPAC, is only one instrument by which any act that could interfere with the smooth flow of cash or influence between Washington and Tel Aviv can be prevented or punished. It draws on an international organisation that does not even have to be organised. The status of ultimate victimhood combined with mass media at all levels committed to protecting “victims” can summon crowds just as Gene Sharp predicted in his works.vi
A business too innocent to fail
Now we come to the issues with which this essay began. What is the aim of the war in Ukraine? Will it end when the military operations have failed?
In April 2022, i.e. just over a month after the Russian intervention, Volodymyr Zelenskyy described “the future for his country”. He used the terms “a big Israel”. In Haaretz it was reported that Zelenskyy wanted Ukraine to become “a big Israel, with its own face”. Writing for the NATO lobby, the Atlantic Council, Daniel Shapiro elaborated what Zelenskyy might mean: the main points are security first, the whole population plays a role, self-defence is the only way, but maintain active defence partnerships, intelligence dominance, technology as key, build an innovation ecosystem, maintain democratic institutions.vii The stories depict this stance for better or worse as the creation of a state under permanent military control, always giving priority to existential threats—presumably from the East.
But is that really what Zelenskyy meant? Or perhaps that is what he was just supposed to say. What about those who have directed nearly all of NATO armament and so many billions through the hands of the Kiev regime—one notorious even before 2022 as the most corrupt in Europe, if not anywhere? Maybe another construction is to be applied. Perhaps Zelenskyy is talking, like some latter day Balfour, on behalf of his sponsors whose Holocaust piety never prevented them from subjecting nearly entire populations to forced medical experiments starting in 2020. Perhaps he is talking about the extensive participation in all sorts of international trafficking, either as agent or protection for the principals. Perhaps he is talking about the permanent and undebatable foreign aid contributions from the US and the extortion from other countries, e.g. as Norman Finkelstein documented.viii There is no doubt that Ukraine has become a major hub for human trafficking, arms smuggling, and biological-chemical testing. They have atomic reactors and have asked for warheads.ix
Add to this the potential of a large and potentially self-righteous diaspora spread throughout the West, heavily subsidised and already equipped with influence in high places. A “Ukraine Lobby” was already in preparation in 1947 when the British shipped some eight thousand POWs of the SS Galizia Division (a Ukrainian force) from Italy to Britain without a single war crimes investigation.x From there they were able to spread throughout the Empire as Canada amply indicates.
Much of the debate about the Ukraine war remains confused because of the successful obfuscation around the term “Nazi”. Essentially a Hollywood story has been substituted for analysis of the historic development of the ideology and government that prevailed in Germany between 1933 and 1945.xi Nazism is treated as sui generis based on criteria that are not unique at all. For example, great attention is given to uniforms and insignia. In fact, after the Great War all the major political factions and parties, e.g. the SPD and DKP, had uniformed paramilitary organisations formed mainly of front veterans. When the NSDAP was able to ban all opponents those uniforms also disappeared. Contemporary fascism also uses current fashion and language. Only the nostalgic retain antiquated uniform and language styles. However repulsive the ideology may be these so-called neo-Nazis are equivalent to the historical re-enactment units found throughout the US for example.
After WW2 much of Europe was a wasteland, especially the East. Refugees understandably fled as far west as they could because getting to North or South America meant living in territories unscathed by war. The British and US secret services deliberately exploited these refugee waves to cover the removal into safety of the residue of their fascist allies. There they were to prepare for the continuation of war against the Soviet Union by other means. These formations often hid behind ethnic front groups, as the fascists did in occupied West Germany. Hence when an embarrassing discovery was made—usually some low or middle grade Nazi veteran—then he could be disgraced, tried or deported while leaving the bulk of the clandestine organisation in tact. These Nazis were obviously the result of careless immigration oversight but by no means a reflection of state policy.
Together, historical re-enactment Nazism and “exposed” single Nazi veterans distracted from the large scale programs supporting and expanding anti-communist forces both domestically and for expeditionary deployment. Much more seriously, these two “shows” and the deliberate suppression of meaningful debate about fascist policies and practices—always reduced to anti-Jewish attitudes and actions alone—have successfully prevented any coherent analysis and debate about the relationship between Anglo-American monopoly capital and the cartels that backed the NSDAP regime or the relationship between US/ NATO policy and its consistent support of fascist regimes in Spain, Portugal and throughout the world. It has prevented coherent debate about the long forgotten but documented participation of reconstructed Nazis in the government of the Federal Republic of Germany and their active participation in the Ukrainian war against the Soviet Union after 1945.
Zelenskyy and his fellow travellers cannot be blamed for their self-confident fascism. It is not an anomaly but a historical product of decades of Anglo-American/ NATO business plans—including the distraction of “Nazi” from the substance of those plans. Given how successful Lord Rothschild’s model for Israel has been, one can scarcely blame a patriot like Volodymyr Zelenskyy for seizing the opportunity to apply it to his own country. The model has been so successful that no one in public dare oppose it. Why not establish another such parasitic machine? Russians just like Arabs provide the permanent enemies with which to sell the permanent victim status at the expense of millions of displaced Ukrainians.
In other words, there is a very successful business model to be implemented wholly consistent with free trade and the open door and all those other slogans, which have anointed plunder and pillage by the occasionally alpine commercial cult in their campaign to assure that all of us own nothing and they will be happy.
Endnotes
i Jonathan Masters and Will Merrow, “How Much as the US Sent to Ukraine Here are Six Charts”, Council on Foreign Relations (10 July 2023). Among those declaring this was Foreign Minister of the German Federal Republic, Annalena Baerbock. Angela Merkel, the former chancellor of the Federal Republic is on record having said that the so-called Minsk Accords were intended to stall the Russian reaction in Donbas until Ukraine could be sufficiently armed to fight against the Russian Federation.
ii Principally the Hague (1907) Conventions and subsequent Geneva Conventions
iii More likely the Eastern Europeans in question were descendent from the Khazar kingdom located far closer to what today is Ukraine. The ruling elite was to have converted to Rabbinic Judaism in the 8th century. The Khazar Khaganate was disbursed by the end of the first millennium CE. This would better explain the hostility toward Russia and myth of a national homeland, displaced in 1917 to Palestine based on contemporary political realities.
iv Historian Gerald Horne ascribes “free trade” to the so-called Glorious Revolution, which also abolished the Royal Africa Company, opening “free trade in slaves”; see The Counter-Revolution of 1776 (2014).
v Bombing of German factories conspicuously omitted Ford plant in Cologne and GM’s Opel factory in Russelsheim, although both Ford and GM claimed and received reparations for damage done by Allied bombers.
vi Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy (1994)
vii Daniel B. Shapiro, “Zelenskyy wants Ukraine to be ‘a big Israel’. Here’s a road map”, New Atlanticist (6 April 2022) “By adapting their country’s mind-set to mirror aspects of Israel’s approach to security challenges, Ukrainian officials can tackle national security challenges with confidence and build a similarly resilient state”.
viii Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (2000)
ix This notorious request by Zelenskyy at the Munich Security Conference in 2022 for atomic weapons was another reason President Vladimir Putin gave for a military response to Kiev’s attacks on the Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine that Russia had been forced to recognise as two independent republics and grant protection.
x A documentary produced by Julian Hendy (The SS in Britain) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjj__aya4BA contains interviews, e.g. with civil servants who were told by US authorities that no pre-immigration investigations were to be conducted. This film about the 14th Waffen SS Division Galizia division has been almost scrubbed from the Web. The film, originally to be broadcast by Yorkshire Television (UK) was never shown. Geoffrey Goodman described details after a private viewing in a Guardian article (12 June 2000).
xi A useful source for the historical context and actual description of the NSDAP regime can be found in Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944, a detailed study written originally in English by Franz Neumann. This book comprises two parts: the NS state and the economic system. Very little attention is paid to the section on the economic system although the regime cannot be understood without its legacy economic policies and the bureaucracy responsible for implementing them.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
A question: Is it the case that an individual member of an organization who rejects participation in the wider group’s malefaction is to be held equally culpable in the wider group’s evildoing just by virtue of affiliation?
If so, this panders to the quilt by association fallacy.
In Canada, the Justin Trudeau government has further sullied its reputation and the reputation of Parliament by having invited and feted the 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka as a “Ukrainian hero and a Canadian hero” who had fought against the Russians.
Yet, fighting against the Russians obviously meant that Hunka had to be fighting on the side of Nazi Germany. That fact seemed to elude the Canadian parliamentarians.
This incident ripped the mask off Trudeau’s protecting “Canadian values,” causing the government to try and have the embarrassing episode struck from Hansard.
“The fact that a motion from the government benches to suppress any official (Hansard) record of the incident being tabled does nothing but underscore its culpability in Canadian-Ukraine fascism,” said the ever insightful writer T.P. Wilkinson in an email.
Canadian officials are concerned that the proper vetting of invitees to the Parliament was not carried out. A spokesperson for the speaker of the House of Commons, Anthony Rota, indicated that Rota had not shared his list of invitees with the Prime Minister’s Office or any opposition parties before the event. Rota had to take the fall, resigning as speaker.
Was it political cowardice that caused Trudeau to duck the subsequent Question Period and evade fellow parliamentarians?
Are there “good Nazis”?
Hunka was a volunteer member of the 14th SS Division Galicia. The SS were notorious for committing war crimes.
But does being a Nazi mean one is ipso facto a war criminal, a scumbag, or some other nefarious descriptor?
Wernher von Braun was a Nazi who was also a rocket engineer. The Americans brought him stateside where he later became a director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Von Braun designed the Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that would send Americans to the moon. The Americans, apparently, thought von Braun was a good enough Nazi to bring to US soil.
What about Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who was the main protagonist in Stephen Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List? Schindler was a member of the Nazi Party, but he is depicted as a humanitarian for helping Jews escape Nazi persecution.
What about Dr. Hans Münch? Or Karl Plagge, former commander of a Nazi forced labor camp? Or John Rabe, an ardent Hitler supporter? Or Nazi party official Helmut Kleinicke who Israel designated as Righteous Among the Nations in January 2020. These men have been described as “good Nazis.”
Nazis are not alone in their monstrosity. To access the research findings of the notorious Japanese scientists of Unit 731 who carried out exceedingly cruel criminal experimentation on humans, the US government had them snatched from the docket of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and brought to America.
Nazism and Chrystia Freeland
Canada, which had denied safe haven for over 900 Jewish refugees aboard the MS St Louis in 1939 (an unsavoury incident for which Trudeau issued a formal apology in 2018), had for some reason seen fit to open its borders to allow several Nazis in.
Nazism is strident in Canada.
Currently, Ukrainian-Canadian Chrystia Freeland serves as number two in Canada’s government, deputy prime minister. This is despite critics branding her as sympathetic to Nazism.
Russian officials are also critical of Freeland. Kirill Kalinin, a spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Ottawa, charged that Freeland evaded revealing her grandfather’s complicity with Nazis during World War II.
Freeland has brushed aside questions regarding her grandfather’s Nazi involvement as Russian disinformation designed to undermine Canadian democracy. Yet, on 7 March 2017, the Globe and Mail reported that “Freeland knew her grandfather was editor of Nazi newspaper.”
The sins of the grandfather do not fall upon the granddaughter, but Freeland must have felt the pressure to publicly denounce Nazism. On 28 March 2019, the CBC quoted Freeland as saying: “Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, ‘incels,’ nativists and radical anti-globalists who resort to violent acts are a threat to the stability of my country and countries around the world.”
However, on 4 March 2022 Canadian Dimension headlined an article: “Chrystia Freeland’s ties to Ukrainian nationalists reveal a double standard The deputy prime minister was photographed with a scarf associated with the Ukrainian far-right at a demonstration in Toronto.”
Freeland deleted a tweet she had posted and relied again on the ad hominem fallacy of Russian disinformation.
Canada’s Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland has now deleted her earlier post where she’s holding a banner with the colours of a far-right group and replaced it with one where she isn’t. pic.twitter.com/UdxtmaCgJi
— Paris Marx (@parismarx) February 28, 2022
It seems more like the claim of disinformation applies to Freeland as evidence indicates that she had contributed to an encyclopedia downplaying the ties of Ukrainian SS units to Nazism.
Trudeau’s double standards on Nazism
When the Trucker Convoy gathered in Ottawa to oppose the government’s COVID mandates, prime minister Trudeau smeared the protestors as homophobic, racist, and Nazis. Hypocritically, it is Trudeau’s government that has had to deny accusations of aiding Ukrainian Nazi fighters. On 4 May 2022, the Department of National Defence dismissed any allegations that the Canadian Armed Forces had trained Ukrainian Nazis. Yet CTV wrote that there is plenty of evidence that Canada helped train Ukraine’s Nazi Azov Battalion and called for the government to be held to account. Unfortunately, support for Ukraine spans the spectrum of Canada’s major political parties, and it is abetted by Canada’s mass media.
So, the hullabaloo — deserved as it is — is puzzling surrounding the former Waffen SS volunteer, Yaroslav Hunka, given a longstanding lax attitude toward Nazism by Canada.
Hunka does have support in at least one corner. The president of the Ukrainian National Federation of Canada, Jurij Klufas, complained about the unfair treatment Hunka is receiving. He makes the point that Hunka was fighting for Ukraine — not Germany — and that Canada, along with other countries had cleared his division of war crimes.
“If you’re a soldier doesn’t mean you’re a member of a certain party from the country,” Klufas said.
How were Nazis accepted into Canada?
A Canadian commission headed by Jules Deschênes issued a report with findings and recommendations concerning the Galicia division in which it stated that “it is worthwhile to pause and examine the blanket accusation brought against the members of the Galicia Division” (p 249) who were held in Britain as POWs.
On 31 May 1950, it was decided by the Canadian cabinet “that Ukrainians, presently residing in the United Kingdom, be admitted to Canada notwithstanding their service in the German army provided they are otherwise admissible. These Ukrainians should be subject to special security screening, but should not be rejected on the grounds of their service in the German army.” (p 250)
An excerpt from the Screening Commission reported: “The general impression which we have formed of all the men in the camp is favourable, as they strike us all as being decent, simple minded sort of people.” (253)
“The Commission is only interested in individuals, of whatever ethnic origin,
who may be seriously suspected of war crimes.” (254)
“Membership alone in the Waffen SS does not, in itself, amount to a crime under international law; it must be membership as qualified by the Tribunal in Nürnberg. It implies either knowledge or participation.” (257)
“… no presumption of individual guilt derives from the declaration of the Nuremberg Tribunal, and that consequently, the prosecution is called to prove not only that the accused was a member of the organization declared criminal, but also that he knew the relevant facts or (if an involuntary member) that he was personally implicated in the commission of crimes….
In the event the courts have in many cases explicitly ruled that the burden of proof remains on the prosecution.” (259)
Remarks by Scott Ritter
Former US Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter is a superbly insightful analyst of the special military operation that Russia is carrying out in Ukraine. He is deeply versed in the history of the former Soviet Union, Russia, and militarism, and he is forthright in presenting his analysis and views. However, there is cause for one to demur from Ritter’s opinions expressed in a recent interview — opinions that are contrary to some of the findings in the Deschênes Commission.
Ritter opined about Hunka that: “He was a rifleman, so he probably shot a few Jewish women himself. He probably enjoyed it, too, because that is how those Ukrainians are that join the Waffen SS. They’re not innocent. These are ideologically motivated thugs.”
In 2011, Hunka waxed poetic in a blog about what motivated him and other Ukrainians to join the Galicia SS: “faith in God and love for Ukraine.”
He lamented that day in 1940 when two enkavedists (special groups of the NKVD, the state security apparatus of the Soviet Union) came and took their beloved Russian language lecturer, an “old, tall, noble in character” Pole, and brought him forthwith to the railway station, where other families had been brought at night, including Hunka’s aunt and uncle Kobrin and his cousins Stefa and Volodymyr. He notes that Stefa, 15 years old like him, died that winter near Irkutsk in Siberia.
He wrote, “The terror of Moscow Communism raged over the Berezhansk land. The NKVD had eyes and ears everywhere.”
Hunka relates that when the German army occupied Berezhany (a city in western Ukraine) in July 1941, the German soldiers were joyfully greeted. No more would the citizens have to live in fear of a middle-of-the-night knock on the door, and Führer Hitler became regarded as the new “liberator” of the Ukrainian people.
This would seem to explain his anti-Russian, anti-Communist disposition — “those beasts turned into human form with a red star on the forehead” — a disposition that would drive him, at age 16, to join the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Is it an honest accounting of his time during WWII? He does not mention the Waffen SS in his blog posting.
Hunka’s professed motivation for joining the OUN/Galicia Waffen SS is understandable, even if the reasoning was flawed. But what do most 16-year-olds know of the world and war? The adult Hunka, who was 85 when he wrote the blog, is another story. Obviously, the truthfulness of the blog relies upon the veracity of its writer.
His joining the nationalist OUN
Ritter was also scathing about Freeland: “Chrystia Freeland, herself, is just a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi…. She is scum personified, and so is almost everyone of Ukrainian descent in Canada…. but I’m not saying that just because you are Ukrainian you are scum, but I’m saying that if your ancestors were Nazis and if you continue to glorify their history, and you continue to try and whitewash it, then you are scum, too.”
For Ritter, Hunka is a “murderous Nazi war criminal.” This is based purely on Hunka’s affiliation in the Waffen SS.
There is no denying that the SS is an utterly despicable outfit. And if Hunka did commit the war crimes that Ritter alleges, then he is indeed a monster. But merely joining a despicable outfit such as the Waffen SS does not mean that a person participated in any horrendous acts against other humans. However, there is a matter of the incriminating cognizance of egregious crimes. At best, Hunka can be accused of being naive or foolhardy in joining the SS for whatever reason. And, to iterate, if Hunka did commit war crimes, then he should be held accountable.
Good for the goose, good for the gander
If everyone who allied with Nazis can be denounced as scum, then the same principle should apply to other despicable outfits that are known to have committed war crimes. That would definitely include the US military as it (with the collusion of Britain and France) is held to have deliberately starved German POWs after Germany’s surrender in WWII, perhaps killing as many as 1.7 million POWs (see Other Losses by James Bacque); the scorched earth destruction and wanton commission of war crimes in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (See A.B. Abrams’s Immovable Object North Korea’s 70 Years At War with American Power. Review. US atrocities were not limited to the DPRK but occurred even in South Korea; e.g., the No Gun Ri massacre); the several massacres perpetrated in Viet Nam (e.g., the rape and killing of women and slaughter of elders during the My Lai massacre); the disgusting abuse of military superiority in Iraq from the Highway of Death, which likened the slaughter of retreating Iraqi soldiers to shooting fish in a barrel, and to the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib; bombing wedding parties in Afghanistan; and the cowardly sacrificing of Ukrainian lives to fight the US-Nato war against Russia. The US military is steeped in war crimes. (See A.B. Abrams’s Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences. Review.)
Scott Ritter was in the US military. Does that make him scum and a rapist of little girls? No. So why does it make every Nazi a war criminal and rapist?
Where does Ritter get off saying things like: “This 98-year-old guy was a young guy at the time, …. He was chasing down the Jewish girls and killing them and raping them because that is what they [the Galicia SS] did.”
There are far too many documented accounts of American soldiers raping and killing. Can one therefore say Ritter was chasing down Iraqi girls and killing them? Of course not.
Ritter, who was an opponent of a war on Iraq, also acknowledges that at one time he was sharing intelligence about Iraq with Israel. But Israel is a war crimes monstrosity itself that is engaged in massive human rights abuses and killings of the indigenous Palestinians.
Thus, it was surprising to hear Ritter say, “[W]hen Jewish people say ‘never again,’ I have to respect that. They mean ‘never again.’”
Ritter doubled down on those two words, never again: “It means it ain’t never again gonna happen.”
Again I will demur with Ritter on this point. The oft heard maxim is that actions speak louder than words. Words are easy. Words in isolation don’t deserve respect; it is the rightful actions that deserve respect. It is the actions that give force to the truthfulness behind words.
Returning to Israel, an informed observer would ask what does the slow motion genocide of Palestinians by Jewish Israelis, supported by much of the Jews diaspora, signify for fidelity to the refrain “never again”?
Conclusion
Dr Wilkinson:
I spent much of my youth around the military and naval forces. I know the sources of the attraction. Ritter is sincere in his loyalties and criticisms. However the reality was for many in the thirties and forties that the SS was just as proud as the USMC. The Corps is the most heavily indoctrinated branch of the regular US military- even the Navy keep them at arm’s length.
So Ritter should not throw stones at nonagenarians.
No peoples are a monolith.
People, especially those imbued with the folly of youth, can make foolish mistakes in choosing which friends to hang with, gangs to join, and organizations to participate in. Then there are those persons addicted to lethal violence some of who primarily enlist in the military for a chance to shoot and kill a purported enemy and not to serve firstly as a defender of their country.
It is not out of the realm of possibility that some people felt or were trapped by their foolish choices but refrained from taking part in dastardly acts of their group. To be clear, people are culpable for their choice of who they associate with. But does this make them equally culpable for the misdeeds of the wicked group members?
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
