The Biden administration is considering providing Ukraine with cluster bombs and may announce this decision in early July, NBC News reports. “We have been thinking about DPICM for a long time,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Friday at the National Press Club. “Yes, of course, there’s a decision-making process ongoing.” Dual-purpose improved conventional munitions…
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Each time it happens, the world insists: ‘never again’. But the political and moral blindspots that allow these atrocities will persist until the lessons of history are learned
It’s happening again. In Darfur, scene of a genocide that killed 300,000 people and displaced millions 20 years ago, armed militias are on the rampage once more. Now, as then, they are targeting ethnic African tribes, murdering, raping and stealing with impunity. “They” are nomadic, ethnic Arab raiders, the much-feared “devils on horseback” – except now they ride in trucks. They’re called the Janjaweed. And they’re back.
How is it possible such horrors can be repeated? The world condemned the 2003 slaughter. The UN and the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigated. Sudan’s former president, Omar al-Bashir, was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity along with his principal allies. The trial of one suspect, known as Ali Kushayb, opened last year. Yet Bashir and the guilty men have evaded justice so far.
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Wealthy donors have long funded think tanks with official-sounding names that produce research that reflects the interests of those funders (Extra!, 7/13). The weapons industry is a major contributor to these idea factories; a recent report from the Quincy Institute (6/1/23) demonstrates just how much influence war profiteers have on the national discourse.
Quincy Institute (6/1/23): “The vast majority of media mentions of think tanks in articles about U.S. arms and the Ukraine war are from think tanks whose funders profit from US military spending.”
The Quincy Institute—whose own start-up funding came mainly from George Soros and Charles Koch—looked at 11 months of Ukraine War coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, from March 1, 2022, through January 31, 2023, and counted each time one of 33 leading think tanks was mentioned. Of the 15 think tanks most often mentioned in the coverage, only one—Human Rights Watch—does not take funding from Pentagon contractors. Quincy’s analysis found that the media were seven times more likely to cite think tanks with war industry ties than they were to cite think tanks without war industry ties.
With 157 mentions each, the top two think tanks were the Atlantic Council and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Both of these think tanks receive millions from the war industry. The Atlantic Council has long been the brain trust of NATO, the military organization whose expansion towards Russia’s borders was a critical factor in Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine. (See FAIR.org, 3/4/22.) Both think tanks receive hundreds of thousands of dollars from Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, companies which have already been awarded billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts as a result of the war in Ukraine.
CSIS was revealed in a New York Times expose (8/7/16) to produce content that reflected the weapons industry priorities of its funders. It also “initiated meetings with Defense Department officials and congressional staff to push for the recommendations” of military funders.
Think tank media mentions related to US military support for Ukraine (Quincy Institute, 6/1/23).
In addition to showing think tanks’ enormous influence, the Quincy report highlights how difficult it is to trace just how much war industry funding these think tanks receive, and exactly whose interests they represent. “Think tanks are not required to disclose their funders,” study author Ben Freeman wrote, and “many think tanks list donors without indicating the amount of donations and others just list donors in ranges (e.g., $250,000 to $499,999).”
While the study was not aimed at establishing a causal connection between weapons industry funding and the think tanks’ positions, it acknowledges that funding typically plays a major role in shaping the institutions. “Funders,” Freeman wrote, “are able to influence think tank work through the mechanisms of censorship, self-censorship, and perspective filtering.” In other words, people with points of view antithetical to the funders likely would not last long in these think tanks.
No compromise with Russia (Atlantic Council, 2/6/23) means no end to the Ukraine arms money flowing to Atlantic Council donors like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon.
Causal or not, there is a marked correlation between war industry funding and hawkish positions. “Think tanks with financial ties to the arms industry often support policies that would benefit the arms industry,” the report noted. For example, one Atlantic Council article (2/6/23) advocated against “any compromise with the Kremlin,” while another, titled “Equity for Ukraine” (1/16/23), argued that Ukraine has a “right to destroy critical infrastructure in Russia and plunge Moscow and other cities into darkness.”
Earlier this year, the president of the American Enterprise Institute—fifth on the list, with 101 mentions—was cited numerous times in the Wall Street Journal (e.g., 1/20/23, 1/25/23) arguing that “tanks and armored personnel carriers are essential,” and agreeing to provide them will “let Ukraine know that it can afford to risk and expend more of its current arsenal of tanks in counteroffensive operations because it can count on getting replacements for them.” AEI (6/9/23) has gone so far as to suggest that the US give tactical nuclear weapons to Ukraine, something that could easily escalate to all-out nuclear war.
The Quincy Institute did not find a single instance in which a media organization disclosed the fact that its source received funding from the war industry, obscuring how interested parties may be shaping coverage or promoting policy recommendations that directly benefit their funders.
The study found that for the few think tanks that receive little or no Pentagon contractor funding, positions on the war are dramatically different. With less influence from the war industry, the study found, these organizations emphasize “expository rather than prescriptive analysis, support for diplomatic solutions, and a focus on the impact of the war on different parts of society and the region.”
Human Rights Watch, which takes no war industry money, “was agnostic on the issue of providing US military assistance to Ukraine,” and instead “focused on human rights abuses in the conflict.” The Carnegie Endowment, which receives less than 1% of its funding from that industry, was never quoted advocating an increase in military spending or weapons sales during the Ukraine War.
One critical way that corporate news media manufactures consent for US foreign policy is by carefully selecting the sources and voices that they present, and narrowing the spectrum of debate. While this can take the form of uncritically repeating pronouncements from government officials, this research demonstrates that there are more subtle ways in which media outlets can push a corporate/state agenda under the guise of independent journalism.
The post Report Shows How Military Industrial Complex Sets Media Narrative on Ukraine appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
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Amidst this week’s strange attempt to instigate a military coup from the head of Russia’s Wagner Group, President Putin took a loud stand calling out the operation as a foreign directed insurgency with parallels drawn from the chaotic revolution of 1917.
Just as in 1917, the nation was at war with an enemy on the verge of defeat, and just as 1917, foreign manipulations using fifth columnists resulted in sucking the nation into Civil War. Putin stated:
Exactly this strike was dealt in 1917 when the country was in WW1, but its victory was stolen. Intrigues and arguments behind the army’s back turned out to be the greatest catastrophe, destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war… Russians were killing Russians, brothers killing brothers. But the beneficiaries were various political chevaliers of fortune and foreign powers who divided the country and tore it into parts. We will not let this happen.
Now I don’t know if the events catalyzed by Prigozhin’s attempted coup are part of a ‘game within a game’ designed to flush out fifth columnists while providing a headfake to western strategists… OR if this was an authentic coup. But what I do know is that there are historical processes at play which too few recognize and which President Putin understands very well.
Some might think Putin’s comparison to the 1917 revolution to be hyperbole, or a disrespect for the glorious Soviet revolution. They would be mistaken.
Aborting a System of Win-Win Cooperation
The sad fact is that neither the Bolsheviks nor Mensheviks which emerged onto the stage of history at the turn of the 20th century were organically arising “peoples’ movements”.
Upon deeper analysis conducted by historians like Anthony Sutton, Kerry Bolton, and Robert Cowley, both organizations which eventually merged into a singular force, enjoyed vast financial patronage of western imperial powerhouses such as Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff (head of Kuhn, Loeb & co.) and even Lord Alfred Milner — head of the newly formed Round Table Movement.
These characters bankrolled much of the Bolshevik movement as early as 1905 in order to destroy a truly revolutionary process that was spreading across much of the world in the wake of the Civil War.
One of the leading champions of this revolutionary process was Lincoln’s former bodyguard and the first Governor of Colorado, William Gilpin. Governor Gilpin envisioned a world of sovereign nation states united by rail lines stretching through the Bering Strait and bringing all the continents and cultures into harmonious co-existence. In his famous 1890 ‘Cosmopolitan Railway’ Gilpin stated:
The cosmopolitan railway will make the whole world one community. It will reduce the separate nations to families of our great nation… From extended intercommunication will arise a wider intercourse of human ideas and as the result, logical and philosophical reciprocities, which will become the germs for innumerable new developments; for in the track of intercommunication, enterprise and invention invariably follow and whatever facilitates one stimulates every other agency of progress.
Describing the obvious brotherhood of Russia and the USA in spearheading this project, Gilpin wrote:
It is a simple and plain proposition, that Russia and the United States, each having broad, uninhabited areas and limitless undeveloped resources, would by the expenditure of two or three hundred millions apiece for a highway of the nations through their now waste places, add a hundred fold to their wealth and power and influence. Nations which can spend in war their thousands of lives – the lives of the best and bravest of their sons and citizens – can surely afford a little of their surplus wealth and energy for such a work as this [p. 35].
The American System Goes Global
Gilpin was not alone in this vision. In fact, he represented a network of statesmen spread all across the globe who recognized that the only way to break out of the endless cycle of wars, usury, and corruption, which the Hobbesian structures of the British Empire maintained globally, was through the adoption of an anti-Free Trade system known as “The American System of Political Economy”. This was a very different concept of “America” than the Pax Americana which has run roughshod over the world since WWII.
In Russia, this process found its champion in the figure of Sergei Witte (Finance Minister and Minister of Transportation from 1892-1903) who led a faction of the Russian intelligentsia in a struggle for progress and cooperation both internally and with allied nations against powerful forces committed to feudalism both within the Russian oligarchy and externally. The regressive forces which Witte had to contend with included powerful reactionary traditionalist forces who yearned for the good old days before Czar Alexander II freed the serfs and on the other extreme, the emergence of vast clusters of anarchist movements threatening to burn down the state in a replication of the Jacobin frenzy of the French revolution.
As Martin Sieff has demonstrated through his many writings on Prince Kropotkin, many of these anarchist networks enjoyed the patronage of powerful forces that cared little for the plight of the working class.
The international spread of the American System between 1876-1905 took the form of large-scale industrialization and railroads. The funding mechanism was located in a practice that has fallen out of favor in the West (although has made a powerful comeback in China in recent years) called ‘dirigisme’ — the emission of productive credit from state banks.
It was Witte who had spearheaded the Trans Siberian Railway’s construction between 1890-1905 with plans to extend rail lines to China and beyond utilizing state directed capital and a blend of private enterprise. A fuller exposition of Witte’s fight will be unveiled in the next installment.
The British Empire, which always relied on keeping nations divided, underdeveloped and dependent on the use of maritime shipping, was not amused.
By controlling the international maritime choke points, the tiny island was able to exert its influence across the globe. Through the vigorous enforcement of laissez-faire doctrines of free trade, nations were blocked from protecting themselves from the financial warfare launched by the city of London against victim states (speculative volatility, usury, cheap dumping, cash cropping, and drug running). Anyone wishing to engage in long term planning in the building up of the land-based transport corridors via rail, roads, and industry would be easily sabotaged if the British System were shaping their world.
The international movement to break this system of evil was the only real revolutionary process animating the world during this time.
The Bolshevik Counter-Revolution: An Anglo-American Fraud
In 1905, Wall Street financier Jacob Schiff had given $200 million to the Japanese to assist their victory against the Russians during the 1904-05 Russo Japanese war. This generosity ultimately earned the banker the Medal of the Rising Sun in the Meiji Palace in 1907.
After crippling the Russian state and military (its navy was wiped out during the war), Schiff turned his attention to financing revolutionary activities within Russia itself. How money was spent by Schiff was difficult to say until 1949, when Schiff’s grandson John Schiff bragged to the New York Journal that his grandfather had given $20 million “for the triumph of communism in Russia.”
American journalist, and Schiff asset George Kennan, played an instrumental role as perception manager of the revolution and bragged that he had converted 52,000 Russian soldiers imprisoned in Japan into Bolshevik revolutionaries. A March 24, 1917 interview recorded in The New York Times celebrating the revolution read:
Mr. Kennan told of the work of the Friends of Russian Freedom in the revolution. He said that during the Russian-Japanese war he was in Tokyo, and that he was permitted to make visits among the 12,000 Russian prisoners in Japanese hands at the end of the first year of the war. He had conceived the idea of putting revolutionary propaganda into the hands of the Russian army.
The Japanese authorities favoured it and gave him permission. After which he sent to America for all the Russian revolutionary literature to be had…
“The movement was financed by a New York banker you all know and love,’ he said, referring to Mr Schiff, ‘and soon we received a ton and a half of Russian revolutionary propaganda. At the end of the war 50,000 Russian officers and men went back to their country ardent revolutionists. The Friends of Russian Freedom had sowed 50,000 seeds of liberty in 100 Russian regiments. I do not know how many of these officers and men were in the Petrograd fortress last week, but we do know what part the army took in the revolution.”
Schiff himself jubilantly stated to the New York Times, March 18, 1917:
May I through your columns give expression to my joy that the Russian nation, a great and good people, have at last effected their deliverance from centuries of autocratic oppression and through an almost bloodless revolution have now come into their own. Praised be God on high!
Historian Kerry Bolton wrote of New York Federal Reserve director William Boyce Thompson who had been installed as head of the American Red Cross during the 1917 revolution and was largely recognized as the true U.S. ambassador to the government, saying:
Thompson set himself up in royal manner in Petrograd reporting directly to Pres. Wilson and bypassing U.S. Ambassador Francis. Thompson provided funds from his own money, first to the Social Revolutionaries, to whom he gave one million rubles, and shortly after $1,000,000 to the Bolsheviks to spread their propaganda to Germany and Austria.
Writing in 1962, historian Arsene de Goulevitch, who experienced the events of 1917, firsthand wrote:
In private interviews, I have been told that over 21 million rubles were spent by Lord Alfred Milner in financing the Russian Revolution… The financier just mentioned was by no means alone among the British to support the Russian revolution with large financial donations. [1]
According to his own accounts, during the four months Leon Trotsky spent in New York in 1917, much of it was spent hobnobbing with the upper crust of Wall Street and being driven around in limousines. [2]
It is also noteworthy that after Trotsky was arrested by Canadian authorities while en route back to Russia with tens of thousands of dollars of Wall Street money, it was none other than Claude Dansey (Cecil Rhodes disciple, deputy chief of the new MI6 and founder of US military intelligence in 1917!!) that directly intervened to liberate Trotsky and company.
Leon Trotsky’s Immortal Treachery
Leon Trotsky, who Lord Milner, Schiff, Paul Warburg etc., always intended to be the leader of the movement that would take control over the dead bodies of the Romanovs, was fortunately ousted by the saner forces around Joseph Stalin in 1927.
As historian Grover Furr masterfully documents using recently declassified material, testimonies, and other evidence from archives in the USA and Russia, Leon Trotsky made several attempts to return to power in Russia after his expulsion. He didn’t do this alone, however, but largely with the help of fascist forces in Britain, Japan, Ukraine, and Germany all the way until the moment he met his untimely end in 1940. This will be the subject of a future review of Grover Furr’s work. [3] One of the best and more recent among Furr’s pioneering writing on this topic can be found in his New Evidence of Trotsky’s Conspiracy, Erythos Press, 2020. Furr’s website is also an invaluable resource.
For all of Lenin’s many problems, he differed from Trotsky on two interconnected points of 1) a general belief in voluntarism and 2) a rejection of the theory of permanent revolution.
Where Lenin believed that productive labor could be channeled towards the improvement of productive forces of society, Trotsky believed that any such effort at peaceful productive improvement would lead only to decadence. Permanent revolution was thus needed to keep workers from falling into sloth amidst the eternal striving for global class struggle. In 1914, a frustrated Lenin spoke of Trotsky’s fetish, saying:
he [Trotsky] deserted the Mensheviks and occupied a vacillating position, now co-operating with Martynov (the economist), now proclaiming his absurdly Left ‘permanent revolution’ theory.
Another point of conflict between Lenin on the one side and Trotsky on the other centered on whether or not Russia should continue to participate in WWI.
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A mind-numbing over-simplification of Russian history has destroyed the ability for countless historians to recognize the reason for the life and death battles that took place between Trotsky and Stalin during the first 20 post revolutionary years [in photo: Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky Where Lenin wanted to bring Russia out of the insane conflict in the first moments of their coup in 1917, Trotsky and his close ally Bukharin demanded that Russia stay in the war with the aim of converting it into a total pan European (and ultimately global) revolution. Trotsky’s commitment to global socialist revolution vs Stalin’s commitment to “socialism in one country” was at the heart of an unbridgeable divide between the two revolutionaries throughout the years.Upon taking charge of the Russian economy, Trotsky and Lenin unleashed a destructive wave of economic reforms titled ‘The New Economic Policy’ (NEP) that saw vast liberalization of the entire state with western corporate powers sweeping in to buy up former national utilities for pennies on the dollar. The most powerful figure of the western magnates to be granted full access to buy up Russia under this new policy was Occidental Petroleum’s Armand Hammer (1898-1990) who was only forced to leave Russia the moment Trotsky was kicked out (and returning to dominance in the weeks after Stalin’s 1953 death).
Later on in life, Hammer described how Lenin told him: ”We do not need doctors, we need businessmen… communism is not working and we must change to a New Economic Policy.”
Working closely with Lenin and especially Trotsky, Hammer became the principal moderator of nearly every business deal made between the Soviet government and western corporations during the 1920s which saw Russia sink into brutal economic enslavement to foreign powers at a pace which would not be seen again for over 60 years.
The vast liberalization of the Russian economy during the dark 1920s paralleled closely the Perestroika program of free trade/privatization of the 1990s and it is no coincidence that George Bush Sr dubbed this program of Balkanized looting of Russia ‘Operation Hammer’.
If one saw a proto-George Soros in the figure of Armand Hammer, they would not be far off.
Parvus and the Pan-European Union
Trotsky’s close association with Alexander Israel Helphand (aka: Parvus) throughout the revolution of 1905 and beyond is also suspicious and should be considered in the context of a much broader imperial geopolitical strategy.
Parvus’ association with the Pan-European Union founded by Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi in 1923 is another relevant anomaly that takes us into the deeper power structures lurking below the surface waves of history. [4] Parvus’s association with the Pan European Union and broader fascist operations across Turkey and the Middle East is laid out in Jeffrey Steinberg’s 2005 report “Cheney Revives Parvus’ Permanent War .madness”
Other members of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s institution included likes of Benito Mussolini, Walter Lippman, Nazi finance minister Hjalmar Schacht and Nazi geopolitician Karl Haushofer, while financiers Max Warburg and Louis de Rothschild openly bankrolled the organization.
In 1932, Kalergi delivered a speech celebrating the great restoration of order that would emerge in the unified pan-European effort to put down Bolshevik anarchism saying:
This eternal war can end only with the constitution of a world republic…. The only way left to save the peace seems to be a politic of peaceful strength, on the model of the Roman Empire, that succeeded in having the longest period of peace in the west thanks to the supremacy of his legions.
This group played a much greater role in history than many realize and set the stage for the European Union. Parvus’ (and Trotsky’s) close association with Vladimir Jabotinsky set the stage for the most fascist elements of Zionism to emerge in the wake of WWII, and Parvus’ work as propagandist and arms dealer for the leadership of the Young Turk movement (deployed to set a weakened Ottoman Empire on fire and provoke what became the Balkan Wars of 1912-13) can still be felt across the Turkish world to this day.
It is also noteworthy that none other than Otto von Hapsburg himself had run this organization for over 30 years and also created a sister organization called Dignitae Humanae Institute to “united the right of the world” under a gnostic Catholic veneer with a Clash of Civilizations rebranding for the alt right. As the ultra-liberalized dissolution of society proceeds expectedly apace under the moral mush of LBGTXYZ gobbledygook, pagan Gaia worship, and critical race theory, it is obvious that a knee jerk leap into radical conservativism will accelerate. Hence, a net has been cast to catch conservative fish.
Located in an 800-year-old monastery in Trisulti, Otto Hapsburg’s organization has found a useful frontman in the form of a Jesuitical fascist right-wing priest of the American alt-right by the name of… Steve Bannon. [5] This fact gives new meaning to Bannon’s self-characterization as a Leninist. In an August 22, 2016 Daily Beast article, journalist Ronald Radosh described a conversation he had with Bannon two years earlier saying “we had a long talk about his approach to politics. He never called himself a “populist” or an “American nationalist,” as so many think of him today. “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed. Shocked, I asked him what he meant.
“Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”Trotskyites Mutate into Neocons
I say this here and now just to draw a parallel in the reader’s mind to the strange transmogrification which leading Trotskyists took in the USA once their leader’s life was snuffed out in 1940. Trotsky’s body wasn’t even cold before such devotees as James Burnham, Sidney Hook, Max Schachtman, Albert Wohlsetter, and Irving Kristol abandoned Trotskyite socialism and adopted a new rabidly right-wing paradigm, which came to be known as ‘neo-conservativism’.
This poisonous movement grew quickly throughout the Cold War and took over the USA over the dead bodies of JFK and his brother while unleashing a new global dis-order ‘clash of civilizations’ each-against-all logic onto the globe under the watch of the Trilateral Commission of Kissinger, Brzezinski, and David Rockefeller.
I think we can intimate what Trotsky ultimately saw as the final destination for his aims of a global revolution of the masses, and willingness to collaborate with Nazis to achieve his ends by considering the writings of former Trotskyite James Burnham.
As Cynthia Chung pointed out in her recent article on the topic, Burnham, (Trotsky’s former personal assistant and a man known to many as the father of the neocons), saw the resolution to the Manichean problem of class struggle and Cold War in a one world fascist government. Right before Trotsky’s 1940 death, Burnham wrote an essay renouncing Dialectic Materialism in favor of the superior philosophy of Bertrand Russell as outlined in the 1913 Principia Scientifica, and hence his rebirth as a neocon was ensured. [6] In his Feb 1940 ‘Science and Style’, Burnham wrote: “Do you wish me to prepare a reading list, Comrade Trotsky? It would be long, ranging from the work of the brilliant mathematicians and logicians of the middle of the last century to one climax in the monumental Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead (the historic turning point in modern logic), and then spreading out in many directions – one of the most fruitful represented by the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science.”
Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead’s three volume Principia Mathematica published between 1910-1913 set the stage for the latter development of cybernetics and information theory by Russell’s pupil Norbert WienerThe question now sits before us: Was Burnham’s conversion to Russell’s worldview inconsistent with the actual goals and mission of Leon Trotsky?
It is too often forgotten that Leon Trotsky, acting as chairman of the technical and scientific board of industry, quite literally controlled all science policy of Russia from 1924-25. During this time, he wrote a 1924 pamphlet outlining his pro-eugenics vision of the future global order that would be brought into existence through the forces of Darwinian natural selection saying:
The human species will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and mass psycho-physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution… man will make his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to a higher consciousness… to create a higher social biological type, or if you please, a superman.
Whether we consider Trotsky’s relentless efforts to integrate Darwinism with Marxist Dialectic Materialism or the Neoconservative commitment to a Darwinian survival of the fittest ethic merged with a gnostic Christian end times doctrine, the effects are largely identical: Global chaos with a supposed point of rapture/synthesis to resolve the chaos of the material world. Getting to this destination, whereby a new order and new Nietzschean human being were to emerge, simply required a cleansing experience.
In this sense, Trotsky could be compared to a Russian version of his contemporary Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Where Chardin was tasked with merging Darwin’s theory of natural selection into Christianity, Trotsky was tasked with merging Darwin’s theory into the state religion of Marxist dialectic materialism in Russia. The end result in either case was identical.
Wohlstetter and RAND Corporation
Albert Wohlstetter is another devout Trotskyist who became a leading neo-conservative and controlling hand behind RAND Corporation. It was under Wohlstetter’s influence that RAND Corp became the principal conduit for the intellectual takeover of all branches of US policy on military, economic, and cultural levels.
How did this occur? Through a process known as Cybernetics.
Created by Norbert Wiener as the “practical application” of Lord Bertrand Russell’s “theoretical” Principia Mathematica of 1910-1913, Cybernetics was essentially a ‘science of control’ which became the conduit used to re-brand eugenics into new clothes after World War II.
As I outlined in my recent essay ‘The Revenge of the Malthusians and the Science of Limits’ the language of Cybernetics was called ‘systems analysis’ and presumed that all systems could be described as closed units susceptible to pure mathematical description and most importantly… manipulation from a scientific elite.
Author Alex Abella described RAND’s systems analysis repackaging of Dialectic Materialism in the following terms in his Soldiers of Reason:
RAND’s systems analysis…refused to be constrained by existing reality…Systems analysis was the freedom to dream and to dream big, to turn away from the idea that reality is a limited set of choices, to strive to bend the world to one’s will…the crux of systems analysis lies in a careful examination of the assumptions that gird the so-called right question, for the moment of greatest danger in a project is when unexamined criteria define the answers we want to extract. Sadly, most RAND analysts failed to perceive this inherent flaw in their wondrous construct. Not only that, the methodology of systems analysis required that all the aspects of a particular problem be broken down into quantities…Those things that could not be eased into a mathematical formula…were left out of the analysis… By extension, if a subject could not be measured, ranged, and classified, it was of little consequence in systems analysis, for it was not rational. Numbers were all – the human factor was a mere adjunct to the empirical.
The key that gives both Dialectic Materialism the same power of evil as the upgraded tool of Bertrand Russell’s Principia Scientifica extolled by Burnham or Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics/systems analysis is found in the following axiom: “Quantity must always govern quality”.
Under the influence of Wohlsetter’s RAND Corporation, the USA was driven into full scale insanity with a military outlook driven by computer models that presumed nuclear war was a winnable endeavor bringing the world closer to full scale nuclear holocaust. The merging of Darwinism with social science created “eugenics” which presumed that quantitative properties like genetic codes and DNA gave rise to qualitative attributes like “morality”, “wisdom” or “fitness to rule or live”.
In order for society to be brought into acceptance of this new soul-less paradigm of existence, with an invisible master class governing depopulated slaves from above, a vast shock therapy would be called for.
The Frankfurt School Global Revolution
That cleansing experience would take the form of ritualistic climax of purgative violence which would usher in a state of total despair and thus a new scientific priesthood managing the slaves of the other under a renewed form of technocratic feudalism. But how would society be brought to such a state of despair such that the masses would clamor for a new age to be imposed upon them in the form of a one world technocratic government?
When Christianity, nationalism, and respect for family values still governed society, such a state of nihilistic despair requisite to achieve this breaking point was more than a little difficult to achieve.
Here the role of Trotsky’s associates Georg Lukacs, and Willi Munzenberg play an important role.
Both men were not only radical Bolsheviks but also founders of a new organization founded in 1923 known as the Institute for Social Research founded in Frankfurt Germany, otherwise known as “The Frankfurt School”.
The Frankfurt School would lay out a comprehensive intellectual framework for a new global aesthetical and scientific revolution premised on the worship of decay, ugliness, and death within a Weberian-Freudian-Marxist synthesis. The system developed by these misanthropic leading priests of the new cult of death would justify the CIA’s funding of abstract art, post-modernist literature, a-tonal music, and other most modernist garbage throughout the Cold War. The launching of this project in full force took the form of a CIA-MI6 funded operation in 1949 dubbed ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom’. Leading organizers of this congress included Lord Bertrand Russell and two former Trotskyists: Sidney Hook and James Burnham.
This group and their role in steering mass education and culture over the ensuing century will be the topic of a future report.
Post-Script: A Final Word from Putin
To this author’s knowledge, the first time Vladimir Putin laid out a full attack on the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution as a foreign directed color revolution was during his 2021 Valdai Club meeting. At his keynote address, the Russian leader called out the social engineers masquerading as revolutionaries and social reformers today driving a parallel to the destructive ideology of the Bolsheviks of 1917:
The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.
Notes
1. Czarism and Revolution, published by Omni Publications in Hawthorne, 1962 French edition, pp. 224, 230.
2. Leon Trotsky: My Life, New York publisher: Scribner’s, 1930, p. 277.
3. One of the best and more recent among Furr’s pioneering writing on this topic can be found in his New Evidence of Trotsky’s Conspiracy, Erythos Press, 2020. Furr’s website is also an invaluable resource.
4. Parvus’s association with the Pan European Union and broader fascist operations across Turkey and the Middle East is laid out in Jeffrey Steinberg’s 2005 report “Cheney Revives Parvus’ Permanent War Madness”
5. This fact gives new meaning to Bannon’s self-characterization as a Leninist. In an August 22, 2016 Daily Beast article, journalist Ronald Radosh described a conversation he had with Bannon two years earlier saying “we had a long talk about his approach to politics. He never called himself a “populist” or an “American nationalist,” as so many think of him today. “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed. Shocked, I asked him what he meant. “Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
6. In his February 1940 ‘Science and Style’, Burnham wrote: “Do you wish me to prepare a reading list, Comrade Trotsky? It would be long, ranging from the work of the brilliant mathematicians and logicians of the middle of the last century to one climax in the monumental Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead (the historic turning point in modern logic), and then spreading out in many directions – one of the most fruitful represented by the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science.”
• Originally published in the The Last American Vagabond
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.
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US neoconservatives like Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken are using Ukraine as the linchpin of their strategy to undermine and destabilise Russia.
Since the start of the conflict in February 2022, billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware has been sent to Ukraine by the EU. By late February 2023, it had forwarded €3.6 billion worth of military assistance to the Zelensky regime via the European Peace Fund. However, even at that time, the total cost for EU countries could have been closer to €6.9 billion.
In late June 2023, the EU pledged a further €3.5 billion in military aid. Josep Borrell is the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EU Commission.
Following this latest pledge, he stated on Twitter:
“We will continue to double down on our military support on both equipment [and] training. For as long as it takes.”
Great news for European and UK armaments companies like BAE Systems, Saab and Rheinmetall, which are raking in huge profits from the destruction of Ukraine (see the CNN Business report “Europe’s arms spending on Ukraine boosts defense companies“).
US arms manufacturers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are also acquiring multi-billion-dollar contracts (as outlined in the online articles “Raytheon wins $1.2 billion surface-to-air missile order for Ukraine” and “Pentagon readies new $2 billion Ukraine air defense package including missiles“).
And as for BlackRock, JP Morgan and private investors, they aim to profit from the country’s reconstruction along with 400 global companies, including Citi, Sanofi and Philips.
As reported on the CNN Business website (“War-torn economy needs private investors to rebuild“), JP Morgan’s Stefan Weiler sees a “tremendous opportunity” for private investors.
At the same time, in “War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land“, the Oakland Institute describes how financial institutions are insidiously supporting the consolidation of farmland by oligarchs and Western financial interests.
With Ukrainian forces struggling on the battlefield, it poses the worrying question: with so much money at stake for Western capital, just how far will the US escalate in order to prevent Russia from securing control over areas of the country?
Meanwhile, away from the boardrooms, business conferences and high-level strategizing, hundreds of thousands of ordinary young Ukrainians have died.
Irish MEPs Mick Wallace and Claire Daley have been staunch critics of the EU stance on Ukraine (see Claire Daley talking in the EU parliament about Ukraine burning through a generation of men on YouTube).
Wallace recently addressed the EU Parliament, describing the heist currently taking place in that country by Western corporations.
Wallace said:
The damage to Ukraine is devastating. Towns and cities that endured for hundreds of years don’t exist anymore. We must recognise that these towns, cities and surrounding lands were long being stolen by local oligarchs colluding with global financial capital. This theft quickened with the onset of the war in 2014.
The pro-Western government opened the doors wide for massive structural adjustment and privatisation programmes spearheaded by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the IMF and the World Bank. Zelensky used the current war to concentrate power and accelerate the corporate fire sale. He banned opposition parties that were resisting deeply unpopular reforms to the laws restricting the sale of land to foreign investors.
Over three million hectares of agricultural land are now owned by companies based in Western tax havens. Ukraine’s mineral deposits alone are worth over $12 trillion. Western companies are licking their lips.
What are the working-class people of Ukraine dying for?
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President Biden accidentally referred to Putin’s war in “Iraq” when answering questions from the press, a year after former president George W Bush made the same gaffe. Both men played crucial roles in the push to invade Iraq.
Asked on Wednesday whether the short-lived Prigozhin rebellion was a sign that Putin was weakening, Biden replied, “It’s hard to tell really. But he’s clearly losing the war in Iraq.”
During the 2020 presidential race, Current Affairs’ Nathan J Robinson wrote the following about Biden’s pivotal role in manufacturing support for the Iraq invasion:
In 2003, Biden was “a senator bullish about the push to war [in Iraq] who helped sell the Bush administration’s pitch to the American public,” who “voted for — and helped advance — the Bush agenda.” He was the war’s “most crucial” senate supporter. Biden repeated the myth that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, saying that “these weapons must be dislodged from Saddam Hussein, or Saddam Hussein must be dislodged from power.” The resulting war was one of the most deadly catastrophes in the history of U.S. foreign policy — the Iraqi death toll was in the hundreds of thousands or possibly even the millions, and 4,500 American troops died.
That Biden’s decomposing brain would find the word “Iraq” when reaching for the word which means “nation that has been illegally invaded by an evil government” is positively Freudian.
In May of last year during a speech in Dallas, George W Bush made a similar Freudian confession, saying, “The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean, of Ukraine.”
After correcting himself with a nervous chuckle, Bush broke the tension with the words, “Iraq too. Anyway.” He then quipped that he is 75 years old, leaning harder on his “Aw shucks gee willikers I’m such a goofball” persona than he ever has in his entire life.
I defy you to find me anything that is more quintessentially representative of the state of the US empire than these two clips. Two decaying empire managers fumbling around in their skulls for the name of nation that’s been invaded by murderous thugs, and coming up with the name of the nation they themselves invaded. It’s truly a thing of beauty.
It’s absolutely ridiculous that they’re trying to charge Putin with war crimes while these two mass murderers are walking free. As American law professor Dale Carpenter has said, “If citizens cannot trust that laws will be enforced in an evenhanded and honest fashion, they cannot be said to live under the rule of law. Instead, they live under the rule of men corrupted by the law.” This is all the more true of laws which would exist between nations.
It’s not a “whataboutism” to say it’s absurd to charge Putin with war crimes without charging men like Bush and Biden — it’s a completely devastating argument against the claim being made. If the law doesn’t apply to everyone, then it’s not the law, it’s just corruption. It’s a tool of the powerful.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
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National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is one of the key people driving US foreign policy. He was mentored by Hillary Clinton with regime changes in Honduras, Libya and Syria. He was the link between Nuland and Biden during the 2014 coup in Ukraine. As reported by Seymour Hersh, Sullivan led the planning of the Nord Stream pipelines destruction in September 2022. Sullivan guides or makes many large and small foreign policy decisions. This article will describe Jake Sullivan’s background, what he says, what he has been doing, where the US is headed and why this should be debated.
Background
Jake Sullivan was born in November 1976. He describes his formative years like this:
I was raised in Minnesota in the 1980s, a child of the later Cold War – of Rocky IV, the Miracle on Ice, and ‘Tear down this wall’. The 90s were my high school and college years. The Soviet Union collapsed. The Iron Curtain disappeared. Germany was reunified. An American-led alliance ended a genocide in Bosnia and prevented one in Kosovo. I went to graduate school in England and gave fiery speeches on the floor of the Oxford Union about how the United States was a force for good in the world.
Sullivan’s education includes Yale (BA), Oxford (MA) and Yale again (JD). He went quickly from academic studies and legal work to political campaigning and government.
Sullivan made important contacts during his college years at elite institutions. For example, he worked with former Deputy Secretary of State and future Brookings Institution president, Strobe Talbott. After a few years clerking for judges, Sullivan transitioned to a law firm in his hometown of Minneapolis. He soon became chief counsel to Senator Amy Klobuchar who connected him to the rising Senator Hillary Clinton.
Mentored by Hillary
Sullivan became a key adviser to Hillary Clinton in her campaign to be Democratic party nominee in 2008. At age 32, Jake Sullivan became deputy chief of staff and director of policy planning when she became secretary of state. He was her constant companion, travelling with her to 112 countries.
The Clinton/Sullivan foreign policy was soon evident. In Honduras, Clinton clashed with progressive Honduras President Manuel Zelaya over whether to re-admit Cuba to the OAS. Seven weeks later, on June 28, Honduran soldiers invaded the president’s home and kidnapped him out of the country, stopping en route at the US Air Base. The coup was so outrageous that even the US ambassador to Honduras denounced it. This was quickly over-ruled as the Clinton/Sullivan team played semantics games to say it was a coup but not a “military coup.” Thus the Honduran coup regime continued to receive US support. They quickly held a dubious election to make the restoration of President Zelaya “moot”. Clinton is proud of this success in her book “Hard Choices.”
Two years later the target was Libya. With Victoria Nuland as State Department spokesperson, the Clinton/Sullivan team promoted sensational claims of a pending massacre and urged intervention in Libya under the “responsibility to protect.” When the UN Security Council passed a resolution authorizing a no-fly zone to protect civilians, the US, Qatar and other NATO members distorted that and started air attacks on Libyan government forces. Today, 12 years later, Libya is still in chaos and war. The sensational claims of 2011 were later found to be false.
When the Libyan government was overthrown in Fall 2011, the Clinton/Sullivan State Department and CIA plotted to seize the Libyan weapons arsenal. Weapons were transferred to the Syrian opposition. US Ambassador Stevens and other Americans were killed in an internecine conflict over control of the weapons cache.
Undeterred, Clinton and Sullivan stepped up their attempts to overthrow the Syrian government. They formed a club of western nations and allies called the “Friends of Syria.” The “Friends” divided tasks who would do what in the campaign to topple the sovereign state. Former policy planner at the Clinton/Sullivan State Department, Ann Marie Slaughter, called for “foreign military intervention.” Sullivan knew they were arming violent sectarian fanatics to overthrow the Syrian government. In an email to Hillary released by Wikileaks, Sullivan noted “AQ is on our side in Syria.”
Biden’s adviser during the 2014 Ukraine Coup
After being Clinton’s policy planner, Sullivan became President Obama’s director of policy planning (Feb 2011 to Feb 2013) then national security adviser to Vice President Biden (Feb 2013 to August 2014).
In his position with Biden, Sullivan had a close-up view of the February 2014 Ukraine coup. He was a key contact between Victoria Nuland, overseeing the coup, and Biden. In the secretly recorded conversation where Nuland and the US Ambassador to Ukraine discuss how to manage the coup, Nuland remarks that Jake Sullivan told her “you need Biden.” Biden gave the “attaboy” and the coup was “midwifed” following a massacre of police AND protesters on the Maidan plaza.
Sullivan must have observed Biden’s use of the vice president’s position for personal family gain. He would have been aware of Hunter Biden’s appointment to the board of the Burisima Ukrainian energy company, and the reason Joe Biden demanded that the Ukrainian special prosecutor who was investigating Burisima to be fired. Biden later bragged and joked about this.
In December 2013, at a conference hosted by Chevron Corporation, Victoria Nuland said the US has spent five BILLION dollars to bring “democracy” to Ukraine.
Sullivan helped create Russiagate
Jake Sullivan was a leading member of the 2016 Hillary Clinton team which promoted Russiagate. The false claim that Trump was secretly contacting Russia was promoted initially to distract from negative news about Hillary Clinton and to smear Trump as a puppet of Putin. Both the Mueller and Durham investigations officially discredited the main claims of Russiagate. There was no collusion. The accusations were untrue, and the FBI gave them unjustified credence for political reasons.
Sullivan played a major role in the deception as shown by his “Statement from Jake Sullivan on New Report Exposing Trump’s Secret Line of Communication to Russia.”
Sullivan’s misinformation
Jake Sullivan is a good speaker, persuasive and with a dry sense of humor. At the same time, he can be disingenuous. Some of his statements are false. For example, in June 2017 Jake Sullivan was interviewed by Frontline television program about US foreign policy and especially US-Russia relations. Regarding NATO’s overthrow of the Libyan government, Sullivan says, “Putin came to believe that the United States had taken Russia for a ride in the UN Security Council that authorized the use of force in Libya…. He thought he was authorizing a purely defensive mission…. Now on the actual language of the resolution, it’s plain as day that Putin was wrong about that.” Contrary to what Sullivan claims, the UN Security Council resolution clearly authorizes a no-fly zone for the protection of civilians, no more. It’s plain as day there was NOT authorization for NATO’s offensive attacks and “regime change.”
Planning the Nord Stream Pipeline destruction
The bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines, filled with 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas, was a monstrous environmental disaster. The destruction also caused huge economic damage to Germany and other European countries. It has been a boon for US liquefied natural gas exports which have surged to fill the gap, but at a high price. Many European factories dependent on cheap gas have closed down. Tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs.
Seymour Hersh reported details of How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline. He says, “Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.” A sabotage plan was prepared and officials in Norway and Denmark included in the plot. The day after the sabotage, Jake Sullivan tweeted
I spoke to my counterpart Jean-Charles Ellermann-Kingombe of Denmark about the apparent sabotage of Nord Stream pipelines. The U.S. is supporting efforts to investigate and we will continue our work to safeguard Europe’s energy security.
Ellerman-Kingombe may have been one of the Danes informed in advance of the bombing. He is close to the US military and NATO command.
Since then, the Swedish investigation of Nord Stream bombing has made little progress. Contrary to Sullivan’s promise in the tweet, the US has not supported other efforts to investigate. When Russia proposed an independent international investigation of the Nord Stream sabotage at the UN Security Council, the resolution failed due to lack of support from the US and US allies. Hungary’s foreign minister recently asked,
How on earth is it possible that someone blows up critical infrastructure on the territory of Europe and no one has a say, no one condemns, no one carries out an investigation?
Economic Plans devoid of reality
Ten weeks ago Jake Sullivan delivered a major speech on “Renewing American Economic Leadership” at the Brookings Institution. He explains how the Biden administration is pursuing a “modern industrial and innovation strategy.” They are trying to implement a “foreign policy for the middle class” which better integrates domestic and foreign policies. The substance of their plan is to increase investments in semiconductors, clean energy minerals and manufacturing. However the new strategy is very unlikely to achieve the stated goal to “lift up all of America’s people, communities, and industries.” Sullivan’s speech completely ignores the elephant in the room: the costly US Empire including wars and 800 foreign military bases which consume about 60% of the total discretionary budget. Under Biden and Sullivan’s foreign policy, there is no intention to rein in the extremely costly military industrial complex. It is not even mentioned.
US exceptionalism 2.0
In December 2018 Jake Sullivan wrote an essay titled “American Exceptionalism, Reclaimed.” It shows his foundational beliefs and philosophy. He separates himself from the “arrogant brand of exceptionalism” demonstrated by Dick Cheney. He also criticizes the “American first” policies of Donald Trump. Sullivan advocates for “a new American exceptionalism” and “American leadership in the 21st Century.”
Sullivan has a shallow Hollywood understanding of history: “The United States stopped Hitler’s Germany, saved Western Europe from economic ruin, stood firm against the Soviet Union, and supported the spread of democracy worldwide.” He believes “The fact that the major powers have not returned to war with one another since 1945 is a remarkable achievement of American statecraft.”
Jake Sullivan is young in age but his ideas are old. The United States is no longer dominant economically or politically. It is certainly not “indispensable.” More and more countries are objecting to US bullying and defying Washington’s demands. Even key allies such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates are ignoring US requests. The trend toward a multipolar world is escalating. Jake Sullivan is trying to reverse the trend but reality and history are working against him. Over the past four or five decades, the US has gone from being an investment, engineering and manufacturing powerhouse to a deficit spending consumer economy waging perpetual war with a bloated military industrial complex.
Instead of reforming and rebuilding the US, the national security state expends much of its energy and resources trying to destabilize countries deemed to be “adversaries”.
Conclusion
Previous national security advisers Henry Kissinger and Zbignew Brzezinski were very influential.
Kissinger is famous for wooing China and dividing the communist bloc. Jake Sullivan is now wooing India in hopes of dividing that country from China and the BRICS alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa).
Brzezinski is famous for plotting the Afghanistan trap. By destabilizing Afghanistan with foreign terrorists beginning 1978, the US induced the Soviet Union to send troops to Afghanistan at the Afghan government’s request. The result was the collapse of the progressive Afghan government, the rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and 40 years of war and chaos.
On 28 February 2022, just four days after Russian troops entered Ukraine, Jake Sullivan’s mentor, Hillary Clinton, was explicit: “Afghanistan is the model.” It appears the US intentionally escalated the provocations in Ukraine to induce Russia to intervene. The goal is to “weaken Russia.” This explains why the US has spent over $100 billion sending weapons and other support to Ukraine. This explains why the US and UK undermined negotiations which could have ended the conflict early on.
The Americans who oversaw the 2014 coup in Kiev, are the same ones running US foreign policy today: Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan. Prospects for ending the Ukraine war are very poor as long as they are in power.
The Democratic Party constantly emphasizes “democracy” yet there is no debate or discussion over US foreign policy. What kind of “democracy” is this where crucial matters of life and death are not discussed?
Robert F Kennedy Jr is now running in the Democratic Party primary. He has a well informed and critical perspective on US foreign policy including the never ending wars, the intelligence agencies and the conflict in Ukraine.
Jake Sullivan is a skilled debater. Why doesn’t he debate Democratic Party candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr over US foreign policy and national security?
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Report details widespread and systematic torture with summary executions of more than 70 people
Russian forces have carried out widespread and systematic torture of civilians detained in connection with their attack on Ukraine, summarily executing more than 70 of them, the UN human rights office said on Tuesday.
It interviewed hundreds of victims and witnesses for a report detailing more than 900 cases of civilians, including children and elderly people, being arbitrarily detained in the conflict, most of them by Russia. The vast majority of those interviewed said they were tortured and in some cases subjected to sexual violence during detention by Russian forces, the head of the UN human rights office in Ukraine said.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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A lot of nonsense is being spouted by a bevy of spontaneous “Russian experts” in light of the Prigozhin spray, a mutiny (no one quite knows what to call it), stillborn in the Russian Federation. It all fell to the theatrical sponsor, promoter and rabble rouser Yevgeny Prigozhin, a convict who rose through the ranks of the deceased Soviet state to find fortune and security via catering, arms and Vladimir Putin’s support.
In the service of the Kremlin, Prigozhin proved his mettle. He did his level best to neutralise protest movements. He created the Internet Research Agency, an outfit employing hundreds dedicated to trolling for the regime. Such efforts have been apoplectically lionised (and vilified) as being vital to winning Donald Trump the US presidency in 2016.
His Wagner mercenary outfit, created in the summer of 2014 in response to the Ukraine conflict, has certainly been busy, having impressed bloody footprints in the Levant, a number of African states, and Ukraine itself. Along the way, benefits flowed for the provision of such services, including natural resource concessions.
But something happened last week. Suddenly, the strong man of the mercenary outfit that had been performing military duties alongside the Russian Army in Ukraine seemed to lose his cool. There were allegations that his men had been fired upon by Russian forces, a point drawn out by his capture of the 72nd Motorised Rifle Brigade commander, Lieutenant Colonel Roman Venevitin. Probably more to the point, he had found out some days earlier that the Russian Defence Ministry was keen to rein in his troops, placing them under contractual obligations. His autonomous wings were going to be clipped.
The fuse duly went. Prigozhin fumed on Telegram, expressing his desire to get a number of officials, most notably the Defence Minister, Sergei Shoigu, and Chief of the General staff Valery Gerasimov, sent packing. A “march for justice” was organised, one that threatened to go all the way to Moscow.
President Vladimir Putin fumed in agitation in his televised address on June 24, claiming that “excessive ambition and personal interests [had] led to treason, to the betrayal of the motherland and the people and the cause”. Within hours, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, whose diplomatic skills are threadbare, had intervened as mediator, after which it was decided that the Wagner forces would withdraw to avoid “shedding Russian blood”.
This all provided some delicious speculative manna for the press corps and commentariat outside Russia. Nature, and media, abhor the vacuum; the filling that follows is often not palatable. There was much breathless, excited pontification about the end of Putin, despite the obvious fact that this insurrection had failed in its tracks. John Lyons of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation was aflame with wonder. Where, he wondered, was the Russian President? Why did the Wagner soldiers “get from Ukraine to Rostov, take control of Ukraine’s war HQ then move to Voronezh without a hint of resistance”?
John Lough of Chatham House in London claimed that Putin had “been shown to have lost his previous ability to be the arbiter between powerful rival groups.” His “public image in Russia as the all-powerful Tsar” had been called into question. Ditto the views of Peter Rutland of Wesleyan University, who was adamant in emphasising Putin’s impotence in being “unable to do anything to stop Prigozhin’s rogue military unit as it seized Rostov-on-Don”, only to then write, without explaining why, about uncharacteristic behaviour from both men in stepping “back from the brink of civil war”.
Then came the hyperventilating chatter about nuclear weapons (too much of the Crimson Tide jitters there), the pathetic wail that accompanies those desperate to fill both column space. The same degree of concern regarding such unsteady nuclear powers as Pakistan is nowhere to be seen, despite ongoing crises and the prospect of political implosion.
Commentors swooned with excitement: the Kremlin had lost the plot; the attempted coup, if it could even be called that, had done wonders to rattle the strongman. Those same commentators could not quite explain that Prigozhin had seemingly been rusticated and banished to Belarus within the shortest of timeframes, where he is likely to keep company with a man of comparatively diminished intellect: Premier Lukashenko himself. Prigozhin, for all his aspirations, has a gangster’s nose for a bargain, poor or otherwise.
As Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov put it, the original criminal case opened against Prigozhin for military mutiny by the Kremlin would be dropped, while any Wagner fighters who had taken part in the “march for justice” would not face any punitive consequences. Those who had not participated would be duly assimilated into the Russian defence architecture in signing contracts with the Defence Ministry.
The image now appearing – much of this subject to redrawing, resketching, and requalifying – is that things were not quite as they seemed. Assuming himself to be a big-brained Wallerstein of regime stirring clout, Prigozhin had seemingly put forth a plan of action that had all the seeds of failure. Britain’s The Telegraph reported that “the mercenary force had only 8,000 fighters rather than the 25,000 claimed and faced likely defeat in any attempt to take the Russian capital.”
Another reading is also possible here, though it will have to be verified in due course. Putin had anticipated that this contingently loyal band of mercenaries was always liable to turn, given the chance. Russia is overrun with such volatile privateers and soldiers of fortune. Where that fortune turns, demands will be made.
Ultimately, in Putin’s Russia, the political is never divorceable from the personal. Chechnya’s resilient thug, Ramzan Kadyrov, very much the prototypical Putin vassal only nominally subservient, suggests that this whole matter could be put down to family business disputes. “A chain of failed business deals created a lingering resentment in the businessman, which reached its peak when St. Petersburg’s authorities did not grant [Prigozhin’s] daughter a coveted land plot.” The big picture, viewed from afar, can be very small indeed.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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We speak with Nina Khrushcheva in Moscow after an extraordinary weekend that saw the most significant challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s leadership since the beginning of his invasion of Ukraine 16 months ago. On Friday, the head of the powerful Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, accused the Russian military of attacking his forces and began a march on Moscow — but the revolt…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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In the midst of Russia’s imperialist war, Ukraine’s unions and popular movements have carried out a double struggle: they have actively engaged in resistance against the invasion while also having to oppose Volodymyr Zelensky’s neoliberal policies and the growing indebtedness of the country fostered by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union. In a recent forum sponsored by…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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In his bestselling book of 1987, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, historian Paul Kennedy chronicles the rise of western power and its world dominance from 1500 to the present. He reports that the rise was not due to any particular event, nor even an unusual series of events. It was, in fact, neither foreseen nor even recognized until it was already well under way, although it may be accurately ascribed to multiple factors, which Kennedy discusses. The same may be said of the ongoing fall of western power.
Although the decline of the West is rapidly becoming more evident to informed observers of current events, the start of that decline is less easy to pinpoint, in part because it seemed less inevitable and more reversible until quite recently. Was the high point the Austro-Hungarian Empire? Victorian England? The U.S. Eisenhower administration? Some might date it from the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, marking the beginning of the truncated “New American Century.”
That “century” appears to be ending in the manner of so many other powers that fill the pages of Kennedy’s book – through imperial overreach, excessive military spending, lagging economic productivity and competitiveness, and failure to invest in the physical, technical and human resources necessary to remain a dominant power. In short, the West is flagging.
The signs for this are too evident to ignore. The industrial base of the West is withering. Post-WWII, the U.S. dominated because it was the only major industrial power to survive unscathed, and its investment in western Europe and Japan increased the wealth of all three. Over the last half of the 20th century, however, these economies began to shift much of their industry to countries with cheaper labor and more efficient production, such that by the 21st century much of their manufacturing capability had vanished, and they became mainly consumer societies.
2023 has become a watershed year for the power shift, due to dramatic western weaknesses exposed by the Ukraine war. The war revealed that a relatively modest economy (Russia) had the capability to outproduce the U.S. and all the NATO countries combined in war materiel. The U.S. “arsenal of democracy” and its European partners proved unable to provide more than a fraction of the weapons and ammunition that Russia’s factories produced. Ukrainian soldiers supplied by NATO countries found themselves vastly outnumbered in tanks, artillery, missiles, unmanned and manned aircraft, and even the latest hypersonic and electronic weapons that were arrayed against them in seemingly limitless supply. The U.S. and European NATO partners could only cobble together small numbers of incompatible weapons from their diminishing inventories, and make promises of future deliveries after months or years.
But the U.S. and its allies were not counting on physical weapons alone. They weaponized the U.S. dollar, through seizures of Russian accounts in U.S., European and other banks totaling more than $300 billion, and through application of economic sanctions, including expulsion of Russian banks from the SWIFT dollar trading system. This also backfired.
First, Russia retaliated by seizing U.S. and European assets within Russia, in equal or greater amounts. Second, they “pivoted east,” negotiating new trading partnerships with China, India and other countries. Third, they and their new partners, including other targets of U.S. sanctions, began to develop financial agreements to displace or reduce the use of SWIFT. Even countries that had heretofore not been threatened with asset seizure or economic sanctions, like Brazil, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia, joined these agreements, in order to expand their trading base, and as insurance against use of the USD for financial pressure or threats. The result was that the Russian economy proved astonishingly resilient – moreso even than many of the NATO countries. The Russian GDP fell by less than 2% in 2022 and is expected to rise by up to 2% in 2023, despite the war and sanctions. Russia has opted for a sustainable but inexorable war with less than 1/6 the casualties of Ukraine. Visitors report that it hardly feels like a country at war. The annual St. Petersburg Economic Forum attracted 17,000 participants from 130 countries and concluded 900 deals and contracts worth 3.9 trillion rubles ($46 billion).
The decline of Europe was further illustrated by the consequences of the US bombing of the Nordstream gas pipelines in September, 2022, and the sanctions on Russian natural gas and petroleum products imposed by NATO. Together, these ended the competitiveness of the European economies, which had hitherto thrived on accessibility to cheap Russian fuel. As predicted by Radek Sikorsky, MEP, this meant
… double-digit inflation, skyrocketing energy prices, and electricity shortage, … Germany will be deindustrialized, … German industries, scientists and engineers will move to the US, who will generously accept them.
And Europe will be set back a couple of decades. Already, most European countries — France, Italy, Spain etc. — have had zero growth in GDP-per-capita for more than a decade. Add in inflation, the standard of living will soon be down 30-40%.
In effect, the U.S. had defeated its NATO “partners” (mainly Germany) and cannibalized their industries for the sake of its own benefit, potentially short-lived.
But the United States believed that its mighty dollar could offset its faded industry and increasingly toothless military – that it could be printed in unlimited amounts without losing value, and could become its most powerful weapon. The history of this dollar began in 1971, when President Richard Nixon announced that, in effect, the U.S. dollar would no longer be backed by gold, but rather by whatever the dollar could purchase in the U.S., i.e. by the U.S. economy itself. This became widely accepted because a) the U.S. was the world’s largest economy, b) the two great international regulatory financial institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, were also based on the dollar, and c) nearly all the world’s countries outside of the Soviet Union and other socialist societies used the dollar as the reserve currency for their own money. In addition, the world shed fixed exchange rates, with their troublesome periodic revaluations, for floating rates, which generally made the changes more gradual and more stable for the major currencies, and especially the dollar.
The effect of so many dollars circulating so widely was to invest most of the world in protecting its value. The more a country’s non-dollar currency became based on the dollar as its reserve currency, the more the incentive for that country to defend the dollar. Later, as the U.S. began to lose its industry, it came to depend on this value to maintain its economy. It marketed its debt to other countries and “persuaded” other countries to fund U.S. bases on their territories for the purpose of “mutual defense.” This is part of the reason the U.S. now has more than 800 military bases worldwide. Although the U.S. national debt is, at time of writing, more than $33 trillion, the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board seem to think that they can continue to unload it without limit onto other countries.
Decision makers in the U.S. seem to think that they have found the goose that lays the golden egg: when they need more money, they have only to borrow indefinitely and market their IOUs to buyers, many of whom don’t really have the option of saying no. Thus, for example, it used unlimited borrowing to fund without hesitation a very costly Ukraine war by more than $100 billion in 2022 alone, while denying basic services to its own citizens.
But borrowing is not the only way that the U.S. raises funds. Given the stability of the dollar, many countries store or invest them in the U.S. But when a country has a disagreement with the U.S., or chooses a leadership or policies not approved by the U.S., the U.S. is not above confiscating those funds. In 2011, this is what it did with $32 billion of Libyan funds, the largest but by no means the only such confiscation of another nation’s funds at that time. Since then, similar confiscations have occurred with Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Afghanistan and other nations. Eclipsing Libya, however, was the confiscation of Russia’s $300 billion by the U.S and its mostly NATO allies, an estimated $100 billion of it by the U.S. alone.
Recently, however, other countries are becoming wary of the U.S. and choosing other options that reduce their participation in what they view as a Mafia-style protection racket as well as their placement of assets in places where they could be confiscated in case of disagreement. As noted earlier, a growing number of countries are opting to either bypass the dollar-based SWIFT system, or to complement it with new agreements where goods are paid in another currency or with multiple currencies. Even Saudi Arabia has begun accepting payment in Chinese Yuan and paying Russia in rubles. In addition, China and other countries have decided to limit or reduce their USD exposure. So far, this has had no appreciable effect on the value of the USD. But if the dollar starts to become less desirable, it may become a questionable investment, in which case the U.S. risks losing its status as a world power – even a modest one. At that point, having demolished German and other European access to cheap fuel, the U.S. will join the rest of the west in its decline, leaving the rising economies of China, India, Brazil, Russia and other countries in Asia, Latin America and possibly Africa to displace them.
Is the Dollar overvalued? By the laws of supply and demand, one could argue that it is not. But it is a fair question when the supply is enormous and growing, and the demand is artificial and coerced. What will happen when the dollar’s near monopoly as an exchange medium ends? The dollar has not always been the preeminent tool for pricing international transactions. At the turn of the 20th century, the British pound sterling was literally the gold standard. But the British economy was fading, and the pound continued to fall against both gold and the USD. Now, although it is still a major currency, it is a mere shadow of its former self. If or when the many dollars worldwide come home to claim their true value, we may discover that they buy little more than castles of sand.
When world power has shifted elsewhere, the U.S., Great Britain, Germany, France and the entire West may come to depend for glory upon their historical and cultural treasures, like the ones of other bygone civilizations that western tourists once visited so widely.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner private army has pulled back from their advance into Moscow on Saturday, agreeing to retreat towards Belarus in a deal struck that will spare them prosecution for their rebellion. After previously stating that his army had no intention of backing down, the fray fizzled out rather quickly, with Prigozhin later stating that he wished to avoid bloodshed.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Coup attempt in Russia.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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By Kalinga Seneviratne in Suva
In a keynote speech at the annual Pacific Update conference the region’s major university, Fiji deputy Prime Minister Professor Biman Prasad has warned delegates from the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand that Oceania is not in good shape because of problems not of their own making.
Professor Prasad was speaking at the three-day conference at the University of the South Pacific where he was the former dean of the Business and Economic Faculty,
He listed these problems as climate change, geopolitics, superpower conflict, a declining resource base in fisheries and forests, environmental degradation and debilitating health problems leading to significant social and economic challenges.
He asked the delegates to consider whether the situation of the South Pacific nations is improving when they take stock of where the region is today.
“What is clear, or should be clear to all of us, is that as a region, we are not in entirely good shape,” said Professor Prasad.
Pacific Update, held annually at USP, is the premier forum for discussing economic, social, political, and environmental issues in the region.
Held on June 13-15 this year, it was co-hosted by the Development Policy Centre of the Australian National University (ANU) and USP’s School of Accounting, Finance and Economics.
Distant wars
In his keynote, Professor Prasad pinpointed an issue adversely affecting the region’s economic wellbeing.“Our region has suffered disproportionally from distant wars in Ukraine,” he said. “Price rises arising from Russia’s war on Ukraine is ravaging communities in our islands by way of price hikes that are making the basics unaffordable.
“Even though not a single grain of wheat is imported from this region, the price increase for a loaf of bread across the Pacific is probably among the highest in the world.
“This is not unbelievable, not to mention unjust,” he noted, adding that this is due to supply chain failures in these remote corners of the world where the cost of shipping goods and services have spiralled.
Though he did not specifically mention the collateral damage from economic sanctions imposed by the West, he did point out that shipping costs have increased several hundred percent since the conflict started.
“In the backdrop of all these, or should I say forefront, is a runaway climate crisis whose most profound and acutest impacts are felt by small island states,” said Professor Prasad. “The impacts of climate change on our economies and societies are systematic; they are widespread, and they are growing”.
Rather than focusing on the problems listed by Professor Prasad, this year’s Pacific Update devoted a significant part of the event to the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme, where Australia has opened its borders to thousands of workers from the Pacific island countries with new provisions provided for them to acquire permanent residency in the country.
Development aid scheme
Australia is presenting this as a development assistance scheme where many academics presenting research papers showed that the remittances they send back help local economies by increasing consumption(and economic growth).Hiroshi Maeda, a researcher from ANU, said that remittances play a crucial role in the economy of the Kingdom of Tonga in the Pacific, a country of just over 106,000 people.
According to recent census data from Australia, New Zealand and the United States of America quoted in a UN report, 126.540 Tongans live overseas. According to a survey by Maeda, temporary migration has helped to increase household savings by 38.1 percent from remittances sent home.
It also increases the expenditure on services such as health, education and recreation while also helping the housing sector.
There was a whole session devoted to the PALM scheme where Australian researchers presented survey findings done among Pacific unskilled workers, mainly working in the farm sector in Australia, about their satisfaction rates with the Australian work experience.
Dung Doan and Ryan Edwards presented data from a joint World Bank-ANU survey. They said there had been allegations of exploited Pacific workers and concerns about worker welfare and social impacts, but this is the first study addressing these issues.
They have interviewed thousands of workers, and the researchers say “a majority of the workers are very satisfied” and “social outcomes on balance are net positive”.
Better planning needed
When IDN asked a panellist about PALM and other migrant labour recruitment schemes of Australia such as hiring of nurses from the Pacific and the impact it is creating — especially in Fiji where there are labour shortages as a result — his response was that it needs better planning by governments to train its workers.But, one Pacific academic from USP (who did not want to be named) told IDN later, “Yes, we can spend to train them, and Australia will come and steal them after six months”. She lamented that there needed to be more Pacific academics who made their voices heard.
One such voice, however, was Denton Rarawa, Senior Advisor in Economics of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) from the Solomon Islands. He pointed out that a major issue the Pacific region needed to address to reach the sustainable development goals (SDGs) was to consider reforms and policies that strike a balance between supporting livelihoods and reducing future debt risks.
“Labour Mobility is resulting in increasing remittances to our region,” but Rarawa warned, “It is having an unintended consequence of brain drain with over 54,000 Pacific workers in Australia and New Zealand at the end of last year.”
All Pacific island nations beyond Papua New Guinea and Fiji have small populations — many have just about 100,000 people, and some, like Nauru, Tuvalu and Kiribati, have just a few thousand.
Rarawa argues that even though “we may be small in land mass, our combined exclusive economic zone covers nearly 20 percent of the world’s surface as a collective, we control nearly 10 percent of the votes at the United Nations.
“We are home to over 60 percent of the world’s tuna supply — therefore, we are a region of strategic value”.
Rarawa believes that good Pacific leadership is needed to exploit this strategic value for the benefit of the people in the Pacific.
“The current strategic environment we find ourselves in just reinforces and re-emphasize the notion for us to seize the opportunity to strengthen our regional solidarity and leverage our current strategic context to address our collective challenges,” argues Rarawa.
“We need deeper regionalism (driven by) political leadership and regionalism (with) people-centred development (that) brings improved socio-economic wellbeing by ensuring access to employment, entrepreneurship, trade, finance and investment in the region.”
Dr Kalinga Seneviratne is a Sri Lanka-born journalist, broadcaster and international communications specialist. He is currently a consultant to the journalism programme at the University of the South Pacific. He is also the former head of research at the Asian Media Information and Communication Center (AMIC) in Singapore. In-Depth News (IDN) is the flagship agency of the non-profit International Press Syndicate.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
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This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Over the past 50 years Daniel Ellsberg remained an antiwar and anti-nuclear activist who inspired a new generation of whistleblowers. In his last interview with Democracy Now! in April, he spoke about the war in Ukraine and why it required a diplomatic solution, and about the latest leak of Pentagon documents by Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira, who has been indicted on six counts of willful retention and transmission of classified information. We asked Ellsberg about what the leaks say about the war in Ukraine, and discussed his decision in 2021 to leak a classified government report that he had kept in his possession for decades, which revealed the U.S. had drawn up plans to attack China with nuclear weapons during the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis. Ellsberg warned the possibility of a nuclear first strike by the United States was an “insane” policy that would end most life on Earth. “The belief that we can do less bad by striking first than if we strike second is what confronts us in Ukraine with a real possibility of a nuclear war coming out of this conflict,” Ellsberg said.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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“Plans love silence. There’ll be no announcement of the start.” Photo credit: Ukraine Defense Ministry
As Ukraine prepared to launch its much heralded but long delayed counteroffensive, the media published a photograph of a Ukrainian soldier with his finger on his lips, symbolizing the need for secrecy to retain some element of surprise for this widely telegraphed operation.
Now that the offensive has been under way for two weeks, it is clear that the Ukrainian government and its Western allies are maintaining silence for quite a different reason: to conceal the brutal cost Ukraine’s brave young people are paying to recover small scraps of territory from Russian occupation forces, in what some are already calling a suicide mission.
Western pundits at first described these first two weeks of fighting as “probing operations” to find weak spots in Russia’s defenses, which Russia has been fortifying since 2022 with multiple layers of minefields, “dragon’s teeth,” tank-traps, pre-positioned artillery, and attack helicopters, unopposed in the air, that can fire 12 anti-tank missiles apiece.
On the advice of British military advisers in Kyiv, Ukraine flung Western tanks and armored vehicles manned by NATO-trained troops into these killing fields without air support or de-mining operations. The results have been predictably disastrous, and it is now clear that these are not just “probing” operations as the propaganda at first claimed, but the long-awaited main offensive.
A Western official with intelligence access told the Associated Press on June 14, “Intense fighting is now ongoing in nearly all sectors of the front… This is much more than probing. These are full-scale movements of armor and heavy equipment into the Russian security zone.”
Other glimpses are emerging of the reality behind the propaganda. At a press conference after a summit at NATO Headquarters, U.S. General Milley warned that the offensive will be long, violent and costly in Ukrainian lives. “This is a very difficult fight. It’s a very violent fight, and it will likely take a considerable amount of time and at high cost,” Milley said.
Russian videos show dozens of Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles lying smashed in minefields, and NATO military advisers in Ukraine have confirmed that it lost 38 tanks in one night on June 8, including newly delivered German-built Leopard IIs.
Rob Lee of the Foreign Policy Research Institute explained to the New York Times that the Russians are trying to inflict as many casualties and destroy as many vehicles as possible in the areas in front of their main defensive lines, turning those areas into lethal kill zones. If this strategy works, any Ukrainian forces that reach the main Russian defense lines will be too weakened and depleted to break through and achieve their goal of severing Russia’s land bridge between Donbas and Crimea.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense reported that Ukraine’s forces suffered 7,500 casualties in the first ten days of the offensive. If Ukraine’s real losses are a fraction of that, the long, violent bloodbath that General Milley anticipates will destroy the new armored brigades that NATO has armed and trained, and serve only to escalate the gory war of attrition that has destroyed Mariupol, Sievierodonetsk and Bakhmut, killing and wounding hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians and Russians.
A senior European military officer in Ukraine provided more details of the carnage to Asia Times, calling Ukraine’s operations on June 8 and 9 a “suicide mission” that violated the basic rules of military tactics. “We tried to tell them to stop these piecemeal tactics, define a main thrust with infantry support and do what they can,” he said. “They were trained by the British, and they’re playing Light Brigade,” he added, comparing the offensive to a suicidal charge into massive Russian cannon fire that wiped out Britain’s Light Cavalry Brigade in Crimea in 1854.
If Ukraine’s “Spring Offensive” plunges on to the bitter end, it could be more like the British and French Somme Offensive, fought near the French River Somme in 1916. After 19,240 British troops were killed on the first day (including Nicolas’s 20-year-old great-uncle, Robert Masterman), the battle raged on for more than four months of pointless, wanton slaughter, with over a million British, French and German casualties. It was finally called off after advancing only six miles and failing to capture either of the two small French towns that were its initial objectives.
The current offensive was delayed for months as Ukraine and its allies grappled with the likelihood of the outcome we are now witnessing. The fact that it went ahead regardless reflects the moral bankruptcy of U.S. and NATO political leaders, who are sacrificing the flower of Ukraine’s youth in a proxy war they will not send their own children or grandchildren to fight.
As Ukraine launches its offensive, NATO is conducting Air Defender, the largest military exercise in its history, from June 12 to 23, with 250 warplanes, including nuclear-capable F-35s, flying from German bases to simulate combat operations in and over Germany, Lithuania, Romania, the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. The exercise has led to at least 15 incidents between NATO and Russian aircraft in the skies near Lithuania.
It seems that nobody involved in NATO has ever stumbled over the concept of a “security dilemma,” in which supposedly defensive actions by one party are perceived as offensive threats by another and lead to a spiral of mutual escalation, as has been the case between NATO and Russia since the 1990s. Professor of Russian history Richard Sakwa has written, “NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence.”
These risks will be evident in the upcoming NATO Summit in Vilnius on July 11-12, where Ukraine and its eastern allies will be pushing for Ukraine membership, while the U.S. and western Europe insist that membership cannot be offered while the war rages on and will instead offer “upgraded” status and a shorter route to membership once the war ends.
The continued insistence that Ukraine will one day be a NATO member only means a prolongation of the conflict, as this is a red line that Russia insists cannot be crossed. That’s why negotiations that lead to a neutral Ukraine are key to ending the war.
But the United States will not agree to that as long as President Biden keeps U.S. Ukraine policy firmly under the thumbs of hawkish neoconservative desk warriors like Anthony Blinken and Victoria Nuland at the State Department and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan at the White House. Pressure to keep escalating U.S. involvement in the war is also coming from Congress, where Republicans accuse Biden of “hemming and hawing” instead of “going all in” to help Ukraine.
Paradoxically, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies are more realistic than their civilian colleagues about the lack of any military solution. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, has called for diplomacy to bring peace to Ukraine, and U.S. intelligence sources have challenged dominant false narratives of the war in leaks to Newsweek and Seymour Hersh, telling Hersh that the neocons are ignoring genuine intelligence and inventing their own, just as they did to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
With the retirement of Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, the State Department is losing the voice of a professional diplomat who was Obama’s chief negotiator for the JCPOA with Iran and urged Biden to rejoin the agreement, and who has taken steps to moderate U.S. brinkmanship toward China. While publicly silent on Ukraine, Sherman was a quiet voice for diplomacy in a war-mad administration.
Many fear that Sherman’s job will now go to Nuland, the leading architect of the ever-mounting catastrophe in Ukraine for the past decade, who already holds the #3 or #4 job at State as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.
Other departures from the senior ranks at State and the Pentagon are likely to cede more ground to the neocons. Colin Kahl, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, worked with Sherman on the JCPOA, opposed sending F-16s to Ukraine, and has maintained that China will not invade Taiwan in the near future. Kahl is leaving the Pentagon to return to his position as a professor at Stanford, just as China hawk General C.Q. Brown will replace General Milley as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs when Milley retires in September.
Meanwhile, other world leaders continue to push for peace talks. A delegation of African heads of state led by President Ramaphosa of South Africa met with President Zelenskyy in Kyiv, and President Putin in Moscow on June 17th, to discuss the African peace plan for Ukraine.
President Putin showed the African leaders the 18-point Istanbul Agreement that a Ukrainian representative had signed back in March 2022, and told them that Ukraine had thrown it in the “dustbin of history,” after the now disgraced Boris Johnson told Zelenskyy the “collective West” would only support Ukraine to fight, not to negotiate with Russia.
The catastrophic results of the first two weeks of Ukraine’s offensive should focus the world’s attention on the urgent need for a ceasefire to halt the daily slaughter and dismemberment of hundreds of brave young Ukrainians, who are being forced to drive through minefields and kill zones in Western gifts that are proving to be no more than U.S.- and NATO-built death-traps.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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The United Nations on Sunday accused the Russian government of denying aid workers access to Moscow-controlled areas of southern Ukraine that were impacted by the devastating collapse of the Kakhovka dam earlier this month. Denise Brown, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Ukraine, said in a statement that Russia has “so far declined our request to access the areas under its temporary military…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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External experts are poring over the “inappropriate editing” of international news published online by RNZ. It has already tightened editorial checks and stood down an online journalist. Will this dent trust in RNZ — or news in general? Were campaigns propagating national propaganda a factor? Mediawatch asks two experts with international experience.
MEDIAWATCH: By Colin Peacock, RNZ Mediawatch presenter
The comedians on 7 Days had a few laughs at RNZ’s expense against a backdrop of the Kremlin on TV Three this week.
“A Radio New Zealand digital journalist has been stood down after it emerged they’d been editing news stories on the broadcaster’s website to give them a pro-Russian slant, which is kind of disgusting,” host Jeremy Corbett said.
“You’d never get infiltration like that on 7 Days. Our security is too strong. Strong like a bear. Strong like the glorious Russian state and its leader Putin,” he said.
- LISTEN TO RNZ MEDIAWATCH: The RNZ editing fallout
- RNZ appoints panel to investigate inappropriate editing of online stories
- ‘I think it’s really important that we preserve the editorial independence of an institution like RNZ’ – PM Chris Hipkins
- Prime Minister responds to questions on RNZ investigation into pro-Russian editing
- Other RNZ inquiry reports
“I love this Russian strategy: ‘First, we take New Zealand’s fourth best and fourth most popular news site — then the world!” said Melanie Bracewell, who said she had not kept up with the news.
Just a joke, obviously, but this week some people have been asking if Kremlin campaigns played a role in the inappropriate editing of online world news.
It was on June 9 that the revelation of it kicked off a media frenzy about propaganda, misinformation, Russia, Ukraine, truth, trust and editorial standards that has been no laughing matter at RNZ.
The story went up a notch last weekend when TVNZ’s Thomas Mead revealed Ukrainian New Zealander Michael Lidski — along with 20 others — had complained about a story written by the journalist in May 2022, which RNZ had re-edited on the day to add alternative perspectives after prompting from an RNZ journalist who considered it sub-standard.
The next day on RNZ’s Checkpoint, presenter Lisa Owen said the suspended RNZ web journalist had told her he edited reports “in that way for five years” — and nobody had ever queried it or told him to stop.
RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson, who is also editor-in-chief, then told Checkpoint he did not consider what he had called “pro-Kremlin garbage” a resignation-worthy issue.
“I think this is a time for us actually working together to fix the problem,” he said.
RNZ had already begun taking out the trash in public by listing the corrupted (and now corrected) stories on the RNZ.co.nz homepage as they are discovered.
Thompson said the problem was “confined to a small area of what RNZ does” but by the following day, RNZ found six more stories — supplied originally by the reputable news agency Reuters — had also been edited in terms more favourable to the ruling regimes.
“RNZ has come out with a statement that said: ‘In our defence, we didn’t actually realise anyone was reading our stories’,” said 7 Days’ Jeremy Corbett.
That was just a gag — but it did actually explain just how it took so long for the dodgy edits to come to light and become newsworthy.
7 Days’ comedians have a laugh at RNZ against the backdrop of the Kremlin in last Thursday night’s episode. Image: TV Three screenshot RNZ/APR Where the problem lay
Last Wednesday’s cartoon in the Stuff papers — featuring an RNZ radio newsreader with a Pinocchio-length nose didn’t raise any laughs there either — because none of the slanted stories in question ever went out in the news on the air.They were only to be found online — and this was a significant distinction as it turned out, because the checks and balances are not quite the same or made by the same staff.
“In radio, a reporter writes a story and sends it to a sub-editor who will then check it. And then a news reader has to read it so there’s a couple of stages. Maybe even a chief reporter would have checked it as well,” Corin Dann told RNZ Morning Report listeners last Monday.
“What I’m trying to establish is what sort of checks and balances were there to ensure that that world story was properly vetted,” he said.
That question — and others — will now be asked by the external experts appointed this week to run the rule of RNZ’s online publishing procedures for a review that will be made public.
On Thursday a former RNZer Brent Edwards made a similar point in the National Business Review where he’ is now the political editor.
“For a couple of years, I was the director of news gathering. I had a large responsibility for RNZ’s news coverage but technically I had no responsibility whatsoever for what went on the web,” he said.
“Done properly the RNZ review panel could do all news media a favour by providing a template for how online news should be curated. It should reinforce the importance of quality, ethical journalism,” Edwards added.
His NBR colleague Dita di Boni said “there but for the grace of God go other outlets” which have “gone digital” in news.
“I worked at TVNZ and there was a rush to digital as well with lots of resources going in but little oversight from the main newsroom.”
Calls for political action
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has made it clear he doesn’t want the government involved in RNZ’s editorial affairs.David Seymour of the ACT party wanted an inquiry — and NZ First leader Winston Peters called for a Royal Commission into the media bias and manipulation.
Former National MP Nathan Guy told Newshub Nation this weekend “heads need to roll” at RNZ.
“If I was the broadcasting minister, I would want the chair in my office and to hold RNZ to account. I want timeframes. I want accountability because we just can’t afford to have our public broadcaster tell unfortunate mistruths to the public,” he said.
In the same discussion, Newsroom’s co-editor Mark Jennings reminded Guy that RNZ’s low-budget digital news transition happened under his National-led government which froze RNZ’s funding for almost a decade.
“This is what happens when you underfund an organisation for so long,” he said.
Jennings also said “trust in RNZ has been hammered by this” — and criticised RNZ chairman Dr Jim Mather for declining to be interviewed on Newshub Nation.
Earlier — under the headline Media shooting itself in the foot — Jennings said surveys have picked up a decline and trust and news media here.
“And the road back for the media just had a major speed bump,” he concluded.
How deep is the damage to trust?
The Press front page is dominated by the RNZ story. Image: The Press/RNZ Pacific While the breach of editorial standards is clear, has there been an over-reaction to what may be the actions of just one employee, which took years to come to light?
Last week the think-tank Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures at Auckland University hosted a timely “disinformation and media manipulation” workshop attended by executives and editors from most major media outlets.
It was arranged long before RNZs problems arose — but those ended up dominating discussion on this theme.
Among the participants was media consultant and commentator Peter Bale, who has previously worked overseas for Reuters, as well as The Financial Times and CNN.
“I really feel for RNZ in this, for the chief executive and everybody else there who does generally a great job. The issue of trust here is in this person’s relationship with their employer and their relationship with the facts.”
Bale is also the newsroom initiative leader at the International News Media Association, which promotes best practice in news and journalism publishing.
The exposure of the “inappropriate editing” undetected for so long has created the impression a lot of content is published online with no checking. That is sometimes the case when speed is a priority, but the vast majority of stuff does go past at least two eyes before publication.
“I think it is true also that editing has been diminished as a skill. But I don’t think it’s necessarily a failure of editing here but a failure of this person’s understanding of what their job is,” Bale told Mediawatch.
“You shouldn’t necessarily need to have a second or third pair of eyes when processing a Reuters story that’s already gone through multiple editors. The critical issue for RNZ is whether they took the initial complaints seriously enough,” he said.
‘Pro-Kremlin garbage’?
Peter Bale, editor of WikiTribune . . . “This person has inserted what are in some people’s views genuine talking points [about] the Russian view . . . But it was very ham-fisted.” Image: RNZ Pacific There have been many reports in recent years about Russia seeding misinformation and disinformation abroad.
Last Tuesday, security and technology consultant Paul Buchanan told Morning Report that RNZ should be better prepared for authoritarian states seeking to mess with its news.
“This incident that prompted this investigation may or may not be just one individual who has certain opinions about the war between Russia and Ukraine. But it is possible that . . . stories were manipulated from abroad,” he said.
Back in March the acting Director-General of the SIS told Parliament: “States are trying, in a coercive disruptive and a covert way, to influence the behaviors of people in New Zealand and influencing their decision making”.
John Mackey named no nations at the time, but his GCSB counterpart Andrew Hampton told MPs research had shown Russia was the source of misinformation many Kiwis were consuming.
Is it really likely the Kremlin or its proxies are pushing propaganda into the news here? And if so, to what end?
“I think there’s been a little bit of ‘too florid’ language used about this. This person has inserted what are in some people’s views genuine talking points from those who . . . want to have expressed what the Russian view is. But it was very ham-fisted,” said Bale.
“There are ways to do this. You could have inserted the Russian perspective to highlight the fact that there is a different view about things like the Orange Revolution when the pro-Kremlin leader in Kyiv was overthrown,” he said.
Not necessarily ‘propaganda’
“I don’t think it is necessarily ‘Kremlin propaganda’ as it’s been described. It was just a misguided attempt to bring another perspective, I suspect, but it still represents a tremendous breach of trust,” he said.“I write a weekly newsletter for The Spinoff about international news, and I try sometimes to show . . . there are other perspectives on these stories. Those things are legitimate to address — but not just surreptitiously squeeze into a story in some sort of perceived balance.
“I don’t think in this particular case that it is to do with the spread of disinformation or misinformation by Russia. I think this is a different set of problems. But I agree (there’s a) threat from the kind of chaos-driving techniques that Russia is particularly brilliant at. They’re very skilled at twisting stories . . . and I think we need to be ready for it,” he said.
The guest speaker at that Koi Tū event last Wednesday was Dr Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein center on Media and Politics at Harvard University in the US, where she researches and tracks the sources of misrepresentation and misinformation in the media, and the impact they have on public trust in media — and also how media can prepare for it.
At the point where 15 supplied news stories had been found to be “inappropriately edited” by RNZ, she took to Twitter to say: “This is wild. Fake news has reached new heights.”
Set against what we’ve seen in US politics — and about Russia and Ukraine — is it really that bad?
“Usually what you see is the spoofing of a website or a URL in order to look like you’re a certain outlet and distribute disinformation that way. It’s very unlikely that someone would go in and work a job and be editing articles without proper oversight,” said Donovan — who is also the co-author of recently published book, Meme Wars, The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy.
“I think when it comes to one country, wanting to insert their views into another country — even though New Zealand is very small — it does track that this would be a way to influence a large group of people.
“But I don’t think if any of us know the degree to which this could be an international operation or not,” she told Mediawatch.
“What you learn is that their pattern is that they happen over and over and over again until a news agency or platform company figures out a mitigation tactic, whether it’s removing that link from search or writing critical press or debunking those stories.
“When I think about the fallout of it . . . using the legitimacy of RNZ in a parasitical kind of way and that legitimacy to spread propaganda is one of the most important pieces of this puzzle that we would need to explore more,” she said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
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In an interview shortly before his death Daniel Ellsberg said the US runs a “covert empire”, which is a really good way of putting it. A giant globe-spanning cluster of nations consistently moves in alignment with the dictates of Washington, but they all keep their official flags and their official governments, so it doesn’t look like an empire despite functioning as one in every meaningful way.
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Daniel Ellsberg (1931-2023)
Oil on canvas. pic.twitter.com/kHBxRIML32
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) June 16, 2023
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We really don’t pay enough attention to the fact that all the most influential media platforms are owned and operated by extremely wealthy people who have every motive to keep us all focused on culture wars and electoral politics so we don’t focus on class war and direct action.
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It’s surreal how saying the FBI constantly grooms mentally ill people to get involved in terrorist plots makes you sound like a kooky crackpot, but it’s actually a well-documented fact that we just don’t talk about much for some reason.
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The only time Trump was praised by the mass media was when he bombed Syria. The only time Biden was condemned by the mass media was when he withdrew from Afghanistan. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere.
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The New York Times publishing an article which criticizes Ukrainian Nazis for wearing Nazi insignia, not because Nazism is wrong but because it’s bad war propaganda, was one of the most New York Times things that has ever happened.
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The decision by some Ukrainian soldiers to wear patches with Nazi icons threatens to reinforce Russian propaganda used to justify the invasion. It also could give the symbols mainstream life after the West's decades-long efforts to eliminate them.https://t.co/TdhO6pKpFG
— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 5, 2023
The article even admitted that western reporters have been avoiding acknowledging the problem because they don’t want to play into “Russian propaganda”, and have actually asked Ukrainian soldiers to remove Nazi patches before taking photos. If you choose not to report something because it would hurt your side’s propaganda efforts, then you are not a journalist, you are a propagandist.
What’s funny about the “Nazis in Ukraine” controversy is that Nazis in Ukraine is not even the strongest argument against western proxy warfare in that nation. Western propagandists could just say “Yes Ukraine has a Nazi problem but we believe the benefits of protecting Ukrainian democracy outweigh the negatives of some skinheads getting rocket launchers here and there” or whatever, and most westerners would swallow it. The only reason propaganda outlets like The New York Times feel the need to keep diddling this issue and manipulating people’s minds and gaslighting everyone about it is because they’re so habituated to pushing for complete and total narrative control on US foreign policy, so it never occurs to them to cede even the slightest amount of ground or yield even the most obvious admissions to avoid looking ridiculous.
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The world is ruled by thugs and tyrants, the most thuggish and tyrannical of whom pour a tremendous amount of energy into convincing their populations that only other countries are ruled by thugs and tyrants.
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If people and digital records survive the Earth’s next act of nuclear warfare, let the record show that we were seeing clear warning signs every day and overwhelmingly ignored them.
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President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus said that the country has started to receive nuclear weapons from Russia, a long-threatened provocation and the latest sign of the worsening relationship between Russia and the U.S. https://t.co/XrExrtoXoN
— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 14, 2023
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Saying “America didn’t bomb Nord Stream, Ukraine did!” is like saying “Will Smith didn’t slap Chris Rock, his hand did!” It’s a distinction without any meaningful difference, no matter how hard they try to spin it as an independent act that the US would’ve had no control over.
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There’s no basis for the belief that today’s CIA and FBI are any less depraved than they were in the days of Dulles and J Edgar Hoover.
Seriously, what’s changed since that time? There was a cold war back then? There’s a cold war now. The laws, rules and policies were drastically changed and the people who did those bad things were punished? They were not.
There’s no basis whatsoever for the belief that the CIA and FBI did bad things in the past but don’t do bad things currently. It’s believed because it is comfortable, and for no other reason.
We learn about bad things the CIA and FBI did “in the past” because they stand nothing to lose by us learning about bad things they wanted to do and already did. Later on what’s happening today will be “in the past” and we’ll learn what they were up to in this slice of spacetime.
All the conditions which existed during the most notorious acts of depravity by those agencies are also the case today. Cold war. Hot war. Dissident groups. The fight for US hegemony. That’s all happening currently, and there’s no reason to believe they’re any nicer and cuddlier about it today.
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US accuses Chinese warship of unsafe maneuver in the Taiwan Strait; China accuses US warships of being on the wrong side of the fucking planet. https://t.co/RtPFgXoW5e
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) June 4, 2023
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If western governments need to keep ramping up censorship, propaganda and the persecution of journalists in order to defend western freedom and democracy, is it really freedom and democracy? And is it worth defending?
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The only way to get a good read on what manipulators are really about is to ignore their words and watch their actions, because they only use language to manipulate and extract what they want from people. Apply this to politicians and governments, and to narcissists in your life.
Example: if you ignore the US government’s stories about its love of freedom and democracy and rules-based order and just look at its actions, what you see is a violent and tyrannical regime which works continually to destroy and subvert nations around the world which disobey it.
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One of the hardest lessons I’ve ever had to learn in life is that projection cuts both directions. We project our bad qualities and motives onto others, wrongly assuming that they have the same character flaws as us, but we can also project our positive traits onto others who might not have them.
In a world full of narcissists, sociopaths and manipulators, this is important to be aware of — whether you’re looking at politicians, governments, or your own interpersonal relations. In the past I’ve suffered serious consequences for assuming that someone must have healthy and relatable reasons for their harmful actions toward me and projecting my own good motives onto them, when really all they wanted was to use and subjugate me.
You can’t assume that someone is operating from the same inner motivations as you, whether those imagined motivations are negative or positive. Some people just suck, and do things you would never do because of motives that would never even occur to you.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Featured image by Treehill via Wikimedia Commons.
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Sahej Rahal (India), Juggernaut, 2019.
A new mood of defiance in the Global South has generated bewilderment in the capitals of the Triad (the United States, Europe, and Japan), where officials are struggling to answer why governments in the Global South have not accepted the Western view of the conflict in Ukraine or universally supported the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in its efforts to ‘weaken Russia’. Governments that had long been pliant to the Triad’s wishes, such as the administrations of Narendra Modi in India and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Türkiye (despite the toxicity of their own regimes), are no longer as reliable.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, India’s Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar has been vocal in defending his government’s refusal to accede to Washington’s pressure. In April 2022, at a joint press conference in Washington, DC with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Jaishankar was asked to explain India’s continued purchase of oil from Russia. His answer was blunt: ‘I noticed you refer to oil purchases. If you are looking at energy purchases from Russia, I would suggest that your attention should be focused on Europe… We do buy some energy which is necessary for our energy security. But I suspect, looking at the figures, probably our total purchases for the month would be less than what Europe does in an afternoon’.
Kandi Narsimlu (India), Waiting at the Bus Stand, 2023.
However, such comments have not deterred Washington’s efforts to win India over to its agenda. On 24 May, the US Congress’s Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party released a policy statement on Taiwan which asserted that ‘[t]he United States should strengthen the NATO Plus arrangement to include India’. This policy statement was released shortly after the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, where India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with the various G7 leaders, including US President Joe Biden, as well as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The Indian government’s response to this ‘NATO Plus’ formulation echoed the sentiment of its earlier remarks about purchasing Russian oil. ‘A lot of Americans still have that NATO treaty construct in their heads’, Jaishankar said in a press conference on 9 June. ‘It seems almost like that is the only template or viewpoint with which they look at the world… That is not a template that applies to India’. India, he said, is not interested in being part of NATO Plus, wishing to maintain a greater degree of geopolitical flexibility. ‘One of the challenges of a changing world’, Jaishankar said, ‘is how do you get people to accept and adjust to those changes’.
Katsura Yuki (Japan), An Ass in a Lion’s Skin, 1956.
There are two significant takeaways from Jaishankar’s statements. First, the Indian government – which does not oppose the United States, either in terms of its programme or temperament – is uninterested in being drawn into a US-led bloc system (the ‘NATO treaty construct’, as Jaishankar put it). Second, like many governments in the Global South, it recognises that we live in ‘changing world’ and that the traditional major powers – especially the United States – need to ‘adjust to those changes’.
In its Investment Outlook 2023 report, Credit Suisse pointed to the ‘deep and persistent fractures’ that have opened up in the international order – another way of referring to what Jaishankar called the ‘changing world’. Credit Suisse describes these ‘fractures’ accurately: ‘The global West (Western developed countries and allies) has drifted away from the global East (China, Russia, and allies) in terms of core strategic interests, while the Global South (Brazil, Russia, India, and China and most developing countries) is reorganising to pursue its own interests’. These final words bear repeating: ‘the Global South… is reorganising to pursue its own interests’.
In mid-April, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs released its Diplomatic Bluebook 2023, in which it noted that we are now at the ‘end of the post-Cold War era’. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States asserted its primacy over the international order and, along with its Triad vassals, established what it called the ‘rules-based international order’. This thirty-year-old US-led project is now floundering, partly due to the internal weaknesses of the Triad countries (including their weakened position in the global economy) and partly due to the rise of the ‘locomotives of the South’ (led by China, but including Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Nigeria). Our calculations, based on the IMF datamapper, show that for the first time in centuries, the Gross Domestic Product of the Global South countries surpassed that of the Global North countries this year. The rise of these developing countries – despite the great social inequality that exists within them – has produced a new attitude amongst their middle classes which is reflected in the increased confidence of their governments: they no longer accept the parochial views of the Triad countries as universal truths, and they have a greater wish to exert their own national and regional interests.
Nelson Makamo (South Africa), The Announcement, 2016.
It is this re-assertion of national and regional interests within the Global South that has revived a set of regional processes, including the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-
South Africa) process. On 1 June, the BRICS foreign ministers met in Cape Town (South Africa) ahead of the summit between their heads of states that is set to take place this August in Johannesburg. The joint statement they issued is instructive: twice, they warned about the negative impact of ‘unilateral economic coercive measures, such as sanctions, boycotts, embargoes, and blockades’ which have ‘produced negative effects, notably in the developing world’. The language in this statement represents a feeling that is shared across the entirety of the Global South. From Bolivia to Sri Lanka, these countries, which make up the majority of the world, are fed up with the IMF-driven debt-austerity cycle and the Triad’s bullying. They are beginning to assert their own sovereign agendas. Interestingly, this revival of sovereign politics is not being driven by inward-looking nationalism, but by a non-aligned internationalism. The BRICS ministers’ statement focuses on ‘strengthening multilateralism and upholding international law, including the purposes and principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations as its indispensable cornerstone’ (incidentally, both China and Russia are part of the twenty-member Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter). The implicit argument being made here is that the US-led Triad states have unilaterally imposed their narrow worldview, based on the interests of their elites, on the countries of the South under the guise of the ‘rules-based international order’. Now, the states of the Global South argue, it is time to return to the source – the UN Charter – and build a genuinely democratic international order.
Leaders of the Third World at the first conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade, 1961.
Credit: Museum of Yugoslavia, Belgrade.The word ‘non-aligned’ has increasingly been used to refer to this new trend in international politics. The term has its origins in the Non-Aligned Conference held in Belgrade (Yugoslavia) in 1961, which was built upon the foundations laid at the Asian-African Conference held in Bandung (Indonesia) in 1955. In those days, non-alignment referred to countries led by movements rooted in the deeply anti-colonial Third World Project, which sought to establish the sovereignty of the new states and the dignity of their people. That moment of non-alignment was killed off by the debt crisis of the 1980s, which began with Mexico’s default in 1982. What we have now is not a return of the old non-alignment, but the emergence of a new political atmosphere and a new political constellation that requires careful study. For now, we can say that this new non-alignment is being demanded by the larger states of the Global South that are uninterested in being subordinated by the Triad’s agenda, but which have not yet established a project of their own – a Global South Project, for instance.
As part of our efforts to understand this emerging dynamic, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research will be joining with the No Cold War campaign, ALBA Movimientos, Pan-Africanism Today, the International Strategy Center (South Korea), and the International Peoples’ Assembly to host the webinar ‘The New Non-Alignment and the New Cold War’ on 17 June. Speakers will include Ronnie Kasrils (former minister of intelligence, South Africa), Sevim Dagdelen (deputy party leader for Die Linke in the German Bundestag), Stephanie Weatherbee (International Peoples’ Assembly), and Srujana Bodapati (Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research).
In 1931, the Jamaican poet and journalist Una Marson (1905–1965) wrote ‘There Will Come a Time’, a poem of hopefulness for a future ‘where love and brotherhood should have full sway’. People in the colonised world, she wrote, would have to pursue a sustained battle to attain their freedom. We are nowhere near the end of that fight, yet we are not in the position of almost total subordination that we were in during the height of the Triad’s primacy, which ran from 1991 to now. It is worthwhile to go back to Marson, who knew with certainty that a more just world would come, even if she would not be alive to witness it:
What matter that we be as cagèd birds
Who beat their breasts against the iron bars
Till blood-drops fall, and in heartbreaking songs
Our souls pass out to God? These very words,
In anguish sung, will mightily prevail.
We will not be among the happy heirs
Of this grand heritage – but unto us
Will come their gratitude and praise,
And children yet unborn will reap in joy
What we have sown in tears.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
According to the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Kiev’s sponsors reportedly demanded that the regime eliminate as many Russians as possible as a condition for sending weapons. The case shows how the West really does not expect a Ukrainian victory on the battlefield, only seeking to weaken Russia as much as possible.
Kiev’s defense chief Aleksey Reznikov claimed during an interview to Foreign Policy that Western supporters, before establishing a policy of unlimited military aid, demanded from Ukraine that as many Russian citizens as possible be killed. Once the extermination of Russians is guaranteed, Western support will be maintained “as long as it takes”, informed the minister.
He told interviewers that, at first, NATO expected Ukraine to manage the challenge of facing Russian troops alone, without Western military support. However, with the worsening of combat conditions and the imminence of the Ukrainian defeat, the receiving of weapons became inevitable. So, the sponsors imposed a condition on the Ukrainians: before admitting any defeat on the battlefield, they must at least achieve the goal of eliminating a large number of Russian soldiers.
“We asked, ‘can we have stingers?’ We were told, ‘No, dig trenches and kill as many Russians as you can before it’s over.’ People thought our victory was impossible”, he said during the interview.
Reznikov made it clear that now Kiev has “Bradleys, Strykers, Abrams, Leopards, and more” because it is fulfilling the imposed objective of killing the enemies. Also, for this same reason Kiev “will soon be equipped with American-made F-16 fighter jets”.
Indeed, the minister’s words bring answers to several questions. For example, previously, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham had said during a meeting with Zelensky in Kiev that the US was making a “good investment” by sending money to “kill Russians”. Now, with the information revealed by Reznikov, it becomes more and more evident that the US really plans to cause the death of Russians with its help to Ukraine.
At first, Reznikov’s words may sound banal, since in a context of conflict there is obviously always the goal of eliminating enemy fighters. However, there are a series of nuances that make the American attitude problematic and highly anti-humanitarian with the Ukrainian proxies themselves.
As the minister made clear, the Western intention was to let the Ukrainians fight alone and achieve the expected result without receiving any military assistance. This is consistent with NATO’s attitude in the early days of Russia’s special operation, which was to refuse the supply of military support, focusing only on humanitarian and financial aid.
However, the situation changed dramatically after April 2022, when NATO started sending tanks to the Ukrainian regime. This change in attitude on the part of the alliance is now perfectly explained: the initial objective was to leave the Ukrainians without help, but this would lead to a quick defeat of Kiev, so an agreement was reached for the country to start receiving unlimited aid in exchange for the elimination of Russian soldiers.
In other words, the alleged “Ukrainian victory”, which the mainstream media talks about so much, was never in NATO’s plans. What the alliance only wants is to kill Russians. It is the plan to kill Moscow’s fighters that justifies the support for Kiev, not any concern for “democracy” or “Ukraine’s territorial integrity”.
This agreement between the Ukrainians and their sponsors is also an important key for understanding the West’s war plans. The US-led military alliance does not aim for victory against the Russians, but for the massive elimination of troops. Usually in wars the goal is victory, and the death of soldiers is just a tool in order to achieve this aim. But in NATO’s proxy war, the final goal is actually restricted to killing Russian soldiers, with no greater ambitions, since defeating Russia currently seems unfeasible.
NATO’s strategists know that in an eventual scenario of open and direct confrontation against Russia, the chances of victory are minimal, since Moscow is the greatest nuclear power in the world. So, the alliance focuses on promoting proxy wars in which as many Russians as possible die, thus achieving enough attrition to generate long-term damage to the Russians. Therefore, in the face of the imminent Ukrainian defeat, NATO seems now “hurried” to generate new anti-Russian flanks in Eurasia, as it is possible to see in regions such as Transnistria, Kosovo, Artsakh, Georgia and Belarus.
Reznikov has, perhaps unintentionally, given an end to the entire narrative spread by his own regime and Western media that the aim of military aid is for Kiev to “win the war” and regain its pre-2014 territory. There are no such goals in the alliance’s plans, which only want Ukrainian forces to kill as many Russians as possible in order to generate losses on America’s biggest geopolitical enemy.
It is important that this information be shared and reach the western public opinion to make it clear to the citizens of NATO’s countries that their tax money is not being invested in any “resistance against the invader”, but, exactly as in Graham’s words, in the death of Russians.
Source: InfoBrics.
Bi-khim Hsiao, Taiwan’s Representative in the United States, is a familiar figure in the halls of power but she does not often make public speeches. So a recent talk and press conference by Ms. Hsiao deserve some attention.
The One China Policy, endorsed by the US and UN, does not recognize Taiwan Island as an independent country but as part of China, with the government in Beijing providing the official ambassadors to the US and UN. Hence Hsiao is not an “ambassador” but a “representative,” and her organization is known as the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO). Her presence and activities in the US are sensitive points in the US-China relationship, which is why she does not often make public appearances.
We might expect therefore that Hsiao had something of considerable consequence to communicate to an American audience. And so she did, but her message did not center exclusively on Taiwan. Hsiao and the reporters in attendance wished to discuss a country over 8000 km away from Taiwan, almost at the opposite end of Eurasia – Ukraine.
The “Tragedy” of Ukraine in the eyes of Taipei’s Representative
In her opening remarks, Hsiao stated: “The Ukraine war has actually generated a lot more attention and interest in … Taiwan’s defense needs. And so there has been an increase in… initiatives to find ways to support Taiwan so that that tragedy will not be repeated in our scenario.”
“Tragedy” indeed. Hsiao, like everyone else in the world, is well aware of the devastation that has been visited on Ukraine as a result of Biden’s cruel proxy war on Russia using Ukrainians as cannon fodder. The “tragedy” of Ukraine has focused not only Hsiao’s mind but mightily distressed all the people of Taiwan Island. This led to the landslide defeat in the 2022 local elections of Hsiao’s Party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which is the home of secessionist sentiment and hostility to Beijing. The DPP was soundly thrashed by the Kuomintang (KMT), the Party that wishes to maintain the status quo with the mainland, leave in place the “strategic ambiguity” of the One China Policy and take a peaceful approach to Beijing.
The first thing that struck me about the press conference was the unreality of Hsiao’s purpose, bordering on insanity. Here we had Taiwan’s envoy discussing war with Mainland China which has the largest PPP-GDP in the world and 18% of all of humanity. Taiwan’s population is 24 million, and it is the size of Maryland.
The bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor, and host of the event, expressed a similar incredulity, asking in the opening question: “Russia versus Ukraine is one thing, but China versus Taiwan is a much more extreme example in terms of proportions…. How do you fight back against that?” The unstated assumption is that Taiwan can succeed with the support of the US. But just how true is that? How sound is Biden’s support for Ukraine?
Asked whether she was “satisfied” with Biden’s commitment to Taiwan, Hsiao demurred
Was she “satisfied” with Joe Biden’s commitment to defend Taiwan, queried another reporter. Hsiao demurred, did not answer “yes,” but instead opined that “in the long run, nothing is ever completely satisfactory.” Here Hsiao seemed to be channeling Volodymyr Zelensky, always demanding more, ever disappointed. Such is the unenviable position of a proxy whose function in the end is to be used, not championed.
Hsiao sounded very much like someone who had doubts about US support – doubts perhaps aroused after the resounding and very bloody defeat of the US proxy, Ukraine, in Bakhmut. We can be sure that the same doubts are cropping up in the minds of the Taiwan electorate. And such doubts are likely to play a decisive role in the upcoming elections in 2024 for President and Legislative Yuan, the unicameral legislature for the entire island. Will the more pacific policies supported by the electorate in the 2022 local elections prevail again in choosing island wide officials in 2024?
US arms to Taiwan Island, a provocation to war, must end
Several reporters raised the question whether the US arming of Taiwan Island could be seen as a provocation. In itself this is a step forward for the US press which might be awakening to the fact that US tactics did indeed provoke the war as in Ukraine. Hsiao dodged that question by ignoring the US dimension and speaking instead of Taiwan’s efforts at increased militarization. Of course, little Taiwan acting on its own can scarcely be seen as a threat or serious provocation to China. But it is quite a different story when the weapons and personnel come from the US. After all the US has an enormous military presence in the region and has declared as a matter of policy that its aim is to bring down China. In this circumstance US weapons, military personnel and actions in Taiwan can be a serious provocation indeed.
Although Hsiao spoke in terms of defense not provocation, she herself undermined that way of regarding the US on Taiwan Island. Asked by another reporter whether there was any evidence for Chinese preparation of an invasion of Taiwan Island, Hsiao said there was none. This is hardly surprising since China’s policy is to re-unite peacefully with the Island, a long-term goal.
One clear and simple lesson of the Hsiao press conference is that Mainland China quite reasonably perceives the US arming of Taiwan as a threat and provocation. Thus, the way to peace is to end the US arming of Taiwan. This should be a top priority in the US peace movement, but unfortunately, it does not often receive so much as a mention.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Belarus says Russia has begun transferring tactical nuclear weapons to the former Soviet state, which shares a nearly 700-mile border with Ukraine, escalating the risk of a nuclear confrontation in Europe. Meanwhile, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has urged allies to “dig deep” to provide more arms and ammunition to help Ukraine as it launches its counteroffensive against Russia.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
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Lots of fun stuff in the news today.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which oversees the spy agencies of the United States, has admitted in a report requested by Senator Ron Wyden that the US intelligence cartel has been circumventing constitutional regulations designed to protect US citizens from government surveillance by simply purchasing information collected by commercial data brokers.
In an escalation in surveillance capitalism that should surprise no one but alarm everyone, US intelligence agencies have found that while the Fourth Amendment prohibits their directly wiretapping, hacking or bugging whomever they please without a warrant, there’s nothing stopping them from simply purchasing massive amounts of data harvested by Silicon Valley tech companies which can provide them with similar kinds of information. So that’s what they’ve been doing, because of course it is.
But remember kids, it’s important for you to be very afraid of TikTok because TikTok might harvest your information and give it to an authoritarian surveillance state.
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CIA: Can I have your personal information?
People: No way!
Google: Can I have your personal information?
People: Sure.
Google: Here's that personal information you bought.
CIA: Thanks!— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) June 15, 2023
A disturbing new Responsible Statecraft piece by Branko Marcetic notes that the civilian leadership roles in the US government which have historically been responsible for reining in the more dangerous impulses of the US war machine have actually been far more hawkish and aggressive on Ukraine than the Pentagon’s professional warmakers. According to a recent Washington Post report, inside the Biden administration “the Pentagon is considered more cautious than the White House or State Department about sending more sophisticated weaponry to Ukraine.”
If only the war machine is responsible for placing checks on the nuclear brinkmanship of the war machine, that means there are no real checks on the nuclear brinkmanship of the war machine. If JFK had been more hawkish and aggressive than his own generals at the most perilous moments of the last cold war, it’s entirely likely that the world as we know it would not exist today. It is bone-chilling that we are relying on the better angels of the most murderous military on earth to see us through these increasingly close games of nuclear chicken.
As Marcetic discussed in another article last year, the insanely hawkish rhetoric we are seeing from the western political/media class around the subject of nuclear brinkmanship is demonstrably far more oriented toward reckless confrontation than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The people whose job it is to encourage restraint in these situations — the press, the diplomats, and the elected officials — are instead doing the exact opposite.
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Insane and evil–the AEI dips a toe in the idea that the US should give Ukraine nukes:https://t.co/qiI7UyXchZ
— Ben Burgis (@BenBurgis) June 13, 2023
And the discourse is only getting crazier. The neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute is now floating the idea of giving nukes to Ukraine, which is about as evil and demented a foreign policy position as anyone could possibly come up with.
This as influential Russian foreign policy strategist Sergey Karaganov argues that Moscow has “set too high a threshold for the use of nuclear weapons” and that “it is necessary to arouse the instinct of self-preservation that the West has lost” by “lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons” and “moving up the deterrence-escalation ladder.” Karaganov cites the fact that Belarus has begun receiving tactical nukes from Russia to show that Moscow is already moving in this direction.
This looks all the more disquieting in light of Michael Tracey’s observations in a recent Newsweek article titled “The Government Keeps Lying to Us About Ukraine. Where Is the Outrage?” Tracey discusses the way fighters from Ukraine and from NATO member Poland have been ramping up attacks on Russian territory, while the US government and news media deceive the American public about the fact that this is happening and how dangerous it is.
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I wrote an item for Newsweek about how the US government is systematically deceiving the American people about the nature of US involvement in Ukraine — and the deception keeps getting more and more extreme https://t.co/zexOTPTCMy
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) June 14, 2023
On top of all this you’ve got the empire’s increasingly ridiculous spin about the Nord Stream pipeline bombings. The mass media are now saying that Ukrainian special operations forces perpetrated the attack, and that the CIA had advanced knowledge of their plans, but tried unsuccessfully to tell them not to go through with it.
Which is a narrative that just so happens to fit perfectly into alignment with the information interests of the US empire. It contradicts reporting by Seymour Hersh that the US was directly involved in the attack, it pins culpability on a nation with whom the west highly sympathizes who can be framed as acting in their own defense against Russian invaders, and the US intelligence cartel gets to wash its hands of the whole ordeal by claiming it told the Ukrainians not to attack pipelines used by US ally Germany.
It’s also a narrative that is completely nonsensical. Saying “America didn’t attack Nord Stream, Ukraine did!” is like saying “Will Smith didn’t slap Chris Rock, his hand did!” Ukraine is completely dependent on the will of the US government to continue this war; if the US government draws a hard line and tells them not to do something or risk losing support, it will necessarily have to obey. It’s been public knowledge for a year now that the CIA is intimately involved in activities on the ground in Ukraine, and the CIA has been actively training Ukrainian special operations forces since before this war even began.
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It’s amazing how many revisions this “actually Ukraine did it” narrative has undergone ever since Hersh’s bombshell in February forced NATO spy agencies to plant a counter-narrative. It’s like watching a slow wiki page edit, revised & drip-dripped across major NATOland media. https://t.co/4lygcedysJ
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) June 14, 2023
So it’s a distinction without a difference to claim that Ukraine and not the US bombed Nord Stream — and that’s pretending for the sake of argument that we know the US wasn’t much more directly involved in the attack than it is admitting. There is currently no logical reason to assume that’s even the case, and there is never any valid reason to take the US intelligence cartel at its word about anything.
We are marching toward dystopia and oblivion, and we are doing it in ways that have no historical precedent. We’re in completely uncharted waters, and things are only getting crazier and crazier.
What a wild world. What a time to be alive.
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Belarus says Russia has begun transferring tactical nuclear weapons to the former Soviet state, which shares a nearly 700-mile border with Ukraine, escalating the risk of a nuclear confrontation in Europe. Meanwhile, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has urged allies to “dig deep” to provide more arms and ammunition to help Ukraine as it launches its counteroffensive against Russia. The Ukraine conflict has intensified the “new Cold War” between the United States and its allies, on one side, and Russia and China, on the other, says Gilbert Achcar, professor of international relations at SOAS University of London. He pegs the start of this new geopolitical standoff to the Kosovo War in 1999, which NATO entered without U.N. approval and over the objections of Russia and China. He says the United States had a “window of opportunity” in the 1990s to reshape the world for more cooperation and multilateralism. “Instead of going for peaceful options, options leading to a long-term peace in international relations and enhancing the role of the United Nations, it made the opposite choices,” including the expansion of NATO, says Achcar. His new book is titled The New Cold War: The United States, Russia and China from Kosovo to Ukraine.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Though Western ‘news’ media have gotten their ‘explanation’ of this event from Ukraine’s Government, it never made sense that Russia would have wanted to flood, harm, and weaken, the entire western half of the territory that Russia now controls in the former Ukraine, including in Crimea (which was getting its water-supply from that dam).
The anonymous author of the “Moon of Alabama” website has a long and almost flawless record of accurately exposing realities that mainstream U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media had been hiding, and the latest such is his June 13 “Did Russia Destroy The Nova Kakhovka Dam?” His report there turns upside-down and inside-out the Ukrainian Government’s ‘explanation’ that the dam had been bombed not by a missile, but by an explosive device which had been placed there by saboteurs whom Ukraine’s Government assumes were from Russia. U.S.-Government-approved ‘news’-media accept and amplify that assumption, but “MoA” does not.
First, he quotes the New York Times and other U.S. Government mouthpieces presenting the Ukrainian Government’s ‘explanation’ of the blow-up; and then he rips it apart by noting the extremely relevant (but in U.S.-and-occupied lands ignored) fact, that on May 12, Britain had supplied to Ukraine its “Storm Shadow” missiles that are designed to have a two-stage bombing-operation: first, a normal surface bomb, but then after it a fuse-ignited ground-penetrating bomb to explode deeper inside even a fortified and hardened underground target such as that dam was apparently blown up.The British-supplied Storm Shadow weapon is perfect for this type of destruction — exploding from deep underground, instead of from the surface. And whereas Russia doesn’t have any Storm Shadows, Ukraine definitely does — ever since May 12.
The present news-report about U.S.-and-allied lies is being simultaneously submitted for publication by all of the standard U.S.-Government mouthpiece propaganda-media, just in case any of them might finally want to go beyond their standard U.S.-Government-approved sources.
Ever since at least late 2022, Russia has been warning that Ukraine’s government wants to blow up that dam. For example, on 1 November 2022, Reuters headlined “Russia announces wider evacuation of occupied southern Ukraine,” and reported that,
“Due to the possibility of the use of prohibited methods of war by the Ukrainian regime, as well as information that Kyiv is preparing a massive missile strike on the Kakhovka hydroelectric station, there is an immediate danger of the Kherson region being flooded,” Vladimir Saldo, Russian-installed head of occupied Kherson province, said in a video message.
“Given the situation, I have decided to expand the evacuation zone by 15 km from the Dnipro,” he said. “The decision will make it possible to create a layered defence in order to repel Ukrainian attacks and protect civilians.”
Moscow has accused Kyiv of planning to use a so-called “dirty bomb” to spread radiation, or to blow up a dam to flood towns and villages in Kherson province. Kyiv says accusations it would use such tactics on its own territory are absurd, but that Russia might be planning such actions itself to blame Ukraine. …
Saldo, the Russian-imposed occupation leader for the province, identified seven towns on the east bank that would now be evacuated, comprising the main populated settlements along that stretch of the river.
Even U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media occasionally report relevant facts when they find them useful to mention in a ‘news’-report that has an anti-Russian “spin.”
So: we know that Russia’s Government was trying to protect the residents in that region against this attack, but U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media have unquestioningly accepted the Ukrainian government’s accusation that Russia’s Government did it. And, now, an extremely likely explanation has finally been provided, which implicates both Ukraine’s government and UK’s Government as having done it.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
For more than 200 years, peace conferences have not only resolved conflicts but regularly signaled the arrival at stage center of a new world power. In 1815, amid the whirling waltzes in Vienna’s palaces that accompanied negotiations ending the Napoleonic wars, Britain emerged for its century-long reign as the globe’s greatest power. Similarly, the 1885 Berlin Conference that carved up the continent of Africa for colonial rule heralded Germany’s rise as Britain’s first serious rival. The somber deliberations in Versailles’s grand Hall of Mirrors that officially ended World War I in 1919 marked America’s debut on the world stage. Similarly, the 1945 peace conference at San Francisco that established the U.N. (just as World War II was about to end) affirmed the ascent of U.S. global hegemony. More
The post Peace for Ukraine Courtesy of China? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Alfred W. McCoy.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
